Quotes About Mythology

It is not difficult to imagine that Gylfaginning represents the first encounter between Gylfi and the Asia-men and that Gylfi's delusion was in accepting that the stories told to him by Hár, Jafnhár, and Thridi were about gods. In other words, it is easy to believe that Snorri wishes us to believe that Gylfi's meeting with the æsir contributed to their euhemerization.

Thus Scandinavian mythology was, with virtually no exception, written down by Christians, and there is no reason to believe that Christianity in Iceland was any different from Christianity anywhere else in western Europe during the High Middle Ages.

Most runic inscriptions are utilitarian, and despite popular conceptions, they have little to say about mythology or magic.

In a cyclical system, however, such a linear progression repeats itself endlessly; each end is followed by a new beginning. Determining the time system of Scandinavian mythology presents special challenges because many of the sources were recorded by Christians, whose notion of time was linear and whose notion of history called for an essentially clear chronology.

For the Christians of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, the gods would have had a place in historical time both through their euhemerization and through their presence in some of the lives of the saints translated from Latin into Icelandic. According to the notion of the euhemerization that prevailed in medieval Iceland, the gods were originally human beings who had emigrated from the Middle East (Tyrkland) to Scandinavia long ago.

In Gylfaginning Snorri uses and expands on these sources, adding, among other things, that the einherjar are "all those men who have fallen in battle since the beginning of the world." He also sends the einherjar out against the forces of chaos at the last battle but gives no details of their fights and fates.

You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.

The Depth of your Mythology is the Extent of your Effectiveness.

While the Goddess indeed had many names, many manifestations throughout human history, she is ultimately one supreme reality. Only after the patriarchal Indo-Europeans overthrew the cultures where the Goddess had flourished from earliest times and imposed the worship of their sky gods was her identity fractured into myriad goddesses, each with an all-too-human personality. We know these goddesses best from Greek and Roman mythology.

Prometheans were never shy about appropriating symbols.

What's the symbolic association between a beast killed by a silver bullet and the moon?

The Fae should know better than to love mortal men.

In any case, Prometheus is in the process of reinvention. I'd like to plead our case.

I don't suppose you know where in Hell we're going?" "Not Hell," Puck said. "Well, perhaps Hell, but I think it unlikely.

We're not sure what his intentions are. He's not himself these days. His head has been turned by many new worshippers. Of the wrong kind.' Jacob thought about that for a bit. The wrong worshippers for Odin. 'You mean white supremacists with valknuts tattooed on their man boobs?' 'I do,' she said. 'Your wits seem intact in some matters.

Katharine Briggs's comprehensive The Fairies in Tradition and Literature.

But when I think Oh William!, don't I mean Oh Lucy! too? Don't I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves! — Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do. — But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean. — This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.

Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves! — Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do. — But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.

Don't I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves! — Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do. — But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean. — This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.

He ripped aside the veil of respectability with which the ancients had clothed their traditional gods and goddesses and exposed the sordid reality underneath. What Socrates and Plato had started, the overthrow of the pagan pantheon, Origen's Christianity finished.

When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. The ancient doctrine of original sin, variants of which occur independently in the mythologies of diverse cultures, could be a reflection of man's awareness of his own inadequacy, of the intuitive hunch that somewhere along the line of his ascent something has gone wrong.

and suddenly, it seemed, he lay in the sunlight, beautiful with his olive skin, dark haired, dark eyed, the gleaming bodily vision of a strayed faun.

Old stories often turn out to be true.

Aphrodite's thirst was never quenched; it was cruel and dreamy. It was certainly the most splendid kind of thirst.