Quotes About Myth

Moreover, the subjective interpretation which sees the myth as a transpersonal psychic event is, in view of the myth's origins in the collective unconscious, much fairer than an attempt to interpret it objectively

some ceremony or course of action, always precedes the formulation of the myth, and it is obvious that action must come before knowledge, the unconscious deed before the spoken content.

The important thing is that consciousness as the acting center precedes consciousness as the cognitive center, in the same way as ritual precedes myth, or magic ceremonial and ethical action precede the scientific view of the world and anthropological knowledge.

When, for example, the myths call God the "Father," they do so, not on a given paternal basis, but because they set up a father figure to which every given father figure has to adjust itself.1

They were as superstitious as owls!

Sin embargo, ese fue su programa estético de los años veinte: construir una lengua literaria para Buenos Aires y darle, al mismo tiempo, una dimensión mítica a la ciudad.

En este mito, el pasado es un espacio donde se reinventa la llanura heroica de las guerras del siglo XIX, la violencia que es la madre del coraje suicida o resignado del gaucho, los códigos de honor de una sociedad rural premoderna. Sin esa dimensión cultural, Buenos Aires moderna sería una ciudad sin raíces, producida por la abundancia económica, la inmigración, las instituciones de las elites letradas. Para Borges, en cambio, es una ciudad

No reptiles are found there [in Ireland], and no snake can live there; for, though often carried thither out of Britain, as soon as the ship comes near the shore, and the scent of the air reaches them, they die.

Nobody knows why some systems—rivers, forests, possibly the London Underground but we're not sure—acquire a genius loci. Not even the genii locorum themselves know the why and the how of it—they only know it happens.

Nightingale said that everything was true, after a fashion, and that had to include vampires, didn't it? I doubted they were anything like they were in books and on TV, and one thing was for certain – they absolutely weren't going to sparkle in the sunlight.

The myth of Aryan dominance, initially an attempt to trace the lost language of the Aryas, began as a set of undemonstrable racial assumptions, and ended in a colossal, perfectly unscientific lie: "I decide who is Jewish and who is Aryan," announced Goebbels. That is what the Nazis meant by natural selection.

Her legend, which would sprout a thousand hallucinations, had been born in our midst – born of stories and rumours which, in time, would become some of the most extravagant realities of our lives.

The belief that Jews have horns apparently derives from a mistranslation from Hebrew of a verse in Exodus, compounded by a Michelangelo sculpture that portrays Moses with horns.) As I grew older, I became aware that many of my peers, evangelical Christians, believed as a matter of doctrine—if

The secularist myth holds that religion held back science for millennia. The reverse is true. Without Judeo-Christian foundations, science simply would not exist as it does in the West.

If the hunters think we do all things by chants and spells, they may believe so -- it does not hurt them.

But which race? Does there exist a German race? Has it ever existed? Will it ever exist? Reality, myth, or hoax of the theorists? Ah well, we respond, a Germanic race does not exist. Various movements. Curiosity. Stupor. We repeat. Does not exist. We don't say so. Scientists say so. Hitler says so.

To believe in the heroic makes heroes.

Where the presence of truth should be possible, it can be possible solely under the condition of the recognition of myth--that is, the recognition of its crushing indifference to truth.

While the government underwrote the West more than any other region, the myth claimed that hardworking Western cowboys and settlers wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to work out their own destiny.

Having western, Russian or Iranian forces providing the ground defeat of Isis would certainly work militarily, but would be the least attractive option as it might help reinforce the Isis myth.

In Greek mythology, Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy, except - due to her rejection of Apollo's affections - nobody would ever believe her warnings.

The Greeks first identified the Amazons ethnographically, as a nation of men and women distinguished by something outstanding in their gender relations. Later, any ambivalence or anxiety that knowledge of this alternative gender-neutral culture evoked among Greeks was played out in their mythic narratives about martial women.

There is no myth relative to the manners and customs of the English that in my experience is more tenaciously held by the ordinary Frenchman than that the sale of a wife in the market-place is an habitual and an accepted fact in English life.

Most historians are engaged in fiction.