mythology

Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph that liv'st unseenWithin thy airy shellBy slow Meander's margent green,And in the violet-imbroider'd valeWhere the love-lorn nightingaleNightly to thee her sad song mourneth well:Canst thou not tell me of a gentle pairThat likest thy Narcissus are?

Everyone thinks of Anubis as this super jacked up jackal. I find that amusing. I guess he must work out a lot._ I guess when you think of it, it is kind of funny. No other picture of gods from that time are ripped. I guess Anubis did Egyptian steroids.

Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony.Little did they suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight's frail figure would be, for the future, no less poetic than Sinbad's haunts or Ariosto's vast geographies.For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.

Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.

The Hawaiian creation myth relates that the present cosmos is only the last of a series, having arisen in stages from the wreck of the previous universe. In this account, the octopus is the lone survivor of the previous, alien universe.

I wish people would spread a Faustian rumor about me.' I leaned over and knocked Sunshine's hand out of Luke's hair. 'A Faustian myth,' I repeated. 'It's so much more interesting than just being that nouveau-poor blond girl who lives in a big house with nobody but her jackass brother with pecs bigger than his brain. Sunshine, if I ever disappear, please tell people that I ran after the Devil, trying to get my soul back.

Only two possible reactions to the mimetic contagion exist, and they make an enormous difference. Either we surrender and join the persecuting crowd, or we resist and stand alone. The first way is the unanimous self-deception we call mythology.

The mythology of a people is far more than a collection of pretty or terrifying fables to be retold in carefully bowdlerized form to our schoolchildren. It is the comment of the men of one particular age or civilization on the mysteries of human existence and the human mind, their model for social behaviour, and their attempt to define in stories of gods and demons their perception of the inner realities. We can learn much from the mythologies of earlier peoples if we have the humility to respect ways of thought widely differing from our own. In certain respects we may be far cleverer than they, but not necessarily wiser. We cannot return to the mythological thinking of an earlier age; it is beyond our reach, like the vanished world of childhood. Even if we feel a nostalgic longing for the past, like that of Jon Keats for Ancient Greece of William Morris for medieval England, there is now no way of entry. The Nazis tries to revive the myths of ancient Germany in their ideology, but such an attempt could only lead to sterility and moral suicide. We cannot deny the demands of our own age, but this need not prevent us turning to the faith of another age with sympathetic understanding, and recapturing imaginatively some of its vanished power. It will even help us view more clearly the assumptions and beliefs of our own time

From The Ghost Wars- on the concept of the Torah as ancient science fiction. __ake the story of the fall of the tower of Babel. Let__ say this represents not an act of God, nor a metaphor for this planet__ diverse linguistic heritage; but a catastrophic act of terrorism by the Divisionists to sever mankind from the neural net. The internet in this situation becomes mankind__ attempt to build a physical replacement for a natural ability long lost. Think of it as a wooden leg or a pacemaker.

One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.

There's my baby!" I cried, quite carried away, "There's my poochiekins!"..."Sadie," My dad said firmly, "Please do not refer to the devourer of souls as 'poochiekins'.

He thought of the deep crevasses and windy caves of Underlay, and the stories of the creatures that dwelt there. Of course, he didn__ believe in them. He__ told them, because the handing on of an oral mythology was very important to a developing culture, but he didn__ believe in supernatural monsters. He shivered. He hoped they didn__ believe in him.

If the students were taught about shuttle flights, plate tectonics and submarine volcanoes, they were also immersed in the traditional myths of their culture__he ancient story, for example, of how the island of Pohnpei had been built under the direction of a mystical octopus, Lidakika. (I was fascinated by this, for it was the only cephalopod creation myth I had ever heard.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed.

My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.

Helios thought he looked pretty hot, and he had an annoying habit of calling the sun his "chick magnet.

She watches him for hours. She wants to be the sheets that cover his toes. She wants to be the ceiling separating him from the sky: above him, the first thing he sees before and after dreams. She wants to be the open window letting in the light for him.