Before grabbing a mythological creature, I’d recommend putting on oven mitts. Especially if you pick up a Phoenix.

They yoked themselves to a car and drew her all the long way through dust and heat. Everyone admired their filial piety when they arrived and the proud and happy mother standing before the statue...

She told us about the goddess called Persephone, who was forced to spend half a year in the darkness deep underground. Winter happened when she was trapped inside the earth. The days shrank, they became...

If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythological lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged role.

In the Christian tradition, there is a very decisive problem in distinguishing between the senses of the terms “Jesus” and “Christ.” “Jesus” refers to a historical character; “Christ” refers to an eternal principle, the Son...

Surely, the gods’ judgment is certain. But as for us, we must be satisfied to ‘come close’ to those things, for we are men, who speak according to what is likely, and whose lectures resemble...

The ancient paused for a moment, as if his strength were failing. Yet I sensed that there was more to tell. Looking deep into my eyes, he whispered: ‘The Gond kingdoms have fallen, their people...

Let’s train ourselves to not hate each other. We all come from the same consciousness in the mind.

Myth is a past with a future, exercising itself in the present.

Maybe love was a myth anyhow, a brew of hormones and fantasy, evolution’s way of getting men and women together long enough for them to procreate,back in the day when girls got pregnant at twelve,...

If I say I do not believe in faeries or elves or trolls, does this imply that I have a set of beliefs and a lifestyle that adheres to this lack of belief? NO, IT...

Well, this is only a story, isn’t it? I mean, our patrons, anyone who comes to this park, are they going to take this to heart, Mister Shake?’They’ll take what pieces they want, and everything...

Well, someone told someone and someone told someone else, you know how it is, that if you filled jugs with water and placed them around the edges of your lawn that you’d be protected. Ghost...

Stories are psycho-diagnostic ― they diagnose the condition of our psyches. When we watch, read or hear a story, whatever detail jumps out reflects an issue in our psyche that requires our attention.

Is there an intelligent man or woman now in the world who believes in the Garden of Eden story? If you find any man who believes it, strike his forehead and you will hear an...

SAINT, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.

I’m drawn to characters who bear similarities to the protagonists in myths and legends. (…)

The obvious pollution occurring in many places – worst of all, in the planned societies- has encouraged the growth of the environmental movement, which, however, as shown in previous chapters, has an agenda that goes...

Christianity is such a silly religion.

It is generally understood that a modern-day book may honorably be based upon an older one, especially since, as Dr. Johnson observed, no man likes owing anything to his contemporaries. The repeated but irrelevant points...

Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.

The signs of the old flame, I know them well.I pray that the earth gape deep enough to take me downor the almighty Father blast me with one bolt to the shades,the pale, glimmering shades...

Time slipped and slid around him, unanchored by any fact that could be verified. Perhaps it did not matter. ‘Where does our story take place, and when?’ asked Cocteau at the start of Orphée. ‘It’s...

As you set out on your journey to Ithaca,pray that your journey be a long one,filled with adventure, filled with discovery.Laestrygonians and Cyclopes,the angry Poseidon–do not fear them:you’ll never find such things on your wayunless...

Vi har ett slags grundmentalitet som gör att vi i första hand ser de förändringar som gör oss osäkra. Och det som gör oss osäkra är skrämmande, och ger i sin tur alltid upphov till...

Music does propagate myths and people have tried to make that myth more than it was.

Like the end, the myth of the beginning overlaps the cycle of birth and death, unfolding like a Möbius strip in ceaseless continuum, which is the paradox that sits above and beyond intellectual explanation in...

…a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to...

We have seen that there are two misconceptions involved in the myth that memory is a thing. One is that memory is a thing (a tangible structure rather than an abstract process) and the other...

At its best, fantasy rewards the reader with a sense of wonder about what lies within the heart of the commonplace world. The greatest tales are told over and over, in many ways, through centuries....

Perfect sanity is a myth propagated by straitjacket salesmen.

There is machinery in the mind that is consciousness. Knowing the machine is the dawn of a new era.

I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based...

The loss of that oral tradition and the breakdown of communication between generations had set my family adrift, floating aimlessly without history and all its accumulated experience to guide us. We need context, we need...

The supernatural worldview is causing a great number of otherwise intelligent people to cling to a collection of atavistic concepts that have not, and never will serve humanity in any ultimately beneficial way. Any benefits...

In the blink of an eye, the fairytales told to children were as real as death and taxes. Vampires, shifters, trolls, demons and creatures of myth, were as real as the air we breathe.

Believe reality is what you were taught was myth.

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them,...

Now, I pray you, cast yourself into a different world, a different trail of thought; step into a place where dragons live and breathe, where they are as real in touch and voice as you...

I have a very clear memory of my first encounter with myth, sitting in a mobile library and travelling, at the same time, with Theseus on the road to Athens. By the time we’d met,...

The predisposition to religious belief is an ineradicable part of human behavior. Mankind has produced 100,000 religions. It is an illusion to think that scientific humanism and learning will dispel religious belief. Men would rather...

It was not enough that food aplenty was within Man’s grasp: he wanted more.It was not enough that prey surrendered themselves to Man according to the natural order: Man wanted to cook his prey. Man...

Caucasian”, most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore.These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them....

Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have...

There are plenty of atheists in foxholes. What I don’t see are Christians in foxholes. If a Christian soldier takes a bullet to the knee, he will undoubtedly first call for a medic, not a...

the dank night is sweeping down from the skyand the setting stars incline our heads to sleep.

Being what we are, rational but also animate, amphibians who start from the world of sense and proceed through myth and metaphor to the world of spirit. I do not see how we could have...

As with . . . even the written word, the remote overview is one more wrenched perspective that developing civilization has glued, collagelike, to the once unified experience of life.