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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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,...

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.

[When asked about his thoughts on gods]I think it’s like a movie that was way too popular. It’s a story that’s been told too many times and just doesn’t mean anything. Man lived on the...

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.

Security is a strange thing, a myth that the brain allows in exchange for a brief moment of peace.

In a segment of the Sermon on the Mount, appearing in Matthew 5, Jesus is reported to have set six new teachings of his against six old Jewish teachings. The latter are introduced by such...

It was a rainy night. It was the myth of a rainy night.

The business of stories is not enchantment. The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up.

We have seen that a myth could never approached in a purely profane setting. It was only comprehensible in a liturgical context that set it apart from everyday life; it must be experienced as part...

The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.

People add color to their story because they think it happened in black and white.

It was only much later that he was made flesh and blood [in the Gospels] on paper. Thus Christ was created as a literary creation.

An interesting contrast between the geology of the present day and that of half a century ago, is presented by the complete emancipation of the modern geologist from the controlling and perverting influence of theology,...

In Pliny I read about the invention of clay modeling. A Sicyonian potter came to Corinth. There his daughter fell in love with a young man who had to make frequent long journeys away from...

There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to ”realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have ”succeeded,” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is ”realizable.”...

I am weary of your quarrels,Weary of your wars and bloodshed,Weary of your prayers for vengeance,Of your wranglings and dissensions

Humans are a story telling species. Throughout history we have told stories to each other and ourselves as one of the ways to understand the world around us. Every culture has its creation myth for...

A swishing is often heard in the Carpathians, the sound as of a thousand mill wheels turning in the water. It is the dead men gnawing at the dead man, in the abyss without issue,...