SCHOLAR ISLAND
MYTHOLOGY
"Myth stands in relationship to mankind in general as a dream does to the individual. A dream shows the individual important psychological truth about himself. A myth shows an important psychological truth which includes mankind as a whole . "
John A. Sanford
Introduction to HE!
"It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation."
-Joseph Campbell
"A person who grasps the inner meaning of a myth is in touch with the universal spiritual question life asks all of us."
John A. Sanford
"Myth is about the unknown; it is about that for which initially we have no words. Myth therefore looks into the heart of a great silence."
-Karen Armstrong
A Short History of Myth
"Myths have no life of themselves. They wait for us to give them body. Let but one person in the world respond to their call, they offer us their vitality unimpaired."
Albert Camus
Prometheus in Hell
"The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stands this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change. "
Joseph Campbell
"We live beyond any tale we happen to enact."
V.S. Pritchett, 'The Myth Makers'
"Myth and history are twins; they represent the ideal and the actual faces of the same reality, The difference is nevertheless important, for history connects us with the past and future whereas myth belongs to the eternal present."
J.G. Bennett
Masters of Wisdom
"Yet through all the variety, one theme is repeated many times. Again and again the effective force is a mystique. Again and again it is the same mystique, variously articulated. Leaders seem to keep looking for the same pattern, and of it is not there, they put it there. This is the pat- tern to which the tale of King Arthur, with his passing and return, gives a mythical form. We might speak of a mystique of transfiguration: The reinstatement of a long-lost glory or promise, as the point of departure for a fresh start, with intervening corruption swept away. On the classical level, 'it is Virgil's return of the Saturnian Age, and the gods before the gods. On the Arthurian level, it is the renewal of the Briton's Kingdom, whether as imagined by Spencer or otherwise. But as a vision in action, it is Israel's repossession of Zion; Luther's deliverance of the pure faith from papal captivity; Hitler' s revival of Charlemagne and Barbarossa; Gandhi's resurrection of buried India. It is Renaissance Italy, reborn; The Erin of saints and heroes; Ghana or Zinabive, reborn. It is the early Chou dynasty reincarnate in Confucius. It is natural Humanity rising like an earthquake under the crust of pseudo-civilization. It is the ghost of the Iroquois confederacy striding into the Winter Palace."
Camelot and the Vision of Albion
by Geoffrey Ashe
St. Martin' s Press
"One of the most uncompromising rejections of early Greek mythology was made by Socrates. Myths frightened or offended him; he preferred to turn his back on them and discipline his mind to think scientifically: To investigate the reason of the being of everything--of everything as it is, not as it appears, and to reject all opinions of which no account can be given. "
Robert Graves
The White Goddess
"In the nineteenth century a phenomenon was always explained by its causes, often at the cost of misunderstanding the phenomenon itself. We of the twentieth century know that a phenomenon, whether individual or collective, can be properly understood only in its creative movement, its archetype, its myth. The Archetype of Europe is simply an infinite quest: Adventure. Noah' s son 'Japheth' was given Europe and Arms and the promise of boundless expansion: 'Dilatatio'. Europe became the meeting place of 7 or 8 different traditions: oriental, Nordic, continental, maritime, individualistic, community minded, rationalist, and magical. The task of synthesizing all of this was undertaken by the Church. Europe is a result of this synthesis." The Gods are within," as Heinrich Zimmer used to say, and they are within our acts, thoughts, and feelings. We do not have to trek across the starry spaces, the brain of heaven, or blast them loose from concealment with mind-blowing chemicals. They are there in the very ways you feel and think and experience your moods and symptoms. Here is Apollo, right here, making us distant and wanting to form artful, clear, and distinct ideas; here is old Saturn, imprisoned in paranoid systems of judgment, defensive maneuvers, melancholic conclusions; here is Mars, having to turn red in the face and ready to kill in order to make a point; and here too is the wood nymph Daphne- Diana, retreating into foliage, the camouflage of innocence, suicide through naturalness."
James Hillman
Puer Papers
Spring Publications
University of Dallas
"In plunging into the deep sea of mythology full of monsters and marvels, one is shown a lot in roaming through the depth of the waters, but one is not taught very much explicitly about the very meaning of the features one is privileged to watch in perusing the old tradition. One has to use one's intuition in deciphering these dreams of the collective genius of a great civilization. In fact, Hindu mythical tradition, instead of explaining its amazing features to the understanding, unfolds them to the pious intuition of the Hindu masses; it impresses their imagination and guides their souls by an immediate impact on the unconscious which is stirred to correspond to the dreamlike features and events of the mythological tales as they evolve in being told."
Henry R. Zimmer
Heinrich Zimmer: Coming into His Own
ed by Margaret H. Case
"The mythical content often appears rather like an over painted, tricked out old beauty. Beneath all the frippery there is nothing of the reborn freshness of a youthful figure with radiant countenance, but only a shriveled, corrugated old thing with a rewritten face. Nevertheless, just such long-overripe old beauties are often the very ones to tell best the ancient tales of life; they are better at that, by far, than the young and attractive fascinators. The only problem is not to shudder at the look of them while we are listening."
Heinrich Zimmer
"William Doty, in defining the words myth and mythology, suggests a connection between the universal ma , the sound a baby makes at its mother's breast, which is also the Indo-European root for mother, and the root sound mu out of which emerges the Greek word mythos, literally " to make a sound with the mouth" or "word" This ma-mu connection he calls "mother-myth," which we might also call the beginning word, the first stage in the articulation of creation. Doty traces the development of the mythos word to its Homeric meaning first as style and then as the arrangement of words in story form, then to Plato as a metaphorical tale used to explain realities beyond the power of simple logic-such as the famous myth of the cave-and finally to Aristotle's use of the term as that most important of dramatic elements, 'plot,' the significant arrangements of events for the ritual process that was Greek tragedy. Mythology or mythologia is a combination of mythos and logos, or informing principle, later the "Word" of the Christian creation myth of John, which begins "In the beginning was the Word." To study mythology is to study myth-logic in general, or the defining myths of cultures in particular, or the cultural and collective inner life of the human quest for self-identity that stretches back at least to the Paleolithic cave paintings, themselves expression of our defining drive to make a metaphor to "tell a story," a drive that continues into the present."
-David Leeming
Myth: A Biography of Belief
"After cohabiting for many years with the corpus of Western literature, I sometimes wonder if it all could be reduced to a few simple stories. James G. Frazer and his epigone Joseph Campbell attempted such a synthesis for myths and legends. On his singing-reciting tours, the poet Carl Sandburg used to utter with banjo accompaniment what he called the shortest poem ever written: "Born, Troubled. Died." Others have proposed thirty-six dramatic situations. The folklorist Vladimir Propp thought he was accomplishing something worthwhile by identifying in Russian folktales 31 functions and 151 elements, with a mathematical symbol assigned to each. The slow collective crystallization of popular stories into a handful of myths reveals some of the shapes our lives may take and the yearnings they express or repress. One of the distinguishing features of our Western collection of myths is that most of them come from ancient sources-Egyptian, Greek, Judaic, Near Eastern. The number of postclassical myths is so limited that I can identify only two that have emerged in the last thousand years."
-Roger Shattuck
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
WHAT IS TO BE THE NEW MYTHOLOGY
By Joseph Campbell
"We live today-thank God!- in a secular state, governed by human beings (with all their inevitable faults) according to principles of law that are still developing and have originated not from Jerusalem, but from Rome.
The concept of the state is yielding rapidly at this hour to the concept of the ecumene, i.e., the whole inhabited earth; and if nothing else unites us, the ecological crisis will. There is no need any more for those locally binding, socio-politically bounded, differing forms of religion which have held men separate in the past, giving to God the things that are Caesar's and to Caesar the things that are God's.
"God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere." So we are told in a little twelfth-century book known as The Book of The Twenty-Four Philosophers. Each of us-whoever and wherever he may be-is then the center, and within him, whether he knows it or not, is that Mind at Large, the laws of which are the laws not only of all minds but of all space as well. For we are the children of this beautiful planet that we have lately seen photographed from the moon.
We were not delivered into this planet by some god, but have come forth from it. We are its eyes and mind, its seeing and its thinking. And the earth, together with its sun, this light around which it flies like a moth, came forth, we are told, from a nebula; and that nebular, in turn, from space. So that we are the mind, ultimately, of space. no wonder, then, if its laws and our are the same! Likewise, our depths are the depths of space, whence all those gods sprang that men's minds in the past projected onto animals and plants, onto hills and streams, the planets in their courses, and their own peculiar social observances.
Our mythology now is to be of infinite space and its light, which is without as well as within. Like moths, we are caught in the spell of its allure, flying to it outward, to the moon and beyond, and flying to it inward. On our planet itself all dividing horizons have been shattered. We can no longer hold our loves at home and project our aggressions elsewhere; for on this spaceship Earth there is no "elsewhere" any more. And no mythology that continues to speak or teach of "elsewhere's" and "outsiders" meets the requirement of this hour.
And so to return to our opening question: What is to be the new mythology?
It is-and will forever be, as long as our human race exists- the old, everlasting, perennial mythology, in its "subjective sense," addressed to the waking of individuals in the knowledge of themselves, not simply as egos fighting for place on the surface of this beautiful planet, but equally as centers of Mind at Large-each in his own way at one with all, and with no horizons."
Joseph Campbell....excerpt from Myths to Live By, Viking Press, 1972
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Book: "JOSEPH CAMPBELL: A Fire in the Mind" by Stephen & Robin Larsen
Book: "Mythology" by Edith Hamilton
Book: "Star Myths Of The Greeks And Romans: A Sourcebook" by Theony Condos
Book: "Don't Know Much About Mythology: Everything You Need to Know About the Greatest Stories in Human History but Never Learned" by Kenneth C. Davis
Book: "The Oxford Companion to World Mythology" by David Leeming
Book: "Myth: A Biography Of Belief" by David Leeming
Book: "Jealous Gods Chosen People: The Mythology of the Middle East" by David Leeming
Book: "Voices of the Ancestors: African Myth" by Tony Allan
Book: "Northern Mythology: From Pagan Faith to Local Legends" compiled by Benjamin Thorpe
Book: "Women of Mythology" by Kay Retzlaff
Book: "Who's who in Classical Mythology" by Adrian Room
Book: "Classical Mythology: A Dictionary of the Tales, Characters and Traditions of Classical Mythology"
Book: "Songs On Bronze: The Greek Myths Made Real" by Nigel Spivey
Book: "Tree Of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism" by Howard Schwartz
Book: "An Introduction to Greek Mythology" by David Bellingham
Book: "Paideia-The Ideals of Greek Culture" by Werner Jaeger
Book: "Realm of the Rising Sun: Japanese Myth" by Tony Allan
Book: "Land of The Dragon: Chinese Myth and Mankind" by Tony Allan
Book: "The Mythology of North America" by John Bierhorst
Book: "Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs" by John Lindow
Book: "Gods and Heroes From Viking Mythology" by Brian Branston
Book: "Triumph of the Hero: Myth and Mankind" by Tony Allan
Book: "Great Heroes of Mythology" by Petra Press
Book: "The Wise Lord of the Sky: Persian Myth" by Tony Allan
Book: "Encyclopedia of Folklore and Literature" Ed. by M.E. Brown & B.A. Rosenberg
Book: "Myths: Myths and Legends of the World Explored" by Kenneth McLeish
Book: "Asian Mythology: Myths and Legends of China, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia" by Rachel Storm
Book: "Chinese Myths & Legends" by O.B. Duane & N. Hutchison
Book: "Egyptian Mythology" by Aude Gros de Beler
Book: "Myths of the East: Dragons, Demons and Dybbuks" by Rachel Storm
Book: "Mythology: Tales of Ancient Civilizations" by Timothy R. Roberts et al.
Book: "Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion" ed by Simon Price & Emily Kearns
Book: "Encyclopedia Of Ancient Myths and Culture"
Book: "The Oxford Companion To World Mythology" by David Leeming
Book: "The Encyclopedia Of Ancient Myths And Culture"
Book: "Mythology of the American Nations" by D.M. Jones & B.L. Molyneaux
Book: "Star Lore: Myths, Legends, and Facts" by William Tyler Olcott
Book: "The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological Exploration of Myth expanded and updated edition" by Otto Rank
Book: "Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn From Myths" by Mary Lefkowitz