"Mythic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... modern pantheist to concoct systems of religion in his cabinet, does it become at once clear that the mythic explanation of those songs is the only one to be admitted, and that the odious facts which those legends express ought to be discarded altogether? At least we hope that, when philosophers come to be the real rulers of the world, they will not give to their ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... 17. Of the mythic or poetic significance of the veronica, there is less to be said than of its natural beauty. I have not been able to discover with what feeling, or at what time, its sacred name was originally given; and the legend of S. Veronica herself is, in the substance ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... direct proof that the classic Greeks, in common with their Aryan forefathers, held the conception of a group of Beings, of mythic origin, represented under the form of armed youths, who were noted dancers, and whose activities were closely connected with the processes of Nature. They recognized a relation between these beings, ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... imagination is a faculty that in the course of ages has undergone a reduction—or at least, some profound changes. So, for reasons indicated later on, the mythic activity has been taken in this work as the central point of our topic, as the primitive and typical form out of which the greater number of the others have arisen. The creative power is there shown entirely unconfined, freed ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... we ourselves so often use upon coffins and grave-stones, seems to bring it into connection rather with the idea of the Midgard-Worm, the great under-lying world-serpent which figures so largely in the mythic cosmogony of the Scandinavians. I suggest that this is the notion, of which the romancer may have heard from Scandinavian sources; and there is even a kind of indication that it was associated in his mind with the idea of paganism, as Brendan ...
— Brendan's Fabulous Voyage • John Patrick Crichton Stuart Bute
... essentially loyal instincts; but (much as Americans often are heard to complain in their own behalf) they have, as an independent nation, no seen and known object for their loyalty. Since the days of Brian Boroime at his mythic court of Tara, the Irish people have hardly set eyes upon the monarch of their country: perhaps (if we except the conquering William of the Boyne) our elderly Adonis, George the Fourth, was the sole specimen ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... But the sacred feasts and purifying ablutions connected with the same spiritual hopes are found in other Oriental cults, and the magnificent suggestive ritual of the Egyptian clergy certainly was more impressive than that of the magi. The mythic drama performed in the grottoes of the Persian god and culminating in the immolation of a steer who was considered as the creator and rejuvenator of the earth, must have seemed less important and affecting than the suffering and joy of Isis seeking and reviving the ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... is the oldest, the most powerful, and the most occult, of the secret societies of Italy. Its mythic origin reaches the era of paganism, and it is not impossible that it may have been founded by some of the despoiled professors of the ancient faith. As time advanced, the brotherhood assumed many outward forms, ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... And these mythic and poetic words, true to man's abiding sense of evil in his deepest hours, stand to-day in the arsenal of theology as proof-texts of the doctrines of ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... flat meadows, mountain-cradled; and the grave of the mythic greyhound, and the fair old church, shrouded in tall trees; and last, but not least, at the famous Leek Hotel, where ruleth Mrs. Lewis, great and wise, over the four months' Babylon of guides, cars, chambermaids, tourists, artists, and reading-parties, camp-stools, telescopes, poetry-books, blue ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... in after years the best companion of memory; it is also a romance of nature and art, and of the mystery of evil, shot through with such sunshine gleams, with the presence of pure color and divine forms, as to seem like the creations of that old mythic Mediterranean world which, though it held shapes of terror, was the most beautiful land that the imagination has ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... older are found in the newer. This older material in the newer philosophy is often used for curious purposes by many scholars. One such use I wish to mention here. The nomenclature which has survived from the earlier state is supposed to be deeply and occultly symbolic and the mythic narratives to be deeply and occultly allegoric. In this way search is made for some profoundly metaphysic cosmogony; some ancient beginning of the mythology is sought in which mystery is ...
— On Limitations To The Use Of Some Anthropologic Data - (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (pages 73-86)) • J. W. Powell
... New-Year carols offer additional illustrations of the ancient heathen customs, and mythic or ritual poetry. The festival which was almost universally celebrated at Christmas-tide, in ancient heathen times, seems to have referred to the renewed life attributed to the sun after the winter solstice. The Christian church turned this festival, so far as possible, into a celebration of the ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... and to all the miseries that poison earthly existence. Thus the notion of the sin of the first authors of humanity, the heritage of which weighs constantly on their descendants, is a fundamental one in Mazdean books. The modification of legends relative to the first man even resulted in the mythic conceptions of the later periods of Zoroastrianism, in attaching a rather singular repetition of this first transgression to several successive generations in the initial ages ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Nimes to Arles, I spent three hours at Tarascon; chiefly for the love of Alphonse Daudet, who has written nothing more genial than "Les Aventures Prodigieuses de Taitarin," and the story of the "siege" of the bright, dead little town (a mythic siege by the Prussians) in the "Conies du Lundi." In the introduction which, for the new edition of his works, he has lately supplied to "Tar- tarin," the author of this extravagant but kindly satire gives some account of the displeasure with which he ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... conjugal life would never have occurred. She would probably have known why the Italian poet makes Angelica prefer Medoro, who was a blond Chevalier de Valois, to Orlando, whose mare was dead, and who knew no better than to fly into a passion. Is not Medoro the mythic form for all courtiers of feminine royalty, and Orlando the myth of disorderly, furious, and impotent revolutions, which destroy but cannot produce? We publish, but without assuming any responsibility for it, this opinion of a ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... fine moustaches exactly as in the mukhalingas of Champa. In the tank of the temple of Mahakut is a half submerged shrine, from which rises a stone linga on which are carved four faces bearing moustaches. There is said to be a gold kosha set with jewels at Sringeri. See J. Mythic. Society (Bangalore), vol. VIII. p. 27. According to Gopinatha Rao, Indian Iconography, vol. II. p. 63, the oldest known lingas have ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... by the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. Hence there is never a quaint Gothic decoration, floral or animal, but it must be symbolic of some great mystery. So the reticulated and geometrical tracery on the sculptured stones has been invested with mythic attributes, under such names as "the Runic Knot." It has been counted symbolical of a mysterious worship or creed, and has been associated with Druids and other respectable, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... beginning of the work of rebirth, a deluge occurs. This flood takes place not merely in the alchemistic process (when the bodies undergo putrefaction in the vessel and become black), but we see the mythic deluges coming with unmistakable regularity at the same time, i.e., after the killing of the original being (separation of the primal parents, etc.), and before the new creation of the world by the son of God. Stucken (SAM., p. 123): "We see corroborated ... what I have already ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... against the reality of miracles in their received sense, are: first, that they are attributable to natural causes; and, second, that they may involve more or less of the parabolic or mythic character. These assumptions do away with any real admission of miracles even on religious grounds. The animus of the whole essay may be determined by the following treatment of testimony and reason: "Testimony, after all, is but a second-hand assurance; it is but a blind guide; testimony ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... from the pressure of bad seasons. Somewhat away from the present coast-line, where the hills begin—perhaps the sea came as far inland once—may be found ancient places, still ports, with histories running back into the mythic period. Passing through such a place on a sunny day in the earlier part of the year, the extreme quiet and air of silence were singularly opposite to the restlessness of the great watering-place near. It was but ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... mythic white haoma plant (Zendavesta, Vendidad, xx. 4; Bundahish, xxvii. 4). It is an idealization of the yellow haoma of the mountains which was used in sacrifices (Yasna, x. 6-10). It corresponds to the soma plant Asclepias acida of the ancient Aryans ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... dead were so thick on the field, after this battle, that their bodies reached to the axle-wheels of the chariots of the victors. At the time of this battle Christianity was being proclaimed in England. It was approaching the North. With the battle of Bravalla the mythic age of Denmark and the North comes ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... consolation, 'though inward far we be'—even the mournful memory of a past of celestial innocence becomes the harbinger of a divine hope. Let the poet then still sing of the past; like the glories of the setting sun flushing down the golden west, it but whispers of a more glorious rise in the mythic east. The root of art springs from the intuitions of eternal love; its leaves, flowers, and fruit, are faith, hope, and charity. May the rapt artist ever remember that the beauty of this earth was not intended to satisfy the requisitions ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Athisl v. Frowine, meeting in battle. Athisl v. Ket and Wig, on challenge. Uffe v. Prince of Saxony and Champion, by challenge. Frode v. Froger, on challenge. Eric v. Grep's brethren, on challenge, twelve a side. Eric v. Alrec, by challenge. Hedin v. Hogni, the mythic everlasting battle. Arngrim v. Scalc, by challenge. Arngrim v. Egtheow, for truage of Permland. Arrow-Odd and Hialmar v. twelve sons of Arngrim Samsey fight. Ane Bow-swayer v. Beorn, by challenge. Starkad v. Wisin, by challenge. Starkad v. Tanlie, ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned") |
