"Mythology" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... separate them as to time, since it is the baptism that cleanses, just as the darkness vanishes before the flash of the electric light when the right button is touched; just as the Augean stables were cleansed, in the fabled story of Grecian mythology, when Hercules turned in the floods of the River Arno; the refuse went out as the ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... law believed in as an ultimate object. "Science" in many minds is genuinely taking the place of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the "Laws of Nature" as objective facts to be revered. A brilliant school of interpretation of Greek mythology would have it that in their origin the Greek gods were only half-metaphoric personifications of those great spheres of abstract law and order into which the natural world falls apart—the sky-sphere, the ocean-sphere, the earth-sphere, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... to fore-shadow the office of the evil archer Loki, who in the Scandinavian mythology shoots Balder with a mistletoe twig. The language closely resembles that of ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... stature, that he seemed more like a god than a man, and such another as Angus Ogue, son of Dagda, [Footnote: Angus Ogue was the god of youth and beauty, son of the Dagda who seems to have been the genius of earth and its fertility or perhaps the Zeus of our Gaelic mythology.] whose fairy palace is on the margin of the Boyne. His head and his feet were bare. His short hunting-cloak was dark-red with flowery devices along the edge. On his breast he wore a brooch of gold bronze; carbuncles and precious stones were set in the bronze, and it ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... branch was the symbol of regal authority. Laid upon the sacrifice in the temple, it made the offering sacred; and with it the priests chastised and put to flight the evil spirits which assailed them. The supreme majesty of Oro, the great god of their mythology, was declared in the coco-nut log from which his image was rudely carved. Upon one of the Tonga Islands there stands a living tree, revered itself as a deity. Even upon the Sandwich Islands the coco palm retains all its ancient reputation; the people ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... would be well to remind you just here that the Almighty, and doubtless his man Moses also, knew that men possessed at least common sense. In the New Testament we have the word tartarus in its verb form. Where did it come from? The Apostle Peter, guided by the divine spirit, found it in Grecian mythology. Is it to be thrown out on that account? Nay, verily. A man of God, that is, a prophet, in any of the ancient ages as far back as Moses, is not to be regarded as under obligations to shun a truth because it was already in use among men. The man who would claim such a silly ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... discoveries should throw discredit on the physical propositions, the theological propositions, unless they can be separated from the physical propositions, will share in that discredit. In this way, undoubtedly, the progress of science may indirectly serve the cause of religious truth. The Hindoo mythology, for example, is bound up with a most absurd geography. Every young Brahmin, therefore, who learns geography in our colleges learns to smile at the Hindoo mythology. If Catholicism has not suffered to an equal degree ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Yahweh in Zech. iii. 9, iv. 10. The latter have been connected by Ewald and others with the later doctrine of seven chief angels,[25] parallel to and influenced by the Ameshaspentas (Amesha Spenta), or seven great spirits of the Persian mythology, but the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... It is WE alone who have devised cause, sequence, reciprocity, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we interpret and intermix this symbol-world, as "being-in-itself," with things, we act once more as we have always acted—MYTHOLOGICALLY. The "non-free will" is mythology; in real life it is only a question of STRONG and WEAK wills.—It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself, when a thinker, in every "causal-connection" and "psychological necessity," manifests something of compulsion, indigence, obsequiousness, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Science, Mythology, Biography, American History, Constitutions, Laws, Land Titles, Cities, Colleges, Army and Navy, Rate of Mortality, Growth of Cities, Insolvent and Assignment Laws, Debts, Rates of Interest, and ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... Galvas fronted Joan as she presently sat with her back resting against the stone; and a medley of the old thoughts rose not unwelcome in her mind. Giant mythology seemed a true thing in sight of these vast regular piles of granite; and the thought of the kind simple monsters who had raised that earn led to musings on the "little people." Her mind brooded over the fairies and their strange ways with young human mothers. She remembered the stories ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... gods: conscience was the wrath of the gods. Eliminate it, and behold! there were no consequences. The gods themselves, that kind of gods, became as extinct as the deities of the Druids, the Greek fates, the terrible figures of German mythology. Yes, and as the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... which seems to merit more attention than it has received, is the very frequent recurrence in Greek mythology of allusions to creatures which have been usually regarded as the creations of a poetic fancy, but which bear a strong resemblance to the Saurian and other monsters of the Oolite and Cretaceous formations. Of course, it is not impossible that ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... just; one in particular has struck me by its refined taste. You say that the Catholics cannot, like the Protestants, admit a Christian mythology, because we have not been trained and accustomed to it by great poets. This is most ingenious; and if my work should be considered good enough to induce people to say that I am the first to commence this ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of poetry, a hundred of novels, sixty of history, the remainder, to make up the thousand, of historical memoirs. The religious works are to be the Old and New Testament, the Koran, a selection of the works of the Fathers of the Church, works respecting the Aryans, Calvinists, of Mythology, &c. The epics are to be Homer, Lucan, Tasso, Telemachus, The Henriade, &c." Machiavelli, Fielding, Richardson, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Corneille, Racine, and Rousseau were ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... The Walkyrie in Teutonic mythology, whose office it is to bear the souls of fallen heroes from the ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... excitement, that he can hardly distinguish it from the animation of external nature, the upswelling of the seed in the earth, and of the sap through the trees. Flavian, to whom, again, as to his later euphuistic kinsmen, old mythology seemed as full of untried, unexpressed motives and interest as human life itself, had long been occupied with a kind of mystic hymn to the vernal principle of life in things; a composition shaping itself, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... at that time; it could not have been conceived by any artist not saturated with Germanism. It is possible to argue one's self into a belief of these things, but only the German can feel them. Yet there is no investigator of comparative mythology and religion who ought not to go to the story of the opera to find an illustration of one of the pervasive laws of his science; there is no folklorist who ought not to be drawn to its subject; no ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... that I permit my people to swear by all the persons of the Roman mythology. There was a horrible profanity in the matter of oaths in those days, and I found that without changing the form of sentences, and sacrificing idioms, at times, I could not ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... 1b. Transcendental Philosophy 2. System of Identity 3a. Doctrine of Freedom 3b. Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... is a work of unrivaled dignity. As the style of classic sculpture became very popular in the sixteenth century, the subjects were increasingly borrowed from pagan literature. Monuments were erected to illustrious men of ancient Rome, and Greek mythology was ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... But I can't complain. I had read Lempriere, and Smith and Bryant, and mythology in general, yet I must go and fall in love with the Sphinx. Men are so vain. Vanity whispered, She will set you a light one; why is a cobbler like a king, for instance? She is not in love with you, ye fool, if you are with her. The harder the riddle the higher ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... dea fornacalis. Grimm mentions a stone found at Cleves with the remarkable inscription—DEAE HLUDANAE SACRVM C. TIBERIVS VERVS, and remarks that Hludana was neither a Roman nor a Celtic goddess, and could be no other than Hlodyn, which shows the identity of the German and Scandinavian Mythology. ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... suggested Cora, "for I haven't any too much time to arrange this affair. We ought to have it in June, when we can depend on having a pleasant evening. Suppose we plan a masked mythology fete? Have a dark, green cavern, presided over by: er—um—let's see—who was the gentleman who had charge of passing shades from earth to some place, and where ...
— The Motor Girls • Margaret Penrose
... Astarte, and from them we derive our festival of Christmas, our Lady Day, and many other festivals with Christian names. It had been their principle from the first to admit any gods who had become popular, and thus were added in rapid succession the numberless gods and goddesses of the heathen mythology. At length Jesus of Nazareth was added to their pantheon. These pontiffs, on perceiving that Christianity, patronised by the Emperor, was likely to gain the day, saw that to maintain their power they must themselves pretend to belong to the new faith. ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... more than either or all of the three you mention; for Persian mythology, like Persian wines and Persian roses, is richer, more subtle, more fragrant, more glowing than any other. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... begins by saying that the play is so well known that it is needless to give an account of it. "But what is the meaning," he exclaims, "of this bold and poetic mixture of clowns and fairies, of mythology, and superstition, of high and low, of the earthly and the supernatural? And the scene is neither Athens nor Greece, but Shakespeare's own England; it is his own time and his own spirit." We are transported ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... mean the collective beliefs of any tribe or nation respecting deities or semi-divine personages. Recent studies in language, or the science of comparative philology, have thrown light on the origin of mythology, and upon the affinities of different polytheistic religions with one another. Among various nations belonging to the same family (as, for example, the peoples of the Aryan race), names of gods, and, to some extent, qualities ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... accused of impiety and of corrupting the youth of Athens with his doctrines. As a matter of fact he was a deeply religious man. If he objected to the crude mythology of Homer, he often spoke of one God, who ruled the world, and of a divine spirit or conscience within his own breast. A jury court found him guilty, however, and condemned him to death. He refused to escape from prison when opportunity offered and passed his last days in eager ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... as hinted at, a characteristic of Southern mythology, while action, assisted by supernatural agencies, is the feature of the Northern deities. Thus Jupiter sits majestic and silent upon Olympus and nods his head, and the whole earth shakes. He is human ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... an ivory tablet, and a breakfast table; a Visscher's Atlas, paged by the Doctor, and a manuscript index; Davies's Life of Garrick, presented to Johnson by the publisher; a walking cane; and a Dictionary of Heathen Mythology, with the Doctor's MS. corrections. His wife's wedding-ring, afterwards made into a mourning-ring; and a massive chair, in which he customarily sat, were ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... Age,' upon which the careful labor of over eight years has been expended, is one for which scholars will be profoundly grateful. It brings together from innumerable sources a vast amount of information, relative to the period covered, never before put in systematic form. The chapters on the mythology and cosmogony of the Norsemen, on the superstitions, slavery, graves, finds, weapons, occupations, feasts, warfare, etc., are intensely interesting. The text is accompanied by nearly fourteen ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... the youth from the older faith. In the end the result was a practical compromise, arranged by certain ecclesiastical politicians, themselves lovers of letters, between the old world and the new. It was agreed, in effect, that the schools should teach humane letters and mythology, leaving it to the Church to teach divine doctrine and the conduct of life. All later history bears the marks of this compromise. Here was the beginning of that distinction and apportionment between the secular and the sacred which is so much more conspicuous in Christian communities than ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... epic source materials has been classical mythology, but inevitably, as suitable classical myths were exhausted, Renaissance poets turned to such sources as the Italian novella, or even—romantic heresy—to comparatively free invention. As if to compensate for these departures from orthodoxy, the later epyllionists leaned ever more heavily ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... these passages to mean that the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the manifestation to our senses of realities greater than itself. Nature was a parable: Scripture was an allegory: pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology, properly understood, were but a preparation for the Gospel. The Greek poets and sages were in a certain sense prophets; for "thoughts beyond their thought to those high bards were given." There had ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... peoples, and working to defend them against the barbarians, would have gone down to posterity, amongst the same peoples, as the good god; but the chief of these devastators will have become the symbol of the evil principle: that is altogether reasonable. It appears from this same mythology that these two princes contended for long, but that neither of them was victorious. Thus they both held their own, just as the two principles shared the empire of the world according to the ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... sister in many of the hieroglyphical inscriptions, as are many of the other queens of the Ptolemies who were not so related to their husbands. This custom, though it took its rise in the Egyptian mythology, must have been strengthened by the marriages of Philadelphus and some of his successors with their sisters. In the hieroglyphical inscriptions he is usually called "beloved by Phtah," the god of Memphis, an addition to his name which was used by ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... bore a great resemblance to that of the Norsemen and of the Germanic races; that is, they worshiped nature (p. 027) and its phenomena. Dagh Bog was the sungod; Perun, the Thor of northern mythology, was the god of thunder; Stri Bog, the god of the winds; Voloss, the protector of flocks. They had neither temples nor regular priests, but worshiped the oak as the symbol of Perun, and before it the leaders offered sacrifices. These ancient deities ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... the four Latin verses, which might make people imagine that, after enjoying the girl as Hebe, I had gone in search of her as Ganymede. This was not the case, but the empress understood Latin and was familiar with mythology, and if she had looked on it in the light I have mentioned I should have been undone. I made six copies of the two documents before I went to bed; I was quite tired out, but the exertion had somewhat soothed ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... or some other bright being carried away by Paris, who represents Night, or Winter, or the Cloud, or some other power of darkness. Without discussing these ideas, it may be said that the Greek poets (at all events before allegorical explanations of mythology came in, about five hundred years before Christ) regarded Helen simply as a woman of wonderful beauty. Homer was not thinking of the Dawn, or the Cloud when he described Helen among the Elders on the Ilian walls, or repeated her lament over the ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... back. The latest feature in nursery autobiography, so far as I could gather, was to have a profound objective sympathy with vegetables and a faculty for naming domestic animals after the principal figures in classical mythology. If you have these gifts you get published by The Atlantic Monthly, with a preface by Viscount GREY. But I doubted whether Priscilla had them. I thought I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920 • Various
... a truly sluggard hero, around whom a pleiad of active heroes groups itself. The Mabinogi of Kilhwch and Olwen, by its entirely primitive aspect, by the part played in it by the wild-boar in conformity to the spirit of Celtic mythology, by the wholly supernatural and magical character of the narration, by innumerable allusions the sense of which escapes us, forms a cycle by itself. It represents for us the Cymric conception in all its purity, before it had been modified by the introduction of any foreign element. Without ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... filthy loves of gods and goddesses, Who in the earlier ages raised a bustle, But never put on pantaloons or bodices;[40] His reverend tutors had at times a tussle, And for their AEneids, Iliads, and Odysseys,[j] Were forced to make an odd sort of apology, For Donna Inez dreaded the Mythology. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... antiquity pervades them, greater perhaps than pervades the legends of any other north European people. We seem transplanted to a world of the most primitive type conceivable; a world of myth and of fable, of direct Nature interpretations, of mythology, in short, pure and simple. Even those stories which are known to be of later origin exhibit to a greater or less degree the same character; one which has come down to them doubtless from earlier half-forgotten tales, of which they are merely the ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... scourge to his people. As he appears in the poem, Beowulf is an idealized Anglo-Saxon hero, but in origin he may have been any one of several other different things. Perhaps he was the old Germanic god Beowa, and his exploits originally allegories, like some of those in the Greek mythology, of his services to man; he may, for instance, first have been the sun, driving away the mists and cold of winter and of the swamps, hostile forces personified in Grendel and his mother. Or, Beowulf may really have been a great human fighter who ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... jealousy, and only the stress of the danger threatening them from their adversaries the demons has induced them to organise themselves into an ordered kingdom under the sovereignty of Indra, who has been anointed by Prajapati. True, many of the offensive features in this mythology and ritual are survivals from a very ancient past, a pre-historic time in which morals were conspicuously absent from religion; the priesthood has forgotten very little, and as a rule has only added new rituals and new interpretations ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... an enthusiasm similar to that which had been formerly excited by cosmopolitan conceptions founded on the law of nature. The movement produced good and evil results. In serious minds it led to a deep and conscientious study of history, national literature, popular mythology, and the like; whilst in frivolous, inflammable spirits it gave birth merely to a torrent of patriotic fervour and rhetorical exaggeration. The Slavophils were the Russian representatives of this nationalistic reaction, and displayed both its ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... more is said. Every day the Press proclaims, openly or by suggestion or allusion, that the only cure for the ills of India is independence from foreign rule, independence to be won by heroic deeds, self-sacrifice, martyrdom on the part of the young, in any case by some form of violence. Hindu mythology, ancient and modern history, and more especially the European literature of revolution, are ransacked to furnish examples that justify revolt and proclaim its inevitable success. The methods of guerilla warfare as practised in Circassia, Spain, and South Africa; Mazzini's ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... heathen of old. The only difference is, that instead of calling this idol Jupiter, they call it Paul; instead of denominating that one Venus, they call it Mary, etc. Well has Bowling said: "The scholar, familiar as he is with the classic descriptions of ancient mythology, when he directs his attention to the ceremonies of Papal worship, can not avoid recognizing their close resemblance, if not their absolute identity. The temples of Jupiter, Diana, Venus or Apollo, their 'altars smoking with incense,' their boys ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... restored, and the mere realities which you have just been looking at are thrown back so far into distance, that the very event of your intrusion upon such scenes begins to look dim and uncertain, as though it belonged to mythology. ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... (Cowania mexicana) in his extended right hand. The head of the arrow was of stone, the fletching of eagle feathers, and the "breath feather" of the downy plume of the Tsenáhale (the Harpy of Navajo mythology). As they held the arrows they ejaculated, "ai', ai', ai', ai'," as they who dance the kátso-yisçà u do in the ceremonies to this day, and after the fourth ai' each one swallowed his arrow, head foremost, until the fletching touched his lips. ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... Indian thought has not yet been undertaken on a comprehensive scale. Sanskritists also with very few exceptions have neglected this important field of study, for most of these scholars have been interested more in mythology, philology, and history than in philosophy. Much work however has already been done in the way of the publication of a large number of important texts, and translations of some of them have also been attempted. But owing to the presence of many technical terms in advanced Sanskrit ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... Reliques, Percy has given us another good work in his Northern Antiquities (1770) translated from the French of Mallet's History of Denmark. This also was of immense influence, since it introduced to English readers a new and fascinating mythology, more rugged and primitive than that of the Greeks; and we are still, in music as in letters, under the spell of Thor and Odin, of Frea and the Valkyr maidens, and of that stupendous drama of passion and tragedy which ended in the "Twilight of the Gods." The literary world ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... group in a special manner peculiar to each tribe, according to its particular conditions of existence, and this process is for a class of groups of people, and particularly for the Aryans (Indo-Europeans) shown individually by comparative mythology. The gods developed by each tribe were national gods, whose power extended no further than to protect the national territory; beyond the frontier other gods held undisputed sway. They could only be conceived of as existing as long as the nation existed. They fell with its decline. This ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... regard the whole Grecian mythology as personifying natural phenomena, interpret the legend as follows: Proserpine who is carried off to the lower world is the seed corn, that, for a time, is buried in the ground. Proserpine who returns to her mother is the corn which rises again to support mankind. The lady who takes ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... foods seasoned with pepper and curry, highly salted and acid foods, and all rich foods; and meat must be eaten only in moderate quantities. Constipation irritates the genitalia directly and increases the inflammation. The close relation of Venus and Bacchus is known not only in mythology. Carbonated waters are to be especially avoided, such as soda, seltzers, Preblauer, Geisshubler, and acid waters; also champagne and beer, heavy Italian, Spanish, and English wines. All alcoholic ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... of common weeds confronts us; the compact, dusty-looking clusters appearing not by waysides only, around the world, but in the mythology, folklore, medicine, and literature of many peoples. Chiron, the centaur, who taught its virtues to Achilles that he might make an ointment to heal his Myrmidons wounded in the siege of Troy, named the plant for ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... feet, with a circumference of from two to three hundred feet. In its strange form this great mound resembled an enormous sphinx; the body uptight, the paws stretched out, crouching in the attitude of the winged monster which Grecian Mythology has placed upon the way ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... god of fire. And of trickery. No, there was no answer there. But Micheals' mind was in mythology now, ...
— The Leech • Phillips Barbee
... purpose, and they are now arranged in a designed order. During some years of study of Greek, Indian, and savage mythologies, I have become more and more impressed with a sense of the inadequacy of the prevalent method of comparative mythology. That method is based on the belief that myths are the result of a disease of language, as the pearl is the result of a disease of the oyster. It is argued that men at some period, or periods, spoke in a singular ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... of immense importance in mysticism; indeed, symbolism and mythology are, as it were, the language of the mystic. This necessity for symbolism is an integral part of the belief in unity; for the essence of true symbolism rests on the belief that all things in Nature have something in common, something in which they are really alike. ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... other; "and of the Roman emperors as low as Severus; besides a great deal of the heathen mythology, and all the metals, semi-metals, planets, and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... somewhat puzzled to know who this St. Blas can be. In my poor opinion, the difficulty is easily enough got over—the word Blas is only a corruption of Blast, and accordingly we shall find that St. Blast, properly so called, is neither more nor less than our old friend AEolus, of the heathen mythology, smuggled into the calendar, who, being the god of blasts and puffs, might well be canonized under the name of St. Blast, without doing violence to the tender consciences of the good Catholics. In this way, according to Dean Swift, ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... walnuts there produced yearly crops. In trying to find out why they produced yearly crops, I also discovered that their persimmons, their plums and their peaches did the same thing. The reason for that apparently goes back to their mythology. They believe in signs and doing certain things according to certain seasons of the year, and one of the things that they did was to gather together in the dark of the moon on one particular night at a certain time and beat the living daylights out of these trees with big bamboo clubs. I ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... successful educational books ever published. The present edition is from the eighty-fourth London edition. The sale in England has reached a hundred thousand copies. A mere glance at the book will explain its popularity. It embraces the elements of Mythology, Astronomy, Architecture, Heraldry, as well as Ancient and Modern History, and gives exactly that kind of information which every body needs. The first principles and foundations of knowledge are often imperfectly understood ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... been recognised by many as a genuine wizard) to the age of Apollonius or Apuleius, magic and sorcery, as a philosophical science or as a vulgar superstition, had apparently more or less distinctly a place in the popular mythology of old Greece. But in the pagan history of neither Greece nor Rome do we read of holocausts of victims, as in Christian Europe, immolated on the altars of a horrid superstition.[19] The occasion of the composition of the treatise by Apuleius 'On Magic' is somewhat romantic. ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... nature. She in some degree shared his ideas on the subject of the fantastic beings who were supposed to haunt the mine, and the two, when alone, told each other stories wild enough to make one shudder—stories well worthy of enriching the hyperborean mythology. ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... gods and daemons of Aeschylus may best bear a comparison with the angels and devils of Milton. The style of the Athenian had, as we have remarked, something of the Oriental character; and the same peculiarity may be traced in his mythology. It has nothing of the amenity and elegance which we generally find in the superstitions of Greece. All is rugged, barbaric, and colossal. The legends of Aeschylus seem to harmonise less with the fragrant groves and graceful porticoes in which his countrymen paid their vows to the God of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... originally made up of Teutonic elements, which have been modified by Danish and Norman invasions, by remnants of old Keltic belief, and by the introduction of Christianity, which last degraded the good fairies into mischievous elves. (See Hazlitt, 'Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare,' Halliwell's 'Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of Midsummer Night's Dream,' also Poet-Lore, April, 1891, ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... the foot of the town, and the mountains rising abrupt around, all combined to present a landscape new and beautiful. Indeed, where may be its parallel? the lake was the Acherusian, Mount Pindus was in sight, and the Elysian fields of mythology spread in the lovely plains over which they passed in ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... do," said Migwan. "You remember the story of the Calydonian Hunt in the mythology book? Well, we'll pretend this ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... He is still for banishing the poets; and as he finds the works of prose writers equally dangerous, he would substitute for them the study of his own laws. He insists strongly on the importance of mathematics as an educational instrument. He is no more reconciled to the Greek mythology than in the Republic, though he would rather say nothing about it out of a reverence for antiquity; and he is equally willing to have recourse to fictions, if they have a moral tendency. His thoughts recur to a golden age in which the sanctity of oaths was respected ...
— Laws • Plato
... for my taste," replied her ladyship, who was the reverse of sylph-like. "Wasn't there someone in Greek mythology who fell in love with a cloud? Lady Mabel would just suit that sort of person. And then she is over-educated and conceited; sets up for a modern Lady Jane Grey, quotes Greek plays, I believe, and looks astounded if people don't ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... it was paganized; and the seven days were allotted to the five planets and the sun and moon in the order which still survives among the Latin nations, and here in England with a further introduction of Scandinavian mythology. The principle of the distribution was what is popularly called "the music of the spheres," and turns on a law of Greek music, which is called by Don Cassius the [Greek: armonia dia teddaron]. Assuming the earth to be the centre of the universe, the celestial bodies ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... Grecian mythology said that the fountain of Hippocrene was struck out by the foot of the winged horse Pegasus. I have often noticed in life that the brightest and most beautiful fountains of Christian comfort and spiritual life have been struck out by the iron-shod hoof of ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... as early as 125; if so, it disputes with the similar work of Quadratus the honor of being the first Christian apology. A large part of it is taken up with a statement of the contradictions and absurdities of the mythology of the Greeks and Barbarians. Of this statement, ch. 13, quoted below, is the conclusion. Then, after a short passage regarding the Jews, the author passes to an exposition of the faith of Christians and a statement regarding their ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... manners and social customs of the people during all their career. In a second part Varro gave his attention to Divine Antiquities, and as St. Augustine drew largely from it in his "City of God," we may be said to be familiar with it at second hand. It was a complete mythology of Italy, minutely describing every thing relating to the services of religion, the festivals, temples, offerings, priests, and so on. Probably the loss of the works of Varro may be accounted for by their lack of popular interest, or by their infelicities ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... in their inventive life, with Christmas a rite full of surprises and tenderness, and "dressing-up parties" spontaneous and joyously absurd. The beasts in the Milford hearth-mythology were not the obscene Night Animals who jump out of closets and eat little girls, but beneficent and bright-eyed creatures—the tam htab, who is woolly and blue and lives in the bathroom, and runs rapidly to warm small feet; the ferruginous oil stove, who purrs and knows stories; and ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... he sighed, twisted his cigar a moment thoughtfully, sighed again, put his feet on the table and turned to the pages of the big book. His fancy was caught by numerous and attractive illustrations in a volume dealing with the mythology of the ancients, and he was soon convinced that he was acquiring a scholarly knowledge of the history of the old ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... an account of the slaughter of the Amalekites, a chapter on 'The Instauration of Civility in Europe, and of Prometheus and Atlas;' but his general notions of history are found to be as rude as his comparative mythology. He scarcely attempts to sift evidence, and next to Inspiration he knows no guide more trustworthy than Pintus or Haytonus, a Talmudic rabbi or a Jesuit father. In the midst of his disquisitions, the reward of the continuous reader ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... myths deal with such subjects as the creation of the world, of man, of animals and plants, the discovery of fire and agriculture, subjects of which the mythology has been incorporated in the religious teachings of the classical and Christian worlds, the mythology of these peoples has little relation to their religion. The gods figure but little in the myths, ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... dog) busxumo. Muzzle busxumi. My mia, mian. Myoptic miopa, miopema. Myopy miopeco. Myosotis miozoto. Myriad miriado. Myriametre miriametro. Myrrh mirho. Myrtle mirto. Mysterious mistera. Mystery mistero. Mystify mistifiki. Mystification mistifiko. Myth mito. Mythology mitologio. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... knowledge of the myths is necessary to any real culture. Modern writers do not make such ready use of them as did the older schools, but Lowell and Tennyson, Browning and Arnold, and a host of minor writers assume that their readers know as their alphabet the stories of mythology. In his hymn On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, Milton has this stanza following one which tells that the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... that there is not much to be evolved from Pig. It all depends how you set to work. Pinecoffin being a Civilian and wishing to do things thoroughly, began with an essay on the Primitive Pig, the Mythology of the Pig, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... everywhere with nearly the same manners, and habits, and customs, as they now have, but especially in the more distant villages where they have little intercourse with the other classes. Even in their religion, Christianity, as I observed before, seems to be formed of the ruins of their mythology; and all these festivities of the church, these fireworks, and images, and gay dresses, harmonize completely with their childish love of show, and are, in fact, their greatest source of delight. To buy these they save up all their money, and when you give a penny to an Indian child, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... dancer must have some skill as an actor, and some acquaintance with mythology—the reason being that the dances at the festivals of the gods partook of the character of pantomime, and represented the most picturesque events and passages in the popular religion. Religious knowledge is happily no longer regarded as a necessary ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... in his tract on Chinese Mythology, the mother of Fo-hi was the daughter of heaven, surnamed Flower-loving; and as the nymph was walking alone on the bank of a river, she found herself encircled by a rainbow, after which she became pregnant, and, at the end of twelve years, was delivered ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... principle that those whose minds are not mature succeed best in the study of a new subject by beginning with what is concrete and appeals to the senses, rather than with the abstract principles. Brief notes on the legendary mythology of the constellations have been added for the benefit of such pupils as are not likely to become familiar with it in the study ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... of the old mythology Arise in gloom and storm; Adramalec, bow down thy head, Reveal, dark fiend, thy form. The giant sons of Anakim Bowed lowest at thy shrine, And thy temple rose in Argola, With its hallowed groves of vine; And there was eastern incense burnt, And there were garments spread, With the fine gold decked ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... was called Argus in mythology, who had a hundred eyes, of which only two were ever asleep at the same time. This bird gets his name from him; though the story is that Mercury killed him, and Venus transferred his eyes to the tail of ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... much more complex plot, but less that is natural and attractive. Historical tradition and the unchanging habits of lovers give their sanction to most of the scenes in Campaspe. But Endymion carries us into the realm of mythology, where all is unreal and where the least heaviness in the pencil of fancy must convert things that should appear golden into dull lead. Lyly's wit strives gallantly to maintain the light tints, pressing ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... one which recurs constantly throughout the art and mythology of India, Egypt, China, and many other Eastern countries. This is the lotus, of which the Easter lily is the modern representative. The lotus appears in a number of forms in the records of antiquity. We have symbolic pictures of the lion carrying the lotus in ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... it sought to worship on account of the sublimity and power possessed by the object of worship. With the advancement of religious practice, religious beliefs and religious ceremonies became more complex. Great systems of mythology sprang up among nations about to enter the precincts of civilization, and polytheism predominated. Purely ethical religions were of a later development, for the notion of the will of the gods concerning the treatment of man by his fellows belongs to an advanced stage of religious belief. ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... I don't know what to think about the future. Long ago I used to hope for a true religion, but now I see that if it is to be free from mythology, it ceases to be a religion altogether, and becomes only science, which has none of the heating and energizing force that a real religion certainly possesses. Neither has science its power of uniting men in bonds of brotherhood, and in giving them an effective hostile action against ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... developed in most of us; but certainly in no preceding age have men taken up the work of life with more earnestness or with more real faith in the unseen than at the present day, when so much of what was once deemed all-important knowledge has been consigned to the limbo of mythology. ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... "Barclay's Geography," and three volumes of "Cook's Voyages," which show that his thoughts extended to the antipodes; and under the heading of Politics he included the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas, a Mythology, and Montesquieu's "Esprit des Lois"! The composition and classification of this library are equally suggestive. Bonaparte carefully searched out the weak places of the organism which he was about to attack—in ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Kosmon. Is Hellenic art without archaisms? And that feature of it held to be its crowning perfection—its head—is not that a very marked one? And, is it not so completely opposed to the artist's experience in the forms of nature that—except in subjects from Greek history and mythology—he dares not use it—at least without modifying it so as to destroy ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... of the Ermine Street, is most probably derived from Teutonic mythology; the "Watlings" being the patrons of handicraft in the Anglo-Saxon Pantheon, and "Irmin" the War-god from whom "Germany" is called.[193] There is no reason to suppose that the roads of Britain had any Roman name, like those of Italy. The designations given them by our English forefathers show ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... which will supplement its intellectual renaissance. Just as the growing power of Christianity in the second and third centuries of our era was shown by the competition of new and imitative religions like that of Mithra, and by spasmodic attempts on the part of the old heathenism to interpret its mythology symbolically and to reform its moral practice; just as the growing power of the gospel in the fifteenth century led the Roman Church to slough off some of its abuses and to tolerate among its adherents reformers ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... when a combination of skill and fraud imposed upon the vulgar, is easily settled. The priests of the ancient mythology, the adepts of the middle ages, turned their knowledge of chemistry and mechanics and their proficiency in legerdemain to account; and before we denounce the latter as impostors, we should bear in mind the ignorance of the times in which ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... degrees Permitting me to sift the grain from chaff, Get truth and falsehood known and named as such. Why did he ever let me dream at all, Not bid me taste the story in its strength? Suppose my childhood was scarce qualified To rightly understand mythology, Silence at least was in his power to keep: I might have—somehow—correspondingly— Well, who knows by what method, gained my gains, Been taught, by forthrights not meanderings, My aim should be to loathe, like Peleus's son, A lie as Hell's Gate, love my wedded wife, Like Hector, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... pageantry. At the coronation of Ptolemy Philadelphus the brilliant city surfeited on a long-drawn golden pomp, decked out in all the physical beauty the inheritance of Greek thought and memories of Greek mythology could suggest, together with a wealth of gorgeous mysticism and rapture of sensuous intoxication, which was the fruit of its intercourse with the oriental world. The writers of Alexandria lacked ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... named Tiger-tail sitting there, his feet dangling above his moored canoe, evidently waiting for the tide to turn before he went out to spear crayfish. I merely noticed he was sitting there in the sunshine, that's all. And then I opened my mythology book and turned to the story of Argus, on which ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... the minds of men. The meagreness or negativeness of their content has been in an inverse ratio to their power. They have become the forms under which all things were comprehended. There was a need or instinct in the human soul which they satisfied; they were not ideas, but gods, and to this new mythology the men of a later generation began to attach the powers and associations ...
— The Republic • Plato
... model; while an allusion to a copper boat, a marvel of magic like Cinderella's slipper, persuades him that the ancient Irish had forestalled the modern dockyards in the making of metal ships. The man who doubted, let us say, our fabulous ancient kings running up to Adam, or found but mythology in some old tale, was as hated as if he had doubted the authority of Scripture. Above all no man was so ignorant, that he had not by rote familiar arguments and statistics to drive away amid familiar applause, all those had they but found strange truth in the world ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... saw some things clearly without seeing them deeply; they interpreted through a beautiful mythology all the external phenomena of Nature. The people of the farther East, on the other hand, saw more obscurely, but far more deeply; they looked less at the visible things which Nature held out to them, and more into the mysteries of ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... little protruding points that are similar to those that Montagne shows, near the apex of Camillea mucronata. These appear like abortive surface perithecia, but I do not find any clue to their nature, and I do not know what they are. Cyclops was the name of a giant in mythology that had but one eye in the middle of his forehead. Thus species has but one "eye," but it is hardly ...
— Synopsis of Some Genera of the Large Pyrenomycetes - Camilla, Thamnomyces, Engleromyces • C. G. Lloyd
... rocking-chair and the spelling-book, the bath-tub and a free constitution, sweeping across the Alleghanies, over-spreading the prairies and pushing on until the dash of the Atlantic in their ears dies in the murmur of the Pacific; and as the wonderful Goddess of the old mythology touched earth, flowers and fruits answered her footfall, so in the long trail of this advancing race, it has left clusters of happy States, teeming with a population, man by man, more intelligent and prosperous than ever before the sun shone upon, and each ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in print, consists entirely of polarised words. Borrow one of these from another language and religion, and you will find it leaves all its magnetism behind it. Take that famous word, O'm, of the Hindoo mythology. Even a priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy Pundit would shut his ears and run away from you in horror, if you should say it aloud. What do you care for O'm? If you wanted to get the Pundit to look at his religion ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... Italy. To do this was his principal aim as a moralist; to revive the grand style of Pindar was his object as an artist. Each attempt involved impossibility, and argued a visionary ambition dimly conscious of its scope. Without freedom, without the living mythology of Hellas, without a triumphant national cause, in the very death of independence, at the end of a long age of glorious but artificial culture, how could Chiabrera dare to pose as Pindar? Instead of the youth of Greece ascending with free flight and all ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Carried beyond the limits of a mere mistake, exaggeration becomes caricature; but when it is magnified beyond humanity's common measures, it may acquire an element approaching to terror. The awe-striking giants of mythology were but magnified men. The first sight of Saint Peter's affects one as though, in the everyday streets, walking among one's fellows, one should meet with a ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... [195] The mythology of Hawaii, one may note, tells of goddesses who were impregnated by bananas they had placed beneath their garments. B. Stern mentions (Medizin in der Tuerkei, Bd. II, p. 24) that the women of Turkey and Egypt use the banana, as well ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... my choice of being any of the fabulous creatures in the mythology book," said Hinpoha musingly, "I think I'd choose to be ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... organization, and comment upon what had previously been done rather was the rule. Still much important work was done here. Books were collected, copied, and preserved, and texts were edited and purified from errors. Here grammar, criticism, prosody, and mythology were first developed into sciences. The study of archaeology was begun, and the first dictionaries were made. The translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek was begun for the benefit of the Alexandrian ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... number, surrounded by white people, and thoroughly converted to Roman Catholicism, promised but scanty remains of heathenism. What was my amazement, however, at discovering, day by day, that there existed among them, entirely by oral tradition, a far grander mythology than that which has been made known to us by either the Chippewa or Iroquois Hiawatha Legends, and that this was illustrated by an incredible number of tales. I soon ascertained that these were very ancient. The old people declared that ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Their mythology for the most part only supplies them with gods whose traditional form is either grotesque, or repulsive, or sensual. But when Christianity has been accepted, and incorporated into the lives of the people, the wide field for artistic and religious ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... known as man's companion and helper from the earliest times. In Greek mythology horses play a very important part, as every one knows who has read the stories of Arion and the winged horse Pegasus. The most famous horse in history probably was Bucephalus (Bull Head), who belonged ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... likewise among the Jews. But the philosophers were divided into antagonistic sects. Out of such conditions no practical religion could develop. In the doctrines of Buddhism were to be found the spirit and purpose of a devout and humanely religious people, but the intricate mythology and racial and other limitations of Buddhism forbade that, although it conquered the half of Asia, it should ever become ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... mythology, anthropology and history are of extraordinary interest today. Diderot relates his saying—"Que si la philosophie avait trouv tant d'obstacles parmi nous c'tait qu'on avait commenc par o il aurait fallu finir, ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... tracery, on the smooth asphalte. And on either side Gorby could see the dim white forms of the old Greek gods and goddesses—Venus Victrix, with the apple in her hand (which Mr. Gorby, in his happy ignorance of heathen mythology, took for Eve offering Adam the forbidden fruit); Diana, with the hound at her feet, and Bacchus and Ariadne (which the detective imagined were the Babes in the Wood). He knew that each of the statues had ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... In the Japanese mythology the number of gods who assemble at their councils is stated to have been eight millions. This is an expression which is used to signify a large number rather than ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... integral portion of all mythological systems. The gods of Greece were wont to change themselves into animals in order to carry out their designs with greater speed, security, and secrecy, than in human forms. In Scandinavian mythology, Odin changed himself into the shape of an eagle, Loki into that of a salmon. Eastern religions ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... we lose by awaking to find that our Theology is human invention and our eschatology an unhealthy dream. We are freed from the incubus of base Hebrew mythology, and from doctrines of Divine government which outrage morality and set cruelty and injustice in the place of holiness. If we have to abandon cherished anthropomorphic visions of future Blessedness, the details of which are either of unseizable dimness or of questionable joy, we are ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... it cannot stand unaided by intolerant laws. Without such laws it was established, and without such laws it may be maintained. It triumphed over the superstitions of the most refined and of the most savage nations, over the graceful mythology of Greece and the bloody idolatry of the Northern forests. It prevailed over the power and policy of the Roman empire. It tamed the barbarians by whom that empire was overthrown. But all these victories were ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... fatiguing thing I ever did, and the dressmaker has made the sleeves of this horrid dress a great deal too tight, and the neck chokes me. Now, I hope this is the last folly of the kind that we shall have here for many a long day. I, for one, refuse to be laced up in this heathen mythology style again. Now then, my dears, all of you to bed. Molly, what in the world are you staying here for? We didn't expect you, and your room ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... me, and that I consider the play itself very ill-timed, improper, and ridiculous. Besides, for a man of talent and a romantic poet you have not exhibited any very great imagination. It is a classical imitation, nothing better. There is something like it in mythology, I believe. Did not Apollo disguise ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... According to Suetonius, the Emperor Augustus possessed in his palace on the Palatine Hill a considerable collection of hatchets of different kinds of rock, nearly all of them found in the island of Capri, and which were to their royal owner the weapons of the heroes of mythology. Pliny tells of a thunder-bolt having fallen into a lake, in which eighty-nine of these wonderful stones were soon afterwards found.[2] Prudentius represents ancient German warriors as wearing gleaming ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... Easton flourished in the West, we may claim that Norwich and Yarmouth, if not as favoured by fashion, had at any rate a claim to intellectual reputation at least quite equal to that city of the ton. Dr. Sayers, whose biography William Taylor had written, and whose 'Dramatic Sketches of Northern Mythology' had created a great sensation at the time, ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... Boxtel did not seem to think so, as, in addition to having his clothes torn, his back bruised, and his hands scratched, he inflicted upon himself the further punishment of tearing out his hair by handfuls, as an offering to that goddess of envy who, as mythology teaches us, wears a head-dress ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... statues of broken gods, headless divinities. I tried to believe in Greek mythology; to fancy that the world had gone backwards, and that there were spirits of the earth and air, that took part in the life of man. But these were poetic visions that shifted and waved with every fleeting fancy. But now this would be a pleasant faith. ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... "This is a mistake. It was never my intention to condemn Alfieri so sweepingly." A few days later I received the following correction. "Keats, in whom the spirit of poetry was stronger than in any contemporary, at home or abroad, delighted in Hellenic imagery and mythology, displaying them admirably; but no poet came nearer than Alfieri to the heroic, since Virgil. Disliking, as I do, prefaces and annotations, excrescences which hang loose like the deciduous bark on a plane-tree, I will here notice an omission of mine on Alfieri, in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... infinitely more foolish, more cowardly, more superstitious. He can—what the lower animals, happily for them, cannot—organise his folly; erect his superstitions into a science; and create a whole mythology out of his blind fear of the unknown. And when he has done that—Woe to the weak! For when he has reduced his superstition to a science, then he will reduce his cruelty to a science likewise, and write books like the Malleus Maleficarum, and the rest of the witch-literature ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... rest on inexpressive blocks of stone; but when opened, they are found to contain beautiful statues of the gods within them. It is not so with the new fables which the Greeks are continually mixing with their mythology. Pygmalion, as we all know, first departed from the rigid outline of ancient sculpture, and impressed life and motion upon marble. The poets, in praise of him, have told us that his ardent wishes warmed a ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... the prehistoric culture of the Aryans, gained through the sciences of comparative philology and mythology, may be summed up as follows: They personified and worshipped the various forces and parts of the physical universe, such as the Sun, the Dawn, Fire, the Winds, the Clouds. The all-embracing sky they worshipped as the Heaven-Father (Dyaus-Pitar, whence Jupiter). They were herdsmen and at least ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... last ten years have sacrificed themselves upon the altar of grand opera—simple, kindly souls, with little or no taste for classical music, who have sat in the dark (mentally and physically), applauding what they didn’t understand, and listening to vague German mythology set to sounds that appear to us outsiders like music sunk into a verbose dotage. I am convinced the greater number would have preferred a jolly performance of Mme. Angot or the Cloches de Corneville, cut in two ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... the most part, Hellenised Judaism; and, not unfrequently, the Hellenic element carries with it a mighty remnant of old-world paganism and a great infusion of the worst and weakest products of Greek scientific speculation; while fragments of Persian and Babylonian, or rather Accadian, mythology burden the Judaic contribution to ...
— The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature - Essay #4 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... warp, etc. As the Fates were represented by the ancient Greeks as spinning the destinies of men, so the Norns in the Norse mythology are said to weave the destinies of the heroes ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... insect, with all the inherent ferocity and strength. It is almost the exact counterpart of an African soldier-ant magnified many hundred thousand times. I wonder," he continued thoughtfully, "if our latter-day insects may not be the deteriorated (in point of size) descendants of the monsters of mythology and geology, for nothing could be a more terrible or ferocious antagonist than many of our well-known insects, if sufficiently enlarged. No animal now alive has more than a small fraction of the strength, in proportion to ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... See Ballads and Metrical Tales, illustrating the Fairy Mythology of Europe (anonymous, London, 1857) for a metrical ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... from the prevalent custom of assembling legislators, magistrates and savants under its protecting canopy to deliberate on civil affairs; while all around, ensconced in every niche, are the tutelary gods and goddesses that make up the Hindoo mythology. It is indeed a quaint, weird spot, full of the witchery of romance and legendary lore; and though years have passed since I last sat under the Cubber Burr's sheltering boughs with a merry party of picnicking maidens, now ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... sides extended, to vast distances, either desert wastes or trackless oceans. How could that same sun, which plunged into the ocean at a fabulous distance in the west, reappear the next morning at an equally great distance in the east? The old mythology asserted that after the sun had dipped in the western ocean at sunset (the Iberians, and other ancient nations, actually imagined that they could hear the hissing of the waters when the glowing globe was plunged therein), it ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... figures and attributes of Jupiter and Apollo, of Mars and Hercules; and his filial piety increased the council of Olympus by the solemn apotheosis of his father Constantius. [11] But the devotion of Constantine was more peculiarly directed to the genius of the Sun, the Apollo of Greek and Roman mythology; and he was pleased to be represented with the symbols of the God of Light and Poetry. The unerring shafts of that deity, the brightness of his eyes, his laurel wreath, immortal beauty, and elegant accomplishments, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... the giant. Longfellow's poem "Enceladus" emphasizes this reference. For the story of the giants and the punishment of Enceladus see any good Greek mythology. ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... between its Satyrs and Bacchantes. Soon she imagined for herself a sort of angel-companion, whose name was Corambe. His presence grew to be more real to her than reality itself, and in her quiet moments she wove out the mythology of his existence, as Bhavadgheetas and Mahabraatus have been dreamed. In process of time, she built, or rather entwisted, for him a little shrine in the woods. All pretty things the child could gather were brought together there, to give him pleasure. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... was, we may say, convulsing Italy, giving a new direction to the ideas of Germany, and penetrating France, Holland, and Switzerland. Happy were the Irish to escape that brilliant but fatal invasion of mythology and Grecian art and literature! Had they not received enough of Greek and Latin lore at the hands of their first apostles and missionaries, and through the instrumentality of the numerous amanuenses and miniaturists in their monasteries and convents? Those holy men had ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... thinking how he shall best serve good causes and damage bad ones, then he is a genuine man of letters. If in addition to this he succeeds in making his manner attractive, he will become a classic. He knows this. He knows, although the Greeks in their mythology forgot to say so, that Conceit was saved to mankind as well as Hope when Pandora clapped the lid ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... Krishna among the educated classes in Bengal and the United Provinces. Krishna has set up distinctly as the Indian Christ, or as the Indian figure to be set up over against Christ. A Krishna story has been disentangled from the gross mythology, and he has become a paragon of virtue,—the work of a distinguished Bengali novelist. I mean no sarcasm. From the sermon of a Hindu preacher in a garden in Calcutta in 1898, I quote: "The same God came into the world as the Krishna of India and the Krishna of Jerusalem." ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... read the title. "Oh, Absalom, thank you. This is lovely. It's a story from Greek mythology—I've been hearing some of these stories from the teacher"—she checked herself, suddenly, at ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... as a believer in the poesy of the old mythology would answer. We may judge by that reply how obstinate and hard the contest which Christianity had to endure among the heathens. The Graceful Superstition was never silent; every, the most household, action of their lives ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... dulness of Duesseldorf, from the bitter angularities of German draughtsmanship and its naivete which is supposed to stand for innocence of spirit—really the reverse, a complete poverty of spirit—and with it all the romantic mythology of German art, the bloated fighting fauns, leering satyrs, frogmen, fishwomen, monkeys, and fairies, imps, dryads, and nymphs. Liebermann discovered the glories of light, of spacing, of pure colour, and comprehended the various combinations by which tonalities could be dissociated and synthesised ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker |
