Mythic Imagery Quotes

I've come to the conclusion that mythology is really a form of archaeological psychology. Mythology gives you a sense of what a people believes, what they fear.

The best description of the Old Testament that I heard was that it starts out as mythology, then it becomes legend, then it becomes history. In the mythological period - there is a distinct mythological period in the Old Testament, where the time spans are impossible and really just imagined.

I love Athena. I love all the goddesses and the archetypes and what they represent because I think they're always going to be relevant not just to women but to humanity. They're living energy. There's a lot we can still learn from them.

'Tragedy' and 'Loud City Song' are both inspired by stories from the past.

Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.

I think the more you understand myths, the more you understand the roots of our culture and the more things will resonate. Do you have to know them? No, but certainly it is nice to recognise how deeply these things are embedded in our literature, our art.

Well documented, the relationship of literature to myth in the Western world has undergone much change over the millennia, as first the age of gods fell away before the notion of a single god, and then, for many people, that single god slipped away, too.

'Valhalla Rising' is a fusion of my upbringing, basically: everything I grew up loving and wanted to make a film of.

Folk tales and myths, they've lasted for a reason. We tell them over and over because we keep finding truths in them, and we keep finding life in them.

I get a lot of inspiration from research in mythology and folklore. I find that, you know, stories people told each other thousands of years ago are still relevant now.

'Journey' was very much inspired by Joseph Campbell's work for 'The Hero's Journey,' but, from among his works, I like 'The Power of Myth' best.

Throughout the ages, stories with certain basic themes have recurred over and over, in widely disparate cultures; emerging like the goddess Venus from the sea of our unconscious.

One of the things I love about Joel and Ethan Coen's movies is that there is this element of the ethereal and the mythic that they play with.

I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.

I definitely read a lot of books on the psychology and mythology behind fairy tales because I think that's really fascinating and there's a lot to draw on there.

Ancient eschatological texts are actually maps of the inner territories of the psyche that seem to transcend race and culture and originate in the collective unconscious.

I find inspiration from a lot of different texts and really old stories and folk tales - things I feel like no one else is reading.

Apparently, the pathfinder duck is a psychological archetype in certain cultures.

'Sanctus' deals with creation myths in every culture. It fascinates me that all cultures, evolving independently, have similar models of mankind's origins, of a Greater Being, of the flood, and so on. It's amazing how they crop up time and time again.

Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.

I find increasingly that the more extreme are the things going on in your life, the more cultural reference points fail you. More mythical reference points actually help, and you realise that's what myths are for. It's for human beings to process their experience in extremis.

But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue Within, and they that lustre have imbibed In the sun's palace-porch, where when unyoked chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave: Shake one, and it awakens; then apply Its polisht lips to your attentive ear, And it remembers its august abodes, And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.