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Mythology   Listen
noun
Mythology  n.  (pl. mythologies)  
1.
The science which treats of myths; a treatise on myths.
2.
A body of myths; esp., the collective myths which describe the gods of a heathen people; as, the mythology of the Greeks.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mythology" Quotes from Famous Books



... Even in those parts of the poems which use romantic motives, one reason of their original charm is that they suggest how the Greek imagination would have dealt with the forsaken merman, the church of Brou, and Tristram and Iseult. The presence of such motives, such mythology, and such Christian and chivalric color in the work of Arnold does not disturb the simple unity of its feeling, which finds no solvent for life, whatever its accident of time and place and faith, except in that Greek spirit which ruled ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... before his imagination and kindled his feelings, and embodied itself in the lofty and stately "Proem" already quoted. His quick and brilliant imagination saw shadows and figures of his ideas in the ancient mythology, which he worked out with curious ingenuity and often much poetry in his Wisdom of the Ancients. Towards the end of his life he began to embody his thoughts and plans in a philosophical tale, which he did not finish—the New Atlantis—a charming ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church

... as a remnant of that beautiful Grecian mythology that deified and poetized everything; and even to us she is still the 'rosy-fingered daughter of the morn.' The 'Levant,' 'Orient,' and 'Occident' are all of them poetical, for they are all true translations from nature. The 'Levant' is where the sun is levant, raising himself ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... whiskers, gave its visage a most truculent expression; and with its grotesquely fashioned ponderous carcass, provided with fin feet of strange formation, seemed to mark it as a personification of one of the fabulous conceptions of mythology. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various

... the American Aborigines." Early in his Western work Powell became interested in the native tribes. In the winter of 1868, while on White River, he studied language, tribal organisation, customs, and mythology of the Utes and from 1870 to 1873 he carried on studies among the Pai Utes, the Moki, etc., being adopted into one of the Moki clans. On his journeys during these periods he often took with him several of the natives for the purpose of investigating ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... entirely lost upon 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 himself ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard

... fruits. There was a perceptible improvement of the public morals, and a partial release from oppression; but, other than that, the SEEDS SOWN BY THE SON OF MAN, having fallen into idolatrous hearts, had produced nothing save innumerable discords and a quasi-poetical mythology. Instead of developing into their practical consequences the principles of morality and government taught by The Word of God, his followers busied themselves in speculations as to his birth, his origin, his person, and his actions; they discussed his parables, and from ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... young Mr. Considine, a priest of the Church of Ireland; but at heart she was as pagan as the top of Slievegullion, and along with her favourite Christian oaths (in one of which St. Anthony of Padua was disguised as Saint Antonio Perrier), and her whispered "Aves," she taught Gabrielle enough pagan mythology and folklore to set her head spinning whenever she found herself alone in the woods ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young

... image of the Virgin in the open shrine. Around this spot, which in the heart of a Christian land retained the vestige of the old idolatry (for just such were the chapels that in the Pagan age were dedicated to the demon-saints of mythology), gathered six or seven miserable and squalid wretches, whom the Curse of the Leper had cut off from mankind. They set up a shrill cry as they turned their ghastly visages towards the horseman; and, without stirring from the spot, ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... much to the age as to the writer. In description he is too copious and detailed: his poems abound with long speeches: his parade of varied learning, his partiality for abstruse mythology, are just the natural defects of a lettered but ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce

... the way that a poet or statesman does; but all had this in common, that they were informed by the desire to represent things—intimate and local things—as they are. The great Italians had gone to religion and mythology for their subjects: nearer at hand, in Antwerp, Rubens was pursuing, according to his lights, the same tradition. The great Dutchmen were the first painters to bend their genius exclusively to the honour of their own country, its worthies, its excesses, its domestic virtues, its trivial dailiness. ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas

... Trinity on the other. It however admits of angels and genii. Gabriel and Michael are the angels of power; Azriel, angel of death; Israfeel, angel of the resurrection. Eblis, or Satan, plays an important part in this mythology. The Koran also teaches the doctrine of Eternal Decrees, or absolute Predestination; of prophets before Mohammed, of whom he is the successor,—as Adam, Noah, Moses, and Jesus; of sacred books, of which all that remain are the Pentateuch, Psalms, Gospels, and Koran; of an intermediate ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... looses the spell. Kempion is a type of a class of story that runs, in many variations, through the romances of chivalry, and from these may have been passed down to the ballad-singer, although ruder forms of it are common to nearly all folk-mythology. The hero is one of those kings' sons, who, along with kings' daughters, people the literature of ballad and maerchen; and he has heard of the 'heavy weird' that has been laid upon a lady to haunt the flood around ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie

... proper creations of the imagination and not of the fancy, are universal verities. What a range of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has the story of Prometheus! Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the history of Europe, (the mythology thinly veiling authentic facts, the invention of the mechanic arts and the migration of colonies,) it gives the history of religion, with some closeness to the faith of later ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... according to Greek mythology, the son of Apollo, the sun god. One day he prevailed upon his father to allow him to mount the chariot of the sun and drive the white cloud-horses across the heavens. He was unable to guide his steeds, however, and they worked great havoc by dragging the sun up and down ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... 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 before the Reformation; so in India the new learning from the West ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong

... doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman empire, outlived the darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and opinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the Christian ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... allowed their imaginations about their gods, as things which have no regard to the publick worship. Upon this principle, I say, as I said before, there was, amongst the pagans, two sorts of religion; one a poetical, and the other a real religion; one practical, the other theatrical; a mythology for the poets, a theology for use. They had fables, and a worship, which, though founded upon ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... mythology, the spirit of revenge, which prompts the members of a family to commit fresh crimes to obtain satisfaction. These crimes necessitate further acts of vengeance, and the curse is thus transmitted from generation to generation. The word is also used for a man's evil ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... [Note 24: Atlas. In mythology, the leader of the Titans, who fought the Gods, and was condemned by Zeus to carry the weight of the vault of heaven on his head and hands. In the sixteenth century the name Atlas was given to a collection of maps by Mercator, probably because a ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... alone is sufficient to wreck the soul, fluttering about without rudder or ballast on the waves of the world. Duality is the root, out of which alone, for mortals, happiness can spring. And the old Hindoo mythology, which is far deeper in its simplicity than the later idealistic pessimism, expresses this beautifully by giving to every god his other half; the supreme instance of which dualism is the divine Pair, the Moony-crested god and his inseparable other half, the Daughter ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain

... was twenty, the youth had become a master of anatomy, which he declared was "the secret of the art," was thoroughly versed in literature, languages, history, poetry, mythology,—everything that could help to make him the greatest sculptor of his age,—and had, even then, produced works of ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden

... mythology, I am sure," said Leonard. "Our old friends the Darkness and the Dawn in an African shape, I suppose. But listen to me, mother. This stone, if it is genuine, is worth many ounces of gold, but there are other stones so like it that ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard

... And of trickery. No, there was no answer there. But Micheals' mind was in mythology now, ...
— The Leech • Phillips Barbee

... to the mythology of the Romancers, the San Greal, or Holy Grail, was the cup out of which Jesus Christ partook of the last supper with his disciples. It was brought into England by Joseph of Arimathea, and remained there, an object of pilgrimage and adoration, for many years ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell

... they are. An air of all but fabulous 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

... and merchantmen manned by lanky broad-shouldered men with hard red-beaked faces and huge hands coarsened by generations of straining on heavy oars and halyards,—men who feared only God and the sea-spirits of their strange mythology and were a law unto themselves, adventurers ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... 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

... descriptions of baby-houses, and of old hats with wet brims; and his amiable partiality for humble life, by assuring us, that a wordy rhetorician, who talks about Thebes, and allegorizes all the heathen mythology, was once a pedlar—and making him break in upon his magnificent orations with two or three awkward notices of something that he had seen when selling winter raiment about the country—or of the changes in the state of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... love compliments! That's my birthday present from you. I wonder if the Chinese babies will be out on the street—the little, golden babies. Why haven't they a legend about those babies? Mr. Heath, do you know Chinese mythology? Kate, aren't you sure those children are primroses transformed by the fairies to ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin

... little of its nature; and I am certain that the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its image. Images form themselves in our minds perpetually as if they were reflected in some pool. We gave ourselves up in old times to mythology, and saw the Gods everywhere. We talked to them face to face, and the stories of that communion are so many that I think they outnumber all the like stories of all the rest of Europe. Even to-day our country people ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats

... north of Europe there is a rugged land, where the winters are long and dark, with short bright summers. Nine hundred years ago the people there were pagans, believing in gods and giants, and their mythology is full of wonderful stories. As these myths, or sacred fables, tell of strange adventures, I think you will like them quite as well as even the ...
— Harper's Young People, August 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... found useful and quite available to most teachers: Andersen's Norse Mythology, Mabie's Norse Stories, Mara Pratt's Stories from Norseland, Fiske's Myths and Myth Makers, Taylor's Primitive Culture, Vol. I.; ...
— A Primary Reader - Old-time Stories, Fairy Tales and Myths Retold by Children • E. Louise Smythe

... him for his fine character and good 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

... temples, reared by adoring votaries to the goddess Tabaca. Boys at school would have construed passages about her. Lempriere, Smith, Anthon, Drissler, and others would have done honor to her. Classic mythology would have been full of her presence. Olympian Jove would have been presented to us with this divinity as his constant attendant, and a nimbus around his immortal brows of her making. Bacchus would have ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille

... more and more attenuated with the lapse of time, the identification with his mother Hathor (Isis) was more complete still. For he took her place and assumed many of her attributes in the later versions of the great saga which is the nucleus of all the literature of mythology—I refer to the story of "The Destruction ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... creature was like the figures of Faunus or Vertumnus, or one of those half-deities or quarter-deities that one sees among the marbles in public collections. "Graeco-Roman School, of the late Antonine Period; probably representing a Rural Deity, or God of Spring or Agriculture in the Latin mythology." Certainly the more decadent side of late Greek or Roman art seemed in some strange way to be living again ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... her to the window, and explained to her for some moments the story of the faded images which represented one chapter out of the mythology of his country. And then she ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... completeness of the work, and which the publishers believe would meet with the sanction of the author himself, as in no way intruding upon his original plan but simply carrying it out in more complete detail. The section on Northern Mythology has been enlarged by a retelling of the epic of the "Nibelungen Lied," together with a summary of Wagner's version of the legend in his series of music-dramas. Under the head of "Hero Myths of the British Race" have been included ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... faintest aquaintance with the man or his teaching. Valentinus also taught at Rome (c. A. D. 140-60), and his strange theories about AEons and Ogdoads, about spiritual, psychical, and material men, or any other fantasy of his speculative mythology, were not thought beneath the criticism of an Irenaeus, a Clement of Alexandria and a Tertullian. Yet no hint is there in the Seven Epistles that these thoughts were familiar to the writer. At one time an exultant Daille found in ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various

... his master, quietly, "to let it be of a different character from that chattered by some of Mr. Cicero's most admired compatriots, if you value the priviledge of hanging at that public window. 'Commit no mythology,' please." ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)

... scenes from mythology) largely predominate. Black silhouettes, details marked with fine incisions, additions of purple and white (latter for linen and flesh of women). Elaborate ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various

... have fancied that the god of day had retired over-wearied from regions he had in vain attempted to subdue. Nowhere does the symbolical dogma of the contests of darkness and light manifest itself in more characteristic traits than in the Scandinavian mythology; and nowhere does it appear physically under a more positive image than in the regions which have been for centuries devoted to this mythology. During the summer at the north, the sun reigns like an absolute sovereign over nature, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... and levy taxes upon poets and story-tellers, wits and humorists wherever they may be of service. Much will have to be said, in the first place, of the man in the moon, whom we must view as he has been manifested in the mask of mirth, and also in the mirror of mythology. Then we shall present the woman in the moon, who is less known than the immortal man. Next a hare will be started; afterwards a frog, and other objects; and when we reach the end of our excursion, if we mistake not, it will be confessed that the moon ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... the superstitions of one class, was so far beyond his time as to reject those of another. No son of fortune, no man placing himself and the world in antagonism, can ever escape from some belief in the Invisible. Caesar could ridicule and profane the mystic rites of Roman mythology, but he must still believe in his fortune, as in a god. And Harold, in his very studies, seeing the freest and boldest minds of antiquity subjected to influences akin to those of his Saxon forefathers, felt less shame in yielding ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... 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 ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... more terrible than he who believes that everything began in matter. It is possible to meet the sceptic who believes that everything began in himself. He doubts not the existence of angels or devils, but the existence of men and cows. For him his own friends are a mythology made up by himself. He created his own father and his own mother. This horrible fancy has in it something decidedly attractive to the somewhat mystical egoism of our day. That publisher who thought that men would get on if they believed in themselves, those seekers after the Superman ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... false, of which, even when true, it is to be the sole source! There never was an "historical" religion, however contemptible, that did not make its thousands of proselytes. Man has been easily led to embrace the most absurd systems of mythology and superstition, and is willing even to go to death ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers

... all the gods of ancient mythology were once men, and he traces for us the evolution of a man into a hero, the hero into a demigod, and the demigod into a divinity. By a slow process, the natural man is divested of all our common faults ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... the chief supernaturals, demons of the swamp and fen. These best localize the legends in which they appear; for which most parts of Hanover and the Cimbric Chersonesus suit indifferently, the Frisian portions pre-eminently, well. The more exalted mythology of Woden, Thor, and Balder, so generally considered to have been all-pervading in Germany and Scandinavia, finds no place in Beowulf. Our Devil and the Devil's Dam are rough analogues of ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham

... familiar adventures and figures of Gothic romance; distressed ladies and their champions, combats with dragons and giants, enchanted castles, magic rings, charmed wells, forest hermitages, etc. But side by side with these appear the fictions of Greek mythology and the personified abstractions of fashionable allegory. Knights, squires, wizards, hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods, Idleness, Gluttony, and Superstition jostle each other in Spenser's fairy land. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... supposed to be a corruption of Sramana, a name applied to Buddha, and to Buddhist priests in general. The ancient mythological religion of the Kudic races has nothing in common with Buddhism. See Castren's 'Lectures on Finnish Mythology,' 1853. Finland was ceded by Sweden to Russia in 1809, See the Author's 'Survey of Languages,' second edition, p. 116. Shamanism found its way from India to Siberia via Tibet, China, and Mongolia. Rules on the formation of magic figures, on the treatment of diseases by charms, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller

... MYTHS. Growth of myths to account for remarkable appearances in Nature—mountains, rocks, curiously marked stones, fossils, products of volcanic action Myths of the transformation of living beings into natural objects Development of the science of Comparative Mythology ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... 46. The Greek word komos denoted a revel or merry-making; afterwards it came to mean the personification of riotous mirth, the god of Revel. Hence also the word comedy. In classical mythology the individuality of Comus is not well defined: this enabled Milton more readily to endow ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton

... altogether a pleasant one. 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 ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... Greek Church. The moonlight turned the banks into shadowy substances, in which the ghosts of former days seemed to make a part; and spurred by the young girl's interest, the Italian, to entertain her, called up all the legends of mythology and the stories of Roman ...
— The Princess Aline • Richard Harding Davis

... same with Boccaccio. For two centuries, when but little was known of the 'Decameron' north of the Alps, he was famous all over Europe simply on account of his Latin compilations on mythology, geography and biography. One of these, 'De Genealogia Deorum,' contains in the fourteenth and fifteenth books a remarkable appendix, in which he discusses the position of the then youthful humanism with regard to the age. We must ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... sites for temples and monasteries, the inscriptions, the little pavilions set up where the view is loveliest—all goes to prove this. In England we have lovelier hills, perhaps, than any in China. But where is our sacred mountain? Where, in all the country, that charming mythology which once in Greece and Italy, as now in China, was the outward expression of the love ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... De Marsay to himself, casting a glance of disdain upon the duenna, "if one cannot make you capitulate, with a little opium one can make you sleep. We know mythology and the ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac

... all other duties, and that they frequently displayed their power in this world in the punishment of the bad and the prosperity of the virtuous. Such were the opinions inculcated by the most celebrated philosophers and poets but the common people, more gratified by the fictions of the received mythology, than by tenets of pure morals, found in the actions recorded of their gods and goddesses a sufficient justification of every species of licentiousness. With respect to a future state of existence, the philosophers themselves appear to have fluctuated in uncertainty, as may be collected from the ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various

... A mythology borrowed from abroad, a literature founded on references to a strange country, and fraught with foreign allusions, are much more confined in their use: they speak to the learned alone; and though intended ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.

... all representations, whether of the one God or of false deities. The golden calf, which was a symbol of Jehovah, is condemned equally with the fair forms that haunted the Greek Olympus, or the half-bestial shapes of Egyptian mythology. The reasons for the prohibition may be considered as two,—the impossibility of setting forth the glory of the Infinite Spirit in any form, and the certainty that the attempt will sink the worshipper deeper in the mire of sense. An image degrades God and damages ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... a low bow, and left him free to go to his awaiting councillors, who were already gathered round a long table covered by green cloth, in a vaulted and stately chamber, stories from Greek mythology carved on its oaken doors and ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida

... experience is not only ignored, it is denied and yet before it can be explained away it has to be explained. It is, in brief, for Mrs. Eddy and her followers the creation of mortal mind. Mortal mind, she says, "is nothing claiming to be something; mythology; error creating other errors; a suppositional material sense; ... that which neither exists in science nor can be recognized by the ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins

... styled also "the tree of councils," 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 grown to womanhood, imagination still loves to roam among its shadows, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various

... Ancient mythology, which undertook to explain everything, easily accounted for the social and political disabilities of woman. Goguet quotes the story from St. Augustine, who got it from Varro. Cecrops, building Athens, saw starting from the earth an olive-plant and a fountain, side by side. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various

... would stop to pick them up, and that in this way he might be able to win the race. So he ran, and when he found himself about to be beaten, he dropped one apple. She stopped to pick it up and thus he gained a little. In this way he won the race and married Atalanta. Greek mythology says that afterwards she and her husband were turned into lions because they offended the gods; however, that need not concern us here. There is a very beautiful moral in the old Greek story, and the merit of the American composition is that its author, Maurice Thompson, perceived this moral ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn

... Sea, the awfulness of whose antiquity hath stricken all mythology dumb;—thou most wrinkled diving Sea, the millions of whose years outnumber even the multitude of thy hoary motions;—thou omniform and most mysterious Sea, mother of the monsters and the gods,—whence shine eternal youth? Still do thy waters hold the infinite thrill of that ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn

... at the idea of our plumping down on Rippenger's school, getting a holiday for the boys, tipping them, and then off with Julia, exactly like two Gods of the Mythology, Apollo and Mercury. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... C class in Ancient History. She did not succeed. Her embarrassment was caused in a great measure by not knowing the names of the pupils. Teachers should obtain lists of the names, if they are not familiar with them. The lesson being one in mythology, could have been made very interesting with a slight effort on the part of the teacher. Many errors in pronunciation made by both teacher and pupils, were allowed to pass. Teaching ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... is the pantheistic way, which identifies the two, which [76] regards nature itself as the living energy of an intelligence of the same kind as though vaster in scope than the human. Partly through the influence of mythology, the Greek mind became early possessed with the conception of nature as living, thinking, almost speaking to the mind of man. This unfixed poetical prepossession, reduced to an abstract form, petrified into an idea, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... air has been the dream of mankind for uncounted centuries. As far back as we have historic records we find stories of the attempts of men to fly. The earliest Greek mythology is full of aeronautical legends, and the disaster which befell Icarus and his wings of wax when exposed to the glare of the midsummer sun in Greece, is part of the schoolboy's task in Ovid. We find like traditions in the legendary ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot

... point to the numerous signs of a system of nature-worship as prevailing among the Pelasgian masses; to the alliance in the war between the nature-powers and the Trojans as against the loftier Hellenic mythology; to the legend in Iliad, i., 396-412, of the great war in heaven, which symbolically describes the collision on earth between the ideas which were locally older and those beginning to surmount them; and, finally, to the traditions extraneous to the poems of competitions between ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne

... head of those of all inventors in all ages and nations. In another part of his writings the same great man illustrates the dignity of useful inventions by one of those happy allusions to the beautiful mythology of the ancients, which he often employs to illuminate as well as to decorate reason. "The dignity," says he, "of this end of endowment of man's life with new commodity appeareth, by the estimation that antiquity made of such as guided ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie

... malignant toward all captains who failed to do them reverence, and brought down frightful squalls on such craft as failed to drop the peaks of their mainsails to the goblin who presided over this shadowy republic. It was the dread of the early navigators—in fact, the Olympus of Dutch mythology. Verditege Hook, the Dunderberg, and the Overslaugh, were names of terror to even the bravest skipper. The old burghers of New York never thought of making their week's voyage to Albany without arranging their wills, and it created as much commotion in New Amsterdam as a modern ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce

... in 1704 in favour of one which was supposed for a long time to have been coined for the purpose, but which had really been applied for many centuries previously to one of the eight spirits of ancient mythology. ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles

... admixture of Northern blood and thought, is yet to be carefully analyzed; and until this analysis is made, discussion of certain features must necessarily be incomplete and unsatisfactory. No one, however, can stand in this Chamber of Psyche, and not feel how great reality the old mythology must still have had, not only for the artists who painted the room, but for the people who inhabited it and enjoyed it. I do not say that they believed it as they believed in the vital articles of Christian faith, but that they accepted it with the same ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... person but a man of unique force, mental and moral. The remark may suggest what is the special value of the literary criticism or its bearing upon history. We may learn from many sources what was the current mythology of the day; and how ordinary people believed in devils and in a material hell lying just beneath our feet. The vision probably strikes us as repulsive and simply preposterous. If we proceed to ask what it meant and ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... of their pure thought-essence. It is on this account that the religious conceptions of the Greeks were so admirably fitted for the art of sculpture, and certain portions of the mediaeval Christian mythology lent themselves so well to painting. For the same reason the metaphysics of ecclesiastical dogma defy the artist's plastic faculty. Art, in a word, is a middle term between reason and the senses. Its secondary aim, after the prime end of presenting the human spirit in beautiful form ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... monopolised by Mr. Satow, for several gentlemen in the consular service, who are passing through the various grades of student interpreters, are distinguishing themselves not alone by their facility in colloquial Japanese, but by their researches in various departments of Japanese history, mythology, archaeology, and literature. Indeed it is to their labours, and to those of a few other Englishmen and Germans, that the Japanese of the rising generation will be indebted for keeping alive not only the knowledge ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird

... becoming more geometrical and conventional in its form. That which particularly distinguishes Lombard from Byzantine art is its sculpture abounding with grotesque imagery, with illustrations of every-day life, of a fanciful mythology not yet quite extinct, and allusions, no longer symbolic but direct, to the Christian creed; the latter quality a striking evidence of the triumph of the Roman Church over all iconoclastic adversaries in Greece." ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith

... Xerxes in the great sea fight in the bay of Salamis, B.C. 480. The poet made this victory the theme of his 'Persians.' This is the only historical Greek tragedy which we now possess: the subjects of all the rest are drawn from mythology. But Aeschylus had a model for his historical play in the 'Phoenician Women' of his predecessor Phrynichus, which dealt with the same theme. Aeschylus, indeed, is said to have imitated it closely in the 'Persians.' Plagiarism was thought to be a ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... Letter-writing in our day. Duty of Women to cultivate Conversation. Duty of Women to cultivate the art of Manners. Value of model Types of Women. Disinterestedness, the Redemption of Man. Woman as seen in Mythology. Conclusion of the matter. Friendship in ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... 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 these things may have been purely ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland

... Ariel[obs3], peri, nymph, nereid, dryad, seamaid, banshee, benshie[obs3], Ormuzd; Oberon, Mab, hamadryad[obs3], naiad, mermaid, kelpie[obs3], Ondine, nixie, sprite; denizens of the air; pixy &c. (bad spirit) 980. mythology; heathen-mythology, fairy-mythology; Lempriere, folklore. Adj. god-like, fairy-like; sylph-like; sylphic[obs3]. Phr. "you moonshine revelers and shades ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... in Grecian mythology, and in the Oriental literature is treated as a sacred animal. "The clouds are cows and the rain milk." I remember what Herodotus says of the Egyptians' worship of heifers and steers; and in the traditions ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... qu'elle soit la plus connue. La veritable histoire est couverte par le voile des temps" (p. 7). Boulanger however was not to be daunted and on the firm foundation of the fact of some ancient and universal catastrophe, as recorded on the surface of the earth and in human mythology, he proceeds to inquire into the moral effects of the changes in the physical environment back to which if possible the history of antiquity must be traced. Man's defeat in his struggle with the elements made him religious, hinc ...
— Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing

... shining through their branches wrought a fantastic 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 queer names, but thought they were merely allegorical. Passing over the bridge, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume

... the terrace she was just going indoors with Mlle, Boncourt to put on her hat and go out into the garden. Her morning occupations were over. Natalya was not treated as a school-girl now. Mlle, Boncourt had not given her lessons in mythology and geography for a long while; but Natalya had every morning to read historical books, travels, or other instructive works with her. Darya Mihailovna selected them, ostensibly on a special system of her ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev

... Mythology; the dark region of the underworld through which the dead must pass before they ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens

... 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 ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats

... The prose light of common day is breaking into prismatic rays. Into the dusty highway of Ancient History all at once sweeps the pageantry of Mythology. Philemon bends above old Baucis at the High School gate, though hitherto they have been sycamores. Olympus is just beyond the clouds. The Elysian Fields lie only the surrender of the will away, if one but droops, with absent eye, head propped ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin

... 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 ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... was taking it holiday-making, it tried very gently to climb and butt, and to play with its sulky fellow travellers. And as it did so it seemed to radiate a sort of poetry on everything: vague impressions of rocks, woods, hedges, the Alps, Italy, and Greece; mythology, of course, and that amusement of "jouer avec des chevres apprivoisees," which that great charmer M. Renan has attributed to his charming Greek people. Now, as I realised the joy of the goat on finding itself ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... and there were present, of course, the wives and daughters; so that, on the whole, the gathering must have been as numerous as it was otherwise remarkable. Nowhere in any of the vistas of history, of romance, or of mythology were it possible to find a spectacle more imposing than that of the child Methuselah surrounded by his father Enoch, his grandfather Jared, his great-grandfather Mahalaleel, his great-great-grandfather Cainan, his great-great-great-grandfather ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field

... a Seminole 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 I was ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers

... lightens, however, and instead of the river bed the scene represents the green valley through which the Rhine is flowing. In the gray dawn one can descry the high hills on either side, and as the light increases Wotan and Fricka, the principal deities of Northern mythology, are seen ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber

... extremely good. Its subject is connected with that of Gray's Descent of Odin, but handled much more fully, and in blank-verse narrative instead of ballad form. The story, like most of those in Norse mythology, has great capabilities; but it may be questioned whether the Greek-Miltonic chastened style which the poet affects is well calculated to bring them out. The death of Nanna, and the blind fratricide Hoder, are touchingly done, and Hermod's ride to Hela's realm is stately. ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury

... stretched upon a cross, and nailed there with the iron bolts of his own cowardice. He had no tears; he told himself no stories. His disgust with himself was so complete that even the process of apologetic mythology had ceased. He was like a man cast down from a pillar, and every bone broken. He lay there, and admitted the facts, and ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... Olympus in Thessaly. Tell Hen. that I saw a whole herd of wild deer bounding down the cliffs, the noise they made was like thunder; I also saw an enormous eagle—one of Jupiter's birds, his real eagles, for, according to the Grecian mythology, Olympus was his favourite haunt. I don't know what it was then, but at present the most wild savage place I ever saw; an immense way up I came to a forest of pines; half of them were broken by thunderbolts, snapped ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... one day, but Mynheer 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 ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

... the whole body of Tinguian mythology points to the conclusion that the chief characters of these tales are not celestial beings but typical, generalized heroes of former ages, whose deeds have been magnified in the telling by many generations of their descendants. These people ...
— Philippine Folk Tales • Mabel Cook Cole

... chain (latitude 7 degrees 10 minutes to 7 degrees 28 minutes) are, according to the information I gathered from the Indians, situated near the sources of Cano de la Tortuga. In the chain of the Encaramada there are some traces of gold. This chain is also celebrated in the mythology of the Tamanacs; for the painted rocks it contains are associated with ancient local traditions. The Orinoco changes its direction at the confluence of the Apure, breaking a part of the chain of the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt

... is a proof, as is the sentiment of the whole verse, that the present poem belongs to a period previous to the Conquest. The term means "where all go to stay," and was the name of the principal realm of departed souls in the mythology of the ancient Nahuas. See Bartholome de Alva, Confessionario en Lengua Mexicana, fol. 13 (Mexico, 1634); Tezozomoc, Cronica Mexicana, cap. 55; D.G. Brinton; The Journey of the Soul (in Aztec and Aryan Myths), ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton

... it is a product of the age of chivalry, but it reaches back to the earliest epochs of German antiquity, and embraces not only the pageantry of courtly chivalry, but also traits of ancient Germanic folklore and probably of Teutonic mythology. One of its earliest critics fitly called it a German "Iliad", for, like this great Greek epic, it goes back to the remotest times and unites the monumental fragments of half-forgotten myths and ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown

... traditions of both Jew and Gentile agree in ascribing to woman a primary agency in the introduction of human evils. In the Greek Mythology, she is indeed not the first offender; but she is the bearer of the box that contained all the crimes and diseases which have punished our world for the abuse of liberty. It is worthy of remark that Pandora, who is the Eve of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... although the Christian clergy set themselves strongly against these ornaments; some even refusing the Communion-Sacrament to those who persist in retaining that heathenish emblem derived from ancient mythology. ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn

... immortal bards, who had a clear and sagacious eye for the discovery of truth. But let us remember that when Thespis spoke from his car, the world had also wise men. Homer had sung his immortal songs, and yet a new form of genius appeared, to which a Sophocles and Aristophanes gave birth; the Sagas and mythology of the North were as an unknown treasure to the stage, until Oehlenschlaeger showed what mighty forms from thence might be made to glide ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen

... only when we take up such a book as this that we realize how rich in interest is the mythology ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton

... the deer in mythology, however, is not usually so beneficent, and "the antelope, the gazelle, and the stag generally, instead of helping the hero, involve him rather in perplexity and peril. This mythical subject is amplified ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

... warmly attached to Napoleon. Once when the Duke of Wellington visited his studio in Brussels and expressed a wish that the great artist would paint him, David coldly replied, "I never paint Englishmen." In his declining years he painted subjects taken from Grecian mythology. Among the paintings executed by David during his banishment were "Love and Psyche," "The Wrath of Achilles," and "Mars Disarmed by Venus." The number of David's pupils who acquired distinction was very great, among whom the best ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... tumult of those great conflicts in which he played the leading part, has passed successively into three media of obscuration, from each of which his figure, like the sun shining through vapors, has received some disguise of shape and color. First came the mist of mythology, in which we discerned the new St. George, serene, impeccable, moving through an orchard of ever-blooming cherry-trees, gracefully vanquishing dragons with a touch, and shedding fragrance and radiance around him. Out of that mythological mist we groped our way, to find ourselves beneath the rolling ...
— The Americanism of Washington • Henry Van Dyke

... send you three grey cats with gifts— (For uniformity of metaphor, Since Bacchus, Satan, and the Hangman Are not contemporaneous in my mythology) I send you three grey cats with gifts, Queen Guinevere, To warn you, sleekly, silently To pay ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert

... Champs, on this subject. Vida's poem is a surprising instance of difficulty overcome, in the manner with which he has moulded the phraseology of the classics to a purpose apparently alien from it; and he has made his mythology agreeable, trivial as it is, by the skill with which it is managed. But I find that both the Caissa, and the Arcadia, which is taken from a paper in the Guardian, were done, as the author says, at the age of 16 or 17 ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... top of Mount Olympus, in Thessaly. Tell Hen that I saw a whole herd of wild deer bounding down the cliffs, the noise they made was like thunder. I also saw an enormous eagle—one of Jupiter's birds, his real eagles, for according to the Grecian mythology Olympus was his favourite haunt. I don't know what it was then, but at present it is the most wild, savage place I ever saw; an immense way up I came to a forest of pines; half of them were broken by thunder-bolts, snapped in the middle, and the ruins lying around in the most hideous confusion; ...
— Letters to his wife Mary Borrow • George Borrow

... idea that they were descended from the plane tree; in the Sagas and Eddas the human race is tethered to the world-ash. Among every people of antiquity this forest faith sprang up and flourished: every race was tethered to some ancestral tree. In the Orient each succeeding Buddha of Indian mythology was tethered to a different tree; each god of the later classical Pantheon was similarly tethered: Jupiter to the oak, Apollo to the laurel, Bacchus to the vine, Minerva to the olive, Juno to the apple, on and on. ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen

... and the weakness of Grecian mythology consisted in the contradictory character of its divinities. It was a strange blending of the natural and the supernatural, the human and the divine. Zeus, the eternal Father,—the immortal King, whose ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... for this mad joy-ride from end to end of the German Empire, and that is the only apology which the author has to make for introducing the latest contributions to Germanic mythology into an otherwise ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith

... as an Oriental allusion, or a name in Hindoo mythology, seemed to ask some explanation for the English reader, notes have been appended, bearing reference to the page. In their compilation, and generally, acknowledgment is due to Professor Johnson's excellent version and edition of the "Hitopadesa," ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson

... instance, or to welcome the advent of some mighty personage. Great preparations were made for these exhibitions of rustic talent; long verses were committed to memory; rehearsals were endless, and the stories of Greek and Roman mythology were ransacked to provide scenes and subjects for the rural pageant. All this must have afforded immense amusement and interest to the country-folk in the neighbourhood of some lord's castle, when the king or queen was expected to sojourn there. Shepherds ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... settled their magicians, and bound their ladies in enchanted gardens; and even the popular superstition of the country seems to have taken its tone and colour from the images around. Tourraine, and all the country on the banks of the Loire, has a kind of popular mythology of its own; it is the land of fairies and elfins, and there is scarcely a glen, a grove, or a shady recess, but what has its tale belonging to it. What one of the French poets has said of the Seine, ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney

... expression that is so marked in one type of the West Ireland women. Later in the day, as the old man talked continually of the fairies and the women they have taken, it seemed that there was a possible link between the wild mythology that is accepted on the islands and the strange beauty ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge

... softened, and if he would not have received new suggestions for the adornment of the garden. Of course, it is well that his immortal production was not composed on this roof, and in sight of these seductive shores, or it would have been more strongly flavored with classic mythology than it is. But, letting Milton go, it may be necessary to say that my writing to-day has nothing to do with my theory of composition in an elevated position; for this is the laziest place that I have ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... 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

... incessantly like water-drops. At the top of the steps stands the towered gateway, painted with red ochre, which leads to the precincts. The guardians of the gate, Ni-O, the two gigantic Deva kings, who have passed from India into Japanese mythology, are encaged in the gateway building. Their cage and their persons are littered with nasty morsels of chewed paper, wherever their worshippers have literally spat their prayers ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... your cap, flap in your face, twist about your legs, and tear your coat skirts; so obstructing you in every conceivable manner and in every conceivable direction, that they seem possessed with a living power of opposition, and commissioned by some evil genius of Fairy Mythology to prevent mortal footsteps from intruding into the valley. Whether you try a zig-zag or a straight course, whether you go up or down, it is the same thing—you must squeeze, and push, and jostle your way through the crowd of bushes, just as you would through a ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins

... who entertain each other with their silly jokes and gigglings that are disgusting. When I had company I always directed the conversation so that my friend would teach me something, or I would teach him. I would read the poets, and Scott's writings and history. Read Josephus, mythology and the Bible together, and never read a course that taught me as much. I would go to the country dances and sometimes to balls in the City. The church did not object to this: I would teach Sunday school at the same time. No one taught me that ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation

... to remark that if you wish to know really any people, it is necessary to have a thorough knowledge of their history, including their mythology, legends and folk-lore: customs, habits and traits of character, which to a superficial observer of a different nationality or race may seem odd and strange, sometimes even utterly subversive of ordinary ideas of morality, but which can be explained and will appear quite reasonable ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... take place at night. The shamans can not explain the meaning of the term, which plainly contains the word ag[)e][']'ya, "woman," and may refer to the moon's supposed influence over women. In Cherokee mythology the moon is a man. The ordinary name is n[^u]['][n]d[^a], or more fully, n[^u]['][n]d[^a] s[^u][n]n[^a]y[)e][']h[)i], "the sun living in the night," while the sun itself is designated as n[^u]['][n]d[^a] ig[)e][']h[)i], "the ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney

... extremely 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 mythology, it might be replied that I come too late, that our taste is formed ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... When I first saw his Ruth I was greatly struck with it, but after visiting the studios of Wyatt and Gibson, and observing their sleek imitations of Grecian art, their learned and faultless statues, nymphs or goddesses or gods of the Greek mythology, it was with infinite pleasure that my eyes rested again on the figure and face of Ruth, perhaps not inferior in perfection of form, but certainly informed with a deep human feeling which I found not in their elaborate works. The artist has chosen the moment in which Ruth is ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant

... Porter; two tea-spoons, 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 also in Mr ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous

... historical investigation has vastly widened and a number of new social sciences have come into existence—ethnology, archaeology, folklore, the comparative studies of cultural materials, i.e., language, mythology, religion, and law, and in connection with and closely related with these, folk-psychology, social psychology, and the psychology of crowds, which latter is, perhaps, the forerunner of a wider and more elaborate political psychology. The historians have been very much concerned with these new ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... mainly for astrological prediction or the fixing of religious observances. Such speculations as were current among them, and also among the Egyptians and others who came to share their knowledge, were almost entirely devoted to mythology, assigning fanciful terrestrial origins to constellations, with occasional controversies as to how the earth is supported in space. The Greeks, too, had an elaborate mythology largely adapted from their neighbours, but they were not satisfied with ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant

... in pardoning those who were condemned with Miss Cavell indicate that the Prussian officials have heard the beating of the wings of those avenging angels of history who, like the Eumenides of classic mythology, are the avengers of ...
— The Case of Edith Cavell - A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants • James M. Beck

... supernatural world, indicate his rarest quality; for in these, it is said, he went out of human nature itself, and created beings that never existed. Wonderful as these are, we must recollect that in them he worked on a basis of popular superstitions, on a mythology as definite as that of Greece and Rome, and though he re-created instead of copying his materials, though he Shakespearianized them, he followed no different process of his genius in delineating Hecate and Titania than in delineating Dame ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various

... apprehended the ancient literature as poets: the men of the Eclaircissement apprehended them as critics. In Elizabeth's day the new learning stimulated English genius to creative activity. In royal progresses, court masques, Lord Mayors' shows, and public pageants of all kinds, mythology ran mad. "Every procession was a pantheon." But the poets were not careful to keep the two worlds of pagan antiquity and mediaeval Christianity distinct. The art of the renaissance was the flower of a double root, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... names of all their deities and many of their rites, but they discarded the loathsome monstrosities of the Nile, the Orontes, and the Ganges; they nationalized their creed, and their own poets created their beautiful mythology. No sacerdotal caste ever ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various

... so glorious a transformation in the character of his countrymen, what may we not look for from the universal dissemination of those writings on whose authors was poured the full splendor of eternal truth? If unassisted human nature, spell-bound by a childish mythology, have done so much, what may we not hope for from the supernatural efforts of preeminent genius, which spake as it was moved by ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... to be clipped into shapes of animals, in the Italian style. I can remember when I was a lad how I used to try to make out what the trees were cut to represent, and how I used to appeal for explanations to Judith, my Welsh nurse. She dealt in a strange mythology of her own, and peopled the gardens with griffins, dragons, good genii and bad, and filled my mind with them at the same time. My nursery window afforded a view of the great fountains at the head of the upper basin, and on moonlight nights the Welshwoman ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... books, so far as we can judge from the hints in the early writers, related chiefly to the ritual and calendar, to their history or Katuns, to astrological predictions and divinations, to their mythology, and to their system ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various



Words linked to "Mythology" :   Greek mythology, Brunnhilde, Brunhild, classical mythology, aggregation, cultural anthropology, Arjuna, mythological, Wayland the Smith, Nibelung, Wayland, Anglo-Saxon deity, Teutonic deity, Wieland, diffusion, Brynhild, Annwfn, mythologize, mythologist, Annwn, thunderbird, assemblage



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