"Mythology" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Christian origin, and present a curious specimen of Christian art in the first century. Each of these two paintings is divided into an upper field, and into a lower smaller one. The smaller field of one of them is destined to expose the folly and corruption of paganism, and Egyptian mythology is selected for the purpose. We behold temples. In front of one of them stands a statue of Isis; another is devoted to Anubis the dog-god: two figures of crocodiles lie stretched across the entrance. On the left, we see a live crocodile waiting for its prey amongst the bulrushes: an ass is in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... Woman, therefore, the beauty of the female mind, this is one great field of his power. The supernatural world, the world of apparitions, that is another. For reasons which it would be easy to give, reasons emanating from the gross mythology of the ancients, no Grecian, [Endnote: 24] no Roman, could have conceived a ghost. That shadowy conception, the protesting apparition, the awful projection of the human conscience, belongs to the Christian mind. And in all ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... verse as the "Light of Greece," there would be no little commotion in the religious world, and thousands with only weak and troubled faith might be disturbed. But simply because we thoroughly understand the mythology of Greece and Rome, we have no fear. We welcome all that it can teach us. We cordially acknowledge the virtues of Socrates and assign him his true place. We enrich the fancy and awaken the intellectual energies of our youth by classical studies, and Christianity shines ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... said Harrison. "You think the Martians paid a visit to the earth, and the Egyptians remembered it in their mythology. Well, you're off, then; there wasn't any Egyptian ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... instituted ostracism; equality is above all things their aim, and therefore they ostracise and banish from the city for a time those who seem to predominate too much through their wealth, or the number of their friends, or through any other political influence. Mythology tells us that the Argonauts left Heracles behind for a similar reason; the ship Argo would not take him because she feared that he would have been too much for the ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... 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
... satire. Certainly the ethical purpose and the reformative element are rather implied than insistently expressed in Lucian; but he affords in his satiric sketches a capital glimpse of the ludicrous perplexity into which the pagan mind was plunged when it had lost faith in its mythology, and when a callous indifference towards the Pantheon left the Roman world literally without a rational creed. As a satire on the old Hellenic religion nothing could be racier than The Dialogues of the Gods and ...
— English Satires • Various
... the oldest established notaries of Paris. Without this letter it is not possible to understand Chesnel's real and assumed fatherhood. It almost recalls Daedalus' address to Icarus; for where, save in old mythology, can you look for comparisons worthy of ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... always lend to them. Even Gypsy, though she had been in the woods many times at night before, shuddered as she stood looking up. A queer thought came to her, of an old fable she had sometime read in Tom's mythology; a fable of some huge Titans, angry and fierce, who tried to climb into heaven; there was just that look about the trees. It was very still. The birds were in their nests, their singing done. From far away in some distant swamp came the monotonous, ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... Mercury, Neptune and Vulcan. It is a remarkable coincidence(?), that there are: First, Twelve Lunations in a year; Second, Twelve Months in a year; Third, Twelve Constellations in the heavens; Fourth, Twelve Gods in the ancient mythology; Fifth, Twelve Labors of Hercules; Sixth, see Law of the Twelve tables(?), Encyclopaedia Britannica on Burying; Seventh, Twelve Sons of Jacob; Eighth, Twelve Tribes of Israel; Ninth, Twelve Apostles of Christ; Tenth, Twelve ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... In the hundred years between the death of the apostles, and the beginning of the third century, there was not time to form a mythology. The times of Trajan's persecution, and that of the philosophic Aurelius, and the busy bustling age of Severus, were not the times for such a business. Bigoted Jews would not, and could not, have made such a character as Jesus of Nazareth; and the philosophers of that ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... was fresh from his university life. If he studied at all when he was at Oxford, he must have studied Latin and Greek, for after these literatures little else was studied. Young men and their staid tutors were compelled to know ancient history and mythology. Like Heine, they may have taken a 'real delight in the mob of gods and goddesses who ran so jolly naked about the world.' In the first three pages of the Anatomy of Wit there are twenty classical ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... purposes as did the 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 in sacred habits, holding ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... another of nearly the same growth which, from being patronized by the court, soon became no less popular than the former. The priests of Fo, coming by invitation from India, imported with them a great portion of the Hindu mythology, which some learned men have supposed to be the origin from whence the Polytheism of Egypt and Greece had its source; and others the direct contrary. Be that as it may, the affinity seems to be too strong not to ascribe them to a common parent; and the representations and the histories of ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... 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 ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... be expected by the preachers of Christianity when they turned themselves to the heathen public. Now the first thing that strikes us is, that the religion they carried with them was exclusive. It denied without reserve the truth of every article of heathen mythology, the existence of every object of their worship. It accepted no compromise, it admitted no comprehension. It must prevail, if it prevailed at all, by the overthrow of every statue, altar, and temple in the world, It will not easily be ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... in ancient Greek mythology, the twin sons of Zeus by Antiope. When children, they were exposed on Mount Cithaeron, but were found and brought up by a shepherd. Amphion became a great singer and musician, Zethus a hunter and herdsman (Apollodorus iii. 5). After punishing Lycus and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to have been ancient names of goddesses; these are Rhiannon (Rigantona, the great queen), and Modron (Matrona, the great mother). The other British deities will be more fully treated by another writer in this series in a work on the ancient mythology of the British Isles. It is enough to say that research tends more and more to confirm the view that the key to the history of the Celtic deities is the realisation of the local character of the vast majority ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... propriety in determining the gender. Of most of the passions and moral qualities of man the ancients formed deities, as they did of various other things: and, when these are personified, they are usually made male or female, according as they were gods or goddesses in the pagan mythology. The same rule applies in other cases: and thus the planet Jupiter will be masculine; Venus, feminine: the ocean, Oceanus, masculine: rivers, months, and winds, the same: the names of places, countries, and islands, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... of our own land, which we may frequently see wherever insects abound—on the green meadow, or by the margin of the brook—is the khunjunee of the Hindoo, by whose romantic and fanciful mythology he has been made a holy bird, bearing on his breast the impression of Salagrama, the stone of Vishnoo, a sacred petrified shell. Protected by this prestige, the little creature ranges unmolested near the habitations of man, and may in this respect be ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... that he can have one God only, when he regards God as the only Mind, Life, and substance. [25] If God is Spirit, as the Scriptures declare, and All-in- all, matter is mythology, and its laws are ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... translation was undertaken from a desire to lay before the English-speaking people the full treasury of epical beauty, folklore, and mythology comprised in The Kalevala, the national epic of the Finns. A brief description of this peculiar people, and of their ethical, linguistic, social, and religious life, seems to be called for here in order that the following poem ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... thing for a woman, when public speaking by her sex was almost unknown. These talks were given weekly, from eleven o'clock till one, to twenty-five or thirty of the most cultivated women of the city. Now the subject of discussion was Grecian mythology; now it was fine arts, education, or the relations of woman to the family, the church, society, and literature. These meetings were continued through five winters, supplemented by evening "conversations," attended by both ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... 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 ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... 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, ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... 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 not be misled by his exclusive references to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... 294called the Chinese Gallery, one hundred and sixty-two feet in length by seventeen feet in breadth, and is divided into five compartments, the centre being illumined with a light of stained glass, on which is represented the God of Thunder, as described in the Chinese mythology, surrounded by the imperial five-clawed dragons, supporting pendent lanterns, ornamented with corresponding devices. The ceiling or cove is the colour of peach blossom; and a Chinese canopy is suspended round from the lower compartment with ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... of time to spare, and his pertinacity in finding her would have been compromising if he had been less ingeniously tactful. It was by no means easy to meet her in society either, for, in spite of recent social developments, Prince Chiaromonte still clung to the antiquated political mythology of Blacks and Whites, and strictly avoided the families he persisted in calling 'Liberals,' on the ground that his father had called them so in 1870, when he was a small boy. It was not until he had bored himself to extinction in ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... the Mythology of the ancient Finns, the second Godhead, being only inferior to Jumala. He was master of the musical art, and when he played upon his instrument produced much the same effect as the Grecian Orpheus, enticing fishes from the stream and the wild ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... being a lion, I must refer you to ancient mythology, where one of these overrated beasts is held ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... his like among the genii of the Parma Cathedral, which we are to study. He is a joyous being to whom it is good merely to be alive. The elfin locks falling about his face make him look like some creature of the woods. We are reminded most of the faun of the Greek mythology. The arrows in his hand suggest some sylvan sport, but in reality they are the emblem of his martyrdom. According to tradition the young saint was bound by his enemies to a tree, and ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... strange adventures 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... All progressive art hitherto has been religious art; and commencements of the periods of decline are accurately marked, in illumination, by its employment on romances instead of psalters; and in painting, by its employment on mythology or profane history instead of sacred history. Yet perhaps I should rather have said, on heathen mythology instead of Christian mythology; for this latter term—first used, I believe, by Lord Lindsay—is more applicable to the subjects of the early painters ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... same history—a prophecy which foretold their birth, and the fable of a supernatural origin, just like the Perseus of mythology, and the philosopher Plato in history. Is it ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... Allen is one of the select band who are saturated with classic lore and who seek to translate the beings of pagan mythology to the Australian bush. 'Gods and Wood Things' contains both prose and verse—the latter rhapsodical, ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... age of Greek philosophy there was no Ethics in the strictest sense. Philosophy proper occupied itself primarily with ontological questions—questions as to the origin and constitution of the material world. It was only when mythology and religion had lost their hold upon the cultured, and the traditions of the poets had come to be doubted, that inquiries as to the meaning of life and ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... that which will least endure a second place in the heart or thoughts, and a languid and occasional study of it was sure to lead to error or infidelity. On the other hand, what was heartily admired and unceasingly contemplated was soon brought nigh to being believed; and the systems of Pagan mythology began gradually to assume the places in the human mind from which the unwatched Christianity was wasting. Men did not indeed openly sacrifice to Jupiter, or build silver shrines for Diana, but the ideas of Paganism ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... There is a regular mythology about Toombs at his State university. The things he said would fill a volume of Sydney Smith, while the pranks he played would rival the record of Robin Hood. There is still standing in the college campus in Athens a noble tree, with the ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... nude figures is so stupid, that it hardly deserves serious discussion—outside of the columns of the comic papers. A classical education, too, gives so many opportunities for the sight or the mention of the nude—for instance, delineations of the gods of the ancient mythology that the demands of the "morality-fanatics" could be met only by cutting off the child from the most beautiful sources of culture. But now, let those who, in the lower classes of our schools, have seen in the text-books of mythology pictures of unclad gods and goddesses, seriously ask themselves ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... recrudescences of savage poetry and superstition, though the Ionians "did not drop the more primitive phases of belief which had clung to them; these rose to the surface with the rest of the marvellous Ionic genius, and many an ancient survival was enshrined in the literature or mythology of Athens which had long passed out of all remembrance at Mycenas." [Footnote: Companion to ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... Probably the reading "fashes," (troubles), "in the flood" is correct, not "fishes," or "freshes." The mother desires that the sea may never cease to be troubled till her sons return (verse 4, line 2). The peculiar doom of women dead in child-bearing occurs even in Aztec mythology. ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... King Arthur, and its pages swarm with the 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. Descents ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of tenderness, of youth, beauty, and childhood. Nothing of the repulsive or terrible ever came from his hand. The sculptor's fancy found expression most fully, perhaps, in the works which are gathered here, illustrating the delightful legends of the Greek mythology. No one can be surprised at the universal homage accorded to his memory ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... character of necessity, and survived as a superstition. Enemies had to be eaten in order to inherit their courage; and, at a still later epoch, the enemy's eye or heart was eaten for the same purpose; while among other tribes, already having a numerous priesthood and a developed mythology, evil gods, thirsty for human blood, were invented, and human sacrifices required by the priests to appease the gods. In this religious phase of its existence, cannibalism attained its most revolting characters. Mexico is a well-known ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... could; but Melville finally relinquished it also. It seems likely, however, that this projected tale was not the one which Hawthorne had originally been meditating. At all events, it was postponed in favor of a new book of wonder-stories from Greek mythology—the first one having had immediate popularity, and by the time this was finished, the occasion had arrived which led to the writing of Pierce's biography. This, in turn, was followed by the offer by the President to his friend of the Liverpool ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... for constantly moving about, were more weary of immediate perception. It was only afterwards when, in the excitement of the thirty-years' war, the arts of Sculpture and Painting and Christian and Pagan Mythology became extinct, that there arose a greater necessity for pictured representations. The Orbis Rerum Sensualium Pictus, which was also to be janua linguarum reserata, of Amos Comenius, appeared first in 1658, and was reprinted ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... say that ethnological considerations formed no part of the undertaking which has resulted in the publication of this volume. Professor J. W. Powell, of the Smithsonian Institution, who is engaged in an investigation of the mythology of the North American Indians, informs me that some of Uncle Remus's stories appear in a number of different languages, and in various modified forms, among the Indians; and he is of the opinion that they ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... mythology and present day conditions can inform us the bride has always gone to the home of her husband and, for a time at least, has been subject to the dictations of her mother-in-law, although the couple are generally soon established in a home of their own, in the town of the ...
— Traditions of the Tinguian: A Study in Philippine Folk-Lore • Fay-Cooper Cole
... explanation of local, historical, and chronological allusions, or to references to Wordsworth's own career that are not obvious without them. It has been occasionally difficult to decide whether some of the allusions, to minute points in ancient history, mediaeval mythology, and contemporary politics, should be explained or left alone; but I have preferred to err on the side of giving a brief clue to details, with ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... creations of Maori mythology were the taniwhas or evil demons, mysterious monsters in the form of gigantic lizards, who were said to inhabit subterranean caves, the deep places of lakes and rivers, and to guard tabued districts. They were on the ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... Devil. Sans. Pangka (mud). According to the Hindu mythology, there is a hell of mud; the bengues of the Gypsies seem to be ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... height. In France the writers of this group carried on war against classic tradition—the idea that every literary work should be modeled after one of those of the ancient writers; subjects of tragedy should be taken from Greek mythology or history; and the characters should think like the classics, and speak in the formal and stilted phraseology of the vernacular translations out of the ancient works. These writers, also, were those who upheld the rights of man, and produced declarations ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... 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 in thoughtful men before the triumph of Christianity, and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... inextricably mixed with Biblical legend and Caucasian philosophy. Some of it has even been invented for commercial purposes. Give a reservation Indian a present, and he will possibly provide you with sacred songs, a mythology, and folk-lore to order! ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... and afterwards of Greece, and Rome, were derived from men famous in those early times, as in the ages of hunting, pasturage, and agriculture. The histories of some of their actions recorded in Scripture, or celebrated in the heathen mythology, are introduced, as the Author hopes, without impropriety into his account of those remote ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... the two mahogany bookcases numbered 11 and 13, and the contents thereof, being volumes of fairy and folk tales of all nations, and dictionaries and other treatises upon demonology, witchcraft, mythology, magic and kindred subjects, to be his, his heirs, ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... find a way or make one," was an expression of the same sturdy independence which to this day distinguishes the descendants of the Northmen. Indeed nothing could be more characteristic of the Scandinavian mythology, than that it had a god with a hammer. A man's character is seen in small matters; and from even so slight a test as the mode in which a man wields a hammer, his energy may in some measure be inferred. Thus an eminent Frenchman hit off in a single phrase the characteristic ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... 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
... 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," and ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... Pagan Tahiti, a coco-nut 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 Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... very ancient date, of whose life and deeds many memorials remain, he has been confused with two Indian divinities, the one Iroquois, the other Algonquin, and his history has been distorted and obscured almost beyond recognition. Through the cloud of mythology which has enveloped his memory, the genius of Longfellow has discerned something of his real character, and has made his name, at least, a household word wherever the English language is spoken. It remains to give ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale
... have said nothing to-day of the mythology of the bird, though I told you that would always be, for us, the most important part of its natural history. But I am obliged, sometimes, to take what we immediately want, rather than what, ultimately, we shall need chiefly. In the second ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... Nicolas' day, either a shoe, or a stocking, or a little basket, into the chimney-piece of their parents' bedroom. We may remark, by the way, that St. Nicolas is the Christian successor of the heathen Nikudr, of ancient German mythology. Pesser, besser,(Ger.) - Better. Pestain - Stain, with the augment. Pfaelzer - A man from the Rhenish Palatinate. Pfeil,(Ger.) - Arrow. Philosopede - Velocipede. Pickel-haube,(Ger.) - The spiked helmet worn by Prussian soldiers. Pie the forms - Break ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... 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 why it had so ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... ei gwmpas, or four yards and a half in girth. As I gazed on the mighty tree I thought of the Ash Yggdrasill mentioned in the Voluspa, or prophecy of Vola, that venerable poem which contains so much relating to the mythology ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... the custom remains of placing a rosy apple in the hand of the dead, that they may find it when they enter paradise. In northern mythology the giants eat apples to keep ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... Patricians were said to derive their origin from Jupiter, whose priests they were. Mythology apart, they derived their name from Patres, the dignity of priest having blended ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... compositions are taken from profane history or mythology. He was in a manner interdicted from using subjects derived from those copious sources, by a decree of the Holy Inquisition of Andalusia, which prohibited painters and sculptors, under the penalties ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... of healing begins in the Hellenic mythology with Apollo, the god of light and the promoter of health. In the "Iliad" he is hailed as the disperser of epidemics, and, in this respect, the ancients were well informed in attributing destruction of infection to the sun's rays. Chiron, the Centaur, it was believed, ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... added new discrepancies in trying to adapt the old tale to the faith of his day. No need to expatiate on the incoherence of a poem formed of such elements. Its heroes are at once pagan and Christian; they believe in Christ and in Weland; they fight against the monsters of Scandinavian mythology, and see in them the descendants of Cain; historical facts, such as a battle of the sixth century, mentioned by Gregory of Tours, where the victory remained to the Frankish ancestor,[58] are mixed up with tales of ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... opportunities for love making, always 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 sun living ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... the virtues of antique republics in that 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 ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... nor the ritual of the Order are masonic, but rather Martiniste and Cabalistic. For amidst all the confused phraseology of the Order, the phrases and symbols borrowed from Egyptian, Greek, or Hindu mythology, one detects the real basis of the whole system—the Jewish Cabala, in which all the three Chiefs were, or became, experts. Mathers in fact translated the famous book of Abraham the Jew from French into English with explanatory notes, ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... bronze in camps and battle-fields,' his brow well furrowed by the 'wrinkles of council,' and his eye 'cutting its way like the sword;' and thence she loved to escape, at Ovid's behest, to the enchanted gardens of the Greek mythology, to the gods and nymphs born of the sunbeam, the wave, the shadows on the hill—delighted to realise in those Greek forms the faith of a refined and intense childhood. Reading was now to her a habit and a passion. Its only rival attraction was the 'dear little ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... they correspond in the main to the traditions which come to us from almost every known country on the globe, concurring to attest the intimate and necessary relation of the human soul with what would seem to be the remnants of an ancient and universal mythology. They bear upon their front the minute impress of reality, not to be mistaken, and beyond the mere invention of the poet. They are a valuable addition to the common stock. The style of Willkomm is clear, and to the point; almost always, as he says, in characterizing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... gaze of his soul upon that other flag. Its possession would be high pride. It would express bloody minglings, near blows. He had a gigantic hatred for those who made great difficulties and complications. They caused it to be as a craved treasure of mythology, hung amid tasks and contrivances ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... exceptional beauty, the so-called Orpheus relief (Fig. 136). This is known to us in three copies, unless indeed the Naples example be the original. The story here set forth is one of the most touching in Greek mythology. Orpheus, the Thracian singer, has descended into Hades in quest of his dead wife, Eurydice, and has so charmed by his music the stern Persephone that she has suffered him to lead back his wife to the upper air, provided ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... liberality of the emperor or empress. She may be compared with Domina Abundia (Old Fr. Dame Habonde, Notre Dame d'Abondance), whose name often occurs in poems of the Middle Ages, a beneficent fairy, who brought plenty to those whom she visited (Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, tr. 1880, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... knowledge of its hero. Hobhouse, his companion, ought to have been better informed, but was not. If anybody is to blame, it is the recent writers, who do know the facts, but are unwilling to hurt so fine an heroic figure or to dethrone "one of the demigods of the liberal mythology." Enough to say that the Muse of History has been guilty of one of those practical jokes to which she is too much addicted, in dressing with tragic buskins and muffling in the cloak of a hero of melodrama, and so palming off for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... AUTOLYCUS, in Greek mythology, the son of Hermes and father of Anticleia, mother of Odysseus. He lived at the foot of Mount Parnassus, and was famous as a thief and swindler. On one occasion he met his match. Sisyphus, who had lost ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... further serve to throw light upon ancient and modern mythology; and in many instances they are known to preserve traces of their fabulous descent, as will clearly appear in some of the following selections. It is the same with those of all nations, whether of eastern or western origin, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... kingdom free from all care, Madeleine often found herself contemplating her son fighting the brave fight, winning crown upon crown, and virtue flinging around him a shield more impenetrable than the fabulous Aegis of pagan mythology. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... violets hung between the vine-wreathed eighteenth century candelabras, round which sported fairies and nymphs, and on the wall-hangings more fairies and nymphs, and all the charming figures of the pastoral mythology—the Corydons, the Phylises, the Rosalinds—animated with their sylvan loves one of those sunny Cytherean landscapes originated by the fanciful imagination of ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... 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 up. 'Orient' will ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a moment's silence. The evocation of that tricksy sprite, the Ariel of French mythology, whose name, by an ironical chance, had been borne by the most ill-fated of all submarine craft, seemed to bring the shadow ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... the road, with a gaudily painted 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 ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... crushed and blazing ruin. Sweet girlish faces that had smiled upon him from the walls, beautiful classical faces that had inspired his artist soul, stern Roman faces, that had made the past seem real, the human faces of gods and goddesses that made mythology seem not wholly a myth, and the white marble faces of the statuary, that ever reminded him of Christine, were now all blackened and defaced forever. But not of these he thought, as he shudderingly covered his eyes with his hands to shut out the vision; but of that terrible face ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... coloured wood up to the galleries, where they terminate in Gothic scroll-work. The organ has a full, clear tone; in front of it stands a painting which, at first sight, resembles a scene from heathen mythology more than a sacred subject. A number of cupids soar among wreaths of flowers, and surround ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... splendid from the dust and 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 ...
— The Americanism of Washington • Henry Van Dyke
... "lovely. I have stood night after night in the cast house watching the metal pour out in its glorious colours. And, when I wake, I go to my window and see the reflections of the blast on the trees, on the first leaves. The charcoal burners come down like giants out of the mythology of the forest. And, when I first came, there was a raccoon hunt, with a great stirring of lanterns and barking dogs in the dark ... ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Awaken the Dawn from the dark Earth and the clouds where she is resting. Aurora in the old mythology is mother of Memnon (the East), and wife of Tithonus (the appearances of Earth and Sky during the last hours of Night). She leaves him every morning in renewed youth, to prepare the way for Phoebus (the Sun), whilst Tithonus remains in ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... young woman. It was the labour assigned to the ejected nuns by the rough earl who said, 'Go spin, ye jades, go spin.' It was the employment at which Roman matrons and Grecian princesses presided amongst their handmaids. Heathen mythology celebrated it in the three Fates spinning and measuring out the thread of human life. Holy Scripture honours it in those 'wise-hearted women' who 'did spin with their hands, and brought that which ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... plants, or, indeed, with all natural objects known to the ancients, the Ivy was the subject of a myth or religious allegory, and in investigating this myth, we find ourselves in a labyrinth of strange mystery. The ordinary works on mythology, indeed, inform the reader that it was the plant sacred to Bacchus, the god of wine, because, as Loudon states, 'this wine is found at Nyssa, the reputed birthplace of Bacchus, and in no other part of India.' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... eclipses of both the Moon and the Sun are caused, according to the Pauranic mythology, by Rahu devouring the Moon and the Sun at certain well-known intervals. Rahu is an Asura whose head only is still alive. Vide Adi Parva, On Churning of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... that Christian nations, with one general consent, in the early education of youth neglect the volume which they consider inspired, and bring the mind, at the most susceptible period, under the dominion of the literature and mythology of the heathen world; and that, too, when the sacred history and poetry are confessedly superior in literary quality. Grave doctors of divinity expend their forces in commenting on and teaching things which would be utterly scouted, were an ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Closet which affrights my Eyes to think of. But any of your learned friends in London will tell you, and probably more accurately than Paddy. I cannot doubt but that Sphinx and heaps more of the childish and dirty mythology of Greece came from Egypt, and who knows how far beyond, whether in Time ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... centre for the religious rites of the Anglo-Saxons. Woden or Odin, Thor and the other deities did not lose their adherents in a day, and Bede records the relapses into idolatry of Northumbria as well as the other parts of England. There can be no doubt that fairies and elves entered largely into the mythology of the Anglo-Saxons, and the firmness of the beliefs in beings of that nature can be easily understood when we realise that it required no fewer than twelve centuries of Christianity to finally destroy them among the people of Yorkshire. In Chapter ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... who is less accustomed to speaking for himself. "Feelings bring up recollections of things one never thought of before,—of the happiest days of our happiest home. 'Tain't much, no, nothing at all, to sell regular black and coloured property; but there's a sort of cross-grained mythology about the business when it comes to selling such ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... you," said 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 fable ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... castles, have 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, may be said with more truth of the Loire—all its women are queens, and all its young men ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... unless I hear the skittering of tiny feet a rod away I may not tell in what direction or how. Then, too, the skittering may be that of some entirely different creature. I prefer to think of them thus, as furry bogles that bob up out of fairy tales and bob back again to the making of a mythology that sniffs of sweet fern and bayberry and has the flavor of ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... mythology of the Klamath and Modoc Indians, the chief spirit who occupied the mystic land of Gaywas, or Crater Lake, was La-o. Under his control were many lesser spirits who appeared to be able to change their forms at will. Many of ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... accordingly we have religions 'of the ages'—(it is Mr. Jowett who so calls them)—of the 'ages before morality;' of ages of which the civil life, the common maxims, and all the secular thoughts have long been dead. 'Every reader of the classics,' said Dr. Johnson, 'finds their mythology tedious.' In that old world, which is so like our modern world in so many things, so much more like than many far more recent, or some that live beside us, there is a part in which we seem to have no kindred, which we stare at, of which we cannot think how it could ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... have ascertained since that it is a Scandinavian word describing a region of cold and darkness, a place, therefore, where people might easily get lost. Well, it might have suited certain conditions I had then in my mind, but Mr. Curtis will never go to Scandinavian mythology when he wants to describe New York. To my thinking, it will figure in his mind ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... comparative method in philology, in mythology—let me add in politics and history and the whole range of human thought—marks a stage in the progress of the human mind at least as great and memorable as the revival of Greek and Latin learning.—FREEMAN, ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... her beautiful indolent grace. She was garbed in some white soft stuff, which floated round her like a cloud, the wide hanging sleeves were lined with faint shell-like pink, and fell away from her bare lovely arms to the hem of her floating draperies. She looked like some goddess of mythology, rather than a living woman, and as Julian Estcourt gazed at her he felt ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... accidental. "But, as it is impossible to impart false ideas, because the false consists of a vicious combination of ideas, so it is impossible to impart a tradition, which, though it be false, has not at first contained some element of truth. Thus mythology appears for the first time, not as the invention of an individual, but as the spontaneous vision of the truth as it appears ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... endeavoured, with more zeal than judgment, to transfer to his imagined interpolators. We need not wonder to find Hector quoting Aristotle, when we see the loves of Theseus and Hippolyta combined with the Gothick mythology of fairies. Shakespeare, indeed, was not the only violator of chronology, for in the same age Sidney, who wanted not the advantages of learning, has, in his Arcadia, confounded the pastoral with the feudal ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... de Titan, 'Titanic voice.' The Titans in ancient mythology were gigantic beings, representing the primitive ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... the independent, yet similar, influence of Virgil upon Dante, and upon Bishop Gawaine Douglas. At earlier dates, the teaching of every master trained in the Eastern schools was necessarily grafted on the wisdom of the Greek mythology; and thus the story of the Nemean Lion, with the aid of Athena in its conquest, is the real root-stock of the legend of St. Jerome's companion, conquered by the healing gentleness of ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... of the great poets—Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton. After the issue of a small volume which attracted little or no attention, he published his Endymion in 1818, which, with some similarity in temperament, he inscribed to the memory of Thomas Chatterton. It is founded upon the Greek mythology, and is written in a varied measure. Its opening line has been ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... to believe in Ancient Mythology, and has been even heard to hint that he considers Dr. LEMPRIERE ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, Jan. 2, 1892 • Various
... for the battle of life who is engaged in a perpetual contention with his dinner, Hippias forsook his prospects at the Bar, and, in the embraces of dyspepsia, compiled his ponderous work on the Fairy Mythology of Europe. He had little to do with the Hope of Raynham beyond what he endured from his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and no less useful in peace. Then the watery god leaned back and smiled as if he would say, "Now, beat that." But the Goddess of Wisdom brought out of the earth a modest, dark tree bearing olives and, in classic phrase, "took the cake," Oriental mythology is more luxuriant and fantastic than that of the West, but I do not know if it has any legend parallel to this. If it has, then I am sure the palm is awarded to the deity who gave to the human race the ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... of these 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 ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... important characters in Zuni mythology, the Kaek-l[o], finding himself alone in the far Northwest, saw many roads, but could not tell which one led to his people, and he wept bitterly. The tear marks are still to be seen on the Kaek-l[o]'s ...
— The Religious Life of the Zuni Child - Bureau of American Ethnology • (Mrs.) Tilly E. (Matilda Coxe Evans) Stevenson
... Scott's essays were, for November, 1791, On the Origin of the Feudal System; for the 14th February, 1792, On the Authenticity of Ossian's Poems; and on the 11th December of the same year, he read one, On the Origin of the Scandinavian Mythology. The selection of these subjects shows the course of his private studies and predilections; but he appears, from the minutes, to have taken his fair share in the ordinary debates of the Society,—and spoke, in the spring of 1791, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... Gujarathee. The Moonshee struggles to get you to disgorge the sound ghain and leads you through the enchanted mazes of the Bagh-o-Bahar; the Pundit distinguishes between the kurmunnee and the kurturree prayog, and has many knotty points of mythology to expound, in order that you may rightly understand his idioms and appreciate his proverbial sayings. Of Pundits there are three species, quite distinct from each other. The first I would recommend if your object should, ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... Father Premare, 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 ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the aquarium itself, we shall see endless repetitions of those "sea-changes" which Shakspeare sang. Ancient mythology typified the changing wonders of aquatic Nature, as well as the fickleness of the treacherous sea, in those shifting deities, Glaucus and Proteus, who tenanted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humor, which floated everything he looked upon. His talk playfully exalting the familiar objects, put the companion at once into an acquaintance with his Lars and Lemurs, and it was very pleasant to learn what was predestined to be a pretty mythology. Few were the objects and lonely the man, "not a person to speak to within sixteen miles except the minister of Dunscore"; so that books inevitably made ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... 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 ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... the mythology, also, of the Iliad, purely Pagan as it is, we discover one important truth unconsciously involved, which was almost entirely lost from view amidst the nearly equal scepticism and credulity of subsequent ages. Zeus or Jupiter ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... mean that the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the outward manifestation of realities greater than itself. Nature was a parable:[1] 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 been a divine dispensation granted to the Jews; there ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... confident of heaven. Another poem in this intermediate collection was no less subjected to severe animadversion, but with infinitely less justice. We mean "The Gods of Greece." This lament for the beautiful old mythology, is but the lament of a poet for the ancient founts of poetry; and few, now-a-days, can be literal enough to suppose it seriously intended to set up Paganism, to the disparagement of Christianity. But the fact is, that Schiller's mind ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... 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 ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... out into a Nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America: neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... schools in Rome, but without success, so profoundly were the ancient intellectual habits rooted in this degenerate people. The long resistance to the new religion was at an end, but Romans, even while confessing that the gods were demons, could not cast off their affection for the mythology and history of their glorious time. Thus Basil had spent his schooldays mostly in the practice of sophistic argument, and the delivery of harangues on traditional subjects. Other youths had shown greater aptitude for this kind of eloquence; ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... now changed. The last century has seen the growth of scientific criticism to its full strength. The whole world of history has been revolutionised and the mythology which embarrassed earnest Christians has vanished as an evil mist, the lifting of which has only more fully revealed the lineaments of infallible Truth. No longer in contact with fact of any kind, Faith stands now and for ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the remains of the literature and the art of ancient Greece and Rome; they are also the most important to us, for many of the great masterpieces of English literature and of modern art have been inspired by them and cannot be understood and appreciated by one ignorant of classical mythology. ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... glorifying the mother (Beatrice D'Este) and the event. Zenale and Bourgogne resorted to the Christian narrative, and represented the Duchess as the Virgin, and her two sons as the Saviour and John the Baptist; Leonardo, on the other hand, took his frame-work from the Greek mythology, and painted Leda and the Dioscures. The picture was greatly admired at the time, though that the figure of the Duchess of Milan should be represented nude was thought rather bad even then. The picture ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... vainly agitated the learned. It may amuse the antiquary to weigh gravely the several doubts as to the derivation of their name from Pelasgus or from Peleg—to connect the scattered fragments of tradition—and to interpret either into history or mythology the language of fabulous genealogies. But our subtlest hypotheses can erect only a fabric of doubt, which, while it is tempting to assault, it is useless to defend. All that it seems to me necessary to say of the Pelasgi ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of etymologies and often seems to trifle with words. He gives etymologies which are bad, and never considers that the meaning of a word may have nothing to do with its derivation. He lived before the days of Comparative Philology or of Comparative Mythology and Religion, which would have opened a new world to him. He makes no allowance for the element of chance either in language or thought; and perhaps there is no greater defect in his system than the want of ...
— Sophist • Plato
... perhaps, and not 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 a man forty ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... researches. It is unfortunate that the task of re-interpretation and re-valuation of 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 ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... There are numerous other mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of relation. But the mathematician argues, from his finite truths, through habit, as if they were of an absolutely general applicability—as the world indeed imagines them to be. Bryant, in his very learned 'Mythology,' mentions an analogous source of error, when he says that 'although the Pagan fables are not believed, yet we forget ourselves continually, and make inferences from them as existing realities.' With the algebraists, however, who are Pagans themselves, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... found speculating upon the astronomical character and signification of the Isles of Wight, Jersey, or Man, arguing, perhaps, that this latter island had not contained a real living race of men but "belonged to astronomical mythology," was a "Man submerged in celestial waters." If the legend of the lost Atlantis is only "like those of Airyana-Vaejo and Jambu-dvipa," it is terrestrial enough, and therefore "the mythological origin of the Deluge legend" is so far an open question. We claim that it is not "indubitably ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... occasionally immolated. The purity of their religion was soon stained by their Celtic neighborhood. In the course of the Roman dominion it became contaminated, and at last profoundly depraved. The fantastic intermixture of Roman mythology with the gloomy but modified superstition of Romanized Celts was not favorable to the simple character of German theology. The entire extirpation, thus brought about, of any conceivable system of religion, prepared the way for a true revelation. Within that little river ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... ideas of the existence of a Deity are vague, at best; and the lines of separation between it and necromancy, medical magic, and demonology are too faintly separated to allow him to speak with discrimination. The best reply, as to his religious views, his mythology, his cosmogony, and his general views as to the mode and manifestations of the government and providences of God, are to be found in his myths and legends. When he assembles his lodge-circle, to hear stories, in seasons of leisure and retirement in the depths of the forest, he recites precisely ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... about earthquakes prior to the last century tended to cultivate superstitious notions respecting them. Even Pliny, Herodotus, Livy, and the other classic writers, were quite ignorant of the true causes, and mythology entered into their speculations. In later times the investigation has become a science. The Chinese were pioneers in this direction, having appointed an Imperial Commission in A.D. 136 to inquire into the subject. It is to be doubted, however, ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... descending node of the Moon by that name. Hence Rahu is the ascending node of the Moon. Graha, is that which seizes; Grahapati is Mangala, so called for its malevolence, Varah is Vrihaspati or Jupiter, who is the counterself of Sukra or Venus. In Hindu mythology, Sukra is a male person, the preceptor of the Daityas and Asuras. Atri is Vudha or Mercury, represented as the sons of Atri. Atryahnamaskarta is Durvasas who was the son of Atri's wife, got by the lady through a boon of Mahadeva. Daksha's Sacrifice sought to fly away from Siva, but the latter ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... make Plato and Zeno, and Shakespeare, and all Shakespeare's gentlemen, possible, again. The women, whose beauty, and sweetness, and dignity, and high accomplishment, and grace, make us understand the Greek Mythology, and weaken our desire to have some glimpse of the most famous women of history. The "best society" is that in which the virtues are most shining, which is the most charitable, forgiving, long-suffering, modest, and innocent. The "best society" is, in its very name, that ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... way—my trifling occupations were swelled into important pursuits; my affections were impetuous and engrossing passions, and nature with all her changes was invested in divine attributes. The very spirit of the Greek mythology inhabited my heart; I deified the ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... Molly, and the girl with a petulant exclamation, sped away, leaving Aurelia to the society of the tapestry. It was of that set of Gobelin work which represents the four elements personified by their goddesses, and Aurelia's mythology, founded on Fenelon, was just sufficient to enable her to recognise the forge of Vulcan and the car [chariot—D.L.] of Venus. Then she looked at the work prepared for her, a creamy piece of white satin, ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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, Jupiter became Jew Peter, and by a natural transition, ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... "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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various |
