Mythos Quotes

“Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.”
― H. P. Lovecraft

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
― H.P Lovecraft

“When we illuminate the road back to our ancestors, they have a way of reaching out, of manifesting themselves...sometimes even physically.”
― Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

“The Chorus Line: The Birth of Telemachus, An Idyll

Nine months he sailed the wine-red seas of his mother's blood
Out of the cave of dreaded Night, of sleep,
Of troubling dreams he sailed
In his frail dark boat, the boat of himself,
Through the dangerous ocean of his vast mother he sailed
From the distant cave where the threads of men's lives are spun,
Then measured, and then cut short
By the Three Fatal Sisters, intent on their gruesome handcrafts,
And the lives of women also are twisted into the strand.

And we, the twelve who were later to die by his hand
At his father's relentless command,
Sailed as well, in the dark frail boats of ourselves
Through the turbulent seas of our swollen and sore-footed mothers
Who were not royal queens, but a motley and piebald collection,
Bought, traded, captured, kidnapped from serfs and strangers.

After the nine-month voyage we came to shore,
Beached at the same time as he was, struck by the hostile air,
Infants when he was an infant, wailing just as he wailed,
Helpless as he was helpless, but ten times more helpless as well,
For his birth was longed-for and feasted, as our births were not.
His mother presented a princeling. Our various mothers
Spawned merely, lambed, farrowed, littered,
Foaled, whelped and kittened, brooded, hatched out their clutch.
We were animal young, to be disposed of at will,
Sold, drowned in the well, traded, used, discarded when bloomless.
He was fathered; we simply appeared,
Like the crocus, the rose, the sparrows endangered in mud.

Our lives were twisted in his life; we also were children
When he was a child,
We were his pets and his toythings, mock sisters, his tiny companions.
We grew as he grew, laughed also, ran as he ran,
Though sandier, hungrier, sun-speckled, most days meatless.
He saw us as rightfully his, for whatever purpose
He chose, to tend him and feed him, to wash him, amuse him,
Rock him to sleep in the dangerous boats of ourselves.

We did not know as we played with him there in the sand
On the beach of our rocky goat-island, close by the harbour,
That he was foredoomed to swell to our cold-eyed teenaged killer.
If we had known that, would we have drowned him back then?
Young children are ruthless and selfish: everyone wants to live.

Twelve against one, he wouldn't have stood a chance.
Would we? In only a minute, when nobody else was looking?
Pushed his still-innocent child's head under the water
With our own still-innocent childish nursemaid hands,
And blamed it on waves. Would we have had it in us?
Ask the Three Sisters, spinning their blood-red mazes,
Tangling the lives of men and women together.
Only they know how events might then have had altered.
Only they know our hearts.
From us you will get no answer.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

“O Moon that rid'st the night to wake
Before the dawn is pale,
The hamadryad in the brake,
The Satyr in the vale,
Caught in thy net of shadows
What dreams hast thou to show?
Who treads the silent meadows
To worship thee below?
The patter of the rain is hushed,
The wind's wild dance is done,
Cloud-mountains ruby-red were flushed
About the setting sun:
And now beneath thy argent beam
The wildwood standeth still,
Some spirit of an ancient dream
Breathes from the silent hill.

Witch-Goddess Moon, thy spell invokes
The Ancient Ones of night,
Once more the old stone altar smokes,
The fire is glimmering bright.
Scattered and few thy children be,
Yet gather we unknown
To dance the old round merrily
About the time-worn stone.
We ask no Heaven, we fear no Hell,
Nor mourn our outcast lot,
Treading the mazes of a spell
By priests and men forgot.”
― Gerald B. Gardner, The Meaning of Witchcraft

“Our fights must be rooted in experiences, in stories, and in anecdotes. People remember these more than sterile numbers or facts. Myths are powerful magic and can turn enemies into friends. In a world where too many still tell stories that some are illegal and that to be free we must control the movement of others, the work of making new myths is essential.”
― Syed Khalid Hussan, Undoing Border Imperialism

“Alte Männer sind eine rachsüchtige Brut. Sie beneiden junge Männer um ihre Kraft und verübeln jungen Frauen ihre Verführungsmacht.”
― Emilia Polo, Pandoras Kuss

“Time slipped and slid around him, unanchored by any fact that could be verified. Perhaps it did not matter. 'Where does our story take place, and when?' asked Cocteau at the start of Orphée. 'It's the privilege of legends to be ageless. Comme il vous plaira. As you please.”
― Ann Wroe, Orpheus: The Song of Life

“It was generally believed, said Theophilus, that Orpheus learned his music from the birds. His small voice, piping after theirs, filled with all the secret stories of the earth.”
― Ann Wroe, Orpheus: The Song of Life

“Ouranos was revolted by them. Maybe he was most horrified by the thought that he, Lord of the Sky, could have fathered such strange and ugly things, but I think that like most hatred his revulsion was rooted in fear.”
― Stephen Fry

“Dionysus? Really? That’s the best you could come up with? I prefer to be called, like, oh I don’t know, Tiresias or something. You’re changing my sexuality.”
― B.L.A., The Automation

“A myth, in its original Greek meaning- muthos- is simply that: a story, one which seeks to render life transparent to an intelligible source.”
― Jules Cashford

“Be as Pelicos.”
― Steven Poore, The Heir to the North

“Their [personal digital assistants] siren voices are living proof of our times - that our mind is software, running on the computer that is our brain. Consciousness is just a couple of clever hack away. We are only meat machines, no better, and increasingly, worse, than computers. According to the more triumphalist voices in the tech industry, we should revel in our soon-to-come obsolescence; we should be grateful that Homo Sapiens will have served as a bridge between biology and the inevitable next step in evolution, superintelligence. Smart money in Silicon Valley thinks so, op-ed pieces proclaim it to be so, and sleek sci-fi flicks reinforce this poor man's Nietzschean ideology.
Mind-as-software is the dominant mythos of liquid modernity, of our hyper-individualized, glove-trotting, technology-worshipping culture. It is the one remaining mythos of an age that believes itself immune to mythology. An age whose elite is witnessing with incomprehension and indifference the dying struggle of the once all-powerful mythos that sustained the West for two millennia - Christianity.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“Wenn wir eine Menge Geld für Auslandsurlaube ausgeben, dann nur deshalb, weil wir echte Anhänger der Mythen des romantischen Konsumismus sind.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Only the extremely strong – those who don’t care what others think – can take an interest in unpopular memes: the truth memes, the Logos memes. Our world has a very simple set up. Emotionally powerful memes are enormously more successful and popular than intellectually powerful memes. The whole of human fate – everything about humanity, the entirety of human history – is bound to that single fact.”
― Joe Dixon, The Intelligence Wars: Logos Versus Mythos

“So herrscht auch im universitären Kontext der Mythos, akademische Leistung entstehe durch Konkurrenz; das heißt durch die Trennung von der eigenen Ganzheit und von anderen Menschen. Hier kann ein erstes Mal die scheinbar innere Pflicht eines Menschen gelesen werden, innere Anteile aus dem Leben auszuschließen, um gesellschaftlichen Wert zu erhalten.”
― Sarina Samaya, Radikal verbunden: Über traumatisierende Herrschaft und den spirituellen Aktivismus als Brücke zwischen sozio-politischem Aufdecken und mitfühlender Bezogenheit

“Es wird ein Mythos aufrecht erhalten, der alles Feminine und Unkontrollierbare ausschließt: es werden feminine, queere, eigen-artige Qualitäten und Akteur*innen abge-wertet, die das Potential hätten, Transformation in ein neues Paradigma anzuregen. Diese Kräfte werden auf al-len Sphären politischen und individuell-leiblichen Seins heimlich und seduktiv-freiwillig unterdrückt;”
― Sarina Samaya, Radikal verbunden: Über traumatisierende Herrschaft und den spirituellen Aktivismus als Brücke zwischen sozio-politischem Aufdecken und mitfühlender Bezogenheit

“Eine Abhängigkeit versteckt hinter dem Mythos der Selbstentfaltung, während der Wille mit den gesellschaftskonformen Zielen verschmolzen ist.”
― Sarina Samaya, Radikal verbunden: Über traumatisierende Herrschaft und den spirituellen Aktivismus als Brücke zwischen sozio-politischem Aufdecken und mitfühlender Bezogenheit

“Toprağa ait olmak istemeyenin göklere de yabancı olduğu gerçeği insanın bölünmesine, parçalanmasına, bütünlüğünü kaybetmesine yol açmış, onu yalnızlaştırıp nevrotikleştirmiştir.”
― İsmail Gezgin, Homo Narrans: İnsan Niçin Anlatır?