I've come to the conclusion that mythology is really a form of archaeological psychology. Mythology gives you a sense of what a people believes, what they fear.
I'm fascinated by almost any mythology that I can get my hands on.
Myths are stories that explain a natural phenomenon. Before humans found scientific explanations for such things as the moon and the sun and rainbows, they tried to understand them by telling stories.
Mythologies are violent things, and to be true to them, you have to go to primal territory.
In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible.
I do love mythology.
The ogres and witches and giants of fairytales stand in as metaphors for those obstacles that we all face in our own lives.
The collective unconscious appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious. We can see this most clearly if we look at the heavenly constellations, whose originally chaotic forms are organized through the projection of images. This explains the influence of the stars as asserted by astrologers. These influences are nothing but unconscious instrospective perceptions of the collective unconscious.
Myths and science fulfill a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it. They both fix the limits of what is considered as possible.
The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.
dreams are our spiritual illustrated discovery journals.
Dreams are like portraits; and we find they please because they are confessed resemblances.
Archetypes, in spite of their conservative nature, are not static but in a continuous dramatic flux. Thus the self as a monad or continuous unit would be dead. But it lives inasmuch as it splits and unites again. There is no energy without opposites!
When I was a kid, I took 'The Brady Bunch' and 'The Partridge Family' very seriously. It was a world to me in the same way that the Greek myths would have been had I read them. You know, Marcia is Athena and Mr. Brady is Zeus.
I think a lot of times dreams are nothing more than a kind of mental or spiritual flatulence. They're a way of relieving pressure.
I have a bit of a love affair with fairy tales and some of the ideas of Irish mythology, like Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, who captured a lot of that very beautifully.
Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.
I'm not interested in types. I'm interested in archetypes.
When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature - this very unique to Japan.
I'm somebody who likes codes and ciphers and chases and artwork and architecture, and all the things you find in a Robert Langdon thriller.
Among the thousand-and-one faces whereby form chooses to reveal itself to us, the one that fascinates me more than any other, and continues to fascinate me, is the structure hidden in mathematical things.
My art has always been in response to visions. Rather than confine my subject to representations of the outer worlds, I include portrayals of the multi-dimensional imaginal realms that pull us toward consciousness evolution.
There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the forms of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action.
Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.
Magick has many aspects, but primarily it acts as a dramatized system of “psychology
