"Myth is more than a statement about how the world ought to work; its poetic and mystic dimensions indicate that it embodies a sense of reality that includes all human capacities, ideal or actual. These, broadly speaking, are the tendency to feel or emotively relate to experience and the tendency to intellectually organize it—the religious, aesthetic, and philosophical aspects of human cultures. Human beings need to belong to a tradition and equally need to know about the world in which they find themselves. Myth is a kind of story that allows a holistic image to pervade and shape consciousness, thus providing a coherent and empowering matrix for action and relationship. It is in this sense that myth is most significant, for it is this creative, ordering capacity of myth that frightens and attracts the rationalistic, other-centered mind, forcing it into thinly veiled pejoration of the mythic faculty, alienistic analysis of it, and counter myth-making of its own. Myth, then, is an expression of the tendency to make stories of power out of the life we live in imagination; from this faculty when it is engaged in ordinary states of consciousness come tales and stories. When it is engaged in nonordinary states, myth proper—that is, mystery mumblings—occur."
Myth is a genre of folklore consisting primarily of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society. For scholars, this is totally different from the ordinary sense of the term myth, meaning a belief that is not true, as the veracity of a piece of folklore is entirely irrelevant to determining whether it constitutes a myth.
"Anonymous myths give birth to other anonymous myths, multiplying and ramifying themselves without the fear of one being absorbed by the other, and beyond any myth teller’s control. Like leaves of grass, they grow and die following the rhythm of impermanent-permanent nature."
Mythology"Myths circulate like gifts without givers, and no myth teller (cares to) knows where they come from or who invented them."
Mythology"Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted."
Mythology"Myths and endless genealogies ... promote controversial speculations rather than advancing God’s work—which is by faith."
Mythology"There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths."
Mythology"Myth may be seen as a teleological statement, a shaped system of reference that allows us to order and thus comprehend perception and knowledge, as Mann suggests. The existence of mythic structures supposes a rational ordering of the universe. The presence of myth in a culture signifies a belief in the teleological nature of existence and indicates that powers other than those of material existence, or what Carlos Castaneda calls “ordinary reality,” guide and direct the universe and human participation in it. As such myth stands as an expression of human need for coherence and integration and as the mode whereby human beings might actively fill that need."
Mythology