MYTH AND SYMBOL
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"The first task of any systematic comparison of the myths and religions of mankind should be to identify these universals (or, as C. G. Jung termed them, archetypes of the unconscious) and as far as possible to interpret them."
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Metaphor as Myth and as Religion
(Joseph Campbell)
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"One's personal myth is the wishing ring that brings to pass the life's events."
Tarot Revelations
(Joseph Campbell & Richard Roberts)
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"While the child Bacchus (the Logos) plays with his toys he is seized by the Titans and torn to pieces. Later these pieces are put together and built into a whole…..this, however clumsy it may seem to us, is an allegory which represents the descending of the One to become the many, and the re-union of the many in the One, through suffering and sacrifice."
The Inner Life
(Charles W. Leadbeater)
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"The point of archetypal images, like the point of myths, is not problem solving but imagining, questioning, going deeper. Archetypal images free us from identifying ourselves with our literal failures and successes or from seeing our lives as banal, or trivial. The aim in attending to these images is to awaken us to a sense of our yet unrealized latent possibilities, to save us from our sense of isolation and meaninglessness. It is to open up our lives to renewal and reshaping. Attending to the images creates a new bond between our personal lives and the collective experience of humankind."
Mirrors of The Self, Archetypal Images That Shape Your Life
(Christine Downing, editor)
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"A greatly educative means employed in the [Ancient] Mysteries was that of instructing, enlarging and purifying the imagination by means of myths, expressing…truths of the Divine world and of the soul's history."
The Meaning of Masonry
(W. L. Wilmshurst)
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"Each of us, as a monad, is the expression of a personal and individual myth; it is for each of us to fulfill and complete that myth in terms of the personal, subjective drama we touch in our dreams, visions, inner experiences." Laurence J. Bendit, psychiatrist, lecturer and author, 'Karma and Cosmos'
Karma, The Universal Law of Harmony
(Virginia Hanson and Rosemarie Stewart, editors)
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"Mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words, in short, to what we call transcendence." Joseph Campbell
The Hero's Journey
(Phil Cousineau, editor)
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"It becomes increasingly apparent to me, after several decades of work with extending human capacities, that capacities evolve and change in response to the larger cultural and mythic patterns of which we are a part. We can only extend our capacities when we are conscious of these larger patterns and assume our role as their co-creator."
The Search for the Beloved
(Jean Houston)
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"Once we begin to understand the workings of mythical language – the language of the collective wisdom – we can begin to use that same understanding to connect with the deeper significance and purpose that lie beneath the apparently mundane events of our everyday lives."
The Alternative Gospel
(John Baldock)
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"The Tree of Life represents the pure, unbroken power of the holy, the diffusion of the divine life through all worlds and the communication of all living things with their divine source."
The Messianic Idea in Judaism, And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality
(Gershom Scholem)
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"Behind symbol and myth stands reality – an essential, dramatic and practical truth."
From Bethlehem to Calvary
(Alice A. Bailey)
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"A symbol always means more than you can put your finger on. Its field of meaning is constantly expanding. The more you ponder a symbol, the more it means to you. As you contemplate a symbol, it generates a growth of consciousness."
Symbols, Guiding Lights Along the Journey of Life
(Kathleen R. Prata)
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"That people should succumb to these eternal images (spiritual symbols) is entirely normal, in fact it is what these images are for. They are meant to attract, to convince, to fascinate, and to overpower. They are created out of the primal stuff of revelation and reflect the ever-unique experience of divinity….Thanks to the labors of the human spirit over the centuries, these images have become embedded in a comprehensive system of thought that ascribes an order to the world." 'Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious', CW 9, 1
Basic Writings of C G Jung
(V S DeLasslo, editor)
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"The first function of mythology is to sanctify the place you are in."
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living
(Diane K. Osbon, editor)
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"A symbol is an outer and visible sign of an inner and spiritual reality, carried out into expression upon the physical plane by the force of the inner embodied life."
The Destiny of the Nations
(Alice A. Bailey)
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"Mythology is apparently coeval with mankind. As far back, that is to say, as we have been able to follow the broken, scattered, earliest evidences of the emergence of our species, signs have been found which indicate that mythological aims and concerns were already shaping the arts and world of Homo sapiens."
Myths To Live By
(Joseph Campbell)
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"Myth is psychic truth."
The Transforming Mind
(Laurence and Phoebe Bendit)
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"Myths are first and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul."
Collected Works
(Carl Jung)
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"The language of symbols is world-wide and goes far beyond and behind that of ordinary speech."
The Transforming Mind
(Laurence and Phoebe Bendit)
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"The myths and stories that have come down to us are not dogma to be taken literally….they are poetry, not theology – meant, in Joseph Campbell's words, 'to touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.'"
The Spiral Dance, A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess
(Starhawk (Miriam Simos))
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"The influence of the symbol must be allowed to pervade all levels of reality; only then can it be seen in all its spiritual grandeur and fecundity."
A Dictionary of Symbols
(J. E. Cirlot)
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"Mythic images are really spontaneous pictures, sprung from the human imagination, which describe in poetic language essential human experiences and essential human patterns of development."
The Mythic Tarot
(Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene)
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"The [Egyptian] myths can no longer be taken simply in their literal sense. They have to be understood as a rendition of deeper thoughts, striving to comprehend the world spiritually, as a unit." Eduard Meyer
The Masks of God
(Joseph Campbell)
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"Any blade of grass may assume, in myth, the figure of the savior and conduct the questing wanderer into the sanctum sanctorum of his own heart."
Hero With A Thousand Faces
(Joseph Campbell)
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"Fraser, Frobenius, Bayley and Muller, to name but four well-known scholars whose contributions to a new science of symbology are the product of years of research in the fields of anthropology, archeology, comparative religions and ethnology, show that the practices, rituals, symbols and beliefs prevailing amongst people widely separated by space, time and cultures are virtually identical."
The Meaning in Dreams and Dreaming
(Maria F. Mahoney)
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