United States or Norway ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
At any rate, religion is truth allegorically and mythically expressed, and thereby made possible and digestible to mankind at large. For mankind could by no means digest it pure and unadulterated, just as we cannot live in pure oxygen but require an addition of four-fifths of nitrogen.
We must now consider the subject from the mythical point of view, as we have done in the case of the other arts. We know that the image and emotions are mythically personified by us, and this fanciful reality is afterwards infused into the words used in its expression.
Drum is not a fable, but an antique reality fallen flaccid; made, by express bequest, as is mythically said, from the skin of Zisca, above 300 years ago: altogether mythic that latter clause. Friedrich, while at Glatz this time, gave a new Dress to the Virgin, say all the Biographers; of which the story is this.
This ultimately led to a universal conception of the efficacy of sound, considered as the manifestation of occult powers. In this mythically spiritual atmosphere, all peoples formerly lived and in great part still continue to live.
The all-swallowing and all-disgorging beast, wolf, or ogre, may have been derived from a view of Night as the all-swallower. But to disengage natural phenomena, mythically stated, from the human tangle of Marchen, to find natural phenomena in such a palimpsest as Perrault's courtly and artificial version of a French popular tale, is a delicate and dangerous task.
Everywhere and at all times there has been much discontent with governments, laws and public regulations; for the most part, however, because men are always ready to make institutions responsible for the misery inseparable from human existence itself; which is, to speak mythically, the curse that was laid on Adam, and through him on the whole race.
To talk of such things is either to speak metaphorically or to think mythically; and myths, the more currency they acquire, pass the more easily into superstitions. It would be a gross and pedantic superstition to venerate any form of society in itself, apart from the safety, breadth, or sweetness which it lent to individual happiness.
Now and then, in walking the interminable streets, one comes suddenly upon very questionable shapes, which, however, we don't question, but walk on and account for them mythically if we can.
God's majesty lies in his operation, not in his definition or his image. Fear and need, then, bring us into the presence of external powers, conceived mythically, whose essential character is to be now terrible, now auspicious.
It is therefore a somewhat moot point whether he ought to be classified as a poet, a painter, or a musician, even using each these words in its widest sense, or whether a new word ought not to be invented in order to describe him. Wagner's poetic ability is shown by his thinking in visible and actual facts, and not in ideas; that is to say, he thinks mythically, as the people have always done.
Word Of The Day