Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 8, 2025
The Phrygians, who claim this goddess, say she was the mother of King Midas; the Romans say she was a Dryad and the wife of Faunus; but the Greeks say she is one of the mothers of Dionysus, whose name must not be uttered; and this is the reason why they cover the tents with vine-leaves during the celebration of her festival, and a sacred serpent sits by the goddess according to the mythus.
Saxo Grammaticus, a very curious Northman of that same century, is still more unhesitating; scruples not to find out a historical fact in every individual mythus, and writes it down as a terrestrial event in Denmark or elsewhere. Torfaeus, learned and cautious, some centuries later, assigns by calculation a date for it: Odin, he says, came into Europe about the Year 70 before Christ.
Turned in the kaleidoscope of the mythus, it assumes yet more gorgeous hues, and becomes a state of pure felicity, an Eden or a Paradise, wherein man dwelt in joy, and from which he wandered or was driven in the old days. It is almost needless to quote examples to show the wide distribution of this myth.
Losing more and more of its original form as an attempted explanation of natural phenomena, the myth now exists in civilized nations as an allegorical type of man’s own history and destiny, and thus is slowly merging into an episode of the second great cycle of the mythus, that of the Paradise lost and regained. It, too, finds its interpretation in psychology.
If Adam may be held to be no more real a personage than Prometheus, and if the story of the Fall is merely an instructive "type," comparable to the profound Promethean mythus, what value has Paul's dialectic?
What may be called the mythus of the Sistine Chapel has at last been finally disproved, partly by the personal observations of Mr. Heath Wilson, and partly by the publication of Michael Angelo's correspondence.
Here is the protagonist of our New World epic, a figure as poetic as that of Achilles, as ideally representative as that of Don Quixote, as romantic in its relation to our homespun and plebeian mythus as Arthur in his to the mailed and plumed cycle of chivalry.
Compare Edda Rhythmica seu Antiquior, vulgo Saemundina dicta, Pars iii. Kauffmann, Balder, Mythus und Sage, pp. 20 sq. The word tivor, usually understood to mean "god," seems to be found nowhere else. Soon was a brother of Balder born. He, Othin's son, proceeded to do battle when one day old. He did not wash his hands or comb his head before he brought Balder's antagonist on to the pyre.
Christianity: its essentials, 13; primitive, 35; a mythus, defects, 121; the true, 122; two benefits, 123; authority, 124; incarnation of, 176; the essence, 306; Fathers, 391. Christian, Emerson a, 267. Christian Examiner, The: on William Emerson, 12; its literary predecessor, 29; on Nature, 103, 104; repudiates Divinity School Address, 124.
All earnest men have seen into it; may still see into it. And now, connected with this, let us glance at the last mythus of the appearance of Thor; and end there. I fancy it to be the latest in date of all these fables; a sorrowing protest against the advance of Christianity, set forth reproachfully by some Conservative Pagan.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking