But remember: what belongs to the sea will always return to the sea.--Nereid

Well, that's history for you, folks. Unfair, untrue and for the most part written by folk who weren't even there.

Women treat us [men] like humanity treats gods – they worship us and keep bothering us to do something.

A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can't get into me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman, with likes and dislikes: a jealous woman.The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names--Mars of the fields and the war, Vesta the fire, Ceres the grain, Mother Tellus the earth, the Penates of the storehouse. The rivers, the springs. And in the storm cloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they aren't people. They don't love and hate, they aren't for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live.

The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.

Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.

When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)

Myths, whether in written or visual form, serve a vital role of asking unanswerable questions and providing unquestionable answers. Most of us, most of the time, have a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to reduce the cognitive dissonance of not knowing by filling the gaps with answers. Traditionally, religious myths have served that role, but today — the age of science — science fiction is our mythology.

What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.

Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.

Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)

There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call atheists, and those who think they are facts are religious. Which group really gets the message?

That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. It's all right, he said. But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used up, I should think.

Aeneas' mother is a star?No; a goddess.I said cautiously, Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus.He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country, among pagans like me, helped him understand my bewilderment. So do we, he said. But Venus also became more...With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite...There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods, he called her, dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skillful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light...It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy.

from Semele RecycledBut then your great voice rang out under the skiesmy name!-- and all those private namesfor the parts and places that had loved you best.And they stirred in their nest of hay and dung.The distraught old ladies chasing their lost altar,and the seers pursuing my skull, their lost employment,and the tumbling boys, who wanted the magic marbles,and the runaway groom, and the fisherman's thirteen children,set up such a clamor, with their cries of Miracle!that our two bodies met like a thunderclapin midday-- right at the corner of that wretched fieldwith its broken fenceposts and startled, skinny cattle.We fell in a heap on the compost heapand all our loving parts made love at once,while the bystanders cheered and prayed and hid their eyesand then went decently about their business.And here is is, moonlight again; we've bathed in the riverand are sweet and wholesome once more.We kneel side by side in the sand;we worship each other in whispers.But the inner parts remember fermenting hay,the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense,and passion, its bloody labor,its birth and rebirth and decay.

As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.

Where the bright seraphim in burning rowTheir loud uplifted angel trumpets blow.

And when suddenlythe god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry,uttered the words: "He has turned round' –she comprehended nothing and said softly: "Who?

I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.

We must have a new mythology, but it must place itself at the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Mythology must become philosophical, so that the people may become rational, and philosophy must become mythological, so that philosophers may become sensible. If we do not give ideas a form that is aesthetic, i.e., mythological, they will hold no interest for people.