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Compiled by JoAnn Kite

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Myth and Symbol
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1		"The myths are metaphorical of spiritual potentiality in the human being, and the same powers that animate our life animate the life of the world." The Power of Myth (Joseph Campbell)

2		"Folklore and fairy tales are filled with lessons about the values of love, compassion, generosity, and caring for family, friends, the sick, and the elderly. These are the virtues that matter to heaven. These are the virtues that matter even if there is no heaven. And these are the virtues we are required to develop and refine on our spiritual journey." Invisible Acts of Power: Personal Choices That Create Miracles (Caroline Myss)

3		"It was Jung's empirical discovery that living the symbolic life – that is, being constantly alive to the symbolic meaning of events both in waking and dreaming reality – greatly enhances realization of the Self." Ariadne's Clue, A Guide to the Symbols of Humankind (Anthony Stevens)

4		"The universally distinguishing characteristic of mythological thought and communication is an implicit connotation through all its metaphorical imagery of a sense of identity of some kind, transcendent of appearances, which unites behind the scenes the opposed actors on the world stage." Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (Joseph Campbell)

5		"The symbol proper is a dynamic and polysymbolic reality, imbued with emotive and conceptual values: in other words, with true life." A Dictionary of Symbols (J. E. Cirlot)

6		"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)

7		"The psychosomatic entity that is everywhere being shaped – namely, the bioenergetic system of the one species, Homo sapiens sapiens – is and has been for some 40 millennia a constant. Hence, the 'elementary ideas' (Bastian) or 'archetypes of the collective unconscious (Jung), of this single species – which are biologically grounded and at once the motivating powers and connoted references of the historically conditioned metaphorical figures of mythologies throughout the world – are, like the laws of space, unchanged by changes of location." The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (Joseph Campbell)

8		"As a culture-wide paradigm shift makes its presence felt, people are searching frantically for a New Story to give their lives meaning….the New Story involves our reunion with the natural world, based on the interconnectedness of all living systems." As Above, So Below: Paths to Spiritual Renewal in Daily Life (Ronald S. Miller and the editors of New Age Journal)

9		"The task of the modern human being is to interiorize mythic symbology;…to comprehend, in short, that all mythological images are aspects of your own immediate experience." Robert Walter, Foreword World Mythology (Roy Willis, General Editor)

10		"It does appear that anyone viewing with unprejudiced eye the religions of mankind must recognize mythic themes at every hand that are shared, though differently interpreted, among the peoples of this planet." The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (Joseph Campbell)

11		"Whether it is expressed in the prose epic of the Winnebago Indians, in a lament for the death of Balder in the Norse sagas, in Walt Whitman's poems of mourning for Abraham Lincoln, or in the dream ritual whereby a man returns to his yourthful hopes and fears, it is the same theme – the drama of new birth through death." Joseph L. Henderson Man and His Symbols (Carl Jung)

12		"Myth is always about soul-making and about the pathos that accompanies the journey of the soul as it travels from out-moded existence to the amplified life in the kingdom. Thus it has much to teach us about where we are right now and where we are headed." Jean Houston, 'Living in One's and Future Myths' The Fabric of the Future (M. J. Ryan, editor)

13		"Symbols are among the most profound expressions of human nature…certain images are universal and timeless, occurring n the East and West, in the ancient past and in our hurly-burly present….such universal images, or archetypes, carry dynamic, creative forces that move us deeply." Sacred Origins of Profound Things (Charles Panati)

14		"The term 'myth' means 'eternal truth' as over against a temporal happening; and hence a myth is not less true, but in a sense more true than an immediate event." The Springs of Creative Living, A Study of Human Nature and God (Rollo May)

15		"Symbols form the rallying-points about which are gathered a whole group of ideas and intuitions. Their presence – sometimes the sudden thought of them – will be enough, in psychological language, to provoke a discharge of energy along some particular path: that is to say, to stir to life all those ideas and intuitions which belong to the self's consciousness of the Absolute, to concentrate vitality on them, and introduce the self into that world of perception of which they are, as it were, the material keys." Mysticism (Evelyn Underhill)

16		"The experience of drama rests upon the impact of a meaning that arises from the challenge inherent in the tensions and oppositions which bring forth difficulties, threats, conflict and crises calling for a closure or satisfaction of entelechial gestalt patterns through resolution and cooperation of the antithetical elements. Thus, every drama 'makes a point', conveys a message or meaning which is the explication of its entelechy. It brings to the fore an implicate archetype that wants to incarnate and be woven into the web of life." The Alchemy of Healing (Edward C. Whitmont, MD)

17		"A mythology is not an ideology. It is not something projected from the brain, but something experienced from the heart, from recognitions of identities behind or within the appearances of nature, perceiving with love a 'thou' where there would have been otherwise only an 'it'. As stated already centuries ago in the Indian Kena Upanishad: 'That which in the lightning flashes forth, makes one blink, and say 'Ah!' – that 'Ah!' refers to divinity." The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (Joseph Campbell)

18		"Symbolism is a language that transcends race, geography, and time. It is the natural Esperanto of humanity." Ariadne's Clue, A Guide to the Symbols of Humankind (Anthony Stevens)

19		"Myth is not a distortion of fact, but the womb through which fact must come. Myth involves an intrinsic understanding of the nature of reality, couched in imaginative terms, carrying a power as strong as nature itself. Myth-making is a natural psychic characteristic." The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events (Jane Roberts)

20		"Myths are first and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

21		"The poets, prophets, and visionaries of untold millenniums – Dante, Aquinas, and Augustine, al-Ghazali and Mohammed, Zarathustra, Shankaracharya, Nagarjuna, and T'ai Tsung, were not bad scientists making misstatements about the weather, or neurotics reading dreams into the stars, but masters of the human spirit teaching a wisdom of death and life. And the thesaurus of the myth-motifs was their vocabulary. They brooded on the state and way of man, and through their broodings came to wisdom; then teaching with the aid of the picture-language of myth, they worked changes on the patterns of their inherited iconographies." The Flight of the Wild Gander (Joseph Campbell)

22		"Myths are a function of nature as well as of culture, and as necessary to the balanced maturation of the human psyche as is nourishment to the body." The Flight of the Wild Gander (Joseph Campbell)

23		"As the imagery of a dream is metaphorical of the psychology of its dreamer, that of a mythology is metaphorical of the psychological posture of the people to whom it pertains." Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (Joseph Campbell)

24		"Mythology, the fine arts, religions of the world, and dreams provide priceless imagery by which the soul's mysteries are simultaneously revealed and contained." Care of the Soul (Thomas Moore)

25		"Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes…..They represent the archetypes in their simplest, barest, and most concise form. In this pure form, the archetypal images afford us the best clues to the understanding of the processes going on in the collective psyche." Marie Louise vonFranz, 'Interpretation of Fairytales' Spiritual Pilgrims, Carl Jung & Teresa of Avila (John Welch, O. Carm.)

This body of quotes compiled by JoAnn Kite