Goddesses Quotes

“In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens. Now she is dead, and the universe is not an organism, but a building, with gods at rest in it in luxury: not as personifications of the energies in their manners of operation, but as luxury tenants, requiring service. And Man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion but as a robot fashioned to serve.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“People often think of the Goddess as a fertility deity only. Not at all—she’s the muse. She’s the inspirer of poetry. She’s the inspirer of the spirit. So, she has three functions: one, to give us life; two, to be the one who receives us in death; and three, to inspire our spiritual, poetic realization.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“Artemis, along with Selene and Hekate, was one of the Greek triads representing the Old European three-bodied or triune aspect of the Goddess. We can see this represented in this figurine (Fig. 72) of Artemis as part of three-fold Hekate. First you have the pillar—the goddess mother is the axis of the universe herself. Round about are three representations of the Goddess, including Artemis, and Hekate, who represents the chthonic underworld—the magic aspect of the Goddess—and then dancing in a relaxed, fluent manner around about we see the three Graces. Artemis is the giver of abundance: Our Lady of the Wild Things, and the All-Mother of the many breasts, who bears the totality of the entities of the natural world. This is something very, very different from the image of the virgin goddess and the mere huntress that we have normally associated with her.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“The relationship of these two gods is important: Hermes guides souls to the knowledge of eternal life by way of intellectual initiation, while Dionysus represents sudden inspiration, the energy of life pouring through time and throwing off old forms to make new life.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“They are equals, but not the same, because when you lose the tension of polarities you lose the tension of life.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“I taught at a women’s college for nearly four decades, and as I said to my students, all I can tell you about mythology is what men have said and have experienced, and now women have to tell us from their point of view what the possibilities of the feminine future are. And it is a future—it’s as though the lift-off has taken place, it really has, there’s no doubt about it. And it’s been one of my great pleasures teaching at Sarah Lawrence all these years instead of teaching a classroom of anonymities, to have had these person-to-person conferences with one woman after another. The sense of individuality that I got from that is something that makes all this general talk about women and men mean nothing to me at all. There is something that the world hasn’t really recognized yet in the female, something that we are waiting now to see.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“When Paris is asked to judge the three goddesses, says Jane Harrison in her wonderful book Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, it amounts to a male put-down of the Goddess. For here were the three major classical goddesses, the three aspects of the one Goddess who is manifested in these three modes, and here is Paris, a languid young man, judging them as though in an Atlantic City beauty contest! And they are vying for his vote by giving him bribes and promises.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“Gods are metaphors transparent to transcendence. And my understanding of the mythological mode is that deities and even people are to be understood in this sense, as metaphors. It’s a poetic understanding. It is to be understood in the same sense as Goethe’s words at the end of Faust: “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis” (“Everything transitory is but a reference”).”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn’t continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“How interesting! In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“The Graces are three aspects of Aphrodite; she’s the prime goddess related to Apollo—his śakti—and the Graces are her inflection as the moving powers of the energy of the world. Euphrosyne is the Grace representing the joy of the radiance that flows out to the world through the qualities of the nine Muses. Aglaea, whose name means “splendor,” represents the energy returning to the deity. Thalia, whose names means “abundance,” unites the two. This is the process of rendering into the world the radiance of the Apollonian consciousness. The central figure is the great serpent whose tail is Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the underworld. Thalia is also the name of the ninth Muse, so she is both below Cerberus’s head and she is also the central Grace above”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“According to a legend preserved in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the tormented nymph Io, when released from Argus by Hermes, fled, in the form of a cow, to Egypt; and there, according to a later legend, recovering her human form, gave birth to a son identified as Serapis, and Io became known as the goddess Isis. The Umbrian master Pinturicchio (1454–1513) gives us a Renaissance version of her rescue, painted in 1493 on a wall of the so-called Borgia Chambers of the Vatican for the Borgia Pope Alexander VI (Fig. 147). Figure 147. Isis with Hermes Trismegistus and Moses (fresco, Renaissance, Vatican, 1493) Pinturicchio shows the rescued nymph, now as Isis, teaching, with Hermes Trismegistus at her right hand and Moses at her left. The statement implied there is that the two variant traditions are two ways of rendering a great, ageless tradition, both issuing from the mouth and the body of the Goddess. This is the biggest statement you can make of the Goddess, and here we have it in the Vatican—that the one teaching is shared by the Hebrew prophets and Greek sages, derived, moreover, not from Moses’s God,17 but from that goddess of whom we read in the words of her most famous initiate, Lucius Apuleius (born c. a.d. 125): I am she that is the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of the powers divine, queen of all that are in hell, the principal of them that dwell in heaven, manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses. At my will the planets of the sky, the wholesome winds of the seas, and the lamentable silences of hell are disposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout the world, in divers manners, in variable customs, and by many names.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“Beginning on the left, first comes a standing figure whose name is Iacchos—Iacchos is the word that was shouted in greeting to the young Dionysus when he appeared in birth, and was the cry that was shouted at the moment of revelation. Personified as the deity Iacchos, he would represent that moment of the illumination that comes at the high point of the mystery drama. The tree behind him is a laurel, a tree that has the apotropaic power of warding off evil. Daphne was turned into a laurel tree, and there’s a place called Daphne on the way from Athens to Eleusis. So this is a threshold where we leave the secular world to enter a protected, sacred space, and the first figure that meets us is an aspect of Dionysus. Next on the way in we encounter the two goddesses: Demeter is holding her torch upward and purifying the upper air, while Persephone, her daughter, is holding her torch downward, purifying the lower, chthonic region.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“His great insight in relation to these two great culture fields was that the dominant pedagogical experience for the hunting people is the animals and the animal world. There the people struggle with the problem of killing animals all the time, and develop the terror and fear of the animals’ revenge, of the evil eye. This brings about a system of rites in which the core idea is of a covenant between the human society and the animal society, and the principal center of this covenant is the principal food animal. This animal world gives itself willingly to the hunter, with the understanding that rituals will be performed to return the life to its source so that the animal can come back again. So you have this idea of an accord and covenant between the two worlds; it’s a beautiful kind of mythology.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“In the Hellenistic period, Scylla was identified with the rock of logic, while Charybdis was identified with the abyss of mysticism. One must sail between—as these are all instructions for moving down through the middle, between each pair of opposites.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“With twelve ships Odysseus sets sail from Troy and goes north to the town of Ismarus. When the ships and warriors arrive, what do they do? They ravage the town and ravish the women. The priest of Ismarus actually thanks Odysseus for not raping his daughter. These men were that rapacious. The gods say, “This is no way for a man to go home to his wife! This is not the proper relationship of a male to a female for a domestic existence.” So they blow those twelve ships astray for ten days. What Odysseus is going to have to do in order to get where he wants to go is to meet those three goddesses and appease them. Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena are going to appear in the forms of three nymphs Circe, Calypso, and Nausicaa.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“There is a sense of respect for the other side: champions are matched as equals, and this is particularly Greek. This is characteristic of these epics and tragedies. Aeschylus wrote his tragedy The Persians only a few years after he himself had been in battle against the Persians, and the humanity with which he treats his former enemy is something typically Greek.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“Martin Nilsson, one of the great authorities on Greek religious antiquity, writes that Artemis was the total Great Goddess and represented all the powers of nature. With the differentiation of the goddesses and the departmentalizing of powers, Artemis came to be associated with the nature world and the forest; she became the Mother of the Wild Things.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“That’s the same idea that comes to us through the German Romantics, as well as out of India. To Goethe’s “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis” (“Everything transitory is but a reference”),5 Nietzsche adds another point: “Alles Unvergängliche—das ist nur ein Gleichnis” (“All things eternal are only references as well”).”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“And through the initiation by the three goddesses who were slighted in the beginning by the Judgment of Paris, he is made ready to return home to his wife, Penelope, and rescue her from the suitors.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“Goethe says that “der Menschheit bestes Tell” (“the best part of man”) is this experience, the Schaudern (“shudder”)20—it’s a kind of noumenal ripple, a realization of how momentary you are in this vast explosion that is the universe, and that’s what you get through Dionysus.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“Now, there’s another interesting thing about the Semitic mythologies: All other mythologies that I know have as their primary divinities those representing nature—the gods of the heavens and of the Earth, and the powers of nature, which are within us as well as out there. And in those mythologies the tribal ancestor is always a secondary god. In the Semitic mythologies, this situation is reversed. The prime divinity in all the Semitic traditions is the local, ancestral divinity. As I pointed out, when you have the same divinities as everybody else, you can say, “He whom you call Zeus we call Indra.” But when your principal divinity is your local tribal divinity, you cannot say this. And so we have a pattern of exclusivism here; we have a pattern of social emphasis or social laws, and we have an antinature accent.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“My definition of mythology is “other people’s religion,” which suggests that ours must be something else. My definition of religion, then, is “misunderstood mythology”—and the misunderstanding consists in mistaking the symbol for the reference.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“Then with his merciless mace he smashed her skull, and with his scimitar split her like a shellfish. He set one half above, as a heavenly roof, that the waters above should not escape, placed the other half over the abyssal Deep, and when that work of world creation was done, assigned the gods to their places, variously, in Heaven, Earth, and the Abyss. Finally, then, he shaped Man to serve the gods, so that all should be free to repose at ease.7 How interesting! In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens. Now she is dead, and the universe is not an organism, but a building, with gods at rest in it in luxury: not as personifications of the energies in their manners of operation, but as luxury tenants, requiring service. And Man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion but as a robot fashioned to serve.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“The function of myth is to put us in sync—with ourselves, with our social group, and with the environment in which we live.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“The thing to note is that all these female figurines are simply naked, whereas the male figures in all the caves are represented in some kind of garment, dressed as shamans. The implication is that in embodying the divine, the female operates in her own character, simply in her nature, while the male magic functions not from the nature of the men’s bodies but from the nature of their roles in the society.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“This is a basic point in mythology: that the individual is performing an act not out of his own impulse, but in accord with the order of the universe.”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

“No one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but new wine is for fresh skins” (Mark 2:22).”
― Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine