The Meaning of Myth Quotes

“A genius is a hero with a pen.”
― Neel Burton, The Meaning of Myth: With 12 Greek Myths Retold and Interpreted by a Psychiatrist

“Even in exile, or because in exile, there are still certain things that man can do that God cannot, like kill himself, or make wine.”
― Neel Burton, The Meaning of Myth: With 12 Greek Myths Retold and Interpreted by a Psychiatrist

“Both the European Union and the United States are in some sense the heirs of Rome. Like Rome, the United States is founded on a republican myth of liberation from a tyrannical oppressor. Just as the Rape of Lucretia led to the overthrow of the last Etruscan king, so the Boston Tea Party led to the overthrow of the British crown. The Founding Fathers of the United States sought quite literally to create a New Rome, with, for instance, a clear separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches of government—with the legislative branch called, as in Rome, the Senate. They even debated whether the executive branch would not be better represented, as in Rome, by two consuls rather than the president that they eventually settled for. The extended period of relative peace and prosperity since the end of the Second World War has been dubbed the Pax Americana [‘American Peace’], after the Pax Romana which perdured from the accession of Augustus in 27 BCE to the death of the last of the Five Good Emperors, Marcus Aurelius, in 180 CE. The United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union can be accounted for, in part, by the ghost of the nineteenth century Pax Britannica, when the British Empire was not merely a province of Rome but a Rome unto herself.”
― Neel Burton, The Meaning of Myth: With 12 Greek Myths Retold and Interpreted by a Psychiatrist

“In myth, even the greatest heroes must meet their tragic end, although, unlike the rest of us, they have at least lived.”
― Neel Burton, The Meaning of Myth: With 12 Greek Myths Retold and Interpreted by a Psychiatrist

“How to interpret all this gender fluidity? In gods, the union of masculine and feminine shows them to be complementary, inseparable, or one and the same, while simultaneously emphasizing divine attributes such as power, fertility, creativity, and boundlessness. In its completeness, the union of the genders also represents perfection and self-sufficiency, and, by extension, serenity,”
― Neel Burton, The Meaning of Myth: With 12 Greek Myths Retold and Interpreted by a Psychiatrist

“The sure mark of the anti-hero is the fear of dying, for life is at its fullest in the face and at the margin of death.”
― Neel Burton, The Meaning of Myth: With 12 Greek Myths Retold and Interpreted by a Psychiatrist

“A common trope in fiction, especially fantasy fiction, is the ‘thinning’ of magic. Magic is fading or has been banished from the land, which is in deathly decline—caught, perhaps, in a perpetual winter—and the hero is called upon to rescue and restore the life-giving forces of old. There is, of course, a glaring parallel with our own world, in which magic has been slowly driven out, first by religion, which over the centuries became increasingly repressive of magic, and more latterly by science, which, for all its advantages, struggles to meet our emotional needs. But when we read or watch fantasy fiction, it is for the side of the old magic, always, that we root, for a golden age when the world, when life, had a meaning in and of itself. Science is the antithesis of myth, which is the epitome of art, for what is the function of art if not to return magic and meaning to the world?”
― Neel Burton, The Meaning of Myth: With 12 Greek Myths Retold and Interpreted by a Psychiatrist

“Ultimately, whether myth is religion or folk tale is, and always has been, a question of faith. When Europeans encountered the narratives of the peoples they colonized, they dismissed them as ‘myths’—whence the modern, pejorative sense of ‘myth’ as ‘fiction’ or ‘falsehood’—but their own Garden of Eden, Holy Trinity, and Easter Resurrection they regarded instead as theology.”
― Neel Burton, The Meaning of Myth: With 12 Greek Myths Retold and Interpreted by a Psychiatrist