What is "mythologies"

Usage examples of "mythologies".

The rites and mythologies of such tribesmen are based generally on the idea that there is actually no such thing as death.

A cross-cultural survey of the mythologies of mankind, consequently, will have to note not only universals but also the transformations of those common themes in the ranges of their occurrence.

In their mythologies, religions, philosophies, and ideals, no less than in their styles of life and dress and in their arts, these four domains have remained throughout their histories distinct.

According to many of the mythologies still flourishing in the Orient, a world flood occurs inevitably at the termination of every aeon.

Indeed, the dominant idea in all the major religions stemming from this area — Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — is that there is but one people on earth that has received the Word, one holy people of one tradition, and that its members, then, are the members of one historic body — not such a natural, cosmic body as that of the earlier (and now Eastern) mythologies, but a supernaturally sanctified, altogether exceptional social body with its own often harshly unnatural laws.

In the mythologies of the Orient serpents generally symbolize the vital power that sloughs death, as serpents shed their skin to be (as it were) reborn.

To some this terrible necessity is fundamentally unacceptable, and such people have, at times, brought forth mythologies of a way to perpetual peace.

Plainly and simply: it has been the nations, tribes, and peoples bred to mythologies of war that have survived to communicate their life-supporting mythic lore to descendants.

And so it is that finally two radically opposed basic mythologies can be identified in the broad panorama of history: one in which this monstrous precondition of all temporal life is affirmed with a will, and the other, in which it is denied.

I have chosen a few characteristic passages that we shall all — I am sure — readily recognize, and which, rehearsed in the present context, may help us to realize that we have been bred to one of the most brutal war mythologies of all time.

So let us review and compare now, briefly, the ideals and destinies of a number of other of the best-known ascetic mythologies of peace.

Comparably, among hunting tribes with their rites based on mythologies of covenants with the animal world, a reciprocity is recognized that extends the bounds of concern of the human spirit to include much more than its own most immediate interests.

I was greatly impressed, many years ago, by the works of a man whom I still regard as having been the most acute student of mythologies of his generation: Leo Frobenius, who viewed the entire history of mankind as a great and single organic process, comparable, in its stages of growth, maturation, and continuation toward senility, to the stages of any single lifetime.

Many mythologies, and not all of them primitive, represent mankind as having sprung plant-like from the earth — the earth "peopling" — or from trees.

The mythologies, religions, philosophies, and modes of thought that came into being six thousand years ago and out of which all the monumental cultures both of the Occident and of the Orient — of Europe, the Near and Middle East, the Far East, even early America — derived their truths and lives, are dissolving from around us, and we are left, each on his own to follow the star and spirit of his own life.