Even the pessimist Koheleth, wearied with groping science, yet believing nothing of the doctrine of immortality, must needs follow precedent and pose as the fabulous King Solomon, son of the half-mythic David.
Before we quit these European customs to go farther afield, it will be well to notice that occasionally the expulsion of Death or of a mythic being is conducted without any visible representative of the personage expelled.
From the sequel of the story we are led to suppose that these songs were extemporary effusions, probably mythic legends, stories of personal adventure, praise of themselves, or vituperation of their enemies.
It was but a sign or symbol of the change from the mythic age to that of practical life.
One of the earliest of these stories of mythic comedy transformed into, or at least presented under the guise of, humanity, is that of Brother Ruth.
He may therefore have been a mythic lord of Elysium, and his daughters would correspond to the maidens of the isle.
Nudd already discussed under his title Nodons, is less prominent than his son Gwyn, whose fight with Gwthur we have explained as a mythic explanation of ritual combats for the increase of fertility.
An Irish mythic poet Nuada Necht may be the Nechtan who owned a magic well whence issued the Boyne, and was perhaps a water-god.
In the ninth century Nennius Arthur is the historic war-chief, possibly Count of Britain, but in the reference to his hunting the Porcus Troit (the Twrch Trwyth) the mythic Arthur momentarily appears.
Traces of succession through a sister's son are found in the Mabinogion, and Livy describes how the mythic Celtic king Ambicatus sent not his own but his sister's sons to found new kingdoms.
Creidylad is daughter of a probable god of growth, nor is it impossible that the story of the battle of Mag-tured is based on mythic explanations of such ritual combats.
The diffusion of the Ambicatus legend would help to preserve unity by recalling the mythic greatness of the past.
Joyce thinks that these notices are as incredible as the mythic tales in the Dindsenchas.
Hence we need not suppose with Professor Windisch that the mythic incidents of the Fionn saga are derived from the Cúchulainn cycle.
The other tales may also be reminiscent of a clan totem tabu, later centred in a mythic hero.
But the Atomists still considered the moving mythicenergies as forces; Empedocles regarded them as love and hate; and Democritus as unconscious necessity.
The story here relates the adventures of a mythic Snake Youth, who brought back a strange woman who gave birth to rattlesnakes; these bit the people and compelled them to migrate.
In addition to the mythic personages, certain symbols are employed to represent the incident of the myth.
It represents crossed logs which whirl around in a mythic lake.
Each is based on a mythic story, and each has four dry-paintings, or so-called altars.
But in a pre-historic period--in a mythic epoch--it was something very grave.
From this mythic ownership Dr Petrie (see essay in Bunting) has delivered it; but he can only deduce the age from the ornamentation and heraldry, which fix its date in the 14th century or a little later.
The mythicand religious legends of the people were preserved in chants, handed down from generation to generation; and in like poetic form was kept the knowledge of the people of botany, medicine and other sciences.
The mystic imagination is a transformation of the mythic imagination, the myth changing into symbols.
This form of association predominates in esthetic andmythic creation, that is to say, in creation of the free fancy; it becomes dimmed in the precise forms of practical, mechanical, and scientific invention.
It is necessary that the mythic form be fashioned before one may pour into it, in a more or less fluid state, the historic metal.
This constructive activity, applying itself to everything and radiating in all directions, is in its early, typical form a mythic creation.
As for the latter, we could not trace them to the same mythic source except by dialectic subtleties which we renounce.
So, for reasons indicated later on, the mythic activity has been taken in this work as the central point of our topic, as the primitive and typical form out of which the greater number of the others have arisen.
In this respect, no invention is personal in the strict sense; there always remains in it a little of that anonymous collaboration the highest expression of which, as we have seen, is the mythic activity.
In the Aryan race, the Vedic epoch, despite its sacerdotal ritualism, is considered as the period par excellence of mythic efflorescence.
Here, the mythic activity suffers only a superficial metamorphosis--the essence is not changed.
And it is well to recollect that even if romance-makers seized upon the plot of the old myth they did so unconscious of itsmythic significance, and probably because it may have been employed in the heroic literature of "Rome la grant.
Siegfried is the name of the mythic national hero of the Germans, whose tragic fate is most powerfully described in the "Nibelungen Lied," and in a series of lays of the Icelandic Edda.
Finn and Ossian belong to the mythic heroic cycle of the Gaels, and Arthur and Merlin to that of the Britons.
These mythic elements have been woven around some real historic hero, and the spirit of his heroism breathes through every fold of the drapery.
And these mythic and poetic words, true to man's abiding sense of evil in his deepest hours, stand to-day in the arsenal of theology as proof-texts of the doctrines of original sin and total depravity!
Goldziher's "Mythology Among the Hebrews," shows the mythiccharacter of many of these revolting Jewish stories, though his theory carries him off his feet.
The origin of Skaldic poetry is lost in mythic or prehistoric darkness, but the Skalds of Iceland continued to play a most important part in the literary development of the north as late as the end of the fourteenth century.
Earth outgrows the mythicfancies Sung beside her in her youth; And those debonair romances Sound but dull beside the truth.
The knowledge of mythic lore has led men in the past broadly to appreciate the motives and conditions of ancient art and literature, and the uniform and ordered evolution of the aesthetic sense.
Penelope was one of those mythic heroines whose beauties were not those of person only, but of character and conduct as well.
There is in modern times a God of the privy, who has no particular name, sex, ormythic record.
Nothing would seem more likely to be preserved in mythic or historic traditions than contact with a superior people, and the mounds would serve to keep the traditions alive.
It was manifestly thus, too, that the poet solved a difficult and delicate problem: he pleased the queen by adopting this mythic hero, for who else was worthy of her august hand?
In short, he faintly sketched a notion somewhat similar to that mythic theory, since so elaborately wrought out by Strauss.
Among the Indians this is known as the "Rock Rovers' Land," and is peopled by mythic beings of uncanny traits.
The Ute Indians, like all the Indians of North America, have a wealth of mythic stories.
The heavenly bodies, the sun and moon and stars, are mythic animals, and all of the phenomena of nature are attributed to these zoic beings.
The purpose of Shamanistic institutions is to control the conduct of the members of the tribe in relation to mythic personages, the mysterious beings in which the savage men believe.
All disease and all injuries are attributed to mythic beings or to witchcraft, and on these pathologic ideas the medicine practices of the people are based.
The lore of this Shaman is composed of mythic tales of ancient animals.
The wind is the breath of some beast, or it is a fanning which rises from under the wings of a mythic bird.
The heroes of these stories are the beasts, birds, and reptiles of the region, and the themes of the stories are the doings of these mythic beasts--the ancients from whom the present animals have descended and degenerated.
In the mind of the savage the world is peopled by a host of mythic beings, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic.
He would put Benjamin Franklin against any of the sages of the mythic or the classic period.
But I cannot say whether it is a subtle fascination, linked with these mythic and moral influences, or only the physical loveliness of this promontory, that lures travelers hither, and detains them on flowery meads.
Herbert urged that he must at least admit that there was a freshness of legend and poetry in what we call the primeval peoples that is wanting now; the mythic period is gone, at any rate.
I think the ancients, who were not troubled with the recondite mystery of protoplasm, were right in the mythic union of Bacchus and Venus.
