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Favorite Trivia – MYTHOLOGY & FOLKLORE & ASTROLOGY
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“The Goddess Envy: Pale, skinny, squint-eyed, mean, her teeth are red with rust, her breast is green with gall, her tongue suffused with poison, and she never laughs except when watching pain.” Ovid’s Metamorphoses |
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Nox is the Roman goddess of the night; Nyx is the Greek goddess of the night.
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| Apache creation tale: Creator made man able to do everything—talk, run, look and hear. He was not satisfied, however, until man could do one more thing and that was to laugh. So man laughed and laughed and laughed. The creator said, “Now you are fit to live.”
Jean Houston – A Mythic Life |
| “A Chinese fairy tale tells of the gardens of the Western Queen Mother in the land of perpetual bloom. It is the story of the peach thief who promises the governor and everyone in the town square that he can produce any fruit in any season.
“The governor asks for a peach. From a bamboo box, the peach thief pulls a coil of rope, hundreds of feet long, and throws it into the heavens. It stays there, as if suspended from the sky. As the crowd watches, the peach thief sends his young son, climbing, climbing into the heavens. The boy disappears into the clouds. The father waits, then suddenly a peach falls to earth. The peach thief presents it to the governor. “A cheer goes up, but it turns to gasps when moments later the son himself falls to earth—in pieces. The old peach thief sadly packs the pieces of his son away in the bamboo box. Shocked and heartbroken, the crowd presses funeral donations upon him. He accepts the gifts gratefully, tucks them away, and then knocks on his bamboo box. ‘You can come out now, my son,’ he says, ‘and thank the generous donors.’ The box flies open and out jumps the son, sound of body and wreathed in smiles.” Kathryn Kleinman & Sara Slavin – On Flowers |
| “We have a word for taking an ancient tale or gritty neighborhood and bleeding the edge from it: that word is ‘Disneyfication.’ In the Brothers Grimm, stories end with terrible retribution: on their way to Cinderella’s wedding, each of the wicked stepsisters has one eye pecked out, and then on the way home, the other. Walt’s 1940 film, by contrast, doesn’t even bother to mete out punishment to the stepsisters, instead concluding with a newlywed kiss between Cinderella and Prince Charming.”
Peter Lunenfeld – City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined |
| “I remember a story about a rat catcher. The rat catcher nailed the tails of dead rats to the headboard of his bed, one, two, three, four, five. The rat catcher killed the king of the rats and everyone knows a king rat can’t be killed unless you boil its heart. As the rat catcher slept the rat king’s tail unpinned itself from the headboard and went along the line plaiting the tails of his dead fellows to make a noose and they throttled the rat catcher.”
Max Porter – Grief Is the Thing with Feathers |
| “During lunch with the Boys Friendly, much hilarity over a line in John Marston’s play The Malcontent. One character refers to an Irishman’s hatred of bumcracks. George Hunter, who edited this Elizabethan drama, explained that if you farted in the presence of an Irishman, he would draw his dagger and kill you.”
Richard Selzer – Diary |
| “When the girl from the hills, with her dead baby in her arms and her heart heavy as lead, went to the tree under which Buddha, the Prince of India, was sitting and implored him to bring her baby back to life, the wise Prince, instead of trying to console her grief, told her to go to the village and get a mustard seed and bring it to him.
“‘But,’ he added, ‘you must get it from someone who has neither lost a father nor a mother, a sister, or a brother, or a child.’ “From house to house she plodded, always receiving the same answer. . . alas, they too, had lost a child or a mother or someone. Again and again she was disappointed. When day came to an end, she returned to Buddha without the mustard seed but very resigned. Having found out that she wasn’t the only one to suffer grief, she buried her baby and found peace.” Maude Parrish – Nine Pounds of Luggage |
| “Niobe was the daughter of Tantalus and wife of Amphion. She, like Cornelia, had twelve children, six boys and six girls; she angered Leto by boasting that she was at least the equal of Leto, who had borne two children only, Apollo and Artemis. The two thereupon killed all Niobe’s offspring; Amphion hanged himself; and Niobe, after one tearful meal, was turned to stone.”
Notes to Satire VI (Juvenal: The Sixteen Satires, trans. with notes by Peter Green) |
| “She had taken up astrology because she had found that people who won’t take advice from a wise and informed friend will blindly follow the orders of planets.”
John Steinbeck – Sweet Thursday |
| “‘Mythology is in truth a disease of language. A myth means a word, but a word which, from being a name or attribute, has been allowed to assume a more substantial existence. Most of the Greek, the Roman, the Indian and other heathen gods are nothing but poetical names, which were gradually allowed to assume a divine personality never contemplated by their original inventors.’ [Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language]
“All of this was the bane of the ancient world. Such men see myth as ‘the product of men’s vain, futile and misguided attempts to express the inexpressible and to verbalize that which is ineffable.'” [Kramer, Mythologies of the Ancient World] Walter Redfern – Puns |
| “Once it chanced that a pinched little fox had crept through a narrow chink into a bin of corn, and when well fed was trying with stuffed stomach to get out again, but in vain. To him quoth a weasel hard by: ‘If you wish to escape from there, you must go back lean to the narrow gap which you entered when lean.'” [Epistles, I. VII.]
Horace: Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. by H. Ruston Fairclough |