Myth

Contextual Quote

"Myth, the concentrated world picture, which, as an abbreviation of appearance, cannot work without the miracle. However, it’s likely that almost everyone in a strict test would feel himself so thoroughly corrupted by the critical-historical spirit of our culture that he could make the previous existence of the myth credible only with something scholarly, with some mediating abstractions. However, without myth every culture forfeits its healthy creative natural power: only a horizon surrounded with myth completes the unity of an entire cultural movement. Only through myth are all the powers of the imagination and of Apollonian dream rescued from their random wandering around. The images of myth must be the unseen, omnipresent, daemonic sentries under whose care the young soul matures and by whose signs a man interprets for himself his life and his struggles. Even the state knows no more powerful unwritten laws than the mythical foundation which guarantees its own connection to religion, its growth out of mythic ideas."

- Nietzche (Birth of Tragedy, section 23) [1]