“Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races, and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings.”

Tracing cosmic fear to the beginnings of recorded storytelling · Essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature

• History
• Horror
• Myth

“In the first age poetry was only an allegorical theology, to bring into the minds of coarse men, by pleasant and coloured fables, the secrets they could not grasp when truth was shown too openly.”

Original: Car la Poésie n'estoit au premier âge qu'une theologie allegorique, pour faire entrer au cerveau des hommes grossiers, par fables plaisantes et colorées, les secrets qu'ils ne pouvoient comprendre, quand trop ouvertement on leur descouvroit la vérité. — Myth and verse as a veiled way of teaching truth · Abrégé de l'art poétique français, 1565 (French)

• Myth
• Poetry
• Truth

“Myth is not a falsehood of the ancient world, but a enduring language forged to speak of universal human truths.”

Viewing mythology as a timeless symbolic language for essential human experience · Critical essay

• Language
• Myth
• Truth

“Many of them were taken from the earliest oral sources, and form part of mankind’s permanent heritage.”

Recognising supernatural legends as part of humanity’s inherited storytelling tradition · Essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature

• Myth
• Storytelling
• Tradition

“I have often had the fancy that there is some one Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.”

Proposing that an individual's character and life may be illuminated by a defining myth · Essay, At Stratford-on-Avon, in Ideas of Good and Evil

• Identity
• Myth
• Understanding