• And thus Freud, like Frazer, judged the worlds of myth, magic, and religion negatively, as errors to be refuted, surpassed, and supplanted finally by science.

• An altogether different approach is represented by Carl G. Jung, in whose view the imageries of mythology and religion serve positive, life-furthering ends.

• Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with these inward forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch. They are telling us in picture language of powers of the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the millenniums.

• Through a dialogue conducted with these inward forces through our dreams and through a study of myths, we can learn to know and come to terms with the greater horizon of our own deeper and wiser, inward self. And analogously, the society that cherishes and keeps its myths alive will be nourished from the soundest, richest strata of the human spirit.

• Its name, Eden, signifies in Hebrew “delight, a place of delight,” and our own English word, Paradise, which is from the Persian, pairi-, “around,” daeza, “a wall,” means properly “a walled enclosure.” Apparently, then, Eden is a walled garden of delight, and in its center stands the great tree; or rather, in its center stand two trees, the one of the knowledge of good and evil, the other of immortal life.

• In the Polynesian Cook Islands there is an amusing local variant of this general myth in the legend of a maiden named Hina (Moon) who enjoyed bathing in a certain pool. A great big eel, one day, swam past and touched her. This occurred again, day after day, until, on one occasion, it threw off its eel costume and a beautiful youth, Te Tuna (the Eel), stood before her, whom she accepted as her lover. Thereafter he would visit her in human form, but become an eel when he swam away, until one day he announced that the time had come for him to leave forever. He would pay her one more visit, arriving in his eel form in a great flood of water, when she should cut off his head and bury it. And so indeed he came. And Hina did exactly as she was told. And every day thereafter she visited the place of the buried head, until a green sprout appeared that grew into a beautiful tree, which in the course of time produced fruits. Those were the first coconuts; and every nut, when husked, still shows the eyes and face of Hina’s lover.

• Myths are the mental supports of rites; rites, the physical enactments of myths.

• In the human species, with its great brain requiring many years to mature, on the other hand, the young are again born too soon, and instead of the pouch we have the home, which is again a sort of external second womb.

• It is in the fields of the arts that the reductive, life-diminishing effect of the loss of all sense of form is today most disquieting; for it is in their arts that the creative energies of a people are best displayed and can best be measured.

• One cannot help comparing the case today with that of the arts in ancient, aging Rome. Why is it that Roman works of architecture and sculpture, for all their power and facility, are less impressive, less moving, less significant formally than the Greek? Many have thought about this problem, and the other night an answer came to me in dream that I would offer now as a major illumination. It is this: that in a small community like Athens the relationship of the creative artist to the local social leaders would be forthright and direct, they would have known each other since boyhood; whereas in such a community as, say, our modern New York, London, or Paris, the artist who would be known has to go to cocktail parties to win commissions, and those who win them are the ones who are not in their studios but at parties, meeting the right people and appearing in the right places.

• potentiality of our species. I draw the main line dividing Orient from Occident vertically through Iran, along a longitude about 60 degrees east of Greenwich. This can be thought of as a cultural watershed. Eastward of that line there are two creative high-culture matrices: India and the Far East (China and Japan); and westward, likewise, there are two: the Levant or Near East, and Europe. 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. And yet they do group significantly in two orders of two: India and the Far East, on one hand; the Levant and Europe, on the other.

• I draw the main line dividing Orient from Occident vertically through Iran, along a longitude about 60 degrees east of Greenwich. This can be thought of as a cultural watershed. Eastward of that line there are two creative high-culture matrices: India and the Far East (China and Japan); and westward, likewise, there are two: the Levant or Near East, and Europe. 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. And yet they do group significantly in two orders of two: India and the Far East, on one hand; the Levant and Europe, on the other.

• For example, let us suppose that you have been chatting comfortably with the unknown gentleman sitting beside you in an airplane seat. A stewardess stops by and respectfully addresses him as “Senator.” When she leaves, you find that you are speaking to him with different feelings from those you had before, and not quite the same sense of ease. He has become for you what Jung has termed a “ mana-personality,” one charged with the magic of an imposing social mask, and you are talking now not simply to a person, but to a personage, a presence.

• Nothing is to be done, even in her own house, independently, by a girl, a young or even an aged woman. The female in childhood is to be subject to her father; in young womanhood, to her husband; and when her lord is dead, to her sons. A woman is never to be independent. She must not attempt to free herself from her father, husband, or sons. Leaving them, she would make both her own and her husband’s families contemptible. She must always be cheerful, clever in the management of her household affairs, careful in cleaning her utensils, and economical in expenditure. She shall obey as long as he lives him to whom her father (or, with her father’s permission, her brother) has given her; and when he is dead, she must never dishonor his memory... Even a husband of no virtue, without any good qualities at all, and pursuing his pleasures elsewhere, is to be worshiped unflaggingly as a god... In reward for such conduct, the female who controls her thoughts, speech, and actions, gains in this life highest renown and in the next a place beside her husband.

• Now is it not amazing to find such a set of Oriental themes set down in the log of the night-sea voyage of a British wartime naval officer, briefly mad? There is an early Buddhist fable of just such an end to a journey, preserved in a famous Hindu book of fables, the fable of “The Four Treasure-Seekers” in the Panchatantra.

• The old fable as here retold is presented as a warning to all of the danger of excessive greed.

• We may all be mothers and fathers, but are never The Mother, The Father.

• When a growing girl becomes aware of the pleasing effect that her blossoming womanhood is beginning to have upon others and takes the credit for this to her own ego, she has already gone a little crazy. She has misplaced her identification. What is causing all the excitement is not her own astonished little ego, but the wonderful new body that is growing up all around it.

• There is a Japanese saying I recall once having heard, of the five stages of man’s growth. “At ten, an animal; at twenty, a lunatic; at thirty, a failure; at forty, a fraud; at fifty, a criminal.” And at sixty, I would add (since by that time one will have gone through all this), one begins advising one’s friends; and at seventy (realizing that everything said has been misunderstood) one keeps quiet and is taken for a sage. “At eighty,” then said Confucius, “I knew my ground and stood firm.”