A Quote by Leopold Von Ranke
It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.
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What they teach you as history is mythology and true mythology is far from fantasy -- it is our true history. A bulk of our real history can be found in Egyptian and Greek mythology. Yes, myths reveal to us worlds of other dimensions that make up our true reality. History books teach us that the minds of the past operated on the same frequency, dimension, or level of consciousness as we do now. Not true at all.
I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.
It is not history, theology or mythology that interest me. It is the fact that history, theology or mythology could have alternative interpretations or explanations. I try to connect the dots between the past and the present.
And so there would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen...our history is always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself...and here I look ahead to the resting of my case: I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and love the saplings and the weeds.
I have always been interested in mythology and history. The more I read, the more I realized that there have always been people at the edges of history that we know very little about. I wanted to use them in a story and bring them back into the public's consciousness. Similarly with mythology: everyone knows some of the Greek or Roman legends, and maybe some of the Egyptian or Norse stories too, but what about the other great mythologies: the Celtic, Chinese, Native American?
I feel, as never before, how justly, from the dawn of history to the present time, men have paid the homage of their gratitude and admiration to the memory of those who nobly sacrifice their lives, that their fellow-men may live in safety and in honor.
The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.
When you look at Istanbul, from Byzantium to the present day, it's striking how it has always been a city of the people, with a political voice, right from its early classical history.
There is an ancient Indian saying that something lives only as long as the last person who remembers it. My people have come to trust memory over history. Memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable while history serves only those who seek to control it, those who douse the flame of memory in order to put out the dangerous fire of truth. Beware these men for they are dangerous themselves and unwise. Their false history is written in the blood of those who might remember and of those who seek the truth.
Mythology does not interest me. Nor does history. But the possible overlap between history and mythology excites me immensely.
The interface of history and myth is where my stories take place anyway, and there's always a way I'm trying to tap mythologies with the perfect understanding that history will trump mythology.
To me, the difference between mythology and real history is that the real history has to tell a kind of believable story of how things happened. The physics has to work.
North Korea has a very striking mythology there. It is influencing the whole nation.
I used to like Norse mythology, Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology. All mythology!
That period of history has always fascinated me - Greek history, Greek mythology.
Memory in Greek mythology is the mother of the muses, and it is so for me. Both personal and societal memory move me strongly, and that is one of the sources of my writing.
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