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Mythology Posters & Prints
for classrooms, homeschoolers, and room decor.
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social studies > MYTHOLOGY < fairy tales & folklore < literature
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A myth can be defined broadly as any traditional story though specifically it is better described as sacred narrative of how the world or humankind came to be. Myths transmit religious or idealized experience, establish behavioral models, and teach.
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| • “Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world.” ~ Ansel Adams |
• “Every man's life is a fairy tale written by God's fingers.” ~ Hans Christian Andersen
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• “Mythology: the body of a primitive people's beliefs, concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.” ~ Ambrose Bierce
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• “Play reaches the habits most needed for intellectural growth.” Bruno Bettelheim
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• “Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.”
• “Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.”
• “Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology.”
• “Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.”
• “What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.”
• “When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost.”
• “There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message?”
• “Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.” xJoseph Cambell
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• “Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.” ~ Jean Cocteau
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• “There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is. ” ~ Eugene Ionesco
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• “We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology.”
• “Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.” Carl Gustav Jung
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• “Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.” ~ D. H. Lawrence
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| • “If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin |
| • “I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.” ~ Claude Lévi-Strauss |
| • “Myths which are believed in tend to become true. ” ~ George Orwell |
• “Something has got to hold it together. I'm saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue.” Tom Robbins
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• “Of all the subjects on this planet, I think my parents would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.” J.K. Rowling
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• “Myths, whether in written or visual form, serve a vital role of asking unanswerable questions and providing unquestionable answers. Most of us, most of the time, have a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to reduce the cognitive dissonance of not knowing by filling the gaps with answers. Traditionally, religious myths have served that role, but today — the age of science — science fiction is our mythology.” ~ Michael Shermer
• “Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life - birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age. They meet a need in the psychological or spiritual nature of humans that has absolutely nothing to do with science. To try to turn a myth into a science, or a science into a myth, is an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an insult to science. In attempting to do this, creationists have missed the significance, meaning, and sublime nature of myths. They took a beautiful story of creation and re-creation and ruined it.” |
• “Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical.” ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
• “In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible.” ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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• “All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.” ~ Wallace Stevens
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• “Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of the rat race is not yet final. ” ~ Hunter S. Thompson
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• “Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes.” The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Marie-Louise von Franz
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• “The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.” ~ Robert Penn Warren
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Marie-Catherine,
Countess d'Aulnoy
no commerically
available image
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Marie-Catherine, Countess d'Aulnoy
b. 1650/51; France
d. 1-4-1705
Madame d'Aulnoy, remembered today as the originator of the term “fairy tale”, recorded stories as they may have been told in her famous literary salon.
• The Fairy Tales of Madame D'Aulnoy
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Charles Perrault
b. 1-6-1628; France
d. 5-16-1703
Charles Perrault, by adapting early folk tales, laid the foundations for the fairy tale genre in a book subtitled “Tales of Mother Goose”. His works include Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, and Bluebeard.
• The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
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Ali Baba and the story of the Forty Thieves, from the Book of One Thousand and One Nights, tells how a poor man discovers the loot of a band of thieves and takes just enough (“Open Sesame”), the greed of his brother who takes more, and the cleverness of his slave who saves himself by saving the people who stole from thieves.
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Beauty and the Beast captures our longing for good to triumph over evil, for enduring love and virtue to be valued more than gold.
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Bluebeard is in the tradition of the one forbidden thing: “Eve, don't eat the apple.”, “Psyche, don't look on his face.”, “Pandora, don't open the box.”
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Cinderella
There are hundreds of versions of unjust oppression overcome by an attendant spirit and love. The earliest known version is Chinese from c. 860 AD.
• Cinderella ballet
• Cinderella opera poster
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In Irish mythology Culann was a smith who was protected by a fierce dog. An unexpected friendly visitor killed the attack dog to save himself and then offered to become Cú Chulainn (“Culann's hound”), to replace the loss.
• Celtic Myths and Legends
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Hanzel and Gretel is a German fairy tale collected by the Grimm Brothers. It originated in the Middle Ages when infanticide was a common practice.
In researching Hanzel and Gretel I found that what was called gingerbread in Medieval times was more like a candy than the cake we have today. See Sharing Food lesson plan ideas for more information
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Little Red Riding Hood was first published in 17th century France, based on versions from the 14th century and many countries - the message is “it's safer in town than in the country (or let's put some technology between us and wild nature).” So why did they leave the elderly in the woods and then send a child to care for her?
Well, clearly it's was just as difficult to care for elderly parents in the 17th century as it is now; today's wolf does cold calling to steal identities, and working parents rely on their children to help with family situations.
• teeth & dental posters
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Melusine is a water-nymph spirit with a serpentine tail living in the sacred springs and rivers of Northern European legends, a female dangerous to mortal men.
Jean d'Arras , the author of the first literary reference to Melusine, has been followed by numerous writers, artists and composers, building on the story. Just to name a few: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Sir Walter Scott, Felix Mendelssohn, Marcel Proust, Maurice Maeterlinck, Claude Debussy, André Breton, Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué wrote Undine which lead to the ballet Ondine. Also compare the Starbucks logo to Melusine.
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Puss in Boots is the tale of a cat helping an impoverished master, the “Marques de Carabas”, attain wealth through trickery.
French author Charles Perrault included Le Maistre Chat, ou Le Chat Botté (”The Booted Cat”) in his collection of eight fairy tales called Histoiries ou contes temps passé.
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Three Little Pigs is a cautionary tale for children about heeding parental advice and avoiding the Big Bad Wolf.
The “pigs” tale is from the 19th century and bears resemblence to an earlier recording by the Grimm Brothers of “The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids”, also Little Red Riding Hood.
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Rapunzel
A woman, long childless, finds herself pregnant and craving the greens “rapunzel” growing in the walled garden next door. The husband, caught by the old woman gardener as he steals some of the rapunzel (also called rampion), promises her the newborn child, if she will only let him go.
The old woman keeps the girl child “safe” in a doorless, stairless tower. When the old woman wants to visit Rapunzel she would command the girl to “let down her hair”, and the old woman would climb up.
Eventually a wandering prince sees the old woman climbing the long hair and uses the same access to meet and fall in love with the Rapunzel. When the pair are discovered, the enraged old woman pushes the prince out the high window into a bed of thornes that scratch his eyes and blinds him; she also casts Rapunzel out.
The homeless girl, and the now blind, wandering prince, find one another and Rapunzel's tears to joy cure the Prince's blindness. The End.
Rampion is a gourmet salad green - seeds here.
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Rumplestiltskin
Rumplestiltskin is a dwarf or goblin who seeks an advantage by playing on the need for feeling important and greed - first the father brags his daughter can spin straw into gold, then the king wants lots of gold, so the girl bargains with a strange little man to fulfill the wishes of both men. What she has to do is give up her first born - but when the time comes the dwarf gives her a reprieve, if she can guess his name.
Rumplestiltskin is first mentioned in an adaption of of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel.
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Sleeping Beauty, a fairytale classic, has several versions.
The basic theme is a much desired child is cursed because of an oversight by the parents in the invitations to the christening. The slighted fairy dooms the princess to prick her finger on a spindle and die. The good godmothers can only alter the spell so the Princess will fall asleep for a hundred years until a prince awakens her with a kiss. The King decides to eliminate the problem by banning all spinning from the land (this would be a huge hardship in those days - if no one was spinning eventually the kingdom would be without clothing.) Despite the prohibition on spindles, the day arrives when the princess sees an old woman spinning.
Curious about this strange activity, she reaches for the spindle, pricks her finger and falls asleep - as does everyone else in the kingdom. In one hundred years the prince show up, kisses the Sleeping Beauty, awakens everyone, and they all live happily ever after.
• Sleeping Beauty ballet
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Snow White
The Snow White story is another common theme in fairy tales: young child loses mother (primary protector), step mother devises a way to remove child from home, child survives and is stronger for the adventure (hero's journey).
In other versions the mirror is the moon, and the seven dwarfs are seven robbers.
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The Witch Baba Yaga, the Story of ‘Vassilissa the Beautiful’
Baba Yaga is the wild old woman (Baba means grandmother), mistress of magic and a forest spirit. She flies about in a mortar, steering with a pestle - the imagary of putting together magic potions, and her house is built on chicken legs.
Compare the Baba Yaga with the witch of Hansel and Gretel, or the wicked stepmother of Cinderella.
Bilibin was an influential 20th-century Russian illustrator who was strongly inspired by Slavic folklore. He died during the siege of Leningrad in WWII.
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The Little Humpbacked Horse ballet is based on a fairy tale by Russian Pyotr Yeshov.
The little horse helps Ivan, the peasant's son, meet all the unreasonable demands of the Tsar, capture the magic firebird, and marry the princess.
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The Emperor and the Nightingale, Illustration for “The Nightingale”
by Harry Clarke, Giclee Print
also The Old Man is Always Right, The Ugly Duckling, & The Little Mermaid
• Hans Christian Andersen posters
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