"There is a beautiful tale among the Australian aborigines which says that the bow and arrow were not man's invention, but an ancestor God turned himself into a bow and his wife became the bowstring, for she constantly has her hands around his neck, as the bowstring embraces the bow. So the couple came down to earth and appeared to a man, revealing themselves as bow and bowstring, and from that the man understood how to construct a bow. The bow ancestor and his wife then disappeared again into a hole in the earth. So man, like an ape, only copied, but did not invent, the bow and arrow. And so the smiths originally, or so it seems from Eliade's rather plausible argument, did not feel that they had invented metallurgy; rather, they learned how to transform metals on the basis of understanding how God made the world."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Marie-Louise von Franz, Creation Myths (1972) German edition (1972) Shambhala English edition 1995.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Metallurgy
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Metallurgy
30 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Metallurgy →
Related Quotes
"Say, any of you boys smithies? Or, if not smithies per se, were you otherwise trained in the metallurgic arts before …"
"The export of into Italy was strictly forbidden; but aluminium was almost the only metal that Italy produced in quant…"
"As the silversmith removes Impurities from silver So the wise man from himself One by one, little by little, again an…"
"Ramsey: At the Naval War College it was metallurgy and nuclear reactors, not 19th-century philosophy."
"Between the years 1942 and 1954, the obtained thousands of pages of technical information about the Manhattan Project…"
"For my financial interest in the greatest metallurgical concern in Germany, the United Steel Works, instead of being …"
"There are only two ores of tin: the peroxide, tin-stone, or Cassiterite; and tin pyrites, sulphide of tin, or Stannin…"
"While Paracelsus was pressing his doctrines on all sides, and endeavouring to lead chemistry into a new channel, anot…"
"Chemistry is not a primitive science, like geometry or astronomy; it is constructed from the debris of a previous sci…"
"Peter Venkman: Ray, for a moment, pretend that I don't know anything about metallurgy, engineering, or physics, and j…"