notes for Jung Group talk in January

I cannot agree that I am any less happy than Socrates was, or that I have more leisure than he had, or that an understanding of the language of myth is irrelevant to self-knowledge.  I deduce---------that he had spent a long time worrying about the Chimaera, the horse-centaurs and the rest, but that the 'reasons of their being' had eluded him because he was no poet and mistrusted poets, and because, as he admitted to Phaedrus, he was a confirmed townsman who seldom visited the countryside: 'fields and trees will not teach me anything, but men do.'  The study of mythology, as I shall show, is based squarely on tree-lore and seasonable observation of life in the fields.

~the White Goddess
Robert Graves