Legends

A legend is a story coming down from the past;especially one popularly regarded as historical although not verifiable. Synonyms for legend include fable, myth, mythos, allegory, parable, fantasy, fiction, narrative, saga, story, and tale.—The Oxford English Dictionary

“When the truth of appearances has faded and is long forgotten, the truth of reality prevails as legend.”—Edna Lister

While a legend is a story about supposedly mythical or supernatural beings or events, such stories often embody wisdom or a cautionary tale. Knowing and understanding the purpose and meaning of legends is essential to comprehending your eternal identity with God, the Source of All.

Legends grow from facts. You must search for the truth in legends, to unfold their hidden facts. Legend, with Facts and Vision, forms the seventh lesser trinity of Via Christa Degrees, whose keynote is Relationship. Legends persist. When the truth of appearances has faded and is long forgotten, the truth of reality prevails as legend.

Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
’My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley

Edna Lister on Legend

Legends instruct and serve as vehicles of information. They represent the different phases of the mind, and humanity’s efforts and struggles to comprehend nature, God, the government of the universe, and the permitted existence of sorrow and evil. Legends teach us wisdom, and the folly of endeavoring to explain that which we are incapable of understanding.—Edna Lister, The 20th Degree, September 21, 1935.

The ancient mysteries of Eleusis, for instance, dramatized some legend that illustrated the workings of the visible universe that revealed the Divinity.—Edna Lister, The 23rd Degree, October 19, 1935.

The legend of the mysteries of how Osiris and Isis became gods forms the basis for all Western legends and mysteries.—Edna Lister, The 24th Degree, Saturday, November 2, 1935.

The stories from ancient Greece, Egypt, and the Mediterranean, about the Hyperboreans, Atlantis, and so on, are all legends. People who need reassurance of God form legends to cover their emotional needs. Each legend contains truth and you must seek, unwrap and unfold the core of truth in each. Yet legends also may gather the moss of opinion, prejudice, bigotry, pride, and fear from the personalities of the people who tell them.
  When you unwrap what others have covered with moss, you unfold the soul or mental faculty that they have obliterated. Moss-covered people try to cover you in moss, too. Don’t live in the shade where it can grow, but stay in the Light where you’ll find the truth. Search for the truth in legends, to unfold their hidden facts.—Edna Lister, The 33 Degrees of Soul Conquering, November 3, 1959.

Legends grow from facts. For example, in the prehistoric era, Isis and Osiris were king and queen of Egypt. The legend of Isis and Osiris serves as the basis and model for all other Western mysteries.—Edna Lister, The Legend of Isis and Osiris, April 14, 1964.

A myth or legend is a story portraying truth, an explanation of phenomena, a legend. Myths are relative truths and are sometimes told as fact. We may comprehend myths on various levels: spiritual, as stories of the gods; intellectual, as history in time and location; emotional, as the subject matter of a story and our reaction to it.—Edna Lister, The Mysteries of Egypt, May 5, 1964.

Truth has always had to be clothed in allegory, myth, legend and figures who serve to flesh out hidden meaning and truth. In all histories of the gods and heroes, the mysteries lay hidden, couched in astronomical details and in the history of visible nature. These, in turn, were only symbols of higher truths and of truth more profound.—Edna Lister, Ancient Myths and Mysteries, May 11, 1965.

All the legends formed into myths and given as mysteries have been for one purpose: To teach initiates that the apparent rule of evil and darkness is but temporary, and that of Light and good are eternal.—Edna Lister, Osiris and Isis: The Model for All Later Mysteries, May 25, 1965.

The worship of material things has caused good, old-fashioned faith to shrink until no more Shekinah glory fills the sanctuaries. We have no pillar of cloud by day, no fire by night to guide us, no more mysteries in our temples. In ancient Greece, with its mysteries from Egypt, handed down from Abraham, with its legends, its myths, all fueling the fires of faith in God, faith reached a burning peak of sacrificial splendor.

Legends and myths survive when barbarism buries philosophies. Truth fills the legends and myths.—Edna Lister, Invisible, Powerful You, December 12, 1965.

The story of the burning bush is more than legend. It is a history as well. It assumes importance for us because they have told it not only in the Book of Exodus, but in the Gospels of Mark and Luke; Stephen repeated it in Acts of the Apostles.—Edna Lister, Seven Manifestations of God: The Burning Bush, November 2, 1969.

Jesus epitomized history. If he had not affiliated himself with and represented history, his life would have been like a myth, he would have ended as a legend.—Edna Lister, When Is Healing Lawful? November 22, 1970.