Politics & Power Quote by Maynard James Keenan

Keenan’s point lands like an aside from someone who’s spent a career smuggling big ideas into loud songs: our most personal label, the thing on a passport or backstage laminate, is often an old story wearing new clothes. By tracing American and European names back to Latin, Greek, and “archetypes,” he’s not doing a etymology flex so much as poking at identity’s supposed originality. We talk about “being yourself” as if the self is handcrafted; Keenan reminds you it’s partly inherited, pre-written, and culturally routed through empires, churches, and classrooms that decided which languages counted as prestigious.

The subtext is classic Keenan: skepticism toward surface-level individuality and a fascination with the deep structure underneath. Archetypes aren’t just Jungian wallpaper here; they’re narrative templates that keep repeating because societies keep needing them. Names become tiny myths you carry around, quietly steering expectation: the saintly echo, the heroic suffix, the classical gravitas. Even when you don’t know the story, the story still works on you, because other people recognize the vibe.

Contextually, this fits a musician who builds work out of recursion and reference. Tool-era Keenan leans on ritual, symbolism, and the sense that modern life is haunted by ancient patterns. So the line functions as a sideways critique of cultural amnesia: we live in supposedly post-myth times, yet we keep baptizing our children in the same old narrative waters, just with updated spelling.