What Is a Myth? The Sacred Understanding of Reality — Basics III

The words “myth” and “mythology” carry an enormous range of meanings. Their meaning changes according to who uses them and in what context. As we shall see, some of those meanings are diametrically opposed. Because the terms can cause confusion and often arise in the study of tales, I will explore several of their meanings and nuances.

To begin with dictionary definitions, Merriam-Webster describes mythology as “a body of myths” and also as the study of myth. Its entry for myth includes traditional stories that express a people’s worldview or explain a practice, belief or natural phenomenon. The word can also refer to beliefs that develop around a person or thing, or to “an unfounded or false notion.” The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary likewise uses mythology for the myths of a particular culture or society, but also for widely held ideas that are untrue. It defines myth both as an ancient story used to explain natural events or a people’s early history and as a belief that is false or unfounded.

These definitions and their connotations roughly reflect what people today understand by mythology or myth. Yet they are insufficient if we want a broader view, one that allows us to read myths on different levels and, where appropriate, compare them with other forms of verbal folklore and their motifs. Myths constitute a genre distinct from legends and folktales, with complexities of their own. As you will have noticed, both the Merriam-Webster and the Oxford dictionary use words such as “untrue” and “false”, suggesting events that are false, unreal or imaginary. That is where I will begin.

Mythology and myth as “false religion” and fantasy

One understanding that remains common in Europe is that mythology was the religion of “the ancients”, the paganism that preceded Christianity, whether Greek, Slavic, Celtic or otherwise. The word is also applied to religions from other continents that are no longer practised, or are practised only to a limited extent or in syncretic forms. Hence the expression “Aztec mythology”. It is unusual, however, to apply it to religions still widely practised, even if they are pantheistic or more or less polytheistic, such as Shinto, certain branches of Hinduism or various African religions. For many people today, then, “mythology” primarily means a collection of stories that people in the past believed were real. In this sense, it is a “fallen religion” that has ceased to be practised and passed into the realm of fantasy.

Several assumptions follow from this view. The first is that a religion’s validity depends on whether people believe in it. The second is that people believed these stories because they were “ancient”, “backward”, “ignorant”, “primitive” and, in general, inferior. If a religion is valid only so long as people believe in it, then, by this reasoning, no religion is actually true. Were one of them true, its truth would not depend on belief. It would be true in itself, as we now tend to think science is. A third assumption follows. The stories that make up a mythology are merely tales people told to make sense of things they could not explain, but which science has explained or will eventually explain. Alternatively, they were political tools used to control populations and extract material wealth from them. This is why some committed atheists use expressions such as “Christian mythology” disparagingly, or claim that all religions are really “mythology”. From an atheist perspective, calling mythology a “false religion” would be redundant, since all religions are considered false.

This disparaging use has a very long history. Paradoxically, early Christians used “mythology” to dismiss the religious narratives of pagans. If Christianity was the true religion, revealed by God, paganism could only consist of false stories invented by human beings (Augustine, VI, 5), much as an atheist might regard Christianity or any other religion today. “Mythology” was not the only disparaging term. “Paganism” itself refers to the beliefs of rural people and carries a certain sense of superiority on the part of city dwellers, supposedly more “advanced”. A similar paternalism survives in distinctions between “folk religion” or “folk customs” and the “official” version of a religion or rationalist materialism. These terms are applied to religious rites and practices, generally steeped in syncretic Christianity, that were passed down orally and eventually pushed to the margins of society. As M. David Litwa explains in his book on Simon Magus, “magic” was likewise used as a term opposed to religion (Litwa, 2024).

The idea of revealed truth contained in a book or sacred scriptures understood as the Word of God was adopted and assimilated by Christians from Judaism, and would later be adopted by Islam as well. If there can be only one true religion, all the others must be tricks, falsehoods or fantasies. At best, they are superstitions or fanciful poetry. At worst, they are lies told by the Devil. The modern Western world still mocks religions, although it now sees in them one of the demons of modernity, ignorance and superstition, rather than the Devil. Philosophers influential in the early Church, such as Justin Martyr (90–165) and Tertullian (155–220), argued that pagan gods were nothing more than evil spirits (Justin Martyr, 5) (Tertullian, 22). More broadly, early Christian writers ridiculed pagan narratives by claiming that Greek and Roman gods were wicked and immoral. They said that pagans animated statues and brought them to life through sacrifices, although it was actually demons that animated the statues to deceive people (Augustine, The City of God, VIII, 23–24). They also claimed that myths were inferior copies made by demons to mock Christian truths that would be revealed later (Justin Martyr, First Apology, 54). Given human nature, had the positions been reversed and pagans occupied the place of Christians, they would surely have called Christianity a collection of myths and tales. We can glimpse something of this response in The True Word by the pagan philosopher Celsus, who lived in the second century CE. There he defends tradition and the ancestral logos while criticising Christianity (Origen, I–II).

Whatever the case, what matters about these uses of language is that they arise from a position of power and a sense of superiority. The underlying message is, “We, who believe this, whether Christianity, atheism or some other religion, are better than you, who will go to Hell or are simply stupid.”

Christian authors in antiquity and, later, the Middle Ages used words such as idolum, idololatria, superstitio, fabulae and mythos to refer to earlier religious narratives. One particularly influential passage was the First Epistle to Timothy, attributed to the apostle Paul, which uses the Greek word μύθους, mýthous. The letter offers doctrinal and organisational advice to Timothy concerning his ministry in the Church at Ephesus, in present-day Turkey. In the translation of the Montserrat Bible, the passage reads, “Avoid profane myths and old wives’ tales” (1 Tim. 4:7). “Old wives’ tales” continued to be used disparagingly, including in reference to folktales, until relatively recent times. The expression did not originate in this passage, but this is one of the earliest surviving instances of its use to disparage a popular oral tradition.

In the same vein, Eusebius of Caesarea (260–339 CE), a philosopher who would become highly influential in the Middle Ages, wrote in the Preparation for the Gospel, an apologetic work directed against paganism, of “the ancient Greek theologians, who call themselves poets [that is, their works are not truths revealed by God but merely human creations] and writers of myths [mýthōn] … [The] myth [mýthos] is indeed a discourse [an argument], but myth is only a reflection and a shadow of the truth” (Eusebius of Caesarea, 1903). It should be said that Christian writers generally preferred the Latin words superstitio or fabulae, fables or tales, when disparaging other religions (Augustine, VI, 5). Some, however, including Eusebius, borrowed the Greek word mûthos, which had not been derogatory for the Greeks. In late Latin it became mythos, now carrying the sense of a false or invented tale.

We can see this borrowing in Augustine, who devoted a substantial part of his most important and influential work, The City of God, to criticising pagan cults and defending Christianity. Augustine cites the earlier pagan thinker Varro, who lived in the first century BCE, and distinguishes three kinds of theology. Natural or physical theology, physicon or naturale, belongs to philosophers. Civil theology concerns cults, rites, festivals and traditions. Mythical or fabulous theology, mythicon or fabulosum, belongs to poets and artists (Augustine, The City of God, VI, 5). As he puts it, “In Latin, we would call the kind [Varro] placed first fabulare, or rather fabulosum [fabulous or mythical], since mythicon comes from fables, given that in Greek mȳthos means fable.” The term spread from Latin into other languages, but no longer with the meaning it had carried in Greek. It had become synonymous with a false story. As the dictionary definitions at the beginning showed, this understanding of myth as fantasy persists today.

Pietro Magni, David, 1851. The biblical figure symbolically represents Giuseppe Garibaldi. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public domain.

Mythology and myth as expressions of identity and propaganda

With the spread of Romanticism and German idealism from the mid-eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century and beyond, various European peoples formed nations, whether through unification, as in Germany, or through separation. This led them to seek out stories in their past, usually their medieval past, that could become renewed “national mythologies”. These stories were often reinvented, rewritten or reshaped to suit nineteenth-century audiences. Sometimes they were invented almost entirely from earlier material (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). The Scottish poems attributed to Ossian, for instance, became a Romantic bestseller and were marketed and believed to be authentic. The same can be said of much of Víctor Balaguer’s work, among that of many other Romantics. I discussed this in my article on the legend of the young Count Wilfred.

The political use of national symbols deemed “mythic” did not end there. As the industrial age advanced, with the dehumanising effects of mass technological reproduction and the spread of Edward Bernays’s psychologically sophisticated approach to mass propaganda (Bernays, 1928), the “mythic” element came to permeate national discourse, from sport to leisure and social media. It often served a concealed, instrumental purpose, whether to persuade young men to go to war, encourage people to buy a particular product or spread certain ideas. New “mythic” national symbols emerged, but they no longer needed to come from a supposedly “mythic” medieval past. Almost anything could acquire “mythic” connotations through propaganda. It might be a consumer product, a car, ham, cheese or wine, or an industry marketed as a source of “national pride” on account of its supposed excellence. It might be an athlete, a singer or a historical event, whether a battle, a confrontation or a defeat. First radio, cinema and television carried these messages, followed by the Internet and social media. Such objects, people and events are described as “mythic” in the sense of legendary or extraordinary, and associated with national pride. As under Romanticism, they become things that “serve the nation”, building and supposedly strengthening a collective national identity.

The French philosopher Roland Barthes (1915–1980) was perhaps the most perceptive analyst of the transformation of myth into an object of mass consumption, propaganda and social manipulation. He addressed it in an essay collected in Mythologies, published in 1957 (Barthes, 2013 [1957]). In Barthes’s terms, “The cultural work once performed by gods and epic sagas is now performed by laundry-detergent advertisements and comic-book characters.” In his semiotic analysis, he distinguishes the primary sign, what is denoted, such as soap, from its connotation or secondary meaning, which might be purity or renewal. The detergent no longer merely removes physical dirt. It spiritually purifies the consumer. A champion tennis player is no longer simply a great athlete but a representative of an entire nation’s excellence. A luxury car becomes a symbol of technological progress. Some of Barthes’s examples now seem dated and we might choose different ones today, but the underlying process continues. In one of his best-known formulations, “Myth [in the modern sense] hides nothing and flaunts nothing. It distorts. Myth is neither a lie nor a confession. It is an inflection” that can be used to manipulate. Propaganda becomes myth and creates a cosmetic image of the world (Barthes, 2013 [1957]), leading us to accept its values without questioning them or considering whether we are being deceived.

If anything, the process has accelerated. Barthes could hardly have imagined the degree of mental fatigue brought about by social media and AI. Almost everyone active on these platforms performs some version of themselves, often changing it as the wind shifts. The modern mythic figure, the influencer, the Instagrammer or the content creator, conceals commercial or self-serving intentions behind a performance of innocence, often bolstered by purchased bots. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han (born 1959) observes in The Burnout Society (2010), Psychopolitics (2014) and, above all, Non-Things (2021), advertising no longer needs merely to sell products. On social media, the person becomes the product, a modest myth of their own making who exploits themselves. This has consequences for the mental health of both the creator and the audience that follows and believes the performance. “The individual becomes a product, a commodity. […] Today people are treated and traded as packages of data that can be exploited economically. They themselves have become commodities.” In broader terms, “The achievement subject is at war with itself and projects itself into the future through a process of self-exploitation until it collapses. The exhausted subject exposes and consumes itself. It is both perpetrator and victim.” People now speak of the “fall of the influencers”, when in fact an exhausted system is recycling and refining itself, adjusting its algorithms to sell an appearance of authenticity and closeness. In place of the old influencer selling an unreal lifestyle comes another kind of fraud, one who claims to be “just like you”.

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) anticipated something of this collapse. In The Absence of Myth, written in 1947 (Bataille, 2024 [1947]), he suggested that “in modernity, having no myth is itself the myth”. He wrote shortly after the horrors of the Second World War, the most violent war the world has yet seen, which devastated Europe and killed millions. Confronted with extreme horror, Bataille saw transcendent meaning fall away. Rather than accept the resulting emptiness, however, he searched throughout his work for meaning and truth. He condensed the thought into a poetic formulation. “‘Night is also a sun’ [a quotation from Nietzsche], and the absence of myth is also a myth, the coldest, the purest, the only true one.” To return to the beginning of this article, contemporary society believes it has freed itself from myth through reason, industry and science. Yet this supposed cleansing, this absence of belief, becomes modernity’s defining myth. That is why the word “myth” is applied to other religions to suggest fanciful fables, just as Christians once applied it to pagan religion. Between 1936 and 1939, Bataille even founded a journal and a secret society, Acéphale, to put his ideas into practice. After the Second World War he studied the ancient idea of myth, especially its destructive aspects, with almost obsessive intensity.

This brings us back to the beginning. I have left until last the earliest meaning, the one myth held for pagan societies before Christianity. I have said that the Greek word mûthos did not carry connotations of fable or fantasy. Let us now consider what it meant.

Mythology and myth in a metaphysical sense

The meanings considered so far, myth as fable or lie and myth as propaganda, ultimately derive from a meaning now thought to have been lost. Bataille sought it without success and eventually abandoned the search. Its source is believed to be irrecoverable at a collective level in the West. To understand it, we must think on several levels at once rather than proceed linearly or look for a single, flat meaning.

Today we commonly say things like “Oh, the Loch Ness monster, Zeus or Jesus Christ is only a myth”, because we tend to divide reality into two realms. On one side is what is real, physical, natural, measurable and true. On the other is what is unreal, imaginary or false. The fault line in this way of dividing existence lies in how we think about truth and falsehood. It arose, first, from literal readings of biblical religious narratives, when people began to read the Bible as if everything in it had happened exactly as described. Later, rationalism and materialist positivism challenged and refuted religious ideas through science. Darwin’s theory of evolution, for example, was set against the biblical account of Creation. The structure built around literal interpretation collapsed, leaving a vast emptiness in Western religious thinking that remains with us today. Scientific arguments and Enlightenment rationalism opposed literal readings of biblical narratives and, by extension, Christianity as a whole and other religions too. The exception was the deist “creator principle”, which could take a more or less secular or religious form.

We can see this attitude expressed metaphorically in Zadig, or The Book of Fate, a short novel by Voltaire (1694–1778). It shows an understanding of myth that spread through modernity and persists today. In one chapter, set in Egypt, merchants from different backgrounds, including an Indian, an Egyptian and a Greek, quarrel over their respective gods during a meal. The elderly Zadig intervenes, arguing that they all worship the same creative principle. In several other scenes, Voltaire satirises religious traditions and myths. Zadig denies, for example, that griffins exist and is threatened with death for saying so, an evident satire of Voltaire’s own time. Elsewhere, he is required to enter a temple using only his left leg. Instead, “In an eloquent speech, he showed that the God of heaven and earth, who favours no one, regards the left foot in precisely the same way as the right” (Voltaire, Zadig, chap. VII), and enters with both feet. Voltaire is not really writing about paganism. His target is the literal interpretation of religions and what he sees as the absurdity of their taboos, rules and myths.

Yet, contrary to Voltaire’s view, many past religions, and some that survive around the world today, did not intend their ancient myths to be read entirely literally. Neither did they dismiss them as old wives’ tales or fables invented by poets. This opens an important question about the nature of reality. Mythology, understood as religious narratives read on both levels at once, offers a way to analyse or divide something vast into smaller parts through symbolic systems. However sceptical or materialist we may be, as human beings we constantly interpret the world through systems of symbols. Language and writing are themselves symbolic systems, as are music and dance (Cassirer, 1955). What you think shapes what you are. We cannot escape language, because we think, remember and live through it. The very structure of thought as mediated by language is symbolic. In that sense, we might say that, insofar as it is symbolic, the structure of human thought is religious. Mircea Eliade expresses this in a passage worth quoting in full.

“Every rite, every myth, every belief or divine figure reflects the experience of the sacred and hence implies the notions of being, of meaning, and of truth. As I observed on another occasion, “it is difficult to imagine how the human mind could function without the conviction that there is something irreducibly real in the world; and it is impossible to imagine how consciousness could appear without conferring a meaning on man’s impulses and experiences. Consciousness of a real and meaningful world is intimately connected with the discovery of the sacred.

Through experience of the sacred, the human mind has perceived the difference between what reveals itself as being real, powerful, rich, and meaningful and what lacks these qualities, that is, the chaotic and dangerous flux of things, their fortuitous and senseless appearances and disappearances.”

In short, the “sacred” is an element in the structure of consciousness and not a stage in the history of consciousness. On the most archaic levels of culture, living, considered as being human, is in itself a religious act, for food-getting, sexual life, and work have a sacramental value. In other words, to be—or, rather, to become—a man signifies being “religious.”” (Eliade 1978, preface, p. xiii).

Eliade wrote many decades ago, and his view of the sacred can now seem rather conservative, traditional and somewhat limited. Some aspects have also aged poorly, such as his references to “archaic levels of culture” or his tendency throughout his career to associate the sacred with order and oppose it to a dissolving chaos that appears accidental. Chaos, too, may be just as sacred, or more so, and may express a further truth. But that is a subject for another article. Even so, Eliade remains relevant for his account of the structure of consciousness and his insistence that the perception of truth in myth has nothing to do with a primitive mentality or with superstition. It concerns how we experience the nature of reality.

We cannot escape the symbolic and religious structure of language, or therefore of our thought. This is one reason why the arts, including music, dance and theatre, originally had religious origins. It also helps explain how even atheist thought may have a religious structure, with its dogmas, taboos, sacred books and prophets. In the past, even the most ordinary actions, ones that might seem trivial to us, such as applying perfume, eating or putting on make-up, could carry two or more meanings beyond those visible at first glance. Consider, too, a competition involving sport, dance, beauty, strength, skill or cunning. It could be regarded as an agon, a sacrifice or offering to the gods involving months or years of effort, training, sweat, blood and personal transformation, an agony. The very substance of a person and their destiny would be directed towards a single moment. Thousands of people might focus their attention on it, each experiencing intense emotions, hope, joy, hatred or anguish. In the final climax, the destinies of the participants would meet in a struggle to fulfil themselves and become something more than human.

Demeter gives ears of grain to Triptolemos while Persephone blesses or crowns him. The Great Eleusinian Relief, fifth century BCE. Among other things, the scene represents the gift of agriculture to humanity and is associated with the Eleusinian Mysteries. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain.

Mythology and myth as sources of meaning

The historian Walter Burkert (1931–2015), a specialist in ancient Greece, often explored how, in ancient thought, human existence, institutions and actions were inseparably shaped by religious and ritual meaning. He did so, for instance, in Savage Energies and Homo Necans (Burkert, 1983, 2001). Myth is the narrative through which this engagement with reality takes place. It serves not simply as a tool, but as a mirror of ourselves and a doorway to the edges of reality. For example, “myth as such is an explanation that lends meaning to the conditions of human life by recounting the deeds and sufferings of figures who are superhuman or all too human”. Or again, “Each of the essays reproduced here addresses a particular critical point in the life of human societies, sacrifice, initiation, renewal, purification or legitimation, and shows that without ritual and myth the crisis in question could not be overcome and the threatened society could not survive.”

Human beings are creatures who make meaning. Myths unfold in a space inhabited by all of us, one we cannot leave because of our nature and the way we relate to what surrounds us. It is neither measurable reality nor fantasy, but the symbolic way in which we connect with the whole. Anthropology and biology tell us that a mammal must be subjected to severe, sustained mistreatment before it loses basic instincts, such as the desire to have sex and reproduce, to eat, or to relate to others of its species. It may even eat to excess until it dies. The loss of symbolic meaning, the inability to read reality on different levels and the refusal to make meaning, when we are a species that makes it wherever we look and touch, is fundamentally a story of abuse and mistreatment.

As Bataille and Camus observed, we live amid a crisis of meaning. Life and reality can seem devoid of meaning at a deep, fundamental level. This is the existential emptiness left when someone is struck by arbitrary misfortune, an unjust illness, an accident, the death of a loved one or the prospect of their own death. For the generation of existentialists, that emptiness was shaped by the horrors of the most violent war in human history, including atomic bombs, mass bombing and genocide. Human beings were reduced to paper dolls to be burned, dismembered or analysed, mere flesh and bone in the hands of a cold scientist, an industrial production line or a banker who profited as the death toll rose. For our generation, which carries the traumas of those before it, the horrors are different, grey and banal, measured in propaganda, governed by a timetable and accompanied by a pill.

Naturally, such emptiness and the need to fill it create fertile ground for malformed versions of spirituality, countless frauds and charlatans, destructive sects of every kind, and the exploitation by individuals and governments of our need to feel that we are more than flesh and bone. We do not want to think that, once dead, we are like a broken toaster to be thrown away. Charlatans and sects are nothing new. They have existed throughout history. Today, however, the field lies wide open.

Myth and logos, the ambivalence of reality

I touched on this earlier. In antiquity, myths were taken very seriously, but never in an entirely literal way. To the supposedly “rational” modern mind, this may seem absurd. Something is either real or it is not. It would also be a mistake simply to say, “Ah, they are metaphors.” A metaphor offers an indirect way of understanding a narrative through a literal substitution, as if to say, “A does not mean A, but it does mean B.” It carries a double meaning, transferring the sense of one concept to another to express a complex idea or add poetic resonance. A symbol, however, represents a network of meanings. It bears the weight of ideas and forms a whole or a system with other symbols (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 7–13).

Myths are far more than metaphors. They are among the richest and most complex ways human beings have found to examine, interpret and live with reality. They divide what seems immeasurable, incomprehensible or meaningless into smaller parts we can, in some way, understand. Anyone can grasp them, including people who could neither read nor write. In this way, myths create systems of meaning where previously we understood nothing, or could find no way to approach what lay beyond comprehension. Through these systems we can learn, pass on knowledge, reason and converse in ways that reach beyond reason. Most importantly, we can also enter that reality, as though myths were a door.

In the modern world, this has largely been reduced to the emotions art may stir in us, whether the art is narrative or not. Today art is tolerated as the amusing, harmless and slightly foolish younger sibling of science and rationality. It is confined to leisure and pleasure, and approached from the comfortable perspective of those who can afford the time and money for it. Even provocative or transgressive art is treated this way. Yet, as we have seen, art and narrative themselves emerge from a religious understanding of reality, from a mythic conception that went beyond signifier and signified, beyond what is observed and what the observation means.

Myth is neither fiction nor escape, nor is it fantasy. It could be as disturbing, unsettling, radiant or glorious for the ancients as it can be for us. Myth does not ask human beings to flee reality, whether that reality is dark and tragic or joyful and hopeful. It gives them ways to understand it both beyond themselves and within themselves. Grasping myth on both levels at once can be liberating, because it allows mythology to live without confining it to claims such as “this happened exactly as the Scriptures say” or “these are all old wives’ tales because nothing happened as described, or in any other way”. Both extremes imprison the mind. They amount to an almost masochistic punishment that modernity has inflicted on itself. It seeks meaning but hesitates to take the final step from mind to soul for fear of seeming “mad or ignorant” or returning to a dark age of primitive superstition. At the same time, it longs to glimpse a “beyond” behind myths, a place with the power to make meaning and bring new, living myths into being.

The separation of myth and reason, the division between what is real and what is not that feeds the extremism of current thought and sterilises everything it touches, was not invented by the early Christians. Rather, it resembles a kind of entropic process affecting all societies. By Plato’s time, in the fourth century BCE, this separation was already taking place in Greece, though its roots were older. “Myth” was associated with narration and imagination and, most importantly, with telling a story aloud. Myth stands in opposition, but also in a complementary relationship, to the written word and to the physical activities and work associated here with logos. Poetry and theatre have oral origins in ritual. Prose arises from writing, from which science and logic develop. Hence myth, as narrative, came to be regarded as invention or imagination, while logos came to mean a reasoned, demonstrable and tangible account. Plato distinguishes myth from logos several times, including in the Protagoras and the Gorgias. “You may well regard it as a myth [muthos], but to me it is a true account [logos]” (Plato, Gorgias, 523a). Yet for Plato they are still complementary rather than enemies. Where one cannot reach, the other may. He uses logos for rigorous analysis, but turns to myth where human reason can go no further. In the Phaedrus, moreover, he explains in the celebrated dialogue why the spoken word is in many respects superior to the written word (Plato, Phaedrus, 275d–276a).

What matters most here is a passage in which Phaedrus speaks with Socrates about the spoken word, which is “full of life and soul, belonging to the one who knows, while writing might be called no more than its reflection” (Plato, Phaedrus, 276a). The spoken word, and thus myth, is alive. It adapts and changes. It does not come from an external object but from within. This is one of the central ideas of everything I have discussed so far. Myth is not to be sought outside ourselves. It is not a message revealed by a distant God. It lies within people and speaks to their needs, fears and interpretations of everything around them, both the ordinary and the ineffable. In one of his letters, Plato explains why he will never write about his deepest spiritual convictions. “There is no work of mine on these matters, nor will there ever be one … for they cannot be expressed in words like other branches of knowledge. Rather, after long engagement with the problem and life spent in its company, light suddenly springs forth in the soul, as from a spark of fire, and thereafter nourishes itself” (Plato, Seventh Letter, 341c–d). This, too, is mythos, a creative and imaginative power connecting what is above and what is below through a quality reason cannot describe, one we can touch only through a system of symbols, through myths.

Terracotta cup attributed to the Boreads Painter, ca. 570–560 BCE. Its interior depicts the apotheosis of Heracles. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain.

Myth and ritual, a doorway to sacred time

As Burkert wrote, myths cannot be understood apart from their connection with rituals (Burkert, 1983, 2001). One aspect that often escapes a modern view is that myths were frequently more than narratives. They could function as a kind of “instruction manual”, offering patterns to be imitated in both directions, from reality to myth and from myth to reality. Such imitation or embodiment could be expressed in ritual through theatre, dance, music or sacrifice. It could also shape any everyday action, because, as I mentioned earlier, reality as a whole was understood on two or more levels. The aim was to make something present and perceptible, to bring about a “presence” that our limited ordinary vision cannot access, and to make sacred or otherworldly time available again.

Among its other meanings, then, myth could be understood as a path to the divine through ritual. Eliade writes, “One essential difference between these two qualities of time strikes us immediately: by its very nature sacred time is reversible in the sense that, properly speaking, it is a primordial mythical time made present. Every religious festival, any liturgical time, represents the reactualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past, “in the beginning.” Religious participation in a festival implies emerging from ordinary temporal duration and reintegration of the mythical time reactualized by the festival. Hence sacred time is indefinitely recoverable, indefinitely repeatable.” (Eliade 1987 [1959], pp. 68–69). A space opens within us that, in keeping with the myth, connects with what we take to be reality. Through ritual, we can enter the mythical time made present once more. We need not attend solemn religious processions in Attica. The space Eliade describes can open when we tell an old story that recreates this time beyond ordinary time. The folklorist Barre Toelken, a specialist in Native American folklore, describes storytelling occasions of great importance to a community. They take place at particular times of year and for particular reasons. A storyteller gathers a large audience and tells the tales or myths in a set order. Comparable practices can be found in many parts of the world, from Africa to Oceania and Europe.

The cult of Heracles, Hercules in Latin, offers a more visible example. It was among the most popular cults in ancient Greece. Young men “imitated” Heracles, but they did not reenact his life as a kind of cosplay, literally doing what he did, which would have been impossible and, in many cases, illegal both then and now. They imitated something more important, the meaning of his solar labours. That meant bringing order to reality and sacrificing oneself to ascend through apotheosis, as the sun does, and become more than merely human. Imitation of myth did not end with paganism. Christians incorporated imitation of the sacred divine figure into their teaching through the “imitation of Christ” practised by martyrs and the most devoted believers. The difference is that what had once involved an indeterminate number of myths was now centred on one. The point here is that a mythic and sacred understanding of time and reality did not vanish with the decline of paganism in Europe. It remains present among different peoples and religions throughout the world today, even if it is in retreat.

Eliade again connects the experience of the sacred with the making of meaning when he explains why myth is considered real. “Myth is regarded as a sacred story, and hence a “true history,” because it always deals with realities. The cosmogonic myth is “true” because the existence of the World is there to prove it; the myth of the origin of death is equally true because man’s mortality proves it, and so on” (Eliade 1963, p. 6). The Creation myth, then, may not describe events exactly as they occurred. Yet what it tells us, the idea or process at its heart, does not take place only within the myth. It is continually taking place in reality, here and now. All reality undergoes an unceasing process of death and rebirth. Heracles may never have overcome Cerberus or cleaned the Augean stables at Eurystheus’s command, but ordering reality and sacrificing oneself are solar labours that can be done both in everyday life and within the individual.

We can thus see why myth is not simply a metaphor. It condenses a truth that anyone can grasp into a narrative episode, a truth that, in Eliade’s terms, is sacred. That narrative can also open the way to a practice, a way of life or a ritual that transforms reality in turn. Some myths, of course, allow for several paths of interpretation. In the study of traditional tales, it is vital at least to understand the idea of mythic or sacred time if we are to see them as more than old wives’ tales or escapist fantasies.