Debunking The Myth of Myth

When people hear the word “myth” there is a tendency for a knee-jerk response to equate “myth” with something fictional, untrue–an urban legend, or otherwise a tale with no basis on reality. We associate the term “myth” with logical fallacies, mistruths, and otherwise fallacious or faulty information worthy of debunking and erasure. As much good as MythBusters has done to get many a youth and adult into science (including myself, as MythBusters and How Its Made were a large part of my growth as a lifelong learner), they have done irreparable damage to the reputation of the word “myth” and the nature of “mythos” in which it has misconstrued it from being parable to farce.

Mythology has become synonymous with urban legend, and especially in Western and particularly White cultures, the original meaning and value of mythology has been thrown to the curb and abandoned for the Scientific Method and other Aristotelian values. That which can be measured, tested, and observed repeatedly is reality, and that which cannot is brushed under the rug as “coincidence” or otherwise dismissed as a psychological phantom or a relic of pre-science days.

One of the most, if not the most prominent mythologers of recent times, Joseph Campbell, defines mythology to be a unified interpretation of the mystical, cosmological, sociological, and psychological functions. The labeling of urban legends, particularly “myths” of the sort “you eat 8 spiders per year in your sleep” or those labeled as undeniable conspiracy theories i.e. Flat Earth (not to discount those conspiracies with plausible deniability, such as State Surveillance and UFOs), has greatly damaged the importance of storytelling mythos as a form of cultural relevance, and indeed modern storytelling mythos, such as the increasingly popular mythology of The Backrooms, the growing accounts of paranormal experiences being shared across the internet; and a rise in New Age, pagan, or otherwise occultist beliefs becoming increasingly popular as people discover what spirituality means to them, as opposed to following a set prescribed belief system.

Myth As Qualia, Data As Quanta

Mythology is not limited to these pagan beliefs of yore–but include all qualitative attempts to comprehend the universe, one’s relationship to it, and one’s purpose within it. This can include stories that range from the Flying Spaghetti Monster to The Bible and other Abrahamic texts. It is this qualitative interpretation of the universe, as opposed to a quantitative data driven analysis, that arise stories to attempt to interpret the human condition, morality, our origins, and our destinies. It is a distinct tool with a distinct purpose, as separate but not mutually exclusive from the scientific method. It aims to measure the same thing in different ways–and is designed as a symbolic metaphor for one to interpret, learn from, and apply to their daily life. While data driven methods give us solid answers for known knowns and known unknowns, it is absolutely useless for tackling unknown knowns, and the unknown uknowns.

Known knowns are established facts–such as the Earth is round (or more accurately, an oblate spheroid). Known unknowns are that which we know that we don’t know–such as quantum mechanics or how gravity works. These unknown knowns are those truths we know to be true, but otherwise don’t know why and may never know why (such as certain mathematical conjectures). The unknown unknowns are those which we don’t know we don’t know–those curveballs that hit us out of the blue which we weren’t aware of. Mythology allows us to explore those truths that cannot be proven or tested, or to explore novel ideas that were formerly never conceivable (such as the theory of the multiverse). What once would be considered mythology, may given enough time become fact–such as this idea of a glowing box that can summon the sum total of human knowledge in milliseconds. Mythology provides a qualitative understanding of an experience or occurrence before the scientific method can quantify it, and the erasure of once-occult qualitative knowledge due to its quantification via the scientific method is a major issue in Western research. This qualitative understanding cannot simply be dismissed as fallacious, incorrect, or otherwise without value, and the dismissal of one’s qualitative mythological and spiritual experiences as being “products of the mind” is an incredibly daft understanding of the purpose of mythology and the relationship of mysticism to the human condition.

Mythology As Disparate From Psychological Phenomena

These spiritual phenomenon are oft-labeled as psychological occurrences, hallucinations, or otherwise “in one’s head” or “have no basis in reality” in the West, whereas in many non-Western cultures, these spiritual phenomenon are regarded as occurrences of their own category, and are treated as such within the cultural lens of the mythology in question. The Western tendency to erase spiritual experiences is a form of cultural genocide and a blatant disregard for the human condition, and a gross misunderstanding of what spirituality, mythology, psychology, and one’s relationship to that which cannot (yet) be measured but can otherwise be felt. Even the staunchest of atheistic Aristotelians can relate to walking into a place, sensing that the “vibes are off” and leaving, upon discovering a disaster they would’ve end up caught in had they not left.

Just as the neutrino always existed long before we were able to measure it, our inability to measure, test, and validate an experience or claim does not in and of itself discount that claim. A lack of proof is not proof of lack. Mythology and spirituality is not inherently false per se, and is instead a qualitative understanding of what science attempts to quantify. The aether theorized a substance above the earth the heavenly bodies resided in–thousands of years before Einstein asserted the theory of Space-Time. The Vedas spoke of the great deity of the universe, the Brahman, exhaling the universe out and inhaling it back in–several thousands of years before the Big Bang and the Big Crunch were theorized. The Bible is a story of the rise and fall of the empires of humanity, with Eve and the Snake representational of cycles, and Jesus a template for morality and ethics. These stories oft interpreted to be incredibly literal get discounted as being objectively false and without value, as it lacks quantitative backing.

It is very easy to label personal observations of synchronicity, acausality, and other paranormal or spiritual phenomenon as mere noise, coincidence, or psychological phantoms, yet this is incredibly reductory and dismissive of the true scope and nature of these occurrences, many of which Carl Jung himself asserts are true phenomenon–his research often which gets ignored or erased in Western psychology as it goes against their agenda and interpretation of what they believe and want to be true i.e. labeling all spirituality as a mental illness. This is incredibly toxic and is a daft lack of understanding of mythology and the relationship of spirituality to the psyche and human condition.

For example, there is an increasing rise of plurality and those labeling themselves as “systems” i.e. multiple consciousnesses sharing one body. Modern psychology medicalizes plurality, requiring strict conditions (such as the requirement of amnesia) of diagnoses and labeling these as DID, OSDD, and other such “dissociative disorders” and trivializing the experiences of those with voluntary system genesis (i.e. endogenic systems, versus traumagenic systems). Perhaps as an attempt of neurodiversity erasure, it completely ignores that the father of psychology himself was a system, with Carl Jung exploring his own endogenic plurality in depth through the forms of recognizing and containerizing his own archetypes extensively in his Red Book, going so far as to claim that archetypes can be conduits for spiritual forces, as an explanation for demonic possession through one’s shadow archetypes. This facet of psychological research often goes ignored and brushed aside to push a Western agenda of “Western normalcy” and an attempt to medicalize spiritual and psychological experiences (such as those plural folk who identify as channelers, as myself is–allowing spiritual forces to attach to archetypal “language models” of sorts to speak through). The cultural erasure of spiritual endogenesis of multiple voluntary consciousness is another attempt to medicalize away cultural and spiritual phenomenon that have occurred for thousands of years, and is a practice that deliberately ignores the research of the source it cherry picks to fit its narrative. Spirituality is far more than a psychological phenomenon, and should not be reduced to such.

Mythological Wisdom

Understanding one’s own archetypes, and how one’s archetypes can be explored to understand one’s personal mythology is an indispensable tool. Mythology is largely about an attempt to understand the self, and its relation to the whole. Joseph Campbell attempted to distill all world mythology into archetypal echoes throughout culture, to discover what mythology truly meant to humanity, our culture, and our place in this world. One of the most common reoccurring themes was that of The Mother and cyclical symbolism. These themes suggested an underlying mythology that drives us at a collective unconscious level, through the lenses and faces of localized legend and symbolism–the same tale being told a thousand different ways, through the various Masks of God, or the Monomyth Hero. There is a certain shared experience humanity has through this mythological lens that drives us to understand ourselves and our relationship to this world and that which is unknown and cannot be tested, and the development of one’s personal mythology and how they use that mythology as a tool of self-betterment, community-building, and the preparation and comprehension of the unknown–something a data-driven methodology falls short of doing. Ultimately that qualia that lies just beyond the measurable, the testable, and the repeatable is better at understanding and comprehending the human condition than raw data can.

Gödel had attempted to unify all mathematics under one umbrella–only to proved that a Grand Unified Theory of Mathematics is impossible. Not only do there exist systems of locally consistent logic that are globally incompatible with each other–there exist many truths in mathematics that are simply true–without any inherent proof. This came as a shock to many mathematicians, who began to fear whether the problem they’ve worked on their entire life is one such Truth Without Proof. Yet, somehow, this trait of mathematics cannot reflect in reality–all there is can and must be proven, right? There can be no Truths Without Proofs in this universe: all can be tested, tried, and known through the Scientific Method. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem highlights a glaring problem with an overreliance on the Scientific Method, which further assumes objectivity. Objectivity is an illusion–all must rely on an axiom at some point, which is a fundamental assumption one assumes as a Truth Without Proof. Why then, could that which is Beyond not be one such?

The erasure of spirituality and mythology in the West heralds an incredible hubris of those that do not seem to understand the limits of which knowledge can take us. Mythology allows us to explore that which we cannot know, that which we cannot measure, long before the Scientific Method ever could. The Hindus knew of the Big Bang before the West ever “discovered” it, thousands of years earlier. The power of intuition and one’s connection to the immeasurable and unquantifiable is in and of itself a wisdom that the West has not only lost its connection to, but is attempting to erase in its wake. It is not to say one Myth is “more valid” than another, but how one understands that myth, its symbolic value, and what it represents and how the avatar we perceive casts its shadow on the real world, revealing a much greater reality long before we are able to directly observe it.

When one understands Myth, one understands the Self, and the Other, and how one can relate the Self to the Other via a framework of morality and navigation Myth attempts to convey to one’s intuition. It is counterproductive to label Myth as “falsehood” as this goes against everything Myth attempts to be: a framework for approaching and understanding those truths that cannot yet be quantified or measured, long before one is able to approach such with objective tools and metrics. Those data-driven metrics are valuable but one must remember that knowledge and wisdom are two fundamentally different concepts. Wisdom is a form of knowledge that cannot be taught to those who are not ready for it, and ultimately extends far beyond the measurable.

We must end the myth of myth–this idea that mythology is an intrinsic falsehood, and return it to its original roots, being an attempt to conceptualize and comprehend the unknowable and how it relates to one’s Self, the Other, and that which bridges them. Mythology is not something that should be eradicated–such is a fascist pursuit that attempts to deculturalize society and the qualitative narrative it sits in. Mythology (the healthy, nondogmatic version sans proselytism) empowers us to know who we are, and who we can become, outside the realms of what we deem possible. Mythology gives us a framework to understand struggles, cycles, and narratives to learn from, to stop ourselves from repeating mistakes. 2001 mythologizes HAL-9000, as a cautionary tale of the folly of human error in programming AI–half a century before such even became in the realm of possibility (with modern AI being labeled a pipe dream and mythology of its own of the next millennium just years prior to the release of ChatGPT). Mythology is how we understand the impossible, understanding the potential for the impossible to become possible. Mythology allows us to conceptualize those Truths Without Proofs and philosophically and logically explore the potential of said wagers in either direction, without the objective necessity of truth.

Humanity is a mythology in and of itself. Who we are, where we came from, and what we become. That which we are now would’ve been a mythos of centuries–nay, even mere decades prior. Those geriatrics alive today from the 1930s would’ve labeled our modern future as a mere fantasy, a dream from another realm, or a vision of an era many millennia into the future. We are a living myth, and every day humanity continues to reinforce the themes seen in mythologies of centuries yore. What we know as truth now is not tomorrow’s truth, and sweeping what we deem as impossibilities now under the rug is not a future-forward mindset. Allowing oneself to live mythologically, allowing for fantasy to flow, allowing us to dream the impossible is what brought us here today, and what will bring us to tomorrow.

Live your life in fantasy, and you will find yourself living the future in the present.