Few words have suffered as much distortion in modern times as “myth.” For many, to call something a myth is to call it false, a pleasant illusion that belongs to the past. We live in an age that demands evidence and proof, so anything that cannot be verified often falls under suspicion. Yet in its original sense, mythos meant something entirely different. It referred to a sacred narrative, a way of conveying truths that exceed the boundaries of literal language.
When ancient people told myths, they were not pretending. They were describing reality in symbolic form. Joseph Campbell wrote that myth is a public dream and dreams are private myths. Carl Jung saw myths as the shared vocabulary of the human unconscious, the stories through which our species recognizes itself. In this sense, a myth is not falsehood but collective truth. It speaks to what is universal, not what is merely factual.
Faith communities often struggle with this idea. To say that the events of the Old Testament are “mythic” can sound like disbelief. Yet mythic truth and historical truth operate on different planes. One reveals meaning, the other records sequence. Both are valuable, but myth offers a kind of truth that history cannot contain. It tells us not what happened once, but what happens always—the fall, the exile, the redemption, the return.
Myth as Transformative Truth
A myth does not aim to inform. It aims to transform. Its purpose is not to satisfy curiosity about the past but to awaken insight about the present. The story of creation in Genesis, for instance, may not describe a chronological event, but it reveals a truth about existence itself: that order emerges from chaos, that being is born from word and breath. It speaks to the structure of consciousness, not geology.
Premodern readers understood this intuitively. They saw sacred texts as layered: literal, moral, spiritual, and mystical. Allegory was not evasion but reverence. The early Church Fathers read scripture as a living organism of meaning. What mattered was not whether something could be proven, but whether it led the soul toward understanding. The myth was not a lie but a mirror in which humanity saw its own reflection in the light of the divine.
Myth also operates at different scales. Some myths belong to tribes or nations. Others belong to civilizations or to humanity as a whole. The flood narrative, for example, appears in Mesopotamian, Hebrew, and even Mesoamerican traditions. Each tells of renewal through destruction, of life emerging through loss. That pattern is not confined to one people; it speaks to the human condition itself. Myth, in this sense, is the language of shared becoming.
Story as the Human Bridge
Story sits between myth and history. It is how human beings translate the universal into the particular. A myth is timeless, but a story unfolds in time. A myth speaks in symbols, while a story speaks in voices. It brings cosmic truth down to human scale, allowing us to feel it rather than simply understand it.
When we say “story,” we often think of fiction, something made up. But the best stories are not lies; they are acts of recognition. A novel, a parable, or a film can express truths that no historical account could reach. Christ’s parables are perhaps the purest form of this. They are not historical reports, yet they reveal the nature of compassion, forgiveness, and spiritual growth more clearly than any argument could. The story is not a substitute for truth but a vessel for it.
Stories are also how we share consciousness. Through them we inhabit other lives, other ages, other minds. They cultivate empathy, helping us to see from within another perspective. This is why we are drawn to stories even when we know they are “fiction.” They feed the same hunger that myths once did: the desire to find meaning in the movement of human life. In modern times, however, the constant consumption of stories can dull this hunger. We scroll and stream but rarely stop to ask what these stories are doing to us. To recover their power, we must read or listen not only for entertainment but for resonance.
History as Collective Memory
History seems, at first glance, to stand in opposition to myth. It deals with evidence, documents, and verifiable events. It strives to be objective. Yet even the most carefully written history is never neutral. Every account is told from somewhere, and that vantage point shapes what is remembered and what is forgotten.
The victors’ chronicles become textbooks. The voices of the defeated or the marginalized fade into footnotes. The modern discipline of historiography emerged from the recognition that history itself is a form of storytelling. We do not merely record events; we interpret them. The choice of what to include, the way causes are linked, and the moral tone of the narrative all reflect the historian’s vision of the world.
Even scientific history is interpretive. Cosmology and evolution are told as stories of beginnings and transformations. They rely on data, yet they also rely on imagination to connect the data into meaning. In this way, history, too, becomes mythic. It gives humanity a sense of origin and destiny. When we say that we live in the Anthropocene, we are not only describing an era of human impact; we are naming a new myth about responsibility and consequence.
The Cycle of Meaning
Myth, story, and history are not separate compartments. They are stages in the life of meaning. A myth gives birth to stories, stories give rise to histories, and histories, over time, return to myth. The process is circular, not linear.
Consider the Exodus. It may have begun as a historical event—a people’s escape from bondage. But as centuries passed, it became a living myth of liberation. Each generation retold it as its own story. In times of oppression, it became a prophecy of freedom. In moments of personal struggle, it became a metaphor for spiritual rebirth. What began as an event became an archetype.
This pattern appears everywhere. The death and resurrection of Christ are both historical and mythic. They happened once, but they also happen continually in the experience of faith. The Enlightenment, too, became a modern myth of reason’s triumph. Even revolutions, wars, and scientific discoveries pass through the same transformation. The boundary between myth, story, and history is porous because human meaning is recursive. What we live, we narrate; what we narrate, we believe; what we believe, we enact again.
Faith Beyond Literalism
The fear that myth erodes faith arises from a misunderstanding of faith itself. Faith is not mere belief in facts; it is trust in meaning. To insist that every biblical event be historically verifiable is to mistake the vessel for the water it holds. The deeper truth of scripture lies in its power to shape the soul, not in its compliance with modern historiography.
Christianity in particular occupies a unique place in this discussion. It is a myth that entered history. The incarnation means that the eternal took on flesh, that the invisible became visible. This fusion is what gives the faith its enduring depth. The resurrection is not only a claim about an event; it is a revelation about life, death, and renewal that continues to unfold in every believer’s experience.
Literalism seeks security. It wants to know that everything happened exactly as described. But the life of faith is not built on certainty; it is built on relationship. The Bible’s power comes not from its historical precision but from its capacity to speak across centuries, cultures, and languages, each time revealing something new about the human condition. To call the scriptures mythic is not to deny their truth but to honor their inexhaustible vitality.
Reimagining Truth in the Modern Age
We live in a time when the boundaries between myth, story, and history are once again shifting. Science, technology, and media have given us new ways to imagine the world, yet they have also fragmented our sense of meaning. We have more data than ever, but less wisdom. In such an age, the recovery of mythic thinking is not a retreat from reason but a deepening of it.
The modern world has its own myths: progress, individuality, innovation, artificial intelligence. Each carries promises and warnings. When people speak of “the singularity,” they are not describing a technical event alone; they are invoking an eschatology, a story of transformation and transcendence. In that sense, our civilization is not post-mythic but myth-making in new forms.
Artificial intelligence may even become a participant in this process. If AI begins to interpret human history and generate narratives about meaning, it could mirror back to us new archetypes of creation and consciousness. Perhaps it will teach us to see ourselves again as part of a larger story, one that includes machines, nature, and cosmos in a single unfolding drama. The challenge is not to abandon reason but to integrate it with imagination, to see truth as a living spectrum rather than a binary of fact and fiction.
The Eternal Return of Meaning
Myth, story, and history are three ways of speaking the same language of truth. Myth transforms us by revealing the eternal. Story humanizes us by giving that eternity a face and a voice. History grounds us by reminding us where we have been. Together they form the triune grammar of human understanding.
To live wisely is to move among them with humility. We must read history with imagination, hear stories with attention, and approach myths with reverence. When we separate them, meaning fragments. When we bring them together, meaning deepens.
Our ancestors told stories to remember who they were. We tell stories to discover who we are becoming. The myths we inherit continue to shape the histories we write, and the histories we write will one day become the myths of those who follow. In that endless return, faith, art, and knowledge all find their place. They remind us that truth is not a fixed point in time but a living dialogue between memory, imagination, and the mystery that holds them both.
Imagine: Pixabay
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