On Myth

Mysteries and Allegories

What is a myth? The Greek word mythos means story but myths are far more than mere stories. Philosophers debated the meaning of myths and found deep allegorical meaning in their oddest parts. In Sallustius' treatise On the Gods and the World, he explains that myths are strange because they are allegorical. Some allegories are physical, theological, or psychological; others are a mixture. However, he also says an "outer shell veils the inner realities" of myths hinting there is a more mysterious nature to myths.

Starting with the Greek philosophers, there was a tendency to rationalize religious and spiritual experiences. As a result, the Platonists developed one of the most sophisticated spiritual systems ever created. However, this rationalizing tendency has an unfortunate side effect. It drags the spiritual downward into the realm of rational thought. It seeks to explain the spiritual when the spirit is beyond rationalization. Our attempts to explain it will always be reductionist and lose part of its deeper meaning which must be experienced and revered. This is the power of faith over rationality. Faith preserves the mystery where rationality seeks to merely explain it.

Myths Are Mysteries, Not Allegories

To allegorize a myth is to drag it down to the rational level so our minds can more easily understand it.

It is ok to do this, but essential to understand that no allegory of a myth is complete or universal. There is no one-to-one relationship between a myth and an allegory. Myths are universally applicable and can apply to many allegorical ideas. But myths are not allegories themselves. An allegory can be rationalized, explained, refuted and discarded. The allegorical view treats myth as a cloak hiding a rational truth. This perspective pervades many Gentile circles that attempt to unlock the “meaning” of the myth as though the myth itself is nothing but a riddle to be solved. The mystical view, on the other hand, treats rationality as the cloak of Divine truth and myth as the intuitive reflection of the Divine itself.

Myths transcends rationality. They are not meant to be understood on the level of rationality but rather experienced as ineffable mysteries. They are inexhaustible objects for contemplation and meditation. Not a puzzle to be unlocked and discarded once understood.

Mysteries are essential to religion and, in many ways, are the bedrock of any spiritual system. Simply put, a religious mystery is something we cannot know by its simple nature and cannot be comprehended by logic or reason.

We should view the confusing nature of the myths the way the Zen masters view the Koan riddles, such as, "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" They defy our simple categorizations and attempts to make them fit our rational systems. They break us from our rational dualistic experience and force us to experience a mystery. That is, of course, if we don’t attempt to rationalize the myth and obfuscate its mystery.

One of the philosophical paradoxes can help us understand this phenomenon further. Perhaps the greatest philosophical mystery is the problem of the One and the Many. How can something like the Cosmos be both One and Many? Or put another way, how is the universe unified yet also made up of many parts? It's illogical, and much ink and breath has been spent trying to produce rational arguments to explain this problem. The Platonic philosopher Proclus perhaps went as far as anyone could in providing logical answers to this problem. Yet, the more astute answer came from his successor, Damascius. He went through every rationalization possible for the problem of the One and the Many in his treatise, Concerning First Principles, and came up without a definite answer. Rather than seeing this as a failure, Damascius understood that this is the nature of the mystery itself. It will not bow down to your rationalizations. Proclus may have provided a rational explanation to solve the problem but Damascius saw the truth: God solves this contradiction by existing.

Similarly, myth solves its contradictions by being what it is: a mystery. To use modern parlance, the seeming contradictions and oddities in myth are a feature, not a bug. 

Modern Confusion

Modern man has increasingly seen the physical world as real and the immaterial as fake and illusory.

Modern people often feel they have to choose between spiritual scriptures as being "true" in the most base, material, and historical sense of the word or being pure fiction. We see this in the Christian sentiment that Jesus is the "myth that became real," as C.S. Lewis said. To many modern Christians, "real" is the material world, and myth is merely fake. To the Gentile, the spiritual should always be regarded as the real world, and the material only a weak copy. This is why we say, "myths are that which never happened but always are."

For many modern people, if their scriptures are myths, they are not real and thus have no power or value. We, however, should not adopt this modern degraded view. In the Iron Age, man struggles to see God in the immaterial; thus, God is seen as a physical being or thing.

There is a similar obsession today with history, genetics and discovering the most purely researched version of Gentile religion. This too is looking for the Gods in the material. No amount of research or archeological discovery will reproduce the Golden Age mindset of our ancestors. Only when we learn to see beyond the material will we begin to embody the perfect Saturnian kingdom within ourselves. When we stop bending the mystical to match the rational or the material, we will begin to see the truth.

How to Read Myth

So with this in mind, the Romanist Society is working on a book of scriptures essential to our spiritual path. Works like Ovid, Iliad, Aeneid, and others are central. However, we have chosen to use poetic translations rather than literal or prose. This is because, the literal and prose translations favor rational understanding over the intuitive beauty of poetry . Reading the myths with an inspired poetic meter is essential to break this rational spell. We should not seek to understand them as historical artifacts or allegories but rather desire to be swept up in their ineffable mystery. As we read, we may still see an allegory or a theological truth veiled in the story, but remember that this is secondary and not the whole truth. The absolute truth of the myths can never be explained away or exhausted.