Mythologizing Ourselves
12th August 2025
Calling a story a “myth” is too often taken to mean it is a lie: I don’t use it that way. Mircea Eliade argued that a mythos is a story that, true or not, functions to form and shape society and social behavior.
Out of all the stories that could be told from any epoch, some are chosen for inclusion in a culture’s memory. And—yes—edited too, whether for “clarity” oractual clarity. Myths encode, and it is in this sense that the Bible is filled with myths, inevitably and necessarily.
Whether this or that event “actually happened” or occurred precisely as described in the Bible is, and has to be, unimportant. We are not living in the event or interacting in real time with the forces and persons involved. Until someone builds a time machine–perhaps even then!–our relationship with ourselves as a species is, inescapably, a relationship with stories.