Today, the word “myth” is most commonly used in a pejorative sense as a synonym for “misconception” or “lie.” The myths of traditional cultures like the ancient Greeks, Scandinavians, and Egyptians are often treated as “fantasy” or “fiction” – escapist entertainment rather than accounts that can and should be taken seriously as truth claims of some sort. Since these traditional stories are set in the distant past, the modern world often characterizes them as awkward, deformed versions of history; the assumption is that ancient cultures were trying to write “history” in the modern sense of the word but failed because they were too “savage” or “primitive” to get it right. The possibility that these cultures were writing something categorically different from history, with different purposes and logic, is seldom considered.
But this modern usage of the word “myth” says more about us and our own misconceptions than it does about what real myths are.
So, then, what is a myth, in the original, proper sense of the word? A myth is a divinely-revealed traditional story that expresses some aspect of the timeless nature of reality and serves as a basis for practical spirituality. This article will largely be concerned with defending, expanding, and refining this definition.
A “mythology” is simply a set of myths, typically those belonging to a particular culture and/or religion. For example, Greek mythology is the set of myths held to be sacred in the religion of the pre-Christian Greeks, and Norse mythology is the set of myths held to be sacred in the religion of the pre-Christian Scandinavians.
This article will first give an in-depth overview of what myth is and what roles it plays in religion and spirituality. Then, it will show how religions that are often thought to lack myths – such as Christianity and Islam – are just as rooted in myth as any other religions are. Finally, it will present a potentially ambitious but hopefully well-argued case that myth is truer than history and provides a better guide to life here and now.
What Is Myth?
First of all, we should note that in traditional, religious cultures, myths are held to be the products of divine revelation and are thus counted among the truest of all truths that can be put into words. As archaeologists Henri and H.A. Frankfort write of the ancient Mesopotamians, for example,
We would explain… that certain atmospheric changes broke a drought and brought about rain. The Babylonians observed the same facts but experienced them as the intervention of the gigantic bird Imdugud which came to their rescue. It covered the sky with the black storm clouds of its wings and devoured the Bull of Heaven, whose hot breath had scorched the crops.
In telling such a myth, the ancients did not intend to provide entertainment…. They were recounting events in which they were involved to the extent of their very existence. They experienced, directly, a conflict of powers, one hostile to the harvest upon which they depended, the other frightening but beneficial: the thunderstorm reprieved them in the nick of time by defeating and utterly destroying the drought. The images had already become traditional at the time when we meet them in art and literature, but originally they must have been seen in the revelation which the experience entailed. They are products of imagination, but they are not mere fantasy…. [T]rue myth presents its images and its imaginary actors, not with the playfulness of fantasy, but with a compelling authority. It perpetuates the revelation of a “Thou.”[1]
As that summary also implies, a myth isn’t something that only happened once in the past and is now over, like historical events. Instead, a myth is something that also keeps happening over and over again in the present. In this case, Imdugud’s victory over the Bull of Heaven recurs every time the autumn rains end the summer drought.
And that gets at what’s perhaps the single biggest difference between history and myth: they occur in two different kinds of time. History occurs in linear, chronological, mundane time – the kind of time in which we all live our everyday lives. Myths, however, occur in sacred time – a cyclical and repeatable kind of time that transcends our everyday lives.
Sacred time can be a confusing concept for many people, and that confusion is perfectly understandable for two reasons. First, the modern, secular world has no concept of sacred time; the only kind of time it takes seriously is mundane, historical time. Today, even religious people who have experienced sacred time firsthand through their religious practices have largely forgotten how to articulate the kind of time that they’ve encountered in those experiences.
And second, sacred time is an inherently paradoxical concept. On the one hand, it refers to events that happened so deep in the past that they occurred before historical, measurable time even existed – “in the beginning,” “once upon a time,” etc. For example, as anthropologist Richard Nelson says of the religion of the Koyukon people of Alaska,
As the Koyukon reckon it, all things human and natural go back to a time called “Kk’adonts’idnee” [“distant time”], which is so remote that no one can explain or understand how long ago it really was. But however ancient this time may be, its events are recounted accurately and in great detail through a prodigious number of stories.[2]
And yet, despite how inconceivably far in the past this mythical time is, it’s also perpetually accessible in the present through religious practices. This is the great paradox of sacred time. In the words of renowned historian of religion Mircea Eliade,
[B]y 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 itself. Hence sacred time is indefinitely recoverable, indefinitely repeatable. From one point of view it could be said that it does not ‘pass,’ that it does not constitute an irreversible duration…. With each periodical festival, the participants find the same sacred time – the same that had been manifested in the festival of the previous year or in the festival of a century earlier.[3]
Although Eliade uses festivals and liturgies as his examples here, his words apply to potentially any and every religious practice. As he writes elsewhere,
A sacrifice, for example, not only exactly reproduces the initial sacrifice revealed by a god… at the beginning of time, it also takes place at that same primordial mythical moment; in other words, every sacrifice repeats the original sacrifice and coincides with it. All sacrifices are performed at the same mythical instant of the beginning; through the paradox of rite, profane time and duration are suspended. And the same holds true for all repetitions, i.e. all imitations of archetypes; through such imitation, man is projected into the mythical epoch in which the archetypes were first revealed.[4]
Thus, religious practices based on the events recounted in myths don’t just commemorate or celebrate something that happened a long time ago and is now over. Instead, they manifest those mythical events here and now. What philosopher of religion Marco Pallis says of fairy tales applies to myths, too: “For us the traditional opening phrase ‘once upon a time’ has come to mean ‘not in reality’ whereas those by whom and for whom the fairy tales were originally told received it in an exactly contrary sense, as meaning ‘at no specifiable time’ because everywhere and ever presently real.”[5]
The religious practices that reactualize myths here and now aren’t limited to actions that only humans perform. All religions teach that all of nature is spiritual and participates in religion – another traditional belief that, sadly, has been largely forgotten today. This is why, in the example from ancient Mesopotamia that we considered a moment ago, the summer drought and the autumn stormclouds manifested a mythical battle between two divine forces. The coming of the rain was seen as a ritual performed by the natural elements themselves, in which they, too, participated in the life of the gods.[6]
We now have another way of putting the definition of myth that we considered in the introduction to this article: a myth is a story that takes place in sacred time, which means that it both happened in the unimaginably remote era in which the world was created and is still happening over and over again today.
This discussion of sacred, mythical time may seem quite abstract so far, so let’s consider another concrete example from a specific religion.
An In-Depth Example
In ancient Egyptian mythology, the creator and sun god Re (also spelled “Ra”) originally ruled directly over the earth and humankind. His reign was a time of great happiness and prosperity, since humans and gods were united and lived as one. But humankind foolishly severed this unity by rebelling against their divine ruler. Because of this idiocy and ingratitude, Re unleashed massive destruction and death upon humanity as he departed from the earth for the sky, where he has remained ever since.[7]
Re appointed another god, Osiris, to rule the earth in his stead. But it wasn’t long before Osiris’s rule, too, came to an untimely end. Osiris’s brother, Seth, was jealous of his position, and murdered him so that he could usurp his throne. Osiris’s wife, Isis, used magic to revive her husband’s corpse for just long enough that she became pregnant with his son, the falcon god Horus. Isis spent the remainder of her pregnancy hiding in the marshes so that Seth’s forces wouldn’t kill Osiris’s legitimate heir. When Horus came of age, he set out to reclaim his rightful throne. After a number of battles against Seth, he triumphed and became the new ruler.[8]
Horus’s reign was almost as ideal as that of Re himself. Indeed, throughout ancient Egyptian mythology and iconography, Horus was frequently fused with Re.[9] Already in the myth itself, therefore, we have an instance of sacred time: Horus’s reign didn’t really follow Re’s reign chronologically, but rather it reactualized Re’s reign.
In historical ancient Egypt, the human pharaoh was called the “living Horus.”[10] By incarnating the sun and falcon god, the pharaoh’s historical reign was folded back into the sacred time of Horus’s ideal reign. Horus’s rule was never truly lost, but returned again and again in cyclical fashion.
This is why, whenever the ancient Egyptians needed to inaugurate a new pharaoh, they did so during their New Year celebration, postponing the inauguration until that date if need be. Even when a pharaoh’s rule continued from one year to the next, he would be ceremonially re-inaugurated at the New Year. The arrival of the New Year didn’t just mean a change in the chronological date; it meant the rebirth of the whole cosmos, just as it had been when it was fresh from Re’s hands, and thus the start of a new cycle of sacred time. The pharaoh’s inauguration or re-inauguration was the reactualization of the inauguration of the reign of Re/Horus.[11][12]
The New Year coincided with the annual flood of the Nile River, whose waters returned the world to its pre-creation state of liquid chaos, and then receded to reveal exceptionally fertile ground like the primeval hillock from which the first creation occurred in ancient Egyptian mythology. Nature thereby participated alongside human society in this ritual regeneration of the cycle of sacred, mythical time.[13][14]
The world had been restored to its original purity, and it was up to humankind to keep it that way – although, since the myth of Re’s rule repeated cyclically, humanity’s rebellion inevitably did, too. That moment of perfection never held, so another New Year festival was necessary to restore it in due time.
The Spiritual Purpose of Myth
Different religions have different terms and concepts for spiritual enlightenment, the experience of oneness with the divine and with all things. But they agree that reaching that state of unparalleled truth and bliss is the meaning of life. (See The Meaning of Life According to Various Religions for thorough scholarly corroboration of that potentially bold-sounding claim.) Everything in religions points toward enlightenment in some way or another, and myth is no exception.
Myths, and religious practices based on them, show us the underlying spiritual unity behind various things that we perceive as separate and different in our everyday lives. For example, since myths take place simultaneously in an infinitely deep past and in the present, they make the past and the present one. The sacred time in which myths take place is thereby a bridge between mundane time and eternity, which unites and transcends all times. As the Katha Upanishad from Hinduism says, the divine is “beyond… past and future.”[15] (Eternity is not just endless duration; it’s the transcendence of duration as such.) Hence why the spiritually sensitive Greek philosopher Plato called the cyclical time of myth “the moving image of unmoving eternity.”[16]
Religious practices based on myth, such as the Egyptian New Year festival in the example in the preceding section, unite the human participants with the divine mythical figures whose primordial actions they embody. The pharaoh incarnating the “living Horus” is the most direct and dramatic example of this in that festival, but all of the human participants were made one with the original humans in the myth, who lived in unity with the gods on earth.
Similarly, in traditional Hindu marriage rites – which, historically speaking, go back several thousand years – the groom says to the bride, “I am Heaven, thou art Earth.” He thereby identifies himself with a sky or fire god and her with an earth goddess whose marriage is recounted in some of the oldest Hindu scriptures. The bride and groom are thus not only united with each other, but with the mythical deities they embody as well.[17]
And since nature is seen as participating in religious rites alongside humanity, the rites unite humanity and nature, too – and nature and the divine.
This whole process is, in practice, a powerful reminder that the divine is both immanent and transcendent – in other words, it’s within everything, and yet also beyond everything. The myths and their larger-than-life divine characters come from the remotest, most inaccessible past – a potent symbol of divine transcendence. But when the myth is reactualized here and now through religious practices, that transcendent divinity is also seen to be immanent in everything involved in the rite. When we’re transported into sacred time, we get a glimpse of how nothing truly exists outside of the divine, and how everything, including ourselves, is infinitely more than we ordinarily think it is.
And that’s without even getting into the contents of myths themselves, which point toward enlightenment verbally or intellectually rather than practically. Consider our example from ancient Egypt again. Originally, the sun god’s reign united the world and the gods; everyone and everything was effortlessly enlightened. But then humanity, in its shortsightedness, rebelled against its divine ruler, just as we do whenever we fall away from the mentality of sacred time and into mundane, historical time, with all of its petty, egoistic anxieties and cravings – “sins,” if you like. This separation from the divine is what makes us suffer – hence the terrible destruction and death that resulted from the sun god’s withdrawal to the sky. But through participation in the religion overseen by the pharaoh, the “living Horus,” the ancient Egyptians could reactualize the kingdom of Horus on earth – that is, they could recover the enlightened state of being that prevailed during the sun god’s original reign.
In these ways and others, myths facilitate the mystical quest at the heart of all religions.
Myth and Sacred Time in Christianity and Islam
Today, some religions are widely thought to be based on particular alleged historical events rather than on myths. You can hear this assertion being made by some of the adherents of these religions, who understandably want to claim the mantle of historical fact for their religion in an age when people are taught to believe that history is truer than myth. The critics of these religions, meanwhile, seek to cast the central stories of these religions as purely historical claims in order to make it possible to “debunk” them by conventional, mundane historical methods.
To be fair to this way of thinking, each religion does have a history that can be studied in a historical way. Each religion arose in a particular historical context, and its subsequent growth and development have unfolded in relation to further historical contexts. But are particular historical events really the basis of a religion’s claims to truth, or does that basis instead lie in timeless myths? Let’s consider just two examples of religions that are often thought to be without myths: Christianity and Islam. Certain other religions could be discussed just as readily in this context, but to do so here would take us too far afield for our present purposes.
Let’s start with Christianity. The story at the heart of Christianity is recounted in four different versions in the four gospels of the New Testament, which is the primary collection of Christian sacred texts. The gospel story tells of a man, Jesus Christ, who was God incarnate, preached God’s message, performed miracles, was executed by crucifixion, and then rose from the dead.
While this story is nominally set in Palestine during the governorship of the Roman official Pontius Pilate, the early Christians seem to have been far less concerned than we today tend to be with any historical dimension that this story may or may not have had. What interested them above all else was its timeless meaning. How can we know this?
The four gospels in the New Testament contain numerous passages that, if interpreted as historical claims, contradict each other. To cite just one example out of the many candidates, in the Gospel of Saint John, Jesus is crucified on the day of Passover, whereas in the Gospel of Saint Mark, he’s crucified on the day after Passover.[18]
Yet the early Christians included both of these texts in the New Testament, so this “contradiction” must not have been seen as such by them. It must not have pertained to anything they saw as being truly essential in this divinely-revealed story. And surely, if they had seen “historical accuracy” as essential, these clear “contradictions” would have bothered them, and efforts would have been made to reconcile them in a “proper” historical way. Since the early Christians have instead passed down to us texts that seem to us to be “rife with historical contradictions,” what we today would tend to call “historical details” in the gospels were evidently perceived by the early Christians to be something else first and foremost. What really mattered was that they conveyed the gospels’ underlying, ageless message about humanity’s (and the world’s) relationship with God as exemplified and instantiated by Jesus Christ. This means that the early Christians must have read the gospel story not primarily as history, but as myth, even if they didn’t necessarily use that word.
We’ve seen how myths are periodically reactualized through the spiritual practices of those who believe in them. The gospel story has always served exactly that purpose for Christians. If Christianity were about nothing more than intellectually believing in a certain set of historical “facts,” it would be spiritually hollow, and it would have died out a long time ago. Instead, the overarching goal of Christianity has always been to reactualize the incarnation of God here and now, to achieve “union with God,” Christianity’s term for spiritual enlightenment, just as Christ was united with God. Like the ancient Egyptian pharaoh sought to incarnate the god Horus, the Christian seeks to incarnate God in his or her own life. As Saint Maximus the Confessor, one of the Church Fathers, writes, the Christian
places himself wholly in God alone, wholly imprinting and forming God alone in himself, so that by grace he himself ‘is God and is called God.’ By his gracious condescension God became man and is called man for the sake of man and by exchanging his condition for ours revealed the power that elevates man to God through his love for God and brings God down to man because of his love for man. By this blessed inversion, man is made God by divinization and God is made man by hominization…. God wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of his embodiment.[19]
Through Christianity’s spiritual practices, the Christian is lifted out of mundane, historical time and transported to the sacred time of Jesus’s life. This is particularly true of the Christian liturgical year, especially as it was understood in ancient and medieval times. The liturgical year follows an annual cycle whose phases are determined by events in the life of Jesus, such as his birth, which is celebrated at Christmas, and his resurrection, which is celebrated at Easter. The historian Jacques Le Goff articulates the meaning that this sacred cycle held for medieval Christians:
[M]en in the middle ages felt or believed that everything which was fundamental for mankind was contemporary. Each year in the liturgy an extraordinary condensed form of [the gospel story] was brought back to life. It was a magical mentality which turned the past into the present, because the web of [time] was eternity.[20]
Furthermore, this annual liturgical cycle was intimately tied to the annual cycle of nature and agriculture, which involved all of nature in the same rites.[21]
(To be clear, Christian doctrine does demand an actual physical Incarnation. I wouldn’t want to claim otherwise, because that would be to espouse something like the docetic heresy. My question is simply: to what degree should that Incarnation be understood as happening in historical time, and to what degree should it be understood as happening in sacred time?)
A similar case can be made with regard to Islam. Throughout the Qur’an, the central sacred text of Islam, references are made to events that can be read on one level as historical occurrences. But the way the Qur’an handles even these seemingly historical references is fundamentally mythical rather than historical. It folds history back into myth, revealing the timeless, repeatable patterns that underlie what would otherwise just be one-off events with proportionately limited importance. As scholar of Islam Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes,
Now, the power of the Quran does not lie in that it expresses a historical fact or phenomenon. It lies in that it is a symbol whose meaning is valid always because it concerns not a particular fact in a particular time but truths which, being in the very nature of things, are perennial. Of course the Quran does mention certain facts such as the rebellion of a certain people against God and His punishment of those people as we see also in the Old Testament. But even those “facts” retain their power because they concern us as symbols of a reality which is always present.[22]
Scholars of religion John Kaltner and Christopher G. Frechette flesh out this point with regard to the Qur’an’s version of the story of the brothers Cain and Abel, another version of which can be found in the Bible:
The lack of identifying characteristics leaves Cain and Abel less individualized in the Qur’an than they are in the Bible and so makes them representatives of types of people rather than unique individuals. The Bible’s older sibling Cain, who works the land and brings vegetation to God, is now just a brother, and the biblical younger sibling Abel, who tends flocks and brings an animal for sacrifice, is simply another brother. What differentiates them in the Qur’an is what they say and do, not their birth order, occupations, offerings, or names. Through their actions and words the qur’anic brothers tell the reader what kind of people they are and represent, and the differences between them could not be more extreme – the murdered one is an innocent victim who places his trust in God, while the murderer is guilty because he relies on himself. The anonymity of the brothers serves another purpose found in the Qur’an’s presentation of a number of biblical figures and events: to enable the reader to focus better on the intended message. The passage does not recount the story of two brothers named Cain and Abel who lived long ago; rather, it contains a lesson about two types of people that has present-day relevance for anyone reading the text.[23]
Granted, the Bible’s Cain and Abel are also ultimately “representatives of types of people rather than unique individuals,” but this point is brought out with greater clarity in the Qur’an than it is in the Bible. The Qur’an leaves little room for doubt that the story of Cain and Abel is first and foremost a myth, which only secondarily manifests in particular historical circumstances.
Like Christian religious practices, Islamic religious practices are largely a matter of pulling the Muslim out of mundane, historical time and into the sacred time of myth. For example, much as Christianity’s traditional liturgical year is woven around celebrations that correspond to the yearly cycle of the seasons, Islam’s five daily prayers are timed to occur simultaneously with daily-recurring celestial events, such as sunrise, solar noon, and sunset. In this way, humans join nature in its cyclical worship of God; as the Qur’an says in surah (chapter) 24, verse 41 (brackets in the original): “do you not see that all those who are in the heavens and earth praise God, as do the birds with wings outstretched? Each knows its [own way] of prayer and glorification: God has full knowledge of what they do.”[24] Furthermore, by performing the same ritual prayers that God revealed to the first, exemplary Islamic community,[25] the worshiper becomes mystically contemporary with, and one with, those original, paradigmatic Muslims. Through all of this, Islam’s ritual prayers unite the past with the present, humans with each other, humanity with nature, and all of that with God. Similar cases can be made for many if not all of the rest of Islam’s spiritual practices.
Why Myth Is Truer than History
This assertion that the stories in the Bible, the Qur’an, and other religious texts should be understood first and foremost as myths, and only secondarily if at all as history, might understandably be off-putting to some devoutly religious people. They might see it as undermining their religion’s claims to truth. To conclude this article, therefore, allow me to attempt to allay such fears by showing how treating religious stories as myths actually bolsters their claims to truth.
This means turning one of modern secularism’s sacred cows on its head: the notion that history is truer than myth. Not only is myth something categorically different from history, and something that deserves respect in its own right. We can go further: there’s far more truth in myth than there is in history.
As I argue at length in Why All Religions Are True, the indescribable Mystery that one experiences in spiritual enlightenment is the only thing worthy of being called absolute truth. Religions are entirely justified in referring to it as the Absolute. Anything that can be put into words is already at least somewhat shy of absolute truth, and belongs instead to the domain of relative truth. But since religions are all about helping us to realize absolute truth for ourselves, their teachings are the truest of all relative truths. In other words, a statement is relatively true to the degree that it points toward absolute truth, and relatively false to the degree that it doesn’t.
After all, everything we do in life is – however consciously or unconsciously – an attempt to reach the absolute bliss of enlightenment, to fulfill desire and alleviate suffering. In practice, we judge things to be true inasmuch as they take us closer to that state. This is what it ultimately means to say that something “works in practice” or “makes successful predictions.” Thus, when religions proclaim in unison that enlightenment is the meaning of life, they’re making what’s by far the most successfully predictive statement there is. Enlightenment is indeed radically more meaningful and fulfilling than anything else we can experience – infinitely more, in fact, since it’s an experience of the Infinite.
Even modern science’s predictive abilities, impressive though they are, are considerably inferior to religion’s predictive abilities. This is the case for two reasons: first, empirical phenomena never exactly fulfill the terms of modern science’s equations (“laws”), but rather only approximately at best,[26] and second, those equations only pertain to narrow, superficial domains of life, not to life as a whole. Religions therefore have far more truth in them than even modern science does.
Modern history, as a branch of modern science, has the same status as the rest of modern science in this regard – it’s often onto something, but without a foundation in the Absolute, it remains stuck in the ever-shifting and ever-tenuous vicissitudes of relativity and mundane appearances. Myth, by contrast, helps us to pierce through those appearances and draw closer to the absolute reality that they hide, as we saw in the section “The Spiritual Purpose of Myth” above. Since both myth and history are types of verbal statements, they both ultimately belong to the realm of relative truth rather than absolute truth. But since myth points toward the Absolute much more directly and powerfully than history does, myth is profoundly truer than even the most careful history is.
This is especially the case because, while you can have myth without history, you can’t have history without at least the shadow of myth behind it. As we’ve seen, myths are expressions of particular views on the big-picture nature of reality in the form of a story. All history is written from a particular perspective that makes various assumptions about the nature of reality before a single piece of evidence is ever collected. These big-picture assumptions aren’t subject to being “proven” or “disproven” by any historical evidence, because they determine how any and all potential historical evidence is perceived and characterized in the first place. The only difference between myths and modern history’s assumptions in this regard is that the latter lack any connection with the Absolute.
Philosophy of science has a word to refer to the relationship between such big-picture assumptions and the evidence: “underdetermination.” Any scientific account of anything, including any historical account of anything, is underdetermined by the facts used to support it; the facts can always support more than one account of them.[27] For this reason, philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend has wittily remarked that history consists of “fairytales woven around events that are vaguely historical.”[28]
Here’s an example of how the same historical facts can support multiple, even competing, readings of them: Muslims have traditionally held that the Prophet Muhammad, the man to whom God revealed the words of the Qur’an, was illiterate, and thus was incapable of having written the Qur’an himself. Modern secular historians, however, have almost always dismissed that claim out of hand and have instead treated the Qur’an as a text written by human beings rather than by God. The modern historians simply assume from the outset that divine revelation doesn’t happen, and then they proceed to characterize the origins of the Qur’an in that light.[29] They’re so committed to this pre-rational, pre-factual assumption that they think that “putting something in its historical context” inherently means to characterize that context in a materialistic way, as if “historical context” and “revelation” were mutually exclusive categories; they never consider the possibility that the historical context could itself be an expression of divine activity in the world, such as by setting up just the right set of conditions for the birth of a new religion.[30] The facts of history by themselves are insufficient to prove who’s right and who’s wrong here, because those facts can be read from either perspective.
In this example, both Muslims and materialist historians are really trying to fold history into myth or something very much like it, just as we all do whenever we attempt to write history – as if we all knew on some deep level that myth is more real and more important than history. Both Muslims and materialists in this example claim to know the meaning of what happened in the past before any research has been done to find out what happened. Since Islam has a far better handle on the meaning of life as a whole than materialism does, Muslims are in a far better position to make this call than materialists are. And Muslims, like all religious people, can treat history in a largely mythical way with far more honesty and self-awareness than materialists can.
And yet, there are facts of history, and these facts must be given their due in any rigorous account of history. Even though different perspectives will naturally characterize these facts in different ways, no perspective can dismiss the necessity of grappling with them one way or another. For example, Christians must grapple with the fact that, as we saw earlier, the Gospel of Saint Mark and the Gospel of Saint John give different dates for Jesus’s crucifixion. Claiming that both gospels give the same date isn’t an option. Furthermore, new facts of history are always coming to light, and it’s impossible to predict in advance what they’ll be.
For these reasons, treating the sacred stories of one’s religion as being primarily historical events rather than primarily mythical events is not only an intellectual category error, but a very risky business all around. Attempting to found timeless myths on the ever-shifting sands of historical knowledge is liable to topple that whole edifice sooner or later.
The solution, it seems to me, is to recognize our myths as myths, and let the sands of history shift as they will. There’s divine purpose behind that shifting, and our histories should take that into account. We should do this at least in part by looking for the presence of our myths in history, since myths are “everywhere and ever presently real,” to reference the quote from Marco Pallis we considered earlier. But we shouldn’t expect the correspondence between our myths and history to be perfect. It’s possible that, say, Christianity’s myths about Christ, or Islam’s myths about the early Muslim community, did manifest exactly in some particular set of historical circumstances. But they need not have done so to be truer accounts of reality than any history could ever be.
And at the same time, it’s historically unreasonable of us to demand them to have manifested exactly in some specific historical time and place. If the historical evidence we have available to us at any given time were to strongly suggest that they did not manifest perfectly in history, there would be divine purpose behind that, too. For example, it could be a reminder – in Islamic terms, a “sign” or ayah – of divine transcendence, of the truth that perfection is an attribute that belongs to the divine alone, that “There is no god but God.”
In any case, myths are invulnerable to history, and we likely stand to benefit spiritually from treating them that way much more systematically than we often do at present.
References:
[1] Frankfort, Henri and H.A. Frankfort. 1946. “Introduction.” In The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East. Eds. Henri Frankfort & H.A. Frankfort. The University of Chicago Press. p. 6-7.
[2] Nelson, Richard K. 1983. Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest. University of Chicago Press. p. 16.
I’ve taken the liberty of putting the word “Kk’adonts’idnee” in quotation marks rather than italics so that it’s displayed better in this format. This slight alteration doesn’t change anything whatsoever in the meaning of the quoted text.
[3] Eliade, Mircea. 1987. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Transl. Willard R. Trask. Harcourt Books. p. 68-69.
[4] Eliade, Mircea. 1959. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. Transl. Willard R. Trask. Harper & Brothers. p. 35.
[5] Pallis, Marco. 2008. The Way and the Mountain: Tibet, Buddhism, and Tradition. World Wisdom. p. 2.
[6] Frankfort, Henri and H.A. Frankfort. 1946. “Introduction.” In The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East. Eds. Henri Frankfort & H.A. Frankfort. The University of Chicago Press. p. 6-7.
[7] Pinch, Geraldine. 2002. Handbook of Egyptian Mythology. ABC-CLIO. p. 68.
[8] Ibid. p. 76.
[9] Ibid. p. 143-144.
[10] Ibid. p. 143.
[11] Ibid. p. 90-91.
[12] Frankfort, Henri and H.A. Frankfort. 1946. “Introduction.” In The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East. Eds. Henri Frankfort & H.A. Frankfort. The University of Chicago Press. p. 25.
[13] Pinch, Geraldine. 2002. Handbook of Egyptian Mythology. ABC-CLIO. p. 90-91.
[14] Frankfort, Henri and H.A. Frankfort. 1946. “Introduction.” In The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East. Eds. Henri Frankfort & H.A. Frankfort. The University of Chicago Press. p. 25.
[15] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “Katha Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 78.
[16] Eliade, Mircea. 1987. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Transl. Willard R. Trask. Harcourt Books. p. 109-110.
[17] Eliade, Mircea. 1959. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. Transl. Willard R. Trask. Harper & Brothers. p. 23.
[18] Ehrman, Bart D. 2000. The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. Oxford University Press. p. 49-51.
[19] Blowers, Paul M. and Robert Louis Wilken (transl.). 2003. On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St Maximus the Confessor. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. p. 60.
[20] Le Goff, Jacques. 1992. Medieval Civilization. Transl. Julia Barrow. Basil Blackwell. p. 174-175.
[21] Ibid. p. 180-181.
[22] Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 2000. Ideals and Realities of Islam. ABC International Group. p. 37-38.
[23] Kaltner, John and Christopher G. Frechette. 2020. How the Qur’an Interprets the Bible: Comparing Islamic, Jewish, and Christian Scriptures. Paulist Press. p. 50.
[24] Haleem, Abdel (transl.) 2005. The Qur’an. Oxford University Press. p. 223-224.
[25] Murata, Sachiko, and William C. Chittick. 1994. The Vision of Islam. Paragon House. p. 167.
[26] Giere, Ronald N. 1999. Science Without Laws. University of Chicago Press. p. 90-91.
[27] There are too many good books on the topic of underdetermination to list them all here, but a particularly good summary can be found in p. 30-42 of K. Brad Wray’s Resisting Scientific Realism, and James T. Cushing’s Quantum Mechanics: Historical Contingency and the Copenhagen Hegemony is a first-rate case study of underdetermination in physics.
[28] Feyerabend, Paul. 2020. The Tyranny of Science. Polity Press. p. 13.
[29] Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 2000. Ideals and Realities of Islam. ABC International Group. p. 31.
[30] Murata, Sachiko, and William C. Chittick. 1994. The Vision of Islam. Paragon House. p. 56-57.