Myth is one of the most persistently misunderstood practices in human culture.
It is routinely dismissed as false explanation, pre-scientific theory, or imaginative error — a childish attempt to answer questions later resolved by reason, evidence, or science.
This series begins by clearing that rubble.
Myth is not bad science
A common mistake is to treat myth as an early or inferior form of science.
On this view, myths are primitive explanations: stories invented to account for lightning, seasons, illness, death, or fate before causal reasoning was properly developed.
This framing is seductive — and entirely wrong.
Myths do not fail because they explain badly.
They fail only if we assume that explanation was ever their task.
Myth is not a set of beliefs
Myths are also often understood as things people once believed.
This, too, is misleading.
Myths do not primarily function as propositions to which assent is given or withdrawn. They are not held in the same way one holds a belief about the weather, a fact of history, or a scientific claim.
People inhabit myths. They act within them. They recognise themselves and others through them.
Belief may accompany this inhabitation — but it is not what makes myth work.
Myth is not false representation
The deepest misunderstanding treats myth as a failed representation of reality.
Here myth is judged by the standards of reference and accuracy: does the story correspond to how the world actually is?
But this judgement presupposes a representational frame that myth does not occupy.
Myth does not aim to mirror the world.
It does not attempt to describe what exists independently of human orientation.
To accuse myth of misrepresentation is therefore a category error.
The representational hangover
Why, then, does myth seem so obviously deficient?
Because modern thought is saturated with representational assumptions.
We are trained to ask of any story:
Is it true?
What does it explain?
What does it refer to?
These are legitimate questions within certain practices.
They are disastrous when applied indiscriminately.
When myth is forced into a representational frame, it can only appear as error.
What disappears when myth is misread
When myth is treated as failed explanation, several things vanish from view:
its role in stabilising meaning,
its capacity to orient action and attention,
its power to organise significance,
and its ability to hold a world steady enough to live in.
These functions are not secondary embellishments.
They are the work myth actually does.
Clearing the ground
This post has been entirely negative by design.
Before myth can be understood, it must be freed from expectations it was never meant to satisfy.
The next post takes the next step, showing why explanation itself is the wrong frame for approaching myth — and how that frame came to dominate our thinking in the first place.
Only then can myth be approached on its own terms.
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