The Myths We Don’t Call Myths: 5 Demythologisation as Myth

The final move in this series must turn back on itself. Having named progress, rationality, necessity, and closure as myths, we now confront a more unsettling possibility: that demythologisation itself is mythic.

Modern intellectual culture often tells a familiar story about itself. Once, we lived amid myth and superstition. Then came reason, science, and critique. Through demythologisation, we are said to have escaped narrative illusion and arrived at a clearer view of reality. This story presents itself as anti‑mythical — yet structurally, it functions exactly like a myth.

Demythologisation promises transcendence. It claims that by exposing myths, we step outside them. But as the previous posts have shown, stepping outside all structuring conditions of intelligibility is not an available move. Critique itself operates within constraints: it privileges certain forms of explanation, legitimises particular authorities, and stabilises expectations about what counts as enlightenment or progress.

The myth of demythologisation does important work. It authorises critique while disguising its own scaffolding. It reassures us that we occupy a privileged vantage point — rational, secular, post‑mythic — from which earlier frameworks can be judged without remainder. In doing so, it quietly installs a new infrastructure of meaning, one that is no less constraining for being unacknowledged.

This is not a call to abandon critique, reason, or science. It is a call to own their mythic character. Demythologisation becomes dangerous only when it mistakes itself for a final escape rather than a situated practice. When its mythic function is invisible, it hardens into authority. When recognised, it becomes a responsible mode of participation.

Seen this way, the goal is not to eliminate myth, but to relate to it lucidly. Myths do not vanish under analysis; they shift, recombine, and reconfigure. The task is to remain attentive to the constraints we inhabit, the narratives that stabilise our thinking, and the power they quietly exercise.

This completes the triad begun with creation without beginnings and deepened through myth as constraint. We end not with demystification, but with responsibility: the willingness to recognise the invisible architecture shaping our worlds, and to live within it consciously, without the comfort of false transcendence.

There is no post‑mythic position. But there is a reflective one. And that, perhaps, is the most human stance available to us.