Introduction

Part of my translation of "Theophany: The Spirit of Ancient Greek Religion" by Walter F. Otto

Do the Gods of Greece still hold an interest for us?

We admire the great works of the Greeks, their architecture, sculpture, poetry, philosophy, and science. We are aware that the Greeks are the founders of European culture, which has drawn upon them time and again throughout the generations in more or less decisive rebirths. We recognize that their creations in nearly every field have been unparalleled, and that they remain valid and exemplary for all time. Homer, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Phidias, and Praxiteles, to name just a few, are still leading figures for us today. We read Homer as if he had written for us, we are struck by the statues of the Gods and the Greek temples, and we are moved by the power of Greek tragedy.

But what about those Gods, whose essence and being are testified to by the statues and temples, those Gods whose spirit pervades the entire poetry of Homer, those Gods whom Pindar’s songs celebrate, who in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles prescribe the norm and purpose of human existence—do those Gods themselves not have any interest for us today?

But where would the “flaw” lie, in them or in us?

Would those immortal works ever have become what they are without the Gods, without those specific Greek Gods who now seem to have no relevance for us? What else, if not their spirit, could have awakened the creative forces that would give rise to works capable of elevating, indeed of inspiring devotion in, humans even millennia later?

How can those Gods be of no consequence to us? How can we be content with the general opinion that they were born of a primitive illusion and are only of interest at the stage of their evolutionary process where they—supposedly coming closer to the God of our religion—are also losing their original ability to inspire creative forces?

This has in fact been the attitude of classical scholarship up to the present day. The doctrines of redemption, ideas of immortality, the mystery rites, and other related phenomena that are closely connected to modern religiosity are studied with religious seriousness, although it cannot be denied that all of this was alien to the ancient Greek worldview, as it appears in its greatest representatives from Homer to Pindar to the tragedians. But such is the power of prejudice that this alienness is regarded as a flaw to be deplored, and their true essence is seen instead as an expression of an immature mentality, whose aberrant beliefs could only be explained by an evolutionary view of human intellect.

Thus, the admirer of Greek poetry and art misses something of no little value, indeed the most precious thing. He sees the figures created by humans and perceives nothing of that sublime figure that stood behind them and brought them to life, nothing of the Divine.

The Divine is an experienced reality

In our book, we will follow the opposite path.

The merits of the scientific research carried out by past generations are indisputable. Thanks to the diligent and meticulous work of data collection and evaluation, it has provided us with a wealth of information that was previously unavailable. But despite all this scholarship and acumen, the result remains very limited. We have learned nothing more about the essence of Greek religion than what we already knew: namely, what it was not. It was not of the same nature as Judeo-Christian religion. Rather, it was what the latter detested: polytheistic, anthropomorphic, naturalistic, not at all moral—in a word, “pagan.” Unlike all other pagan religions, it was Greek. What this means is a question that no one has had the courage to ask. Given the unmistakable beauty of the figures of its Gods, it was believed that one could speak of an “aesthetic religion,” which is to say a religion that was not properly a religion. And it was astonishing that epochs of such greatness as those of Homer and the subsequent ones could have been satisfied with a faith that left man, in the deepest needs and aspirations of his soul, in a desert. What, in fact, could these Gods mean to the soul of man if none of them could be called God in the true sense of the word?

We intend, therefore, to follow the distinctly opposite line, opposing the general assumption with a less superficial premise. Precisely this: the Gods are not fictional or imaginary; they are an experienced reality.

Every human civilization has its own manifestation of the Divine, and it is the peculiarity of this manifestation that characterizes its essence, making it what it had to be. This necessity applies to the Greeks as well: they must have had their own peculiar experience of the Divine. This is why, in order to evaluate their works, it is essential to ask in what precise way the Divine manifested itself to them.

Divine and human things, Goethe writes to Jacobi, constitute such a vast domain that the totality of beings in the fullness of their perceptual capacities would barely suffice to grasp it. How, then, could the voice of the most ingenious and creative among all peoples be missing from the great chorus of humanity? And it is not difficult to perceive this voice, provided we are willing to listen to what the great witnesses have to tell us, starting with Homer.

But, before we begin, we must still say something about prevailing prejudices. We must subject the attitudes and theories that continue to hinder the genuine understanding of Greek religion to brief critical clarification.

What is the origin of the contempt for the world of Greek Gods?

The world of ancient Greek Gods is studied as an object of antiquarian interest with the utmost scientific effort, but without the suspicion that, beyond that interest, it may have a sense and a value—without the suspicion that, like everything significant from the past, it has something to say to us.

The first reason [for the modern failure to understand and appreciate the Greek Gods] lies in the victory of a religion that lays claim to a unique and exclusive truth, in contrast to the tolerance of all previous religions. In light of this claim, all other religions—especially the Greek and Roman ones that were previously dominant in Europe—can only be considered false and must therefore be rejected.

In addition, the proponents of this faith have always, from the beginning, concerned themselves with presenting and judging the religion of the ancients, starting from its deteriorated manifestations.

We previously drew attention to the incomparable creative force of Greek religious thought. Here, it is also appropriate to respond to the condemnatory judgment of Christians by pointing out that at its height, Greek (as well as Roman) paganism was undoubtedly more deeply religious than Christianity has ever been. That is to say, the pagan understanding of Divinity, of what man owes it, of what it deserves penetrated much more deeply into man’s existence as a whole. Worship and profane existence were not so separate that the former belonged only to certain days and hours, while earthly affairs could fully unfold according to their own laws. An extreme example is offered in the domain of poetry, by the difference between Homer and the Nibelungenlied on this subject. On this difference, Goethe is said to have expressed himself in this way, according to Henriette van Knebel in a letter of November 9, 1808: “It is in those times [i.e., the Middle Ages] that true paganism was had, whatever the imprint of the Church might have been on customs or manners; Homer had been in communion with the Gods, but in these figures there is no trace of a celestial reflection.”

In any case, the early Christians, even in their condemnation of ancient religion, were much closer to the truth than their enlightened descendants.

In reality, they took the Greek Gods much more seriously than modern science considers right. Since those Gods did not correspond to the one true concept of God, they had to be demonic powers: therefore—in any case—real. And so they could retain, until modern times, a certain authority as mysterious beings, endowed with malefic charm, with which the imagination could still play, more or less seriously.

“Beautiful beings from a fairy tale”

The beauty of the figures of the Greek Gods and the inexhaustible richness of their myths were sources of joy for the ages of Enlightenment and German classicism. But those Gods were for them, as the young Schiller calls them in the poem The Gods of Greece, “beautiful beings from a fairy tale,” beings who, to the poet’s sorrow, could not withstand the criticism of the intellect. It is not as if each of the Olympians, in his sublime greatness, has appeared before the eyes of the poet as the Pythian Apollos appeared to young Goethe in Song of the Wanderer in the Storm.

Alas! Alas! Inner heat,
heat of the soul
and of the soul’s center.
Burn
against Phoebus Apollo! Cold otherwise
his royal gaze
struck with envy
will linger over the mighty cedar,
which, to be verdant,
does not wait for him.

But in the Classical Walpurgis Night of the second part of Faust, where the Greek myth celebrates a wonderful resurrection, only demigods and demonic figures appear on stage, significantly. The immense distance between this presentation and the true world of the Gods immediately meets the eye in the closing, when Aphrodite, the Goddess of love, is imagined floating on the sea instead of Galatea. Even Hölderlin, the divine singer of Greek culture, only knows the great Greek deities as powers of nature—Apollo, for example, as the God of the sun, or Bacchus as the God of wine—or as models of sublime heroism, such as Hercules. It is already clear that his Saints, who are so poignantly heralded in his song, are not in their deep essence figures of the Olympian religion, since he also includes the person of Christ among them.

The opening of Romanticism to the world of myth

The first significant reaction to the superficiality of the interpretation of myths came from a great philologist: Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812; a professor in Göttingen from 1763), friend of Winckelmann and master of the Schlegel brothers. Heyne understood that it is wrong to look for the origin of myths in the realm of fairy tales and poetry. Rather, it should be understood that poetic imagination contributes to their distortion. Myths, in fact, are nothing more than the mother tongue of spirits unable to express their emotions in any other way than through images and symbols in the face of powerful figures of reality. For the first time, the mythical representations were thus recognized as having a character of truth, even if only a symbolic truth.

Romanticism seemed called to find its way to a deeper understanding of myth. The reality of great poetry itself portrayed a different relationship between poetry and myth: if Heyne had seen poetry as a danger to myth, it was now understood that the poet, precisely as such, is touched by the spirit of myth and draws from its depths the living word. It was thus understood that myths must be something more than images and symbols of possible human experiences that man can construct at any time: myths are revelations of being, each reserved for a particular time in the history of humanity. The endeavor of these brilliant minds was to make the primordial truths more accessible to our ability to grasp them. Instead of approaching myth with preconceived ideas, as had been done until then, they first tried to raise themselves to the level of the myths, in order to be able to hear their language. Schelling expresses this endeavor in his Philosophy of Mythology: “The problem is not how the phenomenon should be bent, distorted, simplified, impoverished in order to be explained according to the principles we have proposed should not be exceeded; the problem is to see how and in what sense our thought must expand to be adequate to the phenomenon.”

Here, a man whose appearance in the history of myth interpretation seems like a myth itself deserves special mention: Jacob Josef Görres, that wonderful spirit whose breath caused the dormant flame of myth to burst into a powerful blaze. He spoke of an ancient, sacred, and long-forgotten mythical knowledge, inherited from prehistoric humanity, from that humanity which, according to his belief, was still, not unlike a newborn child, in vital communion with Mother Nature, so much so that it received from her that knowledge that was destined to be obliterated with the breakdown of this living union.

Alongside him, it is important to remember Schelling, whose Lectures on the Philosophy of Mythology, begun in 1821, still constitute the most inspired and powerful approach to myth on its own terms. It is impossible to imagine a grander interpretation of the reality of myth than the one Schelling, with his impressive erudition, presented in that work: in the history of the formation of myths, according to Schelling, the struggles and powers of the world’s becoming are not so much reflected as they are carried on.

Limits and cessation of the authentic and living research on myths

When, in the second half of the 1950s, Schelling’s mythological writings appeared posthumously, the sense of what it means to engage in a living search for myth had already faded.

In 1810, the first volume of Symbolism and Mythology of the Ancient Peoples, Especially the Greeks by Friedrich Creuzer was published. Its influence was great. Even Schelling learned much from it. But it was a dangerous venture that he undertook. Creuzer thought he could make Those same myths that suggested grand insights to the religious-philosophical spirit of someone like Görres into concrete scientific facts. Creuzer relied on his vast erudition and interpretive acuteness to the point of artifice. It is no wonder that his enterprise provoked the vehement reaction of specialists. It should not have been difficult for Christian August Lobeck, who was better informed and clearer-headed, to demolish those constructions. After the publication of his Aglaophamus (1829), it looked as if myth research had not achieved anything. There is no doubt that the danger inherent in the Creuzerian method was now exposed: the arcane doctrines of the ancient myths that Creuzer believed he had deciphered became objects of ridicule, and anyone who wanted to follow in his footsteps was dissuaded in the strongest possible way. But what did this harsh critic himself have to offer? Was it perhaps a reason to celebrate or to boast of intelligence that errors in execution had silenced a serious project of inspiration and commitment? It was the victory of the most superficial of explanations. It was easy enough for them to dismiss devotion as mere fantasy, since for enlightenment everything is so simple and unproblematic that even a child would be able to understand. Behind the ancient and venerable cults and myths, there was actually nothing, absolutely nothing that deserved deep reflection.

With the polemic unleashed by Creuzer’s interpretation, authentic research on myth was dealt a mortal blow, from which it has not recovered to this day.

Deviant interpretations of religious myths; myths as aberrant products of a primitive mentality

It is not my intention to write a history of research on myths from the time of German classicism to the present day. It is enough, for the purposes of what is relevant here, to recall a few decisive points. In doing so, it is inevitable for more than one important name to go unmentioned. We now turn to the second half of the 19th century, the era of the powerful rise of the natural sciences and of Darwinism, the era in which the almost universally dominant conception of mythic religions, particularly the Greek religion, took root.

By mythic religions, we mean polytheistic religions. To the person of Christian (or Jewish or Islamic) background, such religions seem to lack or betray the very essence of the religious, with their multiplicity of Gods and their intramundane, figurative, anthropomorphic character. Is not the Divine, as such, unity, transmundanity, omnipotence, infinite wisdom and goodness? What else is the serious religious feeling if not reverent tremor before God as Legislator, Judge and Conciliator? And that is especially true of the Olympic chorus of Greek Gods, so fascinating in their figure, but precisely because of this, too earthly to be called “God.”

For this reason, it was believed that the judgments about their nature and origin belonged to aesthetics and to the scientific theory of evolution.

They replaced true religious research with a theory of the evolution of human cognition, for which it was entirely obvious and beyond discussion that the initial stages had to be categorized as a most rudimentary primitiveness. This contradicted the biblical doctrine that the one transcendent God revealed all things to man in the beginning. Nevertheless, science also came to offer a great service to theology: with the rigor that is its own, it seemed to demonstrate that faith in the inconvenient pagan divinities is explicable only by keeping in mind the “errors” typical of primitive mentality.

“The errors!” Yes, errors—note this, because it is telling—errors in logical thought and experimentation. The perspective we are discussing can’t conceive of any other kind of man besides the rational and technical man of the 19th century.

Animism—E.B. Tylor, H. Usener

The works that marked the direction of the science [of religion] throughout Europe and even had a decisive influence on a work of such importance as Erwin Rohde’s Psyche: Worship of souls and belief in immortality among the Greeks came from English scholars. After Herbert Spencer, the first volume of whose great systematic work had already appeared in 1860, came E.B. Tylor with his famous Primitive Culture (1871). Here was the first formulation of a theory destined for exceptional success: so-called animism. According to this theory, primitive man, reflecting on the strange phenomenon of dreaming and even more on what distinguishes a dead body from a living body, would have come to the conclusion that there must be an invisible entity, a “soul,” on which life is based and whose temporary or definitive absence causes sleep or death. Primitive thought had thus found a principle of explanation that could also be applied to the life of animals and plants, indeed to things and phenomena of all kinds that were astonishing or terrifying: they could all bear within them a soul or a spirit, and be similar to humans and personal, even if far superior to them. A completely natural thought process thus led from the primitive concept of the soul to the idea of superhuman beings and, ultimately—given that from this perspective the soul could exist even without an earthly body—to the belief in the Gods.

Another evolutionary theory, which, although it does not concern “animism” contains some analogies to it, was developed by Hermann Usener in his work Names of Gods: Attempt at a theory of the development of religious conceptual formation (1895). Usener is responsible for the concepts still present and operative [in the religious sciences] of Gods of the Moment and Particular Gods. According to Usener, at the origin, man grasped only the most elementary events as divinity, first and foremost those that, with a flash, left his soul stunned and bewildered. A confirmation of this interpretation seemed to him to be some religious observances [dating back to prehistory], but still surviving in historical times. Usener particularly referred to a strange group of Roman deities’ names, collected by the learned Varro at the end of the Republican era and then used by the Fathers of the Church as welcome material for mocking pagan religion. Now those Gods of the Moment and Particular Gods, so limited at the origin, gradually rose over time, as the original meaning of their names became increasingly obscure. Such names could thus be taken as proper names of personal beings, no longer necessarily linked to a single circumscribed field of action, but capable of expanding their sphere of power more and more. This opened up the possibility of unlimited evolution.

Exposed in such a concise way, the theories of these scholars appear fatally muted and unconvincing, even though they had such a strong influence on further research. But both Tylor and Usener carried out their project with such commitment and genuine scholarship that even their errors appear fruitful, and their works can never be said to be completely outdated.

Religion, Magic, and “the Primitive”

Things were different with their successors. They only took the bare theory from them and, applying it blindly to the various manifestations of pagan religions, arrived at conclusions that can only be described as absurd. Proud of possessing an immense amount of material, they simply forgot how to think and judged what they called “primitive” with a carelessness that demonstrated that the real era of primitiveness had only just begun.

And so, between the 19th and 20th centuries, it was “demonstrated” that religion and art originated from the “original stupidity” of man (Konrad Theodor Preuss). And several years later, to the applause of famous specialists, it was also “demonstrated” that the men originally believed they could themselves, through their magical arts, make all their wishes come true, until the blatant impotence of their practices forced them to invent the Gods. It was even asserted that this most primitive stage is demonstrable—with scientific precision—even in a religion like the Roman one (Ludwig Deubner).

This theory of magic is unmistakably a product of the technological era. Magic—no one can deny it—has been and still is a fact. Among so-called primitive peoples, magical formulas, combined with certain practices, produce effects that cannot but appear miraculous given our presuppositions. But careful observers have long noted that those practices, in and of themselves, serve no purpose. Their application, to be effective, requires a long and difficult preparation, as well as an innate spiritual disposition, inherited in certain families. The magician must often toil long to enhance his will to an extent that is entirely inconceivable to us: we even hear it said expressly that this is more a matter of a metanatural intensity of thought—what Paracelsus, with such phenomena in mind, designates as “imagination”—rather than of magical practices, to the point that these can even be omitted.

All of this clearly demonstrates that we find ourselves in a sphere that is certainly not only technical: and yet, all of this is simply ignored by scientific theory. To this mentality, the magician is the precursor of today’s technical man, from whom he differs only in the insufficiency of the means at his disposal. The magician believes that by distorting the real cause-effect relationship and using images, analogies, and similar means, he can achieve his goals with the same necessity with which the modern technician achieves his. Since, therefore, [in magic] there could be no question of anything other than intellectual operations aimed at achieving certain advantages, the existence of a “pre-logical” thought was devised, within the framework of which everything that is absurd from the standpoint of rational experience and logic would appear and continue to be possible. And this was and is supposed to be the way of thinking of so-called primitive peoples, those peoples whom we observe to live and act with so much reasonableness and sanity!

The Gods as natural events that the primitive person thinks are endowed with and moved by a will

How much this “primitive mentality” (Lévy-Bruhl) is an obstacle to understanding pre-Christian cults is demonstrated by the works that go by the name of “science of religions.”

It is time to finally realize the naivety with which scholars of the last generations have projected their own image onto prehistoric man. Because they failed to see in the oldest cults anything but primitive forms of technique, it was natural that the figures of the Gods would lose their life and meaning in their eyes, appearing as pre-scientific concepts of natural phenomena that we also know well, but that we interpret correctly.

Hence all that proliferation—in scientific treatments of Greek religion, even in the most recent ones—of Gods of vegetation, time, year, spring and winter, etc., that is, beings that are called Gods but that in and of themselves are nothing but natural phenomena, to each of which—to explain their cause—a will has been attributed from time to time. That this will, devoid of substance and reality, was venerated as God, that the awareness of its proximity generated not only fear or hope for help, but also joy in songs, dances, and rituals—all this was not a problem for those “scientists,” because they were convinced that a God was originally nothing but a particular force of nature, whose concept had “evolved” over time into that of a Person worthy of veneration. As is known, magically creating something out of nothing is a typical habit of evolutionary theories.

That the idea of God from the beginning belongs to a dimension of being totally different from the realm of cause and effect; and that this idea would never have occurred to a man if God himself had not revealed himself as God: this is a thought or suspicion that does not even cross the minds of those researchers. For them, it is not in doubt that only the modern religion has the right to speak of divine revelation. Those scholars, in the name of science, which is said to be objective, were thus doing the best service to theology.

Interpretation of myths and psychology of the unconscious

Finally, there remains to be said a word about the interpretation of myths based on the recently popular depth psychology. The very term “depth psychology” proclaims from the outset that here, in the foreground, is not the depth of cosmic reality, but rather the true or presumed depth of the human soul.

This approach is dangerously misleading, as it indulges and flatters the harmful narcissism of modern man.

We are no longer talking about a particular mentality, but about experiences and visions that are not simply hypothetical in prehistoric man, but are still observable today and can be made the subject of scientific investigation. Depth psychology teaches its followers to avert their eyes from the world and look only inward, where it proposes the true seat of every mythical event is to be found.

In this way, it contributes in a frightening manner to the impoverishment of contemporary man, who is already on the way to losing the world and occupying himself exclusively with himself, with his science and his technology.

By analyzing the dreams or dream-like states of people suffering from illnesses or psychological disturbances, depth psychology claims that we encounter authentic mythical figures that, precisely because they are such, can shed light on the origin and nature of myth. But that is not enough! Those visions are so similar to the mythical figures that have come down to us from the most remote past that the idea of their mysterious return becomes necessary. Therefore, they have also been called archetypes, that is, primal figures. Preserved through the millennia—without the spirit being aware of it—in the so-called unconscious psyche, they resurface in moments when this psyche needs them, in the form of visions. In order to make this strange process understandable, we must admit the existence of a “collective unconscious,” capable of faithfully preserving what was thought or seen in the most remote prehistory.

If things are as depth psychology claims, myths should have been something akin to lived experiences from their very first appearance. The only difference would have been that back then, they were present in waking consciousness. Later, they would have sunk into the unconscious, where they remain until this day, when psychotherapy sees them emerge in its patients’ dreams and brings them back to consciousness.

Now, let us assume that those dream images are so similar to the original figures of the Gods as to make the hypothesis of a direct relationship inevitable. In that case, the hypothesis of an unconscious mind, in which the ideas of prehistory are preserved, is the very last thing we should consider. Such a hypothesis, in fact, apart from the difficulties it already poses to thought, proceeds from the tacit assumption that the original myth contains no ontological truth. If this were not the assumption, we should at least consider the possibility that the truth contained in the myth might still be experienced today in certain situations, since it faithfully reflects the same reality that we too have to deal with. However, it is not very likely that this should happen by chance in the dreams of this or that person, or even in the dreams of individuals whose minds have become clouded.

Authentic myth—as we shall see later—is essentially intelligence of the spirit. This means that myth does not arise from the dreams of the psyche, but from the clear gaze of the spirit open to being. Authentic myth is not akin to dream visions. In fact, it is the exact opposite. There are indeed men who are sometimes given to being “spiritually vigilant” even in their dreams. However, sleep and dream are generally only open to what happens within the individual or to what concerns him personally, but are closed to the truth of being. As Heraclitus said: “In sleep, when the gates of perception are closed, the mind in us remains disjointed from ‘what surrounds us’… but when it wakes up, it reappears at those gates as if at windows and, reconnecting with what surrounds us, resumes the rational faculty.”

But let’s get to the essence: it is not at all true that dream images are identical or even akin to mythic figures. The interpretation of myth proposed by depth psychology is circular reasoning: it assumes what it believes itself to prove. It begins with a preconceived notion of myth, based on a misunderstanding, only to find this idea confirmed in dream visions. It may also happen that a person who has fallen into a state of deep despair finds a sense of relief and protection, if a mother figure appears to him in a dream. But this mother figure has nothing in common with the ancient divine figure of the “Great Mother” except the name.

In every authentic myth, there is a God with its own world that manifests itself. The God, whatever their name and however they distinguish themselves from the other Gods, is never a single power, but always the entire being of the world revealing itself in the particular way of that God. We call powers with a circumscribed field of action demons or spirits, but to assert that only one of these has developed into a God is a completely inconsistent statement of evolutionary theory.

Thus, the Great Mother Goddess—to stick with this example—is, as a Divinity, an original, living and sacred figure, in and with whom the being of the world reveals itself in its infinity and ineffability. How else could she have won over humans, wrested them from their small selves, and dragged them body and soul into the fearful immensity of the Divine—as the cults, which were to some degree terrible and cruel, that were dedicated to her show? Only the visible manifestation of the original foundation of the totality of being could have such an effect on humans, when they turned to it, vigilant in their senses and with their spirits open to what Goethe calls “the vastness of the Divine.”

Now compare the figures that the psychotherapist finds in the dream life of their patients with those divine figures, and the similarity, already problematic at first glance, will dissolve into nothingness. Dream images, however illuminating they may be on an individual level with regard to the psychology and fate of the subjects of these dreams, say nothing about the “common divine Logos” (Heraclitus).

Therefore, the reference to them only serves to obscure the nature of myth.

Myth as original revelation

“Depth psychology,” from which many still expect the decisive word on myth, belongs, with its doctrines and mentality, to the world that is the exact antithesis of myth. It casts man back onto himself, precluding him from reaching the Spirit that shines from the open vastness of the world. In this regard, it is entirely the child of this era that has become devoid of Gods and the Divine, an era that speaks of “nature” when it has in mind and intends to designate scientific concepts and experiments, speaks of “being” and means the psychological states it has made the object of analysis. Thus, one begins to talk about myth and the eternal return of primordial figures concerning dreams in which a sick soul, all closed up in the dark prison of itself, revels.

But it is now time to interrupt the simply negative discourse and to confront myth directly, asking what its true essence consists of.

We are accustomed to understanding myth as a story that may not be true in the literal sense of the term, but that can nevertheless contain a deeper meaning. With this meaning, the term mythos was already used by the Greeks. The “myths” of the afterlife and the destinies of the soul that Plato poetically narrates in the Phaedo fall into this category, and he explicitly declares that it is foolish to believe that things are exactly as they are told. However, he feels able to affirm that things beyond our knowledge are of that nature.

However, the era of the great myths had to think in a completely different way. Regardless of everything else, the term mythos​—which means nothing but “word”—originally referred to the word of reality, not of thought. These ancient myths, however, appeared to later ages so little worthy of belief that there was no other choice than to declare them absurd or to consider them, no differently than philosophical myths, a fantasy capable of containing deep truths.

This still remains the current idea of myth.

We are accustomed to calling every intentionally serious story “mythical” when it is in contrast to our scientific knowledge of natural phenomena, and so we call any belief in miracles “mythical.” When we read in the Old Testament that the sun stops for Joshua or the walls of Jericho collapse at the sound of the trumpets of the Israelites; when we read in the Gospels of the dead being raised and demons being cast out, what do we say today? All of this is “mythical” because “we know” that demons do not exist. This is precisely what demythologization affirms through its greatest representative.

But the belief in miracles is not in and of itself mythical. What distinguishes mythical figures from our scientific knowledge is something totally different. It is worth noting that we have failed to ask whether all the discourses that go by the name of myth are of the same kind or whether it is possible to identify a group characterized by a specific content, to which the qualification of “mythical” only properly belongs, while all others usurp the name on the basis of superficial similarities.

Ancient civilizations, as well as so-called primitive peoples of today, distinguish among their fabulous tales a special category that deserves the highest respect, not because it has more to do with the exceptional and the portentous than the others, but because it possesses the character of sacredness. This distinction cannot be attributed to simple tradition or the illusions of an archaic mentality. The reality is that the myth, understood in its authenticity, is something that is constitutionally specific and incomparable: it is dynamic, possesses a power, and penetrates life, giving it form.

The formative power of authentic myth is radically different from the power that—as experience teaches—even superstitions exercise in their own way. Where the myth is present, there is true productivity, the birth of eternal figures, and the regeneration of man.

In fact, the original and authentic myth is not conceivable without cult, that is, without a behavior and an action imbued with solemnity and capable of elevating man to a higher sphere.

There have been different opinions over time about the relationship between myth and cult. At first, one might think it is obvious that the original fact was the myth and that the cult was, in relation to this, like an addition in the form of representation. With the advent of the era of rationalism and technology with its typical modes of explanation, the relationship was reversed. It was not the myth, but the cult that had to be the original element: the cult, whose forms are usually ancient, while the traditions of myths are more recent. It was believed that the myth could be explained on the basis of magic, and it was seen as a fantastic explanation of the acts of worship whose true nature and concrete purpose were no longer understood. But when, a few decades ago, through more careful research, the conviction arose that there is no cult at all without myth, and never could have been, the problem had to be posed anew.

Returning to the old conception of cult as a mere representation of myth was impossible, since cult—as evidenced by the cultic rituals that still persist today—is not simply a representation of the mythic event, but is the event itself, in the full sense of the word. How else could salvific effects be expected? The problem itself is poorly posed; the question—does cult depend on myth, or myth on cult?—is mistaken. In reality, not only is there no authentic cult without myth, but there is no authentic myth without cult. Myth and cult are the same thing. This is of decisive importance for understanding either one.

That they are one and the same thing can be easily understood as soon as one frees oneself from the prejudice that the creative and shaping force of myth could only be revealed in words and not also—not to say more originally—in behavior and action. Think of the sacredness and power of suggestion that gesture, bearing, and the rhythm of movement take on in cult; think of the grand language of temples and depictions of Gods. In all of this, the divine truth of myth is manifested no less and with no less immediacy than in the words entrusted to revelation.

We are faced here with an original phenomenon of the religious attitude. This attitude—whether in gesture, action, or word—is itself the manifestation of divinity in the sacredness of its being.

In myth as word, Divinity appears as a figure: more precisely, as a figure similar to humans, a fact of infinitely profound meaning. Thus, with these features, it stands at the center of every authentic myth. The Divinity, an experienceable but unthinkable reality, together with its world, is miraculous—indeed, it is the miracle itself, not because it contradicts natural laws, but because it belongs to a sphere of being different from that to which everything that can be made an object of thought and science belongs.

In the self-testimony of the Divine in myth, three degrees can be distinguished, with the understanding that the distinction should not be interpreted as a temporal succession.

First degree: the upright position, facing the sky, a position that is only proper to humans. It is the first evidence of the myth of the sky, the sun, and the stars, which is revealed here not in words, but in the upwards tension of the body. If the religious sense of this attitude escapes us today, the same cannot be said of other attitudes that have been familiar since time immemorial, such as standing in devotion or ecstasy (Latin: superstitio), raising one’s arms or, conversely, bowing, kneeling, clasping one’s hands, etc. These attitudes are not originally an expression of faith: they are the revelation of the Divine in humans; they are the myth itself made manifest.

Second degree: the myth appears as “form” in the movement and actions of humans. The solemnity of walking, the rhythm and harmony of dances and the like, all this is nothing but the self-testimony of a mythical truth that wants to come to light. The same applies to the works of human hands. A stone is erected, a column is raised, a temple is built. The fact that they are considered sacred appears to the coarse intellect as “fetishism.” [The reality is that, far from being fetishes, that column, that statue, or that temple] is not even a monument intended to keep alive the thought, feeling, or memory of something. The myth itself is the sensible manifestation of the truth, and because it is divine, it wants to dwell with its divinity in the concreteness of forms, in the visible.

Considered from this perspective of cultic action, the myth is easier to grasp in its true sense. The myth of a salvific event, when it manifests itself in the form of action in the ceremonies of festive occasions, is in fact less subject to misunderstanding than when it is proposed in the form of discourse, since in this case it may appear to be about past events that occurred in a remote time. There is no idea that distorts the essence of the myth more than this understanding. The saying of the friend of Emperor Julian is a good example of [a proper] understanding of myth: “This never happened: it is always happening!” Even in our liturgy, the sense that it is not a simple commemorative celebration has not yet been extinguished. The cultic action is indeed the divine event itself in its perpetual re-enactment.

Third degree: the myth as word, in accordance with the original meaning of the term.

That the divine wants to manifest itself in word: this is the greatest event of the myth. And just as the attitudes, actions, and cultic creations [that we have talked about] are themselves myth, so too is sacred discourse the direct manifestation of the divine figure and its power.

The fact that such a figure is similar to the human has already constituted a scandal for the misunderstanders of myth in ancient times, and it continues to be a scandal for its misunderstanders today. Myth is accused of irrationality, without realizing from what irrational premises it proceeds. Even when it is believed that the Divine must, in and of itself, be thought of as incorporeal, can it not assume a human aspect if it has to reveal itself to man? To think that the Divinity meets man with a human face is not superstition, but rather the seal that serves to distinguish the authenticity of every possible revelation.

Thus, to summarize, the two constitutive moments of myth—action and word, cult and myth, understood here in the narrow sense—are configured in this way: in cult, it is man who rises to the Divine, lives and acts in communion with the Gods; in myth, it is the Divine that descends and becomes human.