Philip Pullman, author of the apparently anti-Christian His Dark Materials, and the Archbishop of Canterbury debated the significance of religion, and both enthusiastically agreed that ‘myth’ was an important feature of it. But why?
The Greek word muthos originally meant ‘word, speech, message’. It gradually came to mean ‘significant story’. At the one extreme, these were stories that had strong traditional and communal significance because (for example) they ‘explained’ the nature of the human and divine worlds; at the other, they were straight inventions by philosophers to make a point (e.g. Plato’s muthos of Atlantis). At all times there was an uneasy balance between myth as history that preserved a past, myth as explanation of the world, and myth as key to how things should be. But given myth’s status as story, usually involving men and gods, it is not surprising that Greek intellectuals, with their passion for rational explanations of the world in humanly comprehensible terms, should have begun to ask what sort of authority and credibility they had.
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