I have become quite convinced after many years of people writing "that's a myth" and "this is just a myth" that we never stop to think about what the words "myth" and "mythology" were supposed to mean. I'm okay with people using these terms to mean something like "a fictional tale that cannot be true" but that was never the original intention and I still often write about myths and mythology as what they were supposed to be.
Technically, all scientific explanations are mythology. We derived the word from ancient Greek
mythos, which the
Online Etymology Dictionary says originally meant "speech, thought, story, myth, anything delivered by word of mouth". The dictionary says the modern use of "an untrue story" dates to the 1840s.
Psychologists use "myth" and "mythology" as labels for our perceptions of the world and the things around us. You construct a personal mythology that helps you interpret and understand everything, and you use this mythology to communicate your ideas to others.
By merging personal mythologies together we create social mythologies, shared mythologies. They are simply attempts to explain the world around us.
The evolution of the word "myth" has led it to three modern places:
- A collection of stories about gods and legendary beings or creatures
- An untrue story or legend
- A personal lens for understanding the world and events around us
We construct myths all the time and pass them on. They may be true stories or they may be complete fabrications. A true story may evolve away from its original literal meanings and references. Or a true story may only be told in terms that are limited by the understanding of the story-teller.
Take thunder, for example. Primitive people, having no idea of how sound and electricity work, or even of what an atmosphere is, experienced thunder all the time. They were aware enough to understand that everything seems to have a cause in nature. They could see trees fall, rocks slide, flowing water cut into the landscape, and a million other natural phenomena. But they did not have a body of science to help them understand the mechanics of all these things.
So when the sky thundered people assumed something was making the thunder. They may have guessed that it was a great being. Or maybe the stories started out as imaginary tales told to amuse children but over time the generations of people began to believe the stories meant literally there was someone up in the sky creating a huge fuss.
The myths were attempts to explain how the world worked but they lacked the sophistication of thousands of years of literature, philosophy, and scientific debate.
We still create these kinds of plausible explanations today for just about everything. Average, everyday common people explain all sorts of mundane events with plausible explanations, and accurate explanations. These are all myths in the sense that they are stories we use to explain things. But in some cases the myths take on lives of their own, they change over time in details and maybe even purpose.
Take Donald Trump's claim that he saw thousands of Muslims in America celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers on television in 2001. The verifiable truth has been obscured by the points and counterpoints raised by media researchers and by Trump's supporters and critics. His version of events is a coherent story that has been passed on and shared. That is how we make social myths. They are not necessarily false, untrue stories. They may be untrue or they may be distorted versions of the verifiable truth. But they can also be very accurate in detail.
We rarely have sufficient objective ability to dispute every story people share. Society tends to absorb all these stories and live with them. In time it becomes less important to a majority of people to debate the truth of the facts. The stories live on and may change in unexpected ways.
We keep trying to separate fact from myth but in reality you cannot do that. All you can do is construct more rigid, coherent, and verifiable myths. This is the path that science takes. But science leaves itself open to doubt. A scientist must always follow the facts no matter where they have been before. And so our scientific understanding of the universe also evolves day-by-day, just as the ancient religious myths almost certainly evolved.