We live in a disenchanted world. The phrase is Max Weber’s, describing the process by which modern rationality has stripped the universe of inherent meaning, mystery, and magic. Where pre-modern people saw a cosmos alive with purpose and spiritual significance, we see dead matter obeying mathematical laws.
This disenchantment has brought genuine gains. Modern medicine, technology, and scientific understanding have improved human life in ways our ancestors could not have imagined. I’m not interested in romantic nostalgia for a pre-modern past that was often brutal and short.
But disenchantment has costs. Chief among them: we’ve lost the ability to think in myths.
What Myth Is (And Isn’t)
When modern people hear “myth,” they typically think “falsehood”—a naive story that primitive people believed before science came along to correct them. This is a category error of the highest order.
Myths are not failed science. They’re not primitive attempts to explain thunder or illness that we’ve since surpassed with better explanations. Myths operate on a different register entirely. They’re stories that encode meaning, structure identity, and orient communities toward what matters.
The Genesis creation account isn’t trying to be a cosmological treatise. It’s declaring that the world is good, that humans bear divine image, that work and rest follow sacred rhythms. These claims aren’t scientific—they’re existential, moral, theological. Treating Genesis as failed physics is like treating Shakespeare as failed journalism.
C.S. Lewis captured this distinction beautifully:
Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which become truths down here in the valley; in hac valle abstractionis.
The myth is upstream. The propositions, doctrines, and ethical principles we extract from it are downstream. You can analyze Hamlet for its philosophical implications about mortality and meaning, but the play is more than the sum of its interpretable parts.
The Archetypal Resonance
Jung and his followers identified patterns that recur across mythological traditions worldwide: the hero’s journey, the wise old man, the great mother, the trickster, the shadow. These aren’t coincidences. They point to something deep in human psychology—perhaps in the structure of consciousness itself.
When we encounter these patterns in stories, we recognize something. Not intellectually, but viscerally. The myth speaks to parts of us that propositional language cannot reach.
Consider the hero’s journey: separation from the ordinary world, descent into darkness, confrontation with death or its equivalent, transformation, return. This pattern appears in traditions as diverse as ancient Mesopotamia, medieval Europe, indigenous Americas, and contemporary Hollywood. Why?
Because it maps something true about human experience. We all face calls to adventure we’d rather refuse. We all encounter thresholds we’re afraid to cross. We all wrestle with shadows we’d prefer to deny. And we all—if we’re fortunate—return from these encounters transformed.
The myth doesn’t just describe this process; it shapes it. Story precedes experience.
Modernity’s Myth Problem
Our problem isn’t that we’ve stopped believing in myths. It’s that we’ve stopped recognizing our myths as myths.
Every society runs on founding narratives that define what matters, explain where we came from, and orient us toward where we should go. These narratives can’t be proved scientifically—they’re prior to science, providing the framework within which scientific questions make sense.
The modern West has its own myths. Progress: the assumption that history moves inevitably toward improvement. Individualism: the belief that the autonomous self is the fundamental unit of moral and political reality. Meritocracy: the faith that success reflects deserved reward for talent and effort.
These aren’t self-evident truths. They’re stories we tell ourselves. Stories with genuine power and partial truth. But also stories with blind spots, limitations, and dangers—especially when we treat them as mere descriptions of reality rather than interpretive frameworks we’ve inherited and could revise.
The myth of progress, taken literally, makes us incapable of recognizing genuine loss. The myth of individualism makes us unable to see how persons are constituted by communities. The myth of meritocracy makes us blind to luck, circumstance, and structural advantage.
We need myths. The question is whether we’ll choose them consciously or absorb them unconsciously.
Recovery, Not Return
I’m not suggesting we return to pre-modern mythological thinking wholesale. That’s neither possible nor desirable. We can’t unknow what we know. The critical tools of modernity, properly applied, are genuine achievements.
But we can recover a capacity that modernity has atrophied: the ability to inhabit myths knowingly, to participate in stories that are true in ways deeper than factual accuracy.
Christianity, properly understood, offers this possibility. It claims that in Jesus of Nazareth, the mythic patterns that have haunted human imagination across cultures became historical fact. The dying and rising god, the hero’s descent to hell and return, the king who serves—these archetypal themes were incarnated in a particular man, at a particular time, in a particular place.
This is either the central fact of history or a staggering delusion. But it’s not a myth in the pejorative sense—a pleasant story we tell ourselves to cope with meaninglessness. It’s a claim that meaning itself entered history.
As Lewis wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves:
The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.
Living Mythically
What would it mean to live mythically in a disenchanted age?
First, it would mean taking stories seriously—not as entertainment or escape, but as carriers of meaning that shape perception and action. The stories we inhabit form us more than the propositions we affirm.
Second, it would mean recognizing that the “real world” of pure facts and mechanical causation is itself a story—a useful one for certain purposes, but not the whole truth about existence.
Third, it would mean recovering a sense of participation in larger patterns: seasonal rhythms, liturgical cycles, generational narratives. We are not isolated atoms bouncing randomly through void. We are characters in a story still being told.
Fourth, it would mean accepting that some truths can only be approached through symbol, metaphor, and narrative. Not because we’re too primitive for propositions, but because reality itself exceeds what propositions can capture.
The disenchanted world tells us that meaning is something we project onto meaningless matter. The mythic world suggests that meaning is something we discover, something woven into the fabric of things, something that finds us even as we find it.
I know which story I find more compelling. More importantly, I know which story makes human life comprehensible: the courage to sacrifice, the ache of beauty, the pull of moral obligation, the hope that suffering is not the final word.
We are mythological creatures, whether we know it or not. The only question is whether we’ll choose our myths consciously or sleepwalk through inherited narratives we’ve never examined.
Choose carefully. The stories you inhabit will shape who you become.