Myth as truth

“Myth” is often misheard as “false”; comparativists recover its older sense of narrated world-shaping. Myths coordinate time (origins, catastrophes, returns), identity (who we are in the cosmos), and practice (what ritual re-enacts). Plato criticized some myths yet deployed philosophical myth himself; C.S. Lewis defended myth’s reach into longing; Armstrong often argues myth is a technology of transformation more than information.

Moderns fight rearguard actions about historicity; many communities never framed their core stories as newspaper beats anyway. Fair reading distinguishes layers: priests, poets, philosophers, and rulers reuse myths; cynicism and devotion share a crowded house.

This entry frames myth-as-truth as an authority-and-meaning concept—asking what kind of truth stories bear when they orient a life.