zompist wrote: ↑Sat Apr 25, 2026 4:32 pm
i think myths are routinely overinterpreted Who says myths are created by philosophers, or even priests? They're more like superhero comics. They're created for entertainment and then, centuries later, theologized, and millennia later, turned into metaphysical parables for post-believers.
E.g., what's he "meaning" of the Flood myth? In the Sumerian myth, some of the gods were annoyed at the "noise" of their new human workers; others wanted to save them. Millennia later the Hebrews rewrote it to be about a single god with mixed motives, annoyed by the "sin" of people he had created but did not then lead.
I don't think most myths were created by philosophers, though some, like Atlantis, might have been. The Neoplatonic philosophers thought myths are important, and the theologians took philosophical arguments seriously.
Philosophers like Proclus wrote hymns at various levels. The lower hymns contain the outward forms of the myths. The higher hymns abstract away more and more of their penny dreadful qualities to show the Ideal Forms they thought the myths demonstrate.
The first hymn of Proclus,
To the Sun is a rare example of a higher hymn that has survived. It praises Helios as the fire of the intellect that orders cosmic harmony.
More generally, humans think in terms of tropes. Cultural philosophies are accounts of how the various tropes circulating in a society fit together, very likely arguing against the validity of some of them and in favor of others. Philosophies also introduce new concepts. Sometimes, these become culturally current. Then new philosophies have to incorporate or argue against them.
Hellenized peoples thought it's plausible that the story of Jesus refers to a god because the gospel stories fit the forms of divine stories current at the time. The people who originally circulated them almost certainly had pet interpretations of what they meant. Those don't necessarily fit what they have come to mean 2000 years later.
(One major difference between Christianity and Orphism that's not commonly mentioned is that Orphism was much more ecstatic than rationalistic compared to Christian theology.)
Of course, there are many factors determining whether a particular story is good enough to become canonized. Usually, divine forms are just used for literary effect. For example, I'm pretty sure the Bollywood image of a guy dancing with a bunch of girls is downstream of Krishna. Even in this serious poem:
https://snapshotsofthelabyrinth.photo.b ... %E0%A7%87/, a beauty with "blood-soaked feet" (literally, feet with blood splashing from the chest) evokes an image of Kali. Personally, I'm inclined to imagine something more along these lines:
https://youtu.be/TDtPLoFIofY
zompist wrote: ↑Sat Apr 25, 2026 4:32 pm
The narrative advantage of polytheism is that characters can have ordinary human motivations. Hera is not an evil power, she's jealous. The young Krishna has the amorous thoughts of a teenager. Seth kills Osiris out of perfectly ordinary power politics. Ea wants to destroy mankind, Enki doesn't. A lot of the weird stuff in myths is explained if you remember how premodern kings and queens behaved. It's the same stew of extraordinary power, lack of morals, struggles for power, and a pose of benignity.
Once you theologize the myth, you might want to use simpler categories to be taken seriously. It's hard to convince sophisticated people that non-human phenomena are motivated by jealousy or romance. For example, Radha is Krishnaism's equivalent of Jesus, the most devoted soul. Krishna's girlfriends are the souls worshipping God. Krishna is God, who is attracted to His worshippers in loving (but not literally romantic) attraction. In Gaudiya Vaishnavism, Radha and Krishna's sameness and difference is a mystery that can't be grasped by the conceptual mind.
zompist wrote: ↑Sat Apr 25, 2026 4:32 pm
Also, though monotheism can arise by combining gods, polytheism can arise by combining the single gods of city-states.
The most important god, you mean.