How Myth Becomes Fact: Literalism, History, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought

“Myth is other people's religion. Religion is misunderstood myth. And science, too, is myth in another key—straining for fact but born in the same crucible of human meaning.”

1. The Ancient Logic of Symbolic Thinking

In the earliest cultures, myth was not fiction or primitive science—it was symbolic truth enacted in ritual, song, and story. A myth was not a proposition to believe or disprove, but a relational process: a symbolic act in which the cosmos spoke through the voice of a people. Time was not linear, but recursive. Ancestral actions shaped the present; divine patterns were lived, not historicised.

There was no clear line between symbol and world, between meaning and matter. A god’s journey was a harvest cycle. A hero’s battle was an inner transformation. These were not “made-up stories”—they were ways of making the world cohere in relation to meaning.

2. Myth Becomes Fact: The Birth of History

But something changed.

In the Hebrew tradition—especially from the Babylonian exile onwards—we begin to see a shift: mythic forms become historicised. Events are dated, genealogies are counted, laws are written. The symbolic gestures of myth take on factual framing. The Exodus isn’t just a pattern of liberation—it’s an event that happened in time. God’s covenant is no longer a mythic relationship enacted in ritual, but a contract rooted in law.

This isn’t a misunderstanding of myth—it’s a transformation of it. The sacred becomes anchored in history. Meaning becomes event. And this shift parallels the rise of another mode of thought: proto-scientific thinking.

3. Myth and the Rise of Scientific Consciousness

Scientific thinking, too, seeks order—but not through symbol and ritual. It seeks cause, mechanism, measurement. It is a practice of disembedding: stepping outside the relational field to observe, describe, and predict.

And in this light, the literalisation of myth may be seen not as a fall from symbolic grace, but as an early alignment with emerging empirical impulses. To turn a myth into history is to begin to treat time as linear, events as sequenced, and meaning as potentially independent of ritual context.

In a sense, the Hebrew tradition prefigures scientific thinking. It creates a timeline. It connects events causally. It grounds meaning in worldly narrative, not cosmic metaphor. This is myth imitating the proto-logic of science.

But there is a paradox.

4. The Paradox of Literalism

Once myth becomes fact, it loses its symbolic elasticity. It cannot evolve. It must be defended as history—or dismissed as error.

This creates two pathologies:

• Fundamentalism, which insists the myth is factual truth.

• Secular literalism, which rejects the myth because it is not factual.

In both cases, the myth is misunderstood. Its symbolic logic is read through the lens of propositional truth. But myth is not a statement about the world—it is a way of worlding.

Literalism arrests the mythic process. It turns symbol into doctrine. And yet it also opens a door to new meaning systems—ones built on cause, coherence, and verification. Myth as fact is a bridge between ritual knowledge and scientific thought.

5. A Relational Reconciliation

From a relational perspective, the split between myth and science is not absolute. Both are meaning-making systems—recursive construals of experience within a cosmos that becomes through our participation.

Science disenchanted the world—but not because it killed myth. Rather, it adopted a new grammar of meaning: one of precision, generalisation, and prediction. Yet even here, the cosmos still speaks. The awe of the stars, the elegance of equations, the poetic metaphors in physics—these are mythic impulses in scientific form.

The task now is not to return to pre-modern symbolism, nor to cling to historic literalism, but to re-symbolise the cosmos: to let myth and science spiral into each other as converging grammars of becoming.

We no longer need to choose between fact and meaning. We can read myth as process, science as participation, and the world itself as a living story still unfolding.