Myth (from the Greek mythos, “word”, “narrative”, “tale”) — A traditional narrative, sacred and collective in character, that explains the origin of the cosmos, the gods, human beings, and institutions, establishing an order of meaning prior to any rational justification. Myth does not claim to be a hypothesis open to testing, but a lived truth handed down by the community and often bound to ritual. Greek philosophy is born, in large measure, from its tension with mythical thought: the pre-Socratics replace divine genealogies with natural, impersonal principles (physis, arché), effecting the celebrated passage from mythos to logos — from the tale to the argument that exposes itself to criticism. This opposition, however, is never total. Plato turns to deliberately crafted philosophical myths — the myth of Er, in the Republic, Aristophanes’ speech on the androgyne, in the Symposium, and the narrative of Atlantis, in the Timaeus and Critias — to say what purely rational discourse cannot reach, such as the destiny of the soul or the origin of the world. In the twentieth century, myth is rehabilitated as an autonomous form of knowledge: Ernst Cassirer, in the second volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Mythical Thought), describes it as a primordial way of organizing experience; and Claude Lévi-Strauss, in the structural study of myth, seeks the unconscious logic that orders them, breaking them down into minimal units (the mythemes). Myth is thus closely related to logos, from which it differs, and to ritual, which enacts and renews it.
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