The mythical is neither a lie nor an outgrown preliminary stage of the rational, but a constantly present layer of reality that reveals itself in primal stories, images, and cosmic patterns — and that rational consciousness cannot replace, only repress.
Key moments
In his 1936 lecture on Freud, Thomas Mann formulates a sentence that still irritates: myth is a primitive and early form in the totality of humankind, yet in the individual it is a late and mature one (Mann, 1936). Two opposing movements in a single concept. Whoever speaks of the mythical today immediately encounters the suspicion of backwardness. Myth passes for a lie, an outgrown phase, at best raw material for fantasy novels. And yet it does not let us go. Perhaps you know this: an image, a dream, a story that seizes you without your being able to explain why. A moment in which the rational order of things suddenly grows thin and something older shines through.
This shining-through has a reason. It is no relapse into pre-modern thinking and no sentimental yearning for bygone ages. It signals that beneath the surface of rational consciousness lies a layer of reality that has never disappeared. A layer that is not disposed of by declaring it obsolete.
#What Distinguishes Mythical from Rational Thinking?
The usual answer runs: myth came first, then the Logos. From the magical through the mythical to the mental. So tells the history of consciousness from Jean Gebser to Ken Wilber (Gebser, 1949). The rational is said to have superseded the mythical as the adult supersedes the child. Whoever still clings to myth has missed a developmental stage.
This stage theory is not wrong, but it does not reach far enough. It presupposes that the mythical was an early state of consciousness that we have overcome. But what if the mythical is not a stage at all but a layer? The layer model of reality thinks differently from the stage model: a layer is not superseded. It is overlaid, repressed, forgotten, but it does not disappear. It continues to work — in the hidden, in dreams, in art, in what seizes us without rational explanation.
Jochen Kirchhoff brought this difference to a simple question: is the mythical a preliminary stage we have discarded, or a constantly present world-reality that merely lies hidden (Kirchhoff, 2002)? His answer was clear: myth is not dead. Myth is constantly present. This layer of the mythical exists, and it has an ambivalence that we must endure rather than categorise away.
#Myth and Mythology: A Crucial Distinction
Whoever speaks of the mythical must make a distinction that is almost always blurred in everyday usage: the distinction between the mythical and the mythological. The mythological is, taken literally, the logos of the mythos — a rational processing of mythical content. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is mythologically assembled, not mythical. A rational person has put together archetypes and shaped them into a narrative. This works literarily, but it is something other than the experience that underlies the images.
The mythical itself is not a construction. It is a fundamental attunement of reality that reveals itself in primal stories. Stories that everyone who has a human biography lives through. One is young, and suddenly one is no longer young. One loves, one loses, one searches. These stories repeat because they have a cosmic, a spiritual-cosmic root. They do not come from human inventiveness. They come from a depth familiar to natural philosophy: from a world that is lived through and pervaded by spirit, woven through with high consciousness.
#Plato’s Cave and the Screen World
One of the most powerful mythical images of the West is Plato’s allegory of the cave. Humans sit before a wall onto which shadows are cast. Behind them a priesthood that operates the screen. One is led out, past the machinery of deception, into the light of the sun — the sun of truth and the good.
This image became the core event of the Enlightenment: the unmasking of priestly fraud, the liberation from the matrix of deception. But here the mythical shows its full force. For precisely the West, which set out to free itself from the screen, is the part of the earth that has built a world full of screens. This is not an irony of history. It is a mythical event unfolding before our eyes. We do not see it because we consider the mythical to be settled.
Here the analogy model becomes visible: an image that was set into the world two and a half thousand years ago manifests in the present — not as repetition, but as living reflection. Myth does not recall the past. It shows what is happening now.
#Underworld or Otherworld?
The question in this essay’s title is not wordplay but a philosophical fork in the road. Whoever understands the mythical as underworld — as the dark, repressed, chaotic that lurks beneath the rational — will fear it or romanticise it, but in both cases will treat it as the other of thinking. The mythical would then be what we must control or keep in check.
Whoever understands the mythical as otherworld thinks differently. The otherworld is not beneath us but beside us. It is its own dimension of reality, entangled with the rational world but not derivable from it. The Celtic tradition speaks of the otherworld as a space that is not otherworldly in the sense of unreachable, but one that opens at certain moments: at thresholds, in transitions, in art, in dreams, in genuine encounter.
The consequence of this distinction reaches far. Whoever conceives the mythical as underworld needs control. Whoever grasps it as otherworld needs permeability. They need the ability to open to another register of reality without abandoning the rational. Jochen Kirchhoff repeatedly emphasised that precisely the solid rational foundation is necessary in order to encounter the mythical without being swept away by it (Kirchhoff, 2002). Thomas Mann meant the same: whoever entirely abandons the rational lands in madness.
#What Is Lost When Myth Dies
The repression of the mythical has consequences that reach far beyond the individual psyche. In the Western nihilism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we see what happens when a civilisation kills the mythical: the devaluation of all metaphysical and religious values, the feeling of cosmic abandonment, the horror before the emptiness of infinite space. The human being becomes a cosmically insignificant creature at the threshold of nothingness.
This is not an abstract problem in the history of philosophy. It is a description of what many people feel today without being able to name it. A vacuum of meaning that can be filled neither by consumption nor by efficiency. The gods have withdrawn, as Jochen Kirchhoff put it (Kirchhoff, 2002). But they have not disappeared. They have been repressed. And what is repressed continues to work in hiding: as symptom, as restlessness, as the diffuse feeling that something essential is missing.
Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic in whom Logos and myth were not yet separated, knew: “I searched for myself” (Heraclitus, DK 101). Self-exploration and knowledge of the world are the same event. Whoever knows themselves knows the cosmos. Whoever knows the cosmos knows themselves. This knowledge lives on in the mythical layer of reality, even when rational consciousness has declared it settled.
#The Mythical and You
Perhaps in reading these lines you have recognised something. Not an item of information you did not have before, but a feeling you know yet rarely find words for. The mythical is not a theory. It is a dimension of experience that makes itself known when you allow that the rational order is not the only one.
This is not about abandoning thinking. It is about expanding it: by a layer that thinking itself cannot generate, but that it needs in order to remain alive. Philosophical accompaniment works precisely in this in-between space: where the sayable reaches its limit and the image begins.
If you are moved by the question of what lies beyond the rational surface — not as flight into the irrational, but as an expansion of your thinking by a deeper layer of reality — then you have already begun to listen to the mythical.
#Sources
- Gebser, J. (1949). Ursprung und Gegenwart [The Ever-Present Origin]. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt.
- Heraclitus (c. 500 BCE). Fragments. DK 101: “I searched for myself” (edizesamen emeouton).
- Kirchhoff, J. (2002). Die Anderswelt: Eine Annäherung an die Wirklichkeit [The Otherworld: An Approach to Reality]. Klein Jasedow: Drachen Verlag.
- Mann, T. (1936). Freud und die Zukunft [Freud and the Future]. Lecture at the Akademischer Verein für medizinische Psychologie, Vienna.
- Plato (c. 375 BCE). Republic. Trans. Benjamin Jowett.
