Here we have our present age… bent on the extermination of myth. Man today, stripped of myth, stands famished among all his pasts and must dig frantically for roots. – Friedrich Nietzsche.

We live in a time where science and technology have diminished our suffering. But can the same be said about our psychological suffering? Whilst our lifespans have been prolonged and diseases eradicated, this has not changed our existential predicament. Just like every other man or a woman to have walked this earth, we are born, and we will die.  Everything and everyone we know will turn to dust, and unless we are one of the exceptional few, our legacy will live on for at most a generation. 

While science and technology have much to offer, there is no device, equation, or pharmaceutical drug that can imbue our life with meaning. This role has traditionally been played by myth.

The West finds itself in a difficult position in this regard, the decline of Christianity assured the West into a period of myth-lessness which remains to this day. This lack of myth, irrespective of all the advances in science and technology, has made it harder for us to face up to our existential predicament and increased our propensity for psychological suffering.

How does myth help us shoulder our existential burdens and alleviate our psychological suffering? Have we not moved beyond our need for myth with the rise of science? Myth addressed different questions. The scientific method deals with cause and effect, and helps us understand the workings of the natural world. Myths, on the other hand, are narratives that transmit modes of behavior. patterns of action, and ways of experiencing the world that promote healthy psychological development and meaningful life. 

The myth, in other words, embodies the wisdom of generations past, offering solutions to our shared existential dilemma, and helping unite a culture under a shared vision. When a society loses its myth, the members of that society do not lose their need to author stories about their life. Rather this need is so integral to our well-being that we emphasize certain past events, deny others, and even fabricate certain elements of our life story to make sense of who we are and where we are going. But when a society’s horizons are aligned with myth. The process of constructing a meaningful life story (one that promotes our psychological development) is greatly facilitated. 

To understand how the myth achieves this feat we need to examine the role of the mythological symbol. For it is the symbols of the myth that act as the unnoticed omnipresent guardians, under whose protection the young soul grows up. Unlike a sign, which represents a known entity, a symbol is an image or representation which points to something essentially unknown. 

The abandonment of myth has in part been a reaction against the symbol. Why should we believe in something that considered objectively, through the lens of our more enlightened scientific mind, has no basis in reality? But the role of the symbol is not to help us manipulate or understand the external world, rather its primary purpose is to help us develop psychologically, and it achieves this task irrespective of its external truth value.

Christianity was one of a multitude of religious myths that have great value for the individual. The religious myth is one of man’s greatest and most significant achievements. Giving him the security and inner strength not to be crushed by the monstrousness of the universe.

There has been a loss of myth, but not meaning. 

The West finds itself in a precarious position, for without a myth, to help us author a meaningful life story and unite the culture in which we live, many people will latch on to collectivist political ideologies. These ideologies encompassing their own sets of symbols and rituals, allow those who follow them to feel they are contributing to something bigger than their solitary self. 

The worship of the state is the worship of a false idol. For while collectivist political ideologies can relieve its followers of the burdens of their individual existence, it is an inadequate replacement for myth. Statism does not promote the healthy development of the personality, rather the moral education it offers is one that diminishes the value of the individual in favor of the collective. As history has amply shown, the worship of the state does not produce cultural unity but instead breeds division, conflict, and death.

The state is merely the modern pretense of a shield, a make-belief, a concept. In reality, the ancient war god holds the sacrificial knife, for it is in War that the sheep are sacrificed. So instead of human representatives or a personal divine being, we now have the dark gods of the state. But the old gods are coming to life again in a time when they should have been superseded long ago, and nobody can see it.

If we agree that collectivist political ideologies are an inadequate and destructive alternative to our lack of myth, is the only remaining option to descend into a passive state of nihilism? Such a response is inappropriate and would only lead to a wasted life, for while we may be forced to accept the mythless condition into which we were born, it does not follow that we must endure a meaningless existence as a result.

The need to organize our own small portion of meaning, in an otherwise meaningless world, is why our age, in addition to being a mythless one, can also be viewed as the age of the hero.

The hero is the one who displays the strength of will, rather than being overcome by the inner chaos that plagues those disconnected from an effective myth. The hero faces up to this chaos and discovers his or her own solutions to the existential burdens of our time

The bold few who take on this challenge, return themselves to the world of myth. For in striving to impose order on their own small corner of the world, they have chosen the mythological path, that is represented as the fight with a dragon. Only the one who has risked the fight with the dragon, and has overcome it, wins the treasure. He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self, and thereby has gained himself. This experience gives faith and trust in the ability of the self, to sustain him, for everything that menaced him from inside, he has made his own. He has acquired the right to believe that he will be able to overcome all future threats by the same means. He has arrived at an inner certainty, which makes him capable of self-reliance.