We are literal, scientific, rational, surface-oriented, and fast-paced. Yet without imagination, the world becomes arid. Mythopoetic language is magical; it brings worlds into being. Stories of warriors hunting the windswept plains, gods who trick and deceive, maidens transformed into sea monsters, and spiders that weave the web of life have long

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Cultures that sustain cohesive mythological images connect individuals to the four orders of mystery: the transcendent (the gods), the environment (their home in nature), the tribe (the social fabric), and their own psychological grounding (personal identity). History is not kind to such mythic images, however. The luster of the gods fades, and

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This is why the Greeks needed myth: for that boundary, to know where they stood amidst the infinite. No one can simply coexist with the ocean, storms, the cypress trees. They had to codify the elements with language and greater meaning, and create gods out of them—gods who looked suspiciously like themselves—so that even if they were powerless over

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There’s a sense of omnipotence: where Talos was powered by “divine ichor”, the blood of the immortal gods”, AI is powered by vast amounts of data collected from billions of (non-consenting) internet users which is then processed and stored in vast facilities such as OpenAI’s Stargate I in Abilene, Texas.

The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg argued that myth first emerged to help people cope with what he called “the absolutism of reality” — the overwhelming scale of the world and its fundamental indifference to human concerns.