Who Were the Sea Peoples?

As I have mentioned previously, to mistake a myth for a theory is a terrible error. Genesis I is not a scientific theory of how the world was created, nor is it an historical account. It is a myth about creation: it expresses a mystery that we can't capture in scientific theories or historical accounts, but that we can hint at through poetry such as, "Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters." I was prompted to think about this again tonight when one of my online friends was circulating an inspirational poster telling the reader, "There is nothing wrong with you accept what other people tell you is wrong with you." Of course there is something wrong, and fundamentally wrong, with each of us! That something is expressed again and again in myths: in the Biblical story of the Fall, or Plato's myth of the originally perfect beings that split in two, in the tale of P...

Myths are not ideas, in the sense that a scientific theory or philosophical thesis are ideas. They are images. There telos is not to be analyzed, but to be contemplated. Take the myth of original sin. This is not natively a proposition of moral philosophy. It is neither a scientific nor historical theory as to how humankind wound up in the shape it is in. A myth is an object for contemplation, not for analysis. If one meditates upon a myth, if it is a "true" myth , after some time, one will find that the myth illuminates a part of human experience in a way that neither scientific nor philosophical ideas can. (That is why Plato, the father of philosophy, still continually created myths: the story of the cave is not a "philosophical doctrine": it is a myth .) Now, it is absolutely true that myths can be transformed into theories: then they are called dogma. As Eric Voegelin put it, living symbols are then transformed into hieroglyphs , "superficial invocati...