The Recursion of Mythos
At the dawn of written history, the first words were pressed into soft clay with the tip of a reed. They recorded the legendary exploits of a heroic king in his quest for the meaning of life. The Epic of Gilgamesh originated before 2100 BCE and was passed down for centuries by word of mouth, held in human memory and dynamically shaped by each retelling. Finally, by the 10th century BCE it was fired into 12-tablets of Standard Babylonian cuneiform script, preserving the earliest literary epic ever known.
Grieving the death of his best friend, Gilgamesh left the comforts of his castle to go in search of the mystical figure, Utnapishtim, believed to have found eternal life. As the legend unfolds, he learns that his fear of death is actually the fear of meaninglessness. Although he fails to win immortality, the quest itself gives meaning to his life.
A fascinating interwoven part of the tale appears on the remaining broken shards of tablet 11. Here it is revealed that Utnapishtim’s longevity was gifted to him by the gods because of his role in building an ark to save family and animals from a great flood. While the names and some details conform to differences in language and culture, the story is immediately recognizable as the biblical testament of Noah recorded several hundred years later in the Hebrew Torah.
The oral tradition of transmitting these narratives using memory aids of rhythmic repetition and symbolic re-enactment continued for millennia before scribes began working to document the histories. Literacy was very limited in early societies. Most people were informed of scriptures and myths only by preachers and storytellers.
In the adjacent region of ancient Greece, beginning around 566 BCE, the epic poems of Homer started to be transcribed onto papyri during performances at the Panathenaia Festival in Athens. They were not so durable as clay tablets and few original fragments remain that date before the 3rd century BCE, about the same age as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
This was the period when stories first came to be written. It marked a civilizational transition gradually taking place over centuries. The narratives were foundational tools for education, moral instruction, and social cohesion. They embedded cultural identity in a shared mythology.
When the tales became stabilized by text, it altered how people encountered and engaged with communication. Instead of co-created interactions, written works could be read independently which fostered personal interpretation. Perception shifted from hearing the portrayal of an embodied experience, to reading as a reflective and intellectual act, at least to the extent that education permitted.
This coincided with a phenomenal perceptual shift, though cause and effect are hotly debated. Local myth-based world views were slowly replaced by more universal, self-reflective, and critical modes of thinking. Inherited beliefs about gods, morality, and justice came under question. Reason, logic, and ethical reflection began to usurp mythological explanations. They became aware that the internal voices they heard were not instructions from supernatural beings, but conscientious thinking of their own making that was percolating to the surface.
Literature ultimately deepened the role of narratives in preserving and shaping human identity. It enabled nuanced plot structures and the development of characters with greater complexity. Certain privileged groups had access to works of influential religious, political, and philosophical ideas. The democratization of thought slowly spread.
A rising literary tradition externalized ideas, allowing stories to be preserved, standardized, and reproduced beyond the lifespan of any single storyteller. Civilization became capable of remembering itself. Writing does more than merely document thought; it changes what kind of thought is possible.
Civilization has recurring cycles of advance and decline, often incremental and sometimes precipitous. External stresses of climate, war, and disease sometimes overwhelm cultural progress, and sometimes the culture itself encounters changes it is unable to metabolize.
There were many interacting factors that impacted the millennium after the collapse of the Roman Empire in 476 CE. One of the least appreciated is the isolation of communities that resulted from the deteriorating network of roads. As travel became dangerous, social interaction declined and local dialects proliferated, language barriers limited mutual understanding. Dialogue is to learning as oxygen is to fire. Knowledge, without it, cannot spread.
The Gutenberg press was likely the most significant invention to reverse the communication deficit and ignite the 15th century Renaissance. The wider distribution of Classical texts and explosive growth of literacy promoted a more humanistic way of thinking. It sought the unity of truth within a diversity of philosophical and theological views of reality. The rebirth of the human spirit bred freedom from religious orthodoxy and elevated intellectual inquiry and criticism.
New ideas advanced like wildfire, expanding intellectual fields of investigation not easily accepted by society. When Copernicus decentralized mankind’s place in the cosmos by solar observations, the concept was cautiously withheld from publication until his death. Despite confirmation by Kepler and Galileo 100 years later, religious opposition impeded public acceptance until Newton explained planetary motion mathematically in 1687.
Perspectives that conflict with personal frameworks of belief are not easily assimilated by the human psyche, yet the challenge to our sense of identity can be eased by creative vision. Renaissance artists tried to depict the world as it truly appeared. They adopted analytical methods of portrayal by studying human proportion and anatomy. Linear perspective was developed for the illusion of depth and spatial realism. Art focused on the individually perceived experience of harmony and potential, as so ably illustrated by the multifaceted works of Michelangelo and explorations of Leonardo da Vinci.
Renaissance humanism emphasized the study of classical antiquity, the value of human experience, and the importance of self-examination. Michel de Montaigne was a central literary figure for popularizing the essay as a medium for exploring moral, political, and personal questions. His skepticism challenged the certainty of human knowledge, urging readers to question assumptions and embrace doubt. He cultivated a rhetorical eloquence that influenced thinkers and bridged the gulf between authoritarian scholasticism and self-critical introspective investigation.
The chivalric romances of King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable were the epic oral tales of the earlier Middle Ages. Miguel de Cervantes seismically diverged when he introduced Don Quixote in 1605. It was the birth of the modern novel, blending adventure, romance, and philosophy, with self-awareness, and complex characters. It adopted a more satirical view of society and exposed the difference between illusion and reality.
These budding literary genres exemplify the knight’s quest to explore existential questions, like how to live a meaningful life, the value of experience, and the tension between truth and belief. They harken back to the Epic of Gilgamesh and speak to recursive universal concerns. Quixotic idealism is coined in language as the reach for impossible aspirations.
The point is that new ways of seeing seem to crop up everywhere, all at once. They are not the result of simple germination, but of a simultaneous convergence of beliefs. The pressure to reject unquestioned authority and rely more upon reason and observation led to the integration of arts and sciences. When he combined algebra with geometry and created the Cartesian coordinate system then stated “cogito, ergo sum”, deriving certainty from his own skepticism, René Descartes summarized the insights that preceded him and foreshadowed the Enlightenment on the horizon.
We inhabit a common mythos only so long as it justifies our perception of reality. As traditional religious explanations lost authority, intellectual culture increasingly sought alternative operating systems capable of connecting disparate phenomena into a larger meaningful order. The mid-nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of secular frameworks of understanding; new ways to explain how diverse phenomena could arise from complex underlying processes.
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Nobody went searching for the “origin of species”, because the story of Noah’s Ark explained everything; until it didn’t. In truth, there were a range of misunderstandings about speciation at the time, including transformism and intelligent design. They were insufficient to justify the similarities and differences between animals of the same type, having environmentally shaped traits, living in distant geographic locations, along with the archeological evidence of extinctions. Darwin’s theory of adaptation by natural selection succeeded at interweaving all related information into a more cohesive understanding.
The fundamentals of evolution have since proven applicable to a wide range of sciences; informing medicine and public health, psychology and behavioral science, anthropology and archeology, agriculture and food science, ecology and environmental science, even computer science and AI. It exemplifies a trend that led to the science of complex systems; the study of how macro-level patterns emerge from the interactions of many interdependent elements without a central control mechanism.
The source of psychological drives and desires came under scrutiny as Freud developed a functional framework to describe an interior dialogue between the id, ego, and superego. He theorized that the majority of human impulses arose from a deeply submerged “unconscious mind”, and that awareness was filtered through a “preconscious mind” before final expression in the “conscious mind”. While many specifics of Freudian psychoanalysis have since been discredited, the cognitive system he described shares conceptual parallels to modern neuroscience, especially as it applies to language processing and our subjective representation of the world.
Physical sciences pursued this quest for hidden forces even further. The transition to a dynamic, observer-dependent, relativistic conception of space-time shattered traditional cosmology and led to the current view of an expanding universe that originated with a “Big Bang”; a much different narrative than previously imagined.
Einstein’s “General Relativity” exposed a universal scale plot structure that incited further sub-atomic exploration into non-intuitive quantum mechanisms that climaxed with the novel recognition that the underlying reality is probabilistic rather than deterministic. The uncertainty principle, wave-particle duality, states of superposition and entanglement, together spun a fascinating tale that did little to appease psychological tensions.
These are a selected few of the intellectual transitions that occurred over a relatively brief 100 years; a period of civil and social upheaval that weathered catastrophic global conflicts and economic collapse. Yet invention and creativity seemed inspired in spite of the friction. The truly fascinating aspect is how such cognitive adaptations emerge simultaneously across all fields of cultural endeavor, not as cause and effect, but as concurrent societal realizations.
Fractured perspectives and psychological tensions were reflected in Expressionist, Cubist, and Surrealist movements in visual arts. Literary trends explored non-linear stream-of-consciousness (James Joyce), perceptual fragmentation and loss of identity (Virginia Woolf), cultural and spiritual disintegration by war (T.S. Eliot), to name a few.
Nietzsche foresaw the direction this play was headed before the characters were cast. He observed that European civilization had lost confidence in metaphysical foundations that had organized meaning for centuries. The new emphasis would turn toward self-determination, the creation of new values and meaning independent of traditional religious morality or societal norms. This meant embracing the fullness of life along with its tribulations.
His 1883 novel, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, introduced the heroic ideal of the “Übermensch”, the embodiment of self-sufficiency and the affirmation of life experience. In this narrative we again encounter the acceptance of human mortality in the pursuit of lofty earthly ideals, a recurring mythical subtext.
Let us now clearly define myths, not as false understandings, but as dynamic belief structures that appear true at a given time but evolve when informed by new perspectives. People rarely see the mythology they inhabit. Only in retrospect does it become visible.
During the pre-literary oral tradition, cultural narratives continuously adapted to the dialectic give-and-take between storytellers and their listeners. For thousands of years, stories evolved freely as experience dictated and beliefs changed, because they resided only in memory. Not until writing developed were myths recorded more durably. And text does more than merely document ideas; it promotes the interweaving of diverse threads to produce increasingly complex conceptions.
There is a trade-off. The vast benefits for accretive knowledge retention and enhanced understanding easily outweigh the relative inconvenience of periodically updating the literature. Yet, cultural inheritance that is not easily forgotten destabilizes our view of the world. Psychological adaptation struggles to overcome increasingly large conceptual hurdles, as new mythologies emerge at an accelerating pace. These widely felt forces are broadly exhibited across diverse cultural, intellectual, and creative expressions, and are amplified during certain periods of history, as I’ve described.
The age of digital information is still adolescent but already impacting society through global communications, access to information, and algorithmic direction of attention. Social connectivity makes simultaneous storytellers of everyone as identities become a matter of public narration and meaning is determined by recursive feedback.
Marshall McLuhan famously highlighted the influence of the information source when he proclaimed, “the medium is the message”. His student, Walter J. Ong, expanded on this insight by describing how modern communication technology has produced a “secondary orality” in which textual expression feels as immediate as spoken dialogue. Social media and messaging allow for rapid exchanges that mimic the encounter of oral communication, absent verbal interaction or visible cues of body language.
Today, an entirely new language paradigm proliferates that is no less revolutionary than the first written words. It has transpired within a decade, not centuries. Interactive agents of artificial intelligence are now capable of simulating written human dialogue with uncanny ability; sufficient to pass the Turing Test more often than real people.
Functional and ethical questions abound; like the potential for semantic decay resulting from recursive feedback loops, the challenge of ensuring that AI acts in alignment with human values, and authorship controversies over content generation, to name but a few. New technologies typically outgrow such teething issues as their utility becomes realized over time. Still, unpredictable consequences result from the impact on human experience. Their traces in science, philosophy, and the arts will reveal a cultural mythology that is yet to unfold.
Therein lies the paradox. Humanity is continuously writing the future history that it now inhabits but is unable to perceive until looking back. 20–20 hindsight does not help to resolve the issues of the moment. Our textual tradition, since pre-literate orality, is on the verge of an equally consequential transition; passing from a writer/reader exchange into an interactive dialectic once again. Although it remains text based for now, this too may pass.
Our conscious identity is again challenged, as we await the next mythic hero to offer meaning, expose the illusions of the past, and inspire a higher awareness of the possibilities. Or maybe the rear-view mirror will reveal an antihero instead, an ambiguous synthesis emerging from the vast network of intertwined narratives. Time has a way of telling epic stories.
The irony of an ironic twist in a tale is how it sneaks up and surprises; like a notion that has appeared before, leaving cognitive footprints in the sands. It shouldn’t. A pivotal person at the very beginning of literary history, Plato himself, predicted our predicament. He opposed converting oral discourse into written text, because of what is lost without dialectic interaction. Yet, he famously practiced the process while trying to preserve the origination of meaning by framing it in the language of Socratic dialogues.
In Phaedrus, a young Athenian prompts Socrates to critique the ideas of a speech he has heard. In this conversation he learns to distinguish between rhetoric containing truth and knowledge, versus merely persuasive language. Plato, attributing the words to Socrates, says; “only the presence of the author can compensate for this deficiency…accordingly, only one’s own words or those stemming from them are able to keep the original message alive…and are entitled to be authenticated as one’s legitimate offspring.”
Here he acknowledges that language produced by others does not replicate understanding and simply transcribing it does not perpetuate cognition. He could not have foreseen interactive AI but did anticipate the challenges presented by transitions of human discourse between different modes of language. 2,500 years later, nothing has changed.
