I’m working on a video in which I touch upon the importance of narrative in religion. This is an area I have not thought or written much about, at least not in connection with Thelema, so I thought I’d drop a few additional ideas here, ahead of the video.
I think narrative—particularly mythological narrative—is important to religion, spirituality, or philosophy as a way of life for two reasons.
Narrative embodies knowledge in a way which is easier for people to access than propositional knowledge. For example, reflecting upon the example of Christ is probably a more efficient way to put charity into practice than reflecting upon a philosophical or theological argument about the worth of charity.
My suspicion is that mythology is an evolutionary adaptation of our cognition. It’s easier to understand and put abstract principles in practice when we personify or anthropomorphize them.
The other thing I suspect about narrative is that there’s more information encapsulated in a mythological narrative than can be captured propositionally. Mythological narrative embodies accumulated wisdom about the world, but I suspect that wisdom cannot be exhausted through conceptual reflection upon the meaning of the story.
You could contrast this with Hegel’s approach to mythology, where the intuition of the Absolute in art and eventually religion is gradually incorporated into and more adequately captured by the philosophical system. What I’m suggesting instead is that—particularly in the case of the mythological narratives that have motivated us the most as a culture—there is an inexhaustible depth of meaning there that can never be fully fleshed out in propositions.
In other words, the deeper and more profound the narrative, the more noticeably it escapes dialectical enclosure. Dialectic here means a self-inscribed whole which grants unequivocal meaning to its equivocal parts. The alternative would be that, when we reflect upon deep mythological narrative, we can at best create an “open” whole, as I’ve called it elsewhere. We can make sense of mythological narrative, for sure. But the narrative is always going to indicate a “something else” which we can never get to the bottom of. This “something else” is mystery, it’s why religion can never simply be reduced to philosophy (at least not philosophy as a conceptual system), and it’s why we can never fully capture the phenomenon of God in a logic of immanent totality.
I know that last paragraph is tough to understand. I’m going to circle back on this issue, define terms more clearly, and talk a lot more about this soon.