The role of myths in Minmatar spirituality, a short explanation

Disclaimer: What follows is my personal understanding of these things. It is not intended as doctrine, scripture, or uncontestable fact. You can read it or not; if you do, you can agree with it or not; maybe it speaks to you or it does not.

I speak here of things not often given words to, that those of us who live in this Tradition learn without being explicitly taught. It took me a decade of contact with other traditions to even start to realize there is something to describe; another to be able to even attempt to describe it, and the beginnings of a third to arrive at a decision to do so. I apologize in advance for speaking of these things directly, and to an unselected audience; this is not entirely andesh, and for any offense it causes the fault is only mine.

Most Minmatar traditions I am familiar with, which obviously is only a small subset of all possibilities, consider the real truth of the nature of the universe to be something that cannot be described. The more sacred and the more close to the real truth a thing is, the less likely it is that it can be exactly expressed. The universe does not consist of concepts or words, it simply is. Everything has spirit. Everything is the spirit. Everything is connected. Everything is. True mysteries are sacred and cannot be explained.

Words we use to describe facts are not the facts, they are symbols for those facts that we use to point at them so that we can discuss them. I have a conception of myself, but I am not “I”, I am not my name. Nor am I any passing moment of experiencing myself. I am both more than that - a being that travels through time changing every moment - and less than that - merely a collection of molecules that happen to be in this moment close to each other and create some matter that can experience itself. And both of those descriptions are incomplete, and unnecessary.

When it comes to facts about how objects and beings behave, we can arrive at a somewhat exact understanding of them when we use concepts in a particular way. We can learn to describe gravity and we can predict where it moves things. We can describe technology and invent a skyhook. We can know that someone is in love with someone else, and predict that they will seek that other person’s company at the festival.

All these concepts can be misleading, though. We have a model in our head for how gravity works, but when we go to another planet or a station on another standard, and gravity is a little off for us, the model comes in the way of our predictions as much as it helps. If we assume that a scientific or technological model is true outside of the conditions where it actually holds, it can keep us from the breakthrough. If we only understand love, but not the relevant kinships, we will be surprised when a well-liked suitor is turned down due to pre-existing loyalties.

Sometimes, people start treating a description of concepts and facts as more real than the facts themselves, and when thinking about new things they rely more on the story they tell themselves than the real universe itself. This happens regularly with politics: concepts we use to describe something start to feel real, not just pointers. The Tribe, the House, the Country, the Corporation, they cease to be pointers at a particular group of people and take on life of their own; the real Caldari are like this, no true Brutor would ever do that. Concepts take on a life of their own, almost like they were really real.

Scientists sometimes say “all models are false, but some are useful”. They mean that no scientific model ever captures everything about the universe - if it would, it would have to be as complex as the universe itself, it would have to be the universe. All models are simplifications. Yet many models can be used, to predict things like weather or movement of asteroids on a sun’s orbit, to build railguns and spaceships and skyhooks.

Similarly, all religious ideas are false. Any description of any kind of spirituality is false. The real truth escapes words. No spirit or god can be predicted, no human comprehensively described. No amount of Scripture could ever capture everything correctly. We can only reach the true essence of the universe, the real Mystery, that which is andesh, in fleeting glimpses that cannot really be spoken of. But some ideas are useful: I for one could not have written this paragraph without the ideas of essence, and Mystery, and andesh.

Stories about the God, about spirits of anything and everything, about our own spirits, can resonate in a way that seems to almost capture something that is close to the wordless real truth, to the experienced glimpse of actual spirituality, or to the concepts of alignment and misalignment with it that we mean when we say andesh and ohnesh. Stories can tell the essence of historical events where those events have almost been forgotten or where facts are too dangerous to speak out loud. Stories can make you feel concepts of morality in a way that an abstract lecture about them never could.

Seven Immortal Elders probably did not meet at the Island of Mahj drawn in by visions relating to Artifacts only to be tested by Dark Spirits and to blow up a volcano - not literally. Yet that story resonates with the original coming together and falling apart of the Tribes in a way that still, possibly, evokes the same feelings in us as the original events did in the people who lived through them.

The Amarr God is not mad, Marrha of the Night does not walk the old mansion close to Sundsele, spirits of the dead do not hang around until we let them go in a memorial pyre, no one’s immortal spirit is destroyed by acts ohnesh. I know this, because in the end, none of these things exist in the same sense as concrete things like my breakfast cereal or the skyhook prototype in Auviken or Uncle Masim’s left little toe do. We cannot point at God and say that there is a god, the same way we can point at a rock and say that there is a rock. We cannot measure spirit the same way we can measure radiation.

Such stories, those which are not to be taken as literal truth, but are intended to show you some aspect of The Truth, we call myths. Myths are not fairy tales or holovid dramas, because they are intended to relate to something actually real. Yet they are not scripture or textbooks, because they are not intended to be actually, literally true.

Shamans sometimes explain this by saying that whether a myth is factual does not matter for whether it is true. (That is a sentence hard to translate, but I hope you get the idea.) Custom says one does not really discuss the truth value of myths, at least not outside of a very closed circle whom the myth directly concerns. To do so would be foolish, something only a small child or a very stupid person would do, and they would be laughed at. A myth is not told to teach about facts, but to evoke a deeper emotion or experience or moral sense. It might be factual, but even if it is, that is not its point.

Most people in my tradition think that the question whether God exists (or if ancestors really speak to people, or is the Mountain over there really a sleeping spirit of a dragon) is not only an unnecessary and silly one, but also rude. To claim that your myth is more factual than someone else’s is rude. To take a myth and start debating it as if it is a scientific claim is also rude - even when the tellers themselves are stupid enough to not tell myth and fact apart. One does not inquire whether other people “really believe” in a particular myth; it would be both silly and an invasion of privacy.

I think these customs stem from the fact that due to our history, we have, unlike many other peoples, learned to make a clear difference between what is a scientific explanation open to debate, and what is a spiritual explanation that is always subjective. We have had spiritual explanations forced on us so much that, on our own, we have made doing so the gravest of sins. We have not always been able to tell our histories directly, because it has been forbidden on pain of death, so we have veiled our truths behind what seems like a tale of imagination but carries a deeper meaning.

So when told a myth, one listens to it, thanks the teller, takes those parts that seem subjectively true - even if not factual - and rejects others. This is fine. Myths are not immutable. They are not facts. You can retell them and shape them, as long as you do so in a sincere attempt at the real truth and at what is andesh.

Because in the end everything has spirit, and everything is spirit, and everything simply is, and no words alone can describe what is really real.

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Thank You for this Explanation, Elsebeth Rhiannon.

It is most Thought-Provoking. I have read it 3 Times, and do not Think I fully Understand it Yet. I shall have to Think about it Some More.

I can only speak for me and how i see it, to me myths where/are a story with the purpose of teaching. They often come with a message.

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We have not met and this seems a shame but simultaneously points at an opportunity I may look forward to in the future.

Among my clan, we share many myths but it is the very act of sharing them that we cherish not the myths themselves. For within each myth may be something that resonates with the listener and joins them, like a companion, on whatever Path they currently travel.

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