Historians like to imagine themselves as cartographers of truth—carefully charting the past, distinguishing the solid continents of fact from the drifting fog of legend. Yet more often than not, it’s the fog that decides the map. Myths don’t merely decorate history; they frequently determine it. From Romulus and Remus suckling a she-wolf to George Washington and his suspiciously well-behaved cherry tree, entire civilizations have been built upon stories that never happened but were too useful to abandon. In the end, history is less a record of what occurred than a script that societies keep rewriting to explain why they deserved to occur.
The ancients understood this instinctively. The Greeks never pretended that Zeus had a birth certificate, yet the myths surrounding their gods gave them a coherent cosmology, a moral compass, and a genealogy of power. The stories weren’t true—but they made reality make sense. The myth of divine descent justified kingship, heroism, and even war. To question the story was to risk unraveling the social fabric it had sewn together. In that way, myth became less a lie than an operating system—its falsehoods executing commands that shaped temples, laws, and lives.
Modernity, in its self-congratulatory rationalism, pretends it’s immune to such enchantments. But consider the myths of our own making: the “self-made man,” the “melting pot,” or the fantasy of meritocracy. None of these withstand serious scrutiny, yet they continue to script national behavior, policy, and aspiration. The American Dream, for instance, functions less as a description of opportunity than as a moral anesthetic for inequality. It may be false, but it is powerfully functional. That is the quiet genius of myth—it survives not because it is believed, but because it is useful.
Even science, that most disciplined of truth-seeking enterprises, is not without its myths. The lone genius in the lab coat, illuminated by the light of discovery, is as romantic—and as misleading—as any medieval legend. Real science is messy, collective, political. Yet the myth of objectivity persists because it gives science moral authority. We want to believe that facts arrive unsullied by bias, when in reality they are often born in the same cultural cradle as the myths they claim to banish. The myth of neutrality sustains the institution even when the data refuses to cooperate.
Political regimes have long been the most shameless mythmakers. Napoleon once declared that “history is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.” Stalin took it further, airbrushing his rivals from photographs and textbooks alike. Today, propaganda is less about rewriting old pages than about flooding new ones—creating so many competing myths that the concept of truth itself becomes negotiable. We no longer burn the library; we simply bury it under a landslide of competing narratives. The result is not ignorance, but exhaustion.
Religions, too, have long mastered this choreography between faith and fact. A sacred story begins as metaphor and ends as doctrine; over centuries, the metaphor hardens into marble and the temple is built around it. What began as an attempt to describe the ineffable becomes a rulebook for the definable. The myth creates the fact by manifesting a world in which it must be true. Pilgrims walk the paths where gods once trod, and in walking, they make the legend real again. Faith, then, is not belief in a story—it is participation in its continual reenactment.
In the digital age, the mechanics of myth-making have merely accelerated. Memes, hashtags, and viral “origin stories” now perform the same cultural function as the epic poem once did. A celebrity scandal, a political slogan, or a viral TikTok sound becomes a mythic shorthand for an entire worldview. These myths travel at light speed and demand no parchment—only belief and repetition. The algorithm rewards conviction over correction. In that sense, technology hasn’t replaced myth with truth; it has democratized myth-making itself.
The real trick of history in reverse is that once a myth gains enough momentum, it retroactively manufactures evidence. Archaeologists have spent centuries searching for Troy not because it necessarily existed, but because Homer convinced the world it must have. In our own era, conspiracy theories operate on the same principle: they create the illusion of proof by sheer persistence. The longer a lie survives, the more artifacts it gathers—screenshots, testimonies, “research”—until it begins to fossilize into fact. What began as fiction becomes history through the sedimentation of belief.
This inversion—where myth precedes and produces fact—poses a troubling question: is the truth still recoverable, or has it always been a retrospective illusion? Perhaps we have misunderstood the order of causality all along. Myths are not distortions of truth but engines that make it visible. They give emotion, coherence, and purpose to the chaos of experience. In that sense, they are not enemies of fact but its necessary forerunners. To destroy myth is to dismantle the scaffolding on which meaning itself hangs.
And so we continue to live in reverse, manufacturing the past from the raw material of our desires. Myths may be born of imagination, but they die hard because they explain more than they obscure. History, at its best, is the art of tracing those imaginative footprints back to the real ground they never quite touched. The irony is that we cannot live without the very illusions we claim to outgrow. We make myths to explain facts—and when none exist, we make facts to sustain the myth.