Damn. I am wordy.
Apologies.
I think Robert is reminding us to keep Karl Popper in mind and not make too many unfalsifiable statements. Which I agree with. Everything we use are all useful 'Just So' stories, shorthand.
Anyone who needs a refresher on 20th-century philosophy of science: when Popper talked about falsifiability, he meant that for a theory to be scientifically useful, there has to be some imaginable test that could prove it wrong. If a theory explains everything, it actually explains nothing. Just saying "God," or "gods," or "daimons" - or, let be honest for a sec - any of the explanatory jargon of occultism: thought-forms, egregores, currents, initiation, or even the ubiquitous woo-woo" energy" - are like most of the frameworks we rely on to navigate daily life. They aren't scientific truths. They're narratives and ideas we spin up after the fact to make a messy, chaotic reality look neat, orderly, and then to pose like we know what's "really" going on.
As magicians I will say acknowledging that our stories are unfalsifiable doesn't mean they are useless. Yes, yes let success be thy proof - but I'm a big advocate of myth as right-hemisphere gateways.
(Sorry for the extra background. I am still finding a balance between being accurate and being pithy!)
Look at how our brains are wired. Our left hemisphere is our internal lawyer and bean-counter. It is hyper-concerned with survival and optimizing opportunism. It grabs and holds onto things to use them. It loves symbolic systems, text, theory, logic, category-splitting, and control. It’s the part of us that demands an unfalsifiable theory be "proven."
The right hemisphere, however, deals in context, whole pictures, somatic presence, vibe, stories, and relationship. It is immersive. It's the part that gets the joke without having to have it explained, and it lets us read the room. This part of the brain is also the gateway to teh Totality, the All. See Goethe and McGhilcrist here.
Think of myths as left-right hemisphere bridges. In some indigenous worldviews, the spirits cannot even see us until we enter the story and our offerings are mythologized. Myths are not meant to be explanatory in a purely left-brain, scientific sense. They are human-orienting, and they tell us where we stand in relation to the Whole, the Totality. Some call this God, but you can use whatever words you like.
But they are mostly for us humans to orient ourselves. So pay close attention to the internal felt-meaning you have applied to the words you use, because it will constrain and color what you experience in magic.
On a purely human, psychological level, myths are right-hemisphere affordances to DO something with. In design, an "affordance" is a physical property that invites action - like a handle that shows you how to pull it. Myth is a narrative handle for the psyche.
I also half-joke that myths are the hardware API and GUI for us to interact with the Noetic operating system. I tend to see the underlying nature of reality as pure, unmediated consciousness or intellect (the Noetic layer). We can't look at it directly without our brains frying. Or feeling like we are cacthing on fire (cough - Headless Rite - cough ).
We need a desktop interface. Myth gives us the icons, the windows, and click events. It lets us click a god-level icon to run a program without needing to manually code in binary. (This is a metaphor... we are not in The Matrix... much).
On an extermnal level (if there is such a thing.), I will add here that myths, stories, and their accompanying vibe create local servers for other minds to jump into. It allows us all meet in a recognized nspace to play the game usng the loccal rules , stories, game design, sight and sounds, and other signals we can all relate to - both human and non-human minds.
So, this is why I never try to erase anyone's stories they use to explain God or the Divine. We live inside a high-fidelity MMORPG, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, called Love, Art, and Monsters: Earth, the Multiverse (hehe). It's a game running a simulation on infinite servers all through all time. The simulation is too vast to grasp as raw data. Myth is the player UI that makes the game visible and playable.
Call whatever the hell is going on whatever you want. So if people want to call The Mystery "God," cool! Call it the "gods," fine. I may ask you to explain your mythic worldview and I may quibble some, but that's only because I have my own take.
