Universe: Stop asking if mythology is true

ISN’T mythology just made-up stuff? I hear this every now and then. The confusion comes from how we have collapsed “myth” into “falsehood”: the “myth of climate change”, the “myth of instability”, the “myth of diabetes”.

But the Greek root ‘mythos’ means story — and human beings, all of us, make sense of reality through stories. The discipline that studies these meaning-making stories is mythology. It has nothing to do with the Sanskrit ‘mithya’ (incomplete truth). It has everything to do with how cultures organise their subjective world. Ideas like justice, equality, freedom, right, wrong, good and bad are all based on a framework communicated in stories.

Consider how different civilisations script their stories. The Biblical imagination is strikingly human-centric and legalistic — God, prophet, commandments; obey and it is halal, disobey and it is haram; heaven versus hell. Nature barely appears as the protagonist. Humans have dominion over nature, is what the Bible says.

By contrast, myths that originated in India — Hindu, Buddhist, Jain — begin with prakriti (nature). Monsoon, snakes, rivers, seasons, soil: these are not backdrops, they are plot. Festivals orbit rain cycles, sowing and harvest, waxing and waning moons. We are part of nature. Our mind (purusha) experiences the dance of nature (prakriti).

This difference births two moral grammars. The Abrahamic frame is legal — right and wrong, permitted and forbidden. The Indian one is accounting — debit and credit. Every act is a transaction with the cosmos. Paap is not “sin” but debit incurred by consumption; punya is credit earned by giving back. Your bahi-khata (ledger) is spiritual, not only commercial. No wonder Yama, god of death, is also the accountant who audits our life-book on Yama-dvitiya. In Jain thought, the liberated being is one whose balance sheet is finally zeroed — no debts, no claims.

Once you see the accounting lens, Indian ritual logic clarifies. We honour animal wealth (Govatsa), metal wealth (Dhanteras), plant wealth (Annakut), the goddess (Lakshmi or Kali), and then accounting itself (Bhai Dooj or Yama-dvitiya). Even the much-misused Dhanteras debate reveals discomfort with money talk; some recently rebranded it as “Dhanvantari Day” to sanitise wealth with health. Nice sentiment, little precedent. We have always been honest that prosperity matters — so do generosity and settlement of dues.

Mythology, then, is not about proving whether an event “really happened”. It is about mapping value. When a family lights lamps on amavasya, they are not testing physics; they are signalling hospitality to fortune, clarity against darkness, and the courage to face the audit of life. When a community performs garba, they are not just dancing; they are circling the garbha — the womb — acknowledging dependence on earth’s fertility.

Dismissing mythology as “fake” blinds us to the frameworks that quietly steer law, policy, markets, and households. We don’t need to abandon science to respect story; we need to recognise that data describes while myth decides what counts as good, holy, or fair. The task is not to standardise Indian traditions into a single orthodox manual, but to read our plural stories with rigour.

Stop asking if mythology is true. Start asking what truth it enables: what debts it discloses, what credits it demands, and what kind of society it helps us become.

— The writer is an acclaimed mythologist