Mythologies of Reality: Ancient Realms and Modern Strings

 Humanity’s Endless Love Affair with Illusions

I stopped at Sufism and started reading about quantum mechanics because it finally made sense.

String theory and the Higgs boson were more appealing—and thus less appalling—than “Thou shalt not blah blah fucking blah.”

But the shift revealed something: mythology has always existed to explain reality, just as science does today.

The Norse goddess Thiazi stole the golden apples of immortality. We call that entropy now—the inevitable decay of complex molecular structures.

The Japanese goddess Benzaiten governs everything that flows: water, words, music. We call that wave functions and vibrational states.

Same reality. Different language.

The romantic notion that humans once possessed some pristine ability to link visual perception to reality is quaint bullshit. We’ve always been suckers for perceptual make-believe. Ancient myths of gods hurling thunderbolts, the Salem Witch Trials, the Dancing Plague of 1518—humanity has consistently proven gullible, eagerly swapping observation for collective delusion. Even before institutions stepped in to spoon-feed us meaning, we saw what we wanted to see.

People didn’t lose this capability. They never had it.

What’s changed is the scale of the distortion.

The Magnificent 7—Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, Tesla—now control our information flow, a modern pantheon as influential as any ancient gods. Their algorithms determine what we see, what we believe, what flows and what stagnates. They are Benzaiten with server farms, Thiazi with market caps.

But where the old myths were transparent metaphors—no one mistook Zeus for weather patterns—the new ones masquerade as neutral systems. Recommendation engines. Personalized feeds. Optimization.

This creates a rift between lived experience and constructed reality, wider than any previous gap. Not supernatural. Economic. Algorithmic. Tariffs create artificial barriers between natural economic flows; information systems create vaster barriers between us and direct perception.

The gap allows dangerous ideologies to flourish, just as it did when those in power weaponized myths. The difference is speed and penetration. A god hurling thunderbolts required priests and temples. A feed requires a thumb.

The carnival barker elevated to executive power, proving that spectacle still trumps substance when the information flow is controlled.

Both mythology and science attempt to bridge the rift between the reality we experience and the reality that exists. One uses gods and spirits, the other uses quarks and quantum fields. Both are human attempts to make meaning of the cosmos, yet…

We have figures who’ve mastered the old trickster-god playbook: chaos as strategy, contradiction as brand, the gap between what happened and what’s believed as exploitable terrain.

Reality hasn’t changed. Only our myths have. And the question remains: are we bridging the gap between perception and truth, or just swapping old gods for new grifters?

—Irena Phaedra