The Myth, Captured and Walking Again “Mythic Displacement and Mythic Recovery”

by P. Glenn

We stood on the mountain not just to admire the view -
but to see what had been buried beneath it.

What was lost was not only belief.
It was breath.
It was fire.
It was myth, unchained and alive.

The Christian myth, for a time,
walked with fire in its chest
and grace in its hands.
It sang to the weary.
It fed the hungry.
It welcomed the wanderer.

At first, it lived in story:
a parable told on a hillside,
a broken loaf passed in trembling hands,
a body risen not to conquer,
but to breathe again in those who loved.

But stories don’t stay safe.
And power doesn’t like what it can’t control.

The myth was gathered—
like fire in a brass lamp.
Tamed.
Named.
Lit only by those who held the keys.

They meant well, perhaps:
a creed to protect the mystery,
a canon to guard the truth.

But myths are not meant to be guarded.
They are meant to be walked.

The early cracks were quiet:
a whispered warning here,
a letter that narrowed the circle there.
And then came the Empire.

The wild breath of presence
became a proclamation.
The sacred path
became a paved road—
taxed and toll-gated.

What had danced on water
was now carved in stone.
By the time the councils convened,
the myth had already begun to harden.

They said it was to preserve the truth.
But preservation can look a lot like possession.

It began to speak less like a lover
and more like a law.
It was lifted onto altars
too high for barefoot souls to reach.

This shift - this displacement -
was not merely political or doctrinal.
It was mythic displacement.

But if displacement is real, so is mythic recovery...

And it left many wandering,
holding remnants,
asking if the story had died.

But no true myth dies.
It deepens.
It waits.
It becomes ember beneath the ashes -
until breath returns,
and the fire is kindled again.

Still, even in creeds,
the ember remained.
Still, in the mouths of mystics and mothers
and those who wept with open hands,
the myth whispered its older name.

It has never truly died.
It waits beneath the machinery.
It breathes beneath the rubble.

And if you listen -
not with your ears,
but with your ache -
you might still hear it:

the myth that was once alive…
still alive,
but waiting to be walked again.

This isn’t a call to go back.
It’s a turning toward what might still be true -
not in structure,
but in soul.

The myths we were given weren’t all wrong.
But some were lifted so high
they forgot how to kneel.
Some were hardened
until they could no longer hold us.

To speak of mythic recovery
is not to return to former structures,
but to reclaim the meaning
that lived before the structures hardened.

It is to walk again with the myth -
not as prisoner,
but as pilgrim.

“Once the ember is seen, it cannot be unseen.
And once the path reappears, it cannot be unlived.