Plato: Why Does He Reject Myths?

Something that should be conceded:

He did say that the youth should "first" learn through stories of virtue and excellence, but he said that Homer and Hesiod are outright liars.

I wish we had more information for context.

Replying to myself seems silly, but here I go again.

I do agree with Plato in that The Gods only do what's "good", and that what's "evil" must have another source. Plato really seemed to understand the Gods and what they wanted to teach us. I trust his judgment and makes an excellent argument.

Therefore, my question focuses itself to his relationship with the poets.

Perhaps a mistranslation or out right lie from the enemy? Or maybe since Plato was on that level of understanding he innocently criticized the poets, while not denying the reality of the myths?

Plato did not reject myths. He just mentions that a lot of people will not analyze them spiritually (they are allegories) and have a high risk of being misguided, a problem that we can see even today.

The youth, being not initiated, can be deceived into believing the myths are not what they are, therefore leading them to many wrong conclusions.

Plato did not reject myths. He just mentions that a lot of people will not analyze them spiritually (they are allegories) and have a high risk of being misguided, a problem that we can see even today.

The youth, being not initiated, can be deceived into believing the myths are not what they are, therefore leading them to many wrong conclusions.

I see, I wonder if the poets intended for the myths to be read only by those who understood them, or even at the time of writing, a child could understand the allegory because of the general development of the population.

I see, I wonder if the poets intended for the myths to be read only by those who understood them, or even at the time of writing, a child could understand the allegory because of the general development of the population.

The problem is that like today, people just misunderstand mythology, go to apply it in a "gross manner", or have used theology (the stories of the Gods) to justify gross things, such as for example a person doing a bad act and saying "Yes but the Gods did it", since they read that to a myth that they have misread. This can be purposeful or by pure ignorance.

So between having these and not having these, Plato argues and tries to make a case that it would be best not to and makes a case about dangers involved.

If you look online, you will see people in Quora and Reddit writing about the "sexual adventures of Zeus!", or how "Athena was born out of his head without birth!" to actually project all sorts of human insanity on these topics while in fact these are allegories. Tabloid worthless articles about the Gods and "How they marry their sisters" and other nonsense that has no end to it.

It takes a very advanced individual and a very rational person to understand what is factual and what is not, or what is allegory. That's what Plato tries to explain.

In the East they do the same, saying for example that Ganesha is a symbol for plastic surgery, because she doesn't have a human face, or whatever other bogus. That's a common practice of the retarded or the misguided.

Situations where the misguided aspect happens also happen here. Furrie lovers will look at Bastet being a living cat Goddess and say "maybe I should change my genes to be a cat! Bastet is a cat!" and other low level things. Then if asked they will say "But the Gods did it!". Some might think Sobek was an actual crocodile or something if they try to make their "case". Anything goes.

By the way, in other works, Plato does extol Homer and Socrates wrote with Euripedes. So it's all just a form of criticism and a situation of "What if".

Criticisms like this which are comments or looking back and saying "What if" are taken too far by retarded "scholars" to project an air of uncertainty and "arguing" between the Ancient Philosophers, such as when they say the slightest thing they pretend they are having mega arguments to make them all seem stupid and more "normal" like the idiots of today. They were making commentary not arguing.

They also project as "disagreement and arguing" the fact that a next Philosopher (such as Proclus) sometimes wrote their own works (which were commentary on the works of Plato in many ways) and try to lie that they didn't appreciate Plato so they wanted to "overshadow him" and other sick nonsense, while it is normal to expand on the Platonic Culture that Proclus inherited. One has to have mental illness and only a modern day mentally deceased and filled with hangups scholar would think these topics about these documents.

Many idiots also in modern academia, because they don't have a valid case and want to sound "interesting", their job is essentially to try to go back and find "beefs" and malform anything they touch, to sound "unique" in their "approach". The same disease of bullshit is the case in the modern scholarship or news world, twisting things to insane levels in order to sound "cool" or interesting.

All these people one reads about, were Initiates and in the mysteries all the time. Modern day "translators" are just some dudes who learned how to translate (and poorly so at best). The philosophical works are deep coded materials that were reserved for other Initiates to read in order to understand some topics (these were contained behind the codes). To regular folk reading them they sound like empty discussions. They never truly argued they just pondered things at best, but they were written in such a way that the codes would also be useful if others read them.

There was no malice or anything. People at these levels of consciousness are united and without malicious intents.

The other giant hoax is that Plato Aristotle and Socrates had some sort of great disagreement or whatever, this never happened. Aristotle cites Plato in the best manner and never questions him. They also all cite Pythagoras (who was so important they mention him sometimes with a mere "He", as if he is the source of all knowledge).

There are purposeful misunderstandings of these texts and also horrible translations, plus the Western idiotic mentality and need of future people to see these godmen as anything else or as "regular people".

Plato doesn't call Homer a liar, if I recall, the word is "Mythoplastes" which means "Creator of mythology", ie a person that creates myths that don't reflect real events and molds them, is used. Molding here means that they have power to pass messages that also mold people that read them. Therefore it's a sacred and dangerous practice. Aristotle's student Alexander the Great was sleeping with Illiad (Homer's work) by his bed, all these lessons coming from Plato, which came from Socrates, and so on.

Every next philosopher also had their field and expanded on the greater culture. Poetical works were recognized socially as such, containing some or many theological (important for spiritual messages) parts of work.

Humanizing the Gods such as the works of Euripedes, was done to essentially create a theatricality. That's like making a movie, that's where movies come from. In a movie, we can portray Thor like Marvel (hopefully we do it better than this). That's to create a theatrical act.

Modern analysts are totally retarded and analysis of these works is out of their league. They still do it to sound smart or fancy, and make monsters out of their produced ideas around these topics, or just follow hoaxes other analysts and scholars said and keep perpetuating them, such as Christian Monk translations of the texts, who purposefully translated these as if these were the works of 5 year olds.

Is it possible to have my post deleted?

If you want a post deleted, you can click the "report" button on the bottom left of your post, and write a reason why. But your post in this thread adds to the discussion so there probably isn't any need to have it deleted :)

...

So what would you say, does it worth to learn these old languages to read the "original" works? For example, the original literature of the Iliad we have today available in ancient Greek is probably the same that Alexander The Great read?

Is it possible to have my post deleted?

Why? It was a very good and well pointed post. Thank you.

Y

You are the expert. I wish I could study more but I will have more time in the future. I just wondered about some kind of ulterior motive in plays like Prometheus for example, but my knowledge is really shallow.

Thank you for taking the time to write this, it was unexpected 🙂

Love your interest, thank you for going into these subjects.

Tabloid worthless articles about the Gods and "How they marry their sisters" and other nonsense that has no end to it.

One thing that I wonder, is that was the surface level of the myths really necessary to be things such as rape, incest, cannibalism etc.? Because I think that maybe there could have been better ways of encoding spiritual lessons, without enticing the morbid fascination of the lower individuals with the surface level of seemingly morbid events abd stories between the gods, so that we wouldn't have today things such as college professors talking trash about Zeus, claiming him to be some social interpretation of the " incestuous and adulterous patriarchy of ancient Greece" or some other retarded shit, as well as movies, etc.

Why were the gods even written in the myths, as raping each other, killing and torturing, incest, etc.? Right now, these same things have basically become a huge wall of thorns that block people from reconsidering their interpretations of these myths higher than the sociological level ( I studied Ancient Mythology as a subject and all my instructors and professors, when I told then to consider a spiritual interpretation of the myths and view them as codes, didn't believe me because of the fact that the surface levels are so gruesome sometimes.)