The later mythopoeticists, the Tolkiens and Le Guins were apologetic about their mythpoeia, cleverly relegating it to the realm of the psyche. An affair for the human soul, incredibly important, but disconnected from the real ground of humanity. This was not so for mythopoeticists like William Blake, who understood that to be of the psyche is to be of reality, for it is through our very mind that we experience life. Go further back and there is a clear awareness of mythopoeia /as/ the ground of reality itself, as actual history. The Gothic vogue, Brutus founding Britannia, Aeneas and Rome, Odin founding Germania.

Here the veil between mythopoeia and history is thin and muddled, yet how could it be any other way? What is it about Hitler that brought the world to the brink and stirred Germany into a fervor, if not his mythopoetic ability? What is our historiography and ethnography today, if not mythopoeia? What is the very foundation of America, the greatest empire in history, built upon if not its mythopoeia. Liberty and potential are mythic ideals, forged in the mythopoetic belly of Gothic England, and brought to today's America through its own mythology. The birth of the constitution, the American Revolution, the Civil War, all these events are mythic in tone, just barely beyond the fog of memory, imbued with the lifeblood of their people and drenched in the tears and blood of those who wept and died for them.

There is no story we spin of this world that is not myth. We like to imagine things are different nowadays, that our narratives are built upon the backs of facts and photos and evidence, but all this does is relegate the mythic component into the shadow, where it floats and propels us subconsciously. Meanwhile, in waking life, we cling to the tales we tell of the world without wondering what they say about us, and what is about us that spun them in the first place. Perhaps it's a Biblical legacy, once a work of mythopoeia was claimed as the word of God and now our current secular religions preserve the same epistemological faith, our politics and science seen as magically descending upon us from above, when really they bubbled up from the same empty wellspring of our self that all our ideas do.

Our ancestors, the best of them at least, were far more self aware about this process. They understood that past and future were imprecise things, more about the genealogy of the spirit which passes through them than the mere "facts," and "details," we use to prop up our unthinking assumptions about the world. And because of that, they felt empowered to consciously write the story and fate of their people—as in the great epics which are all part history—whereas nowadays we throw up our hands and surrender it to whatever distant powers impose upon us! We have to return to that same awareness we once did, and recognise the paradoxical nature of truth, for to speak of and to the soul is even more real than to speak of and to causality, or physical details.