Re-Cognition Series, Part II
It may sound strange to say this, but it needs to be said clearly:
The gods were never the point.
They were powerful. They were beautiful. They mattered. But they weren’t the essence of religion. They were symbols—images humans created to carry the weight of meaning, fear, love, wonder, and belonging.
They were also believed to be real—utterly real. These gods were not metaphors to the people who worshiped them. They were understood to be actual beings, forces, and presences that governed the world and shaped human destiny. In their time, they were the best explanations we had for how the world worked.
To create gods was not foolish—it was profoundly human. It was a brilliant expression of the early religious impulse: the desire to understand, to align with what matters, and to survive.
But over time, we forgot something essential:
We were the ones who made them.
When the symbol becomes the master, meaning collapses into obedience. When we forget the story is a story, we lose the truth the story was meant to carry.
The gods were never the mistake. The mistake was believing they were real in the same way the sun and other stars are real—that they acted, judged, ruled, and demanded.
What they actually did—at their best—was gather us into meaning. They helped us live as if life mattered. They showed us how to care, how to fear wisely, how to belong.
The tragedy is not that the gods are gone. The tragedy is that we haven’t yet learned how to live without pretending.
We don’t need to go back. We need to go through—to the other side of myth, where reality still shines and meaning can be made honestly, consciously, and together.
That’s where Opthē is going.