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  1. Apr 2024
    1. Throughout the centuries, the distinction always tilted in favor of logos. Reason could question myths; myths couldn’t challenge reason. Allegory was one of the main devices for rationalizing the irrational, but allegorists “never looked for traces of Mythos in their Logos, but only for traces of their Logos in the Mythos” (32). Allegorists assumed that myth-makers already grasped logos, and “cloaked the Logos in Mythos in order to protect it from the ignorant masses, or to guarantee that only a few elect would have access to it” (32). For advocates of logos, myth was merely accommodated logos. No truth can be told only in mythic terms. Truth is in reason, not in narrative. Allegorists had a problem: “even if the content of the Mythos always reveals itself in the allegorist’s hands to be nothing other than the Logos, none the less the conversion mechanisms which transform that Mythos into his Logos remain resolutely arbitrary and cannot themselves ever be successfully subsumed into the Logos” (33).