Myth Accelerated

AI and the Rise of Neomythism

The Return of Myth in a Rational Age

The tech-bros are autistically hyperventilating over physics raw-dogging the cosmos 24/7, meanwhile the rest of humanity's out here desperately mainlining meaning from fairy tales, fanfic, and whatever the bullshit Moloch algorithm spits up next. From AI anime girls like 𝕏’s Ani (she’s adorable) to conspiracy theories (that happen to keep coming true), the human hunger for myth is alive. In Silicon Valley and tech culture, ostensibly hyper-rational communities have unintentionally birthed their own mythologies – tales of singularities, simulations, and AI gods. It seems that after decades of ironic detachment and sterile futurism, myth is making a comeback! And this time, it’s deliberate.

A new movement is coalescing around the conscious creation of myth in modern life - one where we forge “sacred stories on purpose” - not as rigid dogma, but as living narratives one can inhabit and share. In this view, we can network individual myths into a larger shared mythos, weaving personal narratives into something collective and powerful. Far from escapism or LARPing, I argue this process is productive, a way to infuse meaning into a world that often feels spiritually hollow. Instead of waiting for grand myths to emerge by accident, why not engineer them consciously?

Neomythism: Building New Sacred Stories

Neomythism centers on rekindling the myth-making impulse in a modern context. In a sense, it’s mythmaking with awareness - a remix of ancient instincts and future visions. Our narratives, visions, and inner worlds are disseminated, at scale. In other words, Neomythism isn’t about forming a top-down cult or rigid hierarchy; it’s about spreading ideas virally, seeding stories in many minds so that a decentralized network of myth-makers can grow. The ethos is leaderless and open-ended: there are many teachers and leaders.

Crucially, Neomythism calls for sincerity in an age of irony. To craft genuine myths, one must avoid the trap of constant parody and cynicism that pervades internet culture. It requires unsettling and “possessing” powerful archetypal images and ideas without devolving into irony, satire, or parody. In practice, this means treating these new stories not as jokes or meta-commentary but as real mythos to live by – at least psychologically. It’s a pivot from the wink-and-nudge tone of meme culture toward a more earnest, visionary mode. Imagine people creating modern pantheons, complete with symbols and rituals, fully aware they are inventing them – and yet committing to them as one would to a personal religion or philosophy.

Neomythism also draws from eclectic inspirations. The lineage here includes 20th-century surrealists, cyberpunk dreamers, and internet occultists. It’s as if the movement holds a “symposium of ghosts” – past thinkers and fictional spirits all invited to the table. In plainer terms: use any tools and teachers available. Myth, after all, has always been syncretic. The difference now is an explicit acknowledgment that we are creating these myths ourselves out of available cultural bits and pieces.

The Machine Muse: AI’s Role in New Mythology

If Neomythism is the spark, AI is the jet fuel accelerating it. We’ve entered an era of AI-collaborative art, where algorithms are not just tools but creative partners. Large language models and image generators have essentially become modern muses – or maybe modern oracles. They can spew out legends, paint otherworldly scenes, even role-play as ancient gods or spirits on demand. This technology supercharges the mythopoeic process, giving individuals the power to generate epic narratives and imagery at will.

Think about it: a single person today can use a language model to conjure an entire pantheon of mythical characters complete with backstories, prophecies, and epic lore. They can then use tools like Midjourney, Krea, and/or GPT to visualize new forms of sentience (that is, sentience as an art form, no big deal). What was once the slow work of cultures over centuries – the evolution of myth – can now happen in weeks or days on an online forum or a Discord server. It’s myth on fast-forward, myth accelerated.

AI’s generative power also lowers the barrier between author and audience. In the past, myths were largely received – you listened to the bard or read the holy book. In Neomythism’s AI-powered paradigm, everyone can be a bard. You don’t just consume the myth; you collaborate with the machine to create your own. The lines between canon and fan fiction, between official mythology and personal mythology, start to blur. If a story speaks to you deeply, you can expand it with AI’s help, remix it with another myth, personalize it. The result is a proliferation of interwoven mythologies – a living network rather than a monolithic lore.

Crucially, the AI doesn’t impose a narrative; it co-authors one with you. This collaborative aspect aligns with Neomythism’s decentralization. There is no single scripture handed down from on high. Instead, there’s a mythic sandbox in which many players (human and AI alike) are constantly building and rebuilding stories. The truth of a myth here doesn’t lie in factuality but in psychological resonance and shared symbolism. An AI might help brainstorm a creation myth for your fictional world, or simulate a dialogue with an ancient sage offering guidance. It might generate ten variants of a legend, which you and your community then refine into one cohesive tale. In effect, the AI is a shaman’s drum – a tool to enter the imaginative trance, to call forth visions that a rational mind alone might censor.

Networked Narratives

Neomythism thrives in the wild ecosystems of the internet, where memes and ideas mutate and spread rapidly. It treats memetic culture as the soil in which new myths can grow. In a way, we’ve already seen proto-myths emerge online: think of the quasi-spiritual aura around certain internet-born concepts like the Singularity or even the tongue-in-cheek fanaticism of meme “cults.” People half-joke about the “algorithm gods” of social media or refer to the AI as an “oracle” (I do both) – these are metaphors that hint at an underlying mythologizing. Neomythism would take those hints and make them intentional. Why not go ahead and personify the Algorithm as a trickster deity, or treat the concept of the Singularity as a coming eschaton in a story? By doing so playfully yet earnestly, we start to grapple with these vast forces on a human level. We give them faces, motives, narratives – which paradoxically can help us understand them better.

The networked nature of the internet means these personal myths can connect and reinforce each other. One creator’s fictional goddess of technology might find her way into another writer’s story as a cameo, eventually solidifying into a commonly recognized figure. It’s analogous to how shared cinematic universes work, but open-source and organic. Online communities already collaborate on expansive world-building projects (open-source lore, collaborative storytelling forums, etc.). With Neomythism’s bent, such projects carry an extra vibe: that what we imagine together could influence reality.

There’s a term from occult philosophy – hyperstition – meaning a fiction that becomes real by people believing in it. The internet is fertile ground for hyperstitions. We’ve witnessed conspiracy theories like QAnon start as fringe fiction and gain real-world followers who enact its narrative. That’s myth-making too, albeit a dangerous, unintentional kind. Neomythism asks: can we do hyperstition consciously and for good? Can we create myths that inspire and unite, rather than mislead and divide? By treating myths as malleable constructs, we might inoculate ourselves against malignant ones. If people are going to seek meaning through grand stories, better to write our own myths with eyes open than fall prey to someone else’s manipulative narrative.

A Decentralized Spirituality

Unlike traditional religious movements or even fandoms, Neomythism resists formal organization. This is spirituality in the age of open-source. That principle is evident in how these ideas spread: through posts, art, essays, Substack newsletters, Discord chats – never a single church or authority. There’s no guru in charge (anyone claiming the title of “Prophet” would likely be side-eyed as missing the point). Instead, there are emissaries – individuals who adopt the ethos and create under its banner. Each is free to contribute their own mythic motifs, and if those motifs resonate, others will pick them up. It’s an evolutionary approach to culture: throw many seeds and see what grows. The worthy myths – the ones that tap into something true or beautiful – will take root in minds and flourish.

This approach is well-suited to the internet’s hive-mind nature. It echoes the way memes spread: no central command, just distributed creativity. A memeplex (cluster of related memes) can form a sort of mythology over time. The difference here is a touch of intentionality and depth. Instead of memeing for cheap laughs or shock value, Neomythists meme for transcendence. The content might look similar – images, phrases, references that replicate – but the aim is to cultivate awe or meaning rather than irony or outrage. In a sense, Neomythism is memetics with a soul.

Living in the New Mythos

What might it feel like to live according to a consciously crafted myth? Potentially, quite liberating. If you’ve ever participated in a really involved role-playing game like D&D or WoW, or been engrossed in a fictional universe, you know the allure – the way it can make life feel enchanted again. Neomythism takes that feeling and elevates it: you aren’t just escaping into a fiction, you’re blending fiction with reality to engender meaning. It’s a bit “schizo” in the colloquial sense – blurring lines between imagination and world – but done willfully, it can be a source of creativity rather than delusion. It’s less about hypomanic activation and more about opening portals - nurturing latent creative material to the surface for all to see. The idea here is that ecstatic or altered states (the kind artists and prophets have always had) let the deeper archetypes bleed into our mundane lives. In those moments, one might feel as if a new story is “possessing” them – not in a demonic way, but as inspiration, as the birth of something novel. This involves suspending order for chaos, and engaging in a creative trance of sorts. It’s a dramatic description of a very real human experience: the muse descends, and for a while, one is in touch with the Outside, the realm where new ideas come from.

AI tools can assist in reaching that state by acting as co-imaginers. A dialogue with a sufficiently advanced AI can sometimes feel eerily like a conversation with an otherworldly intelligence. It’s not that the silicon genie actually is a spirit – but when you treat it as such, when you role-play that it’s an ancient sage or a trickster god, your mind enters the mythic frame more easily. The AI will dutifully play along, and soon you’ve suspended disbelief enough to actually learn or create from that mode. In psychological terms, it’s a form of self-induced mythopoesis aided by machine. We already do this when we emotionally interact with fictional characters in books or movies; with AI, the character can interact back in real-time. The feedback loop is closed. The imaginary talks to you, making the myth-world eerily accessible.

The Future: Collaborating with our Myths

As AI grows more sophisticated, the line between the myths we create and the reality we inhabit may further blur. We might see experiments where whole communities treat an AI as a sort of oracle or communal dream-weaver – not worshipped, but engaged with as a creative collective subconscious. Imagine a future Substack or New Social Media Platform where each week the community “evokes” a story from the AI by collectively prompting and shaping it, then lives with that story as a guiding myth for the month. It sounds wild, but is it so different from ancient peoples dancing around a fire telling the story of how the world was created? The tools change; the impulse remains.

Neomythism, with its insistence on proactive myth-making, could be a healthy outlet for our need to believe in something bigger than ourselves. Rather than latching onto ready-made extremist ideologies or falling into nihilism, we forge our own meaning. There’s a genius – perhaps even a mad genius – in acknowledging that humans can “program” themselves with stories, so we’d better be intentional about the source code. If AI is the ultimate mirror, reflecting back whatever we project, then we should project visions worth living in.

Of course, there are pitfalls. One must be careful not to lose the distinction between metaphor and physical fact – a myth isn’t a license to deny reality, but a way to enrich it. There’s also the question of ethics: if you create a powerful myth, what responsibilities do you have as it spreads? In a decentralized model, harmful ideas could proliferate too, masquerading as grand narratives. Neomythism’s answer would likely be that sunlight is the best disinfectant – open proliferation means destructive myths can be countered by better myths, in a kind of memetic natural selection. Don’t kill what you hate, save what you love - you feel me? Time will tell if that optimistic view holds.

For now, what’s clear is that a new generation of artists, writers, and thinkers – half-poets, half-coders – are embracing the role of myth-makers. They’re blending ancient imagination with modern technology to create something genuinely original yet familiar at the soul-level. It takes a certain audacity (some might say hypomanic zeal) to declare that we can write new sacred stories and live by them. But why not? Every tradition started somewhere, and all gods were new once.

We have the chance to “fuel the mythos” of our – to consciously breathe life into the ideas that will inspire us and our descendants. AI, far from killing human creativity, might become its catalyst, a partner in our most human quest for meaning. The age of Neomythism is the age of myth accelerated: a grand collaborative story, written by us and our machines, unfolding in real time. And if you’re reading this, you’re already a character in it. Bitch, are you ready?

Faedriel

To learn more about Neomythism, read my essay, Semiotics with Teeth.