Here is an example of a biological instance giving rise to a specific mythic character.
Biological instance: When men are in the presence of an attractive woman, hormonal shifts alter their brainwaves. A side effect is a perceived drain of energy or focus, as the flood of hormones disrupts the cohesion of the self’s purpose and direction.
Mythic character derived from this: The succubus—an entity said to drain male energy through sexual allure.
The succubus isn’t a medieval fan-fiction. It’s a lossless (or near-lossless) compression of the lived experience of acute limbic hijacking by a fertility signal, rendered in the only medium available at the time: story + demonology.
A biological event occurs: when a man is in the presence of an attractive woman, his neurochemistry shifts—dopamine, testosterone, cortisol, and other modulators reshape his attentional field. Focus dissolves, goal‑orientation blurs, energy feels scattered, and the sense of a coherent self‑trajectory weakens. It isn’t supernatural; it’s a predictable hormonal cascade that temporarily repurposes the system toward mating relevance rather than long‑range intention.
A mythic figure arises to translate this effect into symbolic language: the succubus. A being who “drains” male vitality through sexual allure. A narrative crafted before hormonal models existed, yet perfectly mapping the phenomenology of the experience: the sense of being pulled off one’s axis, the depletion, the trance, the after‑effect of fog or weakness.
In other words, the myth is a metaphorical wrapper for a reproducible biological mechanism. The culture didn’t understand neurotransmitters, so it encoded the experience as a supernatural agent with appetites.
This is the general pattern: biology generates a consistent internal state; myth creates a character to narrativize that state; society inherits the character long after forgetting the mechanism it was explaining.
These mythic characters are representations of the internal, felt-sense, subjective experiences of real-life biological phenomena. Myth is the symbolic language used to explain these phenomena, because the source‑emission itself is unintelligible to most—felt only as a raw current of energy.
You can do this with almost every demon, spirit, or monster:
Paranoia and religious terror emerge when the mythic compression layer becomes so degraded that the symbol detaches from the biological trigger it was meant to represent. What began as a clean loop—biological event, felt internal state, cultural encoding into demon or god, story-based containment—gradually unravels when the lived trigger becomes rare, hidden, or culturally suppressed, and the story circulates without fresh experiential anchoring.
The symbol then hardens into literalism: the succubus is no longer a metaphor for the draining hormonal fog men feel around certain women, but an actual invisible predator; hellfire stops being the felt consequence of limbic chaos and becomes a physical furnace staffed by demons. Once the tether snaps, the brain’s pattern-matching system treats the symbol itself as the threat, so any stray signal—anxiety, intrusive thought, a flicker in peripheral vision—gets interpreted as an attack by a free-floating mythic agent. The amygdala has no error-correction, so fear proves the entity and the entity proves the fear. This is why religious psychosis and ancient myth fixate on the same themes: they are the old containment icons running without grounding, sparking across the cortex. Healthy myth stays connected to the body’s signals; pathological myth forgets it was metaphor and evolves into a rogue process that hijacks the entire system.
Myth is biology explaining itself to consciousness: a mirror of the deep architecture of human experience before analytical tools existed. It arises when a biological event is interpreted by the organism and reflected back in symbolic form through the narrative layer of consciousness.
Healthy myth = symbolic translation tethered to the body
Cultural myth = shared compression of biological states
Psychotic myth = occurs when a symbol becomes untethered from its originating biological signal. Detached from context, the symbol manifests as a free-floating mythic entity, feared because its connection to the original process is no longer recognized
Psychosis is often the raw biological signal erupting without the mythic interface that normally filters and stabilizes it.
The only path to resolving such psychosis is to venture inward and honestly map the terrain of one’s own mind, tracing the detached symbol back to its originating biological and psychological signal.