To Lewis, myths might be beautiful, they might charm our imaginations, but they were lies: inventions that contain no objective truth about the world. This is what troubled Lewis about Christianity. It was like the Norse myth of the dying god Balder, a lovely fiction, “one mythology among many.” Here was the “recognized scientific account” of the growth of religion that Lewis had written about to Arthur Greeves. It is the idea that “most legends have a kernel of fact in them somewhere,” but enthusiasts transform the kernel into a glorified sun god, corn deity, or supernatural messiah.
