Presented by Dr. Nathaniel Ashcroft, Professor of Comparative Religious Studies, Camberwell University

  Good evening. I’m Dr. Nathaniel Ashcroft, and I’ve been asked to speak tonight on the nature of myth—what it means, where it comes from, and why it matters in an age when, increasingly, we think we’ve moved past it.

  I’ve spent the better part of twenty-five years studying the architecture of belief. My doctorate is in comparative religious studies, but I hold degrees in philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics. I’ve spent time with monks in the Judean desert, debated militant atheists in Oxford, and consulted on a Vatican archive digitization effort that I’m still not entirely sure I was supposed to talk about publicly.

  My career has not been about proving or disproving the divine. I believe in God, but I have yet to see a religion that fully understands Him. And I say that not to offend, but to clarify: I do not dismiss faith. I study it. Religions, plural, are the most complex and enduring attempts humanity has made to understand the unreachable. But they are, in the end, attempts—texts filtered through politics, memory, and metaphor.

  That’s where myth lives, not in the literal, but in the reflective.

  See, myths don’t begin with facts. They begin with feelings. Fear. Wonder. Longing. Loss. Before we wrote laws, we whispered warnings. Before we worshipped gods, we gave names to shadows. We told stories—not to lie, but to remember. To explain what frightened us. To preserve what shaped us.

  And sometimes, though rarely, different civilizations remember the same thing.

  The flood myth is the classic example. Nearly every ancient culture has one: Sumer, India, Mesoamerica, Egypt, Scandinavia. A cleansing. A punishment. A second beginning. Why? Did it happen? Perhaps. There’s geological support for several major flood events in prehistory. But even if it didn’t—something left a mark so deep that memory folded it into every language on Earth.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  This is the heart of what I study. Not just what myths say, but why so many say the same thing.

  Sometimes, the resonance makes sense. We all fear death. We all fear storms. We all need fire. But sometimes the echo is… stranger.

  Let me give you an example that’s been occupying my research lately. There’s a symbol—a set of interlocking arcs, almost like a twisted ouroboros—that I first encountered during a site review in Cappadocia. At the time, I assumed it was ornamental. But I’ve since found variations of it in the Scottish Highlands. In Nepalese hill shrines. In pre-Columbian cave art. Always the same ratio. Always etched with care, not vandalism.

  Alongside it, sometimes scrawled nearby or embedded subtly in the design, is a name.

  Or something like a name. I’ve found it at least seventeen times now, across multiple continents, in texts and locations with no clear cultural overlap.

  Solmyrion.

  It doesn’t mean anything in any known language. I’ve checked against Sumerian, Proto-Semitic, Akkadian, Sanskrit, early Celtic roots—you name it. Nothing. It doesn’t match any god, saint, or spirit in the global pantheon. It doesn’t even follow expected phonetic structures. It just is.

  And yet it shows up. Again and again.

  I’ve found it carved into limestone in the ruins of a collapsed French monastery. Scratched into the interior of a sealed burial shaft in northern Wales. On a shard of driftwood pulled from beneath Arctic ice, half-burned and buried in sediment.

  No theology. No accompanying prayer. Just the word. Sometimes mirrored. Sometimes fragmented. But always recognizable.

  Now, I don’t think it’s mystical—not yet. The likely answer is that we’re looking at some pre-linguistic motif or early migratory relic. Possibly even a hoax that spread further than we realized. These things happen. Language fossilizes like bone—it gets picked up, re-used, misremembered.

  But still... there’s something about a name that no one claims. A word with no worshippers. No miracles. No doctrine.

  Just a presence.

  Those are the ones that stay with me.

  Long after the lights are out.