History is not the word history and its cognates repeated over and over again.

History is about real experiences of real individuals as well as about real occurrences, events and situations. It is about an infinity of factors intersecting and intermingling, in order to bring about dynamic trends that cannot be foretold by any kind of neat and rounded theory. The historian and the historically-minded, i.e. civilized, individual is, thus, above all committed to becoming acquainted, from as close quarters as possible, with this inexhaustible ground of objective and subjective reality, upon which any theorizing must be erected. Given the immensity of its object of reference, as well as the natural limitations of the human faculties that ought to be employed in its investigation, any theoretic utterance about historical tendencies, mutual influences, causal concatenations and the like must of necessity be tentative. It is put forward in order to be drastically revised or overthrown. We possess no synoptic (that is all seeing) view of the past, i.e one that collects together in one inclusive tableau as it were all the essential elements and relations that composed the texture of past life. And as to future realities there is no possible knowledge.

Faced with this situation we must be prepared to be rudely tested and disappointed when we bring our cherished conceptions and beliefs about what happened in history and what it meant face to face with the raw data of historical experience as they emerge from the primary labor of delving into the remnants of extinguished life. Luckily for those who prefer to cling to ready-made inherited opinion the greatest part of the record has been erased. This is indubitable fact, which seems prima facie to to justify those who claim that the only possible criterion of truth we possess in reference to "was eigentlich gewesen ist" is only the psychological and existential needs of today's social actors. But this view is too facile and hasty in its craftiness. For to begin with, whatever the social requirements of today we cannot be under any circumstances justified in constructing any theoretical view whatsoever about that portion of past reality which is for us irrevocably expunged. What is lost is lost, and nobody can base any plausible anthropological speculation on it. So, to sidetrack the issue of historical knowledge towards the gaps in the factual record constitutes evasion pure and simple, whose ulterior motive is precisely the construction of fantastic accounts of human life that cannot be tested against experience -because there are no data for this kind of test, you see. A circumstance, nevertheless, which does not prevent those who put forward these intellectual fancies from claiming that they are somehow true, or -if they cannot bring themselves to utter such a swear word- at least correct in some undefinable way. The real point of the dispute, however, is not this. It concerns, rather, the theories that can be erected upon the admittedly meager and deficient factual record that we do possess about what transpired in the past and about how people thought back then about their circumstances of life. It is here that the perversity of absolute ideology shows its true colors. For it treats even the existing and acknowledged facts on a par with the non-existent ones, and even proceeds to baptize them as non-existent if they do not square with its theoretical predilections.

Blumenberg argued that as against the "absolutism of reality" the only sensible reaction of erect man is myth. But this is a myth that assumes the absolute existence of a real world that subsists in and of itself and is in no way a fiction of the human head. Mythic man is beholden to nature, and his myths are the first inchoate attempts to divine its laws and limn its structural outlines. This tight fit between religion and natural necessity was adequately described by Burkert. Modern ideological myth, on the contrary, flows from the exact opposite assumption, namely that the real is an arbitrary construct of the mind and that we should revere the great myth makers that out of the pure spontaneity of their creative imagination were able to stitch together inspiring accounts of life treading on thin air so to speak. It would, consequently, be highly impudent to spoil the mystagogy by inquiring as to what exactly are the real historical referents of this high flown talk.

History as sacred myth, a sacredness which may even presuppose the vanishing of God, is the ingenious ploy of this theoretical priapism, which dissolves human actuality, the actuality of work, desire and suffering, into a bundle of words, mere constellations of "signs" deliberately robbed of all meaning to boot. This is a cult of pure history without humanity and without human beings, a bacchanal of abstractions, the narcissistic self-embrace of an empty self.

Heavily historical societies, whose educational and cultural substructure has however rotted away, are especially prone to this cheap affectation. Lacking the intellectual wherewithal, and the moral stamina, to stare historical experience in the face, they resort to the histrionics of a tedious rhetoric egged on by the gurus of deep-sounding obfuscation, the high priests of turgid logorrhoea.