Pagan cultures have always made use of two sources of knowledge about the world, which Karen Armstrong defined in her book The Battle for God as mythos and logos.  Modern societies, including most modern religion, limits itself to one, logos.  We need both.

Logos is knowledge arrived at through evidence and reason as we
usually think of it.  It gives us knowledge about things, but not
whether they have interior dimensions of meaning and awareness.  You
cannot measure consciousness. 

Mythos addresses the meaning in the world, the value that exists
there intrinsically.  When it is abandoned, the world slides towards
meaninglessness.   Being myself schooled in logos, that is, modern ways
of knowing, it took me many years even after I became Pagan, to realize
its limitations as well as its strengths.

Pagans will do themselves well to help revitalize the missing dimension
of knowledge about the world.  It may seem that myths are primitive
because they are related as stories.  But stories are how we express
meanings that are interior to people and things.  The best stories
always point to much more than they say, which is why they fascinate
long after their first reading.  Poetry also describes more than the
literal meaning of its words, and many myths are not only stories, they
are poetry. 

What makes a poem or story mythic?

As part of my project to bring Robert Bringhurst’s writing to the attention of Pagans, I will give two brief quotations from his essay “The Meaning of Mythology” in his book Everywhere Being is Dancing.

… a myth is not exactly a work of literature: it is
instead a kind of story which a literary work can only partially embody
or contain.  A myth is a theorem about the nature of reality, expressed
not in algebraic symbols or inanimate abstractions but in animate
narrative form. (63)

and

Myths are stories that investigate the nature of the world
from the standpoints f the world, whereas novels, for example,  more
often look at questions of proprietary interest to human beings alone.
(67)

I think we will only really be able to help offset modernity’s slide
into nihilism when we have come to understand and honor mythic ways of
knowning as well as those our own time has come to master.