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MYTHS OF CREATION
2. On Artifacts of Cultural Memory
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2. On Artifacts of Cultural Memory
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Over time, across the late Neolithic era, and through the Bronze and Iron ages, artifacts of cultural memory became more and more crystallized in the forms of objectified culture — not only in language (e.g., rock art, hieroglyphs, and alphabetic inscriptions) but also ... in a wide array of images, sculptures, altars, sacred buildings, commemorative monuments -- even the basic architectural design behind the layout of entire settlements and whole cities. ...
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Because parallels have been found in every corner of the globe, more or less every known culture from prehistory falls under this same purview. We find remarkably parallel cosmogonic views spread widely abroad, among the Greeks the same as the Hindus; the Chinese the same as the Aztecs; the Norse and related Germanic cultures of upper Europe the same as the Hurrians and the Hittites; the Phoenicians, the Chaldeans, and the Babylonians the same as the Iranians, the Canaanites and the Hebrews . . . Only in the last few hundreds of years, however, has it become possible to recognize just how widespread their similar mythic cosmogonies really were.
Our growing body of knowledge regarding how the cosmos was perceived and understood by our mythopoeic ancestors is primarily based on the fractured and fragmentary material remains retrieved from the archaeological dig sites of these very same peoples’ ruined settlements and cities, which have relatively recently been recovered over the last 200 years or so, in nearly every corner of the world. -- All in all, these sites include many of the more well-known large scale constructions (such as palaces, pyramids, ziggurats, open-air amphitheaters and stadiums, passage graves, funeral monuments, memorial tombs and temples), as well as a wide variety of freestanding megalithic earthworks constructed at various intervals during the same time frame (such as medicine wheels, standing stone circles and rows, trackways, causeways, henge ditches and banks, mounds, platforms), and smaller walled sanctuaries and enclosures (such as hogans, kivas, earth-lodges and roundhouses, etc.) -- sites, generally speaking, where the collective memory of entire communities was concentrated and anchored, and regularly expressed in their respective rituals, feast days and customs. Furthermore, some of these archaeological discoveries have brought to light, directly from the ground, previously unknown textual evidence of a given culture's mythos, as well as more substantive evidence about the public rituals these peoples practiced in the past. <insert map and chart here> |
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Furthermore, regardless of their exact placement in chronological time, we also notice that the specific locations of all these types of structures were often conditionally configured vis a vis the environmental constraints of their local surrounding landscape.
In addition, particular architectural and artistic features at these sites, that have survived the ravages of time, strongly suggest express associations with features observable in the nearby visible landscape, and/or celestial objects seen in the local skyscape. -- More specifically, the latter association includes probable visible orientations to celestial latitudes or longitudes, with regard to the declinations or culminations of the planets and/or particular fixed stars. Generally speaking, these sites -- vis a vis the relevant portion of a surrounding landscape and/or skyscape -- provided the a priori frame of reference for their local communities’ store of cultural memory. And, as such, the remains of these sites are representative of a memorializing, myth-making consciousness that has barely survived. |