MYTHS  OF  CREATION

20.   Extended Cycles
​Of Recurrence

— Ultimately, there are no simple myths regarding the beginning of the world anywhere at all to be found. 

The world was everywhere customarily envisioned as a place perennially given to vast oscillations — both Above and Below. 

Indeed, this fundamental principle of regularly recurring oscillation was held to function as a cosmic law during the mythopoeic era, — both quantitatively and qualitatively integrating the microcosm of human ritual activity with the ever-changing cyclical macrocosm of nature. 

By and large all these founding societies regarded these cosmological events to be universal phenomena that had gone on since the dawn of life on Earth; — and every mythic history more or less repeated itself from the beginning — with each catastrophe conferring a distinct eschatological rupture or breaking point between a previous cosmic order and a more recent cosmic order — and with each succeeding catastrophe in this series of disjunctions likewise further & further obscuring earlier preceding catastrophes.

— Both the mythical actions of the gods and the historical deeds of humanity, as such, were seen as reciprocal representations of an eternal cosmogonic struggle, actively defending the world Order against the destructive forces of Chaos; — in the grand context of which, even the most disastrous and most commonly recalled catastrophes of history were also regarded as but seasonal rhythms unfolding in even vaster cycles of repetitious ruptures and renewals . . . in an utterly unimaginable greater chain of being.  . . .