MYTHS  OF  CREATION

3.   Exposition 

The traditional types of
mythopoeic cosmovisions
under scrutiny in the following survey
are representative of some
50 or more
now extinct ancestral cultures
​from all around the globe,
whose remarkably similar worldviews
have been largely neglected or disregarded
as imaginative superstitions thus far.

Beginning during the late Pleistocene
and the early stages of the Neolithic
as basic ways of seeing the world 
from the conventional points of view 
sanctioned by small, tightly-knit 
local communities, 
these budding cosmological visions 
blossomed in the late Bronze & early Iron ages
into fully-developed mythological systems
encompassing the collective entirety 
of much larger populations’ 
general bases of knowledge & belief,  
enduring for hundreds or, in some cases, 
even thousands of years.

Primarily inherited 
from one generation to the next 
by way of word of mouth transmissions 
& repetitive seasonal or annual rites,
time-honored cosmovisions such as these
were most commonly preserved 
by pre-literate peoples
who by and large perceived
every prominent feature of 
the richly multifaceted reality all around them
to be actively living  
component parts
of a single, widespread, 
intrinsically-unified
macrocosmic whole —​
w/ themselves positioned quite squarely 
right in the very middle of it all. 

Although only faded ruins of their 
long-forgotten myths and histories
have come down to us today 
(globally dispersed as they are 
in fragmentary relics and remains   
unfortunately fenced-in in situ 
or roped-off on museum display),  
vestigial traces and scattered signs 
of these once globally
​commonplace ways of life 
have still been found to be abiding  
among latter-day remnants of
​native indigenous populations now 
struggling, in scattered fringes 
on the margins of our modern multinational
industrialized society, 
simply to carry on and survive . . .

(Continue)