MYTHS OF CREATION
3. Exposition
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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 . . . |