MYTHS OF CREATION
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3. Exposition
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The traditional types of mythopoeic cosmovisions (or myth-making worldviews) under scrutiny in the following survey are representative of some three score or more now extinct ancestral cultures from all around the globe, whose remarkably similar mythological and ritual traditions have been largely neglected or disregarded as imaginative superstitions thus far.
Beginning as basic ways of seeing the world from the conventional points of view sanctioned by small, tightly-knit local communities during the late Pleistocene and the early stages of the Neolithic, these budding cosmological visions blossomed in the late Bronze and early Iron ages into fully-developed mythological systems encompassing the collective entirety of much larger populations’ general bases of knowledge and 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 and 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 — with 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 now 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 are sometimes still found to abide 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 . . .
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