THE CREATION OF MYTHS

                                          Coda

          

Coda: On the End of Ritual and the End of Myth

It should also, of course, be understood that the mythos and its accompanying rituals were an indivisible phenomenon during the myth-making era — and when the rituals ceased to be performed, myth became denuded of its original force and power, and quickly was reduced to a form of literary art instead. 

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Although the myth-making (or, mythopoeic) mindset was largely denounced and cast aside by the early freethinkers of the West in the early Iron Age (the so-called “Axial Age”), in many other parts of the world older mythic traditions carried on, adapting to the later vicissitudes of time and space as the new founders of reformulated cultures deemed most suitably fit. Some of these populations, in fact, carried on in much the same way until being encountered by seafaring colonial armies arriving from Europe during the last 500 years. 

— Almost everywhere we look, we still find faded vestiges of now extinct myth-making communities who had continued to very conscientiously preserve and perpetuate their age-old traditions by way of rituals and word of mouth, from one generation to the next — for hundreds, and in some cases, even thousands of years. ... 

...  What long-lived wisdoms might modern civilizations have lost by dispensing with these traditions so casually and callously? ...

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