THE CREATION OF MYTHS

                                 Introduction​

i.    On the Mythical Constitution of the Human Condition

The roots of myth extend back in time to the very dawn of human history. Myth-making communities all over the globe recognized and paid careful attention to patterns and cycles seen in the skies, and struggled to make sense of them and their interactions for thousands of years. 

According to the fragmentary accounts that have come down to us, however, these observations were not recorded out of idle curiosity and wonder at the orderly regularity of the heavens. The real power and vitality of the celestial pantheon, rather, came from the sight of the heavens energized and transformed by relatively rare and/or unexpected  events,  — celestial happenstances that were said to have brought great changes to both the heavens and the earth.

... Ultimately, it was most likely the interplay between temporary celestial events and the fixed regularity of the heavens which created the primary backdrop for the development of our ancestors’ mythologies, religions, and sciences. 


While it is true that men and women have always been determined by the culture they were born into, mankind himself originally shaped his cultures according to his own very real needs.  Partly in order to buffer the stress and fear of  unforgettable cataclysmic events — and partly in order to prepare their descendants for the possible recurrence of the same —  traditional  myth-making communities all over the globe cultivated easily memorable (or, mnemonic) means of passing down their knowledge and beliefs. 

The further we delve into the past, the more we find how cosmogonic myths thoroughly pervaded cosmology, art, iconography, architecture, time reckoning, and religious rituals of all early civilizations.  All of the most ancient peoples reported that the world moved through time in a series of creations and destructions, and that the Ages of the past had repeatedly been bookended by cosmic catastrophes and successive renewals of life on Earth.  The appearances and disappearances of star-like planetary and cometary gods and goddesses provided the foundation for countless myths  — which were originally taken very seriously and regarded as true history the world over.


These cosmogonic myths were once mankind’s oldest known and most commonly held beliefs. Fantastic myths and legends of the world’s cosmic origins unfolding in  orders of Ages regaled  myth-making communities for millennia. Sacrificial rituals dramatically re-enacted the local cosmogony as a sympathetic means of ensuring the fertile wellbeing of their homeland, and the general stability of the created world-order against future shiftings of the planets and stars. 

— By carefully studying the  knowledge they passed down  through myth and ritual (as well as a variety of other types of available historical evidence), we can begin to appreciate the many different ways myth-making communities chose to understand what they saw in the skies, and how they came to use that universal knowledge for their own unique cultural ends. Mankind is distinctly, by nature and history, not only a “culture-making animal;”  — he has also always been a “ceremony-making animal:” a being who has always devised different, yet more or less equivalent systems of meaning in the face of the unbearably contingent forces of reality.

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