Shared Image of the World

THE CREATION OF MYTH

On the Community's Shared
Image of the World

On the Community's Shared Image of the World

Thus, over some considerable but unknown length of time, the shared community mythos became an unconscious rote substratum commonly held and shared by all.

There was nothing mysterious about this; it was simply transmitted from one generation to the next, partly by the everyday process of living in society among relatives and neighbors, without any real conscious effort; — and partly by highly skilled and trained narrators (or, oral historians) whose chosen or elected function it was to do so: typically chiefs, priests or shamans whose livelihood depended on their ability to perform these sacred duties.

— Thereafter reiterated many times over, through many generations to come, as cultural memories more or less shared by the entire community, each community’s local imago mundi (the group’s total sense of reality, or shared image of the world), eventually became more permanently ingrained in the community’s daily, seasonal, and annual practices, their relationships with each other, and their general outlook on life as a whole.

Individuals grew up in relatively isolated communities with a more or less homogeneous world view. Important questions had been settled long ago by founding figures and storytellers, so there was little reason to challenge or modify the traditional wisdom determined by the culture into which they were born.— To be sacred was to remain in place. To keep contained within one’s culturally-sanctioned bounds was to remain in one’s natively-prescribed orbit. — Indeed, there were strong positive restraints upon any would-be innovator who threatened to upset the inherited consensus. To break out, to cross boundaries, to commit transgressions, to choose to go against the interests of the group in favor of one’s own self-interests was tantamount to opening oneself, one’s community and even the whole world itself to the threat of chaos, catastrophe and disaster.

Through the daily practice of familial imitation, the repetition of the traditional gestures and speech of his or her social group, the individual, without conscious realization, was thus enabled to memorize most of the information necessary to accrue an identity attuned to proper social behavior. In this sense, the rote memorization that began in one’s youth, eventually culminated in a well-defined and socially acceptable cultural identity for each individual, as a rightful member of the common consensus.

For ultimately, the common bond of the community, much like today’s national or religious affiliations, consisted in the beliefs that the people themselves held regarding the community. The group was held together by the stories that they told about themselves, and the shared truths and basic values in which all the members of the community commonly believed.

— In short, the entire panoply of things that made up the community’s traditions might be best understood as a system of memory markers (mnemotechnics) that enabled each individual living in the community to integrally belong. Passing on the mythos from one generation to the next was not only needed to form and stabilize the community’s collective identity, but the mythos likewise passed into that identity itself, thereby instilling a sense of a collective social identity to each member of the group.

This furthermore suggests a state of mind or being, or way of life, in which man, as yet, lacked a sense of separate, individual self-identity . — As hinted in historical times by so-called “primitive” peoples that survived into the early 20th century, individuals belonged to a unit, such as a tribe or communal group, where the emphasis was not on the personal but on the impersonal, not on the "I" but on the communal group, the shared “Ego” of the collective.

Such a group, to the extent that it was bound together by a collective self-identity unfolding out of shared myths and rituals, was a closed society. United by a shared sense of reality, a myth-making community behaved as an organism in its own right — and not simply in a metaphorical sense, but in a strict psycho-physiological sense as well.

And because closed groups of humans living together have the tendency to continually, perhaps instinctively, exert pressure on their fellow members to conform to the interests of the group, the individual’s tendency to yield to this pressure appeared as a sort of ‘animal instinct’ — a formative impulse mirroring the instinct that maintains social unity among certain types of insects such as ants and bees. It relied on a projection, both on the part of the collective that wished to continue to remember, and of the individual who wished to remember in order to belong to the group.

—Such a state of affairs allowed cultural groups to reproduce their shared identity more or less indefinitely. — It seems to be primarily in this fashion that group impulse first crystallized, and a collective instinct thus unfolded a shared sense of consciousness, which enabled culture-making man to cope with the perils of the world as a group-ego, in which each and every individual was similarly sustained by his or her native clan.

Each member of the community, as such, was called upon to dwell in the shared social world of the community, in which everything had its given place and role to fulfill. ... — And in a social universe where in-group boundaries were so stable and self-evident, any commonly-held myth, once widely enough known, became commonly believed. — And any commonly believed myth would thereafter be capable of altering the behavior of the group, by inducing the people to act as if the myth were completely factual and true.

Ideas and ideals related to the mythos thus become self-validating within remarkably elastic limits. ...

Membership in such a tightly knit group and participation in its shared sufferings and triumphs, moreover, would give meaning and value to individual human lives. Belonging to a such group would give individuals something beyond the self to serve and to rely on for personal guidance, companionship and aid. — An extraordinary behavioral motility would result, in the course of which the local group acquired new capacities to change, adapt, and learn new ways of doing things — all in order to better survive.

CONTINUE