“Superstition”—degenerate and degrading conceptions obstinately maintained by those who should know better.

J H Moulton DD

Understanding Myths 1

In the development of human culture, we cannot fix a point where myth ends or religion begins. In the whole course of history, religion remains indissolubly connected and penetrated by mythical elements.
E Cassirer

What are Myths?
The Mythopoetic way of Thinking
Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind
So, Into Rationality

Abstract

Myths are connected with religion because they were how the earliest human beings thought, with dreams and reality intertwined and explanations picked from anywhere that seemed suitable at the time, with no particular attempt to find something better. Religion was the magical way these people tried to control their world, and ritual was their method, a type of sympathetic magic. Myths offered pseudo scientific explanations of natural phenomena—fertility, life and death, the creation of the world, its polarities, its social and technical functions. The activities of gods helped humans, but also hit them with evil and disease, and their anger caused floods, famines and wars. Myths were used to explain the rituals, and rituals enacted mythical explanations. The pre-logical way of thinking of mythopoetic thought became associated with religion. Though people began to think logically, they remained associated, and still are.

What are Myths?

Myths are tales that pass down from generation to generation and have become traditional, but mythologists squabble over precisely what a myth is. Some say it is necessarily connected with religion, while others say it is much broader, simply any folk tale, or somewhat less broadly, a tale with a serious purpose distinct from a folktale, which is primarily an entertainment. For the Greeks, “muthos” originally meant something uttered, something from the mouth—a tale, a statement, spoken drama. It probably was associated with religion because the occasions when something significant was uttered were chiefly religious occasions.

The myth exists on the conceptual level and the ritual on the level of action.
C Levi-Strauss

Myth was the thing said (legomenon) and ritual the corresponding thing performed (dromenon, from which comes our word “drama”), so it is often said that myths are explanations of rituals:

Myth in my terminology is the counterpart of ritual. Myth implies ritual, ritual implies myth, they are one and the same…
Sir E R Leach (1910-1989 AD)

It is undoubtedly the case that many myths, perhaps especially in the Near East were associated with rituals, and that some of them may have been created to account for actions whose purpose are no longer apparent.
G S Kirk, Myth (1970)

Regardless of whether the myth or the ritual is original, they replicate each other. The Scottish biblicist and Arabist William Robertson Smith (1846-1894 AD) propagated this view as a way of rationalizing much of the Jewish scriptures, and it is worth quoting Kirk because he correctly rejected the idea as a general hypothesis, but it is valid, as he concedes here, more particularly, and perhaps especially in ANE cultures. Smith accepted that the Semites performed rituals only for a reason, but the story, or myth that explained the ritual was of minor importance and could change.

Semitic myths are embodied in poems designed originally to be chanted or recited at religious exercises. Their objective was to provide an interpretation of ritual in terms of connected stories. In course of time, however, many of the underlying rituals fell into disuse, so that the myths survived as purely literary compostions…
T Gaster

The English classicist Jane Harrison (1850-1928 AD) and Gilbert Murray (1866-1957 AD) found not just Greek literature but all art based on myth as ritual. People gradually stopped believing that the imitation of an action caused it to happen, but still continued to practise ritual as an end in itself, changing into drama and other arts. Some compositions that survive until today as myths were originally literary descriptions of the ceremonies themselves. This is true of the supposed Genesis creation myth when the days of creation are counted. The days are, of course, the days in the week long ceremony when each creative act was celebrated, not any actual days of creation that no human being could possibly know about, even if a god did do the creating. The same is surely true too of some of the miracles of Jesus. They were ceremonies already celebrated among the circle in which Jesus moved, that of the Essenes. Examples are the wedding at Cana, the raising of Jair’s daughter, and the mass feeding, which was truly the origin of the Eucharist because Jesus was conducting one, but it has been suppressed in favour of the uniqely Christian inauguration of it “in memory of me”, supposedly started by Paul.

So, a broad category of myths, although far from all, were meant to be repeated on ritual and ceremonial occasions, and their repetition was part of their purpose, often to preserve the continuity of nature and society. Seasonal and fertility festivals fall into this category—the rituals to reverse the decline of the sun at the winter solstice, and to bring the rains to fertilize the earth required some sort of imitative action to bring it about that the myth explained and justified by showing how and why it was instituted for the first time. Retelling the mythical origin was essential to the continual repetition of the ritual which itself was a type of sympathetic magic to compel the event or to remind a deity of its obligation. The Egyptians had a ceremony each year to remind the Nile of its obligation to rise and inundate the valley!

Another example is the Egyptian myth that each night, when the sun passed beneath the earth, it was threatened by the dragon Apophis, necessitating the priests to get into the celestial telephone exchange called the temple to practise the rituals, chant the hymns, and utter the spells and prayers that would save the sun god from a fate that would affect everyone on earth. The ritual involved the recitation of the myth of Ra’s origin and ancestry, and how he was to defeat the serpent of the night that threatened him, and everyone else. In Babylon, at the New Year (Akidu) festival, the priests of Marduk reminded the god how he was to defeat Tiamat and create the world. Everyone seemed to join in the ceremonies which thereby became a social obligation. Effectively the recitation and enactment of the myth sustained the world. The ritual was not a celebration of the past, but an affirmation of the present. The past and the present were not distinct.

But an association between myth and ritual, even when it is clear, cannot certainly indicate which came first. Inasmuch as myths were independently invented with an explanatory purpose—as Tylor thought, but Smith denied—some could have preceded the rituals, which were then devised to act out the myths which were seen as a form of magic, but the reverse is equally possible, and perhaps more so, that old rituals that had evolved over long periods, but with a forgotten purpose, had myths grafted on to them. Elsewhere in these pages, the custom is noted of a habit parishioners attending one English Protestant Church had of genuflecting to a particular bare recess. The custom went on for generations with no one asking why. Then a vicar had the church decorated and old paint was removed to reveal, in this recess, an image of the Blessed Virgin, a relic of Catholicism that had obviously been whitewashed over at the Reformation. The original Catholic parishioners had continued their habit of bowing to the Virgin, and the custom went on even when the image in the corner had been forgotten!

In the ANE, a common enough reason for changing a myth would have been a conquest, or dynastic change, when a new king and priesthood imposed their new beliefs on to a conquered or subject people. The explanation of rituals by myths was a continuous process not a single one. J G Frazer thought it self-evident that the priests of Attis and Cybele ritually castrated themselves, and the myth of the self-castration of Attis was invented to explain it. Perhaps so, but maybe, in earlier times, the sacred priestess, who represented the goddess, each year copulated with a youth, the sacred king, who was subsequently killed by castration, and that was the origin of the myth. Then, when the miracle occurred that occasionally a castrated youth survived, he was made a priest, and at a later stage still, men keen to become priests, or simply in a religious frenzy castrated themselves, and thus qualified as “Galli.” No one knows this either, but it shows the simple explanation that the myth directly explained a castration ritual is not necessarily so.

Some myths did not have to be ceremonially repeated, but gave a legitimacy to a people. Such a myth was a sort of title deed. Athenians were indissolubly linked with Attica where they were born as children of Athena, their goddess, who sprang herself fully formed from the head of Zeus, the Greek Lord God. So, their entitlement was God given. The Jewish myths of the Old Testament, as Christians call it, are title deeds for Jews, establishing a God given right for the Palestinian hills, and even to the whole of the Levant, since the myths include one that the mythical first real king of the Jews had conquered it all.

Some myths become heroic narratives that help to define the people through informal repetition and story telling, or some just establish mythical relationships such as that the moon is the wife of the sun, or the supposed relationships between nations, through the relationships of the founding heroes, again prominent in the Jewish scriptures. Such myths of informal repetition also give a reason for the emotional commitment to an attitude or belief that rulers like their subjects to have. They can unconsciously reflect the social structure of the society in which they are popular. Sir E R Leach (“The Legitimacy of Solomon”, Genesis as Myth and Other Essays, 1970) showed that some of the myths of the Jewish scriptures were meant to disguise contradictions between how Israel was conceived as being and how it actually was.

Another kind of myth offers a conjectural explanation of some puzzle. People die. The Epic of Gilgamesh explains the ineluctable divine origin of death. Seeking to avoid it, Gilgamesh searches for increasingly higher authorities for a solution to the problem of death but each one tells him that human mortality is inevitable.

Gilgamesh, whither are you wandering?
Life, which you look for, you will never find.
For when the gods created man,
They let death be his share,
And his life kept in their own hands.
Epic of Gilgamesh

Eventually, he discovers there are exceptions. Utnapishtim and his wife survived the Flood and are now immortal, but the exceptional circumstances will never be repeated. Orpheus and Eurydice is the same lesson. Orpheus descends to Hades to retrieve the dead Eurydice, and almost succeeds, but human imperfection supercedes. Humans are not gods, and Orpheus cannot resist a little backward glance to make sure she is following him, thereby breaking his bond and the maid slips back into death. The story of Adam, Eve and the snake in the Jewish scriptures also explains human mortality, and with the same explanation—human frailty—the man breaks his word and death is the outcome.

One form of the definition associating myth with religion was the presence in them of gods, and so the presence of gods was considered the characteristic of myths. Yet a swath of tales exist that are not particularly about gods, though they are about people in the mythological fantasy time called by the Australian Aboriginals, “Dreamtime”, when social customs began, and humans often had the supernatural abilities we have in dreams, though they were not gods. Few scholars would not be willing to call these myths. The gods are not really central to the Odyssey and the Argonautica—they are stories about human adventures, and the gods come in to them as conjectural explanations for events that the men did not understand.

The Mythopoetic way of Thinking

The style of mythical explanations might be something to do with the way pre-literate, pre-logical people thought. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939 AD) noted that pre-literate people treated whatever they met in their world like themselves in a tacit belief that they and plants and animals all understood it equally. He suggested pre-literate people thought emotionally and mystically:

The mythic mind never perceives passively, never merely contemplates things. All its observations spring from some act of participation, some act of emotion and will.
E Cassirier, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Cassirer surmised that the point about myth is that the image it evokes is not, as we think it, a representation of something. In a real sense before writing, reading and arithmetic, it was the thing. Primitive people are in a childlike, mythopoetic state of mind:

Myth arose in the savage condition prevalent in remote ages among the whole [human] race.
Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871)

C Levi-Strauss (b 1908 AD) showed that primitive societies think differently from developed societies, even ones as undeveloped as those in the Bronze Age. It is Stone Age thinking, and Levi-Strauss used the terms “bricolage” and “bricoleur” for this mode of thought. They pertain to using whatever is at hand without any effort to find something better, the bricoleur essentially bodging things together to make something that will do. That it was being done at all is a sign of improvement over savagery, of logical thought emerging. That it leads to a type of taxonomy, albeit one based on principles that seem perverse or whimsical to the logical mind is proof that mythology is not thoughtless.

To use a modern term, myths are fantasy. They relate impossible happenings, but not so much in any way that seems to have been thought through, not deliberately thought out, but rather presented as strange dislocations of familiar or natural causes and associations. The fantastic figures of myths are giants, monsters, supernatural animals, supernatural heroes, magical objects and mysterious phenomena, like invisibility, prophecy, flight, shape-shifting, souls and spirits. The rules of normal actions, reasoning and relationships are distorted and no longer pertain, and supernatural happenings and transformations need and get no explanations. They just are, in this mythical world. The reason is that these narratives originated in a time before people could think rationally.

For primitives, speculation was unlimited, unrestricted by any scientific conditions, and Nature and man were not distinguished. People were social, and society was embedded in Nature and depended on its forces. Though the myths that have come to us are much later, they still reflect the way people thought in the era before rational thought had evolved. Myth illustrates the thought processes of pre-literate, pre-rational people when Nature, whatever it was, was understood in one way. Primitive humans thought only in terms of the personal.

To the mind of a pre-philosophical man, there is no special difficulty in accounting for the apparently haphazard nature of much that goes on in the world. He knows that he himself is a creature of impulse and emotion… What more natural than that the ways of the world around him should have a similar explanation?… Everything there has a personal explanation, not only external and physical phenomena like rain and tempest, thunder and sunshine, illness and death, but also those overmastering psychological impulses…
W K C Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy.

They did not distinguish anything they met as different from meeting their neighbour, their wife or mother. They did not give everything in Nature a personality, they believed it, and thought only in that way. The notion that everything had a spirit was not imposed on natural objects and phenomena, everything was alive, and what was alive had a personality because that is what they understood as life.

The beginning of the emergence from savagery of mythopoetic thinking, the personification of all mental experiences real or envisioned, was the recognition of opposites—the acceptance of dualism in the world—of polarity. Up and down, night and day, hard and soft, left and right, raw and cooked, fresh and putrid, light and dark, full and empty, men and women, us and them, me and you, wet and dry, hot and cold, summer and winter, all were opposites that must have come as a mysterious revelation to the early mind. G E R Lloyd (Polarity and Analogy) pointed out the role of opposites in Greek philosophy, thrust into Greek consciousness, not for the first time, but emphatically as a philosophical principle by the dualism of the Persian religion. C Levi-Strauss had noted the importance of polarity in the Amerindian myths he collected and analyzed. Before long, some of the polar opposites began to seem more all pervading or more cosmic in importance, and the types of opposites were categorized by analogy until a whole bundle were considered good and their opposites bad—good for people and bad for them.

Among the significant categories were life and death, and all those that went to support life and death, light and dark, summer and winter, day and night, wet and dry, glut and famine, and so on. In all this, reason is beginning to prevail, but explanations continued to be personified and mythical. Fire and its role in preserving and tenderizing food in cooking became significant in myths as a great purifier and preventer of corruption. Water too was noted as a provider of life. Agriculture, led to society being more obvious in contrast to wild uncultivated and uncultured Nature, with village and town contrasted with jungle and desert, cultivation and irrigation contrasted with wilderness and chaos, and the sea too to most of these people was a wild, chaotic and dangerous place—in short, what people did was compared and contrasted with what Nature did, introducing for the first time the notion of warfare between humanity and Nature, whereas in the hunter-gatherer stage, Nature had been seen as a human benefactor. An important purpose of speculative myth was to explain these opposites—to make some sort of mythopoetic sense of them, though it is not the purpose of all myths to do this.

So, when the dry season came to an end and the storm clouds brought rain, Babylonians saw the gigantic bird Imdugud coming to save them, darkening the sky with its immense wings causing the blackness of storm clouds, and the chill after the summer heat was because it ate the bull of heaven whose hot breath had scorched the crops. This myth was not an amusing fiction, but was “true”. It was how they actually understood the situation. It was real for them—a pre-rational explanation. To us they are allegory or fantasy, but they were not to those who conceived them. When we say primitive explanation is allegory, it is we who have made it so, and it is our fantasy, not the primitive people’s. In fact, we need not be too smug over our own abilities to think rationally. Tests of formal operational thinking found that most, even trained logicians, got the test wrong, commonly giving the same illogical reasons as untrained laypeople.

Max Müller then George William Cox saw in the Indo-European mythologies the contest between light and darkness. The Aryans based their mythology on the sun, the dawn, and the sky, with solar myths dominant.

I look upon the sunrise and sunset, on the daily return of day and night, on battle between light and darkness, on the whole solar drama in all its details that is acted every day, every month, every year, in heaven and in earth, as the principle subject of early mythology.
M Muller

It is simpler to suppose that a well known type of story was introduced in many places to serve as a primæval precedent of the rituals than to believe that in so many places the rituals spontaneously generated a uniform pattern of myth.
J Fontenrose, Python

But Kirk points out that combat myths are more commonly associated with rituals than other types, so Fontenrose is able to add, elsewhere:

It is undeniable that myths are closely attached to rituals.

And this reflects the close association of combat with the changing seasons and the two suns, the good sun and the wicked sun, this being a dominant aspect of seasonal solar worship. Myths that are relics of old religions have the conflict between good and evil typically as their religious theme, and this stems from the solar drama. Analysing different Greek myths, Cox decided gods and heroes all had some element of the good sun in them, the good sun being victorious over the wicked one, or the bright sky over the dark one—though which was which actually varies according to geographic and climatic situation. The combat of a white dragon and a red dragon, or the hero and the boar or dragon, all stand for the good sun battling the wicked sun. Often the reward of the victor is the virgin bride, standing for the earth goddess, or the earth goddess is imprisoned in a tower, and the hero must save her. It is the didactic purpose of myths that perhaps distinguish them from stories just meant to entertain.

The dislocation of causes and connexions make myths often seem dreamlike. The confusion of temporal and logical sequences in myths is like what we experience in dreams. One subject or location in a dream changes into another with no cause or reason, and its characteristics and situation grossly altered, yet seemingly naturally—in the dream! The conviction of some extant primitive people, like those studied by anthropologists, Australian aboriginals, Tobrianders, and so on, that myths are dreamed might suggest that early humans thought in a dreamlike way, and indeed Australian aboriginals have a sense of continuity with their ancestors and origins that anthropologists have called “Dreamtime”:

The whole life and activity of many primitive peoples, even down to trifling details, is determined and governed by their dreams.
E Cassirer

Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind

Julian Jaynes, a professor of psychology at Princeton, published in 1976 The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a controversial theory of the human mind.

From the early civilizations of the Near East, Jaynes came to the conclusion that most of the people in these archaic cultures were not subjectively conscious as we understand it today. Analyzing Homer’s great epic, The Iliad Jaynes concluded that the characters of the Trojan siege did not have conscious minds, no introspection, no sense of subjectivity, as we know them in the modern human.

There is in general no consciousness in the Iliad.

Rather they were men whom the gods pushed about like robots. The gods sang epics through their lips. Jaynes declares that these Iliadic heroes heard “voices”, real speech and directions from the gods—as clearly as those diagnosed epileptic or schizophrenic today.

Jaynes stresses that the Iliadic man did not possess subjectivity as we do—rather “he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect upon”. This mentality of the Myceneans, Jaynes calls the bicameral mind. What was this bicameral mind? Jaynes briefly discusses brain biology—in that there are three speech areas, for most located in the left hemisphere. They are:

The supplemental motor cortex
Broca’s area
Wernicke’s area.

Jaynes focuses on Wernicke’s area, which is chiefly the posterior part of the left temporal lobe. It is Wernicke’s area that is crucial for human speech. In human brains the corpus callosum can be likened to a small bridge, a band of transverse fibers, only slightly more than one-eighth of an inch in diameter. This bridge “collects from most of the temporal lobe cortex but particularly the middle gyrus of the temporal lobe in Wernicke’s area”. And it was this bridge that served as the means by which the “gods” who dwelled in one hemisphere of the human brain were able to give “directions” to the other hemisphere. It is like thinking of the “two hemispheres of the brain almost as two individuals”. Hence the bicameral mind!

Archaic humans were ordered and moved by the gods through both auditory hallucinations and visual hallucinations. The gods mainly “talked” to them—but sometimes “appeared”, such as Athene appearing to Achilles.

Jaynes believes in the mentality of the early Mycenean that volition, planning and initiative were literally organized with no consciousness whatsoever. Rather such volition was “told” to the individual—“sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or ’god,’ or sometimes as a voice alone”.

Jaynes thinks the great agricultural civilizations that spread over much of the Near East by 5000 BC reflected the bicameral mind. These civilizations were rigid theocracies! They were reminiscent of the Queen Bee and the bee-hive. These bicameral societies reflected “hierarchies of officials, soldiers, or works, inventory of goods, statements of goods owed to the ruler, and particular to gods”.

Jaynes contests that such theocracies were the only means for a bicameral civilization to survive. Circumventing chaos, these rigid hierarchies allowed for “lesser men hallucinating the voices of authorities over them, and those authorities hallucinating yet higher ones, and so” to kings and gods. He says, “the idols of a bicameral world are the carefully tended centers of social control, with auditory hallucinations instead of pheromones”.

In these ancient bicameral societies the idol or the statue was literally the god, says Jaynes. The god/goddess had its own house. It was usually the center of a temple complex. The size varied according to the importance of the god and, of course, the wealth of the city. In these theocracies, the owner of the land was the divine idol—and the people were the tenants. The steward-king served the god by administrating the god’s estates. According to cuneiform texts, the gods also enjoyed eating, drinking, music and dancing. They required beds for sleeping and connubial visits from other gods. They—the statues—were washed and dressed, driven around on special occasions. Ceremony and ritual evolved around these idols.

The collapse of the bicameral mind came slowly, it was a slow erosive breakdown. But Jaynes spotted the first serious indications of collapse by the time of Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, around 1700 BC. Authority had started to crumble—and due to this Egypt had to re-unify itself, hence the Middle Kingdom. Jaynes considers that this slow collapse was caused by natural disasters, such as the Santorini volcanic explosion that devastated many Greek islands. Migration of different peoples into new areas disrupted the bicameral societies already in place. Conquest over peoples by others resulted in further collapse. And writing gradually eroded “the auditory authority of the bicameral mind”.

Jaynes felt a real tipoff of this bicameral breakdown could be discerned in the Babylonian lines [To Marduk]: “My god has forsaken me and disappeared, My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance…” It was with this, he thinks, that one could detect for the first time the mighty themes of the world religions: “Why have the gods left us? Like friends who depart from us, they must be offended. Our misfortunes are our punishments for our offenses. We go down on our knees, begging to be forgiven. And then find redemption in some return of the word of a god.”

For Jaynes this ruin, this bitter bicameral breakdown led to the growth of subjective consciousness in Greece. Moving from the Iliad, Jaynes declares that Homer’s Odyssey is unlike its predecessor. Here we have wily Odysseus, the hero of many devices, a man of a “new mentality”. The Odyssey was about a man who was learning how to get along in a “ruined and god-weakened world”.

With the Golden Age of Greece, in the starstruck sixth century BC, with Solon, with Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras, Jaynes claims we are now with human minds with whom we can feel mentally at home!

So, Into Rationality

It seems extreme, but we now know that many human actions are still unconscious, and at some stage in human evolution we must have been much less conscious than we now are, but not everyone thinks it was so recent:

Any “mythical” stage of Greek thought lay in the far distant past… possibly far back in the Neolithic Age…
G S Kirk, Myth

Jaynes might have brought it closer than we imagined, but, far or near, a lot of rational thinking stands between the original myths of pre-rational people and the myths we now have. So, not everything in myths is necessarily derived from pre-literate ways of thinking. By the time people had started to think rationally, myth had become loved as a genre, whether religious or narrative, and inventions began to be made appropriate to the genre. Australian aboriginals with their idea of the creative past as “Dreamtime” can distinguish their own dreams from reality. They now know what reality is, primitive though their social arrangements might still be, but they treat dreams and reality as equal in value. It is a stage between a semi-consciousness that confuses dreams and reality, and the modern fully conscious, logical state in which most people distinguish the two:

After the primitive stage of genuine myth making, there is a transitional period, in which the old images and symbols are retained, but with a nascent consciousness that they do go beyond the meaning proper… Finally, there may come a time when rational thinking asserts itself, and the foremost intellects of the race awaken out of the dream of mythology.
Francis Macdonald Cornford, The Unwritten Philosophy

Jaynes seems to follow F M Cornford (1874-1943 AD), who also thought rational thinking asserted itself in sixth century Ionia. Perhaps that is when the butterfly stretched its wings and first flew, but the interval from the primitive stage to the final one is a long one. The Assyrians were there, or almost there, and the Sumerians were past the primitive stage themselves. Cornford is careful to speak of “intellects” awakening, because it was popular to personify the whole human race as a child growing up, as if a whole race of people could be treated like a single one of them. In other words, too many people got carried away with a metaphor that could not possibly have offered anything acceptable to science. Myths cannot be considered as collective dreams because people do not dream collectively. What there are are collective thoughts—thoughts that are exchanged and become so popular that everyone accepts them. Myths were the first collective thoughts:

Religious ideas are produced by a synthesis of individual minds in colective action, but once produced they have a life of their own.
E E Evans-Pritchard, Themes of Primitive Religion

Plainly, it is common to every living person to grow through various levels of consciousness until they reach maturity, and Jean Piaget (1896-1980 AD) spent his life tracing them. Observing infants and children, he showed how they learnt to distinguish themselves from the rest of the world, how they used symbols, then generalizations then abstractions.

Piaget concluded that before the emergence of philosophic and scientific thinking in pre-Socratic Greece, the level of conceptual thought of mature humans was little more than that of a modern ten year old. As more complex ways of thinking were explored, more adults were taught them and gradually the level of conceptual thought improved as people progressed beyond ten years old, until now they think maturely at about 18 years old. Though they still have things to learn, they are able to do it, unless they have been mentally disabled in some way. If conciousness in human beings developed through history in the same stages, the the metaphor of the infancy and childhood of a race means something, though it needs care in use.

The primitive mentality does not invent myths, it experiences them. Myths are original revelations of the pre-conscious psyche.
C G Jung

Jung thought that people have something innate called archetypes which myths reflect, but it is a pure speculation and unscientific because untestable. Real images not abstract concepts characterize primitive thought, and also schizophrenia, in which conceptual thought seems to revert to a primitive level rich in images and symbols, and the notion of self becomes uncertain. Freud considered religion, art and morality as generally illogical for logic is not innate or instinctive, but evolves with culture. Levi-Strauss was another who took primitive thought to be based on analogy. Analogy to this day impresses and persuades simple people especially in religious matters because it appeals to immature levels of thought, atavistically speaking, the primitive levels.

In the Upanishads, a father is educating his son about Atman, telling him to bring a banyan fruit, then to break it open. He asked what he saw—a lot of tiny seeds. The father told his son to break a tiny seed and tell him what he saw. The seed was too small to have any visible stucture, so the boy answered that he saw nothing. The father's lesson for the boy was that the vast banyan tree came from nothing, yet the essence of the tree must have been present in the “nothing”. It was the tree's soul or Atman. The father goes on to tell the boy to put a handful of salt in a gourd of water, and to leave it overnight. The boy did as he was told, noticing the salt settled at the bottom of the gourd. When the father asked his son to bring the gourd the next day, and to tell him what he saw, he could see nothing. The salt had dissolved. Told to taste the water the boy reported that it tasted salty. The father's lesson was that the salt was still present but invisibly as its soul. And like these examples soul pervaded the whole universe.

This father is thinking logically not purely mythopoetically, and has lessons in didactic method to teach us all, but not in proving what he has to say. These are analogies that prove nothing about the soul of the universe. Had there been proofs of the soul, then his analogies would have perhaps been good illustrations of its supposed ephemeral nature, but they prove nothing. Bishop Butler wrote a whole book purporting to prove Christianity in the same way, and though it is ingenious enough, it never approaches its objective.

The scientific view has its own invisible entities that could serve as this “soul” of the world, but they can be demonstrated by simple experiments to actually exist. Energy is an invisible entity that really does pervade everything, and does indeed do things as its name implies, like making salt dissolve and trees to grow. Energy could have been called soul or spirit and religions might have made a modicum of sense. Indeed, New Age gurus use the word “energy” for their own gullible devotees in the same way as traditional believers use soul. The primitive thinking which generated mythopoetry personalized its agents, so energy became “gods”, or “spirit” or “soul” having the characteristics of a person. Though a degree of logical thinking is possible even when the thought process is mythical, and analogy is elementary reasoning, abstract formal logic is a literate skill, and emerges only with the invention of writing.