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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: we shall perceive to have guided the myth-makers in their
primitive constructions. The myths and customs and beliefs
which, in an advanced stage of culture, seem meaningless save
when characterized by some quaintly wrought device of symbolic
explanation, did not seem meaningless in the lower culture
which gave birth to them. Myths, like words, survive their
primitive meanings. In the early stage the myth is part and
parcel of the current mode of philosophizing; the explanation
which it offers is, for the time, the natural one, the one
which would most readily occur to any one thinking on the
theme with which the myth is concerned. But by and by the mode
Myths and Myth-Makers |
