Mind and Myth

When they Severed Earth from Sky; How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, by Elizabeth and Paul Barber, is my newest book of interest. I am reading it as a potential comparison with some ideas discussed in The Sacred and the Profane; The Nature of Religion by Mircea Eliade. This standard classic by Eliade discusses the way Time, Space, Nature, the Cosmos, and Human Existence are perceived, understood, shaped, approached, and experienced by religious (wo)man. The sacred (or venerable, religiously affiliated, holy, divine, numinous, wholly other, mysterium tremendum, majestas, mysterium fascinans...) is all that the profane is not. The profane refers to all that is not sacred, a natural reality, or what we might liken to "secular". I have not yet finished The Sacred and the Profane, but I think the descriptions of religious (wo)mans' experience of the sacred will inform my reading of When they Severed Earth from Sky.

It is estimated that we share the same human brain of those living 100,000 years ago. Writing developed about 5,200 years ago. Myth, the Barber's infer, exists as a time capsule into our "pre-historic" (pre-literate) ancestors. As a way to keep important information within the collective memory of generations, myth crunches information and enhances memorability to encode important messages and experiences. Basically, the authors see myth functioning in the human mind as a way to communicate history.

I find this prospect interesting, as it combines linguistics with cognition to understand how myth functioned for prehistoric wo-man. Cognitive psychology has taken on an influential role in understanding the religious mind in the past few decades, and I am primarily interested in investigating the connection between cognitive psychology and the sacred to understand how and why our experience of the sacred is necessary, its function and reasoning in groups of people throughout history, and what role it plays in the contemporary wo-man. I seek the connection between all people-- an experience of the sacred-- cross-culturally and cross-historically. I want to understand how the sacred functions in individuals and groups of people, and form a working hypothesis as to why the sacred pervades each civilization (and beyond civilizations! in pre-history!)