When They Severed Earth from Sky

[David Morris]

>
> Chapter 1
>
> TIME CAPSULES
>
> http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s7805.html
>
> http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s7805.pdf
>
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>From the website:

Discussion of the four fundamental "mytho-linguistic"
principles--Silence, Analogy, Compression, and Restructuring--forms
the greater part of this book. For each, we present the more specific
principles we discovered that fall under its sway, together with
parallel insights about language and a multitude of examples from
world mythology. If Indo-European myths (especially Greco-Roman,
Germanic, Slavic) and those of the Pacific Northwest preponderate,
that is where the combined knowledge and interests of the present
authors are strongest.

What this book is not about is archetypes, the stuff of C. G. Jung and
Joseph Campbell. Those aspects of myth that appear "universal" are, in
our opinion, the result of pitting human cognition against the
small-channel problem just described--common responses to common
problems.

Why would one want thus to "strip the veil of mystery" from mythology?
Some people won't want to; they don't have to read this book. But for
students of cognition, the practical structure of myth gives
interesting new insights into the language-oriented brain that spawned
myth. And for archaeologists, the decoding of myth provides the
possibility of restoring a certain amount of actual history to the
"prehistoric" world, the world before writing. Writing was invented a
mere 5,200 years ago, but we have been speaking and presumably
mythmaking for 100,000 or more. That's a lot of history lost.

To recover what is left of these precious time capsules, we begin with
some of the most transparent mythologies available and build our way,
principle by principle, toward the knottier stuff.

Me:

Dubious hypothesis, that myth refers to "actual" historic events.  And
even more dubious is the theory that there are "four fundamental
"mytho-linguistic" principles--Silence, Analogy, Compression, and
Restructuring" (why four?  why not five?) that can be applied to them
in order to uncover that actual history.

David Morris