The logic of myth: “Crisis” and “norm” in the archaic worldview

Abstract

The present study is devoted to several groups of folklore and mythological plots and motifs seen as a representation of archaic ideas about the crisis. The latter can be interpreted both as an initial ‘deficiency’ of first creation (in the long term, as an eschatological catastrophe), and as a result of purposeful (not fully thought out?) activity of the demiurge. On the basis of an analysis of a number of cosmogonic and etiological myths, it is suggested that crisis in mythic logic proves to be one of the forms of overcoming chaos, which can however give rise to a ‘second-order’ crisis and even a ‘pendular’ crisis (when each phase of overcoming the current crisis gives rise to a new crisis). The condition of ‘cosmic imbalance’ is illustrated by myths about the pacification of ‘solar chaos’, which are widespread in world folklore. In a large number of regional versions of the myth, excessive heat (light) is the starting point of the story, which suggests that such a situation is admissible within the framework of ‘mythological logic’, and therefore, the point of reference in the construction of the story is not an initial state of equilibrium, but a certain crisis that needs to be resolved. The study (1) describes the transition from the original mythological ‘anti-norm’ to the ‘formula of the impossible’ of fairy tales; (2) examines certain object realizations of mythological representations linked to images of space and time. This analysis allows us to assert that, while the image of first creation recalls the idea of morphological incompleteness and inaccessibility of the ‘natural’ state we observe around us, the ‘non-normality’ of the other world of ‘lower’ mythology highlights its deviation from this already existing ‘naturalness’.