ABSTRACT
Myths to organise thought Older conventions have special importance, their invisibility seeming to be in direct
proportion to their ubiquity. Ancient societies made up creation myths – ‘back stories’
serving to impose coherence, sense and value upon their present. They usually
involved the generation of the universe, cosmogony, followed by the maintenance of
a status quo. Some higher power knows how to order things, and it became accepted
that things could be ordered. The will to survive transmutes into a desire to
understand the environment and a separate but parallel urge to control it. Human
consciousness seems to have evolved out of a two-way process, responding to its
surroundings, creating and reflecting social patterns, building on subconscious
foundations, making the world around itself as it was itself being shaped.
