ABSTRACT
Difficult as it is to grapple with something as impalpable as ideology or cosmology, the attempt must be made, given its importance to social structure and individual action. Cosmology is two things simultaneously: a personal belief system and a social construct system; but the two are not synonymous. Cosmologies consist of ideologies, which are themselves structured around myths, incorporating empirical facts of some description, such as that baking packed and tempered mud produces bricks; or, in the Mesopotamian case, human beings from fourteen pieces of clay, seven male and seven female (Bottero 1982:24-32).
