ABSTRACT
In order to neutralize experiences of terror m the face of uncontrollable reality, the human imagination, from its earliest community-forming stages, has resorted to mythical narrations. Key vehicles for elementary allocations of the self and the world, even in modern times myths reach far beyond their most commonly acknowledged realms of prehistory and the collective subconscious (Blumenberg 1971: 11-66). An authoritative genealogy was one of the most elementary endeavors of clan transmission. Thus the making and regular invocation of awe-inspiring founding myths for the sake ot securing order in social life was based on the commitment of the members of the community to the rules purportedly established by their first ancestors. Most tribal clans practiced ritual veneration of a mighty mother deity, whom they made responsible not only for domestic life but also for a variety of public matters — from childbirth to death, and from harvest, the patronage of animals and hunting to warfare. This imaginative endowment of a clan's mother deity and its respective archetypes of femininity have developed through history, and can be viewed as mutually constitutive. Against Bachofen/Freud's theories of mythmaking as ex post facto digestion, or reflection, of historical experience, Georges Devereux argues for the concept of a primacy of mythical structures and the subsequent genesis of historical conditions. He assumes the universalization of early childhood experience, that is, children's primary exposure to matriarchal regimes, to be the proper source of ancient mother myths (Devereux 1986).
