ABSTRACT
As we move forward in time, and geographically, into the period of Greek antiquity stretching from roughly 1200 BC to that flowering of Hellenic culture starting around 500 BC, we encounter a gradual emancipation of thought from that ‘mythical’ world-view described in the last chapter. As we will see, this shift in ‘mentality’ included changes in the way ‘history’ and the passing of time were understood. But let us first map out the general backcloth of the overcoming of the ‘mythical’ mind-set within which those changes occurred – namely, the transition to what is called the ‘rational’, or ‘philosophical’ consciousness which attempts to understand things purely through the exercise of ‘reason’ rather than from the imaginative, ‘poetic’ perspective of intimate involvement in an animated, anthropomorphised world.
