On the Origin of Myths in Catastrophic Experience, vol. 1: Preliminaries

Creation myths around the world reveal an intricate network of recurrent counterintuitive motifs, describing a time when the sky was low, the stars did not yet shine, multiple suns appeared, a ‘world axis’ in the form of a tree, ladder or giant man connected the earth with the sky, a devastating flood or fire ended the old order, and so forth. The present work, in multiple volumes, seeks an origin for these traditions in a series of extraordinary natural events relating especially to the earth’s transition from the last glacial period to the Holocene. This first volume provides an introduction to comparative mythology, catastrophism and the study of the mythical world axis as well as a new synopsis of the universal mythological substrate. It emerges that the mythical world axis cannot have been based on a single object seen or imagined at one of the poles, as has usually been supposed. XXXV + 441 pages. With foreword by Professor Trevor Palmer, 117 black-and-white illustrations and alphabetic index. For the table of contents and a few random sample pages, see https://mythopedia.info/books.html.