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Are Infantile Animist Mythologies?

    It was not unusual to link the animist myths of the cold societies, close to the world of dreams, with infantile states of the psychological development of our species, a relation that would imply that the so called primitive societies have an infantile psychology. With such a point of view we are mistaking oneiric narratives with immature psychology. Archaic myths show simpler forms of rationality, but it is adult human rationality. This kind of parallelism between individual life and the development of a species is just a fallacy. In order to have any sense, it would be necessary to have a synthetic representation of the full history of homo sapiens, something that would imply that we are considering the human being from a posterior time to its existence, which makes no sense. Archaic myths, with its animist characteristics do not represent any infantile psychology, neither our present myths are constructions of a mature psychology, and even if such statements have any meaning, we could never know their truth.

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