Divinization

Myths contain exomorphisms, which determine the limit conditions, the fundamental ontological representations, as well as endomorphisms which develop them in narratives and connect the liminal representations to the everyday acritic knowledge of the community, the Lebenswelt. By mythologization we have described the sequences of exomorphisms and/or endomorphisms, and we have characterized myths by this linguistic action, but there is another linguistic process inverse to mythologization which completes its operations: divinization. Mythologization rendered familiar the unknown. Divinization renders unknown the familiar. The process is specially clear in the social persona of the ancestor, although it can be extended to objects or to the world at large. As time passes, the persona of the ancestor becomes less and less familiar. In the cases where the particular ancestor made a strong imprint in the memory of the group, by means of a successful civilizing action (Maui, Prometheus, Cecrops, Yao, Manu, etc.), he becomes progressively a hero, semi-god, a god, a supreme god, and finally a Deus Otiosus (as Eliade call them). These two processes are at work in myth, and are simply expressions of the active interpretation of life experience (mythologization), and the work of oblivion (or entropy) which is divinization, a return to the unfocused, to apeiron.