by Evan Dwan | Apr 29, 2020 | News |
Karen Armstrong, in her book, A short history of myth, writes that in old times the hunter and shaman of the tribe had to turn their backs on the familiar world, enter the unknown and face fearsome trials. Their journey took them out into uncertainty where they would...
by Evan Dwan | Apr 29, 2020 | News |
In hunting societies, animals were not seen as inferior beings but as possessing superior wisdom. Anthropologists observe that modern-day indigenous groups often refer to animals or birds as ‘peoples’, the same as themselves. They tell stories about humans becoming...
by Evan Dwan | Apr 21, 2020 | News |
Many of the early myths related to the sky. Gazing at the sky, Karen Armstrong suggests, may have given people their first notion of the divine. The sky offered a religious experience without any sense of a god behind it – it offered the essence of the mysterium...
by Evan Dwan | Apr 21, 2020 | News |
Karen Armstrong, the historian of Religion, tells us that the Palaeolithic period (c. 20000 to 8000 BCE) was one of the longest and most formative in the biological evolution of humans. Ethnologists and anthropologists claim that these indigenous people were very...
by Evan Dwan | Apr 14, 2020 | News |
In The patterning instinct, Jeremy Lent takes an approach to history called ‘cognitive history’. This approach holds that instead of history being determined exclusively by material causes like geography, economy, technology etc. the ‘will to meaning’ plays a...
