Religion and myth as principles of culture and the experience of time

Abstract

The article is focused on the emergence of culture from religious and mythological grounds, which is one of the traditional problems of cultural studies. The author analyses the religious principles of culture by considering how the archaic consciousness experiences time. The author considers the special meaning of time and of the nature of time awareness which generates the development of culture. The empirical data of the cultural sciences and their theoretical generalisations show that the origins of cultural representations of humanity should be sought in its religious past. As O. Spengler noticed, the religious past is underpinned by a unique experience of religious myth which is repeated many times during the course of cultural genesis. Myth constitutes an early form of the unity of the world through which order and lawfulness are established in existence, while religion is the very first and fundamental principle of the constitution of the unity of being. Time is the primary condition for distinguishing between the sacred and profane, but it is perceived quite differently from the way objective time is perceived. In prehistoric time, mythical temporality does not distinguish between “before” and “after” — everything exists in “eternal now”, because the event to which the myth refers is a stopping point, Arche as the absolute principle of the origin of things. Time is an existential marking, a form of changing the sacred events of life and a form of human existence. The openness of profane time to the sacred one provides access to Absolute as a constitutive principle of the universe.