Parallel Myths Read Online Free

something that is yearned for and met with joy. The day itself is an important part of Jewish identity; celebration of the Sabbath separates the Jew from his non-Jewish neighbors. The sacred time of the Sabbath is so clearly delineated thatprecise hours are given for the lighting of the traditional candles at its beginning. At its end, there is the ceremony of
Habdalah
, literally “separation.” The
Habdalah
includes opening a box of aromatic spices as prayers are recited, allowing one to savor the last sweet moments of the Sabbath. With the closing of the
Habdalah
box, profane time returns.

HISTORY AND MYTH
     
History is not an objective empirical datum; it is a myth. Myth is no fiction, but a reality; it is, however, one of a different order from that of so-called empirical fact. Myth is the story preserved in the popular memory of a past event and transcends the limits of the external objective world, revealing an ideal world, a subject-object world of facts.
    Historical myths have a profound significance for the act of remembrance. A myth contains the story that is preserved in popular memory and that helps to bring to life some deep stratum buried in the depths of the human spirit. The divorce of the subject from the object as the result of enlightened criticism may provide material for historical knowledge; but insofar as it destroys the myth and dissociates the depths of time from those of man, it only serves to divorce man from history. For the historical tradition which criticism had thought to discredit makes possible a great and occult act of remembrance. It represents, indeed, no external or externally imposed fact alien to man, but one that is a manifestation of the inner mysterious life, in which he can attain to the knowledge of himself and feel himself to be an inalienable participant.
—Nikolai Berdyayev, Russian Christian Existentialist
philosopher,
The Meaning of History
    I am not far from believing that, in our own societies, history has replaced mythology and fulfils the same function, that for societies without writing and without archives the aim of mythology is to ensure that as closely as possible the future will remain faithful to the past. For us, however, the future should always be different, and ever more different, from the present…. But neverthelessthe gap which exists in our mind … between mythology and history can probably be breached by studying histories which are conceived as not at all separated from [,] but a continuation of mythology.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, French anthropologist,
Myth and Meaning
    In short, it would be necessary to confront “historical” man (modern man), who consciously and voluntarily creates history, with that of the man of the traditional civilizations … who has a negative attitude toward history. Whether he abolishes it periodically, whether he devaluates it by perpetually finding transhistorical models and archetypes for it … the man of the traditional civilizations accorded the historical event no value in itself; in other words, he did not regard it as a specific category of his own mode of existence.
    —Mircea Eliade
    To so-called primitive man, myth is history. To modern people, myth and history are considered two distinct and very different things. Despite the fact that our own secular history is reckoned in terms that come directly from myth and religion, we do not, as a rule, see history as integral with our religious life in the same sense that earlier peoples did. One reason the mythic bases of dates and years exist is that it is only relatively recently that Western culture separated history and myth.
    To a person living in a traditional culture, there is no such distinction, and myth is the only history that really matters. For the traditional culture, all that we do in our lifetimes is merely a replay of events that took place in the myths. History in our sense of the word, as specific and unique actions of persons living and dead,