Weird|||Deals

If a child is allowed to develop his own worldview at the age of four or five without any premature infusions of Sunday school, he is apt to traverse in a year or two a slice of mythical ontogeny that uncannily replicates mankind’s phylogenic millennial mythopoeia. I have heard a four-year-old visiting a national cemetery exclaim, “God was the first to die,” matching the Vedic concept of Yama, the primordial colonizer and ruler of the Otherworld; the same child experiencing a thunderstorm asked, “Can lightening be seen under water?” in perfect harmony with the Vedic deity Apā́m Nápāt, who dwells in watery depths and shines forth “clad in lightening.” A five-year-old inquired whether George Washington was the first man,” equating the father of his country with the father of mankind, even as in ancient Iran the primordial king equaled the first mythical man.

— Jaan Puhvel, “Comparative Mythology”

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