pFor other uses, see Mythopoeic (disambiguation).

Mythopoeic thought is a hypothetical stage of human thought preceding modern thought, proposed by Henri Frankfort and his wife Henriette Antonia Frankfort in the 1940s, based on their interpretation of evidence from archaeology and cultural anthropology. According to this proposal, there was a "mythopoeic" stage, in which humanity did not think in terms of generalizations and impersonal laws: instead, humans saw each event as an act of will on the part of some personal being. This way of thinking supposedly explains the ancients' tendency to create myths, which portray events as acts of gods and spirits. A physiological motivation for this was suggested by Julian Jaynes in 1976 in the form of bicameral mentality.

The term[edit]

The term mythopoeic means "myth-making" (from Greek muthos, "myth", and poiein, "to make"). A group of Near Eastern specialists used the term in their 1946 book The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East, later republished as the 1949 paperback Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man.[1] In this book's introduction, two of the specialists, Henri Frankfort and Henriette Groenewegen-Frankfort, argue that mythopoeic thought characterizes a distinct stage of human thought that differs fundamentally from modern, scientific thought. Mythopoeic thought, the Frankforts claim, was concrete and personifying, whereas modern thought is abstract and impersonal: more basically, mythopoeic thought is "pre-philosophical", while modern thought is "philosophical".[2] Because of this basic contrast between mythopoeic and modern thought, the Frankforts often use the term "mythopoeic thought" as a synonym for ancient thought in general.