The most ancient models that have survived can be understood in terms of generalisation: the model of a social system of meaning-makers is mapped onto other domains of experience[1], a process that entails the personification of the categorisable.[2]
The model that is mapped is a social network of meaning-makers, each comprising a social being, a person, embedded[3] behind a perceivable surface[4] — itself one way of construing individual participants in socio-semiotic systems.[5] The distinction between the embedded being and the outer surface models them as separable entities.
This model is mapped onto the perceivable environment, construing all as social participants in — and causes of — natural processes. This mapping results in such construals as persons embodied by other animals, such as serpents, by trees, by springs, rivers, and seas, by mountains, by the sun, the moon and the earth itself.[6]
Footnotes:
[1] See Durkheim (1915/76).
[2] In cognitive linguistics, such mappings of relations are modelled in terms of conceptual metaphor.
[3] This largely involves the use of what cognitive linguistics terms the container schema.
[4] In some traditions, the surface functions as the boundary of the domain of such persons, and to pass beyond the surface is to enter that domain. The Lascaux caves, which contain the earliest paintings in Europe, are thought to have been such a domain for that community; in the Celtic tradition, to enter a sidhe, ‘fairy-mound’ is to enter such an ‘otherworld’.
[5] This ‘homunculus’ model, of course, continues with such concepts as spirit, ghost, soul, and in some usages: psyche, mind and consciousness.
[6] The planet as fertile female figured largely in some agricultural traditions, since fertile soil would produce new life some time after having seed implanted in it. In the Celtic islands off the coast of western Europe, the ancient earth-mound, Newgrange, and stone circle, Stonhenge, are aligned to receive the rays of the sun within them at dawn on the spring equinox, possibly as a soil fertilising process. The concept continues with such ideas as panspermia and Fred Hoyle’s suggestion that comets seed planets with (the molecules necessary for) life.