Primeval Us

In 1725 the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico made a solid pitch for primeval man. The savage who emerged from history in a world fraught with strange happenings cast his own vision upon it. He was a natural poet, who created a mythos with ever more complex stories and legends, to explain the seeming chaos of the world. From chaos came order. It was the expression of the natural poet with the savage.

Civilization has marred that, dampened that and stifled the natural drive toward the primeval. Civilization requires a cyclic renewal to purge the overburdening weight of modernity.

According to him this brought a fall from paradise. It is why we turn to the savage for answers about ourselves, and spiritual understand. Why we hold up the stone age societies in such reverence. Its what Robert E. Howard was writing about and Frazetta captured . . .

post script: of course he didn't have flushing toilets and dentists.