Myth is the youngest, not the oldest, cultural stage

Evidence

In other words: he looks for them first of all in significative language which they have already caused to become objectively contradictory—a contradiction which, as literature, it then tries to overcome: “Myth is initially spoken discourse; the word never applies to its content” (op. cit.). By hypostatizing this late notion of myth and already presupposing reason to be its clear antithesis, he arrives (implicitly rejecting the view of Bachofen, which he ridicules as fashionable, without even mentioning its defender’s name) at a decisive separation of mythology and religion (op. cit., p. 5), in which myth appears not as the older but as the younger stage: “I try to trace the course by which … faith developed, underwent various transformations, and eventually became myth” (op. cit., p. 1). — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 303

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the dialectic view that myth is not pristine antiquity but a late refraction of discourse.
• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s thesis in the main text that myth already contains enlightenment’s logic of objectification and pseudos—readers of the culture industry chapter will recognize the same demystification. — connects to: Myth functioned as action-shaping material, not just representation — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 127; Undifferentiated societies fuse past and future into a mythic other of the present — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 83
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Myth functioned as action-shaping material, not just representation — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 127; Undifferentiated societies fuse past and future into a mythic other of the present — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 83