Myth is the twilight speech of an old man to a boy. All the old men begin at the beginning. Their recitals always speak first of the origin of life. They start by inventing this event which no man witnessed, which still remains a mystery. They initiate the history of their race with a fiction. For, whether it was first in the sense of time, life is, for all men, first of miracles in the sense of prime. This is a fact. Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter.

Maya Deren
Divine Horsemen, Pg 21
McPherson & Company, 1953
 Whenever modern industrial techniques are introduced into a primitive culture, the ritualistic practices rapidly decline and disappear. It has there fore been deduced that the purposes of ritual is the magical control of environmental forces, a function more effectively fulfilled by modern techniques, which it is argued, have therefore come to replace the rituals. However, only a small percentage of religious ritual (as distinct from magic rites) is concerned with such material phenomena. And on the other hand, machines have not so much given control over natural disasters such as drought, flood and epidemic disease, as made possible compensatory, remedial and rescue measures. Moreover, the machine and the culture it has produced made for disasters unknown to primitive man: automobile, train and airplane accidents, nervous disorders, sexual crimes, and the unprecedented enormity of war's destruction. Certainly it cannot be claimed, therefore, that the ritualist appeal against catastrophe have been eliminated because modern industrial man is more secure physically or morally than man in a primitive culture. If one were to compare such cultures in proportion of negative to positive factors within their respective contexts, it is extremely doubtful whether, relatively, the modern culture would show the greater positive weight.

Maya Deren
Divine Horsemen, Pg 188
McPherson & Company, 1953