This is why in archaic cultures the myths describing the creation of the world are recited over a sick person. As Mircea Eliade has written: By making the patient symbolically . . . contemporary with Creation, he lived again in the initial plentitude of being. One does not repair a worn-out organism, it must be re-made; the patient needs to be born again; he needs, as it were, to recover the whole energy and potency that a being has at the moment of its birth.3
