The original Myth did not pass unscrutinized from early anthropology into twentieth-century sociology: it was inspected, curiously handled and finally passed with reservations by the grand old sociologists of civilizations. The affinities between these two approaches were warm. The even older school of civilizational analysis had also placed cultural coherence on a pedestal, the main difference being that it had been pictured in cyclical terms, rather than as a stable pattern frozen by tradition. One of the key bridging thinkers here was Pitrim Sorokin, whose work made four distinct contributions to revitalizing the Myth:

1. It lent it civilizational sweep by ‘gathering up’ the centuries intervening between primitive and modern societies, which then justified the transfer of propositions about the former to the latter. In brief, it served to universalize the Myth.

2. It transmitted the Myth into mainstream sociology. Directly this mythology was built into the foundations of Functionalist thought, its immediate future was assured. More indirectly, by preserving and extending the ‘artistic’ approach to grasping cultural cohesion, civilizational analysis stocked a methodological armoury, from which later non- Functionalists could take up their main conceptual weapons, namely the notions of cultural keys and codes.

3. It elucidated the mechanisms responsible for ‘downwards conflation’, in a powerful account of how the internal logical consistency of Cultural Systems actually generated social uniformities in both mentality and behaviour, thus producing Socio-Cultural cohesion. In short, it actively justified a more precise formulation of the Myth rather than uncritically endorsing the elision of Cultural System and Socio-Cultural integration.

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