The world and body: inversion of the metaphor / myth frame

The article deals with the role of the body in mythological models of development of reality. A human body is one of the tools of understanding the world. Generation of ideas in the process of the world cognition is reliant on the interaction of the body and space, and it can also act as a model for explanation of the world and its objects. However, givenness of the body is not obvious for a human, because its discovery comes, as a rule, when the body has some defects (illness, weakness, fatigue, hyperalertness etc). In the process of ontogeny and phylogenesis, discovery of the body as a specific object of reality has analogous mechanisms, but during phylogenesis the body becomes a constructive element of the metaphor-mythological mechanism, which is a distinction of this process. A hypothesis is put forward in the article that in the course of mythological development of reality the inversion of the role of corporality takes place: at first, the body is a basis of the world my-thologization and then the world is a basis of the body mythologization. Images of corporality serve as central metaphors of the mythological understanding of the world although the body itself is not subject to mythologi-zation. During the Renaissance and early modern period, this metaphor / myth frame changes, and images of ordinary objects of the world (buildings, mechanisms and technical devices) lead to creation of contemporary mythological ideas about the body.