Some fifty thousand years ago human beings experienced a revolution in their use of symbols that is now known as the Great Leap Forward. From what remains of this we may infer that some time around 30,000 years ago humans developed what we may assume was the first world-view. In this world-view, humans understand the World in terms of persons who make symbols. To understand this world-view, we need a paradigm, what we call a model "for" our understanding of this world-view. The paradigm for the earliest world-view is the idea of a Symbol. Hence, this world-view is called the Symbolic World-View. Similarly to what we now call Religion, one of the distinctive characteristics of this world-view is its reliance upon the figure of speech known as Personification. For example, the Indo-European word 'world' actually represents an early world-view, but we no longer recognize this, since our modern-day familiarity with the the word 'world' conceals the original meaning of the word 'world'. Nevertheless, the word is actually a compound of two older English words—'wor' (= 'man') and 'eld' (= 'old')—which means that the World was a person: the Old Man!
Personification betrays the distinctively figurative nature of the grammar of the Symbolic World-View, the grammar of Mythos. But Mythos is rich in symbolic grammar, and Personification is but one among many Figures of Speech of this type, a type that we can group under the heading of Analogy. Analogy is a form of comparison, and thus the term can be used as the name of a class of Figures of Speech; among the elements included in this analogical class of figures are the Simile and the Metaphor. What is more, this analogic class of figures is but one of a pair of major classes, for alongside it we find a metonymic class of such figures as Metonymy itself, Synecdoche, Allusion, and others. Clearly, these two major classes of figures—the Analogic and Metonymic—include the most significant symbolic forms in langauge.
Metonymy and Analogy find expression in Magic, which is the means by which those who embrace the Symbolic World-View understand and manipulate the World. J. G. Frazer's Sympathetic Magic—what anthropologists call the belief that humans possess the power of exploiting magical relations—consists of two branches: Contagious Magic and Imitative Magic. The former of these magics, illustrated by holy water, which touches me and so makes me "holy", is based upon a misunderstanding of Metonymy. And the latter, which uses voodoo dolls that resemble the victim and do their magic by imitation, comes from misunderstanding Analogy. Accordingly, in the History of Ideas, Metonymy and Analogy are of paramount importance.