Abstract
According to the outstanding Russian scientist of the 20th century, O.M. Freudenberg primitive consciousness operated with “metaphors of life” and “metaphors of death”. Metaphors of life reflect the suggestive influence of one individual (or a group of individuals) on another through speech, while others reflect the reaction to such influence – “death”, that is, obedience or resistance. The study of the famous Russian paleoanthropologist B.F. Porshnev “On the Beginning of Human History” reconstructs a similar relationship at an earlier stage in history, between the ancestors of Homo sapiens, when human speech was formed. It was linguistic relations that formed those features of the worldview, which became the basis for the formation of metaphors of “death” and “life” later, in mythological
thinking.