Hey Frank!  It just occurred to me that there's a book you would
enjoy, if you haven't already read it.
It's called "A Canticle for Leibowitz," by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Miller was a tail gunner in WWII, and participated in the bombing
of the Benedictine abbey in Monte Cassino, then the oldest
monastery in the Western world.  I'm sure that was the inspiration
for _Leibowitz_, which came out around 1960.
It's set in the desert southwest, a few centuries into the future,
after the mysterious Flame Deluge has wiped out most of humanity.
The Abbey of Saint Leibowitz is doing what monasteries do during
dark ages: protecting the sacred relics and copying the sacred
texts.  Turns out, though, that one of the sacred relics is a
grocery list, and one of the sacred texts contains this unfathomable
stuff called "Maxwell's equations."
With your interest in how and why people make myths, I think you'd
have a fine time with that book.  I've just been reading the sequel,
"Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman."  They're both wickedly
funny in places, but both really quite profound.
 * SLMR 2.1a * .      You can't learn what you think you already know.
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