中国上古神话与其它文明不同之处，在于它的破碎性，而这破碎是源于先秦诸侯对历史文献的集体燔毁，而不仅是秦始皇的“焚书坑儒”。这场沉默的“文革”，导致了第一代中国神话的毁灭。而后，在亚洲大移民的背景中，印度、伊朗和西亚的神话片段，组成了以《山海经》为代表的第二代神话。这个新神系的建构，主要基于历时性的文化传播，而非共时性的“集体无意识”，它跟非洲智人向全球殖民的模式密切呼应。但是，新神话的建构遭到了轴心时代实用理性主义的阻拦。秦汉两代的帝王和文人，试图以祖先崇拜代替神祇崇拜，以历史叙事代替神话叙事，由此导致第二代中国神话的湮灭。

Ancient Chinese mythology is different from those in other civilizations in its fragmentariness, and the fragmented nature is the result of the collective destruction of historical documents in the pre-Qin feudal states burnt down all historical documents, on top of the massive burning of books and the burying-alive of Confucian scholars during the reign of the First Emperor of Qin. This silent "cultural revolution" in the pre-Qin and Qin era resulted in the destruction of the first generation of Chinese mythology. During the wave of Asian emigration, myth fragments from India, Iran and West Asia constructed the second generation of mythology with The Legends of Mountains and Seas as its representative. The construction of a new god system, mainly based on the diachronic cultural transmission instead of synchronic collective unconsciousness, closely paralleled with the model that African homo sapiens responded to global colonization. However, the construction of a new mythology was blocked by pragmatic rationalism in the Axial Age. Emperors and scholars of Qin and Han dynasties tried to replace god worship with ancestor worship and to replace the historical narrative with myth narrative, which eventually led to the annihilation of the second generation of Chinese mythology.