According to him, the operator that connects myth and human life and makes the unity of different durations possible is ritual: "it is through the mediation of ritual that mythic time is revealed to be the common root of world time and human time"4. Cyclic and linear conceptualizations of time are usually understood to be opposed and mutually exclusive. ...Nancy M. Farriss6 writes: "According to a cyclical conception, time is a perpetual repetition, corresponding to the diurnal and the seasonal rhythms of the natural world, and the past therefore is infinitely repeatable. The cyclic conception of time has been associated with non-Westem and pre-modem societies, in which life is supposed to be circumscribed by ritual; whereas linear time - and its narrativization as history - is associated with modem Western-type societies. ...as Edmund Leach8 puts it, "our modem sophisticated view tends to throw the emphasis on the second of these aspects of time". According to Malinowski, the Trobriand Islanders of North-West Melanesia classified time roughly into three groups: The first is based upon the observation of the stars, sun, and moon; the second upon recurrent changes in wind and weather; the third on human seasonal pursuits'22.