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There is a greater sense of awe in church if certain factors exist in tandem. Lighting, the music, the age of the church itself, and, personally, if Mass is held in Latin.
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The ceremonies in the caves would have included sound, light, and visuals, as well as dancing (ask yourself why the brand of Christianity that is really taking off all over the world is Pentecostal).
The stories of Central Australia often seem strange to people brought up on the fairy-tale. Essentially, they consist of accounts of journeys of mythical ancestors from one sacred place, where they emerge from the earth, to another, where they sit down forever, or go back underground. On their journey, they carry out a number of ceremonies or rituals, which their descendants are obliged to repeat regularly, in order that they and the land they live on may prosper.
These ceremonies consist of inscriptions of collective representations on both the bodies of the participants, and on the land itself. They have both symbolic and natural efficacy, and it is difficult for the outside observer to distinguish between the one and the other. For men and women, the ceremonies help them grow right. For animals and plants, the ceremonies encourage fertility and abundance. The stories are, in a way, road maps and instructions for the rituals. (You can find traces of similar stories elsewhere, where the land remains of day to day importance. There is, for example, a Welsh tale which simply tells of how a witch flew from one place to another, where she crashed and was transformed into a hill).
These stories encode knowledge, but not in ways that make immediate sense to us. Take an example given by Lévi-Strauss (iirc); people fill a container with water, and then ritually chew a particular plant, spitting the fluid into the container. Then a young prepubescent male is given the container and a length of cord; he must successfully climb his way to the top of a large tree and suspend the container from one of the higher branches. They then leave the mixture up in the tree until the moon is high. At that point, the boy shins up the tree again and brings it down. They skim the muck floating on top of the liquid, and they use it for medical purposes.
What they have got is penicillin. It looks as if they have somehow or other accidentally hit on a way of producing this precious substance, but, lacking the scientific method, they have stuck to their tradition,keeping in a whole series of superfluous steps that have no bearing on the matter at all.
However, it can be argued that each of the steps, each of the ritual activities, has its own efficacity. The group sitting round the pot, spitting into it, are working together, and that is important. The boy who is given an important role in the process learns to value it, and this ensures transmission of the skills. The moon is a clock that helps them gauge the time necessary for the transformation. And so on.
So what I'm arguing is that, on the one hand, knowledge gained through the scientific process is only one kind of knowledge, and that there are others which have their own validity. On the other, such ways of knowing are very often corporal as much as they are cerebral, and that in many ways physical movement, ritual, song and artistic inscription, are prior to narrative elaboration. In some ways, that remains true in modern science; laboratories are highly ritualistic places - the use and care of instruments is most thoroughly encoded in the body of the practitioner, and deviations from use and care frowned upon. To the outsider, the scientists may very well seem superstitious.
On fairy tales I wouldn't really trust Bettleheim. Marina Warner's
'From the Beast to the Blonde; on Fairy Tales and their Tellers', is very good indeed, and
Jack Zipes worth having a look at - although he has a political axe to grind.