The article is devoted to the study of the genesis of the concept of "natural" in the archaic (mythological) consciousness. The authors point out that in the Archaic, the "natural" was not an independent category, but was constituted as a negative background ("other") sacred/supernatural. The subject of the research is the phenomenon of the natural in mythological consciousness. The research methodology is based on the synthesis and critical comparison of reductionist ("view from the outside": Tylor, Durkheim, Freud, Levi-Bruhl, Malinovsky, Cassirer, Levi-Strauss) and phenomenological ("view from the inside": Otto, Heiler, van der Leeuw, Menshing, Eliade, Losev, Gantke) approaches. It is concluded that the archaic natural remained a neutral background of ideas related to universal animatedness and totemism, was indifferent to taboos and "participation" in the global whole, had no significance for the "expressive function", poorly reflected the social systems of the archaic and communicative games. Based on phenomenological research, a set of characteristics of the archaic "natural" was revealed: immanence, ordinariness, isolation, anti-ambivalence, abstractness, closeness, unraveling, impersonality, antisymbolicity, antidialogicity, isotropy and finiteness. It is concluded that the natural archaic contained the immanent potential of desacralization, realized in the culture of Modern Times.