The article focuses on the rootedness of the conceptual framework of scientific ontologies (as well as philosophical ones) in the ancient pre-reflexive and pre-theoretical life experience of archaic people, whose mythological contemplation shaped their worldview representations and attitudes. Fate is analyzed as a cultural universal which represents a complex of mythological images - necessity, chance, law, reason, time, which turned into fundamental categories as a result of philosophical and scientific reflection. Science is the center of modern civilization, changing the shape and setting the vector of its development. During the study of the factors that had influence on the formation and development of science, researchers more often pay attention to the role of sociocultural ones and rarely turn to the analysis of their origins, rooted in the pre-reflective, pre-theoretical deep layers of culture. An appeal to the mythological and philosophical foundations of science is the search and identification of the "roots", the origins that made (created) science and preserve their meaning in an implicit form at present. In this respect, the analysis of mythological images of the cultural universal "fate" is very interesting. The content of this universal is a set of mythological images - necessity and chance, law, reason, time. These images were the source of theoretical ideas in the first layer of "philosophemes" about the most general philosophical foundations of culture, the further understanding of which allowed to form fundamental categories in philosophy and science. The mythologem "fate" was formed under the influence of gnoseogenic factors, which are connected with the accumulation of experience of observing the natural world and with the cognition of the outer characteristic of the phenomena of nature, and also of sociogenic factors, which refer to the place of the individual in the social structure according to their destiny. With the growth of personal consciousness and the division of primitive society into social groups, there emerged a necessity to regulate and justify one's position in the social structure. Sociogenic factors had an overwhelming influence on the formation of the mythologem "fate" in the Greek tradition. A special emphasis in the interpretation of fate is the idea of everything being predetermined, independent of the efforts of man; the origins of this idea go back to archaic times. In mythological consciousness, there was a semantic system that generated the ideas of necessity, law, reason, time, eternity. These ideas became the subject of philosophical reflection, which resulted in a layer of special categories - logical-ontological categories. This layer of categories in scientific knowledge is a part of the philosophical foundations of science. They are primarily included in their ontological subsystem, represented by a grid of categories that serve as a matrix of understanding and cognition of the researched objects - categories of causality, necessity, law, chance, time, etc. The categorial foundations of science are a special area, which simultaneously belongs to the internal structure of science and to its infrastructure, and through it science is permanently connected with philosophy and culture.
