You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
All myths are stories, but not all stories are myths. In my definition, myths raise religious questions, questions about the meaning of human life, the possible existence and nature of higher powers, the meaning of death. A myth is not a lie or a false statement to be contrasted with truth, reality, fact, or history, although this usage may be the most common meaning of myth in casual parlance. In the history of religions, the term myth has far more often been used to mean “truth”. What makes this ambiguity possible is that a myth is above all a story that is believed, believed to be true, and that people continue to believe in the face of sometimes overwhelming evidence that it is, in fact, a lie. A myth is a story that is sacred to and shared by a group of people who find their most important meanings in it; it is a story believed to have been composed in the past about an event in the past or, more rarely, in the future, an event that continues to have meaning in the present because it is remembered; it is a story that is part of a larger group of stories.
Certain plots come up again and again, revealing a set of human concerns that transcend any cultural barriers, experiences that we might call cross-cultural or transcultural. As Marina Warner (1995) puts it,
Of course there are fairy tales unique to a single place, which have not been passed on. But there are few really compelling ones that do not turn out to be wearing seven-league boots. The possibility of holding a storehouse of narrative in common could act to enhance our reciprocal relations, to communicate across spaces and barricades of national self-interest and pride. We share more than we perhaps admit or know, and have done so for a very long time [p. 414].