The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

superhuman being or some alleged person or event, with or
without a determinable basis of fact or a natural
explanation, esp., a traditional or legendary story that is
concerned with deities or demigods and the creation of the
world and its inhabitants. 2. stories or matter of this kind …
3. any invented story, idea or concept … 4. an imaginary or
fictitious thing or person. 5. an unproved collective belief
that is accepted uncritically and is used to justify a social
institution. 1
Essentially, all parts of the definition indicate a prevailing
belief in the fictitiousness of myth; such terms as “alleged,”
“determinable,” “factual,” and “natural explanation” imply
falsity or, at least, questionable accuracy. This meta-myth is
deceptive, for it imputes factualness to certain assumptions that
form the basis of western perceptions without acknowledging
that it does so. Part of this meta-myth is the belief that there is
such a thing as determinable fact, natural—that is, right—
explanations, and reality that can be determined outside the
human agency of discovery and fact finding.
This attitude falls more along the lines of uncritical
acceptance used to justify the social institutions of contemporary
societies than of proven belief attested to by many physicists,
psychoanalysts, visionary mystics, poets, artists, and Indians as
well as human experience of thousands of years and thousands of
cultures.
Be that as it may, myth has not been considered synonymous
with belief until recently. Earlier it was synonymous with fable,
from the Greek, where it had the connotation of moral story. The
Greek terms μύ-σ-τησ and μυ-σ-τήρου meant “one who is
initiated” and “a mystery, secret (thing muttered),” respectively,
and are based on the Indo-Germanic root, MU. Another Greek
term, μύ, μ , “a sound of muttering,” and its Latin forms, muttum
or mutum, meaning “a slight sound,” both signify muttering and