The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

muteness. 2
So while μ οσ is translated as “fable,” it is more accurately
translated as “ritual,” that is, as a language construct that
contains the power to transform something (or someone) from
one state or condition to another. Of course it reflects belief, at
least in the sorcerer’s or magician’s sense, but it is at base a
vehicle, a means of transmitting paranormal power.
The mythic narrative as an articulation of thought or wisdom
is not expressible in other forms; it must be seen as a necessary
dimension of human expression, a dimension that is categorically
unique. It is in this sense that facts or explanations of various
phenomena such as “how the Loon got its white neck” or “why
coyote has a ragged coat” can be incorporated into mythic
structures. These pourquoi elements are signals of the kind of
reality myth inhabits, rather than statements about social and
material reality; their referent is to the sacred world of ritual
magic rather than to the external world of machine-verifiable
facts.
In this regard, the American psychoanalyst Rollo May defines
myth “in its historically accurate sense of a psycho-biological
pattern which give meaning and direction to experience.” 3 In
other words, the mythic dimension of experience—the
psychospiritual ordering of nonordinary knowledge—is an
experience that all peoples, past, present, and to come, have in
common. As Thomas Mann observes, myth and life are
identities:
Life, then—at any rate—significant life—was in ancient
times the reconstitution of the myth in flesh and blood; it
referred to and appealed to the myth; only through it …
could it approve itself as genuine and significant. The myth
is the legitimization of life; only through and in it does life
find self-awareness, sanction, consecration. 4