The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

Myth may be seen as a teleological statement, a shaped system
of reference that allows us to order and thus comprehend
perception and knowledge, as Mann suggests. The existence of
mythic structures supposes a rational ordering of the universe.
The presence of myth in a culture signifies a belief in the
teleological nature of existence and indicates that powers other
than those of material existence, or what Carlos Castaneda calls
“ordinary reality,” guide and direct the universe and human
participation in it. As such myth stands as an expression of
human need for coherence and integration and as the mode
whereby human beings might actively fill that need.
Yet myth is more than a statement about how the world ought
to work; its poetic and mystic dimensions indicate that it
embodies a sense of reality that includes all human capacities,
ideal or actual. These, broadly speaking, are the tendency to feel
or emotively relate to experience and the tendency to
intellectually organize it—the religious, aesthetic, and
philosophical aspects of human cultures. Human beings need to
belong to a tradition and equally need to know about the world
in which they find themselves. Myth is a kind of story that allows
a holistic image to pervade and shape consciousness, thus
providing a coherent and empowering matrix for action and
relationship. It is in this sense that myth is most significant, for it
is this creative, ordering capacity of myth that frightens and
attracts the rationalistic, other-centered mind, forcing it into
thinly veiled pejoration of the mythic faculty, alienistic analysis
of it, and counter myth-making of its own.
Myth, then, is an expression of the tendency to make stories of
power out of the life we live in imagination; from this faculty
when it is engaged in ordinary states of consciousness come
tales and stories. When it is engaged in nonordinary states, myth
proper—that is, mystery mumblings—occur. It is of course the
former relationship between myth and imagination that has