The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

of story, requiring supernatural or nonordinary figures as
characters. Further, a myth relies on mystical or metaphysically
charged symbols to convey its significance, and the fact of the
mystical and the teleological nature of myth is embodied in its
characteristic devices; the supernatural characters, the
nonordinary events, the transcendent powers, and the pourquoi
elements all indicate that something sacred is going on.
On literal levels of analysis, the myth tells us what kind of
story it is. It focuses our attention on the level of consciousness
it relates to us and relates us to. Having engaged our immediate
participation on its own level, the myth proceeds to re-create
and renew our ancient relationship to the universe that is beyond
the poverty-stricken limits of the everyday.
Mythologists have long noticed a connection between ritual
and myth. Some believe that ritual is an enactment of a myth,
while others feel that myth tells about the ritual in story form.
Neither explanation seems satisfactory to all parties, and for a
very good reason: these speculations are based on Greek and
Roman mythologies, the only kind that the Church did not
suppress totally, and on extant histories of rituals in Greek and
Roman cultures. The materials thus left available for students of
the mysteries, coupled with analytical methods developed over
two millennia of churchly control of academic research, led to
fundamental misperception and misrepresentation of ritual and
mythic modes.
It was precisely because the classics were based upon
fictive themes that they survived the mythoclastic rigors of
early Christianity. Myths were pagan, and therefore false in
the light of true belief—albeit that true belief might today
be considered merely another variety of mythopoeic faith.
Here is where the game of debunking starts, in the
denunciation of myth as falsehood from the vantage-point of
a rival myth.