ABSTRACT
Modern studies of myth invariably begin by pointing out that, for scholars
studying culture, history, and religion, the term “myth” does not mean what
it is commonly understood to mean, namely, something false or unfounded
(Cohen 1969: 337; Doniger 1998: 1; Dundes 1984: 1; Eliade 1963: 1;
Middleton 1967: x). As Percy Cohen points out, this usage is “almost
always intended pejoratively: here my beliefs are a strong conviction,
yours a dogma, his a myth” (1969: 337). Looking beyond (or beneath) the
modern sense of myth as falsehood, scholars point to the primary role of
myth in traditional societies, in which it appears as a sacred narrative, one that frequently speaks of origins and, in particular, is “shared by a group
of people who fi nd their most important meanings in it” (Doniger 1998:
2; cf. Cohen 1969: 337; Dundes 1984: 1; Eliade 1963: 5). Yet, despite the
scholarly distaste for the notion of myth as falsehood, it is not a bad place
to begin delving into myth, for it refl ects the fact that myths open windows
into unreachable realms and that they therefore do not refl ect and are not
subject to everyday notions of truth. But, of course, not being true in an
ordinary sense does not mean that myths are falsehoods (if they are not
subject to ordinary notions of truth, then, too, they are not subject to
ordinary notions of falsehood). The diffi culty of locating myth is apparent
in an observation made by Mircea Eliade, one of the premier historians
of religion of the latter half of the twentieth century, that myth is a “true
history” describing the acts of “Supernatural Beings” who existed in the
long-ago of the “transcendent times of the ‘beginnings’ ” (1963: 6; cf.
