PABUJI : The God of The Raikas

When we describe a certain story as a myth, what are we saying about it? Clearly, ‘myth’ is not a rigidly defined category: different people may have different opinions as to whether a particular story does or does not qualify for the term, and one may also speak of stories being ‘almost mythical’ or ‘having something of myth about them’. Rather than a category, ‘myth’ denotes a set of typical properties some of which at least must be found in a particular narrative if we are to apply the word to it. Let us examine some of the more important of these properties. PABUJI God of Raikas

In the first place, myths are almost always traditional, that is to say, they circulate in primarily oral form in the societies that own them, rather than being the work of a specific author. Naturally, they do sometimes come to be written down (which is how we can know the mythologies of ancient peoples). But it is important to remember that any given written version of a mythical story is just one version: the fact that it has achieved written form does not privilege it over other versions.

It can be difficult to keep this in mind when we know only a single account of a given myth from long ago, but the truth is that that account will almost certainly have been only one of the numberless versions that circulated when the myth was current. Sometimes more than one version of a myth has survived from antiquity, and we can see that there are significant differences between different versions. PABUJI God of Raikas

– John D. Smith

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