A warning

"Cultural myth has come through the mouths of priests and is therefore not trustworthy as the oral myth.  Cultural myth records what happened, it is fixed, static, and freezes in a pattern which is an inflexible expression of the cultural time and place.  When metaphorical surface becomes ritual, the God no longer wears a human body or speaks for itself."

--- Thelma J. Shinn,  Worlds Within Women: Myth and Mythmaking in Fantastic Literature by Women