Foreword.

Abstract

Greek Mythology and Poetics is the second book in the Myth and Poetics series. My goal, as series editor, is to encourage work that will help integrate literary criticism with the approaches of anthropology and that will pay special attention to problems concerning the nexus of ritual and myth. For such an undertaking, we may look to the comparative testimony of relatively complex societies, such as the Ndembu of Zambia, and also of the very smallest, such as the Yukuna of the Colombian Amazon. 1 Just as important, we must pursue the varied testimonies of the most stratified societies, including those which go under the general heading "Western civilization." It is precisely here that the meaning of myth is the most misleading-and challenging. In a small-scale society myth tends to be viewed as the encoding of that society's concept of truth; at the same time, from the viewpoint of Western civilization, myth has become the opposite of fact, the antithesis of truth. 2 Since the ancient Greek concept of politeiii serves as the foundation for the very word "civilization" and for our concept of Western civilization, more than one of the books in this series will deal primarily with ancient Greece and the ancient Greek city-state, or polis. The testimony of the Greeks is particularly instructive with regard to our central concern, the relationship between ritual and myth. The very word "myth,"