Category Archives: Myths

Sacred narratives

Onam- Indian Festival

Age: 22

Text:
Informant: “Onam is a festival about King Mahabali returning to visit his people once every year. One thing people do is make pookalam, which are flower carpets placed at the entrance of the house to welcome Mahabali. My grandma makes them and that’s where I first saw them. People usually get together to make one and it can take two to three hours. There’s also a big meal called Onasadya which we eat for lunch. People sit in rows with a banana leaf in front of them and volunteers serve the food. Someone will bring a big bucket of rice and scoop it onto everyone’s leaf, then another person comes and gives things like bananas. Everything is vegetarian and there is 25 different dishes, the number of dishes is important and you eat with your hands. There’s also boat races called Vallamkali with 100-foot snake boats. I’ve watched them on TV before.”

Interviewer: “How long have you been celebrating Onam?”
Informant: “Pretty much since I was a kid, maybe when I was six or eight. My family celebrates it and that’s how I learned about it. I don’t celebrate it as much anymore, but my parents still celebrate it.”

Context:
The informant grew up in India and learned about and participated in Onam through family celebrations during childhood. Their first encounter with the traditions was watching their grandmother prepare pookalam flower designs at home. The informant explained that their family regularly celebrated the festival when they were around age six or eight. Although the informant does not celebrate Onam as frequently now that they have moved to America, their parents still celebrate in India.

Analysis:
Onam is an example of festival folklore, which combines storytelling, ritual practices, food traditions, and communal gatherings. The festival is centered around the legend of King Mahabali and his annual return, showing how narratives help explain and structure cultural celebrations. The traditions practiced during Onam also express important Indian cultural values such as hospitality, cooperation, and community. Activities like making pookalam or sharing the Onasadya meal require many people working in tandem, which turns the festival into a collective experience rather than an individual one. The large vegetarian meal served on banana leaves and eaten in rows reinforces a sense of equality, since everyone receives the meal in the same way.

女娲补天 (Nuwa repairs the Sky)- Chinese Myth

Text: 女娲补天 (Nǚwā bǔ tiān)- translated to English as “Nuwa repairs the sky”

Informant: “In ancient times there was a water god and a fire god who were in war with each other. The water god lost, and in his anger he crashed into the huge columns that supported the sky. In ancient Chinese belief, the sky was supported by giant mountain-like pillars so when the columns broke, the sky collapsed and everything fell apart. There were floods everywhere, fires burning, and people were dying. So there was a female goddess named Nuwa who saw all the humans suffering and wanted to save them. She found special stones and used fire to melt them down to patch the hole in the sky. Then she needed something to support the patched sky, so she fought a giant turtle monster that was as tall as a mountain. After beating him, she cut off its four legs and used them as four pillars to hold up the sky. Also during this time, because of the floods and destruction, many other monsters appeared on earth. Nuwa fought all these dragons and monsters and defeated them, finally restoring peace and order to the world.”

Context:

The informant explained that they first learned the story of Nuwa repairing the sky in elementary school through children’s picture books.

Analysis:

Stories like Nuwa repairing the sky belong to a group of sacred narratives that explain how the world came to be ordered the way it is. Unlike folktales, myths are not constantly invented or changed. They tend to become canonical stories that are repeated over long periods of time and eventually written down, often becoming closely tied to religion or cultural tradition.

The story also demonstrates the concept of multiplicity and variation. Many cultures have different myths about how the world was created or repaired after catastrophe. The flooding and destruction in this story are similar to flood narratives found in other traditions, such as the biblical flood story. While the details differ, these stories address similar questions about why disasters happen and how order is restored. Because events like the formation of the world or large natural disasters are difficult to explain, folklore often emerges to help societies make sense of the unknown. In this sense, myths function as early cultural explanations for the natural world, helping people understand chaotic events.

Flooding the World

Text

“I’m sure you’ve heard of the story of Noah and the Ark, the man God told to build a boat and bring two of every animal. From what I learned, God floods the world and only Noah and his family survive. As a catholic, I learned about this tale at a young age during my Sunday school. When I did deeper searching out of curiousity, I found an online story where Zeus floods the world, and an old husband and wife survive by holding onto chests with their belongings and repopulating the Earth by throwing their mother (earth) bones (rocks) behind them. I know there is also a native american story where two climbed to the top of the highest tree to survive a flood. Manu, who was a Hindi legent, survived a flood by following a fish avatar. Chickasaws made rafts to save themselves.”

Context

I would come across these different stories from books I read and things I saw in class, and it always brought me back to Noah and the Ark. I still remember these stories because they made me wonder if they all were somehow inspired by each other. As I got older, I got really interested in Greek Mythology through the book Percy Jackson in particular. My interest caused me to read more and I found stories similar to Noah and the Ark from different cultures.

Analysis

Each religion has their own story, and many are passed down through the generations. Religion is one of the most widespread topics studied from a folklorist perspective because it is informally passed down through stories, sayings, and rituals. The flood stories presented above share related myths but differ based on the values of the respecitve folk groups. In folklore, myths are used in outerwordly contexts to help folk understand their own world and existence. The beauty of folklore is that it is formed on the basis of shared belief and identity and does not focus on the legitmacy of it. Instead, as long as people believe and allow it to shape parts of their lives, it will spread and keep cultural values alive. The flood in all these represent the multiple forms and variation folklore can come in. Folklore often exists in patterns as seen with the flood, but each story is adapted to its culture’s values.

Story of Rama

Text:

“There’s this other god named Rama, and he was building a bridge to, I guess, what’s now known as Sri Lanka. It was called Lanka in the book. While he was doing that, it was actually like a small squirrel, which helped him, like, roll in sand and, like, shake it into stone so that he was able to kind of create that bridge to get there, like, through stepping stones. Um, and even though, like, the squirrel literally was not able to do much—the squirrel was obviously limited by size and strength— it still was blessed by Rama because he’s a lord. Because, you know, he gave that squirrel so much of, um, you know, its spirit and its effort to do something, even if, you know, it was kind of disadvantaged by its, like, size and its strength. So it was kind of showing that, you know, sincerity, devotion, and good intentions are sometimes more important than, you know, your ability to actually get something done.”

Context:

The informant is a 20-year-old of Hindu Indian background, in which religious fables and legends are part of a broader tradition that teaches about the origins of their gods while also teaching karmic values. The story of Rama had stuck with him and was something he absorbed deeply as he grew up. He also encountered it among other Hindus is age, exemplifying how it still transmits through the community in traditional oral storytelling. 

Analysis:

This legend is part of the Vaishnava Hindu narrative tradition, in which Lord Rama — an avatar of Vishnu — becomes a central moral figure. The story functions as an etiological legend, as identified by the informant: the tale encodes central values of Hindu ethics—bhakti (devotion, selfless effort, and divine recognition)—the vehicle of the messenger, nor the strength or status confines its spiritual worthiness. The story continues to circulate within Hindu communities, to highlight the dedication of effort rather than being bound by bodily form, serving as an enduring social function that binds community members around a shared understanding.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux Relic Changing Colors

Text:

“It all started about 15 years ago. I had a huge devotion to St. Thérèse, and I feel that she’s brought me many blessings in my life, so we were going as a family to France, to Paris for a week, and I realized that St. Thérèse… town where she grew up in was Lisieux, France. So I had an original relic, which is a piece of her bone, which is very rare to get. And that’s called a first-degree relic. I then purchased 25 third-degree relics. A third-degree relic is something that was touched a first-degree relic. So it touched a piece of the bone, the hair, so forth, like that. So I bought 25 of those, and my husband was on the parish council and had a meeting with the priest before we left, so I said, take these 25 with you and have them blessed before we go over to France.

He said, This is ridiculous. This is a business meeting. That would be embarrassing to come in with these, uh, medals. I said, no it’s not. The medal is also a St. Thérèse on one side, and the other side is all red. It’s got a little red circle. So, I said, take these. I said, if you don’t take them, it’s gonna look bad because I already told the priest about them. So he gets them blessed.

I got a rental car, and I said, I’m going to Lisieux. So we go, and we had a private tour, and I took her original relic and put it on the floor of where she lived in this convent. My husband and I had the original. Then we went over to her body, and my one daughter came away from the body, and she said, “Oh my gosh, my, my relic turned white.” And I was like, gosh, that’s strange. We don’t really think anything of it. We had the entire basilica to ourselves.

A neighborhood child had cancer, so I had told the mom I would light a candle in the basilica of St. Thérèse Lisieux for her daughter. So, me and my daughter are over lighting a candle, and my husband is sitting in a pew praying in the front of the church. And as we’re sitting there, lighting the candle, one by one before us, they all started, 16 out of the 25, turned from red to white. And they were just one at a time, and we are just sitting there watching this in awe. So I said to my daughter, go get your father. He comes over. He sees these relics. And he is like, “oh my god”, we didn’t even know what to do.

There was a thing of holy wood. We took all the relics and we threw them in there because, honestly, I was a little scared and overwhelmed, and my daughter was kind of in shock. No one knew what to say. We were all just super quiet. And at the end of it, we took them all out, we dried them, the red ones were still red, the white ones had stayed white. So the, the crazy thing is afterwards, my husband said, I’m not gonna tell anyone this, ’cause we’re gonna look like crazy people. And I said, “well, we do have the before and after, and all of us witnessed it.”

So we do tell people the story now. And since then, as people have gotten ill and things like that, we have given out several of them. Each of the kids have one left. I don’t have that many left because people have been buried with them, or people have come to me and asked for them. I still have my original one, and when someone, if I have a friend who has, like, you know, serious illness or whatever, they usually take it with them to doctors’ appointments and things like that. But, so that is, um, my story of my relics turning, and I think our whole family has a beautiful devotion to St. Thérèse now. My one daughter carries around a little, tiny St. Thérèse statue. It’s maybe two inches high.

Context:

The informant is a middle aged white woman from Philadelphia. She recounts a family trip to the Basilica of Saint Thérèse, a major Catholic pilgrimage site associated with Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Before the trip, the family had small medals (treated as relics) blessed by a priest. While visiting the convent and basilica, they prayed, placed the relics near the saint’s body, and lit a candle for a sick child back home. During this time, several of the red-colored relics unexpectedly turned white in front of them. In Catholic culture, relics are sacred objects connected to saints. Pilgrimage sites are often associated with miracles or unexplained phenomena, as is her tomb. The experience was emotional and overwhelming, and the family later shared the relics with others, especially those who were ill.

Analysis:

This is an example of material folklore and religious folk belief centered on miracles. The relics act as physical objects believed to carry spiritual power, and the color change is interpreted as a sign of divine presence or intervention. The event reinforces the family’s faith and deepens their devotion to the saint. It also shows how personal experiences at pilgrimage sites can become meaningful stories that are retold, especially when tied to healing.