A myth is a narrative projection of a given cultural group's sense of its sacred past and its significant relationship with the deeper powers of the surrounding world and universe. A myth is a projection of an aspect of a culture's soul. In its complex but revealing symbolism, a myth is to a culture what a dream is to an...

Secret writing for the transmission of messages has been practiced for nearly 4,000 years. According to David Kahn, the great historian of cryptology, the first example of an intentionally altered message can be traced to a tomb in ancient Egypt dated about 1900 b.c. In the 40 centuries since that...

Clashes between European powers and the indigenous peoples of the Americas began almost immediately upon the arrival of the first Europeans on the shores of the New World. Such conflict seems inevitable in retrospect, and perhaps it should have been expected at the outset as well. The great disparity between the two cultures,...

Any folklorist who saw the 1998 Columbia Pictures film Urban Legend will probably remember the library scene for its depiction of one aspect of folklore research. In this scene the beautiful student Natalie (played by Alicia Witt) suspects that recent campus mayhem was inspired by urban legends, the same kind of stories...