Myth and archetype and how they still affect us.

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Myth come from Greek word Mythos which means "words" or more significantly "story", but it's a special kind of story that has two purposes that is to carry significance and staying power.

Archetype on other hand comes from Myths or history that is archetypes are action, characters, objects carrying a significant meaning to it. Like using Sita's example as ideal wife, in another situations using her as good example of a feminist woman, who prayers to earth goddess to swallow her, rather then going with her husband.

Now coming back to the topic of the topic of how these archetypes are still affect our society. My answer to this, is people use these myth and archetype by distorting it and presenting the part which benefits them to prove their point mostly to show how knowledgeable they are and secondly to maintain power over the "other".

Indian literature is ancient and so is vast, It has talked about different aspects of life and different characters. So when we consider something as "taboo", it is an alien term for India, unlike how our modern India uses it with an ease.

We have stories of "Narad" falling in to pond and emerging from it as a woman, this is how he discovers Maya. Another story of Shiva bathing in the Yamuna to become a woman, so he can dance with Krishna.

One way to appreciate these stories by understanding that in ancient India the line dividing male from female and heterosexual from homosexual were blurred and stories were told without guilt. So from where does these stories come from, perhaps they have their roots in Indian philosophy, which talked about a world where all understanding of divine is believed to exist. Here, there's space for men and women and also for man with woman's heart and for woman with man's needs.

Our Indian mythology and their archetypical characters are friendly towards different ideas of being and seeing. In Devdutt Pattanaik's  words "This teach us that there's nothing unnatural in nature and that every way of being is a manifestation of the divine".

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