Paper short abstract:

What makes people believe in a narrative, what gives them a feeling of belonging to a community however fictitious this might be, is the link they are or are not able to draw between their own personal experience and the story told. Rationality has little to do with this process of identification that is grounded in emotions waiting for recognition.

Paper long abstract:

Since the years 1980, North-American and European feminist bookshops display essays promoting the idea that within each woman would lie the "sacred feminine", a dimension of divine character that would have been kept hidden for centuries because of a male-dominant society. Ancient myths, religious artefacts and archaeological findings are reinterpreted in a view to provide this theory with scientific grounds. Although such a theory was heavily criticised by historians, these were unable to alter the spreading of what has become a modern-day Western myth.

Interviews made with women who believe in this theory show how helpful this narrative was in enabling them to navigate painful events. The myth serves as a metaphor for personal experiences: it provides feelings of frustration and grief with meaning, therefore allowing suffering women to recover a positive image of themselves. By imagining that they belong to a sacred community, they do not feel isolated anymore and regain a sense of purpose. In this case, the persuasive character of the narrative is not a question of objective accuracy but of subjective adequacy: people believe in a story they recognize as their own. In other words, cultural heritage borrowed and adapted from other traditions may be adopted by individuals as their heritage if it provides recognition to the untold story of their lived experience. Myth, however, is not myth by itself: it functions as such as long as someone is able to convince individuals that their story may be expressed in the terms of the narrative.