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Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his great work, Mythologiques, demonstrates that the theme of the continuous and the discrete is an important feature of Amerindian myth. This paper develops his investigation of this fascinating theme further, showing that it is a pervasive principle of Amerindian myth and that it emerges in the most unexpected settings and guises. Apart from being basic to mythic thought in the Americas, it is also found in many other parts of the world, where it plays an equally fundamental role, specifically in cosmogonic myths. This theme is also intimately related to important mythic concepts such as that of the long day or mythic age and that of the sealed container, as well as being an underlying principle of major rituals and festivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hermeneutical project of this essay is to identify the priorities of a classical female Hindu poet-saint through analysis of her poetry and comparative analysis of an authoritative biography of her, composed subsequently by a male court minister. That her poetry survived may be directly related to his identification of her as a saint, and yet his biography has also served to marginalize her poetry since it is only his work that is widely known. The argument in this essay is that these two compositions, while they overtly seek to define and describe the nature of devotion to Śiva, are centrally, and divergently, concerned with a woman's ability to speak authoritatively. Through this analysis, Pechilis argues that both the poet-saint and her biographer belong within a genealogy of feminism; the inclusion of these authors from remote history challenges any perceived dichotomy between the history of feminism and women's history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]