The third function of a traditional mythology is to validate and support a specific moral order, that order of the society out of which that mythology arose. All mythologies come to us in the field of a certain specific culture and must speak to us through the language and symbols of that culture. In traditional mythologies, the notion is really that the moral order is organically related to or somehow of a piece with the cosmic order.

Through this third function, mythology reinforces the moral order by shaping the person to the demands of a specific geographically and histori- cally conditioned social group.

As an example, the primitive rites of initiation, which treated people quite harshly, were intended to solve the problem of getting growing persons over the first great threshold of their development. These rites, commonly, included scarification and certain minor surgeries. Such rites were carried out so that persons could realize that they no longer had the same body they had as children. They could look at themselves afterwards and see that they were different, that they were no longer children. This socially ordered cutting, branding, and cropping was to incorporate them, mind and body, into a larger, more enduring cultural body whose explanatory mythology became their own. The force here, it must be observed, is found in society rather than in nature.

Thus it was the social authority in India, for example, which maintained the caste system as well as the rituals and mythology of suttee. It is precisely here, we might note, that a great difficulty arises. A real danger exists when social institutions press on people mythological structures that no longer match their human experience. For example, when certain religious or political interpretations of human life are insisted upon, mythic dissociation can occur. Through mythic dissociation, persons reject or are cut off from effective explanatory notions about the order of their lives.