David Leeming and Jake Page have provided an introduction and commentary on seventy-two myths drawn from a variety of cultures and language groups. They honor the Native pantheons, cosmologies, heroes, and heroines first as cultural expressions, then as variations on other mythic narratives to which they may be related, and ultimately as expressions of the larger human experience of myth making.

In the process Leeming and Page reveal much of the relationship between rituals, religious traditions (especially shamanism), and the myths they have chosen to retell.