This book was born beside a lake. Not metaphorically — though that would be fitting enough — but in the most literal sense: in the sustained encounter with the mythological tradition of the Sentani people of Lake Sentani, Papua. The lake itself is already a myth: shaped, the Sentani narratives tell us, by the body of a drowned child whose sacrifice became the very ground on which communal life is built. To study the myths of the Sentani people is to understand that the landscape is never merely scenery — it is moral memory, written in water and in stone. Yet this tradition has for too long remained outside the purview of comparative mythology scholarship. The great syntheses of the twentieth century — Campbell’s monomythic arc, Jung’s typology of the collective unconscious, Eliade’s phenomenology of sacred space, Lévi-Strauss’s structural analysis of mythemes — have enriched our understanding of Greek and Mesopotamian, Norse and Hindu, Polynesian and Native American traditions. They have done considerably less for the oral traditions of Melanesia and for Papua in particular.