Wendy Doniger has published more than twenty books on mythology, including The Implied Spider: Politics & Theology in Myth and Other People's Myths: The Cave of Echoes. Doniger, in writing about this lecture for the University of Utah, writes

In many mythologies, rings of memory and forgetfulness are a common narrative convention. Individual members of the intended audience either accept the convention of the ring, allowing themselves to be persuaded, or challenge the assertions that the ring is meant to prove. The details of the ring stories change with teller and intended audience, yet the basic patterns remain. Consider three types of mythical rings, which often join forces in a single story. The first kind, the signet ring, is not magic at all. It is the ring of identity, and occurs in stories in which a lost-and-then-found ring validates a woman's claim that a certain man has slept with her. The second ring is fantastic: this ring gets lost in the ocean, later to be found inside the belly of a fish. The recovered ring may have a positive or a negative power; sometimes its owner has tried to lose it, other times to find it, but inevitably the ring returns. The third type of ring is actually magic: it makes people forget-and sometimes remember-the people they love, or their own identities. In the Hindu story of Shakuntala, and in many stories from other cultures, a caddish lover claims that the amnesiac effects of such a ring excuse his behavior, and, as we shall see, the storyteller also uses the ring to shift moral responsibility magically within the story to befit the changing context of its telling. (qtd. in Announcement, par. 5)

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