Myth

• 1. Introduction

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  The word myth, to most people, means a story that is not true. To a folklorist, that meaning is beside the point. As scholars define the term, the veracity of a piece of folklore is entirely irrelevant to whether it counts as a myth. A myth is a kind of narrative that plays a fundamental role in a society, often endorsed by religious and secular authorities alike. It may be natural or supernatural in character. Many societies file their myths, legends, and history together, treating myths as factual accounts of a remote past. So how did a scholarly category for sacred narrative become an everyday word for falsehood? Who decided that gods belong in myths and kings belong in legends? And why have thinkers from ancient Greece to the present argued so fiercely over what a myth even is? The answers run from a 5th-century Latin author through Victorian theorists to filmmakers and fan-fiction writers working today.

• 2. A Word's Long Journey

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  Ancient Greek gave us the root: μῦθος, mȳthos, meaning speech, narrative, or fiction. Combine it with the suffix -λογία, meaning study, and you get mythología, which Plato used as a general term for fiction or story-telling of any kind. The Greek term passed into Late Latin in the title of Fabius Planciades Fulgentius's 5th-century Mythologiæ, a work on Greco-Roman etiological stories about the gods. Fulgentius treated his material explicitly as allegories that required interpretation, not as true events. From Latin the word moved into Middle French as mythologie. English borrowed mythology in the 15th century, first attested in John Lydgate's Troy Book around 1425, where it meant the exposition or interpretation of fables. For centuries afterward, mythology meant a moral, a fable, an allegory, or a collection of traditional stories understood to be false. Strikingly, mythology entered English before myth itself. Johnson's Dictionary carries an entry for mythology but none for myth. The loanwords mythos and mythus both appeared in English before the first recorded example of myth in 1830. Only in the early 19th century did the word narrow into a scholarly label for a traditional story explaining a natural or social phenomenon and involving supernatural beings.

• 3. Gods, Kings, And Fairies

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  The main characters in a myth are usually non-humans: gods, demigods, and other supernatural figures, though humans, animals, and combinations also appear. Stories about everyday humans, even leaders, tend to live in legends rather than myths. Myths are often set in a world of the remote past, very different from the present, and usually have no historical basis. This boundary leaks constantly. The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid mix divine and human protagonists, defying any clean rule. As stories spread between cultures or as faiths change, a myth can slide into folktale, its gods recast as humans or as giants, elves, and faeries. The traffic runs both ways. Historical and literary material can pick up mythological qualities over time. The Matter of Britain, centered on King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, and the Matter of France appear to originate in real events of the 5th and 8th centuries, then grew mythologised over the following centuries. Some folklore stays outside the category entirely. Fairy stories are not considered true by anyone, which is one reason they are held distinct from myths. Where a sacred narrative ends and a tale for entertainment begins is exactly where scholars have spent the most ink.

• 4. The Trouble With Defining It

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  Finnish folklorist Lauri Honko offered one of the most widely cited definitions: a myth is a story of the gods, a religious account of the beginning of the world and of fundamental events, which expresses and confirms a society's religious values and norms and testifies to the efficacy of ritual. Professor José Manuel Losada framed it differently, as a functional, symbolic, and thematic narrative of extraordinary events with a transcendent, sacred, and supernatural referent that lacks, in principle, historical testimony. Assyriologist Annette Zgoll and classic philologist Christian Zgoll defined a myth as an Erzählstoff, a narrative material that is polymorphic through its variants and combines transcending interpretations of human experience. These definitions matter because calling a narrative a myth can be explosive. Many religious adherents hold their own traditions to be historical without question and object to the label, while applying it freely to other religions. The pejorative sense itself arose from labelling the religious beliefs of other cultures as incorrect. Some scholars respond by calling all religious narratives myths, to avoid depreciating any single tradition. Others abstain from the word entirely. Among biblical scholars of the Old and New Testament, myth carries a technical meaning, describing the actions of the other-worldly in terms of this world, as with the Creation and the Fall.

• 5. Recording And Remaking Myths

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  Mythography is the compilation or description of myths, and the Classical tradition produced a lineage of its practitioners. Ovid, who lived from 43 BCE to 17 or 18 CE, told myths in versions that proved profoundly influential. Fabius Planciades Fulgentius gathered a wide range of myths and gave them moralistic interpretations. The anonymous medieval Vatican Mythographers assembled anthologies of Classical myths that stayed influential to the end of the Middle Ages. Renaissance scholar Natalis Comes wrote a ten-book Mythologiae that became a standard source for classical mythology in later Renaissance Europe. Outside that tradition, the thirteenth-century Prose Edda attributed to the Icelander Snorri Sturluson is the main surviving survey of Norse mythology from the Middle Ages. Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, an anthropologist at Colorado State University, has termed India's Bhats mythographers. The category keeps multiplying. Mythos, preferred by some scholars to dodge the pejorative ring of myth, now points to its Aristotelian sense as a plot point or to a body of interconnected stories, as in the world building of H. P. Lovecraft. Mythopoeia, the conscious generation of mythology, was a term used by J. R. R. Tolkien and, separately, suggested by Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg. Myth criticism, a system of anthropological interpretation, was created by French philosopher Gilbert Durand and carried on by figures such as Georges Dumézil and Pierre Brunel.

• 6. Where Myths Come From

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  Euhemerism holds that myths are distorted accounts of real history. Storytellers elaborate on historical events until the figures in them gain the status of gods. The wind-god Aeolus, by this account, may have evolved from a king who taught his people to use sails and read the winds. Herodotus in the 5th century BCE and Prodicus made claims of this kind, and the theory takes its name from Euhemerus, around 320 BCE, who argued that Greek gods grew from legends about humans. A competing family of theories treats myths as allegory. Apollo stands for the sun, Poseidon for water, Athena for wise judgment, Aphrodite for romantic desire. Müller supported this view, believing myths began as descriptions of nature and were gradually taken literally, so that a poetic image of the sea as raging hardened into the idea of the sea as a raging god. A related theory, personification, says the ancients worshiped natural phenomena like fire and air and slowly deified them. The myth-ritual theory ties myth to ritual. In its extreme form, championed by Smith, people first perform a ritual for reasons unrelated to any story, forget the original reason, then invent a myth to explain it. James George Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, argued that humans began with magical rituals, lost faith in magic, and invented myths about gods, recasting their rituals as religious. Eliade pressed the opposite emphasis, holding that one of myth's foremost functions is to establish models for behavior and to offer a religious experience that returns people to the mythical age. Pattanaik put the disagreement in a phrase: facts are everybody's truth, fiction is nobody's truth, myths are somebody's truth.

• 7. A Century Of Theories

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  Critical interpretation of myth began with the Presocratics, and ancient Greece left an organising scheme behind. Sallustius divided myths into five categories: theological, physical, animistic, material, and mixed, the last used particularly in initiations. Plato condemned poetic myth when discussing education in the Republic, fearing the uneducated might take stories of gods and heroes literally, yet he referred to myths constantly throughout his writings. Later Platonists such as Plutarch, Porphyry, and Proclus wrote explicitly about the symbolic interpretation of traditional and Orphic myths. The first modern Western scholarly theories of myth appeared in the second half of the 19th century, driven partly by a new interest in Europe's ancient past tied to Romantic Nationalism and the research of Jacob Grimm, who lived from 1785 to 1863, and partly by Europeans trying to comprehend and control the cultures they encountered through colonialism. Those encounters reached texts as old as the Sanskrit Rigveda and the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Shaped by emerging ideas about evolution, 19th-century theories often framed myth as a failed or obsolete mode of thought, the primitive counterpart of modern science. Nature mythology, led by Max Müller and Edward Burnett Tylor, dominated the latter part of the century. Müller went so far as to call myth a disease of language. Not everyone agreed, and recent scholarship, finding a fundamental lack of evidence among the people who actually circulated myths, has abandoned its key ideas.

• 8. Myth In The Modern World

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  Sigmund Freud, drawing on Classical myth, began developing the concept of the Oedipus complex in his 1899 work The Interpretation of Dreams. Jung sought the psychology behind world myths and proposed that shared archetypes, innate unconscious forces, explain similarities across cultures. By mid-century, Lévi-Strauss led a structuralist theory that read myths as fixed mental structures built from pairs of opposites such as good and evil. Bronislaw Malinowski focused instead on social function, advancing the idea that origin stories provide a mythic charter, a legitimisation, for cultural norms and institutions. In the 1950s, Barthes published a series of essays in his book Mythologies examining how modern myths are made, an early work in the post-structuralist approach. Rapid secularization in Western culture made scholars more willing to analyse Abrahamic narratives as myths, and theologians such as Rudolf Bultmann argued that a modern Christianity needed to demythologize. The Christian theologian Conrad Hyers pushed back, writing that in a religious context myths are storied vehicles of supreme truth that put one in touch with sacred realities. Late-20th-century researchers influenced by postmodernism argued that each account of a myth carries its own meaning, so there is no such thing as an original version of a myth, a stance illustrated by A. K. Ramanujan's essay Three Hundred Ramayanas. As part of the Göttingen myth research, Annette and Christian Zgoll developed hylistics to extract mythical materials from any medium and compare them across media. That insight points straight at the screen. The film industry now transmits myths to large audiences, and Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series places the Greek deities in a modern-day world. In an interview for a national newspaper, Henry Jenkins described fan fiction as a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.