Mythology, the study and interpretation of myth and the body of myths of a particular culture.
Myth is a complex cultural phenomenon that can be approached from a number of viewpoints.
In general, myth is a narrative that describes and portrays in symbolic language the origin of the basic elements and assumptions of a culture.
Mythic narrative relates, for example, how the world began, how humans and animals were created, and how certain customs, gestures, or forms of human activities originated.
Almost all cultures possess or at one time possessed and lived in terms of myths.
Myths differ from fairy tales in that they refer to a time that is different from ordinary time (see Folktales; Religion).
The time sequence of myth is extraordinary-an "other" time-the time before the conventional world came into being.
Because myths refer to an extraordinary time and place and to gods and other supernatural beings and processes, they have usually been seen as aspects of religion.
Because of the all-encompassing nature of myth, however, it can illuminate many aspects of individual and cultural life.
Meaning and Interpretation 
From the beginnings of Western culture, myth has presented a problem of meaning and interpretation, and a history of controversy has accumulated about both the value and the status of mythology.
Myth, History, and Reason 
In the Greek heritage of the West, myth or mythos has always been in tension with reason or logos, which signified the rational and analytic mode of arriving at a true account of reality.
The Greek philosophers Xenophanes, Plato, and Aristotle, for example, exalted reason and made trenchant criticisms of myth as a proper way of knowing reality.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition the notion of history has been opposed to myth.
Complicating this opposition was the concept that the God of the Hebrews and Christians, although existing outside of ordinary time and space, was revealed to humanity within human history and society.
Thus, God was revealed to Moses in the Egypt of the pharaohs.
The distinctions between reason and myth and between myth and history, although fundamental, were never quite absolute.
Aristotle concluded that in some of the early Greek creation myths, logos and mythos overlapped.
Plato used myths as allegory and also as literary devices in developing an argument.
Mythos, logos, and history overlap in the prologue to the Gospel of John in the New Testament; there, Jesus, the Christ, is portrayed as the Logos, who came from eternity into historical time.
Early Christian theologians, attempting to understand the Christian revelation, argued about the roles of myth and history in the biblical account.
Western Mythical Traditions 
The debate over whether myth, reason, or history best expresses the meaning of the reality of the gods, humans, and nature has continued in Western culture as a legacy from its earliest traditions.
Among these traditions were the myths of the Greeks.
Adopted and assimilated by the Romans, they furnished literary, philosophical, and artistic inspiration to such later periods as the Renaissance and the romantic era.
The pagan tribes of Europe furnished another body of tradition.
After these tribes became part of Christendom, elements of their mythologies persisted as the folkloric substratum of various European cultures.
Modern Concern with Mythology 
The Enlightenment and the romantic movement of modern European culture stimulated interest in myth, both through theories about myth and through new academic disciplines.
Although the Enlightenment emphasized the rationality of human beings, it directed attention to all human expressions, including religion and mythology.
Enlightenment scholars tried to make sense of the seemingly irrational and fantastic mythic stories.
Their explanations included historical evolutionary theories-that human culture evolved from an early state of ignorance and irrationality to the modern culture of rationality-with myths seen as products of the early ages of ignorance and irrationality.
Myths were also thought to result from euhemerism, that is, the divinizing of the heroic virtues of a human being.
More important than any one theory of mythology, however, was the development of systematic disciplines devoted to the study of mythology.
In new fields such as social and cultural anthropology and the history of religions, scholars were forced to come to terms with myths from earlier historical periods outside the Western tradition, and they began to relate the study of myth to a broader understanding of culture and history.
The romantic movement turned to the older Indo-European myths as intellectual and cultural resources.
Romantic scholars tended to view myth as an irreducible form of human expression: For them, myth, as a mode of thinking and perception, possessed prestige equal to or sometimes greater than the rational grasp of reality.
Myth had always been part of classical and theological studies in the West, but during and after the Enlightenment, the concern for myth, revived with new intensity, could be detected in almost all the newer university disciplines-anthropology, history, psychology, history of religions, political science, structural linguistics.
Most current theories of myth emerged from one or more of these disciplines.
Types of Myth 
Myths may be classified according to the dominant theme they portray.
Cosmogonic Myths 
Usually the most important myth in a culture, one that becomes the exemplary model for all other myths, is the cosmogonic myth.
It relates how the entire world came into being.
In some narratives, as in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, the creation of the world proceeds from nothing (creatio ex nihilo).
Egyptian, Australian, Greek, and Mayan myths also speak of creation from nothing.
In most cases the deity in these myths is all-powerful.
The deity may remain at the forefront and become the center of religious life, as with the Hebrews, or may withdraw and become a distant or peripheral deity, as in the myths of the Australian aborigines, Greeks, and Mayans.
Other cosmogonic myths describe creation as an emergence from the lower worlds.
Among the Navajo and Hopi, for example, creation is the result of a progression upward from lower worlds, and the emergence from the last world is the final progression into the world of humanity.
A Polynesian myth places the various layers of emergence in a coconut shell.
Similar in form to such myths are myths of the world egg, known in Africa, China, India, the South Pacific, Greece, and Japan.
In these myths, creation is symbolized as breaking forth from the fertile egg.
The egg is the potential for all life, and sometimes, as in the myth of the Dogon people of West Africa, it is referred to as the "placenta of the world."
Another kind of cosmogonic myth is the world-parent myth.
In the Babylonian creation story Enuma elish, the world parents, Apsu and Tiamat, bear offspring who later find themselves opposed to the parents.
The offspring defeat the parents in a battle, and from the immolated body of Tiamat the world is created.
In other world-parent myths from the Egyptians, Zuńi, and Polynesians, the parents beget offspring but remain in close embrace; the offspring live in darkness, and in the desire for light they push the parents apart, creating a space for the deities to make a human world.
In myths widespread among Siberian-Altaic peoples, in Romania, and in India, creation comes about through the agency of an earth diver, an animal (a turtle or a bird) who dives into the primordial waters to bring up a small piece of earth that later expands into the world.
A motif of several cosmogonic myths is the act of sacrifice.
In the Babylonian myth Tiamat's sacrificed body is the earth, and in the Hindu myth that is recounted in the Rig-Veda, the entire world is the result of a sacrifice by the gods.
Related to cosmogonic myths, but at the other extreme, are myths describing the end of the world (eschatological myths) or the coming of death into the world.
Myths of the end of the world are usually products of urban traditions.
They presuppose the creation of the world by a moral divine being, who in the end destroys the world.
At this time human beings are judged and prepared for a paradisiacal existence or one of eternal torments.
Such myths are present among Hebrews, Christians, Muslims, and Zoroastrians.
A universal conflagration and a final battle of the gods are part of Indo-European mythology and are most fully described in Germanic branches of this mythology.
In Aztec mythology several worlds are created and destroyed by the gods before the creation of the human world.
Myths of the origin of death describe how death entered the world.
In these myths death is not present in the world for a long period of time, but enters it through an accident or because someone simply forgets the message of the gods concerning human life.
In Genesis, death enters when human beings overstep the proper limits of their knowledge.
Myths of Culture Heroes 
Other myths describe the actions and character of beings who are responsible for the discovery of a particular cultural artifact or technological process.
These are the myths of the culture hero.
In Greek mythology Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, is a prototype of this kind of figure.
In the Dogon culture, the blacksmith who steals seeds for the human community from the granary of the gods is similar to Prometheus.
In Ceram, in Indonesia, Hainuwele is also such a figure; from the orifices of her body she provides the community with a host of necessary and luxury goods.
Myths of Birth and Rebirth 
Usually related to initiation rituals, myths of birth and rebirth tell how life can be renewed, time reversed, or humans transmuted into new beings.
In myths about the coming of an ideal society (millenarian myths) or of a savior (messianic myths), eschatological themes are combined with themes of rebirth and renewal (see Messiah; Millennium).
Millenarian and messianic myths are found in tribal cultures in Africa, South America, and Melanesia, as well as in the world religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Mythologies of cargo cults (religious movements found in modern technologically poor cultures such as those of Melanesia) also invariably have millenarian and messianic elements.
Foundation Myths 
Since the beginnings of cities sometime in the 4th and 3rd millennia BC, some creation myths have recounted the founding of cities.
Cities developed out of ceremonial centers; the centers were seen as extraordinary manifestations of sacred power.
This manifestation allowed for the expression of power in a specific place, emphasizing the value of sedentary human life.
The myth of Gilgamesh (see Gilgamesh Epic) in Babylon and that of Romulus and Remus in Rome are foundation myths.
Studies of Myth 
Mythology has attracted scholars in many fields.
Some have studied myths with the aid of materials from history, archaeology, anthropology, and other disciplines.
Others have found in myths materials of use in their respective fields-linguistics and psychology, for example.
Myth and Language 
Because myth is a narrative, many attempts to understand it have focused on its linguistic structure.
In one approach, the meaning of myth is sought in the history and structure of the language itself.
The most famous proponent of myth as an example of the historical development of language is Friedrich Max Müller, a German scholar who spent most of his academic life in England, and whose major studies dealt with the religion and myths of India.
Müller believed that in the Vedic texts of ancient India the gods and their actions do not represent real beings or events; rather, they are products of a confusion of human language, of an attempt, through sensual and visual images, to give expression to natural phenomena (such as thunder or the sea).
Of more recent vintage is the structural linguistic model, which builds on the work of the linguists Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss, and Roman Jakobson, a Russian-American, and the American folklorist Stith Thompson.
Structural linguists concentrate on the total meaning of language as an internal logical system.
In particular they examine the relation between two levels of language: the words and content that are actually spoken; and the underlying systematic structure-the grammar, syntax, and other rules of the language.
The most important student of myth from this perspective has been the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
For him myth represented a special case of linguistic usage, a third level beyond surface narrative and underlying structure.
In myth he discovered certain clusters of relationships that, although expressed in the narrative and dramatic content, obey the systematic order of the language's structure.
He contended that the same logical form is at work in all languages and cultures, in scientific works and tribal myths alike.
See Semantics.
Myth and Knowledge 
Theories stating that myth constitutes a form and way of knowledge are as old as the interpretation of myth itself.
The overlapping of mythic and rational modes was confronted by the classical Greek philosophers; it can also be observed in the insistence of Origen, a 3rd-century church father, that the Christian revelation of God in Jesus could best be understood in mythic terms.
In formulations of the relationship between myth and knowledge, two major orientations recur.
In the first, myth is examined as an intellectual and logical concern.
In the second, myth is studied in its imaginative, intuitive meaning-either as a mode of perception distinguishable from rational, logical kinds of knowledge, or as one that preceded rational knowledge in human intellectual evolution.
One of the fathers of British anthropology, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, thought that myth in archaic cultures was based on a psychological delusion and a mistaken logical inference-on a confusion of subjective and objective reality, of the real and the ideal.
Tylor believed that myth, although illogical, had moral value.