Myth

Category: Fields of research

Myth is a special type of story (narrative) that some people believe to be true, while others don’t. There are three general types of myths. The first type of myth concerns traditional stories about supernatural beings or forces that form the basis of the religious cosmogony of a society or culture. Among these types of myths most important are creation myths and origin myths. The second type of myth is a story about a certain person or event that supposedly happened in the recent or distant past, the difference being that it lacks supernatural elements. Examples of this type of myth are urban legends and folk tales. The stories about Robin Hood are good examples of this kind of myth, as they don't contain supernatural elements, but they lack any historical documentation or backing. The third type of myths is “national myths,” collective myths about the historical past of a society or country. This type of myth serves to create a common symbolic identity of a nation. In this article, we will take a deeper look into the first type of myths.

Theoretical Approaches to Religious Myths

Myths first became the topic of social sciences in the latter half of the 18th century in the works of German Romantics. German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder argued that myths are the products of the spirit (Geist) of the people-nation (Volk) that serve to maintain social life. Haymann Steinthal and Moritz Lazarus, who, in 1860, founded the new science of comparative psychology (Völkerpsychologie), posited that mythology, together with language and customs, form an objective spirit (Volksgeist) common to all the people of a nation. Wilhelm Wundt, who also practiced Völkerpsychologie, viewed myths as Volksseele (popular soul) and a center of collective cultural phenomena.

Edward Tylor, in the book Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilisation (1865), by analyzing sign language in different cultures, concludes that there is a universal psychic unity in humankind, as all elementary processes of the mind are the same in all societies, regardless of racial, climatic, or anatomical differences. The primitive mind blurs the lines between oneself and others and between object and image, and forms the basis of the magic thinking and magic. Tylor divided cultural myths into ‘myths of observation’, which recorded facts, and ‘pure myths’, which are purely fictional. Tylor stresses that the focus of anthropology should be on legends, myths, religion, superstitions, and folklore, as they are the most important and abundant source of cultural survivals. Cultural institutions should always be seen in the context of their usefulness to cultural development. Even cultural institutions, like magic, that are the product of the primitive mind that is not able to rationally understand nature, have their usefulness in the evolutionary stage in which they are developed. For example, religious myths and legends are just a symbolic expression and justification of social relations.

The main subject of George Frazer’s book The Golden Bough: A Study of Comparative Religion (1890) is the myths of Aryan divine priest-kings who are sacrificed when they get old to reinvigorate life and bring fertility to nature. Frazer saw this motif repeated across cultures, suggesting a shared mythic structure. Frazer believed myths were early attempts to explain natural phenomena, much like science does today. For example, seasonal changes were often explained through stories of dying and resurrecting gods like Osiris or Adonis. He believed myths reflected universal psychological and cultural concerns, such as life, death, rebirth, and the human relationship with nature. He argued that myths often arose to justify rituals, not the other way around. Rituals came first, and myths were created to explain their significance. Frazer proposed an evolutionary progression: magic was first, then came religion, and in the end, science emerged. Myths, in this view, belong to the religious phase — a transitional stage between magical thinking and rational inquiry.

Émile Durkheim saw myths as essential components of religious life, deeply tied to ritual, collective identity, and the structure of society. His views are most clearly expressed in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), where he analyzes the role of myth in primitive religions to uncover universal truths about human society. He argues that Myths are collective representations — symbolic expressions of shared beliefs and values. They reflect the social consciousness of a group, not just individual imagination. He believed that society is “in us” as much as we are “in society,” and myths are part of that internalized social reality. Myths and rituals are inseparable: rituals often enact the stories told in myths. For example, Durkheim argued that the Christian communion ritual is meaningless without the myth of the Last Supper. Myths give rituals their symbolic power, grounding them in sacred narratives. The idea of gods or spiritual beings is itself mythical, shaped by collective imagination. Even the most “unreasonable” myths were firmly believed and influenced behavior — they were as real to people as their own sensations. Durkheim saw myths not as historical accounts but as interpretations of present rites. Their purpose is to explain and legitimize existing practices, not to recount past events. In this way, myths help maintain social cohesion and continuity while, at the same time, serving as a base of differentiation from other societies. Myths serve a functional role in society: they express values, categorize the world, resolve tensions, and reinforce norms. Myths are part of the sacred realm, but they represent social structure (social morphology) and moral and social order. Durkheim’s approach treats myth as a social phenomenon, not just a cultural artifact. He believed that by studying myths, especially in their most “elementary” forms, we could understand the deep structure of human thought and society.

In the book Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913), Freud explores the myth (that he invented) about the killing and eating of the violent father in the primal horde. Freud starts with Darwin's theory that states that in early primitive human societies, a single alpha male possessed a harem of females, with all other males prohibited from forming relations with those females. Freud makes an assumption that in a single event in a distant human past, the band of brothers that was expelled from the group by their alpha-male father, returned and killed and ate him. Brothers both feared and respected the father. After the act of murdering and eating the father, the sons are in a state of remorse and guilt, and they give up having sexual relations with the women belonging to the deceased father; in that way, they create a new symbolic order, and that is the order of the law. The respect and remorse that the brothers felt toward their father, to Freud, is the symbolic origin of the Oedipus complex and totemism. Even more, this hypothetical singular event represents the true origins of human society, and of all religions, as an effect of collective guilt and ambivalence regarding the killing of the father figure (the true original sin).

Ernst Cassirer's Language and Myth (1925) is a compact yet profound exploration of how human thought evolved through symbolic forms, especially language and myth. He sees reality as a totality of symbolic forms, and myth as a primordial symbolic expression from which all other expressions evolve. Cassirer argues that both language and myth stem from a prelogical mode of thought. This isn't just primitive logic—it’s a fundamentally different way of understanding the world. Beneath myth and language lies an unconscious structure—a kind of grammar—that shapes how we perceive and express reality. In mythic thought, naming something isn’t just labeling—it’s an act of creation and control. Words are seen as inseparable from the objects they describe. Cassirer explores how metaphor in language reflects magical thinking, where words and symbols carry intrinsic power.

Claude Lévi-Strauss developed the approach of structuralism, which focuses on the synchronic dimension of culture, though he accepts that elements and structures are dynamic and always changing, and a third element, real or imagined, is exactly the source that introduces asymmetry and dynamism into the situation. The best examples of this change are language and myths, whose elements are in a constant state of flux, but those changes must follow the rules of binary oppositions. The study of myth is very important for Lévi-Strauss' theory. In the four-volume book Mythologiques (1964-1971), he refines his structuralist approach to myths. For him, any myth is a projected manifestation of the deep structures existing in the human mind. Myths function like language, with underlying rules and structures. The elements of myths, which he calls mythemes (analogous to the phonemes in linguistics), are part of a larger system and can only gain their meaning from how they are combined and not from their intrinsic value or from some external reality. Myths are structured expressions of the human mind. Myths, although constantly going through a transformation, resist history because they are eternal. All versions of a myth follow the essential structure of a myth. Myths are always the product of a contradiction (an unchanging constant of human existence), and those contradictions are the ones that generate myths. Lévi-Strauss believed that myth constitutes a third level of language, after langue and parole, and in this, myths are the synthesis of the diachronic and the synchronic sides of language. Myths express conflicts between opposites: nature vs. culture, life vs. death, raw vs. cooked, male vs. female. These oppositions reflect how the human mind organizes experience. Myths work to mediate or resolve these contradictions, offering symbolic solutions to cultural tensions. Myths evolve over time but retain their structure. All versions of a myth are relevant — they contribute to a spiral-like development, reflecting ongoing attempts to resolve the same core contradictions. He compared myth-making to scientific thinking: both break down complex problems into parts and analyze relationships. Myth, however, uses symbolic logic, while science uses empirical logic.

In The Savage Mind (1962) Lévi-Strauss demonstrates that the minds of indigenous peoples work like a jack-of-all-trades or Swiss army knife, having a mental non-specialized toolkit. Folklore, myths, and other knowledge of these people serve to organize and engage with the physical and cultural world, and those knowledge systems are well adapted to their specific needs. The myths of the North American Indians are replete with myths about animals and people who have digestive problems or do not have an anus as the end of the digestive tract. Digestion in these myths performs the mediating function of stopping the natural process of rotting, and the same function is performed by the culinary processing of food.

Georges Bataille, in The Absence of Myth (2006), challenged its very necessity in modern life. He argued that the absence of myth had itself become the defining myth of the modern age. In a world fractured by war and rationalism, traditional myths had lost their power to unify or explain human experience. Theory of Religion and The Accursed Share explores how myth once mediated the sacred and the profane. He believed that mythic structures helped societies confront death, eroticism, and sacrifice.

In The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales, and Myths (1951), Erich Fromm sees myths not as just entertainment—they’re psychological maps that reflect inner conflicts, desires, and societal values. The Oedipus myth, for example, is reinterpreted not as a tale of incestuous desire but as a struggle against authoritarian power. Fromm draws on cross-cultural examples—from Ashanti beliefs to biblical stories—to show how symbolic thinking is embedded in human history.

Carl Jung believed that myths were expressions of the collective unconscious, revealing deep psychological truths shared across humanity. He proposed that beneath our personal unconscious lies a collective unconscious — a shared reservoir of archetypes and symbols. Myths, like dreams, emerge from this realm and reflect universal human experiences, such as birth, death, transformation, and rebirth. Myths are populated by archetypal figures: the Hero, the Mother, the Shadow, the Wise Old Man, and more. These figures aren’t just characters — they’re psychological patterns that shape how we think, feel, and behave. Jung saw myths as guides for personal development, especially in the process of individuation — becoming your true self. The Hero’s Journey, for example, mirrors the inner journey of confronting fears, integrating the unconscious, and achieving wholeness. Jung was fascinated by how similar myths appeared across cultures, suggesting a shared psychic structure. He believed myths weren’t invented — they arose spontaneously from the unconscious, much like dreams.

Mircea Eliade, in the books The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954) and The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (1959a), posits that the source of religion is a yearning for an encounter with God and the function of religion is to enable adherents to make contact with God. Eliade acknowledges that the meaning of most religious symbols is unconscious. Myths, rituals, and symbols are the focus of Eliade's study of religion. The „sacred“ are places and times that religion provides to the believer so she or he can have an encounter with God. God is more likely to appear where it appeared before, and that's why, even if a god is omnipresent, believers will go to the religious site to seek out God. Cosmogonies or myths of creation are specifically important because God was closest to people during or after creation. These myths serve to transport believers to the time of the creation so they can be close to God. Cosmogonies are supreme manifestations of divinity and creativity, and religious man wants to be „in statu nascendi“, or when the world was born. For Eliade, myths and the quest for God are the goals by themselves, and not means to an end.

Eliade explores the idea that archaic societies viewed time as cyclical, not linear. Events were meaningful only when they repeated mythical archetypes—original divine acts that occurred in sacred time ("in illo tempore"). This repetition allowed individuals to escape the burden of historical time and participate in a timeless, sacred reality. Sacred time is mythical and eternal, accessed through rituals and myths. Profane time is linear and historical, associated with modern secular life. Archaic humans believed that real events were those that imitated divine models. Rituals, festivals, and myths were ways to re-enact cosmic creation and maintain order. Temples, cities, and mountains were seen as cosmic centers, connecting heaven and earth. Building or settling land involved rituals that mimicked divine creation, transforming chaos into cosmos. Eliade argues that without mythic structure, history becomes terrifying and meaningless.

Roland Barthes’ book of collected essays, Mythologies (1957), explores the myths of popular culture. In these essays, written under the influence of Ferdinand Saussure, Berthold Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Lev Trotsky, Barthes studies wrestling, toys, wine, food, striptease, and photography. He tries to reveal the symbolism and cultural and sociological significance of these popular cultural patterns. Barthes contributed to Saussure's analysis of the relationship between the signified and the signifier. This new conception views signs of the first order of the sign system (both the signifier and the signified) as serving as the signifier of the second order of the sign system, operating at the level of myth. Second-order signs work by establishing an ideologically clear connection of first-order signs with an idea that seems completely natural and thus creates a myth. In the example of a photograph of a non-white soldier saluting in a French military uniform, Barthes reveals the true meaning of the sign, the myth of France as a great nation, full of patriotism, but without racial discrimination.

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Joseph Campbell introduces the concept of the monomyth, also known as the Hero’s Journey—a universal narrative pattern found across cultures and throughout time. Campbell argues that myths from around the world share a common structure: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder... comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” This journey unfolds in three major stages: 1) departure – The hero leaves the familiar world; 2) initiation – The hero faces trials and gains wisdom; and 3) return – The hero brings back a gift or insight to society. Campbell draws from Freud, Jung, and comparative mythology to show how myths reflect universal psychological truths. He connects ancient myths to modern dreams, suggesting that storytelling is a way humans make sense of existence.

References:

Anderson, B. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983);

Bachofen. Myth, Religion, and Mother Right (1992, in German 1961);

Barthes. Mythologies (1972, in French 1957);

Bataille. Story of the Eye (1987, in French, 1928);

- My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man (1989, in French, 1941);

- The Tears of Eros (1989, in French 1961);

- The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism (2006);

Bellah. Varieties of Civil Religion (1980);

- Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (2011);

Campbell, J. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949);

Cassirer. Language and Myth (1946, in German 1925);