Ask ten people what a myth is and most will say "a false story," as in the myth that we use only ten percent of our brains. Scholars mean something different. In this course, a myth is a traditional sacred story, usually about gods, ancestors or the first times, that a community has treated as true in some important sense. Whether a myth is literally accurate is often the least interesting question about it. Better questions are what it meant to the people who told it, what work it did for them, and why it lasted.

Mythos and logos

The English word comes from the Greek mythos, which at first meant simply "speech" or "story." Over time some Greek thinkers set mythos, story, against logos, a reasoned account. The historian Thucydides, writing in the 400s BCE, admitted that leaving out the fabulous might make his history less pleasing to hear, and he left it out anyway. Plato attacked the poets for telling shameful tales about the gods, then invented myths of his own to carry ideas that argument alone could not. So from the beginning, Greek writers both distrusted myth and used it, a tension that runs through the whole study of the subject.

Myth, legend and folktale

Folklorists find it useful to sort traditional stories. In a well known 1965 essay, the anthropologist William Bascom proposed three types. Myths are set in a remote, earlier world, feature gods or other nonhuman beings, and are held as sacred truth. Legends are set in the more recent, recognizable past, feature human heroes, and are believed but not usually sacred. Folktales are understood by their tellers as fiction, told for entertainment and lessons, often opening with a formula like "once upon a time." Bascom himself warned that the categories are tools, not boxes. The same story can be a myth in one community and a folktale in another, and a legend about a real king can drift toward myth as generations pass.

What myths do

Myths can answer "why" questions. An etiological myth explains how something came to be, such as why the spider hangs in corners or why the sea is salty; the name comes from the Greek word for cause. But explanation is only one job. Myths also give a people an identity, tell them where they came from, justify or challenge the way power and property are arranged, teach right conduct, and give shape to rituals and seasons. Later levels look at scholars who stressed one of these jobs above the others, and at what each emphasis left out.

Early ways of reading myths

People have been reinterpreting their own myths for a very long time. Around 300 BCE a Greek writer named Euhemerus claimed to have found an inscription showing that Zeus had been a human king honored after death. From him we get euhemerism, the theory that gods began as real people who were later worshiped. Greek philosophers, especially the Stoics, read myths as allegories of natural forces or moral truths, so that a story's surface stood for hidden ideas. Medieval Christian scholars kept the pagan myths alive partly by reading them as allegories of virtue and vice. Each method rescued old stories by turning them into something else, and each tells us as much about the readers as about the myths.

Where our versions come from

Most myths began in speech and song. What reaches us is usually a written version made much later, often by an outsider: a Christian Icelander writing down the Norse gods two centuries after his country's conversion, a Spanish priest copying a Maya book, a British governor collecting Maori traditions. Every written myth is one telling among many, shaped by whoever recorded it. Living traditions keep changing, and there is rarely one correct version. That is a good reason for humility when comparing cultures, and a reason to ask of any myth who told it, to whom, and why.

Worked example: the pomegranate seed

The Greek Homeric Hymn to Demeter, composed around the 600s BCE, tells how Hades, lord of the dead, carried off Persephone, daughter of the grain goddess Demeter. Grieving, Demeter let the crops fail until Zeus ordered her daughter's return. But Persephone had eaten a pomegranate seed in the underworld, and whoever eats the food of the dead belongs partly to them. So she spends part of each year below and part above.

Read it as etiology, and it explains winter: the earth goes barren while Demeter mourns. Read it with an eye to ritual, and it is the sacred story behind the Eleusinian Mysteries, secret rites near Athens that promised initiates a better lot after death. Read it socially, and it is about a marriage arranged between powerful males without consulting the bride or her mother, and about a mother's grief strong enough to halt the world. A careful reader does not have to choose one meaning. The richness of a myth is that it supports several readings at once, which is exactly why this one outlasted the religion that first told it.