Once Europeans began collecting myths from around the world in the 1800s, they faced a puzzle. Why did peoples with no contact tell such similar stories, and why did educated ancient Greeks keep telling stories of gods behaving badly? Each attempt at an answer became a theory of myth. Each reveals something real while missing something else, and knowing them helps a reader see what kind of question is being asked of a story.

Nature and the "disease of language"

The German-born Oxford scholar Friedrich Max Müller, writing from the 1850s, traced many Indo-European myths to poetic descriptions of nature, above all the sun and the dawn. Ancient speakers, he argued, called natural events by vivid names, and later generations forgot the metaphors and took them as stories about persons. He called mythology a "disease of language," in which metaphors for natural events were misread as tales about gods. The theory was hugely popular and then collapsed, partly because it explained too much. In 1870 the clergyman R. F. Littledale published a mock essay proving, by Müller's own methods, that Müller himself was a solar myth.

Frazer and the dying god

James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (first edition 1890, later twelve volumes) gathered customs from everywhere into one grand story. Its most influential idea was the dying-and-rising god, a deity whose death and return mirror the yearly death and rebirth of plant life; Frazer placed Adonis, Attis and Osiris in this category. The book shaped poets such as T. S. Eliot and opened many readers to comparison. But later scholars found that Frazer relied on travelers' reports he never checked, lifted customs out of context, and forced very different gods into one pattern. The historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith doubted the category exists at all.

Myth as charter

Bronisław Malinowski, who lived for long periods in the Trobriand Islands, argued that you cannot understand a myth from a printed page; you must see it at work. In Myth in Primitive Psychology (1926) he called myth "not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force." For him myth is a charter: a story that justifies present customs and claims by rooting them in the first times. A clan's story of emerging from a particular spot, for example, backed its claim to the land around it. This functional view explains why people quarrel over the right version of a myth. Critics answered that it treats myths as servants of the social order and struggles with myths that question that order or simply delight.

Myth as sacred time

The Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade argued, in books from the late 1940s on, that traditional peoples know two kinds of time. Ordinary time passes, but myth tells of a sacred time of beginnings, and ritual lets people return to that sacred time of beginnings; reciting a creation story at the new year renews the world. Eliade gave a moving picture of how myth gives life meaning. Critics note that he generalized boldly from selected examples and sometimes wrote as if all traditional peoples thought alike.

Myth as structure

The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in a 1955 essay, treated myths like language. Meaning lies not in single episodes but in the relations between elements, especially opposed pairs such as raw and cooked, nature and culture, life and death. On this view a myth works through binary oppositions, giving a logical model for living with contradictions that cannot be solved. He compared all known versions of a myth rather than hunting for the original. Admirers found the method dazzling; critics found it hard to test, since a clever reader can find oppositions almost anywhere.

Myth and the mind

Sigmund Freud read myths like dreams, as disguised wishes, and named his theory of a child's rivalry with a parent after Oedipus. Carl Jung went further, proposing a collective unconscious stocked with archetypes, inherited patterns such as the hero, the wise old man and the shadow, that surface in myths everywhere. Most psychologists today regard the collective unconscious as an idea that cannot be tested, though the archetype vocabulary remains popular with writers.

Worked example: Oedipus four ways

Oedipus is abandoned as a baby because of a prophecy that he will kill his father. He grows up elsewhere, unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother, and blinds himself when the truth comes out. Freud saw in this a universal childhood wish. Lévi-Strauss, laying the wider Theban stories side by side, saw a tension between overvaluing kinship (marrying one's mother) and undervaluing it (killing one's father), alongside a puzzle about whether humans are born from the earth or from two parents. A functionalist would ask what the story did in Athens, where Sophocles staged it before citizens; perhaps it warned about the limits of human knowledge and of a ruler's confidence. A Frazer-style reader might link the doomed king to rites of renewal.

None of these readings is the meaning. Each is a lens, and the honest test is whether it helps us notice something in the story we had missed, without bending the story to fit. A good habit is to ask which details a theory explains and which it quietly ignores.