Comparative mythology
Comparative mythology studies myths from multiple cultures to identify recurring structures, symbols, and functions. Scholars use cross-cultural parallels to trace the development of religions and societies, to reconstruct ancestral narratives, and to evaluate psychological interpretations of myth. Comparative catalogs map recurring motifs such as world-egg cosmogonies, flood cataclysms, dying-and-reborn deities, and creative sacrifice narratives across disparate regional traditions.
The field expanded during eighteenth and nineteenth century comparativism, though twentieth century researchers increasingly favored particularist critiques of sweeping generalizations, while contemporary work blends linguistic, historical, and structural approaches, including E. J. Michael Witzel's efforts to model successive layers of global mythic traditions.
Comparative cataloging shows that motifs span creation narratives, flood cataclysms, hero quests, dying-and-rising gods, trickster bargains, shapeshifting culture heroes, initiatory underworld descents, and cosmic animal hunts that encode social law, subsistence practices, and astronomical observation across continents, allowing researchers to trace how ritual economies and storytelling networks moved together.
Background
defined comparative mythology as "the systematic comparison of myths and mythic themes drawn from a wide variety of cultures". By comparing different cultures' mythologies, scholars try to identify underlying similarities and/or to reconstruct a "protomythology" from which those mythologies developed. To an extent, all theories about mythology follow a comparative approach—as scholar of religion Robert Segal notes, "by definition, all theorists seek similarities among myths". However, scholars of mythology can be roughly divided into particularists, who emphasize the differences between myths, and comparativists, who emphasize the similarities. Particularists tend to "maintain that the similarities deciphered by comparativists are vague and superficial", while comparativists tend to "contend that the differences etched by particularists are trivial and incidental".Comparative approaches to mythology held great popularity among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars. Many of these scholars believed that all myths showed signs of having evolved from a thought which interpreted nearly all myths as poetic descriptions of the sun's behavior. According to this theory, these poetic descriptions had become distorted over time into seemingly diverse stories about gods and heroes. However, modern-day scholars lean more toward particularism, feeling suspicious of broad statements about myths. A recent exception is the historical approach followed in E.J. Michael Witzel's reconstruction of many subsequent layers of older myths.
Approaches
Comparative mythologists come from various fields, including folklore, literature, history, linguistics, and religious studies, and they have used a variety of methods to compare myths.Linguistic
Some scholars look at the linguistic relationships between the myths of different cultures. For example, the similarities between the names of gods in different cultures. One particularly successful example of this approach is the study of Indo-European mythology. Scholars have found striking similarities between the mythological and religious terms used in different cultures of Europe and India. For example, the Greek sky-god Zeus Pater, the Roman sky-god Jupiter, and the Indian sky-god Dyauṣ Pitṛ have linguistically identical names.This suggests that the Greeks, Romans, and Indians originated from a common ancestral culture, and that the names Zeus, Jupiter, Dyaus and the Germanic Tiu evolved from an older name, *Dyēus ph2ter, which referred to the sky-god or, to give an English cognate, the divine father in a Proto-Indo-European religion. An approach which is both historical and comparative was recently proposed by E.J. Michael Witzel. He compares collections of mythologies and reconstructs increasingly older levels, parallel to but not necessarily dependent on language families. The most prominent common feature is a storyline that extends from the creation of the world and of humans to their end. This feature is found in the northern mythologies of Eurasia and the Americas while it is missing in the southern mythologies of Subsaharan Africa, New Guinea and Australia.
Mythological phylogenies also are a potentially powerful way to test hypotheses about cross-cultural relationships among folktales.
Structural
Some scholars look for underlying structures shared by different myths. The folklorist Vladimir Propp proposed that many Russian fairy tales have a common plot structure, in which certain events happen in a predictable order. In contrast, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss examined the structure of a myth in terms of the abstract relationships between its elements, rather than their order in the plot. In particular, Lévi-Strauss believed that the elements of a myth could be organized into binary oppositions. He thought that the myth's purpose was to "mediate" these oppositions, thereby resolving basic tensions or contradictions found in human life or culture.Patterns
Comparativists use the Rank-Raglan mythotype to integrate Otto Rank's psychoanalytic sequence of royal birth, threatened infancy, rescue, and recognition with Lord Raglan's twenty-two trait ritual pattern, producing a checklist that tracks a hero from ominous conception to extraordinary death across traditions. Scholars score figures such as Oedipus, Romulus, Moses, Jesus, and King Arthur against the combined pattern to chart recurring narrative incidents and to evaluate how far biographies align with mythic motifs.Robert A. Segal's anthology In Quest of the Hero circulated Rank's analysis, Raglan's scale, and Alan Dundes's folkloristic update together, making the framework a standard teaching tool in comparative hero studies. Alan Dundes operationalized the checklist to frame biblical and classical narratives as traditional schema rather than precise biographies, asserting that higher scores signal mythic elaboration. Subsequent comparativists such as N. J. Allen, Michael Witzel, Robert M. Price, and Richard Carrier reworked the sequence for structural anthropology, global macro traditions, and historicity debates about Jesus.
Psychoanalysis
Some scholars propose that myths from different cultures reveal the same, or similar, psychoanalytic forces at work in those cultures. Some Freudian thinkers have identified stories similar to the Greek story of Oedipus in many different cultures. They argue that these stories reflect the different expressions of the Oedipus complex in those cultures. Likewise, Jungians have identified images, themes, and patterns that appear in the myths of many different cultures. They believe that these similarities result from archetypes present in the unconscious levels of every person's mind.Motifs
Creation of the earthly realm
A creation myth is a symbolic narrative of how the world began and how people first came to inhabit it. While in popular usage the term myth often refers to false or fanciful stories, members of cultures often ascribe varying degrees of truth to their creation myths. In the society in which it is told, a creation myth is usually regarded as conveying profound truths – metaphorically, symbolically, historically, or literally. They are commonly, although not always, considered cosmogonical myths – that is, they describe the ordering of the cosmos from a state of chaos or amorphousness.Creation myths often share a number of features. They often are considered sacred accounts and can be found in nearly all known religious traditions. They are all stories with a plot and characters who are either deities, human-like figures, or animals, who often speak and transform easily. They are often set in a dim and nonspecific past that historian of religion Mircea Eliade termed in illo tempore. Creation myths address questions deeply meaningful to the society that shares them, revealing their central worldview and the framework for the self-identity of the culture and individual in a universal context.
Creation myths develop in oral traditions and therefore typically have multiple versions; found throughout human culture, they are the most common form of myth.
Omne Vivum ex Ovo (Cosmic Egg)
The cosmic egg is a mythological motif found in the cosmogonies of many cultures and civilizations, including in Proto-Indo-European mythology. Typically, there is an egg which, upon "hatching", either gives rise to the universe itself or gives rise to a primordial being who, in turn, creates the universe. The egg is sometimes lain on the primordial waters of the Earth. Typically, the upper half of the egg, or its outer shell, becomes the heaven and the lower half, or the inner yolk, becomes the Earth. The motif likely stems from simple elements of an egg, including its ability to offer nourishment and give rise to new life, as is reflected by the Latin proverb omne vivum ex ovo.Primordial Chaos
Chaos is the mythological void state preceding the creation of the universe in Greek creation myths. In Christian theology, the same term is used to refer to the gap or the abyss created by the separation of heaven and earth. In Norse mythology, Ginnungagap is the primordial void mentioned in the Gylfaginning, the Eddaic text recording Norse cosmogony. In Chinese mythology, the state of existence before the creation of the universe is often referred to as Hundun, which translates to "primordial chaos" - essentially a formless, undifferentiated state where everything was mixed together before the creation deity, Pangu, separated heaven and earth.Creation of mankind from clay
The creation of man from clay is a theme that recurs throughout numerous world religions and mythologies.In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu is created by the goddess Aruru out of clay. In Greek mythology, Prometheus molded men out of water and earth. Per the Hebrew Bible, "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul". In Hindu mythology, the mother of Ganesh, Parvati, made Ganesh from her skin. In Chinese mythology, Nüwa molded figures from the yellow earth, giving them life and the ability to bear children.