Founding / Origin Myth Explained with Examples

A founding origin myth is an origin story that is partly based on fictions and is perceived as binding. This type of myth can contain both religious and political elements. The term comes from political sociology.

Examples of religious forms are ideas of divine revelation, chosenness and mission, and providence and fate. Such founding myths are partly based on beliefs, without which their potential for effectiveness pales.

As political myth , founding myths are constitutive for a general self-image in modern nation states.  The functions of founding myths are the creation of consensus can be reached, of meaningful values, the generation of collective identity and the legitimacy of power and privileges. They can also play a role in the case of strongly value-oriented political parties as well as in the case of long ago or “legendary” company foundings .

Examples of origin myths

Founding myths occupied a prominent place in Greek mythology. The Greek founding myths establish a special relationship between the deity and the local population. This derived its roots from a heroand saw their traditional legal claims legitimized by the founding myth. The Greek founding myths often embodied the justification for the continued existence of an older social and value system.

The Roman founding myth lets the founders of Rome be suckled by a she-wolf (symbol of wild power) and Romulus immediately defends his city with all his might. Another example is Virgil's Aeneid , in which Aeneas, fleeing from the burning Troy , arrives after many wanderings to Latium, where he becomes the progenitor of the Romans.

The founding myth of the USA that the individual or group can make their fortune against all odds and create law and order (American Dream ) is carried out in many Wild West films.

see also:

Claude Levi-Strauss – The Structural Study of Myth

Mythologies by Roland Barthes

Meaning of Mytheme Explained (Levi Strauss)

In the study of mythology, a mytheme is the irreducible part of a myth, a constant element (unlike a cultural meme ) that always appears interchanged and reassembled - "tied" was the image of Lévi-Strauss - with other related myths in various ways, or united in more complex relationships, such as a molecule in a compound. For example, the myths of Adonis and Osiris sharing a handful of elements, leading some researchers to conclude that they share the same source.

The resercher of popular legends Vladimir Prop considered that the unit of analysis was the individual story . Instead, mytheme is equivalent mythology to phonemes , morphemes and sememe in the linguistic structure divides language: meaning smaller units possible within a linguistic system.

In the 1950s, Claude Lévi-Strauss first adapted his technique of linguistic analysis to the analytical critique of myths. In his work on the mythological systems of primitive tribes, made on the analogy with the linguistic structure, he adopted the term mytheme , stating that the system of meaning within the myths is very similar to that of a linguistic system. This idea is questioned by Roman Jakobson , who considers the mytheme to be a concept (or phoneme) that has no meaning in itself, but appears through sociological analysis.

See: Claude Levi-Strauss – The Structural Study of Myth

Roland Barthes – Myth Today – criticism

Roland Barthes - Myth Today - Criticism

Roland Barthes' collection of compositions titled "Mythologies" and his attached programmatic essay "Myth Today" are considered to be groundbreaking texts in structural analysis and cultural analysis in general, but there are not free from faults or criticism.

Barthes works to unravel the workings of the myth and to de-naturalize what myth makes natural and transparent. Barthes sees myth analysis as a political activity whose objective it to locate the historical ideology at the base of cultural representations. One of the criticisms pointed at Barthes in this regard is that he denies the masses the capacity for independent thinking and creative or deliberative consumption of cultural products. Barthes' perception resembles the too crude idea of the culture industry suggested by the Frankfurt School or the role of the intellectual as perceived by Gramsci which do not leave any room for critical thinking among the none-academic commons.  Barthes assumes that cultural, that is ideological, texts have only one way of being read and that it is the role of the Marxist critique to unveil the hidden ideology inscribed in them which eludes the masses. For example, Stuart Hall had rather different notions regarding the people's ability to converse and criticize cultural texts (see for example: "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular" and "Encoding, Decoding").

 On the other hand, another critique pointed at Barthes' "Myth Today" and his theory is that analyzing the myth does not necessarily mean that it potency and effect are diminished. Demystifying myth by mean of their analysis does not necessarily detract from its effectiveness. On the contrary, agents such as politicians and admen can even make good use of Barthes' theory of myth in order to construct their own myth for their own agenda.   

Roland Barthes - Myth Today - Summary, Analysis and review - part 1 - part 2 - part 3 

Check out: Roland Barthes - The Death of the Author

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Roland Barthes – Myth Today – Summary, Review and Analysis – part 3

In "Myth Today" (in Mythologies) Roland Barthes follows de Saussure's observation regarding the arbitrariness of the lingual sign. But in myth, Barthes argues, the sign entirely arbitrary and it is possible, at least partially, to give a reason why one signifier has a certain meaning attached to it (unlike ordinary, none-myth, language). This does not mean that the relation between signifier and signified in myth is obligatory, for the same meanings can be signified in different ways. But still the relation is not arbitrary because it uses symbols, metaphors and metonyms to convey a certain identifiable meaning.

Myth, according to Barthes and unlike certain formulation of the concept of ideology in the Marxist tradition, does not conceal anything, but it does distort. The myth according to Barthes is an ideological apparatus which portrays reality in a certain manner and in compliance with a certain ruling ideology (Althusser presents a similar argument in Ideologyand Ideological State Apparatuses). The myth does not deny the presence of anything, but it does deny its historicity and it being open to other readings (this is Barthes' initial inclination from structuralism towards post-structuralism). The myth flattens and limits the scope of meaning of the sign It uses and makes sure it could be understood in only one manner.

This is according to Barthes the power of the myth. The none-arbitrary nature of relation between the signifier and the signified presents this link as factual and as a lucid representation of reality as it really is. A myth in that sense is not what it says, but the underlining "natural" and self evident assumption on which it is founded. What presents itself as natural robs signs of their historicity and political nature and thus denies and conceals power struggles and relations in society. This is similar to Marx's description of ideology as "cameraobscura" which inverts reality. Like Claude Levi-Strauss, myth for Barthes is a type of collective illusion, a story that society tells itself in order to justify its own world the way that it is. 

Roland Barthes - Myth Today - Summary, Analysis and review - part 1 - part 2 - part 3 -criticism

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see also:Roland Barthes - The Death of the Author

Roland Barthes – Myth Today – Summary, Review and Analysis – part 2

Myth, according to Roland Barthes in 'Myth Today" (in Mythologies) does not reside in the simple denotational meaning of signs. With myth being a secondary system of signification in which the sign becomes a signifier, that process of signification takes the meaning of symbols in the myth to the realm of association, not denotation.

According to Barthes myth, as a form of speech, is not limited to lingual signs and other types representation (visual, musical etc.) can also take part in a myth because they convey secondary meanings that surpass their referential denotation. Bathes gives the example of a magazine cover portraying a African child in uniform saluting the French flag. The first level of signification is the denotation one – the child saluting the flag. But in the second level of signification, that of myth and connotation, the sign becomes a signifier and the child hails France as a great empire.

Since myths do not convey their meaning directly but rather in a covert manner, Barthes calls his semiology of myths "a science of forms". In the picture Barthes analyzes everything works together, the child, uniform, flag, salutation etc. to produce the desired meaning and to establish the myth. This is what according to Barthes distinguishes his concept of myth from the Marxist concept of ideology, since the science of myth is engaged with the expression of meaning through formal means. 

For Barthes, meanings and myth are historically produced and conditioned, and they are not eternal but rather constantly mutating and reforming. This means, under Barthes' Marxist perception, that myths are always political in being the result of specific power structures in a certain society at a certain time. But myth his the capacity to disguise its own historicity and to present itself as objective and natural (Althusser noted that ideology has not history). What myth does, according to Barthes, is to de-historicize and de-politicize meanings that are always historical and always political (similar notions can be found in Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Production").

Roland Barthes - Myth Today - Summary, Analysis and review - part 1 - part 2 - part 3 -criticism 

See also: Roland Barthes - The Death of the Author

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Roland Barthes – Myth Today – Summary, Review and Analysis

The second section of Roland Barthes' "Mythologies", titled "Myth Today", is a theoretical discussion of Barthes' program for myth analysis which is demonstrated in the first section of Mythologies. What Barthes terms as "myth" is in fact the manner in which a culture signifies and grants meaning to the world around it. According to Barthes, anything can be a myth, and he follows this approach throughout the examples in Mythologies.

Barthes' concept of myth seems similar or at least draws on the concept of ideology as formulated by Marx in The German Ideology. Ideology according to Barthes' version in "Myth Today" is not entirely concealed and is subject for scrutiny through its cultural manifestations. These manifestations, mythologies according to Barthes, present themselves as being "natural" and are therefore transparent. What Barthes is after in his analysis of mythologies is to reveal the ideological nature of culture's underling myth.

At the beginning of "Myth Today" Barthes defines myth a speech. Myth is speech in that that it is part of a system of communication in which it bears meaning. By this definition Barthes expands on Levi-Strauss' perception of myth to include every symbol which conveys meaning (be it a spoken or written text, and image, a design etc. and even human actions such as sunbathing). For Barthes every cultural product had meaning, and this meaning is conditioned by ideology, i.e. myth, and therefore any cultural product can be the subject of mythological analysis and review.

According to Barthes, myth is a form of signification. However myth is different from ordinary speech and language. Barthes follows de-Saussure's discussion regarding the nature of the linguistic sign and he characterizes myth a second class of signification. What was the sign in the first order of language (for example the signifier "cigarette" and the signified of an object made of paper and tobacco) turns into a signifier in the second order (signifying lung cancer). In other words, myth for Barthes is a realm of second class signification which could be seen as a cultural association, to distinguish from denotation. Barthes, in his Rhetoric of the Image, elaborated on the difference between denotation of the signand its connotation and its use in cultural analysis.

Roland Barthes - Myth Today - Summary, Analysis and review - part 1 - part 2 - part 3 -criticism 

See also: Roland Barthes - The Death of the Author

Barthes on readerly and writerly texts

Claude Levi-Strauss

Camera Lucida by Barthes

The Photographic Message

Best Books By Roland Barthes - a recommanded reading list

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Claude Levi-Strauss – The Structural Study of Myth – summary, review and analysis – part 4: the making of myth

Claude Levi-Strauss – The Structural Study of Myth – summary, review and analysis - part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4

Claude Levi-Strauss was heavily influenced by de-Saussure thoughts onthe nature of the linguistic sign. But while de-Saussure separated the synchronic from the diachronic and focused his attention only on the former, Levi-Strauss hold that a myth is not static, and the different times see different versions of the same myth.

When faces with multiple versions of the same myth anthropology until Levi-Strauss was concerned with figuring out which is the "true" version. Levi-Strauss holds that there is no "correct" of "original" version of a myth and that all versions are valid for study especially if studied together. This is because that all versions of a myth, however different in their detail, represent the same "deep structure" of the myth. The extraction of this deep structure of myth can be facilitated by the co-examining of different version of the same myth. The structural study of myth according to Levi-Strauss is able to make order out of chaos by analyzing variations on the structure of the myth. This, for example, can serve to study the way a myth develops over time.

For Levi-Strauss, a myth is the product of contradicting values which exist in every culture. Contradiction such as life and death are irreconcilable and humans are therefore pushed to resolve the contradiction through its symbolic processing in the myth.  The myth works to symbolically resolve cultural contradictions through mediating symbol chains. For example: the contradiction of life/death is translated into the contradiction between agriculture and hunting, which is in turn translated in the myth into the binary pair of herbivores and carnivores and the eventual mediating "in between" symbol of the scavenger (a coyote or raven).

Tracing the route of such symbolic transfigurations in the myth is the manner in which Levi-Strauss believes that anthropology should proceed in the study of myth.

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Claude Levi-Strauss – The Structural Study of Myth – summary, review and analysis - part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4

Claude Levi-Strauss – The Structural Study of Myth – summary, review and analysis – part 3: the myth of Oedipus

Claude Levi-Strauss – The Structural Study of Myth – summary, review and analysis - part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4

In his "The Structural Study of Myth" Claude Levi-Strauss uses the famous example of the myth of Oedipus to illustrate his structural methodology for the study of myth. Levi-Strauss divides the different mythemes (structural units that make up the myth) of the Oedipus myth into a chart that provides both diachronic and synchronic, both syntagmatic and paradigmatic, representation of the structure of the myth. Each column in Levi-Strauss' chart of the Oedipus myth expresses variants of the same theme and the development of the plot is represented by the relations between the columns.

This method enables Levi-Strauss to locate binary relations in the Oedipus myth. For example, the first column in Levi-Strauss' chart has meythemes that represent the attribution of high value to kinship relations (such as Oedipus marries his mother) while events in the second column represent a downscaling of the family (Oedipus kills his father). The third and fourth column in Levi-Strauss' chart of the Oedipus myth represent a binary contradiction regarding the autochthonous origins of man.

Thus, Levi-Strauss' chart of the mythemes of the Oedipus myth find two sets of contradiction which Levi-Strauss finds to be correlated. The validation of the autochthonous theme is the devaluation of the family and kinship and vise-versa. According to Levi-Strauss, these contradictions appear in other cultures' mythologies and they therefore represent a central issue for all cultures.   

According to Levi-Strauss in "The Structural Study of Myth" symbolic translation of different issues is what makes up the myth in the first place and what enables it to function. For example, a binary pair like life/death can be translated into a symbolic pair of sky/earth and eventually find a symbol which unites the two, such as mist (located between the sky and the earth and connects them). These relations should, according to Levi-Strauss, the object of the study of myth.

Broaden your horizons:

  

Claude Levi-Strauss – The Structural Study of Myth – summary, review and analysis - part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4

Claude Levi-Strauss – The Structural Study of Myth – summary, review and analysis – part 2: on mythemes

Claude Levi-Strauss – The Structural Study of Myth – summary, review and analysis - part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4

In his "The Structural Study of Myth" anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss argues that myth is like language. One might suppose that myth is a subdivision of language (a specific form of using language) but according to Levi-Strauss myth has its own characteristics which distinguish it from its language and which make myth a language in itself. This special attribute of myth is revealed according to Levi-Strauss in the attempt to translate a mythical narrative form one language to another. Unlike other form of language, and especially poetry, which lose a lot in translation, myth retains its capacities even when poorly translated. According to Levi-Strauss, this is due to the nature of the structural components which make up a myth which are irreducible and recurrent across myths.

These structural components of myths, which Levi-Strauss terms "mythemes" are not important in themselves and have no intrinsic value but rather, much like the nature of the linguistic sign according to de-Saussure, depend on their structural alignment in order to gain meaning. Every mytheme receives its meaning form its position in the myth and its relations with other mythemes.

In "The Structural Study of Myth" Levi-Strauss is curious how different mythemes group together and reproduced as an underlying structure of myth. The method Levi-Strauss suggests for the study of myth is supposed to address exactly this concern.

According to Levi-Strauss, a myth should by analyzed into its mythemes which are subsequently classified and visually sorted in columns. The horizontal axis of the mythemes chart represents diachronical development in the myth. The vertical column represents variations on the same subject. Thus a map of relations between mythemes is received which enables the anthropologist to see both temporal and thematic relations. Only is reading the myth with both these aspects taken together into account can the meaning of the myth be deciphered.

Broaden your horizons:

  

Claude Levi-Strauss – The Structural Study of Myth – summary, review and analysis - part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4