What Is Myth: Moving inside Myth by Craig Chalquist Ph.D, Ph.D

As a countdown to the 2026 Mythologium Myth Conference, we are exploring the question "What is Myth." Our guest mythologists delve into the nuanced and encompassing ways to define myth from differing cultures and disciplines.

The Mythologium takes place March 13-15 online. You can register here.

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There are many definitions of myth: timeless narratives that remind us of our humanity; revelations of the unconscious psyche; tales woven around emerging archetypes; a system of images that tell us about our place in the universe…

Perhaps defining myth is impossible. Unanimity on an exact definition cannot occur because it will leave out what someone, somewhere, considers important; too loose a definition will lack enough specificity to be useful. Also, a myth nailed down dies, like a pinned butterfly.

The mythical gesture is a wave which, as it breaks, assumes a shape, the way dice form a number when we toss them. But, as the wave withdraws, the unvanquished complications swell in the undertow, and likewise the muddle and the disorder from which the next mythical gesture will be formed. So myth allows of no system. Indeed, when it first came into being, system itself was no more than a flap on a god’s cloak, a minor bequest of Apollo.

— Robert Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

If not a definition of myth, let us have at least a working description (from “write down; copy; sketch”).

Image: The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Working Description of Myth

First of all, a myth is a tale. William Doty and others have contested this, but in actual practice, myth has been told since the dawn of time as a once-upon-a-time or in-the-beginning, even when it includes lists, genealogies, and temple dimensions. Even in them, the tale is implicit.

A myth is an entertaining tale (as Okpewho, Lithui Yang, Hamilton, Yolen, and Tolkien observe), otherwise nobody would hand it down. Something in it must rouse our feelings.

A myth is an entertaining tale that contains great marvels and mysteries that conflict or develop and are usually personified. Not just a small marvel, like a talking dog. Great marvels: numinous, archetypal, and more-than-human, if not always involving gods.

These marvels infuse the existential questions we all face about why we are here, where we are going, birth, life, death, and the Beyond. This makes myth different in degree if not in kind from the folk tale or fairytale, as many scholars note (Robert Redfield’s distinction of Great Traditions from Little Traditions, for example, and Martin S. Day’s between grand opera and operetta, distinctions akin to those made in many cultures).

Furthermore, by being told and retold, a myth becomes collective and eventually traditional, and as such, often believed in, at least by most, because in myth-friendly cultures, few hearers outside the lore-keepers pause to split fanciful from historic or the symbolic from the literal. (“In all the wild imaginings of mythology, a fanciful spirit is playing on the border-line between jest and earnest.” — Bronislaw Malinowski as quoted in Huizinga’s Homo Ludens). But that belief is not strictly literalistic, as in the Protestant query, "Do you believe in God or not?" It’s more like "I've been told" or "what the ancestors said."

Even when myth deals mainly with spiritual forces or presences at play, their relation to the human is always there, whether in the background or in other myths in the cycle or simply implicit in the telling.

What does that give us?

A myth is a collective, entertaining, and imaginative tale of the existential conflicts and relations between grand, more-than-human marvels or mysteries and human beings, at least implicitly, and as such, is a sacred story believed in by most hearers but held as instructive or metaphoric by wisdom teachers.

To this could be added features noted by other theorists of myth: the stories take place in a timeless present (Eliade), the marvels and mysteries are often personified and named (unlike folk tales and fairy tales that deal mainly in roles), various realms of being are described, spiritual entities are present, and the myths tend to collect in groupings we call mythologies (again unlike folk tales, which often fly solo). Also, mythologies are often, but not always, tied to important religious rituals.

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Here is a shorter description:

Myths are fanciful collective sacred tales about interactions with and among mysterious beings, forces, or dimensions of existence. 

Shorter:

Myths are elaborated and hallowed collective dreams/fantasies/stories,

because they begin, as far as we know, in dreamlike or visionary states that, once described, resonate in many listeners. We might refer to mythopoetic tellings not yet aged by tradition as protomyths.

Here’s another try, from my classes:

A myth is a collective oral mystery story that is traditional, fantastic, highly personified, archetypally rich, once believed in, and often sacred.

J.G. Herder shortens it even more:

Myths personify natural forces.

I tend to go with this:

A myth is an imaginative, archetype-rich collective tale dramatizing the play of larger-than-life mysteries, forces, powers, or realms of being.

By that definition, speculative fiction counts as myth: the mythologizing of our time.

Perhaps that will do for now. Even if we can’t define myth, we know it when we hear it by how it is told and we feel in its presence.

Image: The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Mythologizing and Metamythologizing

Not every aspect of every theory, model, or path to myth will have equal weight for the lover of myth. Although I appreciate my intellectual forbears, I do not resonate with all their approaches or ideas about myth. My own approach seeks to be story-centered, animistic-ecological, developmental-cyclical, archetypally informed, culturally appreciative, and pluralistic of view. The basic medium of myth as I hold it is imagination, not as a shallow making-things-up, but as a deeply creative working-with-and-witnessing as, prompted by personal or cultural events, archetypal structures emerge in the space between the human and the more-than-human and coalesce into stories of marvel. If the medium of myth is imagination, storytelling—through voice, ritual, drama, art, film, some creative medium—is its vehicle. Symptom and possession are unconscious vehicles, but vehicles nonetheless.

While working with myth I observe a distinction between two complementary modes of doing it.

Letting it speak to me, studying its sources, reading it out loud, listening to it, walking around inside it, watching it transform me, appreciating it, inquiring into what it provokes or disturbs in me, sharing insights with other readers, hearers, or tellers of a myth, writing or telling my own versions, designing and carrying out myth-honoring rituals, and other participatory activities are examples of the mode of mythologizing. Mythology, of course, is the study of myth, although the word is also used for the collective myths of a culture. Mythography studies theories of myth and ritual, particularly in written form. Mythologizing refers to actively engaging with the tales. Immersion. Not just studying the lake, but swimming in it. (Jung’s dictum comes to mind: You can’t wash a dog without getting wet.)

Metamythology is when we use myth to think about myth and to comment on what we do. Not "meta" as in "above" or "beyond" (late corruptions of the Greek preposition), but as in μετά- , "beside," "with," "among," "between." This prefix informs words like metaphor, midwife, metapsychology, and Plato's metaxy, the nondual middle ground in which fabulous daemons hover between us and the great gods of being.

Academically, “meta” can also mean transdisciplinary: paradigm-breaching, self-reflective, inquiry-driven rather than discipline-driven, and honoring imagination and not just upholding Saturnian rigor or procedure.

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Moving inside Myth

Working metamythologically does not pretend to study the stories from outside their frames. Instead, we move with them, noting how abundantly their content and imagery infuses the very movements of our inquiries about them: heroic efforts to learn about Cuchulainn, threshold insights into Hecate, Underworld sojourns on the way to Osiris, rune-like scribbles to remind us of watchful Odin.

Taking after Odysseus by telling a clever lie to hitch a free ride to mythology class is mythologizing. Noticing the heroic tone in one’s description of the exploit is metamythologizing. So is seeing where Penelope appears nearby, how a classmate’s response reminds us of Tiresias, or when we act more like lost Telemachus than like his swift-footed father. Psychological approaches view the myth as inside us, and at least some of it often is; but metamythologizing views us as inside the myth as well.

When we analyze a myth, we want something from it. Metamythologizing allows us to ask: What does this myth want from me? Why has it popped up here, now? Where in its story is its energy at present? What does it intend? Is it here to bless us, to reveal a truth to us, to seduce us into a new retelling? To demand a symbolic sacrifice? To bestow a gift?

James Hillman was brilliant at tracing the archetypes in our activities: the Hero in our activism, for instance, or motherly Demeter in pleas to save the planet. Inspired by this insight, metamythologizing shifts the lens to other entities present as well: the language in which we tell the tale as a mood or spirit within the tale; the surprise of one of the characters at large in the audience, or in us; the settings of our tellings, as when alternations of genre in a student’s description of Phoenix imagery in a local city mirrored the two “wings” of the city, one artsy and quirky, the other formal and structured. Can we discern the forests of France through the mythic trees of Arduinna of Gaul, Greek caves of limestone in tales of Hades, pulsations of the Nile in the moods of life-giving Isis?

Here are 20 Metamythological Considerations for your perusal:

20 Metamythological Considerations

1. myth is the truth of fact

Story precedes the distinction between mythos and logos, as Eliade, Cassier, and Chase point out; in fact, both are themselves fabled entities. In many cultures (e.g. China), no hard separation is made between the factually historical and the legendary, at least in terms of traditional tales. Myth is not explanation or a doctrine even when it includes elements of both in storied form. As Kathleen Raine is said to have remarked, myth is the truth of fact, not fact the truth of myth.

2. myth itself is a kind or style of thinking  

The logocentric fantasy of an original, pure version of a myth is arid and hopeless. No two tellings are alike, nor should they be. Each telling interprets (Marina Warner, Dennis Tedlock, Dell Hymes, David Aaron Murray, et al). “It is not true that there is some hidden thought or idea at the bottom of the myth, as some in a period of civilization that has become artificial have put it, but the myth itself is a kind or style of thinking. It imparts an idea of the universe, but does it in the sequence of events, actions, and sufferings.” So Nietzsche thought according to Zimmer (The King and the Corpse).

3. myth is a living narrative

Spontaneous in origin (contra Emerson, who thought we could just make up our own), myth is a living narrative, an exemplary illumination or “felt logic” of life (Birenbaum, Myth and Mind), a storied imaginal weave or net that drifts through the world seeking elaboration and evolution. It "appreciates" being given a new form that nods to the old even while bearing it in new directions. Zimmer again: “Myth is the sole and spontaneous image of life itself in its flowing harmony and mutually hostile contrarieties, in all the polyphony and harmony of their contradictions. Therein resides its inexhaustible power” (The King and the Corpse). Fighting off literalistic criticisms of the gods, Sallustius (4^th century) wrote about myth, “This never happened but it always is” (Concerning the Gods and the Universe).

4. Myths exhibit a special kind of autonomy

Myths (and folk tales) exhibit a special kind of autonomy. They push back against the mythuse of bad-hearted retellings. Hitler tried to stage Ragnarok and ended up playing the doomed Fenris wolf. Max Lüthi and Linda Dégh give examples of how märchen have survived exploitation, even Disney’s, without losing their essence; the same is true of myth. Although myths have been retold and modified numerous times before we even hear them, they retain their power to evoke and instruct. For Claude Lévi-Strauss, myths are persons.

5. Myths can hold cultural thought and feeling

Starting out fresh from dreams, visions, or numinous fantasies that are told and catch on, young myths are vibrant. Mature ones are stable, especially when backed by ritual, institution, or creed. Myths in their prime can hold thought and feeling together for entire cultural groups, at least for a while. Eventually, though, they begin to wear out, like the old wineskins Jesus mentions. They limp along as ghosts of themselves, whether literalized, fossilized, fictionalized, or intellectualized, until a change of relevance revitalizes them. 

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6.  Myth has a long lifecycle

Theories of myth habitually focus on single phases of a myth's life cycle: its childlike naturalness and freshness of vision; its sprawling adolescence; its adult responsibilities and norms; or its old-age lameness or crustiness prior to its rebirth through updated tellings that fit the needs of a time. We would do well to keep in mind the entire life cycle of a myth and of its surrounding mythology. Such an understanding would be organic and holistic rather than analytic or reductive.

7.  Unexploited Myth Opens the Door for Exploration 

When we fail to respect the story as story, we face a ruined quarry we have mined for what we wanted to dig from it. But if we show the story respect and hospitality, if we converse with it instead of exploiting it, we open the door for the gods, spirits, daemons, and other presences to walk in, speak to us, and go their way in peace. “Hence the guardian figures that stand at either side of the entrances to holy places: lions, bulls, or fearsome warriors with uplifted weapons,” writes Joseph Campbell in Masks of God. “They are there to keep out the ‘spoil sports,’ the advocates of Aristotelian logic, for whom A can never be B; for whom the actor is never to be lost in the part; for whom the mask, the image, the consecrated host or tree or animal, cannot become God, but only a reference. Such heavy thinkers are to remain without.”

8.  Myth flows beyond the confines of the literal 

Surpassing what is known and customary, myths carry a feeling of the uncanny, the glamorous, the mysterious, the strange, the wondrous, the otherworldly and underworldly. Birenbaum: “Myths often emphasize the very aspects of life that our ethics or our sense of decorum will teach us to shun, such as the grotesque and the violent, the painful, the impractical, the self-indulgent” (Myth and Mind). The mood they evoke flows beyond the confines of literal meaning or belief; even when they mention facts or linear processes, they do so in service to the feeling they evoke.

9. Myth is Layered

Myths are complex, layered by the personal characteristics of each storyteller or writer, cultural interpretations and overlays, linkages to physical places of origin, accretions through time, and foundational archetypal dynamics. None of these dimensions can be reduced to any of the others without degrading the myth—not even to language, for the tale goes on however well or badly it is translated. A myth interpreted in only one fixed way is temporarily drained of life. "A Bantu or Indonesian critic will only be able to wonder: How were the Westerners able to write thousands of volumes on the 'beauty' and the 'eternal values' of The Divine Comedy, the work of a political exile, and see in our mythologies and our messianic symbols only a protest of oppressed peoples?" — Eliade, No Souvenirs.

10. Myth is both culturally distinctive and widespread

Neither a Dionysian overemphasis on myth's cultural differences nor an Apollonian agenda of comparisons that flatten can serve to open the tales. These two gods were, after all, brothers who knew how to work together. To emphasize difference over unity is the reactive reverse of emphasizing unity over difference. In studying myth we must neither forget the cultural distinctiveness of a telling nor, widening our lens, miss the similarities across tales from a range of times and places. In fact, noting these similarities can further our appreciation of where tales and details diverge.

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11. Myth contains multiple meanings

As with art, we cannot make authoritative statements about what myths always mean, either within or across cultures. We can't even say that for a single myth read or heard at different points of an interpreter’s life. An old woman with grown daughters might understand Demeter’s anguish at losing Persephone very differently than when hearing the story as a high-spirited young woman. False confidence in interpretation should give way to a tentative, "This is what the myth brings up for me at this time." For what a myth means to its society of origin, we must rely on the tale-tellers of that society; and they might not agree with each other.

12.  Seek Mythic Flavor

When working archetypally, hunting for images and motifs, we pay less attention to objects and attributes (big breasts = fertility, lighting-throwing = king), which can mislead us, and more to the styles, flavors, or personalities of gods and other beings. All-seeing Jupiter, for all his lightning, is nothing in temperament like impetuous Thor, nor is Odin, tricky though he be, otherwise much like Hermes—Jung, Campbell, and taciturn Tacitus notwithstanding. The ancient Babylonians knew Shamash as the sun, but they prayed to him as a god of justice.

13. Myth is a connective tissue

Archetypes in myths cannot be accounted for as images of instincts, neurological effects, or cultural memes. They image forces, presences, and situations found ultimately in the world around us, where we too evolved. Myth is a connective tissue that links human life to these great ecological (Jacobsen, Keen, Momaday) and trans-cultural forces colored differently for each cultural group. Terrapsychology traces mythic images and archetypes to prominent features of the lands where the stories are told (see my book Terrapsychological Inquiry).

14.  MyTH As collective and multigenerational

By definition, a myth is both collective and multigenerational. A “myth” created out of an egoic agenda is actually a submyth: a story filled with archetypal motifs but not believed in as sacred or traditional or hallowed by the passage of time and many tellings (Le Guin). However, mythopoesis is ongoing; UFOs as spontaneously emerging "modern myth" (Jung) could be seen as examples of protomyths on their way to becoming genuine myths enfolded in arising mythologies.

15.  Myths as a response to structure

Myths give us insight into the underlying structural forces of a time because, as Jung pointed out, they express a compensatory response to them. Think of the powerful goddesses of patriarchal Athens, where women were seldom allowed outside the home. Doty: “Myths (and rituals) may emphasize values and conditions that are just the opposite of what is found in contemporary experience; for example, myths stressing coordination and peace may be prominent during a period of anarchy or warfare” (Mythography). So let’s not kill the messenger.

16. Myths as Embodiment of Nature

Myth does not rigidly separate the natural from the imaginal, cultural, or spiritual. Herder believed myths to be communal poetic philosophy as an embodiment of nature's powers of growth. Farther back, the language of the natural world precedes any human language or story, including myth. Pauline McLeod: “When you look at the complexity of the culture you realise that language, dance, music and art, all depend on the area of land you lived in. What you would present as an area artform would be the spiritform animals from around your region. Therefore, if you lived in the Snowy mountains - they'd be mountain stories; the desert - desert stories; coast - coastal or ocean stories; islands - island and ocean stories” (Aboriginal Storytelling interview with Helen McKay).

Image: Vitor Paladini on Unsplash

17.  Myths reenact themselves

Myths reenact themselves in many ways: by being constellated by outer events and our responses to them; by major life transitions; by gaps or pressures in collective consciousness; by societal blindnesses and injustices that bring the old stories back to life in a kind of unconscious group therapy; by changes in religions and spiritual paths... The contents of the myths we study becomes, at some point, the process by which we inquire. Paying heed to the myths and archetypes within our theorizings and applications of myth deepens our appreciation of the tales. (In Frazer's work, for example, we might discern the figure of Attis awaiting sacrifice; in Malinowski's, the dominance of the solar; in Levi-Strauss's, the mechanics of a blacksmith god; and in so many Modernity perspectives, old Procrustes sharpening his ax.)

18.  Myths as Personal

Myths also come back to life as personal myths, or what Jung called “life myths”: myths we are born into and are tasked with creatively elaborating. Though collective in origin, these myths are personalized in how we reenact them as characters within them. Jung as Faust the alchemist, Freud as King Oedipus, Sir Isaac Newton as Janus, John Keats as Icarus, Percy Shelley as Prometheus, Mary Shelley as Nemesis, Mozart as the divine child Iacchus, Marilyn Monroe as Venus, Martin Luther King Jr. as King Arthur, John Steinbeck as Lancelot, Jim Morrison as Dionysus, Joseph Campbell as Percival, and Ken Wilber as Hephaestus are possible examples. (See my book Storied Lives.)

19.  Myth animateS Newness

Myths and archetypes repeat themselves, but when worked with consciously, their wisdom applied instead of allegorized (Tolkien), they soften so that the stories they animate sprout new delineations and outcomes. It’s as though they want to be told differently. As Jung and Zimmer have observed, myth offers inexhaustible abundance ever in need of consulting and renewing. Herder adds that adding what is new to an old mythology rejuvenates it.  

20.  Myth reguivinates relationships

Consciously reengaging with folklore in general and myth in particular opens an experiential portal by which we walk into a reenchanted world filled with powerful presences that enliven and permeate our relations with ourselves, each other, the animate Earth, and the great cosmos in which we float. Ultimately, our very survival as a species might well depend on the quality, humaneness, and spaciousness of our rejuvenated mythologizing.

Whatever definition or description of myth you call home, may it serve as an appropriate vessel for riding the sea currents of myth to some storied destination.

This is a modified excerpt from the author’s book Myths Among Us: When Timeless Tales Return to Life (World Soul Books, 2018). Register for 2026 Mythologium to explore of the power of myths.

About the Author

Dr. Craig Chalquist is program director of Consciousness, Psychology, and Transformation at National University and a former associate provost and several other administrative and leadership roles. His background includes public presentations, group counseling, depth psychology, mythology, ecopsychology, terrapsychology, and philosophy and wisdom studies. He presents, publishes, and teaches at the intersection of psyche, story, nature, reenchantment, and imagination. He has published more than twenty books, including the hopeful Lamplighter Trilogy of speculative fiction. His motto is: “Converse with everything!” Visit Chalquist.com.