Mythology
The word mythology literally means the (oral) retelling of myths – stories that a particular culture believes to be true and that use the supernatural to interpret natural events and to explain the nature of the universe and humanity. In modern usage, "mythology" is either the body of myths from a particular culture or religion (as in Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology or Norse mythology) or the branch of knowledge dealing with the collection, study and interpretation of myths, also known as mythography.
Term
The term mythology has been in use since the 15th century, and means "an exposition of myths". The current meaning of "body of myths" itself dates to 1781 Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The adjective mythical dates to 1678. Myth in general use is often interchangeable with legend or allegory, but some scholars strictly distinguish the terms. The term has been used in English since the 19th century. The newest edition of the OED distinguishes the meanings
1a. "A traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces or creatures , which embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification for something such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon", citing the Westminster Review of 1830 as the first English attestation.
1b. "As a mass noun: such stories collectively or as a genre." (1840)
2a. "A widespread but untrue or erroneous story or belief" (1849)
2b. "A person or thing held in awe or generally referred to with near reverential admiration on the basis of popularly repeated stories (whether real or fictitious)." (1853)
2c. "A popular conception of a person or thing which exaggerates or idealizes the truth." (1928)
In contrast to the OED's definition of a myth as a "traditional story", many folklorists apply the term to only one group of traditional stories. By this system, traditional stories can be arranged into three groups:
+myths - sacred stories concerning the distant past, particularly the creation of the world; generally focussed on the gods.
+legends - stories about the (usually more recent) past, which generally include, or are based on, some historical events; generally focussed on human heroes.
+folktales/fairytales (or Märchen, the German word for such tales) - stories whose tellers acknowledge them to be fictitious, and which lack any definite historical setting; often include animal characters.
Religious-studies scholars often limit the term "myth" to stories whose main characters "must be gods or near-gods".
Some scholars disagree with such attempts to restrict the definition of the word "myth". The classicist G. S. Kirk thinks the distinction between myths and folktales may be useful, but he argues that "the categorizing of tales as folktales, legends, and proper myths, simple and appealing as it seems, can be seriously confusing". In particular, he rejects the idea "that all myths are associated with religious beliefs, feelings or practices". The religious scholar Robert A. Segal goes even farther, defining myths simply as stories whose main characters are "personalities — divine, human, or even animal".
A popular meaning (which English myth shares with Greek) of a rumour, misconception or mistaken belief, is in marked contrast to the meaning "stories of deep cultural or spiritual significance". In this article, the term is used in the latter sense, detached from the notion of historical truth, throughout.
Characteristics
In Shintoism, the Kappa are a type of water imp and are considered to be one of many suijin (literally "water-deity").Historically, the important approaches to the study of mythological thinking have been those of Vico, Schelling, Schiller, Jung, Freud, Lávy-Bruhl, Levi-Strauss, Frye, the Soviet school, and the Myth and Ritual School.
Myths are narratives about divine or heroic beings, arranged in a coherent system, passed down traditionally, and linked to the spiritual or religious life of a community, endorsed by rulers or priests. Once this link to the spiritual leadership of society is broken, they lose their mythological qualities and become folktales or fairy tales. In folkloristics, which is concerned with the study of both secular and sacred narratives, a myth also derives some of its power from being more than a simple "tale", by comprising an archetypical quality of "truth".
Myths are often intended to explain the universal and local beginnings ("creation myths" and "founding myths"), natural phenomena, inexplicable cultural conventions or rituals, and anything else for which no simple explanation presents itself. This broader truth runs deeper than the advent of critical history, and it may or may not exist as in an authoritative written form which becomes "the story" (preliterate oral traditions may vanish as the written word becomes "the story" and the literate class becomes "the authority"). However, as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl puts it, "The primitive mentality is a condition of the human mind, and not a stage in its historical development."
Most often the term refers specifically to ancient tales of historical cultures, such as Greek mythology or Roman mythology. Some myths descended originally as part of an oral tradition and were only later written down, and many of them exist in multiple versions. According to F. W. J. Schelling in the eighth chapter of Introduction to Philosophy and Mythology, "Mythological representations have been neither invented nor freely accepted. The products of a process independent of thought and will, they were, for the consciousness which underwent them, of an irrefutable and incontestable reality. Peoples and individuals are only the instruments of this process, which goes beyond their horizon and which they serve without understanding." Individual myths or mythemes may be classified in various categories:
-Ritual myths explain the performance of certain religious practices or patterns and associated with temples or centers of worship.
-Origin myths (aetiologies) describe the beginnings of a custom, name or object.
-Creation myths, which describes how the world or universe came into being.
-Cult myths are often seen as explanations for elaborate festivals that magnify the power of the deity.
-Prestige myths are usually associated with a divinely chosen king, hero, city, or people.
-Eschatological myths are stories which describe catastrophic ends to the present world order of the writers. These extend beyond any potential historical scope, and thus can only be described in mythic terms. Apocalyptic literature such as the New Testament Book of Revelation is an example of a set of eschatological myths.
-Social myths reinforce or defend current social values or practices.
-the Trickster myth, which concerns itself with the pranks or tricks played by gods or heroes. Heroes do not have to be in a story to be considered a myth.
Middleton argues that, "For Lévi-Strauss, myth is a structured system of signifiers, whose internal networks of relationships are used to 'map' the structure of other sets of relationships; the 'content' is infinitely variable and relatively unimportant."[16]
Religion and mythology
Significantly, none of the scholarly definitions of "myth" imply that myths are necessarily false. In a scholarly context, the word "myth" may mean "sacred story", "traditional story", or "story about gods", but it does not mean "false story". Therefore, scholars may speak of "religious mythology" without meaning to insult religion. (For instance, a scholar may call Christian and Muslim scriptures "myths" without meaning to insult Christianity and Islam. The Christian apologist C. S. Lewis made a clear distinction between myth and falsehood when he referred to the life of Christ as a myth "which is also a fact" ) However, this scholarly use of the word "myth" may cause confusion and offense, due to the popular use of "myth" to mean "falsehood".
Many myths, such as ritual myths, are clearly part of religion. However, unless we simply define myths as "sacred stories" (instead defining them as "traditional stories", for instance), not all myths are necessarily religious. As the classicist G. S. Kirk notes, "many myths embody a belief in the supernatural [...] but many other myths, or what seem like myths, do not". As an example, Kirk cites the myth of Oedipus, which is "only superficially associated [...] with religion or the supernatural", and is therefore not a sacred story. (Note that folklorists would not classify the Oedipus story as a myth, precisely because it is not a sacred story.
Examples of religious myths include:
-the Hebrew creation account in Genesis
-the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish, a creation account around which the Babylonians' religious New Year festival revolved
-an Australian myth describing the first sacred bora ritual
Related concepts
Myths are not the same as fables, legends, folktales, fairy tales, anecdotes or fiction, but the concepts may overlap. Notably, during Romanticism, folktales and fairy tales were perceived as eroded fragments of earlier mythology (famously by the Brothers Grimm and Elias Lönnrot). Mythological themes are also very often consciously employed in literature, beginning with Homer. The resulting work may expressly refer to a mythological background without itself being part of a body of myths (Cupid and Psyche). The medieval romance in particular plays with this process of turning myth into literature. Euhemerism refers to the process of rationalization of myths, putting themes formerly imbued with mythological qualities into pragmatic contexts, for example following a cultural or religious paradigm shift (notably the re-interpretation of pagan mythology following Christianization). Conversely, historical and literary material may acquire mythological qualities over time, for example the Matter of Britain and the Matter of France, based on historical events of the 5th and 8th centuries, respectively, were first made into epic poetry and became partly mythological over the following centuries. "Conscious generation" of 
