Mytheme
A mytheme is, in comparative mythology and structural anthropology, the smallest meaningful narrative unit of a myth, comparable to the phoneme in linguistics. The concept was coined by Claude Levi-Strauss to analyze the structure of mythic narratives.
Origin and etymology
The word was coined by Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009), French anthropologist and founder of structural anthropology, in his founding article The Structural Study of Myth published in 1955 in the Journal of American Folklore. Levi-Strauss proposed to apply to myths the methods developed by structural linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson). He broke down the myth into constitutive units he called mythemes, by analogy with phoneme and morpheme. Each mytheme is a relation between narrative elements, and it is the structured combination of mythemes that produces the meaning of the myth. He applied this method in his tetralogy Mythologiques (1964-1971).
Evolution and tradition
The analysis in terms of mythemes inspired a major tradition of mythocriticism. Gilbert Durand, in The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary (1960), extended structural work by drawing on psychoanalytic categories. The narratology of Vladimir Propp in Morphology of the Folktale (1928, translated into French in 1965) had prefigured this approach by isolating the recurring functions of marvelous tales. Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), articulated an archetypal monomyth of the hero's journey based on comparable narrative units. Contemporary comparative mythology readily combines structural analysis with Jungian archetypal reading.
Practical use
Identifying mythemes common to several traditions enlightens the reading of tarot arcana and oracles. A recurring mytheme such as the descent into the underworld and the return appears in Sumerian Inanna, Greek Persephone, Orpheus, Christ, Jonah, and finds an echo in the sequence of the Hanged Man (XII) and Death (XIII) in the tarot. On Tarotoui, these cross-cultural mythic structures are mobilized in certain arcanum entries to situate the card within a broader cultural cluster. Detecting mythemes helps you go beyond a purely personal reading and grasp the collective layers of symbolism.
Going further
Structural anthropology has been criticized for a formalism sometimes blind to historical context. Confusing mytheme (a structural unit) with Jungian archetype (an unconscious image) is a frequent mistake: these are two concepts drawn from distinct theoretical frameworks. The mytheme is a tool of analysis, the archetype a psychological hypothesis. Note also that the list of universal mythemes remains open and debated.