This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Myth and Sacred Narrative gathers seventeen concepts naming shapes comparative mythology finds recurring across unrelated traditions, alongside specific narratives the atlas treats individually for their own weight.
The recurring shapes form the larger half. Chaoskampf names the combat myth in which a deity defeats a monstrous embodiment of chaos, establishing or defending the ordered world, and the culture hero secures for humanity the things that make a human world, fire, crafts, land and law. Divine twins pair gods across the Indo-European traditions so regularly that the pattern has drawn comparative attention, and the dying-and-rising deity, once a settled Frazerian category grouping Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis and Attis, is now genuinely contested by scholars who argue the label flattens real differences. Flood myth and hieros gamos, the sacred marriage, recur with striking consistency worldwide, psychopomp names the office of conducting the dead that Hermes, Anubis and Azrael each separately hold, and the trickster and the hero's journey name a character type and a structure Campbell argued underlies myths worldwide, a claim comparative scholars have not uniformly accepted.
Specific narratives close the group. The Popol Vuh's account of Humanity Made From Maize, following two failed prior peoples, sits beside the Eleusinian Mysteries' own Descent and Return of Persephone and What Was Shown in the Telesterion, the guarded initiation those myths served. The Compact Between Mithras and Sol and the Tauroctony record the one scene every excavated Mithraeum shares despite no central authority prescribing it. The Deva-Asura Dichotomy and Crossroads close the set, a rivalry across Vedic, Buddhist and Jain material and a liminal site open to what ordinary space is not.