This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Serious academic study of myth began by treating it mainly as a mistaken kind of early science, an attempt to explain natural phenomena before better tools existed, a reading associated with the anthropologist James Frazer's sprawling comparative work The Golden Bough, published beginning in 1890. That view fell out of favor over the following decades, mainly for assuming every myth was really a fumbling attempt at the same explanatory job history or science does better.
The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski proposed a sharply different reading, arguing from his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands that a myth's real function is social and practical rather than explanatory, a charter validating a community's institutions, its land claims and its social order in the present rather than a failed theory about the physical world. Later structuralist scholarship, associated with Claude Levi-Strauss, shifted attention again, reading a myth's meaning in the underlying oppositions and relationships between its elements rather than in either its explanatory content or its social function alone.
None of these frameworks has fully displaced the others, and a myth studied today is frequently read through more than one lens at once, for what it claims to explain, for what social order it reinforces, and for the structural pattern of its telling, since each approach tends to notice something genuinely real about myth that the other two, applied alone, would miss entirely.