Origin myth
An origin myth is a traditional narrative that explains the beginnings of a people, place, custom, institution, or feature of the world.
Creation myth: A traditional narrative explaining how the world or universe came into existence. World-creation stories are one major kind of origin myth.
Dreamtime: A complex of Indigenous Australian understandings of ancestral beings, creation, law, and continuing relations to Country. Its narratives connect the formation of the world with ancestry, place, and social law.
Sacred narrative: A story treated as religiously significant and connected to a community’s understanding of sacred reality. Sacred status can make an origin account authoritative within a tradition.
Historical narrative: An account of past events built from evidence and historical methods. It evaluates beginnings through documented evidence rather than traditional authority alone.
Cultural memory: Shared interpretations of the past preserved and reshaped through cultural practices and representations. Origin stories help transmit a community’s account of its past across generations.
Etiological myth: A myth that explains the origin of a custom, name, natural feature, or other existing condition. These myths explain particular beginnings rather than creation as a whole.
Popol Vuh: A K’iche’ Maya narrative recounting creation, the Hero Twins, and the origins of humanity. Its creation account links cosmic beginnings to a people’s sacred history.
Oral tradition: The transmission of knowledge, stories, and practices through speech across generations. Many origin myths persist through repeated oral telling and adaptation.
Historiography: The study of how history is written, interpreted, and shaped by evidence and perspective. It examines how origin stories relate to later accounts of a community’s past.
Mythopoeia: The creation or deliberate shaping of myths, especially in literature and art. Writers and artists adapt origin-myth patterns to build new imagined worlds.