So You Want To / Create a Mythopoeia

Myths are, at their core, stories that explain why things are the way they are. Even if you don't happen to believe any, it can't be denied that they are a crucial part of human society, and have been for centuries, if not millennia. Unless your fictional world is populated by some inhuman species that have no epic stories to their name (poor them), it will have its myths, and to not include them would leave a giant hole in your worldbuilding. Hence, Mythopoeia — the art of creating myths. Whether they form the backstory of your world or are the story you're trying to make, this page will try to help you.

Before you begin

• Does your setting have gods? Meddlesome deities are pretty much ubiquitous in myths, whether they're creating the world, crafting the setting's MacGuffin, empowering the heroes or what have you. If you do not have gods (or a singular god) in your setting, it's still a good idea to come up with some explanation as to how the heroes of your stories are capable of superhuman feats. Maybe they're magic — maybe they're just really, really determined. If you do have gods, make sure you have a good idea what they're like.
• What do you want to make your world look like? A Crapsack World will have fatalistic myths explaining why there's no hope and the world is in an awful state. A fanatical theocracy will have myths espousing their way of thinking, full of morality tales and aesops. A militaristic society will have warrior heroes. Myths are created by societies, so they'll reflect them.

The Most Important Myths

Every mythology will have an answer for the most basic of questions — where did the world come from? Where did we come from? If there are gods, where are they from? If your world has magic, how did this happen?

Cosmogony

Meaning, essentially, "origin of the world", cosmogony describes where your world comes from, mainly via a story called the creation myth. There are several basic templates for them:

• From Nothing, where a supreme deity or force of some sort creates the world with nothing to work with. What ends up becoming the world varies — Judeo-Christian God manifests matter and time out of literal void, while in other religions, a god will dream a world into existence, or use their own bodily fluids as the material (a little squicky, but there you have it).
• From Chaos, where there is some omnipresent, nebulous substance (the chaos) and it slowly becomes ordered, possibly giving birth to gods in the process. Most famous of those myths would be the Greek one, where the first gods — Gaia (and, by extension, our planet), Eros, Tartarus and Erebus — were born from Chaos, and all others were descended from those four.
  • Several creation myths feature the god(s) defeating a primordial monster of some sort which represents Chaos — think of Marduk's victory over Tiamat, or the slaying of the Leviathan by God. This subset, when the creation myth involves a battle against a representation of chaos, is called Chaoskampf.
• From Gods, which comes in two forms. In one, two deities (typically sky and earth, though you're free to make your own versions) have sex and one gives birth to the world (or other gods). In other, a deity breaks apart (whether by actions of outside forces or by choice), and the resulting body parts form the world.
• From Another World, where our world is merely the last in a long line of worlds, each of them emerging from the last. Buddhist and Aztec Mythology are the most famous for this, with the Aztecs believing we're currently on the fifth world, and Buddhists believing in an endless cycle of universal destruction/recreation, one that's been going on for eternity.
• From The Ocean, where initially, the world was a giant ocean before something lifted the rock and mud from the bottom, creating land.
• No Beginning, No End, where the world was never created, because it has always existed, and will always continue to exist (though not always in forms we'd be familiar or comfortable with). This is what Jainism teaches.

Those stories will often overlap, and in fantasy, you can probably imagine a few more origin stories particular to your world.

Origin of humans

Where do humans come from? Often, myths have humans sculpted from something like clay, or brought into existence from nothing. Other times, we're descendants of gods, or gods making babies with some other creatures, or uplifted animals. The origin of humans in your setting will tell you a lot about what your particular culture thinks of itself. Ancient Greeks considered men to be gods' playthings (just read any Greek tragedy), so it makes sense that we were made from clay like toys. By contrast, an origin story painting mankind as having divine blood in them would make us superior to the world around us, and put us on a more even ground with deities.

Origin of death and evil

Unless your setting has Jerkass Gods, death and evil probably weren't part of the original plan, so a story might be necessary to explain just what went wrong to make the world the way it is. In some stories, this is the fault of humans, perhaps tempted by an evil deity — in Christianity there's Eve eating the wrong apple after following the snake's advice, in Ancient Greece it's Pandora opening a box she really shouldn't have opened. Other stories place the blame on gods (one Native American myth has several animals voting on whether or not death should be a thing), or point towards human nature (for example, being part-order, part-chaos) making death inevitable. Your task is easier if your gods lack at least one of the following attributes: omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence.

End of the world

This isn't a necessary part of your mythology — in fact, many religions don't have an end-of-the-world scenario. However, if you're writing a mythopoeia, going from the beginning of the world right to its end will give the entire mythic cycle an epic feel — and if you're creating a mythology for your world, the apocalypse is a ready-made plot.

So, how to close your myth cycle?

• Arrival of a saviour: the Crystal Dragon Jesus of your religion arrives! Usually, a great cleansing of the world will follow, and everything will become the paradise it was always meant to be.
• War of the gods: the deities face each other in a divine battle royale, and the resulting damage wrecks the world to an apocalyptic extent.
• The world is remade: If your world is just the latest in the line, it will inevitably end and make way for a new one somewhere in the future.

It's worth noting that all end-of-the-world stories have some optimistic aspect to them (though if you're going for a Crapsack World, feel free to disregard this). A saviour will rescue the righteous, even if the rest of the world burns. A war of the gods will usher a new era for mankind. The old world will die to create a new — and hopefully better — one.

Other stories

There is a lot of myths, and we do mean a lot. This list of categories is only scratching the surface.

• The "why you shouldn't do this" stories: those are the cautionary tales, meant to educate people (often children) about behaviours their society finds immoral. Those myths often star a character whose Fatal Flaw is Pride, and they rarely have a happy ending — rather, they show our prideful hero's fall from grace.
• The "cheating death" stories: a subset of cautionary tales, those myths deal with people who try to cheat death, whether by making themselves immortal or trying to rescue a loved one from the afterlife. The consensus is that death is inevitable — most of the time, the person who's supposed to be saved from death ends up dying anyway, though if your hero earns it, perhaps a happy ending might be possible. If your setting has Necromancy, a "cheating death" myth might be its origin story, and a quick way to show just how different this world is from our own.
• The "why the world works the way it does" stories: how does the sun move across the skies? It's pulled by heavenly horses, or rolled by a beetle. Why can crops only grow for one part of a year? Because your fertility goddess is visiting her daughter. In short, those stories explain natural phenomena that the society is not yet able to explain by science. Those tales are the most numerous, and the most varied — the reason things happen the way they are could be because of gods, people, gods making deals with people, unhappy accidents and more.
• The "where does this come from" stories: why does this rock look like a dragon's head? Because it's a corpse of a dragon! — from that, a story of where the dragon came from and how it died will be spun. Those stories explain the origins of unusual natural features, and may give birth to more elaborate tales.
• The "how we came to be here" stories: those tales deal with how people came to live where they now do — why a city sits where it does, how this valley became a centre of our civillization, and so on. We may've been granted those lands by some higher power, won it by guile or force, or migrated to it from elsewhere.
• The "why we're better than you" stories: those are the stories full of Unfortunate Implications, as they explain why a particular group of people is better than another group of people. To avoid Real Life examples, the mythology of Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors explains why the nobility is the nobility by tracing their origins back to the Risen Saints (the holy figures of the setting), while the commoners are "clayborn", descended from people made artificially by the Saints. invoked
• The "young gods" stories: those myths explore the past of your setting's gods (if there are any) or heroes, showing what made them become who they are by the time their "main" tales happen. A common element is to include something unusual about their birth or early childhood — a promise of things to come, so to say.

Things to keep in mind when writing myths

• Remember to have a recurring cast of characters. Those will typically be the setting's gods and devils, as their immortality allows them to be pretty much everywhere, but some heroes will return from story to story — in fact, the most popular heroes have dozens of myths about their exploits. Artifacts can also be recurring "characters" — for example, a mythical sword wielded by many heroes. Those recurring characters will be the connecting tissue turning your set of tales into a single saga spanning thousands of years and stories.
• Connected to the above, maintain continuity. Not only should the characters return, so should places and events. Perhaps one hero was inspired to defeat a monster by another, earlier one, or is even descended from another hero?
• In general, humans pefer tales of brain rather than tales of brawn, as, much like in the modern day, a Guile Hero is a more interesting character than an Invincible Hero. Reading various myths, you'll quickly notice that if the hero is victorious, it's through ingenuity and cunning rather than simple strength — even Hercules, a mighty warrior, overcomes his ten tasks by being smart about it.
• Keep in mind why a given myth exists. Is the story trying to explain something, or is it trying to teach a lesson? As your mythology grows, a sort of recursion will happen, too. Much like people today write fanfics of their favourite characters' lives after the events of the story (or between installments), so did people of the past fill out the gaps in their heroes' lives. Eventually, you might end up with a myth whose sole purpose would be to explain how a hero of another myth came to be.
• Attach your myths to real places in your world. A character pointing at a mountain and saying "and this is where a great dragon died by the hand of X", or having the Infinity +1 Sword of your story be present in the setting's mythology will add great depth and a sense of epic scale to it.

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