Myths are those stories that "symbolize human experience and embody the spiritual values of a culture" (Rosenberg xiii). But in talking about myth, the term mythology is used in two very different ways.

Mythology is commonly used to refer to the collected myths of a particular culture. So students of myth will talk about Graeco-Roman mythology, Norse mythology, Egyptian mythology, Navajo mythology, or even a mythology of our own nation. In this use of the word mythology, the focus is on how all of the various stories told by peoples within a particular culture both define the members of that culture and serve as the worldview of that culture, its own particular and peculiar answers to the questions which myth raises. One of the aims of this class is for students to gain a basic familiarity with Graeco-Roman and Norse mythology because these mythologies, together with Judaeo-Christian mythology, have been primary influences on Western culture and continue to be referenced, explored, and re-invented in modern American culture.

Mythology is also used to refer to the scholarly study of myth. This is the sense in which Joseph Campbell is talking about myth when he writes

Mythology has been interpreted by the modern intellect as a primitive, fumbling effort to explain the world of nature (Frazier); as a production of poetical fantasy from prehistoric times, misunderstood by succeeding ages (Müller); as a repository of allegorical instruction, to shape the individual to his group (Durkheim); as a group dream, symptomatic of archetypal urges within the depths of the human psyche (Jung); as the traditional vehicle of man's profoundest metaphysical insights (Coomaraswamy); and as God's Revelation to his children (the Church). Mythology is all of these. The various judgments are determined by the viewpoints of the judges. For when scrutinized in terms not of what it is but of how it functions, of how it has served mankind in the past, of how it may serve today, mythology shows itself to be as amenable as life itself to the obsessions and requirements of the individual, the race, the age. (Campbell 382)

Campbell is summarizing some of the various approaches that scholars have taken in attempting to explain what myth is and how it functions. Throughout this course, we will be looking more closely at many of these approaches to mythology as a way of gaining a broader understanding of myth. Each approach serves as a filtering lens that allows us to see some aspect of myth that another view might obscure.