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In the study of [[WikipediaWp:mythology]], a '''mytheme''' is an irreducible nugget of myth, an unchanging element, not unlike a cultural [[meme]], one that is always found shared with other, related mythemes and reassembled in various ways—"bundled" was [[Claude Lévi-Strauss]]'s image— or linked in more complicated relationships, like a molecule in a compound. For example, the myths of [[Adonis]] and [[Osiris]] share several elements, leading some scholars to conclude that they share a source.
The cataloguer of [[folk tale]]s [[Vladimir Propp]] considered that the unit of analysis was the individual tale: the unitary mytheme by contrast is the equivalent in myth of the [[phoneme]]s, [[morpheme]]s and [[sememe]]s into which [[Linguistics|structural linguistics]] divides language: the smallest possible units of meaning within a language system.
