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In the study of [[commonswp:mythology|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 [[wp:Adonis]] and [[wp:Osiris|Osiris]] share several elements, leading some scholars to conclude that they share a source.
The cataloguer of [[folk tale]]s tales [[Vladimir Propp]] considered that the unit of analysis was the individual tale: the unitary mytheme by contrast is the equivalent in myth of the [[wp:phoneme]]s, [[wp:morpheme]]s and [[wp:sememe]]s into which [[Linguistics|structural linguistics]] divides language: the smallest possible units of meaning within a language system.
In the 1950s [[Claude Lévi-Strauss]] first adapted this technique of language analysis to analytic myth criticism. In his work on the myth systems of primitive tribes, working from the analogy of language structure, he adopted the term ''mythème'', with the assertion that the system of meaning within mythic utterances parallels closely that of a language system [http://www.ditl.info/art/definition.php?term=3034].
This idea is somewhat disputed by [[Roman Jakobson]], who takes the mytheme to be a [[wp:concept]] or phoneme which is without significance in itself but whose significance might be shown by [[wp:sociology|sociological]] analysis.
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Neologism coined by [[Levi-Strauss]] by analogy with [[phoneme]], and used to describe the elementary units employed in the [[structuralism|structural analysis]] of [[wp:myth]]s.
Like [[Saussure]]'s [[sign]]s, [[mytheme]] are created by binary or ternary oppositions and are analogous with the functions identified by [[Propp]] in his morphology of the folk tale.
