Origin myth

[7] Many cultures instill the expectation that people take mythical gods and heroes as their role models, imitating their deeds and upholding the customs they established: When the missionary and ethnologist C. Strehlow asked the Australian Arunta why they performed certain ceremonies, the answer was always: "Because the ancestors so commanded it."

[10] In the founding myth of the Zhou dynasty in China, Lady Yuan makes a ritual sacrifice to conceive, then becomes pregnant after stepping into the footprint of the King of Heaven.

She gives birth to a son, Hou Ji, whom she leaves alone in dangerous places where he is protected by sheep, cattle, birds, and woodcutters.

One day, the daughter of the god of the Dnieper River stole a young man's horses while he was herding his cattle, and forced him to lie with her before returning them.

[11] The Torah (or Pentateuch, as biblical scholars sometimes call it) is the collective name for the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

Greek founding myths often embody a justification for the ancient overturning of an older, archaic order, reformulating a historical event anchored in the social and natural world to valorize current community practices, creating symbolic narratives of "collective importance"[13] enriched with metaphor to account for traditional chronologies, and constructing an etiology considered to be plausible among those with a cultural investment.

[14] In the Greek view, the mythic past had deep roots in historic time, its legends treated as facts, as Carlo Brillante has noted,[15] its heroic protagonists seen as links between the "age of origins" and the mortal, everyday world that succeeded it.

A modern translator of Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica has noted, of the many aitia embedded as digressions in that Hellenistic epic, that "crucial to social stability had to be the function of myths in providing explanations, authorization or empowerment for the present in terms of origins: this could apply, not only to foundations or charter myths and genealogical trees (thus supporting family or territorial claims) but also to personal moral choices.

"[16] In the period after Alexander the Great expanded the Hellenistic world, Greek poetry—Callimachus wrote a whole work simply titled Aitia—is replete with founding myths.

"[17] A notable example is the myth of the foundation of Rome—the tale of Romulus and Remus, which Virgil in turn broadens in his Aeneid with the odyssey of Aeneas and his razing of Lavinium, and his son Iulus's later relocation and rule of the famous twins' birthplace Alba Longa, and their descent from his royal line, thus fitting perfectly into the already established canon of events.

Similarly, the Old Testament's story of the Exodus serves as the founding myth for the community of Israel, telling how God delivered the Israelites from slavery and how they therefore belonged to him through the Covenant of Mount Sinai.

[18] During the Middle Ages, founding myths of the medieval communes of northern Italy manifested the increasing self-confidence of the urban population and the will to find a Roman origin, however tenuous and legendary.