In structuralism-influenced studies of mythology, a mytheme is a fundamental generic unit of narrative structure (typically involving a relationship between a character, an event, and a theme) from which myths are thought to be constructed[1][2]—a minimal unit that is always found shared with other, related mythemes[citation needed] and reassembled in various ways ("bundled")[3] or linked in more complicated relationships.
For example, the myths of Greek Adonis and Egyptian Osiris share several elements, leading some scholars to conclude that they share a source, i.e. images passed down in cultures or from one to another, being ascribed new interpretations of the action depicted, as well as new names in various readings of icons.
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), who gave the term wide circulation,[4] wrote, "If one wants to establish a parallel between structural linguistics and the structural analysis of myths, the correspondence is established, not between mytheme and word but between mytheme and phoneme.
In the 1950s, Claude Lévi-Strauss first adapted this technique of language analysis to analytic myth criticism.
Lev Manovich uses the terms seme and mytheme in his book The Language of New Media to describe aspects of culture with which computer images enter into dialogue.