The word "myth" is a foreign language, which first appeared in Greece, and its original meaning is confused with legends, stories, and fables.It was introduced into my country at the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China. By the 1920s, it had been more widely used in my country. Mythology is the most unified and comprehensive ideology, including all the natural sciences and social sciences of the primitive people, so it is called the "encyclopedia" of that period.Myths visualize the objective world through fantasy, and are the product of the collective beliefs of primitive peoples, sacred and credible.The more primitive the myth, the more unconscious the art of narrative.With the development of civilization, mythology has gradually changed from wild to literary.Almost all the myths we see from ancient books have been modified and processed by later generations to varying degrees.Therefore, the restoration of the myth is a very difficult research work.

Myths are not created all the time.Before the clan society, people had just left the state of animals, so there was hardly any productivity, and they basically relied on the gifts of nature, which belonged to the stage of ignorance, and it was impossible to create myths.Around the time of matrilineal clan communes, human beings had preliminary labor productivity, lived on fishing and hunting, had simple living houses, and had social organizations centered on women. Everyone worked together, and people began to form preliminary thinking ability and language. The ability to express provides the conditions for the creation of myths.

In the process of myth formation, the special psychology of primitive people was an important intermediary, because people at that time also dreamed like people today, but they could not explain the scenes in dreams scientifically, and mistakenly believed that besides the body, there were other things. have a soul.Sometimes this soul is with the body, and sometimes it moves independently of the body, but it is invisible and intangible.They even regard the soul as more important than the body.It is believed that if the body is dead, as long as the soul is not dead, there is still hope for resurrection.If the soul dies, it is real death.In ancient China, it was not called soul, but soul. "If the soul is divided, the person will be sick, and if it is completely removed, the person will die." ("Baopuzi·On Immortals"), it can be seen that the original people attached great importance to the soul.For the various scenes they see in their dreams, they think that they are the activities of the soul that has left the body.

Primitive people's abstraction ability is very low, but their ability of image thinking and analogy is very strong. Therefore, they often connect and compare two or more specific things with each other.Things that seem irrelevant to modern people are related to primitive people.Therefore, they not only believe that people have souls, but also that everything in the world has souls. This is what is commonly referred to as "animism."Since the soul can move independently, the soul does not necessarily die after death, so there is the concept of "immortality of the soul".They use this kind of psychology to resist the threat of death to people.

Human imagination played an important active role in the process of myth formation.Whatever people in primitive society want to achieve but are unable to achieve, they try to realize it with the help of imagination.The mythical imagination is not a fantasy or fantasy, in the final analysis, it is determined by the needs of the clan society reality.Their thinking is simple, and their imagination is spontaneous. The result of measuring things by oneself and starting from analogy has created an ever-changing mysterious world.In that fantasy world, there is a blood relationship between humans and animals, and they can transform into each other, people can be skeuomorphic, and things can be anthropomorphic.And because the knowledge of primitive people is very poor, in the process of fighting against nature, they were forced to be slaves of natural forces at first because of the backwardness of tools.They regard the oppression of human beings by natural forces as various gods at work, and gradually develop the concept of gods.Where there are gods, there are gods' activities and stories about gods' activities are myths.

The original legends are as old as myths, and the two are often confused and the boundaries are blurred, so they are collectively called ancient myths and legends. With the improvement of productivity, human beings have various inventions and creations.This is the long-term achievement of collective production practice. People often attach these to certain historical figures, which leads to the myths and legends of the origin of cultural relics.Among them, there are both mythological factors and legend germinations, which are intertwined and difficult to distinguish. Around the end of the primitive society, tribal wars were frequent, and the wars led to ethnic migrations. National heroes who were good at fighting were admired by people and replaced the status of gods.Human beings have developed from ancestor worship to hero worship. The deeds of gods and tribal heroes in primitive mythology are mixed together. The combination of mythology and human words means that people's self-awareness is further enhanced. The all-powerful tribal heroes carry sacred aura and are widely praised by people .In this way, the legendaryization of history and the historicization of myth appear at the same time.This is the first divergence of legend from the hybrid of myth.This part of the legend is also called "social myth" in mythology.

In ancient China, there were also a large number of love legends and fairy tales.In the early days, some of them not only borrowed the expressive techniques of mythology, but even drew materials directly from mythology.When the ancients recorded myths, love legends, and fairy tales, the boundaries were not strict.Some scholars today call it "generalized mythology".The derivative works of the later myths, of course, are not as pure as the original myths, but they flow with the blood of myths, and the boundaries between them are blurred, so they are also called "myth stories" or "gods and demons stories", or "fairy stories" by convention. .

As a scientific term, "legend" only existed in modern times.The Chinese tradition is called "rumor". There are many rumors in "Historical Records" and other official histories and barnyard history, especially in unofficial histories and literati notes.This is the narrative art of the broad masses of the people and one of the important genres of folk literature, which originated in primitive society and flourished in class society, and is related to certain historical figures, historical events, local cultural relics, natural scenery, and social customs.Common modern legends are mostly complex forms centered on characters, events as clues, and scenery as symbols, with prominent historical, national and regional characteristics.This point is different from the ancient myths and legends discussed in this book.

There are basically two kinds of fairy tales. One is based on ancient myths and legends, which has a profound impact on a large number of fairy tales with a strong democratic color in the late feudal society.The other is the fairy tales created by Taoism to propagate its teachings, which generally belong to religious literature, and the mysterious and superstitious parts should be discarded.