The anthropologist C. Scott Littleton defined comparative mythology as "the systematic comparison of myths and mythic themes drawn from a wide variety of cultures".[1] By comparing different cultures' mythologies, scholars try to identify underlying similarities and/or to reconstruct a "protomythology" from which those mythologies developed.[1] To an extent, all theories about mythology follow a comparative approach: as the scholar of religion Robert Segal notes, "by definition, all theorists [of myth] seek similarities among myths".[2] However, scholars of mythology can be roughly divided into particularists, who emphasize the differences between myths, and comparativists, who emphasize the similarities. Particularists tend to "maintain that the similarities deciphered by comparativists are vague and superficial", while comparativists tend to "contend that the differences etched by particularists are trivial and incidental".[3]
Comparative approaches to mythology held great popularity among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars. Many of these scholars believed that all myths showed signs of having evolved from a single myth or mythical theme.[4] For example, the nineteenth-century philologist Friedrich Max Müller led a school of thought which interpreted nearly all myths as poetic descriptions of the sun's behavior. According to this theory, these poetic descriptions had become distorted over time into seemingly diverse stories about gods and heroes.[4] However, modern-day scholars lean more toward particularism, feeling suspicious of broad statements about myths.[5] One exception to this trend is Joseph Campbell's theory of the "monomyth", which is discussed below. Another recent exception is the historical approach followed in E.J. Michael Witzel's reconstruction of many subsequent layers of older mythologies [6] (discussed further below).
Joseph Campbell in his many writings on what should constitute a total science of mythology describes the difference in the two approaches:
"For, as a broad view of the field [of mythology] immediately shows, in every well-established culture realm to which a new system of thought and civilization comes, it is received creatively, not inertly. A sensitive, complex process of selection, adaptation, and development brings the new forms into contact with their approximate analogues or homologues in the native inheritance, and in certain instances - notably in Egypt, Crete, the Indus valley, and a little later, the Far East - prodigious forces of indigenous productivity are released in native style, but on the level of the new stage. In other words, although its culture stage at any given period may be shown to have been derived, as an effect of alien influences, the particular style of each of the great domains can no less surely be shown to be indigenous. And so it is that a scholar largely concerned with native forms will tend to argue for local, stylistic originality, whereas one attentive rather to the broadly flung evidence of diffused techniques, artifacts, and mythological motifs will be inclined to lime out a single culture history of mankind, characterized by well-defined general stages, though rendered by way of no less well-defined local styles. It is one thing to analyze the genesis and subsequent diffusion of the fundamental heritage of all high civilizations whatsoever; another to mark the genesis, maturation, and demise of the several local mythological styles; and a third to measure the force of each local style in the context of the unitary history of mankind. A total science of mythology must give attention, as far as possible, to all three."[7]
