Mythology and Myth Writing

Explain why a myth may have multiple valid versions rather than one canonical text.

Annotate a short myth using the terms motif, symbol, variant, cosmology, and narrative function.

Create a myth-reading record that documents culture, source, version, translator or collector, and historical context.

Distinguish a source text or documented oral performance, a translation or transcription, a modern retelling, and scholarly commentary.

Evaluate a mythological source by checking its authorship, translation or transcription, collection history, and cultural context.

Identify an interpreter’s relationship to a tradition and explain how positionality, audience, and purpose may shape the interpretation.

Apply a functionalist approach to interpret what a selected myth does within its society.

Apply a structuralist approach to identify a central opposition in a selected myth.

Construct a cross-cultural comparison that identifies both a meaningful similarity and a culturally specific difference.

Identify when a story belongs to a living sacred tradition and explain what special care its study or adaptation requires.

Write a concise contextual note that avoids presenting one version as an entire culture’s definitive belief.

Identify how conflict and political order shape creation in the Babylonian *Enuma Elish*.

Interpret uncertainty and creation in the *Nāsadīya Sūkta* without reducing it to a single doctrine.

Compare how Pangu and Nüwa narratives imagine cosmic formation and human origins while identifying their different source histories.

Explain emergence and divine genealogy in one Heliopolitan Egyptian creation account while recognizing that ancient Egypt had multiple cosmogonies.

Explain why Jain cosmology describes an eternal universe rather than a creator-led beginning.

Compare how selected Asian and Egyptian traditions imagine creation through conflict, questioning, emergence, genealogy, or an eternal cosmos.

Explain why similar creation motifs do not necessarily demonstrate a shared origin or identical cultural meaning.

Write an original creation vignette shaped by one studied narrative operation, accompanied by a note naming and transforming its source of inspiration.

Explain how *ma’at* connects divine, social, and moral order in an ancient Egyptian mythic context.

Analyze relationships among kami, place, purity, and disorder in one episode from the *Kojiki*, while distinguishing the text from contemporary Shinto practice.

Explain how divine power and human obligation interact in a selected passage from *Atrahasis*.

Describe the place of one òrìṣà within a documented Yoruba religious and narrative context.

Explain how *ṛta* links cosmic regularity, truth, and ritual in selected Vedic hymns.

Compare how two traditions portray reciprocity between human and divine worlds.

Explain why kami and òrìṣà should not be treated as interchangeable versions of a generic “god.”

Write a mythic character portrait grounded in a sacred being’s relationships, obligations, and cosmology rather than a list of supernatural powers.

Analyze how kingship, friendship, and mortality reshape heroism in *The Epic of Gilgamesh*.

Explain how oral performance and historical memory interact in the *Epic of Sundiata*.

Identify how duty and relationship shape a selected episode from the *Ramayana*.

Analyze trial, collaboration, and renewal in a Hero Twins episode from the K’iche’ Maya *Popol Vuh*.

Analyze how kingship, family loyalty, and moral choice shape a selected episode from the Persian *Shahnameh*.

Interpret the ethical lesson of one Buddhist *Jātaka* tale in relation to karma and compassionate conduct.

Compare two culturally specific models of exemplary action without treating either as universal.

Rewrite a short episode from an appropriate-to-adapt epic or exemplary tale through the viewpoint of a muted character, with a brief contextual note.

Identify recurring trickster traits while distinguishing a broad analytical category from a culture-specific identity.

Analyze wit, survival, and power in an Anansi story situated within either a named Akan context or a specific African diasporic context.

Explain why Èṣù should not be reduced to a Western stereotype of a deceptive trickster.

Analyze creation, appetite, or consequence in one culturally identified Māui narrative.

Interpret Raven’s boundary-crossing role in one documented narrative from a specifically named Northwest Coast community.

Analyze how rebellion and discipline reshape Sun Wukong in a selected episode from *Journey to the West*.

Compare the social consequences of trickster behavior in two selected stories.

Write a rule-breaking scene whose consequences reveal the values of an imagined world without copying a culture-specific trickster figure.

Interpret judgment, remembrance, and continuity in selected passages from ancient Egyptian funerary literature.

Analyze the boundary between life and death in the Japanese account of Izanagi and Izanami.

Identify the structure and purpose of descent in one ancient Greek *katabasis* narrative.

Analyze filial obligation and mediation between worlds in one documented version of the Korean shamanic narrative of Princess Bari.

Explain judgment and moral consequence in a selected Zoroastrian account of the Chinvat Bridge.

Distinguish underworld beings, ghosts, and ancestors rather than treating them as interchangeable categories.

Compare what can and cannot return from death in two selected traditions.

Outline an original descent narrative in which each stage changes the protagonist’s understanding.

Classify transformation in selected stories as punishment, liberation, disguise, initiation, or boundary crossing.

Compare an ancient Medusa source with a modern reinterpretation and identify what the retelling changes.

Analyze longing, belonging, and bodily change in a selected selkie folktale.

Trace how the meaning of the Chinese fox spirit changes across two historical or literary contexts.

Interpret Śikhaṇḍin’s gender history in a selected *Mahābhārata* episode while preserving its epic and religious context.

Distinguish the folkloric category of *yōkai* from a single fixed species by analyzing one named Japanese example.

Analyze how a mythic monster marks a boundary between self and other, human and nonhuman, or order and disorder.

Write a transformation poem that uses bodily change to explore identity without borrowing culturally restricted symbols.

Explain the difference between treating myth as a cultural tradition and treating it as a psychological text.

Apply a Jungian concept to one myth and identify what that reading leaves unexplained.

Summarize Campbell’s monomyth and state two limitations of using it as a universal model.

Apply a feminist lens to identify how voice, agency, or embodiment operates in a selected myth.

Apply a postcolonial or decolonial lens to a modern retelling of a traditional story.

Discuss grief, trauma, or mental distress in a myth without diagnosing its characters or romanticizing suffering.

Interpret an image from a personal dream journal as a personal symbol without making unsupported claims about another culture.

Compare two interpretive lenses and justify which one better answers a specific question about a myth.

Select an appropriate-to-adapt source myth from a South Asian, East Asian, West Asian, or Egyptian tradition and state a clear purpose, audience, and central question for a retelling.

Compare two versions of the myth to identify stable elements and meaningful variations.

Choose which source elements to preserve, transform, or omit and justify each decision.

Change the focal character of the myth while maintaining a coherent relationship to the source.

Relocate an appropriate-to-adapt mythic plot into a new setting without erasing the source tradition’s distinctive logic.

Create an adaptation record addressing attribution, sacred context, stereotypes, cultural distance, and the limits of the writer’s knowledge.

Draft a short retelling that transforms the source while remaining transparent about its origins.

Write an author’s note that identifies sources and explains the retelling’s major creative and ethical choices.

Define the origin, structure, and governing limits of an original mythic cosmos.

Design a symbolic motif and demonstrate how its meaning develops through repetition and variation.

Create a mythic figure whose desires, powers, obligations, and limits form a coherent whole.

Connect a mythic conflict to a personal or philosophical question without claiming another culture’s tradition as one’s own.

Construct a ritual, taboo, or threshold that reveals the values of an imagined community.

Write a passage using repetition, invocation, and patterned phrasing to create a deliberate mythic cadence without imitating a culture-specific sacred form.

Draft an original prose myth with a coherent movement from disruption to consequence.

Transform the prose myth into a companion poem or reflective journal entry with a distinct purpose.

Define a unifying question and intended reader for the mythic section of *The Journal of Ardency*.

Select retellings, original myths, poems, and reflections with primary emphasis on South Asian, East Asian, West Asian, and Egyptian materials.

Arrange the selected pieces to create a deliberate emotional and thematic progression.

Revise one tradition-based piece for mythological accuracy, cultural context, and source transparency.

Revise one piece for imagery, narrative structure, voice, and symbolic coherence.

Write an introductory reflection distinguishing the studied traditions from personal mythmaking.

Format a concise source list and author’s notes for all tradition-based pieces.

Evaluate the completed portfolio using criteria for scholarship, ethical adaptation, literary craft, and personal insight.