The myth is considered the first form of spiritual culture of mankind as this phenomenon arose at the earliest stage of development of society. With its help the primitive people and the first civilizations comprehended the world, explaining a change of seasons, natural disasters and sacraments of human life.
The concept the myth came from an Ancient Greek word mifos (legend). The myth in the most general sense represents the narration reflecting ideas of people of the world, origin of all real. These legends and legends pay much attention to the place of the person in the world and therefore in mythology of any people the leading role is assigned to legends on gods and heroes. Not the rational, but emotional and sensual approach which is based not on concepts, and on collective ideas of any given phenomenon or an event is the cornerstone of mythological comprehension of the world. Mythological thinking does not reflect reality objectively, and treats it, relying on supernatural forces. All legends of ancient times expressed sacral meanings and beliefs of people therefore it is possible to call them predecessors of religious beliefs. In the mythical legend two plans of the narration are usually combined: story about the past (diachronic aspect) and relation to the present or future (synchronic aspect). Thus, these legends connected past events with the present and future that provided a spiritual bond of different generations. Legends in primitive society were not so much stories which told at a fire, and reality which surrounded the person everywhere and defined his public conduct. At later stages of social development the mythology begins to exist separately from religious practices, institutes of social system, literature, doctoring, science and art. It is possible to give the world of ancient Greeks presented in "Odyssey" and "Illiad" by Homer where the mythology acts as a basis for creation of a geroiko-historical plot as an example of similar existence of the myth. In modern society the mythological elements remain not only in fairy tales, movies or literary plots. According to researches in the field of psychoanalytic cultural science the mythical ideas of the world remain in unconscious structures of mentality of the person of any society. Especially brightly it is noticeable in independent reasonings of children on emergence of the world, the natural phenomena or their own birth.