mythos

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)Anything transmitted by word of mouth, such as a fable, legend, narrative, story, or tale (especially a poetic tale).

   “POLY′MYTHY (S[ubstantive]) in Poetry, a fault in an epic poem, when inſtead of a ſingle mythos, or fable, there is a multiplicity of them.”

2. (countable, uncountable)A story or set of stories relevant to or having a significant truth or meaning for a particular culture, religion, society, or other group; a myth, a mythology.

   “But the most highly gifted of all peoples in poetic insight were the Greeks. They possessed supreme ability in the interpretation of nature as expression of spirit. They have countless mythoses to express the immortality of man and his after-life.”

   “The term cobber [...] is still a part of our linguistic culture, and mateship is still a part of our cultural mythos.”

   “Most of the bad broncos, if mythos is peppered with a slight shake of practicality, were more-likely-as-not just a cavvyard of crow-hoppers.”

   “Hollywood studios had largely stopped producing the horror subgenre, save for the odd hybrid vehicle (the sci-fi slasher of Species, the cartoonish evil of Leprechaun), and the iconic killers of the ’80s—Freddy [Krueger], Jason [Voorhees], Michael Myers—had either devolved into needlessly complex mythos or unintentional self-parody, and sometimes both.”

3. (broadly, countable, uncountable)A set of assumptions or beliefs about something.
4. (countable, uncountable)A recurring theme; a motif.

   “To get most benefit from the four mythoi, one must avoid making two errors. First, a work embodying the comic mythos may be called comic but should not be confused with comedy since the latter term has too many meanings that are exclusively dramatic. The same stricture applies to tragedy and the tragic mythos. The second error is to assume that a work embodying the ironic mythos is an anti-romance.”

   “In addition to mythoi drawn from myths and fairy tales, romances also employ mythoi derived from chivalric romances.”