Noun

The collection of myths of a people, concerning the origin of the people, history, deities, ancestors and heroes.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-08, volume=407, issue=8839, page=55, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= Obama goes troll-hunting , passage=The solitary, lumbering trolls of Scandinavian mythology would sometimes be turned to stone by exposure to sunlight. Barack Obama is hoping that several measures announced on June 4th will have a similarly paralysing effect on their modern incarnation, the patent troll.}}

(countable, and, uncountable) A similar body of myths concerning an event, person or institution.

* 2003 , Peter Utgaard, Remembering & Forgetting Nazism: Education, National Identity, and the Victim Myth in Postwar Austria , Berghahn Books, ISBN 978-1-57181-187-5, page x:

This program to distinguish Austria from Germany was important to building a new Austria, but it also indirectly contributed to victim mythology by implying that participation in the Nazi war of conquest was antithetical to Austrian identity.

Pervasive elements of a fictional universe that resemble a mythological universe.

* 2000 April 28, Caryn James (?), As Scheherazade Was Saying . . .], in The New York Times'', page E31, reproduced in ''The New York Times Television Reviews 2000 , Routledge (2001), ISBN 978-1-57958-060-5, [http://books.google.com/books?id=z0QFKpI6p7AC&pg=PA198&dq=mythology page 198:

This tongue-in-cheek episode is especially fun for people who don’t take their “X-Files” mythology seriously.

(uncountable) The systematic collection and study of myths.

Noun

(wikipedia rusalka)

In Slavic mythology, a female water spirit that leads handsome men to their deaths underwater.

*{{quote-news, year=2009, date=March 1, author=Alastair Macaulay, title=What Do Aquawomen Want?, work=New York Times citation

, passage=She is now a rusalka , a water spirit; in revenge she sends their daughter, a rusalochka, to lure him into the water. }}