This study covers those myths that developed in Europe and Asia in the late primitive era, before the creation of class society and urban cultures, but continued to exist more or less unchanged in the era of ancient and pre-feudal civilizations. The author considers the main qualitative characteristic of mythological thinking to be a trope (metonymy, metaphor, etc.), and the myth itself (or its structural core - the mythologem) is a statement reflecting socio-psychological motivations for emotional understanding of the phenomena of the external world or the internal world of a person. Book addressed to historians, cultural scientists, ethnographers, sociologists, psychologists, linguists, as well as a wide range of readers interested in the problems raised in it.