Many myths have formed the fundamental rules of society, which dictate the way in which society is ordered and run. Such myths also serve in explaining certain social divisions, whilst at times validating it. In many cases this division has led to the same order in society today, or an evolved form thereof. We shall look under the areas of the inequality of the sexes, the aristocracy and that of social classes.

Most ancient cultures manifested different forms of sexual inequality of varying degrees. In almost all cases, the men are seen as the dominant side. There are many ways in which mythology has brought about this, which comes from two different approaches. The first approach is that of the males having performed some ritual to justify their superiority, whilst the second one is with the female committing some sort of sin which has lowered their placing in the household.

The first approach to male superiority can be seen from the common practice in many tribes even today. It is the practice of male initiation, which mythology dictates for males in a society, which reach a certain age. The male is required to go and perform some act that would raise his status in society from boy to man, and effectively above that of women who lack such an avenue of self-improvement, due to the inherent bias in the mythologies.

The second approach of the degradation of females in mythology can be seen from the myths like in that of the Greek myth of Pandora, where the first woman was introduced into the world to release sin. The Japanese too have such a myth, involving the primal gods, Izanagi and Izanami. When the wife of Izanagi failed to greet her husband in the style of male primacy, a terrible monster was born which had to be exiled to the sea. In order to prevent this from happening again, Izanami from then on had to greet her husband formally in the style that many Japanese practice till today.

This inequality of the sexes has come a long way, since then. Our modern society introduced the feminist movement in the 1960's. However, even today, much of the world has not been able to completely remove this sexual bias, which in part, was endowed upon humanity by mythology forming our culture.

We shall now move onto the next topic of the aristocracy. Democracy was not a system of government practiced in much of ancient culture. The foremost form of government was aristocracy, which involved a governing family with absolute power, known as the royal family. In oriental cultures this was usually in the form of an emperor or sultan, while in areas in Egypt they were known as Pharaohs.

How were these families able to hold on to power? It was mythology that validated these governments. These families were often thought to be part of the lineage of the gods themselves. The Japanese royal family, for example, were thought to be the children of the sun goddess, Amaterasu. In Egypt, the Pharaohs were the children of Osiris and Isis, and at times the rulers claimed to be gods themselves, like that of Rome. Chinese culture believed that the emperor had the mandate of heaven, which was explicitly stated in the mythology of the Chinese.

And yet it is interesting how the structure of today's government can also be derived from mythology. A simple look at the Greek system shows us a main god, Zeus. Zeus had a wife, Hera, and amongst that a few key players in his court, the Olympians. To further split the job of government, the various other gods who were born from the Olympians were allocated to various jobs. These jobs come in the form such as that of the god of fertility and the god of music. Although it may be considered much simpler than anything that is run in the world today, the ideas and the fundamentals are unchanged.

The last idea is that of social classes. Many ancient cultures had systems of social classes, which at many times held barriers that were not to be transcended. These myths were usually an eventual filtering out between levels of society to form the classes, but it was justified and regimented by mythology. For example, the Chinese myth of human creation tells of how the goddess, Nu Wa, made certain human beings personally out of clay. When she got tired of making the human figures, she used her magic to produce humans en masse. Eventually, those she had made personally became those of upper classes of society, whilst those she had conjured became the lowly peasants.

These forms of social order are still held very much in societies who have not yet uprooted themselves from their tradition and mythology. It is such that we see the great effect that mythology has had on the roles of the male and female in the household, the role of mythology in preserving aristocracy and in conceptualizing governments used till today, and lastly in the forming of social classes.

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