mythicism

noun5

1. •
   The scholarly opinion that the gospels are mythological expansions of historical data.
2. •
   The view that a certain figure or event is unhistorical or mythical, chiefly in the context of pseudo-scholarship.
3. •
   The opinion that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist.
4. •
   The habitual practice of attributing everything to mythological causes; superstition, the opposite of rationalism, or of realism.

   • 1911 "The Californias were an inaccessible and mysterious Occident, invested in the imagination of most mankind with almost Babylonian mythicism." (R. G. Badger, Don Sagasto's daughter)
5. •
   The creative potential for the creation of mythology; the faculty of mythopoeia.

   • 1971 "Individual works are all potential myths, but it is their collective adoption that actualises - if such should be the case - their 'mythicism'." (Levi-Strauss)
   • 1998 "the playful animal familiars of the heroine [in Disney's Pocahontas] are real animals, because this is real mythicism, not pure imagination." (Ziauddin Sardar, Postmodernism and the other: the new imperialism of Western culture, p. 89)