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Myth & archetype

Select a scene — forty words or more — and run Analyse selection for myth and archetype. A sidebar report says what the passage is echoing, if it is echoing anything.

Needs Local (Ollama) as the model; deepseek-r1:14b does noticeably better than 7B here.

The report

  • Summary — one sentence naming the mythic register of the passage, or nothing.
  • Patterns — structural or mythic patterns the passage is enacting: katabasis, threshold crossing, the refusal of the call, the wounded king, the trickster's bargain, the recognition scene, the forbidden room, the unburied dead… Each with a verbatim quote from the passage and a note on what the pattern traditionally asks of the story next — the debt the scene has taken on.
  • Archetypes — figures present (mentor, herald, threshold guardian, shadow, shapeshifter, trickster, the crone, the psychopomp…), who carries each, and a quote.
  • What the pattern asks next — two or three sentences for the writer about where the pattern wants to go and what refusing it would cost.

Why an empty report is a good report

The prompt is explicit that most passages are not myths and that a quiet domestic scene with no descent, no threshold and no guardian gets an empty list. Every quote is checked against the passage; a pattern whose evidence is not actually there is dropped. The one thing this guards against is a model that sees Campbell everywhere.

Relation to the story map

The myth report is per selection and lives in the sidebar for the session. The story map's reading covers something adjacent — outside references per scene, persisted — and both use the same rule: verbatim evidence or nothing.

Into the writer board

Every archetype in the report has Add to writer: attach it to an archetype card on the writer board as a %% REF: [[Card]] %% at the cursor, or make it a new archetype note, tagged and holding the evidence. One way only; the board never reaches the model.

MIT licensed. Concreteness norms CC-BY (Brysbaert et al.).