Ancient ✦ Wisdom ✦ Atlas

Motif family

Betrayal and Violated Trust

Protector betrayal and feast/drink betrayal are different scenes, but both make the broken bond itself the mythic engine.

44 traditions

359 occurrences

358 mapped motifs

7 sub-families

  • afro caribbean
  • akan
  • amazonian
  • arctic inuit
  • arthurian
  • australian aboriginal
  • biblical
  • buddhist
  • celtic irish
  • christian apocrypha
  • confucian
  • egyptian
  • estonian
  • finnish karelian
  • germanic
  • gnostic
  • greek
  • greek roman
  • hausa
  • hawaiian
  • hindu
  • indigenous australian
  • inuit
  • islamic
  • islamicate folklore
  • japanese
  • jewish christian
  • khoisan south african
  • maya
  • melanesian
  • nahua maya inca
  • native american northwest coast
  • native american plains
  • native american southeast
  • native american southwest
  • navajo
  • norse
  • persian
  • roman
  • shan
  • siberian
  • slavic
  • sufi
  • zuni

Conserved neighbors: sacred exchange · sacred law

Sub-families · the next landing down

Protector Betrayal and Protective-Role Inversion

6 motifs

False Allies and Abandonment

2 motifs

Treacherous Assaults and Killings

3 motifs

Deceptive Food and Drink

3 motifs

Fatal and Deceptive Gifts

2 motifs

Reward, Marriage, and Wager Betrayals

3 motifs

Remembrance, Reconciliation, and Denunciation after Betrayal

3 motifs

Not yet placed in a sub-family

336 motifs, showing the 60 most attested

Each motif link opens its evidence page: every tagged passage with its quote, and a path into the book where the passage lives.