This research studies the role played by visual media in sustaining and strengthening the ‘myth of divine music’ associated with Karnatik music. Karnatik music or the South Indian classical music has an acquired quasi-religious identity that remains extraneous to its unique musical aesthetics. By analysing 160 media texts featuring Karnatik music with a specific focus on music videos, the study argues that media has consistently deified this genre of music through its visual and narrative representations. The research identifies a recurring and normalized visual template that accompanies this musical genre in its visual media representations, featuring visuals of Hindu religious iconography and non-participatory ‘neutral visuals’. These visuals which the study calls ‘mythaphors’ are hypothesized as images that are made to look like visual metaphors, but essentially remain signs coded to connote at the mythical levels of signification. The factors that contribute to their paradigmatic selection are studied through a structural and cultural semiotic approach using the theories of Umberto Eco, Juri Lotman, Roland Barthes and Algirdas Greimas. The study finds that ‘mythological’ films have consistently portrayed Karnatik music as a divine musical tongue by combining it with narratives involving Hindu deities. In the analysis of the music videos, the study extracts the binary oppositions that influence their visual selection and production. These texts are found to follow visualization patterns set by cultural texts such as the ‘Ragamala paintings’ of the 14th-19th centuries. The study also finds that the habituated paradigmatic selection of Hindu iconographic visuals in these music videos is a result of a unique intertextual competence shared by both the producers and the spectators of these texts. Interestingly, it is found that music videos that intentionally deviate from the prescribed cultural conventions depict a marked extra-coding in their visual expressions by their use of visuals from contrasting paradigmatic categories.