THE STORY INDEX
A growing collection of myths and legends, with their origins, variations, and sources.
In 637 a monk told the Japanese court that a roaring star was no meteor but a tengu, a "heavenly dog". Over the next thousand years the tengu became a kite that fooled the pious, the fallen soul of a proud monk, a mountain spirit that carried children away, and at last the red-faced, long-nosed figure still honoured on Kurama and Takao.
Read story 13 min readTwo eagles sent by Zeus were said to have met at Delphi, and there Apollo shot a she-dragon and took over an oracle that had belonged to Earth. For centuries a woman of Delphi gave his answers from a tripod, and whether a gas from the rock helped her is still argued.
Read story 14 min readA quarrel among three goddesses, a queen carried off from Sparta and ten years of siege: no single ancient poem tells the whole Trojan War. Homer's Iliad covers about fifty days of it, and the wooden horse is not among them.
Read story 14 min readIzanagi followed his dead wife into Yomi, the land of the dead, broke the one thing she asked of him and saw what she had become. He fled with her army behind him and sealed the pass with a boulder, and the words they spoke across it set how many people die and are born each day.
Read story 10 min readZeus swallowed her mother, and Athena came out of his head in full armour while Olympus shook. She went on to win Athens from Poseidon with an olive tree, and to punish a girl in Lydia who wove as well as she did.
Read story 12 min readDaedalus built the labyrinth on Crete, then wings of feathers and wax to escape the king who held him there. He told his son to fly neither too high nor too low, and the sea where Icarus fell still bears his name.
Read story 13 min readOrpheus sang his way into the land of the dead and won his wife back on one condition, and a few steps from the light he looked back. That loss is first told by Roman poets; several Greek writers before them speak as if he brought her home.
Read story 12 min readHera's trick at his birth put Heracles in the service of a lesser cousin, and the labours he did for him ended with his rise to the gods. Yet the oldest poems never count the labours, and in the fullest Greek account the oracle orders ten.
Read story 11 min readHades carried Demeter's daughter down to the dead, and her mother kept the seed in the ground until the gods gave her back. But Persephone had eaten a pomegranate seed below, so for part of every year she must return, and the oldest telling never says that part is winter.
Read story 12 min readA prince from Troezen sailed to Crete among the young Athenians sent to the Minotaur, came out of the labyrinth by Ariadne's thread, and forgot to change his sail on the way home. Plutarch, who tells the story most fully, also reports a Cretan version in which the Minotaur was a general named Taurus.
Read story 12 min readThe gods made the first woman as the price of fire, and she lifted the lid of a great jar that let countless evils loose among men. In Hesiod it is a storage jar: it became a box in 1508, in a book by Erasmus.
Read story 11 min readPrometheus tricked Zeus over the shares of a sacrifice, stole back the fire Zeus withheld in a fennel stalk, and was chained where an eagle came every day for his liver. In the oldest poems he is the champion of humankind, not its maker: the clay came later.
Read story 11 min readIn the Avesta the pairikā is a demoness who flies between earth and sky until the star Tishtrya binds her; in Persian poetry the parī is the measure of all beauty. Europe met her through Galland's Arabian Nights and Thomas Moore's Peri at the gate of Eden, and her name sounds like "fairy", though the English word does not come from it.
Read story 10 min readRostam left an armlet for the child he might have, and rode home. Years later his son Sohrab marched into Iran to find him, and the two met in single combat without knowing each other.
Read story 11 min readTo free a blinded king from the demons of Mazandaran, Rostam rode the short road alone and met a lion, a desert, a dragon, a witch and the White Div on the way. He is the greatest hero of the Persian epic, yet the Avesta never names him.
Read story 11 min readFalsely accused by his stepmother, Prince Siyavash rode through a mountain of fire and came out unharmed, then chose exile over breaking his word and was killed in the land of his father's enemy. Ferdowsi did not invent him: the Avesta already remembers his murder, and Bukhara had songs of mourning for him.
Read story 12 min readA blacksmith whose sons were fed to a tyrant's serpents tore up the king's testimonial and raised his leather apron on a spear. The Persian kings' great banner was named after him, yet the historians who describe it speak of panther skins and jewels, not an apron.
Read story 9 min readShe raised an abandoned child in her nest on the Alborz, saved his wife and newborn son with her advice, and showed that son the branch that would kill a prince. Behind the Simurgh of Ferdowsi's epic stands an older bird of the Avesta, perched on a tree that holds the seeds of every plant.
Read story 11 min readIn the Avesta he is a dragon with three heads; in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh he is a king whose shoulders sprout two black serpents that must be fed every night. When Fereydun brings him down at last, an angel stops the final blow, and Zahhak is left in chains inside Mount Damavand.
Read story 11 min readAt the beginning, says a hymn of Zarathustra, two spirits made their choice: one chose the truth, the other the lie. Later books tell how the evil one broke into the world, and how it will end in a river of molten metal and a world made new.
Read story 11 min readUnder Yima, says the Avesta, no one grew old or died; the day Jamshid rose into the sky on his throne, says the Shahnameh, was the first New Year. Then he called himself the maker of the world and lost his glory, and in the epic the famous cup of Jamshid is not his at all.
Read story 11 min readMithra has a thousand ears and ten thousand eyes, and he rises over the mountains before the sun to see who breaks their word. Zoroastrians still honour him, but the Roman Mithras who killed a bull, and the claim that he was born on 25 December, are another story.
Read story 10 min readTwo brothers shot down a bird who claimed to be the sun, went down to the lords of death who had killed their father, beat them at their own game and rose as the sun and the moon. The K'iche' book that tells it was written in the 1550s, but Maya artists had been painting the twins for centuries.
Read story 15 min readBefore the first sunrise, the gods of the K'iche' Maya made animals, then a body of mud, then people of wood, and only at the last attempt people of maize who could speak and give thanks. The book that tells it was written in the 1550s, after the Spanish conquest, and survives only in a priest's copy made in the early 1700s.
Read story 14 min read
