COLLECTION
Stories connected by a shared idea.
His name meant "the hidden one", yet Amun of Thebes became king of the gods, the divine father of pharaohs and, for the Greeks, the Zeus Ammon whose desert oracle greeted Alexander as a son. One pharaoh had his name cut out of the temples, and a boy king put it back.
Read story 10 min readFor more than a thousand years Bastet was a lioness who nursed and guarded the king, and only later the cat goddess of Bubastis. Her festival filled the Nile with boats, and her temples filled with mummified cats.
Read story 10 min readWhen people plotted against the ageing sun god, he sent his Eye against them, and she became Sekhmet, the Powerful One. To save the rest of humankind, Ra flooded the fields at night with seven thousand jars of beer coloured red like blood.
Read story 10 min readAnubis kept watch over Egypt's cemeteries from the desert hill and wrapped the dead in linen, and Egyptians carved his name on their tombs in the prayer for a good burial. Yet few texts tell his deeds, and the only story that bears his name is a folk tale about two brothers.
Read story 12 min readRa left Thoth in his place in the night sky, and the Egyptians made the ibis-headed god the scribe of the gods. A Ptolemaic tale tells what became of the prince who stole the book Thoth wrote with his own hand.
Read story 11 min readIn the Hall of the Two Truths the dead denied forty-two sins, one before each judge, and watched their heart weighed against the feather of Maat while a monster waited. The papyri buried with them show the beam level: the heart had to balance, not to be light.
Read story 11 min readBefore there was sky or earth, Atum stood alone on the first mound in the waters of Nun, and from him came the nine gods of Heliopolis. The Egyptians told it in pieces, in spells written down over two thousand years, and other temples told the beginning in other ways.
Read story 9 min readFor eighty years the gods argued over who should inherit the throne of Osiris: his son Horus or his brother Seth. The only full telling, a papyrus of the 12th century BCE, plays the lawsuit as a comedy of tricks, sulks and letters.
Read story 11 min readIsis made a serpent from the old sun god's spittle and would heal him only for his secret name, and she drove the scorpions' poison out of a stranger's child and out of her own. The spells that tell these stories were recited over the sick, and her worship spread from the Nile to Rome.
Read story 12 min readWhen the goddess's face grew dark with anger, Kali sprang from her brow and drank the blood of a demon who multiplied with every drop that fell. Colonial writers made her the goddess of a cult of stranglers; the poets of Bengal call her Mother.
Read story 10 min readA fish that outgrew every pond, a boar that lifted the earth on its tusk, a dwarf who asked a king for three steps of land: again and again, Vishnu comes down into the world. Ten of these descents are famous, but the texts have never fully agreed on which ten.
Read story 10 min readKing Bhagiratha spent years in austerities to bring the heavenly river Ganga down to earth, and Shiva caught her in his hair so that her fall would not break the world. The old tellings disagree on much else, and the great relief at Mamallapuram may not show her at all.
Read story 11 min readWhen Daksha shut Shiva out of his sacrifice, his daughter Sati gave up her body rather than hear her husband insulted, and Shiva's fury wrecked the rite. Textbooks call him the destroyer; the texts that worship him say he makes, keeps and ends the world, and dances while he does it.
Read story 13 min readAs a child he leapt at the sun and broke his jaw; grown up, he crossed the sea in one leap to find Sita and carried a mountain of healing herbs to the battlefield. In India he is worshipped as the model celibate, but the Thai Ramakien gives him loves and sons.
Read story 12 min readBorn in a prison, raised among cowherds, he stole butter, danced on a serpent and held up a mountain, then taught a warrior on a battlefield and died by a hunter's arrow. His childhood is barely in the Mahābhārata, and the Bhāgavata, the fullest telling of his youth, never names Radha.
Read story 11 min readAfter a birth, Korean families set the first bowl of rice and seaweed soup before Samsin Halmeoni, the grandmother who gives children and guards them while they are small. How she won the post is sung only in Jeju: a flower contest in heaven, lost by the Dragon King's daughter.
Read story 10 min readA king had his seventh daughter shut in a box and thrown into a river because she was not a son, and she came back from the other world with the water that raised him from his bier. Korean shamans still sing her story at the rites for the dead, and count her as their ancestor.
Read story 9 min readA boy kills the Dragon King's son, gives his flesh and bones back to his parents to spare them, and returns in a body made of lotus. Two Ming novels made him famous, but the boy god had reached China centuries earlier, with Buddhism, from India.
Read story 11 min readHe beat the storm-calling Chiyou with the help of a drought goddess, and rode a dragon into the sky from the foot of Mount Jing. Sima Qian made him the first sovereign of Chinese history, but no inscription names him before the 4th century BCE.
Read story 10 min readIn Chinese popular religion the Jade Emperor rules heaven as an emperor rules his officials, and his birthday falls on the ninth day of the first month. Yet he is younger than Heaven itself: Song emperors gave him his titles in the 11th and 12th centuries, and in Daoist doctrine three gods still stand above him.
Read story 11 min readA courtier rode out with a red banner to fetch the thunder for his emperor, and caught it twice. Japan's oldest books are full of thunder and wind gods, but the pair with the ring of drums and the bag of wind came later, with Buddhist art from China.
Read story 10 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 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 read
