COLLECTION
Stories connected by a shared idea.
Prometheus 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 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 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 readHuitzilopochtli's mother waits on a hill of sand for a son who never came back, and a Mexica king sent sixty sorcerers to find her. Her great statue was dug up in 1790, buried again more than once, and still divides scholars over whom it shows.
Read story 10 min readA ball of feathers fell on Coatlicue as she swept a hilltop, and her daughter Coyolxauhqui led four hundred brothers up the hill to kill her. The god was born armed and cut his sister down, and the Mexica built their great temple as the hill where it happened.
Read story 10 min readHe went down to the land of the dead for the bones of the first people, and he was the wind, the morning star and a king of Tollan who left his city in shame. The feathered serpent is far older than the Mexica, and the story that they took Cortés for him is younger than the conquest.
Read story 12 min readThe Mexica called him Titlacauan, "we are his slaves": an invisible god of night and fate who gave riches and took them back, and whose living image, a young captive, was honoured for a year and then sacrificed. He was neither the devil the friars made of him nor simply the evil twin of Quetzalcoatl, with whom he tore the earth goddess in two to make the world.
Read story 14 min readShe meets the Dagda in a river at Samhain, fights Cú Chulainn as an eel, a wolf and a heifer, and after the great battle of the gods foretells first peace, then the end of the world. Even the scribes who copied her stories could not agree whether her name meant great queen or phantom queen.
Read story 13 min readThey came to Ireland in dark clouds, won it in two battles at Mag Tuired and lost it to the sons of Míl, who left them the half of the island that lies under the ground. The Christian scholars who wrote the story down could not decide whether they had been gods, demons or men.
Read story 14 min readA daughter of the Jade Emperor let a jade cup fall, was born in a village of Nam Định and died at twenty-one, then kept coming back until the court that had tried to drive her out gave her a temple and a king's title. The fullest telling was written in the 1730s by a woman scholar, who, scholars broadly agree, reshaped a cult that already existed.
Read story 13 min readEvery year on the 23rd of the twelfth lunar month, Vietnamese families send their kitchen gods to heaven on a carp, with two men's hats and one woman's. Their tale, a wife and two husbands who died in one fire, was already written down in 1659, but the gods' names, their number and even the meaning of Ông Công have shifted since.
Read story 12 min readA man so poor that he and his father shared one loincloth hid in the sand, and the princess who found him there made him her husband. In the oldest full telling they become merchants and Buddhists, and their city rises in one night and vanishes in another, leaving a marsh behind.
Read story 12 min readFarmers prayed to Father Mars to keep sickness off their land, his shield fell from the sky in the reign of Numa, and Augustus built him a temple as the Avenger. The Romans told only a few stories of their own about him; most of the rest they borrowed from the Greek Ares.
Read story 12 min readIn a small round temple in the Forum, with no statue of the goddess in it, six priestesses kept the fire on which Rome's safety was thought to depend. They were chosen as little girls, bound for thirty years, and kept the flame until the end of the 4th century CE.
Read story 14 min readJanus kept the doors of Rome and of heaven, looked both ways at once and gave his name to January. Ovid tells him that Greece has no god to match him. Yet the Roman year did not always begin in his month.
Read story 18 min readHe lived in the fresh water beneath the earth, gave every god a task, ate the eight plants of Dilmun and, after a drinking contest, handed his divine powers to Inanna. To the Babylonians he was Ea, the god who warned the flood hero.
Read story 13 min readInanna went down through seven gates to her sister's realm, was turned into a corpse, and came back only by handing the demons a substitute: her husband Dumuzi. For a century it was read as a myth of the seasons, which the Sumerian poem never says.
Read story 10 min readMarduk killed the sea goddess Tiamat, split her like a fish and made heaven and earth from her body, and the poem was recited to his statue at Babylon's New Year festival. It never describes Tiamat as a dragon, and the famous relief said to show their fight portrays another god and another monster.
Read story 14 min readA giant stole Thor's hammer and would give it back only for Freyja as his bride, so Thor went to the wedding in her veil. The poem survives in a single manuscript, and Snorri, who tells so many stories of Thor, never mentions it.
Read story 11 min readA hall roofed with shields, a boar eaten every day and whole again by evening, dead warriors who cut each other down for sport and then sit down to drink, and the women who choose who will die. Most of the picture comes from Snorri Sturluson, writing in Christian Iceland around 1220. The older poems do not always agree with him.
Read story 13 min readKronos swallowed his children as they were born, until he was handed a stone in place of the youngest. That child, Zeus, grew up hidden on Crete and became the third king of heaven, though the Greeks never agreed on where he was hidden, or even on whether he was the youngest.
Read story 9 min readHe left an eye in Mímir's well, hung nine nights on a windy tree to take up the runes, and sends two ravens out over the world every day. The poem that tells of the eye never says it bought wisdom. That explanation is Snorri's.
Read story 12 min readThe wolf breaks loose, the serpent rises from the sea and Surtr's fire burns the world. Then the earth comes up green from the waves a second time. Two old poems tell it in glimpses; a Christian Icelander of the 1220s joined them into one story.
Read story 10 min readShe came to the gods from the Vanir, taught them seiðr, drives a team of cats, weeps red gold for a husband who never returns and takes half of the slain to her own hall. The tale of how she won her necklace survives in a single Icelandic manuscript from the end of the 14th century.
Read story 10 min read
