Across cultures and centuries, we keep telling them. Discover the gods, creatures, and extraordinary ideas that shaped our world.
A growing collection of myths and legends, with their origins, variations, and sources.
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THE STORY INDEX
A growing collection of myths and legends, with their origins, variations, and sources.
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 readNo text from the age of the pyramids says who carved the Great Sphinx or what it was called. More than a thousand years later, a prince dreamed in its shadow that the god would make him king if he freed it from the sand.
Read story 12 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 readTo free his mother from slavery, the bird Garuda stole the drink of immortality from the gods and never tasted it. The Mahābhārata tells how he became Vishnu's mount and the enemy of every snake.
Read story 9 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 readSavitri chose a husband who had one year to live, and when Yama came for him she followed the god of death and talked until he let him go. The epic tells it to praise a faithful wife, but what wins the day is her argument.
Read story 8 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 readA game of dice costs five brothers their kingdom and their wife's dignity, and eighteen days of war at Kurukshetra win it back. To win, they break the rules of battle, and the poem never lets them forget it.
Read story 12 min readA prince is sent into the forest for fourteen years, a demon king carries off his wife, and an army of monkeys helps him win her back. That is Vālmīki's Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa, one telling among hundreds that reach from the Tamil country and Bangkok to a Vietnamese tale of a yaksha king.
Read story 11 min readA poor man mends a swallow's broken legs and its gourd seed makes him rich; his greedy brother breaks a swallow's legs on purpose, and his gourds ruin him. Yet the story does not stop at Nolbu's ruin: the oldest copy and the great pansori libretto end with Heungbu taking his brother in.
Read story 10 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 tiger came to the door in their mother's clothes, and a brother and sister escaped up a rope from heaven to become the sun and the moon. Koreans place such stories in the days when tigers smoked tobacco, yet this one was first written down in the twentieth century, and the oldest full text we have read gives the sun to the brother.
Read story 11 min readIn a song of Jeju Island, a magistrate's runner named Gangnim went down alive to arrest the king of the dead, and the king kept him as his messenger. Television dressed Korea's messengers of death in black; in the rites they were soldiers, and a temple painting of 1676 shows them in red and green beside their horses.
Read story 11 min read
