The gods, heroes and monsters of the world’s great traditions

Why another mythology site

Because the ones that exist force a choice nobody should have to make: an attribute table with no stories in it, a fan wiki where a god's ancient cult and a superhero share a paragraph, or a scanned Victorian translation behind an advertising wall. This encyclopedia is written the way you would want a knowledgeable friend to tell it — the story first, the source named, the disagreements shown rather than smoothed over, and the film version kept in its own box.

Three commitments run through every page here.

• The ancient work is always named. Not "according to legend" but Theogony, Gylfaginning, Pyramid Text 600, the Kojiki, tablet XI of Gilgamesh. You should always be able to go and check.
• Conflicting versions are shown side by side. Ovid's Medusa and Hesiod's Medusa are different characters; Loki's parentage changes between sources; there is no single Egyptian creation story but at least three, from three cities that were arguing. Those arguments are the most interesting thing in the field and they are on the page.
• Modern retellings get their own section. They are discussed seriously — most readers arrive because of one — and never mixed into the ancient account.

Where to start if you are new

If you have never read any of this and want the most rewarding entry point, take one story rather than one god. The myth retellings are written at full length as stories, not summarised, and any one of them will teach you more about its tradition than a list of deities will. If you would rather start from the shape of a pantheon, each tradition hub explains how that mythology survived to reach us — which is a genuinely different question for Greece, for Iceland and for Sumer — before it introduces anybody.

If an adaptation sent you here — a series, a game, a book you have just finished — and you want to know how much of it was real, the comparison pages are built for exactly that question. They test the equations people assume: whether Ares and Mars are the same god (they are not, and Rome would have been offended), whether Hel resembles Hades, how many flood stories genuinely share a source.

The family trees

Every tradition here has an interactive family tree built directly from the parentage recorded on the individual figures' pages, which means the diagram and the articles can never drift apart. They also mark the lines the sources argue about instead of hiding them: where one text makes a goddess the daughter of a sky-god and another has her born from the sea, the tree shows a disputed edge and tells you which work claims what. Untangling a pantheon on a diagram is the fastest way to understand it, and most published trees achieve their neatness by silently choosing sides.

Questions people ask before they start reading

Are these stories suitable for children?

Much of the material is, and a large share of the traffic to any mythology site is school homework. But the sources are frank about violence, incest, mutilation and rape, and this site does not sanitise them into something they were not — it reports what the text says, without dwelling. A parent or teacher should assume a page is written for a general adult reader who does not already know the field.

Why are some traditions here and not others?

The eight covered are the ones with a substantial body of written sources that can be cited and checked, which is the standard this site is built on. Traditions preserved mainly through living oral practice deserve better than an outsider paraphrasing a secondary summary of them, so they are absent rather than badly served. That is a limitation of this site, not a ranking of mythologies.

Do I need to read them in an order?

No. Mythologies are not serialised, and the ancient audiences did not meet these stories in sequence either — a Greek heard them at festivals, on pots, in tragedies, in whatever order life supplied. The one exception is a tradition whose sources are structured as a single narrative arc, like the Norse material running from creation to Ragnarok, and those hubs say so and give a reading order.

How is this different from an encyclopedia entry?

An encyclopedia entry tells you what a god is associated with. A page here tries to tell you what it was like to have that god — what people asked of them, what was actually done at their sanctuaries, which stories a Greek or an Icelander or an Egyptian would have known, and where the record thins out into guesswork. That last part matters most: on any page here, the point at which the evidence runs out is stated rather than papered over.