I’ve always liked the Marduk and Tiamat myth. So old school…
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All of Jeff Noon’s books are Orpheus and Eurydice, f’rinstance.
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When humanity harnessed the power of fire we opened the door to such incredible technology and advancement, so I’m a big fan of all the myths that relate the story of somebody stealing fire from the gods for our use. I think my favourite is the Haida version, with the trickster Raven bringing the Sun to us. I live in the rainy PNW, and I love local indigenous art, so it all comes together nicely. Plus, I love clever crows.
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Off topic for the thread, but I also live in the PNW and also love clever crows. Just the other day I noticed a crow that had dropped a nut or something hard like that (it looked like a walnut, but I’m not sure) into the street and then waited for a car to run it over. Amazing.
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In the southern hemisphere the moon is rotated a fair amount. The rabbit is easy to spot. In the northern hemisphere it’s a face.
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Ah! So that’s where that password came from.
(Safe to say now, since the employer in question imploded)
Speaking of the Popol Vuh, I was quite amused by the Pus Master. I also liked the Corn People.
There used to be a magazine called Motorbooty and one year (1994?) they had a 12-month calendar with different creation myths (or accounts, if you prefer). It was the first I’d ever heard of Yakub or Lilith.
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…Luke and Leia…
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Actually, I had to make up my own myths in a high school project. I had a ton of fun with. Explained why the ocean was salty, origins of war, era of love where gods and humans intermingles and the plethora of demi-gods, origins of man, etc. Great fun.
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I’ve never been able to see the face, even though I’ve always lived in the northern hemisphere. I do see the rabbit rotated at kind of an awkward angle, though.
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The Aztec myths are craaazy, I’ve always been particularly fascinated by the story of Coyolxauhqui, but I can’t seem to find a full version right now.
Seeing the stone depicting her broken body always made it so much more “real”.
I fully approve of this comment.
My favorite thing about the RPG Runequest (or Empire of the Petal Throne for that matter, although it comes across better in the books than the game) was the complex, well put together Gloranthan mythology that underpinned the whole thing. I am soooo looking forward to my kickstarted, massive, multi-hundred page Guide To Glorantha which I will read for pleasure since I don’t game anymore.
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That was quite beautiful. Thank you.
You just reminded me of the Magazine that I subscribed to in my high school/college years, Parabola (The Magazine of Myth and Tradition).
Hard for me to narrow it down, but I’d like to present the following in case anyone wants to brush up:
First of all, the clearing houses:
Sacred Texts .com, which offers the religious and spiritual texts of dozens of cultures
Encyclopedia Mythica, an exhausive collection of world myths and folklore
The Joseph Campbell Foundation presenting the ideas of the man who charted the common threads to all of them.
Here’s the Sacred Texts page on European myths: Celtic, Norse, Greek, Persian, Arabic, Slavic…
Greco-Roman materials from the same source
A nice reference on Chinese mythology from Project Gutenberg.
Africa, courtesey of Encyclopedia Mythica.
If America isn’t too young for your mythological tastes, here’s some American folklore.
Or, if you want to go pre-Columbian, here’s a good site for Native American studies that actually recognizes that there were several hundred cultures, rather than just “Indians”.
Please feel free to add your own…
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As a kid I loved myths - I have a copy or two of the Golden Bough, the White Goddess, the Egyptian Book of the Dead and so on and so forth - and one year, at a weekly market’s magazine remainder stall, I started to find copies of Man Myth and Magic, which was an encyclopedia sold in weekly installments in magazine format. Since they were remainders (if that’s a word in the US - they are books which are sold at far less than the cover price because the store couldn’t shift them, possibly illegally w/o telling the publisher) the magazine run was not complete and they did not appear in order. So, for example, I would learn about every piece of myth and or magic that began with “R” but nothing which began with “N”. Now it all seems so much easier.
Watching the various bits of the interwebs learn and share myths as they come up in popular culture is fun. As an example, as the Mighty Thor films started up, the fanfiction community was cheered to learn that, in order to slow down some building work a giant was doing with his stallion, Loki once got it on with a horse, got pregnant and gave birth to Sleipnir.
So I’ll go with that one as today’s favorite myth.
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If we’d had this swift and decisive moderation back in the day, we might have avoided all this sectarianism…
Awwww, man, I used to love Runequest.
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Me too!
