Hindu
Surya, the Sun God
Borne aloft by his own beams, the visible sun is the eye of three gods and the soul of everything that moves: an all-seer in the oldest hymns, and, a millennium and a half later, a chariot that is the machine of time itself.
Mortality, the underworld, judgement of the dead, rebirth.
Borne aloft by his own beams, the visible sun is the eye of three gods and the soul of everything that moves: an all-seer in the oldest hymns, and, a millennium and a half later, a chariot that is the machine of time itself.
A river that is a goddess and a goddess who is a river: she rises from the foot of a god, washes the moon in passing, and drowns seven of her own newborn sons with a smile.
The deified sacrificial fire of the daily rite, whom the whole Rig Veda begins by naming, carries the offering to heaven with his own mouth, so that the gods eat through him.
The title calls her the eater of time, but the oldest text that names her means only one thing by the word: black. Everything else, the tongue, the corpse underfoot, the eating of the hours, was laid over a battlefield goddess across a thousand years.
A tale stitched together over a thousand years: a Spring-and-Autumn widow who refused a graveside condolence becomes, by the Ming, the wife whose wailing brings down the Great Wall and lays bare her conscript husband's bones.
On a terrace before Mount Qi, the old strategist reads out a roster that drafts the war dead of both sides into a celestial civil service, a mass consolation of the slain that a Ming novelist invented some two thousand six hundred years after the war it crowns.
A wall and its dry ditch deified into a magistrate for the unseen. He keeps the census of the dead and can be whipped when rain fails. Ming edicts ranked him Earl to Prince, then stripped the titles a year later.
At the eastern sea a speaking beast told the Yellow Emperor of every spirit in the world. So a medieval telling claims, two thousand years after his age. The chart made from its words is lost.
A Lin shamaness of Meizhou died around 987 and rose, edict by edict, to Empress of Heaven. The sailors she guards still call her Mazu, their word for Grandmother.
King Yama, imported from India as sole ruler of hell, then broken by Chinese folk religion into the fifth of ten magistrates on a paperwork assembly-line for the dead.
Before his war with Heaven, Sun Wukong is a stone monkey born from a rock on Flower-Fruit Mountain. At a feast he weeps when he learns the ledger of the dead holds his name, and sails off to learn how not to die.
A boy-god who gave his own flesh and bone back to his parents to cancel the debt of his body, then rose again out of lotus stalks: reborn twice over, and by two rival religions.
The dead did not vanish. One soul rose bright into the air and one sank into the ground, and between them the living built a temple, seated a grandson in the ancestor's chair, and fed him until he spoke the blessing back.
The youngest daughter of the Flame Emperor drowned while playing in the water, and came back as a small bird carrying twigs and pebbles to fill in the sea that took her.
The archer won the one drug of no-death from the Queen Mother of the West. His wife stole it, fled to the moon, and left him with nothing to continue: the oldest telling is a theft, not a love story.
A jade-railed paradise in the northwest where four world-rivers rise, deathless trees grow and a stair of three tiers climbs out of the earth and into Heaven itself.
Before she was the jade-decked matron of the immortals, she was a cave-dwelling numen with a tiger's teeth and a leopard's tail, whistling on a western mountain and presiding over plague and ruin.
A king who let no bride reach her wedding bed, and the wild man the gods made out of clay to break him: how the two who first tried to kill each other became the one bond in the oldest story we have.
Goddess of desire and of war in a single body, the morning star who walked down alive into the land of no return: boldest of the great gods, and the most dangerous to love.
Dust for bread, mud for meat, and feathers for clothes: the great below of the Sumerians and Babylonians, a house with a bolt on the door and a queen who lets no one out.
Dying in his bed, Gilgamesh dreams he must stand before the gods and hear them decide what even he can keep.
A goddess so fearsome she was barely worshipped, married off to a different god in every century that told her tale, and finally borrowed by Greek sorcerers who never knew what her name once meant.
He kept his seat when the whole assembly of heaven stood, and the discourtesy cost him everything he was: the story of a plague-god who went down to be judged and came back a king of the dead.
The first being in the Babylonian cosmos was fresh water that did nothing but rest, until noise drove it to murder its own children. Then the poem killed it off the page.
The Sumerians never wrote the poem in which heaven and earth are torn apart. They only ever mention it, in the breath before a story begins: once, in the first days, the sky was prised off the ground and the two were shared out among the gods.
One short, forbidden tablet maps the Babylonian universe as six stone floors stacked in open air: three heavens above, three earths below, each a coloured slab laid down by a single arranging god. It is a diagram, not a story, and it argues with itself.
The war-god lies too tired to rise, until his own heart and seven restless weapons talk him into a slaughter no god can call off. Only his own minister can end it, and only by making war on a mountain instead of on men.
A household cat rears on its hind legs to lick the lamp-oil, wraps a towel round its head and dances: the domestic monster-cat of the Edo books, one branch of a single cat-spirit the sources never cleanly split.
For a thousand years an unmarried princess was scorched out of a tortoise-shell and sent to serve the sun goddess at Ise, where she might not name death, blood, or the Buddha.
The sun-goddess hands her newborn grandson a mirror and tells him to reverence it as her own spirit, then sends him down the Floating Bridge of Heaven to rule the earth: how the imperial line came down from the sky, and why its rulers die like flowers.
His name means "the cormorant-feather roof was not finished". Born at the edge of land and sea, Ugayafukiaezu stands between the gods of Japan's oldest chronicles and the human imperial line.
How the Japanese cosmos stacks in three storeys, and how gods and the dead move between them: a heaven above, a reed-plain between, a country of the dead below, and the doors, roads and one-way seals that join them.
Odin raises a dead wise-woman to make her speak, and she gives him the whole arc of the world: its making, his own hidden secrets, and the fire that ends it all.
Half her body the hue of living flesh, half of it corpse-blue, she keeps a hall where the table is called Famine and the bed is called Care: the daughter Odin cast into the mist to rule everyone who dies quietly.
Downward and northward, under a root of the world-ash, lies the cold country that takes everyone who dies quietly: nine lightless valleys, a river that clangs, a gold-roofed bridge and a gate so high a god must leap it.
Three maidens mighty in wisdom come up from a dwelling beneath the world-ash, cut marks into wood, and lay down the lives of the sons of men.
Izanagi followed his dead wife into the land of the dead to bring her home. He lit a single forbidden light to look at her, and fled a rotting queen: the myth that gave Japan its death, its cleansing rite, and its three brightest gods.
A shadowy country of rot and gloom where a single mouthful of the dead's cooking binds you forever: the underworld of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, and the day it was sealed off from the living.
Izanagi stirred the sea to a curd and raised the first island from a spear-tip. Then he lost his wife to the underworld and came back to wash the pollution off. From the water of his cleansing were born the sun, the moon and the storm.
Izanami spoke first at the pillar and bore the world a crooked child. Then she bore it right: the islands of Japan and the gods of sea, wind and fire. The last birth killed her and made her queen of the dead.
Reared in the marshes until his arm was strong, the falcon-son came for the throne his uncle stole: three ancient traditions, a slaughter, a tribunal and a war, and not one clean duel among them.
The Egyptian underworld is a road the sun and the dead must cross before dawn. A ram-headed sun is hauled by ropes through a valley of the dead, a serpent is staked with knives, and rebirth comes out of a monster's tail.
A love that began in the dark of the womb and did not end at the grave: the sister-wife who searched the whole earth for her murdered husband, and drew an heir from him after death.
A widow cuts a lock of her hair, puts on mourning, and walks out into the marshes to find a husband her brother has thrown to the water: the long search for the body of Osiris, and why no single ancient text tells it whole.
Truth, justice and the balance of the cosmos wear a single ostrich feather; against it the heart of the dead is weighed, and the gods themselves are said to live on her.
Eighty years of lawsuits and duels for a dead king's throne: an uncle and a nephew, a bench of gods that cannot make up its mind, and a mother who will not let her son lose.
A brother's fitted coffin, a body torn into pieces and scattered, and the magic of a wife who gathered them back: how the murdered king was made whole and got an heir from beyond death.
Once a year the god was carried out to die, hunted to his grave on the desert flats, and brought home again: what a royal treasurer, a Greek philosopher and a temple archive each saw of the drama, across seventeen centuries.
Ammit never lifts a claw and never speaks a line. The beast crouching by the scales in the Hall of the Two Truths does one thing only, and it is the worst thing the Egyptian afterlife could imagine.
Reed-pen in one hand and palette in the other, the ibis-headed god stands at the Great Balance and writes down whether a dead soul lived true: the recorder, the proclaimer, and the very word that ordered the world.
A black pig, a mighty storm, an eye put out: how the Egyptians told the wounding of Horus two ways at once, and why the healed eye became the very word for wholeness.
A carrion bird settles over a murdered god at Nedit, beats life back into him with her wings, and draws from the dead body a son sharp as a star: the strangest conception in Egyptian myth, and the making of an avenger.
A sun-disk cradled in the notch between two hills: the Egyptian sign for the horizon was also a place, the gated seam where sky, earth and the underworld meet and the sun goes in and out of the world.
She arches over the whole earth and holds it in her arms; the dead king is her firstborn, the stars are her thousand souls, and each night she swallows the sun to give it back at dawn.
The jackal on the desert ridge, black as fresh silt and embalmer's resin: the god who washed the entrails of Osiris, kept watch over the corpse through the night, and stood at the balance where the heart was weighed.
Storm-god, desert-lord and fratricide: the red god the Egyptians both needed and feared, murderer of Osiris and rival of Horus, who was never only a villain.
The falcon-headed heir who takes back a stolen throne: son of a murdered god, raised in a marsh, and vindicated before the assembled gods as the rightful king of Egypt.
The completed sun going down, whose name means both 'finished' and 'not-be': the Heliopolitan creator drawn as a pharaoh, who lifts the dead king to the sky and will one day draw the whole world back into the flood.
Weret-hekau, Great of Magic: the goddess who reassembled a murdered god, hid her son in a marsh, and wrung the secret name of the sun-god out of his own poisoned body.
Egypt worshipped him for two and a half thousand years and never once wrote his story down: the green mummiform king who absorbed a jackal god, rose as Orion, and lent his name to every vindicated corpse.
Beetle at dawn, blazing disk at noon, a tottering old man sinking into the west: the creator sun-god of Heliopolis who sails the sky by day and fights his way through the underworld by night.
Not a twilight but a doom: the wolf runs free, the serpent floods the land, a ship of dead men's nails breaks loose, and the gods ride knowingly to a battle the prophecy says they cannot win, on a field a hundred miles square.
The best of the gods, so fair that light streamed from him, at home in a hall nothing unclean could enter: the portrait of a god the myth was built to take away.
A god the whole world had sworn never to harm, a sprig of mistletoe no one thought to ask, and a blind brother's hand: how the north's best-loved god was murdered into Hel and the doom of the gods began.
Freyja rides to the battlefield in a chariot drawn by cats and carries home half the slain. She weeps red gold for a husband who wandered off, and men in love pray to her. She is the strangest and most renowned of the Norse goddesses.
Frigg knows the fate of every living thing and never speaks it. When the one doom she tried to bar comes for her son, all she can do is weep. She is the foremost of the goddesses, undone by a single overlooked shrub.
The handsome, fickle mischief-monger of the Aesir who drags the gods into ruin and then, more often than not, is the only one clever enough to haul them back out again.
The strongest of the gods wakes to find his hammer gone, and the only way to get it back is to put on a bridal veil: a portrait of the Aesir's giant-killer at his most terrifying and his most absurd.
Odin hanged himself on the world-tree and gave an eye to a well. In return he took the runes and the deepest draught of wisdom. He is the god who paid for knowledge in his own flesh.
The twice-born stranger who turns pirates into dolphins and a mother into her son's killer, the loosener of cares who is lethal to anyone who denies him.
He drew the darkness by lot, not by choice, and the Greeks feared his name so much they called him the Rich One instead.
The strongman son of Zeus strangled serpents in his cradle and cleaned the world of monsters, but the labour that made him a god began in the ruin of his own house.
Born at dawn, he had invented the lyre and stolen a god's cattle before nightfall. The trickster who talks his way onto Olympus and walks the dead down to Hades.