Mesop.
Gilgamesh and Enkidu
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.
Loss, lament, and its consequences.
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.
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.
One chronicle has the young prince weep that his father must want him dead; the other has the emperor beat his breast and cry "Oh! Our son!" Two eighth-century courts, eight years apart, reading a single father and son in opposite keys.
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.
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.
He followed his dead wife into the land of the dead to bring her home, 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.
Born from a washed nose, he wept the green mountains bare and was cast out of two worlds before he ever drew a sword on the eight-headed serpent: the most turbulent of the Japanese gods, expelled troublemaker turned culture-hero of Izumo.
He stirred the sea to a curd and raised the first island from a spear-tip, then 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.
She spoke first at the pillar and bore the world a crooked child, then bore it right: the islands of Japan and the gods of sea and wind and fire, until the last birth killed her and made her queen of the dead.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
She rides to the battlefield in a chariot drawn by cats and carries home half the slain, weeps red gold for a husband who wandered off, and is the goddess men pray to when they are in love: the strangest and most renowned of the Norse goddesses.
She knows the fate of every living thing and never speaks it, and when the one doom she tried to bar comes for her son, all she can do is weep: the foremost of the goddesses, undone by a single overlooked shrub.
A caged inventor reasons that if the sea and the land are watched, the sky at least lies open. He builds his son a pair of wings, and gives him one rule to keep him alive.
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.
A prince who chose the killers' road, unwound a thread through the dark to end a monster, and forgot a single sail. The founder Athens made in its own image, remembered for what he built and what he abandoned.