Hindu
Sati, Shiva's First Consort
The good wife whose name became English for a rite she never performed: not a widow on a pyre, but a goddess who chose her own father, then unchose the body he gave her.
Loss, lament, and its consequences.
The good wife whose name became English for a rite she never performed: not a widow on a pyre, but a goddess who chose her own father, then unchose the body he gave her.
A Wuling fisherman follows a stream into a corridor of falling peach-blossom and out the other side of history, where refugees from a fallen empire have kept their gentle world for six hundred years: he leaves, marks the road, and can never find it again.
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.
She promised to marry the horse that brought her father home. From the killing that followed came silk and the mulberry tree, and centuries later a goddess.
A love story assembled over seventeen centuries: two idle stars in a Zhou complaint poem become longing lovers under the Han, then a married couple punished with a single night's reunion a year, ferried across the Silver River on a bridge of magpies.
A gentle one-horned beast seen only under a true king. Its capture on a hunt west of Lu forms the closing entry of the Spring and Autumn Annals.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.