Transformation of form: human, divine, animal, natural.
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.
The rain-cloud-dark child who stole butter and danced on a serpent's hoods, grew into the statesman whose peace embassy failed, and then, as a friend's charioteer on the edge of a doomed battlefield, spoke the song that became scripture.
The self-existent one cast his seed into the primeval waters and was born inside a golden egg bright as the sun. After a year he split it into heaven and earth. He is Brahma, the four-faced progenitor of worlds and creatures.
The buffalo-demon had swallowed heaven and no god could stand against him. The gods poured out their fury as light, gathered like a burning mountain, and out of it stepped a single woman onto a lion. She is the one Goddess in whom all goddesses are gathered.
The braided-haired archer of the oldest hymns drank the world-poison to save creation and burnt three flying cities with a single arrow. He sits ash-covered on Kailasa as the great ascetic, destroyer and healer in one body.
The god who measured the whole universe in three strides, then bound himself to it forever by a promise: whenever order fails and wickedness grows strong, he takes visible shape and is born, age after age, to set virtue back on her seat.
One ruler had the father executed for failing at the flood and in the next breath set the same charge on his son; between the two men lie power denied to the father then given to the son, a son born from his father's body, and three conflicting accounts of who killed Gun.
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.
In the moon an exiled woman keeps a white hare that pounds the elixir of immortality. Yet the oldest moon riddle names no hare at all and may mean a toad.
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.
The moon's cold lady was not always a lady, and not always called Chang'e. Before the jade palace and the tender wife, she was a name in flux and a creature crouched on the lunar face.
The nephew of the Jade Emperor, famous for the eye in his forehead and the hound at his heel: except that in the two novels that made him, he catches his quarry with ordinary sharp sight and a borrowed mirror, and the third eye is nowhere in the text.
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 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 waters had swallowed the hills and were climbing towards heaven, and the father who tried to wall them out failed and died for it; only his son, cut from the same body, found the way to let the flood run home to the sea.
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.
Serpent-bodied and human-faced, she patted the first people out of yellow mud, then smelted five-coloured stones to patch a sky that had split from pole to pole.
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.
Two gods stand on a bridge above a formless sea, lower a jewelled spear into the brine and stir until it curdles: how the first island rose from the drippings, and how a botched courtship had to be done over before Japan could be born.
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 rich man shot arrows at a rice-cake for sport, and the wasted rice rose up as a white bird and flew to a mountain where rice began to grow: the founding legend of Japan's most-worshipped kami, whose name means the rice becomes.
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.
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.
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.
How poetry got into the world: a murdered sage, a mead brewed from his blood, and the god who slept three nights with a giant's daughter to steal it, then left her to grief.
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 newborn who burst his swaddling bands to claim the lyre, the bow and the truth of Zeus, then killed a dragon to found the oracle that spoke for him.
The small child who climbed onto her father's knee and asked for a bow, eternal maidenhood and all the mountains in the world, then took them.
She was born from her father's skull in full armour, spear already levelled, and the whole of Olympus reeled at the sight of a daughter equal to Zeus.
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.
The goddess of marriage who ruled beside Zeus and warred against him in the same breath, dressing for seduction as a strategy of state.
A face no one could look at and live, and a hero who beat it by refusing to look. The only mortal monster in a family of immortal ones, killed in her sleep.
Locked in a bronze cell, cast to sea in a chest, sent for a head no man could look at and live. The hero who won by never looking, and killed his grandfather by accident.
He drew the grey sea by lot and never forgave a slight, splitting rock with his trident to raise storms, drown heroes and shake the earth itself.
