#Metamorphosis — The Mytheum

Woodblock-print line drawing of the goddess Nüwa: a human-faced woman with long flowing hair whose lower body is a coiling serpent tail wound among jagged rocks and licking flames, one arm raised overhead holding aloft a stone toward the sky she is mending.

Nüwa, the Creator Goddess

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.

5 minHuainanzi

A black-and-white Edo woodblock book-plate of monster-cats on a house veranda: a striped cat rears upright on its hind legs by a latticed shoji screen, one forepaw raised, beneath a round hanging lamp; behind it a cloth-draped cat dances and a long-tailed cat-creature crouches at right, the label reading "nekomata".

Japanese

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.

5 minYoshida Kenkō

Japanese

The Birth of the Islands

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.

6 minKojiki

A dark, misty underworld chasm. At the top of a rocky crag on the left, Izanagi stands in a long black robe with a sword at his hip, looking down; at the lower right a pale, white-robed woman with long streaming hair, Izanami, rises from the fiery dark of Yomi with her arms flung up toward him, spectral shapes and flame climbing the rocks between them.

Japanese

Izanagi's Descent to Yomi

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.

6 minKojiki

Japanese

Inari, God of Rice

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.

6 minNihon Shoki

A dim blue-green watercolour of the Even Pass of Yomi. Pale, ghostly nude figures climb and struggle up out of the murky underworld dark: a lit figure escapes toward the upper right while others reach and clamber below, half-dissolved into the gloom of the pass between the living and the dead.

Japanese

Yomi, the Land of the Dead

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.

7 minKojiki

Japanese

Izanagi, the Male Who Invites

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.

5 minKojiki

Japanese

Izanami, the Female Who Invites

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.

5 minKojiki

Egyptian

The Death and Return of Osiris

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.

6 minPlutarch

Egyptian

Osiris, Lord of the Dead

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.

5 minPyramid Texts

Icelandic Edda-manuscript illustration: Odin, in the shape of a great winged eagle, spews the stolen Mead of Poetry down into three ritual vessels ranged on a wooden frame, while the giant Suttung — also in eagle-shape — pursues at upper left and a stream of the escaped mead falls away below; a handwritten Icelandic caption box sits at top-left.

Norse

The Mead of Poetry

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.

6 minSnorri Sturluson

An illustration of Loki's punishment: the bound trickster lying beneath a serpent that drips venom on his face, his wife Sigyn beside him holding the catching bowl.

Norse

Loki, the Trickster

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.

6 minSnorri Sturluson

Raphael's fresco The Parnassus: Apollo seated at centre on Parnassus playing a stringed lyre, surrounded by the nine Muses and the great poets of antiquity, beneath a vaulted sky.

Greek

Apollo, God of Light and Prophecy

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.

5 minHomeric Hymn 3

Diana the huntress striding through a dark wood, a gold mantle slipping from her shoulders, reaching back to draw a white-fletched arrow from the quiver at her side while a red recurve bow hangs in her lowered hand. A lean white hound courses at her feet, and a lake glimmers through the trees behind her.

Greek

Artemis, the Huntress

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.

5 minHomeric Hymn 27

A black-figure Panathenaic prize amphora: the goddess Athena Promachos strides to the left between two columns, helmeted, brandishing a spear and holding a round shield, her aegis across her chest.

Greek

Athena, Goddess of Wisdom and War

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.

5 minHesiod

A youthful Bacchus reclining behind a stone table, bare-shouldered in a loose white robe and crowned with an autumnal wreath of grapevine leaves and dark grape clusters. He holds out a shallow footed glass of red wine in his left hand while the fingers of his right toy with the black bow of his sash. A large glass carafe of red wine stands at the lower left, and a heaped bowl of fruit — grapes, apples, a pear, a split pomegranate and figs — sits before him against a dark ground.

Greek

Dionysus, God of Wine and Ecstasy

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.

6 minEuripides

Marble statue of Hera as queen, standing veiled in a long chiton and himation with a diadem band across her brow, her raised right hand holding a sceptre and her extended left hand bearing a shallow offering dish.

Greek

Hera, Queen of Olympus

The goddess of marriage who ruled beside Zeus and warred against him in the same breath, dressing for seduction as a strategy of state.

6 minHomer

A severed, snake-haired head with wide staring eyes and mouth open in a scream, blood streaming from the neck, dark serpents writhing outward from the scalp against a green convex ground ringed by a gilt border — Caravaggio's Medusa, painted on a ceremonial parade shield, showing the Gorgon's face in the instant after decapitation.

Greek

Medusa and the Gorgons

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.

5 minHesiod

A nude young hero in a winged cap holds aloft the severed, snake-haired head of Medusa in his raised left hand and a curved sickle in his lowered right, his own gaze cast down and away from the trophy; the Gorgon's decapitated body slumps beneath his feet on an ornate pedestal against a plain pale wall — Benvenuto Cellini's bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence.

Greek

Perseus, Slayer of Medusa

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.

6 minPseudo-Apollodorus

A grey-bearded, muscular sea-god shown half-length and nude to the waist, a grey-green drape at his hips, gripping a three-pronged trident in his right hand. Behind his shoulder a ship's spar wound with rope and a carved trident emblem sit against a dark wooden ground, with the incised inscription "A·DORIA" at upper left.

Greek

Poseidon, Lord of the Sea

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.

5 minHesiod