#Sacrifice — The Mytheum

The Victory Stele of Naram-Sin: a tall pink-sandstone monument carved in relief. The Akkadian king Naram-Suen, wearing a horned helmet of divinity and carrying a bow and spear, climbs a wooded mountain above his soldiers, who advance in file; his defeated enemies fall, flee and beg beneath him, and sun-and-star glyphs of the gods shine over the peak.

The Curse of Agade

A king took axes to the god's own house, packed the temple's gold into leather bags, and loaded it onto ships. So the poets, four centuries after the city fell, explained why Agade vanished from the earth.

6 min'The cursing of Agade'

A striding, roaring lion in molded glazed brick — tawny mane, cream body, tail curling up behind — walking left to right across a turquoise-blue field bordered above and below by bands of ochre brick, from the Processional Way of Babylon.

Mesop.

The Akitu: Babylon's New Year Festival

For eleven days each spring the priests of Babylon washed a god, stripped a king of his crown and slapped him until he wept, then carried the whole company of the gods out through the glazed gate to renew the year.

8 minF. Thureau-Dangin

A Yamato-e album leaf in the bird's-eye style: two Heian courtiers in yellow robes seated in the autumn grasses beside a brushwood fence at the Nonomiya shrine in Sagano, gold cloud-bands drifting across the scene, and within a green-floored veranda screened by black lattice a court lady reclines in a diamond-patterned robe beside a red curtain-stand — the shrine-retreat where the Ise priestess and her mother waited before the journey to the Grand Shrine.

Japanese

The Saiō: The Imperial Priestess of Ise

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.

8 minNihon Shoki

A quiet ink-and-colour painting of the two primordial deities on a golden cloud-bridge in the high heaven, the standing Izanagi in a gold-patterned white robe holding the heavenly jewelled spear and the kneeling Izanami in white over a red under-robe beside him, the pale primordial sea stretching below them and a wave-fringed shore appearing at the lower right, evoking the sanctioned coming-down between the upper tiers of the three-storey cosmos.

Japanese

The Three Realms: High Heaven, the Central Land, and Yomi

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.

8 minKojiki

Egyptian

The Mysteries of Osiris at Abydos

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.

8 minIkhernofret Stela

An 18th-century Icelandic manuscript illustration of the binding of Fenrir: at right the crowned god Týr, sword raised in one hand, his other hand thrust into the jaws of the great wolf, which bites down on it; the wolf Fenrir crouches at centre; at left a second crowned god of the Aesir holds a spear and a curved fetter; a handwritten caption box sits at the upper right.

Norse

Tyr, God of the Oath

The boldest of the Aesir laid his sword-hand in a wolf's jaws to bind a doom he could not defeat, and lost it: the god who kept a pledge he knew was false.

5 minSnorri Sturluson

Norse

The Binding of Fenrir

A wolf the gods reared at home, two iron chains he snapped like kindling, and a ribbon of six impossible things: how the Aesir caught the beast fated to kill Odin, and what it cost the one god brave enough to feed him.

6 minSnorri Sturluson

Line engraving of the three nude sons of Bor — Odin, Vili and Ve — straining upward to raise the vaulted mass of the slain giant Ymir's body into the sky-dome above them, standing on rocky ground over waves with mist and flame swirling at either side.

Norse

Creation from Ginnungagap

Before earth or heaven there was a yawning gap, and on either side of it fire and ice: how the first giant quickened between them, and how the world was built from his murdered body.

7 minPoetic Edda

Norse

Freyr, Lord of Plenty

He climbed into a seat that was not his, looked out over all the worlds, and fell so hard for a giant's daughter that he gave away the one sword that could have saved him: the Vanir god of the fruitful season, lord of the elves, and the most renowned of the gods you called on for peace.

6 minPoetic Edda

A 19th-century wood-engraving of the world-ash Yggdrasil seen whole: an eagle perched at the crown among the upper branches with four stags browsing the foliage, the central world encircled by the rainbow Bifröst and a ring of water, and the serpent Níðhöggr coiling among the exposed roots at the foot of the tree.

Norse

Yggdrasil, the World Tree

The great ash that binds the worlds is not a serene axis but a creature in perpetual pain: gnawed above, rotting within, torn from below, and still standing green over the well where the Norns pour their clay.

8 minPoetic Edda

A romantic pen-and-ink drawing of Odin on his night-ride: the god in a wide-brimmed hat and cloak riding down toward the shadowy gate of Hel, his spear lowered.

Norse

Odin, the Allfather

He hanged himself on the world-tree and gave an eye to a well, and in return he took the runes and the deepest draught of wisdom: the god who paid for knowledge in his own flesh.

6 minPoetic Edda

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

An engraving of a colossal, heavily muscled Hercules standing frontally, the Nemean lion-skin worn as a hood over his head and draped down his left side, the knotted olive-wood club resting over his right shoulder; small background vignettes show his combats with Antaeus, Cacus and Achelous in a classical landscape.

Greek

Heracles, the Greatest Hero

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.

6 minPseudo-Apollodorus