Chinese
Sun Wukong, the Monkey King
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.
Cunning, deception, the trickster archetype.
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 storm-bird has stolen the writ of fate and made his own word law, and every god the assembly names to fight him refuses. The recovery is a hunt won not by strength but by a trick that turns the thief's own magic dead.
The war-god lies too tired to rise, until his own heart and seven restless weapons talk him into a slaughter no god can call off. Only his own minister can end it, and only by making war on a mountain instead of on men.
Three storm-gods, three chaos-serpents, three ways to win. Indra and Zeus burn their dragons with the thunderbolt, but the god of Izumo does something neither of them does: he pulls a sword out of the dead beast.
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.
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.
The sun-goddess bolts herself inside a stone door and the world goes black; it takes a forged mirror, a ribald dance and eight hundred myriad gods laughing in the dark to trick the light back out.
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.
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.
A mirror forged to trap the sun, a sword drawn from a monster's tail, and a string of curved jewels: how three objects became the proof that Japan's emperors were born to rule.
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.
Eighty years of lawsuits and duels for a dead king's throne: an uncle and a nephew, a bench of gods that cannot make up its mind, and a mother who will not let her son lose.
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.
Storm-god, desert-lord and fratricide: the red god the Egyptians both needed and feared, murderer of Osiris and rival of Horus, who was never only a villain.
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.
A giant buries the thunder-god's hammer eight leagues down and names his ransom: the goddess Freyja for his bride. So the strongest of the gods is bound into a bridal veil and sent to a wedding he means to end with a killing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 strongest of the gods wakes to find his hammer gone, and the only way to get it back is to put on a bridal veil: a portrait of the Aesir's giant-killer at his most terrifying and his most absurd.
The gods pooled their gifts to build one flawless girl, then handed her to mankind as a punishment; when she lifted the lid of a jar, only Hope stayed behind.
He beat a giant with a lie and a sharpened stake, then threw it all away for the pleasure of hearing the monster learn his name.
Born at dawn, he had invented the lyre and stolen a god's cattle before nightfall. The trickster who talks his way onto Olympus and walks the dead down to Hades.
The god who overthrew his father by cunning and force, and then made himself the guardian of oaths.