Md. Asif Uddin
    Figura IIIThe unseen centreA presence known by what it bends.

    The divine presences

    Numina

    Eleven books, read as literature and as evidence. What people said the world was made of before anyone could check, written down — nearly always — long after they had stopped saying it, by someone with reasons of their own.

    I am interested in the seams: where a text contradicts itself and keeps both halves, where a god is plainly two older gods pressed together, where a monk writing in Latin decides what to do with a pagan king. The stories are worth the time on their own. The transmission is worth more.

    Md. Asif Uddin11 books · 55 chapters · 17 topics writtenDhaka · MMXXVI

    Contents

    1. Book IMesopotamian5 chapters · 5 writtenSumer, Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria · c. 3000 BCE – 1st c. CEThe oldest written myths we have, pressed into clay before anyone thought to call them myths.
    2. Book IIEgyptian5 chapters · 5 writtenThe Nile valley, from the Delta to Nubia · c. 3100 BCE – 4th c. CEThree thousand years of it, and no single version of anything — the contradictions are the theology.
    3. Book IIIHindu5 chapters · 5 writtenThe Indian subcontinent · c. 1500 BCE – presentA living tradition, still being told, where the same god is many gods and the cosmos is on its second-hundredth draft.
    4. Book IVChinese5 chaptersThe Yellow and Yangtze basins, and outward · c. 1200 BCE – presentMyth kept turning into history here — the gods become emperors, and the record is written as though they reigned.
    5. Book VGreek5 chaptersThe Aegean, Ionia and the wider Greek world · c. 800 BCE – 4th c. CEThe best-documented pantheon in the West, and the one whose gods behave worst.
    6. Book VIRoman5 chaptersItaly, and then the empire · c. 500 BCE – 4th c. CELess interested in where the gods came from than in what the state owes them, and on which day.
    7. Book VIIMesoamerican5 chaptersSouthern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras · c. 1500 BCE – 16th c. CEMaya, Mixtec, Zapotec and Olmec — read through the few books the burnings missed.
    8. Book VIIICeltic5 chaptersIreland, Wales, Scotland, Brittany and Gaul · c. 500 BCE – 15th c. CE (written down late)Told for centuries before anyone wrote it, and written at last by Christian monks.
    9. Book IXJapanese5 chapters · 1 writtenThe Japanese archipelago · 712 CE – present (as written)Written to justify a dynasty, and describing a world so full of kami that the count is left open.
    10. Book XNorse5 chapters · 1 writtenScandinavia, Iceland and the Norse settlements · c. 800 – 1300 CE (as written)A mythology that knows how it ends, written down two centuries after its people stopped believing it.
    11. Book XIAztec5 chaptersThe Valley of Mexico · 14th c. – 16th c. CEMexica myth, recorded mostly by the people who had just destroyed the state that told it.