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.
11 books · 55 chapters · 2 topics written
- Book IMesopotamianSumer, 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.5 chaptersnothing written yet
- Book IIEgyptianThe 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.5 chaptersnothing written yet
- Book IIIHinduThe 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.5 chaptersnothing written yet
- Book IVChineseThe 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 chaptersnothing written yet
- Book VGreekThe 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.5 chaptersnothing written yet
- Book VIRomanItaly, 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.5 chaptersnothing written yet
- Book VIIMesoamericanSouthern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras · c. 1500 BCE – 16th c. CEMaya, Mixtec, Zapotec and Olmec — read through the few books the burnings missed.5 chaptersnothing written yet
- Book VIIICelticIreland, 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.5 chaptersnothing written yet
- Book IXJapaneseThe 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.5 chapters1 topic
- Book XNorseScandinavia, 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.5 chapters1 topic
- Book XIAztecThe Valley of Mexico · 14th c. – 16th c. CEMexica myth, recorded mostly by the people who had just destroyed the state that told it.5 chaptersnothing written yet