WORLD MYTHOLOGY

From indigenous tales to classical legends, here are myths and folk stories and how they have been written, read and collected, their common features and what they tell us. There are creation myths like the Dreamtime from Australia, Seven Generations of the Age of Gods from Japan, Marduk: The Killing of the Goddess from Mesopotamia, the Cosmic Egg from Finland, the Vedic creation myth from India, the Aztec creation myth from Mexico, the creation of the world from Wyandot North America and the Alaskan peoples, the universality of the serpent in world mythologies and the origin of fire and light. There are great floods like Noah and the Ark, cosmology like the Sky Ladder, Sun and Moon, tribal gods and stories of gods and men like Poseidon, Achilles, Zeus and his thunderbolts, the Trojan War, marrying mortals, Celtic gods, Mount Olympus, Vishnu and his Avatars and medicine people and dogon and Celtic shamanism. There are legendary heroes and fantastical creatures, vampires, demons and spirits and how honey gave the antelope their colours (South Africa). There are the tricksters like the coyote and Reynard the fox and epics like Beowulf, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Mabinogion and Gilgamesh. Death and the afterlife, blurring history and legend like the founder of the Inca dynasty and King Arthur and finally vision quests, divination and fortune telling, witchcraft and ancestor worship from around the world. Superb introduction with short pieces and mono illus. 256pp, softback.