Gilgamesh and Enkidu on a mud-brick terrace above ancient Uruk at golden hour
What are the mythologies? They are the great bodies of sacred story through which every people on earth has tried to answer the oldest questions: where the world came from, why we suffer and die, what the gods ask of us, and how a human being might become something more than they were at birth. From the clay tablets of Mesopotamia to the songs of the Yoruba diviners, the world mythologies are humanity’s first library of the soul.
Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness and later schooled in the Baptist church, I was taught to read scripture as history and nothing more. The stories of other peoples, if they were mentioned at all, sat in a separate box marked “mythology”, and the word was rarely meant kindly. It took the biggest crisis of my life, and my return to scripture through Neville Goddard, before I understood that the two boxes had always belonged on the same shelf.
I do not read these stories as a record of what once happened on a particular riverbank or mountaintop. I read them as vessels that carry meaning, shaped by sages who chose story on purpose, because a truth placed inside a narrative survives conquest, translation and the collapse of empires. Our work is to unwrap them with care. What we find inside is never only about Osiris or Odin or Gilgamesh: it is a description of you, and of a power in you that has slept for far too long.
This page is for those who still hold the Bible as sacred but have grown weary of how it was taught, or of the hypocrisy they have seen in religious institutions. It is not an attack on anyone’s faith. If you read scripture literally, I honour that, because it is where most of us begin; but the literal reading is the first rung of the ladder, not the summit, and in time it gives way to the inner reading, just as the elder serves the younger.
The word comes from the Greek mythos, a word or story. “Mythology” means both the body of myths belonging to a people and the study of those stories.
In the study of religion, a myth is not a false story. It is a sacred narrative that a community holds to be true in its deepest sense: an account of origins, of the gods or ancestors, of how the world was ordered and how human beings should live within that order. That is how I use the word throughout this page, neutrally and with respect.
Myth shades into legend, which attaches wonders to a particular person or place, and into folklore, the wider stock of inherited tales and customs. And many of these traditions are not finished: Hindu, Shinto, Yoruba and many Indigenous traditions are living religions, whose stories are still prayed, sung and danced.
No list can be complete. What follows is a respectful introduction to twelve traditions people most often ask about, through the texts and figures by which they are best known.
Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates in what is now Iraq, gave us the oldest written stories in the world. The Sumerians, and after them the Babylonians and Assyrians, honoured gods such as Enlil of the air, Enki (Ea) of wisdom and the sweet waters, and Inanna (Ishtar), whose descent into the underworld is one of the earliest journeys into death ever written down.
Its masterpiece is the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, befriends the wild man Enkidu; when Enkidu dies, the grieving king sets out to find the secret of eternal life and meets Utnapishtim, who survived a great flood by building a vessel at the command of the god Ea. The same flood is told in the older Babylonian poem Atrahasis, and in a Sumerian version whose hero is called Ziusudra. I explore how closely these accounts mirror Genesis in is Gilgamesh in the Bible?
Egyptian religion unfolded over some three thousand years, with many local cults and creation accounts; at Heliopolis the world emerged from the primordial waters of Nun through Atum. Its oldest religious writings, the Pyramid Texts, were carved inside royal tombs in the twenty-fourth century BCE, and later funerary works such as the Book of the Dead guided the soul through the judgement of the underworld.
Its best-known story is that of Osiris, Isis and Horus. Osiris, the good king, is murdered by his brother Set; the faithful Isis searches for his body, restores him, and conceives their son Horus, who grows up to contend with Set for the throne. Osiris becomes lord of the dead. The fullest continuous telling we have was written by a Greek, Plutarch, in On Isis and Osiris. What Egypt came to mean in the Bible is a story of its own, which I trace in what does Egypt represent in the Bible.
Greek mythology reached its classic written form in the poems attributed to Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and in Hesiod’s Theogony, a genealogy of the gods composed around 700 BCE. Hesiod tells how the Olympians under Zeus overthrew the Titans; Homer sings of Achilles’ wrath and Odysseus’ voyage home.
But Greek myth lived as much in ritual and theatre as in books. At Eleusis, the story of Demeter and her daughter Persephone, carried into the underworld and returned each spring, became the centre of the most famous Mystery rites of the ancient world. In Athens, the tragedians staged the myths of Oedipus and Prometheus before the whole city at the festival of Dionysus.
The Romans identified many of their gods with Greek ones, so that Jupiter answered to Zeus and Venus to Aphrodite, while keeping deities of their own, such as Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings. Alongside the founding legend of Romulus and Remus stand two great literary works. Virgil’s Aeneid carries the Trojan prince Aeneas to Italy as the destined ancestor of Rome, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, completed around 8 CE, gathered hundreds of Greek and Roman myths of transformation into a single poem that shaped European art for two thousand years.
What we know of the gods of the Viking world comes mainly from Iceland, written down after the conversion to Christianity: the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, composed around 1220, and the poems of the Poetic Edda, preserved in a manuscript known as the Codex Regius from the later thirteenth century. Before that, they lived in the mouths of skalds, the poets of the chieftains’ halls.
The Norse cosmos hangs on the world tree Yggdrasil, which binds the nine worlds together. Odin, the all-father, gives an eye for wisdom and, in the poem Hávamál, hangs nine nights on the windswept tree, wounded by a spear, to win the secret of the runes. The story ends at Ragnarök, the doom of the gods, when the world is consumed, and then rises again, green and renewed, from the sea.
Hinduism is a living religion of extraordinary breadth, not one fixed mythology. Its oldest scripture, the Rigveda, is a collection of hymns composed in Sanskrit, generally dated to the second half of the second millennium BCE. The Upanishads that followed turned inward, teaching that the deepest self, atman, is one with brahman, the ground of all being.
The great epics carry the stories most people know. The Ramayana tells of Rama, his wife Sita and the devoted Hanuman; the vast Mahabharata contains the Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna counsels the warrior Arjuna on the field of battle. The Puranas tell of Vishnu and his avatars, of Shiva the great ascetic, and of the Goddess, Devi. One avatar, Matsya the fish, warns Manu of a coming flood and guides his boat to safety.
Chinese myth survives in fragments scattered across philosophical, historical and literary works, such as the Shanhaijing, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, rather than in one sacred epic. The creation story of Pangu, who grows between heaven and earth and pushes them apart, and whose body becomes the mountains, rivers and stars, first appears in writing in the third century CE in the work of Xu Zheng. The goddess Nüwa is said to have shaped humankind from yellow earth and to have mended a broken sky with stones of five colours. And when the waters rose over the land, it was Yu the Great who, by years of patient labour, dredged channels and led the flood back to the sea.
Japan’s myths were first set down in two imperial chronicles, the Kojiki (712 CE) and the Nihon Shoki (720 CE). In them, the divine pair Izanagi and Izanami stand on the floating bridge of heaven and stir the ocean with a jewelled spear; the brine that drips from its tip forms the first island.
Their most beloved episode concerns the sun goddess Amaterasu. Offended by her storming brother Susanoo, she hides in a cave and the world falls dark. The other gods hang a mirror on a tree outside, and the goddess Ame no Uzume dances until they roar with laughter; curious, Amaterasu peers out, glimpses her own radiance, and light returns. These stories remain bound up with Shinto, a living tradition.
The Celtic-speaking peoples left no writings of their own sacred lore, and the druids taught orally. What survives was written down centuries later, largely by Christian monks in Ireland and Wales. In Ireland, the Lebor Gabála Érenn (the Book of Invasions) tells of the successive peoples who took the island, among them the Tuatha Dé Danann, a race of gods. The Ulster Cycle gives us the hero Cú Chulainn and the cattle raid of the Táin Bó Cúailnge. In Wales, the tales known as the Mabinogion, preserved in fourteenth-century manuscripts, offer a world of otherworld kings and cauldrons that restore the dead to life.
The K’iche’ Maya of highland Guatemala preserved their sacred history in the Popol Vuh, written down in the K’iche’ language in Latin letters in the sixteenth century, after the Spanish conquest, and known to us through a copy made by the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez in the early 1700s. In it, the gods fail to make human beings from mud and wood before succeeding with maize. The Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, descend to Xibalba, the underworld, outwit its lords and rise again as heavenly lights.
The Aztecs, or Mexica, told of a succession of worlds, each called a Sun, destroyed in turn, and of the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl and the war and sun god Huitzilopochtli.
Africa holds hundreds of distinct peoples and traditions, and no single example speaks for a continent. Among the best known are those of the Yoruba of south-western Nigeria and neighbouring lands. The supreme being, Olódùmarè, works through the orishas, divine powers such as Obatala, Ogun, Shango and Yemoja. In one account Obatala descends from the sky on a chain to create dry land at Ile-Ife, the sacred city where human life began.
At the heart of Yoruba wisdom is Ifá, a system of divination associated with the orisha Orunmila, whose vast body of verses is memorised by trained priests. UNESCO has recognised the Ifá divination system as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, and Yoruba tradition lives on in Cuba’s Santería and Brazil’s Candomblé. The Akan of Ghana, meanwhile, tell of Anansi, the spider trickster.
“Indigenous mythology” is not one tradition but thousands, each belonging to a people, a language and a land. The Haudenosaunee tell of Sky Woman, who fell through a hole in the sky world and was caught by birds and set down on the back of a great turtle, on which the earth was then spread: Turtle Island. In Māori tradition, Tāne pushes apart his parents, sky and earth, to let in the light. Aboriginal Australians speak of what is often called in English the Dreaming, in which ancestral beings shaped the land and the law.
Many of these are living traditions, some knowledge is reserved for particular people or ceremonies, and the respectful path is to let the communities who carry them interpret their own stories.
The table below gathers eight of these traditions side by side. It is a starting point for comparison, not a summary of any tradition in full.
| Tradition | Region | Key texts or sources | Central figures | Signature theme |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mesopotamian | Ancient Iraq (Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, Assyria) | Epic of Gilgamesh, Atrahasis, Inanna’s Descent | Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Utnapishtim, Inanna, Enki | Mortality and the search for eternal life |
| Egyptian | Nile valley | Pyramid Texts, Book of the Dead, Plutarch’s On Isis and Osiris | Osiris, Isis, Horus, Set, Ra | Death, restoration and rightful order |
| Greek | Greece and the Aegean | Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Hesiod’s Theogony, the tragedians | Zeus, Athena, Demeter, Persephone, Odysseus | Fate, pride and the hero’s trials |
| Norse | Scandinavia and Iceland | Poetic Edda, Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda | Odin, Thor, Loki, Freyja | Sacrifice for wisdom, doom and renewal |
| Hindu | South Asia | Vedas, Upanishads, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas | Vishnu, Shiva, Devi, Krishna, Rama | Dharma and the self as one with the divine |
| Japanese | Japan | Kojiki (712), Nihon Shoki (720) | Izanagi, Izanami, Amaterasu, Susanoo | Divine origins and the return of light |
| Maya (K’iche’) | Highland Guatemala | Popol Vuh | Hunahpu, Xbalanque, the lords of Xibalba | Creation of humankind and victory over death |
| Yoruba | West Africa and the diaspora | Ifá verses (oral tradition) | Olódùmarè, Obatala, Orunmila, Ogun, Shango | Destiny, divination and the orishas |
Lay these traditions side by side and the same great themes keep surfacing. Resemblance does not prove a single source, but the recurrence is where the inner reading begins.
Creation myths tell how order arose from chaos: from the primordial waters of Nun, from the cosmic egg out of which Pangu grows, from the churned ocean of Izanagi’s spear, or from the spoken word. Genesis itself opens with darkness upon the face of the deep and a voice that says “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3, KJV).
Flood myths are found from Mesopotamia (Ziusudra, Atrahasis, Utnapishtim) to Greece (Deucalion and Pyrrha), India (Manu and Matsya) and China (Yu the Great). In each, an old world is washed away and a remnant survives to begin again. I read the ark of Noah as a state of consciousness rather than a wooden boat in the meaning of Noah’s Ark.
The dying and rising god appears in Osiris, in Persephone’s descent and return, in Inanna’s journey through the seven gates of the underworld, and in Odin hanging on the tree. These are not identical stories, yet the mystics saw in them a single teaching.
The hero’s journey was given its most famous modern form by the American scholar Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Campbell argued that hero stories across the world follow one underlying pattern, which he called the monomyth: a call to adventure, a departure, trials and a supreme ordeal, and a return bearing a boon for the community. Not every story fits it, but it opened the eyes of millions to the possibility that these tales describe something in us.
Two other types complete the picture: etiological myths, which explain why the seasons turn or a custom is kept, and trickster myths, of Loki, Anansi or the Yoruba Eshu, which remind us that wisdom often arrives by the side door.
The mystic Manly P. Hall, in The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928), argued that the gods of the old world were never meant to be taken as beings outside us. He wrote that “the vital forces of the universe were personified, becoming the gods and goddesses of the ancient mythologies” (The Ancient Mysteries and Secret Societies). And more pointedly still: “Mythology is nearly always the ritual and the symbolism of a Mystery school.” (The Ancient Mysteries and Secret Societies, Part Two)
That is a remarkable claim. It means the story of Demeter and Persephone was not simply a tale about the seasons; it was the script of an initiation, enacted at Eleusis so that the candidate might pass through death and return changed. Of the myth of the god who dies and rises, Hall wrote that it “is the key to both universal and individual redemption and regeneration” (Atlantis and the Gods of Antiquity). Our full guide to Hall’s great book is coming soon.
Neville Goddard said the same of scripture, and said it plainly. In his lecture “Questions and Answers 1948 Lessons” he taught:
“The Bible was written by intelligent men who used solar and phallic myths to reveal psychological truths. But we have mistaken their allegory for history and, therefore, have failed to see their true message.”
And in “A State Called Moses”:
“When you read scripture in the future, don’t think of it as records of myth or secular history, but glorious revelations of God as eternal states of consciousness, personified.”
Neville is not saying that scripture is “only” myth, nor that myth is lesser than scripture. Both the literal history and the surface story are the outer garment; the body within is a revelation of states of consciousness. This is the heart of the TrueCosmic reading. The great myths, like scripture, can be read as maps of inner transformation. The literal or historical reading is the first rung, honourable and necessary, but it gives way to the inner reading, as I explain in our complete guide to esoteric Bible interpretation.
Read this way, Osiris torn apart and restored is the self scattered among a thousand fears and gathered again by devotion, which is Isis. Gilgamesh, searching the ends of the earth for a plant of immortality, is every one of us looking outside for what can only be found within. Odin on the tree is the willing surrender of the old self in exchange for wisdom. The alchemists understood this too, as I explore in alchemy in the Bible.
When I came back to scripture after some twenty-five years away, I wandered down more than one dead-end alleyway before I settled on a single principle: that God is my own awareness, the I AM. Once that principle landed, the myths of the world stopped being rival religions and became a chorus, all singing of the same hidden power.
How do you actually use these stories, rather than simply admire them? Here is the way I approach any myth, from any tradition, as a living map.
This is a practice, not a trick. Think of a weaver at a loom. No tapestry appears in an afternoon. The weaver passes one thread at a time, row upon row, and for a long while the pattern is invisible, just a fringe of colour on the beam. Yet every pass is building it, and one day the picture stands complete. So it is with the Law: night after night, one assumption at a time, the pattern of your new life is being woven, long before you can see it.
Unwrapped this way, the myths cease to be curiosities and become a portrait of a power sleeping in you. Like the picture hidden in the threads, it is already there, waiting only to be seen.
The mythologies are the bodies of sacred story belonging to the world’s peoples: Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Norse, Hindu, Chinese, Japanese, Celtic, Mesoamerican, African traditions such as the Yoruba, and countless Indigenous traditions. Each explains origins, the gods or ancestors, death and the right way to live. In the study of religion, “myth” means a sacred narrative, not a false one, and many of these traditions are still living faiths today.
No one can say for certain, because people told stories long before writing existed. The oldest myths we can still read come from Mesopotamia, where Sumerian scribes recorded poems about gods and heroes, including early tales of Gilgamesh, and from Egypt, where the Pyramid Texts were carved in the twenty-fourth century BCE. Mesopotamian mythology is therefore usually named as the oldest written mythology in the world.
Mythology is the body of sacred stories; religion is the whole way of life around them, including worship, ritual, ethics, community and institutions. The two overlap, since every religion has its sacred narratives, but they are not the same. A person can study Norse mythology without worshipping Odin, while a Hindu or Yoruba practitioner lives the stories as part of an active faith.
Many early civilisations grew up beside great rivers and coasts, so devastating floods were a shared experience, and the Mesopotamian flood stories are closely related to one another. But the mystics saw more in it. A flood is the overwhelming of an old state of being, and the vessel that survives is the consciousness that holds to a new one. That inner meaning explains why the story speaks to every age, not only the age that first told it.
Not at all. Reading scripture for its inner meaning is ancient: Origen, one of the great early Christian teachers, taught that scripture has a spiritual sense beneath its literal one. The literal reading is a worthy first rung, but it gives way to the inner reading, and seeing the same inner truths in the world’s myths can deepen reverence rather than diminish it. That realisation is where real transformation begins.
So what are the mythologies, in the end? They are humanity’s oldest maps: Gilgamesh at the edge of the world, Isis gathering what was scattered, Odin on the tree, Amaterasu stepping out of the cave. Read on the surface, they are the treasured stories of particular peoples. Read inwardly, they describe the passage every soul must make, from darkness into light, from the old state into the new.
Whatever you are carrying today, the way through and the thing you long for are not waiting at the far edge of the world. They already rest within you, together with the same power that set the stars in their courses, and that power answers to you alone. Awaken it, assume the end, and nothing that stands before you will be able to stand against it. Fear not.
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