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Mythology — The stars we tell ourselves by

We are pattern-seekers. Where there is a sky, we read constellations into it; where there is a death, we tell a story about what comes after.

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We are pattern-seekers. Where there is a sky, we read constellations into it; where there is a death, we tell a story about what comes after. Key sections include: MYTHOLOGY; Why myths recur; The Hero's Journey; Greek; Norse; Egyptian; Hindu; Mesoamerican; Indigenous Australian; African.

Key sections

01MYTHOLOGY
02Why myths recur
03The Hero's Journey
04Greek
05Norse
06Egyptian
07Hindu
08Mesoamerican
09Indigenous Australian
10African
11The recurring patterns
12Modern resonance
13Further reading

Topics covered

catalog culture mythology

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Slide outline

01MYTHOLOGY
02Why myths recur
03The Hero's Journey
04Greek
05Norse
06Egyptian
07Hindu
08Mesoamerican
09Indigenous Australian
10African
11The recurring patterns
12Modern resonance
13Further reading

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Category: Cuisine
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Presentation Transcript

Detailed slide-by-slide text content extracted from this presentation.

Slide 01

MYTHOLOGY

The stars we tell ourselves by
— a thirteen-slide atlas —

Slide 02

Why myths recur

Meaning-making animals
We are pattern-seekers. Where there is a sky, we read constellations into it; where there is a death, we tell a story about what comes after.
Cognitive bedrock — minds tuned to agency, narrative, and cause-and-effect see gods in the storm and ancestors in the harvest.
Oral tradition compresses — across generations, what does not aid memory or meaning falls away. What survives is dense, archetypal, repeatable.
Shared circumstances — floods, harvests, kingship, birth, death. Different peoples answer the same questions with similar shapes.
Diffusion and contact — trade routes carry stories. Some echoes are convergence; some are inheritance.

Slide 03

The Hero's Journey

Joseph Campbell — the monomyth
"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."
THE CALL
THE TRIAL
THE RETURN
Departure, initiation, return — a single shape worn by Odysseus, the Buddha, Luke Skywalker, and Moana alike.

Slide 04

Greek

Olympus — the mountain of gods
The Olympians — Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena. A divine family modelled on the human one: jealous, generous, and absolutely never bored.
Prometheus — the titan who steals fire for humanity and is bound to a rock for his trouble. The first archetype of the rebellious benefactor.
Heracles — twelve labours of penance and proof. The half-god whose strength is matched only by his suffering.
Why it endures — Greek myth gave the West a vocabulary for fate, hubris, and the shape of tragedy itself.

Slide 05

Norse

Yggdrasil — the world tree
Yggdrasil — the great ash tree that holds the nine realms in its branches and roots. The cosmos as a single, living thing.
Odin — one-eyed Allfather, hung himself on the tree for nine nights to win the runes. Wisdom is paid for, not gifted.
Ragnarök — the twilight of the gods. A myth uniquely comfortable with the idea that the divine order itself can end.
Tone — fatalistic, wintry, wry. Heroism here is doing the right thing knowing you will lose.

Slide 06

Egyptian

The journey through the Duat
Osiris — slain by his brother Set, dismembered, scattered. The first dying-and-rising god, lord of the dead.
Isis — wife and sister, who gathers the pieces of Osiris and conceives Horus. The archetype of devotion and magical power.
The Duat — the underworld through which the soul travels each night beside the sun-god Ra. Trials, weighings, transformations.
The weighing of the heart — against the feather of Ma'at. Lighter than truth, you pass. Heavier, and Ammit waits.

Slide 07

Hindu

The cyclical cosmos
Mahabharata — at 1.8 million words, the longest poem ever composed. Within it, the Bhagavad Gita: a god instructing a reluctant warrior on duty.
Ramayana — Rama, Sita, the demon-king Ravana. Exile, abduction, the long bow drawn home.
Yugas — time itself is cyclical. Worlds are born, decay, dissolve, and are dreamed again. Brahma exhales the universe; one day he will inhale.
Many faces, one fabric — Vishnu and Shiva, Devi and Ganesha — different lenses on a single, layered reality.

Slide 08

Mesoamerican

The feathered serpent
Quetzalcoatl — feathered serpent of the Aztecs (Kukulkan to the Maya). Wind, learning, civilization. He sails away promising to return.
The Hero Twins — Hunahpu and Xbalanque outwit the lords of Xibalba in the Maya underworld. Trickster ingenuity defeats death.
Popol Vuh — the K'iche' Maya book of creation: gods try and fail to make humans from mud, then wood, finally maize.
Cosmic clockwork — calendars within calendars. Time as sacred machinery requiring blood, sun, and ritual to keep turning.

Slide 09

Indigenous Australian

The Dreaming — songlines across the land
The Dreaming (Tjukurpa) — not a past but an ever-present creative time, when ancestral beings shaped the land and its laws.
Ancestral beings — the Rainbow Serpent carving rivers; the Wawalag sisters; spirits whose journeys are written into rock and ridge.
Songlines — sung paths across country. To know the song is to know the way: a map, a ritual, a genealogy in one.
The oldest continuing tradition on Earth — sixty-five thousand years of stories carried by voice and ceremony.

Slide 10

African

Anansi the spider — and the wisdom of Ifá
Anansi — Akan trickster who buys all the world's stories from the sky-god Nyame. Tales of cunning that crossed the Atlantic with the enslaved and seeded folklore on three continents.
Ifá — Yoruba divination system: 256 odu (signs), each holding a corpus of verses, ethics, and remedies. UNESCO heritage of memory.
Orishas — Yoruba deities — Shango, Oshun, Ogun — who travelled to the Americas as Candomblé, Santería, Vodou.
Mwindo, Sundiata, the Mwindo Epic — Africa's epic traditions: hero-kings, riddles, talking drums, ancestors who never quite leave.

Slide 11

The recurring patterns

What every people seem to tell
Floods
Gilgamesh, Noah, Manu, Deucalion, the Maya. A world washed clean to begin again.
Tricksters
Anansi, Loki, Coyote, Hermes. Creators-by-mistake who break the rules so the rules can be remade.
Dying & rising gods
Osiris, Dionysus, Baldr, Persephone, the maize god. Death as the necessary half of fertility.
World trees & cosmic axes
Yggdrasil, the Mayan ceiba, the Hindu Ashvattha. A vertical spine connecting heaven, earth, and below.

Slide 12

Modern resonance

The myths we are still telling
When you stop telling old gods, you start telling new ones — in capes, on screens, in the franchises that fill cathedrals' worth of attention every year.
Superheroes — Superman as Moses, Wonder Woman as Athena, Thor explicitly Norse. Pantheons in Lycra.
Cinema — Lucas read Campbell on his way to Star Wars. The Matrix, The Lion King, Moana, Spider-Verse — the monomyth wears modern clothes.
Fantasy fiction — Tolkien knew his Eddas; Le Guin knew her Taoism; Pullman, Gaiman, Martin all build cosmologies that would be familiar to a Bronze Age priest.
The takeaway — myth is not a thing of the past. It is the operating system humans run stories on, and it is running right now.

Slide 13