Art by Simon Bisley for “Slaine: The Horned God” written by Pat Mills for the 2000 AD comic as one of my favorite adaptations of Graves’ Goddess in popular culture, even more so than it was of Frazer – since it essentially adapted Graves, who in turn adapted Frazer

(7) ROBERT GRAVES – THE WHITE GODDESS & THE GREEK MYTHS

Graves saw Frazer’s sacred king and raised it with a queen, his titular White Goddess. For Graves, the monomyth was his theme, or rather the great mythic and poetic Theme:

“The Theme, briefly, is the antique story, which falls into thirteen chapters and an epilogue, of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God’s losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out. The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird.”

However, The White Goddess is not as accessible in its prose as Frazer’s The Golden Bough and is essentially a compilation of poetic musings, which has its shining moments but can often become turgid or bogged down in Graves’ esoteric discussion of the Irish tree alphabet or the poems of Taliesin. And like The Golden Bough, it’s best read as poetry than for factual or historical accuracy.

And he was an apostle of the White Goddess again in his study of Greek mythology. However, it remains my favorite single volume study of Greek mythology.

Essentially it comes in two parts.

The first part is a conventional compendium of Greek mythology – literary retellings of the various myths from their sources – and it is this part that is the basis for the book as my favorite single volume study of Greek mythology, albeit somewhat dense in its prose style.

The second part – his interpretative notes or commentary – is where things get more wild, albeit all in good poetic fun. This is where Graves ‘decodes’ or reconstructs Greek mythology to his monomyth of the Goddess or prehistoric matriarchal religion – “Graves interpreted Bronze Age Greece as changing from a matriarchal society…to a patriarchal one under continual pressure from victorious Greek-speaking tribes. In the second stage local kings came to each settlement as foreign princes, reigned by marrying the hereditary queen, who represented the Triple Goddess, and were ritually slain by the next king after a limited period, originally six months. Kings managed to evade the sacrifice for longer and longer periods, often by sacrificing substitutes, and eventually converted the queen, priestess of the Goddess, into a subservient and chaste wife, and in the final stage had legitimate sons to reign after them”.

So there you go. Of course, the historical accuracy of Graves’ interpretation or commentary has been almost universally contested or considered to be idiosyncratic – “the interpretive notes are of value only as a guide to the author’s personal mythology”. His characteristic rejoinder was to plead poetic privilege, essentially rebuking his critics or classical scholars “You’re not poets!”. And it’s hard to argue with poetry.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Art by Simon Bisley for “Slaine: The Horned God” written by Pat Mills for the 2000 AD comic as one of my favorite adaptations of Frazer’s sacrificial sacred king in popular culture. Well, that and The Wicker Man (which also features in Slaine)

(6) SIR JAMES GEORGE FRAZER – THE GOLDEN BOUGH

“Who are these coming to the sacrifice?” –
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

Behold the monomyth of the sacrificial sacred king.

That is – the monomyth of a recurring or universal mythic archetype, as used by Joseph Campbell for his archetypal hero’s journey. But it doesn’t get much more monomythic that one of the original monomyths – Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

The Golden Bough proposed the monomyth or recurring mythic archetype of sacrificial sacred kings – or their surrogates once the kings wised up to it – as incarnations of gods or solar deities whose death and resurrection in turn represented fertility. And believe me, Frazer saw these sacred kings or fertility cults everywhere – including Jesus and Christianity, controversially at the time – such that he filled several volumes up with them, although more people (including me) tend to read his abridged single volume.

Now I think that Frazer was always entertaining and occasionally illuminating in The Golden Bough – his discussion of the principles of sympathetic magic, a term coined by himself, seems particularly definitive – but in terms of factual or historical accuracy…not so much as he’s much more mixed at best in this respect. As the old adage goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail – and when all you have is a theory of sacred kings, then by god or goddess, everything begins to look like a sacred king, even if you have to hammer everything into shape for it. After all, we all have to make sacrifices…

While Frazer is or was mostly dismissed as a footnote in academic study, The Golden Bough has been highly influential in literary culture, because whether or not it is true, his mythic archetype of the doomed hero or sacrificial sacred king has the elements of a ripping yarn.

Just for starters, there’s his influence on T. S. Eliot, who openly acknowledged the influence of Frazer on The Waste Land, although with the characteristic pessimism of that poem, proposed the cycle might be broken, leaving only violence and death without rebirth – and in which the dying god is just another buried corpse, perhaps even prompting to mind a Nietzschean murder victim or contemporary zombie apocalypse, rising writhing from their own resurrection – “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout?”

Or there’s his influence on Campbell’s own monomyth. Or on Sigmund Freud, lending itself to the segue of his influence on Camille Paglia, who described her primary influence as a fusion of Frazer and Freud (although doubling the inaccuracy of the former with that of the latter).

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Pentheus being torn apart – Attic red-figure vase painting

(5) EURIPIDES – BACCHAE

Literal Dionysian deus ex machina in the original folk horror story and clash of church against state – or cult against throne.

The greatest Greek tragedy – indeed one that has been argued to be one of the greatest ever written – in the usual style of Greek tragedies, which is the gods will screw you over and there’s nothing much you can do about it, even with that weird chorus telling you what’s happening, and even if they liked to call it nemesis for your hubris.

Yes, I know Dionysus personally appears, albeit in mortal disguise, to give Pentheus a repenting chance, but he doesn’t exactly go all out in the attempt because it’s much more demonstrative – and fun – setting up Pentheus for the Wicker Man to his Lord Summerisle. Except that the Bacchae makes the Wicker Man look like a picnic.

Anyway, the play by Euripides is based on the myth of Pentheus, king of Thebes, who is opposed to the new god Dionysus and his cult, despite being, you know, actually related to him. No, seriously, Pentheus is the cousin of Dionysus, because that’s how it was in those days, particularly with Zeus. Worse, Pentheus – and much of Thebes denies the divinity of Dionysus. And you can’t be disrespecting Dionysus.

So Dionysus does what any Greek god would do:
Step 1 – disguise yourself as a mortal priest of yourself and be captured only to respond cryptically to questions
Step 2 – drive your female worshippers or Maenads mad and trick Pentheus into spying on them in disguise as one of them
Step 3 – !!!
Step 4 – profit!

And by step 3, I mean sit back as your Maenads, including Pentheus’ own mother Agave, literally tear Pentheus apart with their bare hands in a crazed frenzy, believing Pentheus to be a wild beast.

That leads to a moment of classic horror as Agave proudly bears the head, still under divine delusion that it is the head of a mountain lion, to her own father Cadmus, only to see it for what it really is when Cadmus recoils and calls upon her to look more closely.

From a modern perspective, it’s hard not to identify or sympathize with King Pentheus cracking down on a strange new cult spreading through his city – particularly one with literal crazed worshippers like the Maenads, up there with the followers of Jim Jones or Charles Manson.

The Bacchae resonates on so many levels. I’ve already compared it to The Wicker Man, which replays many of its story beats for horror – and it’s easy to adapt the Bacchae for horror, from folk horror to cosmic horror – Dionysus as Yog Sothoth, perhaps?

More substantially, others have argued the parallels between it and the Gospels, with Jerusalem for Thebes and Jesus for Dionysus (and the Jewish leaders and Pontius Pilate for Pentheus), except of course Jesus is far more morally palatable in his divine coup de grace than Dionysus.

And there’s the Nietzschean interpretations, most famously with his dichotomy of the Apollonian and Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy – and it is tempting to see Pentheus as a good Apollonian, attempting to hold the line of order against Dionysian chaos. Or the Freudian interpretations with Pentheus as ego trying to hold back the wild ecstasy of the id…

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Netherlandish Proverbs – painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder 1559

(4) FOLKLORE INDEX

Well, Folklore Indices to be precise – two of them, usually used in tandem, the Thompson Motif-Index of Folklore, and the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index of folklore tale types.

Both are regarded as standard tools of folklore studies – and are endlessly fascinating to browse even for those outside folklore studies with a general interest in mythology or culture.

As its title indicates, the Thompson Motif-Index was compiled by American folklorist Stith Thompson (at the substantial length of 6 volumes) as a catalogue or index of motifs – the granular elements of folklore or folktales.

As Thompson himself defined it, “a motif is the smallest element in a tale having a power to persist in tradition. In order to have this power it must have something unusual and striking about it”.

Although in compiling the index, Thompson used a broader-brush approach to motifs as anything that goes to make up a traditional narrative.

Obviously a full summary even of the categories of the Thompson Index would be too exhaustive, let alone the thousands of motifs themselves, but the categories are organized by broader themes denoted by letters from A (Mythological Motifs) to Z (Miscellaneous Groups of Motifs).

This includes animals, taboos, magic, the dead (including ghosts and vampires), marvels, ogres (and monstrous figures in general), tests, deceptions, reversals of fortune, ordaining the future, chance and fate, society, rewards and punishment, captives and fugitives, unnatural cruelty, sex, the nature of life, religion, traits of character and humor.

And as its title indicates, the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index (ATU or AT Index) also involved Thompson – but as originally compiled by Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne and as further expanded and revised by German folklorist Hans-Jorg Uther, classifying tales by their type.

As defined by Thompson, “a type is a traditional tale that has an independent existence. It may be told as a complete narrative and does not depend for its meaning on any other tale. It may indeed happen to be told with another tale, but the fact that it may be told alone attests its independence. It may consist of only one motif or of many”.

The Index divides tales into sections with an AT number for each entry, which also have their own broad title and including closely related folk tales – for example, 545B “The Cat as Helper” includes folk tales with other animal helpers. Similar types are grouped together – “tale types 400–424 all feature brides or wives as the primary protagonist”.

To illustrate further, 510A is their Cinderella entry (including other versions and similar variations), itself a subcategory of 510 Persecuted Heroine, and noting other entries with which it is commonly combined.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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That’s one trippy cover – from a 2023 reprint edition by Martino Fine Books

(3) PRINCIPIA DISCORDIA

Or how I found Goddess and what I did to Her when I Found Her.

No really, that’s the subtitle of the book. The Goddess in question is the playful goddess of chaos in classical mythology, Eris or Discordia, but as the object of the Discordian “religion”, which is either a joke disguised as a religion or a religion disguised as a joke.

The Principia Discordia is the central Discordian “religious” text – and much briefer than other such texts. Written by the pseudonymous Malaclypse the Younger and Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, it is full of contradictions and humor:

“Is Eris true?”
“Everything is true.”
“Even false things?”
“Even false things are true.”
“How can that be?”
“I don’t know man, I didn’t do it.”

At the same time, as noted in its Wikipedia entry, it contains several passages which propose that there is serious intent behind the work, for example a message scrawled on page 00075: “If you think the PRINCIPIA is just a ha-ha, then go read it again.” Also, it is is quoted extensively in and shares many themes with the satirical science fiction book The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, one of my top ten SF books.

“Notable symbols in the book include the Apple of Discord, the pentagon, and the “Sacred Chao”, which resembles the Taijitu of Taoism, but the two principles depicted are “Hodge” and “Podge” rather than yin and yang, and they are represented by the apple and the pentagon, and not by dots. Saints identified include Emperor Norton, Yossarian, Don Quixote, and Bokonon. The Principia also introduces the mysterious word “fnord”, later popularized in The Illuminatus! Trilogy”.

“I can see the fnords!”

I particularly enjoy how it deems every single man, woman and child on Earth as “a genuine and authorized pope of Discordia” – even including an official pope card that may be reproduced and distributed to anyone and everyone. Or that it has five classes of saint as exemplars and models of perfection – with the lowest class of saint being for real people, deceased or otherwise, as the higher classes of saint are reserved for fictional beings, who by virtue of being fictional, are better able to reach the Discordian view of perfection. The canonization of Discordian saints was a profound influence upon myself to canonize my own saints of pagan Catholicism – and apostles of the Goddess.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
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0 The Fool – Rider-Waite Tarot (A.E.Waite & Pamela Colman Smith as artist)

(2) TAROT – RIDER-WAITE & CROWLEY THOTH

The Tarot earns special mention in my Top 10 Mythology Books for the decks of cards, particularly the two iconic and definitive modern decks.

Of course, there are a plethora of modern Tarot decks, most of which originate from those two definitive modern decks (named for their creators) which were themselves substantial reconstructions from earlier tarot decks, pumping up their esoteric mystique – the Rider-Waite deck and the Crowley-Thoth deck, my Old Testament and New Testament of Tarot respectively. (And like Martin Prince in The Simpsons dismissively handwaving away Ray Bradbury from his ABC of science fiction with “I’m aware of his work”, I’m aware of the third most common modern Tarot deck – the Marseilles Tarot).

Interestingly, both these two definitive decks were by female artists, Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider-Waite deck and Lady Frieda Harris. My personal preference is for the artwork and themes of the Crowley-Thoth deck (even if Crowley himself was one generally weird dude and sick puppy), albeit still shaped by the influence of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
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Homer Simpson as Odysseus from “D’oh, Brother Where Art Thou?” in “Tales from the Public Domain” (episode 283 – S13 E14) – aptly enough and still one of the best televised adaptations of the Odyssey

(1) HOMER – ILIAD & ODYSSEY

“Sing, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles”.

Also “tell me, Muse, of the cunning man who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famed city of Troy”

We’re going old school here, the oldest school there is – the Iliad and the Odyssey, the rosy-fingered dawn of Western literature, preceding even literacy as those two epic poems were performed or sung rather than written by their author Homer, with tradition holding that he memorized both and probably changed the story each time he told them. (And no, not that Homer, although I couldn’t resist using him as my feature image). Although everything about Homer – or is that Homers? – is contested, such as whether he was indeed illiterate, or blind, or a man (I do have a soft spot for the theory that while a male Homer authored the Iliad, a female Homer authored the Odyssey), or Greek, or indeed even existed at all, at least as a single person.

“The Greeks held Homer in something like reverence” – as they and everyone else damn well should have or should – “viewing his works as the foundation of their society, in much the same way as modern Europeans view the Bible”. As do I and have since childhood, in which they (or at least the Odyssey) have been hugely influential for me personally, comparable to my god-tier mythologies or books of mythology, such if you were to peel back the layers of my psyche you’d find them deep within it. Of course, that wasn’t because anyone sung them to me – although again they damn well should have – or even that I read them in their original poetic form, but as a prose adaption of the Oydssey for children, which still remains the version of the Odyssey lodged within my psyche. Sadly, I can’t recall the name of its author, except that it was female – aptly enough for that female authorship theory for the Odyssey or both, and aptly enough in that I recall it brought the female characters, upon which its protagonist heavily relies, vividly to life.

Indeed, the Iliad is my Old Testament and the Odyssey is my New Testament. Aptly enough, given the Bronze Age battle hymns of Iliad and Old Testament, or the hero’s return from death in Odyssey and New Testament.

And while we’re on such comparisons, the Second World War is the American Iliad and the Cold War the American Odyssey.

However, I have always preferred the Odyssey to the Iliad. When people think of the Iliad, they usually think of all the things that aren’t actually in it – the whole mythos of the Trojan War in what is usually referred to as the Trojan Cycle. Instead, the Iliad is an incredibly brief snapshot of the Trojan War – a few weeks or so in the final year of a legendary ten year war. And of course most of that is the greatest Greek warrior Achilles sulking in his tent, because the Greek leader Agamemnon deprived him of the booty, in both senses of the word, of a Trojan girl taken captive. Until of course Achilles’ boyfriend Patroclus is killed by the greatest Trojan warrior Hector – at which time, it’s personal. Well until the Trojan king Priam begs Achilles if the latter could please stop dragging Hector’s dead body behind him while doing victory laps in his chariot.

Ultimately though, the Iliad is just men killing each other and squabbling over women. The Odyssey on the other hand is a ten year maritime magical mystery tour – or dare I say it, Poseidon adventure, as the Greek hero Odysseus just tries to return to his kingdom Ithaca after the Trojan War, barely escaping death as he is tossed from flotsam to jetsam in one shipwreck after another from Poseidon’s wrath. I mean, seriously, he could have walked home faster from Turkey to Greece, although Poseidon probably still would have got him somehow. And he loses all his ships and men en route, returning home as lone survivor – and stranger, as even then he has to remain disguised as a beggar to infiltrate his own household and outwit his wife’s persistent suitors partying it up there. And let me tell you, every dog has its day. Literally and heartbreakingly, as he is recognized by his faithful dog Argos who has awaited his return for twenty years (only to finally pass away with that last effort). But also figuratively and with undeniable satisfaction as he outwits and defeats the suitors.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
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Free “divine gallery” art sample from OldWorldGods

I live in a mythic world – and I have special mentions!

That’s right – I don’t just have a top ten mythology books, I have a whole host of special mentions. My usual rule is twenty special mentions for each top ten, where the subject matter is prolific enough, as it is here – which I suppose would usually make each top ten a top thirty if you want to look at it that way.

My special mentions are also where I can have some fun with the subject category and splash out with some wilder entries.

The title page to the 1611 first edition of the King James Bible

(1) BIBLE

The Hebrew dreaming and the great messianic ghost dance.

The holy book of smiting and begetting.

Chosen people and only son.

This is the big one – genesis and apocalypse, alpha and omega, allelujah and amen!

Readers of my top tens will be familiar with me playfully classifying the highest tier (or god-tier) entries as my Old Testament or New Testament – a tribute to the influence of the Bible. I do that in a few ways with my Top 10 Mythology Books (or Top 10 Mythologies), but of course at a fundamental level the Bible is itself my Old Testament and New Testament.

Of course, the Bible is helped into top spot in that for many people it is not just mythology but religion, in contrast to classical mythology or other ‘pagan’ mythologies it largely replaced . The Bible is also the heart, still beating in many ways, of ‘Judeo-Christian’ culture that is one of the two predominant cultural influences in what is often termed as Western civilization, along with the ‘Greco-Roman’ culture that vies with it as the other predominant cultural influence – sometimes in alignment and sometimes as rivals. Athens versus Jerusalem and all that – filtered through Rome. It is as the source for religion rather than mythology that most people come to it, as I did, even if I have lapsed from any religious belief in it.

However, it is the book that doesn’t stop giving, even after you stop believing. That is because of its enduring mythic resonance or narratives and language that in its best passages has an enduring lyrical or poetic quality.

In other words, I read the Bible as mythology rather than religion or in short, as poetry rather than history. Don’t get me wrong – my own hot take, to antagonize both believers and skeptics, is that the Bible is of course a lot less historical than fundamentalist believers usually maintain, but has more history than skeptics usually credit. This is a view influenced by Manfred Barthel’s What The Bible Really Says, which among other things proposes more naturalistic explanations of apparently supernatural miracles – even such things as the burning bush, and not in terms of what Moses was smoking. And also don’t get me wrong as to its literary quality – the Bible is an anthology after all, and one of uneven quality. It may be described by believers as the word of God but he could have used an editor. Or for that matter, better writers of a more modern novelistic style even for its better narrative parts, which tend to resonate more when adapted into more modern style – or screenplays.

I mean seriously, the Bible is the original Game of Thrones – people are often surprised just how much sex and violence is in it (or just how much sheer pagan enjoyment it can provide). It is the book of smiting and begetting after all. And as opposed to Game of Thrones, it finishes with a bang rather than a whimper with a much more sensational, if much trippier, finale, at least in the New Testament and the Book of Apocalypse, my personal favorite book in the Bible.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
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Botticelli’s Birth of Venus

(2) BULFINCH’S MYTHOLOGY (1867)

I believe in all the gods –
especially the goddesses.

Now we get into the second of my three B’s, the top trinity of my top ten books of mythology. And we’re going old school for this one, as in nineteenth century old school – named for its American author Thomas Bulfinch and published as a collection of three volumes after his death in 1867. Yet Bulfinch’s Mythology still remains a classic reference (and handily in the public domain) – as indeed it was for me as my introduction as a child to the world of classical mythology. Well, technically that was the first volume – the Age of Fable – which also featured a briefer recitation of Nordic mythology, admittedly a close second to my love for classical mythology. (The second volume – The Age of Chivalry – featured Arthurian legend, while the third volume The Legends of Charlemagne is pretty much what it says on the tin).

Looking back to it now, it’s somewhat dated and has its flaws as a reference – particularly as his obituary noted, it was “expurgated of all that would be offensive”. Or in other words, half the fun of classical mythology or all the sex and violence. (Indeed, his Wikipedia entry includes an uncited reference that Bulfinch was an anti-homosexuality activist in his final years. If true, that would have made for some awkwardness when compiling classical mythology – those gods tended to swing all ways). Which is somewhat disappointing, because having learnt that Bulfinch was a merchant banker, I fondly imagined him as staid banker by day and Bacchanalian by night, similar to the hedonistic heathen imagined by Chesterton in The Song of the Strange Ascetic.

However, it remains one of the most accessible single-volume references to classical mythology for the general reader – as Bulfinch wrote in his preface:

“Our work is not for the learned, nor for the theologian, nor for the philosopher, but for the reader of English literature, of either sex, who wishes to comprehend the allusions so frequently made by public speakers, lecturers, essayists, and poets, and those which occur in polite conversation.”

Anyway, its impact as an introduction to classical mythology remains profound – if, deep within my psyche, there is any mythology that tempts me to actual religion, it’s classical mythology.

Yes – it’s the nymphs.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
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