(9) EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY:

JOYCE TYDLESLEY – PENGUIN BOOK OF MYTHS & LEGENDS OF ANCIENT EGYPT (2010)

 

“I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra…
‘Who was that
dog-faced man? ‘they asked, the day I rode from town…
Go get my eyelids of red paint.
Hand me my shadow,
I’m going into town after Set”

I’ll never tire of quoting Ishmael Reed’s poem when it comes to Egyptian mythology – or of Egyptian mythology itself.

What’s not to love about those funky animal-headed gods and those slinky goddesses? Especially the goddesses – lithe and svelte in their form-fitting dresses, with their golden skin and painted eyes, they would not look out of place as supermodels on a modern catwalk. Or what’s not to love how the gods kept shifting and swapping out with each other as they rose and fell within the pantheon?

So of course one of my special mentions for books of mythology by subject is for Egyptian mythology, particularly as my Top 10 Mythology Books or special mentions by book doesn’t feature any specific books on the subject. Yes – as usual Barbara Walker’s Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets has numerous entries on subjects of Egyptian mythology, as does the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols.

Hence my keynote book for this special mention is a specific book on the subject of Egyptian mythology by Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley, among her other books on Egyptian history and focus on Egyptian female figures.

 

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP-TIER)

 

 

(8) CELTIC MYTHOLOGY:

PETER BERESFORD ELLIS – DICTIONARY OF CELTIC MYTHOLOGY (1992)

 

My preceding special mention was for books on the subject of Arthurian legend. While Arthurian legend remains my favorite strand of Celtic mythology (although one might argue about how “Celtic” Arthurian legend is), it is far from the only one. Hence this special mention is for books on those other strands or subjects within Celtic mythology.

The mythology of Gaul – which I particularly know from the gods invoked in Asterix comics by Toutatis! The Wicker Man. Druids. The mysterious horned god Cernunnos and other Gallic gods or goddesses. The Celtic mythology that survived most in literary form (mostly as recorded by Christian monks) – in Brittany or coastal France, in Britain and above all in Ireland with its various mythological cycles. The Tuatha de Danann or the gods of Ireland. The Ulster Cycle and Cu Chulainn. The Fenian Cycle and Fionn Mac Cumhaill (sometimes awesomely translated as Finn McCool). And the fairy folklore into which much of the mythology in Ireland, Britain and elsewhere was recycled.

Books on the subject of Celtic mythology already feature as entries in my Top 10 Mythology Books or special mentions – perhaps foremost among them Katherine Briggs and her Dictionary of Fairies, albeit more for that aforementioned fairy folklore. Similarly, The Twilight of the Godlings by Francis Young looks at fairy folklore – but mostly eschews it as surviving Celtic mythology. From recollection, the first volume of Bulfinch’s Mythology or the Age of Fable has some brief reference to Celtic mythology, while the framing device of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess is from Celtic mythology – the Celtic tree alphabet (as well as other aspects of Celtic mythology running through the book, arguably including the White Goddess herself). More generally, Barbara Walker’s Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets has numerous entries on subjects of Celtic mythology.

My keynote book for this special mention is the Dictionary of Celtic Mythology by British novelist Peter Beresford Ellis, because I just can’t resist a good dictionary as my favorite format for reference.

 

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(6) BEOWULF:

SEAMUS HEANEY – A NEW VERSE TRANSLATION (1999)

 

The most enduring mythic character – along with antagonists Grendel and his mother (with the subsequent dragon tending to be overlooked for that more intriguing mother and son duo) – from “the oldest surviving work of fiction in the English language, written sometime between 700 and 1000 AD”.

Indeed it’s so old – how old is it? Older than yo momma! – “that the language it’s written in is barely recognizable as English” and it is more correctly described as Old English.

Like the Iliad and Odyssey earlier in these special mentions, it is an epic poem, but in Beowulf’s case it is “in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend”. The story, set in pagan Scandinavia, is reasonably well known, at least in outline, and is in an effective three-part structure that perhaps has added to its enduring appeal.

Beowulf, a “hero of the Geats” (in southern Sweden), “comes to the aid of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes” (once again gloomy Denmark pops up in classic literature), “whose mead hall Heorot has been under attack by the monster Grendel for twelve years”. In the first part, Beowulf faces off with Grendel, tearing off his arm and slaying him. In the second, Beowulf faces off against Grendel’s monstrous mother out for vengeance and slays her too. Yass hero, slay! Although he slays her in a very different sense in the 2007 film adaptation – not surprisingly given she appears as a golden form of her voice actress Angelina Jolie, complete with high heels! In the third, Beowulf, now a king in his elderly years, faces off and defeats a dragon, but “is mortally wounded in the battle”.

And now, in a posthumous fourth act, Beowulf wins special mention as subject for my books of mythology – reflecting its status as one of the most translated works of Old English literature (in poetry and prose) as well as one of the most adapted and interpreted works of English literature in general. Not bad for a poem over a millennium in age, even going on a millennium and a half.

One such translation is my keynote book for this special mention, the “new verse translation” by Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney. It was widely acclaimed by critics, albeit not universally – perhaps not surprisingly as no less than J.R.R. Tolkien wrote on the difficulty of translating Beowulf in an essay (“On translating Beowulf”).

On the subject of J.R.R. Tolkien, here’s a shoutout to him as an enduring influence on adapting or interpreting Beowulf through his study, in lecture or essay, as well as Beowulf as an enduring influence on Tolkien (“Beowulf is among my most valued sources”) – and through him on modern literary fantasy.

You might know Beowulf’s influence on Tolkien and modern literary fantasy through a little book Tolkien wrote called The Lord of the Rings. Although personally I tend to see more of the direct overlap through The Hobbit – with Bilbo as Beowulf, Gollum as Grendel, and Smaug as, well, the dragon. Sadly, no Grendel’s mother though.

 

 

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.

 

Just to remind you, these are my Top 10 Mythology Books (as at 2025):

 

S-TIER (GOD-TIER – OR IS THAT GODDESS TIER?)

(1) BIBLE

(2) HOMER – ILIAD & ODYSSEY

(3) BARBARA WALKER – ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MYTHS & SECRETS

 

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

(4) KATHERINE BRIGGS – DICTIONARY OF FAIRIES

(5) PETER DICKINSON – THE FLIGHT OF DRAGONS

(6) JOSEPH CAMPBELL – THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES

(7) JEAN CHEVALIER & ALAIN GHEERBRANT – PENGUIN DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLS

(8) WESTON LA BARRE – THE GHOST DANCE

(9) RONALD HUTTON – THE TRIUMPH OF THE MOON

 

X-TIER (WILD TIER – BEST MYTHOLOGY BOOK OF 2024)

(10) NATALIE LAWRENCE – ENCHANTED CREATURES: OUR MONSTERS & THEIR MEANINGS

 

And here are my twenty special mentions:

 

 

 

(1) TAROT – RIDER-WAITE & CROWLEY-THOTH

 

The Tarot earns the top special mention in my Top 10 Mythology Books for the decks of cards, particularly the two iconic and definitive modern decks – special that is, because they are not books as such but decks of cards.

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*****
S-TIER (GOD-TIER)

 

 

 

(2) 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: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

 

 

(3) THOMAS BULFINCH –

BULFINCH’S MYTHOLOGY (1867)

 

I believe in all the gods –
especially the goddesses.

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: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER – OR IS THAT NYMPH-TIER?)

 

 

 

(4) BREWER’S DICTIONARY OF PHRASE & FABLE (1870)

 

Another nineteenth century old school entry, indeed only a few years after Bulfinch’s Mythology and ranking with it as classic reference.

I’m somewhat disappointed that the Brewer of the title is not a reference to brewers of alcohol, somewhat similar to the Guiness Book of Records originating from pub arguments, but from Reverend Ebenezer Cobham Brewer.

However, like Roget’s Thesaurus, the reference book has moved on from him – including into the public domain in its 1895 edition – but continues to be published in new editions, effectively retaining Brewer as a brand name.

It contains “definitions and explanations of many famous phrases, allusions, and figures, whether historical or mythical…The ‘phrase’ part of the title refers mainly to the explanation of various idioms and proverbs, while the “fable” part might more accurately be labelled “folklore” and ranges from classical mythology to relatively recent literature”.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

 

 

(5) SIR JAMES GEORGE FRAZER –

THE GOLDEN BOUGH (1890)

 

“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****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

 

(6) ROBERT GRAVES –

THE WHITE GODDESS / THE GREEK MYTHS (1948 / 1955)

 

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****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

 

(7) WALTER BURKERT –
GREEK RELIGION (1985)

 

If Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths are my Old Testament of classical mythology, Burkert’s Greek Religion is my New Testament. Alternatively, the three are my holy trinity of classical mythology (which I suppose would make Nietzsche the Father, Graves the Son and Burkert the Holy Spirit of classical mythology).

No, seriously. For me, Nietzsche and Graves are poles at the other end of a thematic spectrum from Burkert – which I suppose would make all three the points of a thematic triangle. Whatever.

The line from Nietzsche to Burkert is perhaps more obvious – both came from a long tradition of German classicists or classical philologists, indeed its most prominent figures in the English-speaking world (or at least authors of its most prominent books), but in some ways diametrically opposed from each other.

Nietzsche essentially extrapolated a recurring dichotomy of the Apollonian and the Dionysian from classical mythology, above all in its literary manifestation in Greek tragedy, hence his title The Birth of Tragedy. He wrote as an eccentric poet-philosopher, or as he himself described it, a ‘rhapsodizer’ (prompting thoughts of Nietzsche as rhap-artist), not unlike his own prophetic ‘madman’ and apostle of the death of God before his time – “I have come too early…my time is not yet”.

Graves strikes me as similar to Nietzsche – probably someone somewhere has studied or written of the influence of Nietzsche on Graves, if any, but I don’t know anything about that subject – writing as a fellow rhapsodizer or poet, but as an apostle of the Goddess rather than of the death of God, extrapolating his monomyth of the Goddess or prehistoric matriarchal religion from classical mythology.

Of course, the historical accuracy of either has been almost universally contested or considered to be idiosyncratic – “of value only as a guide to the author’s personal mythology”. But who cares? They’re fun! And it’s hard to argue with poetry.

Burkert’s The Greek Religion on the other hand, originally published in his native German in 1977 and translated into English in 1985, has been widely accepted as a standard work in the field. And unlike Nietzsche or Graves, Burkert pretty much extrapolates nothing, robustly sticking to the facts of his literary or archaeological sources.

Burkert presents classical polytheism as inherently chaotic in nature, but at the heart of classical religion was sacrificial ritual – “The term gods…remains fluid, whereas sacrifice is a fact”.

His section headings say it all about his comprehensive survey of Greek religion – Prehistory and the Minoan-Mycenaean Age; Ritual and Sanctuary; The Gods (the Olympian dirty dozen and the balance of the pantheon); The Dead, Heroes and Chthonic Gods; Polis and Polytheism; Mysteries and Asceticism; and Philosophical Religion.

“He describes the various rituals of sacrifice and libation and explains Greek beliefs about purification. He investigates the inspiration behind the great temples at Olympia, Delphi, Delos, and the Acropolis―discussing the priesthood, sanctuary, and oracles. Considerable attention is given to the individual gods, the position of the heroes, and beliefs about the afterlife. The different festivals are used to illuminate the place of religion in the society of the city-state. The mystery cults, at Eleusis and among the followers of Bacchus and Orpheus, are also set in that context. The book concludes with an assessment of the great classical philosophers’ attitudes to religion”.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

 

 

(8) MIRCEA ELIADE –

THE SACRED & THE PROFANE / SHAMANISM (1957 / 1964)

 

“The nostalgia for Paradise…the desire to find oneself always and without effort in the center of the world, at the heart of reality”.

 

Behold the monomyth!

Campbell’s term of monomyth may be somewhat unfair for Eliade, since he established multiple paradigms in mythology or religion “that persist to this day” – hierophany, sacred space and time, the nostalgia for Paradise, the axis mundi or Center of the World, all myths as creation or origin myths, the eternal return, the terror of history, the coincidence of opposites, deus otiosus, and homo religiosus.

On the other hand, all of his paradigms might be considered permutations of his core concept of hierophany, the manifestation – or intrusion – of the sacred in the world, including but not limited to the earlier concept of theophany or manifestation of a god. In turn, it is hierophany that creates sacred space and time, or rather, divides the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time.

And the rest of his paradigms really flow from that. The mythic or religious connotes the nostalgia for Paradise or desire to return to sacred space or time, which is also the axis mundi or center of the world.

“Myth, then, is always an account of creation” – the primordial time “when the Sacred first appeared, establishing the world’s structure”. By enacting myths and rituals, one doesn’t simply commemorate them but participates in them – one “detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time”, or the eternal return.

On the other hand, “yearning to remain in the mythical age causes a terror of history” – the desire “to escape the linear succession of events” – “Eliade suggests that the abandonment of mythical thought and the full acceptance of linear, historical time, with its terror, is one of the reasons for modern man’s anxieties”.

As for the coincidence of opposites, “Eliade claims that many myths, rituals, and mystical experiences involve a “coincidence of opposites” or “twofold revelation” – “they express on the one hand the diametrical opposition of two divine figures sprung from one and the same principle and destined, in many versions, to be reconciled…the very nature of the divinity, which shows itself, by turns or even simultaneously, benevolent and terrible, creative and destructive, solar and serpentine, and so on”.

Deus otiosus – the inactive (or leisurely) god – is perhaps my favorite paradigm by Eliade. Contrary to those who proposed that religions evolve from polytheism to monotheism, Eliade argued that supreme heavenly beings were less common in advanced cultures.

“Eliade speculates that the discovery of agriculture brought a host of fertility gods and goddesses into the forefront, causing the celestial Supreme Being to fade away and eventually vanish from many ancient religions. Even in primitive hunter-gatherer societies, the High God is a vague, distant figure, dwelling high above the world. Often he has no cult and receives prayer only as a last resort, when all else has failed. Eliade calls the distant High God a deus otiosus (idle god)”.

His book on shamanism, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, is the second of his landmark duo of books after The Sacred and the Profane. It applied his ongoing ideas to shamanism, whicn in turn he saw as the ongoing death and resurrection of shamanic figures.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

 

 

 

 

(9) MARINA WARNER –

NO GO THE BOGEYMAN: SCARING, LULLING & MAKING MOCK (1998)

 

Marina Warner – or Dame Marina Warner to give her title as well – is an English mythographer, typically writing about mythology, folklore or fairytales.

Typically her focus is on female figures – literally in her book Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form. Indeed, she started with the ultimate female figure of Catholic veneration, the Virgin Mary (well, after a book on the Empress Dowager or Dragon Empress of the Qing Empire, Tz’u-his), which she followed with a book on Joan of Arc.

Perhaps her leading book on female figures of folklore and fairytales was the evocatively titled From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers).

In a sense, this book is the companion to that one and something of an exception to the rule of her usual female lens, focusing as it does on the figures of male terror in folklore, fairytales, and fiction – “ogres and giants, bogeymen and bugaboos” (which sadly omits my personal favorite terms of bugbear and bete noire).

Although of course Dame Warner has been prolific enough I could compile a top ten books just of those written by her. She also gets bonus points being identified as the “lady writer” of the Dire Straits song of that name – as the writer the singer sees on television “talking about the Virgin Mary” and who reminds him of his former lover.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

 

 

 

(10) JONATHAN KIRSCH –

THE HARLOT BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD / A HISTORY OF THE END OF THE WORLD (1998 / 2006)

 

Jonathan Kirsch is the author of some of my favorite studies of the Bible. Not of the whole Bible, mind you – for one thing, he tends towards a Jewish focus on the Old Testament (with one notable exception), and for another, he has a particular focus on points of interest there as well.

The Harlot by the Side of the Road was his first such book and its subtitle says it all – Forbidden Tales of the Bible. As does the usual expression of shock he quotes in his introduction – do you mean THAT’S in the Bible?!

“The stories you are about to read are some of the most violent and sexually explicit in all of Western literature. They are tales of human passion in all of its infinite variety: adultery, seduction, incest, rape, mutilation, assassination, torture, sacrifice, and murder”

We’re talking Lot and his daughters in Genesis, then echoed by the Levite and his concubine in Judges, only worse. Much like Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac in Genesis is echoed, only worse, as Jephthah actually sacrificing his daughter in Judges. Which pretty much sums up those two bloody books of the Bible, which would do Quentin Tarantino or Game of Thrones proud.

Indeed, most of the book is from either Genesis or Judges. There is a couple of exceptions, including the one where God tries to kill Moses, until Moses’ quick-thinking wife Zipporah does a spontaneous circumcision of their infant son and smears Moses’ forehead with the bloody foreskin. Which is just odd, akin to of those weird variants of vampire that can be held at bay by some bizarre obsessive-compulsive ritual.

Which perhaps brings us to his book on Moses, although I just don’t find Moses as intriguing a character as the subject of his similar book on King David. After all, Exodus and its related books might easily have been summed up with the subtitle Are We There Yet?

I do like how he compares God and Moses to a constantly bickering old married couple. I mean, I’m only paraphrasing slightly with this exchange:

GOD: “I have had it with these Israelites! I’ll kill all of them and start over with you and your descendants!”
MOSES: “And what would the Egyptians say? That you saved the Israelites from slavery only to kill them in the desert?”
GOD: “Hmmm. Okay – I’ll just kill some of them.”

I’ve always imagined one Israelite turning to another as the God in a box starts yelling again from the Ark of the Covenant – “I preferred the calf”.

As I said, I prefer King David to Moses, because despite the former’s many flaws – and David could be a monumental ass at times – he’s just such a charming rogue, so much so that even God was charmed by him as God’s golden boy. Or at least, he charmed the original author of the Bible – I particularly like the theory Kirsch references that the nucleus of the Bible started as a court biography of David, to which preceding events were added almost as a legendary Hebrew Dreamtime.

However, my absolute favorite Kirsch book remains his study of the Book of Apocalypse or Revelations, not coincidentally my absolute favorite book of the Bible, in A History of the End of the World (and that one notable exception to his focus on the Old Testament I noted at the outset).

Again, the subtitle of the book sums it up – How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Civilization. Or for that matter, the scholarly quip he quotes in his introduction – “Revelations either finds a man mad, or leaves him so”.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(11) BETTANY HUGHES –

HELEN OF TROY / VENUS & APHRODITE (2005 / 2019)

 

A thematic duo of books for my top two favorite female figures from mythology – Aphrodite Venus and Helen of Troy (which I understand to be adapted from or for TV series written and presented by Hughes).

And for those who think it a cheat to include two books within the one entry, I’d rank her Helen of Troy over her Aphrodite & Venus (despite ranking Aphrodite over Helen for my top female figure from mythology). Firstly because it was, well, first of the two (including in my reading order of them) and secondly because it seemed to me the more developed in depth. Don’t get me wrong – her Aphrodite book is an interesting presentation of the goddess in her many aspects, written in Hughes’ characteristic engaging style, but I just would have preferred it to be a little longer to consider its subject a little deeper.

“As soon as men began to write, they made Helen of Troy their subject; for nearly three thousand years she has been both the embodiment of absolute female beauty and a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield”. And that’s literally as soon as men began to write, as she was enshrined within the Iliad, Homer’s epic poem that is the foundation of Western literary culture.

The subtitle of the book sums up her aspects in myth and history – goddess, princess, whore. I was aware of her divine mythic aspect from other sources – including one referenced in this book that saw Helen as a semi-divine figure in a blissful life, ironically with Achilles, but aptly enough coupling the world’s most beautiful women with its greatest warrior. And of course her divine origin as a daughter of Zeus in the form of a swan with Leda, with Helen hatched from an egg.

However, I was intrigued by Helen of Sparta, “the focus of a cult which conflated Helen the heroine with a pre-Greek fertility goddess”. For that matter, I often tend to overlook that Helen was from Sparta (SPARTA!) – and Hughes is evocative in fleshing her out as a Spartan princess or Mycenaean aristocrat, as well as fleshing out Paris as delegate from Troy as Hittite satellite, doing the Bronze Age equivalent of sliding into her dms.

It reminded me of other reading – that while we moderns tend to query a casus belli as retrieving a stolen wife, substituting other theories for the Trojan War, when one looks at ancient or tribal war, that wars fought over women or a woman may not be so strange after all.

And that of course brings me to that other aspect of Helen – “the home-wrecker of the Iliad” and “bitch-whore of Greek tragedy”. It’s an aspect that evokes the original sin of Eve on a geopolitical scale, “held responsible for both the Trojan War and enduring enmity between East and West”. There’s even an apple in Helen’s myth!

As for Aphrodite & Venus, it’s summed up by its subtitle – history of a goddess. And what a goddess! It starts – aptly enough – with her mythic birth (or one of its versions at least), reminding us of something that Botticelli’s famous birth of Venus often charms us to forget, that Aphrodite wasn’t just born from the bubbles of sea foam, but the bloody foam formed by or around the severed genitals of a deposed divine ruler.

It evokes images of the Anatolian goddess Cybele imported into Greece and Rome, some of whose frenzied male devotees were reputed to have castrated themselves at the height of her ecstatic festivals – which I suspect at least of few them regretted in the distinctly, ah, un-ecstatic light of the next day.

I don’t know of any association or connection between Aphrodite and Cybele – the Greeks associated Cybele with mother goddess Rhea – but Aphrodite was certainly associated with ancient near Eastern goddesses of love and war like Ishtar, aptly enough for Aphrodite’s’ blood-foamed birth. Hughes explores this association, seemingly conflated with her origin in Cyprus, as demonstrative of a divine figure far more complex in all her aspects than the mere classical pinup or party girl to which she is often reduced.

One such aspect is as goddess of the Roman Empire itself – evoked in Hughes’ chapter Venus and Empire – as Romans traced their empire to legendary Trojan founder, Aeneas. Aeneas – leader of exiles from the Trojan War, heir to the Trojan royal lineage of Priam, Paris and Hector, and above all, son of Aphrodite. The Romans also looked more favorably on her consorting with the god of war, as while the Greek god of war represented the brutish violence of war (with Athena representing the art of war), the Romans saw their counterpart Mars as representing more martial virtue and honor.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(12) PAUL ROBICHAUD –

PAN: THE GREAT GOD’S MODERN RETURN (2021)

 

Io Pan! Io Pan Pan!

Pan, the original horny god with the groin of a goat or as Bill Hicks styled him, randy Pan the Goat Boy. God of nature, mountains, shepherds and sexuality – also the source of our word panic, for the divine mad fear he could inspire in people, including as savior of Athens, the invading Persian army at Marathon.

As a Capricorn goat boy myself, I’ve long been a Pan fan. And so too is Paul Robichaud, a devotee of Pan. Well perhaps not the Capricorn part, but he has written a whole book as a paean to Pan.

Ironically, the only classical Greek god reported as dead – in a historical legend by Plutarch, with a sailor during the reign of Tiberius reporting a divine proclamation from an island that “the great god Pan is dead” – but reports of his death, to paraphrase Mark Twain, were greatly exaggerated. Pan was the one god that endured more than all the others, even to the extent of embodying in horned and hooved form all classical paganism as a whole in modern romanticism and neo-paganism. Perhaps aptly enough, given the pun on Pan – as the word for “all” in Greek also being Pan.

Robichaud comes from a background as an English professor – it shows in his fluent prose style, but also a focus on literature as he explores how Pan has been imagined in mythology, art, literature, music, spirituality, and popular culture through the centuries. The chapter titles best demonstrate this odyssey of Pan from mythic Pan – through medieval and early modern Pan, Pan’s romantic rebirth, Pan in the twentieth century (and his Edwardian height of popularity) and Pan’s occult power – to contemporary Pan.

All the usual suspects are here as cultural or literary devotees of Pan, but most notably those from Edwardian children’s literature of all places – prompting Bill Hick’s joke about his Goat Boy being available for children’s parties (“Mommy, I want Goat Boy to come play at our house”). Kenneth Grahame’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Peter Pan’s namesake, as well as much of his persona – with the Lost Boys as his satyrs.

Sadly, no C.S. Lewis’ Narnia, despite its deliciously Dionysian portrayal, maenads and all. Pan did often pal around with Dionysus after all, but generally not so much the other gods – not to mention all those fauns in Narnia. Wait a minute…Mr Tumnus is Pan! Spread the word.

Of course, there are bound to be omissions – Bill Hicks’ Goat Boy for one, Rhys Darby’s fleeting Pan-like figure in Flight of The Conchords’ Prince of Parties song for another. There’s just too much Pan – or is that too many Pans? – out there.

Also sadly, Rochibaud does suggest one of my favorite historical legends of how Christianity embodied Pan as its devil – as being just that, a legend dating back only to the nineteenth century (following the hypothesis of Ronald Hutton to that effect).

I still prefer the legend. In one of my story ideas, a somewhat lost and forlorn Satan muses to the protagonist (with whom he has occasional chats) of his origin from Pan (as one of his multiple-choice origin stories). The protagonist calls him out on his conflicting origin stories, to which Satan replies “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am legion, I contain multitudes”. But then he becomes sadly wistful “I would give anything just to dance in the moonlight again, when I was not evil but only wild and free”.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(13) FRANCIS YOUNG –
TWILIGHT OF THE GODLINGS (2023)

 

Small god-shaped holes – or everything you know about fairies is wrong.

Well, perhaps not quite everything, but at least the belief that Britain’s fairies and supernatural beings are the direct preservations or survivals of pagan gods.

But they are small god-shaped holes – filling the niche through many cultures, particularly European folklore or mythology, for ‘godlings’ or what Francis Young dubs small gods (borrowing from Terry Pratchett), although I’d have been tempted to go with hemi-demi-gods.

Essentially those supernatural beings ranking beneath the top-tier gods or major cult figures, somewhere between the human and divine – such as fauns and nymphs in Roman culture, not coincidentally one of the influences Young traces for fairies.

Young argues that earlier folkloric beings (albeit probably only as far back as those Roman godlings) were reinvented within Christianity to fill the niche – or the small god-shaped holes of culture.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(14) NATALIE HAYNES –

DIVINE MIGHT: GODDESSES IN GREEK MYTH (2023)

 

When it comes to classical mythology, I’m in it for the nymphs.

So naturally I’m up for the goddesses in this book by English classicist Natalie Haynes.

Where her previous book Pandora’s Jar celebrated the women of classical mythology, Divine Might playfully worships the goddesses, not surprisingly given the title (and subtitle) – “focusing on the goddesses whose prowess, passions, jealousies, and desires rival those of their male kin”.

As one might expect, the six Olympian goddesses – Hera, Aphrodite, Artemis, Demeter, Hestia and Athene – take center stage. Through the lens of these goddesses, it does detour into other female figures or more minor goddesses, notably (and again not surprisingly) the chapter on Demeter detours into Persephone and Hecate. I hope for a sequel or companion volume extending that detour through the many minor goddesses or demi-goddesses in classical mythology.

The book also reminded me of the odd fact that fully half of the Olympian goddesses – Artemis, Hestia, and Athene – were virgins, which Haynes notes is strikingly at odds with the usual status of women at that time as one in which marriage and children would be expected. But then, the divine make their own rules and break them anyway.

Speaking of virgin goddesses, her chapter gave me a new appreciation of Hestia, a goddess that all too often is told to stay in the hearth, when she is not forgotten or overlooked altogether for the more glamorous Olympian figures. One might extend that by way of alliteration from Hestia to Hera – as the latter’s chapter also gave me a new appreciation of a figure often seen, conveniently for Zeus, as something of a shrew (and bunny boiler).

Aptly enough, both for symmetry and as representative of divine female figures in classical mythology, the book started with the Muses and ended with the Furies – dare I quip, not unlike my ex-wife.

My only complaint? It needed more nymphs! One can only hope for a book of nymphs – perhaps even a dictionary of nymphs…

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(15) CHARLES FORT –

THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED / NEW LANDS / LO! / WILD TALENTS (1919-1932)

 

“Charles Hoy Fort, an eccentric American who meticulously collected and catalogued anomalous phenomena inexplicable or thought impossible by orthodox science – giving his name to ‘Fortean’ and ‘Forteana’ to characterize such phenomena, as in the ongoing online Fortean Times which effectively carries on Fort’s legacy.

I have a soft spot, as did Fort himself from evident from the prolific reports he compiled, for strange “falls” raining from the sky – fish (like on the book cover in my feature image), frogs, and so on.

They also are a good example of the anomalous phenomena Fort researched by visiting libraries in New York and London for more than 30 years “assiduously reading scientific journals, newspapers, and magazines” and compiling thousands of notes “on cards and scraps of paper in shoeboxes”. From this research, Fort wrote the four books in this special mention.

He was also ahead of his time, writing of UFOs – before 1947 and the usual start of “modern UFO allegations”. That might be reflected in why he wrote of triangle UFOs rather than the discs that were more in vogue from 1947, although triangle UFO sightings persist.

I also have a soft spot for his theory of a Super-Sargasso Sea to which he attributed strange falls and UFOs – a “sea” where all lost things go and occasionally rain back down on Earth – and an even softer spot for him effectively dismissing that and all other theories in his work (such as his “cosmic joker” theory), noting “I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written”.

Like H.P. Lovecraft (with whom he was effectively contemporaneous), he was not the best prose stylist – although unlike Lovecraft he had much more of a sense of humor about it, tongue firmly in cheek – but created a modern mythology similar to that of Lovecraft and became a similar cult figure.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(16) PRINCIPIA DISCORDIA (1963)

 

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: 4 STARS*****
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(17) THE BOOK OF THE SUBGENIUS (1983)

 

Eternal salvation or triple your money back!

Similar to Discordianism – with which it is often compared (and with which it arguably overlaps) – the Church of the SubGenius is either a joke disguised as a religion or a religion disguised as a joke, although in my opinion it doesn’t lend itself as much to the latter as Discordianism.

“The Church of the SubGenius is a parody religion described by some of its own members as an ‘insane bogus UFO mind-control cult’…elements of self-help groups, UFO cults, Scientology, apocalyptic Christianity, and utterly shameless money-grubbing antics”.

It purportedly originates from its revered prophet, J.R. Bob Dobbs, usually known simply as “Bob”. (When printing “Bob”‘s name, the “Bob” must always be surrounded by “quotes”). “Bob” is the prophet (as well as avatar and embodiment) of Slack, the cosmic spiritual quality as ineffable as the Tao for which the Church and all its members strive – and to which the Con or Conspiracy is opposed. Which conspiracy? Why, all of them of course – as the Conspiracy represents them all.

The ultimate goal of all SubGeniuses (SubGenii?) is to survive until X-Day, when godlike aliens “will arrive and Rupture all the dues-paying SubGenii to a never-ending tour” (pleasure tour?) “of the universe, while converting Planet Earth into the intergalactic equivalent of a greasy-spoon truck-stop”. For those left behind (anyone who isn’t a paid-up SubGenii), it’s not going to be fun as “human pain is apparently a very high-priced drug among the various gods, demons, and alien beings of the complex and ever-growing SubGenius Pantheon”. X-Day is prophesied to occur on 5 July 1998, at 7 AM – “the fact that that date apparently passed without the arrival of the Alien Fleet has forced SubGenii to come up with a multitude of excuses”.

The Book of the Sub-Genius is of course its foundational text, although the New(er) Testament, Relevation X, comes close!

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(18) WIL HUYGEN & RIEN POORTVLIET –

GNOMES (1977)

 

“Yeah, Rien Poortvliet just called. He wants you to pose for him…Oh come on, beloved illustrator of Gnomes? Jesus, read a coffee table book!”

Archer, “Sea Tunt: Part I”

 

It always surprises me that gnomes are of such recent vintage, compared to other legendary creatures – “A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century”.

He introduced them as earth elementals – to match sylphs as air elementals, undines as water elementals, and salamanders as fire elementals. Note to self – air and water are the s€xy ones.

Anyway, they were “widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature” and “typically depicted as small humanoids who live underground”.

So what’s the difference from dwarves? The short answer is not much, at least in depiction (as opposed to origins in folklore), and any difference is really a matter of stylistic choice. Apparently kobolds or Germanic mine spirits also overlap with gnomes.

Although probably the most famous gnomes are garden gnomes – garden or lawn ornaments crafted as statues of gnomes, typically with beards and pointed conical caps (in the style of those old school dunce caps), that originated in the nineteenth century.

Essentially, Poortvliet’s illustrations of gnomes in this book, written by Wil Huygen, follows the visual depiction of gnomes in the style of diminutive garden gnomes. Ironically, it distinguishes gnomes as always bearded from dwarves as always beardless, which is the opposite of their most popular contemporary depiction as character races in Dungeons and Dragons – arguably following the books of Tolkien, except with gnomes as similar to hobbits or halflings (without the hairy feet).

As for the book itself, it “explains the life and habitat of gnomes in an in-universe fashion, much as a biology book would do, complete with illustrations and textbook notes” – often with astonishingly intricate fictional detail. The titular gnomes are also depicted as living harmoniously with animals and nature, evoking contemporary environmental themes.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(19) LEGENDARY CRYPTIDS

 

As “the biological equivalent of UFO sightings”, cryptids and cryptozoology are another modern mythology par excellence, hence my weird-tier special mention for the Legendary Cryptids X-Twitter account and Youtuber (because it is special mention for what is, after all, my top ten for mythology books).

Legendary Cryptids hasn’t published any books as far as I’m aware – but I anticipate would readily feature any books on cryptids or cryptozoology and has probably compiled enough material for a book.

My personal highlights are the cryptid maps he features for various countries and the ‘iceberg’ memes that in the style of such memes look at increasingly deep or esoteric cryptid lore the further you go below the surface.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(20) CATHERINE JOHNS –

S€X OR SYMBOL: ER0TIC IMAGES OF GREECE & ROME (2002)

 

It is one of my rules in my top tens to throw in a kinky entry amidst my wilder special mentions, usually as my final (twentieth) special mention, at least where the subject matter permits.

And here it certainly does – it is not surprising given how large sexuality looms in human biology that it similarly looms large in our mythology.

I remember in high school that it was a running gag among my friends of drawing d!cks in each other’s textbooks, kind of like the end credits of the 2007 film Superbad. Juvenile, yes I know, or rather adolescent.

The Greeks and Romans were a lot like that – they had art of d!cks everywhere. Well, erotic art in general, but mostly a lot of d!cks. And no, we’re not just talking the ubiquitous nudity of classical art – we’re talking hardcore d!cks, literally in the sense of what is termed ithyphallic.

So much so that when Victorians – the prissy British of the historical Victorian period that is, not the residents of the Australian state – collected classical art in galleries or museums, they found themselves inundated by d!cks, like my high school textbooks or those Superbad end credits, which they then hid in restricted sections or basements.

And these were mythic d!cks! No, seriously – “many had a religious and apotropaic function”. Apotropaic, as in good luck charms or warding off evil, because nothing does that like a d!ck, albeit often depicted with wings or feet. We’re talking things like herms, statues with male genitalia used as boundary or crossroad markers, often invoking the (phallic) god Hermes or Mercury.

And this book has the extensive images of Greek or Roman art to prove it. Like looking through my high school textbooks…

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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TOP TENS – MYTHOLOGY:

TOP 10 BOOKS (SPECIAL MENTION) – TIER LIST

 

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

(1) TAROT – RIDER-WAITE & CROWLEY-THOTH

(2) FOLKLORE INDEX

 

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

(3) THOMAS BULFINCH – BULFINCH’S MYTHOLOGY

(4) BREWER’S DICTIONARY OF PHRASE & FABLE

(5) SIR JAMES GEORGE FRAZER – THE GOLDEN BOUGH

(6) ROBERT GRAVES – THE WHITE GODDESS / THE GREEK MYTHS

(7) WALTER BURKERT – GREEK RELIGION

 

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(8) MIRCEA ELIADE – THE SACRED & THE PROFANE / SHAMANISM

(9) MARINA WARNER – NO GO THE BOGEYMAN

(10) JONATHAN KIRSCH – THE HARLOT BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD / A HISTORY OF THE END OF THE WORLD

(11) BETTANY HUGHES – HELEN OF TROY / APHRODITE & VENUS

(12) PAUL ROBICHAUD – PAN: THE GREAT GOD’S MODERN RETURN

(13) FRANCIS YOUNG – TWILIGHT OF THE GODLINGS

(14) NATALIE HAYNES – DIVINE MIGHT: GODDESS IN GREEK MYTH

 

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(15) CHARLES FORT – BOOK OF THE DAMNED / NEW LANDS / LO / WILD TALENTS

(16) PRINCIPIA DISCORDIA

(17) BOOK OF THE SUB-GENIUS

(18) WIL HUYGEN & RIEN POORTVLIET – GNOMES

(19) LEGENDARY CRYPTIDS

(20) CATHERINE JOHNS – S€X OR SYMBOL: ER0TIC IMAGES OF GREECE & ROME

 

I live in a mythic world.

Mythology has been a subject that has fascinated me since childhood, when I read it avidly – and still does as I read it now, hence my Top 10 Books of Mythology.

These are my books of myth and mystery. I’m not going to seek to define mythology for this top ten. It seems to me that people who have studied it far more than I have differ substantially in their definitions of it and I’m not sure that there’s any easy or singular definition in any event. By its nature, myth overlaps with mystery. It is what it is.

Nor am I going to seek to distinguish myth or mythology from overlapping categories such as folklore or legend. If I might use religious metaphor, mythology tends to be defined in a ‘high-church’ sense involving divine beings or sacred narratives, while folklore or legend tend to be defined in a more ‘low church’ sense involving figures or narratives closer to humans and nature. And while we’re on that point, I’m not going to seek to distinguish myth or mythology from the overlapping subjects of religion or ritual. To extend that metaphor, I’m going with a broad church approach here. I don’t have a religion – I have a mythology.

The only thing I would seek to distinguish myth or mythology from is the colloquial or popular usage of the word myth to connote some collectively or commonly held belief that has no basis in fact, or any false story. I use myth or mythology without any implication as to whether any belief or narrative may be understood as true or otherwise.

So that said, here are my Top 10 Books of Mythology. You know the rules – this is one of my deep dive top tens, counting down from tenth to first place and looking at individual entries in some depth or detail of themselves. Tenth place is my wildcard entry for the best entry from the previous year (2024).

But wait – there’s more! The subject is prolific enough for my usual twenty special mentions per top ten and for honorable mentions beyond that.

 

NOTE

 

I’ve revised this top ten to swap Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces back from special mentions into – spoiler alert! – sixth place

 

 

 

 

(10) NATALIE LAWRENCE –

ENCHANTED CREATURES: OUR MONSTERS AND THEIR MEANINGS (2024)

 

“I began as a scientist and became a hunter of monsters. It is only relatively recently that I have been able to fully articulate why they attracted me so much. I began with the monsters of hundreds of years ago, when the world was an almost alien place, but they taught me how to see what monsters do for us today.”

I tend to award my wildcard tenth place, if I can (or if my top ten subject permits), to best entry for the previous or present year – and this book by Natalie Lawrence was my favorite mythology book from 2024.

Natalie Lawrence taps into our universal fascination with monsters – the titular enchanted creatures from mythology to modern popular culture – and what they mean to (or for) us.

The book is divided into three thematic sections – Monsters of Creation, Monsters of Nature, and Monsters of Knowledge – each of which is divided in turn into thematic chapters.

For the Monsters of Creation, the chapters are The Horned Sorcerer (through the lens of the antlered shamanic figure in Palaeolithic cave art at the Cave of the Trois-Freres in France, a personal favorite of mine as well), Dragons of Chaos, and The Minotaur and the Labyrinth.

For Monsters of Nature, the chapters are Snake Women (through the lens of the recurring dangerous combination of woman and serpent from Eve onwards), Grendel, and Leviathans.

For Monsters of Knowledge, the chapters are Scaly Devils (featuring the fabulous beasts found by Europeans after the Age of Discovery, even if they had to stich them together) and Terrible Lizards (featuring dinosaurs and their fossils).

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(9) RONALD HUTTON –
TRIUMPH OF THE MOON (1999)

 

The history of what Hutton portrays to be the only religion England has ever given the world, modern pagan witchcraft or Wicca.

Ronald Hutton is an English historian who specializes, among other specialties, in the history of the various strands of contemporary paganism – particularly in this book, which might be regarded as his magnum opus.

It may be somewhat deflating or disillusioning for those who like to imagine modern paganism or neopaganism as descending from an unbroken lineage or tradition back to historical paganism, but Hutton presents Wicca definitively as a twentieth century reconstruction, often artistic or literary in nature.

However, Hutton clearly writes from a respect for the new paganism, consistent with his paean to it as the only religion England has given the world (and I understand that he was actually raised as a pagan in his youth).

And for that matter, what does it matter that it is a reconstruction of historical traditions, rather than a genuine continuation of, as neopaganism likes to present itself, longstanding hidden pagan traditions? Scratch beneath the surface and much the same can be said of other religious traditions. After all, if a historian can characterize even Christianity, from a historical perspective, as a Greek hero cult devoted to a Jewish messiah, then what of reconstruction? And that’s setting aside how much of either side of that characterization – Greek and Jewish – might be further characterized as reconstruction, or at least synthesis of other traditions.

Among his other books prior to Triumph of the Moon, Hutton deflated much the same claims of the ritual year in English paganism or at least tradition in Stations of the Sun – demonstrating the various celebrations to be of much more recent vintage than is often claimed for them.

And after Triumph of the Moon, Hutton has gone on to look at other strands within modern paganism in a similar vein (as more reflecting modern reconstruction than genuine historical tradition) – shamanism, druids, and most recently, various ‘pagan’ goddess figures of folklore in his Queens of the Wild.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(8) WESTON LA BARRE –
THE GHOST DANCE: THE ORIGINS OF RELIGION (1970)

 

A sweeping “psychoanalytic account of the birth of religion through the lens of his treatment of the ghost dance religion of native America”.

A sadly elusive and overlooked classic, particularly as anthropologist Weston La Barre regarded it as his magnum opus.

It’s also deliciously snarky, particularly about founding religious figures and classical philosophies.

Essentially, he presents all religion – not just native American – as shamanic in nature. All religions are ghost dances at heart. Indeed, this book led me to see the Bible as the Hebrew dreaming and the great messianic ghost dance.

Don’t get me wrong – I have a soft spot for the ghost dance, both the historical native American ghost dance and its metaphors. Hell – I usually feel my life has been one long ghost dance…

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(7) JEAN CHEVALIER & ALAIN GHEERBRANT –
PENGUIN DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLS (1969)

 

The Penguin dictionaries are usually of high quality whatever the subject, but the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols is the standout for me.

That might be attributed to the collaboration of its original authors – French writer, philosopher and theologian Jean Chevalier, with French poet and explorer Alain Gheerbant. Their literary background shines forth in the lyrical quality or poetic resonance of the entries – although at times the entries can be somewhat overwhelming in the density of their style.

As for the book itself, well, it’s a dictionary…of symbols. Obviously. Although that understates just how comprehensive the entries are, both in quantity and quality – devoted to the symbolism of myths, dreams, habits, gestures, shapes, figures, colors, numbers, plants, animals and more found in mythology and folklore.

I’ll let Penguin’s own publishing entry speak for it – “This is a remarkable dictionary, exploring the vast and various symbols which abound in literature, religion, national identity and are found at the very heart of our dreams and sub-conscious…each entry is given its complete range of interpretations – sexual and spiritual, official and subversive, cultural and religious – to bring meaning and insight to the symbol”.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(6) JOSEPH CAMPBELL –
THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES (1949)

 

Behold the monomyth!

Joseph Campbell, arguably the leading scholar of mythology, developed the monomyth or Hero’s Journey as the archetypal heroic narrative in which the protagonist hero sets out, has transformative adventures and returns home. And it has been a favorite of comparative mythology and literary or writing studies ever since, particularly after George Lucas identified it as a major influence on his original Star Wars trilogy.

Campbell identified it as the monomyth because he saw it to be at least a recurring mythic structure to heroes, if not universal. Of course, it helps to be a monomyth if you pitch it in broad terms that apply to almost any story – the hero (ad)ventures into the mythic world – the supernatural or mysterious realm – and brings something back, not least himself in transformed form.

As per Campbell – “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.”

Or even more broadly, a hero goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis and comes home changed or transformed – which is almost any story.

It also helps to structure it in the basic modern dramatic format of three acts – which Campbell styled as departure, initiation (often featuring death and rebirth or resurrection) and return.

And it helps even more to combine this broad structure at the same time with a number of specific variations from virtually every story – which Campbell styled as stages – which themselves have an almost infinite number of permutations.

Even so, you can’t deny the poetic resonance of Campbell’s stages as he styled or titled them – from the Call to Adventure (often accompanied by a Refusal of the Call) that starts it all, through the Belly of the Whale and the Road of Trials as well as my personal favorite The Meeting with the Goddess, to the triumphant return as the Master of Two Worlds and the Freedom to Live.

Of course, the monomyth has its critics – from those who criticize that its very generality (or vagueness) detracts from its validity or usefulness, to those who criticize its male frame of reference (with some offering up the heroine’s journey as an alternative) or its inherently aristocratic (or autocratic) elitism.

Yet, who can deny the emotional resonance of the hero’s journey – and who hasn’t yearned for their own call to adventure?

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(5) PETER DICKINSON –
THE FLIGHT OF DRAGONS (1979)

 

Here be dragons!

And how! It’s like Jurassic Park, only even more awesome – with dragons! This is a work of “speculative natural history”, which addresses that most awesome question – how dragons might have really existed?

Or more precisely, is there an evolutionary hypothesis that could explain the existence of dragons of mythology and lore?

In doing so, it addresses the question posed by the title – the flight of dragons. Clearly, something extra is needed for the mass of dragons to be lifted by their limited wing area – and if not magic, what?

The answer is the central hypothesis of the work – that dragons were essentially fantasy dirigibles, held aloft by sacs of hydrogen, produced from their own digestive hydrochloric acid. From that, we have their evolution from dinosaurs to most of the tropes of dragons in fantasy, not least their fiery breath, evolved to burn off excess hydrogen but finding use as a weapon – although it also offers explanations for their toxic (or more precisely acidic) blood, their hoards and most other dragon tropes, with an element of legendary embellishment thrown in (intelligence and speech for example).

It also offers explanation for the saddest dragon trope – their absence from reality. Obviously, they were hunted to extinction by humanity and their acidic blood dissolved any bodily remnants that remained behind (so no dragon fossils – alas!)

It’s a nice fantasy theory, even if it seems somewhat contrived or forced at times by standards of biology – but damned if I don’t half believe it, and even more damned if I don’t totally wish that somewhere here or there be dragons…

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(4) KATHARINE BRIGGS – A DICTIONARY OF FAIRIES (1972)

 

What it says on the tin, the definitive guide to that classic subject of British folklore – fairies.

A classic book, alternatively titled An Encyclopedia of Fairies, which now seems sadly out of print (but still available online), by a classic British folklorist – indeed THE classic British folklorist.

Of course, the term fairies now conjures up images of cute little gossamer-winged pixies like Tinkerbell.

In British folklore, fairies were much different, most aptly styled as the Fair Folk, itself a euphemism for things that would flay you and walk around in your skin – because you sure as hell didn’t want to draw their attention or conjure them up by using names more true to their nature, or worse yet, their true names. In fairness (heh), they weren’t always as extreme as to literally flay you and walk around in your skin, only on occasion and only some of them. Some of them were more neutral or even nice, although even the nice ones were usually weird or had weird alien morality. Indeed, alien is an apt description, as in many ways, the fairies of British folklore have been replaced with the aliens of modern folklore. And this book is a fascinating exploration, arranged as a dictionary in alphabetical entries (cross-referenced to other entries) of the various beings, creatures, attributes, themes and tropes of fairy folklore.

Also there’s an annual Katharine Briggs Folklore Award from 1982, named and awarded by the Folklore Society in honour of Briggs (who served as their president).

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(3) BARBARA WALKER – WOMEN’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MYTHS & SECRETS (1983)

 

She is the goddess and this is her body!

Also behold the monomyth! Not of Joseph Campbell’s universal hero, but of the universal goddess (although all heroes are her heroes). Or rather – the Goddess, since she is ultimately all goddesses. Virgin, mother, crone – god the mother and mother of god.

Now we get into my top trinity of my top ten books of mythology. Interestingly, Barbara Walker has also written a number of classic references to knitting. Obviously our interest here consists of her books in neo-pagan feminism, of which this entry was first and foremost – as an encyclopedia reference to mythology and religion through the lens, or rather the dance, of the Goddess. Essentially, throughout all entries there is Walker’s monomyth of the archetypal Goddess throughout mythology and history – or rather prehistory (or perhaps herstory), as the Goddess was displaced, firstly into many goddesses, and secondly by male gods or God.

However, like neo-paganism or the goddess movement in general, Walker’s monomyth is not so much a matter of historical accuracy (as many of her historical sources and interpretations don’t hold up under scrutiny) as it is historical reconstruction – the goddess as sacred poetry rather than sacred history. Or as sacred dance – the ghost dance of the Goddess as it were.

Walker herself is an atheist, so she doesn’t believe in the Goddess as a supernatural entity but as a symbol – and one she proposes as healthier for our society.

As she quotes Eugene O’Neill in one of her entries:

“We should have imagined life as created in the birth-pain of God the Mother. Then we would understand why we, Her children, have inherited pain, for we would know that life’s rhythm beats from Her great heart, torn with the agony of love and birth, and we would feel that death meant reunion with Her, a passing back into Her substance, blood of Her blood again, peace of Her peace.” – Eugene O’Neill, “Strange Interlude”

Of course, Walker’s not just talking your New Age Goddess here, all sweetness and light or maiden and mother – baptized between her breasts. She’s also talking your Old Testament bitch-goddess, apocalyptic wh*re or classic White Goddess of Graves – crucified between her thighs.

But meh – that’s no different from my life anyway:

“Sometimes I am the sister who befriends you, sometimes I am the mother who holds you, and sometimes I am the lover who sticks one in your back.”

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****
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(2) HOMER – ILIAD & ODYSSEY

 

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

“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, 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 (The Adventures of Ulysses by Bernard Evslin), which still remains the version of the Odyssey lodged within my psyche.

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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(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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MYTHOLOGY: TOP 10 BOOKS

(TIER LIST)

 

S-TIER (GOD-TIER – OR IS THAT GODDESS TIER?)

 

(1) BIBLE

(2) HOMER – ILIAD & ODYSSEY

(3) BARBARA WALKER – ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MYTHS & SECRETS

 

If the Bible and Homer are my Old Testament of my books of mythology, then Barbara Walker’s Encyclopedia of Myths & Secrets is my New Testament. And yes – I know that in a literal sense the Bible is both my Old Testament and New Testament, although in a figurative sense I also claim the Iliad as my Old Testament and the Odyssey as my New Testament. That’s just how mythology is, ok?

 

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(4) KATHERINE BRIGGS – DICTIONARY OF FAIRIES

(5) PETER DICKINSON – THE FLIGHT OF DRAGONS

(6) JOSEPH CAMPBELL – THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES

(7) JEAN CHEVALIER & ALAIN GHEERBRANT – PENGUIN DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLS

(8) WESTON LA BARRE – THE GHOST DANCE

(9) RONALD HUTTON – THE TRIUMPH OF THE MOON

 

X-TIER (WILD TIER – BEST MYTHOLOGY BOOK OF 2024)

 

(10) NATALIE LAWRENCE – ENCHANTED CREATURES: OUR MONSTERS & THEIR MEANINGS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(15) CHARLES FORT –

THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED / NEW LANDS / LO! / WILD TALENTS (1919-1932)

 

“Charles Hoy Fort, an eccentric American who meticulously collected and catalogued anomalous phenomena inexplicable or thought impossible by orthodox science – giving his name to ‘Fortean’ and ‘Forteana’ to characterize such phenomena, as in the ongoing online Fortean Times which effectively carries on Fort’s legacy.

I have a soft spot, as did Fort himself from evident from the prolific reports he compiled, for strange “falls” raining from the sky – fish (like on the book cover in my feature image), frogs, and so on.

They also are a good example of the anomalous phenomena Fort researched by visiting libraries in New York and London for more than 30 years “assiduously reading scientific journals, newspapers, and magazines” and compiling thousands of notes “on cards and scraps of paper in shoeboxes”. From this research, Fort wrote the four books in this special mention.

He was also ahead of his time, writing of UFOs – before 1947 and the usual start of “modern UFO allegations”. That might be reflected in why he wrote of triangle UFOs rather than the discs that were more in vogue from 1947, although triangle UFO sightings persist.

I also have a soft spot for his theory of a Super-Sargasso Sea to which he attributed strange falls and UFOs – a “sea” where all lost things go and occasionally rain back down on Earth – and an even softer spot for him effectively dismissing that and all other theories in his work (such as his “cosmic joker” theory), noting “I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written”.

Like H.P. Lovecraft (with whom he was largely contemporaneous), he was not the best prose stylist – although unlike Lovecraft he had much more of a sense of humor about it, tongue firmly in cheek – but created a modern mythology similar to that of Lovecraft and became a similar cult figure.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(5) NORSE MYTHOLOGY:

H.A. GUERBER – MYTHS OF THE NORSEMEN (1909)

 

“Northern mythology is grand and tragical. Its principal theme is the perpetual struggle of the beneficent forces of Nature against the injurious, and hence it is not graceful and idyllic in character, like the religion of the sunny South, where the people could bask in perpetual sunshine, and the fruits of the earth grew ready to their hand.”

Norse mythology – or more broadly Germanic and Scandinavian mythology – is one of the best known, even outside its European continent of origin and centuries after its displacement by Christianity, with the days of the week still named in English for the Norse gods and Thor as one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s highest profile characters. It is also arguably one of the most hardcore mythologies, ranking in third top spot in my Top 10 Mythologies

So of course it also scores special mention as a subject for my books of mythology. Books on the subject already feature as entries in my Top 10 Mythology Books or special mentions. There’s the first volume of Bulfinch’s Mythology, albeit not as much as classical mythology which is the predominant subject of that volume. More generally, Barbara Walker’s Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets as well as the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols have numerous entries on subjects of Norse mythology.

Myths of the Norsemen by American teacher and writer Hélène Adeline Guerber remains one of my favorite books for Norse mythology – and a vintage one at that. It owes its status as my favorite to being one of two books I first read to learn about the Norse myths as a child – the other being Bulfinch’s Mythology, but to be honest this did it better, not least because of its exclusive focus and the art plates throughout the book. It still boggles my mind that they had this vintage book in my school library – although one advantage of its vintage publication is that it is freely available online.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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*

(3) ILIAD & ODYSSEY (TROY & TROJAN WAR):

BARRY STRAUSS – THE TROJAN WAR (2006)

 

“Sing, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles” – or really just anything about the Iliad and the Odyssey, or the Troy and the Trojan war in general.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are of course my primary books of classical mythology, ranking in second spot in my Top 10 Mythology Books. So of course, I have a special mention just for the subject of the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as the Troy and Trojan War in general

Other books on the subject of the Iliad and the Odyssey, other than, well, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in my Top 10 Mythology Books or special mentions include those works on classical mythology in general – Bulfinch’s Mythology with its first volume predominantly on classical mythology and Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths, as well as Bettany Hughes on Helen of Troy. Barbara Walker’s Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets has numerous entries on subjects from the Iliad or Odyssey.

My keynote book for this special mention is The Trojan War by historian Barry Strauss.

“In The Trojan War historian and classicist Barry Strauss explores the myth and the reality behind the war, from Homer’s accounts in The Iliad and The Odyssey to Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of ancient Troy in the late nineteenth century to more recent excavations that have yielded intriguing clues to the story behind the fabled city.”

Essentially, Strauss is able to reconstruct the Trojan War from the Iliad, even if it did not happen quite as Homer described it, although Homer got more right than people give him credit – hence the reconstruction. (I’d love to see someone argue that all the mythological gods stuff was true, but the historical war stuff is false).

And Hector? Thou art avenged! I like how history matches mythology in more often than not showing the Trojans as the civilized society, originating from the Hittites, besieged by the rowdy Greeks as the sea-roving barbarians, or dare I say it, the Sea Peoples – the Vikings of the Aegean.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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(4) CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY:

EURIPIDES & APULEIUS – BACCHAE & GOLDEN ASS

 

I believe in all the gods – especially the goddesses!

And the nymphs – I’m in it for the nymphs.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are of course my primary books of classical mythology, ranking in second spot in my Top 10 Mythology Books, as classical mythology itself does in my Top 10 Mythologies. and Top 10 Mythologies.

However, it’s not all Homer. Indeed, Homer ranks his own special mention – this special mention is for books on the subject of classical mythology other than Homer or within the Iliad, Odyssey and Trojan War.

Books on the subject of classical mythology (or religion) already feature prominently as entries in my Top 10 Mythology Books or special mentions – Bulfinch’s Mythology with its first volume predominantly on classical mythology, Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths, Walter Burkert’s Greek Religion, Bettany Hughes on Aphrodite, Paul Robichaud on Pan, and Natalie Haynes on the Olympian goddesses and other female figures of classical mythology. More generally, Barbara Walker’s Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets as well as the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols have numerous entries on subjects of classical mythology.

However, I have two keynote books for this special mention, both of which are by writers in the classical period itself, Greek and Roman respectively – the Greek dramatist Euripides and Roman writer Apuleius, with their works The Bacchae and The Golden Ass respectively.

I mean, that right there – just the phrasing of Bacchae and Golden Ass – encapsulates my personal  philosophy, my mythos if you will, of classical mythology. Indeed, the phrase Golden Ass encapsulates my personal philosophy of everything – my life has been a quest not for the grail, but the golden ass.

 

“Appear, appear whatsoever thy name or shape!

O mountain bill, snake of the hundred heads,

Lion of the burning flame

O god, beast, mystery, come!”

Firstly, The Bacchae by Euripides – 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…

 

“Queen of Heaven, whether you are known as bountiful Ceres, the primal harvest mother, who, delighted at finding your daughter Proserpine again, abolished our primitive woodland diet, showed us sweet nourishment, and now dwell at Eleusis; or heavenly Venus, who at the founding of the world joined the sexes by creating Love, propagating the human race in endless generation, and worshipped now in the sea-girt sanctuary of Paphos; or Diana, Apollo’s sister, you who relieve the pangs of countless childbirths with your soothing remedies, venerated now at Ephesus; or dread Proserpine herself, she of the night-cries, who triple-faced combats the assault of spirits shutting them from earth above, who wanders the many sacred groves, propitiated by a host of rites; oh, light of woman, illuminating every city, nourishing the glad seed with your misty radiance, shedding that light whose power varies with the passage of the sun; in whatever aspect, by whatever name, with whatever ceremony we should invoke you”

And then there’s The Golden Ass by Apuleius – she is the goddess and this is her body!

As a (bawdy) comic prose novel – “the only ancient Roman novel in Latin to survive in entirety” – it lacks the tragic grandeur of The Bacchae, but what it lacks in grandeur, it makes up in, well, golden ass. The titular ass is what the writer is magically transformed into for a series of picaresque adventures, as well as snippets of classical mythology such as the myth of Cupid (or Eros) and Psyche.

He is restored to human form by the goddess – ironically perhaps given its keynote status as one of my top books of classical mythology, the Egyptian goddess Isis, who initiates Apuleius into her mysteries. O yes!

Isis was of course a popular goddess among the Romans, who took to her despite her Egyptian origin. However, in The Golden Ass, Isis is revealed to be not just a goddess, but effectively the Goddess – made manifest and known as other goddesses, including those in classical mythology.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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