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What is a myth? The Greeks knew and, as usual, had a word for it; the word mythos which means word, story, talk, etc. So, for that matter, did the tribes of North America – for the Chinook ik!anam; for the Kwakiutl nayam; for the Thompson tribe spektakl; for the Tsimshian adaox, while in Alaska it was adaork. And so, of course, did many other cultures – and they had not only the word but the stories to go with it. To most of them it was a story passed orally from one person to another, from generation to generation, telling of some hero, some god, some formulation of an abstract idea such as creation. Some of these became written records and so survived for us to know them and such is their power that, despite the disappearance of the cultures that gave rise to them, modern literature abounds with allusions and direct references to these marvellous tales, many of which are still endlessly retold – as they are in this book. Although they probably represent the most well-known body of mythological material, myths did not start with the Greeks. Many of the myths included here predate the Greeks by many centuries and there can be little doubt that men have constructed accounts to answer such questions as ‘What causes thunder?’ or ‘Where did we come from?’ ever since they were capable of thought. This implies that myths go back not centuries but millions of years but, since those early people could think and formulate the questions to which they had no real answers but could not write either the questions or the answers, we have no way of knowing what myths they constructed. One thing, however, is abundantly clear from the records that are available to us; the urge – the need even – to create myths seems to be inherent in all cultures. Although it can be argued that each culture took over and elaborated the stories of earlier cultures (as the Romans did, taking over virtually the whole of the Greek pantheon and their myths), it is just as valid to suggest that the many similarities between the major myths have no such connections since they appear in cultures so widely separated by both distance and time that no contact between them seems possible. Stories of creation, of floods, of the mating of gods with mortals, of heroes who brought fire – these and many others crop up in the myths of numerous cultures throughout recorded time.

One can regard these ancient tales as simple tales of derring-do – the work of a bygone Archer, Forsyth or Shute – or one can attribute to them the deeper significance that almost certainly prompted their creation. Some maintain that the similarities between many of the basic myths postulate a common origin, others that these similarities prove only that similar questions, similar phenomena, evoke similar answers in each culture. This book brings together under such headings as creation, first humans, flood, etc many of these similar stories but the significance of the similarities and the interpretation of individual myths is left to those whose interests lie in those fields and to the reader who is free to add his own interpretation – or none. Scholars divide stories of the imagination into categories such as myth, legend, fairy-tales, folklore, marchen and so on but, given that the stories relate to postulated entities such as gods, real characters such as Charlemagne, completely imaginary characters such as Ali Baba and characters such as King Arthur who live in that shadowland between fact and fiction, it is hard to see how one can slot all of them neatly into classes. Add to this the fact that huge swathes of what passes in the study of the world’s faiths as religion appear again in world mythologies and it is wise, in my view, to take a much more relaxed view of what constitutes mythology. As a result, this book contains entries that purists might well reject as being outside the realms of true myth but it seems to me that, if a demon such as Ravana in Hindu myth or the oni of Japanese stories are eligible for inclusion, there is no good reason to exclude the whole host of demons which inhabit the grimoires and demonologies of the western world.

Another feature of this book is that it attempts to encompass as wide a coverage of the world’s mythologies as is reasonably possible within one set of covers. If it opens a wider field to those whose reading has previously been confined to the well-known mythologies of the Greeks, the Romans and the Norsemen, it will have served the purpose for which it was conceived. It is a common feature of language that meanings and spellings change over time and distance and it is, therefore, no surprise to find that the names of many of the gods and heroes occur in many forms. Marduk, for example, is said to have 50 names, Ra 75, Allah 99 (or 400), Odin over 200 and Shiva over 1000. I have included all the different versions I have encountered, cross-referenced as appropriate. These alternative names and spellings appear in square brackets after the headword and the entries here also include some favourite epithets and attributes together with equivalents in other cultures. In the case of Chinese entries, there are often significant differences in spelling depending on which of the several transcription systems is used (Wade-Giles and Pinyin are the most frequently used). In this book, all Chinese entries are Wade-Giles. The majority of the entries also carry a label in italics giving an indication of origins. These labels are not intended to indicate nationalties so much as the mythology in which they are featured. Priam for example, though a Trojan, has a Greek label since he appears in the stories of Greek mythology and Lancelot, although French, appears with a British label since he is a hero of the Arthurian saga.

Indexing in this book is based on word order rather than on a strict letterby- letter order. Some languages have unfamiliar letter groups that cause problems in this field. Many Tibetan entries begin with such combinations as dMu, sMan, bDud and so on and some African words begin with uG. One normally finds the Tibetan words indexed under the second (capital) letter but the African words under the first (lower case) letter. Since the normal English practice is to index by initial letter, not sound – we don’t index phonetic under ‘f’ nor psalm under ‘s’ – the word, however pronounced, is indexed here under the first letter, whether capital or lower case.
J. A. Coleman
Penkridge, July 2007