About this encyclopedia

Mythology is badly served online, and it is badly served in a specific way. Reference articles reduce a god to a bulleted attribute sheet — domain, symbol, parents, done — as though the interesting thing about Inanna were that she is associated with love and war. Fan wikis blend a deity's ancient cult with a comic-book character of the same name until neither is legible. The sites that do carry the old public-domain translations bury them under three layers of advertising and a nineteenth-century prose style that nobody under sixty enjoys reading. Meanwhile these are among the best stories anyone has ever told, and they are free.

So the premise of MythosPedia is simple: every figure gets a written portrait rather than a data-sheet. Who they were to the people who actually sacrificed to them. What happens in their myths, told as stories. Who their family were, and which of those lines the ancient authors argued about. What they were shown holding. Where their temples stood and what has been dug up there. And what became of them afterwards in novels, games and films — that last part kept firmly in a section of its own, because Marvel's Thor and the Prose Edda's Thor are different characters who share a hammer.

What this site does that a wiki does not

It names the source, every time. If a page says Loki fathered the wolf Fenrir, it says that the Gylfaginning section of Snorri's Prose Edda is where that genealogy comes from, and that Snorri was writing two centuries after Iceland's conversion to Christianity. Where a claim rests on one late author, you will be told it rests on one late author. That changes how much weight you give it, which is the point.

It shows disagreements instead of averaging them. Ancient traditions contradict each other constantly, and the contradictions are usually the most interesting part — they are where you can see a myth being adapted for a new city, a new dynasty or a new theology. Homer's Iliad calls Aphrodite the daughter of Zeus and Dione; Hesiod has her rise from the sea-foam of a mutilated sky-god, generations earlier. A tidy encyclopedia picks one. This one gives both, with the works attached, and says which version the page's account follows.

It refuses to invent. No epithet, cult site, festival or genealogy appears here because it sounded plausible. Where the evidence runs out — and for Celtic and Mesopotamian material it runs out early and often — the page says so rather than filling the gap with confident-sounding reconstruction. A great deal of what circulates online as Celtic mythology was written in the 1890s or the 1970s, and telling the difference is part of the job.

It keeps the modern afterlife separate and takes it seriously. Readers arrive here because of a game, a film or a novel, and pretending otherwise would be snobbery. Those versions get discussed honestly: what the adaptation took, what it invented, and why. They simply never get mixed into the account of the ancient material.

Who writes it

One person, working from primary sources in translation, standard scholarly editions and reference works, and the published archaeology of the sanctuaries and find-sites involved. That is a real limitation and it is stated rather than hidden: this is a well-researched encyclopedia written by an enthusiast, not a peer-reviewed corpus. It is also why corrections that name a text and passage are welcome and acted on quickly — see the contact page, where the useful format for a correction is spelled out.

The long version of how sources are chosen, weighted and cited is on the sources and method page. It is worth reading before you argue with a page, because it explains why, for instance, Plutarch is treated as the fullest surviving account of the Osiris myth and simultaneously as a Greek writer explaining Egypt to Greeks five hundred years after the fact.

How the site is organised

Eight traditions, each with a pantheon hub that explains how that mythology reached us before listing anybody. Under each hub sit the individual figures. Alongside them sit the myths themselves, retold at length as stories rather than summarised in a paragraph, and an interactive family tree per tradition, built from the parentage recorded on the individual pages so that the tree and the portraits can never drift apart. Where two traditions genuinely invite comparison there is a comparison page that tests the equation rather than assuming it — because Ares and Mars are not the same god, and the reasons why are more interesting than the resemblance.

What it costs

Nothing, and there is no advertising on it. The site is funded by a paid printable companion and by direct support, both explained on the support page. That model is deliberate: advertising rewards page-count and outrage, and this site's only asset is being right.