The Pantheon Companion

The family trees on this site are built to be explored on a screen: drag them, zoom into a branch, follow a name through to its portrait. The companion is the opposite object. It is a set of pages designed to be printed, folded, spilled on and written over — every tradition's descent laid out on one sheet, with the disputed lines drawn as disputed rather than quietly resolved into a tidy diagram.

What is in it

• Eight family-tree sheets, one per tradition, at a size that stays legible when printed on ordinary A4 or US Letter paper. An unbroken rule means the ancient works concur about a descent; a dashed rule means one text claims it and another denies it, and a numbered key in the margin says which is which.
• A source chronology per tradition, showing when each surviving work was written against when the material it describes was current — so it is visible at a glance that Snorri's Prose Edda postdates Iceland's conversion by two centuries, and that Ovid is writing about Greek gods for a Roman audience seven hundred years after Hesiod.
• A one-page who-is-who for each pantheon: the twenty or so figures you need to hold in your head to follow any story in that tradition, with their domains, their symbols in art, and the single myth that best explains them.
• A cross-tradition equivalence sheet that sets out which god-to-god equations are ancient and genuine, which were made by Roman writers for their own purposes, and which are modern inventions with no basis at all.

Who it is actually for

Three groups keep asking for exactly this. Teachers, who need a diagram that can go on a wall or a handout without a login. Games masters and worldbuilders, who need the shape of a pantheon at the table with the arguable bits marked, because the arguable bits are where the plot hooks are. And readers working through the Iliad, the Mahabharata or the Eddas for the first time, who mostly need a chart to stop losing track of who is whose son.

How the disputed lines are drawn

This is the part that does not exist elsewhere, so it is worth describing precisely. On a conventional printed genealogy of the Greek gods, Aphrodite hangs under Zeus and Dione, because a chart has to choose and that is the version Homer supplies. On these sheets she appears twice: once on that line and once rising from the sea-foam of Ouranos two generations earlier, joined by a broken rule, with a marginal key naming the Iliad and the Theogony against each. The same treatment applies to Loki's shifting parentage in the Norse sheet, to the rival Egyptian creation orders of Heliopolis and Memphis, and to the Irish material where a figure's father changes between manuscripts of the same cycle. The result is a chart that is harder to read at a glance and impossible to be misled by.

What you are not being asked to pay for

It is not a summary of this site. Every page here stays free, and the companion does not paywall anything. It is a printed reference layout, which is a genuinely different object from a website and does something a website cannot: sit open next to the book you are reading. If you want the material rather than the format, start from the pantheon hubs and the family trees and pay nothing.

The sheets are laid out for black-and-white printing on a domestic printer, because that is what a school or a kitchen table actually has. Nothing in them depends on colour to be readable, and the disputed-line key works in greyscale.

Buying it funds the writing of more pages, which is described honestly on the support page. The file is delivered as a print-ready PDF immediately after payment, and if it is not what you expected the terms set out a thirty-day refund with no argument attached.