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.

Thirty pages. Twenty-six of them are sheets you would actually print; the other four are the cover, the printing instructions, the contents and the colophon.

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 broken rule means one text claims it and another denies it, and a numbered key at the foot of the sheet says which works are arguing. Between them the eight sheets carry 177 figures and 61 numbered arguments.
• A source chronology per tradition, showing when each surviving work was written against when the material it describes was current — 85 dated entries in all, with the events that matter marked in the same sequence. A ninth sheet puts all eight traditions on a single axis, where it is visible at a glance that Snorri's Prose Edda postdates Iceland's conversion by two hundred and twenty years, 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 figures you need to hold in your head to follow any story in that tradition, with their domains, their symbols in art, the ancient works they are actually attested in, and the places they were actually worshipped. One hundred and sixty entries across the eight sheets.
• A cross-tradition equivalence sheet that sets out which god-to-god equations are ancient and genuine, which were made by an outsider naming somebody else's gods in his own vocabulary, and which are modern inventions with no basis at all — thirty-two equations, sorted into those three kinds, each with the source or the culprit named.

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, because a chart has to choose and that is the version Homer supplies. On the Greek sheet she hangs instead from Ouranos, where the Theogony puts her, and a broken rule runs across to Zeus with a boxed number beside it; the key at the foot of the sheet names Theogony 188–200 against Iliad 5.370–430 and settles nothing. She appears once, in the position this site's pages treat as primary, and the rival claim is drawn as a line rather than deleted.

The same treatment applies across the set. Loki sits among the Æsir on the Norse sheet with a broken rule to Odin, because what is in dispute there is not his parentage but his standing — Gylfaginning counts him a god and Lokasenna has him claim his place by an oath of blood-brotherhood rather than by blood. The Egyptian sheet carries the argument between cities on its face, with Sekhmet contested between the Book of the Heavenly Cow and the Memphite triad inscriptions, and Nefertem's mother changing with whichever city's texts you are reading. And Cú Chulainn appears on the Irish sheet with his father contested between the two recensions of Compert Con Culainn and the Táin — the same tale, in the same cycle, disagreeing with itself. 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. There are no photographs and no plates in it — every mark on every sheet is type or a drawn rule. Nothing depends on colour to be readable, the three kinds of line are three genuinely different line shapes rather than three colours, and the numbered key works in greyscale and survives a photocopier.

Buying it funds the writing of more pages, which is described honestly on the support page. It is sent by hand as an email attachment to the address on your Stripe receipt, within a day of payment and usually a good deal sooner; there is no account to create and nothing to log in to. If it is not what you expected the terms set out a thirty-day refund with no argument attached.