Support the site

Writing one page here means reading the primary sources for a figure, checking what the standard editions say about the passages that disagree with each other, finding out what has actually been excavated at the sanctuaries involved, and only then writing the thing properly. A single entity page takes hours. That is slow, and the slowness is the entire product: fast mythology content already exists in enormous quantities, and most of it is worthless because nobody checked anything.

Support pays for the parts of that work that cost money.

• Reference editions and translations. Good critical editions of the Mesopotamian and Old Irish material are expensive and are not on the open web in usable form.
• Hosting, which keeps the site free of advertising. Advertising rewards page-count and outrage; this site's only asset is being right.
• Time, which is the real constraint. Every hour funded is another figure who gets a portrait instead of an attribute list.

What the money has already gone into

The work is visible rather than promised. The eight interactive family trees are built from the parentage recorded on individual figures' pages, which took longer than drawing eight diagrams would have, because it means a correction to one god's parents redraws the tree automatically instead of leaving a chart to rot out of date. The myth retellings are written from scratch rather than adapted from the out-of-copyright translations everyone else recycles, which is slower by an order of magnitude and is the only way to get prose a modern reader will actually finish. And the disputed-line notation on the trees exists because averaging the sources into one clean answer would have been half a day's work and a lie.

What is next

More figures in the traditions that are thinnest here — the Mesopotamian and Celtic material especially, where the sources are hardest to get at and the popular internet accounts are least reliable. Public-domain art plates on every major page, each credited to its work and holding collection. And the long myth retellings, which are the most expensive thing on the site to produce and the thing readers stay for.

There are two ways to help. The printable companion is a paid download — the family trees and source chronologies laid out to be printed and marked up — and buying it funds the same work while giving you something to keep. Direct support does the same thing without the file.

Free help is worth as much. Sending a sourced correction, telling someone which page settled an argument for them, or linking a myth retelling from a forum where people are arguing about a game's mythology does more for a site like this one than a small payment does, because it is how anyone finds it at all.