Built from the encyclopedia itself
Tools for reading mythology
Five ways into the same material: walk any figure's family, put two pantheons' gods side by side, work out who a half-remembered figure is, see when each tradition's sources were actually written, and test what has stuck.
Everything below is computed while the site is being built, from the same structured data the written pages are checked against. None of it calls anything while you are using it, none of it needs an account, and none of it can disagree with the article it sits next to — if a tool says Cronus is Zeus’s father, it is because the Zeus page says so, in the same field the sentence in the article was written from.
That constraint is the reason there are five tools rather than a dozen. A mythology site can generate infinite quizzes and personality tests out of nothing; the useful ones are the ones that can only exist because somebody has already done the reading for 340 figures and written down, per figure, what the ancient sources actually attribute to them.
The relationship explorer
Stand on any of the 340 figures and see who the sources put around them — parents, partners, siblings, children — as a diagram you can drag and pinch. Click any name to stand on that figure instead and keep walking. Where two ancient works disagree about a connection, the line is drawn as contested and the argument is set out underneath with both works named.
Cross-pantheon comparison
29 divine offices — war, the sea, the dead, oaths, the harvest — laid side by side across the eight traditions, so “who is the Mesopotamian equivalent of Hermes?” gets an answer with its working shown. Tap any two names and it computes what they actually share, then says whether anybody in antiquity ever equated them, and who invented the equation if nobody did.
Which figure is this?
For the half-remembered one. Give whatever you have — a wolf, a spear, that it was Norse, that you saw it in the Prose Edda — and the candidates rank themselves, each quoting the wording on its own page that matched. Criteria the data cannot test are reported as untested rather than used to exclude anybody.
The source timeline
Not when the myths happened — when anybody wrote them down. Put any traditions on one real-year axis and see the distance between the period a body of myth describes and the earliest writing that survives about it. It is four thousand years in one direction for Egypt and two centuries the wrong way for Norse, and that single fact changes how both should be read.
Who’s who
A ten-question round per tradition, built from verified facts on the entity pages: domains, attributes in art, parentage, and which surviving work a figure is actually named in. Every question links to the page that settles it.
The eight family trees
A whole pantheon at once, laid out in generations, where the explorer shows one neighbourhood at a time. Dashed lines are marriages; where the sources disagree about a descent, the disagreement is printed under the diagram instead of being resolved into a tidy line.
What these tools deliberately do not do
They do not tell you which god you are. They do not average two traditions into a single family tree, because the resulting diagram would be a picture of nothing that was ever believed. And they do not treat an equation between two pantheons as a fact about antiquity unless an ancient writer made it: the matcher groups figures by what this encyclopedia records them as governing, which is a modern filing decision and is labelled as one on the page.
The comparisons that are ancient — Roman writers identifying their own gods with Greek ones, Greek writers doing the same to Egyptian ones — are handled in prose, one pair at a time, in the cross-pantheon comparisons, where there is room to say who made the equation and what they wanted from it.
If JavaScript is off
The family-tree pages carry the whole genealogy as a nested list below the diagram, and the written account of the tradition’s descent above it. Each of the newer tools carries the same information in server-rendered prose and links beneath it — the timeline’s dating in words, the twelve written office comparisons, the pantheon indexes. Nothing on this site is only available inside a widget.
Every result here is a link
All four of the interactive tools put their state in the address bar as you use them, and each has a button that copies it. That makes a result something you can send to somebody, cite in a forum answer, or keep. Those links are deliberately not separate pages in the site’s index: they serve the tool and point back to it as the canonical document, because a site that mints a new indexable URL for every combination a visitor tries ends up with tens of thousands of near-identical pages and less traffic than it started with.