Curated category
Legendary progenitors
- NoahNoah is a figure whose name appears in the Hebrew Bible, the Quran, and the writings of the Bahai Faith, making him one of the few characters shared across…
- Adam and EveAdam and Eve are the first man and first woman in the creation myth of the Abrahamic religions. From them flows a startling claim.
- Venus (mythology)Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty, desire, sex, fertility, prosperity, and victory, was so deeply woven into Roman life that the luckiest roll you…
- FreyrFreyr, whose name in Old Norse simply means "the Lord", once stood at the center of a golden temple in Uppsala, his statue carved with an enormous phallus…
- Líf and LífþrasirIn the poem Vafþrúðnismál, the god Odin asks a jötunn named Vafþrúðnir who will survive when Fimbulvetr arrives. The winter at the end of the world brings…
- AeneasAeneas was twice pulled back from death by gods who would not let him die. In Homer's Iliad, Aphrodite and Apollo snatch him from a duel with Diomedes of…
- RaRa was the ancient Egyptian deity of the Sun, and the Egyptians called themselves the "Cattle of Ra." The name fit a strange origin story.
- CybeleA corpulent female figure sits flanked by large felines on a stone slab from Çatalhöyük, dated to the 6th millennium BC.
- YmirYmir is the primeval ancestor of all giants in Norse mythology, a being so enormous that when the gods finally killed him, his body became the world itself.
- Ask and EmblaAsk and Embla were the first man and woman ever to exist, according to Norse mythology. Three gods, one of them Odin, came across these two figures and gave…
- RígsþulaA single sheet of parchment from the fourteenth century holds the only surviving copy of Rígsþula. This fragment rests within Codex Wormianus, cataloged as…