Mythopedia
A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore
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- US$12.99
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From acclaimed folklorist and historian Adrienne Mayor, an enchanting collection of the ancient myths that emerged out of the wonders—and disasters—of the natural world
Mythopedia is a fun, fact-filled A-Z treasury of myths inspired by natural events. Bringing together fifty legends from antiquity to the present, this delightfully entertaining book takes you around the world to explore sunken kingdoms and lost cities, accursed mountains and treacherous terrains, and lethal lakes and singing sand dunes, explaining the historical background and latest science underlying each tale.
As soon as humans invented language, they told stories to explain mysterious things they observed around them—on land, in the seas, and in the skies. Even though these tales are expressed in poetic or supernatural language, they contain surprisingly accurate insights and even eyewitness descriptions of catastrophic events millennia ago. Drawing on her unique insights as a pioneer in the exciting new field of geomythology, Adrienne Mayor describes how cultural memories of tsunamis, volcanic disasters, and other massive geological events can reach back thousands of years as the stories were preserved, elaborated, told, and retold across generations. She shows how geomythology is expanding our understanding of our planet’s history over eons, revealing the human desire to explain nature and weave imaginative stories intertwined with keen observation, rational speculation, and memory.
With captivating drawings by Michele Angel, Mythopedia is a compendium of many marvels, from the Hindu monkey god Hanuman and his army of bridge-building primates to the terrifying sand demon Shensha shen of China, the gnawing glaciers of Austria, and the vengeful fish-headed snake god Nyami Nyami of Africa’s Zambezi River.
Features a cloth cover with an elaborate foil-stamped design
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this captivating volume, folklorist Mayor (The First Fossil Hunters) guides readers through the emerging field of geomythology, which revisits ancient myths for what they reveal of natural history. She examines 53 tales from around the world, showing how they evolved from premodern peoples' need to make sense of natural occurrences, usually ones that were unprecedented and inexplicable, like meteor strikes, disappearing lakes, and frogs and fish falling from the skies. These myths, she writes, provide insight into the ways people have been trying to make rational, proto-scientific sense of the natural world for thousands of years, but also preserve memories of violent catastrophes. These include the volcanic eruption of Budj Bim in Southern Australia a little over 36,000 years ago —Aboriginal tales of the event "convey perceptive observations and understanding of natural evidence" that have "help scientists to understand... geological events in Australia's remote past." In between tales of flaming bodies of water and singing sand dunes, Mayor also includes contemporary geomyths like the Chicago Rat Hole, an impression shaped like a rat's body in a city sidewalk that drew Chicagoans bearing tokens (pennies, flowers, candles, cheese) in early 2024, which help to illustrate that "the human impulse to find meaning... in an extraordinary event... is a strong, timeless, and evolutionarily valuable tendency." Written with wit and erudition, this delights.
