Some of these gods are still worshipped
Calling a story a myth says nothing about whether it is true, and not every tradition in this category belongs to the past. The religions that honoured ZEUS and ODIN faded many centuries ago, though small modern groups have revived them. But hundreds of millions of Hindus pray to VISHNU, SHIVA and GANESHA today, and the Grand Shrine of the sun goddess AMATERASU at Ise draws millions of visitors every year. Our Religion puzzles cover living faiths as people practise them; the puzzles here are about their stories, alongside the gods of peoples from Mesopotamia to Mexico.
Plenty of those gods had real addresses. PANTHEON, the word for a whole family of gods, means 'all the gods', and the Pantheon in Rome, a TEMPLE finished around 125 CE, still has the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.
You can even visit VALHALLA, after a fashion. King Ludwig I of Bavaria built a marble hall of fame by that name above the River Danube, opened in 1842 and modelled on a Greek temple, and it still honours famous Germans with rows of busts. The QUETZAL is real too: a bird with long, shimmering green tail feathers that Aztec rulers wore, and whose name makes up half of Quetzalcoatl's. Today it is Guatemala's national bird, and Guatemalan money is called the quetzal as well.
The same story, told a world apart
Put the myths side by side and the same shapes keep appearing. A great flood wipes out almost everyone except one family and their boat: it happens in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, in the story of Noah, and in the Hindu tale of Manu, who is saved when VISHNU takes the form of a fish. A hero goes down to the land of the dead to bring someone back and is told not to look: Orpheus in Greece, Izanagi in Japan, and both of them look. A trickster who is clever, greedy and funny keeps everyone off balance: LOKI in the north, Anansi the spider in West Africa, Coyote in North America, the Monkey King in China.
Some of this is easy to explain. Floods were a real danger in the river valleys where many early civilisations grew up, and stories travelled with traders. Some of it is harder, and scholars still disagree about how much comes from shared history and how much from people everywhere asking the same questions about death, weather and where everything came from.
Old gods in new costumes
The myths never stopped being retold. In 1949 the writer Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces, arguing that hero stories from all over the world follow the same basic journey: leave home, face trials, come back changed. George Lucas said the book helped shape Star Wars. Marvel's THOR first appeared in a comic in 1962, with LOKI a couple of months behind him, and RAGNAROK became a film title in 2017.
An ORACLE, a PROPHECY, an IMMORTAL villain: the working parts of myth are all over today's films and games. That makes a good challenge to take into class — pick a modern story and track down the old myth hiding inside it.