Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Epics and Myths gathers fourteen narrative poems and works that shaped how a tradition pictured its gods without ever holding scriptural authority in it.

Four are Greco-Roman. Hesiod's Theogony and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey fixed Greek myth in writing by the eighth or seventh century BCE out of oral tradition, even though Greek religion had no revealed book and Plato attacked the poems' theology directly. Virgil's Aeneid gave Rome a divine ancestry tied to Augustus, and Ovid's Metamorphoses chained more than 250 transformation stories into the single most important surviving source for Greco-Roman myth.

Three are Mesopotamian. Enuma Elish tells how Marduk defeats the sea Tiamat and builds the cosmos from her corpse. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest long poem still widely read, holds the flood account of Tablet 11. Atrahasis, its older cousin, tells a fuller version of the same Mesopotamian flood tradition that both parallel and, historians argue, fed into the flood of Genesis.

Two are Norse: the Poetic Edda's Codex Regius manuscript and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, a poetics handbook that became the fullest surviving account of Norse mythology because explaining a kenning means telling the story behind it.

Two are Celtic: The Mabinogion's eleven medieval Welsh tales, and the Book of Invasions, which threads Ireland's mythic settlement into biblical chronology.

The Kalevala, compiled by Elias Lonnrot from Karelian oral poetry, and Beowulf, its Christian narrator keeping a pagan Germanic world intact, are national epics built from older material. The Psychomachia closes the group as an outlier, a Latin allegory staging virtue against vice as literal battle.