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.

Other Myths gathers twenty one narratives that the atlas's other myth groupings do not capture: not a world's making, not a flood, not a hero's ordeal, not a trickster's exploit, not a single cosmic scale event, but the atlas's residual category for a wide range of narratives, most explaining one specific feature of the world or a people.

Several are etiological. The Chameleon's Message explains why people die, a slow chameleon's kind message losing a race to a faster lizard's harsher one. The First Fire explains how fire reached the animal world after the Water Spider succeeds where stronger animals fail. The Tower of Babel explains why humanity speaks many languages, after a shared tongue and a city's ambition are broken apart. Pele's Journey From Kahiki to Hawaii explains the geological succession of the Hawaiian islands as the fire goddess's own progressive movement southeastward.

The largest cluster are scriptural narratives shared, with real variation, across neighboring traditions. Cain and Abel, the Binding of Isaac and the Sacrifice of Ibrahim, Jonah and the Great Fish, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and the Companions of the Cave each survive in a Genesis or Hebrew Bible telling and a distinct Quranic one that names, omits or adds details differently. Iblis's Refusal to Bow and the Night Journey and Ascension of Muhammad are Quranic narratives in their own right, the Harrowing of Hell built from allusive verses rather than any single canonical account, and Lilith and the Golem of Prague are figures assembled over centuries from disparate, non canonical sources.

What unites the twenty one is only what excludes them from every other grouping: the atlas's catch all for myth, its edges the least fixed of any myth grouping it holds.