An entertaining and thought-provoking look at the common threads woven through the world's greatest myths -- and the central role they have played through time.

The author of Parallel Myths and The Book of Ages, J. F. Bierlein teaches in the Washington Semester and World Capitals Program at American University in Washington, and also works for a social sciences consulting firm. Multilingual, he is deeply interested in theology, existentialism, art, opera, and the study of classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Hebrew, as well as other languages. Professor Bierlein and his wife, Heather Diehl, live in northern Virginia.

Acknowledgments
Preface
An Introduction	p. 3
What Is Myth?	p. 3
Language and Myth	p. 6
Time and Myth	p. 11
History and Myth	p. 17
The Civic Myth	p. 19
Morality and Myth	p. 21
The Sense of the Sacred	p. 22
The Cast of Characters	p. 24
The Greek and Roman Pantheon	p. 24
The Norse Pantheon	p. 29
The Gods of India	p. 30
The Egyptian Pantheon	p. 32
The Hawaiian Pantheon	p. 32
The Aztec Pantheon	p. 33
Beginnings - The Creation Myths	p. 37
Creation Myths of India	p. 37
The Creation Myth of Iran	p. 41
The Norse Creation Myth	p. 44
Greek Creation Myths	p. 46
Creation Myths of Africa	p. 48
Creation Myths of Egypt	p. 51
The Creation Myth of Finland	p. 53
The Chinese Creation Myth	p. 53
The Creation Myth of Japan	p. 54
The Polynesian Creation Myths	p. 56
Creation Myths of the Americas	p. 59
The Babylonian Creation Myth	p. 71
The Biblical Creation Stories	p. 73
The Talmudic Creation Story	p. 76
"The Creation"	p. 78
Some Notes on the Creation Myths	p. 80
The Earliest Times	p. 91
The Biblical Fall	p. 91
The Talmudic Fall	p. 95
The Story of Poia (Blackfoot Indian)	p. 97
The Four Ages of Man (India)	p. 100
The Five Ages of Man (Greece)	p. 103
The Five Suns (Aztec)	p. 104
The Five Worlds (Navajo)	p. 105
North American Indian Myths of Emergence	p. 108
Three Stories of Maui the Trickster (Polynesia)	p. 111
Prometheus and Epimetheus (Greece)	p. 114
The Origin of Medicine (Cherokee)	p. 115
Murile and the Moonchief (Kenya)	p. 117
The Human Race Is Saved (Iroquois)	p. 118
The Flood Myths	p. 121
The Story of Noah	p. 121
Manu and the Fish (India)	p. 125
Utnapishtim (Babylonia)	p. 125
The Flood Myth of Hawaii	p. 126
Tata and Nena (Aztec)	p. 127
Deucalion (Greece)	p. 128
North American Flood Myths	p. 129
The Flood Myth of the Incas	p. 133
The Flood Myth of Egypt	p. 134
Tales of Love	p. 136
Greek and Roman Love Myths	p. 136
Two Peruvian Love Stories	p. 147
Angus Og (Scotland and Ireland)	p. 151
Algon and the Sky-Girl (Algonquin Indian)	p. 153
Morality Tales from the Myths	p. 155
Morality Tales from the Mahabharata (India)	p. 156
Anansi the Spider (West Africa)	p. 159
Greek Morality Tales	p. 165
Four Parallel Stories	p. 171
The Story of Two Brothers (Blackfoot Indian)	p. 171
The Story of Two Brothers (Egypt)	p. 173
Bellerophon (Greece)	p. 175
Joseph and Potiphar's Wife (Genesis 39)	p. 176
Some Brief Myths of the Hero	p. 179
The Story of Siegfried (Norse/Germany)	p. 179
Theseus (Greece)	p. 185
Hiawatha Tarenyawagon (Iroquois)	p. 191
The Myth of Sisyphus (Greece)	p. 194
The Journey to the Underworld and the Path of Death	p. 200
Ishtar in the Underworld (Babylonia)	p. 200
Marwe in the Underworld (Kenya)	p. 203
Savitri (India)	p. 205
Pare and Hutu (New Zealand)	p. 209
Sayadio in the Land of the Dead (Iroquois)	p. 210
The Spirit Bride (Algonquin)	p. 211
Osiris and Isis (Egypt)	p. 212
Blue Jay in the Land of the Dead (Chinook)	p. 217
The Greek and Roman Afterlife	p. 220
Peruvian Death Myths	p. 223
Socrates on the Greco-Roman Afterlife	p. 224
Persian (Zoroastrian) Death Myths	p. 226
Nachiketas (India)	p. 227
Jewish Death Myth	p. 229
Tibetan Death Myths	p. 229
Baldur (Norse)	p. 231
The Death of Moses (The Talmud)	p. 233
The End - Visions of the Apocalypse	p. 237
How Rudra Destroys the Universe (India)	p. 237
The Persian Apocalyptic Myth	p. 239
The Islamic Apocalyptic Myth	p. 241
Maitreya (Tibet, Korea, Mongolia)	p. 245
Ragnarok: The Twilight of the Gods (Norse)	p. 246
North American Apocalyptic Myths	p. 248
The Old Testament	p. 249
The New Testament	p. 250
Views of Myth and Meaning	p. 257
Parallel Myths and Ways of Interpreting Them	p. 267
The Discovery of Parallel Myths	p. 267
Myth as a History of Prehistory: The Matriarchal Theory	p. 271
Transitional Thinking in the Interpretation of Myth	p. 275
Psychological Theories of Parallelism in Myth	p. 279
A Modern Nonpsychological Approach: Structuralism	p. 296
Philosophical Perspectives on Myth	p. 299
The "History of Religions" School of Myth	p. 302
Myth - Yours, Mine, and Ours	p. 304
Modern Questions of Faith	p. 304
The Demythologization of Judeo-Christian Culture	p. 314
The Legitimacy of the Supernatural	p. 325
Notes	p. 327
Bibliography	p. 333
Index	p. 339
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

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