Why Myths Fascinate Me?

 

            I am an avid fan of Percy Jackson and his adventures with his fellow demigods. His father and his side of the family have always fascinated me. I didn't believe they existed per se, but the powers, the structures, and the imagination behind the creation of these gods attracted me enough to fall in love with those stories, and Percy took up a top spot in my favourite books list pretty quickly.

But then I read the second series in Percy Jackson, where he and his friends face off against Gaia. One thing that stood out to me was the different manifestations of the gods. I learnt from the book that in Rome, Zeus was called Jupiter, Athena was Minerva, Poseidon was Neptune, and so on. This made me wonder, even if they were not real, there must be something in real life that started these stories.

I jumped into research and was quite surprised to find out that there is a complete field of study dedicated to comparing myths from around the world, called Comparative Mythology. I was taken aback. It is an actual academic discipline, with linguists, archaeologists, and psychologists all working on it from different angles. The more I read, the more I realised that Rick Riordan's books, as creative as they are, were only scratching the surface of something far more in real life.

So, I want to share what I found. And the best way I can think to do it is to ask the same question I started with,

Why do the same gods, the same stories, and the same monsters keep appearing across completely different cultures, cultures that never even met each other?

It turns out there are two very different answers to that question. And both of them are true. Buckle up, its going to be a long read.

One. The Geographical Answer

The first answer is the one that fascinated me the most when I first stumbled into it, because it felt like detective work. Some myths look alike because they literally came from the same place. The same story, told by the same people, and then carried across the world as those people migrated and settled in new lands over thousands of years.

There was a group of people, we do not know what they called themselves, who lived on the grasslands of what is now modern-day Ukraine and southern Russia, somewhere around 4000 to 3000 BCE. Scholars call them the Proto-Indo-Europeans. They herded cattle, they had horses, they had wheels, and they had a language. They also had stories.

Over centuries, their descendants migrated. Some went west into Europe. Some went south into Greece and the regions around it. Some went east, all the way into Iran and India. And as they spread out, their language slowly changed, the way English and German and Dutch all sound different today but are clearly related if you look closely. All of the following languages, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Old Norse, Persian, came from that one original Proto-Indo-European tongue.

Here is what blew my mind. Linguists have been able to reconstruct the name of the chief god of these Proto-Indo-Europeans. The name was *Dyēus Ph₂tēr. It literally means "Sky Father."

Now look at what happened to that name as the people spread, In ancient India, it became Dyauṣ Pitṛ in the Vedic tradition, In Greece, it became Zeus Pater (Zeus is the Father), in Rome, it became Iuppiter, which we know as Jupiter and in Norse mythology, it became Týr.

This is not a coincidence. This is the same name, spoken by the same original people, that slowly changed over thousands of years as their descendants settled on different continents. It is the linguistic equivalent of carbon dating. And it connects directly to what Percy Jackson taught me, Jupiter is just the Roman pronunciation of the original Sky Father. The same god, wearing different clothes depending on which branch of the family you are visiting.

What is even more incredible is that the story followed the name. The Proto-Indo-Europeans had a core myth, a kind of original adventure, that their descendants preserved in their own ways across the world. Scholars call it the Chaoskampf, which is just a German word for "the struggle against chaos." It goes like this: a great monster, almost always a serpent or dragon, is blocking something essential to life, usually water, sometimes cattle. A thunder god with a powerful weapon defeats the monster and releases what was blocked. Life is restored. Order wins.

Now, here is where things get genuinely astonishing.

In India, the Vedic storm god Indra drinks a sacred drink called soma, picks up his diamond thunderbolt called the Vajra (The meaning of Vajra varies through North and South, which is a whole different topic to uncover), and kills a gigantic serpent called Vritra (or Virithrasuran in south). Vritra had been hoarding all of the world's water inside his mountain, causing a massive drought. When Indra strikes him down, the rivers are finally free.

In Greece, Zeus takes his thunderbolts and battles Typhon, a creature with a hundred serpentine heads, each roaring with a different animal's voice, threatening to overthrow the gods of Olympus. Zeus defeats him. And that is just Zeus. Then Heracles kills the nine-headed Hydra. Apollo kills the earth-dragon Python. Greece is practically overflowing with this same fight, wearing slightly different masks each time.

In Norse mythology, which is the one I got interested in again through Percy Jackson and then through Magnus Chase, Thor wields his hammer Mjölnir and battles the Midgard Serpent Jörmungandr, a snake so enormous it encircles the entire earth. At the end of the world, at Ragnarök, they face each other in their final battle. Thor kills the serpent but staggers nine steps and dies from its venom. Even in his defeat, the bones of the story are the same.

And then there is the Hittite version, from ancient Anatolia, modern-day Turkey, where the storm god Tarhunt battles a serpent called Illuyanka. This one is from around 1400 BCE, one of the oldest written versions of this story that we have.

India. Greece. Scandinavia. Anatolia. These civilisations did not read each other's texts. They did not share libraries. What they shared was an ancestor, a group of people on the Eurasian steppe who told one story, and whose descendants carried that story into every corner of the Indo-European world. By the time archaeologists found ancient DNA evidence in European skeletons in the 2010s, they could actually confirm that a massive population migration from the steppe into Europe happened around 3000 BCE. The myths and the genetics are telling the same story.

The Flood, Where Geography Becomes Psychology

The Great Flood story is interesting because it sits right at the boundary between the two explanations I am describing. Some versions of the flood story are clearly related historically, they share specific details because one civilisation borrowed from another. But flood stories appear in cultures that had absolutely no contact with each other, which means something else is also going on.

Let me give you the connected ones first.

In ancient Sumer (modern Iraq), one of the oldest written stories in human history, the Epic of Gilgamesh, contains a flood story that is at least a thousand years older than the one in Genesis. The gods, furious at the noise humanity makes, decide to drown the world. But the god Ea warns a righteous man named Utnapishtim in a dream. He builds a great boat, loads it with his family and pairs of every animal, survives six days and nights of catastrophic flooding, and then releases a dove, a swallow, and a raven to test for dry land. He sacrifices on a mountaintop when the waters recede.

In the Bible, God sees the wickedness of humankind and sends a flood to cleanse the earth. Noah, the one righteous man, builds an Ark, loads his family and pairs of every animal, survives forty days of flood, and releases a raven and a dove to search for land. He sacrifices on a mountaintop when the waters recede.

The parallels there are specific enough that scholars widely agree the Biblical flood story directly inherited the earlier Mesopotamian tradition, probably during the period when Hebrew people were in contact with Babylonian culture. That is the geographical, historical explanation, the story travelled from one civilisation to another through cultural contact.

But then you get the Maya. And the Hindus. And the ancient Greeks. And they all have flood stories too, and they had no contact whatsoever with the Sumerians or the Hebrews.

In the Maya Popol Vuh, from what is now Guatemala, the creator gods are dissatisfied with their wooden human creations, they lack hearts and souls, and they destroy them with a catastrophic flood of heavy rain and thick resin. In Hindu mythology, the god Vishnu takes the form of a giant fish and warns the sage Manu that a great flood is coming, telling him to build a boat and fill it with seeds. In Greek mythology, Zeus destroys a corrupt world with a flood; the righteous Deucalion and Pyrrha survive in a chest and repopulate the earth.

This is where you need the second explanation. Because no amount of cultural contact can explain why cultures on opposite sides of the planet, with no shared ancestry and no shared language, all independently told stories about a catastrophic flood sent to wipe out a corrupt humanity, survived by one righteous person in a vessel.

For that, you need to understand what was happening inside the human mind.

Two. The Psychological Answer

The second answer to why myths look alike does not come from geography at all. It comes from psychology. And it was an idea proposed by a Swiss psychiatrist named Carl Jung, which I found genuinely surprising when I first read about it, I did not expect a therapist to be one of the most important figures in the study of mythology.

Jung argued that beneath the personal layer of the mind, the one that stores our own memories and experiences, there is a deeper layer that is not personal at all. He called it the Collective Unconscious. This layer, he said, does not belong to any individual. It belongs to the human species. And it is populated by what he called archetypes, primordial patterns of image and emotion that arise in every culture, in every time, because every culture faces the same fundamental conditions of being human.

We all die. We are all born. We all experience seasons. We all face things that terrify us. We all wonder where the world came from and where we go when we leave it. And our minds, wired identically at this deepest level, generate the same stories in response.

This is why the flood myth appears in Maya Guatemala and Sumerian Iraq with no cultural connection between them. Floods happened to both civilisations. They lived near rivers. They experienced, from time to time, catastrophic inundations. Their minds responded to that terror with the same psychological need: to give it cosmic meaning, to make the destruction make sense, and to affirm that after the worst thing imaginable happens, life can begin again.

The story is generated, by the human brain, doing what it always does when faced with the same existential emergency.

The God Who Dies and Comes Back

One of the most debated and most genuinely electric patterns in comparative mythology is the idea of the Dying and Rising God, a figure whose death and resurrection was at the centre of ancient religious practice.

The concept was first systematically studied by a Scottish anthropologist named James Frazer in his enormous 1890 work The Golden Bough. Frazer's argument was essentially this: across the ancient world, cultures had independently invented a god who died and returned to life, and whose story was ultimately a metaphor for the agricultural cycle. Crops die in autumn, the earth sleeps in winter, grain returns in spring, and the god's death and resurrection mirrored that rhythm.

His examples were remarkable.

Osiris, in Egyptian mythology, is the god of grain and the Nile's cycle. His brother Set murders him, dismembers his body, and scatters the pieces across the land. His wife Isis reassembles him and partially revives him, not in the world of the living, but as the eternal King of the Dead. In Egyptian art, Osiris is always shown with green skin (the colour of new grain), wrapped in mummy bandages, holding the crook and flail. The harvesting of barley was explicitly linked to his death. The sprouting of new grain was linked to his enduring power.

Dionysus, in Greek mythology, has a stranger and older version of this story than most people realise. In the Orphic tradition, the infant Dionysus is lured by the Titans with toys and mirrors, torn apart, boiled, and eaten. Only his heart is saved, and from it, he is reborn. This version of Dionysus is raw, violent, and seems to reach back to something much older than the wine-God of classical Athens. I never knew Mr. D went through such a traumatic experience. No wonder he doesn’t care about the Half-Blood camp.

Now, here is the part that I found genuinely mind-bending. C.S. Lewis, who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, which some of you might have read, was, before his conversion to Christianity, completely stopped in his tracks by Frazer's work. How could he believe the resurrection of Jesus was unique if the same story had apparently been told of Osiris, of Tammuz, of Dionysus? It took a long night's walk at Oxford with his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, yes, the author of The Lord of the Rings, for Lewis to find his way through the problem.

Tolkien's answer was this: what made Jesus different from Osiris and Tammuz was not the shape of the story but its historicity. Adonis and Osiris died, Tolkien said, at no particular time, in no particular place. Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, at a documented place and time, with historical consequences that reshaped civilisation. The myth, Tolkien suggested, had become fact. Whether you accept that theologically is entirely your own business. But as a piece of intellectual history, two of the greatest fantasy writers of the 20th century, standing in the dark at Oxford, debating comparative mythology, it is an extraordinary image.

The Trickster

If the Thunder God represents order defeating chaos, the Trickster represents something more uncomfortable: the idea that chaos is necessary. That without disruption, without boundary-crossing and rule-breaking, creation itself is not possible.

The Trickster appears in virtually every mythology on earth. And despite arising in cultures that had zero contact with each other, these trickster figures share the same essential qualities: they are clever, they are boundary-crossers, they are neither fully good nor fully evil, and they tend to cause problems that paradoxically result in something new being created.

Loki in Norse mythology, who fans of the Marvel movies will recognise, is actually far more complex in the original myths than any film has captured. He is not a demon. He is blood-brother to Odin, a member of the gods themselves. He is a shapeshifter who has transformed into a woman, a salmon, a fly, and a mare. His mischief begins as creative, he tricks dwarves into forging some of the gods' most important treasures, including Thor's hammer Mjölnir. But eventually his chaos becomes irreversible: he engineers the death of the beloved god Baldr, is imprisoned, and waits for Ragnarök. Loki's story ends in tragedy. His mischief has no redemption.

Hermes in Greek mythology is the opposite in temperament, though similar in function. On the day he is born, he steals Apollo's sacred cattle, hides them, slaughters two as sacrifice, and then invents the first lyre from a tortoiseshell. When brought before Zeus for judgment, he talks his way out of punishment with such charming audacity that Zeus laughs rather than punishes him. Hermes gives Apollo the lyre as compensation, and peace is restored. His mischief ends in gift-giving. His trickery produces culture.

Anansi the spider, from the Akan people of West Africa, is perhaps my favourite of all these figures. He begins as a small spider, not a god, not a hero, and sets out to buy all the world's stories from Nyame, the Sky God. Nyame sets him what seems like an impossible price: capture Onini the Python, Osebo the Leopard, and the Mboro Hornets. Anansi accomplishes all three through cunning alone. He outwits creatures far stronger and more powerful than himself, and wins the right to tell every story ever told. The myth is a foundational statement about the power of intelligence over brute force, and it is a story about storytelling itself being the greatest form of power.

Coyote from the Native American traditions, appearing in dozens of different tribal mythologies, is the most unpredictable. In many traditions, Coyote steals fire for humanity (similar to Prometheus in Greek myth). But Coyote also introduces death into the world through his own selfishness and impulsiveness, and then weeps when his own son is the first to die. He is the Trickster who teaches the hardest lessons by suffering them himself.

What connects all of these across cultures that never met is their position at the threshold, between creation and destruction, between the divine and the mortal, between order and chaos. Every human society that has ever built rules has apparently also felt the need to imagine a figure who laughs at the rules from the doorway. That may be the most honest thing mythology has ever observed about human nature.

The Journey Campbell Forgot

Most people who have read about mythology have heard of Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey: the hero leaves home, faces trials, is transformed, and returns with something of value. Campbell's framework is powerful and genuinely useful. But there is a significant gap in it: the Hero's Journey, in most of Campbell's examples, is structurally male. The hero goes out into the world.

But there is an equally ancient, equally universal pattern that goes in the opposite direction, downward. Into the earth. Into death. And the protagonist is almost always female.

Inanna's Descent is the oldest written underworld narrative we have. Written in Sumerian around 2000 BCE, it tells the story of Inanna, goddess of love, war, and power, who decides to descend into the Great Below, the realm of death, ruled by her sister Ereshkigal. Before she goes, she dresses in her full divine power: the crown of heaven, a lapis lazuli necklace, her breastplate, her golden ring, her sceptre. She tells her servant Ninshubur: if I do not return in three days, go to the gods and ask for help.

At each of the seven gates of the underworld, Inanna is stopped and stripped of one divine attribute. She loses her crown. Her necklace. Her breastplate. Her ring. Her sceptre. She arrives before her sister Ereshkigal naked, powerless, and is struck dead. She is hung on a hook on the wall like a piece of meat.

For three days and three nights she hangs there. Only the intervention of the god Enki saves her, he sends two small beings made of dirt, who revive her with the food and water of life. But she cannot leave without a substitute. She eventually sends her lover Dumuzi in her place, and the alternation between him and his sister Geshtinanna, each spending half the year in the underworld, becomes the explanation for the changing seasons.

Persephone's Descent in Greek mythology follows the same skeleton but in a completely different emotional register. Persephone is not a warrior goddess descending voluntarily. She is a young woman, abducted by Hades while picking flowers. She is dragged into the underworld against her will. But she eats pomegranate seeds there, which creates a binding that forces her partial return, and through her, the entire cycle of seasons is explained. In the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries, Greek initiates would ritually re-enact her descent and return, with the belief that doing so would reveal to them the secret of what awaits after death.

Izanami in Japanese Shinto mythology takes this pattern to its most tragic conclusion. Izanami, female co-creator of the world, dies giving birth to the fire god. Her husband Izanagi descends into Yomi, the land of the dead, to bring her back. She warns him from the darkness: do not light a torch. Do not look at me. He promises. But the darkness is too much for him. He lights a torch, and sees that Izanami has rotted, her body infested with thunder-demons. He flees in horror. She pursues him in rage. He escapes and seals the entrance with a boulder. Standing on opposite sides of the rock, they shout their separation at each other: she will kill a thousand people every day; he will create fifteen hundred new births every day. From this divorce, death and life as we know them are separated for ever.

Three continents. Three completely unconnected cultures. And all three tell a story about a woman who crosses the boundary between life and death, and whose journey explains why the world is structured the way it is. I think the reason this pattern is not as well-known as the Hero's Journey is precisely because it is quieter. It does not involve battles and trophies. It involves loss, stripping away, endurance, and transformation. But it may be the more honest myth of the two.

The World Tree, The Oldest Story of All

Now here is something that genuinely surprised me, because I think it might be the most ancient mythological idea we have. Not the flood. Not the thunder god. Not even the hero.

Across virtually every culture on earth, from the Norse to the Maya to the Hindu tradition to the indigenous peoples of Siberia, ancient human beings imagined a vertical pillar at the centre of the universe, a cosmic axis connecting the world below, the world of the living, and the world above. And in most cultures, this pillar took the form of a tree.

Yggdrasil in Norse mythology is a great ash tree whose three sets of roots reach into three different worlds: the realm of the gods, the realm of the frost-giants, and the frozen underworld. Along its roots gnaws a serpent named Níðhöggr, trying to destroy the cosmos from below. At its crown sits an eagle. A squirrel named Ratatoskr, and I genuinely love that this detail survived six thousand years of mythology, runs up and down the trunk all day, carrying insults between the eagle and the serpent. Odin himself once hung from Yggdrasil for nine days and nine nights, pierced by his own spear, sacrificing himself to himself, to discover the secrets of the runes. The World Tree here is not just a map of the cosmos. It is the path to wisdom, and the price of that wisdom is everything.

Mount Meru in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology performs the same function as a mountain rather than a tree. It stands at the centre of the universe, its peak reaching into the heavens, its base plunging into the cosmic ocean. The extraordinary temple complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and the design of Buddhist stupas across Asia, were deliberately built as physical representations of Meru, allowing people to perform rituals at the symbolic centre of everything.

The Ceiba tree, called Yaxche, the First Tree, in Maya cosmology is perhaps the most beautiful version of this. The Maya imagined it connecting nine levels of the underworld (Xibalba) below, the earthly realm in the middle, and thirteen levels of heaven above. And here is the remarkable part: the Maya did not just imagine this tree. They actually planted ceiba trees at the physical centre of their cities. To walk into a Maya city was to walk toward the axis of the universe.

What connects the Norse ash tree, the Hindu cosmic mountain, and the Maya ceiba is not any historical contact. It is something older. Anthropologist Mircea Eliade, who coined the term Axis Mundi for this concept, argued that it expresses one of the most fundamental needs of the human species: the need to locate yourself at the centre of a meaningful world. To feel that you are not floating randomly in an indifferent universe, but that there is a centre, and that you are connected to it.

Some researchers believe the World Tree motif is even older than agriculture, that it reaches back to the shamanic traditions of Paleolithic humanity, when a shaman would enter a trance state and "climb" a cosmic tree to travel between the worlds of the living and the dead. If that is true, then this image, a tree tall enough to touch the sky, with roots reaching into the underworld, may be the first sacred image our species ever formed. Every myth we have is, in some sense, a branch of this one original tree.

Three. How Did Any of This Survive?

By this point, the real question is not whether the similarities between myths are striking, but how they survived at all. The Proto-Indo-European world belongs to around 4000 BCE. The Rigveda was written down much later, around 1200 BCE. The Norse Eddas, our main written source for Scandinavian myth, were recorded in Iceland in the thirteenth century CE. That leaves a gap of thousands of years. How can a story remain recognisable across that kind of distance without being written down?

One of the most convincing answers comes from oral tradition. In the 1930s, Harvard scholars Milman Parry and Albert Lord travelled to Yugoslavia to study guslari, oral bards who performed long epic poems from memory. What they found was remarkable: these singers were not reciting a fixed text word for word. Instead, they were composing as they performed, using repeated phrases, stock descriptions, and familiar narrative patterns that could be assembled in different ways each time. Lord called these building blocks formulas.

This changed the way scholars understood oral poetry. Repeated phrases such as “swift-footed Achilles” or “rosy-fingered Dawn” in Homer were not signs of poetic laziness. They were tools of composition, helping singers hold metre, structure, and story together across performances. The exact wording could change, but the deeper narrative pattern remained.

That is what matters for comparative mythology. A myth does not survive for millennia because every line is preserved exactly. It survives because its core structure is memorable, repeatable, and adaptable. The names may change, the setting may shift, and the gods may be recast in new cultural forms, but the underlying story can remain the same. The storm god still fights the serpent. Chaos is still defeated. Order is still restored. Waters are released, worlds are protected, and divine kingship is affirmed.

So the thunder god versus serpent myth remains recognisable from Vedic India to medieval Scandinavia not because anyone copied it perfectly for four thousand years, but because oral tradition did not need perfect preservation. It only needed a strong enough narrative skeleton to be retold again and again. That, more than anything, is why comparative mythology matters: it reveals not just shared stories, but the deep patterns of thought that people carried across languages, landscapes, and centuries.