The shelves of the record

Each tradition is a shelf; each work on it is read in episodes, every episode traced to the text it stands on. The first shelves are being fitted; more are staged in the workroom.

• Ancient Egyptian The religious literature of ancient Egypt — the funerary texts that map the soul's passage through the underworld, from the Pyramid Texts to the Book of the Dead.
• Anglo-Saxon The heroic and elegiac poetry of early England — Beowulf and its world of mead-halls, monsters, and wyrd.
• Australian Aboriginal The oral tale traditions of Aboriginal Australia -- animal ancestor-heroes (Dinewan the emu, Bahloo the moon, Byamee the culture-hero) collected directly from Noongahburrah/Yuwaalaraay and other tribal narrators in New South Wales in the 1890s.
• Buddhist The Jataka tales of the Buddha's former births — the Bodhisatta's accumulated lives as king, animal, ascetic, and merchant, preserved in the Pali canon and read across the Buddhist world as moral fable and scripture alike.
• Chinese The mythology of China — cosmogony from the cosmic egg of P'an Ku, the celestial bureaucracy of gods and dragon kings, the Eight Immortals, and the Monkey who stormed heaven.
• Depth Commentary The shelf where the first readers of myth-as-psyche wrote — commentary, served for its claims with receipts.
• Finnish The runo-songs of Finland and Karelia — oral poetry centuries old, compiled by Elias Lönnrot into the Kalevala in the nineteenth century.
• Germanic The folk and household tales of the German-speaking lands as collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm — the ATU-index cornerstone: wonder tales, animal tales, and jokes gathered from oral informants across Hesse and beyond, fixed in print from 1812 onward.
• Greco-Roman The mythology of Greece and Rome as the classical poets shaped it — where the old tales were gathered, retold, and turned toward transformation.
• Greek The mythology of archaic and classical Greece — Homer and Hesiod at the headwaters, the gods of Olympus, and the heroic age the later world never stopped retelling.
• Hawaiian The oral mythology of the Hawaiian Islands as collected and translated by W. D. Westervelt in the early 20th century -- the demigod Maui's exploits and the Pele/Hiiaka volcano-goddess cycle, drawn from named Hawaiian royal and historian sources alongside Westervelt's own fieldwork.
• Hermetic / Alchemical The Hermetic and alchemical tradition — the Emerald Tablet and the assemblies of the philosophers, the Great Work of transmutation carried from late-antique Egypt and the Arabic alchemists into the Latin West, state, never sell.
• Indian / Hindu (Sanskrit epic) The Sanskrit epic and Puranic tradition of the Indian subcontinent — the great narrative poems of Rama, the Pandavas, and the avatars of Vishnu, transmitted first by oral recitation and then in the classical kavya of Valmiki and Vyasa.
• Indic The epic and Puranic tradition of India — the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, oceans of story that fed a subcontinent's mythologies for two and a half millennia.
• Irish The mythology of Ireland — the Mythological, Ulster, and Fenian cycles: the Tuatha de Danaan, Cuchulain and the Red Branch, Finn and the Fianna, as the medieval Gaelic manuscript tradition preserved them.
• Japanese / Shinto The mythology of Japan — the Age of the Gods, Izanagi and Izanami, Amaterasu in the rock-cave, and the descent of the imperial line, as the eighth-century court chronicles fixed it.
• Literary Crystallization Where oral myth hardened into authored literature — epics, dramas, and visionary poems the depth psychologists treat as myth's continuation by other means; kept as its own shelf so the long axis from folk tale to Joyce can be walked.
• Maya The historical and mythological traditions of the Maya peoples of Mesoamerica — Kaqchikel, Kiche, and related highland Guatemalan lineages — as preserved in native-authored alphabetic manuscripts written soon after the Spanish conquest and translated into English by 19th-century Americanist scholars.
• Mesoamerican (Maya / Nahua) The sacred narratives of the Maya and Nahua peoples of Central America — creation accounts, the deeds of hero-twins, and the founding of the Quiche kingdoms — preserved in colonial-era transcriptions of pre-Columbian oral tradition, the Popol Vuh chief among them.
• Mesopotamian The narrative tradition of Sumer, Akkad, Babylon and Assyria - the oldest written stories in the record.
• Middle Eastern The story-ocean of the Islamic world — the Nights as Lane fixed them from Cairo manuscripts, framed tales within tales told against the sentence of death, ranging across the medieval Arab, Persian, and Indian worlds and their jinn, caliphs, and merchants.
• Māori The oral traditions of the Māori of Aotearoa New Zealand — the cosmogony of Rangi and Papa, the deeds of Māui, and the genealogies of migration and settlement, recorded from Māori priests and chiefs and first published in English translation in 1855. House register: this tradition is held state, don't sell — commercial resale of this material is against house policy regardless of what the underlying public-domain license permits.
• Norse The mythology of Iceland and Scandinavia — the Eddas, the sagas, the skaldic songs; the gods of Asgard and the doom that awaits them.
• North American Indigenous The oral traditions of North American Indigenous peoples across culture areas — Eskimo, Algonquian, Iroquoian, Plains, Plateau, Northwest Coast, and others — as recorded by field ethnographers from the mid-19th through early 20th century and gathered here in a single pan-tribal anthology.
• Reference The comparative shelf — public-domain scholarship that reads across the traditions rather than within one. Commentary, never confused with the tales themselves.
• Slavic The mythology and folklore of the Slavic peoples — the Russian skazki with their witches and water-spirits, Baba Yaga and Koshchei the Deathless, Frost and the Leshy, and the older gods remembered inside the peasant tales.
• Vedic (Indian / Sanskrit) The oldest layer of Indian sacred literature — hymns to Agni, Indra, the Maruts, and the Vedic pantheon, composed in archaic Sanskrit and preserved by oral transmission before any script existed to fix them.
• Welsh The medieval prose tales of Wales — the Four Branches of the Mabinogi and their companions, carrying older Celtic myth in Middle Welsh dress.
• Yoruba The traditional religion, mythology, and folklore of the Yoruba-speaking peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa -- the orisha pantheon (Chief and Minor Gods), priesthood and worship, and folk-tales, as systematized by a British colonial ethnographer in the 1890s.