Myth Index

A great animal — bear or elk — is pursued by hunters and escapes into the sky, where the chase is frozen as the stars of the Big Dipper. Phylogenetic work (Julien d'Huy, following Berezkin's data) traces a coherent family of these stories across northern Eurasia and into the Americas along the Beringian route, making it one of the best-evidenced ancient myths in the world.

A bereaved hero follows a dead loved one into the world of the dead and is allowed to lead them home — on a condition, almost always 'do not look back'. The condition is broken; the dead are lost; often the story explains why death is now permanent. Its densest, most structured presence is in Greece, Japan, and dozens of independent-seeming North American traditions.

A flood destroys the world; one household, forewarned, survives. Flood stories exist nearly everywhere — which is precisely why most of them are NOT evidence of a shared origin. The tight Near Eastern cluster (Mesopotamian → Hebrew → Greek) shares rare, arbitrary details like releasing birds as scouts and shows true descent; the Chinese and many other 'flood myths' are different stories that merely share the observation that rivers flood.

Around the world the Pleiades star cluster is a group of girls — usually seven, though only six stars are easily visible — pursued by a male figure identified with Orion, and a story explains why the seventh star is missing. The global spread of the 'seven though six are visible' paradox is the puzzle: it may preserve a memory of the star Pleione when it was visibly separate from Atlas, 70,000–100,000 years ago.

A storm or sky god battles a monstrous serpent that embodies chaos, drought, or the hoarded waters. Comparative Indo-European work (Watkins' 'How to Kill a Dragon') reconstructs even the formula — *the hero slew the serpent* — shared from India to Iceland, with Near Eastern versions interwoven by contact.

Fire belongs to someone else — a god, an old woman, the animals at the world's end — and a hero or trickster steals it for humanity, often paying a price. Fire theft is told on every inhabited continent; the interesting signal is not the theft itself (near-universal) but rare shared details like fire hidden in wood, animal relays scorched by carrying it, and keepers who store fire in their own bodies.