Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore by Adrienne Mayor

Mythopedia (Princeton University Press, 2025) is an A-Z treasury of myths inspired by natural events. Bringing together fifty legends from antiquity to the present, this book takes you around the world to explore sunken kingdoms and lost cities, accursed mountains and treacherous terrains, and lethal lakes and singing sand dunes, explaining the historical background and latest science underlying each tale.
As soon as humans invented language, they told stories to explain mysterious things they observed around them—on land, in the seas, and in the skies. Even though these tales are expressed in poetic or supernatural language, they contain surprisingly accurate insights and even eyewitness descriptions of catastrophic events millennia ago. Drawing on her insights as a pioneer in the new field of geomythology, Adrienne Mayor—a research scholar in classics and history of science at Stanford University—describes how cultural memories of tsunamis, volcanic disasters, and other massive geological events can reach back thousands of years as the stories were preserved, elaborated, told, and retold across generations. She shows how geomythology is expanding our understanding of our planet’s history over eons, revealing the human desire to explain nature and weave imaginative stories intertwined with keen observation, rational speculation, and memory.
Mythopedia is part of the Pedia Books series published by Princeton University Press.
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