Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore

by Adrienne Mayor, Michèle M. Angel (illustrator)

From acclaimed folklorist and historian Adrienne Mayor, an enchanting collection of the ancient myths that emerged out of the wonders—and disasters—of the natural world

Mythopedia is a fun, fact-filled A-Z treasury of myths inspired by natural events. Bringing together fifty legends from antiquity to the present, this delightfully entertaining 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 unique insights as a pioneer in the exciting new field of geomythology, Adrienne Mayor 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.

With captivating drawings by Michele Angel, Mythopedia is a compendium of many marvels, from the Hindu monkey god Hanuman and his army of bridge-building primates to the terrifying sand demon Shensha shen of China, the gnawing glaciers of Austria, and the vengeful fish-headed snake god Nyami Nyami of Africa’s Zambezi River.


Features a cloth cover with an elaborate foil-stamped design

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Mythology, Audiobook, Science, Nature, Natural History

208 pages, Hardcover

Published October 7, 2025

Reviews

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5 stars; really liked the conceptual angle of this book; natural phenomena as a starting point for people to make sense of it all and try and get a handle on reality; in this sense a kind of proto-science in the form of the first thing we do after encountering the new; telling what happens, one thing after another; the birth of story.

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this as sort of research for a podcast I work on and thought it was put together really well. A nice book to pick up and read for a few minutes at a time.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting.

[Richard Moneymaker · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a delightful read! Ms Mayor does a wonderful job of fully detailing the myths that surround geological features and other interesting phenomenons. Easy to understand, full of fun facts and written so laymen such as myself can easily grasp the concepts she offers. Geography and geology nerds...give it a look!

[Susan Paxton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an odd, unclassifiable, compulsively interesting little book, collecting and analyzing myths and legends inspired by natural events. The author, Adrienne Mayor, perhaps best known for The Poison King, has selected examples from all over the world and each entry is a readable chunk of fascinating knowledge. Sometimes the examples are a number of events organized together under a general title ("sandstorms," "lightning"), others cover a single event and analyze it closely, for example, Budj Bim, a dormant volcano in Victoria, Australia that the first nations people have fascinating legends about. She looks at these closely and at the physical evidence, and concludes that tribal memories like this (and, for example, the formation of Crater Lake in Oregon) may easily go back thousands of years or more - in the case of Budj Bim possibly 36,000 years. Some myths are more recent - the infamous "Rat Hole of Chicago," for instance, or the weird Wild West tale of the "Red Ghost."

Overall, fun and fascinating! I really enjoyed it.

[Mackay · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5
A fun little book, not as interesting as I'd hoped.