World Mythology: A Very Short

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World Mythology: A Very Short Introduction
 VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS are for anyone wanting a stimulating and
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Very Short Introductions available now:

ABOLITIONISM Richard S. Newman

THE ABRAHAMIC RELIGIONS Charles L. Cohen
ACCOUNTING Christopher Nobes
ADOLESCENCE Peter K. Smith
THEODOR W. ADORNO Andrew Bowie
ADVERTISING Winston Fletcher
AERIAL WARFARE Frank Ledwidge
AESTHETICS Bence Nanay
AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGION Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
AFRICAN HISTORY John Parker and Richard Rathbone
AFRICAN POLITICS Ian Taylor
AFRICAN RELIGIONS Jacob K. Olupona
AGEING Nancy A. Pachana
AGNOSTICISM Robin Le Poidevin
AGRICULTURE Paul Brassley and Richard Soffe
ALEXANDER THE GREAT Hugh Bowden
ALGEBRA Peter M. Higgins
AMERICAN BUSINESS HISTORY Walter A. Friedman
AMERICAN CULTURAL HISTORY Eric Avila
AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS Andrew Preston
AMERICAN HISTORY Paul S. Boyer
AMERICAN IMMIGRATION David A. Gerber
AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
THE AMERICAN JUDICIAL SYSTEM Charles L. Zelden
AMERICAN LEGAL HISTORY G. Edward White
AMERICAN MILITARY HISTORY Joseph T. Glatthaar
AMERICAN NAVAL HISTORY Craig L. Symonds
AMERICAN POETRY David Caplan
AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY Donald Critchlow
AMERICAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND ELECTIONS L. Sandy Maisel
AMERICAN POLITICS Richard M. Valelly
THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY Charles O. Jones
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION Robert J. Allison
AMERICAN SLAVERY Heather Andrea Williams
THE AMERICAN SOUTH Charles Reagan Wilson
THE AMERICAN WEST Stephen Aron
AMERICAN WOMEN’S HISTORY Susan Ware
AMPHIBIANS T. S. Kemp
ANAESTHESIA Aidan O’Donnell
ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY Michael Beaney
ANARCHISM Alex Prichard
ANCIENT ASSYRIA Karen Radner
ANCIENT EGYPT Ian Shaw
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE Christina Riggs
ANCIENT GREECE Paul Cartledge
THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST Amanda H. Podany
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas
ANCIENT WARFARE Harry Sidebottom
ANGELS David Albert Jones
ANGLICANISM Mark Chapman
THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair
ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR Tristram D. Wyatt
THE ANIMAL KINGDOM Peter Holland
ANIMAL RIGHTS David DeGrazia
THE ANTARCTIC Klaus Dodds
ANTHROPOCENE Erle C. Ellis
ANTISEMITISM Steven Beller
ANXIETY Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman
THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS Paul Foster
APPLIED MATHEMATICS Alain Goriely
THOMAS AQUINAS Fergus Kerr
ARBITRATION Thomas Schultz and Thomas Grant
ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn
ARCHITECTURE Andrew Ballantyne
THE ARCTIC Klaus Dodds and Jamie Woodward
ARISTOCRACY William Doyle
ARISTOTLE Jonathan Barnes
ART HISTORY Dana Arnold
ART THEORY Cynthia Freeland
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Margaret A. Boden
ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY Madeline Y. Hsu
ASTROBIOLOGY David C. Catling
ASTROPHYSICS James Binney
ATHEISM Julian Baggini
THE ATMOSPHERE Paul I. Palmer
AUGUSTINE Henry Chadwick
JANE AUSTEN Tom Keymer
AUSTRALIA Kenneth Morgan
AUTISM Uta Frith
AUTOBIOGRAPHY Laura Marcus
THE AVANT GARDE David Cottington
THE AZTECS Davíd Carrasco
BABYLONIA Trevor Bryce
BACTERIA Sebastian G. B. Amyes
BANKING John Goddard and John O. S. Wilson
BARTHES Jonathan Culler
THE BEATS David Sterritt
BEAUTY Roger Scruton
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Mark Evan Bonds
BEHAVIOURAL ECONOMICS Michelle Baddeley
BESTSELLERS John Sutherland
THE BIBLE John Riches
BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY Eric H. Cline
BIG DATA Dawn E. Holmes
BIOCHEMISTRY Mark Lorch
BIOGEOGRAPHY Mark V. Lomolino
BIOGRAPHY Hermione Lee
BIOMETRICS Michael Fairhurst
ELIZABETH BISHOP Jonathan F. S. Post
BLACK HOLES Katherine Blundell
BLASPHEMY Yvonne Sherwood
BLOOD Chris Cooper
THE BLUES Elijah Wald
THE BODY Chris Shilling
NIELS BOHR J. L. Heilbron
THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER Brian Cummings
THE BOOK OF MORMON Terryl Givens
BORDERS Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen
THE BRAIN Michael O’Shea
BRANDING Robert Jones
THE BRICS Andrew F. Cooper
THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION Martin Loughlin
THE BRITISH EMPIRE Ashley Jackson
BRITISH POLITICS Tony Wright
BUDDHA Michael Carrithers
BUDDHISM Damien Keown
BUDDHIST ETHICS Damien Keown
BYZANTIUM Peter Sarris
CALVINISM Jon Balserak
ALBERT CAMUS Oliver Gloag
CANADA Donald Wright
CANCER Nicholas James
CAPITALISM James Fulcher
CATHOLICISM Gerald O’Collins
CAUSATION Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum
THE CELL Terence Allen and Graham Cowling
THE CELTS Barry Cunliffe
CHAOS Leonard Smith
GEOFFREY CHAUCER David Wallace
CHEMISTRY Peter Atkins
CHILD PSYCHOLOGY Usha Goswami
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Kimberley Reynolds
CHINESE LITERATURE Sabina Knight
CHOICE THEORY Michael Allingham
CHRISTIAN ART Beth Williamson
CHRISTIAN ETHICS D. Stephen Long
CHRISTIANITY Linda Woodhead
CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS Russell Foster and Leon Kreitzman
CITIZENSHIP Richard Bellamy
CITY PLANNING Carl Abbott
CIVIL ENGINEERING David Muir Wood
CLASSICAL LITERATURE William Allan
CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY Helen Morales
CLASSICS Mary Beard and John Henderson
CLAUSEWITZ Michael Howard
CLIMATE Mark Maslin
CLIMATE CHANGE Mark Maslin
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY Susan Llewelyn and Katie Aafjes-van Doorn
COGNITIVE BEHAVIOURAL THERAPY Freda McManus
COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE Richard Passingham
THE COLD WAR Robert J. McMahon
COLONIAL AMERICA Alan Taylor
COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE Rolena Adorno
COMBINATORICS Robin Wilson
COMEDY Matthew Bevis
COMMUNISM Leslie Holmes
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE Ben Hutchinson
COMPETITION AND ANTITRUST LAW Ariel Ezrachi
COMPLEXITY John H. Holland
THE COMPUTER Darrel Ince
COMPUTER SCIENCE Subrata Dasgupta
CONCENTRATION CAMPS Dan Stone
CONFUCIANISM Daniel K. Gardner
THE CONQUISTADORS Matthew Restall and Felipe Fernández-Armesto
CONSCIENCE Paul Strohm
CONSCIOUSNESS Susan Blackmore
CONTEMPORARY ART Julian Stallabrass
CONTEMPORARY FICTION Robert Eaglestone
CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY Simon Critchley
COPERNICUS Owen Gingerich
CORAL REEFS Charles Sheppard
CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY Jeremy Moon
CORRUPTION Leslie Holmes
COSMOLOGY Peter Coles
COUNTRY MUSIC Richard Carlin
CREATIVITY Vlad Glăveanu
CRIME FICTION Richard Bradford
CRIMINAL JUSTICE Julian V. Roberts
CRIMINOLOGY Tim Newburn
CRITICAL THEORY Stephen Eric Bronner
THE CRUSADES Christopher Tyerman
CRYPTOGRAPHY Fred Piper and Sean Murphy
CRYSTALLOGRAPHY A. M. Glazer
THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION Richard Curt Kraus
DADA AND SURREALISM David Hopkins
DANTE Peter Hainsworth and David Robey
DARWIN Jonathan Howard
THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS Timothy H. Lim
DECADENCE David Weir
DECOLONIZATION Dane Kennedy
DEMENTIA Kathleen Taylor
DEMOCRACY Bernard Crick
DEMOGRAPHY Sarah Harper
DEPRESSION Jan Scott and Mary Jane Tacchi
DERRIDA Simon Glendinning
DESCARTES Tom Sorell
DESERTS Nick Middleton
DESIGN John Heskett
DEVELOPMENT Ian Goldin
DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY Lewis Wolpert
THE DEVIL Darren Oldridge
DIASPORA Kevin Kenny
CHARLES DICKENS Jenny Hartley
DICTIONARIES Lynda Mugglestone
DINOSAURS David Norman
DIPLOMATIC HISTORY Joseph M. Siracusa
DOCUMENTARY FILM Patricia Aufderheide
DREAMING J. Allan Hobson
DRUGS Les Iversen
DRUIDS Barry Cunliffe
DYNASTY Jeroen Duindam
DYSLEXIA Margaret J. Snowling
EARLY MUSIC Thomas Forrest Kelly
THE EARTH Martin Redfern
EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE Tim Lenton
ECOLOGY Jaboury Ghazoul
ECONOMICS Partha Dasgupta
EDUCATION Gary Thomas
EGYPTIAN MYTH Geraldine Pinch
EIGHTEENTH‑CENTURY BRITAIN Paul Langford
THE ELEMENTS Philip Ball
EMOTION Dylan Evans
EMPIRE Stephen Howe
EMPLOYMENT LAW David Cabrelli
ENERGY SYSTEMS Nick Jenkins
ENGELS Terrell Carver
ENGINEERING David Blockley
THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Simon Horobin
ENGLISH LITERATURE Jonathan Bate
THE ENLIGHTENMENT John Robertson
ENTREPRENEURSHIP Paul Westhead and Mike Wright
ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS Stephen Smith
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Robin Attfield
ENVIRONMENTAL LAW Elizabeth Fisher
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS Andrew Dobson
ENZYMES Paul Engel
EPICUREANISM Catherine Wilson
EPIDEMIOLOGY Rodolfo Saracci
ETHICS Simon Blackburn
ETHNOMUSICOLOGY Timothy Rice
THE ETRUSCANS Christopher Smith
EUGENICS Philippa Levine
THE EUROPEAN UNION Simon Usherwood and John Pinder
EUROPEAN UNION LAW Anthony Arnull
EVANGELICALISM John Stackhouse
EVIL Luke Russell
EVOLUTION Brian and Deborah Charlesworth
EXISTENTIALISM Thomas Flynn
EXPLORATION Stewart A. Weaver
EXTINCTION Paul B. Wignall
THE EYE Michael Land
FAIRY TALE Marina Warner
FAMILY LAW Jonathan Herring
MICHAEL FARADAY Frank A. J. L. James
FASCISM Kevin Passmore
FASHION Rebecca Arnold
FEDERALISM Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox
FEMINISM Margaret Walters
FILM Michael Wood
FILM MUSIC Kathryn Kalinak
FILM NOIR James Naremore
FIRE Andrew C. Scott
THE FIRST WORLD WAR Michael Howard
FLUID MECHANICS Eric Lauga
FOLK MUSIC Mark Slobin
FOOD John Krebs
FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY David Canter
FORENSIC SCIENCE Jim Fraser
FORESTS Jaboury Ghazoul
FOSSILS Keith Thomson
FOUCAULT Gary Gutting
THE FOUNDING FATHERS R. B. Bernstein
FRACTALS Kenneth Falconer
FREE SPEECH Nigel Warburton
FREE WILL Thomas Pink
FREEMASONRY Andreas Önnerfors
FRENCH LITERATURE John D. Lyons
FRENCH PHILOSOPHY Stephen Gaukroger and Knox Peden
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION William Doyle
FREUD Anthony Storr
FUNDAMENTALISM Malise Ruthven
FUNGI Nicholas P. Money
THE FUTURE Jennifer M. Gidley
GALAXIES John Gribbin
GALILEO Stillman Drake
GAME THEORY Ken Binmore
GANDHI Bhikhu Parekh
GARDEN HISTORY Gordon Campbell
GENES Jonathan Slack
GENIUS Andrew Robinson
GENOMICS John Archibald
GEOGRAPHY John Matthews and David Herbert
GEOLOGY Jan Zalasiewicz
GEOMETRY Maciej Dunajski
GEOPHYSICS William Lowrie
GEOPOLITICS Klaus Dodds
GERMAN LITERATURE Nicholas Boyle
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY Andrew Bowie
THE GHETTO Bryan Cheyette
GLACIATION David J. A. Evans
GLOBAL CATASTROPHES Bill McGuire
GLOBAL ECONOMIC HISTORY Robert C. Allen
GLOBAL ISLAM Nile Green
GLOBALIZATION Manfred B. Steger
GOD John Bowker
GOETHE Ritchie Robertson
THE GOTHIC Nick Groom
GOVERNANCE Mark Bevir
GRAVITY Timothy Clifton
THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL Eric Rauchway
HABEAS CORPUS Amanda Tyler
HABERMAS James Gordon Finlayson
THE HABSBURG EMPIRE Martyn Rady
HAPPINESS Daniel M. Haybron
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE Cheryl A. Wall
THE HEBREW BIBLE AS LITERATURE Tod Linafelt
HEGEL Peter Singer
HEIDEGGER Michael Inwood
THE HELLENISTIC AGE Peter Thonemann
HEREDITY John Waller
HERMENEUTICS Jens Zimmermann
HERODOTUS Jennifer T. Roberts
HIEROGLYPHS Penelope Wilson
HINDUISM Kim Knott
HISTORY John H. Arnold
THE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY Michael Hoskin
THE HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY William H. Brock
THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD James Marten
THE HISTORY OF CINEMA Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING Doron Swade
THE HISTORY OF LIFE Michael Benton
THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS Jacqueline Stedall
THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE William Bynum
THE HISTORY OF PHYSICS J. L. Heilbron
THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT Richard Whatmore
THE HISTORY OF TIME Leofranc Holford‑Strevens
HIV AND AIDS Alan Whiteside
HOBBES Richard Tuck
HOLLYWOOD Peter Decherney
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE Joachim Whaley
HOME Michael Allen Fox
HOMER Barbara Graziosi
HORMONES Martin Luck
HORROR Darryl Jones
HUMAN ANATOMY Leslie Klenerman
HUMAN EVOLUTION Bernard Wood
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY Jamie A. Davies
HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT Adrian Wilkinson
HUMAN RIGHTS Andrew Clapham
HUMANISM Stephen Law
HUME James A. Harris
HUMOUR Noël Carroll
THE ICE AGE Jamie Woodward
IDENTITY Florian Coulmas
IDEOLOGY Michael Freeden
THE IMMUNE SYSTEM Paul Klenerman
INDIAN CINEMA Ashish Rajadhyaksha
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY Sue Hamilton
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Robert C. Allen
INFECTIOUS DISEASE Marta L. Wayne and Benjamin M. Bolker
INFINITY Ian Stewart
INFORMATION Luciano Floridi
INNOVATION Mark Dodgson and David Gann
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Siva Vaidhyanathan
INTELLIGENCE Ian J. Deary
INTERNATIONAL LAW Vaughan Lowe
INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION Khalid Koser
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Christian Reus-Smit
INTERNATIONAL SECURITY Christopher S. Browning
INSECTS Simon Leather
IRAN Ali M. Ansari
ISLAM Malise Ruthven
ISLAMIC HISTORY Adam Silverstein
ISLAMIC LAW Mashood A. Baderin
ISOTOPES Rob Ellam
ITALIAN LITERATURE Peter Hainsworth and David Robey
HENRY JAMES Susan L. Mizruchi
JESUS Richard Bauckham
JEWISH HISTORY David N. Myers
JEWISH LITERATURE Ilan Stavans
JOURNALISM Ian Hargreaves
JAMES JOYCE Colin MacCabe
JUDAISM Norman Solomon
JUNG Anthony Stevens
KABBALAH Joseph Dan
KAFKA Ritchie Robertson
KANT Roger Scruton
KEYNES Robert Skidelsky
KIERKEGAARD Patrick Gardiner
KNOWLEDGE Jennifer Nagel
THE KORAN Michael Cook
KOREA Michael J. Seth
LAKES Warwick F. Vincent
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE Ian H. Thompson
LANDSCAPES AND GEOMORPHOLOGY Andrew Goudie and Heather Viles
LANGUAGES Stephen R. Anderson
LATE ANTIQUITY Gillian Clark
LAW Raymond Wacks
THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS Peter Atkins
LEADERSHIP Keith Grint
LEARNING Mark Haselgrove
LEIBNIZ Maria Rosa Antognazza
C. S. LEWIS James Como
LIBERALISM Michael Freeden
LIGHT Ian Walmsley
LINCOLN Allen C. Guelzo
LINGUISTICS Peter Matthews
LITERARY THEORY Jonathan Culler
LOCKE John Dunn
LOGIC Graham Priest
LOVE Ronald de Sousa
MARTIN LUTHER Scott H. Hendrix
MACHIAVELLI Quentin Skinner
MADNESS Andrew Scull
MAGIC Owen Davies
MAGNA CARTA Nicholas Vincent
MAGNETISM Stephen Blundell
MALTHUS Donald Winch
MAMMALS T. S. Kemp
MANAGEMENT John Hendry
NELSON MANDELA Elleke Boehmer
MAO Delia Davin
MARINE BIOLOGY Philip V. Mladenov
MARKETING Kenneth Le Meunier-FitzHugh
THE MARQUIS DE SADE John Phillips
MARTYRDOM Jolyon Mitchell
MARX Peter Singer
MATERIALS Christopher Hall
MATHEMATICAL FINANCE Mark H. A. Davis
MATHEMATICS Timothy Gowers
MATTER Geoff Cottrell
THE MAYA Matthew Restall and Amara Solari
THE MEANING OF LIFE Terry Eagleton
MEASUREMENT David Hand
MEDICAL ETHICS Michael Dunn and Tony Hope
MEDICAL LAW Charles Foster
MEDIEVAL BRITAIN John Gillingham and Ralph A. Griffiths
MEDIEVAL LITERATURE Elaine Treharne
MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY John Marenbon
MEMORY Jonathan K. Foster
METAPHYSICS Stephen Mumford
METHODISM William J. Abraham
THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION Alan Knight
MICROBIOLOGY Nicholas P. Money
MICROECONOMICS Avinash Dixit
MICROSCOPY Terence Allen
THE MIDDLE AGES Miri Rubin
MILITARY JUSTICE Eugene R. Fidell
MILITARY STRATEGY Antulio J. Echevarria II
JOHN STUART MILL Gregory Claeys
MINERALS David Vaughan
MIRACLES Yujin Nagasawa
MODERN ARCHITECTURE Adam Sharr
MODERN ART David Cottington
MODERN BRAZIL Anthony W. Pereira
MODERN CHINA Rana Mitter
MODERN DRAMA Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
MODERN FRANCE Vanessa R. Schwartz
MODERN INDIA Craig Jeffrey
MODERN IRELAND Senia Pašeta
MODERN ITALY Anna Cento Bull
MODERN JAPAN Christopher Goto-Jones
MODERN LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE Roberto González Echevarría
MODERN WAR Richard English
MODERNISM Christopher Butler
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY Aysha Divan and Janice A. Royds
MOLECULES Philip Ball
MONASTICISM Stephen J. Davis
THE MONGOLS Morris Rossabi
MONTAIGNE William M. Hamlin
MOONS David A. Rothery
MORMONISM Richard Lyman Bushman
MOUNTAINS Martin F. Price
MUHAMMAD Jonathan A. C. Brown
MULTICULTURALISM Ali Rattansi
MULTILINGUALISM John C. Maher
MUSIC Nicholas Cook
MUSIC AND TECHNOLOGY Mark Katz
MYTH Robert A. Segal
NAPOLEON David Bell
THE NAPOLEONIC WARS Mike Rapport
NATIONALISM Steven Grosby
NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE Sean Teuton
NAVIGATION Jim Bennett
NAZI GERMANY Jane Caplan
NEGOTIATION Carrie Menkel-Meadow
NEOLIBERALISM Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy
NETWORKS Guido Caldarelli and Michele Catanzaro
THE NEW TESTAMENT Luke Timothy Johnson
THE NEW TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE Kyle Keefer
NEWTON Robert Iliffe
NIETZSCHE Michael Tanner
NINETEENTH‑CENTURY BRITAIN Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew
THE NORMAN CONQUEST George Garnett
NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green
NORTHERN IRELAND Marc Mulholland
NOTHING Frank Close
NUCLEAR PHYSICS Frank Close
NUCLEAR POWER Maxwell Irvine
NUCLEAR WEAPONS Joseph M. Siracusa
NUMBER THEORY Robin Wilson
NUMBERS Peter M. Higgins
NUTRITION David A. Bender
OBJECTIVITY Stephen Gaukroger
OCEANS Dorrik Stow
THE OLD TESTAMENT Michael D. Coogan
THE ORCHESTRA D. Kern Holoman
ORGANIC CHEMISTRY Graham Patrick
ORGANIZATIONS Mary Jo Hatch
ORGANIZED CRIME Georgios A. Antonopoulos and Georgios Papanicolaou
ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY A. Edward Siecienski
OVID Llewelyn Morgan
PAGANISM Owen Davies
PAKISTAN Pippa Virdee
THE PALESTINIAN–ISRAELI CONFLICT Martin Bunton
PANDEMICS Christian W. McMillen
PARTICLE PHYSICS Frank Close
PAUL E. P. Sanders
IVAN PAVLOV Daniel P. Todes
PEACE Oliver P. Richmond
PENTECOSTALISM William K. Kay
PERCEPTION Brian Rogers
THE PERIODIC TABLE Eric R. Scerri
PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD Timothy Williamson
PHILOSOPHY Edward Craig
PHILOSOPHY IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD Peter Adamson
PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY Samir Okasha
PHILOSOPHY OF LAW Raymond Wacks
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND Barbara Gail Montero
PHILOSOPHY OF PHYSICS David Wallace
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Tim Bayne
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Samir Okasha
PHOTOGRAPHY Steve Edwards
PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY Peter Atkins
PHYSICS Sidney Perkowitz
PILGRIMAGE Ian Reader
PLAGUE Paul Slack
PLANETARY SYSTEMS Raymond T. Pierrehumbert
PLANETS David A. Rothery
PLANTS Timothy Walker
PLATE TECTONICS Peter Molnar
PLATO Julia Annas
POETRY Bernard O’Donoghue
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY David Miller
POLITICS Kenneth Minogue
POLYGAMY Sarah M. S. Pearsall
POPULISM Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser
POSTCOLONIALISM Robert Young
POSTMODERNISM Christopher Butler
POSTSTRUCTURALISM Catherine Belsey
POVERTY Philip N. Jefferson
PREHISTORY Chris Gosden
PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Catherine Osborne
PRIVACY Raymond Wacks
PROBABILITY John Haigh
PROGRESSIVISM Walter Nugent
PROHIBITION W. J. Rorabaugh
PROJECTS Andrew Davies
PROTESTANTISM Mark A. Noll
PSYCHIATRY Tom Burns
PSYCHOANALYSIS Daniel Pick
PSYCHOLOGY Gillian Butler and Freda McManus
PSYCHOLOGY OF MUSIC Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis
PSYCHOPATHY Essi Viding
PSYCHOTHERAPY Tom Burns and Eva Burns-Lundgren
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION Stella Z. Theodoulou and Ravi K. Roy
PUBLIC HEALTH Virginia Berridge
PURITANISM Francis J. Bremer
THE QUAKERS Pink Dandelion
QUANTUM THEORY John Polkinghorne
RACISM Ali Rattansi
RADIOACTIVITY Claudio Tuniz
RASTAFARI Ennis B. Edmonds
READING Belinda Jack
THE REAGAN REVOLUTION Gil Troy
REALITY Jan Westerhoff
RECONSTRUCTION Allen C. Guelzo
THE REFORMATION Peter Marshall
REFUGEES Gil Loescher
RELATIVITY Russell Stannard
RELIGION Thomas A. Tweed
RELIGION IN AMERICA Timothy Beal
THE RENAISSANCE Jerry Brotton
RENAISSANCE ART Geraldine A. Johnson
RENEWABLE ENERGY Nick Jelley
REPTILES T. S. Kemp
REVOLUTIONS Jack A. Goldstone
RHETORIC Richard Toye
RISK Baruch Fischhoff and John Kadvany
RITUAL Barry Stephenson
RIVERS Nick Middleton
ROBOTICS Alan Winfield
ROCKS Jan Zalasiewicz
ROMAN BRITAIN Peter Salway
THE ROMAN EMPIRE Christopher Kelly
THE ROMAN REPUBLIC David M. Gwynn
ROMANTICISM Michael Ferber
ROUSSEAU Robert Wokler
RUSSELL A. C. Grayling
THE RUSSIAN ECONOMY Richard Connolly
RUSSIAN HISTORY Geoffrey Hosking
RUSSIAN LITERATURE Catriona Kelly
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION S. A. Smith
SAINTS Simon Yarrow
SAMURAI Michael Wert
SAVANNAS Peter A. Furley
SCEPTICISM Duncan Pritchard
SCHIZOPHRENIA Chris Frith and Eve Johnstone
SCHOPENHAUER Christopher Janaway
SCIENCE AND RELIGION Thomas Dixon and Adam R. Shapiro
SCIENCE FICTION David Seed
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION Lawrence M. Principe
SCOTLAND Rab Houston
SECULARISM Andrew Copson
SEXUAL SELECTION Marlene Zuk and Leigh W. Simmons
SEXUALITY Véronique Mottier
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Stanley Wells
SHAKESPEARE’S COMEDIES Bart van Es
SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS AND POEMS Jonathan F. S. Post
SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDIES Stanley Wells
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW Christopher Wixson
MARY SHELLEY Charlotte Gordon
THE SHORT STORY Andrew Kahn
SIKHISM Eleanor Nesbitt
SILENT FILM Donna Kornhaber
THE SILK ROAD James A. Millward
SLANG Jonathon Green
SLEEP Steven W. Lockley and Russell G. Foster
SMELL Matthew Cobb
ADAM SMITH Christopher J. Berry
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY John Monaghan and Peter Just
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Richard J. Crisp
SOCIAL WORK Sally Holland and Jonathan Scourfield
SOCIALISM Michael Newman
SOCIOLINGUISTICS John Edwards
SOCIOLOGY Steve Bruce
SOCRATES C. C. W. Taylor
SOFT MATTER Tom McLeish
SOUND Mike Goldsmith
SOUTHEAST ASIA James R. Rush
THE SOVIET UNION Stephen Lovell
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR Helen Graham
SPANISH LITERATURE Jo Labanyi
THE SPARTANS Andrew Bayliss
SPINOZA Roger Scruton
SPIRITUALITY Philip Sheldrake
SPORT Mike Cronin
STARS Andrew King
STATISTICS David J. Hand
STEM CELLS Jonathan Slack
STOICISM Brad Inwood
STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING David Blockley
STUART BRITAIN John Morrill
THE SUN Philip Judge
SUPERCONDUCTIVITY Stephen Blundell
SUPERSTITION Stuart Vyse
SYMMETRY Ian Stewart
SYNAESTHESIA Julia Simner
SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY Jamie A. Davies
SYSTEMS BIOLOGY Eberhard O. Voit
TAXATION Stephen Smith
TEETH Peter S. Ungar
TELESCOPES Geoff Cottrell
TERRORISM Charles Townshend
THEATRE Marvin Carlson
THEOLOGY David F. Ford
THINKING AND REASONING Jonathan St B. T. Evans
THOUGHT Tim Bayne
TIBETAN BUDDHISM Matthew T. Kapstein
TIDES David George Bowers and Emyr Martyn Roberts
TIME Jenann Ismael
TOCQUEVILLE Harvey C. Mansfield
LEO TOLSTOY Liza Knapp
TOPOLOGY Richard Earl
TRAGEDY Adrian Poole
TRANSLATION Matthew Reynolds
THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES Michael S. Neiberg
TRIGONOMETRY Glen Van Brummelen
THE TROJAN WAR Eric H. Cline
TRUST Katherine Hawley
THE TUDORS John Guy
TWENTIETH‑CENTURY BRITAIN Kenneth O. Morgan
TYPOGRAPHY Paul Luna
THE UNITED NATIONS Jussi M. Hanhimäki
UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES David Palfreyman and Paul Temple
THE U.S. CIVIL WAR Louis P. Masur
THE U.S. CONGRESS Donald A. Ritchie
THE U.S. CONSTITUTION David J. Bodenhamer
THE U.S. SUPREME COURT Linda Greenhouse
UTILITARIANISM Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer
UTOPIANISM Lyman Tower Sargent
VETERINARY SCIENCE James Yeates
THE VIKINGS Julian D. Richards
VIOLENCE Philip Dwyer
THE VIRGIN MARY Mary Joan Winn Leith
THE VIRTUES Craig A. Boyd and Kevin Timpe
VIRUSES Dorothy H. Crawford
VOLCANOES Michael J. Branney and Jan Zalasiewicz
VOLTAIRE Nicholas Cronk
WAR AND RELIGION Jolyon Mitchell and Joshua Rey
WAR AND TECHNOLOGY Alex Roland
WATER John Finney
WAVES Mike Goldsmith
WEATHER Storm Dunlop
THE WELFARE STATE David Garland
WITCHCRAFT Malcolm Gaskill
WITTGENSTEIN A. C. Grayling
WORK Stephen Fineman
WORLD MUSIC Philip Bohlman
WORLD MYTHOLOGY David A. Leeming
THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION Amrita Narlikar
WORLD WAR II Gerhard L. Weinberg
WRITING AND SCRIPT Andrew Robinson
ZIONISM Michael Stanislawski
ÉMILE ZOLA Brian Nelson

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MICROBIOMES Angela E. Douglas
GÖDEL’S THEOREM A. W. Moore
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 David A. Leeming

WORLD
MYTHOLOGY
A Very Short Introduction
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Leeming, David Adams, 1937- author.
Title: World mythology : a very short introduction / David Leeming.
Description: [New York] : Oxford University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical
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Identifiers: LCCN 2022018858 (print) | LCCN 2022018859 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197548264
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Printed in the UK by Ashford Colour Press Ltd, Gosport, Hampshire, on acid-free paper
For Margaret, Juliet, and Paul
Contents

List of illustrations

Definitions

1 Deity

2 Creation

3 The flood

4 The trickster

5 The hero

World mythology and cultural myths

Further reading

Index
List of illustrations

1 Figure of Isis–Aphrodite
Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession number 1991.76, purchase, Lila Acheson
Wallace Gift, 1991

2 One of ten marble fragments of the Great Eleusinian Relief

Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession number 14.130.9, Rogers Fund, 1914

3 The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise

Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession number 1975.1.31, Robert Lehman Collection,
1975

4 Figure, seated couple: Dogon twins

Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession number 1977.394.15, gift of Lester
Wunderman, 1977

5 Cuneiform tablet: Atra-hasis, Babylonian flood myth

Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession number 86.11.378a, purchase, 1886

6 Matsya avatar of Vishnu, Uttar Pradesh, India

Unknown artist, ca. 1870. Victoria and Albert Museum, via Wikimedia Commons

7 Mask (Buk, Krar, or Kara)—culture hero/trickster

Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession number 1978.412.1510, The Michael C.
Rockefeller Memorial Collection, purchase, Nelson A. Rockefeller Gift, 1967

8 Striding figure with ibex horns, a raptor skin draped around the shoulders,
and upturned boots—a trickster figure
Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession number 2007.280, purchase, Lila Acheson
Wallace Gift, 2007
9 Native American warriors, ledger book drawing by Arapaho painter Frank
Henderson, ca. 1882
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Off to War (Henderson Ledger Artist B), accession
number 1999.484.18, gift of Charles and Valerie Diker, 1999

10 Bodhisattva Guanyin
Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession number 12.219.1, Rogers Fund, 1913
Definitions

In common parlance, a myth is a false but widespread belief. The

superstition that walking under a ladder will result in catastrophic
events is an example. Myth is also used in connection with
sociopolitical movements or systems of thought. In the nineteenth
century the myth of Manifest Destiny served to justify American
expansion at the expense of Native Americans. Other such myths are
that of the master race central to Nazi ideology and the dictatorship
of the proletariat of Marxist communism. Myths such as the Oedipus
and Elektra complexes are basic to Freudian psychology. Myth used
in these ways refers to concepts and theories. Myth as used in this
Very Short Introduction to world mythology refers to narratives
involving extraordinary or supernatural events and characters widely
accepted as truth in one sense or another by certain groups of
people in the past or even in the present time. Most people would
agree that stories of the Greek Olympians or Norse gods and heroes
are, in this sense, myths. It can be argued that such myths contain
or point to metaphorical truths, much as we might find some truth in
the extraordinary events of our dreams.

In a more academic sense, mythology is the study of myths or of

approaches to a more general concept we call myth. Mythology also
refers to the collected myths of particular cultures—thus, Greek
mythology, Egyptian mythology, Norse mythology, biblical mythology,
or Hindu mythology, for instance. Studying these mythologies
inevitably reveals something of the inner identity of the given
cultures. A comparative consideration of the themes and priorities
inherent in world mythology, the collection of cultural mythologies,
leads to the exposure of mythological constructs that transcend
cultures—constructs such as the deity myth, the creation myth, or
the hero myth and the frequently present constructs such as the
flood myth or the trickster myth. These constructs are, in effect,
universal aspects of the dreams of a species realized in cultural
clothes.

More often than not, myths tend to be what we would call religious
narratives. Deity myths are religious by definition. Creation and flood
myths always involve deities in relation to the world. Trickster and
hero myths, although not necessarily overtly religious, serve as
metaphors for the existence of both evil and the human psyche’s
drive to achieve a higher state of being.

Some of the figures and stories treated here will be familiar to most
readers. Others will be unfamiliar. Some narratives come primarily
from legends and folk tales but nevertheless contain strong mythic
elements such as the miraculous conception, the sacred quest, or
the descent to an underworld. The purpose for the inclusion of
unfamiliar mythologies and mythologized folk material is to reveal
both the cultural variety and the universality of the narratives and
characters of which world mythology is composed.
Chapter 1
Deity

Paleolithic rock and cave art and burial sites indicate that since early
in prehistory human beings have entertained the concept of a higher
power that either creates life or orders it in some way. Since at least
the Neolithic, artists and mythmakers have conceived of that power
as deities, beings with human or animal characteristics, beings that
usually are immortal and sometimes omnipresent and omniscient, or
even omnipotent. There are sky gods who exist somehow outside
our earthly experience, and there are earth deities who reside in our
world. There are creator deities and earth/mother goddesses. There
are storm gods and warrior gods; angry, vengeful gods and
benevolent loving gods; gods who exist as innumerable spirits all
around us. There are high gods who exist with other gods but stand
out above the others and sometimes contain these others as aspects
of themselves. And there are gods who exist alone above creation.
Much of human history reflects the struggles between gods of these
various types, represented by their followers, for dominance of
cultures, nations, and even the world.

Until the rise of monotheism, deities were generally members of

pantheistic families we call pantheons, such as those in ancient
Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece, or they were less formal
collections of spirits such as the Hopi kachina, the Japanese kami, or
the Yoruba orisha.
Mesopotamia (Sumer): the Anunuki
Ancient Sumer, in what is now southern Iraq, is generally thought to
be the first of the great civilizations to emerge from the Neolithic
revolution. With the accelerated development of agriculture and
animal husbandry came the parallel development in Sumer,
beginning in about 4000 BCE, of large permanent settlements or
cities and eventually writing, which is to say, history. And with these
aspects of civilization came a priestly caste and the establishment of
an organized mythology. That mythology, with its pantheon of gods,
provided a metaphysical expression of the society’s primary
concerns, fertility, and governmental order. Much as Roman
mythological figures were related to Greek ones, the Sumerian
deities took related forms and new names in the mythologies of the
Semitic peoples—the Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians—who
over the centuries replaced the Sumerians in Mesopotamia.

The father god of the Sumerians was An (Semitic Anu). His family of
gods was known as the Anunuki. An, with his roaring thunder, was
an embodiment of the sky. His wife Ki was Earth, whom he fertilized
with his semen-rain. Both An and Ki were children of the mother
goddess Nammu. An was associated primarily with the Sumerian city
of Uruk.

More important than the somewhat distant An was his son, the
storm god Enlil (Elil). Enlil controlled the me, the elements of
Sumerian divine order. It was he who gave divine authority to
Sumerian kings. Enlil’s city was Nippur. His sometimes wife was the
great mother goddess Ninhursaga, who embodied earthly fertility,
childbirth, and the seasons and whose sacred sign included the
uterus of a cow, associating her with the even more ancient figure of
the Neolithic cow goddess. Among Enlil’s many offspring was the
moon god Nanna (Sin), who presided over the city of Ur.
A son of An and the riverbed goddess Nammu (“Lady Vulva”) was
Enki (Ea), whose city was Eridu and whose name revealed him as
lord (en) of earth (ki). He lived in the underground sweet waters of
the southern marshlands. A wise god with trickster characteristics,
Enki had an insatiable sexual appetite, which made him an apt
embodiment of fertility. Myths about Enki support his role as the
guardian of the important irrigation principles of Sumer. One myth
tells how, even though he was married to another, Enki directed his
semen into the womb of the earth mother Ninhursaga. When the
goddess gave birth to the beautiful goddess Nimmu, Enki directed
his semen to her womb, and she gave birth to still another goddess,
Ninkurra (“mistress of the land”). Enki then impregnated Ninkurra,
resulting in the birth of Uttu (“vegetation”). Enki hoped to pour his
semen into Uttu’s womb, but Ninhursaga advised the girl to resist
the god until he promised to bring her fruits and vegetables from the
dry lands. This Enki did. After Enki entered Uttu, Ninhursaga wiped
excess semen from the girl’s body and used it to make new plants.

A dominant figure in Sumerian mythology was the goddess Inanna,

who later was known as Ishtar in the Mesopotamian Semitic
cultures. She was the daughter of either the father god An, the high
god Enlil, or Enki. The myth of her marriage with the shepherd king
Dumuzi (Tammuz) gave metaphysical justification for kingship and
for a sacred marriage tradition in which kings and representatives of
the goddess were ritually married in the city of Uruk, Inanna’s cult
center.

A more important aspect of the Inanna–Dumuzi myth is Inanna’s

representation of the land itself and its fertility. In the myth, Utu the
sun god, whose role was to supervise growth on earth, tells his
newly adolescent twin sister, Inanna, that she is now ripe for
marriage and love. The farmer Enkimdu and the shepherd Dumuzi
both court the goddess. After she chooses the shepherd, her mother,
the reed goddess Ningal, tells Inanna to “open your house” to
Dumuzi. When Inanna does open the door to Dumuzi, the bride and
groom are overcome by passion. Inanna calls out:

My vulva, the horn,

The Boat of Heaven,
Is full of eagerness like the young moon.
My untilled land lies fallow.

And Dumuzi answers:

I, Dumuzi, the king, will plow your vulva.

A curious Inanna myth is that of her descent to the underworld ruled

over by her sister Ereshkigal. If Inanna is a goddess of love and
fertility, Ereshkigal is her opposite, a goddess of infertility and death.
Inanna determines that to fully understand life, the overall process
of fertility, she must examine the darkness of the underworld. Before
leaving on her journey, Inanna instructs her faithful companion
Ninshubur to prepare a mourning ceremony for her and, should she
fail to return, to approach Enlil, the moon god Nanna, or Enki for
help. Like the plants of her fields that die in winter, Inanna abandons
the trappings of her glory as she approaches the underworld. At the
gates of her sister’s realm, she demands admittance, claiming that
she has come for the funeral of Gugalanna, the Bull of Heaven. The
Bull of Heaven is a figure traditionally associated with the great
goddess of the earlier Neolithic period. In Sumer he was a symbol of
the kings of Uruk and an astrological figure (Taurus) who
disappeared in winter and returned in the spring. Inanna’s descent
for his funeral represents her association with the life, death, and
resurrection in the agricultural process that she embodies. Ereshkigal
demands that if Inanna is to enter her underground kingdom of
death and infertility, she must abandon all of her remaining queenly
ornaments and appear naked before her. Inanna challenges
Ereshkigal, and her powerlessness in the underworld is clear when
her sister hangs her up to die and dry like a piece of meat.
Back in Uruk, after three days and nights since the queen’s
departure, Ninshubur, following her mistress’s instructions,
approaches Inanna’s relatives for help. Only Enki, the wise god, who
understands Inanna’s importance to Sumerian life and fertility,
agrees to help. Because his home is the underground waters, he is
closer than the others to the underworld and determines what must
be done to liberate the goddess. Enki creates two beings, the Plant
of Life and the Water of Life, from mud under his fingernails and
sends them to the underworld, where he tells them they are to give
comfort to Ereshkigal, who constantly suffers the pains of negative,
unproductive childbirth. In return, the two beings are to request
from Ereshkigal the body of Inanna. This they do, and after
receiving the body, they are able to revive it. The gods of the
underworld, however, demand a substitute for the revived goddess.
When Inanna returns home, having regained her clothing, her
jewelry, and all the symbols of her power, she finds her husband
Dumuzi apparently enjoying his kingship without his wife. He is
horrified when Inanna announces that he is to be her substitute in
the underworld. Only when Dumuzi’s sister offers to spend six
months of each year there for him is he allowed the other six
months reigning in Uruk with the great goddess, performing his
sacred kingship role as fertilizer of the land.

Egypt: The Ogdoad and the Ennead

The mythology of ancient Egypt resembles that of Sumer in that it
places a great deal of emphasis on a sacred kingship related to
elements of its pantheons. It also shares with Sumer an
understandable concern with fertility. In Egypt this concern is based
in part in the death and resurrection process made real in the annual
flooding of the Nile. Egyptian mythology’s most notable characteristic
is its concern with death and the afterlife, especially in connection
with the god king Osiris, his sister-wife, Isis, and their son, Horus. As
symbolic vehicles for metaphysical thought about the nature of
existence, these and other Egyptian deities formed pantheons that
varied somewhat according to different cult centers. But, in general,
the centers were in agreement as to the nature and the functions of
their deities.

Archeological evidence points to a mother goddess cult featuring the

goddesses Hathor, Neith, Maat, and Isis, among others. This would
be in keeping with the Neolithic goddess cults that existed in such
early sites as Çatal Hüyük and Hacilar and elsewhere. It is not until
the Early Dynastic period, beginning in about 3100 BCE, when Upper
and Lower Egypt were united at Memphis, under King Narmer (also
known as Aha or Menes), forming the first great historical nation-
state, that the more formal pantheons of Egyptian mythology began
to come into being. This was shortly after the early development of
hieroglyphic writing. By that time, the Egyptian concept of kingship
was already based on the direct connection between the king and a
god, usually either Horus, the falcon-headed sun god, or his enemy,
Set (Seth).

During the Old Kingdom (ca. 2700–2190 BCE), pantheons took full
theological form at the various cult centers, such as those at
Memphis, Heliopolis, and Khemenu (Hermopolis), near what is now
Cairo. The creator god Ptah stood at the head of the Memphis
pantheon. His wife was the lioness goddess Sekhmet. In the
Hermopolic pantheon, Ptah became Amun. This pantheon was
known as the Ogdoad (“the Eight”), composed of four couples
representing the primordial forces of nature. Amun and Amaunet
were the invisible power, Huh and Hauhet were infinity, Kuk and
Kauhet were darkness, and Nun and Naunet were the primal waters.

In Heliopolis, generally the dominant center, Atum (“the whole One”)

was the creator god combining male and female. Later he would be
assimilated into the sun god Re or Atum-Re, or Amun-Re. Atum was
the founder of the Ennead (“the Nine”). He produced Shu and Tefnut
(Air and Moisture), who in turn produced Geb and Nut (Earth and
Sky), who were the parents of Osiris and his wife, Isis, and Set and
his wife, Nephthys.

The Middle Kingdom (2050–1756 BCE) was ruled primarily from the
Upper (Southern) Egyptian city of Thebes (Waset, modern Luxor and
Karnak). Amun-Re, the ram-headed sun god, an assimilation of
earlier king gods, became the dominant deity. Still later, in the
Amarna period (1353–1327 BCE), the pharaoh Amenhotep IV,
married to Nefertiti, disassociated himself from Amun-Re and the
other gods and changed his name to Akhenaton in honor of Aten,
whom he established as a de facto monotheistic or at least monist or
monolatristic sun god, represented as a sun disk. At Akhenaton’s
death, Amun-Re and the other gods were restored to their former
positions of religious dominance under Akhenaton’s son,
Tutankhamun (“King Tut”).

Deities who maintained importance essentially throughout the

history of ancient Egypt were Osiris and his wife, Isis. It is their story
that most clearly reflects the centrality of Egyptian deities in the
concepts of fertility, the sacred kingship, and the meaningful
afterlife.

Osiris and Isis were children of Geb and Nut in the Heliopolis
Ennead. Although Osiris was probably worshipped as a god-king in
the predynastic period, his cult became prominent later, during the
Fifth Dynasty (2494–2345 BCE), and remained central to funerary
and kingship succession rituals and theology until well into the
Roman period. He is usually depicted as a mummy wearing a crown
and carrying a crook as King of the Dead. In death, pharaohs
became Osiris; in life they were an embodiment of Osiris and Isis’s
son, Horus. Isis also remained a popular deity until the end of
Egyptian civilization. She, too, was clearly associated with fertility,
the afterlife, and the sacred kingship. As the goddess of the throne
and mother of Horus, she was the theological mother of each
pharaoh.
1. An Egyptian terra cotta figure of the great Middle Eastern goddess
Isis–Aphrodite (second century CE) stands proudly in celebration of her
power and fertility.

The complex myth of Osiris and Isis can be pieced together from
elements of the ancient Pyramid and Coffin texts (2400–2040 BCE),
written on pyramid walls and coffins, and various later writings of
the Greco-Roman period, especially those of Plutarch (first century
CE). The texts agree generally that Osiris was a god-king of Egypt
who was killed by his brother, Set and revived by his wife, Isis
sufficiently to make the conception of Horus possible. In some
accounts, Osiris was dismembered by Set and thrown into the Nile.
With the help of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of mummification,
and the Ibis-headed Thoth, god of wisdom and magic and the
inventor of writing, the parts of the dismembered god were retrieved
from the river. Through spells initiated by Isis and her sister (Set’s
wife) Nephthys, spells such as those found in the Book of the
Coming Forth by Day (Book of the dead, 1550 BCE), Osiris was at
least partially revived and was able to impregnate Isis before leaving
for the underworld.

Osiris’s kingship in the underworld is related to the resurrection of

life in the crops that resulted from the death of life and its return in
the annual flooding and subsequent retreat of the Nile. In this
connection, models of the god’s body parts, perhaps especially his
genitals, were ritually planted along the Nile to ensure the annual
flood-based fertility so important to a desert-bound country. The Nile
itself was thought to be related to the bodily fluids of the dead
Osiris.

In the New Kingdom (1550–712 BCE) books relating to the

underworld, the sun god Re went to the place where Osiris was
buried and entered the dead god’s soul, allowing him to live again as
the judge of all those who die and seek a place in his underworld. By
the New Kingdom, Osiris, Isis, and Horus were a divine family with
Isis achieving dominance as a “Mother of God” figure, foreshadowing
the role of Mary in the Christian Holy Family.

Greece and Rome: the Olympians and their ancestors

The gods and goddesses of ancient Greece, as revealed by Homer,
Hesiod, and others, are much more related to human life than the
gods of Sumer and Egypt. The Greek pantheon performs what is, in
effect, a large-scale soap opera reflecting the worst in human
behavior. Known as the Olympians, because they lived on Mount
Olympus, the family headed by Zeus resembles dysfunctional
families in the human world—especially privileged ones—and reflects
a humanistic culture’s skeptical, ironic, and fatalistic attitude toward
deities and life in general. The stories of these gods expose them as
arbitrary, cruel, and self-serving, not only among themselves but
also in their many relationships with humans. At best their activities
are merely comic.

That the Olympians were the way they were is not surprising given
what the Greek myths tell of their immediate ancestors. Hesiod tells
how the great goddess Gaia (Earth) was abused by her husband,
Ouranos (Sky) to such an extent that, in desperation, she plotted
with her son Kronos (Time) to strike out against the abuser. In what
in the early twenty-first century might be called a supremely
Freudian act, Kronos castrated his father with a sickle provided by
his mother and took control of the universe as leader of the Titans.
But Kronos inherited his father’s abusive nature and swallowed each
of the children he fathered with his sister-wife Rhea. With Rhea’s
help, her son Zeus avoided being swallowed and eventually was able
to free his siblings and defeat his father for the kingship of heaven.
Zeus and his brothers and sisters were the older generation of
Olympians: Hestia, Demeter, Poseidon, Hera, and Hades (although
Hades lived “under the earth”).

As head of the Olympian family, Zeus was a leader with limitless

power, symbolized by his thunderbolt. And he was the
ultraphilanderer. He had sexual relations with mortals and immortals,
both male and female. Sometimes he used disguise—for instance, a
bull or swan—to accomplish his predatory goals without his wife’s
knowledge. As an eagle, he abducted the human boy Ganymede and
carried him off to Olympus. As a swan, he raped Leda. Zeus had
several children. The Olympian goddess Athena was conceived in the
Titaness Metis but was born from Zeus’s head as the goddess of
wisdom. The god Dionysos (only rarely included in the list of
Olympians) was fathered by Zeus in the mortal Semele but
preserved at her death in his thigh for eventual birth. Dionysos was
an outsider, the central figure in an ancient mystery cult that
involved frenetic dancing, sexuality, wine, and the celebration of the
earthly—as opposed to heavenly—cycles of death and rebirth.
Aspects of the cult are revealed in Euripides’s play, The Bacchae.

Other children of Zeus were Apollo and Artemis by another Titaness,

Leto. By the nymph Maia, he fathered Hermes. Zeus did have
children by his wife, Hera. These were the warrior god Ares and the
blacksmith Hephaistos (although one story has it that Hera
conceived Hephaistos parthenogenetically—that is, without Zeus’s
help). Zeus also was said by some to be the father of the goddess
Aphrodite, though others said she was conceived in the sea by the
“foam” flowing from the severed genitals of Ouranos.

The rest of the Olympian family, except for Hestia, who sat quietly
by the Olympian hearth, followed in the pattern of privileged
dysfunction. Zeus’s brother, the sea god Poseidon, forced himself on
his sister, the agricultural goddess Demeter. The underworld god
Hades abducted his niece, Demeter’s daughter, Persephone.
Demeter searched for her daughter and eventually secured a
promise that she would be returned to earth for part of each year.
These events provided the basis for an agricultural mystery cult
known as the Eleusinian Mysteries.

As for the rest of the family, Zeus’s son Ares had an affair with his
sister or stepsister Aphrodite, the family vamp. The couple were
caught by Aphrodite’s husband, the hunchback Hephaistos, forever
after a symbol of cuckolds. Zeus’s wife, Hera stood for wronged
wives who understandably became suspicious and nagging. She
usually applied her ire to the women Zeus had seduced, having little
power over the patriarchal dominance her husband possessed.
Zeus’s son Hermes was generally mild-mannered, but he could take
advantage of his privileged position, as, for instance, when he raped
the fleet-footed maiden Apemosyne, using trickery to catch her.
Hermes’s sister Artemis was a confirmed virgin and a hunter. She
took terrible vengeance on males who angered her, including the
poor hunter Actaeon who inadvertently came upon her bathing and
was punished by being turned into a stag whom his own dogs then
tore to pieces.
2. A fragment of a marble relief dating from between 440 and 430 BCE
comes from the sanctuary of Demeter in Eleusis. The goddess Demeter
holds a scepter, and on the right, her daughter, Persephone holds a long
torch. In the center is a demigod, Triptolemus, whom Demeter sends
around Greece to teach people the art of agriculture.

Artemis’s brother Apollo, god of arts and prophecy, and the goddess
Athena were less dysfunctional than other members of their family.
Apollo’s love affairs, for instance, tended to be failures and thus to
make him more sympathetic. He loved the Spartan boy Hyacinth, but
as they were throwing discuses together, one of Apollo’s discs killed
the boy. Apollo also loved the nymph Daphne, but she managed to
escape him, according to the Roman poet Ovid, by being turned into
a tree. Athena was masculinized as a virgin warrior. She had a
fondness for favorite human heroes such as Odysseus and Perseus.

If Athena represents a somewhat positive relationship between gods

and humans, most of the Greek deities direct human life according
to arbitrary, conflicting, and fickle impulses. Nowhere is this clearer
than in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, for instance, where divine
actions manipulate, amplify, and accentuate a fatalistic and tragic
helplessness at the basis of human existence.

It is commonplace to equate Roman mythology to that of Greece.

The head Roman god is Jupiter, a cognate of the Greek Zeus. Juno is
Hera, Mars is Ares, Vulcan is Hephaistos, Diana is Artemis, Mercury
is Hermes, Minerva is Athena, Venus is Aphrodite, Vesta is Hestia,
Pluto is Hades, Ceres is Demeter, Neptune is Poseidon, and Apollo is
still Apollo.

In fact, Roman mythology attaches different meanings and levels of

importance to its version of the Olympians. The Roman pantheon by
the time of the Republic was an amalgam of Etruscan and Latin
tribal as well as Greek ideas. Juno, who in Greece was the ever-
jealous Hera, the nagging jealous wife of Zeus, became in Rome a
version of the Mediterranean Great Mother goddess, who ruled with
Jupiter and Minerva on Rome’s Capitoline Hill. Ares, the war god in
Greece, as Mars took on qualities of an agricultural god in Rome.
Hestia became a version of the Indo-European fire deity supported
by the Vestal Virgins. And the vampish and highly sexual Aphrodite
became the much more sedate mother of the Rome-founding Trojan
hero Aeneas. As the de facto patroness of Rome, she had something
of the status that Athena had in Athens.

Norselands (Iceland): the Vanir and the Aesir

“Norse” mythology is the mythology of the Norsemen, who lived in
Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe in the early Middle
Ages. As raiders and settlers of Britain, Ireland, Iceland, and other
northern European areas, they are more popularly known as Vikings.
Their Germanic language, Old Norse, is the source of present-day
Scandinavian languages. The myths of the Norse people influenced
those we associate with the Anglo-Saxons and Germans, myths such
as those contained in the Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf and the
German epic the Niebelungenlied. The primary source for Norse
mythology, however, is Icelandic texts known as the Younger Edda,
or Prose Edda, compiled by the Icelandic statesman and scholar
Snorri Sturluson in about 1220 CE. Sturluson’s work is based on
much older stories from the oral tradition and from the Elder Edda or
Poetic Edda, written down between the ninth and twelfth centuries
CE.

The Norse deities belong to two pantheons. The older of the

pantheons was that of the Vanir. These were fertility gods and
goddesses associated with water and earth. The most famous of the
Vanir were Freyr and Freya, offspring of Njord the sea god and the
giant Skadi. Freya contains within herself the power of fecundity, the
miracle of sexuality and birth. She is also a goddess of war. Not
surprisingly, she has many sexual liaisons. Once she gave herself to
four dwarves in return for her primary symbol of fertility, the
necklace of the Brisings. Freyr, often depicted with a large phallus, is
a god of earthly fertility and the sun. Freyr, Freya, and their father,
Njord, form a fertility trinity.

The Vanir fought for many years with a younger pantheon, the Aesir.
If the Vanir were deities of the earth, the Aesir were warrior deities
of the sky, living in a Norse version of Mount Olympus called Asgard.
The Aesir were led by the high god and “All Father” Odin (German
Wotan) from his palace, Valhalla (“Hall of the Slain”). Odin
entertained fallen heroes there. In some ways, he was a mysterious
god associated with magic runes that contained ultimate meaning.
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even two or three months. I have seen a number of patients who
have attacks of migraine on Sunday with regularity, and escape
during the interval. Some of these cases ascribed the attacks to
sleeping later on this day than on others, but it is more likely that the
attacks were the result of the culminating effect of a week's hard
work. Between the attacks the patient is usually quite well as far as
headache is concerned, but he may have slight neuralgia in
branches of the trigeminal. The attacks are more or less alike. They
are often preceded by prodromal symptoms for a day or two. The
patient may feel languid or tired for a day before the attack.
Sometimes there is unusual hunger the night before a paroxysm, or
there may be violent gastralgia before each attack. The patient often
wakes in the morning after sound sleep with a pain in the head.
Should the attack come on in the day, it may be preceded by
chilliness, yawning, or sneezing and a sense of general malaise.
Ocular symptoms are frequent as a forerunner of an attack. First
muscæ volitantes are seen, then balls of fire or bright zigzags
appear before the eyes, making it impossible for the patient to read.
These symptoms last for a few minutes or a half hour, and then
cease, to be immediately followed by pain. Hemianopsia is a
precursory symptom of rather frequent occurrence. Ross mentions a
case in which the hemianopsia usually lasted about a half hour, and
was followed by severe hemicrania. The ocular symptoms are often
very alarming to patients.

The pain, as a general rule, is at first in the ophthalmic division of the

fifth nerve and its branches. It may begin in the branches of the
occipital nerve or in the parietal region. It comes on gradually, is dull
and boring at first, but becomes more intense and spreads to one
lateral half of the head, more especially the front part. As it increases
in intensity the pain seems to involve the entire head. Either side of
the head may be affected. Eulenburg thinks that the left side is
attacked twice as often as the right. An individual may have the pain
on opposite sides of the head alternately in different attacks. The
pain is described by patients as dull and boring or intense, and the
head feeling as if it would burst. Patients often make pressure on the
head to obtain relief. At times the pain seems to be of a violent,
throbbing kind, keeping time, as it were, with the pulsation of the
arteries. Lying down usually relieves the pain, but if it is violent the
recumbent position seems to favor the afflux of blood to the head,
and thereby increases the pain. The eye of the affected side
becomes bloodshot, and the tears stream from it. The eyelid droops,
and the sight is dim and clouded or may fail entirely. The least light is
unbearable. During the attack the subject is chilly and intensely
depressed, and the feet are very cold. The pulse is at first slow,
small, and compressible.

Painful points (Valleix's points) are not present, but there is usually
tenderness over the supraorbital notch during an attack of migraine,
and after the paroxysm there is a general soreness of the scalp and
forehead. Sometimes there remains a tenderness of the parts
surrounding the affected nerve. This is not in the nerve itself, but in
the adjacent tissues. Anstie9 says that in his own case, after
repeated attacks of migraine, the bone had become sensibly
thickened in the neighborhood of the supraorbital notch. There is
sometimes hyperæsthesia of the skin in the affected regions of the
forehead and scalp during an attack. As well as hyperæsthesia,
there may be an abnormal acuteness of the sense of touch. Deep
pressure over the superior and middle ganglia of the sympathetic
causes pain, according to Eulenburg. This observer also states that
the spinal processes of the lower cervical and upper dorsal vertebræ
are painful on pressure.
9 Op. cit., p. 182.

During the attack of migraine there is complete loss of appetite, and

any food that may be taken remains undigested in the stomach for
hours. As the pain intensifies there comes on a sense of nausea,
there is a profuse flow of saliva, and large quantities of limpid urine
are passed. Finally, when the pain seems to have reached its
maximum, vomiting occurs. Immediately afterward the pain is greatly
increased, but this is the result of the increased amount of blood in
the cranial cavity from straining. Soon after, the patient is easier, and
falls into a sleep, from which he awakes free from headache. The
crisis is not always accompanied by vomiting. In some instances
there is no nausea, but at the acme of the pain there are two or three
profuse diarrhœic stools, after which the pain is relieved. I have
lately seen such a case in a young man of twenty-three years of age.
Sometimes there is only a profuse sweat or large flow of urine.

During the attack there are disorders of the circulation. The pulse
may be intermittent or irregular, and the extremities are usually cold.
Disorders of cutaneous sensibility are also often present. A condition
of numbness confined to one lateral half of the body is sometimes
experienced during the early part of the paroxysm. This numbness is
noticed even in one half of the tongue.

The German writers have divided migraine into two types, and the
arrangement may be followed in some instances. The first is called
hemicrania spastica or sympathico-tonica. In this form there is
supposed to be vascular spasm and a diminished supply of blood in
the brain. The symptoms are as follows: When the attack has
reached its height the face is pale and sunken; the eye is hollow and
the pupil dilated; the arteries are tense and feel like a cord. The
external ear and the tip of the nose are cold. Eulenburg10 states that
by actual measurement he has found the temperature in the external
auditory meatus fall 0.4° to 0.6° C. The pain is increased by
stooping, straining, or anything which adds to the blood-supply in the
head. At the end of the attack the face becomes flushed and there is
a sense of heat. The conjunctiva becomes reddened, the eye is
suffused, and the pupil, which had been dilated, contracts. The
sense of warmth becomes general, the pulse is quickened, and the
heart palpitates. The crisis is reached with vomiting and a copious
flow of urine or perhaps a diarrhœic stool. There is sometimes an
abundant flow of saliva. One observer has reported that he has
estimated a flow of two pounds of saliva during an attack.
10 Op. cit.

The other variety is termed hemicrania angio-paralytica or neuro-

paralytica. Here we find the opposite condition of things from that
met with in hemicrania spastica. There is marked increase in the
amount of blood in the brain. When the attack is at its height the face
on the affected side is flushed deeply, hot, and turgid. The
conjunctiva is injected, the lachrymal secretion increased, and the
pupil contracted. Sometimes there is slight ptosis. The ear on the
affected side is hot and red. The temperature of the meatus may rise
0.2° to 0.4° C. The temporal artery is swollen, and throbs with
increased force. The carotid beats visibly. There is free perspiration,
which is sometimes unilateral. Compression of the carotid on the
painful side relieves the pain, while pressing on the opposite carotid
makes it worse. The heart beats slowly, the pulse being sometimes
as low as 48 to 56. At the end of the attack the face becomes paler
and the other symptoms subside.

There are many cases in which the vascular conditions present no

peculiarities during the attack, and which cannot be classed with
either of the varieties just described.

In all forms, if the patient can be quiet, he usually falls asleep after
the crisis has been reached, and awakes free from pain, but feeling
haggard and prostrated.

The paroxysm lasts for several hours, generally the greater part of
the day. It may last for several days, with variations of severity. The
attacks are at longer or shorter intervals of time, and in women they
often appear at the menstrual period. The attack may be brought on
by over-mental or bodily exertion, imprudence in eating or drinking,
and exposure to cold draughts of air. It will often begin as a
supraorbital neuralgia from exposure to cold, and go on through all
the phenomena of a regular migraine.

Seizures are often brought on by fatigue, and there are some

persons who invariably have a violent attack of migraine after a
journey. Nursing women are liable to more frequent paroxysms, and
I have recently seen a lady who within a few days after delivery after
both of her confinements suffered from typical attacks of migraine,
although during gestation she had escaped them.
DIAGNOSIS.—Migraine can readily be distinguished from the other
forms of headache by the comparative regularity of the attacks and
its numerous other characteristics. It differs from neuralgia in the
pain being less acute and shooting. The pain of migraine is more dull
and throbbing, and extends more generally over the head. The
ocular phenomena are more or less constant in migraine and do not
occur in neuralgia.

PROGNOSIS.—Migraine is never fatal, and usually becomes less

severe and less frequent as middle life is reached. Some patients
continue to suffer from it during their entire life, and often when the
typical migraine has ceased it is replaced with paroxysms of
neuralgia. Therapeutic and hygienic means are of decided influence
in the course of the disorder, and many patients experience great
relief or temporary immunity from attacks as a result of treatment.
Cases of long standing and those of an hereditary type are most
unfavorable as to relief from treatment or by spontaneous cure.

PATHOLOGY AND MORBID ANATOMY.—Migraine not being a fatal

disease, we know nothing of the changes which exist in the brain; we
can only surmise what are the conditions which exist in the brain
during and before an attack.

It is evident that there is a strong relationship between migraine and

neuralgia of the trigeminal nerve, and if we study the symptoms of
the two conditions, and consider the causes which produce attacks
of each, we cannot but arrive at the conclusion that migraine is a
variety of a neuralgia of the ophthalmic division of the fifth. The late
Anstie has most clearly and forcibly given his reasons for believing
this to be the case, and we cannot but uphold his view.

Migraine is constantly met with in early life as the type of a neuralgia

which in later years loses the special features of a sick headache
and becomes a pure neuralgia. The same forms of trophic lesions
may occur in migraine and in trigeminal neuralgia. Anstie instances
his own case, in which in early life he had distinct attacks of
migraine, with corneal ulceration, orbital periostitis, and obstruction
of the nasal duct, while later in life his attacks were only neuralgic,
without any stomach complications.

Migraine, as already remarked, attacks early life especially at the

time of sexual development, and the same is true of epilepsy. There
is also the same hereditary predisposition to the former as to the
latter. Patients who have migraine belong often to families other
members of which suffer from epilepsy, chorea, and an
uncontrollable tendency to alcoholic excesses. Indeed, occasionally
migraine and epilepsy are interchangeable in the same individual.
Many cases of epilepsy have suffered at some time of their lives
from severe headaches.

Hughlings-Jackson describes the attacks of migraine as arising from

a discharging lesion of the cortex of the brain in the sensory area, or
in that part of it which corresponds to the region of pain in the head.
Genuine epilepsy he holds to be due to a discharging lesion from the
motor area of the cortex. During an attack of migraine the
discharging lesion does not remain confined in the sensory portion of
the cortex, but extends into the medulla oblongata and the cilio-
spinal region of the cord, causing irritation or paralysis of some of
these centres, and causing the vaso-motor and oculo-pupillary
symptoms which are conspicuous during an attack.

In the form of migraine known as hemicrania sympathico-tonica

there is tonic spasm of the vessels of one side of the head. This
explains the pallid face, the lowered temperature, and the sunken
eyes. After the cause of the contraction is removed, then the vessels
relax and the amount of blood-supply greatly increases. Hence the
redness of the conjunctiva, lachrymation, and redness of the ear at
the close of an attack. The vomiting is explained by Eulenburg as
being due to variations in the intracranial blood-pressure. This
causes fitful contractions of the vascular muscles, alternating with
partial relaxation. These conditions must arise in the sympathetic
nerve of the corresponding side.

The dilation of the pupil during an attack depends upon irritation of

the cervical sympathetic ganglia. Other symptoms, such as the
largely increased flow of saliva and the flow of tears or drying of the
Schneiderian mucous membrane, indicate a morbid condition of the
cervical sympathetic. The sensitiveness to pressure in the region of
the upper cervical ganglia and over the spinous processes of the
lower cervical and upper dorsal vertebræ, corresponding to the cilio-
spinal region of the cord, confirms the idea of a morbid state of the
cervical sympathetic.

In hemicrania angio-paralytica there is supposed to be a relaxed

condition of the vessels of one side of the head. Here, instead of an
irritation of the sympathetic, there is a paralytic condition, and we
have the same results as are seen in animals when the cervical
sympathetic is divided. There seem to be good grounds for holding
this view when we consider the flushed face, contracted pupil,
retraction of the eyeball, and occasional ptosis which accompany
this form of headache. Possibly there may be a brief stage of spasm
of the vessels preceding the relaxation which occurs in hemicrania
angio-paralytica.

The slowing of the pulse during an attack of migraine is due probably

to cerebral hyperæmia from relaxation of the vessels, or to the
secondary anæmia and irritation of the medulla oblongata. This
irritation of the medulla is also able to explain the other symptoms of
vaso-motor disturbance which occur during an attack of migraine; for
instance, the small and contracted radial artery, the extreme
coldness of the hands and feet, and the suppression of perspiration
over the whole body except perhaps on the affected side of the
head. Following the stage of irritation of the medulla with contraction
of the vessels comes one of exhaustion with relaxation of the
vessels. This latter state may account for the profuse flow of saliva
and the copious secretion of sweat and urine, as well as the
increased secretion of bile and the condition of broncho-tracheal
catarrh during the attack.

We now come to the question of the origin and seat of the pain in
migraine. This question has involved a great deal of thought, and
has been answered in various ways by different writers. E. du Bois-
Raymond thought that the pain was due to tonic spasm of the
muscular coats of the vessels, and that thereby the nerves in the
sheaths of the vessels were pinched, as it were, and so caused pain.
Moellendorff was of the opinion that the pain was due to dilatation of
the vessels, and not to contraction; and this theory might explain the
pain in the angio-paralytic form. There are many cases in which
neither of these views is sufficient, for we have no reason to believe
that a condition of either anæmia or hyperæmia is present.

Romberg believed that the pain was situated in the brain itself, and
Eulenburg holds that the pain must be caused by alterations in the
blood-supply, without regard to their origin, in the vessels of one side
of the head. He thinks that the vessels may contract and dilate with
suddenness, just as is often seen in some neuralgias, and thus
intensely excite the nerves of sensation which accompany the
vessels. The increase of pain upon stooping, straining, or coughing,
and the influence upon it by compression of the carotids, seem to
give force to this view. But are we not here confusing cause with
effect? Are not these variations in the calibre of the vessels due to
the irritation of the sensory and vaso-motor nerves, which are in a
state of pain? No doubt increase in the blood-supply augments the
pain, just as it does in an inflamed part when more blood goes to the
part. Let a finger with felon hang down, or let a gouty foot rest upon
the floor, what an intensity of pain follows!

Anstie very ably advocated the theory of migraine being a variety of

trigeminal neuralgia in the ophthalmic division; and we incline
strongly to his view. An attack of migraine often begins with pain
distinctly located in the supraorbital nerve as the result of exposure
to cold. Frequently it begins in the infraorbital nerve or in the
branches of the inferior maxillary division of the fifth. The pain then
spreads over one side of the head, both outside and inside, and
goes through the recognized symptoms of migraine. In my own case
I have often had an attack begin with sharp pain in the supraorbital
notch in a spot which could be covered by the tip of the finger. The
nerve has seemed swollen, and has been highly sensitive to
pressure. Then have come pain extending over the entire side of the
head, without its limits being distinctly definable, and the
accompanying phenomena of lachrymation, excessive salivation,
and copious flow of urine, winding up with vomiting or ineffectual
nausea and retching.

Anstie brings forward as arguments to support his view the facts that
the attacks of migraine often interchange with neuralgic seizures,
and that a person who has been migraineuse in early life may in later
years lose his hemicranial attacks, and have violent neuralgia in the
ophthalmic division of the fifth nerve.

The true seat of the lesion, if we may so call it, upon which the
exaggeration of pain-sense depends, is probably in the nerve-centre;
that is, in that part of the trigeminal nucleus back to which the fibres
go which are distributed to the painful areas. The pain is no doubt
chiefly intracranial, and in those portions of the cerebral mass and
meninges to which branches of the trigeminal are distributed. All of
the divisions of the trigeminus send branches to the dura mater.
Many nerves are found in the pia mater as plexuses around the
vessels, some of which penetrate into the centre of the brain. Most of
these nerves come from branches of the trigeminus.

TREATMENT.—The treatment of migraine must be directed to the

palliation of the attacks and to their prevention. So little is known of
the direct cause of the disease that it is difficult to lay out any distinct
course to be followed. Many cases, however, which seem to depend
upon a run-down state of the patient are vastly improved by a course
of tonics and building up. I have often seen anæmic and feeble
women whose attacks were frequent become exempt for a long
period by simply taking iron, quinine, and strychnia, and taking an
increased amount of nourishment. The rest-treatment of Weir
Mitchell is particularly applicable to these cases. In persons whose
digestion is bad, and who suffer from constipation, much can be
done by relieving these conditions. Some cases which are due to
uterine disturbances are benefited by treatment directed to the
womb. There are many cases, however, in which no cause is
apparent. The patient is well nourished, his eyes are good, he
undergoes no strain mentally, morally, or physically, and yet the
attacks of migraine come with tolerable regularity. In these persons
change of climate sometimes works marvellously beneficial results. I
saw last year a young lady who suffered from terrific headaches
which sometimes lasted for days. No plan of treatment or regimen
seemed to exert the slightest influence upon the attacks, and yet on
going to the far West for the summer she remained without an attack
during the whole time she was there. In some individuals all forms of
treatment may be tried in vain. Anti-periodics have been tested, but
with doubtful benefit. Cannabis indica is probably the most potent
remedy which is at our command. Its effects are most decided, and
many cases of severe hemicrania have been cured by this means
alone. It must be given for a long time, and in some instances it is
necessary to give gradually-increasing doses up to the physiological
effects. The drug must be of good quality, otherwise we need expect
no good from it. Indian hemp is well known to be variable in strength,
and the best form in which to use it is a fluid extract made by some
reliable chemist. Arsenic, phosphorus, and strychnia do not seem to
do as much good as in other neuralgias, except so far as they build
up the general health.

Ergot has been used with success as a curative means, and it

probably acts by contracting the vessels of the medulla oblongata. A
combination of ergotin and extract of cannabis indica may be given
together; and if persisted in for a long time will often be of benefit in
lessening the frequency of the attacks. The prolonged use of one of
the bromides is sometimes found curative.

Anstie has found the careful use of galvanism to the head and
sympathetic of positive advantage in keeping off attacks, and
Eulenburg has had the same experience.

In the treatment of the attack the patient should be freed from all
sources of external irritation. He should lie down in a darkened room,
and all noises should be excluded. If the attack is of the hyperæmic
variety, the patient's head should not be low, as this must favor
increase of blood to the head. In this form the patient is often more
comfortable sitting up or walking about. Occasionally an impending
attack can be warded off by the administration of caffeine, guarana,
or cannabis indica. Purgatives are of but little value in this form of
headache. The local application of menthol or of the oleate of
aconitia to the brow of the affected side will sometimes prevent an
attack. If a person can lie down quietly when he feels an attack
coming on, one or two doses of fifteen grains each of the bromide of
lithium will enable him to sleep, and wake free from pain. I have
found the lithium bromide far more valuable in migraine than any
other of the bromides. An effervescing preparation known as bromo-
caffeine is often efficacious in aborting a paroxysm or in palliating it
when it has got under way.

Quinine, in my experience, seems to be of little use in preventing or

cutting short a paroxysm of migraine, although Ross11 has found that
a dose of ten or fifteen grains may arrest it. Ergot has been found
useful, and, as it acts by contracting the arterioles, should be given
only in the angio-paralytic form. The fluid extract of ergot may be
administered, but ergotin in pill form is more acceptable to the
stomach.
11 Diseases of the Nervous System, vol. ii. p. 558.

Inhalations of nitrate of amyl have been used with advantage.

Berger, who was the first to employ this remedy, found that a single
inhalation of a few drops relieved the pain at once, and it did not
return that day. It is indicated only in the sympathico-tonica type. If it
is used, two or three drops of the nitrate in a glass pearl may be
crushed in the handkerchief and inhaled. Nitro-glycerin may also be
given in this variety of migraine.

Once the attack has begun fully, we can only attempt to mitigate the
pain. Firm pressure on the head generally gives relief, and encircling
the head firmly with a rubber bandage is often of great comfort.
Compression of the carotids gives temporary but decided ease to the
pain. Strong counter-irritation in the shape of a mustard plaster to the
nape of the neck or a stimulating application, like Granville's lotion,
to the vertex, will afford relief. I have found in some cases that
placing a hot-water bag, as hot as could be borne, against the back
of the head alleviates the pain. In other instances cold affords more
relief, and an ice-bag resting upon the forehead is the most
efficacious way of applying cold. Hot bottles to the feet are an
accessory not to be overlooked.

In the way of medicine we may give the bromide of lithium every

hour. The bromide of nickel has been recommended by DaCosta as
having peculiar advantages. Cannabis indica may be given in doses
of a quarter of a grain of the extract every two hours until relief is
obtained. Anstie believes strongly in chloral, and says that a single
dose of twenty or thirty grains will often induce a sleep from which
the patient wakes free from pain. The same writer advises the
administration of muriate of ammonium, but it is too nauseous a
dose to be given when the stomach is as much disturbed as it
usually is in an attack of migraine.

Croton chloral is preferred by some to the chloral hydrate. Ross, for

example, gives it in doses of five grains every four hours until relief is
obtained.

Galvanism through the head is often of relief, especially at the

beginning of an attack; but this means is not often available, for it is
not easy to have the suitable apparatus for the constant current at a
patient's home when it is needed. Should galvanism be used, one
pole should be placed on each mastoid process, and a weak current
passed through the head for two or three minutes. The sympathetic
may be galvanized by placing one pole over the upper cervical
ganglion, just behind and below the angle of the jaw, while the other
pole is held in the hand or placed upon the sole of the foot. In
hemicrania spastica the positive pole is put over the ganglion, and in
the angio-paralytic type the negative pole is placed in this location.

Should all of the above means fail, we may resort to morphia

hypodermically. Jewell12 favors the administration of morphia and
atropia, either by the mouth or hypodermically, from the beginning of
an attack until the pain is eased; but I believe that morphia, except
as a last resort, is very undesirable in migraine. Although a small
dose hypodermically will usually promptly bring relief, there are the
unpleasant after-effects of opium felt, and the patient feels more
prostrated and with more disordered digestion than had no morphia
been used. Besides, the morphia habit is liable to be formed,
especially in women, when the drug has once begun to be taken.
12 Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, 1881.

It is for this reason that I prefer to use the bromides, and if a patient
is seen at the beginning of a paroxysm, given a fifteen-grain dose of
bromide of lithium, his feet put in hot mustard-water, and he then
goes to bed, he will almost always cut his attack short, and on
waking from sleep will feel refreshed and able to take food.

I am strongly convinced of the importance of arresting or shortening

the paroxysms of migraine, especially in the young, at the beginning
of the disease. By this means the habit of long attacks is prevented,
and their prostrating after-effects are avoided. Should we succeed in
checking the first few attacks, we may by tonics and regimen
improve and fortify the constitution so as to eradicate or modify the
neuralgic tendency.

VERTIGO.

BY S. WEIR MITCHELL, M.D.

DEFINITION.—The clinical meaning of vertigo has gone, as is
common, far beyond what the term implies. We may define vertigo to
be a sense of defective equilibrium, with or without actual
disturbance of position, and accompanied by varying amounts of
subjective feelings of motion of external objects, of the body itself, or
of the contents of the cranium.

SYMPTOMATOLOGY.—Vertigo consists of attacks which are single or

repeat themselves during a continuous condition lasting for hours or
days, and which I have elsewhere described as the status
vertiginosus.1
1 Med. and Surg. Rep., June, 1877.

The mildest form of vertigo is that in which the patient has a

sensation of the contents of the head as being in motion. If more
severe, there is disturbed equilibrium, an effort is needed to stand
erect, or there is, as in most vertigo, a fear of falling. The brain
seems to be moving round or upward. This type is found in insanity,
in hysteria, and in the vertigo of mental effort observed in extreme
cerebral exhaustion.

In a second clinical species of vertigo the patient appears to himself

to be in motion, while outside objects maintain for him their places.
This may or may not be accompanied with sensory disturbance or an
approach to mental confusion. It is really a delirium of movement.
The patient feels as if he were rolling or falling or reeling or dropping
through space. Meanwhile, however grave the hallucination, he
walks and stands without the least sign of defect in balancing power.
These cases are very rare, but are sometimes seen as temporary
results of hysteria.

Perhaps it is doubtful whether we should really class this symptom-

group as vertigo.
The more common or typical expression of vertigo is marked in its
fulness by a false sense of the movement of external objects and of
the relations in space of the individual to such objects. The
pavement rolls or seems to be coming up in front of him; the houses
stand at angles; walls, pictures, chairs, and tables reel around him,
are still a moment, and again move; or the bed seems to be aslant or
to rock to and fro. In extreme instances objects are seen as if
inverted, and whenever the vertigo is marked the victim reels or falls,
or seeks by rest supine or by closing his eyes to lessen the terrors of
the attack. In severe examples no such help avails, and for hours or
days the patient may lie clutching at the bed for support or in deadly
fear of a new onset of vertigo, which in some cases is brought on by
the least movement of the head, by taking food, by efforts to think, or
by mechanical vibrations.

In most cases there is some mental confusion, or even brief loss of

consciousness at the close of the attack, and nearly always more or
less nausea or vomiting occurs—symptoms which have frequently
misled observers as to the cause of the vertigo, but which have in
most cases only the significance gastric disturbance has in migraine.
As in that disorder, but more rarely, the emesis may be associated
with or replaced by looseness of the bowels, and is very apt to be
followed by a flow of pale clear urine.

Fits of vertigo are often as distinct clinically as epileptic attacks. The

patient has for a few moments, in an acute form, all of the
phenomena of vertigo, and may then recover promptly, or it may
chance that he has a vertiginous status and a series of fits, or
remains for long periods in a state of chronic disorder of head, with
now and then an acute onset.

Physicians do not often witness these fits: I have been so fortunate

as to see several. I take this description of one from my notes: A
young clergyman, after excessive overwork among the poor, came to
consult me for vertigo. As I talked to him an attack came on. I asked
him to keep as composed as possible and to tell me what he felt. He
said: “It has just begun. The objects in the room are moving from
right to left; I can seem to hold them still for a moment, then they go
on and move faster. If I shut my eyes it is relief, but only for a time. I
feel myself as if I were now going round with them. The chair rocks,
and my brain seems moving too.” At the same time he became very
pale, and slipped from his seat. His pulse was quick and feeble and
rapid, and as he lay on the floor unconscious a profuse sweat broke
out on his face. In a moment he was again himself, but did not
recover so as to walk for a half hour. He then complained of
headache, but was able to walk home. This is a fair example of a fit
of vertigo, due, as it proved, to at least two of the causes of vertigo,
which I shall presently discuss.

A few persons insist that something like a distinct aura precedes the
attacks. In other cases the brain symptoms develop gradually, from a
faint sense of dizziness up to a tumultuous feeling of confusion with
sensory illusions. In a few rare cases there is, as in that above
mentioned, an abrupt onset. Something seems to snap in the head,
and the vertigo follows; or, most rare of all, we have a sensory
discharge felt as light or sound, and followed by the ordinary
symptoms.2
2 See the author in lectures on Nerv. Diseases, Disorders of Sleep, p. 63, 2d ed.

DIAGNOSIS.—Vertigo is of course, as a rule, only a complex symptom

of one or more numerous conditions. Acute isolated fits of vertigo are
sometimes puzzling, because epilepsy may be preceded by brief
vertigo and exist without notable spasms. Time may bring to us a
frankly expressive epilepsy to explain former and less distinct fits.
But usually it is the attacks of vertigo which are the causes of doubt.
A man has sudden giddiness, and falls unconscious for a moment.
These attacks persist. How shall we know them as vertigo? how be
secure that they be not some form of the lesser epilepsy? As a rule,
if they be vertigo there will be nausea or emesis, while the intervals
between attacks will offer the usual signs of confusion of head, fear
of losing balance, and all the numerous evidences of disturbed and
easily excitable states of the sensorium—conditions rare in the
interepileptic periods. The effect of bromides may aid the diagnosis,
for, although often of use in vertigo, they have not such power to
inhibit the fits as they possess in epilepsy. Persons long liable to any
form of vertigo can readily cause attacks, or at least vertiginous
feelings, by closing the eyes while standing, by the least rotation, or
by putting a prism on one eye, so that among these tests we may
frequently find the material for a diagnosis, which will of course, in
many instances, be made easy enough by the presence of causes
obviously competent to occasion the one or the other disease.

PROGNOSIS.—In true vertigo, if we exclude the organic causes, and

especially intracranial neoplasms, there is very little to be feared.
Deaths have been seen in Menière's disease, but are most rare.
Even in grave examples of labyrinthine vertigo there is a probability
that the worst which can occur will be deafness, and that vertigo will
gradually cease as the delicate neural tissues become so
degenerated as to cease to respond to irritations.

The DURATION of other forms of vertigo it is less easy to predict.

Ocular vertigoes get well soon after the eye trouble is corrected, and
the like is true of most vertigoes due to peripheral causes. So also
the giddiness which is sometimes seen as a very early symptom in
locomotor ataxia is transient, and will be apt, like the ocular and
bladder troubles which mark the onset, to come and go, and at last
to disappear entirely. It is to be remarked that vertigo at the
beginning of posterior sclerosis is common, and is not due to ocular
motor conditions.

Sometimes in vertigo, as in epilepsy, the removal of a long-existing

cause may not bring about at once a cessation of the abnormal
symptoms its activity awakened, so that it is well, as to the prognosis
of duration, to be somewhat guarded in our statements. Nor is this
need lessened by the fact that vertigo may be an almost lifelong
infliction, without doing any very serious damage to the working
powers of the person so disordered.

ETIOLOGY.—It is generally taken for granted that vertigo has always

for its nearest cause some disorder of cerebral circulation; but while
either active congestion or anæmia of brain may be present with
vertigo, and while extreme states of the one or the other are certainly
competent to produce its milder forms, it does not seem at all sure
that they are essential to its being. Indeed, there is much reason to
believe that vertigo is due in all cases to a disturbance of central
nerve-ganglia, and that the attendant basal condition is but one
incident in the attack.

In vertigo there are the essential phenomena, as disturbed balance,

with a false sense of movement within or without, or of one's self.
Then there are the lesser and unessential phenomena, which vary in
kind and degree, and these are the moral and mental symptoms—
terror, confusion of mind, and sensory illusions; and, last, the nausea
and sickness met with here as in migraine, and the flow of clear, thin
urine.

All of these symptoms should be accounted for in speaking of the

intracranial organs, disorder of which causes vertigo. Ferrier has
especially made it clear that equilibration involves afferent
impressions, co-ordinative centres, and efferent excitations
preservative of balance.

Guiding impressions, which direct the muscles through centres

below the cerebrum, so as to aid in preserving our balance, reach
these centres from the skin and the muscles, so that great loss of
tactility or of the compound impressions called muscular sensations
results in disturbance of equilibrium, but not in true vertigo, which is
clinically this and something more.

A second set of impressions, of use in preserving equilibrial status,

come through the eye, or rather habitually through the eyes,
because the consensual impressions arising out of double vision and
the co-ordinate movements of the two fields of sight have, as is well
known, much to do in this matter. It is hardly needful to dwell on this
point. Certain parts of the ear have, however, the largest share in
maintaining our balance, and it seems likely that the semicircular
canals—the part most concerned—although lying within the petrous
part of the temporal and receiving nerves from the stem which
constitutes the nerve of hearing, may have slight relations or none to
the sense of audition.3 When the horizontal canals are cut, the head
moves from side to side and the animal turns on his long axis. When
the posterior or lower vertical canals suffer, the head sways back
and forward, and the tendency is to fall or turn over backward. When
the upper erect canals are cut, the head moves back and forward,
and the tendency is to turn or fall forward.
3 I have seen a single case of vertigo, with slight deafness on both sides, in which the
sense of the position of sounds was absolutely lost.

In pigeons, injury on one side may get well, but when the canals are
cut on both sides there is permanent loss of balance. In some way,
then, these little organs appear to be needful to the preservation of
equilibrium; and of late some interesting attempts have been made
to explain the mechanism of this function. It probably depends on the
varying pressure relations of the endo-lymph to the nerve-ends
which lie in the membranous canals.

Wm. James of Harvard has shown that total loss of hearing is

usually accompanied by lessened susceptibility to vertiginous
impressions, so that the stone-deaf are not apt to be seasick or
giddy from rotation, owing to their having lost the organ which
responds to such impressions. It would seem also that the entirely
deaf have peculiar difficulty in certain circumstances, as when diving
under water, in recognizing their relations to space.

There is a general tendency to regard the cerebellum as the centre

in which all the many impressions concerned in the preservation of
equilibrium are generally received and made use of for that purpose.
There may be several such centres, and the matter is not as yet
clear. Whatever be the regulative ganglion, it seems clear that it
must be in close relation to the pneumogastric centres, to account by
direct connection or nerve-overflow for the gastric symptoms. But,
besides this, vertigo has clinical relation to moral and mental states
not easy to explain, and in extreme cases gets the brain into such a
state of excitability that mental exertion, emotion, strong light, or loud
sounds share with the least disorder of stomach capacity to cause
an attack.
Vertigo may be due to many forms of blood-poisoning, as at the
onset of fevers, inflammations, the exanthemata—notably in
epidemic influenzas. It may arise in malarial poisoning, sometimes
as the single symptom, as well as in diabetes, albuminuria, lithæmic
conditions, and in all the disorders which induce anæmic states.
Common enough as sign of brain tumor, and especially of growths in
or near the cerebellum, as a result of degenerated vessels, it is also
not very rare in the beginning of some spinal maladies, especially in
posterior sclerosis, and is not always to be then looked upon as of
ocular origin.

Alcohol, hemp, opium, belladonna, gelsemium, anæsthetics, and

tobacco are all, with many others, drugs capable of causing vertigo.

In hot countries heat is a common, and sometimes an unsuspected,

cause of very permanent vertigo.

Lastly, excess in venery, or, in rare cases, every sexual act, profound
moral and emotional perturbations, and in some states of the system
mental exertion, may occasion it, while in hysteria we may have
almost any variety of vertigo well represented. Outside of the brain
grave organic diseases of the heart are apt to produce vertigo,
especially where the walls of the heart are fatty or feeble from any
cause. Suppression of habitual discharges, as of hemorrhoids or
menstrual flow, is certainly competent, but I have more doubt as to
the accepted capacity of rapidly cured cutaneous disease.

The following are some of the more immediate causes of vertigo:

They are disorders of the stomach or of the portal circulation;
laryngeal irritation; irritation of the urethra, as passing a bougie,
especially when the patient is standing up; affections of nerve-trunks;
nerve wounds; sudden freezing of a nerve (Waller and the author);
catarrhal congestion of the nasal sinuses; inflammation and
congestion of inner ear, many irritations of the outer and middle ear;
prolonged use of optically defective eyes; insufficiency of external
muscles of the eye.

It will be needful to treat of some of these causes of vertigo in turn.