One function of myth is as a cultural teaching tool. It demonstrates moral behavior and outlines the rules and standards applied to different members of society. Religion has often been a tool to reinforce prescribed societal roles, and this includes gender divisions. You can usually infer which activities, behaviors, and physical traits were most strongly coded male or female by looking at the culture's deities, culture heroes, and other legendary figures.

But the gender division in mythology isn't always a firm binary. There are a slew of deities from around the world who are both genders, or neither, or known to switch back and forth on a whim. I'm intrigued by these figures and their roles in their respective pantheons, and thought other folks might find them interesting to learn about, too.

When it comes to Mesoamerican cosmology, the Aztec tend to get the most press—largely because more Aztec history survived the Spanish than was preserved from many other cultures. When it comes to the Maya, the majority of their codices were destroyed, forcing modern scholars to reconstruct their beliefs from depictions on the structures and artifacts that avoided similar destruction. These efforts are aided by the one mythological text that was preserved by a uniquely forward-thinking Spanish monk named Francisco Ximenez: The Popol Wuj (or Popol Vuj), a name that roughly translates to “Book of the Community”. This text includes the Maya creation story, which flows into the tale of their culture heroes, the twins Hunahpu (or Junajpu) and Xbalanque.

If any place could be said to be the modern day domain of the Maya, it’s Guatemala. Of the 17.6 million people who live in Guatemala, nearly half (43.75%) belong to the Maya peoples. Maya culture lives on in the country’s food and customs, while the empire’s history can be traced through a slew of archaeological sites and the artifacts recovered from them.  

High fantasy has a long-standing tradition of borrowing from myth and religion, and anyone with even a surface knowledge of world mythology will see that right away reading Wheel of Time. I think I noticed some of this even when I read the books as a kid, but my current re-read coincides with a deep dive on world mythologies, making the familiar names and concepts stand out even more vividly than on my past reads through the series.

(Note: Thar be Wheel of Time book spoilers ahead—if you haven’t read the whole series and care about such things, probably best to stop reading now)

Mythology and folklore can be an excellent source of storytelling inspiration. In the past, it could be tricky to track down info on myths outside what I’ll call the Big 4 (Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Norse). Even for these well-known pantheons, a lot of the available info was over-simplified, or filtered through the view of writers who misconstrued (or sometimes straight-up rewrote) the original story.

Today, scholars, folklorists, and mythologists from around the world can share their knowledge without going through an academic gatekeeper. The result is a wealth of information about mythologies, pantheons, rituals, and folk tales, both ancient and active. While the internet is still shockingly incomplete in some areas, there are tons of resources available for writers seeking inspiration from myths and folk stories. Here are some of the sites I’ve found most useful for my own research.

I’ve been doing a lot of research into ancient mythologies lately. One of the most interesting books I’ve come across in this is Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman. It looks at the Goddess religions that were widespread in the ancient world, the cultures that worshipped these female supreme deities, and when and how they were replaced by the patriarchal cultures that eventually evolved into the religions of the present day.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff to unpack in this book, and I highly recommend it for anyone who’s interested in ancient mythology, specifically as a way to gain insight into the culture that developed it. One of the details that’s stuck with me the most is Stone’s breakdown of the Adam and Eve story as a kind of pre-Christian propoganda against the Goddess.