About the Sources

What this is

Mythos Atlas is an educational encyclopedia of Indian and Greek mythology. Its aim is to help you understand figures, stories, and the texts behind them, and to be honest about where each claim comes from rather than presenting a single flattened version.

Entity and story descriptions

The profile descriptions, story summaries, and relationship notes are editorial summaries: they are written to be accurate and are tied to the primary texts listed on each page, but they are paraphrases, not quotations, and have not all been line-checked against the original sources.

Treat them as a well-researched starting point, not as a citable authority. Where a page cites a specific text (with a confidence rating), that citation names where the claim comes from; the star rating reflects how directly the source supports it, from primary-text attestation down to modern reconstruction or speculation.

Traditions are kept separate

Indian mythology in particular spans Vedic, epic, Puranic, and regional Bhakti traditions that often disagree, and Greek sources conflict too. We tag which tradition a telling comes from and keep conflicting versions side by side instead of merging them. Aphrodite has two birth stories; Sita's abduction differs between Valmiki and Tulsidas. Those differences are the point, not errors to resolve.

The Bhagavad Gita and the AI Scholar

The Scholar answers only from the verses of the Bhagavad Gita and cites the exact sloka it rests on. The verse text is Annie Besant's translation (1895), which is in the public domain, presented alongside the original Sanskrit. The Scholar's prose answer is generated by a language model constrained to those retrieved verses; it is an explanation grounded in the text, not a new translation or a religious authority.

A note on reverence

Many of these figures are objects of living worship for millions of people. Nothing here is intended to diminish that. The tone is that of a museum: curious, respectful, and careful to distinguish what a text says from what later tradition made of it.