DS-004·Editorial · 2026·500g

Mythos Atlas

An illustrated encyclopedia of gods and monsters — 163 figures across six pantheons, each with its story, its iconography, and its counterparts elsewhere. Every quotation is a verified primary-source passage; every page reads in six languages.

Role: Solo · editorial + build
Year: 2026
Category: Editorial
Weight: 500g
Price: Blend

Roast: 4/5
Notes: Illustrated · Cross-pantheon · Quote-checked
Stack: Astro 5 · Pagefind · Cloudflare Workers

Pulled on 2026 · Best by: always

Visit the live site ↗

The origin

Most mythology sites file one culture at a time. I wanted the reverse: an encyclopedia you read across pantheons, where the same job — thunder, the underworld, trickery — is answered by six traditions side by side. Each figure gets its story, its iconography, a verbatim passage from a primary text, and its counterparts elsewhere. And it had to look like one book, not a scrapbook: 163 figures painted in a single house style, old-master chiaroscuro on a dark ground with a per-pantheon accent — AI-generated, and credited as such on every page.

The Medusa entry: a full-height portrait beside the name, tagline, domains, siblings, slayer, and symbols — One entry per figure — portrait, tagline, domains, kin and symbols, all before the story starts.

The pull

An early audit caught quotations that read perfectly, cited plausibly, and did not exist. So the site treats a quotation as evidence. Every blockquote is harvested from a public-domain edition and matched byte-for-byte against the upstream page; the original-language line must be identical across all six locales; and the build fails if any translation drops a section or a quote. Prose stays a human job. The unattended part is a scheduled research loop that hunts primary sources for the next figure in the queue, proves each anchor against the live page, and opens a draft PR containing no prose at all.

The Medusa entry body: prose with linked kin, a Greek line from Hesiod with its translation, and a Sources panel citing the edition — Hesiod in Greek, then in translation — the passage is checked byte-for-byte against the edition it cites.

Two maps hold the collection together. The Constellation is the kinship graph — 163 figures, gold threads joining counterparts across cultures — laid out at build time as plain SVG, so nothing heavy ships to the browser. The Atlas puts each pantheon on the ground it was actually worshipped on: a Natural Earth coastline traced once and committed, halos placed in degrees, and no coordinates for Asgard. All of it is Astro content collections: about 1,270 static pages, Pagefind search, view transitions, six locales.

The Constellation: 163 portrait medallions colour-ringed by pantheon, with gold threads linking counterparts — The Constellation — every figure as a medallion, gold threads to its counterparts, no graph library shipped.

The Atlas: a dark map of Afro-Eurasia with six glowing halos over Scandinavia, Greece, Egypt, India, China, and Japan — The Atlas — each halo covers the land a pantheon was worshipped in, not the worlds it imagined.

What came out

163 figures · 6 pantheons · 6 languages · ~1,270 static pages · every quotation checked against its source