From which god did the Egyptian pharaohs claim to be descended?

Quetzalcoatl was the Aztec god of the atmosphere and of civilizing influences. Besides ruling the wind and sun, he invented agriculture, the calendar, and many arts and crafts. Sometimes represented as a feathered serpent, sometimes as a bearded man, he was also identified as a priest-king who had sailed away, promising to return.

In Malory’s Mane d’Arthur, the Lady of the Lake is a supernatural figure who lives in a magical lake. She steals the infant Lancelot and raises him in the lake, hence his name, Lancelot du Lac. She also awards King Arthur the sword Excalibur, which he takes from an arm reaching out of the lake….

The Round Table seated 150 knights, with one place left open for the Holy Grail. The table’s design was conceived by Merlin to prevent any bickering about who would get places of honor.

The Grateful Dead does not mean a rock group. It is a folktale in which a young man buries a corpse at great personal risk, then obtains a bride with the help of the grateful deceased. A version of the tale appears in the apocryphal Old Testament book of Tobit.

The Phrygian king Tantalus committed an abomination when he cut up his son Pelops and served him for dinner to the gods. He was punished in Hades by unending thirst and hunger. Water slipped away from him whenever he tried to drink it; fruit trees were forever out of reach. This story is the source…

Priapus, a Greek god of animal and plant fertility, was known for his enormous phallus. He was usually described as the son of Dionysus and Aphrodite, though sometimes his mother was said to have been a local nymph. To sophisticated city-dwellers, Priapus often became the subject of racy humor, but rural people adopted him as…