Every story on this site drops the reader straight into a world already in motion — kings cursed by sages, worlds nested inside oceans, beings called Deva, Asura, Rakshasa, Daitya as if the difference were obvious. It usually isn't, and there's rarely anywhere on the page to go looking for the answer. This series exists to be that place: seven articles explaining the texts, the taxonomies, and the cosmology every other chronicle on FamilyRoots.in quietly assumes you already know.
The Seven Foundations
Who's Who Live
The being-types this site's stories use constantly — Deva, Asura, Rakshasa, Daitya, Danava, Naga, Yaksha, Gandharva, and more — actually defined, and mostly cousins.
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What Is a Purana? Live
The 18 Mahapuranas, how they're classified, how they've physically survived a thousand years, and why the same story reads differently across them.
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The Vedas, Briefly Live
The four Vedas, how they were preserved by memory alone for two thousand years, and how they differ from the Puranas built on top of them.
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Sage Taxonomy Live
Rishi, Muni, Rajarishi, Devarishi, Maharishi, Brahmarishi — what actually separates one rank of sage from another, and the one sage who climbed the whole ladder himself.
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The Fourteen Lokas Live
Why an ocean can hold an entire earth, and the layered structure of worlds every cosmic-war story on this site assumes.
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Shakta Tradition, Briefly Live
Devi worship, the Shakta Puranas, the Shakti Peethas, and the ten wisdom-goddess forms this site may cover in full next.
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The Eleven Rudras & the Five Faces Live
Shiva multiplied into eleven fierce companions and folded into five faces looking every direction at once — conceptual categories a companion piece to The Avatars of Shiva surfaced.
Read the full article →Seven companion articles, all live, each explaining a piece of the framework the rest of FamilyRoots.in's Puranic Stories assumes readers already have — who populates these stories, what a Purana is, what the Vedas are, how sages are ranked, where everyone actually lives, the goddess tradition running underneath several of these chronicles, and — added after the first six were already complete — the conceptual categories behind Shiva's eleven fierce companion-forms and his five-faced cosmological aspect. Read this series first, start to finish, then move on to the narrative chronicles — The Twelve Cosmic Wars, The Three Charitas, The Dashavatara, The Saptarishi Chronicles, The Celestial Dynasties, Lives of the Great Asuras, and The Avatars of Shiva — with the vocabulary to read them clearly from the very first page.