I am working on an epic called the Gaiad. It is called the Gaiad because it is the story of Earth, much like the Illiad is the story of Troy (also known as Illium)
The purpose of the Gaiad is to reinvigorate the scientifically known history of the universe, life, and man with a long lost mythopoetic vigor; and to act as inspiration for the future expansion of humanity and life.
The consistent theme of the Gaiad is of family and genealogy. It starts with the big bang as a birth of twins: Yin and Yang representing the divine masculine and feminine. Yin and Yang marry and their descendants continue on to become the universe.
As Apophis did in Egyptian mythology the demon Hillu emerged from the afterbirth of Yin and Yang. This represents evil and chaos as antithetical to family. Hillu has no sex nor genealogy. Hillu is chaos and life is order emerging against this chaos. Hillu personifies all the obstacles that life will face as it develops
Through a systematic genealogy every element and celestial body and particle has a genealogy.
Life on Earth is descended from the marriage of Carbon and Earth. From here the genealogy continues in anthropomorphic representations of ancient evolutionary ancestors. Evolutionary cladistics are genealogies already, so from here the genealogies are no longer metaphorical, just anthropomorphized.
As the narrative continues it follows the adventures of many organisms ranging from bacteria to plants to animals as they survive mass extinctions, multiply, and transition into the forms we know today. Among these events the way that life began sexual reproduction, the Cambrian explosion, life emerging onto land, dinosaurs becoming birds, mammals coming to rule the world, and finally development of complex culture in the apes that became humanity.
After humans emerge the story begins to detail how different groups of humans spread out and became the people of the modern world. There are characters who are the common ancestor of everyone of a certain haplogroup. So every tribe of humanity has its origin story and everyone can see themselves in this narrative regardless of their race, and even if they don’t know their background they can get a genetic test to see themselves in it. Then it goes into the development of agriculture and throughout history telling the stories of great men and women who made great contributions to humanity. These include pagan figures like Hercules, Judaeo-Christian figures like Moses and Christ, and other religious and secular figures such as Muhammad and Confucius and Charlemagne and Gallileo. The story goes up to the present age.
After reaching the present age the Gaiad will continue with the Galaxiad, the story of the Galaxy. The Galaxiad will tell the story of humanity moving from being confined to Earth to living all throughout the Galaxy thousands of years in the future, while maintaining the same mythopoetic vigor of the earlier Gaiad. Characters still address the gods and the stars with pompous speeches, everyone is still introduced by their genealogies. This emphasizes the continuity of the mythopoetic tradition no matter how far we reach into the future.