What Does It Mean To Build A New Mythology? Anand Gandhi & Zain Memon Talk About MAYA

Mythology has always distilled a civilisation’s hard-won insights and made them portable enough to survive for generations. South Asia has a rich heritage of mythology and philosophy, but it hasn’t yet created equally compelling stories for the world.

The problem is twofold: the region lacks the resources and infrastructure to invest in a global cultural enterprise, and the West has only recently recognised the valuable stories, ideas, wisdom, warnings, and prescriptions of other cultures.

We are the first generation of creators from this part of the world with the means to achieve this ambition. We’ve consumed everything that came before us: philosophical wisdom, great literature, film, media, research papers, and peer-reviewed journals. We’ve read Buddha and Dawkins, spoken Kabir and Chomsky, and our peers have grown up in our neighbourhoods and oceans apart.

To adapt an existing mythology means inheriting its characters, themes, tropes, moral prescriptions, values, and priorities. It’s like retelling a story passed down for centuries. When an idea has lived that long, retellings usually aim for modest ambitions: offering new insights from different perspectives or drawing parallels between old wisdom and current developments.

Building a new mythology from scratch is different. It involves sifting through a civilisation’s myth and lore, keeping only what’s relevant, and discarding what’s no longer useful. Then, it’s about creating new maps and blueprints that address today’s questions.

That’s what we did with Maya. We identified the best philosophical and narrative frameworks we grew up with, the intuitive wisdom that needs more precise articulation, and used that as scaffolding to build on the best contemporary ideas we have access to. This practice involved two timeless traditions: "neti neti" (a systemic negation of everything that a thing is not) and "aano bhadra krtavo yantu vishwatah" (let good ideas flow from all directions). These domains included evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, complexity sciences, political theory, cliodynamics, and more. The result is an expansive narrative that’s equal parts mythos and logos, and equally new and unfamiliar to people in South Asia and around the world.

The Maya universe grew from a set of world-building principles and constraints we identified early and have honoured. Some are physical, like the 6.9 billion-year-old planet Neh with its deep-time consequences and Earth-like physics. Nothing is arbitrary: geology shapes evolution, which shapes biology, which shapes cognition, which shapes culture. We enter with a defined level of technology and resources. Narrative principles include the glorification of evil and the assumption of sophistication in every civilisation on Neh, regardless of its level of technology or political order.

Once these foundational decisions were made, the world expanded through the interactions of every system introduced. Even within these constraints, the possibility space was vast, and most of our work involved scrutinising every possible idea to find the ones that truly earned their keep.

Every collaborator who joins us spends time understanding the world, its ethos, and its history before building. Every biologist, architect, linguist, game designer, and artist who has worked on Maya describes Neh differently, but their contributions cohere because the underlying first principles are shared.

The focal challenge and joy of this systems approach is that any new idea must speak to all other systems and reconcile with them. A building cannot be designed purely because it looks cool or striking. It must be consistent with the world’s materials, follow from the species’ physiology and cognition, and sit plausibly within the region’s political history. While no idea can enter the lore in isolation, the best ideas can reshape the lore until it becomes difficult to remember a time before them.

We built frameworks of ecology, economics, and politics, then let these systems interact. These systems had competing priorities, incentives, rulesets, and so they inevitably came into conflict. From there, narratives emerged. 

Then we began dropping characters into these systems with certain intuitions of where this would lead them. At one point, we were surprised to discover that the world of Maya started arguing back with us. Characters refused to interact with systems predictably. Yachay would resist doing what the plot required him to do. Kshar’s moral conflicts complicated matters until we had to rethink his species’ entire political history from first principles.

We realised the world was no longer a canvas for us to paint on, but an autonomous collaborator that demanded respect. This proved truly robust world-building, creating a system complex enough to generate its own internal logic, stories, and opinions.

Now, world-building has its own voice at the table. There have been endless instances when an idea that initially looked flashy and exciting had to bow out because Neh quietly refused it. We have learned to think of these moments as confirmation, not a loss. When the world overrules its authors, it is truly alive.

Every medium poses unique questions about the same world. Novels delve into characters’ minds, exploring memory and perception. Films demand precision and curation in each frame, asking if an idea can be compressed into a single image or glance. Games challenge the design question: what does it feel like to fly like a garuda or tether? Speculative architecture seeks to understand what these species would build and why.

Each medium offers standalone experiences, but they enrich each other. A secondary antagonist in a novel becomes a primary protagonist in a graphic novel, revealing new context.

When creating for multiple mediums, all work must adhere to a larger discipline, ensuring the philosophical premise remains consistent regardless of the entry point.

The audience co-authors meaning, but we hope Maya’s fans will take it further, turning it into a sandbox for their stories. Our aspiration is that the best work in the Maya universe will come from its biggest fans, compensated accordingly.

We are actively reimagining IP and ownership to make this a reality. The mythologies of old belonged to everyone, and so should Maya.