Thousands of years of myth and magic collide with a hundred and fifty years of Darwinism. As children we bandied about complex concepts of morality and religion while the implications of evolution remained cloistered in the vaulted minds of balding polysyllabic scientists. But within these paradigms can be found models of ourselves; clear pools for reflection of our position in time, the world, and our own minds; models for understanding our past, present, and future-how we came to be, who we are, and what we might yet become. Observations and concepts compiled over the millennia of human observation form the basis of these parables. With perspectives and paradigms borrowed and stolen from human biology, genetics, comparative anatomy, and embryology, I hope to conjure images as palpable as the ghosts and angels of myth, yet as natural as the world we see, touch and feel around us.