Phil Hine - Pseudonomicon
Amazon link to Phil Hine's Pseudonomicon. Yeah, I'll be getting a copy almost immediately.
Hanuman
Hanuman is the Hindi diety who aided one of the avatars of Vishni (Rama), assisting in the rescue of Rama's wife, Sita, from Ravana, king of the Rakshasas. He symbolizes the pinnacle of selfless and loving devotion (bhakti) as well as the indomnible bravery of the morally upright individual. Hanuman is the child of Anjana (who was a celestial being once upon a time before she was cursed and turned into a monkey) and a chance encounter with the Wind-God Vayu Deva (who blew her clothes off and, seeing her naked, had to have her). The child of their union is the morally upright Hanuman who inherited his father's godlike abilities of strength and flight.
He gets his name from the marks on his cheeks (hanuhH is Sandskrit for 'cheek') which is the scar left by Indra's Thunderbolt. When Hanuman was young, he mistook the sun for a piece of fruit and leaped into the sky to grab it. Indra, the chap who maintains the balance of the universal laws, zapped the young monkey with his Thunderbolt as he reached for the sun. However, after Dad made the long face, Indra capitulated and retrieved his Thunderbolt, letting the monkey child go free with just a scar to remember his transgression.
Brahma later made Hanuman diamond-hard, invincible to all weapons and attacks, and gave him immortality. This deathlessness (a state making him a chiranjeevi) also allows him to leave his mortal body whenever he chooses to flit about and do the things one does while astral (icchaa maranam -- dying at will). His monkey spirit makes him forget this detail at times and he has to be reminded of his invincibility by others.
How Raven Escaped
Utnapishtim ("he who saw life") was a wise king of Shurrupak (on the banks of the Euphrates). He appears in the epic of Gilgamesh as one of the two human survivors of Enlil's great flood (much like, you know, God's flood, though only a few millennium earlier in the literature). Having been granted immortality after the flood, Utnapishtim was living on the island of Dilmun where Gilgamesh found him during his search for immortality.
Utnapishtim, secretly alerted to Enlil's plan by Ea, the water god, got his wife and "two of every animal" into a boat and rode out Enlil's wrath. When the flood receeded, he sent out birds to search for land. First he sent out a dove, which came back. Then he sent out a swallow, which came back. Then he sent out a raven.
Which never came back.
Mirandola
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was an Italian philosopher and scholar who lived from 1463 until 1494. During his short life, he studied theology and philosophy, dabbled in the Cabala, wrote an extensive series of treaties on all possible subjects (900 in all, collected as Conclusiones philosophicae, cabalasticae et theologicae in Rome). While some were vaguely heretical, they realistically just pointed out the lack of theological enlightenment of the era. He sought a synthesis of religion and philosophy, attempting to counter the spread of pure humanism with a bit of critical thinking. He saw Hebrew and Talmudic sources as viable texts and generally got into trouble over his eagerness and willingess to be a free thinker. His piece, "Oration on the Dignity of Man," is one of the landmark pieces of the Italian Renaissance (some go so far as to call it a "manifesto").
Parts of his Oration can be found here in Latin, Italian, and English. A complete translation can be found here.
Walter Pater's history of Pico in context of the Renaissance can be found here.
Barnabas
Barbabas and the Apocalypse: Wherein Barbabas the Goat stares in the Great Abyss and the Great Abyss stares back.
If Aleister Crowley wrote children's books.