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Fifty Nine Pantheons That Do Not Fit a Named Category

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Fifty Nine Pantheons That Do Not Fit a Named Category

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Other Pantheons gathers fifty nine deity type entries that do not belong under one of the atlas's other named pantheon classifications, the largest and most heterogeneous grouping under deity type.

Most of the fifty nine are indigenous and folk traditions of specific peoples, filed here because each is its own tradition rather than a variant of a larger one already catalogued. Sub-Saharan Africa contributes the largest cluster, twenty five entries including West African, Maasai, Bambara, Mossi, Senufo, Tallensi, Ewe, Edo, Amazigh, Zande, Mbuti, Kikuyu, Luo, Ganda, Dinka, Nuer, Xhosa and Chewa, several, Senufo's Poro and Chewa's Nyau among them, built around initiation societies whose deeper knowledge stays closed and is recorded here only as far as each community has made public. South and Southeast Asia contribute twenty two entries, chiefly India's Adivasi and other indigenous communities, the Adivasi, Tani, Meitei, Kirat, Bodo, Garo, Khasi, Gond, Bhil and Santal among them, several campaigning for census recognition as faiths distinct from Hinduism, alongside the Sinhala and Tamil shared cult, the Vedda, Kalash, Dayak, Javanese, Toraja, Balinese, Igorot, Hmong, Burmese, Thai and Khmer traditions further east. East Asia's Yi, Naxi and Ryukyuan traditions form a third cluster. The diaspora in the Americas contributes Mexican Folk, Kumina and Winti, and antiquity contributes Phrygian.

A final cluster of five entries, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Baha'i and Latter Day Saint, exists so each Abrahamic tradition's own conception of the one God of Abraham stands on its own terms rather than sharing one comparative page.

What unifies the fifty nine is only that none fit elsewhere, not a shared pantheon, cosmology or region.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Sources
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source
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