Figures of Sacred Narrative

This category holds the named figures of scripture, myth and legend who are not themselves gods: prophets, patriarchs and matriarchs, apostles and disciples, saints, sages, founders, kings, heroes and heroines, and their adversaries, demons, monsters and titans. They are the persons who act within a tradition's sacred story without being worshipped as divine.

The boundary with deity is drawn differently in different traditions and is sometimes internally disputed. A figure may be a revered but wholly human teacher in one community and an object of devotion approaching worship in another, and the atlas notes such cases rather than forcing a single classification.