Sikh

This entry exists in a register built for pantheons, and the most useful thing it can say is that the register does not fit. That is a fact about Sikhi and not an omission in the record.

Sikh teaching begins with the declaration that there is one reality, without form, without birth, self-existent, and the opening of the Guru Granth Sahib states it before it states anything else. There is no divine society below that one reality. There are no ranked gods, no generations succeeding one another, no assembly, no divine kingship to be won or lost, and therefore none of the structural questions this atlas asks of a pantheon has a Sikh answer.

The gods of the surrounding Indic traditions are not denied existence in the scripture so much as decisively demoted. They appear, and they are subject to the same order as everything else, and they are not what a person should be addressing.

The Gurus are equally clearly not divine. Ten human teachers held the office in succession, and the tradition is emphatic that they are to be honoured and not worshipped. When the line of human Gurus ended, authority passed to the scripture itself and to the collective body of the community, which is a transfer of office rather than a deification.

So the door from mortal to god, open in Greek and Chinese practice and central to both, is closed here on principle.

Sikhi is unusual among the traditions in this atlas in having a scripture whose text was fixed by the tradition's own founders, in their own lifetimes, in a script devised for the purpose.

The Guru Granth Sahib was compiled by the fifth Guru and given its final form by the tenth, and the composition of the Gurus is preserved alongside verse by earlier figures from other traditions, Hindu and Muslim, included on the strength of what they said rather than who they were. The scripture is arranged by musical mode, because it is meant to be sung, and its authority is not merely textual: the tenth Guru vested the office of Guru in the volume itself, which is why it is treated as a living authority rather than as a book about one.

That leaves comparatively little of the textual uncertainty that dominates the study of older traditions. What is argued over lies elsewhere: the status and authorship of parts of the Dasam Granth, and the historical value of the janamsakhi literature, the traditional narratives of Guru Nanak's life, which are devotional works composed after the fact and which vary considerably between recensions.

The historical record is also comparatively good. The period of the Gurus falls within Mughal history, and Persian-language sources, court records and later colonial documentation supply an external frame that older traditions in this atlas simply do not have.