Deities & Sacred Figures

This section holds the personal figures of the world's religions and mythologies: the gods and goddesses of the great pantheons, the named human and semi-divine figures of scripture and legend who are not themselves gods, the archangels of the Abrahamic traditions, and the archetypal patterns scholars use to compare one figure with another.

A deity is a being held to be divine and, usually, to govern some part of the cosmos or human life. A character is a figure of sacred narrative (a prophet, patriarch, saint, hero or monster), who acts within the story without being worshipped as a god, though the line between the two is drawn differently in different traditions and is sometimes disputed within one. Archangels occupy a rank of their own in Jewish, Christian and Islamic angelology, and archetypes are a modern comparative device rather than objects of belief.

Where a tradition places a figure (god, intermediary, exalted human), is rarely neutral; it is often the point on which whole theologies turn. The same person may be a god in one community and a revered but wholly human teacher in another, and figures who are dual-modelled in this atlas (worshipped as a deity in one setting, remembered as a historical or scriptural person in another) carry a page in more than one category so each perspective can be given its due.

The entries describe the myths, domains, symbols and associated animals, plants and planets of each figure, and note where a tradition's own account differs from the historical-critical reconstruction of scholars. The aim throughout is to report what each tradition holds without adjudicating between them.

The categories under this section sort the figures by kind rather than by religion, so a browser can move from Deities across all pantheons, to the Characters of sacred story, to the Archangels of the Abrahamic hierarchies, to the comparative Archetypes. Within the deity and character pages the entries group further by tradition (Greek, Norse, Hindu, Egyptian and the rest), so a reader can narrow from all gods to one pantheon in a step.