Who begatthe gods?

Family graphs, deity pages and primary sources for eleven pantheons, plus a way to compare them without pretending they match.

Explore the pantheons

A sheet of the Papyrus of Ani showing gods and the weighing of the heart

Odin rides to Hel, a painting by W. G. Collingwood

Eleven traditions, 168 deities

Each has a graph you can trace to its first beings, and a page for every deity with sources.

Odin rides to Hel, W. G. Collingwood, after the Poetic Edda.

Norse

Odin, Thor and Loki as the Eddas tell them, and the giants they came from.

Papyrus of Ani, British Museum (New Kingdom), a Book of the Dead.

Egyptian

From Nun and Atum to Osiris and Horus, with four temple traditions side by side.

A chaos monster and a sun god, drawn by L. Gruner for A. H. Layard's Monuments of Nineveh.

Mesopotamian

Sumerian and Babylonian gods, from Tiamat and Apsu to Inanna and Marduk.

Vishvarupa Vishnu, Kashmir or Himachal, in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art collection.

Hindu

Vedic and Puranic deities, worshipped by about 1.2 billion people today.

Folio 309r of the Book of Kells (Trinity College Dublin), c. 800.

Celtic (Irish)

The Tuatha Dé Danann of Irish manuscripts: the Dagda, Lugh and the Morrígan.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, 'Sangoku ken', a 19th-century woodblock print.

Japanese (Shinto)

Kami of the Kojiki, from Izanagi to Amaterasu, still honoured at Shinto shrines.

Codex Borbonicus, p. 9, a Mexica calendar book painted around the time of the Spanish conquest.

Aztec (Mexica)

Mexica gods in the Florentine Codex, recorded by friars alongside Nahua elders.

Bronze head from Ife, Nigeria, c. 12th-15th century, Kimbell Art Museum.

Yoruba (Orisha)

The orishas of Ifá, a living tradition in Nigeria, Benin and the Americas.

Ivan Bilibin, Baba Yaga, an illustration for a Russian fairy tale (1900s).

Slavic

What can and cannot be known: a few idols, a few chroniclers, much folklore.

The Jade Emperor, a Ming dynasty painting.

Chinese

Creators, heroes and a celestial bureaucracy, with deified people among them.

Giacomo Caneva, photograph of a statue of Jupiter in the Campana collection, 1850s.

Roman

Jupiter, Janus and the state cult, with the Greek parallels sent to thegreekgods.org.

Greek

Hesiod's descent from Chaos, the Olympians and the Muses live on our sister site, thegreekgods.org.

Gods of the sea, the sun, the dead

Choose a theme to see which deities across the pantheons touch it. Each theme comes with a warning about what does not carry over.

Open the full tool

Not just myths

Hindu, Yoruba and Shinto deities are worshipped today by hundreds of millions of people. Here they are described as traditions, with present-day practice stated on each pantheon page. Where a faith has ended, we say that too.