Pantheons
Dozens of traditions spanning sixty thousand years — from Aboriginal Australian Dreamings and the reconstructed sky-fathers of the Proto-Indo-European steppe to living religions. Click a pantheon to open its family tree. Abrahamic traditions and deified humans are catalogued separately: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are monotheistic (not pantheons); their catalogues list angels, prophets, and opposing figures for cross-cultural comparison.
Family Trees
One figure at a time — parents above, siblings and consorts to the sides, children below, cross-cultural parallels at the bottom. Click any connected figure to make them the new focus. Use Back to retrace.
Temporal Map
Each bar shows a tradition's active span; the darker inner bar marks its peak of influence. BCE ↔ CE boundary in gold. Traditions still practiced today extend to the right edge. Click a row to open its family tree.
Cross-Cultural Archetypes
Many roles — sky-father, storm-serpent-slayer, dying-and-rising god, trickster — recur with striking consistency across unrelated cultures. Some reflect shared Indo-European inheritance (Zeus ≈ Jupiter ≈ Indra from *Dyēus Phter); others are independent convergences on universal human experiences. Click any example to open that god.
Deified Humans
Historical persons elevated to divine status — whether by state decree, posthumous cult, or folk veneration. Rome institutionalized it with the imperial cult; East Asia routinely enshrined sage-kings, generals, and scholars; Egypt deified the architect Imhotep two millennia after his death. The line between "great ancestor" and "god" is porous.
Notable Mentions
Figures worth knowing but not included in the main thousand — secondary heroes, regional deities, already-mentioned-in-descriptions characters, and alternate names of catalogued figures. One-line context only; no family trees.