The Pantheon

About this directory

How to read the portraits

No one knows what these beings looked like, and for many of them the question makes no sense. Each portrait here is an emblem: the same gilded roundel for every figure, built from the attributes its tradition gives it (Thoth’s ibis head and scroll, Shiva’s third eye and trident, Thor’s hammer) and tinted with the colour of its tradition. The emblems are the archive’s own interpretive drawings. They do not reproduce any statue, painting or manuscript. Some figures are never pictured by their own traditions, and the archive follows that practice: the God of Israel appears only as the four letters of the divine name, the Shang high god Di as his written character, the Yoruba high god Olódùmarè as rings of light, and the Prophet Muhammad and his family only as their names in Arabic calligraphy, as in the hilye panels of Ottoman mosques.

Each description summarises what the figure’s home chapter says. Where scholars dispute something about a figure, its card carries a contested tag and its detail view explains the dispute. Biblical figures who are also prophets in Islam, such as Abraham, Moses and Jesus, are drawn here after Jewish and Christian iconography; Islamic tradition does not picture them, and their Qur’anic names are given in their entries.

The evidence, honestly

What’s well supported: the names, epithets and main myths given here, which come from the traditions’ own texts and the scholarship cited in each chapter’s source log.

What is not supported: reading the portraits as likenesses, or treating shared attributes (a thunderbolt, a serpent, a sun) as proof that two traditions borrowed from each other. Parallels are discussed, with their evidence, in the comparative theme chapters.

What’s genuinely open: the identifications flagged as contested, such as Viracocha with the Staff God of Tiwanaku, Cernunnos with the antlered figure of the Gundestrup Cauldron, and Asherah as a consort of Yahweh.

Sources: the source log of each linked chapter, and the Pantheon’s own source log in the project’s sources/pantheon.md.