Gods

Figures that bear it

A model judged each figure against its own description, one term at a time. Is: the figure is, or is partly, this thing. Bears: it carries the thing or is marked by it. What a figure does is filed under motifs and powers. Open "why" for the sentence the judgement rests on.

• Amen is Egyptian mythology
  why

  His name was understood to mean the hidden one, and the theology built on that hiddenness is what separates him from the gods he absorbed.

• Anu is Mesopotamian mythology
  why

  Anu, whose Sumerian name is An, stands at the top of the Mesopotamian pantheon as god of the sky and father of the gods.

• Baal is Canaanite and Ugaritic mythology
  why

  He is a young, vigorous figure within that pantheon, contending for kingship among the gods rather than holding it by unquestioned right.

• Balder is Norse mythology
  why

  Balder appears in the Norse sources as the most beautiful and best-spoken of the gods, a figure whose radiance is remarked on wherever he is named.

• Chac is Mayan mythology
  why

  Chac is the Maya god of rain and lightning and stands among the longest continuously worshipped gods anywhere in Mesoamerica — first attested at Protoclassic sites and still addressed among Maya peoples today, a span that very few deities in this bestiary can match.

• Cihuateteo is Aztec mythology
  why

  The Cihuateteo — the name is rendered Women Gods — arise from one of the most deliberate symmetries in Aztec religion.

• Jupiter is Roman mythology
  why

  Jupiter is the sovereign deity of the Roman order: the lord of the sky, wielder of the thunderbolt, and guarantor of oath, law, and state authority, worshipped on the Capitol as the greatest and best of gods.

• Manama is Philippine folklore
  why

  Manama is the supreme deity of the Manuvu people of Mindanao, one of the company of tribal high gods the Philippine record preserves side by side — Bathala of the Tagalogs, Melu of the Blaan, the Bagobo creator among them.

• Mars is Celtic mythology (general)
  why

  The Roman name that swallowed more than sixty Celtic gods, leaving their own names lost and their functions showing through as farming and healing.

• Quetzalcóatl is Mesoamerican mythology
  why

  In some accounts, he plays a crucial role in creating the current world after previous failed attempts by other gods.

• Venus is Roman mythology
  why

  Once identified with the Greek Aphrodite through the usual Roman practice of matching native gods to Greek counterparts, she absorbed Aphrodite's full mythology and became the goddess of love, desire, beauty, and sexual union.

• Xolotl is Aztec mythology
  why

  In one widely-repeated account, when the gods must sacrifice themselves to set the new sun in motion, Xolotl refuses, flees, and transforms repeatedly to escape — into a maize plant, an agave, an amphibian — before being caught and killed.