Hindu
Surya, the Sun God
Borne aloft by his own beams, the visible sun is the eye of three gods and the soul of everything that moves: an all-seer in the oldest hymns, and, a millennium and a half later, a chariot that is the machine of time itself.
The devas and asuras, the great avatars, and the turning cycles of the cosmos — told from the Vedas, the epics, and the Puranas, with every claim kept honest to its source.
Borne aloft by his own beams, the visible sun is the eye of three gods and the soul of everything that moves: an all-seer in the oldest hymns, and, a millennium and a half later, a chariot that is the machine of time itself.
A river that is a goddess and a goddess who is a river: she rises from the foot of a god, washes the moon in passing, and drowns seven of her own newborn sons with a smile.
Kartikeya, the six-faced commander of the divine army, has three fathers, two slain demons, and two explanations for his six faces. Two scriptures a thousand years apart preserve him differently, and the epic's own hymn concedes it.
The good wife whose name became English for a rite she never performed: not a widow on a pyre, but a goddess who chose her own father, then unchose the body he gave her.
The deified sacrificial fire of the daily rite, whom the whole Rig Veda begins by naming, carries the offering to heaven with his own mouth, so that the gods eat through him.
The title calls her the eater of time, but the oldest text that names her means only one thing by the word: black. Everything else, the tongue, the corpse underfoot, the eating of the hours, was laid over a battlefield goddess across a thousand years.
One figure carries three jobs that the texts assembled across seventeen centuries: the first man, the flood-survivor who alone repeopled the earth, and the lawgiver whose name a whole code still bears.
The all-seeing sovereign of the earliest Veda counts every human blink and knows the third party to every whispered conversation. He binds the liar with a shining noose and swells his belly like a hoopless jar, then, to the penitent, loosens the same cord as a herdsman frees a calf.
The name the world knows her by is the last word of her own scripture, a hymn-epithet fastened to the warrior-goddess only after the killing is done, then grown over the centuries into everything she is.
Parvati moulded a boy from the dirt of her own body. A god who did not know his son beheaded him, and he rose again with an elephant's head. The gods gave him a single, world-ordering honour: he is worshipped first, or the other gods are not worshipped at all.
The Vedic storm-king drank the Soma in three sacred beakers. He took up Tvashtar's thunderbolt and split the dragon Vritra, loosing the seven imprisoned rivers. It was the first and greatest deed of the god the Rig Veda crowns sovereign of all that moves and moves not.
The rain-cloud-dark child who stole butter and danced on a serpent's hoods, grew into the statesman whose peace embassy failed, and then, as a friend's charioteer on the edge of a doomed battlefield, spoke the song that became scripture.
Before she held the lute she was a flood that burst the hills: the story of how a Vedic river hardened, over two and a half thousand years, into the white-robed patroness of every author who ever found the right word.
The imperishable bride of Vishnu and mother of the world, golden and lotus-seated: a goddess the oldest hymn summons through fire for cattle and gold, and the later scripture makes rise wet from the churned sea to choose her husband before the watching gods.
Parvati did not win the ascetic god with her beauty: beauty had already failed, and the love-god had been burnt to ash for trying. She won him standing between four fires, having given up even the fallen leaf.
The self-existent one cast his seed into the primeval waters and was born inside a golden egg bright as the sun. After a year he split it into heaven and earth. He is Brahma, the four-faced progenitor of worlds and creatures.
The buffalo-demon had swallowed heaven and no god could stand against him. The gods poured out their fury as light, gathered like a burning mountain, and out of it stepped a single woman onto a lion. She is the one Goddess in whom all goddesses are gathered.
The braided-haired archer of the oldest hymns drank the world-poison to save creation and burnt three flying cities with a single arrow. He sits ash-covered on Kailasa as the great ascetic, destroyer and healer in one body.
The god who measured the whole universe in three strides, then bound himself to it forever by a promise: whenever order fails and wickedness grows strong, he takes visible shape and is born, age after age, to set virtue back on her seat.
The universe is a single vast egg, floating on the primeval water and wrapped in seven concentric skins of element, each ten times the one it encloses: a cocoa-nut of worlds with the creator folded up inside.
One reality wearing three faces: the same supreme god who spins the world into being, holds it steady for an age, then swallows it whole and sleeps on the water until it is time to make it all again.