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.
Offering, ritual death, giving up something for power or favour.
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.
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 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.
On the longest night of the year the Son of Heaven went out to the southern edge of his city, to a patch of ground swept bare, and welcomed the return of the light with a single red calf and vessels of clay and gourd.
One ruler had the father executed for failing at the flood and in the next breath set the same charge on his son; between the two men lie power denied to the father then given to the son, a son born from his father's body, and three conflicting accounts of who killed Gun.
She promised to marry the horse that brought her father home. From the killing that followed came silk and the mulberry tree, and centuries later a goddess.
After years of drought, a new king walked into a sacred grove. He cut his hair, bound his hands, and laid himself on the altar in place of the beast.
A boy-god who gave his own flesh and bone back to his parents to cancel the debt of his body, then rose again out of lotus stalks: reborn twice over, and by two rival religions.
Said to have dredged the rivers and founded the Xia, Yu appears only in texts written more than a thousand years later. The earliest to name him is a bronze bowl, and even that already calls his flood ancient history.
The dead did not vanish. One soul rose bright into the air and one sank into the ground, and between them the living built a temple, seated a grandson in the ancestor's chair, and fed him until he spoke the blessing back.
The waters had swallowed the hills and were climbing towards heaven, and the father who tried to wall them out failed and died for it; only his son, cut from the same body, found the way to let the flood run home to the sea.
A king took axes to the god's own house, packed the temple's gold into leather bags, and loaded it onto ships. So the poets, four centuries after the city fell, explained why Agade vanished from the earth.
For eleven days each spring the priests of Babylon washed a god, stripped a king of his crown and slapped him until he wept, then carried the whole company of the gods out through the glazed gate to renew the year.
For a thousand years an unmarried princess was scorched out of a tortoise-shell and sent to serve the sun goddess at Ise, where she might not name death, blood, or the Buddha.
How the Japanese cosmos stacks in three storeys, and how gods and the dead move between them: a heaven above, a reed-plain between, a country of the dead below, and the doors, roads and one-way seals that join them.
Once a year the god was carried out to die, hunted to his grave on the desert flats, and brought home again: what a royal treasurer, a Greek philosopher and a temple archive each saw of the drama, across seventeen centuries.
The boldest of the Aesir laid his sword-hand in a wolf's jaws to bind a doom he could not defeat, and lost it: the god who kept a pledge he knew was false.
A wolf the gods reared at home, two iron chains he snapped like kindling, and a ribbon of six impossible things: how the Aesir caught the beast fated to kill Odin, and what it cost the one god brave enough to feed him.
Before earth or heaven there was a yawning gap, and on either side of it fire and ice: how the first giant quickened between them, and how the world was built from his murdered body.
Freyr climbed into a seat that was not his and looked out over all the worlds. There he fell so hard for a giant's daughter that he gave away the one sword that could have saved him. He is the Vanir god of the fruitful season, lord of the elves, and the god men called on for peace.
The great ash that binds the worlds is not a serene axis but a creature in perpetual pain: gnawed above, rotting within, torn from below, and still standing green over the well where the Norns pour their clay.
Odin hanged himself on the world-tree and gave an eye to a well. In return he took the runes and the deepest draught of wisdom. He is the god who paid for knowledge in his own flesh.
The twice-born stranger who turns pirates into dolphins and a mother into her son's killer, the loosener of cares who is lethal to anyone who denies him.
The strongman son of Zeus strangled serpents in his cradle and cleaned the world of monsters, but the labour that made him a god began in the ruin of his own house.