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1. Mercury Deities · deities

   Mercurius is the Roman god of trade, gain and the market before he is anything else: his temple stood in the Circus Maximus, the merchants' guild kept him as patron, and the Ides of May was his day, when the dealers sprinkled their wares with water from his well. The herald's staff, the winged sandals and the office of guiding the dead came to him with the Greek Hermes, with whom he was identified early. He is the god of the deal and of the road the deal travels on.

2. Budha Deities · deities

   Budha is the Navagraha of Mercury in Vedic astrology, the son of Chandra (the Moon) and Tara, and the god of intellect, speech, commerce and learning. Wednesday (Budhavara) is his day, green his colour and emerald his gemstone; he is invoked for intelligence, communication and success in business.

3. Hermes Deities · deities

   Greek messenger god, son of Zeus, psychopomp who guides souls to the underworld. God of boundaries, transitions, communication, commerce, and thieves. Invented the lyre, extremely clever and quick-witted. THE messenger deity, master of language and magic. Patron of travelers, merchants, and magicians. Associated with alchemy and hermetic wisdom (Hermes Trismegistus).

4. Tishtrya Deities · deities

   Tishtrya is the yazata of the star Sirius and of the rains, whose hymn is Yasht 8 of the Avesta: as a shining white horse he fights the drought demon Apaosha, is weakened when the sacrifice is withheld and strengthened by the offering of haoma, and by his victory the waters flow and the harvest is assured. His festival, Tiragan, is kept in early summer and is bound up with rain and with the arrow-legends of Arash, and the star's cycle is one of the tradition's markers of the year. The Persian name Tir is also the name of the planet Mercury, but Tishtrya's own identity in the Avesta is the star, not a planet.

5. Abraxas Deities · deities

   Abraxas (Abrasax) is the name at the centre of the Basilidian system reported by Irenaeus (Against Heresies 1.24): the Greek letters of Abrasax sum to 365, the number of the days of the year and of the heavens in that system, so that the name is the name of the whole year and of the power that governs it. From the second century the name crowds the Graeco-Egyptian magical gems, engraved on amulets beside a cock-headed, serpent-legged figure with a whip and shield and invoked with IAO and Sabaoth as a protective name of power. Carl Jung took Abraxas up in the Seven Sermons to the Dead (1916) as the god beyond good and evil, and through Hermann Hesse's Demian the figure entered modern occultism.

6. Aengus Deities · deities

   Aengus is the son of the Dagda and Boann, conceived and born within one lengthened day and fostered by Midir at Brí Léith; he wins Brú na Bóinne from his father by asking for it as a day's and a night's dwelling. Aislinge Óenguso, 'The Dream of Aengus', tells of his love for Caer Ibormeith, whom he finds as a swan and joins as a swan. He is Mac ind Óc, 'the young son', the persuasive and beautiful figure of the Mythological Cycle.

7. Aeolus Deities · deities

   Aeolus is the keeper of the winds, who hosts Odysseus and gives him a bag of contrary winds tied shut. His crew opens it, the ship is blown back, and the lesson is about patience: the wind was already lent, and it was impatience that lost it.

8. Aequitas Deities · deities

   Aequitas is the Roman concept and personification of equity - fairness, even measure, the honest scale - and Cicero gives a tripartite account of it, dividing it into pietas toward the gods, sanctitas toward the dead and iustitia toward other people. As a divine personification she belongs to the vocabulary of the imperial cult, appearing as Aequitas Augusti on coins with scales and cornucopia, and aequitas was also a working principle of Roman law and of the mint's honest measure. She has no temple and no festival that we know of, and no mythology at all.

9. Aglaea Deities · deities

   Aglaea, splendour, is one of the Charites - the Graces - and Hesiod makes the three daughters of Zeus and Eurynome, an Oceanid, naming them Aglaea, Euphrosyne and Thalia (Theogony 907-911). In the same poem she is the youngest of the three and the wife of Hephaestus (945-946). Homer knows the Charites only as a group attending Aphrodite, and in Iliad 14 he gives Pasithea as one of them, so both names and number moved before Hesiod fixed them. Their great cult was at Orchomenus in Boeotia, for which Pindar wrote the fourteenth Olympian.

10. Ahura Mazda Deities · deities

    Ahura Mazda, 'the Wise Lord', is the supreme god of the Gathas of Zarathushtra (Yasna 28-53) and of the later Avesta: uncreated, the source of asha (truth and cosmic order) against druj (the lie), and the maker of the good creation. The Avesta reaches him through the Amesha Spentas, the six 'bounteous immortals' who are at once his attributes and his agents, and the Pahlavi books (Bundahishn, Denkard) develop the cosmogony around him. Zoroastrian worship is aniconic, conducted before a sacred fire, and the winged disc or winged figure of Achaemenid reliefs is often called his image although the identification is disputed.

11. Akshobhya Deities · deities

    Akshobhya, 'the Imperturbable', is the Buddha of the eastern quarter, whose pure land is Abhirati, and whose story is told in the Akshobhyatathagatasyavyuha Sutra: as a monk he vowed never to feel or show anger toward any being, and by that vow became the Buddha of the unshakable mind. In the five-Buddha mandalas he heads the vajra family in the east, and his wisdom is the mirror-like wisdom that reflects without distortion or preference. He is the deep blue figure with the left hand resting open in the lap and the right touching the earth, an image that points to the same gesture as the Buddha's own enlightenment under the bodhi tree.

12. Amaymon Angels & demons · angels_demons

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13. Anansi Deities · deities

    Anansi is the Akan spider trickster who bought all the stories from Nyame by catching four impossible creatures, which is why tales are called Anansesem. Carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Akan people, he became the surviving trickster of the Caribbean and the American South, teaching by wit rather than by power.

14. Anu Deities · deities

    Anu, Sumerian An, is the sky itself and the highest authority of the Mesopotamian pantheon, the father of the gods, whose temple the Eanna, House of Heaven, stood at Uruk; the Sumerian and Akkadian god lists put him at the head of the triad with Enlil and Ea. He is remote: in the Gilgamesh epic he grants Ishtar the Bull of Heaven, in Atrahasis and in Enuma Elish the work is done by his descendants, and kingship descends from heaven at his gift. The other gods act under his authority; he does not act himself.

15. Apollo Deities · deities

    Greek god of light, son of Zeus and Leto, twin of Artemis. Slayer of the Python at Delphi, establishing his oracle. God of rational thought, healing arts, music, and prophecy. Embodies civilized order, artistic excellence, and healing power. Accessible and benevolent solar deity who brings light, health, and inspiration to humanity.

16. Asclepius Deities · deities

    Asclepius is the Greek god of medicine, taught by the centaur Chiron and killed by Zeus' thunderbolt for raising the dead. His sanctuary at Epidaurus was a healing hospital where the sick slept and received the god's dream-prescription, and his serpent-entwined staff is still the sign of medicine.

17. Athena Deities · deities

    Greek goddess born fully formed from Zeus's head. Goddess of wisdom, strategic warfare (not bloodlust), crafts, justice. Protector of Athens. Virgin goddess by choice. Represents sovereignty through intellect, defense over aggression, strategic thinking as power. Wisdom embodied, civilization protected through planning.

18. Aurora Deities · deities

    Aurora is the dawn in Latin - the common noun and the goddess at once, the first light of the day, who lives in the poets far more than in any cult. Roman poets gave her the Greek Eos's rosy fingers, her horses and her lovers, and it is Greek poetry that supplies almost all of her story. The Roman goddess who did have a dawn cult was Mater Matuta, and the two are not the same figure.

19. Aušrinė Deities · deities

    Aušrinė is the Lithuanian goddess of the morning star (Venus), the counterpart of Vakarinė the evening star, described in the dainos as the daughter or attendant of Saulė and linked with beauty, youth, love, health and new beginnings; Lithuanian tradition makes her feminine, while the Latvian reflex Auseklis is a male god, one of the Dieva dēli and the groom of Saules meita in the celestial wedding. Her cult image later merged with the Virgin Mary after Christianisation, and the eight-pointed auseklis star is still the Latvian national symbol of the same figure. The name is etymologically kin to the Indo-European dawn goddess, and to Eos, Aurora and Ushas.

20. Azazel Deities · deities

    Watcher angel who descended to teach humanity forbidden arts: metallurgy, weapons, cosmetics, writing. Bound and imprisoned as punishment. Used as scapegoat in Yom Kippur ritual. Descended for love of humanity, paid price.

21. Bagalamukhi Deities · deities

    Bagalamukhi is the eighth Mahavidya, the golden goddess of stambhana - the power to stop, paralyse and silence - shown holding a club and the tongue of a demon. Her name is glossed as 'she whose face is that of a crane' (baka), though the standard tantric image is a human golden face; the crane-headed figures are a later iconographic drift. Her chief living shrine is at Nalkheda in Madhya Pradesh, and she is invoked against enemies and litigation.

22. Baldur Deities · deities

    Baldur is the Norse god of light and beauty, invulnerable to everything except the mistletoe that Loki turned into a dart. His death is the first sign of Ragnarok, and his return is the first sign of the world after it — the god who comes back when everything else has ended.

23. Baphomet Deities · deities

    Not ancient deity but powerful occult symbol emerging from Templar accusations, fully formed by Eliphas Levi. Goat-headed androgyne with torch between horns, one arm up (solve), one down (coagula). Breasts and phallus. Represents union of all opposites—male/female, light/dark, above/below, animal/divine. 'As above, so below.' Liberation through embracing paradox.

24. Barbelo Deities · deities

    Barbelo is the first emanation of the Monad in the Sethian gnostic system, named in the Apocryphon of John (Nag Hammadi II,1 and parallels) as the Forethought of the Invisible Virginal Spirit: she is 'mother-father', the first aeon, who asks for and receives foreknowledge, and from her comes the Autogenes ('self-begotten') Christ. The Trimorphic Protennoia (Nag Hammadi XIII,1) speaks in her voice as the threefold first thought of the Pleroma, and the Gospel of Judas and Zostrianos invoke the 'aeon of Barbelo' as the highest realm. She is the divine feminine of the gnostic systems and the mother of the heavenly Christ, not a figure of cult.

25. Benzaiten Deities · deities

    Benzaiten is the Japanese form of the Indian goddess Sarasvati, carried through Chinese Buddhism as Biancaitian, and she keeps Sarasvati's office — rivers, speech, music, learning — while becoming a bringer of wealth: in the Edo period the characters of her name were rewritten from goddess of eloquence (弁才天) to goddess of fortune (弁財天). She is the only goddess among the Seven Lucky Gods, and she is identified with the snake deity Ugajin, which is why her shrines stand on islands and springs and keep a white serpent as her messenger. Her great shrines are Enoshima, Chikubu Island and Itsukushima, and the washing of coins in her spring water (zeniarai) at Kamakura is one of her most crowded living practices.

26. Blodeuwedd Deities · deities

    Blodeuwedd is made from flowers by two magicians to be a wife for Lleu, and she falls in love with another man, conspires to kill her husband, and is turned into an owl for it. She is the created thing that becomes a person and is punished for the becoming.

27. Boreas Deities · deities

    Boreas is the north wind, son of Astraeus and Eos and the most violent of the four brothers. He carried off Oreithyia, daughter of the Athenian king Erechtheus, to Thrace, where she bore the winged Boreads, Zetes and Calais, and their sister Chione. The Athenians credited him with wrecking the Persian fleet off Cape Sepias in 480 BCE and gave him a shrine by the Ilissus and a state cult, which is unusually formal footing for a wind. His Roman counterpart is Aquilo.

28. Bragi Deities · deities

    Snorri makes Bragi the god of poetry (Gylfaginning 26): son of Odin, famous for wisdom and eloquence and fair speech, and the husband of Idun. In Skaldskaparmal it is Bragi who tells the myths to Aegir, and in Lokasenna Loki mocks him as brave on the bench and backward in a fight. His name is the ordinary Old Norse word for a poem (bragr), which is why a poet can be called Bragi.

29. Brahma Deities · deities

    Brahma is the Hindu creator, who speaks the Vedas and shapes the worlds, and who is born from the lotus that grows from Vishnu's navel. He is the least worshipped of the great three, and the tradition itself tells a story about why: he claimed a knowledge he did not have.

30. Bres Deities · deities

    Eochu Bres is the beautiful son of Elatha of the Fomorians and Ériu of the Tuatha Dé, made king after Nuada loses his hand and married to Brigid. His reign is remembered for tribute and for the failure of hospitality - the knives at his table were never greased and no guest's breath smelled of ale - until Cairbre mac Étaine made the first satire in Ireland against him and the kingship fell away. Exiled, he led the Fomorians at the Second Battle and was spared by Lugh in exchange for teaching the Tuatha Dé to plough, sow and reap, and in the Dindshenchas Lugh kills him with poisoned milk drawn from wooden cows.

31. Brigid Deities · deities

    Celtic triple goddess of fire, poetry, healing, smithcraft. Tended perpetual sacred flame at Kildare. Associated with sacred wells and springs. Patroness of poets, healers, smiths. Later Christianized as St. Brigid but retained goddess attributes. Represents creative fire, inspiration, transformation through craft.

32. Brihaspati Deities · deities

    Brihaspati is the Vedic lord of prayer and the teacher of the gods, who carries their petitions and gives them counsel - which they frequently ignore. He is the priest in the sense of the person who knows the words and the order they go in.

33. Brynhildr Deities · deities

    Brynhildr is the valkyrie of the Völsung cycle: Völsunga saga and the Eddic poems (Sigrdrífumál, Brot af Sigurðarkviðu, Guðrúnarkviða I, Helreið Brynhildar) tell how she is woken by Sigurðr from a ring of fire, how he wins her and then, under a spell, wins her for Gunnarr instead, and how the deception ends with Sigurðr's death and Brynhildr's own on his pyre. In Sigrdrífumál the awakened valkyrie is named Sigrdrífa, and identifying the two is an old but not certain scholarly equation. The Nibelungenlied's Prünhilt is the German branch of the same tradition.

34. Buddha Deities · deities

    The Buddha is Siddhartha Gautama, who left a palace, sat down under a pipal tree and woke up, and then spent forty-five years teaching a path out of suffering rather than a doctrine about himself. He is not a god in the Buddhist account, and is venerated across traditions as the teacher of gods and men.

35. Caishen Deities · deities

    Caishen is a title more than a single god. The martial wealth god is Zhao Gongming, a Daoist marshal of the Dark Altar (Xuantan) with origins in plague-quelling, who was folded into the Ming novel Fengshen Yanyi and given the four attendants who make up the Five Directions of Wealth; the civil wealth god is usually Bi Gan, the loyal minister of the Shang, or Fan Li, the strategist who retired rich. He is welcomed on the fifth day of the first lunar month, when shops reopen, and his image stands at the counter with a black tiger and a heap of ingots.

36. Calliope Deities · deities

    Calliope is one of the nine Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, born in Pieria after nine nights; Hesiod names her first and calls her the chief of them all because she attends on worshipful princes (Theogony 79-80). She is the Muse of epic poetry and heroic song, and the later handbooks made her the mother of Orpheus by Oeagrus. The Muses were honoured as a college rather than individually, at their sanctuary on Helicon and in the Thespian festival of the Mouseia (Pausanias 9.29-30).

37. Cardea Deities · deities

    Cardea is the Roman goddess of thresholds and hinges, who protects the doorway and, in Ovid, the cradle — the power that decides what crosses. Her rites used hawthorn and beans, and her festival was the first of June.

38. Cherubim Angels & demons · angels_demons

    Second highest order, guardians of divine glory and sacred spaces. Four-faced beings (human, lion, ox, eagle) with four wings. Guard Garden of Eden with flaming sword. Represent divine knowledge and wisdom.

39. Chiyou Deities · deities

    Chiyou is the leader of the Nine Li in the Shanhaijing and the Huainanzi, described as bronze-headed and iron-browed, a maker of weapons and a master of fog and rain. He fought the Yellow Emperor at Zhuolu; the imperial forces could not find their way in the fog until the south-pointing chariot was devised, and the drought goddess Nüba, or in some tellings Yinglong, was brought in to break his rain. Chiyou was captured and executed, and his blood was said to have stained the ground. Later cults honoured him as a god of war — Qin Shi Huang and Liu Bang are both recorded as sacrificing to him — even while the official histories cast him as the rebel.

40. Cian Deities · deities

    Cian is a Tuatha Dé Danann warrior, the son of the physician Dian Cécht and the father of Lugh by Ethniu, Balor's daughter (Lebor Gabála Érenn). He is killed by the three sons of Tuireann, Brian, Iuchar and Iucharba, who come upon him alone and strike him down — the tale has him take another shape to hide and be killed anyway. His death is discovered, and Lugh then exacts the éric, the blood-fine, in the tale Oidheadh Chlainne Tuireann, 'The Death of the Children of Tuireann'.

41. Circe Deities · deities

    Circe is the enchantress of Aiaia who turns Odysseus' crew into swine and then, having been bested, becomes his teacher and host for a year. She is the ambivalent figure of the craft herself: dangerous, knowledgeable, and generous once the terms are clear.

42. Clio Deities · deities

    Clio, the proclaimer, is one of the nine Muses named by Hesiod (Theogony 77-79), daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. She becomes the Muse of history in the Hellenistic and Roman handbooks, an association later readers found in Herodotus' proem, which invokes the Muses as a body and does not name Clio. Like her sisters she is a figure of collective cult, not an individual goddess: the sanctuary on Helicon and the Thespian Mouseia are the attested worship (Pausanias 9.29-30).

43. Clotho Deities · deities

    Clotho is the spinner among the Moirai, the three Fates, and her name comes from klothein, to spin. Hesiod gives two genealogies for the Moirai in one poem: in the Theogony they are born of Nyx without a father (217-222), and later they are daughters of Zeus and Themis, named Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos (901-906). Plato sets the three at the spindle of Necessity in the myth of Er, where Clotho sings of the present moment while her sisters sing of past and future (Republic 617c).

44. Coyote Deities · deities

    Native American trickster deity who creates through mistakes and chaos. Sometimes creator, always disruptor. Teaches through making mistakes, getting caught, being foolish. Represents that chaos teaches, that mistakes are sacred, that humor is survival tool. Sacred fool who reveals truth through absurdity.

45. Daedalus Deities · deities

    Daedalus is the Athenian craftsman, son of Metion, who killed his nephew Perdix - the boy who had invented the saw - and fled to Crete, where he built the labyrinth, the dancing-floor that Homer names at Knossos (Iliad 18.590-592), and the wooden cow for Pasiphae. He made wings of feathers and wax for himself and Icarus, and Icarus flew too near the sun (Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII.183-235; Apollodorus, Epitome 1). Pausanias, who counts two surviving works of Daedalus in Boeotia and is sceptical about the rest, is the ancient reader who takes the attributions with a grain of salt (9.40.3-4).

46. Dian Cécht Deities · deities

    Dian Cécht is the physician of the Tuatha Dé Danann in Cath Maige Tuired: he bathes the wounded in the well Sláine at Achad Abla, chanting with his sons Miach and Octriuil and his daughter Airmed, so that the hurt return to the next day's fighting, and he boasts that he can heal all but the decapitated. He makes Nuada a silver hand with Creidne; when Miach restores a hand of flesh and blood he kills his son out of professional envy, and later scatters the herbs Airmed has catalogued. An early Irish law tract on injury, Bretha Déin Chécht, is attributed to him.

47. Dianmu Deities · deities

    Dianmu is the Mother of Lightning, the partner of Leigong, shown with a mirror in each hand — the flash is her mirrors. She belongs to the later popular and Daoist thunder tradition rather than to the classical sources, and popular storytelling supplies her origin: in one telling a woman struck by Leigong by mistake and restored by the Jade Emperor to be his companion, in another a widow punished for wasting rice. That aetiology — the lightning that comes before the thunder so that people can prepare — is a folktale explanation rather than doctrine, and the earliest layers of the Chinese thunder cult do not have her.

48. Echo Deities · deities

    Echo is an Oread, one of the mountain nymphs, and she exists almost entirely in one story. In Ovid she is a talkative nymph who keeps Juno talking while Zeus's other lovers escape; Juno curses her to have the last word and never the first, and she can only repeat what is said to her. She loves Narcissus, is rejected, and wastes away until only her voice and her bones remain, the bones turning to stone (Metamorphoses III.356-401). In Longus she is a nymph who sings and dances and is loved by Pan, who drives the shepherds mad until they tear her apart, and Earth keeps her songs (Daphnis and Chloe III.23).

49. Ehecatl Deities · deities

    Ehecatl is the wind, the breath of Quetzalcoatl and his aspect as the one who sweeps the road clear for the rain gods: the Florentine Codex and the Leyenda de los Soles have the wind go before Tlaloc's rain, and the gods breathe on the ground bones to make people. His temples are round so that the wind can go round them, as at Calixtlahuaca, and he is the patron of the day sign 1 Wind. The grimoire's quetzalcoatl entry already lists Ehecatl among that god's names, and this entry exists because the aspect was worshipped and addressed as its own lord.

50. Eileithyia Deities · deities

    Eileithyia is the goddess who comes to a woman in labour and brings the child out, or holds it back: she is the power of the birthing hour itself rather than a patron of mothers in general. Hesiod makes her a daughter of Zeus and Hera, and Homer speaks of the Eileithyiai in the plural, which is the older shape of her. In the Heracles story Hera sends her to sit with crossed legs and delay the birth, and the trick is only broken by a ruse; the myth is honest about how little control the labouring woman is granted. Her name appears in Linear B as e-re-u-ti-ja at Amnisos in Crete, which makes her one of the oldest attested Greek deities of any kind.

51. Eir Deities · deities

    Gylfaginning 35 names Eir third among the asynjur and says only that she is an extremely good physician; Skaldskaparmal 75 lists her among the valkyries instead. In Fjolsvinnsmal she is one of the nine maidens who sit with Menglod on Lyfjaberg, the healing hill, and the poem says that those who make offerings to them are guarded from sickness and peril.

52. Enki Deities · deities

    Sumerian god who created humanity from clay and divine blood. Warned Atrahasis about the flood, helping humanity survive when other gods wanted them destroyed. Gave forbidden knowledge to humans. Repeatedly defied divine council to protect his creation. Water and wisdom deity.

53. Enlil Deities · deities

    Enlil, Lord Wind, is the Sumerian god of the wind and of legitimate authority, king of the gods at Nippur where his temple the Ekur, House of the Mountain, stood. He holds the Tablet of Destinies, which the Anzu bird steals from him while he bathes and which Ninurta recovers, and in Atrahasis and in Gilgamesh XI it is Enlil who decrees the flood to end the noise of humanity and who is then rebuked for it by Ea. The Sumerian hymns call him the great mountain and the king whose word cannot be turned back.

54. Eos Deities · deities

    Eos is the dawn, daughter of the Titan Hyperion and Theia, who rises each morning from the edge of Ocean and draws the light up for her brother Helios. Her Homeric epithet is rhododaktylos, rosy-fingered, a formula repeated with the regularity of liturgy. She loved Tithonus and asked Zeus for immortality for him but forgot eternal youth, so he withered until he became a cicada; by the wind Astraeus she is mother of the four winds and of the morning star, and her mourning for her son Memnon is one of the oldest dawn-sorrow stories.

55. Eostre Deities · deities

    Eostre is the Anglo-Saxon dawn-goddess whose name the Venerable Bede gives to the month of April (Eosturmonath); Bede is the only source for her. The spring-equinox festival and the hare and the egg are later and modern readings of the Easter customs rather than anything Bede attests: an old name given a new story.

56. Erato Deities · deities

    Erato is one of the nine Muses named by Hesiod (Theogony 76-79), daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, and her name carries the sense of the lovely and the desired. The allocation of a subject to each Muse is later than Hesiod; Erato becomes the Muse of love poetry and lyric desire in the Hellenistic and Roman lists, shown with a lyre. She was honoured as one of the college, at the Helicon sanctuary and the Thespian Mouseia (Pausanias 9.29-30).

57. Erinle Deities · deities

    Erinle was a great hunter, sometimes described as a herbalist or farmer, who conducted the first Olobu to the site of Ilobu and protected the town from invasion; one day he sank into the earth near Ilobu and became the river that bears his name, a tributary of the Osun. His shrines hold smooth round stones from the Erinle River, and his cult is found in towns across the former Oyo Empire. In Cuba he is Inle, and in Brazil Oxossi Ibualamo, and the diaspora forms have their own emphases. The hunter, the healer and the river are one account in the tradition.

58. Eris Deities · deities

    Greek goddess of discord and strife. Excluded from wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Threw golden apple inscribed 'for the fairest' among goddesses. Led to Judgment of Paris, Trojan War. Represents necessary chaos, productive disruption. Not malicious—catalyst. Reveals truth hidden by false harmony. Discord that serves evolution. Chaos feminine that creates through conflict, not destruction.

59. Erlang Shen Deities · deities

    Erlang Shen is the three-eyed martial god of Guanjiangkou in Sichuan, nephew of the Jade Emperor and son of a mortal and a goddess. He is a god of water and of the engineers who control it, associated with Li Bing's Dujiangyan works and with the theatre; his dog, the Xiaotianquan, bites through disguise. In the Journey to the West he fights Sun Wukong to a standstill, matching the monkey's seventy-two transformations with his own and seeing through them with the third eye.

60. Eshu Deities · deities

    Eshu-Elegbara is the orisha of the crossroads, the messenger of Olodumare and the keeper of ashe, the power that makes a thing happen. He carries the ebo (offering) that a divination prescribes, and every rite salutes him first because he holds the opening; the Ifa odu and the oriki carry him. He is not Satan: the equation is a missionary and colonial misreading, and the Fon/Dahomey Legba is a cognate figure, not the same deity. In the Americas he becomes Elegua in Cuba (the child at the door, St Anthony of Padua) and Exu in Brazil, and the diaspora forms have their own emphases.

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