Egyptian texts name more than 1,400 gods, and some scholars count thousands
There is no agreed definition of a god. Across cultures a deity can be an all-powerful creator, a local spirit of a river, a principle like the soul, or a being that dies and is reborn. Even the English word god may come from a root meaning either to call out or to pour.
Broadly, a deity is a supernatural being with authority over some part of the world or of life, often regarded as sacred and worshipped. The scholar Huw Owen notes a bewildering spread of meanings, from an infinite creator ruling the universe to a finite presence that stirs special feeling. Belief in at least one such being is theism. Polytheists honour many gods, monotheists one, and henotheists acknowledge several while treating one as supreme. Deism, popular among Western intellectuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pictures a creator who then stands back; pantheism identifies God with the universe itself.
The vocabulary has a surprising history. Deity comes through Old French from the Latin deitas, a term coined by Augustine of Hippo from deus. That word shares an ancient Indo-European root with the Sanskrit deva, a shining one, and with the Greek Zeus. Yet in Old Persian the related daiva came to mean a demon. The Germanic word god was originally neuter and drifted toward the masculine under Christian influence, although every ancient Indo-European culture worshipped goddesses as well as gods.
Egypt shows how crowded a pantheon can be. Egyptologist James P. Allen counts more than 1,400 deities named in texts, and around 200 are prominent in temples and the Pyramid Texts, many with animal forms. Shu embodied the air, Meretseger parts of the earth, and Sia the abstract power of perception. In Yoruba religion of West Africa, the god Ogun guards metalwork, hunting and justice, while the goddess Osun, equally primordial, watches over fertility, water, love and peace.
Prehistory is harder to read. Cave art and carvings hint at religious belief, but their purpose is often unclear. Archaeologists once saw almost every prehistoric female figurine as a single mother goddess, ancestor of Ishtar and Aphrodite, an interpretation now generally rejected.
Source: Deity
