Hindu Pantheon

Many texts, many traditions

Hinduism is not a single religion with one founder or scripture but a family of traditions developing over more than three thousand years and practised today by over a billion people. This site's entries follow the principal textual sources while recognising that devotional and regional traditions often tell the stories differently.

The Vedas

The oldest layer is the Rigveda, hymns in Vedic Sanskrit composed in the northwest of the subcontinent in roughly the later second millennium BCE and transmitted orally with extraordinary precision long before being written down. Its prominent gods are Indra, slayer of the serpent Vritra, Agni the fire, Soma, Varuna, and the dawn goddess Ushas; Vishnu and Rudra, later Shiva, are comparatively minor. Later Vedic texts, the Brahmanas and the Upanishads, turned to the meaning of sacrifice and to the identity of the self (atman) with ultimate reality (brahman).

Epics and Puranas

The two Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata, which contains the Bhagavad Gita, and the Ramayana, took shape over centuries around the turn of the common era and remain the most widely known stories in South and Southeast Asia. The Puranas, compiled from roughly the 3rd century CE into the second millennium, organise the gods around great deities: Vishnu and his avatars, including Rama and Krishna; Shiva with Parvati and their sons Ganesha and Kartikeya; and the Goddess, Devi, in forms such as Durga and Kali. The idea of the Trimurti, Brahma as creator, Vishnu as preserver, and Shiva as destroyer, is a Puranic scheme; in practice most devotees worship Vishnu, Shiva, or the Goddess as supreme.

Living worship

Hindu worship centres on temples, household shrines, pilgrimage, and festivals such as Diwali, Holi, and Navaratri. Tamil devotional poetry, regional epics, and local goddess traditions are as much part of Hindu mythology as the Sanskrit texts. The start date of 1500 BCE given here is a conventional marker for the Vedic period; the tradition has no end date.