DeityDB

DeityDB is an open comparative database of spiritual entities across Western religious traditions.

It includes gods, angels, demons, spirits, saints, heroes, aeons, archons, jinn, holy figures, cosmological realms, ritual categories, and symbolic abstractions.

The goal is to make religious entities queryable across traditions instead of leaving them isolated inside separate mythological silos.

Live Explorer

https://deitydb-explorer.fly.dev/

A public read-only web interface with pre-built queries and a full SQL explorer — no installation required.

• Tradition Overview — all 137 traditions by entity count
• Cross-Traditional Parallels — entities linked across tradition boundaries
• Reception Chains — trace how a figure was renamed across traditions
• Angelic Beings, Adversarial Beings, Underworld Entities, Revealer Figures
• About the project · How to contribute

Current Release — v2.1.38

• 4,130 entities
• 7,161 relationships (2,910 crossing tradition boundaries)
• 638 sources
• 137 tradition labels
• 0 unresolved relationship references; 0 unsourced relationships; every entity carries at least one sourced citation (0 fully uncited)
• ~43% of entities carry a verbatim primary-source quotation; the remainder carry a cited source pointer (verbatim-citation work ongoing)
• duplicate-name review complete
• diachronic reception chains across traditions
• public query views, including a comparative-domains pivot (compare a function like Sovereignty or Healing across every tradition)
• Greek pantheon: 599 entities (primary-period coverage 485/599)
• pantheons built to canonical depth across the whole timeline: Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Canaanite, Israelite, Roman, Norse, and Anatolian (Hittite/Hurrian/Luwian) before the Common Era; and forward through Zoroastrian, Manichaean, Mandaean, Gnostic, Hermetic/Theurgic, Jewish (Second Temple → rabbinic → Lurianic Kabbalah), Christian (patristic and Eastern Orthodox), and Islamic (incl. the Shi'a Imamate)

Included Traditions

137 tradition labels in all, including:

• Greek (599 entities; primary-period coverage 485/599)
• Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Canaanite / Ugaritic, Israelite / Second Temple
• Roman, Etruscan, Italic / Sabine
• Celtic (Irish, Welsh, Gaulish), Germanic / Norse, Baltic, Slavic, Finnish, Thracian, Dacian
• Phrygian, Hittite / Hurrian, Urartian, Elamite, Armenian, Mycenaean / Linear B
• Phoenician Iron Age, Aramean, Nabataean, Pre-Islamic / South Arabian, Transjordanian (Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite), Scythian, Iberian / Lusitanian, Meroitic
• Christian, Zoroastrian, Islamic (including Sufi and Shi'a), Jewish mystical (Merkavah and Kabbalah), Hermetic, late-antique ritual traditions
• Gnostic currents: Sethian, Valentinian, Ophite / Archontic, Simonian, Basilidean, Marcionite, Saturnilian, Carpocratian, Mandaean, Manichaean

What Can DeityDB Do?

Example questions:

• Which traditions have serpent or dragon beings?
• Which entities reveal hidden knowledge?
• Which beings are associated with the underworld?
• How do angels, jinn, daimones, archons, and aeons compare?
• Which figures function as holy human intermediaries rather than gods?
• How do concepts like wisdom, justice, death, protection, and revelation move across traditions?
• How did Greek gods get reinterpreted as demons in early Christian sources?
• Which Mesopotamian figures have reception chains into Greek mythology?

Public Views

SELECT * FROM v_release_metrics;
SELECT * FROM v_public_tradition_overview;
SELECT * FROM v_public_relationship_overview;
SELECT * FROM v_public_revealer_figures;
SELECT * FROM v_public_underworld_entities;
SELECT * FROM v_public_angelic_beings;
SELECT * FROM v_public_adversarial_beings;
SELECT * FROM v_public_serpent_dragon_beings;
SELECT * FROM v_public_wisdom_knowledge_beings;
SELECT * FROM v_public_relationship_triples LIMIT 50;

-- Comparative-domain views: compare a divine function across every tradition
SELECT * FROM v_public_domain_overview;
SELECT * FROM v_public_comparative_domains WHERE domain = 'Sovereignty';

See examples/sample_queries.sql for more.

Quick Start

Requires Docker or Podman.

git clone https://github.com/jebboone/deitydb.git
cd deitydb
podman run -d --name deitydb -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres -e POSTGRES_DB=deitydb \
  -p 5432:5432 docker.io/library/postgres:16
sleep 5
gunzip -c backups/deitydb_pg_v2.1.87.sql.gz | podman exec -i deitydb psql -U postgres -d deitydb
podman exec deitydb psql -U postgres -d deitydb -c "select count(*) from entities;"  # expect 4130

docker is drop-in for podman above. The committed dump is the full database — schema, data and citation layer. (schema_postgres.sql is the original v0 skeleton, kept for history only; it does not reflect the current 40-table schema.)

See docs/RESUME.md for the full runbook — SQLite export, Datasette, and deployment.

Design Principle

DeityDB does not treat all religious entities as gods.

It distinguishes between:

• gods
• angels
• demons
• jinn
• saints
• prophets
• imams
• heroes
• aeons
• archons
• daimones
• spirits
• monsters
• cosmological realms
• ritual categories
• personified abstractions

This allows comparison without collapsing every tradition into the same theological category.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md and GOOD_FIRST_ISSUES.md.

High-value areas: the Pseudo-Dionysian celestial hierarchy bridging the Hermetic/theurgic and Christian angelologies, Egyptian late-antique material (Serapis, the decan layer), Phrygian/Anatolian (Cybele/Sabazios), the remaining Naassene/Peratae and minor Gnostic groups, deeper Mesopotamian coverage, data visualization, and API or web-interface work. (The earlier targets — heresiology, Sufism, Kabbalah, patristic angelology, the Greek long tail and tragedy registration, and the late-antique traditions (Zoroastrian, Jewish, Manichaean, Mandaean, Roman, Christian, Hermetic/Theurgic) — are now substantially covered.)

License

MIT. Copyright (c) Jeb Boone.