GODS AND GODDESSES. In human religious experience, manifestations of sacred power (hierophanies) provide centers of meaning, order, worship, and ethics. Humans have always felt that real life is in close contact with sacred power, and that sacred power is often encountered in the form of divine beings. Ideas and experiences of these goddesses and gods thus are not so much intellectual reflections as existential concerns, revolving around the fundamental human questions of life in this world. The manner in which the divine beings are imagined and experienced, and the particular types, functions, and personalities of the divine beings, depend on the cultural context of the particular community of people.

Gods and goddesses fit most aptly into what have been called polytheistic cultures, where the divine reality has not been unified into monistic or monotheistic systems. Monistic views still allow for goddesses and gods as...