I NEED to make one fact clear from the outset: this work is not original. No fieldwork has been involved. Though I have physically travelled the road to and from Damascus, no bright lights assailed me then, nor have they since. I can't claim to have discovered a single hitherto unknown deity. Unknown, that is, to the world at large: all deities by definition are known to some group of people somewhere.
YeGods is an assembly from literally hundreds of sources, from Encyclopaedia Britannica – whose Macro- and Micropaedia pages which I ploughed mercilessly in the 1980s when YeGods was just getting started – to some of the more radical feminist, astrological or mystical sites now available at the drop of a wizard's hat.
Encyclopaedia Britannica's contributors' collective scholarship is reliable and beyond reproach – though here as everywhere, I discover infrequently, there are traps. Nothing in this world, and especially in the world of deities, is closed to interpretation. Or, if you like, misinterpretation.
Below, I list my major sources. The most ubiquitous search engine for these must be Wikipedia, the free-access, free content internet encyclopaedia, launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. Without Wikipedia, Ye Gods could not have come into existence in its present form. I owe these lads and their vast tribe of editors a huge debt of gratitude.
Thanks also to:
Micha F Lindemans and staff, particularly James Hunter, whose sane and sober research in Encyclopedia Mythica (www.pantheon.org) website has repeatedly proved both invaluable source material and a reliable check against other sources. Acknowledged in the script as (MFL) or (EM)
Michael Jordan's Encyclopedia Of Gods (1993) which mutated into first and second editions of Dictionary Of Gods And Goddesses (2004), covers much the same ground as my Ye Gods, but I have many more entries! His sterling research and full bibliography, though, has on many occasions saved me from reinventing the wheel. He is recognised in the text by 'MJ'
Manfred Lurker's Routledge Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses, Devils and Demons is recognised in the text when my source is uniquely his.
The Oxford Companion to World Mythology
www.geocities.com, now sadly defunct except in Japan, was a valuable resource.
Brian Griffiths: 'Chinese Goddess Cults'
Commonsenseatheism.com, a site now closed except for archival material
Ella Elizabeth Clark – Indian Legends of Canada
inanna.virtualove.net.menu/html The Shrine of the Forgotten Goddesses
The Wordsworth Dictionary of Beliefs and Religions
The Witches' Collective
www.mythologydictionary.com, a well-endowed source of information on numerous obscure deities
www.jameswbell.com for Sumerian/Mesopotamian deities
http://iroqoisindians.freeweb-hosting.com for the Haudenosaunee pantheon of the Iroquois Indian tribal confederacy of northern US/southern Canada
www.godfinder.com, now apparently defunct.
www.godfinder.org's Table of Gods: largely one-liner entries that have instigated numerous more detailed searches
www.godchecker.com: run since 1999 by Peter J Allen and Chas Saunders, an irreverent look at more than 4,000 worldwide deities and a valuable start-point for me for many an obscure spiritual being
www.janeraeburn.com for the names of Celtic deities, and the Celtic Gods and Goddesses website
Deities of the Religio Romana (home.scarlet.be/mauk.haemers/collegium_religions/deities/htm, by M Horatius Piscinus, of the Societas Via Romana
Molly Kalafut for material on the Finnish and Norse pantheons
For the basis of the Samoan entries, my thanks to Edward Wozniak/ Balladeer's Blog
Lucille at behindthename.com for Elamite deities