About ELGODS

ELGODS is a free, open spiritual encyclopedia covering deities, sacred texts, practices, festivals, and religions across 308+ tradition tags worldwide, with a rooted focus on the traditions of Bhārata. Our mission is to make wisdom from every tradition equally accessible — without paywalls, without monetization, forever.

Each entry is structured for three audiences — beginner, intermediate, and scholar — so a curious reader and a researcher can both find their level. Where possible we cite primary sources and traditional commentaries.

We are explicit about this because religious content has real stakes. The atlas is being built in two distinct stages:

1. Draft synthesis (AI-assisted)

   First-pass entries are seeded from public scholarly sources, gazetteers, government and ASI records, temple-trust publications, ethnographic work, and tradition-specific texts. We use large language models to synthesize these into structured drafts. A draft is a starting point, not a citation.

2. Scholarly review (human, credentialed)

   Every draft is marked UNVERIFIED until a credentialed reviewer from the relevant tradition — ordained clergy, religious-studies academic, recognized scholar, or community elder — has read, edited, and signed off. Their name, title, and date are recorded in the entry's frontmatter and shown publicly on the Advisory Council page.

Today, 229 of 2,702 entries have cleared the review bar; the remaining 2,473 are AI-assisted drafts under continuous review. The gap is real, the labelling is honest, and our priority is closing the gap rather than expanding the corpus.

The atlas began with the Dharmic traditions of Bhārata (Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh) and their living folk and tribal layers, and is expanding — slowly and conservatively — into the wider world: Zoroastrian yazatas, Shinto kami, Taoist immortals, the Manifestations of the Bahá'í Faith, and more.

The full source and content live at github.com/pmaero-byte/ELGODS. Contributions, corrections, and tradition-specific reviewers are welcome — the easiest path is the web contribution form.

We treat every tradition with equal respect. ELGODS does not promote, rank, or syncretize traditions — it documents them as practitioners and scholars within each tradition describe them.