Family trees of the pantheons

Every published genealogy of a pantheon is a lie of a particular kind: it is tidy. Charts have to draw one line between a parent and a child, so the chart-maker picks a version, and the reader has no way of knowing a choice was made. The trees here are built to avoid that, at the cost of being harder to look at.

What is different about these

They are drawn from the pages, not beside them. Each tree is generated at build time from the parentage, marriages and offspring recorded on the individual figures' own pages. Nothing is entered twice, which means the diagram cannot drift out of step with the articles — correct a god's mother on the portrait and the tree redraws.

Disputed lines are drawn as disputed. Where two ancient works give different parents, the tree shows the conflict rather than resolving it, and names the works. This is the whole reason the feature exists. Aphrodite is the standard example: born from the sea-foam of a mutilated sky-god in one account, the daughter of Zeus and Dione in another, and a chart that shows only one of those is concealing an argument that Greeks themselves were aware of.

They are navigable. Pan and zoom on a phone, tap a name to open that figure's portrait, and come back to the same position. Divine genealogies are dense — a single god may have thirty recorded children — and a static image at readable size does not fit on any screen anyone owns.

How to read one

A few conventions repeat across all eight.

• Generations run downward. Where a tradition has no clear generational structure, the layout follows descent from the oldest recorded ancestor.
• Solid lines are descent the sources agree on. Broken lines are contested, with the disagreeing works named in the note attached.
• A figure can appear on more than one line where the sources genuinely place them in two families. This is not an error and it is not resolved silently.
• Marriage and consort links run horizontally. Ancient family structures do not fit modern nuclear-family assumptions, and no attempt is made to make them.

The trees are also honest about their own limits. Divine genealogy in most traditions is a political document — a city or a dynasty claiming descent — so a tree is a map of claims, not of biology. Two cities producing incompatible ancestries for the same hero were both telling the truth about what they believed.

Which ones repay the most attention

The Greek tree is the largest and the one most people come for, and its interest is the sheer density of the descent from a single generation. The Egyptian tree is the clearest illustration of how theology reshapes genealogy, because the Heliopolitan Ennead is a deliberately engineered structure and other traditions cut straight across it. The Norse tree is small, tangled, and dominated by the fact that most of its gods have giant ancestry. The Celtic tree carries the heaviest annotation on the site, because Irish sources contradict each other freely and Welsh figures do not connect to Irish ones at all.

Why the trees are worth the trouble

A pantheon becomes comprehensible the moment its shape is visible. Which gods belong to the ruling generation and which to the one before it; who married into the family from outside; which figures are grafted on late and connect to nobody; where a whole branch exists to justify one city's claim — none of that is legible from an alphabetical list of names, and all of it is obvious on a diagram. Readers who have struggled through a mythology book and found the names refusing to stick usually find that twenty minutes with the tree fixes the problem permanently, because relationships are far easier to remember than attributes.

Using them

Anyone may print a tree for a class or a game table — the terms of use say so explicitly, and no permission is needed. If you want them laid out for paper rather than for a screen, with the disputed-line key in the margin, that is exactly what the printable companion is.

If a figure is missing from a tree, it is because their page has not been written yet rather than because the relationship is unknown; the trees fill in as the portraits do. If a line looks wrong, the contact page explains the format for a correction that can actually be checked — for genealogy, that means naming the work and passage that gives the parentage you expect.