Which figure is this?

How the ranking works

Two of the six inputs behave differently from the other four, and the difference is worth knowing before you read a result. Tradition and kind are filters. If you say Norse and monster, nothing else is offered, because you already know those two things and Egyptian gods would only be noise. What they govern, the animal, the object and the book are scores. Each one you set is a criterion a figure can meet, and candidates are ordered by how many they meet. Every match is shown with the wording from that figure’s own record that triggered it, so you can see whether the tool has understood you or has caught the right word for the wrong reason.

Nothing is ever excluded for failing a score. That is a considered decision about honesty rather than a convenience. The attribute fields on these 340 figures were measured before this tool was designed: tradition, kind, what a figure governs and which works attest them are recorded for all 340, but an animal is recorded for 155 of them (46 per cent) and a held object for 154 (45 per cent). A figure with no recorded animal is not a figure with no animal — it is a figure whose page had no occasion to name one. Filtering on a field with half coverage would quietly turn that gap into a wrong answer, so an untested criterion is reported as untested and the candidate stays in the list one rank lower.

Why there is no date or period filter

Because there is no honest one to build. Not one of the 340 entity records on this site carries a period field, and inventing one for each figure to make a dropdown work would be exactly the kind of confident-sounding fabrication the rest of the encyclopedia exists to argue against. There is also a better question hiding inside the one people ask: someone who wants to know “how old is this god” almost always means “how old is the writing I can read about them”, and those are different by centuries. So the sixth input is the book instead — the 46 works cited by four or more figures on this site — and the whole argument about when each tradition’s evidence was actually written down lives on the source timeline.

When the tool cannot help

It searches 340 figures across eight traditions, and that is its limit. If you are trying to place something from a tradition this encyclopedia does not cover, or a minor local deity with no page here, no combination of inputs will find it, and the result will say so plainly rather than offering you the nearest famous name. It also works from what a page records, not from every detail in its prose: a god described in the article as riding a goat will only match the goat if the goat is in the structured attributes. When a result looks wrong, open the figure’s page — the article is always the fuller answer, and the tool is only ever a way of getting to it.

If what you actually want is who a figure is related to rather than who they are, the relationship explorer starts from any name and walks outwards; and if you want to know which tradition has a counterpart for a god you already know, that is the cross-pantheon comparison.