Elagabalus saw this as an opportunity to install Elagabal as the chief deity of the Roman pantheon.

The cult statue was brought to Rome by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who before his accession was the hereditary high priest at Emesa and is commonly called Elagabalus after the deity.

Scholars disagree whether the new deity was a refoundation of the ancient Latin cult of Sol, a revival of the cult of Elagabalus or completely new.

It has a clear association with solar deities and solar monism ; as such, it became the preferred epithet of Rome's traditional Sol and the novel, short-lived Roman state cult to Elagabalus, an Emesan solar deity who headed Rome's official pantheon under his namesake emperor.

The Historia Augusta refers to the deity Elagabalus as " also called Jupiter and Sol " ( fuit autem Heliogabali vel Iovis vel Solis ).

As the patron of Delphi ( Pythian Apollo ), Apollo was an oracular god — the prophetic deity of the Delphic Oracle.

The earth deity had power over the ghostly world, and it is believed that she was the deity behind the oracle.

One strategy adopted by both Sargon and Naram-Sin, to maintain control of the country, was to install their daughters, Enheduanna and Emmenanna respectively, as high priestess to Sin, the Akkadian version of the Sumerian moon deity, Nanna, at Ur, in the extreme south of Sumer ; to install sons as provincial ensi governors in strategic locations ; and to marry their daughters to rulers of peripheral parts of the Empire ( Urkesh and Marhashe ).

As, however, the deity is represented in an Neo-Attic, archaistic and conventional character, this copy cannot be relied on as giving us much information as to the usual style of Alcamenes, who was almost certainly a progressive and original artist.

She is thought to bear the name of the deity who was derived from Libya, where known as Neith, the same source sometimes identified as the parallel for Athene.

Plato drew a parallel between Athene and the ancient Libyan and Egyptian goddess Neith, a war deity who also was depicted carrying a shield.

They thought that the deity which was the most popular fire-controlling deity in central and eastern Japan must have been enshrined in it.

This theological viewpoint was also widespread among Judah ’ s neighbors of differing religions who believed the destruction of a particular city could be attributed to the city ’ s deity who was punishing the city for some communal sin or wrongdoing.

The central sanctuary of an Angkorian temple was home to the temple's primary deity, the one to whom the site was dedicated: typically Shiva or Vishnu in the case of a Hindu temple, Buddha or a bodhisattva in the case of a Buddhist temple.

The deity was represented by a statue ( or in the case of Shiva, most commonly by a linga ).

Since the temple was not considered a place of worship for use by the population at large, but rather a home for the deity, the sanctuary needed only to be large enough to hold the statue or linga ; it was never more than a few metres across.

Erwin Rohde wrote that the Python was an earth spirit, who was conquered by Apollo, and buried under the Omphalos, and that it is a case of one deity setting up a temple on the grave of another.

* Christian revivalist movements, such as Pietism or Methodism, which taught that a more personal relationship with a deity was possible

The reverse depicts the Roman goddess Minerva, who was Domitian's favoured deity, and appeared on numerous coin types throughout his reign.

This house was the assembly place for the dead before they began the journey to the Otherworld. He is similar in some regards to the Hindu deity Yama.

According to myth, taiko was started by Ame no Uzume, a shaman-like female deity.

Although the names are old, this opposition is a modern western-influenced development popularized by Martin Haug in the 1880s, and was in effect a realignment of the precepts of Zurvanism ( Zurvanite Zoroastrianism ), which had invented a third deity, Zurvan, in order to explain a mention of twinship ( Yasna 30. 3 ) between the moral and immoral.

Enlil ( nlin ), ( EN = Lord + LÍL = Storm, " Lord ( of the ) Storm ") was the name of a chief deity listed and written about in Sumerian religion, and later in Akkadian, Hittite, Canaanite and other Mesopotamian clay and stone tablets.

Eris has been adopted as the matron deity of the modern Discordian religion, which was begun in the late 1950s by Gregory Hill and Kerry Wendell Thornley under the pen names of " Malaclypse the Younger " and " Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst ".

* A deity in a sketch by Canadian comedy troupe The Kids In The Hall, who is initially assumed to be a harmless mistyping of " dog ".

On 12 August 2012, at the London 2012 Summer Olympics closing ceremony, Monte was the first Brazilian singer performing during Rio de Janeiro's side of the Olympic Flag handover-she initially sang the classical Brazilian piece Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5, representing Brazilian folklore's Yemanjá deity.

He initially seems to be a fierce underworld deity, but Shezmu was quite helpful to the dead.

Most probably he was initially deified as Vishnumoorthi and incorporated into the Bhoota cult of the Tuluvas and then further incorporated as a prominent folk deity into the Theyyam cult as well.

Tiamat was actually, initially, first detailed as a deity for the Forgotten Realms campaign setting in the original Draconomicon ( 1990 ).

A number of oracles and local cults attracted devotees while the central deity, the earth mother and fertility figure Ala, was venerated at shrines throughout Igboland.

Linear B tablets show that Poseidon was venerated at Pylos and Thebes in pre-Olympian Bronze Age Greece as a chief deity, but he was integrated into the Olympian gods as the brother of Zeus and Hades.

A short story appearing in Zhang Zhuo's ( 660-741 ) Tang anthology shows how the deity had been venerated in Shaolin from at least the eighth century.

When the proto-Greeks ( peoples whose language would evolve into Greek proper ) first arrived in the Aegean and on the mainland of modern-day Greece early in the 2nd millennium BCE, they found localized nymphs and divinities already connected with every important feature of the landscape: mountain, cave, grove and spring all had their own locally venerated deity.

The origin of the Old English word Satur is obscure but thought to refer to a particular deity named Sætere who was venerated by the pre-Christian peoples of north-western Germany, some of whom were the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons.

The pagan Mesopotamians venerated images of their gods, which it was believed actually held the essence or personality of the deity that they represented ; this is evident from the poem How Erra Wrecked the World, in which Erra deceived the god Marduk into leaving his cult statue.

According to Angkor scholar Georges Coedès, " Angkor Wat is, if you like, a vaishnavite sanctuary, but the Vishnu venerated there was not the ancient Hindu deity nor even one of the deity's traditional incarnations, but the king Suryavarman II posthumously identified with Vishnu, consubstantial with him, residing in a mausoleum decorated with the graceful figures of apsaras just like Vishnu in his celestial palace.

Kokopelli is a fertility deity, usually depicted as a humpbacked flute player ( often with feathers or antenna-like protrusions on his head ), who has been venerated by some Native American cultures in the Southwestern United States.

* Cult image, a religion-neutral term for a man-made object that is venerated for the deity, spirit or demon that it embodies or represents

Historically, the deity that was venerated at Egyptian Mendes was a ram deity Banebdjed ( literally Ba of the lord of djed, and titled " the Lord of Mendes "), who was the soul of Osiris.

The rebels were the first but not last followers of the Way of Supreme Peace () and venerated the deity Huang-Lao, who according to Zhang Jue had given him a sacred book called the Crucial Keys to the Way of Peace ().

A shrine ( " case or chest for books or papers "; Old French: escrin " box or case ") is a holy or sacred place, which is dedicated to a specific deity, ancestor, hero, martyr, saint, daemon or similar figure of awe and respect, at which they are venerated or worshipped.

Sometimes a human is venerated at a Hindu shrine along with a deity, for instance the 19th century religious teacher Sri Ramakrishna is venerated at the Ramakrishna Temple in Kolkata, India.

Following her work, the idea of a matristic early Europe which had venerated such a deity was developed in books by amateur scholars such as Robert Briffault's The Mothers ( 1927 ) and Robert Graves's The White Goddess ( 1946 ).

Other manifestations of the cult of a deity are the preservation of relics or the creation of images, such as icons ( usually connoting a flat painted image ) or three-dimensional cultic images, denigrated as " idols ", and the specification of sacred places, hilltops and mountains, fissures and caves, springs, pools and groves, or even individual trees or stones, which may be the seat of an oracle or the venerated site of a vision, apparition, miracle or other occurrence commemorated or recreated in cult practices.

This category encompasses deity characters invented for use in fiction and entertainment, as opposed to deities who are or were actually worshiped or venerated by people.

A short story appearing in Zhang Zhuo's ( 660-741 ) Tang anthology shows how the deity had been venerated in the Monastery from at least the eighth century.

In Ancient Greek and Roman temples the cella is a room at the centre of the building, usually containing a cult image or statue representing the particular deity venerated in the temple.

Of the fragmented World Serpent deity that the sarrukh had worshipped, the yuan-ti venerated the strongest aspect, a cruel and despotic deity, Merrshaulk, who grew distant and aloof.

Yet this did not preserve it from the sacrilegious hands of Verres, who carried off from there a bronze image of the deity herself, the most ancient as well as the most venerated in Sicily.

The crocodile, recognized as the deity of the city, was also venerated as such in other Egyptian cities, which gave rise to many quarrels, notably with Ombos.