Vulcan is the Roman god of fire and volcanoes (known to the Greeks as Hephaestus). The fires of Vulcan are considered to be both destructive and symbolic of male fertility.  He is cited as the father of a variety of men, monsters and gods.  The origins of Vulcan likely go back the Cretan god Velchanos, a young god who had a mastery of fire and was consort to the great goddess.  Through later Roman and Greek mythology, Vulcan was also married to Maia, eldest of the Pleiades, and Venus, Roman goddess of love and beauty (originally a goddess of vegetation).  Vulcan is often depicted with a thunderbolt and is considered to be a master blacksmith.  His forge is located deep in the bowels of the earth.

Oya is an orisha of the Yoruba religion of Nigeria, Benin and Togo.  Oya is a warrior spirit who represents wind, fertility and magic.  She also represents change as the guardian of the gates of death and the keeper of the cemetery.  She was the first wife of Chango, orisha of fire and thunder, and she stole his power over fire by drinking some of his magic potion when he was away at battle.  As such she is also associated with thunder and lightning.  In Santeria, a syncretic religion of West Africa and the Caribbean, Oya is identified with Our Lady of the Candelaria (a Spanish word meaning conflagration or large, destructive fire). 

Shiva is a pan-Hindu deity celebrated for his, or perhaps her, extremely attractive attributes.  His name means kind and auspicious, he was inordinately handsome and eternally young, his powers stretch from creation all the way to eradication and he was even a dancer of note.  Shiva is also associated with other powerful Vedic deities such as Brahma and Vishnu.  Shiva has hermaphroditic qualities, sports a crescent moon on her head, five ornamental serpents wrapped around his ash-smeared body and, in some depictions, a third eye that he uses to burn away desire and thus retain a pure form.  Her other name is Rudra which highlights more ferocious qualities; however Shiva the Destroyer is actually a misnomer - Shiva the Transformer would be a more accurate name for this god who is both ascetic and spouse, tiger and lamb, ambivalence and yet deep and searing truth.

The Mother Goddess

The Green Man, our titular hero, epitomizes the shape-shifting nature of pagan deity figures. He is also known as Green George, Green Jack or Jack in the Green and is directly related to the figures of Cernunnos, the Horned God and Pan as a woodlands deity.  The name, Green Man, wasn't even coined until Lady Raglan’s 1939 article, “The Green Man in Church Architecture.”  Prior to this date, these images carved in stone of a male face surrounded by ivy or leaves were known as “foliate masks” in architectural discourse.  They were also more luridly and precisely called “disgorging” or “bloodsucker” heads, depending on whether their mouths were stuffed with foliage or if they were sprouting vegetation from every facial orifice. The Green Man has been carved into holy edifices since the 11th century, an image that likely traveled to Britain from India. He reappears with vigour during the Renaissance on many Gothic buildings and has had a 20th and 21st century rebirth in everything from kimono designs to sculptures to tattoos. Curiously, The Green Man, like a mythic Hugo, Man of a Thousand Faces doll, is connected with a range of traditions and their deities, from the Mesopotamian Tammuz to Jesus to the Norse god Odin to even Peter Pan and Father Christmas. Pretty wild.

Danu

I love troubadour culture and so what’s initially cool about Baphomet is that the first mention of this god surfaced in a Occitanian poem from 1195 called "Senhors, per los nostres peccatz" by the troubadour Gavaudan. Later on, in the 13th century, the order of the Knights Templar were persecuted for supposedly worshipping Baphomet but no one could torture a consistent description of what this god looked like out of any of the knights. Centuries later though, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856) uncovered a series of carved or engraved images found on a number of supposed 13th century Templar artifacts (such as cups, bowls and coffers) and claimed that this was indeed the Baphometic idol. Only in the 19th century, in the drawings of Eliphas Levi, did this powerful mythic figure assume the shape we associate with it today, its image closely tied to Satanic beliefs of self-containment. It is usually depicted as a half male-half female or hermaphroditic being with goat horns, a pentagram on its forehead and with its hands pointing in alternate directions: one to the white moon of Chesed, and the other to the black moon of Geburah. Sometimes its arms are also emblazoned with the words, Dissolve & Congeal, designed to represent the dichotomous yet conjoined forces this deity holds. Although this figure has become associated with the evil powers of the Christian devil, Satan, in fact, this god was originally supposed to represent the fusion of mercy with justice, man with woman, human with beast; in other words, a perfect being. Baphomet appears in the writings of Freemasons and in the text of the Gnostic Catholic mass. As a source of contained, unified energy, Baphomet is a potent figure in the mythic realm of earth-dwelling gods.

As a strong female figure in Norse mythology, first appearing in the 13th c. Poetic Edda,  Freya is both gifted and cursed.  A great beauty who is associated with love and fertility, she is also haunted by the regular disappearance of her husband Oor for whom she weeps tears of gold.  Associated with the powers of nature, due to her ambivalent moral attitudes and her fiercely productive energies, as well as the fact that she is pulled in a chariot by two blue cats and keeps a boar companion, Freya is a beautifully threatening mythical being.  Although many plants were named after Freya, the early Christian church aimed to efface this natural goddess by re-naming them after Mary instead.  Freya however prevails.

Mammon is a fairly self-explanatory and one dimensional deity when it comes down to it.  Stemming from an Arabic term for wealth or perhaps even, ironically, “that in which one trusts,” Mammon was a term in the Bible that evolved, 

through the course of the Gospels, into a personification of evil or Beelzebub. 

When we think of Mammon though, we more commonly imagine him in his literary incarnation, such as that from Spenser’s Faerie Queen or Milton’s Paradise Lost. Associated with the Greek God Plutus, Mammon in any form is opposed to all manifestations of the Green Man, simply serving as the embodiment of cold hard cash in its most domineering guises.

Gaia

Satan has the worst rap of all these deities. Many Christians believe that he was a prideful angel cast down from Heaven by God and condemned to burn eternally in the Lake of Fire.  Actually, the Christian Church created the figure of Satan from a range of pagan sources such as The Horned God and The Green Man, thus making Satanism, in its prior form, one of the world's oldest religions.  The Christian Satan however is basically your all-purpose bad guy. Supposed to have done everything from tempting Eve to sin in the Old Testament to encouraging Judas to betray Jesus in the New Testament, Satan is depicted with horns, wings, a tail and often as a serpent or dragon. Satan’s name means Enemy, Rebel or Evil; he is also known as Lucifer or, in Arabic cultures, Shaitan. Although he is associated with an anti-Christian sect called Satanists, actually very few of these people worship a figure called Satan. Instead they adhere to principles associated with the positive side of his purported darkness; namely informed individualism, connection to nature and an honouring of the primal forces in humanity.

Aphrodite

Morpheus