Hinduism is the third largest religion in the world with over 900 million Hindus worldwide. Hinduism has no original founder and dates back over 4,000 years, being the world's oldest religion. Hinduism is known for its gods/goddesses who are worshipped, there is one God but also millions of gods that Hindus follow, and it is a difficult concept to understand. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get the original essay Hinduism is known as a polytheistic religion because polytheism is “the belief in many gods” (Smart, 2017) and monotheism is the "belief in the existence of one God, or in the oneness of God" (Baaren, 2016) In many ways, Hinduism can be a monotheistic religion, as the Vedas only speak of one God but with many different names and the different names of the deities. have their own personal qualities that distinguish them as a singular deity, but they are all one God. However, Hinduism is primarily known as a polytheistic religion as there are many references to millions of gods/goddesses within the religion. There are many different gods because there are aspects of creation” (Danielou, 1964). Hindus worship different types of deities, which makes them all separate from each other because deities can be classified as different beings. The complexity of Hindu polytheism is due to the number of attempts to explain universal laws and the laws of nature from which the universe could have originated (Danielou, 1964). Due to the attempts of Hindus trying to explain the law of the universe, many deities were co-opted and created, just to try and get answers to why the world exists. The multiple gods/goddesses of Hinduism were created and taken from ancient texts that have important meaning to Hinduism. There are the three main sacred texts where deities can be described; The Vedas, the epics and the Puranas. It is from these texts that the different deities were established. The Vedic deities were created and belonged to the ancient period of the Arayans who were prominent between 1700 and 700 BCE and many deities from this region were also found in Greek mythology. , and there are many similarities between Greek and Hindu deities of this period. It is known that the two types of deities were possibly the same, but with different names, similarities between the two deities include Indra and Zeus; Indra is known to be the king of the heavens and one of his most famous symbols is the lightning bolt. Indra is also associated with weather conditions such as rain, wind and storms. Zeus is known in Greek mythology to also be a weather god. who can control weather aspects, he is the kind of gods/goddesses of Olympus in Greek history and similarly he has lightning as a symbol including both gods symbolizing power and authority. The Vedic gods were created due to the combination of ideas brought to India by the Arayans. There are 33 Vedic gods in total, all of which include descriptions intended to bring benefit to the material world for Hindus. they could worship them and devote their lives to them, the deities were visualized as having both animal and human forms into which they are capable of transforming. Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get a personalized paper now from our expert writers. After the invasion of India by the Aryans, the ancient, 1982)