The Biggest Piece of the Pie

Question: What pantheon is the biggest in number of actual gods and followers? My guess would be the Amatsukami, since they have tons of minor kami, or the Greeks. Thousands of kids and embodied concepts.

Hmm. An interesting question. While it's easy to pinpoint the pantheons that don't have the highest population - most African and Native American pantheon have relatively few gods compared to the large numbers of some of the European religions - it's harder to compare among the ones who do have large, established rosters. I'd say that the serious contenders for largest pantheon are probably the Amatsukami, the Anunna, the Celestial Bureaucracy, and the Dodekatheon.

The Amatsukami are frequently referred to as a whole as the Eight Million Kami; while this isn't supposed to be a literal number, it is meant to represent them as limitlessly large and all-encompassing, and the vast array of different minor gods and spirits in Japanese mythology certainly helps the image. Since kami are basically present in all kinds of things, from a certain point of view, everything in Japan is a god or works for a god, and when everything counts toward your total, eight million doesn't sound too far-fetched. The Amatsukami themselves - that is, the major heavenly deities - number comparatively few when held up against other pantheons, but if you could the hosts of spirits and lesser gods beneath them, you rack up an impressive total indeed.

If I were going to try to literally choose one of these pantheons to win this race (which I'm not, because I have no way of knowing and anyway it's really a matter of what an individual game needs), it'd probably be the Anunna. Their numbers are seriously vast; the pantheon proper, carefully listed out for us on giant stone tablets by generations of Mesopotamian scribes, includes somewhere in the vicinity of three or four thousand different deities, most of them unknown except for their names. That's already impressive enough, but then there's the fact that there are at least two whole other pantheons under the Anunna's umbrella; the Igigi, the "younger" generation of gods who supposedly rebelled against them at some point in order to get out of working for them but go almost entirely unnamed (but we have to assume there were enough of them to pose a serious problem), and the Anunnaki, the underworld pantheon which supposedly mirrors the gods of the heavens exactly, merely within the gloomy arena of Irkallu. That's... a lot of gods, guys. And we don't even know who most of them are.

Much like the Amatsukami, the Shen of China have a sprawling, gigantic number of lesser gods tasked with lesser responsibilities, from the kitchen gods who inhabit every household on up to the large-scale gods of nature and divine order. It's somewhat impossible to get an exact number - and how would you go about it, anyway? Are you counting only Taoist deities? Also Buddhist gods? What about folk deities or imports from places like Tibet and India? - but the bureaucratic setup, which includes things like the Celestial Ministry of the Waters and the Heavenly Division of Storm and Precipitation, certainly gives the impression of a vast, hive-like arrangement of deities.

I actually almost considered not putting the Dodekatheon on here - they have a lot of named figures, but it's hard to compete with the three pantheons above, you know? - but eventually did based on the strength of the Roman version of their religion. Roman myth deified everyone and everything. They were madmen who liked adding gods to the universe and weren't afraid to do it with wild abandon. Not only do you have the sizeable pantheon of the Dodekatheon of Greece (now renamed and 20% Italianized!), but you also have huge legions of minor gods of things like diseases, emotions, seasons, various buildings, and so forth. Greece probably didn't quite have enough gods to compete with pantheons like those above on its own, but Rome, with its popular concepts of genii and mortal deification, really stepped the game up.

So there you have it. Other pantheons are certainly large but not overwhelmingly so (the Devas and Pesedjet, for example), while still others are middling-sized (the Aesir and Tuatha) or economically packaged for everyone's convenience (the Yazata). There are tons of mythologies around the world that only have a couple of gods to their names, but the truly enormous hierarchies are pretty few. Which is probably a good thing for divine population control and politics the universe over.