The term demigod first appeared in English in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, when it was used to render the Greek and Roman concepts of semideus and daemon.
[7][need quotation to verify] The earliest recorded use of the term occurs in texts attributed to the archaic Greek poets Homer and Hesiod.
[13] The first Roman to employ the term "demigod" may have been the poet Ovid (17 or 18 CE), who used the Latin semideus several times in reference to minor deities.
410-420) proposed a hierarchy of gods as follows:[16] The Celtic warrior Cú Chulainn, a major protagonist in the Irish national epic the Táin Bo Cuailnge, ranks as a hero or as a demigod.
In the immediate pre-Roman period, the Celtic Gallaceian tribe in Portugal made powerful, large stone statues of deified local heroes, which stood on hill forts in the mountainous regions of - what is today - Northern Portugal and Spanish Galicia.In Hinduism, the term demigod is used to refer to deities who were once human and later became devas (gods).
She taught this mantra to Madri, King Pandu's other wife, and she immaculately conceived twin boys named Nakula and Sahadeva (children of the Ashvins).
For example, the Rig Veda (1.22.20) reads, "oṃ tad viṣṇoḥ paramam padam sadā paśyanti sūrayaḥ", which translates to, "All the suras [i.e., the devas] look always toward the feet of Lord Vishnu".
A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) translates the Sanskrit word "deva" as "demigod" in his literature when the term referred to a God other than the Supreme Lord.
In the Journey to the West, the Jade Emperor's younger sister Yaoji is mentioned to have descended to the mortal realm and given birth to a child named Yang Jian.
[20] Chen Xiang is nephew of Erlang Shen, birth by his younger sister Huayue Sanniang who married with a mortal scholar.