Gods and goddesses may have multiple heads or arms, as does Brahma goddesses may be many-breasted, as was the great goddess of Ephesus (Artemis) or they may be represented with ferociously "demonic" forms of face or figure and with nonnatural combinations of body parts, as are androgynes and some tricksters. Deities may be conceived as wholly or partly animal, as were Hathor and Anubis, the cow goddess and jackal god in ancient Egyptian religion, or they may have animal avat āras, as does Vi ṣ ṇu, who appears as fish, tortoise, man-lion, and boar. Of course, sharp distinctions are often arbitrary and even misleading, especially since in many religious cultures, the gods often assume, both in mythology and in iconography, animal form (which is, strictly speaking, theriomorphism) mixed, hybrid, semianimal-semihuman form (which is, strictly speaking, therianthropism) or "unrealistic," wildly imaginative, or even grotesque forms. The idea of human form is an essential part of the definition, since otherwise one would have to deal with representations and manifestations of the divine in all possible material forms.
In a more general sense, anthropomorphism can be defined as the description of nonmaterial, "spiritual" entities in physical, and specifically human, form.
This term was also used in Latin by Augustine to refer to those who because of their "carnal thought imagine God in the image of corruptible man" ( Patrologia Latina 42.39), and, under his influence, it continued to be used by authors as late as Leibniz in the seventeenth century. Ancient Greek, including patristic, literature referred (contemptuously) to "anthropomorphites," meaning people holding anthropomorphic ideas of the divine. The idea has a long history in Western thought. ANTHROPOMORPHISM, from the Greek anthr ōpos ("human being") and morph ē ("form"), is a modern term, attested since the eighteenth century, denoting the practically universal tendency to form religious concepts and ideas and, on a more basic level, to experience the divine, or the "numinous" (the term is used here as a convenient shorthand, without necessarily implying commitment to Rudolf Otto's theories), in the categories and shapes most readily available to human thinking -namely, the human ones.
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