The Restoration Rulebook

Why the Names Are Spelled This Way

Every name in the Pantheon is a scholarly restoration, not an invention and never a brand. The marks above the letters are not decoration: they are the original sound of the name — its stress and its long vowels — recovered from the sources and carried into the digital realm. This page is the rulebook every restoration follows.

1. The Restoration Principle

Greek names were written for over two thousand years with pitch accent (the acute and circumflex marks) and vowel quantity (long ē and ō beside short e and o). Schoolbooks dropped both; the alphabet of screens dropped the rest. What remained was a flattened echo — apollon, nike, hera — that loses how the name actually sounded in the mouths of the people who worshipped these gods.

A restoration puts the sound back, using the same conventions as the critical editions scholars read (Liddell–Scott–Jones, Beekes' Etymological Dictionary of Greek, and their peers in every tradition):

Ἀπόλλων→apollon→Apóllōnstress on the penult, long ō

Νίκη→nike→Níkēstress on the first syllable, long ē

Ἑκάτη→hekate→Hekátēstress on the penult, long final ē

These forms are restored-stress, length-preserving transliterations: the acute or circumflex carries the original stress position, the macron (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū) carries the original vowel length. Nothing is added that the sources do not contain; nothing the sources contain is silently discarded.

2. The Tier System in One View

Every name in the lexicon is classified mechanically — never by ownership or fame — by what its restoration preserves:

Tier	Rule	Example
Dual-Tier	Stress and length preserved, and multiple historically valid Unicode spellings — both live as temples	Apóllōn / Apollōn · Hekate / Hekátē · Nike / Níkē
Tier-1	Greek: stress and length both preserved. Other traditions: at least one distinctive mark the ASCII form loses	Ártemis is Tier-2 — only stress. Athēnâ — circumflex carries both, Tier-1
Tier-2	One feature preserved (stress or length), or neither	Átlas (stress only) · Cháos (stress only)

The rule is deliberately mechanical: a circumflex counts as both features because it marks stress and length on the same letter. No editorial judgment calls, no exceptions — the same test for every one of the 895 entries.

3. When the Ideal Form Can't Be Registered

Unicode domains are scarce. When the ideal restoration is unavailable, the rulebook descends a fixed hierarchy — each step still defensible, never a wrong accent for the sake of availability:

Priority	Form	Example	When
1	Full restoration	Aphrodítē	Ideal — used whenever the domain is available
2	Circumflex	Hermês, Poseidôn	Greek has a circumflex and the domain exists — stress and length in one typeable letter
3	Macron-only	Hēra, Persephonē	The standard LSJ convention — always defensible
4	Attested variant	Athēnā (Ἀθηνᾶ)	The canonical form would hurt recognizability; the variant is attested
5	Plain ASCII	Hera	Last resort, never the primary form

A wrong accent is worse than no accent. The form ápollōn was scrapped in favour of plain apollōn — a misplaced mark misreads the name's sound, which is the one thing a restoration must never do.

4. Every Tradition Gets Its Own Convention

Greek rules govern Greek names. Other traditions are restored by their own scholarly standards — the same discipline, different alphabets:

Tradition	Convention	Example
Sanskrit	IAST — macrons for long vowels, underdots for retroflexes	Gaṅgā, Pūṣan, Sarasvatī, Tvaṣṭṛ
Egyptian	Egyptological transliteration — ꜣ, ꜥ, ḥ, ṯ, ḏ	ꜣnpw (Anubis), Sšꜣt (Seshat), Ḥp (Hapi)
Chinese	Pinyin with tone marks	Māzǔ, Fúxī, Guānyīn
Yoruba	Underdot vowels (ẹ, ọ, ṣ) and tone marks where attested	Ọṣun, Ẹṣu, Ṣàngó
Nahuatl	Classical Nahuatl orthography with macrons	Tezcatlipōca, Mixcōātl
Norse	Old Norse letters preserved (þ, ð, ǫ, ø)	Valhǫll, Ásgarðr

The IDNA-2008 compromise. A handful of restorations use an Egyptological letter where the Hebrew-script equivalent would be philologically ideal, because domain registries reject some codepoints under IDNA-2008. Where that happens, the temple documents it openly as a workaround — the restoration rule bends only where the registration system forces it, and always on the record.

5. Why It Matters

Sound is identity. A god's name was sung, sworn by, and carved into stone with its stress and length intact. Restoring both is the difference between a label and a name.

It is also proof of provenance. These names are older than any company. Níkē is the goddess of victory, named in Hesiod's Theogony two and a half thousand years ago; the accent above her í is her own, not anyone's brand. Every restoration here cites its sources — LSJ and Beekes for Greek, Faulkner for Egyptian, Monier-Williams for Sanskrit, and the primary texts in our Sacred Texts library.

And it is checkable. The same mechanical rules run in the open: the lexicon validator, the tier classifier, and this page's examples all agree, because they are all generated from one canonical source. If a restoration ever fails the rules, the build fails — not the reader's trust.

See the rules applied: The Tier System · Why Greek Accents Matter · Enter the Pantheon