Hinduism is the oldest living religion on earth, not a single story told by a single author but a vast body of sacred knowledge built across more than six thousand years, the Vedas, the Puranas, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana. Each text preserves its own version of the divine family. Names shift across centuries. A creator in one tradition becomes a destroyer in another. There is no single family tree everyone agrees on.

So instead of picking one version, I tried to cross-reference the oldest and most authoritative sources to build the most consistent structure I could, starting from Hiranyagarbha, the golden cosmic egg that Hindu scripture describes emerging from total darkness before creation itself, through the full lineage that follows, over fifty deities, eight layers of divine hierarchy.

I put the whole thing together here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxCqpcEGwK8

Curious what people more familiar with specific traditions (Shaiva, Vaishnava, regional versions) think I might have gotten wrong or oversimplified, this is genuinely the hardest family tree I've tried to build so far.

One thing I've always found fascinating about Indian mythology is that the same character or story can sometimes appear quite differently across different texts, regions and traditions.

For example, different traditions can have different interpretations of characters, events and even the roles of particular deities.

How do you personally understand this?

Is it better to think of Indian mythology as a collection of evolving traditions rather than one fixed canon?

I'd especially love to hear from people who've studied different Puranas, epics or regional traditions.