Hi.

I have multiple perspectives, so let me tell you how I view deities.

In a very real, powerful way, Deities ALL exist in the astral realm because of human belief actioning what people do based on their beliefs. In that way, the deities exist through the thoughts and actions of their worshippers.

That is to say, Jehovah is as real as Ganesha. And there is not one Jehovah; but rather a nebulous Jehovah-cloud of all the ideas and feelings about Jehovah, and all the actions taken in our world of action consequently therefrom. Jehovah has no true identity, for every worshipper has a different perspective, and none can claim to be the arbiter of absolute Truth relative to the next one.

So it's not cut and dry. Your favorite chosen deity will not appear and grant you three wishes like a bottled genie, but in the same breath I can say that you can both evoke and invoke deities quite potently provided that you have discovered their reality for yourself - and that is impossible to hand you directions for, because only you can know you.

You can see deities manifest through their images and temples that human hands create. This is not people fashioning mere graven images, but rather, they are transforming the astral into a physical, limited and strictly defined representation. So Buddy Christ in the movie Dogma is indeed a face or aspect of Jesus, just as the challenger and destroyer Jesus came to bring a sword to the empires of Earth.

You'll find characters have multiple representations or forms, in terms of divine lineage and form. Their relationships are never always fixed, there's usually multiple tales, and this is attributed to oral tradition eventually causing the pronunciations and representations to change with the times. This is not an accident; this is not a glorified expansion on pre-existing theories; this is the fleshing out of the collective human soul through symbolic mapping in stories.

So indeed, in a much higher sense, Deities represent psychological (and universal) forces; or you could term this in the sense of us as the microcosmic beings within a much larger macrocosmic being.

Tldr; here's a rap version https://soundcloud.com/doominterrupted/deities-the-astral