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Is there a word for calling or considering yourself a deity?
There was a king of Shinar called Nimrod, who called himself a deity according to certain Islamic scholars and made people worship himself. Nimrod was in the age of prophet Ibrahim(Abraham). This great prophet and a friend of Allah, also known as the patriarch of all subsequent prophets, died at the age of one hundred and seventy five years.
Yes, there is such a word in English. It's called deification whereby a human being is made into and worshiped as a god. This was a common practice among many ancient nations.
Example #1:
He deified himself to make people worship him as a god.
Example #2:
The Romans deified their emperors making them equal to gods.
Another very similar word in meaning to deify would be idolize.
Example:
He was idolized by his tribe and revered as a god.
The best term for this is self-styled god or self-proclaimed god. Using deify with a reflexive pronoun, like he deified himself, could also work.
English has a lot of terms for someone who names himself something: self-styled, self-declared, self-proclaimed, and so on. Many of these have their origins in medieval titles, or styles, so a self-styled king would be someone who is not recognized as king by any country, but refers to himself as king and tries to insist on royal honorifics (your majesty and so on).
However, these terms are generic and can apply to any title or honor—including divinity. A self-styled god or self-proclaimed god would be the same as a self-styled king, but for divinity rather than royalty.
To deify is to make something into a god. It could be used to refer to the actor him-or-herself, as in he deified himself.
The construction self-deify is understandable, but awkward and basically unheard of—see this graph of usage of deify vs. self-deify, where deify enjoys some usage, but self-deify is literally not found at all. So self-deify could be English, but not idiomatic English.
A similar word is apotheosis, which means to become a god. Self-apotheosis, though, doesn’t really make much sense, and apotheosis is less well-known anyway. It’s also more positive—the term usually refers to someone who actually does become a god (it’s from Greek; that sort of thing happens in Greek myths). Deify instead refers more to someone who is worshiped as a god.
It could be called a 'god complex', or 'delusional', 'messiah complex' but it depends on whether or not the person is a god. Followers of many religions would say that their god knew s/he was a god and was not delusional. 'Delusions of grandeur', might also be appropriate.
There is the problem that in using these words that some people might be offended. If you spoke this way about any recognised-by-many deity, you could find yourself in trouble.
In fiction, if you are making up a 'new' god, you'd probably be okay. In a group of agnostics, you would be fine with any of the terms I suggested, though they are negative. If you want an positive way to say 'delusional', I'm stumped.
I think Cookie Monster's answer is the most accurate here. But I found another word that might be helpful. It's divinize(verb) or divinization(noun) . And I think this Wikipedia article might be useful for your research.
There are self-deification and self-divinization (both are also spelt without the hyphen). However, these words are usually used in a more figurative, anthropocentric manner, rather than considering oneself literally a god.
Apotheosis is a noun describing the process of elevating something to the status of deity. The verb form is apotheosize.
