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>You can see a historic parallel to how that played out with the formation of the Roman pantheon. Mostly stolen stories and ideas from the Greek pantheon tweeke
by colechristensen 1y ago
>You can see a historic parallel to how that played out with the formation of the Roman pantheon. Mostly stolen stories and ideas from the Greek pantheon tweeked to fit the empire.
You also have to think in the opposite direction, how did these gods all come about. Every person will have their own at list slightly different understanding and memory of the stories and rituals. Go to the next village over and everything will be almost but not quite the same, go 20, 100, or 1000 miles and differences will scale from mild recognition to completely different. If you meet a group of people from far away and they have a god of war, do you think it's the same god of war as yours or not?
Romans did this by having the same god have several names for, to simplify, several versions of the "same" god.
Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Jupiter Ammon, Jupiter Dolichenus etc.
- xeonmc 1y agoIron Man (Earth-626), Iron Man (Earth-25519), Iron Man (Earth 42069 Prime)
- thaumasiotes 1y agoNo, those are different beings. Zeus Panhellenios who rules over all the Greeks, Zeus Apomyios who keeps flies off of spectators, Zeus Ombrios who rains on crops, and Zeus Keraunios who smites with a thunderbolt are all the same being. You address him differently depending on what you want from him. This is no different from the concern in modern American law with whether a public official takes some action in his private capacity or officially in his public capacity. Gods have no private capacity, but the major ones have many, many different public capacities. (The actual term for this is "aspect"; we would say something like "Zeus in his aspect as Zeus Apomyios".)