Domestication of the gods
When Homer was writing, the gods had not yet been organized into a pantheon. There were many different gods, some of which went by similar names. The “Dionysus” of one proto-Greek town was not precisely the same as the “Dionysus” of another proto-Greek town.1 We think of Homer as describing some preexisting systematization that he inherited, but that’s exactly the wrong way around: the gods that Homer did not mention are not known to us today because he did not mention them; and if there was some distinction that Homer does not observe, then that distinction is now lost. The so-called “Greek gods” did not exist to begin with—or rather, the gods themselves existed, but they were not yet “Greek”. The classification invented by the Greeks and others in the course of history is artificial and reductive.
The gods used to be wilder and more chaotic than they are now. They lived in the forest, at night, or were hidden deep underground. Many gods have been forgotten because they were reduced to their names by cultural settlement.
- Death is Just Around the Corner, ep. 250 ↩