On Sun, 19 Oct 2008, Chris Doss wrote:
> The Gods were generally considered agathoi, were they not? There were no
> gods of evil in the Greek pantheon, or come to think of it in any
> pantheon of which I am aware.
Chris, you're forgetting the entire Axial Age theory, which argues that the transition from a world of "noble ones" to an ethicization of the afterlife (where there were good and evil gods, and good and evil outcomes to life that depended on our deeds) happened sort-of simultaneously in several places circa 800 - 200 BCE. And so each of those "pantheons" had evil gods. For example, in Zoastrianism, gods are split into daevas and the ahuras, the first evil and the second ethical. And they each had chief gods, Ahriman being the head of the evil pack.
There are several other examples. The whole point of the Axial Age theory is that Christianity didn't invent this, it inherited it.
Michael