On Mon, 20 Oct 2008, Chris Doss wrote:
> PS in general I was thinking of the Greek (and Roman) pantheons and the
> Germanic pantheon. Incidentally the Slavic pantheon appears to have been
> close to the Greek one from what we know of it. Ain't no evil gods
> there. There are gods who are stupid, but none who are evil.
Sure, I never argued there weren't such pantheons. I'd agree all were like that before the Axial age, and that some were like that until 1000 CE (notably the Vikings, who preserved and elaborated on their germanic heritage long after the Germans had become Christians). I'm not arguing against the Nietzsche idea in Genealogy; I think it's basically sound.
But you said there were no pantheons that had evil gods, seeming to imply this was a foreign concept to polytheism and only came in with monotheism, which is something Nietzsche believed, but which isn't true. The good/ evil split started out in polytheistic religions, and centrally Zorastrianism. And there were many offshoots in various Indo-European cultures where the gods of the nomadic warrior age, which were originally just the gods, become the evil gods in the settled agricultural age, opposed by a set of good gods. Arguably this happens in early Judaism as well, and preceded the invention of monotheism. (Some people argue that in the very earliest books of the Bible, when God refers to himself as We, he really means it :o)
Michael