On this thread:
I saw this:
Instead of hijacking that thread, I will ask here. How similar/different were the pantheons of polytheistic religions?
I can see how some themes would repeat themselves: Sun God, Earth Goddess and all that, but after a certain point, it is all down to author’s imagination and I would be surprised to see things like familial relationships among gods repeated.
I’d have to strongly disagree with Sage Rat’s statement from the get go - you have to have a VERY superficial understanding of polytheism to spout that.
The Romans were fond of identifying this or that foreign god with one of their own, that doesn’t mean the comparison was accurate.
There are some similarities between the Norse pantheon and the Greek, which may come down to some basic Indo-European religious set-up that got carried to both areas. Mercury/Odin, Thor/Zeus, Frigg/Hera, Frey/Apollo, Freya/Athena, etc.
The Egyptian pantheon, though, was both earlier and geographically separated from anyplace an Indo-European group would have come from. The reason there are similarities at all between them is that the Greeks identified Egyptian gods with their own (and the reigns of the Ptolemies would have further blended the two).
And what Broomstick said about the Romans, too. Although there actually WAS a separate Roman pantheon before they expropriated the Greeks’. But the original Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Minerva, etc., were different from their eventual personalities and characters after they had the Olympians faces pasted on them.