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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8314339" data-attributes="member: 6670763">When we talk about polytheism today, we almost always talk entirely about Indo-European polytheism. Which really is all the same religion with different regional cultural adaptations.African and American pantheons are their own things entirely, and there's various East-Asian pantheons, but I find those hard to really grasp as an outsider after 2000 years of Buddhist and Confucian influence.However, Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, Greek, Roman, Iranian, and Hindu pantheons are all regional evolutions of the same original religion. You keep finding the same characters, stories, and relics all over the place, and with many names you can easily trace them to the same linguistic origin. Sky father, earth mother, thunder god, sun chariot, eagles, underworld, ... You know the package.And ancient people saw that as well. Roman historians described the Germans as worshiping Mars, Mercury, and Hercules. You also have the case where Greeks and Romans adopted Isis as a goddess, even though the Egyptian gods had an independent separate origin. Or you had the Egyptians under Greek rulers worshipping Serapis as their main god, who was both Hades and Osiris.In Indo-European Polytheism, all the people worship the same pantheon. Though within that pantheon are multiple teams. In Greco-Roman religion, you had the division between Olympians and Titans, who were different generations of the same divine family (though with some Titans still keeping a position under Olympian rule). While we don't find this generational conflict in Germanic mythology, we still got the two dynasties of Aesir and Vanir, who apparently had some kind of conflict in the past, which was ended by a hostage exchange that had the Vani Frey, Freya, and Njord live with the Aesir.</blockquote>

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