ON ETHNIC GODS IN HOMER
Proponents of the Axial Age hypothesis claim that each ethnos originally (i.e. in “preaxial” times) viewed its own Gods as distinct from the others’ Gods; the idea of universal Gods, they claim, is a degenerate invention of “postaxial” and “heretical” thinkers such as Xenophanes and Heraclitus. To learn about ancient Hellenic theology, according to this view, we should discard the vast majority of philosophers, and only turn to Homer and Hesiod.
Homer is a divine and divinely inspired poet indeed. Let us look at what the Muse has sung through him: shall we find the notion of Gods being exclusive to an ethnos?
In Odyssey 4.232, we read that Egyptians “are of the race of Pæeon”.
But we know that Pæeon is a Greek God! If Gods are exclusive to an ethnos, how can Egyptian people descend from a Greek God?
In Homer’s understanding, there clearly was an Egyptian God who was the same as the Greek God Pæeon. Egyptians and Greeks must have known this God by different names and worshiped Him through different rituals, as names and rituals are, and ought to be, exclusive to each ethnos; but the God Himself is nonetheless the same.
- Jōsēphus Græcus, The Sun Riders