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A pantheon is the particular set of all Deity of any individual polytheistic religion, mythology, or tradition.
In the modern vernacular, most historical polytheistic religions are referred to as "mythology".Eugenie C. Scott, Evolution Vs. Creationism: An Introduction (2009), p. 58.
In many civilizations, pantheons tended to grow over time. Deities first worshipped as the patrons of cities or places came to be collected together as empires extended over larger territories. Conquests could lead to the subordination of the elder culture's pantheon to a newer one, as in the Greek Titanomachy, and possibly also the case of the Æsir and Vanir in the Norse mythology. Cultural exchange could lead to "the same" deity being renowned in two places under different names, as seen with the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans, and also to the cultural transmission of elements of an extraneous religion into a local cult, as with worship of the deity Osiris, which was later followed in ancient Greece. Max Weber's 1922 opus Economy and Society discusses a tendency of the ancient Greek philosophers to interpret gods worshiped in the pantheons of other cultures as "equivalent to and so identical with the deities of the moderately organized Greek pantheon".Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (1922), p. 23.
In other instances, however, national pantheons were consolidated or simplified into fewer gods, or into a single god with power over all of the areas originally assigned to a pantheon. For example, in the ancient Near East during the first millennium BCE, and Palestinian tribes worshiped much smaller pantheons than had been developed in Egypt and Mesopotamia.Robert Karl Gnuse, No Other Gods: Emergent Monotheism in Israel (1997), p. 200. Weber also identified the link between a pantheon of gods and the development of monotheism, proposing that the domination of a pantheon by a particular god within that pantheon was a step towards followers of the pantheon seeing that god as "an international or universal deity, a transnational god of the entire world". The first known instance of a pantheon being consolidated into a single god, or discarded in favor of a single god, was with the development of the short-lived practice of Atenism in ancient Egypt, with that role being accorded to the sun god.Robert Karl Gnuse, No Other Gods: Emergent Monotheism in Israel (1997), p. 167. A similar process is thought to have taken place with respect to the Israelite deity Yahweh, who, "as a typical West Semitic deity... would have four or five compatriot gods in attendance as he became the national high god".
The concept of a pantheon of gods has been widely imitated in Twentieth-century fantasy literature and role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. These uses tend to borrow heavily from historical patterns. In these contexts, it is considered important for the writer to construct a pantheon of gods that fits the genre, where the characteristics of the gods are in balance so that none of them is able to overwhelm the story, and so that the actions of the characters are not overwhelmed by the machinations of the gods.William Sims Bainbridge, eGods: Faith versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming (2013), p. 57.
Since the 16th century, "pantheon" has also been used in a secular sense to refer to the set of a society's exalted persons—initially including heroic figures, and later extending to celebrities, generally.Matthew Craske and Richard Wrigley, "Introduction", in Matthew Craske, ed., Pantheons: Transformations of a Monumental Idea (2004), pp. 1–2. Lord Byron drew this connection after viewing the busts of famous historical figures in the Roman Pantheon, writing in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage of how he wished to be at the center of an English Pantheon, and thereby associated with divinity.Clara Tuite, Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (2015), pp. 140–141. The Pantheon "thus imbues the modern with the aura of the divine", and "models the interplay of ancient and modern forms of fame". This trend continued into modern times, with the word "pantheon" 'of or for the gods' being reflected in the journalistic meme that refers to financial titans as "Masters of the Universe". For example: Francis Ford Coppola has been described as a member of "that revered pantheon of independent movie directors, which broke the standard Hollywood studio mold as the 1960s expired".Simon Warner, Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture (2013), p. 452.
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