His power was so great that he even promoted and demoted gods according to whether they had given ear or been deaf to petitions.

When they tried to depict the most abiding qualities of men, it was because men had common roots with the unchanging gods.

The two terms may not have originally been distinguished ; though in Homer's poems nectar is usually the drink and ambrosia the food of the gods ; it was with ambrosia Hera " cleansed all defilement from her lovely flesh ", and with ambrosia Athena prepared Penelope in her sleep, so that when she appeared for the final time before her suitors, the effects of years had been stripped away and they were inflamed with passion at the sight of her.

The völva says that the two were capable of very little, lacking in ørlög and says that they were given three gifts by the three gods:

The adjectival epithet Areios was frequently appended to the names of other gods when they take on a warrior aspect or become involved in warfare: Zeus Areios, Athena Areia, even Aphrodite Areia.

: Before this time, and a long time thereafter, they believed in groves and barrows, sanctuaries, and sacred enclosures and in the pagan gods.

However, God tells Judah ( through Isaiah ) that the covenant cannot protect them when they have broken it by the worship of other gods and by acts of injustice and cruelty, which oppose God's law.

Forsaking the worship of God, they worshiped other gods, especially Baal, the Canaanite fertility god.

:" Being in great difficulty they fled to a neighbouring city ( ad civitatem, quæ iuxta erat, confugerunt ) and began to promise and offer to their gods -- But inasmuch as the city was not strong and there were few to offer resistance, they sent messengers to the Danes and asked for friendship and alliance.

:" Birka is the main Geatish town ( oppidum Gothorum ), situated in the middle of Sweden ( Suevoniae ), not far ( non longe ) from the temple called Uppsala ( Ubsola ) which the Swedes ( Sueones ) held in the highest esteem when it comes to the worship of the gods ; here forms an inlet of the Baltic or the Barbaric Sea a port facing north which welcomes all the wild peoples all around this sea but which is risky for those who are careless or ignorant of such places ... they have therefore blocked this inlet of the troubled sea with hidden masses of rocks along more than 100 stadions ( 18 km ).

Those who lived during the Shang Dynasty also believed that their ancestors — their parents and grandparents — became like gods when they died, and that their ancestors wanted to be worshipped, too, like gods.

Medhbh, however, attacks and wounds Corum, having been told by the being the Dagdah that their world must be free of all gods and demi-gods if they are to flourish as a people.

Although ditheism / bitheism imply moral dualism, they are not equivalent: ditheism / bitheism implies ( at least ) two gods, while moral dualism does not imply any-theism ( theos = god ) whatsoever.

Such gods, while keeping the original features of celestial divinities, i. e. transcendent heavenly power and abstention from direct rule in worldly matters, did not share the fate of other celestial gods in Indoeuropean religions-that of becoming dei otiosi or gods without practical purpose, since they did retain a particular sort of influence over the world and mankind.

For all their religious connotations, the emperors were not " gods " in the tradition of the Imperial cult — although they may have been hailed as such in Imperial panegyrics.

Instead, they were seen as the gods ' representatives, effecting their will on earth.

And yet when the gods appear deus ex machina, as they do in eight of the extant plays, they appear " lifeless and mechanical ".

The gods were not pleased, so they turned them all into birds.

The myths about these gods were meant to explain the origins and behavior of the forces they represented.

He acted as the intermediary between his people and the gods, and was obligated to sustain the gods through rituals and offerings so that they could maintain order in the universe.

Clement suggests that at first, men mistakenly believed the Sun, the Moon and other heavenly bodies to be gods.

Although he was a human, the pharaoh was believed to be descended from the gods.

The Egyptians believed in a pantheon of gods, which were involved in all aspects of nature and human society.

It could include gods adopted from foreign cultures, and sometimes even humans: deceased pharaohs were believed to be divine, and occasionally, distinguished commoners such as Imhotep also became deified.

The depictions of the gods in art were not meant as literal representations of how the gods might appear if they were visible, as the gods ' true natures were believed to be mysterious.

Originally, however, the Egyptians believed that only the pharaoh had a ba, and only he could become one with the gods ; dead commoners passed into a dark, bleak realm that represented the opposite of life.

Plutarch tells us that Fabius believed that the disaster at Lake Trasimene was due, in part, to the fact that the gods had become neglected.

Before that battle, a series of omens had been witnessed, including a series of lightning bolts, which Fabius had believed were warnings from the gods.

It is not known if Fabius truly believed that these actions had won the gods over to the Roman side, although the actions probably did ( as intended ) convince the average Roman that the gods had finally been won over.

They had believed his strategy to be flawed before, but now they thought him to be as wise as the gods.

Egyptians associated trees and gardens with gods as they believed that their deities were pleased by gardens.

When the gods were believed to be duly propitiated ... Armour, weapons, and other things of the kind were ordered to be in readiness, and the ancient spoils gathered from the enemy were taken down from the temples and colonnades.

Christian churches maintain such beings are distinct from " gods ", even though some churches authorize supplication, prayer and veneration of heavenly beings, angels, and saints, Christians who died in a state of grace and are believed to be in Heaven.

Many suggest that during the First Temple period, the people of Israel believed that each nation had its own god, but that their god was superior to other gods.

Frazer believed that primitive man starts out with a belief in magical laws ; later, when man begins to lose faith in magic, he invents myths about gods and claims that his formerly magical rituals are religious rituals intended to appease the gods.

The Mesopotamians believed their kings and queens were descended from the City of Gods, but, unlike the ancient Egyptians, they never believed their kings were real gods.

Some of the Aztec stories about Moctezuma describe him as being fearful of the Spanish newcomers, and some sources, such as the Florentine codex, comment that the Aztecs believed the Spaniards to be gods and Cortés to be the returned god Quetzalcoatl.

Hezekiah, the 14th king of Judah " did what was right in the eyes of the Lord " and institutes a far reaching religious reform, centralising sacrifice at the temple at Jerusalem and destroying the images of other gods.

Catullus and Callimachus did not describe the feats of ancient heroes and gods ( except perhaps in re-evaluating and predominantly artistic circumstances, e. g. poems 63 and 64 ), focusing instead on small-scale personal themes.

The practice goes back to the days of the Temple in Jerusalem, but then it was done for the different reason — that money offered to the temple did not have the images of pagan gods on it.

These links between deities were fluid, and did not represent the permanent merging of two gods into one ; therefore, some gods could develop multiple syncretic connections.

The Egyptians did have an aberrant period of some form of monotheism during the New Kingdom, in which the pharaoh Akhenaten abolished the official worship of other gods in favor of the sun-disk Aten.

The exclusion of all but one god was a radical departure from Egyptian tradition and some see Akhenaten as a practitioner of monolatry rather than monotheism, as he did not actively deny the existence of other gods ; he simply refrained from worshipping any but the Aten.

The gods showed Fenrir the silken fetter Gleipnir, told him to tear it, stated that it was much stronger than it appeared, passed it among themselves, used their hands to pull it, and yet it did not tear.

High replies that " so greatly did the gods respect their holy places and places of sanctuary that they did not want to defile them with the wolf's blood even though the prophecies say that he will be the death of Odin.

Likewise, even though the people of Israel worshipped other gods, God continued to love them and did not abandon his covenant with them.

Therefore, it is now generally agreed that the Greeks did not generally think of hubris as a religious matter, still less that it was normally punished by the gods.

But they did believe in lesser gods too.

New gods did not at once replace the old ; they initially joined the ever growing family of deities or were merged with existing ones that seemed to share similar characteristics or responsibilities.

As seen in the saga of Hrafnkell Freysgoði, however, being a priest consisted merely of offering periodic sacrifices to the Norse gods and goddesses ; it was not a full-time role, nor did it involve ordination.

Plautus did not make up or encourage irreverence to the gods, but reflected ideas of his time.

Aristeus did so, and Proteus eventually gave up and told him to sacrifice 12 animals to the gods, leave the corpses in the place of sacrifice, and return three days later.