When did the Greek Gods originate?

Answer 1

Before scientific knowledge available to us today, people invented divine forces to explain the forces of nature and events. We have physical archaeological evidence of this going back up to 60,000 years ago.

The familiar Greek gods were brought into Greece by nomads in the second millennium BCE, who replaced or overlaid the previous inhabitants and their gods. Being nomads, they had sky gods; the previous agricultural inhabitants of course had earth gods. The new gods had to absorb the old gods (just as in Christianity it has absorbed previous practices eg Christmas being reset from January to December to absorb the hard-to-stamp-out Saturnalia, and popular Isis was absorbed into Mary). So in Greece the earth goddess Demeter was retained as a mystery cult; Apollo raped the priestess at Delphi (ie pinched her shrine but kept the priestess and snake), etc etc.

We have an obvious high-god progression Uranus-Chronos-Zeus with each predecessor deposed by succeeding waves of nomadic invaders and their own substituted. And there were all the other gods who looked after different parts of the environment and activity (eg Hermes, as well as being messenger of the gods, was patron of medicine and thieves).

The Greeks themselves were aware of this succession of gods - the 5th Century BCE tragedies refer to 'the old gods' and 'the young gods' (ie the current ones).

Answer 2

The Greek myths were once religion. People have always sought to find reasons for things that they cannot understand. When the Greeks found out that the seasons change, weather happens, or that trees are a good thing, they made "gods" to rule the phenomenon they saw.

And thus was born Persephone, Zeus, and dryads. Just like any tradition, the Greek gods were a way to explain things that were/are unexplainable. While today science explains much of these things, there was no way to understand them at that time. But people thought that if one worshiped the "god" that had control over the particular event, one could gain favor...and disaster would not happen.

An interesting thing about the Greek method of "worship". One did not adore the god, one gave it stuff in order to keep the god from bugging you! The sacrifices, the gifts, and oblations were to appease the god or to curry favor. The concept of "live and let live" was very big in ancient Greece. So if you "worshiped" that particular god, s/he would not visit you...which was a very good thing.

People have always tried to manipulate their surroundings, or at least live in peace with nature. Since disasters happen with depressing frequency, the Greek myths were a way to explain how, if you had paid attention to the god, that disasters happened anyway. Each myth tells the solution to a particular problem. Zeus controls the weather and he had family problems. Persephone got kidnapped and Demeter quit taking care of the land until she found her daughter...so we have seasons. Dryads lived in the trees and if one died, the tree died.

The concept of the myths was to explain the phenomenon AND to perpetuate the "correct" theology. So they had whole families of gods and not one of them could control all of it. It was rather a "kingdom" of gods, like a ruling family. The only culture not to do this was the Israelites. They believed in only one God and that was unique among the cultures.

Answer 3

When people had almost no understanding of science and cause and effect in the physical world, they invented stories to explain 'how is it so' and 'why is it so'. These are myths - a story made up; a legend is a traditional story generally held to be true; history is an analysis of evidence and written to describe with reasonable certainty what actually did happen. While many myths are entirely fanciful, many contain elements of fact, though with the lapse of time and consequent distortions through endless retellings and modifications, it in virtually impossible to determine the fact from the fiction (the little tricky leprachauns at the bottom of an Irish garden probably reflect an early enslaved pigmy people). Greek mythology is a version of this chain. It derived over many centuries from different cultures - the early ones overlaid by incoming waves of immigrants/invaders. In Greek drama, they acknowledge, with 'old gods' and 'new gods', that there was indeed an overlay of one story on another. As examples, the succession of high gods Uranus->Chronos>Zeus shows incoming cultures overlaying earlier, and where Apollo rapes the priestess at Delphi, this is shorthand for the skygod of the nomadic incoming culture replacing the earth goddess of the existing agricultural culture.

Answer 4

Greece