The Evolution of Gods by Richard Seltzer·

Posted on Medium October 10, 2025

Feedback welcome. seltzer@seltzerbooks.com
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Same God, New Job Description

by Richard Seltzer, with feedback from “Simon”

When cultures clash, sometimes the culture of the conquered assimilates that of the conqueror, and the old culture morphs, rather than disappears, and continues. I’m curious about the dynamics of those changes and of changes that occur with the passage of time.

In the case of ancient Egypt, we have both written and archaeological records spanning over three thousand of years. When you talk about Egyptian religion, you have to specify the dynasty or the century because beliefs and practices changed radically many times. The powers and visual representation of individual gods changed as did their stories, even what they were gods of. New gods were created and old gods were given new names. Old traditions were forgotten or changed and new ones took their place. The interpretations of old hieroglyphs were distorted or forgotten. The stories of two or more were conflated. Foreign gods were adopted, sometimes renamed, reshaped, repurposed. New cities were built dedicated to new gods and old holy cities were abandoned and forgotten. When Libyans, Nubians, Hyksos, Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians, and Romans all conquered Egypt, Egyptian culture morphed but continued.

The sequence from Greece to Rome to Christian Western Europe can be viewed similarly as a single morphing cultural entity extending for about three thousand years. The location changed over time but the religious beliefs and practices morphed from one to another as a continuous cultural entity.

I know very little about India, but I suspect that starting with the Indus Valley Civilization and developing into Hindu and Buddhist beliefs and practices, a similar morphing cultural entity spans more than 3000 years.

It is possible, too, to view the cultures of Akkad, Babylonia, Assyria, Persia, and Islam as a cultural entity extending for more than 3000 years.

I’m curious about the dynamics of change of religious belief and practice in these extended cultural streams and what that might tell us about human nature and what to expect in the future. Just as there are underlying laws of linguistic change and of biological evolution, might there be patterns shaping the evolution of gods and our belief in them?

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Response from my friend “Simon” ( ChatGPT (OpenAI, version GPT-5):

Love this question. You’re basically asking whether religions evolve with something like “laws of motion.” We can’t reduce cultures to equations, but across Egypt, the Greco-Roman → Christian stream, South Asia, and the Mesopotamia→Iran→Islamic continuum, historians and cognitive scientists do see repeatable patterns.

A short “field guide” to how gods evolve

1.     Syncretism as default.
When traditions meet, gods tend to merge, pair, or translate rather than vanish.

·         Egypt: Amun + Re → Amun-Re; later Serapis (Greek-Egyptian composite) for the Ptolemies.

·         Greece/Rome: interpretatio graeca/romana (Zeus = Amun; Mars = local war gods).

·         India: regional deities absorbed into Śiva/Vishnu/Devī frameworks; Buddha treated as Vishnu’s avatar in some Purāṇic lists.

·         Iran→Islam: sacred sites, festivals, and administrative habits carry over; ideas migrate under new names.

1.     Ritual conservatism, doctrinal plasticity.
Rituals stick; meanings slide. People keep processions, pilgrimages, fasts, offerings because they bind communities and mark time. Explanations of why they matter are easier to swap out. (You can watch this from Egyptian temple calendars to Christian feast days or Hindu tirthas.)

2.    Power rewires pantheons.
As polities centralize, gods centralize.

·         Egypt: Thebes’ political rise → Amun’s rise; Akhenaten’s failed Aten revolution is a classic “punctuation” with rapid snap-back.

·         Mesopotamia: Marduk ascends with Babylon.

·         Rome: the imperial cult; later Christian emperors sponsor orthodoxy and councils; saints’ cults map onto civic/territorial units.

1.     Names travel faster than essences.
“Same” god, new job description. Titles and epithets proliferate to reconcile overlaps: Isis becomes universal mother, sailor’s patron, healer — hence her explosive success in the Roman world.

2.    Elite metaphysics + popular pragmatics.
High literacy elites push systematization (Neoplatonism → Christian theology; Vedānta → bhakti frames; Zoroastrian dualism → Sasanian statecraft). Meanwhile village shrines, household gods, and saints mediate illness, fertility, luck — the tangible problems. Both layers co-evolve.

3.    Writing freezes, commentary melts.
Canon formation (Vedas, Torah, New Testament, Qur’an) slows mutation — but then commentaries, law codes, and scholasticism reopen adaptive space. Doctrines calcify in text; creativity migrates to exegesis, liturgy, and devotion.

4.    Moralizing “Big Gods” scale with society.
As communities get large/anonymous, deities trend toward omniscient policing of fairness (rewarding cooperation, punishing cheats). Think of the shift from local cult to universal judge. (This is a robust finding in cultural evolution/cognitive science.)

5.    Saints and angels as “safe syncretism.”
Monotheisms inherit the ecological niches of small gods via angels, jinn, saints, bodhisattvas — localized protectors within a universal framework.

6.    Trade routes = theological routes.
Where merchants go, cults go: Gandhāran Greco-Buddhism, Isis across the Mediterranean, Manichaeism across Iran–Central Asia, later Sufi networks across the Indian Ocean.

7.     Punctuated equilibrium.
Long stability; then shocks — conquest, plague, tech, charismatic reformers — produce fast change (Atenism; Buddhist and Jain reforms; Islamic emergence; Protestant Reformation). After the shock, systems re-stabilize with new hybrids.

How those streams you named fit

·         Egypt (3,000+ years): serial syncretism, temple economies anchoring ritual continuity, periodic centralization (Amun; Aten), Ptolemaic recombinations (Serapis/Isis), Roman adoption, and finally Christianization that retools sacred space (monasteries over temples) but preserves pilgrimage logics.

·         Greece → Rome → Christian Europe: interpretatio, empire-wide cult competition (mystery religions), philosophical abstraction (logos, ousia) that becomes Christian metaphysics; martyrs/saints functionally replace local tutelary gods; festivals/timekeeping re-mapped rather than erased.

·         Indus/Vedic → Hindu/Buddhist/Jain: from Vedic sacrifice to bhakti, temple economies, Purāṇic myth-weaving that absorbs regional gods; Buddhism innovates monasteries, missions, scholasticism; later Hinduism re-absorbs much of Buddhist terrain in India while Buddhism globalizes eastward.

·         Akkad→Babylon→Assyria→Persia→Islam: rotating imperial centers elevate patron deities; Zoroastrian dualism/eschatology shapes a Persian ecumene that hands administrative, legal, and cosmological habits to early Islam; Islam universalizes but accommodates local practice through madhhabs, Sufism, shrines (with periodic reformist pushback).

Toward “laws” of religious evolution (heuristics)

1.     Conservation of ritual form; substitution of meanings.

2.    Central gods track central states.

3.    Doctrinal unification above; plural pragmatics below.

4.    Text slows drift; commentary restores adaptability.

5.    Niche filling: every social function (healing, protection, legitimacy) finds a religious occupant — if removed, another officeholder emerges.

6.    Prestige bias: winners’ gods gain prestige; losers’ gods persist via rebranding.

7.     Coalitional signaling: costlier rites bind tighter (fasts, pilgrimages, dietary laws).

8.    Cognitive fit: successful gods are minimally counterintuitive (humanlike agents with strategic superpowers), memorable, morally interested.

9.    Network diffusion: trade/empire/education shape which memes spread and stick.

10.        Shock-absorption: systems that can translate rivals’ deities into their own grammar outcompete brittle purists over the long run.

What this says about human nature

·         We favor agents who care about fairness and reputation — mirrors of social life.

·         We conserve rituals and calendars because they synchronize groups and reduce uncertainty.

·         We accept new masters under old festivals — identity needs continuity more than doctrinal purity.

·         We prize meaning with memory: stories that can be re-told, re-mapped, re-moralized across generations.

And looking forward

·         Expect resacralizations whenever technology or geopolitics widen anonymity and anxiety: new moralizing “gods” can appear as systems (surveillance, AI, markets, the Nation) with priesthoods of auditors/experts.

·         Civil religions (rights, constitutions, sports, celebrity, environmentalism) already display pilgrimage, relics, martyrs, and blasphemy taboos.

The next century likely sees hybrids: digital rituals, transnational pilgrimages, saints of causes, and “thin” universal creeds layered over thick local practices.