Originally Posted by TakuanSoho

Interesting topic. I think this is true of certain demigods like Hercules. Before writing, time becomes a vague concept, so there is a tendency to do what I call "time compression", i.e. turning the slow development of hundreds even thousands of years into something that occurred within a generation. So in keeping with your theory I would say that this happened quite a lot, that many different people doing many different things turned into a single person doing all those things.

But for most gods, I disagree. I think they are more personifications of nature than ancestor worship. There is a strong belief in humanity that all actions have some agent causing them. This underlies the Aristotelian belief that the natural state of items is at rest unless something causes it to move. So something had to cause a storm, hence the cause is a god. Something causes the wheat to grow, that cause is a goddess. Myths were created to explain complex interaction of differing agents. Plants grow and die in a cycle, therefore the goddess of vegetation and the god of death have some sort of agreement (as personalized by the existence of Persephone). And so on.

The Greeks, being highly rationale, took this to greater extents than most other people at the time, which is why they had so many more gods.