Making a religion...

[gavintonks]

dad in Akkadian and Ishkur in Sumerian and Hadad in Aramaic are the names of the storm-god in the Babylonian-Assyrian pantheon. All three are usually written by the logogram dIM. The Akkadian god Adad is cognate in name and functions with northwest Semitic god Hadad.

In Akkadian, Adad is also known as Ramman ("Thunderer") cognate with Aramaic Rimmon which was a byname of the Aramaic Hadad. Ramman was formerly incorrectly taken by many scholars to be an independent Babylonian god later identified with the Amorite god Hadad.

The Sumerian Ishkur appears in the list of gods found at Fara but was of far less importance than the Akkadian Adad later became, probably partly because storms and rain are scarce in southern Babylonia and agriculture there depends on irrigation instead. Also, the gods Enlil and Ninurta also had storm god features which decreased Ishkur's distinctiveness. He sometimes appears as the assistant or companion of one or the other of the two.

When Enki distributed the destinies, he made Ishkur inspector of the cosmos. In one litany Ishkur is proclaimed again and again as "great radiant bull, your name is heaven" and also called son of An, lord of Karkara; twin-brother of Enki, lord of abundance, lord who rides the storm, lion of heaven.

In other texts Adad/Ishkur is sometimes son of the moon god Nanna/Sin by Ningal and brother of Utu/Shamash and Inana/Ishtar. He is also occasionally son of Enlil.

Adad/Ishkur's consort (both in early Sumerian and later Assyrian texts) was Shala, a goddess of grain, who is also sometimes associated with the god Dagan. She was also called Gubarra in the earliest texts. The fire god Gibil (named Gerra in Akkadian) is sometimes the son of Ishkur and Shala.

 

[gavintonks]

Zu, also known as Anzu and Imdugud, in Sumerian, (from An "heaven" and Zu "to know", in the Sumerian language) is a lesser divinity of Akkadian mythology, and the son of the bird goddess Siris. He was conceived by the pure waters of the Apsu and the wide Earth.[1] Both Zu and Siris are seen as massive birds who can breathe fire and water, although Zu is alternately seen as a lion-headed eagle (cf: The Griffin).
Zu as a lion-headed eagle, ca. 2550–2500 BC, Louvre

Anzu was a servant of the chief sky god Enlil, guard of the throne in Enlil's sanctuary, (possibly previously a symbol of Anu), from whom Anzu stole the Tablet of Destinies, so hoping to determine the fate of all things. In one version of the legend, the gods sent Lugalbanda to retrieve the tablets, who in turn, killed Anzu. In another, Ea and Belet-Ili conceived Ninurta for the purpose of retrieving the tablets. In a third legend, found in The Hymn of Ashurbanipal, Marduk is said to have killed Anzu.
Mesopotamian myth

In Sumerian and Akkadian mythology, Zu is a divine storm-bird and the personification of the southern wind and the thunder clouds. This demon, half man and half bird, stole the "Tablets of Destiny" from Enlil and hid them on a mountaintop. Anu ordered the other gods to retrieve the tablets, even though they all feared the demon. According to one text, Marduk killed the bird, but in another text it died through the arrows of the god Ninurta. The bird is also referred to as Imdugud or Anzu.
Babylonian myth

A Babylonian deity associated with cosmogeny, represented as stripping the father of the gods of umsimi, usually translated "crown" but, as it was on the seat of Bel it was actually the "ideal creative organ." "Ham is the Chaldean Zu, and both are cursed for the same allegorically described crime," which parallels the mutilation of Uranos by Kronos and of Set by Horus.

 

[gavintonks]

another link to literally every god
Thousands of NAMES OF GODS, GODDESSES, DEMIGODS, MONSTERS, SPIRITS, DEMONS   & DEITIES for your dog, horse, cat, pet or child - from Chinaroad Lowchens of Australia

 

[Chilari]

Did you just copy a load of wikipedia pages into posts? Because that's how it reads. Doesn't read like your normal syntax in any case. Please avoid doing that as it creates a wall of text not everyone will want to read through; please instead provide links to relevant pages, explaining their relevance, in one concise post. In any case Wikipedia' reliablity is notoriously lax. From what I read there, it counds more like an argument that a lot of gods were thunder gods than an objective examination.

Also given that I spent four years studying ancient Greece and never once heard of any person or deity called Brontes, with or without an association with Thunder, I am rather dubious as to whether all of the listed thunder gods were chief gods, as you claim, let alone major gods.

In any case, there are plenty of chief gods who are not associated with thunder, and at least two named who are the same guy (Jupiter = Zeus, even to the point where classicists until about 1850 used the Roman names when translating Greek texts like the Iliad into English, French and so on).

Regardless of how many chief gods were linked in some way to a relatively uncommon meterological event (compared to, say, clear skies and sunshine), this is a worldbuilding thread about creating a religion; and religions are varied and they are about far more than just deities; they are about the way those deities are worshipped, what people believe they are capable of, what people believe about the world around them and what happens when they die and what's really happening up there in the sky with the sun rising and setting every day. Religion, if embedded deeply enough in a culture, is a medium through which people interact with the world around them. It need not involve praying or sacrificing bulls or eating funny coloured mushrooms, it may not have great architecture or sacred springs or shrines. It is about belief, about how people interact with belief and how they let that belief shape their lives and societies. And it's not always about thunder gods.

There wasn't a word for religion in ancient Greece. Why define something so deeply embedded in culture? And at the same time there's a very blurred line, or perhaps not a line at all, between ancient Greek "religion" and "magic". The gods were called upon in spells and curses, or to protect the recent dead from people seeking to place curse tablets in their graves. Items considered magical - like, in the late archaic and early classical periods, something with an adecedarium on (that's the letters of the alphabet in sequence) - were dedicated at shrines to the gods.

 

[Shockley]

A religion debate touching on linguistics. I might just be dead.

If a fictional example counts, there's Manwe from Tolkien's Silmarillion. He's the Lord of Winds, and governs the sky and clouds. Though not specifically a thunder god per se, he creates weather in collaboration with Ulmo, the Lord of Water (whose domain includes rain, snow, etc. as well as oceans, lakes and rivers). But again, they're not real-world deities, so yeah.

In most mythologies, there is a distinction between a 'weather god' and a 'thunder god.' That's not universal, but that's usually true. For example, Thor is the Norse thunder god, while Frey is the weather god.

Polytheistic peoples of many cultures have postulated a Thunder God, the personification or source of the forces of thunder and lightning; a lightning god does not have a typical depiction, and will vary based on the culture. Frequently, the Thunder God is known as the chief or king of the gods, e.g. Indra in Hinduism, Zeus in Greek mythology, and Perun in ancient Slavic religion; or a close relation thereof, e.g. Thor, son of Odin, in Norse mythology.

Normally, I wouldn't respond to something so obviously cribbed from Wikipedia, but I'll do so. With the exception of Indra, I mentioned each of those figures. Still, that's substantially less than 1% of the polytheistic pantheons in existence.

In Greek mythology, The Elysian Fields, or the Elysian Plains, the final resting places of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous, evolved from a designation of a place or person struck by lightning, enelysion, enelysios.

I hate to be the guy to do this, but this is one of those instances where a Wiki author found one source for something and only one.

The exact etymology of the term 'Elysian' is, as of this moment, undetermined. I went through my own books, did an internet search and even followed up on Walter Burkert, the claimed source of the etymology. Luckily, his book is in the public domain. Burkert himself says the word is, to quote, 'an obscure and mysterious name' and then repeats the above assertion that it derives from Enelysion. Looking at websites, his books seems to be the sole source of the claim.

Egyptologist Jan Assmann has also suggested that Greek Elysion may have instead been derived from the Egyptian term ialu (older iaru), meaning "reeds," with specific reference to the "Reed fields" (Egyptian: sekhet iaru / ialu), a paradisiacal land of plenty where the dead hoped to spend eternity.[2]

The Egyptians gods are actually planets and the reeds are the milky way as in heaven so on earth, hence all the great religeous structures are represented on earth.

Rule of thumb: Ignore Egyptologists. They are, quite possibly, the only academic group worse than anthropologists when it comes to making insane assertions about other fields.

I'll just go down the list of gods presented:

Teshub – Kumarbi is the chief god
Adad, Ishkur, Marduk – This is an odd grouping. Adad and Ishkur are probably the same god, but Marduk is most certainly a distinct entity. Either way, Adad is not the head of his pantheon.

In addition, the idea that Marduk is a thunder god is mistaken. He uses lightning to fight Tiamat (also fire, the four winds and a net), but that wasn't something he was ever associated with. He was a glorified fertility god.

Hadad is Adad. They really botched this classification.

Tarhunt is not the chief of that pantheon.

Brontes is, obviously, not the chief god of the Greek pantheon – he is not even a god. He's a cyclops.

The term 'Pan-Celtic' should never be used for Taranis. He was a particularly popular Gallic god, with limited popularity in some German regions. Certainly not the head of his pantheon. You can't even say that Ambisagrus is a thunder god – we can't say anything about Ambisagrus, because all we know is the name. Loucetios is a war god.

These guys are grouped together because the Celts had a habit of triad worship. Three gods, worshiped in conjunction to make a divine whole. The only argument that could be made for the latter two is that their 'divine whole' is approximately one third thunder god.

It's intellectually dishonest to devote two lines to regional names for Thor and two lines for regional names of Perun. Only the Perun from is recognized as a chief god.

A google search (I don't know anything about Illyrian myth) seems to indicate this is a match. You're at five.

A similar google search at Gebeleizis discredits that claim. Apparently, information on him was missing as far back as Classical Greece, so they just picked a god to tack him on. Zibelthiurdos seems to be in the same boat but, knowing that Dacian comes from PIE and that being my best language, I could see how that would be a thunder god (thiur and dos are big giveaways). That said, none of that indicates that he was a chief god (your chief god, more than likely, would have a name with an -eos or -ios ending) (Addendum: Google search indicates that the chief Dacian god was Sabazios.)

Ukko/Perkele is a sad story, as it has the same problems as the Nordic gods. We only learn of it, extensively, through Christian sources and their own biases. We can say that Ukko (of which Perkele is just another name) was a god of weather, but whether he was a thunder god or that said portfolio was tacked on to justify him to an audience used to Olympic gods we have no real clue.

I didn't know Horagalles, but a quick google search indicates it's just a regional name for Thor. Ergo, probably not the chief god.

'Aplu,' I'm assuming, is there attempt at remembering 'Apulu.' I'm betting you can guess which 'Classic' god this is and why he's neither a thunder god nor a chief god.

As for the last name on the European list, I don't know it. So off to google. After reading a full article on the mythology (which seems fairly basic and tribal, with strong PIE influences giving me a good idea as to how it would have developed), I didn't even see the name listed, though Verdan Skai is listed as their supreme deity.

I don't have the expertise to comment on the other areas, but it's obvious that your list (Wikipedia's list) is of thunder gods/gods that kind of sort of had something vaguely to do with weather doesn't even address the idea of them being the chief god, which was the point of contention.

The Venus of lespugue is the coloured in milky way female side, the nascar lines are the dark spaces in the milky way, the ancients understanding of the cosmos is frightening in its complexity, the incas created a stone calender accurate for 26 000 years.

Uh, dafuq just happened?

 

[Snowpoint]

Game of Thrones handles this well. We only see enough detail of a single religion to say "that is animist" or "that is catholic" A story is about people, not theology. We don't need any details about the religion itself. The only important part is, "How does this motivate my character to action?"

When we see Ned Stark praying in the godswood, we don't really know the rules of his religion. All we know is that Ned is a true believer and being there gives him comfort. That is all we need to know.

 

[Varamyrr]

wow, I didn't expect the start a discussion this large
Anyway, thanks for the input guys.

But I'm still trying to figure out how a religion can be interpreted in different ways. For instance, in The hunchback of Notre Dame you see Frollo on one side and Esmeralda on the other side. The way is it captured is sublime and is something to which I aim for.

 

[gavintonks]

I copied some of the text for convenience which I apologize but I have also studied religions for my book and have spent hours in libraries and tracking down old documents and concepts to get to the root causes of what religion is. I have also studied the 5major publications on Greek and roman mythology and religion and their are hundreds of lesser known localized religions and sects.
Every town literally had its own story and wars and conquest forced people into changing belief. Even with all the written data that we have on the Romans we still find lost towns . It is also naive to pronounce that we know everything, their are hundreds of bibles many suppressed by major religions to keep people in the dark, Their are books like the Oasphe, the trimegestus hermetic, the devils bible and the list goes on and on, I think brin had a list of esoteric books in one of his novels and every one of them was a well documented manuscript of relative information.

 

[gavintonks]

I think we are lost in the woods the man wants to design a religion nit nit pick that we know what the religion meant 3500 years ago, the main point is that thunder and lightning are creations from nothing and are the most powerful natural forces in the belief of man. When you need to eat and food is related to the weather, having a weather god you can pray to to assist dying a slow and horrible death is a good reason to have a god. When the sun wanes and it gets cold and freezing and you give up hope sacrifice something on the equinox, preferably a few humans who there is no food for in any case and hey presto the sun gets stronger again

 

[gavintonks]

Christianity is a collection of 35 000 religions as each church grabs some specific piece of information and bases their faith on it, from the virgin Mary to how many times you are born

 

[Chilari]

I think we are lost in the woods the man wants to design a religion nit nit pick that we know what the religion meant 3500 years ago, the main point is that thunder and lightning are creations from nothing and are the most powerful natural forces in the belief of man. When you need to eat and food is related to the weather, having a weather god you can pray to to assist dying a slow and horrible death is a good reason to have a god. When the sun wanes and it gets cold and freezing and you give up hope sacrifice something on the equinox, preferably a few humans who there is no food for in any case and hey presto the sun gets stronger again

It sounds to me like you've fixated on a conclusion and are researching for data to support it. Not the way to do, well, anything really, from science to history to politics.

In any case, this thread remains a Worldbuilding thread about how one should go about creating a religion, not a Research thread about real world religions.

 

[Lucipher]

just base it off another religion

 

[gavintonks]

It sounds to me like you've fixated on a conclusion and are researching for data to support it. Not the way to do, well, anything really, from science to history to politics.

It never ceases to amaze me how you drag these conclusions out of fresh air and make statements like this. I do not put words in your mouth do not put words in mine. If you think I have some concept or idea why not ask me and I will tell you but please do not think for me.

In any case, this thread remains a Worldbuilding thread about how one should go about creating a religion, not a Research thread about real world religions.

I am not sure how you have come to this conclusion, I how you can possibly make an assumption that you can create a religion with no understanding of real world religion and what it is about?
How can he create something plausible without it being based in a reality that the reader has experienced? What i your beef with the information I have supplied you have started playing my statements and not the thread. It is up to the thread poser to draw conclusions from the information I am posting and not become a big argument about what and how I have researched.

I do not take umberance to any statements that are made or people that have posted, I have replied to the poster directly with information based on my experience and research, so it amazes me that these comments are directed at me, play the thread

 

[Chilari]

You have asserted something about religions ("all religions have a Thunder god as chief"). Others have provided evidence which conflicts with this conclusion ("Not all chief gods have a thunder affiliation"). You have continued to assert it. That is ignoring evidence to preserve the conclusion. That is why I made my first statement. I did not drag a conclusion out of fresh air.

As for the rest, the OP has asked how to create a religion in the Worldbuilding forum. Research is certainly something he should be doing; I do not claim that a religion can be created without knowledge of real religions and never have. But this is not a research thread, this is a thread about how to create a religion as a writer. Posting things that you believe about religion isn't answering the question posed. The OP hasn't created a research thread or asked for help researching real world religions. He has asked how to create a fictional religion. Advice such as deciding how many gods there are, or what ground-level beliefs people hold about the world they live in, is answering the question and is therefore helpful. Arguing about something that has not been asked for is neither relevant nor helpful and, especially with the way you post reply after reply rather than keeping it all in one post, clogs up the thread.

I am not taking umbrage with you. I am taking umbrage with the fact that this thread has derailed into your personal crusade to prove that all chief gods are thunder gods. What you research or don't is irrelevant in a thread about worldbuilding (unless your research was about how writers worldbuild). If people come asking about something relevant to your research in the Research forum, you are welcome to tell them all you like, and others are welcome to contest whatever claims you make with evidence and reason. And in worldbuilding threads if something you research is touched on, it is appropriate to brush on your research briefly, though making an absolute claim is ill-advised (much better to say that many chief gods appear to have a thunder affiliation, for example, rather than outright assert that all definitely did, then get annoyed when someone else presents information to the contrary). But this level of detail, with wikipedia pages pasted in, is nothing short of derailing a thread.

 

[Ravana]

A religion debate touching on linguistics. I might just be dead. [et considerable cetera]

Double-plus thank you.

…knowing that Dacian comes from PIE and that being my best language…

Uhm… PIE is your best language? I'm impressed.

(Yes, I know you probably meant Greek.)

•

Yes, Aplu/Apulu is taken to be an Etruscan equivalent for Apollo.

I'll have to work on Atämshkai; I have some resources on Uralic languages. (The creation story—both versions—are common to many Uralic peoples, by the by, so I wouldn't look too hard for PIE influence there.)

 

[Ravana]

another link to literally every god
Thousands of NAMES OF GODS, GODDESSES, DEMIGODS, MONSTERS, SPIRITS, DEMONS * & DEITIES for your dog, horse, cat, pet or child - from Chinaroad Lowchens of Australia

Literally… wrong. It didn't take me ten seconds to find an omission, less than a minute to find several; it took me only a little longer to confirm that not all of those omissions were covered anywhere in the massive list of links, either. (Several of which are broken, should anyone care.)

 

[Svrtnsse]

Keep in mind that a religion doesn't have to have a god associated with it. Even if gods are a reality and known to exist in your world the religions don't necessarily have to get it right.

 

[Shockley]

Uhm… PIE is your best language? I'm impressed.

(Yes, I know you probably meant Greek.)

No, I mean reconstructed PIE. My Greek is middling to poor, though I can generally make out what I'm reading.

I had a solid basis in Latin due to an elementary school program, Greek due to my mother having been raised in Greece/visiting that country and Old Norse due to a real fascination with that culture, so figuring out the workings of PIE was less difficult for me than it is for others.

Obviously, there are limits to my knowledge of the tongue as it's reconstructed, but I have a working grasp of it better than my other areas.



One last derail, then I am going to let this thread return to its natural course:

I don't think thunder is a 'primordial' element to any religion or chief god - it says a lot that the few confirmed chiefs (Indra, Zeus, Jupiter and Perun) with thunder characteristics all come from cultures that originate from Indo-European peoples. That no convincing Asiatic, African, Semitic, etc. examples were provided says all that really needs to be said.

But I'll push it further. If their is a primordial god-element, and I don't think there is, it's water. The water is the force of creation, with everything else seeming to be secondary. That's water in whatever form - rain, steam, oceans, seas, lakes, ice, etc.

 

[Ravana]

[With apologies: derail continued, hopefully concluded… probably only Shockley will care about this, but I'm having too much fun not to round it out. ]

No, I mean reconstructed PIE. My Greek is middling to poor, though I can generally make out what I'm reading. … Obviously, there are limits to my knowledge of the tongue as it's reconstructed, but I have a working grasp of it better than my other areas.

Then I'm definitely impressed.

I've done coursework in Spanish, Latin, German, Sanskrit and Chinese (it was offered in high school: how could I pass it up?). I will, however, read anything that doesn't run fast enough… even if I have to pick up a new script to do so. My language library has dictionaries/grammars/both for, at last count, 117 languages (I may have missed one or two); as far as I'm aware, every major language group is represented in there somewhere, along with no few minor ones, an isolate or two, and several that are no longer spoken. Can I claim solid knowledge in all, or even most of those? Hell, no: that's why I collect the reference books.

Which brings us to an update on Atämshkai. Unfortunately, I only have references on the major Uralic languages–Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian. Thought I had more. (I did a grad-level paper on Nenets once; apparently I was limited to library resources. My reading German got a whole lot better that term.…) As Moksha is so remote it isn't even mutually intelligible with the other Mordvinic language, Erzya, these are pretty much useless. So what I have been able to determine is based on web sources. I really miss the days when I lived a five minutes' walk from a major university research library… sigh.

One item I have been able to verify: /shkai/ is, uncontroversially, "sun." Which means that Atämshkai is highly unlikely to have been a thunder god originally… he might be totally misidentified as such. I have–barely–been able to verify that there is a being named Atämshkai; "barely" because in the process I was reminded of my limited ability to read Cyrillic (need to practice more), the far more limited ability of machine translators, and in particular their limits re: languages that aren't actually available for said translation.

In other words, I found a reliable source… in Cyrillic… but not in Russian. It was in Moksha.

Here's what Google Translate did to the first passage I put in, on the assumption I was seeing Russian:

Преданиять коряс П. шачсь кичкор пильгокс, сяс Чипазсь и Анге Патяйсь ёрдазь сонь Масторть лангс, коса сон эрясь снярс, мзярс ашезь са пинге рьвяямс.

Predaniyat koryas P. shachs kichkor pilgoks, SNF Chipazs and Ange Patya erdaz dormice Mastort langs, Xhosa dream eryas snyars, mzyars ashez sa ping rvyayams.

All things considered, I suspect the only word in there which isn't a false cognate is "and." Which put paid to getting much else out of that particular source on anything other than an intensive, painstaking basis.

Note that the passage mentions Chipaz, the Erzya sun god and equivalent to Shkai ( = /chi/; /paz/ is simply Erzya for "god"), Ange Patya, the Erzya "mother of gods"; presumably, Mastort is a form of either Mastoron, the earth god, or Mastorpaz, god of the underworld… so this is a genealogy. Assuming Moksha geneaology mirrors what's given in the (Wikipedia) entry on Erzya mythology, Atämshkai would be the equivalent of Pur'ginepaz, the child of Ange Patya's daughter, and is a third-generation deity of comparatively minor importance; his father is not given. One might suspect that Pur'ginepaz as a thunder god arose from syncretization with Russian Perun, however… especially since the morpheme /purga/ (see below) originally referred to snowstorms, not thunder. Given that the entry on Moksha mythology is completely different from that on Erzya–and, conversely, matches Uralic mythology I've seen elsewhere–one might also suspect that Atämshkai and everyone else in his "family" were borrowed into the tradition from whatever source influenced the Erzya pantheon presented.

Should anyone wish to brave further research, the site–which is an extensive, academic encyclopedia on Moksha mythology and folklore, and looks like it would be really neat if only you could read it–here's the link to the specific article in question:

íÃËÛÜÒÚÑÎØ ÃÉÆÃÃŒÃÇÉÑÓØ

The /atäm/ part I have been unable to track down. I found one reasonably thorough, if dated, page on reconstructing Proto-Uralic, but that morpheme does not appear there. I tried several variations, and also fed in about three dozen different English words that might have proved fruitful, including anything vaguely related to weather. There were some intriguing possibilities, but I don't think they bear out. In any event, words related to weather were farther from /atäm/ than several others which were not, and as a rule were not close enough you could make it to /atäm/ even with a compass, a fertile imagination, and a Greenberg tourist guide. Which isn't conclusive, as we're talking about a limited corpora here: the relevant morpheme might simply have not been included.

So I'm not certain identifying Atämshkai as a weather god is correct in the first place, unless /shkai/ in this case is a coincidental resemblance, and we're in fact dealing with completely different morphemes altogether. (Were it not for the Värden Shkai example, I would have been tempted to gloss this as "father of the people," i.e. /ata - moksha/. However, "father" was among the possibilities I tried that didn't pay out.) What is fairly transparent is that this was not the chief deity of a pantheon. Värden Shkai must, I think, be seen as syncretic, rising to "supreme" status as a result of Christian influence… and in any case is most definitely not a thunder god.

In case anyone cares, it also seems Shkai may have begun as female.

---

Enough about that. Shockley's other "derail," which I actually don't think is one:

If their is a primordial god-element, and I don't think there is, it's water. The water is the force of creation, with everything else seeming to be secondary. That's water in whatever form - rain, steam, oceans, seas, lakes, ice, etc.

I'd say water and earth: it's highly unusual not to find an earth deity as a major figure in a given group. At which point it becomes mostly a question of "who came first"–and I agree that, for a great many traditions, it is water. I'm not sure I'd want to go so far as to say they are a majority; I'd want to do a focused count. Keep in mind that many of those come from the same area, too–the Near and Middle East, on to India–or were their direct descendants; this may not bear out elsewhere. In the Uralic creation myths, for example (I remember those coming up somewhere… ), water preexists any mentioned deities, is not personified, and is a passive background from which the seeds of creation are retrieved.

I'd put sky and/or sun as a distant third contender. Weather, of any sort, is never "primordial" to the best of my knowledge: even the ancients recognized this as a phenomenon, not an element: something transient, not something permanent. Whether or not it was tacked on to a supreme being at a later date, or if a weather god was promoted to head of pantheon, is a different matter… and in fact, in the cases I'm familiar with, the weather god was promoted–he was not initially "supreme": Zeus is a perfect example here.

 

[Ravana]

Keep in mind that a religion doesn't have to have a god associated with it. Even if gods are a reality and known to exist in your world the religions don't necessarily have to get it right.

I agree… to the extent that there might be, let's call them "empty," religions, ones for which the deity they worship does not exist.

I'd state one reservation, however: it still depends heavily on to what extent the gods interact with the world. If the interaction is regular and demonstrable, then a form of "Religious Darwinism" will cause those religions which do not have an existent patron to die out, as worshippers will favor faiths from which they derive benefits they can clearly see.

Even that's assuming that the deities behind those faiths aren't of the "jealous" variety: if they are, then the "empty" ones will simply be exterminated as rapidly as they arise… and new ones arising will be highly unlikely.