Always has been. First the Great Mother was buried for three days, kept prisoner underground by her sister Death until she was rescued by Ninshubur (perhaps, from ancient Sumeria, the first recorded resurrection story).
Then Persephone had to spend half the year underground because Demeter her mother had offended the wrong deity, and poor old Osirus was killed by Seth and had his body parts scattered over the Nile, until the Great Mother, now in the person of Isis, lay upon the river as moonlight and gathered him together again thereby conceiving Horus.
And we haven’t even got to the Celtic gods yet. Lugh the thunderstorm deity was a warrior who slew other gods between fathering heroes, and the Celtic goddess Babd was a supernatural demon who would bring about the end of the Earth (although she also was goddess of enlightenment and wisdom). Her English name is Crow.
Like Astarte, also over in the Middle East, the Irish goddess Morrigan was a Goddess of War. Celtic gods who killed other gods are too numerous to mention, as are the Asian ones. Consider the bloodthirsty goddess Kali. Even Shiva the Hindu protector was also dubbed the destroyer.
Meanwhile, Jehovah was kicking Adam and Eve out of paradise, and kicking the Great Mother out of the Judaeo-Christian pantheon altogether.
Many deities of love, wisdom, nature and plenty also populated the pantheons which human civilizations came up with, but they’re always beset by violent counterparts and lethal rivalries – amazingly similar to human society in that way.
Odin, Zeus, Astarte and Indra are boss-gods who mirror the bloodthirsty rivalries of human kings, queens, presidents and leaders of revolts and revolutions. Given our dual nature, compassionate and violent, cooperative and competitive, it’s no surprise that our deities are equally conflicted, being supernatural mirrors of ourselves. The gods experience what we experience, writ large and projected against our background conception of eternity, behaving, as do we, like packs of ravenous dogs. What other kind of world, being our archetypal doubles, would our gods live in? Considering the examples we have worshipfully made them reflect back to ourselves, it’s no surprise that they and we act out the same dramas.
As every practitioner of visualization knows, action follows thought. What we imagine is what we become.
