Photo copyright Eylon
It has been said by some Wiccan authors that mixing mythological pantheons is bad and should be avoided at all costs. The usual argument given for this admonishment is that each pantheon, indeed each deity, has very specific features and should be treated individually. To equate one goddess with a similar goddess from another pantheon is seen as disrespectful. Each deity, it is argued, deserves to be treated as an individual. Bringing together deities and elements of worship from different pantheons is confusing and results in muddled worship and ritual. 1
This argument appears, at least on the surface, difficult to refute if we want to honor the deities as vibrant, powerful, and alive.
However, it seems the deities themselves are not so hard and fast about the distinctions between individual deities, not as unforgiving when worshippers use different names for them, as we simplistic modern humans would make them out to be. There is a long history of mixing pantheons that goes back to the dawn of human reverence of the divine. There are gods and goddesses that we take for granted today as being individual which are actually composite deities amalgamated in the distant past from more than one source deity. Why should modern reverence of ancient deities force them to fossilize when they were clearly organic and changeable in the past?
