I’m reading through some Indian myth right now, and I’m blown away by the number of gods that just represent the sun. There are multiple gods and goddesses representing the earth. There are many war gods (principally Indra, but also Soma). The Indian pantheon has been quoted as numbering the millions, but this probably assumes that every worshipped dead body is also a god of some kind, which isn’t useful for our purposes. It seems safer to assume that the Indian pantheon numbers in the hundreds, possibly over a thousand.
The Greek pantheon is quoted at being somewhere in the hundreds. The Roman pantheon, dozens.
Let’s make a hard pivot: Sanskrit (the language of the Hindu texts) has a system of declensions whereby words can be modified to “agree” with the rest of the sentence. We only have a few of these in English. For instance, contrast the sentences “I gave him the pen” with the sentence “He gave me the pen”. English pronouns still possess this declension aspect; the words must “agree” with the case they are used in, but nouns generally don’t need this. You say “the cat fought the dog” and “the dog fought the cat”. You don’t have to qualify these nouns. There is only one declension in English nouns: the -s to denote plurals. But in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, nouns have myriad required declensions depending on the case.
Sanskrit is notorious for having thousands of potential declensions, possibly up to 6000. Greek has hundreds (possibly 300-600), and Latin has 250-500. Old Persian, also in the family, has hundreds (possibly 300-500) declension possibilities, with dozens of gods in its pantheon, similar to Latin.
There seems to be a correlation between the declension potential of a language and the number of gods in the pantheon of its speakers, at least in Indo-Aryan languages. Note these are very rough numbers, but the trend seems true:
- Sanskrit: 1000-6000 declensions, hundreds-1000 gods
- Greek: 300-600 declensions, hundreds of gods
- Old Persian: 300-500 declensions, dozens of gods
- Latin: 250-500 declensions, dozens of gods
- English: 1 declension, ??? gods (0???)
Is there a logical relationship between declensions and numbers of gods? Could it be that number of a pantheon’s gods represents the number of relationships words can have within language? If that’s true, then this only confirms what the ROBA Hypothesis claims: that language and religion emerge simultaneously from the need to defer violence at the origin. It would be pointless to say that one came before the other.
A further study would look into how monotheism (and iconoclasm) emerged within Semitic thought and what relationship this has with their linguistic inflection. Semitic languages derive their vocabularies from a small subset of sound combinations (called “parent” in 2-sound and “child” in 3-sound forms in Hebrew), and further modifications and additions are made to these words to continue expanding the lexicon. The reconfiguration of Hebrew leading up to the establishment of the nation of Israel would be worth studying, as would the consolidation of Arabic out of all the local Arab dialects. The two have vastly different histories, but might reveal other parallels between language and religion.
I discuss this connection briefly in my upcoming book If These Fists Could Talk: A Stuntman’s Unflinching Take on Violence which will be available Jan. 2025 on Amazon.