The Nature and Names of the Gods
Here is the next section of The New Pagans’ Handbook:
Names
Names are but labels, not the thing itself. However, we feel more comfortable in the presence of an object when we have named it. This is also true of people and certainly of Gods. The name should be capable of carrying more than one idea and more than one aspect of personality. It should carry with it its legend and express the persona of the God. It can be considered as being a shorthand form of all the qualities that the God possesses. It is not the God.
As with all matters of great moment simplicity should be sought. The complex explains little but its own obscurity. We must go carefully and prefer the childlike and simple, for to young children there is little difficulty in names; Mum and Dad would be good enough. Sometimes also children invent secret names for the persons or things they prize. A secret name is a word of power, and it may be that behind our adoption of an obvious and simple name there can also be a secret one shared only with the group and helping to give its members a sense of comradeship and cohesion.
And here is an article by Ron White on the nature and names of the Gods, originally published in Spectrum in 1975:
Who are the Gods?
All over the ancient world the smoke of incense rose incessantly to the heavens from the altars of Goddesses and Gods.
Their attributes were many and their powers various. Devotees frequented the homes of their chosen divinity.
Travellers from city to city might not find their home Gods exactly represented either in ritual or name; yet the similarities were sufficient for a man of Corinth to discover no unease at a temple in Ephesus.
The intelligent knew these deities were aspects of divinity, and although some attempts were made to equate one God with another, there was no sectarian strife and very little of the futilities of theology, which, like heresy, is a child of Monotheism. The story of the Gods and Goddesses was told in myth, altered, varnished, changed to suit invaders and amended to account for great epics in history. The divine function was to help man by providing a focus for his anxieties and hopes; rather than by imposing crippling moral burdens and demanding unnatural behaviour patterns.
