An empirical analysis of polytheism An empirical analysis

• Published in: Quality & quantity Vol. 59; no. Suppl 2; pp. 797 - 818
• Main Author: Gauthier, Laurent
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.04.2025
• Subjects: Methodology of the Social Sciences; Social Sciences; Power laws; Human performance modeling; Ancient Greek polytheism; Religious studies
• ISSN: 0033-5177; 1573-7845
• DOI: 10.1007/s11135-024-02024-3

The study of polytheism in sociology and anthropology is not a very well researched subject, apart from works that belong in historical anthropology, carried out by historians. One limitation in many of these is the lack of data, or any form of systematic survey that could inform quantitative analyses. In this paper, we examine acts of worship in polytheistic religion empirically and quantitatively on a large scale, which has not been done before. We study a large volume of ancient Greek epigraphic sources, and focus on the distribution of votive acs across divinities. Who had the most? Who was the least favored? We show that clear patterns emerge in the distributions of worship acts among gods, across city-states using a maximum likelihood estimator. They follow power laws with a high degree of regularity, and do not appear to be driven by particular characterizations of the polities, as various ordinary least-squares regressions indicate.