The idea that gods derive their power from people believing in them and worshipping them and that gods whom people stop believing in and worshipping will “fade” or possibly even die out pops up fairly frequently in modern popular culture. Most notably, it forms a major part of the premise for Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel American Gods (originally published in 2001 by William Morrow in the United States and Headline the U.K.) and the television series of the same name based on it (originally released on the premium cable network Starz from 2017 through 2021).
Some people have wondered, though: Does this idea have any kind of basis in ancient sources? Did ancient people really believe that their deities drew their powers from people worshipping them? As it turns out, although the version of the idea that is best known today through American Gods and other works is utterly contrary to how ancient people normally thought about their deities, similar ideas about deities being, to some degree, dependent on worship, do crop up in ancient literature.
The “forgotten” gods in American Gods
An important part of the premise in Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods is that deities draw their powers from humans believing in them and worshipping them. Consequently, in the novel, deities need humans to do these things in order for them to survive. The “Old Gods” in the story, who represent Americanized versions of the deities from various world religions and mythologies, are constantly described as weaker now than they once were because they have fewer worshippers.
At one point in the novel, the character Shadow has a dream in which he sees a “Hall of Forgotten Gods.” In it, there are two vast rooms. In the first room, he sees statues of countless deities who have been worshipped in various cultures all over the world throughout history who are no longer worshipped today. The specific name of each deity is emblazoned on the floor in front of their statue. A disembodied voice tells him (on page 58):
“These are the gods who have been forgotten, and now might as well be dead. They can be found only in dry histories. They are gone, all gone, but their names and their images remain with us.”
After this, Shadow passes around a corner into the second room, which is far vaster than the first. In this room, he sees statues of strange deities without names. The voice tells him (on pages 58–59):
“These are the gods who have passed out of memory. Even their names are lost. The people who worshiped them are as forgotten as their gods. Their totems are long since broken and cast down. Their last priests died without passing on their secrets.”
“Gods die. And when they truly die, they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”
The television series American Gods takes the idea of deities drawing their power from their worshippers even further than the original novel. The show explicitly clarifies that members of the “Old Gods” who are not quite deities at the time the show takes place were deities at some time in the past and have become lesser beings due to people’s belief in and worship of them declining over time.
ABOVE: Illustration commissioned by Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab showing how the artist (whose name I am unable to find) imagined the Hall of Forgotten Gods might have looked, retrieved from the American Gods Fandom page
What people in the ancient Mediterranean world actually believed
The whole premise of American Gods that I have outlined in the preceding section very much goes against what people in what I sometimes refer to as “the broader Mediterranean world” (by which I mean the Near East, North Africa, and Europe) generally believed about their deities. People in the broader Mediterranean world in antiquity generally believed that deities are real supernatural beings, at least some of whom have existed since long before humans came into existence. If the deities could exist before humans even existed, then, obviously, they could continue to exist if people stopped believing in them and worshipping them.
On top of this, in general, ancient people didn’t think their personal beliefs about the deities really mattered very much to the deities. Ancient people tended to prioritize religious actions (like making prayers and sacrifices) much more highly than religious thoughts (like whether someone personally believes all the stories about, say, Inanna, Baʿal, Isis, Zeus, Athena, Kybele, Atargatis, or Cernunnos).
This doesn’t mean that ancient people didn’t care about personal beliefs at all. As I discuss in this article I wrote in September 2019 and this other article I wrote in January 2020, it was fairly widely accepted in ancient Greece that, if someone was an ἄθεος (átheos), which literally means “a person without a deity,” then their impiety was a threat to the community. For instance, in around 415 BCE, the Athenians drove out a poet named Diagoras of Melos for allegedly denying the existence of all deities and, in 399 BCE, they sentenced the philosopher Socrates to death for, among other charges, allegedly not recognizing the deities recognized by the state.
People were, however, generally a lot less focused on belief and a lot more focused on practice than people tend to be today in our religious landscape that has been indelibly shaped by Christianity and its peculiar obsession with “orthodoxy.”
ABOVE: Fresco from the House of the Tragic Poet in the Roman city of Pompeii, dating to the first century CE, depicting the wedding of Zeus and Hera on Mount Ida
Nonetheless, it was widely, if not universally, agreed among people in the ancient Mediterranean world that it is very important for humans to worship deities and make sacrifices to them. To understand just how important people thought worship and sacrifices were to the deities, it helps to understand something about how ancient religions generally worked.
As I have discussed previously several times, including in this article I wrote nearly two years ago and in this article I wrote a few weeks ago, ancient people generally did not see their deities as “loving”; instead, they most commonly saw their deities as dangerous, powerful, and capricious.
People did, however, believe that the deities could be bargained with. The foundational principle for many common religious practices was that of “Do ut des,” which means “I give so that you may give” in Latin. This phrase refers to the idea that a person gives a deity worship and sacrifices in the hope that the deity will give them something that they want in exchange.
Thus, in many ancient cultures, the relationship between humans and their deities centered around reciprocal exchange, with humans giving deities worship and deities giving humans things that they wanted in return. Because of this relationship, it is clear that ancient people believed that deities valued their worship very highly, since those deities were willing to give them valuable things that they wanted in exchange for it. As a result of this, the idea that deities were, to some degree, dependent on worship from humans had some degree of circulation.
ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix, dating to between c. 510 and c. 500 BCE, depicting two men sacrificing a pig to the goddess Demeter
The famished deities in the Atraḫasīs Epic
In ancient Mesopotamia, some people seem to have believed that, although the deities can survive without human worshippers, they hunger and thirst after the smoke of sacrificial offerings made by humans and, if humans do not give them sacrificial offerings, they will become ravenously hungry and unquenchably thirsty.
This idea pops up in a number of places, but it is perhaps most famously attested in the Atraḫasīs Epic, an ancient Mesopotamian epic poem about a global flood in the Akkadian language that was most likely originally composed in around the eighteenth century BCE. The poem clearly indicates that the deities predate humans and that they can survive without humans because it begins with an account of how the deities supposedly created humans. Nonetheless, it suggests that, since creating humans, the deities have become dependent on people worshipping them.
In the poem, the chief god Ellil is annoyed because the earth has become too populous and humans are making too much noise for him to sleep. He therefore decides to send a global flood to wipe all humans off the face of the earth. Ellil commands the other deities not to interfere with his plans, but the god Ea, who acts as humanity’s benefactor and protector, disobeys him and warns a man named Atraḫasīs about the impending catastrophe. As a result, Atraḫasīs manages to save himself, his entire family, and all his livestock by building a giant boat.
The poem vividly describes how, after nearly all the humans have been wiped out, the deities become mad with hunger and thirst due to the lack of sacrifices. Tablet three, section three, lines 17–22 read as follows, as translated by Stephanie Dalley in her book Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (page 32):
“[Anu (?)] went berserk,
[the gods (?)] . . . his sons . . . before him,
as for Nintu the Great Mistress,
her lips became encrusted with rime.
The great gods, the Anunna,
stayed parched and famished.”
Later, when the flood subsides, Atraḫasīs makes a sacrificial offering to the deities and they rejoice in the scent of the burning offering. Here is tablet three, section five, lines 1–9 (once again in Dalley’s translation on page 33):
“He put down [ . . . ],
provided food [ . . . ],
[ . . . ]
the gods smelt the fragrance,
gathered like flies over the offering.
When they had eaten the offering,
Nintu got up and blamed them all,
‘Whatever came over Anu who makes the decisions?
Did Ellil (dare to) come for the smoke offering?’”
Thus, the deities effectively decide to let humans continue to exist so that humans will make sacrificial offerings to them to satiate their hunger and thirst.
ABOVE: Illustration by the French painter James Tissot (lived 1836 – 1902) depicting Noah and his family making a sacrifice after the Great Flood, as described in the Biblical version of the flood myth from the Book of Genesis
The importance of worship in ancient Greece and Rome
The idea that deities are actually dependent on sacrifices occurs very rarely in ancient Greek and Roman sources, but the basic idea that deities enjoy and thrive off humans showing them devotion seems to have been almost universally accepted.
For instance, the ancient Athenian tragic playwright Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BCE) wrote a tragedy titled Hippolytos, which was first performed at the City Dionysia in Athens in 428 BCE. The eponymous protagonist of the play is Hippolytos, the son of Theseus, the king of Athens. The play begins with the goddess Aphrodite coming on stage and delivering a monologue in which she explains who she is and how she plans to punish Hippolytos because he has been refusing to worship her. She says, in Rachel Kitzinger’s translation, lines 1–9:
“I am famous and powerful among mortals
and gods. I am called the goddess Kypris.
Of people everywhere—all who see sunlight
between the Atlantic Ocean and the Black Sea—
I rank highest those who revere my power.
I crush those who are proud before me.
For this holds true even for the gods:
they feel pleasure when men honor them.
Soon I will show how true this is.”
There is nothing in this passage to suggest that Aphrodite—or any other Greek deity—requires worship in order to remain powerful. Indeed, if anything, it suggests the exact opposite; Aphrodite begins by describing how she is so powerful before segueing into how she plans to use her power to reward those who worship her and punish those who do not. This suggests that she does not derive her power from the fact that she is worshipped, but rather derives her fame and worship from the fact that she is powerful.
Nonetheless, this passage makes it very clear that, in Euripides’s portrayal, human worship is very important to the Greek deities and it is in a way—albeit a very different way—linked to their power.
ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic white-ground red-figure kylix found at Kameiros on the island of Rhodes, dating to between c. 470 and c. 460 BCE, depicting Aphrodite riding a swan
Varro’s fear of the gods “perishing”
There is only one passage that I am currently aware of in any ancient Greek or Roman source that mentions the idea that the deities require people believing in them and worshipping them in order to sustain their power and their existence.
Marcus Terentius Varro (lived 116 – 27 BCE) was an extraordinarily prolific Roman polymath who lived during the late Roman Republic. He wrote an enormous body of work, extremely little of which survives. The much later Christian bishop, apologist, and theologian Augustine of Hippo (lived 354 – 430 CE), who was also an extraordinarily prolific author, was something of a cautious admirer of Varro. He references Varro’s work many times in his various extant writings. Consequently, much of what we know about Varro’s work comes from him.
Augustine mentions in his apologetic treatise The City of God 6.2 that Varro apparently wrote in one of his now-lost works that he was afraid that, if people did not show enough devotion to the deities, then the deities might perish. Augustine writes, as translated by Marcus Dods:
“But when he so worshipped these same gods, and so vindicated their worship, as to say, in that same literary work of his, that he was afraid lest they should perish, not by an assault by enemies, but by the negligence of the citizens, and that from this ignominy they are being delivered by him, and are being laid up and preserved in the memory of the good by means of such books, with a zeal far more beneficial than that through which Metellus is declared to have rescued the sacred things of Vesta from the flames, and Aeneas to have rescued the Penates from the burning of Troy . . .”
I initially overlooked this passage when writing this article, but I very much appreciate Joshua Langseth for helpfully pointing it out to me on Twitter. It is a clear instance of an ancient Roman person apparently believing almost exactly the same concept that appears in American Gods.
ABOVE: Eighteenth-century illustration by an unknown artist showing what the artist imagined Marcus Terentius Varro might have looked like. (No one knows what he really looked like.)
“Great Pan is dead”?
All this being said, the idea that the deities require people believing in them and worshipping them in order to survive is certainly not a common one in Greek or Roman sources. In fact, I’m not aware of a single occurrence of it aside from Augustine’s passage citing Varro that I’ve just quoted and, in it, Augustine himself seems almost shocked that Varro would write something like this. It clearly was not a widespread idea in antiquity. The ubiquity of the idea in modern culture, though, has led some people to misidentify some ancient stories as examples of it.
For instance, the Greek writer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) recounts a famous story in his essay On the Obsolescence of Oracles 17 about an Egyptian man named Thamous who heard a voice telling him to proclaim “that Great Pan is dead.” He writes, as translated by F. C. Babbitt:
“As for death among such beings, I have heard the words of a man who was not a fool nor an impostor. The father of Aemilianus the orator, to whom some of you have listened, was Epitherses, who lived in our town and was my teacher in grammar. He said that once upon a time in making a voyage to Italy he embarked on a ship carrying freight and many passengers.”
“It was already evening when, near the Echinades Islands, the wind dropped, and the ship drifted near Paxi. Almost everybody was awake, and a good many had not finished their after-dinner wine. Suddenly from the island of Paxi was heard the voice of someone loudly calling Thamous, so that all were amazed. Thamous was an Egyptian pilot, not known by name even to many on board.”
“Twice he was called and made no reply, but the third time he answered; and the caller, raising his voice, said, ‘When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead.’ On hearing this, all, said Epitherses, were astounded and reasoned among themselves whether it were better to carry out the order or to refuse to meddle and let the matter go.”
“Under the circumstances, Thamous made up his mind that if there should be a breeze, he would sail past and keep quiet, but with no wind and a smooth sea about the place he would announce what he had heard. So, when he came opposite Palodes, and there was neither wind nor wave, Thamous from the stern, looking toward the land, said the words as he had heard them: ‘Great Pan is dead.’”
“Even before he had finished there was a great cry of lamentation, not of one person, but of many, mingled with exclamations of amazement. As many persons were on the vessel, the story was soon spread abroad in Rome, and Thamous was sent for by Tiberius Caesar. Tiberius became so convinced of the truth of the story that he caused an inquiry and investigation to be made about Pan; and the scholars, who were numerous at his court, conjectured that he was the son born of Hermes and Penelopê.”
As it happens, the website TV Tropes has a page titled “Gods Need Prayer Badly” about the trope of deities drawing their power from people worshipping them. The page lists Ploutarchos’s story about the death of Pan as a Greek example of the trope:
“A Greek myth/folktale likely written in Christian times by Plutarch tells of the death of the god Pan when people start thinking of him as only a made-up story. One might wonder about the rise of Greek neo-pagans, who have begun worshiping Pan again. Have they resurrected him, or is their belief going unheard?”
This interpretation is almost certainly incorrect.
First of all, it is unlikely that Ploutarchos made up the story of the death of Pan. As the classical folklorist William F. Hansen, who is now an emeritus professor of classical studies and folklore from Indiana University Bloomington, demonstrates in his book Ariadne’s Thread: A Guide to International Stories in Classical Literature, originally published in 2002 by Cornell University Press, on pages 133–136, the story of the death of Pan matches the international folk motif ML 6070 (“The Fairies Send a Message”), in which a person hears a voice from the wilderness declaring that someone, usually a prominent figure among supernatural beings associated with nature, has died.
This motif occurs in the folklore of many different cultures and is attested from sources that are highly unlikely to have gotten it from Ploutarchos. Thus, the most parsimonious explanation for the story is not that Ploutarchos made the story up, but rather that he and these other sources got the story from the same place: from oral folklore.
Secondly, Ploutarchos probably wrote his On the Obsolescence of Oracles in the early second century CE when Christianity was still a fairly obscure minority religion in the Roman Empire. The vast majority of people in Ploutarchos’s time still very much believed in the existence of Pan and all the other traditional Greek and Roman deities. Ploutarchos also says nothing whatsoever in his account about Pan’s supposed death having anything to do with people not believing in him.
It is therefore highly unlikely that the story about the death of Pan recorded by Ploutarchos originally had anything to do with people no longer believing in Pan or with the rise of Christianity. There are plenty of real questions that we can ask about this story and how it might have arisen, but it is clearly not an example of the trope of deities requiring people to believe in them in order to sustain their power and existence.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Roman mosaic depicting the god Pan
I wonder how this idea started then, as it dates back decades. A series I’ve read which started in the 60s already has it for instance.
The earliest I have found it is in Fritz Lieber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, in passing. There is a humorous scene where Heaven is depicted as warm and balmy and ne of the Gods is always wearing Northern furs because that is how he is seen down below–and he sweats from it but must bear his lot!
I think the whole thing may have evolved from German Romanticism reviving Paganism and especially the role this played in the more deliberately focused French and British occult revivals. It may be that the attempt to create a church of Reason in early Revolutionary France made the idea of religion as a deliberate artifact acceptable as an explicit idea by actual users.
Reading Marsilio Ficino from a particular angle COULD be taken as a dim precursor to all of this.
Interesting thanks.
My earliest exposure to this thought came from Neil Fatman’s colleague and sometimes co-contributor Terry Pratchett. Starting with his book ‘Small Gods’ (1992) it is established that in his Diskworld universe religion or rather God-dom worked that way. In fact, in ‘Small Gods’ the protagonist Brother Brotha has a dream that is almost literally the same as the one Shadow is having in ‘Small Gods’.
It starts with the premise that the Great God Om comes to his temple to elevate his latest prophet, but he finds that he can only materialize as a small turtle because while he was busy hanging out with the other Gods in Diskworld’s version of Valhalla, his followers abandoned him for the teachings of his tyrannical high-priest Vorbis and the fear of his inquisition. The only ‘follower’ Om still has is Brutha who was too busy tending the temple’s gardens to notice Vorbis’ new commandments.
Later in ‘Hogfather’ the disappearance of ‘the Hogfather’, Diskworld’s version of Father Christmas promos a vacuum in belief which is filled by various gods, fairies and supernatural entities. One of them is the newly made-up Bilious, God of hangovers. At the end of the book, the Hogfather returns and the various gods and beings that sprung up in his absence fade back again. However Bilious is allowed to stay as in the meantime he has picked up a human girlfriend who ‘believes in him’, thus maintaining his form.
In the Girls:Diskworld role playing game based on the Pratchett universe, Gods are a playable character class. In game mechanics, their power level and character advancement are based on their number of believers rather than their accumulated experience points, with special rules on how to gain or loose believers.
However note that this is not a real life example as the Diskworld is an alternate made-up universe where Gods are as real as magic. I guess all I wanted to point out was that Gaiman was not the first to follow that idea.
I don’t know exactly where the trope originates from, but I do know that Christians have long interpreted the story of the death of Pan recorded by Ploutarchos in On the Obsolescence of Oracles 17 as being about the “pagan” deities of old dying out to make way for the triumph of Christianity over “paganism.” It’s possible that this may be the source for the idea.
That makes sense. Many claimed pagan gods were disguised demons, so perhaps that is similar.
I’ve just updated the article because someone has informed me that almost exactly the same idea that appears in American Gods actually appears in a fragment from the ancient Roman writer Marcus Terentius Varro (lived 116 – 27 BCE) that is known through Augustine of Hippo’s City of God 6.2. It therefore seems that the idea actually goes back to at least the first century BCE.
It is also worth to notice that the concept of “”power”” of a deity portrayed in modern adaptations are sometimes related to the litteracy aproach the modern audience has on the myths, for instance: Comicbooks like Marvel and DC, Videogames like Smite and GoW or YA Novels like Percy Jackson portray the “power” in a literal sense, Zeus and Thor throw bolts left and right, Tyr and Athena are very skilled in batlle, Aphrodite and Freyja use seduction to achieve their goals, etc. Keeping in mind that ancient civilizations never saw their deities as “”fandom characters”” their concept of “power” was more related to the blessings of curses they could release on humans rather than “epic superhero” dynamics. Good article Spencer
Who knew sacrifices offered by worshippers would become a serious addiction when you’re a god.
Loved the analysis, thank you! The relationship of ancient peoples to deities is so different from today’s major religions.
Very interesting. Some other modern examples of the trope I can recall now are the fate of Mab in the _Merlin_ 1998 miniseries, referenced in the TV Tropes entry; the “Just Don’t Look!” episode in The Simpsons: the monsters die when people stop paying attention to them; and even a quote by the late epistemologist Mario Bunge: “The Pythagorean theorem and the legend of El Dorado, the quadratic function and Donald Duck, have a fictional existence. We can imagine them or think about them and, the day they cease to be imaginable or thinkable, they will cease to exist in the manner that Jupiter ceased to exist the day the last heathen disappeared” (Epistemología [1980], ch. 3; my translation).
There is an interesting variation in which the “old gods” don’t die, but go into a sharp decline, such as in Heine’s “Die Götter im Exil” or Borges’ “Ragnarök”. This reminded me as well of an Icelandic medieval story, a version of which was adapted into English verse by Longfellow:
King Olaf crossed himself and said:
“I know that Odin the Great is dead;
Sure is the triumph of our Faith,
The one-eyed stranger was his wraith.”
This was very interesting to read about! I had no idea the death of Pan was an example of a common folklore motif.
The historian Bret Devereaux has done a series called “Practical Polytheism” on his blog where he has explained the “Do ut des” system.
Unfortunately, many authors who have written about the story of the death of Pan, including Robert Graves, have started out with the assumption that it is an account of a real event and therefore tried to rationalize it, when it is probably a more fruitful approach to look at the story as folklore and see where else it may be attested and in what other forms.
I occasionally read Bret Devereaux’s blog, but, until now, I had not read his series on “Practical Polytheism.” I just started reading it. Thank you for pointing it out to me! It seems like it mostly covers information that I already knew, but there are some bits here and there that are new and it’s interesting to hear his take on ancient religion.
Can you look into Gurdjieffs Solar Theology and the reason why this Creator went from Autoegocrat to Trogoautoegocrat, hence the reason for the creation. I would like to hear your take on his ideas.
Top stuff as always! A closer-to-home example of the Atraḫasīs (well done on finding the Unicode glyph for that ḫ…) topos of starving gods would be the blockade of sacrifices in Aristophanes’ Birds, which starves the gods into negotiation with the Nephelococcygian leadership. Obviously the logic there is comic, but it only works if there’s an existing notion that gods are in some sense feeding on their portion of the sacrifice, including the volatile elements of the smoke going up to heaven; Geoffrey Kirk, who had a bit of a fixation with the question of what was going on with the Homeric sacrificial κνίση, argued for this as a vestigial remnant of an older, more material and commensal view of the gods than the Greek epic tradition found comfortable. (See vol. 2 of his Iliad commentary, pp. 10–14, and his earlier article in the 1981 Entretiens Hardt volume on sacrifice.) Of course all this is a bit of a sidebar to your actual topic, which is about waning faith rather than waning sacrificial nutrition – though it probably makes sense that the latter metaphor is dominant in antiquity, given the dominance of practice over belief in ancient models of piety.
I suspect patient zero in the modern memetic pandemic is Lord Dunsany, who was a massive influence on both Lieber and Gaiman, and whose short fiction made a lot of ironic play with the idea of forgotten gods; see especially the end of “A Legend of the Dawn” in Time and the Gods. (Admittedly Dunsany was more amused by gods surviving their own forgetting; for his take on the death of Pan see his mini-story “The Tomb of Pan” in Fifty-One Tales.) All in Gutenberg and your favourite public-domain text repository.
(*Leiber, obviously. Sorry. And for the obliteration of paragraphy in the above.)
Thank you, I didn’t know Lord Dunsany’s work. Could he possibly have been influenced by Heine’s “Die Götter im Exil”?
Yes, almost certainly – at the very least, Dunsany’s regular illustrator Sidney Sime was a huge Heine fan. (There’s stuff about this in Heneage & Ford’s 1980 book on Sime, but access to my copy is currently blocked by a Christmas tree…) Anna Vaninskaya’s 2020 monograph Fantasies of Time and Death has a very useful section (pp. 34–8) tracing the trope of “Dying Gods” up to and including Dunsany; the Heine of course is in there, though she rightly also stresses Dunsany’s originality. (Most of this section is readable in the Google Books sample; pp. 37f. are the key bit.)
I have a few sources to offer. In particular there is one very relevant source you missed, and it actually is discussed in Augustine’s “City of God” close to the section on Varro you mentioned. In the 8th book, Augustine discusses the writing “Aesculapius” attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. In his discussion the mystical belief is aired, that there is an “art of making gods” by which humans actually can create gods through worship. A dead human soul is a demon and through posthumous deification and worship becomes a god. One day the gods of Egypt will die when their worship dies and their statues no longer receive sacrifices. So according to Augustine, Hermes gives a fully developed theory of gods being born and dying essentially identical to Gaimans!
This text “Aesculapius” was rediscovered fully preserved in the Nag Hammadi library. I have read this text which is incredibly dense. I am not certain whether Augustine interprets it correctly or whether it in fact means something entirely different. Perhaps a scholar in Hermeticism could shine a better light on this.
Celsus the anti-Christian writer reports certain Egyptians as believing gods/demons require the smoke of sacrifice for their power. But he personally disagrees and says demons want nothing and need nothing, and simply take pleasure from seeing people’s dedication and piety.
This theory enjoyed a Christianized spin-off. The “Confession of Cyprian” says that Satan and his demons, who disguise themselves as pagan gods, can’t produce anything themselves — but they can work miracles by converting the fumes of sacrifices into other materials. So their only real physical power is what they falsely scam humans into giving them.
I think I’d heard of some Christians having that idea in regards to pagan gods. This appears to be very old.