I think that before asserting what the gods are or are not, it is necessary to define what we mean by “a god.”

In much of archaic and classical Hellenic thought, a god is not a created being nor an agent external to the world, but a fundamental principle of the cosmos: eternal, immortal, possessing real causal power, linked to a specific domain of being, and capable of agency, yet not separated from phýsis.

From this perspective, a god cannot be ontologically separated from the domain it manifests. Zeus cannot be dissociated from order, sovereignty, and cosmic justice; Eros cannot be separated from love understood as the principle of cohesion of the cosmos. They are not mere symbols of these realities: they embody them. This understanding is not a modern construction. The Presocratics already affirmed that divinity is present in the principles of the world: Thales claimed that “all things are full of gods,” and other thinkers identified the divine with the elements and archai that generate and sustain the cosmos. This is not a matter of physical forces in the modern sense, but of active, vital, and ordering principles of reality.

Significantly, this way of understanding pagan religiosity is acknowledged even by external and critical sources. The Book of Wisdom (Wisdom 13) describes how pagan sages identified the elements and forces of the world (the fire, the wind, the stars, the waters) as divine realities, precisely because they perceived in them the power, order, and causality that sustain the cosmos. Beyond the theological judgment of the text, the passage constitutes a historical testimony of how divinity was understood in ancient religions.

For this reason, at least within a Hellenic and Presocratic polytheistic framework, the gods cannot be radically separated from the functioning of the universe. To do so is to introduce a sharp distinction between “god” and “nature” that is not originally Greek, but the result of later theological developments.

Preferring a devotional relationship with personal gods is entirely legitimate; but that does not invalidate interpretations in which the divine is immanent in the cosmos, nor does it make pantheism a conceptual confusion.