Would a Pantheon be polytheistic and Religion monotheist?

This is a role playing idea that I always had: In Civilization V, would a Pantheon be meant to be a polytheistic religion, and then, when it fully develops and becomes a real religion, it would be meant to be a monotheistic religion?

I.e, would a "Pantheon" be polytheistic and a "Religion" monotheistic? I think I just created this idea because the symbol of a Pantheon is Zeus' lightning, and there is almost none polytheistic religion when you go to the "create religion" screen.

Pantheons are really more pantheistic and the things being worshiped are those that are of aspect with the world itself and also a specific belief in an all-encompassing God.

Not all Religions are Monotheistic. Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, are polytheistic religions. Many religions also have pantheistic and paganist concepts within them. Abrahamic religions like Christianity and Islam tend to be monotheistic.

Ximixanga said:

Pantheons are really more pantheistic and the things being worshiped are those that are of aspect with the world itself and also a specific belief in an all-encompassing God.

Not all Religions are Monotheistic. Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, are polytheistic religions. Many religions also have pantheistic and paganist concepts within them. Abrahamic religions like Christianity and Islam tend to be monotheistic.

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So, a Pantheon would be somewhat like the ancient polytheistic religion in Greece, while a Religion would be a "more developed" version of it, but it could still be a polytheistic religion?

I'm asking this because I'm playing with Greece in Civ V, and I want the religion to be the closest possible to ancient Greek polytheism (AKA Hellenism). I'm using a mod called "Historical Religions" that adds Hellenism as a religion, but I just want to know if a Pantheon would fit better.

Some religions are still polytheist.

Hinduism, if I'm not mistaken, is polytheistic.

I imagine that, for game purposes, a Pantheon is a "simple" religion, one with more general concepts, only typically going as deep as "this is the god who makes thunder so loud" and "this is the goddess who makes these tasty fruits come from the ground". I'd say the big defining factor that separates a Religion from a Pantheon is the presence of a holy book: the bigger, more in-depth story of that religion, often outlining guidelines for life within that culture and, in many instances, acting as a code of law for nations. A Pantheon wouldn't be that, because it goes no farther than "these gods make things happen, we must worship them if we want that to continue". A Religion outlines what is expected of people, goes more in-depth with the relationship of gods and people, and/or relations among gods, and often times, relations amongst different people who worship those gods. One is expected to take what the religion teaches and apply it in all aspects of life, not simply worship when it comes up (such as when it doesn't rain, worship rain god, when it is cold, worship summer god). Polytheism and Monotheism are independent of that, there are plenty of Religions in the game that are polytheistic in reality (Hinduism, Shinto, I think Taoism), and Confucianism doesn't even have gods proper since it's more philosophical and ethical, and Buddhists, IIRC, don't consider Buddha a god, more a wise teacher of sorts. Pantheons in-game could easily be monotheistic, as they're very nonspecific so it could easily be interpreted that if you adopt, say, Goddess of Love, that said nonspecific goddess is the only deity your people worship.

When choosing a Pantheon, you can choose out of all these Gods and Godesses. I guess that refers to the polytheistic sides of those old religions.

A pantheon is not a religion. A pantheon is simply the collection of all the gods and goddesses of a religion (polytheistic by definition). The word is used in the same sense you'd use "cast," "team," or "group," but in a very specific case. In this case, only deities. E.g.:

The cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer included Sarah Michelle Gellar and Anthony Stewart Head.

The business team consisted of two project managers, a business analyst, and four developers.

The pantheon of the polytheistic Roman religion included Jupiter and Mars.

Like a lot of words in the English language, its use can be a bit fuzzy, but in general, you need to have a religion before you can have a pantheon. A collection of random gods and goddesses do not become a pantheon until a specific religion is developed.

For instance, Zeus, Thor, Thunderbird and Raijin are all deities, but they do not together make up a pantheon. However, if I start up the Transglobal Church of Thunder (complete with tax write-offs), and declare the previously mentioned thunder gods to be the objects of my worship, they're now part of the Transglobal Church of Thunder pantheon.

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert or scholar in religions. I do not multiple degrees (let alone a single one) on the subject matter at hand. My education on said subject consisted of information gleaned from Google searches and Wikipedia.

TiVO has got the definition of pantheon right and illustrates it well.

It is ironic that the "pantheons" in the game all seem fairly monotheistic: Goddess of the Hunt, e.g., as though Artemis all by her lonesome made up your pantheon. Oh well.

Within the game, it's not particularly easy to do what you want to do, Brazilian. Does your mod let you rename pantheons? You might call yours Olympus: that's where the Greek pantheon hung out, so it might evoke the polytheism you want. Or "The Olympians," that's another collective name. You'd still just get +2 food from camps, or whatever, but if it helps you get into your civ, I'd say that would be the way to go.

even the polytheistic culture tends to finally worships one supreme god, Athens for example, or the Shivaist Hindu. Iirc the trojan worships Apollo, while those with the Agamemnon tends to worship Poseidon.
So i think the way pantheon system working right now is ok, it is not as your people tends to monotheistic, but that your people tends to pick one more important god from their polytheistic culture.
But a follower beliefs called polytheism is also can be inserted, with the ability to pick 2 more pantheons, but somehow it feels like OP, maybe put 15% penalty to their yields.

Great question OP! But the answer is not quite as simple/straight forward.

In my understanding, a pantheon is simply a collection of deities, part of a larger collective theistic tradition. Of course, we know the word to be ancient greek, so it would only be fair to explore its meaning in accordance to that particular cultural heritage; or what we understand of it anyway.

"Ancient religion", as its often referred to, is an oxymoron. A religion requires collective acceptance of doctrine unsupported by scientific proof: faith. The ancient greeks, having only just departed from their paganistic traditions (by paganistic I mean to say a system of cultural governance wherein the natural elements are worshipped) didn't have faith the same way we have, or might have I should say, today. Asking an ancient greek if he "believed" in poseidon would be similar to asking a 21st century person if he thougjt the sea existed: its pretty obvious.

In other words: deities part of the ancient greek pantheon were very much still the andropomorphication of the element or plain they governed: poseidon was the sea, zeus was lightning and demeter was the growing flora. These gods were not infallible or allmighty: they blundered and epicfailed all the time.

The way civ 5 represents this, competently imho, is by letting you choose from a list of andropomorphic deities: messenger of the gods, god of the open sky etc. This emulates the way our ancestors, as far as we can tell, used to worship natural elements rather than a god (whom is all powerful rather than specifically qualified to govern a particular part of our mortal universe)

That is, however, not the same as a polytheistic religion, which, again, requires a collective acceptance of doctrine.

As I see it, religion has doctrine (yes, evem budhism and shintoism and toaism and hinduism and pastafarianism have doctrines) patheons do not.