Barbelith Underground > Temple > Are all god-forms equivalent to archetypes?

I'm not so sure about that. When you look at it, many of these gods and goddesses have been virtually dormant for the last 1500 years in terms of worship. It is only recently that they have been worshipped in large numbers.

Not all of them. As I said, there is a difference between working with an intelligence that hasn't been fed since the end of, say, the Sumerian civilisation, and an entity that has been in constantly fed for thousands of years and still gets weekly attention. A big scary difference, in fact.

Also, what people are worshipping nowadays has changed a great deal from what they worshiped 2000 years ago. Sacrifice is a good example. Many ancient religions demanded human sacrifice, and yet I've heard of no one worshipping these god/desses that believes that said sacrifice is necessary, or even desirable.

That might say more about the occult circles you move in than anything else. Blood sacrifice is pretty essential to working with certain Gods, sometimes the mange sec doesn't quite cut it depending on the personality you are dealing with and what they are used to. It can be a delicate area, and often compromises have to be carefully negotiated. The personalities of Gods seem to be shaped at a cultural level, and decisions over what is and is not acceptable as sacrifice are not in the hands of the pracitioner. If it were as simple as that, do you not think our distant ancestors would have figured it out before throwing their daughters on the pyre?

The simple fact that god/desses have changed over time, (even when they were heavily worshipped), speaks to me of a lack of essential nature

It strongly speaks to me of an essential nature that is capable of growth and development through living interaction with human culture. The Gods don't stay the same anymore than we stay the same, apart from during periods when no one is feeding them and to all intents and purposes they go offline and become dormant. In Haiti you get versions of Ogoun who is represented as a military general riding a tank, a far cry from the original Yoruban God of war, and not too similar to St George either - but all are still discernable as Ogoun's essential essence manaifesting in terms of the time and place he is worshipped and the needs of the worshippers en masse.

Many cultures have no problems whatsoever with the idea of different local 'aspects' or 'versions' of entities existing simultaenously. It's a pretty common phenomena in living magico-religious cultures, and probably only seems a bit odd to us as western magicians because, by and large, we're used to working with the Gods of ancient cultures that have been offline to one degree or another for hundred of years. These personalities tend to be thought of in quite monolithic terms, but I'd hazard a guess that in ancient Scandinavia this local version phenomena was quite common from village to village. The Odin - Villi - Ve complex seems to hint at something similar, as do the differences between Odin, Woden and Wotan. Chances are, if the 'Northern Tradition' had been constantly online to the present day, Odin might not still be represented by his followers as a medieval Viking - at least not exclusively - but that's not to say Odin lacks an "essential nature". Far from it.