On the Origin of Deities, according to Blake and Xenophanes

For comparison: 


William Blake

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve.

And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity.

Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects; thus began Priesthood.
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.


Xenophanes
The Nature of the Gods

Man made his gods, and furnished them
with his own body, voice and garments...
If a horse or lion or a slow ox
had agile hands for paint and sculpture,
the horse would make his god a horse,
the ox would sculpt an ox...
Our gods have flat noses and black skins
say the Ethiopians. The Thracians say
our gods have red hair and hazel eyes.

Xenophanes, c. 570-c.503 (?) BC
Translation by Willis Barnstone (1962),
Greek Literature in Translation, ed. Michael Grant, 1973.


See also the online thesis (Pdf), "Xenophanes, The Gods, and the Reinvention of Poetic Authority", by Derek Heath Smith. Here is a brief extract::


Αἰθίοπές τε θεοὺς σφετέρους σιμοὺς μέλανάς τε
Θρῆικές τε γλαυκοὺς καὶ πυρρούς φασι πέλεσθαι.

"Both the Ethiopians and the Thracians depict the gods as resembling themselves. There seems to be a contradiction here: unless the two races worship entirely different gods, it is impossible for the gods to look like Thracians and like Ethiopians. The human tendency to depict gods with the appearance of their believers results in this type of incongruity. Xenophanes further illustrates this point with a hypothetical premise:

ἀλλ’ εἰ χεῖρας ἔχον βόες ἵπποι τ’ ἠὲ λέοντες
ἢ γράψαι χείρεσσι καὶ ἔργα τελεῖν ἅπερ ἄνδρες,
ἵπποι μέν θ’ ἵπποισι βόες δέ τε βουσὶν ὁμοίας
καί κε θεῶν ἰδέας ἔγραφον καὶ σώματ’ ἐποίουν
τοιαῦθ’ οἷόν περ καὐτοὶ δέμας εἶχον ἕκαστοι

Xenophanes demonstrates the flaw in representing the gods as identical in form to the believer by positing a situation in which it is patently absurd. The image of animals creating artistic representations of themselves and their gods demonstrates an innate flaw in deriving the form of the divine from one’s own body: there is no logical limit that prevents the attribution of incongruous or ridiculous properties to objects of universal worship.

While anthropomorphic features such as clothing and hair color are closely related to the specific cultural norms of the believers in a particular region, Xenophanes also objects to universal human characteristics being attributed to the divine realm."