Myths are often based on a person, then over time take on a life of their own. Deification is the process by which the memory of a real person morphs into mythology about a god.
Below is a table of roughly how long it takes for a real person to be elevated to godhood in cultural mythology:
^ Rank ^ Years ^ Example ^ | Some Person | 0 | | | Great Leader | 20 | Jon Stewart | | Demigod / Saint | 150 | Abraham Lincoln | | God | 500 | Jesus | | Monogod | 1000 | Buddha | | Fading | ? | Zoroaster |
The table requires some clarification. The rankings can’t be taken literally.
For example, Lincoln isn’t literally thought by Americans to be a demigod as of 2016. But he has already taken on a mythological dimension as being, for example, superlatively honest and honorable. It’s comparable to a warrior culture talking about how huge and superhumanly strong some great warrior king was from a few generations ago.
By 500 years after Jesus lived, the council of Nicea had settled the matter of whether he was literally identical to the creator of the universe, and that was the dominant meme for Christians starting in that era. At that time he was still basically a regional phenom–he wouldn’t have been dominant or well known in, for example, east asia.
By 1000 years after their respective lives, Jesus and Buddha had not only taken on the dimensions of a god with supernatural powers and roots in cosmology, but they had been elevated to globally dominant contenders for “one true god”: a serious ideology that most of the world knew about, and either consciously followed or consciously decided not to follow, or sometimes even violently opposed.
Again, the fact that Buddhists have a cosmology that doesn’t literally elevate Buddha to godhood from their perspective is irrelevant to this model. He still occupies the identical space in cultural awareness.
At some point previously deified people normally fade into obscurity as cultural forces adopt new gods. The Norse pantheon counts–people know about them still, but almost no one worships them in earnest, or has a relationship to the stories about them as being true about the universe or even the locally dominant culture. Zoroaster has similarly fallen out of favor even though Zoroastrianism was once dominant in a part of the world.
A notable exception that hasn’t faded is Hinduism, which has remained a dominant cultural force in asia for something like 6,000 years.
The reason this happened is not that the Hindu pantheon has simply persisted through ages, untouched. In fact what happened is that many of the major Hindu gods once were isolated tribal gods–Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesh, and Shakti are examples. Over time they were reinvented, morphing and combining into a single pantheon. At one time, for some people, all of the gods I just mentioned were the creator god from which all things arose, and over time they were arranged into the same worldview and related to one another.
This process of reinvention and reintegration prevents them from fading, even though left in isolation any one of them would’ve been a long faded memory by now.
Obviously not everyone becomes deified. There are a few factors that seem to be at play:
I suspect that to be deified one must be a Great Leader first. This comes in many flavors:
The degree to which a great leader really captures the cultural zeitgeist, and can be heralded as a paragon of that culture’s virtue, is the degree to which that leader will remain sticky in cultural memory, and then begin to take on godlike proportions.
In order for a God to ascend to Monogodhood, the culture that deified him in the first place has be dominant. Particularly, imperial or evangelical mythologies will dominate this space.