“ “Your Gods Were Once Men” – Christian Euhemerism Against Paganism : From Ancient Egypt to Modern India”, ramaseshanchandrasekaran.substack.com, July 10, 2026
“Murugan is once again in the news debates regarding his identity. Is he a pan Indian god, or an exclusively Tamil god, or an ancestor of the Tamils? There are passionate arguments from all sides but what is left out in television debates are a lot of history and theology. This is what I will be doing in this article. The Indian right thinks that this is some new strategy of the Church to appropriate Murugan as an ancestor but what would help them is the hindsight that this is an age-old strategy just being repeated at another time and at another place. Let us get started right away. Our story starts at around 300 BCE in ancient Greece.
Note : I quote a lot from primary sources here and I understand that you cannot read them in full but I request that you at least read the bolded parts in the primary source quotations. Also, what I cover is only a brief expose of euhemerism used by Christians.
Euhemerus : Gods were once men
Around 300 BC, the Greek writer Euhemerus of Messene composed a work called the Sacred Inscription (Hiera Anagraphe), which is a fictional travelogue describing a voyage to the utopian island of Panchaea in the Indian Ocean. There, Euhemerus claimed to have found a golden column inscribed with the “true” history of Zeus, Uranus, Cronus, and the other so called Olympian gods which were worshipped by his fellow Greeks who lived on that island…….”
Read full article at ramaseshanchandrasekaran.substack.com
