This was really helpful. I liked how you gave examples from the poem for each of your points. It was a great list of how the Gods influence and interact with the mortal world.
The gods in the Iliad seem to be an anthropomorphic representation of the seamless thread that connects environmental triggers to a man's thoughts and emotions. The messenger gods like Iris represent moments of reflection, the companion gods like Athene trigger resolve, while more mysterious forces, such as a man's ability to charge himself with scary fighting potential is attributed to gods like Ares that don't talk. The gods in that sense are representations of the logos and an understanding that thought has an origin of outside the individual. Rituals can be seen not as propriations to the gods but as methods to achieve allignment to the logos and to the triggers of thought from the natural world. The fact so many of the characters have divine parentage is a recognition of the habitual complexes of ideas gained in childhood which a man recalls in times of stress.
