Past
Surprising exactly nobody, the Gods had a blessed life. They took over from their parents early, achieved many great deeds, vanquished their enemies, engaged in many, many hijinks, and retired in Italy, watching their kids grow into their own legends.
Sure, it wasn’t all smooth sailing with the kids - like remember that time Heracles savagely beat up Thanatos for just doing his job because Heracles felt embarrassed about being a bad guest to Admetus - but overall it was a retirement many a Boomer would die for.
The birth of Jesus Christ was widely misinterpreted by humans. Humans took it to mean that the age of the Divine was just beginning, but the Gods, being well attuned to the Divine, knew better. They knew it would be the last time a supernatural being would physically walk the Earth.
So, as Jesus was rushing Phi Omega Sigma1, the Gods decided that they would like a final monument to the pre-human past to be built in the great city of Rome. Years earlier, they had offered their help to Agrippa in defeating Marc Anthony and Cleopatra in the Battle of Actium, and so now, they called in the blank favor that had been promised to them, and got Agrippa to build the Pantheon.
The Pantheon of Rome is the Pantheon of the Past, and as such it is a Pantheon of Nostalgia. It remembers a simpler time when we humans were just kids in the world, the ruling of it was left to the Gods, and we were carefree and innocent.
We require urgent changes to the past a lot less than to the present, so the Roman Pantheon hasn’t been touched that much. Sure, it burned down once, and then was changed to a Christian Church, but it still remains a monument to a past era of the Gods. The biggest recent change to the building came from necessity, when in the 17th century Pope Urban VII, the last pope to extend the Papal territory, melted down the bronze ceiling of the Pantheon to make some cannons.
Present
For over seventeen hundred years, the humans refused to accept their place in the world. Anything that happened, even something as intellectually pedestrian as a Yersinia pestis pandemic, was viewed only through the prism of divine intervention. The Gods had passed us the baton but we were stubbornly refusing to pick it up.
Finally, in 1787, Charles Alexandre de Calonne pointed out that we could not engage in self-delusion any more, and that we had collided with reality in the most brutal and direct way possible - through a budget deficit. France was broke, and there was no pretending it away, humans had to stand up and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. The French Revolution is perhaps the greatest story of all time of what happens when humans decide to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, and I recommend studying it in great detail, but for our purposes here only relevant part of it is a building that was being finished around that time.
The Church of Sainte Genevieve was completed in 1790, just as the Ancien Régime was falling, and the Modern Era - the rational, enlightened, and agnostic era - was starting. At that point, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was adopted, subordinating the Church to the Revolutionary government. The Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being were yet to come, but the idea of unshakeable faith was already on shaky ground. In other words, it was a really bad time to complete a church.
The revolutionaries instead decided to use the building as a Panthéon, a temple of the nation, a place to bury the great men of the said great nation. The first hero to be buried there for all time, Mirabeau, lasted all of 3 years, before being moved to an anonymous grave. It turned out that the “nation” wasn’t one single entity - it was many people, all of whom had different ideas about which men were great2.
This wasn’t the only argument about the Panthéon.
As the foundations of France were questioned, unquestioned, and then re-questioned again, so was the Panthéon. It became a church during the Bourbon Restoration. But then the Second Republic came and the church became a “Temple of Humanity”, celebrating human progress in all fields - the Foucault Pendulum was hung there, but was also almost instantly removed when the Church complained3. Then church again, then Panthéon again.
By all accounts, the most interesting part of the Panthéon used to be the debates between the ghosts of Voltaire and Rousseau, who by some incomprehensible decision were buried right across the room from each other. For many years, Parisians would bring some wine and cheese to the Crypt every full moon and watch Rousseau’s ghost say things like “look what your reason gave us - mustard gas” and Voltaire’s spirit respond with a characteristic quip along the lines of “and look at what the expression of your general will has given the Russians4 - nothing at all, not even mustard”. But then, as we all know, the EMP from the Trinity explosion dematerialized all the ghosts for good5, and now the crypt is silent at night like, well, like a grave, yes.
The Panthéon in Paris is the Pantheon of the Present. A chaotic human-only era, where our ideas change so quickly that for the entire duration of it, we have been unable to agree on what the era is all about. We value science and reason, but we do not pray to them. We value art and culture, but we only let them criticize, not guide us. We understand that the Gods are no longer here, but we’re not willing to let the memories of them go. Some would say we yearn for a shadowy group6 to be secretly out there ruling over us. The Pantheon of the Present is the Pantheon of Confusion.
Future
In the Fall of 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, marking the point at which it became unavoidable that at some point very soon we will once again not be the only intelligent species on Earth - and yes, like the Gods, we will have to cede control to our children who, despite being birthed by humans in a human world will be unmistakably posthuman.
At the same time, in a nothing-is-ever-a-coincidence, humans completed their third and final Pantheon - the Pantheon of the Future.
The Pantheon of the Future is not a building, for the future cannot be built in the present, it can only be imagined. Thus, most appropriately, the Pantheon of the Future lives on Netflix.
"Pantheon" is the best sci-fi series I have ever seen. It is based on short stories by the inimitable Ken Liu (who was also involved in making the series itself). For my money, it is the single best piece of media out there that wrestles with our near future.
“Pantheon” seriously explores what it will be like for us to live through a transition to a posthuman future, happening in an exponentially accelerating world. It shows a dream for our future - a dream that we will get to happily live side by side with other intelligent entities, that they won’t devour us like the Gods did to their parents, and that we will have a happy retirement alongside the posthumans, observing their heroic acts and leisurely engaging in a relaxed human retirement. But it also acknowledges a fundamental reality, that while our retirement may well be lovely, the post-human world will belong to the posthumans. But there, too, is hope - the hope that our descendants, even if they are unrecognizably different from us, even if they don’t share any biological components with us - that they still learn something from us and help spread some of the values we cherish the most throughout the Universe.
While the Pantheon of the Past is the Pantheon of Nostalgia,
And the Panthéon of the Present is the Pantheon of Confusion,
The “Pantheon” of the Future is the Pantheon of Hope.
And, thus, it is the most important Pantheon of all.
(Thanks to for reviewing a horrible, no-good, suitable only for the least discerning raccoon out there earlier draft of this)
Jesus’s fraternity record is not widely to known to this day. For over a millennium, the Collegiate Testament had been lost, until the Knights Templar discovered it in 1187. Unfortunately, they took Brother Bartholomeus's warning: "Let those who seek the full truth of the Light-Brotherhood understand - what happens in ΦΩΣ, stays in ΦΩΣ. This is the true Holy Grail of brotherhood.” a bit too literally and took it upon themselves to guard this Testament as a secret. Because of that misunderstanding, a lot of stories that really help explain the Bible - like where Jesus got so good at turning water into wine, or where “let us get lit”, sometimes misremembered as “let there be light” (φῶς means light in Greek) comes from. On top of that, when Philip the Fair suppressed the Templars on charge of being homosexuals, and he confiscated their archives, he read some of the stories from the fraternity, thought to himself “this, too, sounds kinda gay” and hid the testament not to be rediscovered until well into the XXth century.
At some point, the situation got so bad, that the government decided that only people who had been dead for over 10 years could be buried in the Pantheon - to let passions die down, and political battles cool off a bit.
It has since been added again because of course it has. But also it’s presently being repaired, so it's there in terms of people’s belief that it should be there, but it is not physically there.
The communists in Moscow agreed to build their own Pantheon the day after Stalin died, but much like the rest of communism, that idea didn’t go anywhere.
There were some lead coffins made in Romain Britain some 1700 years ago, so there is a possibility that we can find some ghosts that have made it to this day if we open them. However, given how much we’re using the electromagnetic spectrum these days, there is a strong possibility that ghosts will just instantly lose their minds if we let them out, so it might be kinder to keep the coffins closed.
Untergunther, a shadowy group that’s actually real, occasionally looks to the past and tries to repair the Pantheon to what it once was, but all they have managed to fix so far was a clock - ironically the only item in the building that cannot help but focus us on the here and now.