Many practicing polytheism in modern times are feeling something lacking. Intention is there but without knowing the why of it, purpose is missing. Practice without purpose is no more than parroting what we've seen of others or read about somewhere.
We worship a god of thunder and rain, but do not celebrate the rain or know why it is important to life. We worship a goddess of love but live life with hate in our hearts and mind. We worship a god of wisdom but refuse to learn anything new outside a little "approved reading" checkbox we make for ourselves. We worship a god of the sun but not the sunshine itself or even know why it once mattered so much to our ancestors.
The gods as we know them now existed long before we made names for them in our languages, before we personified them, before we made pictures on cave walls. Before we built stone mounds, temples, and alters.
We venerated the gifts received, sunshine, rainfall, favorable wind in the sail, the bounty of the sea and forests, love, courage, wisdom, healing and protection. These great gifts, far greater than what we could achieve as human beings in that time, must have come from someone greater than us. So we deified these happenings, personified them, gave them a name.
Over time and by the indoctrinations of monotheism we have come to a place of forgetting practice and reverence as it should be. We worship a name, an image, a picture, a symbol, even the Christians love their pictures of Jesus and their crucifix pendant. They celebrate his image and symbols now instead of his deeds and life that led to the following it has amassed today, and many Christian converts to paganism have carried this over into their polytheistic practices over the many years.
We venerate many gods, but if we are to make a true and meaningful connection in our practice we have to stop skipping over the gifts and attributes that we experienced divinity in and found them so worthy of naming and deifying thousands and thousands of years ago.
We venerate a diety for their status as such and this is intention, but when we come to understand why such status was attributed, we can practice reverence with purpose.