As a devotional polytheist of many years, I have acquired a lot of personal experiences and associations with Gods and Goddesses. They aren't necessarily historical and I'd never claim they were, but they are personal experiences and observations that have affected me deeply. Here are a few stories about it, for your own inspiration.
[ Set | Skaði | Sekhmet-Eir ]
Set is my Patron God, a Kemetic/Ancient Egyptian worshiping pretty consistently for about 20 years. When I was Kemetic Orthodox, one of the things that prevented me from getting the Rite of Parent Divination for a long time was serious concern that Set might not show up in my results, and that if he did—because of the way Kemetic Orthodox names are structured and the fact Set never appears alone as a Parent in the RPD—I would not have a name that had Set in it, which was important to me. Eventually I was going through a crisis of faith and decided to get the RPD done; I was pacing along our driveway asking for a sign from Set that I was doing the right thing. I was expecting a shooting star—in reality I was outside because I know how common shooting stars are and thought if I just waited long enough I would get what I was looking for—but no shooting stars came. Instead, I was started by a terrifying and thunderous noise, which turned out to be some sort of motion-activated toy somebody had disposed of in my front yard. It had clearly been there many years, but I'd paced that driveway at least once a night in just as long, and had never activated it before.
Set did show up first in my RPD, and when I became Shemsu the name I was given was Setkheni-itw ("My Two Fathers Dazzle," referencing Set and Wepwawet, but with Set in it). Although I am not Kemetic Orthodox anymore, these experiences and the other symbolism in the name I got are still very important to me.
A very specific Set-related story is that of "The Football God." When I was still Kemetic Orthodox, we were discussing the Gods, and somebody brought up that they think Set would really enjoy American football, for the following reasons:
I became inspired by this conversation, decided Set is the God of American Football. I was making statues of him at the time, and painted one in Green Bay Packers colors. He looked something like this:
I put him up on top of the TV, as kind of a makeshift shrine. Although it was a joke, my perspective is that the Gods enjoy this kind of silly whimsy, especially after thousands of years of sparse devotion.
At the time I lived with my parents, who are not Pagans (one is Christian and the other agnostic), and I explained the Football God. One day, during a particularly stressful football game, I noticed there was a beer up by the Football God that I did not put there. Sports fans as a general rule tend to be very superstitious in general, regardless of their actual religious beliefs, so as soon as the household had a shrine to a God of football, the offerings started coming.
About five or so years later, I moved cities, into a house with a friend who is also a die-hard Packer fan, and also atheist-leaning-agnostic. I had left the original Football God statue at my parents' house since they enjoyed the shrine, but since he is my Patron God and I also enjoyed the shrine, I made another Football God statue and created a new shrine at our TV. I explained the Football God to my roommate, how when I was Kemetic Orthodox we had discussed and decided Set was the God of American football and so I made it in his honor.
Yet again, at Packer games, offerings started appearing. I reminded my roommate, "you are an atheist," to which they replied, "Not when it comes to the Packers."
Skaði is an Ancient Norse Goddess who unofortunately is popular among fascist Norse practitioners due to her association with physical health and essentially "working on your body" (you have to be strong and resilient to live the way she does in the mountains). Fascists tend to take this to an extreme; it's related to the crunchy-to-fascist pipeline, they become obsessed with things like working out and "clean living" because they think it proves their superiority.
I have no delusions that I'm physically superior to anyone, but I wanted to work with her because I wanted to work on my physical health. I was also afraid to do so, because my struggles with health are deeply connected to my mental state (ADHD among others); I had heard that she was tough on "laziness" and was worried that if I struggled in my goals she would basically punish me.
I decided to do a meditative ritual in which I met with Skaði in the mountains and, essentially, explained my concerns. She asked me, extremely frankly, "What do you think I'm going to do to you if you fail?" I relayed some of my health concerns, specifically how exactly I felt my health might fail. Her reply was (and I'm paraphrasing as this was a long time ago), "Those aren't punishments, they are consequences."
Basically, she was telling me that all these fears I had of what horrible things might happen to me if I started working with her on improving my diet and exercising more and happened to fail to keep up with it, these were things that are just natural consequences of that failure, not some vengeful punishment by a Goddess, that I should not be using her as an excuse to avoid taking responsibility. I've had my share since then of successes and failures, but I'm no longer afraid to work with Skaði.
Sekhmet-Eir is, in a nutshell, a personal Goddess I work with who is a dual-aspected version of the Egyptian Goddess Sekhmet and the Norse Goddess Eir, both Goddesses associated with healing and medical skill. Obviously, this is not a historical Goddess, she formed during a period I was doing more blending of Kemetic and Norse practice. She appears as a woman with the head of a European cave lion (there is a Sekhmet-ish statue discovered in Germany called the Löwenmensch figurine featuring the head of a cave lion with a human body), wearing Norse clothing.
Sekhmet-Eir is not a replacement of either Sekhmet or Eir, who I more frequently worship and work with as individuals, but kind of a separate Goddess, in the same way Amun-Ra exists alongside Amun and Ra and Hermanubis exists alongside Hermes and Anubis.
Happy Trails,