Question: Let's talk about incest. I'm not a proponent of incest but it seems like it should be more common in the ancient world. Nearly every pantheon has its siblings marrying each other, from Zeus and Hera to Izanami and Izanagi, yet the Egyptian pharaohs are the only ones who regularly practiced incest as a religious/political right. If people mirror their gods, shouldn't there be more records of incest among common people?
This really is becoming the Ancient Sex Blog.
Let me start with reversing your last statement: gods mirror their people. From a sociological standpoint, gods are outgrowths of a society, providing whatever they need in their worldview (whether that's somewhere to pray for rain or victory, someone to point to as an example or someone to use as an illustration of laws or customs). Though there are cases where it appears that a custom arises because of a mythical tale involving it, it's much more common for a tale to arise to explain a custom that already exists. When lightning strikes a building, humanity invents a myth about why the thunder god was angry enough to lash out; when an earthquake hits, humanity invents a myth about what's disturbing the earth mother, and so on and so forth.
But this doesn't have much to do with incest! Most anthropologists, if you ask them, name incest as one of (or even the only one of) the universal taboos that almost every culture has. Cases involving sibling marriage are generally the exception, not the rule, and are almost all bound up with royal or noble family lines; intermarriage of siblings in Egypt, for example, had a lot to do with keeping the pharaonic line pure and unbroken rather than with a general positive attitude toward incest (though, of course, reasons it was okay were invented because humanity likes to make sure we have excuses for the things we do).
In light of this, it can look a little weird that the gods seem to be having a 24/7 incest party to which all siblings, uncles and cousins are invited. Some of this is probably just a Genesis effect; when you're the only people who exist at the beginning of creation, what other choice do you have but to marry your siblings? The Chinese explicitly lay this out in the myth where Nüwa is forced to marry her brother Fuxi in order to repopulate the world; she does it, but at the same time also passes down a law to humanity explaining that it shouldn't be common practice and prohibiting incest for mortals. From a cosmological point of view, of course the gods have to marry each other; there just aren't a lot of other options for the big cosmic movers and shakers at the beginning of time. When you're Zeus and your only options are your sisters or the Titans you're about to lead a war against, pesky things like sibling blood ties probably seem less important.
Another, and probably the more important reason, is that the gods are simply allowed to do things humanity isn't allowed to do, because they're divine and they make the rules. Nobody in ancient Greece is going to try to justify incest because one of the gods did it; not only is that sacrilegious, it's just irrelevant, because Zeus and Hades are gods and can do whatever the fuck they want, and Joe Schmodanthes is bound by the laws of human society. There are even cultures that specifically spell it out; for example, when Chinese Buddhism began infiltrating Japan and the Buddhist prohibition against incest started making Izanagi and Izanami look bad, the writer of the most influential interpretation of the Kojiki wrote an entire defense of the two by claiming that the Japanese gods were unique and incomparable to all other deities, and therefore could not be judged by normal standards of right and decency. Gods absolutely mirror their people; the human passions and goals of any set of deities are easy to see and reflect the sorts of stories and passions playing out on a smaller scale among humanity. But they're still gods, and divine law differs from mortal law; there are almost no cultures that try to hold the gods to the same mores as humanity. They're simply above some of those concerns.
There are, of course, cultures in whose myths incest is very definitely not okay - witness Quetzalcoatl setting himself on fire when he realizes he has raped his sister, or the round mockery of incest among the Vanir by the Aesir, or Sarasvati complaining to the gods about Brahma's incestuous attention, or Enki being punished with near-fatal infections after sleeping with his daughter and granddaughter - which probably reflects cultures in which that idea was so strong that even the gods reflected their peoples' disdain for it. A lot of scholars also favor the idea that sibling incest was more common in very ancient times and only became taboo later as humanity started to realize that it wasn't good for genealogical or social structure, and therefore the oldest myths of people still contain an echo of that long-ago tolerance for the practice.
When Ra decides he wants to sleep with his daughter or Poseidon decides his sister is looking mighty fine today, though... that's a time when humanity kind of just has to start whistling uncomfortably and looking at their toes. They're gods. They're bad. They do what they want.
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