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Ghost Leviathan posted:Came up before, but the Roman habit of appropriating, importing and renaming gods is endlessly interesting to me. The whole thing with the Romans basically importing Greek gods wholesale is pretty well known. Probably contributed to Christianity becoming so widespread and eventually dominant. Any particularly interesting aspects to Roman religions and imported gods that come to mind? The household and family gods are particularly interesting. Reminded of that Doctor Who episode (which is almost basically a crossover with Rome) where the Doctor and Donna become the household gods for a family- rather fitting for the personal experience they've had. The Romans didn't do much more importing than the Greeks themselves did, really. They didn't even rename the Greek gods so much as associate the Greek gods with pre-existing Roman gods with similar roles. Though of course the Romans did some actual importing too, with some mainstream Greek gods that didn't have an obvious Roman equivalent (like Apollo), as well as "mystery religion" gods like Isis and Mithras.
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Aug 4, 2020 19:34
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Hercules was another import
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Aug 4, 2020 19:57
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for all that the traditional take on the roman and greek gods makes them out to be equivalent, they really were not. rome tended to view gods of other pantheons as aspects of their own, but these aspects often differed in very key ways. for example, rome had a much less ambivalent relationship with jupiter and mars than the greeks with zeus and ares; ares is all about bloodthirsty senseless violence while mars is a god of war in all its forms, zeus is kind of a capricious dick while jupiter is somewhat more even-headed and well-disposed toward mortals. mystery religions are essentially outside of the traditional pantheon; they were worshipped in addition to, or in replacement of, the civic religion.
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Aug 4, 2020 21:28
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Another fairly obvious difference between the religions is that Saturn unlike Cronus was actively worshiped and a major figure in Roman religion. Whereas I haven't found much reference to Greeks actively building major temples to Cronus or the like.
Terrible Opinions fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Aug 4, 2020 |
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Aug 4, 2020 21:48
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cheetah7071 posted:Hercules was another import Hercules got around, ended up being worshiped (or at least venerated? I don't claim to understand the exact details) over in Japan too.
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Aug 4, 2020 22:43
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Terrible Opinions posted:Another fairly obvious difference between the religions is that Saturn unlike Cronus was actively worshiped and a major figure in Roman religion. Whereas I haven't found much reference to Greeks actively building major temples to Cronus or the like. There was apparently one Greek festival associated with Cronus, but not much is known about it. There's a weird ambivalence toward Cronus going back all the way to Hesiod, I think. On one hand, he ate his children because he was afraid of being overthrown, and he kept the Cyclopses and Hundred-Handed Ones locked up in Tartarus just because they were ugly. But his reign also coincided with the "Golden Age," when apparently things were pretty good for the original humans, and he overthrew Ouranus, who was also generally seen as a bad guy (and who threw the Cyclopses and Hundred-Handed Ones in Tartarus in the first place). On the third hand, Greek myth even in the time of Homer and Hesiod already seems to have been a patchwork of inconsistent traditions, and I can't remember for sure which of the details I'm mentioning are even present in Hesiod, so it's dangerous to read to much into this kind of "ambivalence," which is perhaps really more of an "inconsistency."
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Aug 4, 2020 22:47
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Kylaer posted:Hercules got around, ended up being worshiped (or at least venerated? I don't claim to understand the exact details) over in Japan too. He was adapted as a defender of Buddha during the Greco-Indian period, and the derivation of that is in Buddhist temples all over, including Japan. Vajrapani is the Buddhist deity that he was syncretized with. It's not really veneration of Herakles per se, you wouldn't know unless you were a nerd about it. But the image of Vajrapani (Nio is the Japanese version) is derived straight from Herakles.
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Aug 4, 2020 22:49
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Silver2195 posted:On the third hand, Greek myth even in the time of Homer and Hesiod already seems to have been a patchwork of inconsistent traditions, and I can't remember for sure which of the details I'm mentioning are even present in Hesiod, so it's dangerous to read to much into this kind of "ambivalence," which is perhaps really more of an "inconsistency." Right, you have to remember these religions don't have any sort of consistent theology. Think of how inconsistent Christianity is and now imagine if it had no ecumenical councils, no Bible, no centrally organized priesthood, all just stories and traditions. There are definite things you can say, like how Mars to the Romans was vastly different than Ares to the Greeks, but you can also find exceptions for everything. Also imagine how many forms of the myths there were in the classical world compared to the surviving written examples we have to go on. Every Greek polis probably had a different version.
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Aug 4, 2020 22:52
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Are we sure Ares was really understood like that? My impression is that some of this was survivorship bias, because so much of our Greek knowledge comes from Athenian sources, and Athenian mythology was chock a block with "The Cool Athena (Who Is Not Like Those Other Goddesses) DESTROYS Clumsy Fool Ares (You Won't Believe What Happens Next)" narratives.
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Aug 4, 2020 23:01
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Yeah. The Romans thought they were literally the children of Mars. There's no evidence for any Greeks holding Ares in any comparable kind of reverence. Ares isn't hated or anything, but in the myths (the ones we have, anyway) he's kind of a dolt and he's not a central figure in anything, whereas Mars is a key figure of the Roman named pantheon. We also have lots of surviving inscriptions, and Mars comes up in them constantly as this respected and important figure. There's nothing at all equivalent for Ares.
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Aug 4, 2020 23:09
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Nessus posted:Are we sure Ares was really understood like that? My impression is that some of this was survivorship bias, because so much of our Greek knowledge comes from Athenian sources, and Athenian mythology was chock a block with "The Cool Athena (Who Is Not Like Those Other Goddesses) DESTROYS Clumsy Fool Ares (You Won't Believe What Happens Next)" narratives. There's a bit of that (Spartans, not surprisingly, seem to have had a more positive view of Ares), but I don't think any Greeks, even the Spartans, viewed Ares as positively as the Romans viewed Mars. Any generalization you make about the classical gods will have some exceptions. After the portrayal of Hades in Disney's Hercules, for example, there was something of a nerd counter-reaction that never really went away ("TIL that actually Hades was a good guy!"), but if you look at what's said about him in Homer, it's clear that people were generally scared him or outright disliked him. One might nevertheless say that however unpleasant Hades may have been, he wasn't a devil figure the way the Disney version comes across as...but the Wikipedia page on interpretatio graeca mentions Hades = Angra Mainyu! Though I can't find a citation for this. Edit: I should note that several myths unflattering to Ares appear in Homer; Classical-period Athenians didn't make them up. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Aug 4, 2020 |
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Aug 4, 2020 23:19
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It's believed all these deities are descended from the Proto-Indo-European religion, which is why you have for example a Jupiter figure in Vedic India, Greece, Rome, the Hittites, Etruria, the Norse, etc. The parallels the ancient people drew between these deities weren't just out of nowhere. They probably weren't aware of it, but they saw Mars and Ares as equivalents because they actually were derived from the same common source.
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Aug 4, 2020 23:32
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I believe Zeus and Jupiter are even etymologically related, both from the indo-european dyeu-pater meaning "sky father"
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Aug 4, 2020 23:35
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cheetah7071 posted:I believe Zeus and Jupiter are even etymologically related, both from the indo-european dyeu-pater meaning "sky father" That's the most obvious example, yeah.
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Aug 4, 2020 23:36
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cheetah7071 posted:I believe Zeus and Jupiter are even etymologically related, both from the indo-european dyeu-pater meaning "sky father" They’re basically the same word
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Aug 4, 2020 23:37
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I had a student in Korea with the English name Zeus once, which I thought was awesome until I found out he actually thought his name was Juice. Korean doesn't have a Z so they substitute a J sound. But then will confusingly often spell J sounds in the Roman alphabet with a Z, like writing the Korean word "jjang" as "zzang" when Romanizing it.
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Aug 4, 2020 23:39
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Has anyone tried to determine if the Greek and Roman pantheons share a common ancestor, perhaps common to a wider area as well? I'm thinking a religious equivalent of Proto-Indo-European. e: learn to refresh Grand Fromage posted:It's believed all these deities are descended from the Proto-Indo-European religion, which is why you have for example a Jupiter figure in Vedic India, Greece, Rome, the Hittites, Etruria, the Norse, etc. The parallels the ancient people drew between these deities weren't just out of nowhere. They probably weren't aware of it, but they saw Mars and Ares as equivalents because they actually were derived from the same common source.
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Aug 4, 2020 23:41
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Has anyone tried to determine if the Greek and Roman pantheons share a common ancestor, perhaps common to a wider area as well? I'm thinking a religious equivalent of Proto-Indo-European. You answered your own question
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Aug 4, 2020 23:42
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PittTheElder posted:Has anyone tried to determine if the Greek and Roman pantheons share a common ancestor, perhaps common to a wider area as well? I'm thinking a religious equivalent of Proto-Indo-European. Yep. The wiki article is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_religion
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Aug 4, 2020 23:42
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PittTheElder posted:Has anyone tried to determine if the Greek and Roman pantheons share a common ancestor, perhaps common to a wider area as well? I'm thinking a religious equivalent of Proto-Indo-European. they, along with hinduism, the germanic religion, and others, are derived from the religion that proto-indo-europeans practiced, yeah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_mythology
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Aug 4, 2020 23:44
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Silver2195 posted:but the Wikipedia page on interpretatio graeca mentions Hades = Angra Mainyu! Though I can't find a citation for this. Plutarch associates Ahriman with Hades in his interesting rendition of Zoroastrian myth in the Moralia. Isis and Osiris, 46-7 posted:The great majority and the wisest of men hold this opinion: they believe that there are two gods, rivals as it were, the one the Artificer of good and the other of evil. There are also those who call the better one a god and the other a daemon, as, for example, Zoroaster the sage, who, they record, lived five thousand years before the time of the Trojan War. He called the one Oromazes and the other Areimanius; and he further declared that among all the things perceptible to the senses, Oromazes may best be compared to light, and Areimanius, conversely, to darkness and ignorance, and midway between the two is Mithras: for this reason the Persians give to Mithras the name of "Mediator." Zoroaster has also taught that men should make votive offerings and thank-offerings to Oromazes, and averting and mourning offerings to Areimanius. They pound up in a mortar a certain plant called omomi at the same time invoking Hades and Darkness; then they mix it with the blood of a wolf that has been sacrificed, and carry it out and cast it into a place where the sun never shines. In fact, they believe that some of the plants belong to the good god and others to the evil daemon; so also of the animals they think that dogs, fowls, and hedgehogs, for example, belong to the good god, but that water-rats belong to the evil one; therefore the man who has killed the most of these they hold to be fortunate.
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Aug 5, 2020 00:30
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Funny how a thousand years of time between the trojan war and plutarch stretched the distance in time from the war to zoroaster from 5 centuries to 5 millennia.
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Aug 5, 2020 01:00
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skasion posted:Plutarch associates Ahriman with Hades in his interesting rendition of Zoroastrian myth in the Moralia. I was about to say that the references to Hades in the passage is less than clear, but I found a book (Traditions of the Magi by Albert F. de Jong) confirming that Greek writers sometimes did indeed refer to Ahriman as Hades. The same book also makes two interesting arguments about the passage from Plutarch you just quoted. One is that the translation "for this reason the Persians give to Mithras the name of 'Mediator'" is probably backwards; the real meaning is most likely "for this reason the Persians give to the Meditator the name 'Mithras,'" i.e., Plutarch is interpreting Mitras in terms of an abstract Neoplatonist concept that mediates between two other abstract Neoplatonist concepts, or something like that. The other argument is that the sacrifices to Ahriman Plutarch describes, with the wolf's blood and so forth, rarely if ever actually occurred; actual Zoroastrian texts have survived that claim that evil Ahriman-worshipers did these things, but like most assertions about devil-worshipers (e.g., treatises on witchcraft in Early Modern Europe), these practices were probably largely imaginary, based on an assumption that there must be devil-worshipers whose religious practices are an elaborate inversion of orthodox ones. Plutarch then seemingly misinterpreted the descriptions of sacrifices to Ahriman as apotropaic rituals performed by mainstream Zoroastrians. Both of these arguments would make the correct understanding of Plutarch's statements rather convoluted, but I guess no more so than the correct understanding of some of Plutarch's statements about Sparta that have been discussed previously in this thread, and indeed I think there's some parallels there. Basically, an awful lot of what Plutarch says about anything seems to be the result of already-flawed sources, misinterpretation of sources, and/or framing things though his particular ethical/philosophical lens. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Aug 5, 2020 |
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Aug 5, 2020 02:40
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I remember writing "Baldr is Jesus" in a notebook many years ago
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Aug 5, 2020 05:33
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FuturePastNow posted:I remember writing "Baldr is Jesus" in a notebook many years ago Jesus if the Ressurection had failed and now everything's hosed.
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Aug 5, 2020 07:52
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Some Ancient Greek deities were certainly part of an inheritence from Proto-Indo-European religion, but a lot of them have non-IE names (most in fact) and might either be syncretized with whatever pre-Greek religion existed in the region or just adopted altogether.
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Aug 5, 2020 08:02
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The Lone Badger posted:Jesus if the Ressurection had failed and now everything's hosed. Oh, so our timeline, then.
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Aug 5, 2020 08:28
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Oh good something I actually sort of knowNessus posted:Are we sure Ares was really understood like that? My impression is that some of this was survivorship bias, because so much of our Greek knowledge comes from Athenian sources, and Athenian mythology was chock a block with "The Cool Athena (Who Is Not Like Those Other Goddesses) DESTROYS Clumsy Fool Ares (You Won't Believe What Happens Next)" narratives. Grand Fromage posted:Yeah. The Romans thought they were literally the children of Mars. There's no evidence for any Greeks holding Ares in any comparable kind of reverence. Ares isn't hated or anything, but in the myths (the ones we have, anyway) he's kind of a dolt and he's not a central figure in anything, whereas Mars is a key figure of the Roman named pantheon. We also have lots of surviving inscriptions, and Mars comes up in them constantly as this respected and important figure. There's nothing at all equivalent for Ares. But what would that matter, really, to their worshipers at the time? Mythology -- especially as it's generally taught to us in grade school as one big book that says "here are the myths, enjoy" -- is generally a really bad way to gauge how ancient people actually perceived their religion. The average Greek or Roman isn't going to recite Hesiod off the tops of their heads to determine all the meaningful ways that their civic gods Ares and Mars are different from each other because of this or that. And even if they did, different places worshiping what everyone considered to be the same gods in different ways was par for the course for those cultures, and might even be a point of pride in some cases. "Oh look, those guys are worshiping Mars and Venus totally wrong. Unlike us, who are doing it right because we're awesome." And when both of your cultures' modus operandi is to assume that everyone in the whole world is worshiping the same gods as you under different names, at what point would the technical differences between them even really matter? Like, those differences obviously exist, but everyone still considered them the same dudes and ladies anyway and even wrote a national epic about how the gods from the Greeks' national epic went and founded your country as well (yes I know I just said myths don't really matter but actually they kinda matter here). Sure, we would never treat Odin and Mercury to be the same god just because Romans thought that Odin was Mercury, but there was enough cultural interplay between Greece and Rome (and the surrounding Etruscans) over a wide enough span of time that, at the very least, it becomes sort of pointless to pick nits about why your god of war Mars, son of the sky god Jupiter, lover of the love goddess Venus, was totally actually different from his god of war Ares, son of the sky god Zeus, lover of the goddess of love Aphrodite, who is actually super technically not the same as my god of war Laran, son of the sky god Tinia, lover of the goddess of love Turan.
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Aug 5, 2020 08:59
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FuturePastNow posted:I remember writing "Baldr is Jesus" in a notebook many years ago Doesn't really help that by the time the Eddas, our main source on Norse mythology, were written down the Norse had been Christians for 8-34 two centuries so even if we assume that they're primarily based on much older works preserved orally with little or no modification by the writers there is still a good chance some Christian influence creeped in over time. Sidenote: According to Snorri Sturluson, who wrote the Prose Edda and a bunch of other poo poo, the Norse gods were actually powerful (but mortal) chieftains from the east who migrated to Scandinavia and became revered as god kings. This is handy because it allowed Norse kings to still claim descent from the gods after Christianisation.
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Aug 5, 2020 12:12
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FreudianSlippers posted:Sidenote: This is also why they are called Aesir, because they came from Asia. True facts
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Aug 5, 2020 12:36
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skasion posted:This is also why they are called Aesir, because they came from Asia. True facts Then where did the Vanir come from?
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Aug 5, 2020 13:11
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Armenia obv.
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Aug 5, 2020 13:11
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Venus, duh.
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Aug 5, 2020 13:37
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Libluini posted:Then where did the Vanir come from? The Tana (modern River Don), which conveniently used to be called Vana
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Aug 5, 2020 13:43
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Libluini posted:Then where did the Vanir come from? 
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Aug 5, 2020 13:44
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Donggograd, capital of the Khanate of Dicks. E: skasion posted:The Tana (modern River Don), which conveniently used to be called Vana Holy poo poo, I was right! 
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Aug 5, 2020 13:47
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I thought I read something a little while back that the grand theory of a singular proto-indo-european language was kinda dubious? Like with its main supporters really stretching to find any evidence and ignoring evidence to the contrary? The idea that all religions had a similar derivation seems similarly suspect.
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Aug 5, 2020 17:47
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I haven't read anything like that, no. The language is widely accepted, especially after a good number of the words predicted to exist were found in inscriptions later. We don't have any PIE writing, but basically there were predictions made for languages between known ones and PIE, which were then found and matched the predicted language shifts precisely. The ways languages evolve are consistent enough you can reconstruct dead languages this way. There are, of course, people who don't accept the existence of PIE since you can always find a contrarian, but they are a minority.
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Aug 5, 2020 17:53
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*edit: Nvm im just dumb
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Aug 5, 2020 18:01
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Dalael posted:I'm sorry, what does PIE stand for? Maybe you write it in ALL CAPS because it's the god of deliciousness?
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Aug 5, 2020 18:01
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