| ▲ | thaumasiotes 20 hours ago |
| > Ginnerup dug up 14 glittering gold disks—some as big as saucers—that archaeologists say were buried about 1,500 years ago > the real showstopper is an amulet called a bracteate with two stylized designs: a man in profile, his long hair pulled back in a braid, and a horse in full gallop. An expert in ancient runes says she was awestruck when she finally made out the inscription on top: “He is Odin’s man.” > These embossed runes are the oldest known written mention of Odin, the Norse god of war and ruler of Valhalla. Ginnerup’s bracteate, which archaeologists describe as the most significant Danish find in centuries, extended the worship of Odin back 150 years I don't think this is right. The first mention of Odin by a Germanic source could date to 500 AD. But the Romans wrote about the Germanic gods several centuries prior to that. They used the equivalence we still use today, calling Odin "Mercury". But what they say about the Germanic gods is compatible with what we know from Germanic sources; there's no reason to believe there was a change in the gods. I note that the image on the bracteate features a pretty prominent swastika. Maybe Hitler was accidentally on to something after all. |
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| ▲ | tokai 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| It's the oldest mention of Odin in Denmark. The sciam journalist lost that detail somewhere. That is why the find pushed worship of Odin in Denmark back 150 years. |
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| ▲ | ethan_smith 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Roman accounts using interpretatio romana (equating Germanic deities with Roman gods) aren't the same as direct written evidence naming "Odin" specifically. The bracteate's significance is that it contains the actual name in runic form, not a Roman interpretation or equivalent. |
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| ▲ | thaumasiotes 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure, but claiming that it pushes back the date of Odin's worship back 150 years is wrong. It hasn't made any change to our beliefs about when Odin was worshiped, or where, or by whom. | | |
| ▲ | tokai 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | >It hasn't made any change to our beliefs about when Odin was worshiped, or where, or by whom. Why state this so strongly over something that was misconstrued? | | |
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| ▲ | HK-NC 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm not sure who decided that Hitler stole the swastika from the Hindus, but it's false. The symbol appeared in the decorations of his childhood church IIRC and wasn't an alien symbol to germans elsewhere. |
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| ▲ | thaumasiotes 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | Where do you think he got the term "Aryan" from? | | |
| ▲ | Reasoning 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | From contemporary ethnologists who used the term to refer to the proto-indo-europeans? Because the term aryan is common amongst the languages descended from the proto-indo-european language (Arya, Iran, Alans, Arios)? Nazi philosophy grew out of 19th century ethnology which was heavily influenced by Darwinism. They believed the proto-indo-european ("Aryan") homeland was in northern Europe and that the spread of "Aryan" language was do to "Aryan" immigration to those regions and that in ancient times those regions were led by an "Aryan" "master race" who ruled over the "lesser races" do to their natural superior genes developed through generations of natural selection in the harsh northern climate. To be clear, I believe that is all BS but I wrote all that to clarify that the Nazis didn't steal the term Aryan from the Hindu, it's a term used by the Indo-Iranians to self-designate which was erroneously misattributed to the proto-indo-europeans by early European ethnologists. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | So Hitler was jealous of the fact that the Romance speakers had history and the Germanic speakers didn't. And he solved that problem by appropriating the history of India and claiming it was also the history of the Germans. He used Indian symbols and Indian words. But that doesn't mean that he took them from India? That's crazy. What else would you say he did? That they were from India was the point. Without their Indian identity, they would have failed to serve his purpose of giving a history to the Germans. | | |
| ▲ | versteegen 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | You are missing Reasoning's point (although I think you're right about the Nazis needing to create or appropriate some other people's heritage). 'Aryan' was a linguistic term previously mistakenly used to mean Proto-Indo-European. Hitler didn't personally invent Nazi master-race ideology and look to India, it's a small pseudo-intellectual extension of (European) 19th/early 20th century ethnology and eugenics, and that's a very important distinction to make, to understand how the Nazi came to believe what they did through a product of many often-plausible steps and all-too-common character flaws, not through one man. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes an hour ago | parent [-] | | > You are missing Reasoning's point Note that the comment here is from HK-NC: >>> I'm not sure who decided that Hitler stole the swastika from the Hindus, but it's false. The symbol appeared in the decorations of his childhood church IIRC and wasn't an alien symbol to germans elsewhere. You're saying I shouldn't be reading this as a claim that the Nazi swastika was an indigenous development, unrelated to the Indian symbol despite the fact that it symbolized an official ideology naming the Indians as a sister tribe to the Germans and adopting the tribal name of the Indians for the Germans, and the fact that it was referred to by its Sanskrit name? > Hitler didn't personally invent Nazi master-race ideology and look to India Why is this relevant? He is the one who adopted the ideology on behalf of the German state. |
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| ▲ | 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | eesmith 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odin#Roman_era_to_Migration_Pe... says "The earliest clear reference to Odin by name is found on a C-bracteate discovered in Denmark in 2020." So, "written mention of Odin" seems to mean written as "Odin', and not as "Mercury". It also mentions some debate over if the Goths actually worshiped Odin/Mercury, but I am too ill-informed to make sense if that's relevant. I did manage to find a scholarly reference to the topic at https://helda.helsinki.fi/server/api/core/bitstreams/c11e69e... ("Pre-print papers of THE 18TH INTERNATIONAL SAGA CONFERENCE SAGAS AND THE CIRCUM-BALTIC ARENA. Helsinki and Tallinn, 7th–14th August 2022") > The problem of Mercury > Despite lack of Germanic evidence for the existence of a cult of Wodan/Óðinn before the fifth (or perhaps even the sixth) century, as presented above, many scholars maintain ancient roots. For example, disregarding critical scholarship on various individual sources, Schjødt reiterated that “taken together, they strongly indicate that Óðinn, although not exactly the same as the god that we know from the Nordic sources, has roots reaching far back in time, probably as early as the Indo-European era (at least 3000 BC)” (Schjødt 2019: 67). ... > The reading of interpretation romana maintains that Tacitus’ famous description of Germanic deities, Deorum maxime Mercurium colunt, should be understood to signify Wodan/Óðinn. Of course, it has already been shown by Karl Helm that this was a historical trope copied from Herodotus, and/or Caesar’s Commentarii de bello gallico (Helm 1946: 7-12). The fact that Caesar was talking about Celts, and his description of religion among the Germani mentions worship of the sun, moon, and fire, does nothing to secure the reliability of such ‘historical’ sources. Either way, the argument that the foremost deity interpreted by Tacitus as a ‘Mercury-type’ must be Wodan/Óðinn is a projection of the latter’s supremacy in Old Norse material onto a Germanic society several centuries older. This becomes a circular argument and cannot be leading. |
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| ▲ | never_inline 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > “taken together, they strongly indicate that Óðinn, although not exactly the same as the god that we know from the Nordic sources, has roots reaching far back in time, probably as early as the Indo-European era A reader might be interested in Kris Creshaw's "The One-eyed god" which reiterates Odin's similarities with other Indo-european analogues, specifically Apollo and Vedic Rudra. Indeed, much of the Odin's acts and characteristics find similarities in the deeds of Rudra or Indra in Vedic myth. The Vedics even had a conception of afterlife similar to Valhalla, where the most excellent people and fallen warriors reach Indra's realm, carried by Apsaras. Indra is also god of sacred verse, "vipratamo kavinam", which is similar to odin mastering the runes, giving a dual priest-king and warrior king function. The efficacy of "several great deeds" is emphasized for both. Eg: The Havāmal: "140. word following word, I found me words, deed following deed, I wrought deeds.". The Rig Veda (1.101.4) - Praised, he is firm at every deed of his. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Indra is also god of sacred verse, "vipratamo kavinam", which is similar to odin mastering the runes That seems pretty tenuous; at the time Indo-Iranian diverged from the European branch, runes didn't exist at all, and most likely the proto-Indo-Europeans had no writing of any variety. For example, different families' words for writing: - write [English], from PIE *wrey; - scribere [Latin], from PIE *(s)kreybʰ; - graphein [Greek], from PIE *gerbʰ; (cognate with English carve) - likhati [Sanskrit], from PIE *reyk(ʷ)h₂; - neveshtan [Persian], from PIE *peyḱ (cognate with English paint) [all taken from wiktionary] This doesn't look like a concept that was around before the groups diverged. |
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| ▲ | thaumasiotes 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Tacitus isn't the only interpretation of the Germanic gods. He is thought to refer to Thor as Hercules, but there are other references where a Jupiter is mentioned. There is a Roman complaint that the Germanic peoples see Mercury as the father of Jupiter when it should be the other way around. And while it's possible, it would be extremely surprising for Odin to be a new addition to the Germanic pantheon when we find him attested under that name in the 5th/6th century. He's in charge of the whole thing! The norm is for gods - all gods - to have very deep roots. Where we can prove that a god is novel, we can also often show that it's a borrowing of a foreign god with deeper roots (e.g. Adonis < Tammuz) or that it is an explicit deification of a human (e.g. if you go to the temple of the city god in Shanghai, there's an informative plaque explaining that the city god was posthumously appointed to the position by an emperor of the Yuan dynasty). I do understand that after cassava or maize was introduced somewhere in Africa, anthropologists documented a new goddess associated with the crop. Innovation exists. But pantheons are very conservative overall. "Several centuries" is not an amount of time where we expect to see pantheonic turnover. | | |
| ▲ | vintermann 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > He's in charge of the whole thing! But he may not always have been. In most European mythologies, the thunder god is the most "in charge". In Norse mythology, the thunder god is the son of the chief god instead. My assumption is that Thor was the main god until they syncretistically tried to incorporate new beliefs about "the father and the son" and self-sacrifice on a tree, which even by this super-early mention of Odin, was over 500 years old. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes an hour ago | parent [-] | | > In most European mythologies, the thunder god is the most "in charge". Most? It's true of the Greeks. It's true of the Romans after their mythology is unified with the Greeks, and there's a good chance it was also true before. But that's it, as far as I see. It's not true of Celtic mythology and Slavic mythology is barely known. | | |
| ▲ | vintermann an hour ago | parent [-] | | Slavic mythology isn't that unknown. We know that a thunder god (Perun) was on top of it. In Finnish mythology, it's pretty clear Ilmarinen (a sky/weather God) is on top of it. Though it has a specific thunder god (Ukko), they seem to think he came later and took over thunder from the sky god. Celtic mythology doesn't have a sky god on top, it's true. But it has the same issue as Norse mythology: in the form we know it, it's much younger (and probably influenced by) Christianity. |
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| ▲ | eesmith 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Were all gods worshiped? By my limited understanding, the question isn't if Odin was part of the pantheon, but rather if there was a specific cult of Odin. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't understand your question. All gods are worshiped by definition. "The cult of Odin" would refer to anything and everything related to Odin. See sense 1 here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cult , or sense 3/4 here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cult . | | |
| ▲ | eesmith 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | I am a software developer with little knowledge of the topic. What do we call a personified supernatural being who is not worshiped? Are there really no such entities? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God informs me: "In polytheistic belief systems, a god is "a spirit or being believed to have created, or for controlling some part of the universe or life, for which such a deity is often worshipped". The "often" tells me that a god is not always worshipped. How should I make sense of this line from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odin#Roman_era_to_Migration_Pe... : "There is no direct, undisputed evidence for the worship of Odin/Mercury among the Goths, and the existence of a cult of Odin among them is debated." Definition 1 starts 'The veneration, devotion and religious rites given to a deity'. What veneration, devotion, and religious rites are attested? | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes an hour ago | parent [-] | | > How should I make sense of this line from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odin#Roman_era_to_Migration_Pe... : "There is no direct, undisputed evidence for the worship of Odin/Mercury among the Goths, and the existence of a cult of Odin among them is debated." You should read "the worship of Odin" and "the existence of a cult of Odin" as meaning the same thing. The sentence wouldn't mean anything different if it said "there is no direct, undisputed evidence for a cult of Odin/Mercury among the Goths, and its existence among them is debated", or "there is no direct, undisputed evidence for the worship of Odin/Mercury among the Goths, and it is debated whether he was part of their pantheon". > Definition 1 starts 'The veneration, devotion and religious rites given to a deity'. There are two concepts here: 1. Belief that a god or spirit exists. 2. Rituals intended to communicate with, maintain good relations with, propitiate, or placate a god or spirit. "Worship", "veneration", and "devotion" all refer to both of those concepts. "Religious rites" refer to the second one. (Compare https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/worship : "to honor or show reverence for as a divine being or supernatural power".) So a reference to belief in a deity is an attestation of "worship", "veneration", and "devotion". For rites, Tacitus mentions that Mercury receives animal and human sacrifices while other deities only get animals. > What do we call a personified supernatural being who is not worshiped? Are there really no such entities? In the ordinary sense, obviously not, because acknowledging that something is a supernatural entity is worshiping it. But even in the sense of particular rituals, there are no such entities. All supernatural beings receive prayers some of the time. |
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