▲ | thaumasiotes 18 hours ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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