The preponderance of atheism among Goths is likely attributable to the dislocation of using God for a religious tradition that is not God’s. People know, inside, when they are being lied to. The religion itself survives, in any case, on some level. But, as I wrote above, it will be much harder to pin it down given the severe lack of tradition among Goths when compared to a civilized people.
Take Masonry, for example, or any of the pseudo-Christian ideas such as felix da cat and observr have been expounding. The word God is used seamlessly, without a feeling of impropriety or dislocation, in any case not one different from the one felt by using the word God for Zeus. In Roman dialects, the contrast is far more jarring and the instances far fewer. Though, still, considering the many dislocations introduced via Christianity, it is still possible, and does happen.
I have always found the word God abhorrent (especially as it is pronounced in Netherlandic) and the above clarifies why; “a god” is something which can be evoked, etc- thus to make this into a singular case, as if there is only one thing that can be evoked, is abhorrent. It is an error beyond all other errors.
I wonder if the name [size=85]IOVE[/size], the way the Romans casually addressed Jupiter, relates to YHWH (“Jahweh”). It seems that Felix perhaps aims at the similarities of these terms.
The Germanic name for Zeus is Tiwaz, the root of Tuesday, as Wotan is of Wednesday, Thor of Thursday, Freya of Friday.
So they knew that Jupiter was the same thing as Zeus. Okay. Please explain the ontology of Jupiter and Zeus. How do they refer to the same thing ontically?
Have you reached any insights about it? I mean we have this historical phenomena where worship of a god arises in particular society and then through a process of interaction with another society that god is amalgamated with a god from the second society. Presumably at one point the gods each had their own mythologies, rites and practices. Those are somehow synthesized. So eventually it is said that the two gods, in this case Zeus and Jupiter, are the same. But it wasn’t always so. Or was it?
Historians now tell us that this is also what happened in the history of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah when Elohim and Yahweh were united into one supreme god in the Hebrew texts. This may have happened when the texts were redacted during the Babylonian captivity. And the unity is not necessarily seamless, as one seems to be able to detect differences in character between the two in the contexts of the stories. If one digs down can one find similar differences between Zeus and Jupiter?
This is far too speculative for me to accept any of it, and even ignoring its speculative nature, its claims are so vague as to be meaningless. Nothing is being said here. In fairness, that is admitted. The truth is, right now: no one knows.
I have wondered this as well. The genealogy of which God is actually worshipped, by name, where, has different cross-pollinations, specially among peoples that inhabited the coasts of the Mediterranean for a long time. I sometimes think it is entirely possible that they are referring to the same divinity.
Zeus is the God of the sky, Tiwaz is the God of the sky. That does not make them the same entity. Nor would they be the same entity as a Sumerian sky God, etc.
It is very hard to establish, for reasons I have expounded on enough, how long those names had been in use. It is sad that the passing of tradition was not seriously developped among Goths. However, that the weekdays bear their names indicates deep significance, and suggests that one possible theory that conjectured that they might be synchretizations and essencially made up on the spot as a kind of reaction to Roman Gods, since what little direct mention of them exists tends to come from a post-contact with Rome era, is incorrect. One thing that makes me believe tha that religion is, however, not altogether that old, even among the Goths, is that none of the names made it into proper religious ceremony like God did. It seems to me there must have been an older religion that simply did not get carried on, perhaps as a result of contact with Rome, perhaps earlier. It could be a situation similar to Mexico, where a very old religious capital inspired religions among the Mayans, and later the Nahuatl, but the details of which were not known even to them, who ascribed the city itself to giants.
It will not come as a surprise, to me, in any case, that peoples with similar sensibilities should have similar Gods. This happened, for example, between the Mayans and Nahuatl, and as has been observed, between Greeks and Romans and Jews and, possibly, Goths, though with Goths the case is less clear. This does not make them “the same God.” And, indeed, they are not.
When a people, like the Goths, or even the Romans in very early times, has very little tradition and is faced with a far superior culture, it is easy to use local names for these foreign Gods and simply forget the old traditions, because of a barbaric loose affiliation with tradition. But this does not change the meanings of things, and the original religion is never truly lost. Jupiter was and is still Jupiter, to the point where one alleges that Jupiter is Zeus but you say that Jupiter is Thor while Zeus is Tiwaz. It is a hopeless falsehood. Words have meanings, and the words for the names of Gods, as even a Goth must see, specially so.
One enjoys the fact that the Jewish tradition is so accutely aware of this fact, that for a long time the centerpiece of their worship was a secret name for that which they worshiped, guarded very carefully by its priests. It is a modern nihilist idea that names don’t matter, perhaps related to Chomsky’s idea that all lannguages say the same thing, and simply use different sounds. A Roman, of course, laughs.
Wrong.
The Goti were a Germanic tribe emerging from the East of Rome about the year 550AD.
Rome came under Gothic rule.
We know about them mainly through Jordanes, himself of part gothic ancestry.
We do not get the word God from the Goths.
The word God comes to us through the German tribes that invaded the British Isles, pincipally the Saxons, who bestowed their langauge on these lands. English spread the world over by colonisation.
Other tribes from Germany also had much to conribute to the history if Europe, such as the Franks who gave their name to France, but not much of their language.
You are a bit ignorant of sme basic facts of history.
Gibberish
I did not say that because it was not the case.
Roman aristocrats learned Greek as SECOND langauge to learn philsophy and law.
And Russians also learned French as a SECOND language. French was the langauge of diplomacy throughout the world.
Don’t be silly. “Goth” is just a name Romans use for the collection of tribes that descended from Scandinavia and spread throughout the mainland, as far China and Portugal. No Scandinavian movement out of Scandinavia that produced any of the Goth people we know today is reckoned as anything but Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, etc, none of the distinctions made on the basis of some as yet (for reasons stated) unknowable cultural distinction but simply on the direction they took when they left Scandinavia.
Why then do they observe our Gods, follow our political mandates, and generally speaking wear suits? Did not every last Gothic king bow to the Roman pope? Yes they did. I find Gothic reckoning of history funny, as if at one point there was Rome populated by hundreds of millions of Romans and then one day Goths came, and all Romans no longer existed and it was simply Goths plundering the ruins of a disappeared people. I suppose Clovis just spontaneously decided to be baptized.
Chinamen wear suits, and so do Goths.
A name later applied to a specific branch of Goths. To distinguish them, for example, from Slavs. All Goths.
Ok.
Yes, I am sure it is to you. A Roman of any provenance or level of education would pause, and consider. Goths are so young, that they do not even fully grasp what it is that history is.
There is more than the normal amount ot Bull Shit on this thread.
Tiu, or Tyr to the vikings was the god os Tuesday (Tiusday). It was not parallel to Zeus, but to Ares and Mars the gos of War.
Gods and their functions, as top god or a god who runs a paricular fucntion change! Not only their names but their importance and fucntion.
Thus Wotan, or Odin was Mr. Wednesday, which was analogous in some ways to Mercury rather than Zeus.
Jupiter or Jove goes for THursday which is the Thrunder day represented by THOR.
For Rome Thursday’s god is top dog whereas in the “germanic” tradition is a less being in charge of thunder bolts as si Jove and Zeus.
Frigg (Friggday or Friday) was Venus, who in Greece was Aphrodite.
There is more standardisation in the DAYS of the week Europewide. Which indicated that ordinary life has aways been a lot more important than what the gods are doing.
And more sense comes from discussions from this when you remind yourself that god are MYTHICAL and not actually real in any meaningful sense.
Wrong again. The word Goth is of Germanic origin. By the tie of the Goths, it was lass about Germans being Romanised, but about Rome becoming Germanised. The entire empire was over run by Germanic tribes of one sort or another.
This does not make any sense
Eventually the whole (known world) became Christianised, even Ireland, Scandinavia and the British Isles. Yet the British Isles France and Rome ALL fell to German tribes.
You really do not have much of a grasp of basic history. There were at its MAXIMUM peak 3 million people in the Roman Empire. You are trying to understand this problem with very little knowledge.
No one is saying that at all
Political expedience showed him the best way to control the people.
This happened in Britain, and Ireland too. And when the Pagen Viking took the land they too converted.
Seriously what the actual fuck are you talking about?
Only to people that have not studied history.
So what is the point?
God is a Germanic word. Used in English speaking countries, Germany uses Gott, as both words share the same root.
Other names for god are far too numerous to mention.
But the virus of the idea is not bounded by the name, sadly.
That is fine, Romans still used it. For a different purpose, incidentally, than the Goths must have used it, though again we cannot be certain what they did use it for before coming under Roman rule.
Germanic is a similar case, where it meant one thing but was used by Romans to denote another, much like “Indian” originally means from a Roman word for an Asian sub-continent, or Aztec originally means some specific thing for the Nahuatl and not a name for a people. And, young lad, if you think about it, for a savage people, there is no need to have a name for yourself. You are just “people.” When you are a Roman, or a Jew, or a Greek, aware of being in a world with different peoples, then you use a name.
It is likely that the Goth tribes had different names to distinguish each other from each other, but Romans didn’t bother to trace it very carefully and neither certainly did the Goths themselves.
Now, young lad, how is it that Slavs are Goths, they are not Germanic, but Goths are Germanic? You are mistaking the nomenclature.
Yes, correct. And generally speaking, all Goths. It all became Rome.
They were all Roman Catholics.
I gather.
If you say so.
Then no one is mistaken. However, young lad, I believe you are missing a lot.
Yes, if you say so.
Spontaneously. Aside from the fact that this is a very poor and shallow interpretation, common among Goths. Perhaps it is this mentality that creates things like communism, as a sort of mirror image, a certain strain of Goths attempting to imitate what they see it is that leaders do.
If you say so.
I don’t mean to tax you, young lad.
We are just sitting here, discussing history and the vicissitudes of peoples, largely because there is some puzzling resistance to accepting the simple question “what does ‘God’ mean?”
Alright, so what does it mean? Can you provide a ‘Germanic’ instance of its use prior to being adopted as a placeholder for Zeus in Roman ceremonies rendered in Gothic tounge? I would dearly like to see it.
You would first have to know what ‘God’ means, young lad, that is the point.
We know, in civilized toungues, what Zeus means. And this is the word used to describe similar entities worshiped in different lands. But I wonder if you would feel comfortable writing the same sentence using ‘Zeus?’ ‘Other names for Zeus are far too numerous to mention.’
Bear in mind, if your young self can, that all these names have an origin. ‘God’ was used for something, before it was adopted by Romans to utilize a native equivalent to tell its stories about Zeus and worship Him.
Imagine, for example, you are a Christian missionary in Japan. And this, again, is an extensively documented problem that our missionaries had in every new barbarian land they arrived in. You need to explain to them what Zeus is. But they don’t have that word. What word do you use? There is, of course, no ‘universal name’ for any being that is worshipped, this is Gothic claptrap. What missionaries did was find some entity that was worshiped localy, and use that name.
Tiwaz is the same word as Zeus, which was pronounced Zdeus, (Tuesday is Zdeusday)
and as old, as Tacitus reports that Tiwaz had been dethroned by Wodan and an overthrow in a Pantheon doesnt happen overnight nor does a deity ascend to the top of a pantheon overnight.
We dont know where the name Zeus originated as little as we do of Poseidon or Dionysos for that matter.
