Gothic paganism
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Gothic paganism was the original religion of the Goths before their conversion to Christianity.
History
The Goths first appear in historical records in the early 3rd century and were Christianised in the 4th and the 5th centuries. Information on the form of Germanic paganism practiced by the Goths before Christianisation is thus limited to a comparatively narrow and sparsely-documented time window in the 3rd and the 4th centuries.[citation needed]
The centre of the Gothic cult was the village or clan (Kuni) and the ritual sacrificial meal held by the villagers under the leadership of the reiks. The reiks saw themselves as the guardians of ethnic tradition. That was expressed starkly in the
After the Goths had settled in Scythia in the 2nd century, it is probable that a process of ethnogenesis was set in motion, and that most of the "Goths" of the 3rd and the 4th centuries were not in fact descended from Scandinavia but, much as was the case with the "Huns" in the following century, consisted of a heterogeneous population, which was united under the name of "Goths" by virtue of having submitted to the elite that was formed by the ruling dynasties of the reiks.[citation needed]
Gothic religion was purely tribal in which
The gradual Christianisation of parts of the Gothic population came to a turning point in the 370s. A civil strife between the Christian reiks Fritigern and the pagan reiks Athanaric prompted Roman military intervention on the side of the Christians, which led to the Gothic War (376–382). In 376, the Romans allowed a number of ostensibly-Christian Goths, including bishops and priests, to cross the Danube and to be granted asylum.[citation needed]
Religious practices
The English word
The name of the Goths themselves is presumably related and means "those who libate", and guþ "idol" is the object of the act of libation.[citation needed]
The words for "to sacrifice" and for "sacrificer" were blotan and blostreis, which were used in Biblical Gothic in the sense of "Christian worship" and "Christian priest".[citation needed]
One peculiarity that separates Gothic religion from all other forms of early Germanic religion is the absence of weapons as grave goods. Pagan warrior graves in Scandinavia, England and Germany almost invariably contained weapons until the practice was discontinued by Christianisation, the pagan Goths do not seem to have felt the need to bury their dead with weapons. That may have arisen from the fact that weapon burials began to become prominent among pagan peoples in the 5th and the 6th centuries, possibly as a method of permanently establishing prestige upon certain families by burial ritual in a period of a heightened economy and increased intergroup competition, thus well after the Goths' Christianisation.[1]
A Gothic belief in witches is attested with the story of the haliurun(n)ae (compare Anglo-Saxon
Gothic deities
Very little can be said with certainty regarding the individual
In the light of comparative evidence from later forms of Germanic paganism, it seems likely that the "Germanic trinity" of Wodanaz, Tīwaz, and Þunraz may have had a parallel among the Goths, with the names Gaut, Teiws, and Fairguneis.[1]
War god *Teiws
The Goths had a cult of a
Among the Tervingi, perhaps also known as the Terwing, the tribe's mythical,
Ancestor Gapt vs. Norse Odin
There was also
*Fairguneis, Ingwaz, and *Donaws
Another important god may have been called
The Gothic letter enguz may indicate the existence among the Goths of the god Ingwaz, an older name for the god Freyr, but there is no other evidence for that.[citation needed]
Finally, the
See also
References
- ^ a b c Wolfram 1990, pp. 116–112.
Sources
- ISBN 0520069838.
Further reading
- Nordgren, Ingemar (2011). "Goths and Religion". In ISBN 9789155486648.
- ISBN 9781843830337.
- ISSN 2507-0444. Retrieved March 5, 2020.
- ISBN 978-0520085114.