Identity and the Gods

[Heron]

In her book Religion in Late Roman Britain (Routledge, 1998), Dorothy Watts says that the cults of Iron Age Britain were "animistic and based on trees, streams, marshes, birds". She suggests that only after the Roman invasion were any of their gods humanised to fit apparent equivalents in the Roman pantheon. She suggests that there was a renewal of paganism for a short time after the Romans left and xtianty was abandoned by many outside of the Romanised towns. She also suggests that this renewal of paganism was only partly a return to the earlier Roman paganism and cites evidence that the emphasis was to gods of places not represented in human form.

She provides a lot of detailed evidence (e.g on burial practices) and her approach is thoroughly academic, though I'm not sure that the broader generalisations she makes are particularly supported by the evidence she gives. Nevertheless, I think it worth considering this balance between humanised deities and deities which have no particular human form (or perhaps even any identity apart from a generic one).

There has been much debate in the past on this forum about the distinction between gods and spirits of place. I'm not sure that the early Romans, before they absorbed the Greek pantheon, made the distinction in a particularly hard and fast way. But what about all the named gods? Watts suggests, for example, that the shrine of Coventina at Carrawburgh might originally simply have been a sacred spring.


Thoughts….?

[dumnorix]

If the comparative evidence is of any use at all, I think all of our core gods must be fairly human. Okay, Lugus was born from an egg, Belgios was a giant serpentine cyclops, and Rigantona occasionally turns into a horse, but the essential nature of the gods is human.

Of course, these are what we might call "mythological gods". The genii loci may be of a different stuff entirely - I tend to call them "land gods". However, some mythological gods are also land gods - take Sul Minerva from Bath for example, who I interpret as equivalent to Brigantī and to Belgios's eye. Tricky one, isn't it!

[redraven]

Missed this post for some reason. Anyway, the framework suggested here mirrors very closely my own experiences. Names have only been a very limited and recent addition for me and even now less than 5 names have been offered. The UPG that has been shown to me is that names are specific to the physical plain. They are a comparably recent tool to facilitate a connection, but for me, they usually represent somewhat of a distraction. If the pre-Roman populations did not tie identity strongly with the individual because the survival strategy relied on the communal tribal identity, then I would suggest that the synopsis presented would have a very good basis to take it forward.

RR