Tread: Very interesting: A drawing of a relief from the great staircase from the Luwian city of Carchemish. It depicts the storm god Tarhunt, holding an axe and vajra (lightning trident), leading the earth goddess Kubaba, holding grain and poppies...🙂 Sounds familiar?
The drawing is from this great article: "Building Inscriptions of Carchemish: The Long Wall of Sculpture and Great Staircase" by J. D. Hawkins
The grain goddess follows the storm god...Because in the area where Carchemish (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carchemish) is located, without rain, the land ends up looking like this...No grains (or poppies)...
This is the climatic year in the area of Carchemish. You can see that the year is clearly divided into hot/dry half and and cool/wet half...
The hottest and driest part of the year is the end of Jul beginning of Aug. Leo...The time of death...Ruled by the god of death...Another name for the destructive burning sun.
The hottest, driest part of the year is marked by the lion animal calendar marker...Leo...The reason for this is that this is when the Eurasian lions main mating season starts...
This is the reason why in Carchemish we also find this relief depicting the above mentioned storm god killing a lion. The image is from this great article "Carchemish ša kišad puratti" by Irene J. Winter jstor.org/stable/3642708…
The other guy helping the storm god is probably the local king, not another god...The role which later became the main role of local kings, who were "(storm) god's incarnation on earth"
Thread: In which I will propose that some of our myths about sky gods are in fact very very old scientific theories which tried to explain the available observed phenomena in the best possible way with the knowledge of the universe people possessed at that time...
Actually I would even argue that we would most likely explain the same observed phenomena today in the same way, if we weren't taught all that "science stuff" at school that some "smart scientists" figured out already, so we don't have to...
So I will start with telling you where the super cool image from the first tweet is from. It's from Prohodna cave in Bulgaria, which was possibly used as an early sky god temple oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-ey…
I always thought that Thor's hammer looked like a stylized axe...
That Thor's "hammer" probably was originally an axe, can be seen from this next artifact. A museum in Utrecht has a relic called "the hammer of St. Martin of Tours".
The "hammer" was made in the 13th or 14th c. from a Bronze Age stone axe dated to 1,000 - 700 BC...
Thread: From khanacademy.org/humanities/anc…
"In some ways what we see on...sarcophagus is simple to understand: women and men...making sacrifices and preparing the deceased for burial before his tomb. However, looking more deeply, many questions remain. How is it to be read?"
A possible reading of the sacrifice panel. From the above article: "...an offering table on which lies a trussed bull...blood...coming from the bull’s neck and pouring into a vessel next to the table. Beneath the table are two small goats, possibly awaiting a similar fate..."
This is climate in Crete...The climatic year is divided into hot and dry half (Apr/May - Sep/Oct) and the cool and wet half (Sep/Oct - Apr/May)...
Very interesting...But I wonder: is this really a panther...Or is it a lioness...Let's see:
See the snake coiling around the goddess? Why is this snake here? For the same reason why on this Roman relief of Ceres (Roman equivalent of Demeter), the goddess is seen emerging from the ground holding grain and snakes...
Snakes are the only true solar animals. They are in our world when sun is in our world (day and hot part of the year) and they are in the underworld when sun is in the underworld (night and cold part of the year)
Thread: Excerpt from "Srpski mitološki rečnik" (Serbian mythological dictionary) dlscrib.com/download/srpsk…
"Holy oak - In the recent past, Kuči (Tribe from Montenegro) did not have a single whole church. The people had no place to gather or perform religious rites..."
"...Feeling the need for a consecrated place they turned to oaks, a practice common among other Serbs and which, in all likelihood, has its origins in a very ancient, pre-Christian veneration of oaks, and trees in general, among the Slavs..."
"...Any large oak growing in a conspicuous place in or near the village became the village temple. The priest performed church rites under it. People gathered around it for village assemblies and celebrations... "
Thread: "In the beginning, Agni burned all things, but at the insistence of Shiva, Brahma withdrew Agni, and instead created Yama, the god of death" from: "Encyclopaedia of the Hindu World, Volume 1" By Gaṅgā Rām Garg...
Very interesting...Because of this: Nergal, the Mesopotamian god of death, who "represented the high summer sun which scorched the earth...which hindered crop production"...
In Mesopotamia, Nergal is associated with lions (is actually depicted as a lion). Why? Because in Mesopotamia, Jul/Aug, Leo, is the hottest and driest part of the year. The time of drought. The time of death...