The Sky Father or his son, the Storm God?

In this video we're going to start in the Pontic-Caspian steppe and examine the origin and transformation of our oldest known gods, the Indo-European Sky Father and his son, the Storm God. From the pit barrels of the Yamnaya, to the hymns of the Vedas, from the thunder of the Olympus, to the unforgiving icy world of the Norse gods, we'll trace how these figures changed names, roles, and even identities across various cultures. We'll find out what happened to them, why did some of the most important gods disappear while others absorbed their powers, and what does this all say about the societies that worshipped them. This is not a simple journey, it is complicated, a story of evolution, replacement, and adaption. It's a story that reaches from prehistoric burials to medieval manuscripts, but by the end of it you'll see just how much of our ancient past is still alive in the myths we tell today. And so if this sounds interesting to you, then grab yourself a cup of tea, and welcome to Crecganford. Around 5,300 years ago a group of people living in the Pontic steppe, most of whom spoke a language we today call Proto-Indo-European, and who shared similar beliefs, started a ritual of burying people in pit graves, and it is the name of these graves which, in Russian, gave rise to this culture's name, the Yamnaya. This culture developed horse riding skills and improved wheeled transport, which allowed them to be incredibly successful pastoral farmers, and to migrate across Europe, through Iran, and into India. And part of the evidence of this is that their language is at the root of many Indo-European languages, Proto-Indo-European. As these people originated in the same place, shared a common language, they shared beliefs, these same beliefs travelled with them and survived, and evolved, much in the same way as their language did. The result of this is that we see commonality in beliefs around the Indo-European landscape, much in the same way we see commonality in language. And from the cultures that evolved out of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, we have good information about five groups of them, the Vedic from northwest India, the Iranians, the Greek, the Roman, and the Old Norse slash Germanic peoples. However, the Yamnaya were not the first Proto-Indo-European speaking people though, they had evolved from an earlier culture which also spoke an early form of Proto-Indo-European. The most often quoted of these are the Reppin culture, and these people almost certainly had the pantheon gods around 8,000 years ago, and I will give an overview of this pantheon now. And if you want to know more about how this pantheon was created, I have made another video that explains this, it is called Lost Gods, Our Oldest Known Religion Pantheon. On the screen I have placed a diagram of the pantheon, and let me go over who these gods are as this will help you understand the context of this video. In the top left we have the primordial beings that helped create the cosmos, Monos and Yemos, or as an anglified translation, Manu and Yemo. Manu sacrifices Yemo to create material to build the cosmos, the earth and the people on it, and in return Yemo becomes lord of the dead. Yemo has two sacred figures to help keep the other world in order. They are the ferryman of the dead, Gerlant, who is represented by a very, very old man, and who transported people across a river in the other world. It was a physical barrier that prevented living people following the dead into the other world. And then there was Koliol, a female figure who fettered people with a noose to pull them from the land of the living into the land of the dead. We have stories of both these figures from all across the Indo-European landscape. We then have a unique group of spirits called the Wothu, a name constructed by the etymologist Anatoly Lieberman. And these have an animistic origin, representing the howling and whistling winds that were heard on a stormy night, that ripped branches from trees, or even uprooted the trees themselves. And these are probably the oldest of all the religious beings we know the names of, and can construct with confidence. And maybe these names are thousands of years older than this very pantheon, perhaps as old as over 10,000 years. And finally, on the bottom left are the Fates. And whilst their names are not attested to, nor can be etymologically reconstructed, as they differ in their cognate in most cultures, I have used Proto-Indo-European equivalents of verbs representing what the Fates did, which is spinning the thread of fate, tying a life to a thread, and then cutting a thread, to symbolise death. Now all these figures on the left are sacred, but not necessarily deities as we would perceive them, they were not gods per se. But then to the right of all these we have the main pantheon of figures, which we would consider gods. At the top we have the Sky Father, a deity who overlooked all of the world, and I'll explain how he developed in other pantheons today. And he had a consort called the Mother Earth, and there was probably another deity representing the night sky as well, Waranus. The Sky Father had children, his eldest son, the Storm God, an answer to why there was thunder and lightning, and a god who was often associated with warriors. And I will also talk about what happened to him today. And then there were the other children, a goddess of the dawn, and the sun, and the moon. It is also thought that the Storm God had a consort, maybe the Sky Woman, and the Storm God's children were probably representing wind and water, due to the results of a storm, but also fire, as lightning would cause fires at some point before the Anaya culture, due to the nature of farming these people participated in, which was primarily pastoral farming of cows, a pastoral deity. And this made the cow a key indicator of wealth, and the resources it provided made it seem like a gift from the gods, and so it became central, or it is probably more appropriate to say to continue to be central to ritual and religion of peoples in this region at the time. So now we understand how the core pantheon looked, and as I said I have made a specific video about how this was constructed, we now have the context to look at how the Sky Father and his son, the Storm God, developed and evolved in other pantheons. There were many cultures that came from the Indo-Europeans, and I mentioned the five, the Vedic, Iranian, Roman, Greek, and the Germanic Old Norse, grouped together. But I am deliberately setting the Iranian pantheon to one side, and I want to explain why. We know the early Indo-Iranians have a religion that stemmed from the Proto-Indo-Europeans, as this continued to develop as the Indo-Europeans dispersed through Iran and into north-west India, and there they formed the Vedic culture. But as these people migrated into the Iranian plateau during the late 3rd to early 2nd millennium BCE, they had a religious revolution, with their beliefs being inversed with the emergence of Zoroastrianism. Now Zoroastrianism is a religion which is traditionally attributed to the prophet Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, where his teachings are of a dualistic cosmology, a cosmos where there was order and chaos, but good and evil in the beginning. Before this it was thought that chaos grew from the cosmos and was not part of its original inception, and the result was that the old gods of the Indo-Europeans became malevolent beings in Zoroastrianism, and a chief god, whose name was Ahura Mazda, was created to become the wise lord and creator, who embodied goodness and the truth, or Asha, and opposed the forces of chaos, or Juj, and who opposed the hostile spirit of Angra Mainyu. And so whilst Zoroastrianism retained some structural elements of Indo-European religion, such as fire worship, sacred formulas, and cosmic order, the rest was revised within this sort of strict understanding of dualism. And this is a transformation, not an evolution, and I would recommend reading Mary Boyce's books on the history of Zoroastrianism as a starting point, and the Indo-European cosmogonic beliefs that were retained within places within the Avestas, by reference in my many videos about Indo-European cosmogony and creation, and often use the work of Bruce Lincoln, who I highly recommend. Without doubt the best place to start when looking at the Indo-European Pantheon is with the Sky Father, often assumed to be the chief god, and who is usually the most attested deity in primary sources. And then second is his son, which may seem surprising rather than the earth mother, but the reasons why will become clear as I proceed. But let's start with the Sky Father, whose Proto-European name is reconstructed as Deus Futur. Now whilst I show on this map how this name would be constructed in various cultures and regions of the Indo-European landscape, what you must also understand is that just because a name is retained, it does not mean that the function and position of the deity that had that name remained the same. And this is what makes a look at the development of these deities very interesting, and tells us much about specific Indo-European cultures. So we know at the top of the Pantheon we have the Sky Father, who has a sacred connection with the Earth Mother, and they have a son who was a storm god, and we can construct their Proto-Indo-European names. Yet if we look at the chief gods of the Vedic, and Greek, and Roman, and Germanic pantheons, we see that none of these names match the linguistic evolution of what the Sky Father's name would exactly be. They have all changed for various reasons, and so we need to answer these four questions. Why did Deus Piter become Indra? Why did Zeus Pater become Zeus? Why did Tis Piter become Jupiter? And why did Tiwaz become Odin? Well, what happened here? Well, in some instances the Sky Father didn't become another god, he was replaced. And this is before we talk about his son Perkunos, and what happened to him. Now the short answer is, it's complicated, and this is why I will also not be talking about the Earth Mother in this video today, otherwise this video may end up being tens of hours long. So, the best place to start, as it is the simplest, is with the Romans, and linguistically we can feel confident that Deus Piter became Tis Piter in the Italic language, being used between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago. And then as Italic evolved, and one branch became Latin, we see Tis Piter become Jupiter, which in modern English we pronounce Jupiter. And so we could say, that was easy, no problem with the Roman Pantheon. But things are complicated, because if we look at the Roman Pantheon we find that there is no storm god, no son of Jupiter, and that is because Jupiter is also the storm god. We know this because we find the epithets of Jupiter Tonens, Jupiter the Thunderer, or Jupiter Pluvius, Jupiter of the Rain, or Jupiter Fulgens, literally meaning Jupiter the Flasher, but is actually referring to lightning. And we see imagery of Jupiter includes him holding a lightning bolt, where it has been broken off in most statues, but where it is there, this bolt is sometimes known as Formen Lovis, meaning the lightning of Jupiter. So what we have here is an absorption of power by the sky father of his storm god son. And this gives Jupiter a more supreme role, Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Jupiter the best and the greatest. And this is interesting, as it suggests that maybe the sky father before absorption wasn't the best and greatest, and that the storm god had a lot of power. And this is a great introduction into understanding what happened in these pantheons, knowing that whilst we see a linguistic evolution of the name, the shifting of power isn't necessarily reflected in that name. Now if we know what happened to the Romans, and it is often true that the Romans were influenced greatly by the Greeks, then understanding the Greeks, well that may not be too complicated. We see that there is a known linguistic evolution of Deus Pater to Zeus Pater in the Proto-Hellenic language, and we see in Mycenaean Greek that this then evolves into Zeus Pater, and so still the sky father in the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE. But by the time we get to Homer's writings into the 1st millennium BCE, Zeus Pater is now Zeus, with his father title removed. But we do start seeing other epithets for Zeus, and the one that is most interesting to us is that of Zeus Kerenenos. Kerenenos is a cognate of Perkinos, suggesting a similar root, and which shows that Zeus is consuming his son's powers at this time, and after this time we see Zeus holding a lightning bolt, which is sometimes referred to as Perkinos, after his son. Which means, unlike the Roman pantheon, we see a clearer path of evidence of this absorption of power in the Greek pantheon, resulting in a supreme being, Zeus. But what also could be at play, due to the cultures in place at the time, including potential farming cultures, is that any existing all powerful god that may have been known in pre-Greek pantheons in this region, may have also helped influence this absorption of power. If Zeus has to be the head of the pantheon, he must be as great as any existing god, and as such that the sky father took this role on as the head of the pantheon and became a supreme god, and as part of this also needed the storm god to function. Which could suggest that the highest ranking god of the Neolithic farming pantheons was a storm god, but this is not to say that there were not goddesses either who had a higher rank in these pantheons, such as the Earth Mother Rock. And to explain this I will make another video, because it is a fascinating journey and evolution of this mother goddess role, and I just can't give it time to do it justice in this video. And so with that we have two sky father evolutions explained, and two absorbed sons, and with so many functions the Greek god's name was simplified to Zeus. Now before I talk about the Vedic and Germanic slash old Norse pantheons, I would like to quickly explain the syncretism, epithets, and interpretatio. Because whilst we have already seen epithets in use here, such as Jupiter the Thunderer, or Zeus the Storm God, in effect a name that always reflects the function of the god, there are two other terms I will be using in a moment. Syncretism, which is where we see different beliefs merge and copy each other whilst retaining aspects unique to their religion, and interpretatio, which was particularly used by the Greeks and the Romans to explain foreign gods in terms that would be recognised by their own speakers. Knowing that, let's head into India and the Vedic culture, where compared to the And this is not linguistic evolution, this is a replacement. We see the name Dyaspita used until the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, but then Indra replaces him, and I mean completely takes on the role of chief deity. This is evidenced in the religious text of Rig Veda, which has over 250 hymns dedicated to Indra, who was the son of Dyaspita. Indra was the storm god of the Vedic religion. And so the question is, why do we see this change? And this is where things are complicated, and where we don't necessarily see the whole picture. Now without doubt the religious revolution of Zoroastrianism would have had an influence on the people migrating into India, as the timelines of change on the Iranian plains is just before we see Indra take the role of the head of the pantheon. And part of this may be because the sky father is a static figure who only overlooks daylight, yet we see much mythology about the night sky, the Milky Way, in the Rig Veda, and so perhaps a deity who is active all hours of the day or night is required. The Rig Veda also contains a number of dragon slaying stories, but one in particular where Indra defeats Phutra has many shared meanings with that of the Enuma Elish, something I go into detail with in this video, Indra vs Marduk, which implies that there probably was a Neolithic farming mythological influence on the Vedic culture as well. This hero deity who could defeat the dragon, who controlled the waters, was in a prime position to take control of the Vedic gods, and so across Greek, Roman, and Vedic cultures we have seen either sky fathers become supreme and their storm god sons disappear, or storm gods become supreme and sky fathers disappear. But I have left the best until last when it comes to the complexity of pantheon evolution, and that is with the Germanic gods, and with a particular focus on Old Norse pantheon, the gods with which the Vikings were familiar. But to understand these we also need to have a look at the Germanic pantheon, as these were a significant influence on the Old Norse beliefs. Now we can reconstruct Tiwaz from the deus of deus Phutra of the Indo-Europeans around 3,500 years ago, and this suggests that the father aspect has already been lost. And this is further seen if we look at the Germanic languages and its cousins 2,500 years ago, with Tiw and Tir being the equivalent of the sky father's name, and Tir, much like deus, is translated to god. But we also see a similar simplification of names from Germanic to Old Norse gods, with the Germanic Ingvi Freyr, meaning Lord Freyr, becoming just Freyr in Old Norse. It is also possible that the same simplification happened to the goddess Freyja as well, but this is not attested to. The other interesting property of the deity's names of the Old Norse pantheon is that it seems that they are not etymologically connected to the names of the Proto-Indo-European gods, as though older names of gods were used from a non-Indo-European culture who may have already been there, in Scandinavia. And one example of that is the storm god, who in Indo-European is Perkinas, or Piran, but in Old Norse most considered to be Thor. And even though Thor's name means thunder, and his hammer Mjolnir is thought to mean lightning maker, although much like Jupiter's lightning bolt, there is some disagreement on that. But the fact is we see a problem with Thor in that he has little or no interaction with thunder or lightning, a storm god without a storm so to speak. However, he is the deity who is associated with combat with the dragon, or the myth-gathered serpent, Jormungandr, which again associates him with the mythology of the storm god. And so we have in Old Norse Tyr and Thor, but if we look at Old Norse Pantheon, who sits at the top of it? And it's Odin, whose name is not etymologically linked with Tyr or Thor, or Deus Puta, or any deity of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. But there is a link. But let's find out how Odin came to be, where he is. Now the earliest attestation to what we think was him is in Tacitus' Germania, who is described in the deities the Germanic tribes celebrate around 2000 years ago. And we see their chief god as being called Mercury, and this is interpretatio Romana, in effect the Romans are saying that the Germanic chief god is most similar to the Roman god Mercury. Now there is a lot of debate about this, but we can evidence this due to archaeological finds of inscriptions such as one which reads Merchio Heraneni, meaning Mercury Raven, found in Bornheim Heimerich, and which can be interpreted as Mercury Raven, or Mercury Woden. And then alongside that we have the days of the week, where we have the Roman Dies Mercury, meaning Mercury's Day, which is translated to Wednesday, or Woden's Day in Germanic. We have a lot of confidence that when the Romans said Mercury, they were in fact referring to Woden. And Woden, well, is he Odin? Well Woden isn't Odin, but we must understand that the Germanic gods whose name was Woden would evolve linguistically into Odin, or Odin, as it went into Scandinavia. And we believe that this happened late in the first millennium BCE. And knowing Woden influenced the name Odin, then we can ask the question, where does Woden come from? And the answer to that is that it is from the Proto-Germanic Wotanaz. And where does Wotanaz come from? Well, it seems as though it derives from the group of frenzied spirits in the Proto-Indo-European, the Wotu. Now this isn't a commonly accepted argument, but it is one that I think I personally find fits very well. And so we have Odin, here characterised as a wild and frenzied man, he is also known for being wise and magical. And this function does not seem to be part of Woden's properties, they weren't incorporated into Odin, or Woden was unable to give them to Odin because Woden didn't have them. And it seems most likely as though the old Norse god of poetry, Oðr, may well have been consumed by Odin, and that's primarily because of the cognate between Oðr and Odin. But if Odin is the chief god, and we know how his name became what it is, then what happened to Tyr? Now consensus is that due to the conflict in Europe between the Romans and the Germanic tribes, then the people needed a strong war god, and Tyr is known for having lost an arm to the wolf child of Loki, Fenrir, indicating a potential weakness in battle. Although Tyr was brave, and his name was used to bless weapons. And it may be that in such a time of conflict, a stronger, wiser, more magical god was required, and so Odin slash Woden took his place. Certainly by the time the Poetic Edda were written in the 13th century, Tyr's mythology has been completely rewritten, or perhaps it is better to say it has all but disappeared, and remnants do remain, including the mention that he is the son of the giant Ymir in the Hymiscyther, where Thor fishes for the Mithgarda serpent, while in the Skarsgård Pummel Tyr is named as the son of Odin. So what we have here is a reflection that maybe Tyr has been reworked in Old Norse mythology to fit the genealogy of Odin becoming chief god, and in effect an Odin centric genealogy has informed the Old Norse mythology we are aware of. But what of Thor, a storm god, in details, but not necessarily his function, and with a name that is not Indo-European? Well his name can be constructed as Thunras in Germanic, and so is there any way Perkunas can become Thunras, and so Thor? Well Perkunas probably means to strike an oak, and Thor means thunderer. And so the meaning is different, with no obvious link, but we see in the early form of the Celtic language that Perkunas became Perkunor, which can be translated to wooded mountain. The Celtic name also then evolves into Tannuris later on. But this wooded mountain top meaning is interesting, because to us if we look at Germanic, what can mean mountain is the Germanic Fjörgyn. And so we have the Germanic Fjörgyn, which can mean mountain, the Tannuris can be mountain, and it seems that this god's name is coming under all sorts of linguistic evolutionary pressures, but at no point is he Thunras, Thor, or Thunor. However, Fjörgyn is in Old Norse myths, sometimes appearing as Odin's father-in-law, but sometimes as the earth's mother. Both figures would be significant, the former making Fjörgyn Thor's grandfather, but equally, in an Indo-European pantheon, the latter would be, well, make Fjörgyn Thor's mother. The fact is that there's lots going on in Europe during the Bronze Age and the Iron Ages, migrations and conflict, trade, and why this name change happened we may never really know. But we do know a god Thor, who had all the hallmarks of a thunder god, did take up the role of a hero in the pantheon, and some would even say he became the equivalent of the Sky Father. As within the text of Alephic's The Lives of Saints, he writes, and this was a thousand years ago, and he shows himself visible in divers' phantasms, to the saint in the appearance of the gods of the heathen, sometimes in Jo's form, who is called Thor, sometimes in Mercury's, who is called Odin, sometimes in that of Venus, the foul goddess, who men call Frigg, and into many other shapes the devil transformed himself in the bishop's light. Jo's form is Jupiter, and comparing Thor to Jupiter is saying Thor is a Sky Father figure. As I said before, it's complicated. Before I conclude all this information, I just want to say that the next video I'll make in this series will discuss the Earth Mother, and maybe some other of the goddesses of the pantheon. And so I want to take this opportunity to thank all my Patrons and my YouTube members for their generous support, their huge amount of questions, and lots of discussion and thought and inspiration. They make a real difference to my ability to make videos, to do research, and to produce the mythology database which is used by academics across the world. And so, how to conclude this? We are lucky when it comes to the Indo-European mythology that we have, because we have primary and secondary source material that goes back thousands of years. And this allows us to better understand how people lived their beliefs, and for this video, how their cultures changed and adapted to what was going on. And that is something that we are missing in First Nation American, or Australian, or Siberian, or African cultures, and one of the regions. It is a huge challenge to do similar work with these, it isn't because we don't want to, many of us would love to understand the roots of mythology from all the people across the world, it is just that the data is severely limited when compared to Proto-Indo-European cultures. What this talk should have revealed is that we also can't make assumptions in Indo-European culture that known linguistic evolution paths also ensure the consistency of meaning of words, and so we mustn't assume a cultural evolution that mirrors that of linguistic evolution. And we also mustn't assume that where Indo-European culture did settle, it did so without influence from cultures already in those areas. In short, it is important to put any considerations about Indo-European beliefs within a completed context as possible, as that will lead to a higher confidence in your research conclusions, and then would allow us to build a better overall web of knowledge of how cultures developed an Indo-European belief. Now with regards specifically to the Sky Father and Storm God, it does appear that while both existed at the same time around 6,000 years ago, certainly by 2,000 years ago one had superseded the other, or did so in most Indo-European pantheons. And this was also a reflection of society, that multiple leaders caused problems, or perhaps this happened because earlier Neolithic farming cultures had a supreme god, and this precedent was copied. Perhaps it was a combination of both, with each culture having its own influences independently. But to sum all this up, it is complicated, and I hope I have shown that. So until next time, please stay safe and well, and this was Crecganford.