Finding the Pre Proto Indo-European Gods

hi i'm john white a specialist in indo-european mythology and today i'm going to uncover some very old european gods and by old i mean gods that were around before the expansion of the proto-indo-european-speaking peoples so almost ten thousand years old maybe older and i will do this by giving an overview of european religion and cultural development across the last thirty thousand years or so which will allow us to understand what sort of gods we are looking for and then using a variety of different evidence we can then find some specific examples in the european pantheons and if you watch until the end of the video you will then see how we can use this to uncover many older gods in one of the major and most well-known paintings showing how these elder gods survived in what was considered an indo-european takeover and so i hope this will be an interesting journey touching on a variety of topics that will interest you so please grab yourself a cup of tea and welcome to kraken ford it is very easy to forget how things have changed even if it costs your mind back to what you think europe was like two thousand years ago it was very different to that of eight thousand years ago the old gods back then weren't those of the indo-european vention oh then zeus or brahma in their indo-european forms they had yet to be established and this is because the cultures of europe have evolved in many ways and continuously throughout the last 50 000 years including some sweeping changes which have brought with them new cultures which in turn have demanded new gods and new beliefs and this is because our ancestors culture was a form of religion and their religion was a form of culture they were very much intertwined one being very much part of the other and we think of these older cultures and beliefs as being erased with changes from migrations and invasions but this isn't always the case some ideas were kept some recycled some reimagined and this is really important to understand if one wishes to practice ideas from these older traditional religions and for those who want to understand how the gods changed and how the properties that those gods possessed changed and so to find some old culture and some old gods we should start by giving a very high level summary of the history of the cultural religion of europe over the last 30 000 years or so so we know what to look for by understanding what's changed now please bear in mind that what i'm giving you here is a very high level very short history lesson i'm skipping over a massive information but it should allow us to gain enough insight to enable us to look at what we need to meet the purpose of this video and speaking of looking for things please remember to look for the like button down here and press it it's free and helps this video and channel grow which makes me want to make more videos and that's a good thing i hope anyway let's get back to time travel and travel back in time in europe around 30 000 years ago so before we start here's an overview of the indo-european region and we're zooming a little to see what europe looked like 30 000 years ago when sea levels were much lower and this aided the people of the time as everyone was a hunter-gatherer wandering around hunting and gathering intermixing with other humanoids and doing things that no doubt influenced the imminent demise of the neanderthals who were themselves happiest living in europe before homo sapiens came along but who had by this time mixed with us enough to leave a legacy in our dna which most europeans today still carry with an average of between two and four percent of the european cna being directly attributable to neanderthals by digress now many of the people around 27 000 years ago probably believed in some form of animism which is believing everything has a soul especially things that moods such as the sun and the moon rivers clouds wind and rain and you could argue that these people felt at one with the world and probably had until their recent past thought that they were just the same as other animals in this world intrinsically linked to one another and these people spent many thousands of years well hunting and gathering and wandering but then the world started to become colder which caused glaciers to form further south pushing people further south to the north coast of the mediterranean in europe around 25 000 years ago and we find dna evidence that this large group of hunter-gatherers started forming two distinct groups at a time noted here as west and east then 20 000 years ago at the coldest part of the last ice age something we call the glacial maximum as glaciers were at their furby south at this point at this time the european western hunter-gatherers then split into two distinct groups which i've called west 1 and west 2 pretty much separated by the alps of northern italy but something else was happening at this point and that was that the group in the east was starting to eat more cereal and grasses such as wheat and barley and so whilst these people weren't farmers they were well aware of the food and drinks that could be made from such plants and i'll refer to a paper by nadal danny atoll in the description below if you want more proof of that then as the ice age started to wane and the world warmed up around 15 000 years ago the west two hunter-gatherer groups started to push back into mainland europe again and the eastern peoples also split into two groups pretty much separated by the euphrates and tigris rivers as there's a large valley there and europe saw the peak of the next warm spell around 14 200 years ago and at this time we see the western groups merging with some intermixing we do see pharma intermixing between the west two group and the yeast one group creating a new group of people who arrive labeled as admixture one whom contain dna from both groups but then europe became cooler in what is known as the older dry spirit around 13 800 years ago and when this happened climate change caused migration and segregation allowing other population groups to start to form we see the hunter-gatherer groups in the west spit again but now where the mixing of east and west happened 500 2 000 years before this point this admixture group split into two groups around the caucus mountains to the east and the black sea and i've called these groups admix yourself and admixture north then the younger dry spirit happens around twelve thousand nine hundred years ago an event where some of the planets sees a huge climate shift and temperatures decrease for almost a thousand years before suddenly rebounding and as an aside this was almost certainly due to several reasons such as volcanic activity possibly an impact from space but one of the key reasons we now know is that a lot of water that was contained as ice in the glaciers in the glaciers and extended polar ice caps melted and this water was released raising sea levels but also made a large lake on the north american continent which we call lake agassiz empty a significant chunk of itself into the atlantic ocean something we call a pulse and all this water at this volume flowing into the ocean had a dramatic effect on weather systems and the result as far as human history is concerned was that by the end of the younger dryas period the areas of the main rivers in the near east became incredibly fertile compared to the rest of europe asia and this was a result of good weather combined with the rivers in the region such as the nile tigris and euphrates all flooding every year and it is this flooding that fertilizes the land due to the muds and silts deposited on the riverbanks and the surrounding land from these rivers after the floods every year and this flooding was considered such an important and significant event in the lives of the people in the region that it must have come from the gods so much so that people told stories about these floods and when the flooding was particularly bad the myths became particularly epic and this is almost certainly the basis for the start of many of the flood myths we hear about today and possibly even the myths around storm gods fighting serpents but i digress a little and we'll talk about those another time now despite the fertile crescent coming into existence europe gets very cold very quickly and we see mixed south group mixing with the west group too again as migrations continue to happen but most significant of all is that when the younger driest period ends and europe warms up again then we see a few major events happen having a significant impact on culture beliefs and history first of all this fertile land in southeast anatolia and northern event where the admixture 2 group is allowed the people here to start cultivating wheat and cereal and so started to grow crops on these fertile lands which meant they had the need for different beliefs beliefs that would make crops grow control the weather the rivers and that would cope with the expanding bat stationary population and so these people these early neolithic farmers started to build villages places of worship worked the land irrigated the land and became the farmers of crops and their gods became not those that moved as part of the environment but became more human in their appearance they became imagined in a form rather than just a spirit now the main reasons why we actually stopped wandering around to grow crops is for a separate video and if you want me to make that then please leave a comment below and for those who want to know more about this research or want to have access some of the slides in this video or the papers i've referenced or just to support the channel then please check out my patreon page which i've put in a link in the description as well and i want to take the opportunity to thank my first patrons for their support divinities and cults horror sock and acetyl and cata factors so thank you very much and as an aside to this for those who are interested in globecki tip as many people like to think of that place as the place where modern human cultural development began this and the other various tech villages were based close to the euphrates to the fertile crescent and i will talk about these more one day as our understanding of this place becomes clearer with every year of research and archaeology that passes but be rest assured what i'll talk about won't involve any advanced civilizations coming from places like atlantis to establish it this wasn't the case and has much more to do with the reason why we started farming but i'm digressing again and i'm promising more videos again and i'll move on so back to the map and 9 000 years ago we see a culmination in all these changes happening with the land and the culture and we see new populations grow with a mixing of the mixed south group and the west 2 group and these then push into the warming mainland europe with their knowledge of how to grow crops and they follow the danube into europe which is a well trodden path for peoples migrating into europe and so it is these peoples who are primarily responsible for bringing farming through anatolia and into europe and bringing with them the ideas of the gods imagined from the fertile crescent along with their cultural ideas including villages and economics and so around 7 000 years ago which is where we see the last major change it is at this point it would be fair to say that the spirit of animism of the hunter-gatherers are close to being forgotten with the gods who helped the crops and the weather and who are held in high esteem amongst the people of the time in their tales of myth and legend from flood myths to dragons they wanted the earth to be fertile fit to sprout life and that's where their beliefs were focused but of equal importance is the rise of the proto-indo-european-speaking people most often represented by the yamnaya culture although the yamnaya culture is not the only culture who represented the proto-indo-europeans but it was these proto-indo-european-speaking peoples from these cultures who were starting to migrate across into europe persia and india from around 8 000 years ago and these people would be pastoral farmers as opposed to agricultural farmers and bring with them the will domestic cattle and the patriarchal bias on the world and a host of new gods to help them help them migrate and invade along with their own beginning and creation myths when these protein european speaking people headed into europe with their horse's wills and language around 6000 years ago europe was a firmly established agricultural farming region which had spent many years worshipping agricultural gods and so these proto-indo-europeans came in with their pastel farming ways so heard animal influence as opposed to crops and much more focus on the importance of the bovine alongside their patriarchal pantheon of indo-european gods and this caused a merging a clashing and a recycling of cultural beliefs and so by 2000 years ago we see a very indo-european influence europe we see the rise of the sky five in those european pantheons and we have evidence of this through archaeology supplemented with dna evidence from proto-indo-european-speaking people to support this understanding of cultural change through migration and by understanding this merging of cultures changing of gods and beliefs it allows us to understand where to look for clues for the gods that existed before the indo-europeans arrived in europe along with their patriarchal pastoral beliefs and so this helps us identify what to look for in finding an old god because it is knowing that the pastel and patriarchal and so hierarchical influence of the protein europeans significantly influenced the pantheons that were restructured which allows us to look for gods that don't fit this and so what were these pre-indo-european pantheons like well they were about fertility they were about getting the birds and the bees to do what birds and bees do and for crops to grow the gods were often female so as to bestow fertility onto the land and this makes them easier to find as the indo-europeans had few female gods and so when these agricultural gods were assimilated into the indo-european pantheons their roles became more passive and if you're interested in who the protein european goddesses were then our current understanding is that there were probably five proto-indo-european goddesses representing the dawn the mother of earth waters those seas or rivers the half for home and a goddess of light which could be interpreted as the sun and i will talk about these deities in a future video because i'm sure there's a lot of interest in those and how we understand this but where we see matriarchal and agricultural focused goddesses we see a very probable pre-indo-european influence and so if we look at a region where we know there was a coming together of these two cultures pastoral and agricultural patriarchal and matriarchal then in a region like this we should see the coming together of these gods shaping religion and so creating a growth from the synthesis of these combined cultures almost irrespective of the amount of influence each had now there will be some evidence of emerging and as religion influenced culture and culture influence to religion then from such a merger we should see new forms of culture such as poetry and philosophy and of course consequential developments in the pantheon and the region where we can see this most clearly is greece with the indo-europeans migrating and invading from the north in the second millennium bce the mycenaeans were thriving in their agricultural beliefs in the south particularly in crete but also on the greek mainland and this cultural clash makes sense as greek culture didn't arise out of nothing it had to come from something and what we see is that although the indo-european-speaking peoples conquered greece they were very quickly influenced by the mycenaean greeks already in place but because of the differences in these cultures the evidence they left us to study are two different trails of evidence you see the protein europeans left as a hypothetical language something we believe we can reconstruct whereas the mediterranean people's leftist archaeology both knew about farming crops and animals but their cultures were very different their values very different matriarchal versus patriarchal blessing the crops and the mother earth versus venerating the sky god and their war gods and so how do we know there are remnants of the agricultural gods in greek mythology or that the mycenaeans influence the indo-europeans and the answer to that lies in their resultant mythology and the best example the most classic of epics are the works of homer and these works had significant input in from the mycenaeans and we see this in the books the iliad and the odyssey because they talk about places that are firmly within the empire of the mycenaeans and not around the rest of greece but we also must be conscious that some of these stories would have originally come from the indo-european culture as some of them also appear in the indian epic the mahabharata however we're talking about influence on greek culture and therefore religion and not the earliest origins of the myths although if you are interested in this subject then i touched on this more in this video which is did homer really rightly idiot and odyssey so knowing that mycenaeans and in the european cultures merged what else can we tell from the resulting greek culture about these gods and the forming of the olympians the pantheon of the gods that sat atop mount olympus well we can see some very visible signs of infants here too at the very top of the pantheon here the chief god well this is zeus he is much more than a sky father in the greek pantheon in some of his earliest forms he is called zeus perkins and so is seen as assimilating the role of the storm god to whom the name perkins is a form of his original window european name but zeus also continues the role of the sky father who is seen as the head of the proto-indo-european pantheon but in greece it is more complex than that as zeus is much more of a supreme being and all powerful being much more than a skyfather figure that you would expect and this is almost certainly because he has adopted some of the character from the head of the previous pantheon who must have been a supreme deity but as zeus is cognate with jesus and so aligned to the sky father we know that despite this influence on him from the original mycenaean culture he is an indo-european god but equally the indo-europeans in their earliest beliefs had these gods of spirits not human figures not personified and so with the human-like depictions of zeus and so we see the agricultural preference of giving god's physical forms have been applied to and so if the sky father has appeared in this new greek culture then what of the agricultural culture's earth mother a supreme divinity of the earth well we could look at zeus to see if his closest female console would be appropriate here but the bad news is that zeus was such a hit with the ladies they can be quite difficult to understand where many of them stood and whilst many people would suggest looking at taylor his wife and sister this is not the best place as she lacks the agricultural credentials necessary despite representing the earth to me the goddess who looks after the harvest and fertility earth is the goddess we're looking at and that goddess would be demeter who not only fits our scope in terms of her abilities but she also had a child resource persephone and if we start looking into her position independent we see that she has quite a different ilk to the other gods with much more history in the homeric hymn to dimitar in his original we see that demeter is zeus's older sister but just as important and interesting is a fragment of the lost orphic theogony where we see demeter is zeus's mother hinting at an older credential and an evolving pantheon and so here for a moment in time is a goddess who is seen as an older and more established god than zeus but who has to relinquish her position in the new patriarchal and hierarchical pantheon because of the role of the sky father but whose mythology is then built around her importance and this is reflected when you see demeter and persephone being central to what was probably the most famous mystery cult in greece the illusion cult their rituals were based around a story where persephone was abducted by hades who is the head of the underworld and demeter caused a drought so bad in the mortal world that people were not able to grow any orphans to give to the gods and this forces to persuade hades to let persephone go however hades had tricked persephone into eating a number of seeds four or six depending on the version of the story you read and the rules of the underworld are that if you eat while you're down there then you cannot leave and so as a compromise persephone was freed but had to return to the underworld for a number of months a year depending on the number of seeds in the version of the story you favor and due to this she was either responsible for winter or for the droughts in the summer both reflecting the amount of time that she is spending in the underworld but what we see of demeter and the illusion cult is that her stories go back to mycenaean greek and so she originates from the agricultural world to the mycenaeans and we see archaeological finds mentioned in her going back to pre-proto-indo-european migration to greece and in these finds we also see an earlier form of her name in sito potner or mistress of the grain but is there any other evidence i can show you to persuade you that she wasn't part of the indo-european pentium and the answer that is yes i wouldn't have asked the question um there is one clue but that is not an ancient manuscript but it's on a vas the vars of cletius and ergomtimos which shows the pantone of gods attending a wedding something is not right on this farce as here we see demeter not on horseback not in a chair like the other gods but she is on foot she is shown in this way because she is a recognized deity but being on foot is representing that she is not a natural fit in the pantheon she's not a pure olympian and this leads me to believe that as the indo-european pantheon took places in the olympian the elder gods didn't quite fit not always and we see this with demeter's position on the vars now this isn't always true and another very interesting god is dionysus who like demeter is always certainly a god from outside the proto-indo-european pantheon born of zeus in the greek mythologies his mother was similarly a figure from anatolia agricultural and representative of the earth and like demeter we also know dionysus is older than the indo-europeans who migrated into greece but in his complex history he is then sprinkled with later in the european mythology but dionysus is on the vars but been shown both on foot and in horseback we also see that demeter is rarely mentioned in homicide or odyssey so whilst the myths are influenced by mycenaean geography it feels like the characters have predominantly retained their indo-european pantheon equivalents and this is not an unusual situation where we see regional influences affect the characters chosen for myths in that region but what we also know is that demeter was also akin to gaia the earth goddess and to kabili a goddess often recognized as the earth mother in other cultures including the phrygians who were from anatolia modern day turkey and other side kaibali is also identified as riya who turns into demeter after sleeping with zeus in the greek myths so what does this mean for our journey in finding old gods well we know indo-europeans migrated into greece significantly influenced its culture and therefore the religion and pantheon but the incumbent population influenced the indo-europeans to keep some of their gods and demeter and dionysus were two that survived the coming together of these cultures and these two gods are agricultural gods and almost certainly originating from 10 000 years ago or so when farming was expanding across anatolia before eventually arriving in southern greece but this isn't a one-off but there are other examples of this in indo-european culture and you may not have realized it as researchers don't often consider these things as it's so easy to forget the past and one big example of this is in old norse yes the vikings they had two sets of gods the asea their war gods and the vanir who were the agricultural gods and the old norse mythology starts out saying that these gods had a war and if we look closely at old norse mythology we find it is full of agricultural myth reflecting the agricultural culture from the origins of baltha which i mentioned in this video to the old norse crescent myth with the mere suckling the bovine and agricultural positioning of the proto-indo-european creation myth which we see also affected in the roman creation myth too with romulus and remus and the difference is that in pastel and so indo-european christians the cow is used to create animals in the world and is not just suckled on but to add more to this then let us think about who the gods of the veneer are and whilst i don't like associating the old norse pantheon with specific attributes i will do so here for ease and so we have uther and nerthus who are often considered representing the sea and the earth treyarch the fertility goddess of fertility in freire considered a god of fair weather we even have uthora in there a potential duplication of odin the veneer are remnants of the pre indo-european gods who dealt with agriculture in germanic tribes these gods of the vineyard are probably older than most of the gods in the asiyah but not all of them and one of these here is very old indeed and perhaps their most popular god has potentially a history older than the europeans too and i will talk about this in another video so remember to become a patron if you want to get the inside scoop of what i'm researching and to support work this channel produces but i think on that note i should stop the journey and say thank you for listening i hope you found this interesting i hope you press the like button and if you missed a video of author and his origins which touches on this whole subject too i'll place a video around here for you to watch and so until next time please stay safe and stay well and this was quick and forward

Channel: Crecganford

Views: 958,914

Keywords: aesir, agricultural farmers, ancient gods, baldr, cybele, demeter, earth mother, european farmers, finding the oldest gods, gods, greek mythology, hera, indo european, mother earth, neolithic farmers, old gods, oldest gods, oldest gods in history, pastoral farmers, persophone, pre proto indo european, proto indo european, sky father, the old gods, the oldest gods, vanir

Id: oWZBxp_SnLk

Length: 29min 9sec (1749 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 11 2022