skin

[haptalaon]

extremely idle thought, but:

It's a popular (and correct, I think) thing to conceive of the gods as having no race and, in artwork to depict them however - not fixed in ancient amber but living and part of wherever you are.Out with the dog, I was reflecting that...gods frequently DO have an(?) ethnicity. Vodou comes to mind first: several lwa are white people, like Mademoiselle Charlotte who is a fancy white lady, and Dinclinsin, 'white colonial slave owner, feared for his temper and cruelty'. But then also, vodou sorts its lwa into nations - I'm not wholly sure I grasp the specific thing this means on the basis of my superficial reading, but there is canonically places the spirits come from and they continue to be that sort of person

I was reflecting that, perhaps as vodou is so of-a-time-and-place with the way it was expressed that, of course it would be developing quickly to hold the experiences of its followers (people whose lives are dominated by racism, necessarily, need a mythic life in which race is also a tangible and meaningful quality). But actually most mythoi I know something about have gods with an ethnic(?) identity.

Norse mythology has the Vanir and Aesir - it's not wholly clear what that means either, but they were separate groups of people who fought and then became a pantheon together, but the division between Vanir and Aesir remained significant, though how is a little vague; and in Irish mythology, there are many groups displaced by groups that follow from over the sea, as well as wars between different peoples. Being so far off in history, we don't know exactly where this came from, but there's some plausible guesses - reflecting actual wars and migrations in which gods came from abroad. There are likely more I don't know!

I don't think this should necessarily change anything about how we do our religious lives - which should always, in part, be determined by our values rather than copying textbooks. But it IS interesting. Politics aside, I suppose this idea that gods have no fixed form is another one of those ambiently Christian hangovers; whereas the broader Pagan norm was that gods had a physicality, and therefore, the sorts of qualities which mortals tend to have, such as an ethnic(?) affiliation.

Comments

[irreversibly]

I've briefly wondered about the same subject sometimes. There's so many mythologies where a division into two (or more) groups exist that it must have been a thing for a really long time. Not just Norse and Irish and Greek, but also the deva/asura distinction (and yaksha/rakshasa in spirits) of Hindu myth, or even the division of gods into original anunnaki and the later igigi in Mesopotamia - much like the later Greek division if you only consider Olympians and then non-Titan 'other' gods.
There's definitely distinct groups of gods, but what those groups are equivalent to in human societies...well. *shrug*