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Making a religion...

Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
It's worth noting, even if the pantheon is demonstrably real, it doesn't necessarily have to suggest that they get the religion they want. Everyone may agree that the gods are real and who they are and what they do, but that doesn't mean they have the same attitude about it. It seems likely to me that people might love or hate them, embrace them or avoid them, seek a "united pantheon" or try to pit god against god. Philosophies would still emerge that are religious in nature but seek to fill in any intellectual or behavioral gaps the gods might have left. Take a look at Tao or Buddhist concepts, for instance, which many local cultures have adopted around their pantheons.
 

Shockley

Maester
I've done coursework in Spanish, Latin, German, Sanskrit and Chinese (it was offered in high school: how could I pass it up?). I will, however, read anything that doesn't run fast enough… even if I have to pick up a new script to do so. My language library has dictionaries/grammars/both for, at last count, 117 languages (I may have missed one or two); as far as I'm aware, every major language group is represented in there somewhere, along with no few minor ones, an isolate or two, and several that are no longer spoken. Can I claim solid knowledge in all, or even most of those? Hell, no: that's why I collect the reference books

I have a good grasp of Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and, as mentioned, reconstructed PIE. My Greek is poor, my Latin is about as good as you can get without serious study, I abandoned Spanish after two years because I find it to be an ugly language, just now commencing my study of French and have a rough grasp of basic spoken German.

If I could do it over again, I'd probably devote more energy into something more useful than reconstructed PIE, but that's already been done and I'm happy with what I know. Since I plan on teaching history, it might help if I backburner that and focus more on my main area – migratory peoples.

As for everything else, we're delving into my weakest area. The only area I can throw in on is the name 'Pur'ginepaz.' Continuing off your idea that this is related to Perun, which seems absolutely solid, I'd break it down as follows:

'Pur' or 'purgin (possibly)' would be something like 'oak,' or, if taken more broadly, 'tree.' For whatever reason, the term in IE can also refer to 'striking' or 'hitting,' which probably ties into the idea of lightning. As used in Perun, the term has a broader meaning – destruction, decimation, etc.

The 'paz' is particularly interesting to me. I'm taking a shot in the dark here (again, completely unfamiliar with the language and not knowing where this breaks), but I wonder if this could be related to the many variations of 'deiwos,' meaning god and usually taking on a hard 't' sound in the derivatives (with many notable exceptions, such as 'Zeus'). Assuming that there is some relationship between their 'p' and 't' (there is, generally, such a shift between the western and eastern children of PIE), it wouldn't surprise me if 'paz' was just a generic title for a god.

I bring all of this up because it fits into something else. When we see the 'deiwos' representatives, they do tend to have thunder god characteristics. Zeus and Jupiter (as Deus) are the obvious examples, though Tyr/Tyz/Tiu/Tiwaz is a sky god. This might fit into a greater PIE pantheon, as all three of these gods are, like the debated example, third generation from a creator/primordial divinity.

I'd say water and earth: it's highly unusual not to find an earth deity as a major figure in a given group. At which point it becomes mostly a question of "who came first"—and I agree that, for a great many traditions, it is water. I'm not sure I'd want to go so far as to say they are a majority; I'd want to do a focused count. Keep in mind that many of those come from the same area, too—the Near and Middle East, on to India—or were their direct descendants; this may not bear out elsewhere. In the Uralic creation myths, for example (I remember those coming up somewhere… ), water preexists any mentioned deities, is not personified, and is a passive background from which the seeds of creation are retrieved.

All of these are fair points. I'd say the primordial beginning, in the context of western/near-eastern mythology, is the joining of water (in some form) to earth (in some form), or some form of earth being brought from some form of water.

I'd put sky and/or sun as a distant third contender. Weather, of any sort, is never "primordial" to the best of my knowledge: even the ancients recognized this as a phenomenon, not an element: something transient, not something permanent. Whether or not it was tacked on to a supreme being at a later date, or if a weather god was promoted to head of pantheon, is a different matter… and in fact, in the cases I'm familiar with, the weather god was promoted—he was not initially "supreme": Zeus is a perfect example here.

Few religions, from what I can see, kept their original head over a long period of time. You already mentioned Zeus as a good example, and there are others. We know, for instance, that the most popular god of the Old Norse was Tyr, not Odin – and Tyr (as Tiu and Tyz, respectively) was worshiped as the chief god by the continental Germans and the Gothic tribes, even though they saw Fro Ing as the chief of the pantheon.

I have a personal theory on this – the 'Deiwos-Derivative' (I'm going to start capitalizing that, I think) was always the chief god, but in most cases was a bland, persona-less figure. Over time, this blank slate took on traits to fit into myths about more realized deities. This would explain the cases where the figure remains prominent (as in Continental Germanic religion) or there one god supplants another – the term is a title and just slips from one god to the next.
 

Sheriff Woody

Troubadour
In other words: how do you make a religion?

Religion, like every other aspect of your story and your story's world, should have meaning.

Start from the bottom and ask yourself what you like and dislike about religions in our reality. Look at multiple religions and find what you agree with, and what you feel is wrong. Why do you feel it's wrong? What would you change? How would you change it to something better? How do you anticipate the world in 50 years if people keep following these beliefs?

Once you have that solid base, it's much easier to fill in the blanks and build from what you have so that you end up with something that makes sense in its own context and feels real, which is important because readers will subconsciously key in on those real-life connotations and feel moved by them in one way or another. The key is to be subtle enough and not preach.
 

Mindfire

Istar
Going to have to contest that one. I'll concede that some chief gods have been thunder gods - Zeus, Jupiter and Thor, for example, but given that Zeus and Jupiter are the same guy I'm not sure we can count them separately. Meanwhile various other pantheons exist - from Egyptian to Aztec to Hindu to pre-Roman Celtic and beyond. I don't recall there ever being any mention of thunder amongst those, that I am aware of. Many of them were heavily associated with animals in some way - snakes and jackals and crocodiles and bears.

Thor wasn't the chief Norse god. Odin was. Thor was "the people's god" if you will. He was the most popular one and the one that cared most about humanity. He was the guardian, the protector, the one who went off the fight Frost Giants so that your family farm didn't get obliterated (and also because he loved to fight). Odin was king. Thor was popular. And actually, I think the sun god is considered top dog in most polytheistic faiths.

EDIT:
*Sees massive discussion of linguistics and the evolution of mythology.*
"Realizes he is out of his depth*
*Exits thread*
 
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