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The Norse giants are what the gods in that tradition fight, yeah? They're not gods in themselves but, like the Titans(?), they're on an equal footing in terms of strength and power.
Well, seconding what was said about B's work, though v. interesting and good if you want it, not being particularly closely related to the actual Vodoun tradition, I can't really find much evidence for any concept of conflict among or between the Vodoun deities, which sort of rules out any kind of gods vs demons/gods vs ice giants dichotomy. Bertiaux seems to be supplying his own ice giants as it were.
Over in my neck of the woods you've got the aforementioned godess Serqet/Selkit/Selkesh- there are many different ways of pronouncing the name. In her "classical" form, just before being assimilated into Isis, she was a human-bodied and -headed queen with a scorpion crown, a guardian against poisons and one of those who guided the soul into the afterlife, as well as looking after children and protecting priests/magicians during spellcasting. There was a lovely voluptuous statue of her in King Tut's tomb.
However, before this, she was very much more in line with the original meaning of her name: She who can tighten or loosen throats. She was represented as a pure scorpion, so that's an example of a non-human deity becoming humanised over the years. Of course we don't know whether the Egyptians saw her as a scorpion or as a woman; whereas many Hindus for example will tell you that the extra arms on their dieties are symbolic. Dieties are normally made out of things that are a danger to their creator, Egypt has the biggest and most dangerous scorpions'l!kt!
There are also scorpions and spiders in West Africa- the scorpions being by far the noblest and most graceful- so I'd imagine there might be simmilar gods found there, and these may or may not have been translated to the Vodoun tradition.
As a lot of the syncretic religions come from communities which had been exposed to a lot of inhumanity in the real and terrible sense of slavery, it strikes me that they'd strive towards deifying the human as opposed to the animal. |
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