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Old Gods

  
 
Seth
00:52 / 03.01.06
I'm doing a project with a friend of mine and as part of the research stage we need information on Gods that have fallen out of regular active worship (at least, to the best of our knowledge). It's early days to talk more than that about specifics.

I'm only just taking my first tentative steps out into this at the moment, and I thought I'd throw it out here for discussion. So please, are there any that hold a special significance for you and why? What are they like to work with? Do you have any experience of communicating with them? Can any of you point me in any directions for reading and research?
 
 
Etruscan
07:09 / 03.01.06
I seem to remember that a lot of the entities named as devils by the bible and in medieval christian/european 'demology' texts (and occasionally goetia) are often, in fact, the gods of other cultures. My brain keeps mumbling something about Balam/Balaam.. Balam being a goetic devil, Balaam a biblical figure who came from the land of "ammon", another goetic devil..
 
 
Aertho
14:33 / 03.01.06
You would think that Priapus would get more action in this day and age.
 
 
nyarlathotep's shoe horn
17:49 / 03.01.06
there's a veritable cavalcade of Roman gods fallen out of favour.

one for every household, with feasts all over the place.

there are Babylonian, Hittite, Assyrian deities for the taking.

I don't know if Osiris has receive much attention in Egypt in the past few hundred years.

lots to choose from.

--not jack
 
 
grant
18:51 / 03.01.06
I think the whole concept of "gods" is kind of no longer active, but that's possibly just my own idiosyncratic interpretation.

The sense I've developed of this stuff, though, is that monotheism wasn't really all that revolutionary when the Hebrews came up with it yonks ago -- that "gods" were always sort of seen (at least by them in the higher levels) as different projections of one big cosmic thing that was too big to be given just one name. There sure seems to be a pattern with local deities in all the "polytheistic" religions, anyway, where, like, there are a whole bunch of Erzulis (West Africa/diaspora) or Minervas (Greco-Roman) or Amuns (Egyptian) depending on what you want or where you are. This seems to reflect a different understanding of what a god is than the one we seem to be getting from Judeo-Christian culture.

That said, I still have an abiding interest (uninformed) in the Norse god Honir, who rules indecision. He travels with Odin and Loki sometimes.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
22:35 / 03.01.06
I'm kind of dealing with something like that myself. The direct-contact work I've been doing with Team Norse has kicked up some unexpected interest from deeply obscure and very mysterious figures.

The biggest problem I've found is a kind of mutual culture shock. It seems that I've done enough work to be mistaken for the kind of practitioner they were used to, but that's leading to complications.

I'm expected to have a lot of knowledge that I just don't: names, words, symbols, concepts and activities that might have been commonplace once keep cropping up and of course I just don't understand. I can't always understand verbal communication, if any, because I don't speak the language. I can't always make myself understood, and often I'm simply not in a position to do what's requested of me because my resources are so very different. Working with 'popular' Gods who've had at least some of this kind of interaction in modern times is a bit easier, because they've had a chance to move on and accommodate some of those cultural, technological and social changes.

I should probably give a practical illustration here. I guess the most notable example in my own experience would be Mordgud. Mordgud's lore is pretty much lost; all we know about Her is Her name, meaning "Battle-weary," and Her job description--She's Heimdall's opposite number, and guards the bridge that leads into Hel. Anything else has to be gleaned from working with people who used to know Her back in the day, who aren't always terribly inclined to chat, or with Her direct, which is what I'm doing. (The popular term for this kind of thing is unsubstantiated personal gnosis or UPG). No historical record of worship of Mordgud exists and I've only been able to find a tiny handful of people who work with Her in modern times, all shamanic types. (I've been driven to speculate that certain beings may only have communicated with spirit-workers and didn't really have much to do with anyone else.)

Mordgud is a psychopomp and concerned with entry and exit to Hel, the realm of those dead who don't die in battle or hang out in gravemounds. She can tell the difference between dead and living souls, because the living make more noise coming over Her bridge than several hundred dead. She's not immediately hostile to visitors, but will demand to know their business before letting them past and can prevent their entry very effectively if need be.

I first encountered her about two months back. I was very tired and winding down towards sleep. My mind was on my spirit-work and my doubts about it when She suddenly appeared in my awareness. I got a strong verbal communication ("Doubt? I am Doubt. Doubt is the bridge between you and the dead, and Doubt guards the bridge. I am Mordgud!"), followed immediately by what felt like an attempt at possession. My strong feeling was that this being was trying to take over so as to speak through me. I got on the floor and was able to negotiate a postponement on the grounds that I was overtired, I needed to check who I was dealing with and that there was nobody for Her to talk to anyway (except my partener, who would not have been happy to be woken up by a death-Goddess wearing my body and wanting a chat). I got very the powerful impression that she'd expected to find a specific set-up, with a wrangler to handle the possessed person and people to speak to. When I convinced Her that this was not the case, the presence withdrew.

I checked in with two related deities to make sure I had the real deal and not something nasty trying to take the piss, and when they confirmed Mordgud's identity I set up a service to invite Her formally to work with me.

My work with Her has been mostly connected to my ancestor work, creating a closer link with my dead and allowing more fluent communication. She also seems to have a kind of martial-arts trainer aspect: my interactions with Her almost always involve vigourous stretching excercises and a kind of ecstatic dance/kicky-fighty thing. I have done fighty-type work once or twice with other members of Team Norse, but it's a rare thing and of a different quality somehow. I suspect that Mordgud deals with a subtly different aspect of the warrior mysteries than, say, Odin. Battle for the battle-weary.
 
  
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