America is a Religion

Just finished watching "Americans Are Religious About America". That rings some bells.

"Basically, American Civil Religion is when Americans are religious about America. The series argues that Americans are being religious when they create and curate American identity and ideals."

Robert Bellah says, "The phrase 'civil religion' is, of course, Rousseau's. In chapter 8, book 4 of The Social Contract, he outlines the simple dogmas of the civil religion: the existence of God, the life to come, the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice, and the exclusion of religious intolerance. All other religious opinions are outside the cognizance of the state and may be freely held by citizens. While the phrase 'civil religion' was not used, to the best of my knowledge, by the founding fathers, and I am certainly not arguing for the particular influence of Rousseau, it is clear that similar ideas, as part of the cultural climate of the late eighteenth century, were to be found among the Americans."

There was a thing briefly, 10 or 11 years ago I think, that takes it further. One of my Roman neo-pagan chums--I can't remember who it was--posted for awhile about launching an American neo-paganism constructed consciously along Roman lines. I can't find it now, might have been at LiveJournal, so I'm relying on memory. The idea was that it makes no sense for Americans to hold on to European (or other) gods. We declared our civil independence, so why not our religious independence?

For a project like that, Rome was an easy choice. The new American republic was modeled in part on the Roman republic. When America was founded, Neoclassicism was a major cultural and political influence in both Europe and America.

I was quite taken with this idea, in part because of my deep roots in America and in part because of the logical consistency. I had a website at ReligioAmericana. Very briefly. I can't find any of its content now, but there wasn't anything memorable.

I don't remember much about the social conversation. There was stuff about heroes, holidays, and monuments. I do remember some of them. Dea America (perhaps aka Our Lady of Guadalupe), Columbia, Lady Liberty, the deified George Washington, and all the company of Founders; the patriotic holidays; and the national monuments and battle fields.

I can understand all that. When I was growing up the lamp on my nightstand was a bronze cast of George Washington praying before the Battle of Valley Forge. Definitely a religious piece, as well as a heritage piece. The lamp had belonged to my (step) father and his father before me. My grandfather was George Washington Place. I'm guessing his name was the reason for buying the lamp.

That was the year I added Fortuna Denveriensis and her festival on November 22 to my calendar. In the classical world every city had its local Fortuna. I wouldn't want to risk not honoring Denver's.

I also remember a post about the importance of rivers in classical paganism. So, Dea Plata for the patron deity of the Platte River that runs through Denver. Once upon a time I knew the Latinized deities of other American rivers. Now I remember Chalchiuhtlicue but not the re-named Colorado River or Green River. How strange is that?

I think my dad would have been pleased. He believed and taught that foreign religions could not take root in America. The land would reject them. He was thinking of the lure of American Indian religions, but a Romanized American paganism seems like it might be another possibility.

More Information

• Bellah, Robert N. "Civil Religion in America." Dædalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 96:1(1967), pp. 1-21. Reprinted at <robertbellah.com>. Retrieved Nov. 18, 2019.
• ReligionForBreakfast. "Americans Are Religious About America." Episode 1. Youtube, Oct. 10, 2019. Retrieved Nov. 18, 2019.
• ReligionForBreakfast. "The Cold War Origins of 'In God We Trust'." Episode 2. Youtube, Jan. 16, 2020. Retrieved June 18, 2020.
• ReligionForBreakfast. "The American Flag is a Religious Symbol." Episode 3. YouTube. Mar. 27, 2020. Retrieved June 18, 2020.
• ReligionForBreakfast. "Ceremonial Deism: The Religion of the Supreme Court." Episode 4. Youtube, June 16, 2020. Retrieved June 18, 2020.

Updated June 18, 2020 to add links.

Asuras and Devas

One of the more interesting questions in religious history is why there is a divide and reversal between the asuras and the devas.

If you've made a serious study of religions this divide is old hat. If you haven't heard of it until now, you can begin to see it easily and quickly just by watching for it. I noticed it before I ever heard about it. From a Christian perspective our word devil must certainly be related to our word deity, and also to the Hindu word deva. From there it just spirals into endless fascination.

Michael York phrases it this way, "The divine-asurian duality I posit rests on an attempt to explain the Indo-Iranian dichotomy in which the Vedic devas or deities versus the asuras or demons becomes inverted into an antagonism between the Avestan demonic daevas and the 'angelic' ahuras headed by Lord Mazda. A further variant of this mythogen is the conflict between the Norse aesir headed by Odin and a unbeatable race of beings called the vanir. 1 The dismemberment of Tyr reflects the temporary impairment of the divine hypostasis which in Scandinavian myth has become permanent as the aesir or Odin successfully gain the pre-eminent position. The much wider survival of the *dei- cognates throughout the IE daughter languages reveals the earlier central placement of the divine devas."

More Information

• "Aesir-Asura correspondence". Wikipedia. Retrieved Nov. 17, 2019.
• "Asura". Wikipedia. Retrieved Nov. 17, 2019.
• New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove. "Zarathustra's Indo-European Legacy". YouTube, Nov. 6, 2016. Retrieved Nov. 17, 2019.
• York, Michael. "Toward a Proto-Indo-European Vocabulary of the Sacred." Word, 44:2(1993), 235-254. Retrieved Nov. 15, 2019.

Related

• War Between the Gods of East and West

Revised to add links.

Linking Religion to Ethnicity

Some interesting thoughts here. Ethnicity, language, religion, and race are not entirely independent variables. Traditional pagans won't be surprised by that.

This particular discussion reminds me of something I often hear from Jewish friends -- if go back just a few generations, you run into a solid wall of orthodoxy. The ancestors of modern Jews are never anything but Orthodox.

It's the same for Christianity in the European diaspora, although not many people I know are willing to acknowledge it.

Ironically, the neo-paganism that draws on our European ethnicity, begins by discarding our actual ethnicity. Go to a Lutheran church in modern America and you'll discover a big chunk of Germans and Scandinavians; the people whose ancestors in Europe were Lutherans. It works for other churches as well.

I might be a bit more sensitive to that because I belong to another culture that approaches being an ethno-religious group--the Mormons. Not that I'm a Mormon, but I'm not exactly not Mormon either. I prefer to call myself an Ethnic Mormon. Nearly all my close relatives are Mormon, and I grew up inside the "Zion Curtain" (the Intermountain West). But if Mormonism were really an ethnicity, I would have to count myself only 1/8 Mormon. It just happens, in my case, to be the pot everyone melts into.

• Masaman. "The Fine Line Between Religion and Ethnicity". YouTube, Nov. 12, 2019.

Ancestors and Personal Power

"In traditional East Asian forms of witchcraft and ceremonial magic, connection to your ancestral lineage hs always been expressed as kind of a requirement. Real talk, right? Historically and culturally, ancestors are always involved. . . . When you do anything at all, it's got to be on behalf of your ancestors or in the name of your ancestors, You talk to them. You ask them for advice. You, like, feed them, too."

And not just East Asia, but all over the world.

"There is this belief in a correlation of some kind, a connection between your closeness to your ancestors and your personal power. The enduring wealth of family dynasties are explained through ancestral connections. Decline and a downfall of a family's collected power is explained by a lack of or broken ancestor connections."

There are many interesting pieces here. The place of adopted children in the family. How ancestral lines can be damaged. How they can be healed. How to create an ancestral altar.

I got a chuckle out of a comment about offerings at the ancestral altar. Just like Mom or Dad loves your gift even when you really got them the wrong thing, your ancestors react the same way. They like that you did something, even if it's not quite right.

• Wen, Benebell. "Ancestral Power and the Witch | Bell Chimes In #44". YouTube, Oct. 26, 2019.

And now, I can't resist adding a different point of view here. Mambo Sandy says, "Every ancestor don't like your ass." Good point, and some sane advice from what is probably my favorite YouTube video of all time.

• Deleon, Mambo Sandy. "Not All Ancestors and Dead Want To Deal With You!!!". YouTube, July 12, 2016.

See also

• Deleon, Mambo Sandy. "How To Properly Start An Altar." YouTube. Feb. 27, 2015.
• Deleon, Mambo Sandy. "Should You Have Ancestor Altar". YouTube. Oct. 30, 2017.

Pater Aeneas

Sum pius Aeneas, raptos qui ex hoste Penates classe veho mecum, fama super aethera notus. Italiam quaero patriam et genus ab Iove summo. [I am pious Aeneas, who carries my Penates, snatched from the enemy, in my fleet with me, known by my fame above the ether. I seek my fatherland, Italy, and a race from highest Jove.]

Vergil, Aeneid 1.378-80.

In my undergrad Latin class we translated Vergil's Aeneid. If you don't already know, the Aeneid is a propaganda piece composed by the Roman poet Vergil (70-14 BCE). It glorifies Aeneas, the legendary Trojan prince who was the supposed ancestor of Julius Caesar.

When Prof. Brian Sykes assigned nicknames to the haplogroups, he chose Gilgamesh as the nickname for the founding ancestor of haplogroup G. I've joked for years that he should have chosen Aeneas.

And yes, I get that this is a marketing ploy to make it easier for customers to relate to the science. I also get that this clever little system always chooses a nickname for the ancestor that begins with the same letter as the haplogroup itself. So haplogroup G has to have an ancestor name that begins with g. And the name Gilgamesh, from the Sumerian Noah, reminds us that haplogroup G originated somewhere in the Middle East. It's not one of the major European groups.

Still. I'd rather have Aeneas as my mythical ancestor.

That's not as crazy as it sounds. Haplogroup G2a, my group, is heavily concentrated in Tyrol and the Alps, and that is where my paternal line originated in historic times. (Swiss, not Swedish as you might suppose from my surname.) My intuition, all those years ago, that it might be connected to the Etruscans and their Rhaetian cousins is increasingly plausible. Presumably, then, the Rhaetian speakers in the Alps originated with those Etruscans who fled a Celtic invasion of Italy in the 4th century BCE.

The Roman historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE, thought the Etruscans came from Lydia in what is now Turkey. The story he tells does not match Aeneas and his band of refugees, but it now seems clear there were other versions. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing 400 year later, thought the Etruscans were indigenous to Tuscany but admitted that his predecessors were "unanimous in stating that the Etruscans came from the East". In fact, Aeneas seems to have been the founder-hero of the Etruscans perhaps from the archaic period and certainly long before he was Romanized.

Having been the mythological founder of the Etruscans, Vergil turned him into a proto-founder of the Romans, then the Habsburgs, those claimants to Rome's legacy, made much of their own supposed descent from him.

Aeneas would be the ideal mythologized representation of the remote ancestor of haplogroup G2a. And that's why I have him on my ancestral altar.

More Information

• Brouwers, Josho. "Aeneas before Virgil: Early Greek sources about the Trojan hero". Ancient World Magazine, Jan. 28, 2018.
• Dillon, Kenneth J. "The Trojan Origin of Roman Civilization (TORC)". Scientia Press. Retrieved Nov. 8, 2019. Speculative.
• Mounford, Peter. "Aeneas: An Etruscan Foundation Legend". ASCS 32 Selected Proceedings, ed. Anne Mackay, 2011. Retrieved Nov. 11, 2019.
• Tanner, Marie. The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Pr., 1993.

Sic pater Aeneas intentis omnibus unus fata renarrabat diuum cursusque docebat. conticuit tandem factoque hic fine quieuit. [So our ancestor Aeneas, as all listened to one man, recounted divine fate, and described his journey. At last he stopped, and making an end here, rested.]

Vergil, Aeneid 3.716–18.

Traditional Adoption

There is ample evidence that European civilization has been invested in the idea of organizing kinship groups into patrilineages, time out of mind. The pattern is enshrined even in Proto-Indo-European and its descendant languages.

With this in mind, I've been trying for many years to get a handle on how our ancestors thought about adoption. Historically, adoption seems to have been very different from our modern world, where the motivation is to ensure the well-being of children.

I started with this question knowing only that ancient Romans had a practice where childless men would adopt a boy from a family with extra sons.

I expected to find arguments in favor of some theoretical "Indo-European" original. Instead I found wide differences in practice, as well as in theory. I'm focusing on just two of them.

I should add that it's not clear to me how far modern scholars would go in accepting broad generalizations from 100 years ago. My interest here is not in modern theory, but in how this subject was explicated in the heyday of nationalism.

"Every where, as at Rome, ' the aggregation of families forms the gens or house. The aggregation of houses makes the tribe. The aggregation of tribes constitutes the commonwealth.' The state is therefore the result of the expansion of its primordial cell; and the genealogical organization of the society precedes and overlaps the territorial. All these groups, lower and higher, regard themselves as united by the bond of kinship. But, as a matter of fact, the kinship is often assumed; and the heterogeneity of blood is explained as the result of the fiction of adoption by which relationship is artificially extended and strangers are admitted to the sacra (Kocourek & Wigmore, 198-99).

"The central principle of the Aryan [Indo-European] household is the Hestia-Vesta cult, or the worship of the sacred hearth. To gain the protection of the ancestral gods the hearth-fire must be kept always burning; and the care of the family sacra is the special function of the house-father, who is lord and priest of the family. . . . The primary purpose of the [marital] union is the birth of a legitimate son to perpetuate the paternal line and to foster the ancestral cult. So paramount is this motive that, in case no son is born in wedlock, resort may be had to adoption, or to analogous expedients for the fictitious extension of fatherhood" (Kocourek & Wigmore, 209).

There's an elephant in the room. Behind these long-winded explanations about patriarchy, patria potestas, and agnatic descent, we see no attempt to claim a Proto-Indo-European original. Instead, the only argument is that patrilineal descent was so important for the family rites, it gave rise to systems of adoption and fictive kinship.

Roman Adoption

"To the early Greeks and Romans, the goal of adoption was to perpetuate the family based on the male line of descent and to ensure the continuation of the family's religious practices. Thus, the adopter originally had to be a male without a legitimate son" (Marriage and Family Encyclopedia).

The Roman adoptio "was the ceremony by which a person who was in the power of his parent (in potestate parentum), whether child or grandchild, male or female, was transferred to the power of the person adopting him. It was effected under the authority of a magistrate (magistratus), the praetor, for instance, at Rome, or a governor (praeses) in the provinces. The person to be adopted was mancipated by his natural father before the competent authority, and surrendered to the adoptive father by the legal form called in jure cessio. When a person was not in the power of his parent (sui juris), the ceremony of adoption was called adrogatio. Originally, it could only be effected at Rome, and only by a vote of the populus (populi auctoritate) in the comitia curiata (lege curiata)" (Smith 1875).

Both adoptio and adrogato required a ritual called detestatio sacrorum (renunciation of private rites) at a comitia calata, a particular type of religious assembly called for particular purposes often involving family law. The adoptee renounced the sacra of his paternal family and placed himself under the authority and family sacra of his adopting father.

The arrangement was purely among the men of the families. "The effect of adoption, as already stated, was to create the legal relation of father and son, just as if the adopted son were born of the blood of the adoptive father in lawful marriage. The adopted child was intitled to the name and sacra privata of the adopting parent, and it appears that the preservation of the sacra privata, which by the laws of the Twelve Tables were made perpetual, was frequently one of the reasons for a childless person adopting a son. In case of intestacy, the adopted child would be the heres of his adoptive father. He became the brother of his adoptive father's daughter, and therefore could not marry her; but he did not become the son of the adoptive father's wife, for adoption only gave to the adopted son the jura agnationis" (Smith 1875).

This last is an important point. It is a common mistake of amateur genealogists working to flesh out their data on Ancient Rome. Not understanding the history of adoption, they include the mother as an adoptive parent, But beyond that, I would expect to find somewhere an argument in favor of a cognatic system that depends on this seemingly minor point. Why, after all, should a woman's family have kinship ties established on their behalf for no more reason than her husband's need for an heir>

Norse Fostering

In Norse society the father had absolute control over whether an infant would live or die. If the father accepted the child and gave it a name, it became a member of his family. If he rejected it, it was exposed. Someone might take pity on the child and rescue it--such is the stuff of fairy tales--but more often it would die.

As far as I can discover the Norse did not have a custom or procedure where one man might be replaced by another as the legal father of a child. In other words, once accepted by the father, a child did not leave the family.

I find one reference to Aetleidung, but haven't been able to discover what it was. From the context is seems to be relevant in a discussion about whether the child belongs only to the adoptive father or also to his family: "The adopted child would thus be received into the whole family connection; as was the case, for instance, in the Aetleidung of the Old Norse law" (Kocourek & Wigmore, 342).

The Norse did, however, have the custom of fostering. In effect, this can be counted as a form of incomplete adoption.

"The general custom was first to have the child knee-seated (knésetja), or put on the knees of him who was to be fosterer; the child was then called the knee-seated (knésetjningr) of his foster-father, who bestowed upon him as much care as if he had been his own child" (Du Chaillu, 43).

Fostering was a hall-mark of upper class child rearing. The foster parents were always of a lower class than the biological parents.

The tie to ones' foster parents was extraordinarily strong, but it did not affect the child's standing or inheritance rights in his biological family. King Haakon Magnusson of Norway (1068-1095) kept the patronymic surname (Magnusson) he got from his father but had the nickname Toresfostre because he was fostered by Tore på Steig.

More Information

• "Adoption: History and Purpose". Marriage and Family Encyclopedia <family.jrank.org/>. Retrieved Nov. 10, 2019.
• Du Chaillu, Paul Belloni. The Viking Age: The Early History, Manners, and Customs of the Ancestors of the English-speaking Nations, Vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890. Retrieved Nov. 10, 2019. Probably outdated.
• Maine, Henry James Sumner. Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas. London: John Murray, 1861. Probably outdated.
• Kocourek,  Albert; John Henry Wigmore (comps.). Primitive and ancient legal institutions (Evolution of Law: Select Readings on the Origin and Development of Legal Institutions, Vol. 2). Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1915, 341-46. Retrieved Nov. 10, 2019. Probably outdated.
• Smith, William. "Adoptio". A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. London, John Murray, 1875. Retrieved Nov. 10, 2019.

Proto-Indo-European Deities

I know I wrote about Proto-Indo-European (PIE) gods and goddesses, some time, some where, but I can't find it now, so I'm going to throw up this quick sketch while I try to remember what I might have said.

I have a post "Spread of the Indo-Europeans" (2015) over at HauriDNA, but that's not what I'm remembering. At one of the predecessor sites to this site I had a fairly lengthy post about the main deities, and their analogs in Roman and Norse cultures.

Here, for now, I'm just going to link Ceisiwr Serith's video about the deities. He covers them in more detail than I would have.

One caution here--because it's so often a source of misunderstanding--this whole thing is an academic construction. European adventurers in the 16th century noticed similarities between widely spread languages. Different cultures across Europe, Iran, and India used similar words for the same thing.

Scholars working in the field of linguistics (really "philology") eventually lumped these languages into a group they called "Indo-European". Indo-European is a language family, not a race. It's the ancestral Indo-Europeans, the group we call Proto-Indo-Europeans, who were a tribe or culture. Modern cultures and individuals who speak an Indo-European language might or might not be descended from the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

• Serith, Ceisiwr. "Proto-Indo-European Deities". YouTube <youtube.com> (June 21, 2014). Retrieved Nov. 9, 2019.

More Information

• "Proto-Indo European Mythology". Wikipedia <wikipedia.org>. Retrieved Nov. 9, 2019.
• Dr. Boaz. "Intro to Indo-European Religion (Ancient Paganism)." YouTube <youtube.com>, Jul. 29, 2018. Retrieved Nov. 27, 2019.
• Serith, Ceisiwr. Deep Ancestors: Practicing the Religion of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Tucson: ADF Publishing, 2009.
• Serith, Ceisiwr. "Is Indo-European a Race?" YouTube <youtube.com> (Mar. 30, 2017). Retrieved Nov. 9, 2019.
• Xidnaf. "Proto-Indo-European Culture." YouTube <youtube.com> (June 24, 2014). Retrieved Nov. 9, 2019.

Revised to add link.