The Pagan God: Popular Religion in the Greco-Roman Near East
The idea of a pagan god has a certain creepy attraction. As everyone knows, pagan gods were not bound by modern standards of polite behavior. One remembers Greek myths featuring randy Zeus, bawdy satyrs chasing shrieking nymphs, Arthur Machen’s story The Great God Pan, and so on. A few pagan gods are even mentioned sparingly in The Bible. I’ve long been curious about them. So I made it my business to read this book.
It’s not written for a general audience. This book is, according to the preface, “an essay on religion in antiquity... an attempt to study the religious elements which late north-western Semitic inscriptions had in common." The time period under discussion encompasses the Persian Empire through the first Christian centuries, or to be precise, the second half of the first millennium B.C. and the first centuries A.D. The book draws heavily on archaeological finds made in the Near East during the one hundred years or so before the book was written in 1977. These include the discovery in 1928 of the ancient city of Ugarit in what is now Syria. Among the ruins, archaeologists found clay tablets written in a then-unknown language. These included a series of stories about the Canaanite god Baal, a "weather god" associated with fertility.
Teixidor maintains that it is not enough to focus on the mystery cults of Orpheus, Dionysis, Isis or Mithras, as these "tell us little about the feelings of the broad masses." He holds that "the common man never rose above his daily prayers, and we may wonder whether the mystery religions were ever the actual creed of the unenlightened faithful...It is in the copious inscriptions produced by the Semites in their own homeland that paramount interest lies" for this author.
Therefore, Teixodor focuses his book on the cult of Baal Shamin (“Lord of Heaven”), the chief god of the Phoenicians, and pagan gods such as El, Bel, and Dagon (or Dagan) worshipped by the Phoenicians, Aramaeans and Arabs. The author holds that the pagan cults were not really religions in the sense we know today, in part because they had no "theological creed such as appears in Judaism or Christianity." Personally, I wonder if that is simply because of the limited source material scholars have to study. The pagan religions were truly old. We may not fully understand them simply because scholars have little to go on except clay tablets, inscriptions on monuments and images on coins. Putting a book like this together must have been a challenge.
Readers will search in vain for an account of how the pagan gods faded away as monotheism took hold. But it's interesting to note that the Baal cult was still prevalent as late as the year 130 AD. One would have thought Christianity was sweeping the globe by then, but apparently that was not yet the case.
N.B. Fans of horror fiction will probably share my view that H.P. Lovecraft borrowed the name of the pagan god Dagon for his short story of the same name, and for his novella “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.”
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