AWE

Shennong (the Divine Farmer)

Chinese history is super interesting. Seriously! They know more of their own history than anyone else on the globe (because they’ve been keeping records continuously since ~1400 BC).1 Also their early records were inscribed on bone and bronze, so they lasted well (comparatively).

If you haven’t heard of Shennong,2 he’s kind of a big deal. He created civilization. He’s the mythic first Yan emperor.34

Such an over-achiever, right!

Such a meaningful and imaginative origin story, too. This is an myth about reality. About the invention of the actual prerequisites to civilization.5 Not a stupid story about a magical garden and how women cannot be trusted.

I wonder how being told such different stories affects our perception of the world… The Chinese have venerated scholars for most of their history. Conservatives (and Americans generally) loathe anyone visibly more intelligent than them (#fauci).6 

Melqart (aka Heracles)

I really want to visit Tyre, Lebanon one day. Did you know it’s been continuously inhabited for 4,700+ years? Twice as long as Rome. Herodotus pegged it’s founding at ~2750 BC.

Phoenicia. That’s a word a lot of people haven’t heard since middle school history. You should learn it again! Phoenicians inhabited the Levant. While the Greeks were still dicking around in city states, Phoenicians created the first Mediterranean ~empire. You might be more familiar with one of their most successful colonies: Carthage.

Back to Melqart. He knows the Jews, and they definitely know him (did you know that at certain points, the Jews worshipped Ya-ya as a co-equal to Melqart8 and Astoreth?). Melqart (like most on this list) controlled the annual cycle of vegetation, was King of the Underworld and, finally, Protector of Existence9

He was the tutelary god of Tyre (in the way that Ya-Ya is the tutelary god of the jewish peoples). As Tyre colonized the Mediterranean, Melqart become venerated in multiple pantheons, or completely syncretized with other gods (Heracles being the most prominent). Melqart and Heracles were so interchangeable that the Hellenes considered ancient temples10 to Melqart to be temples to Heracles.

Dumuzid (the almost Immortal)

I’m going to call him Tammuz from here on, because that’s the name used by ancient Jews in their texts. They kept good records, so it became his standard name for a long time.

Tammuz is an ancient Mesopotamian God. The earliest known record of him dates to ~2600 BC (and they think his cult existed long before that). The Cult of Ishtar and Tammuz died out in the 1800s. AD. I’m pretty sure that's the longevity record for a religion.

There’s actually a lot known about him. He died and was reborn every year, ending the harvest season on his death and starting the growth season upon his rebirth. He was the god of the growth of plants, of shepherds, of milk and of date palms.

He’s actually mentioned once11 and referred to multiple times in the the Old Testament. The old book admonishes His tribe to avoid garden sacrifices (which is where female worshippers made sacrifices to Tammuz on feast days).

Oh, Tammuz is also the Greek god Adonis. The story of Adonis and Aphrodite is a revision of Ishtar’s descent into the Underworld to retrieve Tammuz (her husband). You radically underestimate the level of syncretism in ancient religions. That was how you pacified a conquered region.

Osiris (the God of Life and Death)

More than any other culture (i think), the Egyptians had gods that boomed, busted and disappeared.

But Osiris is not one of those gods. He’s the OG.

From the broadest perspective, he was the god of fertility, agriculture, the afterlife, the dead, resurrection, life, and vegetation (and the judge and lord of the dead). The first evidence of his worship is from the 25th century BC, but historians think it stretches much further.

I like calling him a god of life and death. He oversees both the human life cycle and the environmental life cycle. That’s why he’s an OG.

Inari Ōkami (the popular one)

If you’ve studied the Japanese pantheon(s), you know Inari. They are the Japanese kami of foxes, fertility, rice, tea and sake, of agriculture and industry, of general prosperity and of worldly success. Kitsune are their foxes, and work as their messengers.

Did you notice I said “they”? The three most common depictions of them are as a young female food goddess, an old man carrying rice, and an androgynous bodhisattva.

This doesn’t bother the Japanese.12 Why would kami follow our gender structure? Why would they care? They’re ethereal. If a kami only presents a single gender, it’s not because they feel socially compelled to.

Experts believe Inari’s cult arose in the 500s AD, prior to Japan’s recorded history. At present, more than one-third (32,000) of the Shinto shrines in Japan are dedicated to Inari.

Oh! They’re also absent from classical Japanese mythology (i.e. the 7 core texts). Crazy right?

That’s a self-made person right there.

wink wink

Amenotokotachi no Kami

Disclaimer of “DUH”

We know jack all about pre-900 AD American civilizations. And even when we do have writing, we have no codex to translate Olmec hieroglyphics. Thus, we continue to know jack all.

Ditto for Sub-Saharan Africa. Meroitic is barely deciphered, we know little about Aksumite polytheism (they converted to Orthodox Christianity prior to their empire period), I can’t find anything about Ekoi mythology other than its creation myth, Berber traditional religion is a mish-mash of home-grown, Phoenician, Greek and Egyptian religion (that I can’t separate out meaningfully). Also, their ethnic subgroups, like the Tuareg, have very different gods and priorities.

That said, I want to emphasize that this does not invalidate these cultures. The lack of written records often reflects the available materials for recording, and some mediums degrade faster than others. Oral ancestral histories are a valid recounting of a culture’s history, even though written documentation cannot verify it.

Inari Okami being a prime example.

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