48 Facts About Thracian religion

Thracian religion refers to the mythology, ritual practices and beliefs of the Thracians, a collection of closely related ancient Indo-European peoples who inhabited eastern and southeastern Europe and northwestern Anatolia throughout antiquity and who included the Thracians proper, the Getae, the Dacians, and the Bithynians.

Every Thracian religion deity was assigned the attributes of a mounted hunter.

Since the Thracian religion king was identified with the Hero, who had united with the Great Goddess to become king, so did the human king unite with the Mother Goddess to ensure the plentifulness of the country in an act considered indispensable for him to obtain royal power.

Goddess appeared in Thracian religion art depicted as a frontal facing isolated head in architectural decorations, often as part of an alternating motif with lotuses or palmettes, or in the centre of a symmetrically branching floral ornament.

Thracian religion pantheon had a goddess affiliated - but not identical - to the Great Goddess, and who united with to become the foremother of the Thracian religion people.

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Unlike the Greek Dionysys the Thracian religion chthonic was a god of divination, and all the famous oracles in Thrace belonged to him and all prophesising was made under the god's divine influence.

However, Lycurgus ordered his soldiers to attack the Maenads during the night with the hope of destroying them and Dionysus, but a Thracian religion named Charops revealed the plot to Dionysus, whose army was still in Asia.

Consequently, the "Arean" or "Heroic" is depicted in the Letnitsa Treasure as a mounted hero preparing to fight a bear after having already defeated a wolf, lying dead and upside down beneath the horse's hooves ; this scene represented the Hero as a protector against evil, but was another representation of the test of valour through which the god, and the Thracian religion prince, attained kingship, thus being analogous to the struggle against the Chaos-dragon and the boar hunt .

Princess Pallene herself represented the a form of the Thracian religion Great Goddess, and therefore was a personification of her country.

The identification of this god with the Greek Hermes likely resulted from the latter's role as the god of vows, but from his function as a mediator, especially between Heaven and Earth, which was an important aspect of kingship, since the role of the ruler within Thracian religion society was to mediate between various groups and individuals, between his people and outsiders, and between human community and the gods, hence why the king had to be a priest.

Furthermore, the Thracian religion kings were assimilated to the Hero, who in Thracian religion mythology was usually the son of a deity, and the hence kings claimed divine ancestry, and the mythological origin of royal dynasties was based on the attribution of a divine origin to royal power.

The etymology of royal names and the practice of ritual union with the Mother Goddess are thus evidence that the Thracian religion kings took over the functions of the Hero in the human realm, and the kings therefore patterned their actions on the divine Hero.

One of the most important members of the Thracian religion pantheon was the god, or demigod, or anthropodaemon named in both Thracian religion and Greek sources as Orpheus, and known in northern Thrace as, under which name he was worshipped by the Getae tribe, who called him.

In Thracian religion, the demigod Orpheus was the second son of, born from her union with her first son.

Orpheus thus personified the priestly role of the Thracian religion ruler, attested in the Thracian religion incantation "Our king, being himself god, " and was reflected in his role as a poet and singer, which embodied the concept of the power of words and followed the Indo-European concept of the poet's religious role as the mediator between the gods and humanity.

The myth of the Thracian Orpheus was a myth of shamanistic initiation, and his life symbolised the initiatory process: his singing represented the use of oral transmission in archaic religion, his behaviour included aspects of gender transformation, he descended into and returned from the underworld, and his body was dismembered and the pieces thrown into a river, with his bones being more important than his flesh.

The concept of the hero existed at multiple levels of the Thracian religion cosmology: the omnipotent and universal god was himself the divine all-seeing and all-hearing Hero; and as the tribal ancestor, was an ancestral hero who was believed to protect nature's fruitfulness, thus being a protector deity to whom the tribe demanded help, and was given a local name by each tribe.

In Thracian religion, nymphs were closely associated with the goddess and her cult.

Nymphs are represented engaging in love affairs with centaurs on Thracian religion coins, which is a motif that is present in Greek mythology, and in Hindu mythology in the form of the betrothal of the Apsaras to the Gandharvas.

Thracian religion Chaos-dragon was depicted in various ways, though the most common representation of it was a three-headed or three-bodied snake, sometimes possessing wings or rudimentary legs, thus unifying the elements and spatial zones of the cosmos.

Myths and doctrines constituting the Thracian religion are collectively called by modern-day scholars as "Thracian Orphism, " to distinguish it from the Greek Orphism, which was a later derivation from the Thracian religion from the late 6th century BCE.

Oldest Thracian religion sanctuaries were the simplest, and were dedicated to.

Shamanism was present in Thracian religion, and is attested in the myth of the life of the Thracian Orpheus, which symbolised the initiatory process: his singing represented the use of oral transmission in archaic religion, his behaviour included aspects of gender transformation, he descended into and returned from the underworld, and his body was dismembered and the pieces thrown into a river, with his bones being more important than his flesh.

Bithyni, who were a Thracian religion tribe settled in Asia Minor, named a month of their calendar after.

Thracian religion warriors used to decorate their helmets and shields with ivy during religious festivals.

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The Thracian religion warrior's initiation was an irreversible transformation that entailed going through a series of trials and solving riddles, and was associated with the mythical concept of the road full of danger which begins in one cultural state and reaches another one through crossing wild nature, and along which the Hero encountered unexpected foes personifying the forces of Chaos, destruction, evil, and death.

Thracian religion initiate warrior experienced a symbolic animalistic transformation in addition to gender transformation:.

Thracian religion initiate warrior, thus, during his transition to manhood, was an outsider inhabited the realm of "nature, " that is the animal realm, in opposition to the realm of culture or of "man, " that is the community of kinship.

Therefore, the Thracian religion Hero was commonly depicted as a mounted hunter whose opponents included the lion, the bear, the wolf, and the panther, all animals whose hunting skills the initiates could learn from.

The hunt, in Thracian religion myth, codified the inherently conflicting opposition between animal and man, carnivorous and herbivorous, wild and domesticated, and nature and culture, and therefore was a metaphor for transition.

Gender transformation of the initiate was present in the ritual temporary death which marked completion of the young Thracian religion warrior's initiation, after which he was reborn into a new status, since the boy could only be reborn as a man and warrior after crossing the gateway into the afterlife.

Thracian religion king was assimilated to the Hero and was his substitute on Earth.

Therefore, in addition to being military leaders, the Thracian religion kings were landowners and priest-kings, with the supremacy of the Thracian religion rulers being based on the dual principle of the priest-king.

Once the Thracian religion king had completed his initiation and trials, he was given insignia of power visible on depictions of royal investiture, which were themselves derived from Near Eastern artistic motifs depicting the investiture of kings.

Representations of this identification are present in Thracian religion art, such as on a Thracian religion helmet from Baiceni, where, on one cheekpiece, a snake is depicted coiled under the throne upon which is seated the Hero, who holds a cup and a rhyton in his raised hands and a bow hangs behind his back; and on the other cheekpiece, two dragons are represented on each side of a bull's head, meaning that the Hero's Chaos-dragon enemy was a stealer of bulls.

Additional attributes of kingship included pieces of armour, especially the belt, which was given to Indo-European warriors a marker of their completed initiation, and was therefore called "wolf-like" and hence Thracian religion belt-buckles were decorated with images showing their ritual function: they were sometimes designed in the shape of a wolf figure, or modelled in an openwork technique to look like an animal figure, or feature scenes representing the royal customs.

Material representation of the tripartite function of Thracian religion kingship was the dowry that the Odrysian king Cotys I gave his daughter, and which consisted of a gold shield, two precious cups and two herds of white horses, and a bushel of millet and an underground storeroom filled with onions and a flock of goats, and a "multi-legged hecatomb".

The "fiery investiture, " called the "solar investiture, " was another iteration of this solar-royal association, and Thracian religion kings were considered to be all-seeing as the Sun, and therefore gazing at the ruler-Sun was taboo and was believed to cause blindness.

Since the Thracian religion kings were assimilated to the divine Hero, who in Thracian religion mythology was the son of a deity, they therefore claimed divine ancestry: in the myth of the Hero, once he had defeated the Chaos-dragon, he entered in hierogamy with the goddess, through which the god and the goddess the divine granters of royal power to the kings.

The etymology of royal names, the ritual nature of the royal hunt, and the practice of ritual union with the Mother Goddess are thus evidence that the Thracian religion kings took over the functions of the Hero in the human realm, and the kings therefore patterned their actions on the divine Hero.

Since Thracian religion kings had multiple residences located at cult centres instead of a permanent capital, they visited each residence regularly, and the kingdom's territorial model was re-enacted and the social Cosmos was restructured on each visit.

Thracian religion conceptualised the soul as being immortal, and held it as more important than the body.

Thracian religion healers believed that everything good or bad for the body was derived from the soul, and therefore the soul had to be healed first for the body to then be cured, which was itself based on the Thracian religion conceptualisation of the soul as more important than the body.

The many Thracian religion tombs were always built in high locations so they would face the Sun all day, hence uniting the chthonian and solar cults within themselves, and thus embodying the oneness of the king and the Hero.

Thracian religion conceptualised the soul as being immortal, unlike the Greek version of the afterlife whereby the souls of the dead became pale shadows in the underworld.

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Thracian religion finally became extinct after Christianity was made the state religion of the Roman Empire.

Religion of the Scythians was influenced by that of the Thracians after the Scythians imposed their rule on settled Thracian populations living to the north of the Black Sea when they first arrived in the region of the Pontic Steppe.

Cult of the Thracian religion goddess was adopted by the Greek city-state of Athens in 429 BCE.