How did Greek or Roman choose their gods besides the big name ones? I mean did they have a god of shoes, god who relieves constapation, or one for there squeaky door?

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• kata1yst@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  You have to understand that in the pre-classical era, Roman people had minor god cults throughout their small villages, and the Greeks did the same thing. The cults beliefs did some traveling over time, and reasonable people slowly began piecing together a shared mythos.

  Over time, as the Greeks pulled together their culture into a power structure of loosely associated city-states, their religious cults from dozens and dozens of villages all were glued together into a more cohesive pantheon.

  Romans then adopted and ‘latinized’ the Greek pantheon, mixing in several of their own superstitions and cults.

  This means you will have a God of creation and a God of that pond over there, which might have later been rationalized into a nymph.

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  • GreenShimada@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    OP, this is the most correct answer. Then the gods from the goat herders and gods of the sailors and gods of the farmers ended up sort of getting glued together into responsibility groups, and then get names, so sure, there was a god of vines and grapes and wine, which was likely just the general “please god bless my vines” god for the area where lots of people grew vines and made wine.

    There are similar practices among animist peoples in Sun-Saharan Africa, where local cults are just how people still do things, with their local gods for the village or the cluster of villages.

    Also worth knowing is that when Greeks and Romans traveled, they didn’t say “we have a god of war, and it’s Aries, and your gods are false and that’s the end of the conversation.” They would show up and say “What do you call the god of war? We call him Aries.”

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• AnchoriteMagus@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  List of Roman Deities

  This includes such high profile gods and goddesses as Devera, who blessed the brooms used to sweep temples, Laverna, goddess of charlatans and theives, Lua, who specifically existed to have weapons captured in war sacrificed to her, *Picus, an Italian god of woodpeckers, or Salus, goddess of specifically the welfare of people living in the city of Rome.

  How much more specific and unknown do you want to get? There are plenty of surviving deities from the Roman era who have no surviving function that we know of.

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• homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  St. Hubbins: the Patron Saint of quality footwear

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• yesman@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I’ll just point out that monotheism creates some interesting and silly problems too. The Pegans can just assign fertility to a female god for example. Without that option, monotheists have to shoehorn the concept of fertility and birth into the patriarch god.

  This is the genesis of the idea of men’s spunk being referred to as a “seed”. It was “common sense” in Western civilization from Roman times to the 18th Century that sperm contained fully-formed little people. Women were just the dirt where you planted those little guys. The inventor of the microscope studied sperm first. And he fully expected to find homoculi in his spunk.

  Meanwhile the “primitive” people’s of the world would have found this to be insane. Babies come from women, stupid.

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• reksas@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  i wonder what the most obscure god was

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• melsaskca@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I figure the same reasoning was used for all of those patron saints as well. Or maybe it just evolved naturally as people need to see something bigger than themselves.

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  • RobotToaster@mander.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Many saints just took on the stories and aspects of pagan gods or heroes.

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• gibmiser@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Wasn’t it basically tourism?

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• Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  They did not choose.

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• Entropy_Pyre@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  From what I understand, household gods were very common — personal traditions about a small god that perhaps your family worshipped for generations and had a small shrine to for protection. Some of these were picked up and developed into more general purposes for a larger audience.

  The Romans in particular also had a habit of picking up local deities for a larger pantheon, in these cases less of choosing gods, it was more like reducing some gods with very elaborate lore down to just a few specific traits. Though of course some gods were invented by storytellers on the spot and picked up.

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