I welcome thee free spirit, which thou shalt come with an open heart, open mind and an open soul, for what you are about to read can only be understood by the wise who are eager to learn and to embrace the roots deep and forgotten in the hearts of the free people of Europe, by accepting who you are and where your roots lie, is half way into the great road of life. We will journey unto where our spirit takes us with the knowledge we gained. Learn and teach.
Hello friends! I know this is a very long video (probably too long!) I’ll try to make it shorter next time đ But I hope you enjoy it! This video is about the deities worshiped during the prehistoric periods of the Palaeolithic age to the Mesolithic. I’ve used the Norse Gods as examples of the types of deities that were worshiped during these periods in history. Not that the Norse gods were worshiped in prehistoric times, but certainly the gods of prehistory were the ancestors of certain gods of the Norse Pantheon. This is getting confused? Alright, I’ll explain it better during the video. Hej dĂ„! Tack för idag! đ
In the narrow valley of the Nottinghamshire border, archaeologists went searching for engravings of the British Paleolithic era. In 2003, a team of archaeologists discovered an engraving in a cave near this zone. The Church Hole cave on the Nottinghamshire side of the valley was also the subject of an archaeological intervention. This cave was north-facing and therefore got very little daylight penetrating the interior, and it was assumed that this meant there were no engravings. Moreover, directly opposite this cave, on the south-facing side of the valley, was another cave - named the "Robin Hood Cave" - where there was evidence of living during the Ice Age period. The arrangement of these two sites – which were inhabited at the same time, around 13,000 to 11,000 years-ago – may provide the key to explain how people related to their valley home. At the "Robin Hood Cave", where people used to live, was in sunlight and the large chamber just inside the door provided space for people to cook, prepare hides, and gather socially. In contrast, Church Hole Cave was on the dark side of the valley, reached by crossing a river that flooded the valley bottom, and showed no sign of habitation. People engraved images but did not live there. This suggests the cave was reserved for ritual use, a place of darkness and possibly death. It was accepted that during the Ice Age people had a shamanic worldview. A shamanic journey often involves crossing water (made while in trance). Another common element of a spiritual/shamanic journey is by entering a long and dark passage, moving along it till one reaches the light. People visiting Church Hole Cave from their base in Robin Hood Cave, would experience both elements of a shamanic journey , symbolically of course. When setting off, they would travel down to the river, which they would need to cross. Climbing up to Church Hole Cave, they would then enter a long, dark passage. While most of the rock engravings found by the archaeologists, were in the front of the cave, there were others further back, where the original artist would have been in total darkness. This cave tunel could have possibly represent the symbology of a shamanic journey to the otherworld, for the people that lived in the area during the Ice Age period. The archaeologists suggested that the images at the back of the cave, were stylised women, adopting the late Palaeolithic shape for women as tall and slender but with large buttocks. The carvings on the same side of the cave as the stylised women, there are images of triangles which, using analogies with other Palaeolithic sites, may represent female pubic triangles. One even had a trace of another triangle within it, possibly relating to pregnancy. In fact, all the images on this side – the eastern side – of the cave featured images related to females. At the western side the images were mostly of animals. These included an ibis, a stag, a bison, and a horse, along with other animal shapes. It may represent the animals as prey, but in the context it may represent the spirit animals found on the otherworld during a shamanic journey. It seems that Church Hole Cave was divided between female images on the right side of the cave ( facing east as it is), and hunting prey - potentially a male realm, on the left side of the cave (facing west). Rituals may have been performed there, with each group using the cave at specific times or both groups visiting and interacting with each other. It is only towards the rear of the cave that the passage narrows and this is where the stylised female figures are located. This may be an inner sanctum visited by only a few, perhaps girls on reaching adulthood, initiating them into the mysteries of womanhood. The Palaeolithic people who inhabited this place, had massive challenges with hostile weather and a lack of available game. Church Hole Cave may have been a response to this, initiating the young into the roles of adulthood. It might have also been to experience a shamanic journey in the real life, teaching future shamans and preparing them for what they may face in a spiritual journey.
An archaeological team from the University of Cambridge discovered cave paintings in the northern parts of Spain, Cantabria, that suggest prehistoric humans battled against their own inner demons, fears, and insecurities that bothered them as they struggled with life’s demands during the Paleolithic era. The images found on the limestone walls and ceiling of the cave trace back to 14,000 B.C. and seem to indicate that early hunter-gatherers were often anxious about their ability to kill game animals, reeled from the challenges of raising a family. While these pictographs are crude in terms of their rendering of human anatomy, they have a vivid expressive quality that led the archaeological team to surmise that Ice Age humans had an awful lot of personal stuff going on. Some of the images in the cave include a downcast man apparently being mocked by potential mates for his inability to start a fire, a woman using a stone chopping implement to cut her own body, and a seated man seemingly resigned to his fate at the approach of a charging mastodon. Further chemical analysis will have to be conducted to determine if the ominous red handprints along the walls were symbolic works rendered in red ochre or simply the result of anguished early humans striking the stone surface until they started to bleed. Remarkably, with just a few basic pigments and the most primitive painting tools, our ancestors could so intensely portray their dread of dying alone or their toxic jealously of alpha males. Only a highly skilled but extremely alienated artist could use nothing but melted animal fat blown through a hollow bone to convey his dismay at having no one he could consider a close friend and realizing he was too old to make new ones. It’s clear that these humans felt so disconnected from one another, so unable to constructively address their problems, that they used these sad, disturbing paintings as their sole outlet for comfort. The paintings not only represent the ability of Late Stone Age humans to express their immediate emotional torment but perhaps also to construct larger, more elaborate narratives of their prolonged, agonizing downward spirals. Through paint-application analysis and radiocarbon dating methods, Reddy said his team was able to determine that individual artists sometimes depicted their unraveling over a series of months or even years. Some figures indicate people gorging on bison and growing more and more obese, apparently stuck in a lengthy cycle of compulsive overeating. The self-destructive pattern was broken only once by an extremely brief sequence of dynamic images suspected to be a quickly abandoned attempt at aerobic activity. The drawings finally stop after about 20 meters with a half-finished pictograph of what we speculate is the poor man attempting and failing to fit into his deer-hide frock and pants and then, out of apparent shame, opting not to leave his cave all day. The discovery of the images comes just weeks after archaeologists uncovered a separate set of cave paintings in southern France, whose artists reportedly hunted, reared children, and otherwise did the best they could without taking themselves so seriously.
The Lusitanians might be the most mysterious European people and culture of antiquity, but with time and the evolution of the social sciences working together, Archaeology, History, Anthropology, Genetics and so on, we are always a step closer to know the truth about these people. Nowadays like most European countries, Portugal and the Portuguese people are a mixture of cultures and genes, it is the European country with the most invasions of different cultures through time, beginning at the end of the lower paleolithic and beginning of the middle paleolithic a 300.000 years ago with the homo sapiens till today with globalization increasing. The Portuguese people are a mixture of Middle eastern, North African, Iberian, Celtic, Germanic, Scandinavian, Hellenic, Latin genes and so on but to this day there are still people that have more genes of one single group than another, the Portuguese can go from the latin look, black haired, dark brown eyes and brunette skin to the blonde and redhead with pale skin and light eyes. However, Portugal started its history as a nation with the Lusitanians, a mysterious people that came into Portugal and settled, being one of the most powerful early nations of all Europe, starting from the North and Center of Portugal and quickly spreading even into modern Spain. What history, archaeology and genetics show us nowadays, is that these Lusitanians were in fact of Celtic origin and also Germanic, however, as they spread so much, some Lusitanian tribes had greek genes because of the central costal Hellenic colonies, also Iberian when they came into contact with the Eastern and Central natives of modern Spain and much later Northern African genes when they invaded Southern Portugal. The North of Portugal to this day remained very much Germanic and Celtic along with the people of Galicia from Northwestern modern Spain. To this day when speaking of the first origins of the Portuguese, people will automatically speak of the Lusitanians, a great culture that started around 1500B.C. , people of Celtic and Germanic origins that created the first Nation of Portugal uniting as many tribes as they could. It is interesting to see that one of the latest genetic research shows that the Irish have more than 90% of DNA similarities with the Portuguese and northwestern Spanish people, and in some areas it goes to 100%, these similarities are also shown in France, Germany and the southern parts of Scandinavia. When we hear about the Lusitanians, the name itself doesn't sound very much like a Celtic one or Germanic even, that's because that was the name given to them by the Romans when they invaded the Iberian Peninsula, and after they conquered the Lusitanians, after thousands of battles and very much trouble but at the end won by bribing, the Latin language replaced the Lusitanian one and all the other Celtic and Germanic languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula. Language is the main theme of this post, the Lusitanian language, and by the end of this post you will see the differences between the Lusitanian language and the Latin one, and as much as I did, you will wonder how would Portugal look like today if the Romans never invaded it and Portugal remained a Celtic/Germanic country. The Lusitanians are actually the Leukuire or Leukuir, the people of light and their language was the ancient Leukaeg to the modern Leukantu or Leukaeke and the form of writing was called Leukanturi. Their country Lusitùnia, was called Leukitanea, the land of light. Now let's see a few words in Lusitanian, such as "Trebopala" which means Protector of the Community, or the word "Uelgasaliant", which is a kind of greeting like "welcome" which today in Portuguese is "Bem-vindo" and in Spanish "Bienvenido". For instance, "bÀnd aiwizas" which means "Forever", in Portuguese "Para Sempre" and Spanish "Para siempre". The word "Tuouta" for "Homeland". These are some examples of the language that doesn't sound anything like Latin. There are also the names of the Lusitanian deities, more than 1000 gods and goddesses, which doesn't sound at all Latin, however with time some of them gained a Latin name because the Romans adopted some of the Lusitanian gods. For example we have Trebaruna, it comes from the celtic word "Trebo" meaning "home" and the word "runa" meaning mystery and/or secret, the goddess of magic, death, war and also a protectress of homes and families. Nantosuelta, Sucellos and Epona, exactly the same deities of the Celtic pantheon. Vabusoa or Borus, later Borvo a healing deity associated with bubbling spring water, which the Romans called Bormanicus, equated with Apollo. Durius, the god of the river with the same name which is today's river Douro. Laepo, Laho, Lucubo, Runesocesius (a name already romanized, there isn't any source yet of its name in Lusitanian but cleary comes from the celtic words runa and gaiso, the name of this deity means "The Mysterious One of the Spear". Well the list goes on and honestly I would love to learn more about the Lusitanian language, or the Leukaeke/Leukantu. I wonder how would the language of the Portuguese people would be like today if the Romans had not brought their language, how would the country be if the Celtic and the Germanic peoples stood there, well some did to this day, there are still many living decendents of the Celts and the Germanic peoples and also Scandinavian ones, I am one of those, but there aren't enough to call this Nation a Celtic or Germanic one, of both. Note: If you have any questions for me or if you want to see my artistic works, check out my Facebook page and make a Like if you can by following this link --> http://www.facebook.com/ArithHarger
The Moon has always been of great importance since time long lost in memory, while humanity was still young and looked at the skies for guidance, not only with their deities but also as something to mark the passing of days so they could move from one place to another and count the distance by the passage of the moon. The moon was the first thing to be used as a calendar, in a time when agriculture didn't exist yet, so there was no need to relie on the phases of the sun, the Sun calendar only came during the Neolithic era, when it was requeired to mark the time for planting and harvest, thus beginning the agricultural cycle, that is why that the Moon was the first thing to mark the passage of time, because before agriculture was invented, humans were hunters and nomadic, they moved from one place to another most of the times during the night, avoiding being seen by predatorsorother humansfrom other tribesthat mayattack them. We know this because the oldest lunar calendar ever discovered yet, dates to the Aurignacian period during the Paleolithic era, around 32,000 years ago, the item has a series of Moons, from crescent to full, carved in a snakelike line on a piece of bone, it might have been a portable calendar that would have been carried by hunting trips or in great journeys, as in a way to know how much time had passed, or how much time it takes from one place to another. The Moon was of such importance for early humans, that there has always been Moon Deities, since the discovery of the oldest archaeological sites that had marks,monuments,paintingsetc..aboutthe Moon, every religion and every pantheon, before the coming of the religions based on abrahamic beliefs, had a Moon deity. According to the old beliefs and shamanic practices of old, the Moon deity is Male, of course there are as much Male Moon deities as there are Female ones, but in most religions from different parts of the earth, the Moon is Male. Nowadays we are used to see the Moon Deity as Female, but that is because of the link between female menstrual cycles and the lunar cycles and modern pagans associate the moon to the female energies, but this also happens due to the cultural subjects that Wiccans adapt to their beliefs, for the first pagan religions to be study after some centuries hidden under the Christian veil, were the Greco-Roman beliefs, assumptions about the male side being rational and the female side being irrational, wild, and Wicca being the most popular neo-pagan religion these days, the Moon tends to be seen as Female. In the Norse/Germanic pagan beliefs things are inverted, the Male deities tend to be more aggressive and wild, acting without wasting time thinking about the consequences, more passionate, aggressive, for example Odin as a god of war, wrathful, offensive, or Loki who does things without thinking in the consequences that might comefrom his actions, too impulsive, some times not knowing why he did the things he often does, or the god Freyr, with much passion, losing his mindfor those he loves,doingeverything for them, while the female side is more civilized, thoughtful, self-contained, more concernedwith the welfareand good nutrition of their children, but they can also be very cold and protective. In the Norse/Germanic pagan beliefs, Sunna is the Goddess of the Sun, casting brightness, the oposite of her Brother Mani, the god of the Moon, which has a more obscure behaviour, but he is also very enthusiastic with a playful spirit, however that isn't often seen. Note: If you have any questions for me or if you want to see my artistic works, check out my Facebook page and make a Like if you can by following this link --> http://www.facebook.com/ArithHarger
I am Arith HĂ€rger, a person of the world who happens to be an archaeologist. That's about it. Whatever people say about me, good or bad, it matters little. I am the only one who knows about myself, and that's what matters.
This blog is about the Northern Tradition Paganism, about the roots of European people, Gods, Spirits and other Beings throughout the Nine Cosmic Worlds, the ways of Shamanism and also other tradicional religions of many countries in Europe. Welcome friend and feel free to share with me your thoughts and doubts, your knowledge, for i will also share my lore in this place of learning.
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