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Updated: June 8, 2025
Many of the religious ideas and figures of the Vedas occur also in Persia, and by the study of these it is possible to form certain inferences as to the mental history of Persia before Zarathustra. Mithra the sun-god belongs to Persia as well as India. The heaven-god known in India as Varuna grew into the principal deity of Persia.
They were settled there in a separate community, and vestiges of the Shang population were still to be found there in the fifth century A.D.: they were entirely impoverished potters, still making vessels in the old style. 3 Fusion of Chou and Shang Some of the Shang popular deities, however, were admitted into the official Heaven-worship. Popular deities became "feudal lords" under the Heaven-god.
The position now accorded to the heaven-god in the new Stoic system is so curious and interesting that we must dwell on it for a moment. He is the one universal causal agent, from whom all the forces of nature are derived; or he may be called, in language which would be intelligible to the ordinary Roman, the universal Genius.
Not that the Aryans always remembered that these beings were not local or tribal. The god of heaven could be the god of a particular place too, having a special name there; or he could be appropriated by a tribe who gave him a title as their own particular patron. Each family could have its own heaven-god as well as its own hearth-god.
But those of whom we are speaking worshipped other gods besides those of the household. The second great characteristic of Aryan religion is its adoration of gods who are neither local nor tribal, but universal. Dyaus, the sky, the heaven-god, can be worshipped anywhere; so can the earth, so can the heavenly twins, who were objects of early Aryan religion, so can the sun and moon.
It will be more fully stated and illustrated, presently, but I find that it had already occurred to Dr. Brinton. He is talking specially of a heaven-god; he says 'it came to pass that the idea of God was linked to the heavens long ere man asked himself, Are the heavens material and God spiritual? Dr.
Ahura is a heaven-god, he is, in fact, the bright heaven, and then the good and beneficent being who dwells in brightness. In the hymns he is losing his definite character and becoming an abstraction, a god of dogmatics rather than of history. He is the good principle personified, and as becomes a god of such transcendent character, he does not act directly, but through his satellites.
But without Jupiter, god of the heaven both for Greeks and Romans, and now too in the eyes of both peoples the god who watched over the destiny of the Roman Empire, this wonderful feat could not have been performed. The identification of the heaven-god with the animus mundi of the Stoics was not indeed a new idea; it may be traced up Stoic channels even to Plato.
What is really new and astonishing is that it should have been possible for a conservative Roman like Varro, in that age of carelessness and doubt, to bring the heaven-god, so to speak, down to the Roman Capitol, where his statue was to be seen sitting between Juno and Minerva, and yet to teach the doctrine that he was the same deity as the Jewish Jehovah, and that both were identical with the Stoic animus mundi.
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