This message is in response to Message #59911 on the topic of Asian Migration to Scandinavia, Sept. 1st (and continuing discussion), although I wasn't clever enough to respond directly to the thread.
This comment is on the thread Asian Migration to Scandinavia, because that discussion intersects with something I am working on. I study (Proto)-Indo-European religion, that is, the religion that can be reconstructed based on an analysis of IE language. So I was noticing the discussions about the historical events involving the possible movement of people from the east to Denmark or Scandinavia. I wasn't aware of the historical events with the exception that I had seen the destruction of Dacia by the Romans in about 167 AD. It seems that the Dacians had a major temple at Sarmizgetae which seems to have had a number of characteristics that make it look Zoroastrian (in a vague sort of way). There were plenty of Germanic speaking people in the area of Dacia (now Romania, more or less), notably people referred to as Goths, though that might be a bit vague. In this area there are also reports and inscriptions of a number of gods/goddesses whose names we
can recognize as having a form that shows Germanic sound shifts from a PIE original. Those are my observations based on archaeological reports and my own linguistic analysis.
The other element is the "Aesir-Asura correspondence" the close correspondence between names of Germanic gods and names for Zoroastrian gods which was noticed by language scholars long ago. (There used to be a page on Wikipedia that discussed the "Aesir-Asura correspondence", but it seems to have disappeared at the moment.) This seems to put the Germanic-speaking people on the Zoroastrian side of the Pandemonium, that is the trend in which the Zoroastrians demonized the devas of the Sanskrit speakers while the Sanskrit speakers demonized the asuras of the Zoroastrians. For this reason, a deva (daeva) is a demon in Avestan, and an asura is a demon in Sanskrit, especially later Sanskrit. The pattern is much wider than this: it includes many more gods and also other languages, both Indo-European and Semitic.
What is interesting to me about this is that I could see that there seemed to be a change (or an inconsistency) in the Germanic gods overall, and the pattern follows the Zoroastrian demonization, so I wondered when or where this happened. I had thought that it might be at the time of the destruction of Dacia, but the English seem to have originally maintained a wider list of gods which does not show this pattern, and so it might have developed after the English moved from Saxony to England (say 400+ AD). Of course, if such an event (the diffusion of the Pandemonium) occurred, it might have diffused rather slowly across so great an area, but the Zoroastrian effect seems to show up in the Norse myths told in Iceland, so it must have diffused that far.
Perhaps I'll get energetic (and read Procopius!), as well as make a chart of the pattern of the Pandemonium over the whole of the Germanic speaking world, to see the pattern of diffusion.
Raucous D
Proto-Indo-European religion
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_religion)
*this message has been edited to remove sarcasm, colorful adjectives and rhetorical flourishes.
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