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Gothic paganism orGothic polytheism was the original religion of theGoths before their conversion toChristianity.
TheGoths first appear in historical records in the early 3rd century and wereChristianised in the 4th and the 5th centuries. Information on the form ofGermanic paganism practiced by the Goths before Christianisation is thus limited to a comparatively narrow and sparsely documented time window in the 3rd and the 4th centuries.[citation needed]
The centre of the Gothic cult was the village or clan (Kuni) and the ritual sacrificial meal held by the villagers under the leadership of thereiks. The reiks saw themselves as the guardians of ethnic tradition. That was expressed starkly in theGothic persecution of Christians in the 370s in which the reiksAthanaric saw his privilege threatened by the new religion. He responded by the persecution of converted Goths but not of Christian foreigners. According to the Passio ofSabas the Goth, Sabas was executed for professing Christianity or rather for refusing to sacrifice to the tribal gods, and his companion, the priest Sansalas, was let go because he was a foreigner.[citation needed]
After the Goths had settledin Scythia in the 2nd century, it is probable that a process ofethnogenesis was set in motion, and that most of the "Goths" of the 3rd and the 4th centuries were not in fact descended from Scandinavia but, much as was the case with the "Huns" in the following century, consisted of a heterogeneous population, which was united under the name of "Goths" by virtue of having submitted to the elite that was formed by the ruling dynasties of thereiks.[citation needed]
Gothic religion was purely tribal in whichpolytheism,nature worship, andancestor worship were one and the same. It is known that theAmali dynasty deified their ancestors, theAnsis (cognate with Old Englishēse, Old Norseæsir), and that the Tervingi opened battle with songs of praise for their ancestors.[citation needed]
The gradual Christianisation of parts of the Gothic population came to a turning point in the 370s. A civil strife between the ChristianreiksFritigern and the paganreiksAthanaric prompted Roman military intervention on the side of the Christians, which led to theGothic War (376–382). In 376, the Romans allowed a number of ostensibly-Christian Goths, including bishops and priests, to cross theDanube and to be granted asylum.[citation needed]
The English wordgod itself is cognate with the Gothic wordguþ for a pagan idol, presumably a wooden statue of the kind paraded byWinguric on a chariot when he challenged the Gothic Christians to worship the tribal gods. It became the word for the Christian God in theGothic Bible with itsgrammatical gender changed from neuter to masculine only in the new sense.[citation needed]
The name of theGoths themselves is presumably related and means "those who libate", andguþ "idol" is the object of the act of libation.[citation needed]
The words for "to sacrifice" and for "sacrificer" wereblotan andblostreis, which were used in Biblical Gothic in the sense of "Christian worship" and "Christian priest".[citation needed]
One peculiarity that separates Gothic religion from all other forms of early Germanic religion is the absence of weapons asgrave goods. Pagan warrior graves in Scandinavia, England and Germany almost invariably contained weapons until the practice was discontinued by Christianisation, but the pagan Goths do not seem to have felt the need to bury their dead with weapons. That may have arisen from the fact that weapon burials began to become prominent among pagan peoples in the 5th and the 6th centuries, possibly as a method of permanently establishing prestige upon certain families by burial ritual in a period of a heightened economy and increased intergroup competition, thus well after the Goths' Christianisation.[1]
A Gothic belief in witches is attested with the story of thehaliurun(n)ae (compare Anglo-Saxonhellrúne), who were expelled from the tribe by King Filimer and later mated with evil spirits and gave birth to theHuns, who eventually destroyed the Gothic Empire. Wolfram compares the rejection ofnecromancy or witchcraft by the Goths to the pagan Scandinavian rejection of theseiðr of Finnic sorcerers or shamans.[1]
Very little can be said with certainty regarding the individualgods worshipped among the Goths.
In the light of comparative evidence from later forms of Germanic paganism, it seems likely that the "Germanic trinity" ofWodanaz,Tīwaz, andÞunraz may have had a parallel among the Goths, with the names Gaut, Teiws, and Fairguneis.[1]
The Goths had a cult of agod of war, identified by the Romans withMars, presumably cognate to theProto-GermanicTīwaz, perhaps called*Teiws in Gothic, on the basis on the correspondingletter names.[citation needed]
Among the Tervingi, perhaps also known as theTerwing, the tribe's mythical,eponymous ancestor, possibly related also to theTýrfingr lost sword legend, 'the finger' of the god Týr, which on touch caused sudden death to its enemies.[citation needed]
There was alsoGaut or Gapt, the ancestor of theAmali dynasty and presumably eponymous of the entire people of the "Goths". It is unclear whether this deity should be considered independent of those that were just mentioned or if it is only another name by which either of them was also known.[citation needed]
Old NorseGautr in later centuries served as another name for Odin in Scandinavia. It may also be significant that in theProse Edda, Odin himself is said to have come to the north from the Black Sea region, referred to as Turkland, the lands that some believe were formerly and later inhabited by some ancestors of the Goths. IfGapt was the original "ansic" ancestor, who was later identified with Odin, the Gothic letter name*ansuz (aza) may testify to his importance, but that does not imply that Gaut can be assumed to have had the same attributes typical of Odin in the Viking Age.[citation needed]These may be echoes that hark back to an older influence from many centuries earlier in which it is visible in the archaeological records the introduction of steppes elements from the Yamna Culture among the earliest Germanic cultural horizon, which giving birth to the Corded Ware Culture from the Copper Age.[citation needed]
Another important god may have been called*Fairguneis, identified by the Romans asJupiter and presumed by modern scholars to beThor, but that relies on the accuracy of the Romans' interpretation of Gothic religion.[citation needed]
The Gothic letterenguz may indicate the existence among the Goths of the godIngwaz, an oldername for the god Freyr, but there is no other evidence for this theory.[citation needed]
Finally, theDanube River may have also been deified as*Donaws.[citation needed]
