Cruelest historical concept of a god?

[Kyriakos]

It seems many concepts of a god which appeared in history (and some even still exist in very notable form) can be argued to have been about a god that is cruel. From the abrahamic religions, the god of the old testament, to pre-christian european panthea and the usually catastrophic fate that awaits mortals who seek to either near a god or to antagonise that god, to the gnostic traditions comprising of both an arch-positive deity and some sort of arch-evil that is beyond what is seen by humans (beyond even the devil, who is presented as the servant of that higher evil, usually in identity with the sense of a material world), all those gods seem to have been tending to be on the negative or even downright horrifying side.

The question in the thread is if you have any specific historically spoken of deity, which seems to be the cruelest of all of them.

I am not sure if i have one. The titan order does not seem to be surviving in any texts which would present its own customs and rites, so one cannot really guess much about that. I have read it argued that it possibly involved human sacrifice, but it would have to be obviously from a pre-Homeric epics time, so possibly before even 1000 BC or only surviving up to a century after that.

Maybe some of the ancient phoenician religions could have been more cruel, either centered on Tyre or later on in Carthage.

Some splits of christianity and islam do have curious arguments and depicitons of god too, more curious than the main manifestations of those religions anyway. Such as the small muslim sect which supposedly worships a satanic entity as the higher god.

 

[Dachs]

I think that gods whose worshipers believed that they demanded human sacrifice would be at the top of the list. So, deities like Odin, Huitzilopochtli, Perun, and Shakti.

 

[Lord Baal]

Marduk is meant to have been pretty cruel. Then there's Moloch.

 

[Phrossack]

I think that gods whose worshipers believed that they demanded human sacrifice would be at the top of the list. So, deities like Odin, Huitzilopochtli, Perun, and Shakti.

Perun? The Slavs practiced human sacrifice? I know the Norse did, and ibn Fadlan and ibn Rustah said the Rus' did as well, but since ibn Rustah at least distinguishes between the Rus' and the Slavs and traveled to Novgorod I can't tell if these Rus' were Slavs, Vikings, or a mix.

On a related note, the Balts occasionally made sacrifices to Perkunas (similar to Perun), allegedly even roasting captured crusaders alive in armor and on horseback. But this doesn't seem to have been standard practice.

I'd nominate Huitzilopochtli for the cruellest concept, though.

 

[Dachs]

Human sacrifice to Perun shows up in the Primary Chronicle as something that Vladimir the Great ended when he converted to Christianity.

 

[Kyriakos]

Some info on the "muslim sect" i alluded to in the OP. It is called yazidism, and is mostly argued to be only partly a sect of islam (due to very similar stories in regards to satan in the koran), and moreover a religion based on pre-zoroastrian influences in the region of Messopotamia. Most of its practising members are Kurdish, and of those most of them live in northern Iraq.

Yazidis are monotheists, believing in one God, who created the world and entrusted it into the care of a Heptad of seven Holy Beings, often known as Angels or heft sirr (the Seven Mysteries). Preeminent among these is Tawûsê Melek (frequently known as "Melek Taus" in English publications), the Peacock Angel.

Yazidism is not an off-shoot of another religion (such as Christianity or Islam), but shows influence from the many religions of the middle-east. Core Yazidi cosmology has a pre-Zoroastrian Iranian origin, but Yazidism also includes elements of ancient nature-worship, as well as influences from Christianity, Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Islam and Judaism. The heptad of angels are God's emanations which are formed of the light of God. God delegates most of his action to the heptad and is therefore somewhat deistic in nature.

According to the Encyclopedia of the Orient,

The reason for the Yazidis reputation of being devil worshipers is connected to the other name of Melek Taus, Shaytan, the same name the Koran has for Satan.[25]

Furthermore, the Yazidi story regarding Tawûsê Melek's rise to favor with God is almost identical to the story of the jinn Iblis in Islam, except that Yazidis revere Tawûsê Melek for refusing to submit to God by bowing to Adam, while Muslims believe that Iblis' refusal to submit caused him to fall out of Grace with God, and to later become Satan himself.[26]

Tawûsê Melek is often identified by Muslims and Christians with Shaitan (Satan). Yazidis, however, believe Tawûsê Melek is not a source of evil or wickedness. They consider him to be the leader of the archangels, not a fallen angel. They are forbidden from speaking the name Shaitan. They also hold that the source of evil is in the heart and spirit of humans themselves, not in Tawûsê Melek. The active forces in their religion are Tawûsê Melek and Sheik Adî.

The Kitêba Cilwe "Book of Illumination", which claims to be the words of Tawûsê Melek, and which presumably represents Yazidi belief, states that he allocates responsibilities, blessings and misfortunes as he sees fit and that it is not for the race of Adam to question him. Sheikh Adî believed that the spirit of Tawûsê Melek was the same as his own, perhaps as a reincarnation. He is reported to have said:

I was present when Adam was living in Paradise, and also when Nemrud threw Abraham in fire. I was present when God said to me: 'You are the ruler and Lord on the Earth'. God, the compassionate, gave me seven earths and throne of the heaven.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yazidi

It is interesting that they believe god actually created the world virtually from utter nothingness, whereas other current religions possibly don't make this that much clear (eg christianity seems to allow for the view that the material for the world to be created may have existed already, but in a desolate and dead way, and god ordered it to become able to sustain life. At least that can be said to be the meaning of the genesis part of the old testament, since it mentions that in the beginning something already *potentially* existed, but was then altered crucially by god. Gnostic traditions are heavily focused on this, and they conclude that the original (dead) world is in reality evil itself, and is satan, whereas the devil is only the conscious part of satan, and so on.

 

[Plotinus]

christianity seems to allow for the view that the material for the world to be created may have existed already, but in a desolate and dead way, and god ordered it to become able to sustain life.

That was the view of some early Christians, notably Hermogenes, but this view was regarded as heterodox by most Christians from around the end of the second century onwards. Creation ex nihilo, i.e. from nothing, became the standard view quite quickly. Interestingly, the first person to state this doctrine, arguably, was Basilides, who is traditionally regarded as a major gnostic theologian. The first clear statement of the doctrine is Tatian of Syria, a mid-second-century theologian later regarded as heterodox in some respects (he apparently thought Adam was not saved), but not in this respect.

 

[Kyriakos]

Thank you

I looked a bit at the article on Basileides, who i only had read about in some prose by Borges. At some point some idea called "spirit of limits" (methorion pneuma) was mentioned, and (possibly) linked to another gnostic theology, that of Valentinus which included something termed "horos" which in english was attributed as "limit".
I suppose then that the original greek word may mostly mean "space" (χώρο&#962 which is a bit peculiar, given it does not readily refer to a limit, since the term for limit was always όριον, with an omicron and not an omega.

However it should be noted that the verb for "dividing spaces" is now always "horizo" (χωρίζ&#969 with an omega, and not "orizo" with an omicron, although the latter can be used as well. In general the latter is mostly used so as to define abstract things, whereas the former for material objects. In that sense a "horos" (with the omega) would clearly refer to a material space, not an abstract limit.

By now one can use horos (with the omega) to refer to parts of the mental world too, of course. I do not know if that applied in the ancient past as well.

 

[Plotinus]

Well, my Greek isn't remotely good enough to comment on that; but personally I'm not convinced that Basilides really taught creation ex nihilo, at least on the basis of the few fragments we have from him. It's far clearer in Tatian. Note, though, that Tatian thought that creation was a two-fold process: first God created matter, then he fashioned the world out of it. Later theologians (after Irenaeus, I suppose) tended to think of it as a single act.

 

[Masada]

It is called yazidism, and is mostly argued to be only partly a sect of islam (due to very similar stories in regards to satan in the koran), and moreover a religion based on pre-zoroastrian influences in the region of Messopotamia. Most of its practising members are Kurdish, and of those most of them live in northern Iraq.

Other than the name and where they live, none of that is actually true.

(1) We know next to nothing about the origins of Yazidism. So any claims that it has elements of "pre-Zoroastrian influences" are speculative and very likely wrong given the antiquity of Zoroastrianism. (I'm ignoring the vexed issue of whether or not modern Yazdism is anything like pre-modern Yazidism. I think not but w/e).
(2) The Yazidi don't have a Satan figure at all. Muslims and Christians have for various reasons equated the Yazidi's chief angel/manifestation of the One God with Satan.
(3) Yazidi speak Kurdish but aren't usually considered to be Kurds.

 

[Kyriakos]

^thanks. The yazidi archangel (effectively their god, the peacock figure) is specifically written in their texts to have been god's favorite angel and to have denied god's command to bow to Adam.
Funny that in the Koran someone else is presented as god's favorite angel, and denies to bow down to Adam. His name in the Koran is Shaitan. Of course in Yazidism his name is nothing like that, since it is the obscure Shaytan.

So, glad you felt like contributing. Not wishing to define in just what way you contributed though

 

[Yeekim]

I think that gods whose worshipers believed that they demanded human sacrifice would be at the top of the list. So, deities like Odin, Huitzilopochtli, Perun, and Shakti.

That makes for a rather long list. Human sacrifice was hardly anything exceptional in the world, was it?

 

[Winner]

It's a shame we know so little about the Slavic pagan practices and belief.

 

[Kyriakos]

^Dachs implied those gods which were worshipped in historic times, and some of them even in quite late antiquity or the early medieval era.

(by contrast you won't find any historic presentation of human sacrifice in the Greek world at least after 1000 BC-900 BC. Even in the Iliad, which was written at the earliest sometime before 900 BC, human sacrifice is not a motif at all, and even Iphigenia is not mentioned as being sacrificed by her father Agamemnon (in the Attic Drama, Iphigenia is first argued to be the subject of sacrifice so as to regain the favor of Artemis, and later on merely forced to go to Tauris in the Crimea, so as to be a priestess of Artemis).

Apart from the myths about the titans and their battle with the olympian gods, ceremonial killing is not a subject of greek art. Cronos devoured his childen so that they would not succeed him, but he was a titan, not a follower of a religion himself.

There are some sporadic mythic elements (iirc in the Theogonia) about older religions which possibly did use human sacrifice. The order of Lyceos Zeus (wolven Zeus) is argued to have been like that, since the actual myth of Lycaeos and his transformation into a wolf, by Zeus, heavily relies on that king having killed his own son and tried to serve him as food to the god.

By contrast there are various accounts of civilizations which existed even up to millenia later, and did practise human sacrifice.

 

[Masada]

^thanks. The yazidi archangel (effectively their god, the peacock figure) is specifically written in their texts to have been god's favorite angel and to have denied god's command to bow to Adam.

It's rather more complicated than that. Basically, some Europeans travelling through Iraq in the first decade of the 1900s decided to publish for the folks at home some 'authentic' Yezidi religious works. Unfortunately, the Yezidi's religious texts were in the form of, oh so boring, hymns. So the authors made stuff up. Lots. Of. Stuff. Some scholars think everything. Some just think most of it. That particular story is usually assumed to be one such invention cribbed off the Qur'an. Yezidi practices and beliefs are even more strange and, well, wonderful. Chief among them is a Yezidi belief that their Heptarchy of Angels are periodically reincarnated in human bodies!

Funny that in the Koran someone else is presented as god's favorite angel, and denies to bow down to Adam. His name in the Koran is Shaitan. Of course in Yazidism his name is nothing like that, since it is the obscure Shaytan.

No, it isn't. The Yazidi name for the Peacock Angel is Melek Taus. The claim that Melek Taus is Shaitan (the names are pronounced the same, and the different spelling is IIRC a modern means of differentiating between the devil and Melek Taus being called the devil) was a deliberate invention made to strengthen a claim that the Yazidi were literally devil worshipers as opposed to plain old heterodox Muslims, Gnostic Christians or Pagans. As a result, the Yazidi actually have a pretty strong taboo against using the word Shaitan because uttering it risked getting them killed.

 

[H4run]

^thanks. The yazidi archangel (effectively their god, the peacock figure) is specifically written in their texts to have been god's favorite angel and to have denied god's command to bow to Adam.
Funny that in the Koran someone else is presented as god's favorite angel, and denies to bow down to Adam. His name in the Koran is Shaitan. Of course in Yazidism his name is nothing like that, since it is the obscure Shaytan.

So, glad you felt like contributing. Not wishing to define in just what way you contributed though

shaiton is not a name of an entity in Islam, shaiton is a state of being that can inflict both Djinn and Human, lower their grades into the state where they enjoin or calling for evil and stand in the way of other who want to perform the good deeds.

And in Quran the one who refuse to sajdah to Adam (as) is not an angel, but a djinn kind (different than the Christian who have the rebelious Angel named Lucifer), and this Djinn name is Iblees or Iblis. So it don't have connection with what you state and try to build up here.

 

[Wrymouth3]

It's a shame we know so little about the Slavic pagan practices and belief.

This thread needs more Koschei.

 

[Dachs]

This thread needs more Koschei.

"...but she never let me forget that she had beaten me to that deer."

 

[Jehoshua]

Tezcatlipoca (considered the most powerful god by the Aztecs, the god of destiny, sorcery, discord and change amongst other things) by far. Some of the titles given to him by the Aztecs include "We who's slaves we are" and "The Enemy of Both Sides".

The Aztecs believed that he created war to provide food and drink to the gods, and that despite having the power to forgive sins, heal disease and release a man from fate, that nothing whatsoever in his nature compelled him to do so. Indeed they believed that he was much more likely to bring about a dramatic shift in fortune, or (as god of night) to kill some poor traveller who came across him at night than anything else.

Oh, and the victory of Tezcatlipoca over Quetzalcoatl in the Tollan of Aztec mythology was apparently the rationale justifying all human sacrifice (and associate cannibalism and slavery) in Aztec society and religion.

 

[Kyriakos]

Tezcatlipoca (considered the most powerful god by the Aztecs, the god of destiny, sorcery, discord and change amongst other things) by far. Some of the titles given to him by the Aztecs include "We who's slaves we are" and "The Enemy of Both Sides".

The Aztecs believed that he created war to provide food and drink to the gods, and that despite having the power to forgive sins, heal disease and release a man from fate, that nothing whatsoever in his nature compelled him to do so. Indeed they believed that he was much more likely to bring about a dramatic shift in fortune, or (as god of night) to kill some poor traveller who came across him at night than anything else.

Oh, and the victory of Tezcatlipoca over Quetzalcoatl in the Tollan of Aztec mythology was apparently the rationale justifying all human sacrifice (and associate cannibalism and slavery) in Aztec society and religion.

That does sound pretty horrible indeed (worse than the other aztec god mentioned in my view).

Hm, interesting (and ominous) phrase there: "The enemy of both sides". I guess it can easily mean that no matter what one does, that deity will still be his enemy.

Some more on this, from wiki:

Tezcatlipoca was often described as a rival of another important god of the Aztecs, the culture hero, Quetzalcoatl. In one version of the Aztec creation account[7] the myth of the Five Suns, the first creation, "The Sun of the Earth" was ruled by Tezcatlipoca but destroyed by Quetzalcoatl when he struck down Tezcatlipoca who then transformed into a jaguar. Quetzalcoatl became the ruler of the subsequent creation "Sun of Water", and Tezcatlipoca destroyed the third creation "The Sun of Wind" by striking down Quetzalcoatl.

In later myths, the four gods who created the world, Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli and Xipe Totec were referred to respectively as the Black, the White, the Blue and the Red Tezcatlipoca. The four Tezcatlipocas were the sons of Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl, lady and lord of the duality, and were the creators of all the other gods, as well as the world and all humanity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tezcatlipoca