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Anthropomorphic gods?

Identifying a point by year round observation is not the same as being able to use it on one particular night at sea, if your life depends on it. You don't have the luxury of observing its position for a few months, to determine the point it rotates around.

And it wouldn't be particularly useful anyway, while lacking a stable frame of reference in the first place. I mean, you're going to plot that circle in relation to WHAT frame of reference?

For trips any longer than maybe crossing the 32km (about 20 land miles for you Imperials) from Antykithera to Gramvousa, since you mentioned going to Crete, being wrong even by a couple of degrees can be fatal.

At any rate, for better or from worse, we have accounts for all the period from Homer to Acts about ships going around the shore. In fact, the whole Odissey is what happens when you get blown into the open sea. The guy only had to cross from Turkey to Greece, but once he lost sight of shore, hijinks ensued. Seems to me like if the ancients had a reliable way to find which way is north at sea, the whole story would have come across as a pretty piss-poor excuse to get lost.
 
Also, here's another idea, if we're talking sailing to islands and such in the ancient world.

The highest point in Crete is Mt Ida, standing 2,456m tall. If you punch that in a horizon calculator, it's visible from 177 km distance at sea. It's literally visible from Milos, among other islands in the area.

So anyone taking such as proof that they had more advanced means of navigation than line of sight... yeah. Might want to rethink that.
 
HansMustermann said:
The highest point in Crete is Mt Ida, standing 2,456m tall. If you punch that in a horizon calculator, it's visible from 177 km distance at sea. It's literally visible from Milos, among other islands in the area.
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Did your calculator include humidity and dust? "In a clear day they could see Thera exploding, OMAG!" (A for Anthropomorphic)
 
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When you want to make deals with people you've never met before, there is no point in making them swear oaths on the sacred stone at home or that two-headed goat.
The only kind of shape I can assume is universal when it comes to the Divine is humanoid.
That is why travellers would always "recognize" an aspect of their deity in whatever goes for a God in foreign parts.
 
aleCcowaN said:
Did your calculator include humidity and dust? "In a clear day they could see Thera exploding, OMAG!" (A for Anthropomorphic)
Click to expand...

Well, the point is still that if you sail that-a-way, you (A) have a VERY wide target to hit. You can deviate about 45 degrees (eyeballed) and still hit SOME point in Creta if you start from from Milos, AND sooner or later you'll see that mountain anyway.

That said, the climate of Creta is somewhat dry and it's not going to very dusty at sea. The average humidity is around 50% in December, so there won't be some permanent fog in between.

Or, as I was saying, you can start from Antykithera and only have to go appproximately 30 km (rounded down) before you hit ground if you go in the right direction. The highest point in Gramvousa is 137m (without counting the castle built there later by the Venetians), which is visible from 41 km away. I.e., you can actually see it from the shore of your starting point, on a day without fog or rain or something. Seeing through 30-32km of air is hardly some feat on a clear day.

You have to look through more atmosphere than that to see the stars, if you want to navigate by the stars. Just the stratosphere goes all the way to 50km, which is quite a bit longer distance, and we can see all that far without problems.

So again, it's hardly needing to postulate some advanced navigation techniques, when THERE IS ACTUALLY LINE OF SIGHT BETWEEN THE TWO. Occam's Razor and all that. If you can see point A from point B, you don't need a more advanced explanation for how humans could find point A from point B.
 
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I'd reserve Occam's to shave things closer to the notion of "anthropomorphic gods" than the topic of air turbidity in the Aegean Basin or the polar star and the precession of the equinoxes.

It is a noticeable trait of the "chosen peoples" -and the defeated religions in their areas- that of having a father-god with male attributes. In every other corner of the planet gods would be human like but often having animalistic traits, from Ganesh to Quetzalcoatl.

What always have amazed me is the ability of the children of The Book™ to underrate and scorn "animist" and "polytheist" religions. Those "brutes" knowingly represent their deities in a way they can fathom and they'd never believe the actual gods have any resemblance with those depictions. More importantly, it is widely believed that each individual "god" is just an articulation of the "god principle", which means there is just one very distant "god" concerned with creation and giving the whole universe some structuration and way far from human concerns. In turn that "god principle" factorizes itself in smaller chunks increasingly closer to actual people and their worries. Those partial, local gods are conceived as human or animal as the concerns they were created to tend to, again, without the belief of any real deity being that way.

God, the angels, Lucifer, the saints, the Trinity, Allah and Muhammad, are all either highly hierarchized or stylized residues of that authenticly human way of thinking.

I myself have become a participant of the We Tripantu, the local new year (June 21 to 24th, as neolithic Indians weren't astronomers that good), were people gather around bonfires to share stories related to their family, ethnicity and the divine. It always has impressed me how they accept my postheism as something natural, as they accept agnosticism and christianity. That festival is a place for personal exploration and sharing with others for everyone's "enwisement". No group is "the chosen people" but everybody and all creatures in Earth.

I find that to be much more evolved than "I believe in God our Father. I believe in Christ the Son. I believe in the Holy Spirit. Our God is three in one" or "Allahu Akbar!".
 
Well, you have to look at how such chosen people arose, for things to make sense.

Essentially polytheism IS all about accepting that other people have other beliefs, even when they conflict with your own. E.g., even in Egypt you can see at the same time that one group believed that Ra created the world by jacking off (no, seriously; and some pharaohs ceremonially wanked into the Nile in honour of that), while a couple cities up the river they believed that Ptah crafted the world. You know, what with him being the crafter god.

If you look even closer, each city had their own patron deity, who basically fulfilled all roles of a single God. Seth in his city was just as responsible for fertility as Bast in hers, even if officially his sphere was anything but that.

Or look at Mesopotamia. LONG before they had the monolatry of Marduk, we have written prayers to about two dozen gods which go, basically, 'psst, I know you're the greatest, no matter what the other guys say." (Or even the only one with real power.) But they left the followers of other gods be.

Essentially every city was chosen of their own god, but they didn't go tell the others "your god is false."

And things get even funnier when you look at people assimilating their deities to have some common ground. E.g., if you look at assimilations like Inanna with Artemis, there were wild contradictions. They didn't share much more than their sex and their weapon of choice being a bow. Just about everything else didn't match. Anyone who paid any attention must have noticed that both groups can't possibly be right.

But basically you allowed those guys to worship your virgin deity of the hunt at their serial-rapist deity of war anyway. Meh, it's their problem if they got it wrong.

Monotheism is just what happens when that tolerance breaks down. When one group stops the whole leaving other guys in peace. Essentially it's not that they're ass holes because they're monotheists, it's that said monotheism rose BECAUSE a group were ass holes about religion.
 
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