I find it
interesting that a lot of people fail to come to terms with their own
Religions
histories. I want to know what happened to
El. I want to know where
Baal and
Anath went off to. Have you seen
Dagon and
Ashera around lately? It is frightening to me how
incestual Religions are. Did you know that
Christianity has(d) a
Pantheon? Yup.
We call
Yahweh "
God" now as he has no more competition. A reasonable analogy to the situation would be to say, suppose
Apollo (
Yahweh)
hijacked all of
Zeus's (
El)
followers and told them all that they were to
worship no other
god but him. This is what we talk about when we discuss
Moses and the
covenant. Pretty interesting eh?
Did you know that this lose-knit
polytheistic religion that the
Levites,
Canaanites and later even the Israelites followed included human
sacrifice and temples of
prostitution?
Isaiah was the first to get the ball rolling and start purging the other gods from the temples and smashing their
symbols, not because he claimed that they did not exist, but because the
Israelites were the chosen people of
Yahweh and not only should Israelites only worship their true god, but he felt that the world should as well. Apparently old Izzy was the unwitting founding father of
religious cleansing.
So...
El - the father of the gods,
Baal - Lord of the Sun and Male Fertility,
Anath - Goddess of
Love and
War,
Asherah -
Goddess of
Fertility (
whore houses too), and
Dagon, God of Vegetation all got ousted by
Yahweh. I could never find what
Yahweh's "specialty" was. Wouldn't it be a hoot if he was the "
Trickster"?