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Household deity
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A household deity is a deity or spirit that protects the home, looking after the entire household or certain key members. It has been a common belief in pagan religions as well as in folklore across many parts of the world.
Household deities fit into two types; firstly, a specific goddess (but never a god), often referred to as a hearth goddess or domestic goddess who is associated with the home and hearth, with examples including the Greek Hestia and Norse Frigg.
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Encyclopedia
A household deity is a deity or spirit that protects the home, looking after the entire household or certain key members. It has been a common belief in pagan religions as well as in folklore across many parts of the world.
Household deities fit into two types; firstly, a specific goddess (but never a god), often referred to as a hearth goddess or domestic goddess who is associated with the home and hearth, with examples including the Greek Hestia and Norse Frigg. "Domestic Goddess" can also be used as a euphemism or ironical reference to the traditional female gender role of a housewife.
The second type of household deities are those that are not one singular deity, but a type, or species of animistic deity, who usually have lesser powers than major deities. This type was common in pagan religions, such as the Lares of Roman paganism and Cofgodas of Anglo-Saxon paganism, and these survived Christianisation as fairy-like creatures existing in folklore, such as the Scottish Brownie and Slavic Domovoi.
Household deities were usually worshipped not in temples but in the home, where they would be represented by small idols (such as the teraphim of the Bible), amulets, paintings or reliefs. They could also be found on domestic objects, such as cosmetic articles in the case of Tawaret. The more prosperous houses might have a small shrine to the household god(s); the lararium served this purpose in the case of the Romans. The gods would be treated as members of the family and invited to join in meals, or be given offerings of food and drink.
Type of Household deity
Household Goddess
In many religions, both ancient and modern, a goddess presided over the home. It was always a goddess, and never a god, who fulfilled this role.
Animistic deities
Certain species, or types, of household deities existed. An example of this was the Roman Lares.
Survival in folklore
Many European cultures retained house spirits into the modern period. Some examples of these include:
Although the cosmic status of household deities was not so lofty as that of the Twelve Olympians or the Aesir, they were also jealous of their dignity and had to also to be appeased with shrines and offerings, however humble. Because of their immediacy they had arguably more influence on the day-to-day affairs of men than the remote gods did. Vestiges of their worship persisted long after Christianity and other major religions extirpated nearly every trace of the major pagan pantheons, and indeed, they continue even today, in one form or another.
For centuries Christianity fought a mop-up war against these lingering minor pagan deities, but they proved tenacious. For example, Martin Luther's Tischreden have numerous quite serious references to dealing with kobolds. "Luther no longer believes in Catholic miracles, but he still believes in diabolical entities. His Table Talks are full of curious tales of satanic arts, kobolds, and witches." Eventually rationalism and the industrial revolution threatened to erase most of these minor deities, until the advent of romantic nationalism rehabilitated them and embellished them into objects of literary curiosity in the 19th century. Since the 20th century this literature has been mined for characters for role-playing games, video games, and other fantasy personae, not infrequently invested with invented traits and hierarchies somewhat different from their mythological and folkloric roots.
Origins in animism and ancestor worship
Shinto as an exemplar of development
The general dynamics of the origin and development of household deities over a considerable span may be traced and exemplified by the historically attested origins and current practices of the Shinto belief system in Japan. As the British Japanologist Lafcadio Hearn put it:
Drawing the picture with broader strokes. he continues:
As stated in the Wikipedia article on Shinto,
Many Japanese houses still have a shrine (kamidana "kami shelf") where offerings are made to ancestral kami, as well as to other kami.
Cultural evolution and survival
Edward Burnett Tylor, one of the main founders of the discipline of cultural anthropology, spoke of survivals, vestiges of earlier evolutionary stages in a culture's development. He also coined the term animism. Tylor disagreed with Herbert Spencer, another founder of anthropology, as well as of sociology, about the innateness of the human tendency towards animistic explanations, but both agreed that ancestor worship was the root of religion and that domestic deities were survivals from such an early stage.
Animism and totemism
In contradistinction to both Herbert Spencer and Edward Burnett Tylor, who defended theories of animistic origins of ancestor worship, Émile Durkheim saw its origin in totemism. In reality this distinction is somewhat academic, since totemism may be regarded as particularized manifestation of animism, and something of a synthesis of the two positions was attempted by Sigmund Freud. In Freud's Totem and Taboo, both totem and taboo are outward expressions or manifestations of the same psychological tendency, a concept which is complementary to, or which rather reconciles, the apparent conflict. Freud preferred to emphasize the psychoanalytic implications of the reification of metaphysical forces, but with particular emphasis on its familial nature. This emphasis underscores, rather than weakens, the ancestral component.
Domestic deities and ancestor worship
Jacob Grimm (1835)
The doyen of European folklorists Jacob Grimm did not hesitate to equate the Roman lar familiaris to the brownie. He explains in some detail in his Deutsche Mythologie:
Thomas Keightley (1870)
To underscore the equivalence of brownie, kobold and goblin, consider the words of the English historian and folklorist Thomas Keightly:
MacMichael (1907)
MacMichael elaborated his views on the folkloric belief complex as follows:
New International Encyclopaedia
Demonstrating that this evolution and functional equivalence has generally come to be accepted, and that their nature is indeed that proposed by Grimm, one may refer to the early twentieth century New International Encyclopaedia:
and also
Origin of ancestor worship in animism
Hearn (1878)
William Edward Hearn, a noted classicist and jurist, traced the origin of domestic deities from the earliest stages as an expression of animism, a belief system thought to have existed also in the neolithic, and the forerunner of Indo-European religion. In his analysis of the Indo-European houseold, in Chapter II "The House Spirit", Section 1, he states:
In Section 2 he proceeds to elaborate:
George Henderson (1911)
George Henderson elaborated on the presumed origin of ancestor worship in animism:
List
Specific deities
Domestic or hearth goddesses from various mythologies include:
European
- Hestia, a goddess in Greek paganism
- Vesta, a goddess in Roman paganism
- Frigg, a goddess in Norse paganism
- Gabija, a goddess in Baltic paganism
- Matka Gabia, a goddess in Slavic paganism
- Berehynia, (originally a river spirit, since 1991 has become a hearth goddess in Ukrainian Romantic nationalism)
African
- Bes, a goddess in Egyptian paganism
- Ekwu, a god in Igbo Odinani
Asian
South American
Animistic deities
European
Asian
Bibliography
- [JG] Grimm, Jacob. Deutsche Mythologie (Teutonic Mythology). Göttingen, 1835, 3rd ed., 1854, 2 vols. English translation available online at http://www.northvegr.org/lore/grimmst/017_12.php
- [WEH] Hearn, William Edward. 1878. London: Longman, Green & Co. The Aryan Household, Its Structure and Its Development: An Introduction to Comparative Jurisprudence. "Chapter II: The House Spirit". Available online at http://books.google.com/books?name=9663WttGfbUC&pg=PA39.
- [LH] Hearn,Lafcadio. Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation". The Macmillan Company, New York, 1904. Available online at
- [GH] Henderson, George. "The Finding of the Soul", in Survivals in Belief Among the Celts, I.2. [1911]. Available online at http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/sbc/sbc04.htm.
- [HH] Heine, Heinrich. Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland ("Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany".) Available online at http://www.digbib.org/Heinrich_Heine_1797/Zur_Geschichte_der_Religion_und_Philosophie_in_Deutschland?textonly=1.
- [TK] Keightly, Thomas. The Fairy Mythology: Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries. 1870. Available online at http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/tfm/tfm086.htm.
- [JHM] MacMichael, J. Holden . "The Evil Eye and the Solar Emblem", in The Antiquary, XLIII, Jan-Dec 1907, p 426. Edward Walford et al., eds. London: 1907. ... Available online at http://books.google.com/books?name=zy0x0SNaPeUC&pg=PA426.
- [NIE] The New International Encyclopaedia, Coit et al, eds. Dodd, Mead & Co., 1911. Available online at http://www.sacred-texts.com/shi/jai/index.htm.
See also
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