Magic of the Ages

Overview

The Dacian religion might seem difficult to understand to most. The Dacians are famous for their mysteries, the oldest writing in the world, still un-decyphered, Gods and Goddesses that seem to share attributes and substitute names, to the point that you aren’t sure anymore which Gods is which.

The problem mostly comes from the fact that the Dacians had a very unusual type of religion, inaccurately considered henotheistic by some. They had a Supreme God, and ”lower deities” as some understand it, but by trying to understand the Dacian religion this way one would only get more confused, as the Supreme God/Divinity seems to be sometimes the Goddess Bendis, sometimes Gebeleizis, sometimes Zalmoxes, sometimes the Thracian Knight.

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The reality is that the Dacians had a Supreme God, Supreme Divinity, but the ”lesser deities” were not in fact lesser deities. The Dacian Gods and Goddesses were actually only facets of the Supreme Divinity. Thus explaining why they can share attributes and ”leadership” of the pantheon. This very fact made the Greeks, when they “borrowed” the Geto-Dacian (Thracian) Gods and Goddesses they created new Gods and Goddesses for each of their mutiple aspects. For example, Derzelas became at the same time Dionyssus, Hermes, Apollo, Pan, and a few others, each of them sharing with the original God an aspect and an attribute or two.

This was probably the cause that made the ancient religion not only survive the destruction that was brought upon other ancient pagan religions by Christianity, but in the most peculiar way, it intertwined and mingled and developed with it. So we can witness in the present day the most interesting thing of all: the ancient pagan Dacian holidays being mentioned as holidays in the Eastern Orthodox Christian calendar and celebrated as such. And in the countryside, where the ancient rites are still kept, it is a common sight that the group of people going out in the fields to do the harvest ritual are either blessed by the priest before they leave the village or the Christian priest might actually join the group and add his blessings to the ritual. That was just because of the way the Dacians saw and understood Divinity: the Christian God was only another facet of their Supreme God.

The territory of the ancestral Dacian Empire was regarded by the ancients as the Hyperborean land, the mysterious land at the end of the world, in which Apollo was retreating, full of mysteries, dark forests, fierce warriors and monsters.

The mythical “secret place” of the Gods and of the High Priesthood, the sancto sanctorum of the Dacians, was the Kogaion (Kogaionon) Mountain. There are many controversies as where it is located. Very similar as mystery with the Celtic Avalon Island. 

Another very important thing to note is that Dacian Goddesses and Gods do not have human characteristics like the ones in the other mythologies of Europe. Even if they MAY take a vague human shape when they want to communicate directly with a human, to facilitate interaction, The Divines of the Dacians are actually elemental forces of the Universe. The semi-divine entities can be human-like but never the Divines.

You can find HERE the mythology of the Dacians and nowadays Romanians.

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