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SUMMARY:Pantheon and Meta-tropology: Metaphors\, Metonymies\, Synekdochai 
 and Personified Abstracta in Divine Names from India and Iran to Greece\, 
 Rome and Beyond
DTSTART:20250630T123000Z
DTEND:20250630T140000Z
DTSTAMP:20260413T081125Z
UID:metaphor-talk-30-06-2025-12289@ceres.rub.de
CATEGORIES:
DESCRIPTION:Metaphor Talk by PD Dr. habil. mult. Velizar Sadovski (Disting
 uished Research Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences)\n\nIt is not u
 nknown that in archaic Indo-European mythological traditions a large part 
 of the deities have names that more often than not correspond to (personif
 ied) abstract nouns\, nom-ina actionis and nomina agentis\, or directly re
 present tropes such as metaphor\, metonym\, more rarely synekdoche. This i
 s an inherent onomasiological feature characterizing the Latin gods (e.g. 
 the Sondergötter listed in the indigitamenta kept by the Collegium Pontif
 icum and invoked for public prayers) and the Old Greek pantheon\; as W. Bu
 rkert put it once\, “the Archaic Greek personifications come to assume t
 heir distinctive character in that they mediate between the individual god
 s and the spheres of reality\; they receive mythical and personal elements
  from the gods and in turn give the gods part in the conceptual order of t
 hings”. Thus\, Themis ‘Order’ and Mētis ‘Wisdom’ are wives of Z
 eus\, whose daughter is Dikē ‘Justice’\, Aphrodite is accompanied by 
 Erōs ‘Love’\, Himeros ‘Yearning’\, Peithō ‘Persuasion’\; the
  oldest daughter of Okeanos\, the river Styx\, is mother of Zēlos ‘zeal
 ’ and Nikē ‘Victory’\, Kratos ‘Power’ and Biē ‘Force’. Sim
 ilar theonyms enumerated in the catalogues of Hesiod’s Theogony and visi
 ble in action in Homer’s epic poems are a legion.\nWhat is less well kno
 wn is that in a number of Indo-European religions such divine names and ep
 ithets combine to form whole systems of partial characteristics of a divin
 e power which\, taken together\, form a whole which is not a mechanical su
 m of the individual items in the set\, but has added value and often serve
 s as a starting point for the formation of higher levels of theological an
 d cosmological taxonomies. Such clusters start with “dual deities” (li
 ke Ares’ sons Deimos and Phobos ‘Terror and Fear’)\, divine triads (
 like the Hōrai Thallō ‘Sprouting’\, Karpō ‘Fruiting’ and Auxō 
 ‘Growing’)\, to end up with double triads or hexads like the six Titan
 s and the six Olympic Gods in Greece\, the six high deities of the Vedas (
 the Ādityas) and the six-plus-one in the Avesta (‘Best Rightness’\, 
 ‘Good Thought’\, ‘Royalty Worthy to be Chosen’\, ‘Holy Right-Thi
 nking’\, ‘Integrity’\, ‘Immortality’ plus the Supreme God Ahura 
 Mazdā ‘Lord Mind-Setting/Wisdom’)\, or dodekads like the Roman Dii Co
 n-sentes. Moreover\, such theonyms form the Indo-Iranian catalogues of div
 ine epithets (the 50 names of Ahura Mazdā\, the 100 of Rudra\, the 1000 o
 f Viṣṇu and the 1000 of Śiva)\; sometimes they resume the names of ol
 d\, forgotten gods\, sometimes\, vice versa\, they serve as a basis for th
 e consolidation of whole new (classes of) deities\, and not rarely they en
 ter the sphere of anthroponymy as theophoric personal names.\nThe present 
 lecture will discuss several common Indo-Iranian theonyms and the “meta-
 tropology” behind them\, with a specific emphasis on metaphoric and meto
 nymic designations that rose to the rank of divine names in various Indo-E
 uropean cultures.\n\n 
LOCATION:CERES-Palais\, Raum "Ruhrpott" (4.13)
URL:https://sfb1475.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/de/veranstaltung/metaphor-talk-30-0
 6-2025/
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