because it originated as a plural collective term for ‘gods and goddesses’; in
Germanic the neuter was used for groups including both males and females.^4
The word is evidently a participial formation, ghu-to-, the underlying verb
corresponding to Vedic hu‘pour out, make libation’; the chief priest in the
Vedic ritual was called the hótar. The guðo ̄, then, were ‘those worshipped
(with libations etc.)’.^5
Another Germanic term is more difficult to relate to extra-Germanic roots.
The standard word for the pagan deities in Norse literature is áss, plural æsir.
It corresponds to Old English o ̄s and to the title anseis (=semidei) with which
the Goths, according to Jordanes (Getica 78), exalted their victorious kings. A
proto-Germanic form *ansuz has usually been reconstructed, and connected
on the one hand with Hittite h
̆
assu- ‘king’ and on the other with Vedic ásura-,
Avestan ahura-, a title applied to divinities. However, recent work has cast
doubt on this construction.^6
In Iranian and Slavonic we find a different word again: Old Persian baga-,
Younger Avestan baγa-; Old Church Slavonic bogu ̆, Russian бог, Polish bóg,
Czech bu ̊h, etc. In Vedic India Bhaga is the name of an individual god, listed
together with Mitra, Varuna, Aryaman, and others as one of the A ̄dityas, the
sons of Aditi. There is no mystery here: bhaj means ‘dispense’, and bhága-
is the fortune dispensed by the gods, or the divine dispenser, like Greek
δαμων.
Finally, Greek θεο ́ , a word already attested in the Mycenaean tablets.
Compounds such as θσ-φατο‘god-spoken’, which must have been created
even earlier, before the loss of intervocalic [s], show that it goes back to
dhes-ós. It has a cognate in Armenian dikU (< dhe ̄ses) ‘gods’, and perhaps in
thedesa-, disa-, diza- that appears as an element in some Thracian personal
names.^7 The same root can be traced in certain Italic words with a religious
connotation: Oscan fíísnú‘temple’, Latin fa ̄num (< fas-nom); Latin fe ̄riae
(< fe ̄s-ya ̄), fe ̄stus die ̄s‘holy day’.
It is not probable that the Indo-Europeans had a fixed canon of deities or
assigned a specific number to them. The Hittites spoke of a thousand, the
(^4) Schulze (1966), 853 f.
(^5) Cf. Meid (1991), 17 f.; EIEC 231; M. E. Huld, SIGL 2 (1999), 135 f.; differently C. Watkins in
Mayrhofer et al. (1974), 102 n. 5. The same root probably appears in gutuater, a type of Gaulish
priest (CIL xiii. 1577, 2585, al.); -ater is Celtic for pater, so ‘father of the sacrifice’ or something
of the kind.
(^6) M. E. Huld, SIGL 2 (1999), 136–9, argues that the proto-Germanic form was ansa-, an o-
stem with a heteroclite i-stem plural; he relates this to the root h 2 en(h 1 ) ‘breathe’. J. Puhvel,
Hittite Etymological Dictionary, iii (Berlin–New York 1991), 245 f., shows that h
̆
assu- was ‘the
(true)born one’ and not cognate with the other words. P. Moisson, Études Indo-Européennes 11
(1992), 113–41, persuasively explains ásura- as a derivative of ásu-, the vital spirit that animates
the living and exists independently after death. Cf. also Watkins (1995), 8.
(^7) I. Duridanov in Meid (1998), 562.
- Gods and Goddesses 121