Gothic paganism

Gothic paganism or Gothic polytheism was the original religion of the Goths before their conversion to Christianity.

The Goths first appear in historical records in the early 3rd century and were Christianised in the 4th and the 5th centuries. Information on the form of Germanic paganism practiced by the Goths before Christianisation is thus limited to a comparatively narrow and sparsely documented time window in the 3rd and the 4th centuries.^{[citation needed]}

The centre of the Gothic cult was the village or clan (Kuni) and the ritual sacrificial meal held by the villagers under the leadership of the reiks. The reiks saw themselves as the guardians of ethnic tradition. That was expressed starkly in the Gothic persecution of Christians in the 370s in which the reiks Athanaric saw his privilege threatened by the new religion. He responded by the persecution of converted Goths but not of Christian foreigners. According to the Passio of Sabas the Goth, Sabas was executed for professing Christianity or rather for refusing to sacrifice to the tribal gods, and his companion, the priest Sansalas, was let go because he was a foreigner.^{[citation needed]}

After the Goths had settled in Scythia in the 2nd century, it is probable that a process of ethnogenesis was set in motion, and that most of the "Goths" of the 3rd and the 4th centuries were not in fact descended from Scandinavia but, much as was the case with the "Huns" in the following century, consisted of a heterogeneous population, which was united under the name of "Goths" by virtue of having submitted to the elite that was formed by the ruling dynasties of the reiks.^{[citation needed]}

Gothic religion was purely tribal in which polytheism, nature worship, and ancestor worship were one and the same. It is known that the Amali dynasty deified their ancestors, the Ansis (cognate with Old English ēse, Old Norse æsir), and that the Tervingi opened battle with songs of praise for their ancestors.^{[citation needed]}

The gradual Christianisation of parts of the Gothic population came to a turning point in the 370s. A civil strife between the Christian reiks Fritigern and the pagan reiks Athanaric prompted Roman military intervention on the side of the Christians, which led to the Gothic War (376–382). In 376, the Romans allowed a number of ostensibly-Christian Goths, including bishops and priests, to cross the Danube and to be granted asylum.^{[citation needed]}

The English word god itself is cognate with the Gothic word guþ for a pagan idol, presumably a wooden statue of the kind paraded by Winguric on a chariot when he challenged the Gothic Christians to worship the tribal gods. It became the word for the Christian God in the Gothic Bible with its grammatical gender changed from neuter to masculine only in the new sense.^{[citation needed]}

The name of the Goths themselves is presumably related and means "those who libate", and guþ "idol" is the object of the act of libation.^{[citation needed]}