Hittite Paganism

I haven't seen anything about Hittites written with modern paganism in mind and I've been curious as to what that might look like. I am not a scholar and I have no formal education on anything regarding this topic. The closest I have is that I studied history in college (though, not specifically the ancient near east) and took philosophy of religion classes.

I was just doing a bit of research to sate my own curiosity and figured I might as well share some of it on my website.

Background

The Hittites were an Indo-European group from ancient Anatolia (modern day Turkey). They formed what is known in modern times as the Hittite Empire (~1650 BCE to 1180s BCE). Hittite religion was influenced by its neighbors, as all religions are, but particularly the Mesopotamians.

There are not a lot of contemporary sources for Hittite religious practices and beliefs.

As one would expect, Hittite religion has a lot of elements shared with the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) religion.

Basics

Hittite religion was incredibly localized and there aren't very many deities that are recognized on a large scale. That being said, the Hittites have a quite extensive list of deities, to put it mildly. There is no "sun god" there is "this specific town's sun god". They also "adopted" deities from surrounding cultures, as was usual.

The king was the leader of religious life, though I personally can't find much on the specifics (at least that would make sense to include for a modern practitioner). It does seem like large scale rituals did require the presence of the king, but obviously this is not really relevant to the modern person.

Rituals and Offerings

They did not seem to have set days for festivals and held them whenever there was a reason to (ie hardship, major occasions). From what I've seen, there isn't really a set "formula" for rituals either.

It seems like they did libations and gave offerings of bread. I've also seen livestock mentioned in a few sources.

Pantheon

It's hard to say what the Hittite pantheon is, since deities tended to be incredibly localized with very little (if any) syncretism. As with most regions of the world, the Hittites also worshiped deities from neighboring cultures, so that is also something to keep in mind. Anyway, here's a list of some deities worshiped by the Hittites.

This section is definitely incomplete, descriptions will probably be replaced at a later date.

Alalu: an apparently difficult to pin down god, likely of Mesopotamian origin. Primeval deity.

Anu: Mesopotamian king of the gods, personification of the sky/heavens.

Kumarbi: "father of the gods", possibly chthonic. Some debate over whether or not he's an agricultural deity.

Hannahanna: mother of the gods.

Telepinu: Agricultural god.

Anzili: a goddess who was prayed to for aid during childbirth.

Sun Goddess of Arinna: the tutelary deity of Arinna, near Hattusa (Hittite capital).

Apaliunas: protective deity associated with Wilusa (Anatolian city-state from the late Bronze Age). Apaliunas is interesting (to me, at least, as an Apollo devotee) due to the etymological connection to Apollo.

Inara: goddess of wild animals.

Ishtar: goddess of war, love, sex, political power, et cetera. Also known as Inanna. She is originally from Mesopotamia, but was worshiped by the Hittites as well.

Kashku: god of the moon.

Storm God of Kaliwishna

Lelwani: deity of the underworld. Gender has varied depending on time period/location.

Weather God of Nerik

Shaushka: Hurrian goddess of war, love and healing.

Sun God of Heaven

Sun Goddess of Earth: responsible for all evil, disease, et cetera. Chthonic.

Sutekh: AKA Set, from Egyptian mythology.

Teshub: weather/storm god.

Of course, there are many, many more deities than this, but this should be a pretty good sample size.

Sources

A Note on "Proto-Indo-European religion": PIE religion is a reconstructed framework of a hypothetical religion based on research related to the reconstructed PIE language. It is mentioned as an academic frame of reference, rather than a "this religion is like this one".

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