Day Fourteen: Pantheons With Few Sources

The pantheon prompts are giving me so much trouble because I just have absolutely zero brain cells, hopefully I'll start doing these at a relatively normal pace soon.

I do, personally, worship deities from pantheons that have very little information available about how they were worshiped and what the rituals of the culture they were from looked like. The one I mentioned "yesterday" was Ereshkigal, who's worship was very limited.

As a reconstructionist, lack of information can be paralyzing. What do you do if there is no guidance on what was previously done? Of course, sources for Mesopotamian religion do exist, but I personally find a lot of it unsatisfactory because it's focused on the public worship of the tutelary deity of whichever city the source was from. I have read things that imply private worship, but I haven't been able to find anything that describes it (it's possible that direct sources do not exist).

So, what do we do in these instances? I'm still working it out, but there are some things I've personally tried. One is, obviously, still seeing how the culture the deity is from (in this case Ereshkigal and ancient Mesopotamia). For example, statues of the gods were seen as vessels that the gods sometimes inhabited. They were clothed and treated to feasts. The statue was essentially treated the way the gods would be treated if they suddenly appeared in physical form in front of them.

Another place to look is surrounding cultures. If there are nearby cultures that also worshiped the deity in question, then their ways of performing rituals/etc could also be incorporated. Ereshkigal was syncretized with Allani (Hurrian) and the Sun Goddess of Earth (Hittite). The way those deities were honored could provide insight on how to honor her in modern times.

Another thing to consider is how people viewed their area of influence. Ereshkigal is the ruler of the underworld. Mesopotamians viewed death as just endless misery. The views of the underworld in the ancient Near East/Mediterranean ranged from neutral to negative, though none viewed it as a happy place (to my knowledge). Worshiping a ruler of the underworld could be seen as inviting death and names of underworld deiites were usually euphemistic for this reason (I do not know if that was the case for Ereshkigal, but she was sometimes referred to as Irkalla, which is the name of the underworld in Sumerian religion).

If things get really dire, one could also look at proto-religions (ie Proto-Indo-European).

After gathering whatever background information is available, it's time to just start honoring whichever deity/deities everything was gathered for. While UPG and divination are important parts of paganism generally, it is especially necessary to keep track of UPG for deities that lack the same historical information. UPG I have, for example, is that Ereshkigal enjoys saffron.

I dunno, being a reconstructionist can be difficult sometimes -- it would be much easier to be ecclectic and to just do whatever I want -- but gaining a deeper understanding of the deities I'm interested in and their cultures is just so rewarding and makes me feel closer to them than I would of had I decided to use a different framework.