Here is another candidate universe for the Old Phoenix multiverse:
the Great Baal made the lesser gods;
ancient cults are maintained;
respect is paid to powerful foreign gods - Perkunas and Czernebog of Littorn, Wotan Ammon of Cimberland, Brahma and the Sun;
the stars are fixed in a crystal sphere;
Earth, Moloch, Ashtoreth etc move around the Sun;
one planet is the abode of the dead, another the home of witches etc;
the world was created 5964 years before the year that we would call 1960.
(In Poul Anderson's Operation Luna, evil spirits have migrated from Earth to the Moon.)
Not only do people in Afallon believe all this in their equivalent of 1960 but also there is no sign that they are moving towards any scientific understanding.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I noticed the intellectual and theological backwardness of the Carthaginian timeline of "Delenda Est." Manse will soon touch on why that was so important, including on some points on which we two have disagreed about.
Ad astra! Sean
Perkunas was a Lithuanian/Old Prussian/Balt deity, from PIE *Perkwunos. But Czernobog (aka Chernobog) -- "Black God", literally -- is a Slavic deity (the Slavic equivalent of Perkunas is Perun, also a thunder-god).
Either Poul wasn't clear on that, or it represents a Slavic influence on the Balts -- in that timeline the Balts seem to have come out on top and assimilated the Slavs.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Meaning the "Littorn" of "Delenda Est" seems to descend from the ancestors of the people we call Lithuanians in our timeline. Yes, I can imagine a non Slavic people becoming dominant over the proto-Slavs.
Ad astra! Sean
Slavic and Baltic are sort of daughter-groups; they didn't diverge until about the beginning of our era (CE 0, give or take.)
Baltic is the most conservative of the IE language families, and Slavic is next.
At one point the Balts were much more widespread than they are now; early Russian records mention Baltic-speaking tribes in the vicinity of Moscow.
The Slavic expansions from their ur-heimat, which was somewhat to the south of the Balts (probably in what's now eastern Poland didn't start until after the 300's CE -- probably moving into the gaps caused when the eastern Germanics left under Hunnic pressure and because the collapse of the Roman Empire offered such easy pickings.
There's a very early level of Germanic loan-words in Slavic -- things like the words for "loaf of bread", "penny" and "plow" -- probably picked up from an early form of Gothic.
So in the "Delenda Est" history, in which Central Europe gets badly creamed, the Slavs go under, while the more remote Balts survive and later expand in roughly the way the Slavs did in our history.'
It's perfectly credible; in our own medieval period Lithuania had a huge East European empire, stretching about to the Black Sea, although most of was ruled by, rather than inhabited by, Lithuanians.
The closely related Old Prussians were wiped out by the German crusaders in our middle ages -- the Teutonic Knights and the Knights of the Sword. Pockets of Baltic-speaking Old Prussians survived in Prussia into the 17th century, one of those odd ethnic/linguistic fossils you get, like the Goths who survived in some of the Crimean hill country into the same period.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And your interesting comments corrected a vague misconception I had that the Balt/Lithuanians spoke a non Indo/European language.
Yes, Lithuanians used to have an empire of their own, from the east coast of the Baltic Sea and sprawling east and south between Poland in the west and Muscovy in the east. Which became an even bigger empire when the Grand Prince of Lithuania converted to Catholic Christianity and married the Queen of Poland around 1390, founding the Jagiellonian dynasty which ruled Poland/Lithuania until 1572.
Ad astra! Sean
That was the second Polish princess sent to marry and convert a Lithuanian ruler. IIRC, the first time the Lithuanian backslid and either divorced or sacrificed the princess.
Sean will be incommunicado for a while, repairing or replacing his computer.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I'm back now! I had not known there was an earlier Christian Polish princess who married a pagan Grand Prince of Lithuania. I did know many Lithuanians were becoming Catholics by or before AD 1300.
Ad astra1 Sean
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