The Rest Is History - 58. The World Cup of Gods - Part 1

Episode Date: May 31, 2021

In one of the most anticipated contests of the year, sixteen gods battled for the crown of ultimate deity. Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook offer analysis and insight on the group stages of the competition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the clubetsina is still flowing. The party is continuing into the small hours. In Copenhagen, in Stockholm, in Oslo, in Reykjavik, the tears are flowing at the end of what has been an extraordinary festival of divine sport. Yes, this has been the week of the Rest is History World Cup of Gods.

Tom Holland, have you enjoyed yourself? I've enjoyed it so much. I think it truly has been a festival of divine sport. But I think that I should mention for the benefit of those who may have absolutely no idea what you're going on about, I think you're hallucinating. This week on on twitter we've been holding um a world cup of gods where people vote for in a knockout contest um we are speaking

in the aftermath of the final uh dominic's given some hefty clues there as to who made the final but we won't announce the results and what we'll do is we'll go through the first 16. So we've got eight group matches there. And we'll talk about each match, discuss the God that got knocked out. And then we'll go through the quarterfinals, semifinals to the final, discussing each God in turn. So lots of divine sport to look forward to. But Dominic, first of all, I think we should dedicate this episode to the person who made it all possible, who was your son, wasn't it? Yes, my nine-year-old son.

So we did a World Cup of British Prime Ministers, which was quite interesting in revealing what, well, Twitter users who listen to the rest of history think about Britain's prime ministers anyway. And my son thought this was quite an amusing but ultimately quite boring exercise and said, why don't you have a World Cup that people would actually care about, which is one of ancient gods? And so we did. And it has been good fun. There's been a lot of controversy about who we... So my son's favourite god is Horus

and we never even picked Horus. Tom, would you like to explain our rationale for the gods that we did and didn't pick? Yeah, so we didn't want to cause needless offence. So we didn't want to have gods that people are still worshipping, appearing in Twitter polls and getting knocked out by dog-headed Prince Philip and so on. So the specification was that only those gods were eligible that at some point over the course of history had ceased to be worshipped.

So Odin, for example, is still worshipped by a few people but there was a point where nobody worshipped him right so so um yes so a temple to odin has just opened in iceland i think um but that's kind of very recent likewise in greece there are shrines to the olympians but again they're kind of late 20th century resurrection. So basically it's dead gods. Okay. And I think that that's interesting for the number of gods that therefore didn't make it. So gods from India, from China, from Japan. So places where there's more continuity, I suppose you could argue.

Absolutely. So there's been a lot of talk on the sports forums, obviously, about this tournament. And here is Olly O'Connor with a kind of very interesting point that with this draw, we're guaranteed an Olympian in the final. So he's dwelling on the way that the Greek gods basically dominate the entry lists, highlighting once again their stranglehold on the fan base

over the past 600 years. Throw in an egyptian and norse god as the others and it begs the question how do we grow or diversify the game and again john midgley is his continued eurocentricity will do nothing to calm the fans that the tournament is as ever being stitched up for the big money tv markets of ancient greece and the early viking period there's a serious answer to that though, isn't there, Tom? That the way you would diversify the game is by people no longer worshipping Asian gods or Chinese, Indian, whatever. I mean, the reason we probably didn't include them is not just because we're European, so

we tend to be more interested in Europe. I mean, that's what we studied at school. But also because having a tournament with Ishtar and Kibaleh and Lockheed and Dionysus, you're not going to offend anybody because they're all defunct. They've all been superseded by monotheism, which is not the case of some of these others, presumably. I mean, the interesting and serious point to be made here is the way that Christianity andlam have operated as kind of neutron bombs incinerating gods so it's it's europe the near east where christianity and islam have have really established themselves there is no place for other gods and so they've all gone although tom isn't it might be not discuss this during the podcast that that a lot of these gods actually or at least some of

them have in various ways been incorporated. Well, yes. And that's what actually I found fascinating about this, sort of reading up on all the gods, is the extent to which some of them blend into each other and then they all ultimately flow into what we think of as the invaders that destroyed them. Well, so there were two particularly controversial participants in the last 16, Moloch and Bridget,

both of whom may not even have been gods. Yeah, may not have existed, whereas, of course, all the others did exist. Yeah, well, let's not get into the theoretical. So Moloch and Bridget were both included. I think you would agree that there was some opposition from you to my pressing for them. I didn't mind Moloch because I liked the child eating.

Bridget, I just thought, frankly, I mean, I'd never heard of Bridget. So I was very scornful. And in fact, there were a few people on Twitter who weighed in on Bridget and were like, what? How have you picked somebody nobody's ever heard of? But one for the Irish fans. One for the Irish fans. There was some debate about, I mean, even my wife, who is Irish, said,

who the hell is Bridget? Right, well, we'll come to Bridget and we'll find why I think that she was a worthwhile candidate. But should we come to the first match of the group stages, which was Zeus against Moloch? Well, Moloch is a great god, I think, because he's got everything you want from a god. What is he?

He's mentioned in Leviticus. He's Canaanite, so Phoenician. And he's involved with child sacrifice. So he sort of ticks the boxes of what you assume a generic ancient god will be but he may not even have existed at all am i right tom he may just be that's right so so very so moloch essentially seems to have been the ritual of child sacrifice yeah and so therefore it is contested whether what is being described in in the old testament is a god or a ritual

because basically the old testament is the only evidence that we have for it. So this is, they have what, they're tophets, tophets, or whatever they're called, where they, there are these altars where you sacrifice children. Is that right? Well, again, which is, I think only mentioned it in the Old Testament. And it seems to be a shrine in a place called Gehenna, which is a valley near Jerusalem, where we're told child sacrifice happens.

Yeah. But again, it may be a more kind of general description for a place where child are offered up to a god. What I found fascinating reading about this is, am I right in thinking that these sacrifices may actually have been made to the god of Judaism, to Yahweh? So, for example, Abraham and Isaac, that that story may be a sort of remembered version of the sacrifices that were happening. So the question is, if Moloch was not a god, if it's a description of a sacrifice what to what god were these children being sacrificed um there's a passage in jeremiah where he says that it's to to baal who is the

great god of the canaanites um the kind of king of the canaanite gods i wanted baal in the tournament but i know you did i know you did but we're discussing baal under under the rubric of mollon yeah but i've got baal's got him got a name check uh barl of course is you know the great rival of of yahweh the the god of the jews becomes the god of christians as well um but what you also get in jeremiah is kind of first person commentary from yahweh insisting that he did not demand child sacrifice yeah and there's a possibility that he's slightly protesting too much right that's a strong thing to say about god tom uh you know so jeremiah 19 5 something this is something i did not command or mention nor did it even enter my mind right you think well okay there's something's something very Boris Johnson about that, isn't there?

Slightly. So then if actually the Old Testament bears witness to the kind of buried memories of these rituals, and I think there's quite a lot of evidence that aspects of cultic worship that are condemned by the Hebrew prophets may actually have been applied you know these were cultic practices associated with a figure of yahweh so cleaning up their own religion yeah slightly yes i think so and moloch has become a symbol of that to some extent well sacrificing a child is obviously controversial for us because we're the heirs of of that yeah that that tradition

that moral heritage absolutely repellent i mean we we view it as as highly you know what the most disgusting thing that you can do um but there's a you know there there is evidence i think as you said with with um the sacrifice of you know abraham being asked to sacrifice isaac and then of course shadowing it the the way in which there's a sense that God in the Christian tradition is sacrificing his son. Or there's some, so there are kind of echoes, perhaps, of the relationship of father and a son and the son being sacrificed that perhaps goes back to this. I mean, obviously, these are very contested issues and very deep waters. But the other thing, I think the other thing moving away from the purely biblical is that there is evidence as well for this happening from classical authors.

And is this in Carthage? Are we moving on to Carthage now? Well, there's evidence from a guy called Philo of Byblos, who is writing in the first century AD, who says that basically the people of Phooenicia would do this that the kings would sacrifice their children and they would do it as not because they wanted to get rid of their children but but precisely the opposite the children are the most precious thing to them and so therefore that is what you offer the gods in in a desperate situation because yeah only if you offer something that's absolutely precious to you there's a great scene of this in have you ever read uh flobear's novel salon bus um where there's a huge scene isn't there where

they um they sacrifice all the children in the punic war they're fighting uh that's not the punic war is they're fighting some mercenaries yes they're fighting mercenaries after the first punic war uh and isn't hannibal is spared hamilcar sends another child instead of hannibal or something and hand was spared so that he's going to fight clearly the Romans later on. And so there was a lot kind of an assumption that this was Roman propaganda and perhaps that it wasn't true. But they have you know, there is archaeological evidence for it. They have found kind of cult centers where there's evidence for child sacrifice. And there's a brilliantly creepy illustration from a cemetery, a kind of shattered tower in a Punic cemetery,

Phoenician cemetery, Carthaginian cemetery on the coast of Spain, where there's a baby in a bowl being offered to this kind of two-headed monster uh who's holding a pig right what's the pig what's the pig gonna where's the pig gonna come i don't know it's all i mean that's that's the other thing there's so much we don't know and it's all just incredibly weird and very i think very sinister so perhaps we should put that up um yeah i. I think maybe when we link to this on Twitter or something, we could put a picture of that thing, because it's very, very creepy. And so I think that I'm not surprised that Moloch got knocked out.

Yeah, I was about to say, Moloch got knocked out. Pretty horrible. But he also has a starring role in uh paradise lost um horrid king besmeared with the blood of human sacrifice and parents tears milton's not messing around is he no no and i think that does kind of haunt the imagination still so i think that even though mollock may not even have existed i think that he deserved his place but i i wasn't surprised to see him go out so let's move on to another um another another forward at the first hurdle chippy totech chippy totech was up against odin now chippy totech was another of yours you were very keen on chippy yeah uh he's

he's a colorful character there's a lot of sacrifice going on with him he's aztec he's from what the 14th, 15th century. Tell us about Chippy Totec, Tom. Well, we discussed him briefly in the episode with Camilla Townsend on the Aztecs. And I mentioned there how years ago there was an exhibition on the Aztecs in the Royal Academy, and there was a statue of Chippy Totec there. And he looked rather adorable because he had kind of bubbles all over him.

So he looked like a children's character. Yeah. You know, a lovable cartoon character. It's like a Michelin man, almost. Yes, a little, yes. A bit more bubbly than that. Yes, yes. Kind of, you know, the inside of an Aero,

kind of chocolate bar, little bubbles of chocolate. Maltesers, teasers. Yes. But actually what these bubbles are, are the deposits of fat of the inside of a flayed skin. Lovely. And Chippy Totec is known as the flayed one. Because what he does is he skins himself. And by doing that, he is giving food food to humanity so he's the god of fertility

and agriculture his festival is in the spring it's all about the way that the earth gives forth new life from death and all those kind of rituals but it's done in a very, very terrifyingly literal way, because increasingly, and we heard again that from Camilla Townsend, that as the Aztecs, Aztec power grows and grows, so the rites of sacrifice grew and grew. And prisoners are skinned and the priests of Chipitotec then wear these skins for 20 days. They must have stunk. I mean i mean the stench horrible i mean but and after 20 days they put them in pots and let them rot away and these pots have kind of special seals so they don't smell i wonder whether this so chippy totech i discovered from my reading was also associated with pimples rashes and eye infections and i wonder whether that was because i mean if you go around wearing somebody else's skin for 20 days you're going to develop i mean your own skin will be in a poor condition presumably afterwards i guess that that would be

part of it but i think also what we see with all these gods and it's obviously a crucial part of what makes them worthwhile contenders in the world cup is that they they can do offense and defense that that they they can do you they can do you good and they can do you evil yeah and they're a compound of often of what seems to us opposites and so absolutely chippy um provides people with the food that they need to survive but it give you a bad eye infection he will give you all spots or something. Yeah. I mean, that's such an incredibly banal detail. I'm amazed.

I mean, to think of the god of eye infections. Well, wouldn't strike me as an obvious. You know, I see the Aztecs in a very different light now that I know that. But there's also the sense, you know, the deeper sense that, and we talked about how the priests of chippy um like to stab their penises with thorns of course yeah and i don't think it's an episode of the rest of this through unless we've got some mutilation coming

up later actually yeah we've got quite a lot of genital mutilation but let's get in there early um and so the aztecs did have they had the feeling that unless you were offering blood to the gods, unless the gods were drinking it, then darkness would threaten the whole world. Yeah. And that's kind of common across most of these ancient religions, right? I mean, that's clearly a universal human belief. We're probably unusual in not believing. I mean, I think, well, I suppose, but even in the Christian tradition, you know, drink this blood.

Yes, and Jesus shedding his blood for us. Yeah, so the idea of divine blood is a constant. And again, something I think that we'll see running throughout this contest. Well, for a very colourful, exotic God, if that doesn't sound too sort of orientalising, he performed very poorly, I thought. Well, he was up against Odin, wasn't he?

Yeah, he was. But even so, I thought the flayed one, the skin and all that, I thought that would win him a few brownie points. But possibly doesn't have cut through. Clearly not. I mean, and this is kind of why the gods, you know, the major gods are talking about setting up a Super League. We've just got to hope that they don't go through with that. Because I think it is important.

He just didn't resonate with, you know, he's this Keir Starmer of Aztec gods. I really don't think that Chippy Totec and Keir Starmer are a natural fit. But I think, you know, as Ollie O'Connor said, it's important to grow and diversify the game. Yeah. And, you know,

a World Cup of Gods in which you have Aztecs seriously competing has got to be a more exciting cup. I wanted to have Hernán Cortés. But we know

that he wasn't a god, no. Well, I know, but I mean, there was some doubt at some point, wasn't there?

Anyway, let's move on. Next god. Are we going to do, should we do Is there was some doubt at some point, wasn't there? Anyway, let's move on. Next god. Are we going to do... Should we do Ishtar next? We've got, yes, Mithras against Ishtar. So this was a nice one because this was an all-Asian clash, really, wasn't it? Well, we might discuss that.

Whether Mithras really is a Persian god. Yes, okay. But Ishtar is definitely a Mesopotamian god. So are you a fan of Ishtar? I actually wasn't bothered about Ishtar, but once I read up on Ishtar, I thought she was very interesting.

So she's also known as Inanna. Inanna, right. And she's Sumerian, so incredibly old, much older than most of these gods. And again, has this huge continuity. So I'm not writing thinking that people think that Ishtar,

because she's a goddess of love, that she inspired Aphrodite, that she's a kind of forerunner for Aphrodite. But you all know more about this than me, Tom. I don't know why I'm even talking. So Inanna is the patron goddess of Uruk, which is one of the very earliest cities, perhaps the earliest city.

She then becomes the patron of Sargon of Akkad, who is kind of conventionally thought of as the first imperialist, the first man to carve out an empire. And he has a kind of Moses and the Bulrushes story. So he gets, you know, rather like Moses is, he gets cast out, gets rescued, works as a gardener. That's what you do. And then Ishtar falls in love with him and raises him up to become the greatest king in the world. And so that kind of basically makes her reputation as well.

And the worship of her goes right the way through to assyria she's a great kind of patron of the assyrian kings and patron of the babylonian kings and again we you know we talked about chippy being the god of the harvest and of zits um in a rather similar way um ishtar is a war goddess so that's the role that she plays as the patron of assyria this terrifying militaristic empire but she's also the goddess of love. That's an interesting thing, isn't it, with a lot of these gods, that obviously their meaning changes over time.

But they take on different roles, don't they? I mean, we see this much later on with the Greek gods and goddesses, that they're almost imperialists in themselves and they sort of accumulate territory. They sort of absorb stuff. Yeah, they do. Yeah.

And so Ishtar is the goddess of love. She kind of casts this erotic spell over Uruk. So Uruk is cast as, I suppose really it's the first metropolis to serve the role that cities have always played since, which is as a place where people come to experience the erotic in the way that they might not do in villages or out in the fields. And so again, the followers of Ishtar, you get this kind of haze

of myth that scholars debate whether it's real or not. But for a long time, it's believed that Ishtar was the patroness of sacred prostitution. I think it's now not widely thought that that happened. But you also get her priests are cross-dressing, men sleeping with men, all this kind of stuff reports of copulation in the streets um and are these exaggerated do you think or are they are they real i don't know but there's a kind of sense of a kind of slight you know gay pride parade quality to her worship um which i think is i mean you know the sexual standards are completely different to ours but at the same time the sense that um you can obviously go beyond the bounds of the normal and

if you're a man you can dress as a woman or sleep with another man or whatever is given license by by ishtar and that's the kind of the locus of her power she's not the only god that does that right i mean we're going to come across some more as well. So there's always a role of a god who gives you a license. When you associate yourself with this god or when they have a festival or something, all the traditional rules are suspended and you can kind of crack on and do whatever you like. Yeah, absolutely. And that's all part of the fun.

And Ishtar is a goddess who pushes at the limits so there's a kind of famous story that gets told several times including in gilgamesh the famous epic but the core of the story is is that um she has a sister who's the goddess of the dead right and ishtar goes down essentially because she wants to enact you know you're talking about how gods annex things. Ishtar basically wants to kind of take over the realm of the dead as well as the realm of the living. And she goes through seven gates and at each gate she discards some jewelry, clothing, attributes of her power. She ends up basically naked and powerless and is struck down dead. Everybody on earth loses their libido.

So it's a kind of anti-viagra right nobody nobody can perform Enki the the wise god creates these kind of gender fluid rescuers who go down and bring her back um she comes back she finds everyone is weeping um except for her husband um Dumuzid who he's kind of hanging out in the garden and he doesn't really care so ishtar is incredibly cross about that kills him sends him down to the underworld in her place regrets it tries to get him back and there's a kind of persephone story whereby he comes back for six months to be with her interesting yeah and that's another theme that comes up again and again in these God stories, isn't it?

Death and rebirth or the fertility and sort of, I mean, that's obviously associated with the seasons and all that sort of thing, isn't it? Yeah, and one last thing on Ishtar is that although her worship fades away in the Christian and the Muslim period in the Near East, she has a brother called Shamash, who is the God of the sun. And I went to a place called Lalish in northern Iraq, which is holy to the Yazidis, this kind of religious minority. And it's very syncretic faith, the kind of elements of Judaism and Islam and Christianity and Zoroastrianism, all kind of there. But they have a room, a chamber that is sacred to a holy man called Sheikh Shams. And he is in some way associated with the sun.

And so there are scholars who think that this might be a living link to Shamash and therefore to Ishtar because Shamash is the brother of Ishtar. So I don't think that disqualifies Ishtar because we're talking about Shamash rather than Ishtar. But there is this perhaps living are elements that are still alive living elements still there in Northern Iraq which is kind of wonderful Simone de Beauvoir was a big fan of Ishtar in the second sex she says that Ishtar

has been written out of history by patriarchal men and that feminists should champion Ishtar and her case is proven by the fact that Mithras the gold of the Roman soldiery, beat her. It's a classic patriarchal manoeuvre. And I think on that note, we should go for a break, shouldn't we? We probably should, actually.

I think we're talking too much, Tom. Yes. But when we come back after the break, we'll talk less and we'll move more quickly through our gods. See you in a minute. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment

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therestisentertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com welcome back to the rest is history uh tom holland and i are discussing the world cup of gods we've talked about moloch chipitotec and ishtar and now tom bridget so bridget was a controversial choice irish some would say not a god um explain yourself okay so bridget was a controversial choice Irish some would say not a god explain yourself okay so Bridget is generally held up as an example of a god who becomes a saint so Saint Bridget of Kildare one of the great the great saints of the Irish tradition yeah and so people have debated whether Bridget Saint Bridget existed and essentially whether when Catholics pay their respects to Saint Bridget they're actually paying respect to a pagan god. Because did this happen a lot in early Christianity?

They absorbed local cults and stuff as a sort of, well, as a sort of, you know, branding takeover kind of thing. Well, that's been a kind of popular accusation against the Catholic cult of saints since at least the time of Hume who makes exactly that point um and the evidence for for Bridget having been a god there are um so there's a god the goddess of Yorkshire Brigantia yeah we know that she's worshipped in Britain there's a sculpture found in in Dumfries with an inscription saying that she's called Brigantia and so um it's been popularly thought that Brigantia and Bridget, you know, similar names, maybe the same person. And also there is in the ninth century in Ireland, there is Cormac's glossary, it's called, refers to Bridget being a goddess. And she's part of this kind of pantheon of the Irish gods that has faded by the 9th century.

So that's the basis for thinking that. And she's a poet, she's a healer, and she's a smith. Is that right? That's right, yes. She's a tripartite god. That's what Cormac's glossary says. Yeah. But there is an alternative way of seeing it,

which is to say that actually the evidence for Saint Bridget is much better than there having been a goddess called Bridget. And that perhaps actually it's the other way round, that perhaps you have a saint who mutates into a goddess so that people come to think that, you know, Irish chroniclers come to think that this goddess had existed. And the reason for thinking this is put forward in a very interesting paper by a scholar called Lisa Battelle. And you can read it online. So it's available, well worth reading. And her argument is that Bridget of Kildare did exist, that she performed all kinds, was believed to have performed all kinds of miracles, that she came from a very humble background. She was the daughter of a slave.

And yet she ends up a very powerful figure that kind of, you know, an abbess, the friend of abbots, patron of kings. And so there is a challenge in working out how to portray her power. So there are stories that kind of wonderful stories that are told of her, that she hung her cloak on a sunbeam that she turned water into beer i mean brilliant stuff and you can see why she's kind of popular in our sunbeam yeah it's a wonderful detail um but the way to this is a period where women do not have power. Yeah. And the only example of women exercising power is in the dimension of the supernatural. And so St. Bridget comes to be associated with the attributes of gods.

So the power that she exercises over the landscape, over the animals, over the earth and the sun and the rain. These are powers that kind of derive from the fading pagan traditions. So she's a saint at the same time as there are pagan. So Ireland is not yet fully Christianized. Is that basically the argument? Yeah. And she absorbs elements that are associated with goddesses because these are the only way that Christian writers can express the power of this woman.

Because otherwise, the idea that a woman could have power, spiritual power, is so strange that there is no other way of demonstrating it. So I think that that's a fascinating story. It's a good story, but it wasn't convincing to the Twitterati. No, it wasn't. Because she performed very... I mean, she was up against Apollo,

and Apollo is kind of the Greek god's Greek god. But even. Because she performed very... I mean, she was up against Apollo and Apollo is kind of the Greek god's Greek god. But even so, she performed quite poorly, didn't she? I mean, did she even get 30% of the vote? I don't think she did, no.

Oh, Tom. No. So, it's a shame. So, she got knocked out. But I thought... I mean, that's an interesting story, isn't it? It is an interesting story.

It is. And you claimed, when you selected her, that there would be an interesting story. And and you claimed when you selected her that uh there would be an interesting story and the hands been so you've been vindicated even if no one voted for it um all right who've we got up next uh we got augustus augustus caesar now this is an interesting one because he quite patently is a man i mean and we are going to do a whole podcast i hope on augustus because i think he's clearly one of the two or three you know most important most effective most influential political leaders

in human history yeah the most in european history i would say the most in european history yeah i'm sure that's probably true i mean it's hard to think of anyone who would conceivably rival him actually um but so at what point is he deified he's deified after his death right he's not deified at the in his lifetime or not fully deified is that right well he's worshipped as a god outside rome but then he has he has his east i suppose no doubt yeah so in a in 8014 he dies his body is taken back to rome and they stage this incredible kind of pyrotechnical extravaganza with flames and I mean equivalent to fire

so for people who don't know he is Octavian he is the adopted heir of Julius Caesar who was a god who had been deified and so one of the names he has this isn't a title it's his name his son of a god

yeah so he's defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra he's become the first emperor of Rome and created this new structure and then he's deified and that sort of

he's picking up that tradition from Julius Caesar but then he's passing that on to all subsequent emperors they're all deified aren't they unless they're sort of driven out in

no oh right okay no they're not they're sort of driven out in... No, no. Oh, right, okay. No, they're not. They're not. So Tiberius' son isn't, Caligula obviously isn't, Claudius is, Nero isn't. And so it basically depends whether you measure up or not.

Well, if you're a successful emperor, you're deified then. Put it that way. Yes, yes. But Augustus is the kind of the archetype of the great emperor and therefore the archetype of an emperor who becomes deified so his very name augustus essentially it it signifies someone who's midway between earth and heaven so the the the sense that he is a supernatural figure a more than divine a more than human figure is there right the way from the time actually i mean basically from the moment

that julius caesar is deified because augustus is his adopted son and that therefore in the opinion of the romans is his son he has this quality of the divine about him the name augustus gives him a further quality and by the the final year of his life you know he's starting to fall ill but there are all these kind of portents rumors around him showing that he's going to go to the heavens. And when he, at his funeral, a senator says that he has seen his spirit rising up to the sky and that's enough. So he gets enshrined as a god. And in the first century AD, this is by miles the fastest spreading cult. It's probably the fastest spreading cult across a broader range that history had ever seen, because everywhere in the Roman Empire, this cult is being instituted. And what's so fascinating about this though, Tom,

and what I think makes this in some ways a more fascinating story than almost any other of the contenders, is that it makes us rethink, you know, in the sort of 21st century, we think of mortal and immortal as two completely separate categories, don't we? The natural and supernatural, God and human. And most people who are atheists who are listening to this podcast will think, well, people in the past were very backward and they thought that they were strange creatures in the sky and all this sort of stuff. But Augustus' deification suggests a much more complicated relationship

between mortal and immortal. Because, of course, people didn't think he had powers. The people who had worked with him, who had been his civil servants, who had trudged in with the paperwork every morning and discussed tax policies, knew that they didn't think of him as a god in the sort of marvel superhero film

no sense of the gods did they it's a much more complicated nuanced picture than that it's about authority and about tradition and all this sort of stuff right i think it's also gratitude for because rome has been ravaged by civil war and augustus essentially is the man who brings peace so augustus is you know he's the son of a god he um he brings peace to a Augustus is, you know, he's the son of a God. He brings peace to a ravaged world. The people who support him proclaim this as, and we have inscriptions

saying it, that it's euangelia, so good news. Oh, interesting. Evangelical. Very interesting, yeah. And then when he dies, he goes to heaven

and sits at the right hand of his divine father. So there's nothing odd about that. The people of the Roman Empire take for granted that great people will, you know, can become gods. Lurking behind this, of course, is another cult that emerges in the first century of a son of a god who is a prince of peace, who ascends to heaven and sits at the right century of a son of a god who is a prince of peace who ascends to heaven and sits at the right hand of his father yes what what's shocking about the deification of jesus isn't isn't the fact that a mortal is becoming immortal but that a slave is doing someone who suffers immortal is a nobody rather than so there's a sense in which um so paul what saint

paul when he goes to galatia you know he his letter to the Galatians. Galatians seems to have been a particular cult center for Augustus. A lot of what we know about Augustus, his autobiography, the accounts of that come from Galatia. And so there's a sense, I think, in which Paul certainly is very aware of the fact that the euangelion, the gospel, the good news that he's bringing is a parody of the cult of augustus but also before we move on isn't isn't augustus's cult like well like julius caesar's cult they're clearly picking up aren't they on the sort of hellenistic so alexander the great had been a god philip the second of macedon alexander's father had had god-like attributes the ptolemies in egypt had been worshipped as gods as as pharaohs had, and that the Romans are basically picking up, as their empire has expanded and they've moved into the

eastern Mediterranean, aren't they picking up a lot of that sort of stuff and then transporting it back to Rome in place of the sort of slightly more republican, kind of Cato-ish values that they'd had before that? I think part of the appeal of the cult is that different people, different people's different traditions can project their cultural understandings onto the figure of of this deified emperor yeah um so i think yeah i think i think that's very interesting i think augustus was you know absolutely deserved his presence in the in this world cup but again he crashed out didn't he crashed out to very poorly very in a theme of the number one seed. I think

it was always going to be a difficult match for him. A lot of the fans just couldn't see past the fact that he had once been a man. Yeah. Now, who are we going to do next? Are we going to do... We've got Loke against Anubis. So this is the big shock. And I still think...

I mean, I voted for Anubis. I wanted Anubis. I'm not going to lie. I wanted Anubis to win because of my own association with him at school when I made my Anubis mask. I was very proud of it. However, Loki is a very interesting god, and he probably should have gone further in the tournament. Do you not think?

Surprised he lost. It's a sort of anti-Tom Hiddleston, though, isn't it? Anti-Marvel Comics backlash, I think. Do you think? Because I think that Odin and Loki are well-known, perhaps better known than any other god at the moment because of that Marvel dimension. I think maybe people are a bit bored of him because he's ubiquitous.

Maybe. There's about to be a Loki film or TV series or something, and I think he's just everywhere, and there's trailers for it a lucky film or tv series or something and i think it's just everywhere and there's trailers for all the time and it's a kind of fascinating example of the way in which this in a sense is still a living tradition i suppose so well because you know notoriously what we know about the the gods of the vikings and and is is mediated through writers who are christian by the time they'reic writers. And so therefore the issue is always how Christianised has this been

or are these authentic traditions? And in a sense, so it's always being rewritten, rewritten, rewritten. And their kind of iteration in the Marvel comics is just another example of that. I suppose that's true. Well, anyway, Loki, so he's a trickster. A lot of people will know

that he's the father of Hel and Fenrir the wolf and Jormungandr the serpent, that he's also bizarrely the father of Sleipnir, is it? The eight-legged horse. The eight-legged horse of Odin. Yes. Loki is impregnated. He is impregnated himself and gives birth to this this eight-legged horse i mean that's a very peculiar even by the standards of ancient gods that's a that's a strange carry-on isn't it and then of course famously he tricks hod into the blind brother of balder of balder

and shooting balder the god who everybody loves and then he's punished for that, isn't he? Does a serpent drip venom into his face? Is that it? Yeah, well, there's an intermediate stage because he, the god of the underworld says that Balder can come back if it's shown that everyone is weeping for him. And everyone across creation weeps for him, except for a giantess.

And the gods ask, why are you not weeping? And he says, the giantess says, I don't care. It's like the person who refuses to go to Diana's funeral or something. Yeah. But that turns out to be Loki. And so then they seize him. They seize him and chain him down and put a serpent who drips poison on his head.

So what's all this, Tom? So this is a very unusual figure because most of the gods we've talked about are people who were, you know, you'd associate yourself with their cult because there was something admirable about the god or they incarnated some value, you know, love or fertility or whatever. But he's a pretty malignant presence, isn't he? He's fun, isn't he? I suppose he is fun. I mean, he's in pretty malignant presence, isn't he? He's fun, isn't he? I suppose he is fun. I mean, he's in the kids' stories. So, you know, our house is full of creaking with the weight of kind of Norse myths and stuff.

And he's always in them. I mean, when he's not in them, they're very boring. It's Thor hitting a giant with a hammer. And sometimes he's helping Thor out, isn't he? Yes, he is. Sometimes Thor is an absolute fool. And Loki's there to... I mean, he's kind of divine Odysseus, basically.

Yes, yeah. And people like, you know... Well, that's why the Hiddleston portrayal. I mean, he's much more interesting than Thor in the Marvel Comics films. You know, Thor is just a sort of beefcake, and Hiddleston is playing this sort of charismatic, sort of smirking... Clever person. Yeah, I mean, so that makes it weird that he did crash out, actually.

But again, I think that's a sort of... But people love dogs. I mean, people like tricksters, but they like dogs even more. They're not quite enough, as we found out later in the tournament. Well, we'll come to that. It's a big controversy of the tournament, but we'll save that. Okay, so that was Loki gone. And then we have Kibale.

Right. Yeah. Again, one of your choices. Yes. Now, I was mystified by this choice until I did some research and found out about the priests or the associates of Kibale. But did you find out how old she is? Very old.

You talked about how old Ishtar is. Kibale is older. Is Kibale older? Well, maybe. But it's possible that she goes all the way back to Çatalhöyük. So Kibale is a Phrygian god in Anatolia, what's now Turkey. Turkey, yeah. But it is thought that her cult ultimately has its origins in the figure of a mother goddess

who is associated with these kind of very, very fat women found at Çatalhöyük, which is this kind of incredibly ancient city. Because the statues are very very fat aren't they of her yeah so it's kind of 6000 bc something like that and considering that you know she's worshipped right the way up to kind of 500 ad she if if that's the case then she is the deity that has been worshipped longer than any other so she's been worshipped almost. Much longer than, say, the Jewish three times longer than Jesus so far, which is

extraordinary when you think of it. So we talked about Akhenaten and Tutankhamen. They are closer to us than they are to them. The first worshippers of Kybala. So I think she deserves an absolute veteran. And she's a mother goddess. But what's interesting, the Romans adopted her, didn't. And she's a sort of, she's a mother goddess.

But what's interesting, the Romans adopted her, didn't they? During the Punic War, they brought some stone to Rome. Yeah, so they get told, so they're fighting the war against Hannibal and they get told to bring the cult of Cybele to Rome. And the ship gets stuck and a noble Roman virgin helps pull it up. And there's a famous painting by Mantegna illustrating that in the National Gallery. Pres gallery presumably not single-handed i mean she doesn't that's that's the yeah that's the and at some point is kibble got the face of a stone is that right there's all because she's i think because she's a mother goddess yeah and every cult has you know every

everyone has a mother goddess yeah she can kind of blur in very easily. And so lots of the statues of Cybele, you know, they're done by Greek sculptors. And so she looks like any Greek god. But there are also these much older traditions where she is associated just with stones or with totems or whatever and the stories that are told about kibble are very unlike greek gods really there's there's a kind of strangeness to it um so essentially there's there's this thing where she before she becomes kibble she is hermaphroditic. And she then cuts off her testicles. Right.

Hacks them off and we're back into the genital mutilation. Yeah, we're going to get a bit more of this in a second. These testicles then grow up to become a fruit tree. A river nymph takes the fruit, puts it to her breast, and becomes pregnant with this fruit. Gives birth to this beautiful youth who's given the name of Attis. Okay, yeah. Kibale then falls in love with Attis, who in a sense is her son.

We're the product of her own testicles that have been turned into a tree. Yes, and a fruit. Yes. Attis wants to marry someone. Kibale is jealous, turns up at the marriage. Yeah. Attis goes mad, cuts off his his testicles runs away from the altar and kibale then basically keeps him in kind of suspended animation so it's the worst wedding ever that makes that that makes the wedding for the game of thrones like a battle that's a gate

walk i mean imagine if you're the bride and your groom suddenly hacks off his testicles and runs off with his mother. That didn't go. It's a terrible, it's a terrible, terrible business. Oh, my God. So you can see why the Romans are slightly sniffy about it. Yeah, but then they adopt it. They're like, they're losing a war. They think, well, what's the obvious thing to do?

Let's adopt this really mad religion. Yeah, but they're adopting this kind of stone element they're not adopting all the weird shit that goes with it yeah but then am i not right in thinking that they do adopt the priests and the priests i mean this is obviously why you chose it because you love the subject of genital mutilation the priests are called the galley aren't they and they have yes the day of the of blood, as they call it. Never a very appealing prospect, I think, in a religious... First of all, the day of blood. Anyway, there's a day of blood. Sorry, I know we shouldn't be laughing in our own podcast.

They wave this. It's not funny. I mean, they're chopping off the testicles they wave tambourines around they have a dance and then they mutilate themselves roaming the streets um and so they they spread um westwards to rome and the romans are very disapproving of this and the romans have adopted the cult of Cuba, but they don't approve of these auto-castrating, cross-dressing priests. No. And Seneca says something to the tune of, you know, a cult that requires people to do this

isn't a cult that's worth having. He's not wrong, to be fair. I mean, I think... Well, I... I mean, if it's that that i mean if you had the choice at the time of that or the cult of augustus and what you have to do in the cult of augustus or of course the cult of christ and in the long run it's it's the worship of christ that blocks out the worship of kibble and julian the apostate is really the last

significant figure who who's a big fan of kible. Is he? The nephew of Constantine brought up a Christian, repudiates Christianity, goes back to the worship of Cybele and goes to the great shrine of Cybele. And he's very disappointed to find that it's basically been abandoned. And he writes letters to the priests of Cybele saying, why aren't you handing out alms to the poor and doing charitable work? And the reason for that is that priests of Cybele are too busy hacking off their testicles and roaming the streets dressed as women. And obviously the church doesn't really approve of that. And so it gets phased out. If we had the World Cup now with people having listened to this,

Cybele might do better. Anyway, from one very wacky god to another the last god of this podcast anyway and then we'll do the others in our follow-up podcast the other person who crashed out in the first round of course was prince philip huge disappointment to me and i know to you yes i was gutted that prince philip i thought prince philip would do well um he didn't he was beaten by dionysus wasn't he? Quite comfortably, actually. But Dominic, tell us why we included Prince Philip. Well, Prince Philip is, or was, worshipped. He was worshipped on the island of Tanna,

which is part of Vanuatu, by the Yaonan tribe. So this is what's called a cargo cult, which probably a lot of our listeners will have heard of. So they mainly flourished in kind of Melanesia in the Pacific after the Second World War. And, I mean, the way to think of it is you have all these islands where the sort of tribes are living often untouched, relatively untouched by the outside world.

Around about the period of the Second World War, obviously they're visited by lots of Japanese American soldiers who have a lot of stuff and and the stuff often gets left behind or the stuff washes up on beaches and you have what's called cargo cults so the most famous one concerns a character called John Frum and some anthropologists think that John from means John from America or whatever. And people on the islands, not unreasonably, thought these visitors from another world have come with all this sort of incredible baffling stuff. And one day they will come back and they will bring more stuff.

And they are like visitors from another plane they are like supernatural visitors so prince philip is is well prince philip went to vanuatu in the queen went to vanuatu i think in 1974 and you know how exactly the prince philip cult started is unclear um it's probably connected with that visit in the 70s. They might slightly predate it. If I am being very sceptical, I would say that the single biggest driver of this cult is the fact that every two years,

people from the newspapers arrive in this village and say to these guys, can you please pose with a picture of Prince Philip? Yes. Amused readers of the Daily Telegraph. And documentaries they make, didn't they? They had a documentary about them. Channel 4 brought some of them to England.

And they met Prince Philip. And they met Prince Philip. Now, it may well be, if I'm being completely sceptical, that once the cameras were off and the doors were closed, the tribesmen said to Prince Philip, we're actually perfectly aware that you're not a god, but we fancied the trip to London. I mean, I might be wrong.

I might be being too cynical. Actually, they may well believe it. So Prince Philip, again, there was a lot of discussion about this in the sports forums. So there was a comment from Jeff Hannum. I wonder if Prince Philip has offended the other gods yet. Well, yes. Interesting question.

I mean, you wouldn't want to offend Chippy, would you? No, but I think Prince Philip had seen a lot in his life i think he could cope with you know he'd he'd had an interesting life in himself or maybe kibble's more outlandish cult would be a bit much for him so gareth arden makes exactly this point talking about prince philip seriously he does have a good god-like backstory he fled homeland during perilous war so like an es i suppose yeah married the queen her father became king after a dynastic squabble of a global empire chariot racer sort of because he yes talked about this trapping or whatever it's called yeah um a great athlete played cricket marksman shot pheasants thrill seeker crashed land rover so yeah i mean when when prince philip died

i didn't really know very much about him i just thought he was kind of vaguely boring royal. But he was definitely one of those people who the more I read his obituaries, the more interesting I realised he was. And I think he would make a good god. He would make a brilliant deified Roman emperor, wouldn't he? He probably made a very good Roman emperor. I mean, he looked like could have gone imperial. Well, the thing that Geoff Hannam's saying about has Prince Philip offended other gods? I mean,

that kind of quality of the acerbic, I think is a central quality for a god because they can't just be, yeah, they've got to have

a whiff of danger about them. A god, I don't think, should have any consideration for sort of health and safety considerations

or human resources. No, I would say that if there's a lesson to be drawn from our study of the gods in this World Cup, a concern with health and safety considerations or human resources? No, I would say that if there's a lesson to be drawn from our study of the gods in this World Cup, a concern with health and safety does not feature. And I think that that's a good note on which to end this episode. The eight losers.

And in our next episode, we're going to talk about the last eight and we will get through to the and reveal the champion for those of you who don't already know. So we will just see you on the next podcast. Cheerio. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening,

and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.