Hittite Religion and Rituals: Storm Gods, Sacred Mountains, Cuneiform Prayer Texts, and the Ancient Anatolian Pantheon of Bronze Age Anatolia

They called their realm the Land of a Thousand Gods - and theirs is the oldest Indo-European religion ever written down.

Three thousand years before the decipherment that stunned twentieth-century scholarship, the Hittites ruled Anatolia from the great temple-city of Hattusa: rivals of Egypt, masters of iron, signers of history's first surviving peace treaty - sworn before a thousand gods of both nations, with heaven, earth, mountains, and winds as witnesses. Their kings served as high priests and scolded their gods in prayer. Their armies were purified by marching between the severed halves of sacrificial victims through a gate of thorns. Their wise women transferred plague into piglets and burned the evil away. And in a rock sanctuary outside the capital, two processions of gods carved in living stone still meet - sky god and sun goddess, face to face - in a sacred marriage older than Homer.

This volume of the Esoteric Religious Studies Series recovers a religion that vanished for three millennia and returned by decipherment: the faith of the Hittites in its full strangeness and grandeur - a Bronze Age synthesis where Indo-European sky gods, Hattian earth mothers, Hurrian myth-cycles, and Mesopotamian omen-science fused into a single working sacred order.

WITHIN THIS VOLUME:
- The Pantheon of a Thousand Gods - Tarhunna the Storm God, the Sun Goddess of Arinna, vanishing Telepinu, Kumarbi father of gods, and Ishtar in her Anatolian masks
- Myth and Cosmology - the Kingship in Heaven cycle and the dragon-combat of Illuyanka: the Bronze Age originals behind the Greek Titanomachy and the world's dragon-slayer myths
- Divine Kingship - the king as high priest, the plague prayers of Mursili II, and treaties enforced by the gods themselves
- Temple and Rite - Hattusa's Great Temple and the Yazılıkaya rock sanctuary; priests, priestesses, and the enigmatic "Old Woman" ritualists
- Blood, Bread, and Omens - sacrifice, libation, liver-divination, bird augury, dream incubation, and the sacred calendar from the spring Purulli festival onward
- Magic and Mystery - exorcism, scapegoat rites, oath-curses, night ceremonies, and the question of Hittite mystery cults
- The Esoteric Legacy - from Kubaba of Carchemish to Cybele, Magna Mater of Rome; Hittite echoes in Greek myth, biblical covenant, and modern esoteric thought

Richly illustrated with double-page plates, and completed by a glossary of Hittite religious terms, a guide to the pantheon, a historical timeline, and an introduction to the cuneiform archives of Hattusa.

For the student of comparative religion, the seeker of Indo-European roots, and every reader drawn to what lies buried: this is the sacred world that waited three thousand years under the Anatolian earth to speak again.

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This book is part of the Esoteric Religious Studies Series - the world's sacred traditions, studied from within.