Geto-Dacian Religion
GETO-DACIAN RELIGION. The Getae and the Dacians were ancient Thracian peoples who lived in Moesia, on the northern plain of the river Danube, and in the Carpathian Mountains, approximately in the territory of modern-day Romania and Moldova. Although the religion of the Getae and the Dacians escapes complete reconstruction, it forms, nevertheless, like the religion of the ancient Celts, one of the most interesting chapters in the history of Indo-European religions outside the Greco-Roman world. Despite the rationalistic tendency of some scholars to diminish the importance of religion among these peoples, evidence indicates that the foundation of the state consisting of the Getae and the Dacians was a result of theocratic ideas. These ideas stemmed from the worship of Zalmoxis, possibly an ancient religious reformer to whom the beginnings of Getic kingship are also related. Later on, Zalmoxis was divinized, a process that has frequent parallels in ancient Greece.
As for the Dacians, testimonies explicitly relate their name to the Phrygian word daos ("wolf"). Paul Kretschmer's etymology, which derives dakoi from the Indo-European *dhawo-s ("wolf"), has been supported by Vladimir Georgiev and has received an exhaustive historico-religious comment from Mircea Eliade (1972). Eliade claims that the Dacians, like several other Indo-European peoples, formed a Männerbund based on the idea of ritual lycanthropy.
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