Gods in Disguise

A sacrilegious union, a forbidden cult, and ancient Germanic deities hiding in Christian disguise. Welcome to the seventh episode of Chronotopos.

🔎 THE CASE: What links Saint Michael the Archangel to a mysterious "Saint Venus"? In several territories of southern Italy that were once under Lombard rule, there is a strange and recurring cohabitation of these two saints. In Marcianise, in particular, there was an ancient popular tradition (banned by ecclesiastical authorities in the 1970s) that venerated Saint Venus even as the wife or "sweetheart" of Saint Michael. Behind this "scandalous" bond, unknown to hagiographic sources and unacceptable to the orthodox Church, lies the key to a fascinating mystery: the statues of the winged warrior and his beloved actually represent Odin (Godan) and his companion Freya, the godmother of the Lombard people. In this episode, we will discover how the Lombards masked their deeply rooted paganism, aided also by the phonetic similarity between the Roman "Venus" and Freya's Germanic epithet, Vanadis.

🎧 THE EXPERIMENT: Once again, you won't hear a traditional academic lecture, but a dynamic and engaging Audio Overview. Artificial Intelligence (NotebookLM) has studied and re-elaborated my original scientific research, transforming it into an accessible and thrilling investigative narrative.

📚 ORIGINAL RESEARCH AND SOURCES: The investigation presented in this video is taken from Chapter IX ("A Venus from the Lake") of the book "Il Lago Scomparso: L'eredità sommersa dei Longobardi in Italia" by Giuseppe Greco. To delve into the toponymic and historical investigation:
🔗 https://books.google.it/books?id=-djUEAAAQBAJ

🎙️ LISTEN TO THE PODCAST: Find Chronotopos and our historical investigations on:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/73veX5JnakLNIabBGDEKkM?si=4e1958eba59e491aApple
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/it/podcast/chronotopos-luoghi-storie-e-parole/id1869872321

TAGS: #Lombards #MiddleAges #SaintMichael #SaintVenus #Odin #Freya #Toponymy #MedievalHistory #Chronotopos #GiuseppeGreco #IlLagoScomparso #NotebookLM #Paganism #GodsInDisguise