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Greek and Roman Fairies


Where are the Local Pre-Indo-European Deities and Fairies?
Water fairies were among the most common and ultimately the most important deities of many of the Indo-European farmers and pastoralists and it seems likely that this importance was shared by the Neolithic peoples. Briggs in fact held that water fairies were the most common of all the fairy types the Celtic peoples believed in. Many of these well spirits appear to have existed before the Indo-European invasion and so were so important the belief in them survived from Neolithic Europe the way until well after the post-Christian era. There can be;

“No doubt the Indo-Europeans had no monopoly in religious feeling and observance of this (the worship of water) type; it may go back tens of thousands of years. But it must have been part of their religion, and its prevalence among their linguistic and cultural heirs must be due at least in some degree to the power of Indo-European tradition.” (M. L. West)
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Extracted texts from: SOME PHASES OF THE CULT OF THE NYMPHS
By Floyd G. Ballentine
IT seems to be generally believed to-day that the Greeks and Romans thought of the nymphs as connected especially with springs, rivers, mountains, trees, and meadows, but as possessing little power, and that they did not honor them in any fixed cult as deities who aided men in certain definite ways. Bloch alone, in Roscher, Lex. s. v. Nymphen, has shown to some extent that the nymphs presided over certain provinces, but he has said very little concerning their cult, and has scarcely attempted to show at what times the various forms of their worship existed.
Wissowa, in the preface of his Religion und Kultus der R-dmer, rightly insists on the necessity, in the treatment of Greek and Roman religion, of first getting the facts in the religion of each people, and, in doing so, of carefully distinguishing between the evidence which is Greek and that which is Roman, and of fixing the time during which the various cults or phases of the same cult existed. This I have attempted to do in this paper on the cult of the nymphs, in which I have endeavored to show that they were worshipped by both the Greeks and Romans as goddesses of water, of marriage, and of birth. To this I have added a list of the names of the nymphs.
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