In one of the earliest accounts of Eastern Europe’s old gods, Herodotus (Histories Book IV, Chapters 93–96 – 5thC BCE) tells us that the Eastern, Danubian tribes of the Getae (also later known to the Romans as the Dacians – inhabiting what is now modern Romania), believed in reincarnation and worshipped a god called Zalmoxis or Salmoxis. Most standard translations into English come from manuscripts in which he appears to state that some of the Getae also called Zalmoxis by the name ‘Gebeleizis’. For example:

93 …the Getae are the bravest of the Thracians and the most just. 94. They believe they are immortal in the following sense: they think they do not die and that the one who dies joins Zalmoxis, a divine being; some call this same divine being Gebeleizis. Every four years, they send a messenger to Zalmoxis, who is chosen by chance. They ask him to tell Zalmoxis what they want on that occasion. The mission is performed in the following way: men standing there for that purpose hold three spears; other people take the one who is sent to Zalmoxis by his hands and feet and fling him in the air on the spears. If he dies pierced, they think that the divinity is going to help them; if he does not die, it is he who is accused and they declare that he is a bad person. And, after he has been charged, they send another one. The messenger is told the requests while he is still alive. The same Thracians, on other occasions, when he thunders and lightens, shoot with arrows up in the air against the sky and menace the divinity because they think there is no god other than their own…

The alternative name for their chief afterlife-god given by Herodotus is supposed to be ‘Gebeleizis’, and it appears this way in most of the surviving manuscripts of the Histories, which were originally written in Greek. However, my attention was recently drawn to an opinion expressed by the late Prof Rhys Carpenter in his essay The Cult of the Sleeping Bear (1946), that the original word used by Herodotus was ‘Beleizis’ – the ‘ge-‘ being an ‘italicising’ part of the preceding word. In the most complete and earliest source manuscripts (known as A and B to Herodotus scholars) the ‘Ge’ is apparently absent! This opens up a whole new spectrum of possibilities: It is generally accepted that the use of ‘-zis’ in ther terminus of the name is just the Indo-European word for ‘god’, as seen in the words ‘Zeus’ and ‘Deus’. This means that (assuming both Rhys Carpenter and Herodotus were correct) that the god Thracian god Zalmoxis was known to some of the 5thC BCE Getae as ‘Belei’ or ‘Beli’ – in other words, Belenos! This would make it one of the earliest references to the god whose name was adopted by the European Celtic peoples later calling themselves ‘Belgae’.

This passage by Herodotus (dealing with the incursion upon ‘Scythia’ and Greece by the Persian Empire) has stimulated quite a lot of interest, as little is known about the actual religions of the East European peoples before Romanisation and Christianisation. The peoples of Eastern Europe were generally identified by Greeks such as Herodotus as ‘barbarians’ or more specifically as ‘Thracians’ (the most numerous culture, and that bordering Greece/Macedonia directly). By the 4th/3rdC BCE, however, Thrace, Dacia (northern Thrace) and Illyria had become a contributing part of the cultural movement which we identify further west as ‘Celtic’, albeit with an ‘Eastern’ slant: Celticists and archaeologists might, for example, recognise the significance of both the belief in reincarnation (mentioned by Julius Caesar 400 years later) and the sacrificial ritual of sending a man to the Otherworld through death, to which the Iron Age phenomenon of ‘bog bodies’ (found in northern and western Europe) seem also to attest.

The question now turns to the Thracian Salmoxis of whom Herodotus had more to say (trans. Godley):

…I understand from the Greeks who live beside the Hellespont and Pontus, that this Salmoxis was a man who was once a slave in Samos, his master being Pythagoras son of Mnesarchus; then, after being freed and gaining great wealth, he returned to his own country. Now the Thracians were a poor and backward people, but this Salmoxis knew Ionian ways and a more advanced way of life than the Thracian; for he had consorted with Greeks, and moreover with one of the greatest Greek teachers, Pythagoras; Therefore he made a hall, where he entertained and fed the leaders among his countrymen, and taught them that neither he nor his guests nor any of their descendants would ever die, but that they would go to a place where they would live forever and have all good things. While he was doing as I have said and teaching this doctrine, he was meanwhile making an underground chamber. When this was finished, he vanished from the sight of the Thracians, and went down into the underground chamber, where he lived for three years, while the Thracians wished him back and mourned him for dead; then in the fourth year he appeared to the Thracians, and thus they came to believe what Salmoxis had told them. Such is the Greek story about him…

The text – following on from his account of the Getae and (Ge)Beleizis – appears to give Salmoxis a ‘euhemerized’ slant, even portraying him as a pupil of Pythagoras. This, however, must be examined from the perspective that Herodotus was a Greek (and therefore thought the Greeks to be the true originators of all philosophical doctrines worth their salt) and Pythagoras was legendary for his doctrine of metempsychosis. For the same reason, it was later supposed that Gaulish druids must also have had commerce with Pythagoras. The most important feature of the account (no doubt a garbled understanding of the true Thracian doctrines) is the association of Salmoxis with an underworld feast-hall for the dead and a periodicity of 4 years. The story is even somewhat similar to the later tales in the Christian bible about Jesus’ last supper and his resurrection. The Norse Valhalla also springs to mind, as do the fairy tales of the British and Irish Isles where people are entertained in great underground halls by the wise Fair Folk…

Another consideration for ‘Gebelezius’ is that the name incorporates the Celtic word for the horse – variously written as ‘Gebel’, ‘Cabbyl’, or ‘Capal’ and in a number of other ways. The word ‘Cavalier’ is derived from this Indo-European root-word.