Sea gods

Poseidon’s beginnings are “obscure”, David Konstan writes in the Encyclopedia of Religion (1987), and he notes that the god is “conspicuously associated with the horse”; in the Olympian scheme Poseidon received the waters from Zeus. Konstan also points out that Okeanos, from whom the ocean is named, was first imagined as a river and not the salt sea. Rome’s Neptune began as a god of fresh water, Britannica writes, and became a sea god only when he was identified with Poseidon, by 399 BCE. Poseidon’s own page is Poseidon.

In the Babylonian creation poem Enūma Eliš, Tiamat is one of the two primeval seas: the salt sea, whose waters mingle with the sweet sea Abzu to make the gods (Sophus Helle, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses). When she turns on the younger gods, Marduk kills her and splits her body to make heaven and earth, and her eyes become the Tigris and the Euphrates. Her name comes from the Akkadian word for the sea (Britannica). Konstan sets beside her the Canaanite myth in which the god El favours Yam, “Sea”, against Baal.

Snorri’s Prose Edda gives Njord a home called Noatun and says that he “rules the course of the wind and checks the fury of the sea and of fire. He is invoked by seafarers and by fishermen.” Britannica tells how his marriage to the giantess Skadi failed because he wanted to live by the sea and she in the mountains. Ægir is a different figure: a giant friendly to the gods, their ale-brewer and host (Konstan). The Edda names his wife Rán, who “had a net in which she caught all men who perish at sea”, and explains why poets call gold “the fire of the sea”: Ægir lit his hall with gold.

Varuna, in the Vedas, was “the god-sovereign”, ruler of the sky and keeper of cosmic law (Britannica). His role as god of the sea is post-Vedic, Konstan notes; in later Hinduism he is guardian of the west and lord of oceans and waters.