/lit/ - Literature

>pagan
By the image you posted I take this to mean "European Polytheism". The Mahabarata, the Vedas, and the Bhagavad Gita are some of the vast library of Hindu holy texts, and the Kojiki, rikkokushi, Fudoki, Jinno Shotoki, and Kujiki are all Shinto Holy Texts. I've been really interested in finding works on Chinese Folk Theology, which is something distinct from Confucianism or Taoism, but have had little luck on anything in English, so check out "What the Master Would Not Discuss", which is on ghosts, Gods, Spirits, and the ancestors in Confucius' day. I'm currently reading Towards an Igbo Metaphysics, which is a discussion of the philosophical (and in particular metaphysical) ideas of the Igbo people of Nigeria. It's really neat, because the author, in his autism and low ethnic self-esteem, goes out an interviews hundreds of people over like ten years to actually get hard data on what they believe.

We have nothing of what the Celts thought. We know they had writing, they had long-term contact with the Greeks and apparently had access to the Greek alphabet. They had a priestly order, the Druids, who were the centerpiece of Celtic religious society. They were eradicated by the Romans in order to conquer Gaul. The insular Celts had druids too, but this priestly order was highly atrophied, and by the time St. Patrick came along (there were Christian Saints before Patrick, they were not successful) there were only a few dozen in all of Ireland. Anyone saying they have authoritative texts on what the Celts believed is lying.

The Germanics had writing, but lacked a priestly order akin to the druids. They initially had one, but somewhere around the birth of Jesus this died off. There's some thought that this is due to the Cult of Odin taking over and disrupting the balance of the entire religion, as Tyr (who is cognate with Zeus and Jupiter, and is the Germanic manifestation of Dyeus Phter) is second fiddle to Odin in Germanic religion. There's two Eddas, a Prose Edda by Snorri Sturlson, and a Poetic Edda written earlier by an anonymous source. There's some debate about how much Snorri adds of his own Christianity (he was a Bishop). There's a "folk-theory" that Loki being a bad guy is a Christian intrusion, but many scholars add that it's actually the opposite and that the Devil as a "evil lesser God" running around causing mischief is actually a fusion of the Judaeo-Christian ideas of "Satan" as a single badguy fused out of several nominally independent characters in the Old and New Testaments (Helel, The Pharaoh, the Serpent, the King of Tyre, whatever tempts Jesus in the desert) with the Germanic idea of Loki as, well, an evil God running around causing mischief that has to be fixed. The Germanics have a lot of other poems and stuff talking about the Gods, but those aren't on the level of the Eddas. The Havamal, a poem in the Poetic Edda, is the literal word of Odin on how to live a good life; it's not commandments, it's instruction.