Mastiman

Mastiman is one of the Berber gods named in the Iohannis of Corippus, the Latin epic on the Byzantine wars against the Moors in the 540s CE. He belongs to the religious world of the Laguatan (Louata) confederation of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, alongside the bull-god Gurzil and the war-god Sinifere. Corippus casts him as a grim, chthonic power associated with death and the underworld, before whom human sacrifices were performed, and the poet assimilates him to the Roman god of the dead. Modern scholarship treats him as a genuine indigenous deity of the eastern Berbers rather than a mere literary invention, even if the darker details are coloured by Corippus' hostile Christian perspective.

Domains

• death and underworld

Powers

• to receive the dead and to claim human sacrifice

Relations

• companion: SinifereCorippus names Mastiman and Sinifere together among the deities invoked by the Laguatan and Austur confederations of eastern Libya.Andy Merrills, War, Rebellion and Epic in Byzantine North Africa: A Historical Study of Corippus' Iohannis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). (secondary)

Sources

• Mastiman is a Berber deity named by Corippus among the gods of the Laguatan, interpreted as a god of death or the underworld, sometimes equated by Roman writers with Dis, to whom human victims were offered.: Yves Moderan, Les Maures et l'Afrique romaine (IVe-VIIe siecle) (Rome: Ecole francaise de Rome, 2003). (secondary); Corippus, Iohannis seu De bellis Libycis, ed. James Diggle and F. R. D. Goodyear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). (primary)