If you’re looking for gods specifically associated with sling, then you won’t find any that we know of. Slings aren’t the most godly weapon. But this may also have to do with the fact that weapons in many mythologies tend be attributions rather than having a dedicated god. I’ll list a few examples from the Americas.

Perhaps this is most important, but we are lacking a lot of information. This is the kind of information that gets lost or overlooked. I’m not just talking about slings, the religions of many cultures aren’t often well documented. Looking for something like slings that might get overlooked by the people writing stuff down suffers from this even more.

—

I’ve read that the twin Zuni war gods used slings as weapons. However, they have several other weapons, so slings aren’t special. Just a part of the war aspect.


Illapa and Catequil in Incan mythology are apparently both gods of thunder and lightning, and both apparently use slings, which would make sense with their attributed aspect (the crack of the sling and thunder). I think Illapa was added to the pantheon from another group, so it might be that they are very similar gods (in other words the same god got copy-pasted). Catequil might also be the god of twins? Unrelated, but more on that at the end.


Although not deities, Iroquoian peoples had varying beliefs surrounding a group of entities called little people. Among the Cherokee they are a race of beings, but among the Cayuga it’s largely condensed down to a brother and sister (twins). They have all sorts of stories, but the Cayuga description including slings is:

“These dwarfs are a species of tiny beings who live in the woods and rocky places and hunt with slings for their livelihood. A Cayuga medicine bundle which we obtained at Six Nations includes a tiny sling and several sling- stones which had belonged to the Little People. The great skill and luck in hunting of the latter would no doubt be transferred to anyone possessing one of their weapons.

According to Cayuga tradition there are two such dwarfs-twins, a male and a female. They hunt with slings and stones and are able to injure or kill people who offend them. They have control over certain illnesses and the Dark Dance Feast is performed in part for them, in part for other spiritual beings. They also sometimes participate in the Dream Guessing Feast.” (Witthoff and Hadlock)

—

I can’t think of any others off the top of my head. Anyways, for some weird reason, slings in these three cases have some relation to twins. It’s probably just a coincidence since these groups are all unrelated, it’s just interesting.

So maybe let's revise this from "god of slinging" specifically, to deity, spirit, or cultural figure that employs or is responsible for the development and/or use of slinging.  Even the most mundane aspects of life will typically have some sort of cultural explanation, a story associated with how it came about, and most gods have symbols or tools they are associated with through a profession or practice.  I agree that the smelting of metals with bright shiny aspects of the sun was a major step in human development, and one that would be shrouded in myth and mystery - especially when that metal actually did crash down through the heavens as in the case of meteoric iron.  Even the fashioning of bows, arrows, atlatls and darts is a far greater investment and has that much more prestige attached to it as a result, to say nothing of stone tools (especially those "eccentric" chipped stones one finds in Mesoamerica).

But slinging is still a highly variable endeavor that would surely help from the assistance of some sort of god, don't you think?  I mean, who do you pray to when you need a hit?  Whose cosmological realm is it?  I think more importantly, you are both hitting upon something I didn't include in my original post for fear of dragging it out too long, and that's the social standing of slinging.  We don't consider slings a godly weapon because of our cultural ideals of worth, and a sling just seems simple, humble and mundane to us (which apparently are not godly characteristics).  There's a sort of general dismissal amongst the public, which becomes especially problematic in antiquities research where the sling often remains unknown or ignored - such as when mass finds of sling-bullets have been ignored or mislabeled (there's a thesis out there from 2013 about this by Barbora Kubikova that does a good job of showing the treatment of such finds up to that date, to cite just one thing).  Slinging is a dim part of our culture today but one generally misunderstood or under-evaluated, which becomes a sort of vicious cycle - we don't really see slings in our cultural representations, which colors how we study and understand history, which informs our cultural representations, and so on.

In the so-called old world, use of the sling seems to have become a marker of cultural embarrassment, something you used when you couldn't afford anything else, and I think that is a stigma that in some ways remains with us today - completely removed from any argument on its effectiveness or non-effectiveness.  But there are cultures where we can assume that the sling was not so culturally dismissed.  In Polynesia/Oceania we have evidence of carefully shaped sling-stones, and the descendants of the Inca still weave intricately patterned slings, some apparently just for ceremonial purpose.  A culture that values the sling and slinging highly is probably going to reflect that through the spiritual-symbolic lens of religion that they see the world through - however developed or defined that belief system is. 

It makes sense to me that the sling would be associated with storms and disease in certain cosmologies - Apollo was associated with healing, but also with striking one down in the first place.  Also interesting that there's often a twin connection somewhere - maybe something to do with the act of cordage making?  Twining bits of fiber together until you have something stronger and more useful than the original?  I doubt the word similarity holds true throughout, but the cosmological twins are near universal, probably speaking to their great antiquity.

That's the other aspect that may be coming into play here - the deep-time antiquity of the whole thing.  After all, I don't think cordage making is an invention of our species, but something probably far older, so is it conceivable that the sling itself is an concept-invention-discovery we can't lay claim to?  Deities and belief systems have been replaced and recalibrated countless times before, maybe I'm just looking for belief systems older than memory.  Overall I just think it fascinating that with the sling we can see how a technology in continuous use fares in that shuffle and evolution of world-view.  After all, if it still performs today exactly as it did millennia ago can we really consider it obsolete?  And who gets to define such things?

Anyways, I think I'm loosing my thread and the dogs are beginning to bark for breakfast (hope it all makes enough sense).  Hirtius, do you think you can shoot me a more full citation on where you found the Zuni and Iroquois info (is it the "...little people" 1946 article)?  Anything else anyone is able to find would also be greatly appreciated.  Thanks in advance!

Cheers!

As for imagining that there has to be a god of slinging, that’s just not the case. It sounds like you’re basing this on this that a few religions have had a dedicated god to archery. The Greek pantheon has this for whatever the reason. But that’s more of the exception to the rule. As far as warfare was concerned, the spear was infinitely more important to the Greeks than archery. Archers were kind of in a similar boat as slingers. Is there a Greek god of the spear? Not that I remember, I think it would just be an association of Ares since he’s the God of war. In most religion bows were similarly probably more of an association, having a dedicated god is not the norm. I think many Mayan gods are depicted with atlatls, but I don’t think there is a dedicated god for it. It’s interesting to note that the insistence of having an archery deity like Apollo and Artemis has led to some deities in other religions (like Flidais in Irish mythology) being attributed characterizations they probably didn’t have.


I think you’re also assuming that religion works in a way that you pray to the slinging god for a good shot. Maybe, but that doesn’t have to be the case. I doubt every religion has gods that answer personal prayers. In classical Mediterranean mythologies, it was probably more of a transaction where you would leave an object for the God in exchange for a request. Say you do make a prayer. For what? If I wanted my sling stones to fly true in war, I would pray to a war god. In hunting, I’d pray to a hunting god. Gods in many belief systems embody larger aspects than specific things.


That’s not to say there are no sling gods out there, the religions we are drawing from are based on heavily fragmented information. But even slings might especially suffer. In the Americas, all of our info is post Colombian where slings quickly fall out of favor due to firearms. If you go back even further, slings might have had more significance before bows were introduced. With the prestige hits slings have taken and the already and the losing of information on native beliefs, it’s no wonder that we don’t have more information on slings and deities. There’s just no way of knowing.


Last but not least, the information we do have might be very hard to pin down. The information might be in some inaccessible book (Like the Zuni war gods in the LeBlanc book) or lost in some archives somewhere.

Geez, I make friends everywhere I go.

I wasn’t trying to speak for you, just respond to what I thought you were saying. I wasn’t trying to make broad sweeping statements, but respond to what I thought you were saying. I guess I still don’t understand what you are trying to say or are asking, it would help if you were more concise.

From the European theatre two things come to my mind
Not a god but a demigod - there is this story of Hercules or Heracles as he is called in Greek, where he hunts the Stymphalian birds with a sling, there are several depictions on Greek Vases.
Secondly there are depictions of Nemesis, the goddes of revenge I think, on coins, where she holds a sling in her hand. Probably late Roman,

If you want stories that include slings, there are those as well. There are probably a ton, though again we struggle from lack of information.

—

A woman named Mabel Powers wrote a book called “Stories The Iroquois Tell Their Children”. How authentic the stories are, we have no way of knowing. In one of the stories called “How The Mice Overcame The Warriors”, there are these warriors that want to be at war and kill all of the time. Nice guys. The mice get sick of this and sneak in at night and chew apart all of their weapons. Slings are one of the weapons explicitly mentioned, along with other curiosities like poisoned arrows.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22096/22096-h/22096-h.htm#Page_130


“At this, all the mice set to work. Snap, snap, snap, went the bowstrings on all sides. Then the sharp little teeth began on the feathers that winged the poisoned arrows. Soon the feathers lay in bits about the ground.

Next, the deerskin cords that bound the sling shots were cut in two, and before the moon had risen, every weapon had been made useless; every Indian had been disarmed,—and the mice had scampered away.

The warriors awoke. Again the war cry was raised. They sprang to their feet and seized their weapons, but found them useless. Their bows had no strings; their arrows, no wings; their slings, no cords.”


Although slings aren’t really integral to the story, they do show up in the war context. Who knows how old this story is, but I can imagine slings were probably used in warfare before contact. There’s other evidence to suggest this. The “Little people” stories, that ‘Sling’ was used as a name (‘Shield’ was another such name. Both were rare, likely holdovers from when those objects were more important), and we even have a surviving sling from the early 1900s showing that they were still remembered even then.

Slings among the Little People are probably a better example of stories where slings were more important to characterization.

—

Unfortunately I can’t think of any other stories involving slings. It’s especially tough to find such things since most Native Americans have forgotten slings exist.

As for stories from other slinging cultures, I’m even less familiar with those so I wouldn’t be of much help.

Ive always thought it was interesting that seemingly no culture (at least that I can think of) adopted the whip crack of a sling into a thunder or thunder related deity myth. That was a missed opportunity imo.