DISCUSSION ON ASPECTS OF INDO-EUROPEAN PAGAN LORE

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Victor Rydberg: although he and other scholars have been neglected due to the naturalist, evolutionist, and functionalist approaches to the history of religion, his methodology is spot on from the history of religion approach coming out of Wach, Eliade, Nygren (and the Swedish school), and their students in properly taking a historicial approach to the history of religion.

I also think and am prepared to argue that Rydberg's thesis of a meta-narrative or saga from beginning to end of the world is, indeed, an Indo-European legacy stemming from Proto-Indo-European times. The fact that relatively large chunks of narratival epic stories in some shared order of narratival or plot continuity in later Indo-European cultures' epics indicates, to my mind, a common shared body of legends sharing a common plot structure reflectin a "proto-epic" or "proto-saga".

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As to elves, a friend of mine was working on a comparison of Vedic and Germanic elves some years ago. I'll see what he has. It was sparked partly by comparative work on the Zoroastrian Fravashi and the Germanic Valkyrie within a larger investigation of working out the relation between asuras, devas, daityas, and danavas in Indo-Iranian materials (Vedic, Tajik, Avestan, Armenian). Basically, the older generation of gods were an interdependent family of the forces of creation and destruction (sort of like the sephiroth in cabala). These were the asuras.

But something happened (which involves the world mill, the fall of Yima/Yama, the mortal wounding of the cosmic bovine, and attack on the cosmic plant/tree as parts of the same event). There was a split among the asuras. The asuras that were of the forces of birth, growth, creation and the asuras that were, according to rta, the forces of destruction, decay, and transformation split. The asuras that formerly were rightly the forces of destruction, according to rta, became the daityas or danavas (who are described as former asuras, fallen gods from of old, gods who lost the status as asuras three ages before the birth of the warrior and mortal gods of heaven, the devas). Part of the damage control of this catastrophic event was the warrior gods, the mortal gods of heaven, became the guardian gods that re-ordered the three worlds into something like a protected as well as fortified place. Sometimes, their actions were at odds with the older powers. And so, we find a time of conflict or war between the new devas and older asuras (who are still good). But against the fallen asuras, the daityas and danavas, both the asuras and devas are resolutely united. And there is a coming and final battle when the need for, era of, and reign of the devas will either pass or be transformed.

Interesting that the gods mostly die in Ragnarok and the Indo-Iranian materials refer to them as "mortal gods" and a "temporary rulers". The unfallen asuras look very much like the Vanir. The Daityas and Danavas look very much like two races of giants.

Now within this context of investigation, it seemed that both Vedic elves and Germanic elves were older cousins of humankind. They could intermarry and have offspring. They could form bonds of friendship but there was also an element of mutual distrust between the two races (reflecting Asuras and Devas, Vanir and the Aesir) stemming from these groups having different sets of priorities.

Humans appear to be on friendlier terms with the devas than the elves. Moreover, the elves in both appear to be more associated with the Asuras/Vanir and appear to be, more or less, allies with the devas/Aesir. And they are artisans, co-workers with the Asuras. A central concept more tightly associated with the Asuras/Vanir and elves in both traditions is maya (magical power).

That there is a multi-generational genealogy of gods seems to be reinforced by the Celtic material although it has been reworked to fit the medieval saga motif with less of the Rome/Troy ideology imposed on it.

Other suggested discoveries (in terms of probabilities): Vata-Vayu in Indo-Iranian material also appears with the nicknames Rudra and Siva (later the great god besides Visnu of later Hinduism). The Maruts/wildhunt belong to Rudra/Siva/Vata-Vayu and are loaned to Indra. The suggestion by Rydberg that Vata-Vayu is Odin seems well confirmed. In addition, the association of berserker and fury with Odin is also found with Vata-Vayu-Siva-Rudra. Vata-Vayu-Siva-Rudra provide Indra with isma. Isma is the power to have great strength and near invincibility in battle. It is also the power of shape-shifting. According to the warrior clan-fraternity berserkers are initiated into, one shape-shifts into one's totem animal: vervraka (werewolf), berserkir (bear), and the wild boar (found amongst the Anglo-Saxons). In Persia, isma is asma. As divine wrath/fury, it is Aeshmadeva. With the Zoroastrian reform, Aeshmadeva became demonized. In Jewish-Christian traditions, Aeshmadeva is the demon Asmodeus.

These berserker warriors, in actual combat, functioned a lot like our special forces. They infiltrated enemy ranks and created all sorts of death and mayhem behind the enemies lines while acting as scouts and spies. Then there were the more soldierly warriors (under Indra/Thor) usually associated with the war chariots and orderly formations.

In Tajik, Vedic, Iranian, and Armenian materials, the high asura, guardian of rta, is Dyauspitar (from where we get Jupiter, Tyr) named Varuna. While still the high god and father of justice, to consolidate the relation between the older asuras and young devas, he "incarnates" and is reborn as one of the devas. Lithuanians, Tajiks, and Azeris (plus the arewordi of Armenia) thus speak of Tyr as father of the gods and as the son of the devas. This might clarify some of the "contradictions" about Tyr. As born among the devas, he is sometimes referred to as the "one handed one from on high who is companion and friend to the one eyed leader" when the legitimacy of the devas is challenged.

Some of the gods names are titles of office so to speak, such as Dyauspitar, while others are names. As we can see even in the Mahabharata, even humans, like Arjuna, have multiple names tied to different feats they have done in the past that reflect aspects of their character or nicknames bringing out different aspects of their personalities. So, Rydberg's polynomial hypothesis seems well confirmed.

The two lines I have been working on recently are:

1. The fires. We find a fairly tight correlation in the sacrificial fires in terms of number, construction and shape, and orientation from Vedic India, to Rome, to German, Celtic, Swedish and Baltic cultic sites. There are three fires oriented on a mainly east-west axis (one fire, the guardian fire, is either southwest or northeast of the western hearth fire). The first fire is the hearth fire and it is round and is always west. The second fire is the guardian fire either set south or north of the hearth fire. It is always triangular/crescent. The sacrificial fire is east of the hearth fire (all fires are lit from the hearth fire) and is square. Many sites have a hole where something like a totem-pole may have stood due east of the sacrificial fire.

2. Northern traditions as shared: our labels of Celtic, Germanic, Baltic tend to reinforce an illusion these distincts are as insular and water tight as our labels might seem. We have a number of cultic sites that were shared (west, Celtic-German sites shared -- east, German-Baltic sites shared, a cultic site controlled by German rulers but manned by Celtic priests, a Baltic site with Swedes as its high priests appointed by the Baltic tribes, cultic sites with offerings from Balts, Germans, Celts, and Sarmatians (pagan Iranians who migrated north who apparently maintained the pre-Zoroastrian Iranian religion. Some served in the Roman cavalry and ended up in Britain it seems. Others migrated into present day Russia, Prussia, Sweden/Finland and served with the pagan Lavonian Knights in the defeat of the Teutonic Knights at Tannenberg in 1410).

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I posted a summary of some lines of investigation earlier today. If I can find it, I'll post soon a piece (or I'll reproduce the notes to it) on the possible interconnections of the legend of Yima/Yama, Arthur, Graal (Yima's/Yama's serving cup is sometimes called a well at one root of the cosmic tree), the Round (Round Table, the Central Asian Buddhist Wheel of Life), Yima's/Yama's underworld vara in the north during a harsh winter-age, and why the Zoroastrians have 2 New Year celebrations in their liturgical calendar -- one, Nowruz looking back to the fall of Yima, and the other, Mihragan, that looks forward to the final battle/renewal of the world. In the Indo-Iranian materials, this same legend is supposed to tell about the origin of dragons born from the fall of Yima/Yama. In the oldest strata, Yima/Yama is the ancestor-archetype of humankind (and/or human-like kind in some variats), gayomaretan is not a person but the mortalized life the results as a condition resulting from the fall of Yima/Yama, and the two later ancestors of the human race, born of plants -- are also called Mah and Mahya (the Zoroastrian nickname for the moon as a source of lunacy and lunatics) -- so humans are not quite right after the fall of Yima/Yama. This leads to the opening of two main paths in the afterlife, the southwestern way of the fathers to Yima/Yama's underworld vara in the north under Mt Hara, and the way of the gods and heroes toward the celestial north, either to live on the cosmic mountain of the north, Mt Hara, with the devas till the end of time, or beyond the cosmic mountain through true north to a higher world and exit from this one. The two postmortem paths roughly correlate to the twofold ancestry of the human race in Indo-Iranian materials - regaining the glory of Yima/Yama or the lunacy of Mah/Mahya.

One line I've been investigating is traces of this twofold ancestry and twofold postmortem paths in western IE and Germanic materials but that is in its beginning stages. Currently, I'm reading Littleton's book on Arthur, the Graal, and the Sarmatians as part of that project.

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Second, the issue about Christian influence is actually quite easily settled in two ways. I can post more on this issue later. First find IE material with the same themes that either (1) demonstratively predates Christianity. (2) has not been in contact with Christianity, or (3) both. If it can (and it can), then the thesis of Christian influence is greatly weakened in the case of IE material handled or preserved within a Christian context. Second, I mentioned Aeshmadeva becoming Asmodeus in my last post. In broad strokes, the historical development of Judaism as a religion is divided into 3 or 4 major phases: Pre-exilic Judaism (where Yahweh is a national and tribal god of the Jews, no creation myth or Genesis, no end of the world, cosmic battle, or devil as Yahweh's opponet motifs), Exilic Judaism (where it falls under the influence of Zoroastrianism, including the incorporation of Zoroastrian terms, Persian words, into the next phase of the OT and the emergence of IE material, in Zoroastrian form, in Judaism -- Yahweh is creator, universal God, cosmic battle between good and evil, Satan as God's opponent, and a Messiah coming for the climactic battle -- all Zoroastrian themes), and Post-exilic Judaism (with the same Zoroastrian themes). The so-called fourth phase is after the destruction of the second temple

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Myth

Here is somewhat over simplified overview of the historical development of a theory of mythology. Partly in answer to WX's post, if the function of myth is to connect the beginnings and ends of things with the middle, it has to be a complete saga: beginning, middle, end. Apart from a general theory about the nature of myth, there are many historical and empirical arguments that a unified saga is an IE legacy.

Anyway, a theory of myth.

Historically, the academic study of religion has not been good to myth and mythology. Unexamined biases and cultural agendas prejudiced the study of religion to the extent that it involved a study of myth. Some of these culturally inherited set of biases are older than the discipline of the study of religion (as opposed to studying religion in divinity to become clergy).

An early denigration of myth was in pagan Greek philosophy. The Hellenic sense of time was that it was tragic in nature. With the rise of philosophy there arose the Greek spiritual quest to deny that time and the tragic were ultimately real. This involved a philosophical denial that story, narrative, drama, and time were ultimately real. This quest led in turn to a denigration of myth. Myth, because it was narratival, story, and dramatic, also had to be less than real. If not a lie, it was inferior to real knowledge. For example, in the works of Plato, myth is inferior opinion about mere appearances compared to the timeless and storyless contemplative knowledge of the ever unchanging Forms. Another example, in the work of Aristotle, while logic and metaphysics (the study of the nature of Being itself) are “first philosophy”, ethics, politics, and rhetoric (which includes the study of story and drama) are denigrated in being designated as “second philosophy”. Predicates assigned to the divine were negative concepts with no positive content. The gods and goddesses were a-thanatoi (not mortal). Eternity came to mean timeless and storyless rather than everlasting. So any suggestion that myth might reflect a deeper structural dynamic in Being, that reality might really be story-like in nature, never arose and was never considered because a key motivating presupposition (or delusional need) of this spiritual quest was that story was unreal.

The second trend that builds upon the Greek philosophical denigration of myth with a new twist is the coming of Christianity. Christian apologetics depended upon an educated Greek populace to play the Greek philosophy card with a new twist. The new twist was that while pagan religions were mythic, Christianity was literally historically true. In contrast to pagan mythic religions, Christianity by contrast was grounded in actual historical events. Or so the story goes, closer examination of the formation of the New Testament reveals scanty shreds of authentic historical material about Jesus being woven into a major mythic story (where most of the events and saying attributed to Jesus never historically happened and he never historically said – Jesus is almost completely a fabrication of the church – 300 years of New Testament research has reached a consensus on). In the denigrated sense of myth inherited from Greek philosophy and Christianity, there is overwhelmingly more myth in the story of Jesus as Christ and almost no historical material reflecting the real Jesus of Nazareth in the Christian myth. In the denigrated sense of myth used within Christianity, there really is no longer a viable contrast between the alleged historicity of the founding events of Christianity and the alleged mythic status of paganism. In the denigrated sense of the Christian use of the word myth, Christianity is as much myth as the so-called mythic religions against which it falsely contrasts itself sharply with.

Inheriting the first two trends and partly building upon them while reacting against them, there originated the academic study of religion. At first this took the form of a rationalistic reduction of religion in the Enlightenment. The past (including religions) was superstitious and the present is our opportunity to progress towards a more enlightened future. For the leaders of the Enlightenment who were religious, this broader cultural project involved a rationalist reconstruction of historical religions into a rational religion of morals that all rational humans of good will could agree upon. The main form this project of reconstructing religion took was Deism. Needless to say, unless a myth helped teach a moral lesson within this allegedly new religion of reason (ethical reason), it was superstition. Story, narrative, and thus, myth were not part of the essential core of true religion. Plus if one was only going to look at indivdual stories for their moral lesson one was not looking for a bigger story. It was a mere ornament serving the essential core of the nature of true religion, namely, morality, or myth was superstition. Admiring classical antiquity, the Enlightenment, especially in its quest for a rational and universal religion without myth, was a return to pagan Greek philosophy and culture.

There was a solid beginning made at this time in collecting, documenting, and translating the basic “data”, so to speak, for comparative analyses of religions in the attempt to construct a general theory of religion from a broader and better “data-base”, so to speak, than had ever been available before.

After the Enlightenment, a second phase in the development of the academic study of religion arose that did make significant contributions towards both a general theory of religion and of myth. This was the Romantic movement. We will return to it later. For now, let us just say the Vicktor Rydberg was part of this school of thought and that it was quickly supplanted by new trends reflecting new cultural agendas in the West.

Romanticism was basically supplanted because it was a religious approach to the study of religion. These new 19th century trends shared one thing in common. They were overly impressed with physical science and the values of the Enlightenment. As a result, predominantly non-religious approaches developed a reductionist approach to religion and myth as either “merely” ancient naïve science (where myth incorporated primitive cosmology and gods represented natural forces) or in terms of a positivist (Comte) evolutionary model (social Darwinist) that generally looked at animism as the first primitive stage of religion, then polytheism, then monotheism, and finally leading either to a rational scientific religion of the future (continuing the Deist project) or to a completely secular future in which religion (even its highest form) died out as scientific materialism replaced religion. Instead of explaining religion, the goal was to explain-away religion. While these approaches had several variations, the basic strategy was to reduce elements of myth to someting else. There was not an attempt to look at myth as a whole story. When the obvious flaws in these approaches could no longer be ignored, the reductionist and non-religious approach to religion (on the presupposition that there almost certainly was not a transcendent dimension and religion could not literally be true – literally be a means to understand and connect with the deeper dimensions of reality) turned to explain (explain away) religion and myth in terms of its social function following the structuralist and functionalist models of the behavioral and social sciences. Despite these changing cultural fads in academia, there nevertheless were valuable contributions in the growth of our knowledge of world religions and languages. Since religion does have important social functions, insights into the nature of religion and myth were gained.

Meanwhile, out of Romanticism and a growing number of scholars who thought a nonreductionist approach to religion (a religious study of religion) there developed the History of Religions as a discipline. For the sake of argument, it was argued, the proper study of religion or any particular religion was to treat it “as if” it were true – how was it lived and experienced by its adherents. To cut a long story short, out of this new academic approach to the study of religion (actually, this approach develops steam beginning in the early 1900s and is now over a 100 years old), what I think is a proper understanding of myth developed. It is a summary of that understanding of myth I shall now undertake.

Part of this new endeavor was influenced by the work of the romantic school (to which Rydberg belonged) and their exegetical methods of dealing with religious materials (which the romantics developed out of radical Protestant exegetical and hermeneutical principles dealing with biblical passages, and then, classical material – until it evolved into a general methodology) without the elaborate metaphysics characteristic of German idealism (coming out of Eckhart and Boehme, Oetinger, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and von Baader).

An interesting aside: although he puts it in a theosophical (not Blavatsky’s) evolutionary model where humankind’s religious development spiritually evolves from polytheism into monotheism into monistic pantheism that was quickly challenged as problematic, the German philosopher Schelling did have an interesting discussion to the effect that polytheism had been treated unfairly because if the Christian trinity is three persons sharing one divine substance/nature or unity of will there was no reason one could not have a whole pantheon of many persons sharing one divine substance/nature or unity of will such as found in varieties of polytheism. He also noted how the “manifestations” or “potencies of the divine” even within monotheistic religions could be interpreted as polytheistic in reality and practice while being denied in theology. Following up on Schelling, some 20th century psychologists and theologians (such as the Jungian analyst James Hillman and the theologian David Miller) argued that contrary to officially sanctioned monotheistic appearances we were polytheistic in actual practice (see Hillman’s Revisioning Psychology and Miller’s The New Polytheism).

It was also partly informed by the work of the psychologist C.G.Jung (who comes out of the romantic tradition also). The three main flaws with the Jungian theory were the archetypes and myths were just depth structures of the psyche but not the depth structures of Being (subjective and objective existence, microcosm and macrocosm). It was psychology rather than ontology (this criticism is also made within the Jungian camp by Edinger in Ego and Archetype). Second, his theory of individuation is itself a model unknowingly based upon a particular mythic paradigm that when used as a general exegetical model, sort of distorts material in cookie cutter fashion. Third, his theory of individuation has a problematic relation with morals and ethics. Religious and spiritual development includes moral development (practice and perfection of virtues). Dealing with narcissistic personalities (patients) in developing his theories, Jung developed a theory of individuation that is narcissistic. It is almost cosmic blackmail in its unintended ethical implications. Instead of the normal religious promise become virtuous and your eternal meaning and value will accrue to you, Jung’s theory of individuation reverses it, in effect, give me my meaning and value, give me my validation first, and then, I will be a good and virtuous person (see the criticisms of Jungian psychology on this last point in the moral development psychological theory of Harvard psychologist Kohlberg, the religious development psychological model of Fowler, the books Jung in Context by Peter Homan and Becoming a Self by Moseley).

An influential figure in the study of myth is Joseph Campbell. In the Occidental Mythology of his multi-volume work Masks of God, he claimed that myth had four functions: metaphysical, cosmological, sociological, and psychological. The model proposed below from the History of Religion drops the cosmological function. While many myths and mythologies around the world provide a cosmological component, not all of them do – thus, the second function is not universal, and thus, cannot be part of a universal theory of myth (some nonreductionist theories can require too little to fit the “data” and some can require too much to fit the “data”. Campbell’s second function, as requirement for what any and all mythologies must do requires too much). Campbell’s four functions are:

(1). The metaphysical function: myth awakens and guides our quest for the meaning of life and the mystery of being.

(2). The cosmological function: myth gives a sacred meaning to the scientific picture of the world according to the level of scientific and technological development at the time (flat earth, geocentric, heliocentric, etc.).

(3). The sociological function: myth validates the inherited traditions and patterns of a particular culture and/or folk.

(4). The psychological function: myth is a guide to how to live a human life through its various stages from birth to death (and usually into post-mortem existence or the afterlife).

According to the History of Religion, myth is supposed to be an ontophany (i.e. a revelation of Being). That is, within and by means of its dramatic and narratival structure it reveals or imitatively presents the deep plot, structural dynamics, or core dynamics of reality or Being. On the motif of macrocosm-microcosm, myth as a story presents the archetypal plot or dynamics of not just our psyche but the cosmos.

I once got in a conversation about this with my car mechanic in terms of history vs. myth after he saw Lord of the Rings with his wife. At the end, he summarized, “so history is what I, the driver, the steering wheel and accelerator do, myth is what the transmission does and mythic world ages are what gear you’re in.” I sort of thought it fit.

What we are beginning to rediscover (and are beginning to realize our culture has partially lost since the rise of ancient Greek philosophy) is that reality itself includes, besides a categorical structure of Being (subject of traditional western metaphysics and philosophy), a story dynamics. The ontological status of plot and narrative as part of how reality temporally flows, develops, and unfolds is presented and re-presented in story (for a single quick reference on this that also refers to the other relevant literature, sort of a one-stop crash course, see the book Time, Narrative, and History by David Carr). So, myth, in its structural dynamics (the unfolding plot structure) is ontophany (this term comes from Mircea Eliade). It is also thereby, hierophany, that is, a revelation or manifestation of the large scale workings of the divine and sacred (the direction and purpose of the divine and sacred). The combined implication is that reality, the cosmos, Being, or nature itself (treating these terms as designating the same thing at this point) is naturally a revelation and manifestation of the divine and sacred, that is, the very existence of the world and life is a hierophantic (revelation of the sacred) ontophany (revealed manifestation of the nature and dynamics of Being). Or, in other words, it is a manifestation of sacred power and wisdom.

We are discovering that myth is essential to religion and spirituality. Why? Imagine you wake up one day on a sailing vessel. You have no recollection of boarding and you have no knowledge of where you are at or where they ship should be heading. Perhaps you begin to look for the crew. In the process, you find there is no crew and that your fellow passengers literally and figuratively are in the same boat. Squabbles may break out over who in charge or who should be in charge. But it eventually dawns on everyone that the ship is at peril because it is being buffeted, uncontrolled by a crew, by the tides, currents, and winds. Whether any of you are good or not, you all have to take a crash course in learning, more or less effectively, how to sail. After a while, you all begin to resemble a crew as you collectively gain proficiency with the rudder and the sails. Pretend this is you busy in getting an education or training for a career or profession. There is still the question of where the ship is and where is it going. There is the question of ship stores that may break out into a fight. Some want to eat as much of the food and drink as they want day to day. Others may be more cautious. They may raise the question of whether the ship is supposed to be on a short voyage or a long one. If it is a long one, ship’s stores might need to be conserved. Perhaps an argument breaks out about whether it is or is not a short voyage until someone gets everyone’s attention. Nobody knows for sure and the ship is still in peril no matter how well the crew now manages to sail it because they don’t know how to locate where they are and they don’t know where they are supposed to be going. A search turns up to things. The ship has a compass. No matter which way the ship is heading the compass always points in the same direction. Imagine the compass being your conscience (your basic innate knowledge of right and wrong, of virtues and vices). Still, by itself, it is not of much help if you don’t know where you are and where you are supposed to be going. Then it is noticed that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west during the day and there are stars at night. Again, this additional piece of information, like the compass, might be helpful but together they are not enough. Finally, one finds the maps that mark out the ship’s course. With the maps, the ship’s compass and the stars overhead can guide the voyage. With the maps, the crew knows how long the voyage might be, where they came from, where they are at now, and where they are going. The maps are myths. Let’s turn to a closer look at myths as maps.

As a hierophantic ontophany, myth provides a life or existential road-map as a spiritual guide to our life and our world by answering four questions. The first question is: does existence (the world, Being, the cosmos) have a transcendent intelligibility, meaning, value and purpose? It is a simple and pointed yes or no question. Religious and spiritual viewpoints answer “yes”. Nonreligious and nonspiritual viewpoints, whether acknowledged or not, answer “no”. Every person has a philosophy of life whether they know it or not. It is summed up in their day to day beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions: their basic “take” on life. Rock bottom, it comes down to a “yes” or “no” answer to this question (acknowledging that people can have an ambivalent, ambiguous, and/or hypocritical relation to this question whether they are aware of it or not, it is still at bottom on balance a mostly “yes” or mostly “no” answer). It is for those who answer “yes” to this question that myth has any meaning as it answers the following three questions.

(1). Where did I (we, everything) come from?

(2). Why am I (we, everything) here (i.e., what is my vocation, purpose, destiny, orlog and wyrd, karma)?

(3). Where am I (we, everything) going (is there life after death, etc.)?

By picking up and sustaining our answer “yes” to the first question, myth fulfills Campbell’s first function of myth. By answering the next three questions, myth is a map, a guide to life (to the plot of what the stories of our individual lives are all about-- really) that fulfills Campbell’s third and fourth function.

To summarize and close: myth connects that developing plot that includes what is most real, most important, most essential, most authentic, and most valuable within me with that developing plot outside and beyond me that sustains what is most real, most important, most essential, most authentic, and most valuable in the cosmos as a whole. “We are such stuff as myths are made of….”

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For what it is worth, Constantinople did have an elaborate throne room that used steam to power an elevator for the imperial throne, various mechanical devices and musical instruments that played music by steam, and various animal and human "automata" to impress visitors powered by air, water, or steam. The imperial gardens also had similar air, water or steam driven devices, musical instruments, fountains, and automata. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the technology spread to western Europe where similar royal and estate gardens were designed and built that included water, steam, and air powered fountains, automata, and automata musical instruments (a mechanical bird chirping) from the late 1400s to the 1800s. Since Vikings became the core of the Varangian Guard, perhaps there were Nordic themes incorporated into these mechanical gardens?

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I wasn't ruling that out. I was just pointing out that Byzantium had some technological marvels.

One feature that the IE traditions share with post-exilic Judaism (and hence, Christianity) is reading actual history religiously-mythically. Something of this mindset lives on today with the mere fact our calendar dates from Christ as an ordering of time and history or with modern day fundamentalist Christians reading the newspaper as "signs" of the "last days" or strongly nationalist Russian Orthodox Christians reading contemporary events in terms of the epic-mythos of Rome as the eternal city thus old Rome (of the Father), New Rome (Constantinople -- of the Son), and the third and final Rome (Moscow -- of the Holy Spirit).

Our school history books do this in a faded fashion to the extent we cover the ancient world, then western Europe, and then, US history with the tacit suggestion the US is the latest phase of history and the direction of history has been headed all along just as the western expansion of Europeans was "manifest destiny". I could go on more about national mythology shaping how American (and other countries) see its history or contemporary events. During the Kennedy presidency there was a semi-conspiracy to cast that presidency in the image of Arthur and Camelot (which was also playing an extended amount of time on Broadway at the time, as noted in Geoffry Hodgson's book on 20th century American history). The mortal blow to this way of viewing the world was probably the Thirty Years War. Before that, in a much more vivid fashion, most historical personages and events were remembered, noted, worthy of attention, and were of significance to the extent they embodied mythic paradigms for significant personages and significant events. "Historians" back then did not do history in our modern sense. After the Thirty Years War there is a faded legacy. The fading of heraldry is part of the same phenomenon. The use of acronyms is part of the secularization and "desacralization" of institutions, governments, agencies, and prominent families.

Rydberg analyzed at length that the medieval sagas were an attempt to histocize mythic Germanic materials within a classical Rome scheme (Troy) and biblical scheme. But there is an additional element I call reading historical events mythically (or reflecting mythic realities) that is an IE tradition that predates Christianity. For example, Virgil's Aeneid is noted by Rydberg because its part of the background scheme for how Germanic materials were dealt with but there is also Livy's History of Rome. Indo-European mythology and the early events of Rome's history are so interpermeating each other its almost as if Livy's ideological message is that the founding of Rome is the concrete enactment of the mythic events that founded the cosmos and the gods (as several studies have shown, Rome's true mythology is not the greek overlay that came later but is hidden underneath and within Livy's history). Its a way of looking at historical events, developments, and persons as if, sacramentally, so to speak, they are the re-enactment or "incarnation" of the whole mythology. We find the same thing in the Shahnama of Persia and the Mahabharata of India (although in this one, it is explicitly said the gods and their entire story or history was reincarnated into the human heroes and historical personages in this drama about an apocalyptic war -- Alf Hiltebeitels book The Ritual of Battle analyzes this as well as comparing what's going on in the Mahabharata with Fimbulwinter and Ragnarok). Historical persons and events worth remembering are remembered according to literary paradigms set by the mythology as paradigm. Significant historical persons and events are noticed and remembered to the extent they seem to reflect or re-present mythic persons and events otherwise they are not significant or noteworthy in this mindset.

One last comment, Byzantium was also doing the same "propaganda-saga" creating that Rydberg noted the Christian West and Rome were doing. Byzantines used the fact that the new capital was both Christian and across the straits from Troy to legitimate Constantinople as the full return and home-coming of the Trojans (territorially and religiously, to the true God). This Byzantine scheme also handled Germanic and Slavic materials in a manner similar to what the West did and in competition with the West even before the Great Schism between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches.

Just some additional complicating factors to factor in.

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Mircea Eliade in his The Sacred and the Profane, Myth and Reality, and Cosmos and History uses the following analogy. If you know anything about Platonism, changing appearances of the physical world are only "real" to the extent they participate in the eternal forms. Well, in one way that also denigrated myth by making story ultimately not real, Plato still continues the mythic way of viewing the cosmos in this relation of physical appearances in the realm of becoming to the forms. How did Plato continue while undermining the mythic way of seeing things? In this, according to Eliade, historical events and persons are only significant and "real" if they participate in the mythic paradigm. Where the mythic view differs from Plato is that the mythic paradigm, instead of being a static form, is the real and "big story". A things worth remembering either participate and reflect this reality or are insignificant and "not real". Our "time" is real to the extent it embodies and participates in "that primordial and paradigmatic real time"; our "history" is real to the extent it embodies and participates in "that real primordial and paradigmatic real history". In IE mythic traditions, one might say that it is not so much that one is made in the image of God but that one's whole life conforms to, reflects, and is made in the image of the entire mythic story or one really never lived or was a person of substance; in that case one may have existed but never lived -- was never "real". With that mindset, real concrete historical individuals also consciously tried to make their great deeds conform to the mythic paradigm available (in a way, they sort of made their conformity with mythic reality others would later remember a self-fulfilling prophecy -- instead of imitation of christ it was imitation of the myth as a spiritual way.

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Anyway, trying to remember some questions without going back to look, yes, I can provide an IE Bibliography. I think it should be an annotated one that also explains the relations between works (as well as whether new developments make some parts of these works no longer valid and where the author might have originally changed his or her mind).

The annotation may also need a bibliography. For example, some of the sources IE studies use are works not directly dealing with IE as a topic itself. So, for example, some works are on Islam or Tantric Buddhism but deal with IE materials. For example, Henry Corbin, in a work on Sufism, treats the relation of fravashi and valkyries. In some works on Zoroastrianism, we hear discussion of a "demonization" of Vayu so that he becomes the prototype for Angra Mainyu who is the opponent of Ahura Mazda (Deivos, Varuna) which also matches Baltic materials where Deivos and Velnias (Vayu-Odin) are often at odds if not enemies like they are in Zoroastrian tradition. Or a work on Vedic religion may not be concerned about IE themes but establishes the identity of Vayu = Rudra = Siva (the Maruts are loaned to Indra by Vayu and are also called the Rudriyas). Another scholar, not knowing of this study may still do an independent study on the similarity of Siva and Odin and Loki just from the standpoint of literary criticism and analysis of characters.

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Re: IE Bibliography?

Let me start with eight and an outline scheme found in IE materials with lots of variations on the theme in this scheme.

Here is a very brief IE Bibliography to start with. First, I need to outline a basic scheme that we find reflected in all Indo-European materials and descendent cultures. Draw a triangle. Next, draw two horizontal lines through the triangle at roughly equal heights. Third, draw a vertical line down through the apex of the triangle. The three horizontal layers represent the “three worlds (each threefold themselves so its ninefold total)” of celestial heaven, atmospheric-heaven, and earth. Each of these levels contain more than their physical symbol which is a manifestation of and symbol of higher nonphysical realms. The two halves divided by the vertical line divide, symbolically, daylight and public and public law side from the nighttime and private morals and magic side. The primordial gods that occupy all three levels (asuras or vanir) tend to have less mythology associated with them making them more abstract, or giving them more of a dignified transcendent mystery, and also making them harder to discern in the different cultural inflections of IE material. This order of gods are collectively described as the older and more primordial gods, the sovereign gods, the possessors of the world-frame, and the gods who by their nature are immortal. This order is first Dyauspiter (Diespitar, Jupiter, Ziupiter, Ziuvater, Tyrvater, Tyr, Deivos). Dyaus has two aspects corresponding to the daylight and nighttime sides. These are Mitra-Aryaman (Irmin in Germanic lore) corresponding to the dayside and Varuna corresponding to the night side. Think of one godhead with multiple persons (like the Christian trinity). Dyaus is the father of the primordial atmospheric god the sun, Vivasvant-Surya (another Surya, different accent, is the suns daughter, Vivasvant is also know as the heavenly Agni-Heimdall), and of (or alternatively, grandfather of with Vivasvant being the father of) the terrestrial divine twin gods as well as the ancestral human twins (yemo and manu, Yama and Manu, Yima, Yayati, Nordic Ymir and Mimir, Germanic Tuisto and Mannus, and Roman Remus and Romulus).

The primordial goddesses are Aditi (heavens as womb), Prthivi (Mother Earth), Saraswati (wisdom), as well as a few others.

Note: humans have a joint ancestry. One is solar. One is lunar. For example, in Persian lore, humans have a solar descent from Yima and a lunar descent from Mah and Mahryang (both meaning moon). Humans have a postmortem choice to follow the solar path of the gods or the lunar path of the fathers-ancestors.

Now, after the original cosmos is attacked or something goes wrong, it is re-ordered and a new race of warrior gods, the devas, emerge to defend and protect. It is with this something going wrong that the primordial sacrifice/attack on the cosmic man/god (yemo, prajapati), cosmic bovine, and the cosmic tree/plant occurs. The Vedic Purusha means cosmic “man-bovine-plant” out of which emerges a new making to protect and defend a mortalized life as well as an underworld realm to protect the dead until the attack and war ends. In contrast to the older gods, these have a lot of mythological stories attached to them. They are the action heroes in center stage, so to speak. Also, in contrast to the primordial gods, their immortality is contingent upon a regular supply of soma/haoma/mead/ambrosia/ambrotas and upon their interdependency of fulfilling their roles as upholders and defenders of cosmic order again chaos. They are also dependent on all of life that feeds them as them transform the energies they draw from all of life and return back to strengthen life. These gods can also make mistakes and are fallible. The two primary gods of this new generation, corresponding to the atmospheric level mentioned above, is Thor/Parjanya/Perkunas/Perkun, corresponding to the daylight side, and Odin/Vata/Vayu/Rudra/Siva, corresponding to the nightside. So, now, you have the same triangle with three levels and two sides but also a warrior god overlay (back in the day of overhead projectors, this was a transparency laid on top of the original triangle). As part of this overlay, Agni is reborn into this group from seven or nine mothers as is Heimdall, Tyr/Dyaus, and Mitra (who comes at the end of the war to heal all things).

Anyway, the very short bibliography;

Dumezil, Georges. Gods of the Ancient Northmen. University of California Press, 1973.

“ “ . Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty, Zone Books, 1988.

“ “ .The Destiny of a King. University of Chicago Press, 1973.

“ “ . The Stakes of the Warrior (its at my office so I don’t have the publisher info).

Lincoln, Bruce. Priests, Warriors, and Cattle. University of California Press, 1981.

“ “ . Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation and Destruction. Harvard University Press, 1986.

Littleton, C. Scott. The New Comparative Mythology (its also at my office so I don’t have publisher info).

Puhvel, Jaan. Comparative Mythology (Indo-European). Johns Hopkins University Press (going by memory so can’t recall the date).

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>>So you're saying that, in comparison to Varuna "incarnating" as a deva, Tyr is the "incarnation" of a previous deity. Which generation would he be from originally? And which earlier deity would he be?

: Tyr-Varuna are two aspects of the same sovereign god.

>>In the Greek pantheon, Uranos is believed to equate to Varuna. Is there any surviving story about Uranos "incarnating" as another, later-generation deity?

: the linkage between Varuna and Uranus/Ouranos is an old one that no longer holds up under current linguistic research nor does Polome's earlier, and now disavowed, view that Vata and Varuna were originally the same -- that is no longer a viable hypothesis either. Although Dumezil is somewhat correct that Odin later absorbs some of Varuna's traits; both are binders and magicians and expert spellcrafters.

>>My knowledge of Vedic and Greek mythologies is very poor, so I've had to go searching the internet for information. I came across the book Gods, Sages and Kings: Vedic Secrets of Ancient Civilization by David Frawley over at Google Books. Let me just quote a bit of it, which starts with the author quoting someone else (whose name isn't included in the online sample), so I can show my poor footing on this subject:

: Frawley is not a good source outside of Hindu Ayurveda and Tantra.

>>"A History of the Uranides, a war between the generations of deities relates: in the beginning was Elyun, the Most high, succeeded by Uranus. He is dethrones and emasculated by his son Cronos, who is Elos, but he has an avenger in the person of Zeus, who is Adados, now king of the Gods. There too we find the names of Semitic deities: Elyun is Elyon, who is named in an Aramean inscription and his is the title of the God of Israel in the Psalms; Cronus-Elos is El; Zeus-Adados is Hadad, the name of the Aramean storm God coupled with Zeus in the Hellenic period.

>>"The first God is succeeded by Uranus/Varuna (to equate the Greek and the Sanskrit) who establishes the cosmic order. He is overthrown by his son Chronos or Saturn, who is the God of time and death, the demiurge (Vedic Vritra) who eats his own children. Varuna's rule is reestablished by Jupiter (Zeus-Indra) , whose wisdom brings immortality and returns us to the eternal Father. This is a common ancient myth, Aryan and Semitic."

: this is a bit of Vedic reconstructionism that Frawley is involved in that wants to claim the ancient and original civilization on the planet is the Vedic civilization as envisioned by the Hare Krishnas so take his stuff on the Vedas with a grain of salt. Its also part of a larger movement in India tied to the Jannata Bharatiya Party and Hindutva.

>>So if I understand this correctly, Varuna/Uranos is the father of ??/Cronus, who is the father of Indra/Jupiter? How would these deities fit into the Norse pantheon -- who equates to whom and such?

: Frawley is claiming that Varuna is killed by Vrtra and reborn as Indra-Odin-Jupiter. This has more of doing new creative mythologizing to push the cultural worldview of those like the Hare Krishnas (see another one in this camp, Stephen Knapp) using IE materials rather than an accurate reconstruction of what the original myth originally was.

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Re: IE Bibliography?

I forgot to add that with the emergence of warrior-gods emerges what Dumezil documents and describes as the tri-partite social structure of priests-magicians at the apex, warrior-kings at the middle-level, and husbandmen-farmers-craftsmen at the lower level.

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Brief Vedic Biblio

Some books on Vedic religion that I've found useful.

Griswold, The Religion of the Rgveda (older but still useful).

Johnson, Willard. Poetry and Speculation of the Rgveda. Univ. of California Press, 1986.

Poetry, riddles, and puzzles ritually recited were methods to evoke visionary experiences that in turn enhanced poetic expression. Great mantras (poetic turns of phrase) were brahman phrases (phrases with power). Brahman started out as a term that designated the power of word-magic or mantra. It becomes the warrior drinking boast in Nordic traditions and is the word our "brag" comes from. A true brag, even if it had elements of a fishing story, appeared to "psyche" warriors and priests up for great deeds. Such brags appear to not be taken to be literally true but true of the character of the person even if it did not really happen. Such provides a cautionary note on ancient myths. Were all of they believed in literally like a fundamentalist Christian believes the Bible or are some of them "true boasts" which were known not to have literally happened but are psychologically true of a god or heroes' character? Later, it is the binding and great-making power that mutually feeds the gods as they and humans feed it in an interdependent network of mutual reciprocity of co-dependence upon a collectively shared life-force. Later, brahman displaces the gods and goddesses but for a while it was more like the "force" in Star Wars and before that -- a powerful mantra.

Staal, Fritz. Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar. (a massive two volume study with recordings) This is valuable also because it provides a basis on which to piece together what scraps of information we have on Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Roman ritual.

Woodard has a new book out on Vedic and Roman Ritual Space (Roman ritual is practically identical to that of Vedic ritual except the whole city of Rome was one big altar) but the shape and orientation of the three fires at Germanic sites indicate a great deal of conservatism in terms of rites and rituals: round hearth fire in the west from which the other ritual fires were lit. Due east, a square sacrificial fire and due east of it a pole or tree. Either southwest or northeast, Vedic and Germanic sites had a crescent shaped protecting fire.

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Another historical biblio Formation Zoroastrianism Judaism Christianity

This might be slightly off topic but it overlaps to the extent that it refers you to some works on IE influence, through Zoroastrianism, on the formation of Judaism and Christianity.

You could also think of it as an anti-harassment education reading list next time you get into a religion debate with Christians.

In case anyone is interested in having some “ammo” if they are engaged with Christians in debate or the formation of these religions, here is a summary of what the research methodologies of the History of Religion discovered about Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible’s formation. The usual Christian view of the history of these is more “myth” (in their sense of the word) than fact (sort of an idealized myth of divine origins). Brief bibliography will follow.

Judaism and Christianity Overview

Briefly, what we find in the history of Judaism is the gradual development from polytheism to henotheism to monotheism. At first, the god(s) of the Hebrews is (are) just ethnic and tribal. The god of the Hebrews is their god while neighboring nations have their own gods. As Israel struggles with other nations and peoples, so the Hebrew god struggles with the god of the other people. What mistakenly looks like the exclusivism of monotheism (an image promoted by Christians) – there is only one God – is really at this early phase a form of ethnic exclusivism, in effect, “we worship only our god of our people”. Eventually, at a late phase, Judaism is re-made into a universal monotheism where the Hebrew god is envisioned as God, creator of the universe, under the tutelage of Zoroastrianism. It is from Zoroastrianism that later ancient Judaism’s messianic expectation develops.

Jesus of Nazareth was a follower of John the Baptist. When John was imprisoned and killed, Jesus began his own ministry. Basically, both were preaching the end-times had arrived. Jesus literally was going around preaching that the end of the world had arrived and that “some now living will see the Messiah come before they die”. Historically, Jesus looks like an end-of-the-world-is-here nut.

A wide and very strange variety of Christianities arose after the death of Jesus. Some of these early Christianities did not think that the crucifixion had any religious significance at all. They saw Jesus as just another martyred prophet and continued to preach his message of the coming (soon) of a new age-kingdom. Other versions claimed to have had visionary experiences of a transfigured Jesus-figure from the heavens (Gnosticism grows out of these). These many different Christianities had many different scriptures.

The strain that would become the exclusive form of Christianity (and the exclusive form of the New Testament) we know after Constantine made it the only legal version and stamped out the others also underwent a development that does not sit well with fundamentalists views of origins. First, the earliest strata in what became the New Testament depicts the resurrection-appearances as visionary experiences. About 70 to a 100 years later, after the gospels were written we see a creative process of changing the basic story line about the resurrection (we have about 5446 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. These copies don’t agree enough of the time to lead one leading New Testament scholar to say there are more disagreements in these manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. But we can also see they have undergone several editorial revisions and radical theological makeovers well into the 600s C.E. Examples: Mark has three endings that are noted in footnotes in most modern Bibles, Matthew is a condensed version of an older and much longer Matthew, Paul’s fight with Peter/Cephas and the Jerusalem Church is toned way down in later copies of his epistles and Acts is a late propaganda work on “early Christian unity” probably written by Polycarp or one of his students with a radical re-working of Luke – the olde proto-Luke looks almost Gnostic). This creative re-writing of the resurrection visionary experiences moves it first to the cross. The crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension are the same event. Jesus dies on the cross and Christ is seen from the heavens. Then there is some conflicting “christologies” developing in these materials of whether Jesus was or was not the Christ, and if so, when. Roughly, in developmental order, Jesus becomes the Christ during his ascension-exaltation on the cross, then a new theory that he becomes the Christ when baptized by John in the Jordan, then late nativity narratives are tacked on to affirm Jesus was the Christ at birth. Finally, in the last gospel written, one very late addition is made to John, Jesus was the pre-existent logos from the beginning of time. In this process, Christians writing in separate places try to develop a “canonical” set of resurrection appearances to control the proliferation of prophets and apostles claiming the resurrected Jesus appeared to them (and thus, commissioned them to teach). The oldest is Jesus appeared first to Peter (this is in Corinthians and contradicts the later gospel account of appearing to the women – which ever women were there since the gospels conflict on this too), then to the 12,…and finally, to Paul (Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus is what the early resurrection appearances appear to have actually been like). The last development is the whole-hog invention of “empty-tomb” narratives tacked onto the gospels after they were written and edited and revised several times through the hands of several “editors/co-authors”. These empty-tomb narratives radically contradict each other on close reading. Second, we find Paul (and his followers) re-making a version of Christianity from being a messianic Jewish sect into a Hellenistic Mystery Religion.

Judaism went through four major phases of development. These are:

1. Pre-exilic Judaism

2. Exilic Judaism (Babylonian Captivity)

3. Post-exilic Judaism (also called “Second Temple Judaism”)

4. Rabbinic or Tannaitic Judaism (from the destruction

Pre-exilic Judaism (1040 to 586 B.C.E.)

Pre-exilic Judaism displays a conflict between northern tribes of Israel and the southern tribe of Judea that is both political and religious. The northern tribes (1) politically resist or are cautious about the development of the monarchy in the south, and (2) the monarchy’s demand that all worship will be at the Jerusalem temple. The northern tribes worship a god named El (Hebrew cognate to Allah). They worship this god at numerous high places where altars are set up since ancient (for them) times. Each of these high places where El is worshipped adds a local name to El so that you get El Shaddai, El Shiloh, El Gabr (Gabriel), and so on, which are collectively, the elohim (plural of El).

In practice, the situation amongst looks like a residual polytheism slowly developing into a monotheistic confederation (the confederation of tribes leading to a mutual recognition that “your el shaddai” is the same as our “el Shiloh). In the formation of the Old Testament of the Bible’s oldest strata, the elohist traditions can still be detected and extracted out from the biblical text.

The next oldest strata in the Old Testament of the Bible is the jahwist source material which also can be extracted out from the other materials. This is the material of the southern kingdom of Judea. Instead of El, the Hebrew god is Yahweh. Yahweh was originally a Midianite war god who lived on a mountain (Sinai) and threw thunderbolts down from it. Yahweh (like Zeus and Typhon, Marduk and Tiamat, etc) is also a dragon-slayer god. Annually, on the new year (as part of a religious celebration of symbolic re-creation where order is symbolically re-asserted over chaos) the divine hero of order, Yahweh (and symbolically the king of Israel-Judea), once again symbolically defeats the dragon representing chaos, Leviathian. The southern Judaean jahwist tradition criticizes the northern traditions that maintain their separate high places of worship as well as the north’s hesitant allegiance to the monarchy. The southern yahwist tradition ideologically pushes for all worship to be done exclusively at the Jerusalem temple (advocates for a Jerusalem temple monopoly), all power to be completely consolidated to the monarchy, and calls for the destruction (leading to battles between the tribe of Judea and the northern tribes of Israel) of the high places of worship in the north.

The other two strata we can find in the Old Testament are exilic and post-exilic redactions called the “priestly source” and “deutero-source”. So, we have E, J, P, and D sources in the Old Testament.

Exilic Judaism (722 B.C.E. or 586 B.C.E. to 539 B.C.E.)

Israel is divided after Solomon into the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judea. The northern kingdom is conquered by the Assyrians in 722 B.C.E.

The southern kingdom falls to the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E.

Briefly, Judaism re-makes itself into the image of Zoroastrianism. The Hebrew god becomes the God of the universe, creator, the power of good in battle with the forces of darkness and the devil as fallen angels, this battle will culminate in a final battle where evil is defeated forever by a Savior, and this will be followed by a general resurrection. Yahweh is no longer a tribal war god but the one God.

Meanwhile, the northern tribes that were not taken into exile build their own northern temple complex. This temple will survive after the destruction of the southern temple and Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E. These northern people are depicted in the latter parts of the Bible as low-caste and inferior types. This legacy of the original northern tribes not taken into captivity will be known in the New Testament as the Samaritans.

Post-exilic Judaism

Briefly, this is the Judaism of the time of Jesus where, under Roman rule, messianic expectancy reaches a fever pitch leading to a war with Rome that results in the destruction of the second Jerusalem temple as well as Jerusalem itself with Jews throw out of the land and banned from returning. Jesus (or in the eyes of some of his early followers) was just one of the minor claimants to messianic pretensions.

Rabbinic Judaism

This form of Judaism took form over the years after the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem. It also took form after Christianity began its ascendency. Somewhat paradoxically, the Hebrew canon of the Old Testament that the Protestants believed was the older and original Old Testament (in rejecting the Catholic and Orthodox canon based on the older Greek Old Testament) was formed at this time also.

Christianity

Develops out of the end-of-the-world cult of John the Baptist and Jesus into a Mystery Religion about Christ as the dying and resurrecting savior.

Brief Bibliography (with comments and in no particular order)

General Introduction

Hayes, John. Introduction to the Bible. Westminister Press. (pretty much a “conservative” overview of everything stated above in an introductory undergraduate text for New Testament, Bible, and History of Religion majors, includes discussions of E, J, P, D, northern and southern conflicts between El and Yahweh worshippers, the Zoroastrian make-over, John the Baptist and Jesus as end-of-the-world preachers, gradual formation of resurrection stories and their contradictions, Paul as the inventor of Christianity as we know it, and the pushing back of the millennium as the end of the world prophesied by Jesus doesn’t come as he predicted.).

Von Rad, Gerhard. Old Testament Theology. 2 vols. (the standard textbook on the development of the Old Testament and Judaism. Advanced undergraduate or introductory graduate level. Historically accurate but also trying to maintain the Lutheran faith in the face of historical facts. It is the balancing act that historians of religion who remain Christian play and learned from him amongst others.)

Oesterley, W.O. An Introduction to the Books of the Old Testament. (an older text but still useful. Oesterley essentially presents the same results von Rad does but is occasionally a little more frank and blunt about consequences for Christian belief).

Eissfeldt, Otto. The Old Testament: A History of its Formation. (older but still useful.)

Sheehan, . The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity. (essentially an overview for the general reader of what was sketched above by an ex-Catholic Jesuit who is now a professor of philosophy at University of Chicago).

Ehrman, Bart. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and Faiths We Never Knew (a summary of 300 years of New Testament and Early Christianity research that has become a consensus for the general reader by one of the leading New Testament scholars today. He started out as a conservative evangelical Christian and shares his story about how he changed as he learned about what the historical facts were as he mastered the field and found his faith challenged. He has become a favorite target of evangelicals but academically his research is sound and they work themselves into a deeper frenzy when their attacks are shown to have no substance.)

“ “. Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. (Ehrman’s book summarizing what has been a consensus view in academia about who and what the historical Jesus was for the general reader and the challenges it poses to Christian faith).

“ “ . The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. (Ehrman’s undergraduate college textbook on the formation of the New Testament).

“ “. The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effects of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament. (solid and academic – advanced).

“ “. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. (popular summary of his academic Orthodox Corruption for general readership)

Schweitzer, A. The Quest for the Historical Jesus. (the first classic summary of the results of the first phase of historical Jesus research as it stood in the early 20th century. Jesus is an end-of-the-world prophet who was dead wrong.)

Schweitzer, A. The Mysticism of the Apostle Paul. (Schweitzer’s academic work on Paul as the creator of Christianity as a Mystery Religion).

Reitzenstein. The Hellenistic Mystery Religions. (a more heavy going work as the above).

Bultmann, R. Jesus and the Word (pre-eminent New Testament scholar of the 20th century summarized new research into historical Jesus through the 1940s and 1950s. Basically, the same story told by Schweitzer, and Ehrman).

Bornkamnn, Gunther. Jesus of Nazareth. (student of Bultmann and a major New Testament scholar updating Bultmann’s views into the 1970s. Essentially the same findings as summarized in Schweitzer, Bultmann, Ehrman)

Robinson, J. The New Quest for the Historical Jesus. (brief academic summary of the second, Bultmannian phase of research and essentially reinforces the emerging “consensus” of Jesus as end-of-the-worlder preacher who was wrong).

Metzger, Bruce. The Canon of the New Testament: its Origin, Development, and Significance. (advanced textbook by the current foremost leader in the field at Princeton).

Fuller, Reginald. The Formation of Resurrection Narratives in the New Testament. (a solid and historically accurate study of the creation of the myth of the resurrection from visionary experiences to the late empty tomb narratives while, like von Rad, trying to save Christian faith in a Lutheran perspective in face of historical facts that the resurrection is a historical fiction).

Koestler, Helmut. Early Christian Gospels. (advanced introduction to early Christian scriptures, both those that made it into our New Testament and those which did not, by one of Bultmann’s outstanding students and acclaimed historian of early Christianity at Harvard University).

“ “ . Introduction to the New Testament. 2 vols. (Koestler’s advanced textbook on New Testament).

Ludeman, Gerd. The Resurrection: A Historical Study (an advanced academic study of the early resurrection accounts, their formation, and its status as a historical fiction. Ludemann was one of the leading New Testament scholars in Germany until he actually stopped playing the historian/believer – two headed don’t let your right hand/believer know what your left hand/historian self knows – balancing act and frankly and publically announced the resurrection never happened. Since you have to be a believing Lutheran to hold a professorship in Germany, he was forced to resign. He is now at Vanderbilt University here in Nashville as Professor of New Testament).

“ “ . What Really Happened to Jesus: A Historical Approach to the Resurrection. (Ludemann’s later popular summary of his academic work above with a discussion of the politics involving losing his German professorship).

Neusner, Jacob. Faith, Truth and Freedom: The Expulsion of Gerd Ludemann from the Theology Faculty at Gottingen. (a bit of an aside but a collection of documents and papers discussing them and academic freedom edited by one of the worlds foremost scholars of Judaism, Jacob Neusner.)

“ “. Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism in Talmudic Babylon. (Jacob Neusner’s study of the interactions of these religions in later antiquity)

“ “. Judaism and Zoroastrianism in the Dusk of Antiquity. (another follow up study by Neusner).

(I forget the author). Zoroastrianism and Israel. (older book)

Carter, George. Zoroastrianism and Judaism (older work on the Zoroastrian influence on Judaism reprinted in 2008. There are a whole bunch of titles on the Zoroastrian influence on Judaism that are found in academic journals, such as Journal for the Academy of Religion and History of Religion, as well as in several books on Judaism, Zoroastrianism, or early Christianity as collected articles or as chapters, for example, in his the Zoroastrian Faith, Nigosian briefly touches on the relation and then refers to prior studies.).

Tomasino, A. Judaism Before Jesus. (A popular work that touches on the Zoroastrian influence on Judaism).

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Short Religion and History of Religion Biblio

General Philosophy of Religion

Westphal, Merold. God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenological Philosophy of Religion (provides a useful typology of kinds of religions and the meaning-function of religion in human life and experience).

Taliaferro, Charles. A Contemporary Introdcution to the Philosophy of Religion.

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and Profane.

" " . The Myth of the Eternal Return (Cosmos and History)

" " . Patterns of Comparative Religion

History of Religion

Cone (or Kone). The Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (this work works nicely with Elaide's Myth of the Eternal Return -- both are on how religions pattern time and it also discusses Zoroastrianism as the source of apocalyptic faith and how it got from there to Judaism and Christianity).

Eliade, Mircea. A History of Religious Ideas. (3 vols) An overview of the history of religion from stone age to present. Also covers IE religion and its descendent religious cultures as well as the developments of Judaism under Zoroastrian influence, the emergence of gnosticism as "offspring" of Judaism and Zoroastrianism, early Christianity and Mystery Religions, all the way down to the 19th and 20th century occult revival coming out of gnostic and hermetic roots, etc.).

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Re: Re: Brief Vedic Biblio

I see I will have to add a Zoroastrian biblio. I worked up a fairly comprehensive one quite a while back when I learned another had already done it. I know of a few things that are not in his. This bibliography is so big, it is its own book (not so unusual). Look for Ancient Iran and Zoroastrianism: CSR Bibliographic Studies in Religion, Willard Gurdon Oxtoby. I will add to that later.

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Re: Myths as Brags/brahman and ritual

This is straight Indo-European. Brahman also applied to pregnancy as a condition containing a swelling potency of life so also could a great phrase, riddle, or action.

Besides J. Miller's book The Vision of Cosmic Order in the Rgveda (where we find the gods are mutually interdependent in a life-energy ecology, so to speak, in maintaining rta (order) and ritual is sort of a guided meditation/magical exercise like what is referred to as a performance tantra in Tibetan Buddhism), Johnson's book Poetry and Speculation (where brahman is the magical power of certain mantras that strengthen the bonds of this shared life-force or spiritedness), I refer you to four other books that address the animating spirit (pun intended) of Indo-European ritual. These are the Agni book, a book on Zoroastrian ritual by Jamsheed Choksy titled Purity and Pollution: Triumph Over Evil, Lincoln's book on Indo-European creation and destruction themes, and Brian K Smith's book on Vedic religion and ritual as constructivist-magic titled Reflections on Resemblance.

To begin, we might ask why is the word "religion" the word we use for religion? Part of the reason is Indo-European myth of the primal sacrifice of purusa, prajapati, yima/yama, tuisto/ymir. Religion is cognate with and also derived from a host of related terms connected with ligaments and ligature. It is to make connections or actually re-connect connections dismembered and now re-membered. The sacrifice is not only a symbolic re-doing of that primal sacrifice but also a reintegration of that primal being's ligaments. But now instead of a primal one, there is an integrated "we" made strong by our spirited solidarity, familial, kinship, and brahman-bonds as a network of life against anti-life.

One of the key transformations from Vedic religion to classical Hinduism is that this constructivist sense drops out of the picture. The tenor of the way Vedic texts are read changes. Imagine someone raving at an NFL game that their team is eternally the best ever in this game. In context, we can agree it is true and recognize it is a exclamation. Now imagine someone later hears the statement or hears about it and takes it as true but not as an exclamation. A whole different set of inferences about what it means is set up. The Vedic exclamations about brahman as the animating spirit or spiritedness of life shared by living beings (divine animal human) is turned into some kind of substantial fact. Brahman was the overwhelmingly healthy boastfulness of life and the life-bonds shared by all living beings against anti-life. Then it becomes more like a thing behind the scenes, the real thing. In the Vedic texts, for example, celebrating brahman as "one without a second" is a exclamation and boast that it has no rivals, it is without peer, it is unsurpassed. The change in tenor we find in classical Hinduism reads the same sentence as a factual nonexclamatory statement of metaphysics. The first does not point to a monism and is made in the context of a vigorous polytheism. The second is read as meaning the gods (and other living beings) are not so real because brahman has become understood as the monistic one. IE ritual is rehearsing that original dismemberment but it is also constructing the bonds that make life stronger, the gods stronger, humans stronger, the bond between gods and humans stronger and re-members the ligaments of purusa and prajapati. It is a meditative and tantra-like magic process of celebrating the original dismemberment (de-ligamentizing) that re-integrates and re-members Prajapati who is now all of life as a "we" in solidarity. In the ritual, as Johnson brings out, there were contests between priests (similar to the drinking boasts between warriors in the mead hall) on who could create the most brahman mantra. Sometimes this involved exaggerating a story about a god that is a boast yet true of that god's character and helps empower/feed that god's energy level. Thor going fishing for the Midgard serpent is a likely example. Its a brag that is true to (true as bond, as faithful loyalty) and true of the god's character even if it didn't literally happen that way. These priests would sing a mantra and another would go "pretty good" but that is not how I heard the story, his deeds were even greater than that!

Johnson calls these exchanges during the sacrifice "ritual symposiums". And as brahman mantras, as true boasts-brags (like the glowing smugness of a woman in a certain stage of pregnancy), the sacrificial process of reintegrating that primal being of life and empowering the sacrifice, humans and gods and the bonds between them is accomplished.

As Smith points out, Vedic religion is constructivist in that one had to magically build one's immortality. Atman was created by great deeds. Atman (one's inner bond to brahman) was not something you were born with but something you achieved and accomplished. And, in a way, it is the inner sacrifice of re-integrating Prajapati. Symbolically, in IE ritual space, *you* are purusa and *you* (microcosmic purusa) are being re-integrated and re-connected with stronger ligaments to the rest of life (macrocosmic purusa).

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Tonight or tomorrow, I'll post another biblio list. I think I'll also post more on Rydberg's methodology. Acknowledged or not, its what is being used these days especially focussing on what a character does in a story rather than a character's name -- that's how you identify the person behind the polynominalism.

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Dyaus Pitar = Varuna, was Tyr and Varuna

The evidence for the identity of Dyauspitr-Tyr with Varuna and Mitra is rather extensive but scattered all over the place in Celtic-Zoroastrian comparative studies, Celtic-Vedic comparative studies, and in Zoroastrian-Vedic comparative studies. Kuipner and Boyce made the strongest case for their identity. But another recent bit is a restored Proto-Indo-European text found in several Indo-European traditions that an international team were asked to restore in terms of what the original Proto-Indo-European text would have been based on the later texts that are almost verbatim reflections of each other (similar cases occur when, say, a koine Greek passage from the Bible is translated into kindred languages such as modern Greek, classical Greek, etc. or an Old English text is translated into Middle English and Modern English and then a German translation is found.

Anyway, here is the best and latest reconstructed PIE text where a human ruler is childless and beseeches the divine father of all fathers (father of all or all-father), Deiwos Werunos.

To rḗḱs éh1est. So n̥putlos éh1est. So rēḱs súhnum éwel(e)t. Só tós(j)o ǵʰeutérm̥ (e)pr̥ḱsḱet: "Súhxnus moi ǵn̥h1jot�m!" So ǵʰeutēr tom rḗǵm̥ éweukʷet: "Ihxgeswo deiwóm Wérunom". So rḗḱs deiwóm Werunom h4úpo-sesore nu deiwóm (é)ihxgeto. "ḱludʰí moi, phater Werune!" Deiwós Wérunos km̥ta diwós égʷehat. "Kʷíd welsi?" "Wélmi súxnum." "Tód h1éstu", wéukʷet loukós deiwos Werunos. Rēǵós pótniha súhnum gegonh1e.

The key phrase is

"phater Werune! (father of all or all-father Varuna) Deiwos Werunos (Deivos Varuna or Dyaus Varuna)."

Hamp's/Sen's version from The Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. edited by J.P.Mallory and D.Q Adams. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishing, 1997: 503,

Zimmer some years back showed that Dyauspitar, Varuna, and the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda are all referred to by the single term Asura/Ahura, as Chief Aditya, as all-Father. Given the polynomialism noted by Rydberg, we have all three also called 'Bhaga" and "Apam Napat". All four names are uniquely referred to as Medhira/Mazda "THE Wise". (Zimmer, Münchner Studien 1984:187-215). Mary Boyce (Zoroastrian and Indo-Iranian expert) concurs in her discussion of an inscription from ancient Persia. One of the Artaxerxes (3?) has an prayer to "ahuramazda ura mithra baga" (Boyce, Acta Iranica 21, 1981:59-73) and they are called "highest lord" (ahura berezanta).

A fragment of an evening prayer in Lithuania where forgiveness of any misdeeds or dishonourable thoughts is asked for from Deivos is nearly identical to the Grihya (Vedic domestic householder rituals) evening prayer asking the same thing but addressed to Varuna. If I remember right, this is mentioned in Oldenberg somewhere. Plus, Varuna is the god of the people's assembly where healing in the matters of justice - rta and dharma -- are worked out in reconciliation. Tyr is the god of the Thing.

More to come later....

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Re: Dyaus Pitar = Varuna, was Tyr and Varuna

>>One thing that I think is worthy of further study are the modifications made by various Indo-European groups as they moved away from their homelands, and here I am speaking of modifications that bespeak not merely meme-drift due to time, but possible disputations over various issues that give different emphases to the different IE traditions.

: I'm not sure what you mean. But the main "dispute" we find is between warrior gods and the older generation. War between Vanir and Aesir. In someplaces in Sweden and Iceland, we have evidence of Thor being opposed to the "evil" Odin (farming peoples opposed to the coastal marauders) or refugees from Norwegian kings opposed to Odin (as their patron). In the Baltic, Odin/Velnias has become the "devil" opposed by Perkunas/Thor and Deivos Varunas. In Zoroastrianism, Indra becomes a demon in the service of Angra Mainyu and Vayu is split into the "good" Vayu and the "evil" Vayu. Some have postulated that maybe Odin-Loki were a single deity that underwent a similar split. I don't find that likely. There were always the giants/demons.

With the Tajik alpine tribes, we find a very primitive strata. There we see an older pastoralist phase where the warrior gods never emerge as such. Warriors appeared, it seems, because of cattle-rustling (Lincoln's Priests, Warriors, etc). Before that, so to speak, they were "cowboys" or hunters. So, Thor releases the rains on the plains and mountains and Vayu brings the winds and Visnu is the light of the wide open spaces.

Another very old strata is with the Kalash people. There Indra has become the good/rain and warrior protector that chases off the bad/storm and raider, Vayu. This seems to reflect the struggle between pastoralists and cattle thieves (funny bit, here Odin/Vayu is the "demon" of the Muslims" "fury" and jihad.)

>>What were the disputes that caused the breakup of peoples in the first place, and sent them wandering all about?

There is no evidence they broke up due to disputes. The cause appears to be climate change (which in legend they all put down to the terrible winter of the north) associated with the end of the last ice age. Rich pasture lands and forests were no longer watered by rivers formed by runoff from the glaciers as the glaciers melted and retreated. These plains became too barren to sustain a population and its herds. They literally started the migrations to find greener pastures.

Rydberg and Saxo uncover a difference in the intensity and minutiae of religious worship when Odin is exiled ; when he returns, he returns things to a simpler basis.

Which in the various IE traditions is common, which is merely different from meme-drift, and which are divergences that bespeak ideological differences?

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Re: Re: Dyaus Pitar = Varuna, was Tyr and Varuna

Two brief comments and questions. At one point below, you say you have to see the "originals". What do you mean by that? For example, we have no original Greek New Testament text and that is the best attested ancient manuscript tradition we have. There are +/- 5446 Greek manuscripts of parts of the New Testament. The oldest is dated from 125 years after the "events" it is purportedly about, comes from the 18th chapter of the gospel of John, and is the size of a credit card. Moreover, one prominent NT scholar put it, there are more disagreements and manuscript variations in these manuscripts than there are words in the NT. It is a big question of whether oldest should be trusted more than later. It is also a big question of whether the majority should be trusted. We know of several versions of Mark, 3 versions of Matthew, and two or three versions of Luke. Some letters attributed to Paul are conclusively not his. The Greek New Testament (Nestle-Arland) that is internationally used as the scholarly edition is a probable reconstruction, and in some cases, construction (since there are no autographs aka first originals and no means to judge which version is better) based on our best educated guesses. The Vedic texts and Mahabharata have similar issues. So does Snorri. So, just at the manuscript level what do you mean by "original"? Second, so far I have been giving sources accessible to English-speaking readers. What languages can you read? Also, this especially pertains to your access to the "originals". Translations are even more removed from "originals" than the reconstructed critical editions. Third, you can get books through library loan. Not being able to afford books is not in itself a "refutation". Fourth, I cite older books on points where they are still valid. But you have been citing studies that are 120 to 200 years old. A lot has happened since and because Kessinger Publishing (a reprint house) is publishing these old studies does not bring them up to date. For example, the connection between Varuna and Apam Napat is fairly well established in Vedic, Hindu epic, and Zoroastrian materials (its one reason Varuna becomes a mere ocean god and lunar god in puranic and modern Hinduism). But the original motif, just read the Jaan Puhvel book, was as the night aspect of the sovereign god Deivos, Varuna is the god of the starry deep, of the celestial oceans where the mill turns, of the ocean of a thousand eyes/spies (i.e., stars) and that is why he IS divided up in Celtic lore as Nuada and Nechtan, the puranic Hindu god of oceans, and the Prussian god of night and oceans on the last 50+ years of scholarly work's consensus. I'll provide more biblio in English and other languages but don't then tell me you have to disagree on the basis of you can't afford to buy the books or on the basis of 120 to 200 year old material (which is cited now to the extent it remains valid but on points it is invalid, it is only cited for a while as long as word needs to get out to other researchers it is wrong and here's why and then it drops out of the picture). Borce's argument is that Zarathustra's "reform" was rather "conservative", and thus, Ahura Mazda, Spenta Mainyu and the Amesha Spentas are still pretty close to the nature of the sovereign god and chief of the adityas and the adityas relation to each other. In their case, its not just polynominalism in Rydberg's sense, it is one sovereign entity with multiple personal hypostasis - the best analogy being the Christian Trinity or the Mahayana concept of all the Buddhas. So they are aspects of the sovereign god but also semi-independent persons. This applies strictly and only to the Aditya-group as one of the entities within a polytheistic pantheon and reflects none of the later blending of gods found in the later Vedic materials such as Clara's (as yet unaswered fully on this point) question about henotheism and brags.

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Brags in Modern Heathenry

"I have felt for a long time that the reconstructionist community has confused sacred oaths -- which apply to the LAW, and are the "perjury" spoken of in Voluspa -- with gielps (brags and boasts), which are NOT the same thing, are NOT as binding, and were thought of in a different way.

This is not to say that brags and boasts were not important, and it is not to say that they were not binding.

Certainly one's honor would rise up in ranks amongst one's fellows for fulfilling a boast.

But boasts, as you point out, were more INCITEMENTS to great deeds. In a sense, they were a bold example of what we moderns call "ideals" --- things to stretch for --- and by making an audacious claim towards an ideal, a young person was stretched towards their potential. They were then expected to make a GOOD TRY, a healthy effort, towards fulfilling that boast, no matter how long it would take.

But a boast WAS something thrown into the "well of wyrd", but Wyrd has been too theologized by Bauschatz, becoming too much a repository of history as such, and has lost its resonance of Chance. Wyrd should also have connotations of a Wheel of Fortune, a Roulette Wheel, the Throw of the Dice. Tacitus reports that the Germans were great gamblers.

A boast was a great dice-throw into the roulette wheel of the well of wyrd. It was, by definition, chancy, and very well might not be able to be performed no matter what the utterer might do, because some things lie outside our power and control. But it was, in a sense, a "tempting of fate", and if one was able to win out, one did, in a sense, win back more for the human race from the hands of an impersonal fate, and therefore won appropriate fame for it.

A sacred oath, on the other hand, was something uttered not over ale in a meadhall, but uttered in a law-court, where the literal fate of others was at stake, and where the folk met to determine the truth of things. It was uttered in view of the family hamingja and the gods. In that case, the breaking of an oath was betrayal of the community, of family, and the gods --- a completely different case than someone who merely failed to live up to a boast. Failure to live up to a boast was a disappointment, that would have to be made good later ; failure to honor a sacred oath was perjury, plain and simple.

It seems to me that your suggestion of bringing "brags and boasts" back to something more audacious and the result of competing poets trying to outdo each other in praise --- "competitive praise" --- restores bragging and boasting back to a more Folkloric form. One can open up many books on American folklore, for example, and find Tall Tales and Brags, but I've never seen anyone connect these to the boasts and brags in the Meadhall. No doubt these folkloric forms being separated from religion for over a thousand years have spun off on their own and become far more exaggerated, but it sounds like you are suggesting that there was an element of the boaster in brags to begin with --- yet, it was given a religious context.

To boast in this way is to egg each other on to something greater than one has accepted, and to place oneself within the pathways set down by the Gods. Can one aspire to do deeds like they did? Eliade convincingly argues that even heroes are remembered doing deeds that Gods originally did ; perhaps your theory on brags is the mythopoetic theory that ties all this together".

There is absolutely nothing said above that I disagree with nor that I think conflicts with the historical evidence of our northern traditions.

Let me try to nuance and expand. Before writing, IE traditions were oral, passed down within families and folk. They admit and incorporate within that passing down that they pass on what they best remember. While I agree with Rydberg that there is an original proto-epic, in a way, that was not the important thing in practice -- how one lived. Visiting some of the isolated IE tribes, I was struck that these families had their own tales and version of tales that brought to life what we find in older materials. Analogy: ever been to a series of family re-unions where the "tales" or "lore" of what so and so did don't exactly match but form a living family history? In many respects, ancient theology was something we might have no sense of, good and maybe true and honorable rumors that inspire a folk to not only thrive but strive. They admit they don't have the complete lore (if there is such a thing) nor that their collectively inherited lore (from the gathered families or tribes or folk) totally agrees. Why do they hold true to it and value it? 1. It is the traditions my family passed on to me and I owe who I am to my family. 2. It is not what you believe but what you do. Ancient religions are what scholars call "orthodpraxic" (correct practice) rather than "orthodoxic" (correct belief). So, anciently, it was not a matter of correct knowledge or even agreed upon "belief" (a cheap commodity, which is why Christianity spread most quickly amongst the multi-generational slave class in Rome) but what your elders taught you on how to live with honor (and they would opportunistically draw upon the bits of multiple versions of the inherited lore they knew that helped make the point on a particular occasion). In terms of orthopraxy, the rest was correct ritual and rites. They were sure there was "one true story" (Rydberg) but had a great tolerance for the fact they no longer remembered entire and had to hold onto the conflicting stories -- to the extent they made better sons. That is the larger context within which myth, lore (note, lore rather than dogma), boasts and brags fit -- inspiring greater deeds.

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Book Recommendation Dyaus Pitar = Varuna, was Tyr and Varuna

Another study that by its cover appears not to be on this subject but rather on a totally separate topid of the development of Hindu drama out of Vedic ritual, I recommend (along with most IE and Indologists),

KUIPER, F.B.J., Varuna and Vidusaka. On the origin of the Sanskrit drama. Oxford, 1979. (Leiden Series Description)

A new approach to Vedic religion and an attempt to demonstrate, by means of a detailed analysis of Bharata's Natyasastra, that the oldest form of the Sanskrit drama was a religious coronation ceremony performed for the samraj (universal sovereign) involving the king (embodiment of Varuna) and involving a reiteration of the cosmogony where Varuna (Dyaus) and king become father of the races of gods and men aimed at the renewal of the world that restores fallen Yama.

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Vayu/Odinn Shape-shifting and vampires

On one of the lists I discovered, there was a question about Odinn/Vayu and shapeshifting and vampires. Later, I will post a summary of the works I recommend on the topic of vampires or shape-shifters and Odinn if there is any interest. Anyway, an academic list -- some in German - of solid works.

Kershaw, Kris. The One-eyed God: Odin and the (Indo-) Germanic Männerbünde. Journal of Indo-European Studies. Monograph No. 36.

Wikander, Stig. Vayu: Texte und Untersuchungen zur indo-iranischen Religionsgeschichte : T. 1. Texte, Uppsala, 1941.

Wikander, Stig. Der arische Männerbund : Studien zur indo-iranischen Sprach- und Religionsgeschichte , Uppsala, 1938.

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Re: Vayu/Odinn Shape-shifting and vampires

The original idea isn't sinister. According to the works I mentioned (also found in Dumezil's work on the IE warrior and Lincoln's book on Priests, Warriors and Cattle), there were two types of IE warrior. In today's parlance, we might make the comparison of the distinction between regular rank and file army grunts and special operations.

The regular IE troops fought in formation with coordinated war-chariot and later cavalry tactics. They were under Indra/Perkunas/Thor's protection and patronage.

The special ops warriors were more involved in magic and altered states of consciousness. They were fraternally initiated into totemistic and shamanistic warrior-bands. Prominent totems were the bear, the wolf, the boar, and something else that we can't quite make out but is the origin of the later vampire motif. They were the earthly equivalent of the Rudriyas/Maruts/Wild Hunt. They were under the protection and patronage of Vayu/Rudra/Siva/Odin. In a manner similar to the priests working to build up brahman through effective and powerful mantras, these warriors would work up brahman through drinking (Soma/haoma/Ambrotas/Ambrosia/a special Mead) and psych each other up in true boasts reciting their "warrior resume", so to speak. In the process, there would come upon them the "divine fury spirit" or isma deva (in Sanskrit) or aesma deva (in Avestan) (think of a military holy roller pentecostal service) where their mantras became even more powerfully effective. This spirit came from Vayu/Rudra/Siva/Odin as they became "possessed" with the esprit de corp of the Rudriyas/Maruts/Wild Hunt. They would take on the animal characteristics of the totem animal of their warrior fraternity. The literature said they were shapeshifters who became their totem animal. Some would become bears and this is where we get the word "beserk" from "beserker" the IE root meaning of which is "wearing a bear skin". Related terms say they were "werebears". Those of the wolf fraternity became verevraka or werewolves. Those of the boar fraternity became wereboars. And those of the other fraternity, something that in later legend is re-envisioned as vampire.

These beserker forces were the terrifying special ops of ancient IE armies. We know that the "whatever it was unknown origin" of the vampire was a stealthy infiltrator of enemy camps and position at night bringing death to the enemy in their sleep.

That summarizes the findings of the studies I recommended. This whole style of being a shamanistic shape-shifting warrior empowered/inspired by ismadeva/aesmadeva was one of the practices Zarathustra demonized. The Gathas condemn this warrior cult on ingesting Haoma. Zarathustra thereby splits Vayu into the "good Vayu" and the "bad Vayu". The fury spirit of beserkers, aesmadeva, becomes the demon of shapeshifting fury or demon possession. This aspect of the Zoroastrian reformation influenced Judaism and Christianity. This aesmadeva becomes the demons of shapeshifting wrath named Asmodeus. Ring a bell?

This Zoroastrian reformation appears to have spread its influence throughout the eastern Iranian world (which included at the time Scythia and Sarmatia). This had consequences. In Lithuanian pagan religion, Velnias (Vayu) is already regarded with suspicion and slowly becoming a devil before Christianity gets to the Baltics.

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Re: Vayu/Odinn Shape-shifting and vampires

One piece of evidence in the Gathas is that these warriors, with nothing to do, began to prey on their own people. The complaint in the Gathas appears to be farmers losing livestock to these warriors turned restlers. Off hand, I believe it is found in the hymn to Mithra. Lincoln discusses it but another place to check is Malandra's (I'm going by memory) Introduction to Ancient Zoroastrianism.

By the way, these studies note that the Romans had the wolf totem. The Sarmatians (an Iranian people still practicing the pre-Zoroastrian Indo-Iranian religion) in the east recognized the Baltic Velinas as their Vayu on the basis of the cult and shape-shifting practices. The Sarmatians in the west served as mercs in the Roman cavalry. They were stationed in Britain. After the fall of Rome, they were a settled part of Romano-Celtic Britain. Apparently, the evidence is skimpy, they were sort of nonplussed by their encounter with the boar-beserkers of the Saxons (who did have helms with a boar crest on some).

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Re: Vayu/Odinn Shape-shifting and vampires

I will pull up secondary sources but even the Rgveda, at its earliest strata (before book 10 where gods are identified with gods), Vayu is named Rudra. He is nicknamed "siva" or "auspicious one". In several hymns, Vayu is leader of the Maruts (they are loaned to Indra but they are Vayu's which is very clear in the Rgveda as a primary source). In several hymns, the Maruts are called the Rudriyas. So. these connections are tight, unassailable, and established in the primary source. Vayu is identical to Rudra. This connection goes backover two hundred years and has not ever been challenged. In addition, Vayu is sometimes called the "one eyed" and sometimes referred to as the "wisdom eyed" which later becomes the third eye of Siva. Vayu, while leader of the warrior-dead and battle-field slain, does not seem to personally fight except through magic, and as the one who choses the slain off the battlefield. Vayu is the shamanic figure.

Now, obviously, we do not have a primary source that links Vayu and Odin. But nearly all Indo-Europeanologists, Indologists, and Germanologists agree on linguistic grounds as well as character roles in stories that Vayu is indeed Odin. Polome for a while tried arguing that the PIE root for Vayu-Odin was the same as that for Varuna (in his work of Germanic Religion and in his early 1970s piece?? found in Myth and Law Amongst the Indo-Europeans, Puhvel editor). I don't remember the exact title. But he later gave up on the attempt to argue for the identity of Odin and Varuna (one motivating factor was he really wanted to see the Indo-European sovereign god be the original behind Odin but he could only do that if he could make the case of the already solidly identified Odin-Vayu being the same as Varuna) because the advances in PIE linguistics made it almost certain the two roots were separate, the root for Varuna means "binder" and the root for Vayu-Odin is "fury" and the work of the school of Dumezil convinced him Odin originally belonged to the warrior level of the tripartite IE pantheon instead of the sovereign level. The identification of Odin and Vayu, by the way, is one Rydberg also agrees with. But I can come up with the bibliography. But this identification is about as solid as the claim there is an Indo-European family of languages, cultures, and religions.

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Re: Vayu/Odinn Shape-shifting and vampires

The later Siva retains some of the earlier Rudra but has a whole elaborate non-IE overlay. I guess a good analogy would be what French cooking does to an original ingredient. Also, the original warrior function drops out and is replaced with a nonIE orgiastic replacement.

The locus classicus of studying the question of the similarites and differences between the two would be the Mahabharata. This is widely acknowledged as containing much of Indo-European myth, epic, and saga and in a way, when lined up with the Persian Shahnama, the Eddas, the Celtic epics, is in some respects a better place to compare Indo-European myths and epics (and in light of Rydberg's proto-narrative thesis) for the original narrative comparing characters and comparing episode by episode of the stories. It is in reference to these documents, side by side (more than the Rgveda where the hymns mostly elude to myths that are presupposed in allusion than told), for example, that comparison of the various stories of the Twin (*yemo, Tuisto, Yima, Yama, Prajapati-Purusha, Ymir, Yayati) is done to reconstruct the original whole (see Dumezil, Destiny of the King, Lincoln's Myth, Alf Hiltebetel the Ritual of Battle), that Dyaus-Varuna-Tyr and Nuada are compared to reconstruct the original whole, that the whole battle of the Mahabharata is compared to Ragnarok (this is part of Hiltebeitel's study) which leads to the conclusions that the Hindu-Indian materials lost these because it is attested in all the other sources, that common to IE cultures is a world mill related to ages of the world, the enemies in the Mahabharata are nicknamed after animals that match the animals in the Eddic accounts, and that Dyaus-Tyr is not a combatant killed in the final battle (so, all sources agree with the lack of Tyr's presence in the Poetic Edda and conflict with his fate in the Prose Edda. Also, the blood bond between Odin and Loki have no corresponding material in these other sources and since there is only one reference to this in the Germanic materials -- its probably Christian sabotage inserted by later Christian editors). So, this would be the place to study the Vedic Siva vis a vis Odin verses the post-Vedic Siva of classical Hinduism.

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Re: Indo-European Approaches to Poverty

We must remember that the Indo-Europeans did not have modern population levels, modern societies, and modern economies. For example, the very word "economy" goes back to the ancient Greek oikonomia meaning "household". Older Indo-European roots behind the Greek tend to have the same meaning with additional related meanings such as "managing the family freehold/homestead", "orderly familial relations", "domestic and private religion of the family", "health of stock and kin", "familial reciprocity and kinship obligations vis a vis the family's "wealth" and so on. The original caste system was within a family or extended kinship system. So, the "kings" and "warriors" and "priests" were family members with special status and extra familial obligations. Look at your extended family of just a few years ago. Without the "formal ceremony" of caste recognition, there is a person(s) who are the decision-makers and speakers-for-the-family (even if some disagree, they keep silent), there is the person(s) everyone tends to go to for advice (often the same person is the family archivist -- long memory or whatever), etc.

Justice in modern times has two aspects, distributive and retributive. Distributive would fall under oikonomia. So would much of retributive. But what shape this took depended on the group's resources. Did the IE perform human sacrifice? Yes. But it tended to be the violent criminals or untrustworthy ones or prisoners of war. Think of the manpower our modern criminal justice system requires to make it possible. Think of the social resources needed for that kind of manpower. If you are a small group mutually dependent for each other's survival plus everyone is needed in that task fulltime, what do you do with the elements that threaten you? Send them to jail? Where and guarded by whom? Banish them? Sometimes but if there is a chance that they may form up into bands that come back to raid and kill your group that is not a solution. Or you captured some in war. Unless one has made a peace to be trusted, you can't afford the manpower to stand watch and guard prisoners. So, if no exchange, you kill them. Since everything in traditional socieites is supposed to be a sacred action, capital punishment was a sacrifice to the gods. In fact the old IE words for such also mean excommunication or throwing out the human circle or "becoming the gods property (i.e., "turned over to the gods as something the fragile human circle can't safely handle"). This is the original in ancient Rome of the word "sacrilege". As IE societies evolved into larger civilizations, and the means to deal with these types of issues provided different solutions, they were found. In the areas (usually northern) where the more archaic small-scale social units were maintained so were the old dilemmas that the older, and apparently to us barbaric, solutions solved remained. Thus, while the ancient Romans remembered they too, when they were like the Celts -- small tribal bands instead of a city had human sacrifice to the gods for the protection of their bands, they were nevertheless shocked that for many crimes the penalty was capital punishment (with Celts as well as Germans as well as Romans, there were three matching kinds based on which god was most offended, for example, Lug-Odin-Vayu the penalty was hanging -- BTW, IE capital punishment is another way to add an additional comparative piece to establish a gods/goddesses identity) because Celts did not have the capacity to build and man prisons.

Now if you look at the RgVeda hymns to Varuna, you will find several that will list our obligations to family, extended kin, friend, enemy, and a stranger-outsider. So, these give a good idea of the moral or ethical content of the IE code.

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Asvins: Brief Note

The Asvins, in their cultural variations in all IE cultures outside the Germanic are strongly associated with fertility and medicine. They are twins. They have strong hippomorphic characteristics and have been compared, with more or less lack of final consensus on this last comparison, with the Sanskrit Gandharvas and Greek Centaurs (and the Greek Dioscouri). Some comparisons of them to Germanic lore compare them to Freyr-Freyja - also with not a strong final consensus. In Zoroastrianism, they are still sometimes referred to by their other Vedic name Nasatyas (the physically, and thus, incontestably oldest attested IE document lists sovereigns Mithra Varuna, warriors Vayu Indra, and the fertility-health-prosperity gods Nasatyas in a treaty between the Medes and Hittites) become Haurvatet (wholeness, health) and Ameretet (immortality). This is also what the Asvins are in the pagan religion of the Prussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Slavs.

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Here is the basic reconstruction, culled from numerous sources, of the Zoroastrian "plot" to its version of the proto-narrative.

It was missed until recently because scholars paid attention to the texts instead of the Zoroastrian liturgical cycle which enacts "the history of the world". Remember, of the Avestan texts, all that mostly remains is the Yasna (the Gathas are inside the Yasna and that is why they have two numbers -- we western scholars extracted the Gathas out and gave them the status they have in the minds of many as stand alone scriptures). Imagine the Bible being destroyed but all that remained of it was its liturgical use in church liturgy. The Yasna is the Zoroastrian ritual or missal book. It would then be the liturgical cycle that re-enacts the lost mythic narrative. To begin with, a core part of Zoroastrian myth is not seen until one sees how stories and allusions to the principal players involved play out in the fact that Zoroastrianism has two new years: No Ruz, Mihragan. The Zoroastrian religious calendar, tied to the liturgy, gives some further evidence. Without going into all the whys and wherefores and so on, here is the narrative.

The world has two levels or states. One is a spiritual-spirited-energy state called in Middle Persian, menog. The world is attacked and wounded. The attack has several aspects that are wrongly treated as separate stories but are part of the same cosmic event. These are:

1. The cosmic soul is attacked and mortally wounded (the world is growing old or terminal until its healing and refreshment at the end of time): the cosmic soul is the cosmic man (Yima), the cosmic animal/bovine, and the cosmic plant/tree (i.e., human animal, and vegetable kingdoms). The fall of Yima leads to the slaying of his demonic shadow and usurper Vrtra the dragon. The fall of Yima leads to the state of gayo-maretan or mortal life (originally it is NOT a person but a state of being) so that Yima, as first to die, is asked to prepare his vara under the cosmic mountain in the cosmic north to protect against the winter age and until the war ends.

2. The world mill is rocked off its vertical axis and ever since wobbles. Zoroatrian texts are aware of polar shift and claim this happened when the pole star was Vaem. This star, known to the Hindus as Purva Phalguni, is also attested in Hindu sorces as the time of the fall of Yama, and the time the demons tried to wrestle the world-mill out of the hands of its owner, Varuna Apam Napat, causing it to tip and wobble. Both Zoroastrian and Hindu sources claim, then, that a major "something" happened that rocked the worldmill when Vaem/Purva Phalguni was the pole star. Vaem/Purva Palguni is Delta leonis. It would have been the polestar about 10,000 BCE.

3. With the spirit of Yima gone beyond and with his demonic carcass/dragon killed, it is sacrificed and dismembered. Why?

In its spiritual state, the world is menog. The world is re-ordered into into a defensive system that brings about a more solid physical world less amendable to spirit's will. This state is getik in Middle Persian. Getik is where the warrior gods take, so to speak, center stage to fight the battle and the older gods sort of are in the background. Humans thus have TWO ancestral origins in IE myth. They have a solar/divine ancestry from Yima (son of Vivasvant-Agni, and thus, yes Heimdall -- I have the confirmation of Rydberg's identification of these two ready to send off to WX) from the menog world. They have a lunar ancestry from the getik world. Here the ancestors are Mah and Mahranag (both of which mean "moon" which is "Mah" in Middle Persian). This _re-ordering_ is called bundahishn. NOTE WELL: the original creation is called dai-pad in Middle Persian.

After the world exists, there are two subsequent "age" transitions. These are bundahishn which is transforming the world of menog into the physical realm of getik. Once we see dai-pad and bundahishn in the context of the liturgy we see that bundahishn is not the original creation of the world but its strategic re-ordering for defense which is also the making of it a material world or getik. The next major world transforming event is frashkart. This is the restoration of the world, the healing of the world soul's mortal wounds gained in the initial attack. Besides these two events, the world has 3 main ages. These are:

Dai-pad (time of the original menog creation)

gumesicisn (time of getik and mixture)

wizarishn (time of restoration and separation of good /evil and menog from getik)

Bundahishn is the transition between dai-pad and gumesicisn. Frashkart is the transition after the war from the getik state of mixture or gumesicisn (good and evil mixed, spirit and matter mixed) back to a pure, made fresh, spiritual world of menog (way back, someone asked about gnosticism and IE themes, here is the root of it _THIS WORLD is an armed camp under seige).

Frashkart leads from gumesicisn (mixture of good and evil, spirit and matter) to wizarishn (separation of good and evil, spirit and matter).

No Ruz or the first new year looks back to the events surrounding the attack and fall of Yima and transition of bundahishn of the world from menog to getik. Mihragan looks forward to frashkart as the reversal of bundahishn and the restoration of all things as the world returns to menog.

Now, what does this have to do with Germanic mythology? Some recent IE scholars have posited that the foreground account of origins in the Eddas recounts the events of bundahishn and that there is discernible older strata, barely mentioned but in light of Celtic, Baltic, Vedic and Zoroastrian materials, can be surprisingly rich materials in what they do provide.

I have the citations but am trying to keep it brief. In Indo-Iranian materials we have Dyaus pitar, Mitra (dayside), and Varuna (nightside) as three aspects of the celestial-sovereign god function, Indra (day) and Vayu (night) as two aspects of the atmospheric-warrior god function, and the Asvins as twin gods of the terrestrial-producer god function.

Now, the sovereign god is married to a goddess jointly known as Aditi/Prithivi (the argument for their identification has been made since MacDonald). The three fates are three aspects of her. The sovereign god, as her partner in weaving fate/karma, is owner of the worldmill and called in this aspect Apam Napat. The sun, Surya, is their son. As part of the creation of the menog world, the sun is given a chariot pulled by two horses, the day side of the sovereign god is given a chariot of two horses, and the nightside of the sovereign god is given a chariot of two horse. The sun's horses are quick-waker and might strength. Night has one we know of called frosty mane and the day side has warming mane.

Varuna as Apam Napat has another name associated with his ownership of the mill that is cognate to a Nordic figure, Mundilfari. The other aspects of the sovereign god and his wife became a race of giants in the later Germanic myth. As restored, here is the equivalents of the characters of the original creation time before the re-ordering of the world of this epoch in the last paragraph. The sovereign god is married to an original goddess (divided up into mother-daughter later) corresponding to Aditi-Prithivi called Authr/Nott/Jorth. Tyr's Varuna-nightside is Naglari and Norfi (later made two separate persons). The dayside of the old sovereign god is Dellingr. The son of the sovereign god is Vivasvant/Surya or Dagr/Sol. The same sources identify Vivasvant/Surya or Dagr as an older form of Agni-Heimdall (which has three aspects celestial, atmospheric, terrestrial), and Vivasvant/Dagr/Heimdall father Yama/Yima/Ymir (later, the three castes) and after the bundahishn re-ordering becomes the first teacher of the re-made humans in the getik realm. Aspects weaving destiny of Authr/Nott/jorth or the Norns have as their male partner the owner of the worldmill, the sovereign god know in this aspect as Mundilfori. The horses of the sun chariot also match the Indo-Iranian material. They are Arvakr and Alsvithr. The same for sovereign god's nightside Hrimfaxi and Fjorsvartnir and the dayside Skinfaxi and Glathr.

After some attack, these gods retire into the background as Odinn takes charge of the world he re-orders for defense during the war.

I will have to work up a really, really, I mean really long biblio for this cluster of identifications and reconstructions but the scholars who began this line of reconstruction are Dumezil/Hiltelbeitel. Later, an MIT professor and colleague contributed by reconstructing the myth of the worldmill in IE cultures where these characters reappear in their original guise. Some suggestion of the reconstruction going on is made by Brian Branston in his book Gods of the North (Thames and Hudson) in the 1970s.

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Re: Zoroastrian Plot, Gnosticism and Germanic Ramifications

I'll have to look it up. The Vedic and Avesta materials have a unbounded fire character. The order of the cosmos is one of cooperative boundaries. One meaning of rta is dovetailing.

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Hoenir, Baldr, Tveggi/ was Zoroastrian Plot, Gnosticism and Germanic Ramifications

Another little adjustment. The Bellows Poetic Edda has two mistranslations at the end of Voluspa. Hoenir is not working the prophetic sticks. He is working the sacrificial wands (hlautrith). Baldr returns and Tveggi returns. Bellows tries to identify Tveggi with Odinn. Almost all IE and Germanic scholars today recognize Tveggi as "Twin" and thus, like Yima leading the dead out of his vara after the war, Tuisto/Ymir/Tveggi returns from Hel.

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Re: Two Brothers Fighting for Supremacy

The Zurvanite material is late and shows considerable re-working. The conflict between at the celestial level twins is between Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu, sons of Ahura Mazda. The conflict between twins at the intermediate level is between the good Vayu and the evil Vayu. The conflict between twins at the terestrial level is between Yima and Manu.

Again, the best and recommended media where IE myth is embedded is the following materials side by side. This is the way you learn it in a graduate course. The Eddas, the Celtic Battle of Mag Turig and Mabinogi, the Shanama, the Mahabharata, and Livy's Early History of Rome. The results of these comparisons are what articles, book chapters, and monographs _presuppose_ a prior knowledge of. For example

Dyaus = Bhisma (Mahabarata) = Scaevola (Livy) = Nuada (Celtic) = Tyr Another example, Yama vs Manu, Yima vs Manu, Tuisto vs Mannus, Remus vs Romulus There is the story in Livy about Scaevola (sacrifices hand) and Cocles (one eyed berserker) that has a partial parallel in the Shahnama and in the Mahabharata. When reconstructed and the other tales pairing them are added, we find a tale of Nuada and Lug that adds confirmation.

Contrary to what WX posted, most of the evidence now for Tyr being the old high god is NOT linguistic. These sources provide overlapping characterization and plot development plus shared stories.

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Re: Two Brothers Fighting for Supremacy

I forgot to add, Spenta Mainyu is also known as Spenta Mathra and Spenta Mithra. At the human level, we need to add to the myth of Yama/Yima, Trita/Thraetona Vrtahan/Verethragen, and a few others. By all accounts, Balder = Mitra/Mithra. This intimately connects him with Aryaman/Irmin as an aspect or epithet of the IE sovereign god.

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Re: Two Brothers Fighting for Supremacy

Clarification: Those who think Balder is not a Christian import think he is Mithra/Mitra.

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Re: Two Brothers Fighting for Supremacy

First, there are those that argue for a Christian origin of Balder. I disagree. In fact, in a long round about way I'd argue Christ as a myth is from Balder-Mitra-Mithra and imposed on the end of the world apocalyptic prophet Jesus.

Second, the gist of the argument is it is an old and widespread IE pattern that an aspect of the sovereign god is, by nature, incompatible with a world torn by war. This aspect disappears as the world gets worse. This aspect, although sovereign, cannot rule in this world and remain the best of the gods. Thus, in various ways (with several twists and turns, especially in Iranian materials where this aspect is the main fighter in the war and final battle as Mithra), this most beautiful of the gods returns at the end of time after the war is over. This return of the merciful aspect of the sovereign god restores the world mill in a way that fate as controlled by the sovereign god is not blind (Balder's blind brother being a reflex of Mundifori -- which is why even though sovereign there is a conflict between Odin and Mundifori because the later is blind and no longer fit to rule but rules as sovereign nevertheless). In the other IE materials this is Mitra, Mithra, Maitreya (IE material in Buddhism as is the Wheel of Life/Death as the Arta of Yama -- hence connections with Arthur and the Round Table). In light of the other IE material, this return of the best and merciful half of the sovereign god (who also restores its twin half that as sovereign still rules but is blind) in the Germanic material is none other than Balder.

Briefly, off the top of my head, refer to Dumezil The Gods of the North and Hiltebeitel The Ritual of Battle (a look at the Mahabharata in IE perspective and in particular, the Eddic material as lead up to Ragnarok).

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Re: Two Brothers Fighting for Supremacy

Again, interlude dealing with all the rest, I guess I'll need to do an updated Zoroastrian biblio and outline (not inconsistent with the one provided but details filled in).

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IE Ritual Part 1: Fires - Vedic and Roman

This post compares IE Vedic and Roman concepts as it pertains to IE ritual. Later, Zoroastrian ritual will be added with the objective to say something about northern Baltic, Germanic, and Celtic ritual.

This post briefly examines the terms fas, ius, religio, and pietas in terms of archaic Roman religious usage in light of contemporary research in Indo-European linguistics. Basically, what ius is to fas, pietas is to religio.

It seems to be the majority consensus of contemporary Latin philogy and Indo-European linguistics that fas is cognate to and derived from the same Indo-European root (*dhas) as the Vedic Sanskrit “dharma” and ius is cognate to and derived from the same Indo-European root as the Vedic Sanskrit “rta”. Moreover, the semantic content and relations between these Indo-European roots and both their cognate Vedic and Latin derivatives are very similar. Just like the relation of the Vedic terms dharma and rta in Vedic religion, Dumezil tells us that Fas would be the mystical, invisible basis without which ius is not possible, and which sustains all the visible arrangements and relations defined by ius…A time or a place are fasti or nefasti according as they provide or do not provide human activity with this mystical basis which is its principal security.(Dumezil, 131)

The semantic and relationship between the meanings and relations of fas and ius finds an analogous structure between religio and pietas. We will examine this relationship later but first we need to look briefly at the originals of these two terms.

According to the findings of contemporary linguistics, the cognate Indo-European roots for religio are *lig-,*leg-, *log- (from which, for example, we get legal, legate, college, ligament, ligature, intelligence, legein and logos amongst a plethora of other words). Following up on and reviewing the research of Franz Altheim, W. Ward Fowler, M. Kobbert, and W. Otto, C. Koch has argued that the most ancient concept opposed to religio is in the verb negligere. The oldest positive sense of religio, as W.C. Smith summarizes the research findings of these authorities, seems to be simultaneously “to bind”, “to pay attention to”, and “to reconnect”. Thus, Smith tells us the archaic Latin and Roman meaning of religio is “to pay attention to”, “to be bound to”, and “to re-connect with” a numen, a numinous power outside a person profoundly obligating them to have great scrutiny in having certain responses, attitudes and actions toward it and religio is also the feelings, dispositions, conative and cognitive responses, and actions in a person arising from this contact with a numen, a numinous power that is a overwhelmingly awe-inspiring mystery (mysterium tremendum) displaying an awesome superiority of uncanny power and dignity (majestas) which irresistibly attracts and fascinates (mysterium fascinans). W.C. Smith explains that for the ancient Romans

The early phrase religio mihi est is illuminating. To say that such-and-such a thing was religio for me meant that it was mightily incumbent upon me to do it.(Smith, 20)

W.C. Smith informs us that, in contrast to the Greeks with their eye for form, especially for the Romans, Ritual ceremonies themselves were designated religiones. This is … to be related to a Roman tendency to perceive what we would call the divine or the holy not so much…in the form of a figure or “god” as in a series of standardized acts. Whenever one meets the word…this is what is meant. The religio of a specified god designates the traditional cultic pattern at his shrine. (Smith, 20-21) Smith’s comments concur with and confirm the observations made by the great scholar of Roman religion, Franz Altheim, who wrote

The numen for the Roman is expressed not in the figure but in a succession of acts in which it encounters man.(Altheim, 181) Incidentally, this reason is partly why, legally, the statues and temples of Roman religion (as interpretatio graeca) had a lower legal civil status than the higher public Roman ritual, and thus, why strictly speaking, in terms of ius sacrum, the highest Roman religion always remained right up to the time it was made illegal an imageless and outside fire cult where all sacrifices were made outside and in front of the temple (actually, this description needs refined. The templum was the large platform that the building housing the statue of the divinity stood on. Just like the Vedic altar mound, the templum is a special geometric space worked out by a priest or augur in relation to the alignment of the heavenly, terrestrial and solar influences in the locale. Thus, templum is where we get the word template. In early Roman and Vedic traditions, each god had an energy-geometric representation. In the Indian tradition, this would evolve into the yantras of classical Hinduism. Native Roman gods had a templum. Import or foreign gods did not have a templum. Instead, they had a fanum. Basically, the difference is a templum is sort of like a magic circle or energy-geometric sacred enclosure. By contrast, the fanum was just a surveyed piece of land. In itself, the fanum was not sacred but was secular. The building itself was the Cella. It too was a secular structure incidental to the culus and templum). So just like its Vedic cousin.

Besides being a state of re-connection with a numinous power that obligates a person to attend to it with great scrutiny, religio as a state of being bound to a god’s claims upon a person is brought out by the following Roman text.

Hoc uniculo pietatis obstricti deo et religati sumus. Nimirum religio veri cultus est, superstitio falsi et omnino quid cloas interest, non que mad modem colas. Diximus nomen religionis a uinculo pietatis esse deductum, quod hominem sibi deus religaverit et pietate constrinxerit.

As indicated earlier, the conceptual relation of religio to pietas is semantically and structurally similar to the relation between fas and ius. Pius, pietas, piare, piaculum, and expiare, as part of Roman religious terminology is quite ancient (Dumezil, ). This very early religious use is also attested by its religious usage in other Italic languages such as Volscian pihou (ibid., 132). Dumezil draws out the similarity in relation that exists between religio and pietas to that borne between fas and ius. In relation to religio, he observes,

the connotation of pius is allied to ius rather than to fas but with a moral rather than a juridical coloration. Pietas consists in conformity with normal, traditional, indisputable relationships…which exist reciprocally between people…or without reciprocity, between the individual and that which is superior to him – his country, the gods, and finally humanity.(ibid. 132-133)

It is partly due to this proximity of pius and pietas to ius in the relation pietas has to religio (as ius has to fas) that I used pietas in my prior legal outline of Roman religion.

Altheim, F. A History of Roman Religion.

Dumezil, G. Archaic Roman Religion. 2 vols. Johns Hopkins University.

Fowler, W.W. “The Latin History of the Word ‘Religio’”, Transactions of the Third International Congress for History of Religions, 2 vols. Oxford.

Kobbert M. De verborum religio atque religious usa apud Romanos quaetiones selectae. Konigsberg.

Koch, C. Religio.

Otto, W. “Religio,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft. 12: 533-554.

Public Fires of Rome and Vedic Srauta Fires

There are some differences between the two religions when it comes to public sacrifices but even as exceptions prove the rule, these differences prove deeper similarities. For example, the major difference that develops between the Vedic and Roman cult is the sacrificial forum of the Indian cult remained one where all the fires are in immediate proximity to each other (a few feet apart) We find the same Vedic type of layout in an archaic sacrificial forum under a very ancient cippus (dating back earlier than 600 BCE, it was tiled over in 580 BCE, and then paved) under the southern edge of the Forum. So, the Romans originally had the same size of layout as the sacrificial mound in the Vedic sacrifice. What happened was they made the whole city of Rome the sacrificial forum. The whole city was a templum and altar. The legend of Romulus' plow is recognized as (when compared to Vedic materials) the marking out of the sacred templum for sacrifice. Digs suggest the earliest walls of Rome served a liturgical function as much as defense. So, in effect, the whole city was a Vedic sacrificial mound. The sacred public fires of the sacrificial forum became the fires of the entire city of Rome as a sacred space.

Another part of Roman ius sacrum that is part of public law is the liturgy of the state's cult of the three sacred public fires. As noted, Roman religion, like the Vedic cult, was originally an imageless and outdoor fire cult. It legally and ritualistically remained such (the statue of the divinity and the cella or building housing it were secular ornaments of the sacred templum. No rituals were conducted inside the cella. All rituals were outside to the close of Roman paganism). Liturgically, in conformity to the canons of the ius publicum or ius sacrum, it remained so despite the temples and their cultic images the Romans imported from the Greeks. Once again, for emphasis, the cella and statue were secular ornaments (many “donated” by prominent families who also thereby were promoting themselves. Some cellas and statues are outright political propaganda). The public sacrifices were never inside the temples (the cellas) but outside of them. As numerous scholars have observed, these three public fires of Rome correspond to the three Vedic Srauta fires and the rites of both cults are very similar.

Lets look at these fires and altars in comparison to the Vedic cult. First, in both cults, the Roman public and Vedic Srauta fires are not liturgically independent of each other. They are liturgically interdependent.

First, there is the Volcanus fire. It is a semi-circular and southwestern fire outside of thewalls of Rome to vigilantly keep away aerial demons and enemies from the sacred boundaries of Rome. It is also the fire of the ancestors. The previously mentioned old sacrificial mound excavated on the southern edge of the Forum had the Volcanus fire southwest of the other fires just where it should be if it paralled Vedic ritual. The Volcanus corresponds to the Vedic daksina fire. The daksina fire is also a semi-circular, southwestern, and aerialfire that also guards, like the Volcanus, the sacred enclosure and mound of Vedic sacrifice. The daksina fire is also the one that offerings to the ancestors were burned in. As noted, the main difference between the Roman and Vedic cult is the size of the sacred enclosure or mound. In early Roman religion (as excavated in the southern tip of the Forum) and in the Vedic cult, this enclosure or mound was small and all the fires were close together. From the time of Roman kings down to the close of the public pagan temples, the city of Rome was itself the sacred enclosure or mound. So, its fires were not immediately next to each other. So, a difference between the Roman Volcanus and Vedic daksina is that the Volcanus was outside the city whereas the daksina is right next (but to the southwest) to the other fires of the Vedic Srauta sacrifice.

The second fire is the ignis vestae tended by the Vestal Virgins. It is the public hearth of the cultus of Roma as urbs aeterna. It is the basic public fire. It has a corresponding fire in each Roman home as the ever-lit sacrificial fire of the private and domestic cult of the Roman family. When couples were married (depending on the legal style of marriage, there were several) and started a new household, their new domestic sacrificial hearth fire was either lit from the two families’ hearth fires or the public hearth fire or both. All other public fires are lit from it. It is a round fire dedicated to the earth and to the gods and goddesses of the earth, cereal, fertility, cattle, and herds that are collectively (quirites divi) represented by Quirinus. In other words, it is the terrestrial fire. The ignis vestae corresponds to the Vedic garhapatya fire. Like the ignis vestae fire, the Vedic garhapatya fire is the Srauta hearth in Vedic sacrifice, it is the first Srauta fire to be lit and all other Srauta fires are to be lit from it. Also like the ignis vestae, the Vedic garhapatya is a round fire dedicated to the earth and to the vaisya order of gods and goddesses of the earth, fertility, and herds collectively (visvah devah) represented by the Asvins. The garhapatya fire is also where new married couples in Indian lit their new hearth fire if they set up a new household. Otherwise, the new hearth fire is lit from the parents’ fires or both. The main difference between the Roman and Vedic cult with respect to the Roman ignis vestae and Vedic garhapatya fire is again due to the size of the sacred enclosure or mound. The garhapatya fire itself is located on the mound immediately next to the other two Vedic Srauta fires. Since Rome as urbs was the sacred enclosure or mound, at the time of sacrifice, a portable ignis vestae from the original fire tended by the Vestal Virgins had to be brought to the immediate sacrificial site in front of the temple. This portable ignis vestae was called the foculus fire. It is to the west (sinistra) of the sacrificial fire, the ara or altaria. The foculus was also round. Its liturgical function in a Roman public sacrifice is almost an exact match to the function of the garhapatya fire (which is also the fire left and usually west to the main sacrificial fire, the ahavaniya) in a Vedic Srauta sacrifice.

The ignis vestae as public hearth fire of the Romans, like its Vedic garhaptya counterpart was immensely important. Without the ignis vestae in Roman religion and without the garhaptya in Vedic ritual no public rites or domestic rites could be performed.

The attempt to do so is such a grave form of impietas that in both cults such an act could result in the penalty of death, “excommunication”, and total forfeiture of ones caste privileges and wealth in both cultures.

In Roman ius sacrum, the attempt to conduct public games, public sacrifices without an ever-burning vestal fire, the attempt to put out the ignis vestae, or even domestic rites with the family lararium without the family domestic hearth fire being first lit from the public hearth fire or an older family homestead was such a grave offense that such persons were subject to legis sacramentum -- a mortal ordeal as penance to the gods.

Originally, this penalty was a harsher and earlier death penalty as human sacrifice to the gods as a public penance for such a grave offence on the part of the people as a whole to have such a sacrilegious one in their midst.

Later, in Republican times legis sacramentum became a religious test of ordeal by the divine to the death with forfeiture of the family's entire estate to the state if the person did not survive the ordeal. To summarize, in both Roman and Vedic cults, public or srauta sacrifices could not be performed without the sacred public ignis vestae fire of Rome or the srauta garhaptya fire of Vedic religion. Further in Rome, there could not be any sacred public fires of Rome without the public hearth fire without the Vestal Virgins.

The status of the ignis vestae and garhaptya fires have profound implications for the domestic cult of the household in both Roman and Vedic religion. As indicated briefly above, there could be no domestic cult (such as to the lararium) without the public fire of the Vestals because the domestic hearth fire had to be lit from it (part of the religious marriage ceremony was when a new domus was set up was its hearth fire had to be lit from the public Vestal fire before lars and genius could be installed in the new home).

The same regulations apply in Vedic marriages and setting up a new household for the three higher castes.

The ancient Roman sense of the importance of that public hearth fire tended by the Vestals was that without it there was no hearth and home for the Roman people. There was no Rome.

To return to our comparison of Roman and Vedic ritual, we look at the ara fire in the Roman cult and the ahavaniya fire of the Vedic cult.

The third fire and altar (to the right and east of the foculus) is the ara or altaria. It is the sacrificial fire lit at the time of sacrifice in which the previously cooked organs and some of the meat is burned completely. It is a square fire dedicated to the celestial realm. It is an exact match to the Vedic Srauta ahavaniya fire if we compare the excavated sacrifice pit under the Forum to a Vedic fire mound. The ahavaniya fire (to the right and east of the garhapatya) is square, dedicated to the celestial sphere, and is the one in which are burnt the previously cooked organs and some of the meat of the sacrifice.

As already noted, any higher sacrifices (Vedic srauta, Roman publicum), in both Vedic and Roman cults, were to take place outside. In both cults, the ritual procedure to establish the Srauta or public fires is exactly the same. First,from the public hearth fire the Srauta garhapatyagni or publicum ignis vestae fire is kindled and in both cults it is said the latter are five times more powerful. Second the other two Srauta or publicum fires (daksina or volcanus, the ahavaniya or ara, altaria) are kindled. In the Roman public cult on the Capitoline or in the Regia, there was the southern protecting fire outside the walls (instead of there on the mound as in the Vedic cult) and there was the portable hearth fire" or foculus brought from the ignis vestae (both corresponding to the garhapatyagni) and the "fire of sacrifice" or ara, altaria (corresponding to the ahavaniya).

The Domestic Cult

Another component of both Vedic and Roman religion where there are strong parallels is the domestic religio of the pater familias. Its daily, annual, and family cycle (birth, death, marriage) rites correspond in many ways to the Vedic grhyayajna domestic cult again reflecting the fact that the Romans were originally an Indo-European tribe sharing the same religion with those tribes that turned south andheaded to India and Iran.

Like its cousin, the Vedic Grhya cult, the Roman domestic cult had the same prerequisite and supporting roles to the publicum cult that the Vedic Grhya had to the Srauta or haviryajna sacrifices. Both domestic cults were fire cults. In both, the domestic fire was the sacred fire of worship, sharply contrasted with the secular cooking fire, and both were called the “marriage fire”.

In both, before the domestic altar could be consecrated, the domestic fire had to be lit from the public ignis vestae in Roman religion or the parents fire and the domestic garhaptya grhyayajna fire had to be kindled from the garhaptya srauta fire in Vedic ritual or the parents fire.

In both, when the domestic hearth fire was lit when the young male had become free of the Roman or Vedic pater familias and was a free householder on his own.

In both, if the domestic fire accidentally went out, it was to be re-lit either by rubbing two sticks together (symbolizing its earthly origin and status) or by being re-kindled from the ignis vestae or gahapatyayagni fire or parents fire.

Both the Vedic and Roman domestic cult was also a cult to the ancestors with many similarities between the two. The Roman pater familias cult addressed the Penates, Lares, Manes, and Genius of the family. Lares and Lemurs are Etruscan terms in origin. But the original Roman concept can still be seen behind these two names due to the Latin inscriptions on Roman domestic altars and sarcophagi. In the Indian cult, depending on how they lived, there were good ancestors, who took a northern, eastern, solar, and deifying path of immortality to join the devas, and bad ancestors, who took a southwesternly (thus, one reason for the daksina and volcanus fires location), lunar, and infernal path of the fathers. We find the same in the Roman domestic cult of the ancestors from pre-Republican times on. The good, deified ancestors were divi parentes who attained the immortal and deified status of di superi, extra anni solique vias, and pax aeterna by taking the northeasternly solar path of the divi. It is to them that the daily food, incense, water, and flower sacrifices were made. Their festival was the Parentalia in February and it was characterized by rites of welcome. The bad ancestors were the infernal shades and lemurs that took the southwesternly lunar path and had to be exorcised (interestingly, with black beans) and placated (animas placare paternas) in rites of riddance on Lemuria in May (9th, 11th, 13th). This parallels Vedic practices except for the calendar.

This domestic ritual reflects the twofold ancestry of the human race in Indo-European myth. Humans have a solar and semi-divine ancestry through *yemo (meaning “twin”, Yama, Yima, Ymir, Tuisto). This figure is the son of Vivasvant and the origin of the castes. This ancestry also has connections to the role of and interconnections between Vivasvant, Agni, and Heimdall. The other origin of humans is lunar and terrestrial. They are variously born of a plant/tree. But detailed consideration of this mythological backdrop is beyond the scope of this discussion.

To conclude with a note on the imperial cult of the deified emperor and/or emperor's genius is not all that new to Roman religion but is partly an extension of the domestic cult as can be seen by the fact that the altars of the deified emperors were of the domestic cult type – not public type. If it took on imported and eastern trappings, it had a solid Roman foundation and precedent to build upon.

Further Noteworthy Parallels: A Few Comparisons of Regulations for the flamen Dialis and a Brahman. Later, we can add to this list what we know of similar regulations governing that of Druids.

Lets look at one of these areas. Part of Roman public or sacred law dealt with regulating the lives of the priesthood. Both the Vedic brahman and the Roman flamen dedicated to the old high god Jupiter (Dies Fides) or Dyauspitr Varuna (Latin, Jupiter, Dies pitar, Uranus, Sanskrit, Diespitr, Dyauspitr,Varuna) live by essentially the same regulations as illustrated by these selections from the Roman Ius Publicum and the Indian Laws of Manu below -

1. a. The flamen Dialis cannot be forced to swear an oath or bear witness.
b. The brahman cannot be forced to swear an oath or be subpoenaed as a witness.

2. a. The flamen Dialis must not set eyes on the army.
b. The brahman must not see the army or conduct religious activities in its proximity.

3. a. The flamen Dialis must not mount or touch a horse.
b. The brahman must not ride a horse.

4. a. The flamen Dialis must not eat raw meat or beef.
b. The brahman must not eat meat.

5. a. The flamen Dialis must not go near a funeral pyre.
b. The brahman must not go near a funeral pyre or even be touched by its smoke.

6. a. The flamen Dialis must avoid fermented substances
b. The brahman must not ingest intoxicants.

7. a. The flamen Dialis must not touch or speak about a dog.
b. The brahman must not touch a dog, dog breeders, and must not study the Vedas when he hears a dog barking.

8. a. The flamen Dialis must never, not even at night, doff entirely the insignia of his priesthood nor his sacred cord nor see his wife, the flaminica, entirely in the nude.
b. The brahman must never be stark naked nor remove his sacred cord which is the sign of his status nor see his wife entirely nude.

9. a. The flamen's person is sacrosanct, laying hands on him is death.
b. The assault or killing of a brahman is death.

A difference between the Roman and Indian law in this respect stems from the fact that the Roman priests were specialists for life within a single capacity and office that excluded them from the other priesthoods within the college of pontiffs of flamine maiores. By contrast, brahmans became more omni-competent or multi-taskers in Vedic ritual. The Indian context did not lead to the specialization of the Roman pontiffs as noted by several scholars in comparing Roman and Vedic religions. While among the Celts, the druids appeared to have life-long purity code similar to the above, since the priesthood as a special caste all but disappeared in Germanic culture, it has been suggested that such regulations were for whoever was conducting the ritual and was for a limited time before and during.

As we shall see, these fires are also found among the other Indo-European peoples of Europe, such as the Celts and Germans. Again, as we saw above, the key fire was the hearth fire described as “everlasting fire” of northern European cultic sites in what textual references we have available to us. Also, at the Celtic and Germanic sites that have been excavated, the hearth fire is consistently round and the western fire. The sacrificial fire is due east of it. Remains in these northern fire pits show that the round and terrestrial hearth fire was used to prepare the food (chemical analysis shows that stuff cooked in the first fire was transferred and burned even more in one or both of the other two fires). A portion of this food was burned in the sacrificial fire dedicated the the gods or was burned in a semi-circular fire due south of the hearth fire dedicated to the ancestors. The rest of the food was consumed by the people gathered.