Re: The Tripartitive Nature of IE Tripartition

Hi there Glen. You wrote

> Here's a great revelation I had while sipping some powerful coffee

at my

> favourite cafe. I've already mentioned that I feel that IE

mythology derives

> from three mythologies blended together: Old European, Semitish and

Steppe.

Not bad. Except that I would say Old European, Sumerian and
shamanism.

> Now, the only problem I was having was trying to seperate, within

this

> irish stew of IE mythos, all the elements of the three core

mythologies away

> from each other. I think I started to come around to a solution

once I

> imposed a strategy of "cosmological structure" on each of these

three core

> myths.
>
> Every mythology/theology has a structure in some sense otherwise it

would be

> hard to remember and people wouldn't follow these religions (duh!).
>
> IE myth appears to have had a "tripartitive" nature, seperating the

cosmos

> into three parts: Underworld, Middleworld and Overworld. This is

the very

> basis of IE myth and a perfect example of a mythological structure.

So now

> that my explanation is done, let me list off the structures of the

three

> mythologies and then explain how they eventually would merge

together...

>
> Semitoid myth
> -------------
> Let's suppose that Semitoid myth, that is, the myth of the Semitish

and

> Semitic peoples stemming from a date of around 8000 BCE, was based

on two

> contrastive equations based on an "Overworld" and "Underworld" as

follows:

>
> Realm Function Element Colour
> --------------------------------------------
> Overworld = Order = Air = White
> Underworld = Chaos = Fire = Red
>
> The Underworld represented Chaos (not necessarily Evil!) and the

Overworld

> represented Order (not necessarily Good!). One important reason why

we can't

> view this simple contrast as Good vs Evil (as in later biblical

mythology)

> is because the dead were thought to have lived in the Underworld

(aka

> Sheol). Red is the colour of fire and blood and therefore

associated with

> the chaotic Underworld; white or any bright colour is associated

with the

> brightness of the ordered Overworld whether during day or night.

Not bad Glen. Except that the division is ultimately Sumerian not
Semitic. The order and chaos polarity does hold with an "overworld"
of "order" (i.e. the realm of the Anunaki = Earth and Sky's) and
the "underword" (i.e. the Abzu, the realm of Taimat (The Great
Deeps), and Erishkigal (the Great Below the Earth). Originally it
seems that Erishkigal was the twin (or perhaps even a separate aspect
of) Inanna, so both realms at a very early age seem to have been seen
as realms of a goddess. Rather than a white-red split Glen, it was a
dark-light split. Dark was the realm of Taimat, light the realm of
the Anunaki. And rather than a fire-air split, it was an air-water
split, in which water was seen as primary and air as secondary.
Divinities and myths aroung fire are fairly rare in the Middle East
where as stories of water and floods abounded.

> I haven't completely let go of my view that Semitoid mythology

derived from

> an ancestor-worship mythology. In fact, it makes sense that if

around 8000

> BCE when the Palestine-based Semitoid language fractured into

Semitic

> (Palestine) & Semitish (Cilicia/W Anatolia), and as the Semitoid-

speaking

> peoples were gaining agricultural knowledge from the Caucasic-

speaking east,

> any previous ancestral worship which focused primarily on the

Underworld,

> the realm of the dead, would be completely overshadowed by the new
> importance of the heavens in relation to agriculture.

Glen, any split between what you call Semitic and Semitish in fact
occurred earlier than 8,000 BCE. Since you persist in calling
Epipaleolithic Natufians Semites (when they clearly cannot have been
as Semites were still in Africa at this age), the Beldibi hunter-
gatherer culture showing a Natufian connection was 10,000-8,500 BCE.
Again, whilst this is early enough to have been Nostratic, it is far
too early to have been Semitic.

You continue

Thus, the sky would

> certainly represent a very regular Order where stars had fixed

positions and

> could be predicted, in contrast to the chaotic Underworld where

your dead

> ancestors could cause harm to you if you didn't properly take care

of them

> in their afterlife. The heavens in other words became more

influential on

> the lives of budding agriculturalists than the underworld could

ever be.

It wasn't the dead ancestors you were worried about, it was the
rising of flood waters from the watery deeps, a common occurrence in
Southern Mesopotamia at the end of the last ice age until historic
times.

> In fact, the notion of seven planetary objects may have started

here, along

> with the association of the red planet Mars with the firey

Underworld of

> Chaos. Thus would start a seed for a new IE association of social

functions

> like "warrior" with gods such as these. The planet Jupiter could

have

> already been associated with a storm god (aka. Ea/Enlil/Anu?). And

surely

> the planet Venus was *`ATtaru, originally a male god perhaps, which

would

> eventually become IE's *Xste:r.

Again, it was the study of Astronomy that first occurred in Babylonia
amongst the Sumerians. It was they who named the planets, gave them
their atributes, and divided the zodiac into 12 houses each named
after a constellation. The whole Inanna-Damuzi story is seen as a
calendrical myth tied into the seasons.

> The Semitoid mythology may even have brought the idea of Apocalypse

by fire

> (Underworld!!!) and the whole story has a connection with

agriculture as

> well, which coincidentally the Semitish surely would have known

about based

> also on the Mars=fire=underworld association that cannot be

European nor

> Steppe in origin.

No Glen, sorry mate wrong again. The Apocalypse by fire did not
enter the Middle Eastern religious mindset until Persian times. And
it was not an apocalyse by the fires rising from the underword, but
rather by fires descending from the heavens, as a result of the final
battle between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, between Good and Evil. These
elements were introduced into Middle Eastern myths after Cyrus. They
were carried into Jewish millennarianism by the Jews "returning" from
Babylon under Persian patronage (See Thomas Thompson for what
probably really happened at the time).

Now for round 2.

> European myth
> -------------
> As I've mentioned before, the European myth was dominated by a

great Goddess

> figure who lived in everyone and everything. In a way she might be

viewed as

> the Cosmos itself. The associations of the Old European myth as

described in

> part by Gimbutas were as follows:
>
> Realm Function Colour Symbol
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> Overworld (air) = Creation = Red (blood) = Bird
> Middleworld (earth) = Preservation = Black (earth) = Animal
> Underworld (water) = Destruction = White (bone) = Serpent
>
> This would be the immediate source of the tripartition seen in

later IE myth

> but not of the colour associations whose differences to IE colour

symbolism

> have already been remarked upon by Gimbutas. The European mythology
> contributed the story of the Bird Creatrix and central World Tree

(later a

> great mountain, nail, post, etc).

Harder to argue with. Lets accept it for now.

> Steppe myth
> -----------
> Now for the dessert, I'm starting to realise that there is a simple

bipolar

> contrast between the Heavens and the Earth in Steppe mythology as

follows.

>
> Realm Colour
> -----------------------------------------------
> Heavens = Light (white, yellow, cyan, etc)
> Earth = Darkness (green, blue, etc)

OK except that the light-dark was the Middle Eastern origin too.

> Note, there is no underworld, nor again, a concept of Good vs Evil.
> According to these sets of myths, there was no great Creation or

Apocalypse

> either. The earth was thought to have always existed and would

always exist

> in the future. Humans were born from the sun and the moon and
> *T:eien/T:eieu, the Heaven God, "The Bright One", had little

interest in

> what went on down below. The mythology was certainly polytheistic

and it may

> have contributed the notion of a female sun and male moon who

represented

> rival siblings. I can't agree, therefore, with John that the Steppe
> mythology was "sexless" even though its language probably was.

Glen, the sexing of creation brobably began with the gendering of
language, post Anatolian. Like shamanistic peoples of the steppe
(Uralic, Altaic) etc, (eg. Tengri of the Turko-Mongols) was seen as
formless and genderless. In shamanistic animism, the divine is seen
in the forms of shape-shifting spirits, who can change from male to
female and from human to animal at will. The primary split here is
between the "self" (me, us, the individual) and the "other" (you,
them, the world). It is the role of the shaman-priest as an
intermediary, one who can travel between these two worlds,
negotiating safety (and sometimes danger, if he/she is in a sorcerous
mood). This explains why various IE gods and goddesses seem to have
a capacity to change gender so easily (eg. Nerthus to Njord in
Scandinavia). The classic role of the Steppe shaman seems to live
longest in the Loki-Odin roles, the one who dies and is reborn on the
tree, creating and understanding the divinatory messages of the runes.

> The Mythological Mix
> --------------------
> The first epicenter of a new mythology would have lied in West

Anatolia

> between the Northern Semitoids and Old Europeans at around 7500 BCE

or so.

Shift the location to East Anatolia across Northern Mesopotamia to
the Northern Zagros Glen and you would have a goer. You would also
have to have the dates shift to the wole period 7,500-5,00 BCE It was
a meeting place of 4 traditions. From the west came the naked
pregnant Goddess traditions (from Catal Huyuk), from the South came
the Sumerian mythos, from the Zagros came the Hurro-Urartuean Weather
Gods and Goddesses, with various other traditions added from across
the Caucasas and up from Palestine.

> Overall the Semitoid agricultural-based mythology would win over

but they

> would eventually adopt the tripartitive cosmos concept and the

story of

> Creation. The myth spread from its epicenter, easily throughout the
> MiddleEast and Egypt, even the Semitic peoples were touched. An

important

> thing to note is the change of a firey underworld to a watery one.

This

> created some paradoxes that still linger like
> Fire-Born being a _watery_ Underworld deity and the fact that the

entire

> Underworld is associated with war (aka Chaos) and the colour red,

which

> isn't the colour of normal tap water, need I remind.

What is your evidence here Glen? Or is this a case of dreaming
constructions.

> The second epicenter of mythological exchange lied in the Balkans

and NW

> Pontic, starting at around 6000-5500 BCE after the IEs arrived to

the area

> off the steppes. Most of this new hodgepodge SemitoEuropoid

mythology would

> be adopted but new concepts such as a female sun would be infused

into the

> new religion as well as the association of *T:eieu with the

Overworld god of

> the SemitoEuropoid myth. Either the associations of social caste to

the

> structure started at this time, or were already worked out, at

least in part

> by the European-influenced Semitish a millenium before.

I can accept this as a zone of influence, but it does sound a
real "hodgepodge" of a theory. Glen, what is your evidence?
Scuptures of the divinities? Comparitive mythology? Sounds like a
scholastic - how many angels type of argument.

Regards

John