Re: Demeter and Semele.

junk Sabine writes:

As for Semele, Mark wrote: she is normally thought of as a lunar goddess. Mark, are you sure you don't mix her up with Selene? Or if you didn't your reference book may have

The standard handbooks on Greek mythology (particularly, Graves) all regard Semele as lunar. Even Stefan Zimmer asks questions about reclassifying her as Moist Mother Earth. For myself, I think one has to realize the Greek myths are a conflate, syncretistic jumble which early on became subject to conscious literary development. Nonetheless, her name alone is sufficient evidence to look very hard indeed at the traditional view. As I have posted, only in the myth of Semele do we see Zeus as an explicity solar deity: Scorching-Sky-Father burning Moist-Mother-Earth. Dionysus himself, however, cannot be seen as Indo-European, and a number of myths are intermingled here, with only a residual IE substrate.

As for Ida-mater: I know only one context where this is connected with Demeter, although I don't remember exactly who that was (I'm glad I don't...) Anyway, it belonged to someone's 'translation' of several words from Linear A libation tables. I-da-ma-te as read with the help of Linear B sounds (which is o.k. for me) was understood - I'd say as a real 'academic' 'Volksetymologie': as what it sounds like - nothing else. And then followed by the interpretation (looking for god-names, certainly) that the word mighthave been an early name for Demeter. This strange 'linguistic' effort seems to have stuck somehow. No further comment (et tout le reste est makulatur...)

There is an article by E. Hamp, The Name of Demeter. In: Minos 9/1968, where the author, quite convincingly as far as I can follow as non-linguist, retracts De-meter to the same root as the second part of Posi-daon, both cognates of *dghom (mother of earth, lord of earth).

But I'd love Pjotr to tell us his opinion, too!

I'd love Piotr's opinion too (particularly on how "Ida" is/is not IE). My main source are Stefan Zimmer's review of the EIEC in the Journal of Indo-European Studies 27 (1 & 2), p. 106. He says:

"the only other possible, though doubtful candidate, Gr Δημήτερ (Demeter), Messapic damatura, is not mentioned."
I forget where I got the Ida-Mater reference. It may be from the same issue of JIES, where Gareth Owens argues that Linear A is IE (Owens is a votary of Colin Renfrew, supporting the Anatolian origin; I consequently approach anything he has to say with great trepidation).

As for the twins: having two pairs of twins myself I started reading into that subject some time ago but gave up - it's such a huge field I just couldn't manage. So declaring it as possibly PIE will probably land you between a rock and a hard place - divine twins exist everywhere on the world (often one by the 'real' father, one by a god) and certainly can't be reduced to PIE!

Two pairs of twins! Oh my oh my. My brother as a pair of 20 month old fraternal boys. I know exactly what you went through, continue to go through -- a double blessing, but double trouble that leaves you exhausted.
Other, non-IE cultures do have Divine Twins, but the motif is special in IE, in that it is part and parcel of their cosmology. They are also wrapped up, at the earliest stage of their evolution, with chariots; they are at once the stallions pulling the chariot of the sun, as well as symbolic of the male foal and male child 'twinned at birth', with mythic complication upon mythic complication coming from this (myth is rarely logical, but in the fuzzy intuitive psychological sense, nonetheless often makes sense even to us today). The dead steppe warrior's tomb marker could be the 'head-and-hooves cult' where these parts of a horse, presumably the 'right hand horse' of his chariot are mounted over his grave. With Kastor and Polyneices, one was mortal, the other was not, but they were permitted to share mortality and immortality: you get a death and resurrection cult. I'm not presenting this too well, but in the jumble of conflation, convergence and syncretism, there is enough there to tease out something very important to the late IE view of death and the afterlife: the Divine Twins are inextricably involved.
In Graeco-Roman mythology, you find multiple occurances of essentially the same twins, with different names, different genealogies, but somehow fulfilling much the same role. You even get these divergent pairs meeting each other in certain late myths!
Mark.