Joao wrote
> >1) Dumezil considered Varuna from *WER- "to bind". Indeed Varuna
was a
> > >Binder". Indeed, Ouranos "bind" his children, the Titans.
Joao whoa!
It wasn't Uranus that bound the Titans, but Zeus. Uranus bound the
Cyclops to Tartarus and the Titans, prompted by Gaia and led by
Chronos (her youngest son), rebelled against and castrated their
father. The blood of Uranus falling upon the Earth, gave birth to
the three Erinnyes - Alecto, Tisiphone and Megaera, the furies who
avenge the crimes of purjury and matricide.
The Titans freed the Cyclops, and elected Chronos as their ruler, god
of the seventh day. He married his sister Rhea, and promptly bound
the Cyclops, together with the Hundred Handed Ones, back into
Tartarus.
This myth of the castration seems to have derived from the Luwians if
not the Hittites. The Hittite Kummarbi bit off the genitals of the
old Sumerian Sky God (Anu), swallowing some of his seed. The rest
was spat out, to rest on Mount Kansura, where it grew into a
goddess. Kummarbi gave birth to the Hittite Goddess of Love, as a
result of having swallowed some of the seed. Eventually Ea was
required to operate on Kummarbi to allow the Goddess to escape. The
castration continued down to Roman times, in which the priests of
Kubele (Cybele) were ritually castrated via a heiros-gamos (sacred
marriage) to bring about a spiritual identification with the
castrated god.
This belief in which a woman was drawn forth from a man is another
old mythic Middle Eastern element. Athene was drawn forth from the
head of Zeus, Kumarbi has a child drawn from his thigh, as Dionysus
was born from Zeus. Eve was drawn from Adam's rib. These all seem
cases that were hatched at about the time that atriarchal "dominator"
cultures were replacing the earlier Matrifcal "partnership" cultures
(to use Riane Eisler's terminology).
The knife used in the castration deed also had a further history. It
was used to slay Ullikummi (the Hittite Leviathan, Kummarbi's son)