><an awful lot of stuff mercilessly snipped>
And carelessly snipped perhaps. Hope you re-read...
John of a non-Croft variety states:
>Serious: maybe it's because I used to hang out with Wiccans and got an
>allergy, but I am extremely reluctant to use 'ancient matriarcial
>cultures' in *any* interpretation of prehistory. That part of your >post
>just leaves me cold.
Ah, so you're sexist. Hmm. That's a nasty problem. I agree that Gimbutas'
material is sometimes overly feministic but underlying the crap is something
that makes sense regarding European mythology based on the archaeological
evidence. Despite protests, there does indeed appear to be something
feminine about European religion.
>Impish: Why assume that PIE tripartition has to be a product of any
>other culture or cultures? Why not turn it around and posit the
>relevant elements in these other cultures as product of Indo-European
> >influence?
Coming off the steppe, why in the hell would IE speakers have "influence" on
an emerging agricultural people coming out of Anatolia! It would be the
Anatolian culture that would influence the IE and indeed this is what we
find and SHOULD find.
The World Tree and three realms (Overworld, Middleworld and Underworld) is
at the heart of the IE myth. The problem is... why a World Tree??? There
appears to be a basic creation myth that a female black bird was flying over
the waters or that a female serpent was slithering on the waters, an egg was
dropped and out from it grew a World Tree which seperated the sky from the
deep. This is also reflected in SumeroAkkadian myth (Tiamat).
First, it doesn't make sense for steppe nomads to believe that their world
was born from a great ocean when they haven't even seen one! The underlying
belief on the steppes must have been that the earth always existed, as is
still found amongst some of these eastern peoples.
Second, this bird/serpent figure and the tree that she creates are certainly
related to each other (Note: serpent in the Garden of Eden, serpent in the
tree in Sumerian myth, bird set free in Flood myth to find land). A bird
makes a tree in an ocean in order to perch... duh! Makes sense. If I was a
bird, I'd do the same thing. The bird/serpent figure is invariably female
and one and the same. Further, the bird as well as serpent symbolism is
common in European artefacts linked to a single Goddess figure. A Greek myth
calls the raven creatrix "Nyx", the night goddess but surely the Night can't
be the originator of the world while a) Day is born later?? and b) when
Dyeus is the leader here???! What happens to Night after creation?? It all
doesn't make sense. There is no pattern.
Everything DOES make sense once we realise that the Bird is a Creative
aspect of the Goddess and that the Serpent is the Destructive aspect.
Originally, it would have been a Bird arising from Chaos (Serpent) and
laying the seed that would bring forth the cosmos. I think that the original
IE myth was such that *Da:nu, a sexually ambiguous figure representing
Chaos, gave birth to the cosmos via an egg from which sprand a World Tree.
From the Tree sprang branches, each representing a god. Thus *Nepo:t is
truely the "Grandson" of the Waters because the World Tree is his parent and
*Da:nu his grandparent, as is the case of the other major gods.
The Bird and Serpent along with a third aspect (the Animal, symbol of the
Preserver) are the three aspects of the Goddess according to the European
tripartition which also is associated with the three realms (Bird with
Overworld, Serpent with watery Underworld and Animal with Middleworld). This
structure parallels Hindu mythology and isn't far-fetched at all in
principal.
The European mythology, via a SemitoEuropoid mixture, was later entangled
into a creationless, bi-partition steppe mythology around 5500 BCE where the
bright *T:eieu (aka Dyeus, Etruscan Tin) was the main deity contrasting with
the black earth. I've already described underlying structures to the Old
European, Steppe and Semitoid mythologies in an earlier post and so won't go
back on it again.
Please, read again. I'm not a Wiccan. Sure I've ate a few sacrificial
victims now and then but who hasn't :)
- gLeN
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