There are some interesting ideas here. I almost find myself
surprised when I agree with much of what Glen has said.
In any discussion of IE mythology, I think we need to take
great care in what we define as a god. At the PIE stage, I
have difficulty seeing them having anything beyond
'personified contending forces' ('polydaemonism' to use
Wellhausen's term), something just above animistic shamanism.
Systematic polytheism tends to be lead by clerics.
A second point is that the IE religion was a popular religion.
It was what the folk thought, the tales they passed down. And
if the folk changed their mind, or took hold of a new notion,
their 'religion' also changed. Hinduism, in all its
manifestations, can be described as the present day direct
descendant of the IE religion.
Hinduism is not easily explained in Western (and in
particular, Christian, Jewish or Islamic) terms. It's all
religions at once, with the folk chosing whatever particular
form fits their fancy. From their point of view, Christianity,
Judaism and Islam could be described as sects of Hinduism.
A third point is that what nuggets of authentic IE myth
survive come down to us filtered through a clerical ('first
function') sensibility, as with Vedism and Avestanism, where
old material has been reworked to fit later sensibilities.
Greek myth became subject to literary license: Homer's satiric
view of the gods became the official view. Norse and Baltic
myth comes to us filtered thru a Christian sensibility.
> But... we have two lords fighting over rulership - This much
is clear. This
> two-lord battle must be ancient because the theme exists not
just in IE myth
> but in the nearby Middle East as well (El versus Baal).
For the earliest stage of IE myth, I think this is too
explicit. Two powers contending over earth and sky in a
thunderstorm works very well as a metaphoric folktale, one
that can evolve into full fledged myth.
> The battle sometimes
> involves competing generations of gods but nonetheless there
is indeed a
> battle for the sky, not the underworld or the earth but the
_sky_. This
> mythological fact could serve well to obscure the
connections that the IE
> war god had with the underworld. In other words, the warrior
god fights the
> sky god in the sky, maybe even taking over and voila! After
a while, people
> start believing in an originally underworld war god living
in the sky.
Again, I think this goes too far, at least in IE terms. You
have to keep front and center the very real mythological
division of night and day ('cut' or divided by dawn). In
Homer, Zeus is portrayed as having not that much power during
the night. The identification of Uranos, Cronos and Zeus as
the night, dawn and day gods has been made, tho' there are
problems.
At the same time, in earlier times, none of these stories had
to be particularly consistent. Popular religion thrives on
inconsistency.
> The whole tripartition theme, I feel, is of prehistoric
European origin.
Tripartition crops up in other (non-IE) stratified societies,
as with mediaeval Japan. It is not peculiar to the IEs. It
seems something like this was in effect in preColumbian
Mexico/Yucatan.
> I
> also feel that the IE language (as opposed to culture or
mythology) came
> ultimately from off the steppes, from the east. The pre-IEs
would come from
> east to west into the North Pontic-Caspian area by 7000 BCE.
So, the
> original view of the cosmos of these pre-IEs might have been
more like a
> dual sky-earth opposition only, without a clear underworld.
The
> priest-commoner-warrior themes in IE myth would not have
existed either
> (since they are probably influenced by European tripartitive
ideas too). And
> so, while I am convinced that there was a mythological
connection between
> war and the underworld in the IE speech communities as they
stood from about
> 5500 and 4000 BCE, I have severe doubts that this connection
is much older
> than that amongst the IEs. A war-underworld connection was
probably not a
> theme common to Asian shamanistic religion prior to 5500
BCE.
I am not ready to reach back to 7000 BCE. As a practical
matter, we need to confine ourselves to a time considerably
later, 3500 or so.
And, wherever the linguistic group[s] ancentral to PIE
originated, one also has to consider the influences of non-IE
speaking religions. If we are to take Marija Gimbutas' Old
Europeans at face value, then a convergence (or syncretism) of
religious beliefs would have had to occurred, particularly
vis-a-vis Mother Earth or Gaia or Demeter or Rhea, whatever
you want to call the Great Mother Who is the Earth.
Enough for a while.