>The source of Vanir is North East Caucasian, not Kartvelian.
I thought we had all established that it was Indo-European. Wasn't
there an etymon reconstructed like *wensu?
>I think that the ultimate source, found also in Etruscan /Vanth/ is
>a verbal root meaning "to speak". Semantic shift would be clear:
>/Vanth/ = Fatum; /(w)anaks/ < "who gives orders".
This seems like a bad re-hashing of my previously posted idea that
Vanth, the Etruscan protectoress of the dead, was somehow
connected with the origin of Greek /anax/ and also connected
to the Hattic Wurun-katti "Ruler of the realm", a war god.
I recall Piotr objecting to the idea because, and I admit, that it
was hard at the time for me to reconcile convincingly the
discongruent concepts of "king" (anax), "war god" (Wurunkatti)
and "protectoress of dead" (Vanth). However, this recent
mention of it has caused me to revisit the idea and I realized
some more things.
Vanth has a symbol connected with her, as well as does Charun,
the symbol of the hammer. The interesting thing about the
hammer is that its morphological antecedent is the double-axe,
a symbol of the Eastern Mediterranean goddess, a symbol used
rampantly in the Minoan sphere. It is the symbol for "a", the
first syllable used to spell out Assaram (< Asherah, the West
Semitic fertility godess). As such, a connection can at the very
least be established between this earth goddess archetype and
the later concept of a protectoress of departed souls, who may
be buried into the bosom of Mother Earth afterall.
But still, we are left in the same position of having to connect
three concepts together: a goddess, war god and king. Well,
we need to understand the meaning of Wurunkatti. It is
translated to mean "ruler of the realm" because /katti/ is "ruler,
king" and /wuru/ is a realm or area that this ruler rules over.
However, we then must question what "realm" does Wurunkatti
preside over as a war god. Is he the embodiment of the actual
king -- An abstract representation of his divine power. Perhaps.
However, isn't he also ruler over a _supernatural_ realm, the
otherworld? Since he is a god, the latter thought seems most
likely. Thus, we might say that Wurunkatti is much like Pluto,
an otherworldly king. The fact that there is, beyond just a
conceptual connection between war and death, a precedence
in Canaanite mythology of the god of storms and war, Baal,
ultimately escaping the power of Mot, god of death, shows that
this West Asian war god was in effect master of death at least,
if not always direct ruler over death and the dead.
This now shows a connection between the wanax, the war god
and the deadly Vanth. Yet still, there is the tricky matter of the
sexual differences. Vanth is a female, while the wanax and
Wurunkatti were certainly male. How could sex be confused
here?
A solution I came to realize was that Minoan religion prominently
employs priestesses to the task of divine mediation. They are
the intermediaries between the earth and the metaphysical in
much the same way as the king was. It may be possible that,
if the ancestral Proto-Hattic form of Wurun-katti was something
like *w�non-kate (or without the genitive suffix, *w�no-kate),
the Tyrrhenians must have adopted it as *wenakta at an early
date (c.3000 BCE ?) for the function of "priest/priestess". The
priests and priestesses are, afterall, the rulers of the "realm", are
they not? And as such, they wielded power. As well, the king
too could be termed a *wenakta, since he also held divine
power, protecting the obeissant people of his land and smashing
his enemies just like Wurunkatti.
Due to the strong female involvement in Tyrrhenian religion, it
may be possible that while a king was technically a *wenakta,
the word may have been primarily used for priestesses of the
Goddess or for the Goddess herself, who protected mortals and
held them eternally as a mother in her chthonic lap when they
passed on. The interloping ProtoGreeks would have overlooked
the full connotation of *wenakta as "priest" or "priestess" and,
being patriarchal with a different culture and belief system would
use *wanakts to specifically denote their priest-chiefs.
In EtruscoCypriot, *wenakta would simplify to *wenata, and
regularly became Etruscan /vantH/, the protectoress of
the dead with hammer and wings (both symbolic derivations of
the original double-axe icon).
= gLeN
_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/bcomm&pgmarket=en-ca&RU=http%3a%2f%2fjoin.msn.com%2f%3fpage%3dmisc%2fspecialoffers%26pgmarket%3den-ca