The Indo-Europeans were discovered not much more than two centuries ago. In fact, an English scientist (W. Jones), staying in India at the end of the XVIIIth century, put forth the Indo-European hypothesis based on lexical and grammatical resemblances, observed between the classical languages and Sanskrit. For the first time he established that a far-away prehistory must have necessarily united the people who were going to later occupy the biggest part of Eurasia (from the polar circle to Gibraltar, and from Iceland to Central Asia), the territories that Turkey occupies, Iran and Afghanistan of today as well as the northern part of the Indian Sub-Continent.
The Roman, Germanic, Celtic, Baltic, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Anatolian languages to which we could add Albanian and Armenian consequently belongs to a very vast family and have a history that stretches sometimes over more than four millenniums!
Two points should be noted:
a) Indo-European itself, the so-called mother tongue, has left no direct testimony. The language that we call in this way is a « schematic» language, in reality reduced to a framework of lexical and morphological facts that the linguists have « restored» based on ancient languages that have been in turn attested by texts and/or inscriptions, such as Latin, Homeric Greek, Avestan, Hittite or Vedic Sanskrit to cite only the oldest ones and those that have left the most number of testimonies. Thus, based on Sanskrit mâtar, old Irish mathir, Armenian mayr, Greek mêtêr, etc., one can put together the Indo-European prototype *mâter on the basis of regular and currently well-known phonetic rules (the asterisk serves to indicate a restored form conventionally). But this prehistoric word, simple phonetic skeleton, obviously tells us nothing of the social, psychological or institutional realities that it referred to.
b) The Indo-Europeans likewise have not left any material evidence. Or rather, considering the previous point, it is impossible to attribute a definite Indo-European origin to an archeological vestige. For this, an inscription confirming its origin had to be made. But the Indo-Europeans did not know how to write. In other words, the localization of their original habitat generates discussions and controversy among specialists.
The discovery of the Indo-Europeans and Indo-European languages contributed to another (r)evolution on a totally different plane from the middle of the XIXth century. In the wake of comparative grammar, it became in fact possible to imagine a « comparative mythology», which in its turn encouraged the arrival of a history or a science of religions whose objects and themes would be independent of the demanding tradition centered on the Bible. The « Comparative Mythology » of F. M. Müller (1856) around a decade before his famous «Essays on the Science of Religion » (1867) summarizes this major turning point of the history of ideas and academic disciplines well.
Unfortunately, this first comparative mythology got a lot of overly accurate inspiration from allegoric readings that antiquity had appreciated. Thus we saw « solar », « agrarian», « storm» mythologies etc flourish. This exclusive and mechanical way of reading or interpreting the myths resulted in its discredit from the end of the XIXth century. Only the work of J. G. Frazer, « Le rameau d’or » (The Golden Branch), maintained its glory for a while longer by adding some famous themes such as scapegoat or ritual murder of the old king meant to regenerate the vital forces animating nature.
The initial works of Georges Dumézil (1898-1986) fitted into this « naturalistic » and frazerian context between the middle of the twenties and thirties. But what one could call the first dumezilian topic, set up from 1938, drew from radically different principles. At the end of a study on them, Dumézil incidentally noticed that the series of three big priests of Archaic Rome (the flamines of Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus) presented a plausible homology with the old Vedic theory of the three social classes or varna (priests, warriors and producers). But especially he drew a very general conclusion from it that was to be extremely fecund. According to the latter, the two series of facts, Indian and Roman, would be explained by the presence of a single underlying ideology, itself inherited from the venerable Indo-European prehistory. The form and content of this ideology found its raison d’être in the Indian example. If the Indo-Europeans had conceived and analyzed their own and the Gods’ universe by using an ideology that juxtaposed and prioritized three social principles or functions, it is because it was itself the faithful reflection of a comparable social organization. During the 1940s, Dumézil defined « the ideology of the three functions» as the abstract « exact copy» of an archaic social tripartition and as the mental design that was in a position to justify or legitimize its existence.
But the facts soon obliged Dumézil to review this mechanist and specular model. Apparently, the social realities, historically attested, were often lacking, especially at Rome! In other words, the argument of the reflection, almost everywhere, seemed very difficult to defend. Also, by successive touches, revisions and regrets, Dumézil corrected his first model and wrote a second topic, very different, that blossomed during the 1960s. By renouncing to solve the question related to the origin of the ideology of the three functions, he in fact set the ideological facts free from all narrow sociological determinism. And, from then onwards, he could endeavor to defend a comparative approach founded exclusively on looking out for similar structural series. And it is in particular in the framework of adaptations (of myths or theological data to epics or literature) that they emerged with the most transparency. Thus, in the Indian Mahabarata or Ramayan, the heroes brought together by the different relationships (solidarity, complementarity, opposition, twinship, etc.), reproduce the main functional traits of the Gods who have brought them into the world or inspired their character. The two « systems» are structurally homologous. Thus, by his work, Dumézil establishes that if the comparative evidence and the structural evidence attained a sufficiently high degree of complexity, they had their own demonstrative capacities.
Finally we note that these two dumezilian topics, in no way lacking in interest, themselves « reflect» quite well one of the major alternatives with which several specialists of Human Sciences, since Durkheim, were confronted: Or, like all the materialistic approaches, the symbolic systems, for their form and content, are considered as the more or less faithful expression of a reality (social, psychological…) fundamentally different from them; or, on the contrary, these very systems are known for an autonomy and dynamism sourced within themselves. The debate is open …
Bibliography
G. Dumézil
La religion romaine archaïque, Paris, Gallimard, 1966
Mythe et épopée I, Paris, Gallimard, 1968
Heur et malheur du guerrier, Paris, Payot, 1969
D. Dubuisson
La légende royale dans l'Inde ancienne, Râma et le Râmâyana, Préface de Georges Dumézil, Paris, éd. Économica, 1986.
20th Century Mythologies Dumézil, Eliade, Lévi-Strauss, Equinox Publishing Ltd, London (going to press). |
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