From: [l--p] at [s1.gov] (Loren I. Petrich)
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology,soc.history,alt.pagan,sci.skeptic
Subject: Re: Question regarding the Goddess in Europe
Date: 18 Aug 1993 05:36:17 GMT

In article <24s344$[j f v] at [truffula.fp.trw.com]> [e--w--n] at [trwacs.fp.trw.com] (Harry Erwin) writes:
>Since we don't have much in the way of written records (or even symbolic
>materials) it's hard to treat the Goddess hypothesis as much more than
>speculation. The triune Goddess of the Celts (maiden, woman, crone) has
>connections to the third aspect of IE ideology, so much of what has been
>written in that area is speculative. There is good evidence that the PIE
>groups were patriarchal. 

	The most interesting groups in this connection are the
Neolithic and Minoan ones, who were pre-Indo-European.

	[for more on IE reconstructed culture, see J.P. Mallory's _In
Search of the Indo-Europeans_]

	About Indo-European ideology itself, it is possible to make a
fair number of inferences, both from language and from comparative
mythology. From the vocabulary that can be reconstructed, one can look
for words that are distinctive, rather than "universal" words like
those for numbers, body parts, natural phenomena, and so forth. Their
having a word for "snow", for instance (English "snow", German
"Schnee", Latin "nix, niv-", Greek "nix, niph-", Russian "sneg" < IE
*sneigwh-), means only that the early IE speakers lived somewhere
where it snows, which is a very large area. But words for horses
(Latin "equus", Greek "hippos", Sanskrit "as'va", Old English "eoh" <
IE *ekwos), and wheeled vehicles suggest that the early IE speakers
had horses and wheeled vehicles, the archeological record of which
might be used to set an earliest possible time of presence.

	From clues like this, Marija Gimbutas has proposed the
identification of the IE speakers with the Kurgan culture of South
Russia, which spread from there starting about 4000-3500 BCE. The
culture was named after the burial mounds of its chieftains, who often
had a lot of company in their tombs. The one who is presumably the
leader is always male, as far as has been found.

	Now for cultural deductions. There are a lot of words for a
husband's relatives, but not for a wife's relatives; the in-law
vocabulary suggests that women moved to their husbands, rather than
men to their wives. And there is also the name of a (presumably)
important deity:

	Old English: Tiu
	Old Norse: Tyr
	Latin: Jovis Pater (>Juppiter)
	Greek: Zeus Pater
	Sanskrit: Dyaus Pitar
	IE: *Dye:us [REDACTED] at [te]:r
	[@ = schwa, upside-down "e"]

	Literally, "Father Sky", perhaps the first Heavenly Father in
history. But he was almost certainly not alone, unlike a more familiar
one :-)

	Social structure? The historian Dume'zil has proposed a
tripartite scheme that is much like Plato's Republic:

	Kings and priests	[sovereign class]
	Soldiers		[forceful class]
	Common people		[productive class]

	This division of classes is rather widespread, and it appears
in such things as an ancient Iranian medical text that classifies
medicines as spell-medicines (sovereigns' territory), knife-medicines
(soldiers' territory), and herb-medicines (productive class's
territory). Some early Germanic tribes had three styles of executions:
hanging for sovereign-class offenses, beheading or bludgeoning for
forceful-class offenses, and drowning for productive-class offenses.

	Corresponding to these three classes is three types of
deities:

Sovereign class: god of the bright shining sky
Forceful class: thunder god
Productive class: fertility deities, including a female figure and
twins on horseback

	The first two types are always male, while the third is
a mixed-sex grab bag.

	The Thunder God has an enemy, who is a snake-monster whom he
fights. This is deduced from the numerous stories of deities and
heroes battling snake-monsters.

	Not surprisingly, those deities interpreted as being pre-IE
break this tripartite mold. Example: the Greek Athena is a deity of
wisdom [sovereign], war [forceful], and olive trees and health
[productive].  And by IE standards, she is of the wrong sex for the
first two!

	She may have been a heritage of a pre-IE population in which
women could have important roles and which worshipped deities made in
the likeness of that; in later times she was pictured as something of
a Phyllis Schlafly figure who would present herself as an example of
-- 
/Loren Petrich, the Master Blaster
/[l--p] at [s1.gov]