Indo-European
Mythology and Religion
Essays
by
Alexander Jacob
Indo-European Mythology and Religion. Essays.
Alexander Jacob
© Manticore Press, Melbourne, Australia, 2019.
All rights reserved, no section of this book may be utilized
without permission, except brief quotations, including
electronic reproductions without the permission of the
copyright holders and publisher. Published in Australia.
Thema Classification:
QRS(Ancient Religions and Mythologies), QRD (Hinduism),
1QBA (Ancient World), DB (Ancient Texts), NHC (Ancient
History), QRAX (History of Religion).
978-0-6484996-1-9
m a n t i c o r e p r e s s
www.manticore.press
Contents
Preface
5
I. The Origins of the Indo-European Religions
7
II.
Pralaya
25
Cosmic Floods, the Sun and the First Man
III. Sāmkhya-Yoga, Shramana, Brāhmana, Tantra 67
The religious traditions of the ancient Indians
IV. Vedic and Tantric Rituals
139
A comparison
V.
Reviving
Adam
177
The sacrificial rituals of the Indo-Āryans and the early
Christians
VI. Dionysus and Muruga
211
Notes on the Dionysiac Religion
VII. On the Germanic gods Wotan and Thor
249
Preface
The essays presented in this collection are based
on my earlier works Ātman: A Reconstruction
of the Solar Cosmology of the Indo-Europeans,
Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2005 and Brahman: A Study
of the Solar Rituals of the Indo-Europeans, Hildesheim:
Georg Olms, 2012. They expand on the cosmological and
religious themes discussed in these books with special
reference to the origins and development of the Indic
and European spiritual traditions. Those familiar with my
earlier works will not be surprised that my view of the term
‘Indo-European’ is rather more comprehensive than the
more restricted term ‘Āryan’ that has hitherto been falsely
used as a synonym of it. And those interested in the Āryan
ethos itself will perhaps be surprised to learn that it does
not consist in nationalistic virtues so much as in spiritual
discipline and development. That this development is
characteristic of the religions of all branches of the Indo-
European family is certainly an index of its excellence.
But it is a development that is neither ful y present in all
the individual members of this family nor one that can
be easily disseminated among other communities of the
world as a universal religion.
Alexander Jacob
Casablanca, 2018
5
I. The origins of the
Indo-European religions
The recent comparative linguistic and
mythological studies of scholars such as Giovanni
Semerano1 and M.L. West2 have made it clear
that the origins of Indo-European religion are to be
found in and around the ancient Near East and that the
erstwhile tendency to distinguish, on the basis of the
linguistic difference between agglutinative and inflected
languages, the Egyptian civilisation from the Sumerian
and both from the so-called ‘Indo-European’ cultures
of the Indo-Iranians and the Hittites and Greeks has
ignored the possibility that they may have all been derived
from a common source.3 The similarities between the
1 See Giovanni Semerano , Le Origini del a Cultura Europea:
Rivelazioni della linguistica storica, Firenze: Leo Olschki, 1984-94. The etymological dictionary provided in this work gives Akkadian and
Sumerian origins for many of the ancient Greek, Latin and German
words.
2 See M.L. West, The East Face of Helicon, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
3 Indeed, it will be necessary henceforth to rename the current
linguistic term “Proto-Indo-European” as “Proto-Āryan”, since “Proto-Indo-European” better denotes the original proto-Dravidian/Hurrian language to which Semitic, modern Dravidian and Āryan are related 7
indo-european mythology and religion
cosmological religions of the three most ancient historic
civilisations of Sumer, Egypt, and the Indus Valley indeed
give credence to this possibility. The references in the
Sumerian epic of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, 141-6, to a time when all the peoples of the region “in unison/ To
Enlil4 in one tongue [gave praise],” as well as in Genesis 11:1
to the sons of Noah [Shem, the Semite; Japheth, the Āryan,
and Ham the Hamite] speaking the same tongue original y
reinforce this theory. The common solar cosmological
and philosophical orientation of the religions of Sumer,
Egypt, and India also suggests that these three civilisations
may indeed be derived from a common source. Prof.
Petr Charvat has also recently noted the emergence of
the first “universal religion of Mesopotamia” already
in the Chalcolithic cultures of Tel el Halaf in northern
Mesopotamia and Ubaid in southern Mesopotamia dating
back to the 6th millennium B.C.5
***
As regards the original home of the people who developed
the cosmological insights shared by the most ancient
religions of the region, the major evidence we have is
that of the so-called “Flood” story. The Flood story is
a cosmological account of the birth of the universe and
its light after the destruction of the cosmos at the end
of a cosmic age. The “boat” which survives the flood
bears the seeds of universal life and comes to rest atop a
than the earliest form of the Japhetic/Āryan language. Proto-Indo-European must include Semitic elements as well since Semitic is one of the oldest branches of it.
4 Enlil, the Sumerian god of Wind, is the same as [Skt.] Vāyu,
[Avestan] Wāta, [Germanic] Wotan, who represent the life-breath of the supreme deity in his macroanthropomorphic form.
5 P. Charvat, Mesopotamia Before History, London: Routledge, 2002, p.236.
8
alexander jacob
mountain, which is indeed the location in which the light
of the universe arises – as the Egyptian evidence makes
clear. The story of the deluge, however, is transferred to
a terrestrial setting in the popular flood stories of Sumer,
India, and Israel. The “ark”, or boat, which sails over the
flood, lands on a terrestrial mountain and this mountain
is considered to be the originating point of the race itself
since the survivor is described as a primeval king or sage.
In the Indian account of the Flood in the Bhāgavata
Purāna, the survivor of the Flood is Manu (Man
), who is
called Satyavrata, King of Drāvida, and his boat comes to
rest upon an unnamed “northern” mountain (VIII, 24). In
the Babylonian history of Berossos , the boat of Xisouthros, the survivor of the Flood, lands in Armenia. According
to Nikolaos of Damascus, a contemporary of Augustus,
the Armenian mountain on which the boat landed is the
Baris mountain, which may be the same as Mt. Ararat
(north of Lake Van) mentioned in the biblical Flood story
of Genesis 8:3. According to Berossus, the Babylonians
moved to different parts of Babylonia from Armenia. In
the Ethiopian version of the Greek Pseudo-Callisthenes,
the Brāhmans are called the sons of Adam’s son, Seth,
and Noah was considered a transmitter of the wisdom of
Seth. Since Adam is, as we shall see, indeed the Cosmic
Man and not a human, we may assume that the Brāhmans
referred to here are associated with the preservation of the
Divine Consciousness of Brahman which arises from the
Cosmic Egg and is later conveyed to humanity by Manu/
Noah.
Since the earliest centres of high culture are those of
the Canaanites, Hatti, Elamites, Sumerians, and Egyptians,
it is possible that the region around Mt. Ararat was the
central region from whence the proto-Dravidians travelled
to Palestine, Anatolia, Egypt, Mesopotamia and the shores
9
indo-european mythology and religion
of the Black Sea.6 It is probable also that one of the earliest
regions to be settled by the Noachidian peoples from
neighbouring Armenia was Anatolia. This is suggested by
the great antiquity of the Neolithic archaeological finds at
Çatal Hüyük in (ca. 7th millennium B.C.). The civilisation
of Syro-Palestine may be even as old as that of Anatolia
since settlements in Jordan are traceable from the late 7th
millennium B.C. and in Byblos from the 6th. Following the
archaeological finds from Anatolia and Syro-Palestine are
those from Susa in Elam, in southwestern Iran. Speiser,
along with Frankfort, conjectured that the source of this
culture may have been in Armenia itself since the farthest
northern site to yield pottery of the Susa I type is Mt.
Ararat. As for the biblical account of the earliest Elamites,
it considers Elam as a son of Shem. This suggests that a
major constituent of the proto-Dravidian population in
Elam must have been proto-Semites, probably proto-
Akkadian Semites.
Of the early Ubaid culture of southern Mesopotamia,
Eridu, which dates from the sixth millennium B.C., shows
marked Elamite affinities. It is important to note that,
according to Speiser, the original name of Ku’ara (near
Eridu) in the first dynasty of Uruk—HA.Aki—may be of
Subarian, or Hurrian origin. The very term “subari” or,
more precisely, “suwari”, is related to Suvalliyat (Suvariya)/
Sūrya, which is also the Hititte/Indic name of the sun-
god. Hurri then would be the Iranian pronunciation of the
same name, as the Iranian name of the sun-god, “Hvare”,
suggests. The original Noachidian or proto-Dravidian race
is thus most probably identifiable with the proto-Hurrians
who inhabited the Anatolian-Halafian settlements
associated with the Subarians/Suwarians/Hurrians from
the seventh millennium B.C. These earliest Hurrians
6 The northern shores of the Black Sea, in present-day Ukraine, may be identified as the homeland of the Japhetic Āryans.
10
alexander jacob
spoke an agglutinative language that possessed Dravidian
characteristics and F. Bork and G.W. Brown have revealed
the intimate linguistic relationship between Hurrian
(along with its Mitanni dialect), Elamite, and Dravidian.
The Semitic, Japhetic and Hamitic peoples mentioned in
the Bible are all closely related to this group whose very
name points to a characteristic religious worship of the
sun.
The earliest sites of northern Mesopotamian culture
are to be found in Tel el Halaf, dating back to around
5000 B.C. The powerful influence of the Halafian culture
is attested in the imitations of its pottery in southern
Armenia as well as in northeastern Syria. The Tel el Halaf
pottery is marked by bucranium designs which associate
it with the seventh-millennium shrines of Çatal Hüyük
in eastern Anatolia, which may have been established by
the earliest proto-Dravidians or Hurrians. Charvat has
revealed that the fundamental social and religious forms
of later Mesopotamian culture, including that of Uruk in
Sumer, are evident already in embryonic form in the early
Chalcolithic sites of northern Mesopotamia. Crematory
practices associated with fire-rituals are noticed here and
Tell Arpachiyah (TT6) also gives the first evidence of the
use of the white-red-black colour triad which persists
from Chalcolithic times to Uruk7 and is representative of
the three original castes of the Indo-Europeans, priests,
warriors, and the people (i.e. agriculturists and artisans).
***
7 P. Charvat, Mesopotamia Before History, p.92. In Greek antiquity, black may have denoted prime matter, red matter and white spirit
( ibid., p.93). This corresponds to the three basic energies in Indian philosophy, Tāmas, Rajas, Sattva.The association of the three Indian castes, brahman, kshatriya and shūdra, with these colours is due to the predominance of the sattvic, rājasic, and tāmasic elements, respectively, in them.
11
indo-european mythology and religion
The imperfect state of archaeological researches in
the regions under investigation prohibits any definite
identification of the original people which created the
spiritual culture of these earliest civilisations of mankind.
However, since all these civilisations are situated in the
south and, according to Gordon Childe, the predominant
element in the earliest graves in the region from Elam
to the Danube is the ‘Mediterranean’,8 we may presume
that these early cultures were founded by the genius of
that broad group. The dolichocephalic Mediterranean
people may thus have constituted the earliest strata of
the populations of Asia, Egypt, and Europe. They may be
identified as the “proto-Dravidian” or “proto-Hurrian” or
even proto-Indo-Europeans.
Of the three historic linguistic branches associated
with the sons of Noah, Shem, Japhet, and Ham,9 the earliest
literary evidence is mostly of the Semitic proto-Akkadian.
Many of the words of the earliest Uruk tablets that were
designated as “proto-Euphratean” by B. Landsberger are
most probably of proto-Akkadian origin, as G. Rubio has
recently pointed out. Langdon, however, noted that most
of the Semitic names were concentrated in the north,
and this suggests the “entrance of the Semites into the
northern area at Kish and Maer at a very early period”. The
Semitic Akkadian culture of northern Mesopotamia must
have been related also to that of Elam,
which is described
in Genesis 10:20 as a “son” of Shem. It is not surprising that the earliest Akkadians were closely associated with
Hurrian tribes as wel , with whom they seem to have
shared a common historical tradition. We have here an
8 See G. Childe, The Dawn of European Civilization, London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1961, p.109. The German evidence for this type dates from the late chalcolithic period (early 4th millenium B.C.) called Danube III.
9 By ‘sons’ and ‘fathers’ is obviously meant later and earlier tribes of with their divergent physical and linguistic traits.
12
alexander jacob
indication of the great antiquity of the Semitic Akkadian
family.
***
Although the earliest attested religions are those of the
Semites and the Sumerian and Egyptian Hamites, the
Japhetic Āryans may indeed have been older than the
Hamites, since Ham is represented in the earliest Jahvist
version of the Bible as “the youngest son of Noah”.10 The
Āryans are general y divided into eastern, “shatem” and
western, “centum” Āryans. Regarding the western Āryan
peoples, we may note that, in Genesis 9:2, the eldest son of Japheth [the Āryans] is called Gamer, representing the
Cimmerians, who are described by Herodotus (IV,14) as
having had their initial home “on the shores of the Black
Sea”. The Cimmerians are probably identical to the most
ancient Celts, since the Welsh (who are a southern Celtic
people like the Bretons) call themselves, to this day,
“Cymry”. Diodorus Siculus ( Bibliotheca Historica V,32)
also states that the Celts living close to the Black Sea are
scattered “as far as Scythia” and the northernmost of these
Celtic tribes are the wildest and most powerful having
apparently “wandered across and laid waste the whole of
Asia, under the then name of Cimmerians”. The northern
Celts are no doubt the Goidelic but the fact that the ancient
name is preserved chiefly among the Bretonic Welsh may
be due to the predominance of the conservative Druidic
element among the latter.
The “brothers” of Gamer include Magog (the
Magi or Iranians), Madai (the Medes/Mitanni/Indo-
Iranians), Javan (Greeks), Tubal (uncertain), Meschech
(Cappadocians, according to Josephus) and Tiras
(Thracians, according to Josephus). The eastern Japhetic
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