Indo-European Mythology and Religion

by Alexander Jacob

  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