Śiva and Indo-European Ideology: One Line of Thought

Abstract

When an Indianist colleague recently asked me what I could say about the Indo European background to Indian deities, I thought back over a twenty-year-old interest in the subject and noticed that my published comments on Siva have been particularly dispersed. This paper attempts to consolidate some of them and to push the same line of thought a bit further. The whole approach has been based on the work of Georges Dumezil. Thus, (a) it is diachronic or genetic, in that it looks for the cultural concomitants of the historical common origin of the Indo-European languages and their subsequent spread and diversification, (b) It focuses on ideology and, more precisely, on the notion of a partitional ideology?one divided into a small number of contrasting domains, (c) It recognizes that some features of Indo-European and Indo-Iranian tradition (the "para-Vedic" ones) bypass the Vedas and appear first in Classical Sanskrit texts, (d) It is structural in the sense that it examines entities less in themselves than in their relations to other entities. Thus we shall be less interested in Siva's intrinsic