Some Observations On Dumézil's Views of Indo-European Mythology

Abstract

important inferences from ill-founded and questionable etymologies and because of their lack of insight into the mentality, the religious beliefs and behaviour which may be attributed to those prehistoric communities which spoke the idioms which were to develop into Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. After some decennia of stagnation in this field of inquiry, the French scholar Georges Dum?zil has these last thirty-five years launched out into a series of monographs in which he applies a modernized comparative method, based, it is true, to a certain extent on linguistic data, but improved by a thorough consideration of the social structure and the allied religious beliefs of the prehistoric Indo-Europeans. Especially these last twenty years his theory of the 'three functions' which are, in his view, an outstanding characteristic of the ancient Indo-European religion and 'Weltanschauung', has attracted the attention, and often invited the criticism, of linguists, philologists, and students of the comparative history of religion. This theory of a 'tripartite ideology' of the Indo-Europeans? that is their socio-religious distinction between the three functions of the 'clerical' order, the military order and the 'third estate'? has now been summarized in a recent work 1). Dum?zil's point of view, maintained in a long series of publications, is well-known: this tripartition is reflected in the groupings of, and mutual relation between, the divine powers, in the very structure of Indo-European mythology: beside the magic sovereignty occupied with the celestial