New Perspectives On Myth

New Perspectives on Myth
Wim M.J. van Binsbergen & Eric Venbrux

(eds)

New Perspectives
on Myth

Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference
of the International Association for
Comparative Mythology,
Ravenstein (the Netherlands),
19-21 August, 2008

PIP-TraCS Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and
Transcontinental Comparative Studies No. 5

to Michael Witzel, the driving force behind it all

.
Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative
Studies ( : PIP_TraCS@yahoo.com ) is a publishing initiative of

Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie

volumes published in this series enjoy free-access availability on the Internet
at: http://www.quest-journal.net/PIP/index.htm .
Also see that webpage for full information on the entire series, directions for
prospective contributors, and ordering of hard copies

Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative
Studies, and Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de
Philosophie, are published by Shikanda, Haarlem, the Netherlands

ISBN: 978-90-78382-072

the individual contributions: 2010 copyright the respective authors

this collection, including the right of publication in printed and digital form:
Haarlem / Nijmegen 2010 Wim van Binsbergen & Eric Venbrux

5
Preface

by Wim van Binsbergen & Eric Venbrux

The Second Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative My-
thology (IACM) was held at the former convent of Soeterbeeck near the small medie-
val town of Ravenstein in the Netherlands on 19-21 August 2008. This volume,
entitled New Perspectives on Myth, contains the proceedings of the conference.
In total the work has 19 chapters. The volume consists of five parts: an intro-
duction offering a report of the conference, a section on The Mythology of Death and
Dying, another on Mythological Continuities between Africa and Other Continents, a
section on Theoretical and Methodological Advances, and a final one on Work-in-
Progress. Indexes of proper names and of authors have been added to assist readers in
consulting the proceedings, to highlight the links between chapters, and to provide
something of an inventory of current comparative mythology as a field of studies.
We would like to thank the following institutions for their financial contribu-
tions, making the conference possible: the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies,
Harvard University, USA; the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
(KNAW); the Faculty of Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Neth-
erlands; the African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands; the Sormani Fund, Nij-
megen, the Netherlands; the Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam,
the Netherlands; the International Office, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Nether-
lands; Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie; the
Research School NISCO, Faculty of Social Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen,
the Netherlands; and the International Association for Comparative Mythology
(IACM), Cambridge MA, USA.
We are also indebted to Kirsten Seifikar, who as copy-editor polished up the
English of many contributions and brought the bibliographical material up to a com-
mon standard; and to the editorial team of Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy /
Revue Africaine de Philosophie, for taking care of the books layout, production,
cover, and index.
Last but not least, our thanks are due to the International Association for
Comparative Mythology, and to the participants in the Second Annual Conference of
that organisation, for creating the intellectual conditions towards the present book,
and entrusting its realisation to us.
7
Table of contents

Preface......................................................................................................................5
List of figures.........................................................................................................12
List of tables...........................................................................................................14
PART I. INTRODUCTORY................................................................................................15
Chapter 1. Introduction: The Second Annual Conference of the
International Association for Comparative Mythology, Ravenstein, the
Netherlands, August 19-21, 2008
by Wim van Binsbergen & Eric Venbrux..............................................................17
PART II. MYTHOLOGY OF DEATH AND DYING................................................................23
Chapter 2. Death and Regeneration: The Moon in Australian
Aboriginal Myths of the Origin of Death
by Eric Venbrux.....................................................................................................25
Introduction..................................................................................................25
Contemporary ancestors...............................................................................27
The Dreaming ..............................................................................................28
How death came into the world ...................................................................30
Comparing the myths...................................................................................33
Blaming the totemic ancestors.....................................................................35
Regeneration ................................................................................................36
Concluding discussion .................................................................................38
References....................................................................................................39
Chapter 3. Tales of death and regeneration in West Africa
by Walter E.A. van Beek .......................................................................................41
Introduction: An unromantic Africa ............................................................41
Two cultures: Similarities and differences ..................................................44
The tales.......................................................................................................46
The struggle with death in Kapsiki ..............................................................48
Regeneration: The Dogon sigi myth............................................................49
Death and regeneration: The human way ....................................................51
References....................................................................................................56
8
Chapter 4. A Journey to the Netherworld: Reconstructing Features of
Indo-European Mythology of Death and Funereal Rituals from Baltic,
Slavic, and Buddhist Parallels
by Boris Oguibnine & Nataliya Yanchevskaya ...................................................59
1. Slavic and Baltic Parallels .......................................................................60
2. Buddhist Parallels ....................................................................................68
Bibliography ................................................................................................72
Chapter 5. Death as Defilement in Zoroastrianism
by Victoria Kryukova ............................................................................................75
1. Affinity of Old Iranian and Old Indian traditions....................................76
2. Dogs .........................................................................................................80
3. Good and evil ...........................................................................................80
4. Purification rites.......................................................................................82
5. Dug-out holes...........................................................................................85
6. Archaeological excavations: Results .......................................................86
References....................................................................................................89
Chapter 6. Varins philosophy and the Rk Stones mythology of
death
by Joseph Harris.....................................................................................................91
Varins philosophy and the Rk Stones mythology of death.....................91
The structure of the inscription....................................................................92
Themes of life and death..............................................................................94
The myth in Section Three...........................................................................95
Varins philosophy of death.......................................................................101
Bibliography ..............................................................................................103
PART III. MYTHOLOGICAL CONTINUITIES BETWEEN AFRICA AND OTHER
CONTINENTS................................................................................................................107
Chapter 7. The emergence of the first people from the underworld:
Another cosmogonic myth of a possible African origin
by Yuri Berezkin..................................................................................................109
The dispersal of modern man and the areal patterns of folklore-
mythological motifs .......................................................................110
Negative correlation between the Emergence myth and the
Earth-diver myth............................................................................114
Specific links between the American and the Asian and
Melanesian cases of the Emergence myth .....................................115
The emergence myth in Africa ..................................................................118
Adventure tales of Continental Eurasian origin subsequently
disseminated into Africa, but not into Australia ............................119
Research perspectives ................................................................................121
References..................................................................................................124
Table of Contents
9
Chapter 8. Myths, indigenous culture, and traditions as tools in
reconstructing contested histories: The Ife-Modakeke example
by Bukola Adeyemi Oyeniyi ...............................................................................127
Introduction................................................................................................127
The Ife-Modakeke conflict ........................................................................133
Indigenous culture as a tool of analysis in the Ife-Modakeke
conflict ...........................................................................................136
Conclusion .................................................................................................139
References..................................................................................................142
Chapter 9. The continuity of African and Eurasian mythologies:
General theoretical models, and detailed comparative discussion of the
case of Nkoya mythology from Zambia, South Central Africa
by Wim van Binsbergen.......................................................................................143
1. African transcontinental mythological continuities as a
problem..........................................................................................144
2. Recent interpretative schemas that claim mythological
continuity instead of separation of Eurasia and sub-
Saharan Africa ...............................................................................149
3. From myth to proto-history and back, in tears / Tears ..........................169
4. The problem of contamination...............................................................175
5. Major mythological themes among the Nkoya, with a
discussion of their salient transcontinental
correspondences.............................................................................176
6. Conclusion .............................................................................................201
7. References cited.....................................................................................204
Chapter 10. Pan-Gaean Flood myths: Gondwana myths and beyond
by Michael Witzel................................................................................................225
1. Overview................................................................................................226
2. Gondwana Flood myths .........................................................................226
3. Laurasian Flood myths...........................................................................232
4. A comparison of Gondwana and Laurasian Flood myths......................237
Bibliography ..............................................................................................240
Chapter 11. Hphaistos vs. Pta
by Vclav Blaek.................................................................................................243
1. Greek theonym.......................................................................................243
2. Egyptian origin.......................................................................................244
3. Pta and Hephaestus compared .............................................................248
Post scriptum..............................................................................................249
References..................................................................................................251
10
Chapter 12. Can Japanese mythology contribute to comparative
Eurasian mythology?
by Kazuo Matsumura...........................................................................................253
1. Introduction............................................................................................253
2. Myth of the Sun and Fire .......................................................................255
3. Common structure in classical mythology and culture..........................261
References..................................................................................................263
PART IV. THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL ADVANCES......................................265
Chapter 13. The cosmological theory of myth
by Emily Buchanan Lyle .....................................................................................267
1. Introduction............................................................................................267
2. Cosmological theory..............................................................................268
3. A cosmological model based on Indo-European sources ......................269
4. Building and testing the model ..............................................................270
5. The kinship code....................................................................................272
6. Conclusion .............................................................................................275
Acknowledgements....................................................................................275
Bibliography ..............................................................................................275
Chapter 14. The neurobiological origins of primitive religion:
Implications for comparative mythology
by Steve Farmer ...................................................................................................279
1. Introduction: Neurobiology, myth, and religion....................................280
2. The universality of anthropomorphism, and its role in early
religion.......................................................................................................286
3. Overview of a testable neurodevelopmental model of the
origins of anthropomorphism.....................................................................296
4. Testing the model...................................................................................302
5. Summary and conclusions .....................................................................309
References..................................................................................................310
Chapter 15. Postmodernism and the Comparative Method
by Robert A. Segal ...............................................................................................315
Postmodernism (1) .....................................................................................316
Controlled Comparativism (2) ...................................................................318
New Comparativism (3).............................................................................320
Old Comparativism (4) ..............................................................................321
Hoariness of the positions..........................................................................321
Defending the Comparative Method..........................................................322
Postmodern objections to the Comparative Method..................................322
Frazers Old Comparativism......................................................................329
The superiority of Old Comparativism......................................................332
References..................................................................................................332
Table of Contents
11
Chapter 16. Myth: A challenge to philosophy
by Willem Dupr..................................................................................................335
1. Introduction............................................................................................335
2. Ways to study myth ...............................................................................337
3. Observations ..........................................................................................341
4. Basic meanings ......................................................................................345
5. Why should it be of interest to study myth? ..........................................350
References..................................................................................................353
Chapter 17. Hephaestus and Agni Gods and men on the battlefield in
Greek and Sanskrit epics
by Nick Allen.......................................................................................................357
1. Introduction............................................................................................357
2. Rapprochements.....................................................................................360
3. Differences.............................................................................................368
4. Broader issues ........................................................................................370
References..................................................................................................372
PART V. WORK IN PROGRESS ......................................................................................373
Chapter 18. Sunda The Affirmative life: The mythological
worldview of the contemplative site Nagara Padang, West Java,
Indonesia
by Stephanus Djunatan ........................................................................................375
1. Introduction............................................................................................375
2. The culture-historical setting of the contemplative site.........................376
3. The myth of sagacious individuality......................................................387
4. Mythology as pious teaching: The affirmative life................................389
5. Open ending: A comparative study........................................................401
References..................................................................................................406
Chapter 19. The function of irony in mythical narratives: Hans
Blumenberg and Homers ludicrous gods
by Nadia Sels .......................................................................................................409
1. Introduction............................................................................................409
2. Homers ambiguous portrayal of the gods: An age-old
question..........................................................................................410
3. Blumenberg and the absolutism of reality. Strategies to keep
the gods at bay ...............................................................................413
4. Irony, human helplessness and the divine viewpoint.............................417
5. The ironic attitude and the Homeric gods. Theomachy, Dios
Apat and the entrapment of Ares and Aphrodite. ........................420
6. Conclusion .............................................................................................424
References..................................................................................................425
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ..............................................................................................427
INDEX OF PROPER NAMES AND MOTIFS .......................................................................429
AUTHOR INDEX ..........................................................................................................457

12
List of figures

Fig. 7.1. The global distribution of the motif Shed skin as condition of im-
mortality.........................................................................................................111
Fig. 7.2. The global distribution of the motif Suns children killed...........................112
Fig. 7.3. The global distribution of the motif Person is tricked into killing
his kin.............................................................................................................112
Fig. 7.4. The global distribution of the motif People from the Underworld..............114
Fig. 7.5. The global distribution of the motif The Way from One World to
Another Goes through a Narrow Opening.....................................................116
Fig. 7.6. The global distribution of the motif The False Wife ...................................120
Fig. 7.7. The global distribution of the motif Kind and unkind girls.........................121
Fig. 7.8. The global distribution of the motif Magic flight ........................................121
Fig. 7.9. The global distribution of the Atalanta type version of Magic
flight ...............................................................................................................122
Fig. 7.10. The global distribution of the motif Originator of death the first
sufferer ...........................................................................................................123
Fig. 7.11. The global distribuitoion of the motif Waters give way ............................123
Fig. 9.1. Cavalli-Sforzas well-known array of the populations and lan-
guage groups of the world..............................................................................146
Fig. 9.2. Dendrogram setting out the relative positions of the *Borean-
associated linguistic marco-phyla in relation to Bantu and Khoisan.............153
Fig. 9.3. Provisional situation and time of Contexts of Intensified Trans-
formation and Innovation (CITIs), as crucial stages in the global
history of the mythology of Anatomically Modern Humans.........................163
Fig. 9.4. Diagrammatic representation of the Pelasgian Hypothesis ................. 165-166
Fig. 9.5. Major attestations of the annual communal extinction and rekin-
dling fire.........................................................................................................184
Fig. 9.6. Global distribution of the spiked wheel trap (as typical of Pelas-
gian distributions) ..........................................................................................185
Fig. 9.7. Attestation of spider-related myths..............................................................185
Fig. 9.8. Global distribution of male genital mutilation ............................................187
Fig. 9.9. Global distribution of rain gods with junior status in the pantheon ............198
Fig. 9.10. Global distributions of the mytheme of the unilateral mythical
being...............................................................................................................199
Fig. 12.1. East Asia....................................................................................................254
List of Figures
13
Fig. 12.2. The Pacific Ring of Fire ............................................................................259
Fig. 12.3. The (geographical) distribution of various elements of the myth
of the hidden sun............................................................................................260
Fig. 13.1. The threefold pantheon and related mythic patterns .................................273
Fig. 13.2. A four-generation capsule with bilateral cross-cousin marriage,
showing the ten people who are taken to correspond to gods........................274
Fig. 14.1. Anthropomorphic lion figure, ivory, Holenstein-Stadel, ca.
32,000 BP.......................................................................................................280
Fig. 14.2. Exposure-objects displayed in various positions and configura-
tions from the moving film. Large triangle, small triangle, disc and
house ..............................................................................................................308
Fig. 18.1. The location of the site and surroundings..................................................384
Fig. 18.2. The topography of the terraces and stages.................................................385
Fig. 18.3. The two-dimensional triangle....................................................................397
Fig. 18.4 The hierarchical structure of the Tritangtu.................................................397
Fig. 18.5. The three-dimensional dynamic cyclic spiral ............................................398

14
List of tables

Table 2.1. Comparing Australian myths of death and dying.......................................33
Table 9.1. Narrative Complexes identified in sub-Saharan African cos-
mogonies as collected in historical times.......................................................159
Table 9.2. Contexts of Intensified Transformation and Innovation
(CITIs) in the global history of Anatomically Modern Humans
mythology ......................................................................................................160
Table 9.3. Selected Aarne-Thomson (AT) traits relevant to the combat
theme (Fontenrose 1980) in Nkoya mythology and cosmology....................167
Table 10.1. A comparison of Gondwana and Laurasian Flood myths.......................237
Table 10.2. Combined table of Laurasian and Gondwana Flood myths....................238
Table 11.1. Comparison of Pta and Hephaestus and their spouses..........................248
Table 17.1. Parties in the epic conflict involving Hephaestus and Agni ...................359
Table 18.1. The stages for a pilgrims praying and meditating session.....................385

Part I. Introductory

5
Preface

by Wim van Binsbergen & Eric Venbrux

The Second Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative My-
thology (IACM) was held at the former convent of Soeterbeeck near the small medie-
val town of Ravenstein in the Netherlands on 19-21 August 2008. This volume,
entitled New Perspectives on Myth, contains the proceedings of the conference.
In total the work has 19 chapters. The volume consists of five parts: an intro-
duction offering a report of the conference, a section on The Mythology of Death and
Dying, another on Mythological Continuities between Africa and Other Continents, a
section on Theoretical and Methodological Advances, and a final one on Work-in-
Progress. Indexes of proper names and of authors have been added to assist readers in
consulting the proceedings and to highlight the links between the various chapters.
We would like to thank the following institutions for their financial contribu-
tions, making the conference possible: the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies,
Harvard University, USA; the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
(KNAW); the Faculty of Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Neth-
erlands; the African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands; the Sormani Fund, Nij-
megen, the Netherlands; the Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam,
the Netherlands; the International Office, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Nether-
lands; Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie; the
Research School NISCO, Faculty of Social Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen,
the Netherlands; and the International Association for Comparative Mythology
(IACM), Cambridge MA, USA.
We are also indebted to Kirsten Seifikar, who as copy-editor polished up the
English of many contributions and brought the bibliographical material up to a com-
mon standard; and to the editorial team of Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy /
Revue Africaine de Philosophie, for taking care of the books layout, production,
cover, and index.
Last but not least, our thanks are due to the International Association for
Comparative Mythology, and to the participants in the Second Annual Conference of
that organisation, for creating the intellectual conditions towards the present book,
and entrusting its realisation to us.

17
Chapter 1. Introduction The Second
Annual Conference of the International
Association for Comparative
Mythology
1

Ravenstein, the Netherlands, August 19-21, 2008

by Wim van Binsbergen
2
& Eric Venbrux
3

In August 2008 the International Association for Comparative Mythology (IACM)
held its Second Annual Conference at the Soeterbeeck Conference Centre (a former
convent) near the small medieval town of Ravenstein. Here twenty-two scholars from
five continents met during three days for intense discussions of current work on com-
parative mythology. The twenty-two papers originally to be presented and discussed
were divided into four clusters: 1) the mythology of death and dying; 2) mythological
continuities between Africa and other continents; 3) theoretical and methodological
advances; and 4) work-in-progress. The papers will be specified below, but let us first
introduce the newly founded International Association for Comparative Mythology
(legally incorporated in the State of Massachusetts, USA, 2008).
The IACMs origin lies in the Harvard (Cambridge MA, USA) Project on
Comparative Myth, and the ensuing Harvard Round Table for Comparative Myth,
which under the inspiring initiative and leadership of Michael Witzel, one of the
worlds leading Vedic scholars from the late 1990s onward organised an unbroken
chain of interdisciplinary annual conferences attended by prominent scholars from all

1
An earlier version of this chapter was published in: Anthropos: Internationale Zeitschrift fr Vlker-
und Sprachenkunde / International Review of Anthropology and Linguistics / Revue Internationale
dEthnologie et de Linguistique, 104 (2009), 2: 561-564.
2
African Studies Centre, Leiden / Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam the Nether-
lands.
3
Faculty of Religious Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
18
continents, belonging to such disciplines as comparative mythology, anthropology,
comparative and historical linguistics, genetics, archaeology, intercultural philosophy,
palaeoanthropology, Asian studies, African studies, crop sciences, ethnic studies,
classics, etc. From the 2004 Round Table on, when Wim van Binsbergen joined the
Harvard Round Tables, these annual exchanges have paid consistent attention to Af-
rica in world mythology. In 2005 the annual Round Table was held at Kyoto, Japan,
in a joint venture with the Kyoto-based Research Institute for Humanity and Nature
(RIHN), and the 7th Conference on Ethnogenesis in South and Central Asia (ESCA);
in this connection the Asian dimension of the Harvard Round Table was expanded
with Australia and Oceania. The next years meeting (May 2006) was held in Beijing,
Peoples Republic of China, under the title of the Peking and Harvard University In-
ternational Conference on Comparative Mythology. At this conference the collective
decision was taken to establish an International Association for Comparative Mythol-
ogy (IACM). It was also at this conference that the convenors for the 2008 meeting
received their mandate. The new association held its First Annual Meeting in Edin-
burgh, Scotland, UK, in August 2007, with up to 80 participating scholars, and 30
papers presented. Most Harvard Round Tables have led to internationally published
proceedings. The proceedings of the 2007 First Annual Meeting have been prepared
for publication by the convenor, Emily Lyle, and appeared in the journal Cosmos: The
Journal of the Traditional Cosmology Society. In addition, there has been a substan-
tial spin-off in the way of books and articles published in established peer-reviewed
scholarly journals. To highlight and facilitate the specific focus on comparative my-
thology, at the First Annual Meeting a peer-reviewed journal Comparative Mythology
was initiated, whose preparation is now in full swing.
The 2008 Second Annual Conference is the logical continuation of this inspir-
ing series of interdisciplinary and intercontinental exchanges, which are working in
the frontline of the contemporary transformation of regional studies and traditional
disciplines under the impact of globalisation and of an empowering, multicentred
politics of knowledge production.
The conference was opened by the convenors: Wim van Binsbergen (African
Studies Centre, Leiden, and Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam)
and Eric Venbrux (Faculty of Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen), both
from the Netherlands. Next, Michael Witzel (Cambridge, MA, USA), the Associa-
tions President, gave his Presidential address.
Venbrux, van Binsbergen and Witzel had formed the conferences organizing
committee, responsible for fund raising, and for the delicate task of making an ade-
quate selection (in terms of quality, thematic fit, and available slots for presentations
and participants) from among the great many paper proposals that had come in via the
conference website.
4

4
This website ( http://www.iacm.bravehost.com ) was specifically established for the 2nd Annual Con-
ference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology; open to the general public until
the publication of the Proceedings, it contained all draft papers as presented at the conference, and all
conference circulars.
van Binsbergen & Venbrux Chapter 1: Introduction
19
In all other respects the conference was the responsibility of just the two con-
venors: topical focus, structure and format, organisation and finance, and the subse-
quent publication of papers. The choice of venue (a revamped convent), the in-house
provision of board and lodging, and the programming format, all ensured that confer-
ence participants would be in intensive formal and especially informal contact throug-
hout the duration of the conference, so that informal factual, methodological and
theoretical exchanges would greatly complement the specific formal programme of
paper presentations. Every participant made a formal contribution to the scholarly
exchange, not only by her or his paper, but also by an arrangement according to which
each paper was subjected to one selected participants detailed critical examination,
before the meeting proceeded to general discussion.
5

As mentioned, this conference had four thematic sessions. In the session on
the mythology of death and dying (which reflects the research programme currently
being pursued at Nijmegen by the convenor Eric Venbrux) six papers were presented
on, respectively, moon myths in Australia, myths concerning the avoidance of dying
in West-Africa, Eurasian myths of travels to the netherworld, Zoroastrian death
myths, the pre-Christian mythology of Scandinavia situated in Germanic mythologies
of death and a sociological approach to death myths with special attention to Cal-
vinism.
6

This session was followed by a business meeting of the Board of Directors
(i.e. the Executive) of the IACM. A major decision taken in this connection was ac-
ceptance of the motion to extend the membership of this Board to Dr Bukola A.
Oyeniyi from Nigeria, which would give the Association a formal footing in the Afri-
can continent and would stimulate the pursuit of comparative mythology by African
scholars and institutions.
7
This African appointment complements the representation
of Europe, North America, and Asia on the Board of Directors, and implies the need
for further work towards the formal inclusion of scholars from South America, Aus-
tralia, and Oceania.
The next session likewise comprised six papers. It was devoted to mythologi-

5
In addition to the conference participants, the convenors were pleased to welcome the specialist in
West Java ethnography, Dr Wessing, formerly of Leiden, as a special discussant of Mr Djunatans
paper. Mr Djunatans conference participation made it possible for him to visit his PhD supervisor
Wim van Binsbergen in order to complement the usual e-mail based supervision with far more effec-
tive and comprehensive face-to-face exchanges.
6
Eric Venbrux (Nijmegen): Death and Regeneration. The Moon in Aboriginal Australian Myths of
Death; Walter van Beek (Tilburg): How to Avoid Dying. The Battle against Death in African My-
thologies; Boris Oguibnine (Strasbourg) and Nataliya Yanchevskaya (Cambridge, MA): A Journey
to the Netherworld. Reconstructing Features of Indo-European Mythology and Funeral Rituals from
Baltic, Slavic, and Buddhist Parallels; Victoria Kryukova (St. Petersburg): Death and Defilement in
Zoroastrianism; Joseph Harris (Cambridge, MA): The Rk Stones Mythology of Death; Hans J.
Mol (Canberra): Calvin in Myth. The latter paper was not available for inclusion in the present vol-
ume.
7
An interesting detail is that Dr Oyeniyi only managed to have his visa in time and thus to participate
in the conference, thanks to the capable intervention of Mrs Maaike Westra of the Leiden African Stud-
ies Centres Secretariat.
20
cal continuities between Africa and other continents probably an all-time first in the
history of comparative mythology, and a topical choice which reflects the research
programme currently pursued at Leiden and Rotterdam by Wim van Binsbergen. Af-
rican-Eurasian continuities were examined with regard to: myths on the appearance of
the first humans; the nature and functions of political myths in West Africa during the
last few centuries; the examination of specific detailed parallels between African and
Eurasian mythologies as seen from the perspective of the Nkoya people of Zambia;
Witzels revision of his Laurasian (i.e. Eurasian and N. American) / Gondwana (in-
cluding African) distinction as applied to flood myths; an etymological discussion of
the case for identity between Ancient Greek Hephaestus and Ancient Egyptian i.e.
Northeast African Ptah ; and the relevance of Japanese mythology for comparative
Eurasian mythology in general.
8

Five papers were presented in the session on theoretical and methodological
advances. These addressed: the cosmological theory of myth; neurobiology and the
origins of myth and religion; postmodernism and the comparative method with special
application to comparative mythology; the extent to which myth presents a challenge
to philosophy; and parallels between Greek and Sanskrit epics with special attention
to the fire-associated gods Hephaestus and Agni.
9
A final paper session dealt with
ongoing research in the context of PhD and MA projects, on such diverse topics as the
mythological worldview of a contemplative site in West Java, Indonesia; Blumen-
bergs recent philosophy of myth as applied to irony in Homer; the Tibetan epic of
Gesar of Ling, and Indo-Slavic mythological parallels.
10

The conference concluded with a general discussion, prospects for the 2009
annual conference, and a consideration of options for the publication of the confer-
ence papers. The convenors have decided to aim at a two-stage publication process:

8
Yuri Berezkin, St. Petersburg: The Emergence of the First People from the Underworld: Another
Cosmogonic Myth of Possible African Origin; Bukola A. Oyeniyi, Lagos: Myths, Indigenous Cul-
ture, and Traditions as Tools in Reconstructing Contested Histories: The Ife-Modakeke Example;
Wim van Binsbergen, Leiden / Rotterdam: The Continuity of African and Eurasian Mythologies: As
Seen from the Perspective of the Nkoya People of Zambia, South Central Africa; Michael Witzel,
Cambridge, MA: Pan-Gaean Flood Myths: Gondwana Myths and Beyond; Vclav Blaek, Brno /
Pilzen: Hphaistos vs. Ptah, Kazuo Matsumura, Tokyo: Can Japanese Mythology Contribute to
Comparative Eurasian Mythology?.
9
Emily Lyle (Edinburgh): The Cosmological Theory of Myth; Steve Farmer (independent scholar,
California, USA): Reinventing Comparative Mythology as a Rigorous Science. Neurobiology and the
Origins of Myth and Religion; Robert A. Segal (Aberdeen): Postmodernism and the Comparative
Method: Willem Dupr (Nijmegen): Myth. A Challenge to Philosophy; Nicholas J. Allen (Oxford):
Hephaestus and Agni. Gods and Men on the Battlefield in Greek and Sanskrit Epic.
10
Stephanus Djunatan (Bandung): (Sunda. the Account of Affirmative Life. Mythological Worldview
of the Contempla-tive Site of Nagara Padang, West Java, Indonesia; Nadia Sels (Ghent): Blumen-
berg, Homer, and the Function of Irony in Mythological Narratives; Karel Jan van den Heuvel Reind-
ers (Nijmegen): Travels to Heaven and Hell of Gesar of Ling; and Nataliya Yanchevskaya
(Cambridge, MA): Indo-Slavic Mythological Parallels. Regrettably, of van den Heuvel Reinders and
Yanchevskayas contribution to this session, no written account was available for inclusion in the pre-
sent volume.
van Binsbergen & Venbrux Chapter 1: Introduction
21
first, lightly edited Proceedings the present volume containing the full set of pa-
pers; to be followed by the publication of one or two carefully selected sets of papers,
revised under extensive editorial feed-back, as special issue of a peer-reviewed jour-
nal, or in an edited volume with an established university press.
This Second Annual Conference of the International Association for Compara-
tive Mythology (IACM) has demonstrated that the field of comparative mythology is
rapidly and convincingly shedding its sometime connotations of over-specialised an-
tiquarian scholarship, to become (in close collaboration with a wide range of auxiliary
fields from genetics to linguistics, ethnography, archaeology, statistics, and classics)
an exciting, rapidly expanding domain of theoretical and methodological reflection,
and an ever widening window on humankinds remoter cultural history. Here in ad-
dition to the unmistakable strength of this field among scholars from Europe (includ-
ing Eastern Europe!) and North America new growth points can be discerned
around death as a mythical domain, and around the understanding of Africas place in
the wider cultural history of humankind as a whole. These developments inspire a
sense of gratification and achievement, even though there is a need for the increased
involvement of scholars from other continents, and even though the theoretical de-
bates during this conference brought out the fact that we are still far removed from the
emergence of a mainstream disciplinary consensus.

Part II. Mythology of death and
dying

25
Chapter 2. Death and regeneration:

The Moon in Australian Aboriginal myths of the origin
of death

by Eric Venbrux
1

Abstract: The moon figures prominently in various Australian Aboriginal myths about the origin of
death. In these myths an ancesteral being dies and another being, the moon, offers to revive the first
dead ever. The offer, however, is refused. Hence, death has come to the world.
The myth of the cultural hero Purukupali and his brother Tapara from Bathurst and Melville Is-
lands, northern Australia, is a case in point. Towards the end of the creation period Purukupali intro-
duced death into Tiwi society. Purukupali fought with his younger maternal brother, Tapara, after the
latter had seduced Purukupalis wife and her son had died as a result of neglect. Tapara offered to bring
the child back to life but Purukupali refused the offer and said that because of his son had died all peo-
ple had to die. In his fight Tapara injured Purukupalis leg with a forked throwing club. Tapara was
hurt above the eye, and transformed into the moon. Every month the scar left by the injury above the
eye still can be seen on the moon. In one version of the myth Purukupalis baby, Djinani, dies of star-
vation; in another he dies of thirst due to having been left in the hot sun, while Tapara and Purukupalis
wife Bima were having sex in the bushes. Bima was grief-stricken: her wailing sounds can still be
heard, because she turned into Waijai, the curlew. Whereas Tapara might be seen as a symbol of regen-
eration; think of the waning and waxing of the moon, and Taparas promise to bring Purukupalis dead
son (Djinani) back to life within three days, Purukupali issued death: as his son had died, he said, all
people would have to die.
In this paper I will compare Aboriginal myths involving death and the moon, as recorded by a
number of ethnographers in the respective hunter-gatherer societies across Australia, that have the re-
fusal of a regeneration to life as their theme. These myths may belong to the oldest intangible cultural
heritage of humankind.
Introduction
2

The moon figures prominently in various Australian Aboriginal myths about the ori-

1
Faculty of Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
2
I thank discussant Yuri Berezkin and the participants to the conference for their comments on an ear-
lier version of this paper.
26
gin of death. In these myths an ancestral being dies and another being, the moon, of-
fers to revive the first ever dead. The offer, however, is refused. Hence, death has
come to the world.
In this paper, I will compare Aboriginal myths involving death and the moon
having the refusal of a regeneration to life as their theme, that have been recorded by
a number of ethnographers of the respective hunter-gatherer societies across Austra-
lia. These myths may belong to the oldest intangible cultural heritage of humankind,
but this should not be taken for granted.
Evidence of the oral transmission of the tales over thousands of years is lack-
ing (as is the case with most European folktales, see Venbrux & Meder 1999; Meder
& Venbrux 2000). Besides, they have been transmitted through different media, fre-
quently in a fragmentary manner, and depending on the nature of the tales with
various levels of secrecy (see also Berndt & Berndt 1989). As Patricia Waterman
notes in her tale-type index, The subtlety and complexity of the Aboriginal oral nar-
ratives may surprise those unfamiliar with the tradition (1987: 13). She lists 28 dis-
tinct moon narratives (Waterman 1987: 22-28),
3
a further seven under the heading
origin of death: moon offers life, man chooses death (Ibid.: 84-85),
4
and four more
classified as origin of death: other moon narratives (Ibid.: 85-86).
5
The last two
categories are of interest here, but the more general moon narratives also contain ele-
ments that may be considered in relation to the origin-of-death tales. Watermans in-
dex is a very useful tool, but it must be noted that her overview of these types of tales
is incomplete. Drawing on the ethnographic record, I will add three new types to the
ones already identified by Waterman in this paper.
Scholarly interest in the lore and customs of Aborigines, as I will point out in
the next section, emerged from the idea that the indigenous people of Australia could
be seen as Western mans contemporary ancestors, representing the dawn of human
civilization, where one could see man living as much he did 50,000 years ago
(Mountford 1956: 417). Equally elusive might be the ideology of Aborigines them-
selves that their cosmology is unchanging (Myers 1986), readily adopted in Western
popular wisdom (Chippindale 1994) to the extent that Aborigines have to accommo-
date others perceptions of their past and to live by it (Merlan 1998; Venbrux 2002a,
2007). Furthermore, narrations are affected by attempts to reconstruct a past, also in
view of identity and land rights (see Haviland & Hart 1998; Venbrux 2002b). And
finally, many renditions of myths in popular publications belong under the title of
Australian-European literature, rather than Aboriginal (Berndt & Berndt 1988: 389).
However, these are too inaccurate to be considered here.
In order to understand the myths it is first necessary to say something about
Aboriginal cosmology in general. I will then discuss the selected myths about how

3
Nrs. 20, 23, 26, 29, 32, 35, 38, 41, 44, 47, 50, 53, 56, 59, 62, 65, 68, 71, 74, 77, 80, 83, 86, 89, 92, 95,
98, 101,104 (Waterman 1987: 22-28).
4
Nrs. 2850, 2855, 2860, 2870, 2880, 2885, 2890 (Waterman 1987: 84-85).
5
Nrs. 2905, 2920, 2930, 2940 (Waterman 1987: 85-86).
Venbrux Chapter 2: Death and the Moon
27
death came into the world and offer a comparison. I will look at some of allusions
which are made in the ritual, particularly the blaming of a mythical ancestor for the
occurrence of death. The next section deals with the moon as a symbol of regenera-
tion. I then conclude with a discussion of the myths, returning to the possibility of
antiquity, but not automatically assuming that Aborigines should be considered our
contemporary ancestors.
Contemporary ancestors
The interest in Australian Aboriginal beliefs and traditions increased in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth century. European scholars tried to understand the origin
and evolution not only of the human species, but also of its religion and culture. Aus-
tralian Aborigines were believed to still be in the early stages of this development,
representing the dawn of humankind, according to the learned models of cultural evo-
lution at the time. It was expected that the so-called wild Aborigines in remote Aus-
tralia, almost untouched by European civilisation, would thus enable scholars to gain
a better understanding of how their forbearers must have lived tens of thousands years
ago. Somehow the primitive way of life, beliefs and traditions, dating back to the
Stone Age, would have survived in Australia. In other words, the Australian hunter-
gatherers encountered by Europeans were considered the latters contemporary an-
cestors.
6
The term Aborigines denotes this understanding of a people from the origin
(ab origine), exemplary for the beginnings or early manifestations of social institu-
tions and cultural forms.
The case of the Australian Aborigines was of great importance for social theo-
rizing (Hiatt 1996). For example, mile Durkheims work on the elementary forms of
religion and Sigmund Freuds idea of the primordial band were based on contempo-
rary knowledge about indigenous Australians. Moreover, the books published by
Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen beginning to appear in 1899 made a tremendous
contribution. As a postmaster at Alice Springs, Gillen had become acquainted with
Aborigines in Central Australia. He and Spencer a Melbourne professor managed
to document their traditions and beliefs in great detail. Spencer and Gillen did so on
the basis of first-hand information and even direct observation of a totemic ceremony
that would become crucial evidence for Durkheim concerning his theory on social
cohesin. Bronislaw Malinowski also grappled with Australian materials in his doc-
toral thesis on the Aboriginal family. And Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, who was to be-
come another leading scholar in the field of anthropology, documented and analyzed
the intricacies of Aboriginal social organisation and the variety of systems of kinship
in Australia (see also Hiatt 1996).
The evolutionary interest had waned before a systematic study of myths across
Australia had been made. Ursula McConnel is credited with being the first to publish

6
See Venbrux and Jones 2002.
28
a systematic series of myths (Berndt & Berndt 1988: 389), albeit this concerned a
single society. A great many ethnographers have recorded Aboriginal myths in the
twentieth century (see for further details, Hiatt 1975; Berndt & Berndt 1988, 1989).
However, Patrica Waterman (1987) was the first to provide an index of the available
materials.
It must be noted that across Australia an estimated five hundred distinct in-
digenous languages were spoken. With also considerable variation in their habitat,
Aboriginal groups differed in lifestyle and cultural practices enough for the continent
to harbor a hundred or two hundred indigenous cultures. The picture is somewhat com-
plicated, because a great many Aborigines happen or happened to be multilingual. Al-
most all Aborigines, however, share adherence to the general outline of a cosmology.
The Dreaming
The central concept for understanding Aboriginal cosmology is the Dreaming. The
Dreaming signifies the mythological, formative era during which the enduring shape
of the earth was created, patterns of living were established, and laws for human be-
haviour were set down. The forementioned Spencer and Gillen introduced the term the
Dream time for Aboriginal cosmology. It was their translation of the word alcher-
inga from the Aranda (now: Arrente) in Central Australia. Although this translation is
somewhat misleading, Aborigines have adopted it when speaking about their world-
view in English (Stanner 1979). Most commonly used by Aborigines today are the
terms The Dreaming and Dreaming. Another expression that has currency is The Law.
Dreamtime, the Dreaming and related terms refer to the creation time. Accord-
ing to Aboriginal creation stories, Ancestral Beings reshaped the world in a long dis-
tant past. It must be noted that in contrast to the creation myths of world religions this
was not a creation out of nothing. The world already existed as an inert, amorphous
mass of clay or, covered by water, in fluid condition (Maddock 1982). The powers of
the Dreaming emerged from this mass, came to the surface, took human-like shapes,
and wandered over the earth. In the process, they had their adventures, recounted in
the creation stories, that were events that moulded the landscape, and created nature
and culture. Ancestral Beings transformed into animals and other creatures, vegeta-
tion, natural features, such as rocks and creeks and waterholes, natural forces, such
as thunder and rain, and visible elements and formations in the sky (Mountford 1958).
The Ancestral Beings or world-creative powers, as Maddock (1982) calls them,
gave Aborigines a blueprint for their way of life. According to the creation stories, the
Ancestral Beings also installed the major religious ceremonies.
Some of the narrated events of the Dreaming are re-enacted in those ceremo-
nies. Although the Dreaming refers to the long distant past during the creation period,
it is far more than that. For Aborigines, the Dreaming is omnipresent in space and
time past, present and future. Consequently, W.E.H. Stanner (1979: 24) translates
the Dreaming as everywhen. Generally speaking, Aborigines attribute all acts of
29
creativity to the Ancestral Beings of the Dreaming. So, in principle, there is no differ-
ence between patterns or designs found in nature and those made by Aborigines in the
context of their ceremonial life. Both kinds of design may be conceived of as traces of
the Dreaming, containing spiritual power. Hence, as Peter Sutton makes clear, Abo-
rigines will not unnecessarily make markings, such as doodling or scratching with a
stick in the sand. Their world is one of meaningful signs (Sutton 1988: 13-14). And
every sign is a statement of their being in the world.
The Dreaming thus continues to have relevance for the present as well as for
the future, since Ancestral Beings were present and active not only at the beginning of
life, but continue to exist and exert their influence. They are incorporated into the so-
cial system of clans and kinship, and their interrelationships resemble the ones be-
tween social groupings. Following Kenneth Maddock (1982), a distinction between
these Ancestral Beings can be made between so-called transcendental and totemic
powers. The difference between both types of power corresponds to differences in the
magnitude of their creative acts. Furthermore, the former transcends the specific so-
cial divisions connected to clans or particular kinship relations. The latter are associ-
ated with certain social groups to the exclusion of others. The myths discussed in this
paper concern totemic powers or ancestors.
Throughout Australia, a great diversity in mythological beliefs can be dis-
cerned. An example may be seen in geographical differences in the perception of tran-
scendental powers. In the southern and eastern parts of Australia, an All-Father
figure is said to have had decisive influence in shaping the earth, whereas in northern
Australia, such formative power is ascribed to an All-Mother figure.
7
Respective
examples are Ngurunderi from the Lower River Murray area and Murtankala from
Bathurst and Melville Islands. The majority of religious myths describe the wander-
ings and activities of various creative beings. However, in view of the great variation
in the natural environment, it is not unsurprising that there exists an equal variety in
explanatory myths. Moreover, even within clans and kinship groups, no single version
is necessarily accepted as the only correct one. Frequently, the ancestral connections
referred to reflect the protagonists representations of social relations and subsequent
relations to the land. Ideologically, Aborigines state they belong to the land rather
than that the land belongs to them. Claims to the relevant ancestral connections have
to be rooted in the authority of the Dreamtime, a privilege of the initiated, but still
more of an achievement than a given since new aspects of Dreamtime stories, sup-
posed to have always been there, can be revealed in a dream, a vision, or a newly
made design (cf. Myers 1986). Whether such revelations, embodying the hidden dy-
namics of the Dreamtime, catch on and find acceptance or not often depends on the
political state of affairs. Interestingly, introduced species, Jesus, cars, and planes,
among other things, have become appropriated and incorporated in Aboriginal to-
temic systems.
8

7
See also Hiatts chapter on the high-god controversy (Hiatt 1996: 100-119).
8
Anke Tonnaer 2007 has shown how an airplane dance at Borroloola on two different occasions was
30
How death came into the world
According to Ronald and Catherine Berndt, who recorded numerous indigenous
myths across Australia, the inevitability of death is emphasized (Berndt & Berndt,
1988: 453). The moon figures prominently in various Australian Aboriginal myths
about the origin of death. In these myths, an ancesteral being dies and another being,
the moon, offers to revive the first ever dead. The offer, however, is refused. Hence,
death has come to the world. The myth of the cultural hero Purukupali and his brother
Tapara from Bathurst and Melville Islands, in northern Australia, is a case in point:
Towards the end of the creation period Purukupali introduced death into Tiwi society. Puru-
kupali fought with his younger maternal brother, Tapara, after the latter had seduced Puruku-
palis wife and her son had died as a result of neglect. Tapara offered to bring the child back
to life but Purukupali refused the offer and said that because his son had died, all people had
to die. In his fight, Tapara injured Purukupalis leg with a forked throwing club. Tapara was
hurt above the eye, and transformed into the moon. Every month the scar left by the injury
above the eye still can be seen on the moon. In one version of the myth, Purukupalis baby,
Djinani, dies of starvation; in another, he dies of thirst due to having been left in the hot sun,
while Tapara and Purukupalis wife Bima were having sex in the bushes. Bima was grief-
stricken: her wailing sounds can still be heard, because she turned into Waijai, the curlew. [In
spite of Taparas] promise to bring Purukupalis dead son (Djinani) back to life within three
days, Purukupali issued death: as his son had died, he said, all people would have to die
(Venbrux & Tonnaer 2009).
9

I will return to this particular discussion of the myths (and its variants), but
first I would like to share a few other tales as Aboriginal myths involving death and
the moon that have the refusal of regeneration to life as their theme which have been
recorded across Australia. These are neither the only Australian Aboriginal myths
explaining how death came into the world nor do they seem to be confined exclu-
sively to the smallest continent.
10

used by local Aborigines to forge relations with the outside world. This occurred by respectively pre-
paring male and female performers to pull on one occasion white men from the audience and white
women on the other occasion.
9
The islands remaining mythological ancestors gathered and, following Purukapalis instructions, they
performed a cycle of death rites for the first time. Tiwi people today still follow the script laid down in
the creation period. This includes the ritual roles they enact, the designs and carved and painted posts
erected at the conclusion of the final ceremony, called iloti, meaning for good or forever.
10
Frazer 1913: 59-86 distinguishes four types of myths of the origin of death:
1) Two Messengers,
2) the Waxing and Waning of the Moon,
3) the Serpent and his Cast Skin, and
4) the Banana.
With regard to the second one, concerning the moon, he offers examples from Australia, Asia and Af-
rica. According to Frazer these myths
all imply a belief that death is not a necessary part of the order of nature, but that it originated
in a pure mistake or misdeed of some sort on somebodys part, and that we should all have
lived happy and immortal if it had not been for that disastrous blunder or crime (1913: 84).
31
Waterman (1987: 84-85) indexes 2850 Moon and the old man; 2855 Moon
and turkey; 2860 Moon, bronze-wing pigeon and the water of life; 2870 Moon, his
dog and water; 2880 Moon and Purakapalis child; 2885 Moon, native cat and kanga-
roo; and 2890 Moon and parrot fish as the types of oral narratives concerning the ori-
gin of death in which moon offers life, man chooses death.
11

Another type of tale might be referred to as the Moon and dingo. The follow-
ing was recorded from a man named Daly by anthropologist Deborah Rose (1992:
104) at Victoria River Downs in the northwest of the Northern Territory:
Yeah. Well him [Moon] been talk: You want to die, die! Bones to bones. Kujip. Kujip mean
where he got to go back to bones. That what it really means now . . . [He was being] Cruel.
That waluku [dog; dingo] said: You try, learn me how to go.
Jakilin [Moon] been die, and him come out for four days. And him [dog] been say: You
cant see em me come out four days. Ill go forever. And this walaku been die, and forget
him altogether. Nother walaku been talk: We gotto go like that. And there, we go like that,
all right. And he couldnt make a change. I dont know why. That jakilin should have been
say, Moon should have say: Ah, thats bad. No good you stay back, like that. Why dont you
come back again? That walaku been do wrong. Yeah. Nother dog been there: Whats the
good, poor bugger. Come back, come back, make a new life. And youll die and come back
with new life. Nothing good. He made mistake now, walaku . . . You think. Whats a good
life? Jakilin, that Moon. That one we had to miss out. We have been follow that dog. We
never make change. We should have followed this Moon.
In short, since the mythical Dingo ancestor decided to die, it was peoples fate
to be mortal. He could be blamed for it because the Moon had offered him the chance
to become immortal.
In the next tale Moon and Possum have a fight. After being fatally wounded,
the mythical ancestor Possum decrees that from then on all people have to die like
himself. The Moons offer of immortality comes too late. This type of tale might be
called Moon and Possum. An example is the following account recorded by the
Berndts:
Moon, Gurana, and Spotted Possum, Jindalbu, were once men: but they quarrelled. Possum
picked up a sharp wooden yam stick and knocked Moon down. After a while Moon got up.
Grabbed the same yam stick and hit Possum, mortally wounding him. As he was dying Pos-
sum spoke: All the people who come after me, future generations, when they die theyll die
forever. But Moon said, You should have let me say something first, because I wont die
forever. Ill die for a few days, but I will come back again in the shape of a new moon. As
for human beings we die forever because Possum spoke first. This took place at Manggumu
on the mainland, in Maung country, where there are high rocks near Sandy Creek (Berndt &
Berndt 1988: 397).
Spencer and Gillen (1968 [1899]: 564) documented a variant of the Moon and Pos-
sum narrative among the Aranda from Central Australia:
12

11
Waterman notes, The moon is usually represented as male, and themes concerned with water, bone
or shell, death and rebirth are common in moon narratives. In some accounts, moon exhibits character-
istics typical of the dual trickster / culture hero figure, being on the one hand greedy, lascivious, sly,
and on the other the initiator of marriage, marriage rules and child begetting (1987: 22).
12
Spencer and Gillen 1968 [1899]: 564 state that the moon [] is regarded as of the male sex, and is
32
before there was any moon in the heavens, a man of the Anthinna or opossum totem died and
he was buried, and shortly afterwards arose from his grave in the form of a boy. His people
saw him rising and were very afraid and ran away. He followed them shouting, Do not be
frightened, do not run away, or you will die altogether; I shall die but shall rise again in the
sky. He subsequently grew into a man and died, reappearing as the moon; and since then he
has continued to periodically die and come to life again; but the people who ran away died al-
together. When no longer visible it is supposed that the moon man is living with his two wives
who dwell far away in the west.
In this case, the Possum ancestor turned into the moon. People were afraid be-
cause this man, who died, first resurfaced from the grave as a boy. They ran away and
did not listen to his promise of immortality. As a result, from this time on all had to
die except the moon.
Another additional wrong occurs in the myth when the Moon breaks a strict
taboo by trying to marry his mother-in-law. This resulted in a fight with the in-laws,
but in this case the Moon declares all people have to die. The tale might be called
Moon and his Mother-in-Law. Phyllis Kaberry (2004 [1939]: 128) wrote down the
following version in the Kimberley in the north of Western Australia:
the moon, djuru, had tried to marry his mother-in-law, nambin, and had been attacked by the
infuriated woman and her mates. In revenge he said, I shall die now, but I shall come back in
five days. But when you die, you will not come back. This according to the natives, was the
origin of death and wrong marriage. We got to follow that one moon, they would say with
a grin, and pervert what should serve as a warning against the infringement of tribal law into a
sanction for their own behaviour.
The Moons behaviour in the mythological story happens to be an inversion of
what people consider proper. His breach of the norm was not allowed, since the an-
cestors adherence to the (marriage) rules had severe consequences: the Moon decreed
that they, and by implication their descendants, would die and not return to life.
While the previous three tale-types have not been indexed by Waterman, the
following has, namely as the Moon and Parrot fish (1987: 85, nr. 2890). She also re-
fers to W. Lloyd Warners classic work A Black Civilization, giving a summary of the
account of the Murngin (Yolngu) of Arnhem Land:
The moon decided that when he died he would waste away leaving only bones but would be
reborn. He urged parrot fish to do the same. Fish refused. Because of that choice, men die
permanently (Ibid.).
13

Warners full account (1958 [1937]: 523-524) is worth citing:
In the days of Wongar [creation time], Moon said to the Parrot Fish, Im going to die, but I
wont be finished, for I am going to be alive again and come back.
Parrot Fish said, You are no good. What do you want to die and live again for?
Moon said, What about you?

spoken of as E rwta Oknurcha, or a big man, its name being Atninja.
13
Another version, concerning the same indigenous group, is summarized by Waterman 1987: 85 as
follows: The moon man and the parrot fish man fought, killing each other. Moon mans spirit decreed
he would live in the sky and be constantly reborn, but parrot fish would live in the sea and never come
to life again.
33
Parrot Fish said, Me? Ill die, but I wont come back, and you can pick up my bones.
Well, it doesnt matter about you, said Moon. When I die I want to come back. Every time
I get sick and get more sick and get thinner and thinner and only my bones are left and then
Ill die, but Ill come back again.
The Moon then got sick and wasted away until it had died, then came back again. Parrot Fish
said, I wont be that way. When I die, when man dies, well stay dead. You come back, but
that is wrong.
The Parrot Fish died and never came back, but the Moon, ever since those Wongar days, has
been well and fat, then become ill and wasted away until it was dead again, but it always
comes back and grows to full size. When the Moon had had its conversation with Parrot Fish
he had wanted Parrot Fish to be like him. He had said, Come on and become alive again like
me. I can fix you so that you will come alive again.
No, said Parrot Fish, I want to die and stay dead.
This is what makes man stay dead and never come back to life. The Parrot Fish was a silly
fool.

Here, the narrator again blames a mythological ancestor, the Parrot Fish, for
having brought death to the world, yet listening to the Moon could have prevented it.
Before I turn to Watermans nr. 2880, Moon and Purakapalis child, I will
briefly discuss the motivations beginning to emerge from the five other types that re-
ject the moons offer of eternal life. In Moon and the old man, nr. 2850, an old man
tells the Moon not to bring people to life again.
14
The turkey denied the dying being
restored to life by the Moon for he wanted to have their women, as related in nr. 2855,
Moon and turkey. The next tale-type, nr. 2860, Moon, bronze-wing pigeon and the
water of life, says the Moon has the water of life but the Pigeon does not allow peo-
ple to drink from it, or in a variant that the Pigeon also offers water to drink that turns
people into mortals. In Moon, his dogs and water, nr. 2870, people refused to carry
the Moons dogs across a stream on his request. Forewarned by the Moon, and anger-
ing him, they would no longer be reborn. Finally, the Moon, native cat and kangaroo
tale-type, nr. 2885, tells that both the mythical ancestors of the Native Cat and the
Kangaroo wanted to have nothing to do with the Moon, albeit they were advised by
the latter that people need not remain dead (Waterman 1987: 84-85). In the next sec-
tion, I will offer a comparison of these myths.
Comparing the myths
The table below compares the ten, relevant myths:

type tale / myth offer refused by cause
W2850 Moon and the old man old man said so (authority due to seniority)
W2855 Moon and turkey turkey desired to take the surviving women

14
Van Gennep 1905: 183 cites an example of this myth on the origin of death.
34
after the death of the men
W2860 Moon, bronze-wing
pigeon and the water
of life
pigeon pigeon did not allow old people to
drink the life-restoring water of the
moon or offered his own useless
water to victims of sorcery
W2870 Moon, his dogs and
water
people disobeyed moon (challenged his
authority)
W2880 Moon and Puraka-
palis child
Purakapali his baby died out of neglect when
his younger brother had seduced his
wife
W2885 Moon, native cat and
kangaroo
native cat or kangaroo dislike of the moon
W2890 Moon and parrot fish parrot fish priority of decree: parrot fish spoke
before moon
Moon and dingo dingo dingo forgot about the moons dem-
onstration of how to be reborn
Moon and possum possum fear of the revenant and rejuvenated
possum
Moon and his mother-
in-law
moon punishment moon for desiring his
mother-in-law (illicit marriage)
Table 2.1. Comparing Australian myths of death and dying

Most strikingly, the Moon himself only opts for human mortality in one case the
Moon and his Mother-in-Law myth, whereas in all other cases the Moons offer of
eternal life fails to be accepted as a result of the (in)actions of other protagonists. The
one exception happens to deal with the relationship with in-laws on which one is de-
pendent to obtain women for the sake of human reproduction. The mother-in-law is
the key figure with whom the Moon would have had to adhere to the prescribed
avoidance relationship, out of respect. Furthermore, because she provided him with a
(future) wife, he would have to provide services for her in return. But acting as an
amorous suitor of the mother-in-law, as the Moon did, is one of the most serious
breaches of the norm. Having sex with or marrying ones mother-in-law is strictly
taboo, such a marriage is illicit, and can only be answered with the severe punishment
of the perpetrator (the Moon approached the woman, who strongly objected to this).
This narrative illustrates that the occurrences in myths need not always be demonstra-
tions of proper behaviour.
This myth, however, makes clear that mythical ancestors had to withstand the
temptation and that for men to have a sexual relationship (the most radical inversion
of avoidance) with their mother-in-law would be out of the question. In real life such
cases do sometimes occur, and result in social tensions and conflict. Another in-
grained social tension emerges in the myth of Moon and Purakapalis child (W2880),
35
that is, the tension between fraternal strife and fraternal generosity. Brothers have to
support each other (are members of the same exogamous clan) but simultaneously
they have to compete for the same category of women (potential wives of another clan
with which their clan exchanges marriage partners). Moon, the younger brother, is
taken to task not so much for having pinched Purukapalis wife, but for the neglect
and subsequent death of Purukapalis child, while Moon had a love tryst with the
childs mother. The competition for women is also a theme in the tale of the Moon
and turkey (W2855), where the Turkey refuses to prevent his brothers death, because
he is after their women.
Further features of Aboriginal social life are also expressed in the myths. First
and foremost, the importance of seniority: the right to speak and to issue decrees is
held by initiated, senior men. The story of Moon and the old man (W2850) illustrates
this, and, in addition, the authority of senior men is stressed in a number of the other
myths (W2855, W2860, W2880, W2890). Moon, his dogs, and the water of life
(W2870) offers an example wherein the Moon holds this authority, but is unduly chal-
lenged by other ancestral people. The Parrot fish, in the Moon and the parrot fish
(W2890), appears to have been of equal status as the Moon, and here it is the priority
of the decree that counts. Native Cat and Kangaroo disliked the Moon. As Moon, na-
tive cat and kangaroo (W2885) relates, they wanted to have nothing to do with him:
the Moon thus failed to have authority over them in spite of his intangible asset, the
promise of eternal life. Failure to remember lessons learned, as the Moon and dingo
demonstrates, may have dire consequences. Unjustified fear rather than blind accep-
tance has the same effect in Moon and possum, although the senior mythical ancestor,
Possum, turned into a boy: understandably, a junior person lacked the authority re-
quired to be listened to.
The Moon is presented similarly in the myths as a senior male person. They
vary in their explanations for why the Moons offer of life failed to be granted or ac-
cepted. These mythical occurrences have to be accepted as a fact of life for in peo-
ples worldview this happened to be the actions of their mythical ancestors that
brought death into the world. Whether they like it or not, these formative actions can-
not be undone by non-ancestral mortals.
Blaming the totemic ancestors
From the perspective of the narrators, however, the responsible totemic ancestors can
be blamed for the deaths that do occur. If we return to my main example of the myth
of Moon and Purakapalis child (W2880), this can be further demonstrated. As we
have seen, totemic ancestors such as Turkey, Possum and Parrot Fish were blamed
for having brought death into the world in other tales as well. This blaming may occur
indeed in the narration of the myths concerned. It may also occur on the occasion of
an actual death in verbal expressions and wailing as part of mourning behaviour and
in song lyrics and other ritual actions.
36
The Tiwi culture hero Purukapali was unforgiving with regard to the fatal ne-
glect of his son. He made the law of human mortality, stating: Now that my son is
dead we shall all follow him. We shall all have to follow my son. No one will ever
come back. Everyone will die (Osborne 1974: 83). In the myths final episode Puru-
kapali, carrying the corpse of his baby-boy, walks backwards into the sea. When the
water closes over his head, he calls out: You must all follow me; as I die, so you
must all die (Mountford 1958: 30). The twice-decreed mortality, however, did not
apply to his younger brother, Tapara. The latter turned into the moon.
During my fieldwork in the Tiwi Islands, bereaved senior men frequently
blamed Purukapali, thus expressing their anger concerning the death of a loved one.
In these ritualized exclamations and in their lyrics of mourning songs they said that
they wanted to kill Purukapali, to spit and to hit him in the face. The men stressed
how stupid Purukapali had been, he was talking wrong thing (Venbrux 1995: 136).
Notwithstanding their abhorrence of Purukapali sentencing humans to death, they also
engaged in (partial) re-enactments of the myth. Stamping their feet in the mortuary
rituals, for instance, might be seen as an allusion to the culture hero, who kept stamp-
ing his foot (Osborne 1974: 83-84) when he told everyone they would have to die.
Allusions to the myths episode of the fight between the two brothers are
manifold in the mortuary rituals. For example, Purukapali was hurt with a forked
fighting stick by his younger brother Tapara; therefore, two bands have to be painted
on the leg by someone bereaved of an older brother. Repeatedly, the mythical fight is
the theme of a song in the death rites. To cite the lyrics of one such a song as an ex-
ample: Tapara and Purukapali had a fight, and Purukapali was wounded, got shot, at
his leg by Tapara / He put blood running on the ceremonial ring (milimika). The
words refer to the myth, but as was the case in this instance, may also refer to a fight
between brothers that took place in real life. Tapara was hit in turn by Purukapali with
a pointed fighting stick above his eye, the blood running over his face. Taparas
wounds can still be seen on the moon, for he turned into the moon, and this lunar
manifestation is represented in ritual by the ceremonial ring.
The ritualized blaming of Purukapali helps to channel emotions, such as anger,
after a death. This function of emotional release, besides the explanatory function of
the myth, is an important one in the context of death-related behaviour, including
mourning. On the symbolic level, however, the myth appears also of central impor-
tance in bringing about ritual transformations, the performance of rites of passage, due
to the symbolism of death and rebirth. Whereas Purukapali stands for death, Tapara or
the Moon is employed to symbolize rebirth and regeneration.
Regeneration
Purukapali said all had to die, but Tapara escaped this fate. People, therefore, identify
with the latter when they want to emphasize regeneration. In other words, that in spite
of Purukupalis condemning words life returns. Louis Allen (1975: 219) recorded the
37
following part of the myth that gives an account of T(j)aparas life-force:
Tjapara became the Moon Man. He can be seen in the night sky, his face marked by the
bruises and wounds that Purukapali inflicted. He still feels Purukapali at his heels, for he
never ceases his restless journey. Hungry from his travels, he gorges on crabmeat, growing
rounder and fatter each day until he has feasted so much he falls sick. His wasting body is the
waning moon. Each month he dies, but after three days he comes back to life and begins his
journey once again. His loneliness is over, for he has found many wives, the planets, who ac-
company him on his journey across the sky.
The waning of the moon was always to be followed by its waxing. In another
version, written down by Mountford (1958: 30), the eternal death and rebirth is
stressed:
When Tjapara saw what had happened, he changed himself into the moon. But he did not en-
tirely escape the decree of Purukupali, for, even though Tjapara is eternally reincarnated, he
has to die for three days. On any clear night, one can see on the face of the moon-man the
wounds which he received in his fight with Purukupali so long ago.
Most allusions to Tapara (regeneration) are found among increase rituals, in
contrast to the mortuary rites in which Purukapali (death) turns out the most promi-
nent character. To begin with, the seasonal increase ritual, called kulama, has to be
performed at full moon, that is, when Taparas strength and presence is optimal. Fur-
thermore, this ritual (that lasts three days and nights) marks the transition of the wet
season to the dry season. It coincides, in addition, with the initiation of youths, and as
a psychotherapeutic ritual, dealing with grief and grievances during the first night,
the night of sorrow, when the participants lie down (enacting symbolic death). It is
structured by the ritual procedures of processing a certain type of round tuber with
hairy roots, called kulama. These yams are poisonous in a raw state, but become edi-
ble when carefully prepared, roasted and soaked during the ritual. The performance of
the ritual takes place when the yams have ripened. The ritual is concerned not only
with the change of season and initiation, but also with interpersonal conflicts, the
dead, growth in the natural environment and expansion of food production, human
reproduction, prosperity, health, and peoples well-being in general. It is not without
significance that the sacred yams are placed in a ring made of long, green grass: this
ring is called tapara or the moon. The poisonous yam is a potent symbol of sickness
and danger; when processed in the ritual, rubbing the body with a mixture of yam
mash and red ochre (Taparas blood) is considered an effective prophylactic and heal-
ing act (cf. Venbrux 2008). In line with the powers of Tapara the symbolic actions in
this particular and complex ritual work towards a renewal and regeneration of the
peoples world. The associations of Purukapali and Tapara two major characters in a
single myth, with respectively death and increase rites demonstrates the mythical
characters productiveness in ritual contexts as symbolic vehicles of death and regen-
eration.
38
Concluding discussion
A significant way in which belief is transformed into action is through Aboriginal
ritual. Ritual and mythology are closely intertwined. I have pointed out above some
allusions to the myth of the Moon and Purukapalis child (W2880) in ritual in order
to show that this moon narrative not only provides an explanation of how death came
to the world, but also offers a model for symbolic death and rebirth in major rites of
passage. What is more, the myth appears to have a function in the release of emotions,
especially anger, since after a death, the culture hero Purukapali is blamed for it in a
ritualized manner.
In addition to the seven moon myths under the rubric origin of death: moon
offers life, man chooses death outlined and indexed by Waterman (1987), I identified
three further ones: Moon and dingo, Moon and possum, and Moon and his mother-in-
law. The comparison of the ten available myths from across Australia has shown that
the motivations to refuse the moons offer of life varied. These motivations could be
better understood in the context of Aboriginal social practices and norms. It also be-
came clear, however, that the behaviour of mythical totemic ancestors did not neces-
sary demonstrate the rules of proper conduct. The case of Moon and his mother-in-
law, for example, might only be regarded as a blueprint if the Moons behaviour is
considered an inversion of the way in which people ought to behave.
The interpretation of Australian myths, as Hiatt (1975: 3) points out, has been guided in the
main by four separate though not necessarily incompatible ideas about the nature and purpose
of the subject matter. They are that myth is, or may be at least in part, a kind of (a) history, (b)
charter, (c) dream, or (d) ontology.
The myth of the Moon and Purukupalis child (W2880) can be interpreted in
these ways. For A.P. Elkin (1964 [1938]: 215),
mythology is not just a matter of words and records, but of action and life.
The primary aim of myths, in his view, is keeping Aborigines in living touch
with the creative dream-time; and, therefore, Elkin claims, the myth is life-giving
(Ibid.). The expected efficacy of ritual gestures alluding to the Tiwi moon myth seems
to underscore this point. Moreover, the myth deals with both death and regeneration.
Although the antiquity of this particular myth (or of the ten myths for that
matter) cannot be established, long-term isolation of the Tiwi from the mainland may
be taken into account. Since the last Ice Age, that is, for some 8,000 years they would
have been separated from other Aborigines until the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury; this is supported by linguistic and genetic evidence (see Hart, Pilling & Goodale
1988; Osborne 1974; Kirk 1983). If the myth is indeed authentic, its content may pre-
sent a theme that is very old, even more so because comparable moon myths have
been recorded at various places across Australia. It is not my aim to engage in specu-
lation here, but we simply cannot exclude the possibility.
For one thing, the moon must have been there all the time. As Smith (1970:
71) attests, Aborigines observed and had knowledge of the course of the moon. The
39
waxing and waning of the moon could not go unnoticed. (I was told Tiwi Aborigines
of olden times were also keen observers of the tides). The moon did become an apt
symbol of regeneration in the local religion.
15
The anthropomorphism concerning
natural phenomena like the moon is widespread. Theo Meders discussion of the Man
in the moon (1997) concerns European folktales. He refers to Das Mrchen vom
Mann im Monde, published by Ludwig Bechstein in 1857, and numerous other ver-
sions that share a common theme where someone has committed a wrong and, there-
fore, is similarly sent to the moon. He discerns the motifs in all of these tales as
answers to the following questions: who do we see in the moon?; what is his name?;
what did he do wrong?; how did he get to the moon?; what was his punishment?
(Meder 1997: 223).
16
These questions are also answered by the Australian myth of
Moon and Purukapalis child (W2880). What they all have in common is that they are
etiological tales. The moon myths discussed in this paper also explain how death
came into the world and they make clear who should be blamed for it.
References
Allen, Louis A., 1975, Time Before Morning: Art and Myth of the Australian Aborigines, New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell.
Berndt, R.M. and Berndt, C.H., 1988, The World of the First Australians. Aboriginal Traditional Life:
Past and Present, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Berndt, R.M. and Berndt, C.H., 1989, The Speaking Land: Myth and Story in Aboriginal Australia,
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Chippindale, C., 1994, New and Old in Aboriginal Australia, Cambridge Anthropology 17(2): 4-25.
Elkin, A.P., 1964, The Australian Aborigines, New York: Doubleday [orig. 1938].
Frazer, J.G., 1913, The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, vol. 1. London: MacMillan.
Hart, W.C.M., Pilling, A.R. and Goodale, J.C., 1988, The Tiwi of North Australia. Third Edition. New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Haviland, J. with R. Hart, 1998, Old Man Frog and the Last Aborigines of Barrow Point. Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Hiatt, L.R., 1975 Introduction, in Australian Aboriginal Mythology, ed. L.R. Hiatt, Canberra: Austra-
lian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, pp. 1-23.
Hiatt, L.R., 1996, Arguments About Aborigines: Australia and the Evolution of Social Anthropology,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kaberry, P.M., 2004, Aboriginal Woman: Sacred and Profane, London: Routledge [orig. 1939].
Kirk, R.L., 1983, Aboriginal Man Adapting: The Human Biology of Australian Aborigines, Melbourne:
Oxford University Press.
Maddock, K., 1982, The Australian Aborigines: A Portrait of their Society, Second Edition, Mel-
bourne: Penguin Books.
McConnel, U., 1931, A Moon Legend from the Bloomfield River, North Queensland, Oceania 2: 9-25.
Meder, T., 1997, Het mannetje in de maan, in Van Aladdin tot Zwaan kleef aan. Lexicon van

15
See also McConnel 1931.
16
Interestingly, Meder refers to Dantes Divina Comedia (early fourteenth century) in which the pun-
ishment of the man in the moon has to do with fraternal strife: his name is Cain, and he has been sent
there by God for the bodily harm he inflicted on his brother Abel 1997: 223. Tapara who fought his
brother Purukapali ended up there as well.
40
sprookjes: ontstaan, ontwikkeling, varianten, ed. T. Dekker, J. van der Kooi and T. Meder,
Nijmegen: SUN / Antwerpen: Kritak, pp. 221-225.
Meder, T. and Venbrux, E. 2000, Vertelcultuur, in Volkscultuur. Een inleiding tot de Nederlandse
etnologie, eds. T. Dekker, G. Rooijakkers and H. Roodenburg, Nijmegen: SUN, pp. 282-336.
Merlan, F., 1998, Caging the Rainbow: Places, Politics, and Aborigines in a North Australian Town,
Honolulu: Hawaii University Press.
Mountford, C.P., 1956, Expedition to the Land of the Tiwi, National Geographic 59: 417-440.
Mountford, C.P., 1958, The Tiwi, their Art, Myth and Ceremony, London: Phoenix House.
Myers, F.R., 1986, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert
Aborigines, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Osborne, C.R., 1974, The Tiwi Language, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.
Rose, D.B., 1992, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture, Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, W.R., 1970, Myths and Legends of the Australian Aborigines, New York: Johnson Reprint
[orig. n.d., London: George G. Harrap].
Spencer, B. and Gillen, F.J., 1968, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, New York: Dover Publica-
tions [orig. 1899].
Stanner, W.E.H., 1979, The Dreaming, in White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938-1973, ed.
W.E.H. Stanner, Canberra: Australian National University Press, pp. 23-40.
Sutton, P., 1988, Dreamings, in Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia, ed. P. Sutton, New
York: Viking, pp. 13-32.
Tonnaer, A., 2007, La danse de lavion. Rarticuler les relations de genre au festival de Borroloola
(Australie), in La Dfi Indigne, eds. B. Glowczewski and R. Henry, Paris: Aux lieux dtre,
pp. 89-101.
Van Gennep, A., 1905, Mythes et lgendes dAustralie. tudes dethnographie et de sociologie, Paris:
E. Guilmoto.
Venbrux, E., 1995, A Death in the Tiwi Islands: Conflict, Ritual and Social Life in an Australian Abo-
riginal Community, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Venbrux, E., 2002a, The Craft of the Spider Woman, in Pacific Art: Persistence, Change and Mean-
ing, eds. A. Herle, N. Stanley, K. Stevenson and R.L. Welsch, Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, pp. 324-336.
Venbrux, E., 2002b, Review of Old Man Fog and the Last Aborigines of Barrow Point, by John B.
Haviland and Roger Hart, American Ethnologist 29(1): 219-220.
Venbrux, E., 2007, Quite Another World of Aboriginal Life: Indigenous People in an Evolving Mu-
seumscape, in The Future of Indigenous Museums: Perspectives from the Southwest Pacific,
ed. N. Stanley, New York: Berghahn, pp. 117-134.
Venbrux, E., 2008, Indigenous Religion in an Intercultural Space, in Pulling the Right Threads: The
Ethnographic Life and Legacy of Jane C. Goodale, eds. L. Zimmer-Tamakoshi and J. Putnam-
Dickerson, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 168-186.
Venbrux, E. and Meder, T., 1999, Anders Bijmas Folktale Repertoire and Its Collectors, Fabula
40(3-4): 259-277.
Venbrux, E., & Jones, P., 2002, Prachtaufnahmen: Police Inspector Paul Foelsches Anthropo-
metric Photographs of Aborigines from Northern Australia, 1879, in De bril van Anceaux /
Anceauxs Glasses: Anthropological Photography Since 1860, ed. L. Roodenburg, Leiden:
Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, pp. 116-127.
Venbrux, E. and Tonnaer, A., 2009, Australian Aboriginal Beliefs and Traditions, in Encyclopedia of
Death and the Human Experience, eds. C.D. Bryant and D.L. Peck, Los Angeles: Sage, pp.
86-89.
Warner, W.L., 1958, A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe, Revised edition,
[orig. 1937], New York: Harper & Brothers.
Waterman, P.P., 1987, A Tale-Type Index of Australian Aboriginal Oral Narratives, FFC 238, Hel-
sinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia.
41
Chapter 3. Tales of death and regenera-
tion in West Africa

by Walter E.A. van Beek
1

Abstract: Myths in African traditional religions (plural intended!) often have an ambivalent relation
both to the rituals in those religions and to the conceptions of the other world. For one part the princi-
pal rituals seem to bear little relation to the main body of myth, on the other hand some or many of the
main supernatural agents do not feature in the myths at all. This relative cultural autonomy of myths is
reflected in the issues the myths address among which etiology seems to be of a lesser concern. This
dynamic will be viewed in the myths on death and dying in some West African societies. Here, ques-
tions of ultimate origin do not feature, neither of creation nor of death, but the mythical atention is
more of an intermediate nature, more protohistorical than purely mythical. Thus, one of the glaring
absences, in some cases, is any explanation of deaths origin, while the focus is either on avoiding the
discourse on death and dying, or on the battle against death: how to avoid dying, and why mans ulti-
mate inability to do so. The comparative data stem from the authors research (Kapsiki, North Camer-
oon, and Dogon, Mali) as the core of a wider West African comparison.
Introduction: An unromantic Africa
Books with large collections of myths, especially those of the universalistic kind such
as Campbells,
2
usually have only a short section on African myths. For some reason
or other, Africa seems to fall beyond the scope of cherished mythical tales. Is this se-
lective neglect or is Africa indeed not home to that many myths? I think two proc-
esses are at play here, romanticism and the relationship of myth with folk stories.
First, mythological studies have long been colored by a romantic vision, with myths
as the hallowed remnants of a far greater knowledge born in a bygone golden age,
and handed down through the years as a dwindling heritage of that past.
3
In the last
few decades this view has been severely discredited
4
and rightly so and is defi-
nitely not shared in this article. But the romantic view has had a big impact and one

1
African Studies Centre, Leiden / Department of Religious Studies, Tilburg University.
2
Campbell 1959-1968.
3
Belcher 2005: xvii.
4
See, for example, Segal 1984, 2004, Belcher 2005: xvii-xx.
42
effect has been in the selection of cultures which would fit into the romantic mould
and for which tribal wisdom would seem an appropriate notion. I have the distinct
impression that African local cultures do not evoke the same kind of romantic appeal
that indigenous cultures in other parts of the world generate. The myth of tribal wis-
dom seems to be less powerful in Africa than it is in, for instance, Aboriginal Austra-
lia, on the slopes of the Andes or in Tibet.
5

Somehow the notion of the noble savage resonates more with traditional cul-
tures out of Africa than with the many on the continent, despite the fact that age-old
wisdom should be found more easily on our continent of origin. The situation is simi-
lar in the present vogue of romantic noble savage tourism, where young westerners
are looking for the impassioned age-old wisdom of the shamans to be cured or to be-
come shamans themselves. In this vein too, Africa is not deemed to possess ancient
wisdom for general humanity, as few tourists set out for the African wilds to be ini-
tiated into the tribal wisdom which is the outcome of millennia of survival on a harsh
continent.
6
One reason for this might be that African cultures are not threatened, and
that on a continent full of African cultures it is difficult to use the term indigenous,
with its connotations of a threatened minority clinging to their ancient wisdom in the
face of overwhelming odds. Africa is, in this sense, unromantic. At least, human Af-
rica seems to be rather unromantic, as the Africa-of-the-animals is of course highly
romantic.
Africa is one of these destinations where the West goes to find its adventures in the splendor
of the African game parks: the vast herds of wildebeest thundering through the immense
plains of untouched wilderness, the elusive big five every traveler must have spotted and
photographed.
7

And if Africa is also mentioned in the tourist brochures as the continent of
colorful, strange cultures, of picturesque people in thatched huts that blend in with the
surrounding savannah, these are photo ops, not a source of wonder about ourselves.
For Africanists this is slightly galling, even if such blatant romanticism is not
one they deign to subscribe to. But there might be another reason for the relative ne-
glect of Africa in the world of myths, one which has everything to do with our own
perception. Habitually, three types of prose narrative are discerned: myths, legends
and folk tales.
8
Myths are stories set in a remote past, in an earlier world, with non-
human characters (preferably gods) who are sacred and generate belief. In legends,
the setting is the recent past, with human characters and the story is considered fac-
tual. Folk tales just-so stories operate in a familiar world with human or non-
human characters, often animals, and do not have to be believed. Such a division has

5
Yet some publications try to redress this romantic balance, for example, Ford 1999, Mbitu & Prime
1997.
6
Some examples of mainly South Africans (and an occasional anthropologist) who are initiated as a
sangoma, a native healer, notwithstanding.
7
Van Beek 2007c: 150.
8
For a classic definition, see Bascom 1975, reprinted in Dundes 1984: 5-40.
van Beek Chapter 3: Death Tales in West Africa
43
been found in many case studies as well,
9
as in most African cultures people seem to
separate their folk tales from their myths and legends. Thus, this separation between
fictional accounts, folk tales, and the myths and legends that are considered history is
indeed present throughout Africa.
10

In this contribution I argue two points. First, a distinction is made between
myth and legend which is emic history on the one hand, and the amusement of
folk tales on the other hand, but this does not preclude both types from heavily influ-
encing each other, i.e. using the same themes, characters and plots. Prose narratives
are not that divergent.
11
Second, in many African myths the setting is not that differ-
ent from our present world: African myths have a kind of familiarity, a sense of im-
mediacy that closely links them to the world we know. As I will illustrate, most of the
myths in Africa are not overly etiological or very supernatural as more people than
gods figure in them, the world is present from the start, and only small environmental
details are ever explained.
One reason for this could be that the numbers of folk tales, riddles, dilemma
tales and other forms of oral literature in Africa are overwhelming, swamping the
number of myths and legends in which the function of amusement is less important. It
is questionable whether dividing them into three categories does justice to African
prose narratives and it might be that these categories are part of the relative paucity of
African material in global myth collections.
To highlight some characteristics of the African world of myths and glean
some insight into the specificity of African myths, I will look at two examples that I
consider are functioning myths. The theme is the struggle with life and death, the
way Africans explain life and mortality. In both cases, these tales are set in hero tales
which is a genre in where Africa is also under-represented,
12
but then hero tales of a
different and less classic kind. The cases are both West African: one from the widely
known Dogon
13
of Mali; and the second, the Kapsiki of Cameroon and the Higi of
northeastern Nigeria from the periphery of West Africa.
14
The two accounts stem
from first-hand research over many years and the cases can be seen as a controlled
comparison with similar surroundings, similar historical trajectories and a generally

9
Bascom 1984: 15.
10
Typically, African scholars tend to consider these tales as pathways into local histories (Shokpeka
2005, Mbitu & Prime 1997), while European researchers often inverse the relationship: myths are pre-
sent politics (MacGaffey 2004, Nugent 1997). For the Mandara Mountains, balanced treatments on this
issue are given by Sterner 2003 and Mller-Kosack 2003, and for popular Islam in Africa see van
Binsbergen 1985.
11
See also Belcher 2005, Lynch 2004.
12
Ford 1999 uses a very wide definition for his hero tales.
13
My fieldwork among the Dogon started in 1979-1980 with regular return visits every two years, the
last being in May 2008.
14
The Kapsiki of Cameroon and the Higi of northeastern Nigeria form one ethnic conglomerate, which
I call Kapsiki in this article. My research among these people started in 1972-1973, with regular return
visits every three to five years, the last being in January 2009.
44
similar socio-cultural organization. However, a comparison is about both similarities
and differences, and the two cultures will be shown to have important variations on
the themes chosen.
Two cultures: Similarities and differences
The Kapsiki in northern Cameroon as well as the Dogon in Mali live in a dry Sahe-
lian-savannah environment where the sedentary cultivation of millet, sorghum and
maize is supplemented with animal husbandry (sheep, goats and cattle). Both habitats
are mountainous, relatively densely populated and quite intensively cultivated. Culti-
vation technology is of the classical African iron-type and working units are small.
Subsistence cultivation relies on a broad spectrum of food crops, with some cash
crops to supplement the family budget. Both groups have lived in these areas for a
long time and their dwellings still echo the continuous threat of enslavement in past
centuries.
For safety reasons, people built their villages only in defendable spots and
cleared fields in the immediate vicinity. The fields of the Kapsiki / Higi were situated
around the outcroppings or on the slopes themselves, whereas the Dogon cultivated
primarily those fields visible from the plateau rim. In both cases the picture changed
dramatically with the coming of colonization. The pax colonialis of the Germans and
British for the Kapsiki, and the French in the case of the Dogon, opened up the plains
and plateau as areas of cultivation. Pacification resulted in the populations rapid dis-
persal over the formerly dangerous surrounding areas.
The main, if not the only, socio-political unit consists of the village. Although
the appearance of the villages is strikingly different, both the Kapsiki and the Dogon
villages form the dominant context of village social life. Village communities have
always had a high degree of political autonomy with their own clearly defined terri-
tory, structures of authority and local histories, in which migration traditions domi-
nate. Politics are not centralized. Village heads have only a few ritual obligations, as
have the clan and lineage elders, even though they have more influence in daily life.
Conflict resolution, for instance, is highly informal and does not depend on specific
functionaries. A separate group of specialists exists in both cases: the blacksmith
group amongst the Kapsiki and the blacksmiths and leather workers / tanners among
the Dogon.
For both groups, religion is complex and echoes their history and setting. A
system of major cyclical rituals, more or less tied in to the rites de passage joins a
clearly defined set of sacrificial cults which follow the social echelons of the village:
individual, household, ward, lineage, clan, village, neighborhood, and the whole vil-
lage. Sacrifice forms the core ritual in both cases, with divination being the steering
mechanism. The pantheon, however, is quite different, even though in both cases the
role of the ancestors is limited. Their differences become apparent at the level of ide-
ology and what one might call lifestyle, the specific ways of interaction between
45
members of the same society.
Internal fighting between the villages was much more intense in the case of
the Kapsiki. Skirmishes between Kapsiki villages used to form a continuous threat,
but they were a much-loved male activity. Villages fought each other with some regu-
larity and for a variety of reasons, always following a strict fighting code. While there
were some internal skirmishes among the Dogon, these were far less important. Their
raids were limited to occasional groups of youngsters avenging the affronts by peers
from a neighboring village who had infringed on their territory, i.e. were after their
girls. No slaves were caught and no cases of manslaughter were ever reported. The
Kapsiki had many more domestic slaves than the Dogon who rarely bought or sold
slaves. The Dogon were only likely to be involved in a slave transaction if they were
paying the ransom for a kinsman caught by a Muslim, though they occasionally did
use other kinsmen in the exchange. Slavery was thus a normal occurrence in Kapsiki
villages, but an exception on the Dogon cliff.
The two value systems vary accordingly. The Kapsiki strive for an individual
autonomy: a person should be free from all restraining ties. S/he may call upon clan
members for help but should be wary of these kinsmen taking too much of an interest
in ones property, time and/or labor. A definite work ethic pervades the value system,
albeit an individual one: individuals should work hard and be as autarchic as possible,
economically as well as politically. In social interaction this implies an assertive atti-
tude, protecting ones privacy, and shielding the private sphere from any unwarranted
intrusion by outsiders. Cunning, in the sense of being smarter that the other, is there-
fore a valued faculty.
The Dogon, on the contrary, are strongly oriented towards harmony and con-
tinuous communion with members of their clan and village. Conflicts should be
avoided even if differences of opinion are raised. Not only are the Dogon very much
aware of their mutual interdependency, they cherish and accentuate it wherever they
can. Communal labor, collective action and group responsibility are characteristics of
village life. Hospitality and openness are essential values: each Dogon should be ac-
cessible for anyone at all times. The Dogon language has dozens of ways of welcom-
ing a stranger, whereas the Kapsiki have only one expression for welcome. For
them, strangers are the enemy without any rights, while the Dogon consider them as
guests from whom new words can be learned and information from the outside
world can be gleaned.
A correlated difference is the general view on age. For the Kapsiki, age as
such is not a quality to be respected; their focus is on the hard-working, strong, inde-
pendent adult who needs nobody, works hard and feeds himself and many others. Old
age brings dependency and poverty, in general a loss of status. Old men gradually lose
their wives, while old women become wholly dependent on their sons. Without a liv-
ing son, old age can be hard for the Kapsiki. While age for the Dogon, is crucially
important. Social hierarchy is based on seniority. Everything the whole village, its
fields, crops, houses, lineages and people is owned by the oldest man in the village
(the Hogon). Old age is considered an achievement and forms an important power
46
base, even if old men are dependent on their younger kinfolk for any real labor and
daily care. In Dogon society, dependency on others is not viewed as a problem, but as
a meaningful source for crucial relations.
The tales
The Kapsiki distinguish between folk tales and history of the village stories that I
will call myths. The corpus of the first, called rhena heca (old words), run into the
hundreds,
15
but there are few riddles, dilemma tales and proverbs in Kapsiki oral tales.
Mythical tales are often given no specific name or are named after the main protago-
nist. This genre consists of the history of the village, but it is dominated by the story
of the village hero, Hwempetla. His exploits form the main point of reference for sev-
eral rituals as well as for village identity. The myth I have selected forms a crucial
part of the Hwempetla cycle. The main myths of origin are the tales of migration: how
people came to the area for the first time. For the Kapsiki, they came from just beyond
the confines of the Mandara Mountains, in fact from several points of origin, none
very far away.
The Dogon culture also is a host of folk tales, as well as proverbs, balanced at
the same time with a considerable corpus of tales that function as myths, plus a wealth
of elaborate song texts with varying characteristics, some mythical, some heroic,
some very mundane.
16
As far as tales of origin are concerned, the same holds for the
Dogon as for the Kapsiki though on a larger scale. The Dogon have many tales about
their arrival at the cliff. Their ancestors come from far away Mand, thereby linking
the cliff area to the major expanse of Mand culture, even if they are culturally at the
far eastern end of it. So the major myths of origin are, in fact, village proto-histories,
combined with etiological tales about specific features of the environment: a special
waterhole, a hole in a mountain, as well as a few tales about the provenance of their
castes, the blacksmiths and the leatherworkers.
In neither case does the mythical corpus contain myths of creation as usually
understood: there are no mythical cycles about a creation ab nihilo and no system of
etiological explanations. The latter might be a surprise for those who have read the
elaborate Dogon mythology by Griaule and Dieterlen,
17
but these accounts have been
shown to be fabrications by research teams. The new wave of Dogon research has
clearly shown these myths to be recent constructs, the result of an uncontrolled inter-
action between ethnographers and full-time, creative (!) informants.
18
This evidently

15
I collected 120 folk tales that are in the process of being edited.
16
See van Beek 2008 for an analysis of one major song text.
17
See Griaule 1948, Dieterlen 1952, 1982, Griaule and Dieterlen 1965.
18
See van Beek 1991, 2007 but also the work of Anne Doquet 1997, Jacky Bouju 1984, Eric Jolly
2004 and Polly Richards 2001, 2010. The work of Belcher, cited above, still includes some of the Gri-
aulian myths (Belcher 2005: 342-45) but recognizes that there is some question about them (Ibid.:
47
makes a dent in the many myth collections that include Dogon creation myths, and
in some cases will all but eliminate the category of cosmogonic myths from Africa
because Griaules Dogon tales have been a lynch pin in many mythical analyses.
For both cultures, the general setting of the world, the overall patterns of so-
cial life and the facts of ecology are given. They do not speculate over these things, or
at least they have not developed etiological explanations. If a why question is an-
swered by a myth at all, it is of a more restricted kind. For instance, why black-
smiths is answered by the Kapsiki with a tale of how someone acted oddly, ate
prohibited meat and thus was relegated to the category of blacksmith, but that cate-
gory already existed and no tale explains its origins. Moreover, there are no flood
tales in either of the cultures, a genre that is receiving increasing attention in African
comparative analysis. However, the main rituals are accompanied by a larger number
of myths. Dogon tales on the origins of masks are standard fare for the orubaru per-
formance, and our example is part of this group of the corpus. The Kapsiki burial is
closely linked to the tale used here, though its relationship with the ritual is more am-
bivalent as will be seen. Finally, some tales illustrate encounters with death, epidem-
ics, periodic drought and rain, as we will see in the hero tales of the Kapsiki and the
Dogon. But here too, the corpus is restricted, as is the scope of the questions posed
and answered by the tales.

Who tells the stories? Any Kapsiki can tell a story, but it is usually a more experi-
enced older man who is a good storyteller. He might well be a blacksmith, since this
is part of their repertoire though it does not exclusively belong to them. The context of
the storytelling is neither fixed nor ritually circumscribed. The story used here is well
known, and quickly told by anyone, even by young boys to any inquiring outsider,
although they acknowledge that others know it better. The story is remarkably stable,
as my research has shown: the versions collected in 1972, 1994 and 2009 bear almost
no differences. The occasion chosen is a gathering of men, in which one elder, possi-
bly a ward chief or the village chief himself, deems it wise to use the story for a par-
ticular didactic purpose. While telling the story needs no specific performative setting,
if the story is told well, then it can be quite a performance. Due to the extraordinary
wealth of idiophones in Kapsiki (a Chadic language), a good raconteur makes the
story come alive for his audience by accompanying any relevant action to its idio-
phone; thus his enraptured audience hears arrows whistle, people running, snakes bit-
ing and enemies dying.
Dogon mythical tales, by contrast, are set in a ritual setting. Only a few people
have the right and duty to tell the stories, and can do this very well. In Mand culture,
the storytellers are the initiates (orubaru) of the sigi ritual
19
or their teachers, the

341). He does indeed err on the side of caution, as evidence that these tales were never part of Dogon
culture before the arrival of Griaule is becoming overwhelming. It is better to consider them as fiction
and no longer include them in myth collections.
19
The sigi ritual is explained in the next paragraph.
48
masters of the word. The audience is part of the ritual audience, usually linked with
death. The complex rites of Dogon burial, the first funeral and the final farewell dur-
ing the mask performance habitually offer a niche for telling the main stories that
make up the mythical corpus. The orubaru as a specialist has to tell the story since it
must be told in another language. This is the so-called mask language, sigi so, a deri-
vate language of the regular Dogon language, with only a 20% overlap in vocabulary.
In the literature it is has been dubbed a secret language but all the men speak it and
most of the women can understand it reasonably well, at least in the villages on the
Dogon cliff. The orubaru has to give an impeccable performance for a ritual occasion.
He has to recite the text in fluent sigi so, without faltering, without mistakes, in one
continuous flow of oratory. The ritual language is precisely for such an occasion and
is one-way communication: nobody answers, there is no conversation in sigi so, and it
is not really spoken, as much as shouted. The text is recited loud enough for everyone
to hear, but no one answers. The language is used to shout exhortations at the mask
dancers and to thank them for their performances. The masks do not speak, instead
they just make animal sounds in return.
The struggle with death in Kapsiki
The following rhena ta Hwempetla is the Mogode version of the story where the tale
of village history forms the central part of the story, the one about their village hero
Hwempetla, or Nayekwake. I expected every village to have such a cultural hero,
but that is not the case. Hwempetla is the hero of most Kapsiki villages, but is almost
always defined as belonging to the village of Mogode. He is more in the sphere of a
legend than a myth maybe but that issue is discussed later. Only one village, Kortchi,
had as similar tale on Nikukud, a dialect variant of Nayekwake.
The first part of the foundation myth, rhena ta Ngweu, is about the origin of
the village and the first arrivals from Gudur, and recounts Mogodes dependency on
neighboring Guria. This ends with the genealogy of the Mogode clans through
Hwempetla. Hwempetla was not the first arrival, but the ancestor of all truly autoch-
thonous clans. The second part of this myth is the rhena ta Hwempetla proper and
starts with his miraculous birth followed by his exploits. His famous deeds include
stealing cattle from the neighboring village of Guria and the subsequent war which
Hwempetla won when he was joined by a stranger during the battle. Later on, other
newcomers joined him and would become ancestors of other clans. We start the text
when he was established as chief.
Hwempetla became the village chief. He wanted a woman so he tried to steal Rains daughter
but every time he came near her, Rain started to groan, and ultimately he got tired of the
game. Why do you want to steal my daughter? Maybe you will succeed but then rain will
fall continuously on your little piece of land and drought will reign elsewhere. Your fields will
be washed away by the rain. Is that what you want? You have to go down to the earth, and I
will stay up here to go from village to village till the end of the world.
49
So you wont give me your child?
No, I wont give her to you.
Then Rain and Hwempetla made a bet. Rain would grant Hwempetla a favor if he could hide
for eight days. Hwempetla left and hid in a beer jar between the sorrel which is kept there, in
Rains very house. Then Rain started his search: he came with enormous winds, tore trees
down, and destroyed houses and termites hills. Everywhere he searched, in mouse holes, un-
der stones, everywhere. Exhausted, he returned home after eight days and found Hwempetla
there who told him that he was in the sorrel, inside the beer jar.
You are right, Rain says. I have ransacked the whole earth and did not find you as you
were in my own house. I am for everyone, not for someone special. If you and your small
mountain are thirsty, then you have to tell me so. You tell me; I am thirsty and then Ill come
and pour myself out on your mountain. Do not buy rain from someone else but come and ask
me for it, Rain told him.
Finally, Hwempetla was approaching the end of his days and he told his people: I liberated
you from our enemies and I will try to liberate you from Death as well. If I do my utmost, I
should succeed. So when his time came, he thought: With my powers I should succeed, I
will be too quick for Death. He took his bulls skin and flew through the air. Death chased
him, faster and faster and threatened to overtake him. Hwempetla tried to throw off Death by
flying straight through a mountain, but Death still followed him.
20
Then he tried to hide from
Death but to no avail. He hid in a thorn bush but Death found him. He hid inside the straw on
the roof but Death found him. He hid inside a termite hill but his hairs stuck out and gave him
away. He hid inside a hollow baobab tree but Death saw him. He then dug himself into the
stem of the sorrel, and made himself very small. For four days and nights Death searched eve-
rywhere in the straw, in the pool, in a well but there was no sign of Hwempetla. Then at
last Death saw a toe sticking out of the sorrel because the stem was too small. So finally
Hwempetla had to admit defeat. If the sorrel had been larger, I could have beaten Death, he
said. You people, there is no use trying to hide from death but prepare yourself for a digni-
fied end, and do as I will do shortly. Wrap me inside the skin of my bull and during the dance
the smith has to carry me on his shoulders and my wife should hold its tail. When you hear a
whooshing noise, I will be gone. Then go to a spot in the bush with a lot of fleas, above two
holes in the ground. Make my grave there, and my wifes. And so it happened. During the
dance, Hwempetla flew off the smiths shoulders, pulling his wife behind him by the tail.
People started searching the bush and finally found two holes in the ground, covered with
fleas. They made two graves and covered them with leaves.
21

Regeneration: The Dogon sigi myth
The Dogon text considered here is part of a larger corpus of texts recited by the vil-
lage speaker in sigi so at various rituals. The other deals with the Dogons arrival
from Mand and the finding of the masks in the village of Yougo in the northeast.
This central ritual spot in the Dogon area is the scene of the selected tale, the myth of

20
This particular mountain has caves, proof of Hwempetlas flight through the air. One of them is used
for girls initiation ceremonies at the time of their first marriage (makwa).
21
During the annual rain hunt, these graves are repaired and covered with leaves to ask Hwempetla for
rain, a request he will convey to Rain. The discourse on rain, as elsewhere in the Mandara Mountains,
is easy to read as a discourse on power (van Beek 1997).
50
the coming of another ritual, the sigi. Once every sixty years, the ritual of the sigi is
danced in Dogon villages over a five-year period starting in Yougo and then traveling
through Dogon country, being performed in different villages further along the cliff.
The ritual itself consists mainly of a string of fully adorned men lined up according to
descending order of age who dance following a specific route through the village, the
sigi oju, the way of the sigi. The following text is this rituals accompanying myth.
Sen Senu, a young boy, lived in the village of Yougo with his father Sanga Yngulu and his
mother Na Yngulu. One day while herding his fathers cattle, Sen Senu grew tired and thirsty
and climbed a tamarind tree to suck its fruits. The owner of the tree came along: What are
you doing in my tree? Shall I throw my stick at you? Sen Senu, showing no respect, an-
swered: I want to suck them with my mouth, not my anus. Of course the owner grew angry
and hit him. When he came limping home, Sen Senus parents asked why he had been beaten
and how he had lost the herd. I have been hit by the owner of the tamarind tree! His father
promised to go with Sen Senu next day and kill the owner. Early in the morning, the birds
awakened Sen Senu and his father, and they walked to the tree. The owner met them. Why
have you beaten my son? The owner answered: Because he has insulted me and told him
how Sen Senu, in answer to his question about what he was doing in his tree, had answered
that he was sucking fruit with his mouth not his anus. The father asked his son whether this
was true, and his son agreed. Please accept my apologies for my son, the father said. The
owner, accepting the apologies, told the father to climb the tamarind tree and take whatever
fruit he wanted, or to suck as many as he wanted to. The father, with his gun at the foot of the
tree, climbed and picked a number of fruits. From beneath, Sen Senu called to him Why are
you climbing the tree, father? The owner has given me fruit for the porridge. Sen Senu
retorted: That is not the way, father. First you come to kill him, now you accept his fruits as
a gift. If you are like that I am no longer your herdsman. That is entirely up to you, son.
My way, Sen Senu said is the way of the sigi, I will follow the sigi. All right, my son,
that is entirely up to you! So Sen Senu set out alone into the bush, and met someone herding
chickens. After exchanging greetings, the stranger asked where Sen Senu was heading. I am
following the road of the sigi. That is a hard road, the road of the sigi. Still I want to try
it, said Sen Senu. Somewhat further in the bush, in encounters with people herding goats,
sheep, horses, donkeys and cattle, the same exchange was held: Where are you going? I
am following the sigi oju. The sigi oju is a hard road. I will try it anyway. At last Sen
Senu encountered an elephant [in some versions it is a lion]. Where are you going? Sen
Senu: I am following the road of the sigi. The elephant trumpeted: I have the sigi. Sen
Senu: If you have the sigi, then do as you like. The elephant ate Sen Senu, and for three
whole years Sen Senu remained inside the elephants belly. At length the elephant grew thirsty
and went to drink from a water-hole just outside the village. The animal then defecated and
out came Sen Senu, carrying with him the dalewa (the forked sigi stool), the oblong calabash
(koju pom) and the horses tail (s duro). Then his sister came along to fetch water. Seeing
Sen Senu, she tried to speak to him but he could not speak. She ran back into the village and
cried out Sen Senu is at the pool. Her father thought she was crazy as Sen Senu had been
gone for three years, eaten by an elephant, and the period of mourning had long come to an
end. Look for yourself, she said, and so he did. At the water-hole, his father asked Sen
Senu to come home. Sen Senu started to speak in the language of sigi (sigi so): Go and brew
beer, let everyone adorn himself in his finest; if not, I will not be able to return home. So, go
and receive me.
[Sen Senu then gave very detailed instructions on how to brew beer, how to fetch water, how
to make porridge, how to ferment the beer and how to ration it.]
When everything had been done as instructed, the elders came to Sen Senu and asked: Who
will be at the front? Sen Senu then sang one of the twelve sigi songs, Please forgive, eld-
51
ers, you are the oldest but if you do not know the road of the sigi, I am the first, and I will turn
to the left. The elders responded: Yes, you know the way. Three years is not three days;
you have been inside the elephant, you know more than we do. Thus Sen Senu came home
and this is the way that the sigi came to the villages.
Death and regeneration: The human way
What are these tales? They are both primarily about human beings who do special
deeds which result in rituals. Yet if they are hero tales, these heroes are not the stan-
dard Campbellian kind: they do not leave the village and they do no deeds elsewhere
(it is difficult to see the elephants belly as an arena)
22
The only relevance of these
tales are for the villages of Mogode and Yugo. In fact they are quite irresponsible,
more like children than heroes. Hwempetla starts a war with Guria which he would
have lost if not for the unplanned arrival of a stranger; while Sen Senu starts his road
of the sigi after severely insulting an old man. In fact he was transgressing all normal
rules of behavior, and by acting so extremely impolite he estranged his father in the
process. Hwempetlas bet with his father-in-law is just as odd, and his request is cor-
rectly deemed stupid; his wise in-law transfers it into a sensible proposition: Come
and ask me for rain whenever your people need it. For Sen Senu, wisdom comes
from the belly and the rear end of an elephant. This makes sense since animals are
considered to be knowledgeable about the bush,
23
and although elephants are not the
wiliest of animals (foxes are!), they are indeed part of the bush. Hwempetlas struggle
with death is less than successful; though it does underscore his super-human abilities
he can fly! and also highlights his surrender to Death: even Hwempetla will not
escape his fate.
Both myths, though not overly heroic, address ritual to some extent. The Kap-
siki burial ritual has been redefined, and the rain ritual has been abolished, at least this
village is liberated from the ascendancy of rain makers (including the Guria one). This
latter element implies full autonomy for the village as the rain rituals form a special
link with the ancestral village of Gudur, the mythical place of origin of many of the
Mandara groups and whose ritual power still serves many villages. For the Dogon,
Sen Senu gave shape to the sigi: he taught them the proper way to make beer and to
adorn themselves for the ritual. However, the changes are limited in scope. The Kap-
siki funeral already existed and Hwempetla added an element the simulacrum of the
flight of the corpse on the blacksmiths shoulders from the dancing ground to the
grave. In the case of Sen Senu, people were already talking about the sigi oju before
he showed them the way. Rather than inventing the ritual as such, he helped to de-
fine the proper sigi. Neither heroes invent, instead they adjust and adapt existing ritual
structures, loading them with their own personal histories, as well as giving new

22
Cf. Campbell 1959-68 with the critique of Segal 1984, 1996 & 2004.
23
Van Beek 1992.
52
shape to old ideas.
There is a huge body of literature on the relationship between myth and ritual
in fact a whole myth-and-ritual school
24
but this is not the place to dive into that
sea. Both the Kapsiki and Dogon corpus of mythical tales show that the relationship
between ritual and myth is complex. Sometimes the relationship is strong, but more
often the relationship is quite weak. The two examples given are related: Hwem-
petlas main message is set in the context of a burial. Some details of the tale includ-
ing his wife holding on to the cows tail and his flying can be found in certain aspects
of the Kapsiki burial ritual. After all during the burial ceremony, the widow does hold
the cows tail, and the smith tried to run as fast as he can towards the grave with the
corpse around his neck so the deceaseds gown flaps in the wind. Despite this, the
Kapsiki never explain this aspect of their funeral by referring to the tale of Hwem-
petla. The rain hunt, on the other hand, is explained by the tale, but even then only the
absence of a rain maker, as only one detail of the rain hunt comes from the tale, while
the rain-hunting party takes care of the graves of Hwempetla and his wife. The Dogon
tale has the closest links with ritual of any of the Dogon myths and explains the de-
tails of the ritual, such as the brewing process, the forked stool of the initiates and the
special calabash. But here too, the ritual already existed in the tale, at least the idea of
the ritual, and the hero sets out looking for it, more as an exile, rather than on a quest
for knowledge he has to learn. And that knowledge is in the details, not the ritual as
such. Viewing the two bodies of myth and their links with ritual, it is safe to say that
myth and ritual are not reducible to each other but are parallel worlds, which I have
dubbed virtual worlds, with a dialectic relationship.
25
Myth and ritual usually live in
their own worlds, which only incidentally touch, each with its own logic, a narrative
logic in the case of myth, and a performance logic in the case of rituals.
Both tales are about life, the sigi is about regeneration, and for Hwempetla it is
about escaping death. Life is seen in both as precarious, fleeting and not self-evident.
Life is something one has to work for, to exert oneself for, and for the continuity of
which one has to perform the proper rituals. The results come from a transgression of
normal rules, rebellion against a superior enemy in the Kapsiki case, gross insults
against the vaunted respect for age in the Dogon case. Life has rules that are broken,
at least to some extent, and breaking the rules results in new rules: the rules of normal
daily life are converted and exchanged into the rules of ritual behavior.
The myths in question are situated geographically and genealogically. Though
in principle village-based, both transcend the village as their exploits have become
known by and relevant for the villages in the larger region: a host of villages at the
center of the Dogon region celebrate the sigi (though by no means all) and most Kap-
siki villages acknowledge Hwempetla, follow his redefinition of the funeral proceed-
ings, even if his rain exploits are only deemed relevant for Mogode. Sen Senu is of
Yougo stock, but his ritual prowess is appreciated. While Hwempetla is proudly

24
For an overview and criticism, see Segal 2004 and Doty 2000: 234 ff.
25
For the notion of virtual world, see van Beek 2007a.
53
claimed as the direct ancestor of about half of the Mogode clans. The other category
used in the literature is the legend, and both tales come close to these as well: deemed
historic and about humans and believable. However, legends are usually not tied to
rituals and do not serve as a charter. While both the stories discussed here are about
rituals and function within rituals as well as having a genealogical charter.
The struggle with death, as told below, tells us nothing about how death came
into the world, but it does tell us why everyone has to succumb to it. Or in the Dogon
case, how everyone can enhance their own survival on earth through progeny. It is not
the situation of the world which is the explanandum, but the submission of mankind
to the conditions already prevalent in the world, as well as the way of making the
most out of a difficult situation. The focus is on the human condition and lived reality,
and not the virtual reality of history.
In some other cases in the Mandara Mountains, people tell tales about the ori-
gin of death, but they do this humanely, mundanely and blandly. The example below
is from the Mofu, the Kapsikis eastern neighbors:
Formerly people did not die but just lay resting in their grave for two years and then came
back. An old man married a young woman, had three children, then died and rested. After
eighteen months he came back, wanting to see his wife again. His wife cried out: Are you
there already? Have I not suffered enough? Why leave already? The man grew angry and
told the other dead: Lets stay in the grave. We will not leave again. Since that time people
really have died.
26

In this case, the burden of guilt is put on the shoulders of the women. A very
common story, told in many groups including the Kapsiki, is the tale of the separation
of heaven and earth.
Heaven used to be very close to the earth, and people had to bend over continuously. Any
food they took straight from heaven, above them. One day a young girl found sorghum grains
on the earth and started to pound them, her pounding stick going straight into the face of
heaven. Heaven withdrew, and she kept going till heaven was far away. Now people have to
cultivate and eat sorghum.
27

As Mller-Kosack has noted concerning their northern neighbors the Mafa,
that the mythological imagination is more concerned with transformational issues
and matters of maintenance and change than cosmological structures.
28
I have also
received a definite impression that cosmology is hugely overrated in mythological
studies.
In both cases, folk tales surround these hero myths. They use the same story
lines, the same themes and to some extent the same characters. Many Dogon folk tales
deal with the elephant or the lion and its usual adversary the rabbit. But many of the
exploits of both protagonists reflect the themes in Sen Senus tale: entering the anus,

26
Vincent 1991: 749.
27
Jauoen 1995: 18, Vincent 2008:140, Sundermeier 1998:161. See also Juillerat 1971: 160, Scheub
2000.
28
Mller-Kosack 2003: 66. Good examples are also found in Sterner 2003: 215-18 and Juillerat 1971:
63.
54
staying inside, eating the other from the inside out, coming out fully decorated and the
like. With Hwempetla, the likeness with folk tales is even stronger. The usual hero of
the folk tales, rhena heca, is the meke (the ground squirrel) who is clever, wily and
full of tricks. His adversary is usually the leopard or the hyena, who are dumb, strong
and easy to trick, but still immortal. This particular story is told and widely distributed
with the ground squirrel (meke) in the role of Hwempetla; the squirrel being the stan-
dard protagonist in traditional Kapsiki stories, rhena heca. In the squirrel version, the
ending is different: the squirrel marries Rains daughter and gives an elephant as bride
price. To trick his father-in-law, he eats the elephant from the inside, helped by the
leopard, and then arranges it so that the angry Rain catches the leopard in flagrante
delicto. The squirrel also dallies with Death, giving Death a terrible punishment, cen-
tering again on the anus. So the difference between the myth and the folk tale is
not overly clear and the boundaries become vague. Yet for both the Kapsiki and the
Dogon, the genres are distinct. For the Kapsiki, the story of Hwempetla is just that,
the story of Hwempetla, and is deemed completely historical. Folk tales are called
tales of old (rhena heca), not seemingly too different, but for them a different cate-
gory anyway. For the Dogon, one main difference lies in the language. The Sen Senu
myth is told in sigi so which is a ritual language reserved for ritual occasions. Folk
tales are told in everyday Dogon language and called wn, a term without a clear
etymology.
So this corpus of African myths is ill served by the habitual characterization of
oral tales, conflating as they do many of the habitual distinctions within their own
lived reality. There is no clear-cut mythical world, no virtual reality of supernatural
beings independent of the world of everyday. The world invoked by African myths is
very much the one we know, our daily reality and our direct environment. The tales
may tell us why there is a specific hole in the mountain, why we brew beer as we do,
why we perform the ritual dances we do, why the blacksmith has to run with the
corpse on his shoulder, or why there is always water at a certain spot on the cliff. But
that is about the scale of it: restricted, immediate and relevant. Speaking about Afri-
can myths, Sundermeyer remarks:
The overwhelming majority of them speak of the origins of the first men and women, not of
an actual act of creation by God. They are about people. They are not interested in the origin
of the world as such. They hardly mention the stars, or the cosmos, or the distant world.
29

And even the origins of man usually mean the origins of the first man and
woman in the village or group. The world as a whole is not invoked, nor is the cosmos
or the basic facts of life: the existence of death or of Death, often conceived as a
person is self-evident, and social categories such as blacksmiths already existed in
the oldest tales, and the rules of politeness have never changed. The myths indicate
that we cannot escape our fate, our condition humaine, but that we have to live with it.
And to live to the full, we have to exert ourselves, to follow the instructions of those
that know even if they are from ancient times and to work on it in our own lives. It

29
Sundermeier 1998: 106.
55
is not the etiology of death that is important here, nor the cosmology and certainly not
any cosmogony, but instead it is the existential fact of living, either in a direct way as
a failure to escape death, or in an indirect way as a rebirth and fertility. The borders
between the genres become blurred and they seem to conflate from the extremes of
mythical reality and deep history to the everyday world of lived reality.
One can glean from the total corpus of prose narratives, and in particular from
its mythical part, what a culture is interested in. What constitutes the focus of their
discourse? What are the questions they see as relevant? In our two cases it is clearly
not the conditions under which they live or the provenance of their problems, but the
solutions their cultures have found to cope with such realities. Their interest is in spe-
cific cultural elements, those which they consider central to their identity. The Dogon
are fascinated by their own masks and everything that belongs to the mask complex,
including the sigi: they talk about it, the children make drawings of masks, and they
tell tales of performances and failures.
30
The Kapsiki see Hwempetlas exploits as a
natural precursor for their own existence, their burial, their rain rituals, and their fas-
cination with cleverness and deceit. Myths speak about our being in this world, the
success story of our survival and our font of cultural self-confidence. These are the
tales that prove that one is rightly and justly here, and is well adapted to the here and
now.
This is rather unromantic as myth analysis goes; the cosmic element is miss-
ing, and the great battles between good and evil are absent, as are the moral dilemmas
and the fundamental tragedy of human life. Intellectually there is no deep reflection
on ultimate origins, no creative way of thinking existence out of non-existence, no
wondrous speculation on the beginning or on the end of times. It is more mundane,
more related to everyday life, and thus less mythic, at least in the way the North At-
lantic has usually defined myth. Gods of any kind play a small part on the mythic
stage as humans have the major roles, with their (simile) characters in animal tales
very close at hand. For African prose narratives, the inclusion in or exclusion from
general book collections of myths, tells us more about our own definitions, our way of
ordering the world, our preferences in discourses and about the deep romanticism
long rampant in this scholarly endeavor, than about the quality of African tales or of
myths from other parts of the world for that matter.
African mythology is, therefore, eminently human and does not in the end try
to explain why things are as they are, but poses another question: How can we live
with life as it is? It does not explain the world; it instead explains life, human life,
our life. It does so by rendering our environment human, recognizable look, that
hole in that mountain over there and immediate, bringing the scale of the world
down to human measurements and standards. Thus we live in a world that is not alien.
We belong here, we are not the aliens in this world because our ancestors made their
imprint on it. Life does indeed have its risks, but these are human risks and human
problems, droughts induced by someone, fertility enhanced by someone else. African

30
See van Beek 2006 for young boys fascination with masks.
56
mythology is not a window on the universe or a window on our global earth. It is a
window on something much more relevant and at least as interesting: a window on
ourselves, on our humanity, our fate, our destiny and on the ways we can make this
restricted life into something worthwhile, not everlasting, but worthwhile as each of
us walks his own small patch of earth for a short, fleeting moment.

I want to close with some wild speculation:

if it is correct to say that myths in Africa are more human oriented than in other
continents,
if truly myths in Africa are more animal-oriented than in other continents,
if indeed myths in Africa question the given environment less than in other conti-
nents,
if myths in Africa are less prone to speculation,

one reason might reside in the deep history of man inside Africa. For the human sub-
species Africa is home, and has been so for all of our non-recorded history. In Africa,
man has evolved into a familiar surrounding, in an environment made up of animals
and equals. In other continents we are newcomers, adapting to an alien environment
which evoked fear, wonder and reflection, an environment in which we could not
fall back upon the familiarities of the living world with kindred beings. If myth is also
an instrument for cultural adaptation, then the radical change in habitat as we ventured
out of Africa may well have generated speculation, cosmogony, in short the creative
virtual world we usually call myth.
References
Bascom, W.R., 1975, African dilemma tales, the Hague: Mouton.
Bascom, W.R., 1984, The forms of folklore: prose narratives, in: Sacred Narrative: Readings in the
Theory of Myth, A. Dundes, ed., Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 5-29.
Belcher, S., 2005, African Myths of Origin, London: Penguin.
Bouju, J., 1984, Graine de lhomme, enfant du mil. Paris: Socit dEthnographie
Campbell, J., 1959-1968, The Masks of God, 4 vols., London: Secker & Warburg
Dieterlen, G., 1952, Le savoir dogon, Journal des Africanistes, 22:115-158.
Dieterlen, G., 1982, Le titre dhonneur des Arou (Dogon-Mali). Paris: Muse de lHomme (Socit des
Africanistes)
Doquet, A., 1997, Les masques dogon; ethnologie savante et ethnologie autochtone, Paris: Karthala.
Doty, W.G., 2000, Mythography: The study of myths and rituals, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press.
Dundes, A., 1984, ed., Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth, Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Ford, C.W., 1999, The Hero with an African Face: Mythic Wisdom of Traditional Africa, New York:
Bantam Books.
Griaule, M., 1948, Dieu deau: Entretiens avec Ogotemmli. Paris.
Griaule, M. and Dieterlen, G., 1965, Le renard ple. Tome I: Le mythe cosmogonique. La cration du
57
monde. Paris: Institut de lEthnologie.
Jauoen, R., 1995, Leucharistie du mil: Languages dun people, expressions de la foi, Paris: Karthala.
Jolly, E., 2004, Boire avec esprit. Bire de mil et socit Dogon. Nanterre, Socit dEthnologie.
Juillerat, B., 1971, Les bases de lorganisation sociale chez les Mouktl (Nord Cameroun), Paris:
University of Paris: Mmoires de lInstitut de lEthnologie VIII.
Lynch, P.A., 2004, African Mythology A to Z, New York: Facts on File.
MacGaffey, W., 2004, Earth shrines and the politics of memory in Dagbon, Ghana Studies, 7: 11-24.
Mbitu, N. & Prime, R., 1997, Essential African Mythology, London: Thorsons.
Mller-Kosack, G., 2003, The Way of the Beer: Ritual Re-enactment of History among the Mafa, Lon-
don: Mandaras.
Nugent, P., 1997, Myths of Origin and the Origin of Myth: Local Politics and the Uses of History in
Ghanas Volta Region, Berlin: Das Arabische Buch.
Richards, P., 2001, Imina Sangan or Masque la Mode. Contemporary Masquerade in the
Dogon Region, in Re-Visions: Review of the Collection of the Horniman Museum. London,
107-123.
Richards, P., 2010, Dogon masks now. New York, Museum of African Art.
Scheub, H.E., 2000, A Dictionary of African Mythology: The Mythmaker as Storyteller, Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press.
Segal, R.A., 1984, Joseph Campbells Theory of Myth, in: Sacred Narrative. Readings in the Theory of
Myth, A. Dundes, ed., Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 256-269.
Segal, R.A., 1996, Theories of Myth: Vol. 2 Anthropology, Folklore and Myth, New York: Garland
Publishing.
Segal, R.A., 2004, Myth: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shokpeka, S.A., 2005, Myth in the context of African traditional histories: Can it be called applied
history?, History in Africa, 2, 32: 485-491.
Sterner, J. A., 2003, The Ways of the Mandara Mountains: A Comparative Regional Approach, Kln:
Rdiger Kppe.
Sundermeier, T., 1998, The Individual and Community in African Traditional Religions, Hamburg: LIT
Verlag.
van Beek, W.E.A., 1991, Dogon restudied: A field evaluation of the work of Marcel Griaule, Current
Anthropology, 32, 2: 139-167.
van Beek, W.E.A., 1992, Becoming Human in Dogon, Mali, in: Coming into Existence, G. Aijmer, ed.,
Gteborg, Sweden: IASSA Publications, pp. 47-69.
van Beek, W.E.A., 1997, Rain as a discourse of power: Rainmaking in Kapsiki, in: lHomme et l eau
dans le bassin du lac Chad, H. Jungraithmayer, D. Barreteau & U. Seibert, eds., Paris:
ORSTOM, pp. 285-297.
van Beek, W.E.A., 2004, Haunting Griaule: Experiences from the restudy of the Dogon, History in
Africa, 31: 43-68.
van Beek, W.E.A., 2006, Boys and masks among the Dogon, in: S. Ottenberg & D.A. Binckley (eds)
Playful Performers. African Childrens Masquerades, New Brunswick & London: Transac-
tion Publishers, pp. 67-88.
van Beek, W.E.A., 2007a, De rite is rond: Betekenis en boodschap van het ongewone, Inaugural Lec-
ture, Tilburg University.
van Beek, W.E.A., 2007b, Approaching African tourism: Paradigms and Paradoxes, in: African Alter-
natives, P. Chabal, U. Engel and L. de Haan, eds., Leiden: Brill, pp. 145-172.
van Beek, W.E.A., 2007c, Approaching African Tourism; paradigms and paradoxes, in P. Chabal, U.
Engel & L. de Haan (eds.) African alternatives, Leiden, Brill 2007, pp. 145-172.
van Beek, W.E.A., 2008, In memory of a great singer: The Dogon baja ni as a cultural-historical per-
formance, in: Mande Mansa, Mand, S. Belcher, J. Jansen & M. NDaou, eds., Worlds 2: 193-
215.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1985, The historical interpretation of myth in the context of popular Islam, in:
Theoretical Explorations in African Religion, W. van Binsbergen and M. Schoffeleers, eds.,
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 189-224.
58
Vincent, J.-F., 1991, Princes montagnards du Nord-Cameroun. Les Mofu-Diamar et le pouvoir politi-
que. Paris: Harmattan.
Vincent, J.-F., 2008, Statut et puissance du Dieu-du-ciel en Afrique de sahel, in J. Fedry et al., Dieu
seul! Le Dieu du ciel chez les montagnards du nord des Monts Mandara, Yaound: Presses
UCAC, pp. 147-78.
59
Chapter 4. A journey to the netherworld

Reconstructing features of Indo-European mythology
of death and funeral rituals from Baltic, Slavic, and
Buddhist parallels

by Boris Oguibnine
1
& Nataliya Yanchevskaya
2

Abstract. This paper reconstructs some aspects of the Indo-European mythology related to death, the
journey to the netherworld, and the process of dying and returning from the world of the dead. Particu-
larly, we compare and contrast a series of Old Indian (Vedic), Indo-Iranian, Old Slavic, and Baltic
myths and burial rituals. We isolate the mythological motif of a path to the netherworld (the world of
the dead or ancestors), e.g. crossing the waters, going over fire, ascending a tree, descending into a
well, etc. The motif of a path is compared and contrasted with the motif of a mythological character
that undertakes a journey to the netherworld, completes it, and returns back to the world of the living.
In Indo-Iranian and Old Slavic traditions, there is a number of myths and folktales that have a
character whose name usually means the Third (for example, Slavic Tretyak) who goes to or finds
himself in the netherworld (the third kingdom), overcomes a variety of obstacles (sometimes escaping
three inevitable deaths), miraculously returns to the living, reestablishes the connection between the
three worlds (netherworld, heaven, and earth), and thus recreates the tripartite Universe.
The aforementioned Indo-European motifs find their continuation in Buddhist soteriological
myths. The latter are structured as a sequence of motifs: to exist in the world of the living to die hav-
ing reached the limit of life in due course to be reborn by overcoming obstacles.
We also draw upon Old Slavic mythological motifs of right (literally, someones own, not
forced upon the one who is dying) and wrong (literally, someone elses, not belonging to the one
who is dying) deaths. Colloquially, the right death (someones own) means a death of natural
causes, but in myth it acquires an additional ethical facet of fulfilling someones role in this world (e.g.
a heroic death, however violent or unnatural, is not wrong). The right death is (or should be) fol-
lowed by the right funeral ritual in which the motif of journey to the netherworld along a path with
obstacles plays an important role. The wrong death can in certain cases be overcome by a right ritual
helping the dead receive their share (Russian dolya, Sanskrit bhaga, etc.), prevail over obstacles during
the journey, and become proper ancestors, not the living undead. The Slavic motifs of right and
wrong deaths are compared with their counterparts in Indian, Iranian, and Baltic traditions, and the
comparison is used to reconstruct major features of the Indo-European mythology of death.

1
Universit Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, France.
2
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA,. USA.
60
1. Slavic and Baltic parallels
1.1. Crossing the threshold
The sequence life-death-afterlife, or new life, is clearly present on the Indo-European
level (and is perhaps universal). Baltic and Slavic evidence of funereal rituals affords
us new insight into the sequences conceptual background and sources.
An old Prussian funereal ritual reported by travelers around 870-890 includes
the following events:

1. before either cremation or burial, the dead person is left at home as
long as the ritual continues (note that the richer the dead is, the longer
the ritual takes);
2. a ritual feast is held by the living, which is functionally tantamount to
destruction of edible and drinkable matter; and
3. an equestrian contest that results in sharing the dead persons posses-
sions by the participants according to their success in the contest takes
place.

Toporov (2005) draws the following parallels from mythological and ritual
evidence of the liminal state of the dead between life and death. According to
Toporov, how a dead person is ritually helped by the living to cross the threshold of
death is similar to how the Universe is ritually helped to resume its seasonal cycle in
the ritual on the threshold of winter on the eve of New Year, which bears obvious
macrocosmic connotations: cyclical destruction of the universe is to stimulate creative
forces of the Cosmos, and so are the ritual contest and chariot races described in the
gveda (cf. the potlatch paradigm suggested by F.B.J. Kuiper). The equestrian contest
can be viewed as an established social practice that embodies the primordial contest
between the cosmic powers of the netherworld and of the upper world that in Vedic
India corresponds to the macrocosmic fight of the god Indra with his adversary
(known as Vtra, Vala, etc.) whom he defeats and thus restores the cosmos anew
(Toporov 2005: 539-548). Toporov states that when a ritual is performed adequately
and properly reproduces the primordial proto-ritual it guarantees its inclusion into the
general cosmological pattern, thus achieving the goals of the ritual (Toporov
1987:14).
Both components of the Baltic funereal ritual - the feast and the contest - sup-
port Indo-European evidence: they are necessary to ensure that the sequence life-
death-afterlife is cyclical, and that the whole cycle, when repeated, assures immortal-
ity.
1.2. State of mind at the moment of death
That the idea of immortality seems to belong inherently to the core of the funereal
practices is shown by mythological data associated with death. Take, for example,
Oguibnine & Yanchevskaya Chapter 4: Journey to the Netherworld
61
Indian religious beliefs regarding the state of mind at the moment of death: the future
fate of a dying person is believed to be determined by it (see Edgerton 1927). Accord-
ing to those beliefs, there is continuity between this life and the life after death, and
the souls state at the time of death or near death determines the dying persons future
life.
The earliest Vedic texts do not contain any traces of the belief that the dying
person concentrates his thoughts on the next world, but the Middle Vedic (Brhmaa)
texts do, e.g. atapatha Brhmaa 10.6.3.1 speculates about a frame of mind (kratu)
at the moment of death: Just as far as his kratu extends as he passes away from this
world, with precisely such a kratu he enters upon the other world after death (Edger-
ton 1927:223). An underlying idea of many Indian tales summarized by Edgerton is
that a dying person builds his own future in accordance with his last wish at the mo-
ment of death. In other words he gains a desired identity as it is imagined by his mind.
If a suicide is committed, whoever/whatever a dying person imagines himself to be
just before taking his own life, he will eventually become that.
A couple of telling examples from Buddhist and Jain sources are worth men-
tioning at this point. In Divyvadna, ch. XXXIV, p. 478 sqq., the youth Brah-
maprabha commits a suicide by cutting his throat in order to feed a starving tigress,
but before doing so he announces that he is free from any worldly desire, his only
purpose is to become a Buddha. He then indeed becomes a Buddha, although after
many existences.
In Jain sources, there are tales of the nidna, a wish for some worldly benefit
in a future life, that has to be confessed as sinful in order to prevent it from coming
into effect. For example, the dying ascetic Sambhuya is visited by a king and his
harem; one of the ladies bows down to honor the dying saint, and a strand of her hair
touches his feet; his desires are aroused, and he makes a nidna that he may become
emperor of the universe and enjoy a large harem; his desire is fulfilled, but the king-
ship leads him to sinful acts; as a result, he is reborn in hell. Had the ascetic confessed
his sinful desire before dying, that would have implied repentance and reformation,
and the nidna would have had no effect
3

The aforementioned continuity manifests itself in various effects that the final
moments before death have upon the fate of a dying person. A new identity (fate) ac-
quired by a dead person is determined by either the nature of his accumulated deeds
(merits) or by a sinful or meritorious wish thought of just before death or at the very
moment of death and independent of any past acts and their relative merits. A main
point here is that something that has been accumulated during life (acts, wishes, etc.)
produces a conspicuous effect. In Chinese Buddhist sources, there is a principle of
birth and death according to which a mans soul escapes from his body through an
upper or lower body part at death. A bystander can tell whether the dead man will go
to a good or bad rebirth by noticing which part of the corpse retains its warmth long-
est (Edgerton 1927: 234-235).

3
See also Buddhist Parallels 1 below.
62
1.3. Distribution of the deads possessions
To uncover a common conceptual pattern, the following significant features can be
emphasized in both Buddhist beliefs and the Old Prussian ritual.
In the Old Prussian ritual, a time passes before cremation (i.e. before the body
is disposed of): the dead lies at home as long as an equestrian contest is taking place
(from two months to half a year). The better among the participants (those whose
horses are faster) get the better and the bigger parts of the dead persons possessions.
The less or worse parts are placed at shorter distances from the dead persons house,
and they are given to those whose horses are slower. Thus, both time and space de-
termine the way the possessions accumulated by the dead person before death are dis-
tributed among the living.
Another significant feature is that accumulating deeds (good or bad), wishes,
and merits is clearly equivalent in value and significance to the wealth and posses-
sions accumulated by a dying or dead person. Suffice it to mention here that Buddhist
monastic codes (vinaya) imply a set of mutual obligations between the dead and the
living, e.g.
to perform the funeral and to transfer to the deceased the reward or merit, that results from
the ritualized recitation of the Dharma; the deceased, in exchange, is to allow the distribution
of his estate [...] (Schopen 2004: 96).
4

1.4. Depossession and repossession
Mutual obligations of the dead and the living belong to Indo-European antiquity. The
importance of a proper funeral (such as destruction by fire) to all Indo-European peo-
ples has been observed by Afanassiev (2008: 1239), i.e. all ancient Indo-European
peoples known to him at the time believed that unless the deceased persons body was
dealt with properly, the deceased persons soul (his immaterial component) would not
find peace: it would roam the world, languish and suffer, take vengeance on relatives
of the deceased and fellow country-men by sending them bad harvest, famine and dis-
eases.
5

Old Prussian customs also reveal a common feature that can be explained as
originated from the common Indo-European background. As Toporov observed, all
the possessions of the deceased are spent in three ways: one part, his personal be-
longings (weapons, clothes, i.e. his personal attributes), are burnt at the same time as
his body; another part is spent gradually as food and drinks during a ritual feast held
by the living and as expenses covering preparations for the funereal ritual and its exe-
cution; the third part is spent in the course of equestrian competitions. The common
feature of these three ways is that wasting or exhaustion of dead mans riches is dis-
guised as distribution (Toporov 2005: 547). The spending or wasting of the riches is,
as Toporov points out, a paradoxical variant of their distribution during the funeral.

4
5
63
Parts are divided according to a degree of success in competition. All that is meant to
benefit the living as well as the deceased in his afterlife in the other world: the dead
will be compensated in the next world for his property lost in this world.
6

A more general point regarding a deceased persons property that is to be
shared is worth emphasizing here. Slavic traditional lore amply uses the concept of
dolja (Russian dolja 1. share, part, portion; 2. fate, lot; see Sedakova 1987). This con-
cept is central to the funereal ritual and relevant from a comparative perspective. A
share (dolja) that is allotted to anyone who is dying may be ones own or, on the
contrary, not-ones own: thus there is a distinction between ones own death and
not-ones own death (svoja smert vs. nesvoja smert). Ones own death is a well-
studied Indo-European phraseologic formulaic expression that is reflected in Old Per-
sian, Lithuanian, Russian and Latin (comparable thematic parallels are also found in
Hittite texts: Puhvel 1969, 169-75). Death is viewed as an allotted fate: several Slavic
languages possess words that have a rather transparent morphological structure - a
dead person is descriptively denoted as one with no (good) share: Ukrainian nebogo,
Bielorussian neboshik, Czech neboztik, Serbo-Croatian uboze (cf. Russian ubogij that
combines semantic features of beggar; destitute and deceased). Correspondingly,
the Slavic funereal ritual sometimes features the figure of a beggar that symbolically
represents the deceased man and gets the deceased mans share of the property. The
theme of dispossession and poverty of the deceased man is connected with the motif
of Death (and the deceased man himself) being tormented by hunger and can be com-
pared with the rite of feeding the grave at funereal feast (Sedakova 1987: 57, 62, fn.
11). The above is strongly reminiscent of passages from Buddhist texts where living
monks are expected to get their share of the deceased mans property as long as the
funereal ritual is adequately performed. Please note that our purpose is to present
Buddhist parallels as additional evidence of a substantial body of inherited features
that go back to Indo-European antiquity.
Besides Baltic and Slavic evidence, Vedic and Greek antecedents of funeral
rituals have been analyzed by Toporov (2005: 548-566). In Toporovs view, the time
allotted by the living to the dead body in Old Prussian sources is a transitory period
between death and cremation during which his friends and relatives have to behave
correctly, adequately, i.e. they have to perform rituals of expenditure or spend-
ing. The purpose of the ritual feast is to spend food and drinks. Equestrian competi-
tions imply distribution of the dead persons possessions. The cremation of the body
is to be accompanied by burning of the deceased persons clothes and weapons. All
that is to ensure an adequate passage of the deceased from this world into the afterlife.
In Buddhist monastic practices, the adequacy of the ritual is controlled by a
special figure of the belligerent ghost (the dead himself) who appears wielding a club
to threaten the monks, if they have not fulfilled all requirements before distributing
the robe and bowl.
7

6
7
64
1.5. Keeping dead bodies
Other features of Baltic, Slavic and Indian folk beliefs support our hypothesis of a
common Indo-European background of the rituals described above.
A peculiar Baltic practice to leave a dead body for a long time before a suit-
able disposal is analogous to Slavic (Russian) custom reported by the English trader
F. Morrison in 1593 (reproduced in Toporov 2005: 567, fn.7):
...the Moscovites in Russia bring the dead bodies in winter thus frozen over, and so lay them
on heapes in the Belfries of the Churches, where they lie without rotting, or ill smell, till about
our Lady day in Lent the snow begins to thaw, and the earth to be fit for digging (for till that
time the earth is covered with deepe and hard snow, and if it were not so covered, yet is so
hard by continuall frost, as it cannot be digged. And at that time each family takes the bodies
of their dead, and takes care to burie them (Itinerary, IV:4).
The quotation corroborates descriptions of funereal customs of the Old Prussians who
were supposed to master a freezing technique of conserving the dead bodies.
Moreover, Russian folklore sources that report how the dead are transferred to
the burial abundantly inform us that the body was carried either on sledges or on
horses (Sobolev 2000: 115 sqq.).
1.6. The Third and the ship
Among significant characters of Slavic mythology and folklore connected with death
and funerary rituals, there is a character called the Third (in Russian folktales - Ivan
Tretej, Tretjak, the third/youngest son, etc.). He reaches the subterranean kingdom
(death's realm), but is able to overcome death and come back to life, thus ensuring
that the link between the Subterranean, Heaven and Earth is not broken. Tretjak and
similar characters have important parallels in the Old Iranian and Vedic mythology -
they correspond to Vedic Trita and Old Iranian rita, both the youngest (the third in
line) among three brothers (for a thorough investigation of these characters and com-
parative evidence supporting their connection to the realm of death and cycle life-
death-afterlife see Toporov 2006; see also Oguibnine, in press and Yanchevskaya, in
press). The significance of the number three can also be seen in a Galician custom
where the third husband is forbidden to enter the house through a door after the wed-
ding, but has to use a window (thus he is identified with the dead and the wedding
ceremony with a funeral). Another Slavic funereal custom is of relevance here: drag-
ging a dead body through an opening in the house not normally used by the living to
enter or exit, i.e. not through an entrance door. In other words, the ways the dead are
dealt with are inversed with regard to the ways of the living. Moreover, it is believed
that if a dead person is carried away through a door used by the living, he might come
back and threaten them. The custom is reflected in a Russian folktale in which a girl is
maltreated by Satan, doomed to death and carried from her house through a hole made
under the threshold, not through a door (Anuchin 1890: 11-12, fn. 25). The girl is
probably a folktale counterpart of the mythological Third, because after the girl is bur-
65
ied, a flower grows on her tomb and it turns into the very same girl who thus comes
back to life. Like the Third, the girl overcomes her own death and actualizes the link
between the realms.
The special connection of the youngest (or the third) son with death, as well as
his place between the realms of life and death also have supporting evidence in Baltic
data. Baltic folklore describes a custom when the youngest son of an ill father is
named heir whenever the fathers recovery from a mortal illness is impossible (Caland
1914: 511-512). That should be interpreted as another distant and yet related feature
common to Baltic and Slavic folklore: the dying survives through property that is
transferred to the youngest son acting as a mediator between the living and the dying.
Caland also reports a Lettish custom of placing children on the coffin carried to the
burial place. A witness explains that it is done to ensure that the children remember
the spot of the burial. However, according to Caland, another explanation is possible.
He suggests that the continual references to the youngest fits into the framework of
the age pyramid where the position and role of the youngest is pre-determined (Ca-
land 1914: 484; 507-509).
Some Slavic artifacts used in funereal rites are particularly interesting from a
comparative perspective and prove to be extremely ancient. For example, a ship is
known to be used for burial in Russia since about the twenties of the 10th century as
reported by Ibn-Faln, an Arabic Muslim writer and traveler, who wrote an account
of his travels as a member of an embassy of the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad (Anuchin
1890: 72 sqq.;
8
Montgomery 2000). Ibn-Faln gives a detailed description of a fu-
neral by cremation of a rich and important man. This is a ship burial (or boat grave) in
which a ship or boat is used as a vessel for both the dead and the goods intended for
the grave.
9
Among the goods are: clothes and a sable placed on the dead persons
head; quilt and cushions; alcohol, fruits, bread, and meat; moreover, a dog cut in two;
all of the dead persons weaponry; two mounts and two cows cut into pieces whose
flesh is thrown into the ship; a rooster and a hen; and the dead persons slave-girl who
wishes to die with her master and who is to be burnt along with the master and his
ship. Although many features of Ibn-Falns description are not, as Montgomery
argues, originally Russian, it is clear that the dead are provided for a long trip to the
Otherworld.
It is evident that the Russian ceremony belongs to a hoary antiquity and inher-
its Indo-European features that have been shown to be prominent in Vedic and Bud-
dhist soteriological views (Oguibenine, in press). The views are thematically linked
with the ideas of overcoming obstacles to reach a long unencumbered existence,
whereas the journey to overcome these obstacles is metaphorically conceptualized as

8
Anuchins account, one of the first on Ibn-Falns report, is obsolete on several points. Montgom-
erys translation is more accurate and is accompanied by thorough comments without avoiding some
controversial issues.
9
No less significant is the fact that the Indo-European words for ship and death are almost identical:
cf. Lettish nave, Lithuanian nove, Old Russian nav, Gothic naus, Old Icelandic ndr dead body, and
the common Indo-European *nau ship (Ivanov 1987: 9).
66
a trip over dangerous waters, thus implying a figurative representation of a ship or
boat as a vehicle for salvation.
1.7. Overcoming death
Several other features of the anthropology of death are presumably of Indo-
European origin. Ivanov (1990: 5-6; cf. also Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1985) finds the
following main stages in the Indo-European funereal ritual:

preparing the dead body for the burial, starting with lamentation
and mourning;
carrying the dead body to the place of a burial;
putting the dead body (in some variants jointly with sacrificial
animals and other people) on a pyre (basic variant) or into water or
earth; wine is poured into the fire;
making a ritual effigy (a double) of the dead person out of bones;
creating a temporary dwelling place for the effigy;
burying the urn filled with bones.

The idea of overcoming death in order to attain afterlife following ones death
plays an essential role in the Indo-European conception of death. This conception is
basically founded on the idea that death culminates life and is followed by afterlife (=
new life). Vedic and Buddhist mythologies elaborate soteriological doctrines of yus
(allotted lifespan) that is not supposed to be interrupted unless a violent death occurs.
A natural death ends one's lifespan, but one's lifespan can and has to be extended by
overcoming death, i.e. death is an obstacle among others to be overcome, crossed
(Oguibnine, in press). Funereal rituals reenact scenarios of overcoming death, hence
their successive stages are not only part of the ritual, but also are meant to enhance the
ritual and to ensure that death is overcome.
Indo-European terminology that reflects the endeavor of overcoming includes
the verb *terh
2
- to cross over, pass through, overcome, vanquish. As Watkins (1995:
355) suggests, a prominent semantic feature of this verb is temporariness, transitori-
ness, non-permanence, which made it pathetically apt in the context of the object
DEATH. Vedic and Buddhist motifs of overcoming death, often expressed in words
related to the Indo-European verb *terh
2
- and its derivates, are central in narratives
that present life and death as events cyclically following each other in a context of
continuous struggle against various obstacles (Oguibenine, in press). It is important
that this motif appears in fragments that describe funereal and similar rituals when a
dead person is praised because of his exceptional characteristics. The motif can be
seen when we compare, as proposed by Ivanov (1990: 6-7), Hittite funereal rituals
with Greek praises of a dead hero: the lamented dead king is said to become a god
[iuni (= DINGIR
LIM
-i) kiari] according to the text KUB XXX.16 + XXIX I Vs, I
1-17, where the Greek verb to pay ones last respects to is used (Iliad
67
16.456-457, 674-675). It can be surmised that the dead hero is identified with the king
or a god when last respects are paid to him by erecting a tomb or a commemorative
stela. The Greek verb is etymologically related to (if not borrowed from) Anatolian
words: Hittite tar-u- to overcome, vanquish (< IE. *terh
2
-), Lycian trq(q)as-,
trqqt- god, trqqtasi (Aikhenvald, Bajun, Ivanov 1987: 155-160).
The Indo-European verb *mer- is known to mean to die in numerous Indo-
European languages. However, recent comparative evidence shows that the original
meaning of the verb was to disappear (semantic development from to disappear to
to die must have been due to tabooing: Ivanov 1990a: 5 sqq. adducing Hittite data).
This correlates with the aforementioned ideas about the king becoming a god at his
death: not only does the attitude towards death include praising the dead person be-
coming a divine and powerful being, but also it includes the euphemistic use of a verb
that means to die. Hittite euphemistic use of the expression to become god in the
context of death is also reflected in the custom of religious worship of an effigy of the
king after his death.
Worshipping relics of the dead or constructing a funereal monument are fea-
tures of funerals attested among Indo-European peoples. In spite of their universality,
it should be made clear that relics are, as the Buddhist inscription of Senavarma, King
of Oi (early first century CE), says,
saturated / invigorated / enlivened by morality, saturated / invigorated / enlivened by concen-
tration, wisdom, emancipation, knowledge, and vision,
in other words, as suggested again by Schopen,
what is invigorated with morality and wisdom.is what continues to live after the breakdown
of the body (Schopen 1997: 154).
It is striking that the Indo-European funereal ritual includes a step described
above as making a ritual effigy (a double) of the dead person out of bones. Both
Buddhist practice and Hittite ritual include worship of an image of the deceased king:
bringing water, oil, bread, and cattle to feed the deceased persons sitting effigy as
the Hittite expression ALAM aan is tentatively translated by Otten (1958: 24-25).
Ottens summary (Otten 1958: 13) also suggests that the Hittite ritual feast included
an offering of a meal to the bones of the cremated deceased person, and the offering
was shared by all who had come to collect the bones. Moreover, the dead persons
soul was given drinks three times. That is a remarkable echo of the Slavic name
*trizna funereal feast in which Toporov uncovers an underlying hint of the number
three (Toporov 2005).
1.8. The Old Woman
Slavic folklore has another prominent character, the Old Woman (Baba Yaga) who
represents death and can cause it. A similar character is found in Baltic and Hittite
traditional death lore: Lettish Velu Mate Mother of Spirits / of the Dead and Hittite
SAL
U.GI Wise Woman respectively (Toporov 1985: 540 and Toporov 1987: 20
68
sqq.; Otten 1958, passim). The Old Woman of Slavic folktales invites a hero doomed
to death who then overcomes it through his victory over the Old Woman. Accord-
ingly, the heros initiation appears to be a link in a chain of ritualized events reported
in tales that reflect the funereal ritual, while the ritual itself is meant to counterbalance
and overcome the horror of death by promoting the idea of a new life (the afterlife).
2. Buddhist parallels
2.0. Indo-European background
So far we have mostly compared Slavic and Baltic evidence with Old Indo-European
data, but it also has analogies in Buddhist data, thus confirming an inherently tradi-
tional character of Baltic and Slavic realms as most ancient heirs to the Indo-
European religion, and, if not unexpectedly, the genuine position of Buddhism within
the Indo-European.
Indo-European background, if not origin, can be identified in the Buddhist fu-
neral, because death is interpreted as disappearance and compensated by collecting
belongings of the deceased, separating them from the dead body, and finally by dis-
tributing them among the living. Buddhist legal texts (vinaya) explicitly specify a set
of mutual obligations between the dead and the living as a specific instance of an es-
tablished Indian norm (Schopen 2004:96).
2.1. Future fate
Buddhists, particularly later Southern Buddhists, differ from the Jains in that they do
not believe that the effectiveness of a wish expressed on the death-bed depends on
how much merit has been accumulated by the dying person. Some time may elapse
between the making of a wish and the moment of death, but it is essential that the
same frame of mind continues up to the very moment of death. That the fulfillment of
a wish is immediate and sufficiently independent of any previously accumulated merit
is cogently illustrated by a Buddhist tale highlighting a courtesan murdered by four
youths: she wishes to be reborn as an ogress and kill her murderers; her wish is ful-
filled, but it cannot be said that she has accumulated any merit that can expedite the
fulfillment of her wish (HOS 29.129).
However, as Edgerton convincingly shows, the later Southern Buddhists also
held other and fairly different views on what determines the future fate. Their views
were somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, a quite popular belief held that the
totality of a dying persons past acts influenced his consciousness. On the other hand,
they believed that only the state of mind just before death was crucial. An interesting
conclusion was that if one could forget his sins completely at the moment of death, he
would be saved (Edgerton 1927: 234).
69
2.2. Monks possessions
To begin with, the Buddhist monastic code (reflecting Buddhist beliefs and prescrib-
ing ritual practices) is explicit in suggesting that a monks monastic status or reputa-
tion, i.e. a monks identity, strongly depends on his material possessions. An example
is found in Cravastu 124.11-125.9 where a little known monk is the one who had
no medicine, while the Avadnaataka 1.271-273 mentions the Buddha himself and a
selfish monk as widely known and as being recipients of robes, bowls, medicine,
and so on (Schopen 2004:114-115 and 2004:102: Who you were was determined by
what you received and had).
Special attention should be paid to the following features of Buddhist funerary
practices that can be fruitfully compared to Old Prussian evidence.
At death, a monks property had to be divided and distributed. This occurrence
is vividly depicted in several accounts of the Mlasarvstivdin monastic funeral
from the Cvaravastu (Schopen 2004: 106-121).
There we find an account of the distribution of a deceased monks belongings
(his bowl and robes) that had to be done by a distributor-of-robes only after several
preliminary steps: removing monks body, honoring the body, cremating the body and
reciting the Dharma for the monks sake (Schopen 2004: 106-107).
Obviously, the recitation of the Dharma is an inherently Buddhist practice. It
might seem that no comparative issue can be discovered here: the recitation by itself
is something beyond the materiality of the dead body; with recitation, a new aspect is
revealed by the ceremony - that of the immaterial, non-corporeal substance of the de-
ceased. Moreover, the Dharma, i.e. the recited Vinaya rules, belong to the core of the
Buddhist doctrine and practice. And yet, the comparison is convincing because the
same fundamental features appear in Buddhist practices as well as in the evidence
being compared.
2.3. Competition
For example, there is an account of the death and funeral of the murdered monk
Udyin whose body lies hidden in a heap of trash. Several categories of individuals, in
accordance with the Old Prussian evidence, compete for the privilege to honor his
body (fellow monks, the king and a lay-sister, the Queen Mlik who finally wins on
her claim to have been a disciple of Udyin). Not surprisingly, the account mentions
that Udyins robes have to be brought back before performing the honors (Schopen
2004: 97, 108-110).
A highly instructive issue is that competition sometimes turns into an ex-
change of claims and counterclaims regarding a dead monks property. More pre-
cisely, an account in the Kudrakavastu (preserved in Tibetan, commented and
translated by Schopen 2004: 98-100 and 110-113) that describes origins of the relic
cult says that after the death of the monk riputra his remains, his bowl and his mo-
nastic robes (i.e. all his possessions) were taken by the novice Cunda and handed to a
70
monk named nanda. But then a controversy emerges regarding riputra's posses-
sions that are to become his relics: another patron of riputra, the householder
Anthapiada, who is a lay follower of the Buddhist faith, also claims the relics.
Consequently, a deadlock develops that Schopen rightly describes as an indication of
friction between the lay and monastic communities. It is resolved by the Buddha
summoning nanda and asking to turn the relics over to Anthapiada. The whole
story is actually not only about access to and control of relics, two highly sought-after
privileges, but, more importantly, about the festival that was to accompany the raising
of the stpa that would host riputras relics. Anthapiada takes the relics, but
accidentally locks the door when he goes away from home, thus creating an obstacle
for the laypersons who cannot pay homage to the relics. The Buddha rules then that
laypersons can build stpas, but only within the monastic complex. The outcome of
this ruling is, interestingly, the increased amount of wealth received by monasteries,
because the stpa festivals give rise to trade, gifts, and donations. Thus, the deceased
monks relics in some sense produce wealth that is divided among the other monks.
Another piece of evidence tells us that the estate of the monk Upananda, a
large quantity of gold, had to be distributed among his fellow monks favoring direct
participation in the funeral: only those present will receive a share. Additionally, on
another occasion, the order of preference is based on competition between the most
senior and the most junior monks. That is called the first and last principle (Schopen
2004: 115-116, 102-103).
Thus we see that competitions before the final disposal of the body and distri-
bution of possessions are present both in the Old Prussian funereal games and in the
Buddhist accounts (although this combination is unevenly and diversely embedded in
latter texts). The deceased persons wealth, whatever its form, is at stake and its dis-
tribution is made rather concordantly.
An interesting and telling feature of how a persons identity is determined and
shown after death is explicit in those parts of Buddhist monastic codes that rule how
survivors should behave if a deceased monk has left debts. It is worth noting here that
his debts are to be repaid by his fellow monks: the debts are not only anthropological
or religious debts (The anthropological and religious debt is so explained in the Tait-
tirya Sahit 6.3.10.5 A Brahmin, at his very birth, is born with a triple debt - of
studentship to the seers, of sacrifice to the gods, of offspring to the fathers). Brah-
manical literature and Buddhist Vinaya treatises were equally preoccupied with finan-
cial debt, and often both sorts are intertwined (Schopen 2004:122). Because a monks
identity depends on his material possessions, whatever a deceased monk has acquired
before his death, for example, by borrowing from householders, is part of his identity
and status. It is not surprising to find that borrowed money had to be repaid by the
monks of his community after selling the bowl and robes of the deceased. Although
this event appears customary and unremarkable, the rites described above show that
death is understood as passage through life to afterlife (cf. Vedic ideas of obstacles
and impediments on ones way to salvation: life itself is seen as an obstacle to salva-
tion - Oguibnine, in press). The persuasion that the personality of a deceased man
71
crosses the threshold of death is almost palpable in Buddhist texts about monastic or-
der (curiously, in spite of the Buddhist philosophical doctrine of no abiding Self). The
act of overcoming is ritually symbolized by the transfer of the property of the de-
ceased monk to his brethren. It is noteworthy that in Brahmanism, whose numerous
features were absorbed by Buddhism, the material debt of a departed ascetic or agni-
hotrin is tightly connected to religious merit. As the Brahmanic collection of legal
maxims Nradasmti I.7 says,
If an ascetic or an agnihotrin dies in debt, all of the merit from his austerities and sacrifices
belongs to his creditors.
10

Furthermore, in the funereal ritual as described in Mlasarvstivda-vinaya a
direct connection is established between the distribution of the deceased monks
property and particular stages of the ritual: the ritual is segmented into a few series of
actions that are linked within a series and imbued with particular significance. The
more remote a series is from the moment of death, the less a degree of participation of
the monk who performs this part of the ritual. For example, the first series begins
when the gong for the dead is being beaten, and the monk who comes in at that mo-
ment remains until the end of the ritual; in the next series, when the caitya is being
performed, another monk comes in and remains for the duration of the ceremony, i.e.,
he participates only in later parts of the ritual; finally, a monk who comes only when
a formal motion is being made (i.e., some Vinaya texts are being read) misses most
of the ritual except the final part. It is important to note that a degree of participation
in the funeral determines who has the right to receive more of the dead monks estate,
i.e., the monk who comes first gets the most of it (see Schopen 1997: 208-209).
2.4. Rites of separation
In the Mlasarvstivda monastic funeral the obligatory actions performed before any
distribution of a deceased monks property are threefold: ritualized removal of the
body, honor of the body including various preparations prior to cremation, and a ritu-
alized recitation of select sacred Dharma texts. Most significantly, as Schopen under-
lines, an exchange takes place at this moment. The robe and bowl, an euphemism
for all personal property of a monk, is separated from his body and distributed among
the living who perform the funeral and thus transfer to the deceased the reward (the
merit) resulted from a ritualized recitation of the Dharma (Schopen 2004:96).
2.5. Final remarks
Whether we consider the rules of the Old Prussian funereal ritual, or the instructions
of Buddhist Vinaya prescriptive texts, parallels between the two practices are striking.
One set of similar features is particularly worth noticing: the monks participating in
the funeral receive the deceased monks merit, whereas the ritual they are performing

10
Schopen 2004: 123; after Lariviere 1989.
72
generates merit that is transferred to the deceased, thus circulating merit between the
dead and the living. Similarly, Wulfstans account of Old Prussian funeral customs
clearly shows that a deceaseds person possessions distributed before his cremation
are described, on the one hand, as possessions, personal belongings (cattle, money,
etc.) as feoh (cf. Latin pecus), and, on the other hand as fate, success, achievement
(the latter is analogous to the merit in Buddhism).
That Vedic, Greek (both meticulously studied by Toporov 2004: 553 sqq.),
Old Prussian and Buddhist traditions share common features seems indisputable. Ex-
planations based on accidental convergences are less plausible. An alternative expla-
nation based on the assumption that common features are not inherited, but are mere
manifestations of the universal, is obviously available always, but is too simplistic.
Bibliography
Aikhenvald, A.J., Bajun, L.S., & Ivanov, V.V., 1987, Materialy k rekonstrukcii kulturno-
istoricheskogo processa v drevnej Maloj Azii, in: Issledovanija po epigrafike i jazykam drev-
nej Anatolii, Kipra i antichnogo Severnogo Prichernomorja, Moscow: Institut vseobshej isto-
rii, pp. 106-191.
Afanassiev, A.N., 2008, Slavyanskaya mifologiya, Moscow, Saint Petersburg.
Anuchin, D.N., 1890, Sani, ladji i koni kak prinadlezhnosti poxoronnogo obrjada. Arxeologo-
etnograficheskij etjud. Drevnosti , XIV, Moscow.
Bronkhorst, J., 2005, Les reliques dans les religions de lInde, in: Indische Kultur im Kontext. Rituale,
Texte und Ideen aus Indien und der Welt. Festschrift fr Klaus Mylius, hrsg. von Lars Ghler,
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, pp.49-85.
Bronkhorst, J., 2007, Greater Magadha, studies in the culture of early India, Leiden: Brill.
Burlingame, E.W. 1921, Buddhist Legends, vol. 2 (Harvard Oriental Series, vol. 29), Cambrdige, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Caland, W., 1914, Die vorchristlichen baltischen Totengebruche, Archiv fr Religionswissenschaft,
17. Band, pp. 476-512.
Cowell, E.V. & Neil, R.A., 1886, The Divyvadna. A Collection of Early Buddhist Legends, Cam-
bridge.
Dutt, N., 1947, Cvaravastu. Gilgit Manuscripts, III, Srinagar.
Edgerton, F., 1927, The Hour of Death. Its Importance for Man's Future Fate in Hindu and Western
Religions, Annals of the Bhandarkar Institute, vol. VIII, pp. 219-249.
Ivanov, V.V., 1987, Lingvisticheskije materialy k rekonstrukcii pogrebalnych tekstov v baltijskoj tra-
dicii, in: Balto-slavjasnkije issledovanija 1985, Moscow: Nauka, pp. 3-10.
Ivanov, V.V., 1990, Rekonstrukcija struktury simvoliki i semantiki indoevropejskogo pogrebal'nogo
obryada, in: Issledovanija v oblasti balto-slavjanskoj duxovnoj kultury (Pogrebalnyj obrjad),
Moscow: Nauka, pp. 5-11.
Kuiper, F.B.J., 1983, Ancient Indian Cosmology, Delhi: Vikas.
Montgomery, J.E., 2000, Ibn-Faln and the Russiyyah, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 3, pp.
1-25.
Oguibnine, B., 1983, From a Vedic Ritual to the Buddhist Practice of Initiation to the Doctrine, in: Ph.
Denwood and A. Pjatigorskij eds. Buddhist Studies. Ancient and Modern, London: Curzon
Press, Barnes and Noble, pp. 107-123.
Oguibnine, B., (in press), Vodnye pregrady i drugije prepjatstivja v vedijskoj mifologii i buddijskoj
soteriologii, in: Gedenkschrift T.Ja. Elizarenkova, Moscow.
Otten, H., 1958, Hethitische Totenrituale, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
73
Puhvel, J., 1969, The Death of Cambyses and Hittite Parallels, in: Studia Classica and Orientalia
Antonino Pagliaro Oblata III, Roma: Herder, pp. 169-175.
Schopen, G., 1997, On Avoiding Ghosts and Social Censure: Monastic Funerals in the Mulasarvasti-
vada-vinaya, in: G. Schopen, Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks, Honolulu: University of
Hawai'i Press, pp. 204-237.
Schopen, G., 2004, Deaths, Funerals, and the Division of Property in a Monastic Code, in: G. Schopen,
Buddhist Monks and Business Matters. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, pp. 91-121.
Schopen, G., 2004, Buddhist Monks and Business Matters. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, pp.
91-121.
Sedakova, O.A., 1987, Tema doli v pogrebalnom obrjade (vostochno- i juzhnoslavjanskij material),
in: Balto-slavjasnkije issledovanija 1985, Moscow: Nauka, pp. 54-63.
Sobolev, A.N., 2000, Mifologija slavjan, Saint Peterburg: Lan'.
Speyer, J.S., 1902-1909, Avadnaataka, A Century of Edifying Tales Belonging to Hnayna (Biblio-
theca Buddhica 3.1-2), St. Petersburg.
Toporov, V.N., 1985, Tradition mythologique lettonne et *vel- en balto-slave (un fragment du mythe
principal), in: Exigences et perspective de la semiotique / Aims and Prospects of Semiotics.
Essays in Honor of A.J. Greimas, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 539-549.
Toporov, V.N., 1987, Zametki po poxoronnoj obrjadnosti, in: Balto-slavjasnkije issledovanija 1985,
Moscow: Nauka, pp. 10-52.
Toporov, V.N., 2005, Konnye sostjazanija na poxoronax, in: V.N. Toporov, Issledovanija po etimologii
i semantike, I. Teorija i nekotoryje chastnye jeje prilozhenija, Moscow: Jazyki slavjanskoj
kultury, pp. 539-578.
Toporov, V.N., 2005a, K semantike troichnosti (slav. *trizna i dr.) in: V.N. Toporov, Issledovanija po
etimologii i semantike, I. Teorija i nekotoryje chastnye jeje prilozhenija, Moscow: Jazyki
slavjanskoj kultury, pp. 272-291.
Toporov, V.N., 2006, Avest. rita, raetona, dr.-ind. Trita i dr. i ix indoevropejskije istoki, In:
Toporov, V.N., Indojevropejskije jazyki I indoevropeistika, 2, Moscow, Jazyki Slavjanskoj
Kultury, pp. 479-504.
Watkins, C., 1995, Latin tarentum, the ludi Saecularis, and Indo-European eschatology, in.: C. Wat-
kins, How to Kill a Dragon. Aspects of Indo-European Poetics, New York Oxford : Oxford
University Press, pp. 347-356.
Weber, A., 1964, The atapatha-Brhmaa in the Madhyandina-akh, with extracts from the com-
mentaries of Syaa, Harisvmin, and Dvivedagaga, Chowkamba Sanskrit Series, 96, Vara-
nasi.
Yanchevskaya, N., in press, Path to the Realm of the Dead: Vedic Trita.

75
Chapter 5. Death as defilement in
Zoroastrianism

by Victoria Kryukova
1

Abstract: In spite of that the Indian and Iranian traditions are close, as regards to death, even the com-
mon motives and subjects (such as the story of Yama / Yima, the chthonic dogs) appear in a rather
different way in Zoroastrianism. So, Iranian Yima, as we can see starting with the Avestan Videvdat,
unlike Indian Yama, is neither the first mortal, nor the King of the dead. In fact, Yima is not concerned
with death, but on contrary is, like Noah, a savior of righteous people from it.
As to the Zoroastrian dogs, unlike the Indian dogs of Yama, Iranian ones dont look for people
predetermined to die, but accompany Daena, the personal belief who leads immortal souls to the other
world. Thus, at least in mythology (and not in ritual practice), sacred dogs are removed from the dying
and dead to avoid the contaminating contact with death.
The distance separating these characters from death in Zoroastrianism could be explained from the
idea of death as the greatest defilement, which is infectious and can infect with death all good crea-
tions. Therefore its undesirable for heroes, deities and holy creations to be in any contact with death.
To some extent, this idea exists in many religions, but it became an ide fixe in Zoroastrianism, over-
riding other mythological motives and ritual practices.
The Avestan Videvdat is devoted mainly to the driving away a demoness of death and decay
Druxsh-ya-Nasu (lit. Lie which is Corpse), which comes in the form of a fly, flying from the North,
the direction of hell. Although several names of demons specializing in different aspects of death are
known in the Avesta, this one is the principal in the Videvdat. She attacks a dead body and penetrates it
through its 9 holes. This pollution infects with death those around and for the purification some rites
are needed, connected with isolation and repeated ablutions.
On the one hand, the isolation of the infected with death who has to be purified, as it is depicted
in Videvdat, typologically and in ritual practice is very close to the testing of a candidate during initia-
tion (and the place of isolation is like a grave, a cave, a womb and so on). In the same manner the sin-
ner is isolated, who carried a corpse alone (he becomes a container of Druxsh-ya-Nasu). They let him
to reach the old age out of the community and then kill him ritually. The custom of isolation of a dying
person (who is dying always because he is infected with death) has continued among Tajiks till our
days in the foothills of Pamirs. They leave the dying alone in a special building, sometimes for several
days without any care, waiting for his death. At the same time the idea of the infecting blackness of
death is widespread among the Iranian peoples.
On the other hand, the Zoroastrian system of ritual ablutions, which are fulfilled in the direction
from N to S during 9 nights and days in 9 holes (probably, the most ancient variant of this ritual was
discovered by Sarianidi in 2007 in Gonur (Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex); this could,
maybe, along with the NE (?) image of the fly-contamination help to understand some differences in
the Iranian and Indian myth and ritual) with the purpose of driving away pollution and death, repeats,
as it was noted by some scholars, the very rhythm of the liturgy. The 9 holes (as well as 9 nights and
days) associate with 9 rivers of the Iranian world picture, 9 holes of the human body and so on. This
shows a correlation of microcosm and macrocosm, which both are purified from death and pollution.

1
Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia.
76
1. Affinity of Old Iranian and Old Indian traditions
When the similarity and affinity of Old Iranian and Old Indian traditions are de-
scribed, a set of common or closely related notions, mythological themes, images,
names of deities, rites are usually mentioned, which are primarily known from literary
sources, namely from the corpus of Vedic and Avestan texts. A characteristic example
of such comparison is the parallelism between the heroes of the Indian and Iranian
myths of divine twins, Yama, the son of Vvasvat and Yima, the son of Viuuahat.
The parallelism is all the more so unambiguous, because even the names, both per-
sonal and patronymic, of these legendary kings and culture heroes are cognate. How-
ever, notwithstanding the undoubted commonness of the primary meaning of these
names with some other images of Indo-European myths, Iranian tradition alienates
radiant Yima (yim xat) from the realm of Death, at least in a version survived in
the Avestan Codex of ritual purity, in the Vdvdd (the law discarding the
daeuus (Skjrv 2007: 106, Benveniste 1970), which became one of the founda-
tions of the following Zoroastrian religious literature.
1.1. Heavens abode
Thus g-Veda calls Yama the gatherer of people (RV X. 14.1) and the first mortal,
who showed the path of death to others (RV X. 14.2), whose abode is higher heaven
(RV X. 14.8), avarodhana diva (RV IX. 113.8) according to R. Dandekar closed
place of sky (Dandekar 2002: 86), Bloomfields heavens firm abode (Bloomfield
1972: 144). Yimas abode, the concentric fortification Vara- built by him, is an en-
tirely closed building, equipped with sole lighting coming through the door-window,
selfilluminating from inside (V 2.30).
2
The Sraoas (Avestan deity of obedience)
palace of thousand columns located on the highest peak of Harait was probably a
pattern of such a description. It is said that this palace is selfilluminating from inside,
covered by stars from outside (Y 57.21: huuraoxnm atar.nam sthrpasm
nitara.nam).
It is notable that there is an allusion of this construction in one of the latest
Avestan texts V 14.14, which also indirectly connects it to abode of the righteous in
heaven mentioned in the Avestan Yats. V 14.14 tells about the building (for atone-
ment for the greatest sin the killing of an otter, a sacred animal which gives fertility)
an unusual house with cattle-shed and marvellously made beds, whose origin goes
back to the description of the heavens abode of Ai and Arduu Sra Anhita
(Kryukova 2007: 350-351). Usage of terms, words and word-combinations from other
Avestan texts is typical for Vdvdd, which was partly composed in the Avestan lan-
guage which was already dead.
Thus we can outline the connection between the very earthly Yimas construc-
tion and heavenly gods abode and compare them with the heaven abode of Yama,

2
On the translation door-window see: Steblin-Kamensky 1998: 80 with note 3.
Kryukova Chapter 5: Death as Defilement
77
despite the fact that in the Avestan text itself it is written that the construction is not
the place of posthumous blessed to dwell in, but it is a cover keeping them alive from
cold wind and the hot one, pain and death (V 2.5, Y 9,5). In the latter I see an exag-
gerated urge to deny physical death as suffering and destruction of the body.
1.2. Heavy rain
Middle Persian texts treat the image of Yima in the same sense, not connecting king
Yima to death. Menog i xrad XXVII 27-31 narrates about the construction of a refuge
Yimkard (made by Yima) by Yima, where the chosen good creatures escape from
Markan heavy shower (av. mahrka-, destroyer),
3
which probably appeared in
the Pehlevi text by consonance with Hebrew malk heavy rain (West 1871: 134). If
we accept Wests proposal, well have a combination of Iranian and NE myth in
which frost and cold turn into heavy rain, and the situation becomes more and more
similar to the flood story. At the same time, could we suppose that the Avestan variant
of myth is also a consequence of the invasion of NE tradition, and its Middle Persian
reading just turns us to sources of these images again?
Ancient Indian variants of the flood myth are connected with Manu, brother of
Yama, just as latter is son of Vvasvat (atapatha brhmaa I 8,1), with Viu (Ma-
hbhrata III 186-187, 194) and Ki.
1.3. Three steps
Returning to the Avestan story about Yima, we need to note the strongest connection
between Yima and Viu: famous three steps of Viu, with which he measures earth,
and which embrace three worlds, corresponding to Yimas earth enlargement in three
movements with two wonderful tools. . Pirart found that the Avestan words used in
the description of Yimas Vara, which also consists of three parts, demonstrate a se-
quence of floors (the higher, the middle, the lower) (Pirart 2007: 165). The same is
the case in V 14.14 and we can suppose that this is another connection with the three
steps of Viu. There is also an essentially Avestan character, the already mentioned
owner of a heavenly palace, a god Sraoa. Frda.gam enlarging earthly world
serves as his epithet. Perhaps, following Sraoa (Y 57.29), Vdvdds Yima became
the owner of two tools and also two kingdoms or rules (Sraoa defends people in two
worlds material and mental, Y 57.25). The fact that Sraoa is named the first of
Ahura Mazds creatures, who respected him and other deities as a priest, with
barsman in hands, also connects Sraoshas image with Yimas Vdvdd story this
is the role of priest proposed to Yima by Ahura Mazd, which Yima rejected.

It is interesting that Yima and Viu connection appears or passes on to the
story of the construction of Vara, because we see here a mention of feet, so important

3
Bartholomae: Zerstrer, Verderber (Bartholomae 1904: 1147).
78
in Vius image. (In fact hands are mentioned too, because, evidently, myths narra-
tor would feel bewilderment otherwise):

V 2.31 Thus Yima said iwthin himself:
How shall I mangage to make that Vara
which Ahura Mazd has commanded me to make?
And Ahura Mazd said to Yima:
O beautiful Yima, son of Viuuahat!
Trample (vspara) this earth with they heels,
and knead (vxaa) it with thy hands,
as the potter does when kneading (vuuaiieite)
the raw clay.

It is evident that this plain construction technique was mentioned here solely
because the matter had mythological basis. All verbs used for denoting the operations
with the earth, vspara, vxaa and vuuaiieite have the prefix v- which has the
meaning of division; in addition vuuaiia is used in V 2.11 just for describing the
enlarging of the earth: Thus Yima moved apart (vuuaiia) this earth so that it be-
came one third more than before. The process of building the Vara of three floors
(three heavens) is a repetition of the enlarging of the earth in three movements.
So we can suppose that it is Yima who represents the deity in Iranian tradition
(or appears as its pale shadow), which was named Viu in India. Furthermore, in
Yimas story told in the second chapter of the Avestan Vdvdd, we even can see a
detailed two part story telling of RV passage dedicated to Viu, for the sake of de-
fence (rescue from the anger of gods / Asurs ?), happiness and prosperity of men,
measuring the world in three steps:

RV VI.49 He who for mans behoof in his affliction thrice measured out the earthly regions,
Viu
When one so great as thou affordeth shelter, may we with wealth and with ourselves be happy.
(Tr. by Ralph T.H. Griffith (The Hymns 1973))
1.4. Son of the sun
There is also another line, showing, on the one hand, a connection, and on the other
hand, discrepancy between Iranian and Indian images and characters. The role of
the first mortal is occupied in Iranian mythology not by Yima, but by Gaiia Martn
(av. mortal life, pehl. Gaymard), from whom, according to Yat 13.87 Ahura
Mazd produced family of Aryan lands. There are some details in Middle Persian lit-
erature about creation of Gaiia Martn as the first man by Ohrmazd (Ahura Mazd)
and about his death, which is determined in advance by Ohrmazd and will happen by
79
the hands of the antagonist of Ohrmazd, Ahriman. This first death was very basis for
increase and multiplication of life and, according to logic of Zoroastrian theologists,
was quite defensible. This idea of deaths excuse as of an impulse of lifes increase is
not expressed in the Avestan text (Yat 13.87) at all and the very death is not men-
tioned there.
Epithets of Gaymard in the Bundahin are light (rn) and white (spd),
likewise epithets of Yima in the Avesta are beautiful (srra-) and radiant (xata-).
Perhaps this could show a connection of both characters with sun-cults without speak-
ing about the fact that the father of Yima is Viuuahat (shining). We can find out
a little about him from the Zoroastrian texts, but he is a sun-god in Indian tradition.
Indian Vvasvat personifying light in heaven and on earth is also a father of people. At
the same time he is the father of Yama; and a parallel to Vvasvat image, Mrtaa,
(from the dead egg) refers us to the name of the first Iranian man, to Gaiia Martn,
mortal life. So, Yima is connected with sun because he is its son. But one of the fea-
tures of a sun-god is also Avestan Sraoa, who begins his daily way in the East, where
India is located, and finishes it in the West (Y 57.29). Apparently this is a reason why
Vara of Yima and palace of Sraoa are selfilluminating from inside, Sraoa is sun
himself and Yima partly inherits features of Sraoa, due to the genealogical connec-
tion with sun.

1.5. Sun-god
In its turn, returning to what is common in the images of Iranian Sraoa and Yima and
Indian Viu, it is necessary to mention, that the latter also has bright features of a
sun-god, which has been stressed many times. In addition to this, embracing three
worlds with his three steps, with the last his step, Viu climbs to the highest sphere
of heaven, where the abode of Agn-sun is (RV I.72.2-4), where the gods live in bliss
(RV III.29.7), where the abode of righteous is (RV I.154.5-6). This, without doubt,
returns us to the heavenly abode of Vedic Yama and to the connection between Vara
of Yima and palaces of Sraoa and gods of Yats.

1.6. Death
Summarising what has been said above I like to look closely at some aspects of it.
First, in view of all diffusion of mythological images and subjects, telling about the
first mortal and therefore about the appearance of death, the Iranian tradition in con-
trast to the Indian one, gives to Yima the features of Sraoa and Viu and diverts
death away from him (and also, unlike the Middle Persian texts, from Gaiia Martn).
Second, in subjects, connected with these two Avestan characters, Yima and Gaiia
Martn, there are no excuses for death (again unlike the Middle Persian texts).
80
2. Dogs
Roughly the same thing is applicable to the motif of the death-noose: whereas in the
Vedas the noose figures as an attribute of Vrua, as well as of the king of the dead
Yama (both of them being positive images), the same tool in the Avesta belongs to
one of the demons of death, Ast.votu, depicted, as well as all the other demonic
beings, very unfavourably, as belonging to the realm of Darkness. An interesting
functional shift occurs as regards the couple of the chthonic dogs. According to the
g-Veda, they belong to Yama and look for those who are destined to die. The dogs
are closely connected with death in the Zoroastrian tradition as well. However, this
relationship is represented here in a different, if not the opposite way. The dogs,
which are referred to in the Avestan Vdvdd (they are not mentioned anywhere else
in the Avesta) as the second good creatures after the human beings, accompany the
deity of Faith and the inner faith of a person (understood as one of the constituents of
soul, a sort of inner double) already after ones death. This means that the encounter
of the mythic dogs with a human does not take place when he or she is desecrated by
dying and death, but when his / her soul has already been separated from the body. In
contrast with the Vedic dogs, the Avestan ones do not attract the death, but, on the
contrary, charm it away from a corps with their sight, a capacity which accounts for
the role the dogs play in the Zoroastrian funeral ceremony. The force of sanctity as-
cribed to the dogs by the Zoroastrians is so great, that they are entitled to substitute
for a second person in the funeral rite, a single-handed fulfilment of which is believed
to be a gravest sin. Obviously, all these details testify to the same connexion of the
dogs with Death, which is well known all over the Indo-European world and even
wider, but the Avestan texts represent this relationship in a very special perspective.
3. Good and evil
It is well known that the specific attitude to the death, dying, ageing, and corporal de-
fect, is very characteristic of Zoroastrianism. It is beyond all doubt, that this attitude,
subjected to the thoroughgoing (at least, in the priests mind) division of the whole
creation into the good and evil, could not leave the treatment of the mythic themes
unaffected. According to this scheme, the life of the creatures of Ahura Mazda and the
Holy Spirit belongs to the first side, and their death, accordingly, to the second. Be-
sides, in addition to the natural development of the mythic themes under the influence
of the idea of the main line dividing the Universe, direct revision by the priests cannot
be excluded, which should have reach the full extent of its power during the period of
the codification of the Avesta. It must be taken into account that the main internal ten-
sion of Zoroastrianism, which differentiates the Zoroastrian orthodoxy, ascribing
primordial superiority to the Good Energies, from the Zervanite heresy, proceeding
from the ontological equality of right and wrong, could also give rise to different atti-
81
tudes towards death. Whereas an orthodox saw in death the will of Ahura Mazd, a
Zervanite should have ascribed it to the realm of pure evil. A testimony to the fact that
this problem was a matter of controversy among the priests, can be found, for in-
stance, in the Avestan Vdvdd:

Vd 5.8. O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Does water kill? Ahura Mazda an-
swered: Water kills no man: Asto.votu binds him, and, thus bound, Vaiiu carries him off;
and the flood takes him up, the flood takes him down, the flood throws him ashore; then birds
feed upon him. When he goes away, it is by the will of Fate he goes.
Vd 5.9. Fire kills no man: Asto.votu binds him, and, thus bound, Vaiiu carries him off;
and the fire burns up flesh and vital force (utana-).

It is evident here, how the priests solve the problem of a death caused by
pure sacred elements, water and fire. It is noteworthy, that in contrast with the sub-
sequent Zoroastrian books written in Middle Persian, the compilers of the Vdvdd
do not yet refer to the will of Ahura Mazd as to the principal cause of human death.
In the Avestan text we have baxta- , fate, destiny, which, as we have seen, operates
over humans life and brings him to death, that is, immediately to the demons of death
(the question arises, whether baxta- is to be interpreted in this context as a deity or a
constituent of human being.)
3.1. Assaults on bodies
Avestan vaiiu- means air, wind and (Good) deity of air and space; in the Avesta
the relation of the two Vaiiu to good and evil is not specified. Asto.votu and (Bad)
Vaiiu are only two of the hosts of demons, who act under authority of the Evil Spirit
and represent the forces of the evil, darkness, pollution and death thought for Zoro-
astrian all these notions are equivalent. In the Avesta their realm is defined as drug-,
Lie, that is, everything opposite to the universal law and Truth, aa-. The most
prominent role in the Vdvdd, being the part of the Avesta focusing on the battle
against the demons, is played by the motif of driving out the she-Demon of Death,
who represents cadaveric pollution, and moreover, the corpse itself and it is called
Drux-ya-Nasu, the Lie which is the Corpse. Numerous chapters of the Vdvdd
deal with the cases of her assaults on the bodies of the dead and the living, as well as
to the rites driving her out. This fact leaves no room for doubt about her importance
and danger in the eyes of Zoroastrians, probably because she personified the trans-
missibility or infectioness of death. For a Zoroastrian, to be in infected by death
did not mean to go from hence into the other world or into the abode of righteous,
but to become a receptacle of evil; it is due to this belief that the Zoroastrians had
such a horror of a contact with a dead substance.
82
3.2. Fly attracted by the corpse
Drux-ya-Nasu, arriving from the north in the shape of a disgusting fly, attacks the
human body, once the soul has left it under the pressure of the other demons.
3.2.1. Sacred and polluted
The Zoroastrian terminology taken in general, as represented by the Avestan
Vdvdd, does not constitute a consistent and well-elaborated system. This is clear,
in particular, from the discrepancies in the texts concerning funeral rites. In contrast,
the terms and epithets applied to the Drux-ya-Nasu are defined quite sharply. Putting
them into practice is determined by complicated gradation of the sacred and impure, a
concept to be briefly set forth as follows: the more sacred a being is, the more pollu-
tion its corpse disseminates the more contagious it is. The cadavers of the nasty, de-
monic beings are therefore, pure, because the noxious creatures defile everything
while being alive (V 5.27-38). For the activity of Drux-ya-Nasu the following terms
are elaborated:
she pounces upon, swoops down (frduuasaiti) on a good creature and, depending on the
grade of its holiness, overtakes (frnaoiti) a group of surrounding creatures, infecting
(paiti.raaeiti) some of them. As regards to the corpses of those beings, whose status of holi-
ness is insufficient to be infected by Drux-ya-Nasu, the verb admixes (ham.raaeiti) is
used, their corps does not admix with the good creatures (V 5.27-36).
Moreover, a man carrying a dead body alone, becomes entirely a receptacle of
Drux-ya-Nasu, who penetrates, admixes (raa) with the sinner through his
natural orifices, among which nose, eyes, mouth, penis and anus are enumerated, af-
fecting him to fingertips (V 3.14). Obviously, ears were not included in this list by
mistake; together with them, we would have the well-known scheme of the 9 natural
orifices, in which the number 9 is itself important.
3.3. Receptacle of the demon
Thus, the infective nature of this defilement is understandable. It is also quite clear
that, elementary logical reasoning in this context does not permit deriving the diver-
sity of the world from the corpse, which became a receptacle of the demon. Therefore,
unlike Yama and Prus a, the Avestan Yima and Gaiia Martn, does not have to die
in the course of the narrative of the increase of the world and mankind, as well as for
the sake of justifying death, all the more so that, as the history of Yima was included
in the Vdvdd.
4. Purification rites
A considerable part of the Vdvdd deals with the procedures of purification from
83
Drux-ya-Nasu. All of them have similar structure and contain isolation of the puri-
fied in a room of minimum dimensions alienated from the community; restriction of
food, drinking, clothes and contacts with the outside world; ritual baths and other pu-
rificatory activities. The most severe procedure is appointed to the abovementioned
sinner, who transported a corpse alone, because he is believed to have become a
corpse himself and to be very dangerous and contagious. Nevertheless, one does not
kill him immediately, but allows him to live to get old in a special isolated building
(V 3. 15-20). The description of this place of confinement is repeated in its entirety in
V 5.46-49, in connection with the purification of a woman after miscarriage (her
womb is called tomb, daxma-), and it is expanded in V 16.2-12, where the name of
this place is mentioned as airime gtm place of repose (or place of impurity?).
Here a woman in the state of impurity may spend, depending on her condition, up to 9
nights, after which time 3 holes are to be dug: two for a bath in the bovine urine, and
one for a bath with water. Similar place is mentioned again in connexion with the
main Zoroastrian purificatory ceremony nine nights (V 9.33-36).
4.1 Rites of separation
Typologically, such a construction for isolation of those who are contaminated or to
fulfil purificatory ceremonies before an initiation or consecration is close to the Zoro-
astrian temporary tombs kata-, a sort of mortuary. They were made by threes (for
men, women and children) in wintertime, when it was difficult to observe the Zoroas-
trian funeral rites (V 5.10-11). The small dimensions of the cells, as well as of the
wards, were designed to minimise the dissemination of defilement. Actually, the Zo-
roastrian custom of ritual burying of nails and hair, which brought into existence spe-
cial buildings with no entrance, accords with the same ideas. Zoroastrian wards for
the ritually impure women had no normal entrance as well (it was considerably lower
than the usual one). Obviously this is a trace of the well known ritual and mythologi-
cal understanding of the unusual place of a dead person among the living people: dead
cannot leave the house from usual door, a hole in the wall or another kind of opening
have to be made for this.
4
In the foothill of the Pamir almost until now the practice of
isolation of the amort has been preserved, who were placed into small buildings,
where they were agonizing alone, away from the village; according to some evidence,
someone used to bring to them food, other witnesses report that it was only checked
from time to time, to see whether a dying person is dead or still alive (Khamidjanova
1980: 289; Rakhimov 2007: 127f). The idea of isolation of the purified in a small
room, associated with a tomb and with mothers womb alike, is parallel to the Old
Indian religious practice, where it undergoes profound ritual interpretation. The spe-
cific character of the Iranian attitude to the death is caused by the Panic fear before

4
It is interesting that fire temples were built in Iran using the same constructional scheme in order to
hide them from the Muslims: according . Boyce, a priest was forced to creep into the small camera
without windows (it was located inside a dwelling house), where the sacred fire was being maintained
(Boyce 1966: 51-52).
84
the defilement brought about by a corpse. The modern Persians and Tadjiks call the
defilement through the death siyh, blackness It is believed that the blackness dur-
ing three days after ones death is imbuing the deads house, and it is infective and
dangerous for the neighbourhood. As for the Zoroastrians, it is well known that they
regarded all symptoms of illness, ageing and corporal defects as results of activity of
the Evil Spirit. Thus, the sacrifices offered up by ill or disabled were not accepted by
gods. And just as the wicked did not ascend Noahs Ark so there was no room in
Yimas Vara for the people with defects, that is, with the marks of the Evil Spirit.
4.2. The number nine
Apart from the isolation chambers, which can reasonably be called temporary
tombs, the most important role in the driving out of Drux-ya-Nasu is played by the
place in which the ritual baths nine nights are fulfilled. The using of number 9 here
is absolutely clear (9=3*3), besides other meanings and significance in this case 9
also means correspondence between 9 holes of human body through which Drux-ya-
Nasu attacks a human being and 9 mythic Iranian rivers of universe by which this
body has to be cleansed for the harmonious purity both of microcosm and macrocosm.
All varieties of these constructions by the Iranian Zoroastrians and Indian Par-
sees are considered in detail in the treatise by Choksy (Choksy 1989), I would like to
emphasize only some significant points: the number of the holes in the most ancient
Iranian ritual was 9 (3 groups by 3), the three sections of the road of the purified were
paved with plastered soil, stones etc., different agents were used for the purification,
first of all bovine urine, also different mixtures with ashes, the last thing used was
water . The direction of movement during the purification was from north to south;
the Parsees replaced it with the direction from west to east, a substitution caused by
the difference between the localisation of hell and paradise in Iranian and Indian tradi-
tions. A prominent part in the ritual was taken by dogs, which drove Drux-ya-Nasu
by means of their sight. According to the Vdvdd, new holes for the baths were or
could be dug every time there was a need to fulfil a new complex of the rites.
4.3. Directions and flies
The translations of Avestan designations of the cardinal directions were suggested by
Bartholomae (1904: 79-80). To him, the Old Iranian concept of the directions did not
fit the Old Indian one; the Zoroastrian paradise is associated with the south, the hell -
with the north. Bartholomaes opinion was rejected by Lommel, who argued that the
Old Iranian concept of the directions principally coincided with the Indian (Lommel
1923: 204f). Nevertheless, there is an undoubted textual evidence for Bartholomaes
view, provided by the Hadoxt Nask, which was acknowledged by Lommel himself,
who regarded it as an innovation. Besides, Bartholomaes opinion goes well with
actual ritual practices, preserved in Iran for centuries, placing the Zoroastrian hell to
the north, and the paradise to the south. At any rate, this correspondence really took
85
place, as testified by Middle Persian vocabulary. Correct interpretation of the designa-
tions of the cardinal directions is of great importance both for the line of march of
Iranian tribes to their historical territory, and to the pattern of their religious rites.
Taking for granted the attested correspondence between the north and hell, especially
if it evolved out of accord with the common Indo-Iranian attribution of hell and para-
dise to certain directions, as Lommel believed, different hypotheses can be suggested
in order to account for this phenomenon. From the northern side, according to the
Vdvdd, the she-demon Drux-ya-Nasu arrives in the shape of fly. Such a represen-
tation of the demon is quite natural against the background of the total division of the
creation with the adversarial position of its parts: all the insects, reptiles, varmints and
other harmful animals, are believed by the Zoroastrians to be noxious creatures, xraf-
stra-, which are prescribed to be killed. The flies are mentioned between the xrafstra-,
but their role is insignificant by comparison with Drux-ya-Nasu. Again, in some
Middle-East perspectives the flies take a rather prominent place. Apart from the well-
known Hebrew notions of impurity of the flies and the exclusion of their penetration
into the Temple, I mean the exegesis of the Old Testament by St. Jerome, according to
which Bal-Zebb is explained as lord of flies, a reading which was widely ac-
cepted in the Christian World. It is not excluded that this exegesis also corresponds to
some realities with which St. Jerome got acquainted during his journey to the East. As
for Semitic tradition proper, it may be worth noting that the Ugaritic god Bl zbl
builds his palace on the Northern Mountain (apanu).
5. Dug-out holes
In fact, all the information we possess of Old Iranian purification rites, is drawn from
the Avestan Vdvdd, it is difficult to expect a lot of material evidences from pits
dug out in earth. One can add to this some results of archaeological research, obtained
in Pendjikent (V-VIII centuries AD), where an external court of a temple was exca-
vated on a bank of a canal with a row of 9 holes disposed in the direction from west to
east. The holes were dug in groups by three, a structure corresponding to the descrip-
tion of the Vdvdd. The western group of the holes was filled with tender ground
mixed with coals (Shkoda 1997). I believe that this fact testifies to the direction of
movement from west to east, because the coals and ashes could serve as additional
purifying agents to be used on the first stages of the baths. The direction of the holes
from west to east could be viewed as an argument in favour of Lommels theory, but
one should bear in mind that the Zoroastrian Soghd was subject to extremely strong
Indian influence.
5.1. Ritual variation
Some other traces of purificatory rituals in Zoroastrian (or close to them) territories
may not be so bright but nevertheless they are noteworthy. So, during excavations at a
86
Khwarazmian cult centre Kalali-gir 2 (IV-II centuries BC) a rectangular room with a
khum at the entrance and a hearth in its remote part was opened with orientation
probably from east to west (the entrance is at the east side), which was connected by
B.I. Vainberg to purification rites: the surface of the floor had several layers of coat-
ing, and near this room a complex with rather strange pits faced with bricks was lo-
cated (Kalali-gir 2 2004: 88, 234). The irregular disposition of these pits was unlike
the ones mentioned in the passages of the Vdvdd as well as the Pendjikents
straight row of holes, and this circumstance suggests a possibility of variety in the
ritual.
6. Archaeological excavations: Results
Very elaborated Zoroastrian rituals dealing with the driving away Drux-ya-Nasu can
have many different ancient roots.
So, in the course of work of the Margiana Archaeological expedition headed
by V. Sarianidi, two rooms and a square (at two different parts of the site Area 16
rooms 88 and 92, and also Area 13) with specially prepared holes were excavated in
2007-2008 at Gonur-depe, Turkmenistan (so-called Bactria-Margiana Archaeological
Complex, Bronze Age).
5
These three sets of holes are not alike and rather demonstrate
different types of ritual construction with one or two common elements:

1. round holes with walls formed of clay / alabaster and
2. bricks.

The detailed description of rooms 88 and 92 was published recently in Russian
by N.A. Dubova (Dubova 2008), and I would like only to stress some aspects which
could be connected with ritual ablutions and impurity.
Floors of both rooms 88 and 92 are covered with a thick clay coating. As to
typological close features of all holes, dimensions of which vary (e.g. from 30 cm to
more than 1 m in diameter, from 5 to 40 cm deep), almost all of them have walls
from clay or alabaster (or clay / alabaster plaster), some are covered with pieces of
ceramics and/or broken bricks and stones, especially at the square of the area 13. The
purpose of such a placement can be not an attempt to gather water or something else,
but striving to protect earth from pollution of ritual impure matters. This mode is
well-known in different traditions, including Zoroastrian one. At Gonurs area 16,
there are also some few solitary holes partially covered with pieces of ceramics of the
same type; each of them is linked to a grave. One can suppose that after finishing bur-
ial, participants made a kind of ablution over such hole.
The filling of holes, besides the usual sand, very often contains ashes, some-

5
I am very grateful to Dr V.I. Sarianidi and Dr N.A. Dubova who allowed me to participate in the
work of the Margiana Archaeological Expedition and use its materials.
87
times small parts of charcoal substances which could be used as additional means
for purification or as a kind of sacrifice during purification. At the same time all three
objects are connected to animal sacrifices: some fragments of horns are found in the
room 88, astragals in the room 92, burnt bones and astragals at the area 13. Thus one
can assume that rituals fulfilled here represented an elaborated complex set of acts.
Although the walls of holes sometimes bear traces of water or other liquids they
have the form of wave, which I believe possibly demonstrate that they were not filled
with water (as a rule the walls are too thin for this), but small amount of water was
poured over holes, as e.g. in Zoroastrian rites of purity. In one of the holes at the room
88 a broken vessel with spout was found which may have been was used for ablutions
and then was abandoned in its proper place. In addition to this in the process of re-
moving the upper layers of soil at the area 16 room 88 in some holes a dry cracked
ground with smooth surface appeared, it looked like earth was made wet and then it
dried out.
6

In case of the Area 16 near the holes several bricks were stacked, or one can
find even a row of bricks as in the room 88. This is also close to the Zoroastrian sys-
tem of ablutions, when priest or the candidate himself could stay longer and remain
pure from ritual point of view in the places (e.g. stones) of the territory for ablutions.
An important detail is the direction of the assumed rituals. Both rooms 88 and
92 and three holes at the square of area 13 are oriented NS (room 88 shows that they
were more probably situated from N to S, because of place for entrance, e.g.). The
most interesting is room 88, which has not only holes and bricks, but also a little dou-
ble bath(?) for feet(?) only, one part of which has a round opening perhaps for running
water . Near this bath a gathering of small ritual balls of clay was placed, in which I
see individual sacrifices, perhaps substitutional, made in the process of a purificatory
rite. Following the plan of the room 88 we can even outline a probable sketch of a
path of the priest or the candidate from the eastern and western corners of the northern
wall to the double bath and then on or along the brick row to the group of the holes
placed in the south-west part of the room, where a central and more carefully made
southern hole is the end of way. It is worthy of notice that not all holes were in use at
the very same period, the plan of room 88 by Dubova does not reflect a microstrati-
graphy, it shows rather all discovered holes. Some of them were made over others,
and there were also very small remnants of the coating of former destroyed circles
which were not depicted. Therefore one can suppose a relatively long period of use of
this room for the same purpose.
Room 92 which is located not far from room 88 and on the same line, and ad-
mittedly forms along with the room 88 and some adjacent rooms a complex. The
room 92 is perhaps a bathroom provided with an oven and a well for sewage. But it is
not inconceivable that the oven served not only for heating water, but also for temper-
ing ritual tools and vessels. N.A. Dubova in her description of the area 16 stresses that

6
On the contrary, N.A. Dubova insists on the absence of traces of water at the room 88 in her article
(Dubova 2008).
88
the adjacent to the room 88, a room 87, is equipped with a niche with strongly fired
walls and floor (Dubova 2008), which could also serve for the tempering.
As to the small square of the area 13, it was used, I think, for common and in-
dividual rituals, as evident from its composition and location between buildings or at a
border of a complex of buildings. It is worthy of notice that planning of buildings
which form this square is very similar to the one of the area16 and very typical unlike
many other parts of the site. So I suppose that these two areas could belong to one
period. The same observation demonstrates the similarity in the discussed holes. At
the square several holes with scattered pieces of ceramics and/or broken bricks and
stones were open which were situated at the day surface of the ground. In some of
them broken fired bones of animals were found. In addition to this in the southern part
of the square a row of three dug holes located NS was discovered. It is not clear, how
many holes were originally in the row because this part of the area was destroyed; but
it could be an interesting case of a row of three holes which is well known in ancient
Indian and Iranian practise.
Of course, I cannot affirm that rituals of Gonur are the same as Zoroastrian
ones, the interpretation of Gonurs constructions is controversial and the difference
between Zoroastrian places for ablutions and rooms at Gonur is clear. It is possible
only to suppose that in the ancient city civilisation with the high culture of priesthood
we can find a basis for a future religion. It is very likely that the same parallel occurs
in Indus valley civilization, where the Great Bath and places for ablutions were dis-
covered at Mohenjo-Daro and the Vedic rules of ritual purity were derived from pre-
Vedic ones.
7
At the same time the difference between ancient Iranian and Indian
mythological and ritual features probably can be explaned by different pre-Indo-
European traditions (though they also had close relations) which served as local back-
grounds for important peculiarities in new religious systems.

7
But besides the possible future development the Gonurs rituals, they should have their own history
too. We could find perhaps a parallel to the Gonurs holes at the site of Aji-kui, which is located sev-
eral km from the first one. G. Rossi Osmida calls two rooms with a lot of holes at this site a sanctuary
(Rossi Osmida: 78). It is not inconceivable that at least one part of this set of holes was used for ritual
ablutions; their large number could be in connection with the tradition of making new row of holes for
new series of rituals. So, at Gonur the new holes were made over the old (room 88). Some parallels
arise when we try to compare the facts of Gonur with Ancient Near Eastern rituals and ritual objects. I
think that the Gonurs mode of making round holes with walls of coating, accompanied with sacrifice
and together with use of some purifying matters such as ashes could be compared with Sumero-
Assyrian rituals, especially bt-rimki: in Assyrian texts one can find a mention of making an enclosure
of alabaster for healing a diseased (Emelyanov 2003: 206); they fulfil rituals of bt-rimki after making
an animal sacrifice; different purifying agents were added in water for ablutions; the bt-rimki ritual
included seven individual ablutions, when Gonurs rituals consisted also of several ablutions carried
out over separate holes; also balls of clay attract attention.
89
References
Bartholomae, C., 1904, Altiranisches Wrterbuch, Straburg: Trbner.
Benveniste, E., 1970, Que signifie Vidvdt?, W.B. Henning Memorial Volume, London, 37-42.
Bloomfield, M., 1908, The Religion of the Veda, New York and London: G.P. Putnams Sons.
Boyce, M., 1966, The Fire-temples of Kerman, Acta Orientalia, XXX, 51-72.
Choksy, J. K., 1989, Purity and Pollution in Zoroastrianism: Triumph over Evil, Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Dandekar, R.N., 2002, Ot ved k induizmu: evolyucioniruyushchaya mifologiya, Moskva: Vostochnaya
literatura.
Dubova, N.A., 2008, Dom ochishcheniya na Gonur Depe, Trudy Margianskoy archeologicheskoy
ekspedicii, T. II. Moskva, 84-93.
Emelyanov, V.V., 2003, Ritual v drevney Mesopotamii, Sankt-Peterburg: Azbuka-klassika, Peterburg-
skoe vostokovedenie.
Kalali-gir 2, 2004, Kultovy centr v Drevnem Khorezme, Otvetstvenny redaktor B.I. Vainberg, Moskva:
Vostochnaya literatura.
Khamidjanova, M.A., 1980, Nekotorye arkhaicheskie pogrebalnye obryady tadjikov, Sbornik statey
po istorii, arkheologii, etnografii i iskusstvu Sredney Azii, Pamyati A.A. Semyenova,
Dushanbe.
Kryukova, V., 2007, Gates of the Zoroastrian Paradise, The Journal of Indo-European Studies Vol. 35
N 3-4, 345-356.
Lommel, H.,1923, Awestische Einzelstudien, Zeitschrift fr Indologie und Iranistik, 2, 204-236.
Pirart, ., 2007, Georges Dumzil face aux dmons iraniens, Paris: LHarmattan.
Rakhimov, R.R., 2007, Koran i rozovoe plamya, Sankt-Peterburg: Nauka.
Rossi Osmida, G., Adji Kui Oasis Vol.I, Venezia: Il Punto.
Shkoda, V.G., 1997, Baranm gh(?) v Penjikente, Pamyatniki stariny, Koncepcii, Otkrytiya, Versii,
Pamyati V.D. Beletskogo, T.II. Sankt-Peterburg-Pskov, 387-389.
Skjrv, P.O., 2007, The Videvdat: its Ritual-Mythical Significance, The Age of the Parthians. The
Idea of Iran Vol. II, London, New-York: I.B. Tauris, 105-141.
Steblin-Kamensky, I.M., 1998, [Mif o Yime], perevod I.M. Steblin-Kamenskogo, Avesta v russkih
perevodakh, Sankt-Petrburg: Zhurnal Neva, Letniy Sad, 77-81.
The Hymns of the Rgveda, 1973, Translated with a Popular Commentary by Ralph T.H. Griffith, re-
vised ed., New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
West, E.W., 1871, The Book of the Mainyo-i khard, Stuttgart-London: Grninger.

91
Chapter 6. Varins philosophy and the
Rk Stones mythology of death

by Joseph Harris
1

Abstract. The Rk Stone (stergtland, Sweden, 801-c. 850) bears the longest of all runic inscriptions
and one of the most fruitful for our understanding of the pre-Christian mythology of Scandinavia.
While it is true that almost everything about the inscription is controversial, I am confident that my
series of recent articles form an adequately secure basis for the interpretation of Rks mythology and
beliefs on the subject of death. The talk will situate Rk among various Germanic mythologies of death
more generally, with special attention to the Baldr myth, in particular to the Baldr-figures slayer, des-
ignated a i at un in this text. Some effort at wider, extra-Germanic comparisons will be made, centered
principally on this demonic figure.
Varins philosophy and the Rk Stones mythology of
death
The Rk Stone is an important document in the history of Old Swedish and, more
generally, of Nordic mythology, as well as of great importance for linguistic purposes.
Its inscription, with about 750 runes in a mixture of prose and verse, is the longest of
any rune stone. If its accepted date of the first half of the ninth century is correct and
this assessment from the early days of modern runology, has recently been ratified by
a thorough contemporary study (Barnes 2007) then it occupies a crucial position in
the development of Nordic, especially Swedish, runic monuments; and it has been
studied and fiercely debated for almost a century and a half. Most of the problems of
decipherment have long been solved, but there is still room for a good deal of dis-
agreement over aspects of the content and message of the inscription, especially its
deeply encrypted third section. In this brief presentation, based on earlier writings by
the author as well as on the long tradition of scholarship on the inscription,
2
I wish to

1
Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA.
2
The classics: Bugge 1910, von Friesen 1920, Hfler 1952, Wessn 1958, Lnnroth 1977, Widmark
1992, 1993, 1997, Grnvik 1983, 2003. Recent work: Harris 2006, 2009, forthcoming a, b.
92
discuss the death philosophy of the raiser of the monument in so far as we can deduce
it from the inscription itself and from a few important parallel texts. I will not have
recourse to a principled philological argument. That has been done in my earlier pa-
pers. What I want to ask here is more general: what did death mean to the author of
Rk and how did he understand the myth he cites there? The reader is referred to ear-
lier publications for the philological underpinnings and for step-by-step mythological
reconstruction.
The structure of the inscription
I begin with a text and translation of the whole inscription. A-E refers to faces of the
stone; the line numbers 1-28 and the Old Swedish normalization follow Wessn
(1958):

Dedication (lines 1-2, side A):
Aft Vamo standa runaR aR. / n Varinn fai, faiR aft faigian sunu.
In memory of Vamo stand these runes. But Varin wrote them, a father in memory of
his death-doomed son.

Narrative section one (3-11, A-B; Theoderic section):
First question / hint (3-5): Sagum mg-minni at: hvriaR valraubaR vaRin tvaR /
aR, sva tvalf sinnum vaRin numnaR at valraubu, / baaR saman a ymissum man-
num?
I pronounce this hint for the lad: Which were the two war-spoils which, both to-
gether, were taken twelve times in booty-taking from different men?
Second question / hint (5-8): at sagum anna/rt: hvaR fur niu aldum an uri fiaru /
mer Hraigutum, auk do/miR n umb sakaR?
This I pronounce as second: Who became without life (died) among the Hrei-Goths
nine ages ago, and yet his affairs are still under discussion?
Answer (A9-B11): Re jorikR hinn urmoi,
stilliR / flutna, strandu HreimaraR.
SitiR nu garuR a [B] guta sinum,
skialdi umb fatlaR, skati Mringa.
jorik the bold, ruler of sea-warriors, (once) ruled the shore of the Gothic Sea. Now
he sits outfitted on his Gothic steed, with his shield buckled on, prince of the
Mrings.
Narrative section two (12-19; side C; the twenty kings):
First question / hint (12-14): at sagum tvalfta, hvar hstR se Gu/nnaR etu vettvangi
a, kunungaR tvaiR tigiR sva/ a liggia?
This I pronounce as twelfth: Where does the steed of Gunn see food on the battle-
Harris Chapter 6: Death, Varin, and the Rk Stone
93
field, which twenty kings are lying on?
Second question / hint (14-17): at sagum rettaunda, hvariR t/vaiR tigiR kunungaR
satin at Siolundi fia/gura vintur at fiagurum nampnum, burn/iR fiagurum brrum?
This I pronounce as thirteenth: Which twenty kings sat on Zealand for four winters
under four names, sons of four brothers?
Answer (17-19): ValkaR fim, Raulfs sy/niR, HraiulfaR fim, Rugulfs syniR, HaislaR
fim, Haru/s syniR, KynmundaR fim, BernaR synir.
Five Valkis, sons of Raulf; five Hraiulfs, sons of Rugulf; five Haisls, sons of
Haru; five Kynmunds, sons of Bern.
Line 20 (after Grnvik): nukmmalukiainhuaR[...]ftiRfra
Narrative section three (according to JH; 21-26, 28, 27; C, D, C top, E):
First question / hint (21-22): Sagum mg-minni at: hvaR Inguld/inga vaRi guldinn at
kvanaR husli?
I pronounce this hint for the lad: Who among the descendants of Ing-Vald was com-
pensated for through the sacrifice of a woman?
Second question / hint (23-24): Sagum mg-minni: [h]vaim se burinn ni/R drngi?
I pronounce a (further) hint for the lad: To whom was a son born for a gallant young
man?
Answer (24-26, 28, 27): Vilinn es at + knua knatt/i i at un. Vilinn es at + nyti. /
Sagum mg-minni: or /ol nirR / sefi via vari.
Vilinn it is, whom the enemy slew. Vilinn it is: may he enjoy (this monument). I pro-
nounce a (final?) hint for the lad: At ninety, the Kinsman, respecter of shrines, en-
gendered Thor.
The inscription is comprised of a dedication and three more or less narrative
sections, each composed of two questions or hinting questions and an answer. Line 20
at one edge of side C has sustained extensive damage, and its reconstruction is a prob-
lem of its own (Harris forthcoming a). Like several of my predecessors who have
closely studied Rk, I believe it to be a frame (like the dedication) that introduces
Section Three.
As a whole, each sections questions and their answer evoke a story-complex.
Both the structure and the content are clearest in Section One, which deals with the
famous figure of Theodoric the Great (the Dietrich von Bern of high medieval Ger-
man epic) in an early form of his life in heroic legend. All three sections treat material
that can be interpreted thematically as concerned with life and death, especially with
the persistence of life in the face of death. Theodoric died nine generations ago among
his Goths; yet his deeds are still debated in the present of the inscription, and in the
form of his equestrian statue in Aachen, he still sits armed and ready for battle. The
twenty kings of Section Two seem to have been members of a war-band / trading
company, a classic Mnnerbund that lives on institutionally after the deaths of indi-
viduals. Section Three features a promising man struck down at an early age and how
his death was compensated for within the family by the birth of a (half) brother.
94
Themes of life and death
Thus death is central to all three sections, but in different ways all three also show
how life goes on in some form. In the Theodoric section, the heroic individual sur-
vives through his reputation, something like the kleos aphithon or dmr that dies
never, though this famous Indo-European and Germanic theme is more interestingly
nuanced in Rk. The twenty kings share names and fathers (probably the initiatory-
leader figures attested in Mnnerbnde around the world); and if my interpretation is
right, the idea of survival here is a corporate one: the individual is subsumed into a
group of brothers, which cannot die since its form of life exists on a different
plain from that of the heroic individual. Section Three combines elements of the indi-
vidual (as in Section One) and of the group (as in the pseudo-family of Section Two).
Here the group is that of blood relations, the family. The head of the clan of the Ing-
Valdings is represented by the pious ninety-year old Kinsman, who sires a replace-
ment for his fallen son. The on-going life of Section Three is therefore partly indi-
vidual and partly corporate or institutional.
I have further argued that the three stories or narrative complexes together
comprise a sort of argument, a Levi-Straussian form of native philosophy through
stories that are good to think with. Certainly the inscription as I interpret it yields to
this Hegelian formal postulate almost too easily, and of course I worry that the form I
see is a product of my reading, my expectations, rather than inherent in the material
the inscription itself being, of course, the only ultimate key to the mode of thought of
the makers and audiences of the stone. But the obliqueness of the problem statement
on the stone (detailed below), its divergence from a simplified Lvi-Straussian para-
digm, is a factor that speaks in favor of this interpretation. For, although life and death
are featured as the red threads of the narrative material in all three sections, the simple
binary opposition we might expect say, raw vs. cooked does not emerge as the
problem. Nor does the mediation generate reduced restatements of the binary (in
principle going on until the impulse is exhausted) as in a truly Levi-Straussian myth
complex. Instead mediation on Rk produces a single final myth satisfying within
itself, I believe, the problem posed by the juxtaposition of the two preceding stories.
The limitation of the Rk inscription to three story-complexes and a single opposi-
tion-through-mediation movement may make it unsuitable as evidence that the story
in Section Three somehow embodies a whole societys ultimate solution to the phi-
losophical problem. But we seem at least justified in treating the inscription as one
mans, Varins, thought process and solution that is, in treating him as its author.
I submit that the author and audience accept both life and death in their coexis-
tence. They would regard the following two statements as equally true and inter-
changeable: Death comes and goes even as life persists and life comes and goes
while death persists. I suggest that to us the former seems to be optimistic, redolent
of fertility and affirmation, while the latter focuses on negation and annihilation. In
any case, the problem set by the three sections is not life against death but the con-
texts of life and of death: the individual in its strongest form (the hero, the singular
95
master of plural masses) is opposed to the group in a very strong form (the all-male
family of warriors / traders, where the plural engulfs and contains traces of the sin-
gular), and the mediation product of this binary is a form of life-and-death (that is, of
human existence) in which both the singular individual and the plural matrix of like-
blooded persons receive equal value. In other words and anticipating in modern
terms our conclusion the DNA-community is the form of group immortality in
which the individual finds its optimal realization. But we will be in a better position to
justify this mode of mediated individual immortality after discussing the myth in Sec-
tion Three.
The first two narrative sections deal with heroic material like that of Germanic
heroic and eulogistic poetry found in West Germanic sources and elsewhere in North
Germanic. While every aspect of Rk has been furiously debated, one can safely say
that Sections One and Two are less contentious than Section Three and that they con-
trast with Three in being drawn from the heroic, that is secular human, world. They
also contrast with Section Three in having item numbers attached to them, as if they
represented selections from the same itemized repertoire of heroic lore, while Section
Three comprises unnumbered mythic material and is drawn from a different store.
Other Norse sources, notably the Poetic and Prose Eddas, but also the Gotland picture
stones and several mythic-heroic sagas, evince a similar juxtapositioning of heroic
and mythic narrative even while maintaining the distinction between human actions
and sacred story. Thematically, however, all three sections make literary sense both
individually and in juxtaposition, and it will come as no surprise that death-and-life
might be an appealing unifying subject in Rks attempt at a discursive funeral or
memorial inscription as a whole. The author Varin finds heroic stories no less apt for
thinking with than myth, but the sacred story is saved to the last and deployed, it
seems, to clinch a kind of argument.
The dedicatory lines tell us unambiguously that the stone was raised and the
runes cut by Varin, a father in memory of his death-doomed (ON feigr) son Vamo.
The body of the inscription in its three narrative sections is a small anthology of he-
roic-mythic stories or minni produced for Varins mgr descendant, an emotion-
laden word found in early poetry and at least once in an earlier funeral inscription.
The stories, however, could not be related in detail on stone. Instead, they are evoked
by hinting questions and brief answers in a version of a skaldic routine or game
known as greppa-minni; cf. mg-minni. Vamo may have been very young (mgr
also means boy); and the playful routine may be evoking some favorite tales as a
kind of gift of story for the dead. But the thematic connections and sense of the whole
seem serious and religious in a sense deeper than cult. I will return to the meaning of
the whole after discussion of the more difficult mythic material of the cipher section.
The myth in Section Three
Like the other sections, Section Three cannot really narrate its myth according to our
96
understanding of narration, confined as it is within the parameters of the available
stone surfaces and by the medium of runes and ciphers. In Sweden of the early ninth
century, real narration would have been a feature only of the oral medium, the voice,
and one of the mysteries associated with the Rk stone is precisely Varins precocious
attempt at literature in a preliterate environment (cf. Harris 2009 and forthcoming b).
Despite the refraction of the narrative, however, the hints supplied by the sections
questions and answer do give the modern myth-reconstructor enough to go on. From
the first question (ll. 21-22) we learn that the tragedy-with-redemption that we are
about to hear of (in our minds ear) takes place within a certain clan, the Inguldings,
reconstructed as descendants of a founder figure or patriarch, Ing-Vald. To ask who
was compensated for implies a death, the only important moment for compensation in
such stories. Compensation can be wergild or revenge, but the subsequent events do
not deal directly with either; instead the birth of a new son seems to be itself the com-
pensation for the death of his brother. And that form of compensation is commensu-
rate with the involvement of a woman in the story (ll. 21-22); it also agrees with an
ancient form of compensation alluded to in a famous Icelandic poem of 961, Egill
Skallagrmssons Sonatorrek (st. 17), and also in an analogue of the Sonatorrek pas-
sage in the Old English epic Beowulf.
3

The second question (ll. 23-24) is predicated upon the death alluded to in the
first, but asks to whom, to what father, an heir was born in the place of a gallant
young man (drngi). These shards come together into a fairly coherent mosaic: a
young man (drngr) of the Ingulding clan was killed; the compensation for him came
in the form of the birth of a new son to the father of the drngr, a descendant (nir)
who will take the place of the dead. The answer section contributes some of the
names, in direct answer to the question form of the hints: the dead youth is Vilin; the
father is not named but called by a title, shrine-respecting Kinsman, and character-
ized as ninety years of age at the time of the birth; the newborn son is named Thor.
The name of the god Thor of course puts the story into the realm of myth if we had
doubted it before; but the structure and content of the story, as defined by the basic
actions and actors grieving father, dead youth, newborn heir, and a mother and a
slayer yet to be discussed are obviously sufficient to raise the possibility that we are
dealing with a version of the myth of the death of Baldr so well known from later
West Scandinavian texts. There Odin is the grieving father, Baldr the early-dead son,
and Vli or Bous the newborn brother.
The hypothesis that Vilins death and the compensatory birth of Thor repre-
sents an East Scandinavian variant, attested several centuries before the familiar west-
ern variants, provides a precise explanation for the role of the woman in Question
One, where the compensation for the dead youth of the Inguldings is said to take place
at kvanaR husli through the sacrifice of a woman. In the Baldr story, both in the Ice-
landic forms and in the Danish form reported in Saxo Grammaticus, it was foretold or
fated that revenge for Baldr could only be brought about by a child sired upon the

3
Beowulf and Sonatorrek cited from Primary works in Bibliography; Harris 1994, 1999.
97
maiden Rinda / Rindr.
4
Odin carried out this deed through magic or trickery (depend-
ing on the sources). So the sacrifice of a woman refers to the fate-sanctioned rape of
Rinda / Rindr or else an East Scandinavian stand-in for her. Probably the name of the
woman in the Swedish version on Rk was *Vrind-, the etymologically correct east-
ern form, because in East Gautland, not too far from Rk, there was a farm name
which place-name scholars had taken back to the form *Vrindar-v Rinds sanctu-
ary, adding good and independent evidence to the worship of this chthonic figure,
probably a close analogue of Jr, the earth goddess / giantess on whom Odin fa-
thered Thor in the western genealogical myths.
Other evidence supporting the identification of Rks myth as an early East
Scandinavian variant of Baldrs death may be briefly mentioned. Odin is presented in
western sources as very old, and his unnamed analogue on Rk is ninety when he
begets the replacement son Thor. This part of the sacred mystery is embedded in a
complex rhetorical, runic, and graphic schema (ll. 26, 28, 27), but even in the abbrevi-
ated form of this essay we can appreciate the way the most sacred title and subject of
the concluding sentence of the inscription are saved for the top face of the stone, some
two-and-a-half meters above the earth and normally visible to the gods only. The ac-
tual name of Odin is avoided here, as frequently (he had a large number of aliases), by
the use of a term that emphasizes the family context (sefi Kinsman) and in that con-
text his piety toward the shrines (vari via). Rks myth bestows the name Thor on the
newborn brother. The variance from the standard version of the Baldr myth is not as
great as it might appear: Thor is everywhere called Odins son; his mother is an earth
goddess / giantess who is frequently mentioned together with Rind; Thors son
Magni, also born of a giantess, is, like Vli, a precocious baby. In the modern recep-
tion the Baldr myth is strongly characterized, not by narrative structure or dramatis
personae the tools I have used to reconstruct the myth but by the name of Baldr
(which may be a title rather than a name); so it is perhaps psychologically difficult to
accept as a version of the well-known myth a narrative in which the otherwise un-
known Vilin occupies Baldrs slot. But it is not difficult to relate the name Vilinn to
the sphere of Odin or to construct arguments for its plausible application to the Baldr
figure. I believe it is more important to emphasize, however, that Vilins story was in
runes as much as four centuries before the Baldr figure emerges in writing and that a
great deal of variation must have taken place in cults and in myths, for which there
was never a standard until the thirteenth-century Christian writers of Iceland and
Denmark canonized the narrative forms known to them.
Still, the myth in Section Three may be only distantly related to the Baldr
myth, so that scholarship should retain the possibility of treating it separately. The
contrasting figure of the last of the dramatis personae, the slayer, may lead in that
direction. The Rk inscription attributes Vilins death to iat un. This word is certainly
an early form, the earliest in writing, of the later ON jtunn and cognate with OE eo-
ten, and in the later Old Norse texts a jtunn was a giant. I believe, however, that we

4
Saxo cited from Primary works in Bibliography.
98
would do well to remember how early this Rk i atun is and to try to separate it in our
minds from the modern image also from nineteenth-century folklore and from the
fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sagas, where the majority of jtnar appear of the
big goofy and largely comical figures we call giants. In Anglo-Saxon, eoten covers
giant, monster, enemy (Clark Hall and Meritt: 1962, s.v.), and the chief eoten of
English texts, Grendel, is surely more monster than folklore giant. For Varins phi-
losophy of death and the early mythology it is based on, we need a more profound
view of the iatun. But first we must examine, even if briefly and inconclusively, the
implications of iatun in the Vilin / Baldr narrative.
The western versions of Baldrs death offer three different patterns: those of
verse, of Saxo, and of Snorri. Verse passages (which are generally regarded as older
than the thirteenth-century prose authors) alluding to the killing of Baldr name the
lone slayer Hr and say he is Baldrs brother. Saxo also has a Htherus who acts
alone but is not related to Balderus. Snorri alone has the famously complicated plot
whereby Loki, who is a jtunn, is the intellectual author of Baldrs slaying, which is
carried out by a blind Hr (presumably Baldrs brother).
5
A Swedish (Gautish) hero-
icized version of the story is found in Beowulf according to which Here-beald (the
Baldr figure) is accidentally slain by his brother H-cyn (Hr). Probably the sin-
gle slayer and brother motifs are more original than Snorris wonderfully complex
story and Saxos confused one; one scholar, for example, puts Lokis entry into the
Baldr myth as late as the eleventh century. Now, the Rk narrative has in the slayer
slot a single figure, not explicitly blind or explicitly related to the victim or explicitly
acting by accident, and characterized only by the word iatun. This could be simply a
name, a nickname, or a prejudicial epithet; or it could be a species label. The later
involvement of the jtunn Loki in the west argues for the last of these possibilities;
but even if we wished to favor one of the first three possibilities in order more
smoothly to integrate the Rk myth into the Baldr complex, we would have to face the
implications of iatun for any attempt to understand Varins thought. In other words,
whether in the Rk story a human or divine brother of Vilin is branded an iatun or
whether the unrelated slayer actually belongs to that non-human, non-god race, i atun
might be crucial to Varins death philosophy.
In the earliest layer of Norse mythological sources, jtnar sometimes seem,
Titan-like, to be an older race of gods; sometimes monster fits better than giant to
describe them. Lokis three monstrous children are jtnar: Fenrir, the wolf who will
defeat and swallow Odin at the cosmic battle of Ragnark; the Midgarsormr, the sea-
serpent who encircles the lands of the earth and will kill Thor when Ragnark comes;
and Hel, the ghastly half-black, half-white mistress of the lands of the dead. Another
animal-monster of the final battle is the hellhound Garmr, nemesis, according to
Snorri, of the god Tr. In the mythology the term jtnar also covers a wide variety of
more or less humanoid figures, all being united by their structural opposition to the

5
Gade 2006 argues that Snorri may not have known that Hr was Baldrs brother. The case is well
argued, but unconvincing considering the verse testimony. Hrs blindness may be a motif borrowed
by Snorri from Christian sources: ODonoghue 2003.
99
gods, but also closely integrated with the community of gods. One could almost de-
fine the jtunn of Norse myth not by size or body type, but by its relationship to the
society of the gods a relationship that includes, but is not limited to, hostility. But
surveys of the use of the term jtnar in the ever-later literary forms probably give less
insight into Rks iatun than the etymologies of some of the probably early mytho-
logical jtnar. Hrsvelgr (corpse-gulper) is an eagle, perhaps mythologized from
the carrion-eating beasts of battle, but not the only corpse-eating jtunn. The serpent
Nhggr (hate-striker) sucks corpses, and wolves tear men, perhaps near Corpse
Strand (Nstrnd). In Egill Skallagrmssons Hfulausn (about 936), the poet pic-
tures the goddess of the dead, Hel, as a carrion crow standing upon the battlefield-
dead;
6
and Hel is, I believe, of importance in understanding the early conception of
iatun.
The word hel, all commentators agree, is from a root meaning hide, cover,
enwrap (e.g., OE, OS, OHG helan conceal); the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root
*kel- gives words like conceal and Gk. kalypso. Originally hel was where the dead are
hidden, covered, enwrapped, the grave, especially the communal burial place of the
stone age. The goddess, or rather iat un, Hel is generally thought to be a personifi-
cation based on the place hel. The word family is very large in Germanic alone, and
hel the place is attested in every Germanic language. But the person or demon Hel
may also be old. Hermann Gntert, in his famous 1919 book Kalypso, explores espe-
cially this PIE word family and at one point argues that the goddess is pre-Indo-
European in the sense that the name and function are shared with Uralic (here =
Finno-Ugric), which had a chthonic death-goddess Koljo (< PIE *koljo-; cf. hel <
PGmc *halja- < PIE *koljo- [Gntert 1919: 52-53]). Despite the fact that the god-
dess Hel is not attested in Old English or the other older Germanic languages except
Old Norse, the Finno-Ugric connection convinces Gntert that she was an ancient,
Common Germanic demon a demon [...] not a personally formed goddess!
7
Hel
seems, then, etymologically to be a demon who covers, hides, conceals the corpses
of the dead, but Gntert frequently refers to her with a different vocabulary: a corpse-
demon that eats men ... [I]n the caves and tombs in which the dead were sunk,
crouches the greedy, corpse-demon who gulps down all human bodies.
8
This lan-
guage implicitly identifies the concealing she-demon with one that actively
(gierig) lusts to consume its victims; with this language Gntert seems to have in
mind the wolf and hound associated with death, finding especially in Garmr the an-
cient conception of the corpse-eater, the animalistic, greedy, gulping death-demon

6
In Primary works: Skjaldedigtning BI: 32: tra nipt Nara / nttver ara the kinswoman of Nari
(Loki)(>Hel) trod the dinner of eagles (corpses) (Hfulausn, st. 10).
7
Gntert 1919: 39: eine uralte, gemeingermanische Dmonin eine Dmonin [] nicht eine
persnlich gestaltete Gttin! Modern opinion is divided on this particular Germanic-Finno-Ugric rela-
tionship: Klystra et al. 1991-96, II: 105.
8
Gntert 1919: 40, 39: [die] menschenverschlingende[ ] Leichendmonin, wie ich sie fr gemein-
germanisch und vorgermanisch halte; in den Hhlen und Grften, in welche die Toten gesenkt
werden, haust die gierige, alle Menschenleiber verschlingende Leichendmonin.
100
that lies at the basis of the four-eyed hound of the ancient Indic peoples, the two
hellhounds of the Avesta ... and the Kerberos of the Greeks.
9
Gntert goes on to
make what he calls eine Proportion a proportional formula out of the relationship
of the goddess and the hellhound such that:
The figures of gods and demons, which originated on the basis of similar con-
ceptions, appear in the language of myth as blood relatives:

Hel : Fenrisulfr, Garmr = Hekate, Hekabe : Kerberos.
10

The etymologies of Fenrir and Garmr offer no help in conceptualizing death;
but all these creatures are jtnar, and this word has a rich and widely agreed etymol-
ogy that leads back into the sphere of Hels corpse-gulping canine kin. The source,
PGmc *etuna- (< PIE *eduno-), is derived from the verb *etan- to eat, carrying a
basic meaning eater, further glossed by the etymologists to their own taste as glut-
ton (with the folklore giant in mind) or corpse-devourer (roughly in Gnterts
sense).
11
If Fin. etona, etana is a borrowing from Germanic, its sense snail, worm;
evil person may be a reflection of original devouring death. Later Danish and Swed-
ish forms with -tt- (jtte, jtte) will have derived from forms in the paradigm which
(before the first consonant shift) had the geminating combination -dn-. In addition to
the -n- derivatives (iatun, jtte, etc.), there are -l- derivatives such as NNorw. jtul
giant. As for the secular meaning glutton, preferred by, for example, Hellquist
(1967: s.v.), it seems unlikely that such an early mythological term would have taken
its name merely from human gluttony or from its projection onto the appetite of gi-
ants such as we encounter in the comical forms of folktales; and even if big eater
were the original meaning of the form, an early religious-mythological context would
in any case have lent a pregnant significance. Finally, very recent linguistic work by
Michael Janda throws further light on the derivation of PGmc *etuna-. In the context
of working out the derivation of Varua, Janda set up a parallel with our word (I will
not attempt to recount the parallel here), which shares a rare derivational suffix and
chain of development (Janda 2000: 110-112). It would appear, then, that the old Ger-
manic word *etuna-, perhaps originally designating a demon who consumes (the
dead), is constructed according to a pattern rare in Germanic and paralleled by one of
the most original Indic gods, a god also associated with the dead and one who hap-

9
Gntert 1919: 41: Mit diesem Garmr aber haben wir einen Beleg fr die uralte Vorstellung vom
Leichenfresser genannt, vom tierisch, gierig schlingenden Todesdmon, wie er gemeinsam dem
vierugigen Hund der alten Inder, den beiden Hllenhunden des Awesta ... und dem Kerberos der
Griechen zugrunde liegt.
10
Gntert 1919: 41: Gottesgestalten und Dmonen, die auf Grund hnlicher Vorstellungen entstanden
waren, erscheinen in der Sprache des Mythos als leibliche Verwandte : Hel : Fenrisulfr, Garmr =
Hekate, Hekabe : Kerberos.
11
A somewhat less controversial derivation from pre-Germanic; pro: Karsten 1943: 82-83 and his ear-
lier work; contra: Collinder 1932-34: 188-190 and earlier. A modern balance is drawn by Klystra et al.
1991-96, I: 57.
101
pens to share a semantic range with the Germanic Hel since Janda finally glosses
Varua as the god with the covering, wrapping.
12

Varins philosophy of death
I have argued that the constellation of heroic story material and myth on the Rk
stone constitutes a kind of reasoning process about life and death and that the ideas
derivable from the inscription are attributable to Varin, the bereaved father and spon-
sor of the stone. I further believe that Varins philosophy of death was based on or at
least included his local variant of the myth we are more familiar with as attached to
Baldr. Scholars of Nordic paganism, notably Jan de Vries, see Baldrs death as the
First Death and the mythologem as a whole as dealing with the problem of death (de
Vries 1956-57, II: 237-238). The hermeneutical fit between Rks Section Three
and the western Baldr myth must remain on several levels hypothetical; but if my phi-
lological work and basic myth reconstruction are convincing, interpretations of the
Baldr myth can at least help in the effort to understand Varin.
Varin may then have felt that he had honored his predeceased son with a col-
lection of stories that affirmed, if not life out of death, at least an equal balance of life
with death and that in the Vilin myth he had supplied a deeply sacred story that
clinched a theological argument. The first line of the inscription describes Vamo as
death-doomed, which may mean that he died young; and in relation to Varin, of
course he did. If so, neither the immortality of imperishable fame exemplified in the
Theodoric of Section One, the heroic hope common to the Indo-Europeans generally,
nor the immortality of the sodality, the Mnnerbund of Section Two, will have had
the full force of analogy as applied to Vamo. But Section Three, with the myth of
regeneration within the bloodline provided Varins consolation. Varin seems to have
been positively guided by the idea expressed negatively in Sonatorrek, st. 17: This is
also said that no one may get recompense for a son unless he himself begets again the
descendant who will be a man born for the other one, in the place of his brother.
13

Though Egill Skallagrmsson and the Old Man of Beowulf, ll. 2444-62, both consid-
ered this bit of ancient wisdom as inapplicable to themselves, Varin, by bringing to
bear the Vilin myth, seems to accept it as his hope. It is unclear in the maxim and in
Rks question / hint hvaim se burinn nir drngi (to whom was a son born for a
gallant young man?) whether the newborn son will simply replace the deceased or
will actually replicate him, whether we are dealing with dedication to a specific role
or position within the family or with rebirth. Rebirth is of course (before cloning) a
purely illogical and therefore eminently religious idea; it has been rather extensively
discussed in relation to early Germanic beliefs.
14
Dedication is perhaps a rationalizing

12
Janda 2000: 111: der (Gott) mit der Umhllung.
13
Translation mine; cf. Harris 1994.
14
See especially Eckhardt 1937, de Vries 1956-57, I: 94-95, 180-183, 217-218, and Harris 1994.
102
development from the religious idea; in any case, dedication is exactly what we meet
in the western variants of the Baldr myth, except that there the dedication is not pre-
cisely (or not only) a matter of replacement, but rather a dedication to revenge. Varin
seems to emphasize the positive regeneration of the family through individual re-
placement rather than the negative compensation of revenge; but we cannot exclude
the possibility that the myth complex that constituted Varins tools for philosophizing
also included revenge.
It is impossible to overlook the relationship of homology between Varins own
story and the story he chose for Section Three. Varin parallels the sefi via vari as
bereaved father while Vamo mirrors Vilin as the early dead promising youth
(drngr). It follows that Varins consolation is the hope that the mythic solution will
somehow govern his future too. The parallel relationship between Varin and the myth
he had inscribed on Rk is underlined by the alliterative continuity from the real-life
father and son at least to the dead drngr of the myth, Vilin; and if my complex
speculations linking sefi via vari to Inguldinga (from a founder *Ing(i)-Vald-r/i?) and
both to Odin can be trusted, then the aged father in the myth may also have had v-
alliteration in his avoided name. In any case, the sefi Kinsman in Rks myth seems
to play the role of Odin in the western analogue. I will take this extremely speculative
line of thought one stage further and wonder whether the alliterative signal of the fam-
ily relationships could have been established before initial w- was lost or became v- or
while it was still remembered that inn had once been pronounced *Wenn. The w-
series might thus have included: Varinn < *war-ana-z; Vmr < *waiha-ma-z;
Vilinn < *wil-ana-z; and the unnamed *w-ana-z. Loss of intial w- before vowels
like is dated c. 650-800 by Noreen (1923: 169). If the alliterative link is to be trusted
(with or without Odin and/or Vald), Varin may have seen his family as somehow part
of the Inguldings, perhaps conceived as his mythic forefathers.
Another link between the human family of Varin and Vamo and the Inguld-
ings of the Vilin / Baldr myth can probably be extracted from the word faigian death-
doomed, chosen by Varin as the only characterization of his son on the entire monu-
ment. All we really know about Vamo is that he was fated and in fact died. Baldr is
similarly fated, and the only real story told of him centers on his death. Of course,
Snorri fleshes out Baldrs character: he is beloved and beautiful; his parents and his
wife are accounted for; his judgments are mentioned; and the circumstances of his
death, the attempt to save him, and his funeral are all recounted. But the actual deeds
of the living Baldr are limited to receiving ominous dreams, standing as a target, and
dying; one might add as actions from the world of the dead that Baldr sends a ring
back to his father and after Ragnark will return with the younger gods to start a new
aeon, but in effect Baldr is not an action hero but a passive member of the dead
around whom fears accumulate. The fate theme in Baldrs life begins when he discov-
ers through dreams that he is to die;
15
although the word ON feigr doomed is not
used of Baldr in surviving texts, it precisely describes his nature. Through this word,

15
In Primary works: Gylfaginning, chap. 49; Poetic Edda (Baldrs draumar).
103
augmented by the homology of structural situation and perhaps by a special relation-
ship to the family of Vilin, Varin has set up a paradigmatic relationship between the
two honored dead and the two bereaved families. This is precisely the kind of rela-
tionship between homo religiosus and his gods in the famous theory of Mircea Eliade
(1959): divine acts in illo tempore constitute a paradigm for the life of the believer.
Rk furnishes relatively scanty evidence of paradigmatic grief compared to the Sona-
torrek of Egill Skallagrmsson, another bereaved father, who, I have argued, viewed
his situation through the lens of the Baldr tragedy, as Eliades theory would have pre-
dicted. And the presence of allusions to Baldrs death in other Norse funeral poems
(Harris 1999) suggests that Snorris characterization of Baldr as grta gu god of
lamentations uses the word grtr in a semi-technical sense as (a poem of) lamenta-
tion.
16

We must close without solving the puzzle of Varins final understanding of
death itself. Did iatun still carry in Varins day the baggage of its ancient associa-
tions? Was the monster iatun a personification? Or had the hostile giant of later
times already established itself, to be realized in the Vilin myth as either an epithet or
an anticipation of Loki? We can be certain that, however terrible its monstrous repre-
sentation, death was balanced in Varins imagination by the life of the clan: man did
not face death as an individual, but life-and-death as part of a blood family, clan, or
what we might now call a DNA pool.
Bibliography
Primary works
Beowulf:
Klaebers Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 2008, R.D. Fulk, R.E. Bjork, and J.D. Niles, eds., 4th
ed. rev., Toronto / Buffalo / London: University of Toronto Press.
Poetic Edda: Edda: Die Lieder des Codex regius nebst verwandten Denkmlern, 1962, G. Neckel and
H. Kuhn, eds., 4th ed. rev., Heidelberg: Winter.

Prose Edda:
Gylfaginning, Snorri Sturluson, Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning, 1982, A. Faulkes, ed., Oxford: Ox-
Skldskaparml, Snorri Sturluson, Edda: Skldskaparml, 1998, A. Faulkes, ed., 2 vols., London: Vi-
king Society.

Saxo:
Saxo Grammaticus, The History of the Danes, 1979, P. Fisher, trans., H.R. Ellis Davidson, ed., 2 vols.,
Cambridge: Brewer / Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield.
Saxonis Gesta Danorum. I: Text, 1931, J. Olrik and H. Rder, eds., Copenhagen: Levin & Munks-
gaard.
Skjaldedigtning: Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning, 1912, F. Jnsson, ed., Copenhagen: Gyldendal /

16
In Primary works: Skaldskaparml, p. 17; also Helgason 1944; Harris 2000.
104
Kristiania: Nordisk forlag, [version] B [vol.] I.
Sonatorrek: Skjaldevers, 1962, J. Helgason, ed. (Nordisk filologi A12). Copenhagen: Munksgaard /
Oslo: Dreyer / Stockholm: Norstedt, pp. 29-38.
Secondary works
Barnes, M., 2007, Rk-steinen noen runologiske og sprklige overveielser, Maal og minne, 2: 120-
132.
Bugge, S., 1910, Der Runenstein von Rk in stergtland, Schweden, M. Olsen, ed., with contributions
by A. Olrik and E. Brate, Stockholm: Hggstrm.
Clark Hall, J.R. & H.D. Meritt, 1962, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 4th ed. rev., Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Collinder, B., 1932-1934, Die urgermanischen lehnwrter im finnischen (Skrifter utgivna av Kungl.
Humanistiska Vetenskapssamfundet i Uppsala 28: 1), Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell; Leipzig:
Harrassowitz.
de Vries, J., 1956-1957, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 2 vols., (Grundriss der germanischen
Philologie 12/I-II), Berlin: de Gruyter.
Eckhardt, K.A., 1937, Irdische Unsterblichkeit: Germanischer Glaube an die Wiederverkrperung in
der Sippe, Weimar: H. Bhlau.
Eliade, M., 1959, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. W.R. Trask, New York:
Harper & Row. [French orig. 1949.]
Gade, K.E., 2006, Hr ... sonr ins but did Snorri know that? in: The Fantastic in Old Norse /
Icelandic Literature: Sagas and the British Isles, Preprint papers of the 13th International
Saga Conference, Durham and York, 6th12th August 2006, J. McKinnell, D. Ashurst, and D.
Kick, eds., Durham: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies of Durham University. I:
268-277.
Grnvik, O., 1983, Runeinnskrifte p Rk-steinen, Maal og minne, 3-4: 101-150.
Grnvik, O., 2003, Der Rkstein: ber die religise Bestimmung und das weltliche Schicksal eines
Helden aus der frhen Wikingerzeit (Osloer Beitrge zur Germanistik 33), Frankfurt am Main:
Lang.
Gntert, H., 1919, Kalypso: Bedeutungsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen auf dem Gebiet der indogerma-
nischen Sprachen, Halle a. S: Niemeyer.
Harris, J., 1994, A Nativist Approach to Beowulf: The Case of Germanic Elegy, in: Companion to
Old English Poetry, H. Aertsen and R. H. Bremmer, Jr., eds., Amsterdam: VUUP, pp. 45-62.
Harris, J., 1999, Gosgn sem hjlp til a lifa af Sonatorreki, in: Heiin minni: Greinar um for-
nar bkmenntir, H. Bessason and B. Hafsta, eds., Reykjavk: Heimskringla, pp. 47-70.
Harris, J., 2000, The Bllsta-Inscriptions and Old Norse Literary History, in: International Scandina-
vian and Medieval Studies in Memory of Gerd Wolfgang Weber, M. Dallapiazza, O. Hansen,
P. Meulengracht Srensen, and Y. S. Bonnetain, eds., Trieste: Parnaso, pp. 223-239.
Harris, J., 2006, Myth and Meaning in the Rk Inscription, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 2: 45-
109.
Harris, J., 2009, The Rk Stone through Anglo-Saxon Eyes, in: The Anglo-Saxons and the North:
Essays Reflecting the Theme of the 10th Meeting of the International Society of Anglo-
Saxonists in Helsinki, August 2001, M. Kilpi, L. Kahlas-Tarkka, J. Roberts, and O. Ti-
mofeeva, eds., Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, pp. 11-45.
Harris, J., forthcoming a, The Rk Inscription, l. 20, in: a festschrift comprising a special issue of
Mediaeval Scandinavia.
Harris, J., forthcoming b, Philology, Elegy, and Cultural Change, in: proceedings of a workshop on
Nordic civilization in the medieval world to appear in Gripla in 2009.
Helgason, J., 1944, Bllsta-inskriftens i grati, Arkiv fr nordisk filologi, 59: 159-162.
Hellquist, E., 1967, Svensk etymologisk ordbok, 3
rd
ed, Lund: Gleerups. [2nd ed. rev. 1939.]
Hfler, O., 1952, Der Runenstein von Rk und die germanische Individualweihe, (Germanisches
Sakralknigtum I), Tbingen: Niemeyer; Mnster: Bhlau.
105
Janda, M., 2000, Eleusis: Das indogermanische Erbe der Mysterien, (Innsbrucker Beitrge zur
Sprachwissenschaft 96), Innsbruck: Institut fr Sprachwissenschaft der Universitt Innsbruck.
Karsten, T.E., 1943, Finnar och germaner, Folkmlsstudier, 9-10: I-VIII, 1-260, 261-630.
Klystra, A.D., Hahmo, S.-L., Hofstra, T. and Nikkil, O., 1991-1996, Lexikon der lteren
germanischen Lehnwrter in den ostseefinnischen Sprachen, 2 vols., Amsterdam / Atlanta:
Rodopi.
Lnnroth, L., 1977, The Riddles of the Rk-Stone: A Structural Approach, Arkiv fr nordisk filologi,
92: 1-57.
Noreen, A., 1923, Altislndische und altnorwegische Grammatik, 4th ed. rev., Halle: Niemeyer.
ODonoghue, H., 2003, What has Baldr to do with Lamech? The Lethal Shot of a Blind Man in Old
Norse Myth and Jewish Exegetical Traditions, Medium vum, 72: 82-107.
Rdei, K., et al., 1986-1991, Uralisches etymologisches Wrterbuch, 3 vols., Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
von Friesen, O., 1920, Rkstenen: Runstenen vid Rks kyrka Lysings hrad stergtland, Stockholm:
K. Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien.
Wessn, E., 1958, Runstenen vid Rks kyrka, (Kungl. vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademiens
handlingar, filologisk-filosofiska serien 5), Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.
Widmark, G., 1992, Varfr ristade Varin runor? Tankar kring Rkstenen, Saga och Sed: Kungl.
Gustav Adolfs Akademiens rsbok 1992 [publ. 1993], pp. 25-43.
Widmark, G., 1993, Vamod eller Vmod, in: Nordiska orter och ord. Festskrift till Bengt Pamp p
65-rsdagen den 3 november 1993, Lund: Dialekt- och ortnamnsarkivet i Lund, pp. 210-212.
Widmark, G., 1997, Tolkningen som social konstruktion: Rkstenens inskrift, in: Runor och ABC.
Elva frelsningar frn ett symposium i Stockholm vre 1995, Steffan Nystrm, ed.,
Stockholm: Sllskapet Runica et Medivalia; Riksantikvariembetet; Stockholms
Medeltitidsmuseum, pp. 165-175.

Part III. Mythological continuities
between Africa and other
continents

109
Chapter 7. The emergence of the first
people from the underworld:

Another cosmogonic myth of a possible African origin

by Yuri Berezkin
1

Abstract: Among cosmogonic tales, the Emergence of the first people from the underworld (further:
EP) and the Earth-diver are spread across by far the largest areas of the globe. These tales seem to be
initially connected with different cultural traditions. The EP is typical for sub-Saharan Africa, Indo-
Pacific borderlands of Asia, Australia and Melanesia, South and Central America, southern part of
North America. Stories in question tell how people of all sexes and ages come out of the ground, rock,
tree trunk, etc. and spread across the earth. These stories should not be mixed up with tales about emer-
gence of the primeval couple (the latter are also predominantly characteristic for the Indo-Pacific world
but are less specific). The EP is unknown in Northern and Central Eurasia besides few texts (Nganasan,
Selkup) which speak about people growing out of the ground like grass. In sub-Saharan Africa the EP
is the only widespread anthropogenic myth and it can well form part of the primeval mythology known
to the first people migrated out of Africa. In South and South-East Asia the EP probably acquired addi-
tional details which were later brought to the Americas by the first migrants. 1) People who come out
of their original enclosure are menaced by monster (in Asia: Lushei, Wa, Kond; in America: Seneca,
Arikara, Lipan, Murato, Witoto, Wanka, Yurakare, Yabuti, Kamaiura, Toba, Kaduveo). 2) The way
from one part of the universe into another leads through a narrow opening; certain person or creature
sticks in it broking for ever the communication between the worlds (in Asia: Kond, Moi, Ma, Sre, Ban-
har, Visaya, Paivan; in America: Kiowa, Caddo, Seminole, Yaruro, Warao, Karia, Shuar, Mai Huna,
Witoto, Surui, Gavio, Zoro, Paresi, Caraja, Angaite, Mataco). 3) When people come from the under-
world, the two-headed creature sticks in the opening or is prevented from coming to earth (in New
Guinea and Asia: Medjprat, Moi, Ma, Sre, Banhar; in America: Mandan, Angaite). The areas of EP and
the Earth-diver myths only slightly overlap along their contact zones in North America and North-East
India. The Earth-diver is typical for Northern and Central Eurasia and for North America (mostly
northern and central areas of the continent), the American and the Asian versions having the same basic
structure. This tale probably emerged in South-Central Asia, elaborated in Southern Siberia and then
brought to the New World in Terminal Pleistocene. The differentiation of its American variants took
part on the place. In Terminal Pleistocene Early Holocene the bearers of the Agate Basin tradition
were probably familiar with this myth and brought it across American Subarctic.

1
Museum of Anthropology & Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint-
Petersburg, Russia.
110
The dispersal of modern man and the areal patterns of
folklore-mythological motifs
This paper uses as its main source the electronic catalogue of the folklore-
mythological motifs which contains information on the world distribution of about
1500 motifs and more than 40,000 Russian abstracts of particular texts.
2
Our Cata-
logue is not another general index of tale-types or motifs. It has not been created to
register broad narrative units, but with a particular aim to accumulate data relevant to
research on early migrations and prehistoric cultural contacts. Initially the problem of
the peopling of the New World was the focus of our studies. After 2003 when the
folklore and mythological materials from Western Eurasia and Africa were included,
even earlier periods of human history could be addressed. The major results of previ-
ous research (Berezkin 2002a 2009b only papers in English cited) are as follows.
In the late 1990s the computing of data on the areal distribution of about 1000
mythological motifs that were checked for the American Indians and the Eskimo
demonstrated the existence of two main sets of motifs. One of them was best repre-
sented in Amazonia and Guiana and another across the Plains and around the Great
Lakes. The mythologies of these regions proved to be the most different from each
other. As our database acquired world-wide dimensions, it became clear that these
American mythological complexes corresponded to the similar complexes in the Old
World. Some tendencies are especially apparent if we minimize the entropic effect
of the Western Eurasian fairy-tale and compute only cosmological and etiological
motifs that are only relatively rarely adopted into the fairy-tale to be introduced with it
to the new territories. These other tendencies can be better understood when we look
closely at the adventure motifs which have been adapted into the fairy-tale from more
archaic Eurasian folklore.
The folklore-mythological traditions that share the least number of motifs are
located in continental Eurasia, especially in Southern Siberia, and the other in Mela-
nesia, especially across New Guinea. The sets of motifs in Melanesia and Amazonia
are statistically identical. The North American mythologies are more similar to the
Southern Siberian ones than the South American mythologies. The traditions of the
southeast borderlands of Asia are also intermediate between continental Asian and
Melanesian complexes.
The two major sets of motifs of world mythology are referred to as the Conti-
nental Eurasian and the Indo-Pacific. The mythologies of sub-Saharan Africa are

2
See: http://www.ruthenia.ru/folklore/berezkin . Information from about 5500 publications in Ger-
manic, Slavic, Romance and Baltic-Finnish languages have been extracted and reorganized. For a list
of the motifs with English translations and for maps with the areal distribution of motifs see:
http://starling.rinet.ru/kozmin/tales/index.php?index=berezkin. The financial support was provided by
the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (projects 04-06-80238 and 07-06-00441-a), special pro-
grams of the Presidium of Russian Academy of Sciences Adaptation of peoples and cultures to envi-
ronmental changes... and Historical-cultural heritage and spiritual values of Russia and INTAS
project 05-10000008-7922.
Berezkin Chapter 7: First People from the Underworld
111
relatively poor in cosmological and etiological motifs. Because of this they stand not
far from the zero position between the two extremes but still nearer to the Indo-Pacific
than to the Continental Eurasian pole.

Fig. 7.1. The global distribution of the motif Shed skin as condition of immortality

Such a picture fits perfectly the Out-of-Africa scenario of the peopling of the
world by modern man suggested by geneticists and increasing supported by archae-
ologists. At about 60,000 BP groups of Homo sapiens, the so called beachcombers,
began to move along the coast of the Indian Ocean. In the Middle East this stream
split. Some groups continued their movement to the east till Australia and East Asia,
while others migrated in a northerly direction, eventually occupying the same part of
Eurasia where the Neanderthals lived before. There is evidence that Indo-Pacific my-
thology has preserved its African heritage with the discovery of links between tales
recorded in Africa, non-Aryan India, Southeast Asia and Australia. The distribution of
motifs Shed skin as condition of immortality (Fig. 7.1) and Suns children killed (Fig.
7.2) provide good illustrations. Texts related to the latter motif can be slightly re-
grouped according to different wording of the same theme: Person is tricked into kill-
ing his kin (Fig. 7.3).

112

Fig. 7.2. The global distribution of the motif Suns children killed

Fig. 7.3. The global distribution of the motif Person is tricked into killing his kin
113
In Continental Eurasia, the African mythology was largely lost. This might
have occurred soon after the peopling of the sub-glacial zone with its very different
environment when compared with their more tropical homeland and certainly during
the Late Glacial Maximum (LGM) when population density in Northern Eurasia de-
creased and those groups that successfully adapted themselves to the changed climatic
conditions underwent deep cultural transformation. All this contributed to the idio-
syncratic deviations from former tradition. This founder effect created a new mythol-
ogy that was very different from Indo-Pacific mythology. The population survived
during the LGM in the periglacial forest steppes of the southern half of Siberia includ-
ing the Angara and the Aldan basins, while the more northern tundra areas were
empty (Kuzmin & Keates 2005). Since about 18-19,000 BP when the acme of the
LGM was over, the Continental Eurasian set of motifs probably began to disseminate
thanks to the progressive expansion of surviving population. The approximate date of
18-19,000 BP as the beginning of the recovery in population growth from LGM
minimum population is based on the dating of the Dyuktai culture in Eastern and
Northeastern Siberia (Yi & Clark 1985: 10) and on the assessment of time for the re-
peopling of the Northeast Europe by human groups of probable Southern Siberian
origin (Pavlov 2009).
Mythology of Southeast Asia and its adjacent areas preserved its African roots
though it also went through a process of change during the Upper Pleistocene. In
comparison with African mythologies, the mythologies of the Indo-Pacific border-
lands of Asia are much richer and this enrichment had to take place between the initial
peopling of these territories by Homo sapiens and the beginning of the peopling of the
New World. During the Late Pleistocene era, the difference between the Indo-Pacific
and the Continental Eurasian complexes increased. At about 15,000-12,000 BP both
sets of motifs were brought to the New World and mixed there. The Indo-Pacific
complex became predominant in South and Central America while the Continental
Eurasian complex was mainly found in North America, especially to the east of the
Rockies. The mixing of the two complexes might have initially begun in Siberia since
groups from East Asia probably took part in its peopling after the LGM.
The sound part of our hypothesis is the assumption that 60,000 BP, i.e. before
the modern humans migrated to Asia, language had developed enough to retell stories
about mythical beings and primeval ancestors. The global patterns in the distribution
of the motifs provide strong evidence in favor of such a conclusion. The mythology of
the first out-of-Africa migrants was not especially developed: e.g. seven to nine dif-
ferent explanations of the mortal nature of man, some tales about the Sun and the
Moon, possibly some simple ideas about the Milky Way, the Pleiades and the Belt of
Orion, and animal stories. The core of all adventure stories which are now widespread
in Africa were probably brought there later from Asia.
I did not initially consider the cosmogonic tale of the emergence of the first
people from the underworld as having an African origin. It seemed that the plot of this
tale was too simple to exclude its independent formation. However, the mapping of
the tale makes the hypothesis of its multiple origin unlikely (Fig. 7.4).
114

Fig. 7.4. The global distribution of the motif People from the Underworld.
Negative correlation between the Emergence myth
and the Earth-diver myth
In order to demonstrate this, I will begin with another cosmogonic myth, the Earth-
diver, which is definitely considered as a major (if not the major) tale of the Continen-
tal Eurasian complex. The Earth-diver is known in Northern Eurasia, North America
and South Asia. All South Asian traditions are different from the others because they
describe the adventures of the personages in the Lower world while the descent there
is only briefly mentioned. In Eurasian and American traditions the position of the sto-
ryteller is always in the Middle world and no adventures in the Lower world are de-
scribed. What is crucial for the plot in Northern Eurasian, America and selects
variants recorded there are other factors including who, how many times, and on
whose initiative do they dive into the water to bring mud up from the bottom. We can
conclude, therefore, that the American versions are derived from the Siberian ones
and not directly from the South Asian variants.
In Europe to the west of Middle Volga area the Earth-diver is probably of re-
cent origin. It was influenced by the Manichean ideology in Southern Siberia and
brought to the northern Balkans by nomads. The local Manicheans, i.e. the Bogomils,
incorporated the Earth-diver into their thinking and due to this the plot reached as far
as the Alps and the Baltic. In the Volga Ural area and across most of Siberia the
115
original pre-Manichean and the Manichean-influenced traditions coexist (Napolskih
2008).
The Earth-diver is absent in Northeast Asia and among the Aleuts and the Es-
kimo, the Eyak and those Athabaskans who live in western and southwestern Alaska.
Therefore, it could hardly have been spread to the New World during the recent mil-
lennia and must have been brought there when the ice-sheets still existed. Across the
American Subarctic it spread from the south with the groups who had been pioneering
this areas after the melting of the ice-sheets, which explains the uniformity of all local
versions, both the Athabascan and the Algonkian ones. The closest parallels to the
Siberian versions are found among the Californian Penuti and the Middle Missouri
Sioux groups. There are only small drops of Earth-diver in Latin America, the
southern most being the Siona and Secoya version in Columbian Amazonia (Berezkin
2007a).
Even though the Earth-diver and the Emergence myth are the most widespread
cosmogonic tales in the world, it is remarkable that they are not shared by most tradi-
tions and never incorporated into the same stories although logically they do not ex-
clude each other. These myths slightly overlap only along the frontier zones of their
areal distribution in South Asia and in eastern North America. I could find but two or
three cases of the Emergence myth in continental Eurasia and even these are vague
and either reduced to a phrase about people who grew from the earth like grass or
unclear concerning the very existence of the motif (as in Iranian tradition reflected in
Zend-Avesta).
Specific links between the American and the Asian
and Melanesian cases of the Emergence myth
When I speak about the Emergence myth, I am not referring to the simple motif of the
primeval couple who came to earth to generate the first humans, but the more peculiar
stories which tell how people of both sexes and all ages emerged from the ground,
rock, tree trunk, bamboo stem, etc. and spread across the earth. Stories about the
emergence of a human couple who comes out of a primeval enclosure together with
different species of animals can also be included since here the primeval underworld
dwellers are not clearly differentiated between real people and real animals and the
important point is the multitude of the beings who ascend to the earth. The primeval
couple motif itself is also predominantly characteristic of the Indo-Pacific world but
is less specific. Stories which describe how people descend from the sky or how game
animals (not in company with the people) ascend from out of the earth should be
treated separately, but some of them share specific details with the real Emergence
from the underworld tales (see below Warao and Angaite stories).
The Emergence myth is especially popular in New Guinea and western Mela-
nesia. A Highland Papuan version serves as an example.
116
Dugum Dani. Ancestors of all the kin groups as well as all animals, birds and invertebrates
came out of the cave Huwainmo. After that most of the living creatures decided to acquire
their zoomorphic appearance but people remained anthropomorphic (Heider 1970: 141).
The hypothesis of the common origin of all circum-Pacific versions both in
Asia and in America is confirmed by the existence of additional peculiar details
linked to the main plot. These details are not known either in Africa, or in Australia.
Consequently they had to appear after the peopling of Australia (45-40,000 BP), but
before the beginning of the peopling of America (ca. 15,000 b.p). The details in ques-
tion (Fig. 7.5) are as follows: 1) people who come out of their original enclosure are
menaced by a monster (in Asia: Lushei, Wa, Kond; in America: Seneca, Arikara,
Lipan, Murato, Witoto, Wanka, Yurakare, Yabuti, Kamaiura, Toba, Kaduveo); 2) the
way from one part of the universe into another leads though a narrow opening; a cer-
tain person or creature blocks forever the communication between the worlds (in
Asia: Kond, Moi, Ma, Sre, Banhar, Visaya, Paivan; in America: Kiowa, Caddo,
Seminole, Yaruro, Warao, Karia, Shuar, Mai Huna, Witoto, Surui, Gavio, Zoro,
Paresi, Caraja, Angaite, Mataco); 3) when people come from the underworld, the two-
headed creature gets stuck in the opening or is prevented from coming to earth (in
New Guinea and Asia: Medjprat, Moi, Ma, Sre, Banhar; in America: Mandan, An-
gaite).

Fig. 7.5. The global distribution of the motif The Way from One World to Another
Goes through a Narrow Opening.

117
Here are several short abstracts of such texts.

Mejprat (New Guinea Papuans). Two hunters pursued an opossum and heard some noise from
trunk of a mango. They cut the trunk open and people began to climb out. The last to appear
was the two-headed man but the hunters pushed him back (Elmberg 1968, no. 30: 269, 274-
275).
Lushais (Northeast India). People lived in the underworld. The kings brother following his
hunting dog entered a cavern and ascended to the earth. He returned to call other people but
when they arrived near the surface a large serpent stopped their progress and they saw a great
stone kept up merely by a bird. The kings brother killed the serpent and the people emerged
into the light. The king discovered that he forgot magic objects and returned to fetch them.
Before he got back the bird let the stone fall and the king with his wife remained underground.
The kings wife decided that the kings brother was responsible for the misfortune and cursed
him and all the people to suffer diseases (Shakespear 1909: 392-393).
Kond (Middle India). From the very place where Nirantali goddess herself and human beings
were born emerged a man-eating bullock. When it charged Nirantali, she hit it on the head
with the wood and the bullock fell back into the pit. The door broke and the bullock stuck in
the opening, so the other half of mankind had to be born elsewhere. Parts of the bullocks
body Nirantali transformed into luminaries, plants and other objects (Elwin 1954, no. 12:
432).
Moi (border of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) Ancestors of the Moi lived in the underworld
and decided to ascend to the earth through an opening. The prettiest women remained behind.
Monstrous two-headed bullock stuck in the opening and died there blocking the exit. Thats
because there are few pretty women among the Moi (Besnard 1907: 87).
Seneca (New York State). The first people came forth from the crest of a mountain. The base
of the mountain was surrounded by a huge serpent and it consumed all the people except two
children. They made a bow and arrow dipped in poison by which they were able to kill the
serpent who in its agony threw up the skeletal remains of the devoured people. These bones
turned into stones. From the two children the new race descended (Stone 1841: 8-10 in Ar-
chambault 2006: 6).
Mandan (Middle Missouri, North Dakota). Heros mother-in-law who had buffalo nature
opened a hole in the ground and the buffalo came out of it. The hero pushed back those of
them who had two heads (Beckwith 1938, no. 4: 76).
Arikara (Middle Missouri, South Dakota; many versions). Buffalo looked like humans with
horns. They struck a hollow cotton wood tree with a pole, multitude of people who lived un-
derground came out. Buffalo killed and ate them. The first to come was Cut-Nose who re-
turned into the hollow and again helped the buffalo to lure the people out of the ground. Once
a youth escaped, met the wife of the buffalos chief. She fell in love with him, told him to
make bows and arrows and give them to people when they would come out. The buffalo-
people ran away, turned into real buffaloes. They had with them pieces of human meat that
turned into part of their own flesh. This is the reason why hunting buffalo the Arikara do not
eat the meat under the shoulder (Dorsey 1904, no. 13: 40-44).
Warao (Orinoco Delta; many versions). People lived in the sky. Hunters arrow fell to the
ground, made an opening, and through it the earth below was seen. People began to descend
from the sky by a rope. A pregnant woman was stuck in the opening blocking it forever. She
turned into the Morning Star (Wilbert 1970, no. 101, 102, 103, 141, 145, 146: 216-220, 293-
294, 307-311).
Yabuti (Rondonia, Brazil). People lived underground and began to come out through an open-
ing. Cannibal bat killed and ate them. Kabeb discovered the hole, descended into it, found
118
there a stone enclosure with people inside it. He broke the enclosure, people emerged to the
earth and became to speak different languages (Maldi 1991: 256-257).
Surui (Rondonia, Brazil). Palop in guise of a wretched old man visited the hut of Surui ances-
tors, a girl rejected him. He came again as a handsome youth, transformed the house into the
rock, people inside it called for help. Different birds tried to open a hole but broke their axes
(i.e. their beaks). The woodpecker succeeded. People came out but a pregnant woman with an
immense belly was stuck in the hole. She turned into bee, the ancestors who remained behind
her could not come out and died (Mindlin 1995, no. 7: 62-65).
Caduveo (Mato Grosso, Brazil). Somebody was stealing fish from the Gods trap. His dogs
could not find the beast. He sent some birds after it, one of them directed him to the hole in
the ground. The God pulled out the people and animals but the beast devoured them. God
killed the beast and divided its fat between different animal species (Wilbert & Simoneau
1990, no. 2: 21-22).
Angaite (Chaco). People lived in the sky and decided to climb down to earth by a rope. A
two-headed man stuck in the opening and blocked it forever (Cordeu 1973, no. 2: 201).
The Emergence myth in Africa
In Africa, the Emergence myth is the most widespread story which explains how the
earth became peopled by human beings. The motif of the first people living in the sky
is also widely known but the descent from the sky is rarely described in any detail.
Here are some examples of the typical African variants of the Emergence from
the underworld.
Bushmen. The depression of Lwe goes down to the bottom of the world. All people and
animals lived there and the space was scarce. First people pushed out to earth the animals who
dispersed across the country. Then they began to quarrel and pushed out each other. Living in-
side the hole people were immortal but began to die after coming to earth (Dornan 1925: 171).
Sandawe. Natunda emerged from a crack in the trunk of a big baobab. He widened the open-
ing and out came first a hyena, then a brebis antilope, then a woman with children, then a
man, then animals of all kind, then many different people (Millroth 1965: 43-44).
Owambo. People lived inside trunk of a tree. They called woodpecker for help, it pecked open
a hole, people came out to live on earth (Kuusi 1969, no. 1: 67, 73).
Herrero. The ancestors of the Herrero together with their cattle came out of the trunk of the
Combretacee tree. The bushmen, goats and sheep came out of a hole in the ground (Baumann
1936: 225; Parrinder 1967: 39).
Santrokofi. The ancestors ascended from the Underworld though a hole at Nkonya mountain.
The first to appear was a priest with his drum, then a warrior with his shield and sword, then
different men and women, When the priest saw his wife with another man, he struck him and
threw his drum back into the hole. Those who still were underground could not ascend any-
more (Debrunner 1969: 554-555).
There is also a Berber version from Maghreb. Although North African folklore is largely simi-
lar to Western Eurasian folklore, some etiological myths from this region demonstrate sub-
Saharan connections.
Berber. A man and a woman lived in the Underworld. They met each other, begot four boys
and four girls who also intermarried and multiplied. Boys and girls separately found openings
119
that lead to the earth and ascended, met each other and intermarried. One couple was wild, the
woman became teriel (witch) and the man a lion (Frobenius & Fox 1937: 49-57).
For comparison I will also add two Australian stories.
Dieri. Ground split open and the totem ancestors of the matrilineages came to the earth. For
some time they were lying under the sun, then turned into real people and dispersed across the
country (Berndt & Berndt 1964: 205).
Aranda. First women and after them men came out of the crack in a rock. The first man was a
favorite of the women, others killed him. He tried to ascend from the grave but they pierced
him with a spear and trampled the ground. Thats because the dead never revive (Strehlow
1947: 44-45).
Adventure tales of Continental Eurasian origin subse-
quently disseminated into Africa, but not into Austra-
lia
The abundance of Melanesian versions and the existence of Australian versions are
crucial arguments in favor of the African origin of the Emergence myth. As it was
told above, after (probably long after) the migration out-of-Africa there was an exten-
sive infiltration of Eurasian narratives into this continent. However, Australia since its
initial peopling was much more consistently isolated than Africa from Eurasia, espe-
cially after it was cut off from New Guinea by sea transgression in the Early Holocene
period. Should we have in the Old World only African and Asian cases of the Emer-
gence myth, the probability of the Asian origin of this motif would be about the same
as of its African origin. But the distribution of the motif all along the African Aus-
tralian arch (besides the Arabian Iranian gap for which data are scarce or completely
absent) makes it more probable that it spread with the first groups of Homo sapiens.
To illustrate the opposite areal pattern of the motifs distribution in the Asian
core (Australia being empty), I suggest several maps. They show the distribution of
adventure stories widely known across the world but not in Australia, with Africa and
South America also poorly represented. I guess that these stories emerged as part of
the Continental Eurasian complex and spread across the world after the LGM.
The first one is the False wife (Fig. 7.6). In Eurasia and North America this is
the most popular tale-producing motif represented by numerous regional variants. All
the variants, however, share the basic core. According to it a bad (ugly, of low de-
scent, etc.) woman or female demonic creature disguised as a woman takes the place
of the mans wife or bride (rare: female relation). In some of the South American ver-
sions the imposter is a male trickster. Several gaps in Eurasian distribution of the mo-
tif are probably due to the shortcomings of my database and will be addressed in the
future but the absence of the False wife across extensive areas of Central and South
America is certain. Moreover, even though some sources on Australian folklore have
still also not been processed, the motif is definitely absent in the Australian tale-type
index (Waterman 1987). In Africa the motif is less popular than in Eurasia and the
120
existing versions have detailed Asian and European parallels.

Fig. 7.6. The global distribution of the motif The False Wife.

Another motif is Kind and unkind girls (Fig. 7.7). The Northern Eurasian and
extremely rare American versions are the most diversified and incorporated into the
actual mythological beliefs. All other versions are more standard and incorporated
into the fairy-tale, while no versions at all are recorded in Australia.
Siberian and North American folklore contains the most elaborated cases of
the Magic flight motif with the standard selection of objects thrown behind by the fu-
gitives and transformed into mighty obstacles before the pursuer (Fig. 7.8). These ob-
jects are whetstone which turns into a mountain or rock and a comb which turns into a
thicket. The farther we go from Siberia, the less standard and logical becomes the
choice of the objects and the rarer the motif itself. The Atalanta type version of Magic
flight (Fig. 7.9) looks like an early and amorphous initial variant, a prototype of the
more elaborated versions which eventually emerged in Northern Eurasia. The Ata-
lanta type is used in the flight from pursuer episodes on different continents but least
of all in Northern Eurasia where it could be pushed out by the more developed motif
of objects transformed into mighty obstacles. The selection of the whetstone and
comb as the preferable objects to be thrown is the last step in this development.

121

Fig. 7.7. The global distribution of the motif Kind and unkind girls.

Fig. 7.8. The global distribution of the motif Magic flight.
122

Fig. 7.9. The global distribution of the Atalanta type version of Magic flight.
Research perspectives
All the research realized during the last decade demonstrated that the mapping of the
motifs is a powerful tool for reconstructing the distant past and that the world distribu-
tion of folklore-mythological motifs fits almost perfectly major patterns of migrations
in deep prehistory which have been reconstructed by populational genetics and ar-
chaeology. Are there any cases of motifs distribution which still cannot be ex-
plained?
There is one case for which no particular historic scenario could still be found.
A half a dozen rather enigmatic links exist between sub-Saharan African and North
American mythologies. One of them is related to the distribution of motifs which ex-
plain the origin of death (most of the non-African cases of the Originator of death the
first sufferer are recorded in North America and only one in South America, Fig.
7.10). Another link is the motif of Waters give way (when person comes to the water
body, waters give way in front of him or her and he or she reaches the other bank
walking along the dry ground; Fig. 7.11). The major area where this motif is found
includes Africa and adjacent part of Asia from Near East to India but a separate zone
of its distribution is in North America. The most interesting parallels, however, are
connected with trickster stories. The two regions where the trickster stories are the
most popular and elaborated are sub-Saharan Africa and North America with an adja
123

Fig. 7.10. The global distribution of the motif Originator of death the first sufferer.

Fig. 7.11. The global distribution of the motif Waters give way.

124
cent part in Northeast Asia, and these share some relatively rare (especially in com-
parison with half a Globe wide distribution of Jackal / Fox / Coyote) zoomorphic
forms of the Trickster (Spider and Hare / Rabbit) and some particular plots (e.g. the
Bungling host). The number of such parallels is not so great to exclude independent
invention, but the topic deserves further investigation.
References
Archambault, J., 2006, Native views of origins: Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 3, Environ-
ments, Origins, and Population, D.M. Ubelaker, volume editor, Washington: Smithsonian In-
stitution, pp. 4-15.
Baumann, H., 1936, Schpfung und Urzeit des Menschen im Mythus der Afrikanischen Vlker, Berlin:
Dieter Reimer, 435 S.
Beckwith, M., 1938, Mandan-Hidatsa Myths and Ceremonies, Memoires of the American Folk-Lore
Society, G.E. Stecherd [i.e. Stechert] & Co. (New York), vol. 32.
Berezkin, Y., 2002a, Some results of comparative study of American and Siberian mythologies: appli-
cations for the peopling of the New World, Acta Americana (Stockholm Uppsala) 10 (1): 5-
28.
Berezkin, Y., 2002b, Review of Thomas A. Gregor & Donald Tuzin, eds. Gender in Amazonia and
Melanesia. An Exploration of the Comparative Method. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2001, p. 392, Latin American Indian Literatures Journal 18 (1):
84-91.
Berezkin, Y., 2004, Southern Siberian - North American Links in Mythology, Acta Americana (Stock-
holm - Uppsala) 12 (1): 5-27.
Berezkin, Y., 2005a, The assessment of the probable age of Eurasian-American mythological links,
Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia (Novosibirsk) 1 (21): 146-151.
Berezkin, Y., 2005b, Continental Eurasian and Pacific Links in American Mythologies and Their Pos-
sible Time-depth, Latin American Indian Literatures Journal 21 (2): 99-115.
Berezkin, Y., 2006, Folklore-Mythological Parallels among Peoples of Western Siberia, Northeastern
Asia, and the Lower Amur Primorye Region, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 3 (27):
112-122.
Berezkin, Y., 2006, The cosmic hunt: variants of a Siberian North-American myth, Folklore (Tartu)
31: 79-100.
Berezkin, Y., 2007a, Earth-diver and emergence from under the earth: cosmological tales as an
evidence in favor of the heterogenic origins of American Indians, Archaeology, Ethnology &
Anthropology of Eurasia (Novosibirsk) 4 (32): 110-123.
Berezkin, Y., 2007b, Dwarfs and cranes. Baltic Finnish mythologies in Eurasian and American per-
spective (70 years after Yri Toivonen), Folklore (Tartu) 36: 75-96.
Berezkin, Y., 2009a, Out of Africa and further along the coast: African - South Asian - Australian
mythological parallels, Cosmos 23, 1: 3-28.
Berezkin, Y., 2009b, Why Are People Mortal? World Mythology and the Out-of-Africa Scenario,
Ancient Human Migrations: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ed. by P.N. Peregrine and M.
Feldman, Salt Lake City: Utah University Press (in press).
Berezkin, Y., 2009c, Thinking about death from the very beginning. African origins of some mytho-
logical motifs, Proceedings of the International Conference on Comparative Mythology (Bei-
jing, May 11-13, 2006), Beijing: Beijing University Press (in press).
Berndt, R.M. & Berndt, C.H., 1964, The World of the First Australians. An introduction to the tradi-
tional life of the Australian Aborigines, London: Angus and Robertson.
Besnard, M.H., 1907, Les populations Moi du Darlac, Bulletin de lEcole Franaise dExtrme-Orient
125
7 (1-2): 61-86.
Cordeu, E.J., 1973. Textos mticos de los Angait (Chennesma) y Sanapana, Scripta Ethnologica 1
(1): 199-234.
Debrunner, H.W., 1969, Gottheit und Urmensch bei den Togo-Restvlkern, Anthropos 63 (3-4): 549-
560.
Dornan, S.S., 1925, Pygmies & Bushmen of the Kalahari, London: Seeley, Service & Co..
Dorsey, G.A., 1904, Traditions of the Arikara. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Publication no. 17.
Elmberg, J.E., 1968, Balance and Circulation. Aspects of Tradition and Change among the Mejprat of
Irian Barat, Stockholm: The Ethnographic Museum.
Elwin, V., 1954, Tribal Myths of Orissa, Bombay: Oxford University Press.
Frobenius, L. & Fox, D.C., 1937, African Genesis. Folk Tales and Myths of Africa, New York: Stack-
pole Sons.
Heider, K.G., 1970, The Dugum Dani. A Papuan Culture in the Highland of West New Guinea, New
York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
Kuusi, M., 1969, The woodpecker that helped people out of the tree, Temenos, Studies in Comparative
Religion 4: 67-75.
Kuzmin, Y.V., & Keates, S.G., 2005, Siberia at the Last Glacial Maximum: continuity or discontinuity
of human populations?, Severnaia Patsifika kulturnye adaptatsii v kontse pleistotsena i
golocena [Northern Pacific: Cultural Adaptations in the End of the Pleistocene and Holocene],
Magadan: Severny Mezhdunarodny Universitet, pp. 84-87.
Maldi, D., 1991, O complexo cultural do Marico: sociedades indgenas dos Ros Branco, Colorado e
Mequens, afluentes do Mdio Guapor, Boletim do Museu Paraense Emlio Goeldi, Antro-
pologia 7 (2): 209-269.
Millroth, B., 1965, Lyuba: Traditional Religion of the Sukuma, Uppsala: University of Uppsala.
Mindlin, B., 1995, Unwritten Stories of the Suru Indians of Rondonia, University of Texas Austin,
Institute of Anthropology, Latin American Studies.
Napolskih, V., 2008, Motiv o nyrianii za zemlei v balkano-slavianskoi apokrifichekoi traditsii i rannia
istoria slavian [The earth-diver motif in the Balcan-Slavic apocriphic tradition and the early
history of Slavs], Etnologia na Prostranstvo [Ethnology of Space], part 2. Sofia: Rod, pp.
109-115.
Parrinder, G., 1967, African Mythology, London: Paul Hamlyn.
Pavlov, P.Y., 2009, Paleolit severo-vostoka Yevropy [The Paleolithic of the Northeast of Europe].
Dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences. Defended at Saint-Petersburg, In-
stitute for the History of Material Culture, 25 March 2009.
Shakespear, J., 1909, Folk-tales of the Lushais and their neighbours, Folk-Lore 20 (4): 388-420.
Stone, W.L., 1841, Life and times of Red-Jacket, or Sa-go-ye-wat-ha; being the sequel to the history of
the Six nations, New York and London: Wiley and Putnam.
Strehlow, T.G.H., 1947, Aranda Traditions, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Waterman, P.P., 1987, A Tale-Type Index of Australian Aboriginal Oral Narratives. Helsinki:
Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia.
Wilbert, J., 1970, Folk Literature of the Warao Indians. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center
Publications:, University of California..
Wilbert, J. & Simoneau, K., 1990, Folk Literature of the Caduveo Indians, Los Angeles: UCLA Latin
American Center Publications, University of California.
Yi, S., & Clark, G., 1985, The Dyuktai Culture and New World origins, Current Anthropology 26 (1):
1-7.

127
Chapter 8. Myths, indigenous culture,
and traditions as tools in reconstruct-
ing contested histories

The Ife-Modakeke example

by Bukola Adeyemi Oyeniyi
1

Abstract: Customs and traditions continue to be an invaluable source of information for historians of
the African past. A vast amount of information and explanations on complex African issues can be
found in these aspects of African culture. This paper deals with the Ife-Modakeke conflict, especially
the determination of the main contending issue in the conflict i.e. the determination of whether Mo-
dakeke was established as a ward in Ile-Ife or a separate town entire of Ile-Ife. It examines the function
of Yoruba customs and traditions in the reconstruction of the intention of Ooni Abeweila, the Ife king
that established Modakeke, and the various interpretations given his intentions during and after his
reign. The paper analyzes the kind of information and explanations cultural practices like Ogun-Pipin,
(inheritance sharing), Ile-Mimu (division or sharing of lands among family members), Oko-Yiya (divi-
sion or sharing of farmland among family members), Ise-Yiya (division or sharing of occupation
among family members), etc, could offer when the event that led to the establishment of Modakeke
occurred, and in secondary sources, on the Ife-Modakeke conflicts of the later days. Finally, the paper
considers the kinds of questions historians must ask in order to make customs and traditions useful
tools in explaining, reconstructing, and understanding a peoples past.
Introduction
Using the Ife-Modakeke conflict, this paper examines the use of indigenous culture in
resolving contested histories. Ile-Ife, the famed cradle of the Yoruba people, has been
described as the political, religious and cultural headquarters of Yorubaland (Ade-
Ajayi & Akintoye 1980: 281). However, between the 15th and 16th century, the an-
cient city lost its political power to Old-Oyo and was never able to recover even when

1
Redeemers University, Ibadan, Nigeria.
128
Old-Oyo fell in the 19th century. Modakeke, as a community, owes its existence to
the collapse of the Old-Oyo, especially the internecine wars between other Yoruba
communities in their bids to fill the leadership vacuum created by the fall of Old-Oyo
(Oguntomisin & Falola 1992: 328). As a people, the Modakeke were the displaced
Yoruba-speaking people who fled from the wars and settled in Ile-Ife from 1800. As
Samuel Johnson noted, they were initially well-received. Yet no sooner had they set-
tled down when their initial joyful acceptance transformed into open hostilities. The
situation was so grave that Ooni Abegunle Abeweila, the king of Ile-Ife, physically
separated the two peoples: the displaced people were given a place, called Modakeke,
and invested one Wingbolu, obviously their leading figure, as the Ogunsuwa (Baale)
of Modakeke (Oyeniyi 2003: 710). The issue came to a head when, in 1846, war
broke-out between the Modakeke and their Ife hosts.
The outcome of the 1846 war was grave for the Ife, as they lost the war. Not
only were they enslaved by the Modakeke, Ile-Ife was also set on fire. Consequently,
Ife people fled among other places to Isoya, Ipetumodu, Araromi, Oke-Igbo (Ogun-
tomisin & Falola 1992: 326). From 1846 when the conflict began to 1999 when the
last episode of the conflict played out, inter-group relations between the Ife and Mo-
dakeke were characterized by mutual recriminations, open conflicts, and the wanton
destruction of lives and property.
Competing explanations have been offered by scholars for the Ife-Modakeke
conflict. Samuel Johnson, who pioneered Yoruba study, noted that the causa beli was
the deposition from Ibadan of Maye Okunade, an Ife-born war veteran and the first
Baale of Ibadan, by the Oyo in the camp. Ibadan, another Yoruba town, had existed as
a small market-village before the 19th century wars. It however developed into a big
city when warriors from different parts of Yorubaland converged on it as a war-camp,
especially in their bids to repel the attack of the Fulani Jihadist from Ilorin. Maye
Okunade emerged as the head of Ibadan after he successfully led an assault on another
Yoruba town Owu. Okunade was described as an irritable terror who derived much
pleasure from victimizing and deriding the Oyo as a homeless and disgraceful people.
He was given to sudden bursts of anger and violence, most of which were not pre-
ceded by any rational thought (Samuel Johnson 1920: 90).
On one occasion, Okunade beheaded a Oyo soldier over a minor squabble the
Oyo soldier was having with an Amejiogbe, an Ijebu soldier. Without probing into
what had transpired between them, Okunade, in his characteristic manner, beheaded
the Oyo soldier who was said to be reprimanding the Amejiogbe over a commonly
used ground for refuse disposal. Other Oyo soldiers in the camp, fearing for their
lives, ganged-up, fought and expelled Okunade from Ibadan. Attempts to restore
Okunade with a coalition between the Ile-Ife and Ijebu ended in a fiasco, since they
lost the war and Okunade was killed (Oguntomisin & Falola 1992: 326).
Other accounts of the initial cause of the war were that the Modakeke, owing
to their strategic importance in Ile-Ife, had become unruly. They had started behaving
as hosts rather than guests. Prior to their arrival, Ile-Ife was said to have had no stand-
ing army; hence, the new entrants formed the bulk of its first army (Horton1973: 125).
Oyeniyi Chapter 8: Reconstructing Contested Histories
129
In addition, their coming in Ile-Ife put the ancient city on the road to economic pros-
perity, as the displaced were said to be good farmers and hunters and that the Ife
chiefs were fighting among themselves over the displaced people. Realizing their stra-
tegic importance, the displaced people became unruly, thereby, warranting a change
of attitude by the Ife people (Ade-Ajayi & Akintoye1980: 286).
More pivotal to the current contestation of the conflict was the need to deter-
mine the place of Modakeke in Ile-Ife. On the one hand, as the Modakeke were
known to say, it was the intention of the Ooni who gave them Modakeke to make
them become independent of Ile-Ife. The Ife people, on the other hand, insisted, as
they have always done since the death of Ooni Abeweila, that the kings intention was
for Modakeke to be a ward of Ile-Ife. Inability to decide and agree on this has polar-
ized the two communities and has lead to other unresolved issues such as the Isakole
or rent-payment (between 1920 and 1978) and the local government council head-
quarters (between 1956 and 1999) (Albert 2001:9).
Faced with these protracted contestations and the absolute lack of records of
the kings intentions; how do we reconstruct and determine the place of Modakeke as
conceived by the Ife king who established it? Without doubt, the wanton destruction
of lives and property that have followed attempts to repel Modakekes independence
by the Ife and Modakekes refusal to be classified as one of the wards in Ile-Ife would
have been avoided if these issues were resolved.
As argued in this paper, indigenous culture, that includes myths, folklore, leg-
ends, day-to-day cultural practices which a particular people believe to be true about
themselves, the world around them and the general course of events, has an important
place in reconstructing contested histories, such as with the Ife-Modakeke conflicts.
Indigenous culture is borne-out of real events. They encapsulate a peoples historical
realities that possess symbolic meanings, which, through regular use, have become
transformed and embodied in concrete genres. When such events are carried over
from one generation to another, they assume the force of customs, traditions, cultural
practices, etc.
One general characteristic of indigenous culture is that it is not formally
taught. It is nevertheless well known and adopted by an entire population of a particu-
lar area. For instance, among the Yoruba, proverbs, idioms, epigrammatic expressions
and their various interpretations, hidden meanings and expressions are mostly not
taught, but are generally acquired in the process of growing up. As a normal Yoruba
child develops, the child acquires these cultural expressions as integral part of his or
her identity as a Yoruba person.
Indigenous culture is both endogenous and exogenous to humans. It develops
from peoples interactions with themselves as well as with their environment. In so far
as these remain inalienable qualities of indigenous culture, it could be regarded as a
strategic way in which a peoples past is preserved. In other words, myths, traditions,
indigenous practices, in so far as they embody a peoples way of life, can be regarded
as records of their histories. They are therefore a pool of vital resources for historical
reconstruction, especially where written or oral testimonies are lacking or are the sub-
130
ject of controversy.
Sadly, the use of indigenous culture eludes scholars, since the majority of
scholars considers indigenous culture as barbaric, unscientific, and therefore should
not have any place in historical reconstructions. This is not to say that indigenous cul-
tures and myths have not been used in historical reconstructions, it is however to un-
derscore the fact that their use, so far, have been limited. For instance, earlier in the
development of African History, Kenneth Dike, Ade-Ajayi, and others pioneered the
use of oral accounts to establish the existence of history in Africa before the colonial
intrusion. Even at this time, oral accounts rather than cultural practices as a whole
remained the focus. Indigenous culture, like mythology, cultural practices, and oral
renditions were never considered as adjuncts to either written sources or archival re-
cords. The general practice was to regard anything not found in the records as devoid
of any historical value. In the 1960s and the 1970s, after the pioneering efforts of
Kenneth Dike (1965), Ade-Ajayi (1965) and others, the use of oral accounts in his-
torical reconstructions have been neglected. This is more obvious in the general trend
of undergraduate and graduate long essays, theses and dissertations, which tend to
glorify written records in an obtuse manner.
This has had a negative impact on the use of indigenous cultures in developing
historical reconstructions, especially in Africa, as the role of historical scholarship in
nation-building has receded to the background. Owing to this, most of the histories, so
far reconstructed, have become submerged in new controversies. How many of these
histories are abound today and are being passed from generation to generation?
No less criticism accompanies the use of oral tradition, myths, and cultural
practices in historical writings. Like other human activities, cultural practices are dy-
namic. This position holds that culture is dynamic and capable of being adapted and
interpreted to suit particular purposes. Again, the fact that cultural issues are undocu-
mented, but passed from one generation to another make it susceptible to manipula-
tion, embellishment and other human factors. While not discounting any of these and
other arguments on the limitations of the use of culture in historical reconstruction, it
must be noted that indigenous culture is systemic in nature. It has both a nucleus and a
periphery. More often than not, at the nucleus remains the core of the practice. This
core, on the one hand, is unnoticed and hidden to sight. Being thus, the core takes
enormous time to yield to changes. On the other hand, the periphery is open and
yields to change almost unnoticeably. One way of conceptualizing this process is to
view it as a person travelling a long distance with layovers at different points in their
journey. As the traveler progresses from one layover point to the other, what he
thinks, feels and says about the journey takes on progressively greater historical sig-
nificance, thus rendering what occasioned the journey in the first place as less impor-
tant. By the time the wayfarer reaches the end of the journey, the story has taken on a
life of its own and the facts of the original event have become almost irrelevant.
In yet another sense, it is not very different from a football match. The ulti-
mate aim is to score goals. However if a goal comes may be a story for another day.
Yet on game day, no coach would tolerate a player who left the task of scoring goals
131
and focused on the task of dribbling others, although one inexorably leads to the
other. Understanding the core of any cultural practice would therefore help the re-
searcher understand the primary purpose of the practice. As the various examples
used in this study shall show, indigenous culture, like other human phenomenon, can
be influenced internally as well as from its environment. For instance, change in any
culture could result from its internal mechanisms as well as being a response to exter-
nal contacts. European contacts in Africa have had long historical roots, but both
slavery and colonialism have impacted on Africa in a myriad of ways. Some of the
changes wrought by both experiences are both endogenous as well as exogenous.
In relation to the Yoruba, the nineteenth-century Yoruba war not only led to
the incorporation of Yoruba nations into the vortex of colonialism, but also affected
valued Yoruba cultures and institutions that gave expressions to these cultures. Politi-
cal control, as a result of the 19th century Yoruba war, changed dramatically. Socie-
ties, for the first time in Yorubaland, arose and developed new political arrangements
that had no historical roots. A notable example is Ibadan, with its unique socio-
political arrangement that saw the emergence of two distinct lines of leadership, one
military and the other civil. Another development worth mentioning here is the fact
that indigenous practices like among other things, human sacrifices and pawnship
gave way as colonial administration instituted rules that considered such practices as
obsolete and not amenable to the colonial system. In all these, changes were wrought
within the system through internal as well as external factors. In essence, although
cultural practices are dynamic, their cores values remain.
Among the Yoruba, as with other groups in Nigeria vis--vis Africa, there
were and are important cultural practices that characterized the Yoruba world,
whether in continental Africa or in the diasporas. These are some of the specific ele-
ments that constituted the Yoruba identity and help in sorting out the Yoruba from
other groups. They encapsulate and give meaning to the Yoruba world. They are inte-
gral parts that cannot be separated from the whole. In everyday living as well as in
different other life-forms and expressions, the Yoruba employs indigenous culture as
a concise way of giving expression to their views, preferences and interests. As a re-
sult, multi-layered meanings and interpretations of these cultures are abound within
the Yoruba world. In most cases, these meanings and interpretations are mutually un-
derstandable and/or intelligible only to the Yoruba. Hence, as a language of expres-
sion, Yoruba is not just a language; it is equally a tool, something like a lens, through
which the entire Yoruba world can be viewed.
As the Yoruba are known to say, Owe lesin Oro, Oro lesin Owe, BOro ba
sonu, Owe la fi n wa (Proverbs are like horses, when words are lost, we ride on prov-
erbs to locate them). The meanings and interpretations associated with this saying are
not limited to the occasions in which it was used, but are also associated with a time
loop. In the Yoruba corpus, cultural practices, customs, traditions, words, proverbs,
idioms and issues have more than the meanings and interpretations imposed on them
by the circumstances surrounding them. The Yoruba world imposes both an immedi-
ate and future meanings and interpretations on words, proverbs, idioms and events. In
132
the proverb above, the etymological meaning would read something like: Proverbs are
the horses of words, when a word is lost; proverbs help in finding it. Any Yoruba per-
son that offers this as an interpretation and meaning of the proverb is likely to be re-
garded as Omo Enu, i.e. one who understands body languages and expressions, as
opposed to an Omo Oju, i.e. those who cannot demonstrate any understanding
unless of the spoken words. A rather preferred interpretation would look like: Prov-
erbs are like horses, they help in resolving difficult matters. This negates the popular
position that words have no meanings outside the occasions surrounding their usage.
To an Omo Oju, as against the Omo Enu, the interpretation and meaning of the prov-
erb would look like this: Wisdom solves knotty problems. Just as Omo in the above
identity tags is translated as any individual irrespective of age, as against the child that
the word connotes, so are Yoruba words, idioms, proverbs, issues, and phenomena,
they are capable of different interpretations, meanings and connotations. In most
cases, the most obvious meanings and interpretations are not always the intended
ones. As Johnson has noted, the Yoruba were fond of ambiguous form of speech mak-
ing, which, to the untutored, imposes a great danger as Yoruba becomes unintelligible
and the process of learning it becomes cumbersome. The difficulty, which non-
Yoruba people faced with understanding tangled meanings associated with Yoruba
words, applies to both non-Yoruba and Yoruba people also, as not all of them under-
stand the tangled meanings The richness of the language is underscored by this pecu-
liar characteristic.
In such a tangled web of meanings, interpretations and hidden intentions; how
do historians, especially in an age where Western values dominate and demonize the
richness associated with other languages, make sense of the Yoruba indigenous cul-
ture? Among others, Oyekan Owomoyela (2005) did an interpretative work on
Yoruba proverbs. N.A. Fadipe (1970), Karin Barber (1980), and Samuel Johnson
(1920) made some effort to copiously document some forms of interpretation and
guide, not to the understanding of the Yoruba world, but to understanding some of the
cultural practices, customs, tradition, proverbs and idioms collated in their works.
Aside from these few works and one or two dictionaries of Yoruba words, no other
work is as yet known that could serve as an eye-opener to understanding the Yoruba
world. This development owes, in part, to the nature of historical studies inherited
from the West, with their emphasis on written records. At another level, the blame
could be laid on the threshold of the Yoruba intelligentsia who, in spite of many years
of independence, remain attached to the Western academic orthodoxy and its obtuse
fascination with written records.
This study is divided into four sections. The first section is this introductory
section, which sets out the argument the study pursues. The second section examines
Ife-Modakeke conflicts, focusing specifically on the contested issues in the conflict.
The third section looks at indigenous culture, as a tool for historical reconstruction,
while the fourth section, which concludes the study, applies insights from indigenous
culture into the Ife-Modakeke conflict. The study concludes by suggesting that a
pragmatic use of indigenous culture interfaced with other research methods, could
133
serve as a veritable tool for historical reconstruction, especially in contested situa-
tions.

The Ife-Modakeke conflict
The Ife-Modakeke conflict remains a vexed issue among Nigerians. Its origins are
buried in the internecine war that bedeviled Yorubaland throughout the 19th century.
The war arose, in part, from personal conflicts between the Alaafin of Oyo and
Afonja, Oyos Field Marshall, at Ilorin. To fortify his position, Afonja invited Alimi,
a Fulani cleric from Sokoto, Northern Nigeria to fight Old-Oyo. Before the final
show-down with Oyo-Ile, the capital of Old-Oyo, Afonja and his men had sacked all
the outlying cities and towns, causing its inhabitants to flee in different directions. A
similar fate befell the inhabitants of Oyo-Ile (Ade-Ajayi & Smith 1964: 34).
Eventually, Alimi and his men upstaged and killed Afonja. They finally took
over Ilorin; from where they furthered their exploits against Yorubaland. Other
Yoruba cities and towns became separated, as they became engrossed with filing the
leadership vacuum created by the fall of Old-Oyo. In the ensuing confusion,
Yorubaland was decimated by the jihadists and internal rancor among the Yoruba, as
one turned on the other in a bloody war that lasted an entire century.
Three groups of refugees resulted from these wars: (a) those who fled as
groups, which were made up of whole villages with their kings, chiefs, priests and
priestesses and all other aspects of their socio-economic and political administrations;
(b) those who fled as individuals; and (c) fleeing soldiers (Oguntomisin & Falola
1992). The first group sought refuge in established towns and villages that were far
removed from the war, while the second moved in with their relatives and friends in
different cities and towns where they could find refuge. The last group sought to con-
tinue the war from other theaters. They congregated around notable soldiers, espe-
cially in Ibadan and Ijaye where they established new towns and cities and defended
not only these cities and towns but also the entire Yorubaland from the invading Fu-
lani Jihadists.
Ile-Ife, like many other Yoruba communities far-removed from the main thea-
ters of the war, received refugees from the ruins of the Old-Oyo. Mainly, the largest
number of refugees received by Ile-Ife was those belonging to the first category. But,
unlike in other places such as Ogbomosho, Oshogbo, and Abeokuta where such refu-
gees were given new settlements or allowed to settle separate from their hosts, Ile-Ife
admitted the refugees into their different quarters. No specific order was imposed and
Ife chiefs and notables were said to be quarrelling with one another over the refugees,
as they found them good at farming, hunting and soldiering. As Samuel Johnson had
noted, the Ife threw caution to the wind in order to take advantage of their situation.
The refugees initial acceptance soon degenerated and metamorphosed into
hostilities as they settled down and began to reject their subordination and enslave-
134
ment by the Ife. As Johnson (1920: 98) described their situation following this de-
velopment,
they became hewers of wood and drawers of water and were treated no better than
dogs.
It was owing to this development that Chief Obalaaye of Iraye quarters was
saddled with the responsibilities of taking care and controlling the refugees affairs.
Coincidentally, it was during this time Maye Okunade was uprooted from Ibadan by
the Oyo soldiers.
These twin developments impacted negatively on the situations of the refugees
at Ile-Ife. On the one hand, the expulsion of Okunade was followed by the massive
movement of Ife soldiers from Ibadan to Ile-Ife, as they were apprehensive that the
Oyo soldiers might avenge Okunades brutal treatment on them. Their arrival at Ile-
Ife had a socio-economic and a psychological impact on both the Ife and the refugees
living in their midst. The war had reduced the revenue accruable to Ile-Ife from its
satellite towns, since most of them had been abandoned for fear of the jihadists. The
refugees who had been providing for Ife had become unruly; thereby threatening the
food supply and the economic survival of the ancient town. With increased popula-
tion, especially of soldiers who were uprooted by the Oyo, the Ife refugees kinsmen,
the Ife peoples attitude toward the refugees in their midst changed. They began to be
maltreated, sold as slaves, sacrificed to idols, and treated generally no better than
dogs.
Attempts by various Ife kings to reverse the situation met with stiff opposition
from the Ife people. Three kings were killed by their Ife subjects on account of their
favourable dispositions to the refugees. At the height of it all, Ooni Abeweila, who
was one of the sons of Ooni Akinmoyero who had taken the first batch of refugees,
gave the refugees a separate settlement outside of the Ife gates, called Modakeke, and
invested one Wingbolu, obviously the leader of the refugees, as the (Baale) Ogun-
suwa of Modakeke in 1836. While the intention of the king was to quell the internal
trouble through physical separation, his action incensed the Ife against the king. For
the refugees, now called the Modakeke, or the Modakeke people, it was a succor to
their troubles. As long as Abeweila was alive, he ensured peace, no matter how frag-
ile, between the Ife and the Modakeke. He ordered and built city-fences around Ile-Ife
as well as Modakeke. Although Ile-Ife has always had a city-fence, Abeweila never-
theless expanded and widened it beyond what it used to be. For the Modakeke, the
city-fence was said to have been built with mud mixed with palm-oil and not water.
The city-fence was said to have seven gates (Akanji 2007: 234).
However, the separation of the Modakeke adversely affected Ifes economy,
since the Modakeke had formed the core of its agricultural economy. Hence, the Ife,
realizing that they could no longer force the Modakeke to work on their farms, be-
came even more incensed against Abeweila and sought every means of killing him.
Realizing the precarious state he was in, Abeweila recruited the Modakeke into his
palace guards to provide him with security. He reigned for ten years. Eventually he
was poisoned by the Ife and died because he separated Modakeke from Ile-Ife.
135
With the death of Abeweila, the Ife immediately besieged Modakeke in 1846.
However, they lost the war. Three months later, another war was waged by the Ife
against Modakeke. In this second engagement, the Modakeke won again. However,
unlike in the first war where the Modakeke were afraid to enslave their former mas-
ters, in the second engagement, they not only enslaved the Ife, but Ile-Ife was also set
ablaze and its inhabitants were displaced among other communities to Isoya, Araromi,
Oke-Igbo.
After about ten years in exile outside Ile-Ife, Bashorun Ogunmola of Ibadan
waded into the conflict, especially because the traditional gods had not been wor-
shiped since the beginning of the conflict in 1846. At the end of Ogunmolas interven-
tion, Ile-Ife became a vassal of Ibadan, and Ibadan imposed a Resident Officer (Ajele)
on Ile-Ife and Modakeke. To shake-off Ibadan overlordship or colonization, Ile-Ife
allied with the Ekitiparapo, a development that incensed Ibadan and caused Ibadan to
raise an army to support Modakeke and fight Ile-Ife. Ile-Ife lost and their city was
razed to the ground by fire for the second time (Oyeniyi 2003).
In their intervention efforts, which began in 1866, the colonial administration
became involved in the conflict. They restored the Ife back to Ile-Ife, as well as or-
dered the dissolution of Modakeke, as requested by the Ife and their Ekitiparapo al-
lies. From the colonial time, through independence up to 1999, recurring conflicts
have dominated Ife-Modakeke relations. Among the issues in contention include: the
payment of Isakole going back to 1921 when the Modakeke were restored to Ile-Ife,
this time as a ward in Ile-Ife and not as a separate community; the selection of a sepa-
rate Imam (Moslem cleric) for Modakeke; the creation of a local government in Mo-
dakeke; and the location of local government headquarters.
All through these years, the identity of the Modakeke in Ile-Ife has been a sub-
ject of contention. While the Ife were wont to say that Modakeke is a ward like the
other 13 wards in Ile-Ife, the Modakeke have come out boldly and argue that Mo-
dakeke is a separate entire community of Ile-Ife. During the colonial period, colonial
rule treated Modakeke as a ward of Ile-Ife. The post-colonial situation has not signifi-
cantly changed from the colonial period. Immediately after Nigerias independence in
1960, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, premier of the Western Region, refused to grant Mo-
dakeke a separate local government council claiming that by so doing, the govern-
ment would be dividing one town Ife-Ife - into two. It must be noted that Chief
Awolowo was the premier of the region while the Ooni of Ife, Oba Adesoji Aderemi,
was the Governor of the Region.
Between 1979 and 1981, Chief Bola Ige, the Governor of Oyo State, under the
party led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), refused to
grant Modakeke a separate local government council under the guise that: honour-
able members are expected to pay due and loyal adherence to the Partys standpoints,
and stick to them, regardless of their individual predilections (Oyeniyi 2003). On the
December 13th 1983, when Chief Omololu Olunloyo, the new Governor of Oyo State
under the National Party of Nigeria (NPN), sent a Bill to the House calling for the
creation of a separate local council for Modakeke - Oranmiyan West Local Govern-
136
ment Council the Modakeke were joyful. Unfortunately, the military government of
General Mohammed Buhari took control of the Federal Government; thereby truncat-
ing the dream of an all-inclusive local council for Modakeke.
On May 27th 1989, the Military government of General Ibrahim Badamosi
Babangida announced the creation of 147 local councils, among which was Ife North
local council, incorporating Modakeke (wards 1 to 14), Origbo, and Oyere. The head-
quarters of this new local government council was located at Ipetumodu. To the Mo-
dakeke, this was a dream come true. Chief Oladiran Ajayi, the Otun Asiwaju of
Modakeke summed up the feelings of his people in the following terms:
It is sure that we are in the Promised Land. Agitation, Oppression and Unhealthy rivalry be-
tween Modakeke and Ife have been solved after 150 years (1838-1989) of wars and near
apartheid in an independent Nigeria. What an uneasy journey of 150 years towards the Prom-
ised Land (Omosini 1992: 175).
From the above statement, there is no questioning the fact that the most con-
tentious issue in the Ife-Modakeke conflict is the determination of the identity of Mo-
dakeke in Ile-Ife. In other words, what was the original intention of Ooni Abeweila in
establishing Modakeke? Was it for the new settlement to be a separate community, as
the Modakeke have claimed or to be a ward in Ile-Ife, as argued by the Ife? Sadly the
task of understanding the intention of the king is made the more difficult by the lack
of written records. It has proved absolutely impossible to reconstruct the intentions of
the king from the various accounts of the two communities, as recurrent wars and
conflicts between the two communities are eloquent testimonies to how unhelpful
these accounts have been.
Indigenous culture, as noted above, offers a window of opportunity to histori-
ans in their bid to decipher whatever contested issues lie before them. In the specific
case of the Ife-Modakeke conflict, especially the determination of the intention of the
Ife king that established Modakeke, indigenous culture among the Ife and Modakeke
offers historians the opportunity to interpret the kings intention in line with the prac-
tices of the period and the exegesis of the time. As it is generally known, kings, chiefs
and elders are considered the repository of their communitys culture. Hence, in the
next section, the study turns to examining how indigenous culture could help in de-
termining the contested Ife-Modakeke histories.
Indigenous culture as a tool of analysis in the Ife-
Modakeke conflict
Even though no written records exist to substantiate the wishes of the Ooni Abeweila,
there are, however, bodies of laws, customs, culture and practices that could serve as
useful insights into knowing the mindset of the monarch regarding his establishment
of Modakeke. For example, customs and practices such as Ile Mimu or Ile Yiya
(separation or creation of separate household) and Ise Yiya or Oko Yiya (demarcat-
137
ing farms or apportioning farms). Here whenever and wherever land, occupation, or
properties were divided or separated for whatever reason among individuals and
groups, each had unhindered control over their property, land, occupation, etc. and
could do with their portion whatever suits their fancy except outright sale (Fadipe
1970: 169-180).
Among the Yoruba, land could be divided among individuals and groups for
two reasons: death of parents, especially the father, and when situations warrant that
two groups should separate from one another. In the case of the death of the parents,
the mans property and wealth is shared among his children, especially his male heirs.
The practice is for the most senior male member of the extended family or the family
head to call the immediate family of the bereaved and other extended family members
together. It is at such meetings that the estate of the departed is shared among his
children.
In those cases in which the estate included land and houses, then only the male
children inherited the property since it must be kept within the family. If the children
of the departed were females, then the land and houses were passed on to other male
relatives. On some occasions, females were allowed to inherit houses and land, espe-
cially in cases when the male children of the departed were deemed incapable of
maintaining the inheritances. In cases where the children were still minors, the male
relatives were given the inheritances for safe keeping until the children had grown up
to an age when they were capable of directing their own affairs. By and large, the
practice was to keep the mans inheritance in the family line. This is called Ogun
Pipin (Fadipe 1970: 149).
When the need arises to separate two or more people, the process differs from
the above. However, on a general scale, it is almost the same as Ogun Pipin. In Iresa,
one of the ancient Yoruba towns, because the kingship title is preserved in the male-
line, a certain king who had a set of twins realized that the choice of who would suc-
ceed him might pose serious problems after his death. He therefore divided his territo-
ries equally between the two brothers, relocated some of his people and invested one
of his twin sons as Aresa of Iresa Apa (Head of Iresa who is fair in complexion) and
the other as Aresa of Iresa Adu (Head of Iresa who is dark in complexion). Although
each of the towns and their respective heads preserve their corporate independence,
they nevertheless regard both their towns and themselves as one. This is called Ilu-
Yiya (Samuel Johnson 1920: 89).
When the relationship between two people or even two communities totters on
the brink of collapse, or when land scarcity or an epidemic threatens the corporate
existence of a people or a group of people, then the community in pre-colonial
Yorubaland, the affected person or persons can resettled on another land or at a dif-
ferent location. This new location is usually called Araromi meaning I am comfort-
able here. But in a way, the name actually refers to their plight before coming to the
new place. Modakeke was, in the same vein, resettled and named after the noise made
by a nest of stock, on a large tree near the site of the town, meaning, I am quiet
here or I am at peace here. Some believe that the name came from the pecking on
138
wood by some birds. This shows the practice of resettlement was common among the
Yoruba and it was called Ile-Mimu or Ilu-Mimu or Ilu-Yiya (land apportioning or
town / village apportioning).
Like the apprenticeship of a young man which is considered completed upon
only when the young man is married and independent, a new community is believed
to have been created as soon as it separated from the mother community and a new
leader was invested with an office and title to rule over it. In spite of its socio-political
independence, the new town, just like the young man, still owes allegiance to the
mother community, as a son remains his fathers in spite of his independence. Al-
though some variations may exist from one place to another, this practice is also
common to all villages and towns in Yorubaland.
Samuel Johnson, commenting on community formation among the Yoruba, in-
toned:
perhaps a halting place for refreshments in a long line of march between two towns. In any
case it is one individual that first attracts others to the spot; if the site be on the highway to a
large town, or in a caravan route, so much the better; the wives of the farmers ever ready to of-
fer refreshments to wearied travelers, who render the spot in time as a recognized halting
place, the more distant from a town, the more essential it necessarily must be as a resting
place, if a popular resort, a market soon springs up in the place, into which neighbouring
farmers bring their wares for sale, and weekly fairs held; market sheds are built all over the
place and it became a sort of caravanserai or sleeping place for travelers. As soon as houses
begin to spring up and a village or hamlet formed, the necessity for order and control becomes
apparent. All Yoruba towns, with very few exceptions are built on this uniform plan, and the
origin of most of them is more or less the same, and all have certain identical features (Samuel
Johnson 1920: 90).
He explained further that in special cases, like the outbreak of epidemics, conflict
situations, and over-population, an influential personage with a large following delib-
erately built a town, and was from the beginning recognized as its head. He explained
that in whatever the case, the new village or town is answerable to the mother town
from where it sprang (Samuel Johnson 1920).
In the patrilineal lineage system Idile -, the male child continually stays in his
fathers employ from the cradle until the day of his marriage. Such a child is consid-
ered to be in an apprenticeship under his father; a state he retains until his father con-
siders him old enough to take care of his own family (Fadipe 1970: 68). As a custom,
a year or more before this period ends, a dog is usually presented to the young man to
take care of. Unknowingly, he is continually watched in his relationship with the dog.
The intention behind this present is to note the young mans reactions to the mood-
swings of the dog; as if a woman is like a dog that wags his tail at you one moment
and barks at you the next moment. If the young man passes this test, a young girl is
secretly sought for him and the young man is considered to have completed his ap-
prenticeship the day his father calls him to show him the portion of land that belongs
to him from the family farm. He is also given a house or rooms of his own and other
basic household and farming items. A week or two after this, a new bride is brought to
him to begin his own family. This is called Ile-Yiya and Ise-Yiya.
In relation to land and houses, the basic rule among the Yoruba is that, while
139
they could be transferred from one hand to the other, they must however not be traded
away. Almost as a general principle, land, once given, is never taken back except in
cases of treason, which renders the grantee an outlaw and the land is confiscated.
Even with this, such land must be left untilled once there is a mark of its previous oc-
cupation. Should the need arise to employ the land in some form, the entire commu-
nity must come together to discuss the possibility of seeking out alternatives, if any
(Fadipe 1970).
Although land, when given as a gift, is given eternally, barring treason, the
grantee is only allowed to plant and harvest food crops and not the tree crops that he
may have found already on the land. Inadvertently, grantees are only allowed to plant
such crops as meet her or his fancies, but some crops such as palm trees and kola nuts.
are regarded as belonging to the landowners unless it was the grantee who planted
them. Hence the adage the grantee is to look down not up (Fadipe 1970). Land re-
mained the most vexed issue among the Yoruba. In fact the Yoruba can conciliate on
all matters except land. This is because land was regarded as the only inheritance that
links the living with both the dead and the unborn; hence, efforts must be made to
ensure that the family, as well as the state, preserves its land.
Conclusion
Cultural methods such as Ile-Mimu, Ile-Yiya, Ise-Yiya, Ogun Pipin, and Ogun-Jije are
common among the traditional Yoruba communities as a means of wealth redistribu-
tion, family recreation, solving the congestion problem of over populated communi-
ties, prevention of overt conflict behaviour, and conflict mitigation, among others.
When the Ife-Modakeke conflict is viewed from the standpoint of any of these cul-
tural practices, one notices that many of the views expressed by the various commis-
sions of inquiry, politicians, and scholars took no notice of any of these avowed
practices in their examination of the conflict.
After considering the representative examples of indigenous practices among
the Yoruba above, it is gratifying to note that Modakeke must have been given as a
gift, which was not intended to be taken back unless on condition of treason. What is
not clear is whether the internal scuffle that necessitated the granting of the land to the
displaced people and other development since 1846 in the Ife-Modakeke conflict
qualify as treason. There is nothing in oral history to suggest the possibility of this.
Commonsense also suggests that if it was bad enough to qualify as treason, the king
would not have deemed it fit to grant them such a land in the first place. However, it
may be argued that because the king had blood relations with the displaced people, he
may not have regarded their actions as treasonous, especially since they supported
him. No matter how sound this may be, the fact must still be recognize that if the king
did not consider their actions as treasonable, then it cannot possibly be considered
treason. This is because treason can only be committed against a sitting head of gov-
ernment; hence, we can conclude that the problem was not bad enough to qualify as
140
treason. It can also be safely argued that the judgment of the Imole, the highest ruling
court at Ile-Ife (Oyeniyi 2003), that Abeweila erred in granting out the land qualified
as treason, as it directly challenges the power of the Ooni to distribute and administer
land. Hence, it is against the prevailing Yoruba custom to request the land from the
Modakeke and to wage war against them in order to achieve this. As one wrong can-
not justify another, Modakekes reaction cannot amount to treason; rather, it qualifies
as self-defence.
When these insights from indigenous culture are juxtaposed with others pro-
vided, for instance, by archaeology, one gets the impression that Ooni Abeweila never
intended Modakeke to be a ward under Ife-Ife. Rather, he wanted it to be a separate
and an independent town like Ipetumodu and other Ifes satellite towns. To buttress
this fact, the king fenced Ile-Ife, Modakeke, and invested the new community with a
Baale, the Ogunsuwa of Modakeke.
The fact that no other ward in Ile-Ife has a wall delimiting it from other areas,
renders the argument that Modakeke was meant to be a ward in Ile-Ife is questionable.
All evidence, despite their limitations, point to the fact that Modakeke was meant to
be like Ipetumodu, Apomu, Ikire, and other satellite towns surrounding Ile-Ife and not
a ward dependent on Ile-Ife.
It must be stated that, until this date, government reports, court proceedings,
committee and commission reports have consistently argued that Modakeke was
meant to be a ward in Ile-Ife and that allowing it to have an independent status is like
dividing a town into two. No mention is as yet made as to why other wards in Ile-Ife,
during this period, were not fenced and invested with a Baale just like Modakeke.
Until these substantial differences are accounted for, we may not get near the end of
resolving the Ife-Modakeke conflict.
Culture has been defined as a peoples total way of life. If this is so, it is in-
controvertible that lessons of culture, whatever their inadequacies, are time-tested and
must not be ignored. Undoubtedly, African indigenous cultures are rich in two impor-
tant elements: the tradition of family or neighbourhood negotiation facilitated by eld-
ers and the attitude of togetherness in the spirit of humanity. These are two important
landmarks that could help in resolving intra-ethnic conflict in Africa. As the case of
Ife-Modakeke conflict has shown, conflict resolution efforts must emphasize these
two fundamental factors, which are ably represented in indigenous culture, if it is go-
ing to relate to the peoples world. Indigenous culture evolves from repeated actions
and experiences. Therefore, it cannot possibly extend beyond peoples cultural milieu.
A better understanding of a peoples culture will definitely assist in solving knotty
issues associated with human or inter-group relations.
As the globalisation sociologist Jonathan Friedman has brilliantly noted, the
construction of a history is the construction of a meaningful universe of events and
narratives for an individual or a collectively defined subject. How then does one make
a meaning out of a past long gone and of which nothing is remembered? Can we con-
struct a meaningful universe or hazard a narrative for a collectively defined subject in
a complex web of claims and counter-claims? How can we do any of these where
141
written records are lacking? As shown with the example of the Ife-Modakeke conflict,
cultural practices, myths, and traditions offer strategic ways in which a peoples past
are unintendedly preserved and offer a picture of former historical realities. Hence, as
unintended witnesses, they reflect the historical truth as perceived by the people at the
time of the events.
Indigenous cultures are many and multidimensional. How then do historians
determine which of the numerous cultures to use for reconstruction? The answer is
relevance. The most relevant and the most related of the indigenous cultures should be
the guiding post upon which historians should construct their arguments. However, in
determining what is relevant in the Ife-Modakeke conflict another problem arises. It
must first be determined relevance to what? Is it relevant to the specific issue or sub-
ject in question, say the Ife-Modakeke conflict, or the Yoruba wars that serves as the
harbingers of displacement or the numerous problems associated with displacement
generally? The answer is likely to be found in the subject under examination, the con-
text in which the subject is set, as well as the historians dexterity in knowing which
positions provide better answers to the questions imposed upon the historian by the
subject under examination. In determining the intention of Abeweila on the position
of Modakeke, the question goes beyond the one imposed by the subject to include
wider controversial issues involved in the Ife-Modakeke conflict. Or how do we
measure the intention of Abeweila when we already knew he was born of the dis-
placed woman earlier given to Ooni Akinmoyero? How do we determine the intention
of the Ife when we already know that some other Oonis were killed or forced to com-
mit suicide for their friendly relations with the displaced population? These are com-
plex questions can only have equally complex answers. It is in complex situations like
this, that indigenous cultures remain the only veritable tool available to historians if
they must get answers to complex historical questions.
Students of politics would agree with historians that clearly defined geo-
graphical boundaries and power, as encapsulated in a distinct head that is not subordi-
nate to any other power for his/her domestic relations, are some of the criteria of an
independent state. In pre-colonial Africa, the idea of the state existed in a somewhat
different context than the modern state today. States existed that were independent,
but which had filial relations with other states. This situation was not to undermine
their existences as corporate entities, but to ascertain reciprocal relationships between
the states. Among the Yoruba, the saying is well known that Alaafin owns all lands.
But this is not to say that all lands in Yorubaland belongs to the Alaafin of Oyo; rather
to underscore the primacy of Alaafin over all Yoruba kings, especially in the Oyo-
Yoruba speaking areas.
Given the considerations above, there is no questioning the fact that indige-
nous culture, although voiceless, could serve in reconstructing events whose truths
have long been submerged in contested renditions over time. Cultural practices are,
therefore, vital historiographical tools and are chief techniques for remembering the
past in a more reliable way. When used in conjunction with other sources, they could
help in reconstructing contested histories. Mythology, oral renditions, cultural prac-
142
tices and other forms of indigenous cultural expressions may be unscientific; they
nevertheless hold important truths about a community and a people, their worldviews
and their histories.
References
Ade-Ajayi, J.F., 1965, Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841-1891, London: Longmans.
Ade-Ajayi, J.F. & Smith, R., 1964, Yoruba Warfare in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, London:
Cambridge University Press.
Ade-Ajayi J.F.A.& Akintoye, S. A., 1980, Yorubaland in the Nineteenth Century in Obaro Ikime
(ed.), Groundwork of Nigerian History (Ibadan, Nigeria: Heinemann.
Akanji, Olajide Olayemi, 2007, Migration, Communal Conflicts and Group Rights in Ife-Modakeke,
Nigeria, Ibadan, Nigeria: Unpublished Ph. D thesis submitted to the University of Ibadan,
Ibadan.
Akinjogbin, I.A., 1992, The Cradle of A Race: Ife From The Beginning To 1980, Port Harcourt: Sunray
Publications.
Akinwumi O. & Okpeh O., et al., 2005, Inter-Group Relations in the 19th and 20th Century Nigeria,
Makurdi, Nigeria: Aboki Publishers.
Albert, I. O., 2001, Introduction to Third Party Intervention in Community Conflicts, Ibadan: John
Archers Publishers Ltd.
Barber, Karin, 1980, African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, USA: Blackwell Pub-
lishing Ltd.
Dike, Kenneth Onwuka, 1965, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830-1885: An Introduction to
the Economic and Political History of Nigeria, California, USA: Clarendon Press.
Fadipe, N. A., 1970, The Sociology of the Yoruba, Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press.
Falola, T. & Jennings, C., 2003, Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written and Un-
earthed, Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press.
Horton, Robin & Finnegan, Ruth (eds.), 1973, Modes of Thought: Essays on Thinking in Western and
Non-Western Societies, London: Faber & Faber.
Ikime, O., 1980, Groundwork of Nigerian History, Nigeria: Heinemann Educational Books, Nig. Ltd...
Johnson, S. 1920, The History of the Yorubas from Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Pro-
tectorate, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Oguntomisin Dare & Falola Toyin, 1992, Yoruba Warlords of the Nineteenth Century, New York,
USA: Africa World Press.
Omosini, Olufemi, 1992, Ife: The Years of Recovery (1894-1930) in Akinjogbin, I.A. (ed.), The Cra-
dle of A Race: Ife From The Beginning To 1980, Port Harcourt: Sunray Publications.
Owomoyela, Oyekan, 2005, Yoruba Proverbs, Rochester, USA: University of Rochester Press.
Oyeniyi, Bukola Adeyemi, 2006, Problems of Inter-Group Relations in Nigeria: Origin and Causes of
Ife Modakeke Conflict in Akinwumi Olayemi and Okpeh A. Okpeh (eds.) Inter-Group Rela-
tions in the 19th and 20th Century Nigeria, Markurdi, Nigeria: Aboki Publishers.
Tamuno, N.T., 1980, Peace and Violence in Nigeria, Lagos, Nigeria: Federal Government Press.

143
Chapter 9. The continuity of African
and Eurasian mythologies

General theoretical models, and detailed comparative
discussion of the case of Nkoya mythology from
Zambia, South Central Africa
1

Wim van Binsbergen
2

Abstract. This paper looks at mythological continuities between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the
Old World not so much North Africa, but Eurasia. This is a remarkably unusual perspective in the
field of comparative mythology: the othering and exclusion of Africa and Africans have been an invet-
erate though obsolescent feature of North Atlantic scholarship. The approach in this paper is greatly
inspired by Michael Witzels recent work in comparative mythology, but takes exception to his Laura-
sian / Gondwana distinction, which is predicated on absolute Eurasian / African discontinuity. Instead,

1
This is a greatly revised version of the paper I presented at the Second Annual Conference of the In-
ternational Association for Comparative Mythology, Ravenstein, the Netherlands, August 2008. The
present argument tries to bring to fruition earlier attempts to deal with the same subject matter, notably
van Binsbergen 1998-2006, and my abortive 1998 book draft Global bee flight: Sub-Saharan Africa,
Ancient Egypt, and the World - Beyond the Black Athena thesis. My extensive work in comparative
mythology since the late 1990s has finally enabled me to approach this complex and counter-
paradigmatic subject matter with more confidence and, I hope, with greater theoretical and methodo-
logical sophistication. I wish to acknowledge the Nkoya people of Zambia, who from the early 1970s
have welcomed me in their midst; the African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands for their pa-
tience and trust, enabling me to complete this long and arduous trajectory even if it seemed to lead me
away from Africa; Michael Witzel as a greatly inspiring and facilitating presence in my work since
2003; Eric Venbrux for amicably sharing with me the task of convening the 2008 Ravenstein confer-
ence, editing its scholarly products, and specifically commenting on the present paper; Kirsten Seifikar
for copy-editing under great pressure of time; Steve Farmer for being a critical inspiration to my work
from 2004 on, stressing the importance of mythological drift and contamination; and Emily Lyle, Boris
Oguibnine, and the conference participants in general, for useful comments on the conference version,
and inspiring discussions.
2
African Studies Centre, Leiden / Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Nether-
lands.
144
the present argument seeks to include sub-Saharan Africa in the standard comparative mythology as
applied to the rest of the world. For this purpose a two-stage argument is deployed. Since the article is
essentially a review of several decades of the authors research, it risks being unusually auto-
referential, for which apologies are hereby offered. First, twentieth-century interpretative schemas are
discussed that stipulate mythological continuity instead of separation between Eurasia and sub-Saharan
Africa: Frobenius South Erythraean model; cultural diffusion from Egypt; combined cultural and
demic diffusion from sub-Saharan Africa shaping Egyptian and subsequently Greek mythology (Afro-
centrism, Bernals Black Athena thesis). Then, as background for the latest generation of models, indi-
cations for transcontinental continuities are discussed from the fields of long-range linguistics
(concentrating on Starostins *Borean hypothesis, and adducing new material concerning the place of
Niger-Congo > Bantu in the *Borean schema), and molecular genetics: the Out-of-Africa hypothesis,
and the Back-into-Africa hypothesis. This sets the scene for a discussion of the authors Aggregative
Diachronic Model of World Mythology, suggesting that Pandoras Box (the cultural heritage with
which Anatomically Modern Humans left Africa from 80 ka BP on) contained a few identifiable basic
mythological motifs, which were subsequently developed, transformed and innovated in Asia, after
which the results where fed back into Africa in the Back-into-Africa movement the entire process
resulting in considerable African-Eurasian continuity. After a discussion, in regard of the last few mil-
lennia, of the authors Pelasgian Model (proposing cultural including mythological transmission from
Western Asia / the Mediterranean by the cross-model mechanism, i.e. in all four directions Western
Europe; Northern Europe; the Eurasian Steppe to South, East and South Asia; and sub-Saharan Africa
from the Late Bronze Age onward), the transition to the second stage of the argument is formed by an
examination of the mythology of the Nkoya people of Zambia, South Central Africa, in the light of the
Aarne-Thompson classification; this again yields results suggestive of considerable African-Eurasian
continuity. This means that the authors 1992 analysis of Nkoya mythology in terms of local protohis-
tory, may no longer be tenable. Contamination by recent Islamic and Christian proselytisation is dis-
cussed and ruled out as a major factor in African-Eurasian mythological continuities. To clinch the
argument in favour of massive African-Eurasian mythological continuities, 26 Nkoya mythemes are
considered in detail against the fully referenced background of their global correspondences. A high
degree of African-Eurasian mythological continuity is the arguments main, theoretically and empiri-
cally grounded, conclusion. While this highlights overall African-Eurasian cultural connections, it par-
ticularly lends support to the Pelasgian hypothesis, and throws in relief unsuspected but close and
multiplex affinities between a South Central African kingship and the Eurasian Steppe.
1. African transcontinental mythological continuities
as a problem
In this paper I will look at mythological continuities between sub-Saharan Africa and
the rest of the Old World not so much North Africa, but especially Eurasia.
This is a remarkably unusual perspective in the field of comparative mythol-
ogy. While many comparative mythologists wisely concentrate on one geographic
region, culture area or language phylum they know well, it is not uncommon to study
east-west continuities across Eurasia. Such studies are facilitated by the fact that from
North-western Europe to East and South-East Asia there has been a chain of ancient
literate civilisations whose mythologies are particularly well studied; the Indo-
European languages, the means of expression of many of these civilisations, encom-
pass much of Asia and most of Europe. This is the part of the world, and the cultural
and linguistic tradition, to which most comparative mythologists themselves belong
van Binsbergen Chapter 9: African-Eurasian Mythological Continuity
145
anyway, and with whose mythologies, societies and histories they feel comfortably at
home. By contrast, Africa and its inhabitants have, since early modern times (Kant,
Hegel), been singled out as proverbial others. Although this continent has known
some of the oldest literate civilisations in the world (Egypt, Nubia), writing and en-
during state organisation have been relatively rare in sub-Saharan Africa until Modern
times. While being locked in orality may constitute an ideal breeding ground for
story-telling, relatively few of these stories have been recorded unless very late
(mainly in the late 19th and early 20th century CE), mainly by cultural and linguistic
strangers, and usually at a rather lower level of scholarship than that informing, for
instance, the study of West and South Asian ancient mythologies. African Studies
have largely developed in splendid isolation from the mainstream humanities. African
linguistics (studying the languages in which most African stories have been told for
millennia) have largely enjoyed the same isolation. For, with the exception of
Afroasiatic,
3
the historic languages of Africa belong to macrophyla which have been
exclusive to sub-Saharan Africa in historical times: Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo (with
Bantu as a major phylum), and Khoisan. Until quite recently, most linguists would be
prepared to take seriously the view of Cavalli-Sforza (leading geneticist of the previ-
ous generation and of a previous scientific paradigm in genetics), according to whom
African languages represent a particularly peripheral branch of the languages of hu-
mankind, as would befit their speakers as, allegedly, constituting a particularly pe-
ripheral branch of humanity (Fig. 9.1). Increasing marginalisation and humiliation of
sub-Saharan Africa, its cultures and its economies, have been among the major trends
of global history since the late 19th century, and the approach to African mythologies
has reflected that trend. Africa, in the utterly mistaken popular perception of much of
the non-African modern world (and of some African elites), is a devastated continent
of people who, in cultural, political, nutritional, economic, philosophical and moral
respects, are losers, and who would be best served by being liberated from their Afri-
canness.
Inevitably, this state of affairs conducive, as we know, to overt or hidden ra-
cism has generated major redressive responses. Africanist anthropologists in the
classic period (mid-20th century) often saw it as their task to vindicate the rationality,
effectiveness, complexity and beauty of the African cultures they studied (e.g. Evans-
Pritchard 1937 / 1972; Frobenius 1954 / 1933; Gluckman 1955a). From the 1960s on
(when most African countries regained territorial independence after much less than a
century of effective colonial rule) the general tendency among Africanist and African
scholars has been to insist that things African would have to be analysed and ex-
plained by reference to African conditions (almost as if Africa could only lose from
transcontinental comparison, and would necessarily find itself there on the side of
indebtedness and deficit). Afrocentrists in the North Atlantic region and (since the

3
Afroasiatic has major branches in sub-Saharan Africa (Cushitic, Omotic and Chadic), but also Berber
and Old Egyptian as branches outside sub-Saharan Africa, whilst Semitic extensively spoken in
North Africa and the Middle East transcends the distinction, both through Ethiopian, and through
Arabic as religious, political and mercantile lingua franca.
146
1950s) also in Africa, have adopted an affirmative, counter-hegemonic stance vis--
vis Africanness, making Afrocentricity (of the stronger or the more moderate varie-
ties) the mainstay of their intellectual life and their personal identity. Their good in-
tentions often in combination with poor scholarship make them ideologically
sympathetic, but scientifically suspect
4
for as we all know, consciousness-raising is
only permissible as a major motor of scholarship as long as it remains implicit, and
mainstream, which in the world today often means: implicitly hegemonic.
Fig. 9.1. Cavalli-Sforzas well-know array of the populations and language groups of
the world ( Cavalli-Sforza 1997: 7722, with thanks)

4
Cf. Howe 1999; Fauvelle et al. 2000 however, see my contribution to the same book, and to the
Black Athena debate (van Binsbergen 2000, 1997b); for a recent, and more critical, assessment of
Bernal and his Black Athena thesis (Bernal 1987, 1991, 2001, 2006), cf. van Binsbergen & Woud-
huizen, in press; van Binsbergen 2010a and in press.
147
Also my own position in this intellectual and identitary mine-field is, admit-
tedly, very far from neutral.
5
After finishing my studies as a specialist on the oral his-
tory and anthropology of North African popular Islam, in the first half of my career I
became, as a professor of anthropology, a mainstream student of African religions and
cultures; in the second half, as a protohistorian and a professor of intercultural phi-
losophy, I have been a vocal critic of the implicitly hegemonic epistemological as-
sumptions on which North Atlantic studies of Africa are often based. Between these
two phases I allowed the participant observation that has been my standard fieldwork
method in various African locations, to go so unprofessionally out of hand, that I
ended up as a diviner-priest-healer in the Southern African sangoma tradition (practis-
ing till this very day), and as the adoptive son of a Zambian king, inheriting his royal
bow and arrows and a very large piece of land at his death in 1993 (cf. van Binsbergen
2003a). I speak (rather, have once spoken) five African languages; have a place in
Africa I consider home; count myself as an African; let a life-force-affirming and kin-
ship-centred spirituality from Africa diffusely (and, of course, without the celebration
of violence from which 20th-century Nkoya kings already radically distanced them-
selves) inform my personal life; and I deeply regret, resent, and combat, the othering
and marginalisation to which sub-Saharan Africa, its cultural forms and its knowl-
edges have been subjected.
It is exclusion, and not difference as such I am objecting to. Quite rightly, it
has been a refrain of contemporary philosophy (especially Derrida, e.g. 1967 / 1997
and Deleuze, e.g. 1968) that difference is the very condition for identity, and the rec-
ognition of the others difference is the ethical condition for equitable relationships
and for a sane socio-political system. Difference can still be, and usually is, articu-
lated within the context of an overarching, unifying condition, ultimately that of shar-
ing a common humanity, in the light of which all difference may be taken a relative
view of, and may be overcome. Exclusion is when such an overarching unifying con-

5
On my intellectual stance as a student of mythology, between rupture and fusion, cf. van Binsbergen
2009a. In the opinion of my dear colleague Steve Farmer 2010, this volume), the best thing that could
happen to comparative mythology is that it becomes a rigorous science a variant on the prescription
that Husserl 1911 / 1965) wrote to cure philosophy of its ills, with his plea for Philosophie als strenge
Wissenschaft. My view is rather different from Farmers: I see comparative mythology, of all fields of
scholarship, as privileged in that it can afford to let its method be informed, in part, by the insight that
all scientific endeavour is, among other things, an attempt at creating imaginative myth: a yarn people
tell, sufficiently captivating to produce the impression of being real and true, but meant to be super-
seded by a better yarn as soon as possible. Speaking of comparative mythology: perhaps, today, hu-
mankinds most dangerous myth is no longer even racism (cf. Montagu 1942 / 1974) or Christian and
Islamic fundamentalism, but the navely modernist belief exploited by governments and corporate
enterprise that science produces lasting, unshakable, universal, and redeeming truth; cf. Harding
1997; van Binsbergen 2007b). Yet my view is complementary to, rather than diametrically opposed, to
Farmers. For what, then, constitutes a better yarn? In the short run, one that is performatively more
persuasive and seductive, in terms of the ideology and fashion of the day; but in the long run, one that
takes into account all available data, all available alternative explanations, and all criticism while not
necessarily true in itself, and inviting what I have called mythical fusion on the part of the researcher,
truth still constitutes the ultimate boundary condition of science, also in comparative mythology.
148
dition is denied, or is taken not to apply to certain classes of humans (Blacks, Jews,
women, homosexuals, redheads, Basarwa / Bushmen, Tutsi, Palestinians, etc. a
form of violence in thought that often is a stepping-stone to physical violence.
6
It is
impossible to study culture, religion, myth without allowing for the difference that is
enshrined in, liberated by, and celebrated by, local and regional cultural specificity.
Absolute universalism is not the paroxysm, but the annihilation, of culture; hence a
form of violence in its own right. This also helps to define my project with regard to
transcontinental continuities in African mythology: not the blindly-ideological denial
of difference and the imposition of one unifying formula for mythology all across the
Old World that would be absurd but the identification of an overarching interpre-
tative framework in which African mythological difference (and European and Asian
mythological difference, for that matter) can yet be recognised and integrated as part
of a wider system.
Most of my empirical research of the last two decades has been aimed at dem-
onstrating transcontinental continuities involving sub-Saharan Africa. I pursue this
line of research, ultimately in a bid to demonstrate in the face of the traumatic insis-
tence on difference or rather on exclusion that is inherent in all thinking in terms of
race, ethnicity, nationalism and continentalism the fundamental underlying unity of
all of us, Anatomically Modern Humans the sub-species that came into being in Af-
rica c. 200 ka BP, and that spread from Africa all over the world from c. 80 ka BP.
Admittedly, with such a big chip on ones shoulders
7
it is not easy to produce objec-
tive and universalising, high-quality scholarship. However, I suspect that the only dif-
ference between me and more common comparative mythologists from the North
Atlantic region is that the latter have largely gotten away with their reluctance to
fathom their own identitary complacency even while engaging in transcontinental en-
counters and transcultural knowledge production.
Since comparative mythology is essentially an empirical science, its exponents
may well consider such meta-argument in the intercultural epistemology and politics
of knowledge production a waste of time, and prefer to get down to the data at hand.
As a concrete challenge of empirical research, then, and in my personal research prac-
tice, broadly two complementary problems converge in the topic of Africas transcon-
tinental mythological continuities:
At the theoretical level, there is the recent availability of interpretative sche-
mas that stipulate mythological continuity instead of separation between Eura-
sia and sub-Saharan Africa.
At the descriptive, analytical level: my personal experience to the effect that
my earlier, rather standard ethnohistorical reading of the mythology of the
Nkoya people of Zambia, South Central Africa, as oblique but decodable
statements on regional history over the last half millennium, in my own per-

6
Wyschogrod 1989; Schroeder 1996; McKenna 1992; with particular reference to Levinas e.g. 1971 /
1961, 1981 / 1974 , Girard e.g. 1972 and Derrida 1997.
7
Cf. Amselle 2001 for an attack on my and Coqury-Vidrovitchs variety of moderate Afrocentrism.
149
ception collapsed totally as soon as I realised (by the late 1990s) that what
resonated in these Nkoya mythologies were echoes of a well-known Eurasian
mythological repertoire that could be traced back to the Bronze Age (van
Binsbergen 1998-2006, 2009: 10).

Thus the first point in our empirical challenge to explore African-Eurasian
mythological continuities, springs from the availability of models, both inside com-
parative mythology and in its ancillary sciences, that imply and even dictate such con-
tinuity, while in our second point we exchange this deductive perspective of
theoretical application, for an inductive perspective of empirical exploration. Here
African-Eurasian continuity presents itself, not as a theoretically-underpinned re-
search programme, but as the possible, alternative interpretation for a concrete set of
empirical mythological data.
2. Recent interpretative schemas that claim mytho-
logical continuity instead of separation of Eurasia and
sub-Saharan Africa
Much of the past and current othering of Africa turns out to be based on obsolescent
scholarly paradigms reflecting a colonial, North Atlantic-centred geopolitics of a by-
gone period; new paradigms have emerged that persuade us to reconsider the position
of sub-Saharan Africa in terms of far greater continuity with Eurasia. Let us first re-
view some of the older transcontinental models foreshadowing this state of affairs,
and then turn to the most recent statements of transcontinental mythological continu-
ity.

2.1. A selective
8
review of older transcontinental hypotheses relevant for
comparative mythology
Let us begin our review with a few models that emerged in the course of the twentieth
century and that prepared the way for our present analytical tools.

8
Selective, for I am leaving out here one such transcontinental hypothesis that was very popular in the
early 20th century CE: the Hamitic thesis, which typical product of the racialist and colonialist ide-
ology then prevailing in the North Atlantic region sought to explain the apparent contradiction be-
tween unmistakable sub-Saharan African cultural achievements, and negative sterotypes of Africans
among the North Atlantic dominant groups, by assuming that all such achievements were due to the
influx, into sub-Saharan Africa, of Hamitic-speaking (i.e. Afroasiatic-speaking) West Asians and
North Africans. On the surface, this may look dangerously close to my Pelasgian hypothesis; on closer
analysis, it is certainly not, but space is lacking for a further discussion here. I refer the reader to the
final chapter of van Binsbergen, in press.
150
2.1.1. Frobenius (1931) model of the South Erythraean culture extending from the
Persian Gulf and the Red (Erythraean) Sea to East Africa and South West Asia
This model (although somewhat reminiscent of the pan-Babylonism that haunted
scholarship in the early 20th century) helped to pinpoint some of the main African-
Eurasian parallels that are also brought out by our Nkoya case in the fields of king-
ship, female puberty rites, divination, music, and metallurgy; moreover, considering
the times, it displayed a refreshing recognition of the value and the power of African
cultures. However Frobenius was at a loss as to the identification of the mechanisms
that could be held accountable for these parallels. Also did he under-estimate the
wider extension of these communalities, beyond the South Erythraean complex,
both on the African continent and in West Asia, Egypt, Southern Europe and South
Asia. In actual fact, there is rather more continuity between Ancient Egypt and sub-
Saharan Africa, than between the latter and Ancient Mesopotamia. No convincing and
lasting explanation is to be expected from Frobenius approach.
2.1.2. Cultural diffusion from Egypt (the Egyptocentric argument)
Confronting the Egyptocentrism that was in fashion in the early 20th century,
9
already
Frobenius declined the possibility that major traits in sub-Saharan Africa, such as sa-
cred kingship and regicide, could exclusively be due to Ancient Egyptian influence;
he stressed that regicide (which we will encounter below among Nkoya mythemes,
and which Frobenius considered constitutive of the South Erythraean complex) also
occurs in South Asia.
10
Yet one can remain critical of the Egyptocentrism displayed
till this very day by Martin Bernal (1987, 1991, 2001, 2006), Cheikh Anta Diop (e.g.
1954, 1989), Obenga (e.g. 1992, 1995) and other Afrocentrists, and yet admit that for
three millennia Ancient Egypt was one of the worlds most powerful states and
economies, exerting an enormous influence all over the Mediterranean and West Asia,
and inevitably also in the Northern half of Africa. After decades of ideological in-
fatuation with Egypt as allegedly the Africa par excellence, the more recent re-
search (e.g. that highlighted in the Cahiers Caribens dgyptologie, or the work of
the Cameroonian Egyptologist Oum Ndigi) is now applying sound scholarly methods
to the assessment of Egypt-Africa relations, and making progress. Some of the spe-
cific Nkoya / Egypt parallels may be explained in this light, but others need to be ex-
plained by what is often the more powerful model: an appeal to common origins, in
this case the fact that both Egypt, and (largely passing via Egypt, admittedly) the cul-
tural inroads from West Asia into sub-Saharan Africa (partly only from the Middle
Bronze Age onward chariot-facilitated, as I have suggested), drew from West Asian
proto-Neolithic culture, in which much of the Asian innovations and transformations
of the Out-of-Africa heritage had come to fruition. The same, incidentally, applies to
Bernals insistence on what he takes to be Ancient Greeces almost total dependence

9
Smith 1923 / 1970; Seligman 1934; cf. Meyerowitz 1960.
10
Frobenius 1931: 325; 1929: 331-349, where the obvious connection with Frazers 1911-1915)
Golden Bough based on the mytheme of cyclical regicide is further explored.
151
upon Egyptian (and, by a later Afrocentrist twist in his argument, African) cultural
including mythical materials: such an overstatement does not take into account the
fact that both Egypt, and the Aegean, draw from the same West Asian-Mediterranean-
Saharan Neolithic or Bronze Age source which I will identify below as Pelasgian.
This common source is, incidentally, partly responsible
11
for the considerable affini-
ties between the Egyptian Delta on the one hand, and West Asia (including Sumer and
Neolithic Anatolia) on the other hand an affinity which is also manifest in the reed-
and-bee complex, and which may well have managed, in this form, to reach South
Central Africa and inform Nkoya mythology.
2.1.3. Combined cultural and demic diffusion
12
from sub-Saharan Africa shaping
Egyptian and subsequently Greek mythology (the Afrocentrist position, and Bernals
Afrocentrist afterthought after his Egyptocentrist Black Athena position)
In the course of his Black Athena researches, Martin Bernal found that much of what
he was trying to say had already been said by Afrocentrist writers such as Du Bois
(1947) and Diop,
13
and he gradually situated the epicentre of the cultural initiative
decisively shaping Greek classical culture (and hence, to a considerable extent, North
Atlantic and global world culture), no longer in Egypt, but in sub-Saharan Africa, of
which Egypt was considered to be the oldest and most brilliant child. Whatever the
deficiencies of Afrocentrist and Bernallian scholarship,
14
the main thrust of such stud-
ies has been a most timely counter-hegemonic exercise in the politics of knowledge.
This makes them important eye-openers in the global politics of knowledge, yet at the
same time unmistakably ideological.
On the basis of a kindred knowledge-political position, I have often been a vo-
cal supporter and defender of the weaker forms of Afrocentrism. However, in my
quest for scholarly, methodologically and theoretically underpinned valid knowledge I
have repeatedly been compelled to appear disloyal to the counter-hegemonic cause of
Afrocentrism, and I reject the wholesale claim that everything of value in global cul-

11
Pace Rice 1990, who insists on a one-way process, from Sumer to Sudan.
12
For the term demic diffusion, cf. Sokal et al. 1982, 1991; Barbujani et al. 1994.
13
Which, by an analogy with the history of pop music (where also Elvis Presley 1935-1977 was
chided for appropriating Black achievements), earned Bernal the undeservedly disrespectful epithet
the academic Elvis; Berlinerblau 1999.
14
I have suggested (van Binsbergen 2000, 1997b) that these deficiencies have been somewhat exagger-
ated by critics for reasons of North Atlantic hegemony and mainstream paradigmatic power games.
Nonetheless there are major shortcomings, although different ones from ones for which Bernal has
been grilled by Lefkowitz & MacLean Rogers and their contributors (1996). Bernals fixation on lan-
guage as the prime historical source does not permit him to bring major socio-cultural processes to life,
and leads to repetitious irrelevance especially in Bernal 2006. And his politically-correct fixation on
African origins (while archaeologically underpinned, e.g. Hoffman 1991 / 1979; Williams 1986) pre-
vents him from seeing the major West Asian / Mediterranean contribution to the Egyptian culture, so-
ciety and state which I have sought to capture by the Pelasgian hypothesis, largely (though
reluctantly, given my own Afrocentrist inclinations) reversing the direction of cultural transmission in
the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, from South-North to North-South.
152
tural history has an African origin, not only in the remotest past of the Out-of-Africa
Exodus 80 60 ka ago (that claim is undeniable, but it is not central to the Afrocen-
trist and Bernallian argument), but also in Neolithic and Bronze Age times down to
the present day. Thus my extensive empirical, comparative and theoretical research
(even though partly informed by the post-modern position on local, multiple, manipu-
lable and transient truths in science), has finally forced me to admit (van Binsbergen
2010b) an extra-African origin and subsequent transcontinental spread into Africa, for
mankala board games (the nation game of Africa, as Culin 1896 had it); for geoman-
tic divination including such famous African systems as Ifa, Sikidy and Hakata; for
the belief in an unilateral mythical being (cf. von Sicard 1968-1969); and for many
aspects of mythology (Late or Post-Palaeolithic) centring on the Separation of Heaven
and Earth, shamanism, and the kingship; and as my research in progress seems to
indicate even for the Niger-Congo / Bantu linguistic family.
2.2. Linguistic indications for transcontinental continuities
Whereas in the field of linguistics the prominent Niger-Congo specialist Roger
Blench in a recent paper (Blench 2006) can still insist on the fundamental and primor-
dial difference between Southern (e.g. African and Indo-Pacific) languages on the one
hand, and Northern (Eurasian) on the other hand, other voices in long-range linguis-
tics have advocated the inclusion of African languages under an extensive linguistic
category encompassing much of the Old World (Eurasiatic / Nostratic), and even most
of humankind (*Borean). One of todays primary resources for long-range linguistic
research is the Tower of Babel etymological database, comprising most of the lan-
guage phyla spoken in the world today, and supported by major research institutions
(two Moscow universities, Leiden university, the Hong Kong City University, and the
Santa Fe Institute); while defective on Nilo-Saharan, and truncated on Niger-Congo >
Bantu, Khoisan is amply represented here, and features as another macrophylum un-
der *Borean the highest level reconstructible parent language, supposed to be spo-
ken in Central Asia c. 25 ka BP. When the designation *Borean was chosen,
Georgiy Starostin already objected
15
that (since it implicitly refers to the Northern,
boreal, hemisphere) it was based on the prejudgment that Eurasiatic / Nostratic,
Afroasiatic, Dene-Caucasian and Austric would be more closely related to one an-
other than to the African macrophyla Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo, and possibly
Khoisan.
16
Although I am not a Bantuist by training, this inspired me to investigate

15
Anonymous, n.d. (a).
16
Already two decades ago, leading linguists (Kaiser & Shevoroshin 1988) included Nilo-Saharan and
Niger-Congo as branches of Super-Nostratic, where Nostratic is more or less synonymous with Eura-
siatic. The *Borean nature of Khoisan was accepted, on formal linguistic grounds (e.g. its affinities
with Northern Caucasian are obvious), but also in the light of Cavalli-Sforzas hypothesis of modern
Khoisan speakers being the descendants of a hybrid Asian / African population whose Asian ancestors
still lived in the Asian continent 10 ka BP (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994: 176; pace Vigilant 1989, 1991).
However, I reject Cavalli-Sforzas view (although shared by many others) of African languages as
constituting isolated and archaic branches of the world genealogy of languages.
153
whether also Niger-Congo including Bantu may be seen as the result of local Af-
rican (to some extent including Palaeo-African) interaction
17
with incoming transcon-
tinental elements. The results
18
confirm African-Eurasian linguistic continuity: more
than a quarter of all 1,153 reconstructed *Borean roots can be demonstrated to have
reflexes in proto-Bantu (van Binsbergen 2010d), traces of which are found all over the
Bronze Age Mediterranean (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen in press), and whose
homeland emerges from an environmental, phyto-geographical and zoo-geographical
analysis of proto-Bantu as a well-watered, rather temperate zone. Strictly speaking,
the compilation of a proto-Bantu corpus has been too controversial to pretend there is
one proto-Bantu lexicon (cf. Dalby 1975, 1976; Meeussen 1980; Vansina 1979-1980;
Flight 1980, 1988; Maho 2003). In the end however Guthries (1967-1971) recon-
struction offers a useful if far from ideal compromise. Since *Borean is here claimed
to account for only a limited part of the proto-Bantu lexicon, and the Pelasgian influx
is claimed to amount to primarily a cultural influence with only slight demographic
impact, we need not enter here into a discussion of the obvious heterogeneity and pos-
sible polygenesis of Bantu and the rejection of the Bantu migration model (Bennett
1983; Vansina 1979-1980, 1995).
Fig. 9.2. Dendrogram setting out the relative positions of the *Borean-associated lin-
guistic macro-phyla in relation to Bantu and Khoisan

17
Cf. the comments by Oliver and Simiyu Wandibba in Oliver et al. 2001, in response to Ehret 1998,
cf. 2001. Considering the commonly recognised affinities between Austric and Bantu, and the insis-
tence, by linguistic specialists, on the contribution, to Bantu, of non-Bantu elements from inside the
African continent, the linguistic process of Bantu genesis was probably much more complex than I
propose below to have been the case (with my appeal to an unoccupied and defenceless niche of cul-
tural ecology) for the spiked wheel trap and similarly distributed cultural items such as mankala, geo-
mantic divination and the belief in a unilateral being.
18
van Binsbergen 2010d; van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen, in press.
154
My statistical outcomes
19
suggest an initial bifurcation of the *Borean-speaking lin-
guistic, cultural and demographic stock, with
1. one, ultimately Peripheral, branch vacating the Central Asian homeland and
moving on (being chased? or differentially equipped with the necessary tech-
nology to explore new continents and on their own initiative?) to South East
Asia, Oceania, the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, and
2. the other, ultimately Central, branch remaining in the Eurasian homeland,
gradually expanding westward to finally occupy most of Eurasia, and the
Northern half of Africa.

Perhaps there is a very simply explanation for the bifurcation between the pe-
ripheral branch (African languages, Amerind and Austric) and the central branch
(Eurasiatic / Nostratic, Afroasiatic, and Sino-Caucasian) that strikingly emerges from
Fig. 9.2. When we confront these statistical results with the reconstruction of the
global history of mtDNA haplo groups (Forster 2004), the peripheral branch appears
to derive from mtDNA haplo type M, the central branch from type N the bifurcation
appears to mainly reflect an initial segmentation, already in the Arabian peninsula
some 60 ka BP, of the second sally Out of Africa.
One of the arguments levelled against long-range linguistic reconstructions
such as the Nostratic and the *Borean hypotheses is the point of linguistic drift: the
rate of spontaneous change inherent in cultural phenomena including language (and
mythologies for that matter; or genetics, with their characteristically huge error distri-
butions) appears to be so high that any effect of genuine long-range transmission
would tend to be obscured, reducing the long-range evidence to wishful thinking.
However, this argument is not so devastating as it seems. The evidence of many doz-

19
Van Binsbergen 2010d. The logarithmic scale was experimentally determined so as to fit an esti-
mated age for *Borean of 25 ka (proposed date of the split separating the African / Amerind / Austric
macrophyla from the Eurasiatic / Afroasiatic / Sino-Caucasian macrophyla), and, as a benchmark, the
dissociation between Afroasiatic and Eurasiatic at 12.5 ka BP (under the Natufian hypothesis cf. Mili-
tarev & Shnirelman 1988; Militarev 1996, 2002; Turner 2008; and references cited there according to
which Afroasiatic emerged in Syro-Palestine in the context of the Mesolithic Natufian culture, c. 14.5
11.5 ka BP; and moreover assuming that the middle of the Natufian period marks the dissociation of
Eurasiatic and Afroasiatic). The relative length k of each scale unit of 2.5 ka is given by:
k =
1
/
(a+b*
r
log(c*q+d))
=
1
/
10
log(0.476*q)
,
where q is the inversed rank of that scale unit, counting from the origin. Other choices for the parame-
ters (the constants: c, here 0.476; a and d, here 0; b, here 1; and r, here 10) would produce a similar
logarithmic scale but with lesser or greater acceleration of rate of change towards more recent millen-
nia. The present parameter choice (scale A) gives a greatly accelerated rate of change from the Meso-
lithic onward. Stipulating a very high rate of acceleration for the most recent millennia, scale A situates
the node splitting Austric from the African / Amerind macrophyla at c. 24 ka BP; the node splitting the
Eurasiatic / Afroasiatic from the Sino-Caucasian macrophyla at c. 23 ka BP; and the node splitting
African macrophyla from Amerind at c. 20 ka BP. These are excessively high dates, which can be
brought down by assuming the split between Eurasiatic and Afroasiatic to have occurred several ka
later, and adjusting the parameters accordingly as in scale B, with which I am more comfortable (c =
0.666).
155
ens of near-universals of the culture of Anatomically Modern Humans right into mod-
ern times (Brown 1991) could be explained in various ways (innate patterns Chom-
sky; a collective unconscious as a palimpsest of a groups deep history Jung; the
constant re-creation of culture as a result of the converging capabilities of human
minds neurobiology), but as compared to these, the hypothesis of long-term conser-
vation and transmission, across tens of thousands of years of culture has certainly the
highest explanatory power; such a thesis is also massively supported by specialist
studies of lithic industries. The challenge for the sociological imagination is to iden-
tify socio-cultural contexts that are so highly controlled and formalised that relatively
lossless long-range transmission becomes plausible; initiation rites, and their associ-
ated arts and myths constitute a promising case. Moreover, there is the eloquent ar-
gument
20
of over a thousand *Borean roots that establish continuity across
macrophyla, even across tens of thousands of kilometres and tens of thousands of
years. Let me present one pet example:
EXAMPLE OF A GLOBAL ETYMOLOGY: THE COMPLEX EARTH / BOTTOM / HUMAN
The root -ntu, human, person, although only one of many of hundreds of reconstructed
proto-Bantu roots (cf. Guthrie 1948, 1967-1971: *-nto, Guthrie no. 1789; Meeussen 1980:*-
ntu; found in many or all languages of the large Bantu family (a branch of the Niger-Congo
macrophylum), was so conspicuous in the eyes of Bleek (1851) the first European linguist to
subject these languages to thorough comparative study, that he named them Bantu languages
after that root (ba- being a common form of the plural personal nominal prefix). However, -ntu
is not exclusive to the Bantu family. This is already clear from proto-Austronesian *taw, hu-
man, raw (Adelaar 1995: 345). Looking for an etymology of the puzzling Greek word n-
thrpos human, the Dutch linguist Ode (1927) had the felicitous inspiration to see this word
as a reflex of what he claims to be proto-Indo-European *-nt, under (cf. the more consensu-
ally established proto-Indo-European: *ndho under cf. Pokorny 1959-1969: I, 323) thus
proposing an underlying semantics of humans as ground or underworld dwellers. This, inci-
dentally, also offered Ode an interesting etymology of the long contested Ancient Greek
theonym Athena as an underworld goddess.
21
Along this line, many more possible (pseudo-?)
cognates from many language phyla come into view, against the background of the *Borean
hypothesis. Thus, (pseudo-?) cognates of Bantu -ntu seem to be proto-Afroasiatic *t V a
kind of soil (cf. Old Egyptian t A, earth, with cognates in Central and East Chadic and in
Low East Cushitic), from *Borean *TVHV, earth; a reflex of this root is also found in Sino-
Caucasian notably as t (modern Beijing Chinese), th (Classic Old Chinese), land, soil,
Karlgren code: 0062 a-c, suggested to be of Austric origin: notably proto-Austronesian
*buRtaq earth, soil, proto-Austroasiatic *t j earth, Proto-Miao-Yao *Ctau (cf. Bengtson &
Ruhlen 1994: 60, tak, however the latter two authors according to Starostin & Starostin
1998-2008 Long-range etymologies s.v. *TVHV, earth seem to confuse the reflexes of
*Borean *TVHV with those of *TVKV). Considering the remarkable similarities between
Southern and Eastern African Khoisan and North Caucasian,
22
one should not be surprised

20
Starostin & Starostin 1998-2008; Bengtson & Ruhlen 1994.
21
For alternative etymologies, of the name Athena, cf. Hrozny 1951: 228; Fauth 1979a; Bernal 1987
(contested by Jasanoff & Nussbaum 1996, Egberts 1997; van Binsbergen 1997b); Blaek 2010 (this
volume).
22
As we have seen, Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994 claim a link between Khoisan speakers and West Asia.
156
that also some Khoisan language families seem to attach to the very old and very widespread
earth / human complex which we have identified here: South Khoisan (Taa): *ta^, *tu^, per-
son; North Khoisan (proto-Zhu) *u, person Central Khoisan has *khoe etc. person,
which might well be a transformation of *u. (Note that here, too, like in Bantu, it is the word
for human that produces the ethnonyms Taa, Zhu and Khoe / Khoi, or Khoekhoe / Khoik-
hoi!) Further possibilities are contained in the reflexes of another *Borean root *TVHV, bot-
tom, which however is both semantically and phonologically so close to *TVHV earth
(however, in *Borean reconstructions, the vowels, indicated by *-V-, had to remain unspeci-
fied and therefore could differ) that we may well have to do with one and the same word:
proto-Sino-Tibetan *dilH bottom (e.g. Chinese *tj bottom Karlgren code 0590 c;
*tj, root, base, Karlgren code 0590 d) from proto-Sino-Caucasian *dVHV , bottom; from
the same *Borean root *TVHV, bottom, also Afroasiatic *duH-, low (e.g. Egyptian: dH (21)
low, East Chadic: *dwaHdaH- down) as well as proto-Austroasiatic *duj (also *t uj
tail, vagina), proto-Miao-Yao *t[ o ]i.B tail, Proto-Austronesian: *hudi buttocks (not in
Proto-Austronesian B) (also *udehi last, behind the latter, Austric forms being predicated
on a semantics of lower part of the rump, cf. English bottom) (cf. Peiros 1998: 157, 165;
most of these data Starostin & Starostin 1998-2008, with thanks).
In the light of these linguistic considerations, mythological continuity between Africa
and Eurasia have become thinkable, even probable, despite the theoretical and meth-
odological difficulties attending such a position.
2.3. Genetic indications for transcontinental continuities, and their elaboration
in the field of comparative mythology
For another ancillary science of comparative mythology, population genetics, a simi-
lar story of previously unsuspected African-Eurasian continuity has emerged in recent
years.
2.3.1. Out of Africa
In the first place, the emergence of the Out-of-Africa hypothesis in the 1980s (Cann et
al. 1987), meanwhile embraced by most specialists, has made it thinkable by now
even: common-place that Anatomically Modern Humans (people like you and me)
emerged in Africa c. 200 ka BP, and only spread to other continents from 80 ka BP
on. Archaeology has meanwhile brought to light the sophisticated harpoons, cleverly
incised lime-stone blocks, and rock paintings, which our direct ancestors were capable
of making around about the time of the Out-of-Africa Exodus, and there is no denial:
these were people with mental capabilities essentially identical to our own. The study
of cultural (near-)universals (e.g. Brown 1991, who presents a long list) allows us a
glimpse of what would have been part of the common heritage (which I have termed
Pandoras Box despite the pejorative connotations this term has had since Hesiod),
developed by Anatomically Modern Humans before the Exodus, and subsequently
taken to other continents, to be further transmitted, transformed, and innovated.
157
2.3.2. Towards an Aggregative Diachronic Model of World Mythology
A few years ago my dear colleague Michael Witzel, prompted by my transcontinental
analysis of the symbolism of leopard skin and of speckled surface textures in general
(van Binsbergen 2004), asked me to look at African cosmogonic myths for one of the
Harvard Round Table meetings out of which the International Association for Com-
parative Mythology was to develop, under his inspiring presidency. I was deeply im-
pressed by his seminal paper on world mythology as a window, in its own right, on
humankinds remotest past (Witzel 2001), and I set out to do a Michael Witzel on
the African material. Classifying the African cosmogonic myths then at my disposal
into some twenty Narrative Complexes, I tentatively formulated an Aggregative
(because each complex was an analytical construct of high aggregation) Diachronic
(because I adopted a time perspective encompassing the entire life span of 200 ka at-
tributed to Anatomically Modern Humans) Model of Global Mythology. The model is
based on recent genetic insights (e.g. Forster 2004, highlighting the diversification
and spread of mitochondrial DNA types) in the emergence and spread of Anatomi-
cally Modern Humans, combined with long-range linguistics, archaeology, and com-
parative ethnography. In terms of this model:
1. a handful of identifiable initial mythological traits in Pandoras Box in sub-
Saharan Africa
2. were taken to Asia and beyond, even ultimately back into Africa on the
wings of the demic diffusion known as the Out-of-Africa migration,
3. and on their way underwent very substantial (and to a certain extent, recon-
structible) transformations and innovations,
4. proliferating into a few dozen of Narrative Complexes, NarComs, i.e. coher-
ent complexes of mythemes that we may define analytically so as to impose
some manageable order on the confusion and abundance of the data of com-
parative mythology, and place them in a hypothetical historical sequence.

Initially, I distinguished twenty NarComs on the basis of a corpus of African
cosmogonic myths attested in historical times which I then projected onto Eurasian
(mainly literate) mythologies and their distribution maps, so as to try and identify pre-
Out-of-Africa NarComs if any, and to suggest how, from that handful of NarComs in
Pandoras Box, the others may have emerged as transformations and innovations, in
the course of an extended world history of mythology which largely coincided with
the world history of the spread and diversification of Anatomically Modern Hu-
mans.
23

23
Later, when concentrating on the present analysis of a global sample of flood myths (Isaak 2006; van
Binsbergen with Isaak 2008) I had occasion to define nearly the same number of additional NarComs,
which had not been conspicuous in the earlier, African sample: 21 The white god; 22 Astronomy pole
unilateral being; 23 Trickster Raven Coyote; 24 Raising the corn spirit; 25 Cow of heaven; 26 Earth diver;
27 Music Orpheus flute reed; 28 Games contests combats; 29 The four (elements and / or cardinal direc-
158
5. such proliferation especially took place in the context of less than a dozen
Contexts of Intensified Transformation and Innovation CITIs, which are in
principle identifiable
24
in time and space (see Fig. 9.3) although much further
linguistic and archaeological work needs to be done on this point, and which
largely coincide with the contexts in which new modes of production and new
(macro-) linguistic families can be argued to have emerged.

It is the segmented nature of this process that allows us to propose dating for
its phases. Traits that tend to universality in the cultures of Anatomically Modern
Humans may be surmised to have been part of the original Out-of-Africa package,
i.e. Pandoras Box. Two Sallies out of Africa have been reconstructed, of which the
first (c. 80 ka BP)
25
reached Australia along the Indian Ocean coast, but was further
abortive; while the second, c. 20 ka later, populated the other continents; hence traits
that are found in Africa, the Andaman Islands, New Guinea and Australia, but no-
where else, could be argued to date from Sally I and possibly from Pandoras Box.
The latters further contents may be argued on the basis of calibration against sub-
Saharan African traits in historical times which must be a combination of
(a) (evolved) Pandora-Box materials having remained inside Africa, and
(b) Asia-evolved materials brought to Africa in the context of the Back-
into-Africa movement from Asia from c. 15 ka BP on.
26

This feedback movements importance for comparative mythology cannot be
overestimated: bringing back to Africa (and, as a side-effect, to Europe) the complex
mythologies that had meanwhile evolved in Asia, the result was an amazing (but little
appreciated) continuity of mythologies throughout the three continents of the Old
World from the Neolithic onward: emphasis on the separation of Heaven and Earth,
the devices to effect their re-connection (demiurge, king, shaman, sacrifice, any verti-
cal nature or man-made object) etc.
No doubt my schema (van Binsbergen 2006a, 2006b) was too grandiose and
too audacious to convince in detail, and my initial data were of admittedly poor qual-
ity, but I will not budge from the basic point:
27
most if not all mythologies outside Af-

tions); 30 Blood as poison, menstruation; 31 Tortoise / turtle; 33 Fragmented monster becomes the world
or humankind; 34 Vagina dentata; 36 Fire; 37 Earth-dragon mountain volcano. (NarComs nos. 32 and 35
were defined but subsequently discarded as superfluous).
24
I have argued (van Binsbergen 2006a, 2006b) that CITIs could be identified and dated by a combina-
tion of methods, including hermeneutical close reading of mythological material collected in historical
times, systematic analysis of the logical relation implied in each NarCom, modes-of-production analy-
sis, and examination of rock art.
25
Population genetics based on multivariate analysis inevitably works with error margins of tens of ka.
The date of 80 ka BP reflects Forsters 2004 high dating which I have so far tried to follow, but there is
increasing internal evidence that the lower dating of 60 ka BP gives better results for comparative my-
thology.
26
Cf. Hammer et al. 1998; Cruciani et al. 2002; Coia et al. 2005; Underhill 2004; Forster 2004.
27
Here formulated by formal analogy with Starostins *Borean hypothesis, which could be summarised
159
rica can be taken to descend, in part, from postulated pre-Exodus mythologies devel-
oped in Africa between 200 and 80 ka BP. To support this claim, I drew up a big table
(van Binsbergen 2007a) where the 20 Narrative Complexes as attested in African
cosmogonic myths, are also explored for Eurasian mythologies, with surprising re-
sults suggestive of very considerable continuity. As a basis for thinking about Afri-
can-Eurasian mythological continuity, this could be a meaningful first step towards
formulating the overarching unifying system within which to define Asian, European
and African mythological specificities.
28

Table 9.1. Narrative Complexes identified in sub-Saharan African cosmogonies as
collected in historical times

1 Separation of Heaven and Earth 11 Primal waters and the flood
2 Reconnection of Heaven and Earth 12 From the tree
3 What is in heaven
29
13 Cosmic rainbow snake

in the following terms: most if not all macrophyla attested in historical times can be taken to descend,
in part, from a postulated *Borean parent phylum developed in Central Asia c. 25 ka BP.
28
My 2006a summary ended thus:
While predicated on Witzels seminal long-range approach to world mythology, his Laur-
asian / Gondwana dichotomy is replaced by a systematically argued combination of continu-
ity, transformation, interaction, and feedback. (van Binsbergen 2006a: 319; a diagrammatic
representation of Witzels Laurasian / Gondwana distinction, radically separating Eurasian
and African mythologies, appears on my p. 321).
This message has taken a while to register. Although there has been considerable approachment on
individual points, grosso modo Michael Witzel has continued to rely on his Gondwana / Laurasian
dichotomy right up to his contribution in the present volume (Witzel 2010) in the tradition of African
othering and African-Eurasian discontinuity. Michael Witzels conceptual apparatus on this point is
somewhat unfortunate. Gondwana and Laurasian are geological terms to designate phases and sections
of the postulated original land mass from which, ever since Wegener (1912), modern geo-physics has
claimed that present-day continents were formed, on a time scale measured, not in tens of millennia
like the cultural (including mythological) history of Anatomically Modern Humans), but in hundreds of
millions of years! By its play on such utter primordiality, Witzels distinction confusingly suggests a
fundamental and perennial separation of African / Australian / New Guinean mythologies on the one
hand, and Eurasian / Oceanian / American mythologies on the other. Such an approach claims that
there are, basically and inevitably, two main branches of mythologising humankind: the primitive
southern section with high levels of skin pigmentation, and the more advanced northern one with lesser
levels. However, my difference with Michael Witzel (while acknowledging the enormous inspiration
which his work and person have been for me in recent years), however, concerns. not in the first place
ideology or the transcontinental politics of knowledge, but empirical facts: given the combined, state-
of-the-art genetic paradigms of the Out-of-Africa migration and the Back-into-Africa migration,
Laurasian and Gondwana mythologies can only be relative and connected ideal-types, inevitably
continuous and interpenetrating with Laurasian mythology developing out of Gondwana in Asia
during the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic ever after the Second Out-of-Africa Sally (from ca. 60 ka
BP; for a provisional reconstruction of the specific steps see Table 9.2), while subsequently Laur-
asian-type mythologies percolated into Africa, overlaying and often like in the Nkoya case nearly
obscuring the Palaeo-African Gondwana heritage, as a result, in general, of the Back-into-Africa
movement (from ca. 15 ka BP), and more recently, and in particular, the southward expansion, into
sub-Saharan Africa, of the Pelasgian realm from the Late Bronze Age onward.
29
Further analysis suggests this NarCom an analytical construct, like all other NarComs to be an
160
4 Lightning bird and World egg 14 Duality Two children Twins
5 Mantis 15 Spider and feminine arts
6 Rescue from ogre 16 Shamanism / bones
7 From the mouth 17 Speckledness / granulated surface texture /
leopard
8 The stones 18 Honey bees, (honey-)beer
9 The moon 19 Cosmogonic virgin and her lover-son
10 The earth 20 Contradictory messengers bring death

Table 9.2. Contexts of Intensified Transformation and Innovation (CITIs) in the
global history of Anatomically Modern Humans mythology

CITI proposed Narrative Complex
(no. and description)
mtDNA type remarks linguistic
context
in time in space

I. Pre-
Out-of-
Africa
Middle
Palaeo-
lithic 80
ka BP and
earlier
Sub-
Saharan
Africa
Pandoras Box: the original
mythical package, perhaps
containing: 4. The Lightning
Bird (and the World Egg)
8. The stones (as earth; under
CITI VI revised as the stones
as connection between heaven
and earth)
9. The Moon
10. The Earth as primary (10
was subsequently
revised towards cattle, in the
Neolithic)
12. From the Tree (in subse-
quent CITIs diversified into
12a The world and humanity
from the tree, and 12c the
leg-child)
13. The Cosmic / Rainbow
Snake
15. The Spider (subsequent
transformed into the feminine
arts in CITI VI)
L (L1, L2, L3) The emergence of Anatomi-
cally Modern Humans as a bio-
logical mutation?
Africas soil carrying capacity,
even for hunting and collecting,
is the lowest in the world,
mainly due to geological condi-
tions that predate the appearance
of humans by hundreds of mil-
lions of years, so it is possible
that there was a push out of
Africa
The emergence of myth as
constitutive of a new type of
human community: self-
reflective, coherent, communi-
cating, engaging in hunting and
collecting, and creating coher-
ence, through the narrative and
ritual management of symbols,
leading to articulate language
If this last point is plausible,
then the earliest phase in the
overall process is in itself myth-
driven
Proto-
Human
II. Middle
Palaeo-
lithic, c.
80 ka BP
West
Asia, and
from
there to
Australia
and New
Guinea
5. The Mantis N and / or M Leaving Africa and venturing
into West Asia is likely to have
produced new challenges and to
have given access to new oppor-
tunities; possibly Neanderthaloid
influence;

III. Mid-
dle Pa-
laeolithic,
c. 35 ka
BP
West
Asia
6. Escape from the Ogre A and B (out of
N)
Neanderthaloid influence?

unfortunate contamination of nos. 4 (cf. Rain), 13, and 19.
161
IV. Upper
Palaeo-
lithic, c.
20 ka BP
Central
Asia
11. The Primal Waters and the
Flood
B (out of N) Installation of the cosmogony of
the Mother / Mistress of the
Primal Waters, and the Land
*Borean
V. Upper
Palaeo-
lithic, c.
15 ka BP
Central
Asia
1. The separation of Heaven
and Earth 16. Shamanism,
bones
N (H, A, B) The separation of Heaven and
Earth as central cosmogonic
theme; shamanism associated
with naked-eye astronomy (for
hunters, later agriculturalists).
The shamans (belief of) travel-
ling along the celestial axis to
underworld and upper world,
created (the idea of) a politico-
religious social hierarchy on
which more effective forms of
socio-political organisation
could be based.
Peripheral
and Cen-
tral
branches
of *Borean
have sepa-
rated
VI.
proto-
Neolithic
c. 12 ka
BP
Extended
Fertile
Crescent
2. The Re-Connection of
Heaven and Earth (after sepa-
ration)
19. The Cosmogonic Virgin
and her Son / lover
14. Twins
R and M1 Neolithic food production
through agriculture and animal
husbandry; Neolithic arts and
crafts such as pottery, spinning,
weaving; male ascendance;
complex society, the emergence
of writing, the state, organised
religion, and science; incipient
metallurgy
Eurasiatic
and
Afro-
Asiatic
separate
VII.
Neolithic
or Bronze
Age c. 5
ka BP
Extended
Fertile
Crescent
7. From the Mouth too recent and
too limited in
scope to be
interpreted in
terms of mtDNA
type
Masculinisation and mythical
hysterical displacement of
procreative functions, from
groin to mouth and head tran-
scendentalism as triggered by
writing, the state, organised
priesthood, and science

VIII.
Neolithic
to Iron
Age c. 3
ka BP
Extended
Fertile
Crescent
14a. Twins, Two Children,
Duality

further reflection needed
2.3.3. Back into Africa
Nor did this exhaust the inspiration of state-of-the-art population genetics towards the
rethinking of African-Eurasian mythological continuities. And that is just as well, be-
cause merely invoking a postulated common origin, at a moment in time at least 80 ka
BP, risks being as ineffective as a claim of continuity, as the mythical close kinship of
Arabs and Jews (propounded or implied by the sacred books of both groups, the
Qurn and the Tanach or Bible) turns out to be when it comes to resolving the cur-
rent socio-political tensions in the Middle East To make the idea of African-
Eurasian mythological continuities a tangible reality, we would like to have some-
thing a bit more recent than the Out-of-Africa Exodus, and state-of-the-art population
genetics has been good enough to oblige: by identifying, as we have seen, from the
indirect and complex evidence of molecular genetic analysis, the Back-into-Africa
162
movement, from East and West Asia, from 15 ka BP on. Population movements mas-
sive enough to leave detectable traces to be picked up by state-of-the-art molecular
biology, and so relatively recent that they can only have involved Anatomically Mod-
ern Humans in full command of symbolic thought and articulate language, such
movements must necessarily have involved (as a form of demic diffusion) a measure
of cultural, including mythological, transmission from Eurasia, back into Africa, dur-
ing the same period.
The Back-into-Africa movement makes it understandable, not only that Eura-
sian and African languages are found to be cognate, but also that African mythologies
as recorded in historical times (and with the exception of the iconographic records of
rock art and the performative repertoire of ritual and folklore both of them posing
extreme methodological problems of interpretation and periodisation) must be over-
laid with, and may even merge with, Eurasian mythologies. And this is precisely what
we observe.
I find it illuminating, and in line with the (admittedly very limited, and diffi-
cult to decode, available iconographic) data, to see, in the Eurasian Upper Palaeo-
lithic, the succession, c. 5-10 ka apart, of two main cosmogonic schemas:
a) first the Cosmogony of the Separation of the Waters and the Land (which gave us
flood myths evoking the annihilation of the cosmic order, when that order is
based on the separation of the waters), and subsequently
b) the Cosmogony of the Separation of Heaven and Earth (connected with the rise of
naked-eye astronomy, detailed time reckoning, and of shamanism as an unprece-
dented concentration of symbolic power).

Although massive vestiges of (a) survived until historical times (notably in the
form of the aquatic and marine connotations of the Mother Goddess and of her son-
lover, the Hero), (b) has become absolutely dominant, and as a result the central
theme in Eurasian mythologies has now been for three or four millennia at least: how
was the Separation of Heaven and Earth effected, how can humankind overcome its
traumatic effects (basically, by items coming down from heaven such as rain, fire,
seeds, cattle, humans, angels, Gods son , or rising up to heaven such as moun-
tains, poles, spires, towers, altars, sacrifices , or by re-unifying heaven and earth
such as a demiurge, king, priest, shaman, twin) and what eschatological implication
does this worldview have. Well, notwithstanding the prevalence of flood myths also
in Africa, this same preoccupation with the effects of the Separation of Heaven and
Earth is found in sub-Saharan African mythologies, in such a way that I have spoken,
in connection with that part of the world, of relatively old genes with relatively mod-
ern mythologies.

163

1: CITI (VII and VIII could not be drawn in location, hence the broken lines connecting object and num-
ber); 2: Pandoras Box = CITI I, 200-80 ka BP; 3: direct diffusion of (evolved) Pandora-Box / CITI I mo-
tifs into Eurasia and the rest of the world, unaffected by the innovation and transformation in the
subsequent succession of CITIs; 4: Extended Fertile Crescent, proto-Neolithic; 5: Back-into-Africa
movement, 15 ka BP; 6: Spread and diversification of the mtDNA types of Anatomically Modern Humans
(Forster 2004); 7: Extended General Sunda Thesis (Oppenheimer 1998 and van Binsbergen in preparation
(b), van Binsbergen with Isaak 2008).
Fig. 9.3. Provisional situation in space and time of Contexts of Intensified Transfor-
mation and Innovation (CITIs), as crucial stages in the global history of the mythol-
ogy of Anatomically Modern Humans
164
However, 15 ka is still a very long time span, and one in which mythological
drift is likely to play havoc with any empirical evidence of transcontinental transmis-
sion. Therefore we are fortunate that the Back-in-Africa mechanism can be nar-
rowed down, in so far as it refers to Western Eurasia (Underhill 2004 however also
claims a substantial Eastern Eurasian influx into Africa, cf. Oppenheimer 1998),
30
to
the much more recent Pelasgian hypothesis, which moreover is open to direct study
by the examination of ethnographic distributions. In addition to genetics and linguis-
tics, archaeology and comparative mythology, comparative ethnography has been
recognised as another venue towards the retrieval of the otherwise undocumented
past.
31
The distribution of ethnographic traits, used with caution, can provide clues as
to the extent and boundaries of culture areas in pre- and proto-history, and indicate
affinities otherwise overlooked. Although soon my results proved to be supported by
genetic distribution patterns as well,
32
it was the analysis of a large number of ethno-
graphic trait distributions throughout the Old World, that has recently made me for-
mulate the Pelasgian hypothesis, with, I believe, considerable implications for
comparative mythology.
2.4. The Pelasgian hypothesis
The Pelasgian hypothesis is one of the tools promising to create order among, and to
make sense of, the unmistakable comparative trends emerging from the huge global
mythological corpus.
33
It is an integrative perspective on long-range ethnic, cultural,
linguistic and genetic affinities encompassing Africa, Europe, and Asia. This hy-
pothesis proposes an original, primary Pelasgian realm in Neolithic West Central
Asia, which due to westbound population movements in the Early and Middle Bronze
Ages (greatly facilitated by Central Asian pastoralists achievements, notably the rise

30
I refrain here from a substantial discussion of Oppenheimers (1998) Sunda thesis. It has two aspects:
(a) the General Sunda hypothesis, claiming that with the global rise of the sea level at the beginning of
the Holocene (10 ka BP) the inundation of the Sunda subcontinent (now the Indonesian archipelago)
caused a massive population movement into Oceania and to Western Eurasia, triggering the civilisa-
tions of the Indus valley and of Mesopotamia, if not further a field; (b) the Special Sunda thesis, claim-
ing that in this process the core mythologies of the Ancient Near East including those of Genesis (e.g.
the Standard Elaborate Flood myth) were transmitted from a South East Asian origin. A statistically
based analysis of Flood myths worldwide brought me to dismiss (b), but, especially for Africa, (a) still
has a lot to offer (van Binsbergen with Isaak 2008; van Binsbergen, in preparation (a)). It cannot be
ruled out that a Sunda mechanism was behind the introduction, to South Central Africa, of some of the
stories recognised to have travelled (Werner 1933); but the Sunda hypothesis does not throw much
light on the data covered in Section 5, and their distributions. A carefully edited, lavishly annotated and
comparatively referenced Indonesian collection like de Vries 1925 shows only a few Ancient Near
Eastern themes (e.g. the motif of the snake-related Herb of Life) and African themes (which de Vries
traces by reference to Frobenius story collections); in the Indonesian context, however, these motifs
give the distinct impression of distant echoes, not of original prototypes.
31
Cf. Vansina 1968, 1981, 1990; van Binsbergen 1981.
32
For these genetic details, see van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen, in press.
33
van Binsbergen, 2010b, 2010c; van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen, in press.
165
of horse-riding and of chariot technology) led to the establishment of a secondary
Mediterranean-Pelasgian realm by the Late Bronze Age. Although linguistically and
ethnically heterogeneous,
34
the primary and secondary Pelasgian realms stood out by
a package of traits; individual Pelasgian population groups never displayed the en-
tire package, but selectively adopted a number of them, also a basis for ethnico-
political identification with other such groups, e.g. in the context of the Sea Peoples
episode at the very end of the Bronze Age. As many as 80 Pelasgian traits have been
identified.
35

Fig. 9.4. Diagrammatic representation of the Pelasgian Hypothesis

34
As a result, the term Pelasgian can only be employed as an analytical label, without any one-to-one
correspondence with the ethnic distinctions the historical actors themselves were making. The latter
have been taken up by modern students of ancient languages and ethnicities; for an overview of ancient
uses of the terms to which Pelasgian refers, see van Binsbergen 2010c.
35
A full list is presented in van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen, in press: chapter 28. A selection of pro-
posed Pelasgian traits includes (order is arbitrary): gold mining and metallurgy; relatively early adop-
tion and transmission (if not invention) of iron-working technology; veneration of a Mother goddess
associated with bees; male genital mutilation in at least part of the realm; territorial cults centring on
earth shrines, often in the form of herms, with divination function; a central flood myth and a creation
mythology centring on the primal emergence of Land from Water, with the Primal Waters personified
as a virgin Creator Goddess; military prowess and pre-marital sexual license of women; veneration of a
divine pair of opposite gender (e.g. Athena and Poseidon, Athena and Hephaestus, N Wa and Fu
Xi associated with the installation of culture and world order there are indications that the
Graeco-Roman claim of Lacus Tritonis / ot al-Jerd (modern Southern Tunisia) as birth place of
Athena (and Poseidon?) mirrors an earlier, more eastern, Central Asian birthplace by a major inland
lake, and such mirroring occurs in other ancient place names including (H)Iberia, Libya, and Africa /
Ifriqa (Karst 1931); relatively early adoption and transmission of chariot technology; the hunting tech-
nology of the spiked wheel trap; veneration of a solar god; headhunting and skull cult; common genetic
background in respect of certain genetic markers; boat cult, often associated with the afterlife.
166

The distribution of these traits brings out one of the essential features of the
Pelasgian hypothesis, notably the cross-model: from the Middle Bronze Age on, and
largely on the wings of horse-riding and chariot technology, Pelasgian traits have
been selectively transmitted in all four directions: west to the Western Mediterranean
and the Celtic World; north to the Uralic and Germanic world; East across the Eura-
sian Steppe to East Asia, with diversions to South and South East Asia; and south
across the Sahara into sub-Saharan Africa notably the area where Niger-Congo (>
Bantu) is spoken in historical times.

2.5. Good old Aarne-Thompson
But while these are recently formulated models in full process of testing and refine-
ment, there are also time-honoured approaches to comparative mythology, which are
in principle general and universally applicable, and therefore invite specific applica-
tion to Africa. Ever since the early 20th century CE, the standard tool of comparative
mythologists has been the Aarne, subsequently Aarne-Thompson, AT, typological
classification of folktales.
36
Widely used and highly effective, it was recently updated
by Uther (2004). The system has been the basis for much comparative mythological
research on a local and regional basis.
37
Only rarely has it been applied to Africa.
38

One elegant way of demonstrating the continuity of African mythologies and those of

36
Aarne-Thompson 1973, cf. Thompson 1955-1958.
37
Cf. British Columbia Folklore Society 2000, which provides an impressive bibliography.
38
E.g. Clarke 1958 (West Africa), and two collections of Ancient Egyptian material (El-
Shamy 1980; Maspero 2002).
167
Eurasia would therefore be to assess how many of the AT entries apply to one particu-
lar African mythology, e.g. that of the Nkoya of Zambia, South Central Africa, among
whom I have done ethnohistorical and ethnographic research since the early 1970s.
The Aarne-Thompson-Uther list is very extensive and therefore difficult to handle.
Instead, I have used the selection which Fontenrose (1980) has made out of this list,
with specific reference to the combat myth whose analysis is at the heart of Fonten-
roses work. Fontenroses highly selective list (Fontenrose 1980: 583f, Themes and
motifs part II) still comprises 399 entries. Of these, as much as one-fifth can be ar-
gued to apply to Nkoya mythology, as set out in Table 9.3.
Table 9.3. Selected Aarne-Thompson (AT) traits relevant to the combat theme
(Fontenrose 1980) in Nkoya mythology and cosmology
AT number description Nkoya application
A128 Mutilated god Mwenda-Njangula is unilateral
A154 Nectar, soma mead (mbote) has comparable mythical connotations
A162.2-3 Sky-god fights dragon of the
waters or evil demon
Likambi Mange and her artificial woman versus Shi-
hoka Nalinanga
A162.8 Rebellion of gods against
their ruler
creation myth as told by the nature prophet and witch-
finder Lubumba (interviews September-October 1973)
A255 Contest with drought demon Likambi Mange and her artificial woman versus Shi-
hoka Nalinanga (Snake child / mother of Drought)
A721.1 Theft of sun Kapesh and subjects attempt theft of moon
A1010 Deluge, inundation of world Flood myths present although not always in very con-
spicuous form
A1111 A monster keeps water from
mankind until a hero defeats
him and releases it
Vr tra-like connotations implied by the name Shihoka
Nalinanga Snake child / mother of Drought
B11 Dragon Shihoka Nalinanga
B11.4.1 Dragon can fly kings ambivalent benevolent / malevolent connota-
tions which (cf. Shihoka) approach those of snake or
dragon, great powers of malele (wizardry) are attrib-
uted, including the powers of bilocation, exceedingly
rapid locomotion, shape-shifting and invisibility
B11.5.1 Dragon has power of trans-
forming himself
as previous
B11.9 Dragon as power of evil as previous
B11.10.3 Fight against dragon Likambi Mange and her artificial woman versus Shi-
hoka Nalinanga
B11.11.7 Woman as dragon-slayer as previous
B11.12.3 Fiery dragon Shihoka Nalinanga Snake child / mother of Drought
B31 Giant bird the creator god and the latters son are both [ giant ]
birds
B56 Garuda-bird as previous
B91, 91.1 Mythical snake, snake-demon Shihoka Nalinanga
B872 Giant bird the creator god and the latters son are both [ giant ]
birds
D152.1-3 Transformation to hawk /
eagle / vulture
as previous; two of these species are royal clan names
D161.1, 162 Transformation to swan /
crane
kalyange (stork, heron) as implied evocation of creator
god
D185.1 Transformation to fly / bee Nkoya apical ancestress considered queen bee, and so
is bride-taking family in wedding song
168
D 191, 194,
199.2
Transformation to snake /
crocodile / dragon
Shihoka Nalinanga
D215 Transformation to tree Manenga, Shinkisha: kings named after trees
D391 Transformation of snake to
man
Shihoka Nalinanga
D399.1 Transformation of dragon to
man or other animal
as previous
D429.2.1 Dragon king as wind Lipepo, Royal Person Wind
D651 Transformation to defeat
enemies
kings malele
D671 Transformation flight as previous
D950.0.1 Magic tree guarded by snake tree connotations of Manenga, Shinkisha; cf. Shihoka
Nalinanga
D1171.6 Magic cup, Grail Cauldron of Kingship
D1344.5 Magic ointment renders in-
vulnerable
kings malele
D1472,
1472.1.9-19
Wunschding, magic cup,
Grail
Cauldron of Kingship
D1710 Possession of magic powers kings malele
D2141.0.3,
2142.0.1
Evil demon produces storms,
controls winds
Lipepo, Wind
E422 Living corpse Several people within living memory were known as
Mufuenda (Dead Man Walking) since they returned
to life after having been declared dead
E481.1 Land of dead in lower world Mwaat Yaav, Lord of Death
E481.2 Land of dead across water as previous, north of the Congo / Zambezi watershed
E481.6.2 Land of dead in west as previous, Nkoya are often called Mbwela, People
of the West
E485 Land of skulls Kayambila, Thatching with Skulls
E781 Eyes removed but replaced obliquely implied in Kapeshs attempted stealing of
the moon
F93.1 River as entrance to lower
world
streams and ponds (whose fishing rights are jealously
guarded, usually by king and headman) are considered
to be abodes of the ancestors; a reluctant chosen can-
didate for name inheritance can escape the elders
ruling if he or she runs away and reaches the valleys
central stream before being physically caught by the
elders and invested with the vacant name
F141.1 River as barrier to otherworld as previous; but also in the variants presented by
Jacottet (1899-1901)
F302.3.4 Fairy demoness entices men
to harm them
Likambi Manges artificial woman
F420.4.1.1 Protean transformations of
water-deity
kings malele; the underlying image often appears to
be that of a water dragon either terrestrial (of the
deep) or celestial (of the sky)
F432 Spirits of wind, storm, thun-
der, cold
Lipepo
F512.1 One-eyed person, Cyclops Mwenda-Njangula
F526.6 Snake-man compound Shihoka Nalinanga
F771.1.9 House of skulls as murderers
abode
Kayambila
G264 La belle dame Likambi Mange and her artificial woman
G303.1.1 Evil demon is gods son. Prophet Lubumbas account of creation
G303.3.3.6.1 Evil demon in form of snake as previous; and Shihoka Nalinanga
G303.4.1.2.1 Evil demon has one eye in
middle of forehead
Mwenda-Njangula
G303.8.1 Evil demon driven from
heaven
Lubumbas account
G308 Sea monster mystical powers and kings often have the connotations
169
of (celestial or terrestrial) water snake
G315 Demon cuts off mens heads
to build with them
Kayambila
M2 King makes inhuman deci-
sions
Kayambila and several other kings recounted in Likota
lya Bankoya
Q482 Noble person must do menial
service
the Kahare royal ancestors suffering humiliation as
swine herds at the Lunda capital of Mwaat Yaav,
Lord of Death
R185 Hero fights Death to save
somebody
Prince Luhambas successful war (whose implied
purpose was to save his sister Princess Katete) against
Mwaat Yaavs (Lord of Death) Humbu punitive
expedition
T173 Murderous bride Likambi Manges artificial woman

Although it remains possible to argue about the justification of some of the entries in
this Table, the majority of entries are absolutely straight-forward, and they form a
nice initial statement on Nkoya-Eurasian mythological continuities. However, the ap-
plication of this insight in the Nkoya research threatened to be devastating for my ear-
lier research work, as we shall now see.
3. From myth to proto-history and back, in tears /
Tears
After extensive work on historical reconstruction (largely on the basis of mythical and
oral historical materials) in the field of North African popular Islam and of Central
African pre-colonial religious forms, and before exploring urban culture and ecstatic
cults in Southern Africa, the Nkoya people of Zambia constituted, for decades from
1972 onward, my main research focus in Africa. Speaking a Central Bantu language,
the Nkoya (numbering ca. 100,000) emerged (under the effect of the ethnic dynamics
of the colonial state as mediated through the indirect rule of Barotseland, with local
Christian intellectuals as major ethnic brokers) as a comprehensive self-affirming eth-
nic identity towards the middle of the 20th century CE. This ethnic label emerged as a
bundling of a great many smaller identities each characterised by their own name,
clan affiliation, areas of residence, royal and chiefly leaders, dialectical variations,
historical traditions etc. (van Binsbergen 1992). The Nkoya primarily inhabit the fer-
tile plateau of the Kafue / Zambezi watershed, although smaller branches of this eth-
nic cluster are found in Western, Central and Southern Zambia, and small minorities
of Nkoya urban migrants inhabits all towns of South Central and Southern Africa. In
an economy combining highly perfected hunting and fishing techniques with surpris-
ingly complex forms of cultivation (Trapnell & Clothier 1937; Schltz 1976), with an
unbroken local pottery tradition going back at least two millennia, and extensive iron
metallurgy, the kingship, name inheritance rites (which merge with the kingship in the
enthronisation rite), and female initiation rites are among the Nkoyas central institu-
tions. These are largely continuous with those of neighbouring peoples in the wide
vicinity. The Nkoya also knew male initiation rites including male genital mutilation,
170
but these were discontinued as a result of a complex process spanning several centu-
ries (van Binsbergen 1992, 1993), in the course of which Nkoya distinctiveness was
asserted vis--vis the kingship and culture of the Lunda under the royal title of Mwati
Yamvo / Mwaat Yaav in Southern Congo (whose overlordship used to be acknowl-
edged across many hundreds of kilometres into what is today Zambia and Angola),
and vis--vis the cluster of circumcising peoples in that region: Chokwe, Luvale,
Mbunda and Luchazi. The Lozi (Barotse, Luyi) of the Zambezi flood plain
39
went
through a similar process as the Nkoya, initially parallel with and hardly distinguish-
able from the ethnic clusters and ruling groups that were to end up under the Nkoya
label, subsequently however in an increasingly hegemonic, subordinating relation vis-
-vis the Nkoya groups. The latter development especially took place after the South-
ern African ethnico-military upheaval known as the mfecane (ca. 1820 CE) induced
immigration from Southern Africa in the early 19th century. This made a Sotho dia-
lect the language of communication throughout rapidly expanding Barotseland.
Nkoya court culture especially its royal orchestra has continued to dominate all royal
courts in Western Zambia even to this day (Brown 1984; Kawanga 1978), and the
Nkoya-Luyana language has remained the Luyi court language. Early Christian mis-
sion in what was to be Western Zambia concentrated on these Barotse / Luyi / Lozi of
the Upper Zambezi flood plain, from the 1880s CE on; among the Nkoya, Christian
missions only started in the late 1910s CE. To legitimate its control over Western
Zambia, the early British colonial administration (from 1900 CE on) had an interest in
greatly exaggerating the extent and effectiveness of the Barotse pre-colonial state,
which was granted Protectorate status; in the process, Lozi domination over the
Nkoya was further enhanced, and for decades, the Nkoya kings (called chiefs since
incorporation in the Lozi indigenous administration, and in the colonial state) were
forbidden even to have royal drums. Only the Nkoya royal orchestras serving the Lozi
royal establishments throughout the region testify to the Nkoyas earlier exalted posi-
tion. In recent decades, now that Nkoya musical and ritual culture (despite the re-
instatement of royal drums) has come to be largely virtualised, it is still through the
annual two-day Kazanga festival (a radical transformation of an ancient royal harvest
festival, discontinued in the late 19th century CE)
40
that the Nkoya through a rich rep-
ertoire of music and dance present their identity to the wider world at the regional and
national level.
Using the Nkoya data first for a theoretical book largely based on the Nkoya
data (van Binsbergen 1981) and a series of ethnographic and ethnohistorical articles, I
edited (van Binsbergen 1988) Likota lya Bankoya, a collection of oral traditions of the
Nkoya people of Zambia compiled and synthesised by the first local Christian minis-
ter of religion. Soon this was followed (van Binsbergen 1992, incorporating 1988; cf.
1987) by my analytical study Tears of Rain: Ethnicity and history in Central Western
Zambia, a reconstruction of half a millennium of state formation in the region, based

39
Cf. Gluckman 1941, 1943, 1949, 1951, 1955b; Mainga 1966, 1972, 1973; Prins 1980; Muuka 1966.
40
Van Binsbergen 1993, 1995b, 1999, 2003c.
171
on a close reading of these worked-up traditions against the combined background of:
(a) traditions I had collected in the region in the course of two decades, not only at
the royal courts (where central dynastic oral histories are managed, controlled
and transmitted), but also in commoner villages where the traditions were rela-
tively decentralised and unprocessed in the light of dynastic aspirations, and
therefore reveal many flaws, contradictions and manipulations in the inte-
grated courtly accounts
(b) the existing historical and theoretical literature on South Central Africa; and
(c) my own background as a long-standing observer, and increasingly as much-
more-than-scientific participant, in Nkoya village life and regional traditional
politics.

The focus of Tears of Rain was proto-historical (not a single written text older
than c. 200 years existed on the area, and no more than a handful older than a cen-
tury). Given the very recent emergence of the Nkoya ethnic identity, it also had to be
trans-ethnic / regional, encompassing the whole of Western Zambia and reaching into
Angola and Southern Congo, but even so covering only a small portion of the African
continent. The transcontinental mythological links which the present argument will
assert for the Nkoya people, cannot claim to apply to the whole of Africa, yet they
make us look with a different eye at the isolated position in which African mytholo-
gies are so often put by contrast to Eurasian ones (cf. Frazer 1918; Witzel 2001,
2010).
Extensive exposure to Assyriology, Egyptology and comparative mythology
in the first half of the 1990s, however, made me realise that what I had considered, in
my Nkoya history, to be an distorted traditional account of historical events in Iron
Age South Central Africa up to half a millennium BP, apparently contained many
highly specific parallels with the mythologies attested in the texts of civilisations ex-
tremely remote in space and time from Nkoyaland.
41
Below I will offer a detailed dis-

41
From 1990 on, one of my major research projects has been the comparative study of African divina-
tion systems, in an attempt to situate, in space and time, the system I had encountered during fieldwork
in Francistown, Botswana, from 1988 on. From this context I derived my first empirically underpinned
insight in African-Eurasian continuities (apart from noting the as I much later was to realise, Pelas-
gian continuities between Ancient Greece and the highlands of North-western Tunisia, site of my
first fieldwork in the late 1960s): the Francistown system turned out to be a form of geomantic divina-
tion, closely cognate to those in the rest of Southern Africa, Madagascar and the Comoro Islands, and
West Africa; these could all be traced to the system of
c
ilm al-raml (Arabic Sand Science) or att al-
raml (Arabic Sand Calligraphy) a divination system that surfaces in
c
Abs d Iraq by the end of the
first millennium CE, probably under influence from both North Africa (the principal author on
c
ilm al-
raml is the Berber sheikh Muh ammad al-Znt) and (with the Tang dynasty having far extended
West, a thriving East Asian trade in the harbour of Bas ra, and demonstrable Chinese influence on intel-
lectual life in Iraq) from Chinese divination well-known as y jng (I Ching; cf. van Binsbergen
1995a, 1996, 2005). In view of the recognised continuity between Islamic secret sciences, those of
Graeco-Roman Antiquity, and those of Ancient Egypt and the Ancient Near East (Fah d 1966; Bottro
1992; Ray 1981; Borghouts 1995; Bouch-Leclercq 1879; Delatte & Delatte 1936; Ullman 1972), this
172
cussion of these possible specific mythological correspondences with Egypt, the An-
cient Near East, Graeco-Roman Antiquity, South Asia, Central Asia, and even North
America. So I had to face the possibility (van Binsbergen 1998-2006) that my histori-
cal reconstruction in Tears of Rain, however acclaimed by the doyen of Central Afri-
can protohistory Jan Vansina (1993), was yet largely fictitious and based on some sort
of proto-historical fallacy of misplaced concreteness (Whitehead 1925). In other
words, I now fear that at the time I had systematically mistaken for

(a) distorted-but-retrievable facts of South Central African Iron Age history in the
second half of the second millennium CE, what in fact were
(b) mere resonances devoid of all genuine historicity and spuriously localised
of widespread mythological materials percolating throughout the Old World

and among other places attested in millennia-old texts from the outer fringes
of the African continent, and beyond.

Let me give one example of what this concretely means for proto-historical analysis
in the South Central African context.
THE NKOYA KING AS DEATH DEMON. The legendary Nkoya king Kayambilas throne name
boasts that he thatched his palace with the skulls of his enemies. This cruel practice has, in the
first place, local resonances. It is part of a violent skull complex that was quite central to
Nkoya culture before modern times, and elements of which have persisted at least in the form
of rumours e.g. the rumour (as late as 1973 leading to a grim court case; van Binsbergen
1975 and 2003b) that the king routinely sends out his henchmen to kill stray children, because
his life force and that of the country depends on consumption of their brains. Is Kayambila
only an a-historical evocation epiphany of an underworld demon? And does the same apply to
his overlord the Lunda king Mwaat Yaav, whose name means literally the Lord of Death and
whose very real though distant court at Musumba, far north of the Zambezi / Congo water-
shed, has long been known as the scene of great cruelty (cf. Frazer 1911-1915). Or could Ka-
yambila yet have been historical? The political events in Western Zambia 1820-1950 make us
read as a counter-hegemonic claim, and hence as potentially mythical, the account of Kayam-
bila graciously extending Nkoya regalia to his alleged poor relative the Barotse king Mu-
lambwa. However, some of the other traditions concerning Kayambila have a remarkable real-
life flavour, for instance when he is depicted as naming his new-born grandson in the early
morning light.
42
This grandson was explicitly claimed to be still alive in the early twentieth
century CE, when Rev. Shimunika his close kinsman, who described the birth scene was
in his teens. I was therefore persuaded, in Tears of Rain, to consider Kayambila as a historical
figure, and to situate his rule shortly after 1800 CE. However, the skull motif makes him more
than life-size. He has effectively taken on the features of a king of the underworld. The popu-

project ramified out into Antiquity and the Ancient Near East, in a bid to identify proto-geomancies. In
this connection I was fortunate to join the Research Group on Magic and Religion in the Ancient Near
East, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS), Wassenaar, 1994-1995, whose stimulating
impact I hereby acknowledge. However, the antecedents that I was looking for were only found much
later, and scarcely in that context (with the exception of the Pre-Socratics), but in a transcontinental
elemental system of transformations ranging in the recognisable Pelasgian distribution from the
Mediterranean to East Asia and South Central Africa (van Binsbergen 2009b, 2010e).
42
Cf. van Binsbergen 1992; Anonymous [ J.M. Shimunika], n.d. The same birth custom existed in
Ancient Egypt, cf. Stricker 1963-1989.
173
lar consciousness of common Nkoya villagers has retained this conception of the kingship to a
great extent in this society where sorcery and counter-sorcery constitute the routine imagina-
tion and discourse though very rarely the practice of the ongoing social process (cf. van
Binsbergen 1981, 2001), the king is considered the greatest sorcerer of all. This also casts a
different light on the Nkoya tradition according to which the founders of present-day royal
dynasties came to their present homeland in western central Zambia in an attempt to escape
from the humiliation (pig herding) they were suffering at the court of Mwaat Yaav. Now,
when we consider the myth of Nkoya kings leaving Musumba, are we talking about historical
migrations of small proto-dynastic groups from Southern Congo (formerly Zaire) in the sec-
ond half of the second millennium CE? Or about mans eternal struggle with death? (Cf.
Fontenrose 1980, who considers this the underlying motif of all combat myths worldwide.)
Must we reckon, here and in the other cases of extensive ancient parallels in modern Nkoya
traditions and institutions, with the possibility that old mythical themes were deliberately re-
vived and enacted by what were truly eighteenth and nineteenth century CE political actors
in Nkoyaland in an atavistic bid to create continuity with, and legitimacy in the light of, the
very remote past of several millennia ago? (Much like, in Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt,
kings of the late periods claimed legitimacy by reviving the memory of their very distant, leg-
endary predecessors: Sargon II (early 8th century BCE) naming himself after Sargon of Akkad
across 16 centuries; and Sargon IIs contemporary the 25th-dynasty Nubian pharaoh Shabaka
claiming, likewise across one and a half millennium, a 6th-dynasty throne name for himself.)
Or does the Nkoya skull complex have genuine Eurasian parallels, to be explained by Nkoya
and Western Eurasia sharing a common cultural source? Below, Section 5 will make the plau-
sibility of the latter position abundantly clear, to the detriment of my localised, proto-historical
reading of such myths.
Although it had escaped my attention at the time, a similar objection had been
brought by Wrigley against the work of my dear friend and sometime academic su-
pervisor Matthew Schoffeleers, who engaged in similar proto-historical research in
Malawi in the 1960-1980s.
43
Wrigleys summary reads (1988):
Debates over the Zimba period of Zambesian history prompt a new consideration of the
mythical element in oral traditions. The work of M. Schoffeleers on Mbona, presiding spirit of
a famous rainshrine in southern Malawi, is exploited in order to cast doubt on his reconstruc-
tion of 16th and 17th-century political history. It is suggested that Mbona was the serpentine
power immanent in the Zambesi; that reports of his martyrdom at the hands of a secular
ruler are versions of an ancient myth of the lightning and the rainbow; that his journey to, and
subsequent flight from, Kaphiri-ntiwa, scene of the Maravi creation myth, is a variant of the
visit made to the sky by Kintu, the First Man of Ganda tradition. It is not very likely that
such stories attest the rise of a great military State c. 1600 and the ensuing suppression of reli-
gious institutions.
Seeking to retrieve the recent proto-historical past of sub-Saharan Africa was
very much en vogue among historians and anthropologists from the late 1960s on-
wards (cf. Ranger & Kimambo 1972). Confident in our use of a systematic method to
extract fragments of historical fact from local myth,
44
we did not heed Wrigleys criti-
cism, which meanwhile however I have come to consider as eminently well-taken.
Yet even Wrigleys position it still displayed the familiar, main-stream limitation of
considering in a splendid tradition of which Luc de Heusch (1958, 1972, 1982) has

43
Cf. Schoffeleers 1985, 1988, 1992; Wrigley 1988; van Binsbergen 2008a.
44
Vansina 1965, 1985; Schoffeleers 1979, 1985; van Binsbergen 1981, 1985.
174
been the principal exponent the Bantu world as the exclusive realm within which
any mythological interpretation of South Central African oral-historical narrative
would have to be set. From the perspective of mainstream disciplinary ideology, one
of the greatest sins that a modern Africanist can commit is to try and explain things
African by reference to phenomena outside the African continent. However under-
standable in the light of the hegemonic modern history of North Atlantic involvement
with Africa and of African Studies need to dissociate from that history, the conde-
scending futility of this position is clear when we try to apply it, mutatis mutandis, to
the study of Christianity as a largely European (but not Europe-originating) expres-
sion, to the explosive question of the autochthony of Indian languages and of the
Vedic scriptures, etc.
45
African societies and cultures cannot be studied meaningfully
by reifying their Africanity, but must be studied, like any other societies and cultures
in the modern world, as part of the global constellation as a whole.
My progressively confident re-reading of Nkoya oral historical narrative as
possibly parallel to widely circulating and very ancient Eurasian mythology set the
scene for a long book draft provisionally entitled (by reference to the Egyptian royal
title) Global Bee Flight: Sub-Saharan Africa, Ancient Egypt, and the World Beyond
the Black Athena thesis, on which I have worked since 1998, constantly rewriting
previous drafts in the light of successive and hopefully more valid models of global
mythology since prehistory. This intellectual struggle has been an attempt, among
other motifs,
46
to critically come to terms with the tendency to localising compart-
mentalisation, which has characterised anthropology (especially African ethnography)
to an excessive extent ever since the rise of classic anthropology, with its emphasis on
participant observation within narrow spatio-temporal horizons. However, the same
tendency has also been endemic, in varying degrees, in all other area studies of an
ethnographic, philologico-linguistic, or archaeological nature. It has likewise been
built into the very structure of modern academia in the differentiation and organisa-
tion of disciplines, journals, libraries, funding structures etc. producing such appar-
ent factuality that it is difficult not to project it onto the world of our data. Admittedly,
without localising compartmentalisation no ethnography, no coherent linguistic de-
scription, no recording, archiving and comparing mythologies. Yet the compartmen-
talisation has to be transcended, and all cultural, ethnic and linguistic boundaries need
to be considered as potentially porous and dynamic, if cultural process is to be under-

45
Cf. Witzel 1989, 1997, 2003.
46
The book draft with the working title Global bee flight (the most obsolete part of it sought to trace
the global ramifications of Ancient Egyptian royal titulature) grew out of a request from Martin Bernal,
1997, to contribute to a collection of papers by scholars sympathetic to his Black Athena thesis. How-
ever, when I found that the Pelasgian West Asian / Mediterranean contribution to the Ancient Egyptian
dynastic state and culture had to be regarded as independent in its own right, and could not be reduced
to an Afrocentric South-North model, the text expanded far beyond article length, frictions arose, and I
did not make Bernals deadline. Frustrated, doubting my provisional results but initially lacking the
transdisciplinary resources and inspiration to do better, I allowed the draft to be shelved ever since
until I returned to the text with a revised version of the original draft (1998-2006), and the conclusive
statement in the present argument.
175
stood across the 200 millennia of the history of Anatomically Modern Humans, and
on a global scale. Modern globalisation studies have taught us that, as one of the sali-
ent aspects of the world today; established forms of localising compartmentalisation
are today giving way both to the effacing of time-honoured boundaries, and to the rise
of new ones. Such studies have led to a spate of neo-diffusionist studies (considering
the global transmission, especially in recent decades, of artefacts, identities, innova-
tions, of political, artistic, scientific and religious ideas). This has also brought us to
look slightly more tolerantly (but still scornful of their lack of sophistication) at clas-
sic diffusion studies the mainstream anthropology of the late 19th and early 20th
century, when culture theory was largely non-existent and therefore artefacts, styles
and institutions were considered to hop around the world, limitlessly, and fragmentar-
ily i.e. non-integrated in wider cultural complexes either at their place of origin or at
the destinations to which they allegedly were diffused.
However, the plausibility of transcontinental continuity between African and
Eurasian mythologies is not only called in question by the bad name that traditional
diffusionism has obtained (partly as a result of its own deficiencies, partly as the pre-
dictable demonisation resulting from its being supplanted by the classic anthropologi-
cal paradigm). There is also the very real problem that no long-range implications can
be attached to such continuities, even if empirically established, if they could be dem-
onstrated to result from recent, deliberate cultural transmission notably in the context
of Christian and Islamic proselytisation, and the diffusion of modern formal education
and publishing. This is the problem of contamination.
4. The problem of contamination
From the very beginning of the modern study on African myths, scholars have been
conscious of the possibility of transcontinental borrowing. Many of these scholars
were Christian missionaries, and they were particularly keen to detect similarities be-
tween African myths and those of the Bible. Such correspondences were also spotted
with regard to South Central Africa.
47
Werner, in her valuable and influential collec-
tion of myths from the Bantu-speaking peoples, includes an entire chapter on stories
which have travelled, even though she declares herself not to subscribe, in general, to
the Diffusionist hypothesis (Werner 1933: 307).
But it is not only direct Christian and Islamic proselytisation that might be
held responsible for the recent intrusion of Eurasian themes in sub-Saharan Africa, i.e.
in historical times and especially from the 19th century CE on. Another, though re-
lated, cause is the availability and often wide circulation of printed texts in which
North Atlantic scholars and missionaries have laid down their researches in the fields
of African ethnography, oral history and oral literature, texts which in many cases
are subsequently appropriated by African informants and presented as the unadulter-

47
E.g. Torrend 1905, 1910, cf. 1921; Jacottet 1899-1901.
176
ated truth of their own, local cultural traditions. Historians and anthropologists work-
ing on the Lower Congo region were among the first to note this phenomenon (spe-
cifically for the Lower Congo region) and to label it recycling (cf. Janzen 1985). In
Western Zambia, with its large number of missionary vernacular publications dating
from the early 20th century, this effect is inevitable and considerable.
Thus the main Nkoya oral-historical text, Likota lya Bankoya, in format (short chapters
opened with a large, uncial-like chapter number, and numbered verses) and also in contents
(cf. Kings 1 and 2) owes a considerable debt to the Old Testament (whose principal translator
in Nkoya, Rev. Johasaphat Shimunika note the biblical given name was also the compiler
of Likota lya Bankoya); Likota also contains elements of recycling, especially of published
compilations of Lozi royal traditions concerning king Mulambwa. My own book Tears of
Rain was published in 1992 in a bound edition, and was issued a few years later in a low-cost
Zambian edition; within a few years I could detect traces of its being recycled into Nkoya oral
historical accounts pretending to be authentic and unadulterated. The same phenomenon was
noted by the oral-historian Robert Papstein among the Luvale of North Western Zambia,
where his own texts, and those of his predecessors such as C.N.M. White, were rapidly and
constantly recycled (R. Papstein, 1979, personal communication).
Under such circumstances, the present arguments central claim is far from
obvious: that elements of mythology found among the Nkoya in the second half of the
20th century CE, are continuous with Eurasian mythologies, hardly as a result of re-
cent recycling from the Early Modern period on, but mainly because of long-range
connections in space and time going back to the Bronze Age or earlier. This is why a
detailed, fully referenced examination of the transcontinental evidence is necessary,
however great the cost in research time and printing space. These findings, presented
in Section 5, will demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the great majority of the
transcontinental correspondences in Nkoya mythology have nothing to do with the
spread of Christianity and Islam neither thematically, nor as far as concerns the
mechanisms of their transcontinental transmission.
5. Major mythological themes among the Nkoya, with
a discussion of their salient transcontinental corre-
spondences
In this section, 26 mythemes
48
are considered that circulate in Nkoya mythology (van
Binsbergen 1992). Per mytheme, first the Nkoya data are summarised, then the Com-
parative data given. In a few cases I found it useful to include distribution maps, but I
have not attempted, at this stage, to provide such maps for all mythemes. Throughout

48
Conceivably, I could have considered these Nkoya motifs in the light of the Narrative Complexes
making up my Aggregative Diachronic Model. That would have nicely closed the circle of the present
argument, and remains a task for further elaboration. Here, however, I have refrained from doing so,
because the point here is merely to demonstrate the Nkoya mythemes continuity with Eurasian motifs,
rather than classifying and periodising them within the history of global mythology. The two lines of
argument are complementary, not consecutive.
177
this section I will use a smaller type-face and line spacing, to mark this text as docu-
mentary rather than argumentative.
5.1. The reed-and-bee complex
Nkoya: Among the Nkoya the reed-and-bee complex takes a number of different manifestations:

a. The apical ancestress of the Nkoya, Libupe, as a Queen Bee travelling with her Swarm and
landing at the land of Nkoya
b. The grooms family approaching a brides village in order to collect her in marriage, in their
conventionalised songs still apply the imagery of bees (mapuka) to themselves
c. Mbote, mead, male Nkoya courtiers paroxysm of bliss
d. Primordial mythical twins of complementary gender, Katete (Reed Person) and Luhamba
(Royal Person Going from Branch to Branch / Beehive) hide from the King of Dead
(Mwaat Yaav) in a Reed Mat and a Bee Hive.
e. A reed mat is the central, eponymical locus of investiture / enthronisation / name inheritance
(ushwana)
f. Royal courts, ushwana ritual sites, royal dead bodies and royal graves (cf. Cunnison 1968 for
an Eastern Lunda parallel) are sheltered by reed mats
g. Reed mats are the standard bedding
h. The Eastern Nkoya (Mashasha) consider the reed mat their emblem, probably as a moveable
shrine containing royal ancestral relics

Comparative:
Mead: In the Ancient Near East (especially Anatolia and Ancient Egypt), Ancient Europe in-
cluding classical Greece, Germanic and Celtic Europe, South Asia (cf. soma) and in Madagascar, mead
was a focal element in cosmology and social interaction (cf. Dickson 1978; Fontenrose 1980: 538;
Beaujard 1994; Kerenyi 1976: 35; gveda V, 43:3-4, VIII, 5:6); theft of mead / soma (Jacobsdttir
2002; Knipe 1967).
Bee and honey: Hymenoptera (including bees) and Diptera (including flies and midges) have
tended to be associated with the sun, the rainbow, and the Supreme God in Ancient Egypt and through-
out the Ancient Near East (air, shimmering; Draffkorn Kilmer 1987). In Ancient Egypt, this link even
gave rise to the golden fly as an accolade for military prowess (Houlihan 1996: 192). In the Anatolian
Kumarbi epic, a bee saves the world (Gterbock 1948). In Egypt, the bee motif is connected with tears
of the divinity motif (see below), since not only humans, but also bees, are reputed to have sprung
from such tears. The bee as a ritual focus and symbol was a constant factor in Greek art from Minoan
times on, with extensions to the isles of Rhodes and Thera; bees fed the infant Zeus on Crete, hence
Melisseus as name of the father of the nymphs who attended the female priesthood of major god-
desses is called Melissae, bees; cf. the motif of bees and kingship (Apollodorus / Frazer 1970: I, 7). In
the Celtic world, Ogma Cermait of the honeyed mouth is the Irish equivalent of Arthur / Gvrydion
(Cotterell 1989: 62); below we will see several more instances demonstrating the closeness of Nkoya
and Celtic mythologies. In Northern Europe, the 15th Canto of the Kalevala (Tamminen 1928) abounds
with honey and bee motifs.
Reed: had a central symbolic significance in Ancient Egypt from earliest dynastic times (Em-
ery 1961); there is evidence of mat burial here (Goneim 1956: fig. 19, opposite p. 64). The same reed
complex is in evidence in Neolithic atal Hyk and in Ancient Mesopotamia, which is likely to have
influenced earliest temple and royal architecture in Egypt (Rice 1990). Reed mats play a conspicuous
role in the lives of Central Asian peoples such as Mongols and Kyrgyz (Sommer 1996; Waugh 2002).
Prometheus in Ancient Greek myth brought fire from heaven in a narthex i.e. a hollow reed; the return
of the fire is a much more widespread flood motif. Reed is associated with origin of the world, among
the Zulu (Callaway 1870), the Japanese (Kojiki, I, cf. Chamberlain 1919 and Philippi 1968), Egypt
(Chemmis / A-bt, and spelling variants; Helck 1979; also see below, the motif of royal
178
sibling complementarity / rivalry), and Yoruba (van der Sluijs, n.d.). Werner (1933) records a myth
from the Bantu-speaking area where the first couple come forth from an exploding reed stalk; cf. Pro-
metheus (fire stolen in reed stalk / narthex), and many North American flood myths and cosmogonies,
where reed plays a central role (e.g. Navajo, cf. Capinera 1993: 226-228, Newcomb 1990; Hopi / Sia,
Alexander 1916: 203; Pima, Frazer 1918: 283-287; Hopi, Waters 1963: 12-20; Caddo, cf. Erdoes &
Ortiz 1984: 120-122). In the Gilgamesh epic, after the gods had decided to destroy humankind, the God
Enki went to warn the prospective flood hero Atraasis using the very words of the Nkoya myth of
Katete and Luhamba: Do you hear, Reed Person? (cf. Lambert & Millard 1969; Cagni 1975; Frymer-
Kensky 1977).
Reed and bee: one of the principal Ancient Egyptian royal titles, nswt-bt She [ the ts
doubly mark the expression as feminine ] of the Reed and the Bee, as attested in writing and iconogra-
phy from earliest dynastic times onward (cf. Thierry 1913; Sethe 1930; Mller 1938; Kaplony 1963;
Schott 1956; Otto 1960, and numerous more recent general accounts including Edwards 1985; Spencer
1993; Kemp 1995; Gundlach 1997; 1998; Dosrev 1993; Wilkinson 1900; no consensus on explanation
of this title (not Upper / Lower Egypt!), Probably: cosmogonic evocation of the Primal Hill (reed
clump) emerging from the Primal Waters, and touched by the First Sun (bee). The latter is an indication
that upon the very ancient, in principle horizontal cosmogony of the Separation of Water and Land
already a rather newer dispensation had been superimposed, namely the vertical cosmogony of the
Separation of Heaven and Earth (dating from c. 15 ka BP). Lower Egypt has featured, from earliest
dynastic times, a Sas-based cult of a goddess associated with bees and honey. This cult is a variant, no
doubt, not so much of Upper Egyptian and ultimately African continuities, but of more general Eastern
Mediterranean Bronze Age mother goddesses (some of them persisting well into the Iron Age) simi-
larly associated with bees and honey (cf. Gimbutas 1982 for the European Neolithic) notably a priest-
hood designated as bees. The Indian god of love, Kama, seems to have borrowed the reed-and-honey
symbolism: he carries a bow made of sugar-cane stalk strung with a line of humming-bees and he
shoots arrows tipped with flowers.
5.2. The King of Death
Nkoya: The Lunda king / hereditary royal title Mwati Yamvo / Mwaat Yaav (Lord of
Death), overlord of the Nkoya kings.
Comparative: Ancient Greek Hades / Pluto, South Asian Yama, Chinese Yanluo and
Japanese Enma Dai-. Like the Lunda and the Nkoya king (cf. Frazer 1911-1915), the Turk-
ish king is strangled at the end of his reign (Los 1969: 260).
5.3. Kings herding pigs
Nkoya: kings when staying with Mwaat Yaav (Lord of Death).
Comparative: a taboo on pork consumption (which, ironically from a Judaeo-Islamic perspec-
tive, could be interpreted as affirmation of belonging to the pig clan) in many parts of Niger-Congo
speaking Africa, and moreover among Israelites / Jews and Muslims; pig sacred to Ancient Egyptian
Seth and Isis, and to Greek Circe. As a strange combination of solar underworld deity out in the Ocean
(retaining, in fragmented and barely recognisable fashion, most crucial aspects of the Mother of the
Waters Below, Aside and Above), Circe as host of Odysseus and his companions with Circe, turning
them into pigs (Odyssea X, 212 f), has striking structural correspondences with this Nkoya motif
while the Circe motif has also been recognised in South Asia (Gerland 1869), and its general Pelasgian
nature is further highlighted by the associations between Circe (and Odysseus) with the Tyrrhenian
kingship (Hesiod, Theogonia, 1011 f; van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen, in press).
179
5.4. Stranger hunter seizes the kingship; menstruation considered to be
disqualifying
Nkoya: the standard form of this myth in S.C. Africa (cf. Turner 1955; Hoover 1980) is that of
Chibinda / Hunter, depriving Luwji / Moon from her kingship on the pretext of her menstruation;
among the Nkoya a version circulates featuring royals from the local tradition. The motif also occurs in
the West African Sundjata epic (Innes 1974; Jansen 1995).
Comparative: Medb (cf. Edel 1986), legendary Irish queen who because of her name (She
Who Makes Drunk, cf. mead), her aquatic connotations (her nickname is great-bladdered she is a
Mother of the Waters), her affirmation of menstruation even though it disqualifies her from giving
battle (a common motif in the Irish early literature), further confirms our impression of the closeness of
the Nkoya and the Celtic mythological worlds. The disqualifying nature of menstruation is central to
Bantu-speaking societies; it also surfaces in the Dogon cosmogony (the creator Amma removed the
Earths clitoris in the form of an anthill, and had intercourse with her, but menses began when the off-
spring of that union committed incest with his mother) but it is also highly elaborated in Judaism, many
forms of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Shintoism transmitting a trait widely circulating in the
Pelasgian realm.
5.5. Regicide as socio-political renewal
Nkoya: prominent motif in Nkoya mythology; cf. Mwaat Yaav (item 3 above) and Zimbabwe
and N. Nigeria (Smith 1919: 114f). Frobenius (1931) sees this motif as constitutive for the societies of
South Central Africa.
Comparative: widespread motif of comparative mythology, cf. The Golden Bough (Frazer
1911-1915).
5.6. Stealing the moon
Nkoya: King Kapesh Kamunungampanda, with several South Central African parallels
Comparative: Uralic world: the primordial smith Ilmarinen plucks the moon from a tree in
heaven (Kalevala, Tamminen 1928: 139). Bringing down the moon is a central motif in Graeco-Roman
magic as well as an activity attributed to witches by Russian peasants (Hastings 1908-1921: VIII, 270,
273f, 282, IV: 815). Egypt: Seth steals the Eye of Horus (usually identified with the moon) (Monet,
n.d.; de Buck 1935-1961). Korea: a dog is ordered to steal the moon (Grayson 2001: 254f). Burma: a
plot to steal the moon (Davison 1994). Highly significant, considering the abundance of Central Asian
reminiscences in Nkoya mythology, is that the motif of stealing the moon also occurs in the Kyrgyz
Epic Manas (Kmkulkz 2005, lines 3180f). Among the Dong minority, China: annual festival of
Stealing Moon Dishes (Anonynous, Dong minority, n.d.). Stealing the moon (with or without the sun)
is a frequent motif in North American mythology, where Raven engages in this act among the North
West Coast groups (e.g. Tlingit, Haida, Kwakiutl, Dogrib, Tsimshian) and Coyote and Antelope or
Eagle try to outdo each other in this act in the Northern Rockies region and among the Hopi (Jones
1914; Swanton 1909; Clark 1966; Hastings 1908-1921: V: 706). Frazers Folk-lore of the Old Testa-
ment
49
(1918: ch. 2, The Fall of Man, 3. The Story of the Cast Skin) plausibly explains this
mytheme by the moons (not unlike the cauldrons, see below) being as a widespread symbol of death
and rebirth. In the background are widespread mythemes of heroic theft (cf. Jakobsdttir 2002; Knipe
1967): in Nordic mythology, Loki turns into a fly to steal Freyas golden necklace; cf. the theft of soma
in Indian mythology, by Garuda, Varua, or some other agent. Whatever botanical or symbolic associa-
tions attach to the highly complex concept of Soma, it is essentially the Moon, so at an abstract level
the motif of stealing the moon is structurally equivalent to that of stealing soma. But also cf. Prome-

49
Responsible, however, for the widespread but utterly wrong notion that flood myths are absent from
sub-Saharan Africa.
180
theuss theft of fire from heaven (see the reed motif, above), for the benefit of humans, allegedly his
own creatures. However, from the perspective of flood myth to which both Prometheus and the
Tower / Kapesh motif are intimately related new fire needs to be brought so as to restore the natural
and human order after the Flood. Humans theft of what is jealously guarded in heaven is an act of
defiance and hope in the face of death, as essential to the human condition. The heroic theft motif will
also appear below, when we discuss the cauldron of kingship.
50

5.7. A flood and tower complex; 1. the Tower into heaven
Nkoya: The Nkoya, Mbwela, Ila, and Kaonde, of Western Zambia, have the myth that a royal
Kapesh
51
Kamunungampanda (The Kapesh understood to be a vertical structure Joining Forked
Branches, or Joining with a Sibling let the people build a tower to bring the moon down from
heaven, so that it could serve as a royal pendant for the royal child; the tower collapsed and the nations
were dispersed.
52
Almost the same story was recorded for Barotseland, Mbunda, Bena-Lulua, Kiokwe,
Kanioka and Rozwe of Zimbabwe (cf. Rotse of Zambia?) by Frobenius (1931: 166f in the Zimbabwe
case the emphasis is on immortality through the royal pendant, cf. Frazer 1918 as mentioned above;
Jensen 1932: 76). This myth is also told for the Bemba of Zambia (Roberts 1973) and for Mozambique
(Feldman 1963); Willis (1994: 273) perceives a belt of tower myths in Africa from Angola via Zim-
babwe to Mozambique (e.g. the Tonga or Tsonga, Frobenius 1954: Mrchentext 1). Among the
Nkoyas northern neighbours the Luba, the tower was allegedly built by the Rainbow Serpent, waging
war on the sky king (Reefe 1981). This is almost identical to the Pare version from Tanzania (van der
Sluijs n.d.). It also comes close to the story told among the Nkoyas close Western neighbours (Luyi /
Lozi, Subiya; Jacottet 1899-1901; Jalla 1903), where Nyambi and his wife Nasilele flee from their
original dwelling on earth along a spiders web, pursued by humans whom they fear; the humans build
a tower to continue their pursuit, trying to kill Nyambi, but in vain because the tower collapsed, fol-
lowed by the confusion of nations and tongues. Among the Boni or Sania, near Lamu, Kenya, Indian
Ocean coast, such confusion is attributed, not to the flood, but to a famine (van der Sluijs n.d.). Among
the Chokwe (originally a few hundred kms North-West of the Nkoya, now also in their near vicinity)
mention is made of a Kaposhi clan, with owl and nightjar as their totem (both highly speckled birds;
see the footnote below on Heracles and Hera), and reputed to have been one of the oldest clans, and
one that enslaved others for their ritual building projects (Matthe 2003).
Comparative: Like the stairs and the bridge, the tower is also among the common symbols of

50
Cf. Table 9.3, AT mytheme stealing the sun, with Nkoya application. It is interesting that the moon,
itself only in indirect possession of its light (but that is far from obvious, and in the Western tradition
took an exceptional mind like Anaximanders 5th century BCE to realise), should inspire so many
motifs of stealth and stealing. Cf. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens:
The moons an errant thief
and its pale fire it snatches from the sun.
This is the central motif of Nabokovs (1962) intertextuality-centred novel Pale Fire, where the critics
/ editors treacherous appropriation of text is set off against the poets original light.
51
Kapesh has no convincing etymology in Nkoya or other Bantu languages. Considering that the best
known flood stories are from the Ancient Near East and especially the Tanach, it is relevant that
qp occurs in Biblical Hebrew as the capering movement of a fleeing deer semantically unconvincing
although a swaggering gait has been associated with kingship (Graves 1988). Semantically and pho-
nologically a perfect fit offers the Indo-Aryan form *-gabhasti-, forked carriage pole, hand (Starostin
& Starostin 1998-2008, Indo-European etymology; de Vries 1958 s.v. gaffel), which also reminds
us of chariot technology as the main mechanism of spread of the Pelasgian package from the Middle to
Late Bronze Age on.
52
Gender is not expressed by syntactic means; by projection of todays conditions Kapeshs gender is
assumed to have been male, perhaps doing violence to the original story (cf. van Binsbergen 1992).
181
shamanism, with its imagery of the shaman travelling between upper world, ordinary life world and
underworld (Eliade 1968). In order to perceive the relation between the Tower myth and the Flood
myth (see next mytheme), it is useful to define the widespread model of the Standard Elaborate Flood
Myth (cf. Smith 1873 (first decipherment of Babylonian flood text); Frazer 1916, 1918; Dundes 1988;
Isaak 2006 (hundred of flood stories summarised, with bibliography); Dang Nghiem Van 1993; Lewis
2006; Walker 1976; Marler & Dexter 2003; van Dijk 1983; Witzel 2010; van Binsbergen with Isaak
2008):
1. The cosmic order is provisionally established, including humans, but Heaven and Earth still
merge, or are at least still connected through a tower, ladder, pole, thongs, ropes, etc.
2. humans commit a transgression (sorcery, murder, eating from forbidding fruit, discovery of
sexuality in general, more specifically incest, etc.)
3. the connection between Heaven and Earth is severed, and humankind is destroyed by a flood
4. usually by the intercession of a (or the) divine being, there are one or more flood survivors,
whose main task is to repopulate the earth; a typical mytheme here is that of the twin siblings
who survive the flood and repopulate the world incestuously (cf. Katete and Luhamba; cf.
Egyptian Shu and Tefnut, Greek Apollo and Artemis, and Dogon Nommo among the West
African Dogon) note the parallel with the discovery of sexuality, murder and incest (2)
5. renewed humankind attempts to reconnect to Heaven with the various natural, personal and
ritual devices listed above especially a tower
6. in the process the confusion of nations occurs a multitude of ethnic and language groups
emerge.
However, among the twentieth-century Nkoya, the Flood motif appears to be absent and the
very central tower mytheme is completely divorced from the Flood motif. In the Nkoya version the
defiance of the sky king is strictly speaking absent (although it is also a form of hubris to try and bring
the moon down), but such defiance is central to the Luba version. The latter is very close to the Nimrod
myth (Genesis 12). Greek mythology knew the Aloadae, Giant twin brothers who tried to overthrow
Zeus, seeking access to heaven by stacking major mountains on top of one another (Ilias V, 385, Od-
yssea XI 305; Pindarus, Pythian Ode IV, 89; Apollodorus Bibliotheca I, 7. 4; Atsma 2000-2010). In
Phoenicia, Astarte / Astaroth, was known as Lady Tower, town goddess of Sidon, Tyre, and Byblos
she wears a tower as a crown (cf. Greek / Phrygian / Arabian / Egyptian Rhea, Tyche, Cybele, Allat,
Hathor); she is a Mother of the Waters (Athirat). In South China the Flood-associated tower takes the
form of a ladder (Willis 1994: 93f); the ladder is also conspicuous in Egyptian (Seth) and Hebrew
(Jacob) myth, but without clear Flood connotations. The making of a rope of arrows for going from
earth to heaven is called a characteristic [ Native ] American motif by Fontenrose (1980: 513 n. 40).
5.8. A flood and tower complex 2. the Flood
Nkoya: Again, among the twentieth-century Nkoya, the Flood motif appears to be totally ab-
sent and the Tower motif is no longer understood as connected with the Flood. We do not need to ac-
cept this lacuna as definitive. Namafe (2006) and Kamuwango (2007), hailing from Western Zambia
themselves, claim that there is a Lozi flood myth which stands to reason, because the annual trans-
humance of the royal household in response to the annual Zambezi flooding is a central theme in Lozi
society whose musical and ceremonial life is largely in the hands of Nkoya specialists. Having de-
monstrably merged with Lozi mythology on other motifs (e.g. Mulambwa; the unilateral being),
against the background of a shared court language and court culture, one can hardly assume Nkoya
mythology to have been impervious to Lozi flood myths, if the Nkoya did not yet have them in the first
place. But it is thinkable that the Flood motif was deliberately rejected by the Nkoya in the course of
182
the last hundred years because it was recognised to be associated, no longer with the remotest past, but
with the hated Lozi as dwellers of the Zambezi flood plain. Geographically, culturally and linguisti-
cally close to the Nkoya, are also the Luvale and Chokwe; and Mwene (Ruler) Manenga features ex-
tensively in Nkoya traditions as in those of Luvale and Chokwe. Among the latter the following
localised Flood myth was recorded: A Queen named Mwene Manenga sought food and shelter in a
village. She was refused, and when she reproached the villagers for their selfishness, they said, in ef-
fect, What can you do about it? So she began a slow incantation, and on the last long note, the
whole village sank into the ground, and water flowed into the depression, forming what is now Lake
Dilolo. When the villages headman returned from the hunt and saw what had happened to his family,
he drowned himself in the lake (Vitaliano 1973: 164-165; Kelsen 1988: 136; Isaak 2006 no. 47).
Meanwhile, in Jallas versions collected in Western Zambia at the end of the 19th century (Jalla 1903:
Appendix, pp. 319f; 1909; 1921; cf. Bouchet 1922; Rooke 1980) selected elements of the Standard
Elaborate Flood Myth are included, still in such a way that at first glance one is not aware that a flood
myth is involved:
53
Nyambi and his first human creatures (especially the male Kamunu) live in each
others proximity, Kamunu engages in a series of transgressions for which relatively mild punishment
is meted out by Nyambi, until the latter finally, after crossing a great river, withdraws to Heaven along
a spiders thread, after which humankind each morning humbly greets the rising sun in an attempt at a
ritual re-connection of Heaven and Earth.
54
Deeply implied in the Lozi story seems to be a reference to
the discovery of sexuality as a central transgression in line with the Standard Elaborate Flood Myth,
whose other elements we also detect: initial merging, later separation and partial re-connection of
Heaven and Earth, the flood (here reduced to a great river, and no longer explicitly destructive, but
what could be worse than Gods withdrawal from Earth?). Significant other elements however are left
out: destruction by flood, and the confusion of nations which however surfaces in other local ac-
counts.
Comparative: For the global connections of the Flood motif, see under Tower motif, else-
where in this Section.
5.9. The bird-like nature of gods
Nkoya: the Nkoya (Likota 4:1) equate Nyambi with a bird, and Nyambis child, the demiurge
Mvula / Rain (both of indeterminate gender) is also a bird; the birds are unspecified, but the human
clans Hawks and Buzzards are declared to be the relatives of Mvula, so Mvula may be thought of as a
large bird of prey. The Nkoya consider their kingship to derive from (the tears of, see below) the demi-
urge Mvula / Rain, and their kingship has an intimate connection with birds. The two clans contesting
the kingship are both named after bird species (Hawks and Buzzards). The major headmanship of

53
In Feldman 1963 this myth is erroneously attributed to Mozambique.
54
Nyambi is attended not only by a spider but also by a wagtail bird (Motacilla capensis), which opens
up an interesting comparative angle. In the main Japanese creation myth virtually the same bird (Mo-
tacilla grandis) showed the first creatures Izanami and Izanagi how to engage in sexual intercourse by
the suggestive, incessant up and down movements of its tail, after which it is named in several linguis-
tic contexts, e.g. in English and Dutch (Kojiki, cf. Philippi 1977; van Binsbergen 2009b). It is as if the
wagtail in the Western Zambian story signals that, implicitly, we are in the presence of a Flood caused
by the invention of sexuality. We hit here upon a controversial but logical and crucial implication of
the idea of transcontinental continuities: if the latter can be taken for a fact, then in principle well-
attested, studied and understood symbolic relationships in one location may be used to illuminate less
explicit similar relationships in another location belonging to the same complex, even though in an-
other continent not just on the basis of a formal typological similarity and an appeal to inherent con-
vergent properties of the mind of Anatomically Modern Humans, but on the basis of real historical
cognateship between cultural forms with a common origin. This methodological claim is basic to my
work in the field of comparative mythology, geomantic divination, transformative cycles of elements,
astronomical nomenclature etc.
183
Shipungu is also named after a bird species, the fish eagle. There is moreover the cosmogonic symbol-
ism of the kalyangu bird, the white heron. Finally, the kings alter-ego, his court jester, has the official
title of Kayoni ka Mwene (the kings bird), and appears in public (notably during the annual Kazanga
royal festival) as a large-billed giant bird. These aspects of Nkoya royal symbolism are reminiscent of
the giant bird sculptures adorning the famous sanctuary of Great Zimbabwe.
Comparative: The conception of major gods as birds occurs in West Asia (e.g. Egyptian Ho-
rus, Mut), Central and East Asia (e.g. Garuda), and may have shamanic connotations. Cf. the white,
often aquatic, bird-like connotations of creation gods in the Mediterranean and throughout the Pelas-
gian realm (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen, in press), but also the Raven and Eagle characters in North
American mythology.
5.10. The annual extinction and rekindling of fire
Nkoya: In the Nkoya foundation myth of kingship, a blissful celestial downpour (of Mvula /
Rain, Nyambis Child) follows the successful removal from the fire of the cauldron of kingship by the
qualifying clan, follows by the adage Our kingship is from the Drops / Tears of Mvula / Rain. I pro-
pose this implies an aetiological myth of the annual extinction and rekindling from a unique royal
source, of all humanly used fire. Among the twentieth-century Nkoya this custom is no longer found.
However, it has been recorded for the Bantu-speaking groups of Central Zambia (Sala, Soli, Nsenga;
cf. Apthorpe 1959, 1960; Argyle 1959; Brelsford 1935, 1965); these groups are closely connected with
the Nkoya by language, custom, historical traditions, migrations and diplomatic relations (van Binsber-
gen 1992). In Swaziland (Kuper 1968), once a year the dirt of the past year is burnt on a sacrificial
fire, and rain, again, is supposed to extinguish the fire at the cattle byre. Throughout sub-Saharan Af-
rica fires are extinguished at the kings death and rekindled at the enthronisation of the successor; van
der Sluijs (n.d.) attributes this custom to the following peoples: Mundang, Haussa, Gwari, Nupe,
Mossi, Yoruba, Ruanda, Wasegue, Wadoe, Wawemba, Walumbwe, Wahemba, Mambwe, Lunda,
Kanioka, Bangala, Bihe.
Van der Sluijs cites a gruesome African accession rite that brings out how much the fire ex-
tinguishing custom may re-enact creation, or second creation of the Flood: Upon the accession of the
new king, a pubescent boy and virgin appeared naked before the king, rekindled the fire with their fire-
sticks, performed their first act of love, and were buried alive. Unfortunately, no source accompanies
this account; and although it is reminiscent of the ethnographic vignettes out of which James Frazers
work was built up, I have been unable to find it there. The sexual element is reminiscent of the Moats
Mong agricultural festival of the Ao people of Nagaland, India, however, the latter does not feature
human sacrifice.
Comparative: Annual communal renewal of the fire was a widespread phenomenon in pre-
modern Europe. This custom has been recorded for the remarkable Aegean island of Lemnos, which
moreover stands out for such (presumably Pelasgian) traits as a fire cult dedicated to the god Hephaes-
tus, and a mythical tradition of (temporary) female rule and female sexual revolt (Burkert 1970; Apol-
lonius Rhodius, Argonautica). The badnjak Christmas log of the Serbs and other Balkan populations
clearly marks a cognate custom (Evans 1876-1877). Annual extinction and rekindling of the fire is also
found in Bulgaria (Conrad 1987) and Anatolian Turkey (And 1980). Annual extinction and rekindling
of fire was part of Jewish ritual of the Karaites during the Middle Ages (Frank 2001). A similar rite has
been part of Christianity especially in connection with Easter (Idinopulos 1982; MacGregor 1992). The
custom was given much attention in the English Christian annual ritual and festive cycle during the
Medieval and Early Modern periods (Hutton 1994); it was closely related with the folklore institution
known as the Needfire ritual (Davidson 1955). The same custom was also reported in the Perlesvaus, a
medieval French version of the Arthurian narratives (Williams 1937). At least partially informed by
Christianity, the same custom is part of carnival celebrations in the Caribbean (Liverpool 1998) and in
the Santeria rituals in the same region (Wirtz 2005). A similar annual rite has been recorded for India
(Jurewicz 2004; Mookerjee 1998) and among the Hindu immigrants that settled in Africa from the 19th
century CE onward (Murray 1956; broken arrows in Fig. 9.5). Similar customs exist among Native
Americans of the Southeast (cf. Johnson & Hook 1995: 5) but explicitly not among the Powhatan Indi-
184
ans of Virginia (cf. Rountree 1992); and in Meso America among the Aztecs (Elson & Smith 2001) and
the Mayas (Long 1923). A limiting case is the Israelites temple fire, which could not be lit from an
external source (Leviticus 10: 2). Apparently, this temple fire was of a different, transformed and more
transcendent class than the fires evoked in the narrative of the Cauldron of Kingship and its parallels,
for it is a widely held Rabbinical contention that throughout the history of the Israelite temples, the fire
was never extinguished by rain it belongs to a godhead who (contrary to the Nkoya one) is not in the
first place a god of rain.
In Fig. 9.6, not only the typical Pelasgian distribution is shown, but also the attestations in
Northern Africa, in continuous lines along the Nile valley and across the Sahara, hint at probable
North-South transmission routes of which the Sahara one abounds with protohistoric rock art depict-
ing chariots.
Looking at this distribution map, the obvious question is: why not take the region with the
greatest incidence (sub-Saharan Africa) as the origin, and postulate historical transmission to other
continents from there or multilocal independent invention, for that matter. In fact, my answer to this
question informs much of the analysis in the present paper, and of my second thoughts about Bernals
Black Athena thesis. The challenge of this kind of geographic distributions of traits (high African inci-
dence, sporadic Eurasian incidence, yet a probable origin in Eurasia) is one of the reasons why I formu-
lated the Pelasgian hypothesis. I consider the spiked wheel trap, a simple hunting device (Fig. 9.6), as
the index fossil for this kind of distributions, cf. the very similar distributions of the mankala board
game, of geomantic divination, and (also see below, Fig. 9.10) that of the belief in a unilateral mythical
being (van Binsbergen 1997c, 2010b, 2010c). In some cases it is possible to argue the greater Eurasian
antiquity on archaeological grounds. My general argument is that, by the Late Bronze Age in the Medi-
terranean / West Asia, sub-Saharan Africa constituted a relatively vacant, defenceless cultural niche,
into which relatively archaic Pelasgian traits (including Niger-Congo > Bantu?) could be diffused and
where they could continue to thrive while in the Pelasgian core land (West Asia, the Mediterranean)
they were already being superseded by local cultural innovations.
Fig. 9.5. Major attestations of the annual communal extinction and rekindling of fire
1
2
3

LEGEND: 1. trait attested; 2. cognate trait attested; 3. limited transmission of trait (accounting for only
two African data points) through Indian indentured labour and other migration, 19th-20th c. CE; full
references in: van Binsbergen, in preparation (b), but most already appear above.

185
Fig. 9.6. Global distribution of the spiked wheel trap (as typical of Pelasgian distribu-
tions)

for sources: see van Binsbergen 2010b and Lindblom 1935
inset (obscuring a part of the world map where there are no attestations): modern spiked wheel from the
Acholi people, Southern Sudan (Sparks 2006).
Fig. 9.7. Attestations of spider-related mythemes
1
2
3

1. Spider Supreme god; 2. oblique references to spider in folklore etc., not mythical; 3. spinning and
weaving goddesses, with spider connotations; full references in: van Binsbergen, in preparation (b).

5.11. Spider-like elements of the creator god
Nkoya: Nyambi as spider: not directly stated in Nkoya context today; but it is a spider that
helps Nyambi escape from humans by climbing to heaven; thus also among neighbouring Zambian
groups, where the creator god is called Leza (Cotterell 1989: 89). It is not sure whether we can consider
Nyambi in the Nkoya conception a High God he / she appears as immanent, earth-dweller, and in-
timidated by the ever more demanding humans, and the retreat to heaven is a flight. Some of the mis-
sionary accounts of Nyambi collected around 1900 suggest that Nyambi in fact is not God in his / her
own right, but Gods child: Jacottet (1899-1901) has a story where Nyambi has fallen from the sky, like
186
the Greek fire-god Hephaestus (Ilias, I, 568 f, etc.), Egyptian Min (whose belemnite symbol
equates him with lightning), or any demiurge. This makes it conceivable that Nyambis shift to tran-
scendent High God status is a result of the introduction of Christianity in the early 20th century. The
missionary Smith (1907: 300f), who had a special comparative interest in African ideas of God (Smith
1950) notes a similar indeterminacy in the conception of god of the Ila, the Nkoyas eastern
neighbours.

Comparative (on Spider-like elements of the creator god): Nyambi (with variants) carries spi-
der-like connotations in West and Central African cultures (where there is a link with the trickster fig-
ure Anansi, considered a son of Nyambi carrying, probably, another variant of the Nyambi name). The
comparative mythology of the Creator / Creatrix as Spider is very rich and reaches from West Africa
(besides Nyambi / Anansi also the Yoruba war god Ogun Cotterell 1989: 143), via Egypt (Neith), the
Middle East and Ancient Greece (with the semantically and phonologically closely related cluster of
Neith / Athena / Anahita / Anath / Inanna / Uttu, goddesses of weaving and warfare and perhaps to be
understood as domesticated demoted Creation Goddesses demoted and supplanted under a later mascu-
line cosmology), to surface also throughout Oceania (Cotterell 1989: 151, 133f, 219, 224, 240f; Willis
1994: 294). The spider-like equation of weaving and the sun is manifest also in the Japanese sun god-
dess Amaterasu. Also the Tiwi of Northern Australia have a Spider Woman myth (Venbrux 2003).
Apparently the circum-Pacific line is continued in North America among the Navajo (the benevolent
Spider Woman Naste Etsan facilitating twin culture heroes access to the sun god), and in the North
American Prairie the culture hero and trickster Inktomi (Cotterell 1989: 240; Willis 1994: 227). More
isolated, the spider appears as an ancient Australian icon (Stubbs 1978; Cotterell 1989: 58). Almost as
if to encapsulate the vanquished goddess of an earlier dispensation, the spider is one of the Egyptian
shamans spirit familiars (Helck 1984; along with the midge and the mantis; the mantis would then be
another old god, cf. Khoisan Heitsi-Eibib, with probably a West Asian prototype in view of that re-
gional original of the Khoisan speakers, cf. Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994).
5.12. The creator god associated with speaking
Nkoya: implied in the Nkoya theonym Nyambi (found, with variations, throughout West and
Central Africa) is perhaps the proto-Bantu root gmb- to speak (Guthrie no. 770), but this may be a
popular etymology which I have not myself heard among the Nkoya (cf. their Ngambela = Speaker,
Prime Minister). Baumann (1936; also Pettersson 1973: 144) claims that no etymology for the name
Nyambi can be found; this amounts to the claim that the origin of that name lies outside the Bantu-
speaking region a claim I am inclined to support in the light of the proposed continuity with West
African, Mediterranean and West Asian theonyms *[ n ][ a ][ t ][ n ][ a ][ t ], such as Neith, Athena,
Anat etc., cf. Ghanaian Nyame. The bird-like connotations of Nyambi are found also in Northern An-
gola (Capello & Ivens 1886; Wastiau 1997). Nyambi abounds in Dennetts (1906: 166f and passim)
intriguing discussion of West African kingship, and his explanation, although with the appearances of
another popular etymology, is worth quoting:
The name for God is NZAMBI and its literal meaning is the personal essence (IMBI) of the
fours (ZIA or ZA = four). What then are the fours? They are the groups each of four powers
called BAKICI BACI [ i.e. representatives of all the different families owning sacred ground
within his kingdom ] (Dennett 1906: 13, 166f).
Comparative: the idea of the Creator / Creatrix who through an utterance brings the world into
being has many Eurasian parallels e.g. Genesis 1: 3; Babylonian Marduk in Enuma Elish, see: King
1999 / 1902). This brings to mind two animals with widespread Eurasian connotations of speaking: (a)
the bee (both in Eurasiatic / Nostratic and in Afroasiatic) because (e.g. Budge 1898; Judges 4: 4f) of its
humming noise and as a divine epiphany (also see the reed and bee complex discussed above) (b) white
aquatic birds, especially the swan, which are symbolic of, or identical with, the Mother of the Primal
Waters and hence an ancient creator goddess, all over Eurasia from the Celtic and Uralic realms all the
way to East Asia (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen, in press).
187
5.13. Aetiological myths of circumcision
Nkoya: According to Nkoya traditions, their kingships were established when they fled from a
tyrannical king (Mwaat Yaav, see elsewhere in this Section) seeking to impose the circumcision rites
that he controlled. The Nkoya claim that circumcision was instituted when a female royal allowed her
son to play in the grass, where his foreskin was accidentally cut by a sharp blade of grass.
Comparative: male genital mutilation is widespread globally (see Fig. 9.8) and its origins are
lost in the mists of time. The Tanach contains one of the few aetiological myths known to me on this
topic (Genesis 17:10-14, cf. Joshua 5: 4-7). For the Dogon, whose recorded elaborate mythology how-
ever has been called to question, circumcision originates in the desire to remove primordial reproduc-
tive organs of the opposite gender (Bonnefoy 2002 / 1991: 125f). The Tsonga of South East Africa
attribute (Junod 1962: I, 72f) the institution to the Lemba people, conspicuous for their apparent rem-
nants of West Semitic culture (Parfitt 1992; van Warmelo 1966; von Sicard 1952: 140 ff). Among the
Taala of Madagascar (linguistically, at least, more cognate to South East Asia than to Africa) circum-
cision appears in several myth but more as a taken-for-granted background than as an explicandum
(Beaujard 2004). The Nkoya account is reminiscent of Exodus 4: 24-26: And it came to pass by the
way in the inn, that the LORD met him, and sought to kill him. 25 Then Zipporah took a sharp stone,
and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to
me. 26 So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision.
Fig. 9.8. Global distribution of male genital mutilation

1. Regions where male genital mutilation has been practiced traditionally since pre-modern times; 2.
Diffusion in context of Islam from 7th century CE from 3; 3. Mecca; from: van Binsbergen & Woud-
huizen, in press, where full references are given.

The Central and South African connotations of the Nkoya kingship make it possible to con-
nect the motif of fleeing from a tyrannical king who seeks to impose circumcision, (a) to the advent of
Islam in Northern India c. 1000 CE groups fleeing such imposition fled to West Asia, Europe and
East Africa as Gypsies, Tzigane, Roma people; the alternative name for one of the two major Nkoya
royal titles, Kahare, is Kale (Smith & Dale 1920), which in five continents, including Africa, is a
Gypsy name meaning Black; (b) to the Islamisation of Central Asia around the same time.
55

55
For a background on Roma / Gypsies, cf. Turner 1926; Kenrick 1993; Marushiakova & Popov 2001;
Guy 2001; Fonseca 1996; Hancock 1987.
188
5.14. The cauldron of kingship
Nkoya: In the Nkoya myth of the institution of kingship (in their own perception one of their
two central institutions, the other being female puberty rites
56
) the Cauldon of Kingship,
57
full of meat,
is cooking on an enormous fire, and the challenge is: which of the clans can lift it off the fire? Only one
princess / clan leader succeeds, and takes the kingship. (The episode concludes (see above) with a
blissful downpour of Rain / Mvula, and the royal adage linking Nkoya kingship with the Tears / Drops
of Mvula / Rain.) An illuminating variant was published by Jacottet 1899-1901 (cf. Jalla 1903): here it
is the superior resourcefulness of humans over animals / clans which decides the outcome the humans
pour water on the fire; of course, the animals in Jacottet are identical with the clans (named after ani-
mals) in the Nkoya version the same kind of transformation is standard in North American flood
myths, which are typically set in a primordial time when society still consisted of speaking and acting
animals, i.e. clan totems.
Meanwhile, in historical times the central symbol of royal office has been, not a cauldron, but
a Conus-shell white disc to be worn as a pendant (mpande, with equivalents all over Southern Africa,
where also the term ndoro is used), and the royal drums,
58
to which human sacrifices were customarily
made comparable to the foundation sacrifices for the royal palace, fence, and tomb. Also in South East
and East Asia, a typological convergence can be noted in recent millennia, from bronze vessels sym-
bolising high status, to bronze drums and bells for royal orchestras (cf. Han Xiaorong 1998). To further
complicate matters, von Sicard (1952), in an intriguing and well documented study that however (like
most of his work) has been radically dismissed by classic anthropologists of South Central Africa, sees
the royal drums of that region as equivalents, even transformations, of the Ark of the Covenant of the
ancient Israelites. Such drums are certainly, as ultimate group symbols, comparable to the aniconic
palladia of West Asia and the Aegean (Gardiner 1893; Ptscher 1979b) including those associated
with Hermes and with Athena. At the same time they carry implied associations with the vessel in
which the Flood hero made his escape not without significance, for throughout the Pelasgian realm
(which includes Ancient Egypt) boats are venerated as ritual objects, and part of royal ritual throughout
the Pelasgian realm (including the motif of royal twins, possibly flood survivors) can be understood as
a re-enactment of the Flood and second creation, the retrieval of fire, the repopulation of the earth, etc.
Comparative: This motif confirms once more the closeness between Nkoya and Celtic my-
thology I submit: because of the Pelasgian / West to Central Asian origin of both. Cauldrons of king-
ship abound in the Celtic world (the cauldron of the Tuatha D Danann; the cauldron of the Dagda; the
cauldron of Dymwach the Giant which was one of the 13 treasures of the Island of Britain (Brom-

56
Among the twentieth-century Nkoya no aetiological myth of female puberty rites could be collected,
even though these rites featured prominently in my decades of fieldwork, and I was granted access to
secret string figures and songs texts. My student Thera Rasing (2002) had the same experience, work-
ing on female puberty rites of the Zambian Bemba.
57
Probably there never were any cast-iron cauldrons made on African soil. The Nkoya story of the
Cauldron of Kingship, set in a context of hunting-gathering as still the sole mode of production, would
have to refer to an earthenware pot if historical logic were to be strictly applied; however, I am confi-
dent that latter-day Nkoya implicitly take the Cauldron of Kingship to have been of cast iron. Portu-
guese-made iron cooking-pots have been part of Nkoya court life ever since the penetration of
eastbound long-distance trade beyond the Zambezi, in the 17th century CE. At the height of the slave
trade (which was only effectively suppressed in the 1900s, whilst slavery as an institution lasted till
1930), cooking-pots were only second to guns as major articles of wealth and exchange against slaves.
As late as 1919, Barotse indunas (royal representatives) still exacted a tribute in pots (as, most proba-
bly, slaves) from the Kahare area (Zambia Archives, file ZA 1 / 13). The surprising but multiple Eura-
sian Steppe connotations of the Nkoya kingship lend another dimension to this problem: Hunnic
cauldrons of typical design specific of the invading Steppe pastoralists were found all over Europe for
the middle of the first millennium CE (cf. Maenchen-Helfen & Knight 1973).
58
These are kettle drums, cf. below, Cauldron of kingship.
189
wich 1991; Rhys 1891; Squire 1905, 1906; MacCulloch 1908-1920; Macalister 1941). A magic caul-
dron played a major part in the story of the birth of the great Welsh bard Taliesin, as recounted in the
last of the Mabinogion stories (Quest 1849; Clouston 1887); however, even though the cauldron and
fluid of inspiration have correspondences in the Nordic and Sanskrit Asian world, I am inclined to con-
sider this story part of the legitimation of the bardic profession, and of relatively late and secondary
nature. Arthur acquired his cauldron of kingship through theft. C Chulainn, himself a divine hero,
steals his royal kettle from a god. A similarly stolen kettle appears, as Aegirs, in Nordic mythology.
Also in Baltic mythology there is a very close parallel with the Nkoya narrative of the cauldron of
kingship (Meistere 1997-2002, based on the Early Modern author Fabricius). They pay homage to
Perkons by first pouring him beer, which is then brought around the fire, and at last pour it in this fire,
asking Perkons to give them rain. Celtic kings at enthronisation are reported to be symbolically
cooked in a cooking-pot full of horse meat (Graves 1988: 384; a more extensive and scholarly source is
McCormick 2007: 91; OMeara 1982: 110; Squire 1905: 73f. For a wider Early Indo-European per-
spective on this cf. Puhvel 1970; this includes (Puhvel 1970: 161f) the Indian avamedha ritual mating
of queen and stallion.)
59
Various properties were attributed to these cauldrons (e.g. as symbols of re-
birth and of the Goddesss womb, as granting of longevity, rejuvenation of slain bodies, Holy Grail,
torture instrument, divination instrument (with a Japanese temple / tea counterpart, Hastings 1908-
1921, Index volume, s.v. cauldron) and evocation of the leaders largesse, cornucopia-like; the latter
is certainly compatible with a pre-food production, hunting-gathering mode of production, cf. Sahlins
1965). Many of these elements survive in modern Wicca cults. Such features are not limited to ancient
Ireland but extend all over Iron-Age Europe, from Gaul (where a famous cauldron, that of Gundestrup
was crafted c. 100 BCE) to Denmark (where that cauldron ended up in a peat bog) and Thrace (which
has been claimed to be the home of the narrative themes displayed on that cauldron (Klindt-Jensen
1959; Olmsted 1976; Kaul & Martens 1995; Kaul et al. 1991); another comparable cauldron, from the
Bronze Age, was found at Hassle, Sweden, in 1936. Also the Graeco-Roman war god Ares / Mars is
reputed to rejuvenate himself by bathing in a kettle of boiling water, cf. the above royal enthronisation
rites (Anonymous, Early Roman Religion, 1955: 28). The mytheme of the cauldron of kingship is
also related to the struggle over sacred tripods, such as mark the mythical encounter between Apollo
and Heracles in the context of the Delphi temple precinct (Fontenrose 1980: 401f). The tripod at Delphi
was not only seized by Heracles but also by Lykos (Lykoros) / Pyrrhos / Deukalion (Fontenrose 1980:
422f). Ino (Leukothea / White Goddess, the mothers sister of Dionysus) was stricken with madness by
Hera and put her infant Melicartes (< Melqart, Lord of the Town, major Phoenician god equated with
Heracles) into a seething cauldron (Euripides Medea 1284f; Apollodorus Bibliotheca 1,9,1f. 3,4,3;
Ovid Metamorphoses 4, 506-542; Farnell 1916; Meyer 1884). Cochrane (n.d.: 130) claims worldwide
cognates for this story. This does not exhaust the motif of the cauldron of kingship. Also in the Tanach
is the flesh pot (Exodus 16: 3) a symbol of abundance. The motif also surfaces in the Egyptian Pyramid
texts, when the megalomaniac utterances of King Unas (c. 2400 BCE) in his so-called Cannibal
Hymn boasts about the cannibalistic contents of his cauldron (Mercer 1952: utterances 402a ff; Faulk-
ner 1924). The motif also surfaces in Indian mythology in a myth about the cosmic god Vishnu (Keith
1917: 78f ):
The sound ghrm, with which Visnus head fell, became the gharma, or sacrificial kettle; and

59
Cf. in Greek mythology the mating of Pasiphae Cretan Minos spouse and as All-Shining an evo-
cation of sun or moon; but also, in Nkoya enthronisation ritual, the transgressive incestuous mating of
the prospective king with his nowadays classificatory sister; is this another displaced Central Asian
Steppe / South Asian motif, along with the ghabasti-carriage pole? Classificatory kinship is a techni-
cal term forged by the early American anthropologist Morgan (1871), to denote a system where mem-
bers of society are subsumed under a small number of very broad categories, whose nature and implied
relationships are nonetheless modelled after primary relations existing between close biological kin.
E.g. among the Nkoya, every person has a considerable number of fathers, mothers, brothers,
sisters, children including distant, putative and fictive kinsmen, and their spouses, in addition to
close biological kin.
190
as his strength dwindled away, the mahdvira, or pot of great strength, acquired its name.
Highly significant, considering the abundance of Central Asian reminiscences in Nkoya my-
thology, is that the cauldron of leadership also occurs in the Kyrgyz Epic Manas (Kmkulkz 2005,
lines 2970f). Bronze vessels were the major regalia in Shang China, and foretold the end of that
dynasty; the fact that the Chinese emperor had no monopoly of the vessels but merely was allowed to
have a larger number of them than other nobles, suggests this to be a pre-imperial trait marking leader-
ship. Still further Eurasian parallels can be found (e.g. Zournatzi 2000). Even from North America,
references to a ritual apparently similar to that described in the Nkoya myth can be found in the
Heyoka Societys ritual of pulling off the boiling kettle (Swann 1994: 437f).
5.15. Female royal prowess
Nkoya: Legendary Queen Shikanda of the Nkoya, whose epithet is Shikanda bakandile
baKaonde Shikanda who destroyed / circumcised the Kaonde [ the Nkoyas northern neighbours ], is
a formidable mythical female warrior true to a model of female military prowess (combined with
total sexual liberty) ranging from the Queen Nzingha / Jinga c. 1600 CE of the Mbundu people of An-
gola (cf. Fraser 1988), Queen Naumba of the Sala (a Zambian people closely related to the Nkoya; cf.
Brelsford 1935), to West African female warriors in Benin (formerly Dahomey; cf. Law 1993; Alpern
1998 however considers the Benin women regiments as an Early Modern phenomenon).
Comparative: Female prowess is found in the warrior connotations of North African women
in Antiquity (Lhote 1959), and the West Asian Amazons. The latter have been habitually dismissed as
a mere myth of male alterising self-construction (Blok 1995), yet were in the recent decade to a consid-
erable extent confirmed by sound archaeological research (cf. Davis-Kimball 2002; Guliaev 2003). In
perfect accordance with the Pelasgian cross-model, we also find warrior women in Celtic Europe e.g.
Queen Boadicea, ancient Nordic Europe (Saxo Grammaticus 1979), and in the extreme East Japans
women samurai. Moreover there is the series of warrior goddesses discussed elsewhere in this Section,
from Neith / Athena / Anahita etc. Shikandas name may be indicative of a further South Asian connec-
tion, cf. the war god Skanda who defeats the demon Taraka and thus saves the world (Willis 1994: 84);
pronounced by Nkoya-speaking mouths, Skanda would sound as Shikanda.
5.16. Royal sibling complementarity / rivalry
Nkoya: In Nkoya mythology, Katete and Luhamba are a royal sibling pair; so are Shihoka
Nalinanga and his (classificatory) sister Likambi Mange / Sorceress, but the latter are locked in mor-
tal rivalry and envy. Shihoka lived at Lukolwe near the Kabombo / Zambezi confluence, while Likambi
lived on the Zambezi, in the flood plain. Shihokas people produced boats and wooden dishes, and
when Likambi sent messengers requesting her rightful share of these products, her envoys were chased.
This made Likambi resort to sorcery, she had a diviner-priest produce a beautiful artificial woman full
of poison; when this object was sent to Lukolwe, she proved irresistible, and as a murderous bride of
the AT category the cause of Shihokas death. In general it appears (van Binsbergen 1992) as if the
Nkoya male king (and his counterparts among neighbouring groups) only rules in the name of his sister
and this is a widespread pattern among Niger-Congo-speaking peoples (Claessen 1981, 1984).
60

Comparative: Many Flood stories following the Standard Elaborate format (see above) have
primordial twins as flood survivors, who incestuously repopulate the world, and who thus at Second
Creation may emulate the First Creation. Cf. Genesis 1 f (Adam and H ava / Eve ). In Ancient Egyptian
mythology the first two creatures, Shu and Tefnut, are raised in the very swamp at A-bt (The Hori-
zon of the Bee [ Ruler ]) / Chemmis (they are called the two royal children of Chemmis (Helck
1979), where also Horus (formally their grandchild, but clearly belonging to a different tradition) was

60
Underneath the Shihoka-Likambi rivalry we could also suspect that between Nkoya and Lozi, but
since open expressions of animosity vis--vis the Lozi are common-place in 20th-century Nkoyaland, it
seems less likely that such animosity would have to be concealed in myth.
191
to be hidden by Isis. For a possible link with the Nkoya kingship, see above, the reed and bee com-
plex. In Celtic mythology the royal twins, with the rivalry element, appear as Arthur and his sisters
Morgause and Morgan le Fay / Sorceress (who possibly feature among the Nkoya as the two royal
ladies which incidentally is also an Egyptian throne title,

nbty. As a result of this rivalry, Arthur
dies at the hands of a freak (his son by his sister Morgause, at least in Sir Thomas Malorys version of
Le Morte dArthur 1978 / 1485) created and sent by one of his sisters sorcery acts. Also in Uralic
mythology: in the Kalevala, Vaeinaemoeinen and Joukahainen struggle over bows, boats, horses and
gold in a way reminiscent of Shihoka and Likambi (Tamminen 1928: 90).
61

5.17. Serpent, child [ or mother ] of Drought
Nkoya: In Nkoya mythology, a prominent character is king Shihoka Nalinanga: Snake, Child
[ or Mother ] of Drought, known as a cattle raider and locked in deadly rivalry with his royal sister.
Here we may perceive a link between Nkoya mythology and that of neighbouring Eastern Angola,
whose cultures and languages are continuous with those of Western Zambia. One of the major Angolan
tales (Chatelain 1894) deals with the descent of the male Sudika-Mbambi into the underworld. Sudika
is in love with the daughter of the underworld king Kalunga-Ngombe [ Grave-Cattle ], but she has
been kidnapped by Kinioka kia Tumba [ Snake of Tumba / Skin? worldwide, the association of skin
and dryness is a common one ], apparently a cognate character to Shihoka Nalinanga. In the under-
world, Sudika is swallowed by a monster, Kimbiji [ Two-Persons ? ] kia Malenda a Ngandu [ With
Crocodile Scales ]; however, Sudikas brother Kabundungulu catches the monster and cuts it open,
after which he magically restores his brother to life from the bones, in shamanic fashion. A great water
serpent is also very conspicuous in the stories which Jacottet collected in Western Zambia at the end of
the 19th century (e.g. Jacottet 1899-1901: III, 71f, 136f narrative XXV and LVII.); under the Luyi
name Lingongole, this mythical character is reminiscent of the Rainbow Snake. It should be distin-
guished from the Great Forest Snake (Jacottet 1899-1901: iii, 138), who in the modern Nkoya con-
sciousness has become indistinguishable from Mwenda-Njangula.
Comparative: The snake / serpent is a feature of mythology everywhere and of all times. I felt
justified to claim the presence of a snake Narrative Complex already in the very oldest mythology, that
is, included in Pandoras Box. The primordial snake often appears in the form of the Rainbow Serpent
(in Australia and archaic Africa; Buchler & Maddock 1978), but this celestial form often has a com-
plement in a terrestrial or aquatic serpent; the celestial and terrestrial / aquatic forms may also coincide,
which stands to reason since in many archaic cosmologies there is considerable equivalence between
the Waters Above (the sky), the Waters Below (the underworld, Apsu etc.), and the Waters Aside
of the ordinary life-world, the seas and rivers. The rainbow appears when rain is over (cf. Genesis 9:
13, after Nah s Flood) and therefore is the adversary of rain, the harbinger of drought. Cf. the Austra-
lian notion of drought as the son of Rain, the former seeking to prevent the latter, his father, from fal-
ling (Andrews 2000). However, Rain, as Demiurge, in Nkoya cosmology and myth appears, not in a
paternal but in a filial role, as bird-like child of a bird-like High God which in recent centuries has been
known under the name of Nyambi. I prefer to interpret Shihokas mythical character not by reference to
Pandoras Box, but to much more recent mythical connotations. Shihokas symbolism is somewhat
reminiscent of the West Asian snake symbolism informing such biblical passages as Genesis 3 (tempta-
tion by and cursing of the snake, causing humans to be evicted from Paradise into the wilderness which

61
The transition from paradisiacal sibling complementarity to deadly sibling rivalry is not obvious, and
suggests that two mythemes of widely different background and origin have been combined here: (a)
the motif of the paradisiacal siblings, at first or second creation (in other words, after the Flood), and
(b) a masculinising telescoping of generations and authorities, that transforms (under the impact of the
new cosmogony of the Separation of Heaven and Earth) the Virgin Mother of the Waters with her Only
Son and Lover, into an uneasy dyadic union, in which the male partner, with celestial connotations,
claims equality and usurps the female partners seniority, both in generation and in prerogatives of
ruling.
192
by implication is drought-stricken) and Numbers 21: 8 (the raising of the brazen snake in the desert).
The association of the underworld with cattle is common-place in European mythology (cf. Hercules
with the cattle of Geryon and of Cacus, but also Plutos / Hades association with cattle as the most
obvious form of wealth in Indo-European contexts; the association also surfaces in several of Grimms
Hausmrchen; Grimm & Grimm 1812-1815 / 1996) and Shihoka is, among other things, a cattle
raider (also see Unilateral being, below). Not only as a conflict between royal siblings of opposite gen-
der, but also in terms of the dry / wet opposition, this conflict is reminiscent of that of Arthur and Mor-
gan. Morgans name means sea-born (Rhys 1891: 22f, cf. 324f), and she, again, is an epiphany of the
Mother of the Waters hence the rightful Lady of Avalon (Rhys 1891: 348), whose position is usurped
by male ascendance. According to one version Morgan, too, resorts to the production of an artificial
human being to inflict fatal harm upon Arthur. In Shihoka Nalinanga, a specific parallel with Ancient
Egypt may be pointed out: the fact that there we have the First-Dynasty King Snake (WAd) whose name
may also be translated as Green. Moreover Shu, the ancient Egyptian air-god whose name means Emp-
tiness or Dryness, has a son Geb, the earth god, the latter is not himself represented as a snake but
displays the chthonic connotations of the snake which are virtually universal; for the Geb motif in sub-
Saharan Africa (cf. Ndigi 1996). Also cf. Zmey Gorynych, the dragon of the Slavic mythology; its
name is translated as Snake son-of-mountain, cf. earth / drought; and in Indian mythology: Vr tra, the
drought-causing serpent (Mackenzie 1913). In many mythologies, the opposition wet / dry creates a
central dynamism. It is this opposition, in fact, that informs the old Cosmogony of the Separation of
Water and Land. Here the senior position is accorded to the aquatic side, the Mother of the Waters,
who gives birth to the land as the junior component of reality, and who had to do this from a virginal
state because there was no other being to impregnate her. In the Nkoya narrative the dry / wet opposi-
tion is applied in several ways. Snake Child or Parent of Drought, although producing boats, lives in
the forest, while his counterpart lives in the flood plain, as the structural exponent of the Mother of the
Waters, who in vain claims her privilege of supremacy, after her position has already been redefined
from intergeneration (Virgin Mother and Only Child, who becomes her lover) to Elder Sister / Younger
Brother with further humiliation in stock for the Elder Sister. The opposition between Rain and
Drought is, however, not just a binary cosmological opposition, but may be interpreted as part of a
transformational cycle involving not only fire and water, but also earth, air, metal, and possibly other
elements such as aether (cf. van Binsbergen 2009, where the implied presence of this cycle among the
Nkoya is discussed). The suggestion of cyclical transformation around Shihoka Nalinanga has a paral-
lel in Nordic mythology: the rain god Freyr on the day of Ragnarok (the Nordic Apocalypse) will battle
without weapons (for he gave his sword away to Skirnir), and will be the first to be killed by the fire
giant Surt [ a Fire Giant ] again enacting the same scheme of Water being destroyed by Fire. In the
present volume, Nick Allen (2010) treats the same essentially cyclical and elemental opposition for
Hephaestus (Fire) versus Scamander (Water), and Vr tra (Drought Serpent) versus Indra (Rain). So at
one level the conflict between the siblings is to be explained as the antagonistic interaction between
elements within a transformative cycle: Water destroys Fire, Fire destroys Wood, etc.
5.18. Artificial woman wreaks doom
Nkoya: When Shihoka Nalinanga does not meet her demands, Likambi Mange has a diviner-
priest construct an artificial woman, who is sent to Shihoka and causes his death.
Comparative: The motif of artificially constructed human beings is so central in todays popu-
lar culture (cyborgs etc.), that we are inclined to consider it the expression of highly developed tech-
nologi-cal culture, in which electronic and digital advances have brought about the situation where
man-machine communication is increasingly supplanting the interaction between humans. However,
the same motif is prominent in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (cf. Higley 1997a, 1997b), where
the artificial beings are studied rumoured to have been created by some of the finest male minds in
European cultural history: Virgil, Simon Magus, Pope Sylvester II, Albertus Magnus, Robert Gros-
seteste, Roger Bacon, Paracelsus, Rabbi Loew of Prague, Ren Descartes, Thomas Edison and on into
the twentieth century with such parallels as Daedalus, Hephaestus, Talus and Pygmalion in the
imagination of the Ancient World. The related motif of the cyborg has so proliferated in recent years
193
that we cannot begin to indicate the relevant literature. A major early study in this field was: Haraway
(1991). Meanwhile the most famous example in this category is Mary Shelleys literary creation,
Frankenstein, cf. Shelley 1831; Heideman 2001). Artificial humans are a feature of the imagination
worldwide combining the appropriation of divine creative power, with the evil connotations that such
hubris predictably has. The artificial creation of humans, especially from earth or mud, is a widespread
motif: Chinese N Wa (Willis 1994: 91), Oceanian gods, the biblical god (Genesis 1-2; alterna-
tively from Adams rib, and anyway the perpetrator of the Fall of Man), and, by Hephaestus from the
earth / Earth / Gaia, Greek Pandora is created as punishment for humans acquisition of fire from Pro-
metheus (Ovid, Metamorphoses, X; Willis 1994: 131). Cf. Penglas (1997) on the Near Eastern ante-
cedents of the Pandora myth (as distinct from Egyptian antecedents of Pandora, as in Bernal 2001: 25f
after Walcot 1966). Greek shape-shifting sea god Proteus substituted Helen by a dummy to be sent to
Troy to be the doom of her times, keeping the original at his island Pharos before the Egyptian coast,
where innocently she was later reunited with Menelaus (Cotterell 1989: 232). Bata, Anubis brother,
flees after a Potiphar-like incident (cf. Genesis 39: 1 f), to Syria, where the Ennead has a wife for him
made by Chnum. This wife is almost violated by personified Sea. Bata has emasculated himself and
has hidden his heart in a pine tree, etc. Bata becomes a bull, then an avocado tree, then a piece of furni-
ture, whose splinter kills the bad woman. Bata ends up as king (Willis 1994: 53). This does not exhaust
the mythical motif of an artificial woman wreaking doom. Its further manifestations include: continen-
tal European Melusine, an evil shape-shifting mermaid who with all her snake connotations appears
to be essentially a domesticated transformation of the prehistoric Mother of the Primal Waters (cf.
Couldrette 1866; Higley 1999); the Lilith of Hebrew tradition (cf. Koltuv 1986 and references cited
there); Roman Fama, Rumour; and Blodeuwedd, the artificial woman created out of flowers so as to
marry a man whose mother (Aranrhod) has cursed him never to marry a mortal (Mabinogion, IV; Jones
& Jones 1949). Melusine and Blodeuwedd spring from the Celtic world and reinforce the Celtic dimen-
sion of such Eurasian continuities as surface repeatedly in the Nkoya case. In a way, Graeco-Roman
Aphrodite / Venus (born not from a womb but from sea foam / from Uranus severed genitals (Hesiod,
Theogonia, 176f), and the cause of incessant mischief in the world of gods and men) is quite a home in
this company. Widespread in medieval European literature is the myth of the poison girl (Hertz 1905),
featuring Aristotle of all people, and with reminiscences also of Medea, who however was of normal
though divine birth, granddaughter of the Sun, daughter of Jasons adversary Aetes of Colchis, and
niece of Circe. The motif is also sporadically found in North America: in a Tlingit myth, Raven made a
woman under the earth (Swanton 1909: 32). Usually, then, the evil artificial human is female, but also
male examples may be found, e.g. the 9-mile-long Mokerkialfi (Mist Wader) created out of clay by
the evil Jotun giants for their battle with the Germanic gods (Guerber 1909: 74f); or the golem of me-
dieval and Early-Modern Jewish tradition, again out of clay, usually male, and whose evil deeds are
scarcely compensated by the fact that he was intended to protect the Jews from accusations of ritual
human sacrifice (Cf. Idel 1990; Looby n.d.).
5.19. Building with skulls
Nkoya: The legendary Nkoya king Kayambilas throne name boasts that he thatched his house
with the skulls of his enemies. This cruel practice has, in the first place, regional resonances. It is part
of a violent skull complex that was quite central to Nkoya culture before modern times. Still in the late
19th century CE, the Nkoya courtiers are reported to drink their mead and sorghum beer from the
skulls (in fact, occiputs) of their slain enemies. It is to the hunter and explorer George Copp Westbeech
(apud Tabler 1963; Sampson 1972) that we owe a description of Nkoya use of the occiput. The
Nkoyas eastern neighbours, the Ila, kept piles of skulls in memory of the Barotse (cum Nkoya!) attack
upon their cattle in the 1880s, despite Ila defeat (Smith & Dale 1920: I, 44). For parallels to the Nkoya
skull cup among the Nkoyas northern neighbours the Kaonde, cf. Jaeger 1974; for Zimbabwean paral-
lels, cf. the numerous references to smashed skulls in Selous 1893, 1896. Among the Ila, whose culture
and language overlaps with that of the Nkoya, still in the early 20th century the practice prevailed that a
suitor was only eligible for marriage if he brought his prospective affines the skull of a slain en-emy
(Smith & Dale 1920: I, 44, 77; Muntemba 1973). Moreover, especially at the annual royal Kazanga
194
harvest festival the king would conclude his royal dance pouring a libation (nowadays of village-brewn
beer, originally probably of slave blood; in the latter case the episode would be strikingly similar to
early-dynastic Egyptian rites, cf. Wilkinson 2001) for his royal ancestors at an arboreal shrine, and
drinking part of the liquid slaves would be immolated for the occasion, and the occiput of a slain
slave buried to the rim into the ground in front of the shrine would serve as a drinking vessel (Mayowe
1994).
Comparative: The skull cult is likely to go back, ultimately, to Palaeolithic times. Admittedly,
Binford (1981) has argued that what has been construed as evidence of cultic and cannibalistic prac-
tices of Palaeolithic Man (e.g. the Sinanthropus, 500 ka BP) may very well be attributed to the known
actions of predatory animals. Yet the cult of the cave-bear and the practice of skull offerings continue
to be more or less accepted themes in the study of prehistoric religion (Maringer 1952: 75-82 and pas-
sim, which contains a wealth of information of skull cults, see index of that book, s. v. schedel /
skull; Gahs 1928). A general study of the place of the human skull in cultural history was made by
Henschen (1966). Skull cults are a widespread feature of Neolithic cultures in the Near East (Mellaart
1967; Edwards et al.1986: index, s.v. skulls (painted, plastered, on floors, skull-burials and cult, Jeri-
cho), pp. 505-506). Like heads conserved in honey, human skulls were widely used in divination (Betz
1986: 75: PGM IV.2125-39; Montgomery 1911), which may have extended to libation or drinking
from such skulls.
Building with skulls. Before we discuss this gruesome form of architecture, let us consider the
more positive case, when the building-with-skulls mytheme has associations not only with extreme
violence and destruction, but also with cosmogony: in Ancient Nordic mythology, the gods fashioned
the sky out of the skull of the giant Ymir, and used his eyebrows as a protective barrier (Rosenberg
1994). However, as we have seen in Table 9.3, the Kayambila motif reflects two AT motifs that have a
wide global distribution: F771.1.9 house of skulls as murderers abode; and G315 demon cuts off
mens heads to build with them. The parallels to the Kayambila motif in Greek mythology are unmis-
takable. Cycnus / Swan (Fontenrose 1980: 29) was reported to be in the habit of ambushing travellers
and piling up their skulls, from which he intended to build a temple for the god whose son he was re-
puted to be: Ares, Apollo, or Phobos (Apollodorus Bibliotheca, 2.114; Stesichorus, Fragment 207);
only Heracles victory over Cycnus prevented this architectural feat. Fontenrose argues that Cycnus is
primarily a manifestation of the underworld god Hades; the association with the sun is no longer puz-
zling once we realise that as highlighted in Egyptian belief the sun passes through the underworld
during the night; an ulterior explanation would be that the swan is an evocation of the Mother of the
Primary Waters under the Cosmogony of the Separation of Water and Land, and that later this creator
deity was fragmented into sky god, sea god and underworld god, and masculinated. Nor was the pos-
session of a mound of skulls limited to Cycnus: Diomedes son of Ares was reputed to possess a mount
of skulls, apparently a rudimentary shrine in the nature of a herm, an earth shrine found all over the Old
World from Khoisan speaking Namibia (where it is sacred to the trickster god Heitsi-Eibib) to Mongo-
lia, Tibet and even North America, typically located at through-roads and at crossroads and to which
individual travellers are supposed to add a stone. Antaeus son of Poseidon boasted a similar collection
of skulls (Fontenrose 1980: 330). Like Cycnus, Antaeus was reputedly killed by Heracles,
62
notably in

62
The question as to why Heracles / Glory of Hera, should have the task of clearing the world from
monsters is a challenge in its own right for comparative mythology. As long as we stick to the nave
etymology of Hera as heroine, we will not make much progress towards answering this question. Nor
should we take Heracles as one, monolithic and integrated character a great diversity of characters
hide under this designation (Gruppe 1964; Ptscher 1979a; Brundage 1958; Levy 1934; Graves 1988).
Burkert (1979) sees Heracles as originating in Palaeolithic hunter culture and traditions of shamanistic
crossings into the netherworld; that is less revealing than it sounds, since we have reason to presume
(van Binsbergen 2006a, 2006b, and above) that all mythology has that kind of background. As one of
the possible readings of the Heracles character I submit the following. Typical of mythological com-
plexes is their layeredness (cf. Farmer et al. 2002). Often, older dispensations of a worldview and the
attending mythology are not downright supplanted by later, dominant ones, but forced into an uneasy,
twisted, compromised relationship with them. Hera is, from one point of view, a transformation of the
195
Libya, which in classical Antiquity referred to Africa, but not to Africa alone there also being vast
stretches of Asia designated by that name (Karst 1931). Whereas in the Cycnus myth the skulls serve as
building bricks rather than as roofing-tiles, Antaeus corresponds even more closely with Kayambila in
that it was his specific intention to use the collected skulls for roofing, in his case roofing a temple for
his father Poseidon. Antaeuss link with the underworld is further accentuated by the fact that his
mother was Gaia / Earth, so that whenever he was exhausted from combat, he would only have to lie
down in order to have his strength replenished. Heracles could only overcome him by preventing this
contact with Earth lifting him up in Heracles capacity of the celestial axis. Nor was this the end of
the sinister skull collection in the Greek myths. According to Fontenrose (1980: 333): ...Oinomaos,
Euenos, and Atalantas father. Of all these kings it is said that they heaped up or hung up the skulls of
those suitors [ of their daughter ] who lost the race; and the first two are linked with Phorbas, Kyknos,
and Antaeus. Oenomaus tragic strategy concerning his daughter Hippodameia formed the motif of the
great temple sculptures at the Parthenon and Olympia. Even the name of Geryon, whom Heracles re-
lieved of his cattle, may be etymologically linked to karanos, cranium, skull (Fontenrose 1980: 333,
where also other etymological associations are cited, with ample bibliography). Also Herculess enemy
Cacus, another death demon and cattle rustler (cf. the Nkoya tradition on Shihoka Nalinanga as cattle
rustler, above), had hung the entrance to his cave with the skulls of his slain victims. Finally, the state-
house of the mythical Phlegyan nation was a skull-hung oak tree (Fontenrose 1980: 54). If that name
can be considered to derive from Indo-European bh[ e ]leg-, to burn black with smoke and hence as a
cognate of our word black (Partridge 1979, s.v. black) then we might suggest that the Phlegyans,
though mythical, were at one stage thought of as Black people, and perhaps were among the pre- or

Mother of the Primal Waters under the Cosmogony of the Separation of Water and Land. But at the
same time she is an exponent of the Cosmogony of the Separation of Heaven and Earth, which seems
to have largely supplanted the earlier cosmogony. Under the new dispensation, Hera appears as a sky
goddess her association with speckled or striped animals (cuckoo, peacock; cf. van Binsbergen 2004),
her enmity of the solar complex of Colchian Aetes and his sisters Circe and Pasiphae, the plausible
Kartvelian etymology of Heras name setting sun (proto-Kartvelian *cwer- (Starostin & Starostin
1998-2008, Kartvelian etymology; Klimov 1998: 525), and her complementarity with the sky god
Zeus, all make that at least one aspect of her is that of a goddess of the sky at night, when the revolu-
tion of the heavens around the celestial pole and axis is most conspicuous. The militant Heracles, with
his star-spangled association with the brightly speckled quail, his lion-skin and his club evocative of
the celestial axis, rounding up the mythical cattle regardless of whether it belongs to the heavens (as in
Egypt and the Ancient Near East; Hera is bopis, cow-eyed and europia, broadly seeing; Heracles is
bouphagos, cow-eating, ouranios, celestial) or to the underworld, primarily represents the aggres-
sive subjugation of the older cosmogony (and its human adherents) by the newer cosmogony. Heracles
is in the first place the celestial axis the great discovery of naked-eye astronomy by the outgoing
Upper Paleolithic (cf. Rappenglck 1999); hence Herodotus, (Historiae, II), is found by commentators
notably Lloyd 1988: 29 to have equated Heracles with Egyptian Shu, who holds up the heavens. In
so far as the recognition of the celestial axis is shamanic (it is the shamans privilege to move up and
down the axis into heaven and underworld), Burkert is right that Heracles has shamanic aspects. Hera-
cles works (typically organised as a dozen, according to the zodiac) summarise the overthrow of the
demonised protagonists of the older cosmogonic dispensation. Hence even Heracles as ipoktonos
grub-eater: if we may appeal to Egyptian-Aegean mythological continuity, in so far as Neith / Bee
Ruler as Mother of the Waters represents the older disposition and was replaced by the solar god R
c
,
Heracles as championing the new disposition kills the bees offspring, the grub; just like Aristaeus (as a
god an evocation of the protypical Pelasgian rustic) in conflict with Orpheus but a son of the Neith-like
goddess Cyrene, saw his bees killed but restored from cattle. This approach also throws some light on
nocturnal Heras otherwise unexplained enmity vis--vis the solar / diurnal Aetes c.s. and on Jasons
rival Pelias emphasis on Aphrodite, and refusal to include Hera, in the annual festival at Iolcus. The
heroes associated with Hera (besides Jason apparently also Menelaus, Antenor, and Orpheus) are don-
ning leopard / panther skins as befits a goddess of the star-spangled night-sky, and it is her hatred that
brings Jason to adventure into Colchis (Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica).
196
proto-Bantu presences in the Eastern Mediterranean and West Asia (cf. van Binsbergen & Woud-
huizen, in press); however, more authoritative is Starostin & Starostin (1998-2008: Indo-European
etymology) Proto-Indo-European: *bhleig- shining bright. Skull-decorated temples are characteris-
tic of Kali in Hinduism, and are also found in other South Asian contexts. The human skull is also a
favourite decorative motif found in the dwellings of leading men in South East Asia, and for some
Meso American temples e.g. the walls of the Maya centre of Chichen Itza are adorned with numerous
sculptural representations of skulls. Skulls also used to abound in European Christian churches, when
still in regular use as burial sites. In South Asia it is not necessarily an act of cruelty to use a deceaseds
skull as a drinking vessel it may even be an act of mourning (Eliseev et al. 1994: 459, 180).
Drinking from skulls: In comparative mythology, the locus classicus for drinking from the
skulls of slain enemies is Herodotus accounts of the Scythians (Historiae IV, 64). A related example
from Eastern Europe is the drinking vessel which the Pecheneg Khan Kurya made out of Svyatoslavs
skull (Schreiber n.d.: 304). This Kiev practice combines Steppe with Viking antecedents, and we are
not surprised that there is disagreement as to whether the Vikings of Northwestern Europe did or did
not drink from skull cups. At any rate, centuries later the skull of Blackbeard the Pirate (c. 1680
1718), whose original name was Edward Teach, Thatch or Thache, was turned into a cup so that his
fate appears to be one that Kayambila the Thatcher could have predicted. A clear-cut parallel with the
Nkoya case comes from the European Iron Age: In 216 BCE, the Boii Gauls in Gallia Cisalpina (mod-
ern North Italy) killed the consul Lucius Postumius Albino and used his skull as a sacrificial vessel
(Livy, Ab Urbe condita, XXIII 23.4; Dio Cassius, Historia Romana, XV, 3.2). Nor does this exhaust
the evidence for an Eurasian skull complex. The Scythian and Celtic habit of drinking from enemy
skulls as recorded in Antiquity, seems to form the Western end of a skull complex that extends across
the steppe belt of Eurasia all the way to the Pacific coast. Los (1969: 58, 116) sees the use of the skull
cups in the first place as a Turkish-Mongolian custom, later also among the Bulgars, and during the
Migrations of the Nations also occasionally among Germanic kings in Europe (e.g. Alboin had the
skull guilded of the Gepid king Kunimond (Los 1969: 244 n. 209; Thierry 1856: 112f). Laoshang
Chanyu defeated the Yueh-chi (probably a branch of Tocharians) in 170 BCE and
made their kings skull into a drinking vessel, after which his people fled westward (Los 1969: 116).
Glimpses of the Inner Eurasian skull cult can be found with Herodotus (on the Issedones, Herodotus,
Historiae, 1, 201; 4: 13, 16, 15f. cf. Baldick 2000: 17; also the Herodotus commentator Corcella elabo-
rates on this point, cf. Corcella 1984; Asheri & Corcella 2007), and by the 10th-century Iranian geogra-
pher Ibn Rusta (Baldick 2000: 29). General ownership of enemy skulls is reported for the Avars
(Baldick 2000: 36). Drinking from enemy skulls has been reported from the Bulghars of the Danube
(Baldick 2000: 31) and the Mongols (the king of the Hsiung-nu / / Huns in 202 BCE Baldick
2000: 23; such drinking vessels are indispensable for Hsiung-nu when sealing a treaty, Baldick 2000:
36; interestingly, Nkoya in the 19th century had the same war tactics as the Hsiung-nu: luring the en-
emy to distant places. The skull-cup practice was also found in Korea (Hulbert 1905; Serruys 1958;
Yetts 1926 as a practice associated with Chinese in Korea). Head-hunting practices in Taiwan are well
attested (Watson Andaya 2004; Shepherd 1993). In Japan the custom appears to be transformed into
drinking from an animal skull (Blacker 1967; Seki 1966), while the skull is reported as a witchcraft
item there (Casal 1959). Throughout Central and East Asia, the ancestral practice of drinking from a
human skull appears to have been incorporated, transformed and sanctioned in Buddhist ritual (Park &
Song 2005); highly decorated, such skull cups are conspicuous especially in Tibetan Buddhism. The
practice of skull drinking is also reported from Native (North) Americans (Chacon & Dye 2007).
So here a number of greatly different themes need to be distinguished: the skull as a memento
of human mortality on the one hand evokes violence and unrestricted power the realm of the gods of
war and death but on the other hand resignation with the finitude of human life, of continued com-
mitment after the death of a loved one, and even of liberation of lifes woes, or eternal salvation. In the
Nkoya case, however, the emphasis is clearly on violence and unrestricted power, in amazing continu-
ity with the Eurasian skull complex, especially with the Turks of the Eurasian Steppe (cf. Los 1969:
51f).
Kazanga festival: as already noted, in its original form the Kazanga festival had considerable
parallels with the Egyptian kings heb sed festival: although this would ideally only be held at 30 years
197
intervals it also involved the erection of royal pavilions and the immolation of captives (cf. Wilkinson
2001).
5.20. Creation from tears of the divinity
Nkoya: The Nkoya myth of kingship concludes with the adage Our kingship is from the Tears
/ Drops of Rain.
Comparative: In Ancient Egypt, the tears of the divinity image first emerge with the Coffin
Texts, after the Old Kingdom (Anthes 1961: 30; de Buck 1935-1961: VII, 465 a. Mankind arose from
the tears of the suns / Ra
c
s eye. In another version humankind did not directly issue from R
c
s tears,
but R
c
s tears fertilised the earth so that it could bring forth mankind: the sun-god wept and from the
tear (remy ) that fell on earth, there sprang man (remet ) Hart 1993: 181; hiero-
glyphic text added; in van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen, in press, an argument is presented to link Egyp-
tian remet and the Etruscan / Latin place name Roma, to proto-Bantu *-dm (Guthrie no. 697),
husband, man, cf. Roma as a Gypsy ethnonym, against the background of other indications of proto-
Bantu in the Bronze Age Mediterranean). By a very close parallel with the Egyptian case, the Nordic
sun-god Balder was called God of Tears, not only because he was accidentally killed by his blind
twin brother Hod, but particularly because humankind emerged from his tears. In Indian myth, the
motif of a gods creative tears (Prajpati, notably) comes very close to that of the Egyptian case
(Mackenzie 1913: vi). Japanese mythology also knew the creative tears, notably those that were shed
by the god Izanagi, out of grief over his sister-wife Izanami; these turned into a beauteous babe, the
goddess Nakisawame-no-Mikoto (Kojiki), the goddess of wells and clear water.
But not all divine tears coagulate into humans. In Babylonian mythology (Enuma Elish) the
tears of the female chaos and water goddess Timat became the source of the rivers Tigris and Euphra-
tes. Here it is the blood of Kingu, Tiamats consort, from which their adversary Marduk created the
first humans; cf. Aphrodite apud Hesiod. According to the Ancient Greeks, the inundation of the Nile
was due to the tears of Isis (Hopfner 1940-1941: II, 1041, p. 175), which fell into the water when she
was violated by her son Horus (Papyrus Harris, VII, 10) another case of a mythical virgin mother
(she was only posthumously impregnated) and her only son being transformed in the direction of mas-
culine dominance, and turning sour. In Graeco-Roman mythology, morning dew is said to spring from
the tears the goddess Es spilled over the loss of her lover (Ovid, Metamorphoses, XIII, 842f); like-
wise, in Oceanian mythology (which shows many unexplained parallels with that of Western Eurasia)
dew is interpreted as the tears of the celestial god Rangi over the terrestrial goddess Papa (Best 1922:
14). Back in Greece, also the river Kokytus, identical to or closely related to the better known river
Styx, is made up of tears but tears of humans, not of gods. The Achelous river in Asia Minor sprung
from Niobes tears when, in retaliation for her idle boasting, the two divine children Apollo and Arte-
mis had killed Niobes children (Iliad XXIV 602). Other rivers and lakes were supposed to originate
from the tears shed by nymphs; in Germanic mythology, nixies / stream maiden were depicted in the
same manner. Among such nymphs is, in Italy, the otherwise unknown Nestis, who with her tears
feeds the life stream of beings and thus represents water among the four elements (Empedocles,
Fragments, 6, Leonard 1908; my translation); this comes close again to tears creating humans. In Juda-
ism, God is claimed to weep over the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, and out of pity with his
creatures, thus bringing about a silent stream (Schwartz 2004: 37f; Fishbane 2003: 167).
Nor are all divine tears benevolent and creative. Relatively close to Egypt, among the Nilotic
Dinka people venerating the demiurge Deng, the adage exists Dengs Tears are Blood (Scheub 2000).
And at the other end of Asia, the tears of the storm god Susanowo also carried violent associations:
Susanowos tears, which caused the rain, were tears of destruction. Like the tears of the Egyptian Seth
and of angry gods in other lands, they dried up the oceans and withered the forests (Andrews 2000:
196). In the New World, the Inca creator god Viracocha, having completed his creative activities, often
takes trips to Earth disguised as a beggar to check up on the state of the world, which usually causes
him to cry (Urton 1999: 64; Salomon & Urioste 1991); note the parallel with Mwene Manenga above.
In Mikmaq mythology (South Eastern Canada, with optimal opportunities for trans-Atlantic influences
198
from Africa and Europe) tears shed by the creator sungod brought about a Flood (Whitehead 1991).
Similar instances of crying gods in the New World causing a Flood are given in Andrews 2000: 35. In
a Kathlamet myth from the North Western USA, it is tears shed by a rejected lover that bring about the
Flood (Frazer 1918: 325-326; Kelsen 1988: 148).

5.21. The rain god has junior / filial status in the pantheon
Nkoya: Mvula / Rain, child of Nyambi.
Comparative: Junior pantheon status of the rain god (in terms, not so much of power, but of
formal genealogical position; e.g. Zeus in the Greek pantheon, as son of Kronos and grandson of Ura-
nus, although the king of heaven is yet junior) is widely attested in Western and Eastern Eurasia. This
fits in with the Cosmogony of the Separation of Heaven and Earth, where Rain, as a principal connec-
tion between Heaven and Earth in societies based on rain-fed agriculture, tends to be regarded as the
child of the supreme celestial god.

Fig. 9.9. Global distribution of rain gods with junior status in the pantheon

From: van Binsbergen, in preparation (b), where full references will be given
5.22. The unilateral mythical being
Nkoya: Among the Nkoya, Mwenda-Njangula (Walker of the Height) is a mythical being
with only one side to his / her body. One meets Mwenda-Njangula in the forest, and if one is the first to
extend a greeting, one will gain great knowledge and riches, but in the alternative case, misfortune,
even death. In the narratives which the missionary Jacottet (1899-1901: III, passim, and II, 122f ) col-
lected in Barotseland by the end of the 19th century, Mwenda-Njangula (and various alternative
names), appears as a cattle herder who, every morning, crosses a boundary consisting of a river, where
his mother makes a fordable passage.
Comparative: Werner (1933: ch. XIII) has recognised the prominence of this motif in the my-
thology of Bantu speaking peoples and devotes nearly an entire chapter to it. The mytheme of the uni-
lateral mythical being, whose standard discussion is in von Sicard (1968-1969), has a global
distribution of typical Pelasgian shape (cf. van Binsbergen, 2010b, 2010c).
Jacottet (1899-1901) suspected direct Judaeo-Christian influence in Mwenda-Njangulas daily
river crossing (cf. Moses Red Sea crossing, Exodus 14: 16) but a more convincing reading of this story
is to consider the boundary the one between the underworld and the upper world such as is also found
199
in Japanese mythology regarding Izanagis return from the underworld (the Land of Yomi) where, with
relief and relish, he leaves his wretched sister-wife Izanami. Throughout the Old World, rivers consti-
tute the abode of the ancestors, in other words, the underworld.
This motif is akin to that of Mwene Manenga testing generosity (elsewhere in this Section),
and of Jacob wrestling with an unspecified being at the ford of the Jabbok (Genesis 32:24); without
satisfactory etymology in Afroasiatic including Semitic, this hydronym has a transparent etymology in
proto-Bantu -jbok- (Guthrie no. 916), to cross river, and is one of the indications of a Niger-Congo
presence in the Bronze Age Mediterranean (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen, in press). We are in the
presence of transformation of the postulated Mother of the Waters here, who especially appears in her
capacity of ruler of the underworld the stream, among other mythical references, marks the boundary
between life and death.
Fig. 9.10. Global distribution of the mytheme of the unilateral mythical being (van
Binsbergen 2010b)

1. von Sicards (1968-1969) attestations of the unilateral figure outside Africa; 2. attestation of the
unilateral figure from other sources than von Sicard; 3. generalised extent of von Sicards numerous
African attestations of the unilateral figure; from: van Binsbergen 2010b, with full references.
5.23. The king with only one hair
Nkoya: King Kahare With One Hair; I have usually interpreted this as a reference to the very
tall conical hairdress of the Ila, with which people especially the Kahare kingship has great affinities.
Comparative: This mytheme is complementary to the skull complex. There is the Nordic case
of princess Syrith, daughter of king Syvaldus; she had been abducted by a giant, who had twisted and
pressed her locks together so that they formed on her head one hard mass which hardly could be
combed out except with the aid of an iron tool (Rydberg 1906: III, 774). Greek mythology knows a
King Nisus of Megara with one crucial hair (Parada & Frlag 1997). The unshaven magical hair in the
Tanach (Shimshon, Judges 13: 24f) is reminiscent of Greek mythology rather than of the Biblical mi-
lieu (Apollo never shorn; King Nisus, and king Pterelaos; Margalith 1986). However, for this
mytheme the Eurasian Steppe connections seem to be most to the point here, and they seem to confirm
the Scythian / Pelasgian continuities in the Nkoya kingship. Several Central Asian peoples (Warangs,
following the Agrippaeans and Turks; Svyatoslav of Kiev adopted the same custom) had as the stan-
dard coiffure of adult men: a clean-shaven head with only one tuft of hair left (Los 1969: 267 n 290).
This is also the standard hairdo of mythical and royal children in the Ancient Egyptian tradition an-
other indication of the latters possible Steppe connotations, along with artefacts such as spoke-
wheeled chariots and the royal diadem, and elements of Uralic in Egyptian theonyms (van Binsbergen
& Woudhuizen, in press). The infant Horus, with the unique tuft of hair, was impersonated by an adult
200
priest on the 16th of the month Kojahk (Stricker 1963-1989 IV: 492f). Herodotus, Historiae, IV, 23)
describes the Agrippaeans (Scythian in dress but with their own language) as a group of pacifist and
mediators, comparable to North African saints (Gellner 1969), the Sudan leopard-skin chiefs (Evans-
Pritchard 1967 / 1940), and the mediators that established themselves in the middle of the second mil-
lennium around the Congo-Zambezi watershed (White 1962; Vansina 1966; van Binsbergen 1981)
with whom they have, in my opinion, not just a formal but also a historical connection, besides all dis-
playing the tendency of wearing a leopard-skin (van Binsbergen 2004). The mytheme of one hair also
has attestations in the New World: World Buffalo, also a symbol of humankind, loses one hair every
year (Leeming & Page 2000: 37); bridges of only one hair width occur in a Meso American myth of the
hero Nakal who is engaged in a Orpheus-like descent into the underworld in order to retrieve his wife
(Seal 2001). Although North Atlantic Modern popular culture has associated scalping primarily with
Native Americans, Scythians, and probably also Sarmatians, also scalped their enemies and attached
the scalps to their horses bridles (Los 1969: 78). In North America, deceased Pawnee who have been
scalped are supposed to name each other after the few patches of hair still left on their heads: One-
Hair, Forehead-Hair, Hair-Back-of-the-Head, all of you come! (Anonymous, The mystery of death,
n.d.). Among the Omaha Native Americans, one strand of hair is dedicated to the thunder (Anonymous,
The gods of the elements, n.d.).
5.24. The frog as a cosmogonic evocation
Nkoya: One of the principal mythical Nkoya kings has the title of Kambotwe (Person Frog).
Comparative: cf. the widespread cosmogonic connotations of reed and swamp as discussed
under reed and bee; in Egypt (Hermopolitan cosmogony) the primal gods are represented as pairs of
frogs. However, an Australian myth (with a strange parallel in Grimms Hausmrchen) sees the frog as
the origin both of the Flood, and of the Drought that preceded it (Thomas 1923).
5.25. The goddess as a crone testing generosity and punishing with the Flood
Nkoya: Among the Nkoyas neighbours, the legendary Queen Manenga (who also features
prominently among the Nkoya) presents herself in the form of an old woman asking favours, and when
these are refused, she brings down a Flood.
Comparative: In Apollonius Rhodius Greek Argonauts story, in order to test Jason before en-
trusting her mission to Colchis to him, Hera appears to him as an old woman and asks him to carry her
across a river. Such generosity tests are common worldwide. A similar story to Manengas is told about
the Hawaiian goddess of fire, Pele (Monaghan 2010: 262); and for the Spanish male mythical figure
Nuberu. Elsewhere in this Section we have seen how also the Inca creator god Viracocha goes around
disguised (Urton 1999: 64; Salomon & Urioste 1991). So does Nordic Odinn. Also the Christian Chris-
tophorus motif is related.
5.26. The mytheme of matriarchy
Nkoya: Although since the late 19th century, nearly all Nkoya kings have been male, a careful
decoding the Nkoya oral traditions, written in a language that (like most languages) does not mark
gender morphologically, suggests out that, initially, Nkoya kingship was reserved to women (van Bins-
bergen 1992).
Comparative: It has been a moot point among scholars, ever since the mid-19th century CE
(Bachofen 1861 / 1948, Morgan 1871, 1877 / 1963, Engels 1884 / 1976, etc.), whether there ever was a
historical society that could be called matriarchic in the sense of implementing, in real-life situations of
the family, political and economic institutions, the premise of female supremacy implied in the cos-
mogony of the Water and the Land. However, throughout the huge global corpus of comparative my-
thology we see time and again traces of a claim of female supremacy, and of its challenge and effective
rejection by males (cf. Sierksma 1962).
201
6. Conclusion
Several hard conclusions can be based on the extensive data presented in Section 5.
In the first place, this material proves, beyond reasonable doubt, the existence
of massive comprehensive transcontinental Eurasian-African mythological continui-
ties, in the case of the Nkoya, and of sub-Saharan Africa in general. Just like Newton
(1687 / 1947) established that celestial mechanics should coincide with terrestrial me-
chanics, there can no longer be a separate comparative mythology for Eurasia, and
another one for Africa. This does not mean there are no profound differences between
mythologies in the world. Yet sharing a common origin in Africa (hence always car-
rying a substrate, however submerged, of Palaeo-African mythemes such as the Earth,
the Spider, the Tree, and the Serpent), and being subject to transcontinental movement
and feedback in more recent millennia, have produced a complex pattern of partial
and fragmented continuity that cannot be reduced to a simple North-South dichotomy.
In the second place, on the basis of these extensive data, we can simply rule
out Christian and Islamic contamination as the principal source of such transcontinen-
tal mythological continuities.
In the third place, it is no exaggeration to claim that for most of the mythemes
considered, the Pelasgian hypothesis offers a sufficient explanation for their presence
among the Nkoya. Claiming to take effect over a period of only a handful of millen-
nia, the time span of this hypothesis is sufficiently short to allow for sometimes un-
canny, precise correspondences, whose very identification admittedly borders on the
insane (e.g. Do you hear, Reed Person between the Nkoya and the Gilgamesh
epic). However, the data show that we cannot take recourse to the Pelasgian hypothe-
sis for all mythemes listed. Thus, in relation with the mytheme of stealing the moon,
while largely Pelasgian in its more recent distribution, the extensive North American
attestations coupled with the paucity of this mytheme outside the Pelasgian realm
might suggest a New World, trans-Beringian origin.
63
By the same token, Flood

63
In addition to the fairly consensual view of eastbound trans-Beringian migration into the New World
mainly during the Upper Palaeolithic as the main or only source of human population in the Americas,
recent genetic research has brought to light evidence for the complementary, opposite movement
(Tamm et al. 2007). In my multivariate analysis of flood myths world-wide (van Binsbergen with Isaak
2008), I also pointed out mythemes that might have a New World origin and that subsequently spread
to the Old World. The long-range linguistic closeness of the African, Amerind and Austric macrophyla
casts an interesting light on these suggestions: while typologically New-World in view of data col-
lected in historical times, they may yet originate in Asia, at a time when the Peripheral macrophyla
had not yet separated. The North-South dichotomy as perceived by Witzel, and the Sunda origin of
major mythemes percolating in West Eurasia (like the Flood) as perceived by Oppenheimer, may yet
turn out to have a genuine, though relative, basis (although very different from what these authors en-
visaged) in the distinctiveness of the Peripheral branch of *Borean since c. 20 ka BP. However, a ca-
veat is in order here. Modern research on transcontinental connections (e.g. Jett 2002) shows that also
in the most recent millennia, from widely divergent ethnic and language groups, a constant trickle of
eastbound trans-Bering migrations has continued to contribute to the population of North America; so
that North American mythological parallels, especially when sporadic, might sometimes be considered
to be, in fact, Asian ones.
202
myths as such are at least Upper Palaeolithic and almost universal, yet in so far as the
Standard Elaborate Flood Myth is involved, the transmission structure is primarily
Pelasgian. The spider mytheme appears to belong to Pandoras Box, and from there to
have been largely transmitted, also to West Asia and the Mediterranean, via the Pe-
ripheral Branch of *Borean, consisting of African languages, Amerind and Austric;
more recently this mytheme was redefined towards female domesticity in Neolithic
and Early Bronze Age West Asia, and despite much older antecedents largely trans-
mitted on the wings of Pelasgian expansion. The fact that so many Nkoya motifs have
North American counterparts, may also be attributed (see previous footnote) to the
communality of Amerind, African languages, and Austric in Upper Palaeolithic times,
and reminds us that the Pelasgian hypothesis, referring to a much more recent period,
can scarcely be invoked to explain African / New World parallels.
64
Also the snake /
drought motif belongs to Pandoras box, and cannot be subsumed under the Pelasgian
hypothesis.
65
The myth of matriarchy is highly contested; on this controversial point,
no suggestion as to the transmission mechanism can be made without further study of
the details; matriliny, however, (as distinct from matriarchy) qualifies as a Pelasgian
trait.
The systemic divorce between the royal and the commoner modes of Nkoya
society (although greatly overlapping in time, place and personnel) makes for an in-
ternal contradiction, which I have discussed elsewhere (van Binsbergen 2003b) as if
these were two complementary modalities within the same culture (cf. Leach 1954),
regardless of their apparently very different historical antecedents:
the villagers have been pacifist, productive in many ways, and largely station-
ary (displaying a regional continuity going back at least two millennia, as the
archaeology of Western Zambian pottery suggests),
whereas the royal capitals have been centres of organised violence directed
both at strangers and at the local population, have been non-productive and
parasitical, and have been nodes through which foreign artefacts, people and
cultural forms have passed for centuries.

As the extensive non-Nkoya African references in Section 5 suggest, there is
perhaps with the exception of their rare musical talents little to make the Nkoya ex-
ceptional among their neighbours. In some respects, however, the Nkoya case, and the
South Central African case in general, seem to occupy a special place in sub-Saharan
Africa as a whole.
In the first place, we are reminded of Willis (1994: 265) distinction of mytho-

64
Although little noticed by comparative mythologists (however, cf. Berezkin 2008, 2009), these paral-
lels are extensive, including, in addition to mythology: female puberty rites, divination and gaming,
basketry, hunting and fishing methods.
65
Meanwhile it is remarkable that the Indo-European roots for earth (*dghem-) and snake
(*g(h)em-, *g(h)my-) are, according to specialist opinion, hardly distinguishable (Starostin & Sta-
rostin 1998-2008 Indo-European etymology; Pokorny 1959-69: I, 662 f, 790; Buck n.d.: 16).
203
logical zones in sub-Saharan Africa according to linguistic (macro)phylum, where
especially the mythologically elaborate, non-Bantu Niger-Congo speaking West Afri-
can region (with the Dogon as a typical, though ethnographically highly contexted
case; cf. van Beek 2010) is contrasted with the Bantu-speaking South Central and
Southern region possessing relatively rudimentary and implicit mythologies of
which the Nkoya are a typical case. As Victor Turners famous studies (Turner 1967,
1968) of the Ndembu Lunda (quite close to the Nkoya in culture and language) indi-
cate, the central locus of cultural memory in the societies of South Central Africa is
ritual action, to which mythical and religious texts are a diffuse, oblique, multi-
layered, fragmented, unstable and situational, occasional commentary.
In the second place, kingship-related themes are so dominant in South Central
Africa (due to the excessively violent grasp in which kingships have held this region
during the centuries of long-distance trade especially in slaves) that, in this part of
Africa, the mythological expressions suggestive of Eurasian mythologies (centring on
the kingship and the Separation of Heaven and Earth) have left little room for Palaeo-
African expressions, such as focussing on the Tree as the source of life and of human-
kind, on the emergence of humankind not from heaven but from the Earth, on the
Rainbow Snake, the rain bird,
66
the origin of death, animal stories featuring tricksters
such as Hare, etc. Only a few fragments of these presumably Palaeo-African my-
thologies (as well-known from other parts of Africa) became visible to me in the
Nkoya case such Narrative Complexes (NC, cf. Table 9.1.) as the Moon (NC 9),
Spider (NC 15), and Cosmogonic Rainbow Snake (NC 13); for instance, the standard
African myth of the origin of death through ontradictory messengers (NC 20), which
Yuri Berezkin 2009 considers to go back to Pandoras Box (pace Oppenheimer 1998)
does not feature in my Nkoya mythological corpus, although it does in texts collected
by missionaries in Western Zambia around 1900. This state of affairs suggests that,
while in the Nkoya case the element of Eurasian-African continuity is extensive and
undeniable, this may be less so for some other parts of Africa and that in the latter
regions, the Palaeo-African mythological element harking back to the pre-Exodus
times, is rather more conspicuous.
67

66
E.g. Jacottet 1899-1901: II, 152.
67
By a different route, Michael Witzel has arrived at a similar conclusion in his contribution to the
present book (p. 232 n. 14). I have no quarrel with his attempt to identify a very old mythological layer
in global cultural history my concept of Pandoras Box does exactly the same, and was inspired by
his work in the first place. Where we part is when Witzel, with his strict distinction between Laurasian
and Gondwana mythologies, suggests that the former, more developed, type should be exclusive to
Northern regions, the latter, more primitive, type to the Southern regions, instead of recognising
that, since all mythologies ultimately derive from pre-Exodus Africa, there is an implied Pandoras
Box / Gondwana substrate in every mythology recorded in historical times, whenever and wherever.
204
7. References cited
Aarne, Antti & Thompson, Stith, 1973, The types of the folktale, Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fen-
nica.
Adelaar, A., 1995, Asian roots of the Malagasy: A linguistic perspective, Bijdragen tot de Taal-,
Land- en Volkenkunde 151, 3: 325-356.
Alexander, Hartley Burr, 1916, North American [ Mythology ], volume X of Gray, L.H. (ed.), The My-
thology of All Races, Boston: Marshall Jones Co.
Allen, Nick, 2010 [ this volume ]
Alpern, S.B., 1998, On the origins of the Amazons of Dahomey, History in Africa, 25: 9-25.
Amselle, J.-L., 2001, Branchements: Anthropologie de luniversalit des cultures, Paris: Flammarion.
And, Metin, 1980, On the dramatic fertility rituals of Anatolian Turkey, Asian Folklore Studies, 39, 2:
85-104.
Andrews, Tamra, 2000, Dictionary of nature myths: Legends of the earth, sea, and sky, New York:
Anonymous [ J.M. Shimunika ], n.d., Muhumpu wa byambo bya mwaka Nkoya, s.l. [ Luampa,
Mankoya ]: s.n. [ South African General Mission ], typescript in the authors possession.
Anonymous, 1955, Early Roman Religion, 1945-1952, The Classical Weekly, 48, 3: 25-35.
Anthes, R., 1961, Mythology in Ancient Egypt, in: Kramer, S.N., ed., Mythologies of the Ancient
World, Garden City (NY): Doubleday, pp. 15-92.
Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, see Frazer 1970.
Apthorpe, R.J., 1959, Northern Rhodesia: Clanship, chieftainship and Nsenga political adaptation, in:
R.J. Apthorpe, (ed.), From tribal rule to modern government, Lusaka: Rhodes Livingstone In-
stitute, Thirteenth Conference Proceedings, pp. 69-98.
Apthorpe, R.J., 1960, Mythical African political structures, Northern Rhodesia, in: A. Dubb, ed.,
Myth in modern Africa, Lusaka: Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 14th Conference Proceedings,
pp. 18-37.
Argyle, W.J., 1959, Northern Rhodesia: Soli chieftainships and political adaptation, in: R.J. Ap-
thorpe, ed., From tribal rule to modern government, Lusaka: Rhodes Livingstone Institute,
Thirteenth Conference Proceedings.
Bachofen, J.J., 1948, Das Mutterrecht. Eine Untersuchung ber die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach
ihrer religisen und rechtlichen Natur, I-II, Basel / Stuttgart : Meuli, first published 1861.
Baldick, J., 2000, Animal and shaman: Ancient religions of Central Asia, London: Tauris.
Barbujani, G., Pilastro, A., De Dominico, S., & Renfrew, C., 1994, Genetic variation in North Africa
and Eurasia: Neolithic demic diffusion vs. Paleolithic colonisation, Americal Journal of
Physical Anthropology, 95: 137-154.
Baumann, H., 1936, Schpfung und Urzeit der Menschen im Mythos der afrikanischen Vlker, Berlin:
Reimer.
Beaujard, P., 1994, Les rituels en riziculture chez les Taala de lIkongo (Sud-Est de Madagascar),
paper presented at the congress on Malagasy cultural identity from the Asian perspective,
Leiden, Centrum voor Niet-Westerse Studies, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, 28-29 March 1994.
Beaujard, P., 2004, Myths: Mythology and society in Madagascar: A Taala example, in: Philip M.
Peek, & Kwesi Yankah, eds., African folklore: An encyclopedia, New York / London:
Routledge, pp. 282- 286.
Bengtson, J.D., & M. Ruhlen, 1994, Global etymologies, in: Ruhlen, M., ed., On the origin of lan-
guages, Stanford (CA): Stanford University Press, pp. 277-336.
Bennett, Patrick R., 1983, Patterns in linguistic geography and the Bantu origins controversy, History
in Africa, 10: 35-51.
Berezkin, Yuri, 2008, Why Are People Mortal? World Mythology and the Out-of-Africa Scenario,
in: Peter N. Peregrine & Marcus Feldman, eds., Ancient human migrations: A multidiscipli-
nary approach, Salt Lake City: Utah University Press.
Berezkin, Yuri, 2009, Out of Africa and further along the coast: African - South Asian - Australian
205
mythological parallels, Cosmos: The Journal of the Traditional Cosmology Society), 23.
Berlinerblau, J., 1999, Heresy in the university: The Black Athena controvery and the responsibilities
of American intellectuals, New Brunswick etc.: Rutgers University Press.
Bernal, Martin Gardiner, 1987, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization, I, The
fabrication of Ancient Greece 1787-1987, London: Free Association Books / New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press.
Bernal, Martin Gardiner, 1991, Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic roots of classical civilization. II, The
archaeological and documentary evidence, London: Free Association Books; New Bruns-
wick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Bernal, Martin Gardiner, 2001, 1. Can we be fair? A reply to John Baines, in: Bernal, Martin Gar-
diner (D. Chioni Moore, ed.), Black Athena writes back: Martin Bernal responds to his critics,
Durham & London: Duke University Press, pp. 25-43.
Bernal, Martin Gardiner, 2006, Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic roots of classical civilization. III, The
linguistic evidence, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Best, Elsdon, 1922, Some aspects of Maori myth and religion, Wellington: Shearer / Government
Printer.
Betz, H.D., 1986, The Greek magical papyri in translation: Including the demotic spells, Chicago /
London: University of Chicago Press.
Binford, L.R., 1981, Bones: Ancient men and modern myths, New York: Academic Press.
Blacker, C., 1967, Supernatural abductions in Japanese folklore, Asian Folklore Studies, 26, 2: 111-
147.
Blaek, V., 2010, Hphaistos vs. Ptah, this volume.
Bleek W., 1851, De nominum generibus linguarum Africae australis, copticae, semiticarum aliarum-
que sexualium, PhD thesis, Bonn University.
Blench, Roger, 2006, The Pleistocene settlement on the rim of the Indian Ocean, paper presented at
the 18th Congress of the Indo-Pacific prehistory Association, and subsequently revised, at:
http://www.rogerblench.info/Archaeology%20data/Indian%20Ocean%20settlement%20paper
%202006.pdf , retrieved 30-9-2008.
Blok, J.H., 1995, The early Amazons: Modern and ancient perspectives on a persistent myth, Leiden:
Brill.
Bonnefoy, Yves, 2002, American, African, and Old European mythologies, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, first published 1991.
Borghouts, J.F., 1995, Witchcraft, magic, and divination in ancient Egypt, in: Sasson, J.M., with J.
Baines, G. Beckman & K.S. Rubinson, eds., Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, III, New
York etc.: Scribners, pp. 1775-1785.
Bottro, J., 1992, Mesopotamia: Writing, reasoning, and the gods, Chicago & London: University of
Chicago Press.
Bouch-Leclercq, A., 1879, Histoire de la divination dans lantiquit, I-IV, Paris: Leroux.
Bouchet, J., 1922, Comment lvangile agit au Zambze, Paris: Socit des mission vangliques.
Brelsford, W.V., 1935, History and customs of the Basala, Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute, 65: 205-215.
Brelsford, W.V., 1965, The tribes of Zambia, Lusaka: Government Printer, 2nd ed., first edition 1956.
British Columbia Folklore Society, 2000, The Motif Index: Bibliography, at
http://www.folklore.bc.ca/Mibib.htm .
Bromwich, Rachel, 1991, Tri Thlws ar Ddeg Ynys Prydain, ed. and tr. Rachel Bromwich, Trioedd
Ynys Prydein, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1978; revised ed. 1991 (Critical edition of
the trioedd texts with notes, first published in 1961). Appendix III. Edited from Cardiff MS.
17, pp. 95-96, and other variants.
Brown, D.E., 1991, Human universals, New York: McGraw-Hill.
Brown, E.D., 1984, Drums of life: Royal music and social life in Western Zambia, Ph.D. thesis, Uni-
versity of Washington, School of Music; University Microfilms, Ann Arbor.
Brundage, W., 1958, Herakles the Levantine: A comprehensive view, Journal of Near Eastern Stud-
ies, 17: 225-236.
206
Buchler, Ira R. & Kenneth Maddock, 1978, eds., The Rainbow Serpent: A chromatic piece, The Hague:
Mouton.
Buck, C.D., n.d., Indo-European etymology, used in the Tower of Babel etymological database (Sta-
rostin & Starostin 1998-2008).
Budge, E.A.W.T, 1898, The Book of the Dead: The Chapters of Coming forth by Day, London: British
Museum.
Burkert, Walter, 1970, Jason, Hypsipyle, and New Fire at Lemnos: A study in myth and ritual, The
Classical Quarterly, New Series, 20, 1: 1-16.
Burkert, Walter, 1979, Heracles and the master of the animals, in: Walter Burkert, Structure and his-
tory in Greek mythology and ritual, Berkeley: California University Press, pp. 78-98 and 176-
187.
Cagni, L., 1975, Il mito babilonese di Atrahasis, Rivista Biblica, 23: 225-259.
Callaway, Henry, 1870, The religious system of the Amazulu: Izinyanga zokubula; or, Divination, as
existing among the Amazulu, in their own words, with a translation into English, and notes,
Springvale, Natal: Blair.
Cann, R.L., M. Stoneking, & A.C. Wilson, 1987, Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution, Nature,
325: 31-36.
Capello, H., & R. Ivens, 1886, De Angola contra-costa: Descripo de uma viagem atravez do conti-
nente Africano comprehendendo narrativas diversas, aventuras e importantes descobertas en-
tre as quaes figuram a des origens do Lualaba, caminho entre as duas costas, visita s terras
da Garanganja, Katanga e ao curso do Luapula, bem como a descida do Zambeze, do Choa
oa Oceano, I-II, Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional.
Capinera, J.L., 1993, Insects in art and religion: The American Southwest, American Entomologist,
39, 4: 221-229.
Casal, U.A., 1959, The goblin fox and badger and other witch animals of Japan, Folklore Studies, 18:
1-93.
Cavalli-Sforza, L.L., 1997, Genes, people, and languages, Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences of the United States of America, 94: 7719-7724.
Cavalli-Sforza, L.L., Piazza, A., & Menozzi, A., 1994, The history and geography of the human genes,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Chacon, Richard J. & David H. Dye, 2007, Introduction to human trophy taking: An ancient and wide-
spread practice, in: Chacon, Richard J. & David H. Dye, eds., The taking and displaying of
human body parts as trophies by Amerindians, New York: Springer, pp. 5-31.
Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 1919, A translation of the Ko-ji-ki, or Records of Ancient Matters: Read be-
fore the Asiatic Society of Japan April 12th, May 10th, and June 21st, 1882, reprinted 2008,
Charleston SC: Forgotten Books.
Chatelain, Heli, 1894, Folk-tales of Angola: Fifty tales, with Ki-mbundu text, literal English transla-
tion, introduction and notes, Boston & New York: Stechert for the American Folk-Lore Soci-
ety.
Claessen, H.J.M., 1981, Specific features of the African early state, in: H.J.M. Claessen & P. Skalnk,
eds, The study of the state, The Hague / Paris: Mouton, pp. 59-86.
Claessen, H.J.M., 1984, Een wijkende einder: Problemen en perspectieven bij onderzoek van de
vroege staat in Afrika, in: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., &. Hesseling, G.S.C.M., eds., Aspecten
van staat en maatschappij in Afrika, Leiden: African Studies Centre, pp. 101-117.
Clark, Ella E., 1966, Indian Legends from the Northern Rockies, Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press.
Clarke, Kenneth Wendell, 1958, A motif-index of the folktales of culture-Area V: West Africa,
Bloomington: Indiana University. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis.
Clouston, W.A., 1887, Popular tales and fictions, their migrations and transformations, I-II, Edin-
burgh / London: Blackwood.
Coia, Valentina; Giovanni Destro-Bisol; Fabio Verginelli; Cinzia Battaggia; Ilaria Boschi; Fulvio Cru-
ciani; Gabriella Spedini; David Comas; Francesc Calafell, 2005, Brief communication:
mtDNA variation in North Cameroon: Lack of Asian lineages and implications for back mi-
207
gration from Asia to sub-Saharan Africa, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 128,
3: 678-681.
Conrad, J.L., 1987, Bulgarian magic charms: Ritual, form, and content, The Slavic and East Euro-
pean Journal, 31, 44: 548-562.
Corcella, A., 1984, Erodoto e lanalogia, Palermo: Sellerio.
Cotterell, Arthur, 1989, The illustrated encyclopedia of myths and legends, London etc.: Guild.
Cruciani, F., Santolamazza, P., Shen, P., Macaulay, V., Moral, P., Olckers, A., Modiano, D., Holmes,
S., Destro-Bisol, G., Coia, V., Wallace, D.C., Oefner, P.J., Torroni, A., Cavalli-Sforza, L.L.,
Scozzari, R., Underhill, P.A., 2002, A back migration from Asia to sub-Saharan Africa is
supported by high-resolution analysis of human Y-chromosome haplotypes, American Jour-
nal of Human Genetics, 70: 1197-1214.
Culin, S., 1896, Mankala, the national game of Africa, in: The Director, ed., US National Museum
Annual Report, Washington: United States National Museum, pp. 595-607.
Cunnison, I.G., 1968, ed., Mwata Kazembe XIV: Historical traditions of the Eastern Lunda (Ifikolwe
Fyandi na Banti Bandi), Central Bantu Historical Texts II, Lusaka: Rhodes-Livingstone Insti-
tute, Rhodes-Livingstone Communication no. 23, reprinted in 1968.
Dalby, David, 1975, The prehistorical implications of Guthries Comparative Bantu Part I: Problems
of internal relationship, The Journal of African History, 16, 4: 481-501.
Dalby, David, 1976, The prehistorical implications of Guthries Comparative Bantu. Part II: Interpre-
tation of cultural vocabulary, The Journal of African History, 17, 1: 1-27.
Dang Nghiem Van, 1993, The flood myth and the origin of ethnic groups in Southeast Asia, The
Journal of American Folklore, 106, 421: 304-337.
David Asheri, Alan Lloyd, & Aldo Corcella. 2007, A commentary of Herodotus Books I-IV, Oxford:
Davidson, T., 1955, The Needfire ritual, Antiquity, 29: 132-136.
Davis-Kimball, J., with Behan, M., 2002, Women warriors: An archaeologists search for historys
hidden heroines, New York: Warner.
Davison, Katherine, 1994, Magic moon: Stories from Asia, Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Books.
de Buck, A., 1935-1961, The Egyptian coffin texts, I-VII, Chicago: Oriental Institute.
de Heusch, L., 1958, Essais sur le symbolisme de linceste royal en Afrique, Brussels: Universit libre
de Bruxelles, Institut de Sociologie Solvay.
de Heusch, L., 1972, Le roi ivre ou lorigine de ltat, Paris: Gallimard.
de Heusch, L., 1982, Rois ns dun coeur de vache: Mythes et rites bantous, Paris: Gallimard.
de Vries, Jan, 1925, Volksverhalen uit Oost-Indie (Sprookjes en fabels), Zutphen: Thieme.
de Vries, Jan, 1958, Etymologisch woordenboek: Waar komen onze woorden en plaatsnamen vandaan?
Utrecht / Antwerpen: Spectrum, first edition.
Delatte, A., & Delatte, E., 1936, Un trait byzantin de gomancie : Codex Parisinus 2419 (avec une
importante bibliographie sur la gomancie europenne, dans les notes infra-paginales), M-
langes Franz Cumont, Annuaire de lInstitut de philologie et dhistoire orientales et slaves
(Bruxelles), 4: 575-658.
Deleuze, G., 1968, Diffrence et rptition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Dennett, R.E., 1906, At the back of the Black mans mind; or, Notes on the kingly office in West Africa,
London: Macmillan.
Derrida, J., 1997, Lcriture et la difference, Paris: Seuil, first published 1967.
Dickson, J.H., 1978, Bronze age mead, Antiquity, 52: 108-113.
Diop, C.A., 1954, Nations ngres et culture, Paris: Prsence Africaine.
Diop, C.A., 1989, The cultural unity of Black Africa: The domains of patriarchy and of matriarchy in
classical antiquity, London: Karnak House.
Dosrev, V., 1993, Considrations sur les titulatures des rois de la IVe dynastie gyptienne, Bulletin de
lInstitut Franais dArchologie Orientale du Caire, 93: 179-204.
Draffkorn Kilmer, A., 1987, The symbolism of the flies in the Mesopotamian flood myth and some
further implications, in: Rochberg-Halton, F., ed., Language, literature and history: Philol-
ogical and historical studies presented to Erica Reiner, New Haven (Conn.): American Orien-
208
tal Society, pp. 175-180.
Du Bois, W.E.B., 1947, The World and Africa: An inquiry into the part which Africa has played in
world history, New York: Viking.
Dundes, Alan, 1988, ed., The flood myth, Berkeley & London: University of California Press.
Edel, D., 1986, Tussen mythe en werkelijkheid: Koningin Medb van Connacht en haar beoordelaars,
vroeger en nu, in: van Dijk-Hemmes, F., 1986, ed., T is kwaad gerucht als zij niet binnen
blijft: Vrouwen in oude culturen, Utrecht: Hes, pp. 61-94.
Edwards, I.E.S., 1985, The early dynastic period in Egypt, in: Edwards, I.E.S., C.J. Gadd & N.G.L.
Hammond, eds., 1985, The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 1 part 2: Early history of the
Middle East, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3rd ed., 1st published 1971, pp. 1-70.
Edwards, I.E.S., C.J. Gadd & N.G.L. Hammond, eds., 1986, The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 1
part 1: Prolegomena and prehistory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3rd ed., first
ed. 1970.
Egberts, A., 1997, Consonants in collision: Neith and Athena reconsidered, in: van Binsbergen
1997a: 149-163.
Ehret, C.E., 1998, An African classical age: Eastern and southern Africa in world history, 1000 BC to
AD 400, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia / Oxford: Currey.
Ehret, Christopher, 2001, Bantu expansions: Re-envisioning a central problem of early African his-
tory, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 34, 1: 5-41.
Eliade, M., 1968, Le chamanisme: Et les techniques archaques de lextase, Paris: Payot; 1st ed. 1951.
Eliseev, Serge; J. Hackin, Clment Huart, Raymonde Linossier, Charles-Henri Marchal, Henri Maspe-
ro, H. De Wilman-Grabowska, 1994, Asiatic mythology: A detailed description and explana-
tion of the mythologies, New York: Crescent.
El-Shamy, Hasan M., 1980, Folktales of Egypt, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Elson, Christina M., & Michael E. Smith, 2001, Archaeological deposits from the Aztec New Fire
ceremony, Ancient Mesoamerica, 12, 2: 157-174.
Emery, W.B., 1961, Archaic Egypt: Culture and civilization in Egypt five thousand years ago, Har-
mondsworth: Penguin.
Engels, F., 1976, Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privatseigentums und des Staats, Marx-Engels Werke,
XXI, Berlin: Dietz; originally published in 1884.
Erdoes, Richard & Alfonso Ortiz, 1984, American Indian myths and legends, New York: Pantheon.
Evans, Arthur J., 1876-1877, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on foot during the insurrection,
August and September 1875: With an historical review of Bosnia, and a glimpse at the Croats,
Slavonians, and the ancient republic of Ragusa, London: Longmans & Green.
Evans-Pritchards, E.E., 1967, The Nuer: A description of the modes of livelihood and political institu-
tions of a Nilotic people, Oxford: Clarendon; reprint of the original edition of 1940.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 1972, Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande, London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, reprint of the first edition of 1937.
Fah d T., 1966, La divination arabe: tudes religieuses, sociologiques et folkloriques sur le milieu natif
de l Islam, Leiden: Brill.
Farmer, S., 2010, The neurobiological origins of primitive religion: Implications for comparative
mythology, this volume.
Farmer, S., J.B. Henderson, & M.Witzel, 2002, Neurobiology, layered texts, and correlative cosmolo-
gies: A cross-cultural framework for Premodern history, Bulletin of the Museum of Far East-
ern Antiquities, 72: 48-90.
Farnell, Lewis R., 1916, Ino-Leukothea, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 36: 36-44.
Faulkner, R.O., 1924, The Cannibal Hymn from the Pyramid Texts, The Journal of Egyptian
Archaeology, 10, 2: 97-103.
Fauth, W., 1979a, Athena, in: K. Ziegler & W. Sontheimer, eds., Der kleine Pauly: Lexikon der
Antike, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, cols. 681-686.
Fauvelle-Aymar, F.-X., Chrtien, J.-P., & Perrot, C.-H., 2000, eds., Afrocentrismes: Lhistoire des
Africains entre gypte et Amrique, Paris: Karthala.
Feldman, Susan, 1963, ed. African myths and tales, New York: Dell.
209
Fishbane, Michael A., 2003, Biblical myth and rabbinic mythmaking, New York: Oxford University
Press.
Flight, Colin, 1980, Malcolm Guthrie and the reconstruction of Bantu prehistory, History in Africa, 7:
81-118.
Flight, Colin, 1988, Bantu trees and some wider ramifications, African Languages and Cultures, 1, 1:
25-43.
Fonseca, Isabel, 1996, Bury me standing: The Gypsies and their journey, New York: Vintage Books.
Fontenrose, J., 1980, Python: A study of Delphic myth and its origins, Berkeley etc.: University of Cali-
fornia Press; paperback edition, reprint of the 1959 first edition.
Forster, Peter, 2004, Ice Ages and the mitochondrial DNA chronology of human dispersals: A re-
view, theme issue The evolutionary legacy of the Ice Ages, Philosophical Transactions of
the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 359, 1442: 255-264.
Frank, D., 2001,Karaite Ritual, in: Fine, Lawrence, ed, Judaism in practice: From the Middle Ages
through the early modern period, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 248-264.
Fraser, Lady Antonia, 1988, The warrior queens: Boadiceas chariot, New York: Knopf.
Frazer, James George, 1911-1915, The golden bough: A study in magic and religion, I-VIII in 12 vols,
3rd ed., rev. and enlarged, London: Macmillan; first published 1890-1915.
Frazer, James George, 1916, Ancient stories of a Great Flood, The Journal of the Royal Anthropo-
logical Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 46: 231-283.
Frazer, James George, 1918, Folk-lore in the Old Testament: Studies in comparative religion, legend
and law, I-III, London: Macmillan.
Frazer, James George, 1970, Apollodorus; The Library, I-II, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, Loeb, first published 1921.
Frobenius, L., 1931, Erythra: Lnder und Zeiten des heiligen Knigsmordes, Berlin / Zrich: Atlantis-
Verlag.
Frobenius, L., 1954, Kulturgeschichte Afrikas, Zrich: Phaidon; first published Vienna 1933.
Frymer-Kensky, T., 1977, The Atraasis epic and its significance for our understanding of Genesis 1-
9, Beitrge zur Assyriologie und semitischen Sprachwissenschaft, 40: 147-166.
Gahs, A., 1928, Kopf, Schdel- und Langknochenopfer bei Rentiervlkern, in: Koppers, W., ed.,
Festschrift / Publication dhommage offerte au P.W. Schmidt, Vienna: Mechitaristen-
Congregations-Buchdruckerei, pp. 231-269.
Gardiner, E., 1893, Palladia from Mycenae, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 13: 21-28.
Gellner, E.A., 1969, Saints of the Atlas, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
Gerland, G.K.C., 1869, Altgriechische Mrchen in der Odyssee: Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden
Mythologie, Magdeburg: Creutz.
Gimbutas, M., 1982, The goddesses and gods of old Europe 6500-3500: Myths and cult images, Lon-
don: Thames & Hudson.
Girard, Ren, 1972, La violence et le sacr, Paris: Grasset.
Gluckman, H.M., 1941, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, Rhodes-Livingstone Paper No. 7. Liv-
ingstone, Northern Rhodesia: Rhodes-Livingstone Institute.
Gluckman, H.M., 1943, Essays on Lozi land and royal property, Rhodes-Livingstone Paper No. 10.
Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia: Rhodes-Livingstone Institute.
Gluckman, H.M., 1949, The role of the sexes in Wiko circumcision ceremonies, in: M. Fortes, ed.,
Social structure, London: Oxford University Press, pp. 145-167.
Gluckman, H.M., 1951, The Lozi of Barotseland, N.W. Rhodesia, in: Colson, E., & Gluckman, H.M.,
eds., Seven tribes of British Central Africa, Oxford University Press for Rhodes-Livingstone
Institute, pp. 1-93.
Gluckman, H.M., 1955a, Custom and conflict in Africa, Oxford: Blackwell.
Gluckman, H.M., 1955b, The judicial process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia, Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Goneim, M.Z., 1956, De verdwenen pyramide, Den Haag: Van Stockum, Dutch translation of: The
buried pyramid, London: Longmans / Green: New York, 1956.
Graves, R., 1988, The white goddess: A historical grammar of poetic myth, London / Boston: Faber &
210
Faber, reprint of 1961 edition, first published 1948.
Grayson, James Huntley, 2001, Myths and legends from Korea: An annotated compendium of ancient
and modern, Richmond: Curson.
Grimm, Jacob & Wilhelm, 1812-1815, Kinder- und Hausmaerchen, ed. Hans-Jrg Uther, I,-IV,
Mnchen: Diederichs.
Gruppe, O., 1964, Herakles, in: Paulys Realenzyclopdie der classische Altertumswissenschaft, neue
Bearbeitung begonnen von G. Wissowa, W. Kroll ed., Supplementband 3, reprint of the 1918
ed., Stuttgart: Druckenmller, cols. 910-1121.
Guerber, H.A., n.d. [ ca. 1925 ], Noorsche mythen: Uit de eddas en de sagen, ed. H.W.P.E. van den
Bergh van Eysinga, 3rd impr., Zutphen: Thieme, Dutch tr. of Myths of the Norsemen: From
the eddas and sagas, London: Harrap, 1909, reprinted 1992, New York: Dover.
Guliaev, Valeri I., 2003, Amazons in the Scythia: New finds at the middle Don, Southern Russia,
World Archaeology, special issue The social commemoration of warfare, 35, 1: 112-125.
Gundlach, R., 1997, Die Legitimationen des gyptischen Konigs: Versuch einer Systematisierung, in:
R. Gundlach & Chr. Raedler, eds., Selbstverstandnis und Realitt: Beitrge zur gyptischen
Konigsideologie I, gypten und Altes Testament 36.1, Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, pp. 11-19.
Gundlach, R., 1998, Der Pharao und sein Staat: Die Grundlegung der gyptischen Knigsideologie im
4. und 3. Jahrtausend, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Gterbock, Hans G., 1948, The Hittite version of the Hurrian Kumarbi Myths: Oriental forerunners of
Hesiod, American Journal of Archaeology, 52: 123-134.
Guthrie, M., 1948, The classification of the Bantu languages, London: International African Institute /
Oxford University Press, reprinted 1967.
Guthrie, Malcolm, 1967-1971, Comparative Bantu: An introduction to the comparative linguistics and
prehistory of the Bantu languages, I-IV, Westmead / Farnborough / Hants: Gregg.
Guy, Will, 2001, Between past and future: The Roma of Central and Eastern Europe, Hatfield: Univer-
sity of Hertfordshire Press.
Hammer, M.F., T. Karafet, A. Rasanayagam, E.T. Wood, T.K. Altheide, T. Jenkins, R.C. Griffiths,
A.R. Templeton & S.L. Zegura, 1998, Out of Africa and back again: Nested cladistic analysis
of human Y chromosome variation, Molecular Biology and Evolution, 15, 4: 427-441.
Han Xiaorong, 1998, The present echoes of the ancient bronze drum: Nationalism and archeology in
modern Vietnam and China, Explorations in Southeast Asian Studies: A Journal of the
Southeast Asian Studies Student Association, 2, 2 Fall 1998, also at:
http://www.hawaii.edu/cseas/pubs/explore/han.html#refs
Hancock, Ian, 1987, The pariah syndrome: An account of gypsy slavery and persecution, Ann Arbor:
Karoma.
Haraway, Donna J., 1991, Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature, New York:
Routledge.
Harding, S., 1997, Is modern science an ethnoscience? Rethinking epistemological assumptions, in:
Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, ed., Postcolonial African philosophy: A critical reader, Oxford:
Blackwell, pp. 45-70.
Hart, G., 1993, A dictionary of Egyptian gods and goddesses, London: Routledge, first published 1986.
Hastings, James, with Selbie, J.A., & Gray, L.H., 1908-1921, eds., Encyclopaedia of religion and eth-
ics, I-XII + Index volume, Edinburgh: Clark / New York: Scribner, 2nd ed. 1974-1981.
Heideman, Eric M., 2001, Your mother was the lightning: The Frankenstein legacy in film and
literature, MonsterCine, April-June 2001, Issue 3, at
http://www.monsterzine.com/200104/legacy.html
Helck, W., 1979, Chemmis, in: K. Ziegler & W. Sontheimer, eds., Der kleine Pauly: Lexikon der
Antike, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, col. i: 1143.
Helck, W., 1984, Schamane und Zauberer, in: Anonymous, ed., Mlanges Adolphe Gutbub,
Montpellier: Institut dEgyptologie, Universit Paul Valery Montpellier III, Publications de la
Recherche, pp. 103-108.
Henschen, F., 1966, Der menschliche Schdel in der Kulturgeschichte, Berlin / Heidelberg: Springer;
Engl. version 1966 The human skull: A cultural history, London: Thames & Hudson.
211
Hertz, Wilhelm, 1905, Gesammelte Abhandlungen von Wilhelm Hertz, ed. F. von der Leyen, Stuttgart:
Cotta.
Higley, Sarah L., 1997a, The legend of the learned mans android, in: Thomas Hahn & Alan Lupack,
eds., Retelling Tales: Essays in Honor of Russell Peck, Cambridge: Brewer, pp. 127-160.
Higley, Sarah L., 1997b, Alien intellect and the roboticization of the scientist, Camera Obscura:
Feminism, culture, and media studies, 40-41: 131-162.
Higley, Sarah L., 1999, The lost parts of artificial women, Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural
and Interlanguage Communication, 18, 2-3: 267-280.
Hoffman, M.A., 1979, Egypt Before the pharaohs, New York: Knopf, rev. ed. 1991.
Hoover, J.J., 1980, The seduction of Ruweji: Reconstructing Ruund history (the nuclear Lunda: Zare,
Angola, Zambia), I-II, PhD thesis, Ann Arbor, Michigan / London: University Microfilms In-
ternational.
Hopfner, T., 1940-1941, Plutarch ber Isis und Osiris, I-II, Prague: Orientalisches Institut.
Houlihan, P.F., 1996, The animal world of the pharaohs, London: Thames & Hudson.
Howe, S., 1999, Afrocentrism: Mythical pasts and imagined homes, London / New York: Verso, first
published 1998.
Hrozny, B., 1951, Ancient history of western Asia, India and Crete, Prague: Artia.
Hulbert, H.B., 1905, The history of Korea, The Methodist Publishing House; reprint, New York / Lon-
don: Routledge, 1999 / 2006.
Husserl, E., 1911, Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft, Logos: Internationale Zeitschrift fr
Philosophie der Kultur, 1, 3.
Husserl, E., 1965, Phenomenology and the crisis of philosophy: Philosophy as rigorous science, and
Philosophy and the crisis of European man, tr. with notes and introd. by Q. Lauer, New York:
Harper.
Hutton, Ronald, 1994, The rise and fall of merry England: The ritual year 1400-1700, Oxford / New
York: Oxford University Press.
Idel, M., 1990, Golem: Jewish magical and mystical traditions on the artificial anthropoid, Albany:
State University of New York (SUNY) Press.
Idinopulos, T.A., 1982, Holy fire in Jerusalem, Christian Century, April 7, 1982, p. 407.
Innes, G., 1974, Sundjata: Three Mandinka versions, London: School of Oriental and African Studies.
Isaak, Mark., 2006, Flood stories from around the world, at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~misaak/floods.htm .
Jacottet, Emile, 1899-1901, tudes sur les langues du Haut Zambeze, I-III, Paris: Leroux.
Jaeger, D., 1974, ed., Kaonde histories (Part II), Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, mimeo.
Jakobsdttir, Svava, 2002, Gunnl and the precious mead [ Hvaml ]. in: Acker, Paul, & Larring-
ton, Caroly, eds., The Poetic Edda: Essays on old Norse mythology, New York: Routledge,
pp. 27-58.
Jalla, Adolphe D., 1903, Pioniers parmi les Ma-Rotse, Florence: Claudienne.
Jalla, Adolphe D., 1921, History, traditions and legends of the Barotse people, Lealui: Colonial Office,
African no. 1179, original title: Litaba za sicaba sa Malozi, Oxford University Press, Cape-
town, 1921; revised edition, Oxford University Press, London, 1959.
Jalla, Adolphe, 1909, History, traditions and legends of the Barotse nation, typescript in the manu-
script collection of Livingstone Museum, Livingstone, Zambia, 1909.
Jansen, J., 1995, De draaiende put: Een studie naar de relatie tussen het Sunjata-epos en de
samenleving in de Haut-Niger (Mali), Ph.D. thesis, Leiden: Research School Centre for Non
Western Studies (CNWS).
Janzen, J., 1985, The consequences of literacy for African religion, in: Wim M.J. van Binsbergen &
J.M. Schoffeleers, eds., Theoretical explorations in African religion, London / Boston / Mel-
bourne: Kegan Paul International, pp. 225-252.
Jasanoff, J.H., & Nussbaum, A., 1996, Word games: The linguistic evidence in Black Athena, in:
Lefkowitz, M.R., & MacLean Rogers, G., eds., Black Athena revisited, Chapel Hill & Lon-
don: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 177-205.
Jensen, A.E., 1932, Die staatliche Organisation und die historischen berlieferungen der Barotse am
212
oberen Zambezi, Jahresbericht Wrttembergischer Vereins fr Handelsgeographie, 50: 71-
115.
Jett, Stephen C. 2002, Pre-Columbian transoceanic contacts: The present state of the evidence, paper
presented at the 2002 NEARA [New England Antiquities Research Association ] ABC Plus
Ten conference in Waltham, Massachusetts, at:
http://www.neara.org/jett/precolumbiantransoceanic.pdf
Johnson, Michael, & Richard Hook, 1995, American Indians of the Southeast, Westminster MD: Os-
prey.
Jones, G. & Jones, T., 1949, The Mabinogion, translated by Jones, G. & Jones, T., London: Dent.
Jones, Livingston French, 1914, A study of the Tlingits of Alaska, New York: Revell.
Junod, H.A., 1962, The life of a South African tribe, New Hyde Park (N.Y.): University Books, reprint
of the 1927 second revised edition as published in London: Macmillan.
Jurewicz, J., 2004, Essays in Indian philosophy, religion and literature, 2004, New Delhi: Motilal Ba-
narsidass.
Kaiser, M., & V. Shevoroshkin, Nostratic, Annual Review of Anthropology, 17: 302-329.
Kamuwanga, Liswaniso, 2007, Prayer for protection: A comparative perspective on Psalms in relation
to Lozi prayer traditions, PhD thesis, University of Pretoria.
Kaplony, P., 1963, Die Inschriften der gyptischen Frhzeit, I-III, gyptologische Abhandlungen 8,
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz
Karst, J., 1931, Origines Mediterraneae: Die vorgeschichtlichen Mittelmeervlker nach Ursprung,
Schichtung und Verwandtschaft: Ethnologisch-linguistische Forschungen ber Euskaldenak
(Urbasken), Alarodier und Proto-Phrygen, Pyrenaeo-Kaukasier und Atlanto-Ligurer, West-
und Ostiberer, Liguro-Leleger, Etrusker und Pelasger, Tyrrhener, Lyder und Hetiter,
Heidelberg: Winters.
Kaul, F., Marazov, I., Best, J., & de Vries, N., 1991, Thracian tales on the Gundestrup cauldron, Am-
sterdam: Najade.
Kaul, F., & J. Martens, 1995, Southeast European influences in the Early Iron Age of Southern Scan-
dinavia. Gundestrup and the Cimbri, Acta Archaeologica, 66: 111-161.
Kawanga, Davison, 1978, Nkoya songs as taped by Wim van Binsbergen: Translations and notes,
manuscript, authors collection.
Keith, A.B., 1917, Indian [ Mythology ], volume VI of Gray, L.H. (ed.), The Mythology of All Races,
Boston: Marshall Jones Co.
Kelsen, Hans, 1988, The principle of retribution in the flood and catastrophe myths, in Dundes, Alan,
ed., The flood myth, Berkeley & London: University of California Press, pp. 125-149.
Kemp, B.J., 1995, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a civilization, London: Routledge, first published 1989.
Kenrick, Donald, 1993, From India to the Mediterranean: The migration of the Gypsies, Paris: Gypsy
Research Centre, University Ren Descartes.
Kerenyi, Karl, 1976, Dionysos: Archetypal image of indestructible life, Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
King, L.W., 1999, Enuma Elish: The Seven Tablets of Creation: Or the Babylonian and Assyrian Leg-
ends Concerning the Creation of the World and of Mankind, Escondido CA: BookTree, fas-
cimile reprint of the 1902 edition , London: Luzac.
Klimov, Georgii Andreevich, 1998, Etymological dictionary of the Kartvelian languages, Berlin / New
York : Mouton De Gruyter.
Klindt-Jensen, O., 1959, The Gundestrup bowl a reassessment, Antiquity, 33: 161-169.
Knipe, D.M., 1967, The heroic theft: Myths from Rgveda IV and the Ancient Near East, History of
Religions, 6, 4: 328-360.
Kmkulkz, Elmira, 2005, The Kyrgyz epic Manas: Selections translated, introduced and annotated,
at: http://www.silkroadfoundation.org/folklore/manas/manasintro.html .
Kojiki, see Chamberlain 1919 and Philippi 1968.
Koltuv, Barbara Black, 1986, The Book of Lilith, York Beach, MN: Nicolas-Hays.
Kuper, H., 1968, Celebration of growth and kingship: Incwala in Swaziland, African Arts, 1, 3: 56-
59+90.
213
Lambert, W.G., & Millard, A.R., 1969, Atra-Hasis. The Babylonian story of the flood, Oxford: Claren-
don.
Law, R., 1993, The Amazons of Dahomey, Paideuma, 39: 245-260.
Leach, E.R., 1954, Political systems of Highland Burma, London: Athlone.
Leeming, David Adams, & Jake Page, 2000, The mythology of native North America, Norman: Univer-
sity of Oklahoma Press.
Lefkowitz, M.R., & MacLean Rogers, G., 1996, eds, Black Athena revisited, Chapel Hill & London:
University of North Carolina Press.
Leonard, William Ellery, 1908, The fragments of Empedocles, Chicago: Open Court.
Levinas, E., 1971, Totalit et infini: Essai sur lexteriorit, La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, first published
1961.
Levinas, E., 1981, Autrement qutre ou au-del de lessence, La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, first publis-
hed 1974.
Levy, G.R., 1934, The Oriental origin of Herakles, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 54: 40-53.
Lewis, Mark Edward, 2006, The flood myths of early China, Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press.
Lhote, H., 1959, The search for the Tassili frescoes, New York: Dutton / London: Hutchinson; Engl tr.
of: la dcouverte des fresques du Tassili, Paris: Arthaud, 1958.
Lindblom, Gerhard, 1935, The spiked wheel-trap and its distribution, Geografiska Annaler, Supple-
ment: Hyllningsskrift Tillagnad Sven Hedin, 17: 621-633.
Liverpool, H.U., 1998, Origins of rituals and customs in the Trinidad carnival: African or European,
TDR / The Drama Review, 42, 3: 24-37.
Lloyd, A. B., 1988, Herodotus Book II, vol. iii, Commentary 99-182, Leiden & New York: Brill.
Long, R.C.E., 1923, The Burner Period of the Mayas, Man, 23: 173-176.
Los, F.J., 1969, Oost -Europa: In vr- en vroeghistorische tijd, Oostburg: Pieters.
Macalister, R.A.S., 1941, Lebor Gabla renn: Book of the Taking of Ireland Part 1. ed. and tr. by
Macalister, R.A.S., Dublin: Irish Texts Society.
MacCulloch, J.A., 1908-1921, Blest, abode of the, Celtic, in: Hastings 1908-1921: II, 689-696.
MacGregor, A.J., 1992, Fire and light in the western triduum: Their use at Tenebrae and at the Pas-
chal vigil, Collegeville (Minn.): Liturgical Press.
Mackenzie, Donald Alexander, 1913, Indian myth and legend, London: Gresham.
Maho, Jouni, 2003, A classification of the Bantu languages: An update of Guthries referential sys-
tem, in: D. Nurse & G. Philippson, eds., The Bantu languages, London / New York, pp. 639-
651.
Mainga, M., 1973, Bulozi under the Luyana kings, London: Longman.
Malory, Thomas, 1978, Le morte dArthur, London: Dent, first published 1485.
Maenchen-Helfen, O., & M. Knight, 1973, The world of the Huns, Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Margalith, Othniel, 1986, Samsons riddle and Samsons magic locks, Vetus Testamentum, 36: 25-34.
Maringer, J., 1952, De godsdienst der praehistorie, Roermond / Maaseik: Romen; English edition,
1960, The gods of prehistoric man, New York: Knopf.
Marler, J., & Robbins Dexter, M., 2003, eds., The Black Sea flood and its aftermath: Papers from the
First International Symposium on the Interdisciplinary Significance of the Black Sea Flood,
Liguria Study Center, Bogliasco, Italy, June 3-7, 2002, Sebastopol, CA.
Marushiakova, Elena & Vesselin Popov, 2001, Gypsies in the Ottoman empire, Hatfield: University of
Hertfordshire Press.
Maspero, Gaston, 2002, Popular stories of ancient Egypt, ed. Hasan El-Shamy, Santa
Barbara: ABC-CLIO.
Matthe, Marcus, personal communication, 1-3 May 2003.
Mayowe, Stanford, 1994, interview, Kaoma, Zambia, 8 July 1994.
McCormick F., 2007, The horse in early Ireland, Anthropozoologica, 42, 1: 85-104.
McKenna, A.J., 1992, Violence and difference: Girard, Derrida and deconstruction, Champaign IL:
University of Illinois Press.
214
Meeussen, A.E., 1980, Bantu lexical reconstructions, Archief voor Antropologie, 27, Tervuren:
Koninklijk Museum voor Midden-Afrika.
Mellaart, J., 1967, atal Hyk: A Neolithic town in Anatolia, New York: McGraw-Hill.
Mercer, S.A.B., 1952, The pyramid texts in translation and commentary, I-IV, New York, London,
Toronto: Longmans & Green.
Meyer, Eduard, 1884, Geschichte des Altertums, I-V, Stuttgart & Berlin: Cotta.
Meyerowitz, E.L.R., 1960, The divine kingship in Ghana and in Ancient Egypt, London: Faber & Fa-
ber.
Militarev, A., 1996, Home for Afrasian?: African or Asian: area linguistic arguments, in: C.
Griefenow-Mewis & R.M. Voigt, eds., Cushitic and Omotic Languages: Proceedings of the
Third International Symposium Berlin, March 17-19, 1994, Kln: Kppe, pp.13-32.
Militarev, A., 2002, The prehistory of a dispersal: the Proto-Afrasian (Afroasiatic) farming, in: Bell-
wood, P., & Renfrew, C., eds., Examining the farming / language dispersal hypothesis, Cam-
bridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Militarev, A.Y. & V.A. Shnirelman, 1988, The problem of proto-Afrasian home and culture (an essay
in linguoarchaeological reconstruction), Paper presented at the 12th International Congress of
Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Zagreb.
Monaghan, Patricia, 2010, Encyclopedia of goddesses and heroines, Santa Barbara CA: Greenwood /
ABC CLIO.
Montagu, A., 1974, Mans most dangerous myth: The fallacy of race, 5th ed., New York: Columbia
University Press, first published 1942.
Montgomery, J.A., 1911, A magical skull, The Museum Journal, 2: 58-60.
Mookerjee, A, 1998, Ritual art of India, New Delhi: Healing Arts Press.
Morgan, Lewis Henry, 1871, Systems of consanguinity and affinity of the human family, Washington
DC: Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge.
Morgan, Lewis Henry, 1963, Ancient society, E. Leacock, ed. New York: Meridian Books / World
Publishing, first published 1877.
Mller, H., 1938, Die formale Entwicklung der Titulatur der gyptischen Knige, Glckstadt /
Hamburg / New York: gyptologische Forschungen VII.
Muntemba, Shimwaayi, 1973, personal communication, 12 September 1973.
Murray, Margaret A., 1956, 89. Indians in Africa', Man, 56, (Jun., 1956), p. 87
Mutumba Mainga, 1966, The origin of the Lozi: Some oral traditions in: E. Stokes & R. Brown, eds.,
The Zambesian past, Manchester: Manchester University Press for Institute for Social Re-
search, pp. 238-247.
Mutumba Mainga, 1972, A history of Lozi religion to the end of the nineteenth century, in: Ranger,
T.O., & Kimambo, I., eds., The historical study of African religion, London: Heinemann, pp.
95-107.
Muuka, L.S., 1966, The colonization of Barotseland in the 17th century, in: Stokes, E., & R. Brown,
eds, 1966, The Zambesian past, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 248-260.
Nabokov, V.V., 1962, Pale fire, New York: Putnam.
Namafe, C.M., 2006, The Lozi flood tradition, in: Tvedt, T., & T. Oestigaard, eds., A history of water,
III: The world of water, London: Tauris, pp. 470-483.
Ndigi, Oum, 1996, Gb / K.b / Gbgb / Kb / Kbkb: Ou le nom du dieu de la terre et de loiseau
crateur mythologique chez les gyptiens et les Basa du Cameroun, Bulletin: Socit
dgyptologie (Genve), 20: 49-70.
Newcomb, F.J., 1990, Navaho folk tales, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Newton, I. 1947. [ Principia Mathematica ] Sir Isaac Newtons Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy and His System of the World, Engl. tr., Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of
California Press, first published 1687.
OMeara, J.J. 1982, Gerald of Wales: The history and topography of Ireland, Penguin, Harmonds-
worth.
Obenga, T., 1992, Ancient Egypt and Black Africa, London: Karnak House.
Obenga, T., 1995, Cheikh Anta Diop, Volney et le Sphinx: Contribution de Cheikh Anta Diop
215
Ihistoriographie mondiale, Paris, Prsence Africaine.
Ode, A.W.M., 1927, Reflexe von Tabu und Noa in den Indogermanischen Sprachen, Mede-
delingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, afd. Letterkunde, 63, A, 3: 73-100.
Oliver, Roland, Thomas Spear, Kairn Klieman, Jan Vansina, Scott MacEachern, David Schoenbrun,
James Denbow, Yvonne Bastin, H.M. Batibo, Bernd Heine, Michael Mann, Derek Nurse, Si-
miyu Wandibba, 2001, Comments on Christopher Ehret, Bantu History: Re-Envisioning the
Evidence of Language, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 34, 1: 43-81.
Olmsted, G.S., 1976, The Gundestrup version of Tin B Cuailnge, Antiquity, 50: 95-103.
Oppenheimer, S., 1998, Eden in the East. The drowned continent of Southeast Asia, London: Wei-
denfeld & Nicholson.
Otto, E., 1960, Der Gebrauch des Knigstitels bjtj, Zeitschrift fr die gyptische Sprache und
Altertumskunde, 85: 143-152.
Papstein, R., 1979, personal communication, 12 October 1979.
Parfitt, T., 1992, Journey to the vanished city: The search for a lost tribe of Israel, London etc.: Hodder
& Stoughton.
Park, Young-Mann, & Song, Min-Young, 2005, Won Hyos one heart-mind and meditation on one
heart-mind as part of holistic education, in: John P. Miller, ed., Holistic learning and spiritu-
ality in education: Breaking new ground, Albany NY: State University of New York Press.
Partridge, E., 1979, Origins: A short etymological dictionary of modern English, London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, first published 1958.
Peiros, Ilya, 1998, Comparative linguistics in Southeast Asia, Canberra: Australian National Univer-
sity.
Penglas, C., 1997, Greek myths and Mesopotamia; Parallels and influence in the Homeric hymns and
Hesiod, London / New York: Routledge.
Pettersson, O., 1973, Chiefs and gods: Religious and social elements in South Eastern Bantu kingship,
Nendeln (Liechtenstein): Kraus, first published 1953: Lund: Gleerup.
Philippi, Donald L., 1968, Kojiki, translated with an introduction and notes, Tokyo: University of To-
kyo Press.
Pokorny, J., 1959-1969, Indogermanisches etymologisches Wrterbuch, I-II, Bern & Munich: Franke.
Ptscher, W., 1979a, Herakles, in: K. Ziegler & W. Sontheimer, eds., Der kleine Pauly: Lexikon der
Antike, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, cols. II: 1050-1052.
Ptscher, W., 1979b, Palladion, K. Ziegler and W. Sontheimer, eds., Der kleine Pauly: Lexikon der
Antike. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, cols. IV, 431-432.
Prins, G., 1980, The hidden hippopotamus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Puhvel J., 1970, Aspects of equine functionality, in: Puhvel, J., ed., Myth and law among the Indo-
Europeans, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 157-172.
Quest, Charlotte Schreiber, tr., 1849, The Mabinogion, from the Llyfr coch o Hergest, and other an-
cient Welsh MSS., with an English translation and notes, I-IV, London: Longmans, Brown,
Green, & Longmans.
Ranger, T.O., & Kimambo, I., 1972, eds, The historical study of African religion, London: Heinemann.
Rappenglueck, Michael A., 1999, Eine Himmelskarte aus der Eiszeit? Ein Beitrag zur Urgeschichte
der Himmelskunde und zur palaeoastroniomischen Methodik, Frankfurt a/Main: Peter Lang.
Rasing, T., 2001, The bush burned the stones remain: Womens initiation and globalization in Zambia,
Ph.D. thesis, Erasmus University Rotterdam; Hamburg / Boston / Muenster: LIT Verlag.
Ray, J.D., 1981, Ancient Egypt, in: Loewe, M., & C. Blacker, eds., Oracles and divination, London
etc.: Allen & Unwin, pp. 174-190.
Reefe, T.Q., 1981, The rainbow and the kings: A history of the Luba empire to 1891, Berkeley & Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Rhys, John, 1891, Studies in the Arthurian legend, Oxford: Clarendon.
Rice, Michael, 1990, Egypts Making: The origins of ancient Egypt, 5000-2000 B.C., London & New
York: Routledge.
Roberts, A., 1973, A history of the Bemba, London: Longman.
Rooke, Andrew, 1980, Kuomboka: Ancient wisdom of the Malozi, Sunrise Magazine (Theosophical
216
University Press), February 1980.
Rosenberg, Donna, 1994, World mythology: An anthology of the great myths and epics, New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Rountree, Helen C., 1992, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their traditional culture, Norman, OK:
University of Oklahoma Press.
Rydberg, Viktor, 1906, Teutonic mythology gods and goddesses of the Northland, I-III, London / Co-
penhagen / Stockholm, etc.: Noroena Society,
Sahlins, M., 1965, On the sociology of primitive exchange, in: M. Banton, ed., The relevance of mod-
els for social anthropology, London: Tavistock, A.S.A. Monographs no. 1, pp. 139-236.
Salomon, Frank, & George L. Urioste, 1991, tr., The Huarochir manuscript: A testament of ancient
and colonial Andean religion, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Sampson, R., 1972, The man with a toothbrush in his hat: The story and times of George Copp West-
beech in Central Africa, Lusaka: Multimedia.
Saxo Grammaticus, 1979, History of the Danes [ Gesta Danorum ], tr. Peter Fisher, Totowa NJ: Row-
man & Littlefield.
Scheub, Harold, 2000, A dictionary of African mythology: The mythmaker as storyteller, New York /
Oxford etc.: Oxford University Press.
Schoffeleers, J.M., 1979, ed., Guardians of the land. Essays on Central African territorial cults,
Gwelo: Mambo Press.
Schoffeleers, J.M., 1985, Oral history and the retrieval of the distant past: On the use of legendary
chronicles as sources of historical information, in: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Schof-
feleers, J.M., eds., Theoretical explorations in African religion, London / Boston: Kegan Paul
International for African Studies Centre, pp. 164-188.
Schoffeleers, J.M., 1992, River of blood: The genesis of a martyr cult in southern Malawi, Madison:
Wisconsin University Press.
Schoffeleers, Matthew, 1988, Myth and / or history: A reply to Christopher Wrigley, Journal of Afri-
can History, 29, 3: 385-390.
Schott, S., 1956, Zur Kronungstitulatur der Pyramidenzeit, Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissen-
schaften in Gttingen, Philologisch-historische Klasse, 1956, Nr. 4), Gttingen: Akademie der
Wissenschaften in Gttingen.
Schreiber, H., n.d. [ c. 1970 ], Kooplui veroveren de wereld: Verlucht met 91 afbeeldingen en 18
kaarten, Den Haag / Brussel: Van Goor / Van Hoeve / Manteau.
Schroeder, B., 1996, Altared ground: Levinas, history, and violence, New York & London: Routledge.
Schltz, J., 1976, Land use in Zambia, Part I. The basically traditional land-use systems and their re-
gions, Mnchen: Weltforum Verlag.
Schwartz, Howard, 2004, Tree of souls: The mythology of Judaism, New York: Oxford University
Press.
Seal, Graham, 2001, Encyclopedia of folk heroes, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
Seki, K., 1966, Types of Japanese folktales, Asian Folklore Studies, 25: 1-220.
Seligman, C.G., 1934, Egypt and Negro Africa: A study in divine kingship, London: Routledge.
Selous, Frederick Courteney, 1893, Travel and adventure in South-East Africa: Being the narrative of
the last eleven years spent by the author on the Zambesi and its tributaries; with an account of
the colonisation of Mashunaland and the progress of the gold industry in that country, Lon-
don: Ward.
Selous, Frederick Courteney, 1896, Sunshine and storm in Rhodesia: Being a narrative of events in
Matabeleland both before and during the recent native insurrection up to the date of the dis-
bandment of the Bulawayo Field Force, London: Ward, reprinted 1968: Bulawayo, Books of
Rhodesia.
Serruys, H., 1958, A note on arrows and oaths among the Mongols, Journal of the American Oriental
Society, 78, 4: 279-294.
Sethe, K., 1930, Urgeschichte und lteste Religion der gypter, Leipzig: Abhandlungen fr die Kunde
des Morgenlandes, 18, 4.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1831, Frankenstein, or: The modern Prometheus, London: Colburn &
217
Bentley / Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute.
Shepherd, J.R., 1993, Statecraft and political economy on the Taiwan frontier 1600-1800, Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Sierksma, F., 1962, De roof van het vrouwengeheim: De mythe van de dictatuur der vrouwen en het
ontstaan der geheime mannengenootschappen, The Hague: Mouton.
Skeat, Walter W., 1866, ed., The romans of Partenay, or of Lusignen: otherwise known as the Tale of
Melusine [ by La Couldrette ], Early English Texts Society, Old Series 22, London: Trbner.
Smith, E.W., & A.M. Dale, 1920, The Ila-speaking peoples of Northern Rhodesia, I-II, London: Mac-
millan.
Smith, Edwin William, 1907, A handbook of the Ila language (commonly called the Seshukulumbwe)
spoken in North-Western Rhodesia, South-Central Africa, comprising grammar, exercises,
specimens of Ila tales, and vocabularies, London etc.: Frowde / Oxford University Press.
Smith, Edwin William, 1950, African ideas of God, London: Edinburgh House.
Smith, G. Elliot, 1919, The evolution of the dragon, Manchester: Manchester University Press / Lon-
don, New York, etc.: Longmans, Green & Co.
Smith, G. Elliot, 1970, The Ancient Egyptians and the origin of civilization, Freeport, New York:
Books for Libraries Press, first published 1923.
Smith, George, 1873, The Chaldean account of Genesis, containing the description of the creation, the
fall of man, the deluge, the tower of Babel, the times of the patriarchs, and Nimrod; Babylo-
nian fables, and legends of the gods; from the cuneiform inscriptions, London: Sampson,
Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington.
Sokal, R.R., N.L. Oden, & C. Wilson, 1991, Genetic evidence for the spread of agriculture in Europe
by demic diffusion, Nature, 351: 143-145.
Sokal, R.R., & P. Menozzi, 1982, Spatial autocorrelations of HLA frequencies in Europe support
demic diffusion of early farmers, American Naturalist, 119: 1-17.
Sommer, John, 1996, The Kyrgyz and their reed screens, no place: Sommer.
Sparks, Rachael, 2006a, Acholi wheel trap, Southern Sudan Project, Pitt-Rivers Museum, accession
number 1922.25.6, from Acholi, Sudan, collected by C.G. and B.Z. Seligman, 1922, at:
http://southernsudan.prm.ox.ac.uk/details/1922.25.6/ retrieved 6 July 2009.
Spencer, A.J., 1993, Early Egypt: The rise of civilisation in the Nile valley, London: British Museum
Press.
Squire, Charles, 1905, The mythology of the British Islands: An introduction to Celtic myth, legend,
poetry, and romance, London: Blackie.
Squire, Charles, 1906, The mythology of ancient Britain and Ireland, London: Constable.
Starostin, Sergei, & Starostin, George, 1998-2008, Tower of Babel etymological database, participants:
Russian State University of the Humanities (Center of Comparative Linguistics), Moscow
Jewish University, Russian Academy of Sciences (Dept. of History and Philology), Santa Fe
Institute (New Mexico, USA), City University of Hong Kong, Leiden University, at:
http://starling.rinet.ru/babel.htm .
Stricker, B.H., 1963-1989, De geboorte van Horus, I-V, Leiden: Brill, Ex Oriente Lux.
Stubbs, Dacre, 1978, Prehistoric art of Australia, South Melbourn: Sun Books, first published 1974.
Swann, Brian, 1994, ed., Coming to light: Contemporary translations of the native literatures of North
America, New York: Random House.
Swanton, J.P., 1909, Tlingit myths and texts, Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office.
Tabler, E.C., 1963, ed., The diaries of G. Westbeech 1885-1888, in: E.C. Tabler, ed., Trade and
travel in early Barotseland, London: Chatto & Windus, pp. 23-101.
Tamm, Erika, Toomas Kivisild, Maere Reidla, Mait Metspalu, David Glenn Smith, Connie J. Mulligan,
Claudio M. Bravi, Olga Rickards, Cristina Martinez-Labarga, Elsa K. Khusnutdinova, Sar-
dana A. Fedorova, Maria V. Golubenko, Vadim A. Stepanov, Marina A. Gubina, Sergey I.
Zhadanov, Ludmila P. Ossipova, Larisa Damba, Mikhail I. Voevoda, Jose E. Dipierri, Richard
Villems, Ripan S. Malhi, 2007, Beringian standstill and spread of Native American foun-
ders, PLOS One Open Access, at:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000829.
218
Tamminen, Maya, 1928, Finsche mythen en legenden: Het volksepos Kalevala: Met een inleiding en
afbeeldingen, Zutphen: Thieme.
Thierry, A., 1856, Histoire dAttila et de ses successeurs, Paris: Didier.
Thierry, G.J., 1913, De religieuze beteekenis van het Aegyptische koningschap: I. De titulatuur,
Leiden: Brill.
Thomas, William Jenkyn, 1923, Some myths and legends of the Australian Aborigines, Melbourne etc.:
Whitcombe & Tombs.
Thompson, Stith, 1955-1958, Motif-index of folk literature: A classification of narrative elements in
folktales, ballads, myths, fables, mediaeval romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest- books and local
legends, I-VI, Rev. & enlarged ed., Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Torrend, J., 1905, The Sabaeans on the Zambezi, Proceedings of the Rhodesia Scientific Association,
5, 2: 40-54.
Torrend, J., 1910, Likenesses of Moses' story in the Central African folk-Lore, Anthropos, 5: 54-70.
Torrend, J., 1921, Specimens of Bantu folk-lore from northern Rhodesia: Texts (collected with the help
of the phonograph) and English translations, London: Paul, Trench, Trbner & Co., / New
York: Dutton & Co.
Trapnell, C.J., & J. Clothier, 1937, Ecological survey of North-Western Rhodesia, Lusaka: Government
Printer.
Turner II, Christy G, 2008, A dental anthropological hypothesis relating to the ethnogenesis, origin
and antiquity of the Afro-Asiatic language family: Peopling of the Eurafrican-South Asian tri-
angle IV, in: Bengston, John D., 2008, ed., In hot pursuit of language in prehistory: Essays in
the four fields of anthropology in honour of Harold Crane Fleming, Amsterdam / Philadel-
phia: John Benjamins, pp. 17-23.
Turner, Ralph L., 1926, The position of Romani in Indo-Aryan, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society,
3rd Ser. 5 / 4: 145-188.
Turner, V.W., 1955, A Lunda love story and its consequences: Selected texts from traditions collected
by Henrique Dias de Carvalho at the court of Mwantianvwa in 1887, Rhodes-Livingstone
Journal, 19: 1-26.
Turner, V.W., 1967, The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual, Ithaca (N.Y.): Cornell University
Press.
Turner, V.W., 1968, The drums of affliction: A study of religious processes among the Ndembu, Ox-
ford: Clarendon.
Ullman, M., 1972, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaft im Islam, Handbuch der Orientalistik, Erste
Abteilung: Der Nahe und der Mittlere Osten,, Ergnzungsband VI, 2. Abschnitt, Leiden: Brill.
Underhill, P., 2004, The South Asian Y chromosome landscape, paper presented at the 2004 Harvard
Round Table, Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge
MA.
Urton, Gary, 1999, Inca myths, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Uther, Hans-Jrg, 2004, The types of international folktales: A classification and bibliography, based
on the system of Antti Aarne & Stith Thompson, Helsinki : Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, Aca-
demia Scientiarum Fennica.
van Beek, Walter, 2010, Tales of death and regeneration in West Africa, this volume.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1975, Labour migration and the generation conflict: social change in
Western Zambia, paper read at the 34th Annual Meeting, Society for Applied Anthropology,
Amsterdam; also at: http://www.shikanda.net/ethnicity/labour.htm.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1981, Religious Change in Zambia: Exploratory studies, London / Boston:
Kegan Paul International.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1985, The historical interpretation of myth in the context of popular Is-
lam in: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Schoffeleers, J.M., 1985, Theoretical explorations in
African religion, London / Boston: Kegan Paul International, pp. 189-224.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1987, Likota lya Bankoya: Memory, myth and history, in: Cahiers
dEtudes Africaines, numro spcial sur Modes populaires dhistoire en Afrique, eds. B.
Jewsiewicki & C. Moniot, 27, 3-4: 359-392.
219
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1988, ed., J. Shimunikas Likota lya Bankoya: Nkoya version, Research
report No. 31B, Leiden: African Studies Centre.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1992, Tears of Rain: Ethnicity and history in central western Zambia,
London / Boston: Kegan Paul International.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1993, Mukanda: Towards a history of circumcision rites in western Zam-
bia, 18th-20th century, in: J.-P. Chrtien, avec collaboration de C.-H. Perrot, G. Prunier & D.
Raison-Jourde, eds., Linvention religieuse en Afrique: Histoire et religion en Afrique noire,
Paris: Agence de Culture et de Coopration Technique / Karthala, pp. 49-103.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1995a, Four-tablet divination as trans-regional medical technology in
Southern Africa, Journal of Religion in Africa, 25, 2: 114-140.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1995b, The Kazanga festival: Ethnicity as cultural mediation and trans-
formation in central western Zambia, African Studies, 53, 2: 92-125.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1996, Transregional and historical connections of four-tablet divination in
Southern Africa, Journal of Religion in Africa, 26, 1: 2-29.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1997a, ed., Black Athena: Ten Years After, Hoofddorp: Dutch Archaeo-
logical and Historical Society, special issue, Talanta: Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeologi-
cal and Historical Society, vols. 28-29, 1996-97; updated version in press as: Black Athena
comes of age, Berlin / Boston / Munster: LIT.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1997b, Black Athena Ten Years After: Towards a constructive re-
assessment, in: van Binsbergen 1997a, pp. 11-64.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1997c, Rethinking Africas contribution to global cultural history: Lessons
from a comparative historical analysis of mankala board-games and geomantic divination, in:
van Binsbergen 1997a, pp. 221-254.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1998-2006, Skulls and tears: Identifying and analysing an African fantasy
space extending over 5000 kilometres and across 5000 years: Paper read at the conference
Fantasy spaces: The power of images in a globalizing world, Amsterdam, the Netherlands,
26-29 August 1998; greatly revised and expanded version (2006) at:
http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/fantasy_space_2006_expanded.pdf
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1999, Nkoya royal chiefs and the Kazanga Cultural Association in western
central Zambia today: Resilience, decline, or folklorisation?, in: E.A.B. van Rouveroy van
Nieuwaal & R. van Dijk, eds., African chieftaincy in a new socio-political landscape, Ham-
burg / Mnster: LIT-Verlag, pp. 97-133.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2000a, Dans le troisime millnaire avec Black Athena?, in: Fauvelle-
Aymar, F.-X., Chrtien, J.-P., & Perrot, C.-H., Afrocentrismes: Lhistoire des Africains entre
gypte et Amrique, Paris: Karthala, pp. 127-150.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2000b, Le point de vue de Wim van Binsbergen, in: Autour dun livre.
Afrocentrisme, de Stephen Howe, et Afrocentrismes: Lhistoire des Africains entre Egypte et
Amrique, de Jean-Pierre chrtien [ sic ], Franois-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar et Claude-Hlne
Perrot (dir.), par Mohamed Mbodj, Jean Copans et Wim van Binsbergen, Politique africaine,
no. 79, octobre 2000, pp. 175-180.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2001, Witchcraft in modern Africa as virtualised boundary conditions of the
kinship order, in: Bond, G.C., & Ciekawy, D.M., eds., Witchcraft dialogues: Anthropological
and philosophical exchanges, pp. 212-263.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2003a, Intercultural encounters: African and anthropological lessons to-
wards a philosophy of interculturality, Berlin / Boston / Muenster: LIT.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2003b, Then give him to the crocodiles: Violence, state formation, and
cultural discontinuity in west central Zambia, 1600-2000, in: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., in
collaboration with Pelgrim, R., eds., The dynamics of power and the rule of law: Essays on Af-
rica and beyond in honour of Emile Adriaan B. van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal, Berlin / Mnster
/ London: LIT, pp. 197-220.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2003c, Les chefs royaux nkoya et lAssociation culturelle Kazanga dans la
Zambie du centre-ouest aujourdhui: Rsiliation, dclin ou folklorisation de la fonction du
chef traditionnel?, in: Perrot, Claude.-Hlne, & Fauvelle-Aymar, Franois-Xavier, eds., Le
220
retour des rois: Les autorits traditionnelles et ltat en Afrique contemporaine, Paris: Kar-
thala, pp. 489-512.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2004, Long -range mythical continuities across Africa and Asia: Linguis-
tic and iconographic evidence concerning leopard symbolism, paper presented at the Round
Table on Myth, Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge
(Mass.), 8-10 May, 2004; at:
http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/leopard_harvard/leopardwww.htm.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2006a, Mythological archaeology: Situating sub-Saharan African cos-
mogonic myths within a long-range intercontinential comparative perspective, in: Osada, To-
shiki, with the assistance of Hase, Noriko, eds., Proceedings of the Pre-symposium of RIHN [
Research Institute for Humanity and Nature ] and 7th ESCA [ Ethnogenesis in South and Cen-
tral Asia ] Harvard-Kyoto Roundtable, Kyoto: Research Institute for Humanity and Nature
(RIHN), pp. 319-349; also at:
http://shikanda.net/ancient_models/kyoto_as_published_2006_EDIT2.pdf .
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2006b, Further steps towards an aggregative diachronic approach to world
mythology, starting from the African continent, paper read at the International Conference on
Comparative Mythology, organized by Peking University (Research Institute of Sanskrit
Manuscripts & Buddhist Literature) and the Mythology Project, Asia Center, Harvard Univer-
sity (Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies), May 10-14, 2006, at Peking University, Bei-
jing, China; in press in: Duan Qing & Gu Zhenkun, eds., Proceedings of the International
Conference on Comparative Mythology, Beijing 2008 ; preprint at:
http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/Further%20steps%20def.pdf .
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2007a, Extensive table of Old World mythological continuities, classified
on the basis of 20 Narrative Complexes (NCs) as found in a corpus of sub-Saharan African
cosmogonic myths collected in historic times: Including mythologies from Ancient Egypt,
Graeco-Roman Antiquity, the Bible, and selected other literate civilisations of the Old World,
outside sub-Saharan Africa, at:
http://shikanda.net/ancient_models/Mythological%20continuities%20def.pdf
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2007b, The underpinning of scientific knowledge systems: Epistemology
or hegemonic power? The implications of Sandra Hardings critique of North Atlantic science
for the appreciation of African knowledge systems, in: Hountondji, Paulin J., ed., La rationa-
lit, une ou plurielle, Dakar: CODESRIA [ Conseil pour le dveloppement de la recherche en
sciences sociales en Afrique ] / UNESCO [ Organisation des Nations Unies pour lducation,
la science et la culture ], pp. 294-327.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2009a, Rupture and fusion in the approach to myth: Situating myth analy-
sis between philosophy, poetics and long-range historical reconstruction, Religion Compass,
3: 1-34.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2009b, Giving birth to Fire: Evidence for a widespread cosmology revolv-
ing on an elemental transformative cycle, in Japan, throughout the Old World, and in the New
World, paper presented at the Third Annual Meeting of the International Association for
Comparative Mythology, Tokyo, Japan, 23-24 May 2009; available at:
http://www.shikanda.net/topicalities/paper_Japan_final.pdf
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2009c, Expressions of traditional wisdom from Africa and beyond: An
exploration in intercultural epistemology, Brussels: Acadmie Royale des Sciences
dOutremer.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010a, The continued relevance of Martin Bernals Black Athena thesis:
Yes and No, Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie, 23,
1-2 (2009) ; preprint at: http://shikanda.net/topicalities/Black_Athena_YES_AND_NO.pdf.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010b, The spiked wheel trap as a cultural index fossil in African prehis-
tory: An exercise in global distribution analysis based on Lindbloms 1935 data, pre-
publication version at: http://shikanda.net/topicalities/spiked_wheel_trap.pdf.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010c, Towards the Pelasgian hypothesis: An integrative perspective long-
range ethnic, cultural, linguistic and genetic affinities encompassing Africa, Europe, and
221
Asia, Leiden: Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative Studies.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010d, Cluster analysis assessing the relation between the Eurasian,
American, African and Oceanian linguistic macro-phyla: On the basis of the distribution of
the proposed *Borean derivates in their respective lexicons: With a lemma exploring *Borean
reflexes in Guthries Proto-Bantu, Leiden: Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transconti-
nental Comparative Studies.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010e, Before the Pre-Socratics: The evidence of a common elemental
transformational cycle underlying Asian, African and European cosmologies since Neolithic
times, Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie, 24, 1-2.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., in collaboration with Mark Isaak, 2008, Transcontinental mythological
patterns in prehistory: A multivariate contents analysis of flood myths worldwide challenges
Oppenheimers claim that the core mythologies of the Ancient Near East and the Bible origi-
nate from early Holocene South East Asia, Cosmos: The Journal of the Traditional Cosmol-
ogy Society, 23 (2007): 29-80.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., in press [ 2010 ], ed., Black Athena comes of age, Berlin etc.: LIT.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., in preparation (a), Out of Africa or out of Sundaland: Mythical discourse in
global perspective.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., in preparation (b), The origin and global distribution of flood myths: A
statistical and distributional contents analysis.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Geschiere, P.L., 2005, eds., Commodification: Things, agency and iden-
tity, Berlin / Boston / Munster: LIT.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & van Dijk, R., 2003, eds, Situating globality: African agency in the ap-
propriation of global culture, Leiden: Brill.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Woudhuizen, Fred C., in press, Ethnicity in Mediterranean proto-
history, Cambridge: British Archaeology Reports (BAR) International Series.
van Dijk, J., 1983, LUGAL UD ME-LAM-bi NIP-GAL - Le recit pique et didactique des travaux de
Ninurta, du Deluge et de la nouvelle creation, Leiden: Brill.
van Warmelo, N.J., 1966, Zur Sprache und Herkunft der Lemba, Deutsches Institut fr Afrika-
Forschung, Hamburger Beitrge zur Afrika-Kunde, 5: 273-283.
Vansina, Jan, 1965, Oral tradition, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Vansina, Jan, 1966, Kingdoms of the savanna, Madison: Wisconsin University Press.
Vansina, Jan, 1968, The use of ethnographic data as sources for history, in: Ranger, T.O., ed., 1968,
Emerging Themes of African History, Dar es Salaam: East African Publishing House, pp. 97-
124.
Vansina, Jan, 1979-1980, Bantu in the crystal ball, I-II, History in Africa, 12: 287-333; 13: 293-325.
Vansina, Jan, 1981, Ethnography as history: The past of the peoples in the equatorial rainforest of
Africa, Kiabara, 4, 2: 157-191.
Vansina, Jan, 1985, Oral tradition as history, London / Nairobi: Currey / Heinemann Kenya.
Vansina, Jan, 1990, Paths in the rainforests: Toward a history of political tradition in Equatorial Af-
rica, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Vansina, Jan, 1993, [ Review of : Binsbergen, W.M.J. van, 1992, Tears of Rain: Ethnicity and history
in Central Western Zambia, Londen / Boston: Kegan Paul International ], Anthropos, 88: 215-
217.
Vansina, Jan, 1995, New linguistic evidence and the Bantu expansion. Journal of African History,
36, 2: 173-195.
Venbrux, Eric, 2003, The craft of the spider woman: A history of Tiwi bark baskets, in: Herle, A.,
Stevenson, K., Stanley, N., & Welsch, R.L., eds., Pacific art: Persistence, change and mean-
ing, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 324-336.
Vigilant, Linda, Mark Stoneking; Henry Harpending; Kristen Hawkes; Allan C. Wilson, 1991, African
populations and the evolution of human mitochondrial DNA. Science, New Series 253, 5027:
1503-1507.
Vigilant, Linda, R. Pennington, Henry Harpending, T.D. Kocher, & Allan C. Wilson, 1989, Mito-
chondrial DNA sequences in single hairs from a southern African population, Proceedings of
222
the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 86: 9350-9354.
Vitaliano, Dorothy B., 1973, Legends of the earth, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
von Sicard, H., 1952, Ngoma lungundu: Eine Afrikanische Bundeslade, Studia Ethnographica Upsa-
liensis, V, Uppsala: Universitet Uppsala.
von Sicard, H., 1968-1969, Luwe und verwandte mythische Gestalten, Anthropos, 63-64: 665-737.
Walcot, P., 1956, Text of Hesiods Theogony and the Hittite epic of the Kumarbi, Classical Quar-
terly, 6: 198-208.
Walker, G.B., 1976, The great flood and its diffusion, in: Walker, G.B., Diffusion: Five studies in
early history, London: Research Publishing Co., pp. 43-63.
Wastiau, B., 1997, Mahamba: The transforming arts of spirit possession among the Luvale-speaking
people of the Upper Zambezi, Ph.D. thesis, University of East Anglia.
Waters, Frank., 1963, Book of the Hopi, New York: Penguin Books.
Watson Andaya, V., 2004, History, headhunting and gender in monsoon Asia: Comparative and longi-
tudinal views, South East Asia Research, 12, 1: 13-52.
Wegener, Alfred, 1912, Die entstehung der Kontinente, Geologische Rundschau, 3, 4: 272-292.
Werner, A., 1933, Myths and legends of the Bantu, London: Cass, reprinted 1968.
White, C.M.N., 1962, The ethno-history of the Upper Zambezi, African Studies, 21: 10-27.
Whitehead, A.N., 1925, Science and the modern world, New York: Macmillan.
Whitehead, Ruth Holmes, 1991, The old man told us: Excerpts from Micmac History, 1500-1950, Hali-
fax: Nimbus.
Wilkins, W.J., 1900, Hindu Mythology: Vedic and Puranic, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co. / London:
Thacker, first published 1882.
Wilkinson, T.A.H., 2001, Early dynastic Egypt, London / New York: Routledge, first published 1999.
Williams, B.B., 1986, The A-group royal cemetery at Qustul. Cemetery L: Excavations between Abu
Simbel and the Sudan frontier, Keith C. Seele, Director, Oriental Institute Nubian Expedition
volume III, Part 1, Chicago: Oriental Institute.
Williams, M., 1937, Apropos of an episode in Perlesvaus , Folklore, 48, 3: 263-266.
Willis, Roy, 1994, ed., Mythen van de mensheid, Baarn: Anthos; Dutch tr. of World mythology, 1993,
London / New York: Duncan Baird.
Wirtz, K., 2005, Where obscurity is a virtue: The mystique of unintelligibility in Santera ritual,
Language and Communication, 25, 4: 351-375.
Witzel, Michael, 1989, Tracing the Vedic dialects. in: Caillat, Colette, ed., Dialectes dans les littratu-
res indo-aryennes, Paris: Fondation Hugot, pp. 97-264.
Witzel, Michael, 1997, The development of the Vedic canon and its schools: The social and political
milieu (Materials on Vedic akhas 8), in: Michael Witzel, ed.. Inside the texts, beyond the
texts: New approaches to the study of the Vedas, Harvard Oriental Series, Opera Minora, II,
Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press, pp. 257-345.
Witzel, Michael, 1999, Substrate languages of Old Indo-Aryan (Rgvedic, Middle and Late Vedic),
Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, 5, 1: 1-67.
Witzel, Michael, 2001, Comparison and reconstruction: Language and mythology, Mother Tongue, 6:
45-62.
Witzel, Michael, 2003, Das alte Indien, Mnchen: Beck.
Witzel, Michael, 2010, Pan-Gaean Flood myths: Gondwana myths and beyond, this volume.
Wrigley, Christopher, 1988, The river-god and the historians: Myth in the Shire Valley and else-
where, Journal of African History, 29, 3: 367-383.
Wyschogrod, E., 1989. Derrida, Levinas and violence, in: H. Silverman, ed., Derrida and deconstruc-
tion, New York: Routledge, pp. 183-200.
Yetts, W.P., 1926, Links between ancient China and the West, Geographical Review, 16, 4: 614-622.
Zambia Archives, file ZA 1 / 13 Barotse influence, entry Anon. 29/7/1919, brief 242/1.F/19, Zambia
National Archives, Lusaka, Zambia.
Zournatzi, A., 2000, Inscribed silver vessels of the Odrysian Kings: Gifts, tribute, and the diffusion of
the forms of Achaemenid metalware in Thrace, American Journal of Archaeology, 104, 4:
683-706.
223

non-academic Internet resources

Anonymous, Dong Minority, n.d. Stealing moon dishes, at http://www.cultural-
china.com/chinaWH/html/en/Traditions98bye5472.html
Anonymous, n.d. (a), Borean languages, at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borean_languages, retrieved
3 July 2009.
Anonymous, n.d., Indian [ = Native American ] Mythology - The Mystery Of Death - Death, at:
http://www.oldandsold.com/articles26/indian-mythology-35.shtml , retrieved 1-11-2009
Anonymous, Mythology Of All Races - Indian [ = Native American ] Mythology: The Gods Of The
Elements, at: http://www.oldandsold.com/articles26/indian-mythology-31.shtml, retrieved 1-
11-2009
Atsma, Aaron J., 2000-2010, Theoi website, at: http://www.theoi.com
Cochrane, Eve, n.d., The Egyptian morning star, at: www.maverickscience.com/horus.pdf
Looby, Robert, From the clay of the Kabala to the steel of Metropolis.The Golem Myth, Three Mon-
keys Online, at:
http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/als/_the_golem_myth_film_literature.html, retrieved 4-
11-2009
Meistere, Baiba, 1997-2002, Perkons. Encyclopedia Mythica, at:
http://www.pantheon.org/articles/p/perkons.html, retrieved 20-06-2010
Monet, Jefferson, The Moon in Ancient Egypt, at: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/moon.htm
Parada, Carlos, & Maicar Frlag, 1997, Megara, Greek Mythology Link (site owner Carlos Parada,
author of Genealogical Guide to Greek Mythology), at:
http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Megara.html, retrieved 1-11-2009
van der Sluijs, Marinus Anthony, n.d. [ 2004 ], Mythopedia database on African myth, at:
http://www.mythopedia.info , retrieved April 2005.
Waugh, Daniel C., 2002, The Mongols and the Silk Road, I, Wednesday University Lecture 3, Walter
Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington/ Seattle Arts and
Lectures/ Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, at:
http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/lectures/wulec3.html

225
Chapter 10. Pan-Gaean Flood myths

Gondwana myths and beyond

by Michael Witzel
1

Abstract. Mythological compendia and indexes such as that by Stith Thompson create the impression
that flood myths are rare in Africa and Australia. Erroneously, I too thought so in my short summary of
Laurasian mythology (2001). A closer look at the worldwide distribution of flood myths tells differ-
ently. While they are fairly widespread in the Laurasian Area (Eurasia, Polynesia, the Americas), they
are by no means absent from what I like to call the Gondwana belt (sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea /
Melanesia, Australia). The hundreds of recorded flood myths from both areas can be classified into a
few major types, region per region. A comparison of the Australian and African versions indicates a
strong overlap that goes back to the time of the exodus from Africa, some 60,000 years ago. The Eura-
sian-American versions are more narrowly confined to a few basic types that can be traced back to the
emergence of Laurasian mythology. However, the Laurasian types clearly emerge from the earlier
Gondwana prototype. In sum, the flood myth is an ancient inheritance of human mythology. It is part
of a very old core of myths connected with the emergence of humans and their early, evil ways sur-
prisingly echoing the Mesopotamian and Biblical accounts in many respects. Whether this myth has
taken shape among the bottleneck population along the shores of E.Africa or even before, in the mind
of the African Eve must remain moot, just as the psychological reason for its invention and formula-
tion, which is a topic to be investigated by the study of the human brain and its productions.
1. Overview
The flood myth is found widespread in Laurasian mythology
2
as well as in Gondwana
areas. It is based on a relatively small number of well attested mythemes connected
with a flood. This presentation is intended as a specimen of various investigations that

1
Harvard University, Cambridge M.A., USA.
2
For the terminology, see Witzel 2001. Gondwana refers to the southern, Out of Africa, mythologies
(c. 65,000 years ago) and their subsequent local offshoots. Laurasian refers to Gondwanas northern
offshoot, marked by subsequent independent development, characterized by an intricate story line, of
the Out of Africa mythologies. It is prevalent in Eurasia and the Americas as well as in the Austrone-
sian speaking areas of S.E. Asia, Polynesia and Madagascar.
226
should be carried out for all major myths involving both Gondwana and Laurasian
mythologies.
3

In both areas, the flood myths have regardless of their details a distinct aspect
of retribution or revenge. It does not matter whether the flood emerges from heaven,
from the ocean, or just from a calabash (a mytheme found both inside and outside
Gondwanaland).
In most Gondwana myths, the flood is retribution for or the result of a mis-
take. It frequently originates from rain or from a rain spell. Some divine creature is
involved, either the rainbow snake (only in Australia) or a deity from heaven or from
the mountains.
2. Gondwana Flood myths
2.1. Australia
To begin this investigation, we take a closer look at Australia since this region was
settled early (c. 40-60,000 BCE) and thus offers the possibility of the relatively undis-
turbed preservation of old data. The idea of the rain spell is found in all of Australia.
It is common in all three major cultural areas, the Southeast, the Northeast and the
North. However, scholars suspect the latter two areas witnessed later intrusions of
people,
4
concepts and motifs from New Guinea during the last Ice Age. It is best
therefore to keep these areas separate, at first. Moreover, while the flood as retribution
or as the result of a mistake is very common, the involvement of the rainbow snake is
found only in the north, while that of a creator deity is present only in the Southeast
This is of importance since the latter type of deity is also found in Africa.
The Southeast
The Southeast exhibits other phenomena of retention, such as some linguistic fea-
tures
5
and some indications of genetic peculiarities. It also has relative homogeneity
in the etyma of tribal names, favoring those in Gu-. From the point of view of relig-

3
In this short review, the actual texts cannot be presented. For a large selection see
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html. (by Mark Isaak. Copyright 1996-2002, revision of
September 2, 2002; mirrored from http://home.earthlink.net/~misaak/floods.htm) and Thompson 1993:
Motif A1010 sqq: The Flood. For a review of the restricted materials available to Frazer as well as to
Hastings (1909-1928, and an update until 1951) see Dundes 1988: 113-116. Inspired by van Bins-
bergen (Beijing presentation 2006: 18, 2007; but his own view is somewhat different) one might be
tempted to consider the spread of the motif in Africa as occasioned by diffusion from Austronesian
Madagascar into E. Africa. This might even have reached W. Africa by maritime means. However, van
Binsbergens map of African occurrences overlaps only partially with that of Baumann 1936: 307sqq.;
see further below.
4
Now confirmed by genetics, see Hudjashov et al. 2007.
5
On linguistic means to separate SE Australia from the rest, see Wurm 1979: 578 sqq.; Usher 2002.
Witzel Chapter 10: Pan-Gaean Flood Myths
227
ion, the Southeast is the only area in Australia that knows of a Deus Otiosus, a distant
creator god that may also be assumed for Tasmania. An earlier occupation of the
Southeast by Tasmanians may be the reason of these facts.
6
The individual flood mo-
tifs involved are the follow(1) Flood covering all land, all people die, except some
(2) Flood as retribution by creator for evil deeds of humans, emerging from ocean
(3) Flood as retribution for specific evil deeds of (a) man, emerging from frog
(4) Flood as solution for overpopulation (by animal clans), emerging from rain spell (All
these are old features comparable with Laur. mythology),
The Northeast
The Northeast is generally regarded as a separate myth zone, with some influ-
ence from eastern New Guinea; it has an extension to the southern and western parts
of Australia, again a feature with some linguistic backing (area of non-bound pro-
nouns). The major myths involved are the following:

(1) Flood covering all land, few survive on mountain
(2) Flood from rain spell, all die
(3) Flood from water bag, covering land, stopped by tree
(4) Flood from misdeed / mistake of rainmaker, covering all land
(5) Flood from spell, reaches canoe on top of mountain
(6) Flood with boat carrying people
(7) Flood from salt water in footsteps, as retribution
(8) Flood from river kills half of mankind

The North(west)
The northern part of Australia, especially Arnhem Land and the Kimberleys, are re-
garded as the original home of the languages different from the large Pama-Nyungan
language family that covers the rest of Australia. The north has a large number of
densely packed languages, which is a typical characteristic of the original homeland
of a language family. The area is also recognized for its prefixed bound pronouns
which are only found here in this particular way, excluding even those parts of Aus-
tralia that have other bound pronouns (i.e. the Southeast and much of the central and
western areas).
The mythological facts tend to agree with the concept of the North and
Northwest as a separate region, though some secondary western New Guinean influ-
ence during the past Glacial Maximum has been proposed and now verified by popu-
lation genetics.
7

6
Cf. Usher 2002.
7
Hudjashov 2007.
228
As far as the flood myth is concerned, the following mythemes are typical.
The Rainbow Serpents involvement in the flood (mythemes 1-8) is a typical intrusive
Papua feature of this area.
(1) Flood from rainbow serpents rain spell, as high as tall serpent
(2) Flood from rainbow serpents flooding, children drown
(3) Flood from crying, people die, rainbow serpent eats them
(4) Flood from rain rock, Rainbow Snake urinates, people drown
8

(5) Flood from crying / breaking rainbow snakes eggs, becomes rock
(6) Flood from killing snake; woman drowns, is eaten by snake
(7) Flood from killing rainbow snake; women drown, eaten by snake
(8) Flood from tree falling into creek, all drown
(9) Flood from felling tree, people drown
(10) Flood from wounds, people drown to dream world
(11) Flood from wounds / rain spell, and crying / tears; people washed away
(12) Flood from honey bag, people turn into birds
In spite of some regional differences, nearly all of Australia is thus character-
ized by having flood myths that involve rain or rain spells, sometimes boats are also
included so that one can flee to the mountains or other areas.
Another universal Australian motif is that of retribution for some sort of mis-
take or evil deed: by a creator deity in the Southeast myths, and by a rainbow snake in
the Northwest. Some of these motifs, such as that the rainbow snake, will also be met
with in other areas of Gondwanaland (and even in Laurasian India and South Amer-
ica).
Summing up, in all of Australia, we can discern the following main motifs:
(1) Flood covering all land, few survive on mountain
(2) Flood from water or honey bag, covering land, stopped by tree
(3) Flood from misdeed / mistake of rainmaker, covering all land
(4) Flood from salt water in footsteps, as retribution
(5) Flood from (rainbow snakes) rain spell, all die
(6) Flood from spell, escape by boat, to top of mountain
(7) Rainbow serpents flooding (from rain rock), children / people drown
(8) Flood from crying, rainbow serpent eats people
(9) Flood from killing the rainbow snake; woman is eaten by snake
(10) Flood from tree falling / felled into creek, all drown
(11) Flood from wounds and rain spell / crying tears, people drown, go to dream world.

8
The same is also said of the S.E. Australian supreme deity Bundjel, see Dundes 1988: 130.
229
2.2. New Guinea and the other Melanesian islands
The vast island of New Guinea and the other Melanesian islands stretch in a wide arch
all the way from Indonesia to Fiji and New Caledonia, from the equator to the Tropic
of Capricorn. Unlike Australia, a vast area of hunter and gatherer cultures, Melanesia
has preserved, largely until today, early food producing societies of a horticultural
type. They are interesting as societies with mythologies of early food producing peo-
ple that are quasi frozen in time (though one obviously must not forget that the Mela-
nesians are modern humans, just like everybody else on the globe, with some 130,000
years of historical background). The type of flood myths found in Melanesia matches
those in Australia to some extent. A simplified list includes these four major items:
9

(1) General flood covers all, except a mountain
(2) Creator / other god destroys humans by flood
(3) Flood as retribution for killing of culture hero; some people escape
(4) Flood as retribution for other mistakes; escape on raft or canoe.
In this paper, some of the important variants are given in some detail. E.g. At (Aeta,
in the central Philippines), are an isolated hunter gatherer tribe. They tell this myth:
Water covered the whole earth, and all the Ats drowned except two men and a woman who
were carried far to sea. They would have perished, but a great eagle offered to carry them on
its back to their homes. One man refused, but the other two people accepted and returned to
Mapula.
10

2.3. Andaman Islands
The Andaman Islands have been largely isolated for very long periods in history, ba-
sically until the arrival of the British in mid-19th century. Their people speak isolate
languages (connected by Greenberg to Papuan), and they exhibit a dominant, very old
strain of DNA (NRY D), belonging to the early South Asian descendants of the move
out of Africa.
11
Interestingly, their mythology has retained some very ancient traits as
well.
12
Their flood myth, too, fits the pattern of the Papuan and Australian flood
myths. It is also one of retribution for early human misdeeds, and an escape by boat.
Some time after their creation, men grew disobedient. In anger, Puluga, the Creator, sent a
flood which covered the whole land, except perhaps Saddle Peak where Puluga himself re-
sided. Of all creatures, the only survivors were two men and two women who had the fortune
to be in a canoe when the flood came. The waters sank and they landed, but they found them-
selves in a sad plight. Puluga recreated birds and animals for their use, but the world was still
damp and without fire

9
Cf. also S. Thompson, 1932-6, Motif A 1010 Melanesian; Kamma 1978. For some additional Melane-
sian myths see Hans Kelsen in Dundes 1988: 130 sq.
10
Gaster 1952, 1958: 103-104.
11
Thangaraj 2003; Endicott 2003.
12
See now the discussion by Sreenathan, forthcoming in Mother Tongue 2010, no. 14.
230
After the people had warmed themselves [at the fire newly created by Puluga] and had leisure
to reflect, they began to murmur against the Creator and even plotted to murder him. How-
ever, the Creator warned them against such rash action, explaining that men had brought the
flood on themselves by their disobedience, and that another such offense would likewise be
met with punishment. That was the last time the Creator spoke with men face to face.
13

The Biblical echoes of flood and covenant are striking in this isolated popula-
tion. However, we must evaluate this flood myth against the emerging Andaman-
Melanesian-Australian pattern as well as in the framework of the complicated evi-
dence from sub-Saharan Africa.
2.4. Africa
While North Africa and the northern parts of East Africa clearly belong to the realm
of Laurasian mythology, the vast lands south of the Sahara present a complicated pic-
ture. Anthropologists have long expressed the view that, like in Australia, there are
several areas that have been influenced by the north, especially from the Sahel belt
and from the northern part of the East African area.
14
The data presented below will
therefore be subdivided along these lines: (a) the core area, sub-Saharan Africa; (b)
possible influence of the Sahel belt; and (c) northern East African influences.
In all areas, the flood myth
15
is basically seen as an act of retribution. The
flood often originates from rain (or a vessel); and it is caused by some heavenly dei-
ties or mountain spirits. We begin with the area that has most likely retained the most
original features, the central core area stretching from West Africa to the Congo and
South Africa.
Core area
The central sub-Saharan area exhibits some seven major mythemes. For practical rea-
sons, the Pygmies are included here, though their mythology may go back much be-
yond any Bantu settlements in the area.
(1) Flood and first humans: flood emerging from tree
(2) Flood as retribution; from gods granddaughter
(3) Flood from sun / moon fight, and first / later humans

13
Gaster 1958: 104-105; another version (Beckwith 1987: 319) has a great storm killing many people
and turning them into fishes and birds; the water rose above the trees; Minni Cara and Minni Kota took
the fire in a cooking pot to a cave on top of a hill where it was kept until the flood receded.
14
Cf. now van Binsbergen 2006, and Beijing presentation (2006, handout p. 18). He explains all Afri-
can occurrences by N-S diffusion (out of the Sahel and E. Africa). However, at least some of the occur-
rences in Frobenius / van Binsbergens (Handout 2006: 24) Atlantic / SW African core area would
point to an older, Gondwana layer in Africa.
15
The flood myth has been discussed at length by Baumann 1936: 307 sqq.; he criticizes the then (as
today) prevailing opinion that the flood myth is hardly found in Africa (Doniger 1991). Instead, it is
basically spread, in pockets, all over sub-Saharan Africa, with some variants. (For an English summary
of Baumanns observations, see Hans Kelsen in Dundes 1988: 136-137). See also S. Thompson, Motif
A1010: African; cf. n. 2224, 1189, 2219.
231
(4) Flood from a vessel; retribution for killing
(5) Flood as retribution: for sores
(6) Flood: sores
(7) Flood as retribution, by spell
West Africa
The areas in West Africa that are closer to the Sahel belt and that are prone to influ-
ences from the northern belt exhibit these major mythemes:
(1) Flood from calabash
(2) Flood from calabash, and stones creating rivers / flood
(3) Flood as retribution by a god
(4) Flood, from rain, as punishment; escape
(5) Flood, of village, broken clay pot as marriage sign
(6) Flood, friend of sun and moon, rise to sky
Eastern belt
As indicated, the eastern belt of Africa, stretching from Kenya to South Africa, has
been subject to influences from the Nilotic and Omotic areas. It exhibits the following
major mythemes of the flood myth:
(1) Flood from pot on top of house
(2) Flood, from rain, retribution for murder, boat; rainbow
(3) Flood from rain, retribution by spirit on mountain
(4) Lake created by mountain spirits
In sum, the sub-Saharan African evidence suggests the following major
mythemes within flood myth traditions:
(1) Flood and first humans: flood emerging from tree; no retribution, (Pygmy)
(2) Flood (from rain) as retribution; by a god, gods granddaughter or mountain spirits
(3) Flood from sun / moon fight, first and later humans
(4) Flood from vessel or calabash; retribution for killing
(5) Flood as retribution and sores; or by spell
It is remarkable that a specific item such as that of the connection with wounds
16
re-
appears in Australia (see above,) but not in Laurasian mythology.
Finally, through a general comparison of Gondwana myths, involving the Af-
rican, Andaman, Melanesian and Australian flood myths, we arrive at the flowing
simplified scheme that seems older than any Christian or (Islamic) influence in the
regions concerned.

16
W. van Binsbergen suggested to me during the Ravenstein conference that this may refer to men-
struation.
232

(1) General flood covers all except a mountain (Pygmy, Mel., Aus.)
(2) Flood as retribution by god(s) / spirits, destruction of humans, (escape by
boat) (Mel., Andaman, Afr.)
(2a) Flood as retribution for killing of culture hero / rainbow snake
(Mel., Aus.)
(2b) Flood by mistake or spell of rainmaker / rainbow snake, escape by
boat to mountain; some eaten by snake (Aus. only)
17

(2c) Flood as retribution for other mistakes (Mel., Aus.)
(3) Flood from vessel, calabash, water / honey bag (Aus., Afr.) Laur.: rain
(4) Flood caused by someones wounds or sores (Aus., Afr.)
3. Laurasian Flood myths
The Laurasian versions of the flood myth are much better known; they have been ex-
tensively been collected by Stith Thompson; here follows a brief overview from his
data.
Stith Thompson (1993): Mot i f A1010 The Fl ood. (Presented here in abbreviated form).
A1011.1. Flood partially caused by breaking forth of springs. Irish, India, cf. A941.6. Break-
ing forth of springs partial cause of flood. A1011.2. Flood caused by rising of river. S. A. In-
dian (Chiriguano).
Fl ood f rom f l ui ds of t he body:
A1012.1. Fl ood fr om t ear s. N. A. Indian; Polynesian: Rain from tears. D1567.2. Saints
tears produce fountain. A1012.1.1. Flood from Adams tears of repentance. A1012.1.2. Flood
from tears of grieving lover. N. Am. Indian (Ntlakapanaq); S. Am. Indian (Chaco).
A1012.2. Fl ood f r om ur i ne. Koryak, Eskimo, Athapascan Indians.
A1012.3. Fl ood fr om bl ood. American Indian (Mono). A1012.3.1. Flood from slain gi-
ants blood. Iceland.
A1013. Fl ood f rom bel l y. It flows from pierced belly of monster. Indonesian, North and
South American Indian (Toba).
A1013.1. Vomiting of a whale causes flood. N. Am. Indian (Dn).
Other causes
A1015. Flood caused by gods or other superior beings. (Cf. A1018.) Babylonian, Marque-
sas, S. Am. Indian (Tupinamba, Yuracare)
A1015.3. Flood caused by deity stamping on floor of heavens. Maori.
A1016. Pseudo- sci ent i f i c explanations of the flood. A1016.3. Flood caused by melting of
ice after great spell of cold. N. Am. Indian (Dn), S. Am. Indian (Gusinde) A1016.6. Moon
falls into sea and causes flood by overflowing. S. Am. Indian (Fuegians) A1017.2. Flood
caused by prayer. Maori. A1017.3. Flood caused by curse. S. Am. Indian (Chiriguano).

17
Cf. the appearance of the rainbow in Biblical myth, after the flood.
233
A1018. Fl ood as puni shment . Old Testament, Spanish. Cole: Australian; (cf. B 91.6. Ser-
pent causes flood). Jewish, Greek, Babylonian, India, Buddhist myth, Society Is., Hawaiian,
Maori, Marquesas; N. Am. Indian (Calif., Pomo, Wishosk, Apache, Hopi, Zui; Caribbean
(Cuan); S. Am. Indian (Chaco, Cubeo, Toba, Inca). See also references to Sintflut in
A1010 and A1015, where in nearly all cases the gods produce the flood as punishment. (Cf.
Q200. Deeds punished. Q552.19.6. Flood as punishment for murder). A1018.1. Flood as
punishment for breaking tabu. Fiji, Tahiti, Maori, Andaman; S. Am. Indian (Toba, Mataco,
Lengua). A1018.2. Flood as punishment for incest. American Indian (Namba); cf. Incest pun-
ished. T410.
A1018.3. Flood brought as r evenge for i nj ur y. Tuamotu; N. Am. Indian (Carrier,
Tsetsaut, North Pacific Tribes, Haida, Kwakiutl, Mono, Shasta, Pima, Ojibwa, Menomini);
Central and S. Am. Indian (Cahita, Bororo, Tupinamba). A1019. Deluge: miscellaneous.
A1019.3. Flood because earth has become too thickly populated. India [and also in Mesopo-
tamia]. A1019.4. Flood puts out world-fire. (Cf. A1030.) S. Am. Indian (Tupinamba, Tucuna,
Nimuendaj, Cubeo).
A1020. Escape fr om del uge. A1021. Deluge: escape i n boat (ark) Irish, Icelandic,
Spanish, Greek, Hebrew: Genesis, ch. 6, 7, 8; Jewish, Babylonian, Hindu / India / Buddhist
myth, Chinese, Siberian, Pelew Is. (Micronesia), Maori; Eskimo, American Indian (Carrier,
Chipewyan, Coos, Kathlamet, Nootka, Chimariko, Salishan, Crow, Cochiti, White Mountain
Apache, Ojibwa, Choctaw, Shawnee, Natchez, Aztec, Arawak, Carib, Mbaya, Mura, Nimuen-
daj, Taulipang, Camara (selections only); cf. Z356. Unique survivor A1021.0.2. Escape
from deluge in wooden cask (drum). Chinese, S.A. Indian (Guapor). A1021.0.3. Deluge:
escape in gourd. India. 1021.0.4. Deluge: escape on floating tree. Korean. A1021.0.5. Deluge:
escape in hollow tree trunk. American Indian (Seneca, Mexican). A1021.0.6. Deluge: escape
on floating building. American Indian (Tlingit, Cahita).
A1021.1. Pairs of animals in ark. Seed of all beings put into ark to escape destruction. See
references to Sintflutsage in A1010; Irish, Hebrew: Genesis 6:19, Babylonian, Hindu; Aztec.
A1021.2. Bird scouts sent out from ark. Irish, Hebrew, Babylonian
A1022. Escape fr om del uge on mount ai n. Greek, Hebrew, Hindu / India, Philippines,
Borneo, West Caroline Is.; Polynesian, Cook Group, Hawaii; N. Am. Indian (Bella-Bella,
Tahltan, Luiseo, Shasta, Blackfoot, Chiricahua Apache, Zui); S. Am. Indian (Araucanian,
Inca, Yunca, (Peru), Caingang, Amazon (only a selection of references for North and South
America.). Australian.
A1023. Escape fr om del uge on t r ee. India; American Indian (Paiute, Plains Cree, Fox,
Catawba, Ackawoi, Caingang, Guayaki, Maina); cf. R311. Tree refuge. A1024. Escape from
deluge in cave. Andaman Is.; American Indian (Cheyenne, Arawak, Antis, Yuracare). A1025.
Escape from deluge on island. Society Is. A1026. Escape from deluge on foot. Chinese.
A1027. Rescue from deluge by fish. Hindu, cf. B551. Fish carries man across water.
A1028. Br i ngi ng del uge t o end. A1028.1. Trickster sticks spear in ground and leads wa-
ter to sea, ending deluge. S. Am. Indian (Chaco). [This is similar to the widespread Himalayan
myth of a great flood in a valley or from a pond ended by a deity cutting the mountains to let
the flood escape (Kashmir, Kashgar, Kathmandu, Eastern Nepal).
18
A1028.2. Birds fill sea
with dirt and overcome flood. S. Am. Indian (Caingang).
A1029. Mi scel l aneous A1029.3. Escape from deluge in pot or jar. S. Am. Indian
(Chiriguano, Guarayu). A1029.4. Flood: refuge in huge gourds with seven rooms in each. In-
dia. A 1029.5. Escape from deluge in box or basket. American Indian (Thompson River,
Apache, Guarayu, Cubeo, Chaco. A1029.6. Survivors of flood establish homes. S. Am. Indian

18
See Allen 1997.
234
(Chiriguano).
Ot her worl d cat ast rophes: Fire, winter, etc.:
A1030. World-fire. A conflagration destroys the earth. Iceland, Greek, Lithuanian, Jewish,
Babylonian, Siberian, Hindu / Indian, Chinese; Maori; N. Am. Indian, S. Am. Indian.
A1035. Quenching the world-fire. A1035.1. Rain invoked to destroy world-fire. A1040. Con-
tinuous winter destroys the race. A1046. Continuous world-eclipse. India; S. Am. Indian.

The motif of actual descent from heaven or from a high mountain is often
connected with that of a primordial flood that wiped out all early humans.
19
It is best
known from the Biblical story of Noahs flood and from the ancient Mesopotamian
Gilgamesh epic (Utanapishtims tale, tablet XI),
20
the oldest attested written version
in world literature.
21
The early Indian version telling of the flood of Manu
22
is found
in a later Vedic text, the atapatha Brhmaa only; however, is of the same time pe-
riod as that of the Hebrew Bible.
All these versions agree in that a great flood covered all lands and only a few
humans survived on a boat. When the flood receded it got stuck on a certain moun-
tain: Ararat in the Caucasus, Mt. Niir in eastern Mesopotamia, the northern moun-
tains (Himalaya) in the atapatha Brhmaa or later, as Naubandhana mountain tying
up the boat, in S. Kashmir. The survivors then stepped down from the mountain to
repopulate the earth. This congruence of tales has led to widespread speculation,
which are usually based on limited comparisons only. However, from the point of
view of Laurasian mythology, these three tales would merely constitute other exam-
ples derived from the secondary Laurasian sub-region of the Greater Near East.
The Biblical version stresses the flood as punishment for an evil deed. Like-
wise, the Mesopotamian gods grew restless because of the constant noise of the bus-
tling humans and decided to kill them.
23
The element of retribution or revenge
24
by a
deity (or outstanding human such as a shaman-like figure) is indeed a frequent and
outstanding feature of this myth wherever it is found. It may be best summarized by a

19
The flood is just one of the several ways that the early earth and (proto-)humans have been wiped out
several times (Meso-America), or will be wiped out in the future: by water, ice, fire, wind, devouring,
etc. See the discussions in Dundes 1988; Day 1984: 400 sqq.; Yamada 2003 (especially on S. China
and S.E. Asia).
20
Itself adapted from the myth of Atraasis (or Ziusudra), a Sumerian text translated from the Ak-
kadian, see Kovacs 1985: 97 n. 1.
21
Heidel 1963, Gardner and Maier 1984, Kovacs 1985, Dalley 1989, etc. Detailed version by Petti-
nato 1992, with the first complete translation of new materials, discovered in a royal tomb in 1999 by
the Italian archaeological mission at Me-Turan, between Djala and Tigri. It has a new end of the Gil-
gamesh saga, of c. 1700 BCE, much older than the Ninive text. Pettinato has been publishing on the
new texts since 2001.
22
For recent work on the flood myth, see Gonda 1978; Etter 1989; Magnone 1999: 125-136, 2000:
233-244.
23
Atraasis II SBV [Standard Babylonian Version] iv, Dalley 1989: 23 sqq.
24
For the Pan-Gaean topic of retribution and revenge, cf. Smith 1996: 35, 151 sqq.
235
Polynesian version, that of the Maori:
25

Puta preached the good doctrines to the wicked tribes in the name of Tane. Mataaho or
Matheo was the most obstinate unbeliever of all the skeptical race. Puta prayed to Rangi
(heaven) to upset the earth; then the earth turned upside down
26
and all the people perished in
the deluge. Hence the flood is called overturning of Mataaho.
The Marquesas version of the myth is closest to that of the Bible.
27
However,
there are various versions of the myth with other Polynesians, and even in another
version with the Maori, such as the following contemporary one:
Up to the present time Ranginui, the Sky, has remained separate from his wife, the Earth. But
their love has never diminished
At length, lest all the land be lost, a party of the other children of Ranginui and Papatuanuku
resolved to turn their mother over, so that she and Ranginui should not be always seeing one
anothers grief and grieving more. This was done and is called Te Hurihanga a Mataaho
When Papatuanuku was turned over by Mataaho, Ruaumoko was still at her breast, and he
remained there and was carried to the world below. To keep him warm there he was given
fire. He is the guardian of earthquakes, and the rumblings that disturb this land are made by
him as he walks about.
28

The motif of a great flood is found all over the Laurasian area,
29
according to
S. Thompsons Motif Index (A 1010),
30
from Ireland and Old Egypt to Siberia,
China,
31
India,
32
Indo-China,
33
Indonesia, Polynesia and to the Americas. It is found

25
Tregear 1891: 558, 222. Another Polynesian myth has Tane jumping on heaven until it cracks. For
the Hawaiian version see Beckwith 1987: 315. In some versions, Christian influence is seen. For other
Oceanic versions pp. 315 sqq.
26
As it does, according to Vedic myth, every night; see Kuiper 1983, Witzel 1995-97.
27
Tregear 1891: 560.
28
The myth continues: This is the narrative about the generations of the ancestors of men from the
beginning of the Po, and therefore we, the people of this land, carefully preserved these traditions of
old times as a thing to be taught to the generations that come after us. So we repeat them in our karakia
[invocation] and whenever we relate the deeds of the ancestors from whom each iwi [bone] and fam-
ily is descended, and on other similar occasions.
(http://www.maori.org.nz/korero/?d=page&pid=sp40&parent=36).
29
Though in some areas with its reverse version, that of a flooding caused by a great lake or pond,
that laid the Kathmandu and Kashmir valley dry but briefly flooded nearby areas (See Allen 1997).
30
Thompson 1993, Motif: A1010. Deluge. Inundation of whole world or section. Irish, Greek, Egyp-
tian, Persian, Hindu / India, Chinese, Korean, Indo-Chinese, Indonesian, Philippine (Tinguian), Polyne-
sian (Samoan, Hawaii), Siberian, Eskimo, N.A. Indian (Pima, Walapai, Sia, Hopi, Sinkyone, Calif.
Indian, Maya, Mixtec), S. Am. Indian (Carib, Chibcha, Amazon tribes, Jivaro, Yugua, Cubeo, Aymara,
Zaparoans, Pebans, Bacairi, Nambicuara, Guapor, Caingang, Eastern Brazil).
31
See Yang and An 2005: 74. Mathieu 1989, myths no. 39-41. A new creation of humans occurs
through the marriage of a brother and sister after all humans had been wiped out by a disaster (flood,
fire, snow, etc.); this myth is found with the Han and some 40 other ethnic groups. In some versions,
the first child is abnormal due to a mistake in the marriage procedure (as in Japan), such as a spheri-
cally shaped child, a gourd or stone, all of which has echoes in Indo-Iranian and Japanese myth; see
Yang and An 2005: 68, 73 sq.
32
In a different version found with the Mundas, see Ponette 1968: 99: a rain of fire sent as punishment
236
among the Inuit, North, Central and South American tribes, including those of the
Amazon and the now exterminated Neolithic Selknam hunter and gatherers of Tierra
del Fuego. The latter have transmitted, along with the now exterminated Yamana
tribe, the myth about a flood
34
that covered all the land, except for five mountains
(just as in a Navajo tale, which ironically comes from a different language group, the
non-Amerindian Na-Dene). It is an example of ultima Thule tales that are not likely to
have been transmitted by diffusion from the Maya or Inca civilizations.
35

Once, when spring was approaching, an Ibis was seen flying over someones hut and people
shouted the Ibises are flying. Spring is here. ... However, the Ibis herself ... took offense at
all that shouting, and, in revenge, let it snow so hard and long that the whole earth was blan-
keted. The sun came out, the snow melted, and the earth was flooded. People hurried to their
canoes, but only the very lucky reached one or another of the five mountain peaks that re-
mained above the waters. When the flood subsided, these came down, rebuilt their huts along
the shore, and ever since that time, women have been ruled by men.
36

In short, the following main motifs are found in the Laurasian area:
(1) General flood covers all except a mountain
(2) Flood caused by gods or superior beings: escape in a gourd, boat, pot, ark; on a tree, on a
mountain
(2a) Flood as punishment, as revenge for injury
(3) Flood by breaking forth of springs, of vault of heaven, rain, etc.
(4) Flood from fluids of the body (tears, urine, blood).

Based on incomplete evidence, I have previously claimed that the myth was
missing in Africa and Australia.
37
The handbooks provide almost exclusively Laura-
sian entries: Stith Thompsons Motif Index (A 1010); Frazers large collection of
flood myths seemed to indicate that it is absent in Africa and China,
38
(and Dundes
like most mythologists since Frazer maintains the same,
39
quoting one flood myth
from the Sahel belt of N. Cameroon and one from Australia). Yet, it can be shown
that the few African flood stories known to me then cannot simply be explained, as I
thought then, as intrusions from the Sahel belt or from northern sections of the East

by the supreme god Siboga.
33
See Yamada 2003, where the gourd motif is fairly prominent. The paper contains a careful discus-
sion of various mythemes and subtypes of the flood myth in this area: brother and sister survive the
flood, classified as 1. Primordial flood, 2. Cosmic antagonists, 3. Cosmic flood, 4. Flood caused by
sin. The gourd appears in versions 2 and 4.
34
Gusinde 1931= Campbell I 2: 259.
35
Cf. also the Inca tale reported at Barber & Barber 2004: 202sq. = Sullivan 1996: 16. It dates back (in
two versions) to the 16th century. See further Bierhorst 1988: for Guyana 79 sq; for the Gran Chaco
142 sq., for Tierra del Fuego 164 sq.
36
Gusinde 1931, Wilbert 1977: 25-30.
37
Witzel 2001. Cf. also Yamada 2003: 1.
38
See Dundes 1988: 115, Yamada 2003.
39
Dundes 1988: 2.
237
African Highway that is, the Savanna and Steppe belt stretching from Uganda /
Kenya to S. Africa. Nor are the Australian flood myths to be derived from missionary
tales, such as the Aranda myth in Dundes book clearly is, at least in its current form
that has included Noahs ark.
40

4. A comparison of Gondwana and Laurasian Flood
myths
Table 10.1. A comparison of Gondwana and Laurasian Flood myths
Gondwana flood myths Laurasian flood myths
(1) General flood covers all except a mountain
Gondwana myths: Pygmy, Melanesia, Australia.
Near East, India, Siberia, Taiwan, S.E. Asia,
Americas, etc.
(2) Flood as retribution by god(s) / spirits & de-
struction of humans: Melanesia, Andaman Isl.,
Africa
Near East, Polynesia, Americas, etc.
Escape by boat (worldwide)
(2a) as retribution for killing of culture hero /
rainbow snake: Mel., Aus.

(2b) by mistake or spell of rainmaker / rain-
bow snake, some humans eaten by snake:
Aus. only
cf. rainbow after flood (Hebrew Bible)
(2c) as retribution for other mistakes: Melane-
sia, Australia
human noise, etc.
(3) Flood from vessel, calabash, water / honey
bag: Australia, Africa
by rain (Near East, etc,), overturning of heaven /
earth (Polynesia)
(4) Flood caused by someones wounds or sores:
Australia, Africa
from fluids of the body

In sum, both the Laurasian and the Gondwana flood myths share the topic of
retribution by a divine or superior human being. It often is caused by some sort of
mistake of one or more early humans and executed by excessive rain. Some people
escape by float or boat, usually to one or more high mountains. In some cases, a new
race of humans evolves from the saved primordial persons. The motif of revenge for
bodily harm, however, is limited to the Gondwana area, as are the motifs of the spell
of a rainmaker or the killing of the Rainbow Snake.
Finally, it is instructive to compare the positioning of the flood myth in Laura-
sian and Gondwana myths / story line.

40
Erich Kolig in: Dundes 1988: 241 sqq.
238
Table 10.2. Combined table of Laurasian and Gondwana Flood myths
Gondwana mythology Laurasian mythology
Creation from nothing, chaos, etc.
earth, heaven, sea preexist Father Heaven / Mother Earth created
Hi gh God in / toward heaven, (Fat her ) Heaven engenders:
sends down his son, totems, etc. two generations (Titans / Olympians):
Four (five) generations / ages
heaven pushed up, sun released
current gods defeat / kill predecessors
killing the dragon / sacred drink
to cr eat e humans: from tree / clay humans: somat i c descendants of (sun) god
they show hubr i s they (or a god) show hubr i s
are punished by a f l ood are punished by a f l ood
Trickster deities bring culture Trickster deities bring culture
humans spread, emergence of nobles
local tribes local history begins
final destruction of the world
new heaven and earth emerge

The position of the flood myth seems best located in Gondwana myths as a
punishment of or revenge against early humans for their hubris or transgressions. In
Laurasian myths, this is positioned after the creation of the world and the preparation
of the world for (human) habitation. It functions as an interlude in the continuing
creation of humans and of culture. In Gondwana myths, the original creation is miss-
ing, and humans are created by a High God or his son. Importantly, both myth fami-
lies frequently share the motif of human hubris as the cause of the flood.
In sum, the flood motif is wide-spread and universal.
41
In view of major simi-
larities, we have to regard the Flood Myth as an early myth that is indeed pan-human
and that belongs to the Pan-Gaean period, before the expansion of Homo Sapiens out
of East Africa. It must have been taken over from the original tales of the African
Eve.
If so, both the Laurasian and the Gondwana (African, Australian etc.) flood
myths go back to a time well before the last Ice Age. Consequently, naturalistic ex-
planations must be excluded, such as a flood caused by the meltdown of the great ice
shields, or the recently popular story of the fairly quick flooding of the Black Sea out
of the Mediterranean. It also means that we can safely exclude diffusion from Near
Eastern (Mesopotamian) origins, a theory that was popular earlier on.
42
There have

41
For a fairly comprehensive listing see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html.
42
Keller 1955, 1956. Or the recent N.W. coast Amerindian theories of an Ice age refuge and conse-
quent meltdown, not to speak of more esoteric explanations such as that of an astronomical myth,
found with the Inca (W. Sullivan 1996). A similar kind of mythological explanation would provide for
a big flood in the subterranean (= heavenly) ocean of night (cf. the myth of the suns progress through
the underground waters in Egypt, etc.); or a flood in the yearly night, at the time of winter solstice, if
the Milky Way would stop turning: it would remain flattened out as ocean surrounding and flooding
the world, see illustrations in Witzel 1984.
239
been innumerable other, often quite fanciful explanations of this myth, ranging from a
diffusion of the Biblical or Mesopotamian motif
43
to such inventive psychological
explanations such as that of the late A. Dundes connecting mens wish to give birth
and the salty floods with a nightly vesical dream, an urge to urinate.
44

Instead, a pre-existing (Pan-Gaean) flood story has been intelligently inserted
into the structure of Laurasian mythology. This took place at a node in the storyline
where it does not disturb its flow. Instead, it dovetails well with the separate myth of a
(3 or 4-fold) re-creation of the world and the re-emergence of humans as told in
Meso- / South American and Eurasian mythology.
Employing this example, we can further extrapolate how Laurasian mythology
developed out of earlier forms of Gondwana mythologies. It appears that Laurasian
mythology is just one offshoot of an earlier form that was close to the various Gond-
wana mythologies. Comparing them and Laurasian mythology, we can try to establish
their common ancestor that was prevalent long before the exodus from Africa, in
other words, at the time of the African Eve.

It now is obvious that that my original claim (2001) of a purely Laurasian origin of
the flood myth was not correct, based as it was, on limited evidence only,
45
and that
we have to rethink the problem. Importantly for the Laurasian theory, this apparent
setback is not as crucial as it may look initially. Like any developing theory, the pre-
sent one, too, will initially contain a few items that are unimportant, insufficient to
sustain the theory, or that are just plainly wrong. As Ragin
46
has it
... most interesting findings usually result from ... hypothesis formation based on preliminary
data analyses. In other words, most hypotheses and concepts are refined, often reformulated,
after the data have been collected and analyzed.
Initial examinations of data usually expose the inadequacy of initial theoretical
formulations, and a dialogue, of sorts, develops between the investigators conceptual
tools for understanding the data and the data analysis itself. The interplay between
concept formulation and data analysis leads to progressively more refined concepts
and hypotheses. Preliminary theoretical ideas may continue to serve as guides, but
they are often refined or altered, sometimes fundamentally, in the course of the analy-
sis.
The case of the flood myth belongs to the latter category, that of refinement of
theoretical concepts, of reformulation after the data have been collected and ana-
lyzed. Though it is present in many, if not most Laurasian mythologies as part of its
original story line, it apparently did not originate with the ancient Laurasian shamans.
It seems to be much older and it was artfully incorporated, as a popular motif that

43
See Habilitationsschrift by A. Etter 1989, and other Indologists such as Gonda, Magnone 1999,
2000, etc.
44
Dundes 1988: 151-165.
45
Stith Thompson: A 1010: Melanesian, Australian, African.
46
Ragin 1987: 164-5; cf. p. 55.
240
could be used to explain many things that have gone wrong (see the Biblical or Ya-
mana myths).
However, this re-adjustment of the theory also means that the Laurasian theory
itself cannot be contradicted simply by the appearance of these African and Australian
motifs. It merely has to be fine-tuned and amended.
Bibliography
Allen, N.J., 1997, And the lake drained away: An essay in Himalayan comparative mythology, In:
Mandala and landscape, Macdonald, A.W., ed., New Delhi: D.K. Printworld. pp. 435-451.
Barber, E.W. & Barber, P.T., 2004, When they severed earth from sky: how the human mind shapes
myth, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Baumann, H., 1936, Schpfung und Urzeit der Menschen im Mythos der afrikanischen Vlker, Berlin:
Dietrich Reimer.
Beckwith, M.W., 1987 [1940], Hawaiian Myth. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Bierhorst, J. 1988, The Mythology of South America, New York: William Morrow.
Campbell, J., 1988-1989 [1983], Historical Atlas of World Mythology. Vol. I. The way of the animal
powers. Part 1: Mythologies of the primitive hunter and gatherers. Part 2: Mythologies of the
great hunt,; Vol. II. The way of the seeded earth. Part 1. The sacrifice; Part 2. Mythologies of
the primitive planters: The Northern Americas; Part 3. Mythologies of the primitive planters:
the middle and southern Americas, New York: Harper & Row.
Dalley, S., 1989, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh and others, Oxford: Ox-
Day, M.S., 1984, The many meanings of myth. Lanham, New York and London: University Press of
America.
Doniger, W., 1991, Review of: C. Ginsburg, Deciphering the Witches Sabbath, New York: Pantheon
Books in: The New York Times Book Review (July 14, 1991): 3, 26.
Doniger, W., 1998, The implied Spider. Politics and Theology in Myth. New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press.
Dundes, A., 1988, The Flood Myth, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Endicott, P., et al., 2003, The Genetic Origins of the Andaman Islanders, The American Journal Hu-
man Genetics, 72, 6: 1590-1593.
Etter, A., 1989, Die Flut-Sage, Habilitationsschrift: University of Zrich.
Hastings, J., 1928, Encyclopaedia of religion and ethics, edited by James Hastings. With the assistance
of John A. Selbie and other scholars. Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark; New York, Scribner, first
published 1909-1921.
Gardner, J., & Maier, J., 1984, Gilgamesh, with the assistance of R.A. Henshaw, Translated from the
Sn-Leqi-Unninn version, New York: Random House.
Gaster, T.H., 1952 [1958], The oldest stories in the world: originally translated and retold, with com-
ments, New York: Viking Press; Boston: Beacon Press..
Gonda, J., 1978, De Indische zondvloed-mythe, Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akade-
mie van Wetenschappen, Afdeling Letterkunde, NR deel 41, no. 2,: 27-46. [English version in
the Proceedings of the 29th All India Oriental Conference].
Greenberg, J.H., 1971, The Indo-Pacific hypothesis, in Current Trends in Linguistics VIII, Thomas
Sebeok, ed., The Hague: Mouton, pp. 807-871.
Gusinde, M., 1931, Die Feuerland Indianer. Ergebnisse meiner vier Forschungsreisen in den Jahren
1918 bis 1924. Unternommen im Auftrage des Ministerio de Instruccin pblica de Chile; in
drei Bnden herausgegeben von Martin Gusinde. 1. Die Selknam; vom Leben und Denken
eines Jgervolkes auf der grossen Feuerlandinsel. Bd. 2. Die Yamana; vom Leben und
241
Denken der Wassernomaden am Kap Hoorn.Bd. 3., T. 1. Die Halakwulup.
Mdling bei Wien: Verlag der Internationalen Zeitschrift Anthropos. [Trans. by J. Wilbert, 1977,
Folk literature of the Yamana Indians: Martin Gusindes Collection of Yamana Narratives,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Heidel, A., 1946, [1963] The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels. A translation and interpre-
tation of the Gilgamesh Epic and related Babylonian and Assyrian documents. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Howitt, A.W., 1904, The native Tribes of Southeast Australia, London: Macmillan.
Hudjashov, G., et al., 2007, Revealing the prehistoric settlement of Australia, Y-chromosom and
mtDNA analysis, PNAS, 104 (21) (May 22, 2007): 8726-8730.
Isaak, M., 1996-2002, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html. Mirrored from
http://home.earthlink.net/~misaak/floods.htm) 1996-2002, revision of September 2, 2002.
Kamma, F.C.,1979, Religious Texts of the Oral Tradition from Western New-Guinea (Irian Jaya), Part
B: The Threat to Life and its Defense Against Natural and Supernatural Phenomena, Lei-
den: Brill.
Keller, W., 1955, Und die Bibel hat doch recht: Forscher beweisen die historische Wahrheit, Dssel-
dorf: Econ-Verlag, 1955. [English Trans. By W. Neil, 1956, The Bible as history: a confirma-
tion of the Book of Books, New York: W. Morrow].
Kelsen, Hans, 1988, The Principle of Retribution in the Flood and Catastrophe Myths, in: Dundes
1988: 125-149.
Kolig, Erich, 1988, Noahs Ark Revisited: On the Myth-Land Connection in Traditional Australian
Aboriginal Thought, in: Dundes 1988: 241-248.
Kovacs, M.G., 1985, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Kuiper, F.B.J., 1983, Ancient Indian Cosmology, J. Irwin, ed., Delhi: Vikas.
Magnone, P., 1999, Matsyavatara: scenari indiani del diluvio, [Matsyvatra: Indian scenarios of the
flood], In: Atti del Nono Convegno Nazionale di Studi Sanscriti (Genova, 23-24 ottobre 1997,
Saverio Sani and Oscar Botto, eds., Torino: ETS, pp. 125-136.
Magnone, P., 2000, Floodlighting the Deluge: Traditions in Comparison, Studia Indologiczne 7: 233-
244.
Mathieu, R., 1989, Anthologie des mythes et lgendes de la Chine ancienne, Paris: Gallimard.
Pettinato, G., 1992, La saga di Gilgamesh, Milano: Rusconi.
Ponette, P., 1968, ed. and trans. of: Menas Ooa, Siboga. Oo ea ea bogko. Singbonga
and the Spirit World of the Mundas. Ranchi: Catholic Press.
Ragin, F., 1987, The Comparative Method. Moving beyond qualitative and quantitative strategies,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Smith, W.R., 1996 [1930], Aborigine Myths and Legends, London: Random House.
Sullivan, W., 1996, The Secret of the Incas. Myth, astronomy, and the war against time, New York:
Three Rivers Press.
Thangaraj, K., 2003, Genetic Affinities of the Andaman Islanders, a Vanishing Human Population,
Current Biology 13 (January 21, 2003): 86-93.
Thompson, S.,1932-1936, Motif Index of folk-literature. A classification of narrative elements in folk-
tales, ballads, myths, fables, mediaeval romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books, and local
legends, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. [2nd ed. 1966; computer file,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press / Clayton: InteLex corp. 1993].
Tregear, E., 1891, The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary, Wellington: Lyon and Blair, (repr.
Oosterhout: Anthropological Publications, 1969).
Usher, T., 2002, The origin of the Tasmanian languages, Mother Tongue VII, pp. 65-84.
van Binsbergen, W., 2006, Mythological Archaeology. Situating sub-Saharan African cosmogonic
myths within a long-range intercontinental comparative perspective, In: Proceedings of the
Pre-Symposium of RHIN and 7th ESCA Harvard-Kyoto Round Table, Published by the Re-
search Institute for Humanity and Nature (RHIN), ed. Toshiki Osada, Kyoto: RHIN, pp. 319-
349.
Wilbert, J., 1977, Folk literature of the Yamana Indians: Martin Gusindes collection of Yamana nar-
242
ratives, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wilbert, J., 1975, Folk literature of the Selknam Indians: Martin Gusindes collection of Selknam nar-
ratives. Los Angeles: University of California Press. [see: Gusinde, M.].
Witzel, M., 1984, Sur le chemin du ciel, Bulletin des tudes indiennes, 2: 213-279.
Witzel, M., 1995, Looking for the heavenly casket, Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 1.2.
Witzel, M., 1996, Looking for the heavenly casket, Fs . P. Thieme, Sudien zur Indologie und
Iranistik, 20: 531-544 [expanded version].
Witzel, M., 2001, Comparison and Reconstruction: Language and Mythology, Mother Tongue VI ,
pp. 45-62.
Wurm, S.A., 1979, History of Australian Languages, in: Australian linguistic studies, Wurm, S.A.,
ed., 578 sqq. Canberra: Dept. of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian
National University.
Yamada, H., 2003, The Gourd in South Chinese and Southeast Asian Flood Myths, Presentation at
the International Symposium on fudaraku tokai. Nara, July 19-20, 2003.
Yang, L. & An, D. with Jessica Anderson Turner, 2005, Handbook of Chinese Mythology, Santa Bar-
bara: ABC Clio.

243
Chapter 11. Hphaistos vs. Ptah

by Vclav Blaek
1

Abstract. For the Greek theonym Hephaestus, an etymology is proposed to suggest that this god can be
related to the Egyptian god Pta. In a postscript, the analogy is considered with Martin Bernals well-
known, and contested, proposed etymology for the Greek theonym Athena from Egyptian *@t-Nt,
House (Temple) of Neith.
1. Greek theonym
The Greek theonym `/Hfaistoj was known already to Homer.
2
In other Greek dia-
lects other variants appear: Doric `/Afaistoj, Aeolic '/faistoj.
3
The theonym is
attested already in Mycenaean a-pa-i-ti-jo (KN I 588.1),
4
which reflects *'Afastioj
or *'Afaistwn (Aura Jorro 1985: 73). There is also the variant Hfastoj, attested
on the Attic vases.
5

1.1. Burning
There is perhaps the only semantically acceptable internal etymology of the theonym,
viz. its derivation from f lightning, kindling.
6
The relation of the divine smith to
fire is apparent, e.g. in the metonymic use of the name of 'Hfaistoj instead of pr
by Homer:
ka t mcn r sxzVsin flloisin katkaion, splgcna d r mperatej perecon
`Hfastoio

1
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.
2
Cf. Ilias XVIII, 397; VIII, 195 and Odyssea IV, 617 etc.
3
Frisk 1973-1991-1979: I, 646.
4
KN is a standard designation of the tablets in the Linear script B from Knossos.
5
Furne 1972: 336; Chantraine 1968-1980: I, 418.
6
See Herodotus VII, 215 about the lamp-lighting time:
`Ormato dc per lcnwn fj k to stratopdou
and they set forth from the camp about the time when the lamps are lit):
ptw pr I kindle fire, fw I handle (Preller & Robert 1894: 174; see Liddell & Scott 1901: 657;
Frisk 1973-1991-1979: I, 126.
244
These they burned upon the split logs of firewood, but they spitted the inward meats, and
held them in the flames to cook (Ilias II, 425-26; translated by S. Butler 1923-26),
cf. also flx `Hfastoio (Ilias XVII, 88) for fire, nfaistoj fire that is no real
fire (Euripides, Orestes 621). Concerning the hypothetical second component
*aistos, it seems possible to accept the idea forwarded by Carnoy (1957: 69) and to
see here a derivative of the type of *ait
h
tos from Greek aqw I light up, kindle, cf.
aiqoj burning heat, fire.
1.2. Shining Aphrodite
The ugly and lame Hephaestus (see Odyssea VIII, 306-311) had the most charming
wife on the Olympus, Aphrodite. Their marriage is already implicitly mentioned in
Odyssea VIII, 267-70, where the perfidy of Aphrodite with Ares in the house of
Hephaestus is described. Her name, 'Afrodth, Cretan 'Afordit, Cypriotic 'Aforo-
dit, Pamphylian Fordt, has been etymologized in numerous studies.
7
I prefer the
idea proposed by K. Witczak (1993: 118-20) who sees here the compound of *ab
h
or-
/*ab
h
ro- very & *dt shining, hence super-shining, in agreement with one of her
epithets, da bright. Among numerous epithets of Aphrodite, it is possible to find
the information about her power, expressed by the word megqoj greatness, might,
power, when Hesiodus describes Alcmene and compares her with Aphrodite (Hesiod
1983: Shield of Heracles, verse 5).
2. Egyptian origin
The Egyptian origin of the theonym is at least comparably promising .
2.1. Temple in Memphis
In his Historiae, Herodotus (5th century BC) mentioned several times the Temple of
Hephaestus in the Egyptian city of Memphis, the capital of what has been known
since Manetho (3
rd
century B.C.) as the Old Kingdom:

[II, 3.1] kousa d ka lla n Mmfi, lqn j lgouj tosi resi to `Hfastou
I also heard other things at Memphis in conversation with the priests of Hephaestus
[II, 99.4] j d t Mni totJ t prtJ genomnJ basili crson gegonnai t
pergmnon, toto mn n at plin ktsai tathn tij nn Mmfij kaletai, ... toto
d to `Hfastou t rn drsasqai n at, n mga te ka xiaphghttaton
Then, when this first king Min had made dry land of what he thus cut off, he first founded in
it that city which is now called Memphis, ... and secondly, he built in it the great and most
noteworthy temple of Hephaestus.

7
These studies are summarized and briefly commented on by Witczak 1993: 115-16.
Blaek Chapter 11: Hephaistos versus Ptah
245
2.1.1. Pta
Apparently, Herodotus Hephaestus from Egyptian Memphis was the Egyptian god
Ptah, because it is this god which is the main patron of the city and had a big temple
here. It was only Cicero in his De Natura Deorum (III, 22.55f), who unambiguously
identified Vulcan, the Roman counterpart of Hephaestus, with the Egyptian god Ptah:
Volcani item complures: primus Caelo natus, ex quo et Minerva Apollinem eum cuius in tu-
tela Athenas antiqui historici esse voluerunt, secundus Nilo natus, Phthas ut Aegyptii appel-
lant, quem custodem esse Aegypti volunt, tertius ex tertio Iove et Iunone, qui Lemni fabricae
traditur praefuisse, quartus Memalio natus, qui tenuit insulas propter Siciliam quae Volcaniae
nominabantur.
There are also several Vulcans; the first, the son of the Sky, was reputed the father by Mi-
nerva of the Apollo said by the ancient historians to be the tutelary deity of Athens; the sec-
ond, the son of Nile, is named by the Egyptians Phthas, and is deemed the guardian of Egypt;
the third is the son of Jupiter and Juno, and is fabled to have been the master of a smithy at
Lemnos; the fourth is the son of Memalius, and lord of the islands near Sicily which used to
be named the Isles of Vulcan.
2.1.2. Pataikos
In this regard, it is interesting to note what Herodotus (III, 37.2-3) wrote about the
Phoenician god Pataikos, corresponding with Greek Hephaestus:
j d d ka j to `Hfastou t rn lqe ka poll t glmati kateglase: sti
gr to `Hfastou tgalma tosi Foinikhoisi Patakoisi mferstaton, toj o
Fonikej n tsi prrVsi tn trihrwn perigousi. j dc totouj m pwpe, g dc
shmanw: pugmaou ndrj mmhsij sti. slqe dc ka j tn Kaberwn t rn, j t
o qemitn sti sinai llon ge tn ra: tata dc t glmata ka nprhse poll
kataskyaj
He [= Cambyses] likewise went into the temple of Hephaestus, and made great sport of the
image. For the image of Hephaestus is very like the Pataeci of the Phoenicians, wherewith
they ornament the prows of their ships of war. Of persons have not seen these, I will explain
in a different way - it is a figure resembling that of a pigmy. He went also into the temple of
the Cabiri, which it is unlawful for any one to enter except the priests, and not only made sport
of the images, but even burnt them. (translated by George Rawlinson, cf. Herodotus 1872)
2.2.1. Etymology of Pataikos: making
The Phoenician theonym Pataikos has no parallels in the Semitic pantheon, although
it could be etymologized on the basis of the verb p-t-q: Akkadian patqu to shape,
create, form, particularly to form brick, wall, building, statue, to create heaven,
earth, mankind, also to cast metal, pitqu casting of metal, e.g. pitqu er, kaspi
cast copper, silver;
8
Post-Biblical Hebrew p-t-q to cleave, split, Syriac p-t-q to
cleave, split, break, Arabic f-t-q to tear, rip open, split, yield well.
9

8
Black & Postgate 2000 = CDA 270, 276.
9
See Klein 1987: 537; Takcs 2001: 532.
246
2.2.2. Pataikos: artisans patron
Alternatively the theonym Pataikos can represent an adaptation of the name of one of
the most important Egyptian gods, Pt, patron of artisans, who was worshipped espe-
cially in Memphis,
10
Demotic Pt, Coptic Pta. Significantly, there are the cuneiform
transcriptions of this divine name: Middle Babylonian
m
Si-ip-ta-u = Z3 Pt son of
Ptah and
lu
i-ku-up-ta-a = .t k3 Pt house of the spirit of Ptah, i.e. the sacred
name of Memphis; from the Boazky archive the name of the king Merneptah
m
Mar-
ni-ip-ta = Mry ny Pt beloved by Pta; the latest one, from the Assyrian epoch, is
m
Ip-ti-ar-si-e-u = Pt -r dy-sw
it is Ptah who gave it.
11

It is apparent, the transcriptions from the 2nd mill. BC reflect the vocalization *Pta,
but the Assyrian record from the 1st mill. *Pti is closer to Herodotus Ptaikoj not
only in form, but also in time. The name of the Greek god could ultimately represent
an adaptation of the idiom of the type Egyptian .t Pt house / temple of Ptah,
which may be vocalized as *(t)-Pta-i (*-i is the genitive ending), cf. the name of
the goddess Hathor, Egyptian (from the Pyramid Texts) .t r, lit. house / temple of
Horus, in the New Kingdom the fest, continuing in Coptic Sahidic -at
h
r third
month of the Coptic year, Greek Aqr, Arabic Htr, in contrast to .t W
C
r.t capi-
tal of the Hyksoses, lit. house by the leg, i.e. arm of the river, in Greek trans-
cription Aarij, without any traces of -t-.
12
The preservation of the medial -t- has
been explained variously:

(i) depending on accent
13
or
(ii) in cluster with the following laryngeal.
14

The following development is difficult to reconstruct, perhaps *(t)-Pta-i >
*Hpsta(h)i
o
>*Hp
h
stai
o
>*Hp
h
aist
o
. The epenthesis of this type is known in his-
tory of Egyptian, e.g. Coptic Sahidic noyt, Bohairic nit, Fayyumic nait flour, De-
motic nyt: Middle Egyptian ndy-w flour.
15

2.3. Divine name
The most archaic attestation of the divine name Pt appears in the Pyramid Texts,
namely in the Utterance 573, 1482c:

10
Erman & Grapow 1971 = Wb. I, 565; 329.
11
Vycichl 1983: 166, 517; 1990: 80-81, 179-80, 191.
12
Vycichl 1983: 317, 237.
13
Vycichl 1990: 251.
14
Egberts 1996-97: 159.
15
Erman & Grapow 1971 = Wb. II, 370; Vycichl 1983: 141: *nadyaw > *naydaw.
247
Commend N. to Wr-ps.f, the beloved Ptah, the son of Ptah,
where the epithet wr-ps means greatly noble.
16

2.4. Director
The theonym could be connected with the verb pt- to form, create, according to Er-
man & Grapow 1971 = Wb. (I, 565) attested only in the Greek-Romance period, yet
included in the Dictionary of Middle Egyptian by Faulkner;
17
these attestations con-
tinue in Demotic pt- to carve = sculpter, ciseler = schnitzen, meisseln, Coptic
Sahidic pt-, Bohairic p
h
t- to carve, engrave.
18
Outside of Egyptian Hebrew patt-
to engrave, pitta- engraving, engraved decoration, Jewish Aramaic & Phoenician
pt- engraving seem to be related.
19
But ern (1976: 130) supposed that the late
Egyptian and Coptic verb was borrowed from West Semitic. The examples from other
Semitic languages confirm * in the position of the third radical: Akkadian patu to
puncture, bore through, Qatabanian ft to inscribe, engrave, Sabaic ft decorated
stonework, Mehri (Jahn 1902) fta Loch, Verwundung (Takcs 2001: 532). This
fact represents a very strong argument for its borrowing from a Semitic source charac-
terized by the change * > *. This feature is typical for such languages as Hebrew,
Phoenician or Aramaic. Vycichl (1959: 146) tried to connect the Egyptian verb with
Akkadian patqu to shape, create, form, particularly to form brick, wall, building,
statue, to create heaven, earth, mankind, also to cast metal (Black & Postgate
2000 = CDA 270). From the point of view of semantics this motivation looks very
convincing not only for the verb to carve, engrave, but also for the god who was the
patron of craftsmen. But the difference in the third radical is incompatible with the
idea of common origin. And so from the point of view of historical phonetics the best
etymology comes from connecting the Egyptian verb with Epigraphic South Arabian:
Qatabanian ft- to order, direct, Sabaic ft- to leave the decision to someone, author-
ize; further cf. Himyaritic fata-a to give judgment (Biella 1982: 412), Geez fat-a to
judge, decide, arbitrate (Leslau 1987: 170). Finally, the semantic development from
the meaning to order, direct, judge to the name of the god, who was a universal crea-
tor and demiurg, is quite acceptable.
2.5. Title high priest
The title of Ptahs high priest wr rp(w) -mwt, lit. greatest of the controllers of

16
Translated by Samuel A. Mercer: The Pyramid Texts, New York: Longmans & Green 1952 also
see http://thepyramidtexts.blogspot.com/2007/09/texts-of-miscellaneous-contents_9035.html .
17
Faulkner 1981: 96; cf. also Hannig & Vomberg 1999 = WPS 519; the latter dictionary covers the
Egyptian lexicon for the time interval 2800-950 B.C.
18
Vycichl 1983: 166.
19
Koehler & Baumgartner 2001: 985-86; Ricks 1989: 132.
248
craftsmen (Erman & Grapow 1971 = Wb. I, 565; 329), provides evidence of a rela-
tion of Pt to craftsmen.
2.6. Big-bellied dwarf
Ptah is associated with the figures of dwarves in workshop scenes from mastaba
tombs in the Old Kingdom. In the Late Period it was probably Ptah who was depicted
as a big-bellied dwarf on magical stelae and as figurines, going back to the association
with the craftsman-dwarves.
20

2.7. Ptas wife
The Egyptian tradition knew the spouse of Ptah. It was the goddess Sm.t, first ap-
pearing already in the Pyramid Texts and attested still in Old Coptic in the form
Sami and in the Greek transcription Petescmij of an Egyptian toponym, lit. that
what was given by Sakhmet (see Vycichl 1983: 203 who proposed the vocalisation
*simat). In Ancient Greek iconography, she was characterized by a lioness head.
Her name was formed from the word sm power, hence powerful. This word also
served as an epithet of the goddess Hathor (Erman & Grapow 1971 = Wb. IV, 249-
50).
3. Pta and Hephaestus compared
The common features of Ptah and Hephaestus and their spouses can be compared in
the following table:

Ptah Hephaestus Paragraph
Name
*(t)-Pta-i > *Hpsta(h)i
o
>*Hp
h
stai
o

>*Hp
h
aist
o

2.2.
Specialization Patron of craftsmen Active craftsman 2.6.
Physical shape Dwarf-like Lame 2.6.; 1.2.
Wife
Sm.t powerful
megqei dat. power 2.7.; 1.2.

Table 11.1. Comparison of Pta and Hephaestus and their spouses

It seems, it is safe to conclude that the theonym Ptah could be adapted in the com-
pound *(t)-Pta-i house of Ptah in Greek already in the 2nd mill. BC not only as
a word, but also with basic features characterizing him and his charming and warlike
wife.

20
On this point, cf. [Jonsson, K.M.], 1998-2008, The Egyptian Gods: their main centers of worship
and some festival days, at: http://www.philae.nu/akhet/NetjeruP.html.
249
Post scriptum in the light of the Black Athena debate
21

The idea of so called Black Athena has been widely discussed. It was originally
proposed by Bernal
22
who tried to etymologize the Greek goddess 'Aqnh (e.g. by
Homer with more archaic counterparts in Doric 'Aqna known from Argos or Phocis
and Mycenaean Atana), on the basis of Egyptian syntagm .t (n) N.t temple of [the
goddess] Neit, used as the sacred name of Sas, the ancient city from the Western
Delta. Bernal (1997a: 91) reconstructed the vocalization *at (Vn) Ni.t. The first
component should be reconstructed as *t, originally contracted from *-wi.t
house.
23

There are really some examples where the final -t in the first component in
compounds is preserved, e.g. .t r, lit. house / temple of Horus (see 2.2.2.
above), furthermore the ancient city from Lower Egypt .t-ry-b house or temple
situated in the middle, known from the Assyrian transcriptions
lu
a-at-a-ri-ba,
lu
a-at-i-ri-bi from the time of Assurbanipal, c. 650 B.C., with a Greek adaptation
recorded by Herodotus (II, 166) in the 5th century B.C. as '/Aqribij, 'Aqribthj
nomj, and finally continuing as Coptic Sahidic Atrpe, Bohairic At
h
rbi.
24

There are also the opposite examples, e.g. .t W
C
r.t capital of the Hyksos, lit.
house by the leg, i.e. arm of the river, in Greek transcription Aarij, without any
traces of -t- (Vycichl 1983: 237), or .t k3 Pt- house of the spirit of Ptah, serving as
the sacred name of Memphis, known from the cuneiform transcription as
lu
i-ku-up-
ta-a and even from the transcription in the Linear script B as ai-ku-pi-ti-yo
25
from
the 13rd cent. B.C.
26

The double reflexes of the final -t in compounds does not have any unambigu-
ous solution. Vycichl (1990: 251) explained it without reference to the position of
accent in old compounds, while Egberts (1996-97: 159) mentioned that old -t is pre-
served only in the sandhi cluster with the following laryngeal.
The second component of the compound, the theonym N(y).t, is known from

21
I am indebted to Wim van Binsbergen for extensive critical comments (including the parallel be-
tween my Hephaistos etymology and Bernals Athena etymology) which prompted the present Post
scriptum. However, the responsibility for this part of my text, as for the rest, is exclusively my own.
22
Cf. Bernal 1996-97a: 1-94 with older literature; cf. van Binsbergen 1996-97 (now in press as van
Binsbergen 2010) and Egberts 1996-97, who rejected Bernals proposal.
23
Vycichl 1990: 178.
24
Vycichl 1983: 18; 1990: 182.
25
The Greek toponym Aiyu:o is generally considered to derive from this name.
26
Vycichl 1983: 5 reconstructed the first component as *-yi.t, easy derivable from *-wi.t recon-
structed by him in Vycichl 1990: 178.
250
the Middle Kingdom. In the time of the New Kingdom the spelling Nr.t also ap-
peared.
27
The vocalization of the goddess name is preserved in several sources: He-
brew s
e
nat (Genesis 41.45) = Coptic Sahidic Asennet
h
, Asennt
h
wife of Joseph,
reflexing probably the Egyptian female name N-sy Ny.t she belongs to [the goddess]
Neith. Plato (Timaeus 21b) mediated the Greek transcription Nhq, preserving the old
diphthong which was already lost in the transcription Ntwkrij of the name of the
queen N.t qr.t from the 6th century B.C., recorded by Manetho in the 3rd cent. B.C.
(Vycichl 1983: 17; Waddell 1940).
Combining these sources, it is safe and reasonable to conclude that the Egyp-
tian divine name would be vocalized as *Nyi.t or *N3i.t (it is regularly derivable
from still older *Nri.t, regarding the archaizing New Egyptian spelling). The Ionian-
Attic change * > would regularly transformed it in the form attested by Plato. Al-
though the final -t in the Greek adaptation Nhq of the feminine theonym N(y).t was
preserved, there are many examples of dropping of the final -t in the Greek adapta-
tions.
28

One of Bernals weakest arguments is his explanation of origin of the second
vowel in the theonym *At
h
n(i). In the compound .t N(y).t there is no space for any
middle vowel, cf. .t r, .t-ry-b, discussed above. Bernal solves this puzzle by the
genitive particle n, correctly ny in m. and n.t in f., vocalized as *niy-u and *ni.t-u re-
spectively (Vycichl 1983: 134), from the Middle Kingdom already without final *-u.
But there are no traces of the prothetic vowel, neither in the genitive particle nor in
the divine-name, as Egberts mentions (1996-97, 159). The genitive particle connect-
ing two feminines should also be in agreement with the same gender. So the whole
formation could be reconstructed as *(yi)t-nit-N3it around 2000 B.C., in the 1st
millennium B.C. probably *(t)ni(t)Nyit.
Summing up,

on the one hand, the goddess Neith really represents a functional counterpart
of Greek *At
h
n(i), which makes Bernals hypothesis attractive and possibly
an important support in argumentation about the proposed Egyptian origin of
the Greek theonym `/Hfaistoj,
yet, on the other hand, in the context of a specifically philological argument
Bernals hypothesis cannot be accepted without new arguments being ad-
vanced towards its linguistic vindication.
29

27
Erman & Grapow 1971 = Wb. II, 198.
28
Cf. the adaptations attested in the 5th cent. B.C.: cmya (Herodotus II, 69) crocodile < Egyptian
f. mz.t id. (Erman & Grapow 1971 = Wb. III, 96) or kmmi gum (Herodotus II, 86, 96) < Egyptian
qmy.t id. (Erman & Grapow 1971 = Wb. V, 39) - see Hemmerdinger 1968: 243; McGready 1968: 249-
50; Fournet 1989: 62, 68.
29
Still less convincing is the attempt to etymologize the name of the temple of Athena Parqenn at
the citadel at Athens on the basis of the Egyptian place name Pr-tn, lit. house of glitter, attested in
Sas (Bernal 1996-97a: 95-97). It would be rash to claim that the word is without any satifactory ety-
mology. It was Eric Hamp 1972 who separated it from the word parqnoj virgin and proposed an
251

Perhaps to be preferred over Bernals hypothesis is the Semitic etymology of the
name of the goddess *At
h
n or urrian etymology of the city-name *At
h
ni, both
discussed in Blaek 2007.
References
Aura Jorro, F., 1985-93, Diccionario micnico, I-II. Madrid: Consejo superior de investigaciones
cientficas.
Bernal, M., 1996-1997a, Responses to Black Athena: general and linguistic issues, Talanta 28-29: 65-
98.
Bernal, M., 1996-1997b, Response to Arno Egberts, Talanta 28-29: 165-171.
Biella, J.C., 1982, Dictionary of Old South Arabic: Sabean Dialect, Chico: Scholar Press.
Black, J., George, A., and Postgate, N. (eds.), 2000, A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian [CDA], Wies-
baden: Harrassowitz.
Blaek, V., 2007, Theonymica Helleno-Semitica II: Pallas At
h
n / At
h
n Potnia Virgin or Lady?,
DO-SO-MO, Fascicula Mycenologica Polona 7: 161-176.
Butler, S., 1923-26, The Iliad of Homer (XIII) & The Odyssey (XV), rendered into English prose. In:
The Schrewsbury edition of works of S. Butler, ed. by H.J. Jones & A.T. Bartholomew. Lon-
don: Cape.
Carnoy, A., 1957, Dictionnaire tymologique de la mythologie grco-romaine, Louvain: Universitas.
ern, J., 1976, Coptic Etymological Dictionary, Cambridge: University Press.
Chantraine, P., 1968-80, Dictionnaire tymologique de la langue grecque, I-IV. Paris: Klincksieck.
Cicero, 1972, De Natura Deorum, H. Rackham, ed. and trans., Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University
/ London: Heinemann.
Egberts, A., 1996-1997, Consonants in collision,: Neith and Athena reconsidered, Talanta 28-29: 149-
163.
Erman, A. and Grapow, H., (eds)., 1971, Wrterbuch der gyptischen Sprache, [Wb] I-VI, Berlin:
Akademie-Verlag.
Euripides, The Orestes, ed. by N. Wedd. Cambridge: University Press.
Faulkner, R., 1981, A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian, Oxford: Griffith Institute.
Fournet, J.L., 1989, Les emprunts du grec lgyptien, BSLP 84/1: 55-80.
Frisk, H., 1973-1991-1979, Griechisches etymologisches Wrterbuch, I-III, Heidelberg: Winter (2nd
edition for I and III, 3rd edition for II).
Furne, E.I., 1972, Die wichtigsten konsonantischen Erscheinungen des Vorgriechischen, The Hague -
Paris: Mouton.
Hamp, E.P., 1972, APENO and its cognates, in: Homenaje Antonio Tovar, Madrid: Editorial
Gredos, pp. 177-180.
Hannig, R. and Vomberg, P., (eds.), 1999, Wortschatz der Pharaonen in Sachgruppen, [WPS], Mainz:
von Zabern.
Hemmerdinger, B., 1968, Noms communs grecs dorigine egyptienne, Glotta 46: 238-247.
Herodotus, 1963, Historin, B.A. Van Groningen, ed., Leiden: Brill.
Herodotus, 1862, History, edited and translated by G. Rawlinson et al., London: Murray.
Hesiod, 1983, Theogony, Works and days, Shield, translated by A.N. Athanassakis. Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press.
Homrou ep, 1942, Ilias & Odysseia, Leipzig: Insel Verlag.
Jahn, Alfred, 1902, Die Mehri-Sprache in Sdarabien: Texte und Wrterbuch, Vienna: Hlder for
Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, Sdarabische Expedition, Band III.

ingenious etymology from *p
h
art
h
en- < *b
h
3
h
-en- high hill citadel (cf. German Berg vs. Burg).
252
Klein, E., 1987, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language, New York -
London: Macmillan.
Koehler, L. and Baumgartner, W., 2001, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, Lei-
den-Boston-Kln: Brill.
Leslau, W., 1987, Comparative Dictionary of Ge
C
ez (Classical Ethiopic), Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Liddell, H.G. and Scott, R., 1901, A Greek-English Lexicon, 8th edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
McGready, A.G., 1968, Egyptian words in the Greek Vocabulary, Glotta 46: 247-254.
Mercer, S. A., 1952, The Pyramid Texts, New York: Longmanns & Green.
Plato, 1975, Plato in twelve volumes, IX: Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles, with an
English translation by R.G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge (Mss.) Harvard
University Press / London: Heinemann.
Preller, L. & Robert, C., 1894, Griechische Mythologie, 4th edition, Berlin: Weidmann.
Ricks, S.D., 1989, Lexicon of Inscriptional Qatabanian, Roma: Pontificio Istituto Biblico.
Schrader, O. and Nehring, A., 1917-1929, Reallexikon der indogermanischen Altertumskunde, I-II.
Berlin - Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter.
Solmsen, F. (ed.), et al., 1990, Hesiodi Theogonia, Opera et dies, Scutum, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Takcs, G., 2001, Etymological Dictionary of Egyptian, Vol. II: b-, p-, f-. Leiden-Boston-Kln: Brill.
van Binsbergen, W., 1996-1997, Black Athena ten years after: towards a constructive re-assessment,
Talanta 28-29: 11-64.
van Binsbergen, W., in press (2010), ed., Black Athena comes of age, Berlin etc.: LIT.
Vycichl, W., 1959, gyptisch-semitische Anklnge, Zeitschrift fr gyptische Sprache 84: 145-147.
Vycichl, W., 1983, Dictionnare tymologique de la langue copte, Leuven-Paris: Peeters.
Vycichl, W., 1990, La vocalisation de la langue gyptienne, I: La phontique,. Caire: Institut franais
darcheologie orientale du Caire (Bibliothque dtude, T. 16).
Waddell, W. G. 1940. Manetho, with an English translation. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press.
Witczak, Krzysztof T. 1993. Greek Aphrodite and her Indo-European origin. In: Miscellanea Linguisti-
ca Graeco-Latina, ed. by Lambert Isebaert. Namur: Socit des tudes classiques, 115-123.

253
Chapter 12. Can Japanese mythology
contribute to comparative Eurasian
mythology?

by Kazuo Matsumura
1

Abstract: Comparison of classical Japanese mythology and mythologies of various other Eurasian
countries have been conducted by many eminent scholars: In Japan, by the late Taryo Obayashi, Atsu-
hiko Yoshida, and Hitoshi Yamada; in Europe, by late Nelly Naumann; and in the United States by
Michael Witzel. After introducing the contributions of these scholars, I indicate a connecting threads to
the following topics of classical mythology and history of Japan usually discussed separately; Jomon
clay figurines; Flood myth and incest; the World Parent Izanagi and Izanami; Sun Goddess Amaterasu
and her brother Susanowo; the Hidden Sun motif; Amaterasu as a Virgin Mother Goddess; Himiko, the
Queen of Yamatai Kingdom; the Hime-hiko ruling system; Onari-kamiin southern islands of Okinawa;
male-female leaders of Japanese new religions. As mentioned, parallel examples of these motifs could
be found not only in China, but in Taiwan, Siberia, Mongolia, Oceania, Southeast Asia, and even in
North America. Tracing the origin of motifs is brilliantly conducted by the scholars mentioned above.
What I am intending here is slightly different. I am more interested in transformation: how various
motifs coming from abroad were organized as the classical Japanese cultural system of which mythol-
ogy is an important element; what was the core of the idea. In my opinion, these topics could be classi-
fied into the following categories:
1. Brother-sister marriage: Izanagi and Izanami; Flood myth and incest; Amaterasu and Susanowo.
2. Brother-sister antagonism: the Hidden Sun motif.
3. Brother-sister rulership: Himiko; Hime-hiko system; Onari-kami in Okinawa; male-female lead-
ers of new religions.
4. Mother-Son deities and / or Virgin Mother Goddess: Amaterasu and Hono-ninigi; Athena and
Erichthonios; Mary and Jesus.
5. Corn mother: Amaterasu and Hono-ninigi. What is most notable is the brother-sister combina-
tion.
This combines separation and integration of two spheres: sacred and profane (or secular). The Mother-
son pair is also prominent and shows the same combination. These two categories may indicate a
strong female principle active in Japan through the ages. As the cases of Athena and Mary show, how-
ever, this combination of sacred (female) and profane (male) is not limited to Japan; under certain con-
ditions, it could occur in other Eurasian mythologies as well.
1. Introduction
Classical Japanese mythology is mainly recorded in the Kojiki (dated to 712 CE) and

1
Wako University, Tokyo, Japan.
254
Nihonshoki (720 CE). The production of these books was inspired by the introduction
of writing and advanced ideas from China regarding technology, agriculture, philoso-
phy, religions (Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism), and politics. Episodes in these
mythological texts show motifs common not only to classical Chinese myths, but also
to various mythologies from other Euro-Asian countries. Since Japan is situated at the
eastern coast of Eurasian continent, it received many cultural influences from
neighboring regions. Bordered on the north by Siberia, on the west by the Korean
peninsula, and on the southwest by southern China and Taiwan, oversea influences
could penetrate in Japan from various directions (Map 1). Yet despite the close prox-
imity of others, the Japanese archipelago has for the most part been inhabited from ca.
10,000 B.C. to the present in relative isolation and safety from more powerful foreign
invaders. Thus, the archaeological remains from the oldest pre-agricultural Stone Age
to the Bronze Age, through the Iron Age, down to the more modern historical periods
are well attested. This means that cultural strata discerned in the classical Japanese
mythology can be compared with actual archaeological discoveries which enables the
examination of the validity of mythological traditions.

Fig. 12. 1. East Asia.
The comparison of classical Japanese mythology and mythologies of various
other Eurasian countries has been conducted by many eminent scholars. In Japan,
mythological studies have been conducted by the late Taryo Obayashi (Psproth &
Yamada 2002), Atsuhiko Yoshida (1977), and Hitoshi Yamada (2006). In Europe, the
Matsumura Chapter 12: Japan and Comparative Eurasian Mythology
255
late Nelly Naumann (2000; Matsumura 2006) and in the United States Michael Witzel

(2005) have also closely studied comparative mythology and Japan.
As I mentioned, parallel examples of similar motifs can be found not only in
China, but also in Taiwan, Siberia, Mongolia, Oceania, Southeast Asia, and even in
North America. The scholars mentioned have done brilliant work in tracing the origin
of similar motifs. What I am intending here is slightly different. I am more interested
in transformation:
2
how various motifs coming from abroad were interpreteted as
classical Japanese mythology and what was the core of the idea. Among the contribu-
tors mentioned above, the most ambitious and audacious is doubtlessly Witzel. His
approach is both philological and ethological (Kulturgeschichtlich). Mine is more of a
structural interpretation. I wish to touch upon two topics. One is the myth of the sun
and fire. The other is about the presumed common structure in classical Japanese my-
thology and culture.
2. Myth of the Sun and Fire
Witzels paper (2005) presents excellent cases of parallelism in the mythological
theme concerning sun and fire, all through Europe, India, Southeast Asia, East Asia,
Siberia, North America, Meso-America, and South America. His argument is further
supported by his methodology. Traditionally, in comparative mythology, not enough
attention was paid to rituals. Witzel first compares the Indian pair of myth and ritual
about the emergence of light with the Japanese pair of myth (about the rebirth of the
sun goddess Amaterasu) and ritual (the coronation ritual of the new emperor, Daijo-
sai) about the same genre.
There is no denying that Witzel is on the right track. The myth of the
(re)emergence of light and related ritual must have been part of the large mythological
structure shared by the common Laurasian heritance. After his comparison of India
and Japan, Witzel expands the scope of his inquiry not only to include the Indo-
Europeans, but the East Asians, Siberians, North American natives, Meso-Americans,
and South American natives as well. What Witzel (2005: 50) suggests about the future
directions of research about mythology is absolutely right, namely, that the
(Re)creation of sunlight, descent from solar ancestors, emergence of death, and the great
flood, all brought together in one single, long myth.
Among these various people, the basic frame is identical, while the differences are
superficial.
Here I will pay more attention to these superficial differences and try to avoid
the central issue. The reason is twofold. One, I am not capable of discussing the In-
dian material. I am much more comfortable with Japanese mythology proper. Thus
my comparison is between the Japanese myth of the Hidden Sun and similar myths

2
My previous papers touching upon this issue are: Matsumura 1996, 1998, 2003, and 2006.
256
about the sun or fire in the circum-pacific area, while the Indic and Indo-European
materials are excluded. The scale is much smaller than the cases discussed by Witzel.
Nevertheless, interesting insights can also be learned even if my comparison must
stay at the superficial level.
Let me first summarize the main plot of Japanese version of the Hidden Sun
myth. For convenience, the summary is divided into five sections (A~E).
A. The first important gods are the couple of Izanagi and Izanami. They are the parents of the
world. The couple was ordered by elder gods to consolidate and fertilize the land from the
chaotic primordial ocean. By sexually uniting on the newly created island, they produced
other islands and a younger generation of gods of various functions. When Izanami gave birth
to the fire god Kagutuchi, she was burnt to death. Izanagi followed his sister / wife to the land
of the dead. His plan however failed. When he returned from the land of the dead, Izanagi pu-
rified himself in a stream. From his eyes were born the solar goddess, Amaterasu and the lunar
god, Tsukuyomi; from his nose was born the violent god Susanowo.
B. The heavenly world was entrusted to Amaterasu, the night to Tsukuyomi, and the ocean to
Susanowo by their father Izanagi. Since Susanowo was unruly, Izanagi ordered his son to be
expelled to the underworld. Susanowo visited his sister Amaterasu under the pretext of saying
farewell. Amaterasu however suspected her brothers hidden intention and confronted
Susanowo in full armor. Susanowo proposed to make an oath and bear children. In his opinion
that act would prove his innocence. The two then exchanged personal items (Amaterasu, jew-
els and Susanowo, a sword). Then each chewed the item and spat the pieces into air. Then
from Amaterasus jewels, three goddesses appeared, and from Susanowos sword, five gods.
C. Thus, Susanowo declared his innocence and stayed at his sisters Heavenly domain. How-
ever, he engaged in several misdeeds and in anger Amaterasu hid herself in the Rock Cave of
Heaven. This produced universal darkness. Gods and goddesses gathered and discussed how
to restore the world. The solution was to have Ame-no-Uzume, Dancing Goddess of Heaven,
perform an erotic dance in front of the cave. This caused great laughter among the deities, and
Amaterasu, being curious, opened the door a little and peaked out. Then Tajikarao, the God of
Might, took her by the hand and pulled her out of the cave.
D. Susanowo was expelled from the Heaven and descended to the earthly land. On the way, he
murdered the Food Goddess Ukemochi. Among other crops that grew from her corpse were
rice, wheat, and beans and these were eventually given to Amaterasu.
E. One of Amaterasus grandchilden was elected as a ruler of the earthly world and with the
accompaniment of five powerful gods and royal regalia given by Amaterasu, this divine child,
Hono-ninigi, descended and became the ancestor of the Imperial line.
Here, we may discern the following elements:

1. the hiding of the sun;
2. an erotic dance;
3. laughter; and
4. a trick.

I shall list the myth of the hidden sun or the myth of fire-theft among the people of the
circum-Pacific regions. The examples of myths from Northeastern Asia are found
among the Ainu, Koryak, and Chukchee. The examples of myths from Northwestern
America are found among the Tlingit, Thimshian, Kwakiutl, Sinkyone, and Pomo.
257
Numbers one to four in square brackets indicate the four elements above. Numbers
with parenthesis are ones that are somewhat unclear or doubtful.
Ainu: The Sun Goddess was abducted by the Demon. The earth became en-
tirely dark, and many gods and people died. Aynu-rak-kur, the Hero, was asked by
gods to rescue the Sun Goddess. He together with the Mountain God of Kemushiri
went down into the Underworld, conquering the Demon and saved the Sun Goddess
(Kindiachi 1936: 130-144). [1]
Koryak: Raven-man swallowed the sun and kept it in his mouth. Big-Ravens
daughter tickled him until he laughed, opened his mouth, and let the sun fly out. Then
daylight appeared again (Jochelson 1904: 423). [1, 3, 4]
Chukchee 1: The Raven wanted to obtain the sun, which was in the possession
of the Demon. The Raven went to a distant country and found the house of the chief.
In that house, sun, moon, and stars were kept sewed up in black walrus-hide, like
large balls. The Raven seduced the daughter of the Demon and successfully obtained
the ball of the stars, the ball of the moon, and finally the ball of the sun.
3
[1, 4]
Chukchee 2: In another version, the Creator made the Raven, and bit him to
obtain the light. The Raven gathered various birds. They flew off toward the dawn
and tried to pierce the stone wall of the day with their beaks. At last one bird suc-
ceeded in making a small hole, and the dawn passed through.
4
[1]
Tlingit: There was no light. A chief kept the light in three small boxes. The
chief had a daughter. El, the Hero, could assume any form. He became a tiny piece of
grass, and let the chiefs daughter swallow it when she drank water. Being conceived
in this way, she gave birth to a baby which was in fact El. He kept crying demanding
the three boxes that contained the heavenly lights. When he had the first box, he
opened it, and instantly stars appeared in the sky. Then from the second box, the
moon appeared. When El obtained the last box, he changed himself into a crow and
flew away with the box. Then he gave the sun to the people. After this, El went out to
an island in the middle of the sea. It was in this island that fire was kept. At that time,
people did not have fire. El being dressed in magpie skin snatched a burning brand.
Since the island was so far away, he had to drop the brand, and the sparks were blown
on to the rocks and trees. This is why fire is found in rocks and trees.
5
[1, 4]
Tsimshian: Finding the world always in darkness, the Raven (Giant) went up
to heaven. There he found the daughter of the chief of heaven. When she came close
to a spring, he changed himself into the leaf of a cedar tree and floated on the water.
When the chiefs daughter drank the water, the Raven in the form of a leaf was also
swallowed, thus he succeeded in being born as her child. The child kept crying. He
wanted a box that hung in the chiefs house. Inside the box, the daylight was kept.
The Raven got a hold of the box and then ran away with it. That is how the sun was

3
Bogoras 1902: 627.
4
Bogoras 1902: 640.
5
Golder 1907: 292-293.
258
obtained.
6
[1, 4]
Kwakiutl: Counselor of the World wanted to steal the box containing the sun
from Day Receptacle Woman. He transformed himself into a baby and entered the
womb of the woman. After four days, he was born. The baby cried for the box. As
soon as he was given the box, the Counselor of the World ran away. He then opened
the box, took out the sun and the double-headed serpent mask of the sun. This is how
the world obtained the sun. The mask is the daybreak mask used in the winter dance.
7

[1, 4]
Sinkyone: There was no fire. A child kept crying. People did not know why.
When he grew up, he said he feared the fire although people could not see it. People
searched for it and discovered that the Spider was hiding the fire inside his body.
Coyote gathered many animals. He ordered the animals to do ridiculous things. All
tried hard, but the Spider did not laugh. Finally the Skunk came dancing in with his
tail stuck up. All laughed and the Spider laughed, too. Then fire shot out of his mouth.
Thus the fire was obtained.
8
[1, 2, 3, 4]
Pomo: In olden days, the sun did not move across the heaven. It only rose
above the eastern horizon and sank again. Coyote, wishing to find out the reason, set
out to the east with singers and dancers. They arrived at the home of the Sun people.
The sun was hanging from one of the rafters of the dance-house. The party of the
Coyote entered that house singing and dancing. The Coyote party and the Sun people
danced together. While dancing, the Coyote liberated four mice, and they gnawed the
sun from the rafters. The Coyote and his party brought the sun back to their village.
The people discussed where to situate it and decided to hang it up in the middle of the
sky. Various birds try the task, but none succeeded. When finally the Crows volun-
teered, everyone laughed as they thought the Crows were too slow and too weak for
the task. But after much effort, they accomplished the task and received lots of pre-
sents from people.
9
[1, (2), (3), 4]

Most of these examples belong to cosmogony. They explain how in the primordial
condition the sun was brought to this world through the workings of a cunning Trick-
ster. In these cases, the sun is not deified. It is simply an object. So we may conclude
that while the motif of the acquisition of the sun is identical, there are no parallels in
religious significance between the Japanese Sun Goddess Amaterasu and the exam-
ples discussed above. Still the emphasis on dancing and laughing in the myths sug-
gests that some kind of ritual for the appearance of light and the sun was important
across the entire circum-Pacific area. We must turn our attention to another meaning
of this identical motif.
In the case of the Indian myth concerning the emergence of light, it was the

6
Boas 1916: 60-62.
7
Boas & Hunt 1905: 395-397.
8
Kroeber 1919: 347.
9
Barret 1906: 44-46.
259
Dawn goddess who hid in the cave, and what was released from the cave was a horde
of cows. The solar and fiery aspect of the original myth seems to be weakened here.
However, the myths from Japan and the circum-Pacific region are all about the sun
and/or fire. There is no mention of the dawn nor cows. Is this just a coincidence or is
there a reason?
I think the persistence of the sun / fire element with the accompanying ritualis-
tic elements of dancing and laughing are due to a common environmental factor
which is frequent volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.

Fig 12.2. The Pacific Ring of Fire

The Pacific Ring of Fire (or sometimes called circum-Pacific belt or circum-
Pacific seismic belt) is an area encircling the basin of the Pacific Ocean which fre-
quently has earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Stretching 40.000 km in a horseshoe
shape along the Pacific rim, it is associated with a nearly continuous series of volcanic
belts. The Ring of Fire has 452 volcanoes and is home to over 75% of the worlds
active and dormant volcanoes. In the northern section, the Aleutian Islands, the Kam-
chatka Peninsula, and Japan are included; in the southern portion, the Mariana Is-
lands, the Philippines, Bougainville, Tonga, and New Zealand; New Guinea and the
Indonesian islands of Sumatra / Sumatera, Java, Bali, Flores and Timor lie between
the Ring of Fire and the next most active seismic region, the Alpide belt. Crossing the
Bering Sea, the Ring covers all the western coasts of the North and South Americas
(cf. www. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Ring of Fire ).

260

Fig. 12.3. The geographical distribution of elements of the myth of the hidden sun

Due to the dark sky and subsequent famine caused by huge volcanic eruptions,
the people from these regions must have remembered these horrible memories in the
form of myths, especially myths of the Hidden Sun
10
The sun, volcano, light, and fire
are often interchangeable in myth. It is not a coincidence that the Pacific Ring of Fire
where volcanic activity is most prominent (Map 2) and the extensive distribution of
the myth of the Hidden Sun (Map 3) are overlapping.

10
Barber& Barber 2004, especially chapters 2, 8, 17.
261
3. Common structure in classical mythology and cul-
ture
The second topic is about a thread that connects the following various topics of classi-
cal mythology and the history of Japan that are usually discussed separately:
1. Jomon clay figurines: the Jomon were basically a hunting and gathering so-
ciety. The Jomon period began around twelve thousand years ago and lasted
until the fifth century B.C. when the new agricultural age began which is
called the Yayoi period. The Jomon period is characterized by many female
figurines. Some vases also have female faces and are shaped like pregnant
women. In Japanese myth, Izanami gave birth to the fire god Kagutuchi. The
myth says that fire comes from the body of a goddess. This type of myth may
have appeared already in the Jomon period. Along with this female symbol,
there are examples of stone pillars shaped like penises. These seem to be two
symbols visualizing the principle of harmony and cooperation between men
and women.
2. World Parents Izanagi and Izanami: The couple of Izanagi and Izanami cre-
ated the world and gods. They are the parents of the world in Japanese my-
thology. When the couple was ordered to create the land, there was only the
chaotic primordial ocean. The couple were brother and sister. They united and
created other gods, but their first child was a deformed leech-child and they let
it float away. The motif of the story certainly reminds us of the Flood Myth
found among the minority ethnic groups of southern China, including the
Miao and the Lao.
11

3. Amaterasu and Susanowo: Just like Izanagi and Izanami, Susanowo and
Amaterasu are brother and sister. As the ritual of oath-taking, they exchanged
belongings, and by chewing and spitting out the pieces, they gave birth to
children. This does not involve actual sexual intercourse, but this is certainly
symbolic incest. However, with the Hidden Sun motif, their antagonism is
clear.
Amaterasu as a Virgin Mother Goddess: As the summary above shows,
Amaterasu never had a sexual relationship. She is a virgin goddess. Still, as the result
of Susanowos oath, she became mother of five gods including, Oshiho-mimi, father
of the ruler of the terrestrial land, Hono-ninigi. Like Athena and Virgin Mary,
Amaterasu is a Virgin Mother Goddess. She is the ideal type of goddess men dream
of. Amaterasu is still worshipped as a titular goddess of the Imperial line since she is
claimed as the ancestress of the Imperial family.
Amaterasu as Mirror: Amaterasu is symbolized as mirror. The largest bronze
mirror discovered in Japan is 46.5 cm in diameter and weighs 7.95 kg. It is certainly
not for cosmetics. The purpose was to reflect the sun beams. The bronze mirror was
first imported from China and was believed to expel evil powers. That is why people
of the Yayoi culture put mirrors in their graves. So far five hundred bronze mirrors
have been discovered in graves.

11
Dundes 1988.
262
Himiko, the Queen of Yamatai Kingdom: The name of Queen Himiko, the
ruler of Yamatai kingdom, appears in the Wei dynasty history Wei Zhi, which is part of
the history of the Three Kingdom Period (220-280 CE) in China. The text says: The
country formerly had a man as ruler. For some seventy or eighty years after that there
were disturbances and warfare. Thereupon the people agreed upon a woman for their
ruler. Her name was Himiko. She occupied herself with magic and sorcery, bewitch-
ing the people. Though mature in age, she remained unmarried. She had a younger
brother who assisted her in ruling the country. After she became ruler, there were only
a few who saw her. She had a thousand women as attendants, but only one man. He
served her food and drink and acted as a medium of communication. Himiko seems
to be a shamaness. Many examples of Japanese shamanism are of the female-
possession type. Both Amaterasu, who hid in the cave, and Ameno-uzume, who be-
came intoxicated through dance, may be included in this category.
Hime-hiko ruling system: The text says that Himiko did not appear in public
and the important role of delivering her messages was done by a single man, her
brother who assisted her in ruling the country. The division of female / male is clear:
Himiko, as female, represents the inner, sacred, spiritual and religious vs. her brother,
as male, who represents the outer, secular, physical and political. This kind of division
of authority is well attested in the Kojiki and Nihonshoki. Examples of brother and sister
pairs whose names are produced by adding the male indicator -biko (hiko) or the fe-
male indicator -bime (hime) to the place names they jointly ruled are easily found:
Saho-biko and Saho-bime; Nuka-biko and Nuka-bime; Kitsu-biko and Kitsu-bime,
Usatsu-biko and Usatsu-bime, etc.
12

Wonari-gami in Okinawa: Okinawa, that belongs to the southern Ryukyu is-
lands, still preserves a strong tradition of female shamans. Moreover, there is a belief
in the protective power of sisters. At the state level, the king was spiritually protected
by the highest priestess, Kikoe-no-Okimi, who was no one other than the kings sister.
All sisters were regarded by brothers as a protective deity, wonari-gami.
Male-female division of rulership in Japanese new religions: In Japans new
religions, often the founder is female. Tenriky was founded by Miki Nakayama
(1798-1887); motoky by Nao Deguchi (1836-1918); Reiykai expanded its size
due to Kimi Kotani (1901-1971); Rissh-Kseikais expansion due to Myk Na-
ganuma (1889-1957); Tensh-Ktai-Jingky was founded by Sayo Kitamura (1900-
1967).
What is interesting is that in almost all these religions there were male organ-
izers along with the female spiritual leaders. Miki Nakayama had as assistant her eld-
est son Shji Nakayama (1821-1881) or the carpenter IzIburi (1833-1907); for Nao
Deguchi, Onisabur Deguchi, her son-in-law (1871-1948); for Kimi Kotani, Kakutar
Kubo (1892-1944); for Myk Naganuma, Nikkei Niwano (1906-1999).
In my opinion, these topics could be classified into following categories:

12
Matsumura 1999.
263
I. Brother-Sister marriage: 2. World Parents Izanagi and Izanami; 3.
Amaterasu and Susanowo.
II. Brother-Sister antagonism: 3. Amaterasu and Susanowo.
III. Brother-Sister rulership: 6. Himiko; 7. Hime-hiko system; 8.
Wonari-gami in Okinawa; 9. Male-female divisions of new religions.
IV. Virgin Mother Goddess or Mother-Son Deities: 4. Amaterasu and
(Oshiho-mimi) and Hono-ninigi; Athena and Erichthonios; Mary and
Jesus.
13

V. Corn Mother and Corn-Spirit: 4. Amaterasu and Hono-ninigi

What is most notable here is the Brother-Sister combination. This combination
means both the integration and the separation of two spheres. This is naturally one
variant of the basic dichotomy model of the human brain: male and female; sister and
brother; mother and child; ying and yang; the sun and moon; secular and profane, etc.
Along with the Brother-Sister combination, the Mother-Son combination is also
prominent and shows the similar combination of both integration and separation.
These two combinations / divisions show the strong tendency of the active presence
of females in Japanese history throughout the ages. Whether it stems from geographi-
cal or ecological or historical or social reasons is not clear. As the cases of Athena and
Mary show, however, such a tendency is not limited to Japan; it could occur in other
areas under certain circumstances.

References
Barber, E.W. & Barber, P.T., 2004, When they Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind shapes Myth,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Barret, S.A., 1906, A Composite Myth of the Pomo Indians, Journal of American Folklore 19: 37-51.
Boas, F. & Hunt, G., 1905, Kwakitul Texts, Leiden / New York: Knickerbocker Press.
Boas, F., 1916, Tsimshian Mythology, Government Printing Office.
Bogoras, W., 1902, The Folklore of Northeastern Asia as compared with that of Northwestern Amer-
ica, American Anthropologist, N. S. 4, pp. 577-683.
Dundes, A., 1988, The Flood Myth, University of California Press.
Eiichiro, I., 1964, Mother-Son Deities, History of Religion 4: 30-52.
Golder, F.A., 1907, Tlingit Myths, Journal of American Folklore 20: 290-295.
Jochelson, W., 1904, The Mythology of the Koryak, American Anthropologist, N S. 6:, 413-425.
Kindaichi, K., 1936, Yukar, Iwanami, pp. 130-144.
Kojiki ,1982, Chamberlain, Basil Hall trans., Toyko: Charles E. Tuttle.
Kroeber, A.L., 1919, Sinkyone Tales, Journal of American Folklore 32: 346-351.
Matsumura, K., 1996, Birds as Symbols of the Realm of the Sacred in Japanese Myth, Tenri Journal of
Religion 24: 97-134.
Matsumura, K., 1998, Alone among Women- A Comparative Mythic Analysis of the Development of
Amaterasu Theology, Inoue Junko ed., Kami, Kokugakuin University, pp. 42-71.

13
Eiichiro 1964.
264
Matsumura, K., 1999, Megami no Shinwagaku (Mythology of Goddess), Heibonsha.
Matsumura, K., 2003, The Koki Story and the Femininity of the Foundress of Tenrikyo, Women and
Religion, Tenri Yamato Culture Congress, 359-397.
Matsumura, K., 2006, Nelly Naumanns Contribution to the Study of Japanese Religion and
Mythology, Religious Studies Review 32: 163-168.
Matsumura, K., 2006, Ancient Japan and Religion, in: Swanson, P. & Chilson, C., eds., Nanzan Guide
to Japanese Religions, University of Hawaii Press, pp. 131-143.
Naumann, N., 2000, Japanese Prehistory- The Material and Spiritual Culture of the Jomon Period, Wiesbaden:
Otto Harrassowitz Verslag.
Nihongi (Nihonshoki) ,1972, Aston, W. G. trans., Toyko: Charles E. Tuttle.
Paproth, H-J. & Yamada, H., 2002, Taryo Obayashi 1929-2001, Zeitschrift fr Ethnologie 127: 139-146.
Witzel, M., 2005, Vala and Iwato- The Myth of the Hidden Sun in India, Japan, and Beyond, Electric
Journal of Vedic Studies 12: 1-69.
Yamada, H., 2006, Mythology of the Taiwan Aborigines: State of the Art, presented at Harvard and
Peking University International Conference on Comparative Mythology, May, 2006.
Yoshida, Atsuhiko, 1977, Japanese Mythology and the Indo-European Trifunctional System, Diogenes
98 (1977) 93-116.

Part IV. Theoretical and
methodological advances

267
Chapter 13. The cosmological theory of
myth

by Emily Buchanan Lyle
1

Abstract: I think now is the time to stress that I have a new theory of myth which I can call the cosmo-
logical theory. I have been much inclined to credit my predecessors and this may sometimes have re-
sulted in the impression that what I am saying is not new. But it is, and it is important for our
understanding of modern people as well as ancient culture. I have learnt much from predecessors and it
is inconceivable that I could have usefully approached a work of this scale without them, but when I
look at their oevres as a whole, I can see that I have drawn on one aspect of their work, and often quite
a small one. I do not carry over the baggage from their whole theory but merely had my ideas sparked
by one element of what they were saying. So to understand what I am saying it is unnecessary and
irrelevant to grip the whole life work of the often voluminous scholars of the twentieth century. Let us
make a fresh start with the twenty-first century, and a new millennium, and listen directly to the evi-
dence from the past (and even sometimes from the present) and build, build, build, as we need to do if
we want to turn over in our hands the intricate structure from which our mythic heritage stems. I plan
to lay out a set of core particulars during my presentation. If other scholars find that they have ideas
that overlap with mine, let them build them in or use them to modify or refute parts of the structure.
The cosmological theory of myth depends on the concept that an oral society was fused together in a
different way from a literate one, and that all our written evidence by definition is flawed. Although we
naturally need to use written evidence for the vanished past we need also to create models of what kind
of society could have operated the systems that can be postulated on the basis of the surviving evi-
dence. The model is at once conceptual and social; it has static elements relating to place and dynamic
elements relating to time and also to the narratives unfolding in time that are our myths. Comparison is
one of the means to understanding. and the results of one comparison will give rise to formulations that
can be explored and tested through other comparisons. We have the world before us as we set out on
our enquiries.
1. Introduction
The view I am putting forward is relatively new. My major statements began with
a contribution to History of Religions in 1982 and continued with a book-length study
(1990) and a series of articles. Throughout I have tried to remain aware of the contri-
butions and lines of thought of other scholars and to relate to them where possible, but

1
University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
268
it has become increasingly clear that what is really required to move the subject for-
ward is for the field to include published reactions to the view that I have been articu-
lating as clearly as I can in the virtual absence of scholarly discussion. Debate, as is
well known, leads to the refinement and clarification of theory and methodology, as
well as to the assimilation of unfamiliar approaches and materials. It seems to me that
scholars have continued to work with outworn concepts without taking on board the
alternatives presently on offer, and I suggest that it is high time for a re-assessment.
Although the new view I am referring to has its core in the Indo-European material
that I shall discuss later, I shall first offer some general comments on the broad field
of cosmological theory in which it is embedded.
2. Cosmological theory
I shall take as my starting-point some remarks by Robert Segal in his recent book on
myth (Segal 2004: 2). He argues that what unite the study of myth across the disci-
plines are the questions asked and he raises three key questions, which are those of
origin, function and subject matter. I shall offer brief answers to these three questions
with the aim of setting my specific theory in context.
As regards origin, I have found the approach taken by Peter Berger and Tho-
mas Luckman a useful one (Berger and Luckman 1967; Berger 1969: 3-101). Since
human beings are not hard-wired, and have bewilderingly wide choice, they have had
to participate in creating social and conceptual worlds to shore up the identities of the
individual and society. Since these worlds are self-created, humans, sometimes in re-
lation to specific environments, have adopted different schemas. The origin is the
same and lies in the nature of the human being and it is hypothesised that all human
beings have a cosmology and related myths. However, individual societies have cre-
ated their own distinctive cosmologies (either because they were in isolation from
each other or by way of contrast with neighbours) and these cosmologies can vary in
their degree of complexity and integration. For this reason, it is necessary to study
individual cases.
As regards function, although a cosmology is constantly subject to adaptation,
once created it soon acquires the force of tradition and tends to remain in place, serv-
ing to give the individual person, and the society as a whole, ontological security in an
unquestioned universe. The overall scheme may also serve to privilege certain sec-
tions of society which would accordingly have a vested interest in retaining it and
would act to reinforce the status quo.
As regards subject matter, I would see myth as the part of a cosmology that is
expressed as verbal narrative, the primary myths being those that treat the establish-
ment of the universe, in all its facets, including the human one. Although it can be
interesting and fruitful to study myths merely as verbal forms, the information is
much richer, and the conclusions that can be drawn are much more secure, in cases
where a cosmological setting can be established.
Lyle Chapter 13: The Cosmological Theory of Myth
269
3. A cosmological model based on Indo-European
sources
The wide range of Indo-European materials and the depth of recorded Indo-European
history make the field an excellent one for the study of cosmology. Since cosmology
is not language-bound, information about an early cosmology derivable from sources
in Indo-European languages will not necessarily be found only within that field and
the question of boundary should initially be left open. The process of enquiry is a dia-
lectical one, with a model being built on the basis of materials present in one or more
of the components available for comparison, and then being subjected to scrutiny in
the light of more detailed study of all the components. In cosmology, as opposed to
purely linguistic enquiries, there are non-verbal relationships to consider.
As regards stories alone, an exploration of the use of the analogical discovery
method to reach back from a range of narratives to a posited myth may be found in
Lyle 2007. As regards the non-verbal, Georges Dumzil posited a code by which gods
in a polytheistic system corresponded to three aspects of society 1 the sacred, 2
physical force, and 3 prosperity and fertility that at one time he saw embodied in
priests, warriors and herders / cultivators (for overviews, see Littleton 1982 and Belier
1991). By so doing, he opened the door to cosmological study but he did not step
through. Two scholars have since gone through the door into a world of primitive
(or cosmological) classification. They are Kim McCone who recognises the triad as
belonging to an age-grade system with: 1 old men, 2 young men and 3 mature men
(McCone 1986; 1987), and N.J. Allen who understands Dumzils three as survivals
into the historical period of a prehistoric system including kinship bonds which rested
on four rather than three (Allen 1987; 2000).
There has not been up to the present sufficient recognition of the fundamental
difference that this makes for our study methods. We can now posit an origin point
and work forwards through history to illuminate the diachronic changes that would
have resulted in the situations we find in our sources. Both synchronic studies of the
modelled cosmology and diachronic studies of the stages of revision are urgently
called for. Naturally, this will require some rethinking by interested scholars in spe-
cific areas of specialisation whose contributions will be essential to the success of the
enterprise. When a great deal of effort has gone into creating integrated systems rest-
ing on all the information obtainable within one country or one language group, there
is a natural reluctance to see them broken apart to be re-aligned in another way. How-
ever, from a long-term point of view, we can see that these areal groupings are not
being abandoned but will offer exciting possibilities for the diachronic study of
change and development once a suggested model has been put in place.
Since cosmology operates in space and time, as well as in relation to human
society and the human body, it is a totality with many levels that has to be understood
as macrocosm, mesocosm and microcosm. The nature of this overall analogical sys-
tem enables us to run checks by studying each of a series of parallel registers. As
Burkert noted (1972: 399):
270
Order and pattern which the human spirit craves, are to be found not only in the form of
conceptual rigor and neatly logical structure, but, at an earlier level, in richness of mutual allu-
siveness and interconnection, where things fit together symbolically.
I think that we have sufficient information among our widely scattered Indo-
European materials to rebuild this harmonious structure harmonious in this context
meaning fitting together well, rather than necessarily implying the existence of an
ideal conceptual environment to live in.
4. Building and testing the model
The actual process of building the model has been one of trial and error, and this work
still continues, so we are at an interesting stage when there is enough of a set outline
for scholars to relate their own insights to it, while at the same time there remain ob-
vious points of enquiry where matters are still fluid. What I would regard as my own
key insights have mainly come through the shedding of assumptions. It is because we
all operate in terms of deeply ingrained views that it is so necessary to have debate so
that the positions and the grounds they rest on can be brought out into the open. It
does seem to me, as my scheme has developed, that more recent forms of the model
are solid improvements on earlier forms, although I remain open to further possibili-
ties.
I shall take the case of the three axes of polarity that I currently posit as under-
lying the structure. These were already present in my theory when I published Archaic
Cosmos: Polarity, Space and Time in 1990 and were explored more fully in Lyle
1995. The main thing I was doing in these earlier works was insisting that we have to
articulate things in such a way that we have the tools we need to work with. Dualities
are all over the place, as we might say, but can we do nothing else than just note their
existence? I am not inventing these polarities but am simply finding them and positing
their importance in an overall structure and seeing them as applying generally and not
just in one register, i.e., for example, spatial dualities would have equivalents in terms
of time. There is certainly nothing new about positing spatiotemporal correspon-
dences (see, e.g., Gaborieau 1982).
This concept of the three axes of polarity has stood up well and remained use-
ful over the course of the years and, up to now, I have not felt the need to depart from
it. However, responding to a query raised by the Slovenian scholar Mirjam Mencej,
when she visited Edinburgh as a Cosmos Fellow in April 2007, concerning an appar-
ent lack of fit in my model between the fertile summer half of the year and the period
of human maturity (then placed in winter), I undertook a re-examination of the polari-
ties on the three axes and concluded that the plus and minus signs needed to be re-
versed, one effect of this being to locate the male superior half in the winter (which
should apparently be regarded as the sacred half), while the inferior female and
Dumzilian 3rd-function half would be connected with summer. A related change to
the model made at this time was the identification of the female quarter with the first
271
part of the summer half (the summer season) rather than with the second part (the au-
tumn season), as had been previously proposed. For an update on these changes, re-
sulting from my internal testing, see Lyle 2008a and forthcoming, Celtic). It was
interesting to find that when confronted with challenge it was possible to modify the
structure in this rather radical way without there being any danger of the whole sys-
tem collapsing like a house of cards. A much better overall harmonisation has been
achieved which can now be subjected to scrutiny in its turn.
The wider point I would make about the three-axis system (that appears to be
present in the Indo-European materials) is that, when we are wondering whether an-
other society outside the Indo-European area shares the same cosmology, one ques-
tion to ask is whether a three-axis system can be traced there (cf. Lyle forthcoming,
Complex). Cross-cutting dualities are very commonly found but could potentially be
confined to a two-axis system. We can test for the number of axes initially by explor-
ing the registers of space and time where they are likely to be most evident.
I mentioned one of the Dumzilian functions above, and this gives an entry
into the question of how we can test the validity of Dumzils theory and others re-
lated to it. One approach is the simple one of going over all the materials Dumzil
uses and seeing whether his interpretations carry conviction. There is a danger of sub-
jectivity when the often elusive points in a narrative or other source are caught up into
a schema, and, of course, the originator can never be free from this danger. I now see
an interesting opportunity arising of reviewing these materials afresh with alternative
interpretations in mind and assessing the different strengths of the two possibilities
offered. In this way, it should be feasible to arrive at a more objective view.
I concluded long ago that Dumzils argument that there was an overarching
schema of three functions of the sacred, physical force and prosperity was a sound
one, and it can be suggested that this academic position has been significantly
strengthened by the realisation that the schema could have very ancient roots in a sys-
tem of life-stages (Lyle 1997; 2001). However, I did not consider his ideas about the
pantheon securely based, and I think scholarship has been going into unnecessary
contortions in an attempt to make things fit when it has not simply withdrawn from
a field that has been found so unrewarding. I shall briefly consider here the case of the
divine twins (the Avins, the Dioskouroi). Dumzil places them both in the third func-
tion, but their separate natures have been studied and have led scholars who concen-
trated attention on them to place one in the second function and one in the third (see,
e.g., Ward 1968: 20-24). Although this in itself is not conclusive, it is certainly an
alternative that should be considered and it throws doubt on the force of the reasons
adduced by Dumzil for placing them both in the 3rd-function slot mainly, I think,
their being named third in the Mitanni treaty (Dumzil 1945: 34-40; 1994: 81, 232).
We should remain aware that there may be other triads in the system besides the func-
tional one (Lyle 2004). The other problematic thing that Dumzil does in relation to
the Avinic pair is to conflate them with the Romulus / Remus, Manu / Yama pair.
This royal pair is so different from the Avins that Donald Ward, in his study of Indo-
European twin gods, had no hesitation in distinguishing them (Ward 1968: 6-11), and
272
the opposition between the Romulus / Remus pair, who are sometimes presented sim-
ply as brothers rather than twins, has been fruitfully studied without reference to the
Avinic pair (cf., e.g., Puhvel 1987: 284-290; Lyle 1990: 105-118).
In the face of problems like this, which arise when we take Dumzils hy-
pothesised composition of the pantheon as our base, I feel that we should discard it
entirely and make a fresh start, while always, of course, checking back to his formula-
tions to see if his wide reading and detailed reflections resulted in insights that should
be retained and built in to the new model or that might serve to complement it. Test-
ing can lead to rejection and I think this step should be taken in relation to the part of
Dumzilian theory that deals with the pantheon.
5. The kinship code
A kinship structure is a relatively recent addition to my theoretical model (Lyle 2006:
103-106), since a long period of preliminary exploration was required before it was
possible to arrive at what currently seems the optimum formulation. It is highly com-
plex and carries a great deal of information, and this makes it all the easier to refute. If
it does not work and succeed in throwing light on later forms that are assumed to be
derived from it, it can be considered detail by detail. If some details survive the proc-
ess, it may be that a more satisfying model can then be built. The idea that a kinship
structure would be the base for rich, all-embracing Indo-European cosmological
statements is tied in with the recent view that our historical evidence goes back to
prehistory and a time when primitive classification would have been in force. A so-
ciety with such a classification could reasonably have been expected to draw on its
social organisation to create a divine mirror image. Paradoxically, in the course of
time the organisation of society was totally revised, and we have to work in reverse
and posit a type of society that matches the traces of mythology that have remained.
The proposed family set consists of ten members. The pantheon can be pre-
sented as a block, as in Fig. 13.1, or as selected people in a kinship diagram as in Fig.
13.2. Fig. 13.1 shows the sequence of components of space and time which has four
regular parts and also makes special provision for the representation of kingship (Lyle
2008b and forthcoming, Cosmic). An important distinction made in both figures is
that between the old gods (shown above) and the young gods (shown below). The
system offers the precise number of ten slots which relate to divisions of space and
time as well as to elements of kinship and succession. A major difficulty which has
confronted comparative mythology has been the question of defining the number of
gods (for sometimes we find gods split into several aspects and at other times we find
gods merged together), and I suggest that it may be useful to explore these materials
further when the limits are set in this way.

273

Fig. 13.1. The tenfold pantheon and related mythic patterns.
The numbers are those of Dumzils three functions. Females are indicated by circles and kings by
stars.

For example, in the case of the female component, studies in the past may
have explored a single great goddess or may have looked at three goddesses expres-
sive of maiden, wife and crone. The firm suggestion of the structure offered here is
that there are two goddesses, one of whom is the primal source of everything and so
could be a great goddess, but not the great goddess since there is another powerful
goddess who is young queen rather than ancestress. Both goddesses relate to the triad
of gods and so have three aspects which could readily have been given separate iden-
tities. In the representation of the pantheon in Fig. 13.1, special attention is drawn to
the roles of the goddesses as central components of two mythic patterns, which I have
explored in recent articles that deal respectively with the old goddess in relation to
three old gods in a treatment of the cosmogony (Lyle 2007), and with the young god-
dess in relation to a set of five young gods, one of whom steals her away so that an
expedition has to be mounted to recover her (Lyle 2008c). Since the young goddess is
the figure previously identified as the sun goddess (cf., e.g. West 2007: 227-237), this
theme can be connected to the story of bringing the sun back from being hidden in
darkness that has been explored by Michael Witzel (2005) and Kazuo Matsumura
(2010, this volume).
The actual kinship-and-succession structure (see Fig. 13.2) shows how power
in a matrilineal system could be spread between two lines of males that supplied one
of its members to take the central role of king in alternate generations (cf. Finkelberg
2005: 65-89). In the generations before that of the current king, the important prede-
cessors are the kings mothers brother, who was the previous king, his fathers father,
who was the king before that, his father and his maternal great-grandmother. It is hy-
pothesised that these four correspond to the four old gods.
274

Fig. 13.2. A four-generation capsule with bilateral cross-cousin marriage, showing
the ten people who are taken to correspond to gods
The triangles indicate males and the circles females. Lines above indicate sibling relationships and
lines below indicate marriage. The figure illustrates matrilineal succession, with kings coming alter-
nately from two different patrilines and marrying into a line of queens.

In the current generation there is the king himself and a brother (marked with a
cross) connected with the dead who is also regarded as a king. This, in terms of myth
and legend, is the murdered or sacrificed brother of the Romulus / Remus, Manu /
Yama pair, and it can be suggested that Baldr, who is killed accidentally by a
brother (Harris 2010, this volume), may be another instance of this king of the dead
figure. The queen (the sun goddess) has two brothers, who are presented in myth and
epic as twins (the Avins). It can be noted that the line of succession passes through
one of the twins, and that this factor distinguishes him from his brother. I suggest that
he is the 3rd-function twin connected with fertility and that his brother is the 2nd-
function warlike one. The king also has two brothers and, as already noted, one of
these is dead. The other appears to represent the patriline after the king has left it at
his inauguration to become the representative of the whole.
We seem here to have before us the leaders of a hierarchically organised soci-
ety plus the ancestors who were distinguished from the generalised group of the dead
and may have been the recipients of special offerings. Some of the relationships
among the gods become very clear when this posited set of relationships is kept in
mind and I think the structure will prove exceedingly useful in the interpretation of
the myths found in various parts of the Indo-European world that supplied the bits and
pieces of evidence which initially allowed the model to be put together. It should per-
haps be added that not every story about the gods will fit this structure. Story-tellers
275
had fertile imaginations and a story told for its own sake or shaped to the particular
religious or political ends of a specific historical period has a separate identity and
may have only a tangential connection with myth even when it names gods. I believe,
however, that the comparative study of all available story evidence has allowed some
strong patterns of myth to emerge which can be matched to the cosmological structure
offered here.
6. Conclusion
As I mentioned, N.J. Allen was one of the scholars who initiated this new method
which we can use to approach the Indo-European historical materials on myth in light
of a hypothesised structure in order to make more sense of them than previous theo-
retical approaches have succeeded in doing. He has looked at structures of both space
and time in terms that are not so remote from what I am offering (e.g., Allen 1991;
1998; 2001). His system at present is not fully compatible with mine (it gives no overt
place to goddesses), but the more important point is that the two systems resemble
each other and together point to the existence of a spatiotemporal system that we can
begin to grasp.
Cosmological theory seems to be about to come into its own and, of course, I
look forward to the further developments that will rapidly become possible when
more scholars concern themselves centrally with this field. So far the model is a fairly
static one, but I think it may soon reach the point when we can activate it and begin to
see how men and women, in tandem with the gods and goddesses that their ancestors
had projected, went about the business of maintaining the cosmos as the years and
generations (and even millennia) went by.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my appreciation of the support received for my attendance at
the IACM conference in Ravenstein, Netherlands, on 19-21 August 2008, and for the
comments offered on my paper during this conference.
Bibliography
Allen, N.J., 1987, The Ideology of the Indo-Europeans: Dumzils Theory and the Idea of a Fourth
Function, International Journal of Moral and Social Studies, 2: 23-39.
Allen, N.J., 1991, Some Gods of Pre-Islamic Nuristan, Revue de lHistoire des Religions, 208: 141-
168.
Allen, N.J., 1998, Varnas, Colours, and Functions: Expanding Dumzils Schema, Zeitschrift fr
Religion, 6: 163-177.
276
Allen, N.J., 2000, Categories and Classifications: Maussian Reflections on the Social, New York and
Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Allen, N.J., 2001, The Articulation of Time: Some Indo-European Comparisons, Cosmos, 17: 163-
178.
Belier, W.W., 1991, Decayed Gods: Origin and Development of Georges Dumzils Idologie Tripar-
tie, Leiden: Brill.
Berger, P.L. & Luckman, T., 1967, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of
Knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Berger, P.L., 1969, The Social Reality of Religion, London: Faber and Faber.
Burkert, W., 1972, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Dumzil, G., 1945, Naissance dArchanges, Paris: Gallimard.
Dumzil, G., 1994, Le Roman des Jumeaux et autres essays, Paris: Gallimard.
Finkelberg, M., 2005, Greeks and Pre-Greeks: Perspectives on Aegean Prehistory, Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Gaborieau, M., 1982, Les Ftes, le temps et lespace: structure du calendrier hindou dans sa version
indo-npalaise, LHomme, 22, 11-29.
Harris, J. (in this publication). The Rk Stones Mythology of Death.
Littleton, C.S., 1982, The New Comparative Mythology: An Anthropological Assessment of the Work of
Georges Dumzil, 3rd ed. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press.
Lyle, E., 1982, Dumzils Three Functions and Indo-European Cosmic Structure, History of Relig-
ions, 22: 25-44.
Lyle, E., 1990, Archaic Cosmos: Polarity, Space and Time, Edinburgh: Polygon.
Lyle, E., 1995, Modeling Feature and Mark in Old-World Cosmology, Semiotica 106: 171-185.
Lyle, E., 1997, Age Grades, Age Classes and Alternate Succession: A Restatement of the Basis at the
Societal Level of Indo-European Symbolic Partition, Emania, 16: 63-71.
Lyle, E., trans. A. Le Borgne, 2001, Grades dge, classes dge et succession alterne: nouvelles vues
sur lorigine des partitions symboliques indo-europennes au niveau societal, Ollodagos, 16:
111-145.
Lyle, E., 2004, Which Triad? A Critique and Development of Dumzils Trifunctional Theory, Revue
de lHistoire des Religions, 221: 5-21.
Lyle, E., 2006, The Importance of the Prehistory of Indo-European Structures for Indo-European Stud-
ies, Journal of Indo-European Studies, 34: 99-110.
Lyle, E., 2007, Narrative Form and the Structure of Myth, Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore,
33: 59-69. http://www.folklore.ee/Folklore/vol33/lyle.pdf
Lyle, E., 2008a, Time and the Indo-European Gods in the Slavic Context, Studia Mythologica
Slavica, 11, 115-126.
Lyle, E., 2008b, The Indo-European Ritual Year as a Two-phase Cycle, Including a Period of Rever-
sal, in Concepts of Space and Time in European Folklore, M. Mencej, ed., pp. 11-21. Zbirka
upanieva knjinica. Ljubljana: Filozofska fakulteta, Oddelek za etnologijo in kulturno an-
tropologijo.
Lyle, E., 2008c, The Marriage and Recovery of the Young Goddess: Story and Structure, Journal of
Indo-European Studies, 36, 356-370.
Lyle, E., (forthcoming), The Celtic Year and Gender, The Ritual Year, 4.
Lyle, E., (forthcoming), A Complex Eurasian Cosmology: Not One Duality but Three Interlocking
Dualities, Proceedings of the Round Table on Comparative Mythology, Beijing, 11-13 May
2006, ed. Duan Qing and Michael Witzel.
Lyle, E., (forthcoming), Cosmic Space and the Human Body: Some General Principles and the Indo-
European Configuration, Man in India.
Matsumura, K., (in this publication). Can Japanese Mythology Contribute to the Comparative Eura-
sian Mythology.
McCone, K., 1986, Werewolves, Cyclopes, Dibergs and Fianna: Juvenile Delinquency in Early Ire-
land, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 12: 1-22.
277
McCone, K. 1987, Hund, Wolf und Krieger bei den Indogermanen, in Studien zum indogermanischen
Wortschatz, ed. W. Meid, pp. 101-154. Innsbrucker Beitrge zr Sprachwissenschaft 52.
Innsbruck: Institut fr Sprachwissenschaft der Universitt Innsbruck.
Puhvel, J., 1987, Comparative Mythology, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Ward, D., 1968, The Divine Twins: An Indo-European Myth in Germanic Tradition, Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
West, M.L., 2007, Indo-European Poetry and Myth, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Witzel, M., 2005, Vala and Iwato: The Myth of the Hidden Sun in India, Japan, and Beyond, Elec-
tronic Journal of Vedic Studies, 12, 1: 1-69.

279
Chapter 14. The neurobiological origins
of primitive religion

Implications for comparative mythology

by Steve Farmer
1

Abstract. This paper describes a testable neurobiological model of the origins of primitive religion and
myth. The paper is divided into four parts. Reflecting the aims of this conference, part one discusses
the need for such a model in comparative mythology. Topics covered include the help such a model
can give in distinguishing similarities in myths arising from shared ancestry or cultural transmission
from those due to parallel invention; in establishing the maximum time depth possible in reconstructing
ancient myths; in dating the oldest mythic thinking, which neurobiological data suggest predated ana-
tomically modern man (placing the earliest myths long before ca. 200,000 years BP, and undermining
claims they were inventions of some later period); in picturing how myths were transformed in the
last 5,000 years of literate religious, philosophical, and cosmological traditions; and in explaining the
remarkable persistence of myth in modern political and religious thought.
Sections two and three review earlier naturalistic models of religion and myth and introduce the first
testable model of the origins of these phenomena. The model builds on recent neurodevelopmental
findings that picture models of the world as high-dimensional elaborations of lower-level perceptual
maps heavily biased to process social information; in humans, the emergence of these models can be
traced from infancy through adulthood as they unfold in the cortical and subcortical systems of the so-
called social brain. The paper provides evidence that the anthropomorphism underlying primitive relig-
ion and myth was a spandrel or non-adaptive side-effect of the development of these systems, which
are critical to human survival.
Section four discusses empirical tests of the model involving neuropathologies that affect the social
brain. Data here are drawn from research on one remarkable form of synesthesia linked to exaggerated
anthropomorphizing tendencies and on autistic disorders in which such tendencies are missing or badly
attenuated. The importance of testing the model is critical: the view that religion is a byproduct of some
sort of the so-called social brain is suggested in a number of recent naturalistic models developed by
Guthrie, Boyer, Atran, Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and others, and can presently claim to be the consen-
sual view; but in the absence of rigorous ways to test these models, that view cannot claim scientific
status or provide a solid foundation for future research in comparative mythology or religion.
The ideas presented in this paper are part of a broader model developed elsewhere (Farmer, Henderson,
and Witzel 2002; Farmer 2008; Farmer forthcoming) that combines neurobiological, philological, and
historical evidence with computer simulations to explain important global parallels in the evolution of
traditional religious, philosophical, and cosmological systems. The general aim of the paper is to sug-
gest that by combining work in these fields we can build testable models of the evolution of human
thought of the same general class that have long been indispensable in the physical and biological sci-
ences.

1
Independent scholar, Palo Alto, California, USA.
280

We are in the midst of a historical moment reminiscent of the one in which
biology found itself before the last World War, when vitalist doctrines pre-
dominated, even among scientists. Molecular biology has destroyed them.
We must assume that the same will happen to spiritualistic theses.
2

If oxen and horses and lions had hands or could draw and create works like
those of men, and if animals were to draw pictures of gods, horses would
draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and each would make
their bodies similar in shape to their own.
3

Fig. 14.1. Anthropomorphic lion figure, ivory, Hohlenstein-Stadel, c. 32,000 BP
1. Introduction: Neurobiology, myth, and religion
This paper describes a neurobiological model of the origins of primitive religion and
myth and anthropomorphism in general. Reflecting the aims of this conference, the
paper pays special attention to the models implications for comparative mythology.
The paper draws in part from a book-in-progress (Brains and history) that combines
neurobiological, philological, historical, and computational research to generate a

2
Changeux 1985.
3
Ascribed to Xenophanes, early 6th to early 5th

centuries BCE; first cited in Clement of Alexandria,
Stromata, 3rd cent. CE.
Farmer Chapter 14: Neurobiological Origins and Their Implications
281
general model of the evolution of major world traditions. Due to limitations of space,
I will largely confine myself in this talk to discussing the links between primitive re-
ligion and myth, having in mind by the latter (following the definition in the Oxford
English Dictionary) a narrative usually involving supernatural persons, actions, or
events, and embodying stories of natural or historical phenomena. Other sides of
primitive religion illuminated by brain-culture studies involving visions, ritualistic
magic, mechanisms of social bonding, communication with gods and ancestors, con-
cepts of life after death, etc. are dealt with elsewhere in my book and will be noted
here only in passing. Also left aside in this paper is discussion of key transformations
that occurred in myth and religion in literate traditions over the past 5,000 years; dis-
cussion of the stereotypical changes that occurred in this period play a key role in the
book noted above, which describes computer models capable of simulating those
transformations in detail.
4

The questions this paper addresses are simple but have broad implications.
Why did early humans everywhere tend to model reality or at least the most emo-
tionally salient parts of reality as the result of the acts of supernatural beings? Why
did they endow those beings with human mental and social qualities, and often with
human physical traits as well? Can we build testable models of how anthropomorphic
views are generated, creating a foundation for scientific approaches to comparative
religion and mythology? Testing is essential, since while in the last decade numerous
studies have approached religion and myth from naturalistic viewpoints, due to a lack
of tests no model can currently claim scientific status.
Most of my paper focuses on oral rather than literate traditions, but in passing
I will suggest ways in which joint neurobiological and philological studies can illumi-
nate step-like developments in traditional philosophical, religious, and cosmological
systems emerging cross-culturally over the last 5,000 years. I will also suggest why
modern models of the world have lost most of their anthropomorphic qualities, al-
though it is still possible to detect survivals of these in simple psychological tests; one
of the most dramatic of these tests is illustrated near the end of my talk. The general
aim of my paper is to suggest that it is possible to build models of the evolution of
myth and religion that are no less rigorous than models in the biological and physical
sciences and that can be verified not only in textual data but in useful heuristic com-
puter simulations as well.
1.1 Why is a neurobiological model of myth needed?
Lets start with the most basic question. Why do we need a neurobiological model of
myth? Below I suggest four answers to that question. I will spend the most time on
the first of these, since it reflects on the most important theoretical work currently
going on in the field, much of it first discussed in this series of annual conferences,

4
On this, see Farmer 1998, 2008; Farmer, Henderson, & Witzel 2002; and Farmer, Henderson, Witzel,
& Robinson 2002; parts of the underlying simulation engine used in these models are described in a
working paper by Farmer, Zaumen, Sproat, & Witzel 2009.
282
which (unofficially) began in 2004.

1. A neurobiological model is needed to help sort out similarities in myths
due to common descent, transmission, and parallel invention and to help
estimate the maximum time-depth possible in reconstructing ancestral
myths.
Some of the most important recent work in the field involves attempts to re-
construct prehistoric myths using methods loosely based on those used in comparative
linguistics and population genetics (Witzel, in press). The aim is to reconstruct prehis-
toric myths and if possible to infer something about ancient migrations by comparing
myths in the oldest available texts. Given the massive corruption found in what cur-
rently passes for our earliest ancient texts, such reconstructions can only claim ap-
proximate validity, and the time depth of reconstruction is open to debate (Farmer
2007 and below; Witzel, in press). But if used cautiously such reconstructions can be
useful heuristic tools in modeling prehistory, especially when their results heavily
overlap with (similarly approximate) linguistic and genetic reconstructions.
One obvious limitation to this approach arises from differences in the ways
that myths as opposed to genes or languages change over time. Old myths not only
drifted in sense or merged with or were replaced by foreign myths, paralleling similar
behavior in historical linguistics or population genetics, but were also at times aban-
doned or invented anew as ecological or cultural conditions changed. Classic exam-
ples include the rapid appearance of horses in the mythologies of North American
Plains Indians after the first European contact; the equally rapid development of
Melanesian cargo cults due to similar influences; and the wholesale invention by
Mormons of an entire mythology for New World Indians in the 1820s and 30s. Nor
are major ecological or cultural changes necessary to generate new myths. In his clas-
sic study of cosmologies among the Mountain Ok in Inner New Guinea, Fredrik Barth
(1987) not only records major differences in myths in nearby Ok villages, but also the
birth of new myths due simply to the private visions or ambitions or memory failures
of single ritual specialists.
5

One reason why more attention is currently paid to the transmission rather
than generation of myths lies in the fact that research in comparative mythology nec-
essarily depends on data fixed in texts. This gives even ancient myths a misleading
aura of semi-permanence that is often projected into preliterate contexts.
6
The most

5
Abandonment of old myths and inventions of new ones of course tend to occur most quickly in cases
in which old gods (or saints or spirits or divinized ancestors) fail in their assigned functions. Hence the
origins of Western medieval rituals known as the humiliation of the saint or medieval Chinese demo-
tions of bureaucratic gods who failed during famines or other local disasters. Abandonment of myths
(often accompanied by the demonization of failed deities) is in any event common and has to be taken
into account in any theoretical model of comparative mythology.
6
Clearly some types of oral transmission are capable of relatively high-fidelity; the classical case lies
in some types of Vedic traditions. But this is an extreme case and may itself have originally emerged as
a kind of counter-literacy under pressures from literate technologies imported from the Persian Em-
pire. On this, see Farmer, Henderson, and Witzel 2002, n. 55; and in detail, Farmer, forthcoming.
283
extreme case lies in attempts to reconstruct myths antedating the apparent African
diaspora. Even in ideal circumstances the texts in this case are a minimum of 50,000
years younger than the attempted reconstructions; sometimes, quite ludicrously, the
claimed evidence includes missionary reports a few centuries old at best. The impos-
sibility of useful reconstruction in this case is obvious when we consider not only the
instability of myths and the corruption of sources but as well the massive ecological
upheavals that followed the apparent African exodus 50-70,000 years ago. While
traveling to their later homelands, the earliest humans in the Middle East, South or
Central Asia, Europe, the Far East, and Oceania lived through the worst of the last
glacial period including the ascent to the glacial maximum ca. 18-20,000 years ago
and descent to its minimum ca. 10-12,000 years BP; wild climate changes between or
after those periods, including the sudden Great Freeze of the Younger Dryas event,
ca, 13,000 years BP, and the sea rises that accompanied the collapse of the Laurentide
ice sheet ca. 8,400 years ago; habitation at different times of savannas, jungles, de-
serts, river basins, coastal areas, mountains, and high plateaus, each obviously with
different mythic demands; correlated changes including major extinctions of animal
and plant life on which human survival depended, each again surely deeply impacting
myths; population bottlenecks precipitated not only by migrations but by disease and
famines, with similar results; and the first large-scale diversification of human
economies starting after the last glacial minimum, resulting in radically altered hunt-
ing and gathering environments and the first pastoral and farming and urban trading
societies; the fact that the latter changes directly impacted myth formation can be un-
ambiguously validated in our earliest texts. Myths are acutely sensitive to ecological
change, and sorting out the effects of such change again requires a model of myth
generation and that requires an understanding of the evolutionary and neurobiologi-
cal origins of the anthropomorphic tendencies that lie at the base of primitive religion
and myth.
There is still another way that myth transmission differs from that of lan-
guages and genes that again suggests the need for such a model. Not only can we ex-
pect ecological upheavals to encourage inventions of new myths, but we can also
predict that new myths generated in similar environments often have similar features.
Just as in biology, comparative mythology is full of examples of how similar ecol-
ogies encourage the emergence of similar forms; given sufficient data, we should be
able to develop usable estimates of the frequency of independent invention based on
mass comparison of cognate and non-cognate myth complexes (Farmer 2007). It
would be a strange farming society indeed that lacked cyclical planting and harvesting
myths and at some point dead-and-resurrected gods; anomalous river dwellers who
lacked flood myths; and rare religions of the oppressed that at some point did not in-
vent (or adopt from other cultures) cosmic saviors. Due to limits in our textual
sources, our detailed understanding of similarities in myths is often too imprecise to
confirm whether those similarities derive from common descent, transmission, or par-
allel invention; at times all may play partial roles. Uncertainties are greatest in the
case of similar myths known only in fragmentary form from widely separated eras,
284
which is often the only evidence available; this is a particularly serious problem in
comparative studies of Indo-European myths. What is clear is that a generative model
of myths is required before we can expect to sort out all these issues in a systematic
fashion.
Possessing such a model will not give us every answer; a neurobiological
model cannot yet give us reliable estimates of the maximum time depth of reconstruc-
tions of ancestral myths, which can be expected to depend on the stability of condi-
tions between the oldest versions of those myths and those used in their
reconstruction; such estimates require a detailed understanding of prehistoric ecologi-
cal changes that currently eludes us. But such a model can help us develop such esti-
mates when conjoined with improved data that should become available in the next
few decades. Bill Zaumen, Richard Sproat, Michael Witzel, and I have developed cul-
tural simulation software that should prove useful in analyzing data of these types;
that software will be released via Internet for customized use by non-programmers in
2010 (cf. Farmer, Zaumen, Sproat, and Witzel 2009).

2. A neurobiological model can help us decide between models that picture
primitive myth and religion as cultural inventions and those that view
them as (adaptive or non-adaptive) byproducts of brain processes; it can
also help us estimate the dates of the earliest myths.
There are three approaches to dating the earliest myths. The first is based on
the assumption that myth is an invention that appeared at a given point in prehistory.
One common period suggested for the earliest myths is the time of the so-called sym-
bolic explosion, sometime shortly after 40,000 years BP, when iconographical evi-
dence of anthropomorphism first appeared.
7
Other variants assume that myth
originated before modern mans African exodus but leave the dates open. If we ac-
cepted either alternative and (quite dubiously) assumed as well that that oral myths
were capable of remaining relatively stable through multiple population bottlenecks
and ecological upheavals, we could make a case that someday we might reconstruct
mans first myths.
The second and third views assume that myth-making is a byproduct (either
selected for or a non-adaptive side-effect or spandrel
8
) of neurobiological processes.
On either of these evolution models, the question of when the first myth appeared is
meaningless. The anthropomorphic modeling associated with myth in both cases
reaches back minimally to the first modern humans, ca. 200,000 years BP; depending
on which sides of brain processes that we associate with myth generation those dates
can be pushed back much further an issue that is addressed later in this paper.
The idea that the anthropomorphism underlying primitive religion and myth is

7
E.g., in the ivory anthropomorphic lion from Hohlenstein-Stadel, ca. 32,000 years BP, seen at
http://www.safarmer.com/Hohlenstein-Stadel.jpg and in Fig. 14.1.
8
A term for a non-adaptive side-effect, introduced into evolutionary biology by Gould and Lewontin
1979.
285
in fact a side-effect of brain development is supported by a great deal of testable evi-
dence reviewed at length in this paper. That evidence suggests that religion and myth
are non-adaptive (and in evolutionary terms, quite expensive) byproducts of the ways
in which the so-called social brain distributed brain systems involved in face-
recognition, the reading of emotions and sexual signals, modeling of the cognitive
states of others (in so-called theories of mind), etc. developed early in evolution (see
Sections 3.1 ff.). On this evidence, crude animistic modeling of some sort can be ex-
pected in all higher social animals, not just in man amusingly, in a sense vindicating
the words ascribed to Xenophanes, found in the epigraph of this paper. In this case,
the elaboration of such models in myths can be traced back as far as we are comfort-
able placing human language. Much evidence suggests that language too emerged
over a vast period, with the result (as discussed below) that something corresponding
to myth can be claimed to be much older than the first Anatomically Modern Humans.

3. A neural model is needed to explain cross-cultural similarities in the ways
myths were transformed in literate traditions, helping generate the partly
deanthropomorphized deities and cosmic principles of later world tradi-
tions.
One perennial problem in mythological research is that preliterate and literate
myths are often naively confused (Farmer 2007). One reason is presumably because
even ethnographic reports of myths eventually reach us via texts, which often mis-
leadingly conflate a plethora of myth variants in single fixed forms. Moreover, once
prehistoric myths found their way into texts, they tended to get worked up abstractly
by scribes and commentators operating over long periods in stratified textual tradi-
tions, helping transform myths into the abstract religious, philosophical, and cosmo-
logical forms typical of mature premodern civilizations (Farmer 1998; Farmer,
Henderson, and Witzel 2002; Gonzalez-Reimann 2002; Farmer 2008; Farmer forth-
coming).
9
Cross-cultural data summarized in these studies suggest that the exegetical
methods used to integrate myths in manuscripts were similar cross-culturally, due
again to neurobiological influences.

The implication is that a neurobiological model is
needed not only of myth generation, but of myth transformation in literate traditions
as well.

4. A neurobiological model is needed to explain the unreasonable persever-
ance of primitive mythic tendencies in modern traditions.
Myths in the forms studied in comparative mythology arise from what can be
pictured as default conditions in the human brain expressed in some way in all peri-
ods of history (infra and Farmer forthcoming). In later cultures, those default condi-
tions may be partly overwritten by literate traditions in which anthropomorphic

9
It is the predictability of these processes that allows us to model long-range patterns of growth in
those traditions in computer simulations. See Farmer, Henderson, & Witzel 2002; Farmer, Henderson,
Witzel, & Robinson 2002; Farmer 2008 and forthcoming.
286
tendencies become worked up abstractly in predictable directions (Farmer 1998;
Farmer, Henderson, and Witzel 2002; Farmer 2008; Farmer forthcoming). This not-
withstanding, it can be shown from simple experiments (cf. Section 4.3 below) that
myth-making tendencies can be identified in all normal subjects just below the sur-
face; study of neuropathologies in which those tendencies are amplified or attenuated
provides useful ways to uncover which sides of neural processing are involved in
myth generation. The fact that even modern societies have not succeeded in eliminat-
ing these tendencies entirely helps explain why after at least 250 years of scientific
discussion primitive thought forms including myth continue to be major political, re-
ligious, and cultural influences even in technologically advanced societies like the
United States.
In order to explain the perseverance of myth in modern cultures, we need a
testable model of its origins. The confident prediction made in the early 1980s by
Jean-Pierre Changeux a leading neurobiological theorist and early advocate of
brain-culture studies of the coming demise of spiritualistic theses may be true in
the scientific world; recent studies show that an insignificant percentage of top scien-
tific researchers identify themselves as being religious in any form (for summaries of
the data, see Dawkins 2006: 97-103). But the deep neurobiological roots of anthro-
pomorphism discussed later suggest that we cannot expect that the same will be true
for global populations at least until some future time when more of the worlds
population is exposed to serious scientific education.
2. The universality of anthropomorphism, and its role
in early religion
2.1. Overview
But were in fact primitive religion and myth really universal in premodern times? Be-
fore developing a testable model to explain their origins, we need to discuss claims
involving preliterate tribes who were innocent of religion, or at least who supposedly
told no myths about gods or spirits. If such tribes have ever existed, any model that
claims that primitive religion and myth arose from neurobiological default states
would hardly be credible.
Claims of the existence of such tribes have been made repeatedly since antiq-
uity. The most recent involve the Pirah of the Amazon, whose reportedly simple cul-
ture and primitive linguistic traits at least as pictured by the linguist (and former
Christian missionary) Daniel Everett have made a sensation in the global press. But
a closer look at the evidence suggests a more complex and quite melancholic story:
among the few artifacts noted in Everetts works are Pirah necklaces made from
seeds, homespun cotton string, teeth, feathers, beads, beer-can pull-tabs, and/or other
objects, whose functions are decorative only secondarily, their primary purpose be-
ing to ward off the evil spirits that they see almost daily (Everett 2005). As this pas-
287
sage suggests, the claimed reluctance of the Pirah to tell myths may itself testify to
the fearful hold gods and spirits have over their daily life. The inclusion among Pirah
spirit-deflectors of beer-can pull-tabs also hints that the impoverishment of this rap-
idly dying culture may involve recent disruptions to old ways of life. The result as one
severe Everett critic notes may be a creolized, stripped-down remnant of older val-
ues tied to the Pirahs earlier links to tribes known to have once possessed a rich my-
thology (Levinson 2005).
Everetts testimony in asides also suggests that the Pirah are much more
prone to myth telling than he tells the press. Thus despite his public claims that none
of the Pirah is bilingual, in his technical papers he speaks repeatedly of tribesmen
freely relating stories in Portuguese as well as their native language (e.g., Everett
2005). Much comparative evidence demonstrates that myth telling is not as common
in some premodern societies as others, but and here the Pirah must stand for the
rest no one has ever turned up evidence of a single early society that failed to pic-
ture major segments of reality in anthropomorphic terms.
The fact that anthropomorphism was pervasive in early cultures does not mean
that religion consists only of stories about gods and spirits. Any comprehensive model
of myth and religion must account as well for the means of communicating with gods,
spirits, and ancestors; for concepts of souls and life after death; for shifts from blood
sacrifices to anthropomorphic gods to spiritual sacrifices to transcendent deities; for
the related shift in literate times from tribal to universal ethical ideas; for the magical
union of worshippers with redemptive deities; for the (fairly late) development of
meditative practices aimed at mystical union; and so on down a long list (Farmer
2008; Farmer, Henderson, and Witzel 2002; Farmer forthcoming). Tied to many of
these developments is the fact that cruder anthropomorphism tended to diminish in
literate traditions, eventually giving birth to monotheistic gods and abstract cosmic
principles often not only said to be distant from human form but to transcend human
understanding as well.
Despite these complexities, anthropomorphism remains our best entry point to
studying primitive religion and myth scientifically. There was a popular saying in the
nineteenth century inspired by the work of the French physiologist Jean Pierre Ca-
banis; the most famous version shows up in William James, a staunch spiritualist,
who cited it critically in Principles of psychology (1890): The brain secretes thought
as the kidneys secrete urine, or the liver secretes bile. Darwin (1838) earlier proposed
a version less apt to shock the pious, but still prudently confined to a private note-
book: Why is thought being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a
property of matter?
Darwin could have added: And why does thought so often express itself in an-
thropomorphic forms? Why do children draw faces on the sun, or turn house doors
into mouths and windows into eyes? Why are childrens stories populated world-wide
by talking animals inhabiting human social settings? Why did early cultures link gods
with stars or constellations linked with social myths? Why do human languages as-
sign gender to inanimate parts of nature? And if overextensions of human traits to the
288
exterior world are rooted in neurobiology, how have human cultures managed to tran-
scend anthropomorphic tendencies? Why do we tend to associate myth more with ear-
lier than with later cultures?
The aim of the model discussed below (starting with Section 3.1) is to demon-
strate that primitive anthropomorphism is a predictable side-effect of neural develop-
ment originating in social biases in brain programs running continuously in all of us.
While these biases may be partially overwritten in literate traditions, in times of his-
torical stress they tend to return to full strength.
The brain not only naturally secretes thought but gods and myths as well a
finding that could bode ill for mans long-term survival, given his growing techno-
logical power. Before sketching out the grounds of the model, it will be useful to look
at earlier attempts to link anthropomorphism to primitive myth and religion and the
brain to religious experiences of other types.
2.2. Earlier naturalistic models of myth and religion
The idea that the gods inhabiting myth originated in overextensions of human quali-
ties to the exterior world can be traced to antiquity. The most famous expression of
that idea came in the words found at the head of this paper traditionally ascribed to
Xenophanes, who lived in the early 6th to early 5th

centuries BCE. Similar ideas show
up in Hebrew scriptures compiled in the same period, an era in which the expanded
use of lightweight writing materials was radically transforming mythic traditions
throughout Eurasia (Farmer 1998; Farmer, Henderson, and Witzel 2002; Farmer
forthcoming).
In the middle of the eighteenth century, Hume placed anthropomorphism at
the center of his Natural history of religion (1757) and Dialogues concerning natural
religion (first published 1779), which continue to have a deep impact on naturalistic
models of religion and myth (see below, Section 2.6):
There is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to
transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of
which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds;
and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or
good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us (Hume 1757).
In the nineteenth century, these ideas turned up in dozens of variants as evolu-
tionary models grew in popularity in all fields from biology to cultural history. In
1841 Feuerbach argued in Das Wesen des Christentums that even late theological
concepts in Christianity consisted in the projection of mans nature into ideas of god.
Feuerbach did not suggest a clear evolutionary path from primitive anthropomorphism
to the Christian ideas discussed in his work; his model derived from critiques of
Hegel and not what anyone today would view as scientific or historical data. But his
approach had a major impact on naturalistic studies of religion, which began to appear
in large numbers after Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859.
The most influential of these came in E.B. Tylors Researches into the Early
289
History of Mankind (1865) and Primitive Culture (1871). Tylor argued that the origins
of religion lay in primitive animism, which can be roughly viewed as an extension
of concepts of life or soul (anima in Latin) to the non-human world. Similar views
were advanced in the early years of evolutionary theory by others, many of them
closely aligned with Darwin. These included (besides Herbert Spencer) Darwins
neighbor John Lubbock, in Pre-historic Times (1865) and Origins of Civilization and
the Primitive Condition of Man (1870); and the ethnologist John Ferguson McLennan.
In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin summed up views of anthropomorph-
ism that were widespread at that time by quoting McLennans The worship of plants
and animals (1869), which placed the origins of religion in the simplest and earliest
hypothesis to occur about the world that natural phenomena are ascribable to the
presence in animals, plants, and things, and in the forces of nature, of such spirits
prompting to action as men are conscious they themselves possess. Transmitted
largely through Tylors concept of animism, this view has impacted a long list of
writers stretching from Piaget in the 1920s to recent writers including Boyer, Atran,
Harris, Dennett, and Dawkins. The most detailed model of the origins of anthropo-
morphism so far is found in the work of the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie, to whom
we will return shortly.
At the end of the nineteenth century William James took a radically different
approach to religion in Varieties of religious experience, which was originally written
for his Gifford lectures in Edinburgh in 1901-1902. Unlike these earlier figures, James
had little if any interest in gods, formal theology, religious institutions, or historical
transformations in religion. As his title implies, his interest lay in religious experience
existential anxiety, ecstasy, possession, hallucination, prophecy, spiritual healing,
conversion, mystical rapture, and so on. James acknowledged that much of this ex-
perience could be viewed as abnormal from a psychological standpoint. But in his
eyes that did not undermine its spiritual validity, which in the light of his pragma-
tism could only be measured by its psychological effects. James beliefs here were
intensely personal: he claimed his lifelong depressions only lifted once he embraced
his wifes spiritualism, which expanded in old age when much of his time was taken
up in seances and conversations with the dead. One of James last publications, in
1909, notoriously recorded his conversations with his dead friend Roger Hodgson.
(James New York Times obituary the next year carried the wonderful subtitle Expo-
nent of pragmatism and dabbled in spooks.)
The influence of James work in studies of the origins of primitive religion has
in many ways been unfortunate due to his shift of emphasis from primitive anthropo-
morphism to subjective religious experience, all of it approached ahistorically. In the
1970s, working in the tradition of James, Norman Geschwind, one of the twentieth
centurys great neurologists, took this trend further in reexamining what has been
claimed since antiquity to be the heightened religious experiences of epileptics. What
followed were a series of still controversial studies that attempt to link a set of behav-
iors including intensified religiosity and hypergraphia to the period between seizures
in temporal lobe epileptics (Waxman & Geschwind 1974, 1975; cf. Trimble & Free-
290
man 2006). In the following decades, a large literature has developed that has either
supported or attacked Geschwinds attempts to localize extreme forms of religious
experience in specific regions of the brain. Recent claims have even been made that
intimations of God can be induced artificially in the temporal lobe (the region most
associated with epileptic seizures) by the application of technologies including Trans-
cranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) (St.-Pierre & Persinger 2006).
10

Many recent studies in the tradition of James have been sensationalized in the
press and have been credulously hailed by New Age spiritualists, including at times
researchers involved in the studies. The most famous are associated with Andrew
Newberg and his coworkers at the University of Pennsylvania (cf., e.g. Newberg et al.
2001, 2003; Khalsa et al. 2009). Using non-invasive imaging techniques, Newbergs
group has studied changes in regional blood flow patterns in the brains of meditating
Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns while they used various visualization or chanting
methods. What all this has to do with religion is questionable: from a neurobiological
angle, one could predict similar blood-flow patterns would show up from studies of
atheists changing nonsense words and perhaps pornographic rhyme.
Many similar studies have recently been undertaken elsewhere; perhaps the
most notorious much ridiculed in the field is a study by a University of Montreal
group that reports results of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies
of blood-flow patterns in Carmelite nuns recorded while they were subjectively in a
state of union with God. The authors claim (without a hint of skepticism) that the
experiences of their subjects may also include:
the sense of having touched the ultimate ground of reality, the experience of timelessness
and spacelessness, the sense of union with humankind and the universe, as well as feelings of
positive affect, peace, joy, and unconditional love (Beauregard and Paquette 2006).
It is impossible to imagine what light if any fMRI studies of modern meditat-
ing monks and nuns could throw on primitive religion which highlights one problem
introduced in naturalistic approaches to religion and myth since James altered the di-
rection of research in the early twentieth century. From an historical standpoint, medi-
tation of the types described in the studies described above have little to do with
primitive religion: formal meditation was a relatively late development in religious
thought, appearing at the earliest towards the middle of the first millennium BCE,
when religion underwent major changes under the impact of expanding literacy.
Claims that studies like this may someday identify a God spot (to cite a
credulous Scientific American article) or similar things, clash with everything known
about the distributed nature of brain functions, which are discussed later in this paper:
cognitive functions (including those involving religion) are located in circuits linking
many brain areas, and not in single regions. The conclusion is that little help can be
expected in understanding primitive myth and religion by the kinds of neuro-

10
For an amusing story on this method and its failure when tested on the evolutionary biologist (and
atheist) Richard Dawkins, see in the UK Telegraph from 2003: Holy Visions Elude Scientists,
http://tinyurl.com/5t9oav. More on Persingers claimed God helmet can be found on the Web.
291
theology widely discussed in recent years in the mass press.
11

2.3. Darwins dog and chimpanzee rain dances: standard cognitive ap-
proaches to the origins of religion
Starting in the 1990s, a growing number of researchers began to return to naturalistic
views of the origins of anthropomorphism discussed in the tradition extending from
Hume to Lubbock, Tylor, McLennan, Darwin, and other early evolutionary theorists.
The first influential work of this type is by the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie, found
in a major book, Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion (1993) and a number of
shorter studies (cf., e.g., Guthrie 2002). Guthries model is not grounded in a detailed
discussion of the brain, but it does take cognitive research and evolutionary studies of
behavior seriously. Guthries model illustrates both the uses and limitations of current
evolutionary approaches to myth and religion including the problem of deciding
between alternative models in the absence of ways to test those models and is worth
discussing in detail.
12

Guthrie expands on a suggestion in Darwin in extending to the animal world
in general what can be broadly viewed as animism, which he sees as an ancient
adaptive mechanism tied to evolutionary survival. He takes his inspiration in one re-
cent paper from a wonderful passage from the The Descent of Man (1871), which I
quote here a bit more fully than Guthrie does in his paper:

11
Two recent papers by Kapogiannis et al., published after this article was in press, that associate acti-
vation of neural networks linked to the so-called social brain with different sides of anthropomorphic
religious belief are more useful, although they persist in misrepresenting single cognitive functions
with localized brain regions.
12
A number of later studies follow the general path taken by Guthrie. My discussion of his work below
must stand in lieu of a broader discussion of the literature. A few major studies at least indirectly influ-
enced by Guthries views of anthropomorphism and the origins of religion all also discuss a wider
range of religious topics include Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Re-
ligious Thought (2001); Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion
(2002); David Sloan Wilson, Darwins Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society
(2002); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004); Daniel Den-
nett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006); and Richard Dawkins, The God
Delusion (2006). Reasons proposed for the origins of religion in these studies range from variants of
the old claim that religion was selected for in evolution to enhance group survival (a view proposed in
updated form in Wilsons work) to a diverse set of theories (in Boyer, Atran, Harris, Dennett, and
Dawkins), more in harmony with the model developed in this paper, that most sides of religion were
non-adaptive side-effects of human evolution. There is a great deal of useful material in these studies,
but as in the case of Guthries seminal work, there is little discussion in any of them of the detailed
neurobiological underpinnings of their models or of empirical tests that would allow us to verify or
falsify them; as a result, no broad consensus has emerged in the field on the origins of myth and relig-
ion, outside of agreement that those origins can be explained in biological terms and often involve the
so-called social brain. A deeper problem arises from the fact that none of these studies distinguishes
clearly between primitive myth and religion and their later transformations in literate traditions, with
the result that their models (like those of James and his followers) are largely ahistorical, which limits
their usefulness in broader studies of comparative mythology and the history of thought.
292
The tendency in savages to imagine that natural objects and agencies are animated by spiritual
or living essences, is perhaps illustrated by a little fact which I once noticed: my dog, a full-
grown and very sensible animal, was lying on the lawn during a hot and still day; but at a little
distance a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol, which would have been wholly
disregarded by the dog, had any one stood near it. As it was, every time that the parasol
slightly moved, the dog growled fiercely and barked. He must, I think, have reasoned to him-
self in a rapid and unconscious manner, that movement without any apparent cause indicated
the presence of some strange living agent, and that no stranger had a right to be in his territory
(Guthrie 2002; Darwin 1871, ch. 3).
Darwin tied these animistic tendencies to what he characterized as religions ugliest
features, including human sacrifice aimed at appeasing anthropomorphic deities. He
continues further in the Descent of man in a passage not quoted by Guthrie. Darwin
here clearly endorses the idea that religion is an unwanted side-effect of evolution:
The same high mental faculties which first led man to believe in unseen spiritual agen-
cieswould infallibly lead himto various strange superstitions and customs. Many of these
are terrible to think of such as the sacrifice of human beings to a blood-loving god; the trial
of innocent persons by the ordeal of poison or fire; witchcraft, &c.As Sir J. Lubbock [in
Pre-historic Times] has well observed, it is not too much to say that the horrible dread of un-
known evil hangs like a thick cloud over savage life, and embitters every pleasure. These
miserable and indirect consequences of our highest faculties may be compared with the inci-
dental and occasional mistakes of the instincts of the lower animals.
Guthrie expands on Darwins suggestion involving his dog with evidence
drawn from studies of animal behavior. The tendency to ascribe animacy to nature, as
Guthrie sees it, is rooted in questions of survival, in the horrible dread of unknown
evil noted by Lubbock and Darwin. The gravest dangers to animals and early man
were not inanimate but animate, and the two were not always easy to distinguish.
Camouflage and mimicry are employed by predators and prey alike, making it diffi-
cult to detect animate dangers on the rapid time scales needed to guarantee survival.
As a result, animals tend to evolve heightened perceptual mechanisms to detect ani-
mate objects. In the case of sudden movement or suspicious noises the default condi-
tion, as illustrated by Darwins dog, is to assume that the sources are alive. Guthrie
writes:
Like us, other animals appear to attribute characteristics of life and agency to the inanimate
world. In this sense, other animals are animists. This is because we all respond to perceptual
ambiguity in a strategic way, produced by natural selection: when in doubt about whether
something is animate or intentional, or is the result of action by something animate or inten-
tional, we assume that it is (2002).
Drawing on a classic paper that compares cognition in animals and children, Guthrie
writes:
An S-shaped object on a woodland path might be either a stick or a snake. As Ristau (1998:
139) puts it, a fail-safe mechanism for most species would be to interact with an unknown
object as though it were animate, and probably predacious (Guthrie 2002).
The better safe than sorry explanation that Guthrie proposes to explain why
animals have heightened animate detection systems is repeated by many others, in-
cluding Boyer (2001), Atran (2002), and Dennett (2006).
293
Guthrie reviews interesting if anecdotal evidence of animals behaving
as though in the presence of unseen agents (for example, even with no predator in sight, they
often act cautiously though occasionally, as in the chimpanzee rain dance, with bravado)
(Guthrie 2002).
He points to evidence of perceptual bias in detecting animate objects, including rapid
responses in animals and children to eyes or anything resembling them reflected in
the common development of false eye-spots as defenses against predators. After re-
viewing a number of similar examples, he returns to the chimpanzee rain dance as an
epitomal example of animal animism (2002):
Finally, and most tellingly, wild chimpanzeesoften respond to thunderstorms, to rapid
streams and to waterfalls with the kind of display (shaking and dragging branches and rushing
about vigorously) that they use as a threat against predators and other chimpanzees. Observers
have reported this behaviour in six communities of African chimpanzees, out of nine commu-
nities that have been closely studied.Goodall and many other chimp-watchers think this be-
haviour is indeed a threat directed toward these inanimate targets as though they were alive.
The response is both widespread and indiscriminable from those toward actual, natural agents,
visible or not.
I will return to chimpanzee rain dance, which is in fact of significant importance in
understanding the origins of myth, in Section 3.6 below.
2.4. Animate detection systems: partial support for the standard model
Guthrie and the long line of later writers after him who have developed similar mod-
els frequently allude to cognitive psychology and the brain, but do not attempt to ex-
plain the mechanisms behind their models in detailed neurobiological terms. But part
of those models can find support in recent brain research, especially those parts in-
volving animate detection systems. Studies of the eternal war between rats and cats
provide a nice example. Recent studies have confirmed that rat brains have what we
can picture as built-in cat detectors, mediated by pheromones in cat urine. Even a
slight whiff of cat will trigger aversive reactions in rats, mediated by circuits in the
amygdala and linked cortical and subcortical fear centers (Takahashi et al. 2005;
Blanchard et al. 2005). Unfortunately for rats, a protozoan parasite known as
Toxoplasma gondii has evolved ways to breech these cat-detection systems for its
own selfish benefit. Toxoplasma has the unique property of living in rats but repro-
ducing only in cat intestines; at appropriate times in the parasites life cycle
Toxoplasma cysts implanted in the rats amydala emit chemicals that convert the rats
innate fear of cats into a fatal cat attraction allowing the parasite to complete its life
cycle in a predictable fashion (Vyas et al. 2007). Few better examples exist of the
perversity of Nature, red in tooth and claw that underlies modern cognitive models
of animal animism.
Moving up the evolutionary ladder, the best-known studies of higher brain
systems specialized to detect animate dangers involve innate fears in primates of
snakes. Inspired by the studies of Alfred Brehm (1829-84), Darwin once again lies at
the center of the story, which involves experiments described both in The descent of
294
man (1871) and The expression of the emotions in man and animals (1872). Darwin
showed monkeys and baboons at the London Zoological Gardens stuffed snakes, dead
fish, mice, and turtles to check their reactions. Depending on the stimulus, the re-
sponses of the primates ranged from total indifference to curiosity to fear and aggres-
sion which was intense in the case of snakes. Many later researchers have replicated
Darwins work, leading to the consensual view today that most primates (there are a
few exceptions) including humans have an innate fear of snakes.
These examples involve responses to specific animate threats, and hence can
only provide limited support for Guthries model of animal animism. But recently a
study by New et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provided
evidence of attention biases to animate objects of a generalized sort that go much fur-
ther (New et al. 2007; Ohman 2007). While the study does not mention religion, it
implicitly provides some of the best evidence of neural processes that might be cited
in support of the model of the origins of primitive religion proposed by Guthrie and
later writers in his tradition.
Like Guthrie and these writers, New et al. hypothesized that the brain evolved
rapid-detection systems to spot animate dangers in the environment. They tested this
idea by showing human subjects outdoor scenes modified randomly by the insertion
of computer images of animate or inanimate objects. All their subjects identified the
animate objects in the scenes much faster and more reliably than the inanimate ob-
jects. This was even true when the inanimate objects were vehicles, whose detection
might have life-or-death consequences in modern life. The researchers argue from the
latter finding that animate monitoring biases emerged early in evolution and did not
derive from cultural conditioning. The paper concludes:
Changes to animals, whether human or non-human, were detected more quickly and reliably
than changes to vehicles, buildings, plants or tools. Better change detection for non-human
animals than for vehicles reveals a monitoring system better tuned to ancestral than to modern
priorities. The ability to quickly detect changes in the state and location of vehicles on the
highway has life-or-death consequences. Yet subjects were better at detecting changes to
non-human animals, an ability that had life-or-death consequences for our hunter-gatherer an-
cestors but is merely a distraction in modern cities and suburbs. This speaks to the origin of
the selection criteria that created the animate monitoring bias (New et al. 2007).
Still another recent paper has similarly found that new-born babies have innate
biases to attend to biological as opposed to non-biological motions. The paper sup-
ports the thesis that these biases are presumably part of an evolutionarily ancient and
nonspecies-specific system predisposing animals to preferentially attend to other ani-
mals (Simion et al. 2008). It can finally be noted that this thesis can also be sup-
ported by studies of brain-damaged subjects who selectively lose the ability to name
living or nonliving things, which similarly suggest that the living / nonliving distinc-
tion may be intrinsic to brain processing (cf. Damasio et al. 1996; Martin et al. 1996;
for a different interpretation, see Marques 2002; Marques et al. 2008). All these stud-
ies can be tied at least suggestively to neurobiological models of the origins of myth.
295
2.5. From animism to anthropomorphism: inadequacy of the standard model
Before these papers appeared, Guthrie had already claimed that perceptual biases in-
volving animate danger were linked to the origins of anthropomorphic gods. But nei-
ther Guthrie nor later writers in his tradition (Boyer, Atran, Dawkins, etc.) have
proposed any detailed model of the neurobiological sides of those links. To verify
their models, we would need to specify the exact path that leads from animate detec-
tion biases to the generation of anthropomorphic deities. That generation obviously
cannot be explained simply by invoking models of animal animism, which picture
animism as a general survival strategy in a world teeming with animate dangers: hu-
mans may be the most dangerous of animals, but they are obviously not the only ones,
as the case of snakes makes evident. The evidence in the recent papers by New et al.
and Simion et al. suggest that human attention systems were primed by evolution to
be as alert to the presence of other animals as to humans; this being the case, why
should we expect human and not animal traits to dominate in religion? Even ancient
myths involving animal worship heavily anthropomorphized the objects of worship,
as suggested in the earliest prehistoric hints we have of myths (cf. again the Hohlen-
stein-Stadel lion referred to above). The result is that even if animal animism might
have been involved in early religion, that concept does not lead us to the anthropo-
morphism in ancient myths.
Guthrie himself acknowledges that anthropomorphism and not heightened
awareness of animacy lies at the heart of human religion: his emphasis on the later is
apparently meant only to suggest that religion has deep evolutionary roots. His long-
est study, Faces in the Clouds (1993), provides a useful anthology of hundreds of ex-
amples of anthropomorphism the best to date not only in religion but in science,
philosophy, the arts, and popular culture. Here and elsewhere (e.g. 2002) Guthrie also
discusses a number of primitive perceptual biases, including human face-recognition
systems, that can be linked at least intuitively to anthropomorphic modeling of the
world. The book reviews tendencies of children to draw faces on inanimate objects
and survivals of those tendencies in adults when they talk to their animals or pets.
In a key passage cited below, Guthrie explains his views of the origins of an-
thropomorphism; interestingly, despite the 250 years separating their works, those
views do not provide an advance over the commonsense (if fundamentally untestable)
view that Hume expressed in 1757 (above, Sec. 2.2): anthropomorphism is part of a
quasi-rational if misguided search for order in the world:
My explanation of anthropomorphism closely resembles that for animism. Both phenomena
stem from the search for organization and significance, and both consist in overestimating
them. Scanning the world for what most concerns us living things and especially humans
we find many apparent cases. Some of these prove illusory. When they do, we are animating
(attributing life to the nonliving) or anthropomorphizing (attributing human characteristics to
the nonhuman). Central among human characteristics is symbolic interaction. Animism and
anthropomorphism are on a continuum and may coexist: in verbally urging a balky computer,
we both animate (give it life) and anthropomorphize (give it language) (Guthrie 1993: 62-63).
Elsewhere he writes that
296
we believe in gods mainly because facing uncertainty, perception and cognition default to the
most important possibilities we know. If those possibilities are actualities, we gain from hav-
ing anticipated them, and if not, we lose little (Guthrie 2002).
This view is no less plausible nor any more satisfactory than it was in
Humes time. To bring this intuitive view into the realm of testable science, we need a
biological understanding of why primitive man defaulted to anthropomorphism when
modeling the world. Fast responses to animate danger undoubtedly had survival value
in prehistoric times, but those responses do not need to be linked to any models of the
world. In fact, responses like these arise from activation of subcortical regions that
occur long before conscious awareness of danger arises in the cortex (cf. LeDoux
1994, 1996, 2007), where such models are constructed. Nor can fast response to ani-
mate danger be linked credibly to anthropomorphic myths involving the sun, moon,
planets, constellations, seasons, times of the day, weather patterns, or other natural
forces, let alone cultural entities like cities, which were mythologized and worshipped
far into premodern times. Recalling the links Darwin drew between anthropomor-
phism and unsavory sides of religion including human sacrifice, it is difficult to agree
with Guthrie in picturing it as part of a quasi-rational strategy in which we lose little
if wrong. Darwin seems closer to the truth in picturing these as unwanted (and quite
costly) side-effects of neural processes, or as he put it as miserable and indirect con-
sequences of our highest faculties.
Models like Guthries and later cognitive psychologists fail not only in not
adequately explaining how anthropomorphism arose in neural terms but also in ignor-
ing how it changed over time. Modern survivals of anthropomorphism are common,
but outside of their expression in children, in followers of primitive religions, or in
subjects with rare neuropathologies (discussed in Section 4.1 below), these survivals
pale in intensity when compared with the pervasive anthropomorphism found in all
premodern societies. There is a transformational side to anthropomorphism in the his-
tory of religion that requires study as well. Neither the neurobiological nor literate
mechanisms underlying those transformations figure in Guthries work nor in recent
naturalistic studies of myth and religion like those of Boyer, Atran, Wilson, Harris,
Dennett, and Dawkins. If we wish to moderate the uglier sides of religion, or to retain
any of its beneficial side-effects, if there are any, we must understand both its biologi-
cal and historical sides as deeply as that of any other part of human culture. And any
such endeavor must begin with an attempt to develop models not only of how myth
originated but also how it changed over time (Farmer 1998, 2008; Farmer, Henderson,
and Witzel 2002; Farmer forthcoming).
3. Overview of a testable neurodevelopmental model
of the origins of anthropomorphism
3.1. Introduction
The rest of this paper introduces a neurobiological model of the origins of anthropo-
297
morphism. The model agrees with recent studies that argue that the roots of anthro-
pomorphism can be linked some way to animate detection biases in perception; but it
extends those views by pointing to developmental processes that link these biases to
the ways that the brain maps reality in general, allowing us to develop explicit tests of
the model. The broader conclusion emerges that anthropomorphism is a costly side-
effect of the emergence of the social brain diverse sets of distributed brain systems
involved in face-recognition, reading of emotions and sexual signals, modeling the
intentions of others (development of a theory of mind or TOA to use the technical
term), the internalization of cultural codes of behavior, and so on. The difference be-
tween this and related models does not lie in the claim that anthropomorphism arises
from overextensions of social models to the external world, which in the last half dec-
ade has become the consensual view; but in the evidence it provides that the anthro-
pomorphism underlying primitive religion and myth is a direct consequence of normal
neurodevelopmental processes.
There are large consequences to this neural twist on old views of myth. As
side-effects of brain development, anthropomorphism cannot be pictured as an adap-
tive result of evolution, as has been claimed in the case of animal animism. Myth
and early religion instead appear to be costly in biological terms, as Darwin suggested
in The Descent of Man. That does not mean that anthropomorphism might not have
isolated secondary benefits, but only that it was not positively selected for in evolu-
tion.
13

An understanding of three basic brain principles is sufficient to construct a
testable neurodevelopmental model of the origins of anthropomorphism:

1. Perception and cognition exist in distributed and not localized brain
systems;
2. Lower-level perceptual systems are heavily weighted to detect social
data;
3. Normal neurodevelopment occurs in orderly layered ways, with lower-
level maps guiding the development of higher-level maps, which
helps keep distributed systems in sync.

Combining these principles allows us to explain why the brain in its default

13
The claim that religion and myth were directly selected for a view recently updated by Wilson (who
claims that religion enhances group survival) have begun in the last decade to give way to a broad
consensus that myth and religion are spandrels of neural development, e.g. in studies by Boyer,
Atran, Harris, Dennett, and Dawkins. The recent books by the latter three devote much time to debunk-
ing claims that diverse sides of religion provide selective advantages to individuals or groups. The
view that anthropomorphic elements in religion are evolutionary byproducts without adaptive functions
can also be claimed for many other sides of religion not touched on in this paper, including those in-
volving ritual, imitative magic, concepts of faith, priestly intercession, sacrificial rites, social bonding,
ideas of life after death, and ethical sides of religion, etc. On these issues, some also susceptible of
tests, see Farmer, forthcoming. Some but not all of these are also briefly treated in Farmer 1998;
Farmer, Henderson, & Witzel 2002; and Farmer 2008.
298
states overextends human physical, mental, and social properties to the external
world. Survivals of these tendencies can be detected in everyone in subtle experi-
ments, but those tendencies show up in the most extreme form in preliterate cultures
and children before literate forces have worked up these states in abstract forms.
As in the work of Guthrie and others noted above, one center of the model lies
in the heavy social biases found in lower levels of brain processing. The brain is not a
generalized computer, as was once widely assumed, but is made up of highly special-
ized sets of analogical or correlative or mirroring systems often referred to as to-
pographic brain maps in the neurobiological literature
14
that are heavily biased to
process social information. Due to the step-like and layered ways in which neural
maps emerge throughout development, in normal individuals social biases in percep-
tion detectable at birth are mirrored in all higher brain programs, including those
associated with the social brain. On the model, the anthropomorphism expressed in
primitive myth and religion arises naturally from the analogical extension of those
maps to general models of the world. The model thus confirms intuitive views of an-
thropomorphism endorsed by a long line of writers from antiquity (e.g., in fragments
ascribed by tradition to Xenophanes) to Hume and Darwin and Guthrie and Dawkins.
But since the model is rooted in neurodevelopmental principles, it can be tested in
studies of neurological conditions that impact the social brain.
3.2. An overview of distributed brain processes
Any understanding of the origins of anthropomorphism requires a brief understanding
of the distributed ways in which brains process information. In the 1980s and 1990s,
one brain model that was popular with linguists and researchers in the so-called cog-
nitive sciences it found few supporters among neurobiologists pictured brain proc-
essing as occurring in highly localized brain modules. The best known of these
models was described in 1983 in a popular book by the philosopher Jerry Fodor enti-
tled The modularity of mind, which heavily influenced linguists in the Chomskyan
tradition. The most controversial side of these models involved claims about language
modules, whose development was often said to depend on special genes that suppos-
edly differentiated man from other animals.
15
Nave adoption of such theories can

14
For detailed reviews of the perceptual and cognitive functions of such maps, see Simmons & Barsa-
lou 2003; Thivierge & Marcus 2007; on topographic maps in joint brain-culture studies, see Farmer,
Henderson, & Witzel 2002; Farmer 2008. Reference here is often made as well to putative mirror
neurons, originally claimed to exist in the premotor cortex. Due to the ubiquity of topographic map-
ping in the brain and the distributed nature of brain maps, I prefer to avoid these terms, which mislead-
ing suggest that such mappings are properties of an isolated class of neurons and not of distributed
neural assemblies in general.
15
Hence all the excitement among linguists like Pinker when what was quickly dubbed the language
gene (FOXP2) was identified in 2001. Its supposed special association with language came in the fact
that one rare type of speaking disorder was associated with damage to the gene. The excitement has
since faded as evidence has surfaced that FOXP2 is a general regulatory gene with widespread func-
tions in the brain and body; for discussion, see Farmer, forthcoming.
299
encourage the idea that some special module for religion or in its crassest form a
God spot exists somewhere in the brain.
Neurobiological research from dozens of subfields can be used to demonstrate
that module theories of the brain are mistaken. Much evidence in the last decade has
confirmed views proposed by a long line of earlier neuroscientists and network mode-
lists (e.g., Jackson 1873; Luria 1973; Edelman and Mountcastle 1982; Rumelhart et
al. 1986; McClelland et al. 1986) that all higher brain functions including those in-
volved with language occur not in localized but in distributed systems; in brief, brain
functions involve the interaction of many neural assemblies in widely separated re-
gions; the coordinated firings of these assemblies is facilitated by feedforward and
feedback loops linking these assemblies in every part of the brain. Damage to certain
parts of the brain (e.g., Brocas or Wernickes areas, the regions most popularly asso-
ciated with language) may in fact affect functions like language more drastically than
damage in other areas; in a similar way, damage to key transmission stations in a
power grid may be more destructive than damage elsewhere. But that does not mean
that language is localized in Brocas or Wernickes areas, any more than the electric-
ity in a power grid is localized in the transmission stations; in fact, neuropsychologi-
cal tests can typically detect subtle language deficits from damage to nearly any major
brain system. The claim that language or any brain functions, including those involv-
ing religion, can be localized in any one region grossly oversimplifies a complex
situation.
To pick a handful of linguistic examples: the processing of words is known to
occur in different brain regions depending on the language being spoken (Valaki et al.
2004), on whether the speaker is literate or illiterate (Petersson et al. 2000; Li et al.
2006), on the class of words being spoken (e.g., verbs or nouns) (Damasio et al. 1996;
Martin et al. 1996), and even on whether the sense of the words is known from first-
hand experience (say from milking a cow) or second-hand experience (from seeing a
picture of a cow and hearing stories about how cows are milked). Location of lan-
guage encoding in individuals may also change as experience with the referent
changes (e.g., the speaker finally milks a cow) (cf. Pulvermller 2002a, 2002b).
Many of these findings, which have been confirmed in studies both of brain
damaged patients and normal subjects, show how far we have come from the simple
language module theories that were popular until a few years ago, at least among
cognitive psychologists. Recent studies have even shown that reading disorders can be
triggered by different sorts of brain damage depending on the nature of the writing
system (e.g., on whether it is an alphabetic system or one with characters like Chi-
nese) (cf., e.g., Siok WT et al. 2004, 2008).
3.3. Distributed brain systems and layered developments in brain maps
The fact that brain functions are distributed over wide regions of the brain has
important implications for understanding how all higher-level cognitive systems
including those involving primitive religion and myth emerge during development.
300
If the distribution of brain functions not only differs in different people, but even in
single persons over time, how does the brain insure that the distributed systems stay in
sync?
Evidence suggests that this synchronization depends in part on alignment of
neural maps that exhibit high levels of structural symmetry throughout much of the
brain the mirroring or topographic (or correlative or analogical) brain maps men-
tioned in Sec. 3.1. Research in neurogenetics, brain imaging studies, neural network
simulations, and other rapidly developing fields all suggest that the job of keeping
these maps aligned during development is facilitated by the layered development of
the neocortex and related brain systems; the general idea is that the structure of neural
maps in early maturing brain systems (e.g. those involving perception) guides the de-
velopment of maps in later developing systems (e.g. those that involve cognition and
higher-level models of the world).
The kinds of topographic or analogical maps that emerge from this process can
be said to underlie all cognition in the brain from spatial concepts to the analogical
or metaphorical constructs that underlie all meaning in language (cf. Lakoff and John-
son, 1980, 1999). The same kinds of analogical maps can also be linked to many de-
fault conditions besides anthropomorphism that show up globally in primitive
thought including the types of analogical reasoning found in imitative magic, in so-
called correlative thinking and premodern systems of correspondences, and a wide
range of similar analogical ideas (Farmer 1998, 2008; Farmer, Henderson, and Witzel
2002).
In terms of development, the idea that the structure of lower maps guides the
development of higher ones differs radically from the ideas involved in older modu-
lar views of the brain, which typically assumed that special genes (including lan-
guage genes) were independently responsible for bringing higher cognitive functions
to maturity (for a succinct overview of the differences in these two types of models,
see Mareschal et al. 2007: Vol. 1: 57 ff.).
One of the many advantages of the analogical and layered ways in which brain
maps develop involves what might be termed epigenetic or neurocultural economy,
which makes the most of neural plasticity: the layered development of brain systems
allows the gradual plastic adaptation of the brain during development to the specific
language, traditions, and technologies of different cultures without requiring any un-
derlying genetic change, except the change involved in gene expression. A prime case
involves the ways in which in some premodern societies professional reciters (includ-
ing mythic storytellers) were capable of allocating large areas of cortical space to the
memorization of vast oral traditions in ways beyond the capabilities of modern intel-
lectuals. Conversely, in literate societies large areas of the brain have become partly
specialized for reading and writing without the need for any specialized literacy
genes, freeing other brain regions from memorization tasks. These plastic realloca-
tions of brain space have major effects on other cognitive abilities and on the evolu-
tion in literate traditions of broad models of the world (Farmer forthcoming).
301
3.4. The development of the social brain and of anthropomorphic deities
How can this view of brain development help us build a testable model of the origins
of myth and religion? The answer to that question lies in a grasp of the depths of the
social biases that we can identify in brain processing. Those biases are a major ele-
ment in social models of the origins of intelligence, which have become increasingly
influential since they were introduced over four decades ago (e.g., Jolly 1966; Whiten
and Byrne 1988; Dunbar 1993, 1997; Barrett and Henzi 2005). In summary, these
models hold that the enlarged primate brain, and in humans the prefrontal cortex in
particular, evolved to enhance survival in complex social environments, and not to
facilitate more abstract calculations.
Regardless of what other evolutionary pressures can be linked to the enlarged
brain, social models of the origin of intelligence explain massive imbalances in the
allocation of human cortical space: by far the largest part of the neocortex is dedicated
to processing data involving faces, emotions, gestures, language, sexual and social
cues, and related signals, and not socially neutral data. Although social deception cer-
tainly was not the only force involved in brain expansion, it indisputably does play a
major role in the primate world, as has been shown now in many carefully designed
field studies stretching back over two decades (e.g., Cheney and Seyfarth 1990). In
humans, the enlarged cortex among other things allows us to invent stories and tell
effective lies, whose uses in enhancing personal survival and sexual success are obvi-
ous. One much-discussed paper by Byrne and Corp (2004) claims that cortical size
can in fact be directly related to primate deception rates: the amusing (or melan-
cholic) implication is that the ability to lie unlike primitive religious impulses may
have been specifically selected for in evolution.
Social biases in human brain processing are far more prominent in the human
brain than the general animate attentional biases discussed earlier, emphasized so
strongly by Guthrie or New et al., etc., that involve non-human animals. These social
biases can be identified in fact in every early processing area of the brain involved in
perception or attention. A few examples that show up at or near birth include orienta-
tion biases involving faces (even three blobs that remotely suggest facial structure
will catch a normal infants attention) (Morton and Johnson 1991; Simion et al.
2007); crying and sucking responses, guided in part by smell, touch, and sight of the
mother (Doucet et al. 2007); and preferences in hearing (apparently appearing even in
the fetal environment) for human speech over other types of audio input (Voulou-
manos and Werker 2007; Rosen and Iverson 2007).
Higher-level systems that emerge out of these primitive biases from infancy to
adulthood include sophisticated face-reading systems capable of evaluations of com-
plex emotions; social-bonding systems mediated by neurohormones like oxytocin and
arginine vasopressin, which in part involve the senses of smell and touch; linguistic
systems that generate narrative behaviors following stereotypical social plots; and
ultimately, especially in prefrontal cortex and linked subcortical centers, high-level
models that integrate all these abilities into complex temporal-spatial social models of
302
the world. Layered models of development can even explain ways in which facial
recognition programs detectable in newborns slowly narrow in preference over time,
similar to the ways in which babbling progressively narrows to a specific language,
leading to so-called other-race or cross-race effects (Kelly et al. 2009; Goodman et
al. 2007), which can contribute to ethnocentric preferences and incipient racism even
in young children.
Expanding on words ascribed by tradition to Aristotle: man is not only a social
animal but the most social of all animals, due to our nearly total reliance on other hu-
mans for survival. When social biases in early map formation are absent or attenuated,
as is the case in some developmental disorders, preventing the normal formation of
social models of the world, the consequences in later cognition in general are typically
catastrophic.
3.5. Dating the earliest myths, and more on chimpanzee rain dances
The combined weight of these data suggest that the origins of anthropomorphism seen
in primitive religion and myth can be modeled in a straightforward way as the product
of heavy social biases in early brain processing, on the one hand, and the orderly step-
like ways in which normal brain maps form, on the other.
One benefit of the model is that it makes a clear statement about the antiquity
of early mythic thinking. As a side-effect of normal brain development, human an-
thropomorphic modeling of the world can be expected to have appeared no later than
anatomically modern man, which based on current data places its origins no later than
ca. 200,000 years BP. This differs radically from recent claims that religious thinking
is related to the sudden appearance of special abilities in human cognition that go
back at best to the upper Paleolithic (Bloch 2008). How far back we choose to imag-
ine the existence of narrated myths about the social activities of anthropomorphic
gods and spirits depends on when we decide that sufficient language was in place to
encode such narratives.
One interesting implication of these views revolves around what they imply
about the cognitive systems of other social animals, whose basic cortical structures
are similarly topographically organized. While chimpanzees lack language, on the
model it is safe to say that something like the claim ascribed to Xenophanes is proba-
bly correct: that in the chimpanzee rain dance described by Goodall and others (Sec-
tion 2.3 above), whatever storm gods the chimps appear to be threatening are
probably viewed by them as beings rather like themselves.
4. Testing the model
4.1. Exaggerated anthropomorphizing tendencies in one form of synesthesia
As noted earlier in the paper, one advantage of this model is that it can be rigorously
303
tested, and by implication is falsifiable. In this and the next section, I will discuss two
such tests. The first involves studies of exaggerated anthropomorphizing tendencies in
one remarkable type of synesthesia and the second dampened anthropomorphizing
tendencies in subjects with autistic disorders.
Lets look first at exaggerated anthropomorphism. One side of the model de-
pends on the layered ways in which brain maps develop, with higher-level cognitive
maps topologically mirroring the structure of perceptual maps. Applying this principle
to the origins of religion, the model suggests that in normal brain development social
biases in perception present at birth are progressively elaborated in higher cognitive
maps, eventually giving rise to the anthropomorphic models of the world associated
with primitive myth and religion.
One kind of evidence that confirms that brain maps are organized in these mir-
roring ways lies in studies of synesthesia, the remarkable condition in which sensory
data (taste, touch, smells, colors, etc.) or even abstract concepts (letters, numbers,
days of the week, etc.) evoke mirrored responses in linked perceptual, cognitive, emo-
tional, or motor circuits. The result is that synesthetes may taste words, hear or
smell shapes, or reliably attach specific emotions to specific colors, days, or abstract
concepts.
Synesthesia is by no means rare, as was believed even a few years ago. One
recent study suggests that in clinical forms it shows up in over 4% of the population
(Simner et al. 2006). In less extreme ways all of us are synesthetes; this is illustrated
most dramatically in the impact of music and dance on emotional and motor systems.
Research in the last few years in fact suggests that synesthesia is closely related to
normal sensory integration going on in everyone below the level of consciousness (cf.
Mulvenna and Walsh 2006; Sagiv and Ward 2006). The suggestion is that clinical
forms of synesthesia simply involve higher-than-normal activation of synaptic links
binding analogical maps in different brain systems.
Research on synesthesia began in the nineteenth century, but for a long time
the condition was viewed as an oddity in psychology.
16
That changed in the early
1990s, when studies of brain mapping encouraged the recognition that the condition
throws light on how brains integrate information in general. Good arguments exist
that synesthesia currently provides a broad window on the neural grounds of analogi-
cal thinking, which is critical to many primitive default conditions in human thought,
including premodern myth and religion. The exaggerated tendencies of synesthetes to
taste or smell words, touch sounds, to attach colors (or moral qualities) to letters
or numbers, and so on, can be related to the biological roots of imitative magic, nu-
merology, religious rituals involving music and dance, and the elaborate correspon-
dences and mirroring cosmologies that eventually emerged in all mature premodern
cultures. Recent studies have even identified one type of visual-touch synesthesia that
leads some subjects to literally feel the pain observed in others, which in less ex-

16
For a regularly updated bibliography of studies from the nineteenth century to the present, see
http://www.syn.sussex.ac.uk/5.html, maintained by researchers at the University of Sussex. Only the
more recent of these are found in the PubMed data base.
304
treme forms can be said to lie at the primitive roots of empathy and ultimately of ethi-
cal thinking (Banissy and Ward 2007).
In the model of the origins of myth introduced above, anthropomorphism is
pictured as a side-effect during normal brain development of social biases in attention
that can be identified even in newborns. One prerequisite for the model is the mainte-
nance throughout development of topographic symmetry in brain maps as higher-level
cognition is shaped by the biases of lower-level systems. If we toss into the model the
heightened awareness of such symmetries found in synesthesia, the model makes an
interesting and testable prediction. Just as some synesthetes have a heightened aware-
ness of topographic mapping between tastes and sounds, or colors and numbers, and
so on, we can expect others to have heightened awareness of anthropomorphism ex-
pressed in different perceptual and cognitive neural domains.
Remarkably, two recent studies amply confirm this prediction. The studies ex-
pand on reports of extreme anthropomorphizers that have appeared sporadically since
the late nineteenth century. One recent study by Smilek et al. (2007) discusses a re-
markable seventeen year-old girl, TE, who attributes inanimate objects including
letters, numbers, abstract shapes and even her bedroom furniture! with personali-
ties and social interactions, which include friendships and hatreds between num-
bers and letters. The authors describe not only the girls synesthetic associations
between different letters, colors, and numbers, but as well the human qualities she
ascribes to these and other classes of objects in her life.
In the passage below, the girl is quoted on her reaction to the number Three,
to which she had a deep dislike since early childhood. Her dislike of the personality
of the number is mitigated by what appears to be a touch of empathy evoked by
Threes youth and lowly social status:
Three is pure blue, the same color as [the letter] E. Three is male; definitely male. Three is
such a jerk! He only thinks of himself. He does not care about any other numbers or anything.
All he wants is to better himself and hell use any sneaky, underhanded means necessary. But
hes also pretty young; he doesnt understand anything and he doesnt have much power, as
far as social status is concerned. So he tries to hang out with Eight (whos also a bad number)
just so he can feel better about himself. But really, none of the numbers can stand him. Hes a
real jerk. Hell pretend as though hes your friend, but then hell manipulate you and stab you
in the back if he feels he can gain something from it. Then hell never speak to you again. If
Three had parents, even his parents would hate him. Its not as though what he does has some
purpose or something behind it, hes just a really nasty number. He just wants things for him-
self. He doesnt care in what he does [sic]. If he had a voice, it wouldnt be high-pitched, but it
wouldnt be deep. Itd be on the high side, a very annoying voice. Hed be short and very thin,
very annoying (Smilek et al. 2007: 981).
Smilek and coworkers tested TE over a long period, confirming that the per-
sonalities of objects and the social relations she attributed to them were not invented
on the fly but remained stable over long periods. The human traits she assigned to
them were also complex. Smilek et al. note that TE used no less than 190 unique
characteristics to describe the personalities of inanimate objects with whom TE had
intimate relations. Interestingly, the personalities she attributed to shapes that she had
not seen before were far simpler than those she assigned to familiar objects just as
305
most people would attribute personality traits more hesitantly to new acquaintances
than old ones. The suggestion is that TE routinely overextends maps of the social
brain to the exterior world in general, as predicted in the views of myth discussed
above. This view is supported by the fact TE often made moral judgments about in-
animate objects, even demanding that her father remove furniture from her bedroom
of whose personalities she disapproved.
TEs description of relations between numbers, letters, and objects even mir-
rored what we might refer to as dominance hierarchies in the human world, which in
her case includes a touch of religion. Thus TE described the numbers Zero and
One which are interestingly the only numbers she failed to assign gender as the
gods of the numbers. It is worth noting in passing that TEs attribution to numbers
of moral traits distinguishing good and bad numbers was a feature of numero-
logical traditions found globally in all major premodern civilizations.
Another paper by Simner and Holenstein (2007), published almost simultane-
ously with the previous study, discusses a number of similar cases, only limited this
time to subjects who only anthropomorphize numbers and letters. They also review
earlier case histories going back to the nineteenth century, when anthropomorphizing
versions of synesthesia were first identified. They describe a recent case involving a
well-educated twenty-three-year-old woman who (much like TE) assigned rich per-
sonalities, moral traits, and social relations to letters and numbers. The researchers
assigned the dozens of anthropomorphic qualities that the subject ascribed to these
graphemes to eight categories, including gender, general personality traits, physical
appearance, occupation, family relationships (e.g., mother, daughter), other social re-
lationships (neighbor, friend), and emotional ties to other letters or numbers (lovers,
friends, etc.).
Other reports they cite in their paper are similar in character. The following
passage that they translate from an 1893 French study suggests again how extensive
the social dimensions are of these extreme anthropomorphizers:
1, 2, 3 are children [who] play together. 4 is a good peaceful woman, absorbed by down-to-
earth occupations 5 is a young man, ordinary and common in his tastes and appearance, but
extravagant and self-centered. 6 is a young man polite, gentle, average intelligence; or-
phan. 7 is a bad sort, although brought up well; spiritual, extravagant, gay, likeable; capable of
very good actions on occasion 8 is a very dignified lady, who acts appropriately. She is
the wife of 9 [who is] self-centered, maniacal, grumpy, endlessly reproaching his wife for one
thing or another (Simner and Holenstein 2007, translating Flournoy 1893).
One perceptive comment made by Simner and Holenstein is that the personal-
ity types of numbers and letters described in these studies tend to reflect the society
that is contemporary with the report. Older studies, for example, mention society
girls and housekeepers, whereas such descriptions are less apparent in modern ac-
counts. Extending this comment to studies of myth would lead us to expect that the
specific kinds of anthropomorphizing found in premodern traditions should reflect
local social norms, much as Durkheim and Mauss claimed a century ago.
For now, it is enough to suggest that this remarkable form of synesthesia sup-
ports the thesis that anthropomorphic models of the world arise as natural extensions
306
of the systems of the social brain to the inanimate world, as predicted by the model
developed in this paper.
4.2. A reverse test: attenuated anthropomorphizing tendencies in autism
At the opposite extreme are people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a catch-all
term applied to individuals with developmental dysfunctions involving impairments
of social cognition and communication. Sometimes these deficits are linked to savant-
like abilities in fields demanding few social skills, including mathematics, music, and
drawing.
Autism is currently labeled a spectrum disorder since the types and severity
of the condition vary along a wide range. For our purposes, the most useful subjects
are those with Aspergers syndrome and other high-functioning forms of autism, in
which intelligence is largely spared. In subjects with high-functioning autism, the
most obvious problems are not intellectual but social impairments. Typical problems
include failure to make eye contact and difficulties reading the intentions of others via
speech, facial expression, body language, and other nonverbal forms of communica-
tion. Often the condition includes problems empathizing with others, the reverse of
the situation of the visual-touch synesthetes mentioned above.
While the causes for ASD appear to be multiple, there is general agreement
that all types of ASD involve disruption during neurodevelopment of the so-called
social brain. The early social biases in perception underlying these developments are
often missing or abnormal in infants later diagnosed as having ASD. Thus gaze cue-
ing tendencies of normal infants to follow an adults eyes to a target is often ab-
sent or aberrant in children who later develop autism (Johnson et al. 2005). This
deficiency can be linked to the common failure of ASD children to develop the joint
attention with adults that is critical to normal intellectual development (Mundy and
Acra 2006). Facial recognition systems too are often abnormal in children who de-
velop ASD, and even more broadly, tendencies to prefer human to inanimate stimuli
are absent in many ASD subjects.
On our model of the origins of myth, we can predict that abnormal social bi-
ases in perception in infancy, or anomalies in the ways that brain maps develop that
prevent these biases from being elaborated in accustomed layered ways in higher sys-
tems, should disrupt the social brain and normal anthropomorphizing tendencies. The
implication follows that subjects with high-functioning autism should exhibit far
fewer anthropomorphizing tendencies than normal subjects.
4.3. Relevance to these tests of the Heider-Simmel experiment
Evidence supporting these views comes from studies of perception that reach back to
World War II. In 1944, Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel made a short animated
cartoon involving two triangles, a small disc, and a schematic picture of a house. In
the cartoon, the triangles (which come in two sizes) and small disc move around each
307
other and in or out of the house in patterns designed to suggest human activities.
Typical actions include aggressive behaviors (e.g., the triangles strike one another),
elation (e.g., the small triangle and disc move quickly around each other in circles),
and so on.
17

The original Heider and Simmel study suggested that normal individuals typi-
cally project elaborate social narratives on those movements that go far beyond what
the authors scripted in the cartoon. Subjects often characterized the big triangle as an
aggressor and the smaller triangle as a protector or lover of the disc. In one section
of the animation, human subjects often interpret the small triangle and disc as escap-
ing the large triangle, who had earlier cornered the disc in the house for reasons
Heider and Simmel leave to the viewers fertile imagination.
Normal subjects typically ascribe gender, emotion, short- and long-term goals,
and complex personal relationships to the triangles and circle. Just as in the case of
hyper-anthropomorphizing synesthetes, the contents of the stories vary widely in in-
dividuals with different cultural values. Informal experiments I have conducted with
the animations suggest that researchers in the hard sciences regularly report far less
detailed anthropomorphic narratives than humanistic researchers or in some cases
may report no anthropomorphic narratives at all. But this probably simply involves
biases derived from their professional training, since when prompted to report anthro-
pomorphic stories about the animations they can readily do so, sometimes volunteer-
ing that they actively suppressed reporting such stories in their first pass on the test.
18

People with damage to brain regions associated with the so-called social brain
may associate some of the simple movements of the geometric figures with anthro-
pomorphic action, but on the whole they fail to elaborate these into the rich social nar-
ratives spontaneously reported by normal controls. Thus Heberlein and Adolphs
(2004), who used the original Heider-Simmel animations in one series of experiments,
report one patient with bilateral damage to the amygdala whose stories about the ani-
mation were entirely asocial, in purely geometric terms, despite normal perceptual
processes. Similar results have been observed in numerous patients with high-
functioning autism shown these or closely related animations under well-controlled
conditions (see, e.g., Abell et al. 2000; Bowler & Thommen 2000; Klin 2000; Castelli
et al. 2002).
These studies suggest that normal overextension of anthropomorphic mental
states to the inanimate world is sharply impaired in autistic subjects, even in cases of
Aspergers syndrome where general intelligence is normal. Further support for this
view comes in studies of drawings by autistic subjects, which frequently favor inani-
mate over human subjects. There are exceptions to this rule in some autistic savants
(Cox and Eames 1999), presumably due to the wide variation of subjects classified as
having ASD. In general, however, when children classified as having Aspergers syn-

17
One early version of the 1944 Heider-Simmel animation can be found online at
http://tinyurl.com/yjn5djk.
18
This is an apparent example of the kinds of cultural overwriting of anthropomorphic tendencies dis-
cussed earlier.
308
drome are asked to draw humans, their abilities to do so are badly impaired when
compared to normal children, even when their abilities to draw trees or houses are
equal to that of controls (Lim and Slaughter 2008).

Figure reproduced from Heider & Simmel 1944. The movements of the triangles and disc in the anima-
tion were scripted to suggest human motivations behind the movements. Normal subjects tend to invent
complex social plots to explain those motivations, which go far beyond what was originally scripted
into the animation. Patients with damage to neural areas involved in processing social data and autistic
subjects report simpler narratives devoid of most anthropomorphic details when compared with those
of matched controls. For an online version of the animation, see footnote 13.
Fig. 14.2. Exposure-objects displayed in various positions and configurations from
the moving film: Large triangle, small triangle, disc and house.

The result is that just as in the opposite extreme involving hyper-anthropo-
morphizing synesthetes studies of subjects with autism further support the thesis
that the anthropomorphic tendencies in cognition we find in primitive religion and
myth develop in layered ways out of social biases in perception identifiable even in
infants; when those social biases are missing or layered map development is dis-
rupted, normal anthropomorphizing tendencies are also disrupted.
It can be further predicted on the model that tests of intensity in religious be-
lief of individuals with high-functioning autism, using measures like the Duke Relig-
ion Index (Koenig et al. 1997), can be expected to be significantly lower than those of
matched controls, at least so far as those tests reflect anthropomorphic sides of relig-
ion. Conversely, the model predicts that hyper-anthropomorphizing synesthetes
should score much higher on those tests than normal.
19
The model makes no clear
predictions concerning other types of self-reported religious experience that do not
involve anthropomorphization, including those measured by the Magical Ideation
inventory (Eckblad and Chapman 1983).

19
The same can be predicted for subjects with Williams syndrome, not discussed in this paper, as noted
in Farmer forthcoming.
309
5. Summary and conclusions
This paper began with a discussion of how a neurobiological model of the origins of
primitive religion and myth can contribute to scientific approaches to comparative
mythology. It continued with a review of previous naturalistic models of anthropo-
morphism, ranging from those of Hume to Darwin to modern writers including Guth-
rie and others in the tradition of cognitive psychology (including Boyer, Atran,
Wilson, Harris, Dennett, and Dawkins). It argued that none of these models are de-
tailed enough on the neurobiological level to be rigorously tested, which has pre-
vented the formation of any consensus in the field capable of transforming studies of
myth into a rigorous science.
The rest of the paper developed a model of anthropomorphism grounded in re-
cent studies of neurodevelopment. In brief, the model posits that heavy social biases
in perception and attention detectable in infancy are elaborated during normal devel-
opment into the high-level systems of the social brain; due to the layered and topog-
raphic (or mirroring) ways in which normal brain maps are generated, in the brains
default state anthropomorphic models are routinely overextended into the non-human
world.
The paper also suggested reasons why as a corollary of normal brain develop-
ment the roots of mythic thought can be claimed at a minimum to be as old as the first
anatomically modern humans. If we take seriously the evidence published in the last
few decades involving the so-called chimpanzee rain dance, there are reasons to claim
on the same evidence that something crudely equivalent to mythic thinking existed in
mans ancestors long before myth could be elaborated in linguistic form.
One of the novel advantages of the model is that it makes testable predictions
that can be used to support or falsify it. This paper discusses several of these involv-
ing exaggerated anthropomorphizing tendencies observed in one type of synesthesia
and attenuated anthropomorphizing tendencies in subjects with high-functioning
forms of autism. Further tests are proposed following the models predictions of
higher or lower than normal religious sentiments in these two classes of subjects.
There is much more to say on these topics that I have not been able to take up
in this paper. One key issue I have not discussed relates to which emotionally salient
parts of reality (supra, Sec. 0.1) tend to be anthropomorphized in myth and which
ones are not. Some light on this topic is thrown by recent lab studies involving anima-
tions a bit like those used in the original Heider-Simmel test, which suggest that deci-
sions in this case may involve significant cultural entrainment (Schlottmann et al.
2006). Other issues I have not dealt with in detail include ways in which premodern
peoples communicated with anthropomorphic spirits, how myths were transformed
abstractly over long periods in literate traditions, and how such transformations can be
simulated in computer models of the growth of scholastic-type systems in manuscript
traditions. These and related topics are discussed in already published or forthcoming
studies (e.g., Farmer 1998; Farmer, Henderson, & Witzel 2002; Farmer, Henderson,
Witzel, & Robinson 2002; Farmer 2008 and forthcoming).
310
The deep object of this paper has been to suggest that recent work in neurobi-
ology and culture can produce testable models that are of considerable use in studies
of comparative mythology and cross-cultural studies of the evolution of thought. The
fact that construction of models of this type is possible today suggests that in the com-
ing decades combined historical and neurobiological research can be expected to
deeply challenge thousands of years of assumptions about the evolution of human
thought.
References
Abell, F., Happ, F., & Frith, U., 2000, Do triangles play tricks? Attribution of mental states to ani-
mated shapes in normal and abnormal development, Journal of Cognition and Development,
15: 1-20.
Atran, S., 2002, In gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion, New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Banissy, M.J. & Ward, J., 2007, Mirror-touch synesthesia is linked with empathy, Nature Neurosci-
ence, July 10 (7): 815-816.
Barrett, L. & Henzi, P., 2005, The social nature of primate cognition, Proceedings Biological Sciences,
Sep 22; 272 (1575): 1865-1875.
Barth, F., 1987, Cosmologies in the making: A generative approach to cultural variation in inner New
Guinea. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Beauregard, M. & Paquette, V., 2006, Neural correlates of a mystical experience in Carmelite nuns,
Neuroscience Letters, Sep 25; 405 (3): 186-190.
Blanchard, D.C., Canteras, N.S., Markham, C.M., Pentkowski, N.S., & Blanchard, R.J., 2005, Lesions
of structures showing FOS expression to cat presentation: Effects on responsivity to a cat, cat
odor, and nonpredator threat, Neuroscience Biobehavioral Reviews, 2005; 29 (8): 1243-1253.
Bloch, M., 2008, Why religion is nothing special but is central, Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society of London Series B Biological Sciences, Jun 12; 363 (1499): 2055-2061.
Bowler, D.M. & Thommen, E., 2000, Attribution of mechanical and social causality to animated dis-
plays by children with autism, Autism, 4: 147-171.
Boyer, P., 2001, Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought, New York: Basic
Books.
Byrne, R.W. & Corp, N., 2004, Neocortex size predicts deception rate in primates, Proceedings Bio-
logical Sciences, Aug 22; 271 (1549): 1693-1699.
Castelli, F., Frith, C., Happ, F., & Frith, U., 2002, Autism, Asperger syndrome and brain mechanisms
for the attribution of mental states to animated shapes, Brain, Aug; 125 (Pt 8): 1839-1849.
Changeux, J-P., 1985, Neuronal Man, New York: Pantheon Books.
Cheney, D.L. & Seyfarth, R.M., 1990, How monkeys see the world: Inside the mind of another species,
Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Cox, M. & Eames, K., 1999, Contrasting styles of drawing in gifted individuals with autism, Autism, 3:
397-409.
Damasio, H., Grabowski, T.J., Tranel, D., Hichwa, R.D. & Damasio, A.R., 1996, A neural basis for
lexical retrieval, Nature, Apr 11; 380 (6574): 499-505.
Darwin, C., 1859, The origin of species, London: John Murray.
Darwin, C., 1871, The descent of man, London: John Murray.
Darwin, C., 1872, The expression of the emotions in man and animals, London: John Murray.
Darwin, C., 1838, Notebook C, in Barrett, P.H., Gautrey, P.J., Herbert, S., Kohn, D. & Smith, S., eds.,
1987, Charles Darwins notebooks, 1836-1844: Geology, transmutation of species, meta-
physical enquiries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
311
Dawkins, R., 2006, The god delusion, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
de Haan, M. & Groen, M., 2006, Neural bases of infants processing of social information in faces, in
Marshall, P. & Fox, N. eds., The development of social engagement: Neurobiological perspec-
tives, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 46-80.
Dennett, D., 2006, Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon, New York: Viking Penguin.
Doucet, S., Soussignan, R., Sagot, P. & Schaal, B., 2007, The smellscape of mothers breast: Effects
of odor masking and selective unmasking on neonatal arousal, oral, and visual responses, De-
velopmental Psychobiology, Mar; 49 (2): 129-138.
Dunbar, R., 1993, Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans, Behavioral and
Brain Sciences, 16 (4): 681-735.
Dunbar, R., 1997, Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
Eckblad, M. & Chapman, L.J., 1983, Magical ideation as an indicator of schizotypy, Journal of Con-
sulting and Clinical Psychology, Apr; 51(2): 215-225.
Edelman, G. & Mountcastle, V., 1982, The mindful brain: Cortical organization and the group-
selective theory of higher brain function, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Classic Series.
Everett, D., 2005, Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirah, Current Anthropology,
Aug-Oct 2005; 46 (4): 621-646.
Farmer, S., Henderson, J.B., & Witzel, M., 2000 [2002], Neurobiology, layered texts, and correlative
cosmologies: A cross-cultural framework for premodern history, Bulletin of the Museum of
Far Eastern Antiquities, 72: 48-89.
Farmer, S., Henderson, J.B., Witzel, M., & Robinson, P., 2002, Computer models of the evolution of
premodern religious, philosophical, and cosmological systems,. Online adjunct of Farmer et
al., 2002.
Farmer, S., Zaumen, W., Sproat, R., & Witzel, M., 2009, Simulating the evolution of political-religious
extremism: implications for international policy decisions, Working Paper #1, The Cultural
Modeling Research Group, Palo Alto.
Farmer, S., 1998, Syncretism in the West: Picos 900 theses (1486): The evolution of traditional reli-
gious and philosophical systems, Tempe, Arizona.
Farmer, S., 2006 [2008], Neurobiology, primitive gods, and textual traditions: From myth to religions
and philosophies, Cosmos, 22: 55-119.
Farmer, S., 2007, Methodological problems in studies of the global distribution of myths, Paper pre-
sented at the First Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative My-
thology, University of Edinburgh, 28 Aug 2007.
Farmer, S., Forthcoming, Brains and history: The evolution of thought.
Feuerbach, L.A., 1841, Das Wesen des Christentums, Leipzig.
Flournoy, T., 1893, Des phnomnes de synopsie, Geneva and Paris: Felix Alcan.
Fodor, J., 1983, The modularity of mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gonzlez-Reimann, L., 2002, The Mahbhrata and the yugas, New York: Peter Lang Publishers.
Goodman, G.S., Sayfan, L., Lee, J.S., Sandhei, M., Walle-Olsen, A., Magnussen, S., Pezdek, K., Arre-
dondo, P., 2007, The development of memory for own- and other-race faces. Journal of Ex-
perimental Child Psychology, Dec; 98 (4): 233-242.
Gould, S. & Lewontin, R.C., 1979, The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A cri-
tique of the adaptationist programme, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B
Biolocial Sciences, 21 Sep; 205 (1161): 581-598.
Guthrie, S., 2002, Animal animism: Evolutionary roots of religious cognition, in: Pyysiinen, I. &
Antttonen, V., eds., Current approaches in the cognitive science of religion, London: Contin-
uum International Publishing Group, pp. 38-76.
Guthrie, S., 1993, Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harris, S., 2004, The end of faith: Religion, terror, and the future of reason, New York: W.W. Norton
and Co..
Heberlein, A.S. & Adolphs, R., 2004, Impaired spontaneous anthropomorphizing despite intact percep-
tion and social knowledge, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S A, May 11;
312
101 (19): 7487-7491.
Heider, F. & Simmel, M., 1944, An experimental study of apparent behavior, American Journal of
Psychology 57: 243-259.
Hume, D., 1779, Dialogues concerning natural religion, London.
Hume, D., 1757, Four dissertations: I. The natural history of religion; II. Of the passions; III. Of trag-
edy; IV. Of the standard of taste, London: A Millar.
Jackson, L.H,. 1873, On the anatomical and physiological localization of movements in the brain, The
Lancet, 18 January 1873;1: 84-85,162-164,232-234.
James, W., 1890, Principles of psychology, New York: Henry Holt and Co..
James, W., 1902, Varieties of religious experience, New York: Longmans, Green and Co..
Johnson, M.H., Griffin, R., Csibra, G., Halit, H., Farroni, T., de Haan, M., Tucker, L.A., Baron-Cohen,
S. & Richards, J., 2005, The emergence of the social brain network: Evidence from typical
and atypical development, Development and Psychopathology, Summer; 17 (3): 599-619.
Jolly, A., 1966, Lemur social behavior and primate intelligence, Science, Jul 29; 153 (735): 501-506.
Kapogiannis, D., Barbey, A.K., Su, M., Krueger, F. & Grafman, J., 2009, Neuroanatomical variability
of religiosity, PLoS ONE, 4 (9): e7180.
Kapogiannis, D., Barbey, A.K., Su, M., Zamboni, G., Krueger, F. & Grafman, J., 2009, Cognitive and
neural foundations of religious belief, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S
A, Mar 24; 106 (12): 4876-4881.
Kelly, D.J., Liu, S., Lee, K., Quinn, P.C., Pascalis, O., Slater, A.M. & Ge, L., 2009, Development of
the other-race effect during infancy: evidence toward universality? Journal of Experimental
Child Psychology, Sep; 104 (1): 105-114.
Khalsa, D.S., Amen, D., Hanks, C., Money, N. & Newberg, A., 2009, Cerebral blood flow changes
during chanting meditation, Nuclear Medicine Communications, Dec; 30 (12): 956-961.
Klin, A., 2000, Attributing social meaning to ambiguous visual stimuli in higher-functioning autism
and Asperger syndrome: The social attribution task, Journal of Child Psychology and Psy-
chiatry, Oct; 41 (7): 831-846.
Koenig, H., Parkerson, G.R. Jr. & Meador, K.G., 1997, Religion index for psychiatric research,
American Journal of Psychiatry, Jun; 154 (6): 885-886.
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M., 1980, Metaphors we live by, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M., 1999, Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to
Western thought, New York: Basic Books.
LeDoux, J.E., 1994, Emotion, memory and the brain, Scientific American, Jun; 270 (6):50-57.
LeDoux, J.E., 1996, The emotional brain, New York: Touchtone.
LeDoux, J.E., 2007, The amygdala, Current Biology, Oct 23; 17 (20): R868-874.
Levinson, S.C., 2005, Comments on Everett, D.L., Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in
Pirah, Current Anthropology, Aug-Oct; 46 (4): 637-638.
Li, G., Cheung, R.T., Gao, J.H., Lee, T.M., Tan, L.H., Fox, P.T., Jack, C.R. Jr. & Yang, E.S., 2006,
Cognitive processing in Chinese literate and illiterate subjects: An fMRI study, Human Brain
Mapping, Feb; 27 (2): 144-152.
Lim, H.K. & Slaughter, V., 2008, Brief report: Human figure drawings by children with Aspergers
syndrome, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, May; 38 (5): 988-994.
Lubbock, J.H.., 1865, Pre-historic times, as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and cus-
toms of modern savages, London: Williams and Norgate.
Lubbock, J.H., 1870, The origins of civilization and the primitive conditions of man: Mental and social
conditions of savages, London: Longmans, Green and Co..
Luria, A., 1973, The working brain, New York: Basic Books.
Mareschal, D., Johnson, M., Sirois, S., Spratling, M., Thomas, A.M. & Westermann, G., 2007, Neuro-
constructivism I: How the brain constructs cognition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mareschal, D., Sirois, S., & Westermann, G., eds., 2007, Neuroconstructivism II: Perspectives and
prospects, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marques, J.F., Canessa, N., Siri, S., Catrical, E. & Cappa, S., 2008, Conceptual knowledge in the
brain: fMRI evidence for a featural organization, Brain Research, Feb 15; 1194: 90-99.
313
Marques, J.F., 2002, Names, concepts, features and the living / nonliving things dissociation,
Cognition, Oct; 85 (3): 251-275.
Martin, A., Wiggs, C.L., Ungerleider, L.G., Haxby, J.V. 1996, Neural correlates of category-specific
knowledge, Nature, Feb 15; 379 (6566): 649-652.
McClelland, J.L., Rumelhart, D.E., and the PDP Research Group, 1986, Parallel distributed process-
ing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. Volume II: Psychological and biological
models, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McLennan, J.F., 1869-1870, The worship of plants and animals, Fortnightly Review, 1869; 6: 407-427;
1870; 7: 194-216.
Morton, J. & Johnson, M.H., 1991, CONSPEC and CONLERN: a two-process theory of infant face
recognition, Psychological Review, Apr; 98 (2): 164-181.
Mulvenna, C.M. & Walsh, V., 2006, Synaesthesia: supernormal integration?, Trends in Cognitive Sci-
ences, Aug; 10 (8): 350-352.
Mundy, P. & Acra, F., 2006, Joint attention, social engagement and the development of social compe-
tence, in: Marshall, P. and Fox, N., eds., The development of social engagement: Neurobio-
logical perspectives, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 81-117.
New, J., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J., 2007, Category-specific attention for animals reflects ancestral
priorities, not expertise, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S A, Oct 16; 104
(42): 16598-16603.
Newberg, A., Alavi, A., Baime, M., Pourdehnad, M., Santanna, J. & dAquili, E., 2001, The measure-
ment of regional cerebral blood flow during the complex cognitive task of meditation: A pre-
liminary SPECT study, Psychiatry Research, Apr 10; 106 (2): 113-122.
Newberg, A., Pourdehnad, M., Alavi, A., & dAquili, E.G., 2003, Cerebral blood flow during medita-
tive prayer: Preliminary findings and methodological issues, Percept Mot Skills, Oct; 97 (2):
625-630.
Ohman, A., 2007, Has evolution primed humans to beware the beast?, Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences U S A, Oct 16; 104 (42): 16396-16397.
Petersson, K.M., Reis, A., Askelf, S., Castro-Caldas, A. & Ingvar, M., 2000, Language processing
modulated by literacy: A network analysis of verbal repetition in literate and illiterate sub-
jects, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, May; 12 (3): 364-382.
Pulvermller, F., 2002a, A brain perspective on language mechanisms: From discrete neuronal ensem-
bles to serial order, Progress in Neurobiology, 2002a; 67: 85-111.
Pulvermller, F., 2002b, The neuroscience of language: On brain circuits of words and serial order,
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Ristau, C.A., 1998, Cognitive ethology: The minds of children and animals, in: Cummins, D.D. & Al-
len, C., eds., The evolution of mind, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 127-161.
Rosen, S. & Iverson, P., 2007, Constructing adequate non-speech analogues: What is special about
speech anyway?, Developmental Science, Mar; 10 (2): 159-164.
Rumelhardt, D.E., McClelland JL, and the PDP Research Group, 1986, Parallel distributed processing:
Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. Volume I: The foundations. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Sagiv, N. & Ward, J., 2006, Crossmodal interactions: Lessons from synesthesia, Progress in Brain
Research, 155: 259-271.
Schlottmann, A., Ray, E.D., Mitchell, A. & Demetriou, N., 2006, Perceived physical and social causal-
ity in animated motions: Spontaneous reports and ratings, Acta Psychologica (Amst), Sep-Oct;
123 (1-2): 112-143.
Simion, F., Leo, I., Turati, C., Valenza, E. & Dalla Barba, B., 2007, How face specialization emerges
in the first months of life, Progress in Brain Research, 164: 169-185.
Simion, F., Regolin, L. & Bulf, H., 2008, A predisposition for biological motion in the newborn baby,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S A, Jan 15; 105 (2): 809-813.
Simmons, K. & Barsalou, L.W., 2003, The similarity-in-topography principle: Reconciling theories of
conceptual deficits, Cognitive Neuropsychology, 20: 451-486.
Simner, J. & Holenstein, E., 2007, Ordinal linguistic personification as a variant of synesthesia,
314
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Apr; 19 (4): 694-703.
Simner, J., Mulvenna, C., Sagiv, N., Tsakanikos, E., Witherby, S.A., Fraser, C., Scott, K. & Ward, J.,
2006, Synaesthesia: The prevalence of atypical cross-modal experiences, Perception, 35 (8):
1024-1033.
Siok, W.T., Niu, Z., Jin, Z., Perfetti, C.A. & Tan, L.H., 2008, A structural-functional basis for dyslexia
in the cortex of Chinese readers, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S A, Apr
8; 105 (14): 5561-5566.
Siok, W.T., Perfetti, C.A., Jin, Z., Tan, L.H., 2004, Biological abnormality of impaired reading is con-
strained by culture, Nature, Sep 2; 431 (7004): 71-76.
Smilek, D., Malcolmson, K.A., Carriere, J.S., Eller, M., Kwan, D. & Reynolds, M., 2007, When 3 is a
jerk and E is a king: Personifying inanimate objects in synesthesia, Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience, Jun; 19 (6): 981-992.
St.-Pierre, L.S. & Persinger, M.A., 2006, Experimental facilitation of the sensed presence is predicted
by the specific patterns of the applied magnetic fields, not by suggestibility: Re-analyses of 19
experiments, International Journal of Neuroscience, 116 (19): 1079-1096.
Takahashi, L.K., Nakashima, B.R., Hong, H. & Watanabe, K., 2005, The smell of danger: Abehavioral
and neural analysis of predator odor-induced fear, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews,
29 (8): 1157-1167.
Thivierge, J.P., & Marcus, G.F., 2007, The topographic brain: From neural connectivity to cognition,
Trends in Neurosciences, Jun; 30 (6): 251-259.
Trimble, M., & Freeman, A., 2006, An investigation of religiosity and the Gastaut-Geschwind syn-
drome in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, Epilepsy and Behavior, Nov; 9 (3): 407-414.
Tylor, E.B., 1865, Researches into the early history of mankind and the development of civilization,
London: John Murray.
Tylor, E.B., 1871, Primitive culture, London: John Murray.
Valaki, C.E., Maestu, F., Simos, P.G., Zhang, W., Fernandez, A., Amo, C.M., Ortiz, T.M. & Papanico-
laou, A.C., 2004, Cortical organization for receptive language functions in Chinese, English,
and Spanish: A cross-linguistic MEG study, Neuropsychologia, 42 (7): 967-979.
Vouloumanos, A. & Werker, J.F., 2007, Listening to language at birth: Evidence for a bias for speech
in neonates, Developmental Science, Mar; 10 (2): 159-164.
Vyas, A., Kim, S.K., Giacomini, N., Boothroyd, J.C. & Sapolsky, R.M., 2007, Behavioral changes
induced by Toxoplasma infection of rodents are highly specific to aversion of cat odors,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S A, Apr 10; 104 (15): 6442-6447.
Waxman, S.G., & Geschwind, N., 1974, Hypergraphia in temporal lobe epilepsy, Neurology, Jul; 24
(7): 629-636.
Waxman, S.G., & Geschwind, N., 1975, The interictal behavior syndrome of temporal lobe epilepsy,
Archives of General Psychiatry, Dec; 32 (12): 1580-1586.
Whiten, A., Byrne, R.W., 1988, eds., Machiavellian intelligence: Social expertise and the evolution of
intellect in monkeys, apes, and humans, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wilson, D.S., 2002, Darwins cathedral: Evolution, religion, and the nature of society, Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Witzel, M., in press, The origins of the worlds mythologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
315
Chapter 15. Postmodernism and the
Comparative Method

by Robert A. Segal
1

Abstract. There are currently four positions on the comparative method in the study of myth.
At one extreme lies the postmodern position, which spurns comparison altogether. In light of the
postmodernist focus on the unique, the eccentric, the exotic, the marginal, the neglected, and the ex-
cluded, the modernist concern with the general is anathema. The assumptions here are that the com-
parative method seeks only similarities, that similarities deny differences, that similarities take the
items compared out of context, that similarity means identity, that similarities are invariably superfi-
cial, and that similarities are ineluctably invidious.
The second position, less radical and much older, allows for comparisons, but on only a regional or
local rather than worldwide scale. The comparisons permitted are called controlled comparisons. This
kind of comparativism regularly takes place among, for example, Indo-Europeanists.
A third, more recent position allows anew for universal comparisons, but only when differences as
well as similarities are sought. This position, which dubs itself the new comparativism, assumes that
older comparativism though not, as with the first two positions, comparison per se seeks only simi-
larities, that similarities exclusively are invariably superficial, and that similarities exclusively are un-
avoidably invidious.
The fourth and final position is that of old comparativism, or what used to be called simply The
Comparative Method. Here comparisons are universal, and the quest can, though not must, be for
sheer similarities. The exemplar of old comparativism is J. G. Frazer. Old, or traditional, comparativ-
ism would spurn the criticisms of the other three positions. The criticisms, it would be said, do not
apply even to Frazer.
Elsewhere I have defended the comparative method against the assumptions made by controlled
comparativists and by new comparativists: that the only proper similarities are regional rather than
universal (controlled comparativism) and that differences are more important than similarities (new
comparativism). I have enlisted the grand case of William Robertson Smith both to show that regional
comparisons are not at odds with universal ones and to show that the quest for similarities is not at odds
with the quest for differences. I have argued that Smith is entitled to give equal weight to similarities
and differences.
Now I want to defend the comparative method against the much stronger assumption made by
postmodernists: that the quest for similarities is in itself objectionable. I have previously enlisted J. G.
Frazer in defense of old comparativism against controlled comparativism and new comparativism. Now
I want to enlist him anew in defense of old comparativism against postmodernism. I will be arguing
that Frazer is entitled to seek similarities exclusively and to give no weight to differences. I will be
asserting postmodern objections to the quest for sheer similarities evince a misunderstanding about the
nature of knowledge.

1
School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, University of Aberdeen, Kings College, Aberdeen, Scot-
land, UK.
316
In the study of myth and of religion there are four main positions on the comparative
method:

Postmodernism
Controlled Comparativism
New Comparativism, and
Old Comparativism

I will first introduce these individual positions serially, then discuss them in their mu-
tual relationships, comparing and evaluating them.
Postmodernism (1)
At one extreme lies the postmodern position, which spurns comparison altogether. In
light of the postmodernist focus on the unique, the eccentric, the exotic, the marginal,
the neglected, and the excluded, the modernist concern with the general is anathema.
The assumptions here are that the comparative method seeks only similarities, that
similarities deny differences, that similarities take the items compared out of context,
that similarity means identity, that similarities are invariably superficial, and that
similarities are ineluctably invidious. To quote Pauline Marie Rosenau, who distin-
guishes between tamer, affirmative postmodernists and bolder, skeptical ones:
Post-modernists believe that representation encourages generalization, and in
so doing it focuses on identity and fails to appreciate the importance of difference....
The very act of comparing, in an effort to uncover similarities and differences, is a
meaningless activity because post-modern epistemology holds it impossible ever to
define adequately the elements to be contrasted or likened. The skeptical postmodern-
ists reservations about the possibility of generalizing and their emphasis on differ-
ence ... form the basis of rejecting the comparative method. If, as they conclude,
everything is unique, then the comparative method is invalid in its attempts to search
for and explain similarities and differences while holding certain dimensions constant
(assuming a degree of sameness in other variables). The affirmative post-modernists,
as well, question the linguistic representation upon which any comparative statements
are necessarily based (Rosenau 1991: 97, 105-106).
Here the comparative method is assumed to be used for finding only similari-
ties and is therefore objectionable.
By contrast, postmodernist Mark Taylor acknowledges that comparison can
serve to find differences as well as similarities. Furthermore, he considers the quest
for sheer differences to be no less one-sided than the quest for sheer similarities:
While always involving an interplay between sameness and difference, the activity of com-
parison can have as its goal either the reduction of differences to identity or the establishment
of differences that have little or nothing in common. When carried to extremes, the former ap-
proach leads to a monistic perennial philosophy according to which all religions are purported
Segal Postmodernism and the Comparative Method
317
[sic] to express the same truth differently, while the latter issues in a dualistic heresiological
model in which true religion is privileged over and set against false religions (Taylor 1998:
14).
But the middle ground that Taylor then proposes is in fact the one-sided quest
for sheer differences:
The challenge of effective comparison is to find a mean between these extremes that allows
interpreters to understand differences without erasing them.... [I]t is necessary to develop
comparative analyses that do not presuppose universal principles or reinscribe ahistorical es-
sences. Whether or not it is possible to realize such a comparativist program, many critics
schooled in poststructuralism insist that the very effort to establish similarities where there ap-
pear to be differences is, in the last analysis, intellectually misleading ... (Taylor 1998: 14-
15).
In other words, would-be similarities cover up irreducible differences. While
Taylor, unlike Rosenaus postmodernists, is prepared to use the term comparative
method for the quest for differences only, he, too, objects to the method exactly inso-
far as it seeks similarities.
Moreover, Taylors objection is based on political as well as intellectual
grounds: When reason is obsessed with unity, they argue, it tends to become as
hegemonic as political and economic orders constructed to regulate whatever does not
fit into or agree with governing structures (Taylor 1998: 15). The distinctiveness of
the other overrun by the focus on similarities is imperialistic.
Although often spurned by other postmodernists for not going far enough, the
anthropologist Clifford Geertz is the key postmodern anti-comparativist. Hailing from
the social sciences, Geertz bases his opposition to the comparative method on a
broader opposition to an explanatory approach to culture, of which myth and religion
are parts. To be sure, he does not, like conventional postmodernists, equate explana-
tory with scientific. Rather, he pits explanatory social science against interpretive
social science, which he espouses. By an interpretive approach to culture, Geertz
means many things, but among them is the primacy of the particular over the general,
or of differences over similarities. By an explanatory approach to culture he means the
primacy of the general over the particular.
Geertz opposes generalizations on multiple grounds. They are inaccurate and
tendentious. They are somehow inseparable from the particulars that yield them and,
when separated, prove to be banal or empty:
Theoretical formulations [i.e., generalizations] hover so low over the [particularistic] inter-
pretations they govern that they dont make much sense or hold much interest apart from
them. ... [S]tated independently of their [particularistic] applications, they seem either com-
monplace or vacant (Geertz 1973: 25).
Above all for Geertz, generalizations miss the distinctiveness of the particulars
they amass:
Within the bloated categories of regime description, Feudalism or Colonialism, Late Capital-
ism or The World System, Neo-Monarchy or Parliamentary Militarism, there is a resident
suchness, deep Moroccanicity, inner Indonesianness, struggling to get out. Such a conception
of things is usually called nationalism. That is certainly not wrong, but, another bloated cate-
318
gory, grouping the ungroupable and blurring distinctions internally felt, it is less definite than
it seems. Every quiddity has its own form of suchness, and no one who comes to Morocco or
Indonesia to find out what goes on there is likely to confuse them with each other or to be sat-
isfied with elevated banalities about common humanity or a universal need for self-expression
(Geertz 1995: 23).
It is in the particular and not in the general that the significance of any cultural phe-
nomenon lies:
[T]he notion that the essence of what it means to be human is most clearly revealed in those
features of human culture that are universal rather than in those that are distinctive to this peo-
ple or that is a prejudice we are not necessarily obliged to share. Is it in grasping such general
facts that man has everywhere some sort of religion or in grasping the richness of this re-
ligious phenomenon or that Balinese trance or Indian ritualism, Aztec human sacrifice or
Zui rain- dancing that we grasp him? Is the fact that marriage is universal (if it is) as
penetrating a comment on what we are as the facts concerning Himalayan polyandry, or those
fantastic Australian marriage rules, or the elaborate bride- price systems of Bantu Africa?
(Geertz 1973: 43).
Geertz never makes clear what the proper place of generalization is. At his
most exasperated, he rejects generalizations altogether, even though he himself em-
ploys them even here, in contrasting one case of marriage to another. More often, he
limits generalizations to identifying the categories under which particulars fall. Still
other times, he allows generalizations to determine the cause but not the meaning
of particulars. In any event his opposition to generalizations means his opposition to
the comparative method.
2

Controlled Comparativism (2)
The second position, less radical and much older, allows for comparisons, but on only
a regional or local rather than worldwide scale. The comparisons permitted are called
controlled comparisons (see Eggan 1954: 754). This kind of comparativism is regu-
larly carried out by, for example, Indo-Europeanists. Among scholars of the ancient
Near East, ancient Israel is regularly compared with ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia
but not with some place in Asia. And even though biblicist S. H. Hooke is prepared to
use the term primitive to characterize the stage of civilization in the circumscribed
area of Egypt and Mesopotamia, he objects to the use of the term for any universal
human stage:
Now the expression primitive man is almost as vague as the phrase the man in the street....
The only kind of behaviour or mentality which we can recognize as primitive in the strict
sense is such as can be shown to lie historically at the fountain-head of a civilization. The ear-
liest civilizations known to us are those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the earliest evidence
which we can gather concerning the beliefs and practices there prevalent constitutes for us
what is primitive in the historical [rather than evaluative] sense (Hooke 1933: 1-2).

2
On Geertzs interpretivism, including his fluctuating position on generalizations, see Segal 1992: 77-
101, 1999, and 2003.
319
Again the assumption here is that the comparative method identifies only simi-
larities. In contrast to postmodernism, controlled comparativism allows for narrow
comparisons, but only because they presuppose the distinctiveness the uniqueness,
the incomparability of the area or element within which the cases being compared
lie. Hooke attributes the kindred beliefs and practices in the ancient Near East to cir-
cumstances that would seemingly be, or have been, worldwide, yet the myth and rit-
ual pattern that he works out is nevertheless confined to the ancient Near East:
When we examine these early modes of behaviour we find that their originators were not oc-
cupied with general questions concerning the world but with certain practical and pressing
problems of daily life. There were the main problems of securing the means of subsistence, to
keep the sun and moon doing their duty, to ensure the regular flooding of the Nile, to maintain
the bodily vigour of the king who was the embodiment of the prosperity of the community....
In order to meet these needs the early inhabitants of Egypt and Mesopotamia developed a set
of customary actions directed towards a definite end. Thus the coronation of the king, both in
Egypt and Babylon, consisted of a regular pattern of actions, of things prescribed to be done,
whose purpose was to fit the king completely to be the source of the well-being of the com-
munity. This is the sense in which we shall use the term ritual.... Moreover, we find that
these early ritual patterns consisted not only of things done but of things said.... In general the
spoken part of a ritual consists of a description of what is being done, it is the story which the
ritual enacts. This is the sense in which the term myth is used in our discussion (Hooke
1933: 2-3).
There is a double irony in Hookes procedure. First, the source of his regional
pattern is J. G. Frazers theory of primitive religion worldwide.
3
To keep his com-
parativism regional, Hooke simply attributes similarities within the area to physical
proximity and thereby to diffusion rather, than, like Frazer, to independent invention.
Once, but only once, the distinctiveness of the ancient Near East is presupposed can
similarities within it safely be sought. Second, even the most circumscribed compari-
sons never fend off particularistic critics. Some critics of Hooke asserted that Egypt
and Mesopotamia were distinct from each other.
4
William Foxwell Albright and his
followers asserted, even more forcefully, that Israel was distinct from both. Regional
comparativism was thus used to highlight the differences between Israel and its pa-
gan neighbors. Books with titles like The Old Testament Against Its Environment, by
a student of Albrights, say it all.
5

3
Hooke, limiting himself to Frazers later, intellectualist, anti-ritualist view of primitives and of
myth, sets his own view against Frazers. But in fact Hookes whole myth and ritual pattern comes
from earlier, ritualist Frazer. On Hookes actual beholdenness to Frazer, see Segal 1998: 5-7, 83.
4
Egyptologist Henri Frankfort stresses the differences between Egypt and Mesopotamia: It is now, I
hope, also evident that the similarities between Egypt and Mesopotamia are by no means more impor-
tant than their differences (Frankfort 1951: 17). See also Frankfort 1948.
5
Among those responding to Hooke, Sigmund Mowinckel argues for a weaker case of Hookes pattern
in Israel: see Mowinckel 1962; 1954: ch. 3. William Foxwell Albright differentiates Israelite mono-
theism from the conceptions of god in all surrounding cultures, including the worship of Akhenaten,
and attributes the distinctively Israelite conception to the genius of Moses: see Albright 1957 [1946]:
249-72. To ensure the avoidance of theological miscegenation, Albright rejects evolution as the source
of Israelite monotheism. In so doing, he reinforces the linkage between old comparativism and evolu-
tion. G. Ernest Wright puts forcefully his Albright-inspired rejection of, at once, old comparativism and
320
New Comparativism (3)
A third, more recent position allows anew for universal comparisons, but only when
differences as well as similarities are sought. This position, which dubs itself the new
comparativism, assumes that older comparativism though not, as with the first two
positions, comparison per se seeks only similarities, that similarities exclusively are
invariably superficial, and that similarities are unavoidably invidious. To quote Wil-
liam Paden, one of the better-known new comparativists:
One of the most serious criticisms of the older comparativisms was that they obliterated local
meanings and contexts.... If it is similarity which makes a comparative analysis possible, ... it
is difference which makes it interesting. A central purpose of comparison should be to expose
the diversity of the variant objects it compares (Paden 1996: 8-9).
The new comparativism does not merely permit the quest for differences but
demands it. And clearly, difference is the point of comparison.
Doubtless the most engaging practitioner of new comparativism was Ninian
Smart, but he himself never used the term and was temperamentally too irenic to push
for any dogmatic commitment to the method. Rather, his own delight in spotting both
unexpected similarities and stalwart differences among religions evinces new com-
parativism at its best.
The most celebrated advocate of new comparativism, is Jonathan Z. Smith,
though he does not use the term either. Against old comparativism, likewise not a
term used by him, he asserts that similarity is not identity, that difference therefore
remains, and that, as for Paden, difference is the point of comparison:
It is axiomatic that comparison is never a matter of identity. Comparison re-
quires the acceptance of difference as the grounds of its being interesting, and a meth-
odological manipulation of that difference to achieve some stated cognitive end. The
questions of comparison are questions of judgment with respect to difference: What
differences are to be maintained in the interest of comparative inquiry? What differ-
ences can be defensibly relaxed and relativized in light of the intellectual tasks at
hand? (Smith 1987: 13-14).
Against postmodernism, Smith asserts that the quest for uniqueness is as vain
as the opposite: the search for identity. By nature, uniqueness precludes comparison:
Uniqueness denies the possibility of comparison and taxonomy; [by contrast,] the individual
[i.e., the particular] requires comparative and classificatory endeavors. Uniqueness prevents
science and cognition; the individual invites the same. To put this another way, absolute dif-
ference is not a category for thought but one that denies the possibility of thought (Smith

evolution: The purpose of the lectures is to examine and lay emphasis upon those central elements of
Biblical faith which are so unique and sui generis that they cannot have developed by any natural evo-
lutionary process from the pagan world in which they appeared.... It is the contention of this mono-
graph that the faith of Israel even in its earliest and basic forms is so utterly different from that of the
contemporary polytheisms that one simply cannot explain it fully by evolutionary or environmental
categories (Wright 1950: 7). Undeniably, for Frazer comparativism is tied to evolution, but old com-
parativism per se is not, so that old comparativism cannot be facilely rejected, as it often is, on the
grounds that some practitioners of it assume evolution: see Segal 2001: 346-347.
321
1987: 34-35).
For Smith, new comparativism, unlike old, avoids identity by seeking differ-
ences as well as similarities. Unlike postmodernism, new comparativism avoids
uniqueness by seeking similarities as well as differences.
Old Comparativism (4)
The fourth and final position in religious studies today is that of old comparativism,
or what used to be called simply The Comparative Method. Here comparisons are
universal, and the quest can, though need not, be for sheer similarities. The exemplar
of old comparativism is J. G. Frazer. Old, or traditional, comparativism would dismiss
the criticisms of the other three positions. The criticisms, it would be said, do not ap-
ply even to Frazer, let alone to old comparativism itself. This fourth, stalwart position
has few defenders in the contemporary study of myth and of religion.
6
I am not dis-
pleased to number myself among them.
Hoariness of the positions
Apart from the persuasiveness of the four positions, none of them is new. Old com-
parativism is truly old, going back at least to Aristotle. Postmodernism is as old as
ancient Greek skepticism. In the fifth century BC Herodotus employed the equivalent
of new comparativism to find differences differences between his fellow Greeks and
the often eccentric and exotic other. True, he was hopelessly politically incorrect
and presumed that Greeks alone were civilized and that all others, especially Persians,
were barbarian, but it was the differences that he nevertheless sought. Furthermore, he
did not simply note the differences but accounted for them: the superiority of Greek,
or at least Athenian, culture stemmed from its democratic form of government,
whereas the inferiority of its nemesis, Persia, stemmed from its tyranny.
Somewhat closer to our time, new comparativism was practiced magisterially
more than a century ago by William Robertson Smith. In his Lectures on the Religion
of the Semites (1889) Smith compared ancient Semitic religion with primitive relig-
ion to show at once the similarities and the differences. Where the younger, if still
old-style, comparativist Frazer sought to show only the similarities between primitive
religion and Christianity, new-style comparativist Smith sought to show the differ-
ences as well. He wanted to show how far Christianity, which in its ancient, pre-
Christian, Semitic form was primitive-like, had advanced beyond its primitive roots.

6
Howard Eilberg-Schwartz seeks to revive the comparison of ancient Judaism with primitive relig-
ions. Yet the brand of comparativism that he proposes amounts to new comparativism, albeit with as
much emphasis on similarities as on differences. See Eilberg-Schwartz 1990.
322
And he, too, accounted for the differences by a mix of internal and external factors.
Contrary to some new comparativists, the new comparativism in religious studies did
not arise merely a few decades ago in reaction to Mircea Eliades presumably old-
style comparativism.
Defending the Comparative method
Elsewhere I have defended the comparative method against the assumptions made by
controlled comparativists and by new comparativists: that the only proper similarities
are regional rather than universal (controlled comparativism) and that differences are
more important than similarities (new comparativism). I have enlisted the grand case
of William Robertson Smith both to show that regional comparisons (Semitic relig-
ions) do not preclude universal ones (primitive religions) and to show that the quest
for differences (Semitic versus Aryan religion) does not undercut the quest for simi-
larities (between Semitic and Aryan religions as well as among primitive religions)
(see Segal 2001: 363-72).
Now I want to defend the comparative method against the much stronger as-
sumption made by postmodernists: that the quest for similarities is in itself objection-
able. I have previously enlisted J. G. Frazer in defense of old comparativism against
controlled comparativism and new comparativism (see Segal 2001: 359-62). Now I
want to enlist him anew in defense of old comparativism and against postmodernism.
Postmodern objections to the Comparative Method
From a postmodern viewpoint, the quest for similarities sought by old comparativism
is objectionable because the quest:

(1) denies differences
(2) confuses similarity with identity
(3) generalizes too broadly
(4) generalizes prematurely
(5) takes phenomena out of context
(6) generalizes at all.

All of these objections are in fact misconceptions, either about comparison or
about knowledge itself.
7

7
The following section is a revised version of Segal 2001: 348-358.
323
(1) Denying differences
First, to compare phenomena is simply to match them up. It is scarcely to dictate what
will be found. It is therefore scarcely to dictate finding only similarities. Indeed, to
compare phenomena is necessarily to find differences as well as similarities. Even if
one were seeking only similarities, one would know that one had found them all only
at the point at which no further differences could be converted into similarities. Con-
sequently, one can as readily use the comparative method to find differences as use it
to find similarities. Geertz himself compares Indonesia with Morocco to illuminate
the differences between them:
The dissimilitudes of Morocco and Indonesia do not separate them into absolute types, the so-
ciological equivalent of natural kinds; they reflect back and forth upon one another, mutually
framing, reciprocally clarifying. Or so they seem to do for me. I learned more about Indonesia
when, shaken by the disturbances of the mid-sixties, I decided it the better part of valor to
work in Morocco, than I would have had I gone back then directly to Indonesia. And I learned
more about Morocco when, after things had settled down again in the seventies, I returned, not
without trepidation, to Indonesia, than I would have by confining myself, as beginning to find
my feet in another civilization, I was tempted to do, thenceforth to North Africa (Geertz 1995:
28).
8

The comparative method can thus be used by those who seek differences
postmodernists and new comparativists as well as by those who seek similarities
controlled comparativists and old comparativists.
(2) Confusing similarity with identity
Second, it is a logical truism that any two entities, however much alike, are still dis-
tinct. Therefore the comparison of phenomena can never yield identity, only similar-
ity. Even to seek only similarities is not to eliminate differences. Conversely, to seek
only differences a typically defensive reaction by those fearful of comparison is
not to eradicate similarities. The options are neither wholesale identity nor total
uniqueness but only further similarities or further differences.
But to argue that the comparative method can be used to find either differ-
ences or similarities or even both is not to argue that the method must be used to find
both as if the quest for either alone were improper. It is against the assumption that
the method not merely can but need be used to find differences whether differences
as well as similarities (new comparativism) or differences in place of similarities
(postmodernism)that I am arguing.
Those who seek sheer similarities not only cannot but do not deny the fact of
differences. They deny the importance of differences. To counter vaunted similarities
with sheer differences is, then, to miss the point. To argue from the fact of differ-
ences, which are never denied, to the importance of them is to beg the question: why
are differences more significant than similarities? The argument in favor of similari-
ties that similarities are weightier than differences may be question-begging, but

8
See also Geertz 1968.
324
so is the argument in favor of differences that differences are deeper than similari-
ties. What privileges difference, as Derrida would put it, is the assumption, which
requires defending, that difference is deeper than similarity. Contrary to Geertz, the
question whether the universality of marriage is as penetrating a comment on what
we are as the facts concerning Himalayan polyandry, or those fantastic Australian
marriage rules, or the elaborate bride-price systems of Bantu Africa is not rhetorical.
In any case the comparative method itself establishes only the fact, not the impor-
tance, of either similarities or differences.
(3) Generalizing too broadly
Third, any two phenomena are comparable. Comparisons are useful or useless, not
right or wrong, not too broad or too narrow. It is fallacious to assert, for example, that
earliest Christianity is always comparable only with other religions of late antiquity
and never with primitive religions. Controlled comparativism rests on this fallacy.
(The premise that comparison yields only similarities is also fallacious.) The point of
a comparison determines the proper scale. Christianity can be compared with any
other religion, with all other religions, or with nonreligious movements. If one wants
to understand why people X practice animal sacrifice, a comparison with a people
who do not practice it would ordinarily, though not invariably, be too broad. But a
comparison with any other people who practice it would likely not be.
(4) Generalizing prematurely
Fourth, comparisons are always considered provisional, not conclusive. Comparisons
are subject to correction or abandonment, as new facts arise. The failure of existing
generalizations is scarcely an argument against generalizations per se. Moreover, one
will never be able to identify all the cases of animal sacrifice or to accumulate all the
information about all of those cases. How would one even know if one had? It is a
rudimentary fallacy of explanation the so-called Baconian, or inductivist, fallacy
to oppose drawing conclusions until all the knowable facts are in. Because generali-
zations are recognized as tentative, the comparative method does not generalize pre-
maturely. If it did, then even noncomparativist conclusions about people X alone
would also be premature, for here, too, all the knowable facts are never in. And the
facts do not include causes, which are inferred.
(5) Taking phenomena out of context
Fifth, proper comparisons do not take phenomena out of context. The attentiveness to
differences by new comparativists and the restriction of comparisons to contiguous
regions by controlled comparativists are meant to be antidotes to the disregard of con-
text. But in actuality proper comparisons not only do not but cannot take phenomena
out of their contexts. To be able to compare the offering of animal sacrifices by peo-
325
ple X with the offering of the same by people Y, one had better be sure that both peo-
ples do indeed kill animals and offer them to their gods to win their gods favor. From
where but the context can this information be secured?
Frazer, who is routinely castigated for supposedly tearing cases out of context,
himself emphasizes the centrality of context:
The [anthropological] method is neither more nor less than induction .... And the first condi-
tion of a sound induction is exact observation. What we want, therefore, in this branch of sci-
ence is, first and foremost, full, true, and precise accounts of savage and barbarous peoples
based on personal observation. Such accounts are best given by men who have lived for many
years among the peoples, have won their confidence, and can converse with them familiarly in
their native language ... (Frazer 1922: 588).
Sounding just like his critics, Frazer declares that
Hardly anything impairs the value of observations of a particular people so much as the inter-
polation of comparisons with other peoples ... (Frazer 1922: 590).
Worried that comparison prior to observation will contaminate the observa-
tion, Frazer insists that
Every observer of a savage or barbarous people should describe it as if no other people ex-
isted on the face of the earth
that is, in its particularity. Frazer permits the observer to be a comparativist as well,
but only if the activities are kept separate:
The business of comparison is not for him [i.e., the observer], at least not for him in the capac-
ity of observer; if he desires to draw comparisons with other peoples, as he is of course at lib-
erty to do, he should keep his comparisons strictly apart from his observations: mixture of the
two is, if not absolutely fatal, at least a great impediment to the utility of both (Frazer 1922:
590).
Far, then, from comparing phenomena severed from their contexts, the com-
parative method compares phenomena in their contexts. How, then, can old compara-
tivists be guilty of having obliterated local meanings and contexts, to quote again
new comparativist Paden?
What might seem to be taking phenomena out of context is in fact mere selec-
tiveness. Insofar as the object of comparison is animal sacrifices, much else about the
peoples compared will properly be ignored as irrelevant and not obliterated though
relevant. Even an analysis of the animal sacrifices of people X alone will ignore many
aspects of their lives that have no bearing on the topic of hand. The difference be-
tween the selectiveness of a generalist and that of a particularist is only one of degree.
The broader the scale of a comparison, the more selective the elements compared will
be in order to encompass all cases. But selection is not obliteration. If one is compar-
ing animal sacrifices worldwide, one will disregard the differences between one form
of animal sacrifice and another. But to select only common elements from all the
cases is not to ignore the context, which is still indispensable for determining the exis-
tence of animal sacrifice in each case.
326
(6) Generalizing at all
Sixth and most of all, comparison is not merely permissible but indispensable. To un-
derstand any phenomenon, however specific, is to identify it and to account for it. To
identify something is to place it in a category, and to account for it is to account for
the category of which it is a member. Both procedures are thus inescapably compara-
tivist.
9

Suppose one wants to know why people X just people X practice animal
sacrifice, and suppose one ascertains from people X that they offer animal sacrifices
to their gods because they believe that sacrifices will win their gods favor. One then
claims that people X offer animal sacrifices for this reason. But presupposed in the
claim that people X offer animal sacrifices because they believe that they will thereby
win their gods favor is the claim that other peoples who believe that their gods favor
can be won through animal sacrifices will also offer them. Otherwise why would peo-
ple X offer them? To propose the belief as a sufficient explanation of people Xs of-
fering animal sacrifices is to presuppose a generalization, however obvious, about
other peoples: that they are prepared to give up valuable possessions to their gods be-
cause they believe that it pays to do so. This generalization about the practical, vested
motivation of other peoples alone accounts for the behavior of people X in partic-
ular.
10

Take the case of the French Revolution. Suppose one claims, on the basis of
an intensive study of the French urban poor, that the urban poor revolted because the
price of bread kept rising. Built into this claim, even if offered only about the French
case, is the generalized claim that whenever the price of bread rises, people will re-
volt. Otherwise what explains why the French revolted? Because they were French?
That answer is circular. Because they were hungry? But then one is explaining the
French Revolution in particular by appeal to the generalization, however self-evident,
that when people are hungry enough, they will revolt. If one replies that by no means
all peoples revolt when the price of bread or of food generally rises, then the pur-
ported explanation of even the French case is inadequate, for something more than the
rising price of bread must have been the cause in that case if the rising price is not
sufficient to spur revolt every time. Whatever else is added hatred of the monarchy,
despair over the prospect of reform, agitation by the press constitutes a sufficient
explanation of the French Revolution only if it also constitutes a sufficient explana-
tion of every other revolution. If these same circumstances do not produce revolution

9
On the connection between categorization and explanation see Mayr and Ashlock 1991: 124-125;
Hempel 1965: 453-457. A most helpful example of the connection between the two is that of medical
diagnosis, which is cited by not only Hempel and others but also Geertz, who, however, ironically in-
vokes it as a would-be illustration of sheer categorization one of the ways he tries to distinguish in-
terpretation from explanation: see Geertz 1973: 26-27.
10
The locus classicus of this view of explanation is Popper 1959: section 12. The locus classicus of the
view that the explanation of human events is of the particular is Collingwood 1946. For decades, the
generalist Hempel and the particularist William Dray debated. For references, see Segal 2001: 355 n.
28.
327
every time, then they inadequately account for revolution any time.
Apply this argument to animal sacrifice. Suppose, again, one claims, on the
basis of a meticulous study of people X, that they sacrifice animals to their gods be-
cause they believe that they will thereby win their gods favor. Built into this claim
about people X is the generalization that whenever people believe they can win their
gods favor by animal sacrifices, they will do so. If one replies that not all peoples
who believe that their gods favor can be won by animal sacrifice proceed to practice
it, then the explanation is inadequate even for people X. For something else must be at
work to account for why people X proceed with the sacrifices when other peoples
who share the belief in the efficacy of animal sacrifice do not. What must be added
can range from, say, the desperation of people X to win their gods favor to the inex-
pensiveness of their sacrifices. Whatever else suffices to account for the case of peo-
ple X does so only if it also suffices to account for the sacrifices of other peoples in
the same circumstances as well.
Several anticipated objections can readily be met. It might be argued that other
peoples offer animal sacrifices for different reasons. Suppose a study of people Y re-
veals that they offer animal sacrifices out of duty rather than out of a calculated pay-
off. But that discovery is no argument against the proposed explanation for people X,
for the claim made about them is intended to provide only a sufficient, not also a nec-
essary, explanation. The claim is not that the only reason for animal sacrifice is the
calculation that it pays but that whenever the calculation exists, there will be animal
sacrifices. Most explanations of human behavior and even of physical events are in-
tended to be at best merely sufficient, not necessary, ones.
11
Ordinarily, there are too
many possible causes of the same behavior to be able to stipulate which are necessary
ones. People may revolt for many reasons. They need not be famished to do so.
12

Conversely, it might be argued that even would-be sufficient generalizations
invariably fail to suffice. Suppose a study of people Z discloses that they, like people
X, believe that animal sacrifices will win their gods favor, are desperate to gain that
favor, and can readily afford the sacrifices. Yet suppose that even so, they, in contrast
to people X, do not make the sacrifices. Obviously, the explanation of people X
thereby proves insufficient and must be supplemented to account for their own pro-
ceeding to make sacrifices. But suppose, further, that no matter how many additions
are made, the explanation still fails to account for the difference between people Xs
behavior and people Zs. The proper conclusion to be drawn is not that the reasons for
people Xs behavior are mysterious but that the reasons are so numerous or so com-
plex that no other people will likely share them all. Most explanations of human be-

11
To be sure, some explanations of human behavior claim to be only necessary. Emile Durkheims
sociology of religion is so much more extreme than Max Webers because Durkheim claims to be pro-
viding sufficient as well as necessary causes of religion, where Weber claims to be providing only nec-
essary ones. David Hume maintained that explanations must be necessary as well as sufficient.
12
Anthropologist Franz Boas objection to the comparative method is exactly that, according to him, it
presumes to provide necessary as well as sufficient causes. Boas insists that the same effects often stem
from different causes, so that no one cause is necessary. See Boas 1896.
328
havior and even of physical events are intended as less than sufficient ones.
13
Most
often, they are offered as merely probabilistic.
14
The claim is that whenever the condi-
tions named occur, the behavior will likely, not inevitably, occur, and the degree of
likelihood can even be less than 50%. No matter how famished people are, not all and
maybe not even most will revolt.
Finally, it might be argued that even necessary and sufficient generalizations
are irrelevant because the behavior itself is unique. Suppose that only people X offer
animal sacrifices. Or suppose that only people X offer sacrifices of a particular ani-
mal, one found only in their locale. But the uniqueness of their case is merely a his-
torical contingency. The explanation offered for their unique case would still have to
hold, even if as less than a sufficient explanation, for any other people in the same
circumstances who also offered animal sacrifices, of any kind or of a specific kind.
The comparative method is often confused with the assumption of universals as if it
stands committed to similarities not merely across any cultures but across all cultures.
In actuality, the method requires the search for multiple instances of a phenomenon
but allows for the discovery of even just one. Still, if the explanation given of people
X would not apply to any other people in kindred conditions who did offer these sac-
rifices, the explanation fails to explain even the sole case to date of people X.
In short, the way to understand people X is not merely by myopically studying
them more and more. It is also by studying other peoples as well. One cannot, in
postmodern fashion, ignore other peoples and focus only on people X. One cannot say
blithely that one cares only about people X or, like Geertz, that the differences be-
tween people X and other peoples are more profound than the similarities. Even if one
is interested only in the particular, similarities are indispensable, both in categorizing,
for example, the French Revolution as a revolution and in accounting for it. Geertz
himself employs similarities even in the effort to articulate the distinctiveness of the
cultures he has studied. Without such favorite categories as culture, ethos, world view,
ritual, social change, ideology, revolution, nationalism, politics, person, art, and law,
he would be rendered speechless.
The comparative method amounts to more than the juxtaposition of phenom-
ena. It means the identification of a common category for those phenomena. That
identification spurs either the application or the discovery of a common explanation
of that category. While the comparative method can be used to find differences as

13
As Ernest Nagel writes, The search for explanations is directed to the ideal of ascertaining the nec-
essary and sufficient conditions for the occurrence of phenomena. This ideal is rarely achieved, how-
ever, and even in the best-developed natural sciences it is often an open question whether the
conditions mentioned in an explanation are indeed sufficient (Nagel 1952: 167).
14
As philosopher of science Wesley C. Salmon writes of modern physics, Some first-rate physicists
are presently working to find a deterministic theory to replace the current quantum mechanics, one by
which it will be possible to explain what now seems irreducibly statistical by means of hidden vari-
ables that cannot occur in the present theory. No one can say for sure whether they will succeed; any
new theory, deterministic or indeterministic, has to stand the test of experiment. The current quantum
theory does show, however, that the world may be fundamentally and irremediably indeterministic, for
according to the best currently available knowledge, it is (Salmon 1971: 321).
329
well as similarities, the method itself seeks similarities and finds differences only
where the similarities cease. Put another way, new comparativists must be old com-
parativists as well. And postmodernists must be comparativists, too.
Frazers Old Comparativism
In his Folk-lore in the Old Testament (1918), J. G. Frazer seeks to show the primitive
character of a seemingly advanced culture:
Despite the high moral and religious development of the ancient Hebrews, there is no reason
to suppose that they formed an exception to this general law. They, too, had probably passed
through a stage of barbarism and even of savagery; and this probability, based on the analogy
of other races, is confirmed by an examination of their literature, which contains many refer-
ences to beliefs and practices that can hardly be explained except on the supposition that they
are rudimentary survivals from a far lower level of culture. It is to the illustration and explana-
tion of a few such relics of ruder times, as they are preserved like fossils in the Old Testament,
that I have addressed myself in the present work.... The instrument for the detection of sav-
agery under civilization is the comparative method ... (Frazer 1918: I, vii-viiii).
Frazers procedure is to note some odd belief, practice, or incident in the Bible
that the Bible itself fails to explain. He then turns to comparable cases around the
world, makes sense of them, and applies that solution to the biblical case. Only the
similarities, not the differences, between Israelite and primitive religion faze him. Be-
cause the similarities are with primitive religion, Israelite religion is reduced to a
primitive religion and, even more, to the yet earlier practice of magic.
For example, Frazer is struck by the Israelite fear of a census in 2 Samuel 24
and 1 Chronicles 21, which recounts 2 Samuel. While on other occasions the census is
not feared, in 2 Samuel God is said to be angry with Israel beforehand and orders
King David to conduct a census in retaliation. Not only God but also David and his
general Joab know that harm will thereby befall Israel. Joab objects to his kings order
but is overruled. No sooner is the census completed than David himself regrets the
deed and asks God, who had instructed him to undertake the census, for forgiveness
for having undertaken it! God offers David three forms of punishment, and David
chooses one: three days of plague, which kills 70,000 Israelites. A true Hobsons
choice! To quote 2 Samuel 24.1-15:
Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them,
saying, Go, count the people of Israel and Judah. So the king said to Joab and the command-
ers of the army, who were with him, Go through all the tribes of Israel, from Dan to Beer-
sheba, and take a census of the people, so that I may know how many there are.... So Joab
and the commanders of the army went out from the presence of the king to take a census of
the people of Israel.... But afterward, David was stricken to the heart because he had num-
bered the people. David said to the Lord, I have sinned greatly in what I have done. But now,
O Lord, I pray you, take away the guilt of your servant; for I have done very foolishly. When
David rose in the morning, the word of the Lord came to the prophet Gad, Davids seer, say-
ing, Go and say to David: Thus says the Lord: Three things I offer you; choose one of them,
and I will do it to you. So Gad came to David and told him; he asked him, Shall three years
330
of famine come to you on your land? Or will you flee three months before your foes while
they pursue you? Or shall there be three days pestilence in your land? Now consider, and de-
cide what answer I shall return to the one who sent me. Then David said to Gad, I am in
great distress; let us fall into the hand of the Lord, for his mercy is great; but let me not fall
into human hands. So the Lord sent a pestilence on Israel from that morning until the ap-
pointed time; and seventy thousand of the people died, from Dan to Beer-sheba.
David then performs a triple penance, and God ends the plague. In the version
of the incident in Chronicles it is Satan, not God, who prods David into taking the
census. God there merely punishes Israel for the census and does not initiate it.
Incontestably, Frazer skirts many aspects of the event: why is either God or
Satan angry with Israel; why does God or Satan resort to the census as the way of get-
ting back at Israel; why does David, knowing better, nevertheless carry out the cen-
sus; why does God offer David a choice of punishments; and why does David choose
the punishment that he does? But Frazer does not claim to be answering these ques-
tions and so cannot be faulted for failing to answer them. He claims to be answering
only one central question: why is the census feared? He cites case after case in which
primitive and peasant peoples fear that counting something will lead to the loss of it:
The objection which Jehovah, or rather the Jews, entertained to the taking of a census appears
to be simply a particular case of the general aversion which many ignorant people feel to al-
lowing themselves, their cattle, or their possessions to be counted. This curious superstition
for such it is seems to be common among the black races of Africa. For example, among the
Bakongo, of the Lower Congo, it is considered extremely unlucky for a woman to count her
children one, two, three, and so on, for the evil spirits will hear and take some of them away
by death. The people themselves do not like to be counted; for they fear that counting will
draw to them the attention of the evil spirits, and as a result of the counting some of them will
soon die.... Similar superstitions are to be found in Europe and in our own country to this
day.... On the whole we may assume, with a fair degree of probability, that the objection
which the Jews in King Davids time felt to the taking of a census rested on no firmer founda-
tion than sheer superstition, which may have been confirmed by an outbreak of plague imme-
diately after the numbering of the people (Frazer 1918: II, 557-63).
In other words, the superstition rests on the commission of the post hoc, propter hoc
fallacy.
In the Bible itself counting is sinful: it incurs divine wrath. In Frazers primi-
tive examples it is unlucky: it automatically sets off malevolent forces. By Frazers
distinction, the effect of counting is magical, not religious, so that what in the Bible is
manifestly a religious objection is for Frazer a magical one. God becomes a mechani-
cal force unleashed by the counting rather than the agent of the plague. He is like a
genie released from a bottle.
Lamentably, Frazer never specifies how counting subjects its victims to harm.
Most likely, knowing the number of a group is akin to knowing its name, which is
equivalent to possessing a portion of it, which by Frazers second law of magic is
equivalent to possessing it all. Whoever learns the census total thereby controls the
subject and can inflict harm on it by doing something to the name, which in magic is
regarded as tangible. God does not initiate the counting. It is not clear who does. Nor
is it clear who the magician is.
There is nothing objectionable in Frazers version of the comparative method.
331
He is not claiming that the Israelite case is identical with the other ones, only similar.
Rather than denying any differences, he is simply interested in the similarities. Rather
than taking either the Israelite case or the parallel ones out of their contexts, he first
establishes them as cases of fear of a census. He then invokes the magical fear of
counting as the common explanation of the cases. He offers his analysis with a fair
degree of probability, not with certainty. He is able to make sense of the Israelite
case because he is able to make sense of so many similar cases. The Israelite census
was likely feared for magical reasons because elsewhere censuses have been feared
for magical reasons.
Frazers use of the comparative method doubtless seems extreme because his
analysis of the Davidic case does not merely commit him to a generalization but is
itself the application of the generalization. This distinction is, however, false. Suppose
Frazer were explicating the Davidic case internally. He would still be explicating it on
the basis of a tacit generalization. His argument that the Israelites opposed censuses
because they believed that counting unleashed malevolent forces would still rest on
the generalization that whenever people believe that a census will unleash malevolent
forces, they will fear it. Frazer would simply already have reached that generalization
before studying the Israelite case. In truth, Frazer has reached that conclusion before
opening the Bible. In presenting himself as initially puzzled, he is being rhetorical. He
is presenting himself as an innocent, even devout reader of the Bible who cannot
make sense of the story internally and must therefore turn to parallel cases to do so.
But even if he were genuinely puzzled, he would not be exceeding the limits of the
comparative method by enlisting it to explicate a particular case as well as to justify
the explication by appeal to the generalization. At the same time the generalization
must fit the Israelite case, and one can maintain that by Frazers own distinction, the
case seems to be less magical than religious, for the fear is more of Gods decision to
punish than of the unleashing of a mechanical force.
15

The issue, however, is not whether Frazers analysis is persuasive. The issue is
whether he is entitled to analyze the Israelite case cross-culturally i.e., compara-
tively. I claim that he is and that he is guilty of none of the charges made against old
comparativists by controlled comparativists, by new comparativists, or above all by
postmoderns. If even he, the epitome of old comparativism, stands innocent of any
abuse of the comparative method, then who, pray tell, is guilty?

15
In his comments on my paper, Professor Dupr (2008) notes that Frazers characterization of these
activities as savage and barbarian is hardly compatible with Frazers insistence on untainted observa-
tion. To quote Frazer again, What we want, therefore, in this branch of science is, first and foremost,
full, true, and precise accounts of savage and barbarous peoples based on personal observation. But
Frazer is asking his informants to be sheer observers and is not barring himself, as comparativist inter-
preter, from making judgments. Even if those judgments are based on Frazers commitment to evolu-
tion, old comparativism itself is separable from any commitment to evolution by practitioners.
332
The superiority of Old Comparativism
In his most helpful comments on my paper, the present version of which incorporates
some of them, Wilhelm Dupr concludes by advocating the use of all four varieties of
comparativism. For him, controlled comparativism, new comparativism, and post-
modernism as well as old comparativism all offer complementary traits which are
likely to improve the comparativist program if we integrate them in their complemen-
tarity (Dupr 2008: 3). Dupr assumes that I am advocating the same, but I am actu-
ally less ecumenical than he. While my paper is intended to defend old comparativism
against misconceptions, I myself think that it renders the three alternatives useless.
Controlled comparativism refuses to go beyond the region even though it uses univer-
sal, hence old comparativist, categories like myth, ritual, religion, gods, and kingship.
New comparativism declares, without argument, that differences as well as similari-
ties must be sought and that differences count even more. But the sole way to find
differences, whatever their status, is through old comparativism. Differences are dif-
ferences only within categories, which means only within similarities. One cannot
bypass similarities and get to differences. Postmodernism pronounces differences the
only goal. But postmodernism, no less than new comparativism, is beholden to its
nemesis to attain its end. Who, then, needs postmodernism or new comparativism or
controlled comparativism when one has old comparativism?
References
Albright, W.F., 1957 [1946], From the Stone Age to Christianity, 2nd ed. [1st ed. 1940], Garden City,
NY: Doubleday Anchor Books.
Boas, F., 1896, The Limitations of the Comparative Method, Science, n.s., 4: 901-908. Reprinted in
Boas, 1940, Race, Language, and Culture, New York: Macmillan, pp. 270-280.
Collingwood, R.G., 1946, The Idea of History, Knox, T.M., ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dupr, W., 2008, Robert A. Segal: Postmodernism and the Comparative Method, 3 pp. Unpublished
response to Segal, Postmodernism and the Comparative Method.
Eggan, F., 1954, Social Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Comparison, American Anthro-
pologist 56: 743-763.
Eilberg-Schwartz, H., 1990, The Savage in Judaism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Frankfort, H., 1948, Kingship and the Gods, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Frankfort, H., 1951, The Problem of Similarity in Ancient Near Eastern Religions, Frazer Lecture 1950,
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Frazer, J.G., 1918, Folk-lore in the Old Testament, 3 vols., London: Macmillan.
Frazer, J.G., 1922, The Scope and Method of Mental Anthropology, Science Progress 16: 580-594.
Geertz, C., 1968, Islam Observed, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Geertz, C., 1973, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books.
Geertz, C., 1995, After the Fact, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hempel, C.G., 1965, Aspects of Scientific Explanation And Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science,
New York: Free Press.
Hooke, S.H., 1933, The Myth and Ritual Pattern of the Ancient East, in: Hooke, S.H., ed., Myth and
Ritual, London: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-14.
Mayr, E., & Ashlock, P.D., 1991, Principles of Systematic Zoology, 2nd ed. [1st ed. 1969], New York:
333
McGraw-Hill.
Mowinckel, S., 1954, He That Cometh, Anderson, G.W., trans., Nashville: Abingdon.
Mowinckel, S., 1962, The Psalms in Israels Worship, Ap-Thomas, D.R., trans., 2 vols., New York:
Abingdon.
Nagel, E., 1952, Some Issues in the Logic of Historical Analysis, Scientific Monthly 74: 162-169.
Paden, W.E., 1996, Elements of a New Comparativism, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion
8: 5-14.
Popper, K., 1959, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1st English ed., New York: Basic Books; London:
Hutchinson.
Rosenau, P.M., 1991, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Salmon, W.C., 1971, Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Science, in: Fineberg, J., ed., Rea-
son and Responsibility, 2nd ed. [1st ed. 1965], Belmont, CA: Dickenson, pp. 321-326.
Segal, R.A., 1992, Explaining and Interpreting Religion, New York: Lang.
Segal, R.A., 1998, ed., Myth and Ritual Theory, Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Segal, R.A., 1999, Weber and Geertz on the Meaning of Religion, Religion 29: 61-71.
Segal, R.A., 2001, In Defense of the Comparative Method, Numen 48: 339-374.
Segal, R.A., 2003, Clifford Geertzs Interpretive Approach to Religion, in: Glazier, S. D., & Flower-
day, C.A., Selected Readings in the Anthropology of Religion, Westport, CT: Praeger, pp.
17-34.
Smith, J.Z., 1987, To Take Place, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Taylor, M.C., ed., 1998, Critical Terms for Religious Studies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wright, G.E., 1950, The Old Testament Against its Environment, London: SCM Press.

335
Chapter 16. Myth a challenge to
philosophy

by Willem Dupr
1

Abstract. Whether myths and mythologies are essential to our humanity, or whether they are features
which account for the persistence of self-inflicted immaturity, are questions which cannot be an-
swered by a simple yes or no. But since these questions and their assumptions affect all aspects of
being human and cultural, they require an understanding of myth which comprises the positive as well
as the negative features of mythological expressions and processes. Even if the study of myths and
mythologies should be no more than an investigation of irrationalities, it will be necessary to come to a
by intention complete understanding of myth and to approach relevant phenomena in the light of
theories which are as adequate as possible. But since we cannot exclude the possibility that myths and
mythologies are indispensable conditions of practice and theory, it will be necessary to consider this
possibility and to develop our theories accordingly.
Since I assume that the distinction between myth and reason is a precondition for the emergence of
philosophy and scholarship, I would like to argue that philosophy as well as scholarship have to be
careful about their relationship with myth, especially if we agree with Aristotle that knowledge and
understanding are, indeed, the subject matter of philosophy (Aristotle, Metaphics Bk XII, 9, 1075a).
In order to comply with the demands of an open and in principle comprehensive understanding
of myths and mythologies, I begin with some reflections on what it means, or could mean, to be ra-
tional about myth. Next, I would like to focus on several observations in connection with myths and
mythologies. Since these observations provide a strong motive to take up the question about an ade-
quate concept of myth, I shall discuss this point in a following step. And, because the effort to come to
grips with myth on a conceptual level cannot be separated from interests in studying myth, I intend to
round off these explorations with a few words about this aspect of mythological studies.
Though I am convinced that the understanding of myth is a necessary requirement for the devel-
opment of theoretical reasoning, I do not intend to elaborate this point. But I do hope that the thoughts I
present are sufficient to arouse interest in the correlation between myth and thinking, and strong
enough to initiate further reflections on the mythic conditions of philosophy and the formation of theo-
ries.
1. Introduction
Myth is a word we associate with many different things: stories about divine beings,

1
Faculty of Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
336
religious attitudes, ritual practices, the order of social, political, economic and other
relations, basic convictions and notions of the ultimate. Moreover, we are used to cor-
relating myths with particular frames and states of mind which, on personal or com-
munal grounds, account for the acceptance or, by contrast, the rejection of myths and
mythologies. Like the messages they convey, these associations and correlations may
be highly problematic. But because they refer to issues which concern the fundamen-
tals of being human and culture, they suggest that we face problems of pivotal impor-
tance. To consider possible extremes, we can think of myths and mythologies as
necessary modes and foremost manifestations of human potential; while it is also con-
ceivable that they confront us with the effects and pervasion of delusion, self-
deception, and irrationality, or with past stages of human development.
Whether these myths and mythologies are essential to our humanity, or are
features which account for the persistence of self-inflicted immaturity (Kant 1784:
481), are questions which cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. But since
these questions and their assumptions affect all aspects of human life, they require an
understanding of myth which comprises the positive as well as the negative features
of mythological expressions and processes.
What matters is not merely the interpretation of particular myths and the mes-
sages they convey, but the intent to bring into focus whatever relates to myth, and
thus, to consider the ways in which we might, and ought to, deal with this problem.
While myths may have their own about, as occurrences in cultural history and as
expressions of human beings they also include another about and a deeper level of
meaning that invites us to investigate this particular subject and the ways we relate
when we speak of myth and consider some of the further ramifications of this dis-
course. Even if the study of myths and mythologies were no more than an investig-
ation of irrationalities, it would still be necessary to come to a as far as possible -
complete understanding of myth, and to approach the relevant phenomena in light of
theories which agree with this intended aim. But since we cannot exclude the possibil-
ity that myths and mythologies are indispensable conditions of practice and theory, it
will be necessary to consider this point as well, and to develop our theories accord-
ingly.
Since I assume that the distinction between mythos and logos, or, as the two
Greek terms suggest, between the word of tradition and the word of reflective reason-
ing, is a precondition for the emergence of philosophy and scholarship, I would like to
argue that philosophy and scholarship have to look closely at their relationship with
myth, especially when we agree with Aristotle that knowledge and understanding are,
indeed, the subject matter of theoretical reasoning (Metaphysics XII. 9, 1075a). While
knowledge and understanding have their own problems, they may nevertheless de-
pend on myths and mythologies in ways which concern the conditions of their possi-
bility.
In order to comply with the demands of an open and, in principle, compre-
hensive understanding of myths and mythologies, I begin with some reflections on
what it means, or could mean, to be rational about myth, and to study myths and my-
Dupr Chapter 16: Myth: A Challenge to Philosophy
337
thologies, as the subject matter requires when we let it be whatever it is, and as the
conditions permit under which we are able to develop our studies. Next, I would like
to focus on several observations in connection with myths and mythologies. Since
these observations furnish a strong motive for initially taking up the question concern-
ing an adequate conception of myth, I shall discuss this point in a following step.
And, since the effort to come to grips with myth on a conceptual level cannot be sepa-
rated from actual interests in studying myth, I intend to conclude these explorations
with a few final words about this aspect of mythological studies.
Although I am convinced that the understanding of myth is a necessary re-
quirement for the development of theoretical reasoning, I do not intend to elaborate on
this point here. But I do hope that the thoughts I present are sufficient to arouse inter-
est in the correlation between myth and thinking, and strong enough to initiate further
reflections on the mythic conditions of philosophy and the formation of theories. I
begin with the first point under the heading of ways to study myth.
2. Ways to study myth
Since we associate so many different phenomena with the meaning of myth, numer-
ous questions and perspectives must be dealt with in the study of this particular sub-
ject matter. To exemplify this point we can think of the history of culture as it offers
variable sets of stories and notions about divine agents, about decisive events in the
beginning of time, about the fundamental conditions of being human and developing
culture; that is, as it offers particular stories and notions which are believed to be true
and sufficiently important to shape and structure the life of individuals and communi-
ties as well as of entire cultures and traditions. If and to the extent that we recognize
the presence of myth in these stories and notions, it makes sense to look at them
closely and to launch (what we could call) the scholarly study of myths and mytholo-
gies. Along with collecting relevant data and working on the problem of adequate
theoretical definitions, we can try to map this data, to compare them with each other,
and to establish relations between them. Moreover, while we intend to better under-
stand what we are studying, a host of disciplines appears which suggest that we focus
on the study of myth from many perspectives including biological, psychological,
social, political, cultural and anthropological, or with questions about religion, litera-
ture, art history and other issues in the field of cultural and symbolic studies.
In contrast to the scholarly study of myth, the history of philosophy offers per-
spectives which derive from the reactions to the challenges and apparent seductions of
myths and mythologies. They are perspectives which correlate with philosophical ef-
forts to clarify the meaning of myth, but which reflect also the impact of myth on phi-
losophy, as well as the influence of philosophical theories and positions on the
scholarly study of myths and mythologies. When these three factors are combined, the
scholarly study of myths and mythologies is not necessarily absent or irrelevant. Nor
does the configuration of these factors imply that the search for adequate definitions
338
has ceased to be of pivotal importance. But important as these ramifications may be as
far as the history of philosophy is concerned, they do not change the fact that the reac-
tions themselves have been more important inasmuch as they define the meaning of
myth in modes and forms of specific responses.
2

Since the philosophical assessment of the meaning of myth is already an issue
whenever we engage in mythological studies, either directly or indirectly, it is both
justified and necessary to specifically look at questions about myth and philosophy.
Because of their entanglement with the history of philosophy, these questions may
lack the clarity of unequivocal definitions and well-structured arguments. They may
be the result of unquestioned presuppositions and apparently self-evident assump-
tions. But whatever the status of the questions and the answers may be, these can still
be approached rationally. Since we cannot disregard them without adopting at least
some of them in our inquiries, it is a hermeneutical requirement and a demand of ob-
jectivity to become aware of this problem and to consider its possible impact on the
course of scholarly studies. After all, to the extent that we are able to expect the un-
expected (Heraclitus, frag. 18; Kirk 1962: 195), we are not only capable of working
with tentative notions of myth and philosophy, but it is also possible to let them clar-
ify each other by means of the contrasts they evoke in the process of variable confron-
tations. What, then, does it mean to be rational about myth, if we refer to myth as a
problem of, and in, philosophy?
When we think of myth and whatever is associated with this term as a possible
subject in philosophical inquiries, we can speak of basically six options (or types of
reaction) that should be considered in the confrontation of philosophy with myths and
mythologies:

1) we can reject myth as a relevant topic of philosophical investigations, and use
the study of myths and mythologies as reason for, and justification of, this re-
jection;
2) we can think of a mythologization of reason in which reason becomes another,
and in essence, the only myth which matches the needs and the potential of in-
telligent beings, and use the study of myths and mythologies to accomplish
this goal;
3) we can think of a rationalization (or conceptual revaluation) of myth and use
the study of myths and mythologies accordingly;
4) we can combine the previous approaches and use this combination as the way
to deal with the meanings of myths and mythologies;
5) we can try to understand the meaning of myth and study the occurrence of

2
When Wim van Binsbergen (2009: 9) notices that Eliade (1963: 15) instead of aiming merely at
identifying elements of empirical reality open to further analytical scrutiny, provides a definition
which amounts to a theory in a nutshell, he is right in annotating this observation. But it is also possi-
ble that definitions of myth are bound to become theoretical because the subject matter requires a theo-
retical stance in order to be discernable in one way or another. See also Robert A. Segal (2004: 10)
where he states that theorizing is inescapable.
339
myths and mythologies in their concrete reality as well as with regard to the
ramifications of this reality;
6) we can of course also dismiss the issue and turn to more important matters.

In each of the first three cases we can think of particular reasons which ask for
specific approaches. If we consider the first option where we assume that myth is an
insult to truth and the dignity of reasonable beings, then it is for the sake of truth, dig-
nity, and reason that myth should be abolished. And since one has to know the enemy
one struggles with, the study could help to accomplish ones goals. An example of
this first approach is the work of Ernst Topitsch, a neo-positivist philosopher in the
tradition of the Viennese Circle (Topitsch 1979). Yet another approach to this issue,
could be to point to the ways in which theology is used (see de Vries 1961).
However, if myth is, as the second option suggests, a force in human history,
and as such a necessary ingredient in the realization of humanity, we could argue that
reason needs to partake in myth if it is to become effective, and that the study of myth
should serve this purpose. Ernst Bloch (see 1968, 1985), Hans Jonas (see 1964, 1969),
and Rudolf Bultmann (see 1954) favor this approach. At the moment, Hans Blumen-
berg (see Blumenberg 1979) seems to move in a similar direction. Moreover, if we
think of the various ways in which philosophy and science have tried to establish
their superiority in the organization of human affairs, we could mention this point as
well.
3

And finally, concerning the third option. If reason is all that counts, one could
argue that myth has to become part of reason, that it has to be purified from all irra-
tionalities to retain or to gain its proper meaning, and that the study of myth may
show us the way in which we can reach this goal. A classical example of this kind of
study is the treatment of myth in the work of Plato and, in our time, of Ernst Cassirer.
4

In contrast to the first three options, the fourth presents itself as a recollection of the
previous ways of understanding. In line with Hegels idea of dialectics, we could ar-
gue that each of the first three approaches makes sense up to a certain degree, and that
it is this feature which turns them into elements of a fourth way. Since they exemplify
the sequential meaning of negari, conservari and elevari, they form not only a dialec-

3
The mood of this development can be grasped in a remark of A. Hitler on Rosenbergs Der Mythos
des 20. Jahrhunderts:
In einem Tischgesprch vom 11. 4. 1942 erklrte er, er habe seinerzeit ausdrcklich abge-
lehnt, diesem Buch parteippstlichen Charakter zu geben, da schon der Titel schief sei. Denn
man knne nicht sagen, da man den Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts, also etwas Mystisches,
gegen die Geistesauffassung des 19. Jahrhunderts stellen wolle, sondern msse als National-
sozialist sagen, da man den Glauben und das Wissen des 20. Jahrhunderts gegen den Mythos
des 19. Jahrhunderts stelle.
The quote can be found in Frank 1988: 108. See also Heine 1966: 201 ff.
4
As to Plato, see Theo Kobusch 1990; Crsgen 2002; Cassirer 1955, 1944, and 1946 (in which the
experiences of Nazism compelled him to acknowledge the irrational forces of contemporary political
myths). See also Barber 2004.
340
tical structure that reveals itself in this sequence, but also offer this structure as a de-
vice to cope with the issue. What matters is the combination or synthesis of these op-
tions, and the perspectives which become possible if we remember the synthesis in
each of its elements. Heinz Reinwalds Myth and Method can be seen as an exempli-
fication of this approach (Reinwald 1991). Moreover, we can also think of Claude
Lvi-Strauss (see 1979), Jean-Pierre Vernant (see 1965), Paul Ricoeur (see 1990),
Bruno Liebrucks (see 1972), among many others.
If (and here I refer to the fifth option) we have to take things as they present
themselves in terms of truth and reality, then we should be reasonable and study the
elements and features of myth accordingly. This approach does not necessarily ex-
clude the previous options, though it stresses the point that they are no options to be-
gin with. If myth is an expression of irrationality, we have to study it as irrationality.
If it is something else, we have to take it as this something else. The decisive premise
is the idea of tentative beginnings, in which philosophy is not only in search of itself,
but explores also the world of mythic relations in such a way that it considers their
philosophical ramifications as well. In the exploration of these relations philosophy
acknowledges the scholarly study of myths and mythologies in various disciplines.
But at the same time it distinguishes itself from them by its questions and interests
inasmuch as philosophy centers on conditions and principles, including those of its
own project, as well as those of all other projects in relation to which it assumes the
status of a meta-science. Examples of this approach are Schellings studies in the phi-
losophy of mythology and revelation, and, in more recent times, Kurt Hbners The
Truth of Myth.
5

Since it is always possible, though not necessarily feasible or wise, to skip an
issue, I have mentioned this point as a sixth option. As Aristotle has stated (Metaphys-
ics 1000a), philosophers have better things to do than to keep themselves busy with
the subtleties of mythologists. And, there are numerous philosophers who think along
similar lines. Yet, as the previous approach indicates, I do not think that this stance is
philosophically defensible. Even if Aristotle is right, from a philosophical point of
view it would still be necessary to know why he is right. Besides, it is also possible
that myth has more than a superficial bearing on philosophy. When dealing with the
relationship between myth and philosophy, we cannot disregard claims such as these;
namely, that myth is part of philosophy, that myth is philosophy, that philosophy is
myth, that myth grows out of philosophy, that philosophy grows out of myth, that
myth and philosophy are independent of each other but serve the same function, and
that myth and philosophy are independent of each other and serve different functions
(Segal 2004: 36). Since it is not fitting for philosophy to work with prejudices without
examining them, we have to keep all options open with regards to the consequences
of the study of myth and independent of these consequences. Though it is imperative
to be as objective as possible, we can neither exclude the possibility that new insights

5
Hbner 1985. See also Gusdorf 1953, Brand 1978, Day 1984, Doty 1986, Hatab 1992, Bolle 1993 and
(from a psychological and historical point of view) Jung and Kernyi 1963, Campbell 1970, Eliade
1975.
341
require a revision of previous ways of understanding, nor can we dismiss the experi-
ence that subjectivity is a necessary condition of objectivity. Since subjectivity is al-
ways also a matter of intersubjectivity and the cultural processes that shape them both,
it remains an issue which is in need of continuous clarification.
In keeping all options open, I do not think that it is the task of philosophy to
add new myths to old ones, or to alter them in its own fashion, but to understand the
problems of myths and mythologies as thoroughly as possible in the spirit of compre-
hension and critical appropriation. In fact, even if one agrees that, historically, phi-
losophy took a path away from its mythic origins and the runways provided by
mythology, there can be no doubt that the proper goal of philosophy is philosophy and
nothing else; but it may turn out that philosophy relates to something like its own
myth, that it develops this myth (and not other ones) as the subject matter in philoso-
phy demands.
6
But as the task speaks for itself, it clearly indicates that philosophy
should give a name to the truth which as meaning and as reality is either present or
absent in the occurrence of mythic relations as well as in the manifest and latent mes-
sages contained in myths and mythologies.
7

3. Observations
Present-day usage connects the word myth with notions of delusions, unreality, and
lie.
8
Myth is almost by definition derogatory and misleading. The enlightened mind
has no need for myth.
9
This understanding of myth has a history of long standing. But

6
See Kernyi 1964: 11: Es sei aber einmal die Frage in aller Schrfe gestellt: Ist die gnzliche
Ausschaltung des Mythos, nicht nur die Entmythologisierung, sondern auch die Entmythisierung,
historisch und phnomenologisch berhaupt mglich?
7
With regard to the present study on myth see Ivan Strenski 1987; Jamme 1991; Kernyi 1996; Segal
1999; van Binsbergen 2009; Dubuisson 2006.
8
In this and the following section I resume thoughts which I have developed in Dupr 1999, 2005.
9
See, for instance, Niebuhr 1968: 15, where he points out in a text of 1937:
In the lexicon of the average modern, particularly in America, a myth is a piece of fiction,
usually inherited from the childhood of the race. The scientific outlook of our mature culture
has supposedly invalidated the truth value of these primitive stories in which gods and devils,
nymphs and satyrs, fairies and witches are portrayed in actions and attitudes which partly tran-
scend and partly conform to human limitations. They are regarded as the opulent fruits of an
infantile imagination which are bound to wither under the sober discipline of a developed in-
telligence. Science has displaced mythology Such are the convictions which belong to the
unquestioned certainties of the modern man.
In reality, myth appears in crisis situations: if another person behaves strangely, if she or he relates to
vital ideas which are not our own, we are inclined to speak of myth. If myth is no label of outright lies,
myth stands for insufficient thinking, for adhering to misleading and false beliefs, for being victim to
delusions. If one is convinced that a position in favor of atomic plants is based on packs of lies and
delusions, one might easily speak of, for instance, Five Myths About Nuclear Energy, no matter
whether the arguments are true or false (see Shrader-Frechette 2008). The opponents adhesion to myth
342
does it also do justice to the meaning of myth and to philosophy and scholarship as
they relate to myth and mythology? If the term is used with these and other similar
connotations, we cannot deny this usage. But usage alone does not determine the
whole truth about the concept, or that we are free to disregard the reasons which re-
quire a revision. Since it is possible that present day usage is only partly correct, it is
not unlikely that it confronts us with dialectical ramifications because, and when, we
desist from acknowledging this partiality. Indeed, if we consider the various meanings
in which we speak of myth in the context of, for instance, social and cultural studies,
it becomes evident that more is at stake than present day usage suggests, and that the
solution to this problem depends on the situations we address; that is to say, whether
there are situations in which myths turn out to be fantasy, and others where it is more
to the point to connect myth with truth.
While strictly speaking it might be true that true myths are false (from a
logical point of view), this very assumption could also be false for the simple reason
that it is necessary to distinguish between true and false myths; that is to say, between
myths which are beneficial (and in this sense true), and myths which are detrimental
(and in this sense false). If we consider, for instance, the Myth of the 20th Century
as it has been proclaimed by national socialists, the myth of honor, blood, and destiny,
I think that it is a gruesome example of a false myth, with horrible consequences, and
lasting scars on the face of humanity. By contrast, we could point to the Christian
Myth, the myth of forgiveness, the suffering God, and salvation history, as an exam-
ple which indicates at least what a true myth can be if one shapes ones life accord-
ingly (and does not use it to justify murder and other crimes). However, if we focus
on the myth of the French Revolution we might say that in some ways it can be classi-
fied as a false myth, whereas in other ways it may be said to be a true myth.
These three examples show clearly that the question about myth is no simple
matter. When we compare them with the myths we find in handbooks of mythology,
we may question whether they are myths at all; or, if they are, whether they are not
broken rather than unbroken, as Paul Tillich (1987: 262) intimates. If each of the
three examples is indeed a myth, then they oblige us to ask what these myths have in
common; where and in what sense are they different; what does it precisely mean that
myth can be judged true or false; or more generally, how these examples relate to
myth if we think of it in terms of a (Weberian) ideal type. But the issue becomes even
more complicated when we look at the history of the term and its many uses.
In Early Greek usage, myth (or mythos) was no fictional story or untruth, but a
word that was spoken with the authority of a living tradition (see, for instance, Otto
1955; Kernyi 1964). Mythos is synonymous with logos, though the word for myth is
given more weight. Mytheomai, I speak, was an expression for speaking the truth. As
Xenophanes (frag. 1) tells us, we must not forget that
prudent people praise God first, with devotional sayings, mythoi, and pure words, logoi (Di-

appears as a form of escapism. People cling to stages of human development that belong to a different
time. Unlike our own culture which is based on common sense and realistically oriented, it is other
cultures which still live by myth. After all, the obvious needs no explanation.
343
els 1964: 127).
If Parmenides (frag. 8) insists on the necessity to follow the right way, to think
as truth and logos demand, he calls this
the one myth of the way (mythos hodoio) (Diels 1964: 235).
In the course of time, as the Greeks discovered philosophy and rational thinking (not
only about nature but also) about the various stories of gods and goddesses, they
started to developed different theories about the meaning of myths and began to op-
pose logos against mythos. As a result of this opposition, myths turned into fairy tales
while the term myth became a symbol of delusion and ignorance.
10
Although the
original meaning of mytheomai lingered on, the meaning of mythos started to hold
different connotations. As Socrates remarks in Platos Gorgias: Hear, then, a very
beautiful logos. A fable (mythos), you will think. But I call it a logos. For what I am
going to tell, I tell you as pure truth.
11

As language and usage develop, the same words do not necessarily keep the
same meaning. They can assume meanings which differ considerably from what they
used to convey in previous periods. But there is more going on in Ancient Greece as
far as the meaning of mythos and logos is concerned. Since their shifts in meaning
concur with changes of identity and belonging, the terms themselves turn into sym-
bols and criteria of mutual assessment. Indeed, if we consider the emergence and de-

10
Cf. Mller 1998: 281-295. As to the first attempts at demythologization see also Hbner 1985: 145:
Unter den Logographen, Genealogen und Mythographen versteht man eine Gruppe, die ver-
suchte, den Mythos auf den Logos zu bringen, also ihm eine dem aufkommenden Rational-
ismus entsprechende systematische Ordnung zu geben. Dazu gehrte aber nicht zuletzt,
mittels mglichst lckenloser Genealogien die mythischen Geschichten in den durchgehenden
Zusammenhang der profanen Zeit zu bringen. Dennoch blieb man dabei teilweise noch in der
alten Anschauungsweise befangen. Besonders deutlich zeigt sich dies bei Pherekydes (6. Jahr-
hundert v. Chr.)(146) So archaisch auch der Stil des Pherekydes anmutet, so wenig kann
doch darber hinweggesehen werden, da nunmehr in Prosa geschrieben wird. Man distan-
ziert sich von den Dichtern. Alles haben den Gttern Homer und Hesiod angehngt, klagt
Xenophanes, und Hekataios (6. Jahrhundert v. Chr.) betont, er erzhle den Mythos so, wie er
ihm wahr zu sein scheint, er erzhle einen logos eiks, etwas Wahres: Denn die
Geschichten der Griechen scheinen mir auch mannigfaltig und lcherlich zu sein.
[Hekataios, perhaps a student of Anaximander, lived in Miletus and had considerable knowl-
edge about the countries and traditions of various peoples WD]. Eiks war offenbar in
dieser Zeit ein Schlagwort. Wir finden es auch bei dem Mythographen Hellanikos (5. Jahr-
hundert v. Chr.), womit er das in seinen Augen Natrliche und Vernnftige gegenber dem
Phantastischen, nur Erfundenen der Dichter hervorzuheben sucht. Nun beginnt auf breiter
Front die Entmythologisierung. Da wird durch Hekataios aus dem Hllenhund Kerberos
eine gewhnliche giftige Schlange. Herakles holt die Rinder des Geryones nicht von einer
fernen Insel im Westen, sondern aus dem nahen Ambrakia, und selbstverstndlich zieht er
nicht alleine gegen den Knig Augeas, sondern zusammen mit den Epeern, um nur einige
Beispiele zu geben. Der Mythos wird also nicht einfach aufgegeben, er wird nur vernnftig
erklrt.
See also Detienne 1986.
11
Gorgias 523a. For the translation of this quote, I follow Xaveer de Win 1978, Part I: 204.
344
velopment of philosophy in Ancient Greece, we not only become witnesses to a new
tradition in cultural history, but we also observe a far-reaching struggle between tradi-
tional truth claims and philosophical insights (see Hatab 192, Schwabl 1995). For
when Plato points out (in the third book of The Republic) that philosophy provides a
better theology, it becomes clear that he sees in it an alternative tradition which
serves as a replacement of the Homeric canon. Although Aristotles cultivation of
reason (Nicomachean Ethics X. 8, 1179a) aims at knowledge for the sake of knowl-
edge (Metaphysics I. 2, 982a), thought and word insist on becoming practical realities.
While the logos stands for those who follow the ways of philosophy, mythos becomes
the mark of those who are unable or unwilling to accept the challenges of true human-
ity. Mythos is not merely a term that has changed its meaning, but turns out to be a
symbol which, as tacit myth within and outside philosophy, functions as a label that
initiates and confirms social and cultural otherness.
The reference to the Apostle Paul is no more than one in many instances
which shows the change in the usage of the term myth, but it nevertheless reveals the
dialectical ramifications of these changes. For when he tells Timothy that he should
not waste his time with unholy, silly myths, but practice piety instead (1 Tim. 4. 7),
he may have a point as far as the cultivation of religious attitudes is concerned. How-
ever, when he remarks in 2 Tim. 4. 4: from truth they will abstain, and turn to
myths,
12
it becomes clear that he has more in mind when he uses this term. For
whereas this usage implies the mythlessness of his own message, it functions also as a
device which, by pointing to religious backwardness, puts his fellow humans in a
place where the people he refers to do not want to be.
These few indications are sufficient to state the problem. If we focus on the
usage of the term myth, the question is not whether this usage has changed (as it
undoubtedly has), but whether it still refers to notions of identity and belonging;
whether labelling is still taking place when we call a conviction or a way of behaving
and doing things a myth. Since there are sufficient indications that this is indeed the
case, we are still burdened with the history of the word and its usage. Though label-
ling is a common human attitude, philosophy and scholarship have to avoid it. And, if
we think about it, it is quite possible that our own convictions and evidences are not
so very different from those of others. Therefore, we are undoubtedly better off when
we concede that there is mutuality in labelling (or since myth is the label: in myth-
calling
13
), and concentrate on the question of true and false myths (or beneficial and
detrimental myths) instead of ignoring the issue. After all, if we insist on being with-
out myth, this insistence could turn out to be the myth that persists in the denial of
myth or, as Laurence Coupe puts it, in the myth of mythlessness.
14

12
See also 2 Petrus 1. 16: We did not follow sophisticated myths when we proclaimed the power and
the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but have been eye witnesses to his sublime greatness.
13
I use the term myth-calling analogously to name-calling which Websters New World Dictionary
defines as the use of disparaging or abusive names in attacking another.
14
Coupe 1997: 9. See, for instance, also Hbner 1985: 109:
345
4. Basic meanings
If it is true that present day use of the word myth relates implicitly to issues of identity
in conjunction with more or less obvious forms of labelling, these connotations are
sufficiently important to be acknowledged, and to revise this use accordingly. To do
this, we have to consider the relationship between philosophy and tradition, and to
focus especially on religious traditions and the ways they tend to disregard the truth
claims of other religions. At least since David Humes Natural History of Religion,
philosophers have been (or could have been) aware of this tendency and the fact that
something is wrong if one ignores the challenges of mutuality. Unfortunately, though
philosophers of the Enlightenment noticed the problem of mutuality in religious tradi-
tions, and took the ignoring of this problem as an indication of delusory beliefs in all
religions, they overlooked the fact that the history of philosophy and the belief in rea-
son display similar patterns of mutual labelling and myth-calling.
Indeed, when we observe today that what is a myth for one is a non-myth or
true reality for another, or that positions and convictions assume opposite meanings as
positions and perspectives change, we have every reason to pay attention to this ob-
servation. It is an issue which asks for the deconstruction of prejudices as well as for
an assessment of the conditions under which it is possible to recover the meanings
that have been lost in the course of biased developments. Moreover, when we focus
on the relationship between mythos and logos in philosophy, we may even wonder
whether this relationship is not covered by the same mythological figure which Lvi-
Strauss has discovered in traditional mythologies.
15

Der Grieche, der im Mythos lebte und nicht, wie wir, auerhalb seiner, konnte ebenso wenig
in dem hier gemeinten Sinn ber ihn sprechen wie ber ihn reflektieren.
If we ask how it is possible to study myth, the problem of speaking about myth is indeed a real problem.
But Hbners approach is ambiguous. For if we are really ouside myth, as he assumes, how, then, are
we able to relate to myth in the first place? unless this outside of is in itself a myth which enables us
to recognize similarities in the myths of others. In this regard, I prefer to rely on the experiences of
intercultural differences, both as they confront us with contrasts that make us see, and relate to cul-
tural realities under conditions which reveal similarities and dissimilarities in relatively distinct ways.
15
I refer to: fx(a) : fy(b) fx(b): fa-1(Y)
(Here, with two terms, a and b, being given as well as two functions, x and y, of these terms,
it is assumed that a relation of equivalence exists between two situations, defined respectively
by an inversion of terms and relations, under two conditions: (1) that one term be replaced by
its opposite (in the above formula, a and a-1); (2) that an inversion be made between the func-
tion value and the term value of two elements (above, y and a). Lvi-Strauss 1967: 225).
If we think, for instance, of the Purusha myth (see g Veda 10. 90; and the references to Prakrti and
Purusha in the Bhagavad Gita) the formula can be read as follows: Whereas (the Great Lord of all)
creation (a), becomes manifest in the entanglement of Prakrti and Purusha (fx), this entanglement re-
lates to purusha (b) freeing himself from prakrti (fy), as purusha (b), entering and getting absorbed by
prakrti (fx) relates to the harmonious order of things (Y) as it emerges in and from the sacrifice of Pu-
rusha (a-1). When applied to the tension between mythos and logos, we can read the formula in two
ways, depending on whether we emphasize the liberating role of logos or the guiding function of my-
346
The practice of religious, philosophical, and ordinary myth-calling is no triv-
ial affair. Since it subverts the purpose of humanity and intelligence, it is an issue of
general concern which requires continuous attention. As to its consequences it under-
lines the necessity to come to an understanding of myth which covers not only the
history of myth-calling, but recalls also the (Greek) beginnings of this history when
mythos and logos were equally indebted to (what was believed to be) truth.
The question about a revised or critical use of the term myth is primarily a
problem of Western history and its beginnings in Greek thought and attitudes. But
since it concerns in principle all cultures and traditions, it becomes a problem of phi-
losophical anthropology within the horizon of cultural history. In fact, if we think
about the method that could lead to an adequate concept of myth, I would like to ar-
gue that rather than taking our cue from Greek tradition, we should turn to the primal
(or life-communal) cultures of gatherers and hunters in order to recover the meaning
of myth in its anthropological and cultural significance.
With regard to the Greeks, we know already that myth referred to stories about
gods and divine beings on the one hand and, more generally, to the word of tradition
on the other hand; that is, to the hieros logos both as it could be found in these stories,
and as it exceeded them in its meanings. But when we ask what we can do with these
two notions, we are already in the middle of controversy. Even though our under-
standing of primal cultures is limited, and biased by the conditions under which we
relate to them, they offer nonetheless examples of more or less homogenous traditions
which can be used to represent an ideal type. These traditions deserve to be and must
be studied on their own grounds. But we can also refer to them as we try to be mind-
ful of the meaning of being human and cultural in a more general sense; that is to say,
as we think about our own being within the context of cultural multiplicity and human
unity as far as the basics of personal and communal existence are concerned.
Since the two notions of myth that is, of myth as it refers to stories about di-
vine beings, and as it coincides with the word of tradition are such that they permit
us to distinguish similar phenomena in other cultures and traditions, I think that it
makes sense to focus on these primal cultures, and to develop the questions about
myths and mythologies as we try to get hold of our own being in the light of these
cultures.
The study of myth which I propose, is largely indebted to the authors I have
mentioned in connection with the fourth and fifth option above. In particular, I would

thos. Myth (a) which seduces (fx) relates to Logos (b) which liberates (fy) like Logos (b) which se-
duces (fx) relates to Liberation (Y) in the destruction of Myth (a-1). Logos (a) which decides (fx) re-
lates to Mythos (b) which guides (fy) like Logos (b) which decides (fx) relates to Guidance and
Liberation (Y) in the destruction of Logos (a-1). The alternative to the myth of mythlessness or the
myth of logoslessness as they emerge from the destruction of Mythos or Logos (and can be found in
extreme forms of scientism and fideism) consists, however, not in a renewed identification of mythos
and logos, but in a distinction which implies mutual recognition. It is an invitation to consider the dif-
ferences in questions, interests, ways of thinking, object relations, and so forth, as they mark the mean-
ing of being human under changing conditions.
347
like to refer to Schellings proposal of a philosophical ethnology.
16
But since I con-
sider it necessary to emphasize the persistence of elementary conditions on cultural
grounds, I see a closer connection than these authors did between the life-communal
cultures of gatherers and hunters and our own as well as other peoples conditions of
primal existence.
To give a few indications of the proposed approach, I would like to indicate
that myth, as the word of tradition and as the story of divine beings, becomes above
all a key element of and in the constitution of cultural reality and personal conscious-
ness. In its primary meaning, myth is not a story (in the sense of an incidental ac-
count), nor an elaboration of specific notions, but the pattern of evidences by which
people live, in which they are aware of themselves and all reality, which they presup-
pose as they concentrate on the particulars of ordinary life. Myth tells the tale of being
human.
17
It comes into being where the world becomes evident; where true reality
begins to be an issue. Myth is primarily not a form of knowledge (as Cassirer as-
sumed), but a dimension and form of consciousness. In the light of myth, the world
reveals itself as an integral feature of the semantic space that enables human beings to
communicate, and to disclose in their own way the truth in and behind appearances. If
we approach myth from the experience of cultural differences, it makes itself known
as the grammar that guides and orders the arrangement of symbolic meanings.
Before myth extends into narratives which confirm its impact on conscious-
ness, it consists in frameworks of relations which determine and qualify the life that
evolves in them. In its basic function myth does not provide insights, but specifies the
conditions under which it becomes possible to acquire them. The study of myth is, in
this regard, not about truth-claims, but about the presuppositions as well as the possi-
bility of these claims. Myth forms and opens the space that is home and world. Be-
cause of myth it is possible to give in Shakespeares words to airy nothing a
local habitation and a name (Midsummer Nights Dream V. 1); or, perhaps more to
the point, to find myth in the realization of this very possibility. As myth attracts and
harbors knowledge and experiences, it endorses and legitimizes them, while it is also
shaped and changed by them.
Moreover, as myth relates to divine beings, these beings present themselves as
names which speak in and with the tradition that is part of them. The central names of
myths are no allegories, at least not primarily, which say something else that is en-
coded in them, but as Schelling has pointed out using Coleridges term tautegories
which say what they are and as they are in the saying.
18
As tautegories they emerge in
an reversal of naming in which names gain meaning apart from and prior to the
movements of designation. The divine beings, whether they are ancestors or heroes,
totems or creator gods, do, or do not, exist in their specific modes of existence and
non-existence; not as things exist, but as the non-visible realities of numbers and laws,

16
See Schelling 1959: 130; Dupr 1975, 1996.
17
Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein: An entire mythology is stored in our language (Wittgenstein 1979: 70).
18
Schelling 1959: 197f. See also Hedley 2000: 134f, 2008: 121ff; H. Stachowiak 1985: 143-155.
348
of ethical codes and values, of communities and the ideals of humanity, are part of our
life in accordance with their respective characters.
19

To understand the meaning of tautegorical names, we could say that they im-
ply, and hinge on, different ways of speaking which in a sense is trivial, but be-
comes critical when we explore the extreme possibilities of speaking. If we think
along these lines, it makes sense to relate not only to the individual subject that
speaks, but also to language and tradition as they form their own beginnings, and join
in the same processes which consist in and structure the expressions of humanity
and thus, as they account for particular ways of speaking (Rogerson 1984: 63).
The conditions under which we become aware of mythic phenomena in primal
cultures make it necessary to approach myths and mythologies from a dynamic per-
spective. If we contrast mythic names with the stories in which they occur, and ob-
serve that these stories may be told and retold in variable combinations, we encounter
myth as it unfolds in stories, and mythic names and notions as they enfold these sto-
ries as well as the traditions by which people live. But on the one hand, the result is
such that we are left with a body of narratives which can be collected and fixed. On
the other hand, if we consider the collections of myths and recall the manner in which
they are produced (and collected), we notice that they are temporary and in the proc-
ess of being made. The tension we face in these opposing movements underscores the
necessity to distinguish between actual myths as they are part of specific mythologies,
and the latent myths which appear in them. But because we have no right to omit the
processes in which these latent myths are generated, we have to think of what we may
call the mythic, both as it precedes these processes, and as it converges on the (untold
or silent) myths which form the basis of specific myths and mythologies.
To come to an understanding of the relationship between myth and mythology,
the available stories offer themselves as (first) indications of the latent (untold) myth
from which they derive. Conversely, if we follow these indications and think of the
myths that enfold them, we may return to the stories and approach them once more in
the light of these preceding (and, in principle, not synchronic but enchronic) myths.
But while a body of stories refers to the untold myth from which it stems, its stories
do not necessarily reflect and articulate the whole myth (or complete configuration of
untold myths) by which people live. Though life-communal cultures are spontaneous
enough to cover large segments of culture and consciousness in mythological expres-
sions, they do not cover all of them. In its actuality a particular mythology may be

19
When we speak, for instance, of science, mathematics, or of whatever discipline we have in mind, we
refer to particular activities and achievements which can be distinguished by these names. However, if
we substantialize these names in such a way that they include whatever has been and will be accom-
plished, we may share only fragments of this inclusion, but instead of referring to these fragments, we
use the names as they stand for themselves and attract whatever belongs to them. The switch from an
indicative to an integral and (ultimately) tautegorical use of names may be inconsequential on the level
of ordinary communication. But as it confirms opposite modes of intentionality, it points to a basic
tension in the perception of reality which, when we consider the prominent place of tautegoric rela-
tions, is crucial to the formation of myths and mythologies because and to the extent that it centers on
one of the two poles.
349
more or less comprehensive. And, whereas the idea of total coverage assumes the
meaning of a limit, we can think of an opposite limit where all narratives are gone
because they have disappeared in words and notions that encapsulate their myths
without releasing them. The assumption of this second limit is a thought experiment.
But it is an experiment which makes us wonder about situations in which we know
many mythologies, though we are not sure anymore whether we can, or should, em-
brace any one of them.
Whereas the distinction between myth and mythology aims at the recovery of
the myth in mythology and the understanding of mythology in conjunction with this
myth, the distinction between myth and the mythic centers on the formation of myths
and mythologies in cultural history, and on the mythic as the time absorbing source
and beginning of this formation. If the first distinction relates to the plurality of
mythological expressions in more or less distinct units, the second distinction refers to
the convergence of myths and mythologies in the unity of being human and cultural.
To the extent that the basic myths of different mythologies are one inasmuch as they
concur with momentary (though relatively lasting) configurations of the semantic
space that defines culture and consciousness, they can be used to distinguish various
cultures with their specific histories. And conversely, inasmuch as cultural differences
concur with shifts in myth and mythology, they can be used in the clarification of
these shifts. However, inasmuch as myths are similar and dissimilar, they let us, and
compel us to, think of the mythic in being human and cultural not as another myth,
but as focus and vanishing point of mythological processes.
Since the distinction between the myth and the mythic derives from the per-
ception of actual myths and mythologies and the necessity to account for distinct and
related phenomena, it raises several questions of whether the relation with the mythic
is transient, of whether it is typical for particular cultures and not for others and of
whether it reflects certain stages in cultural development or does it persist in all situa-
tions. The answer to this question depends on our understanding of being human and
cultural, as well as on the one hand, the meaning of language and communication, and
on the other hand, the conditions of thought and tradition. If we accept the idea that
human beings do not exist without a life-world in which they find their identity and
personhood, and take into consideration that myths account for the cosmological
character of cultural reality in life-communal cultures, we may as well say that the
mythic turns out to be an unconditional requirement of human existence. We may
think of the mythic in terms of a dimension of consciousness, or as a principle which
becomes effective in the formation of mythic symbols (or tautegories) and the con-
figurations that determine the myth of mythologies, but in either way we relate to and
rely on it as we cope with reality in practice and in theory. As the vanishing point of
all reality, it is as unseizable as reality itself. But since we think of it not as object,
but as the implicit limit of thinking and speaking it gives us the notion of truth both
as it precedes being and understanding, and as it guides and accompanies the assess-
ment of actions and attitudes. As the source of spiritual light it enables us to see what
affects us and to evaluate the effects of this experience as we see and become aware
350
of them. In the realization of this ability we depend on the use of reason and the
measures reason provides in the pursuit of true understanding. But to be reasonable,
we depend on reality as it invites us to rely on reason. While reality appears to be sub-
ject to truth and reason, this appearance is not a consequence, but a condition of being
reasonable, both as this condition results from mythological processes, and as it
evolves with them in the interactions of attitudes and activities.
From a historical point of view it is evident that the stories about gods and
goddesses became problematic when the word of philosophy and scholarship began to
compete with the word of tradition. But the fact that these myths have been abolished,
does not necessarily imply that philosophy and scholarship relinquished their own
myth. As I have indicated already, if we consider the relationship between myth and
mythology, we can also think of myths without mythologies. We could thus argue that
reason and being are terms from a different myth which, as myth without apparent
mythology, became the matrix of a new tradition within traditions. The tension be-
tween the word of the one and the words of other traditions became a powerful stimu-
lant to the dynamics of being human and cultured, as well as to the ways in which
thinking relates to itself and the whole of reality. In coping with the words of sur-
rounding traditions, the myth of philosophy and scholarship may be hidden away in
the evidences of reflective thought. But the fact that it has been or is forgotten, does
not mean that the myth has ceased to be a decisive factor in the formation of philoso-
phical systems and the development of scientific paradigms.
Whatever the ways may be in which we understand, and relate to, the mythic
in the distinction of myths and mythologies, I do not think that philosophy and schol-
arship are rational in their approach to the study of myth, if they disregard their possi-
ble dependence on mythological conditions. What matters is not whether myths and
mythologies are primitive forms of science (which they are not), but whether and
how they form the medium in which we exist as human beings, in which we become
aware of ourselves and the whole of reality, and on the basis of which we are able to
act as reasonable beings.
5. Why should it be of interest to study myth?
Since the meaning of myth belongs to that of the semantic space in which we operate
as thinking beings, there are numerous reasons for our being interested in the clarifi-
cation of this issue. On formal grounds we could argue that the paradigms or discipli-
nary matrixes of our studies are especially sensitive to the delineations in which the
subjects of investigation do appear. Even if myth should not be decisive for the di-
mensionalization of reality, we should still know why and how it interferes with the
perception of things, as it apparently does. Before we know what myth truly implies,
the argument confronts us with a basic ambiguity. On the one hand, we cannot discard
the belief that myth may be no more than a distorting factor which needs to be
checked, and in which case, as Stephen Toulmin has pointed out (Toulmin 1970), we
351
have to be careful that it does not creep into off-duty writings. On the other hand, we
cannot exclude the possibility that myth is an indispensable condition of reflective
thinking, as well as of scholarly inquiries, and that the primary issue is not the rejec-
tion of myth, but the recovery of those mythic elements which sustain the idea of
pure science and are likely to affect, change, and deepen its meaning as they become
the subject of critical and self-critical considerations.
20

Another point which could be mentioned in this context concerns the episte-
mological aspects of the problem of myth. Because myth refers to concrete features at
least to the extent that cultures, traditions, and human beings do, in fact, create its
meaning, we cannot dismiss the questions of how we become aware of these features,
how we know what we perceive, what the experiences are that permit and compel us
to distinguish relevant phenomena, and so forth. The questions are part of the problem
of interpersonal relations in the form of self understanding and the understanding of
others. They have their place in the study of ones own and of other cultures, of ones
own and of other religions. But they refer also to the possibility of meeting myth on
its own ground and in terms that agree with the demands of empirical existence. Since
Theagenes of Rhegion (6th century BC) became convinced that myth needs an alle-
gorical interpretation, Western scholars have tried to come closer to myth by connect-
ing it with various parameters. Myth became an expression of poetry, of priestly
fraud, of forgotten histories,
21
of primitive science, and so forth. Today we try to
make sense of myth by connecting it with social functions, with subconscious proc-
esses, with archetypical mappings, with historical states and developments. I do not
think that these connections are necessarily wrong or without insight. They do make
sense in a variety of ways, and we have to explore these possibilities. But at the same
time it would certainly be insufficient if we did not try to take myths literally; if we
did not first take them at their face value, before we try to look for hidden meanings.
Though Schelling has already made this attempt, the issue itself is still grossly ne-
glected (Djuri 1979).
Since I have already touched on the issue of identity formation and labelling, I
do not have to repeat this point. Within the context of philosophical anthropology it is
clear that we have to focus on myth if we intend to do justice to the meaning of being
human and its place in the whole of reality. But as this issue extends into various as-
pects of philosophy and culture, it assumes special significance in the discussion of
philosophy and ideology on the one hand, and with regard to questions about epochal
shifts and their impact on the understanding of philosophy on the other hand. More-
over, as Kolakowski (1974) and Hbner (1985) have pointed out, if philosophy in-
tends to make sense of questions about chance and providence, of how we cope with

20
As to the discussion of this point see, for instance, Gilkey 1976; Maziarz 1971; Munson 1975;
Barbour 1984; and Scarborough 1994.
21
See, for instance, Ppin 1958 and de Vries 1961. With the forgotten histories I refer to the Euhe-
meristic interpretation of myth in which Zeus (and other gods) are said to have been historical figures.
As the historical knowledge faded away, the memory acquired features of divine action and religious
worship.
352
strange experiences in our life, with illness and death, with disaster and war, with
salvation and doom then it must not disregard the ways in which myths tackle these
problems. Nor can we preclude the possibility that only myth is able to provide a solu-
tion or that these problems present themselves in mythic terms the moment we try to
define them as, for instance, when we think of events like September 11th
, 2001 and
the present breakdown of the financial and economic system. And, if it should turn
out that these kinds of experiences are essential ingredients of and for the notion of
God, one might wonder how it will ever be possible to develop a philosophical theol-
ogy, that is indeed philosophical and not another version of theological reasoning,
without an adequate theory of myth.
Finally, I would like to point to the ontological significance of myth. As Kurt
Hbner has shown, it is possible to contrast scientific ontology with mythological on-
tology if we assume that they both provide models to cope more or less reasonably
with experiences.
22
But since the two models are specifications of cultural reality in
their particular ways, I do not think that it is sufficient to juxtapose them without an-
swering the question about their mediation as well as about the conditions of their
possibility. Here I would like to refer once more to the distinction between myth and
mythology (and the mythic as depth and lasting origin), but now with the additional
qualification that myth itself is more comprehensive than the mythologies which re-
flect some of its meanings, and that it is precisely this comprehensiveness which
needs to be taken seriously in its nature, its possibilities, and consequences. For if it is
true that myth consists in the configuration of evidences with the implication of natu-
ralness, and that it insists on the tautegories which attract meanings in their own way,
then we cannot doubt that myth is always a whole, no matter how limited it may be in
its actuality. As tautegories form their own centers of reality, the space between them
becomes a field for various activities. As we can think of changing configurations, we
can think of new and different possibilities. But whatever the shifts may be, whether
some of the tautegories fade away while others emerge, or whether some stay the
same while others change, they form a whole in tautegorical difference and it is the
whole that extends or changes together with them. Within the limits of tautegorical
symbols and the semantic spaces they entail, there is room for ordinary existence both
as it evolves in conjunction with them, and as it modifies them in concrete relations.
Because of these symbols and spaces and their dimensions we can think of religion as
a particular mode of human existence, and of religions as modifications of this mode
in connection with different sets of tautegories and various relations to the meaning of
tautegorical difference.
23
In the same way, we can also think of philosophy and sci-

22
See Hbner 1985: 239 ff , part three, on the rationality of the mythic.
23
With the notion of tautegorical difference I refer to the idea that the cultural universe which is consti-
tuted in the constellation of tautegorical names is closed: in one sense, we always have to say, that is it!
But as there is tension and movement in the constellation of tautegories, their last word is always also a
first one. If we begin to understand, it is fine. But there is more to it, in depth and beyond all exten-
sions. There remains the question: what is it all about? Both moments are of vital importance for reli-
gious existence. If one of them is neglected the result is either fundamentalism or nihilism. Although I
353
ence as they evolve from ordinary existence in conjunction with their specific tautego-
ries not as mythologies we know from prephilosophical and prescientific cultures,
but as logomythologies (German: Logomythie, Dupr 1973: 954) whose purpose it is
to understand the world as well as the various mythologies in terms of theoretical rea-
soning. If the universe not the universe that we imagine to exist out there, but the
one that is formed by the tautegories of myth which is supposed to comprise the out
there as well is large enough to contain God and Nirvana (as tautegories of tautego-
ries), we should not in advance exclude the possibility that the tautegoric whole is
capable of including philosophy as well as science and scholarship. It is at least a
point which deserves to be considered. Since we hardly scratch the surface of reality,
we should not believe that we have reached its essence, even if we assume that it has
no essence at all.
The distinction between mythos and logos is a necessary distinction as far as
the possibility of philosophy and science is concerned. It is a necessity which concurs
with the emergence of philosophy and science inasmuch as they relate to the logos in
forms of self-relation: as Parmenides has taught his fellow philosophers, with the lo-
gos we have to decide and come to a conclusion.
24
But the distinction does not neces-
sarily mean that myth is a delusion, that only logos is true, that mythos and logos
could not both be true and false, or that the distinction between them is not, in fact, an
indistinction when seen from the viewpoint of myth. When Parmenides called his way
a myth, he probably meant what he said. But when philosophers developed their
myths of the way, and started to refer to the myths of others in order to proclaim
their cultural superiority, it is not surprising that this has been the beginning of off-
duty mythologies.
References
Aristotle, 1941, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics; see Richard McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aris-
totle, New York: Random House.
Barber, W.W. & P.T., 2004, When They Severed Earth from Sky. How the Human Mind Shapes Myth,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Barbour, I., 1984, Myths, Models and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion, New
York: Harper & Row.
Bloch, E., 1985, Literarische Aufstze, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 9).
Bloch, E., 1968, Atheismus im Christentum: zur Religion des Exodus und des Reichs, Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp.
Blumenberg, H., 1979, Arbeit am Mythos, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 5th edition 1990.
Bultmann, R., Jaspers, K., 1954, Die Frage der Entmythologisierung, Mnchen: Piper.

do not agree with Blumenbergs simplistic opposition between myth and dogma (see Blumenberg
1990: 239ff), I think that he has a point here. For as myth tells dogma that dogma derives from myth
and mythology, it becomes a thorn in the flesh of dogmatic thought, which reminds one to look out, to
avoid dogmatism, to accept myth as a jester in the court of dogmatic reasoning.
24
See frag. 7: ...do thou judge by reason the strife-encompassed proof that I have spoken. Kirk &
Raven 1962: 271.
354
Bolle, K. W., 1993, The Freedom of Man in Myth, Nashville: Vanderbilt.
Brand, G., 1978, Welt, Geschichte, Mythos und Politik, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Campbell, J., 1970, The Masks of God, 4 vols., New York: Viking Compass Book.
Cassirer, E., 1944, An Essay on Man, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Cassirer, E., 1946, The Myth of the State, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Cassirer, E., 1955, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, translated by Ralph Manheim, Volume Two:
Mythical Thought, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Coupe, L., 1997, Myth, London: Routledge.
Crsgen, D., 2002, Die Rationalitt des Mythischen: Der philosophische Mythos bei Platon und seine
Exegese im Neuplatonismus, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Day, M.S., 1984, The Many Meanings of Myth, Lanham: University Press of America.
Detienne, M., 1986, The Creation of Mythology, translated by. M. Cook, Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
de Vries, J., 1961, Forschungsgeschichte der Mythologie, Freiburg: Karl Alber.
de Win, Xaveer, 1978, Plato: Verzameld Werk, deel I, Antwerpen: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel.
Diels, H., 1964, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Griechisch und Deutsch, Bd I, Zrich:
Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchandlung.
Djuri, M., 1979, Mythos, Wissenschaft, Ideologie Ein Problemaufri, Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Doty, W.G., 1986, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals, Alabama: The University of Ala-
bama Press.
Dubuisson, D., 2006, Twentieth Century Mythologies, translated by Martha Cunningham, London:
Equinox.
Dupr, W., 1973, Mythos, Handbuch philosophischer Grundbegriffe, Mnchen, IV. 948-956.
Dupr, W., 1975, Religion in Primitive Cultures: A Study in Ethnophilosophy, The Hague: Mouton.
Dupr, W., 1996, Unio Mythica. The One that Differs in Oneness, in S.J. Denning-Bolle, E. Gerow,
eds., The persistence of religions: Essays in honor of Kees W. Bolle, Malibu: Undena Publica-
tions, 259-283.
Dupr, W., 1999, Moral Cosmos: A Struggle Between True and False Myths, Cosmos: The Journal
of the Traditional Cosmology Society, 15, 1-2: 23-44.
Dupr, W., 2005, The Quest for Myth as a Key to Implicit Religion, Implicit Religion, vol. 8, nr. 2,
2005 (2006), 147-165.
Eliade, M., 1963, Aspects du mythe, Paris: Gallimard.
Eliade, M., 1975, Myth and Reality, translated by Willard R. Trask, New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Frank, M., 1988, Gott im Exil, Vorlesungen ber die Neue Mythologie II. Teil, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Gilkey, L., 1976, Religion and the Scientific Future: Reflections on Myth, Science, and Theology, Lon-
don: S.C.M. Press.
Gusdorf, G., 1953, Mythe et mtaphysique, Paris: Flammarion.
Hatab, L.J., 1992, Myth and Philosophy: A Contest of Truths, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court.
Hedley, D., 2000, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hedley, D., 2008, Living Forms of the Imagination, London: Clark International.
Heine, H., 1966, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, Frankfurt: Insel Verlag.
Heraclitus, see Diels, H., 1964, 139-190.
Hbner, K., 1985, Die Wahrheit des Mythos, Mnchen: C.H. Beck.
Hume, D., 1976, The Natural History of Religion, (1757), edited by A. Wayne Colver, Oxford: Claren-
don Press.
Jamme, Chr., 1991, Einfhrung in die Philosophie des Mythos: Neuzeit und Gegenwart, Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Jonas, H., 1964, Heidegger and Theology The Review of Metaphysics, 18, 2: 207-233.
Jonas, H., 1969, Myth and Mysticism: A Study of Objectification and Interiorization in Religious
Thought, The Journal of Religion, 49,4: 315-329.
Jung, C.G. and Kernyi, C., 1963, Essays on a Science of Mythology, New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Kant, I., 1784 Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklrung?, Berlinische Monatsschrift, 12.
Kernyi, K., 1964, Griechische Grundbegriffe, Zrich: Rhein Verlag.
355
Kernyi, K., 1996, Die Erffnung des Zugangs zum Mythos: Ein Lesebuch, Darmstadt: Wissenschaft-
liche Buchgesellschaft.
Kirk, G.S. & Raven, J.E., 1962, The Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of
Texts, Cambridge: University Press.
Kobusch, T., 1990, Die Wiederkehr des Mythos. Zur Funktion des Mythos in Platons Denken und in
der Philosophie der Gegenwart in: Gerhard Binder, Bernd Effe, eds., Mythos. Erzhlende
Weltdeutung im Spannunsfeld von Ritual, Geschichte und Rationalitt, Trier: Wissenschaft-
licher Verlag, 13-32.
Kolakowski, L., 1973, Die Gegenwrigkeit des Mythos, Mnchen: Piper.
Lvi-Strauss, C., 1967, Structural Anthropology, Garden City: Anchor Books.
Lvi-Strauss, C., 1979, Myth and Meaning, New York: Shocken.
Liebrucks, B., 1972, Erkenntnis und Dialektik: zur Einfhrung in eine Philosophie von der Sprache
her: Aufstze aus den Jahren 1949 bis 1971, Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff (Sprache und
Mythos, 110-151).
Maziarz, E., 1971, Science and Myths as Symbolic Structures in George F. McLean, ed., Myth and
Philosophy, Volume XLV of Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Associa-
tion.
Mller, H-P., 1998, Anfnge der Religionskritik bei den Vorsokratikern in A.T. Khoury, G. Vanoni
(Hg.), Geglaubt habe ich, deshalb habe ich geredet, Wrzburg: Echter Verlag, 281-295.
Munson, T.M., 1975, Religious Consciousness and Experience, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Niebuhr, R., 1968, Faith and Politics: A Commentary on Religious, Social and Political Thought in a
Technological Age, edited by R.H. Stone, New York: George Braziller.
Otto, W. F., 1955, Die Gestalt und das Sein, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1955.
Parmenides, see Diels, H., 1964, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Bd I, Zrich: Weidmannsche
Verlagsbuchandlung.
Ppin, J., 1958, Mythe et Allgorie, Les origines grecques et les contestations judo-chrtiennes, Paris:
ditions Montaigne.
Plato, Gorgias; see de Win, Xaveer, 1978, Plato: Verzameld Werk, deel I, Antwerpen: De
Nederlandsche Boekhandel.
Reinwald, H., 1991, Mythos und Methode: Zum Verhltnis von Wissenschaft, Kultur und Erkenntnis,
Mnchen: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
Ricoeur, P., 1990, Time and Narrative, translated by K. BLamey and D. Pellauer, Chicago: The Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Rogerson, J.W., 1984, Slippery Words: Myth, in A. Dundes, ed., Sacred Narrative: Readings in the
Theory of Myth, Berkeley: University of California Press, 62-71.
Scarborough, M., 1994, Myth and Modernity: Postcritical Reflections, Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Schelling, F.W.J., 1959, Historisch kritische Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie, (1842/46)
Werke VI (M. Schrter), Mnchen: Becksche Verlagsbuchhandlung.
Schwabl, H., 1995, Notizen zu den Quellen ber die Anfnge der Philosophie: Aristoteles und
Hesiod, in Danilo N. Basta et al., Kriza I Perspektive Filozofije: Mihailu Djuriu za
sedamdeseti rodendan, Beograd: Tersit, 309-322.
Segal, R.A., 1999, Theorizing about myth, Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press.
Shakespeare, W., A Midsummer Nightss Dream.
Shrader-Frechette, K., 2008, Five Myths About Nuclear Energy, America, vol. 198, no. 20, at:
http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=10884
Stachowiak, H., 1985, ber tautegorische Modelle, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Psychology.
Proceedings of the 9th International Wittgenstein Symposium, 19th to 26th August, Wien
(Hlder-Pichler-Tempsky), 143-155.
Strenski, I., 1987, Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History. Cassirer, Eliade, Lvi-Strauss
and Malinowski, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Theagenes of Rhegion, see Diels, H., 1964, 51-52.
356
Tillich, P., 1987, Writings in the Philosophy of Religion, edited by John Clayton, Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Topitsch, E., 1979, Gemeinsame Grundlagen mythischen und philosophischen Denkens in Hans
Poser (ed.), Philosophie und Mythos, Berlin: De Gruyter.
Toulmin, S., 1970, Contemporary Scientific Mythology in Stephen Toulmin, Ronald Hepburn, and
Alasdair MacIntyre, Metaphysical Beliefs: Three Essays by Stephen Toulmin, Ronald W. Hep-
burn and Alasdair MacIntyre, 2nd ed., London: S. C. M. Press.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2009, Rupture and Fusion in the Approach to Myth: Situating Myth
Analysis Between Philosophy, Poetics and Long-Range Historical Reconstruction, Religion
Compass, 3: 1-34.
Wittgenstein, L., 1979, Sources and Perspectives, ed. by C. G. Luckhart, Hassocks: Harvester Press.
Xenophanes, see Diels, H., 1964, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Bd I, Zrich: Weidmannsche
Verlagsbuchandlung.

357
Chapter 17. Hephaestus and Agni

Gods and men on the battlefield in Greek and Sanskrit
epics

by Nick Allen
1

Abstract. Indo-European languages have received an enormous amount of comparative study, for
which Greek and Sanskrit (with Latin) are often regarded as the fundamental pillars. One might expect,
then, that the comparison between Greek and Sanskrit epic would be well advanced and that by now
some consensus would have been reached on the question of how much, if any, of their narrative con-
tent goes back to a common origin in early Indo-European times. However, this is not the case, and in
practice most students of one epic simply proceed as if they could take for granted that the other was of
no relevance or interest to them.
After a brief mention of various other reasons for this unsatisfactory situation, I focus here on the
apparent differences in modes of involvement of gods in the struggles of mortals. A typology of such
modes in Homer might include gods who father warriors, gods who fight mortals or intervene in their
fights (violently, or with material help, or with advice), and gods who fight other gods in the course of
human battles. Examples of all these modes can in fact be found in the Mahabharata, though not neces-
sarily in the great eighteen-day war that forms the centrepiece of the epic. For instance, the best exam-
ple of gods fighting gods comes in the episode of the Khandava Forest Fire (Book 1), where Agni (=
Fire), assisted by Arjuna, opposes Indra (here = rain, i.e. water). The comparison is with Iliad book 21,
where Hephaestus (here = fire), assisting Achilles, opposes the river Scamander. The rapprochement
involves not only the elements, and several deities other than those mentioned, but also many details,
including some similes.
The similarities are naturally acompanied by many differences (context, course of events, person-
nel, motivation...), and the major theoretical issue is how one can attempt to demonstrate that the tradi-
tions are in fact cognate and derive from an early common origin. The aim here is not so much to
contribute to an understanding of the two epics, but rather, in a case where the prehistory is somewhat
less long and obscure than in many cases studied by comparativists, to give a convincing example of
how much can be preserved by oral tradition over a period of the order of two millennia.
1. Introduction
If Homer is a foundational text for Greek culture and hence for the entire European
literary tradition, the Sanskrit Mahbhrata (which includes a compressed version of

1
Oxford University, UK.
358
the Rmyan a story) is of comparable status within the Hindu tradition. Both grew
from oral traditions, Homer reaching written form around 700 BC, while the Sanskrit
epic emerged around the turn of the eras. The Sanskrit epic is about seven times as
long as the two Greek epics combined. Greek and Sanskrit are of course cognate lan-
guages within the Indo-European (IE) family, so the hypothesis of a common origin
for the two epic traditions (in a protonarrative) is an obvious one. However, surpris-
ingly few people have presented a detailed comparison of the two traditions, and I
shall spend most of this paper simply doing that. At the end I shall try to assess the
methodology, asking how convincing are such comparisons, and what conclusions
can be drawn from them.
Both traditions are so extensive that exact comparisons at a useful level of de-
tail are impossible, so how does one choose what to compare with what? I will not
provide a general answer to this question here, but instead will reveal how the present
essay originated. After having become interested in the similarities between Greek
and Sanskrit theories about the elements, I was reading an article on the conflict be-
tween the fire god and the river god in Iliad Book 21 (Wathelet 2004), when I was
reminded of the final section in Book 1 of the Mahbhrata. I soon recognised that
both texts combine the following four themes:

God of fire fights god associated with water.
Gods en masse participate in the conflict.
Central hero of respective epic is allied with god of fire.
Fire prevails.

The fire-water conflict remains at the heart of this paper, but the comparison
becomes more convincing if its scope is extended. We shall focus centrally on Iliad
Books 18-22 (only glancing at 23-24) and on the subparvan called The Burning of
the Khnd ava Forest (Mbh 1,214-225).
2

In view of the genesis of the paper I have so far referred to Greece before In-
dia, but for various reasons I shall now reverse the order and consistently put India
first. A long prcis of the two texts is unnecessary since the important points will
emerge in the course of their comparison. However, brief summaries are indispensa-
ble.
Mbh 214: Leaving their capital, Arjuna and Krishna make a pleasure outing. A brahmin ap-
proaches. 215: The brahmin is the god Agni and wants to burn the forest, but the Indra (king
of the gods, and god of war) protects it with rain. Arjuna will help Agni, but needs weapons.
216: Agni procures the weapons and starts his fire. 217: While the heroes prevent the inhabi-
tants of the forest from escaping, the fire rages. Indra takes note, and rains, so fire and water

2
Within the subparvan, The rgakas (1,220-225.4) forms a distinct substory, labelled as such in
some of the manuscript colophons; it is of only limited use here. I use the Critical Edition, which is
translated by van Buitenen (1973: 412-431, including the substory). This edition relegates a good deal
of text to footnotes or to its Appendix 1. Such relegated material is normally omitted by van Buitenen,
but some of The Vulgate can be found in Ganguli (1993: 432-455). Unless specially mentioned, all
references are to Mbh 1.
Allen Chapter 17: Hephaestus and Agni
359
are now opposed. 218: Arjuna counters Indra, who escalates the conflict. Krishna kills de-
mons, and other gods join in, but the heroes turn them back. 219: Indra and his troops return to
heaven, and the fire goes on burning. In all, only six beings escape the fire, including the four
rgaka birds (). 225: After six days Agni is satisfied. Indra rewards the heroes.
Iliad 18: Achilles learns of Patroclus death. His mother Thetis visits, and will help him take
revenge: she will get him new armour, made by Hephaestus. Helped by Athena, Achilles
frightens the Trojans, showing them that he is rejoining the fray. 19: Thetis brings the armour,
and the reunited Greek army mobilises. 20: Calling a divine assembly, Zeus tells the gods to
join in the fighting, though they do not yet fight each other. Achilles kills various Trojans, but
two major foes are saved by divine intervention. 21: Many Trojans flee into the Skamander.
3

Becoming angry at the bloodshed and corpses, the river attacks Achilles, whose life is at risk.
Hera summons Hephaestus to attack the river, who yields. The other gods fight each other, or
contemplate doing so. Achilles goes on fighting on the plain. 22: He kills his arch-enemy Hec-
tor.

Let us start with an overview of the parties involved in the conflict.
Table 17.1. Parties in the epic conflict involving Hephaestus and Agni
protagonists side F(ire) side W(ater)
gods Agni Indra (and his troop of gods)
Sanskrit
humans Arjuna (and Krishna) Khnd ava forest and its inhabitants
gods Hephaestus Skamander (and Simoeis)
Greek
humans Greeks, esp. Achilles Troy and Trojans

Annotations to this schema: Agni (Sanskrit agni is cognate with Latin ignis) is god of
Fire. Indra is king of the gods (like Zeus in Greece). Arjuna is the central hero of the
Mahbhrata, friend of the incarnate god Krishna, and son of Indra. Khnd ava is
north of Delhi. Following the abduction of Helen, the Greeks attack Troy. Hephaestus
is a craftsman god, and can also appear as fire. Achilles is the central hero of the Iliad.
Skamander is a river near Troy, as is Simoeis.
The two stories differ greatly, but let us explore the similarities before the dif-
ferences. To do this in an orderly way, I divide each story into five successive phases
(A-E), with the main Fire-Water conflict emerging in phase D. Each phase is intro-
duced with a summary of the Sanskrit and Greek, and an italicised statement of what
the two phases have in common. We can now work through the phases, collecting
rapprochements. For brevity, I minimise intra-tradition or intra-epic comparisons (i.e.,
Sanskrit-Sanskrit or Greek-Greek) even though they are sometimes very interesting.

3
I use this name (its human name) throughout, though the gods call the river Xanthus.
360
2. Rapprochements
2.1. Phase A. Background conflict
Sanskrit: Having developed a passionate desire to consume the forest, Agni has re-
peatedly been prevented by Indra from doing so.
Greek: The Greeks have long been fighting the Trojans. Achilles withdraws. When he
loses Patroclus, he develops a passionate desire to kill Trojans, particularly Hector.
Shared: A long-standing background conflict precedes our episode. Someone on side
F conceives a craving to destroy a component of side W.
A1. Arrogant king causes disaffection
A certain King vetaki indulges excessively in sacrificing. He shows a lack of consid-
eration and judgement by overworking his brahmins, who eventually refuse to serve
him, and he also overworks Agni (the sacrificial fire), who falls ill, losing colour and
appetite (Appendix 1.118 of the Critical Edition, see footnote 2).
The leader of the Greeks, King Agamemnon, shows arrogance and lack of
consideration for his followers. Achilles therefore refuses to serve him, withdraws his
troops (the Myrmidons), and temporarily loses his own appetite for fighting.
A2. Intense desire
Agni learns from the supreme god Brahm that the remedy for his depression is to
consume the Khnd ava forest and the fat of its inhabitants. Seven attempts fail be-
cause the fire is doused by water (either rain sent by Indra or water brought by the
forests inhabitants). Brahm now advises Agni to call on Arjuna and Krishna to help
him satisfy his intense hunger.
Deprived of their best warrior, the Greeks fail in their attempts to defeat the
Trojans. However, when Patroclus is killed by Hector, Achilles profound grief leads
on to fury and, more precisely, to a determination to kill Hector.
A3. Absent male friend
One or other side is strongly influenced by a personal friendship. Indra (side W)
wants to protect the Khnd ava forest because it is the home of his friend, the snake
Taks aka (215.7). Achilles (side F) wants to kill Trojans to avenge his dear friend Pa-
troclus. Neither friend is physically involved in our conflict: Taks aka is elsewhere (in
fact at Kuruks etra), and Patroclus is already dead.
A4. Divine helper to central hero
Although the Sanskrit has two heroes and the Greek only one, the difference is mis-
leading. Krishna is not only less prominent than Arjuna in this episode, but he is also
far more of a god (as is clear in the Bhagavad Gt, which is part of Mbh Book 6). In
fact, Krishna often relates to Arjuna as Athena relates to Achilles or Odysseus (a huge
topic!). Krishna helping Arjuna here parallels Athena helping Achilles, as (e.g.) at
21.304.
361
2.2. Phase B. Preparation
Arjuna and Krishna help Agni prepare to consume the forest and its inhabitants.
Achilles prepares to resume helping the Greeks against the Trojans.
To join or rejoin the background conflict the heroes prepare for battle.
B1. Deity visits hero
Agni visits the heroes in the form of a red blazing brahmin (214.29f); and Thetis with
her sea nymphs visits Achilles (18.65-72). This visit marks the transition from the
background to our episode proper, and is one of many cases where the rapprochement
is based on the action, not the agent. The similarity between Agni and Thetis is lim-
ited to this context and therefore can be referred to as fleeting, when compared with
more consistent and lasting resemblances.
B2. Heroes need military equipment
When Agni explains his situation and desires, Arjuna is happy to help him, but he
needs equipment (bow, arrows, chariot, horses) as does Krishna. Agni agrees to
provide it.
Thetis hears from her son of the death of Patroclus and of the loss of the ar-
mour he had borrowed from Achilles. Thetis promises to obtain what is needed
(18.73-144).
B3. Deity obtains equipment, which is welcomed
Agni thinks of Varun a, who at once appears and supplies Arjunas needs. Agni him-
self gives Krishna a disk (used as a weapon) and a club. Thetis goes to Mount Olym-
pus and visits Hephaestus, who promptly makes the panoply, including the famous
shield.
When the equipment arrives, a dialogue takes place between the supplier and
the hero. Agni and Thetis both praise the equipment, and the respective heroes are
enthusiastic. Arjuna expresses his gratitude (216.26-9), as does Achilles (19.18f).
4

B4. Craftsman god
The divine arms given to Arjuna and Krishna are described, but it is only the origin of
the chariot that is mentioned. It was created by Prajpati Vivakarman. Vivakarman
is a craftsman god like Hephaestus.
5

Varun a, Guardian of the Western Quarter, lives in the water as its lord (jale-
vara, 216.1). Hephaestus recalls spending nine years working amid the Ocean, when

4
Arjuna then urges Agni to burn vigorously (216.30), and the fire starts straight after this. Just before
the start of the fire-water battle in the Greek, Hephaestus receives similar encouragement from his
mother (221.333).
5
Another supernatural craftsman appears at the end of the episode, namely the asura Maya, who is
allowed to escape the fire. He describes himself as the Vivakarman of the demons (2,1.5).
362
Hera threw him from heaven (18.394-403). So in both cases a deity who supplies
arms lives or has lived in the sea.
B5. Missile returns to thrower (so that it can be reused)
This motif applies to Krishnas discus (216.24, 219.7) and to three missiles in the
Greek (20.324, 20.441, 22.277).
B6. Chariot and horses
Arjunas divine chariot and horses are described when he receives them but they
fairly soon disappear from the text. Nothing is said about the heroes dismounting, but
by the last line of the book (225.17) they are sitting on a river bank.
Similarly, Achilles chariot and divine horses are mentioned early in the epi-
sode, but the hero soon seems to be on foot and has certainly abandoned his chariot by
phase D. The chariot and horses simply fade out.
B7. Fearsome noise helps side F
On the flagpole of Arjunas chariot there perches a divine monkeywhich seemed to
roar out, and on the flag itself large creatures are portrayed whose roars make ene-
mies swoon (216.13f). When Arjuna strings his bow, its twang causes fear (216.19),
while Krishnas club roars like a thunderbolt (216.25).
While the Trojans are trying to take the corpse of Patroclus, Achilles utters fu-
rious shouts, his voice reinforced by Athenas. The sound causes consternation among
the Trojans, who abandon Patroclus body (18.215-233).
6

B8. Happy scenes in town and country
The subparvan opens by describing the peaceful and orderly life in the Pnd ava capi-
tal (214.1-13). Arjuna and Krishna then leave the town with a crowd of women to
enjoy a luxurious picnic in the countryside, after which they meet Agni. Achilles
shield is ornamented by Hephaestus with scenes, first of city life, then of rural life.
At the Indian picnic the women wear garlands, receive fine clothes and dance
rapturously (214.22f). On the shield, the country scenes end in a dance, involving gar-
landed maidens clad in fine linen (18.595-7).
7

2.3. Phase C. Conflict begins
Arjuna and Krishna start helping Agni by killing the creatures that try to escape.
Achilles starts fighting. His duels with Aeneas and Hector are abortive, but he kills
other Trojans.
Side F starts destroying side W, but the watery component of W is not yet actively in-

6
Achilles also utters a fearful cry when he calls the Greeks to the assembly (19.41). Loud noises are
frequent in both texts and may call for more systematic study.
7
For further comparative work on the shield see Allen 2006, 2007.
363
volved.
C1. Victims thrown to destruction
When animals try to jump out of the forest, Arjuna laughingly kills them and throws
them back in the fire. In phase D,
8
Lycaon tries to leave the river and escape; when he
begs for mercy, Achilles mockingly kills him and flings him back in the water (21.35-
127).
C2. Flames reach sky
Agnis flames rise to the sky and worry the gods, who then involve Indra. When
Achilles frightens the Trojans (B7), Athena makes him blaze, and the gleam goes to-
wards heaven. It is as when a city is under siege and at sunset the beleaguered citizens
light beacon fires and the glare shoots upwards; the citizens hope that neighbouring
islanders may sail to help them (18.202-227, phase B). The islanders who potentially
respond to the flames parallel the Sanskrit gods who actually respond.
9

C3. Fire burns forest
Agnis activity finds another parallel within a Greek simile. Achilles (on side F), as he
continues his slaughter, is compared to a fire raging through deep forests, driven on
by the wind (20.490-94). In the main story too, Hephaestus, instructed by Hera, burns
the trees on the banks of the river (21.337f, 350-2).

C4. Aquatic beings
In Khnd ava forest the watery places (streams, marshes, ponds?) come to the boil, and
turtles and fishes die in their thousands (217.9). In the Greek phase D, fishes are men-
tioned several times (21.1211-7, 203f), but the closest comparison is when Hephaes-
tus, acting as Fire, torments the eels and fishes in Skamanders eddies (21.353).
C5. Hither and thither
Just before the reference to the turtles and fishes the creatures of the forest are de-
scribed as darting hither and thither (tatra tatra, 217.7). Tormented by Hephaestus,
the eels and fishes plunge this way and that (entha kai entha, 21.354).
2.4. Phase D. Conflict of elements
Indra now tries to protect the forest, using rain, thunder and rocks; but the heroes
prove invincible.

8
Comparisons that straddle phases are presented according to their position in the Sanskrit.
9
Cf. also a later comparison: the suffering Achilles inflicts on the Trojans is as when the smoke rising
from a burning city reaches broad heaven and the anger of the gods drives it on (21.522, phase E).
364
Some Trojans flee into Skamander, who attacks Achilles. Hera calls on her
son Hephaestus to help the hero, who survives.
Side W receives divine reinforcement, but side F resists successfully.
D1. Element-linked new participants
The new figures who now join the battle add to its scale and give it cosmic resonance.
The most important among them are individuals closely linked with elements. As al-
ready implied, Indras rain represents water, being opposed to Agni (Fire), who is al-
ready involved. In Greece the new participant is Hephaestus (here in the role of fire,
not as a craftsman); his opponent is Skamander, who is already involved.
In both epics the new participant is assisted by wind (the mobile and macro-
scopic form of the element air). Vyu, the wind god, assists Indra in raising the rain-
storm, and to help Hephaestus, Hera rouses the West and South winds (21.334). So
the winds help side W in India, side F in Greece. However the wind also helps Agni,
by serving as his charioteer (agnih vtasrathih , 219.36). We shall come back to the
inconsistency. The point here is simply the involvement of beings linked with the
three mobile elements.
D2. Other divine participants are listed
There is also a less important class of new participants. When Arjuna has countered
Indras thunderbolt, he is attacked by several types of supernatural entities, including
snakes, demons and gods (218.23). In fact some fifteen gods are listed as accompany-
ing Indra, each with his own name and weapon (218.31-35). One final verse (36), lists
groups of gods, such as Rudras, Vasus and Maruts.
In Greece, Zeus calls a divine assembly, attended by individual gods and by
two groups, namely rivers and nymphs. He tells the gods to choose one or other side
to support on the battlefield, and the text gives us five pairs of names, one pro-Greek
god paired with one pro-Trojan. Hephaestus and Skamander come last in that list,
though they actually fight first.
D3. Side-W[ater] birds
During this phase birds (garud as), resembling thunderbolts, fly down from the sky to
attack the heroes (218.20), but are killed by Arjuna. Much later, just before Achilles
kills him, Hector darts down like an eagle swooping through the clouds to seize a
lamb or hare (22.306-311).
D4. Side-W[ater]s anger and aggression
The new participants contribute to an escalation of the conflict. In Sanskrit phase C
side F encounters no opposition, and the only emotions mentioned are the terror of
victims and the happiness of Agni. We now meet anger. When Indras rainshafts are
evaporated by Agni, and his initial attacks are countered by Arjuna, Indra is enraged
and charges furiously on his elephant, wielding thunderbolt, rocks and a mountain
peak.
365
In Greek phase C, Achilles meets little resistance. But after the hero kills Ly-
caon and Asteropaeus, Skamander loses patience and, with Apollos encouragement,
starts to attack him. He pursues Achilles across the plain, beats down on his shoulders
and, still furious, calls on his brother river Simoeis to help.
D5. Hero almost killed
When Indra charges, he announces to the gods that the two heroes are dead (215.29).
We must understand as good as dead it is a threat, heightening the tension, not an
erroneous statement of fact.
Achilles thinks he is about to drown, and Hera recognises this danger (21.281-
3, 326-9).
D6. Rescued or spared
Six beings escape from the forest fire. Indra rescues the son of the snake Taks aka (see
A3); Arjuna spares the palace-building demon Maya (see fn.4); and Agni spares the
four rgaka birds.
The comparable cases in the Greek are Aeneas who was saved by Poseidon
(20.75-350); Hector who was temporarily saved by Apollo (20.419-454); and Agenor
who was also saved by Apollo (21.544-611). In both epics the three instances of res-
cue are dispersed across the episode.
When saving the snake, Indra uses his my, his power of deception, and
dazes Arjuna with wind and rain (218.9f). When saving Aeneas, Poseidon sheds mist
over the eyes of Achilles (20.321, 341). Both heroes react emotionally to the gods
action.
10

D7. King of gods is happy
Both our traditions share a curious air of light-heartedness, of being not quite serious.
Indra may be a friend of Taks aka, but he is the divine father of Arjuna, and their rela-
tions are normally excellent. His anger (noted in D4) can only be simulated (or per-
haps a minor component in a mixture of emotions). As the text makes clear, what the
god is really doing is testing his son. When the heroes successfully resist the gods,
Indra is delighted (paramaprto, 218.43), and he sends a rain of stones as a further test
of Arjunas bravery (vryam jijsuh , desiring to know it, 44). When he sees the
gods retreating, Indras good mood is confirmed (avastithah prtah ) and he praises the
two heroes (219.11). At the end of our episode Indra offers the hero boons, mention-
ing his satisfaction at their achievement (tust o smi, 225.8).
When Zeus tells the assembled gods to join in the fighting, he tells Poseidon
that he himself will stay on Olympus and enjoy the spectacle (phrena terpsomai,
20.23). He also explains that the gods are to fight in case the Trojans yield too easily
to Achilles, but this seems a flimsy excuse, comparable to Indras alleged friendship

10
When Apollo saves Agenor, he too uses a trick (dolos, 599, 604), but of a different kind. Arjuna tells
Maya not to be afraid (219.38), and Poseidon says the same to Achilles (21.288).
366
with Taks aka. In any case, when the gods do begin to fight, Zeuss heart within him
laughs for joy (egelasse gthosuni, 21.289f). Here then, Indra resembles not
Skamander, but Zeus.
2.5. Phase E. Conflict contracts and ends
Side W gods retreat. Voice tells them to return to heaven. Agni is finally satisfied.
Skamander yields to Hephaestus and Hera. After half-hearted fighting most gods re-
turn to heaven. Achilles continues killing Trojans and finally kills Hector.
Reinforcements to side W accept defeat and withdraw. Side F fulfils original desire.
E1. Combatants obey higher power
Having enjoyed his sons success, Indra might have departed spontaneously, but in
fact a disembodied Voice (vg aarrin , 219.12) instructs him to do so, mentioning
that the forest is destined for destruction. Indra accepts the authority of the Voice, and
Agni is implicitly allowed to continue.
Having failed to conciliate Hephaestus, Skamander prays to Hera, who stops
both the gods from fighting. In prompting the de-escalation of violence, Heras au-
thority parallels that of the Voice. Possibly this Voice-Hera correspondence finds ex-
tra support in the sex of Vc (Voice); this goddess is sometimes said to be the
consort of Brahm, as Hera is the consort (wife as well as sister) of Zeus.
E2. Undefeatable, so calm down
The Voice states that the heroes cannot be vanquished in any world (219.16), and
after hearing it, Indra sheds his wrath and indignation (kopmars au, 19). In conced-
ing defeat, Skamander remarks that Hephaestus cannot be matched (antipherizein,
21.357) by any of the gods, and on Heras instructions the rivers fury is quelled
(dam menos, 21.383).
E3. Hero like lion
When the gods depart, the heroes emit a lions roar. Although no roar is mentioned,
Achilles is compared twice to a lion. The comparison is made once by the poet in a
lengthy simile during the fight with Aeneas, and again by Achilles himself in his final
dialogue with Hector.
Lions tend to kill deer, and deer appear on side W. A list of the forest inhabi-
tants includes mr gs (219.2), and the twelve Trojan princes captured by Achilles are
compared to frightened fawns (nebrous, 21.29).
E4. King of gods watches
The Voice tells Indra to watch the forest fire, and no doubt he does. As he has planned
(D7), Zeus enjoys the sight of the gods bickering on the plain of Troy, and he also
watches the final Achilles-Hector duel (22.166f).
367
E5. Shelter under banks
Desperate to escape, the forest inhabitants seek shelter behind banks (rodhah su,
219.28). The Trojans who jumped into Skamander cower beneath its steep banks
(21.25).
E6. Hot fat
Although Agni sometimes says he wants to consume the forest as such (e.g. 215.11),
what he most desires is its inhabitants their flesh and blood, and above all their fat.
According to Brahm (A2), it is the fat that will restore Agni to normality (Appx
1.118 line 108). Fat becomes liquid when heated, and references are made to floods
of fat (medhaughair, 219.32), to the elixir or nectar (sudh, 219.34) procured by the
heroes, to rivers (kulys, 225.6) of fat and marrow, to eating flesh and drinking fat and
blood (225.16).
11

When Skamander gives in to Hephaestus, his fair streams are seething as
when a cauldron is heated and the lard of a fatted pig melts and bubbles.
E7. Satisfaction of initial desire
Our episode began in an atmosphere of contentment (B8), and it ends similarly. Agni
is completely satisfied and Indra returns to congratulate and reward the heroes. At the
very end of the book, Arjuna and Krishna are sitting on the lovely river bank and
chatting constructively with Maya, one of those spared from the fire (D6).
Like Agni, Achilles achieves in Book 22 by killing Hector the vengeance
that he so passionately desired at the start of the episode (A2). However, he only
achieves peace of mind in Book 24 when he hands over Hectors corpse to Priam.
Though the war will continue, for the moment the mood is one of reconciliation.
E8. Closure
In the Sanskrit our episode forms a demarcated textual unit, an upaparvan. Introduc-
ing his commentary, Kirk proposes (1985: 45f) that the most natural division of the
Iliad may be into three movements. The second would end with the death of Patro-
clus and the third would open with Achilles return to battle. The upaparvan corre-
sponds to the third movement.
This comparison can be reinforced in three ways. Firstly, in both epics the dis-
tinct or distinguishable episodes we have been studying are situated just before a ma-
jor break in the narrative. In other words, looked at simply in terms of form, the end
of Mbh 1 corresponds to the end of the Iliad.
Secondly, within this short section of the narrative, but towards its end, we en-
counter subordinate parts which are distinct in character and introduce new individu-
als and themes. The rgaka subepisode narrates the response of Agni (see D6) to
the plight of four birds. A sage who wants children becomes a bird, mates accordingly

11
If Agni consumes meat, Achilles wishes he could carve up Hector and eat him raw (22.347). Cf. also
the heros assimilation to a lion (E3).
368
with a wife in the Khnd ava forest, and produces four fledgelings. He leaves his nest
for a new partner (Lapit), but when Agni spares his offspring he returns (for a more
complete summary and discussion see Hiltebeitel 2007: 118-123). The story is still
about Agnis forest fire, but it concentrates on the family relationships between seven
newly introduced characters, all of whom are named.
Even though the war remains in the background, Iliad Books 23 and 24 are not
about fighting but about the fate of two corpses. Patroclus, killed by Hector in Book
17, is now cremated and his death is marked by the funeral games; Hector who was
killed by Achilles in Book 22 is now ransomed by his father Priam and cremated by
the Trojans. The new characters (new relative to our episode) include competitors at
the games and the women who mourn Hector.
12

Thirdly, both epics display a similar ring composition. In phase A, Agni and
Achilles conceive their desire. After the preparation phase B, they start consuming
and killing in phase C. In phase D, the climax, they meet and overcome watery op-
position. Phase E starts by deescalating the conflict so that the participants are as in
phase C, then moves towards a degree of closure, both emotional and narratological.
3. Differences
It is useless to aim for a complete comparison, since similarities need to be weighed
against differences, and the differences are so many and so large that a long list would
be of questionable use. A certain number of differences have already been implied,
and I shall now list a few more, ignoring (among much else) the different languages,
metres, names, and geographical / cultural settings.
1. The two episodes are differently situated within the story line of the whole
epic (whether one takes the Greek whole to be Homer or The Cycle). In India the
forest fire is a minor event occurring long before the Great War (which occupies
Books 6-10 out of the 18), while our Greek episode is a major event within the corre-
sponding Greek war.
13
This bears on the motif of testing the hero (D7). Arjuna is
tested by Indra in advance of the Great War; Achilles is already fighting that war.
2. Agni and Hephaestus contrast in many ways. Agni is a major figure in the
cult, while Hephaestus is not; Agni is scarcely a craftsman, and differs from Hephaes-
tus in his motives. He is active throughout, and he consumes living beings, while
Hephaestus, as Fire, is active only in phase D and consumes only corpses and vegeta-
tion. One of the greatest differences between the two epic traditions is the timing of

12
The two sub-episodes are not closely related, though a few points can be noted: the emphasis on pity
(for the helpless rgakas, for the two fallen warriors); a female (Hera, Lapit) reproaches a male
(Apollo, the sage); a father (the sage, Priam), who yearns for his son(s), alive or dead.
13
One of the arguments for the correspondence is the five-phase structure of the wars. Four leaders of
the Kauravas and four leaders of the Trojans succeed each other before a final nocturnal massacre in an
enclosed area (Allen in press a).
369
the fire gods intervention. It contributes a good deal to the difficulty, at first reading,
of appreciating the degree of similarity between the two stories.
However, fire is much more pervasive in the Greek than the Agni-Hephaestus
comparison suggests. Achilles himself is fiery. During the entire episode, he is as-
similated to fire no less than twelve times (Richardson 1993: 138, commenting on the
last such passage, 22.317-321). In general, the mortal Achilles resembles the mortal
Arjuna (both are active throughout the episode). However, Achilles fiery quality
makes him resemble a fire god, while Arjuna is not particularly close to Agni. The
quality shared by Achilles and Hephaestus reinforces the validity of side F as an
analytic concept, but it also hints at the great complexity of Achilles persona.
3. The great Indra of side W, the atmospheric god of storms, clouds and rain,
contrasts markedly with the minor figure of Skamander. Although he attends Zeuss
assembly, Skamander is normally tied down to the plain of Troy and to the physical
form of a river. Moreover, one reason for his fighting is obedience to Zeuss orders.
However, Indra corresponds not only to Skamander (D4, E1, etc). As king of the
gods, who enjoys himself and watches the end of the conflict from afar (D7, E4), he
also corresponds to Zeus.
4. Apart from Agni, the mass of the Indian gods are on side W. The Greek
gods distribute themselves in mutually hostile pairs between the two sides (recalling
the chief human warriors in the Mahbhrata Great War, and the gods in Norse and
Iranian eschatological wars).
5. The forest and its inhabitants contrast with Troy and the Trojans (despite
e.g. E5). The contrast might be thought of as nature versus culture, except that the
forest contains supernatural beings who are neither plants nor animals.
6. A different type of contrast concerns the emotions of the audience. Sympa-
thy is scarcely elicited for the victims of Agni, as it is for the Trojans and their down-
fall. This must relate partly to difference 1. The Sanskrit episode is only a rehearsal:
in the Great War itself Arjunas victims do sometimes attract sympathy.
7. Cosmic overtones. The forest fire foreshadows the Great War, which itself
is but one episode in the ever-renewed cosmic battle of gods and demons. Moreover,
the Great War represents a break in cosmic time it is debated whether the break
separates yugas (ages) or kalpas (sequences of yugas). Greece knows of cosmic bat-
tles, such as the Titanomachy, and of cosmic sequences or cycles (Hesiods five ages
or five races), but within our episode demons are ignored, and the end of the heroic
race seems far off.
8. A difference that would merit fuller treatment concerns theories of Indo-
European ideology. Dumzils trifunctionalism is by now well known, but it can be
argued that the ideology in fact exhibited a more inclusive pentadic structure, of
which the five elements are one expression (Allen 2005). Fire, air and water would
represent the traditional functions in the standard order F1, F2, F3, while ether and
earth (essentially immobile) would represent respectively F4+ and F4-. The Sanskrit
story conforms reasonably to the pentadic schema. Agni, appearing as a brahmin,
represents F1 and opposes water, which Dumzil already linked with F3 (fertility,
370
etc). F2 is represented by air or, as here, by wind or its god, whose position seems
intermediate or ambiguous: Vyu assists Indras brief storm, but he is also, and more
enduringly, Agnis charioteer. A comparable ambiguity affects Indra, traditionally
understood by Dumzilians as representing F2 (though there is more to be said Al-
len in press b). Publicly he joins side W and fights using water, but his true feeling is
delight at the success of his son in championing side F. In other words, both Vyu and
Indra are in some sense allied with Agni giving us the classic Dumzilian structure
F1+2 versus F3.
However, the Sanskrit contains other important figures, even if we ignore In-
dras troops. Above the fray, yet behind the action uninvolved yet involved, there
stands Brahm the Creator, representing F4+. It is he who sets in motion the whole
epic, by agreeing to lighten the load of beings who oppress the earth, and it is he who
sets in motion this particular episode by advising Agni to consume the forest and to
call on Arjunas help (A2).
14
At the other end of the hierarchy are the demonic inhabi-
tants of the forest, representing F4-.
A similar analysis of the Greek would at best be partial. One can argue for
Zeus F4+, winds F2, twinned rivers (recalling Simoeis) F3, Trojans F4-, but without
calling on the hypothetical element-function linkage (which would be circular), I see
no reason to interpret Hephaestus or the fiery Achilles as representing F1.
15
Here, as
often, it seems that Sanskrit epic has retained more of the old Indo-European func-
tional ideology than the Greek.
As I say, it is easy to think of further differences, but these are not an obstacle
to the common origin theory. They are exactly what one expects if oral traditions are
passed on independently over long periods (the common linguistic ancestor of Greek
and Sanskrit was perhaps spoken around 2500 BCE).
4. Broader issues
Let us assume that the similarities we have listed are genuine, i.e. that the texts say
what I have alleged and that the shared features have been accurately identified.
Could such a degree of similarity be explained other than by common origin? Inde-
pendent invention, even in societies of comparable socioeconomic type, is surely im-
possible, and direct influence of one epic on the other (as if the Mahbhrata derived
from Alexander taking Homer to India) is at least as unlikely. The natural explanation
is that the similarities derive from a common origin in a protoepic or protonarrative,
and the most economic hypothesis is that this was told in an early unwritten Indo-
European language.

14
If the disembodied Voice is his, or expresses his views, he also directly steers events.
15
The approach in terms of functions could be enriched by bringing in eschatological battles from
Scandinavia, where the fiery Surtr fights and kills third-functional Freyr, and from Iran, where the fiery
Aa Vahita fights Indra (here demonic).
371
In work of this sort, everything turns on whether the rapprochements are con-
vincing. I shall comment first on their variety. One dimension of this can be called
scope. The most global similarities are the Two sides, which form a framework domi-
nating the whole episode, and the Sequence of five phases. Each phase in itself is a
rapprochement applying to substantial parts of the narrative; one can also recall the
twelve dispersed passages that link Achilles with fire and thus relate him to the fire
gods. All these are broad-scope similarities. At the other end of the scale are tiny de-
tails such as C5, Hither and thither, which turns on the repetition of a single adverb
and may perhaps be coincidental.
A common type of rapprochement links the Sanskrit main story with some-
thing in a Greek simile, for instance C3, Fire burns forest. My favourite example is
E6, Hot fat, which reads oddly in Homer but makes perfect sense in the Sanskrit. The
same phenomenon has been noted elsewhere (Allen 1996), and shows that narrow-
scope comparisons can sometimes carry considerable weight.
Rapprochements can also be formal, in that they concern the organisation of
the text rather than its content (E8).
The most important consideration is no doubt the number of rapprochements.
Precise figures mean little, since the analyst can often bisect a single rapprochement
or combine two or more separate ones. Nevertheless, we have assembled well over
thirty. This number should be sufficient for it not to matter if a few (like C5) are re-
jected. Moreover, this particular paper does not stand alone. The larger the number of
acceptable rapprochements between the Sanskrit and Greek epics (some are already
published, others will be), the more likely it becomes that the epics are cognate and
the less sceptical one needs to feel a priori towards each new proposal. Moreover if,
as I believe, a great deal of IE common heritage still remains to be recognised in other
parts of the IE-speaking world, it is not only Sanskrit-Greek comparisons that are
relevant to judgements of what is plausible.
What is the future for this sort of work? The implication is that the great ma-
jority of the similarities we have identified represent features that were already pre-
sent in a protonarrative. Theoretically, one can reasonably envisage the reconstruction
of abstract schemes of protonarratives, together with hypothetical accounts of the
steps leading from there to the texts we read now. However, this can wait. A vast
amount of basic intricate work is needed first. It is not only a matter of extending to
other parts of the epic narratives the style of comparison attempted here and integrat-
ing the results, while giving due attention to the other branches of IE tradition, but we
also need to incorporate intra-tradition comparisons. A hint of the complexities to be
expected is given by some of the more stable rapprochements we have met; while In-
dra corresponds to Skamander and Zeus (difference 3), Zeus corresponds to Indra and
Brahm (difference 8). Significant and stable one-to-one correspondences may prove
rare.
It would facilitate reconstruction if, given a particular rapprochement, we
could say which attested version was the more conservative the closer to the proton-
arrative. My view, or hypothesis, is that the Sanskrit is usually the more conservative,
372
the Greek more innovatory (cf. difference 8). For instance, one can plausibly derive
Homeric similes, which are comparatively speaking a rare phenomenon, from or-
dinary stories such as the Sanskrit preserves, but not vice versa; and the Indian separa-
tion of the fire god and the craftsman god is probably older than their fusion in
Hephaestus. But one cannot assume that the Greek is never the more conservative.
References
Allen, N.J., 1996, Homers simile, Vyasas story, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 6, 2: 206-218.
Allen, N.J., 2005, Thomas McEvilley: the missing dimension, Internation Journal of Hindu Studies,
9/1-3: 59-75.
Allen, N.J., 2006, The Buddhist Wheel of Existence and two Greek comparisons, in: Anthropology of
the Indo-European World and Material Culture: 5th International Colloquium of Anthropolo-
gy of the Indo-European World and Comparative Mythology, M.V. Garca Quintela, F.J. Gon-
zlez Garca and F. Criado Boado, eds., Budapest: Archaeolingua, pp. 219-228.
Allen, N.J., 2007, The shield of Achilles and Indo-European tradition, Cuadernos de filologa clsica:
Estudios griegos e indoeuropeos, 17: 33-44.
Allen, N.J., (in press a), The Indo-European background to classical mythology, in: Companion to
classical mythology, K. Dowden and N. Livingstone, eds., Oxford: Blackwell.
Allen, N.J., (in press b), Idologie indo-europenne et conflits des chefs dans le Mahbhrata, in: Le
conflit et sa reprsentation dans lAntiquit, H. Mnard, P. Sauzeau and J.-F. Thomas, eds.,
Montpellier: Universit Paul-Valrie.
Ganguli, K.M., 1993, The Mahabharata (trans), 1st paperback ed., Vol. I (of 4). New Delhi: Munshiram
Manoharlal.
Hiltebeitel, A., 2007, Among friends: marriage, women, and some little birds, in: Gender and narrative
in the Mahbhrata, S. Brodbeck and B. Black, eds., London and New York: Routledge, pp.
110-143.
Kirk, G.S., 1985, The Iliad: a commentary, Volume I: Books 1-4. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Richardson, N., 1993, The Iliad: a commentary, Volume VI: Books 21-24. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
van Buitenen, J.A.B., 1973, trans., ed. The Mahabharata. 1. The book of the beginning. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press.
Wathelet, P., 2004, Le combat dHphastos contre le Scamandre et le Simos dans lIliade, in: Leau et
le feu dans les religions antiques, G. Capdeville, ed. Paris: de Boccard, pp. 61-77.

Part V. Work in progress

375
Chapter 18. Sunda
1
The affirmative life

The mythological worldview of the contemplative site
of Nagara Padang, West Java, Indonesia

by Stephanus Djunatan
2

Abstract. The study of indigenous myth such as the one at the rocky contemplative site of Nagara
Padang, Gunung Padang, West Java can be a useful starting point for the comparative study of human
wisdom. After discussing the cultural history setting and providing a sketch of the landscape, I will
delineate the teaching myth and its meaning. I will analyze this meaning using an etic approach on the
teaching myth. The analysis proposes the account of affirmative life as the indigenous ontological con-
ception of life. This discussion of the comparative studies of human wisdom will conclude by compar-
ing the indigenous ontological conception and the Dao De Chings ontological conception. An open
ending is an invitation to maintain intercultural dialogue.
1. Introduction
In todays era of globalisation, intercultural encounter studies of indigenous mytholo-
gies seek to offer a comparative understanding of human civilizations, highlighting
the interconnection of contemporary global life. One form in which mythology can
manifest itself is as a narrative form depicting how life began and where it is heading,
thus illuminating the spiral process of life as locally understood.
This is the kind of mythology that is told at the Sundanese site of Nagara
Padang, West Java, and which presumably dates back to the pre-Hindu and Buddhist
era in the Indonesian Archipelago. The believed meditating place of the historically-
legendary King of the Sundanese kingdom of Galuh, Prabu Premana Dikusumah

1
The term Sunda used here in the title is not intended to refer to the vast land between Asia and Aus-
tralia, or to the Sundanese people and culture. Instead the term is used to represent the Sundanese way
of thinking and living, and Sundanese religiosity based on the primordial legacy, Hindu-Buddhist and
Sufic influence on the people and the culture.
2
Parahyangan Catholic University, Bandung, West Java, Indonesia; Ph.D. student at the Department of
Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam.
376
(circa 6th c. CE)
3
and the alleged tomb of the sacred, semi-mythical King of the Sun-
danese kingdom of Pajajaran (12th c. CE), Prabu Silihwangi, expresses this mytho-
logical narrative form of life through 17 stages, 13 of which are marked by huge rocks
located in the uninhabited area above the Rawabogo desa.
Each stage has its name and proper meaning which relates to a conception of
the cyclic spiral of Life. The spiritual journey begins with a childhood phase, fol-
lowed by an adulthood phase extolling indigenous noble virtues and principal atti-
tudes for everyday life such as: silihwangi (intersubjective dignification), welas
asih (compassion), sapajajaran (equality), nuhunkeun (gratitude), and keadilan
(justice); and the phase of sagacity in which the self achieves and performs the af-
firmative life in daily life.
After discussing the meanings informaing these respective stages, we depict
the indigenous interpretation of ontology implied within such meaning. This mytho-
logical narrative of life hinges on the worldview of Tritangtu, the triadic structure by
which Life is maintained. These tripartite subjects illustrate an ontological account:
notably the moment of Becoming-One.
This indigenous harmony combined with Hinduism / Buddhism and Sufic / Is-
lamic spiritual beliefs defines for each individual a position in the middle of the triadic
structure, in such a way that each subject emerges as a luminous intermediary of all
other subjects. This harmonious spiritual moment of unification in life is the epistemic
foundation for the affirmative life expressed in the noble virtues and principal attitude
expressed above.
While this sums up the Sundas ontological and epistemic narrative form for
thinking cosmological interconnectedness, as a final step this paper proposes to apply
this Sunda paradigm to the present-day interplay of civilizations in our globalizing
world (etic interpretation). This means thinking and implementing mythical and mys-
tical triadic subjects, such as an account of articulate middle-ness, intermediary sub-
jects.
For this purpose, the indigenous account will be compared with the perspec-
tive offered by the Dao De Ching. Chinese classical wisdom also explains the
standpoint of affirmative life. Together these two distinct eastern wisdom traditions
offer an invitation for contemporary civilizations to engage themselves in pragmatic
connectivity.
2. The culture-historical setting of the contemplative
site
The contemplative site Nagara Padang is located at Gunung Padang or Pasir Pamipi-
ran in the southern region of Bandung Area, West Java. Dry padi fields, crops planted
side by side the government owned pine plantation, and human settlements surround

3
See Saleh Danasasmita 1984: especially part IV, p. 101-106; Yoseph Iskandar 1997: 140-146.
Djunatan Chapter 18: A Contemplative Site in West Java
377
the contemplative site.
4
The human settlements or kampongs are under the administra-
tion of the Rawabogo village. The Rawabogo Village is the place where guardians of
the site live. The village was settled in the 19th century CE
5
by people who originated
from the Regency of Sukapura in the Dutch Colonial era which is known today as the
Regency of Tasikmalaya and Ciamis. Rawabogo village is an agricultural community
where most people work in the rice fields in addition to poultry breeding and animal
husbandry.
Although the policy of decentralisation has split the regency of Bandung into
two administrations since 2006, and Gunung Padang is part nowadays of the Regency
of West Bandung, the guardians from Rawabogo village still maintain the contempla-
tive site. The guardians often accompany pilgrims while they carry out their respec-
tive contemplative journey in the site. During a pilgrimage, the guardian will explain
the reasons and the purpose of praying and meditation in the site. Every guardian de-
velops his own version of the teaching story during pilgrimage. These explanations
are then passed down by guardians to apprentices for generations. There is no formal
apprenticeship as a guardian. The preparation to be a guardian depends on how in-
tensely an apprentice contemplates his life. An older guardian or a local elder will
also determine how a guardian-to-be accomplishes the apprenticeship. The elder will
convey his teaching story of a pilgrimage of the Nagara Padang to the apprentice who
is usually his first born son or his first son-in-law, if he does not have a son. The fact
that there are several kinds of teaching stories of Nagara Padang demonstrates the
various emic approaches of the site. Observers have to discover for themselves which
guardians possesses relatively deep discernment over life and which ones provide co-
herence between the name of the site and the meaning of the teaching story of the pil-
grimage.
For example, one can uncover such coherence in what both Abah Karmo, an
elder and the prominent guardian, and Pak Undang, an apprentice of guardianship of
the site, have said about their understanding of the connotation of the name of the site.
They believe the name of the site, Gunung Padang, is a phrasal riddle. The term
Gunung or mountain connotes head or widely interpreted, selfhood. While the
term Padang denotes bright, light or illumination. Alternatively, Padang also
connotes illuminating heart.
6
One can also perceive the illuminating heart as a
careful discernment or deliberation, or a visionary contemplation. In short the emic
interpretation of the riddle Gunung Padang is the illuminating selfhood.
Both the denotation and the connotation which the guardians produce shows

4
The government owned pine forest has been managed and controlled by The Department of Forestry
(Perum Perhutani) since 1970.
5
According to the village chief of Rawabogo, the first inhabitants were the Islamic mysticism or Suf-
ism. For a discussion of the spread of Islam in West Java, especially in the regency of Sakapura, now
Tasikmalaya, see Iip D. Yahya 2006, cf. Denys Lombard 1990/2005 vol. 2: 55, 125-128.
6
Pak Undang said in the first interview: ari gunung luhur, padang nyatana hate urang Ieu gunung
teh luhur, ari padang teh hate nu caang. This means: Mount is our head, the light is in our illuminat-
ing heart (my translation); see Djunatan 2008: 105.
378
the fact that both the elder and the apprentice employ their teaching authority. Their
authority is obtained from acknowledgements from the surrounding communities and
others outside the village and receive a formal certificate signed by Lurah, the head of
village
7
of Rawabogo. Because of this authority, I started by observing the teaching
narratives of sagacious figures such as Abah Karmo and Pak Undang. They are indis-
pensable figures in the village because people and visitors seek their consultation and
follow their advice.
Abah Karmo and Pak Undang live at Kampong Ciparigi which is on the out-
skirts of Rawabogo Village. Abah Karmo (70) has been a guardian for forty years,
since he was approximately 30 years old. His first born son, Bapak Undang (50) has
gradually started to take over his fathers role as an active guardian. Now that Abah
Karmo is beginning to retire, he is accompanying fewer pilgrims to the site. He dele-
gates his authority of teaching to Pak Undang. Pak Undang started his apprenticeship
in his youth. He has contemplated his life since he was young with reference to the
meaning produced concerning the site. Bapak Undang refers to his method of appren-
ticeship as maca alam,
8
which means to contemplate the self which is the inherent
part of the Universe. The method of learning and producing meaning has to do with
the one ngaji badan (diri)
9
or the contemplation of selfhood. These indigenous
methods start with an intense reflection and deliberation on daily activities. One could
argue that these indigenous methods are sound because they are based on the intuition
of the guardians and their respective sensitivity toward daily activities. By performing
these methods, the guardians perceive coherent meaning between the occurring event,
their effort to produce meaning and their cultural heritage.
The brief description of the Rawabogo village and the role of the main guard-
ian discussed above indicate a human reconstruction of the meaning at the site Nagara
Padang (i.e. an emic interpretation about the site). Such an emic interpretation pro-
vides an indigenous conception of life which included not only the cultural heritage
embodied by the inhabitants, but also an explanation of the origin and the purpose of
life. The latter implies an ontological world-view in which the presence of the natural
world, that is, the heavens and the earth are indispensable for human existence.
10

7
Lurah or Kepala Desa is the government representative which acts as an administrator of a village
8
See my interview with Pak Undang, in Djunatan 2008.
9
See also the Forum Discussion Group with some apprenticeships as Sunda elders including elders
such as Abah Ajat Poerba Sasaka or Ki Laras Maya in Djunatan 2008. Another reference is Straathof
1971: 262-264, 345-350.
10
The presence of the natural world plays a significant part in the worldview of eastern indigenous
philosophy. The idea conveys the contextuality of human knowledge and the idea of a mutual relation-
ship or reciprocity between human beings and the natural world (the heavens and the earth). Laurie
Anne Whit, an American philosopher, states:
It is in this sense that indigenous knowledge of the natural world is presentational. The pres-
ence of the natural world is a condition for the very possibility of knowledge. Knowledge is
located in the world as much as it is located in a people or a person; it is part of what relates
the human and non human. And it is thoroughly contextualized: specific knowledge requires
specific places whereby it can be recalled and experienced. Whit et al., 2001: 16.
379
The cultural heritage which the inhabitants embody comprises three main set-
tings: the primordial Sunda legacy, the Hindu-Buddhist and the Sufic influence. One
should not be too quick to judge the assimilation of these cultural and religious heri-
tages as syncretistic. Indeed these heritages merge to produce an assimilative repre-
sentation. Nevertheless, the syncretistic representation comes from an outside
standpoint, mainly a pure religious conviction. This standpoint views as if it were
the authentic religious representation without any external influences. Thus, one can
claim a syncretistic representation only at an etic level of interpretation by observing a
gesture of rituals, a displayed symbol, a praying act or any religious object or cere-
mony.
11
One should be critical of the etic level of interpretation due to the standpoint
of the emic one
12
. The emic level of interpretation produces an explanation of how
religious heritage is assimilated. The assimilation implies a particular way of thinking
that allows both the distinction and the assimilation of the three religious elements.
In historical records one can trace this unique way of thinking in the form of
poetic stories and in the Sundanese narrative poem (Pantun). These records were tran-
scribed from traditional story-telling. Story-telling is the way indigenous communities
in the West Java have traditionally produced their own storys of the origin and the
purpose of life and their knowledge of what ought to be done and what ought not to
be done. These short narratives depict an indigenous ontological and epistemological
account of Life.
In the case of the contemplative site Nagara Padang at Gunung Padang, the
narratives mention Gunung Padang as the indispensable name, not only as the name
of a place where heroic figures have meditated or died, but the name also indicates the
semiotic meaning of the indigenous ontological and epistemological conceptions. The
narratives of Gunung Padang are: Carita Ciung Wanara, Carita Parahyangan, and
Wawacan Sajarah Galuh. I will now discuss each of these narratives.
2.1. Carita Ciung Wanara
This is the story of the historical figure Ciung Wanara (Sang Manarah). The story
was sung by story teller Ki Subarma. The transcript of this oral performance was
made by Ajip Rosidi, a prominent contemporary Sundanese elder in 1973. Gunung
Padang, according to the story, was a meditating place for Prabu Sang Premana Diku-
sumah, the King of Galuh (Galih Pakuan) around 703 CE. The King decided because
of a conflict during his rule
13
to delegate his throne to the prime minister Mantri

11
For this etic interpretation see Clifford Geertz 1969: 5; cf. with van Binsbergen 2003: 237, 349 and
Straathof 1970: 345-350 concerning his association of ngaji badan with Catholic teaching of charity
and sociality.
12
For another etic approach to Sunda cosmology see Straathof 1970: 260; Wessing 1988:43; 2006:
206-207; cf. for a similar etic approach to indigenous cosmology on sangomahood in Africa see van
Binsbergen 2003: 237, 244.
13
This conflict of power occurred because the kingdom of Galuh was a vassal kingdom under determi-
nation of the kingdom of Mataram in Central Java see, Atja & Saleh Dana sasmita 1981: 25pp; Dana-
sasmita 1984: 94pp; Iskandar 1997: 140-141.
380
Anom Aria Kebonan Kideng Agung. The king then left the palace and started to
meditate at Gunung Padang. He became a Pandita (a Reverend Monk) known as Pan-
dita Ajar Sidik.
The prime minister, however, betrayed the king. He took over the throne and
then claimed that he was actually the real Prabu Premana Dikusumah. He also took
the real kings wives as his own wives. Meanwhile, Pandita Ajar Sidik came to his
wife, Dewi Naga Ningrum, in a dream. Prabu Premana Dikusumah told her that she
would bear a son who would rule the Kingdom of Galuh. This prophecy upset the
usurper King Premana Dikusumah. The king then called Pandita Ajar Sidik and chal-
lenged the monk to prophesy whether his wives would bear sons. In order to make
them look pregnant, the fake king hid the night before a wide-mouthed clay pot on
Dewi Naga Ningrums belly and he used a wide rim golden bowl for the other wife
Dewi Pangreyep. As soon as the monk Pandita Ajar Sidik prophesied, both ladies ac-
tually became pregnant.
The fake king became very upset and ordered his subjects to kill the monk.
Yet Pandita was invincible because of his supernatural power. In order to prevent
more bloodshed, Pandita offered to die. The event of his death which is connected
with Gunung Padang is described in the following verses:
14

Lungkruk Pandita Sidik
Sukma tinggal di kurungan
Biur ngapung ka mega malang
Ku malayang di mega malang
....
Banusan Ajar Sidik
Mulih ka jati mulang ka asal
Kebo mulih pakandangan
Clik ragrag di Nagara Gunung Padang

Salin jisim
Salin jinis
Pandita saparantosna ka Gunung Padang
Salin jisim, jalin jisin
Ngajadi Naga Wiru keur tapa

(Summary translation: the Pandita Ajar Sidik let himself die. His spirit left the body.
He became one with the origin of Life. After this, his spirit stayed in Nagara Gunung
Padang, where he metamorphosed in to the meditating Dragon of Wiru).

14
See Rosidi 1973: 52-53.
381
2.2. Carita Parahyangan
This poetic narrative was compiled and translated into Bahasa Indonesia from old
manuscripts in 1981.
15
Some Sundanese scholars claim the story was anonymously
written in 1579. The manuscript is a reconstruction of the history of West Java after
Islam spread over the region. In this historical reconstruction of West Java, the death
of Prabu Premana Dikusumah is told. He received another title in this version, Pen-
deta Sakti Bagawat Sajalajala, (the Sacred Monk Bagawat Sajalajala). It is told that
mercenaries, under the order of Sang Tamperan (the prime minister who took over the
throne) tried to kill the Monk.
Sang Tamperan was a nephew of King Sanjaya, the prominent ruler of Sunda
Pakuan Kingdom.
16
The nephew was Sanjayas caretaker for the vassal kingdom of
Galuh. The death of the sacred monk had to do with the birth of Ciung Wanara or
Sang Manarah, and his step brother Aria Banga. These historical figures were indis-
pensable in the history of Java. The conflict between these brothers was the origin of
separation. The Sundanese kingdoms were split into Negeri Sunda which is west of
Citarum river, and Negeri Galuh that lies to the east of the river. Both were separate
from the rest of Java where the prominent Javanese kingdoms were built.
17

2.3. Wawacan Sajarah Galuh
This poetic narrative is another Islamic anecdote about the Kingdom of Galuh and
Gunung Padang, translated into Bahasa in 1983. The origin of Gunung Padang was
assimilated into the chronicle of the prophet Noah and the Flood Myth.
18
Ratu
Pusaka, the ruler of Java, did not obey Noahs prophecy about the coming flood. Be-
fore Gods inflicted his punishment, the King Ratu Pusaka built Gunung Padang and
Gunung Galunggung, which were not covered with water when the flood came. Dur-
ing the flood, the King and his subjects escaped to Gunung Padang, and survived
there until the flood subsided.
The story returns again to the origin of the name when it describes the killing
of the Monk (Pandita) of Gunung Padang. Again, this story had to do with the birth of
Ciung Wanara, and the conflict of Ciung Wanara with his stepbrother Aria Banga
which resulted in the division of Sundanese Galuh Kingdom, ruled by Ciung Wanara
(Sang Manarah, Sang Surotama) and his descendants, and Negeri Sunda ruled by Aria
Banga and his successors. One of Ciung Wanaras successors was the semi-mythical
King of Sunda, Prabu Siliwangi, who ruled the Kingdom of Pajajaran.

15
See Atja & Saleh Danasasmita 1981: iii.
16
Later, Sanjaya moved to the central Java. He established the (old) Kingdom of Mataram. See Iskan-
dar 1997: 141
17
See Saleh Danasasmita 1984 on part IV: 112, cf. Iskandar 1997: 155; Sumardjo 2003: 112
18
See Ekadjati 1981
382
2.4. Lessons learned from these narratives
a) Among the lessons learned from these narratives is that Gunung Padang is not
only the name for an individual mountain. The Sundanese elders that I inter-
viewed describe three different locations for Gunung Padang. A local journal
of Sunda Literature reported one of the locations of Gunung Padang was in
Cianjur Regency (west of Bandung).
19
The second location is the one I ob-
served. And the third one allegedly lies in Ciamis Regency (east of Bandung).
Some elders are sure that the name Gunung Padang hints of a principal pre-
supposition of the conception of the origin and the purpose of life, and for the
indigenous virtues of life.
20
This presupposition determines the Sundanese on-
tological (cosmological) and epistemological accounts, as well as the Sun-
danese worldview and religious belief.
b) A mountain is a central symbol for the Sundanese. It symbolizes the idea of
axis mundi, a sacred mediator between the earth and the heavens.
21
An Axis
mundi can be represented either by ancestral spirits, or by certain figures such
as a shaman, a storyteller (tukang pantun, dalang), a guardian, an elder, a king
or by natural phenomena such as mountains, trees, rocks, or by certain animals
(like a water buffalo, a tiger, a snake, a dragon, a phoenix, and the garuda),
or by buildings like a grave, a temple (candi), a palace and a house. The axis
mundi is regarded as sacred in the Indonesian Archipelago and in general in
Southeast Asian primordial religiosity.
22
Therefore, the Sundanese people be-
lieve human beings and the non-human figures communicate with each other
through mediation of the axis mundi. The indigenous narratives describe
Gunung Padang as the meditation place for semi-historical and mythical fig-
ures who wanted to contemplate a sagacious life and to maintain sagacious in-
dividuality. According to the storytellers, the latter is always associated with
supernatural capabilities.
c) The name Gunung Padang is also associated with the spiritual experience of
self-illumination. It refers to the individuals experience who seek self-
enlightenment through intense meditation and contemplation of the Sundanese
virtues of life. The sagacious selfhood is the personification of the principal
virtue of life, that is, intersubjective dignification or silihwangi. It is important

19
See Bachtiar 2006: 33-35.
20
See Forum Group Discussion with Ki Laras Maya, Abah Badra Santana, and Abah Atmajawijaya 27
November 2007.
21
Wessing 1988: 43; 2006: 225-226; Sumardjo 2003: 22.
22
For the significance of the idea of the Axis Mundi in the Indonesian Archipelago, see Sumardjo 2003:
5 (The axis mundi as Dunia Tengah or the mediation between human and non-human beings and the
Almighty; Rachmat Subagya 1979; the idea of the axis mundi in the South East Asian primordial re-
ligiosity see Wessing 1988 (on the chthonic forces in the mountains as the axis mundi); 1997 (on the
Nyai Roro Kidul, the Queen of the South / Indian Ocean); 2006 (on symbolic animals as the axis mundi
in the South East Asian primordial religiosity).
383
to note that the idea of self-enlightenment and the achievement of spiritual
life, is not exclusively a Sundanese invention. The self-enlightenment of life
associated with sagacious selfhood is an ancient conception of the Sage in the
Indonesian Archipelago.
23
A teaching narrative as a calling to obtain self-
enlightenment also plays a significant role in other faiths including Hinduism,
Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. It is also indispensable for the Indian and
Chinese Sage. In short, the idea of the sagacious selfhood is not unfamiliar; it
is a resonance of ancient civilizations.
24

2.5. Sketch of the landscape
After depicting the historical and cultural setting, it is also important to provide a geo-
logical sketch of the Nagara Padang site. The site is located in Gunung Padang or
Pasir Pamipiran (elevation 1224 m., see Fig. 18.1). The mountain is a part of a moun-
tainous area in the south of Bandung. According to geological data, this mountain
emerged in the Miocene epoch. This mountain is supposed to be an erupted volcano.
On the mountain climatic erosions over the ages have exposed large igneous rock
formations.
The igneous rocks are naturally formed in such a way that they look like ter-
races. With some human intervention these terraces have defined on the mountain into
3 shaped phases of the life cycle and 17 prayer and meditation stages. This interven-
tion indicates the guardians reconstruction of the natural formation of the rocks. The
reconstruction provides the guardians with teaching materials which they employ in
order to assist pilgrims while they are performing all prayer and meditation sessions at
the site. Fig. 18.2 below renders the topography of phases, terraces, and stages.
The topography above is equivalent to a complete cyclic life spiral. The cyclic
life spiral starts with the initial phase of life: the birth and childhood period (A). This
phase consists of a narrative of birth, a memory of parental nurturing and a reflection
of formal education. These narratives are a necessary condition for establishing a
foundation of humane quality.
The next phase portrays the adult period (B) and connotes the capability to
perform daily work, to maintain material belongings, and to show ones competence
and skills. The adult period refers to the development of human capabilities such as
mind, affection and volition, that of the physical body, and the growing awareness of
the spiritual realms. The achievement of adulthood will determine the next phase that
is the mature period. According to the Sundanese belief, the period of mature indi-
viduality has to do with a process of becoming wise. In this way, sagacious individu-
ality reflects an expression of Sundanese principal virtues in daily life.

23
Cf. Subagya 1979: 76.
24
The story of the Sage in Chinese tradition, see Fung Yu-Lan 1969 vol. 1; in Indian, Hinduism and
Buddhism see Armstrong 1994,: 28-34; Fung Yu-Lan 1969 vol. II; in Islam particularly Sufism, see
Simuh 1996; Nurbakhsh 2002; Chittick 2002.
384
Fig. 18.1: The location of the Site and surroundings.
25

25
The map is courtesy of Periplus Map of Bandung Area, HK 2004.
385
Fig. 18.2. The topography of the terraces and stages

Legend for Fig 18.2: I to VII: the terraces; A, B, C: Three phases of the cyclic life spiral the stages
for a pilgrims praying and meditating session are set out in the following table.

Table 18.1. The stages for a pilgrims praying and meditating session
Phase A: the terraces I III, the Birth and Childhood
I.1 Cikahuripan (spring of life)
II.2.a. Lawang Saketeng (The entry Gate of Saketeng)
II.2.b. Lawang Kadua (The exit Gate)
III.3. Batu Palawangan Ibu (The rock of the vaginal passage)
III.4. Batu Paibuan (The rock of Motherhood)
III.5. Batu Panyipuhan (The rock of formal education)
III.6. Batu Poponcoran (The rock of the final examination)
Phase B: the terraces IV V, of the adulthood
IV.7. Batu Kaca Saadeg (The rock of self-reflection)
IV.8. Batu Gedong Peteng (The rock of the dark cave)
V.9. Batu Karaton (The rock of Royal Palace)
V.10. Batu Kutarungu (The Rock of the Ear)
Phase C: the terraces VI VII, the maturity or sagacious individuality
VI.11. Masjid Agung (The Mosque of Majesty)
VII.12. Batu Bumi Agung (The rock of Glorious Earth)
386
VII.13. Batu Korsi Gading (The rock of Ivory Throne)
VII.14. Batu Pakuwon Prabu Siliwangi (The commemorative slab of Prabu
Silihwangi)
VII.15. Batu Lawang Tujuh (The rock of the seven doors)
VII.16. Batu Padaringan / Leuit Salawe Jajar (The rock of rice barns, or the
curved array of 25 rocks)
VII.17. Puncak Manik (The summit of Light)

The contemplation of the phase of maturity [C] starts with an acknowledge-
ment of the glorious Almighty
26
who is the proprietor of the universe. This is self-
awareness toward the presentation of the earth and the heavens. This understanding
reveals the triadic structure of life or Tritangtu which comprises the self (human be-
ings), the earth (the underworld) and the heavens
27
(the upperworld). The ternary life
structure is the implication of Sunda virtues: silihwangi (intersubjective dignifica-
tion), welas asih (compassion); and Sunda cardinal principle of life: silih asuh, silih
asih, silih asah (to love, to care and to teach each other), sapajajaran (equality), nu-
hunkeun (gratefulness), and kaadilan (justice).
It is interesting to discover that the implicit conclusion to this phase of sagacious in-
dividuality, is death. One experiences death as a moment of unification: the self be-
comes one with the earth and the heavens. The moment of unification is described in a
Sundanese phrase: mulang ka jati, mulih ka asal.
This phrase connotes a homeward journey, or going back to the unity with
the other two features in the ternary life structure. Nevertheless, the journey home
initiates a new cyclic process which elevates an individual to a human being of higher
quality. The continuation symbolizes a journey into perfection as the Sage. A Sun-
danese word describes this moment of the becoming-one as ngahiang.
28
The word
literally means disappearing. Thus, the Sage will disappear when one knows the
end of ones life is arriving. This disappearance includes the body. The word connotes
death with the completeness of body and soul; both are unified with the earth and the
heavens. In Islamic mysticism, the journey home is referred to as marifat.
29

One can find these three phases of cyclic life spiral in the form of the Sages
teaching story at the contemplative site. The teaching story of the Sage places a pil-
grim whose intention is to contemplate their respective journey of life as the child.

26
The supernatural authority in Sunda tradition is called Gusti. Such term is less similar with God
in Judaism since the Almighty does not represent any gender character. Because of this non-gender
character, it is better to mention It in capital so that the term is close to the emic belief of the super-
natural authority. The term Gusti is abbreviation of Geus ti ditu na or As it already is. See
Djunatan 2008: 41 cf. p. 130 concerning connotation tengah with Dat MahaKawasa or the Al-
mighty.
27
See Sumardjo 2003, 2006; cf. with Wessing 1988, 1997.
28
This term articulated by Ki Laras Maya and confirmed in other elders in my interview sessions.
29
Cf. Simuh 1996: 92; Nurbakhsh 2002: 2; Chittick 2002: 71.
387
This child is a future heroic figure who eventually becomes the Sage. Thus, the hero
is not Prabu Silihwangi, the prominent Sundanese Sage King who is closely con-
nected to the site. But rather, metaphorically speaking, it can be said to be the pilgrim
himself, who emerges to become the Sage King.
In other words, one follows the teaching story of the future sage-child while
one is making a pilgrimage at the site. The story of the future sage conveys an ideali-
zation of either an individual or a communal life. Such idealization is related with an
indigenous belief about the origin and the cosmological structure of life.
30
The belief
causes the story to be sacred; it is not merely a story of an individual, but the sacred
story of the Sage. Therefore, the teaching materials which the guardians communicate
are coherent elements of the sacred story of the Sage.
3. The myth of sagacious individuality
A myth can be viewed as either a story of a heroic figure, a sacred tale or merely an
imaginative antidote of primitive minds originating from illiterate societies. However,
this heroic and sacred story actually depicts a complexity and completeness of human
existence both individually and collectively. In other words, in a myth one conceives
of the existence of life as a wholeness which includes a complex and complete life
cycle.
31

The story of wholeness implies at least four fundamental inner aspects of hu-
man beings. Maria M. Colavito
32
lists these four aspects as maia, mythos, mimesis and
logos. Maia stands for a dynamic experience of life which portrays an image of the
cosmic life out of the chaotic one. Mythos refers to a capability of oral expression
which turns this dynamic experience into a story. Mimesis is a process of describing
communal mores, virtues and noble principles of life as an integral part of the story.
The last aspect, logos puts these community mores, virtues, and principles of life
into a common conception regardless of any individual experience. In this sense, my-
thology is conceived as a complete narrative which theorizes dynamic inner capacities
and experiences in which mores, virtues and principles of life are shareable and com-
prehensible.
If such mores, virtues and principles of life are shareable and comprehensible,
myth explains human intention to understand the origin, the meaning and the purpose
of life. To tell narratives of a holistic life is to disclose layers or levels of meaning in
order to answer the quest for life.
33
These narratives need actors which can be either
supra human or non-human representations. These fictitious actors are the projection
of a human being individually and collectively. In this sense, mythology provides a

30
See Barnard & Spencer 1998: 386, the entry of Myth and Mythology.
31
Cf. Korab-Karpowicz 2002: 209-210.
32
Cited in de Nicols 1999: 188-190.
33
Cf. Korab-Karpowicz 2002: 210.
388
chance for reflection for each individual so that they can each deliberate on their own
journey of life. In other words, the story is about the journey of the self who tries to
probe for quests of life.
34

Thus the aspects of a myth can be summed up in following points:

a) A story about how complex and complete a life cycle is.
b) The presentation of a heroic figure, in the form either of a human be-
ing, a non-human figure or a supernatural one, is to explain the fact
that the complexities of life with its ups and downs are inevitable.
Moreover, the story of the deeds of the heroic figure conveys the
meaning of the inevitable cycle of life.
c) The ultimate purpose of any heroic figure is to attain sagacious indi-
viduality. The sagacious individual is concerned with the experience of
illumination. In turn, the sagacious individual is the person who can
answer and resolve the quests for life.
d) The achievement of sagacious individuality is the central meaning of
the myth. It is the achievement of any individual regardless their back-
ground. Every person who reads or hears the kind of story about the
Sage should be able to articulate the moral, the virtues and the values
implied inside the individual.
35
The articulation of these morals, virtues
and values is a new phase of the life cycle for any sagacious individual.

Together the four aspects of myth above define mythology as:
the narratives of the cyclic life spiral which convey that the meaning of
a complexity and completeness of the life cycle is to achieve the saga-
cious individuality. By contemplating such narratives, each individual
can realize his or her own life journey as the attainment of the saga-
cious individuality.
Thus, I propose that mythology is every human beings story of the sagacious
selfhood in which the attainment of the Sage is the ultimate meaning.
I uncovered this type of mythology in the teaching narratives during my visit
to the Nagara Padang pilgrimage site. When one begins a pilgrimage there, the guard-
ian of the site always opens the teaching narratives with the phrase:
Urang mun rek asup ka Nagara Padang
(If you [someone] want[s] to enter the Nagara Padang site (my translation).
This phrase indicates an invitation for a pilgrim to consider himself or herself
to be the actor of the story. In other words, a pilgrim will be a hero who will complete
his life journey for sagacious individuality. When a pilgrim realizes this purpose, the
guardian will continue reciting instructional materials, such as with the following cita-

34
Cf. Nnoruka 1999: 413.
35
See Barnard & Spencer 1998: the entry Myth and Mythology.
389
tion.
Ayeuna ceuna lamun [urang] rek nak ka gunung padang kudu mawa bakakak hayam. Tah
padahal lain bawa bakakak hayam. ta simbul jeung gambaran. ... Urang th kudu lir ibarat
hayam dibelah dua, dibakakak, saha badan urang, serah sumerah ka saha. Hiji menta pidua ti
indung bapa, serah sumerah ka mahakawasa, boga tekad didinya. Geus serah sumerah ka nu
Maha Kawasa, lir ibarat hayam dibelah dua, teu daya teu upaya, ujud paparin obah pangersa
Gusti.
36

(My translation: Now, it is said when we want to visit Nagara Padang, we have to bring a long
chicken cut in half vertically but unseparated. This is symbolic for us. We have to be like a
chicken cut-in-half so that we can resign ourselves, asking who we are. First, we are begging
our living and ancestral parents to say a prayer for our intention, so that we realize that we
should entrust our live to the Almighty. We are nothing, have no authority against the will of
The Almighty; this is the reason we have to submit ourselves to It.
37
)
The guardian conveys the teaching narrative to the heroic pilgrim whose inten-
tion it is to perform prayer and meditating sessions at the site. It is a narrative since
the guardians tell a pilgrim what will happen during the pilgrimage at the site. The
citation explains a certain disposition of ones mind and physical gestures. This spiri-
tual and physical disposition is the ground for the subsequent teaching sessions during
further stages of the pilgrimage.
The other indispensable point is that the guardians teaching focuses on the
contemplation of the self. The ideal disposition of the pilgrimage is to submit and to
entrust the self to the living and ancestral parents and to the Almighty. From the
standpoint of the Sundanese conception, the parents represent not only the biological
father and mother. This metaphor of parents includes the ancestral spirits and the
earth. The Sundanese believe that since the beginning of life, every individual was
born to the earth.
38
The metaphor of the parents also connotes a mutual interconnec-
tivity between human beings and the natural world or the heavens and the earth.
4. Mythology as pious teaching: The affirmative life
Two points are needed to clarify before explicating the complete teaching narratives.
They are the emic level of interpretation, a production of knowledge of the sage per-
formed by the guardian, and the etic approach to the emic interpretation. For the sec-
ond point, this paper tries to provide a semiotic categorization of the meaning of the
teaching narratives.

36
This citation is Pak Undangs explanation. See Djunatan 2008: 31.
37
The Almighty in the indigenous sense is not characterized by sexual gender. Ki Laras Maya for ex-
ample, is often called the Almighty Gusti. Yet this word is a puzzle from Geus ti dituna (as it is from
the beginning). This puzzle means The Almighty embodies neither gender, characters, personae nor
physical appearance. It is just the Almighty. Thus I prefer to use It in order to provide closest mean-
ing for this indigenous term. See Djunatan 2008: 95.
38
For the ancient idea of the birth of human beings into the earth see Berezkin, 2008.
390
Firstly, an interpretation of the guardians at the contemplative site should be
analyzed based on the religious and cultural heritage of Java, especially West Java.
There are three components of this heritage namely, the pre-Hindu indigenous legacy,
the Hindu-Buddhist heritage and the influence of Sufism. These legacies influence the
guardians production of the teaching narratives of the Sage and also the guardians
interpretation of the natural formations of the rocky stages. In other words, the natural
formations of the rocks at the site emerge as the signifier for the guardians so that they
can produce the coherent signified of the rocky stages in the form of the teaching nar-
ratives.
Secondly, the pilgrim or the observer who performs contemplative acts at the
site produces their own meaning of the stages in accordance with the teaching narra-
tives told by the guardians. In other words, the pilgrim or the observer produces the
signified of the stages by correlating the natural formation of the stage and the teach-
ing narratives with their own intense prayer and meditation during the pilgrimage.
After clarifying both the guardians and the pilgrims standpoint, this explana-
tion applies a semiotic method, namely the triadic models of the sign.
39
I decided to
employ the method of semiotics in order to analyze Gunung Padang as the sign or the
signifier, that is, its natural formation of the stages. While the guardians teaching nar-
ratives, and the meaning produced by the pilgrims in accordance with the teaching
narratives, are the signified.
The etic approach of the site will provide a comprehensive analysis. For this
purpose, I will apply semiotic terms such as:

The sign vehicle, to depict the physical formation of the rocks, especially
the name of the rocks and some special marks or forms in some of these
rocks. In short these names are also categorized as the signifier of each
stage, which will provide the materials for interpretation.
The sense, to explicate the content of the teaching narratives as it is told by
the guardians. The guardians teaching narratives are the signified of the
emic approach which provides materials for an etic interpretation.
The last is the referent or the meaning of the stage which is coherent with
the teaching narratives of the sagacious personality and the names or special
forms of the stages.
40
The senses of the stage are the signified, which is pro-
duced by both the guardians and the pilgrims / observers.

Based on these semiotic terms, I am about to explain an etic approach for each
phase and its stages.

39
See Nth 1995: 89-90, for the correlation of the signifier with the signified based on the view of
interpreter the triadic models of the sign in semiotics.
40
Nth 1995: 89.
391
4.1. The opening ritual ceremonies
The sign vehicle: The fountain of Gunung Padang, Cikahuripan and the entry gate,
Lawang Saketeng.
The sense: The purification of the self, and the awareness that the self belongs to the
universe and the Almighty.
The referent: A spring usually represents a mothers breast milk or cai nyusu in the
Sundanese conception. In this sense, water is associated with the idea that a human
fetus lives in the liquid of the mothers womb. The living in the liquid of the womb
symbolizes that human beings live in a sterile or a pure condition. By accepting the
pure beginning of life, every human being should cleanse his / her body (diri) by
taking a shower in the fountain. The water of the fountain cleanses the designation
and the essence, the body and the soul.
This entry gate or Gapura signifies the awareness that an individual has a ge-
nealogical bond with other manifestations of life, metaphorically speaking, the heav-
ens and the earth.
41
According to non-western indigenous knowledge, the idea of the
genealogical bond is a presupposition of human existence. In this sense, human beings
cannot live without such bonds. The awareness of this close relationship is revealed in
the guardians opening prayer. This opening prayer shows that human beings have a
correlationship with the spirits of the ancestors and the keepers of the earth and the
heavens. These non-human figures are the parents. A pilgrim should ask the parents
permission and blessing to participate in the pilgrimage.
4.2. The phase of childhood
The sign vehicle: The rock of the vaginal passage, Batu Palawangan Ibu; The rock of
the motherhood, Batu Paibuan; The rock of the formal education, Batu Panyipuhan;
and The passage of final examination, Batu Poponcoran.
The sense: A description of the birth phase of every child. This phase includes the
story of a parental upbringing and nurturing of the child, an early education and a
formal one. The initiation of the child into adulthood concludes the childhood phase.
The referent: The birth for every human being is the reason for human presence in
this world. Consequently, each individual has something to be revealed during his
own life journey. This life duty is to perfect life in any kind of its manifestation. In
the Sundanese tradition, this duty is called kasampurnaan
42
or the perfection. This
Sundanese term connotes human beings duty to maintain the correlation with the
others.. The others are described in the following phrase.
43

Patalina Diri ka Gusti, Patalina diri ka sasama, Patalina diri ka Alam
This poetic phrase relates how each individual has a constant relationship with

41
Whitt et al. 2001: 4-8.
42
Maya 2008: 13.
43
Maya 2008: 16-17.
392
the Almighty, their fellow human beings and the earth. To fulfill this duty is both to
glorify the Almighty and to affirm the existence of all its creatures. In the state of na-
ture, every individual is in charge of maintaining such a relationship. This shall be the
ultimate vision and the mission of life for every human being.
The rock of Motherhood represents for each individual parental upbringing
and nurturing. How parents bring up their children contributes to their growth, helping
improve both physical and mental aspects including the application of the five human
senses and the use of cognitive, affective and volitional capabilities. These physical
and mental capabilities are the necessary requirements for a mature individual. The
child also learns about the virtues in this parental upbringing.
This rock also symbolizes the parental education of the sensitivity and the af-
firmation of life. The Sundanese believe that a father should be in charge of improv-
ing his childs cognitive and technical skills. Thus, the fatherhood connotes with the
mind and knowledge of a sagacious individuality (elmu pangaji panalar diri, pikeun
darajatna). A mother will nurture the affective and volitional aspect of children.
Motherhood, therefore, has to do with affection and volition (elmu pangaji pangulas
rasa
44
pikeun martabatna). The early education of these mental and psychological
aspects is the inevitable task of motherhood. These cognitive, affective and volitional
aspects are basic to sagacious individuality.
45

The rock of the formal education refers to a state school, an Islamic religious
boarding school (pesantren
46
), or an indigenous one (padepokan). The educational
institutions are the places where children go through the process of the formation of
the self. The children can learn not only knowledge and skills and empathy and social
sensitivities, but also self-discipline and self-determination to achieve their respective
purpose of life. They learn to internalize and to practice virtues. In other words, the
children learn to express the basic characteristics of sagacious individuality. Teachers
in the formal education can only persuade a child so that this young boy or girl is will-
ing to apply what has been learned in school.
The passage of the final examination concludes the childhood phase. If an in-
dividual can pass a final examination it means he / she is ready to enter the next
phase, the adult one. This higher category connotes a readiness of each individual to
express his own competence, skills and to learn more how to apply the virtues of life
in daily activities.
4.3. The phase of adulthood
The sign vehicle: The rocks of self-awareness (Batu Kaca Saadeg), The rocks of the
dark cave (Batu Gedong Peteng), The rocks of the palace (Batu Karaton), and The

44
The Sundanese lexicon defines Rasa as the capability of human senses, as the mental and rational
perception or judgment (budi, jiwa), intuition, hope (asa), the memorizing capacity (ras). See Danadi-
brata 2006.
45
Maya 2008: 30-31.
46
Of Pesantren or Islamic Seminary cf. Geertz 1969: 177-179.
393
rocks of ear (Batu Kuta rungu).
The sense: a child growing-up begins to show competence and skills in daily activi-
ties. A grown-up individual someday will possess material belongings and achieve a
career. Having a position he or she will exercise power to manage others. To have a
career and to exercise a power means that a grown-up individual learns more in-
tensely the expression of the principal virtues of life, such as charity (amal ibadah),
and reciprocal caring, loving, teaching (silih asuh, silih asih, silih asah). If the child
growing-up realizes that ability and the skills, material belongings, status and power
are the duty and the expression of an affirmative life, then he or she should begin the
phase contemplating the future and self-perseverance in order to be able to express
duty in ones daily chores.
The referent: the rock of self-awareness signifies the invitation of the grown-up chil-
dren to have their respective specialized vision and mission of life. This self-
awareness tries to answer the quests of life: what is the purpose of my life? What do I
want to do to accomplish my duty of glorification and dignification of the heavens,
the earth, and human beings? How do I realize this duty in my daily chores?
The answers to these questions are uncovered by contemplating ones current
psychological and spiritual condition. This means that the quests of life should be re-
sponded to right then and there. This response reveals the Sundanese paradigm of the
contextuality of the spatial and temporal dimension of existence. The result is affirma-
tion in every daily occurrence.
The rock of the dark cave symbolizes a hard or difficult situation. The difficult
situation occurs because the grown-up individual has nothing to support himself or
herself. The grown-up individual should overcome this by working hard. He / she
should apply his / her competence and skills to an occupation and adopt a career oth-
erwise nothing will offer support to his / her life. To have an occupation in this sense
is to have a bright individual life.
Thus every young adult should fulfill his / her duty in accordance with his /
her career in life., It is questionable how this duty will be accomplished without such
a career. To have a career, however, is not only to support ones own life but also to
assist others. The assistance of the others means the expression of the virtue of charity
(amal ibadah) and reciprocal nurturing, loving and teaching (silih asuh, silih asih,
silih asah). In other words, to supply necessities and to assist other people and other
creatures is to fulfill the duty of pursuing an affirmative life.
The rock of the royal palace characterizes the embodiment of power. In order
to fulfill ones duty, there is a presumption of power of humanity where individuals
supply their own necessities and the necessities of others. In short, an individual gains
sense of authority from their own career. The embodiment of authority strengthens the
individual to express the virtue of charity and reciprocal nurturing, loving and teach-
ing. The Sundanese people against the idea that authority can be used to dominate
events to subordinate others.
In order to prevent the negative application of authority, while growing-up the
child should listen to his conscience. The rock of ear connotes the firm conscience of
394
an individual and the individuals self-determination to follow the path of the duty of
an affirmative life. The Sundanese people believe that is through the conscience that
the Almighty speaks. The child growing up should not be easily distracted from the
pathway which she or he decides to walk on. A young adult should only listen to the
advice of his / her conscience. He / she should not easily believe to useless opinions,
news, and gossip which lead one away from the duty of existence.
Sundanese elders highly recommend listening to and acting according to the
advice of the conscience. This ancestral sagacity meets Sufism. The idea that the Al-
mighty speaks through human conscience corresponds to Islamic mysticism.
47
Be-
sides this sagacious characteristic, Sundanese wisdom also encourages the individual
to express the duty of the affirmative life through human senses.
48
The two important
human senses in this case are sight and hearing. Both senses are the way in for our
thought and consideration, our affection and volition. What one sees and hears will
influence their responses. Thus, a careful discernment of external information helps us
to manage our life. The Sundanese word for self-discernment is eling or pepel-
ing.
49
The word is an application of the capability of budi, the conscience, and
akal, the mind, in order to prevent any negative effects from external influence.
4.4. The phase of the sage
The sign vehicle: The Mosque of Majesty (Masjid Agung), The rock of glorious earth
(Batu Bumi Agung), The rock of the ivory throne (Batu Korsi Gading), The rock of
Eyang Prabu Silihwangi (Pakuwon Eyang Prabu Silihwangi), The rock of the seven
doors (Batu Lawang Tujuh), The rock of the rice barn or the curved array of the 25
prophets (Batu Padaringan), and The rock of the summit of the light (Puncak Manik).
There is a carving of kopiah (the Indonesian Moslems rimless cap) on a leaning rock slab.
The guardians always guide a pilgrim to perform a resignation prayer as a sign of self-
entrustment to the Almighty. At the monument of the Eyang Prabu Silihwangi, a pilgrim will
find a monument (a small lingga) with a carving of a thumb on the top of it. The thumb is as-
sociated with the name Prabu Silihwangi. The name refers to the way in which one might
show appreciation to someone. To give a thumb means to respect and to honor that person.
The sense: While growing up the child will realize the glory of the Almighty as he /
she enters the phase of the sage. This realization leads him or her to acknowledge the
idea that the Almighty is the proprietor of the heavens and the earth. This is a self
awareness that human beings are an inherent feature in the triadic structure of life, the
Tritangtu. The journey afterwards is an internalization of the noble virtues of life
which are compassion (welas asih), equality (sapajajaran), intersubjective dignifica-
tion (silihwangi), justice (kaadilan), gratitude (nuhunkeun) and the ability to reveal
the personal destiny (takdir). These are the main characteristics of the Sage in Sun-
danese belief. Moreover, the Sage is always associated with the name Prabu

47
See Chittick 2002: 24-26.
48
See Maya 2008: 38-39.
49
See Sunda lexicon entry of this word, eling or its derivation pepeling, see Danadibrata 2006.
395
Silihwangi, the moksa-King of Pajajaran (12th c. CE). The wise man in this context
should be able to perform some sort of outstanding physical and mental challenge.
Some of them are able to stand on the top of the rock of the glorious earth which is
steep and slippery. Once at the top the wise man then has to move to the neighboring
rock, that is, the rock of the ivory stone. He / she has to be able to sit on the top of the
rock of the ivory stone and the way down from the ivory throne is very risky. In the
final stages of the pilgrimage, the pilgrim learns how to actively reveal his / her own
destiny, how to affirm the equality of mankind, the ability to prophesy like a prophet,
and the experience of the union mysticism with the Light. The spiritual journey ends
in the summit of the light. This is the realization of the enlightened human being or
the sagacious individuality.
The referent: The Mosque of Majesty is located higher on the mountain Gunung
Padang from which everyone can see the panorama of the South of Bandung. It signi-
fies the glorification of the Almighty. This is the acknowledgement that the Almighty
is the only authority and the proprietor of this universe. Human authority is merely a
mandate from the Almighty.
Human beings do not occupy and conquer the universe. Moreover, human be-
ings cannot claim that the arrangement and management of life are solely up to human
competence and skills. Everybody is merely a mediator who leads the universe and
the other creatures to the Majesty. In other words, it is through human beings the Al-
mighty perfects the universe. This is the task of the affirmative life so that individuals
are in charge of maintaining and developing all manifestations of life. If one knows
his position as the keeper of the earth, one shall realize that human beings are an inte-
grated part of the heavens and the earth.
The rock of glorious earth symbolizes a dignification of the motherland and an
attitude of holding the nationhood in high esteem. Every grown-up individual is in
charge of protecting the land and the nation. One can express ones duty by nurturing,
caring and maintaining any manifestation of life inhabiting the area. Neither are ag-
gressive violence, nor armed defense the primary strategies for protecting the mother-
land and the nationhood. The nurturing of and the care for the motherland are the
ultimate strategies for protecting and maintaining Life. To manage the earth is com-
patible with the care of human body and soul .
The rock of the ivory throne signifies the dedication of the human authority to
fulfill its duty of protecting the motherland and the nation as explained in the rock of
glorious earth. Along with to the rock of glorious earth, this rock represents the con-
templation of the divine authority as an expression of compassion or welas asih,
rohman-rohim. This expression is the essential Sundanese virtue. The affirmative
life is mainly characterized by those who are compassionate and practice this noble
virtue.
The commemoration rock slab of Eyang Prabu Silihwangi symbolizes the vir-
tue of gratitude, nuhunkeun. Human beings should be able to express gratefulness
toward any kind of experience and any given bread. By referring to the previous
rocks, this stage also uncovers the other essential Sunda virtues of the affirmative life:
396
the intersubjective dignification, silihwangi. Every grown-up individual should be
able to express this through a mutual and respectful interaction with the others, the
earth and the heavens.
The rock of the seven doors connotes a personal destiny revealed by ones
birthday. A birthday connotes a specific destiny for everyone. The grown-up individ-
ual should be able to follow his / her own path. This conception of destiny does not
entail a passive response. Instead of passivity, individuals should be proactive in real-
izing their respective destiny (takdir).
50

The curved array of 25 rocks symbolizes not only the 25 acknowledged
prophets in the Koran, but also a significant Sundanese virtue, that is, equality or
egalitarianism (sapajajaran). Then the natural formation can be regarded as the 25
full rice barns, the symbol of prosperity. The idea of prosperity has to do with the
value of egalitarianism. Every human and non-human being deserves to have equal
access to prosperity in front of The Almighty.
Thus, the duty of human beings is clearer in this context. By following the
teaching narratives from the first stage until the curved array of 25 rocks, every indi-
vidual is called to bring prosperity to all. It is every human beings responsibility to
distribute the natural resources so that the other creatures can enjoy life in a proper
way. In this context, personal wealth is dedicated to the prosperity of the earth, and
the nationhood. By fulfilling this life task, human beings, based on the mandate from
the Almighty, expresses the dignification of their selves, the perfection of creation,
and the glorification of the Almighty.
The Summit of Light is the final stage in the pilgrimage of life. The purpose of
life is depicted in this final place, the becoming-one with the universe and the Al-
mighty, the moksa in Buddhism; or its sufic equivalent, the makrifat, the union mysti-
cism.
51
The experience of becoming one is the final realization of the idea of the
affirmative life. The moksa or the makrifat, is the ultimate achievement of the Sage.
After the grown-up individual ends his or her contemplation in the final stage,
he or she is encouraged to actualize his or her own vision and mission as a Sage. The
realization of sagacious individuality is done in accordance with ones occupation,
competence, skills, and his / her social, cultural and religious context, as well as social
roles. After passing the various stages, it is now time to go and perform ones destiny
(takdir) as the manifestation of sagacious individuality. The Guardian affirms, Tereh
make salawasna or Go and apply the values and virtues of the Sage as long as you
live. It is time to dedicate oneself to the service of the affirmative Life.

50
See Djunatan 2008: 40, the guardian confirms the active attitude toward the destiny as follows: Aye-
una ngudag lawang tujuh, mun teu mah didinya ngudak hak warisna masing-masing, hak tujuanana
masing-masing dina poe anu tujuh eta. In English translation: Now, following the seven doors, every-
one has their respective pathways in life, respective destiny in accordance with their own birthday.
51
This unifying process, becoming-one with the Universe and The Almighty is also rephrased in Suf-
ism as marifat. Thus this mysticism corresponds with the Sunda primordial ontological paradigm.
See Nurbakhsh 2002: 2-3.
397
4.5. A philosophical interpretation
The teaching narratives above reveal the indigenous ontological conception, that is,
the Tritangtu or the triadic structure of life. This conception consists of three inter-
connecting features: the human being (the self), the earth and the heavens. Each fea-
ture exists in a parallel position. These triadic features can not be adequately
illustrated as either a two-dimensional triangle, in which the heavens is the higher
rank and the other two features are lower, or a hierarchical structure, which places the
heavens to be the ultimate, human beings in the middle, and the earth in the lowest
place.
52
(See Fig. 18.3 and Fig. 18.4 below).

Fig. 18.3. The two dimensional triangle of the Tritangtu

Fig. 18.4. The hierarchical structure of the Tritangtu

The problem with the triangle diagram (Fig. 18.3) and the hierarchical struc-
ture of the Tritangtu (Fig. 18.4) is that they reduce the triadic structure to merely a
difference in higher and lower status. Both diagrams only convey the static position of
each feature without explaining the dynamic interconnections among the features. The

52
For the two dimensional triangle, cf. Sumardjo 2002, 2003:307; cf. Wessing 1979: 102. For the hier-
archical structure of Tritangtu cf. Sumardjo 2006: 356-360.
398
diagrams also cannot properly convey the idea that each feature becomes the middle
for the other two. Here, the middle should be preferred as a connecting agent more
than a static middle position. In this sense, the middle is not associated with an estab-
lished position or status of the three features in the Tritangtu. The middle connotes a
dynamic function of interconnectivity rather than an established status. It is the mid-
dle that correlates the other features in the triadic structure.
To consider the middle as the interconnecting agent in the Tritangtu is to illus-
trate the triadic structure in a three-dimensional dynamic cyclic spiral.
53
The three
dimensional illustration contains a parallelism of the three features. On the one hand
the parallelism describes an equal status of the three features; on the other hand, it
conveys the dynamic interconnection among them. The equality of the features em-
phasizes the function of the middle as the interconnecting agent. Fig. 18.5 illustrates
the three-dimensional dynamic cyclic spiral.
Fig. 18.5. The three-dimensional dynamic cyclic spiral

This three dimensional illustration of the dynamic cyclic spiral shows how the
heavens (Hvs), human beings (HBs) and the earth (E) exist in an equal position. It
also describes the interconnectivity among these three features. The cyclic life spiral
begins at the birth of every individual moving toward the manifestation of the life of a
sage. The circular arrows represent a process of life which presumes the interconnec-
tivity among the three equal features for the purpose of the development of the saga-
cious selfhood. The sage does not reach a final attainment, but the sages attainment
depends on the ongoing actualizations of (Sundanese) principal virtues of life in daily
matters. Thus, becoming a sage, which requires the continuous mutual interconnec-
tion between the heavens and the earth, is an inevitable process in the development of
human character. The development of the sagacious character is impossible unless the
awareness and the practice of interconnectivity are realized in daily attitudes.

53
This is an etic interpretation inferred from several intensive interviews with the guardians. The emic
interpretation or the guardians conception provides the idea that the three features in the triadic struc-
ture of life reciprocally sustain each other so that one feature clarifies the existence of the two others.
399
The illustration of the dynamic cyclic life spiral corresponds to the Sundanese
phrase opat kalima pancer.
54
Word by word, this phrase denotes the four compass
points (opat), the fifth point or the nucleus (kalima) and the high noon (pancer).
Opat, the four compass points symbolize the universe or the Mandala.
55
Kalima,
the nucleus connotes tengah or the middle. I propose the use of the term the mid-
dle rather than the centre or pusat in Bahasa.
56
The connotation that is derived
from the use of the term middle, emphasizes the meaning of the connecting agent
that conjoins the compass points, Papat, or the mandala. The meaning of the middle
is supported by the last word in the phrase, pancer or the high noon.
Independently, Pancer or the high noon
57
reveals the moment when light
shines without any shadow on all compass points. One can clearly see everything un-
der the sun. One can also perceive a harmonious composition of a landscape. If one
combines the middle, tengah with the high noon, pancer, one will uncover once
again the interpretation of the Almighty, human beings and the Universe as the inter-
connecting agents. This interpretation is necessary if one wants to reveal the Sun-
danese way of thinking, that is, the comprehensive worldview. In other words, the
Sundanese comprehensive worldview is a presumption which explains why Sun-
danese people conceive of a relationship between the opposites. In this sense, the
mandala or the compass points are comprehensive because they are woven by the
connecting agent, the middle.
A Sundanese metaphor of the light also refers to the middle as the intercon-
necting agent. Pak Undang explained such a metaphor in the following way:
Pancerna, anu tara bohong tea di urang, atawa batin urang, hate urang.
58

Ari tengah pancerna, ari pancer lamun disimbulkeun kana jiwa urang, anu tadi tea nu tara
bohong tea, tengahna mah kitu.
59

(My translation: The high noon is the part inside us which never lies, or our conscience, our
heart. If the high noon is symbolized inside our soul, it is our heart which never lies; the
middle is always like that.)
The citation mentions the idea that metaphorically speaking the high noon in-
side the human soul is hate, the heart or conscience. The function of the heart or the
conscience is to convey the truth. The sunlight offers consideration of and directions

54
This phrase becomes one of the meditative keywords on the contemplative site Nagara Padang for a
pilgrim. Meditating on this phrase will lead pilgrims awareness to honour and to dignify the universe
and the Almighty. Dignification of both features in triadic structure of life is equivalent to dignifying
human beings. See Pak Undang in Djunatan 2008: 130.
55
The Hindu-Tantric and Buddhist mandala as the complete structure of the universe is a significant
idea of the cosmic existence in the Archipelago. See Sumardjo 2003: 77; Lombard 1995 jilid III.
56
In Javanese, the term tengah could be translated into pusat in Bahasa or the centre. Such a transla-
tion will reduce the deepest connotation of the word. For the translation of tengah into pusat see
Sumardjo 2003, 2006. Geertz 1969; cf. with my research report Djunatan 2008.
57
See Danadibratas Sunda Lexicon for this entry.
58
Pak Undang 2008: 130.
59
Pak Undang 2008: 136.
400
concerning what ought or ought not be done. The metaphor of the high noon in this
sense is also the presentation of the Almighty inside the human soul. In other words,
just as the sun illuminates a landscape, the human heart can also illuminate the right
path to walk on and guide the right conduct to be performed. In other words, the light,
the sun and the heart is the essence of the Almighty and it is the middle in this inter-
pretation. Therefore, in the Sundanese belief the Almighty is lighting the mandala, the
four compass points so that it becomes the unification of life. The unification of life
represents the comprehensive worldview and human existence as the interconnecting
agent in Sundanese peoples conception.
The guardian of the site employs the meaning of the human existence as the
interconnecting agent, as explained by the phrase papat kalmia pancer, to solve the
riddle of Nagara Padang. The name Nagara Padang consists of the word Nagara
and Padang.
60
The word Nagara should be read starting from the last syllable to the
first one. It becomes ra ga na. Ra and Ga are combined so that one can read
them as Raga or the (human) body. These three syllables are accompanied with the
preposition dina or in / into. Together the word should be read as Dina Raga Na,
or in the body. The word Padang means light, brightness, or illumination. Thus the
riddle of Nagara Padang means either there is the light in the human body or that
the human body itself is the representation of the Light or the Almighty. Both solu-
tions of the riddle emphasize the following ontological formulations about the presen-
tation of human beings.

a) The presentation of human beings is the realization of a dynamic inter-
connectivity within its inner self.
b) The presentation of human beings is as a mediating agent who inter-
weaves the different elements in the universe; and by becoming such
an agent, human beings are interconnected with the heavens and with
the earth.

Both conceptions characterize human existence as an experience of self-
enlightenment. In every individuals inner life, there is a tendency to experience self-
illumination in order to answer the quests for life (formulation a). In answering such
quests for life, an individual should have a sensibility to listen to his / her conscience.
Under the influence of the conscience an individual should be able to deliberate and to
discern all sorts of impulses and reactions. In doing this, the individual will work it
through in their own mind which path in life they decide to take. In order to determine
their individual pathway in life, the individual should be able to practice self-
perseverance and self-discipline so that he or she is consistent in realizing his or her
own destiny in life. By being aware of the purpose of life, each individual is aiming
for the realization of the Sage through their daily attitudes. This is the experience of
the illumination of the inner self. In short, the experience of self-enlightenment im-

60
Cf. the transcription of my interview with Pak Undang in Djunatan 2008: 104.
401
plies the interconnectivity of the physical and the mental aspects, the body and the
soul.
Outwardly, human beings will be interconnected with others in accordance
with the second meaning (formulation b). This interconnectivity defines precisely the
role of every human being. Such role can be described with the questions how do I as
an individual realize my presentation for others? or what can I do for others? Such
questions are indispensable for individuals rather than asking what is it? or who are
you? In other words, life is defined by an individuals role not only to themselves but
also their function in a communal life. From this standpoint, the role interconnects the
individual with others. The status of an individual is not an established position to
define identity.
Thus the Nagara Padang site proposes the idea that human beings exist in a
mutual interconnectivity. Human beings exist for the earth and the heavens and like-
wise the heavens and the earth exist for human beings. The ontological role is the rea-
son for existence; it is more than a definitive establishment of the self-identity. In
other words, the indigenous ontological conception of human beings is that every hu-
man being is always interconnected with others. Human existence is an expression of
this correlation especially within the triadic structure of life, the Tritangtu. From an
etic interpretative perspective, I would formulate this ontological standpoint as the
affirmative life. The word affirmative is essential because it will uncover the Sun-
danese virtues of life that have already been discussed above. An affirmative individ-
ual expresses intersubjective dignification (silihwangi), reciprocal nurturing, loving
and teaching (silih asuh, silih asah, silih asih), equality or egalitarianism (sapaja-
jaran), gratitude (nuhunkuen), compassion (welas asih), and justice (adil). These vir-
tues explain how Life embodies affirmative qualities in its essence and design.
61
Thus,
after discussing the characteristics of affirmative individuals, I will now shift to a
wider context of abstraction. The presentation of affirmative subjects draws particular
attention to the idea of affirmation as key to conceiving of life in general.
5. Open ending: A comparative study
The indigenous ontological conception of life and human beings underlies an episte-
mological framework of knowledge production.
62
Before the discussion of the frame-
work continues further, one should think of the etic philosophical interpretation
instead of the emic one. The external formulation of the emic ontological conception

61
One should refer to indigenous classification implied in the conception of Life. Such classification
differentiates wadah or cangkang or the designation and eusi or the essence. A poetic phrase de-
scribes this differentiation, cangkang reujeung eusina kudu sarua lobana (the designation and the
essence should be compatible [equal]). See Sumardjo 2006: 331.
62
See van Binsbergen 2003 and 2008, for an intensive as well as extensive philosophical discourse of
local knowledge production from the standpoint of intercultural encounters.
402
can be compared with a typical philosophical conception. This typical philosophical
conception emerges in the Chinese classical philosophy, the Dao De Ching. Thus, the
following comparative study between the Sundanese ontological conception and the
Chinese one will depend on the etic interpretation of both theories. This comparative
study will proceed first with the interpretation of the Sundanese ontological concep-
tion, the affirmative life.
5.1. The Sundanese affirmative life
Before I explain the triadic structure of life Tritangtu, I would like to start with the
following Sundanese poetic phrase.
Dunya sakitu legana, heurinna ngan ku dua jalma, lalaki jeung awewe
63

(Our vast earth only comprises man and woman, my translation).
This phrase describes a metaphorical polarized pair, man and woman.
64
The pair ex-
plains the two opposite sides. Other opposites can be mentioned such as darkness and
light, success and failure, persistence and distraction, selflessness and selfishness,
among others. In metaphors, these opposites indicate the binary presentation of exis-
tence, as shown in the previous pairs.
Nevertheless, the existence of these paradox subjects cannot be conceived
unless the third conjoining one is implied. If one only recognizes two distinct sub-
jects, one will ignore the foundational one which underlies the whole existence itself.
In the quotation above the earth or dunya is the third conjoining subject, which
unifies man and woman. Thus, Tritangtu is really the triadic structure of life.
Symbolically the triadic structure is shown in terms of the earth, man and woman.
From this standpoint, the opposite subjects are the necessary condition for existence
while the underlying third feature is the sufficient reason for existence so that life be-
comes a comprehensive presentation.
65

The triadic structure of life implies using logical operations to theorize about
the indigenous ontological conception. The indigenous logical operation consists of
three mechanisms as follows:

1. The acknowledgement of the unique presentation of a subject. The acknowl-
edgement is meant for the recognition that different features exist in life, either
symbolically projected on to the Tritangtu, human beings, earth and heavens
or experienced inwardly or reciprocally correlated among the mind, the affec-
tion and the volition.
2. The assertion of the unique existence of the two distinct representations. This

63
My interview with Abah Karmo.
64
It is clear that polarization of subjects discovers Sufisms influence in the peoples mind and belief.
See Chittick 2002: 30.
65
Wessing 2006: 211-212.
403
assertion explains the opposition of one against the other. The assertion is in-
evitable if one thinks of the diversity of the presentations of individuals, or of
the plural expression of the One. Moreover, a clear distinction will define a
particularity of self-identity. A man is distinct from a woman. A classification
is made for the plural presentations. The man occupies one side, the woman
the other. The clear distinction of these sides implies the negative logical op-
eration so that the contradiction will obtain. Only one side is true. Conse-
quently, the prevailing one will synthesize the opposite. This way of thinking,
I argue, has been employed in the logic of identity formation and the principle
of the excluded third.
66

3. The apposition
67
of the dualistic presentations is a comprehensive review. The
review is made based on the idea that one side clarifies the existence of the
others and vice versa. The negative logical operation of the pair does not dem-
onstrate a complete thinking process. The teaching narratives of sagacity on
the site prove this comprehensive worldview. The guardian mentions:
...didinya memang ta jalan had jeung gorng. Ngan had nu mana gorng nu
mana. Ulah gorengna gorng teuing. Had ge ulah had teuing. Sabab gorng teuing
kacida, had teuing pare og loba teuing bera mah euweuh eusian, hapa. Euweuh
araheun, had teuing. Siger tengah. (Handap) teuing bisi jongklok, tukang teuing bisi
jongklok. Geura panggihan, geura tepungan anu aya dina wujud. Geura tepangan anu
aya dina raga, geura wincik anu aya dina diri, geura papay anu aya dina rasa.
68
.
(... there is good and bad. Yet one has to carefully understand both. It is better if it is
not too bad or not too good, because that means excess. If there are too many grains
of rice, they are empty. Too good is aimless. Be comprehensive. Too low one can
fall; too high one can also fall. Find this out within. Discover this inside the body,
perform self-management. Be aware of your conscience.)

The guardian employs the logical operation of the apposition when he perceives the
existence of the opposites such as good / bad (hade / goreng), male / female (lalaki /
awewe), day / night. The logical operation leads to the understanding that the good is
in apposition to the bad. This comprehension is not only about a theory of a balanced
perception of these opposites. One should be able to conceive of both sides simulta-
neously and recognize that the opposites are interconnected. The self-awareness of
this appositive correlation is symbolized in the Sundanese compound word Siger
tengah or according to my translation be comprehensive. This compound word is
associated with the idea of the interconnecting middle. The middle functions as the
inclusive connectivity of the paradox. This is not a third way which exclusively exists
along side the opposites. The opposites are correlated in so far as one side implies the
other sides existence.
According to another interpretation, Siger means crown or corona. Semi-

66
Cf. van Binsbergen 2008: 13, 30.
67
See Fung Yu-Lan, 1969: 31.
68
Transcription of my interview with Pak Undang in Djunatan 2008: 120.
404
otically, the crown or the corona symbolizes the circle of light for someone who is
honored and perfect.
69
The circle posits the comprehensive worldview so that every
presentation is irreplaceable. The circle clarifies the idea that the man explains the
presentation of the woman, and vice versa. In short the circle embodies the connect-
ing middle position, which is the apposition of distinct subjects.
Together the ternary logical operations above enhance the idea of the affirma-
tive life in the indigenous ontological conception. The idea clarifies that Life in itself
embodies a comprehensive quality. This quality enriches the human recognition of the
multiple as well as the unique presentations of individuals. The comprehensive
worldview is an explanation of the human interconnecting presentation. It is an inclu-
sive recognition of the others.
5.2. The wisdom of the affirmative life
Wisdom can be considered part of indigenous intelligence
70
or as a part of indigenous
knowledge production. Indigenous sagacious knowledge serves a pragmatic function
in dealing with daily conduct and behavior. The pragmatic function acknowledges the
nature of human virtues and vices. It also asserts the human virtues against the human
fragilities. The identification of virtues and vices in daily conduct explain the prevail-
ing virtues over the vices. Nevertheless, the identification of the prevailing virtues
should be completed by a third logical operation. The Apposition of the opposites,
that the virtues are seen in apposition to the vices, is needed so that one can under-
stand that the virtues interconnect with the vices.
This apposition is the comprehensive worldview of sagacious individuality.
Human beings inevitably identify the bad characters along with the good ones. Thus
the binary quality of human characters is the necessary explanation of human exis-
tence. A close comparison of the ternary logical operations of sagacious knowledge
can be made with Chinese classical philosophy. In the 2nd verse of Chapter 2 of the
Chinese Dao De Ching it is written:

Therefore having and not having arise together
Difficult and easy complement each other
Long and short contrast each other
High and low rest upon each other

Voice and sound harmonize each other

69
See Wiratakusumah 2008.
70
van Binsbergen 2008: 18-19.
71
Lao Tsu in Gia-Fu Feng and Jane Englishs translation (1972/1997): chapter 2 yng shn
(self-cultured, self-development), in roman pinyin at
http://www.yellowbridge.com/onlinelit/daodejing02.php or http://www.edepot.com/taocp.html:
(qu) you wu xing sheng, nan yi xing cheng,
405
Front and back follow one another
71

Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing,
teaching no-talking
72

Each line of the 2nd verse identifies the opposite, such as having - not having. Fol-
lowing the opposites are reciprocal complements, such as arise together, each other
(xing, )
73
and the (literary) equivalence (zh, ), for the explanation of the corre-
lation between the binary such as going (manage affairs) and doing nothing (wu
wei), teaching and no-talking. The polarized sides are not intelligible unless this
reciprocal correlation is present.
The Dao De Ching is also a teaching narrative about a reciprocal explanation
or apposition of the paradox. In other words, the reciprocal complements in the sec-
ond verses of Dao De Ching above explain the basic Chinese mindset, the correlative
thinking.
74
The correlative thinking also explains that every subject presumes the exis-
tence of the others. A subject is a part of the others, or it belongs to others. In short,
each subject needs a reciprocating acknowledgment.
75
This reciprocity and the cor-
relative thinking explain the wisdom of the affirmative life.
When one thinks of the ideas of the correlative mind and reciprocal thinking
found in Chinese classics, one can identify that this mindset is also familiar to the
teaching narratives at the contemplative site Nagara Padang. The third logical opera-
tion in Sundanese thought demonstrates a similar way of thinking. The apposition or
the comprehensive mind reflects the correlative thinking and the reciprocity between
two distinct and polarized features of life. One can identify the comprehensive mind
in realization of Sunda principal virtues of life. The virtues are an expression of the
wisdom of the affirmative life.
If one expresses the wisdom of the affirmative life, one is able to see the full-
ness of human presentation. To be able to conceive of such a presentation is to im-
prove sagacious individuality. The sagacious individual does not emphasize one side
in preference to the other. The wisdom of the affirmative life is a way of thinking that
is consistently critical of the desire to prevail over others. One needs to be aware of

chang duan xing xing, gao xia xing qing,
yin sheng xing he, qian hou xing sui.
shi yi sheng ren, chu wu wei zh shi, xing bu yan (er) zh jiao.
72
Cf. Legges translation of this line: Therefore the sage manages affairs without doing anything (wu
wei), and conveys his instructions without the use of speech. The character zh () connects go
(manages affairs) with doing nothing (without doing anything, wu wei), and teaching with no-
talking. See http://www.yellowbridge.com/onlinelit/daodejing02.php .
73
Suzukis translation is mutually. Other scholars like Legge translates it, one another; Goddard has
all are opposite and each reveals the other. Suzukis translation of Daodejing see.
http://www.yellowbridge.com/onlinelit/daodejing02.php.
74
Lai 2002: 22.
75
Whit et al., 2001: 10.
406
our inner negative intention to eliminate others. Instead of expressing this negative
force, one needs to promote a more comprehensive worldview. Realizing this com-
prehensive worldview in daily conduct, one will maintain affirmative individuality. In
turn, once sagacious individuality is achieved, one immediately expresses his / her
respect for life and dignifies existence in multiple forms.
To conclude this account of work in progress, the contemplative site of Nagara
Padang reveals the wisdom of people who inhabit West Java (now comprised of three
provinces). However, the Sunda refers to more that the vast land between Asia and
Australia and the people who live there. My informant, Ki Laras Maya often said that
the Sunda should also be known as an ideology of the wisdom of the affirmative
life.
76
Such wisdom can contribute to human interaction and enhance civilization even
though adversity will always occur in the process of mediation or negotiation for a
common understanding and for the establishment of peace. Of course, the wisdom of
the affirmative life is not always the best medicine for all human problems nowadays.
It is a persuasive invitation to a pragmatic interconnectivity and it promotes the pri-
macy of life over our negative interests which try to exploit benefits from other mani-
festations of life.
References
Armstrong, K., 1994, A History of God, NY: Balantine Books
Anne Whitt, L. et al., 2001, Indigenous Perspective in A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, D.
Jameison (ed.), USA UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Barnard, A. & Spencer, J., 1998, Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, London & New
York: Routledge.
Danadibrata R.A., 2006, Kamus Basa Sunda, Bandung: PT. Kiblat.
Bachtiar T., 2006, Basa Hujan Di Gunung Padang, artikel sempalan (sisipan) majalah bulanan basa
Sunda, Cupumanik, nomer 32/2006.
Berezkin, Y., 2008, The emergence of the first people from the underworld: another cosmogonic myth
of a possible African origin, the paper seminar presented at the 2nd annual conference of In-
ternational Association for Comparative Mythology, Ravenstein, The Netherlands, 19 21
August 2008.
Chittick, W.C., 2002, Tassawuf di Mata Kaum Sufi, Bandung: Mizan.
Danasasmita, S., 1984, Sejarah Jawa Barat, Dalam masa kekuasaan Raja-Raja 130 1500 M., jilid
tidak dipublikasi.
Danasasmita, S., & Atja, P., 1981, Carita Parahyangan, Bandung: Proyek Pengembangan
Permuseuman Jawa Barat.
de Nicols, A.T., 1999, Meditations through the Rg Veda: A Retrospective in Philosophy East and
West, April, 49, 2; Academic Research Library pp. 184 193.
Djunatan S., 2008, Pola Rasionalitas dan Sistem Pengetahuan dalam Worldview Budaya Sunda ber-
dasarkan situs Nagara Padang, Gunung Padang, Desa Rawabogo, Kecamatan Ciwidey, Ka-
bupaten Bandung, Bandung: CCRS FF & LPPM UNPAR.
Ekadjati, E.S., (penyunting), 1981, Wawacan Sajarah Galuh, disunting oleh, Jakarta-Bandung, Lem-
baga Penelitian Perancis untuk Timur Jauh, Ecole Francaise dextreme-orient.

76
See interview with Maya in Djunatan 2008.
407
Ekadjati, E.S., Wibisana W., Anggawisastra A.K., 1982, Naskah Sunda Lama Kelompok Babad,
Proyek Penelitian Bahasa dan Sastra Indonesia dan Daerah Jawa Barat Departemen Pen-
didikan dan Kebudayaan.
Ekadjati, E.S., 2005, Kebudayaan Sunda, Suatu Pendekatan Sejarah, jilid 1, Jakarta: Pustaka Jaya.
Geertz, C., 1969, The Religion of Java, Chicago: The Chicago University Press
Ifeany Nnoruka, S., 1999, African Culture and the Quest for Truth, Philosophy Today, Winter, 43, 4;
Academic Research Library, pp. 411 421.
Iskandar, Y., 1997, Sejarah Jawa Barat, Yuganing Rajakawasa, Bandung: CV Geger Sunten.
Korab-Karpowicz, W.J., 2002, Rethinking Philosophy, a reflection on philosophy, myth, and science,
Philosophy Today, Summer, 46, 2; Academic Research Library pp. 209 217.
Lai, K.L., 2002 Classical China, in A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, Dale Jameison (ed.),
USA UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Lewisohn, L. (ed.), 2002, Warisan Sufi, Sufisme Persia Klasik, dari permulaan hingga Rumi (700
1300), Buku Pertama. Yogyakarta: Pustaka Sufi.
Lombard, D., 1990, Le Carrefour Javanais, Essai dhistoire globale II Les reseaux asiatiques; III
Lheritage des royaumes conctriques, cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.
Translated into Bahasa in 1996 / 2005, Nusa Jawa: Silang Budaya Jaringan Asia, volume II:
Jaringan Asia and III: Warisan Kerajaan-Kerajaan Konsentris, Jakarta: Penerbit Gramedia
Pustaka Umum & Forum Jakarta Paris, cole Francais dExtrme Orient.
Maya, K.L., 2007, Nga bedah Talaga Bandung, Adegan hirup ku Ugana, dina ka Hyang Na, artikel
dipublikasi sebagai panduan atikan untuk Sumur Bandung. Bandung: not published.
Maya, K.L., (Abah Adjat Poerba Sasaka), 2008, MUSTIKA PURAGA JATI SUNDA, Ngamanaan
falsafah sarta ajn-inajn kamanusaan Sunda dina nata diri, nata raga keur hahirupan,
Bandung: not published
Nth, W., 1995, Handbook of Semiotics, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Nubakhsh, Dr. Javad, 2002, Kata Pengantar: Ciri-ciri Khas Utama Sufisme dalam Periode Awal Is-
lam, dlm. L. Leonard (ed.), 2002, Warisan Sufi, Sufisme Persia Klasik, dari permulaan
hingga Rumi (700 1300), Buku Pertama. Yogyakarta: Pustaka Sufi.
Rosidi, A. (ed.), & Ki Subarma (juru pantun / story-teller), 1973, Carita Ciung Wanara, Bandung:
Proyek Penelitian Pantun dan Folklor Sunda.
Sumardjo, J., 2002, Arkeologi Budaya Indonesia, Yogyakarta: Kalam.
Sumardjo, J., 2003, Simbol-simbol artefak Budaya Sunda, tafsir-tafsir pantun Sunda, Bandung: Kelir.
Sumardjo, J., 2004, Hermeneutika Sunda, simbol-simbol Babad Pakuan / Guru Gantangan, Bandung:
Kelir.
Sumardjo, J., 2006, Khazanah Pantun Sunda, sebuah interpretasi, Bandung:Kelir.
Simuh, Dr., 1996, Sufisme Jawa, Transformasi tassawuf Islam ke Mistik Jawa, Yogyakarta: Bentang.
Straathof, W. 1971, Agama Djawa-Sunda: Sedjarah, Adjaran dan Tjara Berpikirnja, vol. 1 4, diter-
bitkan dalam Majalah Basis sepanjang thn. 1971: 203 206 & 220 223, 258 265 & 287,
313 318, 345 350.
Subagya, R., 1979, Agama Asli Indonesia, Jakarta: CLC
Fung Yu-Lan 1969, History of Chinese Philosophy, Vol. I and Vol. II, 6th printing, New Jersey:
Princeton.
Tsu, L., transl. Gia-Fu, Feng & English, Jane 1997, Tao Te Ching, New York: Vintage Books.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2003, Intercultural Encounters, Berlin: LIT.
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2009, Expressions of traditional wisdom from Africa and beyond: An ex-
ploration in intercultural epistemology, Brussels: Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences /
Academie Royale des Sciences dOutre-mer, Classes des Sciences morales et politiques, M-
moire in-8, Nouvelle Srie, Tome 53, fasc. 4.
Wessing, R., 1979, Life in the Cosmic Village: Cognitive models in Sundanese life in Art, Ritual, and
Society in Indonesia, E.M. Bruner & J.O. Becker (eds.), Athens: Ohio University, Center for
International Studies, Southeast Asia Program, Papers in International Studies, Southeast Asia
Series no. 54, pp. 96 126.
Wessing, R., 1988, Spirits of the Earth and Spirits of the Water: Chthonic Forces in the Mountains of
408
West Java, in Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 47, 1988, pp. 43 61.
Wessing, R., 1997, A Princess from Sunda, Some Aspects of Nyai Roro Kidul, Asian Folklore Stud-
ies, Vol. 56: 317 353.
Wessing, R., 2006, Symbolic Animals in the Land between the Waters, Markers of Place and Transi-
tion, Asian Folklore Studies, Vol. 65, pp. 205 239.
Wiratakusumah, J., 2008, Siger Tengah, Jalan Politik Sunda?, Harian KOMPAS, sabtu 26 Juli 2008.
Yahya, I.D., 2006, Ajengan Cipasung, Biografi KH. Moh. Ilyas Ruhiat, Yogyakarta: Penerbit Lkis.

409
Chapter 19. The function of irony in
mythical narratives

Hans Blumenberg and Homers ludicrous gods

by Nadia Sels
1

Abstract. Dealing with Greek mythology, one inevitably encounters the problem of the ambiguous
treatment of the Olympic pantheon. It seems that for the Greeks, the gods could be both the object of
sincere reverence and the source of ironic laughter. This apparent paradox is especially striking in the
epics of Homer, where solemn veneration can in a few verses turn into mockery, and vice versa. To
rationalise this ambiguity, classical scholars have often attempted to artificially separate these two atti-
tudes by ascribing them to different authors, ages or poetic registers. This point of departure, however,
was motivated by the expectations of a monotheistic and thus anachronistic model they enforced upon
Greek mythology.
I want to argue that these seemingly incompatible attitudes are two sides of the same coin, and that
this ironic streak of Greek mythology is inherent to its function.
For this hypothesis, I base myself on the theories of Hans Blumenberg. This philosopher and clas-
sical philologist approached myth not as a particular archaic genre, but as a continuous process of sym-
bolisation that enables man to reduce what he called the absolutism of reality (Wirklichkeitsabsolutis-
mus). This liminal concept refers to a condition of being totally overwhelmed by the undifferentiated
threat of the outside world. The polytheistic pantheon and the stories that surround it are considered to
be the primitive means by which man succeeded to differentiate this threat, and thus to restrict it. Me-
diated by myth, the absolutism of reality becomes both sublime and manageable. Irony forms a part of
this process.
To concretise and illustrate these theories, I will apply them to some excerpts from the Homeric
epics wherein the gods are depicted in an ironical way: the battle of the gods (Ilias XX), the story
about the entrapment of Aphrodite and Ares by Hephaestus (Odyssea 8.266-369), and, in particular,
the beguilement of Zeus by Hera (Ilias XIV).
1. Introduction
I would like to start my argument with a personal anecdote. One night, when I was
still very young, my father took me for a walk in a nature reserve near our house. In

1
University of Ghent, Belgium (FWO, Flanders).
410
the distance we could see some flickering lights, probably street lamps or something.
But my father, who loved folk tales, told me that these little stars were will-o-the
wisps, unbaptized souls that were doomed to roam the heath. He then warned me
never to beckon to these lights, for they would take it as a sign that you were prepared
to baptize them and come rushing to you at such a speed that it would crack your
chest. Fascinated by the story, I tarried till I dropped behind and then, terrified, half-
heartedly, beckoned. The only thing that followed me as I spurted back to my father
was some whirling snowflakes. In spite of this experience, surprisingly, for years I
kept thinking of the little sparkles on the heath as restless souls, will-o-the-wisps, and
nothing else. But maybe it is even more surprising that I beckoned altogether. For if I
did believe my fathers story, even slightly, I was taking a deadly risk, and if not, the
gesture would have been meaningless. At the time, I think it would be correct to say, I
understood my fathers story as a myth. Like a myth it was a fascinating story that
defined and explained a part of the world, but at the same time it was not totally clear
whether I understood it to be fact or fiction, real or unreal. By beckoning, was I ac-
knowledging or mocking the legend of the will-o-the-wisps?
2. Homers ambiguous portrayal of the gods: An age-
old question
This inherent ambiguity of myth, the fact that it often seems to hover between mock-
ery and veneration, is one of its most puzzling qualities. Another good example of this
mythical paradox is found in Homers ambiguous portrayal of the Olympian gods, the
subject I want to discuss here. The Homeric gods are anthropomorphic. They are not
only human, but all too human even. At the same time these belligerent, pretentious
and childish creatures represent exalted cosmic forces that are deemed worthy of ven-
eration and awe. Calhoun phrases the paradox very accurately:
The scandalous tale of Ares and Aphrodite, for example, ends on a note of serene beauty and
dignity; in three lines we pass from a scene that might have shocked the goodwife of Bath to
the august serenity of the most sacred shrine of earths most potent goddess ( 360-362). That
majestic Zeus whose nod shakes great Olympus, the Zeus of Phidias and of all poets, is also
the furtive, henpecked husband, made querulous by the thought of Heras nagging, who pres-
ently finds relief in a ridiculous squabble with his consort (A 528-567). In the Theomachy is
this same curious intermingling of the sublime with the ridiculous and vulgar, lines that are
stigmatized as unspeakably bad by Leaf and Wilamowitz and lines that can be acclaimed for
their sublimity by so critical a spirit as Edward Gibbon (Calhoun 1937a: 11-12).
This seeming discrepancy in Homers conception of Olympus, which Calhoun
calls one of the unsolved puzzles of Homeric study (1937a: 11) has even troubled
scholars of antiquity as early as the sixth century. It led to criticism of Xenophanes,
the philosopher who was scandalised by the immorality of the gods, and to the alle-
goric readings of Theagenes and Pherecydes, who tried to exonerate Homer with their
Sels Chapter 19: The Function of Irony in Homer
411
distorting interpretations.
2
It can indeed be said that it was Homers often ludicrous
depiction of the gods that sparked off the first instances of literary criticism in West-
ern history. The problem which had puzzled many scholars in Homeric studies con-
tinued in to the twentieth century when contested passages were often disposed of as
late interpolations that were consciously critical. The original epics were assumed to
be composed in
an early period of simple faith and sincere religious feeling in which poets sing of the gods
with reverence or exalt them as the benevolent rulers of the cosmos,
while the scandalous scenes originated in
subsequent periods of iconoclastic scepticism usually a concomitant of the Ionian philoso-
phy in which later poets scoff and jeer at the deities of earlier generations.
3

It was only with the work of George Calhoun that this kind of thinking lost its
legitimacy. He pointed out that
[i]n those instances in which the cultural background of mythology or religion is definitely
known we find uniformly that naive, grotesque elements appear at a very primitive level and
are in no way incompatible with devout religious feeling (Calhoun 1937b: 266-267).
4

Calhoun assumed that the grotesque elements in Homer came from ancient
folk tales and Mrchen
5
and were combined with the more solemn material for aes-
thetic reasons. For him, chopping up Homer in different religious strata is
as intelligent as would be the assumption that the tesserae of different colours in a mosaic
must have been set by different hands (Calhoun 1937b: 272).
Today, it is obvious that Calhouns position has prevailed. Nowadays no one
would consider marking the scandalous Homeric passages as interpolations. It is clear
that those philologists who once did this were projecting the expectations and charac-
teristics of a relatively modern, monotheistic system of belief that of their own time
and culture on that of Homer. By now we have become aware that contradiction is
common in human imagination and thinking, at an individual level as well as on a
collective scale, and that mythic thinking in particular tolerates discrepancies to a far
greater extent.
6

2
See also Sikes 1940: 123 and Detienne 1981: 12.
3
I quote from George M. Calhouns Higher Criticism on Olympus (1937: 258), in which he attacks
such hypotheses, principally those of Wilamowitz and Finsler. I also refer to this article for a general
survey of their positions.
4
G.S. Kirk also stresses that there is a constant between myth and fairytale, and that seriousness and
play are consistently intertwined (Kirk 1990: 31).
5
See Calhouns article Homers Gods Myth and Mrchen (1939), where he substantiates this theory
with a list of fairy tale elements from Homer.
6
See also Keller: One of the prime characteristics of primitive social forms is the ease with which they
ignore consistency. This general proposition could be illustrated at length from Homer, entirely apart
from the subject of rationalisation. For example, the gods are represented as eating with men, as enjoy-
ing the savor of sacrifices; yet it is elsewhere stated that they eat ambrosia (that is immortality), that a
fluid called ichor supplies for them the place of blood, and so on. Souls are incorporeal and like
412
Paul Veynes study Les Grecs ont-ils cru leurs mythes? (1983) has been cru-
cial in that respect. In this work, Veyne has demonstrated how our modern opposi-
tions true / false, fact / fiction and belief / disbelief simply do not fit myth. These
concepts are anachronistic when applied to the Greeks and their relation to mythol-
ogy, because the distinction between fiction and reality had yet to be made (Veyne
1988:17). So the question of whether the Greeks believed in their own myths cannot
simply be answered with yes or no, because believing meant something totally dif-
ferent to them.
7
Veyne lays bare the historicity of the concept of truth and states that
myth was not, and cannot be evaluated by that standard. It was a tertium quid, neither
true nor false (Veyne 1988: 28).
8
For instance, he illustrates this statement by citing
the work of Dan Sperber on the mythic convictions of the Ethiopian Dorz concerning
the leopard:
[T]he leopard is a Christian animal who respects the fasts of the Coptic Church, the obser-
vance of which, in Ethiopia, is the principal test of religion. Nonetheless, a Dorz is no less
careful to protect his livestock on Wednesdays and Fridays, the fast days, than on other days
of the week. He holds it true that leopards fast and that they eat every day. Leopards are dan-
gerous every day; this he knows by experience. They are Christians; tradition proves it (Veyne
1988: xi).
So Veyne would definitely argue against the old thesis that the scandalous
Olympian sections are late interpolations. Just as the leopard can be considered both a
piously ascetic Christian and a dangerous predator at the same time, it is not a contra-
diction for the Homeric gods to be considered ridiculous childish creatures and divine
cosmic entities at the same time.
However, there is an important distinction between Calhouns argumentation
and that of Veyne. While Veyne speaks of the functioning of thoughts and beliefs,
Calhoun limits himself ultimately to discussing the workings of literature. He sees the
two contradictory images of the gods not as two sides of the same religious coin, but
as different stylistic elements that Homer combines to make his story more attractive.
The sublime gods are the gods of religion, or of his ethical thought while their ri-
diculous counterparts are exponents of a vulgar folk tradition, the ancient, grotesque
gods of myth, crystallized in their unchanging tradition (Calhoun 1937a: 17). In this
way, even Calhouns solution holds on to the old division. When it comes down to it,
he flinches from confronting the possibility that Homeric religion is simply radically
different from the modern one and inherently allows for this contradiction. By refus-
ing to take the ambiguity of the Homeric gods seriously, he misses out on the chance
of considering more far-ranging conclusions. For a literary work is never merely a

smoke; yet Odysseus can keep them away from his blood-filled trench at the point of the sword (Kel-
ler 1910: 652-653).
7
And even for us, Veyne argues, matters of true or false, believing or disbelieving are not as clear-cut
as we like to think. Another very illumination study on the relativity of the verb to believe, that fol-
lows a similar line of thought, is Jean Pouillons article Remarques sur le verbe croire (1979).
8
Marcel Detiennes Les matres de la vrit dans la Grce archaque (1967) should also be mentioned
here, as it substantiates the fact that the concept of truth is historically and culturally defined.
413
literary work; it reflects a world of thought, real mentalities and attitudes.
Surprisingly, Calhouns approach has set the tone in Homeric studies for the
treatment of the problem right up to the present day. Even the sophisticated Laurence
Coupe still glosses over the strangely ambiguous character of the Homeric gods by
reducing them to mere literary tools:
The deities of Homer are, significantly, presented as vividly, sometimes ridiculously, anthro-
pomorphic: they exhibit all the lust and greed, pettiness and spite, of which humans are capa-
ble. They shift their allegiances in the war according to whim, or decide to hinder the heros
progress because of some nurtured grievance. They are primarily literary devices, which help
to get the tale told (Coupe 1997: 102).
Although we agree with the fact that the Homeric epics are primarily literary
works and not theological treatises, we cannot ignore their powerful religious dimen-
sions. Furthermore, the conclusion that the element of parody, even mockery, was not
incompatible with sincere veneration, leaves us with the question of how both sides
are interrelated. How should we conceive of this religious attitude? And what was the
function of this parodical element?
In what follows, I want to propose an answer to this question on the basis of
the theories developed by the German thinker Hans Blumenberg in his work Arbeit
am Mythos (1979).
9
Blumenberg has developed a fresh and challenging conception of
the workings of myth and looks at parody as an important element of the mythical,
vital to its functioning. After giving a compendious survey of Blumenbergs line of
reasoning, I will further explore the meaning of the concepts of parody and irony and
try to conceptually adapt them to the Homeric context. I will then attempt to prove the
usefulness of these theories by checking them against the epics themselves, and apply
them specifically to the three challenged passages Calhoun mentions: the Theomachy
and the Dios Apat in the Iliad, and the story of Ares and Aphrodite in the Odyssey.
3. Blumenberg and the absolutism of reality: Strate-
gies to keep the gods at bay
Being both a philosopher and a philologist, Hans Blumenberg approached myth from
a dual perspective. In his work, mythology refers not only to the stories we call myths,
but also to a more abstract conception, a modality of imagining and thinking that
gives structure to the world by narration. The point of departure for Blumenberg was
the work of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who in his Philosophie der symbolischen
Formen (1923-1929) tried to bridge the gap between the Enlightenments distrust for
myth and Romanticisms idealisation of it. Blumenberg adopts Cassirers insight of
not seeing mythos as the opposite of logos, but as a preliminary phase, a steppingstone
towards it. For Blumenberg the only problem with this theory is that it implies that
once the stadium of logos is reached, myth should become redundant and dissolve.

9
From here on, I will refer to the English translation Work on Myth (1985) by Robert Wallace.
414
This, according to Blumenberg, has never happened. Myth is still, implicitly or ex-
plicitly, omnipresent. His conclusion is that myth cannot be a primitive and imperfect
form of logos. Since myth is not made futile by logos, then it must serve some other
purpose, a purpose of its own. This is why Blumenberg proposes that we stop study-
ing myth from the point of a terminus ad quem, that is from the point of logos which
should evolve in an almost teleological way, but should instead look at it from its
terminus a quo, from the situation out of which myth originated, or from the problem
that triggered it.
To conceptualise this situation, Blumenberg is forced to create a sort of an-
thropological myth himself, and to use what he calls a liminal concept: the Absolutis-
mus der Wirklichkeit, absolutism of reality. Absolutism of reality refers to a certain
state of total fear and paralysis that overtook primitive man or should have over-
taken him when he left his biological niche as an animal and exchanged the habitat
of the woods for the vast plains of the savannah. In this environment with its open
horizon, to which he was no longer adapted, danger could come from anywhere. Re-
acting to possibilities and threats of the environment was no longer a matter of re-
flexes and instincts; for the first time, a future had to be anticipated:
What is here called the absolutism of reality is the totality of what goes with
this situational leap, which is inconceivable without super-accomplishment in conse-
quence of a sudden lack of adaption. Part of this is the capacity of foresight, anticipa-
tion of what has not yet taken place, preparation for what is absent, beyond the
horizon. It all converges on what is accomplished by concepts. Before that, though,
the pure state of indefinite anticipation is anxiety. To formulate it paradoxically, it is
intentionality of consciousness without an object. As a result of it, the whole horizon
becomes equivalent as the totality of the directions from which it can come at once
(Blumenberg 1985: 4).
Absolutism of reality is not the fear of some particular threat, but exactly the
more radical form of anxiety that occurs when the threat is not specified, is every-
where and nowhere, reality itself. Against this Angst the German word is more ap-
propriate no defence is possible because it is absolute, unrestricted by forms or
names. However, absolutism of reality is a liminal concept. Man has never been
overwhelmed by it in this measure. As far as we can go back, it has always been kept
at bay by something that could turn this total, undefined Angst into mere concrete
fear, directed at a well-defined danger. This was accomplished by means of myth.
10

Many factors have contributed to the exact shaping of mythical narratives in-
cluding among other factors psychological, biological, and socio-political realities.
Yet for Blumenberg the reasons why these stories have taken these particular forms is
less important, than the fact that they have taken these specific forms no matter what
these forms may be. By these means, man succeeds in structuralizing his world, in

10
Blumenbergs a quo- approach is consistent with Kenneth Burkes remark on myth: critical and
imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose. They are not
merely answers, they are strategic answers, stylized answers (Quoted in Coupe 1997: 177, italics in
the original).
415
making it appear comprehensible, even controllable. In the first place this is not
achieved through logos, reason, but through imagination, for reason itself only be-
comes possible on irrational premises:
[A]nxiety must again and again be rationalised into fear, both in the history of mankind and in
that of the individual. This occurs primarily, not through experience and knowledge, but rather
through devices like that of the substitution of the familiar for the unfamiliar, of explanations
for the inexplicable, of names for the unnameable (Blumenberg 1985: 5).
Myths primal function is to give the uncontrollable and indefinable
11
a face
and a name: it takes the form of monsters and gods. By this, the horror is channelled
and mitigated into milder emotions: awe, astonishment and rapture (Blumenberg
1985: 62). The mystery becomes more fascinans than tremendum, to use, as Blumen-
berg sometimes does, Rudolf Ottos terms.
The process of restricting the threat by naming and delimiting it leads to even
further ramifications: more and more names appear to classify the sacred, with more
and more stories and particularities attached to them. A mythology comes into being.
The main aim of this mythology is the division of power. Therefore, Blumenberg ar-
gues, religion was originally always polytheistic. For every threatening Poseidon,
there must be a helpful Athena, for every vindictive Hera, there must be a benevolent
Zeus. This is also the reason why mythology loves to portray the gods as a bunch of
quarrelsome children:
12
Not only to be able to shield oneself from one power with the
aid of another, but simply to see one as always occupied and entangled with the other,
was an encouragement to man deriving from there mere multiplicity (Blumenberg
1985: 14). In a later stage, some religions will indeed turn to monotheism. I cannot go
into this issue here, and will restrict myself to saying that even then mythology tries to
confine the gods powers, by a covenant, a treaty he enters with man, but also by in-
troducing saints, angels and even a Mother of God to mollify his wrath (see Blumen-
berg 1985: 22-23 and 140).
With this theory about the division of powers, Blumenberg provides an expla-
nation for a multitude of properties of mythology, like the polytheistic origin of relig-
ion, the superabundance of names in mythological genealogies and the quarrelsome
nature of the gods. But there is more that seems to be consistent with his theory, like
the fact that the Olympians are not the primordial gods, but were preceded by several
older generations. In contrast with the rude gods of the past, Blumenberg suggests,
man could depict the present gods as charitable and well-disposed towards man.
Moreover, the fact that Zeus had not ruled the world since the beginning of time sug-
gested that his reign was not absolute and did not have to last eternally. The story of
Prometheus, not accidentally the creator and champion of man, reminds us that even
Zeus is not invincible in the end.
Of course, the function of myth is not to totally deny the threat posed by the

11
Outside and inside us, psychoanalysis would argue.
12
Discussing the Homeric epics, Calhoun even goes as far as to call the quarrelling of the gods the
dominant motif of the Olympian scenes throughout both poems (Calhoun 1939a: 22).
416
sacral. On the contrary, myth can only work properly if it represents the horror. But it
allows us the choice of how we represent it: the Titans, the vengeful Zeus that causes
the Deluge, creatures like Python and Typhon, are all set in a distant past, and the
monsters that roamed the earth are consistently accompanied by heroes that get the
better of them. And as the work of mythology advances, even the monsters lose their
grim disposition and become alluring.
13
This is what happened to Medusa, who
through the ages iconographically evolved from a hideous beast to an image of ago-
nized beauty (Blumenberg 1985: 15, 65-66). Blumenberg considers the Gorgon to be
exemplary for the workings of myth. Her capacity to turn those who look her in the
face into stone seems to suggest the paralysing panic of the absolutism of reality. Like
all monsters, she is a ragbag of animal body parts. This hybrid, polymorphous body
reflects the amorphous, undefined fear she symbolizes, but at the same time the min-
ute description defines and restricts it. Apollodorus describes her with snakes instead
of hair, a tong that hung out between an enormous set of teeth, iron claws and dragon
scales, but, as Blumenberg remarks, each of [these] details [] makes Medusa more
harmless (Blumenberg 1985: 116-117). Myth is Perseus mirror-shield that reflects
our fears in an image we can face and by doing so enables us to conquer them. Once
Medusa is defeated, we can incorporate her powers. The head becomes beneficial; it
merges with the protective aegis of sublime Athena.
But next to description and division of power, there is another important
stratagem of myth that Blumenberg discusses, which is the one that concerns us here,
its comical character. His theory on this matter may be a valuable addition to Cal-
houns insights, since he shows how the ambiguous image of the Homeric gods may
be motivated by more than simply aesthetic reasons. The problem has always been
closely connected to the question to what extent ancient people literally believed in
their myths. After all, is not mocking the gods only a step away from denying their
existence altogether? Blumenberg has a paradoxical answer to this question. On the
one hand, he affirms that the mockery of the gods is a form of rebellion against them,
a declaration of independence. On the other hand, this mockery is not contradictory to
myth. Far from that, it is one of the techniques of work on myth (Blumenberg 1985:
33). Parody may seem to undermine the authority of the gods, but at the same time it
confirms them, makes them possible, bearable. We can only endure a god that to
some extent we know we can defy. Parody is a method that ensures we can defy them.
This is what Homer does when he pokes fun at the gods, and this is what I did
when I beckoned the will-o-the-wisps. To make the god endure curses, mockery,
and blasphemous ceremonies is to feel out and possibly to displace the limits on
which one can rely. To provoke the savior to the point where he comes []. One can
do this, or say that, without being struck by lightning. It is the first stage of Enlight-
enment satire, of rhetorical secularization as a stylistic technique employed by a
spirit that is not yet confident of its enlightened status (Blumenberg 1985: 16-17). So

13
See Woodford 2003: 133-140 for some specific examples of how the images of monsters evolved
during antiquity.
417
when I assured myself that the unbaptized souls on the heath were really not that dan-
gerous, I was on a small scale preparing my own Enlightenment. But at the same time
the gesture made it possible for me for the first time to confidently believe in these
spirits; it reassured me, that by admitting their existence, I was not admitting some
terrible power in the world that could not be controlled. On the contrary, the will-o-
the-wisps provided me with an image in which I could store some of the absolutism
of reality. With them, some of my fears were banned to the heath, to a no mans land
between reality and fiction.
4. Irony, human helplessness and the divine
viewpoint
Up until now, I have used Blumenbergs term parody. This concept is of course in-
evitably anachronistic: if we follow Veyne and Blumenberg we have to assume that
mockery came naturally to the Greeks when dealing with their gods. Homer mentally
did not have to make the shift to a specific genre or stylistic device when he inserted
his comical passages, as Calhoun would certainly have it, and as the term parody
implies. However, there are additional reasons why this word is not entirely adequate.
A classical definition considers parody to be any cultural practice which provides a
relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice
(Dentith 2000: 9). Definitions may vary, of course, but the element of a serious origi-
nal seems to be elementary. In my reading of Blumenberg however, it is essential that
there never was such an original, there never was an early period of simple faith and
sincere religious feeling. On the contrary, Blumenbergs theory implies that the
mocking attitude towards the gods was the original one, and that the kind of religion
that could distinguish sincerity from mockery, fiction from fact, only became possible
after this period of work on myth.
Blumenberg stresses that for him, there is no original myth, only Arbeit am
Mythos: I do not want to leave room for the assumption that myth is the primary,
archaic formation, in relation to which everything subsequent can be called reception.
[] [T]he process of reception has itself become a presentation of its manner of func-
tioning (Blumenberg 1985: 118). There is no original myth to be found, since myth is
not a certain fixed genre, but a movement away from something. The parodic tone of
these stories should not be interpreted as an allusion to a serious original, but rather as
an essential and inextricable feature of what myth is and does. Thus, we are obliged to
work with oppositions and concepts that do not suit myth because only the work of
myth made these oppositions and concepts possible in the first place. It would be
more correct to state that the comical engendered the serious rather than the other way
round.
14

14
See also Csapo 2005: 7: Our own concept of false narrative depends on our concept of true account,
and the opposition false / true narrative is shaped by such other oppositions as myth / science, legend /
418
So the difficulty in approaching this problem is that our perception is funda-
mentally incommensurable to the Greek one.
15
But if we would venture to use a mod-
ern term to describe this aspect of Greek mythology, I think irony would be a good
choice. For while the concept of parody relies strongly on the opposition between a
serious original and a playful copy, the concept of irony has always implied ambigu-
ity, contradiction and doubt. I will elucidate this by looking a bit closer at the theory
of irony.
We use the word irony for many and different kinds of acts and speech acts.
But to keep it simple, we can begin to define it with the classical notions of simulation
and dissimulation: pretending to be what one is not and pretending not to be what
one is (Muecke 1970: 25). In the schoolbook example of Marc Antonys speech in
Shakespeares Julius Caesar, when he claims that Brutus is an honourable man,
Marc Antony implies that Brutus, on the contrary, is an unscrupulous murderer. But
to speak of irony, there must at least be a possibility that someone might have taken
Marc Anthonys words literally. So the classical definition of irony implies on the one
hand the self-conscious ironist, together with, in most cases, an accomplice audience
that understands his real intentions, and on the other hand, the victim, a naive listener
who is fooled by the ironists dissimulation (Hutcheon 2005: 43). But, as is clear even
in this simplified situation, the literal interpretation must always be possible if not,
we would not speak of irony but of mockery. The essence of irony is doubt: there
must always remain a certain ambiguity.
So in reality, more often than not, the ironists intention is not completely
clear, not even to himself. This is something that distinguishes the ironist from the
parodist, who can clearly draw the line between the serious original and the mocking
parody. The true meaning of what is said is suspended; it is constantly shifting from
one side to the other. This is what Kenneth Burke means when he poetically calls
irony the dancing of an attitude (Burke 1989: 79). Therefore, most theorists of irony
also allow for broader definitions this irony is based not on dissimulation but on
ambiguity and paradox. Some go even further and speak of something like general
or cosmic irony, no longer a simple trope, but a general attitude towards life.
Schlegel, for example, considered irony to be the recognition of the fact that the
world in its essence is paradoxical and that an ambivalent attitude alone can grasp its
contradictory totality (Quoted in Muecke 1970: 19).
One of these theorists, Douglas Muecke, sees this general irony as a reaction
to the human condition itself: irony is mans makeshift measure to cope with his in-

history, myth or legend / literature. Westerners invented the concepts of science, history, and literature
partly to distinguish our own culture thought and expression from that of mythmaking societies. How,
then, could these distinctions be the same for us and them?
15
What remains extraordinarily difficult to establish is the effect of this parody on the sacred stories
themselves. Part of the difficulty concerns the very status of religious myth in classical Greece. []
[T]he categories of the modern (i.e. post-medieval) world simply do not translate to this early social
world. [] At all events, the Greeks seemed able to sustain an attitude or frame of mind in which the
serious forms and their parodic counterparts could exist side by side, even when these serious forms
and thus their parodies - carried some of the most sacred stories of their culture (Dentith 2000: 40-41).
419
ability to understand and control the world. So that what is called World Irony or
Philosophical Irony or Cosmic Irony is sometimes little more than a presentation of
the helplessness of men in the face of an indifferent universe, a presentation coloured
with feelings of resignation and melancholy or even despair, bitterness, and indigna-
tion (Muecke 1970: 69). What Muecke says here about irony is, of course, almost
exactly the same as what Blumenberg says about myth: both are described as a reac-
tion to human vulnerability. One step further, and Mueckes description of General
Irony leads us right back to Blumenbergs theories about the absolutism of reality:
This lightness may be but is not necessarily an inability to feel the terrible serious-
ness of life; it may be a refusal to be overwhelmed by it, an assertion of the spiritual
power of man over existence (Muecke 1970: 36, my italics).
Since for Muecke the concept of irony touches upon the (lack of) meaning of
human existence itself, it is not at all surprising that his general irony also has an im-
portant religious dimension. He starts out from the idea that the ironic smile has its
origins in the experience of looking down at the misery or helplessness of others
while being in a position of control:
In Lucretius, Lucan, Cicero, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bacon, Heine,
Nietzsche, Flaubert, Amiel, Tennyson, Meredith, not to mention the Bible, we find the
idea that looking down from on high upon the doings of men induces laughter or at
least a smile. The ironics awareness of himself as observer tends to enhance his feel-
ing of freedom and induce a mood perhaps of serenity, or joyfulness, or even exulta-
tion. His awareness of the victims unawareness invites him to see the victim as
bound or trapped where he feels free; committed where he feels disengaged; swayed
by emotions, harassed, or miserable, where he is dispassionate, serene, or even moved
to laughter; trustful, credulous or nave, where he is critical, sceptical, or content to
suspend judgement (Muecke 1970: 37).
Muecke claims it is based on this experience that the ironic attitude is mod-
elled. He proceeds:
From this point of view the archetypal ironist is God he that sitteth in the heavens shall
laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. He is the ironist par excellence because he is
omniscient, omnipotent, transcendent, absolute, infinite, and free. [] In earthly art Irony has
this meaning conduct similar to gods. The archetypal victim of irony is man, seen, per con-
tra, as trapped and submerged in time and matter, blind, contingent, limited, and unfree and
confidently unaware that this is his predicament (Muecke 1970: 37-38).
For Muecke, the mental construction of the concept of divinity and the ironic disposi-
tion are closely related. Muecke considers irony a paradoxical attitude of looking
down on ones own limitations from the viewpoint of a god.
At this point, I come back to our Olympian gods, who hold this same position
of supreme irony. Take, for example, the final verses of Sophocles tragedy Women of
Trachis:
Let all men here forgive me, / And mark the malevolence /
Of the unforgiving gods / In this event.
We call them / Fathers of sons, and they /
Look down unmoved / Upon our tragedies. /
420
[] Women of Trachis, you have leave to go. / You have seen strange things, /
The awful hand of death, new shapes of woe, / Uncounted sufferings; /
And all that you have seen / Is God.

In Homers Iliad, the Gods are only slightly less callous towards human suf-
fering. They have much in common with the superior beings Jenyn describes in a pas-
sage quoted by Muecke:
As we drown whelps and kittens, they amuse themselves, now and then, with sinking a ship,
and stand round the fields of Blenheim, or the walls of Prague, as we encircle a cockpit. As we
shoot a bird flying, they take a man in the midst of his business or pleasure, and knock him
down with an apo-plexy. Some of them, perhaps, are virtuosi, and delight in the operations of
an asthma, as a human phi-losopher in the effects of the air-pump. To swell a man with a tym-
pany is as good sport as to blow a frog. Many a merry bout have these frolic beings at the vi-
cissitudes of an ague, and good sport it is to see a man tumble with an epilepsy, and revive and
tumble again, and all this he knows not why (Muecke 1970: 30-31).
In the same dispassionate way, Apollo crushes Patroclus with a simple gesture
or spreads plague in the Greek camp. In the same way, Athena light-heartedly tricks
Hector into walking towards his death. But most of the time, they just gaze at us from
above. Griffin even states that looking on is the very essence of the concept god
(Griffin 1978: 1) and Austin claims that
the first function of Homers gods is to witness the world (Austin 1989: 141).
But the interesting thing, of course, is that in the Homeric epics these same
powerful gods are made a laughingstock in their turn. And this, I want to argue, is
exactly what Homeric parody of the gods is all about: if man can conceive of being
looked at ironically it is only a small step to reverse the gaze. This is also exactly what
Muecke claims irony enables us to do: that is the ability to take on a double view-
point, of changing places with the gods. Blumenberg as well would agree that man
can only tolerate the overwhelming power of the gods if he is able to downplay it
somehow and that this is what myth (i.e. parody) does. Let us then take a look at the
Homeric epics themselves and see if we can recognize this pattern there. We will take
a look at the three most notorious instances of Olympian ridiculousness, the ones al-
ready summed up by Calhoun: the Theomachy, the Dios Apat and, finally, the en-
trapment of Ares and Aphrodite. The point I will try to make is that even at a very
concrete textual level, we can clearly find that the helplessness of the gods is a re-
versed reflection of human suffering.
5. The ironic attitude and the Homeric gods: Theo-
machy, Dios Apat and the entrapment of Ares and
Aphrodite
The first passage we will discuss is the Theomachy. At the point where the battle over
Troy reaches its peak, Zeus allows the other gods to freely participate in the battle and
421
fight each other. In this bombastic scene, Homer pulls out all the stops:
[O]n the other gods fell strife momentous and dire, and in different directions the heart in their
breasts was blown. Together then they clashed with a mighty din and the wide earth rang, and
round about great heaven pealed as with a trumpet. And Zeus heard it where he sat on Olym-
pus, and the heart within him laughed with joy as he saw the gods joining in strife (Iliad XXI,
385-390).
16

The first thing that draws our attention here is the peculiar role of Zeus, who
stays at Olympus to enjoy the show. As far as focalisation is concerned, the position
of Zeus is obviously identical to the position of the reader / listener, who is encour-
aged by these lines to laugh with joy as he sees the gods join in strife, as does the
ruler of Olympus himself. In Zeus we immediately recognise the detached ironic
onlooker, watching from up high, smiling.
And the spectacle will give him cause for smiling. It may indeed be the most
striking case of the intermingling of the sublime with the ridiculous and vulgar, as
Calhoun puts it (1937: 11-12). The lines that paint the gods descent from Olympus
are truly majestic: their battle cries fill the air, and the earth shakes so hard that Hades
fears it will crack and reveal the shady realms of the dead (Iliad XX, 47-70). The bat-
tle itself, however, is not that exalted. The gods boast and rail against each other like
little children. The goddesses especially do not act very worthy. The catfight between
Hera and Artemis particularly descends, ending with Hera smacking the goddess of
hunt over the ears with her own bow, after which she runs off crying to Zeus like a
little girl something her father seems to find rather amusing.
The other element that immediately catches the eye is the parallel with the
situation of the mortals. Human tragedy is about to culminate Achilles is setting out
to kill Hector thereby sealing the fate of Troy and consciously securing his own death
sentence. Precisely at this point in the story, where the suffering becomes almost un-
bearable, the gods take over the battlefield and replace tragedy with comedy. There is
absolutely no narrative need for this fight between the gods; it changes nothing in the
outcome of the story. But it does serve as a counterweight to the battle of the humans
sometimes the duels are obviously modelled on previous combats between mortal
champions. This scene of comic relief has a reassuring effect: for once we mortals
watch as the gods themselves struggle on the battlefield. Even if none of them loses
his life, they do all lose their detachedness and dignity. The divinity that wins the
most sympathy is Hermes, who is put in against Leto, but makes his escape with the
witticism that he finds it far to dangerous to fight a lover of Zeus. He unheroically
tells Leto she is free to boast her victory over him amongst the gods.
In the second scene, the famous Dios Apat or beguilement of Zeus, it is the
father of gods and men himself who is shown up. To have free hand in helping the
Achaeans, which Zeus has forbidden her, Hera plots to seduce her husband and put
him to sleep. With the help of Hypnos and the magical girdle of Aphrodite, her plan
succeeds: Zeus becomes so enchanted by his wifes beauty that he does not see

16
Translation by A.T. Murray, Loeb Classical Library.
422
through her plans and wants to make love to her there and then. Hera for a moment
feigns to object: she would be ashamed, she says, if the other gods would see them
lying there together. Zeus however quickly does away with that objection:
Hera, fear not in this that any god or man will see, with such a cloud shall I enfold you, a
cloud of gold. Through it not even Helios could discern us, though his sight is the keenest of
all for seeing. At that the son of Cronos clasped his wife in his arms []. Thus in quiet slept
the father on topmost Gargarus, by sleep and love subdued [] (Iliad XIV, 342-353).
17

Typically this scene has been interpreted both as the sacred hieros gamos of
heaven and earth, and as a late interpolation, a sceptical mockery of the Olympians.
Again, the theme of someone looking on is extremely important for the
shameful and comic character of the whole situation. Even Helios cannot look
through this nebula, Zeus tells Hera (XIV, 342-345). That may well be so, but there is
a gaze even more pervasive that that of Helios: for Homer himself watches on, and we
with him. So we are literally placed above the highest of the gods and look down on
him as he finds himself in a position of ignorance and helplessness. In the meantime,
the war for Helen is going on below. But at least we know now that even Zeus is not
above losing his head over a beautiful woman.
The third and last scene I will discuss is maybe the most striking example. It is
the well-known story of the adulterous love affair of Ares and Aphrodite, who are
caught in the act by Aphrodites husband Hephaestus. Hephaestus, who was warned
by all-seeing Helius, has forged an invisible and unbreakable net that falls over the
lovers and binds them tight. The god of smithy then invites the other gods to come
and look:
Father Zeus, and you other blessed gods that are forever, come hither that you may see a mat-
ter laughable and unendurable, how Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus, scorns me for being lame
and loves hateful Ares because he is handsome and strong of limb, whereas I was born mis-
shapen. [] [Y]ou shall see where these two have come up into my bed and sleep together in
love, while I am filled with grief at the sight. [] [T]he gods, the givers of good things,
stood in the gateway; and unquenchable laughter arose among the blessed gods as they saw
the craft of wise Hephaestus (Odyssey VIII, 306-327).
18

The ironic audience, here, is more present than ever: it is the group of gods
around Hephaestus bed, onlookers who entertain themselves from their safe, superior
position by watching the helplessness and shame of others. Homer of course focalizes
not through the eyes of the unhappy victims, but through this divine audience: the
ironic smile of the reader or listener is theirs.
But let us now look at the precise context in which this story is embedded. The
tale is sung by the Phaeacian singer Demodocus, and in his audience we find Odys-
seus, on his way back from Troy to Ithaca. For the first time in his eventful, many
years journey home he has some real hope of actually getting there with the help of
the friendly Phaeacians. Homer does not tell this story here randomly: there are obvi-
ous parallels to be drawn between Odysseus situation and that of Hephaestus. First of

17
18
423
all, Odysseus also has reason to fear for the conjugal fidelity of his wife since he has
been away from home for twenty years now. As we know, suitors are indeed planning
to take his place on his throne and in his bed at that very moment. Both, moreover, are
famous for their cunning: Hephaestus is called poluphronos (ingenious, inventive)
(Odyssey VIII, 297), a word that of course immediately recalls the typical epitheton of
Odysseus, polutropos. The adjective poluphronos itself is only used eight times in the
Odyssey, and every single time for one of them both, Hephaestus or Odysseus. In ad-
dition, they are both craftsmen: we know of Odysseus that he has built his own bed-
room and has inventively forged his own bed out of the trunk of an old olive tree
(Odyssey XXIII, 181-205).
19

We can imagine what goes through Odysseus head while he listens to the
singers story. But we, who listen to Homer, know that his wife Penelope has been as
faithful as Aphrodite was fickle. It is no coincidence that the motive of the conjugal
bed is stressed. For while Hephaestus can complain that his shameless wife cheats on
him in his own bed, for Odysseus the olive tree bed, that links him to the god, will
become the symbol of Penelopes loyalty. Once Odysseus finally arrives at Ithaca,
Penelope, afraid that he might be an impostor, puts him to the test by suggesting that
the bed be removed from his bedroom and put elsewhere. At that point, the collected
Odysseus for once loses his grip on himself. Angrily he asks how the bed could have
been replaced, as it is literally rooted in the ground. He then tells the story about how
he made it, a story known to no stranger. This is the final sign for Penelope to accept
that Odysseus is really her long lost husband. Their marriage proves to be as stable
and indestructible as the remarkable bed they share.
So for once, the comparison between god and man works out in favour of the
mortal.
[T]he marriage of the Ithacan couple is of such a nature as to make the gods themselves envi-
ous. The gods imposed these woes on us, explains Penelope in XXIII: 210-212, because
they were jealous of our living together to enjoy our youth and reach the threshold of old
age. For the relationship of Odysseus and Penelope, uniquely stable amongst mortals, is
equally rare among the gods as well. Aphrodite, the fairest of the Olympian goddesses, and
Hephaestus, shrewd patron of intelligence and craft, do not live in such secure happiness with
one another. Their marriage is flimsy as the invisible net which catches the wife in an adulter-
ous embrace (Newton 1987: 19).
So we, mortals, who listen to the story of Ares and Aphrodite, have the rare
pleasure not only to experience the feeling of literally looking down upon such pow-
erful divinities, but also the hope that we can do better than them.
The gods are a thinking concept. Just as man can borrow their distant perspec-
tive, they can take over mans helplessness. There is an extreme satisfaction in this, of
course. For without openly revolting (this would only be terrifying and would destroy
the gods effectiveness as representative of the absolutism of reality), man can have a
taste of what it is like to switch roles. This, of course, can only be done with extreme

19
The parallel has been noticed and discussed by several authors. For a survey, see Newton 1987 and
Brown 1989.
424
caution and subtlety. This irony is never in contradiction with the divine power; ulti-
mately, the ironic tone of myth is recognition of the gods superiority. Yet, their su-
preme position is only useful and bearable to the imagination of man when it is
balanced by a parodic tone. But never is the irony implying that the gods should or
could be more dignified. Homers irony is General Irony, the irony that simply ac-
knowledges that a serious look at life is just not an option: for reality is far too com-
plex, ambiguous and paradoxical to approach it in a straightforward manner. Life is
too complex to fit the dichotomy of play and sincerity, of reality and fiction, since we
can only come to a concept of reality through fiction, through myth.
6. Conclusion
In this article, I have tried to show how the theories of Hans Blumenberg, in particular
his notion of the parodic function of myth, can help us to conceptualise the function
of Homers ambiguous portrayal of the gods, and thus make the Homeric epics more
accessible. In my discussion of the three scandalous Olympian scenes, I hope to
have demonstrated how this parody or irony serves to mitigate the discrepancy be-
tween the helplessness of humans and the omnipotence of the gods. Every time, the
situation of the Olympians stood in direct relation to the situation of the mortal he-
roes. And every time, the focalisation of the text allowed for a turning of the tables,
putting the reader / listener in a position where they could view the comical mishaps
of the gods.
This kind of reasoning, of course, is by nature speculative and can claim no
more than to offer a working hypothesis. But it was never my intention to give some
ultimate, fully underpinned interpretation of this ambiguity in the Homeric presenta-
tion of the gods. To do this is practically impossible. Rather, my aim was to supply
for a conceptual line of thinking that allowed the present-day reader of Homer to step
out of a certain modern mindset, that is constructed around a set of dichotomies that
probably were not Homers, and to become aware of the possibility of looking at
these texts in a different way. Truth and falsity, fact and fiction, play and sincerity, are
all oppositions that are central to our thinking so we can never fully abandon them.
Neither is it possible to make a real reconstruction of how these semantic fields func-
tioned and related in the Homeric mind. Nevertheless, it can be illuminating to simply
assume that they worked differently then, and to seek how it might have been differ-
ent. As the case of Calhoun shows, such an approach can elucidate some apparently
problematic features of these texts.
But, more importantly, it can show us that mythology itself was the means by
which these dichotomies were developed in the first place. This is the insight that
Blumenberg advances, that our logical categories were built on the fundamental divi-
sion and structuring of the world that was brought about by myth. This, to me, seems
the great advantage of the Blumenbergian theory. It not only has some interesting
points to make about the mythical functioning of the Homeric epics, but it also allows
425
us to relate these findings to the mythical aspect of our thinking until this day. This
also brings along a great challenge, for it implies that the tools and concepts we use to
describe myths are themselves in a way mythical. Or as Coupe puts it: reading myth
is also mythic reading (Coupe 1997: 151). This is by no means an excuse for defeat-
ism; it only asks for a broader, more challenging interpretation of what comparative
mythology means. Not only should we be prepared to compare the myths we call
myths with each other, we should also dare to compare myths with the myths we
live with, the myths we use in our everyday speech and thinking. This will probably
require a more or less ambiguous attitude. We should take our own categories serious
and put then into perspective at the same time, consider them true and false at the
same time. But Homer shows us that that is not always feasible. Sometimes, we have
to take a will-o-the wisp as the guiding light.
References
Austin, N., 1989, Meaning and Being in Myth, University Park and London: Pennsylvania State Uni-
versity Press.
Blumenberg, H., 1979, Arbeit am Mythos, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Blumenberg, H., 1985, Work on Myth, Translated into English by Robert Wallace, Cambridge Mass.:
MIT Press.
Brown, C.G., 1989, Ares, Aphrodite, and the Laughter of the Gods, Phoenix, 43, 4: 283-293.
Burke, K., 1989, On symbols and society, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Calhoun, G.M., 1937a, Homers Gods: Prolegomena, Transactions and Proceedings of the American
Philological Association, 68: 11-25.
Calhoun, G.M., 1937b, The Higher Criticism on Olympus, The American Journal of Philology, 58, 3:
257-274.
Calhoun, G.M., 1939, Homers Gods: Myth and Mrchen, The American Journal of Philology, 60, 1:
1-28.
Cassirer, E., 1923-29, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Berlin: B. Cassirer.
Coupe, L.,1997, Myth, London: Routledge.
Csapo, E., 2005, Theories of Mythology, Oxford: Blackwell.
Dentith, S., 2000, Parody, London: Routledge.
Detienne, M., 1967, Les matres de la vrit dans la Grce archaque, Paris: Librairie Franois Maspe-
ro.
Detienne, M., 1981, Linvention de la mythologie, Paris: Gallimard.
Griffin, J., 1987, The Divine Audience and the Religion of the Iliad, The Classical Quarterly, New
Series. 28, 1: 1-22.
Homer, 1999, Iliad (trans. A.T. Murray) Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press.
Homer, 1995, Odyssey (trans. A.T. Murray) Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Har-
vard University Press.
Hutcheon, L., 2005, Ironys Edge. The Theory and Politics of Irony, London: Routledge.
Keller, A.G., 1910, The Study of Homeric Religion, in: The American Journal of Sociology, 15 (5):
641-656.
Kirk, G.S., 1990, The Nature of Greek Myths, London: Penguin Books.
Muecke, D.C., 1970, Irony. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.
Newton, R.M., 1987, Odysseus and Hephaestus in the Odyssey, in: The Classical Journal, 83 (1): 12-
20.
426
Otto, R., 1958, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine
and Its Relation to the Rational, New York: Oxford University Press.
Pouillon, J., 1979, Remarques sur le verbe croire, in: La fonction symbolique. Essais
danthropologie, M. Izard and P. Smith, eds., Paris: Gallimard.
Sikes, E.E., 1940, The Humour of Homer, in: The Classical Review, 54 (3): 121-127.
Sophocles, 1993, Complete Works, Vol. II: Ajax, Electra, Trachiniae, Philoctetes (trans. F. Storr), Loeb
Classical Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Veyne, P., 1983, Les Grecs ont-ils cru leurs mythes?: Essai sur limagination constituante, Paris:
Editions du Seuil.
Veyne, P., 1988, Did the Greeks believe in their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination,
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Woodford, S., 2003, Images of myths in classical antiquity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

427
List of contributors
Nicholas J. ALLEN
Faculty of Oriental Studies
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Yuri BEREZKIN
Department of America
Kunstkamera, Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography,
Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia

Vclav BLAEK
Department of Linguistics and Baltic Languages
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Stephanus DJUNATAN
Faculty of Philosophy
Parahyangan Catholic University, Bandung, West Java, Indonesia

Willem DUPR
Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies
Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Stephen FARMER
Independent scholar, Portola Valley, CA, USA

Joseph C. HARRIS
Department of English
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Victoria KRYUKOVA
Department of Central Asia
Kunstkamera, Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography,
Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia

Emily B. LYLE
Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies
Edinburgh University, Scotland, UK

428
Kazuo MATSUMURA
Department of Transcultural Studies
Wako University, Tokyo, Japan

Boris OGUIBNINE
Arts, Literature and Languages
Universit Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, France

Bukola A. OYENIYI
Redeemers University
Ibadan, Nigeria

Robert A. SEGAL
Department of Divinity and Religious Studies
University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK

Nadia SELS
Department of Latin and Greek
University of Ghent, Belgium

Walter E.A. VAN BEEK
African Studies Centre, Leiden /
Department of Religious Studies, Tilburg University, The Netherlands

Wim VAN BINSBERGEN
African Studies Centre, Leiden /
Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Eric VENBRUX
Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies
Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Michael WITZEL
Department of Sankrit and Indian Studies

Nataliya YANCHEVSKAYA
Department of Sankrit and Indian Studies

429
Index of proper names and motifs

Explanatory comments have only been added when deemed absolutely necessary. Most proper names
in this Index are only self-explanatory to the specialist, although they are usually elucidated by the
main text. Apart from names of authors, their places of work, and papers that have not been included in
the present collection, the overviews of original conference papers in the Introduction to this book has
not been indexed, since the final versions appear in this book. For claritys sake, recognised mythologi-
cal motifs / mythemes have usually been accommodated in a separate entry, detached from the key
word in question. Also see Author Index.

A Black Civilization, 32; cf.
Warner, W.L.
A Dictionary of Middle Egyp-
tian, 247; cf. Faulkner, R.O.
A-bt, 177, the Horizon of the
Bee, in Ancient Egyptian
mythology birth place of
Shu and Tefnut, and of Ho-
rus, q.v., 190; cf. Chemmis
Aachen, 93
Aarne-Thompson comparative
mythological classification,
144, 166-167
Aarne-Thompson-Uther com-
parative mythological classi-
fication, 167
Ab Urbe Condita, 196; cf. Livy
Aba Karmo, 377-378, 402n
Abah Ajat Poerba Sasaka,
378n
Abah Atmajawijaya, 382n
Abah Badra Santana, 382n
Abah Karmo, 377, 402n; and
Pak Undang, 378
c
Abad, Iraq, 171; Caliph of
Baghdad, 65
Abegunle Abeweila, Ooni,
king of Ile-Ife, 127-129,
134-136, 140-141
Abel, biblical mythical figure,
39n
Abeokuta, 133
Aberdeen, Scotland, UK, 428,
20n, 315n
Aboriginal, Aborigines, origi-
nal inhabitants of Australia,
25-30, 35, 38-39, 42, 30n; in
Central Australia, 27
Achaean(s), 421
Achelous, 197
Achilles, 357, 359-371, 421,
362n-363n, 365n, 367n; and
Hector, 366; and Hephaes-
tus, 369
Acholi, 185
Ackawoi, 233
Acra, 306
Adam, biblical first man, 190,
193, 232; and Hava / Eve,
190
Aderemi, 135
Adesoji, 135
Adeyemi, 127
Aetes of Colchis, mythical
king, 193, 195n
Aegean, 151, 183, 188
Aegir, 189
Aeneas, 365-366; and Hector,
362
Aeolic, Ancient Greek dialect,
243
Aeta, see At
Afonja, 133
Africa(n(s)), 17-21, 41-44, 47,
54-56, 109-111, 113, 116,
118-119, 122, 127, 130-131,
140-141, 143-162, 164, 166-
167, 169-175, 178-181, 183-
184, 186-188, 190-192, 195,
198-203, 225-226, 229-232,
236-240, 283-284, 293, 318,
323-324, 330, 20n, 30n,
42n-43n, 143n, 145n, 149n,
151n-154n, 157n, 159n,
164n-166n, 171n-172n,
179n, 188n, 201n, 203n,
225n-226n, 230n, 239n,
379n; East African High-
way, ecological and demo-
graphic corridor from Kenya
to South Africa, 237; Af-
rica-of-the-animals, 42; Sa-
hel, 44, 230-231, 236, 230n;
sub-Saharan, 109-110, 118,
122, 143-145, 147-151, 154,
157-159, 162, 166, 173,
175, 183-184, 192, 201-203,
225, 230-231, 145n, 149n,
159n, 179n, 230n; North ,
see: North Africa; Northern
, 184; West , 19-20, 41,
43, 179, 181, 186, 190, 203,
230-231, 166n, 171n; West
and Central Africa, 186;
Central , 169, 172; Central
& South , 187; East ,
230, 238; and South Central
Africa, 172n; and South
West Asia, 150; South Cen-
tral , 143-144, 148, 151,
167, 171-172, 174-175, 179,
188, 202-203, 164n; Iron
Age, 172 and Southern Af-
rica, 169; Southern , 147,
169-170, 188, 171n; South
Africa(n(s)), 231, 42n; and
Eurasia(n), 20, 143-144,
149-150, 153, 156, 159,
161, 175, 159n, 171n;and
Australia, 225, 236, 240;
and Asian, 119; and China,
430
236; and Europe, 198; and
South America, 119; and
Indo-Pacific, 152; also see
Old World, Ifriqa, Palaeo-
Africa(n(s)), Gondwana
African Eve, 225, 238-239
African History, 130
African Studies Centre, Lei-
den, 5, 18, 428, 17n, 41n,
143n
African Studies, 42, 145, 174
Africanist, see African Studies
Africanity, 174
Africanness, 145-146
Afroasiatic, linguistic macro-
phylum, 145, 152, 154-156,
161, 186, 199, 145n, 149n,
154n; and Eurasiatic, 154n;
cf. Chadic, Cushitic, Omo-
tic, Berber, Egyptian, Se-
mitic, Haussa, Arabic,
Hebrew, Borean
Afrocentric/sm, Afrocentricity,
144-146, 150-152, 148n,
151n, 174n; and Martin
Bernal, 151-152; in the
North Atlantic, 145; Afro-
centric model of South-
North transcontinental cul-
tural flow, 174n
Agamemnon, 360
Agate Basin, 109
Agenor, 365, 365n
Aggregative Diachronic Model
of World Mythology, 144,
157, 176n
Agni, 20, 357-370, 361n, 367n;
as sun, 79; and Achilles,
368; and Hephaestus, 368-
369; and Thetis, 361; cf. Hot
Fat
Agrippaeans, 199-200; and
Turks, 199
Ahriman, 79
Ahura Mazd, 77-78, 80-81;
and the Holy Spirit, 80; also
see Ohrmazd
Ainu, 256-257
Ajele, 135
Aji-kui, 88n
Ajip Rosidi, 379
Akhenaten, 319n
Akinmoyero, 134, 141
Akintoye, 127, 129
Akkad, 173
Akkadian, 245, 247, 234n
Alaafin of Oyo and Afonja,
133, 141
Alaska, 115
Albertus Magnus, 192
Albino, 196
Alboin, 196
Alcmene, 244
Aldan Basin, 113
Aleutian Islands, 259
Aleuts, and the Eskimo, 115
Alexander the Great, king of
Macedon, 370
Alexandria, 280n
Algonkian, 115
Alice Springs, 27
Alimi, 133
Allat, 181; cf. Rhea, Tyche,
Cybele, Hathor
All-Father, 29; cf. Father
All-Mother, 29; cf. Mother
All-Shining, see Pasiphae
Almighty, epithet the supreme
being in Sunda context, of
386, 389, 391-392, 394-396,
399-400, 382n, 386n, 389n,
396n, 399n
Aloadae, Giant twins, 181
Alpide belt, 259
Alps, and the Baltic, 114
Amaterasu, 186, 253, 255-256,
258, 261-263; and Hono-
ninigi, 253, 263; and
Susanowo, 253, 261, 263
Amazon River and Amazonia
region, 233, 236, 286, 235n;
and Guiana and, 110; , Co-
lumbia, 115
Amazons, legendary all-female
society, 190
Ambrakia, 343n
Amejiogbe, 128
Ame-no-Uzume, 256, 262
America(n(s)), 19-21, 109-110,
114-116, 119-120, 122, 172,
178-179, 181, 183, 184,
186, 188, 190, 193-194,
196, 200-202, 228, 232-233,
236, 239, 253, 255-256,
282, 290, 427, 159n, 189n,
201n, 341n, 378n; New
World, 201n; North and
South America, 109, 154,
225, 235, 237, 259, 201n,
225n;North America,
Northern Rockies, 179;
North West Coast, 179;
Northwestern, 256; Subarc-
tic, 109, 115; Central and
South America, 119, 236;
Meso America(n(s)), 184,
196, 200, 239, 255, 234n;
America(s), and Asia 109,
115; and Melanesia, 115
American Indians, see Native
Americans
Amerind, linguistic macrophy-
lum, 154, 202, 154n, 201n;
and Austric, 154, 202, 201n;
also see Dene, Amerind
Amerindian, see Native
American
Amma, 179
Anahita, 186, 190; also see
Arduui Sura Anahita,
Anath, Neith, Athena, An-
ansi, Nyambi
Anansi, 186
Anat(h), 186
Anatolia(n(s)), 67, 151, 177,
183; and Ancient Egypt,
177; Kumarbi, 177; cf. Tur-
key, Asia Minor
Anatomically Modern Hu-
mans, 144, 148, 155-158,
160, 162-163, 175, 285,
159n, 182n
Anaximander, 180n, 343n
Ancestral Beings of the
Dreaming, 28-29
Ancient Egypt(ian(s)), 20, 144-
145, 150-151, 155-156, 172-
174, 177-179, 188-194, 196-
197, 199-200, 235, 243-250,
249, 318-319, 143n, 145n,
151n, 166n, 171n-172n,
174n, 235n, 238n, 247n-
248n, 250n, 319n; First-
Dynasty, 192; Delta, 117,
151, 249; Western Delta,
249; Old Kingdom, 197,
244, 248; Middle Kingdom,
250; Memphis, 245; Pyra-
mids, 189; Gods, 248n; Ho-
rus, Seth and Isis, 178; 183;
Min, 186; Shu, 195n; and
Tefnut, 181; Egyptian Rhea,
181; Pta, Phthas, 245; and
the Ancient Near East, 171n,
195n; and Babylon, 319;
and Mesopotamia, 318-319,
319n; and Aegean, 195n;
and Africa, 150; cf. Heliopo-
lis
Ancient Egyptian language:
see Middle Egyptian; De-
motic, 246-247; Demotic
Pt, 246; and Coptic, 247;
Egyptian Hebrew, 247
Ancient Greek(s), Greece, 20,
63, 66-67, 72, 99-100, 144,
150-151, 155, 177-178, 181,
186, 193-195, 197-200, 233-
234, 243-246, 248-250, 336,
342-344, 346, 357-361, 362-
Index of Proper Names and Motifs
431
365, 368-372, 409, 412,
417-418, 420, 428, 100n,
171n, 189n, 235n, 249n,
343n, 345n, 361n-362n,
418n; Apollo and Artemis,
181; Circe, 178; Hephaes-
tus, 245; Pandora, 193; Ha-
des, 178; Hephaestus, 20;
Greek-Greek, intra-epic
comparison, 359; and Ro-
mance languages and litera-
tures, 247; Ancient Greek
language, and Sanskrit, 20,
357-358, 370; also see
Achaean
Ancient Israel(ite(s)), 178, 184,
188, 318-319, 329-331,
319n-320n; kingdom of ,
and Judah, 329
Ancient Mesopotamia, 150;
and Egypt, 173; also see
next entry
Ancient Near East, 172, 177,
88n, 164n, 180n
Ancient Nordic world, 194
Ancient World, 192
Andaman Isl., 158, 229, 231-
233, 237; and Melanesian,
Australian, 230
Andes, 42
Angaite, 109, 115-116, 118
Angara Basin, 113
Anglo-Saxon, 98
Angola(n(s)), 170-171, 180,
186, 190-191; and Southern
Congo, 171
Annual Conference of the In-
ternational Association For
Comparative Mythology;
First, Edinburgh, 18; Sec-
ond, Ravenstein, 5, 17-18,
21, 18n, 143n
Antaeus, 194-195
Antelope, 179
Antenor, 195n
Anthinna, 32
Anthropomorphism, 280
Anthropos: Internationale
Zeitschrift fr Vlker- und
Sprachenkunde / Interna-
tional Review of Anthropol-
ogy and Linguistics / Revue
Internationale dEthnologie
et de Linguistique, 17n
Antiquity, Graeco-Roman,
172, 190, 195-196, 171n-
172n; and the Ancient Near
East, 172n
Antis, American ethnic group,
233
Anubis, 193
Ao, ethnic group in Nagaland,
India, 183
Apache, 233
Apat, 413, 420-421
Aphrodite, 193, 197, 244, 409-
410, 413, 420-423, 195n;
Shining, 244; wife of
Hephaestus, 244; compared
with Egyptian Sekhmet,
248; and Ares, 409; cf.
Graeco-Roman
Apocalypse, book of the New
Testament, and by implica-
tion eschatological
mytheme, 192; cf. Ragnark
Apollo, 181, 189, 194, 197,
199, 245, 365, 420, 365n,
368n; and Artemis, 197; and
Heracles, 189; .cf. Minerva
Apomu Ikere, 140
Appendix, section of Mahab-
harata, 367
Apsu, 191
Aquatic Beings, in Iliad and
Mahabharata, 363
Arab(s), Arabia(n), 119, 154,
161, 181, 247; Htr, 246;
Muslim, 65; and Jews, 161;
South Epigraphic 247
Arabic, Semitic language, 65,
245-246, 145n, 171n
Aramaic, 247
Aranda, see Arrente
Aranrhod, 193
Ararat, 234
Araromi, 128, 135, 137
Araucanian, 233
Arawak, 233
Archaic Cosmos: Polarity,
Space and Time, 270; cf.
Lyle, E.
Arduui Sura Anahita, 76; cf.
Anahita
Ares, 189, 194, 244, 409-410;
and Aphrodite, 410, 420,
422-423; and Aphrodite in
the Odyssea, 413; cf. Mars
Aresa of Iresa Adu, 137
Argonautica, 183, 195n; cf.
Apollonius Rhodius
Argonauts, 200
Argos, 249
Aria Banga, 381
Arikara, 109, 116-117
Aristaeus, 195n
Arjuna, 357-365, 367-370,
361n, 365n; and Krishna,
358, 360-362, 367
Ark of the Covenant, 188
Arnhem Land, 32; and the
Kimberleys, 227
Arrente (Aranda), 28, 31, 119,
237
Artemis, 181, 197, 421
Arthur, king, 177, 183, 189,
191-192; and Morgan, 192
Arts, feminine, see Spider
Aryan, 78, 111, 322; cf. Indo-
Aryan, Indo-European
Aa Vahita, 370n
ASD, see Autism Spectrum
Disorder
Asenneth, 250
Ashlock, 326n
Ai, 76
Asia Minor, 197; cf. Anatolia
Asia(n(s)), 18-19, 109-111,
113-116, 119-120, 122, 124,
144-145, 150-152, 154, 157-
162, 164, 166, 172, 177-
179, 183-184, 186-191, 195-
197, 199, 202, 229, 237,
253-256, 283, 318, 382,
406, 427, 30n, 149n, 151n-
152n, 155n, 159n, 164n-
165n, 171n-172n, 174n,
189n, 201n, 225n, 234n,
375n, 382n; Northeast Asia,
115, 124, 256; East Asia,
113, 166, 186, 254-255,
171n; and South Asia, 144;
and South-East Asia, 144;
East and West Asia, 162;
Central, 152, 154, 161, 164,
172, 177, 179, 188, 190,
199, 283, 159n, 165n;
Steppe, 189n; and East
Asia, 183, 196; West(ern)
Asia, 144, 150-151, 160,
183-184, 186-188, 190-191,
202, 149n, 151n, 155n; Neo-
lithic, 151; Southeast Asia,
154, 187, 196, 253, 255,
382, 164n, 382n; and Aus-
tralia, 111; and East Asia,
188; and South Asia, 109,
166; South Asia, 114-115,
150, 172, 177-178, 190,
196, 229, 189n; Asian-
Mediterranean-Saharan Pe-
lasgian complex, 151; Asia
and Africa, 30n;; Asia and
Australia, 406, 375n; Asia
and America, 116; and
Europe, 120; and Melanesia,
110; so see Far East, Old
World, Eurasia
Aspergers syndrome, 306-307
Asseneth, biblical figure, wife
432
of Joseph, 250
Assurbanipal, 249
Assyria(n), 246, 249, 88n
Assyriology, 171; cf. Ak-
kadian, Ancient Near East,
Mesopotamia
Astaroth, 181
Astarte, 181
Asteropaeus, 365
Asto vidotu, death demon, 80-
81
Astronomy-Pole-Unilateral
Being, Additional Narrative
Complex, 157n-158n
Asur, Aur, 78
At, ethnic group in the Central
Philippines, 229
Atalanta-type version of Magic
flight, aspect of the Emer-
gence of First People
mytheme, 120, 122
Atalanta, 195
Atana, Mycenaean, 249; cf.
Athena
Athab/pascan(s), 115, 232; and
Algonkian, 115
Athena, 144, 151, 155, 174,
184, 186, 188, 190, 243,
245. 249, 253, 261, 263,
359-360, 362-363, 415-416,
420, 143n, 146n, 155n,
165n, 174n, 250n; Parthe-
nn, 250n; and Erichtho-
nios, 253, 263; and
Hephaestus, 165n; and Po-
seidon, 165n; and Virgin
Mary, 253, 261, 263; also
see Atana, Neith, Anahita,
Anath, Nyambi
Athens, Athenian(s), 321, 245,
180n, 250n
Athirat, 181
Atmajawijaya, 382n
Atninja, 32n
Atraasis, 178, 234n; cf. Flood,
Noah, Ziusudra
Attic, Ancient Greek dialect,
243; cf. Ionian
Augeas, Ancient Greek mythi-
cal king, 343n
Australia(n(s)), 18-19, 25-32,
34, 38-39, 42, 109, 111,
116, 119-120, 158, 160,
186, 191, 200, 225-233,
236-238, 240, 318, 324,
406, 19n, 30n, 159n, 226n,
228n, 239n, 375n; Aborigi-
nal, 25, 27, 30; Northern
Territory, 31; Central Aus-
tralia, 28, 31; Western Aus-
tralia, 32; Australia, and
Africa, 225; and Europe, 26;
and East Asia, 111; and
Melanesia, 109; and New
Guinea, 160; and Oceania,
18; also see Aboriginal,
Oceania
Austric, linguistic macrophy-
lum, 152, 154-156, 202,
153n-154n, 201n; and
Bantu, 153n; in Upper Pa-
laeolithic, 202; cf. Borean,
Peripheral and Central
Branches
Austroasiatic, 155-156; cf.
Austronesian, Austric
Austronesian, 155, 225n-226n;
Proto- , 156; Madagascar,
226n; cf. Austric
Autism Spectrum Disorder,
306-307
Avadanasataka, 69
Avalon, 192
Avars, 196
Avesta(n), Awesta(n), 75-82,
84-85, 100, 100n; Sraoa,
79; Videvdad, 75, 78, 80-82,
85; Yats, 76; Yima and
Gaiia Mar, 82
Awolowo, 135
Axis Mundi, in the Indonesian
Archipelago, 382n
Ayeuna, 389, 396n
Aymara, 235n
Aynu-rak-kur, hero figure in
Ainu myth, 257
Aztec(s), 184, 233, 318

Baale of Ibadan, 128, 128, 134,
140
Baba Yaga, 67
Babangida, General Ibrahim
Badamosi, 136
Babel, 152
Babylon(ian(s), 181, 186, 197,
232-234, 246, 319, 234n;
pan-Babylonism, 150;
Babylonian Marduk in
Enuma Elish, 186; cf. Mar-
duk
Bacairi, 235n
Ba
c
al Zebul/b, Ugaritic deity,
85
Back-into-Africa, genetic hy-
pothesis of Eurasian return
migration from the Upper
Palaeolithic onward, 144,
158, 161-164, 159n
Bactria-Margiana Archaeo-
logical Complex, 75, 86
Badamosi, 136
Badra, 382n
Baghdad, 65
Bahasa Indonesia, 381, 399,
399n
Bajun, 67
Bakici Baci, representatives of
all the different families
owning sacred ground
within the kingdom, West
African Bantu (Bakongo)
expression, 186; cf. Nyambi
Bakongo, 330
Bald(e)r, 91, 96-98, 101-103,
197, 274, 98n, 102n
Balderus, see Baldr
Baldrs Draumar, part of Poetic
Edda, 102n
Bali, Balinese, 259, 318
Balkan(s), 114, 183
Baltic, 59-60, 63-65, 67-68,
114, 189, 427, 19n; Baltic-
Finnish, 110n; and Hittite,
67; and Slavic, 60, 63, 65,
68
Banana, type of fruit, one of J.
Frazers basic mythemes on
the Origin of Death, 30n
Bandung, 376-377, 382-383,
395, 427, 20n, 375n, 384n
Bangala, African ethnic group,
183
Banhar, Asian ethnic group,
109, 116
Bantu studies, Bantuist, 152
Bantu, linguistic phylum, 144-
145, 152-153, 155-156, 166,
169, 174-175, 178-179, 183-
184, 186, 196-199, 203,
230, 318, 324, 153n, 180n;
speaking Africa, 318, 324;
speaking South Central and
Southern Africa, 203; Cen-
tral Bantu, 169; and
Khoisan, 153; in the Bronze
Age Mediterranean, 197;
also see Niger-Congo
Banusan Ajar Sidik, 380
Bapak Undang, 378
Barotse, Barotseland, 169-170,
172, 180, 193, 198, 188n; cf.
Luyi, Lozi, Rotse, Nkoya,
Luyana
Basarwa, Botswana division of
San, q.v.
Bashorun Ogunmola of Ibadan,
135
Bara, 171n
Bata, 193
Bath, Goodwife of 410
433
Bathurst and Melville Islands,
25, 29-30
Batu Bumi Agung, 385, 394
Batu Gedong Peteng, 385, 392
Batu Kaca Saadeg, 385, 392
Batu Karaton, 385, 392
Batu Korsi Gading, 386, 394
Batu Kuta, 393
Batu Kutarungu, 385
Batu Lawang Tujuh, 386, 394
Batu Padaringan, 386, 394
Batu Paibuan, 385, 391
Batu Pakuwon Prabu Sili-
wangi, 386
Batu Palawangan Ibu, 385, 391
Batu Panyipuhan, 385, 391
Batu Poponcoran, 385, 391
Bee(s), 174, 177-178, 190,
174n, 195n; Hive, 177, q.v.;
Ruler, 195n; also see
Transformation, Honey,
Reed, Queen Bee, Melissae,
Melisseus, Luhamba, She of
the Reed and the Bee
Beer, cf. Honey
Beer-sheba, 329-330
Beijing, 18, 226n, 230n; Bei-
jing Chinese dialect, 155
Belfries of the Churches, 64;
cf. cemetery
Belgium, 428, 409n; cf. Flan-
ders
Bella-Bella, 233
Bemba, 180, 188n; cf.
Wawemba
Bena-Lulua, 180
Benin, 190
Beowulf, 96, 98, 101, 96n; and
Sonatorrek, 96n
Berber(s), 118, 145n, 171n;
and Old Egyptian, 145n
Bering Strait, Sea, Beringian,
201, 259, 201n
Bern(aR), father of five Kyn-
munds in Rk Stone con-
text, 93
Bern, town in Switzerland, 93
Bhagavad Gt, 360, 345n
Bible, biblical, 161, 175, 199,
225, 230, 234-235, 237,
239-240, 329-331, 419,
180n, 232n, 320n; Biblical
Hebrew, 180n; cf. Tanach,
Old Testament, constituting
books, and individual bibli-
cal figures e.g. Adam, Eve,
Noah
Bibliotheca, 181, 189, 194; cf.
Apollodorus
Bielorussia(n), 63
Big-bellied, 248; cf. Ogre
Big-Raven, 257
Bihe, 183
Bima, 25, 30
Bird, 160, 233; also see Giant,
Garuda, Lightning Bird
Birth and Childhood, 385
Biur, 380
Black Athena, 144, 151, 174,
184, 249, 143n, 146n, 174n;
cf. Bernal, M., Lefkowitz,
M., Hephaestus, Blaek, V.
Black Sea, 238
Blackbeard the Pirate, 196
Blackfoot, 233
Blenheim, 420
Blodeuwedd, 193
Blood, 197, 158n
Blood-as-Poison / Menstrua-
tion, Additional Narrative
Complex, 157n-158n
Boadicea, 190
Boat, also see Flood myths
Witzel model
Body, 99n; Body Fluids, also
see Flood myths Witzel
model
Bogomils, 114
Bohairic, 246-247, 249
Boii Gauls, in Gallia Cisalpina,
196
Bola Ige, 135
Bones, 31; also see Shaman-
ism, divination
Boni, ethnic group East Africa,
180; cf. Sania
Borean, hypothetical parent
linguistic macrophylum,
144, 152-156, 161, 202,
152n, 154n, 158n-159n,
201n; cf. Eurasiatic,
Afroasiatic, Bantu, Niger-
Congo, Khoisan, Nilo-
Saharan, Sino-Caucasian,
Austric, Amerind
Borneo, 233
Bororo, 233
Borroloola, 29n
Botswana, 171n
Bottom, cf. Global Etymology
of Earth, Bottom, Human
Bougainville, 259
Bous, 96
Brahm, 360, 366-367, 370-
371
Brahmaa, 61
Brahmanic, Brahmanical,
Brahmanism, 70-71
Brahmaprabha, 61
Brahmin, 70
Brains and History, 280; cf.
Farmer, S.
Brazil, 117-118, 235n
Breaking the Spell: Religion as
a Natural Phenomenon,
291n; cf. Dennett, D.
Bride, also see Murderous
bride, The False Wife
Britain, British, 44, 170, 229,
166n; cf. Great-Britain, UK,
English
Britain, the island of, literary
expression, 188
Brno, 427, 20n, 243n
Brocas Area, 299
Bronze Age, 86, 144, 149, 151,
161, 165, 176, 189, 254,
159n, 180n; Mediterranean,
153, 184, 199; Middle ,
150, 164, 166
Brother, 35, 192; Brother-
sister, 253, 263; cf. Sister
Brutus, 418
Buddha, 61, 69-70
Buddhism, Buddhist(s), 59, 61-
63, 65-72, 196, 233, 254,
290, 375-376, 383, 396,
19n, 61n-63n, 383n, 399n;
Southern Buddhists, 68; and
Jain, 61; Baltic and Slavic
Parallels, 19n, 61n-63n; Vi-
naya, 70-71; and Sufism,
376
Buffalo, 117, 200
Buhari, 136
Building with skulls, also see
Demon cuts off mens head,
193-194; cf. Skull
Bulg(h)ars, 196
Bulgaria, 183
Bundahin, 79
Bundjel, Australian supreme
deity, 228n
Burma, 179
Burning of the Khandava For-
est, 358
Bushmen, see San
Buzzard, 182
Byblos, 181

Cabanis, 287
Cabiri, 245
Cacus, 192, 195
Caddo, 109, 116, 178
Caduveo, 118
Cahiers Caribens
dgyptologie, 150
Cahita, ethnic group, South
America, 233
Cain, biblical mythical figure,
434
39n
Caingang, ethnic group, South
America, 233, 235n
Calabash, also see Flood myths
Witzel model
California(n), 115, 233, 20n,
235n, 279n; Penuti, and the
Middle Missouri Sioux, 115
Caliph of Baghdad, 65; cf.
Abasid
Calligraphy, Sand, 171n; cf.
c
ilm al-raml
Calvin in Myth, 19n; cf. Mol.
H.J.
Calvinism, 19
Camara, American ethnic
group, 233
Cambodia, 117
Cambridge MA, USA, 5, 17-
18, 427-428, 19n-20n, 59n,
91n, 225n
Cambyses, 245
Cameroon(ian), 41, 43-44, 236,
43n; Egyptologist Oum
Ndigi, 150
Canada, 197
Canberra, 19n
Cannibal Bat, mythical figure,
Brazil, 117
Cannibal Hymn, 189; cf. Unas,
Ancient Egypt
Capitalism, 317
Caraja, 109, 116
Cardinal Directions, see Direc-
tions
Carib, 233, 235n
Caribbean, 183, 233
Carita Ciung Wanara, 379
Carita Parahyangan, 379, 381
Carmelites, Roman Catholic
religious order, 290
Caroline Isl., 233
Carrier, North American ethnic
group, 233
Cat, see Native Cat
atal Hyk, and Ancient
Mesopotamia, 177
Catalogue, Electronic, of Folk-
lore-Mythological Motifs,
110; cf. Berezkin
Catawba, 233
Catholic, see Roman Catholic
Cattle, see Grave-Cattle, Cow
Caucasus, 234
Cauldron, of Kingship, 168,
184, 188, 188n
CDA, Concise Dictionary of
Akkadian, 247, 245n; cf.
Black, G.A., & Postgate, N.
Celtic, 166, 177, 179, 186,
188-191, 193, 196, 271,
427; Europe, 190; and
Uralic, 186; cf. Nkoya
Central and East Chadic and in
Low East Cushitic, 155
Central Khoisan, 156
Cerberus, Kerberos, under-
world hound, 100, 100n,
343n
Cermait, cf. Ogma
Chaco, 118, 232-233, 236n
Chadic, 47, 155-156, 145n; cf.
Afroasiatic, East Chadic
Chariot, 60, 150, 165-166, 361-
362, 165n, 180n; cf. Horse
Chemmis, 177, 190; cf. A-bt
Cheyenne, 233
Chibcha, 235n
Chibinda, 179
Chichen Itza, 196
Chief Bola Ige, 135
Chief Obafemi Awolowo, 135
Chief Obalaaye of Iraye, 134
Chief Oladiran Ajayi, 136
Chief Omololu Olunloyo, 135
Chimariko, 233
China, Chinese, 18, 61, 155-
156, 178-179, 181, 190,
193, 196, 233-236, 253-255,
261-262, 299, 376, 383,
402, 404-405, 171n, 234n-
235n, 282n, 383n; Classic
Old Chinese, 155; Buddhist,
61; Dao De Ching, 404; N
Wa, 193; and South East
Asia, 234n; and Taiwan,
254; in Korea, 196
Chipewyan, 233
Chiricahua Apache, 233
Chiriguano, 232-234
Chnum, 193; cf. Ptah
Choctaw, 233
Chokwe, 170, 180, 182
Christ, 344n
Christ, see Jesus
Christian(s), Christianity, 19,
85, 91, 97, 144, 169-170,
174-176, 179, 183, 186,
196, 200-201, 231, 286,
288, 321, 324, 342, 383,
412, 98n, 147n, 235n; Chris-
tophorus, 200; Myth, 342;
World, 85; and Islam, 175-
176, 201, 383, 147n; cf.
Judaeo-Christian, Bible
Christmas, 183
Christophorus, 200
Chronicles, two book of the
Bible, 329-330
Chukchee, 256-257
Ciamis Regency, 377, 382
Cianjur Regency, 382
Cikahuripan, 385, 391
Ciparigi, 378
Circe, 178, 193; and Pasiphae,
195n
Citarum River, 381
CITI, see Context of Intensi-
fied Transformation and In-
novation
Ciung Wanara, 379, 381
Classificatory kinship, 189n
Cochiti, 233
Codex of Ritual Purity,
Avestan, 76; cf. Videvdad
Coffin Texts, 197; cf. Ancient
Egypt
Colchis, Colchian, 193, 200;
king Aetes, 195n;
Cold, see Spirits
Colonialism, 317, 377
Columbia, 115, 166n; cf. Ama-
zonia
Combat, Combatants, see
Games
Combretacee, tree species, 118
Comoro Isl., 171n
Comparative Method, Com-
parativism, 5, 17-18, 21, 33-
34, 157, 176-180, 182-183,
186-188, 190-192, 194, 197-
200, 239, 248, 253, 267,
315-316, 318, 320-322, 324,
329, 332, 143n, 363n; Con-
trolled , 316, 318; Old ,
316, 321, 332; involving
Australia, 34; of Ptah and
Hephaestus and, 248;
Greek-Greek, intra-epic
comparison, 359; cf. Gener-
alizing
Compensation, 96
Competing, 69, 128
7th Conference on Ethnogene-
sis in South and Central
Asia (ESCA), 18
Conflict, 44-45, 362-363, 366
Confucius, Confucianism, 254
Congo, 168, 170-173, 176,
230, 330; and South Africa,
230
Congo-Zambezi watershed,
200
Contamination, 144
Contest with drought demon,
Aarne-Thompson no. A255,
167-169; also see Games,
Combat, Fontenrose
Context of Intensified Trans-
formation and Innovation,
435
158, 160, 163, 158n
Continuities, 5, 234; mytho-
logical, between Africa and
other continents, 107-264,
esp. 143-224
Contradictory messengers
bring death, Narrative Com-
plex, 159-160
Controlled Comparativism, see
Comparative
Conus shell, 188
Cook Group, 233
Coos, North American ethnic
group, 233
Coptic, Copt, 246-250, 412;
Church, 412; Pta, 246;
Sahidic, 246-247; Sahidic
Asenneth, 250; Sahidic
Atrpe, 249; cf. Old Coptic
Corn Mother and Corn-Spirit,
mytheme, 263
Corn, 253, 263; Corn-Spirit,
263; Corn Spirit, Raising
the, Additional Narrative
Complex, 157n-158n
Corpse, 75, 81, 99; demoness,
99n; Strand, 99; Devourer,
99n-100n; also see Living
Corpse, Dead Man Walking,
Nstrnd
Cosmogony of the Separation
of Heaven and Earth, 162,
198, 195n
Cosmogony of the Separation
of the Waters and the Land,
162, 192, 194, 195n
Cosmogony, Cosmogonic,
160-162, 192, 194, 198,
203, 195n; Cosmogonic
Rainbow Snake, 203; Vir-
gin, 161, q.v.; also see Crea-
tion
Cosmological Theory of Myth,
267; cf. Lyle, E.
Cosmology, Cosmological, 18,
267-268, 275
Cosmos, the world, 18, 60,
270; cf. Universe
Cosmos: Journal of the Tradi-
tional Cosmology Society,
18; Cosmos Fellowship, 270
Counselor of the World, 258
Covenant, 188
Cow of Heaven, Additional
Narrative Complex, 157n-
158n; cf. Heaven
Coyote, 124, 258, 157n; and
Antelope, 179; also see
Trickster
Craftsman, 361; cf. Pta,
Hephaestus, Maya
Crane, also see Transformation
Creation, 186, 190, 197, 238;
cf. Cosmogony
Creator Goddess, Creatrix,
186, 165n; Creator, 186,
229-230, 257, 370, 165n;
also see Cosmogony
Cree, North American ethnico-
linguistic group, 233
Crescent, 161, 163; cf. Moon
Crete, Cretan, 177, 244; Cretan
Minos, 189n
Critical Edition, of the Ma-
habharata, 360, 358n
Crocodile, 191; scales, 191;
also see Transformation,
Kimbiji
Cronus, Kronos, 422
Crow, North American ethnic
group, 233
Crow, species of birds, 258
C Chulainn, 189
Cuan, ethnic group, Caribbean,
233
Cubeo, ethnic group, Carib-
bean, 233, 235n
Cultivation, 44
Culture Hero, also see Flood
myths Witzel model
Cunda, a Buddhist monk, 69
Cushitic, 155, 145n; cf.
Afroasiatic
Cut-Nose, 117
Cybele, 181
Cycle, wider category of An-
cient Greek epics, 368; cf.
Homer
Cyclops, see One-eyed
Cycnus, 194-195; cf. Swan
Cypriotic, Ancient Greek dia-
lect, 244
Cyrene, 195n
Czech(s), Czech Republic, 63,
427, 243n

Daedalus, 192
Daena, 75
Dagda, 188
Dahomey, 190
Daijo-sai, 255
Dakota, North, 117
Daly, Australian informant, 31
Dame, La belle , Aarne-
Thompson no. 0264, 167-
169
Dan, biblical location and eth-
nic group, 329-330
Dancing Goddess of Heaven,
Japanese, 256; cf. Ame-no-
Uzume
Danish, 96; and Swedish, 100
Danube, 196
Dao De Ching, 375-376, 402,
405, 405n; cf. Lao Tze
Darwins Cathedral: Evolu-
tion, Religion, and the Na-
ture of Society, 291n; cf.
Wilson, D.S.
Das Mrchen vom Mann im
Monde, 39; cf. Bechstein, L.
Das Wesen des Christentums,
288; cf. Feuerbach, L.
Dat MahaKawasa, Sunda ex-
pression for the Almighty,
386n
David, king, biblical figure,
329-331
Dawn, Japanese goddess, 259
Day Receptacle Woman,
Kwakiutl mythical concept,
258
De Natura Deorum, 245; cf.
Cicero
Dead Man Walking, Nkoya
mythical concept, 168
Dead, also see: Land of ,
King of
Death demon, 100n
Death, Dead, 5, 25, 49, 51, 54,
63, 66, 75-76, 79-81, 94,
101, 168-169, 172, 178,
19n; Dead, Land of the, q.v.;
also see Hero fights , Con-
tradictory Messengers bring
, Underworld, Demon of
Death; Ivan Tretej, King of

Death, origin of, also see:
Originator of death the first
sufferer, Two Messengers,
Waxing and Waning, Ser-
pent, Banana
Delhi, 359
Delphi, 189
Delta, see Ancient Egypt
Deluge, 167, 233, 416, 235n;
also see Flood, Inundation
Deluge, inundation of world,
Aarne-Thompson no.
A1010, 167-169
Demiurge, 191
Demodocus, 422
Demon cuts off mens heads to
build with them, Aarne-
Thompson no. G315, 167-
169
Demon, 81, 169, 172, 257; of
Death, 81; also see Fairy
demoness, serpent, snake
436
Demons, 100n; female, 99n
Den norsk-islandske skjalde-
digtning, 99n
Dendrogram, 153
Dene, ethnico-linguistic clus-
ter, North America, 232; cf.
Na-Dene
Dene-Caucasian, 152; and
Austric, 152; cf. Sino-
Caucasian
Deng, 197; Dengs Tears, 197
Denmark, 97, 189
Dentata, see Vagina
Department of America,
Kunstkamera, Peter the
Great Museum of Anthro-
pology and Ethnography,
Russian Academy of Sci-
ences, St. Petersburg, Rus-
sia, 427
Department of Arts, Literature
and Languages, Universit
Marc Bloch, Strassbourg,
France, 428
Department of Celtic and Scot-
tish Studies, Edinburgh
University, Scotland, UK,
427
Department of Central Asia,
Kunstkamera, Peter the
Great Museum of Anthro-
pology and Ethnography,
Russian Academy of Sci-
ences, St. Petersburg, Rus-
sia, 427
Department of Divinity and
Religious Studies, Univer-
sity of Aberdeen, Scotland,
UK, 428
Department of English, Har-
vard University, Cambridge
MA, USA, 427
Department of Forestry, West-
ern Java, 377n
Department of Latin and
Greek, University of Ghent,
Belgium, 428
Department of Linguistics and
Baltic Languages, Masaryk
University, Brno, Czech
Republic, 427
Department of Philosophy,
Erasmus University, Rotter-
dam, the Netherlands, 375n
Department of Religious Stud-
ies, Studies, Tilburg Univer-
sity, the Netherlands, 428,
41n
Department of Sankrit and
Indian Studies, Harvard uni-
versity, Cambridge MA,
USA, 5, 428
Department of Transcultural
Studies, Wako University,
Tokyo, Japan, 428
Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhun-
derts, 339n; cf. Rosenberg,
A., Hitler, A., Nazism
Destruction of humankind, also
model; Destroyer, 77n
Deukalion, 189
Deus Otiosus, 227
Dewi Naga Ningrum, 380
Dewi Pangreyep, 380
Dharma, 62, 69, 71
Dialogues concerning Natural
Religion, 288; cf. Hume, D.
Dieri, Australian ethnic group,
119
Dietrich von Bern, 93
Diffusion, 175, 187
Dignification, 399n
Dikusumah, 375, 379-381
Dilolo, 182
Dina Raga Na, 400
Dingirlim-i, 66
Dingo, 31
Dinka, 197
Diomedes, 194
Dionysus, 189
Dios Apat, 420-421; in the
Iliad, 413
Dioscuri, Dioskouroi, 271
Diptera, zoological class, 177
Directions, 84; also see Four
Diver, Earth, see Earth Diver
Divina Comedia, 39n; cf.
Alighieri, Dante
Divyavadana, 61
Djala and Tigri, West Asian
archaeological sites, 234n
Djinani, 25, 30
DNA, Desoxyribonucleic acid,
103, 154, 157, 160-161,
163, 229; DNA-community,
95
Dog, 80; cf. Hllenhund, Cer-
berus
Dogon, 41, 43-55, 179, 181,
187, 203, 43n, 47n; Nommo,
181
Dogrib, 179
Dong, ethnic minority in
China, 179
Doric, Ancient Greek dialect,
243, 249
Dorz, Ethiopian ethnic group,
412
Dragon as power of evil,
Aarne-Thompson no. B11.9,
167-169
Dragon can fly, Aarne-
Thompson no. B11.4.1, 167-
169
Dragon has power of transfor-
mation, Aarne-Thompson
no. B11.5.1, 167-169
Dragon king as wind, Aarne-
Thompson no. D429.2.1,
167-169
Dragon, 167-168, 380; of
Wiru, 380; also see Fiery,
Fight, Sky god, Transforma-
tion, Woman fights
Dragon, Aarne-Thompson no.
B11, 167-169
Dream, 28-29, 347; Dream-
time, 28-29, pivotal Austra-
lian cosmological concept
Drops, 183, 188, 197; cf.
Mvula, Rain
Drought, 167, 191-192, 200;
Drought Serpent, 192; also
see Contest, Waters, Vtra,
Snake Child / Parent of
Drunk, see Intoxication
Drux-ya-Nasu, 75, 81-86
Dryas, 283
Dryness, 192; cf. Drought,
Waters
Duality, 160-161, 270; also see
Pairs
Duality-Two children-Twins,
Narrative Complex, 159-160
Dug-out, 85
Dugum Dani, ethnic group in
New Guinea, 116
Duke Religion Index, 308; cf.
Koenig
Dunia Tengah, Sunda axis
mundi, 382n
Dutch, see Netherlands
Dwarf, Dwarf-like, 248
Dying, see Death
Dymwach the Giant, 188
Dyuktai, ethnic group in Sibe-
ria, 113

Eagle / vulture, Aarne-
Thompson no. D152.1-3,
167-169
Eagle, 179, 183
Early-Modern, 193; Jewish,
193
Earth Diver, 109, 114-115; in
Latin America, 115; and the
Emergence of the First Peo-
ple, 115
Earth Diver, Additional Narra-
437
tive Complex, 157n-158n
Earth, 64, 152, 155, 158-162,
178-179, 181-182, 193, 195,
197-198, 201, 203, 235,
238, 385, 157n, 191n, 195n;
also see Gaia, Flood myths
Witzel model, Overturning ,
also see Flood myths Wit-
zel model, Earth-Dragon,
Separation, Reconnection,
Heaven, Mother, Papa,
Global Etymology of Earth,
Bottom, Human
Earth, the, Narrative Complex,
159-160
Earth-Dragon / Mountain /
Volcano, Additional Narra-
tive Complex, 157n-158n;
cf. Fire
East African Highway, eco-
logical and demographic
corridor from Kenya to
South Africa, 237
East Chadic, 156; cf. Chadic,
Afroasiatic
Easter, 183; cf. Fire
Eddas, 95; Poetic , 102n
Edinburgh, Edinburgh Univer-
sity, 18, 270, 289, 427, 20n,
267n
Edison, Thomas A., 192
Egg, 160; also see World Egg
Egypt, see Ancient Egypt
Egyptocentrism, Egyptocen-
trist, 150; M. Bernals Black
Athena thesis as, 151
Egyptology, 105, 150, 171;
Oum Ndigi, 150; Henri
Frankfort, 319n
Eight, personification, 304
Eiks, central Greek concept,
343n
Ekitiparapo, 135
Elder Sister, proposed trans-
formation of Virgin Mother,
192
Elements, transformative cycle
of, 81, 192, 197, 200, 357-
358, 363-364, 369, 157n;
also see Four
Emergence of First People
motif, 109, 114-115, 118-
119; also see: Shed skin,
Suns children killed, Person
is tricked into killing his kin,
People from the Under-
world, the Way from One
World to Another Goes
through a Narrow Opening,
the False Wife, Kind and
unkind girls, Magic flight,
Atalanta type, Originator of
death the first sufferer, Earth
Diver
Emptiness, 192
Enemies, also see Transforma-
tion
Energy, 80, 341n
English, England, 5, 28, 64, 96,
98-99, 110, 156, 281, 427,
110n, 230n, 396n, 404n,
413n; Christian, 183; and
Dutch, 182n; cf. Anglo-
Saxon, Old English, Britain,
Great Britain
Enki, 178
Enlightenment, 345, 413, 416-
417
Enma Dai-, 178
Ennead, 193
Entmythisierung, German,
demythising, 341n
Entmythologisierung, German,
demythologising, in Ancient
Greek intellectual history,
341n, 343n
Enuma Elish, 186, 197
EP, see Emergence of First
People
Epic poets, Greek, 179, 190,
343n; cf. Homer, Apollonius
Rhodius
Equestrian competitions, 63;
cf. Horse
Erasmus University Rotterdam
the Netherlands, 5, 18, 428,
17n, 143n, 375n
Erichthonios, 253, 263
Erythraean, see Red Sea, South
Erythraean, Frobenius
ESCA, see: Conference, 7th,
on Ethnogenesis in South
and Central Asia
Escape, 160, 233, 237; also see
Flood myths Witzel model
Eskimo, 110, 115, 232-233,
235n
Ethiopia(n(s)), 412, 145n; cf.
Dorz
Ethnogenesis, see Conference,
7th
Etruscan, 197
Euenos, 195
Euhemeristic, mythological
theory that gods and heroes
are exalted historical per-
sons, 351n; cf. Euhemerus
Euphrates, 197
Eurasia(n(s)), 19-20, 109-111,
113-115, 119-120, 143-144,
148-149, 152, 154, 156-157,
159, 162-164, 166-167, 171,
173-176, 184, 186, 190,
193, 196-199, 201, 203,
225, 239, 253-254, 288,
20n, 159n, 164n, 176n,
201n, 225n; West Eurasia,
110, 118, 164, 197-198,
164n, 201n; Northern Eura-
sia, 113-114, 120; Eastern
Eurasia, 164; Continental
Eurasia, 111, 113-114, 119;
Continental Eurasia and the
Indo-Pacific, 110; Eurasian
Steppe, 144, 166, 199, 188n;
Upper Palaeolithic, 162; and
African, 162, 201, 203,
159n; and American, 114,
225, 225n; and North Amer-
ica, 119; cf. Europe, Asia
Eurasiatic, linguistic macro-
phylum, 152, 154, 161, 186,
152n, 154n; and Afroasiatic,
154n
Europe(an(s)), 19, 21, 26-27,
39, 62, 113-114, 120, 131,
144, 148, 150, 155, 158-
159, 164, 177-178, 183,
187, 189-190, 192-193, 196,
198, 253-255, 282-283, 330,
357, 43n, 188n; Northern,
144, 177; Northeast, 113;
North-western, 144; Eastern
21, 196; Central , 109;
Western, 144; Europe-
originating, 174; Melusine,
193; Christian, 196; Iron
Age, 196; Neolithic, 178;
and African, 159; and East
Africa, 187; and Asian, 148;
also see Old World, Eurasia
Eve, see African , Out-of-
Africa
Evil demon driven from
heaven, Aarne-Thompson
no. G303.S.1, 167-169
Evil demon has one eye in
middle of forehead, Aarne-
Thompson no. G303.4.1.2.1,
167-169
Evil demon in form of snake,
Aarne-Thompson no.
G303.3.3.6.1, 167-169
Evil demon is gods son,
Aarne-Thompson no. 05
03.1.1, 167-169
Evil demon produces storms,
controls winds, Aarne-
Thompson no. D2141.0.3.
2142.0.1, 167-169
438
Evil demon, also see Sky god
Evil Spirit, 81, 84; also see
Dragon
Exodus, Out-of-Africa, 152,
156, 159, 161, 187, 189,
198, 203, 203n; also see
Out-of-Africa, Back-into-
Africa
Exposure-objects, 308
Expression of the Emotions in
Man and Animals, 294; cf.
Darwin, C.
Extended Fertile Crescent, 161,
163
Extended General Sunda The-
sis, 163; cf. Special Sunda
Thesis, Oppenheimer, S.
Eyak, 115
Eyang Prabu Silihwangi, 394-
395
Eye, of Horus, 179; also see
One-eyed person, evil de-
mon
Eyes removed but replaced,
Aarne-Thompson no. E781,
167-169

Faces in the Clouds: A New
Theory of Religion, 295; cf.
Guthrie, S.
Faculty of Oriental Studies,
University of Oxford, Ox-
ford, UK, 427
Faculty of Philosophy, Parahy-
angan Catholic University,
Bandung, West Java, Indo-
nesia, 427-428
Faculty of Philosophy, Theol-
ogy and Religious Studies,
Radboud University Nij-
megen, 427-428
Faculty of Religious Studies,
Radboud University Ni-
jmegen, the Netherlands, 5,
18, 17n, 25n, 335n
Faculty of Social Sciences,
Radboud University Nij-
megen, the Netherlands, 5
Failure to Remember Lessons
Learned, Australian motif,
35
Fairy demoness entices men to
harm them, Aarne-
Thompson no. F302.3.4,
167-169
Faith, 80, 291n
Fall of Man, biblical concept,
179, 193
Fama, Roman, 193, cf. Rumour
Far East, 283
Fate, 81
Father, 419; Heaven, 238;
Zeus, 422; cf. Mother, All-
Father
Fayyumic, Ancient Egyptian
dialect, 246
Federal Government, Nigeria,
136
Feminine Arts, see Spider
Fenrir, 98; and Garmr, 100
Fenrisulfr, 100, 100n
Fertile Crescent, cf. Extended
Fertile Crescent
Feudalism, 317
Fiery dragon, Aarne-
Thompson no. B11.12.3,
167-169
Fight against dragon, Aarne-
Thompson no. B11.10.3,
167-169
Fiji, 229, 233; and New Cale-
donia, 229
Finno-Ugric, 99; cf. Uralic
Fire Giant, 192
Fire, 81, 192, 234, 255, 259-
260, 357-359, 363-364, 368-
369, 371, 158n, 180n; Fire-
Water, 359; cf. Hephaestus,
Kagutuchi, Water(s), Ele-
ments, Fiery Dragon, Easter,
Hot Fat, Phlegian, Maya,
World-Fire
Fire, Additional Narrative
Complex, 157n-158n
First Man, Ganda tradition,
173; cf. Emergence
Fish, 32-33, 35, 233
Five Myths about Nuclear En-
ergy, 341n; cf. Shrader-
Frechette [ add init ]
Flanders, 409n; cf. Belgium
Flight, also see Transforma-
tion, Magic flight, Atalanta
type
Flood myths Witzel model:
A. Gondwana Flood myths;
(1) General flood covers all
except a mountain -- Gond-
wana myths: Pygmy. Mela-
nesia, Australia; 2) Flood as
retribution by god(s) / spirits
& destruction of humans:
Melanesia. Andaman Isl.,
Africa; Escape by boat
(worldwide); (2a) as retribu-
tion for killing of culture
hero rainbow snake: Mela-
nesia, Australia; (2b) by
mistake or spell of rain-
maker / rainbow snake,
some humans eaten by
snake: Australia only (ogre
motif); (2c) as retribution
for other mistakes: Melane-
sia. Australia; (3) Flood
from vessel, calabash, water
/ honey bag: Australia, Af-
rica; (4) Flood caused by
someone s wounds or sores:
Australia, Africa; B. Laura-
sian flood myths: Near East,
India, Siberia. Taiwan, S.E.
Asia, Americas, etc.; include
similar themes as Gondwana
Flood myths; but: rainbow
after flood (Hebrew Bible);
human noise, etc.; Flood by
rain (Near East, etc,), over-
turning of Heaven / Earth
(Polynesia); Flood from flu-
ids of the body
Flood, 161, 167, 180-183, 188,
190-191, 198, 200-202, 225,
227-233, 236-238, 253, 261,
381, 20n, 164n, 182n, 191n,
201n, 226n, 236n; also see
Deluge, Standard Elaborate
Flood Myth, Sintflut, Primal
Waters, Inundation
Flores, 259; and Timor, 259
Fluids, from the Body, see
Body, also see Flood myths
Witzel model
Flute, see Music, Reed
Fly, insect, 82; also see Trans-
formation
Folk-lore in the Old Testament,
179, 329; cf. Frazer, J.
Forehead-Hair, 200
Forest Snake, 191
Forest, 191, 357-358; Snake,
191
Forked Branch, central epi-
phany of the sacred in South
Central Africa, 180
Forum Discussion Group,
Sunda elders, 378n, 382n
Foundation for Scientific Re-
search, FWO, Flanders,
409n
Four, in West African cosmo-
logy, 186, 324
Four, the, (Elements and / or
Cardinal Directions), Addi-
tional Narrative Complex,
157n-158n; Four Genera-
tions (or Five)
Fox, mammal species, 124
Fox, North American ethnic
group, 233
439
FOXP2, alleged language
gene, 298n
Fragmented Monster Becomes
the World or Humankind,
Additional Narrative Com-
plex, 157n-158n; cf. Ymir
France, French, 44, 183, 287,
305, 428, 59n; cf. Gallia
[Transalpiana]
Francistown, Botswana town,
171n
Frankenstein, 193; cf. Shelley,
M.
French Revolution, 326, 328,
342
French, see France
Freya, 179
Freyr, 192, 370n
Fridays, 412
Frog, 200; cf. Frog Person,
Kambotwe
Fuegian(s), see Tierra del
Fuego
Fulani, Jihadist(s), 128, 133
Functional Magnetic Reso-
nance Imaging, 290
Funerary rites, 66, 19n; cf.
Death, Ivan Tretej
Fu Xi, 165n; cf. N Wa
FWO, see Foundation for Sci-
entific Research

Gad, biblical prophet, 329-330
Gaia, 193, 195; cf. Earth
Gaiia Martn, mortal life,
78-79, 82
Galicia(n), 64
Galih Pakuan, 379
Gallia, Gaul, 189; Gallia Cisal-
pina, modern North Italy,
196
Galuh, 375, 379-381, 379n
Galunggung, 381
Games, 366
Games-Contests-Combats,
plex, 157n-158n
Ganda, 173
Gapura, 391
Gargarus, top of Mount Ida,
Asia Minor, 422
Garmr, 98-100
Garuda, 179, 183; Garuda-bird,
Aarne-Thompson no. B56,
167-169
Gate of Saketeng, 385
Gaut(ish), Gautland, 97-98;
East , 97
Gavio, ethnic group, 109, 116
Gaymard, 78-79
Geb, 192; cf, Earth, Ancient
Egypt
Geez, 247; cf. Ethiopia, Se-
mitic
General Ibrahim Badamosi
Babangida, 136
General Mohammed Buhari,
136
General Sunda Thesis, 163,
164n; cf. Special , Oppen-
heimer, S.
Generalizing, as aspect of
Comparative Method, 324,
326
Genesis, Bereit, biblical book,
181, 186-187, 190-191, 193,
199, 233, 250, 164n
Gepids, Ancient Germanic
ethnic group, 196
German(s), 93, 353, 413-414,
251n; and British, For the
Kapsiki, 44; cf. Old High
German
Germanic, language group, 19,
91, 94-95, 99-101, 166, 177,
193, 196-197, 100n, 110n;
Common, 99; Proto-
Germanic; North Germanic,
95; , Slavic, Romance and
Baltic-Finnish, languages, as
sources of world mythology
database, 110n; Hel, 101;
and Celtic Europe, 177;
and Finno-Ugric, 99n; cf.
Indo-European, Slavic, Ro-
mance, Celtic, etc.
Geryon, 195, 343n; and Cacus,
192
Gesar of Ling, 20, 20n
Ghana, 186; Nyame, primal
god, 186
Ghent, Belgium, 428, 20n,
409n
Gia-Fu, 404n
Giant bird, Aarne-Thompson
no. B31, BS72, 167-169
Giant, 167, 181, 188, 192, 257;
cf. Fire-
Gifford lectures, 289
Gilgamesh, 178, 201, 234,
234n
Girl, see Kind and unkind girld
Glacial Maximum, 113, 227
Glaciation, cf. Great Freeze;
Ice Age
Global Bee Flight, 174, 174n;
cf. van Binsbergen, W.
Global Etymology of Earth,
Bottom, Human, 155f
Glory of Hera, Heracles, Greek
mythical character, 194n
God, 54-55, 118, 162, 177-178,
182, 185-186, 191, 197,
238, 256-257, 290, 299,
329-331, 342, 352-353, 357-
358, 381, 415, 419-420,
39n, 100n-101n, 248n,
290n-291n, 343n, 386n,
411n; , translated term
rendering a concept in Juda-
ism, 386n; Homers, 411n;
and Nirvana, 353; Enki,
178; of Might, 256; of
Tears, 197; also see Rebel-
lion,Goddess
Gods son, also see Evil demon
Goddess, 162, 186, 189, 253,
256-258, 261, 263, 99n,
165n; also see God
Gondwana, 20, 143, 225-226,
231, 237-239, 203n, 225n,
230n; and Laurasian, 226,
237, 159n; in Asia, 159n
Gondwanaland, 226, 228
Gonur, 75, 86, 88, 88n
Gonur-depe, 86
Gorgias, 343, 343n; cf. Plato
Gorgon, 416
Gothic, language, 65n
Goths, Gotland, 93, 95; Gothic
Sea, 92; cf. Hrei-Goths
Governor of Oyo State, 135
Graeco-Roman, 172, 179, 189,
193, 197, 165n, 171n; Aph-
rodite, 193; cf. Antiquity
Grail, 168, 189; also see Magic
cup, Holy Grail
Gran Chaco, 236n
Granulation, granulated surface
texture, see Speckledness,
Leopard
Grave-Cattle, 191
Great Bath, 88,
Great Freeze of the Younger
Dryas, 283
Greater Near East, 234
Greece, see Ancient Greece
Green, colour associated in
Ancient Egypt with
pharaonic protector goddess,
and with the sea, 192
Grendel, 98
Gu-, prefix of ethnonyms in
Southwest Australia, 226
Gu/nnaR, 92
Guapor(n), 233, 235n
Guarayu, 233
Guardian of the Western Quar-
ter, epithet of Varua, 361
Guayaki, 233
440
Gudur, 48, 51
Guiana, 110
Gundestrup Kettle, 189
Gunn, Gu/nnaR, 92
Gunung Padang, 375-377, 379-
383, 390-391, 395; and
Gunung Galunggung, 381
Gurana, 31
Guria, 48, 51
Gusti, Sunda supernatural au-
thority, 389, 391, 386n,
389n
Guyana, 236n
Gvrydion, 177
Gwari, African ethnic group,
183
Gylfaginning, Snorri Sturluson,
Edda: Prologue and Gylfa-
ginning,
Gypsies, 187, 197, 187n; cf.
Roma

Hades, 178, 192, 194, 421
Hadoxt Nask, 84
Haida, 179, 233
Hair-Back-of-the-Head, 200
Haisl, HaislaR, 93
Hakata, 152
Hamitic Thesis, 149n; cf.
North-South, Pelasgian The-
sis
Han, Chinese ethnic group,
235n
Harait, 76
Hare, mammal species often
perceived as Trickster, 124,
203
Harm, also see evil, demon,
fairy demoness
Haru, 93
Harvard Round Tables, 18,
157; For Comparative Myth,
17
Harvard University, 5, 17-18,
157, 427-428, 59n, 91n,
225n
Hassle, archaeological site,
Sweden, 189
Hathor, 181, 246, 248; cf. An-
cient Egypt
Hausmrchen, 192, 200; cf.
Grimm, W. & J.
Haussa, 183
Hawaii, Hawaiian, 200, 233,
235n
Hawks, and Buzzards, 182
Head of Iresa, 137
Head, see Demon cuts off
Head-hunting, 196
Heaven and Hell of Gesar of
Ling, 20n, cf. van den Heu-
vel Reinders, Karel Jan
Heaven, 53, 64, 76, 52, 158-
159, 161-162, 178, 181-182,
198, 203, 238, 256, 20n,
191n, 195n; Heaven and
Earth, 64, 158, 161, 181-
182, 198; also see Evil de-
mon, Flood myths Witzel
model, Overturning, Cow of
Heaven, Separation, Recon-
nection, What is in Heaven,
Earth, Rock Cave
Hebrew(s), 77, 85, 181, 193,
233-234, 237, 245, 247,
250, 288, 329, 180n; He-
brew Bible, 234, 237; Post-
biblical , 245; cf. Tanach,
Bible; cf. Israelites, Judaism,
Jews
Hector, 359-360, 362, 364-368,
420-421, 367n
Heider-Simmel experiment,
306-308
Heitsi-Eibib, 186, 194
Hekabe, 100, 100n; cf. Death,
Underworld
Hekate, 100, 100n; cf. Death,
Underworld
Hel(l), 98-101, 20n, 99n-100n;
cf. Death, Underworld
Helen, 193, 359, 422; cf. Me-
nelaus, Proteus
Helius, Helios, 422
Hephaestus, 20, 183, 186, 192-
193, 243-245, 248, 357,
359, 361-364, 366-370, 372,
409, 422-423, 165n, 361n;
and Agni, 20, 357, 359; and
Hera, 366; and Skamander,
364; cf. Pta, Fire
Her(r)ero, 118
Hera, 180, 189, 200, 359, 362-
366, 409-410, 415, 421-422,
194n-195n, 368n; and Ar-
temis, 421; cf. Juno, Voice-
Hera, Heracles
Heracles, 1189, 194-195, 244,
194n-195n, 343n; and Hera,
180; cf. Hercules, Glory of
Hera
Herb of Life, 164n
Hercules, 192, 195; cf. Hera-
cles
Here-beald, 98
Hermes, 188, 421
Hermopolis, Hermopolitan,
200; Ancient Egyptian town
associated with a specific
cosmogonic myth
Hero Fights Death to Save
Somebody, Aarne-
Thompson no. R185, 167-
169
Hero, 117, 162, 169, 257, 361,
365-366; also see Monster
Heyoka Society, North Amer-
ica, 190; cf. Cauldron of
Kingship
Hidden Sun, motif, 253, 255-
256, 260-261; cf. Sun
High God, 185-186, 191, 238
Higher Criticism on Olym-
pus, 411n; cf. Calhoun,
G.M.
Higi, 43-44, 43n
Hill, cf. Primal , Mountain
Himalaya(n(s)), 233-234, 318,
324
Hime-hiko, 253, 262-263
Himiko, 253, 262-263
Himyaritic, 247
Hindu, Hinduism, 179, 183,
196, 233-234, 358, 375-376,
383, 390, 235n, 383n;
Hindu-Tantric, and Bud-
dhism, 399n; Hindu and
Buddhist/Buddhism, 375,
379, 390, 375n, 383n;
Hindu-Buddhist and Sufic,
379, 375n
Hippodameia, 195
Historia Romana, 196; cf. Dio
Cassius
Historiae, 196, 200, 244, 195n;
cf. Herodotus
History of Religions, scholarly
journal, 267
Hittite, 63, 66-67
Hive, 177; cf. Bee
Hod, 197
H-cyn, 98
Hfulausn, 99; cf. Egill Skal-
lagrmsson
Hogon, 45
Hohlenstein-Stadel, archaeo-
logical site, Germany, 280,
295, 284n
Hllenhund, underworld dog,
343n; in Awesta, 100n; cf.
Cerberus
Holocene, 109, 119, 164n
Holy Grail, 189; cf. Grail
Holy One, epithet of Ahura
Mazda, 81
Holy Visions Elude Scien-
tists, anonymous newspa-
per article, 290n
Homers Gods Myth and
Mrchen, 411n; cf. Cal-
441
houn, G.M.
Homo Sapiens, 238; cf. Ana-
tomically Modern Humans
Honey / bees / (honey-)beer,
Honey Bag, also see Flood
myths Witzel model
Hong Kong City University,
152
Hono-ninigi, 253, 256, 261,
263; cf. Amaterasu
Hopi, 178-179, 233, 235n
Horizon of the Bee, see A-bt
Horse, 165-166; in royal in-
thronisation ritual, 189; cf.
Equestrian, Chariot
Horus, 179, 183, 190, 197,
199, 246, 249; also see Eye
of
Hot Fat, 367, 371, cf. Fire,
Agni
Htherus, 98
House of skulls as murderers
abode, Aarne-Thompson no.
F771.1.9, 167-169
Hraigutum, 92
Hraiulf(aR), 93
Hrei-Goths, 92; cf. Goths
HreimaraR, 92
Hrsvelgr, 99
Hsiung-nu, 196
@t-Nt, proposed etymology of
Athena, 243; cf. Pta,
Hephaestus, Bernal, M;
Blaek, V.
Humans, Humankind, Human-
ity, 18, 144, 148, 155-158,
160, 162-163, 175, 180,
285, 395, 401, 404, 421,
159n, 182n; also see de-
struction of , Anatomically
Modern Humans, Monster,
Inhuman, Palaeolithic, Exo-
dus, Out-of-Africa, Global
Etymology of Earth, Bot-
tom, Human
Humbu, 169
Hun(s), Hunnic, linguistico-
ethnic cluster in Western
Eurasia, 196, 188n; cf.
Cauldron of Kingship
Huna, 109, 116
Hunter, mythical figure, 117,
179
Hurihanga, 235
Huwainmo, 116
Hwempetla, 46, 48-49, 51-52,
54-55, 49n
Hyksos, 246, 249
Hymenoptera, zoological class,
177
Hymn, 78, 189
Hypnos, 421

I Ching, see y jng
IACM, see International Asso-
ciation for Comparative My-
thology
Ibadan, 128, 131, 133-135,
428, 127n; and Ijaye, 133;
of Maye Okunade, 128
Iberia, 165n
Ibis, 236
Ibn Rusta, 196
Ibu, 385, 391
Iburi, 262
Ice Age, 38, 226, 238, 238n; cf.
Glaciation
Iceland, 232, 234; and Den-
mark, 97
Icelandic, 96, 233, 65n, cf. Old
Icelandic
Idile, Yoruba patrilineal sys-
tem, 138
IE, see Indo-European
Ifa, 152; cf. Hakata, Sikidy,
c
ilm al-raml
Ife, 127-129, 133-136, 140-
141; Ife North, 136; and
Modakeke, 127-129, 132-
136, 139-141, 20n, q.v.
Ifriqa, 165n; cf. Africa
Igbo, 128
Ijaye, 133
Ijebu, 128
Ikire, 140
Ila, 180, 186, 193, 199
Ile Mimu, Yoruba practice,
127, 136, 138-139
Ile Yiya, Yoruba practice, 136,
138-139
Ile-Ife, 127-129, 133-136, 140;
and Modakeke, 135
Ilias, Iliad, 66, 181, 186, 197,
244, 357-359, 367-368, 409,
413, 420-422, 243n; cf.
Homer, Hephaestus
c
ilm al-raml, highly influential
form of geomantic divina-
tion from Islamic, Abasid
Iraq, see Ifa, Hakata, Sikidy
Ilmarinen, 179
Ilorin, 128, 133
Imam, 135; cf. Islam
Imbi, West Africa / Kongo
concept of personal essence,
186
Immortality, cf. Shed skin,
Snake
Imole, Yoruba court, 140
In Gods We Trust, 291n; cf.
Atran, S.
Inanna, 186; cf. Ishtar, Astarte
Inca, 197, 200, 233, 236, 236n,
238n
India(n(s)), 5, 59-61, 64, 68,
75-79, 83-85, 88, 109, 111,
117, 122, 158, 174, 178-
180, 183-184, 187, 189,
192, 197, 228, 232-235,
237, 255, 258, 318, 358,
362, 364, 368-369, 370,
372, 383, 428, 235n, 382n-
383n; Vvasvat, 79; Yama,
75; and Iranian, 75-76, 88;
and Chinese Sage, 383; and
Japan, 255; cf. Indic, Native
Americans, Old Indian
Indian Ocean, 111, 158, 180,
382n
Indians, American, see Native
Americans
Indic, 100; and Indo-European,
256
Indigenous, 129-130, 136, 140-
141, 404
Indo-Aryan, 180n
Indo-China, Indo-Chinese, 235
Indo-European, linguistic phy-
lum, 59-60, 62-68, 76, 80,
88, 99, 144, 155, 189, 192,
195-196, 256, 268-272, 274-
275, 284, 357-358, 369-371,
19n, 65n, 180n, 202n; spec.
Germanic, 94; Proto-Indo-
European, 99-100, 196;
Indo-Europeans, speakers of
Indo-European, 101, 255;
Indo-Europeanists, 315,
318; also see Old Indo-
European
Indo-Iranian, 85; and Japanese,
235n; and Old Slavic, 59; cf.
Indic
Indology, Indologist(s), 239n;
cf. Indo-Iranian, India(n(s))
Indonesia(n(s)), 20, 229, 232,
235, 259, 318, 323, 381-
383, 427, 164n, 235n, 375n,
382n; Archipelago, 375,
382; Muslims, 394; Indone-
sianness, 317; also see Ba-
hasa
Indo-Pacific, 109-111, 115,
152; and Continental Eura-
sian, 113
Indo-Slavic, 20
Indra, 60, 192, 357-360, 363-
371, 370n; and Brahm, 371
Indus, 88, 164n
442
Inguld, Ingulding(s)/a, 96, 93,
96, 102
Ing-Vald, 93, 96, 102
Ing-Valdings, 94
Inhuman decision, also see
King
Inktomi, 186
Innovation, 158, 160, 163
Ino, 189; cf. Leukothea, White
Goddess, Dionysus, Meli-
cartes
INTAS, Russian research fund-
ing organisation, 110n
International Association for
Comparative Mythology, 5,
17-19, 21, 157, 275
International Office, Radboud
University, Nijmegen, 5
Internet, 284
Intoxication, 179
Inuit, 236
Inundation, 235n; also see
Deluge, Flood
Invulnerability, see Magic
ointment
Iolcus, 195n
Ionian, 411; Ionian-Attic, 250
Iove, see Jupiter
Ipetumodu, 128, 136, 140
Iran(ian), 59, 64, 75-79, 83-85,
88, 115, 119, 196, 369, 83n,
370n, 84; Affinity of Old
Iranian and Old Indian, 76;
Yima, 75; Zoroastrians and
Indian Parsees, 84; Sraoa
and Yima and Indian Vi, 79;
and Near East, 77; and In-
dia(n(s)), 75, 78, 84, 88
Iraq, 171n; cf. Abasid
Iraye, 134
Ireland, Irish, Irish, 177, 179,
189, 232-233, 235n; and Old
Egypt, 235
Iresa, 137
Iron-Age Europe, 189
Irony, 409, 417; General, 419,
424; Cosmic, 419; Philoso-
phical , 419
Isakole, 129, 135
Ise-Yiya, 127, 138-139
Isis, 178, 191, 197; cf. Horus,
Ancient Egypt
Islam(ic), 45, 65, 135, 144,
147, 169, 175-176, 178-179,
187, 201, 231, 376, 381,
383, 386, 392, 394, 43n,
147n, 171n, 377n, 383n,
392n; and Judaism, 178;
Islamisation of Central Asia,
187; in Africa, 43n; in
Northern India, 187; in West
Java, 377n; and Christian,
144; cf. Mosque, Imam, Ji-
had, Qurn, Jews
Isoya, 128, 135
Israel(ite(s)), see Ancient Is-
rael(ite(s))
Israel, Israelite kingdom, 329
Issedones, 196
Italy, Italian, 196-197, 234n;
also see Gallia
Ithaca(n), 422-423; cf. Odys-
seus, Penelope
Ivan Tretej, Russian folktale
character, 64; cf. Tretjak
Ivory Throne, 386
Izanagi, Japanese cosmogonic
god, 197, 199, 263, 182n;
and Izanami, 253, 256, 261,
q.v.
Izanami, Japanese cosmogonic
goddess, 197, 199, 253, 256,
261, 263; and Izanagi, 182n,
q.v.
IzIburi, 262

Jabbok, Stream, 199; Bantu
etymology, 199
Jackal, mammal species, 124
Jacob, biblical figure, 181, 199
Jain(s), 61, 68
Jakilin, Moon, in Australian
Aborigian myths, 31
Japan(ese), 18, 20, 177-178,
186, 189-190, 196-197, 199,
253-256, 258-259, 261-263,
428, 182n, 235n, 253n;
Classical, 253; Sun Goddess
Amaterasu, 258, q.v.
Jason, 193, 200, 195n; cf. Hera,
Pelias, Iolcus
Java(nese), 20, 259, 375-376,
379, 381, 390, 406, 427,
375n, 377n, 379n, 381n,
399n; cf. Sunda
Jehovah, 330
Jericho, 194
Jerusalem, 197
Jesus, 29, 253, 263, 344n; cf.
Christ, Christianity
Jews, Jewish, 148, 161, 178,
183, 193, 233-234, 247,
330; in King Davids time,
330; Jewish Aramaic, 247;
and Muslims, 178; cf. An-
cient Israel(ite(s)), Judaism
Jihad, Jihadist(s), 128, 133
Jindalbu, 31
Jinga, Angolan queen, see
Nzingha
Jivaro, 235n
Joab, 329
Joining Forked Branches, see
Kapesh
Jomon, 253, 261
Joshua, biblical book, 187
Jotun, 193
Joukahainen, 191
Judaeo-Christian, 198
Judah, Israelite kingdom, 329
Judaism, 179, 197, 321n, 386n;
Judaeo-Islamic, 178
Judges, biblical book, 186, 199
Julius Caesar, 418; cf. Shake-
speare, W.
Junior status in pantheon, of
Rain god, 198
Juno, and Jupiter, 245; cf. Hera
Jupiter, 245; cf. Zeus

Kabeb, 117
Kabombo, 190
Kabundungulu, 191
Kadua, 385
Kaduveo, 109, 116
Kafue, 169
Kagutuchi, Japanese Fire god,
256, 261
Kahare, 169, 187, 199, 188n
Kakutaro Kubo, 262
Kalali-gir 2, cult centre, 86
Kale, 187; cf. Kahare, Gypsies
Kalevala, 177, 179, 191
Kali, in Hinduism, 196
Kalima, 399
Kalunga-Ngombe, 191
Kalypso, 99
Kama, 178
Kamaiura, 109, 116
Kambotwe, 200; cf. Frog
Kamchatka Peninsula, 259
Kampong Ciparigi, 378
Kamunu, 182
Kamunungampanda, Joining
Forked Branches, 179-180;
cf. Kapesh
Kangaroo, 33, 35
Kanioka, 180, 183; cf. Rozwe
Kaonde, 180, 190, 193
Kapesh, tower-associated
mythical figure, S.C. Africa,
167-168, 179-180, 180n;
Kamunungampanda, Join-
ing Forked Branches, 180
Kaphiri-ntiwa, 173
Kaposhi, 180
Kapsiki, 41, 43-48, 51-55, 43n;
Kapsiki and the Dogon, 44,
47, 54; cf. Higi; and Dogon,
52
443
Karaites, 183
Karaton, 385, 392
Karia, 109, 116
Kartvelian, 195n
Kashgar, 233
Kashmir, 233-234, 235n
Katete, 169, 177-178; and Lu-
hamba, 178, 181, 190; cf.
Reed
Kathlamet, 198, 233
Kathmandu, 233; and Kashmir,
235n
Kauravas, 368n
Kawasa, 389
Kayambila, 168-169, 172, 193-
196; cf. Skull, Thatching
Kayoni, 183
Kazanga, 170, 183, 193, 196
Kemushiri, 257
Kenya, 180, 231, 237
Kepala Desa, 378n
Kerberos, see Cerberus
Khan, 196
Khava, 359-360, 363, 368;
Khandava Forest Fire, 357
Khoe, Khoi, 156; cf. Khoisan
Khoekhoe, Khoikhoi, 156; cf.
Khoisan
Khoisan, linguistic macrophy-
lum, 145, 152-153, 155-156,
186, 194, 152n, 155n;
Heitsi-Eibib, 186; and North
Caucasian, 155, q.v.; also
see Central
Khwarazmian, 86
Ki Laras, see Maya
Ki Subarma, 379
Kideng, 379
Kidul, 382n
Kiev, 196, 199
Kikoe-no-Okimi, 262
Kimberley, the Kimberleys,
Australian region, 32, 227
Kimbiji kia Malenda a
Ngandu, Two Persons [?]
with Crocodile Scale, 191
Kimi Kotani, 262
Kind and unkind girls, aspect
of the Emergence of First
People mytheme, 120-121
King makes inhuman decision,
Aarne-Thompson no. M2,
167-169
King, 67, 75, 169, 172, 177-
179, 186, 189, 192, 199,
329-330, 360, 365-366, 375-
376, 379-381, 387, 395,
315n; Agamemnon, 360;
David, 329; Kahare, 199;
Kapesh Kamunungampanda,
179; Nisus of Megara, 199;
of Dead, 177; of Death, 178;
of Galuh, 379; of Oi, 67; of
Pajajaran, 395; of the Sun-
danese, 375-376, 381; Pre-
mana Dikusumah, 380; Ratu
Pusaka, 381; Sanjaya, 381;
Unas, 189; cf. Kingdom,
Neo-Monarchy
Kings College, 315n
Kingdom, 197, 244, 246, 248,
250, 253, 262, 380-381,
381n; Galuh and Gunung
Padang, 380-381; Mataram,
381n; Pajajaran, 381
Kingship, 168, 184, 188, 188n,
cf. Cauldron, Regicide
Kingu, 197
Kinioka, 191
Kinship, cf. Person is tricked
into killing his kin; Classi-
ficatory
Kintu, 173
Kiokwe, 180
Kiowa, 109, 116
Kitsu-biko and Kitsu-bime,
262
KN, standard designation of
Knossos Linear B tablets,
243, 243n
KNAW, see Royal Netherlands
Academy of Sciences
Knossos, 243n
Kojahk, Ancient Egyptian
month, 200
Kojiki, 177, 197, 253, 182n;
and Nihonshoki, 262; also
see Chamberlain, B.H.
Kokytus, 197
Koljo, Uralic death goddess, 99
Kond, 109, 116-117
Kong, 152
Koran, see Quran
Korea(n(s)), 179, 196, 233,
254, 235n
Kortchi, 48
Koryak, 232, 256-257
Krishna, 358-362, 367
Kronos, see Cronus
Kujip, 31
Kumarbi, 177; cf. Hittite, Bee
Kunimond, 196
Kunstkamera, Peter the Great
Museum of Anthropology
and Ethnography, Russian
Academy of Sciences, St.
Petersburg, Russia, 427,
109n
Kuruks, 360
Kurya, 196
Kuta, 393
Kutarungu, 385
Kwakiutl, 179, 233, 256, 258
Kyknos, 195
Kynmund(aR), 93
Kyoto, 18
Kyrgyz, 177; epic Manas, 179,
190

La Divina Comedia, 39n; cf.
Dante Alighieri
Lacus Tritonis, 165n; cf. o
al-Jerid, salt lake in modern
Southeastern Tunisia
Lady of Avalon, 192
Lady Tower, 181; cf. Astaroth
Lagos, 20n
Lake Dilolo, 182
Lamu, 180
Land of dead across water,
Aarne-Thompson no.
E481.2, 167-169
Land of dead in lower world,
Aarne-Thompson no.
E4S1.1, 167-169
Land of dead in West, Aarne-
Thompson no. E4S1.6.2,
167-169
Land of skulls, Aarne-
Thompson no. E4S5, 167-
169
Land of Yomi, 199; cf. Dead,
Underworld
Laos, 117
Laoshang Chanyu, 196
Lapit, 368
Laras, 406, 378n, 382n, 386n,
389n
Late Glacial Maximum, 113,
119
Late Period, Ancient Egypt,
248,
Latin, 63, 72, 115, 197, 289,
357, 359, 428
Laurasian, 20, 143, 225-228,
230-232, 234-240, 255,
159n, 225n; Area, 225;
Flood, 232; and Gondwana,
237-238, 203n; India and
South America, 228
Laurentide, 283
Lawang Kadua, 385
Lawang Saketeng, 385, 391
Le Morte dArthur, 191; cf.
Thomas Malory
Lectures on the Religion of the
Semites, 321; cf. Robertson
Smith, W.
Leiden, 5, 18, 20, 152, 428,
17n, 19n-20n, 41n, 143n
444
Lemba, 187
Lemnos, 183, 245
Lengua, South American eth-
nic group, 233
Lent, 64
Leopard, 412; also see Speck-
ledness
Les Grecs ont-ils cru leurs
mythes, 412; cf. Veyne, P.
Les matres de la vrit dans la
Grce archaque, 412n; cf.
Detienne, M.
Leto, 421
Lettish, Latvian, 65, 67, 65n
Leuit Salawe Jajar, 386
Leukothea, 189
Leviticus, Bible book, 184
Lewontin, 284n
Leza, 185
LGM, see Late Glacial Maxi-
mum
Libupe, 177
Libya, 195, 165n
Lie Which Is Corpse, Zoroas-
trian death demoness Drux-
ya-Nasu, 75, 81
Life, 52, 55, 376, 379-380,
395-396, 401, 404, 424,
164n, 401n
Light, 386, 395-396, 400
Lightning Bird and World egg,
Likambi Mange, 167-169, 190,
192
Likota lya Bankoya, 169-170,
176, 182; cf. Shimunika,
J.M. / van Binsbergen, W.
Lilith, 193
Lingongole, 191
Lipan, 109, 116
Lipepo, 168; cf Wind
Lithuanian, 63, 234, 65n
Living corpse, Aarne-
Thompson no. E422, 167-
169
Loeb Classical Library, 421n-
422n
Loew, Rabbi, of Prague, 192
Logographers in Ancient
Greece, 343n
Logomythie, German, the
mythology of rationality,
353
Logos, 343n, 346n
Loki, 98, 103, 179, 99n
London Zoological Gardens,
294
Longmans & Green, publishing
house, 247n
Lord, 168-169, 172, 178, 187,
189, 329-330, 419, 344n-
345n; Jesus Christ, 344n;
Lord of Death, 168-169,
172, 178; Lord of the Town,
189
Lover, 191n; also see Virgin
Lower Congo, 176, 330
Lower Egypt, 178, 249
Lower World, 114; cf. Under-
world
Lozi, 170, 176, 180-182, 190n;
cf. Luyi, Rotse, Luyana,
Nkoya
Luba, 180-181
Lubumba, Nkoya prophet, 167-
168
Luchazi, 170
Lucius Postumius Albino, 196
Luhamba, 169, 177-178, 181,
190; cf. Bee
Luiseo, 233
Lukolwe, 190
Lunda, 169-170, 172, 177-178,
183, 203; and Nkoya, 178;
Eastern , 177; cf. Ndembu
Lungkruk Pandita Sidik, 380
Lurah, 378, 378n
Lushais, 117
Lushei, 109, 116
Luvale, 170, 176, 182; and
Chokwe, 182
Luwji, Moon, 179
Luyi, 170, 180, 191; cf. Lozi,
Rotse
Lycaon, 363; and Asteropaeus,
365
Lycia, Lycian, 67
Lykoros, 189
Lykos, 189

Mabinogion, 189, 193; cf.
Quest, C. Schreiber-
Madagascar, 177, 187, 225n-
226n; and the Comoro Is-
lands, 171n
Mrings, 92
Mafa, 53
Maghreb, 118
Magic cup, Grail, Aarne-
Thompson no. D1171.6,
167-169; also see
Wunschding
Magic flight, aspect of the
mytheme, 121; also see Ata-
lanta type
Magic ointment renders in-
vulnerable, Aarne-
Thompson no. D 1344.5,
167-169
Magic powers, possession of,
Aarne-Thompson no.
D1710, 167-169
Magic tree guarded by snake,
Aarne-Thompson no.
D950.0.1, 167-169
Magic, 120-122, 168, 172n
Magical Ideation inventory,
308; cf. Eckblad & Chap-
man
Magni, 97
Maha Kawasa, 389
Mahabharata, 77, 357-360,
367, 369-370, 358n; cf. Ap-
pendix, Critical Edition
MahaKawasa, 386n
Mai Huna, 109, 116
Maia, 387
Maina, 233
Maker of the Material World,
epithet of Ahura Mazda, 81
Malawi, 173
Mali, 41, 43-44
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 27
Mambwe, 183
Manas, 179, 190
Mandala, 399
Mandan, 109, 116-117
Mandara Mountains, 46, 51,
53, 43n, 49n
Mand, 46-47, 49
Manenga, mythical queen, S.C.
Africa, 168, 182, 197, 199-
200; cf. Flood, Hera
Manetho, 244, 250
Mange, see Likambi
Manggumu, 31
Mni, 244
Manichean(s), 114-115
Mankind, 197, 288; also see
Monster, Humans
Mnnerbund, German, male
association, 93-84, 101
Mantis, Narrative Complex,
159-160
Mantri Anom Aria Kebonan
Kideng Agung, 379
Manu, 77, 234, 271, 274
Maori, 232-235
Mapula, 229
Maravi, 173
Mark Anthony, literary charac-
ter in Shakespeare, 418
Marduk, 186, 197
Margiana Archaeological Ex-
pedition, 86, 86n; cf. Bac-
tria-Margiana
Archaeological Complex
Mariana Islands, 259
Marquesas, 232-233, 235
445
Mars, 189; cf. Ares
Maruts, 364
Mary, and Jesus, 253, 263; cf.
Virgin
Masaryk University, 427, 243n
Masculinisation, 161
Mashasha, 177; cf. Nkoya
Masjid Agung, 385, 394
Massachusetts, 17
Mataaho, sceptical mythical
figure, 235
Mataco, American ethnic
group, 109, 116, 233
Mataram, 379n, 381n
Matheo, see Mataaho
Mato Grosso, 118
Maung, 31
Maya, an asura associated with
crafts and fire, 365, 367,
361n, 365n,
Maya, Ki Laras (Abah Adjat
Poerba Sasaka), 406, 378n,
382n, 386n, 389n, 391n-
392n, 394n, 406n
Maya, Mayas, Meso American
ethnic group and language,
184, 196, 236, 235n,
Maye Okunade, 128, 134
Mayowe, Stanford, 194
Mazda, see Ahura
Mbaya, 233
Mbh, see Mahabarata
Mbona, 173
Mbote, 177
Mbunda, 180; and Luchazi,
170
Mbundu, 190
Mbwela, 168, 180
Mead, alcoholic drink from
honey, 177; also see Honey
Mecca, 187; cf. Islam
Medb, 179
Medea, 193; Medea, 189, cf.
Euripides
Medieval, see Middle Ages
Meditation, 399n
Mediterranean, 144, 153, 166,
178, 183-184, 186, 196-197,
199, 202, 238, 151n, 172n,
174n; Eastern, and West
Asia, 196; Mediterranean-
Pelasgian, 165; and West
Asia, 150, 186; in the
Bronze Age, 153, 184, 199;
Eastern , Bronze Age, 178
Medusa, 416
Megara, 199
Mejprat, 117
Melanesia(n(s)), 109-110, 115,
119, 225, 229, 231-232,
237, 282, 229n, 239n; and
Amazonia, 110; and Austra-
lia, 231; cf. Oceania
Melbourne, 27
Melicartes, 189; cf. Melqart,
Heracles, Leukothea
Melissae, 177; cf. Bee
Melisseus, 177; cf. Bee
Melqart, 189; cf. Melicartes
Melusine, and Blodeuwedd,
193
Melville Isl., 25, 29-30
Memalius, 245
Memphis, 244-246, 249
Mencej, 270
Menelaus, 193, 195n; cf. Helen
Menes, legendary first king of
Ancient Egypt, 244
Menial tasks, also see Noble
person
Menog, 77
Menomini, 233
Menstruation, see Blood-as-
Poison
Merneptah, 246
Mesolithic, Natufian, 154n
Mesopotamia(n), 150, 173,
177, 225, 233-234, 238-239,
318-319, 164n, 319n; and
Bible world, 225; Gil-
gamesh, 234
Messengers, Two, one of J.
Frazers basic mythemes on
the Origin of Death, 30n; cf.
Contradictory messengers
Metamorphoses, 189, 193, 197;
cf. Ovid(ius) Naso
Metaphysics, 335-336, 340,
344; cf. Aristotle
Me-Turan, 234n
Mexico, Mexican, 233
Mikmaq, 197
Miao, 261; Miao-Yao, 156;
Proto-Miao-Yao, 155; and
the Lao, 261
Micronesia, 233
Middle Ages, Medieval, 183;
and Early Modern Europe,
192
Middle Babylonian, 246
Middle East, 85, 111, 161, 283;
and Ancient Greece, 186; cf.
West Asia
Middle Egyptian, 246
Middle Persian, 77-79, 81, 85
Middle Vedic, 61
Midgarsormr, 98
Midsummer Nightss Dream,
347, 355n; cf. Shakespeare,
W.
Migrations of the Nations, 196
Miki Nakayama, 262
Miletus, 343n
Milky Way, 113, 238n
Mimesis, 387
Mimu, 136
Min, Ancient Egyptian god,
186; also see Menes
Minerva, 245; and Apollo, 245;
cf. Athena
Minni Cara and Minni Kota,
230n
Minoan, 177; cf. Crete
Minos, king, 189n; cf. Pasi-
phae, Daedalus
Miocene, 383
Missouri, 115, 117
Mist Wader, see Mokerkialfi
Mistake, also see Flood myths
Witzel model
Mistress of the Primal Waters,
161; cf. Mother, Virgin,
Separation, Waters
Mitanni, 271
Mixtec, 235n
Moats Mong, 183
Modakeke, 127-129, 134-137,
139-141; cf. Ife
Mofu, 53
Mogode, Kapsiki village,
Cameroon, 48, 51-53; and
Yugo, 51
Mohenjo-Daro, 88
Moi, 109, 116-117; Ancestors
of the 117
Mokerkialfi, 193
Mol, H.J., 19n
Mong, 183
Mongolia, Mongol(s), 194,
196, 253, 255; and Kyrgyz,
177
Monk, 69, 380-381
Mono, 232-233
Monster keeps water from
mankind until a hero defeats
him and releases it, Aarne-
Thompson no. A1111, 167-
169
Monster, 117, also see Sea
monster, Fragmented
Montreal, 290
Moon, 25, 31-39, 113, 160,
179, 203, 232, 19n, 32n;
Waxing and Waning of,
30n; Moon and Parrot, 32;
and Possum, 31; and Pura-
kapali, 31, 33-35, 38-39; in
Australian Aboriginal Myths
of the Origin of Death, 25 f;
Moon Man, 37; cf. Tjapara,
446
Crescent, Luweji
Moon, the, Narrative Complex,
159-160
Morgan Le Fay, 191-192; and
Morgause, 191
Morgause, 191
Mormons, 282
Morning Star, 117
Morocco, 318, 323; Moroc-
canicity, 317; and Indonesia,
323
Moscow, Moscovites, 64, 152
Moses, biblical figure, 319n;
s Red Sea crossing, 198
Moslem, see Islam
Mosque of Majesty, 385, 394-
395
Mossi, 183
Motacilla, genus of birds, 182n
Mother Tongue, scholarly
journal, 229n
Mother, 67, 161-162, 178-179,
181, 186, 191-194, 199,
238, 253, 261, 263, 415,
165n, 191n, 195n, 229n;;
Earth, 238; Goddess, 162;
of God, 415; of Spirits,
67; of the (Primal) Waters,
178-179, 181, 186, 192-194,
199, 195n; Motherhood,
385, 392; Mother-in-Law,
32, 34; Mother-Son, 253;
Mother-Son Deities, 263;
also see Earth, God, Waters,
Separation, Virgin, All-
Mother
Mountain God of Kemushiri,
257
Mountain Ok, ethnic group in
Inner New Guinea, 282
Mountain, 46, 53, 85, 233, 257,
282, 43n, 49n; also see
Flood myths Witzel
model; also see Earth-
Dragon
Mouth, 161; from the , Nar-
rative Complex, 159-160
Mozambique, 180, 182n
Mri, 290
Mry, 246
Muammad al-Zanati, 171n
Mufuenda, 168; cf. Dead Man
Walking
Mulambwa, 172, 176, 181
Mulih, 380
Mundang, 183
Mundas, 235n
Mundi, 382n
Mura, 233
Murato, 109, 116
Murderous bride, Aarne-
Thompson no. T173, 167-
169; cf. The False Wife
Murngin, 32
Murray, River, 29
Murtankala, 29
Music-Orpheus-Flute-Reed,
plex, 157n-158n
Muslim, see Islam
Musumba, 172-173
Mut, Ancient Egyptian god
represented as vulture, 183
Mutilated god, Aarne-
169
Mvula, Rain, Nkoya demi-
urge, 182-183, 188, 198
Mwaat Yaav, Mwati Yamvo,
Lord of Death, in Southern
Congo, 168-170, 172-173,
177-179, 187
Mwenda-Njangula, 167-168,
191, 198
Mwene Manenga, see Manega
Mwene, Nkoya: King, 182-
183, 197, 199
Mycenaean, 243, 249
Myrmidons, 360
Myth and Method, 340; cf.
Reinwald, H.
Myth and Mythology, 387n-
388n; cf. Barnard, A., &
Spencer, J.
Myth of the Sun and Fire, 255
Mythographers, in Ancient
Greece, 343n
Mythological Continuities
between Africa and Other
Continents, 5, 107-252
Mythology of Death and Dy-
ing, 5, 23-106

Ntlakapanaq, 232
Na-Dene, 236; different from
Amerind, q.v.; cf. Dene
Nagaland, Nagaland, 183, 380
Naganuma, 262
Nagara (Gunung) Padang, 375-
380, 383, 388-389, 400-401,
405-406, 399n
Nakal, Meso American mythi-
cal hero, 200
Nakisawame-no-Mikoto, 197
Nalinanga, see Shihoka
Namba, 233
Nambicuara, 235n
Namibia, 194
Nao Deguchi, 262
Nara, 99n
NarCom, see Narrative Com-
plex
Nari, 99n
Narrative Complexes, 159-160,
191, 203, 157n-159n, 176n;
in Pandoras Box, 157; cf.
NarCom, NC
Narrow Opening, 116; also
see: the Way from One
World
Nasilele, 180
Naste Etsan, Navajo spider
goddess, 186; cf. Spider
Nstrnd, Corpse Strand, 99
Natchez, 233
National Party of Nigeria, 135
Nationalsozialismus, 339n; cf.
Hitler, A., Rosenberg, A.
Native Americans, 110, 200,
232-236, 282,235n, 238n; of
the Southeast USA, 183;
and the Eskimo, 110; cf.
Amerind, (Na-)Dene
Native Cat, 33, 35; and Kanga-
roo, 33, 35
Natufian, 154n
Natunda, 118
Natural History of Religion,
345; cf. Hume, D.
Naubandhana, 234
Naumba, 190
Navajo, 178, 186, 236
Nayekwake, 48
Nazism, see Nationalsozialis-
mus
NC, see Narrative Complex
Ndembu Lunda, 203
Neanderthals, 111; Neander-
thaloid, 160
Near East, cf. Ancient Near
East, Greater Near East
Nectar, Soma, Aarne-
169
Needfire, 183
Negeri Galuh, 381
Negeri Sunda, 381
Neith, 186, 190, 243, 249-250,
195n; cf. Nestis, Athena, @t-
Nt, Bernal, M., Anahita,
Anath, Anansi, Nyambi
Neolithic, 150-152, 158, 160-
161, 163-164, 177-178, 194;
and Bronze Age, 152; and
Early Bronze Age West
Asia, 202; and Early Bronze
Age, 151n; Selknam, 236;
West Central Asia, 164
Neo-Monarchy, 317
Nepal, 233
447
Nestis, 197; cf. Neith
Netherlands Institute for
Avanced Studies (NIAS),
Wassenaar, 172n
Netherlands, the, 5, 17-18, 155,
275, 377, 427-428, 17n,
25n, 143n, 172n, 182n,
335n; cf. African Studies
Centre, Radboud University,
Ravenstein, Tilburg Univer-
sity
Netherworld, see Underworld
Neurobiology, 280, 299
New Caledonia, 229
New Guinea(n), 109-110, 115-
117, 119, 158, 160, 225-
227, 229, 259, 282, 159n;
Highland Papua, 115; and
Asia, 109, 116; and Austra-
lia, 158; and Indonesia, 259;
Papuans, 117; cf. Oceania
New Norwegian, 100
New World Dictionary, 344n
New York Times, 289
New York, USA State, 117
New Zealand, 259
Ngajadi Naga Wiru, 380
Ngambela, 186
Ngan, 403
Nganasan, 109
Nghiem, 181
Ngurunderi, 29
Ngweu, 48
NIAS, see Netherlands Insti-
tute for Advanced Studies
Nicomachean Ethics, 344; cf.
Aristotle
Nhggr (hate-striker), 99
Niger-Congo, 144-145, 152-
153, 155, 166, 178, 184,
190, 199, 203, 152n
Nigeria(n(s)), 19, 43, 131, 133,
135-136, 179, 428, 43n,
127n
Nihongi, Nihonshoki, 254, 262
Nijmegen, the Netherlands, 5,
18-19, 427-428, 17n, 19n-
20n, 25n, 335n
Nikkei Niwano, 262
Nikukud, 48
Nile, River, 184, 197, 245, 319
Nilo-Saharan, linguistic
macrophylum, 145, 152,
152n; and Niger-Congo,
152, 152n
Nilotic, Dinka, 197; and Omo-
tic, 231
Nimrod, biblical mythical
character, 181
Nimuendaj, 233
Ningrum, 380
Ninive, 234n
Niobe, 197
Nirantali, 117
Nirvana, 353
NISCO Research School, Fac-
ulty of Social Sciences,
Radboud University Ni-
jmegen, 5
Niir, Mount, 234
Nisus, 199
Niwano, 262
Nkonya, 118
Nkoya, Nkoyaland, ethnic
group and language of Zam-
bia, S.C. Africa, 20, 143-
144, 147-151, 167-174, 176-
193, 195-203, 143n, 159n,
176n, 180n, 188n-190n; and
Luyana language, 170; and
Lozi, 190n; Eastern Nkoya,
177, cf. Mashasha; King
As Death Demon, 172;
Nkoya-Eurasian continui-
ties, 169; and Celtic, 177,
179, 188; and the Gil-
gamesh, 201; and Western
Eurasia, 173
Noah, biblical mythical charac-
ter, 75, 234, 237; and the
Flood Myth, 381; Noahs
Ark, 84, 188; cf. Flood,
Atraasis, Ziusudra, Utnap-
ishtim
Noble person must do menial
service, Aarne-Thompson
no. Q482, 167-169
Nommo, 181
Nootka, 233
Nordic, Norse, 91, 95, 97-99,
101, 103, 179, 189-190,
192, 194, 197, 199-200,
369; Nordic Apocalypse,
192; Nordic Europe, 190;
Nordic Odinn, 200; Nordic
and Sanskrit Asian, 189;
Norse and Iranian, 369; also
see Old Norse
North Africa(n(s)), 118, 143-
144, 147, 169, 190, 200,
230, 323, 149n, 171n; and
the Middle East, 145n
North America(n(s)), 19, 21,
109-110, 113, 115, 122,
172, 178-179, 183, 186,
188, 190, 193-194, 200-202,
253, 255, 201n; Plains Indi-
ans, 282; Prairie, 186; and
South America, 232-233,
259; and North-East India,
109; and South Asia, 114;
cf. Native Americans
North Atlantic, 55, 143, 147-
149, 151, 174-175, 149n,
151n; Modern, 200
North Caucasian, 155, 152n
North Khoisan, 156
Northern Mountain, mythical
dwelling place of Ba
c
al
Zebul/b, Ugaritic deity, q.v.,
85
North-South diffusion, model
for intracontinental African
cultural flow, 184, 201,
151n, 201n; questioned by
Witzel, 230n; cf. South-
North, Afrocentrism,
Hamitic, Pelasgian
Norwegian, New, 100
Nostratic, 152, 154, 152n; and
Afroasiatic, 186; cf. Super-
Nostratic, Eurasiastic, Bo-
rean
NPN, see National Party of
Nigeria
Nsenga, 183
N Wa, 193, 165n; cf. Fu Xi
Nuberu, 200
Nubia(n(s)), 145, 173
Nuclear, 341n
Nuka-biko and Nuka-bime,
262
Numbers, biblical book, 192
Nupe, 183
Nurbakhsh, 383n, 386n, 396n
Nyai Roro Kidul, the Queen of
the South / Indian Ocean,
382n
Nyambi, West and S.C. Afri-
can deity, 180, 182-183,
185-186, 191, 198, 182n; cf.
Nyame, Anahita, Neith,
Athena, Anath
Nyambis Child, Mvula / Rain,
Nkoya mythical figure, 183,
Nyame, 186; cf. Nyambi
Nzambi, 186; cf. Nyambi
Nzingha, Angolan warrior-
queen, 190

Oba Adesoji Aderemi, 135
Obafemi, 135
Obalaaye, 134
Oceania(n(s)), 18-19, 154, 186,
193, 197, 253, 255, 283,
159n, 164n; cf. New Guinea,
Australia, Melanesia, Papua
Odin(n), 96-98, 102, 200
Odyssea / Odyssey, 178, 181,
244, 409, 413, 422-423,
448
243n
Odysseus, 178, 360, 422-423,
412n; and Penelope, 423
OE, see Old English
Oenomaus, 195
Ogbomosho, 133
Ogma Cermait, 177
Ogre, Rescue from the, Narra-
tive Complex, 159-160; also
model
Ogun Pipin, 137, 139
Ogun, Yoruba creator god, 186
Ogun-Jije, 139
Ogunmola, 135
Ogunsuwa of Modakeke, 128,
134, 140
OHG, see Old High German
Ohrmazd, 78-79; cf. Ahura
Mazda
Oinomaos, 195
Ointment, see Magic ointment
Ojibwa, 233
Oju, 132
Ok, mountain in New Guinea,
282
Oke-Igbo, 128, 135
Okinawa, 253, 262-263
Oknurcha, 32n
Oko-Yiya, 127, 136
Okunade, 128, 134
Oladiran, 136
Old Comparativism, see Com-
parativism
Old Coptic in the, 248
Old Egyptian, 155
Old English, 96, 97, 99
Old High German, 99
Old Icelandic, 65n
Old Indian, 59, 83-84
Old Indo-European, 68
Old Iranian, 84-85; and Old
Indian, 76; and Vedic, 64
Old Norse, 97, 99
Old Persian, 63
Old Prussian(s), 62-64, 69-72;
and Buddhist, 72
Old Russian, 65n
Old Slavic, 59
Old Swedish, 91-92, 99
Old Testament, see Testament
Old Woman, 67-68; Slavic, 68
Old World, 110, 119, 143-144,
148, 152, 158, 164, 172,
194, 199, 201n; cf. Asia, Af-
rica, Europe
Old-Oyo, 127-128, 133
Olunloyo, 135
Olympia, 195
Olympian(s), central Greek
deities, 238, 498-410, 412,
415, 419-420, 422-424,
415n
Olympus, Mount, 244, 361,
365, 410, 421, 411n
Omaha, Native American eth-
nico-linguistic group, 200
Omo Enu, 132
Omo Oju, 132
Omololu, 135
Omotic, 145n; and Chadic,
145n
Onari-kami(in), 253
One-eyed person, Cyclops,
Aarne-Thompson no.
F512.1, 167-169
One-Hair, 200; cf. With-One-
Hair
Onisabur, 262
Ooni Abegunle Abeweila, 127-
129, 134, 136, 140
Ooni Akinmoyero, 134, 141
Opening, 116; cf. the Way
from One World.
Oranmiyan West Local Gov-
ernment Council, 135
Orestes, 244; cf. Euripides
Oriental, 427
Origbo, 136
Originator of death the first
sufferer, aspect of the
mytheme, 122-123
Origins of Civilization and the
Primitive Condition of Man,
289; cf. Tylor, E.
Orinoco Delta, 117
Orion, Belt of, 113
Oro, 131
Orpheus, 157n, 200, 157n,
195n; also see Music
OS, see Old Swedish
Oshiho-mimi, 261, 263
Oshogbo, 133
Otherworld, 65; cf. Under-
world, Heaven
Otun Asiwaju of Modakeke,
136
Out-of-Africa, 111, 113, 119,
144, 150, 156-158, 159n;
Pre-Out-of-Africa, 160;
Exodus, 152, 156, 161;
original Out-of-Africa /
Pandora Box Narrative
Complexes, 157; two Sal-
lies, 158, 159n; also see
Exodus, Back-into-Africa,
African Eve, Lefkowitz, M.
Overturning of Heaven and
Earth, also see Flood myths
Witzel model
Owambo, 118
Owu, Yoruba town, 128
Oxford English Dictionary,
281
Oxford University, 357n
Oxford, England, UK, 281,
427, 20n, 357n
Oyekan Owomoyela, 132
Oyere, 136
Oyo, 128, 133-135, 141; s
Field Marshall, 133
Oyo-Ile, 133
Oyo-Yoruba, 141

Pacific Ocean, 116, 186, 196,
233, 256, 258-260; Pacific
Ring of Fire, 259-260;
North Pacific Tribes, 233
Padaringan, 386, 394
Paibuan, 385, 391
Paiute, 233
Paivan, 109, 116
Pajajaran, 376, 381, 395
Pak Undang, 377-378, 399,
377n-378n, 389n, 399n-
400n, 403n
Pakuan, 379, 381
Pakuwon, 386; Pakuwon Ey-
ang Prabu Silihwangi, 394
Pal(a)eolithic, 160-162, 194,
202, 302, 159n, 194n-195n,
201n; Man, 194; Pre-Out-
of-Africa Middle , 160;
Upper Palaeolithic, 161,
202, 195n, 201n; Middle
and Upper , 159n
Palaeo-African, 153, 201, 203,
159n; cf. Exodus, Out-of-
Africa, Back-into-Africa,
Pelasgian
Palawangan, 385, 391
Pale Fire, 180n; cf. Nabokov,
V.V.
Palestine, Palestinians, 148
Palo Alto, 279n
Palop, 118
Pama-Nyungan, 227
Pamipiran, 376, 383
Pamir(s), 75, 83
Pamphylian, 244
Pan, Panic, 83
Pancer, 399
Pancerna, 399
Pandita, 381; Pandita Ajar
Sidik, 380
Pandora, Greek mythical char-
acter, artificial woman
meant to wreak disaster, 193
Pandoras Box, original cul-
449
tural (including mythologi-
cal) heritage (predating the
Out-of-Africa Exodus, q.v.)
of Anatomically Modern
Humans, 144, 156-158, 160,
163, 191, 202-203
Pan-Gaean, Flood, 225, 238-
239, 234n
Pangreyep, 380
Pantun, 379
Panyipuhan, 385, 391
Papa, Oceanian terrestrial god-
dess, 197
Papat, compass points
(Sunda), 399
Papatuanuku, 235
Papua(n(s)), 115, 117, 228-
229; and Australian, 229; cf.
New Guinea
Papyrus Harris, 197
Paradise, 191
Parahyangan Catholic Univer-
sity, 379, 381, 427, 375n
Pare, 180
Parent, 192, 253, 261, 263; cf.
Mother, Father, Child, Son,
Daughter
Paresi, 109, 116
Parliamentary Militarism, 317
Parody, 416
Parrot Fish, 32-33, 35; cf. Pos-
sum
Parsees, 84
Parthenon, 195; and Olympia,
195
parthenn, Greek, virgin,
perhaps Libyan, 250n
Pasiphae, 189n, 195n
Pasir Pamipiran, 376, 383
Pataeci, Phoenician gods, 245
Pataikos, 245-246
Patalina Diri, 391
Patroclus, 359-362, 367-368,
420
Pawnee, 200
PDP, Parallel Distributed Proc-
essing; Research Group,
299
Pebans, 235n
Pecheneg Khan Kurya, 196
Pehlevi, 77
Peking University, 18; and
Harvard University Interna-
tional Conference, 18
Pelasgian, 151, 153, 164-166,
178-179, 183-185, 188, 190,
198-199, 201-202, 149n,
151n, 159n, 165n, 171n-
172n, 174n, 180n, 195n;
Hypothesis, 165; Model,
144; West Asia, 174n
Pelew Isl., 233
Pelias, 195n
Pendeta Sakti Bagawat Sajala-
jala, 381
Pendjikent, 85-86
Penelope, 423; cf. Odysseus
Peninsula, 259
Pennsylvania, 290
Penuti, 115
People from the Underworld,
aspect of the Emergence of
First People mytheme, 114
People of the West, see
Mbwela, 168
Peoples Republic of China, 18
Peripheral and Central,
branches of Borean, 154,
161, 202, 201n
Periplus, publishing house,
384n
Perkons, 189
Perlesvaus, 183
Perseus, 416
Persia(n(s)), 63, 77-79, 81, 84-
85, 150, 321, 235n, 282n;
Empire, 282n; and Tadjiks,
84; also see Middle Persian,
Persian, Old Persian
Persian Gulf, 150
Person Frog, Nkoya mythical
character, 200; cf. Kam-
botwe
Person is tricked into killing
his kin, aspect of the Emer-
gence of First People
mytheme, 112
Peru, 233
Perum Perhutani, Department
of Forestry, Ramagobo,
Java, 377n
Pesantren, 392n
Peteng, 385, 392
Peter the Great Museum of
Anthropology and Ethno-
graphy, 427
Petrus / Peter, two books of
the New Testament, 344n
PGM, Papyri Graeci Magici /
Greek Magical Papyri, 194
PGMC, see Proto-Germanic
Phaeacian(s), 422
Pharos, 193
Phidias, 410
Philippines, 229, 233, 259,
235n
Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus
University Rotterdam, 5, 18,
428, 17n, 143n
Philosophie der symbolischen
Formen, 413; cf. Cassirer, E.
Phlegyan(s), 195
Phobos, 194
Phocis, 249
Phoenicia(n(s)), 181, 189, 245,
247
Phorbas, 195
Phrygian, 181
Phthas, see Pta
PIE, see Proto-Indo-European
Pigeon, 33
Pilzen, Czech Republic, 20n
Pima, 178, 233, 235n
Pipin, 137, 139
Pirah, Amazonian ethnic
group, 286-287
Pirate, 196
Plains, North American region,
110, 233; Plains Indians,
282
Pleiades, 113
Pleistocene, 109; Upper, 113;
Terminal, 109
Pluto, Roman underworld god,
178, 192; cf. Hades, under-
world
Polarity, 270
Pole, see Astronomy
Polynesia(n(s)), 225, 232-233,
235, 237, 235n; and Mada-
gascar, 225n
Pomo, 233, 256, 258
Pope, see Sylvester II
Poponcoran, 385, 391
Portola Valley, 427
Portuguese, 287, 188n
Poseidon, 194-195, 365, 415,
165n, 365n; cf. Waters
Possum, Spotted, 31-32; and
Parrot Fish, 35
Postmodernism, 315-316, 321,
332; and the Comparative
Method, 315-334
Post-Palaeolithic, 152
Potiphar, biblical character,
193; cf. Joseph
Powhatan Indians, 183
Prabu Premana Dikusumah,
375, 380-381
Prabu Sang Premana Dikusu-
mah, 379
Prabu Sili(h)wangi, 376, 381,
386-387, 394
Prague, Czech Republic, 192,
420
Prairie, 186
Prajpati, 197; Vivakarman,
361
Prakrti and Purusha, in the
Bhagavad Gita, 345n
450
Pre-historic Times, 289, 292;
cf. Lubbock, J.
Presidium of Russian Academy
of Sciences, 110n
Presley, Elvis, 151n
Pre-Socratics, 172n
Priam(us), 367-368, 368n
Primal Hill, 178
Primal Waters and the Flood,
Narrative Complex, 159-
161; also see Waters
Primitive Culture, 289; cf.
Tylor, E.
Principles of Psychology, 287;
cf. James, W.
Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, USA
scholarly journal, 294
Prometheus, 177-178, 180,
193, 415
Promised Land, 136
Protean transformations of
water-deity, Aarne-
Thompson no. F420.4.1.1,
167-169
Protectorate, status of Barotse-
land, W. Zambia, in colonial
period, 170
Proteus, 193; also see Trans-
formation, Protean
Proto-Germanic, 99-100
Proto-Human, 160
Proverbs, 131-132
Prussian, 60, 62-64, 69-72;
also see Old Prussian
Pta, 20, 243, 245-249; Pta
and Hephaestus, 248
Pterelaos, 199
PubMed, 303n
Puluga, Andaman creator god,
229-230
Puncak Manik, 386, 394
Purification, 82
Purukupali, 25, 30-31, 33-39,
30n, 39n
Purus(h)a, 82, 345n
Pusaka, 381
Puta, mythical Maori prophet,
235
Pygmalion, 192
Pygmy/ies, 230-232, 237
Pyramid Texts, 189, 246, 248,
247n
Pyrrhos, 189
Pythian Odes, 181; cf. Pin-
dar(us)
Python, 416; cf. Typhon
Qatabanian, 247

Queen Shikanda of the Nkoya,
190
Queen, 69, 177, 182, 190, 200,
253, 262, 382n; Boadicea,
190; Himiko, 262; Mlik,
69; Manenga, 200; Naumba
of the Sala, 190; Nzingha,
190; of the South, 382n; of
Yamatai Kingdom, 253,
262; cf. Queen Bee
Quest: An African Journal of
Philosophy / Revue Afri-
caine de Philosophie, 5
Qurn, 161, 396; cf. Islam

Rabbi, Rabbinical, 184, 192;
cf. Loew
Rabbit, mammal species, 124
Ra
c
, 197, Ancient Egyptian
sun-god
Rachmat Subagya, 382n
Radboud University Nijmegen,
5, 18, 427-428, 17n, 25n,
335n
Raulf, 93
Raga, 400
Ragnaro/k, 98, 102, 192
Rain god, Junior status in pan-
theon, 198
Rain, 48-49, 54, 170-172, 176,
182-183, 188, 191-192, 197-
198, 232, 234, 49n, 160n;
and Drought, 192; and
Hwempetla, 49; also see
Mvula, Rainbow, Rainbow
Serpent, Flood myths Wit-
zel model
Rainbow Serpent / Snake, 160,
180, 191, 203, 228, 237;
Rainbow Snake, Cosmic,
Narrative Complex, 159-
160; also see Flood myths
Witzel model
Rainbow, 160, 180, 191, 203,
228, 237; also see Flood
myths Witzel model
Rain-maker, also see Flood
myths Witzel model
Raising the Corn Spirit, see
Corn Spirit
Rangi, 197, 235; cf. Papa
Ranginui, and Papatuanuku,
235
Rasa, Sunda concept of mental
powers, 392n
Ratu Pusaka, 381
Raven, 179, 193, 157n, 353n;
and Eagle, 183; Raven-man,
257; also see Trickster, Big-
Raven
Ravenstein, town, the Nether-
lands, 5, 17, 275, 143n,
231n
Rawabogo Village, 376-378,
377n
Rebellion of gods against their
ruler, Aarne-Thompson no.
A162.8, 167-169
Rebirth, 101
Receptacle, 82, 258
Reconnection of Heaven and
Earth, Narrative Complex,
159-160
Red Sea, 150; cf. Moses,
Erythraean
Re, 92
Redeemers University, 127n,
428
Reed, Person, 177-178, 201;
Mat, 177; Mat and Bee
Hive, 177; also see Music,
Flood, Katete
Reed-and-bee, 151, 177; cf.
She of the
Reed-and-honey, 178
Regency of Sukapura, 377
Regency of Tasikmalaya and
Ciamis, 377
Regency of West Bandung,
377
Regeneration, 36, 49, 19n
Regicide, 179
Reiyka, 262
Religion Explained: the Evolu-
tionary Origins of Religious
Thought, 291n; cf. Boyer, P.
Remarques sur le verbe
croire , 412n; cf. Pouil-
lon, J.
Remus, Roman mythical fig-
ure, 271-272, 274
Rescue, 160, 233, 365; also see
Ogre
Research Group on Magic and
Religion in the Ancient Near
East, Netherlands Institute
for Advanced Study, Was-
senaar, 1994-1995, 172n
Research Institute for Human-
ity and Nature (RIHN),
Kyoto, Japan, 18
Research School NISCO, Rad-
boud University, Nijmegen,
the Netherlands, 5
Researches into the Early His-
tory of Mankind, 288; cf.
Tylor, E.
Resident Officer, 135
Retribution, also see Flood
myths Witzel model
Revolution, 326, 328, 342
451
g Veda, 76, 78-79; the Hymns
of the, 89, 345n
Rhea, 181
Rhegion, 351
Rhodes, and Thera, Aegean
islands, 177
RIHN, see Research Institute
for Humanity and Nature
Rind(r), 97
Ring of Fire, Pacific, 259
Rissh-Kseikai, 262
River as barrier to otherworld,
Aarne-Thompson no.
F141.1, 167-169
River as entrance to lower
world, Aarne-Thompson no.
F93.1, 167-169
Rock Cave of Heaven, divine
abode in Japanese mythol-
ogy, 256
Rock of the Ear, in Sunda sa-
cred geography, 385
Rockies, Rocky Mountains,
113, 179
Rk, 91-99, 101-103, 19n; Rk
Stone, 91
Roma, Gypsies, 187n, 197
Roman Catholic, 290, 427,
375n, 379n
Romance languages, 110n
Romanticism, 413
Rome, Roma(n(s)), city and
empire, 187, 193, 197, 245;
Religion, 189; cf. Graeco-
Roman, Fama, Pluto, Venus,
Dio Cassius, Vulcan, Mi-
nerva, Roma-Gypsies
Romulus, 271-272, 274; cf.
Remus
Rondonia, 117-118
Rotse, 180; cf. Lozi, Luyi,
Rozwe
Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 5,
18, 20, 428, 17n, 20n, 143n,
375n
Round Tables, Harvard, 18; cf.
Witzel, M.
Royal Netherlands Academy of
Arts and Sciences, 5
Royal Person Going from
Branch to Branch, Nkoya
mythical figure, 177; cf. Lu-
hamba, Bee
Royal Person Wind, Nkoya
mythical figure, 168
Rozwe, 180, cf. Lozi
Ruanda, 183
Ruaumoko, 235
Rudras, 364
Rugulf, 93
Ruler, 182, 190, 195n; cf. Bee,
King, Kingship
Rules, also see Rebellion
Rumour, 193; cf. Fama
Russia(n(s)), 59, 63-65, 86,
110, 179, 427, 65n, 75n,
109n-110n; and Latin, 63;
also see Old Russian
Russian Academy of Sciences,
427, 75n, 109n
Russian Foundation for Basic
Research, 110n
Rusta, see Ibn Rusta
Rv, see g Veda
Ryukyu, 262

Sm.t, see Sekhmet
Sabaic, 247
Sacred Monk Bagawat Sajala-
jala, 381
Saddle Peak, mythical seat of
primal deity, North Anda-
man Island, 229
Sage, 386-388, 390, 396, 400;
king, 387; Chinese, 383n;
Sundanese, 394; Indonesian,
383; cf. Wisdom
Sagum, 92-93
Sahara, 166, 184, 230
Sahel, see Africa
Sahidic, 246-247, 249-250
Saho-biko and Saho-bime, 262
Saint Petersburg, Russia, 19n-
20n, 75n, 109n
Sas, Ancient Egyptian town,
178, 249, 250n; cf. Neith,
Bee
Sajalajala, 381
Sajarah, 379, 381
Sakapura, 377n
Sakhmet, see Sekhmet
Sakti, 381
SAL U.GI, see Wise Woman
Sala, ethnic group, Central
Zambia, 183, 190
Salawe, 386
Saleh Dana, 379n
Saleh Danasasmita, 376n, 381n
Salin, 380
Salishan, North West Coast
American ethnic group, 233
Sam, 291n
Sambhuya, 61
Samoan, 235n
Samuel, two Bible books; on
God concept, 329
San, ethnic group in Southern
Africa, formerly called
Bushmen, 118, 148; cf.
Khoisan, Basarwa
Sand Calligraphy / Science,
171, 171n; cf.
c
ilm al-raml
Sandawe, 118
Sandy Creek, Australian loca-
tion, 31
Sang Manarah, 379, 381
Sang Surotama, 381
Sang Tamperan, 381
Sanga Yngulu, 50
Sania, 180
Sanjaya, 381, 381n
Sanskrit, 5, 20, 59, 189, 357-
360, 363-364, 367, 369-372,
428, 363n; and Greek, 359,
371; Mahabharata, 357
Santa Fe Institute, 152
Santana, 382n
Santeria, 183
Santrokofi, 118
Sargon II, 173
Sargon of Akkad, 173
Sarianidi, 75, 86, 86n
Sariputra, 70
Sarmatians, 200
Sasaka, 378n
Satan, 64, 330
atapatha Brahmaa, 61, 234
Savanna, 237; cf. Sahel
Saxo Grammaticus, 96, 190
Sayo Kitamura, 262
SBV, Standard Babylonian
Version, 234n
Scales, 191
Scamander, River, 192, 357
Scandinavia(n), 19, 91, 370n;
East , 96-97; cf. Nordic
School of Divinity, History and
Philosophy, University of
Aberdeen, 315n
Scientific American, periodical,
290
Scotland, 18, 427-428, 267n,
315n
Scutum, 244; cf. Hesiod
Scythian(s), 199-200; and
Celtic, 196; cf. Skull
Sea monster, Aarne-Thompson
no. G308, 167-169
Secoya, 115
Seed, 233
Seifikar, Kirsten, 5, 143n
Sekhmet, Ancient Egyptian
goddess, 248; cf. Sakhmet
Selknam, extinct Neolithic
ethnic group, Tierra des
Fuego, 236
Selkup, 109
Seminole, 109, 116
Semitic, 85, 187, 199, 245,
247, 251, 321-322, 145n;
452
Semites, 321; Semitic and
Aryan religions, quest for
their differences and simi-
larities, categories and pur-
suits in 19
th
-c. CE
scholarship, 322; cf. He-
brew, Arabic, Akkadian,
Ugaritic, West Semitic,
Afroasiatic
Sen Senu, 50
Senavarma, 67
Seneca, North American ethnic
group, 109, 116-117, 233
Senu, 50-54
Separation, 192, 194, 198,
195n; Separation of Heaven
and Earth, 152, 159, 162,
178, 203, 191n; Narrative
Complex, 159-160; Separa-
tion of Water and Land, 178
Serbo-Croatian, 63
Serbs, 183
Serpent, 180, 191-192, 201,
228, 233, 30n; cf. Snake,
Dragon, Rainbow Snake,
Rainbow
Seth, 178-179, 181, 197
Shabaka, 173
Shamanism / bones, 160-161,
Shang, 190
Shasta, 233
Shawnee, 233
She of the Reed and the Bee,
Ancient Egyptian royal title,
178; cf. Reed, Bee, Neith
She Who Makes Drunk, 179;
cf. Medb, Mead, Waters
Shed skin as condition of im-
mortality, aspect of the
mytheme, 111
Shield of Heracles, see Scutum
Shihoka Nalinanga, 167-168,
190-192, 195; and Likambi,
191, 190n; cf. Likambi
Shikanda, 190; cf. Skanda
Shimshon, 199
Shinkisha, 168
Shintoism, 179
Shipungu, 183
Shu, 181, 190, 192, 195n; and
Tefnut, 190
Shuar, 109, 116
Sia, North American ethnic
group, 178, 235n
Siberia, Siberian(s), 109-110,
113-115, 120, 233-235, 237,
253-255, 235n; Eastern and
Northeastern, 113; and
North American, 120
Sibling, 180; cf. Brother, Sis-
ter, Twins
Sicily, 245
Sidon, 181
Sikidy, 152; cf. Ifa, Hakata
Silihwangi, 376, 381, 386-387,
394-395
Simoeis, 359, 365, 370
Simon Magus, 192
Sinanthropus, 194
Sinkyone, 256, 258, 235n
Sino-Caucasian, linguistic
macrophylum, 154-156,
154n; cf. North Caucasian,
Sino-Tibetan
Sino-Tibetan, 156
Sintflut, Sintflutsage, German,
Flood (myth), 233; cf. Flood
Siolundi, 93
Siona, 115
Sioux, 115
Sister, 192; cf. Brother, Sib-
ling, Twins
SitiR, 92
Skldskaparml, 103
Skamander, River, 359, 363-
367, 369; and Zeus, 371; cf.
Hephaestus, Indra, Agni
Skanda, 190
Skin, 179, 191, 30n
Skirnir, 192
Skjrv, 76
Skull, 168, 194, 196; also see
House of skulls, land of
skulls, Demon cuts
Skunk, 258
Sky, 235, 245; Sky god, 167;
Sky-god fights dragon of the
waters or evil demon,
Aarne-Thompson no.
A162.2-3, 167-169; also
see: Heaven, What is in
Heaven
Slavic, 59-60, 63-65, 67-68,
192, 19n, 110n; and Baltic,
60, 68; and Indian, 64; also
see Old Slavic
Sleep, cf. Hypnos
Slovenian, 270
Snake, 160, 167, 191-192, 203,
228, 237, 343n; snake-man,
168; snake-demon, Aarne-
Thompson no. 391. 91.1,
167-169; Snake Child or
Parent of Drought, 191-192;
Snake in Ancient Greek my-
thology, 343n; Snake of
Tumba, 191; Snake Son of
mountain, 192; also see
Evil demon, Rainbow
Snake, Transformation, tree
Snake, Ancient Egyptian First-
Dynasty King, 192
Snake-man compound, Aarne-
Thompson no. F526.6, 167-
169; also see Forest Snake,
Rainbow
Snorri, 98, 102-103, 98n
Socrates, 343
Soeterbeeck Conference Cen-
tre, Ravenstein, the Nether-
lands, 5, 17
Soghd, 85
Sokoto, 133
Soli, 183
Soma, 179; also see Nectar
Son 78, 161; and Lover, 191n;
also see Separation of Land
and Water, Virgin
Sonatorrek, 96, 101, 103, 96n;
cf. Egill Skallagrmsson
Sorceress, 190-191
Sores, also see Flood myths
Witzel model
Sormani Fund, 5
Sotho, 170
South America, 19, 109-110,
113, 119, 122, 255; and
Eurasia, 239; also see Amer-
ica
South Dakota, 117
South Erythraean, 144, 150; cf.
Red Sea, Frobenius
South Khoisan, 156
South-North, flow of cultural
transmission, 151n, 174n; cf.
North-South, Afrocentrism,
Pelasgian, Hamitic
Spain, Spanish, 200, 233
Speaking, 54, 169, 186, 147n
Special Sunda hypothesis,
164n; cf. Oppenheimer, S.
Speckledness / granulated sur-
face texture / leopard, Nar-
rative Complex, 159-160; cf.
Possum, Spotted
Spell, 291n; also see Flood
myths Witzel model
Spider, 124, 160, 185-186,
201, 203, 258; and Hare,
124; Supreme, 185; Spider
Woman, 186; Naste Etsan,
186; Spider and Feminine
Arts, Narrative Complex,
159-160; cf. Nyambi,
Athena, Neith, Anahita
Spirit, 67, 80-81, 84, 168; of
wind, storm, thunder, cold,
Aarne-Thompson no. F432,
453
167-169
Spotted Possum, 31; cf. Speck-
ledness, Parrot Fish
Sraoa, 76-77; and Viu, 79
Stamping, 36
Standard Elaborate Flood
Myth, 181-182, 190, 202,
164n
Star, 117
Stealing, Moon Dishes, 179;
also see Theft
Steppe, 144, 166, 196, 199,
237, 188n-189n
Stone, 27, 91, 254, 19n;
Stones, the, Narrative Com-
plex, 159-160
Storm, also see evil demon,
Spirits, Susanowo
Story-teller, -telling, 274, 379
Strasbourg, 428, 19n, 59n
Stromata, 280n; cf. Clemens of
Alexandria
Styx, 197; cf. Underworld,
River
Subarctic, 109, 115
Subiya, 180
sub-Saharan Africa, 109-110,
143-145, 147-151, 154, 157-
160, 162, 166, 173-175,
183-184, 192, 201-203, 225,
230-231, 143n, 145n, 149n,
159n, 179n, 230n; and North
America, 122; sub-Saharan
Africa on the Emergence of
the First People, 109
Subterranean, see Underworld
Sudan, 185, 200, 151n
Sudika-Mbambi, 191
Sufism, 376, 379, 390, 394,
375n, 377n, 383n, 396n,
402n; and Buddhism, 376
Sukapura, 377
Sukma, 380
Sumatera, / Sumatra, 259
Sumer, Sumer(ian(s)), 151n,
234n; Sumero-Assyrian,
88n; and Neolithic Anatolia,
151
Summit of Light, 396
Sun, 111-113, 178, 193, 253,
255-258, 260-261; Suns
children killed, aspect of the
mytheme, 112; Sun and
Moon, 113; Sun-god, 79;
Sun Goddess, 257; also see
Amaterasu, Sun-god; Agni,
Theft, Hidden , Ra
c
Sunda Lexicon, 399n; cf.
Danadibrata, R.A.
Sunda thesis, see Extended ,
Special , Oppenheimer, S.
Sunda, Sundanese, 163, 375-
376, 379, 381-383, 386-387,
389, 391-396, 398-403, 405-
406, 164n, 201n, 375n,
378n-379n, 386n, 392n,
394n, 396n, 399n; Galuh
Kingdom, 381; Sage King,
387; Pakuan Kingdom,
381Literature, 382
Sundjata, 179
Super-Nostratic, 152n; cf.
Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Borean
Supreme God in Ancient Egypt
and, 177
Surt, 192
Surtr, 370n
Surui, 109, 116, 118
Survivals, 298
Survivors, 233; cf. Flood
Susanowo, 197, 253, 256, 263;
and Amaterasu, 261
Sussex, 303n
Suzuki, 405n
Svyatoslav of Kiev, 196, 199
Swan, 194; also see Transfor-
mation
Swarm, 177; cf. Bee
Swaziland, 183
Sweden, Swedish, 91-92, 96-
98, 100, 189; also see Old
Swedish
Sylvester II, Pope, 192
Synesthesia, 303
Syria, 193
Syriac, 245
Syrith, 199
Syro-Palestine, 154n; also see
Palestine / Palestinians, Is-
rael, Ancient Israelites
Syvaldus, king, 199

Taa, ethno-linguistic group in
Southern Africa, division of
Khoisan, 156
Tah, 389
Tahiti, 233
Taittirya Sahita, 70
Taiwan, 196, 237, 253-255
Tajikarao, 256
Tajiks, Tadjiks, 75, 84
Taksaka, 360, 365-366
Taliesin, 189
Talus, 192
Tanach, 161, 187, 189, 199,
180n; cf. Bible
Taala of Madagascar, 187
Tane, 235, 235n
Tanzania, 180
Taoism, 254
Tapara, 25, 30, 36-37, 39n; and
Purukapali, 25, 30, 36, q.v.
Taraka, 190
Taryo, 253-254
Tasikmalaya, 377, 377n
Tasmania(n(s)), 227
Taulipang, 233
Te Hurihanga A Mataaho,
Maori mythical concept of
turning the earth over to end
the Flood, 235
Teach, Edward, 196
Tears of Rain, 170-172, 176;
cf. van Binsbergen, W.
Tears, 169-172, 176, 188, 197;
Tears of Mvula, 183; cf.
Flood, Rain, Drop, Ra
c
Tefnut, 181, 190
Telegraph, UK newspaper,
290n
Temple, 85, 197, 243-244
Tenriko, 262
Tensho-Kotai-Jingukyo, 262
Tereh, 396
Terror, 291n
Testament, Old, 85, 176, 233,
319, 329; cf. Bible, Tanach
Thache, Thatch, see Teach, E.
Thatching, with skulls, 168,
196; cf. Skull, Kayambila,
Building
The Bungling host, mytheme
(Berezkin), 124
The Descent of Man, 289, 291,
294, 297; cf. Darwin, C.
The End of Faith, 291n; cf.
Harris, S.
The False Wife, aspect of the
mytheme, 120
The God Delusion, 291n; cf.
Dawkins, R.
The Golden Bough, 179, 150n;
cf. Frazer, J.
The History of the Danes, 96,
98, 190, 97n; cf. Saxo
Grammaticus
The Law, Australian Aborigi-
nal pivotal concept, 28
The Republic, 344; cf. Plato
The Serpent and his Cast Skin,
one of J. Frazers basic
mythemes on the Origin of
Death, 179, 30n
The Way from One World to
Another Goes through a
Narrow Opening, aspect of
the Emergence of First Peo-
ple mytheme, 116
454
The White Goddess, 189; cf.
Graves, R.
Theft of Sun, Aarne-Thompson
no. A721.1, 167-169
Theft, 179; cf. previous entry,
Moon, Kapesh
Theodoric the Great, 92-94,
101
Theogonia, 178, 193; cf. He-
siod
Theomachy, 410, 413, 420
Thera, 177, 188n
Thetis, 359, 361
Thimshian, 256
Thompson River, 233
Thompsons, Stith, Motif In-
dex, 235-236
Thor, 93, 96-98
Thrace, 189
Three Kingdom Period, Chi-
nese history, 262
Thule, 236
Thunder, also see Spirits
Tiamat, 197
Tibet(an), 20, 42, 69, 194, 196;
Tibetan Buddhism, 196
Tierra del Fuego, 232, 236,
236n
Tigri, see Djala
Tigris, 197
Tilburg University, the Nether-
lands, 428, 19n, 41n
Timaeus, 250; cf. Plato
Timon of Athens, 180n; cf.
Shakespeare, W.
Timor, 259
Timothy, 2 books of the New
Testament, 344
Tinguian, 235n
Titans, 98, 238, 416; Ti-
tanomachy, 369
Tiwi Islands, 36
Tiwi, Northern Australian eth-
nic group, 25, 30, 36, 38-39,
186, 30n
Tjapara, the Moon, Australian,
37
Tlingit, 179, 193, 233, 256-257
TMS, see Transcranian Mag-
netic Stimulation
Toa, 297
Toba, 109, 116, 232-233
Tocharians, 196
Tokyo, 428, 20n, 253n
Tonga, 180, 259
Tortoise-Turtle, Additional
158n
Tower of Babel, global etymo-
logical database, 152; cf.
Starostin & Starostin
Tower, 152, 180-182; cf.
Flood, Standard Elaborate
Toxoplasma, 293
Trachis, 419-420
Transcranial Magnetic Stimu-
lation, 290
Transformation, 158, 160, 163,
167-168; flight, Aarne-
Thompson no. D671, 167-
169 of dragon to man or
other animal, Aarne-
Thompson no. D399.1, 167-
169; of snake to man,
Aarne-Thompson no. D391,
167-169; to defeat ene-
mies, Aarne-Thompson no.
D651, 167-169; to fly,
bee, Aarne-Thompson no.
D1S5.1, 167-169; to snake
/ crocodile / dragon , Aarne-
Thompson no. D191.194.
199.2, 167-169; to swan,
crane, Aarne-Thompson no.
D161.1,162, 167-169; to
tree, Aarne-Thompson no.
D215, 167-169; also see
Dragon
Translation, 101n, 247n, 421n-
422n
Tree, 160, 201, 203, 233; Tree,
From the, Narrative Com-
plex, 159-160; also see
Transformation, Magic tree,
Snake
Tretyak, Tretjak, 59, 64
Tretej, 64
Trickster, 124, 233, 238, 258,
157n; Trickster-Raven-
Coyote, Additional Narra-
tive Complex, 157n-158n
Trita, 64
Tritangtu, 376, 386, 394, 397-
398, 401-402, 397n
Tritonis, see Lacus Tritonis,
Tropic of Capricorn, 229
Troy, Trojan(s), 193, 359, 464,
359-370, 421-422, 363n,
368n
Truth of Myth, 81, 340, 424,
343n
Tsetsaut, 233
Tsimshian, 179, 257
Tsonga of South East Africa,
180, 187
Tsukuyomi, Japanese moon
god, 256
Tuamotu, 233
Tuatha D Danann, 188
Tucuna, 233
Tujuh, 386, 394
Tumba, 191
Tunisia, 165n, 171n
Tupinamba, 232-233
Turkey, Turkish, Turk(s), 35,
178, 183, 196, 199
Turkish-Mongolian, linguistic
cluster, 196
Turkmenistan, 86
Turtle, see Tortoise
Tutsi, 148
Twins, 160-161; also see Dual-
ity, and next entry
Two Children, 161; also see
Duality, Twins
Two-Persons, see Kimbiji,
Angolan mythical figure,
191
Tyche, 181
Typhon, 416
Tyr, 98
Tyre, 181
Tyrrhenian, 178
Tzigane, 187

Udayin, 69
Uganda, 237
Ugaritic, 85
UK, see United Kingdom
Ukemochi, Japanese Food
Goddess , 256
Ukrainia(n), 63
Unas, 189; cf. Cannibal Hymn
Underworld, 64, 114, 118, 257,
19n; cf. People from the
Underworld, lower world,
also see River, Hllenhund,
Dog, Cerberus
Unilateral Being, 192; also see
Astronomy
United Kingdom, 18, 427-428,
267n, 290n, 315n, 357n
United States of America, 5,
17-18, 198, 253, 255, 286,
427-428, 20n, 59n, 91n,
225n, 279n; North Western
, 198
Unity Party of Nigeria, 135
Universe, 59-60, 80, 378, 399,
396n
Universit Marc Bloch, 428,
59n
University of Aberdeen, 428,
315n
University of Edinburgh, 267n
University of Ghent, 409n, 428
University of Montreal, 290
University of Oxford, 427
University of Pennsylvania,
290
455
University of Sussex, 303n
Upananda, 70
UPN, see Unity Party of Nige-
ria
Upper Egyptian mythical con-
tinuities, or their absense, in
Lower Egypt, 178
Ural Mountains, 114
Uralic, 99, 166, 179, 186, 191,
199; and Germanic, 166;
Uralic traces in Old Egyp-
tian, 199; also see Finno-
Ugric
Uranus, 193, 198
USA, see United States of
America
Usatsu-biko, 262
Usatsu-bime, 262
Utanapishtim, 234; cf. Noah,
Ziusudra, Atraasis
Uttu, 186; cf. Spider

Vaeinaemoeinen, 191
Vagina Dentata, Additional
158n
Vahita, 370n
Vaiiu, 81
Vala, 60
Vald, 102
Vli, 96-97
ValkaR, 93
Valkis, 93
Vamo, 92, 95, 101-102
van den Heuvel Reinders, Ka-
rel Jan, 20n
Vara, 77-79, 84
Varieties of Religious Experi-
ence, 289; cf. James, W.
Varin(n), 91-92, 94-95, 98,
101-103
Varu, 100-101
Varua, 80, 100-101, 179, 361;
associated with wrapping,
101n; cf. Guardian
Vasus, 364; cf. Maruts
Veda(s), Vedic, 17, 59-61, 63-
66, 70, 72, 79-80, 88, 174,
234, 235n, 282n, 345n; and
Avestan, 76; and Buddhist,
65-66; and Greek, 63; In-
dia, 60; Trita, 64; and Old
Iranian, 64; Yama, 79;
.also see Middle Vedic
Velu Mate Mother of Spirits /
of the Dead (Lettish), 67;
cf. Wise Woman
Venus, 193; cf. Aphrodite
Vessel, also see Flood myths
Witzel model
Victoria River Downs, Austra-
lia, 31
Vdvdt, 75-78, 80-82, 85
Viennese Circle, 339
Vietnam, 117
Vikings, 196
Vilin(n), 93, 96-98, 101-103
Vinaya, 69-71
Viracocha, 197, 200
Virgin, 161; Cosmogonic Vir-
gin Mother and Only Child /
Lover-son, 159-160, 192;
Virgin Mother of the Wa-
ters, 191n; Virgin Mother
Goddess, 253, 261, 263
Virginia, 184
Visaya, 109, 116
Vishnu, 189
Viuua, 76, 78-79
Vvasvat, 76-77, 79; and Yima,
76
Voice-Hera, 366
Volcano, see Earth-Dragon
Volga, 114
Vomiting, 232
Vrind-, Vrindar-v, 97
Vtra, 167, 192
Vulcan, Isles of, 245; further
see Hephaestus
Vulgate, primal Latin Bible
translation, 358n

Wa, Asian ethnic group, 109,
116, 193, 165n
WAd, see Green
Wadoe, 183
Wahemba, 183
Wako University, 428, 253n
Walapai, 235n
Walker of the Height,
Mwenda-Njangula, Nkoya
unilateral mythical charac-
ter, 198
Walumbwe, 183
Wanara, 379, 381
Wandibba, 153n
Wanka, 109, 116
War, 280, 306, 368-369
Warangs, 199
Warao, 109, 115-117
Wasegue, 183
Wassenaar, the Netherlands,
172n
Water Bag, also see Flood
myths Witzel model
Water(s), 81, 122-123, 161-
162, 178, 181, 186, 191-
194, 199-200, 229, 165n,
191n, 195n; and the Land,
200; Primal , 178, 165n;
Waters Below, Aside and
Above, 132, 178, 191; also
see Monster, Waters give
way, Transformation, Sky
god, Aquatic Beings
Waters give way, aspect of the
mytheme, 123
Wawacan Sajarah Galuh, 379,
381
Wawemba, 183; cf. Bemba
Waxing and Waning of the
Moon, one of J. Frazers ba-
sic mythemes on the Origin
of Death, 30n; cf. Moon
Wb, Wrterbuch der gyp-
tischen Sprache, 247-248,
246n, 250n; cf. Erman, A.,
& Grapow, H.
Websters New World Diction-
ary, 344n
Wednesdays and Fridays, fast
days among the Ethiopian
Dorz people, 412
Wei Zhi, 262
Welsh, 189
Wernickes area, 299
West Asia, see Asia, West
West Caroline Is, 233
West Scandinavian, 96
West Semitic, 187, 247
Westerly islands, Ancient
Greek mythical concept,
343n
Western, the West, see North
Atlantic, Europe, North
American
Westerners, 418n; cf. Mbwela
Westra, Maaike, 19n
What is in Heaven, Narrative
Complex, 159-160
White God, Additional Narra-
tive Complex, 157n-158n;
cf. Leukothea
White Mountain Apache, 233
Wicca, 189
Wife, see The False , Sek-
hmet, Aphrodite
Williams syndrome, 308n
Wind, 168; also see Dragon,
Spirits, evil demon, Royal
Person Wind, Lipepo
Wingbolu, 128, 134
Wirklichkeitsabsolutismus,
German, absolutism of real-
ity (Blumenberg), 409, 414
Wisdom, 132, 404
Wise Woman (Hittite ), 67
Wishosk, 233
With-One Hair, epithet of one
456
Nkoya king Kahare, 199
Witoto, 109, 116
Woman as dragon-slayer,
Aarne-Thompson no.
B11.11.7, 167-169
Woman, 67-68, 167, 186, 258;
cf. Wise Woman
Women of Trachis, 419-420; cf.
Sophocles
Wonari-gami in Okinawa, 262-
263
Wongar, 32-33
Wood, 192
World Buffalo, 200
World Egg, 160; also see
Lightning Bird
World Parents, Izanagi and
Izanami (Japan), q.v., 253,
261, 263
World War 280; II, 306
World-fire, 234
World-Wide Web, 290n; cf.
Internet
Wounds, also see Flood myths
Witzel model
WPS, Wortschatz der
Pharaonen in Sachgruppen,
247n; cf. Hannig, R., &
Vomberg, P.
Wulfstan, 72
Wunschding. magic cup, Grail,
Aarne-Thompson no.
D1472, 1472.1.9-19, 167-
169

Xanthus, 359n
Xi, 181, 234, 165n

Yaav, see Mwaat Yaav
Yabuti, 109, 116-117
Yaga, 67
Yama, 75-77, 79-80, 178, 271,
274; and Prua, 82; cf.
Death
Yamana, 236, 240
Yamatai, 253, 262
Yamvo, see Mwaat Yaav
Yanluo, 178
Yaruro, 109, 116
Yat, 76, 78-79
Yayoi, 261
y jng, I Ching, 375-376, 402,
404-405, 171n
Yima, 75-79, 82, 84; and Gaiia
Martn, 79; and Viu, 77;
in the Avesta, 79
Yimkard, 77
Yiya, 136
Ymir, 194
Yolngu, 32
Yomi, 199
Yoruba(-land), 127-129, 131-
133, 137-141, 178, 183, 186
Yoseph Iskandar, 376n
Yougo, 49-50, 52
Yueh-chi, 196
Yugo, 51
Yugua, 235n
Yu-Lan, 383n, 403n
Yunca, 233
Yurac/kare, 109, 116, 232-233

Zaire, see Congo
Zambezi, River, 168-170, 172-
173, 181-182, 190, 188n; cf.
Congo-Zambezi watershed
Zambia Archives, 188n
Zambia(n), 20, 143-144, 147-
148, 167, 169-173, 176,
180-183, 185, 190-191, 202-
203; Western Zambia, 170-
172, 176, 180-182, 191,
202-203, 182n; Central
Zambia, 183; Central West-
ern Zambia, 170; Central
and Southern Zambia, 169;
Bemba, 182n, 188n; and
Angola, 170
Zanati, see Muammad al-
Zanati
Zaparoans, 235n
Zealand, location in Rk Stone
context, 93
Zend-Avesta, 115
Zervan, 80-81
Zeus, 177, 181, 198, 359, 364-
366, 369-371, 409-410, 415-
416, 421-422; of Phidias,
410, 195n, 351n; also cf.
Jupiter
Zhi, 262
Zhu, 156
Zia, 186
Zimba, period in Zambezian
history, South Central Af-
rica, 173
Zimbabwe(an(s)), 179-180,
183, 193; And Northern Ni-
geria, 179
Zipporah, 187
Ziusudra, 234n
Zmey Gorynych, 192
Zoro, 109, 116
Zoroastrianism, 19, 75-76, 79-
88, 19n
Zui, 233, 318

457
Author index

The author index gives places where an author is mentioned in the discursive text, but ignores the end
bibliographies of individual chapters unless the author was not specifically mentioned elsewhere in
the text. Apart from names of authors, their places of work, and papers that have not been included in
the present collection, the overviews of original conference papers in the Introduction to this book have
not been indexed, since the final versions appear in this book. For publications by multiple authors, all
authors names have been indexed, whenever possible.

Aarne, Antti, 144, 166-167
Abell, F., 307
Acra, F., 306
Ade-Ajayi, J.F., 127, 129-130,
133
Adelaar, A., 155
Adolphs, R., 307
Afanassiev, A.N., 62
Aikhenvald, A.J., 67
Akanji, Olajide Olayemi, 134
Akinjogbin, I.A., 142
Akintoye, S. A., 127, 129
Akinwumi, O., 142
Alavi, A., 290
Albert, I.O., 129
Albertus Magnus, 192
Albright, William Foxwell,
319, 319n
Alexander, Hartley Burr, 178
Alighieri, Dante, 419, 39n
Allen, Louis A., 36
Allen, N.J., 192, 269, 275, 357,
369-371, 427, 20n, 233n,
235n, 362n, 368n
Alpern, S.B., 190
Altheide, T.K., 158n
Amen, D., 290
Amiel, H.F., 419
Amo, C.M., 299
Amselle, J.-L., 148n
An, D., 235n
And, Metin, 183
Andrews, Tamra, 191, 197-198
Anggawisastra A.K., 381n
Anthes, R., 197
Anuchin, D.N., 64-65, 65n
Apollodorus, 177, 181, 189,
194, 416
Apollonius Rhodius, 183, 200,
195n
Apthorpe, R.J., 183
Archambault, J., 117
Argyle, W.J., 183
Aristotle, 193, 302, 321, 335-
336, 340, 344
Armstrong, K., 383n
Arredondo, P., 302
Asheri, David, 196
Ashlock, P.D., 326n
Askelf, S., 299
Atja, P., 376n, 379n, 381n
Atran, S., 279, 289, 292, 295-
296, 309, 291n, 297n
Atsma, Aaron J., 181
Aura Jorro, F., 243
Austin, N., 420

Bachofen, J.J., 200
Bachtiar, T., 382n
Bacon, Francis, 324, 419
Bacon, Roger, 192
Baime, M., 290
Bajun, L.S., 67
Baldick, J., 196
Banissy, M.J.., 304
Barber, E.W., 236n, 260n,
339n
Barber, Karin, 132
Barber, P.T., 236n, 260n, 339n
Barbey, A.K., 291n
Barbour, I., 351n
Barbujani, G., 151n
Barnard, A., 387n-388n
Barnes, M., 91
Baron-Cohen, S. 306
Barret, S.A., 258n
Barrett, L., 301
Barrett, P.H., 310
Barsalou, L.W., 299n
Barth, Fredrik, 282
Bartholomae, C., 84, 77n
Bascom, W.R., 42n-43n
Bastin, Yvonne, 153n
Batibo, H.M., 153n
Battaggia, Cinzia, 158n
Baumann, H., 118, 186, 226n,
230n
Baumgartner, W., 247n
Beaujard, P., 177, 187
Beauregard, M., 290
Bechstein, Ludwig, 39
Beckwith, M.W., 117, 230n,
235n
Behan, M., 190
Belcher, S., 41n, 43n, 46n
Belier, W.W., 269
Bengtson, J.D., 155, 155n
Bennett, Patrick R., 153
Benveniste, E., 76
Berezkin, Y., 109-110, 115,
203, 427, 20n, 25n, 202n,
389n
Berger, P.L., 268
Berlinerblau, J., 151n
Bernal, Martin Gardiner, 144,
150-151, 184, 193, 243,
249-251, 146n, 151n, 155n,
174n, 249n-250n
Berndt, C.H., 26, 28, 30-31,
119
458
Berndt, R.M., 26, 28, 30-31,
119
Besnard, M.H., 117
Best, Elsdon, 197
Best, J., 189
Betz, H.D., 194
Biella, J.C., 247
Bierhorst, J., 236n
Binford, L.R., 194
Black, G.A., 245n
Black, J., 247, 245n
Blacker, C., 196
Blanchard, D.C., 293
Blanchard, R.J., 293
Blaek, Vclav, 243, 251, 427,
20n, 155n
Bleek, W., 155
Blench, Roger, 152
Bloch, Ernst, 339
Bloch, M., 302
Blok, J.H., 190
Bloomfield, M., 76
Blumenberg, H., 20, 339, 409,
413-417, 419-420, 424,
353n, 414n
Boas, F., 258n, 327n
Bogoras, W., 257n
Bolle, K.W., 340n
Bonnefoy, Yves, 187
Boothroyd, J.C. 293
Borghouts, J.F., 171n
Boschi, Ilaria, 158n
Bottro, J., 171n
Bouch-Leclercq, A., 171n
Bouchet, J., 182
Bouju, Jacky, 46n
Bowler, D.M., 307
Boyce, M., 83n
Boyer, P., 279, 289, 292, 295-
296, 309, 291n, 297n
Brand, G., 340n
Bravi, Claudio M., 201n
Brehm, Alfred, 293
Brelsford, W.V., 183, 190
British Columbia Folklore
Society, 166n
Bromwich, Rachel, 189
Bronkhorst, J., 72
Brown, C.G., 423n
Brown, D.E., 155-156
Brown, E.D., 170
Brundage, W., 194n
Buchler, Ira R.., 29, 191
Buck, C.D., 202n
Budge, E.A.W.T, 186
Bugge, S., 91n
Bulf, H., 294-295
Bultmann, R., 339
Burke, Kenneth, 418, 414n
Burkert, W., 183, 269, 194n-
195n
Burlingame, E.W. 72
Butler, S., 244
Byrne, R.W., 301

Cabanis, Jean Pierre, 287
Cagni, L., 178
Calafell, Francesc, 158n
Caland, W., 65
Calhoun, G.M., 410-413,416-
417, 420-421, 424, 411n,
415n
Callaway, Henry, 177
Campbell, J., 41, 51, 41n, 51n,
236n, 340n
Canessa, N., 294
Cann, R.L., 156
Canteras, N.S., 293
Capello, H., 186
Capinera, J.L., 178
Cappa, S., 294
Carnoy, A., 244
Carriere, J.S., 304
Carus, Titus Lucretius, 419
Casal, U.A., 196
Cassirer, E., 339, 347, 413,
339n
Cassius Dio, L., 196
Castelli, F., 307
Castro-Caldas, A. 299
Catrical, E., 294
Cavalli-Sforza, L.L., 145-146,
186, 152n, 155n, 158n
ern, J., 247
Chacon, Richard J., 196
Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 177
Changeux, J.-P., 286, 280n
Chantraine, P., 243n
Chapman, L.J., 308
Chatelain, Heli, 191
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 419
Cheney, D.L., 301
Cheung, R.T., 299
Chippindale, C., 26
Chittick, W.C., 383n, 386n,
394n, 402n
Choksy, J.K., 84
Chomsky, Noam, 155, 298
Chrtien, J.-P., 146n
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 245,
419
Claessen, H.J.M., 190
Clark Hall, J.R., 98
Clark, Ella E., 98, 113, 179
Clark, G., 113
Clarke, Kenneth Wendell, 166n
Clment Huart, 196
Clement of Alexandria, 280n
Clothier, J., 169
Clouston, W.A., 189
Cochrane, Eve, 189
Coia, Valentina, 158n
Colavito, Maria M., 387
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 347
Collinder, B., 100n
Collingwood, R.G., 326n
Comas, David, 158n
Conrad, J.L., 183
Coqury-Vidrovitch, C., 148n
Corcella, A., 196
Cordeu, E.J., 118
Corp, N., 301
Cosmides, L., 301
Cotterell, Arthur, 177, 185-186,
193
Cou(l)drette, 193
Coupe, L., 344, 413, 425, 344n,
414n
Cowell, E.V., 72
Cox, M., 307
Cruciani, Fulvio, 158n
Csapo, E., 417n
Csibra, G., 306
Culin, S., 152
Cunnison, I.G., 177
Crsgen, D., 339n

dAquili, E., 290
Dalby, David, 153
Dale, A.M., 187, 193
Dalla Barba, B., 294-295, 301
Dalley, S., 234n
Damasio, A.R., 294, 299
Damasio, H., 294, 299
Damba, Larisa, 201n
Danadibrata R.A., 392n, 394n,
399n
Danasasmita, S., 376n, 379n,
381n
Dandekar, R.N., 76
Dang Nghiem Van, 181
Dante, see Alighieri
Darwin, C., 287-289, 291-294,
296-298, 309, 291n
Davidson, T., 183
Davis-Kimball, J., 190
Davison, Katherine, 179
Dawkins, R., 279, 286, 289,
295-296, 298, 309, 290n-
291n, 297n
Day, M.S., 234n, 340n
de Buck, A., 179, 197
de Dominico, S., 151n
de Haan, M., 306
de Heusch, L., 173
de Nicols, A.T., 387n
de Vries, J., 101, 339, 101n,
164n, 180n, 351n
de Vries, N., 189
Author Index
459
de Wilman-Grabowska, H., 196
de Win, Xaveer, 343
Debrunner, H.W., 118
Delatte, A., 171n
Delatte, E., 171n
Deleuze, G., 147
Demetriou, N., 309
Denbow, James, 153n
Dennett, D., 279, 289, 292,
296, 309, 291n, 297n
Dennett, R.E., 186
Dentith, S., 417, 418n
Derrida, J., 147, 324, 148n
Descartes, Ren, 192
Destro-Bisol, Giovanni, 158n
Detienne, M., 343n, 411n-412n
Dexter, Robbins 181
Dickson, J.H., 177
Diels, H., 338, 343
Dieterlen, G., 46, 46n
Dike, Kenneth Onwuka, 130
Diop, Cheikh Anta, 150-151
Dipierri, Jose E., 201n
Djunatan, S., 375, 427, 19n-
20n, 377n-378n, 386n,
389n, 396n, 399n-400n,
403n, 406n
Djuri, M., 351
Doniger, W., 230n
Doquet, A., 46n
Dornan, S.S., 118
Dorsey, G.A., 117
Dosrev, V., 178
Doty, W.G., 52n, 340n
Doucet, S., 301
Draffkorn Kilmer, A., 177
Dray, William, 326n
Du Bois, W.E.B., 151
Dubova, N.A., 86-88, 86n-87n
Dubuisson, D., 341n
Dumzil, G., 269, 270-273,
369-370
Dunbar, R., 301
Dundes, A., 181, 236-237, 239,
42n, 226n, 228n-230n,
234n, 236n-237n, 239n,
261n
Dupr, W., 427, 332, 335, 353,
427, 20n, 331n, 341n, 347n
Durkheim, E., 27, 305, 327n
Dutt, N., 72
Dye, David H., 196

Eames, K., 307
Eckblad, M., 308
Eckhardt, K.A., 101n
Edel, D., 179
Edelman, G., 299
Edgerton, F., 61, 68
Edwards, I.E.S., 178, 194
Egberts, A., 249-250, 155n,
246n, 249n
Eggan, F., 318
Egill Skallagrmsson, 96, 99,
101, 103
Ehret, C.E., 153n
Eiichiro, I., 263n
Eilberg-Schwartz, H., 321n
Ekadjati, E.S., 381n
Eliade, M., 103, 181, 322,
338n, 340n
Eliseev, Serge, 196
Elkin, A.P., 38
Eller, M., 304
Elmberg, J.E., 117
El-Shamy, Hasan M., 166n
Elson, Christina M., 184
Elwin, V., 117
Emelyanov, V.V., 88n
Emery, W.B., 177
Empedocles, 197
Endicott, P., 229n
Engels, F., 200
English, Jane, 404n
Erdoes, Richard, 178
Erman, A., 247-248, 246n,
250n
Etter, A., 234n, 239n
Euhemerus, 197
Euripides, 189, 244
Evans, Arthur J., 183
Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 145, 200
Everett, D., 286-287

Fad, T., 171n
Fabricius, 189
Fadipe, N.A., 132, 137-139
Falola Toyin, 128, 133
Farmer, S., 279, 282-288, 296,
300, 309, 427, 20n, 143n,
147n, 194n, 281n-282n,
285n, 297n-298n, 308n
Farnell, Lewis R., 189
Farroni, T., 306
Faulkner, R.O., 189, 247, 247n
Fauth, W., 155n
Fauvelle-Aymar, F.-X., 146n
Fedorova, Sardana A., 201n
Feldman, S., 180, 182n
Fernandez, A., 299
Feuerbach, L.A., 288
Finkelberg, M., 273
Finnegan, Ruth, 128
Finsler, G., 411n
Fishbane, Michael A., 197
Flaubert, G., 419
Flight, Colin, 153
Flournoy, T., 305
Fodor, J., 298
Fonseca, I., 187n
Fontenrose, J., 167, 173, 177,
181, 189, 194-195
Ford, C.W., 42n-43n
Frlag, Maicar
Forster, Peter, 154, 157, 163,
158n
Fournet, J.L., 250n
Fox, D.C., 119
Fox, P.T., 299
Frank, D., 183
Frank, M., 339n
Frankfort, H., 319n
Fraser, C., 303
Fraser, Lady Antonia, 190
Frazer, J.G., 171-172, 177-181,
183, 198, 236, 315, 319,
321-322, 325, 329-331, 30n,
150n, 226n, 319n-320n,
331n
Freeman, A., 289-290
Freud, Sigmund, 27
Friedman, Jonathan, 140
Frisk, H., 243n
Frith, C., 307
Frith, U., 307
Frobenius, L., 119, 144-145,
150, 179-180, 150n, 164n,
230n
Frymer-Kensky, T., 178
Fung Yu-Lan, 383n, 403n
Furne, E.I., 243n

Gaborieau, M., 270
Gadd, C.J., 178, 194
Gade, K.E., 98n
Gahs, A., 194
Gamkrelidze, T.V., 66
Ganguli, K.M., 358n
Gao, J.H., 299
Gardiner, E., 188
Gardner, J., 234n
Gaster, T.H., 229n-230n
Gautrey, P.J., 310
Ge, L., 302
Geertz, C., 317-318, 323-324,
328, 318n, 323n, 326n,
379n, 392n, 399n
Gellner, E.A., 200
George, A., 247, 245n
Gerland, G.K.C., 178
Geschwind, Norman, 289
Giacomini, N., 293
Gia-Fu Feng, 404n
Gibbon, Edward, 410
Gilkey, L., 351n
Gillen, J.F., 27-28, 31, 31n
Gimbutas, M., 178
Girard, Ren, 148n
Gluckman, H.M., 145, 170n
Golder, F.A., 257n
460
Golubenko, Maria V., 201n
Gonda, J., 234n, 239n
Goneim, M.Z., 177
Gonzalez-Reimann, L., 285
Goodale, J.C., 38
Goodall, J., 293, 302
Goodman, G.S., 302
Gould, S., 284n
Grabowski, T.J., 294, 299
Grafman, J., 291n
Grapow, H., 247-248, 246n,
250n
Graves, R., 189, 180n, 194n
Gray, L.H., 179, 189, 226n
Grayson, James Huntley, 179
Greenberg, J.H., 229
Griaule, M., 46-47, 46n-47n
Griffin, J., 420
Griffin, R., 306
Griffith, Ralph T.H., 78
Griffiths, R.C., 158n
Grimm, Jacob, 192, 200
Grimm, Wilhelm, 192, 200
Groen, M., 306
Grnvik, O., 93, 91n
Grosseteste, Robert, 192
Gruppe, O., 194n
Gubina, Marina A., 201n
Guerber, H.A., 193
Guliaev, Valeri I., 190
Gundlach, R., 178
Gntert, H., 99-100, 99n-100n
Gusdorf, G., 340n
Gusinde, M., 232, 236n
Gterbock, Hans G., 177
Guthrie, Malcolm, 153, 155,
186, 197, 199
Guthrie, S., 279, 289, 291-296,
298, 301, 309, 291n
Guy, Will, 187n

Hackin, J., 196
Hahmo, S.-L., 99n-100n
Halit, H., 306
Hall, C., 98
Hammer, M.F., 158n
Hammond, N.G.L., 178, 194
Hamp, E.P., 250n
Han Xiaorong, 188
Hancock, I., 187n
Hanks, C., 290
Hannig, R., 247n
Happ, F., 307
Haraway, Donna J., 193
Harding, S., 147n
Harpending, Henry, 152n
Harris, J., 91, 93, 96, 103, 274,
279, 427, 19n, 91n, 96n,
101n, 103n
Harris, S., 289, 296, 309, 291n,
297n
Hart, G., 197
Hart, R., 26,
Hart, W.C.M., 38
Hastings, James, 179, 189,
226n
Hatab, L.J., 344, 340n
Haviland, J., 26
Hawkes, Kristen, 152n
Haxby, J.V. 294, 299
Heberlein, A.S., 307
Hedley, D., 347n
Hegel, G.W.F., 94, 145, 288,
339
Heidel, A., 234n
Heideman, Eric M., 193
Heider, F., 306-309, 307n
Heider, K.G., 116
Heine, Bernd, 153n
Heine, H., 419, 339n
Hekataios, 343n
Helck, W., 177, 186, 190
Helgason, J., 103n
Hellanicus, Hellanikos, 343n
Hellquist, E., 100
Hemmerdinger, B., 250n
Hempel, C.G., 326n
Henderson, J.B., 279, 285-288,
296, 300, 309, 281n-282n,
285n, 297n-298n
Henschen, F., 194
Henzi, P., 301
Heraclitus, 338
Herbert, S., 310
Herodotus, 196, 200, 244-246,
249, 321, 195n, 243n, 250n
Hertz, Wilhelm, 193
Hesiod, 156, 178, 193, 197,
244, 369, 343n
Hiatt, L.R., 27-28, 38, 29n
Hichwa, R.D., 294, 299
Higley, Sarah L., 192-193
Hiltebeitel, A., 368
Hitler, A., 339n
Hobson, T., 329
Hodgson, R., 289
Hoffman, M.A., 151n
Hfler, O., 91n
Hofstra, T., 99n-100n
Holenstein, E., 305
Holmes, S., 158n
Homer, 20, 243, 249, 344, 357-
358, 368, 370-372, 409-413,
416-417, 420-425, 343n,
411n, 415n
Hong, H., 293
Hook, Richard, 183
Hooke, S.H., 318-319, 319n
Hoover, J.J., 179
Hopfner, T., 197
Horton, Robin, 128
Houlihan, P.F., 177
Howe, S., 146
Howitt, A.W., 241
Hrozny, B., 155n
Hbner, K., 340, 351-352,
340n, 343n-345n, 352n
Hudjashov, G., 226n-227n
Hulbert, H.B., 196
Hume, D., 288, 291, 295-296,
298, 309, 345, 327n
Hunt, G., 258n, 327n
Husserl, E., 147n
Hutcheon, L., 418
Hutton, Ronald, 183

Ibn Rusta, 196
Ibn-Faln, 65
Idel, M., 193
Idinopulos, T.A., 183
Ifeany Nnoruka, S., 338n
Ikime, O., 142
Ingvar, M., 299
Innes, G.,179
Isaak, M., 163, 181-182, 157n,
164n, 201n, 226n
Iskandar, Y., 376n, 379n, 381n
Ivanov, V.V., 66-67, 65n
Ivens, R., 186
Iverson, P., 301

Jack, C.R. Jr., 299
Jackson, L.H,. 299
Jacottet, E., 168, 180, 185, 188,
191, 198, 175n, 203n
Jaeger, D., 193
Jahn, Alfred, 247
Jakobsdttir, Svava, 177, 179
Jalla, Adolphe D., 180, 182,
188
James, W., 187, 287, 289-290,
291n
Jamme, Chr., 341n
Janda, M., 100-101, 101n
Jansen, J., 179
Janzen, J., 176
Jasanoff, J.H., 155n
Jaspers, K., 339
Jauoen, R., 53n
Jenkins, T., 158n
Jennings, C., 128, 133
Jensen, A.E., 180
Jenyn, 420
Jerome, St., 85
Jett, Stephen C., 201n
Jin, Z., 299
Jochelson, W., 257
Johnson, M., 300
Johnson, M.H., 301, 306
Author Index
461
Johnson, Michael, 183
Johnson, Samuel, 128, 132-
134, 137-138
Jolly, A., 301
Jolly, Eric, 46n
Jonas, Hans, 339
Jones, G., 193
Jones, Livingston French, 179
Jones, P., 27n
Jones, T., 193
Jonsson, K.M., 248n
Juillerat, B., 53n
Jung, C.G., 155, 340n
Junod, H.A., 187
Jurewicz, J., 183

Kaberry, Phyllis M., 32
Kaiser, M., 152n
Kamma, F.C., 229n
Kamuwanga, Liswaniso, 181
Kant, I., 145, 336
Kaplony, P., 178
Kapogiannis, D., 291n
Karafet, T., 158n
Karlgren, B., 155-156
Karst, J., 195, 165n
Karsten, T.E., 100n
Kaul, F., 189
Kawanga, Davison, 170
Keates, S.G., 113
Keith, A.B., 189
Keller, A.G., 411n-412n
Keller, W., 238n
Kelly, D.J., 302
Kelsen, Hans, 182, 198, 229n-
230n
Kemp, B.J., 178
Kenneth Maddock, 29
Kenrick, D., 187n
Kerenyi, K. / C., 177, 342,
340n-341n
Khalsa, D.S., 290
Khamidjanova, M.A., 83
Khusnutdinova, Elsa K., 201n
Ki Subarma, 379, 380n
Kim, S.K., 293
Kimambo, I., 173
Kindaichi, K., 257
King, L.W., 186
Kirk, G.S., 338, 367, 353n,
411n
Kirk, R.L., 38
Kitamura, Sayo, 262
Kivisild, Toomas, 201n
Klaeber, F., 103
Klein, E., 245n
Klieman, Kairn, 153n
Klimov, Georgii Andreevich,
195n
Klin, A., 307
Klindt-Jensen, O., 189
Klystra, A.D., 99n-100n
Knight, M., 188n
Knipe, D.M., 177, 179
Kobusch, T., 339n
Kocher, T.D., 152n
Kmkulkz, Elmira, 179,
190
Koehler, L., 247n
Koenig, H., 308
Kohn, D., 310
Kolakowski, L., 351
Kolig, Erich, 237n
Koltuv, Barbara Black, 193
Korab-Karpowicz, W.J., 387n
Kovacs, M.G., 234n
Kroeber, A.L., 258n
Krueger, F.291n
Kryukova, V., 75-76, 427, 19n
Kuiper, F.B.J., 60, 183, 235n
Kuper, H., 183
Kuusi, M., 118
Kuzmin, Y.V., 113
Kwan, D., 304

Lai, K.L., 405n
Lakoff, G., 300
Lambert, W.G., 178
Lao Tsu, Lao Tze, 375-376,
402, 404-405; 404n-405n
Law, R., 190
Leach, E.R., 202
Leaf, W., 410
LeDoux, J.E., 296
Lee, J.S., 302
Lee, K., 302
Lee, T.M., 299
Leeming, David Adams, 200
Lefkowitz, M.R., 151n
Legge, J., 405n
Leo, I., 294-295, 301
Leonard, William Ellery, 197
Leslau, W., 247
Levinas, E., 148n
Levinson, S.C., 287
Lvi-Strauss, 94, 340, 345,
345n
Levy, G.R., 194n
Lewis, Mark Edward, 181
Lewisohn, L., 407
Lewontin, R.C., 284n
Lhote, H., 190
Li, G., 299
Liddell, H.G., 243n
Liebrucks, Bruno, 340
Lim, H.K., 308
Lindblom, Gerhard, 185
Linossier, Raymonde, 196
Littleton, C.S., 269
Liu, S., 302
Liverpool, H.U., 183
Livius, Livy, 196
Lloyd, A.B., 195n
Lombard, D., 377n, 399n
Lommel, H., 84-85
Long, R.C.E., 184
Lnnroth, L., 91n
Looby, Robert, 193
Los, F.J., 178, 196, 199-200
Lubbock, J.H., 289, 291-292
Lucan, 419
Luckman, Thomas, 268
Lucretius, see: Carus
Luria, A., 299
Lyle, E., 18, 267, 269-273,
427, 20n, 143n
Lynch, P.A., 43n

Macalister, R.A.S., 189
Macaulay, V., 158n
MacCulloch, J.A., 189
MacEachern, Scott, 153n
MacGaffey, W., 43n
MacGregor, A.J., 183
Mackenzie, Donald Alexander,
192, 197
MacLean Rogers, G., 151n
Maddock, K.,28-29, 191
Maenchen-Helfen, O., 188n
Maestu, F., 299
Magnone, P., 234n, 239n
Magnussen, S., 302
Maho, Jouni, 153
Maier, J., 234n
Mainga, M., 170n
Malcolmson, K.A., 304
Maldi, D., 118
Malhi, Ripan S., 201n
Malinowski, B., 27
Malory, Thomas, 191
Mann, Michael, 153n
Marazov, I., 189
Marchal, Charles-Henri, 196
Marcus, G.F., 298n
Mareschal, D., 300
Margalith, Othniel, 199
Maringer, J., 194
Markham, C.M., 293
Marler, J., 181
Marques, J.F., 294
Martens, J., 189
Martin, A., 294, 299
Martinez-Labarga, Cristina,
201n
Marushiakova, Elena, 187n
Maspero, Gaston, 166n
Maspero, Henri, 196
Mathieu, R., 235n
Matsumura, K., 253, 255, 273,
428, 20n, 255n, 262n
462
Matthe, Marcus, 180
Mauss, M., 305
Mayr, E., 326n
Maziarz, E., 351n
Mbitu, N., 42n-43n
McClelland, J.L., 299
McCone, Kim, 269
McConnel, U., 27, 39n
McCormick F., 189
McGready, A.G., 250n
McKenna, A.J., 148n
McLennan, J.F., 289, 291
Meador, K.G., 308
Meder, Theo, 26, 39, 39n
Meeussen, A.E., 153, 155
Meistere, Baiba, 189
Mellaart, J., 194
Mencej, Mirjam, 270
Menozzi, A., 145-146, 186,
151n-152n, 155n
Mercer, S.A., 189, 247n
Meredith, G., 419
Meritt, H.D., 98
Merlan, F., 26
Merritt, H.D., 98
Metspalu, Mait, 201n
Meyer, E., 189
Meyerowitz, E.L.R., 150n
Militarev, A.Y., 154n
Millard, A.R., 178
Millroth, B., 118
Mindlin, B., 118
Mitchell, A., 309
Modiano, D., 158n
Monaghan, Patricia, 200
Monet, Jefferson, 179
Money, N. 290
Montagu, A., 147n
Montgomery, J.A., 194
Montgomery, J.E., 65, 65n
Mookerjee, A., 183
Moral, P., 158n
Morgan, Lewis Henry, 189n,
200
Morrison, F., 64
Morton, J., 301
Mountcastle, V., 299
Mountford, C.P., 26, 28, 36-37
Mowinckel, S., 319n
Muecke, D.C., 418-420
Mller, H., 178
Mller, H.-P., 343n
Mller-Kosack, G., 53, 43n
Mulligan, Connie J., 201n
Mulvenna, C.M., 303
Mundy, P., 306
Munson, T.M., 351n
Muntemba, Shimwaayi, 193
Murray, A.T., 421n-422n
Murray, M.A., 183
Muuka, L.S., 170n
Myers, F.R., 26, 29

Nabokov, V.V., 180n
Nagel, Ernest, 328n
Nakashima, B.R., 293
Namafe, C.M., 181
Napolskih, V., 115
Naso, Publius Ovidius, 189,
193, 197
Naumann, Nelly, 253, 255
Nehring, A., 252
Neil, R.A., 72
New, J., 301
Newberg, A., 290
Newcomb, F.J., 178
Newton, I., 201
Newton, R.M., 423, 423n
Niebuhr, R., 341n
Nietzsche, F., 419
Nikkil, O., 99n-100n
Niu, Z., 299
Noreen, A., 102
Nth, W., 390n
Nubakhsh, Javad, 407
Nugent, P., 43n
Nurse, Derek, 153n
Nussbaum, A., 155n

ODonoghue, H., 98n
OMeara, J.J., 189
Obayashi, Taryo, 253-254
Obenga, T., 150
Ode, A.W.M., 155
Oden, N.L., 151n
Oefner, P.J., 158n
Oguibnine, Oguibenine, Boris,
59, 64-66, 70, 428, 19n,
143n
Oguntomisin Dare, 128, 133
Ohman, A., 294
Okpeh, O., 142
Olckers, A., 158n
Oliver, Roland, 153n
Olmsted, G.S., 189
Omosini, Olufemi, 136
Oppenheimer, S., 163-164,
203, 164n, 201n
Ortiz, Alfonso, 178
Ortiz, T.M., 299
Osborne, C.R., 36, 38
Ossipova, Ludmila P., 201n
Otten, H., 67-68
Otto, E., 178
Otto, R., 415
Otto, W.F., 342
Oum Ndigi, 150, 192
Ovidius / Ovid, see Naso
Owomoyela, Oyekan, 132
Oyeniyi, Bukola Adeyemi, 19,
127-128, 135, 140, 428,
19n-20n

Paden, W.E., 320, 325
Page, Jake, 200
Papanicolaou, A.C., 299
Paproth, H.J., 254, 264
Papstein, R., 176
Paquette, V., 290
Paracelsus, T.B. von
Hohenheim, 192
Parada, Carlos, 199
Parfitt, T., 187
Park, Young-Mann, 196
Parkerson, G.R. Jr., 308
Parmenides, 343, 353
Parrinder, G., 118
Partridge, E., 195
Pascalis, O., 302
Paul, St, Apostle, 344
Pavlov, P.Y., 113
PDP Research Group, 299 (cf.
Index of Proper Names)
Peiros, Ilya, 156
Penglas, C., 193
Pennington, R., 152n
Pentkowski, N.S., 293
Ppin, J., 351n
Perfetti, C.A. 299
Perrot, C.-H., 146n
Persinger, M.A., 290
Petersson, K.M., 299
Pettersson, O., 186
Pettinato, G., 234n
Pezdek, K., 302
Pherecydes, Pherekydes, 410,
343n
Philippi, D.L., 177, 182n
Piaget, J., 289
Piazza, A., 145-146, 186, 152n,
155n
Pilastro, A., 151n
Pilling, A.R. 38
Pindarus / Pindar, 181
Pinker, S., 298n
Pirart, E., 77
Plato, 250, 339, 343-344, 339n
Pokorny, J., 155, 202n
Ponette, P., 235n
Popov, Vesselin, 187n
Popper, K., 326n
Postgate, N., 247, 245n
Ptscher, W., 188, 194n
Pouillon, Jean, 412n
Pourdehnad, M., 290
Preller, L., 243n
Prime, R., 42n-43n
Prins, G., 170n
Puhvel J., 63, 189, 272
Author Index
463
Pulvermller, F., 299

Quest, Charlotte Schreiber, 189
Quinn, P.C., 302

Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred, 27
Ragin, F., 239, 239n
Rakhimov, R.R., 83
Ranger, T.O., 173
Rappenglck, M.A., 195n
Rasanayagam, A., 158n
Rasing, T., 188n
Raven, J.E., 353
Rawlinson, G., 245
Ray, E.D., 309
Ray, J.D., 171n
Rdei, K., 105
Reefe, T.Q., 180
Regolin, L., 294-295
Reidla, Maere, 201n
Reinwald, Heinz, 340
Reis, A., 299
Renfrew, C., 151n
Reynolds, M., 304
Rhys, J., 189, 192
Rice, Michael, 177, 151n
Richards, J., 306
Richards, Polly, 46n
Richardson, N., 369
Rickards, Olga, 201n
Ricks, S.D., 247n
Ricoeur, Paul, 340
Ristau, C.A., 292
Robert, C., 243n
Roberts, A., 180
Robertson Smith, William,
315, 321-322
Robinson, P., 309, 281n, 285n
Rogerson, J.W., 348
Rooke, A., 182
Rose, Deborah B., 31
Rosen, S., 301
Rosenau, P.M., 316-317
Rosenberg, A., 339n
Rosenberg, Donna, 194
Rosidi, A., 379, 380n
Rossi Osmida, G., 88n
Rountree, Helen C., 184
Ruhlen, Merritt, 155, 155n
Rumelhardt, D.E., 299
Rydberg, Viktor, 199

Sagiv, N., 303
Sagot, P., 301
Sahlins, M., 189
Saleh Danasasmita, 379n, 381n
Salmon, Wesley C, 328n
Salomon, F., 197, 200
Sampson, R., 193
Sandhei, M., 302
Santanna, J.290
Santolamazza, P., 158n
Sapolsky, R.M., 293
Sarianidi, V.I., 86n
Saxo Grammaticus, 96, 98,
190, 97n
Sayfan, L., 302
Scarborough, M., 351n
Schaal, B., 301
Schelling, F.W.J., 340, 347,
351, 347n
Scheub, H.E., 197, 53n
Schlottmann, A., 309
Schoenbrun, David, 153n
Schoffeleers, J.M., 173, 173n
Schopen, G., 62, 67-71, 71n
Schott, S., 178
Schrader, O., 252
Schreiber, H., 196
Schroeder, B., 148n
Schltz, J., 169
Schwabl, H., 344
Schwartz, Howard, 197
Scott, K., 303
Scott, R., 243n
Scozzari, R., 158n
Seal, Graham, 200
Sedakova, O.A., 63
Segal, R., 268, 315, 322, 340,
428, 20n, 41n, 51n-52n,
318n-320n, 322n, 326n,
338n, 341n
Seki, K., 196
Selbie, J.A., 179, 189, 226n
Seligman, C.G., 150n
Selous, Frederick Courteney,
193
Sels, N., 409, 428, 20n
Serruys, H., 196
Sethe, K., 178
Seyfarth, R.M., 301
Shakespear, J., 117
Shakespeare, W., 347, 418-419,
180n, 355n
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft,
193
Shen, P., 158n
Shepherd, J.R., 196
Shevoroshkin, V., 152n
Shimunika, J.M., 172, 176,
172n
Shkoda, V.G., 85
Shnirelman, V.A., 154n
Shokpeka, S.A., 43n
Shrader-Frechette, K., 341n
Sierksma, F., 200
Sikes, E.E., 411n
Simion, F., 294-295, 301
Simmel, M.-A., 306-309, 307n
Simmons, K. , 299n
Simner, J., 303, 305
Simoneau, K., 118
Simos, P.G., 299
Simuh, 383n, 386n
Siok, W.T., 299
Siri, S., 294
Sirois, S., 300
Skeat, Walter W., 217
Skjrv, P.O., 76
Slater, A.M. 302
Slaughter, V., 308
Smart, Ninian, 320
Smilek, D., 304
Smith, David Glenn, 201n
Smith, Edwin William, 186-
187, 193
Smith, G. Elliot, 179, 150n,
Smith, George, 181
Smith, J.Z., 320-321
Smith, Michael E., 184
Smith, R., 133
Smith, S., 310
Smith, W. Robertson, 315,
321-322
Smith, W.R., 38, 241, 234n
Snorri Sturluson, 102n-103n
Sobolev, A.N., 64
Sokal, R.R., 151n
Solmsen, F., 252
Sommer, J., 177
Song, Min-Young, 196
Sophocles, 419
Soussignan, R., 301
Sparks, R., 185
Spear, Thomas, 153n
Spedini, Gabriella, 158n
Spencer, A.J., 178
Spencer, B., 27-28, 31, 31n
Spencer, Herbert, 289
Spencer, J., 387n-388n
Sperber, Dan, 412
Speyer, J.S., 73
Spratling, M., 300
Sproat, Richard, 284, 281n
Squire, Charles, 189
Sreenathan, M., 229n
St.-Pierre, L.S., 290
Stachowiak, H., 347n
Stanner, W.E.H., 28
Starostin, Georgiy, 152, 155-
156, 196, 155n, 158n, 180n,
195n, 202n
Starostin, Sergei, 144, 155-156,
196, 155n, 158n, 180n,
195n, 202n
Steblin-Kamensky, I.M., 76n
Stepanov, Vadim A., 201n
Sterner, J.A., 43n, 53n
Stesichorus, 194
Stone, W.L., 117
464
Stoneking, M., 156, 152n
Straathof, W., 378n-379n
Strehlow, T.G.H., 119
Strenski, I., 341n
Stricker, B.H., 200, 172n
Stubbs, Dacre, 186
Su, M., 291n
Subagya, R., 382n-383n
Sullivan, W., 236n, 238n
Sumardjo, J., 381n-382n, 386n,
397n, 399n, 401n
Sundermeier, T., 54, 53n-54n
Sutton, Peter, 29
Swann, B., 190
Swanton, J.P., 179, 193

Tabler, E.C., 193
Takcs, 247, 245n
Takahashi, L.K., 293
Tamm, Erika, 201n
Tamminen, Maya, 177, 179,
191
Tamuno, N.T., 142
Tan, L.H., 299
Taylor, M.C., 316-317
Templeton, A.R., 158n
Tennyson, A., 419
Thangaraj, K., 229n
Theagenes of Rhegion, 351,
410
Thierry, A., 196
Thierry, G.J., 178
Thivierge, J.P., 298n
Thomas, A.M. 300
Thomas, William Jenkyn, 200
Thommen, E., 307
Thompson, Stith, 144, 166-167,
225, 232-233, 235-236,
166n, 226n, 229n-230n,
235n, 239n
Tillich, Paul, 342
Tonnaer, A., 30, 29n
Tooby, J., 301
Topitsch, Ernst, 339
Toporov, V.N., 60, 62-64, 67,
72
Torrend, J., 175n
Torroni, A., 158n
Toulmin, Stephen, 350
Tranel, D., 294, 299
Trapnell, C.J., 169
Tregear, E., 235n
Trimble, M., 289-290
Tsakanikos, E., 303
Tucker, L.A., 306
Turati, C., 294-295, 301
Turner II, Christy G., 154n,
Turner, Jessica Anderson, 235n
Turner, Ralph L., 187n
Turner, V.W., 179, 203
Tylor, E.B., 288-289, 291

Ullman, M., 171n
Underhill, P., 164, 158n
Ungerleider, L.G., 294, 299
Urioste, George L., 197, 200
Urton, G., 197, 200
Usher, T., 226n-227n
Uther, Hans-Jrg, 166-167

Vainberg, B.I., 86
Valaki, C.E., 299
Valenza, E. 294-295, 301
van Beek, Walter, 41, 203, 428,
19n, 42n, 46n, 49n, 51n-
52n, 55n
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 3,
5, 17-18, 20, 143-144, 147,
149, 152-153, 157-159, 163,
169-170, 172-173, 176, 178,
181, 183-187, 190, 192,
196-200, 202, 428, 19n-20n,
43n, 143n, 146n-147n,
149n, 151n, 153n-155n,
157n-159n, 164n-165n,
170n-173n, 180n, 182n,
194n-195n, 201n, 226n,
230n-231n, 249n, 338n,
341n, 379n, 401n, 403n-
404n
van Buitenen, J.A.B., 358n
van der Sluijs, Marinus An-
thony, 178, 180, 183
van Dijk, J., 181
van Gennep, A., 33n
van Warmelo, N.J., 187
Vansina, Jan, 153, 172, 200,
153n, 164n, 173n
Venbrux, Eric, 3, 5, 17-19, 25-
26, 30, 36-37, 186, 428,
19n, 27n, 143n
Vergilius, Virgil, 192
Verginelli, Fabio, 158n
Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 340
Veyne, P., 412, 417, 412n
Vigilant, Linda, 152n
Villems, Richard, 201n
Vincent, J.-F., 53n
Vitaliano, Dorothy B., 182
Voevoda, Mikhail I., 201n
Vomberg, P., 247n
von Friesen, O., 91n
von Schlegel, F., 418
von Sicard, H., 152, 187-188,
198-199
von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff,
U., 410, 411n
Vouloumanos, A., 301
Vyas, A., 293
Vycichl, W., 247-250, 246n-
247n, 249n

Waddell, W.G., 250
Walcot, P., 193
Walker, G.B., 181, 198
Wallace, D.C., 158n
Wallace, Robert, 413n
Walle-Olsen, A., 302
Walsh, V., 303
Wandibba, Simiyu, 153n
Ward, D., 271, 303-304
Ward, J., 303-304
Warmelo, W.L., 187
Warner, W. Lloyd, 32
Wastiau, B., 186
Watanabe, K., 293
Waterman, P.P., 26, 28, 33,
26n, 31n-32n
Waters, Frank, 179, 192
Wathelet, P., 358
Watkins, C., 66
Watson Andaya, V., 196
Waugh, Daniel C., 177
Waxman, S.G., 289
Weber, A., 73
Weber, Max, 342, 327n
Wegener, Alfred, 159n
Werker, J.F., 301
Werner, A., 175, 178, 198,
164n
Wessn, E., 92, 91n
Wessing, R., 19n, 379n, 382n,
386n, 397n, 402n
West, E.W., 89
West, M.L., 273
Westbeech, George Copp, 193
Westermann, G., 300
Whit, Laurie Anne, 378n
White, C.M.N., 176, 200
Whitehead, A.N., 172
Whitehead, Ruth Holmes, 198
Whiten, A., 301
Whitt, L., 391n
Wibisana W., 381n
Widmark, G., 91n
Wiggs, C.L., 294, 299
Wilbert, J., 117-118, 236n
Wilkins, W.J., 222
Wilkinson, T.A.H., 178, 194,
197
Williams, B.B., 151n
Williams, M., 183
Willis, Roy, 180-181, 186, 190,
193, 202
Wilson, A.C., 156, 152n
Wilson, C., 151n
Wilson, D.S., 296, 309, 291n,
297n
Wiratakusumah, J., 404n
Author Index
465
Wirtz, K., 183
Witczak, Krzysztof T., 244,
244n
Witherby, S.A., 303
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 347n
Witzel, Michael, 4, 17-18, 20,
143, 157, 171, 181, 194,
225, 253, 255-256, 273,
279, 282, 284-288, 296,
300, 309, 428, 20n, 143n,
159n, 174n, 201n, 203n,
225n, 235n-236n, 238n,
281n-282n, 285n, 297n-
298n
Wood, E.T., 158n
Woodford, S., 416n
Woudhuizen, Fred, 153, 178,
183, 186-187, 196-197, 199,
146n, 153n, 164n-165n
Wright, G.E., 319n-320n
Wrigley, C., 173, 173n
Wurm, S.A., 226n
Wyschogrod, E., 148n

Xenophanes, 285, 288, 298,
302, 342, 410, 280n, 343n

Yahya, Iip D., 377n
Yamada, Hitoshi, 253-254,
264, 234n, 236n
Yanchevskaya, N., 59, 64, 428,
19n-20n
Yang, E.S., 299
Yang, L., 235n
Yetts, W.P., 196
Yi, S., 113
Yoshida, Atsuhiko , 253-254

Zaumen, Bill, 284, 281n
Zegura, S.L., 158n
Zhadanov, Sergey I., 201n
Zhang, W., 299
Zournatzi, A., 190

466

New Perspectives On Myth

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originalbeschreibung:

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

New Perspectives On Myth

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

New Perspectives on Myth

Wim M.J. van Binsbergen & Eric Venbrux

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen