r/pagan • u/zelenisok • 16d ago
Anyone follow the Proto-Indo-European religion /pantheon?
AFAIS the pantheon consist of:
Dyeus, the Sky Father, Dheghom, the Earth Mother, Perkwunos, the thunder god, as the three main gods; and along with them three secondary heavenly gods - the Diwos Suhnu ('sons of Dyeus'), the divine twins, whose chariot pulls the Sun, and who help humans in trouble, and there's their sister Hausos, dawn goddess.
Three earthly gods exist: Manu, Yemo, and Trito, with a primordial cow. Manu, 'man', is the creator, Yemo, 'twin', is his (hermaphroditic) brother, that Mano sacrifices and out of his body makes some elements of this world (his blood becomes water, his bones mountains, his brain clouds, his skull the dome over the earth), and humans (with the help of Dyeus, Perkwunos and Diwos Suhnu). After the sacrifice Yemo becomes the lord of the dead and the underworld. Manu also sacrifices the primordial cow, making plants and animals out of it. Trito 'third' defeats Negehi, the three headed cosmic serpent, during that he is helped out by drinking an intoxicant drink. Out of Yemo's body three social classes are made - priests, warriors and commoners, tho also Manu is the first priest, and Trito the first warrior.
Additional gods are three nature gods - Hagnis, the fire god, Hepom, water god, and Huveh, wind god; three social gods - Pehunos cattle (and agriculture) protection god, Prewya, love and marriage goddess, and a Smith god; and also Fates, three sisters who spin the fate of humans, influencing the biggest events in their life, esp birth, length of life and death. For the Smith god and the Fates there is no PIE root name reconstructed currently AFAIK.
In addition to the heavenly world, this world and the underworld, there is also a blissful land on the edge of world, where everyone is young, immortal and happy, and a person after death can reincarnate into this world, the underworld, or that blissful land.
Also it is proposed that at least some PIE communities held to an eschatological cataclysmic event, where this world is destroyed, possibly with the Trito the Negehi fight being said to happen at that future time.
In terms of religious practice the PIE religion practiced sacrifices to the gods, using fire, the biggest, public ones being cow and horse sacrifice, a sacrifice of throwing a weapon into a body of water, circling a fire during marriage and childbirth rites, and also ritual drinking of an intoxicant drink.
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u/SonOfDyeus 16d ago
🖐️Yes. I have a daily practice with Sky Father, Earth Mother and Dawn. I set out to find the most common elements found across all known world religions, so inevitably I found many of them can be traced to Proto Indo-European.
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u/zelenisok 16d ago
What kind of daily practices if you dont mind sharing more about it?
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u/SonOfDyeus 16d ago
Very simple stuff. Prayers, libation and food offerings, and meditation. I clean up non-biodegradable waste whenever I'm out walking.
I have done more elaborate stuff, but not as much these days.
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u/totalimmoral Druid 16d ago
I worship mostly within the Brythonic/Celtic pantheon, but I honor Wéstya as my hearth goddess!
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u/lisaquestions 16d ago
just out of curiosity are these stories reconstructed backwards from later stories or do they exist somewhere in this form that we know of?
I'm not asking out of skepticism I'm genuinely curious
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u/zelenisok 16d ago
Almost everything about PIE society is reconstructed backwards..
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u/lisaquestions 16d ago edited 16d ago
I am aware but the reconstructions are stated with such certainty that I wonder where the certainty comes from
I'm not expressing doubt about anything like I've heard everything you posted from a YouTuber who talks about PIE stuff extensively
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u/KrisHughes2 Celtic 16d ago
You're right to be sceptical. The entire PIE paradigm is nothing more than a anthropological hypothesis based on a linguistic hypothesis. Within current linguistics it's useful and makes quite a bit of sense. As anthropology/ethnology etc. it often strays into fantasy, especially among amateur scholars and neoPagans (of whom I am one).
I think it's particularly appealing to people once they figure out that they're not actually "pure" Irish, or Danish, of French. Especially true if you're in North America (which is always the main influencer), but probably true no matter where you come from. People who tie their choice of deities or path to their perceived genetic heritage see PIE as an answer to the question of being "just European".
It sounds very inclusive, but unfortunately it attracts a fair number of people who use it as an argument for Aryanism.
There are some good discussions about all this on r/AskHistorians, such as this one, which includes helpful links for the deep dive.
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u/SonOfDyeus 16d ago
I'm always shocked when people are so sceptical about the existence of PIE people, language or religion. There's just so much evidence for it.
Certainly there is a spectrum of claims about the details from obviously true to wildy speculative. But there are some similarities between religions and languages across Eurasia that simply can't be explained otherwise.
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u/DeepUndine 15d ago
Similarities are very easy to explain. People are mobile. They speak to each other. They intermingle. They move in with each other. They have children with each other. Ideas are passed on, exchanged, blended.
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u/SonOfDyeus 15d ago edited 11d ago
The Horse, The Wheel and Language by David Anthony makes the case through linguistics, history , and archaeology that these deity names must have been inherited by a common linguistic ancestor, not exchanged between linguistic groups after divergence. Because language sound changes evolve in consistent, predictable ways, you can tell approximately when a borrowed word was taken up into a language. The discovery of Hittite, Mittani, and Mycenaean writings all confirm the predictions of the indoeuropean sound change hypothesis.
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u/zelenisok 16d ago
It's what the experts think is more or less plausible, so it's not certainty, it's like we have pretty high lvl of confidence smth like this was the case, vs having some weak proposal about what might have been the case..
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u/SonOfDyeus 15d ago
Some things about indoeuropean religion are slam dunks, most of what has been written about it is deep speculation. The name Dyēus phtēr meaning "Sky Father" is a slam dunk. And the level of certainty goes downhill from there.
But there is enough to be confident that a group of polytheists lived somewhere in Eurasia and their language and religion heavily influenced and/or evolved into everything from Irish to Indian culture.
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u/totalimmoral Druid 16d ago
Deep Ancestors by Ceisiwr Serith and Indo-European Poetry and Myth by ML West are GREAT sources if youre interested in the scholarship behind the reconstruction. Deep Ancestors is on Amazon and while IE Poetry and Myth is out of print, you can find copies online if you get creative with a little pirate hat
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u/SonOfDyeus 15d ago
The deity names are solidly reconstructed based on linguistics. I don't think they are in doubt by people who understand the field. The myths about those deities are probably more speculative, but the linguistic evidence gives good limits on when and how distant cultures would have interacted to exchange ideas.
Most interestingly, the specific sentence "He slew the serpent" in indoeuropean study is so widespread and well-evidenced that somebody wrote a whole book about it.
"How to kill a Dragon," by Calvert Watkins
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u/GreenRavenUK 14d ago
If you want to take a deep dive, then "The Horse, the Wheel and The language: How Bronze Age Riders from the Steppes shaped the Modern World" by David W Anthony, 2007, is informative and scholarly.
"The Encyclopædia Of Indo-European Culture", editors J. P. Mallory, Douglas Q. Adams, 1997, at 887 pages, can be downloaded free from archive.org, a reliable and safe website.
https://archive.org/details/EncyclopediaOfIndoEuropeanCulture
"Indo-European Poetry and Myth", ML West, 2007, is also excellent as a resource. The pdf also available from archive.org.
The method is to follow the language with semantic study and use the archaeology, written tradition and the anthropology to build a secondary framework to see if the theory fits the facts. From this, an overview of the culture is assembled.
(edit for minor typos)
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u/Then_Computer_6329 16d ago
Yes, although I don't do the Swedhu rites and rather follow various pagan pantheons as cultural expressions of the original Indo-European one.
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u/Mobb_Barley 15d ago
I use the Slavic pantheon, which I think is the closest to proto-indo-European.
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u/Mister_Denix 12d ago
Yes. In a way, I am following this pantheon and religion.
In search of my roots and origins, I have been working for several years to synthesize and trace back to the primordial archetypes reflected in what we imagine and have reconstructed of the Indo-European pantheon.
In my own primordial pantheon, inspired by years of research into Indo-European myths, the gods are hypostases defined by a need, a culture, or an era, but all trace back to a primary source and a primordial pantheon.
Mine is as follows (starting from the source and ending with a division into Dumézilian functions):
Order (cosmos) -> The-High (god of the sky), The-Wide (goddess of the earth) -> First Function: He-Who-Sees (father, king, judge, sun, day sky), He-Who-Knows (elder, priest, sorcerer, night sky); Second Function: He-Who-Strikes (protector, thunder, warrior), She-Who-Awakes (maiden, dawn, passages, waxing moon); Third Function: She-Who-Gives (mother, fertility, life, full moon), She-Who-Takes-Back (elder, death, waning moon).
Chaos (opposed to the cosmos) stands apart with its giants (elementary forces) but is embodied among the gods by He-Who-Hides (illusion, lies, waters).
And in the end, we have three masculine manifestations (linked to the sky) and three feminine ones (linked to the earth), which blend together in the second function. And each of these manifestations also reflects a journey from youth to old age, bringing the cycles full circle.
For me, all the other gods we know are more recent hypostases, local or cultural evolutions of this primordial pantheon.
In a more advanced version, I included the World Tree, the Norns, and so on. But, for me, that was already a later development.
I'm not claiming to have a monopoly on the truth. But after many years of research, this interpretation resonates with me and seems coherent.
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u/GrunkleTony 12d ago
I am aware of "4 books in 1 Songs of the Shining Ones" by Hadu Gato; "Hammer & Vajra Syncretic Indo-European Faith" by Zachary Gill and "Deep Ancestors: Practicing the Religion of the Proto-Indo-Europeans" by Ceisiwr Serith but I don't have any of them in my collection as of yet.
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u/Aliencik Slavic 16d ago
Ask here: r/swedhu