A READER IN COMPARATIVE INDO-EUROPEAN MYTHOLOGY

© This publication is intended primarily for the use of students of the University of Zagreb.
It should not be copied or otherwise reproduced without a permission from the author.
FOREWORD
Comparative Indo-European religion is a study of the history of religious ideas. The central
idea of this approach is that by comparing the religious ideas of the peoples who speak (or
spoke) Indo-European languages we can plausibly reconstruct some of the religious ideas of
the speakers of the common Proto-Indo-European language, from which the attested
languages are descended. As in the case of the reconstruction of the PIE phonology and
morphology, the reconstruction of the PIE religion is not an end in itself. Rather, it is intended
to shed some light on the earliest history of religious ideas of the early historical communities
of speakers of IE languages.
The approach adopted here is strictly inductive; we do not make any a priori assumptions
about what the system of belief of Indo-Europeans may have been, nor do we posit any
original „ideology“, or mythopoetic „structure“. We believe we can know about the PIE
religion only what the reconstructed fragments of PIE religious texts can teach us. Since
„Proto-Indo-European“ is primarily a linguistic entity, our primary data are mythological texts
attested in different IE traditions, and all conclusions are based on their comparison. The texts
selected here are meant not only to illustrate the common features of various IE traditions, but
also their differences, and the multi-faceted nature of all religions.
It should be stressed that this booklet is not in the first place about what Indo-Europeans
believed, or how they represented their gods. It is about how they expressed their beliefs in
words, and how they addressed their gods in their prayers, hymns, and incantations. We hope
to reach a picture of this by a careful semantic reconstruction of the religious terminology of
PIE, including the poetic formulas, occurring in texts dealing with religious matters. These
formulas have been preserved thanks to the stubborn and uninterupted oral poetic tradition
extending from PIE to the daughter languages. Much in that picture is likely to remain
fragmentary and unclear, but a fragmentary reconstruction reached by sound methodology is
preferable, in our opinion, to aprioristic speculations of any kind, however persuasive and
rational they might appear to the uninformed reader.
Zagreb, November 2010