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Achilles and the Caucasus (K. Tuite) — août 17, 2007 — pg. 42 and Caucasian epics, focusing upon the situation of the man before his death, differ notably from the Indo-European hope for incorruptible fame conveyed by the Homeric poems. The latter doctrine is furthermore embedded in the distinctly IE ideology of three social functions — perhaps realized as distinct classes: priests, warriors and food-producers (Dumézil 1992; Littleton 1982) — with the corresponding need to harness the aggressive activity of the warrior class. On the other hand, the epics of Gilgamesh and Amiran reflect fundamentally opposite perceptions of women as partners of men. During his career as an itinerant warrior, Amiran shows little interest in women as anything other than pretexts to do battle, but this indifference turns to overt hostility during his imprisonment in the mountain. As was expressed in the final episode of the Svan myth cited earlier, should Amiran escape, it is feared he will wipe the earth clean of ‘blacksmiths and the bright-eyed ones’. The text-internal motivation for this destructive misogyny is usually a scene in which a hunter or shepherd encounters the enchained Amiran on the one day each year (or each seven years) when his rocky covering opens, exposing him to the open air. Amiran instructs the hunter to fetch the chain from his hearth, which Amiran needs in order to reach his enormous sword, which he will use to break his chains. He also demands that the man neither speak nor turn back while doing this. On returning home, the villager is pestered with questions by his wife, who is not unreasonably curious as to why her husband is hauling the hearth chain off to the mountains. He turns to rebuke her, or in some versions, to hit her. By the time he reaches the spot where he saw Amiran, it is too late; the mountain has already closed up again (Charachidzé 1986: 120-123). While on the face of it this is a rather feeble pretext for the destruction of an entire gender, Charachidzé has demonstrated that the Amiran cycle is embedded in a dominant ideology which portrays women as impure, dangerous and of demonic origin (Charachidzé 1968; Tuite 1993). By contrast to early-20th century Transcaucasia, the image of gender relations reflected in the Mesopotamian epic composed five millenia earlier is one of cooperation rather than
Achilles and the Caucasus (K. Tuite) — août 17, 2007 — pg. 43 hostility. Although society in both contexts demands that men renounce their dreams of license and one-sided exploitation, the message of Gilgamesh is that by foresaking the state of nature one attains wisdom and a superior form of happiness; underlying the Amiran cycle and related texts is at best a grudging acceptance of the constraints of social reciprocity and the concomitant obligation to enter into contact with impure, dangerous women — as long as they don’t get too close, too often. 4.4. IE WARRIOR-INITIATION MOTIFS. The early Indo- Europeans, unlike their Near Eastern, Old European and Caucasian neighbors, institutionalized violence as the primary function of a distinct social class. The accession of an adolescent to the status of adult warrior was marked by initiation rituals of different sorts, some of which can be reconstructed on the basis of comparisons of the traditions of widely-flung IE peoples. One of the strangest of these — one that seems almost comic from a modern perspective — was the presentation of the initiand before a monstrous mannequin, which he was forced to attack (Dumézil 1985: 215- 229). 44 The myths and legends from which the mannequin ritual was reconstructed all feature a confrontation between a hithertoinvincible hero and an inert massive object of some kind, which pins him beneath its enormous weight, or which cannot be moved, despite the hero’s superhuman strength. 45 The hero only succeeds in overcoming the inert resistance by appealing to the gods for a supplement of strength. The Amiran cycle contains a comparable confrontation between an immobile object and an irresistible force, along with numerous other episodes and symbols which can only be explained as borrowings from early IE warrior-initiation traditions (Charachidzé 1986: 25-61). Archaic Greek civilization, 44 “Were he able to summon up the necessary courage to do so, he discovered that his seemingly ferocious and formidable opponent was only a joke, with the implicit lesson that all of his future (non-IE) enemies would be no more formidable than this dummy” (Lincoln 1987: 12). 45 The best-known IE examples are from the antipodes of the IE world: Scandinavia (∏órr crushed beneath the foot of the stone monster Hrungir) and India (Indra vs. Vrtra “Resistance”) (Dumézil loc. cit.).
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