Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty

by Georges Dumézil, Derek Coltman (Translator)

In his work the late Georges Dumezil, arguably the most important modern mythologist, demonstrated that every Indo-European religious and social system was structured according to three primary functions: sovereignty, war, and fertility. Mitra-Varuna, a penetrating inquiry into the first of these functions - religious and political sovereignty - is among the first of his texts to implement this revolutionary theory. Dumezil shows how, from Vedic India to Ireland from Caucasia to Rome, and from Iran to Old Germany, the sovereign gods and heroes always appear in couples: the creative but violent legislator and his counterpart, the conservative guarantor of world order. In effect, Mitra-Varuna presents an archaeology of representations of religious and political power. Georges Dumezil a member of the Academie Francaise, was Professor of Indo-European Civilization in the College de France. He is the author of numerous books including Camillus, The Gods of the Ancient Northmen, and The Stakes of the Warrior. Derek Coltman lives in England and is the translator of Dumezil's From Myth to Fiction.

Genres: History, Mythology, Anthropology, Religion, Nonfiction, Sociology, Essays

192 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1940

About the author

Georges Dumézil was a French comparative philologist best known for his analysis of sovereignty and power in Proto-Indo-European religion and society. He is considered one of the major contributors to mythography, in particular for his formulation of the trifunctional hypothesis of social class in ancient societies.

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the middle now, of my third book of Dumézil's - Mitra-Varuna is my second - and I'm still not sure if old Georges is the world's most erudite crackpot, or else the most discerning mythologist to ever put pen to paper. The truth probably lies closer to the latter, but I can't shake, for the life of me, the niggling feeling of the former. To explain: Dumézil has a particular sthick, and it runs through everything he writes - the idea that across the entirety of the Indo-European world, which stretches from India up through Persia and across Italy all the way to Ireland - across this vast span of land and culture and history - lies a shared mythological structure (an 'ideology') that can be found if you squint just right. In service of this idea does Dumézil excavate an utterly mind-boggling array of mythological data, drawing analogy after analogy, comparison after comparison, each one more fantastic than the last.

Were it anyone else less accomplished, much of it would seem simply too fantastic. But Dumézil makes it stick, and he does so, for the most part, by sheer force of intellect and learning. I mean, consider the list of countries I mentioned. Dumézil, the Frenchman, speaks languages from all of them. Or reads at least. Sanskrit, Old Norse, Greek, Latin, Avestan (ancient Iranian) - all of these, and probably a couple more, make an appearance throughout. And that's just languages, the minimum necessary baseline to even begin to engage in the comparative mythological work within. As for those myths themselves, Dumézil's knowledge seems inexhaustible. Every couple of pages brings with it a new divinity, a new cadre of mythic personalities and stories, here from the Rig Veda, there from the Zoroastrian texts, and further down still, from the mytho-historic writings of Livy, Plutarch, or Dionysius of Halicarnassus.

With all that in hand, what of this shared mythological structure itself? In truth, Mitra-Varuna deals with just one of the three 'functions' Dumézil claims to have discovered in his study of Indo-European myth: that of sovereignty. The other two, war and economy, are mostly dealt with elsewhere, but all three in the end comprise the famous 'trifunctional hypothesis', for which Dumezil made his name. The idea being that the same three 'functions' - of sovereignty, war, and economy - can be found instantiated in variation after variation, myth after myth, all across the Indo-European terrain. As for the function of the sovereign, this too is split down the middle into the named complementary pair: Mitra, the juridical divinity of order, benevolence, and priestliness; Varuna, the 'terrible' God, magical, 'binding', and instituting.

And from here do these twinned motifs spiral outward and proliferate: the priestly brahman (India) and the holy flamen (Rome); the sovereign Rex (Rome) and the ruling Raj (India); In Rome again, the volatile Romulus, founder of the city, and the pious Numa, successor and stabilizer. Moving North, we find the wizened Odin and the heroic Tyr (Norse); And Ireland bound, the tribal kings, Nuada and Lug. In all these and more does the Mitra-Varuna 'function' find its place, with Dumézil as giddy guide, pointing out again and again - and this pair! And that pair! Parallels everywhere. Like I said, it's brilliance tinged with an ever so slightly (how slightly?) long-drawn bow. Yet it helps too that Dumézil writes with a graceful pen, marrying story-telling with an ease of expression that everywhere conveys the very real wonder in which he so obviously delights.

A skeptical word to close though: this is a book that's 'ideational' through and through. Utterly unconcerned with why or how these mythic doubles find their innumerable reflections, M-V concerns itself simply with pointing out that they exist. Occasional gestures towards some shared and distant 'Indo-European heritage' that connects them all is about as close to any materialist analysis that this study gets. As such it's all very strangely free-floating, barely grounded in social practice, with narrative and grammatical analysis making up the bulk of the book. It's fascinating reading, but undeniably professorial, and, dare I say, even escapist. Not the worst thing, given the times.

[Kiarash · Rating 4 out of 5]

کتاب برای افرادی است که یا به صورت حرفه ای اسطوره و اسطوره شناسی تطبیقی را دنبال میکنند یا اینکه به میزان زیادی به اسطوره ها علاقه دارند. نویسنده تلاش کرده است که تصویری از دو شیوه مختلف حکومت در میان خدایان یا شاه خدایان فرهنگ های هندواروپایی مختلف به دست دهد که تا حدود زیادی با هم منطبق هستند.
نویسنده با معرفی و بهره گیری از دو مفهوم "Celeritas - Gravitas"
دو شیوه حاکمیت را توصیف میکند که در کنار هم در این فرهنگ ها دیده میشوند و به صورت تز و آنتی تز هم عمل میکنند. یکی مناسب برای شروع و بنیان گذاری دیگری برای حفظ نظم و عدل. یکی با نمادهای مربوط به سرعت و دیگری با نمادهای مربوط به یکجا بودن و ایستایی.
زوج های مختلف از خدایان یا دسته های روحانی مذهبی از فرهنگ های مختلف هندی - ایرانی - رومی و نورسی در این کتاب با همدیگر مطابقت داده شده اند. بخشی از کتاب در ادامه
------------------------------------
نوروز، جشن سال نوی ایرانی و جشن اهورامزدا که در روز اورمزد ماه اول برپا میشود آفرینش را یادآوری میکند. جشن میترا که در مهر روز از مهر ماه برپا میشود پایان جهان را نشان میدهد. در توضیح این امر، بیرونی توضیح میدهد: زیرا در مهرگان آنچه می اندیشد به کمال میرسد و چیز بیشتری نخواهد داشت. و نیز زیرا حیوانات از جفت گیری دست میکشند.
تضاد بین مهرگان و نوروز تضاد بین کمال و نیروی خلاقه است.
این تضاد همان است که در هند بین میترا و وارونا و در روم بین فلامینی ها و لوپرچی ها و همچنین بین نوما و رومولوس میبینیم.
در حماسه، نوروز منتسب به جمشید است پادشاهی که با سرعت بسیار در آسمان پرواز میکند و مهرگان منتسب به فریدون است، پادشاه عادلی که نظم را به جامعه باز میگرداند و آرام با اطرافیانش صحبت میکند.

[CivilWar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beyond eye-opening little book which first elucidated the nature of how Indo-Europeans conceptualized sovereignty, a duality of the terrible creative sovereign and the moral priestly organizer who acts as a paragon of normal, day-to-day morality. This concept, although this book is just a "program" and indeed it is but the second book after Dumézil started the project he's so famous for with Gods of the Ancient Northmen, but it is unbelievable how much Dumézil manages to extract out of the discovery of this functional pair: essentially the beginning of the study of the Indo-European view and mythology of sovereignty and its related mythologems/motifs. Besides the ones I already knew from other writings, at least vaguely, such as the contrast between the one-eyed sovereign and the one-handed sovereign, or the terrible creatively violent sovereign contrasted with the upholder of normal, day-to-day morality, both being facets of sovereignty (the usage of the word "excess" for the latter and its focus on the sovereign's erotic excesses, such as Romulus' rape of the Sabine women and later whipping them to re-fertilize them, reminds me immediately of George's Bataille L'Érotisme), there are some I had never even considered about, i.e. how, in Indian mythology, the Solar/Lunar Dynasties, which alternate each other, clearly represent those very values of Mitra-Varuna, who are themselves tied with day and night, or how this is evidently an extremely ancient dynastic myth/notion because not only is it also present in Iranian mythology, if changed by Zoroastrianism, but in Roman mythology too: Tullus Hostilius is the son of the one of the cohorts of Romulus, while the next emperor is a son of Numa, thus forming two alternating "dynasties" between tyrannical creative kings like Romulus and ultra-moral ones sprang from Numa. Or how gandharvas, centaurs and Romulus' Cereles all refer to the same concepts, with overlapping imagery, and are likely sprung from Indo-European archaic societies' male secret societies whose job was to break up normal day-to-day morality for a day or two; they are all even tied with horses and "swiftness", a theme that we would later return to in the analysis of Vayu and "swift-footed" Achilles and Lesser Ajax....

Overall this is an absolutely essential must read to understand, even to look at, any Indo-European mythology, specially where it's high, supreme gods are concerned. This book was, along with his early writings on Germanic mythology, one of the biggest advancements in the study of mythology ever published, one of the breakthroughs and pushed past all of the specialist bigotry that sees "literary creations" and "fictions" in every late piece of writing, or the view of mythology as merely reflecting ritual and magical beliefs: although, as he writes, this was just a program (and what results this program led to!), it was the program for a study of mythology that sees in it the embodied ideology of the people who have dreamed and lived it, and by virtue of the comparativist method, could be used to see, through the lines, the proto-ideology of the original Proto-Indo-European community - and that such at thing could be done has put on the map the chance to do the same for other proto-communities, whose mythology however, are harder to track than the very extensive and far-back mythology of the Indo-European peoples. Shall another incredible scholar at some point make sense of a proto-Sino-Tibetan ideology and mythology? We shall see, but if so, it will no doubt be with Dumézil's method, making use of the rich store of knowledge, methodological and otherwise, that started with this book and other early ones.

[Max Stoffel-Rosales · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always wanted to read this chappy, & when I saw him lying in dust at the local bookstore, I carpe'd that particular diem faster than you can say 'seize the day'. Now, first thing's first:

The translator of my edition, one Derek Coltman, is very good. He does well even when tasked, in the preface to the 2nd edition, with rendering into English a capital bit of sardony: back-to-back references to the Holocaust & the vileness that is the atomic bomb. There were even a couple spots where I wanted to look up the French (but didn't) because I was so tickled by choice of words (one that I remember was 'slapdash').

There are a few negligible mistakes, really just typos, which are probably the publisher's. It is, I imagine, a distinctly annoying task to proofread any work that features multiple dead languages, specially those that require their own set of weird & impenetrable diacritics in transliteration (like Sanscrit). An example is the quote from Hesiod on page 78, which reads νυχτ' instead of νύκτ' (from Theogony, l.176). No harm, no fowl. Now for the hard stuff.

Dumézil's philology is solid despite its age. He sometimes uses a strange/obsolescent term, like 'Lettish' for 'Latvian', but that is a simple matter of nomenclature. He generally gives S words in root-form, & everything apart from Greek is transliterated, which is both a formatting convention &, I daresay, an attempt not to look like a know-it-all. All this is very typical.

The main issue with comparativist lit is that, once an author becomes convinced of his own argument, the more summarily & obsessively he will scour the native texts, from Roman pseudo-history & to admitted folkloric Old Norse horseshit, to find whatever might, or at least pretends to, corroborate. And while I don't think Dumézil has fallen into his own head in quite the way Robert Graves did (who was, to begin with, not a philologist), he nevertheless shows a dismissiveness toward the very real possibility of mythological figures & mythemes to replicate themselves on their own (in just the way he dismissed the claim of 'everydayness' of words like G δέειν in the myth of Uranus' binding of the Titans; these words happen as a matter of course. When we discuss a myth of imprisonment, we will of course meet with such a word as 'bind/fetter'). Still, most of the comparisons made in the book are tenable if not very convincing, but they are always interesting. And isn't that what matters?

On a more personal level, anyone who maintains the cognateness of G Uranos with S Varuna has my vote of confidence, even if he accepts the popular etymology which I reject. Dumézil evidently has a work on specifically that matter, which I'd love to get my hands on, but it doesn't appear to have been translated into English as of yet... Anyone out there willing, SVP?

[Aryan Prasad · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book is a printed form of lectures delivered at École des hautes etudes in late 1930s. At that time it was state of art research in comparative mythology. It is return in a convoluted way fit only for reading by an expert.

[Rogue Podcast · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the most readable text, but full of vital information for anyone interested in Indo-European studies.

[A. B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book, this details the dualism of the roles concerning sovereignty in cultures descended from their Indo-European roots. In line with the Trifunctional Hypothesis of ‘Gods of the Ancient Northmen’, Dumezil elaborates on the two aspects of the first function on sovereignty at the level of ideology; and how much they actually were adopted as practice.

Thus the realm of sovereignty is divided between two different forces, to put it simplistically: 'the Sovereign God of Magic'(Varuna-figure) and 'the Sovereign God of Law' (Mitra-figure).

E.g. in Rome: The Luperci (Varuna) are a group of warriors, who symbolise chaos while the flamines (priests, Mitra) symbolises the order of the established religion. The Luperci are allowed to run rampant once a year, at a fertility ritual; while the Flamen reigns throughout. This is paralleled in India by the Gandharva, a group of almost-demonic warriors who symbolise chaos. They are also a similarly dissolute, drunken bunch who carry off women. The Brahmana are the representatives of the Mitra-figure. As are the centaurs in Greek myth. Thus, the Luperci have CELERITAS (swiftness), while the flamens have GRAVITAS. As befits their dualistic, complementary positions in the social hierarchy. They are both equally sacred.
Luperci are something of the ‘other world’ (Varuna), flamines of ‘this world’ (Mitra). Luperci and flamines have the exact opposite taboos and obligations. The Luperci/Gandharva/Kentauro also have the mystique, magical power and poesy that comes from being of the ‘other world’.

Mitra is the essence of the brahmans and Varuna the essence of the rajanya or Kshatriya -all these twinned expressions define homologous points on the two levels we have learned to recognize through Numa and Romulus. Mitra is the sovereign under his reasoning aspect, luminous, ordered, calm, benevolent, priestly; Varuna is the sovereign under his attacking aspect, dark, inspired, violent, terrible, warlike.

Thus compare: Mitra-Varuna= Zeus-Ouranos = Dius Fidius-Iupitter = Tyr-Odin = Mithra-Ahura Mazda. Also compare the pseudo-mythical 'early Roman history': Romulus vs. Numa, Tullius Hostilius vs. Ancus Marcius.

Sacrifice (Fides, Shraddha) was an important component of these cultures.

Correctly understood, it means at most something akin to the trust that a good workman has in his tools and technique. It would be more correct, Levi says, to place sraddha on the level of magic than on that of religion, and to understand it as denoting the state of mind of a sacrificer who knows how to perform his office correctly, and who also knows that his sacrifice, if performed in accordance with the rules, must produce its effect.

Thus sacrifice and ritual is even more potent than the gods!

There was also conflict between the guardians of the first function and the second function because law naturally is less important in times of war. This is reflected in various stories which led to the eclipse of certain law gods (like Mitra and Tyr, Dius Fidius and Mithra in later ages) in favour of warrior gods.

[These stories express] the opposition between the automatic and blind law of the jurist and the flexible counter-law of the warrior. In opposition to a capitalist morality based upon magico-religious sovereignty, it erects a heroic mystique that has as its justification the shifting, unpredictable task of the [military].

Greece is odd in that is does not really reflect Indo-European categories despite speaking an Indo-European tongue:

We are assured, however, that Zeus and the living religious concepts of Greece in their entirety are essentially formed of a substance that is Aegean and not Indo-European. What to me seemed to have come from the Indo-European fund can no longer be regarded as more than fable, matter for literature alone, not for worship. Here Uranos, there the centaurs; but no, those “everyday” monsters, embodied in processions, are not the centaurs, only satyrs and silens; And Uranos is now nothing more than the figurehead of an “academic” cosmogony.

The North also differs substantially in that the social structure is quite classless and undefined (which so forcefully struck Julius Caesar). At the level of ideology however, the Trifunctional Hypothesis is maintained.
As Caesar also noticed, their main preoccupation was with war- constant war. Hence their gods too had to morph. Tyr-Mitra faded, Thor and Odin became every significant and warlike.
Their totalitarian wealth redistribution system was also a reason in contrast to societies like Ireland which valued private property.

The condemnation of the “stable and liberal economy” presided over by Tiwaz was a preparation for the glorification of the “shifting and totalitarian economy” presided over by Wodhanaz.

This bipartition also seems a characteristic of Indo-European society independent of the mere bipartition at the level of the first function. This is revealed also in the Indic caste system which is dialectical in nature.

[It] led me to look more closely at the Indo­ European hierarchy of social functions, and I observed that this “bipartition” was not a specific characteristic of the first function, but that, by a sort of dialectical deduction, the entire social and cosmic hierarchy was made up of similar opposing pairs, successively harmonized into wider and wider concepts.

Very interesting concepts, will need to look much further into this.

[Alicia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mitra-Varuna authored by Georges Dumezil was well written; not dry like many non-fiction books. It read at a moderate pace and had much information about the Indo-European people's ideology. I liked how it attempted to show the earlier point of views and faiths of ancient Romans and Hindus. I found this book fascinating; learned much. I highly recommend this book for those interested in history, Indo-European studies, Hinduism, Roman history, the Rig Veda or anthropology.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes, I cling on to weird little pieces of information, that don’t turn out to be as relevant as the consistency of my memory would have me believe. One was the idea – more speculation, really – that in his early career, Michel Foucault was an enthusiast for the comparative mythologist Georges Dumezil, and this enthusiasm may have been part of the reason why some French academics saw Foucault as a potential avenger for the French academic right in its long struggle against a scene dominated by the likes of Sartre and Althusser. Well, if Foucault’s thought wound up redounding to the right’s benefit – and that is a deeply controversial argument, even now – it only happened after a long swim by the old bald idea-monger in the waters of Maoism and other areas of the left, and if helped the right, it was a largely Anglo-American (and Germanic) neoliberal right more than any kind of French one…

Anyway! Dumezil mostly dealt with very old cultural artifacts, and if he was a right-winger at sketchier-than-usual time, he was of a kind that our culture has given a pass to: conservative nationalists of nationalities opposed to Germany, the DeGaulle/Churchill exception to the “everyone on the right got joined team fascism, 1920-1945” rule. Dumezil was an Action Francaise guy and a resistance man along those lines during the war, and his introduction makes clear the debts he owed to Jewish forebears in the field. This was the field of comparative mythology. Comparative linguistics had made huge advances, is arguably our most truly scientific social science (though I’d like to know more about how, exactly, that works, how they work backwards towards “proto” versions of languages, etc). You could see why mythologists might want to do the same thing, and according to the same lines, that is, that of the language family. Dumezil was tracing the myths that were told in Indo-European languages, at the same time that the Nazis were mobilizing another name for “Indo-European,” “Aryan,” for altogether different and worse ends.

There were Indo-European languages- was there an Indo-European culture? “Sort of,” seems to be the answer Dumezil gives. Dumezil uses linguistics and tracings from the development of mythology and political institutions in the societies of ancient Indo-Europeans from India to Ireland, and making important stops in Persia and Rome, to argue that along with linguistic roots, these societies also shared certain concepts that informed their methods of governance. In particular, the titular two versions of sovereignty, which were usually paired with two versions of what we’d now call religion (but which is a tricky term for Dumezil for reasons we’ll get into). The Mitra version of sovereignty emphasized the enforcement of regularity- the keeping of laws and codes, enforcement of contracts, observation of taboos and holy days, acquisition of wide bodies of knowledge, etc. Yes, our cat was named Mithra after the Persian god who Dumezil saw as an expression of this concept (though, to be fair, the name was not my idea but that of a roommate). The Varuna version of sovereignty was more about what a certain contemporary of Dumezil would call “the exception” - this was irregular, wild, warlike, upturning normal rules of religious observance and decorum, and usually only manifested itself in emergencies or special festival days.

Dumezil marshals an impressive array of source readings to back up this argument. I don’t know the field well enough to know how many counters, if any, there are to his examples- my guess would be, if you wanted to really argue against it, the first thing you’d say would be “who the hell really knows what was going on as far back as Vedic India or pre-Republican Rome?” but of course that would cut across the point of the whole field. I do know his examples were pretty interesting, even if he often got into the weeds of the linguistics and taking pot-shots at other pedants with opinions about the real olden days.

To me, this book was probably more interesting as an exercise in certain kinds of thought that, when I look upon contemporary writing, does not seem very common today, and that I found a pleasant stretch to get into myself. We think of religion as being a set of rules and institutions that always and everywhere define an in and an out group- we often fudge about “eastern religions” such as Buddhism or Taoism because many practitioners don’t do this (institutional Buddhism seems to do it often enough), so maybe they’re “philosophies” instead. The ancient Roman religion on which Dumezil spends so much time certainly had its rules, institutions and so on, and Rome was no stranger to in-out distinctions, but if Dumezil is right, they had violations of the rules – regular, ritual violation – built in. He talks about the Lupercali, whose priesthood consisted of some of the hale men of the community, who would get together once a year to enact a wild fertility ritual, getting drunk, running naked around the streets, lashing women with cow-hide whips to make them more fertile. None of this would be allowed normally. Roman society may have been patriarchal but you couldn’t literally drunkenly whip random women on the street and avoid penalty! In many ways, the whole Lupercali thing went against our idea of Rome, hell, Rome’s idea of Rome- orderly, rational, lawful. But it was built into the Roman religion- which, given that it originally meant “scrupulous observation of rules,” would seem not to apply to an enterprise with built-in violation… except, of course, it was a rule that you got to do it, or anyway, the guys in the Lupercali club – which reminded me of nothing so much as some of the clubs of Mardi Gras revelers in New Orleans – could. Dumezil multiplies examples found in India and elsewhere, though he craftily moves between examples drawn from attested histories (though even these are sketchy ancient histories), reading the existence of real things from myths, etc.

Very few of them have the vocabulary to really describe it, and I don’t intend to do their work for them, but there’s an extent to which many contemporary fascists want to recreate the dynamic of a rigidly hierarchical, hieratic state, but with a special order of guys (usually, themselves and the people they imagine to be their friends) who get to go around and just go buck wild. Among other things, if they’re the lupercali or the mannerbund (a German practice of allowing young men to basically form gangs in the woods until their hormones calm down), if they do the rules wrong – drink, smoke, play too much video games, let half-Asians lead their Nazi gang – well, what’s to be expected? It’s for the priest-types to keep all the rules. You need the gang to do the violence that keeps the system going, not just to keep the underclass down but to restore the society’s vitality etc etc. There’s a reason that a fair amount of these contemporary fascist groups look to frats, soccer hooligan clubs, or other weak examples of this kind of masculine (homosocial, too, but no one tell them, it’ll hurt their feelings) transgressive-but-socially-nodded-at grouping as examples for their organizing. Truth be told, I’m not so un-essentialist as to think portioning off the newly-testosterone-portioned of the population to work off steam until they’re ready to be human beings again is the worst idea… but, you know, probably shouldn’t be allowed to be in charge of anything important.

Anyway! This was dry at times but thought-provoking. I have no idea if it is any way “accurate.” I don’t really care that much- part of me does rather think if it happened before the printing press, it’s basically mythological in any event… ****

[Scylvendi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite being an academic work it's easy to follow and reads like a detective novel that's about to reveal some grand conspiracy. Although it's an academic work, and not a schizopost, so what I got towards the end was "just" a vague understanding of the general political-religious themes shared by all Indo-Europeans. Anonymous Fertilization, eye/arm mutilations, totalitarianism/capitalism. Good shit that we still like.

[Alix Amnamare · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few of Dumezil's ideas in this book are out-of-date, including at least one fairly major identification he draws, and his ideas in general are always debated, but this is still an interesting read, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Indo-European mythology. Dumezil lays out a clear, if somewhat meandering, argument for a double-sovereignty motif in Indo-European thought. I find the book most rewarding for all the comparisons between the various Indo-European cultures he brings up, and less so for his ultimate argument.

[Roman · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting and deep study of the mythological roots of the concept of political sovereignty for the Indo-European peoples. It gives a reader some food for thoughts that is quite relevant even in modern political conditions.