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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in indo-european

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

“Milk” writes Julie Sahni in the introduction to her chapter on South Asian sweets, frequently dairy-based, “is the divine food of the Aryans.”

For Sahni, of course, “Aryan” means nothing like what it would have meant to Hitler. Sahni uses the term in its original sense: as the endonym (i.e. the name by which a given community knows itself) of the Sanskrit-speaking population that first entered the Indian Subcontinent between 5000 and 4000 years ago.

(A related population, also calling themselves the Ârya, the “Noble Ones,” went west into the Iranian plateau, and in fact the word “Iran” itself comes from the same root: “the Land of the Noble Ones.” According to Indo-Europeanist J. M. Mallory, the term “Aryan” properly describes only this ancient Indo-Iranian population or their descendants. No doubt Hitler would have been furious to discover that he wasn't really an Aryan.)

Milk is a miracle. If you slaughter a cow, you get food to feed the family for maybe a month. If, however, you milk the cow instead, you get enough food to feed the family for years. Divine food, indeed. Small wonder that the cow was the basic unit of value across the entire Indo-European diaspora.

In the Elder Days, human beings lost the ability to digest milk as they grew out of infancy, but with the advent of pastoralism back in the Neolithic, certain human populations acquired what is called “lactase persistence”: the useful genetic mutations that permit continued milk-drinking into adulthood. Julie Sahni's Indo-Aryan ancestors were one such population, and it's possible that this ability was one of the things that distinguished the Ârya from the peoples that they conquered in their travels.

Other populations with lactase persistence arose separately in Central Asia and West Central Africa. (Interestingly, the genetic mutations allowing for adult milk consumption among the world's three main populations of milk-drinkers are different mutations. Clearly, the ability to keep digesting dairy has high survival value.) Milk isn't just the divine food of the Aryans; it's also the divine food of the Mongols, and of the Maasai, and the Fulani.

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  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Myself, I like nut milks, grain milks, and bean milks just fine. But good old mammal milk is the Original.
  • Jamie
    Jamie says #
    Mr. Posch, Yeah, I wasn't attempting to harsh on non-dairy milk. I'm sure that some of it's quite delicious. A significant fract
  • Jamie
    Jamie says #
    Mr. Posch, I don't give a Gods damn what anyone says. I like milk.

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Our God Is a Solid Hill-Fort

Last Samhain having marked the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, here in Minnesota—the Holy Land of American Lutheranism—it was All “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” All the Time.

It might have been irritating, but instead I found myself reflecting on the ways of the ancient ancestors.

Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott: so begins Luther's marching-song of Protestantism Militant. The tune is a good, rousing, beer-swilling one, the lyrics a paraphrase of the Biblical psalm 46. The Hebrew begins: Elohim lanu mahase va-'oz, “Elohim [is] to us a protection and strength.” By the rules of Hebrew poetry, one could also translate, “Elohim [is] to us a strong protection.”

So Luther doesn't just translate, he Germanizes: “Our god is a solid burg.” Burg can mean “protection, refuge,” but primarily it means “castle, fort.”

It's an ancient word, from the depths of the Indo-European past. Originally, it meant a “hill-fort.” The Bronze Age having been a time of demographic upheaval, you can trace the spread of the Indo-European-speaking ancestors by the hill-forts that they left behind them.

In any given tribal territory, the largest hill-fort (in Irish, it would have been called a dún) marked the seat of the chieftain, or king (or, sometimes, queen). Here on a hill was found the Royal Hall, safe behind its solid concentric earthen walls. Most people lived dispersed throughout the territory, but in times of war they could gather together safely behind the walls of the burg.

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs

 

In the Northern Hemisphere, the period around the 1st of May is observed by many pagans as Beltane, based on the Gaelic celebration that traditionally marked the beginning of summer. As a celebration of life, which is bursting forth in abundance at the peak of spring, it is easy to see why this holy day is so popular with pagans of so many paths, including Druids.

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For millennia, people have used a wide variety of methods designed to foretell future events or to gain advice from the spirit realm. In many cultures, the ability to divine the future was a highly valued skill, and the word of augurs and professional soothsayers could influence important political or strategic decisions, such as whether or not an army should head into battle, or if planting or harvesting should commence. The ability to decipher meaning from the chaos of everyday life helped to establish a sense of order in the cosmos.

Divination remains popular in today’s society, even if the status of most professional readers and astrologers may not be quite as illustrious as in the past. Some of the more familiar forms of divination, such as tarot cards, are relatively recent inventions, while others—such as throwing bones or scrying for patterns in a crystal ball or flames are quite ancient. What all these forms of divination hold in common is a desire to try to provide answers for an oftentimes uncertain world.

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs

Do Druids Cast Spells? A Look at Magic in Druidry 

I’m not sure where it happened, but somewhere along the way the notion that Druidry and magic are somehow separate things seems to have slipped into the collective consciousness. Perhaps it is because in Neo-paganism we tend to view magic as being the purview of witches and Wicca, the role of magic in Druidry has by consequence been diminished to the point that some may forget it is even there in the first place!

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  • Joanna van der Hoeven
    Joanna van der Hoeven says #
    Hiya - I find this post very interesting, but difficult to read because of what looks like a formatting error. Am I the only one e

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Thinking in Circles

Thinking in circles.

Imagine: some people think that's a bad thing.

6000 years ago, the Mother Language had a word: *serk-. It meant “make restitution, compensate.”

It also meant “make a circle, complete.”

Restitution is an important cultural value. When you screw up, you need to make up for it. People are going to hurt one another, and restitution helps heal the wound.

So what does restitution have to do with circles?

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  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I remember an article in Science News that said reciprocity is the basis for all moral and economic activities.
  • Tasha Halpert
    Tasha Halpert says #
    And what goes around comes around, also a circle. Do unto others, as the saying goes, (And be sure it is what you would like done
Did Ancient Indo-Europeans Celebrate Samhain 6000 Years Ago?

According to Italian anthropologist Augusto S. Cacopardo, we've been celebrating Samhain for a long, long time now.

Some 6500 years ago, a group of people speaking a family of related dialects called Proto-Indo-European lived in the grasslands between the Black and Caspian Seas. In time, they expanded east and west into Asia and Europe, bringing with them their language, ancestral to many South Asian, and most European, languages, including the one that you're reading now.

In his book Pagan Christmas: Winter Feasts of the Kalasha of the Hindu Kush (2010) Dr. Cacopardo contends that they also brought with them a festival called *Semen(os), the ancestor (and namesake) of our modern Samhain.

Of this festival Cacopardo writes, [T]hough it may not have marked the beginning of the year, it seems to have some traits of a New Year feast, or it must have opened, at any rate, the winter period (260).

He adds: It surely marked, however, a time considered to be particularly numinous because gods and fairies came close to human beings. It coincided with the time when the herds were brought back to their winter quarters and it marked the beginning of the winter sacrifices (260n51).

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