Are You Dumezilmaxxing?

You Should Be

While Dumezil may sound like a fresh new brand of test-blasting, muscle-megafying, heart-tissue-thickening-myocardial-infarction-inducing gym sauce, it is in fact the name of one of the great theorists of myth of the 20^th century.  If you have not made the acquaintance of Georges Dumezil, I have written this piece as a general introduction to his thought and significance.  In addition to being brilliant, he is an example of the sort of scholar who infuses into his work a general rightist outlook without being overtly political.  Such a model is, I believe, ever more necessary for those of us trying to dodge the censorious attentions of HR covens.

Georges Dumezil, Proflexxoring

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Georges Dumezil was born in Paris in 1898, the son of a prominent general.  Precocious from a young age, he mastered several ancient languages as a child, and it was clear that he had the makings of a great scholar.  He attended the elite Ecole normale superieure until 1916, when he went off to war as an artillery officer.  Returning to school in 1919, he fell under the influence of linguist Antoine Meillet, from whom Dumezil learned the fundamentals of Indo-European linguistics. 

This would prove pivotal for his career.  Dumezil was unbelievably gifted with languages.  Various sources have him mastering nearly forty, though the exact number is hard to pin down.  In any case the sheer range is incredible, not only major and obscure languages from every extant and attested Indo-European family, but also Semitic, Turkic, Caucasian, and in his old age, Native American tongues from a variety of unrelated groups.  Yet despite all of this, he was never primarily a linguist; the words were the means to an end.  It was the stories that interested Dumezil, myths from across Eurasia that he believed held the key to understanding an important and untold saga of the human past- the rise of the Indo-Europeans.

It is important to note that in pursuing the study of comparative myth Dumezil was embarking on an undertaking that was neither new nor held in high esteem.  The previous century had given the world a number of astonishing breakthroughs in Indo-European linguistics, opening a window into the development of the most ubiquitous family of human languages.  The Age of Exploration had brought European scholars into contact with everything from ancient literature in Eastern libraries to campfire stories from remote islands. Much important scholarship was produced on myth and its role in human life. But alongside this came a range of controversial, highly speculative, and not especially rigorous works that either suffered from a failure of imagination (Max Muller’s solar theories) or involved a lot of middlebrow-tier armchair anthropologizing that seemed reasonable so long as one tilted one’s head and squinted (Frazer).  Imperialism and nationalism gave both competing and overlapping justifications for squeezing stories to fit political imperatives.  There was a countertendency to universalize, to find common patterns that rendered individual myths mere instantiations of some human whole.

Dumezil’s work would steer a careful and scholarly path through the pitfalls of contemporary myth theory.  He was fortunate in many ways that his rightist political inclinations rendered him unable to find a position in France after the First World War, with the left in the ascendant everywhere.  Shunned by lesser scholars with positions owed to their deference to Bolshevism, he made his way to Istanbul.  There he embarked on a remarkable period of study, learning not only Turkish, but the languages of Caucasia and ancient and modern Iranian dialects.  He read the sacred scriptures of Zoroastrianism along with the Vedas, with much more besides.

He came to a profound conclusion.  Having studied exhaustively both Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages and literature, he believed that the stories of the former revealed a distinct social, political, and religious structure which characterized them from their earliest days through their subsequent branching evolution.  In short, what looked like the myths of very different cultures from Iceland to India were fundamentally the same stories with regional coloration, which reflected a well-defined worldview unique to the Indo-Europeans.  Dumezil’s central theoretical contribution was his trifunctional hypothesis, which held that Indo-European society was organized according to three functions or social roles, a principle that extended into their divine order.

The first of these functions was sovereignty, the province of priests and kings.  This caste ruled the community both by upholding law and performing the rituals that ensured the gods were appeased.  Gods pertaining to the function of sovereignty centered on a divine pair, one a god of contracts and law, the other a type of magical binder, executing wrath on oath-breakers or on those who offended the gods.  The second function concerned war and warriors, with the prime deity being a dragon or serpent-slaying thunder god.  The third function was related to agriculture and labor, the most important relevant gods here being a pair of twins having a relationship with horses.

The social function based caste system outlined here immediately brings to mind Hinduism, with its respective Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas.  In a pair of groundbreaking works, Flamen-Brahman (1935) and Mitra-Varuna (1940), Dumezil argued that the social structure of Ancient India was itself a reflection of something still older, and which had close parallels among the Celts, Germans, and Romans of antiquity.  The first work, for example, argued not only for an etymological connection between the Hindu Brahmin priestly caste and the Roman priestly order of Flamens, but laid out how each group practiced archaic rituals and taboos inexplicable apart from a shared origin.

The second work laid out the basic structure of trifunctionalism, where he argued that the Vedic gods Mitra and Varuna epitomized the previously mentioned aspects of sovereignty.  Parallels to this, Dumezil believed, could be found in the Norse pair of Tyr and Odin, the Roman Dius Fidius and Jupiter, and the Celtic Nuada and Lugh among others.  The first of the pair was always associated with contracts and law, the second with magic and restraint.  Tyr, for example, famously gave his hand as surety to the Fenris Wolf, while Odin bound doomed warriors in place with his enchanted spear.  The Vedic thunder god Indra was the archetype of the warrior deity, wielding his great mace against the water snake Vrtra, just as Thor used Mjolnir against Jormungandr (who lived in the sea).  In Greek and Roman religion, the thunder god evolved into the main deity owing to Eastern influences, and the dragon-slaying motif migrated to the son of the Thunderer, Heracles, who with his club battled a snakelike dragon named Hydra (cf. ὕδωρ-> hudor-> water).  The third-function Vedic Asvin horse-twins have their counterparts in obscure Greek deities like the Dioskouroi (god’s boys) and echoes in Anglo-Saxon legends concerning Hengst and Horsa (Stallion and Horse).

It is important to bear in mind that, in the same way proto-Indo-European words are all theoretical reconstructions, so too are the social structures Dumezil outlines unattested in their original form.  Dumezil, using his broad and considerable erudition, examined myths with the view that they retained echoes of an earlier form of society, and from that basis compared them with similar stories he believed to be related to gain insight into what the older form might have been.  His most important technique was to use the methods of linguistics in this way, to peer through a dark glass at a primordial dragon-slayer the way one sees through ‘father’ to *ph₂tḗr.  The social structures Dumezil described existed nowhere in their pure form by the time they were recorded in history, and in many cases, especially in the Near East and adjacent places like Greece, they retained but faint hints of the past.  Small bits show through here and there, in the caste system of Plato’s Republic, in the medieval division of oratores, bellatores, and, laboratores, but for the most part, subsequent evolution largely erased the lifestyle of the horse-lords of the steppe.

To a leftist, such changes are interesting in that they illustrate progress; at one point groups of mounted marauders poured out of what is today Ukraine into Asia Minor, Persia, India, and Europe and now their descendants are peaceable, low-testosterone bugmen and inexpensive tech support workers, while their original homeland is now the new birthplace of Our Democracy, defended from Putlerite aggression by Hindu-symbolism enthusiasts. 

The cow is sacred to Azov.

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For the right, the past is prologue, and not even really past.  Tradition seeks the eternal instantiated in the now, and the recovery of forms is not only an academic exercise.  As can be imagined, the sort of scholarship Dumezil engaged in attracted minds that recoiled at the mundane, and this naturally led to Dumezil’s alignment with rightist politics.  However, the way he went about this says a great deal about the man and the perspective he took on his own work.

To begin with, while he produced overtly political articles earlier in his life and had firmly held opinions about current events throughout, he never attempted to create a unified whole out of his scholarship and his advocacy.  Men like Guenon and Evola were certainly scholars, but their pursuit of knowledge was of a piece with the project of reviving traditional spiritual practices and social and political systems they believed were truer ways of being than offered by contemporary life.  There is something to be said for this; at its best it leads to a revival of something good, like the great renewal of Orthodox mystical practice occasioned by the publication of the Philokalia, while on the other hand you get Stonehenge druid-larping (druid being a cognate and conceptual relation to Brahmin, thanks Dumezil).

Equity means we only sacrifice white men, like the government.

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Scholarship and advocacy, at best, exist in a kind of symphony, united but distinct.  When they overlap there is a tendency for one to swallow the other in the interest of some particular goal.  Scholarship eats advocacy when it retreats into abstractions and quietism, advocacy does the same to scholarship when some political end requires the shading of knowledge in that direction. 

Dumezil maintained an early interest, but not any demonstrated affiliation, with the Action Francaise, and was friends with its founder, Charles Maurras.  He was close to Mircea Eliade, who was certainly sympathetic to fascism, but also wrote under a pen name advocating for an alliance between France and Italy against Germany, seeing Nazism as qualitatively more evil and threatening than the ideology of Mussolini.  He was a Freemason who made his peace with the Vichy regime in order to study unmolested, but who aided Jewish colleagues in so far as he was able.  Ernst Junger makes for an interesting comparison, though the latter was more an artist than a scholar.  Indeed, in reading Eumeswil, I was struck by how much Dumezil reminded me of the character of the historian Vigo, a spellbinding lecturer and brilliant scholar indifferent to the political machinations around him, content to influence events through his students.  Guy G. Stroumsa, writing of the controversies that came to light near the end of Dumezil’s life in 1986, said of him:

Dumezil, as we shall see, was a highly complex figure, and had a very ambiguous attitude toward history, politics, and the contemporary world.  In a word, he sometimes behaved and expressed himself as if the ancient myths he was studying had a presence, a reality, an ontic quality clearer than concrete events, which belonged to the world of ephemeral phenomena.

One might fairly characterize him as a monarchist who saw in the hierarchical caste system of the Indo-Europeans something worthwhile, but not especially replicable or practical in his own context.  Dumezil could be elliptical on these points, both from a wish to avoid what he saw as distracting controversies and from a genuine self-awareness that his mind was often roaming in places other than the here and now, and thus the very timelessness of his outlook would make his prescriptions incomprehensible to interlocutors.  This is not to say that he would have been wrong, but being misunderstood means either giving up or impoverishing your ideas, and neither was an attractive proposition to him.

So what is of interest to the aspiring rightist scholar?  To the extent Dumezil sought influence it was in the world of ideas, and among men who would in turn shape the minds of others.  This, I believe, is a wise course for those who are able.  Like Vigo, Dumezil’s power lay in his ability to gather around him those who wished for a deeper sort of knowledge, and offer to them a worldview that was not bound to any one time or place, sending them forth as agents of influence.  His legacy reflects this.  Many mainstream scholars reject his theories; Eric Csapo’s 2005 Theories of Mythology ignores him entirely.  Others believe his ideas were too broad or the result of selection bias.  Interestingly, in this latter category one can place Evola, who believed that the features Dumezil believed were characteristic of the Indo-Europeans were actually human universals (Evola would reference Egypt and China alongside Greece and Rome as bearing elements of a primordial Tradition, while such universalism was anathema to Dumezil).  However, on the right, especially in France with the Nouvelle Droite, Dumezil exerts a powerful influence, and his work is an excellent way to encounter scholarship from a rightist mind that is not also a species of rightist advocacy. 

For those seeking an introduction to comparative mythology, I would suggest beginning with Dumezil’s The Gods of the Ancient Northmen, which is one of his later works, and quite accessible for anyone with general knowledge of Norse myth.  As to a comprehensive overview of Dumezil’s theories, his magnum opus is Mythe et Epopee, which has the advantage of being very thorough, but the drawback of being only available in French.  However, Finnish-American scholar Jaan Puhvel’s Comparative Mythology is relatively short and very approachable; I have given away copies of it to bright high-school students, and they have universally praised it. 

So hit the library and Dumezilmaxx today, along with some raw eggs and deadlifts.  In fact, save time and just slonk and lift in the stacks and dare the nerds to stop you.

Sure, he’s got a sweet collection of books and knows three-dozen languages, but I bench more, so there’s that.

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