STRUCTURE OF MYTHOLOGY STUDIES
W.G.Davey: All Rights Reserved
Overview
Indo European languages, and the peoples who speak them, are spread from Ireland to India. And since these languages must have a common origin so once there was one original Indo European people. Most agree that they lived in the plains of southern Russia, and we believe that this must have been where the names of the great rivers, Danube, Dneistr, Dneiper, and Don, echo the name of their goddess, Danu.
The folklore of this people is found in the myths of their descendants, but every people has transposed the stories to their own land. Ireland is the scene of Cuchulain’s exploits, the Welsh Arthur fights in Britain, and the Hindu gods are found in India. And so, the stories that have come down to us must be looked at critically to try to recognize the later overlay. The documents left in different countries are subject to the variability of memories and the ravages of time. Also they have been added to, expanded by adding local stories, or simply changed to satisfy their audiences. And, in many cases, they have simply been lost except for fragments of names and themes of the stories. We must recognize these problems when we study the mythologies.
There are six cases where there is an extensive mythology, Irish, Welsh (mostly Arthurian), Germanic (mostly Norse), Greek, Persian, and Indian, and we examine each of these, thoroughly and critically.
In each case we begin with a short account of the history of the people. We then list the available sources and critically examine them to try and understand the inevitable contradictions and discrepancies. And then we study the individual names, the genealogies, and the themes of the stories to see if they are matched in any other Indo European mythology.
The inclusion of themes is obvious, but our emphasis upon names and genealogies requires some explanation. We have found that these similar or identical names are found across every mythology when one looks deeply enough, but, apart from a few cases, this fact has not previously been recognized. The reason is that although all gods, goddesses, heroes, and demons had many names, in almost all mythologies, only a few (or just one) is used. It is only in India, where the documentation vastly exceeds all the rest combined, that the many alternative names can be found. And it is in this study that this fact is first identified. And so, in most mythologies, names and genealogies must be related to Indian examples. The same is true of the themes of the stories though not to quite the same extent.
This places India in a unique position, and we must discuss, and emphasize, its literature in a way that is surely unfamiliar even to scholars. This is a difficult situation for most readers since most of the names and the stories will not have, for example, the familiarity of Norse legends. We have no alternative but to discuss the names and genealogies in some detail since they are not found in this form anywhere else. But we have not tried to cover the Indian themes as a whole and give the Indian stories in the discussion of the other mythologies where they are found to match their stories.
We have not tried to avoid detail where it is necessary and ask the reader to bear with us when considerable numbers of unfamiliar names appear. The truth lies in the details, and we particularly want to allow the reader to be able follow in our path refer to the original documentation. This is not a work of fact, not fiction, and all sources can be found and checked.