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INDO EUROPEAN RELIGION: THE PRIMACY OF MAN

by Daniel Gurpide

What is most striking when studying Indo-European cosmogony is the solemn affirmation, found everywhere, of man’s primacy. Indo-European cosmogony places a ‘cosmic man’ at the ‘beginning’ of the current cycle of the world. It is from him that all things derive: gods, nature, living beings—and man himself as historical being. In the Indian world, the Rig Veda names him Purusha; his name is Ymir in the Edda; and, according to Tacitus, he was called Mannus among continental Germans. For the Vedic Indians, Purusha is the One through whom the universe begins (again). He is ‘naught but this universe, what has passed and what is yet to come.’ In the same fashion, Ymir is the undivided One: and by him the world is first organised. His own birth results from the meeting of fire and ice.

The universe does not derive its existence from something not part of it. It proceeds from the being of cosmic man: his body, his gaze, his word—and his consciousness. There is no opposition between two worlds—between created being and uncreated being. On the contrary, there is incessant conversion and consubstantiality between beings and things, between heaven and earth, between men and gods.

In such a Weltanschauung, the gods are themselves a quarter of the cosmic man. They are superior men in the Nietzschean sense; in a certain way they perpetuate the transfigured and transfiguring memory of the first ‘civilising heroes’: those who brought humankind from its precedent stage—and truly founded, by ordering it into three functions, human society, Indo-European society. These gods do not represent ‘Good’—neither do they represent ‘Evil.’ Insofar as they represent sublimated forms of the good and evil that coexist, as antagonists, within life itself, they are both good and evil. Hence, each presents an ambivalent aspect—a human aspect. This explains why mythical imagination tends to split personality: Mitra-Varuna, Jupiter-Dius Fidius, Odin/Wotan-Tyr, etc. In relation to present humankind, which they have instituted as such, these gods correspond indeed to their mythical ‘ancestors’ and ideal models. Legislators, inventors of social tradition, they remain present, are still active. However, they also remain subject to fatum: destined in a very human way to an ‘end.’

In brief, we are referring not to creating gods, but rather to creatures—human gods who are, nevertheless, organisers-orderers of the world: ancestral gods for current humankind; gods who are great in both good and evil and who place themselves beyond such notions. On Olympus, says Heraclitus, ‘the gods are immortal men, whereas men are mortal gods; our life is their death and our death their life.’