The Gods of the Celts and the Indo-Europeans

Archaeolingua Series Maior 6

Budapest, Archaeolingua, 1994
Keménykötés | Hardback
493 oldal, színes és fekete-fehér illusztrációkkal | 493 pages with colored and grayscale images

ISBN 963 8046 07 4

Description

This book is a comprehensive study of Gaulish and Romano-Gaulish deity-name inscriptions and Irish manuscript sources as well as of gods, myths, and deity names from the traditions of other Indo-European languages. The etymological analysis of Celtic names forms the basis, and it also forms the vantage point from which the comparative analysis of Indo-European deities proceeds. The Celtic deity names are sorted into groups according to linkage chains arising from inscriptions with overlapping multiple by-names. By aligning these attributes with the attributes derived from iconographic portrayals, the study develops a motif repertoire for each of the gods venerated in Gaul, Celtic Spain, and Celtic Britain which in turn is compared to the attributes of the counterpart characters in the euhemerized mythology preserved in early Welsh and Irish saga literature in order to develop an outline of the structure of early Celtic pantheon. This Celtic motif repertoire is then compared to similar repertoires from Greece, Rome, Iceland, Vedic India, Avestan Persia, and Lithuania to develop their ancestral prototype structure. Such a comparison naturally leads to the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European pantheon.