Proto-Indo-European Sacrifices

Sacrifices

Main article: Proto-Indo-European Sacrifices

The reconstructed cosmology of the Proto-Indo-Europeans shows that ritual sacrifice of cattle, the cow in particular, was at the root of their beliefs, as the primordial condition of the world order. The myth of *Trito, the first warrior, involves the liberation of cattle stolen by a three-headed entity named *Ngʷʰi. After recovering the wealth of the people, Trito eventually offers the cattle to the priest in order to ensure the continuity of the cycle of giving between gods and humans. The word for "oath", *h₁óitos, derives from the verb *h₁ey- ("to go"), after the practice of walking between slaughtered animals as part of taking an oath.

The Kernosovskiy idol, featuring a man with a belt, axes, and testicles to symbolize the warrior; dated to the middle of the third millennium BC and associated with the late Yamnaya culture.

Proto-Indo-Europeans likely had a sacred tradition of horse sacrifice for the renewal of kingship involving the ritual mating of a queen or king with a horse, which was then sacrificed and cut up for distribution to the other participants in the ritual. In both the Roman Equus October and the Indic Aśvamedhá, the horse sacrifice is performed on behalf of the warrior class or to a warrior deity, and the dismembered pieces of the animal eventually goes to different locations or deities. Another reflex may be found in a medieval Irish tradition involving a king-designate from County Donegal copulating with a mare before bathing with the parts of the sacrificed animal. The Indic ritual likewise involved the symbolic marriage of the queen to the dead stallion. Further, if Hittite laws prohibited copulation with animals, they made an exception of horses or mules. In both the Celtic and Indic traditions, an intoxicating brewage played a part in the ritual, and the suffix in aśva-medhá could be related to the Old Indic word mad- ("boil, rejoice, get drunk"). Jaan Puhvel has also compared the Vedic name of the tradition with the Gaulish god Epomeduos, the "master of horses".

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References

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