Twentieth Century Mythologies

Dumaezil, Laevi-Strauss, Eliade

Daniel Dubuisson, Martha Cunningham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317491590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Myths have intrigued scholars throughout history. 'Twentieth Century Mythologies' traces the study of myth over the last century, presenting the key theories of mythology and critiquing traditional definitions of myth. The volume presents the work of influential scholars in mythology: the noted Indo-Europeanist Georges Dumezil, the structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, and the historian of religions Mircea Eliade. 'Twentieth Century Mythologies' is an indispensable resource for scholars of religion and myth and for all those interested in the history of ideas.

PART ONE
Georges Dumézil, or Society

CHAPTER 1
The Indo-European background

An indefatigable worker and reader, as well as a prolific writer, Georges Dumézil (1898–1986) never imagined that the life of a scholar would yield any outcome other than the edification that comes from his work, since through it alone, he asserted, his existence metamorphosed into destiny. In Dumézil’s eyes, intellectual work and the written word were absolutely essential. Nevertheless, the highly unusual breadth of his work is stupefying: several dozen volumes composed in approximately sixty years, from 1924 to 1986. His youthful illusions, despite his superior gifts, were brutally dashed by the First World War, but his sceptical, doubting spirit sought and found in intellectual adventure an elegant and fitting answer (as others later remarked) to the desperation and absurdity of the time. His personal life, carefully guarded and subordinated in every respect to his immense labour, can be reduced for our purposes to a few dates that punctuate the twentieth century and trace the progress of an exemplary if not ideal career.

In 1916 Dumézil enrolled as an honours student in the École Normale Supérieure in Paris; and in 1919, following a few months’ active military service at the front, he returned to graduate with a teaching degree (agrégé). His chosen area of study was Classics, which he may later have regretted, as he became certain that literary studies could never result in the sort of immortal perfection that accompanies the rigorous analyses of phonological systems or the humblest mathematical theorem.

From 1920 to 1925 Dumézil underwent a period of relative inactivity. A few months had been enough to convince him that he was not cut out to teach at high school level for the rest of his life (note that ten years later Lévi-Strauss arrived at the same decision, following a period of similar length, although a bit less disappointing). Little is known of his activities during these years:¹ he won a scholarship; a few varied jobs sustained him (journalism, secretarial work); he frequented the company of Charles Maurras and the Action Française; he had a short stay of six months in Warsaw; and above all he wrote a piece of work strongly reminiscent of James George Frazer (1854–1941): Le festin d’immortalité (The Feast of Immortality) (1924). The influence of the great Frazer dominated this whole period, lasting until 1934–35.

From 1925 to 1931 Dumézil was Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Istanbul, where his teaching is thought to have contributed to the secularization policy of Mustapha Kemal Atatürk. This long period in Turkey, “happy years” interspersed with study vacations in France, changed and enriched Dumézil’s life and intellectual projects. The brilliant student of the École Normale Supérieure, with his formal background in classical philology, encountered in Turkey what came to be his cherished Caucasians. Expelled from Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, the Caucasians had regrouped and settled on the welcoming shores of the Marmara Sea; they offered much of value to Dumézil. The Ossetians, members of the Indo-European linguistic family and distant relatives of the Scythians, represented for Dumézil the third pillar – after India and Rome – on which to base his comparativist and mythological work. The Ubykhs, the Tcherkess, and some others, all of whom together form an original linguistic group completely separate from the Indo-European world, caused Dumézil to put together a second work – more difficult, more austere – devoted to the comparative grammar of Caucasian languages of the northwest. These men and women of the Caucasus afforded him something else as well: the obligation, in addition to the revelation, of fieldwork, thanks to which Dumézil understood that the myths, tales, and fables were not just philological texts to edit, translate, and comment upon. They were also traditional tales representing above all a living heritage: elements of a vast collective memory affirming the personality and unity of a human community.

From 1931 to 1933 Dumézil taught French at the University of Upsala, later succeeded in the same post by Michel Foucault. Here he perfected his knowledge of Germanic languages. From 1933 to 1935, he was in charge of lectures in the Department of Religious Sciences at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. He became Director of Studies there in 1935, nominated by one of the greatest French Indologists, Sylvain Lévi. His courses were suspended during his second period of military service (from 1939 to 1940); then from 1941 to 1942 he was dismissed by the Vichy government for having been a freemason from 1936 to 1939.

In 1949 Dumézil entered the Collège de France in Paris, introduced and sponsored by Émile Benveniste and Jules Bloch. In 1970 he was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. And in 1979 he was elected to the Académie française, and received into the immortels by Lévi-Strauss.

In appearance this is a perfect life story. On closer examination the extensive early period of solitude (1920–1935) comes to the fore. These were long years of exile, of caution, living on the periphery of the university, during which the young Dumézil became conscious of how many dead ends he had come up against through the simplistic Frazerism of his early work. But at the same time these were fruitful years of study and apprenticeship, during which he furthered his training, “snaring” (as he put it) more than thirty languages, which equipped him to deal with all Indo-European mythologies and literatures, as well as the formidable linguistic problems posed by his second vocation as scholar of Caucasian studies.

Thus one can understand how he became so prolific, from the Mythes et dieux des Germains (MDG) (1939) to L’héritage indo-européen à Rome (Héritage) (1949), by way of Mitra-Varuna: Essai sur deux représentations de la souveraineté (Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty) (1940) and Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus (JMQ) (4 volumes – 1941, 1944, 1947, 1948). These all followed his fundamental thesis of 1938, encapsulated by the term “tripartite ideology,” defined, thoughtfully and concisely, as follows:

[My research] has established that one of the most ordinary and emphatic structures of everyday Indo-European thought was the tripartite, trifunctional concept of reality and, even further, of the imaginary. For the Indo-Europeans, three modes and principles of action, coordinated and prioritized, were necessary for the harmonized organism, be it the world itself, society, or even the soul: (1) magical–religious and intellectual sovereignty; (2) physical, combative force; and (3) procreative, economic activity in its rich abundance. This structure is found in the best-known theologies: those of Vedic India, Iran, Rome, and Scandinavia. In India, Iran, Ireland, and with the oldest Ionians, the framework was at the base of social systems both real and ideal; everywhere it provided the orientation of numerous liturgical, political, and juridical practices, just as it underpinned mythic, epic, and “historical” narratives.

(Mariages:89)

The year 1938, then, was crucial for Dumézil, for it witnessed the foundations and first evidence of the “new comparative mythology.” A feverishly productive decade followed, with books churned out at an amazing rate (thirteen between 1939 and 1949), wherein the style of writing reflects a joyful, daring spirit. Thus it was a decisive decade, but a painful decade as well, which yielded the first attacks by philologists defending their particular domain. One can say today that, whatever corrections Dumézil made to his resounding theses, classical Latin philology strongly resisted the insights he brought to it, simply because those insights originated in comparativism. Fundamentally it was comparativism alone that was decisive in this, claiming to illuminate the history of Roman origins using Ossetian or Germanic fables. Dumézil offered the old philology what in effect were extended races on the open seas whereas in fact they preferred coastal waters. And this was not a mere fleeting disagreement but rather the deciding confrontation between two different conceptions of the scientific task.

Dumézil later responded to these attacks sometimes with courtesy, but more often with irritation, if not with his indomitable irony. One can only admire his tenacity, perseverance, and opinionated stance for alone, and until the eve of his death, he faced criticism the malevolence of which sometimes approached calumny.² And one ought not to fear being either too pointed or too precise concerning Dumézil’s political opinions and the concomitant polemical statements. As with many political thinkers generally classified as right-wing, Dumézil did not see human beings as naturally generous, tolerant, and virtuous; nor did he see them as possessing talents in equal measure. He was incredulous at the “progress” of morality, and did not believe that some pedagogy or other would one day correct this condition. His pessimism, and a certain misanthropy, drove him to prefer political regimes that guaranteed a degree of continuity, capable of firmly keeping order while at the same time guaranteeing justice and intellectual freedom. Finally, for Dumézil, the ideal lay in the enlightened despot, supporting a Diderot or a Voltaire while exacting loyalty from his subjects. It would of course be unfair to see in this political utopia an unavowed nostalgia for the brutal, anti-Semitic regimes responsible for so much bloodshed during the twentieth century. Nor can we forget how many Jewish intellectuals watched over his career or intervened on his behalf: particularly Michel Bréal, Lévi, Marcel Mauss, Bloch, Benveniste, and Lévi-Strauss.

Fiercely protective of his liberty and independence, Dumézil persisted in refusing to allow a school to grow up around him that would bring together students or disciples. He knew the human heart too well to imagine that for a single minute his “loyal followers” would behave any differently from others’. If for his whole life he refused the role of master, let alone that of “master thinker,” Dumézil was nevertheless a scrupulous and tolerant friend, attentive to the least detail and curious about anything one might be thinking, realizing as he did how valuable these things were, irrespective of clans, opinions, or fashions. He was a conservative who loved to provoke; a classical philologist who was adept at fieldwork; a misanthropist who adored friendships; a skeptic who believed in science. It would be easy for those who knew him to add other paradoxes to the list, but the most apt is perhaps the one that he himself used to describe his life as a whole: according to Dumézil, it had been one long series of busman’s holidays. And the holidays came to an end on October 11, 1986.

The publication of La religion romaine archaïque (Archaic Roman Religion) (1966) was followed by the volumes that would eventually constitute the series Mythe et épopée, in which all subjects and questions previously treated (in the 1940s and 1950s) are addressed in a new perspective and profoundly reconsidered. Henceforth, the three functions would serve to reveal structural relations uniting theology or myth at one end of the spectrum, with literature at the other end. This reorientation effectively renewed his initial proposition, affirming two things: not just the possibility of discovering trifunctional, archaic fossils, but also the existence of an epic Indo-European literature – prehistoric, and recognizable by its preferred or dominant themes (for example the three sins of the warrior) and its archetypical characters, the most prominent being the royal couple.

Since controversy and debate surrounded the three functions for such a long time, it would be a pity if today they were all that was retained from so vast a corpus of work; and even more so if the functions were reduced to a stereotypical formula. Besides the fact that the trifunctional system is morphologically rich, and expressed in numerous ways, one must also remember that its very existence rests on a piece of evidence – the Indo-European fact – the study of which Dumézil associated with two conjoint methodological principles: comparativism and a certain empirical, deductive conception of structuralis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: History and comparative epistemology
• Part I: Georges Dumézil, or Society
• Part II: Claude Lévi-Strauss, or the Mind
• Part III: Mircea Eliade, or the Sacred
• Addendum III: Esotericism and fascism
• Addendum IV: The reconstruction of prehistoric religions
• Addendum V: The Eliadean conception of symbolism
• Addendum VI: Forgetting the Shoah
• Conclusion: Modern theories of myth and the history of Western thought
• Bibliography
• Index