Reconstructing a Religion From Words

The speakers of Proto-Indo-European left no texts, no inscriptions and no identifiable temples, and almost everything proposed about their religion comes from comparing the vocabularies of their descendants. The method is simple to describe. Where the same word appears in branches that separated early and had no later contact, and where it appears with the same religious sense, the word and the concept are both likely to be inherited. The most secure result is a sky father whose name is reconstructed from Sanskrit Dyaus Pitar, Greek Zeus Pater and Latin Jupiter, all of them the same phrase.

Beyond that, comparative work supports a set of formulae used in praise poetry, a vocabulary of sacrifice and of libation, and a divine pair of horse twins. The method has real limits and they should be stated. It recovers words rather than beliefs, it cannot date what it recovers, and it has been pushed far past what the evidence supports: the trifunctional scheme associated with Georges Dumezil, which sorts Indo-European society and its gods into three fixed classes, remains influential and remains contested. Reconstructed religion is also the part of this field most often taken up for political purposes, which is a reason to be careful with it rather than to avoid it.