Divine twins

The Divine Twins are youthful horsemen, either gods or demigods, who serve as rescuers and healers in Proto-Indo-European mythology.[1]

Like other figures found in Indo-European myths, the Divine Twins are not directly attested by archaeological or written materials, but scholars of comparative mythology and Indo-European studies generally agree on the motif they have reconstructed by way of the comparative method.[2][3]

Name

Although the Proto-Indo-European name of the Divine Twins cannot be reconstructed with certainty based on the available linguistic evidence, the most frequent epithets associated with the two brothers in liturgic and poetic traditions are the "Youthful" and the "Sons" (or "Grandsons") of the Sky-God (Dyēus).[4][5][3]

Two well-accepted descendants of the Divine Twins, the Vedic Aśvins and the Lithuanian Ašvieniai, are linguistic cognates ultimately deriving from the Proto-Indo-European word for the horse, *h₁éḱwos. They are related to Sanskrit áśva and Avestan aspā (from Indo-Iranian *aćua), and to Old Lithuanian ašva, all sharing the meaning of "mare".[6][7]

Role

Represented as young men rescuing mortals from peril in battle or at sea, the Divine Twins rode the steeds that pull the sun across the sky and were sometimes depicted as horses themselves.[8] They shared a sister, the Dawn (Hausōs), also the daughter of the Sky-God (Dyēus).[9] The two brothers are generally portrayed as healers and helpers, travelling in miraculous vehicles in order to save shipwrecked mortals.[1] They are often differentiated: one is represented as a physically strong and aggressive warrior, while the other is seen as a healer who rather gives attention to domestic duties, agrarian pursuits, or romantic adventures.[3]

In the Vedic, Greek and Baltic traditions, the Divine Twins similarly appear as the personifications of the morning and evening star.[1] They are depicted as the lovers or the companions of a solar female deity, preferably the Sun's daughter but sometimes also the Dawn. In the majority of stories when they appear, the Divine Twins rescue the Dawn from a watery peril, a theme that emerged from their role as the solar steeds.[10][3]

At night, the horses of the sun returned to the east in a golden boat, where they traversed the sea[lower-alpha 1] to bring back the Sun into the sky each morning. During the day, they crossed the nocturnal sky in pursuit of their consort, the morning star. In what seems to be a later addition confined to Europe, they were said to take a rest at the end of the day on the "Isles of the Blessed", a land seating in the western sea which possessed magic apple orchards.[3] By the Bronze Age, the Divine Twins were also represented as the coachmen of the horse-driven solar chariots.[9]

Evidence

Pair of Roman statuettes (3rd century AD) depicting the Dioscuri as horsemen.

Three Indo-European traditions (Greek, Indic and Baltic) attest the mytheme of equestrian twins, all associated with the dawn or the sun's daughter. Although their names do not form a complete group of cognates, they nonetheless share a similar epithet leading to a possible ancestral name, either the sons or grandsons of the sky-god Dyēus.[5][3][4]

(?) *diwós suhₓnū́ ("sons of Dyēus"), or *diwós népoth₁e ("grandsons of Dyēus"),[4]
- Vedic: the Divó nápātā (the Aśvins), the "sons of Dyaús", the sky-god, always referred to in dual in the Rigveda, without individual names,[2][12][13]
- Lithuanian: the Dievo sūneliai (the Ašvieniai), the "sons of Dievas", pulling the carriage of Saulė (the Sun) through the sky,[10][13]
- Latvian: the Dieva dēli, the "sons of Dievs", the sky-god,[10][13]
- Greek: the Diós-kouroi (Castor and Pollux), the "boys of Zeus", the sky-god.[2][13]
  - Paelignian: the Ioviois Pvclois and Ioveis Pvcles, interpreted as a calque of the Greek theonym Diós-kouroi.[14][15]

Other reflexes in Indo-European mythologies are less secured:

Celtic: the "Dioskouroi", said by Timaeus to be venerated by Atlantic Celts above all other gods, with an ancient tradition of the Dioskouroi having visited them from across the Ocean (the name certainly stems from interpretatio graeca as it is a Greek and not a Celtic form, and it may be the same of the story),[16]
Anglo-Saxon: Hengist and Horsa, said to have come by the sea in response to a plea from the beleaguered British king Vortigern; descendants of Odin, their names mean Stallion and Horse,[16]
Germanic: the Alcis, a pair of young brothers worshipped by the Naharvali tribe, compared by Tacitus to Castor and Pollux,[16]
Baltic: Ūsiņš or Ūsinis, a Baltic god in the dainas associated with horses[17][18] and light/sun,[19] and possibly one of the sons of Dievs.[20][21][22]
Welsh: Brân and Manawydan.[9]
Greek: Amphion and Zethus, another pair of twins fathered by Zeus and Antiope; the legendary founders of Thebes, they are called "Dioskouroi, riders of white horses" (λευκόπωλος) by Euripedes in his play The Phoenician Women (the same epithet is used in Heracles and in the lost play Antiope); in keeping with the theme of distinction between the twins, Amphion was said to be the more contemplative, sensitive one, whereas Zethus was more masculine and tied to physical pursuits, like hunting and cattle-breeding.[23][24][25]
Vedic: another possible reflexes are Nakula and Sahadeva of Vedic religion and literature. Mothered by Princess Madri, who summoned the Aśvins themselves in a prayer to beget her sons (thus them being called Ashvineya (आश्विनेय)), the twins are two of the five Pandava brothers, married to the same woman, Draupadi. In the Mahabharata epic, Nakula is described in terms of his exceptional beauty, warriorship and martial prowess, while Sahadeva is depicted as patient, wise, intelligent and a "learned man". Nakula takes great interest in Virata's horses, and his brother Sahadeva become Virata's cowherd.[26][27][28][29][30][31]
Rome/Greece: Polish historian Krzysztof Tomasz Witczak has suggested that the Sicilian deites, the Palici, a pair of twins fathered by Zeus (in one account), may derive from the divine twins.[32]

Legacy

Ašvieniai, commonly called the little horses, on the rooftop of a house in Nida, Lithuania

The mytheme of the Divine Twins was widely popular in the Indo-European traditions, and evidence for their worship can be found from Scandinavia to the Near East as early as the Bronze Age. The motif was also adopted in non-Indo-European cultures, as attested by the Etruscan Tinas Clenar, the "sons of Jupiter".[33]

Scholars have proposed that, in Myceanean times, there might have been a worship of twin deities, based on the presence of pairs of brothers or male twins in Attica and Boeotia.[34]

The most prevalent functions associated with the twins in later myths are magic healers and physicians, sailors and saviours at sea, warriors and providers of divine aid in battle, controllers of weather and keepers of the wind, assistants at birth with a connection to fertility, divinities of dance, protectors of the oath, and founders of cities, sometimes related to swans.[3][35]

Scholarship suggests that the mytheme of twins has echoes in the medieval legend of Amicus and Amelius,[36] and in Belarrussian folklore, with Saints George and Nicholas - both being paired up together, their having an association with horses and their dual nature as healers.[37]

Literary approaches to the mytheme of the Indo-European Divine Twins can be found in Zeus, a Study in Ancient Religion (1925), by Arthur Bernard Cook. The British scholar posits that some versions of The Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird, collected from Greek and Albanian sources, contain some remnants of Helen and her brothers, the Dioskouroi, in the characters of the wonder-children (triplets or two male/one female siblings) with astronomical motifs on their bodies.[38] The idea is reiterated in Angelo de Gubernatis's Zoological Mythology, Vol. 1.[39] The Italian scholar analyses the twins in a variant of The Boys with the Golden Stars format as the "Açvinau" (Asvins) of Vedic lore.[40]

References

Footnotes

The northern Black Sea or the Sea of Azov.[11]

Citations

Jackson 2002, p. 78.
West 2007, p. 187.
Mallory & Adams 1997, p. 161.
Jackson 2002, p. 67.
West 2007, p. 187–191.
Derksen 2015, p. 65.
Lubotsky, Alexander. "Indo-Aryan Inherited Lexicon". Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Project. Leiden University. See entry áśva- (online database).
West 2007, p. 188.
Mallory & Adams 2006, p. 432.
West 2007, p. 189.
West 2007, p. 191.
Beekes 2011, p. 35.
Parpola 2015, p. 109.
Prósper, Blanca María. “The Instrumental Case in the Thematic Noun Inflection of Continental Celtic.” Historische Sprachforschung / Historical Linguistics, vol. 124, 2011, pp. 250–267. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41553575. Accessed 21 Apr. 2020.
Weinstock, Stefan. “Two Archaic Inscriptions from Latium.” The Journal of Roman Studies, vol. 50, 1960, pp. 112–118. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/298293. Accessed 21 Apr. 2020.
West 2007, p. 190.
Latvian Ūsiņš ‘bee-god and patron of horses’. Václav Blažek. BALTISTICA XLVII(2) 2012. pp. 359–366
Lichtgott der alten Letten. Haralds Biezais. Almquist & Wiksell. 1976. pp. 155-189
Priede, Janis. Development of the Study of Religion in Latvian in the 20th Century. In: Studying Religions with the Iron Curtain Closed and Opened: the academia study of religion in eastern Europe. Leiden: Brill. 2015. p. 225.
Christensen, Lisbeth Bredholt; Hammer, Olav; Warburton, David (2014). The Handbook of Religions in Ancient Europe. Routledge. p. 368. ISBN 978-1-317-54452-4.
Leeming, David Adams (2003). From Olympus to Camelot: The World of European Mythology. Oxford University Press. pp. 125–126. ISBN 0-19-514361-2
The Oxford Companion to World Mythology. David Leeming. Oxford University Press. 2005. pp. 101-102
Sanko, Siarhei (2018). "Reflexes of Ancient Ideas about Divine Twins in the Images of Saints George and Nicholas in Belarusian Folklore". Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore. 72: 15–40. doi:10.7592/fejf2018.72.sanko. ISSN 1406-0957.
Roman, Luke; Roman, Monica (2010). Encyclopedia of Greek and Roman Mythology. Infobase Publishing. p. 58. ISBN 978-1-4381-2639-5.
"Apollodorus, Library, book 3, chapter 5, section 5". www.perseus.tufts.edu.
Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings. Olga M. Davidson. Cornell University Press. 1994. p. 143
Mallory, James P.; Adams, Douglas Q., eds. (1997), Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, London: Routledge, ISBN 978-1-884964-98-5, (EIEC) pp. 164-165
The New Comparative Mythology: An Anthropological Assessment of the Theories of Georges Dumézil - Revised Edition. C. Scott Littleton. University of California Press. 1973. p. 209.
Stealing Helen: The Myth of the Abducted Wife in Comparative Perspective. Lowell Edmunds. Princeton University Press. 2016. p. 77
Hindu World: An Encyclopedic Survey of Hinduism. Volume II M-Z. Benjamin Walker. Routledge. 2019. Entry: "Pandava"
Frame, Douglas. "Hippota Nestor — Chapter 3. Vedic". Center for Hellenic Studies
Witczak, K. T.; Zawiasa, D. "The Sicilian Palici as representatives of the indo-european divine twins". In: ΜΥΘΟΣ, n. 12, 2004-2005. pp. 93-106.
Mallory & Adams 1997, p. 165.
Buck, Robert J. A History of Boeotia. the University of Alberta Press. 1979. p. 57. Parameter error in {{ISBN}}: Missing ISBN.
Shapiro 1982.
Shapiro, Marianne. “‘AMI ET AMILE’ AND MYTHS OF DIVINE TWINSHIP.” Romanische Forschungen, vol. 102, no. 2/3, 1990, pp. 131–148. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27940080. Accessed 21 Apr. 2020.
Sanko, Siarhei. (2018). "Reflexes of Ancient Ideas about Divine Twins in the Images of Saints George and Nicholas in Belarusian Folklore". In: Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore. 72. 15-40. [DOI: 10.7592/FEJF2018.72.sanko.]
Cook, Arthur Bernard. Zeus, A Study In Ancient Religion. Cambridge University Press. 1925. Vol. II, Part I. Appendix F. pp. 1003–1019.
de Gubernatis, Angelo. Zoological mythology; or, The legends of animals. London: Trübner & Co. 1872. p. 412.
Jones, W. Henry; Kropf, Lajos. The Folk-Tales of the Magyars. London: Published for the Folk-lore society by Elliot Stock. 1889. Notes on Folk-tale nr. 11. pp. 338.

Bibliography

Beekes, Robert S. P. (2011). Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction. John Benjamins Publishing. ISBN 978-9027211859.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
Jackson, Peter (2002). "Light from Distant Asterisks. Towards a Description of the Indo-European Religious Heritage". Numen. 49 (1): 61–102. doi:10.1163/15685270252772777. ISSN 0029-5973. JSTOR 3270472.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
Mallory, James P.; Adams, Douglas Q. (1997), Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, London: Routledge, ISBN 978-1-884964-98-5CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
Mallory, James P.; Adams, Douglas Q. (2006), The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-929668-2CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
O'Brien, Steven (1982). "Dioscuric elements in Celtic and Germanic mythology". Journal of Indo-European Studies. 10: 117–136.
Shapiro, Michael (1982). "Neglected evidence of Dioscurism (divine twinning) in the Old Slavic pantheon". Journal of Indo-European Studies. 10: 137–166.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
Parpola, Asko (2015). The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization. Oxford University Press. p. 109. ISBN 9780190226923.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
West, Morris L. (2007). Indo-European Poetry and Myth. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199280759.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)