Mythology: Georges Dumézil and the Trifunctional Hypothesis

Love this guy: Georges_Dumézil


 I read his stuff when I was a young man. He also studied Mythology and saw in his studies of the Indo-Europeans mythological patterns that had for thousands of years formed the basis for why Western Society has the beliefs systems, marital systems, religious construction, and political organizations it now supports.
He looked at the ancient Norse culture of Odin/Thor, Greek Mythology, and even Indian-Aryan Hindu beliefs and came up with a “trifunctional” or Three Part structure or theory that all of European, Russian, Greek, Roman, Iranian, and Indian cultures shared. He found all of Western Asia used the same trinity of Gods and Myths that formed a unified 3-part construct for how religious casts, the kingship-military cast, and the common people were connected via the religions and mythologies of our cultures.

You can see remnants of this in the RigVeda which is an ancient Sanskrit text that forms the original mythology that got shared then transformed among all these cultures. All these cultures connect us as one people as they came from a core culture that rose up in southern Russia and the Ukraine about 3000 bc. Even the Celts in England/Ireland came from them as did the language roots, religions, and people of India.
I like this guy’s idea as he basically shows the proto-indoeuropeans formulated ancients Gods based on a rigid cast that is still superimposed on our societies today.

For example, the religious caste in Norse-Viking culture was represented by Odin (the priests and rabbi’s of today), Thor represented the warriors or ruling cast (like our ruling political structures), and Freyr the commoners or citizens (the workers/farmers/laborers). Rome had something similar to this as did the Hindu caste systems which continue even today. Death by three forms was part of this religious structure as well…..death by fire, water, etc was tied to each caste as were deep connections between kingships and the rights of religious castes over the fates of the commoners.
You see this trifecta structure in the Three Earth Mothers myths I’ve talked about, the Three Apples of Paris in Greek Myth, The Three Fates or Norns of the Romans, Goldilocks and the Three Bears or other European fairy tales, and the classical 3-part structure found in most Story Arcs of modern film and books.
This shows that Mythology is not some historical relic of idolatry or faded religion of history but a continual thread that supports modern culture in many forms. It’s a bedrock layer of symbology that permeates our modern religious views, our financial caste systems, our representational democracies, and our military structures. We also segregate society based on these ideas and groups or races of people unconsciously.
It’s why Mythology and exploring the personal and wider cultural symbols and myths is so fascinating. We are who we are because of our ancestors beliefs we blindly carry forward, not knowing who we are really or why we support the cultural frameworks we pretend to understand when all of it is based on artificial constructs our ancient ancestors created thousands of years ago.
– the Author



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