Pantheon and Meta-tropology: Metaphors, metonymies, synekdochai and personified abstracta in divine names from India and Iran to Greece, Rome and Beyond
CERES-Palais, Raum "Ruhrpott" (4.13)
Metaphor Talk by Dr. Velizar Sadovski (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Iranian Studies)
It is not unknown that in archaic Indo-European mythological traditions a large part of the deities have names that more often than not correspond to (personified) abstract nouns, nom-ina actionis and nomina agentis, or directly represent tropes such as metaphor, metonym, more rarely synekdoche. This is an inherent onomasiological feature characterizing the Latin gods (e.g. the Sondergötter listed in the indigitamenta kept by the Collegium Pontificum and invoked for public prayers) and the Old Greek pantheon; as W. Burkert put it once, “the Ar-chaic Greek personifications come to assume their distinctive character in that they mediate between the individual gods and the spheres of reality; they receive mythical and personal elements from the gods and in turn give the gods part in the conceptual order of things”. Thus, Themis ‘Order’ and Mētis ‘Wisdom’ are wives of Zeus, whose daughter is Dikē ‘Jus-tice’, Aphrodite is accompanied by Erōs ‘Love’, Himeros ‘Yearning’, Peithō ‘Persuasion’; the oldest daughter of Okea¬nos, the river Styx, is mother of Zēlos ‘zeal’ and Nikē ‘Victory’, Kratos ‘Power’ and Biē ‘Force’. Similar theonyms enumerated in the catalogues of Hesiod’s Theogony and visible in action in Homer’s epic poems are a legion.
What is less well known is that in a number of Indo-European religions such divine names and epithets combine to form whole systems of partial characteristics of a divine power which, taken together, form a whole which is not a mechanical sum of the individual items in the set, but has added value and often serves as a starting point for the formation of higher levels of theological and cosmological taxonomies. Such clusters start with “dual deities” (like Ares’ sons Deimos and Phobos ‘Terror and Fear’), divine triads (like the Hōrai Thallō ‘Sprouting’, Karpō ‘Fruiting’ and Auxō ‘Growing’), to end up with double triads or hexads like the six Titans and the six Olympic Gods in Greece, the six high deities of the Vedas (the Ādityas) and the six-plus-one in the Avesta (‘Best Rightness’, ‘Good Thought’, ‘Royalty Worthy to be Chosen’, ‘Holy Right-Thinking’, ‘Integrity’, ‘Immortality’ plus the Supreme God Ahura Maz¬dā ‘Lord Mind-Setting/Wisdom’), or dodekads like the Roman Dii Con-sentes. Moreover, such theonyms form the Indo-Iranian catalogues of divine epithets (the 50 names of Ahura Mazdā, the 100 of Rudra, the 1000 of Viṣṇu and the 1000 of Śiva); some-times they resume the names of old, forgotten gods, sometimes, vice versa, they serve as a basis for the consolidation of whole new (classes of) deities, and not rarely they enter the sphere of anthroponymy as theophoric personal names.
The present lecture will discuss several common Indo-Iranian theonyms and the “meta-tropology” behind them, with a specific emphasis on metaphoric and metonymic designations that rose to the rank of divine names in various Indo-European cultures.
