-Caveat Lector-
Lithuanian is generally considered the most conservative of the West IE
languages, followed very closely by Latvian. (I say this cautiously, since I
have quite a few Latvian friends.) It's been said that the speech of a
Lithuanian peasant is the closest thing to the original West IE dialect
possible today. In the early 1920's, before the Baltic countries were given
their (first) independence, Soviet ethnographers did a lot of pioneering
work there, recording an amazing amount of folklore (which for the most part
still has not been translated, AFAIK)--and *filming* "pagan" ceremonies in
the countryside. There is unfortunately some evidence that the "pagan"
rituals were influenced by the romantic Druidism of the 19th-century
folklore movement (James MacPherson, Iolo Morganwg, etc.); I remember seeing
photos of a Latvian song-fest which included "archdruids" tricked out in
idealized white robes, with vaguely Egyptian headdresses and solar brooches
hanging on their chests, looking identical to the Masonic Druids who show up
at Stonehenge every St. John's Day. But the peasant folklore, from what
little I've seen of it, is a dragon's hoard of extremely ancient religious,
cultural, and linguistic material. Knowing very little Latvian myself, I was
startled to realize how much Latvian poetry *looks* like Sanskrit.
Going off on a new tangent, picking up on your last point, can we find
evidence for a *common origin* for the IE and Semitic culture horizons? This
is not as far-fetched as it might seem, since the presumed homelands for
both groups are quite close geographically, although probably not
contiguous. And, once again, where do the frigging Sumerians fit into all of
this?
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Das GOAT [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Thursday, October 28, 1999 6:32 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [CTRL] Fwd: Heavenly Osiris and Earthly Isis? No doubt.
>
> -Caveat Lector-
>
> In a message dated 99-10-27 11:17:07 EDT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>
> >In the Germanic languages, the moon is male (cf MHG 'der Mond') and the
> sun
> >is female ('die Sonne'); I believe this is echoed in a number of other IE
> >language groups. Determining to what extent the dichotomy reflects
> religious
> >doctrine/practice is extremely difficult, particularly when, as with the
> >German and their cousins the Norse, the myths were only collected and
> >recorded well after the conversion to Christianity and are thus in many
> >cases closer in spirit to "fairy tales" than to true myths. But see Jaan
> >Puhvel, *Comparative Mythology*, and J.P. Mallory, *In Search of the
> >Indo-Europeans*; see also Mircea Eliade, *A History of Religious
> Thought*,
> >vol. 1.
>
> The same in Latvian, my father's native language, and I seem to recall
> that
> the Letts --if not the oldest, the SECOND oldest group of Indo-Europeans
> to
> survive culturally intact into the Middle Ages-- honored a moon god and a
> sun
> goddess. If I have enough time off the job to consult my hefty Sanskrit
> dictionary (which includes etymologies), I'll report what the respective
> genders of sun and moon are in that ancient IE language.
> All to show that, at least ORIGINALLY, both Near Eastern and I-E cultures
> shared a tendency to reverse modern sex-roles, in terms of the gender of
> planetary deities.
>
>
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