﻿Welcome to Crecganford, I’m Jon White, and in this video we’re going to look at what it meant
to follow the religion of the Proto Indo-Europeans. Because if we do this,
we will understand why it allowed the Proto Indo-Europeans to be
so successful, spreading across the Indo European landscape as effectively
and as remorselessly as they did. So grab yourself a cup of tea and let’s begin.
First off I want to let you know that all my videos have subtitles for those who
struggle with my accent or who wish to understand spellings of words, and it has chapters as well,
and references to the papers and books I use are in the description below, and it also has
a like button which, if you press, will help me out and hopefully make this video more popular.
So, with that, back to the Proto Indo-Europeans and their religion, and as I said in the
introduction the Proto Indo-European’s religion was critical to their success. Now for those who
know something about the Proto Indo-Europeans, and if you’ve been watching my videos to date
you’ll certainly be very much aware, you will know that they were the first people to ride horses and
use wheeled transport. And so it is easy to say it is this technology that made them successful.
And whilst the technology played a key role, without a doubt, on its own it probably would not
have been enough to show how successful they were if you look back at it today. And to understand
this we need to understand their religion, and the best place to do this is with the Indo-European
Creation Myth, which contains key information we need to understand how the religion worked.
Now I’ve told a few versions of the Creation Myth in various videos, and I’ll eventually
tell a complete and unabridged version at some point, but here I will give an overview due to me
having covered this ground before in a number of videos. And so in the Creation Myth it starts with
the creation of the cosmos and at this point two brothers come into existence, and they are twins,
and their names, Manus and Yemo, and they also have with them an ox. After a period of time
Manus sacrifices his brother Yemo, and from Yemo’s body parts Manus creates the world, and then he
creates a king for the land, and from the bits left over he creates man, but more specifically
he creates three classes of men, the priests, the warriors, and the commoners or farmers,
in effect the food producers. And after this Manus then sacrifices the ox, and from this
he creates the animals and plants, and he then comes down onto the world and as the first priest,
he shows man that through ritual sacrifice, the world can be kept in order. And then one night
the tribe’s oxen are stolen, in a very underhand way, by a serpent, and so a man makes a sacrifice
to the storm god for strength, and with his newly found strength he finds and kills the serpent,
which allows him to bring the cattle home, and he is declared the first warrior Trito. Now,
with the cattle back with people, the wealth and resources of the tribe is where it belongs,
and the priest then sacrifices one of the cattle as an offering to the Sky Father, who is pleased
with the offering and order is restored to the world. That is a synopsis of the Indo-European
Creation Myth, and if you’re new to this and you want to learn more about it then I would recommend
watching this playlist, although I don’t know what I’m looking at as it’s not there, on my YouTube
channel called the Proto Indo-European Myth and Religion playlist. But let’s assume you’re here,
know all this, and ready to learn more, and so we can now ask what does this myth and tell us about
the Proto Indo-European speaking people’s religion and their religious practices and beliefs.
Well, there are four main takeaways from this myth. First we know that
the Indo-European society consisted of classes with a vertical structure of social standing,
from priests at the top, then warriors, and then commoners. Secondly, we have the king, who,
being made of the same material as the world and all the three classes of man, represents
all of these classes, he embodies social order. But he must also be willing to sacrifice himself
for the good of his people and the good of the land. Because by sacrificing himself,
his body parts will nourish the cosmos, the world, and the people, and another king will be anointed,
and the cosmos will continue. The third point is that the Priest must perform the sacrifices,
and they must be performed without fault. This is his role and if order is not restored after
a sacrifice, then the sacrifice is deemed not to have been performed properly, which may mean
it was time for a new priest. And the fourth and final point, and it is alluded to in point two,
and that is that man is a microcosm of the cosmos, and the cosmos is a macrocosm
of man. In effect man made the cosmos out of man, Manus made it out of Yemo, and this cosmos relies
on this sacrifice of man to be maintained, to nourish itself, so it then can nourish man. A
cyclical process that shows man thought man was at one with the world, and respecting the world, an
aspect of humanity that has been lost in today’s societies. And if that doesn’t make sense,
please watch the How to Create a World video which explains this far more thoroughly. Now the
subjects of the Creation Myth all have names, with Manus the first man and priest, and Yemo meaning
twin and who was the king. And additionally, to this we also have the warrior who was named Trito,
meaning third, and the serpent he killed was a three headed, sixed eyed serpent named NgWhi.
And I’ll use these names as I explain more, because this next bit is important to understand.
Manus, Yemo, Trito, alongside NgWhi, so the man, his twin, the warrior, and the serpent, they
weren’t regarded as simple characters in a story by the Indo-Europeans.
They defined what a member of their equivalent social class was to behave like, they were
exemplary examples of each class. Your objective in life was to be as good as your tripartite
equivalent, and so to be a King you must act like Yemo, and be prepared to sacrifice yourself
for the greater good of your people. To be a priest you must act like Manus, you must know how
to sacrifice, how to dismember a body perfectly so it can be consumed by the cosmos effectively.
And to be a warrior, you had to be like Trito, fearless, and able to defeat any enemy,
those enemies who were considered thieves and sub-human, as what those serpents were.
The driving belief of the Indo-European warriors was that no one but the Indo-European tribes
could own cattle as they were a gift from the Sky Father, Dyēus Phtḗr. If other people owned those
cattle they must have stolen them, because they were meant to go to the Indo-Europeans. And so the
warriors felt they had a right to get those cattle back. The figures of Man, his twin, and third,
are then ideal members of the tribe for any person to reach, and it was their duty to do this,
so the world could be kept in order. The priest had to sacrifice correctly had to be right, the
body had to be dismembered so the microcosmic order of things could be attained, so the world
would be replenished of the things it needed to carry on. The world and man were created from
the same material, their understanding was that matter was indestructible, that it was
infinitely transmutable. But also the cosmos was timeless. Men may come and go,
words pass through lips and ears, but the balance of everything within the cosmos
always remained the same. And to supplement this there was the warrior. The warrior who would go
on cattle raids to retrieve cattle from the enemies. This cattle raid was a ritual act. A
boy’s first raid was his passage to manhood, and a process that required the boy to be
tested against a large hand made serpent. And when the boy realised that it was a dummy,
as it was hand made, when he went on a real battle he would treat the enemies as dummies, as clowns,
as the serpent he met. It was no more frightening than a joke for him. But before the cattle raid,
rituals were performed, liberations poured, a state of frenzy attained by all the warriors,
reinforcing within themselves that they were stronger than their enemy,
that they could take their enemies land and their possession, because the enemies had stolen them.
These warriors drove the Proto Indo-Europeans across Europe and Asia, and they treated all
non-Indo-Europeans as their enemy. They had to right to take their enemies possessions, and more
importantly that each of them were aiming to be a warrior as perfect as Trito, the perfect warrior.
And so the Proto Indo-Europeans were not only raiding for cattle, they were raiding to
show that they were the best warriors, they were raiding for the immortality that comes with being
the best of warriors, to be a warrior that was the equivalent of Trito. And such a warrior would do
deeds that allow poets to write about verse about them, and songs would be sung of those deeds,
and this would make you immortal. Much like the way we look back and read poems about Sigurð or
Archilles. There is a poetic phrase in the Proto Indo-European language that translates as
“Fame does not decay”. And so to raid is to go on a journey to become not only wealthy, but
also to become immortal. And it is this mindset that drove the Proto Indo-European warriors
became the mighty and formidable force which would result in the literal replacing of a huge amount
of the population across Europe and Asia. And this too would result in influencing and
evolution of many of the religions that would grow in their new homelands. But
very few, very few individuals indeed, would ever acquire that elusive goal of fame which
didn’t decay, but the culture as a whole did, and that is all because of the horse, the wheel,
and a few other factors, but most important in my eyes was the culture, the religion. Maybe with the
exception of the Sky Father, the gods were never really that important in traditional religions,
you didn’t worship them directly, not regularly anyway, not like every Sunday you went to temple,
they were there as markers on where you should aim for in life. They were perfection in a world
where people understood the balance of all things, it was their belief in their religious ideals
that made the Proto Indo-Europeans become the influence they now are on our modern-day society.
And that is the story of, and the importance of, the religion of the Proto Indo-Europeans. I hope
you enjoyed that journey, please leave questions below if you do. I will do my best to respond to
as many as I can, although I am not around as much in the first week of this videos release, but I
will do my best. And until the next video, please stay safe, stay well. And this was Crecganford.