﻿What did our Indo-European ancestors think happened to them when they died? Well grab
yourself a cup of tea as we’re going to take a look the deity who would take your life from you,
the Indo-European goddess of death. I’m Jon White and welcome to Crecganford.
As previously discussed, the Indo-European cosmos was a macrocosmic image of man, and man was a
microcosmic image of the Indo-European cosmos. And so, in Indo-European religion,
ritual sacrifice played the role of providing material from man to the cosmos, to replenish it,
but this wasn’t the only way the cosmos was replenished. Death itself was regarded
as a form of sacrifice, and so some cultures had rituals and prayers that told the body what to do
when you died, enabling it to replenish the cosmos. An example of this is seen in an ancient
funeral hymn of the Rig Veda (10.16.3) which reads as follows. Your eye must go to the sun,
Your soul must go to the wind, You must go to the sky and the earth, according to what is right.
Go to the waters in you are placed there. You must establish the plants with your
flesh. Here the body is being told to go back to specific parts of the cosmos,
parts that we saw used in the building of the world in many Indo-European mythologies,
and something I’ve spoken about before in this video, about how to create the world.
And so the existence of this this text shows that people, at the time it was written, about 3,500
years ago, didn’t think that death was the end of the journey of a person, because once you are back
being part of the cosmos, bodies can then be born using the same material, and so an infinite cycle
of man going back to cosmos going back to man going back to cosmos continues. And we see this
in other texts, for example this piece written by Empedokles, Fragment 9 Diels-Kranz, which reads.
When the elements are mixed into man or the race of wild animals or bushes or birds,
that is called birth. And when the elements separate, that is “the evil-spirited fate”.
Now to us, that evil-spirited fate was death. And so we can understand that behind these words
of our ancestors there are four principles of belief. That matter is indestructible.
That matter is infinitely transmutable. That man and the cosmos are composed of the same
material substance. And that Time is eternal. And we could summarise these principles into
a that belief that whilst change in the cosmos is constant, it is also meaningless.
For nothing that is real is ever created or destroyed, yes individuals come and go,
cultures will come and go, but the material substance created from the sacrifice of Yemo
in the Indo-European Creation Myth, and who himself came from the cosmos,
that material substance will always be. However, within many beliefs today there is something that
is not material, and yet considered an essential part of a person, and that is a person’s soul.
The soul is not a material thing, and there is no evidence that I’m aware of that our earliest
Proto Indo-European speaking ancestors believed in the concept of a soul. The view, partially due
to their limited understanding of physiology, by our ancestors, was that the life force was best
associated with breathe, the movement of the chest, that’s the a sign of being alive. And
so when the chest stopped moving, and the breathe stopped escaping the nose and mouth, it was said
that life had escaped with the wind. And as knowledge of the human physiology increased,
we see the heart take over from breath in later cultures, and so when the heart stop beating they
considered someone dead, before the current day understanding that it is the brain that makes us
alive. And so this makes us ask a question, and one that those who have watched the Ferryman video
may have already asked themselves. If there was no belief of a soul then why do Indo-Europeans have
this elaborate journey of death enshrined into their afterlife mythology, mythology such as the
Ferryman? This is a mythology that takes you on a journey from your grave to the Netherworld. And
on this journey you have to cross a river, or an expanse of water, and this was where the Ferryman,
an old man with a white beard would take you, without cost, without judgement.
And why this journey specifically, this pathway, this river? And more importantly how
do you get to the river? Does this represent our ancestor’s view of oblivion, or are they trying to
gain awareness of what is after death? Well there was someone else involved in the journey of death,
someone who helped you into death, a figure who is considered the goddess of the Otherworld or
perhaps more appropriately the goddess of the Netherworld. And this goddess,
often represented as a maiden, is said to have greeted the personification of the dead person
in their grave, and then “sends” them on their way to the Netherworld.
And it was German linguist Güntert, who through his work in the first half of the 20th century,
showed that this goddess was the personification of the grave, and was a partial reflection of the
decomposition and decay of what happens within the grave. And within his work he
reconstructed her name, and this goddess was known as Kolyo, Kolyo the Coverer. Although
if you are familiar with Greek mythology, her name continues in the form of a Nymph known as Calypso.
And in Old Norse she is the goddess called Hel. But she also appears as the Vedic god Sarva and
the Avestan Saurva. Now Kolyo, as I’ll refer to from here on, was not looked at negatively,
not like a devil figure, well not wholly negatively anyway. She was, from the front,
beautiful, young, incredibly seductive maiden. But her back, if she turned around,
you would see that her back was covered with snakes and worms, lizards and rot.
She was both the appeal and the horror of death, and her role was to take the persona from the
grave, down into the Netherworld, and this was achieved through the fixing of a noose about her
victim’s body, and she would drag them down. By the neck or by the feet, much in the same ways
as animals are restrained. And so the dead were led away within bonds that allow them to struggle,
but not to escape, and these we refer to as the bonds of death. And this theme was something
that was brought to the living world through sacrifice by hanging, and we see records of this
within texts across multiple cultures. And there are also texts that tell the story of how she,
Kolyo or versions of her, takes her victims, and I will read some of these now. First from
the Greek Epic, the Illiad (18.530-38). While they were sitting idly in front of the speaking-place
they heard much uproar around the cattle. They mounted their horses straightaway, and were off in
pursuit, arriving beside the banks of the river, where they did battle and with their bronze-tipped
spears. And Strife and Confusion joined the battle there, and baneful Death was there; Holding one
man who was freshly wounded, but still alive, and another unwounded, but she dragged off another,
a dead man, down from the battle by his feet. And the garment across her shoulders was red
with the blood of men. In this text the persona of Death was written as the Greek “ker-”, which
is cognate to the Proto Indo-European “ger-”, and which we see being used for the meaning “old” and
“worn out”, a term that is more often used with reference to the name of the Proto Indo-European
Ferryman, Geron which evolved into the Greek Charon. But Death is female here, not male, and so
we can assume that it is referring to Kolyo. And we also see that she is pulling people down into
death by their feet. Now if we look at the Greek text the Odes by Horace (Ode 3.24, lines 1-8), and
the locations within it are in fact reference to the seas around the foot of Italy,
this reads. You who are richer than the unrifled Treasuries of the Arabs and the wealth of India.
You may fill all the Tyrrhenian, and the Apulian sea with the foundations of your home,
but if grim necessity drives her adamantine nails in the highest heavens, you'll not free your soul
from fear, nor your head from the snares of Death. Here the person is pulled by the neck,
but we also see death is referred to as a her, again inferring the goddess Kolyo. Next,
we have stanza 37 of Sólarljóð, an Old Norse text, and this reads. The ropes of Hel came swiftly;
they swung by my side. I wanted to break them, but they were tough. Light it is to fare when free!
Here we know Hel is a female goddess, and again she evolved from Kolyo,
and she uses ropes, nooses to take her victims to the Netherworld of Hel. Now I’ll just take
a mini detour to say that because this rope, this noose, was a known object that Death used in
taking you, it is why Odin, a god of the dead, is sometimes referred to as Lord of the Noose and why
he hanged himself on the Yggdrassil when finding the Runes, it is in fact a form of sacrifice.
And so I hope that explains a little where that symbology comes from,
and helps emphasise why it is not analogous to being crucified as some scholars point out.
The next text we will look at is the Atharva Veda (6.63.1-3) where there is a section with the
Goddess of Death named Nirriti that reads. That cord which the goddess Nirrti bound to your neck,
which was unloosenable, that I removed from you, for your long life, energy, and strength.
Being born again, eating the food which does not make you ill. Praise to you, Nirrti, you
whose splendour is scorching. Untie the fetters made of iron! Truly, Yama gave you back to me.
Praise to that Yama; praise to Death! You were the sacrificial patron bound here to a pillar
made of iron, harnessed by deaths which were thousandfold. United with Yama and the fathers,
raise this man to the highest heaven! And finally we also see in the Pahlavi text on the Denkart
(Denkart 3.358 (Dresden edition, p. 263, lines 1-9)) similar descriptions. Now truly, that
deed which is most important for a man to do for himself is that which no one else will do for him,
and which no one else is able to do for him, to which, preventing the cord of Astwihad,
"the Binder of the Body”, from coming around the soul, by protecting from sin and not abandoning
works of virtue. Thus, when Astwihäd bears the body to another place at death and he kills it,
he may not pass the fetter around the soul whereby he would drag the soul to hell and thus impede the
Renovation of the world. He may torture the body, causing it most extraordinary pain and sorrow,
and he may kill it; but the soul, he will free. It is up to immortality itself, along with the
Righteous, where it strides rests and prays in the highest peace and happiness. From these stories we
can see that across the individual Indo-European civilizations this story of Kolyo developed
differently, which is something we see in many other myths as well. But there is also enough
similarity that we can infer with confidence that they all came from the same source,
and so we can conclude that they all derived from a single Proto-Indo-European idea. However, there
is one important difference that arises between these texts, and that is between the Indo-Iranian
texts and the European texts when talking about finding salvation from Death's bonds. For while
the Indo-Iranian texts cited above are primarily concerned with being freed from those bonds,
the European sources do not mention of escape or salvation, they tell of the harshness of the
bonds, and death is certain. This in a way, aligns with the evolution of the soul in the Ferryman
story, where we see the Indo-Iranian myths evolve to talk of a soul, but the Europeans do not.
It feels as though the European stories are more earthly, natural, and potentially the older,
having not seen this evolution in the process of death and the body before being migrated from
their Proto Indo-European homelands. There is however one European text which speaks of the
possibility of salvation from the bonds of death, and it is an Old Norse text, although
one that has many Christian themes incorporated within it, with words such as Apostle and Devil
within the text, and add to this the fact that at the point in the story I am going to read from,
the main character Hfran, had been to Rome twice, a Christian pilgrimage, this story has obviously
evolved significantly beyond its original wording, much influenced by Christianity. This is from
chapter 157 from Njal’s Saga. Hrafn the Red was chased into a river. There, he seemed to see
the torments of Hell below, and it seemed to him that devils would drag him down and Hrafn said,
"Thy hound has run to Rome twice, O Apostle Peter, and would run a third time, if you permit it."
Then the devils let him loose, and he came across the river. And so this is clearly a story singing
the praises of Christianity, rather than the early form of Death, and so we can exclude this from our
understanding of the original form of the story. And so from this, we can therefore say that there
was an Indo-Iranian concern for learning how to gain salvation from Death’s bonds, and this
aligns to their belief in salvation, which was a significant part of Indo-Iranian religions.
And there was divergence again with some mythology showing how the individual could escape the bonds,
but in other myths it would be the job of the priests conducting the death ritual to provide
the necessary actions within the ritual to aid the escape by the victim. And I can talk about
this more in another video as that story would eventually link to a very different deity indeed.
But a question we should ponder is where did Death drag her victims? Well the place
of death was a place of nothingness, and this is seen in the formula of the descriptions of this
Otherworld throughout mythology. It is a place without summer, without winter, without hunger,
without thirst, it was a place without suffering, without illness, without old age, without death.
And whilst that may seem like an enticing place, think of the halls of Valhol, or the
halls of Valhalla, they’re almost enticing, but thinking about it, what they really mean is that
there is nothing there. And I’ll explain this place more in my next video. But for those who
didn’t want to die, who did not want to be pulled down by the noose of Death, their only hope was
continued existence was through the immortality of fame, and as mentioned in my Indo-European
Religion and Immortality video. It was through your actions, and the poetry written about them
that you became famous. The Indo-Europeans had the poetic term “fame does not decay”
or perhaps more anglicised it would be more appropriate to say “the fame that does not die”.
And that was what you were striving to gain. And this
may now make sense, because your body decayed at death to become part of the cosmos, and so your
reputation, your fame, would be the only thing that continued, rather than the soul. And so
you were reliant on the poets for immortality, but true immortality was only available
to the gods. And so I will conclude the story of Koylo, the goddess of death here,
and I hope you enjoyed this video so much you’ll hit the like button and subscribe to the channel.
Please ask questions and comment below, I do my best to reply to as many as I can.
And until the next video, please stay safe and stay well. And this was Crecganford.