Concept of Sovereignty in the Indo-European World
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* Book: Mitra-Varuna (Georges Dumézil)
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"It’s not often that a work of comparative mythology has concrete applications in the modern world, but such is the power of Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna.
In it, Dumézil uses comparative evidence to draw out a conception of sovereignty common to the Indo-European world and thus ancient. He begins by noticing the parallels between the Romans and Indians. The Romans had essentially two classes of public religious figure: a) the Luperci who presided over the Lupercalia, and b) the flamines who presided over the state cult—he then draws parallels between these and the Gandharva/brahmins in the East. The Lupercalia was an extremely archaic annual festival that involved unruly and bloody fertility rites of an esoteric nature which connected it to the traditional founders Romulus and Remus; the Luperci were youths who formed an initiatic war band, carrying out these bizarre rites and wearing animal disguises—the parallels with the Germanic wolf-cults are clear, as with the Indian Gandharva. The state cult, on the other hand, was the centre of the religious life of the city, which was carried out by a priestly couple, the rex-flamen. This was what most Romans would encounter in everyday life, and which provided a sense of stability, continuity, and social cohesion. The two are oppositional, though not antagonistic—the Luperci appear only one day a year, the flamines daily; the flamines represent divine order, the Luperci divine disorder; the flamines are radically familiar, the Luperci radically other. Above all, the Luperci represent speed and violence (celeritas), the flamines majesty and solemnity (gravitas). The Luperci are the type of the magician-king, the flamines that of the jurist-priest.
This dichotomy runs through notions of sovereignty throughout the various Indo-European branches. I have already drawn out some of the political implications of this framework in my article The Odinic vs. the Tyrrhic, so I will refer you there for those. This book, when read a little below the surface (and there is a lot below the surface), reveals itself to be the ultimate work of political theology, exhaustively describing our social reality from the Bronze Age to now. It is of course more than that—it is a set of theological categories which have political implications, not a set of political categories. I hope to draw out more of the theological implications of this framework in the future if I ever get time to write a book between all the other things IP demands."
(https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/ten-books-required-to-understand-eb5)