The Sky Father and Earth Mother: the Basis of All Indo-European Religions, Part Four, the Celtic Earth Mother

 The Proto-Celtic Earth Mother

She has been reconstructed as *Danu, from whom we derive the Irish Reflex Danu and the Welsh Dôn. *Danu ultimately derives from the PIE reconstructed goddess, *Dānu, whose reflex is found in the Vedic Dānu, the mother of a primordial race, the Danavas. She is an extremely ancient water deity, who is indirectly defeated by Indra when He slays Her son, Vṛtra, the serpent/dragon, in order to release the waters. There are no hymns addressed to Her in the Rig Veda, but She is, nonetheless a divine entity, a deva‑matr̥, a 'mother of divine beings'. Her name is also preserved in the Iranian word Dānu, meaning 'river, running water'. Likewise, on the continent, the Celtic reflex of the goddess is preserved in the names of great rivers, such as the Danube (Latin name, Danuvius), the Don, Dnieper, Dniester and the Donets in Russia. The Daugava which runs through Belarus and Latvia from its source in Russia, flowing into the Baltic Sea. A tributary of the Daugava, the Dysna, flows through Lithuania and Belarus. Indeed, the meaning of the root behind the PIE *Dānu, the noun, * dānu‑ means 'river, stream, flowing water.' The underlying verbal root of the noun is *dʰenh₂‑ /*dʰen‑, 'to flow, run, drip.' *dānu‑ is reconstructed from the following reflexes:-

. Sanskrit: dā́nu — 'fluid, drop,' also the primordial mother.

. Avestan: dānu — 'river'.

. Old Irish: Danu — ancestral mother of the gods.

. Welsh: Dôn — same reflex.

. Hittite: dānu‑ — “river”.

Just as the Vedic Dānu is the mother of the Danavas, so the Iranian Dānava are the children of a primordial water deity, whose name was suppressed and consequently not preserved in the Avesta, but the concept is clearly there, and Her name survives in Her offspring. Due to the religious reforms of Zoroaster and the elevation of Ahura Mazda, ancient Indo-European deities were either demonised or erased. We see this pattern time and time again with all monotheistic religions, which are basically intolerant. Fortunately, the same or similar deities survive in the Rig Veda, which gives us insight into the Iranian reflexes. 

It is clear from all these reflexes that the Proto-Celtic *Danu and the PIE *Dānu is strongly associated with water, in particular, rivers. As is evident from the Vedic, Irish and Celtic mythologies, She is also an ancestral deity. This is demonstrated in the Irish mythology where Danu is said to be the mother of the Irish gods, the Tuatha Dé Danann ('the people of the goddess Danu') and in the Welsh mythology as the mother of the Welsh gods, the Plant Dôn ('the Children of Dôn').

My readers may be wondering why the PIE *Dānu and the Proto-Celtic *Danu should be considered to be Earth Mothers when they are so clearly associated with water and rivers? The answer to that question is that the ancestors did not draw such a clear cut distinction between these two domains. The waters that *Dānu and *Danu preside over are the waters beneath the earth, as opposed to the waters which rain down from the heavens. The rivers themselves were important boundary markers for the tribes who occupied the land. It should also be remembered that across Indo-European mythologies, creation begins with the primordial waters, and water is the source of life and fertility. The rivers thus, are the visible representations of the goddess, and it should be noted that hydronyms are the most ancient form of nomenclature that we have, and rarely change with the migrations of peoples.

It is interesting that the PIE and Celtic Earth Mothers do not have a male consort. The absence of such a consort is quite meaningful; *Danu belongs to the oldest ad deepest layer of Indo-European myth, where origin mothers are mothers, but not wives. Examples of such deities include the Vedic Dānu, the Greek Tethys (mother of rivers), the Norse Nótt (the personification of night and mother of Jörð), Jörð, (the personification of the earth), the Greek Gaia (the earth itself), the Vedic Pṛthivī (personification of the earth), and the Baltic Žemyna (the personification of the living earth). Broadly speaking, the various Indo-European Earth Mothers all appear before the Sky Father in the earliest layers of the cosmology; they have roles independent of the Sky Father. Indeed, in the Greek mythology, Gaia produces Uranus, the sky by Herself. In the Celtic mythology, *Danu, no father of Her offspring is mentioned. It is clear that the Earth Mother is older than the Sky Father by at last one cosmological generation. The children of the PIE and Proto-Celtic *Danu appear before the manifestation of the Sky Father. It is only with the appearance of the PIE Sky Father that marriage appears as an institution. The sky is a much later ordering principle.

Riders of the Sidhe, 1911, John Duncan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Riders_of_th_Sidhe_(big).jpg

The Language of the Leubingen Community-Unetice Culture Part 5

 In this essay I wish to discuss the language spoken by the people of Leubingen and its subsequent development. The development of language in the Unetice cultural areas is inextricably linked to the DNA of their populations. As Gustav Kossinna demonstrated in his The Indo-Germanics: An Outline: Part 1: The Proto-Indo-Germanics and The Origin of the Germanics: On the Method of Settlement Archaeology (both translated into English from German by Trevor Sutcliffe), a material culture in its entirety is ultimately linked to and is the possession of the people who created it and the same can be said for language, in my opinion.

                       'Sharply defined archaeological cultural areas correspond unquestionably

                        with the areas of particular people or tribes.' (Kossinna's Law)

In other words, a unified culture is the product of a unified ethnicity, not withstanding that individual elements of that culture may be present in other ethno-cultures through trade or copying. The key word to emphasise here is unified. I believe that DNA studies are finally vindicating Kossinna's theory.

Returning now to the issue at hand, the language spoken by the Unetice culture or more specifically the community at Leubingen. In 1950 BCE, the approximate date of the Leubingen burials, the Germanic and Celtic languages did not yet exist, but obviously the ancestors of those who spoke those languages did exist and so did the ancestral language(s) of Germanic and Celtic. Proto-Celtic, the hypothetical original language of the Celtic dialects did not arise until about 1300-800 BCE, and Proto-Germanic is even later at 500 BCE to 200 CE. Thus Proto-Celtic (southern branch of Unetice) broke away from Proto-Indo-European (Proto-Indo-Germanic, as it is known in the German speaking world) much earlier than Proto-Germanic (northern branch of Unetice) and for this reason Celtic civilisation is much older than the Germanic.

Proto-Celtic started to emerge with the Urnfield and the early Hallstatt cultures. Prior to this point in time the ancestor of Proto-Celtic is an early Northwest Indo-European dialect, from which Proto-Germanic and Proto-Italic also emerged. An alternative name for 'North-West-Indo-European' (NwIE) is 'Italo-Celtic-Germanic'. This was the language likely spoken by the inhabitants of the Unetice Bronze Age community at Leubingen. I believe that it would be appropriate to call this language-'Celtic-Germanic'. Proto-Germanic started to emerge with the Nordic Bronze Age and Jastorf cultures. 

Just as Proto-Celtic and Proto-Germanic developed from NwIE so did the peoples themselves, the Celts and the Germanics, and this is reflected in their similar DNA, consisting of shared Yamnaya derived steppe ancestry, Neolithic European Farmer ancestry and Western Hunter Gatherer ancestry. It is the Yamnaya ancestry, the largest shared element which was the Indo-European speaking component and is reflected in R1b and R1a lineages. Across the Germanic and former Celtic speaking worlds these two haplogroups are dominant, most especially R1b which is shared by people of Germanic and Celtic ancestry. Both Proto-Celts and Proto-Germanics descend from the Bell Beaker, Unetice and Tumulus cultures. By the time that the Germanics and Celts developed into separate and distinct cultures their genetic admixtures changed slightly but the shared deep ancestry remained as it still does today.

The cause of the breakdown of NwIE is due to the subsequent geographical isolation of the Proto-Germanics with the onset of the Nordic Bronze Age, creating different trade networks from the Proto-Celts with their Urnfield and Hallstatt networks. The dramatic sound shifts which affected the northern branch of the Unetice culture was responsible for the development of Germanic into a separate language (Grimm's Law, Verner's Law, et cetera). As Proto-Germanic and Proto-Celtic developed into separate languages so did their material cultures along with slight changes in genetic admixtures.

The Unetice culture is a fascinating one as it represents a culture from which both the Germanics and Celts descend from and is thus worthy of more study and discussion, which I intend to continue (the gods willing) on this blog.