Asuras:Devas::Aesir:Vanir?

[Taliesin]

A friend of mine recently told me about a book he read which described the Indo-Persian and Norse pantheons as analogous. In fact, the claim was that the basic organisation of divine beings common to both cultures is not coincidental, and that they descend from some ancestral religious tradition. For those not familiar with the mythologies in question, the basic idea is that the gods are divided into two warring factions (or three for the Norse): a good or noble pantheon and a collection of destructive evil-doers. The Aesir are the gods who side with men-- Odin, Tyr, Freya, etc., and the Vanir are the race of giants who assault the Aesir and eventually destroy them in Ragnarok. For the Persians, Ahuras are the good beings, fighting demonic devas; the Indians have the inverse, with angelic Devas combatting evil Asuras. (The Greeks, of course, have a similar arrangement with Olympians and Titans, but they are not of interest here.)

My question is-- has anyone here heard anything about this theory that Norse and Indo-Persian folk religions share a source? Etymologically, it certainly looks more than plausible: the words Aesir/Asuras and Vanir/Devas bear remarkable resemblances to each other. Yet given the distances involved and the fact that the cultures are otherwise very different, the claim seems counterintuitive.

Could somebody with some more definite knowledge shed some light on this, I wonder?

 

[SeleucusNicator]

They are both Indo-European cultures. They came from, at the very least, the same linguistic tradition. Probably the same cultural tradition as well.

Oh, and the Greeks, as yet another Indo-European people, are very, very much of interest here. As are all other Indo-European peoples.

 

[Taliesin]

Well yes, I realise that the Greeks are of Indo-European stock and thus are culturally related, but I'm specifically interested in the pantheons which are closely related etymologically speaking.

And why do only a few Indo-European cultures exhibit this cosmological paradigm? These groups must be more closely related than simply qua descendants of Indo-European, or else we would expect their conception of the gods to be more widespread (and the names to be similar).

 

[SeleucusNicator]

Let me explain in a little more detail, as past discussions on this have caused some controversey at CFC.

There is a relatively simple method for taking languages we suspect are related and piecing together a mother tongue from which they all originated. For instance, taking several Romance languages and applying the method will produce something very close to Vulgar Latin, a good example because we actually have some Vulgar Latin to back this up.

The various Indo-European languages (Germanic, Greek, Celtic, Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Slavic, etc.) all have systematic points of comparison between them. These are not simply "this word sounds like that word, sort of", but are more along the lines of "in words that have a common meaning, one language always has an f where another has a th". Such a massive scale of systematic comparison points leads to one answer: all of these languages came from a common ancestor.

A speaker group, I would argue, virtually always has its own culture.

 

[SeleucusNicator]

Well yes, I realise that the Greeks are of Indo-European stock and thus are culturally related, but I'm specifically interested in the pantheons which are closely related etymologically speaking.

And why do only a few Indo-European cultures exhibit this cosmological paradigm? These groups must be more closely related than simply qua descendants of Indo-European, or else we would expect their conception of the gods to be more widespread (and the names to be similar).

It is possible that the original Indo-European culture was rather simple and that most groups developed their own, unqiue, more complex religious traditions or adopted new ones from an external source (in some cases we know they more or less just copied what they found in their new homes).

The Indo-Aryans and the Germanic may simply kept more of the old traditions, or they might have stayed together longer and such developed a common Indo-European culture that was more complex and less prone to change.

 

[Richard Cribb]

The Aesir are the gods who side with men-- Odin, Tyr, Freya, etc., and the Vanir are the race of giants who assault the Aesir and eventually destroy them in Ragnarok.

This is beyond the scope of my knowledge I am afraid, and I am not familiar with this theory, do you happen to have any references?
However what you wrote above is not correct. The Vanir are not giants, they are gods who after a war with the Aesir eventually becomes integrated with them.
Actually some of the most prominent gods are Vanir; Njord, Frey and Freya.
As for Ragnarok, check out the answers of my ongoing PM-quiz next week.

 

[The Last Conformist]

The words Aesir (sg áss) and Ahura both descend from a common source; *ansura. The original meaning seems to be "lord".

Deva descends from *deiwos, the Norse reflex of which is Tyr (< Common Germanic tiwaz), originally meaning "god", but in the Viking Age chiefly used as the name of the god of war. This probably was the PIE word for "god".

I'm not familiar with the etymology of Vanir.

There's been alot of work trying to reconstruct a common Indo-European proto-religion. The most famous name here would be Georges Dumézil. What's beyond of question is that many divine names occur in many widely soundered Indo-European languages. Examples include Latin Jupiter and Sanskrit Dyaus Pitar (meaning "sky father"), and Greek Ouranos with Sanskrit Varuna.

 

[The Last Conformist]

The Indo-Aryans and the Germanic may simply kept more of the old traditions, or they might have stayed together longer and such developed a common Indo-European culture that was more complex and less prone to change.

The later is unlikely, since Germanic certainly is closer related to Italic and Celtic than too Indo-Iranian.

 

[Richard Cribb]

I'm not familiar with the etymology of Vanir.

I think it is supposed to come from the old-Norse word vinr(friend).

 

[Verbose]

I would think the idea of two sides in a divine conflict might be a bit overstated, but of course I haven't read the book and don't quite know the argument.

The Aesir and the Vanir aren't really in conflict. It seems the Vanir may have been chronologically earlier divinities, a different "generation" perhaps?
After all Niord (god of the sea) and his children the fertility gods Frey and Freya are Vanir integrated in the Aesir pantheon.
Something about fertility, death and water with the Vanir it seems, but very little is known about ancient Nordic/Germanic religion prior to the late version written down and focused on the Aesir.

The idea of successive generations of gods you get in ancient Greece as well with the Olympic goods supplanting a parental generation. More direct conflict between them than in the Norse mythology BTW.

 

[The Last Conformist]

Well, the integration of Njord, Frey, and Freya in the Aesir pantheon is presented as the direct result of a war between the Aesir and Vanir. Unlike the Greek case, there's no hint that the Vanir were in any sense ancestral to the Aesir.

I suppose the traditional interpretation that the myth of Aesir-Vanir war reflects a merger between an older Vanir-worship and an immigrant Aesir religion has something going for it.

It may be mentioned that Tacitus tells of a Germanic cult of Nerthus, a lacustrine deity, in the frist century AD. Her name is probably cognate with Njärd, a little-known Scandinavian godess presented as sister and wife of Njord, and whose name is simply a feminine version of his. Some writers think they represent a masc/fem split of an original hermaphroditic deity. Of course, Aesir-worship is known for continental Germanics too.

 

[Gelion]

Doesnt it belong in history?

 

[The Last Conformist]

Doesnt it belong in history?

Doesn't what?

 

[Gelion]

Doesn't what?

Pard me....
Doesn't this thread belong to the History Forum?

 

[The Last Conformist]

I suppose it should be added explicitly that whatever the point of the Aesir-Vanir war myth may be, it's certainly very different from the struggles between the Ahura's and Deva's of ancient Iranian religion, which are a classic case of the forces of cosmic order battling the forces of chaos.

Typologically, the Norse correspondent to the Deva's would be the giants.

(Another etymological tidbit; the Scandinavian words for "giant", Isl. jotun, mod. Sw. jätte, etc, derives from *etanaz "eater". Åke Ohlmarks had a fairly nutty theory about them representing a pre-Germanic farmer population who were perceived as gluttonous by presumably faminished immigrating Germanic-speaking nomads.)

 

[Taliesin]

Ah, that error on the Vanir was embarrassing. I thought they were the giants for some reason. Clearly, then, the case isn't as strong or as interesting as first appeared to me. However, the etymological correlations you've given me are very interesting.

I suppose the traditional interpretation that the myth of Aesir-Vanir war reflects a merger between an older Vanir-worship and an immigrant Aesir religion has something going for it.

I found some speculation of this kind on the question of how the Indian and Persian pantheons are the inverse of each other. The idea was that originally, Asuras and Devas were two equally "good" groups of divinities; however, social forces produced competing sacrificial cults, with one group favouring the Asuras and one the Devas. Then the groups separated in two, or more likely the Indian branch was dominated by Deva-worshippers and the Iranian by Asura-worshippers.

I was going to note that it is interesting that both Norse and Indo-Persian had such a split, but since, as you point out, the Vanir do not correspond to the Devas, the similarities must be almost entirely linguistic.

Neat info on Jupiter and Uranus, TLC!