Georges Dumézil

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Georges Dumézil (born March 4, 1898 in Paris ; † October 11, 1986 ibid) was a French religious scholar and sociologist who became famous for his analysis of Indo-European religion and society. Today he is regarded as one of the most important contributors to mythography , especially for his formulation of the trifunctional hypothesis of social classes in Indo-European societies.

Life

From 1931 to 1933, Georges Dumézil was a French lecturer at Uppsala University , where he established lasting contacts with Swedish religious historians. He was influenced, among others, by James Frazer and the German Indo-Europeanist Hermann Güntert , and later also by the Saussure student Antoine Meillet . He also published in the Festschrift for Hermann Hirt , Germanic and Indo-European (1936). Roger Caillois was one of his students .

This is a translation of parts of the text from the French-language article

Georges Dumézil was the grandson of a cooper from Bayon-sur-Gironde . His father Jean Anatole Dumézil (1847–1929) attended high school, where he was enthusiastic about Latin and modern languages. He later embarked on a military career that led him to the rank of general. The father conveyed his son's interest in Latin, whereupon he was able to read the original epic Aeneid of Virgil at the age of nine . At the same time he learned ancient Greek and German as a child.

Subsequent to his father's military transfers, Dumézil changed high school several times. So were Bourges , Briancon , Paris , Neufchâteau , Troyes , then again Paris and Tarbes and finally Vincennes stations of his school career. He then attended the preliminary course of the Classes préparatoires littéraires (called khâgne ) at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. During this time he met Michel Bréal , who put him in touch with Antoine Meillet and entrusted him with his Sanskrit dictionary, after which Dumézil dealt with Sanskrit and Arabic. In 1916 he was admitted as the best candidate to study at the École normal supérieure de Paris .

When the First World War broke out, Dumézil was mobilized as an artillery officer , in which he remained from March 1917 to February 1919. He then took part in the academic selection examination Agrégation de lettres (6th edition), later he briefly accepted a teaching post in Beauvais . In January 1921 a teaching position for French at the University of Warsaw followed . In 1922 he was back in France and began his dissertations in religious studies and comparative mythology . His doctoral supervisor was Antoine Meillet. Dumézil defended his work in April 1924. The first work was entitled Le Festin d'immortalité. Étude de mythologie comparée indo-européenne , in it he treated similarities between the ambrosia attributed to the Greco-Roman gods and a comparable drink in Indian mythology called Amrita . However, he did not limit himself to an exclusively comparative approach, but took up elements from another field of Indian mythology. This brought him the accusation of having taken liberties in dealing with facts and embellishing his story, an accusation that is still held against him at times. Dumézil himself admitted that in his dissertation, in the absence of an equivalent in Norse mythology , he had reinterpreted beer as the immortality drink. He titled his second doctoral thesis Le Crime des Lemniennes. Rites et Légends du monde égéen .

In 1925 Dumézil accepted a position at the University of Istanbul , where a chair for religious studies was created at the request of its founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk . There he dealt with Turkish and also traveled to the Russian-Caucasian border region and beyond. Studies on the mythology and language of the Ossetians , as well as on the now extinct ubychic language , whose speakers fled from the Russian army to western Turkey from 1860 to 1870, followed. The Adygeic and Abkhaz languages ​​were also the subject of his studies. His extensive research on the languages ​​of the Caucasus was incorporated into the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire des langues orientales in Paris.

In 1931 Dumézil followed a call to the University of Uppsala in Sweden, where he deepened his knowledge of Norse mythology and learned Swedish . Thanks to this detour to Scandinavia, Dumézil's personal protégé Michel Foucault was later called to Uppsala. In 1933 Dumézil gave up this position and received the post of a chargé de conférences of religious studies through the mediation of his friend, Indologist Sylvain Lévi in Paris . He was then appointed directeur d'étude comparative des religions des peuples indo-européens of the 5th section at the École pratique des hautes études . With Marcel Granet he also attended lectures in sinology , wrote nationalist-minded articles under the pseudonym Georges Marcenay and maintained contact with the anthropologist Marcel Mauss . In 1938 he began with Jupiter Mars Quirinus , in which he presented his model of the three classes ( Théorie de la trifonctionnalité ).

In 1941 Dumézil was removed from the faculty because of his membership in Freemasonry . The clergyman Pierre Dabosville , director of the private school École Saint-Martin-de-France in Pontoise , helped him to get a job as a Latin and Greek teacher at his institute. Dumézil's students there included the future lawyer and politician Jean-Marc Varaut . Thanks to an intervention by the ancient historian Jérôme Carcopino , Dumézil was able to return to university operations in 1942. From 1949 to 1968 he held a specially created chair for Indo-European civilizations at the Collège de France . Between 1952 and 1972 he made new study trips to the Caucasus.

In 1968 Dumézil retired , but remained publicly active for three years as a participant in conferences, particularly at US universities such as Princeton . A complete edition of his scientific work was created. In 1968, 1971 and 1973, Mythe et Épopée appeared in three volumes . In 1970 he was appointed to the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres . The Académie française accepted him into their ranks in 1978. One year after him, his wife Madeleine died in 1987. The couple had two children, Perrine and Claude: Perrine Dumézil, an astrophysicist , was married to Hubert Curien , who was promoted to research minister under François Mitterrand ; Claude Dumézil (1929–2013) was a psychoanalyst .

plant

Dumézil saw myths , which he treated structurally rather than historically , as social patterns . To do this, he developed a method of comparative mythology , according to which two gods were identical if they performed analogous functions in their respective pantheons . He undertook to use a comparative method to uncover previously unrecognized but striking structural parallels in Indian , Persian , Ossetian , Greek , Roman and Germanic sagas of gods and heroes. Dumézil recognized an analogy between Indo-European language development and Indo-European religious development.

His structural theory is based on the thesis that the divine heaven is an image of society. Many Indo-European cultures consisted of the three free classes of teaching, military and nutritional status. Dumézil then concluded the following scheme:

Hell-Juridisch: ind. Mitra, Roman Dius Fidus, Germ. Tyr, Celtic Teutates; Function: judge, legislator, stays in the background

Dark magic: ind. Varuna, Roman Jupiter, Germ. Odin; Function: ruler, is often seen as unjust

Strength : ind. Indra, Roman Mars, Germ. Thor, Celtic Taranis; Function: Hero with a primitive weapon (club, hammer), kills the water snake

Fertility : ind. Nasatya, Roman Quirinus. germ. Njord & Freyr; Function: benefactor of the people

The system proved to be a suitable model and gave comparative religious studies a boost in development. The names (and their etymology) took a back seat in favor of sagas, myths, and structural properties that link certain deities together. So a heroic god of thunder became more tangible than before. The Germanic Thor and the Indian Indra drink and eat abundantly, are irascible and fight like the Baltic Perkunas (Slavic: Perun) a dragon-like creature.

In addition, he postulated a primal ideology that saw the primal religion as a projection of contemporary social conditions. He proceeded from a three-part class society ("idéologie tripartite"): priesthood , warrior class and peasant class . This is reflected in the “Ur-Pantheon”, the myths and heroic poems. So then deities would be found everywhere, law and order, others who represent incalculable violence and still others who represent fertility.

He was also interested in Aryan men's associations and describes, among other things, Vedic men's associations in 1940 . His work Ouranós-Varuna is devoted to the problem of sacred royalty, in which kings are ritually mutilated and killed.

The limitation of his three-class model “priest, warrior, farmer” is evident in early Scandinavian society, which did not have a priesthood. In the Edda Rígsþula , on the other hand, a three-class model “nobility, free peasant, slave” is presented. The king's mirror describes four classes: merchants, aristocracy with the king at their head, clergy and peasants.

However, in the last few years of his life, Dumézil became very self-critical. Although he was considered one of the greatest advocates of Indo-European language research, he began to question this above all: The “Indo-European civilizations” are to be classified as the products of novelists.

In addition to his mythographic and linguistic writings, Georges Dumézil published a novel: Le Moyne noir en gris dedans Varenne. Sotie nostradamique .

Fonts

  • An almost complete list of publications can be found in: Hommages à Georges Dumézil. Bruxelles, 1960 (Collection Latomus, 45) pp. Xi-xxii.
  • 1924: Le Festin d'immortalité. (Dissertation)
  • 1929: Le Problème des Centaures .
  • 1934: Ouranós-Varuna
  • 1935: Flemish Brahman
  • 1939: Mythes et dieux des Germains. Essai d'interprétation comparative . Series: Mythes et religions , 1st PUF, Paris
  • 1940: Mithra-Varuna, Essai sur deux représentations indo-européennes de la Souveraineté . PUF, Paris 1940
  • Übers. Inge Köck: Loki . (Loki) WBG, Darmstadt 1959
  • Aspects of the warrior function among the Indo-Europeans . (Aspects de la fonction guerrière chez les Indo-Européens) Scientific Book Society WBG, Darmstadt 1964
  • Myth and Epic . The ideology of the three functions in the epics of the Indo-European peoples. (Myth et épopée)
  1. The relieved earth. (La terre soulagée) Campus Verlag , 1989; Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris 1989 (on the Mahabharata ) (More in this series not published in German)
  • Translator Eva Moldenhauer : The black monk in Varennes. Nostradamian farce and divertissement on the last words of Socrates . Novel. (Le moyne noir en gris dedans Varennes) Insel, Frankfurt 1989; Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2018 (additional editions) Table of contents

literature

  • Tributes to Georges Dumézil. Bruxelles 1960 (Collection Latomus, 45) Festschrift
  • Ulf Drobin: Indoeuropeerna i myt och foskning . In: Gro Steinsland, Ulf Drobin, Juha Pentikäinen, Preben Meulengracht Sørensen (eds.): Nordisk Hedendom. Et symposium . Syddansk Universitetsforlag, Odense 1991, pp. 65-85
  • Didier Eribon : Faut-il brûler Dumézil? Mythology, science et politique. Flammarion, Paris 1992 ISBN 978-2-080-66709-0
  • Stephan Moebius : The sorcerer's apprentices. Sociological history of the Collège de Sociologie 1937–1939. UVK, Konstanz 2006 ISBN 3-89669-532-0
  • Edgar C. Polomé : About Dumézil: Apropos of a special number of the Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft. In: Journal of Indo-European Studies 27, 1999, pp. 248-256
  • Bernfried Schlerath: Georges Dumézil and the reconstruction of the Indo-European culture. Kratylos 40/41 1996, pp. 1-48, 1-67
  • Rüdiger Schmitt :  Dumézil's three-function theory. In: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (RGA). 2nd Edition. Volume 6, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1986, ISBN 3-11-010468-7 , pp. 276-280.
  • Journal for Religious Studies , 98, 2 1998, special issue: "Georges Dumézil", contains
  1. Guy G. Stroumsa: Georges Dumézil. Ancient German Myths, and Modern Demons. Pp. 125-136
  2. Max Deeg: Dumézil 'in practice': the 'case' of Varuna and Odin. Pp. 137-162
  3. Nick Allen: Varnas, colors, and functions. Expanding Dumézil's scheme. Pp. 163-177
  4. David H. Sick: Dumézil, Lincoln, and the Genetic Model. Pp. 179-195
  5. Carlos Marroquin: Comments on a topic of myth research by Georges Dumézil and Roger Callois. Pp. 197-206
  6. Cristiano Grottanelli: Dumézil's Aryens in 1941. pp. 207-219
  7. Bruce Lincoln : Dumézil, Ideology, and the Indo-Europeans. Pp. 221-227

Web links

notes

  1. ↑ Drobin p. 65.
  2. ↑ Drobin p. 67.
  3. ^ Sverre Bagge: "Old Norse Theories of Society. From Rígþula to Konungs skuggsiá . “In: Jens eike Schnall, Rudolf Simek (Ed.): Speculum Regale. The old Norwegian king mirror (Konungs skuggsjá) in the European tradition. Vienna. 2000. Studia Septentrionalia 5. pp. 7-45, 9 f.
  4. ↑ Didier Eribon: Entretien avec G. Dumezil , Gallimard, Paris 1987, p. 220
personal data
SURNAME Dumézil, Georges
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French religious scholar
DATE OF BIRTH March 4, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH October 11, 1986
Place of death Paris