Gigantomachia » Indo-European parallels

An Overview: Gigantomachias in Greek myth

mce — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 18:26:05 +0000

In Greek myth, accounts of a war between the gods and the giants are already to be found in Homer and Hesoid (ca 800 BC?). Because cognate accounts are to be found in widely dispersed Indo-European traditions stretching from India to Scandinavia, these myths clearly reach back thousands of years before Homer and Hesoid into Proto-Indo-European (PIE) prehistory (ca 4000 BC?).

The Greeks knew the following 4 variants of the gigantomachia (in addition to the philosophical elaboration of the theme to be found in philosophers like Plato):

a) The titanomachia described by Hesiod, Aeschylus and Apollodorus (among others).

b) The gigantomachia described by Apollodorus and Diodorus

c) The battle of Zeus and Typhon described in Hesiod, Aeschylus and Apollodorus.

d) The war of the giant Aloadai twins, Ephialtes and Otos, against the gods described in Homer, Apollodorus, Hyginus, Virgil and Ovid.

Notes:

a) Beyond cognates in other Indo-European mythologies, further roots of these Greek accounts of the gigantomachia go into the ancient near-east and middle east, to peoples like the Sumerians, Assyrians and Hittites, where myths with similar themes (especially the rivalry between different generations of gods and a battle with a Typhon-like monster) are recorded as early as ca 2500 BC. Since Indo-Europeans like the Hittites were present in the mix of peoples in the ancient near-east and middle east, the question of known and potential borrowings between different language, culture and political groups is highly complicated. A last source of influence, one often put forward by the Greeks themselves, was Egypt. Here, too, repeated wars between the gods are to be found. For our concerns, the great question in these rich mythologies does not concern their involuted and highly interesting historical relations, but their structural properties. How do they represent and explain plurality at origin? What clues does this give us to ontology and epistemology? And what do these latter have to do with our lives today?

b) the fourth variant, the war of the Aloadai against Olympos, appears throughout the tradition, usually by reference to Pelion and Ossa, in, eg, Shakespeare (Hamlet and The Merry Wives of Windsor) and Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel).

Etymology of Sinn-sent-senso-sendero etc

mce — Sun, 21 Sep 2003 13:01:47 +0000

Heidgger remarks somewhere (in a note in Unterwegs zur Sprache?) on the Indo-European background to the complex of German ‘Sinn’, French ‘sens’, English ‘sent’ and ‘sense’, Italian ‘senso’, Spanish ‘sendero’, etc. These have the double meaning of ‘way’, ‘away’, ‘direction’, ‘path’ (Sinn, sens, sent, senso, sendero) and ‘meaning’ or ‘sense’ (Sinn, sens, sense, senso).

Why and how do ‘way’ and ‘meaning’ belong together?

Consider the case of any everyday example of meaning or sense. How did it come to be understood? Whatever the particulars involved, it must have been the case that the way to this meaning were fitted to it somehow. How else could it have arrived? But how could it be fitted in this way while the process were still underway?

It would seem that the path to meaning – Plato’s dialectic - is mysteriously fitted to its object in a way which seems to involve a reversal of time (so that the obect sought is able to reach back to structure the way to it) and which is grounded in some fundamental fashion which is deeper than any particular case.

There is plurality at origin. Enabling and structuring this original plurality are borders. These borders are not possibilities of being because they are between the possibilities of being. They are impossibilities of being which yet belong essentially to being. These impossibilities which bind together the possibilities of being ground all the pathways which are taken to meaning and sense. The possibility at arriving at meaning is grounded in the impossiblities which enable and structure plurality at origin.

It is of the very nature of the pathway (senso) to meaning (senso) to be utterly dark and silent. This path, any path, is grounded in that original difference whose obscurity has been described by poets and thinkers from Hesiod and the Icelandic Edda to Eliot and Beckett:

para venir a lo que no eres,
has de ir por donde no eres.
(San Juan de la Cruz)

In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
(Eliot)

Ginnungagap

mce — Sat, 20 Sep 2003 15:00:40 +0000

From the Völuspá section of the Norse-Icelandic Poetic Edda, with English and German translations:

3. Ár var alda, þar er Ýmir bygði
var-a sandr né sær né svalar unnir;
jörð fannsk æva né upphiminn,
gap var ginnunga en gras hvergi.

3. Of old was the age, when Ymir lived;
Sea nor cool waves, nor sand there were;
Earth had not been, nor heaven above,
But a yawning gap, and grass nowhere.

3. Urzeit war es, da Ymir hauste:
nicht war Sand noch See noch Salzwogen,
nicht Erde unten, noch oben Himmel,
Gähnung grundlos, doch Gras nirgend.

Ginnungagap is the abysmal gap of origin which forms the border between (ie, at once separates and joins) the northern ice and the southern fire. It is out of this gap through the action of the giants and gods that the world is born – middle earth (Miðgarð).

As with the Greeks, the mystery lies in the joint of what belongs below (ice, north, night, giants) with what belongs above (fire, south, day, gods). It is the nature of human being, the creatures of Miðgarð, to be subject to this mystery and to the care and anxiety which follow from its difficult complexity.

The battle of the gods in Greece

mce — Sun, 31 Aug 2003 19:16:48 +0000

Like many Indo-European cultures, Greek myth and cult celebrated a series of primordial battles through which the order of the world was both threatened and forged. Two of these battles, the battle of the gods and giants (the gigantomachia or gigantomachy) and the battle of the gods and titans (the titanomachia or titanomachy) were confused even in antiquity and may, indeed, never have been clearly separate events. In both, an older generation of divine beings associated with (but somehow also antagonistic to) Gaia, earth, engage in a decisive battle with the Olympian gods of the sky. The outcome of the battle is to determine the rule of the earth and even before the advent of philosophy such ‘rule’ is associated with more than mere power. The myths themselves imply that something is at stake here which goes to the constitutional foundations of being itself. Hesiod, for example, describes the battle as follows: “The boundless sea rang terribly around, and the earth crashed loudly: wide Heaven was shaken and groaned, and high Olympus reeled from its foundation under the charge of the undying gods”.

That being itself is at stake in this battle is to be seen in the German-Scandinavian variant of this Indo-European theme, where the war between gods and giants concludes only by putting an the end to the world in Götterdämmerung or Ragnarök.

With Plato, the ontological implications of the battle achieve conceptual translucence: the perennial argument between idealists and materialists is described as “a battle of gods and giants going on between them over their quarrel about reality [gigantomachia peri tes ousias]“.