3
Gods and Goddesses
The Indo-Europeans, it is clear, spoke both about ‘the gods’ collectively and
about gods as individuals. They perhaps had their different words for different
categories of supernatural being. But the most important term, one that has
left representatives in nearly all branches of the Indo-European family,
was based on the root diw/dyu, which denoted the bright sky or the light of
day. In MIE it took the form deiwós, plural deiwο- ́s. From this come Vedic
devá-, Avestan dae ̄va-, Old Phrygian devos (Neo-Phrygian dative-locative
plural δεω), Oscan deíva ̄-, Messapic deiva,dı ̄va‘goddess’, Venetic deivos
‘gods’, Latin deus, proto-Germanic tı ̄waz,^1 Old Irish día, Old Church
Slavonic divu ̆‘demon’, Old Prussian deiws/deywis, Lithuanian Die ̃vas, Latvian
Dievs. A derivative deiwios seems to be attested in Mycenaean de-wi-jo, de-u-
jo-i.^2 In Anatolian we find forms derived from dyeus: Hittite siu ̄s, siu ̄n-‘god’,
a declension built on the old accusative siu ̄n; similarly, with thematic stem,
Palaic tiuna-‘divine’.^3
The gods, then, or at any rate those designated by this word, were literally
‘the celestials’; they belonged in the sky. Although Greek had long abandoned
deiwo ̄ ́s in favour of a different word, the concept of the heavenly location
survived: the Homeric gods are portrayed as dwelling in heaven, and they are
designated in formulaic phrases as ‘the heavenly ones’ (ο1ρανωνε) or as
‘the gods who occupy the broad heaven’ (το? ο1ραν:ν ε1ρ7ν #χουσιν).
Certain other terms for ‘god’ current in particular areas can be explained
on the basis of Indo-European cognates. A proto-Germanic word guða- is
represented in Gothic guþ, Old Norse goð, Old High German got, English
‘god’. This has the peculiarity of being neuter, perhaps, as Schulze argued,
(^1) The plural tívar survives in Norse as a poetic word for ‘the gods’, and the singular týr occurs
in kennings for Odin and Thor. Otherwise in Germanic the singular appears as the name of a
different deity: Norse Týr, West Germanic Tı ̄waz, whose name was chosen in translating Martis
dies‘Tuesday’. See de Vries (1956), ii. 4 f., 11, 25 f.
(^2) M. S. Ruipérez and E. Risch in A. Heubeck–G. Neumann (edd.), Res Mycenaeae (Akten des
VII. Internationalen Mykenologischen Colloquiums, 1983), 411 f.
(^3) Cf. Melchert (1994), 150, 209. For dyeus (> Greek Ζε3, etc.) see Chapter 4.