Animals such as dogs are better than humans at sensing the presence of
gods and spirits.^51 But a human being may be temporarily granted the special
kind of vision that enables him to see the gods in their true form and know
them for what they are. In the fifth book of the Iliad (127 f.) Athena tells
Diomedes that she has removed the ‘fog’ (qχλ3) that has hitherto lain upon
his eyes, so that he will be able to distinguish between god and mortal and
identify any deity that he may encounter in the battle. In the Maha ̄bha ̄rata (3.
- 16 f.) Arjuna, before being given divine weapons, is visited by the gods,
and Yama bellows ‘Arjuna, Arjuna, behold us! The World Guardians have
assembled. We bestow on you eyesight, for you are worthy of seeing us.’
GODS’ NAMESOf the many individual gods that the Indo-Europeans must have known by
name, very few can now be identified. In principle divine names, no less than
ordinary vocabulary items, could appear in recognizably related forms in
different language branches. In a small number of cases they do, or may do,
and these will be discussed in due course. But for the most part the different
pantheons have very little in common, at least in terms of shared names.
Sometimes a god’s essence survived under a different name, or his functions
were taken over by another deity.
More than one factor contributed to the replacement of names. A god’s
primary name might be avoided for taboo reasons. It might be displaced by
familiar epithets or titles, rather as the Christian deity is no longer known as
Yahweh or Jehovah but is mostly just called God, or alternatively the
Almighty, the Heavenly Father, the Lord, and so forth.^52
Scholars have often found that divine names in different traditions looked
as if they should be the same, but showed anomalies of form, and did not
quite correspond in the way that the laws of phonology would predict. There
is a school of thought that admits some licence in the matter. Jan de Vries
wrote that ‘the research of recent years has shown that especially in religious
nomenclature the sound laws do not need to be followed in their
unconditional strictness’. No less a philologist than Roman Jakobson opined
(^51) Eumaeus’ dogs whimper and cower as Athena comes to talk to Odysseus (Od. 16. 162 f.;
see A. Hoekstra’s note on 161). Grimm (1883–8), 667, 1484, collects material from Germanic
folk-tales. Dogs howl at the approach of the Lithuanian death goddess Giltine ̇: Biezais–Balys
(1973), 408.
(^52) Cf. Usener (1896), 324 f.; Vendryès (1948), 264 f.; G. Dumézil, Les dieux des Indo-Européens
(Paris 1952), 5 f.; M. Gimbutas, JIES 1 (1973), 469 f.; Sergent (1995), 390.
134 3. Gods and Goddesses