Indo-European Poetry and Myth

gods (3. 6. 9; 8. 28. 1, 35. 3) or the three cohorts (6. 51. 2, 52. 15; 7. 35. 11; 10.

49. 2, 63. 2, 65. 9). In the Atharvaveda the three groups have their ‘seats’ in
    heaven, in the lower air (antáriks
    ̇

am, literally the in-between domicile), and
on the earth:

yé deva ́ ̄ divis

̇

ádo, | antariks

̇

asádas ́ca yé, | yé cemé bhu ̄ ́miya ̄m ádhi.

The gods who are heaven-seated,

and those who are interzone-seated,

and these who are on the earth.

(10. 9. 12, cf. 11. 6. 12.) The same classification is given by the early Vedic
commentator Ya ̄ska (Nirukta 7. 5) and in TS 2. 4. 8. 2. The gods of the
antáriks
̇

am are alternatively described as madhyamastha ̄na-, of the middle
station. We might be tempted to compare Plautus, Cistellaria 512, where
Alcesimarchus exclaims at ita me di deaeque, superi atque inferi et medioxumi,
except that this has all the appearance of a comic invention. In the solemn
prayer reported by Livy 1. 32. 10 we find a threefold division that does
not correspond to the Indian: audi Iuppiter et tu Iane Quirine diique omnes
caelestes uosque terrestres uosque inferni.
The Indo-Europeans perhaps had no clear-cut doctrine of a division of
gods between two or three levels of the cosmos. But in certain circumstances
it was natural to draw such distinctions, and they may have been drawn
informally and inconsistently to suit the occasion.

Gods and men: two races

The opposition of celestial and terrestrial did, however, play a fundamental
role in Indo-European thought and language: not in contrasting different
orders of supernatural being, but in contrasting the gods with humankind. As
the gods were deiwo ̄ ́s, the heavenly ones, man was ‘the earthly’, designated by
a derivative of the old word for earth, dé



gom-/d


gm-.^14 This is the source
of words for ‘man, human being’ in various languages: Phrygian zemelos;
Latinhomo (cf. humus‘earth’), Oscan humuf, Umbrian homu; old Lithuanian
zˇmuõ, plural zˇmóne ̇s; Gothic and Old English guma, Old Norse gumi, Old
High German gomo (< proto-Germanic guman);^15 Old Irish duine, Welsh
dyn, Breton den (< gdon-yo-).^16 In Greek the inherited word was replaced by

(^14) Schulze (1966), 146.
(^15) This survives in modern German Bräuti-gam, English bride-groom (with intrusive r by
false association).
(^16) Cf. Feist (1939), 225 f.; Gamkrelidze–Ivanov (1995), 720.
124 3. Gods and Goddesses