The roots of the present world crisis

 

Asko Parpola explaining his take on
the horned gods

The link below goes to an interview with famous Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola, published in a pro-Hindu Western magazine. The interview was centered on Parpola´s book “The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization”.

While Parpola is interesting, his perspective is rather “moderate” (give or take a few details), perhaps too moderate for the interviewers, who frequently query him on controversial topics. For instance, Parpola believes that the striking similarity between the Proto-Shiva figure at the so-called Pashupati seal from the Indus Valley Civilization and the Celtic horned god Cernunnos is a sheer co-incidence, which is of course *very* hard to believe!

That being said, the main take away from this interview is that the history of the Indo-Europeans is far more complex than I previously imagined, with a number of different migrations from the Proto-IE homeland in Eastern Europe to Asia. Parpola mentions at least three Indo-European incursions into India. Interestingly, he believes that the Atharva Veda Samhita is a result of the first of these incursions – my understanding is that the Atharva Vedic tradition is usually dated later than the classical Rig Vedic one. But yes, the Atharva Veda was certainly a mixture of Indo-Aryan and Late Harappan elements. What we take to be “typical” Aryan or Vedic culture is the result of a second wave of migrations. If I understand him correctly, Parpola believes that Buddhism and Jainism are products of a culture which combined elements from both the Atharva Vedic and the Rig Vedic traditions.

An even later invasion is associated with the epic Mahabharata, since the cultures of the two competing clans described therein are strikingly different. The most intriguing suggestion in the interview (and presumably the book) is that “Left Hand Tantrism” might be Indo-European, more specifically East Iranian, rather than native to pre-Aryan India. Parpola believes that the East Iranians had sexual orgies before their wars, used bowls carved from the skulls of killed enemies for drinking, and so on! However, Parpola also has arguments for Goddess worship coming from the Indus Valley Civilization. One IVC seal depicts a bull about to have sexual intercourse with a human female, resembling the hieros gamos known from Mesopotamia. Apparently, in the Vedic ritual in which a queen is supposed to lay down with a sacrificed horse, the queen is called “mahishi”, the female form of the word for water buffalo (“mahisha” being the masculine variant). This could be a survival of an earlier tradition in which the sacrificed animal was indeed a water buffalo – as it still is in some rituals to the Goddess today.

Other topics discussed in this interview include BMAC and Mitanni, and the recent Hindu nationalist attacks on independent scholarship. 

Recommended.

Asko Parpola on the roots of Hinduism