| Popis: |
For the purpose of forming an idea of the language spoken by the Indo-Europeans before their dispersion, the various languages belonging to the Indo-European family have been compared. The religion of the Aryan tribe cannot be known except by a comparison of the data that we possess concerning the beliefs of those Indo-European peoples who seem to have best preserved the mentality and the customs of their ancestors. Consequently, scholars have investigated the beliefs of the Romans prior to Greek or Etruscan influence, the religious customs of the Pelasgian Greeks, the heathen survivals among Kelts, Teutons, and Slavs, and still more the religion of the Lithuanians before their conversion at the end of the Middle Ages, or the Indian poetry of the Vedas. The inquiry has resulted in bringing forward some peculiarities that are common to all those religions, such as the essential features of the worship of the dead, a certain number of rites, of sacrificial customs, of myths, etc. As for the gods, the tempting identifications of the philologists of fifty years ago have generally proved to be unsatisfactory, and much disappointment awaits him who endeavors to discover the names of the primitive gods. The reason for that difficulty seems to be that the Indo-European gods in all probability had no real names but were simply designated by their functions. That is why Herodotus, for instance, says that the Pelasgians had given no names to their gods. This was very much the case with the Prussians before they were Christianized and Teutonized. A mediaeval author writes about them |
