How Quantitative Methods Can Shed Light on a Problem of Comparative Mythology: The Myth of the Struggle for Supremacy Between Two Groups of Deities Reconsidered

Abstract

This chapter treats a well-known mythic theme from Japanese mythology: the struggle of the ‘Earthly Deities’ against the ‘Heavenly Deities’ for government of the world. To this day, many scholars interpret this episode in a purely historical fashion, that is, as a reflection of the conflict between two political groups. However, this approach fails to explain the wide distribution of very similar myths in Eurasia. Examples include the mythologies of Greece (Titans versus Olympians), India (Devas versus Asuras) and Scandinavia (giants versus gods). The historical-comparative approaches of Georges Dumézil and Michael Witzel take the wide distribution of this theme into account and explain it with common origin. Dumézil believes that the Indo-Europeans shared a tripartite ideology which was represented in their social structure as well as in their myths. According to this theory, one group of deities represented the ‘functions’ of ‘king/priest’ and of ‘warrior’ while the other group (which loses the struggle) represents the function of ‘cultivator/herder’. Witzel, on the other hand, argues that the theme can be explained as one episode in the ‘Laurasian story line’ which was created by our ancestors some 40,000 years ago in or near south-western Asia and subsequently diffused parallel to the spread of the human race. After a discussion of these two theories, I will suggest how quantitative approaches like social network analysis, phylogenetics or principal component analysis might enable us to counter-check these hypotheses and be instrumental in either refuting them or placing them—and thereby the often highly speculative field of comparative mythology as such—on a firmer scientific fundament.