Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty

Georges Dumézil, founder of the new comparative mythology, discovered that all Indo-European religions are articulated according to three hierarchical functions: sacred sovereignty, force, and fecundity. In Mitra-Varuna he develops this general theory but concentrates on the most important of these functions: sovereignty. In particular, Dumézil shows that religious and/or political sovereignty - from India to Rome, from Iran to Scandinavia - is conceived as a dual category: on the one hand the magician-king (raj, rex), on the other the jurist-priest (brahman, flamen). Mitra-Varuna, combines extraordinarv scholarship and theoretical discovery with the pleasures of storytelling. A founding work of comparative, mythology, it is today a seminal essay in the archaeology of power.Distributed for Zone Books.