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Vedic áśvamedha- and Gaulish IIPOMIIDVOSAuthor(s): Jaan PuhvelSource: Language, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1955), pp. 353-354Published by: Linguistic Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/410802 .Accessed: 05/07/2011 21:02

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VEDIC dbvamedha- AND GAULISH IIPOMIIDVOS

JAAN PUHVEL

Harvard University

This paper is intended as a short linguistic contribution to the study of an important feature of Indo-European religious history: the sacrifice of the horse. There exists a copious and valuable bibliography on the subject,' and I shall re- frain from needless repetition of the materials and conclusions presented there. Only features of immediate importance for my comparison will be explicitly mentioned.

It is generally admitted that the sacrifice of the horse goes back to the common Indo-European period (Koppers 284-5); this fact emerges clearly from the wealth and variety of available ethnographic, information. Materials of often surpris- ingly homogeneous character are attested for many of the Indo-European tribes. The most elaborate information comes from Indic; and Sanskrit is the only IE language in which a specific name for the sacrifice, viz. dcva-medha-, is explicitly attested. The first element of this endocentric compound is IE *b6wo- 'horse'; the noun m dha- (m.) denotes properly a sacrificial offering of food and drink, and seems to be connected with mad- 'be drunk, rejoice',' presumably *mdd- dho- > *mdzdha- > midha- (Wackernagel, Altind. Gramm. 1.274 [G6ttingen, 1896]). It is noteworthy that in the Rig-Veda divamedha- is attested only as the exocentric name of a prince (RV 5.28.4, 5, 6). This motivates a comparison with a proper name attested repeatedly on silver coins of the Gaulish Aruerni (A. Holder, Alt-Celtischer Sprachschatz 1.1447 [Leipzig, 1894]; Whatmough, DAG 157): IIPOMIIDV..., ...POMIIDOVS, ...VOS, IIPOMIIDVOS. II seems to be graphic for e (presumably short; perhaps originating in hiatus, where e and i fluctuated and the glide was inconsistently written, e.g. FILIIA for filia or filea). Holder's interpretation tp6migduos

is probably correct. D'Arbois de Jubainville thought that it means 'ivre de cheval, passionn6 pour le cheval'; one may indeed compare W meddw, Bret. mezu 'drunk', and OIr. Medb, pre- sumably from a Keltic derivative *medwo- from IE *midhu- 'sweet' (Ved. mddhu-), neuter 'sweet drink, honey, mead' (Ved. mddhu, Gk. mgthu; OIr. mid, W medd, OCorn. medu, Bret. mez). The early Indo-Europeans were undoubtedly 'crazy about horses', and so were the Gauls-cf. the cult of the goddess Epona; many Gaulish proper names sound extravagant to modern ears; yet I propose that we discard de Jubainville's interpretation. No conclusion must be based on the ab-

1 The reader is referred particularly to the following works: W. Koppers, Pferdeopfer und Pferdekult der Indogermanen, Wiener Beitrage zur Kulturgeschichte und Linguistik 4.279-409 (1936); P.-E. Dumont, L'advamedha (Paris, 1927); J. von Negelein, Das Pferd im arischen Altertum (K6nigsberg, 1903); F. Schachermeyr, Poseidon und die Entstehung des griechischen Gotterglaubens (Bern, 1950), esp. 65-108; E. Delebecque, Le cheval dans

l'Iliade (Paris, 1951), esp. 239-44; H. A. Potratz, Das Pferd in der Friihzeit (Rostock, 1938); V. Hehn, Kulturpflanzen und Haustiere (Berlin, 1914); 0. Keller, Die antike Tierwelt (Leip- zig, 1909); R. Hindringer, Weiheross und Rossweihe (Miinchen, 1932); L. von Schroeder, Arische Religion (Leipzig, 1914-6).

2 An alternative analysis is *mly-dho-, cf. Ved. mayas- 'strength, vigor'. 353

354 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 31, NUMBER 3

sence of a Gaulish simplex *meduos 'drunk', for a mere adjective is less likely than a name to appear in a linguistic corpus like the Gaulish; but it raises the possibility that Epomeduos should be analyzed as an exocentric *Epo-medu-, with -o- a samAs8nta suffix attached to the compound, rather than as *Epo- meduo-. Then Epo- may be immediately compared with Ved. A•va-; -medu- cannot be equated with -medha- but would seem to be a closely related semantic case. In m~dha- (mad-) the idea of 'intoxicating beverage' has led to the meaning of 'sacrificial drink' and hence 'sacrifice'; Gaul. -medu- would seem to go back to a similar usage of the word *mWdhu somewhere between Indo-European and Gaulish. Thus RV Advamedha- and Gaul. Epomeduos would seem to emanate from closely related Indo-European ritual terms, semantically identical but showing etymological (though almost homophonous) variation of the second element.

A particularly noteworthy concordance between Indic and Keltic features of the horse sacrifice concerns the sexual aspects of the rite. This feature was cer- tainly present in Indo-European times (Koppers 344-9), and can also be traced in Germanic territory (287, 346):. indications of a fertility cult are found in Greek and Roman sources (H. M. Hubbell, Horse sacrifice in antiquity, Yale class stud. 1.181-92 [1928]; E. S. McCartney, CJ 22.674-6 [1927]). Yet most re- markable is the grotesque parallelism between the rites involving the mahisI and the dead stallion in the Yajurveda (Dumont 178-82) and the description of a northern Irish royal consecration by Geraldus Cambrensis in his Topographia hibernica (F. E. Schroder, ZfCPh. 16.310-2 [1927]), where the prospective king has symbolic sexual intercourse with a mare, followed by sacrifice of the animal and a ceremonial bath (Koppers 288-9, Schachermeyr 97). This seems to be, like the names Advamedha- : Epomeduos, a particularly archaic concordance be- tween Indic and Keltic, and underlines the surviving importance of fertility rites involving the horse.

The sense which we have ascribed to -medu- in Epomeduos may now help us to understand another of the Gaulish proper names involving this word. I cannot believe that Medugenus, Meducinus (Holder 2.526) means 'mead-born'; if we accept the above analysis of Epomeduos, it may be interpreted as 'born through sacrifice', i.e. born thanks to fertility rites to previously barren parents. The appearance of medu- in divine names (De[abus] Vercane et Medun(a)e ..., Holder 2.528) and river names (*Medudna, Holder 2.525) also indicates that the word once had more of a sacral connotation than the standard translation would in- dicate. A similar feature appears in the Rig-Veda, where mddhu is practically equated to soma- in many contexts.

* See also W. P. Lehmann's paper, Lin and laukr in the Edda, to appear in Germanic review.