The Inaugural Volume of the Dumézilian Programme

Dumézil opens Mitra-Varuna with the methodological declaration that orients the rest of the volume and the half-century of comparative scholarship that followed it. The book, originally published in 1940 and revised in 1948, is the inaugural application of the comparative-philological method that would become the Dumézilian programme — the systematic reading of Indo-European mythological and ritual material to disclose the structural patterns the divergent particulars share. Dumézil names the programme’s scope in the preface to the second edition:

“Mitra-Varuna was to be merely the first in a series of studies devoted to a comparative exploration of the religions of Indo-European peoples, to the ideas those peoples had formed of human and divine society.” — Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, Preface to the Second Edition The thesis the programme would unfold across subsequent volumes (Jupiter-Mars-Quirinus, Naissance de Rome, L’idéologie tripartie des Indo-Européens) is that the early Indo-European peoples organised their cosmological and political imagination around three functions: sovereignty, force, and fertility/production. Mitra-Varuna is the inaugural close case-study of the bipartite structure of the sovereign function itself, in which the magical-juridical sovereignty of Varuna and the contractual-luminous sovereignty of Mitra constitute a complementary pair whose tension is operative across the Indo-European tradition. The book’s preface to the second edition, in which Dumézil acknowledges the influence of Marcel Mauss and the criticisms his fragmentary method had received, supplies the methodological self-awareness that the rest of the volume rests on.

The Bipartite Sovereign: Varuna and Mitra

The book’s central chapters develop the bipartite structure of the sovereign function through close reading of the Vedic material. Varuna is the magical king who governs through māyā (cosmic illusion or magical-creative power), through vrata (sacred decree), and through the pāśa (the noose or binding cord) by which he captures wrongdoers and immobilises them under cosmic law. Varuna is the nocturnal sovereign, the lord of the waters, the king who operates through the magical-juridical power that binds rather than persuades. Mitra is the contractual sovereign, the god of the agreement made between equals, the luminous deity associated with the day, with the mitram (the contract or friendship) that names the operative bond. The two sovereigns are not opposites in a Manichean sense; they are a complementary pair whose joint operation constitutes the sovereign function in the Vedic tradition. The reading carries forward Mauss’s insight in The Gift that the contract presupposes the bond, and that the relation between bond and contract is the operative material of the political-religious imagination. The depth-psychological reader will recognise in the Varuna/Mitra pair the same complementarity that Jung had been articulating under different names — the coincidentia oppositorum, the alchemical coniunctio — though the philological substrate Dumézil supplies is more historically specific than the Jungian formulation often was.

Romulus and Numa: The Roman Application

The book’s middle chapters carry the bipartite-sovereign analysis into the Roman material. Romulus, the founder-king who governs through magical-creative innovation and through the violence of foundation, is read as the Roman Varuna; Numa, the second king who institutes the priestly order, the calendar, and the contractual structures of Roman religion, is read as the Roman Mitra. The reading is exemplary of Dumézil’s comparative method: the Vedic and Roman traditions, separated by millennia of independent development, share a structural pattern that the philological work uncovers, and the pattern is more specific than coincidence would explain. The chapters on the flamen dialis (the high priest of Jupiter, whose extensive ritual prohibitions Dumézil reads as preserving the magical-binding sovereignty in priestly form) and on the rex sacrorum (the priest-king who took over the sacral functions of the Roman king after the expulsion of the Tarquins) supply the dense philological material on which the comparative thesis rests. The reading is unsentimental about the methodological constraints. Dumézil is clear that the comparative-Indo-European thesis cannot be defended at the level of any single piece of evidence; it can only be defended at the level of the cumulative pattern that the comparative work uncovers across the Vedic, Roman, Germanic, Celtic, and Iranian traditions.

The Tripartite Theory and Its Reception

The book’s closing chapters anticipate the larger tripartite theory the rest of the Dumézilian corpus would develop. The sovereign function is the first of three; force (warrior class, Indra, Mars, Týr) and fertility/production (the third function, agricultural and economic) constitute the other two. The tripartite theory, as it developed across Dumézil’s subsequent volumes, became the most influential comparative-Indo-European framework of the twentieth century, and remains a working frame in classical philology, comparative religion, and the historical study of political legitimacy. The reception has not been uncritical. Bruce Lincoln’s subsequent scholarship has identified political affiliations in Dumézil’s formative period (the 1930s and early 1940s) that the contemporary practitioner must reckon with, and the methodological scrutiny applied to comparative-mythological scholarship since the 1990s has identified specific over-readings the original work was prone to. The contemporary reader of Dumézil therefore reads with double vision: alert to the philological achievements that have not been superseded, and alert to the methodological and political concerns that the later scholarship has identified.

For any practitioner whose work draws on the comparative-Indo-European tradition, Mitra-Varuna is the inaugural text of the Dumézilian programme and the working introduction to the bipartite-sovereign analysis that runs through the rest of his corpus. After Dumézil, the depth-psychological reading of authority, of the dyadic structure of legitimation, and of the cosmological imagination of the political has the philological foundation it had previously lacked. The book is also the natural pair to Émile Benveniste’s Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes — the philological complement that supplies the lexical substrate Dumézil’s mythological-comparative readings rest on — and to Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion, with which Dumézil’s programme shares the comparative ambition while diverging in the structural-functional specificity that distinguishes Dumézil’s method from Eliade’s phenomenology.