The Divine Twins in Indo-European Religion

Horses, Chariot, the Sun, Dawn and the Sky Father: From Rome to India a Consistent Myth Has a Proto-Indo-European Origin

The Roman Dioscuri Castor and Pollux, with their horses. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image: author.

Most of the old Pagan religions in Europe were part of an original source: Proto-Indo-European religion. We can discover how the primordial religion looked like by comparing myths of different cultures and ethnic groups. Through this method, scholars have been able to reconstruct the entire pantheon of the primeval gods and goddesses.

One of the central figures in the Indo-European pantheon is the Sky Father. He is also known by his reconstructed Proto-Indo-European term, *Dyeus. The patriarch of the gods has an intricate web of family relatives — as it is well evinced, for example, through both Vedic and Greek mythologies. Among these relatives, the sons of *Dyeus are probably the most relevant ones. They are the divine Twins.

There is an unusual academic consensus around the ancient Indo-European origins of the divine Twins. It is considered one of the few original myths within the primordial Proto-Indo-European pantheon. We can find the same divine Twin figures in Greek, Vedic, Roman and Baltic mythology. They are the original “Sons of God.”