The Earth Mother Goddess in Indo-European Religion

Paired with the Sky Father, the Indo-European Earth Mother Brings Forth Life in Pagan Myth through Fertile Intercourse with the Sky God

In a previous lecture, I was presenting the origins and character of the Indo-European Sky Father *Dyéus. Seen as the sovereign god of the pantheon of gods of the Proto-Indo-European religion — the shared common substratum of Roman, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Greek and Vedic Pagan religions — , the Sky Father is very often invoked together with the Earth Mother. This sacred marriage of Sky and Earth has not a distinctive theological role or relevance in the main myth narrative; it is rather part of naming sequences, including rivers, mountains, the Great Sea, winds and clouds — all these are entities of divine nature, attributes of a deity, or places where deities live.

Prthu chasing Prithivī in the form of a cow.

Vedic evidences of the divine Sky and Earth pair are plenty. Dyaus the father regularly appears with Prithivī the mother. Several hymns in the Rigveda use it, like in RV 6.51.6: Díyaus pítah, Prithivi mátar ádhrug. (“O heaven father, Earth our guileless mother.”) In other…