What Did the Indo-Europeans Believe? Part II
Patriarchy; Ancestor Worship; Tripartite Social Structure
For Part I, click here.
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Last week we introduced this series which will explain Proto-Indo-European (henceforth: “Indo-European”) folkways. Many believe that little to nothing can be recovered of this ancestor people, which is wrong—you will see just how much is legible to us, and this series is only the tip of the iceberg.
This grows out of a larger debate which is currently gaining steam, over whether European paganisms are viable religions. The motivation is twofold: 1) if we can hold up concrete, recoverable practices of the Indo-Europeans, then surely we can recover the daughter religions; and 2) since the ancestral principle mandates that “the older, the more authoritative”, we should be able to say what the oldest and most authoritative practices available are.
Patriarchal Kinship
Indo-European society was strongly patriarchal, organized around the authority of the House Father and structured by lineage through male descent. Ancestors—particularly male ancestors—were treated as powerful, ongoing presences, capable of aiding or harming the living. This belief was reflected in law, ritual, and household religion across IE cultures.
Linguistic reconstruction paints a very clear picture, as IE terms for family and kinship show a distinct emphasis on male lineage:
pH₂tēr (“father”) gives us Vedic pitṛ́, Latin pater, Greek patḗr, Old Norse faðir
suh₂nús (“son”) and dʰugh₂tḗr (“daughter”) indicate an awareness of descent, but social authority was centred on the male line.
The IE root dem- (“household”) gives Latin domus, Greek domos, and Sanskrit dam—the household was a male-headed unit.
There is a strong body of evidence, supported by most of the IE linguistic branches, as well as modern archaeology and genetics, that the IEs were patrilineal (kinship was reckoned through the father alone), patrilocal (the wife would depart her family and come to live with the husband’s family), and patriarchal (the father ruled as absolute monarch within the household). Let us take each of these in turn.
Patrilineality
Focusing on the linguistic evidence, we can reconstruct a rich vocabulary for patrilineal relations, but far fewer terms for maternal kin. Some examples:
ph₂tḗr – “father”
áwō(n) – “grandfather” (often used for paternal grandfather)
dʰugh₂tḗr – “daughter” (feminine form of a male-centred lineage)
swésōr – “sister” (again from the male speaker’s perspective)
nepōts – “grandson / nephew” (often used for brother’s son)
déh₃r – “brother-in-law (husband’s brother)”
By contrast, PIE lacks certain maternal-specific terms:
No PIE word for “mother’s brother”
No PIE word for “maternal uncle’s children”
This is also reflected in naming patterns, especially in patronymics. In IE daughter cultures, names are derived overwhelmingly from the father’s name, not the mother’s. In Vedic Sanskrit and Ancient Greek, the father’s name is core to identity, especially in heroic or genealogical contexts—for example, in Homer, no major hero is identified as “son of such-and-such mother,” but nearly all are “son of such-and-such father.” This is especially so when it comes to tribal identities, where IE cultures often identify tribes or peoples through eponymous male ancestors. The Vedic Dānavas “descendants of Danu” gives us a rare matronymic. For every one of these there are dozens, if not hundreds of tribes descended from Yadu, Turvasu, Pūru—eponymous male ancestors of Vedic tribes. This is so in the West too. Graeci, Latini, Romans, Achaeans—all male eponyms, not female.
It is also well known that most IE peoples followed the practice of agnation, the overt reckoning of descent only through the male line. Inheritance would pass from father to son along with family name. Women married out of their natal kin-group. Clan membership was male defined. For example, the Roman Gracchi brothers feuded with the Scipiones (their maternal cousins) because they had no legal kinship to them. Further examples can be found in the Mahābhārata and Njáls saga, where complex feuds emerge where shared maternal kinship is ignored, and men kill uterine half-brothers or refuse to support them, since only full agnates count in the logic of blood-feud.
Patrilocality
In IE society, the female would join the husband’s household and detach from her father’s. The PIE root wedh- means “to lead” (as in leading the bride to the husband’s house), not “to bind” as in mutual union. This has descendant terms in most IE branches:
Greek: gamein means “to marry” and functions in the active voice only for men.
Latin: we have the formulaic phrase for “marry” uxorem ducere meaning “to lead a wife”.
Sanskrit: the term for “bride” vadhu- literally means “the led one”.
Old English: compare the terms wīfian (“to marry a woman”) vs. niman tō wīfe (“to take as wife”), a clear asymmetry in agency.
Proto-Germanic: we get brūdigumō meaning “bridegroom” (where guma = “man”) vs. brūdiz (“bride”)—the roles are clearly defined relative to the man.
Lithuanian: the term for “wedding” vėdýba derives from vesti, “to lead”.
Slavic: similarly, vesti ženu means “to lead a wife” (Russian svad’ba means “wedding”, from the same root).
By contrast we have virtually no IE vocabulary for a man marrying into a woman’s household, as we do in non-IE matrilineal systems such as Dravidian and Austroasiatic, which often have a dedicated vocabulary for both types of post-marital residence, as well as semantic transparency in kin terms indicating household directionality (e.g., “wife-taker” vs. “husband-taker”).
Somewhat controversially, the PIE root dʰugh₂tḗr – “daughter” is often argued to be etymologically related to dʰewgʰ- meaning “to milk”, with the -ter suffix appending “-er”, so the literal meaning of daughter may be something like “milker”, indicating a kind of utilitarian role.
Patriarchalism
The IEs were perhaps the most ruthlessly patriarchal people ever to live. In IE society, the House Father, or master of the domus, was absolute in his authority.
The PIE root pótis means “master,” and appears in many authoritative male roles:
Sanskrit: pati – “lord, husband”
Latin: potis – “capable, powerful”
Greek: posis – “husband”
Proto-Germanic: fadiz – “lord”
This is usually yoked to a term for the household: dem-. Its cognates domus (Latin), dom (Slavic), demeinō (Greek), are always associated with male authority:
Latin dominus – master of the house
Sanskrit gṛhapati – “lord of the house”
Greek despótēs – male household head
From this, we get the compound dʰeh₁mos pótis or dems potis, with formulaic, structural isoglosses emerging in different languages preserving the same ideological-linguistic construction: a male figure as patriarchal sovereign over a bound kin-community.
Sanskrit – viś-páti, “lord of the clan”
Avestan – vīspaiti-, same construction
Latin – dominus populi, a later usage
Germanic – folc-frea, “lord of the folk” in Old English, e.g., Beowulf
This was an absolute monarch that ruled over his domus, “household”, and answered to no authority higher than his own deceased line of forefathers. In Vedic India, legal codes such as the Manusmṛti specify male inheritance and the sacral authority of the father as sacrificer and lawgiver, the supreme justice and legal decider in family matters. In Rome, the paterfamilias had absolute legal and religious authority (patria potestas) over the household, including control over the domestic cult of the Lares and Manes. Famously, Roman fathers were known to have the jurisdiction to put their wife and children to death if they saw fit, the ius vitae necisque (“power of life and death”). This absolute authority was called manus, meaning “hand”, and finds a Germanic linguistic cognate in mund (sometimes munt), the exact same authority as practiced by Northwestern Europeans.1
The absolute authority scaled up as well, as kingship was originally regarded as an extended household relation. Among the IEs the king was not an elected executive but the father of the people, analogous to the paterfamilias, with his rule over a tribe (dēmos/viś/folk) mirroring male household authority—the pótis was both warlord and sacral protector, linked with divine mandate as passed down through the line of ancestors. His was a sacral office. In many IE cultures, this king figure offered sacrifice (just as the pati performs ritual), dispensed justice (a household duty scaled to the tribe), and held potis not just as power, but as ritual seniority. His office was not earned, but inherited.
This sacral office brings us to the next belief of our Indo-Europeans, namely ancestor worship.