![fig. 5: Aeson rising from Medea's cauldron, Etruscan bucchero ware, 630 BCE. San Paolo (Cerveteri), Lazio, Italy. Courtesy of Museo Nazionale Etrusco, Rome, Italy. ](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2026-04/Screen%20Shot%202026-04-14%20at%209.23.40%20PM.png?itok=jG2c49dR) 

 



 

#  Apotheosis and Afterlife of the Indo-European Hero 

 





April 15, 2026

 

 

 [ David Gordon White ](https://www.religion.ucsb.edu/people/david-gordon-white) 

 

Edited by Aaron M. Ullrey

1\. Archeological, philological, and DNA data indicate that the speakers of a “Proto-Indo-European” (hereafter PIE) language began to migrate out of Anatolia sometime between 7500 and 6000 BCE.\[1\] Between 4000 and 2000 BCE, PIE diversified into the five major Indo-European subfamilies: Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, and Indo-Iranian. Together with a common tongue, the Indo-European speakers carried with them a stock of socio-cultural traditions. Some of these concerned the lives and afterlives of heroes, including the mythology and imagery of the apotheosis of exemplary warriors and other persons of “heroic” stature. Because these specific themes appear in no other cultural areas, I argue these similarities are best explained on the basis of Indo-European monogenesis, the dissemination from a common source of cognate traditions, embedded in disparate linguistic, social, and cultural formations.\[2\]

Over the past two centuries, the field of Indo-European philology has reached a high level of precision in recovering the archaic root forms, vocabulary, and grammatical structures of the Proto-Indo-European language, mapping their ramifications and transformations across the ancient and modern languages of the Indo-European family. Founded in 1938 by the French scholar Georges Dumézil, the sister discipline of comparative Indo-European mythology has had a more checkered history. On the one hand, because mythemes are more complex than phonemes, their content and structure cannot be analyzed with an equal degree of precision. On the other, Dumézil's principal focus was, throughout some fifty years of research and writing, the retrieval of what he termed the “three functions” of an Indo-European social ideology. According to his theory, the great narrative cycles of Indo-European myth and epic were possessed of a common structure grounded in a vision of human society as organized around the three ideal functions of sovereignty, martial strength, and fertility. This theoretical construct is embedded in the subtitle of the first volume of Dumézil's *magnum opus*, the three-volume *Mythe et épopée*, which, translated into English, reads “The Ideology of the Three Functions in the Epics of the Indo-European Peoples.”\[3\] Titled “A Hero,” Part One of the second volume compares the complex myths of three epic heroes: the Indic Śiśupāla, the Norse Starkaðr, and the Greek Herakles.\[4\] The great bulk of studies devoted to Indo-European hero traditions, if not to Indo-European mythology in general, has hewed to the Dumézilian agenda of identifying the “trifunctional” structure undergirding their mythemes.\[5\] As I have demonstrated in my recent study, *Dæmons Are Forever: Contacts and Exchanges in the Eurasian Pandemonium*,\[6\] there is much to this rich mythology that falls outside the purview of a theoretical ideology of the three functions. The present study focuses, precisely, on an aspect of Indo-European epic hero traditions untreated by Dumézil and his successors: the apotheosis and afterlife of the exemplary warrior.

*Apotheōsis* is a term that first appears, albeit infrequently, in classical Greek, where it simply denotes “deification.”\[7\] I employ the term in its most widely attested English-language usage, which, reflective of developments of the term in later Greek and Latin sources, is definable as “ascension into heaven; spiritual departure from earthly life; resurrection (literal and figurative) . . . the action, process, or fact of ranking, or of being ranked, among the gods; transformation into a god, deification, elevation to divine status.”\[8\] The Indo-European hero’s apotheosis flowed from the special nature of his death, which was violent, often suicidal, and “assimilable to a ritual and sacrificial death.”\[9\] While the great majority of these heroic figures were male, certain females, such as the South Asian *satī*s who ascended the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands, were also elevated to divine status.

In Indo-European cultures, the apotheosis of the hero was represented through a specific sequence of motifs, with variations ascribable to a given culture’s war machinery and its mode of disposing of the dead.

(1a) The hero’s death issues immediately into his resurrection and apotheosis, or (1b) his resurrection and apotheosis are initiated through a transfer mechanism, often a cauldron. (2) The slain hero is conveyed to a divine, immortal plane in a vehicle identical to his war machine: (2a) a chariot-*cum*-airship, (2b) a ship, (2c) or a horse. (3) The divine, immortal plane to which he is conveyed is situated (3a) in heaven, (3b) under the earth, or (3c) beneath the sea. (4) Divine bird-maidens play an active role in the hero’s transport and transformation, in some cases by feeding on his body.

The chariot-*cum*-airship appears as a hero’s mythical vehicle of apotheosis in those Indo-European societies that favored the chariot as a war machine and that located their world of the gods in a heavenly sphere: India, Rome, and Greece.\[10\] The ship and horse appear as preferred conveyances among Norse and Celtic populations, who located the abode of their divinized heroes under mountains or mounds, or beneath the sea.



 

Several of the apotheosis motifs outlined above appear together in the climactic conclusion of the eleventh-century Indian alchemical work titled *Rasārṇava*, “The Ocean of Mercury.” After his long and painstaking preparation of an optimal mercurial elixir, the alchemist is instructed to pour that preparation into a cauldron.

> A beautiful, shiny copper vessel (*pātra*) has the measure of the man in height and half that in diameter. Over it he should place a four-sided wooden frame, and he should coat \[its inner surface\] with clarified butter and oil rendered from human fat, in equal amounts. Having worshiped the cauldron (*kaṭāha*), he should venerate the regents of the \[four\] quarters. He should worship a virgin. After that, he should likewise offer tribute in \[each of\] the \[eight\] directions. Then he should slowly pump the bellows on all four sides. \[The mass inside the cauldron\] should be superheated. When it has become smokeless, then \[the alchemist\]—after bowing to his *guru*, his \[personal\] god, the sun, moon, and, likewise, the planets, and after worshiping the lunar mansions—should throw himself in.\[11\]

Serially boiled down to the primordial five elements, he is then resurrected.

> Intoning the sound of the great *huṃ* \[mantra\], he who is assuredly revered by the gods comes forth in the fulness of his flesh, shining like the sun. Possessed of great strength, his body is massive and empowered with divine vision. Now, he is mounted on an airship (*vimāna*) wrought in flaming gold, sparkling with heavenly gemstones and rubies, decked out with flowered garlands and banners, and decorated with a mesh of tiny bells. The peal of its great bell resonates for over nine hundred miles. Adorned with heavenly finery and divine garlands, perfectly conversant in erotic delights and trembling with sexual desire, a divine maiden (*devakanyā*) comes to him, accompanied by the enchanting sounds of conches and musical instruments, and Apsara song and dance. Taking that supreme practitioner (*sādhaka*) into her embrace, she shall remain \[with him\] in the World of the Perfected Beings (Siddhas) for ever after. There he takes delight in heavenly baths, liqueurs, and divine finery, and there he finds love-starved Siddha maidens by the hundreds of thousands. When all creatures, mobile and immobile, have perished in the terrible doomsday flood below, the perfected alchemist remains ensconced in the abode of the gods above the destruction. The doomsday fire, which is a destroyer of life and indeed of time itself, has been described in detail in many places.\[12\]

A sort of escape clause, the *Rasārṇava*’s final verse allows for the possibility of failure, namely the alchemist’s death. It reads, “In the event that he should be unable to complete the process, then, in fact, success (*siddhi*) will arise through another body.”\[13\] This coda need not concern us, for our interest lies in the sequence of events outlined in the nine verses preceding it. The alchemist-practitioner’s suicide into a cauldron (*kaṭāha*) is immediately followed by his resurrection and apotheosis. Accompanied by a divine maiden on an airship, he accedes to immortality on a heavenly plane.

The *Rasārṇava* presents itself as a Tantra, that is, a work belonging to the corpus of medieval Asian religious literature whose hallmark for advanced practitioners was the attainment of supernatural powers (*siddhi*s), self-divinization, sexual gratification with divine maidens, and bodily ascent to the abode of the immortals.\[14\] In tantric parlance, the term *sādhaka* (practitioner) was often used interchangeably with *yogi* and *vīra* (hero). Without the courage of a great hero, these practitioners could never voluntarily give up their human lives in their quest for superhumanity.\[15\] Suicide through alchemy of the sort prescribed in the *Rasārṇava* was, however, an outlier in the world of tantric practice. Far more common was a *vīra*’s self-sacrifice to shape-shifting maidens called Yoginīs in the Hindu Tantras and Ḍākiṇīs in Buddhist sources. Hundreds of images from across Asia portray these as animal- or bird-headed figures with voluptuous naked human bodies.\[16\] In certain Buddhist sources, these maidens were also called “heroes’ wives” (*vīrabhāryā*s).\[17\] In the tantric context, the danger of consorting with these female carnivores was on a par with that endured by the male praying mantis, with the important caveat that after being devoured by them six times, the hero would be reborn, one final time, as a supernaturally powerful and attractive being, a veritable Yoginī magnet.\[18\]



 

3\. The tantric usage of the term *vīra*, meaning hero, should be interpreted literally. The suicidal practices of tantric virtuosi made them the equals of valiant warriors whose battlefield deaths issued in their apotheosis,\[19\] their conveyance to heaven on flying chariots. Their transformation flowed from the special nature of their departure from life.\[20\] One of the earliest dramatic accounts of a warrior’s apotheosis appears in the *Mahābhārata* (MBh), the source of the Śiśupāla myth interpreted by Dumézil. In this massive epic, the divine maidens who convey dead heroes up to heaven are called Apsaras, nymphs who, like the Yoginīs of later tradition, morphed into human and avian forms.

> Then, in the wide sky people heard the sounds \[emitted\] by airships, \[that is,\] by the throngs of Apsaras \[who were singing\] songs \[and playing\] musical instruments to \[honor\] the slain and butchered heroes \[who had died\] facing \[their enemies\]. Causing them to mount and ascend in their airships, those throngs of Apsaras departed together with those heroes, by the thousands.\[21\]

This leitmotiv appears time and again in India’s later epic literature. The twelfth- to fifteenth-century Old Rajasthani epic poem *Pṛthvirāj Raso* relates that “taken onto an Apsara’s lap,” the Rajput hero (*bīr*) Jai Singh “was mounted on a divine airship.”\[22\] As described in several colonial-period hero songs (*bīr gīt*) from the Shekhavati region of eastern Rajasthan, airships guided by Apsaras (*accharāṃ*) conveyed slain heroes to the world of the sun (*surlok*) or the world of the gods (*devlok*).\[23\] Also appearing throughout ancient and medieval Indic literature are the terms *bīr gati* (Sanskrit *vīragati*, “the path/realm of heroes”) and *bīr lok* (Sanskrit *vīraloka*, “the world of heroes”).\[24\]

 Found across a wide belt of southern and western India, “hero stones” (Marathi, *vīragal*s; Kannada, *vīrakkal*s) provide iconographic depictions of similar transitions and transformations. These medieval bas reliefs are usually divided into three panels, the lowermost panel portraying the hero’s death and the uppermost panel his reception into a heavenly realm. At the Amṛteśvara temple (1196 CE) in the modern Indian state of Karnataka (see fig. 1) and at other sites across the subcontinent, the middle panel is dedicated to the hero’s heavenly ascent, in an airship or flying chariot, flanked by a pair of divine maidens.\[25\] In Rajasthan in particular, the Rajput warrior’s female counterpart was the *satī*, the widow who threw herself onto her husband’s funeral pyre. Her heroic suicide issued into her apotheosis, her transformation into a goddess, for which reason the memorials called “*satī-*stones” were frequently paired with hero stones.\[26\] In other instances, a *satī* would be figured together with a hero on the same *vīragal*.\[27\]



 

    ![fig. 1: Hero Stone, Amṛteśvara, Karnataka, India, 1196 CE. Photo courtesy of Karine Ladrich. ](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-04/fig.%201.jpg?itok=T4JD_Fj2) 

 



 

 fig. 1: Hero Stone, Amṛteśvara, Karnataka, India, 1196 CE. Photo courtesy of Karine Ladrich.



   

Veiled allusions to the Apsaras’ avian form appear in literary and artistic sources.\[28\] In Bhāsa’s third-century CE play *Abhiṣekanāṭaka*, a dying hero’s inner soliloquy evokes “these Apsaras, Urvaśī and the others, \[that\] have come for me. Yoked to a thousand swans, this airship, a chariot (*vāhin*) of heroes, has been sent by Kāla (the god of death) to guide me.”\[29\] The deaths and heavenly ascents of the illustrious MBh chariot warriors Droṇa and Bhūriśravas have been figured sculpturally at the Angkor Wat archaeological site in contemporary Siam Reap, Cambodia. There, on the south exterior wall of the mid-eleventh-century Baphuon temple’s second terrace, lower-panel bas-reliefs depict the two heroes’ deaths, with their obeisance before Brahmā in *brahmaloka* shown on the uppermost panels. Also shown in *brahmaloka* is a group of Apsaras, depicted as female figures with lotuses in their hands, together with a flock of geese (*haṃsa*), likely a representation of those same Apsaras as waterfowl.\[30\] A painting on the wall of a Benares temple highlights the same dynamic, in this case a *satī*’s airship rising heavenward on the back of a swan.\[31\]

In its account of the apotheosis of four chariot warriors, including Droṇa and Bhūriśravas, as well as that of a handful of hermit renouncers who have voluntarily given up their bodies through self-mortification, the MBh describes these figures as *yogayukta*. The second member of this Sanskrit compound is the cognate of the English word “yoked.” This denotation of the term *yoga* has no relationship to the body of physical and meditative practice with which yoga has been identified for centuries. Rather, the epic’s compilers had the more archaic and literal use of the term in mind. In the Vedas and Upaniṣads, the word yoga denoted the harnessed team of horses that pulled a chariot (*ratha*).\[32\] When, as the epic MBh relates, these dying heroes and world renouncers, who were *yogayukta*, “rose to the sun,” their yoga was either their body-as-chariot hitched to a team of horses, or a horse-drawn chariot (*rathayoga*) sent down from the heavens to carry their body to a divine plane.\[33\] Perhaps because the epic emphasized the renunciant nature of their deaths, these *yogayukta* figures’ apotheoses never involved divine maidens.



 

4\. In the Greco-Roman world, Zeus’s thunderbolt was a prime instrument of apotheosis, as evidenced in the name Elysium, the paradisical abode of immortalized heroes whose name derives from *en-ēlusion*, “a place struck by lightning.” From the first century BCE onward, altar-shaped tombs, whose ornamentation featured “eagles of apotheosis,” were a funerary fashion of ancient Rome. The altar was a representation of the funeral pyre, which served to free persons from their carnal shell and launch them in their ascent to the realm of the gods. The mythology and iconography of Herakles, the archetypal hero of classical mythology, bring together all these themes. The most extensive textual account of his apotheosis appears in Diodorus Siculus’s *Bibliotheca* *Historica*. Having completed the twelve labors required of him by the gods, Herakles wished to perform a sacrifice and asked that a particular shirt and robe be sent to him by his wife Deïaneira. Before dispatching the shirt, Deïaneira anointed it with what she believed to be a love charm, but which was, in fact, a terrible poison.

> As Heracles continued to suffer more and more . . . he dispatched Licymnius and Iolaüs to Delphi to inquire of Apollo what he must do . . . The god gave the reply that Heracles should be taken, and with him his armour and weapons of war, unto Oetê and that they should build a huge pyre near him; what remained to be done, he said, would rest with Zeus. Now when Iolaüs had carried out these orders and had withdrawn to a distance to see what would take place, Heracles, having abandoned hope for himself, ascended the pyre . . . And immediately lightning (*keraunios*) also fell from the heavens and the pyre was wholly consumed. After this, when the companions of Iolaüs came to gather up the bones of Heracles and found not a single bone anywhere, they assumed that, in accordance with the words of the oracle, he had passed from among men into the company of the gods (*ex anthrōpōn eis theous methestasthai*).\[36\]

Diodorus’s account dates from the middle of the first century BCE, and no other written account of Herakles’s apotheosis predates the second century BCE. The iconographic record, however, is more ancient, dating from as early as the sixth century BCE. Three red-figure Attic vases, dating from between 420 to 380 BCE, are exemplary.\[37\] On these, the pyre dominates the lower part of the composition, with Herakles’s muscle corselet lying upon it, an artistic representation of the hero’s mortal coil burned away by the pyre, releasing his divine portion to ascend to Olympus.\[38\] On these vases’ upper register, Herakles sits by the side of Athena (or Nike) in a quadriga, a chariot drawn by a team of four.\[39\] (see fig. 2) Athena, patron goddess of Athens, is referred to as “owl-eyed” (*glaukopis*) in the Homeric epics,\[40\] and the reverse of the Athenian silver tetradrachm, one of the most common coins of the ancient world, features a big-eyed owl along with the first three letters of her name.\[41\] The Greek goddess’s avian manifestation is absent, however, from these Attic vases, on which she is always represented in anthropomorphic form.



 

    ![fig. 2: Death and apotheosis of Herakles, terracotta calyx krater, 4th century BCE. Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession no. 52.11.18. Public domain. ](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__960x960_scale/public/2026-04/fig.%202.jpg?itok=HLRIlbov) 

 



 

 fig. 2: Death and apotheosis of Herakles, terracotta calyx krater, 4th century BCE. Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession no. 52.11.18. Public domain.



   

Julius Caesar and thirty-five of the Roman emperors who succeeded him were burned on pyres and divinized—at which point they became gods, *divi*—and apotheosis was, together with triumphal procession, a perennial motif of imperial iconography.\[42\] In sculptural depictions of apotheosis, the deceased emperor is most often shown ascending to heaven on a chariot or on the back of a winged creature. Such an ascent is depicted on a panel from the so-called Belvedere Altar in Rome, which, erected in the final decade BCE by the emperor Augustus, shows “a male in a triumphal chariot ascending in an apparent apotheosis watched by several gods . . .” In a provocative article, Bridget Buxton argues that rather than representing the divinization of an emperor, “the scene on the Belvedere altar depicts the fate of a hero, not a *divus*,” and the “destination of \[the figure on\] the funeral chariot is clearly the blessed field of the heroes in Elysium.”\[43\] The panel represents a slain hero’s translation to a privileged afterlife, after the model of Herakles. However, no divine maiden is depicted on this image.

 The iconographic theme of chariot-borne apotheosis was so powerful that it influenced representations of the post-mortem transformation of Rome’s first Christian emperor, Constantine. Having converted to Christianity in 312 CE, Constantine was not burned on a pyre following his death because, as enjoined by the early Church Fathers, “apotheosis was incompatible with the new religion because it implied the worship of dead people as gods.”\[44\] Constantine was likely the first Roman emperor to have been inhumed and the first for whom a pyre was not erected. In spite of this, commemorative medallions struck following Constantine’s death depict the Christian emperor mounted on a rising chariot and extending his hand toward the hand of God emerging downward from the sky. (see fig. 3) Considered to be the earliest iconographic representation of the “new” Christian god, the medallion represents an impossible juxtaposition of two contradictory views about the afterlife for exemplary humans. At the same time, one cannot but wonder whether the New Testament account of the post-mortem ascension of the King of Kings was not also influenced by prevailing Roman traditions, even if his bodily resurrection from the grave lay at the very foundation of the new religion.\[45\]



 

    ![fig. 3: Apotheosis of Emperor Constantine, commemorative medallion, reverse, 337 CE. Courtesy of the British Museum, image i.d. 01335786001; accession no. 1986,0610.1.  ](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-04/fig.%203.jpg?itok=hkbdaILg) 

 



 

 fig. 3: Apotheosis of Emperor Constantine, commemorative medallion, reverse, 337 CE. Courtesy of the British Museum, image i.d. 01335786001; accession no. [1986,0610.1](https://www.bmimages.com/results.asp?I2=1986,0610.1).



   

5\. The Indic record constitutes the easternmost extension of a mythic complex attested from Iceland to Southeast Asia. The apotheoses of slain Indian warriors bear comparison with those of the heroes of Norse mythology at the complex’s westernmost extension, as attested in Alexander Kinloch Forbes’s observation regarding Indian heroes: “Like the virgins of Valhalla, the choosers of the slain \[i.e., the Valkyries\], the Upsurâs \[Apsaras\] continually hover above the field of battle, ready to convey to Swerga \[*svarga*, “heaven”\] the warriors who pass to heaven through its carnage.”\[46\] As portrayed in the medieval Norse *Edda* and *Saga* literature, these divine maidens were, like the Yoginīs, “markedly sexual.”\[47\] Also like their Indic homologues, they were frequently identified with waterfowl when guiding fallen warriors to Valhǫll, the “Hill of the Slain,” the subterranean paradise reserved for the Norse hero.\[48\] A number of eighth- to tenth-century picture stones from the Swedish island of Gotland illustrate the roles and representations of the Valkyries in the Norse heroic afterlife.\[49\] As Sigmund Oehrl has convincingly argued, the birds appearing on certain of these inscribed tablets are Valkyries, evidenced both by the names of two of their number—Svanhvít (White Swan) and Svanhilðr (Battle Swan)—and by word-descriptions of several of their sisters.\[50\] On one of these images, a bird—a long-necked swan or crane—either nudges or disgorgesa slain warrior into Oðinn’s hall, where he is given a “hero’s reception” by an anthropomorphic Valkyrie holding a drinking horn in her hand.\[51\] (see fig. 4). As related in the *Edda*s, once arrived in Oðinn’s hall, he and his fellow fallen warriors shared in Valhǫll’s daily renewed divine banquet and engaged in combat training with the gods to prepare for Ragnarøk, the final battle of Norse eschatology.



 

    ![fig. 4: Avian Valkyrie nudging or disgorging slain warrior into Oðinn's hall, Alskog Kyrka, Gotland, Sweden, ca. 700-1000 CE. Image from Sune Lindqvist, Gotlands Bildsteine (Stockholm: Wahlstrom & Widstrand, 1941), vol. 1, fig. 135, with details traced in red by Sigmund Oehrl. By permission from Sigmund Oehrl. ](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-04/fig.%204.jpg?itok=sw59R_-T) 

 



 

 fig. 4: Avian Valkyrie nudging or disgorging slain warrior into Oðinn's hall, Alskog Kyrka, Gotland, Sweden, ca. 700-1000 CE. Image from Sune Lindqvist, *Gotlands Bildsteine* (Stockholm: Wahlstrom & Widstrand, 1941), vol. 1, fig. 135, with details traced in red by Sigmund Oehrl. By permission from Sigmund Oehrl.



   

Other Gotland picture stones provide further detail. A dead hero, guided by an avian Valkyrie, is shown journeying to Valhǫll in two stages: first on a ship and then on the back of an eight-legged horse, very likely Sleipnir, the god Oðinn’s own equine mount.\[53\] Being seafaring people, the Vikings replaced the airships of South Asian apotheosis mythology with nautical vessels. Representations of the hero’s post-mortem voyage conformed with Viking mortuary practices in which entire ships whose design replicated Oðinn’s hall were interred under great burial mounds.\[54\] Two fourteenth-century Icelandic legendary sagas speak of royal figures who buried themselves alive, together with their ships and entire crew, inside grave mounds, at which point they became subterranean guardian spirits of the Icelandic landscape. One of these, Halfdan, “made a large grave mound, and went into it alive, as his father had done, with all of his ship’s crew, and turned into a troll.”\[55\] The funerary rites surrounding great ship burials were performative dramas lasting several days, their storylines reenacting the exemplary *gesta* of mythic Norse heroes, Sigurðr in particular,\[56\] in much the same way that Christian funerals and burials were reenactments of Christ’s death and resurrection.\[57\] However, these maritime ships may also have been symbolic airships. As Flemming Kaul, curator of the prehistory collections at the National Museum of Denmark, has noted:

> \[t\]he possibilities of connecting the ship with the last journey or the release of the soul have recently been considered on the basis of a number of princely burials of

> the \[1300-750 BCE\] Urnfield Culture \[of Central Europe, so called because the cremated ashes of the dead were buried in urns\]. By analyzing the wagon fittings carrying plastic (sic) aquatic birds from cremation burials \[in\] . . . Germany, L. Nebelsick has convincingly argued that the wagon frames should be regarded as symbolic bird ships. When such a ship at a funeral was burnt with the dead resting in the very same ship, then a successful apotheosis was completed . . . \[A\]ll these narratives seem to be concerned with the integration of the dead person into a mythological world . . . by the means of horses and ships.\[58\]



 

6\. The northwestern European record is unique in that the migrations of its actors can be traced with some precision. It is also unique because much of its text-based data has come down to us through Christian clerics who viewed the pagan traditions they documented with a jaundiced eye. By the late ninth to early tenth century, as a result of Norse Viking raids on Ireland and Scotland, intermarriage between Scandinavians and Celts generated a mixed Norse-Gaelic population inhabiting a wide swathe of insular northwestern Europe, extending from the British Isles to Iceland. Séamus Mac Mathúna notes that “this mixed Norse-Gaelic people would have acted as channels of communication and mediation, transmitting various linguistic and literary items into Old Norse culture.”\[59\]

The mythic afterlives of Celtic heroes bear certain resemblances to those of their Norse homologues, indicating a shared tradition due either to medieval exchanges or to a far more ancient Indo-European heritage. While fragmentary, these Celtic traditions are nonetheless coherent in their vision of the post-mortem fates of heroes and other exemplary figures. However, while chariots figured among ancient Celtic weapons of war, and while medieval Irish and later Welsh and Breton myth and legend knew of female psychopomps and a subterranean, insular “Otherworld” of immortals,\[60\] the male figures journeying to these lands were rarely cast as slain warriors.\[61\]

In several cases, the Otherworld portrayed in the Celtic record was the locus of what may be termed an “anticipated afterlife.” The protagonists of these detailed narratives were not warriors but rather members of the Catholic clergy whose seafaring journeys carried them to an insular paradise portending a glorious future exaltation. Perhaps inspired by the Greek “Island of the Blest” (*makarōn nēsoi*)—which, evoked in Hesiod’s circa 700 BCE *Works and Days*, were reserved for the “god-like race of the hero-men called demigods” (*andrōn ērōōn theion genos oi kaleontai ēmitheoi*)\[62\]—these Celtic clerics’ legendary voyages were narrative expressions of a specifically Irish instantiation of the voluntary form of self-exile known as the *peregrinatio pro Christo* (“Voyage for Christ”)*.*\[63\] The exemplary account of such a journey into the unknown was the wildly popular eighth- to tenth-century *Navigatio Sancti Brendani* (“The Voyage of Saint Brendan”). In it, the last of a series of islands discovered by Brendan and his fellow monks is portrayed as an earthly paradise that God has reserved for Brendan, his successors, and future Christians martyrs, a place for them to await their definitive entry into heaven at the Final Judgment.\[64\] In many respects, Brendan’s *peregrinatio* to an insular “Land of Promise” was a mirror of—or, as several scholars have argued, the inspiration for—the Otherworld chronicled in the Irish narrative works called *echtrai* (outings or adventures) and *imramma* (“rowings about” or “sea voyages”).\[65\] As was the case in Scandinavian myth and image depicting the two-stage journey of slain heroes to Valhǫll, carried first by ship over the sea and then by horse into Oðinn’s subterranean hall, certain of these tales locate the world of the dead *both* across the sea *and* in subterranean “fairy mounds.”

As Celticist John Carey convincingly argues, the earliest Irish sources invariably situate the Otherworld below the ground.\[66\] The *Leabhar Gabála Érenn* (“The Book of the Taking of Ireland”), an eleventh-century manuscript relaying traditions from approximately three centuries prior,\[67\] relates that following their defeat by the human “Sons of Mil,” the immortal Túatha Dé Dannan (“People of the Goddess Danu”) betook themselves to Ireland’s subterranean spirit world. Known as *sídhe*, the modern Irish equivalent of the English “fairy,” their dwellings have been called *síd*s (“fairy mounds”) for well over a thousand years.\[68\] Beginning with the 863 CE *Annála Uladh* (“Annals of Ulster”), the textual record identifies the principal inhabitants of Ireland's iconic burial mounds of Newgrange (County Meath) as Dé Dannan warriors.\[69\] In a similar vein, the ninth- to twelfth-century Welsh *Mabinogi* paints a picture of the Otherworld kingdom of Annwfn as a land peopled by heroes, beautiful women, and the equestrian goddess Rhiannon.\[70\] Now, it is the case that there are no accounts in Irish mythology of warriors or heroes entering these fairy mounds immediately following their battlefield deaths. However, as Laurent Guyénot has observed, certain medieval romances cast the subterranean *síd* as “a world of the dead, destined for warriors gloriously slain in battle, a world of the untimely dead,” not yet overtaken by Christian visions of a subterranean Hell.\[71\]

Slightly later than the traditions enshrined in the *Leabhar Gabála Érenn*, two works belonging to the Old Irish *echtrai* genre locate the Otherworld far across a western sea. In the earliest of these, the circa 700 CE *Echtrae Chonnlae* (“Adventure of Connlae,” hereafter EC), young Prince Connlae has the Otherworld described to him by a “woman in unusual clothing.” Offering him a magic apple, she inveigles him to sail with her on her crystal ship to the “*síd* of Bóadag,” which he does, never to be seen again.\[72\] As does the EC, the *Immram Brain* (“Voyage of Bran,” hereafter IB) features a mysteriously-clad woman who offers its eponymous prince a flowering apple branch. Next follows a long description of a wondrous western island populated by an immortal host that passes its days in chariot racing and sexual dalliance. Bran departs with his men for her “Land of Women,” meeting the chariot-riding sea god Manannán Mac Lir along the way.\[73\]

 The Irish tale bearing the greatest resemblance to the Scandinavian textual sources is the *Serglige Con Culainn* (“The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn,” hereafter SCC).\[74\] The narrative opens as the great chariot warrior Cú Chulainn and his entourage behold a flock of wondrous birds hovering before them over a lake. The women in the group call out to their men to bring them down in order that they may adorn their shoulders with those birds' wings.

> Cú Chulainn is able to obtain a pair for each woman except his own wife . . . so he promises her that if birds come to the area again, the most beautiful pair will be hers. Shortly thereafter, two birds bound by a gold chain fly over the lake. Cú Chulainn attempts to shoot them down for his wife, despite her entreaty not to do so on the basis that these birds evidently possess some kind of power. After some unsuccessful attempts, he succeeds in wounding one before they fly beneath the lake. Despondent because his shot missed, he goes to sleep by a stone. While he sleeps, two women come to Cú Chulainn in a vision and beat him senseless with horsewhips. He regains consciousness but is unable to speak and is confined to his bed for the next year.\[75\]

His mute and bed-ridden state is the “wasting sickness” of the work’s title. Observing that “\[i\]t is generally accepted that the two chain-linked birds that Cú Chulainn is unable to bring down and the two Otherworld women who whip him are one and the same, though the tale does not explicitly say so,” Heather Key details several Old Irish works featuring shape-shifting “Otherworld women.” In one case, the women lead their hero into a *síd*. Key further notes that the birds in question—swans, geese, or cranes—“appear to be related to water, which ... was seen by the Celts as an entrance to the Otherworld.”\[76\] In this respect, they may be viewed as the sisters of other female shapeshifters of Indo-European mythology: Apsaras, Yoginīs, Ḍākiṇīs, and Valkyries.

The warrior Cú Chulainn eventually learns the identity of his two whip-bearing attackers: the sisters Lí Ban and Fand from the Otherworld land of Mag Mell (“Plain of Delights”). The latter is in love with him and promises to heal him if he will join forces for but one day to battle the enemies of Labraid, their king. Still bedridden, Cú Chulainn sends his charioteer Lóeg to Mag Mell on a reconnaissance mission. Carried there on the shoulder of Labraid’s queen, Lóeg is brought “opposite to the shore of an island, and there they saw a skiff of bronze lying on the lake before them. They entered into the skiff, and they crossed over to the island, and came to the palace door. . .”\[77\] Labraid welcomes Lóeg and then sends him back to his own land. Lóeg then reports to Cú Chulainn.

> I came in joyous sport, to a place that is wonderful though not unknown, to a cairn (*carnd*) where scores of companies were assembled, where I found long-haired Labraid. I found him seated on the cairn, with thousands of weapons . . . Now there is a spring in the mound (*síd*) . . . There is a vat (*dabach*) of intoxicating mead (*mid*) . . . I saw gaily clad warriors at play with weapons . . .\[78\]

The SCC’s Otherworld is not located across the sea. Key notes that “Lí Ban tells Cú Chulainn that Labraid dwells on a clear lake, and Lóeg says he meets Labraid in a mound. This seems to suggest the presence of a *síd* on an island in the lake, rather than an Otherworld island across the ocean . . .” This lake location is further confirmed when, following Cú Chulainn’s unsuccessful attempts to bring them down, the two bird-maidens are said to “fly beneath the lake.”\[79\]

The Otherworld encountered by seafarers like Lóeg, Connlae, and Bran is inhabited either by slain warriors of yore who were brought there following their deaths, or by warriors from a sort of parallel universe imperceptible to the human eye. Such is the message conveyed by the chariot-riding god Manannán Mac Lir in the IB, when he states that “what is a clear sea for the prowed skiff in which Bran is, that is a happy plain (Mag Mell) with profusion of flowers to me from the chariot of two wheels.”\[80\] This begs the question, once again, as to why the protagonists of these tales are never portrayed journeying to the Otherworld immediately following a battlefield death. I would conjecture that just as Saint Brendan and his men’s glimpse of an island paradise was but a foreshadowing of their ultimate entrance into heaven after the final judgment, theirs was a journey to an “anticipated afterlife.” Because Christian doctrine prohibited direct accession to heaven or any other sort of happy post-mortem existence prior to the Final Judgment, the Christian authors who recorded these pre-Christian tales would have considered apotheosis to be as much an impossibility as it had been for the Christian emperor Constantine.



 

7\. The Irish mythological record would enjoy a long afterlife. According to John Carey, the IB and EC were probably transmitted to Wales in the eighth-to-ninth century, likely influencing the composition of the ninth- to twelfth-century *Mabinogi* and *Preiddeu Annwfn* (“The Spoils of the Otherworld,” hereafter PA). From Wales, they were transmitted to France, where they inspired the Grail legend.\[81\] It was likely along this line of transmission that an enchanted island of dead heroes, later called Avalon, would become the locus of Welsh traditions surrounding the legendary King Arthur. The PA tells of an expedition launched by Arthur to the subterranean or submarine realm of Annwfn, where there lay a Cauldron of the Otherworld “kindled by the breath of nine maidens” (*o anadyl naw morwyn gochyneuit*).\[82\] This cauldron was held in a castle named Kaer Sidi (“Mound Fortress”), Sidi being a cognate term of the Irish *síd*.\[83\]

In his 1136 CE *Historia regum Britaniae* (“History of the Kings of Britain”), Geoffrey of Monmouth would call this otherworldly land Avalon, a name which, related to the Early Irish *ablach* (“apple tree”), recalls the apple fruit and branch featured in the EC and IB. Mortally wounded in the battle of Camlann, King Arthur was taken to this land “to have his wounds tended.” Some twelve years later, in his *Vita Merlini* (“The Life of Merlin”), Geoffrey would refer to this *Insula Pomorum* (“Island of the Apples”) as the domain of the enchantress Morgan le Faye and her eight fairy sisters.\[84\] Geoffrey’s most immediate source for Avalon, as argued by Clive Tolley, would have been the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela, who, in his circa 43 CE *De Chorographia* ("Description of the World"), gave the account of an island off the coast of Brittany inhabited by nine seeresses “whom the Gauls call ‘maidens’ . . .” These “turn themselves into whatever animals they like \[and\] heal whatever among other people would be incurable.”\[85\]

Exported onto continental France together with fantastic themes drawn mainly from Celtic mythology, this “Matter of Britain” would form the basis for the Arthurian romance genre, emblematized by the circa 1240 CE *Mort Artur* (“The Death of Arthur”), the final tome of a great cycle of works called the *Lancelot-Graal*.\[86\] In *Mort Artur*’s penultimate chapter, Arthur’s squire Girflet accompanies his master to a certain “Black Chapel,” where the mortally wounded king passes the night in prayer. Girflet rides away but looks back.

> He saw arriving in the midst of the sea a skiff filled with ladies; the boat drew up right abreast of King Arthur, who was still seated on the shore. The ladies came over to the boat’s gunwale and their mistress, who was holding Arthur’s sister Morgan by the hand, called out to Arthur to climb aboard. As soon as he saw his sister Morgan, the king consented and rose up from the ground where he had been sitting; then he came onto the boat, *bringing with him his horse* and his weapons.\[87\]

From the late twelfth century onward, Brittany’s poetic *lais—*literary-*cum*-musical compositions based on Breton “adventure tales”—would launch over a dozen heroes of chivalry into an otherworldly Avalon, a paradise reserved for valiant knights fallen in battle.\[88\] For example, in the twelfth- to thirteenth-century *La Bataille Loquifer* (“The Battle of Loquifer”), a hero is carried on the wings of Morgan and two other fairies to Avalon, portrayed as a fortified city-state whose magical walls have the power to heal every wound by simple contact. This castle’s keep is inhabited by “fairy folk” (*gent faé*) who are none other than the heroes of Arthurian romance: Arthur, Gawain, Yvain, Roland, and Perceval.\[89\] With this, we see that the Arthurian Avalon had come to constitute an earthly afterlife reserved for slain warriors, in distinction to the heavenly afterlife reserved by the Church for saints and martyrs.



 

8\. Another instrument for the regeneration or revival of a slain hero was a cauldron, recalling that from which the puréed *Rasārṇava*’s alchemist arose in part two of this study. From Bohemia to Ireland, from the Late Bronze Age to the Roman period, attestations are found of cauldrons deposited in lakes, marshes, and bogs, these bodies of water viewed as so many portals to the Otherworld. *Hverr* and *ketill* are synonymous Old Norse terms for cauldron, and this is reflected in modern-day southern Scandinavian toponyms that refer to lakes and bogs as *hverr* and *ketill*.\[90\] Throughout the eleventh- to fourteenth-century CE Viking Period, these wetland landforms were venues to ritually deposit weapons and tools, including cauldrons.\[91\]

Nearly all the Indo-European sources for this cauldron-portal motif, both textual and archeological, are Norse or Celtic, with two possible exceptions. The first of these concerns the ancient Greek myth of Medea’s “cauldron of regeneration.” Medea, a sorceress, has succeeded in rejuvenating Aeson, the father of Jason (of Argonaut fame), with herbs and potions. Later, her cauldron plays a central role in an elaborate subterfuge. Feigning to have transformed an old ram into a young lamb by dismembering and plunging it into her cauldron (*lebēs*), she promises the same could be done for the Pileas, Jason’s aging uncle. When the old patriarch’s gullible daughters slit their father‘s throat, hack his body to pieces, and plunge his remains into the cauldron, no resurrection follows.\[92\] While the textual record makes no mention of a cauldron in Aeson’s rejuvenation, this is precisely what is portrayed on a fourth-century BCE Etruscan mirror and a seventh-century BCE vase in which a male figure rises out of a great vat. (see fig. 5) The image is evocative, but it is not of a piece with the mytheme of the hero’s resurrection from a cauldron, since Aeson has not been slain in battle. Returning to India, the MBh’s account of a great battle between the gods and their asura rivals includes a description of a wondrous airborne “triple city” serving as the asuras’ flying fortress. In that fortress is a well or pool (*vāpī*), gifted as a boon to the asura hero (*vīra*) Hari, that has the power to resurrect mighty warriors slain in battle.\[93\]



 

    ![fig. 5: Aeson rising from Medea's cauldron, Etruscan bucchero ware, 630 BCE. San Paolo (Cerveteri), Lazio, Italy. Courtesy of Museo Nazionale Etrusco, Rome, Italy. ](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-04/Screen%20Shot%202026-04-14%20at%209.23.40%20PM.png?itok=vVfS3Ijf) 

 



 

 fig. 5: Aeson rising from Medea's cauldron, Etruscan bucchero ware, 630 BCE. San Paolo (Cerveteri), Lazio, Italy. Courtesy of Museo Nazionale Etrusco, Rome, Italy.



   

Cauldrons of rebirth were a fixture of medieval Celtic literature and frequently linked to the essentially aristocratic pastime of warfare as well as to the fabrication of tools. As noted above, the SCC featured “a spring in the mound (*síd*)” containing “a vat of intoxicating mead,” with the term for "vat" (*dabach*) also denoting a hollow pit or pool.\[94\] Also, according to Irish sources, these magical recipients originally *emerged* from the lakes, marshes, and bogs that were their supernatural habitats.\[95\] With this, we appear to be in the presence of a double mimesis in which cauldrons were replicas of the shallow bodies of water into which they were deposited.\[96\]

Likely manufactured in faraway first-century BCE Thrace, the most famous of all the ancient Celtic cauldrons was discovered where it had been deliberately deposited, on a dry mound in the midst of a peat bog at the Danish site of Gundestrup. One of the inner plates of the cauldron portrays an army in military formation, marching toward an enormous female “goddess” figure who is drowning a victim by dunking him in a great cauldron.\[97\] In a tale from the Welsh *Mabinogi*, men slain in battle were made to return to life on the following day, after being plunged into a cauldron.\[98\] A similar dynamic is recorded in medieval Irish sources. Following the Second Battle of Magh Tuiredh, the god Dian Cecht—the “healer” of the "immortal" Túatha Dé Dannan—restored dead warriors to life by immersing them in a well called Sláíne, “Health,” and chanting spells over them.\[99\] It would appear that once plunged into a cauldron, the body of a slain hero, or of the sacrificial victim portrayed on the Gundestrup Cauldron, was effectively transferred to the Otherworld where they were made to live again. Clive Tolley summarizes, “The cauldron and the Otherworld are thus interrelated motifs, seen variously as sources of healing and resurrection (for the wounded Arthur) and of knowledge (the seeresses).”\[100\]



 

9\. The most fascinating Celtic tradition concerning shape-shifting female psychopomps is also the most ancient, dating from the first centuries of the Common Era and connecting remarkably to Indic warrior heroes and Yoginīs. As we have seen, the Norse Valkyries were alluring shape-shifting maidens who guided slain warriors from the battlefield to Valhǫll. As Matthias Egeler has observed, their Irish homologues—including the Bodb, the three Morrigans, and others—bore the same features as the Valkyries, with one exception. They did not fetch slain warriors to a hero’s paradise; they simply fed on their dead bodies.\[101\] Which would explain why, as the first- to third-century CE Greek and Latin authors Aelian and Silius Italicus relate, the Celtiberians, i.e., the Celtic warriors of Spain, purposefully and ritually abandoned their battlefield dead in order that they be devoured by vultures. In this ritual complement to a warrior’s heroic death, the birds served as psychopomps, transferring the hero to paradise. As Egeler concludes, “\[h\]ere the vulture feeds on the dead like the Bodb, and this is explicitly linked to the transition of the deceased to the realms of the dead; furthermore, this ritual is restricted to those fallen in warfare, just as the interest of the Bodb in Ireland focuses on the dead of the battlefield and the heroes of war.”\[102\] Archaeological data further attest the practice of excarnation in Iron Age Gaul and Britain.\[103\] Here, we should recall the scene portrayed on the Gotland picture stone of a long-necked swan or crane nudging or *disgorging* a slain warrior into Oðinn’s hall (see fig. 4), an indication that perhaps a hero’s most direct path to the world of the gods was through these bird-maidens’ digestive tracts.

 In medieval India, the bird- and animal-headed Yoginīs and Ḍākiṇīs—heiresses to the Apsaras and homologues of the Irish Bodb and the shape-shifting “maidens” of Pomponius Mela’s *De Chorographia*—were known to feast on the bodies of heroes, not only slain warriors but also tantric *vīra*s. Their habits were directly adapted into Hindu and Buddhist Tantra, in which the “heroic practice” of the virtuoso adept was nothing other than his suicide, voluntarily offering his body to these predatory maidens. In the Hindu tantric practice of “supreme yoga” (*parayoga*) or “fierce consorting” (*haṭhamelaka*), yogis or *vīra*s devoured by Yoginīs attained identity with Śiva; in other words, they were divinized.\[104\] The apotheosis of tantric heroes flowed directly from the apotheosis of slain warriors. In an India whose mercenary soldiers often put on the guise of “yogis,”\[105\] the conceptual transition would have been a seamless one.



 

10\. Georges Dumézil's comparative study of the “novels” (*roman*s) of three Indo-European epic heroes is devoted to the adventurous and often notorious lives of their flawed protagonists: the Indic Śiśupāla, the Norse Starkaðr, and the Greek Herakles. In his rich and detailed analysis of these narratives’ common mythemes (*isothèmes*), Dumézil carefully notes their convergences and divergences (*concordances et discordances*), with the important exception of their immediate post-mortem fates.\[106\] A ray of light issues from Śiśupāla's decapitated trunk and is absorbed into the body of Kṛṣṇa, the god who beheaded him.\[107\] Starkaðr “bites the dust” when his head falls to the ground, after which his body is burned and his ashes buried by his human executioner.\[108\] In neither episode can these two figures’ post-mortem transformations be qualified as apotheoses. Such is not the case for the thunderstruck Herakles who, once ascended to Olympus in a chariot in the company of a goddess, completes his transformation into a god by being made to pass through the undergarments of the goddess Hera in a simulated childbirth.\[109\]

As always, Dumézil argues that the abundance of mythemes common to the three “novels” is best explained because they all flowed from a common Indo-European source: This is monogenesis. While I agree with him that their commonalities cannot have been the result of independent innovation or of archetypal images of the human psyche, I am not certain that a third alternative, namely borrowing, can be rejected out of hand.\[110\] Partial or complete versions of Homer's *Odyssey* were circulating in South Asia by no later than the sixth century, and the authors of the Norse *Edda*s and *Saga*s had a thorough knowledge of classical mythology.\[111\] As such, one might hypothesize that a version of the Herakles cycle could have been appropriated into Indic and Scandinavian narratives. But when one turns to the apotheosis and afterlife themes surveyed in this study, Indo-European monogenesis is the sole satisfactory explanation for the remarkable parallels attested in the Indic, Greek, Roman, Norse, and Celtic archival, iconographic, and archeological records. These attest to a continuity between these heroes' machines of war and the vehicles that carry them to a glorious afterlife: chariots, horses, and ships. Furthermore, in addition to myth and image, we also find traces of apotheosis-related ritual practice in Scandinavian ship burials, the Celtiberian exposure of dead warriors, and so forth. These bear witness to a perennial Indo-European vision of the slain hero’s passing “from among men into the company of the gods.”\[112\]



 

Author Biography

### David Gordon White 

 

David Gordon White is an American Indologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, known for his revisionist histories of South Asian religious practices. His scholarship primarily focuses on the "grit and grime" of medieval India, exploring the historical realities of yoga, tantra, and alchemy beyond their modern, sanitized interpretations. He is widely recognized for his influential books, such as *The Alchemical Body* and *Sinister Yogis*, which recast the historical yogi as a power-seeking sorcerer rather than a peaceful meditator.



 



      ![Headshot of David Gordon White](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-04/White_David_Gordon_au5387606.jpg?h=ef9f23ce&itok=DJ12dtM7) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

####  Notes 

\[1\] Bouckaert et al., 2012: 957–60; see esp. p. 959, fig. 2.

\[2\] Concerning instances of “Indo-European-like” myths and images appearing in a small number of non-Indo-European sources, I offer the following caveat. In the case of the Hebrew-language Old Testament, Arabic-language *ḥadith*s, and Etruscan sculpture, the resemblance of apotheosis-type motifs to Indo-European mythemes is probably the result of cultural diffusion. Apotheosis narratives from more distant non-Indo-European traditions are extremely rare, and they entirely lack the specific elements discussed here.

\[3\] “L'idéologie des trois fonctions dans les épopées des peuples Indo-européens.” Dumézil 1968 \[1986\]; vol 2: Dumézil 1971 (1986); vol. 3: Dumézil 1973 (1981).

\[4\] Dumézil 1971 (1986): 17-132. English translation Dumézil 1983.

\[5\] Studies of Indo-European hero mythology guided by Dumezil's trifunctional analysis include Cohen 1977; Dubuisson 1979; Grisward 1991; Vielle 1996; Blaive and Sterckx 2014; and Allen 2020.

\[6\] White 2022: 18–22 and passim.

\[7\] Liddell and Scott 1996: 199, s.v. ἀποθέωσις.

\[8\] *Oxford English Dictionary*, s.v. “apotheosis, n.”

\[9\] Guyénot 2011: 37, 65; Weinberger-Thomas 1999: 18–19, 76, 86.

\[10\] The earliest archaeological and literary evidence for war chariots appears in Indo-European contexts. Parpola 2015: 49, 56, 59–60, 86–88, 109–11; Mayrhofer 1996: 417–18, s.v. YOJ; Hartmann 2022: 40, 108; Malandra 1982: 377–80, s.v. “Chariot.”

\[11\] *Rasarṇava* 18.213b–216b in Ray and Kaviratna 1910: 433–44.

\[12\] *Rasārṇava* 18.221–229, in Ray and Kaviratna 1910: 435–36.

\[13\] *Rasārṇava* 18.230, in Ray and Kaviratna 1910: 436.

\[14\] On the person of the *sādhaka*-as-tantric practitioner, the goal of whose practice is supernatural power rather than disembodied liberation, see Kiss 2015: 35–47, 128–74, 231–313; and Brunner 1974: 411–43.

\[15\] *Brahmayāmala* 14.38c, cited in Kiss 2015: 398, note 71.

\[16\] The richest sources for the iconography of the tantric Yoginīs are Dehejia 1986; Policardi 2020; and Kaimal 2021.

\[17\] *Abhidhānottara* 45.11, in Sugiki 2024: 330; *Cakrasaṃvara Tantra* 11.2.1–3, in Gray 2007: 206-7; and *Hevajra Tantra* 1.7.21a, 1.11.9–11, in Snellgrove 1959: 24–25, 40–43.

\[18\] Serbaeva, 2013: 199–201; Serbaeva 2016: 53, 57.

\[19\] Kiss 2015: 177, verse 6; 255, verse 175; 305, verse 608cd.

\[20\] Guyénot 2011: 37, 65; Weinberger-Thomas 1999: 18–19, 76, 86.

\[21\] MBh 8.33.55–56, in Dandekar 1974: 1718.

\[22\] *Pṛthvirāj Raso* 27.66, in Hoernle 1886: 76.

\[23\] Shekhavat 1991: 162, 303, 336.

\[24\] MBh 9.30.40, in Dandekar 1974: 1865.

\[25\] Several of these hero stones are discussed in Settar and Sontheimer 1982: 80, 191, 229, 253, 275–76.

\[26\] Weinberger-Thomas 1999: 160–174 and passim.

\[27\] Weinberger-Thomas 1999: 53–55, 160–74 and figs. 14–16; Jain 1982: figs. 6, 7, 11, and 27; Doshi 1982: figs. 4, 14, and 15; and Settar and Sontheimer 1982: figs. 16, 33, and 34.

\[28\] Already in the circa eighth-century BCE *Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa* (11.5.1.4), Apsaras are said to transform into waterfowl (*ātayaḥ*).

\[29\] *Abhiṣekanāṭaka* 1.26, in Sastri 1913: 12.

\[30\] Ly 2003: 135-36, and figs. 4 and 7.

\[31\] Weinberger-Thomas 1999: 25, fig. 5.

\[32\] *Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣad* 4.3.10, in Limaye and Vadekar 1958: 239.  *Rathayoga* denotes the yoked team of horses that pulls the chariot (*ratha*). For discussion, see White 2009: 60–67.

\[33\] White 2009: 67–73.

\[34\] Nagy 2013: 44.

\[35\] Turcan and Tommasi 2005: 438, s.v. “Apotheosis.”

\[36\] Diodorus Siculus, *Bibliotheca* *Historica* 4.38.1–4, in Oldfather 1935: 464–468.

\[37\] Documented in Boardman 1986: 132, note 10. As Boardman notes (p. 128), after this time, “the chariot group alone becomes a popular subject, with either Athena or Nike at the reins . . . The version with the pyre survives only on Apulian vases later in the fourth century . . .”

\[38\] Ovid, *Metamorphoses* 9.265–68, in Miller 1916: 20–23. The son of Zeus himself and the human woman Alkmene, Herakles was semi-divine by birth: see below, note 45.

\[39\] Boardman 1986: 127–29, 132, note 10; Verbanck-Piérard 1987: 189. Mingazzini 1925: 417–90 is an exhaustive catalogue of the over one hundred seventy extant Athenian vases depicting various episodes in the apotheosis narrative.

\[40\] *Iliad* 1.206, in Murray 1924: 28; *Odyssey* 1.156, in Murray 1976: 24.

\[41\] Eich 2022: 23, fig. 1.1.

\[42\] For a general discussion of the *divi* and their place in the divine hierarchy of imperial Rome, see Scheid 2019: 121–23, 167–74, 238.

\[43\] Buxton 2014: 91–92, 100-2. Buxton’s fig. 3 is a photograph of the monument, now held in the Vatican Museum (MVF.II.2, Museo Gregoriano Profano, Vatican City).

\[44\] Turcan and Tommasi 2004: 440, s.v. “apotheosis.”

\[45\] Mark 16:19 in May and Metzger 1973: 1239. Cf. Guyénot (2011: 43), who notes that, like Herakles and other mythic heroes possessed of a “genetic mythology” that cast them as sons of a divine father and a human mother, the Biblical account of Jesus’s birth from a divine father and a human mother is not mentioned in either the Gospel of Mark or in the apostle Paul’s letters. This birth story is only recounted in the later Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

\[46\] Forbes 1993: 425.

\[47\] Egeler 2008: 9–10, citing “the three Helgi poems of the *Poetic Edda*,” the *Sigrdrífomál*, *Helreið Brynhildar*, *Vǫlundarqviða*; *Vǫlsunga saga*; and the *Gísla saga*.

\[48\] Boyer 2014: 83, 196.

\[49\] Oehrl 2012: 93-96; Oehrl 2020: 123, 125, 134. Price (2010: 125) notes that picture stone memorials are unique to this Swedish island.

\[50\] Oehrl 2010: 1-38; Oehrl 2012: 93–96; and Oehrl 2020: 138–51. The *Vǫlundrkviða* (in Pettit 2023: 350–52) relates that three Valkyries, of which one named Svanhvít (“White Swan”) were observed with their “swan skins (*álptarhamir*) lying beside them. They then flew off “to seek battles.” Four works from the *Poetic Edda* (*Dráp Niflunga*, *Hamðismál*, *Sigurðarkviða in skamma* and especially the *Guðrúnarhvǫt*, in Pettit 2023: 715–23) identify Svanhildr (“Battle Swan”) as a daughter of Sigurðr and Guðrún. Their names are not inscribed on Gotland’s picture stones.

\[51\] Oehrl 2020: 141–44, and figs. 28, 29, and 30; Oehrl 2010: 3–9, 21–24.

\[52\] Oehrl 2020:133–36, 138, 143–45, 148, 150; Boyer 2014: 35, 82–83, 93, 113, 175, 178. The Norse term for such a select warrior was *einheri*, “unique hero.” The Sanskrit cognate term *ekavīra* was similarly applied to a select cohort of MBh chariot warriors.

\[53\] Oehrl 2010: 3–5, 11, 14–15; Oehrl 2020: 153, 155.

\[54\] Price 2010: 138–39 and fig. 2.

\[55\] *Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar* 26, in Schröder 1917: 139. Cf. *Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss* 18–20, in Boyer and Renaud 2012: 667–71.

\[56\] Price 2010: 141–42, 145. On Sigurðr's parental relationship to the avian Valkyrie Svanhildr, see above, note 50.

\[57 Price 2010: 150.

\[58\] Kaul 2020: 187–88.

\[59\] Mac Mathúna 2020: 283–84.

\[60\] Sims-Williams (1990: 60) notes that “the Otherworld” is a modern academic term that has no set equivalent in medieval Celtic literatures. A variety of terms, such as the Welsh *annwfn*, the English *Avalon*, and the Irish *síd* have been collocated under the heading of the “Otherworld.”

\[61\] For references to tales in which fairies convey slain warriors to the Otherworld, see Cross 1952: 260, 267 (F323, F399.1).

\[62\] Hesiod, *Works and Days* 159–60, 171, in Evelyn-White 1977: 14–15. For a review of this ancient Greek tradition, see Nesselrath 2020: 373–88.

\[63\] Varandas 2022: 423–28.

\[64\] Mac Mathúna 2020: 284-86; Guyénot 2011: 244–46.

\[65\] Varandas 2022: 423; Mac Mathúna 2020: 286–88.

\[66\] Carey 1982: 36–43.

\[67\] Guyénot 2011: 27.

\[68\] Knott and Murphy 1966: 104.

\[69\] Swift 2003: 55-57; Guyénot 2011: 28.

\[70\] *Mabinogi*, “Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed,” in Ford 2008: 38–47.

\[71\] Guyénot 2011: 75, 118, 134–35, 233.

\[72\] Translated in Bitel 2024: 17–21

\[73\] *Immram Bran* 1–25, 32, 61–62, in Meyer 1895: 1–12, 16, 28–30. See below, note 80.

\[74\] Dillon 1953: 30–45; Leahy 1905. Key (2023: 56–57) dates the SCC to the late seventh to early eighth century. Mac Mathúna (2020: 289) calls it “a compilation of the eleventh century based on ninth-century material.”

\[75\] Key 2023: 109.

\[76\] Key 2023:129130.

\[77\] Leahy 1905.

\[78\] SCC 1.1, 1.2, 1.11, 1.12, 2.6, text and translation in Key 2023: 111–13, 115, 117–18. Here, I have emended Key’s translation of *carnd* from “mound” to “cairn.”

\[79\] Key 2023: 120.

\[80\] *Immran Bran* 34, in Meyer 1895: 18.

\[81\] Mac Mathúna 2020: 331, n. 135.

\[82\] *Preiddeu Annwn*, lines 13–15, tr. in Higley 2007. The work is contained in the fourteenth-century *Llyfr Taliesin* (“Book of Taliesin”). Following Higley, Tolley (2020: 502) notes that this expression may “relate to the narrator’s utterance rather than the cauldron itself.”

\[83\] *Preiddeu Annwn*, line 3, discussed in Tolley (2020: 502), who suggests that the Mound Fortress is located beneath the sea. Carey (1982: 42) locates it underground.

\[84\] Mac Mathúna 2020: 315; Flood 2015: 85–86.

\[85\] *De Chorographia* 3.24, in Tolley 2020: 501–2.

\[86\] Edition and translation into modern French in Hult 2009. All other narrative accounts of Arthur’s death, including Sir Thomas Malory’s 1470 English-language *Le Morte Darthur* (Cooper 1998) hew closely to the Old French narrative.

\[87\] Hult 2009: 876, 878. My italics.

\[88\] Guyénot 2011: 75–79.

\[89\] Guyénot 2011: 74, quoting *La Bataille Loquifer*, verses 3899–3900.

\[90\] Lund 2008: 64.

\[91\] Lund 2008: 59–60, 62.

\[92\] Mayor 2018: 33–40, and fig. 2.4.

\[93\] MBh 8.24.24–25, in Dandekar 1974: 1689.

\[94\] eDIL s.v. "dabach" ([dil.ie/14084](https://dil.ie/14084)).

\[95\] Green 1998: 64, 69, 70.

\[96\] Tolley 2020: 498; Green 1998: 72.

\[97\] Green 1998: 76–79 and fig. 3.

\[98\] *Mabinogi*, “Branwen, Daughter of Llŷr,” in Ford 2008: 69. However, after their resurrection, they lacked the power of speech.

\[99\] Tolley 2020: 499, note 46, citing the eleventh- to twelfth-century *Caith Maige Tuired*. Mac Cana (1958: 50–60) argues that the Irish cauldrons of resurrection are relatively late “authorial development(s) based on well-recorded cauldrons of plenty, combined with resurrections of warriors taking place in other settings such as wells and ditches.”

\[100\] Ibid., 503.

\[101\] Egeler 2008: 7–10.

\[102\] Egeler 2008: 11. Cf. Haeussler 2010: 252.

\[103\] Haeussler 2012: 250.

\[104\] White 2020: 63-68; White 2024: 373–76.

\[105\] White 2009: 71-72, 208-11, 220–26.

\[106\] Dumézil 1971 (1986), 125–28.

\[107\] MBh 2.42.22, in Dandekar 1971: 341.

\[108\] Saxo Grammaticus 8.8.12, in Troadec 1995: 352. *Terrae glebam morsu* reads more literally as “biting a clod of earth.”

\[109\] Diodorus Siculus, *BibliothecaHistorica* 4.39.2, in Oldfather 1935: 468–69.

\[110\] Dumézil 1971 (1986): 78–79.

\[111\]White 2022: 19, 132–135.

\[112\] See above, note 36.



 

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##  Suggested Citation 

White, David Gordon. "Apotheosis and Afterlife of the Indo-European Hero." *Archive of Mystical Experiences*. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2026.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Archive of Mystical Experiences ](/topic-tags/archive-mystical-experiences)