Alby Stone
Georges Dumézil’s discovery of the tripartite Indo-European (IE) social structure, and kindred phenomena in myth and religion, has provided much fuel for controversy. Even now, nearly seventy years after the first stirrings of the trifunctional theory, historians of IE myth and religion are deeply – sometimes bitterly – divided on the issue.
This is in spite of Dumézil, and those who have followed and developed his theory, being able to draw on a considerable body of ancient literature as evidence. If the trifunctional theory is accepted for historical IE peoples, then its range and sophistication at the time of the earliest IE literature (possibly as early as 1500 BCE, if linguistic evidence for Vedic and Hittite is any guide), then it ought logically to have had its roots in prehistory.
Witch's Well 