ABSTRACT
The story of Cyavana, told in various Sanskrit texts, is relatively well known to Indo-European comparativists via Dumézil: the sage uses his powers to force Indra, king of the gods, to admit the third-functional Aśvin deities to the soma sacrifice. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Prometheus tricks Zeus into allowing humans the more nourishing parts of a sacrifice. Each story involves both attractive females (Sukanyā, Pandora) and paired males who are somehow close to humanity, and in each case, the innovation regarding sacrifice marks a significant transition in mythic world history. The chapter compares the two stories and proposes that, although Prometheus is a complex figure, one of his components is a Cyavana-like figure derived from an ancestral Indo-European story.
