We know the part that is assigned by M. Dumézil to the Terrible
Sovereign of the Indo-European mythologies. On the one hand,
at the very heart of the function of sovereignty, it is opposed to
that of the Sovereign Law-giver (Varuna is opposed to Mitra,
Jupiter to Fides); and on the other hand, compared with the
warrior-gods who always fight by military means, the Terrible
Sovereign has a kind of monopoly of another weapon--magic.
"So there are no mythical combats about Varuna, who is never-
theless the most invincible of the gods. His supreme weapon is his
'māyā of Asura', his magic as Sovereign creator of forms and of
marvels, which also enables him to administer the world and keep
it in balance. This weapon is, moreover, depicted in most cases in
the form of a noose, of a knot, of material or figurative bonds
(pāsā). The warrior-god, on the contrary, is Indra, a fighting god,
wielder of the thunderbolt and the hero of innumerable duels, of
perils encountered and victories hard-won." The same opposition
can be observed in Greece: whilst Zeus fights and wages difficult
wars, "Ouranos does not fight; there is no trace of a struggle in
his legend, although he is the most terrible of kings and the least
easily dethroned: in his infallible grasp he immobilises--more
exactly, he 'binds', hechainsup--his eventual rivals in hell." In the
Nordic mythologies, "Odin is certainly the governor, the warrior-
chief in this world and the next. Yet neither in the prose Edda nor
in the Edda poems does he himself fight. . . . He has a whole series

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