Divine Twins

Summary

Divine twins are two brothers, or a brother and a sister, born of one womb, each of whom then has a different work in the story. The oldest complete story of twins to survive in writing is a tablet from Ugarit that scholars call "The Gracious Gods", KTU 1.23: El goes out to the seashore, finds two women at a cauldron and takes them to his house, and they bear Shahar and Shalim, dawn and dusk, and El orders an offering for Shapsh the sun and for the stars. Then the women bear "the gracious gods", a lip to the earth and a lip to the heavens, birds of the sky and fish of the sea going into their mouths and never filling them, and El sends them into the desert for seven years, until they reach the guardian of the sown land and cry: open!

The story recurs in many mythologies, and what the twins do differs. In India the Aśvins are two horsemen who come before the dawn, rescue the drowning and heal the blind and the old; their mother Saraṇyū is also the mother of the twins Yama and Yamī; Yamī asks her brother to lie with her and he refuses, and Yama becomes the first to die and the king of the dead. Among the Greeks the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, are one mortal and one immortal, and the immortal shares his immortality with his brother day by day; they appear to sailors as two lights in the storm; and Leto bears Zeus the twins Apollo and Artemis. At Rome the twins Romulus and Remus are thrown into the Tiber and a she-wolf suckles them; later they quarrel over the city, with no seniority to decide between them, and Romulus kills his brother when he leaps over his wall. In Iran Zarathustra says that in the beginning there were twin spirits, one of whom chose truth and the other the lie, and in the Pahlavi books Jam has a twin sister, Jamag. In Mesopotamia Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea, "the divine twins", guard the doors, and the Babylonians named the two bright stars of Gemini after them. In China Fuxi and Nüwa are a brother and sister alone on Mount Kunlun, who marry if the smoke comes together. And among the Tuareg of Aïr Ayur, the crescent, and his sister Tayurt hatch from two eggs.

The idea these stories turn on is that one birth divides into two works. Twins are equal in origin, neither the elder, as Livy says of Romulus and Remus, so the story divides between them what cannot be held together: dawn and dusk for Shahar and Shalim, immortality and death for Castor and Pollux, the city and the killing for Romulus and Remus, truth and the lie for the two spirits of Iran, life and death for Yama, who dies first, and Yamī, who remains. One question recurs in the stories of twin brother and sister: will they unite? Yama refuses; Fuxi and Nüwa unite by Heaven's leave; Jam and his twin sister Jamag have twins of their own in the Bundahishn. And another thing recurs: the twins come together in the hour of danger, as horsemen or as lights, rescuing the drowning at sea among the Indians and Greeks and guarding the door among the Babylonians.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Arabic calls a child born with another in one womb tawʾam, and Lane says it is of the measure fawʿal, originally wawʾam, its first w changed to t as in tawlaj from walaja, and that it comes from al-wiʾām, "mutual nearness, mutual agreement". Akkadian calls a twin tūʾamu and the two stars of Gemini "the Great Twins", and Hebrew says tāʾôm, the word with which Genesis describes Jacob and Esau in their mother's womb. Sanskrit says yama for twin, the word that names Yama, king of the dead, and Avestan yəma, with which Zarathustra names the two spirits. On the method we read it as Arabic waʾm, the root of tawʾam before the t came in: y and w are glides that replace each other, the glottal stop drops in Sanskrit, and m is m. So in all these languages the twin is named by agreement and nearness, and in the stories the twins are near and alike, and then part.

Linguistic Root

Tawʾam and wiʾām

Lane, under t-ʾ-m: tāʾama akhāhu, he was born a twin with his brother; atʾamat al-marʾa, she bore two at one birth; mitʾām, a woman accustomed to bear twins; tāʾama al-thawb, he wove a cloth of threads two and two together in warp and woof; and tawʾam, a child born with one or more others at one birth, male or female, humā tawʾamān, "they are twins". He adds that it is of the measure fawʿal according to al-Khalīl and al-Jawharī, originally wawʾam, as tawlaj is originally wawlaj, and that it comes from al-wiʾām, mutual nearness and agreement. The Akkadian dictionary gives tūʾamu as twin, of men, gods, animals and plants, said of parts of buildings and of the liver, and of stars. BDB gives Hebrew tāʾôm as twin, used in the plural, of Jacob and Esau in Genesis 25:24 and of Perez and Zerah in 38:27, and sets beside it the name Thomas, rendered in Greek Δίδυμος, "twin". So the three letters t, glottal stop and m stand in Arabic, Hebrew and Akkadian, and Arabic alone keeps the story of their origin: the w that became t, and the agreement it was taken from.

Yama between yamm and wiʾām

The project's Hindu essay reads the name Yama as Arabic al-yamm, the sea whose bottom cannot be reached, so that on his page Yama is the lord of the far depth from which no one has returned. The word's Sanskrit meaning is "twin", as Monier-Williams says, which is why Yama and Yamī bear it, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica notes Avestan yə̄mā, "twins", in Yasna 30.3, where the two spirits are. If we read the word's meaning and not only the name, the twin is waʾm: Sanskrit y in place of Arabic w, two glides that replace each other, as Lane says the w of tawʾam became t; the glottal stop drops, since Sanskrit does not write it inside a word; and m is m. The two readings stand together: yamm is the essay's reading of the king of the dead, and wiʾām the reading of the word that called him a twin. It is a reading proposed on the method, since all the Semitic forms carry the t, and yama is the ordinary Indo-Iranian word for twin.

The essays' readings

The Babylonian essay reads "twin" in the name of Tiamat as a third option, making it "the first doubleness", salt water and sweet, and grades it medium, preferring tahūm, the deep. In Enūma eliš Tiamat is not a twin but the partner of Apsu. The Roman essay reads Romulus from raml, sand, and Remus from raḥim, the womb, so that the twins are for it "the land and mercy". And Lane keeps the Arabs' name for a pair of stars that never part: al-farqadān, two stars near the pole that never set, by which one steers by sea and by land. They are in Ursa Minor, not in Gemini, but like the Dioscuri they are a pair of lights that seafarers look to.

Attestations by Culture

Ugarit: dawn and dusk

Scholars set Shahar and Shalim beside the morning star and the evening star, and Pardee reads their epithet in the tablet as "who delimit the day". Wyatt suggests this is why Shalim comes last in the god lists of Ugarit, as dusk comes last in the day. So the twins are the two ends of the day, born together of one father, and never together in the sky.

India: the Aśvins, and Yama and Yamī

Hymn 10.17 says that Tvaṣṭar gave his daughter in marriage to Vivasvān, and Yama's mother vanished on her way to his house; the gods hid the immortal woman from mortals, made one like her and gave her to Vivasvān, and Saraṇyū bore the Aśvins and then deserted "both twinned pairs". So Saraṇyū had two pairs of twins: Yama and Yamī, and the Aśvins. In hymn 10.10 Yamī says that their maker made them a couple in the womb, and Yama says: I will not fold my arms about your body; they call it sin when a man comes near his sister; seek another. The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa says the gods kept the Aśvins from the soma because they mixed with men, healing them, until they made the sage Cyavana young again and he showed them how to claim their share.

Iran: the two spirits, and Jam and Jamag

Yasna 30.3 says that in the beginning there were two twin spirits whose difference shows in thought, word and deed, and calls the worse of them "the bad one", who is Angra Mainyu. The Encyclopaedia Iranica notes that scholars have asked whether the "twins" of this Yasna relate to the story of Yima, and that because the twins here are the two spirits there is no direct connection. It says that only Pahlavi Jam has a twin sister, Jamag; that the Pāzand Ayādgār ī Zāmāspīg gives Wīwanghān a pair of twins, Jam and Jamag; and that the Bundahishn gives them twin children.

Greece: the Dioscuri, and Apollo and Artemis

Hesiod says that Leto lay with Zeus and bore Apollo and Artemis, delighting in arrows. The Dioscuri page tells how Pollux shared his immortality with his brother. The version Apollodorus gives makes the brothers the sons of two fathers, Zeus and Tyndareus, on one night, so twins among the Greeks can have two fathers: an immortal and a mortal in one womb.

Rome: the city and the killing

Livy says that Rhea Silvia bore twins and named Mars as their father; the king ordered them thrown into the river, they were left at the edge of the flood, and when the water fell a she-wolf came and suckled them, and the king's herdsman Faustulus found them. Grown up, they wished to found a city, "and since the brothers were twins, and respect for their age could not determine between them", they took the auspices: Remus saw six vultures first, Romulus twelve; they quarrelled and Remus was killed, the commoner story being that he leaped over the new walls in mockery and his brother slew him.

Mesopotamia: the Great Twins

ORACC says that Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea are underworld deities who often occur together and are called "the Divine Twins", that they were associated with Nergal, that the Assyrians buried small figurines of them at doors as guardians, and that one belongs to the right side and the other to the left. The star compendium MUL.APIN names "the Great Twins" Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea, the stars α and β Geminorum.

China: brother and sister

The Duyizhi tells that Nüwa and her brother were alone on Mount Kunlun at the beginning of the world and asked for a sign permitting them to marry: if the smoke came together, they would marry; it did, and Nüwa made a fan of grass to hide her face. The early texts do not call them twins, but they are the first brother and sister, and their story is Yama and Yamī's question with another answer.

The Amazigh: the children of two eggs

The Tuareg of Aïr tell that Ayur, the crescent, and his sister Tayurt were wonder-children who hatched from two eggs that sprang from the knee of a lonely shepherd, fled together when the shepherd meant to sacrifice Tayurt, and that Tayurt became the great kindly moon.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In most stories the twins meet at the light. Shahar and Shalim are dawn and dusk; the Aśvins come before the dawn and are brothers of Uṣas; the Dioscuri are lights on the masts and stars in Gemini; Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea are the same two stars for the Babylonians; Ayur and Tayurt are crescent and moon; and Apollo and Artemis are sun and moon in the Greek essay. So the twins enter the sun's journey: they come at the two ends of the day, they drive the chariot, and the Sun's daughter mounts the Aśvins' car.

They meet at death. Yama is the first to die and the king of the dead; Pollux shares death with his brother day by day; Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea are underworld gods who guard its doors; Remus is killed at the wall. This belongs to the descent to the underworld: one twin goes down and the other stays or shares it, as Geshtinanna shares half the year in the house of the dead with her brother Dumuzi.

They meet at the city and at marriage. Romulus and Remus quarrel over one city, and the one who survives builds it and names it after himself, as in Genesis Cain builds the first city after killing his brother, the comparison the Roman essay draws. The question of brother and sister in India, China and Iran is the question of the first creation: how people multiply when only two are on the earth, which is told in the creation of humans and the sacred marriage. And twins born from eggs among the Amazigh and the Greeks, Ayur and Tayurt from two eggs and Helen from an egg in Apollodorus's version, join them to the cosmic egg.

In the Völsunga saga 2 and 7 Sigmund and Signý are twins; the sister comes to her brother in a witch's shape, he lies with her without knowing her, and she bears him Sinfjötli to avenge their father, which is Yama and Yamī's question with a third answer; see Sigmund and Sinfjötli.

Symbolic Reading

The Greek rereading essay reads Apollo and Artemis as "the divine twin": Apollo the sun, whose chariot he drives and whose arrows are its rays, and Artemis the moon, who hunts by night with the stars for hounds. The Canaanite essay reads Shahar and Shalim as dawn and dusk, deriving Shalim from peace and completeness. The Roman rereading essay reads the twins thrown into the Tiber as the floods that threatened the settlements on its banks, and their survival as overcoming them. The second Roman essay reads Romulus and Remus as land and mercy and links their story with Cain and Abel.

The texts themselves gather these readings into one thing: twins are two equals with neither ahead, so they become the image of every pair that alternates and does not meet, dawn and dusk, day and night, life and death; and yet they also become the image of what can be built only by one: Romulus's city, and the king of the dead who goes first.