The Feast of Immortality: A Study in Comparative Indo-European Mythology

The Feast of Immortality is Georges Dumézil’s first major work and the earliest full articulation of a comparative method that would later define Indo-European mythology as a serious discipline. Originally submitted as his doctoral thesis in 1924 and long unavailable to Anglophone readers, this volume appears here in English for the first time.

At its center is the Indo-European “Cycle of Ambrosia,” a mythic complex surrounding the divine drink of immortality — amṛta, ambrosia, the beer of the Æsir, the ale of the Tuatha Dé Danann — and the rites, conflicts, and cosmological distinctions it sustains. Dumézil demonstrates that this cycle is not an incidental motif, but a coherent and deeply conserved structure marking a boundary between mortals and immortals across the Indo-European world.

Drawing on Indian epic literature, Germanic Eddic poetry, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Slavic, Iranian, Armenian, and lesser-known traditions, Dumézil reconstructs the shared mythic sequence underlying these diverse cultures. He advances a rigorous methodological argument: that comparative mythology must focus not on isolated themes or divine names, but on complex narrative cycles whose internal structure excludes chance or simple borrowing.

The book culminates in an examination of the ritual dimension of ambrosia — festivals, sacrificial feasts, and ceremonial reenactments — situating myth and rite within a single symbolic economy of sustenance, sovereignty, and immortality.