Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science

ARYAN IDOLS •

INDO-EuROPEAN MYTHOLOGY AS IDEOLOGY AND SCIENCE

STEFAN ARVIDSSON Translated by Sonia Wichmann

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

In memory of Caj Schmitz pte

Stefan ArvidsSQn is assIstant professor at the University of Halmstad and a researcher at the UniverSity of Lund. His most relogin JOm ideoiogloch llettnsklp (Brutus Ostlings Bokf()rlag Symposlon, 2ooo). Ubrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arvidsson, Stefan, 1968[Ariska idoler. English] Aryan Idols; Indo- European mythology as ideology and science I Stefan Arvidsson ; translated by Sonia WIChmann. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 0-'2'26-01860-7 (cloth: alk. paper) 1.lndo-Europeans-Religion. '2. Mythology, Indo-European. I. TItle. BL660-A78'3 '2006 100.89'09-d0'2 '2005030550

8

w

The paper used in mis publication meets minimum requlremenla of the American National Standard for Informatlon Sclenrn-Permanence of Paper for Printed LIbrary Materials, ANSI Z]9.48-1991.

There are more idols than realities in the world. Friedrich Nietzsche. Twilight ofthe Jdol5

are

idol \'i~d~l\ n [ME, fro AF idle, fro LL idolum. fro Gk eidolon image, idol; akin to Gk eidos form-more at

IDYLL] (13C)

1:

a representation or

symbol of an object of worship; broadly: a false god something bobs: PRETENDER,

IMPOSTOR

2.

a : a likeness of

3: a form or appearance

visible but without substance IDEAL 2.

4: an object of extreme devotion ; also:

s: a false conception:

FALLACY

MerTjam-Web$ter~ Collegiate D~tjona,."

lith ed.

Contents

Preface

XI

Introduction 1.

1

From Noah's Sons to the Aryan Race: The Foundation Is Laid 13

2. A Place in the Sun: The Paradigm of Nature Mythology

63

3. Primitive Aryans: Research near the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

4. Order and Barbarism: Aryan Religion in the Third Reich

178

S. Horsemen from the East: Alternatives to Nazi Research 239

Conclusion 309 Bibliography 325 Index 341

124

Preface

For over two hundred years, a series of historians, linguists, folklorists, and archaeologists have tfied to re-create a lost culture. Using ancient texts, medieval records, philological observations, and archaeological remains, they have described a world, a religion, and a people older than the Sumerians. with whom all history is said to have begun. Those who maintained this culture have been called -Indo-Europeans" and "Proto-lndo·Europeans~"Aryans· and "Ancient Aryans; "Japhetites,· and "wiros," among many other terms. These people have not left behind any texts, no objects can definitely be tied to them. nor do we know any "tndo-European" by name. In spite afthat, scholars have stubbornly tried to reach back to the ancient "'ndo-Europeans; with the help of bold historical, linguistic, and archaeological reconstructions, in the hopes of finding the foundation of their own culture and religion there. The fundamental thesis of this study is that these prehistoric peoples have preoccupied people in modern times primarily because they were. to use the words of Claude Levi-Strauss, ~good to think with; rather than because they were meaningful historical actors. The interest in the ·'ndo-Europeans; ·Aryans; and their ·others- (who have varied through history from Jews to savages, Orientals, aristocrats, priests, matriarchal peasants. warlike nomads, French liberals, and German nationalists), stemmed-and still stems-from a will to create alternatives to those identities that have been provided by tradition. The scholarship about the Indo-Europeans, their culture, and their religion has been an attempt to create new categories of thought, new identities, and thereby a future different from the one that seemed to be prescribed. t began work on Aryan Idols in the fall of 1995. It has mainly been carried out at the Department of Theology at Lund University, which is a very stimulating milieu for anyone interested in studying how ideological motives influence science. For support, encouragement. and a great deal of wisdom, I thank the participants In the seminar on the history of religions. The seminar is led by Tord Olsson. who was also my adviser during the first years, and I thank him

xii

Pre/au

for stimulating and inspiring conversations. During the last years, Catharina Raudvere was my adviser, and I thank her for sage advice about culturaJ his· tory and historiography, and for an unfailing faith in the value of my work. I would further like to thank all of those who have been good enough to help me. by letter or otherwise. to understand things about the study of the IndoEuropeans and their mythology: Anders Andren, Goran Dahl. Sten Dahlstedt. VIf Drobin. Mattias GardeU. Cristiano Grottanelli. Jan Hjarpe. Alee Hultkrantz. Peter Jackson. Carl-Martin Edsman. Oaude Levi-Strauss, Sven-Eric Liedman. Patrizia Pinotti. Edgar Polome. Jaan Puhvel, Colin Renfrew, Stephanie von Schnurbein. Eva Stohlander Axelsson. Jesper Svenbro. and UUa W"llcander. For extn. contributions in the area, I thank Erik af Edholm. Olav Hammer. and Leif Undin. Many thanks to Jonathan Z. Smith. who let me use an unpublished manuscript about Frazer and Indo-European mythology. I thank Per Haupt for informing me of the educated public's opinion about my dissertation. Sincere thanks also for the invaluable contributions of the following people: editorial director Alan Thomas. manuscript editor Erik Carlson. promotions manager Stephanie Hlywak. and assistant editor Randy Petilos. of the University of Chicago Press; and translator Sonia Wichmann. This study would never have been written without the intellectual and emotional help of three people. From the time when I sent my first draft to Chicago. Bruce Lincoln has steadfastly encouraged me to continue work and to send over new sections. in spite of the fact that he knew he would have to use all of his philological competence to understand these texts, in Swedish and not always well worked out. Bruce's comments have been invaluable. and to the extent the study has any merits as insight into Indo·European scholarship. this is almost entirely due to him. Still. it is not all of the SCientific help Bruce has given that I value the most. For almost ten years, Nina Bjork has been the first to read what I have put together. If the language in the study is readable and some of the arguments can be followed, it is probably thanks to her. I am however most grateful to Nina for all the discussions about thinking. life choices. and politics that she and I have had through the years. Between 1987 and 1999. Caj Schmitz and I had almost daily discussions about the pros and cons of modern society and about the essence and value of reason. I hope that Caj will not mind too much the theoretical shortcomings of the study when he reads it in that higher realm that none of us believes exists. Bruce. Nina, and Caj have all shown me that any intellectual activity worth its name is driven by the heart and guided by the brain, and that the wrath over how we human beings have wasted our chances to create a world o(human dignity is the best fuel for humanism.

Introduction

DUMEZll AND THE INDO-EUROPEAN IDEOLOGY Georges Dumhil (1898-1986) is among the few historians of religion whose theories have found a wider audience outside the discipline. and even outside the academy. For haifa century-from the 19305 up until his death-Dumb-il was one of the foremost humanists in France, a status which was confirmed at the Pantheon in 1979 when he was welcomed into the Academie Fran~ise by aaude Uvi·Stn.uss as one of the "Forty Immortals~ The scholarly work that had led Dumhil to this position was based on a wide-ranging hypothesis that all peoples who spoke Indo-European. or. as they were sometimes called even as late as the 1960s, "Aryan~ languages had also inherited a common ideology. In the course of his historical and philological research, Dumb-il had found traces of this ideology in Roman texts, Greek myths. Indian hymns, and Old Norse saga literature. The ideology was characterized by a special three-part structure that organized distinct cultural fields. This structure above all guided the pantheon and the social order, but also such things as the classification of various kinds of heroic types. punishments, and taxes. At the highest level in this ·Indo-European~ tripartite structure was the "function- of the sovereign holders ofpower-the priests, lawmakers, and kings; below it, that of the warriors; and at the bottom, the function of the people. or producers. Ever since the first books about the tripartite ideology (l'ideologie tripartite) of the Indo-Europeans came out during the 1930S, Dumhil's theories have won supporters. Among those supporters were not only experts on Indo-European religion, but also historians of religions (such as Mircea Eliade and Jan de Vries), historians (such as Georges Duby and Jacques LeGoff), anthropologists (such as Claude Lt!vi-Strauss and Marshall Sahlins), and other humanists. In addition, some individuals whose interest in the prehistoric world of the Indo-Europeans was based not on scientific curiosity, but rather on a dream I. Aboul Durnhll',llft. ftt Eribon 1916. 199:l.

1

2

f"trodueticn

lnrrodudi.on

of rekindling the old pre-Christian ~Indo-European·or -Aryan- paganism, also found inspiration in his work. 2 There were even some who wanted to oppose the -Judea-Christian- liberal and egalitarian society and who thought that Dumelil's discovery of a pre-Christian. Indo-European tradition that divided society into leaders. warriors. and producers titted perfectly into their world· view.) These persons declared that it was natural for people who belonged to the Indo-European branch of the human race to live in accordance with the hierarchical Indo-European ideology. The classification -the Indo-European branch ofhumanity· could be defined either as the group of people who spoke some Indo-European language (Latin. Sanskrit, French. Swedish. Persian, and so forth) or as the group ofAryans. who were typically imagined as tall, blond. and blue-eyed specimens of homo sapiens. In a few critical articles from the early 1980s, the two highly regarded historians Arnaldo Momigliano and Carlo Ginzburg claimed that Dumhil himself belonged to the group that opposed the "Judeo-Christian~society. In his research on Indo-European religion and mythology. Dumhil had. they suggested. not onJy carried out objective studies. but had in fact also sought to support the forces that wanted to re-create a traditional hierarchical order in Europe. Momigliano and Ginzburg argued that Dumhil's theory about the Indo-European tripartite ideology had more to do with the Fascism ofthe 1930S than with prehistoric religions. According to the two historians, Dumezil's work amounted to an attempt to confer historical background and legitimacy on the Fascist dream of a society that wouJd be harmoniously integrated and, at the same time, hierarchically divided into leaders, soldiers, and workers. By implying that the prehistoric Indo-Europeans had structured their society and their worldview according to a hierarchical tripartite pattern, Dumezil wanted to make the Fascist ideals appear natural, and consequently to make the liberal and socialist ones appear inherently unnatural. Momigliano and Ginzburg even thought they could discern a certain sympathy for the German version of Fascism, or Nazism, in Dumezil's books from the 1930S. However, those who have continued Momigliano's and Ginzburg's ideological critique-in particular, the American historian of religion Bruce Lincoln-have discounted the latter accusation; Lincoln argues that Dumezil was, on the contrary, deeply anchored in a Germanophobic French Fascism. Up until his death, Dumezil repudiated all claims that Issued from a perspective of ideological critique, and since his death, this position has been '1. Dum~tllil

used,

(Of ~umpl
I'.

22.

From Noah's Sons to the Aryan Raa

Chapter Olle

After the faU of Nazi Germany. the term MAryan" was replaced more and more frequently by "Indo-European:" One contributing factor to this-aside from the most obvious one-was the fact that postwar scholarship was dominated by Georges Dumezil. who never (with one exception) spoke about "Aryans" or "Aryan religion."19 Today, these terms are used only by neo-Nazis and by the occasional Indian historian who chooses to speak about Aryans because the word (arya) has its own Indian history.20 It is very important to observe that the various terms (Hamites, laphetites. Aryans, Indo-Europeans, etc.) do not necessarily denote the same people, neither over time nor across various writers. It is not certain that those people whom a neo-Nazi wants to call ~AryanN are the same as the ones linguists in the nineteenth century meant when they talked about ~Aryans.N And Jones's "Hamitic familyN includes races that Dumezil never would have dreamed of calling ~Indo-European:' However. in spite of these differences, there is a continuity or a stability-an equivalence in the narrative. rather than in the object of the narrative-a fact which [ hope will become apparent in this study as a whole.

Language and Origins The notion that the languages of the world could be divided into three large language families was difficult to reconcile with another idea that also stemmed from biblical mythology, namely. the idea that aU languages should be traceable to Adam, the ancient father of all human beings. 2' After all, Adam and Eve must have used a language, and it is reasonable to imagine that just as all people descend from them, so all the languages of the world are modified variations of one original language that God had imparted to his image. But

19. Grotanelli (1998) has pointed out that Dumhil has in faet used MAryanS" (Fr. Aryens, In the meaning MIndo-Europeans; not Indo-Iranians), although he himsel( denied this. The yearwas 1941. In the article. Dumhil also discusses the nobility and racial affiliation of the Aryans. The reason why Dumhil departed (rom his usual praxis is, according to GrottaneUi. that he wanted to curry fayor among the Vichy Fascist and Nazi authorities who had taken away hIs right to teach because he had been a Freemason. 20. The Indian historian P. P. Narayanan Nambudiri is not consistent in his discussion of "Aryans" and "nce" (1992, 18). It is haul nOI to get the Impression that the confusion serves a purpose-an aim that probably should be connecled to Nambildiri's own caste slatuS (one of Kerala's higher ones and drya in the tradilionallinguiStic use). :1.1. On the discussion about humanity's ur-language, ue Olender 1992, I-Ii; LInCOln aooo, 76-100 et passim.

23

then what kind oflanguage was it? Ever since the church father Augustine, the church had declared that Adam and Eve argued in Hebrew in the garden of Eden, but during the Middle Ages, theologians and learned men from various European countries had begun to propose other theories. Suggestions such as French, Swedish, and Dutch could, however, never become serious threats to the language of the ~Old Testament~ Only toward the end of the eighteenth century, with its radical questioning of the authority of the priests and of the Christian worldview, did the climate become such that alternatives to Hebrew could seriously be considered. One language that then surfaced as a possible original language was the Indo-European language Sanskrit.22 Jones had several compatriots who eagerly began studying India's learned languages in the second part of the eighteenth century.21 Epoch-making translations from Sanskrit to English included, for example, Charles Wilkins's Bhagavad Gita (1784) and Hitopadesha (1787), as well as Jones's translation of Kalidasa's drama Sakunta/a and the Laws ofManu. The Indian books awakened great interest. and many of the so-called Calcutta Sanskritists' translations were in turn translated into French and German. Among the intellectuals of Europe, a passion spread for everything Indian, an lndomania that reached its highest point during the period 1790-1820, that is, the high romantic period. The idealization of India was not, of course, about contemporary India, but rather an India that was given the epithet ~dassical; borrowed from classical antiquity-an India that could be glimpsed among ruins, old statues, Sanskrit manuscripts, and Brahmanic teachings. Jones is very clear on this point: ~Nor can we reasonably doubt, how degenerate and abased so ever the Hindus may now appear, that in some early age they were splendid in arts and arms, happy in government, wise in legislation. and eminent in various knowledge."'· The ancient Indians appeared to Jones to be a people related to the Greeks and Romans, who had been idealized by humanists since the Renaissance. Raymond Schwab has in a now classic book referred to the time around 1800 as an Oriental Renaissance. 25 The term is in accordance with Olender 199a, 6-u. Among the Indian elite. this ootion had been established long before any Europeans came up with the idea. According to this idea, Sanskrit was The Language and foreign tongues were only corrupted dialects of it-dialects that one should alfOid learning to understand. just "the barbarians" should not be allowed to leam Sanskrit (Halbfass 1988, 179). :13. The history of the "Calcutta Sanskritists" is told in Trautmann 1997. a.. Jones 1799, I:as. :IS. Schwab 1984, esp. II-ao. Schwab borrowed the expression from Edgar Qulnet, who used It In Ginl, des religion. (1841). The term "Oriental" indicates that it not only referred to Indians but that other peoplt'l (rom the "East" became pollible obJecl$ for Idealiution as well. Schwab's book, howeyer, deal. ,ltT\OlIt exclusively with the r~ptlon of the Indian and. to some extent. the 1:;1,

I.

24

ChapurOne

the Indomanic romantics' own position: just as Byzantium's fall had brought about the introduction of ancient Greek and Latin literature to Europe and made it the literary foundation for a ~c1assical" Renaissance that replaced Mthe Middle Ages; it was hoped that the study of Sanskrit literature would foster an MOriental renaissance that could liberate people from the "dassical w era. As far as Indo-European scholarship was concerned, the fascination with India and with Sanskrit meant that the image of the ancient Indians became prototypical for the image of Indo*Europeans in general-the ancient Indian became the Indo-European per se. M

The Lutheran priest and preromantic Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) was the first to spread the doctrine of Indomania in German. 26 The rise of the Indian civilization was, according to Herder, one of the most important steps in the development of the human race toward humanity and perfection. His depiction of the Indians was colored by his admiration-typical of its time-for everything and everyone that could be idealized as ·primitive; ·folk; or -archaic.- In line with Rousseau and Montesquieu, Herder contrasted the innocent Indians, who inhabit -the most beautiful and fertile area on earth; with the Europeans: It is therefore indisputable, that the Brahman had educated their people towards a certain gentleness, moderation and purity, or, at the very least, had strengthened them in these virtues, so that, conversely, to them the Europeans often appeared dirty, drunken and raving. Their bearing and language are spontaneous and graceful, their relations are peaceful, their bodies are clean, and their way of tife is simple and harmless. Children are raised in a mild manner, yet they nevertheless are not lacking in knowledge, nor even less in quiet industry and the fine, though imitative, arts; even the lowest tribes learn to read, write and count. Therefore, since the Brahman were for millennia the educators of the youth, they have provided an unequivocal service to humanity.v

Iranian, culture, and It isalso these cultures that interest us here. sinet the IndiansarKIlranians (as well as the Hittites-although they are largdy a different story, since they were unknown during the entire nineteenth century) are the only Indo-European Orientals. 26. On Herder's Indomania, see Halbfass 1988, 69-7:1; and Poliakov 1974. 186f. 27. Herder 1814-16, 3:31; in German in Herder 1965. 2:33: ·Unleugbar ist's also. daB die Brahmanen ihrem Volk elne Sanftmut. Hollichkeit, M5Bigung und Keuschleit angebildet oder es wenigstens In diesen Tugenden so bestarkt haben, daB die Europ5er ihnen dagegen oft als Unreine, Trunkne und Rasende erscheinen. Ungelwugen-tlerllch sind ihre Gebirden und Sprache, friedlkh ihr Umgang. rein ihr Korper, einfach und harmos ihre UMnsweJse. Ole Kindhelt wlrd milde enogen, und doch fehlt es Ihnen nlcht an KeonntnlsH:n, noch mlnder an ItUlem FldB und

From Noah's Som to the Aryan Raa

2S

From Herder's sympathetic attitude toward the Indian priesthood. and his appreciation for religion and ~fables; it is apparent that he has strayed quite a bit from the enlightened path where Bryant and Jones moved, and reached the place where the romantics gazed on fields of blue flowers. And accordingly. it was Herder's romantic followers who took up the theme of the extraordinary lndians; the idealization of India came to serve both as a protest against and an escape from a contemporary world that seemed to consist of the triumphal march of rationalism, the bloodbath of the French Revolution, and the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars. The romantics found the uniqueness of life threatened on all fronts: mechanistic science, materialistic anthropology, tradition-hating politics, watered-down theology, and wilted classicism had made a feeling of enthusiasm impossible. Basing their work on concepts and ideas from Indian literature, the Bhagavadgita and the Upanishads, the romantics created an image of the ancient Indians as being lost in contemplation of the spiritual nature ofthe world, the migration ofsouls. and the recurring incarnations ofthe gods.UI The romantics were especially fascinated by the Hindu religion's predilection for pantheism, in which they seemed to find parallels to the thoughts of such favorite philosophers as Spinoza and Jakob Bohme and recognize their own nature worship and Weltfr6mmigkeit. 29 The goal of the romantics was, in the classic words of Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg (Novalis), -to give meaning to the ordinary, give a secret importance to the usual, give dignity to the well-known by making it unknown.'"30 That task was easier to carry out with the help of India. In the homeland of the Calcutta Sanskritists, their work was admired and discussed by romantic authors such as Shelley and Lord Byron. but it was at the German-speaking universities that they aroused the greatest scientific rein nachahrnenden Kunsten; selbst die nledrigern StammI' lernen lesen, schreiben und rechnen. 01 nun die Bnhmanen die Enieh« deor 'ugend sind, so haben sie damit selt Jahrtausenden ein unverkennbares Verdienst urn die Menschheoit." a8. The Upanishads had been translated from Pe~ian by Anqueti1.Dupperon and published In 1801-:1 with the title Oupnek'hal. The book was a tnnslation into Latin of fifty Upanishads thaI had been tnnslated into Pe~ian in 1657 by Dan Shukoh under the title Sirr-j Akbar (The great I«r~). Moslem humanists had eveor since the lime of AI-Birunis (973-1048) studied theo Indian culture and tnnslated texts from Sanskrit Into Persian and Anbian. In theo nineteenth century, Oupnek'hal becameo the most wideoly used source in Europe about Indian mysticism. The book Is .1110 Important for the history of philosophy, since it cameo to form the basis oftheo first European synthesis between Indian and European thinking, Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy (Halbfass 1988, 14-53, 106, lIsf.). 19. On rollUlntlclsm and the Indian pantheism, see Halbfass 1988.71, 17ff.; and Behler and Struc.Oppenberg 1975o lCcllC-exliv. BO. Cited hi HanlOn 1994, 100.

26

From N04h'$ Sons to the Aryan Rau

Chapter One

and philosophical curioSity.31 The explanation for this should be sought in the history of German identity. No Germany existed at the dawn of the eighteenth century. Those who dreamed of a united Germany had difficulty convincing the ruling powers of the necessity and naturalness of such a reorganization. because a state was stiU, to a large extent, defined by its aristocracy: Austria was the land of the Austrian emperor; and Prussia, that of the Prussian king. The nationalists. "greater Germans," had a hard ideological battle to wage in the beginning.:rz They could not invoke religious circumstances to justify ere· atiog a Germany. since the imagined kingdom would include both Catholic and Protestant areas. Nor were there any obvious historical events, dynasties, or geographical boundaries that could provide a foundation for the desired nation_ The greater-Germany rhetoric therefore came to be based on one of; Herder's pet ideas, namely that the borders of states should coincide with linguistic borders. In Herder's philosophy, language held a key position because it was the foremost expression of the "soul of the people" (Volksgeist). Herder broke with the Enlightenment notion of the human being as one for whom reason and ability to make contracts are the primary resources in social life, and instead he described human beings and races as a part of the "organically" growing natural world. According to Herder, it is vital for humanity as a whole that the soul of each folk (Volk) may grow freely, and therefore it is natural that linguistic circumstances define people's solidarity and state borders. It was unnatural that not all German-speaking people lived within the same kingdom. Thanks to these ideas, language became the foundational cornerstone for the greater Germans and acquired the unique position that it would gain only later within other nationalistic movements. The result of the fetishizing of language was that interest in linguistic studies in general, and in German and its "Indo-Germanic" relatives in particular, became very great in German-speaking countries during the nineteenth century. Epoch-making efforts to develop the study of Indian languages and to establish a new comparative historical linguistic science were made by August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), Wilhelm von Humboldt (l767-J867),Jacob Grimm (1785-1863), Franz Bopp (1791-1867), and August Friedrich Pott (1802-87), among others. People from language backgrounds other than German also contributed to developing the field of comparative philology or comparative grammar, above all, the Dane Rasmus

)L On the

rise ofGerrmln indology, set Pollock 199). On the history of IJldo.European lingulsdc:

r~arch, set Jankowdty 19~

)1. On ~rman

5ebeo1t 1966; and Lehmann 1967. nationalism, see Dahlstedt and Uedman 1996,27-ss,

27

Uthuanlan

:l

Family tree model (From Schleicher 1861-61.)

Rask (1787-1832) deserves mention. The founding axiom for this new science was typically romantic: structural similarities are due to a common origin, which means that the question of why there are similarities between the various Indo-European languages is explained by the fact that they all descended from an "original language:" This type ofexplanatory model is usually called genetic (from Lat. genus, -descent"), and during the nineteenth century the genetic model of explanation became one of the basic building blocks of humanistic thinking in general: a phenomenon was not thoroughly illuminated until its origin was mapped out. This romantic search for origins was rarely a purely scientific theoretical postulate; it usually also had nostalgic undertones and was linked to a religious notion of origin as a state of unspoiled harmony.:l3 Even though Indo-Europeanists have occasionally tried to work out alterna· lives to the genetic model of explanation, these have never achieved anything near the popularity of the genetic model. The popularity did not depend only on a romantic search for origins, however. The credibility of the model was atrengthened by the knowledge that the similarities between the Romance languages were due to their mutual descent from Latin. Was it not reason· able then, people speculated, that the similarities between Indo-European S3- TheGmman ~rmanlst Klaus von See (1994. 135-60) hasshown how the German linguistic theoriel.nd conc:t'\XI of the nineleenth century were modeled on IUCh fOlmntic values. as well as ,lfO bdnllnnuenced by other non.dtntllk f.eton••hove.1I by nationalistic feelings and ideas.

28

From Noah's Scm to the Arydll RtlU

ChapurOnt

languages had the same explanation? The genetic explanation became even more convincing when it was iconized by August Schleicher in the middle of the nineteenth century. Schleicher's so-called family tree model lent an aura of self·evidence to the genetic explanation and gave it a pedagogical simplicity. Schleicher was a champion of Charles Darwin's theories, and it seems as if the postulate that similarity should be explained by common origins was also strengthened by

the rise ofhistoriciz.ing biology. Darwin explained similarities between different species. as we know, by the fact that they had once had the same Mancestors; and the differences meant that the species had, after a long period of isolation. developed different innate possibilities. A similar chain of events was conceivable within the quasi-natural kingdom oflanguages: through isolation and internal change, dialects of ancient Aryan had arisen, and these had later developed into distinct languages.

The Art ofClassifying Religions In German-speaking areas, the romantic Friedrich Schlegel was the first to produce an independent work about India's languages and literature, the suc· cessful aber die Sprache und Weisheit der lndier (1808).)4 Schlegel's interest in Indian culture had been awakened by the translations of Herder and the Calcutta Sanskritists. The possibiJity for "enthusiasm" that he sensed lay hidden in Indian cultural history led him to begin looking for someone who could teach him Sanskrit. Since it was impossible to travel to England because of the Napoleonic War. Schlegel had to go to Paris in 1802, where Alexander HamiJton, left behind by his ship, was able to give him lessons in Sanskrit and Indian life and institutions. With this newly gained knowledge, Schlegel sat down to write aber die Sprache und Weisheit der lndier, which became the culmination of Indomania. In this book, the lndiophile Schlegel argued that all Indo· European languages had developed from Sanskrit. In his classic lecture in Calcutta, Jones had speculated that all Indo-European languages could be traced to an original language that '"perhaps no longer exists," but Schlegel then claimed that it "was apparent through comparisons that the Indian langauge is older and the others younger and derived from it."35 Consequently, 34. On Schlesd. see PoIiakov 1974, 100. 1901f.; Schwab 1984. 67-78; Fddman lnd Rkhardson 1975. ]06--1"; HalbCass 1988, 74-8); and Traulmann 1997, 139-42. 35- SdUqd 1975. US-

29

he called the Indo-European language family "the Indian language family" (der indischen Sprachfamitie). Schlegel further argued that it was pointless to look for Adam and Eve's original language; the only thing we can determine is that we can group some languages together into various language families, and any attempts to go beyond these are fruitless, according to him.- The problem of which language was humanity's first was thereby dissolved, and Schlegel can therefore be said to have advocated a polygenetic, in contrast to a monogenetic, model of the birth of languages: the languages of the world have not one, but several, origins. In aber die SpracJte und Weisheit der lndier, Schlegel concentrates on the char· acter of two language families. One language family is inflecting (for example, has word roots that can be conjugated or declined, reduplication, and vowel gradation), and consists of the Indo·European languages. In these languages, the word's "root'" is like a Uliving seed~ and new words are formed as they grow out of the root, without ever losing their connection to the original meaning of the root. The '"pure'" Indo-European languages form an "organic fabric."37In the other language famiJy, words are instead built up by adding affixes to the basic stem. The languages in this family, which later became known as agglutinative, are by no means '"organic; but rather, the words in them are constructed by "mechanically'" adding word parts to the root. In these languages, '"their roots present us with no living productive germ, but seem like an agglomeration of atoms, easiJy dispersed and scattered by every casual breath."31 like most other romantics, Schlegel was influenced by Herder's notion of languages as expressions of the '"soul of the people,'" and he therefore thought that differences between languages were connected to differences between the inteUectual abilities of various peoples. As a rule, what has been said about old languages is true, Schlegel writes in aber die Sprache und Weisheit der lndier, namely, that they tend to be more poetic and richer in imagery than newer languages. But this is not the case with Sanskrit: "It is true that the Indian is almost entirely a philosophical or rather a religious language, and perhaps none, not even excepting the Greek, is so philosophically clear and sharply defined: It has no variable or artibrary combination of abstractions, but is formed on It permanent system, in which the deep symbolic signification of words and

36. Ibid., l60r., 167. 37. Ibid., 1$9. 1b6d., 1,59; In £n&!iIh In Schletti 1849. 449.

sa.

30

From Noah's SolIS to the Aryan Rau

ChapkrOne

expressions reciprocally explain, elucidate, and support each other:'39 This unique ~c1arity" and intellectual potential seem to Schlegel to be the result of the history of the rise of language. While the noninflecting languages have arisen through onomatopoeic processes, we find no trace of such processes in Sanskrit. It seems to have a completely different origin: "The earliest language was not the mere instinctive cry of physical nature, nor was it from an indis~ criminate imitation of natural tones; and perhaps Sanskrit is actually proofthat "the primitive condition of mankind was not one of mere animal instinct.~.a Keeping in mind what Schlegel further writes about Sanskrit-that it "already from the beginning possessed the brightest and most sincere clarity~ and that it had -in its first and most fundamental parts the highest concepts from the world of pure thought, just as it expresses the whole foundation of consciousness not through image, but with immediate c1arity~-one can understand why Martin Bernal interprets Schlegel as saying that the Indo-European languages have a divine origin, while other languages have developed from the sounds of animals.·! However, Schlegel contradicts this statement by declaring, in aber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, that he realizes that all languages have a natural origin, that one need not count on ~external help" in order to explain the genesis of the Indo-European languages. But he does oppose the belief that all languages must have the same origin, that ~they were all equally wild and raw from the beginning:"·' The reason why only some people have received an ~admirable gift of light clarity [lichter Besonnenheit]'" and how it has arisen remain unclear. on Thanks to Herder's philosophy, historical linguistic research could be viewed as a method of examining the mental capacities of peoples, as the example of Schlegel shows. Since language is the most basic expression of the soul of the . people and is the foundation for philosophical discussions, societal laws, and artistic reflection, language affiliation also becomes an indication of religious character: language sets the framework for religious thought. The philologist, expert in foreign languages and cryptic texts, thereby becomes the person

39. Schlegel 1975, 17); in English in Schlegel 1849, 457: "Es ist wahr. beinah die ganze indische

Sprache ist eine philosophische oder vielmehr religi6se Terminologie; und vlellelcht ist keine Sprache. selbst die Griechische nicht ausgenommen. so philosophisch k.lar unci scharfbestimmt als die indische; aber fl"('illch ist es kein veranderliches Kombinatlonssplel willkurlicher Abstrakdonen, sondern eine bleibendes System. wo die einmal geheiligten tlefbedeutenden Ausdrilcke und Worte sich gegenseitig erheUen. bestlmmen und tragen: 40. Schlegel 1975. 169. 42.. Schlegel 19750 16],169. 41. Ibid.; Bernal 1997. 131. 4]. IbId" 169.

TABLE 2

31

From the Bible to linguistics

Mosaic ethnography

Christian tradition

Bryant and Jones

Shem

Hebrews

Semites

H,m

Afro-Asiatics (Egyptians, Canaanites)

AfrO-Asiatics, Indians. and Europeans

Indian languages

lndoEuropeans

Japheth

Europeans

Tartars

Agglutinating languages

Turanians

Schlegel

Muller Semites

who is best equipped to discover the spirit of long~forgotten religions. Above all, the notion that religion is tightly linked to linguistic group became widely disseminated through the lectures that were given in the 1870S by the foremost indo-Europeanist of the time, the philologist Friedrich Max MUller, and were attended by tens ofthousands of people. In his lectures, MUller distanced himself from the traditional classification systems that arranged the world's religions using dichotomies such as ~true· and ~false~ "revealed" and ~natural; and ~in~ dividuar and ~ethnic:'" Instead, he felt that the only scientific way to classify religions was by language: ~The only scientific and truly genetic classification of religions is the same as the classification of languages, and ... particularly in the early history of the human intellect, there exists the most intimate relationship between language, religion, and nationality.-4s In Miiller's own historiography, there are three linguistically defined religious groups: the Indo*European. the Semitic, and the Turanic. We have already become acquainted with the first two; In the third, Miiller included religions that were followed by people who spoke Sami, Turkish, Chinese, and other Euro-Asiatic languages that Miiller (wrongly) believed to be related and that he had named the Turanic language family. In these three groups we can still hear the echo of the book of Genesis. For Miiller, language. religion, and reason were so closely related that fairly specific words and expressions from comparative philology could also be used when discussing the history of religion. So, according to Miiller, the ~isolating~ and ~monosyllabicChinese~ gives rise to ~an ancient colourless and unpoetical religion, a religion we might almost venture to call monosyllabic, consisting of 44- See F. M. MUller 18730 esp. wcond .nd third Imum. 45. Ibid.. 143.

32

ChapkrO"e

From N(H3h~ Sons to the A.ryan Rtue

the worship of a host ofsingle spirits. representing the sky. the sun, storms and lightning. mountains and rivers. one standing by the side of the other without any mutual attraction. without any higher principle to hold them together."46 Since the Chinese language is -isolating'" (entire words are joined to entire words) we consequently find a firm polytheism in China. Through the works of MUller, the notion that religiosity is dependent on language affiliation also became known outside the (raternity of philologists and became a central point of departure for all research into the history of religions for a long time to come. The Heavenly Father

The cornerstone of the philological history of religion during the nineteenth century was etymological research. The romantic idealization of the original meant that this research was understood as not only an investigation ofa word's history, but also as a step toward. the true or real meaning of the word. The completed study of the origin ofa religious term was thought to show the true spiritual meaning behind the religious phenomenon that the word denoted. For the historical study of Indo-European religion, the absolutely most important etymological discovery was the reconstruction of the name of the Proto-IndoEuropean supreme god. This discovery must also be attributed to Jones. When Jones arrived in Calcutta to assume his post as judge, he thought himselftransported to ancient times: ~We now live among the adorers ofthose very deities, who were worshipped under different names in old Greea and Italy:47 In this new-old land, Jones found, among others, ~the trident of NEP· TUNE, the eagle of IUPITER, the satyrs of BACCHUS, the bow of CUPID, and the chariot of the SUN:" Jones believed that all ofthese heathen gods were created by ~Hamites; and he set out to try to reconstruct a ·Hamitic" pantheon by, for example, comparing the Indian god who possessed ~Neptune's triton" (Shiva) to Neptune himself. According to Jones, one could confirm the equivalence of two mythical figures ~when features of resemblance, too strong to have been accidental, are observable in different systems of polytheism.~'" Jones's comparisons depended on typical attributes (the god who bears the triton), similarities of cults (the god who is invoked first), or similarities in domain (the god who watches over the law). Often, however, these comparisons, even if this is rarely explkitly stated, seem to be initiated by etymological ideas. At

33

least this is the case with Jones's comparisons of Janus and Ganesha, Ceres and Shri (Lakshmi), and Pan and Pavao. Most of Jones's comparisons have not held up under examination by later philologists and historians of religion, but one of them still stands the test. In ~On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and lndia~ from 1784, Jones compares the Roman god of the sky, Dies-piter, better known in the vocative form Jupiter, with the Vedic Dyaus pita.so He also claims to see an etymological relationship and similarities between these two gods and Shiva and Zeus (gen. Di6s) pater. This largely successful comparison (except for Shiva) revealed that Ham's descendants had worshipped a heavenly father who, reconstructed to ProtoIndo-European, would have been called -Dieus p~tlk The word -di~us is related to -dyews, ~dear sky; ~day; but also to -deiuos, ~god· (Skt. diva, Lat. deus, O.lr. dfa, O.lcel. Tyr), while ·phpr is the Swedish fader, Latin pater, Greek pater, and Sanskrit pitA. The discovery of a Hamitic heavenly father was strange and fascinating to a public that for the most part consisted of people who worshipped a ·Semitic; Judeo-Christian, heavenly father. Even if it cannot be definitively proved, I suspect that Jones also aimed to connect this newly discovered ~Hamitie heavenly father with his Semitic equivalent. In one passage Jones writes: ~I hardly dare suggest, that ZEY, SlY, and JOY, are the same syllable differently pronounced."S1 The caution in this sentence, where Zev is Zeus, Siv Shiva and Jov JovefJupiter-is strange considering that the comparison is hardJy more speculative than many of his other ones. It becomes more understandable, however, if Jones imagined that the chain could be extended: ZEV, SlY, JOY, JHYH. The Semitic name of god, Jahve (yHYH) would thus be etymologicalJy related to the Hamitic one. This hypothesis becomes quite plausible in view ofthe fact that Jones strove to defend the Bible's position as the true source of humanity's most ancient history. Knowledge about India had already been used by British and French deists, who had argued that the ancient Indian tradition could compete well with the Bible in terms of the notion of god, philosophical reflection, and reliability of chronology.52 The best-known deist to promote this idea was Voltaire, whose ambition in religious politics was to reduce the Catholic Church's grip

so· Ibid., 1~48f[ 51. Ibid., 1:149.

46. Ibid., 155-$6. 47· J~ 1799. 1:::1'.

48. Ibid.. 1:28. 49. Ibid., L'U9.

51 About drbm and IndomanIa, IH Schwab 1984. S2-l5S; HlIbfas1l988. 54-68; and Tr.lutnYnn 1997.66-10.

From Noah's SoIlS U! tJr~ Aryan Race

35

on society and to spread a "natural" and "rational" belief in god. Part of this project involved writing a world history that did not exaggerate the contributions of the Jews and Christians to civilization but that instead pointed to the existence of an ethical monotheism outside the Judeo-Christian sphere. The scant knowledge about India that Voltaire had acquired served him well in this connection: by idealizing India and emphasizing its holy sources, the biblical tradition's status was lowered. What Voltaire wanted to show was that a belief in god has always existed and that it thrives without the church and priesthood. even without Christianity and Mosaic legends. Jones was ofa different opinion. According to him, radical deism takes away the foundation of the true faith: "Either the first eleven chapters of Genesis. all due allowances being made for a figurative Eastern style. are true. or the whole fabrick of our national religion is false~ Jones's method was to turn the question around: the Indian texts do not show that true religion exists in scattered places all over the world. or that "heathen" documents sometimes must be given more credence than the Bible. Instead. the Hindu tales show that Moses was right. If the Bible's teachings about the one invisible god. the tale of Eden. Noah. and the Aood.. could be found in the Hamitic tradition-would not the truth of the Bible then be saved? Would not. in fact. theological dogma be turned into a scientific truth?

3 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Jupiter and Thetis (1811), According to Willia,m Jones, Zeus, or Jupiter here, is one version of the original Indo-European or Hamlte god "the heavenly father:' The classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, who had a good ey~ for the ninet~nth century's ideological use of Gr~k mythology, simply calls Zeus the arch-patriarchal bourgeois" (Georges Wildenstein, In~, 1954,)

I am persuaded. that a connexion subsisted between the old idolatrous naUons of Egypt. India. Greece. and Italy. long before they migrated to their several settlements. and consequently before the birth of MOSES; but the proof of this proposition will in no degree affect the truth and facticity of the Mosait:lc History. which. if confirmation were necessary. it would rather tend to confirm. The Divine Legate. educated by the daughter of a \dng. and in all respects highly accomplished. could not but know the mythological system of Egypt:. but he must have condemned the super· sUtions of that people. and despised the speculative absurdities of their priests; though some of their traditions concerning the creation and the flood were grounded in truth.. , , There is no shadow then of a foundation for an opinion. that MOSES borrowed the first nine or ten chapters of Genesis from the literature of Egypt: still less can the adamantine pillars of our Christian faith be moved by the result of any debates on the comparative antiquity of the Hindus and Egyptians, or of any inquiries into the Indian

Theology.~

.u. /Onn 1799. 1."23). 54. Ibid.. 1:1.76C.

37

36

Ad~

Antediluvian

----------------Postdiluvian Shem

N~h----------------

Ham------J.pheth

I

I The Confusion of Languages.

The people of the world are dMdod.

Peleg

I Abl
especially classical Greece, had toward the end of the eighteenth century become the main example of moral stature, intellectual capacity. artistic accomplishment, and political sense. The neoclassicism promoted by Johann

Winckelmann provided a model (not only for art; the historian George L. Masse has shown that classical ideals were also the basis for valuation of human types: the more like Greek statues, the higher up in the hierarchy)."

Neoclassicism's scholarly counterpart came to be called neohumanism, a mainly philological movement that had the honor to become the backbone of WilheJm von Humboldt's groundbreaking theory of civilization and education, realized in 1809 in what today is called the Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin. and thereafter spread to all the educational institutions ofEurope.1OO For Humboldt. the Hellenes appeared to be nobility incarnated. With knowledge of their language and cultural history. a new kind of human being could step forth: well rounded. harmonious, sincere. and responsible. By cultivating the feeling for ancient civilization and by adopting ~Greek~ virtues. the German bourgoisie could lead the German states away from feudal power· and life· systems without becoming involved in bloody and plebeian experiments of the type that followed the French Revolution. The feudal way of life would be banished with the help of public officials who had been vaccinated, by the Hum· boldtian educational system. against rash insanity and cowardly conservatism. Studies of ancient languages and cultures therefore became emblematic for the nationalistic German-speaking bourgeoisie's cultural and political program. and German scholars took the lead in investigating both classical and IndoEuropean cultures and mythologies. In the first volume of Martin Bernal's controversial Black Athena: The AfroAsiatic Roots ofClassical Civilization (1987), he describes how modern schol· arship on classical antiquity has been influenced by racist and nationalist ways of thinking. lll1 According to Bernal, a completely new model, which he 99. Moue 1997, '12f.. 25 100. About the history of claS$lcalscholal'$hip, see Bernal 1997. esp. 278-8), )05-1): and Landgren and Ostenberg 1996. 101. BladeAlhetlQ has been much debated, especially in the United States, where the discussion has been colored by the country's racist history. The most convincing critique ofBlade ....thetlQ has been of Bt-mal's own attempt to write a new history of the origin ofHdlaJ. The negative critique of his study of the older historiography hal been Iwi convincing. It is my understanding that Bernal's dftCriptlon of the parts that are essential for the study of the image of the Indo-Europeans-that is to say, about classical scholarship during the dghteenth and nin~eenthcentury (chaps. 4-9 In vol I)-Is larzely t'OITKl. For a critique of kmal'. historiogr.Iphy, see ankla under the hndl"& "Historiograph( in Lefkowitz and ROFt' 199'6. The eumpkos of errors In Sunil'. ~tltion

Fro," N04h~ Sons to the Aryan Rau

51

caDs the -Aryan moder and which was to iUuminate classical Greek culture. was created during the nineteenth century. With this title Bernal wants to stress that the Hellenes were considered. to be cultura11y independent of their Asiatic and African neighbors because of racist value systems. and that they were instead linked to their Aryan cousins. In Black Athena. it is above all the German philologist Karl Otfried MUller (1797-1840) who bears the blame for this view. One reason why Bernal singles out MUller is that he had argued, in Gesc:hidt~ helltni.sdter Stlimme und Stiid~ (1820-24) that the Hellenes' uniqueness and greatness was solely the result of their own efforts; the classical Greeks' debt to their OrientaJ. Semitic. and African neighbors was, according to MUller. negligible. 102 In other words. Millier presented the European cradle as self-made. The ideological victory was a given: if HelJas was to function as the example for a culturally high-standing German nation-state, it was essen. tial that the model not have been constituted by foreign cultures. Influences from neighboring peoples that could not be denied (especially the alphabet) were explained by the claim that the Greeks. on their own, had imported the item in question. With the Greek war of independence (1821-29), where the Greeks fought the Ottoman Empire. Muller's isolation of the Hellenes from the surrounding peoples became timely. and for the bourgeoisie. with their classical schooling, it seemed increasingly absurd that Greece and the West ever could have received anything valuable from the Orient. Miiller was the tirst one to radicaDy question the older historiography where the Greek culture was considered to be indebted above all to Egypt, and to that extent he was one engineer behind the "Aryan model."' But MUller was not, in spite of what Bernal says. much of a racist, nor was he fascinated with the Indian or the Indo·European heritage.103 In fact, it was not until the 1840sand 1850s that the image of Hellas changed. from having been a European cradle to an Indo· European one, through the work of the brothers Curtius.l/)4ln order to completely inoculate the Hellenes against all fo~eign influence, especially from the Semitic Phoenicians, Ernst Curtius constructed an "improved~ two-

th.t .re pointed out in the articles In Lefkowitz and Rogen do not, in my opinion. change Bernal's aentral view In any decisive way. Cf. ~vine's (1998) opinions about Lefkowitz and Rogen's anthology. See also the discussion between Bernal and critics In .pecial editions of VEST ("Black Athena" 1995) and Ta/ant4 ("Black Athena: Ten Years After" 1997). 10:1. K. O. MilDer 1810-24. 10]. Critique and ddenseofSunal'sviewof Millkrcan be found In "Black Athena: Ten Years After" 1997. Jodne H. BIok·. criticism of Bernal Is quite devutating on several poinU, and it if mUrdy ~If that Bernal demonized MUlier. 104- SH Sunall997, ]16-11.

52

From

Chapw ONtI

race theory in Griedtische Geschjchte (1857-67). The original population that the Indo-European Greeks had vanquished when they penetrated the southern Balkan peninsula had. according to Curtius. not been a Negroid or Near Eastern population, like in South Asia, but rather a primitive Indo-European population fragment rarisch-pelasgi.schen Volker'1.I05 1he Hellenes. "the Occidental Aryans,~ and the great culture they created were therefore the result of an adventurous conquest and at the same time, in contrast to the Indian culture. thoroughly Aryan.106 There is, however, no textual evidence in either Greek or Indian texts that such an invasion actually happened. Ancient legends about adventurous jour-

neys. such as the story aCthe Argonauts, have instead been interpreted as literary memories from the time of the conquests and have had to serve as proo( But the most important argument by Curtius. and other scholars. that an invasion actually took place is naturally the Indo--European origin of the Greek language. as well as the existence ofloanwords that are ofsuch a nature that conquerors are expected to borrow them from an original population (for example. topographical names). In spite of this, the Hellenes have never been as closely connected to the Indo--European discourse as the Indians and later. the Germanic peoples. In the historiography about the Indo-Europeans, the ancient Greeks have always posed a problem-partiy because the classicists have not allowed the idealized Hellas to be reduced to one among many Indo-European siblings. and partly because the Greek culture and religion never seemed quite suitable for Indo· European comparisons (they are said to be too distorted by Near Eastern ideas).

New Methods, New Homelllnds The theory about India as the original home of the Indo-Europeans. and the Indians as a kind of model Aryans. lost supporters during the nineteenth century, and other homelands and other model Aryans took their place instead. I07 The Indians' "Aryan- cousins. the Iranians or Persians. captivated many. Anquetil· Dupperon, Jones. and Herder all suggested, on some occasion. Iran (Persia) as the original home of the Indo-Europeans, There were many circumstances that made Iran an attractive possibility. Some scholars claimed that the Iranian Avestan rthe Zend language") was at least as old as Sanskrit, while others felt

los. Curtius 1874,1;]8. 106. Ibid.. l:ll. 107. On the phUoIosial and historiclll debate about the original home of the AryalU dwin& the niMteenth centurY, lee Sc:hradcr 1907, 1:1-21; and Mallory 197), a5-)l,

Noah~

Sons to the A1)'"n Race

53

that iran's central position between the indO-European extremes. India and Europe. was another strong argument. Other factors that argued for Iran came from the Bible. where Eden. from which the Aryans' forefathers must have come first of all, was said to be situated between four rivers_ It was felt that two of these could be identified. with the help of the Bible. as the Euphrates and the ligris, but the two others were problematic. Some scholars then saw a chance to include areas with IndO-European populations in the geography of Eden. For example. Lassen suggested that the two unknown rivers were the Indus and the Oxus (Amu·Darja) and that Eden and "Ancient Arya [Fornarienl," as the Swedish author Victor Rydberg calls the original home of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. had been in the Persian highlands.1IIlI Finally. analy~ ses of place·names and climatological facts in Avestan were said to point to Iranian areas. and J. G. Rhode concluded in Die heiJige Sage des undvolkes (1820) that the original home must have been where the Oxus and Jaxartes (Syr-Darja) have their sources. that is. in the Iranian-speaking Pamir. These and other arguments (the fact that the people of Iran, unlike those of India, were not humiliated by a colonial power was surely not unimportant) led. to Iran or lranian territories in Central Asia becoming the favorite locations for the original home from the 1820S to the 1880s.1119 There were, however, even more places in the world that could be pointed out as the homeland. If it had not been located in the Indian Himalayas or the Iranian Pamir. perhaps it had been in more western mountain areas? Some information pointed to the Caucasus. According to the Bible. Noah's ark was stranded on Mount Ararat. which was identified with a mountain in the Caucasus, and the postdiluvian race must therefore have begun populat·

108. Lassen 1841-61, 1:528(.; Rydberg 1886-89109- Mallory 1973. ~ 34L 4Lf.;: Cwtius 1874, 161.1lrune
58

Chapkr Onll

Consequently, these people spoke what Muller calls "nomadic or Turanian languages.'"I2l During the nineteenth and a good part of the twentieth centu· ries, the opposition between the Iranians or Aryans, ~people of the plow" (PIE ·ar(y)o-, [ran), and the Turanians, the warlike and barbaric nomads, was one of the central pillars in the discourse about the Indo·Europeans.1zz (During the second half of the twentieth century, however, there was a complete reversal of this opposition, as we shall see in chapter s.) The archaeologist Marek Zvelebil has described how archaeologists and his· torians during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries systematically idealized those free farmers who cultivated their own land and posited them as "our~ true ancestors. iU According to Zvelebil, there were three main reasons why farmer romanticism was so strong within the ranks of humanistic scholarship of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. First of all, it was a reaction against industrialism and urbanization. In spite of the fact that nearly all of the scholars belonged to the bourgeoisie, which encouraged and profited from these changes, humanists tended to turn their backs on geuhiift. Secondly. nationalistic propaganda led to a fetishizing of the fatherland and those who cultivated the earth. Finally. the idealization of farmers legitimized colonial· ism, in which European farmers drove out, ~civilized~ or eradicated the ~na· tive people~ of colonized lands. Probably few ideas have had more influence over modern European thought than that of the cultural-geographical matrix whose center is made up ofcivilized, virtuous farmers who fight against nature (both internal and external) surrounded by ~primitive people~ rsavages" if a contemporary group, "barbarians~ if ancient ones). Wandering peoples who are forced to look for animals and plants to eat were considered low, while settled ones with control over animals and the growth of crops were consid· ered of higher standing. The central point seems to have been whether people controlled nature (which is the case with the agrarian and pastoral societies that manipulate vegetation and tame animals) or were subject to the whims of nature (which was said to be the case with those societies that had to follow

F. M. MUller 186"]-75. :a:9; 1874, 95. 112. Difference in material culture could be spiced up with raclal·scientillc specuJatiOI\5. So a certain Charles Morris in 1888 claimed thalW Aryans, living in Caucasus. beca~ while when they made a transition from having been a Mongoloid herding people to becoming agriculturalists. and the inventor of the skuIl.measuring system (the cephalic index), the Swede Andert Rettiw.. named the dolichocephalic head shape Aryan and the brachyttphalic OM Thnnian (Mallory 1973.:J3; PoIiakov 1974. :164). 1:a). Zvdebill996. l:al.

5 Martin Eski! Winge, 7hor~ Batik againsl the Giants and the Midgdrd Ser~nt (1871). Along with the scene depicted In Winge's iconi:r.ed painting, Apollo's struggle against Python and Indra's fight with Vrtra were interpreted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries at the struggle of the Aryan against both the brute force of nature and primitive peoples. (Henningsen et at 1991.)

60

From Noah's Sons w the Aryan Race

Chapter Om!

nature looking for berries. game, and grazing lands). What ennobles human beings. and elevates them above the animals. is that they grow, cultivate. and materialize their dreams and ideals. Thus, it is good to emigrate in order to spread culture. but bad to emigrate in order to find food. In the century of colonialism, the European imagination fostered the idea that all of civilization must have a cu1ture~creating race to thank for its exis~

tenee. Certain peoples were considered to be masters ofcivilization and culture; others were incapable of any goal.oriented creativity. And who could doubt that the true virtuosi of civilization were the Indo-Europeans, those whom Bryant and Jones had called Hamites and seen as heathens. world conquerors, and cultural heroes? What people had colonized America, and was in the process of colonizing Africa, Asia, and Oceania? The Indo-Europeans. Portuguese, Spanish. French, Italian. English, German, and Russian are all Indo-European languages that have spread across the world from the sixteenth century onward. The Indo-Europeans as born conquerors and the maintainers of all civilization. therefore became a cliche. Using an image that was popular in its time. the lndo-Europeanist August Friedrich Pott explained, in Etymologische Forschung (1833-36), that the original home of the Indo-Europeans must have been in Asia, since the spread of civilization follows the sun; therefore, Europe's conquest of America is only a natural, legal continuation of the Asiatic Aryans' conquest of Europe. m

Conclusion There is a rivulet that leads from the genealogical lists of Noah's sons' tribes (the Semitic Hebrews, the Japhetic heathens around the Mediterranean, and the cursed and empire-building Hamites) in the book ofGenesis, to the abundance of literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about Aryans and Indo-Europeans. In the wake of colonial discoveries of new peoples in Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania, the Mosaic ethnography was actualized and revised. Jacob Bryant and William Jones brought Noah's sons a step closer to the Indo-Europeans by describing them as ancient cultural heroes who traveled for discovery, and as apostates whose mythologies and pseudohistorical texts contained echoes of Moses's holy narrative. The discovery of the lndo~ European language family in 1786 brought with it a change of the supporting foundations: now it was no longer the authority of the Bible, but that of comparative linguistics that supported the new people. Philologists uncovered 1:l4. Poliakov 1974. 197·

61

several language families that were isolated from each other, and together with historians. they used ancient sources and artifacts to relate these families to each other and to places. people. and events. The historical linguistic construction was both supported and challenged in the nineteenth century by racial anthropology, which created its own image of the Indo- Europeans. or Aryans, based on similarities and differences among selected parts of the human body among various groups of people. When Miiller saw racial anthropology grow strong and expropriate his term ~Aryan race,~ he distanced himself from it. l25 In a lecture in Strasbourg in 1872 Muller declared that: These two sciences. the Science of Language and the Science of Man, cannot. at least for the present, be kept too much asunder; and many misunderstandings, many controversies, would h;lVe been avoided. if scholars had not attempted to draw conclusions from language to blood, or from blood to language. When each of these sciences shall have carried out independently its own classification of men and languages, then, and then only, will it be time to compare their results; but even then, I must repeat, what I have said many times before, it would be as wrong to speak of Aryan blood as of dolichocephalic grammar.L26 The importance of the shift from the Aryan or Indo-European "race~ or people as a linguistic family to a physical-genetic species cannot be stressed enough. The shift marks the transition from the realm of possibility to that of necessity: a person is inescapably a member or not a member of a biological entity. From the point of view of romantic philology, one could, for example, claim that Yiddish-speaking Jews or English-speaking blacks belong to the Aryan ~race.~ In this regard Thomas R. Trautmann seems to have been correct when he wrote that "philology is bad for racial hygiene.~L27 At the end of the nineteenth century, the culturalist philology was unable to prevent the word urace~ from being usurped by naturalist forces, and human beings came to be seen more and more as part of the necessary realm of nature, rather than the contingent realm of culture. The change in the concept of race, and the forward march of racial anthropology from the mid-nineteenth century, was also connected to a general shift in authority-from humanism, idealism, and Christianity to "the new Enlightenment,~ positivism, and materialism.\2.lI The older humanism and the new Enlightenment were united in the belief in the liberating I:lS. Volgll967. 7; Tl'lllltmann 1997, 183; Chaudhurl1974. 313-16. 1:16. F. M. Milller 1867-7S. 4::1:13. 1:18. ~ Fringsmyr 1980, 169f. 1:17. Tnlutmann 1997. 181.

62

Chaptu One

potential of scientific knowledge, in the possibility of accomplishing social improvements politically, and in the need to find or retrieve a view of life that suited the modern human being. But while humanism tried to found its ideology on the remains of Christianity and romanticism, the representatives of the new Enlightenment thought that the laws of nature should be decisive in how man formed his view of the world and organized society. The contrast between those who wanted to put a culturalist and those who wanted to put a naturalist perspective on the Indo-Europeans is a recurring feature in the two-hundred-year*old history of the scholarship: In chapter 2. we will meet the cultural and humanistic research that dominated during the nineteenth century, and in chapters 3 and 4 we will see how naturalism spread.

CHAPTER 2

A Place in the Sun: The Paradigm of Nature Mythology

"DAWN LOVES TH E SUN" At the height of colonialism, there was no interest in bringing out the similarities between the different peoples of the world. The ancient history of the Indo-Europeans became, as we saw in chapter 1, the proof that one branch of humanity was predestined to exploit and rule the others. At the same time, the ground was prepared for researching the spiritual and religious universe of this immutable dominant group: What religion and mythology is suitable to cultural heroes? In the two centuries of research on Indo*Europeans, several different theories about their religion have been presented. One of these theories supported, and was in turn supported by, the image of the Indo-Europeans as civilized farmers. Among many of the thinkers that we have already met in the previous chapter there were ideas, conceptions, facts, and conclusions that became fundamental for the construction of this theory. It received its final form, however, in the works of Friedrich Max MUller and his colleagues in what has come to be called the school of nature mythology. Here it is appropriate to talk about a paradigm in Thomas Kuhn's sense; that is to say, a system of thought that is the framework for the puzzle solVing of normal science. This chapter will be about the paradigm of nature mythology that dominated IndoEuropean research during the second part of the nineteenth century. But before examining the nature-mythological research itself, we should refer to chapter I to see how some ofthe supporting pillars in the paradigm of nature mythology were raised by scholars that we have already discussed.

The Religion ofLight In Oberdie Sprache und Weisheit der lndier (1808), Schlegel protested against the thesis that the ancient Indian religion had been pantheistic. He suggested describing it as theistic, meaning the belief that God is a person who is sepa-

63

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Chapter Two

rated from the world and is dualistic.1 According to Schlegel. the ancient Indians saw the world. as an arena in which the power of good and light struggled against the low power of darkness. In -the old religion of light,· the divine revealed itse:lfthrough the benevolent phenomena of nature, especially through sunlight and fire. Reading Schlegel's presentation today. one might wonder whether he has in mind the pre~Muslim religion of the Iranians. Zoroastrianism, rather than the religion that emerges in the Vedic texts. Schlegel had in fact become acquainted with Zoroastrianism in Paris. where he had not only learned. Sanskrit but also studied the sibling of this language. Avestan. with Antoine-Leonard de Chezy.l He had presumably become acquainted with the Avestan imaginary world through a translation that was by chance accessible in French. The reason for this -accidental translation" was that the Indomanic hypothesis that the cultural history of India was even older than that of the Hebrews had raised the question of whether the oldest r~Ligious texts of India might be as venerable as the ancient source texts of Christianity. For profes~ sional historians of religions as well as for religiously interested laymen. it therefore became important to copy. translate. and interpret the Rigveda, in particular. In the search for copies of the Rigveda, Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil~Duperron was able. with the help of some Parsi priests, to obtain what he considered to be the oldest of all Vedic texts.' However. the Zend~ Avesta. which came out in 1771, was not, as promised. an archaic Vedic text. but turned out instead to be a translation from Pahlavi of translated parts of the Avesta. Knowledge about Indo-Iranian languages and the ancient cultures of the Indians and Iranians was. however. still so incomplete that it was not until well into the nineteenth century that philologists reached a concensus about what book Anquetil~Duperron had actually translated. Whether Schlegel believed that the Zend-Avesta was in fact an ancient Indian text, or whether he'instead only (and quite rightly so) Imagined a close relationship between Indian and Iranian religious history, I cannot say. The fact is in any case that he valued the Iranian religion very highly. Usually the teachings in the Avesta are interpreted as a radical dualism in which an evil and a good power, best known in the Pahlavi forms Ohrmuzd and Ahriman, are involved in a cosmic battle. In aber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, Schlegel writes about this religion that ~yet, notwithstanding these defects Idualistic systems], the intellectual religion of the Persians deserves to rank

Schlegd 1915. :129-4:1:I- Struc·Oppenberg 1915. chuvili. So About Anquetil-DupftTOl\. 1ft Schwab 1984. 66(.. 1.S8--64, ~ paulm.

1-

A Plaa in the Sun

65

next to the Christian faith and doctrine, as propounded in the Old Testament and developed and completed in the New: its severe truth and high moral tendency give it a decided superiority to all other Oriental systems:"· The idea that the original religion of the Indo-Europeans was a cult of the benevolent light also recurred in Karl Otfried Muller's analysis of Apollo in Die Dorier (1814).5 Muller partly diverges from the traditional interpretation of Apollo as a personification of Light and the sun (Apollo Foibos). explaining instead that ~this true Hellenic, Doric divinity~ certainly is Linked to light but that it is not an example of crass, materialistic nature worship.' Apollo's connection to light and the sun must instead be understood in a symbolic way, as an expression of the true nature of the god: spiritual enlightenment, purity, and goodness. Schlegel had argued exactly the same thing about the ancient Indian gods: the fact that these were connected to various natural phenomena does not mean that they have anything at all in common with the degenerated Hindu nature religion and materialism oflater times? Both Schlegel and MulIer also label the objects of study a ~dualisticpsupernatural cult,· which means a religion in which darkness and light represent opposite ethical imperatives. Even in Germanic territory-Indo~Europeanmythology's third leg, next to the Indo~Iranian (Aryan) and classical ones-scholars have found the same ~religion of light:" In the chapter ~Geschichte des Heidentums im nordlichen Europa" in Creuzer's Symbolik und Mythologie tier alten VOlker, Franz Josef Mone writes that the battle of light against dark was at the core of the ancient Germanic religion.' Mone broke with the tradition from Snorri Sturlusson, where Odin and the Aesir were interpreted euhemeristically as people from Asia. and claimed instead that Odin. the highest god of the Germans. was a symbol of holy light. I believe in general that the knowledge of Iranian dualism was very important for the construction of a Proto-Indo-European religion, especially during the second part of the nineteenth cenury, when many researchers also located the original homeland on Iranian ground. The Iranian dualism actually contributed to, or reinforced, many of the most important components of the theory of •. Schlegel 1889, :a83; In English in SchIege1197S, 2.:19: 'Ungeachtet dleser Mangel wird man der lntdlelr:tuellen Rdlglon d~ I\':rser, nichst der chrlstlJchen Lehre, so wie diese 1m a!ten TestlJment vorbereltet, und 1m neuen atUgefUhrt WId vollendet 1st,Ieicht den Vonug der Erhabenheit und relativen Wahrhcit vcr allen andem orientali5cMn Denkarten, wenigsten5 in moralischef Raclalcht, luerkennm." So K. O. Mliller 1'20-14, :a:199-366. 4Q9I: 7. SdUqelI9?So 2.:11. 6. Ibid.. 1'20-14. :&:201. ,. About Mane, 6ee Seipp 1968, l$.

66

67

Indo-European religion that will be discussed in the following chapters: dual· ism, the motif of struggle, the good power as a sun and light god, as well as the emphasis on human participation in the struggle between good and evil. The Iranian tradition also held a special place in the reconstruction of IndoEuropean religion by Adolphe Pictet. but in quite a different way. Pietel held that it was only the Iranians who had preserved the original monotheism. while all other Indo*European people had defected to polytheism (-multiplication

des dieux"V The man who had saved monotheism was the Iranian prophet zarathustra. the Moses of the Indo-Europeans, a figure who fascinated both scholars and laymen during the nineteenth century. Pictet's main proof that a ·primitive monotheism" had ever existed at"all is devd-, the word for -god- in Sanskrit. According to Pietel, the word meant "high god~ and was the root of both the Greeks' and the Romans' word for gods (Lat. deus, Gk.the6s).10 The "primitive Aryans~ (les Aryas primiti/s) had worshipped this high god with prayers and a cu.lt of offerings-they did not. however, need priests. temples, and idols. Schlegel. MuUer. Mone. and, to some degree. Pictet thus understood the Indo-European reUgions as religions in which the good god is manifested through the light of nature. The Indo-European religions are semipantheistic. monotheistic, and dualistic. During the nineteenth century, these assumptions formed the basis of the first paradigm within Indo-European scholarship. The person who contributed the most to creating this paradigm of nature mythology or nature allegory was Friedrich Max Muller.

Friedrich Max Muller The German-English philologist and historian of religions Friedrich Max Mill· ler has come to personify nineteenth-century research about Indo-European religion. From the middle of the century until his death. MUller was an intellectual star whose lectures about Aryan religion cou.ld attract as many as 1.500 listeners. One of his biographers calls him "the Erasmus of the nineteenth century; an epithet that might be justified insofar as both Erasmus of Rotterdam and Muller were the foremost philologically oriented humanists of their time. but neither of them was honored mainly for his ingenious thinking. MiilIer's

9. Pktet 18s9-630 1708, '11f.

10. Ibid.• 'lift'. According 10 todaY'1 understanding, the Latin dclU did not develop from Sanskrit tkva, but rather both developed from ProtG-lndo-European ·de/uN, Ind Greek tht6s il not rdated to these: words at .11.

6 Friedrich Max Muller (1902). Photograph by Walter L. Collis. Hill & Saunders, Oxford

fame rested instead on his reputation as a Livingstone of the academy. an explorer of the oldest history of the human soul. Through his work about the origin of religions, Indian literature, the Aryan character. and the relationship between language and thought. new ground was broken in a field ofknowledge (the history of religions) that earlier had been almost unknown or that had been inadequately explored from a scientific viewpoint. In the previous chapter, I discussed how Muller attempted to make the British colonials understand that their Indian subjects were "Aryan brothers." MUlier had Imbibed his love for India in his childhood through his father,

68

ChaptuTwo

who was a famous romantic poet.1I During his years of study. his interest grew even more when he read Schlegel's aber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. went to Bopp's lectures on comparative philology. and studied Sanskrit with Hermann Brockhaus. In 1845. he traveled to Paris, which had emerged as a Mecca of Orientalism during the 18305 and 18405. With the intervention of Baron von Eckstein, he came into contact with Eug~ne Burnouf (1801-52), the grand old man of Oriental scholarship.u Hurnour was part of the Catholic circle that. following Schlegel, looked for traces ofan original revelation among the Indo-European texts. and he convinced Milller to begin translating the most tradition-steeped of all Indian texts: the Rigveda, ~the Aryan Bible:"l] When MUller's classic translation was completed, barely thirty years later, he was already a well-known man. He had by then published a number of popular books about religion and linguistics, and he had participated in lively debates with Charles Darwin, theosophists, and Indian reformers, as well as published the well-received novel DeutsdTe Liebe. His fame also rested on the fact that he was the editor of the first fifty volumes of the first comprehensive English-language collection of non-Christian holy sources, The Sacred Books ofthe East (1879-94).

At age twenty-five, Muller moved to Oxford, where he worked until his death. He became part of a circle of Oxonians who shared his interest in German philosophy and science and his admiration for the English author Thomas Carlyle. The friends in his circle-James Anthony Froude, Matthew Arnold, Charles Kingsley, and Christian K. J. von Bunsen-had a passion for the "Aryan~ -Teutonic," and "AnglO-Saxon" heritage. They studied the latest German Bible criticism, and in religious questions they tended to welcome liberalizations within the Anglican Church (which conservatives saw as -Germanification-). MiilIer's and his friends' Christian faith was strongly colored by bourgeois

II. Therure three bioBn.phie5ofMUUer. Trompll978: CN.udhuri 1974:and voigt 1967. Unkwtunatdy, all three are rather narrow In their ptnpK1.Wts. For the scientific and historical context one can consult Trautmann (1991), Dorsan (I9SS, 1968), Stocking (1987), and Bernal (1997). The letter collection published by MillIer's wife is also of Interest (F. M. Muller 1902). Two years after the Swtdlsh edition of this book, Lourtns P. Van den Bo5ch publlshtd a monograph on Miiller: Frkdridt MIU MiUln= A Lift Devoud to the HunuUlities. Leiden: Brill,:1OO1. 12. About Burnouf. who In UJIOI*latiofl with Ouistian I...assen initiated the Rudy of Buddhist Pal.i texts and who also carried out pionffl'illi work with the Vedic texts., Alat4 and Punuuu. and who actually 5hould haw been discussed In ~ ckWlln this book. see Schwab 1984. ~ et passim. 13. The expression was originally coined by the lranianist lames D. Darmestettr (Olender 199~ 9).

A Plaa in the Sun

69

humanism and idealism. Their relationship to the emerging modern society was ambivalent: on the one hand, they saw the potential for mankind's Iibera· tion from fossilized ideas and norms; on the other hand. they were afraid of banalization, vulgarization, and the rule of the flesh, which risked entailing that their love for the true and beautiful would be replaced by a love of pleasure, entertainment, and vanities.M MiilIer's personal faith was Lutheran, with strong strains of Pietism. which made him less concerned than many others of his generation about the German Bible criticism's questioning of the Bible's reliability as a historical source. For Muller, Jesus was a messenger oflove who had never been the same as the Christ of theology. As a philologist and historian, Muller considered it just as natural to apply nominal and real criticism to the Semitic Bible as to the indoEuropean texts. He was a child of the liberal theology that emerged during the nineteenth century and that distanced itself just as strongly from the older orthodoxy as it did from atheistic rationalism. The liberal theologians in general took a positive attitude to modern society and science and tried to tone down the fantastic and miraculous sides of the Christian message. They held on to the idea of a natural theology: revelation is not necessary in order for people to believe in God, since belief arises automatically when rational people are confronted with the realities of life, The origin of the notion ofgod, according to MiilIer, can be found in the experience of the infinite.iS MiilIer wrote that every finite sensation was followed by a sensation, or, if that expression was considered too strong, a feeling or premonition of the infinite and used the example that when one looks at the horizon, a feeling soon arises about something beyond it, and something beyond that, and so forth. 16 From this recognition of the infinite springs the pious feeling of man's inconsequence and dependence on the ali-encompassing, the absolute, the infinite-God. But if the belief in God arises natura1Jy, then why do the religions appear to be so different in different lands and among different peoples? Why do such varied religious types as Greek polytheism, Catholic monotheism, and West African -fetishism" exist? What is the meaning of the fact that there

14- F. M. MUller 1867-7So ,pI3. IS- See F. M. MilDer 1880, 7-53. 159-'101. My presentation of Miilltr's philosophy and h.lstorioBraphy is mainly bued on the 15O'paJt' articH' -£su,y on Comparative Mythology" (1856: in MUlIer 186'7-75). which camt to function as Miilltr's propammadcttxt. and the Hibbert lectures hdd in 1878, published In Swedish in 1880 III'Ider the tilk kJisionvu IU$/NWII och uMekling. as w~ as the wlddy read lfftrodudioff to the $ciOlu of RelipJn (Ilm). with a Swedish tnnsbtion In 1874 by the pioneering Iibtm thtoIotian Fredrik Fthr. 16. F. M. M(iller 1880, 47.

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ChapurTwo

A PlaCfl in the Sun

have been imperfect religions? These questions are the motor behind Muller's research project and his entry into Aryan mythology: "I do not yet despair of discovering the chord by which the dissonance of the Veda and Zendavesta and the Chinese Kings wi.ll be brought into unison with the key-note of the Bible. There can be nothing accidental. nothing inharmonious on earth or in history; the unresolved discords in the East must find their solution, and we dare not leave off till we have discovered the why and the wherefore."I11hus, among Bible-like texts, the philologist should look for traces of the natural

revelation. The philologist's task is to hunt. "like an Indian trapper, spying (or every footprint, every layer, every broken blade that might tell and testify ofthe former presence of man in his early wanderings and searchings after light and truth."11 MUller found one definite trace in India. Just as Jones had rejoiced at being able to re-create the name of the Proto-Indo·European heavenly father. MillIer saw this reconstruction as a proof of God's presence in history. Fifteen years after he wrote the words above, he wrote about the reconstruction of ·D~ p~t~r:"Doesit not show us, at the earliest dawn of history, the fathers of the Aryan race. the fathers of our own race, gathered in the great temple of nature, like brothers of the same house, and looking up in adoration to the sky as the emblem of what they yearned for. a father and a God. Nay. can we not hear in that old name of jupirer, i.e. Heaven·Father, the true key·note which still sounds on in our own prayer, 'Our Father which is in heaven: and which imparts to these words their deepest tone. and their fullest importrt' If it is possible to rediscover the Christian high god in Indian and Roman mythology, might it not then be possible to find him in all other religions as well? The ·science of religion; or history of religions. that Millier worked all of his life to establish had precisely this goal: to find traces of the original experience of the infinite among the oldest and most primitive peoples. With an attitude that was unusually tolerant for its time. Muller wrote about the religions of the world: ·We little thought when we heard for the first time the name of Jupiter. degraded it may be by Homer and Ovid into a scolding husband or a faithless lover, what sacred records lay enshrined in this unholy name. We shall have to learn the same lesson again and again in the Science of Religion. viz. that the place whereon we stand is holy ground."20 Muller's attempt to win sympathy for the establishment of a science of religion in which Christianity would not be given any privileged place a priori was opposed by theologians

17. F. M. Mllller 1901, 1:198. 18. F. M. Mlliler 1867-75, d)[.

19. Ibid.• 4:1.1.1[

1.0. F. M. Muller 1874. 104; In Enallsh In F. M. MllIltr 18730 1~

71

who considered it both blasphemous and fruitless to compare the Bible and heathen myths. One Catholic priest even called Mwler's series of lectures about the religions of the world ·a crusade against Divine revelation, against Jesus Christ, and against Christianity;":!1 More romantic natures did not appreciate MillIer's initiative either, because they felt that religion was too holy a subject to be examined in the cold light of science. A third group thought that there was about as much value in studying religion as in studying alchemy. Even ifMillIer worried about certain consequences that the comparative science of religion might have-for example, that it could be misused. to confirm certain opinions held by the charlatans within the Theosophical Society-he was convinced of its necessity and importance: ·Those who would use a comparative study of religions as a means for debasing Christianity by exalting the other religions of mankind. are to my mind as dangerous allies as those who think it necessary to debase all other religions in order to exalt Christianity. Science wants no partisans. I make no secret that the true Christianity, I mean the religion of Christ, seems to me to become more and more exalted the more we know, and the more we appreciate the treasures of the truth hidden in the despised religions ofthe world. But no one can honestly arrive at that conviction, unless he uses honestly the same measures for all religions~ It is true, MiiI1er felt, that many traditions and customs of foreign religions are pure superstition and ignorance, but the same is also true for Christianity in its existing form. The science of religion has the task of diagnosing these spiritual ailments, and is just as necessary as the doctor who treats physical ailments. Because scholar· ship uncovers the true and common core ofall religions (Religion), the world's religiOns can be raised to higher levels and be reformed. When this work has been completed, a perfect religion will finally evolve. and religion will regain the importance that ·ahistorical rationalism,· that is to say, Enlightenment thinking and positivism, had taken away from it.D

Understanding Myths Muller's program for the science of religion contains other points besides showing the unity of all religions. The scholarship should also show that there is a rational meaning for the varying customs, rituals, and conceptions of the divine found in different religions. The goal is, in other words, to demonstrate

1.1. Cited In Ch.udhurtl914. 362 (d. F. M. Mllller 1901, 1.:458). 1.:1.. F. M. MlI.Utr 1874, l.ar~ In English in F. M. Mlliler 1873. 37l. 1.3. F. M. MQIler 1874, 191.

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A PlDa in the Sun

Cht:lpter Two

that the seemingly irrational multitude of religions is in fact rational. In his

youth. MUller was fascinated by Hegel's philosophy, like "everybody else who pretended to have any kind of mental life; to use Nirad C. Chaudhuri's poorly chosen words. 24 In contrast to the romantics' obsession with paradisical origins, Hegel preached a modern belief in universal evolutionism, a development that implies that God. ..the world spirit," should reach perfection and selfknowledge. A distinguishing feature of the Hegelian tradition is that historical

development should be seen not only as meaningful. but above aU as rational. Divine reason is at work everywhere: "There is nothing irrational in either history or nature:-» The Hegelian idealism of reason left deep traces within most of the humanistic subjects, including also theology. Liberal theology was spurred by Hegel's philosophy. and Muller became one of the best known representatives of the movement. Hand in hand with the belief in a rational development went the belief that this meant a greater humanity. an increased degree of cohumanity and goodness. During the nineteenth century. liberal theologians liked to use the teachings in the book of Genesis about man as God's image in order to emphasize the role of human beings as participants in the perfection of creation. Muller formulates it as "Human nature is divine nature modified."'K In the very influential programmatic text "Essay on Comparative Mythology; Muller writes: The history of the world. or. as it is called. "Universal History; has laid open new avenues of thought. and it has enriched our language with a word which never passed the lips of Socrates or Plato, or Aristotle-mankind. Where the Greek saw barbarians. we see brethren; where the Greek saw heroes and demigods. we see our parents and ancestors; where the Greek saw nations (f8Vfl). we see mankind. toiling and suffering. separated by oceans. divided by language. and severed by national enmity.yet evermore tending. under a divine control. towards the fulfilment of that inscrutable purpose for which the world was created, and man placed in it. bearing the image of God. History. therefore. with its dusty and mouldering pages, is to us as sacred a volume as the book of nature. In both we read. or we try to read, the reflex of the laws and thoughts of a Divine Wisdom. 27 If nothing can exist that is against reason. if everything that happens does so in accordance with a divine providence. then why are there religious expressions that seem to be the opposite of the true faith? The reconstruction of the

heavenly father made it possible for MOiler to confirm the existence of a common core for the Aryan and Semitic traditions. The Aryan religions. however. included other gods and histories about their personalities. drives, and deeds that were not as easy to handle. For example. why have people told stories about the highest god as a rapist in the shape of a swan? Who created all these myths that are "absurd and irrational. and frequently opposed to the principles of thought. religion. and morality?"2I For Miiller. it was absolutely clear that there must be some way to explain the existence of these blasphemous myths. If this was not possible. then the hypothesis about ~a regular and consistent progress of the human intellect" must be re;ected..19 One of the basic assumptions in MUlIer's Christian-bourgeois worldview was thus at stake. In the mid-nineteenth century. there was a great variety of theories about the nature of myth from which MUlIer could choose in order to explain their origin. Most orthe theories assigned. a positive value to the myths. and the fact is that Miiller's aversion to myths is atypical for humanists of the nineteenth century. Most of them let themselves be seduced by the heroism. imagination. and poetic qualities of the tales. This positive view of myths was. however. not old. but stemmed from the romantics' protest against the rational iconoclasm of the Enlightenment philosophers. which caused an upward valuation of ancient and medieval cultures. This also meant that ~myth~ came to be seen as an interesting and important element in premodern views of life. Another factor that contributed to raising the status of myths was the fact that the classical mythologies now were joined by other tales that seemed to belong to the same genre. These mythlike narratives did not come only from the Indian. Persian. or Chinese high cultures. but also from the "savages· in Africa and America. Through the Songs ofOssian. Paul Henri Mallet's work about the Eddic songs. and new editions of medieval legends such as the NibeJungslied. the European barbaric peoples also added their gifts to the mythological treasures of the world. Finally Herder. in Volkslieder (l778). connected myths with peasant culture and folk narrative art. What had originally been a Greek genre concept was thus expanded and came to be seen as a universal form of expression. In the follOWing discussion. I will try to briefly describe four main trends in the reflection about myths during the nineteenth century.30

:18.

Ibid.. :1;;11.

Ibid.• 2:17. 30. lht synlhHis II based mainly on Vrlts 1961; .nd Feldnan and Richardson 1975; for more re(erencft to the hlltory of the COI\C'l!pt myth. It'e ArvMiason 1999; and Lincoln 2000. :19.

:u. Chaudhuri 197", 79; Trompf 1978, 8ff. "15- F. M. Mlliler 1867-7S0 2:6.

:16. :17.

Cited In Oaudhurll97", 381.. F. M. Mllller 1867-75. 2:Sf.

73

or

74

Chapur1Wo

The traditional Chri5tian and rationalist perspective: Myths are lies. Ever since the church fathers, non·Judeo-Christian tales about supernatural happenings and divine creatures, ~myths· (Gk. mythos). or "fables- (Lat.fabula), have been labeled as heathen falsehoods that arose from hostile or stupid attempts to try to understand the message of Christianity, or from Satanic conspiracies. During the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment philosophers took up this conception of myth and turned it against Christianity: The tales of the Bible are also ·myths~ childish legends, and old wives' tales. In the pre· vious chapter. we saw that similarities between the tales of Christianity and heathen material were used in precisely this way by Voltaire. an anticlerical writer. Within the rationalistic movement it was popular to explain the origin of myths euhemerically, which means that they are unveiled as bad historiography: the gods and heroes of the myths were actually ordinary mortals whose powers had been exaggerated with time and whose being had been assigned superhuman abilities. 1. The naturali5tic perspective: Myths are explanations of nature. David Hume declares in The Natural Hi5tory of Religion (1757) that mythology is only one branch on the tree of religion. which has been watered by people's fears and ignorance since the beginning of time. The fear of powerful natural processes (thunder, drought, eclipses, and so forth) drove ancient people to make the incomprehensible comprehensible by ascribing human qualities to nature. Religion is "sick men's dreams:"31 Hume's theory was later developed further by Charles Dupuis in Origine de tous /es culles ou La Religion universelle (1795). According to Dupuis, all religion has been mediated by evil priests and foolish poets, but its actual root can be found in man's experience of nature. Among other things, ancient people were faSCinated by nature's capacity to regenerate itself, and they began to imagine that all of nature consists of differently gendered creatures whose sexual union creates the changes of nature. The rituals in this ancient religion consisted mainly of fertility cults dedicated to the beneficial sun. The worship of Jesus (Sol invictus) was, according to citoyen Dupuis, the most successful sun cult in history. 3. The nationalistic perspective: Myths are expressions of the soul of the people. This perspective is above all based on Herder's thinking. If myths can be found in all times and in all cultures, then according to this reasoning. they are probably an essential component of the integration of social groups and of the spiritual maturation of the individual. Myths and similar narratives, like legends and folktales, all have, according to Herder, a national or ethnic 1.

31. Cited in ~man and Richardson Ill?S. IS
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7S

stamp, since they were formed when the folk soul encountered the natural environment. F. A. Wolf gave more credibility to this perspective when he used a new source-critical methodology in Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) to prove that the Homeric epics were not the work of a single author. Instead, the Iliad and the Odyssey were probably composed about sao B.C. from diverse folktales. The great classical epics thus could be traced to older mythopoeic folk poetry. 4- The symbolic perspective: Myths are veiled wisdom. We have already encountered one variant of this perspective in the work of Bryant and Jones, who both imagined that the biblical truths about the creation and oldest history of mankind also could be found in heathen mythologies. A similar view was taken by Creuzer and Gorres, but with the difference that Bryant's and Jones's deism here gave way to a speculative Catholicism. In Symbolik und Mythologie der alten .VOlker, Creuur, for example, relates that the Brahmans had preserved the memory of a divine intervention in the world.:J1 They had then repackaged this originaJ revelation into symbols, which Creuzer interpreted in a Neoplatonist way as signs that can connect the divine with the earthly. the infinite with the finite. The Brahmans then emigrated to the Near East and Greece to spread the original religion. However. the simple people who inhabited these areas were unable to understand the teachings of the priests. For instead of understanding the symbols intuitively, they began to speak with, interpret, and explain the symbols. With that, the mystical transcendence of the symbols was dissolved and they were reduced to elements in aJlegorical myths. The task of the modern scholar is, according to Creuzer and the champions of the symbolic perspective, to penetrate the overgrown allegories of the myths in order to reach the original idea. Using Johann Jakob Bachofen's expression, the symbolic perspective sees myths as ·symbol exegesis;"33 The symbolic perspective was held in trust during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by a Christian tradition that was originally liberal theological, later mystifying or ·vitalistic,~ and in which the Bible was -demythologized: M The expression Mdemythologize must not be interpreted as aligning with the rationalistic perspective. It was not a matter of showing that the mythical tales In the Bible are nonsense, but on the contrary, of rejecting the narrative structure of these tales because it was simply a supplement to the true, symbolic content of the tale, which the interpreter could access using his intuition. 3"l. 5H Feldman and Richardson 1!nSo 388[: and Momigliano 1994, 114. 33. fMchofrn 1954, 61.

76

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Language and Mythology Strictly speaking. Muller did not adhere to any of these four perspectives, but developed a viewpoint of his own. In order to explain the origins of myths he founded the discipline of comparative mythology, which would use linguistic and philological tools to trace and compare various blasphemous myths. One could say that comparative mythology relates to the science of religion as pathology relates to physiology. Theoretically. it builds further on the idea that the notion of a divine creator and lord originates from man's encounter with the forces of nature. its ingenuity and regularity. According to Muller, there

was one natural phenomenon that awoke the religious feelings of ancient people more than others, namely light. the sun's path across the sky, the play between day and night. This conception was strengthened by the fact that the Vedic pantheon consisted of gods called "beings of light" (devd-) and that one of the foremost of these gods was the Light sky (Dyaus). On a personal level, Muller found the religious feelings behind this form of religion very understandable: Let us imagine, as well as we can, the healthy and strong feelings of a youthful race of men, free to follow the call of their hearts,-unfeuered by the rules and prejudices of a refined society, and controlled only by those laws which nature and the glOlce5 have englOlved on every human heart. Let us imagine such hearts suddenly lighted up by love,-by a feeling of which they knew not either whence it came and whither it would carry them; an impulse they did not even know how to name. If they wanted to name it, where could they look? Was not love to them like an awakening from sleep? Was it not like a morn IOIdiating with heavenly splendour over their souls, pervading their hearts with a glowing warmth, purifying their whole being like a fresh breeze, and illuminating the whole world around them with a new light? If it was so, there was but one name by which they could express love,-there was but one similitude for the roseate bloom that betlOlYS the dawn of love,-it was the blush of the day. the rising of the sun. -The sun has risen~ they said, where we say, -I love"; -the sun has set,- they said, where we say, "I have loved.~14 However, this incomplete, but not unhealthy, form of religion, in which God is worshipped through nature, turned into mythological gibberish with time. The process behind this distortion was linguistic. According to Muller, there is a constant struggle between the limitations that language places on reason

34- F. M. M~ 1867-75, :1:.12.9.

77

and the mind's free search for truth.» Language develops according to its own laws, which cannot be influenced by individuals, and depending on the maturity of the language, the way in which the idea of God can be formulated varies. MUller found four main periods in the development oflanguage, religion, and mythology: the rhematic. the dialectic, the mythopoeic, and the national. MUller calls the very oldest stage in the history of human language the rhematic period. During this period, only very simple word roots existed: some nouns that denoted everyday objects as well as the basic counting words. The language was agglutinating, which meant that words were constructed by "g1uing~ together many different word parts. The transition to the next epoch in the history of language, the dialectic period, happened through a "centralization~ or "standardization~of the language. 36 Certain expressions and rules became fixed, and a true grammar evolved. During the rhematic period languages had been "nomadic"-a wild, unruly growth of dialects, words, and phonemes-and only during the dialectic period was order estabUshed.37 Not all languages, however, had undergone this cultivation. According to Muller, the Turanic languages (Turkic, Mongolian, Chinese, and others) still existed on an agglutinating level. On the other hand, the "unnatural~ inflecting, Indo· European and Semitic language families had reached a higher leveL3I These observations are thus completely in line with two theories that we encountered in the previous chapter: Schlegel's value-loaded distinction between agglutinating and inflecting languages. and MilUer's own notion of an eternal struggle between nomadic Turanians and civilized Aryans. In order to understand the oldest history of religions of mankind, one must first. writes Ml11ler, reflect on how the first two stages of language determined people's ability "to express the whole fulness and infinity of the Divine.-- MUller believed that languages during this time were still so undeveloped. that it was impossible to adequately describe the experience of the divine. Instead, the ancients had to be satisfied with using symbols to speak about God, and they then chose various natural phenomena. The Aryan mythology therefore is mainly about nature, above all about the sun, the sky, and fire, which "bear the character of law, order, power, and wisdom.~411 According to Muller, this type of religion could be found in its most developed form in the Rigveda, the ancient

For a diJctwlon of Muller's contradictory ideas about me limiting function of language '00 the Iibtntion oflhoughl. 1ft Connor 1989. 36. F. M. Mullu 1874. 90. )9. Ibid., 2.n. n. F. M. MllIkr 1861-7S. 1:9 40. F. M. Mauer 1867-7S. :1:.1430 31. F. M. MOUer tf13. lSS3s.

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text of Aryan mythology.·! In this text, we find that God is symbolized by various natural phenomena. such as the all-encompassing sky Varuna, the light sky DyaUs, the blushing morning sky Mitra or Usas, and the aU-illuminating sun SOrya. Milller seemed to find "the old Aryans' search for the eternal within all areas of nature~ but above aU it was the light that became the ruling image for divine presence.·2 "The Aryans, as far as the annales of their language allow us to see, recognised the presence of the Divine in the bright and sunny aspects of nature, and they. therefore. called the blue sky. the fertile earth. the genial fire, the bright day. the golden dawn their Devas. that is the bright ones."43 Comparative mythology proves this by showing the etymological and religious·historical connections between the Indian sun god Surya and the Greek Helios, between the sky god Dyaus and Zeus, and between the dawn goddess U$8.S and Eos. The myth that has best succeeded in keeping the ex~ perience of the infinite intact is also the myth that is most Widespread among Aryan peoples, -repeated a hundred times in Aryan mythology-: -The Dawn loves the Sun.~44 Significantly, among the gods of the Rigveda, it is U$8.S, the goddess of the dawn, the firstborn of the gods, who is the divinity most loved by ancient Indians, according to Miiller. 4s Recurring Aryan myths about the struggle between summer and winter, the return of spring, and the rebirth of nature are in fact variants of the original myth about the struggle between day and night. Comparative mythology thus supports Schlegel's, Pictet's, and K. O. Muller's notion that the Indo~European religIon was a cult of sun and light. Milller believed that during the rhematic and dialectic periods, religion was still fairly uncorrupted. It was only during the mythopoeiG period of language. "a few centuries" before Thales, that the true decline occurred.46 During this era, language was confused. and its rules and semantics were distorted. Dur~ ing the rhematic period, aU words had represented concrete objects, and all of the elements that made up words (roots, suffixes, case endings, and so on) still had their own meanings. But reason's drive toward more abstraction came to unsettle this one-ta-one correspondence. The words that became decisive for the development of religion were semiabstract nouns, words such as -day." -winter; -flood; and "thunder." When we use words from this word group, we can only sense a tiny piece of the whole to which the word refers, and therefore, according to MillJer, they are in themselves a kind of concentrated myth,

44. Ibid., 81· 41. Ibid.• 2;'76: d. F. M. Miiller 1880, 1:1.3-27. 45. Ibid., 2:94f. 4:1.. F. M. MUller 1880, :1.09. 41. F. M. MUller 1867-75. 4:233. 46. About the mythopoeic time, KC' esp. F. M. MllIl« 1867-7S. ~2-69.

7 Unknown artist, The god Surya with Aruna, -Dawn; as driver (n.d.). The mustration Is from William Jones, -On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India- (1784). (From Jones 1799.)

a kind of ·unconscious poetry."47 Since these nouns always have a gender, the phenomena that they denote begin to seem anthropomorphic: "As long as peo~le though~ in language, it was simply impossible to speak of morning or evemng, of spnng and winter, without giving to these conceptions something of an individual, active. sexual, and at last, personal charactec.'41 In a similar 47. Ibid., :I.:S:I..

4'. Ibid., :a:ss.

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way, says Muller, a true poet, a word person who lives more in language than in thought, is unable to write about sunrises or storms as completely lifeless objects: ·Every word., whether noun or verb, had still its full original power during the mythopoeic ages. Words were heavy and unwieldy. They said more than they ought to say, and hence, much of the strangeness of the mythological language, which we can only understand by watching the natural growth of speech. Where we speak of the sun following the dawn, the ancient poets could only speak and think of the sun loving and embracing the dawn.·" Mythical phrases were also simultaneously transparent and unwieldy at this stage. Everyone knew that the sentence "Nyx has given birth to Hypnos and the Oneroi tribe· meant nothing more than "During the night man sleeps and dreams:'50 Every Greek understood other similar expressions, for example, that Apophasis is the daughter of Epimetheus, as a poetic rewriting of the fact that reflection leads to asking for forgiveness. As long as these expressions could be understood by referring to the language itself, MUller continues in "Essay on Comparative Mythology~ they were still not myths. Mythical tales arose only once the ·etymological consciousness· had been lost.51 As long as the only linguistic complication was abstraction, only allegories, riddles, proverbs, and rebuses were created. but no real myths, no narratives in which people invested religious feelings. One more step was required in order for a polytheistic mythology to arise, and that was the confusion that was created. because some words are synonyms or homonyms. Most of the nouns in the original language were "'appellates· or ·predicates~ which means that they were named after the most characteristic feature ofthe object they denote. But objects can have more than one distinguishing feature, and this had the consequence that synonyms (several words for one object) were created. Other wordS came to refer to many different objects because they all contained the same feature. For instance, both the earth and sky can be called ·wide~ to borrow MUller's example from the Rigveda. ·Wide· (Skt. prthvi) was thus a homonym (a word for many objects) for earth and sky. Through the multitude of synonyms and homonyms, during the mythopoeic time a web of associations was woven between various things, both animate and inanimate, and various qualities. In order to make the nodes in this language web comprehensible, people began to create different tales. So, for example, hard-to-understand synonyms could be presented as siblings, or

49. Ibid., :1:63. SO. See F. M. Muller 1867-75, ~:l6,18, 5:1, 64-73. 5L Ibid..1:5:&..

81 qualities could stray from one thing in the constellation of synonyms to an. other: if both lion and sun were ·powerful~ then the sun soon had claws and a mane. Another circumstance that created myths was that new and incorrect meanings were added to old expressions once people no longer understood them. Such folk etymologies, according to Miiller, claimed that Apollo Oelios, ·the fair Apollo," was from the city ofOelos. S2 I am not convinced that Muller himself always understood. exactly what he meant when he described these lingUistic processes. 53 In any case, the kernel of his argument is that myths arise from random connections between dif. ferent words and from the gap between words and objects. The instability of language opens up the possibility of anthropomorphizing nature. Mythology can be said to arise when poetry is placed before philosophy: "Mythology, in the highest sense, is the power exercized by language on thought.-s4 In Les origines indo-europeennes ou /es Aryas primitifs. Pictet formulates Muller's reasoning as follows: "Polytheism is developed there as the great poetry of 52- Ibid., 2-,3SJ.. Mullers Clnivre often contains ambiguities and contradictions. In one text hr C1n c::omt across as a German chauvinist, only to a.ppnr as a pacifist and humanist in another. SometilTltS hr expreun himsdf in such a way that the reader becomes convinced that he believes humanity Is steadily pr0grt'S5ing; at other times he _nu to long for a 1051 Arcadia. Some of the pandoxes in Muller's work C1n be explained by the fact that he revised his opinions during hb; sixty years of activity: forex.ample. raciaJ-anthropologk:aJ argumenu influenced him during the 18405 and 18505, but bter he woWd turn completely agailUl this viewpoint. Other contradiclions are not Ml1lkr's own, but are mated to problems within a .....!'de intell«tual rnovnnent: alIlibmLI andlOk:rant Christian think-en :It the end of the ni~th century ~ ditficulty balancing the attmlpt 10 defend Ouistianity aocl SIte$Il iu uniquenas, on the one ~nd, and, on the othn- hand, to argue tNt God don not :&bandon 1nyone and that traces of the true religion C1n be found everywhere. One example of MUlier's contradictions in political questions is a leclure that he gave:lt the uni. yersity in Strasbourg a year after the French-German war :lnd the unification ofGermany (1117:1). MQ.Uer inlrod~ the lecture, which is about the contributions of linguistic:l to the understanding of man, with, Iv says. some emodonaIly charged won:ls about the fanwtic: thing that has happened-rumely, thai Germany is -once :&pin" unified... In the nul breath, ho¥.~, he mentions war as the worst insult to everything that hufTWlity mods for and 1.5 the phenomenon that more than others makes us doubt man's inteillgence-exctpt:lt those times, he continues, when war 15 a duty, after which there follows an affected tribute to "the Divine justice" thai forced the war lIlinst France and made Gefll'l1nyi unification possible. When nethen lUrlUi to the actualleclure 1tJd( and is to give some example 01 the unexpected result of comparative phUoklgy, he ~ to direct attentkm 10 the fact that the Gennan aocl Frmch words lOr "tear, cry" (Z.ihre, llInf1c ) have the _ origin! In spite of the oonciliatory tone of this etymology, the French newspapen raged 'bout the fact lhat MUlier had ha.stened to give
91

Aryans and Semites In the previous chapter, we saw how ~Indo-Europeans~ and ~Aryans~ were expropriated by racial anthropology. In this chapter, we have so far examined how Millier an9 other philologists determined the basic character of Indo· European religion and mythology. It is therefore time to examine the scholars' view of the relationship between Indo-European and Semitic religion, as well as the relationship between this pair of opposites and anti-Semitism. The right place to begin such an examination is France, where the ideas of Herder, Schlegel, and other German romantics were imported during the 1820S and 1830S by reactionary French intellectuals. The modernization and liberalization that was carried out under the reign of the ~bourgeois k.ing~ Louis-Philippe X (1830-48) made an excellent breeding ground for political protest movements that worked toward a restoration of I'Ancien Regime. Simultaneously it also nourished a radicalization of liberal, republican, and socialist groups; and strangely enough, the new knowledge about the culture and religion of the Indo- Europeans also came to be used by this phalanx. In an unpublished manuscript entitled ~Den ariska romantiken~ (The Aryan romanticism), the Swedish historian of religion and Indo-Europeanist Stig Wikander claims that it was, in fact, in these progressive circles that the Indo-European discourse first acquired anti·Semitic connotations.74 According to Wikander, the background to this was the unsuccessfuJ revolution of February 1848, which was followed by conservative politics and strict censorship. By praising the Aryans, radical intellectuals supposedly tried to attack the reactionary powers, especially the Roman Catholic priesthood that supported a USemitic~ tradi· tion, and still escape censorship. The Aryan was to represent the modern free Individual, while the Semite stood for the Judeo-Christian tradition that had always worked against the freedom of people and of thought, and that had legitimized repressive feudal societies. The German romantic philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte had accused the Old Testament of being chauvinistic and irreconcilable with the ideals of the French Revolution, an accusation that resonated with the French radicals. 7s With the goal of emphasizing the need

74. The manuscript, "Den ariska romantlken" (seventy-nine pages), can be found among 72. Trompf 1978, 84. 7).

About the 5un as symbol In Victorian art and literature, see Bullen 1989,

W1kander'. archives In the Uppsala Unl~r5ity Ubrary. The work on the manuscript is mentioned In a letter from Robert Richardson dated 1976. 75. MOise 1997, 29.

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for continued Iiberaliz.ation and modernization. the radicals stressed that the Semitic, Judeo-Christian tradition was something foreign- ·our true heritage" was the Indo-European one. In France. this progressive (in the sense of being progress and reform oriented) opposition was introduced above all by Edgar Quinet (t803-7S). Jules Michelet (1798-1874). and Ernest Renan.7f;

Just as Voltaire, a century earlier, had used the new discoveries about India to relativize Christianity and diminish the power of the priests, Quinet and Michelet adopted the German Indo- Eu ropean scholarship with the aim of

challenging the powerful position that the Catholic Church, and the Jesuit order, which had been reinstated in 1814. held within French cultural life and

the educational system. According to Quinet. there was a longing to find M

a culture in the old Orient that would be able to compete with the Hebrew culture."77 Both Quinet and Michelet, the latter one of the foremost historians in nineteenth-century France, wrote books that became milestones on the way toward a secularized Europe. With Genie tks religions (1842), which was an answer to the Roman Catholic author Chateaubriand's apologetic Genie du christianisme (1802), Quinet wanted to ~mobilize both Aryans and Greeks as comrades in the battle against Semitic mentality and oppression by the church;"7' Michelet's Bible de l'humaniti came out in the 18605, when Pictet's Les origines indo-europeennes ou les Aryas primitift had made IndoEuropean studies fashionable in Paris, and it quickly became a cult favorite among the anticlericals. In Quinet's and Michelet's histories of religions, the Indo-Europeans and their religions usually appear as superior to all others. During the 1830S, Michelet had held that the Jewish-Semitic race made up a natural part of Western culture, but later he changed his opinion and denied that the Judeo-Christian, Semitic heritage had contributed anything of value to European culture." All steps toward freedom, brotherhood, and free pursuit of knowledge had been taken by the Indo*European race, by Greeks and Romans, by Indians and Persians. Neither Quinet nor Michelet had any formal competence in the area of reli* gious or linguistic history, but in Ernest Renan (1823-92) the French progressive tradition found the expert it needed. Renan was one of France's most influential

Pi4u in the Sun

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cultural figures in the second half of the nineteenth century.1I) His position within French cultural life of the nineteenth century has been compared to Voltaire's during the eighteenth century and has even led to the coining of the phrase Renanism, which is characterized by an elitist and ironic attitude toward life. Renan developed this attitude particularly after the FranarPrussian War and the Paris Commune, although he had earlier felt attracted to a more progressive worldview. Like Muller and many other scholars within the IndoEuropean discourse of the nineteenth century, Renan held views that were neither entirely liberal nor conservative. He supported the liberal fight for ad* ditional freedoms concerning matters of conscience and freedom of the press, and in questions of religious politics he was dearly liberal and anticlerical. He also opposed nationalism, which he saw as unworthy of educated people. At the same time, however, he had elitist and authoritarian ideals, and in spite ofa kind ofhumanitarian pathos, he did not venture beyond moralism in sociopolitical questions and feared popular attempts to reorganize society. His ever* strong idealism changed, with time, from a utopianism of freedom to a protoFascistic utopia of order. Renan was well versed in the contemporary scholarly literature about the history of religions. He had, for example, translated his friend Millier's programmatic article ~Essay on Comparative Mythology~ into French. More important was the fact that Renan was one of the absolutely foremost Oriental~ ists of his time. It is easy to understand that statements about the differences between Semitic and Aryan religion seemed very credible when the source was a professor of Hebrew at the College de France. Renan's view of the Semitic religions was completely in line with Quinet's and Michelet's negative views. Particularly important for Renan's view of Semitic religion was apparently his reading of Christian l..assen's Indische Alterthumskunde (1847-58). In spite of the fact that Lassen's expertise did not stretch beyond a knowledge ofAncient India, and that he lacked formal knowledge about Semitic religion, Renan's view of the Semites' beliefs and mentality seems to depend to a large degree on Lassen's ideas.11 Renan's contrast of Aryan and Semitic culture, which can be found most distinctly in the introduction to Histoire generale et systeme compare des langues semitiques (18S8), sometimes follows almost exactly In-

dische Alterthumskunde. 16. A. detaikd insight Into the Vr'OrId of the Frmch Orientallw and AfyInists can be gained from Schwab 1984. n. From Schwab 1984. 1978. The apress'on Is from W\bnder', "Om arisb romantiken" (manlltCript), 79-1bid.; Schwab 1984, )921£.

10. About Rman, Rl! Wardman's biography (1964), which u.nfortunattJyis more. ~ al Itudy than.n intdlectual ~y-and a distutdul one at thaL M a (.'(lrl'dation to Wardman I haw: uwd Said 19930 132-50 f't passim: u -U u TodoaoY 19930 Uo-lJ, 140-49. f't paSlim. II. 1 am IT'tet'ulIO Erik Ii Edholm Cor brin&in& my .ttMUon 10 l..u.5en.

94

Clu}pur Two

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9S

According to Lassen. the Semites, mainly Jews and Arabs. and the IndoEuropeans. make up two branches of the Caucasian (white) race. They are the foremost cultural peoples of the world, and as such. they struggle with each other to attain control of the world. However, the Semitic race is the less gifted contestant, and the laurel wreath from this "wrestling match- (Ringen ... urn die Herrschaft dec Welt) will therefore go to the lndo-Germans.11 The Semitic mentality is above all spoiled by its strong tendency toward subjectivity. The Semite is like a big child. for whom everything circles around the self. and "his worldview is subjective and egotistical:-a' Consequently, Semitic poetry. for example, is just a place where the poet can pour out his completely private feelings and passions. Literary genres such as epic and drama, that require the poet to keep his personality in the background. are completely missing in Semitic literature. Semites can appreciate an emotional and subjective form of art like music, but they have neither been able to create sculpture nor painting. The Indo·Germans, on the other hand, have been able to produce poetry, epic, heroic poems, national drama, sculpture, and paintings in which we meet the worldview of an entire people. The egocentric Semite is likewise completely excluded from the pure thought of philosophy, and his God is just like him: self·absorbed, capricious, and emotional. This Semitic narcissism has, according to Lassen, given rise to an intolerant religion in which only I and Mine count. and the jealousy of the Semitic God has made the Semitic religions claim to possess the only truth. The fanaticism and missionary activity found among the Semitic peoples has always been foreign to the Indo-Germans. The latter have instead always preserved tolerance and freedom of thought, which in turn has led to the rise of advanced philosophical and scientific theories. It cannot be denied, writes Lassen, that the stubborn and self-righteous Semites have periodically been successful warriors, seafarers, and traders, but the nations they have founded have always degenerated into despotism because of the Semitic rulers' selfindulgent egotism. They have not been able to imitate the stability and order that the Indo-Germans have created, or societies in which norms and solidarity are shared by all citizens.

agrees with Lassen's understanding of the shortcomings of the Semitic art forms: the poetry is subjective and based on unimaginative similesi there are no plastic arts and no epic. Nor have the Semites understood anything about science and philosophy. However, Renan emphasizes, they have had "a higher instinct" (un instinct superior) for religion. While the Indo-European race (La race indo-e!Jropeenne) has tried to explain the world and humankind by using rational systems, the Semites have tried to gain knowledge about God. They lack curiosity about the world and are satisfied to state that -God is almighty!.... In contrast to the philosophical tracts that the ancient Indo-Europeans have creat~d, "the theocratic race of the Semites" (La race theocratique des Simites) can offer only "psalms and prophesies, whose wisdom is presented through riddles and symbols:'85 The religion ofthe Indo-Europeans, on the other hand, is a polytheistic my· thology where nature is seen as divine: -Mythology is pantheism in religion.~16 Mythological thought, in turn, leads to philosophical thought and natural science: "The conception of multiplicity in the universe is the polytheism found among peoples in their infancy:"'7 The religion of the Semites, in contrast, is a strict monotheism in which the transcendental God is presented as an absolute patriarch: "The Semites did not understand the variety, the plurality, the genders in God: the word goddess in Hebrew is the most horrible barbarism..... Entirely in line with Lassen, Renan further claims that monotheism has made the Semites intolerant, while the Indo-Europeans never conceived of their religion as the only truth. For them, religion was mainly a tool for social cohesion (une $Om d'heritage de famille ou de caste)." According to Renan, alJ of the intelligence of the ancient lndo-Europeans was not enough to arrive at the concept of the unity of the divine. In order for this idea to arise, people had to live for a long time in the desert: "Nature, on the other hand, plays a very smaJl role in the Semitic religions: the desert is monotheistici sublime in its immense uniformity, it primarily revealed to man the idea of 'infinite:'"90 In the desert, neither space nor time leave any traces; this emptiness halts creativity, and curiosity about the surrounding

Lassen's comparison between the Aryan and the Semitic mentality (perhaps it is more a question of contrast than of comparison) is repeated, as pointed out, in Histoire generaJe et systeme compare des Langues semitiqua. Renan entirely

84. Renan 18sS. 10. 86. Ibid, 7. 8s.lbid., 4. 9. B7.lbld.. 9. 88. Ibid.. sf.: ~Ln Similes ne c:omprirtnt point en Dietl I. varietl,la pllll'a1itl, Ie sexe le mot dtflse ieBit en hebreu Ie plus horrible barbarisme.~ 89. Ibid.. 7. 90. Ibid.. 6: ~La nature, d'un autre e6t1, dent ptu de place dans Ies religions ~mitiques: Ie cWwrt esl rnonothmte; Itlbllme dans 100 Immeme unlformltl. Um.aa tout d'abord ill'homme I'kW de 11nfinL"

82..1..as5m 1&47-61, 1:'U7·

83. I'*l, 1:414-

96

ChaptuTwo

A PIau in the Sun

TABLE 4

Lassen's and Renan's opposition

The Semitic race

The Indo-European race

Subjectivism. egotism

Objectivism, ability to abstract and generalize

Lyric poetry

Poetry. epic. drama. sculpture, painting

Religion. monotheism, unity

Mythology, polytheism. philosophy. science. multiplicity

Fanatism, mission

Tolerance, longing {or freedom. ethnic religions

Oan. polygamy, despotism

Politics. democracy

Prophets

Avatars

Note: for ITIOI'e on prophets and avatars, _

below.

world becomes minimal. According to Renan, the way of life of the Bedouins is the true way of life of the Semites: "The true Semitic society is that of the tent and of the tribe,"'! The whole Semitic. Moslem world is one giant clan in which the caliph rules like a kind of patriarch or papa over families who live by primitive rules about duty and blood revenge. The Semitic race also lacks refinement in the area of flirtation; it is "a race that is solely virile, but completely lacks flexibility and finesse.-92 It is Significant that while there is one God, there are many wives.

The Human Being Comes ofAge Lassen's and Renan's work in developing a dichotomy between Semitic and Aryan can be contextualized with the help of two texts that illuminate [ndoEuropean historiography from interesting angles, although without using the terms "lndo·European~or "Aryan,~ One of the texts is the above-named anti·

91. Ibid., 1,1: ~La veritable socil!ti semitique est celie de Ja tente et de Ja tribu." 9:1. Ibid... 16. Renan summarizes !Us view or the Semitic race in the rollowing sentence: ~Alnsl k race setrutique se reconnalt presque uniqunn~t i des caract~ nl!ptlfs: eUe n'a ni mytho£ogle, ni ~ , ni sdena:, ni philo6ophle. ni fiction. nJ art5 plastiques, ni vie civile; en tout. absence de complexill!, de nuances, sentiment Musil de I'unit"" (lSss. 16).jThus, the ~tk: race II fee· ogni2.abIe almost solely lhrough neptiw cNracterlstk:1: it has neither mythology, not epic, nor tcienoe, nor philosophy, nor fiction. nor plastic aru, nor dvlllife; in sum. an abIenct of oompIex1ty, of nuance, an exclusive sentiment oJ unity.)

97

clerical classic Bible de l'humaniti (1864), written by Renan's older friend Michelet. The book is a strange mixture of humanism and prejudice, of emotional eruptions and half-digested knowledge about the Orient and about MUller's and Kuhn's theories. Its overriding aim is to explain how a perverted Oriental tradition (that is, Christianity) has arisen and how it has come to infect the European world. Michelet even seems to experience the eternal, cosmic battie between the Orient and the Occident on a personal plane: "Athens's fright on the day when the sea disappeared under the fleet of the Persian as commanded by the Phoenicians; the fear of Syracuse when the vessels of Carthage were bringing its black Moloch; I experience the same upon seeing Greece invaded, penetrated by the dark gods of the Orient."93 For Miche1et, the Phoenicians' homeland, Syria, appears as the source of all evil, for there orgiastic gods like "Attis-Adonis~ "Sabas-Sabaoth," "Baal-Bacchus," and "Mjthra-Venus" have appeared. A large part of Bible de l'humanili is taken up by Michelet's attempt to explain the unique nature of Judaism and its relationship to the tradition of its Semitic cousin Phoenicia. Incidentally, it is significant that the anticlerical Michelet is not interested in making a terminological distinction between a good. (from the Christian viewpoint) and a bad Jewish tradition by calling the former ~Hebrew" or "Israelite," This was otherwise a common way to give the appearance of discontinuity between the ~Hebrew" tradition that stemmed from heroes such as Abraham and Moses, and the Judaism that continued to exist in spite of the arrival of the Savior. Michelet thus calls even the good (from a Christian viewpoint), pre·Christian period "Jewish; and the Holy Bible is called "the beautiful Jewish encyclopedia that is called Bible."M Michelet accounts for the distinctive character of the Jewish tradition in Bible de l'humaniti with a kind of speculative historical materialism.95 The hard life of the Jews as wandering shepherds in desert areas, their time as slaves in Egypt and later as unwilling farmers in Palestine, has given them a special mentality, a slave mentality. For the slave, the valuation of night and day is reversed, since night becomes the best time. Only at night is the slave free-free to weave dreams and pray to his God that he will take pity on him and his people. But when God did not listen to the prayers, a great self-hatred began to grow among the enslaved Jews, writes Michelet, and a longing arose for ~the blood~red morning~ when Jehovah, the avenger. would come with the Iife~extinguishing force of the invisible desert wind and crush their enemies. As a slave, according to Michelet, it is easy to begin to doubt the possibility of Mic:hodrt 1867, 394. 94. Ibkl, 144. 9).

98

99

improving one's situation using rational actions, and instead, slaves tend to long for supernatural interventions and to fantasize about coming Messiah figures. The Jewish slaves began to imagine that God indeed loves the meek of the world and is suspicious of those who are proud and powerful. The small pathetic group of Jewish people therefore came to see themselves as a chosen people. With time. however, the slave people turned into wealthy merchants. Their fear of becoming enslaved again made them begin to depend on wealth that could easiJy be transported in troubled times: money. It was even better if the money existed, but was invisible: interest. In spite of the radical change from having been slaves to becoming capitalists. the Jews' religion did not change. The Jews still, writes Michelet, wait for the vengeful Jehovah and long for the day when Messiah will arrive. Michelefs account, which I have not understood in all of its particulars, does show some insight into the situation of the Jewish slaves, but they and the other Near Eastern peoples are described very negatively throughout. The organization of the book also makes no secret of Michelet's Aryanist preferences: the second part of Bible de l'humaniti is about the religion of the Egyptians, Canaanites. and Jews, and is entitled ·People of the Dusk. Night. and Half-Light" The first part takes up the religious heritage of the Indians. Persians. and Greeks. and is entitled "'People of Light"'; in it Michelet can ex· claim in sentences Uke this: ·We live from light, and our legitimate ancestors are the people of light. the Aryas."K Similar names for Indo·Europeans are found around the same time in, for example. the work of the physician Carl Gustav Carus, who refers to the Europeans as ·people of day~ Carns even claimed that there was a connection between the blond hair of the Europeans and the sun, as well as between their blue eyes and the sky.

For Michelet, ·the people of light· are guardians of the beautiful. the true. and the right: ·Out of lndia, until (17)89. there fell a torrent of light-the river of Right and Reason.... Above all. it is the French Revolution's ideals of brotherhood and humanity that Michelet sees prefigured in the ancient IndoEuropean tradition, The most critical period in world history was, according to Michelet, when Indo·European and Oriental met for the first time by the Mediterranean. The destructive forces were led by Syrian Phoenicians, who first battled the Hellenes and then the Romans: ·The proud genius of Rome appeared predestined to continue the work of the Greeks, to defend the world 96, Ibid.. u. 97· ~ Moue 1997,:d.

from being swallowed up from the East by the gods of Asia, who came, cruel. or weeping. to bury the human soul. Whether Moloch attacked it with his horns of iron. or whether Adonis buried it in the myrrh of eternal weddings, the Orient was the sepulchre."'9f "'The orgy ofAsia, the Orient," and the gods Isis and "Bacchus·Adonis·Sabas· penetrnted as far as the city of Rome. 1Oll The cult of the Oriental gods, as well as interest in Oriental teachings such as Christi. anity, was maintained above all by slaves and women. Just as the "slave" was a definitive figure in Michelet's history of the growth of Judaism, so "woman· was instrumental in the development ofChristianity. New Roman inheritance laws had made it possible for women to donate money to raise temples to Bacchus, Serapis. Mithra, and Jesus. All of these divinities promised heavenly interventions and thus prevented human beings from becoming mature and self-governing. reflecting over their own situation and. after rational thought. trying to improve it. According to Michelet. the strongest shield against Oriental escapism was formed by Roman law, the stoic phiJosophy that praised nature's rational order (logos), as well as the enterprising nature personified by Hercules when he showed, with his twelve heroic acts, that even the captive can be strong, and "that one can preserve the liberty of one's soul even in slavery."IOl On the highest level. the conflict between the Orient and Europe was about the opposition between hoping for a savior or Messiah who miracu. lously puts everything to right and belieVing in man's own abiJity to improve his circumstances, On one side were the "sick in soul," and on the other side, the heroic and stoic humanists whose struggle one day will lead to revolution. "'mankind's most beautiful celebration."1Q2 Even if Michelet does not use the term Indo-Europeans in Bible de I'humanit4. this work contributed to the view of Indo-Europeans as prototypes for the self-governing, rational, and secularized human being. and the Semites as prototypes for religious fanatics. The other text that I believe may enrich the understanding of the associations raised by Lassen's and Renan's dichotomy is Das Mutterrec:ht: Eine Untersuc:hung "her die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiiisen und rechtlichen Natur (1861). In this text, the Swiss legal historian Johann Jakob Sachofen argues that other legal systems have preceded tier pie ~ Rome semblait pr&lntinl! l continUei' laevre grecque. pour dlfendre le monde de Im,.Ioutissement Oriental des dieux d~, qui wnalnt, cruel_, au pleureurs enterrer I'lme humaine. Que Moloch I'attaq:lit de ses corner de ferqu' Adonis 11nhumAt dans la myrrhe des naces l!ternelles, l'Orient c'l!tait Ie sl!pulcre," 9f. Ibid., 371; In French In Michdrt. 1864-. 411.: "Le

100, Mlchelet 1867.374.

101, Ibid., 3n.

101. Ibid., 417, 43:1. 436.

100 the patriarchal order. The first system that can be seen in the classical sources is, according to Bachofen. an acephalic, orgiastic, and ~hetaerie culture. This promiscuous disorder caused difficulties for the women, however, and they decided, together with the men, to institutionalize marriage. Thereby man entered into a higher stage ofculture that was defined by mothers having power. This stage was socioeconomically secured by the emergence of agriculture and

the resulting tendency to settle in one place. Under this matriarchal order, religion was radicaUy different from what it was under the later patriarchal order,lOl While the patriarchal religion held the sun, the sky, and the sea to be the main holy objects. the matriarchal reUgion circled around the moon and the earth. It also emphasized death cults more than joyful rituals, and its ideology was materialistic. Bachofen believed that the matriarchal religion and the older ~hetaerian" religion, where Aphrodite and Dionysus were worshipped, had come from Africa and Asia. In Greece, they were held in trust by a population that Ba* chofen calls Pelasgian. This word was used by scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to denote the pre-Indo-European population of Greece. a Greek counterpart to India's pre·Aryan dasyu and dasa. In a figurative sense, ~Pelasgian" has also been used to denote the pre-lndo*European population of Italy. In this book I shall further expand the meaning of the word and use the term Pelasgian religion to denote the type of religion that Bachofen presents as prepatriarchal. The division between patriarchal belief in a higher god and Pelasgian religion and the division that goes back to the Noachites of the Bible make up the fundamental structures that have guided the research about IndoEuropean mythology and religion. After the triumph of patriarchy, the Pelasgian religion survived in under* ground mystery cults. Bachofen explains the transformation of the primitive nature religion into a mystery religion by the fact that even those people who had lived under the matriarchal order had cultivated a chthonic, pan* theistic. and physical mysticism where they sensed the unity of life and ~the harmony of the universe.~I()4 They had been acquainted with "the revelation of the body~ but had not yet formed ~the inner spiritual factor'" that becomes possible only in the more advanced patriarchal culture. lOS The patriarchal 8achofen molt often spnb about a -gynocraoc" order, which Cor him means I'I'IOthft' rule and not women's rule. Ragnar Numdin calls II simply ·a kind of petticoat government" (1947,3a). 104. Bachofen 19
,

,

Kon

ARYANJ .......

Friedrich Max MUlier's picture of the relationship between religion and ethnicity (11173). (From MiilIer 1873.) 10

encapsulated by this concept had the highest standing in the Bible, and that it was with its help that Christianity had managed to free itself from the oppres· sive laws of the Torah-.M? We have also seen that scholars who leaned toward language metaphysics, like MUller and Renan. claimed that the circumstance

that Christianity was spread and formu.lated in Indo· European languages (above aU Greek, Latin. and Church Slavonic) was decisive for its progress. All of these various -don't pretend that Jesus was a Jew and that the Christians were a Jewish sect- strategies have been successful: how often have we not read about how unique Christianity is, what a radical break it made against

Judaism? And how often have we read about ..the Jew Jesus"?

Modernistic Ideals ofReligion Let us now try to place the Aryanism of the nineteenth century in a larger context. Renan was anticlerical, his presentation of the Semitic tradition al· most completely negative, and he worshipped science and modern society. In spite of this, he felt that some form of religion was necessary even in modern society. During the twentieth century, the notion of religion's necessity has for the most part meant that the individual needs a religion in order not to feel that life is meaningless. For Renan, and for many others in the nineteenth century who were interested in the spirituality of the future, on the other hand, it 147. Trompfl!178,13.

119

was the interpersonal aspect that had to be supported by religion. It is true that the romantic tradition from Schleiermacher, in which the basis of religion was the individual's experience, was already flourishing in the nineteenth century, but in France especially, scholars placed great value on the social function of religion. There were several reasons why it was in France, in particular, that this aspect became the most discussed. The most important reason was probably the experiences from the Revolution of 1789. Through the Revolution, and the work that later governments and public opinion carried out, a set of new phenomena were created to replace the Christian habits, but that were still religious or similar to religion (depending on how religion is defined): new holidays, a new calendar, new unassailable authority figures, a new priesthood. new martyrs and saints. The experiences from the Revolution put into focus the ability of religion to create social integration and solidarity. Among those who had a positive view of the Revolution's message about freedom. equality. and brotherhood, the idea soon arose that a new religion could be created using these ideals. a "religion of humanity; that would become the national religion of France. The idea was also that this new religion would not be in opposition to science, neither natural science nor historical Bible criticism. This religion would be a religion adapted to modern times; it would be what I will call a modernistic religion."' In France, the foremost proponents ofthe creation ofa ~[eIigion of human· ity" synchronized with modernity were Henri de Saint·Simon and Auguste Comte. The latter introduced and instituted a new religion, positivism. that would be a synthesis of religion and science. In positivism, the universe, earth, man, and reason were worshipped, and scientific theories would make up the foundation of the positivist worldview. The highest values in Comte's "sociocratic religion" were humanistic themes like love, belief in progress, sense of order, and altruism. The progressive and anticlerical Aryanists that we discussed in this chapter were all influenced by Comte's and Saint·Simon's thinking; Renan is even often presented as Comte's foremost disciple. Renan, like Quinet and Michelet, dreamed about creating a reasonable and ethical religion that would be purified of all superstition. (A great step toward a postChristian, ~religious~ world was taken in 1794 when Maximilien Robespierre inaugurated Notre·Dame as a "temple of reason~ where the highest being would

148. As far as I know, the~ ls no monognph about the search for a religion suited to modern society. Strtnsk1 (1997) i.I very illuminating (let chaps. 2 and 3. and np. 6If.). Otherwise this lKlion bulkb on Rodhe 1935, 403: Frlnpmyr 1980, 171-80: and Wardmann 1964, 25. 36, 44-47, 10,85,201, tt pusim,

\20

Chapur7Wo

be worshipped in a "cult of reason:') It was self-evident that the Indo· European tradition would make up a part of the modernistic religion, for it was the Indo-Europeans who, with their boldness and freedom of thought, had created philosophy, natural science. and art, and who had broken with the despotic and patriarchal patterns. Their religion had humanistic overtones, and they did not sacrifice nature for the supernatural sphere. The ideal of freedom and individualism came out of the Indo-European tradition and the semi-Aryan Christianity. The Indo-European race was. according to Renan, the very motor of history: ~In the theogony of the Indo- Europeans, nature comes alive and becomes divine. life is seen as a struggle. the universe as an eternal fluctuation. and through the godly dynasties theogony becomes in a way a bearer of revolution and progressl"l., Here Renan interprets the myth of how the Olympian Zeus murders his father, the TItan Chronos, in order to take his place as a tale about the world as a place that undergoes constant evolution. But the revolutionary romanticism of Renan, just like that of Comte, did not have socialist overtones. On the contrary, one of the points of creating -the new religion or idealism- was to stem revolutionary socialism.lso Renan's and Comte's struggle to improve conditions for the worker class, which they idealized as a dynamic raw material, was above aU about educating and refining it. Therefore, the concept oforder became strongly emphasized in a movement that was otherwise open minded. and with the years Renan actually became -more disciplinarian than humanist:'W He claimed among other things that a new priesthood was needed, a -spiritual aristocracy," as well as clear hierar* chies, if a new modernistic religion was to arise.152 According to Renan. it was only the Indo-Europeans who had the ability to organize society and create states. Science, freedom, and order were thus lndo--European gifts that the new religion of humanity was to keep in trust. Could the Semites also contribute something to Renan's modernistic religion? Yes, they could-namely, what Jesus had learned in the forests of Galilee: idealistic striving, the wish to create a better world. The future religion of humanity must take over the utopian force and ethical position*taking from the Semitic race. In spite of the fact that Renan tried to separate Christianity from the Jews and describe it as freed -from almost everything that came from that race," he seems to accord

A PIau in the Sun

12\

them certain positive qualities. -There was a need for a Father in heaven to keep accounts for man's efforts and to promise him a reward. There was need for a future justice.... All of this was just what Judaism had."153 Ethical ideas about justice and forgiveness were lacking in the Indo-European tradition, and besides, idealism was needed to create solidarity and togetherness. The -Indo--European- state machinery could organize -the collective egotism,- but it was not enough to create true brotherhood, an organic unit. In order to create social devotion, Semitic religiosity was necessary, because -the organization of devotion is religion."lS4 The French ideology thus needed both Aryan humanism and sense of order and Semitic will to sacrifice and morality. It was not only among French Aryanists that people looked for a modernistic religion. Above I discussed how Muller's research aimed to create a pan~Aryan religion that would bridge the paradoxes of modern times. The -church of the future- that he dreamed of chiefly resembled a Protestant congregation, and the attempts to create a modernistic religion were definitely most intense among liberal, Protestant theologians. For the most part, these distanced themselves from Renan's radical theories about Semitic, Aryan. and Christian, but this did not prevent the existence of many points of contact between the French idea of a religion of humanity and the liberal· theological view of Christianity. The same attempt to synchronize religion with modern society arose later within Catholicism. Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Parsism, and esotericism. Characteristic for these modernistic movements is. among other things. an impersonal image of God with pantheistic features-they -crossed out the transcendence."1S5 Modernism, in the area of religion, meant immanence (God becomes the world; Jesus -an inner force"; salvation. reincarnation; magical forces, -energy"; angels, UFOs; and so on), as Pope Benedict XV already knew.1Sf In line with the supernatural becoming immanent, some of the value ofhaving priests and carrying out rituals also disappeared. The modernists also tended to interpret the holy sources of their own tradition symbolically, which provided an opportunity to ignore whatever made the accommodation of religion to the modern world more difficult. The ethics within the modernistic movements were liberal. tolerant, and individualistic, and there was generally a positive attitude toward science and political reforms. All of this, according to scholars, had a prehistory in Indo~European mythology.

149. Renan 18Ss. 7. ISO. Wardnwm 1964, I, 31.35; Fringsmyr 1980, I'72J. IS" Watdmann 1'}6.4. 127.

IS). Renan 1880, 37.

Ip..lbid., 57, Ip...

1S4-

Ibid.. 31.

Iss. Rodhe 1935. 2.0, Fringsmyr 1980, 176. 156. Harriton 192.1, 3S-

122

Conclusion Out of romanticism's passion for India, and out of the knowledge of the Indo· European languages. a paradigm developed in the mid-nineteenth century that provided the framework for historical research about Indo-European religion. The method within this paradigm was historica1·philological and the method of interpretation was allegorical. The Indo-European sources were thought to show that Indo-Europeans or Proto-Indo-Europeans perceived God in nature, or that they chose naturaJ phenomena as symbols for God. The sun, the morning. lightning, and dear sky were favorites, according to scholars. The Indo· European worldview was neither one of crass materialism nor one of an antiquated and antiscientific transcendentalism, but a worldly idealism. In addition to revealing itself through nature. the divine could also show itself in history through righteous heroes and avatars. The Indo-Europeans were the people of light, hard-working farmers who worshipped the good, the right, and the true. Throughout history, the Indo-Europeans have struggled against nomadic barbarians and people of darkness in order to carry on the flame of humanity and reason. A special opponent was the Semitic people, who, like the Indo-Europeans, were a cultural people. The Semitic Jews have preserved the monotheism that at least partly forms the basis of Christianity. But where the Jewish people's essence was seen as oriented to the beyond. nomadic, and overcultivated, the Indo-Europeans' essence was seen as natural and cultivated. The difference between Indo-European and Semitic was thought to be deep as a ravine. In 1876/77, for example. the historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges writes: "Let us now compare the [Aryan} customs. the institutions, and the beliefs that we have just expounded with the customs, the institutions. and the beliefs of the Semitic peoples. The whole is completely different: we find no relationship from any point of view; it is an absolutely different world from our own;"ID The scholarship about Indo-European religion gained its strength by giving a long historical background to an ideology and culture that the modern bourgeoisie was looking for. Although the nature-mythological paradigm could also be embraced by reactionary thinkers, it was mainly a progressive project. It is as a modernistic project that we meet the discourse about the IndoEuropeans in the work of ~the two who have done the most to popularize the Aryan theory": Mtiller and Renan. 1St For the liberal theologian Muller, it aimed

157. Cited in MomigUano 1994. 176. 1S8. PoIiakoY 1974. 259.

123

A PIau ill the SUII

Chapter Two

to free Christianity from medieval remnants; for Renan, it aimed to create a new religion. The Indo-European tradition was also presented as the origin of the humanist-bourgeois culture. where the fine arts, the free search for knowledge. and the secular state made up the highest values. The Semitic tradition was instead portrayed as the root of, on the one hand. medievaJ ignorance. feudal oppression, and paralyzing conservatism within all areas, and on the other hand, egotism, greediness, and speculative capitalism.

•

PrimitiveAryaflS

CHAPTER 3

Primitive Aryans: Research near the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century

EUROPE'S BARBARJANS In the previous chapter, I showed that within the scholarship about IndoEuropean religion, there was one paradigm with roots in the romanticism of the early nineteenth century. Actually. it is inaccurate to talk about a true paradigm before the middle of the century. when MUller and his coUeagues agreed on certain theoretical and methodical postulates and disseminated their ideas to a broad public. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the paradigm of nature mythology had already begun to weaken. and instead another movement arose that turned against the nature-mythological school's Aryan*romantic interpretation of the Indo-Europeans' religion. The decline of Aryan romanticism and of the school of nature mythology was due to both intrascientific reasons and general cultural events that shook the bourgeois idealism and liberal humanism that had motivated them. On the general cultural plane. one can point to majo'r political events such as the Paris Commune of 1871, which awakened the upper and middle classes to the threat that socialist and radical movements posed to the stability of society. The unification of Germany in the same year was another important event. The unification meant that nationalism, which had proved to be the most ef· fective weapon against radical ideas, was strengthened. The nationalism that had been a liberal tradition during the early nineteenth century was reshaped during the period we are concerned with in this chapter to become a weapon in the fight against the international worker movement. Interest in Nthe people" and Nthe masses; which had already been stimulated by the French Revolu· tion, now increased among intellectuals. Sociology was founded during this period. and other related disciplines that studied nonelite cultures. such as folklore (Ger. Volkskunde) and anthropology, or ethnology (Ger. Volkerkunde), became fashionable. The position of archaeology and racial anthropology in the intellectual debate also grew stronger. We have already discussed in chap· ter 1 the forward march of racial anthropology during this period, and in this

124

125

chapter we will discuss the sociology of religion, anthropology. folklore, and archaeology-that is, disciplines that do not study the "high cultural" side of mankind, which had been the focus of attention within Aryan romanticism, in which subjects like human language, religion. art, and literature sustained the scholarship. Generally, it can be said that scholarship now began to focus on the concrete, material, and physical characteristics of the Indo.Europeans. When these aspects of the Indo-European came to the foreground, we can. like Stig Wtkander, talk about an Aryan naturalism. This arose at the same time as other new cultural and intellectual movements. Within the fine arts, real· ism and naturalism developed. Darwinism was victorious within most fields of knowledge. A "vitalistic" attitude within ethics and philosophical thought successfuUy competed with humanism; "life" and "authenticity" became more important concepts than "freedom" and "humanitY-' Aryan naturalism flour· ishes during the period we will analyze in this chapter, a period that stretches roughly from the 1870S to the 1920S, paralleling the decline of Aryan romanti· cism.1 Where the Aryan·romantic interest was preserved. however, especially within Wagnerianism, where interest in lndo-European religion, poetry, and symbolism continued, the humanism and liberalism ofthe nature-mythological school were replaced by vitalism, nationalism. and mysticism.

The FaU ofNature Mythology During the two centuries that the Indo· European discourse has existed, there has been a tug·of·war between philology and linguistics, on one side. and anthropology, archaeology, and other subjects that traditionaUy study the "lower" side of man, on the other. Racial anthropology, which studied man as a biological species, as nature, also belongs to the latter group. In chapter I, I mentioned the criticism that the anthropologist Robert G. Latham directed in the 18505 against Indomania and against Muller's attempt to classify reli· gions and peoples according to linguistic lines. At the end of the nineteenth century. the critique by racial anthropologists against MUlier continued, yet it was not that, but rather evolutionary anthropology. that finally crushed the nature· mythological theories. The discipline of evolutionary anthropology

I. This period.lution is not IntendN to be uniq~. My impression is that it is fairly well in line with what other disciplines dealing with modern history consider to be reasonable. Puschner et aI. 1996 has this periodization in Handbuch fllr "Vlilkisdrrn &wqun~ 1871-1918; and A. D. MOo mlglianowrltes that one can notice "a newatmOlphere. a new attitude toward the understanding 0( ancient rellgiolU about 1870-1880" (1994. '124).

126

PrimitiVf! A.ryans

Chapter 7hrff

was fueled by the contemporary belief in progress and in Darwinism's revolutionary theories about how nature's order was the result of a long historical process of change.1

The first to apply an evolutionary perspective to religious and cultural phenomena was the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917).10 his classic book Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development ofMythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language (1871), Tylor sketched-out a history in which all cultures undergo a development from primitive to civilized stages. Not even religion is excluded from this universaJ evolution. Tylor calls the most primitive form of religion animism, which roughly means a belief in spirits. Animism, according to Tyler, arose through speculations about the difference between a dead and a living body. and through the inability to distinguish dream from reality. Later, polytheism developed out of animism, and at the top of the evolution of religions is, not surprisingly, Christian monotheism. During the 186Os, Tylor had been influenced by MUller's theories, and he took a generally positive view of MOller's work. The two scholars shared certain liberal ideas, and both understood religion as a basically intellectual and philosophical ac· tivity. But there was one fundamental stumbling block: evolutionism's notion that man was a highly developed animal. This notion was, according to Muller, incompatible with Christian anthropogony. Even the first human being to step forth into the light of history, Muller wrote fifteen years before Darwin's On the Origin ofSpecies, shows that ~the divine gift of a sound and sober intellect belonged to him from the very first; and the idea of a humanity emerging slowly from the depths ofan animal brutality can never be maintained again:" When it turned out that this prognosis was a serious miscalculation, Mi.i.ller attempted, in a debate with Darwin, to refute evolutionism by showing that human language could not have developed from the sounds of animals and that man therefore is essentially different from animals. The conflict between MUlier's Christian humanism and the new evolutionism gained real momentum only when Tylor's colleagues Robert Ranulph Marett (1866-1943) and Andrew Lang (1844-1912) became interested in primitive religion. Marett proposed his own theory about the nature of primitive religion, which he presented as considerably more wild and barbaric than Tylor had. Marett felt that animism had been preceded by apreanimism that had sprung out of people's fear and fascination with certain natural phenomena that they About evolutionist anthropcMogy, _ l- F. M Millla' 1867-7S, 2.:8. 2..

Stoddnll987, 144-273-

127

believed contained supernatural power (historians of religion often used the Melanesian word mLlnLl to denote this power). Thus, the most primitive religion had developed from irrational feelings, and not, as Tylor argued, from thought processes that, primitive as they may have been, still.must be called rational. The notion that the source of religion could be found amid not-yet-completely human mental conditions was further strengthened when Marett argued that in primitive religions, ritual was at least as important as mythical narratives. Marett's discussions of preanimism thus implied a radical break with Muller's nostalgic descriptions of the primitive humans of ancient times. The leading critic of Muller's point of view became Lang, ~c1assical 'performer, essayist, historian, poet, critic. anthropologist, sports writeC4 The basic question in the debate that Lang's criticism provoked was about the nature of religion, and it was formulated in typical nineteenth·century fashion as a historical question about the origin of religion.s To answer the question, it was important to decide which material was best to use in order to get at this origin. MiUler argued that by learning ancient languages, one could gain access to the oldest possible evidence, the Vedic texts. Lang, however, argued that these books demonstrated a high degree of sophistication, and that ethnographic reports about contemporary ~savages" should be used instead. Specifically, Lang believed that the savages still lived in a culturaJ stage that was significantly older than the one that existed when the ancient Indian religions had been created. The religions of the contemporary savages were, according to Lang, ~surviv­ als,~ remnants from a stage of development that Europeans had left behind thousands of years ago. Lang summarizes his differences with Mt1ller: The main causes were that whereas ML Max Muller explained Greek myths by etymologies of the words in the Aryan languages, chiefly Greek. Latin, Slavonic, and Sanskrit, I kept find.ing myths very closely resembling those of Greece among Red Indians, Kaffirs, Eskimo, Samoyeds, Kami· laroi. Maouris, and Cahrocs. Now if Aryan myths arose from a ·disease~ of Aryan languages, it certainly seemed an odd thing that myths so similar to these abounded where non-Aryan languages alone prevailed. Did a kind of linguistic measles affect all tongues alike, from Sanskrit to Choctow, and everywhere produce the same ugly scars in religion and myth? The ugly scars were the problem! A civilised fancy is not puzzled for a moment by a beautiful beneficient Sun-god, or even by his beholding

4. DorIon 19550 16; lbout Ling. see Stoddng 1996, so-6lSo About the deblte, see DorIon 19S5; 1968, :106-'11; and Stoddng 1987, 6u.. 305-8.

128

CJuJplf:r

Primitive Ary Ger. f, as in ·ph1t1r > Swed.fader, but Lat. pater, Skt. pitiH, as evidence that the Germans were an original population that had become Indo·Europeanized by an immigrating race. He further claimed that when the names -Germansand -Celts" were used in ancient texts, they did not denote races, but rather cultural. linguistic, and social units. Finally, he argued that the Germans and Celts had not been clearly separated in prehistory, but in fact lived together at times. -The specific problem Hubert and other republican patriots faced at the level of national mythic subtext was this: who were the French? What did they have to do with the Germans? Were the French really only Romans who had absorbed the vanquished Celts without remainder? Were they, rather, Celts who had superficially acquired Latin language and political institutions, but who fundamentally continued being Gauls? Or, heaven forbid, were the French really Franks-Germans!"S7 Hubert was thus one of those who wanted to see the Celts as the predecessors of the French, and like his opponents on the other side of the Rhine, he hoped. that it would be possible to revitalize the nation with the help of myths about its past heroes.

LIFE AND FESTIVALS An Aryan Loves Life The transformation ofthe lndo.European discourse-from a bourgeois,largely liberal hwnanism toa nationalist and racist "primitivism; from Aryan romanticism to Aryan naturalism-was stimulated by an intellectual tradition that can hardly be called scientific in its entirety but yet produced at least one scien. tific work about IndO-European religion, and whose basic ideas later became important for Nazi scholarship on Aryan religion. This tradition is connected to the names Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1869), Richard Wagner (1813-83), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). What separates this system of thought from other contemporary systems is that the ~truth" ofreflection and observa. tion is subordinated to "life"-reason is seen as subordinated to the irrational process of life. The valuation of life shifted, however, from Schopenhauer's pessimism to Nietzsche's promotion of the strong life. Interestingly enough, both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche sought support for their antithetical views ofUfe in Indian literature. Schopenhauer-according to Uon Poliakov, one of those who have done the most to spread knowledge about the words -Aryan" and "Semitic" in Germany-found his own hatred of life weU expressed. in the Upanishads, which he knew through Anquetil·Dupperon's Oupnek'hat, and in the Buddhist text.Sllt is well known that Schopenhauer's knowledge about Indian philosophy was important for Die Welt au Wille und Vorstellung (t818), where the world is presented as a totally meaningless world of illusion (Vorstellung, maya), driven by a blind (orce (Wille, brahman). Schopenhauer contrasted the Indians' "idealism and pessimism" with the Jews' worldly and life-affirming religion, their -realism and optimism."59 For Schopenhauer, the hope was that people would cast away the Jewish-Semitic religion and embrace the Indian·Aryan one. Christianity, according to Schopenhauer, must have an Indian origin: "Its absolutely Indian ethics, which sharpens morality to asceticism, its pessimism and its Avatar are witness to this;""O By -Avatar; Schopenhauer meant Christ. and he continues in Parerga und Paralipomena (l8S1):

The center and heart of Christianity consist of the doctrine of the fall, original sin, the depravity of our natural state, and the corruption of man according to nature. Connected with this are intercession and atone58. About Schopenhauer and Indi:an philosophy. see Halbfass 1988, 106-2.0; and PoIlakov 2.47ff. 59. Schopenhauer 192.9, 2.4460. Ibid.. :146.

1974.

54· IbKI., 332.· ss. Cited In Chaudhurll974. '14.

56. See Lincoln 19981, ISr. 57. Stmllkll99), 197.

ment through the Redeemer, in which we share through faith in him. But Christianity thus shows itself to be pessimism and is, therefore, diametrically opposed to the optimism of Judaism, as also of Islam, the genuine offspring thereof; on the other hand, it is related to Brahmanism and Buddhism.... The fundamental difference in religions is to be found in the question whether they are optimism or pessimism, certainly not whether they are monotheism, polytheism, Trimurti, Trinity, pantheism, or atheism (like Buddhism). For this reason, the Old and New Testaments are diametrically opposed, and their amalgamation forms a queer centaur. The Old Testament is optimism; the New, ~imism. As previously shown, the former comes (rom the doctrine of Ormuzd; the latter, accord· ing to its inner spirit, is related to Brahmanism and Buddhism and so. in all probability, can somehow be historically derived therefrom. 61 Schopenhauer's speculations and descriptions did not convince everyone. People such as Heinrich Heine. Jules Michelet. Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, and Paul de Lagarde argued that it was instead the Indian or Indo-European religions that were life affirming, and that the core of the Jewish religion was a transcendentalism turned away from the world. 62 This also became Nietzsche's opinion. It is significant that Nietzsche did not point to the Upanishads as India's foremost text, but instead (like Schlegel and other reactionary thinkers) praised the Laws ofManu as the true expression of -an affirming Aryan religion- Qasagande arische Religion)." That Nietzsche pointed to this work, the foremost legislature of caste society. must be understood in light of his social-Darwinist and Faustian admiration for the strong individual who is

61_ Schopenhauer 1929, )87-88; in German in Schopenh.auer 19650 4$8: ~ Mi~punkt und

das Hendes Christentums Lst die Lehre vom Sfindenfall, von der Erbsunde. von der Heillosigkeit unsers n.atUrllchen Zustandes und der Verderbthelt des natllrllchen Menschen, verbunden mit der Vertretung: und Vers6hnung dutch den ErI6ser, deren man teilhaft wird dutch den Glauhen an ihn. Oadurch nun abet uigt dasabe sich als Pusimlsmus, lsi also clem Optimismus des Juden· turns. wit auch des echten Kindes des.selben. des Ldams, gerade entgegengesctzt, hinsqen clem Brahmanismus unci. Buddhaismus verwandl. ... Der Grundunterschied de1 Religionen liqt darin. ob sle Optimlsmus oder Pess.imismus sind, keineswegs darin, ob Monotheismus, Polytheismus, Trlmurti, Drelenlgkelt, Pantheismus oder Atheismus (wle der Buddhaismus). Dleserwegen sind AItes Testament unci. Neues Testllmt:nt einander diametraJ entgegengesetzl. und ihre Vereinigung blIdg einen wunderlichen Kentlluten. Du AIte Testament nimlich lsi Optimismus,
Rituals. holy days. drama rCatholic-)

Tendency to pantheism

Tendency to polytheism and mysticism

Adapted to science, reasonable. humanist

Adapted to customs. vitalistic

where the Indo-Europeans' existential feeling for life was expressed, which was in Line with the Wagnerianism and vitalism of the turn of the century. Above all, von Schroeder's work should be seen against the background of attempts to renew folk-national, and more or less heathen, rituals. Within the various groups that are usually denoted viilkische or national romantic, rituals such as folk and free dance. natural gymnastics, and weapons games, as well as seasonal cults like the lighting of bonfires on Walpurgis Night and the making of midsummer poles, were enacted. 91 These groups fought the -Semitic- religion's hatred of life, body. and nature and fought to revitalize heathen or Christian Aryan holidays that were adapted to the German or Germanic disposition. To some extent, the Christian opposition between Jewish text· and law·based religion and Christian religion oflove was replaced by the opposition between Jewish written and legal religion and Aryan reli· gion of celebration and festival. 91 The dream was to revitalize the Germanic spirit of love of life by driving out Semitic Christianity and reconnecting to the almost aesthetic religiosity (rather than dogmatic religion) that springs out of the people and the land. The sun cult became the main expression of 91. About national romantic (~isdte) Ideoiosy, see Pu5chner et aI. 1996; 100 Noll \994. 9:a. The dichotomy perhaps never became quite fixed to the dichotomy between Jewish and Aryan rdigion but could be connected with. for example, Jewish 1M clusical religion. According to SUg Wlkandu (-Om helip festeno'manu.script)), the internt in I rdigion of celebntion Of" festivll rnched I culmination It the t'nd oftlw 19')05, when Karl Kerfnyi, Johan Hub.lnp, 1M Roger Clillois wrote lbout the subject.

this immanent, vitalistic religion. The worship of sun and light Is a prevalent feature in much of bourgeois culture around the turn of the century: -Down with the cross. up with the maypole~J Von Schroeder was very conscious of the fact that his work aligned with the contemporary search for a new old religion. The greatest stumbling block of the time, -the question of questions, the struggle of struggles,· has to do with ·the great struggle about belief;- he writes in Arisdte Religion. He asks himself whether modern science will be able to replace religion, and whether in that case it will be able to give us answers to the basic existential questions." Or must religion be regenerated? Von Schroeder doubts the first possibility and points to authors who have already begun ·the renewal of our religion and philosophy· in a promising way.95 He names Chamberlain, Leo Tolstoy, the Indologist and philosopher Paul Deussen, the philosopher Rudolf Eucken, and the liberal theologian Adolf Harnack. These thinkers. then, are to help renew a religion that can be traced back to prehistoric Aryan religion. For even von Schroeder writes about the ongoing struggle against Semitic religions, in~ c1uding the -half-Semitic· Christianity. In its place. von Schroeder imagines that -the higher forms of the Indian religious development· will be used.. 96 By removing a Semitic component and replacing it with an Indian-Aryan one. a spiritual catastrophe will be avoided. Let us conclude the discussion of neotraditionalism by referring to a text that is very reminiscent of von Schroeder's work, and that is typical for its time in many ways. In the work of the archaeologist and classicist Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), Nietzschean vitalism is combined with evolutionism, and the HeUenes, idols of the European bourgeoisie, are turned into a primitive tribe. In both of the expansive monographs Prolegomena to the Study ofthe Greek Religion (1903) and Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912), Harrison turns against the contemporary high·cultural and idealized view of classical antiquity. She anchors her own evolutionist perspective in the ancient distinction between Olympian and chthonic rituals. Harrison argues that this double set of rituals mirrors a historical development in which the Olympian type represented a younger and more civilized form of religion that circled around the joyous Olympian sacrifice and around the benevolent.

93. I am thankful to Edward Lind (or mowing me this citation from Karl-Erik Forsslund's nova Slorgdn:k" (1900, '104). 94. Schroeder 1914-16, I:I[ 96.lbki, \:10. 9So 1b6d., 1:6.

166

Ch~pur

Primitive Aryans

Three

rational, and anthropomorphic Olympian gods. The Olympians' task was to watch over the world and maintain the cosmos. Thus far. Harrison's ideas do not differ from the conception of established research. But while the latter was founded on the assumption that the Greek and Olympian religions were largely identical, Harrison claims that scholars have forgotten the older (from an evolutionary standpoint) chthonic religion. According to her. this religion had been spread all around the Mediterranean and had been the true religion of Greece up to the seventh century. In her description of this "Pelasgian- reo Iigion, Harrison borrows from evolutionist anthropology and uses terms such as -totem: "mana: -animism,- and -medicine men:" Ritually, the Olympian cult of sacrifice corresponded to apotropaic (averting) rituals. and theologically, the Olympian gods corresponded to spirits. ghosts, and nature forces. The so-called year spirit, Enaitos-daimones, holds a special place in Harrison's investigation. This creature, who has features ofMannhardt's grain demon and Fraz.er's dying and reawakened god. is a personification of benevolent nature who is born. dies, and reawakens with the progress of the year. The ~Pelasgian· apotropaic exorcism serves to renew the year spirit and. thereby. nature's fertility. The chthonic cult also included a mother goddess, the life giver of everything. who demanded energy from her worshippers. But with the arrival of the Olympian religion. the goddesses were transformed. Even if Harrison shows no particular sympathy for the ~Pelasgian~chthonic religion. it is clear that she truly despises the Olympian religion, especially in the form in which Hesiod presents it. In his ~bourgeois, pessimistic· world. no primal goddesses were allowed; instead, the goddesses were demonized as types such as Pandora or domesticated as ~Iovesick geese:'9' Harrison, a suffragist and introducer of modern thinkers such as Bergson. Freud, lung, and Durkheim, thus diverged from her colleagues in not idoliZing the Olympians. On the contrary. in Themis she even writes that she has stopped viewing the Olympians as real gods and instead interprets them simply as artistic figures.- She now sees the Olympians as the result of a deification of nature, which was followed by an idealization of the gods that went so far that they have become sterile. intellectual abstractions. With the Olympians' victory over the Pelasgian religion, reflection, distinction. and clarity triumph over pulsing life. Evolutionists such as Harrison and Frazer loved the thought that divinl· ties came and went; Wagner wrote about Gotterdammerung and Nietzsche about Gotzen-Diimmerung. Nietzsche's declaration that God is dead is famous. and even Nietzsche's liberal critic Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendortr. the

Unknown artist, Hennes, Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, and Paris (n.d). The old goddesses demanded exploits rrom their worshippers; the Olympians wanted only admiration: '"The woman who earlier had inspired became a temptress; she who created everything, gods as well as mortals, became the plaything of the Olympians. their slave, only gifted with physical beauty and with the cunning and temptations or a slave· (Harrison 1908, 285). Here, Hermes leads Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite to Paris's judgment or who is the most desirable woman on earth. (Harrison 17

1908.)

foremost classicist of the turn of the century, declared that ~no god has eternal life.'"" Much of the turn of the century's interest in dying gods can be seen as radical, humanistic play with the idea of crucifixion. but there was also a serious thought that humans themselves construct and obliterate their supernatural idols. While a modernistic freethinker like Frazer saw this as proof of the fallacy of religion, the thought could inspire a neotraditionalist like Harrison to try to imagine the ideal religion. Above all, she seems to have been fascinated by Greek mystery religions. In the mystery religions, religion functioned as it should. for there it supported the pulsing life (duree. writes Harrison, using the concept of the vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson): ~1he religious impulse

97·~r~I908,~73,a84[

98. Harrison

191~,

476ft".

167

99. Cited In Momlgll.no 1994, 267.

168

Primitive A.ryans

Chapur Three

is directed. if I am right, primarily to one end and one only, the conservation and promotion of life. ~IOO Harrison was not alone in believing that mystery religions wefe an especially vitalizing type of religion. The fact is that one of

the most dominant traits of turn-of-the-century research is the notion that mystery religions have developed oul of a primitive fertility cult. For example. the Swedish evolutionist Martin P. Nilsson argued that mystery religions were the highest stage that folk religion. by which he meant peasant religion, could attain.to! For neotraditionalist thinkers like Harrison or von Schroeder. the mystery religions' belief in the reincarnation of the soul could be an attractive

alternative to the rationalistic belief of modernism and the transcendentalism of traditionalism. In the mysteries. one could also find a religion in which the theatrical and the aesthetic had a prominent place, and where a moving -religiosity- was more important than dogma and texts.

Jewish SdJolars and Aryan Religion I will conclude this chapter as I started it. namely, with the criticism that destroyed the paradigm of nature mythology. However, we shall now turn to France, where MUlier's nature mythology was represented by prominent scholars such as Albert Rl!ville (1826-1906), Michel Brl!aI {t832-1915}, and Salomon Reinach (1858-1932). For these three, the research on the history of religions was one link in the creation ofa modernistic religion and culture. For the Jew Reinach, the work was mainly about reforming the traditional Judaism that stood in the way of the assimilation of the Jews, since they placed so much importance on rituals, ceremonial clothing, and religious laws.lo::l Actually, Reinach imagined in a typically modernistic fashion that the rituals, clothing, and laws were only empty shells. With a symbolical method of interpretation, it also became evident that all religions were one and the same at their innermost core. And once this was understood, Reinach hoped, the Jews would cease to be a people and a race and instead become a religious grouping, an organization that people joined based on beliefs. 103

169

Should not Reinach's ideas also fit the ethnically Jewish scholars £mile Durkheim (1858-19t7) and Marcel Mauss, professor of primitive religions (1872-1950), and their colleague, the nominally Catholic Henri Hubert (1872.192.7), professor of European primitive religions? So asks Ivan Strenski, in his Durkheim and the Jews ofFrance (1997). In this book. Strenski shows that cer· tain of Durkheim's and his friends' standpoints can be seen in relationship to their understanding of what I have here called modernist and neotraditionalist ideals. Their theories have also been formed in reaction against MillJer's nature· mythological research. Renan's Aryanism, and the increasing anti-Semitism of the time. The following discussion largely follows Strenski's analysis. The Durkheimians were known as self·conscious modern scholars with socialist or leftist-liberal convictions. But in spite of that. they did not accept Reinach's modernistic notion of religion: MGiven that this critique of Talmudic Judaism was fashionable in the liberal and enlightened scholarly circles in which the Durkheimians moved, it is striking that the Durkheimians totally rejected the liberal position."104 According to Strenski's analysis, there were many reasons for this. First of all. a pure careerism seems to have had something to do with it-in order to rise in the academic world it was not enough to repeat old ideas. and Reinach's book on the history of religions. Orpheus. had come out in six editions already in its first year (1909) and had thirty-eight editions by 1930. Secondly, Durkheim, Mauss, and Hubert were worried about how short the step could be from a modernist history of religions with strong anti-Jewish and Aryanist features to pure anti·Semitism. In chapter 2, I tried to show how complicated it can be, a century later, to separate anti-Jewish humanism from anti-Semitism, and it was hardly any easier in Durkheim's own time. There were two ways to prevent people from taking the step from anti·Jewish to anti-Semitic. The first was to show that the Semitic tradition also had myths and was therefore just as well equipped as the Indo·European religion to meet modern culture, with its worldliness and science. Maurice Olender has shown that the ethnically Jewish Hungarian Orientalist 19naz Goldziher (1850-1921) chose this way out. In Der Mythos bei den Hebraern und seine geschicht·

fiche Entwicklung: Untersuchungen zur Mythologie und Religionswissenschaft 100. Harrison 191.'1, 477; 19'11. I. 101. Nilsson 1961, 42«. 10'1. About Reinach. see Strensk!I9S!7, esp. 69-81. 10]. However, Reinach seemed to be as unable as Renan to determine whether "tlloe" ila good term to think with or not; see the somewhat confused discu55ion in OrftlU, where he first d~letI that "an Aryan nice" exisu but at thto same time cWms that there has ~n a northern European "type" that penetrated India In prehistoric times (1930, 49).

(1876), Goldziher applied Muliers' and Kuhn's theories to Hebrew material and

thought he could prove that solar heroes were everywhere in the Bible. His aim, writes Olender. was to deny that the ability to create myths was unique to the Aryans no de-Aryanize mythologizing-) and that the Semites had not, 104.

StrelUki 1997. 107.

1

Chapter Three

170

as Renan had emphatically claimed, completely lacked myths,lOS Goldziher's attempt to prove the existence of Hebrew myths was thus a way to raise the Semitic tradition and to emphasize its liberal, poetic, and philosophical side.

Judaism had the same potential as other religions to fit modern times: Min asking the Christian West to recognize the 'mythology of the Hebrews: he was asking his contemporaries to assimilate the Jews into European culture."I06 With the help of the history of religions, people thus hoped to lessen anti~ Jewish and/or anti~Semitic feelings by presenting the Jewish-Semitic religion as quite similar to the Indo-European one. This method was probably most attractive for modernists who. for one reason or another, were not satisfied with Lassen's and Renan's radical distinction between Indo-European and Semitic religions. The Durkheimians, however, determjned to try the other method. They questioned the truth ofthe claim that mythology is required for the emergence of a rich culture and chose instead to stress the value of rituals. This was completely in contrast to the modernistic and liberal-theological notion that rituals are meaningless decorations at best and, at worst, expressions of a crass materialism. The modernist Reinach held precisely this view, while the Durkheimians thus insisted that rituals and ceremonies were not a played-out ~magic" stage in the developmental history of religions. According to Strenski, the Durkheimians-that is, above all Mauss-took over the ~ritu­ alistic" standpoint from Sylvain Levi (1863-1935), a French Jewwho instructed Mauss and Hubert in Indology, in other words, a "Semite" who lectured about ~Aryans.~ Levi had been influenced by Lang's evolutionist critique of MUller's nature mythology. In Le Doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brahmanas (l898), he therefore tried to study the Vedic literature mythopoeically, instead of seeing it as natural philosophy, in light of the Vedic sacrificial rituals. In contrast to MUlier, Levi argued that it was the concrete rituals and organization of religions that enabled them to survive, rather than some abstract worldview. Through this reorientation-from myth, language, and philosophy to ritual, colt, and community-Levi became one of the most important sources of inspiration for von Schroeder's Mysterium und Mjmus im Rigveda, where Levi's ritual· ism was combined with Wagnerian and Nietzschean ideas about the cultural significance of drama and festival. Levi's theoretical perspective was completely in line with his ideological or normative conception of religion. Unlike Reinach and other modernists, Levi valued, in particular, the traditional ~Talmudic" or "rabbinic~ Judaism lOS.

Primitive Aryans

that eastern European Jews had brought with them to France at the end of the nineteenth century. Levi's work on Vedic rituals can actually be seen as a defense of this traditional Judaism, since the discussion about Vedic and Indian religion, ifone can believe Strenski, in many aspects presented a contrast to the discussion about Jewish-Semitic religion: ~The history of the religions of India constituted a parallel universe of symbolic discourse for speaking about the history of Israel and Judaism:'lOi' The criticism that MUlier and other modern· ist scholars directed against the degenerated and "Turanified" Hinduism (and against the "medieval" Catholic Church) because it was obsolete, authoritarian, and consisted only of empty rituals that aimed to provide material well·being also applied to Levi's traditionalistic Judaism. His defense of Vedic ritualism, which was that it was a powerful means to keep a community together and to pass on religion from generation to generation, became, when turned around, a defense against modernistic reforms of Judaism. The Durkheimians embraced Levi's ritualism in order to wrest the debate on the history of religions away from Aryan myths, but perhaps they also thought there was another advantage to be gained. This was linked to the project that made them famous: the attempt to create a sociology of religion. When the Durkheimians appeared on the French intellectual scene, it was well prepared, thanks to individuals like Comte, Michelet, and Renan, for studies about the relationship of religion to social factors. But one might ask whether striving to found a sociology of religion was also a way to completely turn around the ideas of MUlier; for what is a sociology of religion if not the opposite of nature mythology, a culture mythology? The symbols and signs of religion are no longer related to natural phenomena, but rather to human constellations. In any case, the Durkheimians' theories can be seen as a reaction against the views that were presented by MUller, Renan, Cox, Fiske, Kuhn, Breal, and Reinach, among others. These scholars praised the Aryan religion, marginalized the Semitic one, stressed the importance of mythology for religion, and interpreted religion as an allegory of nature. Strenski summarizes: "Where MUller was Aryanist and early on had acquired the reputation of being anti-Semitic, the Durkheimians were cosmopolitan and nonexclusive; where MUller saw Romantic individualism and mystic rapture, the Durkheimians looked to Enlightenment fellow· ship and cooperation; where Muller saw society as formed by its language, myths, philosophy, and poetry, the Durkheimians saw society actively forming modes of literary, linguistic, and poetic expression; where Muller saw myth

Olender 199:1, 1:11.

106. Ibid.,134.

17\

107· Strtnskl1997. 1::15·

172

Chapter 1hrtJe

and philosophy. the Durkheimians saw ritual and concrete human relations~ The Durkheimians' interest in religion's function of creating social cohesion, certainly stimulated by the flag-waving and fetishistic nationalism of the time.

meant that they were thematically close to what I have called a neotraditionalist understanding of religion. Whether this term could be applied to Durkheim's, Hubert's, and Mauss's work in its entirety. I will not venture to say. I can point out, however. that there is a strong connection in the history of ideas from

Durkheim's sociology of religion. across Bronislaw Malinowski. to the foremost neotraditionalist scholar of the twentieth century, Mircea ELiade. With him. the interest in myths has been reawakened. but they are now understood in a neotraditionalist way. in the spirit of the Durkheimians, as a means of forming a human group. and in a neotraditionalist way in the Wagnerian spirit. as a means of expressing an aesthetic·metaphysical view of life. The ethnically Jewish scholars Sylvain Levi. Marcel Mauss, and £mile Durkheim tried to undermine the Aryanist school of nature mythology, which they saw as antHewish and potentially anti-Semitic. In passing. we previously mentioned that the also ethnically Jewish Ignaz Goldziher tried to raise the status of the Semitic religions by making them resemble the Aryan ones. It is therefore reasonable to ask whether ethnically Jewish scholars in general have been more critical of the Indo- European scholarship. I have, however, not had the opportunity to examine this question systematically. There seem to have been several Jewish scholars during the end of the nineteenth century who took a fairly conventional and uncritical position on the research. The naturemythologically oriented scholars lames Darmesterer and Michel Breal can perhaps be counted among them. 109 Their view of the opposition between Aryan and Jewish-Semitic religion was probably quite similar to Renan's or Miiller's. These scholars were in that case inclined to support an anti-Jewish Aryanist tradition because they believed that it would mean a step forward toward a freer, more tolerant, and modern Europe. Evolutionist research, as we have seen, presented an opportunity for scholars to liberate themselves from the nature-mythological school's idealization of the IndO-Europeans. Salomon Reinach was one of those who saw evolution· ism as an opportunity to tone down the differences between IndO-Europeans

108. ~ 1996, 69.

log. About I>arTnuttm, see Stmald 1997, 66l.• 99. About Brial. see "Brial; in £/. Other JewIsh scholan who should be studied in this connectk)n are Theodor Benrey, who at.n early polnt located the original homeland in eallern Europe. and Heymann Sleniahl (see ROmer 1985. 71).

Primitiw AJ7asm\ lin- ~rrnanen :w best~tm und .de fUr ehenWigc Kellen :w vtd1rm.. So de.- Jude Sigmund Feist-, wahm\d ~.dchauf diedeuuehe A1tertwtuJnmdewe,m. Olkrdas deul5Chen M.lrchen in Bausch und ~ ab IpQte Entlehnui18 aus dem indischen Fabdschatt hinstellen. DB lit. aura Lttzte gnehen, HindlerJeist in der WlSIenSChaf't. dem die Kultur zur Ware und ~r MelUCh zur ~ldavten Sathe wird." II).

174

PrimitiYe Aryans

Chapter Three

fact, of the four main proponents of the view that Georges Dumezil's theories about an Indo-European tripartite ideology must be seen in connection with the Fascistic ideologies of the 19305 and 19405, three are ofJewish descent. On a more speculative level, it would also be interesting to examine the relationship between the theories of Claude Levi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida and the Indo-European discQurse,'16 I do not know if ooecan claim that the ideological-as opposed to the theoretical and methodical-critique of Indt'?-European scholarship has been closer to Jewish scholars than to non-Jewish scholars. Naturally, there have also been non-Jewish scholars who have found the idealization of the Indo-European religion distasteful. Maurice Olender has, for example, shown how a Christian apologist, Rudolf Friedrich Grau (1835-93), tried to remove positive connotations from Indo-European religion. and during the Nazi rule of Germany. various Christian societies tried to fight the idealization of Aryan and Germanic religion that was at the heart of several successful neo-pagan groups.1I7 In chapter 5, we shall see how some Catholic priests struggled against the same tendency. But even ~Aryann or "lndo·European~ lndo-Europeanists without Christian faith could react negatively. Above all, this seems to be true for the evolutionist scholars, which relates to their entire view or people and their historiography. The best example of a non-Aryanist UAryan~ might be Otto Schrader, whom we mentioned in connection with evolutionism and to whom we shall return in the following chapters. Schrader realized that the scholarship about the Indo- Europeans and their religion was far from ideologically innocent, as the following citation from 1907 shows: Ever more clearly an idea is appearing on the horizon, in which the concept of Indo-European is flowing into that of the Germanic peoples. According to this patriotic, and therefore welcomed, belief, the Germanic u6. Lbti-Strauss's ideological value judgments are not easy to understand. I imagined at one point that his persistence about myth as a universal form of expre5Sion had arisen in polemic against the theories of Renan and other scholars that Aryans are the only ones who have been able to create myths. but this was in any case not confirmed by Levi·5trauss himself (letter of August S. I99S). Derrida's emphasis on the precedence of rhetoric and ethics above pure thought, logos. is reminiscent oCthe contrast between semites and Aryans for Renan. In his later philosophy. Oerrida also writes about the opposition between Hebrews and Hellenes. Otherwise. see especially Derrida's article "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of PhilosophY. in Margins ofPh/loJophl (19S~), where Renan figures and where Derrida writes that the white man elevated his own mythology, ·Indo-European mythology; to logos. In general, the French postmodern movement is a protest against the progressive, universalist, and liberal tradition represented by Renan. 117. Olender 199a, 106-14.

175

or pre-Germanic peoples crashed into the rest of the world by sea from the storm-whipped shores of the North Sea or from the ancient forests on the coasts of the Baltic Sea. Hand in hand with this teaching is the ever-increasing belief in the singular superiority of ancient Indo-European culture both in material and in social and ethical respects. Soon, through linguistic comparison, one will be able to see that the former "IndoEuropean paradise~ is not to be found "in the ceiling of the world~ but in Scania, Schleswieg-Holstein, or perhaps even Berlin and its surroundings. lIlI At the same time when Schrader wrote these lines. Andrew Lang and a whole group of evolutionist scholars, like the classicists Jane Ellen Harrison and Gilbert Murray. were making the discussion of ~Indo-Europeans~and "Aryans~ unfashionable in England. In Germany as well, evolutionists like Otto Gruppe and Hermann Usener attacked Indo-European scholarship, even if it was not as much weakened as in England. In German. the /unggrammatik (new grammar) school within comparative linguistics also had a sobering effect on the research. In France, the climate was changed through works by Salomon Reinach, tmile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss. Henri Hubert, and the Indo·Europeanist Ferdinand de Saussure. who was inspired both by Durkheim and the new grammarians. Not until the 1930S would the Indo-European research and discourse regain the attractiveness it had held during MiilIer's period of greatness in the second half of the nineteenth century. Conclusion In the paradigm of nature mythology, the Indo·Europeans appeared as a highstanding cultural people with a taste for art and a great capacity for intellectual thought. This view of the Indo-Europeans provided a mythical model for those academics and members of the educated public who believed in the poSSibility uS. Schrader 1907, ix-x: "Immer deutlicher taucht am Horizont eine Vorstellung auf, der der Begriffdes [ndogermanemtums in dem des Germanentums zerfliesst Von den sturmgepeitsehten Gestaden der Nordsee oder aus den Urwii1dern an den Kiisten der Ostsee haben nach diesem patriotischen und darum willig aufgenomenen Glauben die Germanen oder Priigermanen schon In unvordenldicher Zeit zu Wasser und:tu Land die Welt bis :tum Oxus und Ganges Oberllutet. Hand in Hand mit dieser Lehre geht. auf angebliche Zeugnlsse der Prihistorie gestilttt, eine Immer mehr sich stelgernde Vorstellung von der einstigen Hohe der urindogermanischen Kulturebenso In materieller wie in gesellschaftlicher und sittlicher Hinsicht. Bald wird man wieder bei dem elnnmals dUTCh sprachllche Gleichungen gewonnenen 'indogermanischen Pandies' angekommen leln, nur dau man selnen S
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the exchange between neo-pagan groups, Wagner societies. greater German parties, and the folklorists in Vienna was intensive and mutual.' The folklorists believed, in particular, that it was their task to give German-speaking individuals insight about their history and their true identity. The nationalistic discipline of folklore in Vienna 3. About thco development offolldon! In Austria dUring the early ~ntieth century. see Bockhorn 1994.

180

ChapurFour

Order and Barbarism

included three competing schools. One school. the Catholic. will be discussed in the next chapter. Of the two schools that are relevant for this chapter, one consisted of colleagues and students of Leopold von Schroeder and included individuals such as Georg Hiising, Edmund Mudrak. Karl von SpieB. and Wolfgang Schultz. They saw it as their mission to prove the existence of an unbroken continuity between contemporary German culture and the origi· nal prehistoric Germanic and Indo-Germanic cultures. Through studies of myths. tales. and legends, they tried to identify ~the domestic- and distinguish it from "the foreign.- The other school had principally the same aim, and its members-among others, Lily Weiser (Weiser-Aall), Otto Hofler, Richard Wolfram, and Gilbert Trathnigg-had also been strongly influenced by von Schroeder's work. Their real teacher, however. was von Schroeder's antagonist at the university in Vienna. the Germanist Rudolf Much (1862-1936).4 There was one difference between the two schools: while the first school studied myths and other oral literature, the members of Much's school emphasized the study of rituals and cults. In this work they were strongly influenced by von Schroeder's Mysterium und Mimus im Rigveda. The difference between the two folkloristic schools was therefore, writes the Austrian ethnologist Olaf Rockhorn, the difference between -mythical legend- and -ecstatic cult:'5 As we shall see, this basic methodological difference between the -mythologistsand the -ritualists- eventually developed into greater conflicts on both the theoretical and the institutional levels. In the 1930S, and especially after the Anschluj. the Austrian -mythologists" became linked to the National Socialist educational system led by the chief ideologist of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). Alfred Rosenberg.tiThe Nazi educational policy strove to "purify· the existing educational institutions of all foreign elements. both on the theoretical and personal political planes. It also strove to build up its own alternative educational sys·

son of Austrian archaeologist Matthaus Much, who pre5ented evIdence of a northern European original home In 190::1 In Die Helmal tkr Indogermanen im Udrte der urgeschidrt/lchen ForJdrung. Because Gustaf kassina published a book In the same year, Ole l~mani.scM Frage archiiologisdl beantworkr, in whkh he argued the Arne thing. Much'. book ~ived leu attention. The Much family'. home was urly on I Clmler for Austria's grNter 4. Rudolf Much was the

G ~ Nazis (Bockhorn 1994, 14S). S-1bid..,1~

6- About the fates of the V~ foWorists,

....

'

see Urldd 1994; and artidn in Dow and U.fdd

181

terns. Rosenberg's alternative became the creation of Hohe Schule der Partei, under the leadership of the Nietzschean philosopher Alfred Baumler.' At this institution, departments would be established for biology, racial biology, religious studies, Oriental studies, Germanic studies. and German folklore, among others. In addition, the coUege would include an Institut zur Erforschung der arischen Geistesgeschichte, or, by another name. lnstitut fUr indogermanische Geistegeschichte. The institute was to be led by the classicist Richard Harder, and its mission would be -to present the entire spiritual heritage of Aryanism from the witness accounts of the oriental and Western history. Naturally special notice must also be taken of the Aryan spirit's Jewish opponent.... The plan was to hire specialists for the institute who could work within different fields such as -the history of the ancient Indo-European mentality; ·Iranian religious history; "Continental European history; -Aryan philosophy; -inherited psychology· (Erbpsychologie), and -the history of Jewish mentality:' The ques· tions that these specialists would investigate concerned. among other things. -the indo-Germanization of the Christian dogmas; -Aryan and non-Aryan in ancient Indian religious belief." -the Mycenean culture as a mixture of Nordic and Mediterranean elements,~ ..the struggle against astrology; -cults foreign to the race and the fight against them," ~Iranian influence on the Hellenistic religions; -the struggle of Greek philosophy against Christianity; and -ancient and Oriental traits of the church fathers."9 The "mythologists~ were thus attached to Rosenberg's office. The "ritualistsJ~ Much's students, were instead recruited for a different Nazi research project that was called Das Ahnenerbe, Forschungsinstitut fUr Geistesurgeschichte (Institute for the history of ancient culture).1D Around 1935, the Reichsfiihrer Heinrich Himmler, Rosenberg's competitor for ideological power in the Third Reich, had begun to build up Ahnenerbe as a research division within the 55 whose goal was to research the cultural history of the Germans and the

7. About the contribution of Rosenberg. see Bollmus 1970; see also Uxfdd 1994. Von Schroeder'. pupil Wolfgang Schultz was chosen by Rosenberg as the leader of research about Arisdle Weltanschauung und Volkslwnde, a project that, however, seem. to have remained on paper only (Bollmus 1970, 174, 308n70); about Schultz, see also Hermand 1991, 19'
Ordu and Barbarism

193

"the divine will. which strives to shape and introduce order into nations for the enhancement of every living thing;"5' In earlier chapters, we have seen how scholars have had one historic people represent the entire Indo-European human family: for rationalists and liberals, the (humanist) image of the Athenians was the prototype for the Indo-Europeans; for the nature mythologists. the (romantic) image of the prehistoric Indian and Iranian people; for the evolutionary folklorists. the (-primitivist") image of ancient Germanics and Celts. The Nazi Uideo[ogists of order- found their ideal in Hellas, but not in Athens. The nineteenth-century Philhellenes had loved classical Athens. the city of democracy, rational conversation. harmoni~ ous art. and noble character. There was however, even during the nineteenth century, a competing ideology which praised heroic Doric Sparta rather than enlightened Ionic HelIas.S2 The difference was great: from admiration for -the first democracy of the world; the pioneers of philosophy. and the producers of beauty to reverence for the Spartan city-state. where a conservative landOWning warrior caste ruled over merchants, artisans. and Helot serfs. Admiration for the Spartan way of life had already sprouted in the work of Friedrich Schlegel and K. O. Muller. but it is only toward the end of the nineteenth century that the interest in taciturn, brave, and independent Sparta began to overtake the admiration for the Athenians of light (whom one could never be quite sure had not mingled with some Orientals during their trading journeys). Some of those who looked enviously at the slave-owning Spartan warrior aristocracy were Rosenberg, GUnther. and Dacre. Hitler also approved ofSparta but had no use for Negroid Indians and barbaric Germans. 53 Accord· ing to Hitler. Sparta was "the purest racial state of history" and its rigid division of inhabitants into aristocratic -Spartiates- and enslaved Helots was a model for Nazi racial politics.SoI One should also note that the modern Germans could not be divided into nobles and slaves: Germany was not like Sparta, insofar as 51. Gunther 1967. 53.

43. About DatJ'l and Nazi folk romanticism, see LutzMft 1971, S:1-SS tt passim: and Hermand 199:1. l08ff. tt puslm.. 44. WOst 194:1. 67f.: "Die ~-einheit Mensch·Ahnenerbe·Glaubenskraft ist geborgen in elner

ebenso dreifach Einheit von {.d)ensordnungen. die man mit den Kennworten Landschaft-8IutGeschichte oder-untCf Venidlt auf den wis.senschafugeschichtlichen Verlauf-Rasse-RaumUit (iibertiekrung) malk. wobei zwischen Raw unci Raum oder B1ul unci Boden ein bnonders urtfim1icher Zusammenhanl besteht." 48. GUnther 1967. S14S- Ibid.. 9649.lbkL 46. GUnther 19)4. 31SO. GUnther 1934. 26. 47. Ibid.. ul.

sa. About Na'l::ism. classical research. and the view of classical antiquity, see Losemann '977. esp. 17ff.; about the Idealization of the Doric-Spartan tradition, see Rawson 1969. esp. 306-43; and Bernal 1997. :1.83-85. The Nazi research was to study ancient Greece and Italy "in its IndoGermanic-Aryan context" (tex! from Ahnene:rbe cited In !.osemann 19n. u8). In line with this. ROIt"r1be'l wanted to expand thec::onttpt or"antiquity": "Theconcept orantiquity should include the history of aU those ~ and culture:lthat because or their ancienl origin in northern Europe dttmnine the fate 0( the: world. which means that the Indians and the: Iranians must ;oin the: Gree:b and Romans in our imagined wocid" (cited in Lo5e:mann 19n. 141). S3- l.oIemann 1m, Ill; Goodricke.Qarite 1998. 6sS4- Cited in Losemann 1m. II

Order a"d Barbarism

Chaptt:r Four

194

TABLE 7

The aristocracy of the past as today's nation

Sparta

Rome

India

Modern Europe

Spartiates

Patricians

A"I'

Germans, Teutons, or Aryans

Helots

P1_

Slidr.t and caodala

Subhumans

the slaves were included in the nation. Germany is the Sparta aCthe Spartiates. and its Helots are other peoples who should be enslaved (above all. Slavic people like the Poles and Russians). In the same way. Nazi scholars-and the

same could be said of reactionary scholars in other countries-have refused to recognize themselves in the ancient Indo-European societies as a whole. and instead have identified with its aristocracy: The Germans historically cor· responded to the elite. to the "aryas~ of India, to the patricians of Rome. and the "Spartiates" of Sparta. Patriarchy?

The government of the noble fanners was, not surprisingly. thought to be patriarchal. Earlier evolutionist research had imagined that women had a prominent place in agrarian societies, at least during their more primitive stages, and that patriarchy had arisen only in connection with the rise of high culture. But the prehistorians and philologists who have written about Proto·lndo-European society have. unlike the evolutionists, always claimed that it was patriarchal, The Indo-European discourse was thus on a colLision course with evolution· ism in this question. From the mid·nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, Johann Jakob Bachofen was the great name in the discussion about power relationships during prehistory, but his ideas did not clarify the question of Proto-Indo-European culture. They could, in particular, indicate either that Proto·lndo-European society had been matriarchal (since matriarchy existed before patriarchy, which was first developed in the high cultures of classical antiquity), or that it had been patriarchal (since it was among the Indo-European Greeks and Romans that patriarchy was first developed), The latter hypothesis had a certain advantage, since it was supported by another influential researcher, the conservative British historian oflaw Henry Sumner Maine (1822-88).55 In the same year when Bachofen published DaJ Mutter5S. About Maine, 1ft Stcx:k1ni 198'7, 117-d: Tnutmann 1997, 204-6.

195

recht, Maine published Ancient Law (1861), where he argued that ancient Aryan society was ruled patriarchaUy and structured around patrilineal families. Three years after Ancient Law. another important work came out about Indo-European law, La cite antique (1864), by the conservative French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges {t830-89).S6 Through studies of the Vedic texts and particularly of the Laws ofManu, Fustel de Coulanges concluded that the foundation of the Indo--Ewopean religion was the deification of dead ancestors. The worship of ancestors was tied to the hearth of the family and the clan, which in some cases itself became personified and deified (for example, as Agni).S7 The idea behind the cult was that the ancestors continued to live as long as the family's fire bwned.. The ancestor cult was physically tied to graves that marked the family's right to agricultural lands. The cult of the dead thereby was the root of the family's identity, of religion, and of private ownership of land. Especially the last point was important, since Maine, based on Tacitus's Germania, among other sources, had worked with the assumption that a primitive viUage communism had existed among the Proto-Indo·Europeans. But for Fustel de Coulanges, private ownership was original and natural. and one can state that his historiography among other things served. to protect the old order against demands for reform raised by the Second Empire's radical liberals and socialists. It became increasingly important to counteract the progressive forces after the Paris Commune of 1871, when communists had introduced common ownership of production. From the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the debate about prehistoric power relationships between the sexes, marriage rules, group marriage. abduction of women, sexual life, promiscuity, kinship systems, inheritance rights, and forms of ownership was intensive.SI On one side, there were conservative scholars like Maine and Fustel de Coulanges, and on the other side, there were progressive scholars like Bachofen, the evolutionist John Mclennan, and the Orientalist William Robertson Smith, On the progressive side was also the American Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-81), who in the 1870S sketched the family's development from "the collective family" (where broth· ers and sisters marry each other) and "the barbarian family" (where blood ties ,56. About Fustel de Coulanges, see Momigliano 1994, 16:1-78, :137-39, 244. 57. In Vesta (1943), Ahnenerbe'. expert on Indo· European migion, Otto Huth, attempted to use phllologlcal and folkloristic mWiods to anatyu and trace the connections between the May bonfire and an ancient cult of the hearth in which the anceston Iivt."d on after death. Cc. Hauer 1936, IntI'.

58. About the lnthropolotkal r~arch on the orlgln of the filmily, and 50 on. _ Stcx:king 1987, tip. 117-2', 197-201, 22'-3:1:.nd Num~in 1947. 52-44.10-91.

196

197

Ch"pto Four

are important at marriage, but not in sexual life) to "the patriarchal family" (polygyny) and "the civilized family" (marriage of couples with inheritance

rights for the children)." He connected this development with the various races, so that the precivilized forms were tied to the "Malaysian; "Turanian," and "Ganowan" (?) races, and the civilized forms to the "Uratic; "Semitic; and

"Aryan" races. According to Morgan, the Aryan race was also the most civilized in the area of private life.

On the whole, the debate between conservatives and progressives reflected the anxiety aCthe conquering bourgeois class about revolutionary ideas and its divided or "pragmatic" relationship to the freedom of the individual. Neither of the two parties questioned the basic values of family order and ownership: everyone knew that patriarchy, monogamous marriage. and private owner· ship belonged to the highest stage of humankind. 6O The question was only whether these circumstances had always existed and shouJd be conserved or were the resuJt of human beings' continual striving to live in a civilized. man· nero Around the turn of the century. scholars asked themselves if this schism regarding Proto· Indo· European society could be resolved with the help of linguistic paleontology. Which kinship terms could actually be reconstructed? CouJd terms be found that pointed to certain types of ownership structures and marriage rituals? The foremost philologists of the time, Otto Schrader and Hermann Hirt (1865-1936), presented. evidence that indicated that Proto-lodoEuropean society had in fact been patriarchal. According to Schrader. it was. for example. quite clear that the ancient Indo-European marriage rules demanded. that the woman should move to the man's home and therewith join his kin: "The woman disappeared, so to speak, into the house oCher husband.tt6l Sons, on the other hand, couJd continue to live in their own large families. which Schrader presents as a tyrannical "hearth community" (·domHos) which was subordinated to the absolute power of the "patriarch" (·potis. "·demspotu"p,l "Therefore, we have in the lndo·European family, a strict agnatic [based on the father) system of relationships, within which the lord of the house (·p6ti-s) is

59. About Morgan. see Stocking 1987. 3l51f. et pusim; 1996. ISf. 60. The important ex«ptlon is Friedrich £op. who because of h1I communist ~ defended Bachofen'5 and Morgan'5 theorie5 in ~r Ursprung dl:r Fsmilie, da PriW"~igt."tiIl4ms WId da St-ts (884). 61. Schmer 1907. 3::31S "Ou Weib verschwand. sozusagrn. in dem Hause des EhegattelL" 6:1. Ibid., :1."']66. Aa:xJrding toSctu-ade1. the Indo-European word for hearth community wuwith updated orthography-'domHos (Skt. ddmiJ, Lat domlU). which t~y iii undentood simply as "~." And the word for "clan" (itt), 'uik'- (Lat. vlclU, Skt. vU. Av. v~).11 today Interpreted II "village" or as "the village of the dan" (&eekes 1995, '4).

given complete paternal power. He ruJes with an iron fist over his household, which remains under his control. and after his death, transfers its allegiance to the oldest son or uncle. thereby creating a herd community. Furthermore, the position of women is one of complete servitude."63 When the patriarch dies, the family group thus lives on under the leadership of sons and uncles, who now form a ~brotherhood" or a clan (·uiK-). Several clans that join together form a "tribe" (·teuta < O.lr. tUath, Goth. /Jiuda, Ger. deutsch) that is led by a -king" (·h3reg.s < Skt. mj-, Lat. rex. O.lr. rt). There is, however, no higher national unit, and the fundamental social unit remains the exogamous clan. The ideological glue that holds the clan together is worship of the common ancestors (Skt. pittiras, Lat. manes. Goth. anses). Unlike Schrader. whose work had an antiauthoritarian subtext. Hirt took a more neutral stand. which contributed. to the more authoritative status the Nazi researchers gave his work. In several articles. and above aU in Die Indogermanen (1905-7), Hirt had also supported the archaeologists who argued for a northern European homeland. which suited. the Nazi ideology. But not even Hirt's works were completely easy to adapt to the Nazi mythology. To a great extent, Hirt agreed with Schrader that the hub of the Proto~lndo~European world had been made up of patrilinear clans that were joined together with the help of ancestor cults: "Family and clan ties created the basis of all societal order in the Indo-European tribes, even into historical times..... In clan society, according to Hirt, a simple folk and peasant democracy reigned. He proved this by shOWing that there were no traces of an aristocracy among the Indo-European people who still lived near the original home. that is to say. the Germans and Slavs. Only with the Indo-European expansion across Europe and Asia was the clan order transformed so that the conquerors became a warrior aristocracy in the colonized lands. This notion was entirely in line with the nineteenth·century liberal view of the Germanic people, but it went against the Nazi researchers' wishes. According to them, the Indo-Germans made up the aristocracy of humanity, they were -noble farmers, patrilinear Indo-Germans" (adeJbiiuerlicher vaterrechtlicher Indogermanen). and such

Schrader 1911. 112,: "So haben wir In dtr indogennanischen Familie cine stre:ng agnatische aufgeb;iute Verwandt5chaft mit dem mit voller viterlkher ~waJt ausgesta.ueten Hausherrn (·p6ti-s) an der Spitte 0\ntn gdemL Er hmx:ht mit eIsemer ~F Ubn- die Seinen. die. ~ tr kbt. unttr ihm beIsammen bleiben, aber aoch wohI nach sdnem T~ unter deor Henschaft des i1testen Sohnes oder Vaterbruden fortfahren eloe Herdgemeinxhaft. zu bilden. AU5StrSt geknechtet bit die Lage dtr Frauen." 64. Hln 1905-7. 4)0: "Slppen und Sippenvetbande bllden bis in die historischen Zelten hinein die Grundlage aller gesellKhaftJichen Ordnung der Indogermanischen Stimme." 6)..

198

Order and Barbarism

Chapter Four

people could hardly have worked to promote any kind ofdemocratic rule of the masses. 65 On the other hand. the Nazis liked the thought that patriarchal clan society had been sanctioned by religion; for example. SS-Ahnenerbe scholar Jacob Wilhelm Hauer writes about the ancestor cult as an excellent support for the survival of the family and the race and about "the fire of the hearth as the holy sign of the divinity residing among the family."" One of Hirt's observations on the history of religions is interesting in this context. In contrast to Schrader-and to the joy of the Nazi researchers-Hirt imagined that Proto~lndo-Europeansociety did not consist only of a conglom· erate of clans and tribes, but that there had also existed a higher "nationa'" entity. that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had made up "a people."'67 Unlike the famiJies. the "people" could not be held together by worship of some special clan's ancestor. but was instead held together by a worship of nature. The na· tional god therefore came to have some features ofthe ancestors in general. and was simultaneously associated with nature: ·Di~ p~t~r. Through this thesis, Hirt took half a step away from MUlIer's theory about mythology as nature poetry and toward the interwar theory that the religious symbols represent different groups of people (classes, races, and so on). WUst could therefore present Hirt as a predecessor to his own suggestion where the god ·Di~us p~t~r is Nthe embodiment of racially determined consciousness.N68

Continuityfrom the Nineteenth Century There is a clear connection, in terms of ideology and intellectual history, be· tween the interwar period's Nideologies oforder· and the nineteenth century's nature mythologists. Among both groups, the Indo-European race was understood as the civilizing race and as the incarnation of the beautiful, the right, and the g~. The Indo-Europeans were seen as the cultural heroes of human· ity. those who re·create the world to become a good place. A less prominent researcher, but all the greater an authority figure, Adolf Hitler, expressed it like this: -All the human culture, all the results of art, science. and technology

65- Gilnther 193~, 9. 66. Hauer 19]6, 178: "Das Feucrdes Hcrdn a1s dcr hc.[1i8~ leichcns dcr in der Famllic wohn. cnden Gottheit. ... Ahncn· und Heroenverduung Ww:I die kultische GeItaItung der Ehrfurcht VOf dcm 8lut· und Geist:zusamme:nhang. der GcsctUccht an Geschlecht durch JahrtaUKnden bindet: (Anct'stor and hero worship b«:ume the cuhic Um by which l"e\i~ieJ~ of the rtlationship bmoocen blood and. spirit binds one generation to another throuJhout the mllIennia.J &,. Hin 1905-7, ~3.9. 505-n.

68. Wiist 194" Bo.

199

that we see before us today. are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact admits of the not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher humanity. therefore representing the prototype of all that we understand by the word 'man~ He is the Prometheus of mankind from whose bright forehead the divine spark ofgenius has sl?rung at all times:'" The nature mythologists of the nineteenth century had used the Indo· Europeans as a weapon in the struggle against aristocratic structures, Nmedieval Nvalues, N and conservative -Semitic religiosity. They were modernists. and the IndoEuropeans were the prehistoric idols of the modernists. But when the bourgeois class, at the end of the nineteenth century, turned into a hegemonic middle class. it grew all the more skeptical about modernization. One of the reasons for this was that more radical modernists. social democrats, communists, anarchists, and union people turned up. The Paris Commune and. later, the Russian Revolution convinced many within the bourgeois class that develop· ment must either be stopped or forced to take a new direction. Because of the threat from radicalism. many bourgeois became conservative. nostalgic. nationalistic, and farmer-romantic. This was true also for academics and the educated middle class. Modernization was no longer seen as desirable, or as a step toward true culture, but rather as a step toward chaos, barbarianism. The image of the Indo-Europeans as cultural heroes changed from a modernist to a neotraditionalist idea. However, this bourgeois neotraditionalism did not become aU powerful within Nazi research. A barbarophile, -Dionysian: but nonetheless neotraditional ideology, which was in many ways the opposite of the "ideology of order: flourished especially within the SS. In the previous chapter, we saw how researchers who had been influenced by evolutionism presented the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a primitive people like any other. There was thus a nonidealizing element in evolutionism as well, but nonetheless it was the image of the evolutionists that paved the way for the new. barbarophile ideal image. Perhaps, the promoters of barbarian ideology thought. it was Na return•to the barbaric forces· rather than order and stability that was primarily needed to fight modernism.?O This neotraditional phalanx was attracted by what could be found underneath the surface of the bourgeois, so to speak, and they wanted to take part in the -Folk·s· barbaric primal force and boldness. They thus iden· tified with those whom Muller and the nature mythologists had described as the archenemies of the Aryans: the barbarians. Through an intensive effort, 69. Hider 19430 290. 70- a. Oesterle 1994, 201.

200

Order and Barbarism

Chapter Four

TABLE 8

Nazi scholarship's continuity with older scholarship

Older research: modernism

Nazi research: neotraditionalism

Institutions in the Third Reich

Scholars during the 19305 and 19405

Nature

Order ideology

Colleges,

Viennese "mytholo-

Rosenberg's • party college

mythologists

as well as partly SS-Ahnenerbe

Evolutionists

Barbarophilism

SS-Ahnenerhe and independent scholars

gists; scholars from the Nordic movement (Gunther. Kummer), as well as certain 55-scholars (Wiist) Viennese "ritualists"

(Hofler, WeiserAalI, Wolfram) and other "male-fellowship researchers· (Wikander)

modernism would be defeated and a new lifestyle reborn. The neotraditionalists sought a change that would strengthen values that were the opposite of those of the Bolshevik revolution. which had destroyed private ownership of land and factories, legalized abortion. and done away with monarchy and the nobility. It would be a change backward-a revolution in the etymological meaning of the word (Lat. re-volvere. "to return~). Ahnenerbe's Jacob Wilhelm Hauer aptly writes about the prehistoric Indo-Europeans that for them. "the conservative revolutionary" was the ideal man?l

ARYAN MALE FELLOWSHIPS Matriarchy?

The barbarophile, antibourgeois neotraditionalists wanted to write their own histories. One approach was to try to dislodge the doctrine of an eternal Aryan patriarchy and instead unearth alternative forms of power from the historical sources. For example. one might question whether the Indo- Europeans really

71. Hauer 1936. 18S·

201

had not passed through Bachofen's matriarchal stage. In spite of the fact that Fustel de Coulanges. Schrader. Hirt, and other scholars maintained that Ancient Aryaland had had a patriarchal culture. the question arose whether "our ancestors" also had Jived in a matriarchy at some pointo n If the comparative history of law did not give any support to this opinion. could the hypothesis perhaps still be proved, indirectly, by presenting evidence that there had once existed a cult of Mother Earth? If the Indo-Europeans were farmers. then according to the anthropological theories of the time they should have worshipped the earth that gave them its harvest. In the ensuing discussion (one that has continued into our time. to which we will return in chapter s). scholars have systematically mixed together these two questions and considered themselves able to prove the existence of a matriarchy through discoveries of figurines that have been interpreted as representations of Mother Earth. Jacob Grimm, in Deutsche Mythologie. had already found traces of an IndoEuropean Mother Earth goddess. n but the work that seriously raised interest in an Indo-European Mother Earth goddess was Mutter Erde: Ein Versuch uber Volksreligion (190S). by Albrecht Dieterich (1866-1908). Inspired by the perspective of folk psychology, Dieterich hoped to rediscover a human "primal idea~ that arises to provide an answer to the question of where life comes from and where it goes after death. The answer is Mother Earth: "The human soul comes from the earth, it returns to the earth. and the earth gives birth to her again in a new human birth."74 According to Dieterich. worship of the maternal earth. which was repre· sented by the goddesses Gaia and Demeter in Greek mythology. is directly related to the presence of agriculture. The fact is that agrarian symbols do actually color the entire mythology around Mother Earth: so. for example, the plow is interpreted as a phallus that penetrates Mother Earth. and the rain as the sperm of the heavenly father. Dieterich uses anthropological parallels in order to show that these interpretations had in all likelihood been connected to primitive fertility rites: "Among primitive peoples. one may observe the many ways in which the penis and the vulva are used as magical fertility agents; in these instances it cannot be doubted that the fertility of the earth is portrayed 71. To my knowledge. there is no sNdy that examines the hypothesis of an Indo-European matriarchy and the worsnip ofan Indo-European Motner Earth goddess from the perspective of the history of ideas. Petterson's crltlcal examination (1967) is, however. very useful. The oldest text I have found thal attempts to refute the theory of an Aryan matriarchy is an article from 1895 by the historian Berthold DelbrOck. "Cas Mutterrecht bei den Indogermanen:' 73. GrImm 1854.1119. 74. Dleterlch 1905, a7.

202

Chapur Four

Order and Barbarism

through the mimical practice of copulation. Harvest festivals were celebrated using, among other things. the figurative representations of penis and vulva, women uncovering their bodies. and obscene language."75 Dieterich also finds similar rituals, where. for example, the events of the wedding night take place out on the fields or where "completely naked virgins" rituaUy plow the earth, among civilized peoples. The logic behind these rituals, he explains, is ~magic of analogy," a concept that probably aims to translate Frazer's "homeopathic magic; or the belief that like causes like. Folk religion. according to Dieterich,

assumes that everything is the same in different incarnations and that

ev~

erything therefore is connected: "And so to us it is perfectly clear, that in this primitive religion, the proof of the magic performance is the fruitfulness of the earth. In it, rain and male semen, plow and penis, furrow and female sex organs, as well as the harvest, which is both seed and fruit, and the male seed and the human child, are identical entities."76 The folk cult was transformed over time into mystery cults, Dieterich continues, of which the best known is the cult of Demeter in Eleusis. In the mysteries, the agrarian experiences of the rebirth of nature have been translated into soteriological thoughts about the migration of souls. The basic idea was that ~only the mother of allliv~ ing things who is beneath can give new life."77 The cult participants became children who were reborn by symbolically going down into Demeter's womb in ~the earth's dim realm of death."7I Demeter's peaceful motherliness and comforting philosophy, however, became Mengulfed~ by "the destructive and reawakened god's drunken orgy, which raged like a religious insanity from the northern mountains across Greece, and by the Mother who constantly flung herself from the gorges of the Asiatic mountains over widespread lands."79 Dieterich presents these new types of religion, the worship of Dionysus and M of Mthe Great Mother (Megale meter). Rhea or Kybele. as perverted versions of the Mother Earth cult:

75. Ibid.. 94; "Bei wilden VOlkern sind die mannigfaltigsten Briuche beobachtet worded, die Penis und Vulva als magische Agenten der Fruchtbarkelt aller Art in eine rituelle Aktion setten; es kann in etIichen F":l.Uen ein Zweifel nicht sein, daB die Befruchtung der Erde durch mimische AUsiibung der Begattung dargesteUt werden soli. Erntefeste werden mit Anwendung figurlicher Darstellung von pe:n~ und vulva, SelbstentbloBung der Frauen, Gebrauch obsz6ner Ausdriicke und dergieichen mehr gefeiert." 76. Ibid.. 101; ·Und so istes uns hotrentllch wlrkllch !dar geworden, daB fllr diese Vollureliglon das Zeugen der Zauberakt 1st, der die Erde fruchtbar macht, daB fUr sie Rtgen und menschllcher Same, Pflug und rnannlisches Glied, die Erdengrube und der weibllche SChoB, Ackerfurche und weiblicher Geschlechtsteil, daB das Getreidekorn, das zuglelch Same und Frucht 1st under der rnenschliche Same und das menschllche Kind ldentlsche Dlnge sind:' n. Ibid.• 55, 100. 79. Ibid.. 89f. 78. Ibid., 100.

203

Nevertheless, she was only the mother of gods; not the goddess of the fertile fields, but the wild mountain mother. Above all, Crete and the Near East, Phrygia and Lybia were the centers of her cult. She had given birth to the highest god in the wild mountain gorge. she had nursed him there, she binds the wild animals of the wilderness and for her, the lion is nothing but a little puppy, the powerful one, the 1to'tvta t'}11PCiW. In the thunderous mountain forests. on the peaks of granite, she thrills to the storm's orgy. Around her she has all the phallic figures, which have been born from the rain~drenched earth (Curetes. Corybantes); she was thought to be androgynous, able to create from within herself, or else her son became her 10ver.1lI The cult of the Great Mother is obscene (but not easily differentiated from the Mother Earth cult) and consists of "sexual rites. in a lusty cult of phallos and cunus."81 Dieterich links this reversed mother religion to matriarchy, although he is doubtful whether the true Mother Earth cult had any connection with this order.82 (At least that is how I understand him: the whole distinction between Mother Earth religion and Great Mother religion seems obscure to me.) It is, however, Significant that Dieterich stresses that the Great Mother comes "from Asia Mand distinguishes her from a ~Western" Mother Earth-his presentation is often reminiscent of Bachofen's and Michelet's Orientalist pre;udices.83 In Mutter Erde, we are in the same turn-of-the-century intellectual milieu as in the work of von Schroeder and Jane Ellen Harrison. The similarities to Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study ofGreek Religion (1903) are especially striking: in both cases an evolutionist model is combined and modified with vitalist motifs of rebirth. Like von Schroeder and Harrison, the cultural pessimist Dieterich also aimed to heal humanity from the wounds of modernity.84 Sure enough, his historiography did arouse the curiosity of authors and intellectuals who felt that the stage following the Mother Earth reLigion had not been any improvement. This stage was characterized, in particular, by the worship of

SO. Ibid., 8:1f.: "Aber sie war doch eigentlich nur die Gottermutter; nlcht die Gottin des fruchtbaren Ackerfeldes, sondern die wilde Bergmutter. Kreta und Kleinaslen, Phryglen und Lydien vor allern waren die eigensten Statten lhres Kultes. Den hOchsten Gott hatte sie in den Schluchten und in der Wildnis der Berge geboren und gesiugt, sie bandigt die gewaitigen TIere der Wi.ldnis, die Ulwen sind wle Hundchen vor ihr, der Gewaitigen, der ItO''tVlCl brlpmv. 1m brausenden Bergwald. aur den Gipfeln der Felsgebirge wohnt sie und :deht sje elnher in den Orgien des Sturmet. Urn sle sind aUerlei phallische Gettalten, die aus der beregneten Erde geschossen sind (Kureten, Korybanten): mannweiblich war sie gedacht. die in sich seiber zeugt, oder es wlrd lhr Sohn Ihr Gel1ebter." 8]. Ibid.. 8:1;, 84. 81. Ibid.. 89, 84, See Asslon 1994, 1\3f. 8'1. Ibid., 88r" 94.

204

Order and BariJari5m

ChapurFour

205

a heavenly god who. in Dieterich's words, had been formed by -the religious force of the Semitic Orient· and was an extension of Judaism's ·stiff-Iegged 'manJy' monotheism" and that "in its innermost and most consistent being

negates marriage and motherhood.."15 Antimodernist cultural critics embraced Dieterich and his predecessor Bachofen. They "seized on the idea of a universal matriarchal agricultural culture; writes the historian Michael Spattel, "but reshaped it in accordance with farmer-romantic and anti-Christian notions:"'6 Those who after the turn ofthe century saw Bachofen as a ttierophant pined for a time when a "Christian-idealistic belief in the future and a mania for material development" was not predommant.17 1hey wanted to return to "the mother womb; to the dead, and to the ancestors, they wanted to move "from present time to past time,· "Crom the cosmopolitan mentality to the deep roots of the people; "from the surface of the earth to the deep of the earth's mother,· or "from the day of consciousness to the spiritual excess of night'" Those who went the furthest. the turn-of-the-century hippies and pre-Fascists in Ascona and Schwabing. dreamed about renewing the rebirthing Mother, the earth who guarantees the process of life. Among these radicals, the philosopher Alfred Baumler, later Rosenberg's right-hand man, and the author Ludwig Klages deserve mention. The bohemian-radical features of this heterogenous group become apparent in Klages's interpretation of Nietzsche." Klages's Nietzsche is not the Nietzsche who preached the constant self-discipline of the individual or the will to power. Klages despised this Faustian drive to transform and overcome, which he felt was a Christian desire. Klages's Nietzsche was instead the Nietzsche who preached the pagan drunkenness of Dionysus, the falling away of consciousness. In Dieterich's Mutter Erde, Klages and others in Dionysus's modern following could read about the prepatriarchal orgiastic cult of "the demonic· (that is to say "those who cause,· from Gk. dajmon) and the "holy" phal/oi. 90 Before the rain was interpreted as the seed of the heavenly father and the sun's rays as his organ, the fertility process was seen as the result of throngs of phalli, "throngs of little demons,· penetrating "a motherly earth womb."'l The demonic phalli -who were represented mythically and iconographically by sileni and sa-

8S· Dieterich 19O5. 9O£.

86. Sp6ttellC}98, 3:1$. About the Bachofen reception during the twentieth century, see Wagner. Hasell99~ Zinser I!XII; Hultkrantz 1961, 8off.; and Lime 1980. 87. se.e Zinser 1991, 369. 88. Cited in Zimer 1991, 370. 89. About Klages, see Aschheim 1992, 79-84. 90. Dieterich 19O5o 93. III. "Aile causa lind 'Dimooen'" (Ibid., 99). 91. Ibid., 9:1ff.

20

Unknown artist, Dionysus with sileni (n.d.). (Angelika Schone, Der Ihiasos, 1987.)

tyrs in Greece-later were given an important role in the mystery cult's "secret

rituals" where they participated as symbols in the drama of"refertilization and rebirth."9'l The Christians, Dieterich writes, disapproved ofthe primitive Mother Earth religion, but they would oppose the phallic cult even more; Christianity carried out "a demonization of the phallus· (Verteufelung des Phallus).93 Because of factors like the loosening of social ties and the victories of the psychoanalytical understanding of man, wild Dionysus, with his retinue of phallic satyrs and sileni, became a figure who could be upheld against liberal rationalism, Christian guilt, increasing industrial ugliness, and modern inau-

9:1. Ibid.. 11of. 93. Ibid., liS: "Das Phallu.s-sakrament der antiken Mysterien war von unaustUgbal1'r Lebenskraft: in unverkennebarem Ab/)Ud wei-B es In chrisuische Uturgie sich einzusdunuggeln. Freilich bnn es da In der Tat nur wlrkllchem 'Slide' sith erhalten. Denn du Christentum hat mlr grimmlger Enersle die, lch m6chte ugen, v6llige Verteufelung des Phallus durchgesetzt" [The phallic ucrame:nt of antique mylt~ had an Inextinguishable life force: in an unrecognizable depietion, It has managed to smug1e luelflntoChrlstlan liturgy. Certainly, what we have here is nothing but "pktum7 beause. to me. Orlltlanlty hal a grimmer energy. whkh. I assert. has accomplisht'd the compifle demonlutlon of the phallus.1

206

ChapurFour

thenticity at the turn of the century. That this new paganism was not merely a game with mythical figures can be illustrated by the fact that some people tried to obtain permission from Nietzsche's sister to attempt to cure his insanity by

imitating the cultic dance that the priesthood of the great Phrygian mother of the gods, the transvestite Corybantes, performed during ancient times.IM The Corybantian priests were seen as the direct opposite of Jahve's ascetic, legalistic, and life-negating priesthood. Here a veritable "reorganization of all values· has taken place: Christ on the cross is the misfortune of humanity. the heathen orgiastic Dionysus its savior. Considering the interest that persons with radical and neotraditional ideals showed in tales about prehistoric matriarchy, the Mother Earth goddess, and the phallic cults, it is interesting and significant that I have hardly been able to find any scholar who has argued that the Indo-European people have also passed through a matriarchal stage.9S Although Dieterich mainly focuses on "Indo-European~material. he himself claims that the beliefin earth as a mother is an ancient, universal folk religion.!16 As far as I know, there were no concrete 94. Aschheim 1992..19. 95. In IS9S the historian Berthold Delbriick wrote2.ll2.rticle, "Das Mutterrecht bel den lndogermanen," which aimed to refute a.I1 specul2.tions about an Indo-European matriuchy. According to him, everything points to the fact that "the original Indo-Germ2.nic population," at the time right before the Indo-Europeans spread across the world, lived in patriarchal and monogamous families that collected around the hearth and the ancet;tors. All tracesof an older matrilinea.l order among the Indo-European peoples, above all the high status of the mother's brother, wh.ich at this time was interpreted by anthropologists as a remnant ofa matriarchal order, are dismissed by Delbrilck. In general. he cha.llengesevolutionist anthropology's thesis that humanity during some period had lived in an "animal-like" promiscuity and in a matriarchy. Like Mu MQller in a completely different context, Delbriick turns against those who believe that "the primitive peoples" lack history. and that their customs therefore are identical with those of the origina.l people. Instead, one can ask "how things stand with family relationships among the apes" (Delbrikk 1895, 2.6). Not even the apes. according to Delbriick, live under "animalistic" conditions. but m2.lly species actually live in stable family constellations. Thus, no promiscuous and matrilineal intermediate stages are neeeded in the development from ape to dvilized human being. To my knowledge, the only one who has continued with similu etiological speculations is the leading postwar expert on Greek religion. Walter Burkert, who in Homo Neams (1983) defines rnan asa "hunting ape" and wh.o claims that the hunt has shaped the biological constitution of human beings. He further links hunting to Miinnerbund: "The success of the 'hunting ape' was due to his ability to work cooperatively. to unite with other men in the communal hunt. Thus, man ever since the development of hunting has belonged to two overlapping social structures, the family and the Miinnerbund: his world falls into pairs of categories: indoors and out, security and adventure, women's work and men's, love and death. At the core of this new type of male community, which is biologic2.lIy analogou.s to a pack of wolves. are the acts of killing and eating" (1983, 18). What experiences could have lent credibility to this theory! 96. see Dieterich 1905, I1nl, 30. Yet scholan could claim that the belief In • Mother Earth "especially [canJ be proved among the Indo-Germanic peoples" (Briem 192.6. 84).

Order and Barbarism

207

studies to show that Mother Earth was a specific ancient Indo- European goddess.?? However, one remarkable person should be mentioned in this connection: the German-Dutch dilettante Hermann Wirth (1885-1981), who in 1928 published Aufgang der Menschhejt. 98 In this work, Wirth relates how an ancient Aryan people lived on Atlantis, where they worshipped a solar father god but followed a matriarchal legal order. When Atlantis sank, the ancient Aryans fled to the north. By mapping out their culture, which mainly meant studying runes. inscriptions, and other prehistoric images. Wirth hoped to be able to resuscitate this ~Nordic race" and its original religion. These eccentric theories made it possible for Wirth to become a cofounder ofSS-Ahnenerbe in 1935. After a few years, however, Wirth fell out of grace and his ideas had to give way to less fantastic theories. The Nazis, who were now in secure possession of power. were tired of fuzzy dreams of matriarchy, regardless of how conservative and racist they were. The fact that the theory of a matriarchal Proto-Indo-European ancient culture never became successful did not mean that the patriarchal theory had undisputed power. The Viennese folklorists who were recruited to Ahnenerbe, "the Ritualists; whom we shall now discuss, in fact came to represent a third ~sociogony.~

Male Fellowships? the anthropologist Henrich Schurtz published his Altersklassen und Miinnerbunde: Eine Darstellung der Grundformen der Gesellschajt. in which he attacked Bachofen's historiography. According to Schurtz, it is unthinkable that women have ever ruled a society because they completely lack social instincts. Woman is driven only by the wiU to reproduce herself, and only ~abnormal or pathological" women are interested in social questions." "The woman is under the influence of the sexual impulse and the family feelings which arise from it. The man, on the other hand, is determined more from a In

1902,

91. The notion of a prehistoric and anCient beliefin Mother Earth has lived on for a long time, especially among Jungians (Erich Neumann. The Great Mother [19S5J) and feminists (Merlin Stone, When God was a Woman [19161. Interesting in this context is a.Iso Hans Peter Duerr's&dna oder Die Uebe zum Leben, where Duerr largely follows Dieterich's ideas but claims that "the IndoEuropean Greeks" were too male chauvinistic to understand the beauty of the myth about how Mother Earth and her sonllover brought forth the world. Instead they interpreted the magical love act as a rape (Duerr 198" ISS. 149f.). One is reminded of the suffngist Jane Ellen Harrison's speech about how the Greeks degraded all the old goddesses to slaves and playthings for Zeus, "the arch-patrl2.rchal bourgeois," and the other male Olympians (1908, 2.85). 98. Schnurbeln 199~, IISf. 99. SchUrtll9Q2.. ~o.

208

Chapter Four

pure instinct, and this manner binds him to others of his nature. Therefore. the woman is the shelter of all social formation that results from the union of two persons aCthe opposite sex, while, in constrast. the man is the representative of pure social association and therefore higher social ties~1OO Using ethnographic

material from ~primitive· people. Schum tried to promote a theory of his own. He claimed that these people always had some form of male feUowships (Miinnerbunde) that formed the foundation of society. The male fellowships consisted of groups of initiated youths who lived. together in special buildings, who defended the tribe in case of war, and who "honored" the unmarried girls of the tribe in sexual games. The male fellowships also had their own religious cults, where the members embodied the souls of dead warriors with weapon dances and masked or painted faces. The theory about male fellowships awoke great admiration as a counteridea to Bachofen's matriarchy theory, and fairly soon it became connected to the world of the Indo-Europeans. llll The first one to see this possibility seems to have been Leopold von Schroeder. In an appendix to Mysterlum und Mimus im Rigveda (1908), he links Schurtz's male fellowships to the customs of the IndoEuropean peoples: -The mimetic weapon dances of the Maruts, the Germanic sword dances, the dances of the Roman $alii, of the Curetes and Corybantes of Greece and Phrygia lead us, observing comparatively, to the inevitable conclusion that the young men of Aryan antiquity performed similar weapon dances, whereby the dancers represented deceased warrior spirits, the animiU miJitium interfectorum. ... These spirits, however. were already considered to be virile phallic demons. which. throughout nature, produced growth. fertility and good crop yields.'"102 Because of the male fellowships' sexual activities. they were as· 100. Ibid.. iv: "Das Weib steht vorhernchend tmtef" dem Einfluss ~r Geschlechuliebe und der aus ihr enupringendm Famili~,~r Mann dagegen wird mehr durch einen reinen GeseUigkeitstrieb, del' ihn mit seinesgleichen verbindet, in seinem Verhalten bestimmt. Darum is(
15-4. See Canlck 1986. About the research on Dionysus, see McGinthy 1978. 155. Letter from Hafler to Wikander. March 10, 1941: "Die Indogermanische Expansion nach Aiien von politlschen GebUden derselben Struktut voUxogen hat wie spittf die germanische Expansion, lias gennanische WodankOnigtum von ihnIkhen Knkn g ~ ist. wie du del erstm indog~Hdcknzeitalters;"

156. Ibid.. 157. Wikandtf 1938. 74: -Die Maret's reflektieren ~n den krieserischen Aspekt. den die

Minnerbuooe bei den arischen Stimmen der Wandenmgs- und Eroberungszell von.ugsweise entwickelt hanen;"

223

Myth, Order; and '"ationa/ism The male-fellowship scholars were ritualists, which in this context means both that they considered the study of ritual to be more important for an understanding of a religion than the study of its myths and dogmas and that they interpreted religious sources and accounts as reflections of rituals. This perspective made it possible for the scholars to study texts as reflections of relationships between different groups, or as expressions of specific group interests. In other words, ritualism often went hand in hand with a sociological perspective. For Hofler, the sociological point of view became most frUitful when he applied it to the Germanic (actually Old Norse) pantheon. In Germanic so-ciety, according to Hofler, it was impossible to reconcile the way of life of the farmer and of the warrior, which was mainly a result of the relatively high status of women in the agricultural kinship world. But in spite of these reaJ oppositions, Honer still claimed that the fertility cuJt of the farmers and the ecstatic cult of the male fellowships had been combined at an early stage. He saw the much debated depiction in VO/uspa (21-26) of the struggle and the peace agreement between the Vanir gods and the Aesir gods as proof of this. lSI Hofler's interpretation of this passage later became widely spread through the scholar who has done more than anyone else to propagate a sociological study of Indo-European mythology: Georges Dumezil, to whom we shall shortly return in the next chapter. Wikander, who incidentally was a close friend of Dumezil, called his method ""a sociological way of looking" in Der arische Miinnerbund. ~ An example of what this might imply is when Wikander refers to the malefellowiship religion as "Turic.~ For MUller, this word (strictly speaking "Tuea. nian") denoted the wild. non-Aryan people who warred against the Iranian peasants (·ar(y)o., > Iran). Wikander replaced MUlIer's ""ethnological" inter. pretation with a sociological one: ""Turic"" means roughly ""folk; or ~barbarian~ in the barbarophile meaning (uninfluenced by priests and civilization).I60 IsS. Hafler 1934, 19st: 159· WibndeT 1938, vii.

160. W~ 194'1, 35. 38. 4Q. In Der IUisdIe MiflrJUinuJd. Wikander describes the Turanlans' King Frisy.lip u -arch-mairyo;" that is to say. u the prototype fOf" the male.fel.lowshlp warrior. And he claims that Frilylp originally did flO( have "an altogether hostile. anti-Iranian charan of the battle motif In Nui id~ogy, ~ Hermand 1992, 186; and Uxfekll994, lOS-

236

Orderand &rlxuism

OaptuFow

European male fellowship members as long·haired. "wildly ecstatic warriors" who "danced into the fray" without helmets.1OO Like Hofler and Wikander before him, he also discussed the fact that the warriors identified themselves with wolves or werewolves, something that according to Widengren made

them "throw themselves into the fight like raging beasts of prey.'"2(I! The malefellowship scholars interpreted the struggle of the Indo-Europeans against

other people and races as a communion in which gods and ancestors were united with the living. The National Socialist ideology swung between two poles. 202 On the one hand, it defended order, private ownership. the sanctity of the family. the authority ofthe patriarch, and bourgeois traditions. For this bourgeois neotraditionalism, the enemy consisted of social democrats; anarchists; suffragists; and communists, who believed in common ownership of factories and land, a more egalitarian society. and a more liberal society in the area of sexuality, for example, and who wanted to do away with obsolete traditions. On the other hand, there was within National Socialism an antibourgeois phalanx that basically wanted to re-create society. The enemies of this phalanx were not only modernists on the Left, but also traditionalists in conservative-aristocratic guise and ultrabourgeois neotraditionalists. Ingemar Karlsson and Arne Ruth have in Samhiillet som teater (1983) differentiated three ·symbolic worlds" within the Nazi movement that can be related to this opposition: Culturally pessimistic: Organic society, art and culture. German folk soul, master race, Lebensraum, greater Germany, the Third Reich, Na· tional Socialism, loyalty and readiness, readiness for sacrifice, personality and leaders, racial thinking. Provincial: Blut und Boden, home territory, idyll, nature, landscape, rootedness, handicraft and manual labor. fertility, health, purity, racial thinking, fate and providence. Activist: War and fire, struggle and discipline, front experience. death and martyrdom, blood sacrifice, war socialism, loyalty and obedience, youth and beauty, personality and hero, racial thinking, woman as whore or saint.203

200. w ~ 1969.

The key concepts that Karlsson and Ruth outline make it possible to identify the ·ideology oforder" with the two first symbolic worlds and the male fellowships' "barbarian ideology" with the latter. For the barbarian ideologists, the ~demonic,·"ecstatic~ "cultish,· and ·tragic~ were the fundamental ingredients in the religion of the Aryans and Germans, and the scholars' own worldview was deeply rooted in Nietzschean vitalism and mysticism. Of the three who wrote books about Odin, Martin Nincks found terminology in Bachhofen, who had been ordained. as the interwar hierophant; Hofler built his theoretical discussions on Klages; and Hans Neumann used Martin Heidegger, the philosopher who wanted to descend to the Beingness that existed beyond the division between object and subject of knowledge. In the IndO-European discourse, this trend surfaced in the discussion of whether "our Indo- European ancestors" might have worshipped "dark~ and ·demonic~ gods. For the scholars of order this was unimaginable: "we" are after all those who fight against darkness. According to Rosenberg, possession, magic. sacrificial cults, and superstition were foreign Afro-Asiatic phenomena that, to the extent they were found on Nordic-German territory, must be seen as results of the Semitic, Roman Catholic Church's invasion. 204 The Germanist Klaus von See has illustrated the conflict between the two phalanxes with the example of the struggle over which typeface should be used within the Nazi movement: either the reasonable, sober, and balanced antiqua or the original. natural, and German gothic typeface. 3M In the arena of art, the same opposition reigned. between realistic. ·kitschy" art and expressionism.It was the bourgeois·conservative phalanx, led by Alfred Rosenberg, that won in the National Socialist cultural struggle: the classic antiqua triumphed over the Germanic gothic, and bourgeois kitsch over avant-garde expressionism. As early as 1934, Hitler had called off the ·National Socialist revolution" and labeled expressionism "un-German~; and with the exhibit of Entartele Kunst in 1937, the barbarophile phalanx was definitely outmaneuvered.l interpret the critique against Hofler's theories as one stage in the same cultural struggle. In the same year when Spehr criticized Hofler's ·primitivism" (1936), he was also attacked by Rosenberg's folklorist Matthes Ziegler, who argued that Hofler's research leads to "a demonization of our ancestors' religion."201 Once the Nazis had established their power in the Third Reich, they did not want anything to

IS-34. S3-

201..lbid...46. 202. "Then' are of C'OUf'K 1 numbrr of books and Ilt'ticks peodu«d in the Third Rdch lhat I ha~ not discu.s.5
Here, although the passage is hard to interpret, Dumezil seems to share Wtkan· der's understanding that the male fellowships sometimes "worked as protectors of (the true) administration of justice," and that they even introduced an idea of humanjty to people. It is also hard to understand how the magician of the past could have developed into the modern policeman. The citation indicates

Ibid., 398(

Is-In a laterworic, Der Fr",/aliork and mapa; out his influence on postwar research, The best introductlon to DumhU's work b adler 1991, ~n ifLundilger Jensen and Sch0dt (1994) Ind Puhvel (1989) In! ~ rtlder friendly.

252

Horsemenfrom the ~

253

cal. structuralist perspective made it possible for Dumezil to de-emphasize the historical etymological approach. which had fallen into disrepute since Millier's days. For MiilIer. two gods had been identical if their names could be derived etymologically from a Proto-Indo-European name (£Os is identical with Usas since < ·Ausos). Dumezil instead suggested a comparative method that looks at the structure of the pantheon: one god is the same as another if they have the same relationship to the other gods in the pantheon. For example, the Vedic war god is identical to the Germanic one if he relates to the Vedic fertility god in the same way that the Germanic war god relates to the Ger~ manic fertility god. (This is in any case the methodological ideal; reality has

not always looked this way.) Dumezil's structuralist method has thus meant that the etymological method of proof has been less important in twentieth-century research about Indo-European mythology than it was in nineteenth-century research. Most historians of religion have seen this as a healthy development-Dumezil has "liberated comparative mythology from the tyranny of etymology;' claims one enthusiast.15 As Bruce Lincoln has pointed out. this has obscured the fact that all the god names that have been reconstructed are in fact names of natural phenomena. except for ·Dilw phpr. ~Heavenly Father~; -Swel. "The Sun~; -Awos. "The Dawn"; and -Egni. "Fire."'K This fact. one might think, should speak for the position that the nature mythologists were not entirely wrong. It Is also remarkable that no one has protested against the reduced importance of etymology. considering that etymological identification is what justifies the fact that comparative mythology isolates the Indo-Europeans as a freestanding entity. which a structural perspective does not do. For if the relationship between different mythical beings in a certain mythology is to be connected to the relationship between mythical beings in another mythology. then why should the Vedic mythology be compared with Roman, rather than with (nonIndo-European) Sumerian mythology? The genetic-historical model. whose main method is etymology, provided a justification for this-common origin; the structural model does not. It therefore seems that twentieth-century scholars have analyzed a linguistically determined religious area using methods that risk breaking up the unity of this object of study. The fact that historians of religion have not realized the riskiness of this maneuver probably has to do with a barely conscious Platonism within the scholarly ranks: ~The IndoEuropeans~ exist in the same way that birches and houses do, and not in the 3S. Puhvd 1996. 153-

36.

Uncoln 1991, 6.

2.4 Father Wilhelm Koppers (J940S?). Photograph by Briihlmeyer. Vienna. (Austrian National Library Vienna, Picture Archive.)

same way as, for example. ~the Orient; ~atoms; or ~paleolithicum~; that is to say. not as objects that have been named and created by and for research. and whose right to existence is dependent on a number of (in the best-case scenario) dearly formulated criteria and questions.

From Primal Culture to Primal Indo-German In the 1930S and 1940S, Dumezil took the first steps toward the ~Dumezil­ ian" paradigm that would dominate the scholarship about Indo-European mythology within the field of history of religions during the postwar period. At the same time. other scholars laid the foundation for postwar theories about the Proto-Indo-European culture and about the geographical position of the Proto·lndo-European homeland. These scholars-with Father Wilhelm Schmidt (1868-1954) and Father Wilhelm Koppers (1886-1961) in the lead-stood. like Dumezil. in a complex relationship to the Aryanist research of the Third Reich. The main contribution to the understanding of Indo-European religion that came out of this research tradition was the anthology that Koppers published in 1936 with the title Die Indogermanen- und Germanenfrage: Neue Wege zur ihrer Liisung. The anthology was compiled as an answer to another anthology with a similar title. Germanen und Indoger-

254

Chapter Five

manen: Volkstum, Sprache. Kultur-a work with Nazi overtones that had been published a few months earlier.31 Before we examine how the historiography in Die Indogermanen~ und Germanenfrage differs from that of the Nazis, we must briefly examine the theoretical background to the historiography of Koppers and his coworkers. 37. The rune scholar Helmuth Arnu published Germanen wnd Indogermanen in 1936 as a festsehrlft for Hermann Hin. In the foreword. Arntz introduces the anthology as a volume that will present the very Latest theories about the Indo·Europeans, their original home, and their culture. He assures the reader that only real schoLars have been included-dilettantes such as Hermann Wirth and Guido von Ust have been rejected. In spite of Arnn's assurance, it seems as if well-reputed scholars who had a critical attitude toward these new theories have been refused (see Schmidt 1968. 314) and thaI certain contributions (at least Benveniste's) have encounlered the paternalistic comments of the editor. In spite of contributions from prominent French scholan such as Antoine Meillet, Georges Dum~i1, and troUe Benveniste, whose articles. symptomatically, are about purely Ie
"'"

TOTEMlSM

AGRARlAN-

'" Mlddk

j

MATRlARCHY ...........

High cultures •

/

City-states

2S Development of cultural circles. the ur-Indo-Germans' culture as a mixed culture. and the origins of the high cultures, according to Schmidt and Koppers.

Nazis stood waiting outside the borders of Catholic Austria, this revision was introduced: the lndo-Germans were tainted from the very beginning. Phallic fertility cults, primitive blood and intoxication rituals, and the worship of Mother Earth might fascinate neotraditionalist vitalists like Albrecht Diet. erich and Ludwig Klages, but they quite certainly stirred opposite feelings for Catholic clerics and Nazis. It was the overlapping values between the Nazi and Catholic researchers that made it possible for Koppers to annoy the Nazis with his thesis about ·southern· clements.n That Schmidt and Koppers consciously strove to lower the status of the Indo·Germans is obvious from an article in Anthropos by Koppers from 1935. There he writes that it has pained him to deny the Indo-Germans-"our own family"-the cultural high position that earlier researchers had ascribed to them. by which he means that he denied. that the ancient Indo-Germans lived in an agrarian high culture in northern Europe.71 However, such a historical revision is healthy, he continues, for when we see the ancestors'life in light of the history of all humanity, historiography is freed. from idealizing anachronisms. The Indo-Germans do take an honored place in the history of mankind, but "... all great circles of humanity and culture.

72. CrItique 0( Koppm's thesis about "southern" dtmnlLS

was presented. for example, by

Hauer, who amana other things dalms that the southern riemmLS are found only among the Indians and tNt Koppen genfrally bullds on JUperficlal similarities (.939, 32-.... ). 13. Kopperl 1935, SO.

268

HOrKm~nfrom th~

ChaptuFlve

each in their unique way and time, bring their gifts. which then. depending. of course, on whether they have proven their worth. all take part in the further development and benefit of human culture?4 There is a constantly recurring ambivalence among the Austrian clerics: on the one hand, "our race" has preserved monotheism and can therefore be understood as a very important race of cultural heroes; on the other hand, they have lived like primitive herders and contaminated monotheism with "southern" elements. Let us now try to untangle what the image of the ancient Indo~Germansas pastoralists might have signified. In earlier chapters, we have see how nomads have been presented as the direct opposite of the Aryans, as violent and life hating. But did pastoralists necessarily awaken negative feelings among the Catholic priests? After all. many of the biblical heroes were nomadic herders. Schmidt's historiography actually presents the Indo-Germans and Semites as close to each other in terms ofcultural history, geography, linguistics. and race. According to Schmidt. the ancient Indo-Germans learned how to raise cattle from Altaic peoples (proto-Turko-Mongols) somewhere north of the Cauca· sus. The Semites lived just south of the ancient Indo-Germans, and they also learned cattle raising from Altaic peoples. Besides. Schmidt believed that the languages of the Indo·Germans and the Semites. just like their racial categories, were related. Did the new, ~Catholic" view of the Indo·Europeans mean that they also were ~children of the unforested steppe"?7s In that case they would have changed places in Ernest Renan's Aryanist dichotomy: from life-loving humanists from green landscapes. to life~hatingascetics from the desert (see table 4). I believe, however, that another path of associations is more likely. Huns, Tartars, Turks, Kazaks, and Mongols are nomadic peoples from inner Eurasia who have continuously been demonized by European, Christian, and humanist historiography. Victor Hehn gives a pregnant expression to this in Kulturpjlanun und Haustiere. He writes that in ancient times, culture was transferred from the Orient to Europe. The Orient, over time, met a bitter fate when "the region ofagriculture and settled peoples butted against the immense steppes and deserts, which, time and time again, brought forth wild and bloodthirsty nomads:'76 The first nomadic groups that the new settlers came across Wiker· und Kulturkreise bringen, und xwardlecoinxellll!n in ihm' Art und xu ihrC'r ldt, ihre Gaben. die dann. :wsammen8C'~nalilr1lch sowC'it liC' DaUC'rWftU aufxuwNm hablon. dnn Hochbau ~ mmschIic~ Kultur zugute komrMn aol\C'n: 7~ 1M expression is t1ken from von See 1994, 191. 76. Hdm 187.. 11: "Dif: Rtgion dC'f acker· unci stidttbaunden WIlker VOI"deruim5 stiC'slan urtermC'SS1ichC ~ unci WUstm. aus denC'n immer von NC'UC'm wIkI.. b1utgierip NomadC'n 74. Ibid., 31: -AIle groGen

~.

Lul

269

belonged to the Semitic and Iranian peoples, who were "of the same blood. of noble descent and beautiful character, cultivatable with a capacity and need for civilized life."" The true destruction took place when the "bestial races· of the Turks and Mongols ("Turanians:' using Muller's terminology), forced their way into "the Aryan-Semitic world" (der arisch-semitischen Welt)?' Seljuk (i.e., Turkish] chieftains swung their leather whips, placed their feet on the necks of conquered Arabian emirs before having them chopped to pieces; Persian maidens with almond eyes and long lashes were dragged screaming to the felt tents of their howling misshapen masters; so from the Aral Sea to the Mediterranean, ignoble. totally Asian blood was mixed with that of older, cultured peoples, and was a further effacious element of moral degeneracy and spiritual impotence. Furthermore, the Turkish conquest appears to be merely easy suffering in comparison with the atrocious horrors which marked the path of the Mongols. What this race of yellow, slant-eyed jackals from the Gobi Desert had already perpetrat~ on eastern soil cannot even be described in words." Hehn's antipathy toward nomads was not due to any nostalgic farmer romanticism. He was a liberal humanist and Hegelian progress optimist who did not see continuity with the past or anchoring in "the natural condition" as virtues, but rather as signs of stagnation. For Hehn, the discovery of agriculture did not mark the transition from barbarianism to civilization; horticulture did so instead. Italy was Hehn's ideal, and he was glad that wine and olive oil graduaUy began to crowd out beer and butter among the uncivilized Germans. In his time. he praised. the public cafe conversations about politics ("the land of freedomi, where the cosmopolitan Jews' opinions were valuable contributions, and he contrasted the world of the cafes to the reactionary church. Ideologically, Hehn thus had very little in common with the priests from Societas Verbi Divini. But in spite of the ideological distance between Hehn and the priests, Schmidt and Koppers promoted Hehn's image of the Indo-Germans

n

Ibid.. II. 78. Ibid., I:l.f. 79. Ibid., 13: "Seldschukische H~uptljnge schwangen di~ Ledcorpeitsch~,legten besieglen arabischen Emlren felerlich den Fuuauf d~n Nacken und Iiessen slcodann in Stiick~ hau~n; perslsche Midc:hen mit manddfOrmigcon Augm und langcon Wimpern wurden in die schmutzigm Filuelte lhm' h~en mi5gle5talteten Gebieter gesch1C'ppl; so mischt 5ich von Ara~ bis zum mittellindischen Meer unotdle5 hodtuiatisches Blut in das der altm KulturvOlker. als coin fortwirkendes Ekment sittlicher ErniC'drigung und gdstiger Ohnmacht. 1ndC'u, audt die tiirlci5che Eroberwtg mc:hdnl aJs nUl gninses Ldde 1m VC'fgIC'k:h mil dm mtKtzlichm Griueln, die den Weg der Monpn bndchnften. Will diC'lC' Race gdber $dillbIlckender Schacble aus dC'f Wilst.t' Gobi .uf oriental1Jchmt Boden vmibt hat,llsIt ddt mit Wonen pr nicht schilda'1L"

270

as nomads. Considering that the Catholic Church during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century was -extremely positive to agriculture~ it is reasonable to assume that the image of the Indo-Germans as nomads was not any kind of idealization for Schmidt and Koppers.1ll On the contrary. the fact that the Catholic priests shared farmer-romantic sentiments with German national romantic writers and Nazi researchers shows

that even describing the Indo-Germans as warlike nomads was in fact an insult. This was especially true in Austria, which had at least since the battle of Vienna in 1683. when the Moslem Mhordes" were conquered. seen itself as a bastion against infidel eastern barbarianism. Nor was there any doubt for the Nazis that the Roman Catholic priests aimed to drag the Indo-Germans into the dirt. Had the ancestors been herd~driving nomads on the south Russian steppes, instead of noble farmers in northern Europe? Had they been some kind of Mongols or Turks? Walther Wo.st wrote: "On the other front, the Roman-Catholic ethnography is setting off mines. A relationship between the Indo~Europeansand the Altaic nomads is taken seriously, and with the same intention a beliefin a high and single god among the people ofTIerra del Fuego. the Indians and the Australian aborigines, is pointed out. It then becomes easier to do missionary work and. at the same time. deal a blow to the racial pride of the Indo-Germans. whose belief in one god one possibly mentions.... However, there are reasons to believe that Wost could not quite judge the intent of "the Roman-Catholic anthropology." Schmidt's and Koppers's image of nomadic herders was not-in contrast to that of MUlier and Wilst, for example-altogether negative. On the steppes, the Indo~Germansdid not simply keep raising livestock, but they also learned to ride and to tum the horse into a weapon. And with the development of the cavalry and war chariots pulled by horses, as well as an adventurous disposition and an ability to think in large terms. Schmidt assures us, the Indo-Germans began a heroic conquest of the world. In time, the Indo~Germanswere joined by "Hamito-Semitic· peoples as mankind's great conquerors. These people were, according to Schmidt, "born rulers; and typically enough belonged to an especially strong racial type: 82 "The two secondary herding peoples, which, independent of the other and

80. Nencioni 1998. 119. 81. W-ust 1942, 10: -Auf de!" anderen Front 1l6t r6misch-katholiKhe VOIkerkunde die Mlnen der flemmlan'erWandtKhaft. Springen. Bttiehunsen d« ~ zum AItaJ-Nomadentum werden emslhaft eriirtet. mit iImIlcher GrundabPeht der Hoch- und Elnptpdanke bet FeuoerUndern. Indbnern unci Austrainegem ~. Es 11& Iich dann Iektllft" GlaubmRusbmtuna U'eiben und zUJldch dem Rauestol'l der IncSosermanm YOn deren E1nptglauben man mOsIkhJt spricht, tin StoG Yn'IttUn; • 82. Schmklt 1936, 1$1.

Horumetf from

th~

£Iul

271

yet dependant upon the primary herders, the Altaic tribes. became herders, conquerors and then dominant peoples. were nevertheless a different race from the Altaic. with almost exactly opposing racial characteristics. They were both long-headed, the Hamito~Semitesdarker in eye, hair, and skin, while in all of these the Indo-Europeans were lighter; both were tall."13 The totemic and agrarian-matriarchal cultural circles had already melted together at an early stage and formed city~states, with trade and crafts. But since "there was still no vertical. hierarchical order; these city-states could not yet be united into greater units. kingdoms and empires." It became the civilizing task of the Indo-Germans and the Semites. Schmidt writes in one of his books, to create hierarchies that could integrate the city~states. They themselves would beoome the highest caste, the endogamous aristocracy of the kingdoms. Those high cultures that were created were "not simply the invention or work of one race or one cultural circle; since the totemic and agrarian-matriarchal conglomerate contributed agriculture, handicrafts, trade, writing, time systems, and so forth. as The pastoral cultural circle. on its part. contributed animal husbandry and leather working-but above all. the crucial sense of order. For Schmidt, it was obvious that social ·order- and hierarchies were civilizing steps forward, but he also claimed that the Indo-Germanic ruling class had become arrogant and proud. When the Indo-Germans had lived on the steppes. they had humbly worshipped the creator god as the heavenly father, but when they now ruled over foreign peoples, they began to see themselves as equals of the gods. As long as God remained a heavenly power there was no danger: "Here the rulers were nothing other than a sort of leadership which resembled the old herding culture's patriarch, standing at the head of the extended familYi these patriarchs and aristocrats believed that they were closer to, but not that they themselves were. God; their position brought with it more responsibilitY-'"

8). Schmidt 19-46-..9. 1:28): "Die heiden sekundamJ HirtenvOlker, die, unabhlingig voneinandel-, doch abhlngig von den primlren Hirten\i5lkern. den A1taistimmen, 'lU Hirten-, Eroberer, und Herrschervfllkern wurden. waren aber von gan'l ander Raw als die Altai\i5lker, mit rassischen Eigenschaften, die denen der letzteren fast enlgegengeset7.t waren. Sie waren beide langkopfig, die Hamitosemiten In der Faroe der Augen, Hure und Haut dunkler, die Indogermanen in allem heI.Ier. beide hochwiichsig: 8... Schmidt 1946-49, L"271. The notion that pa.storalists _re needed to create kingdoms had already been presented In 1911 by John Myres In "The Dawn oJHisUJry (Trigger 1993. 204). Schmidt 1946-49, 1:18486. Ibkl, 1:286: -Die HerrscMr waren hier nichts a.nderes als tint H6herfiihrung des an der Spitu der Gro8 familie stehendton Patriarchen der altm Hinmkultur. Dieses patriarchaUchm Herncher und Arlstokraten g1aubtm 'lwar, der Gottheit niher. aher nicht Gott selb$t 'lU sdn; Ihre hOhere Stellung!qte Ihnen luch gr6Bc!re Verantwortllchkrit aur.

as.

272

It was worse when the heavenly religion was mixed. with the sun worship of the totemic cultural circle. "a kind of monism, which saw the sun as the foremost power source ofall nature:"" Then the rulers amId be identified with God-could themselves become God. Simultaneously with this apotheosis. the working people were dehumanized and seen as work animals: The overwrought arches of culture, which had excesses-superman and divinized man on the one hand and dehumanized and animalized man on the other-could not remain standing under such pressure, and therefore broke apart from the strain. either through the enfeebling and elimination of the working masses or through rebellion against the rulers. who had become degenerate through their pride, gluttony, and intemperance.... the knowledge of noblesse oblige, which they had brought with them from their old religion, became ever more lost to them, and the former federalist feudalism became an ever more centralized union.-

It is hard not to read this passage about the sun-worshipping superhumans as a commentary on the power politics waged under the protection of the swastika. Schmidt continues that we can see what Indo-Germanic arrogance can lead to in South Asia, where the Brahmans "who claim to represent the Aryan racial purity" uphold a caste system that is completely destroying India." The Brahmanic religion shows that the ruling castes have created "a heavenly elevation where one no longer walks on earth and where every similarity with the people as a whole has been 10st."90 The monarchist Schmidt seems to say that rulers should include the entire people and should not believe themselves to be Obermenschen." In Ras.sen und VOlker in Vorgeschichte und Geschichu des Abend/andes (1946-49), whose core idea goes back to a work from 1927, but which was

87.lbici, 1:286. 88. Ibkl. 1.:137:·Die hier Ins G~, UIt Obermenschung und vt'lgottung rint'lwits, zur Enlmt'l\SChung und Vertierung andeneits, uberspannlen T ~ dft" Kultur konnlen clem auf Ihnen lastended Druck natiirlich auf die Dauer nicht standhalten und brachen unter diesn Oberspannung zusammen, entweder in der Entkriftung und Vernlchtung der arbeitenden Musen oder in der Auflehnung gegen ihre in Hochmul el'$urrten, in Wolilleben und Ausschweifung entarteten Herrscher ... d.u 8ewuBtsein der moralischen Verplichtung grgen die Behemchten. du sie aus ihrer a1ten ReligkMl mitgebracht hatten. ging den H~ immer mehr Y'trk>rm. was auch in der Vemkhtung; des ilteren IOdetativen FeudalismuI dutch eine i.mmef stirker

durchgefilhrw entra1istiJche Gldchschaltung lum Ausdruck kam: Sg. Ibid., 3=7 90. Ibid., 3:7.

91. C[ SChmidt 1946-49, 1:286, where the good ~relgn ill compared to FrllZer'. kings who were ~ when they became weak.

273 reworked during the war, Schmidt writes that the arrogance and pride of the ancient conqueror peoples celebrate their greatest triumph in the Aryan Third Reich. This kingdom formed by "Prussian militarism" is "no high culture. but a faU into the deepest non-culture, since it denies the foundation of all culture. namely, the human personality and its highest value, freedom.'"92 In modern times. Schmidt argues, the "Indo-German neuroticism, egotism, and refinement" that exploded in Hitler's empire has been nourished by Protestantism, humanism, Kant's critical philosophy, Hegel's deification of man, Nietzsche's superhuman doctrine, Heidegger's existentialism, and race mysticism: "In that cauldron of the Nazi witches' kitchen bubbled furthermore a nasty mixture of hatred ofChristianity, Nietzschean superman ideology, and the Nordic twilight of the gods [Gotterdammerung]."') Schmidt here makes himself a spokesman for a conservative Christian explanation of the successes of Nazism: since the fall of medieval culture, man has done away with the supernatural and made himself a god. This humanistic pride-which Miiller and Renan would also have called Aryan, but which they. notably, would have welcomed as a rescue from world-shunning transcendentalism-has created the Nazis' nihilistic belief in their own self-sufficiency and high station.

The Divine Nordic Race Before Schmidt and Koppers unveiled Nazism as an ideology of hubris, they did not distance themselves from Nazi ideology in a larger sense. But when the political situation became more acute, they began to understand that the greater German, anti-Semitic, and racist policy was a two-edged sword that could just as well be turned against the Catholic congregation as against the 1ews, liberals, and Bolsheviks. Could Nazism be reconciled with Catholicism? Schmidt came to disagree. According to him, it was very possible to be Catholic and Fascist at the same time, but not to be Catholic and Nazi. Among other things. Schmidt shunned the Nazis' Oirtation with pagan symbolism, and even if Hitler sometimes caUed for the support of God and saw himself as a crusading knight in a battle against Bolshevism, Schmidt was afraid that the Third Reich was inescapably on its way toward a "new German paganism:"'4 The neo-paganism that Schmidt feared also went hand in hand with Nazism's 91. Ibid., 1:)11. 93. Ibid.• 3:8: -In den Zeuberk6seln der nalislischen H6en1dkhe brodel.fe also nom _iter ein wlderllches Gebriu von Christentumshall, Nlet.lchesc:hen Obermenschentum und nordischer G6tterdlmerung; 9-t. Cited In Conte 1987. 270. Cf. 81'1ndewle 1990. 213f.

274

Chapter Five

differentia specifu:.a: the idea of race. While Hitler understood that Christianity was a good means of uniting people, Schmidt writes. GUnther and Rosenberg were hostile to Christianity. since their arrogance had made them elevate the Nordic human being to a god.9!i And it was precisely the notion of race that was the great stumbling block for the priest who wanted to unite all people under one and the same belief. For Schmidt, it was essential that the difference

between faithful and unfaithfuJ was considered more basic than the differ· eRee between pure racial and foreign racial. Can a converted JewlJewess be a good person (a good Christian), or does he/she remain a racial enemy? The Catholic universal history did not want to have anything to do with chosen people or divine races. For Catholic ideologues-as for all ideologues who are members of superethnic. missionizing. universalist religions-it is important to potentially be able to include all individuals, regardless of which people or race they belong to. In this respect, Catholicism is just as dependent on the division between Catholics and others as Nazism is dependent on the division between Indo-Germans and others. It was the inability to reconcile a religious and a racial classification that Schmidt, who was considered the main authority of the Roman Catholic Church within racial anthropology during the 1930S, seems to have realized in middecade. It became in his interest to oppose the notion of race, as least as it was promoted by the Nazis." In this respect. Schmidt's situation was no different from that of others with extreme right-wing opinions (for example, Dumezil) who for one reason or another disapproved of the Nazis' naturalistic or "materialistic· view of human beings." In Rassen und VOlker. Schmidt attacks the Nazis' racial-anthropological ideas by making a distinction between his own "rational" and the Nazis' "irrational- racial anthropology.- It is the fault of irrational racial anthropology that the Nordic race has been raised to the skies, Schmidt claims, and laments that Hitler let himselfbe misled by "the irrational racial movement of the foreigners Gobineau, (Georges Vacher del Lapouge, and Chamberlain" and by the German researchers who embraced the "Frenchmen's" and "Englishmen's" theories about a Germanic-Nordic noble race." The representatives of rational racial anthropology who did not inform

95. See SChmidt 1~6-49, 1:33-3596. SChmidt's friend Pope Pius XI wrote an encyclkal. Humt'ni Generls UnUM,ln thesumrner of 19)8, which lUmed againsl. the racism and antl-5emItism of the time from a unl\tiAlist-Christian per5pe'ctive. The encyclical was, however, ntver made public: 1ft Pue&cq .nd Suc:htcky 1997· 97. Grotannelli 1998 has written about DumhU'. "culturallsm." 98. See Schmkit 1946-49, 1:141. 119-w8;.nd Conte 1987. 99. See SChmidt 1946-49. 1;4-:10.

Horumen from UJe E4st

275

Hitler about the faults of the irrational racial anthropology bear much of the guilt for the degeneration of Germany ("Abfall DeutschJands '10m Abendland im Nationalsozialismus").100 Rational racial anthropology is instead built on Mendel's theories and is very skeptical of the irrational researchers' notion that mental characteristics can be inherited. According to the rational viewpoint. these characteristics are a product of milieu and culture. Schmidt thereby defended some kind of culturalism. and in line with that. he toned down his aggressive anti-Semitism around 1936 and instead began to spread a "culturalist· anti-Jewish propaganda {"Christian anti-Semitismj.101 Empirically, the racial-anthropological discussion that Schmidt engaged in was about the superiority of the Nordic race, and the identification between this race and the Indo-Germans.lCl'I: Above all. it was Hans F. K, GUnther's theories that established such an identity, His work about Europe's races, like that of Gobineau. Chamberlain, and later Hitler, was permeated by apocalyptic moods. 103 This is evident in GUnther's article in Germanen und Indogermanen, which also shows quite clearly the tendentious side of the anthology: To sum up, these Indo-Europeans not only had the same language, but also, both bodily and spiritually, had been characterized by the domi100. Ibid., 3:6. 101. Before World Wac I. Sdunidt wuaa::ocdins wConte I "militant Inti·Semite" (1987. 266). :and Brandewie's picture (1990) is not muehdifrerent. even ilhedoes claim. on weak grounds. thai Schmidt's Inti-Semitism mainly wu directed against modernist and liberal Jews, not lOW2I'd thole who followed traditional Judaism. When Schmidt in 1936 spoke warmty for tolen.na 2mona the races of Europe, ke dkI not include the}ewish "race" in this category (Conte 1987. 268(). 102- Two examples o( the identification between the Indo-Germans and the Nordic race; "Nordische Ruse und IndoJermanentum aehOrm von UranCang an zusamnten; es bnn kdn einziger triftiger Grund dagegen angegeben werden" (Hauer 19)9. s) [The Nordic race and the Indo-EuroPNO race ha~ bdonged together from the very beginning; no convincing IlJument against it can be Isserted\;"E.s giebt nu eine ein:zige Rasse, detYn Vorkommen bei allen Indogermanen nach:zuwe[sen: die Nordische" (Reche 1936, 312) [Only one race can be proven to be the same as all Indo-Europearu: the Nordic racel. 103. In Meln Kampf, Hitler formulates his version ofGoblneau's degeneration hIstoriography as follows: "Aryan races-often absurdly small numerically-subject foreign peoples. and then, stimulated by the special livIng conditions of the new territory (fertllity. climatic conditions, etc.) and assisted by the multitude of lower-type beings standing at their disposal as helpers. develop the intellectual and organlutional capacities dormant within them.... Hence it is no accident that the first cultures arow In places where the Aryan, in his encounters with lower peoples, subjugated them and bent them to his will They then became the first technical instrument In the service oi. developing cult\l~•... As soon as the subjected people began to raise themselves up and probably approached. the conqueror in language. the sharp dividing wall betweflI master and ~rvant feU. 1ht Aryan gave up the purity olhis blood and. thf:refore, kist his so;oum in the paradiJe which he had mack for himsdr h94J, a9S, 296).

276

CJrapur Five

Ho~mt"from

nance of the same race, that is. the Nordic race. We find. in all of these tribes. that this racially Nordic overlay. the creators and bearers of IndoEuropean languages and mores, through foreign influence. in which they gave up their ancient ways and neglected to care for their race, became nearly extinct through losses from war, declining birth rates. and degeneration. The remaining population tooK over the Indo-European language and still speaks it-today the only remaining sign of a once-dominant

Nordic layer. Most of the people speaking lndo-European languages today have just inherited the language and not the genetics of the IndoEuropeans. The same fate is threatening the Germanic peoples if there is no last-minute reversal. This reversal has already been begun in National Socialistic Germany. We hope that other Germanic peoples will soon come to the proper understanding and not suffer the same fate as their linguistic and genetic ancestoTS.104

The Nordic race had been tainted during its journeys of conquest around the world, Gunther argued, and now it could be found in its completely pure form only in the Swedish landscapes around Lake Yattern.1OS One of the greatest threats was the ~eastern· race that was a mixture of the Nordic and Mongolian races.-In France, for example, the blond dolichocephalies who once populated the land were hastily reduced during the nineteenth century and the land was now dominated by the eastern race. In Der Mythus der 20. Jahrhunderts (1933), Alfred Rosenberg used Gunther's classifications and linked the eastern rAl· pine; "eastern-Mongolian,- or "Negroid-eastern") race to democracy, pacifism, 104· GlJnther 1936. 340; "Zusamm~lassendist l:U sagm. dil samtliche IndogermanenslimlM

nieht nur die gleiche Spnche. sondern aoch, sowohl in kOrperlichen als in setiischen Zilgen, urspriinglich durch dIS Vorherrschm der glcichen Rasse, nimlich der no«l.ischen Rasse, gekenn. :tek:hnet sind. Fast bel allrn find~ wk. dassdie ursprilnglich non.fisch-rus1scht Obersc:hicht, die dir SchOplerin und Triigerin der indogermanischen Sprachen und Ges.ittungen war. durch lremden EinOuB, deml:ufolge sle die a1tOberlielerten Sitten aufgab und so die RassenpOege vernachllissigte. nach einer gewissen Zeit vrrschwund~ war und dutch Kriegsverlusle, Geburtenriickgang und Entartung lasl vollkommen aulgemeut wurde. Es !, die indogermanlsche Sprache iibernommen hatte und auch heute noch sprleht-heute das eindge und letzte Zeichen einer ehemals nordischen HerrenschJcht. Ole heule lebenden AngehOrlgen der melslen Indogermanisch sprechenden Vlker sind mel,ten, nur noch die Spracherben und nleht mehr die Bluterben de lndogermanen.-Fur die germanlschen VOlker droht jetzt das gleiche Schlcksal. wenn nkht in lettter Siunde eine Umkehr elnlrltt. Dal nationalsozlalisllsche Deutschland hat dlese Umkehr beceits begonngn. Hofen wlr, daB die anderen germanischen Volker rechl bald auch noch zur Einsicht kommen und nicht das $chleml erlelden, das lhre Sprach- und Blutwerwandeten in friiheren Zeilen betroffen hat.105. Gunther 19~5. 9::1. 106. See Gunther 19::150 104(.

•

the Elm

277

Catholicism, merchants, bourgeoisie, lawyers, and enfeeblement. 107 ~rvantes's Sancho Panzo is the typical example of the eastern individual: "Sancho Panza is, as a racial type, the pure eastern dark person: superstitious, incapable of culture, unimaginative, materialistic; up to a point loyal, but for the most part merely servile:-Through the French Revolution, these "eastern round·heads· took power from the "North-Western long-skulls~ in France, and since 1918 (the Weimar Republic), they also rule in Germany.1Ot To some extent, the attacks on the "liberal" and "petit bourgeois· eastern race were only a continuation of the German researchers' devaluation of the Celts (the eastern race was also known as the ~CeItic· race). Perhaps, as Edouard Conte has suggested, one might also see it as a recoding of the opposition between Protestants and Catholics. llo In any case, it was a question of trying to mythologize certain political, nationalist, and religious-politics ideologies. The trick in these racial typologies is to make ideologies seem inevitable and indisputable. There was, however, another element in the hatred of the eastern race that made Schmidt come to its defense (which he would hardly have done had it only been a matter of hidden attacks on ~French·liberalism).In order to understand Schmidt's way of handling the idealization of the Nordic, we must briefly summarize his entire racial historiography. In Asia. three races arose that came to be included, in various constellations, in the three primary cultural circles. The agrarian-matriarchal cultural circle was maintained by "Mongoloid" and -Negroid- people, the totemistic by -Negroid· and ~Europid- human types, and the Central Asian herding culture by "Mongoloid" and "Europid" round-heads.1II Some of the primary herding culture's round·heads eventually wandered eastward, where they were united with agriculturalists, resulting in the appearance of a higher agrarian cultural circle that eventually stretched from northern India, across Persia, the Alps, and northern Italy. to France. These noble round-heads belonged to the eastern, or Alpine, race, and according to Schmidt created a "blossoming farming cuiture":u1"While the real conquerors with the help of their herds were able to advance rapidly, the round-headed Alpines, with the cultivation of their fields, pressed forward more slowly in stages, yet more surely and permanently; yet 107. See Rosenberg 19330 86. 10~-8, 194, ::113, ~b. 108. Ibid.• ~90; "Sancho Panu ist der Rassentyphus des rein ostischen dunklen Menschen:

abergliubisch. kulturunf;ihlg. schwunglos, materialistisch; bls zum einem gewissen Grader 'tceu; meistens }edoch nur unlerwiirfig." 109· Ibid.• lOS. 638. 1Il. See Schmidt 1946-49. 1:273-317. IIO. Conte 1987, 266. 112. Ibid.• 3:17.

278

Horsemen from the East

Chapter Fille

.'

-•

--... Coo

'

,

_. 'O'

=,-

•

26 Schematic map of how scholars and writers during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century created overlaps among race, ethnicity, and religion.

they nevertheless retained the components of the primary Altaic nomadic herders, the oldest fuling race:"113 The herding cultures north of the Caucasus. if I have understood correctly. consisted of Indo-German-speaking ~Nordids~ and Semitic ~Mediterraneans,~ who were both long skulled. When the IndoGerman long-heads finally had learned to use the horse for war, they began to conquer the world. They came to Europe in several waves. At first they were peaceful and were assimilated into the older population, but later on in history they came to rule over the short-skulled, "eastern~ farmers. But the Indo~ German long-heads could never have built up the European culture without help from the agriculture of the older short·skulls. According to Schmidt, the notion of the eastern race as a liberal merchant race must be completely discarded, and to those Nazis who claim that ~the eastern race has not made any

113.1bld., 1::184: ·Wahrend die eigentlichen Eroberervolker mit Hilfe lhrer Heden In rascheren ZUgen vordringen Konnten, schoben diese rundkopfigen Alplnen mit der etappenwelse vordrln· genden Rodungswirtschaft ihres Ackerbaues sich langsamer, aber desto sicherer und d.lluerhafter vor; sie enthielten aber auch BestandteUe der primiren a1tallschen Hlrtennomaden. der iltesten Herrscherrasse;

279

actual contribution to Europe's culture.- Schmidt retorts that if it had not been for the short-skulls, there would be no agriculture at all in Europe-something that the Nazis would have regretted as much as the Catholics. Schmidt ties his presentation ofthe history oCthe races to a religious-historical explanation of old Germanic religion, where we can see again the conflicted attitude to (Indo-)Germans that characterized the Austrian priests. The farmers of the eastern race had brought to northern Europ~ a "Pelasgian~ chthonic cult around the Vanir gods Nerthus and Freja.ll~ The worship of the Aesir gods, on the other hand, came with the first Indo-German migration. It was above all the heavenly god Tyr (related to Lat. deus, Skt. devd-, < ·deivos, which is related to ·Dithis [ph"t~r]) who was honored, and his cult eventually merged with the Mother Earth religion of the short-skulls. The last wave of Indo-European Nor· dids who came to northern Europe from eastern Europe brought with them the ecstatic cult ofthe death god Odin. who ·was close to the barbarian forms of the lowest shamanism."l15 The cult of the death god spread quickly, which is why it was not any ofthe "older. milder, purer forms ofthe Germanic paganism" but "the lowestn form, the religion of Odin, that the Christian missionaries confronted in northern Europe. l16 Christianity managed to conquer the cult of Odin, partly because it was easy for the missionaries to link the Christian god to the older worship of the heavenly god Tyr, "just as the purer figures from the matriarchal period~ could be linked to "honoring the Christian virgin mother Mary."lI? Here Schmidt is not far from the conservative national romantic scholars, who idolized the Germanic religion as long as it resembled the Christian one, while they maintained that Odin was the creation of a foreign people (see 220 f.). From Schmidt's perspective, the revolutionary phalanx of Nazism, to which the male· fellowship researchers who were fascinated by Odin belonged, was the evil one, not its conservative and farmer-romantic phalanx.

Integration Beginning with the Nordic·lndo-German conquest of Europe-so continues Schmidt's history-the people experienced a time of hardship. However, the medieval period was a good epoch, when the Roman Catholic Church managed to unite the people of Europe. European high culture could take shape, thanks to "the trinitarian Christianity'" that was able to create unity out of muitiplicity.lIs

114. Ibid., :1:270, 283-89; Schmidt 1968, 318-:10. 115. Schmidt 1946-49. :1::188. 117. Ibid.• :1:288f. 116. Ibid., 2:288. 118. Ibid., 3:4S7.

280

Ho~men from

ChapkrFiYe

Without "'the trinitarian idea of God's wonderful power" and "the south's centuries-old cultural superiority;" the Germans would stiU have been barbarians,lIt With the humanistic Renaissance began the modern decline which later reached low-water marks such as the Protestant Reformation. the French Revolution, nineteenth-eentury atheistic materialism. ltaly's destruction of the church state. and the world wars. I20 The Nazi passion for "the Nordic" and the Protestant struggle for Los-lIOn-Rom made the situation worse by separating the Germans from culture-creating Rome. The Nazis' arrogance and apotheosis ofthe Nordic race worked against all efforts to restore the "medieval" Holy Roman Empire. or course. Bolshevik Russia was not a good sign either. The revolution of 1917. according to Schmidt. had its origins in the Russian (Indo-German) upper-class oppression of the peasants. It is no coincidence. he maintains, that Stalin, "der Fuhrer RuBlands," is a Georgian and thus descends from "the Caucasian·pre-Indo·German" race that has made up Europe's short-skulled farmer dass.m However, the revolution did not bring any return to a healthy condition: "Unfortunately, in this manner Bolshevik Russia is also a thorough denial of the West: it falsifies its pre-Indo-European base, it de~troys its Indo-European and Germanic overlay. and is fighting and destroying the religions of these strata. especially Christianity in all its forms, even Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the form in which it first had arrived there:"JD lfthe Nazi mistake was to overempha· size the Indo-German heritage at the expense of the pre-Indo-German (though "Europidl heritage. the mistake of the Bolshevists was to deny both. W

One and a half years after Koppers published Die Indogermanen- und Ger· manenfrage, Hitler carried out the Anschluss_ At first. Schmidt cooperated with influential Nazis. In order to give the Catholic Church a strong position in Ostmark. 'Schmidt and the bishops of Austria were prepared to meet the Nazis 119. Ibid.. 3:458f.; dt~ in Conte 198?, 266. no. Schmidt 1946-49, 3:450. 121. Tht study of Caucasian languages wascarr!edoutduring the 1!nOS in Russ~ at the lr1$titute for Japhetlte Languages (ibid, 3:20). 121. Ibid., 3::11: -Leider iSI das bolschewlkische RuBland aber auch nach dltser Rlchlung dlt grilndllchsle Verneinung des Abendlandes: ('lI verfalscht schon seint vorlndogermanlschen Grundlagen. ('lI terSt6rtseinen Indosermanischen un
um."

the EaSI

28\

27 Catholic clerics and scouts celebrating the pope at Berliner Sportpalats (1935). Unknown photographer. (Wlger and von WeIck 1990.)

halfway.124 However. through what seems to have been pressure from the Pope. the negotiations were interrupted. whereupon Schmidt was placed under house arrest (a fact that is usually taken as proof of Schmidt's anti·Nazism). After a few days. through the intervention of MussoLini, he received permission to leave the country. at the request of Pius XI. He first went to Rome. after which he settled in Switzerland, where he also moved the Anthropos Institute. In a chapter of Rossen und VOlker that surely must have been written near the end of the war, Schmidt writes that once Nazism has been conquered. Europe can rise again only if the two halves that make up the population of the continent are united. The farmers' slow but thorough nature must be united with the rulers' more volatile temperament. The solution after the war is to unite Christianity, re-Christianize Europe, and create "die Vereinigten Staaten von Europa; a ~Christian-Western Civitas Dei: l2S Unity seems in general to be the fundamental virtue for Schmidt. Unity was the first attribute of the high cultures: "The ability to integrate is the first. fundamental sign of a high cui·

U4- Maytr 1975-91,?49; Brandewie 1990. 217-31 tt passim.

12S. It II amwJng to ~mem~ that the fint spokesrnotn for the European Union were Robert SchtllTllon and AkIde de Ga.Iptri. who were UIOdIted with the rnctionary Catholk: Opus Dd

.....p.

282

Chaptu Fivt

Horumen from the Enst

ture:"l26 For integration, vertical direction and rational thinking ace necessary. One might thus wonder about the balance between the two halves. for the ability to unite and organize people was still an Indo-German specialty. In conclusion. it would be interesting to compare more closely the distinction that father Schmidt outlines between a southern, pious. pre-Indo-German and brachycephalic farmer class and a northern. adventurous, Indo-German and dolichocephalic warrior elite to the distinction made by Catholic royalist and Fascist Dumezil between -the slow,· -the regulated; ..the benevolent; and -the liberal,- on the one hand. and ..the quick; "the raging," the totalitarian; and "the dark; on the other.m For Dumail. it is not readily apparent which classes belong to which side. since he sometimes argues that this duality runs straight through all the functions, but the tendency seems to me to be that the former aspect (represented by Mitra and Tyr). is linked to peasants and priests. just as it is for Schmidt, and that the latter aspect (represented by Varona and Odin), is linked to warriors and magicians. And is not Schmidt's uncertainty about whether the Indo-Germans are a people who unite or who arrogantly crush also DumezU's question about whether the king is a symbol of the whole society or a representative for the military male fellowships? And is not the fear of the Nordic Indo·Germans' dark. aggressive side that can be seen in Schmidt's work the same fear that made DumezU say that the Germans' religion had experienced a ~glide toward militarism'"? It does seem clear to me that both Schmidt and DumezU, using history, struggled to understand and question the connections between rulership and the Fascist movement that identified itself with the Aryan, Nordic. Germanic race and that saw itselfas the foremost of all cultural peoples. It also seems as if they simultaneously wanted to find a place in modern society for the old rulers, for the king and the pope, or at least for what they saw as the tried and true way to rule.

ARCHAEOLOGY AND CRITIQYE From a Socialist Horizon The authors who contributed to Koppers's lndogermanen· und Germanenfrage had diverse reasons for doing so. It might seem surprising that the Australian· British prehistorian Gordon ChUde (1892-1957), one of the foremost archaeolo~ gists of the twentieth century and a socialist and historical materialist, chose to

participate. But in spite of the ideological differences between Childe and the Catholic priests, it was his work, along with that of Schmidt and Koppers, that provided the foundation for the postwar theories about Proto-Indo.-European culture. Childe probably agreed to participate in lndogermanen· und Germanenfrage because he wanted to fight Nazi research in general and because he wanted to add support for Schrader's eastern European homeland, Childe had been strongly influenced by Gustaf Kossina's cultural-historical methodology and had worked in accordance with the principle that archaeologists should identify archaeological "cultures" in order to then link them to a particular ethnic group. This did not mean, however, that he approved of Kossina's German chauvinistic thesis about a northern European homeland, and in his article in lndogermanen· und Germanenfrage, he writes that northern Europe is hardly a promising Urheimat for the Indo-Germans. 12I Instead. Childe argues for a "reversal of Kossina's migrations: which would mean that the Indo·Europeans had wandered from the Pontic steppes in southern Russia and the Ukraine to northern Europe.129 Childe's interest in ~the Indo.-German question" went back further in time, however. As early as 1926 he had written a whole monograph on the question, 1he Aryans: A Study of Indo-European Origins, which in the Anglo-Saxon world was long considered to be the final word on the subject. Childe's book was the first English summary of the discussion about the Aryans since Isaac Taylor's 1he Origins of the Aryans (1889), and as ChUde himself pointed out in the foreword, several important discoveries had been made since then, 1. Arthur Evans had excavated Knossos and Heinrich SchIiemann had e.xca· vated Mycenae; the ~peacefuJ" Knossos (ca. 2100-1300 B.C.) had been ascribed a pre-Aryan population by certain archaeologists, while the miHtary·heroic Mycenae (ca. 1600-1200 B.C.) had been assigned an Indo·European one, Hence, the image of the Indo-Europeans as military conquerors had received additional support. 2. When 1he Aryans was written, Childe had not yet had time to read the complete reports from the excavations of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro (ca, 2500-1700 B.C.) that were carried out under the leadership of John Marshall, but from the information he had access to, he still concluded that the people of the Indus culture were related to ~Mesopotamia'spre-Aryan population."IJO And this was exactly what the scholarship later concluded: just as in the southern Balkan Peninsula, the Indo-Europeans came as a conquering warrior people •

n6. SChmidt 1946-49, 1:314. 11.7. M an alternative to Gunther's classification of Europe'.

nces, Schmidt also created hla

own classifiation,ln whkh the round·skulled Alpine or "stem ntCC appears more U I romp!.. ment to the Nordic rICe than IS Its opponent (Ibid., :1:16«,).

283

la8, ChUde 19)6, sa9, 11.9, Chllde 1926, SS'

130· Chllde 191.6, 26f., 30·

284

to a peaceful, civilized land. For both the Minoans and the people of the [ndus culture, an image was constructed of a life~loving culture whose ~Pelasgian· religion was goddess based and revolved around productivity and fertility. The archaeologists' condusions thereby came to support the philologists' theory that everywhere in Eurasia the pre-Indo-European culture and its religions had been the opposite of the Indo~Europeanones: peaceable, female, chthonic, and focused on rebirth. This image has since been reproduced countless times. both in scientific and in popular-scientific works. 13l 3. In 1907, Hugo Winckler had shown that there were traces, from 1400 or

1300 B.C., ofIndo-European words in Hurrian texts from the Mitanni kingdom. In these texts, there were Indo-Aryan proper names; names of the Vedic gods Indra (Indara), Vacuna (Uruwana), Nasatya (Nasattiya). and Mitra (Mitra); and Indo-Aryan expressions for horse husbandry; as weU as a word that has been interpreted as "'professional warrior," maryanni. related to Sanskrit marya and Avestan mairyo, which Wikander had interpreted as "'male feUowship."' The scholars interpreted the existence of these Indo-European words as a sign that the Indo-Europeans had arrived in the area as a horse-riding warrior elite. The texts from Mittani are in fact the oldest evidence that exists in any Indo-European language. This came as a surprise to scholars, for if there was any place where the Indo-Europeans were not supposed to exist. it was in the Semitic Near East. It was these facts. among others. that convinced Schmidt and Koppers that the Indo-Europeans had been livestock-herding nomads and mounted warriors who had been dose to the Semites. The dichotomy between life-loving Aryans. who lived in green landscapes. and life-hating Semites. who lived where the sun had scorched the earth. began to seem less and less appropriate. 4. The thesis about the northern homeland of the Indo-Europeans had met still more resistance when Bedtich Hrozny in 1917 presented proof that the language on some tablets from Egypt and Bogazkale from 1900 8.C. was Indo-European. For various reasons. those who had spoken this language were identified with the Hittites of the Bible. and the language consequently came to be called Hittite. The world of the Indo-Europeans thus came to include the Near East to an even greater extent.

285

mounted Indo-Europeans with horse-drawn war wagons had infiltrated the Near East and South Asia and formed "'Aryan aristocracies" there.lJ:I The original home of these aristocrats should, according to Childe, be sought on "a continental region traversed by rivers. sufficiently wooded to afford shelter to bears and beavers but open enough to nourish hares and swift horses and to permit the unimpeded progress of vehides."U'l Childe found a place that corresponded to such an area in the southern Russian steppe area around the archaeological remains that are called kurgan. "grave mounds."' In the Kurgan culture. the ancient Aryans supposedly lived by raising cattle and horses. "'the Aryan animal par exceJJence."'u. They worshipped the heavenly father, the goddess of the dawn. storm gods. and hippomorphic twins but had "'no Earth Goddess.",l3s By tracing the spread of the kurgan graves and other objects such as cord-decorated ceramic ware and battle-axes, Chi.lde reversed Kossina's and Hirt's migrations so that the northern cultures appeared as the result of immigration from the southeast. When the Aryan culture arrived in Europe toward the end of the second millennium. according to Childe. a primitive agricultural society already existed there. This was a "totally stagnated; superstitious, and death-fixated megalithic culture that had a "'clumsy and barbaric" art and whose cradle was in Egypt. 136 The culture should not be called "European,· Childe wrote. continuing: But the first culture was essentially a peasant civilization and as such unprogressive and rigid. Left to itself it might have remained on the level of a totemic society in Melanesia and North America.... The ferment which transmuted the societies of agricultural clans into the heroic tribes of the Bronze and Iron ages, thus opening the way to initiative and individuality. we regard as Aryan. Thus the Aryans do appear everywhere as promoters of true progress and in Europe their expansion marks the moment when the prehistory of our continent begins to diverge from that of Africa or the Pacific. U7 Thus, the European identity first arose when the Aryan peoples arrived in Europe (which in Childe's presentation mainly meant western Europe). The European civilization was then brought over from France to the British Isles by people who were at least partly Aryans, and "'the genuinely Western civilization that since has led Britain was apparently driven by them."l3t While

The picture that took shape thanks to these new discoveries was that from the beginning of the second millennium and for half a millennium onward. 131. Su, for example, E. O.lamn, 71ft Cultojth,MoUlu.GoddaI (1959): or HaN Peter Duftr. $.t.tiM «kr Die Lid» rum U«" (1917).

13'1. ~ Childe 1926. 135. Chllde 19:16, 90. 134- Ibid.. 83. 135. Ibid.. 81.

136. Ibid" 1]6. 210. 1]7. Ibid" 211. 1]8. Ibid.• 210.

286

HOrsmfm fro", the LuI

CJrapkrRw

western Europe ·since then" has had a genuine civilization, Scandinavia and northern Europe developed differently. There the older culture had a stronger position. which resulted in a mixed culture consisting of newly arrived Aryans and "despicable savages" (by which Childe meant the same people that Kossina had chosen as ancient Aryans).1J9"The gulf between French and Scandinavian culture at the beginning of the Hod millennium is enormous. The superiority of the former is the measure of the contribution made by the Aryan element to the European civilization.'"·.a Just like Schmidt. Childe imagined that the European culture consisted of a pre-Indo·European agrarian population and an Indo-European conquering race. However. they valued these sectors differently. While Schmidt saw both as essential for the emergence of a European high culture. Childe was completely Aryanist. ChiJde took this attitude not because ofany racism. but rather because he did not share the folk romanticism of Schmidt. Muller. and the Nazis. Instead he praised -progressiveness; which meant for him the ability to promote internationalism. trade. and economics and to create an -enlightened and careful organization" that could protect the freedom of the individual. KI The most progressive people in history have. of course. been the Aryans. According to Childe. the Aryans above all have their language, and the reasoning that this language made possible. to thank for their progressiveness-they were -a people whose language was pregnant with great possibilities.-141 Childe's Aryanism thus went back to the modernist, liberal, and humanist nineteenth·century historiography, in which the Aryans were presented as the first humanists and as primarily shaped by their language; unsurprisingly, he also wrote about "the Aryan interest in humanity."l43 ChiJde's humanism made it hard for him to accept the interwar period's great interest in racial anthropology. TypicaUy for the time, he does claim that "the ur-Aryans mainly belonged to the Nordk race; that it is "the European race parexcelJence," and, to some extent, he also uses anthropometric studies. K4 But at the same time, his nineteenth-century humanism makes him claim that race is an unimportant factor in the history of the lndo-Europeans-the decisive factor is instead the Indo-European language. Childe's ideological position becomes explicit in the following angry passage (refreshing for anyone who has read about the superiority of the Aryan race ad nauseam):

139. Ibid., 107. 140- Ibid., :lU. 141. Ibid.. :waf.

142.. Ibid.. So 14]. Ibid.. 209.

144- See Oilde 1926, 4. 2.4ff.. 96-103.159, 164. 16)!.. 21.2..

287

Not only are they {the theories of racial anthropology) worthless; they are mischievous_ They have induced their votaries to postulate all sorts or migrations, for which there are as yet not a particle of evidence. To buttress the Nordic's claim to be the ruling race par ucelknce, attempts have been made. and are still being made, to prove that the earliest dynasties of China, Sumer, and Egypt were established by invaders from Europe and even today the vision of certain prehistorians is absolutely distorted by this preconception. Such misdirected enthusiasm also injures science in another way. The apotheosis of the Nordics has been linked to the policies of imperialism and world domination: the word -Aryan~ has become the watchword of dangerous factions and especially of the more brutal and blatant forms of anti-Semitism. Indeed the neglect and discredit into which the study of Indo~European philology has fallen in England are very largely attributable to a legitimate reaction against the extravagancies of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and his ilk. and the gravest objection to the word Aryan is its association with pogroms. K5 As a socialist, Childe was something of a stranger among the scholars of Indo-European culture and religion, and perhaps it is not surprising that he later dismissed The Aryans by saying it was the most childish thing he had ever written. Very few socialists have studied Indo-European religion, mainly because almost all academics up to the 19605 held nonsocialist views, but probably also because the Indo~Europeanswere not a suitable object of study for socialists, since the category had not been created from historical materialist classifications, but from linguistic and/or racial ones. l46 After the end of World War II, almost no research was done about lndo- Europeans in the communist countries, and the Soviet leadership prohibited the use of the term indbgermanisdr in the DDR. instead suggesting indoe.uropiiisdr.K1 In the Soviet Union, scholars even argued that "it is absolutely necessary to make dear to everyone that the belief in the original homelands comes to the same thing as the belief in God's sovereign authority."KI Since the fall of the Berlin WaIl in 1989. interest in the Indo·Europeans has reportedJy been growing again 1450 Ibid.• 164. 146. According to Schmidt (1946-4!il. po), an -Institute for Japhetite research" was opened in 192:1 In Leningrad. Unfortunately I have not had the opportunity to investigate mo~ exactly what this Institute did. 147· ROmer 19850 53148. The duilion Is from the I..mln Ac.dI.'lTlY from Richthofen 19)6. 2.27-"Es ill n6t1g. jedern wntlndlich xu machen. daB doer Glaube an Urhftmaten gldchbedeutend mit dftn Glauben an die HerrsdWi Gatta Ist.-

289

288 in eastern Europe, and several professorships in Indo-European studies have been established in former East Germany. The Rise ofthe European Patriarchy

Even if Childe lost interest in the Aryans and turned his attention to other objects of study, eventually becoming arguably the foremost archaeologist of the century. his theories about the origin, migrations, and cultural feats of the Aryans did not go to waste. The person who did the most to promote them in the postwar period was Lithuanian·American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921-94).10 a series of articles from 1956 on, and through the more popular scientific monographs Gods and Goddesses oJOW Europe, 7000-3500 B.C.: Myths. Legends and Cult Images (1974; 2nd ed. 1982 with the Significant title change The Goddesses and Gods ofOld Europe) and The LAnguage ofthe Goddesses: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilisation (1989), Gimbutas convinced a large number of scholars to join forces behind Schrader's and Childe's eastern European homeland. While most of the archaeologists of the postwar period gave up looking for the Aryans' homeland, Gimbutas tried to work further with that framework in mind. Typical for her work is the radical distinction she made between the matriarchal pre-Indo-European culture and the patriarchal Indo-European culture. As we have seen, there was a great deal of older research that Gimbutas could use for support, for example, Schrader's: ~We therefore come to the conclusion that, in southern and southeastern Europe, before the Indo-Europeans set foot there. a population ofAsia Minor was situated. in which the rights of mothers and matriarchy were just as valid as patriarchy and the subordination of women had been to the Indo-Europeans.... I would like to imagine that the Indo-Europeanization of Europe meant. at the same time. a victory of patriarchy over the preexisting matriarchy~49 According to Gimbutas. some of the most important remains from the matriarchal original population were to be found in the excavations that she led from 1967 to 1980 on the Balkan Peninsula. She named the culture that could be reconstructed from these findings ~Old Europe.~ 149- Sc:hrader 1907, 2.:367= -Wit kornmen also zu dem SchIuu, dasI im Il-.onchen und sUdOIdl· chm Europa, bevor die Indogermanen dudb5t f5.efl Fuu fu5tm, rine nach ~ von K1rinuian hin- CIder heruberrekhende Bev6lkerungSUII, be der Mutterrecht und FraumhtTnchaft, nkht, wie bei den Indogermanen, Valerrecht und Frauenknechtung gallen.... m6chte.1Io g1auben, dus die Indogermanisierung Europu zuglelch einen Sleg der vltcrrechLllchen tlber die vorher dasclbst hcrrschmde mutterrechllschc FamilJc bcdcut~e:'

Im

•

28 Unknown artist, ~MistressofAnimals" (ClI. 700 B.C.). This painting from a Boeotian

amphora is canonical within the research that is seeking Europe's true -Pelasgianorigin. It is reproduced in, for example, 'ane Ellen Harrison's Prolegomena to the Sludy of Gruk Religion (1908). Marija Gimbutas's The Language of the Godtku {1989l, and Hans Peter Duerr's &dna oder D~ Liebe tum Leben (198s). (Harrison 1908.)

The term Old Europe is applied to a pre·Indo·European culture of Europe. a culture matrifocal and probably matrilinear, agricultural and sedentary, egalitarian and peaceful. It contrasted sharply with the ensuing Proto-Indo·European culture which was patriarchal, stratified, pastoral, mobile, and war-oriented, superimposed on all Europe, except the southern and western fringes, in the course of three waves of infiltration from the Russian steppes. between 4500 and ~soo Be. During and after this period the female deities. or more accurately the Goddess Creatrix in her many aspects, were largely replaced by the predominandy male divinities of the Indo-Europeans. What developed after c. ~soo BC was a melange of the two mythiC systems. Old European and Indo-European.l$O Gimbutas tried to understand the worldview of Old Europe by analYZing grave artifacts and excavated statuettes. but also through very speculative interpretations of decorated ceramics. The conclusion was that Old Europe's 150. Glmbuta. 1989a, 9.

291

290 ideology corresponded to the ancient, "Pelasgian" Mother Earth religion that Bachofen, Dieterich. and Harrison had reconstructed earlier. Gimbutas also referred. to their works, as well as to other work belonging to the same tradition (for example. Robert BrifFault's The Mothers {19:l7 J and E. 0. James's The Cult afthe Mother-Goddess (1959». Celebration of life is the leading motif in Old European ideology and

art. There is no stagnation; life energy is constantly moving as a serpent, spiral. or whirl.... Sacred images and symbols. goddesses and gods. their birds and animals. mysterious snakes. batrachians, and insects, were more real than actual daily events.... The Goddess in all her manifestations was

a symbol of the unity of all life in Nature. Her power was in the water and stone, in tomb and cave, in animals and birds, snakes and fish, hills. trees, and Oowers. Hence the holistic and mythopoetic perception of sacredness and mystery of all there is on Earth. This culture took keen delight in the natural wonders of this world.... This was a 10ng~lasting period of remarkable creativity and stability. an age free of strife. Their culture was a culture of art.1SI Gimbutas blamed the decline of the Old European culture on the IndoEuropeans. Around the middle of the fifth miUenium, the Indo-Europeans Lived on the Pontic steppes north ofthe Caucasus. Gimbutas called their culture the Kurgan culture after the grave mounds that she, like Childe, considered the foremost archaeological sign of Indo~European presence. From analyses of dwellings and graves, Gimbutas concluded that the Kurgan culture was patriarchal and socially hierarchical with a separate aristocracy. Their gods were connected to the sun, the water. and thunder. Insofar as their pantheon contained any goddesses. they were borrowed from the Balkans and the Mediterranean. l52 By following the kurgan graves and other objects (like corded ware and battle·axes), Gimbutas believed she could confirm that there were several invasions by ·hordes of pastoralists· between ca. 4500-2500, when mounted Ind~Europeans spread across Europe and "pulled up the flowering culture of Old Europe by the roots:"w Between 3500 and 2000 they also attacked northern Iran and Anatolia. For the European population, the invasions brought "revolutionary changes:"lst These changes included ·that the society moved from being matrilineal to patrilineal; that the cultivated "theocracy· was replaced by a militant patriarchy; that a society based on equality of the sexes became a lSI. Gimbutas 1989b. 3:11. IS2- Glmbu.tas 1910. 111.

15). Glmbuta. 1994. 134; 1970. 155, 154- Glmbutll. 1970. 110.

male-dominated hierarchy; that the female earth goddesses were pushed out of the pantheon by the Indo-European sky gods:"LS5 Indo~European beliefs now became the official religion. Gimbutas saw DumeziJ's description of the Indo--European pantheon as largely correct, but with the modilication that he was wrong to restrict the goddesses to the lowest prodUcing and reproducing function. In fact. the goddesses were transfunctional. l .56 It is interesting to note that Gimbutas, like Schmidt and Koppers. sees the IndO-Europeans as relatives of the Semitic cattle herders. 157 She describes the encounter between Old Europe and the Ind~Europeansas the meeting be~ tween ·the domestic. ancient European tradition that had been taken over from Paleolithic times· and -the foreign, close to Middle Eastern IndO-European tradition.· ISl In line with this, Gimbutas argues that the lndo- Europeans were helped by Semitic-descended Christianity in the work of crushing ·our authentic. European Heritage.'"l59 But hope lives on: The next stage. that of the pastoral and patriarchal warrior gods, who either supplanted or assimilated the matristic pantheon of goddesses and gods. represents an intermediary stage before Christianity and the spread of the philosophical rejection of this world. A prejudice against this worldliness developed and with it the rejection of the Goddess and

ISS. Gimbutas 1994, IJS; "Dieser Wandel dJilckte skh im Ubergang von einer matrillnearen zu einn- patrilinun'n (;ewllcchaft aus; die kultivierte ·Theokratie· wurde abgel6s1 von einem militanlm Patriardtal; rifle auf Gleichhet der Geschlechter beruhende GaeI1sc:heft wurde zur minnt'rdom.inierten HieraId\ie; die ~iblkhm ErdtJottheiten wurden YOm Pantheon de! indogermanschen HilTllMlsgOtter ~rdringt." 156. Gimbutas (1989b, xviii, xix) claims that Dumezll has not understood thaI the IndoEuropean mythologies are a mixture of Proto-Indo-European and Old European pantheons and that he therero~ understands the goddesses only as belonging to the third funclJon ("Venuses"). while they actually a~ transfunetional ("queens~ "ladies"). This argument is a btl strange. since it undermine$ Gimbuw's own image of the Indo-Europnns as archpatriarchaI.: if the IndoEuropnns ~ really so palriard\a.l. then how could the JOddesses continue to be multihceted, tnnsfunctkmal? Pi'ONbly Gimbuw means thaI Dumh.il reproduces the Indo-Europeans' oppression of the goddesses when he places them within the prodUcing and reprodUcing sphere, for the goddesses were actually trarufunctional. 157. Already Hehn. who anticipated the Catholics· image of the Indo-Germans as nolNds, In KulturpfUuturr UtJlJ H,ul.ltien compared the Indo-Germans' wanderings to the Hebrews' entry Into Palestine: "Elne VergkichUlli Gerihrm etwa die Andeutunsen des Allen Testaments iibet' die kriegische Einwandmmg semilischer Hi~r In Palistina" (1874. 19). (One poinl of comparison approximalely agren with the indications found In the Old Testament about the militaristIc immigration of5emitic pa.toral peoples into Palestine). IsS· Glmbutll 1994, 134. 1S9. Glmbutll 1989b. xxi.

292

all she stood for. The Goddess gradually retreated into the depths of (or· ests or onto mountaintops. where she remained to this day in beliefs and fairy stories. Human alienation (rom the vital roots of earthly life ensued. the result of which are clear in our contemporary society. But the cycles never stop turning. and now we find the Goddess re-emerging from the (orests and mountains bringing us hope for the future. returning us to our most ancient human roots. 16O

Thus. me Indo-Europeans never completely succeeded in destroying the god-

dess religion. Gimbutas's enthusiasm for the culture and religion of Old Europe has resulted in her becoming a prophet for oeo-pagan feminists who want to fight Indo-European and Semitic oppression,l6l Here we find ourselves far from the ideology of the nineteenth century as expressed by MUller when he constructed a radical opposition between the monotheistic and moralistic Semites and the humanistic, creative, and progress-oriented Aryans even as he simultaneously upwardly valued both as necessary complements for modern man. For Gimbutas, on the other hand, both Semites and Aryans are gravediggers of the authentic life. Gimbutas's image of Old Europe's religion is actually very modern, insofar as her speculative reconstruction assumes the neotraditionalist, vitalistic reaction against modernistic ideals. She seems to me to be deeply anchored in turn-of-the-century thinking by continuing a metaphysics of gender in which the entire cosmos can be divided into male and female. The reason for her ideological successes, aside from her provocative speculations, is that she uses the theories of older researchers in order to strongly mark the contingent. the nonnecessary, in the existence of an ~lndo­ European~ and ~Semitic~ patriarchal society-since it has been preceded by a matriarchal pre-Indo-European society that is "our authentic European heritage:' Gimbutas's critique of Indo-European aggression thus has very different ideological overtones from that ofSchmidt and Koppers. who wanted to stem neo-pagan and racist Nazism. Of course, the closer we come to our Own time the harder it is to see how ideologies-in which we ourselves swim around-affect the truth seeking that strives for objectivity and persuasive evidence. The enterprise also becomes politically hotter and more sensitive. And it becomes more disagreeable to make the wrong conclusions. In Gimbutas's case, I think that many readers 160. Ibid., 3:11. 161. Neo.pagan Ind feministic boob lodly 1Omt'llmn refer 10 "the Teulonlc-SM'lltlc pau\archy· (SchnurbeJn 1991, :as:a).

Ifonemt" from the EAst

293

of her work have sensed that there is another agenda behind her theoretical constructions, in addition to the clearly feminist agenda. This subtext probably is related to the fact that she was forced into exile by the Bolshevik troops who invaded her homeland, Lithuania, in 1944-45, moving across the Baltic and eastern Europe. There is something very ~Cold War~ about her theories and about the maps she draws of Indo-European invasions of eastern Europe and the Balkan Peninsula. In any case, a connection can be observed between not idealizing, or even disapproving of, the Indo-Europeans, and placing their homeland on Slavic ground. Hehn, whose disgust for nomadic peoples is cited above, claimed that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had been nomads in Central Asia, and that the most conservative of all the Indo-European peoples had been the Slavs. Hehn's distaste for the Slavic peoples was even so strong that the Nazis forgave him for his liberalism and used him for their own anti-Slavic and anti-Bolshevik rhetoric.~ Even Schrader, who wanted to stem what he thought was an undisguised idealization of the Indo-Europeans, felt that the Slavs were very close to the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Schmidt and Koppers were, as we have seen, ambivalent toward the Lndo- European heritage and located the original home in the (at that time) Bolshevik southern Russia. Childe, on the other hand, was Aryanist, and in spite of that located the original home on Slavic territory; but then, he was also a socialist. Whether Gimbutas associated Slavic people with warlike and barbarian horsemen, and whether she saw Bolshevism as typically Slavic, I don't know.""ls it perhaps significant that she chose not to use the Russian archaeologists' term ~Yamna~ for the archaeological culture that she identified as that of the ancient Indo-Europeans, but instead chose to introduce "Kurgan"-a word she claims exists in both Slavic and Turkish languages (where it denotes a grave mound), and which therefore has the right ~connotations for an eastern origin,,?l64

The Rise ofEuropean Agrku/ture Gimbutas's status as a scholar is controversial. On the one hand, she is praised by laymen and by most of the scholars who have investigated the question of 162. SCt' Losemann IW7, 17tf. 163. Marlff (1997) Slrc!S!a Gimbutas's strong Lithuanian identity and the tnumatic constquenctS that the Polish and later the RlUSian BolJhevlIr: occupation of Lithuania had for her and her tducattd family, who ~ to have MId llbtnl and romantic·nationaliJt vallM!S. M Cor many Uthuanians during 1M lntel'Wtlr period. 1M German ...my Instead seemtd lib defeoom of the Uthuanlan culture. 164. Glmbuttol 1970, 1$6.

294

Horsemen from the East

Ch~ptf:r Fi~

TABLE 13 Relationships among methods. privileged peoples. cultural forms. and placement of original homeland within Indo-European scholarship

Method

Philology"

anthropology"

Cultur.l.l. history, ucha"'ogy. philology
mparison a/Early Christianity and the Rtligions of Lau Antiquity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1990. Smith. Wtlllam Robertson. Lutures on the Re/igwn ofthe Semites. Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1889. Sombart, Nicolaus. Dk deutsdlen Manner und ihre Feim:k: Carl Schmitt-ein deuLSChes Schicksal zwischen Miinnerbund und Matriarchatsmythos. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, J991. Spehr, Harald. ·Waren die Germanen 'Ekstatiker'?" Rasse: MonatschriftfUr der Nordisdten &wegung, no. 3. (1936). Sp3ttel, Michael. "Mannerphantasien: Bachofens Wirkung auf die Volkerkundlische Konstruktion von Kultur~ ZRGG, so, no. 4 (1998). Stern, Fritz. 1hePoliticsofCullural Despair; A StudyUt. the R~ofthe ~nnan~/deol00. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974Stocking, George W. VlClorian Anthropology. New York: Free PIUS, 1987. - -.. A.fter Tylor: British Soci4J Anthropology. J888-1951. London: Athlone, 1996. Strensld.lvan. Religion in Relation; Method. Application and Moral Location. London: Macmillan, 1993. - -.. "The Rise of Ritual and the Hegemony ofMyth: Sytvain Uvi, the Durkheimians, and Max MUlIer;" In Patton and Doniger 1996. - -.. Durkheim and the Jews of france. Chicago: University of Chicago Pf6S, 1997. Strombeck, Dag. "Brooerna Grimm och folkJoristikens vetenskapliga grundlaggning~ In Briiderna Grimms sagor. S6dertiJje: Gidlunds. 1981. Struc-Oppenberg, Ursula. "Ober die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier~ In KriUsche Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 8. Munich: Schoningh., 1975. Stunkel, Kenneth R. "India and the Idea of Primitive Revelation in French Neo-Catholic Thought." Journal ofReligious History, no. 8 (1975). Szemerenyi, Oswald. "Studies in the Kinship Terminology of the Indo-European languages." Acta lranica, no. 7 (1977). Taylor, Isaac. The Origin ofthe Aryans. London: Walter Scott, 1889. Theweleit, Klaus. Mansfantasier. Stehag: Brutus Ostlings Bokrorlag Symposion, 1995. Thompson. Stith. The Folktale. New York: Dryden Press, 1946. Thorson, Edred. Northern Ma~. St. Paul, Minn.: Uewellyn Publications, 1992. Todorov, Tzvetan. On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Radsm, and ExotieLsm in French Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993-

Bibliogrtilp/ry

339

Trautmann, Thomas R. Aryans and Britisl1lndia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Trigger, Bruce G.Arkeologins idihistoria. Stocldtolm: Brutus Ostlings BoId3r1ag Sympasion, 1993. Trompf, G. W. Friedrit::h Max MiUJer: A.J: a Th~rls1 ofComparatiw Religion. Bombay: Shakuntala Publishing Co.• 1978. Trubetskoj (Trubettkoy), Nikolaj. MGedank~n fiber das Indogermanenprobl~m.·In Sch~r~r 1968. Tully, James, ed. Meaning and Coniul: Quentin Skinner and His Critics. Cambridge: Polity, 1988. Ustorf, Werner. MTwo Tales of Post-Christendom: Hauer's Neopaganist Mission of the 1930S and the 'Soul for Europe' Protect of the 199OS." Swedish Missiologiall Themes 87, no. 2 (1999). Van den Bosch, Lourens P. Friedrich Max Muller: A. Life Devoted to the Humanities. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Voigt, Johannes H. Max Mueller: The Man and Hu Ideas. Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1967. Volger, Gisela, and Karin von Weick. MiinnerbandlMiinnerbunde: Zur Rolle des Mannes im Kulturvergleich. Cologne: Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, 1990. von See, Klaus. "Politische Mannerbund-Ideologie von der wilhelminschen Zeit bis zum Nationalsozialismus:' In VOlger and von Weick 1990. - -.. Barbar, Germane, Arier: Die Sudte nadJ der ldentitiit der Deutsdten. Heidelberg: Universitiitsverlag C. Winter, 1994. Vries, Jan de. Forschun~ge:sdti£h~ der Mythologie. Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1961. Wagner-Hue!. Beate. Matriarchatstheorien der A.lurtumw~mchaft. Darmstadt: WlSSenschafliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992. Wailes, Bernard. and Oar~ Zoll. "Civilisation. Barbarism.. and Nationalism in European Archaeology." In Kohl and Fawcett 1995Wardman. H. W. Ernest Renan: A. Critical Biography. London: Athlone PIUS, 1964Wassterstrom. Steven M. Religion aftu Re4gion: ~nhom Scholem, Mbua fliade, and Henry Corbin at EranDS. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Wegierslci, Mark. "The New Right in Europe." Telos, nos. 98-99 (1994). Widengren, Geo, 1945- Religionens viirld: Religionsfenomenologiska studieroch ovenilcter. Stockholm: Svenska kyrkans diakonistyrelses bold3r1ag, 1945- -.. Der Feudalismus im alten Iran: Miinnerbund, ~folgswesen, Feudalismus in der iranischen Geseiluhafi im Hinblidr aufdie indogermanischen Verhiiltnisse. Cologne: Westdeutschen Verlag, 1969. Wikander, Stig. Der arische Miinnerbund. Lund: Gleerups, 1938. - -.. "Gudinnan Anahita och den zoroastiska eldskulten~ Religion och Bibel 1 (1942). Wistrich, Robert S. Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991. Wust, Walther. "Bestand die zoroa$lrisc.he Urgemeinde wirklich aus berufsmiBigen Ekstatikern und schamanisierenden Rinderhirten der Steppe?" ARW, no. 36 (1939).

340

Bibliography

Index

- -.. Indogumanisches &unntnis. Berlin: Ahnenerbe-Stiftung Verlag. 1942lapatero, Gonza.lo Ruiz. "Celts and Iberians; Ideological Manipulations in Spanish Archaeology." In Graves-Brown et 311996. Zinser, Hartmut. ·Der Mythos der Mutterrechu in der Zeit zwischen den Weltkriegen." In Kippenberg and Luchesi 1991. Zvelebil. Marek. "Farmers Our Ancestors and the Identity of Europe." In Graves-Brown et al. 1996.

Page numbers jn italics refer to figures. Action franl;llise. 3. 240-41. 243. 249, 25On33.263 Adorno. Theodor W.• 184 Aerirg~.223.279

Ahnenerbe. 181-89. 198, 200. 209-10. 23' Altheim. Franz, 214n130, 238, 304 ancestor cult, 187, 195, 198 Ancient Arya, 53, 303; patriarchal culture of, 201 ancient Greece, 49-50 animism, and Indo-European religion. 126. 129; and Tylor. IsS AnquetiJ-Duperron. AbrahamHyacinthe. 20, '15. 52. 64 Anthony, David W., '194 anthropology, grpwth of discipline, 124,

."

Anthropos, 261. 267

Anthropos institute, 281 anticlericals, 92; and Aryan romanticism.l06 antirationallsm, of interwar period, 230 anti-Semitism, 91. 10'1-5, 169; Christian, 275; and Indo-European discourse. 4, 10'1; of Michelet, Quinet, Renan, 108; nineteenth century, 310 Anttila, Raimo, 304 Apollo, 101; Apollonian and Dionysian,

.,.

Arbman. Ernst. '121 Amtt, Helmuth, '1S4n37

arya,20-22,45,19O

Aryan and Semitic: common core. 73; dichotomy between, 96-99, u8. '1'17.

"0

Aryan languages, I. 8'1. Su also indoEuropean languages Aryan mythology; 70, 83; Muller's conception of, n-82 Aryan naturalism, 105-7. 1'15. 155. 163 Aryan race, 142. 282, 314; Aryan brotherhood. 8'1; "Aryan Parngraph." 21; genetic. 61; and private life, 196; superiority of, 238; two halves of, 4748, See also Nordic race Aryan religion, 66. 73, 139; AryanNordic spirituality. 184; as "ideology of order: 179; male fellowships (ue male fellowships); and Niettsehe, ISO. 152; paganism, 2; as primitive religion, 131-4.1; and Semitic religion. 113, 171-71; and von Schroeder. 157-62. See also IndoEuropean religion Aryan research. and ideology, 238 Aryan romanticism, 105-6, 163; and anticlericalism. 107; decline of, 1242S

Aryan term. '10-2'1; etymology of, 190 Aryanism. 317; of nineteenth century. u8; Schmidt's revision of Ary.mist dichotomy, 268; and Third Reich rnearch, '153-54

342

I....

I....

Aryans: conflict with Turanians. 77; and Dravidians, 45; and earthly life. 135; idealization of. 94-99. 221; and nature worship, 162; prehistory of. S3R.l09; primitive.ss. 1.14; p~ive. 28586: struggle against primitive peoples. 58-59; Aryan Third Reich, 273 -.r(y)0·,56

Asmussen, les P., 8 Atlantis. 107 Austrian Christian Socialist Party. 140

Austro-Fascists. 161-64 avatars: and Christ. 149; and IndoEuropeans. 111-13; and prophets. 188 Avestan, 10, 51-53. 57. 64

Bachofen.lohann Jakob, 99-102,194-95101-4,107-8,137.166,190

Balder, as Jesus, JSJ

Black Athena. See Bernal. Martin Blanquistes, 104-5 Bloch, Marc, 246 Bliiher, Hans. 233-34 Blumbach, Johann Friedrich, 54 Blut-und·Bothn mythology. 192 Bolshevism, 263, 280, 297 Bopp. Franz, 6,26, 49 bourgeoisie: and class struggle, 176-77; ideology of. 317-18. 320-21 brachycephalic, 146 (round head), 277.

'S'

Brahmans, 247-48; religion, 272 Brahmo Samaj (reform Hindu), 83n56 Breal. Michel, 168, 172 Briffault. Robert. 290 Broca. PauL 43 Bryant, 'acob, 14-16, 31, 37. 60, 309 Burkert, Walter, 206n95

blrbarlan, 58: ideology. 171~-137; image Of,144-46

bt.rbltilm, VI. civilization. 119 blrblrophillsm, 'lg-20, and maleftUowshlp research, 132

Barrtl. Maurice. 240 81rthn, Roland. 311 Baltlan, Adolf. :125 a.tall~, Geo!"86. 249-50 &lun*r. Alfred. 181, 204, 134

Baymtth. 153 beech tree, etymology 0(, 54 Betkes, Robert S, p" 12. 56n117 Benfey, Theodor, 134

Benveniste, £mUe, 6 Serpan. Hrnri, 167. 130 Bertin-Rome Axis, 264 Bernal, M.rtln, 11, 30, 50-51 Bh.p....dglta, :i5 Bible: and classification of humanity, 13IS; criticism, 69; historiosraphy of, 60, nO."'7: as source of human history, 33, 3S blndlnS sods, 247017, 248 blraclallheory: In Greece, 51-52; In Indl., 44-46, 49; in prehistoric Europe, 57

Caillois, Roger, 249-50 Calcutta Sanslcritists, 23. 25. 28. 44. 46-

47 caste society. 40. 45. ISO, 272, 310 Catholic Church, 33. 104, 134, 280; derics, 267; and ethnography. 26162; and Indo-European studies in Austria (see Koppers, Schmidt); mission, 134. 258 Catholicism. 75. 273; Fascist. 314. neotraditional. 240; reactionary. 239; Romantic, 41. 231n184; and universal history, 274; and view of India. 41 Caucasian family, 54 Celts; 51: as Europe's main cuJtural people. 239: German scholars' devaluation of. 277 Central Asian herding culture, 258-59 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart. 10, 43, 153-56.162-63.227-28,274-750 287.

,., ,.•

O1.lIde. Gordon, 6, 282-88. 293. 1.97, 310, Christ. Dumlzil'l view. 249 Christian Socialist Party, 263 Christianity. 113, 27'9. 28" .Id to Indo--

Europeans. 291; anti-Christian view of anti modernists, 204; Grimm's view of. 134; Indian origin. Schopenhauer's views on, 149-50; liberal. 88; Nazi view of. 134; Ni~e's view of. 152; and universality, 42 chthonic cult, 2340198, 279 church of the future. 84, 90 dan society. 197 Clarke, J. J., 102 classification; in comparative linguistics, 313; evolutioni.st, 138. 312; and historiography, 317-18. 320-21.; in history of religions. 306; of humanity. 1., 49, 274. 282n127. 309; of European races, 282n127; of languages, Trubetskoj. l.96-9'To as Noachites. 14; racial. 42-43. 276; of religions. 9, 13-14, 28-32; of religious groups. sociological, 249 Oouston, William Alexander. 134 Collingwood. R. G.• 5 colonialism, 58. 60, 63; and race, 44-46.

"0

communism. primitive. 195 comparative mythology, 76. 83 comparative philology,s. 1.6-27; challenge to racial theories. 43-44 Comle. Auguste. U9 Conte, Edooard, 277 Cosquin, Emmanuel, 134 Creuzer, Friedrich. 38, 40, 75, 2310184 cults. 21.9; prepatriarchal orgiastic. 1.04Sa also demonic cuJt; fertility cuJts; mystery cuJts; phallic cults cultural circle doctrine, 2550 257-59; agrarian~matriarchal cultural circle, 258.265.1.71; pastoral cultural circle, :tSS. 271; primary hunting-gathering cuJture. 251: totemistlc hunting cuJtural cirde. 258 cultural-historical.nthropology.257, 283, 2.97. See also cultural circle doctrine cultural hlstorlcallChexM of archaeology. 14'-44

343

culturalism. 106; and understanding of Indo-Europeans. 313 culture. study of. 11.4-25. 143 Curetes and Corybantes, 203. 208 Curtius. Ernst, 51-52.101.106 d'Annunzio. Gabriele. 240 Darmesterer, James. 172 Dani, Richard Walther. 191-93 Darwinism. 4. 125-1.6 dasyu.45 de Benoist, Alain, 304-5 de Brasses, Charles. 129 de Coulanges, Numa Denis Fustel. 195. 214,1.40 de Gobineau, Joseph-Arther. 42-.". 45. 106. Iso. 274-75 de Lagarde. Paule. 150 de Maistre. Joseph-Marie. 247n17 de Quatrefage5, Armand. 146-47 de Saussure. Ferdinand. 1750 251 de Vries, Jan. 1 Delbriick. Berthold. 206n95 demonic cuJt. 204-5. 217-21., 220-21; of Germanics, 210 demonic Vedic gods, 121 demonologists. 137. See also under evolutionism Derrida, Jacques. 174 Deutsche Mythologie. 132, 201 t/evd-. 66, 76. 117. :t79 Dies-piter. See Jupiter Dieterich, Albrecht. 201-6. :til. 266-67. 290; and phallic cuJts, 109 ·Dilus ~ttr. 33, 70. 1S7. 198, 252. 259. 279. 310-U diffusionist explanations of cultural similarities. 255 Dionysus, 204-6, 214. 218. 314; festivals. 209; and Klages. 230 dolichocephalies. :i76-n, :t8:t Doniger. Wendy. 303 Dorsan, Richard M., 130. 139 Dow, lames R.• II Drews, Robert. 299 Drobln, 297

vir.

344

I""'"

I""'"

dual sovereignty. of Indo-Europeans, 241,246-47. See also DumezU.

Georges dualism of Indo-Europeans. 86, 242; and mythology, 28, Duby, Georges, I Duerr, Hans Peter, 207n97. 289 Dumezil, Georges. 1-3. 6. 10. ::unmS-t6, 22,139.174.214. 22}, 274. 282, 304-6,

307-8, 315; critique by Renfrew, 299; and Gimbutu. 2910156; Mitra-

Vanma. 241. 2.45. 248-49; new comparative mythology. 2S1; and postwar scholarship. 301-2; tripartite Ideology.

I,

239-53

Dupuis. Charles. 74 Durkheim, £ml1e. 169. 172, 175-76, 251;

Influence of. 250 Durkhtlm school, 131, 148 Durkhelmians. 169-72-

01-'". 76. 78, 214

Ealleton. Terry. 6011 tlrth ao