Stefan Arvidsson

Stefan Arvidsson (born 1968) is a Swedish historian who is Professor of the History of Religions at Stockholm University and Professor in the Study of Religions at Linnaeus University.

Aryan idols: Indo-European mythology as ideology and science

 * Arvidsson, S. (2006). Aryan idols: Indo-European mythology as ideology and science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Preface and Introduction

 * Over over two hundred years, a series of historians, linguists, folklorists, and archaeologists have tried 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-Indo-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 "Indo-European" by name. In spite of that, scholars have stubbornly tried to reach back to the ancient "Indo-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. xi


 * The fundamental thesis of this study is that these prehistoric peoples have preoccupied people in modern times primarily because they were, to use the word of Claude Levi-Strauss, "good to think with," rather than because they were meaningful historical actors. The interest in the "Indo-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 (Arvidsson 2006, p. xi)."


 * The classification "the Indo-European branch of humanity" 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 of Aryans, who were typically imagined as tall, blond, and blue-eyed specimens of homo sapiens. 2


 * "On a more general level, the debate is about whether there is something in the nature of research about Indo-Europeans that makes it especially prone to ideological abuse-perhaps something related to the fact that for the past two centuries, the majority of scholars who have done research on the Indo-Europeans have considered themselves descendants of this mythical race (Arvidsson 2006, p.3)."


 * "Formulated in accordance with R. G. Collingwood's thought, the same question would be "To what "ideological" problem were the Indo-Europeans the solution?" More recently, Quentin Skinner has pointed to the philological rule that a text can be understood only if one also understands why it exists in the first place; understanding is about understanding not only what is in the text but why it is there. The aim of this book is, in other words, to examine what ideological motives causes an array of scholars during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries to become interested in Indo-European religion and culture and made them prioritize certain historical areas and sources, choose certain perspectives and hypotheses instead of others, and make certain kinds of associations or use a certain rhetoric (Arvidsson 2006, p.5, emphasis in the original)."


 * "However the main reason why scholarship about the Indo-Europeans has tended to produce myths is that so many who have written (and read) about it have interpreted it as concerning their own origin : "We all have a need to understand," writes, for example Danish scholar of Iranian studies, Jes P. Asmussen, "What our Indo-European" forefathers felt and thought." The research on the Indo-Europeans has created a "web of scientific myths," to use Vernant's phrase, because it has dealt with "our origins" and hence, about the way "we" should do things. However, as we shall see later on, there have been many scholars who have resisted presenting the Indo-Europeans as "our true ancestor"—some (scholars of Jewish ancestry) because the Indo-Europeans could not possibly have been their forefathers, and others because they disproved of the mythologization for various reasons, even though they themselves might have been defined as "Indo-Europeans," (Arvidsson 2006, p.8, emphasis in the original)."

Chapter 1

 * After the fall of Nazi Germany, the term “Aryan” 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 Dumézil, who never (with one exception) spoke about "Ary­ans" or “Aryan religion". 22


 * "The idealization of India was not, of course, about contemporary India, but rather an India that was given the epithet "classical," 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 people related to the Greeks and Romans, who had been idealized by humanists since the Renaissance (Arvidsson 2006, p.23)."


 * This hypothesis becomes quite plausible in view of the 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 reli­ ability 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 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 traditions 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. 33-5


 * "An old worldview where Palestine and the Hebrews were the center of the world began to be challenged by a new one where the Indo-Europeans and their original home were seen as the creative center of the world, and ever since then India, Tibet, and the Himalayas have also assumed a special place in Western mythical geography as an alternative axis mundi to "Semitic" Jerusalem and Israel. 38


 * A time when the devil himself studied Sankrit, if one can believe Heinrich Heine. 38


 * When Schlegel imagined that knowledge about India could be used to improve the chaotic situation in Europe, he had to claim that the pantheistic view was not domestic, but had been introduced to India by foreign peoples. It is also significant for Schlegel's ideological turnaround that he refrains from discussing the quietistic Upani- shads in Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Instead, he argues that what is genuinely original and valuable in the Indian religion is ethics and law, and that the foremost document of Indian literature is the Laws of Manu. 39


 * "The hypothesis that somewhere, sometime, an Indo-European race has existed has always been anchored in linguistic observations. But during the nineteenth century, racial anthropologist also began to discuss the Indo-Europeans, which came to mean that the proprietorship of philologists in Indo-European research was questioned (Arvidsson 2006, p.41)."


 * With the help of the measurements and speculations of racial anthropology, a “Japhetic,” "Aryan,” or “Indo-European” race was gradually chiseled out. A number of scholars—Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Friedrich Max Müller, Christian Lassen, Adolphe Pictet, H. S. Chamberlain, Paul Broca, Karl Penka, and Hans F. K. Günther, to name a few —described the Indo-Europeans as blond, blue eyed, tall, with straight (leptorrhine) noses, straight (orthognathous) profiles and long, narrow (dolichocephalic) skulls. Now the Indo-Europeans were no longer a large group of different people who spoke Indo-European languages, but a delineated group of people with defined physical characteris tics. Indians, Persians, Greeks. Romans, Celts, Germans, Slavs, and Balts were now different parts of the same organic whole: the Aryan race. 43


 * The most severe attack against Müller came during the 1850s from the anthropologist Robert G. Latham, who argued that physical appearance and intelligence level must become the basis for the classification of humanity. It cannot be reasonable, according to Latham, to link a people like the Indians, who have never conquered anything, with the European world rulers. And a people who have produced Shakespeare cannot have much in common with one that has not accomplished anything more sublime than the Ramayana. Latham therefore declared that the Indians and Europeans belonged to separate races: the Europeans belonged to the Japhetic race, while the Indians belonged to the Mongolian. 47


 * In other words, Müller presented the European cradle as self-m ade . The ideological victory was a given: if Hellas 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, Müller’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. 51


 * The original population that the Indo-European Greeks had vanquished when they penetrated the south­ ern 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 (“arisch-pelasgischen Volker“).505 The Hellenes, “the O c­ cidental 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.52


 * There is, however, no textual evidence in either Greek or Indian texts that such an invasion actually happened. 52


 * 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—partly 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). 52


 * "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 (Arvidsson 2006, p.52)."

Chapter 2

 * And it is true that the Aryans were praised in the nineteenth century by people whom one should not hesitate to call proto·Nazis, in spite of the anachronism. However, there were also some people who sang the same tune but whose political and religious ideas should not be characterized in this way. Michelet's. Quinefs. and Renan's struggle against "Semitic mentality~ and Judeo-Christian religiosity was a struggle against dogmatism. irrationalism, and conservatism, and for science. secular lawmaking, and education. Naturally, this does not mean that the work of these scholars does not contain prejudiced. one-sided. or historically false claims, nor is my analysis meant to question the fact that anti·Semitism was very widespread among all kinds of intellectuals in the nineteenth century, in France as well as in other Western lands. But it is misleading to label as anti·Semitic all Aryanist attacks on Judaism and Christianity that were made in the name of universalism and liberalism.
 * p 108

Chapter 3

 * "The emergence of the discipline of folklore is intimately connected to nationalism. This is especially clear with the founders of the discipline, the brothers Wilhelm (1786-1859) and Jacob (author of the Grimm's Law of comparative Indo-European linguistics) Grimm (1785-1863). The purpose of their famed project of collecting folktales from the German peasant population was primarily to (re-) create a strong German culture that could free itself from dependence on "foreign" cultures. One step in this project was to show that there existed a rich "German" mythology that could successfully compete with classical Judeo-Christian traditions. The fact that the brothers Grimm had to look for mythical histories among the contemporary peasantry was connected to the state of the source material: there were almost no texts about an ancient "German" mythology ((Arvidsson 2006, pp.131-132, second parenthesis added)."


 * "Since this discipline (folklore) arose in what became Germany in 1871, this change (the rising importance of folklore rather than philology) meant that the Indo-Europeans began to look less and less like the Indians and the Iranians, and more and more like Germans. This meant, in turn, that they became less civilized and more primitive and barbaric. The image of the Indo-Europeans as a primitive tribe received an additional boost from the discipline of the Indo-Europeans of prehistoric archaeology. When archaeologists became involved in the debate about the Indo-Europeans, the Germanic's position was further strengthened within the comparative work, and the original home of the Indo-Europeans was moved from the noble and exotic Asia to the rustic European homeland (Arvidsson 2006, pp. 141-142, parentheses added)."


 * It was surely no coincidence that when the idea of a European original home was presented for the first time, it was in the introduction to an edition of Tacitus's Germ ania from 1851. The author of the introduction was the an thropologist Robert G. Latham, who, as we have seen, criticized Miiller in the 1850s for talking about an "Aryan brotherhood” between the people of India and Europe. Lathams irritation over Indomania led him to radically reposi tion the homeland of the Indo-Europeans: it had been located not in India or the surrounding areas, but rather somewhere near todays Lithuania. 142


 * "There were many reasons for this shift (of homeland from Asia to Europe). First of all, the hypothesis of a European homeland accorded with the folklore's focus on Germanic material. A second, closely related reason was that the idea of a northern European homeland was in line with the strong German nationalism that bloomed after the Franco-Prussian War and Germany's unification. One's native land now became more valuable than any dreamed-of colonizable, but foreign lands. Thirdly, the ideas of racial anthropology gained more and more credibility, and according to them, Europe was the origin of the e white Aryan race ((Arvidsson 2006, p.142, parenthesis added)."


 * The term "Nordic race" now began to be used as synonymous with “Aryan" and 'Indo-Germanic race." 143


 * "It was thus from this area (which Germany had recently annexed) that the greatest of all cultural peoples, the blue-eyed, long-skulled, Indo-Germanic race, had emigrated to civilize the world. According to Kossina, the Indo-Germanic race had attended its cultural-hero status purely because of racial-biological factors. On their migrations, southwards, the racially pure Indo-Germans had nonetheless become contaminated and this was why their cultural-heroic exploits in Greece, Rome and India had not become enduring (Arvidsson 2006, p.144)."


 * "The "primitivization" of the Indo-Europeans was also stimulated by the fact that the Indo-Europeans were decreasingly linked to high-cultural India.. It is revealing that Hermann Hirt, probably the foremost philologist of the turn of the century, claimed that "many Indo-Iranian concepts should rather be traced to Babylon than to the Indo-Germans." Instead the Indo-Europeans were now increasingly associated with Germanic barbarians (Arvidsson 2006, p.176)."

Chapter 4

 * "For Hofler and Wikander, it was inconceivable that the "light" and noble Indo-Europeans that the nature mythologists and order ideologists had reconstructed had been able to conquer most of Eurasia. In order to carry out such a deed, they reasoned, the Indo-Europeans would mainly need not a high-standing culture, but a barbaric primal force, a force like the one the Germans had had during the Great Migration. As a commentary to Wikander's book about the Iranian male-fellowship god Vayu, Hofler writes that "the Indo-European expansion toward Asia has the same form of political structure as the later Germanic expansion, the Germanic kingdom of Wodan bears similar strengths as the first heroic age of the Indo-Europeans." According to Hofller it is only in light of the research on male fellowships and the "the discovery of the ur-Indo-German social structure" that the expansion can be understood. In Der arische Mannerbund, Wikander writes something similar: "The Maruts reflect the warrior aspect, which the male fellowships of the Aryan tribes had developed preferentially during the age of migration and conquest." Hofler and Wikander argues that the model of conquest that had been developed to explain the fact that the Indo-European languages were spread across Europe and Asia at the dawn of history required the Indo-Europeans to be exceptionally dynamic and uninhibited warriors (Arvidsson 2006, p. 222)."

Chapter 5 and Conclusion

 * "Hehn argued that, it was risky, in the attempts to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European culture, to depend too much on linguistic paleontology, whose methodological accuracy he doubted. How can we be sure, for example, that the Proto-Indo-Europeans owned tame horses simply because we can reconstruct the word for horse (*h1ekuos)? Did they perhaps only know about the animal, without having domesticated it? Or how do we know that *h3evis denoted "goat" and not some other similar animal, and that it has not acquired the meaning "goat" later? (Arvidsson 2006, p. 255)."


 * In the Soviet Union, scholars even argued that ”it is absolutely necessary to make clear to everyone that the belief in the original homelands comes to the same thing as the belief in God’s sovereign authority.”287


 * "In Gimbutas's case I (Arvidsson) think that many readers 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, Indo-Europeans, and placing their homeland on Slavic ground (Arvidsson 2006, p.293)."


 * "For those who have approached the question of the origin of the Indo-European peoples and languages from the angle of philology, the great problem has been that there are no texts about migrations, much less about military invasions… From the Rigveda, people have taken passages that tell about the Aryans' attacks on cities and concluded that they then must have been a foreign, warlike, nomadic people. Nor does Roman, Hittite, Slavic, Celtic, or Germanic, written material mention migrations or conquests from the time when the Indo-Europeans supposedly emigrated from their original home. The philologists have, however, been able to pint to certain loanwords, especially topographic and hydrographic names, as evidence of migration. But the cornerstone of philologists' work has been linguistic paleontology, which tried to re-create, through comparisons, a vocabulary that indicates knowledge about certain objects and phenomena (Arvidsson 2006, p.295)."


 * "Renfrew bases his critique of linguistic paleontology particularly on an article by J. Fraser from 1926, but it is also in line with the criticism that Victor Hehn expressed. Several linguists, as well, have remained skeptical about the possibilities and axioms of linguistic paleontology. Most debated is the Russian structuralist Prince Niklaj Trubestkoj (1890-1938), who argues in the famous article "Gedanken uber das Indogermanenproblem" (1936) although it is possible that the similarities between the Indo-European languages are due to a common origin, this hypothesis is not necessary. He found that notion of an original language (the family tree model) more romantic than scientific and imagined that the genetic classification might be replaced with a structuralist one (Arvidsson 2006, p.296)."


 * "The historian of religions Ulf Drobin clarifies Trubetskoy's point: "all classification must stem from criteria. The followers of the language tree theory avoid definite criteria and replace them with a concept of language that is BOTH changeable (in time) and constant (Indo-European). In the final analysis they end up in paradoxes and mysticism. Ur-Indo-European must either lack prehistory, or it must have a non-Indo-European prehistory. The latter, however, cannot be explained with out some form of criteria" (Arvidsson 2006, p.297, emphasis and parentheses in the original)."


 * Renfrew thus argues that Europe’s prehistory is not distinguished by warlike migrations or cultural-heroic elites. In the last few decades, the historiogra­ phy in which the Indo-Europeans are presented as conquerors has also been questioned by scholars in other geographical areas. In the Indian area, it is still mainly laymen who have opposed describing South Asia's prehistory as a struggle between white conquerors and peaceful, dark-skinned farmers.(298)


 * "The sometimes interwoven traditions that have dominated the postwar period-personified by Dumezil and Gimbutas—have generally been considered to represent an objective, scientific body of research that contrasts sharply with the Nazis' misuse of the Indo-Europeans. But as we have seen in this chapter, there is no reason to stop critically analyzing the ideology of Indo-European scholarship. If Dumezil and Gimbutas have each represented a constructive research tradition, Bruce Lincoln can represent the tradition of ideological critique among scholars of Indo-European heritage (Arvidsson 2006, pp. 301-302)."


 * "According to Lincoln, then, Indo-European research misses what is instructive about studying myths and religious texts in the first place, since it demand that the researchers leave the historically and socially determined place in which they were used in order to reach the imagined Ancient Arya., "the never-never land east of the asterisk," to use the expression of Lincoln's colleague Wendy Doniger (Arvidsson 2006, p. 303)."


 * It is easy-as is evident from a critical reading of, for example. the foremost work about the Aryan discourse, Leon Poliakov's The Aryan Myth-to interpret all praise of the Aryan mentality as an expression of the naturalistic critique of the Semites, that is to say, as true anti-Semitism. But during the nineteenth century, especially, and even into the twentieth century, there did exist an Aryanist tradition that had very little in common with the naturalistic tradition and its Nazi anticlimax. This Aryanism had liberal and universalist overtones, and interpreted. the Semitic tradition as the incarnation of conservatism and antiquated. pluralistic chauvinism. Scholars such as Renan and Müller would probably have criticized. Nazism in the same way that they criticized traditionalistic Semitic religions: it stands in the way of the realization of universal humanity. From this perspective, the Aryan becomes the same as the consummate human being. 317


 * Several people who have examined Indo-European scholarship have drawn parallels between research about the Proto-Indo-European world and myths, in the sense of narratives about origin. Indo-European research has, in many ways, been an attempt to write the origin narrative of the bourgeois class - a narrative that, by talking about how things originally were, has sanctioned a certain kind of behavior, idealized a certain type of person, and affirmed certain feelings. Certainly, there have been some scholars who have not identified themselves with the Proto-Indo-Europeans, but they are few.
 * p.319-320