Stefan Arvidsson Quotes

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).

During the postwar (post 1945 CE) period, these two theories (Father Wilhelm Schmidt and Father Wilhelm Kopper's theory of primal cultures, and Georges Dumezil's theory of Indo-European mythology) have completely dominated research about Indo-European religion and culture—in spite of the fact that they arose in an ideological atmosphere that did not differ much from the Nazi one (Arvidsson 2006, p. 239, parentheses added).

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

"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

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).

Lincoln argues that Dumézil was, on the contrary, deeply anchored in a Germanophobie French Fascism.

Through Eribon’s defense, it has nevertheless been shown that Dumézil really did support the French Fascist organization Action française during the 1930s, and that he wrote articles, under a pseudonym, in which he praised Mussolini.

In the 1970s, the Mankind Quarterly, which alternates articles about race and genetics with articles about the Indo-Europeans and prehistoric cultures, became a model when one of Europe’s leading neo-Fascists, Alain de Benoist, founded his own journal called Nouvelle École. In the journals so-called Comité de patronage were, among others, Roger Pearson, Mircea Eliade, the German classicist Franz Altheim (formerly of SS-Ahnenerbe), Marija Gimbutas, Stig Wikander, and the Swedish racial anthropologist Bertil J. Lundman. There was also the Benoist sympathizer Jean Haudry, who publishes Frances foremost journal for Indo-European studies, Études indo-européennes . Some people were probably on the Comité de patronage because they were unaware of its political sympathies, or because they wanted to sun themselves in the glow of great scholarly names; others were there because they supported the neo-Fascist views of the journal. Georges Dumézil was also on the journals Comité de patronage. But when Benoist in 1972-73 (no. 22-23) published an honorary issue for Dumézil, which made the French press speculate whether Dumézil sympathized with Benoist’s neo-Fascism, Dumézil withdrew his support from the journal. In newspaper interviews, he later made it clear that he did not support Benoist s neo-Fascism, at least not without reservations. However, this event triggered the ideologically critical examination of his work...

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).

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

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

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).

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

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).

According to Renfrew, there are many pitfalls in the attempt to create an “inventory’’ of Proto-Indo-European words. For example, it can be very difficult to determine whether a word truly is inherited from the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary or has been borrowed later from an Indo-European sib­ling language. If this question cannot be resolved, it is impossible to determine whether the object or phenomenon that the word denoted existed in the Proto-Indo-European homeland or is something that people became acquainted with later. And how can we know, Renfrew continues his critical review, that the semantic meaning of a word has been constant over the centuries? Without knowing that, one cannot use the word in question to create a picture of, say, the fauna that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were familiar with.