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).
Swedish historian
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.
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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
First, there is no direct evidence for the culture of the Indo-Europeans, with the result that researchers have used their imagination to a very high degree. It is only with the help of methodologically problematic linguistic and archaeological theories that they have been able to chisel an Indo- European culture in to being. (8).
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...
It is important to realize, however, that the exaltation of the Indo-Europeans or the Aryans—especially during the nineteenth century, but also later, for example, for the socialist Gordon Childe—was a song of praise for the modern citizen with a scientific out look, liberal values, and humanistic ideals. In the nineteenth century, the Indo-Europeans were mainly models for a progressive bourgeois ideology, and the attacks on Jewish and Semitic religiosity (which sometimes included Christianity) aimed to form a worldview that fitted modern society and was not necessarily connected to any racial ideology.
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).
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).
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.
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).
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)."
Muller and Schmidt shared the view that an original monotheism had survived beneath the surface o f the Indo-European mythologies. The main evidence for this was the reconstruction of the name of the highest god of the Indo-Europeans: *Diéus phater, “Heavenly Father." Scholars with Christian faith and a preference for “Aryan ancestors" liked to present the Indo- Europeans as caretakers o f a religion that resembled true Christianity. A more radical researcher like Ernest Renan, on the other hand, idealized the polytheism of the Indo-Europeans. Along with Müller, Christian Lassen, Adolphe Pictet, and others, Renan constructed an ideologically very effective and long-lived opposition between Indo-European, or Aryan, and Semitic. They connected Shem's family line with monotheism, intolerance, egotism, conservatism, otherworldliness, irrational rituals, and a lack of feeling for art and nature. On the other hand, the Indo-European peoples were seen as spiritual, imaginative, humanistic, philosophical, sincere, and freedom loving. With the establishment of this dichotomy, the discourse about the Indo-Europeans became intimately connected with anti-Semitism during the second half of the nineteenth century. It is important to realize, however, that the exaltation of the Indo-Europeans or the Aryans—especially during the nineteenth century, but also later, for example, for the socialist Gordon Childe—was a song of praise for the modern citizen with a scientific out look, liberal values, and humanistic ideals. In the nineteenth century, the Indo-Europeans were mainly models for a progressive bourgeois ideology, and the attacks on Jewish and Semitic religiosity (which sometimes included Christianity) aimed to form a worldview that fitted modern society and was not necessarily connected to any racial ideology. (310)
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 "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).