Stefan Arvidsson Quotes

Georges Dumézil (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 half a century—from the 1930s up until his death—Dumézil was one of the foremost humanists in France, a status which was confirmed at the Panthéon in 1979 when he was welcomed into the Académie Française by Claude Lévi-Strauss as one of the “Forty Immortals.“ The scholarly work that had led Dumézil 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 i960s, "Aryan“ languages had also inherited a common ideology. In the course of his historical and philological research, Dumézil 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 of power—the priests, lawmakers, and kings; below it, that of the warriors; and at the bottom, the function of the people, or producers.

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.

Most notable is perhaps that no one reacted to the fact that the editor of the world-leading journal for research on the Indo-Europeans, Journal of Indo-European Studies, Roger Pearson, had since the 1950's has been "one of America's foremost Nazi apologists and quite clearly a racist with one of the world's best web of contacts." Before Pearson, along with Marija Gimbutas , Edgar C. Polome' and Raimo Antilla, founded the Journal of Indo-European Studies, he had worked with Hans F. K. Gunther, who had continued to spread his racial doctrines after the fall of the Third Reich. Pearson was also chairman of the American Division of the World Anti Communist League and lobbied in Washington for more funds for the Defense, the Contras, and the UNITA guerillas. Together with Polome', one of the United States' leading researchers in the area of Germanic religion, he has also published the academic, racist journal the Mankind Quarterly. 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 .

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.

The discourse about the Indo-Europeans was also dependent on the most powerful movement of the nineteenth century, imperialism. To an even greater extent than concerned the view of Semites, racism was present in the scholars' depictions of how the Indo-European colonizers in ancient times conquered a dark, primitive original population. The Indo-Europeans were presented as humanity's cultural heroes, who, undefeated throughout history, spread knowledge and ruled over lower peoples, and who therefore seemed predestined to remain rulers even in the future. The “Aryan” colony of India came to have a special place in this context. The scholars' racist at­titude made them seek evidence in the Vedic texts that the ancient Aryan immigrants (aryas) had had a racial consciousness, and that the caste society was a kind of apartheid system from the very beginning. But reference to the higher castes as “Aryan brothers" could also be used for humanitar­ian aims. By referring to the relationship between Europeans and Indians, people imagined that they could more easily reform the Hindu culture and modernize or “Indo-Europeanize" Indian society. (310-11)

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)

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).

If what I claimed above is true, that the research on Indo-Europeans has not given rise to myths in the sense of sheer fiction, one might still suppose that it has given rise to another kind of myth—namely, myth as normative narrative. In this sense of the word, myth involves a narrative about origins that gives in­dividuals a feeling of belonging with others; that motivates certain actions; that legitimizes specific institutions; and that presents certain behaviors, feelings, and norms as natural, eternal, and necessary.(7)

The discussion about the Indo-Europeans has never been pure and simple fiction. The question is, however, what relationship the scholarly pursuit of knowledge has to mythical thinking and to its more universal relative, ideology—if we define ideology as a somewhat coherent system of ideas and norms that express a socially determined interest.(6)

There are people who, independently of the debate about Dumézil, have main­ tained that the scholarly work on the Indo-Europeans is simply a collection of myths. So, for example, the historian Léon Poliakov titled his book on the Indo-European discourse Le Mythe Aryen. The British archaeologist Colin Renfrew has described the research on Indo-Europeans as “a modern myth,“ and Bruce Lincoln has argued, in a book analyzing the research about Indo- European mythology, that this research has been “mythology with footnotes.“9 The French classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant also calls the nineteenth-century scholarship “a web of scientific myths.“ (5)