It is important to realize, however, that the exaltation of the Indo-Europeans or the Aryans—especially during the nineteenth century, but also later… - Stefan Arvidsson

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).

It was during the 1920s and 1930s that Georges Dumézil supported Action française and wrote for its journals. It was also during this period that he began to develop his own theories about Indo-European mythology. Is it possible that Dumézil used the ancient Indo-Europeans in the same way that the Nazi scholars did (albeit with an entirely different level of scientific accuracy and methodological acuteness)—to give historical legitimacy to a Fascist movement? Did Action française perhaps receive a mythology of origin, a narrative that ascribes such a fundamental meaning to certain ideas and norms that they seem natural and eternal, through the work of Georges Dumézil?

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