Excerpts from Aryan Idols by Stefan Arvidsson (2006)

Excerpts from Aryan Idols by Stefan Arvidsson (2006)

"For 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.

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)."

"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)."

"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)."

"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 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)."

"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)."

"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)."

"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)."

"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)."

"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 Indo0-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)."

"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 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)."

"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)."

Arvidsson, Stefan (2006), Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as
Ideology and Science, translated by Sonia Wichmann, Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press.