THE RELIGIOUS ATTITUDES OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS

CHAPTER FIVE

IF we survey the whole field of Indo-European religiosity it is clear that much of what has been held in the Christian West as characteristic of the especially religious mind, will be found lacking in the Indo-European — lacking for those who seek to measure the Indo-European in terms of their own different religious stamp. Death can never be regarded by the Indo-European as a gloomy admonition to belief and religiosity. The fear of death, the threatened end of the world and the judgment of the dead have often been described as reasons for adhering to the narrow path of faith and morality. This is not true of the Indo-Europeans, for whom religiosity is a means to a fuller and wider life. As the Edda says:

Bright and cheerful
should each man be
until death strikes him!
(Edda, Vol. II, 1920, p. 144.)

Death is a significant phenomenon of human life, but the strength of Indo-European religiosity is not based upon the contemplation or fear of death. Death belongs to the universal order of life. The Indo-European faces it in the same way as the best in our people do today. Because for the honest man perfect human life is already possible on this earth, through balanced self-assertion; because in the order of the world the death of the individual is a natural phenomenon in the life or progression of the race, and because the beyond has no essential meaning in the life of the Indo-European, death has no influence on the Indo-European’s beliefs or moral concepts, except as a reminder that the time allowed to the individual to fulfil his purpose and duties as a member of the race is limited.

It is striking how pallid and how unstimulating are the original Indo-European ideas of life after death, such as the kingdom of death, of Hades, or Hel as seen by the Teutons.30 The Teutonic concept of Valhalla is scarcely of value here, being a late and exceptional development, derived less from religious disposition than from the poetic descriptive gift, of the Norwegian and Icelandic poets of the Viking era. It is also striking to find that no memories of Valhalla have been preserved in German sagas and fairy tales. Fundamentally, death for the Indo-Europeans meant the passage to a life, which in its individual features resembled life in the world of the living, only it was quieter, more balanced. The dead person remained part of the clan soul, in which he had shared when alive. He was at no time an unbridled individual, but always part of the existence over generations of a clan, inhabiting hereditary farms in the national homeland. As part of the clan soul individual death had no meaning for him. What concerned him in the kingdom of death was the welfare and prosperity of his clan, with its horses and cattle, fields and meadows. Achilles, when dead, asks Odysseus, who had penetrated into the underworld: “Give me news of my splendid sons!” (Odyssey, XL, 492), and goes away “with great strides, filled with joy” when he has learned of “his sons’ virtue” (XI, 539-540). As Paul Thieme (Studien zur indogermanischen Wortkunde und Religionsgeschichte, 1952, pp. 46 et seq.), has shown, the Indo-European ideas of a kingdom of the dead were originally less gloomy than the later Hellenic ideas of Hades or the Teutonic concept of Hel. In the Rig Veda of the Indians, as in the Avesta of the Iranians and as with Homer, memories are preserved of the kingdom of the dead as a pleasant meadow, a cattle meadow (Rig Veda) or a foal’s meadow (Homer) separated from the land of the living only by a river. On such green meadows the dead are reunited with their ancestors. According to Hans Hartmann (Der Totenkult in Irland, 1952, pp. 207-208) the honouring of dead ancestors as well as the worship of fire and the sun in Celtic Ireland corresponds to North-Germanic, Italic, Tocharic and Indo-Iranian customs, and seems therefore to form part of common Indo-European customs. Corresponding word equivalents between the Celtic and Italic on the one side and the Indo-Iranian on the other are also found (Paul Kretschmer: Einleitung in die Geschichte der griechischen Sprache, 1896, pp. 125 et seq.; J. Vendryès: Les Correspondances de vocabulaire entre l’Indo-Arien et l’Italo-Celtique, Memoires de la Société de Linguistique, Vol. XX, 1918, pp. 268 ff., 285). Indo-European religiosity in fact has never emphasised the death of the individual, for the world order is regarded as timeless. Despite the decline of whole eras shaken through guilt, there is no actual world’s end, nor any dawn of a “Kingdom of God” transforming all things, in preparation for which many “Westerners” today retreat from the world to reflect upon their “last hour”.

As long as the order of life is preserved by the efforts of man and God against the powers hostile to the divine, the idea of redemption is incomprehensible to the Indo-Europeans. Redemption from what — and to what other existence? Midgard was not evil, and if one strove by brave, noble or moral action to keep the forces of Utgard at bay, there was no better life than that of friendship with the Gods by participating through balanced self-assertion in the universal order of life.

The true and original Indo-Europeans lack the figures of redeemers, the “heralds of salvation” and “saviours”, who are so characteristic of the history of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and the entire region from Hither-Asia to India. The earliest stirring of the idea of redemption, and the earliest figure of a redeemer, the saoshyant, amongst the peoples of Indo-European tongue is found with the Persians undoubtedly due to an admixture of Hither-Asiatic race and culture whom L. F. Clauss has aptly described as “redemption men”. Also, aspects of the Teutonic God Balder belong to the saviour figures of Hither-Asia, most of all in the circle of the Babylonian Astarte legends and the ideas widely spread in the Orient of the dying and ever rising God.31 Balder has rightly often been compared with Christ. He is a saviour figure, given new meaning by the Teutonic spirit, and is no more an original Teutonic God, than are the Vanir, from south-east Europe whose Hither-Asiatic features were reinterpreted in Teutonic forms. For the unfolding of religious feelings heralds of salvation were not necessary to the Indo-Europeans.

The concept of a redeemer who serves as a mediator between the divinity and man must also be alien to Indo-European religiosity; according to his own nature, the Indo-European seeks the natural direct way to God. For this reason a priesthood as a more sacred class, elevated above the rest of the people, could not develop amongst the original Indo-Europeans.32 The idea of priests as mediators between the deity and men would have been a contradiction of Indo-European religiosity and instead of a rulership of priests there developed amongst the original Indo-Europeans the far-sighted, resolute state organisations of the Nordic-Indo-European kind. Comprising a community of farmer warriors, the idea of the state proceeded from the freedom and equality of the land-owning family fathers, who owned their hereditary farm as freemen (Greek: klaroi or kleroi, Latin: heredia). It sprang therefore from a rural democracy, which in later times was usually succeeded by a city trading democracy. Democracy based on the rural spirit of yeomen has been celebrated by Gottfried Keller in Fähnlein der sieben Aufrechten (1861), while democracy based on the city trader spirit was pilloried by him in Martin Salander (1896). The democracy of yeomen, by its very nature, did not permit the existence of a priestly hierarchy. Such other functions as a priestly hierarchy might desire to usurp were already fulfilled by the father of the family and the heads of the clans, tribes and nations in their natural and national function as a part of the world order.

It is true that the Indo-European might accept the priest as an interpreter and perfecter of the traditional folk spirit, as the unfolder and new creator of hereditary religiosity; that is in accordance with Indo-European nature. But the idea of the priest as a prophet, anxious to dominate and spiritually enchain the religious community, is something which Indo-European nature cannot tolerate, for Nordic-Indo-European religiosity is based on noble, measured conduct and the secure maintenance of a bodily and spiritual distance between men. Both heightening oneself, and emotional intoxication, ekstasis, or holy orgia, and standing outside oneself and the infiltration of self into the spiritual domains of other men, are distinctive features of the Hither-Asiatic race soul. Measure (balance), yoga (Latin: iugum, German: Joch, English: yoke), metron, temperantia, are as above, distinctive features of the Nordic race soul and of the original Indo-European religiosity: eusebeia synonymous with sophrosyne; Sanskrit: upeksha, Pali: upekha; likewise in the religiosity of the Stoics (apatheia) and of the Epicureans (ataraxia).

This is not to suggest that the Indo-Europeans were not aware that the condition of intoxication is indicative of superabundant spiritual activity — as distinct from alcoholic intoxication, which like the Nectar of the Hellenes or the Met (Mead) of the Teutons they prepared from honey, and known by the Indo-Aryans as Soma and the Iranians as Haoma. From Herodotus (I, 33) and from Tacitus (Germania, XXII), it can be seen that the Indo-Europeans demanded control of any state of intoxication. The sense of intoxication of the spiritual creator when finding and shaping new knowledge is admittedly to be traced amongst all peoples of Indo-European tongue, the mania musoon, the craze of the Muses without which, according to Plato, there is no spiritual creation. Without this “madness”, the creations, re-creations and new creations of Indo-European religiosity would not have been possible. But when one seeks to ascertain to what extent the Indo-Europeans have expressed such spiritual intoxication in visible behaviour and in words, again and again one becomes aware of their self-control (yoga, enkrateia, disciplina, self-control). Such intoxications allow the spirit to take flight, but the flight itself obeys the laws of race soul striving for balance. Hölderlin knew the “uncontrolled powers of Genius” but as a basic principle of creation he taught the Indo-European to seek the wisdom of a maturer age: “Hate intoxication like the frost!” he said, to which he added the admonition, “Be devout only as the Greeks were devout!” In this he echoed the words of Horace (ars poetica, 268-269), expressing the awe aroused in men by the works of Hellenic poetry:

vos exemplaria Graeca
nocturna versate manu, versate diurna!

If we ask ourselves what the Hellenic spirit and what Hellenic art signified to Horace, to Winckelmann, Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hölderlin, and Shelley, then it must have been this: that among all Indo-European peoples, it was granted to the Hellenes to represent with the greatest clarity and beauty the balanced dignity of man in fearless freedom of the spirit. Walter F. Otto (Das Wort der Antike, 1962, p. 345) has described the impression — attractive to the Indo-European nature — which strikes visitors to a museum of ancient art when they pass from the Egyptian or Hindoo or east-Asiatic displays into the room of Hellenic art: “The first feeling one receives,” he writes, “is that of a wonderful freedom.” With such a feeling of freedom as this, the Hellenic man of balance and dignity confronted the deity.

What such Indo-European freedom signifies in the state will be studied later. Here we can only allude to what Cornelius Tacitus wrote: Freedom (libertas) in the Indo-European sense is only possible where a people strives to achieve the value of virtus, the dignity of the powerful, upright individual man. If in a people the freedom of the city masses, who desire welfare (Bread and Circuses) from the State, triumphs then in such a state the freedom of the individual man and that of the minority will be steadily suppressed by the majority, until finally only dominatio is still possible, that is to say, the equal subjection of all under one tyrant.

Confronted with the hereditary disposition of the Indo-Europeans, religions which have been described as revelations or stipendiary religions, i.e. religions with a “founder” were unable to develop among them. The sudden transformation of one’s own nature into something completely different, the transformation which is regarded as a re-birth or inner experience belongs far more to the oriental race soul of the desert, and readily occurs in the Orient, where the predominant spirit is of the Hither-Asiatic and Oriental races.33

Revelation — L. F. Clauss calls the Oriental race “revelation men” — the forming of religions through a prophet, the excitability and impulsiveness of the faithful for the revealed faith, are all phenomena which do not prosper in the realm of Indo-European religiosity. The elevation of faith in itself, and of credulity for the sake of credulity, the meritoriousness of faith as a particularly powerful magical means for justification before God — Luther’s sola fide — religious manifestations such as these appear to the Nordic-Indo-Europeans as a distortion of human nature, of that human nature which is willed by the deity itself. Faith in itself cannot be an Indo-European value, but it is certainly a value for men of Oriental (desert land) races. Goethe in his introductory poem to the Westöstlichen Divan — typified the overexcess and excitedness of Oriental faith and the lack of thought corresponding to such excess, being all “Broad belief and narrow thought”. Excitedness for a belief, excitedness over an urge to convert, the mission to “unbelievers” the assertion that one’s own belief alone could make one blessed, an excitedness, further, which expresses itself in hatred towards other Gods and persecution of their believers: such excited rage or fanaticism has repeatedly emanated from tribes of predominantly Oriental race and from the religious life of such tribes. Eduard Meyer, in his Geschichte des Alterums (1907, Part I, Book I, p. 385), has even spoken of the brutal cruelty, which has distinguished the religious spirit of peoples of Semitic language.

All this is as remote and unnatural to the Indo-European as is the immersion of the self into alien domains of the soul, frequently evident in men of Hither-Asiatic race. The more convinced the Indo-European lived in his belief, all the more repellent to his nature must have been the idea of its being represented to a stranger as the only valid one before God. The Indo-European religiosity does not preach to non-believers, but is willing to explain to an enquirer the nature of his personal beliefs. Hence the patience of all Indo-Europeans in religious matters. In my book Die Nordische Rasse bei den Indogermanen Asiens (1934, p. 112), I have written: “Zeal to convert and intolerance have always remained alien to every aspect of Indo-European religiosity. In this is revealed the Nordic sense of distance between one man and another, modesty which proscribes intrusion upon the spiritual domains of other men. One cannot imagine a true Hellene preaching his religious ideas to a non-Hellene; no Teuton, Roman, Persian or Aryan Brahman Indian, who would have wished to ‘convert’ other men to his belief. To the Nordic race soul, interfering in the spiritual life of other men is as ignoble as violating individual boundaries.” Mutual tolerance of religious forms is a distinctive feature of the Indo-European. The memorial stones in the Roman-Teutonic frontier region reveal through their inscriptions that the Roman frontier troops and settlers not only honoured their own Gods, but also respected the local deity of the Teutons, the genius huius loci.

In the Persian kingdom of the Achaemenides, Ahura Mazda was worshipped as the Imperial God (G. Widengren: Hochgottglaube im Alten Iran, Uppsala Universitets Årsskrift, 1938, pp. 259 et seq.) and from being an Iranian tribal God became God over all peoples of the earth.

Jahve (Jehovah), who was originally a Hebrew tribal God, subsequently turned for many — not all — Jews into a God of all the peoples. But the Persians, as Indo-Europeans, never forced Ahura Mazda on the alien tribes and peoples of their kingdom. The kings Cyrus the Great and Darius passed commandments concerning the mutual tolerance of the religions of their Empire (G. Widengren: Iranische Geisteswelt, Vienna, 1961, pp. 245 et seq.). The Indian King Asoka, who was converted to Buddhism, the sole religion which spread peacefully and without bloodshed, ruled in approximately the middle of the third century B.C. in India over a great kingdom, and introduced laws prescribing mutual tolerance between the religions of his kingdoms. They were engraved on stone tablets, and many were rediscovered at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The historian can only cite such examples from the Indo-European realm. Vergil’s law of sparing the vanquished (parcere subjectis) was practised by the Romans not only on subject peoples, but also on their Gods and religions although an interpretatio Romana once attempted to include alien Gods as being off-shoots of their own deities.

Ammianus Marcellinus, a troop leader in the army of the Emperor Julian, whom the Christians called the Apostate (apostata) wished to continue the histories of Tacitus in his own writings. In recording the events in his time, when Christianity had already become the state religion, Ammianus — a pagan — reported the intrigues of the Christians against Julian without abuse, since this would not have corresponded to his Hellenic-Roman attitude of tolerance. In the controversies of Pagan and Christian writers and poets, passionate worshippers of the old Roman belief such as Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, Ambrosius Theodosius Macrodius and Claudius Rutilius Namantianus, have given their opinion of Christianity and Christians in a dignified manner. Abuse and contempt for opponents is found in these times only amongst the Christian writers. Only after their conversion to Christianity, whose idea of God corresponded to the intolerant, religious war-waging Gods of the Semitic tribe, have Indo-European peoples forced their beliefs on alien tribes; the king of the Franks, Charlemagne, forced Christianity upon the Saxons who were subjected after a bloody struggle. King Olav Tryggveson of Norway (995-1000), after being baptised in England, was persuaded to force conversion on his own people by cunning, treachery and cruel persecutions, as well as by bribing them to submit to baptism. Andreas Heusler (Germanentum, 1934, pp. 47, 48, 119, 122) has asserted that among the Northern Teutons there was quite enough violence, but never cruelty; only after the introduction of Christianity did converted zealots behave cruelly towards their countrymen. With the conversion of the North, an alien wave of cruelty entered the land. Heusler has said that the methods of torture used by the converted King Olav against those who were reluctant to change their faith, could have been learned by the Northerners “only in the Orient”.

Only in Iceland, whence many Pagan Norwegian yeomen fled from religious persecution to found a state of free and equal landowning family fathers, a characteristic Teutonic democracy, was the inherited tolerance restored and preserved. In this country alone was the Pagan faith permitted to survive without persecution after the triumph of Christianity — as recorded in the poems of the Edda and the long series of tales of the Icelanders, the Sögur (singular: Saga; cf. Andreas Heusler: Germanentum, 1934, p. 94; Hans Kuhn: Das Nordgermanische Heidentum in den ersten christlichen Jahrhunderten, Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, Vol. LXXIX, 1942, p. 166). Even the heroic songs of Teutonic antiquity which had been collected and recorded by the Christian Charlemagne, king of the Franks, were burned as being pagan by his son, Ludwig the Pious. Indo-European belief without tolerance is inconceivable, and any Indo-European religious form, which demanded “true believers”, is similarly inconceivable, just as much as an Indo-European form of belief in conflict with free research, and independent thought is inconceivable. Where excitedness of belief might damage the inborn love of truth and the inborn nobility of the freeman, rightness of belief cannot be considered as a value of religiosity. All Indo-European forms of belief, so long as they maintained the pure, traditional Nordic spirit, have remained free from any rigid doctrine of belief or dogma and from the worship of a revealed word. Hence it follows that under the original Indo-Europeans there arose no teachers to instruct the people in their beliefs, no Theologians, and no priesthood holier and more elevated than the rest of the people. In this respect it is also a fact that Indo-European religious communities have never become churches. The churchifying of a belief is again an assertion of the spirit of the Oriental (desert lands) race or of the joint effect of Oriental and Hither-Asiatic race spirit.

There is yet another reason why no church could arise amongst the Indo-Europeans. A church as a sacred and sanctifying device for a community of men practising their special form of religiosity under priestly dominance, of men who desire to justify themselves before the deity — such a church can only take root, where “this world” is regarded as “unholy” and enticing to “sin”. The result of the creation of such a church was to institute a separate holy region of the devout, a device to redeem hereditary sinful man (original sin) from the constriction of “this world” through its merciful means and to reveal a way of salvation to redemption.

But where the world consists of ordered life and the deity itself has joy in the justified man, the church as such has no meaning.

Pay homage to the God,
Through the whole world!
(Von Platen)

Communion of belief will not therefore be shaped by the Indo-Europeans into a community with a special, rigid religious outlook. The formation of a community in this sense is opposed by the originality of the Nordic race soul of the individual Indo-European nations. “They live for themselves and apart” (colunt discreti ac diversi) said Tacitus (Germania, XVI), describing the Teutonic manner of settlement. More than a habit, it is indeed an expression of the spiritual nature of the Teuton, of the Teutonic joy in the mutual retention of distance between men. In this frame of mind a taciturn, confiding community of belief is possible, but not the formation of a community upon which a spirit can descend, in whose tension all individual human nature consumes itself.

The Brahmanism of the Aryan Indians like the Druidism of the Celts, is an exception among the priesthoods of the Indo-European peoples, but it only developed as such over the course of the centuries, reflecting alien admixtures, customs and influences.

Indo-European religiosity will never be able to unfold in its purity in a church-community but certainly in a State whose structure is in accordance with the racial nature. In the Gau region of the Teutons, in the civitas of the Romans, in the polis of the Hellenes, i.e. in those folk orders in which Indo-European men organised their nation-states along lines peculiar to their own disposition, Indo-European religiosity has been able to develop in the purest of all forms. The individual Indo-European removed himself apart from men when he wished to pray (cf. Odyssey, XII, 33), in contrast with the practice of the Semitic peoples, for whom prayer was a communal rite. But in Xenophon’s Oikonomikos (XI, 8), an official state prayer is mentioned, which implores of the Gods to send down on them “health, bodily strength, understanding between friends, salvation in war and well-being”. Here the community of belief is a national not a religious community, and in such a kingdom Indo-European religiosity flowers to perfection.

Inborn Indo-European religiosity will unfold much more easily in a definite mystical form than in belief in redemption and revelation or in churchly forms. What causes the Indo-Europeans to show interest in mystical views, is the possibility of direct relationship with the deity, the deepening of an ever vital urge to “reciprocal friendship between Gods and men” (Plato) and the implicit tendency towards the ideas of the universal deity (Pantheism). The idea of miraculous creation is alien to the Indo-European, and particularly in mysticism the idea of creation falls away. Mystical outlooks have easily grown out of the Indo-European; with the Indians in the Vedas and Upanishads, in Brahmanism, in Buddhism, with Hellenes in the expositions of Platonic thought which incorporated Plato’s anamnesis in the mystical sense though weakened and alienated by oriental spirit in the thinking of Plotinus and his neo-Platonic followers in the Middle Ages. Where Indo-Europeans accepted alien beliefs, mystical thought has later set in against these beliefs, as is already found with the Christian Boethius (480-525), who in his work, Concerning Consolation Through Philosophy, advances viewpoints which he had taken over from Plato, the Stoics, the Neo-Pythagorians, and from Plotinus, rather than from Christian services. The same mystic revolt, tending towards a return to Pantheism, is found in the Sufism which arose amongst the Aryan Persians after their forcible conversion to Islam. It also began to stir in Europe as soon as the Nordic-Teutonic spirit began to express itself against the Roman-Christian belief. Meister Eckhart, possibly represents most strongly the development of mysticism as a result of the revolt of the Teutonic Indo-European spirit against Roman-Christianity.

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