Orientation

Left and right brain divisions and dependencies

Why is the brain so clearly and deeply divided? Why are the two cerebral hemispheres asymmetrical?Is the division of labor in the brain complete or do the sides overlap in functions? A lot of what we once thought went on in one hemisphere alone is now known to go on in both. For instance, both sides of the brain can handle words and images, both are involved in thinking and both can process language. Further, there is duplication across both spheres. While the hemispheres need to cooperate, believe it or not, Iain McGilchrist claims there is a power struggle between them, analogous to differences between Freud’s id and superego or Marx’s divided worker possessing both  class-in-itself and class-for-itself identities. It is only at the level of the interpretation of specific events that competition between hemispheres occurs. The left hemisphere is ultimately dependent on the right, though it seems to have no awareness of this fact. As we will find in Part II, the brain does not merely mediate our experience of the world but shapes it as well.

Where we are going?

This article is divided into two parts. In Part, we will contrast the differences between the left and the right side of the brain. Secondly, we will discuss how the left brain at its worst leads to schizoid or schizophrenic behavior. Lastly, in Part I we will explore the commonalities between schizophrenia and modern art, including painting, music and writing literature. Without arguing that modern art causes schizophrenia there is no question that cases of schizophrenia have multiplied during the industrialization process of the 19^thand the first third of the 20^th century.

In Part II of this article, the author of the book The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist ambitiously claims that the difference between the hemispheres is not just inside the brains of individuals. They are expressed in the history of the West of the brain’s response to changes in the movements of thinking from ancient Greeks through the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

Differences Between Hemispheres

Faust is seen by many as the best representative of modern self-consciousness who declared there were two souls in his breast. The right side of the brain deals with the big picture and emerges first in human development. Its attention is diffused and it searches for unique patterns in the real world. Whatever information it finds, it places it in a context. For the brain’s right side, wholes are more than the sum of their parts. Once the new information is in, its function is to stabilize the system (negative feedback). The right hemisphere watches out not only for itself but for the left side as well. It multitasks. In the brain, the right-side does parallel processing of systems at the same time. It generates alternatives to problems.

The left hemisphere is its junior partner and is more unpredictable. The left hemisphere is more specialized, focused and sees the parts very well in isolation. The left hemisphere does not seek out new information but focuses on bringing order and logic within the system. It does not seek out the new but organizes information within into types and classifies it. If the right hemisphere, processing wholistically, misses the trees for the forest, the left hemisphere is preoccupied with the trees, missing the forest. At its worst, the right side of the brain has attention deficient disorder. A corresponding downside of the left side of the brain would be obsessive compulsive disorder.

While the focus of the right hemisphere is to bring information from the real world into the system, the left hemisphere abstracts from what the right hemisphere brings in and then generalizes from it. The left hemisphere prefers to do one thing at a time, serially. It prefers linear processes with a beginning, middle and end. The right side of the brain understands that processes recur, they are cyclic, reciprocal and sometimes turn into spirals. The left side likes to break things into parts, analyzing them while the right side likes to pull processes together synthetizing them. The left side takes what the right brain pulls together and gives fixity to what was once an ambiguous process. It seizes one alternative and turns it every which way. Believe it or not, a great deal of psychological research shows that most of the normal psychological processes go on in our unconscious, namely the automatic systems and sympathetic parts of our systems such as heart rate and blood pressure in reaction to emotions. This is part of the right side of the brain. The conscious part of our system. Where we solve problems is the domain of the left side of the brain.

The left side of the brain is most at home with either/or answers, while the right side can tolerate ambiguity. The left side likes single meaning while the right side can handle meanings which only partly overlap. The left side of the brain is more likely to be dogmatic and the right side more open-minded. The left side prefers the denotation of language with precision of reference and meaning. The right side is more sensitive to the connotation, emotional side of language.

Rationality vs reason

A number of years ago two rhetoricians, Stephen Toulmin and Chaim Perelman made a very important distinction between two words we tend to use interchangeably: reason and rationality. These distinctions arose in order to address the question of the difference between formal logic and informal logic. We use our reason when we try to make probabilistic guesses about what is likely to be true when no one knows for sure (informal logic). Formal logic, what they call rationality, occurs in situations which are closed systems when one answer where one sure answer is possible. An example of a closed system problem is a word puzzle. You don’t search for information outside the problem to solve it. All the information you need is within the problem. The left side of the brain follows rules and manipulates symbols. The right side of the brain is more creative and finds new rules and new symbol systems. The right side of the brain is reasonable, the left side is rational. Rationality is about the relation of means to ends. The right side sees further into the distance by looking at ends in themselves. In terms of processing events, the right side is at its best starting things up and closing things out. The left side at its best is processing things in the middle, once they are under control. This has many other ramifications.

What Can Go Wrong With the Left Side of the Brain?

McGilchrist does not have much to say about what can go wrong with the right side of the brain, but he has plenty to say and what can go wrong with the left side. Remember that we said the one psychological fruit of the left-side of the brain that can be out of control is in obsessive-compulsive behavior. While repetition brings comfort, past a certain point it can result in mindless pounding or the mechanical and repetitive assembling and disassembling of machines. The left side prefers the codes for non-living things like tools or machines. On one hand it can lead to the perfecting of inventions. Yet this can lead to unrealistic perfectionism. Without the right side of the brain’s input, the left side of the brain can create non-realistic, distorted fantastic images which can result in the world being seen as uncanny as we shall see.

The left sphere has a precarious relationship with emotional life. It is capable of superficial social emotions but not good at imaging in depth the emotions of others.

The left side is good at making judgments when all the information is in but not when judgement is required in situations that are ill-defined. Because it prefers the world of the inanimate things, it often, as in the case of Descartes, treats its body as a thing among other objects. At worst it might not recognize its own body parts as in asomatognosia – a feeling that parts of a person’s body is “missing” or have disappeared from corporeal awareness.

In any dynamic system, there is positive feedback which amplifiers the system to help it deal with environmental stress. On the other hand, negative feedback cools the system out to regulate the system over time. When the left side of the brain goes haywire the amplification process takes on a life of its own and shows itself in doing and undoing rituals or in pathological gambling.

The left side of the brain is individualistic and has to be coaxed into understanding other people. It takes a gods-eye-view of things, a view from nowhere so that it barely takes into account people other than its own self-interest, let alone anyone else’s. Table A at the end of Part I is a summary of the differences between the hemispheres.

Weaknesses in Left Hemisphere

To recap, in cases where the right hemisphere is damaged, we will find similar problems that we might identify in schizophrenia. These include:

• A lack of common sense.

 The Left Hemisphere Schizoid and Schizophrenia States and Behavior

The old ideas of schizophrenia include:

• That schizophrenia is a retreat to primitive emotions and infantile body states.

Rather than a regression to an earlier developmental state, schizophrenia can happen to a mature adult. Secondly, schizophrenia is far from being irrational. In fact, it is hyper-rational. It is a product of the left side of the brain gone haywire! Instead of lacking in self-awareness the schizophrenic is hyper-reflective and cannot get out of their head back into the world. Rather than being lost in their emotional life, the schizophrenic is disengaged from their emotions and the emotions of others. This results in depersonalization, in which the person loses a sense of their identity in the world. They see themselves as an automaton. Schizophrenics routinely see themselves as machines, robots, computers or cameras. At the other end, they see the world in a derealized way which is when the real world loses its aliveness and becomes a thing, an object unconnected to the rest of the world.

Modernism and schizophrenia: the core phenomenology

In Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber and the Schizophrenic Mind Louis Sass explores the idea that madness is the end point of a trajectory that consciousness follows when it separates from the body and the passions from the social and practical world and turns upon itself. Chris Frith identification of the core abnormality of schizophrenia is an awareness of automatic processes. There is a veering between two apparently opposite positions that are really aspects of the same positions. They are omnipotence and impotence. Either there is no self or an all-observing eye that swallows the whole world into the self.

Schizophrenia and Schizoid  Disorders are Connected to Industrialization

Anthropological psychiatrists claim that schizophrenia goes all the way back to hunting and gathering societies. Yet McGilchrist points out that schizophrenia has grown with industrialization. He claims that in England it was rare if it existed at all before the 18^th century. The same was true in Ireland, Yankeedom or Italy. Schizophrenia steeply increased in the first half of the 20^th century. Mental health is generally better in rural populations. The risk of developing schizophrenia is doubled in urban environments. Multiple personality disorders are also modern. On the positive  side people with schizoid or schizotypal traits will be attracted to and deemed suitable for employment in science, technology and administration, all of which have been influential in shaping our world during the last 100 years.

Dissociation is Connected to Both the Left Hemisphere and Schizophrenia

This includes:

• Loss of feeling of belonging to the world (feeling we are spectators rather than participants).

The Relationship Between Schizophrenia and Modern Art

Self-referentiality, depersonalization and realization and representation

McGilchrist says in both schizophrenia and in the modern artist the interpreter begins to interpret himself. Each’s focus on paranoia do not allow for accidents or unintended actions. Depersonalization and derealization in each leads to devitalization. Devitalization leads to boredom, and boredom to sensationalism. Emptiness and restlessness lead to gross stimulation. Speech becomes either gross or hyperbolic.  Music appears loud and nervous .The left hemisphere with its orientation towards what is lifeless and mechanical appears desperate to shock us back to life. There is concern with materiality and simultaneous impulse in both modern art and schizophrenia. Representation is when real objects are replaced by concepts and concepts turn into things. Objects become more abstract and more thing-like. There is also a preference for inanimate things. In his book The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of the Enlightenment, DM Levin writes that representation, rather than the presence of the real world, the left hemisphere’s role is the characteristic state of modernity.

The heart of the modern art is a dogmatic trampling of all taboos. The artist makes a fetish, a fascination with the amoral restlessness of modern urban life. Shock and novelty become defenses against the boredom and seeming inauthenticity of modern life. There is a fear that without novelty there is only banality. Objects are juxtaposed without being brought into relation. Increasingly, perspective is deliberately disrupted as with the Cubists. Modernism does not build on the past while taking it in a new direction, but it wants to sweep away the past altogether and start from scratch.

The left hemisphere prefers cylinders, cubes or spheres. McGilchrist points out that Modernist art appears to mimic the world as it would appear to someone whose right brain was inactivated. He writes:

The demonization of the body reaches its most disturbing apotheosis in the bizarrely distorted and dismembered marionettes of Hans Bellmer. Pointillism reduces Gestalt figures to a mass of discrete points. Collage represents the concept of a whole as composed of independent pieces. Futurism declares the left hemisphere’s preference for the future over the past. What the artist has written about his work is as important as the thing itself as if the artwork could not stand for itself. Similarly, some painters have made the eye more intellectual and have gone far beyond what was previously called a joy in form or color. More and more the symbolic replaces that which exists in reality. (415-416)

 Modern artists

In fact, a remarkable number of the leading figures of modernism displayed schizoid or schizotypal features: These included Nietzsche, Jarry, Strindberg, Dali, Wittgenstein, Kafka, and Stravinsky. Antonin Artaud had schizophrenia. He told Anais Nin that he wanted a theatre that would be like a shock treatment to galvanize people into feeling. In modern art attention is focused on the medium, not on the world beyond that medium. The content is denied. The self-reflective statements of modern literature and criticism concentrate attention on language and either deny or minimize the world beyond language. Tristen Tzara one of the founders of Dada summed up modernism early when he proclaimed that art is a private affair. The artist produces it for himself and any judgment about it had become completely subjective on the part of the critic. No critic has any objective powers.

 Modern music

Since the 20^th century, music has aspired to and attained a high level of abstraction. As Schoenberg put it, how the music sounds is not the point. Gilchrist claims the melodic line has been largely abandoned and its harmonic structures are hard to appreciate intuitively even if they might be  appreciated conceptually. Nietzsche writes that our ears have become more intellectual. The meaning in music is confusing because of the way it sounds. McGilchrist writes that the idea is to disturb the listener’s feeling of gravitational attraction by combining so many different forms of attraction that this sense of location cannot adjust fast enough. The lack of tonal centers destroys the listeners anchor point. He says we do not have sufficient short-term memory to cope with the degrees of apparent formlessness. On the other hand, harmony in music is an analogues to perspective in painting. Both harmony and perspective is right hemisphere dependent.

Coming Attractions

The differences between the left and the right side of the brain are not simply bio- psychological phenomenon taking place inside the bodies and minds of individuals schizophrenics or modern artists.  They are also manifested physically, materially in the world through the social institutions and movements in the West from the ancient world of the Greeks and the Romans through the Middle Ages and on to Modern life, beginning in the 14^th century. The Renaissance is often contrasted to the Reformation, the Enlightenment to Romantism and Capitalism to Socialism. Can the differences in these European movements be expressions of the left and right brains? Can the common social problems which arose  between the Reformation, the Enlightenment and capitalism be attributed to the left brain which has gotten out of control? Through McGilchrist, I will examine this in Part II. 

Table A Contrasting the Left to the Right Side of the Brain

Mythology and folklore can be used for political and religious purposes whether they be to support socialism or fascism. What was going on at the end of the 19^th century politically and in the 1930s that made mythology so attractive to both German and French fascists? Why did the imagined gods of the Indo-Europeans change from how they were conceived in the 19^th century? Why was their geographical location changed from India to Germany? The Indo-Europeans of the 19^th century were considered monotheists. But in the 20^th century they became polytheists or even animists. Why was this? Why does the study of Indo-Europeans persist even after the Nazis used the search for the Indo European for such horrible ends? What can be done to minimize the chances of the study of comparative mythology being used for political and religious purposes? Its gods are different and the places they were said to inhabit change. 

I Aryanization Project of the 20^th century: Order Theorists vs Barbarophiles

Order Theory

Theorists of order was built out of late 19^th century scholarship. It was an attempt by the bourgeoisie to shore up their private property, the sanctity of the family and the authority of the father in the face of:

• the challenging of a deterministic view of science and
• artistic movements which challenged representation.

It used research on Aryans to defend its existing order by promoting a pessimistic, romantic cultural appeal of the virtues of organic society. At least in their origins, Indo-Germans were seen as proud pagans. Arvidsson says Indo-Germans do not pray bending over and kneeling, but rather standing and stretching their hands toward the sky. Also, the gods were in the world, not transcendent to it. Because the gods are immanent, there is no separation between the supernatural world beyond and the natural world we know. Neither was there a distinction between appearances and reality. Appearances were not epiphenomenon or illusions. What appeared is what reality was. Aryans were imagined as passive provincial—farmers rooted in the landscape and distinguished by their love or life and nature. Because there was no gap between the natural and supernational world there were no bridges (saviors) necessary to get from this world to the next.

However, order theorists are not primitivists. Their interest in the Aryans is to see them as a beacon of light arising from the darkness of tribal groups. The dark forces of nature are  exiled to pre-Aryantimes. The Aryans had reverence for the sun in its struggle against darkness. For all Indo-Europeans, the sun is the highest good. Myths about the victory of the sun are the founding matrix for the worldview and life of IE. Arvidsson suggests the sun was imagined by the bourgeoisie as behind the order theorists acting as a cosmic constable who could strike down the chaotic beasts of darkness.

Order theorists vs  cultural evolutionists

The order theorists’ picture of the Aryans as the light at the end of a dark tunnel was challenged by cultural evolutionists who claimed that ancient peoples could not have been as high standing as order theorists claimed. Evolutionists began to describe PIE as a primitive people like any other. It dissolved the whole IE field since its classifications of primitive-civilized made linguistic categories irrelevant. In addition, race was having a declining place within evolutionary anthropology. Broadly speaking, the evolutionists supported the Enlightenment’s social unity of mankind across space and over time. 

Order theorists turn right

Order theorists relied on mythology. This theory became connected to the world of Indo-Europeans through Leopold von Schroeder and Viennese mythologists. These included  scholars from Nordic movements such as those of Gunther and Kummer as well as SS scholars such as Wust. Von Schroeder’s mission was to show an unbroken continuity between contemporary German culture and Germanic Indo-European cultures through studies of myths and legends. In the 1930s order theory was carried on by Rosenberg’s party college as well as partly by SS Ahnenerbe.

Barbarism theory

While order theory incorporates Neo-tradition religion for the purposes of papering over growing questions about industrialization and modernity, it still accepts modernity, even though it is critical of it. Barbarophiles, on the other hand not only criticize modernists on the left, but traditionalists of order in conservative aristocratic circles on the right.  Barbarian theory proposes the Germans must break out of the iron cage of modernity which they believe was created by the Jews. While order theorists wanted to use Aryan theory to justify why it deserves to stay in power, barbarians theorists wanted to recreate a new society.

Male fellowships and rituals

Arvidsson points out that the dissolution of traditional Western European society during the 19^thcentury produced a need for new connections. This, combined with the growing women’s movement at the turn of the century, made joining clubs an attractive alternative. At the end of the 19^th century, numerous singing, hunting and teetotalers’ societies were formed. Among the more powerful were male fellowship societies.

These male fellowships had an uncompromising hatred of materialistic and pragmatic life. They questioned bourgeois ideals and were motivated by a neo-traditionalism that was revolutionary rather than conservative. These consisted of groups of initiated youths who lived together in special buildings and initiation rituals that were synchronized with seasonal shifts during the year. Members were presented in mythical dress as vegetation demons. They emulated ancient German secret rites. However, male fellowship scholars considered ritual more important than myths in the study of a religion.

According to Otto Höfler there was once a wild army of men led by Odin, that had no women, children, or servants among them. These groups encouraged courage, camaraderie, ambition and hard discipline. By fighting side by side, these warriors grew closer to their brothers in arms than to their own families. The demonic, ecstatic, cultist and tragic were fundamental ingredients in the religion of Aryans. Barbarophile theorists tried to show how male fellowships existed in Iran and India. The struggle for and against the religion of male fellowships has made up the main theme in Indo-Iranian religious history.

Ancient Aryan religion as warlike

By the early 20^th century German competition with other nation-states for colonies made aggression and imperialism a growing possibility and this is expressed in the changes attributes of Aryan gods. Whereas for order theorists, Aryans were peaceful, rooted, life-affirming farmers, for the barbarophiles Aryans were believed to be activists, struggling, warlike and familiar with sacrifice and death. The power underlying their religion was not a warm ever-present sun, rejuvenating the crops but rather the storm god Odin and the chthonic gods or goddesses Dionysius or Ruda. For barbarophiles, Aryans are not the light at the end of the tunnel of previously primal dark people. The Aryans and their gods themselves were dark and ecstatic forces.

The conviction that Aryans were warlike was hardly confined to barbarophiles scholars like Otto Höfler. The fact that a socialist (Childe), a royalist (Schmidt) and a feminist (Gimbutas) agreed to show that the latter conviction was far from limited to the moderate right-wing and that Aryans were anything but farmers.

Folk psychology and barbarophiles

During the interwar period, this theory was also reinforced by so-called folk psychology, a discipline that had been developed during the 19^th century by evolutionary-influenced scholars like Adolf Bastian and Wilhelm Wundt. It had the aim of determining the differences between the psychicconstitutions of different peoples and races. It was their notion that different people and different races could be proven to have different mental capabilities. Needless to say, this attracted reactionary thinkers during the interwar period while feeding colonial appetites.

Ludwig Klages claimed there first existed a natural cosmic state that can be compared to a collective dream state or Dionysian life intoxication. This paradisiacal order was shattered when the rational spirit penetrated the sphere of spiritual, illuminated life. This led Klages to a cult of an immanent ecstatic mysticism that aspired to return to the cosmic original condition. Jung was especially interested in the folk psychological differences between Jews and Germans. For him, Odin was the truest expression of German folk soul and the Nazis’ dramatic use of neo-pagan symbols was a natural and healthy answer to what was perceived as thousands of years of Semitic-Christian oppression.

Please see my table at the end of this article which compares order theorists with Barbarophile theory.

French Fascist Mythology

Action Française

The members of Action Française were either royalists or neo-royalists. They  wanted to know how the king’s power could be recreated after having been weakened. During the 1930s  the French Action Française strove to ally itself with Italy. Mussolini and the Pope had agreed to share ideological power (which Lincoln had related to Dumezil’s dual sovereignty as we shall see) with the aim of counterbalancing Germany’s growing influence. It was hoped that France and Italy together would protect the classical heritage from the barbarians from the North (the Germans).

Dumezil’s Indo-European three-part order

The master of many languages, Dumezil had written 50 books which Bruce Lincoln says are marked by extraordinary lucidity, ingenuity, rigor, intelligence and a respect for system and structure as he explained the complex logic encoded in mythic narratives.  Dumezil has presented his work as strictly apolitical and that it powerfully influenced those of all ideological persuasions. Scholars who have endorsed Dumezil’s research include Levi-Strauss, Eliade, Sahlins, Vernant, Le Goff and Caillois.

Dumezil argues that there are three functions of the ideal social order of Indo-European demonstrated:

• • noble, chivalric
  • brutal
• abundance, prosperity and fertility including:
  • production
  • agriculture
  • reproduction
  • herding

Dumezil felt that the Indo-Europeans were a particularly favored people in world history for they alone discovered the secret of organizing thought and society in a trifunctional structure.

Dumezil’s ideological Use of Indo-European Mythology

For 50 years George Dumezil was among the few historians of religion whose theories have found a wider audience outside the discipline and even the academy. Influence by Durkheim gave Dumezil a structural and anti-historical bent. Dumezil deemphasized the historical etymological approach. Dumezil’s structuralist method had meant that the etymological method of proof had been less important in 20^th century research about Indo-Europeans. Bruce Lincoln says this allowed comparative mythology to isolate Indo-European studies as a freestanding entity.

Initially Dumezil worked with themes taken from the evolutionists, particularly Sir James Frazer and his dying god cycle. But the anthropological and folkloristic material that assumed such a prominent place in the turn of the century evolutionism largely disappeared from Indo European religious research with Dumezil’s fame. Just as other right wing Aryanists, Dumezil wanted to separate the Indo-Europeans from any cultural evolutionary schema.

Dumezil’s right-wing connections

No Germanist was more influential on Dumezil than Höfler except the Dutch historian of religions Jan de Vries, (1890-1964). De Vries book carried a swastika on its cover (1934) and celebrates the race of blue-eyed blond-haired warriors. Also noteworthy is the Swedish Indo-Europeanist Stig Wikander who remained close friends and made fundamental contributions to Dumezil’s thought over a period of five decades. He was also an active street fighter of fascism on the streets of France in 1934.

Since the 1980s Dumezil  has been criticized politically for:

• his involvement in circles close to Maurras’ Action Française.

It was during the 1920s and 1930s that Georges Dumezil supported Action Française and wrote for its journals. Dumezil published articles in two right-wing newspapers. He praised Mussolini’s Italy and urged France to align itself with him so that together they might check the growth of German power. Dumezil was profascist but anti-Nazi. His theory about tripartite ideology of Indo-Europeans suited the Italian and French corporative ideals in which society is divided into leaders, soldiers and producers.

In a critical article of the early 1980s Momigliano and Carlo Ginzburg claimed Dumezil belonged to a group that oppose the Judeo-Christian society. His theme of the binding gods should be connected to a reactionary ideology with roots in Joseph’s Marie de Maistre who conceived of God as the one who binds individuals together into a nation. Male fellowship constituted central power that can actually functions as an agenda of real order.

Dumezil supported these forces that wanted to recreate a traditional hierarchical order in Europe. His respected work in prehistoric religions is not easily separatable from his interest in right-wing European politics in the 1930s. More specifically Dumezil wanted to make fascist ideals appear natural and make the liberal and socialist ones unnatural. He was looking to confer the historical legitimacy to the Fascist dream. Bruce Lincoln writes that Dumezil was deeply anchored in the Germanophobia and French fascism. He wrote articles which supported the French fascist organization Action Française and wrote articles under a pseudonym in which he praised Mussolini. Father Schmidt, an Austrian fascist, Catholic and royalist of Action Française also supported the restoration of a medieval type of society with stable hierarchies and integrating corporations.

Scholarship in myth was largely inseparable with discussions about Aryans for most of the 19^thcentury and continued into 1930s and 1940s. But after World War II any research about Aryans became suspect. Understandably, after the Nazi disaster and after World War II the study of Indo-Europeans did not die. It shifted its home from Germany to France. Between 1946 and 1949 classes where classes of Dumezil were joined by Levi-Strauss and Mircea Eliade who continued to produce concrete and less political inflammatory material in mythology. However, right-wing mythology  continued in Switzerland, Romania and in the United States. See my article Aryan Right-Wing Mythology for the New Age: Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell.

The Fate or Order Theorists and Barbarophiles with the Nazis

The period from 1930 to 1945 saw the second flowering of Indo-European  studies. The ideology that motivated this research Arvidsson calls “barbarian ideology”. To understand this, it is important to fix in our minds how the Nazis made sense of Germany in the 1930s.

Arvidsson characterizes the Nazis as skeptical of capitalism because its individualism undermines the organic unity of a cultural group. So too, capitalism’s  internationalism creates cultural mixes which the Nazis thought only lead to cultural degeneration. The Nazis thought that the best cultures do not mix racially. The basic political unit for the Nazis was neither internationalism nor localism, but the state. In terms of geographic mythology, the Nazis imagined the ancient Germans as farmers surrounded by forests. The urbanization of the modern world creates a parasitic relationship with these farmers. The city is seen as a place of rootless individuals who lack a common purpose. The city was also the seedbed for secularization, atheism and other fragmenting forces. All these forces of centrifugalizing are typified by the Jew.

For the Nazis the organic unity of the nation did not mean everyone was equal. Most, if not virtually all individuals need strong leadership and were moved to defend their land and race. The Nazis do not defend their land defensively. Loyalty to the nation is sustained and amplified by the process of fighting, dying and winning wars.

Once the Nazis had established their power in the Third Reich, they did not want anything to do with the wild, ecstatic and barbaric myth and rituals. The male fellowship radical hatred of all materialism and all pragmatic thinking were inappropriate for a party that now aimed for cooperation with capitalists. What was needed was not Odin or Rudra storming demons, but Thor and Zeus’s police protection

The 3^rd Reich did not to have to create its fundamental myths. Rather, it was German mythology resuscitated in the 19^th century that gave it form, spirit and institutions.

Roger Pearson and Neo-Nazism

Pearson, in 1946

Yet, since World War II some have worked to reconstitute the study of IE myth (while “Aryan” use is forbidden). The New Right carried on contemporary racist literature  on Aryan tradition. For example, in the Journal of Indo-European Studies, Roger Pearson, founder of Northern League for Pan-Nordic Friendship and former director of the World Anti-Communist League, was described as “one of the most persistent neo-Nazis in the world was one of the most persistent neo-Nazi apologists in America and one of the best-connected racialists in the world”. Pearson continued his writings on the relation of race, intelligence and eugenics. One of the books announced itself as based on Hans Gunther, having been the 3^rd Reich’s foremost theorist of racial science. Pearson also arranged for an English edition of Gunther’s work on Indo-European’s religion. In 1974, Pearson began receiving grants from the Pioneer Fund which directs its assets to the cause of eugenics and race betterment. His book is  Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academia. A book which Stefan Kuhl calls the most comprehensive defense of scientific racism in the US since 1945.

Conclusion: How to Overcome the Ideological Uses of Mythology

This itself is a myth and ritual based upon romantic nostalgia for paradise. Myths are authoritative narratives that can be used to construct boundaries and hierarchies. For example, he interprets Laws of Manu as attempts by priests and kings to appear to be indispensable for society. Lincoln says we need a political theory of narration that recognizes the capacity of narrators to modify details of stories that pass through them by introducing changes in the classificatory order as they do so, most often in ways that reflect their subject position and advance their interests.

In order to combat this, Lincoln developed a ten-step methodology for studying myth:

6. establish a date and authorship of all texts and the circumstances of their appearance, circulation and reception.

Right-Wing Research: Order vs Barbarism in the 20^th century

Purpose of this article

In search of the Indo-Europeans

In Part I of this article I explore those theories that searched for the Indo-Europeans by dissecting language based on the theories of Sir William Jones and Max Muller. Both these theorists suspected that India was the home of the Indo-Europeans. Further on, in the hands of the Grimm Brothers, the search for the Indo-Europeans takes a nationalist turn. Finally, neo-traditional religion supports the vitality of chthonic earth gods. Lastly, I discuss the impact of racial anthropology in which the search for Indo-Europeans is now based on the climate of the area, the skin color and brain size of people in these cultures.

Part II continues this rightward turn in Indo European studies with explicitly fascist direction. Following Arvidsson, I contrast the difference between the “order” theorists and the more “barbarophilism” as they affect the rise of Hitler. India falls out of favor as the home of the Indo-Europeans and is replaced by Germany.

But later, following Bruce Lincoln we find a French fascism smuggled into the work of the great French comparative mythologist, Georges Dumezil. I close with a brief presentation of the fascist work of Roger Pearson in his efforts to carry Indo-European studies right into second half of the 19^th century. By way of conclusion, I present comparative mythologist Bruce Lincoln’s ten methodological steps to be sure that the political use of mythology does not interfere with the science of comparative mythology.

Who were the Indo-European scholars and what were their methodological problems?

The problem for these scholars was that Indo-Europeans have not left behind any texts and no objects that can definably be tied to them. Given these problems, why did these scholars not give up and turn their attention to other excavations? Why did they persist under these difficult conditions? The answer Stefan Arvidsson gives is that most of these scholars did so for religious and political/ideological reasons.

I The Ideological Origins of the Search for Indo-Europeans 

Aryan sun chariot (est. 1600 BC).

Anthropology typically examines the similarities and differences between cultures. Yet anthropologists are affected by the political climate of their countries. In European colonial times of the late 18^th century, there was little to gain by elites for pursuing the Enlightenment dream of finding a universality of all cultures. Instead, religious and political zealots look for differences to justify the subjugation of these countries. The ancient history of the supposed Indo-Europeans became the proof that one branch of humanity was destined to exploit and rule the others. Mythology became an ideology to justify conquest. As Arvidsson pointed out, romantics like Chateaubriand, and Joseph de Maistre stressed importance of Laws of Manu found in India as a justification for a tripart conservative ideology as we will see later.

Indo-European “Aryan” studies were appropriated at an early stage by racial science. British archeologist Colin Renfrew has concluded from his own research that the research in IE is itself a modern myth. They included those who want to rekindle the old pre-Christian IE or Aryan paganism. Even as late as 1940-44 the most important dividing line among Europe’s inhabitants were between Aryans and Semites. After the fall of Germany in World War II “Aryan” was replaced by “Indo European” because post-war scholarship was dominated by Dumezil who never spoke about “Aryan religion”. Today the term is only used by Neo-Nazis.

Why was it so important for Germany to search for a culture of its origins? Unlike Britain, France or Spain there was no Germany until the end of the 18^th century. The usual process of nation-building involved a reference to an ancient geographical homeland as well as an ancient religion. In this climate of imperial ambitions, Germany had neither, so it set out to discover one.

II Discovery of Sanskrit

Sir William Jones

The Romantic use of language interpreted by various peoples who spoke IE languages made them have an organic unity and had a common fate. They claimed that all people who spoke IE had also inherited a common belief system. IE scholars like Bryant and Jones attempted to find similarities in the myths and god figures and found traces of these beliefs in at least four places: Roman texts, Greek myths, Indian hymns and Norse saga literature.

Bruce Lincoln, in his great book Theorizing Myth says Sir William Jones (1746-1794), established himself as one of the world’s foremost linguists with a grasp of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Turkish along with a knowledge of Persian and Arabic. He was a scholar, poet and translator sympathetic to the most liberal causes of his day. By a series of occupational happenstances, this led him to study Sanskrit.

In 1785 he gave a lecture in which he proposed the common origin of the languages (Sanskrit) to which others would later derive and give the name “Aryan”. Jones discovered the similarities between Latin and Greek European languages and the Sanskrit and Persian languages which were termed linguistic families”. The Bhagavad Gita was translated by Jones along with The Laws of Manu. India was assumed to be the oldest member of that group.

Jones focused on four specific domains of culture a) language and letters b) philosophy and religion c) architecture and sculpture d) science and arts. In his discussion of an evaluation basing his judgments on what he took to be levels of accomplishment, he considered India first among the nations and evaluated it most favorably. He connected the peoples of India and Iran on the basis of their linguistic, religious and artistic similarities.

Romanticism and India

Interest in Sanskrit exploded. Herder (1744-1803) was the first to spread the doctrine of Indomania in German. He thought it was one of the most important steps in the development of the human race. Raymond Schwab referred to the period around 1800 as an “Oriental Renaissance”. Schlegel’s book in 1808 made the case for India as the Aryan homeland. In the translation of the Laws of Manu, the word “Aryan” means noble. The plot thickens.

For romantics the idealization of India served both as a protest against and an escape from the contemporary world that seemed the like a confident march of progress. Threatened by rationalism, mechanistic science, materialistic anthropology, anti-aristocratic politics and watered down theology Romantics made India a mystical unity that did away with interdisciplinary European conflicts. While the Enlightenment advocated a contractual right of man, German Romantics argued that human races are an organic part of the natural world with India as its model. Poets such as Shelley, Lord Byron and Schopenhauer attempted to synthesize India with European thinking.

Paris was the Mecca of Orientalism during the 1830s-1840s and it was hoped that studying Sanskrit would liberate scholars from their preoccupation with Greece and Rome. For some time, ancient India became the imagined home of Indo-Europeans. The attractive power of this world grew in 1819 through the writings of Frederic Schlegel, who attempted to build a comparative linguistics (1767-1845) along with von Humboldt and Jacob Grimm (1785-1863). Like many to come, Herder believed that Asia was the original home of human unity.

The discovery of IE language transformed India, Persia and Central Asia as a kind of European Orient. Thomas Trautmann writes that Jones’ work is nothing less than a project to make the new Orientalism safe for Anglicans. Interest in India was popularized by the historian of religion, Max Muller. What we are interested in is the relationship of that discovery to political interests of colonial British rule in the late 18^th and 19^thcenturies.

Language mediates how nature grows in culture

For Romantics, language was the most basic expression of the soul of a people and is the foundation for musical and artistic traditions as well as social laws. The study of the origin of language (philology) was the cornerstone in the 19^th century of research in the search for Indo-Europeans. Language became the vehicle through which nature grows through people.

For Hamann and Herder, the ancient vernacular of languages and literature — poetry and myth – was a prime basis of national identity. Each language embodied the history of the people who spoke it. Each language had a basis in poetry and music far deeper than the degraded prose of modernity. For Herder, the formation of culture consisted of 4 parts:

• A variety of climates — heat and cold have an impact on the disposition of customs and bodies. Climate first produces change at the body’s most superficial level. Over long periods of time the effects penetrate deeper to transform skeletal structure and even the shape of the skull and nose
• The landscape – the features of individuals in a culture are brought into line with the features of the landscape.
• Language impacts thought and social relations.
• The arts through music and dance.

III Max Muller and the Birth of Comparative Religion

Comparative religion as rooted in linguistics

As a philologist, Max Muller believed that religion is tightly linked to linguistic groups. Muller thought the only scientific way of classifying religion was by language. He raised the question that if the belief in God arises naturally, why are there such different religious types? In order to explain the origins of myths he founded the discipline of comparative mythology.

Primitive religion was monotheist and rooted in sun-worship

Which natural phenomenon had been the most prominent in catalyzing the mythopoetic imagination? Was it thunder and lightning, earthquakes, volcanos or the sun and dawn? Muller suspected that primitive religion was monothetic and this divine creator had originated from humanity’s encounter with forces of nature. However, it was not the wildest and most unpredictable events but it was the ones which were the most persistent and reliable. He thought the light of the sun fit the bill. Muller hoped to find traces of the original experience of the infinite among the oldest and most primitive peoples. He believed that the origin of monotheism was India. In the hopes of finding the monotheistic roots of India, he translated the Rigveda.

Use and abuse of myth: history of myth

According to Bruce Lincoln, the word “myth” has been used in many ways depending on the historical period. Myth had been used originally in early Greek times to mean a primordial truth or a sacred story. It gradually became discredited with the rise of the Pre-Socrates and dismissed by the Romans as a “fable”. Christianity saw myth as a lie and set them in dualistic opposition to the non-mythic bible. With the rise of science myth was seen as either as a sign of ignorance, the result of poetic revelry or a children’s story. Resurrected by the romantics in the 19^th century, it became politicized and used to assist in the building of nation-states. In the 20^th century it helped to build support for the wave of fascism in the 20^th century.

Muller sees myth as degenerative

Muller was a modernist Protestant. He was not a romantic when it came to myths. He found myth irrational and immoral. Muller agreed the IE mythology was a poetic explanation of nature.  But if Vedic India was equal to the West, what kept India economically and politically backward? Unlike Nietzsche and other romantics, Muller saw myth not as a foundation of all religion but as a source of religious degeneration. Like Hamann and Herder, he took poetry to be present from human origins and to reflect an innate religious awareness. Myth was a later development, a disease of language. The Jews, Muslims and Christians as staunch monotheists were less disposed to the seductions of myth.

Muller and British colonialism

Muller hoped to influence a change in British colonial politics. He wanted to make the British colonists understand that their Indian subjects were Aryan brothers. During a long degeneration, Indian religion withered while Europeans grew and matured into monotheism.  Muller hoped that the people of India would leave behind worship of idols if they received knowledge about the old Aryan Vedic religion.

IV Romantics Champion Myth and Folklore to Build Nationalism

At the end of the 18^th century romanticism turned its back on the Enlightenment, especially its more deterministic tendencies. Myth was given a new lease on life. People such as Jones saw myth symbolically as veiled wisdom which simply needed to be first interpreted and then explained. Interest in the vernaculars (local language) displaced the international languages of church and court while myths and to a lesser extent, folk songs were constitutive as an authentic primordial voice of the volk.

The use of myth at the end of the 18^th century was also used by nationalists in their search for a language and set of stories on which the emergence of the nation-state could be founded. In the hands of the Brothers Grimm and others this is exactly what happened. The Grimm’s monumental research shows a Herderian interest in language and myth. They devoted themselves to the first encyclopedic compendium of German myths of 4 volumes. The Grimms argued that it was the conversion to Christianity that shattered the nexus of land-myth and folk. Myth then became entangled with attempts to contrast Aryans and Semites, as we shall see.

Grimm stirs the use of folklore to build nationalism

For the brothers Grimm, prehistory was not a period of dark barbarism but a high cultural golden age. The recovery of ancient texts during the Renaissance included Tacitus’ Germania, first published in 1457.  It dealt with the German sense of honor and integrity, their physical prowess, their courage and sense of  beauty. They were received with enthusiasm by the people of Northern Europe, in part because Tacitus broke the Mediterranean monopoly on antiquity by giving the Germans, Scandinavians, Dutch and Anglo Saxons their first sense of the prestige derived from a deep and noble past.

Grimm (1785 – 1863) gathered folktales from German peasants in order to recreate a strong German culture. He wanted to find a rich German stories  that could successfully compete with classical Judeo-Christian traditions  He hoped that within the surface of folktales searchers  he could find traces of a German mythopoetic prehistory. Theorists of Northern origins challenged the Bible, for orthodox religion looked to Israel as the cradle of language. Grimm’s work spread and scholars began to record tales and customs of their society. Nationalist motives were always in the search for myths whether they were folktales or rituals.

V From Modernist to Neo-Traditional Religion: Fall of Nature Mythology of Max Muller

Modernist theories of religion see the modernization process, including science, as part of the evolution of religion. The focus of religious experience is the individual. Modernist theories of religion look for a common core in all religion and its practices involve ethics and prayer. Modernists understand animism and polytheism as late degenerate forms of primitive monotheist tendency. To study non-modern cultures it focuses the language, and it studies myth. Max Muller was a modernist.

Capitalist class rejects modernist religious interpretations

Bruce Lincoln points out that when the bourgeois class at the end of the 19^th century became the ruling class, it grew all the more skeptical about modernization. One of the reasons was that more radical modernists, social democrats, communists, anarchists and union members became interested in these subjects. Events that shook bourgeois idealism and liberal humanism were the real threat of socialism as seen in the Paris Commune. Between 1880-1920, the bourgeois class became a dominating class whose interest in social change decreased, and the relationship between a civilized bourgeoisie and a barbaric working-class now became more important than the relationship between the bourgeois class and a reactionary aristocracy and priesthood which the bourgeoisie had defeated. In reaction, the bourgeois became conservative, nostalgic and nationalistic.  Correspondingly, the image of IE as cultural heroes changed from a modernist to a neo-traditionalist. But what does neo-traditionalist mean?

What is neo-traditional religion?

Neo-traditional ideals of religion want to recreate a vitalized traditional religion that could serve as a counterbalance to modernization (Muller). Von Schroder, a Baltic German Indologist, wants to renew folk-national, heathen rituals. Scholars like Lang, Von Schroeder, Harrison, Mauss and Eliade think that modernization has been chocked full of what is most vital in religion which was its magical, communitarian and collective rituals. What makes religion vital is what makes religion locally dispersed. Rather than ethics and prayer, what makes religion juicy is its altered states. Animism and polytheism are not only prior to monotheism, but once monotheism comes to power the part of religion that speaks to most people is chocked off. Further, evolutionary anthropologists claimed as Muller’s theories were no more than Christian crypto-apologetics. Frazer’s theories of ancient religion were an attempt to replace Muller’s philological paradigm with an evolutionist and folkloristic theory.

Jane Harrison and the chthonic roots of Olympian Greece religion

Beyond anthropology, the importance of ritual as opposed to myth  was embraced by classicists like Jane Harrison (1850-1928), Francis Cornford (1874-1943) and the Cambridge ritualists, Jane Harrison argued chthonic religion had been the true religion of Greece up to the 7^th century BCE. With the Olympians’ victory over the Pelasgian religion, reflection, distinction and clarity triumph over pulsing life. She held that myth arose as an attempt to explain well-entrenched and no longer understood rites.

VI Aryan Studies Turn Rightward at the End of the 19^th Century

Aryan liberal romanticism which began with Jones had weakened substantially by 1870. Yet the search for the Aryans grew, with input from Michelet, Fichte, Lasson and Hubert on the left and Renan, Schlegel and Wagner on the right.

Right-wing transitions to Aryanism

On the right, Renan idealized the polytheism of the IE. He constructed a long-lived opposition between IE and Semitic people. He connected the Biblical Shem’s line with monotheistic intolerance, egotism, conservatism, otherworldliness, irrational rituals along with lack of feeling for art and nature. For conservatives, the Jews promoted modernism. From 1870 on IE became connected with anti-Semitism.

Schlegel questions whether the French Revolution really was, along with its cosmopolitan and humanistic optimism, about progress. Becoming a Catholic, he came to embrace a nationalistic, reactionary and pessimistic world view.  In circles close to Schlegel people began for the first time to value the Middle Agesmore highly.

Wagner

Wagner greatly admired Grimm for all his work on folktales. He sought to connect the Volk through art rather than scholarship. According to Wagner, a total work of art would integrate music, poetry dance, theatrical spectacle, the plastic arts and architecture. This integration of all the arts would undermine the shallowness of modernism, and rejuvenate an appreciation of folk, where the arts and rituals were once one.

Wagner worked on his materials over the next thirty years into the four dramas of The Ring Circle. This was intended as a ritual celebration, not a theatrical performance. He claimed that both the science and art of today are specialization of activities that were once unified. He believed this appreciation of the beauty of nature could arises only out of polytheism. That Wagner traced the origins of the German Volk to India shows that he understood them as part of the Aryan Diaspora.

The place and misplace of Nietzsche in Aryan politics

For Nietzsche, myth was a necessary foundation for all religion. In his earlier writings on myth, he took Wagner’s theories as his point of departure, especially in his book Birth of Tragedy. But in his later life Nietzsche disliked the vulgar antisemitism and German nationalism of Wagner. Nietzsche threw in the towel with Wagner after The Ring premiere at Bayreuth. Nevertheless Nietzsche’s training was in classical philology and he was well-versed with research in Indo-European linguistics and myth and undertook his own studies. He was not dependent on Wagner for this.

Nietzsche has been mistakenly categorized as antisemitic, especially in liberal and socialist circles. But as Walter Kaufman pointed out many years ago in his great biography of Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s work was taken over by his sister who had fascist connections so that his work was pulverized to make it fit with Nazi ideology.

Bruce Lincoln gives us at least four reasons why Nietzsche was not antisemitic or a proponent of fascism

• Nietzsche’s “blond beast” is not a special race but a category that encompasses multiple races, including Greeks and Japanese. However, he gave them further consideration. His detailed discussion was all devoted to the Greeks and the Germans.
• Soon after Nietzsche wrote Genealogy of Morals he came upon the Laws of Manu, an ancient Indian text on the ethics, law and social structure of India. Nietzsche admired the original religion and culture in India. While all the world’s people originated in India, he thought those of the West-Egyptians and Europeans came from the higher castes and it was for them that was reserved the title “Indo-Europeans”. While Nietzsche showed racial bias it was towards Europeans and Egyptians, not Germans.
• Nietzsche drew a sharp distinction between ancient and modern Germans. Ancient Germans (based on the work of Tacitus) had freedom and energy, but modern Germans did not, having become ever less Aryan and ever less [superior?]. Therefore, Nietzsche saw nothing in the Germans of his time that was noteworthy.
• The Nazis were antisemitic – Nietzsche was anti-Christian. His early antipathy toward the Jews and Judaism was gradually attenuated and balanced by a growing, occasionally grudging respect. Instead, he became mercilessly more critical of Christianity. Everything wrong in Judaism was amplified and exacerbated in Christianity. The criticism he had of the Jews was that they were the first weak Christians, not that they had any of the other characteristics that fascists attributed to them. His most acidic systematic criticisms, his theory of resentment was leveled at Christianity not Judaism. Christianity is treated as the extreme form of all that is sickeningly present in Judaism.

VII) Racial Anthropology

As we’ve seen, the first Indo-European studies were grounded in linguistic observations. Max Muller equated linguistic affinity with ethnic affinity as opposed to physical appearance. In retrospect, he rightfully saw language, religion and nationality as independent of blood, skull or hair color. Jones also did not think skin color was important. However, both scholars’ contention was increasingly isolated and drowned out. The issue was how to measure being Indo-European? Did one belong with those who spoke related languages and are considered to have a similar culture, or with those who looked similar?

During the 19^th century, racial anthropologists began to discuss IE, threatening the proprietorship of linguists. Instead of the study of religion, language and folklore to find the origins of Indo-Europeans, the new school focused on differences between people in material and physical characteristics and their geographical location. Racial anthropologists argued that people’s physical appearance could directly explain their degree of civilization. They debated which race was the original one and whether other races were the result of evolution or degeneration. They thought pure races were more fit than mixed ones. Racial anthropology became a study of signs where the internal moral and cultural states could be interpreted from external physical signs.

Climate, skin color and physique

According to Tacitus, the German climate is harsh and damper in the North and West, windier in the South and East. The cold and damp character of the Northern environment impressed itself on the bodies of those who live there. Bruce Lincoln says the whiteness of the cold must have scorched the Indo-Europeans and produced their red color. From mid-19^th century, the empirical methods of racial anthropologists were improved to measurement of skin color and the size of skulls and noses. Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) argued that Aryans could be identified by their long skulls, blond hair and blue eyes. In his more extreme moments, Carus associated blond hair with the color of the sun and blue eyes with that of the sky, which identified Aryans as day people in contrast to the darker, lesser races.

The changing meaning of “barbarians”

Bourgeois humanists before 1870 looked down on barbarians for having had destroyed classical Rome. But as romanticism gained hold of bourgeois ideology, barbarian invasions were seen in a more positive light. As European romantics grew more cynical of the benefits of civilization and they studied the decline of other world civilizations and tumultuous migrations, the violence of the barbarians seemed to be necessary steps in a process of revitalization. Over a period of time from 1870, the barbarian origin of Europe changed from having been a source of guilt and shame to being something honorable.

The right turn against India

A racial anthropology of India begins in 1840s. It was discovered that not all Indian languages were Sanskrit.  South Indians had Dravidian language roots. From this, John Stevenson developed the racial theory of Indian civilization. According to him Indian races were divided into Aryans and Dravidians. It was thought the caste society was developed as a protective mechanism against racial mixing. In other words, violence was justified as a means of maintaining racial purity. This theoretical framework served to legitimatize British colonialization. The relations of the British as a new invader into India was only the latest version of a hierarchical order that had existed thousands of years before. These vital colonizers had no use for romanticizing India.

Arthur de Gobineau and Germany as the proposed new home of Indo-Europeans

Scholars like Gobineau, Chamberlain and Paul Broca described Indo-Europeans  as blond, blue-eyed and tall with straight noses, a straight profile and long narrow skulls. In their hands, Indo-Europeans were no longer a large group of different people who spoke IE languages but a delineated group of people with defined physical characteristics.

According to Gobineau, what happened in India was that white Aryans became brown and their culture and religion degenerated into Hinduism. This racist historiography was also backed up by philological interpretations of India’s oldest source, the text the Rigveda as an interpretation of the description of the Aryan Dravidian conflict. Gobineau’s moral of history claimed that when whites racially mix their superior civilization degenerates. Indo-Europeans were  looking  less and less like Indians and Iranians and more and more like Germans. Led by Renan, the culture that was Indo-European was no longer to be discovered in West Asia but ultimately in Germany. Wagner was friends with Gobineau and tried to make de Gobineau’s theories less pessimistic and more antisemitic. Wagner’s son-in-law was Houston Chamberlain (1855-1927) whose book in 1899 was the foundation text for the development of Nazi ideology.

Please see my table which compares the framework for the changing meaning of Indo-Europeans.

Changing Meaning of Indo-European –19^th-20^th Centuries