IT is the spiritual strength of the Indo-Europeans — and this is witnessed by the great poetry of these peoples, and above all by their tragedies — to feel a deep joy in destiny — in the tension between the limitation of man and the boundlessness of the Gods. Nietzsche once called this joy amor fati. Particularly the men rich in soul amongst the Indo-European peoples feel — in the very midst of the blows of destiny — that the deity has allotted them a great destiny in which they must prove themselves. Goethe, in a letter to Countess Auguste zu Stolberg of the 17th July 1777 expresses a truly Indo-European thought, when he writes:
| Alles geben die Götter, die unendlichen, ihren Lieblingen ganz: alle Freuden, die unendlichen, alle Schmerzen, die unendlichen, ganz. The eternal Gods give everything utterly to their favourites, all joys, and all sorrows for all eternity — utterly and completely. |
Never is this Indo-European joy in destiny turned into an acceptance of fate, into fatalism. When faced with the certainty of death the Indo-European remains conscious that his inherited nature is that of the warrior. This is expressed in the Indian Bhagavad Gita (XI, 38) by the God Krishna, when he says to Arjuna: “Joy and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat, think on these things and array thyself for the battle, thus shalt thou bring no blame upon thyself”. And later the God characterises Indo-European nature still more clearly, when he (XVIII, 59) says: “When thou . . . thinkest: ‘I will not fight’, then this thy resolution is vain, thy aristocratic nature will drive thee to it”.
This is the Indo-European view of destiny, the Indo-European joy in destiny, and for the Indo-Europeans life and belief would be feebly relaxed, if this spectacle were withdrawn in favour of a redeeming God.
Ideas of a redemption and of redeemers have, with the peoples of Indo-European tongue, only been able to spread in the late periods and then usually only amongst Indo-Europeanised sub-stratas. When one wishes to apply a concept like redemption to the original nature of the Indo-European, one can speak at most of a self-redemption, but never of a redemption through a God-man, a demi-God or God. But Indo-European self-redemption should be described more correctly as self-liberation, as the liberation of the morally self-purifying soul, sinking through itself into its own ground of being, a liberation into the timeless and spaceless and a liberation from the necessity of existence and the necessity of being. Such a self-liberation, attained by overcoming the desires of the self (Pali: kilesa = nibbana or tanhakkhaya, the apatheia of the Stoics) was taught by the Indian prince’s son, Siddhartha, the Wiseman with “eyes the colour of blossoming flax”,16 who later was called Buddha, the Illuminated.
Such a liberation from time and space is experienced in the Indo-European realm by the mystic as the Nirvana during lifetime (Pali: samditthika nibbana), as the apartness or solitude of the individual soul sinking into itself, which experiences itself on its deepest ground as the universal soul or part of it. Hence the mysticism of the West may not be confused with a redemption.
The Indo-Europeans have always tended to raise the power of destiny above that of the Gods (cf. Iliad, XV, 117; XVII, 198 ff.; XXII, 213; Odyssey, III, 236 ff.; Hesiod, Theogony, 220; Aeschylus, Prometheus, 515 ff.; Herodotus, I, 91) especially, undoubtedly, the Indians, the Hellenes and the Teutons. The Moira or aisa of the Hellenes who already appeared in Homer and Heraclitus, corresponded to the Norns of the Teutons, to the wurd (Weird, Wyrd; Scandinavian: Urd). In Shakespeare’s Macbeth destiny (old English: Wyrd) is represented by the Three Weird Sisters, who correspond to the Parcae with the Romans and as goddesses of destiny also appear with the Slavs in similar shapes,17 while there was a goddess of destiny among the Letts (Latvians, an Indo-European Baltic people), who was called Leima. Even Plato (Laws, V, 741a) in the late period of his people, stressed that the deity was subject to destiny, and an Anglo-Saxon proverb, composed by a Christian poet, holds firm to the pre-Christian outlook: “Christ is powerful, but more powerful is destiny.” Ahura Mazda, the god of the heavens of the Iranians, distributes destiny as does Zeus, the heavenly God of the Hellenes (G. Widengren: Hochgottglaube im alten Iran, Uppsala Universitets Årsskrift, 1938, VI, pp. 253 ff.); both, however, can do nothing against destiny. But I repeat, this Indo-European view of destiny has nothing to do with fatalism referring merely to that ultimate and hard reality, from an awareness of which Indo-European religiosity originates to rise Godwards. According to his whole nature the Indo-European cannot even wish to be redeemed from the tension of his destiny-bound life. The loosening of this tension would have signified for him a weakening of his religiosity. The very fact of being bound to destiny has from the beginning proved to be the source of his spiritual existence. “The heart’s wave would not have foamed upwards so beautifully and become spirit, if the old silent rock, destiny, had not faced it.” This certainty, expressed by Hölderlin in his Hyperion, was presaged by the tragedies of Sophocles and of every great poet of Indo-European nature. It is the same certainty, which Schopenhauer has expressed in a hard remark: “A happy life is impossible, the highest to which man can attain is a heroic course of life” (Parerga und Paralipomena, Volume XI, Chapter 34).
It is clear that a religiosity arising from such an attitude towards life can never become universal. Indo-European religions can never be transferred to other human breeds at choice. To them belongs mahatma (India), megalethor (Iliad, XVI, 257; Odyssey, XI, 85), megalophron or megalopsychos (Hellenic — cf. Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, II, 7, 7; IV, 3, 1-34), magnitudo animi (Ulrich Knoche: Magnitudo animi, Philologus, Supplementband XXVII, 3, 1935), magnanimus (Roman), the mikilman and the storrada (North German), of the ancient Nordic mikilmenska or stormenska, of the men of hochgemüte (lofty heart), as it was called in the German Middle Ages — all descriptions which could each be a translation of the other. Religiosity is here the maturing of the hero in the face of destiny, which he confronts alongside his Gods. This is also the meaning of Shakespeare’s “Readiness is all” (Hamlet, V, 2, 233) and “ripeness is all” (King Lear, V, 2, 33).
It has been said that the Teutonic conception of life was a Pan-tragedy, an attitude which conceives all existence and events of the world as borne along by an ultimately tragic primal ground.18 But this Pan-tragedy, which appears almost super-consciously with the true Teuton, Hebbel, is not solely Teutonic, and is found amongst all Indo-Europeans,19 permeating all Indo-European religiosity. The Indo-European becomes a mature man only through his life of tension before destiny. The Teutonic hero, superbly characterised by the Icelandic Sagas, loftily understands the fate meeting him as his destiny, remains upright in the midst of it, and is thus true to himself. Aeschylus (Prometheus Bound, 936) commented similarly, when he said: “Wise men are they who honour Adrasteia”, Adrasteia being a Hellenic goddess of destiny.
Because destiny signified so much to the religious Indo-Europeans, we find many names for it in their languages: the moira of the Hellenes correspondes to the fatum of the Romans, the ananke and heimarmene of the Hellenes to the necessitas and fatalitas of the Romans. The Teutons named destiny according to the aspect from which they viewed it, as örlog, metod, wurd, skuld and giskapu (cf. also Eduard Neumann, Das Schicksal in der Edda, Beiträge zur deutschen Philologie, Vol. III, 1955). With the Indians the idea of destiny had become the idea of Karma (cf. Julius von Negelein: Die Weltanschauungen des indogermanischen Asiens, Veröffentlichungen des Indogermanischen Seminars der Universität Erlangen, Vol. I, 1924, pp. 116 et seq., pp. 165 et seq.) the idea of a soul migration which according to one’s moral behaviour during lifetime invariably led to a better or worse life after reincarnation — a concept which was, however, peculiar to the Indians. The idea of a cycle of births, according to the description by the Hellenes of a kyklos tes geneseoos, was originally probably peculiar to all Indo-Europeans, and is also proved to have existed among the Celts and Teutons (cf. also Erik Therman: Eddan och dess Ödestragik 1938, pp. 133-134, 172). Perhaps it is also to be explained from the attentive observation of inherited bodily and spiritual features in the clans amongst the Indians as well as the Iranians, the Hellenes as well as the Romans and Teutons — for heredity, or having to be as one is, is destiny.
Erik Therman (Eddan och dess Ödestragik, 1938, p. 90) has found a “mocking defiance in the face of destiny, a struggle against this destiny despite recognition of its supreme power” to be characteristic of the Edda and many of the Icelandic tales. Such a defiance also still speaks from the Mediaeval Nibelungenlied, which astonished Goethe by its non-Christian character, which characterised Teutonic imperturbability in the face of merciless destiny. It was this same Indo-European imperturbability, which Vergil and even the mild Horace praised:
| Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari. (Georgica, II, 490-492) Si fractus illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinae. (Carmina, III, 3, 7-8) |
Geibel also expressed the same idea in his Brünhilde (II, 2):
| If there’s anything more powerful than fate, Then it’s courage, which bears fate unshaken. |
I have mentioned above that the idea of destiny had already been reflected in Hellenic philosophy by Heraclitus, Plato and others. The Stoics, in particular, Posidonius, conveyed the Hellenic concept of a law of destiny (heimarmene) to the Romans, which was most clearly understood by Epicurus and his disciples Titus Lucretius Carus, Vergilius and Horatius.
The Church has attempted to displace the Indo-European idea of destiny by the idea of providence (providentia). With thinking men the attempt failed, for thinking Indo-Europeans would not accept a providence, which blindly distributes an excess of grim blows of fortune, at the same time regarding this as love and benevolence. In Kant’s Opus Postumum is found the remark: “If we wished to form a concept of God from experience, then all morality would fall away and only despotism be left.” Therefore, concluded Kant, one would have to assume that such a creator of the world had no regard for the happiness of his creatures.
Whoever is of the same opinion as Baetke (op. cit., p. 33) or H. Rückert, that such views signify “no satisfactory solution to the question of destiny”, or shares the allusion that these men were “never ready religiously to face the question of destiny”,20 — understands here as an outside observer, by the question of destiny something completely different from that resolute acceptance of destiny in which the Indo-European saw himself living. It is not by dissolving the question of destiny in the idea of redemption that the Indo-European can perfect his nature — for such redemption would probably appear to him as evasion; his nature is perfected solely through proving himself in the face of destiny. “This above all: to thine own self be true!” (Hamlet, I, 3, 78). From the moral command to remain true to oneself, however, it again follows that Indo-European religiosity is of an aristocratic character: one does not advise the degenerate to remain true to himself.
Here I have not tried to provide any solution to the philosophic or religious question of destiny, but merely to explain how the Indo-European has lived in his destiny and how it has contributed to the maturity of his character.
The certainty of a destiny has not made the true Indo-European seek redemption, and even when his destiny caused him to tremble, he never turned to contrition or fearful awareness of “sin”. Aeschylus, who was completely permeated by Hellenic religiosity and by the power of the divine, stands upright, like every Indo-European, before the immortal Gods, and despite every shattering experience has no feeling of sin.
Thus Indo-European religiosity is not concerned with anxiety, or self-damnation, or contrition, but with the man who would honour the divinity by standing up squarely amid the turmoil of destiny to pay him homage.
The German word fromm, meaning religious or devout, is derived from the stem meaning capable or fit, and is related to the Gothic fruma, meaning first, and to the Greek promos, meaning furthermost. For the Indo-Europeans, religiosity showed itself as the will which revealed in the midst of destiny, before the friendly Gods, the fitness of the true-natured man who thus became all the more upright and god-filled the more shattering were the blows of destiny. In particular the best men and the truest matured are expected by the Gods to prove themselves on the anvil of destiny.
The defiant religiosity of Indo-European youth, which challenges destiny to test the strength of the young soul, has been stressed by Goethe in his poem Prometheus. Hebbel has also strikingly portrayed youthful Nordic Indo-European religiosity in the poem To the Young Men. Indo-European nature extends from such youthful religiosity outwards to the quieter, more devoted and fulfilled religiosity of the poem by Goethe, Grenzen der Menschheit.