NEVER have Indo-Europeans imagined to become more religious when a “beyond” claimed to release them from “this world”, which was devalued to a place of sorrow, persecution and salvation — to a “beyond” to which was attributed the fullness of joys, so that a soul fleeing “this world”, must long for it all his earthly life.
The American religious scientist, William James, has contrasted the religion of healthy mindedness and the religion of the sick soul,21 and Western examples of the religiosity of a sick soul may be found in Blaise Pascal and Sören Kierkegaard. Indo-European religiosity is healthy both in body and soul, and the God-filled soul after elevation to the divine achieves equilibrium in all the bodily and spiritual powers of man.
While non-Indo-European or non-Nordic religiosity, often breaks out all the more excitedly the more a religious man loses his equilibrium, the more he is in ekstasis or outside himself, the more the Nordic Indo-European strives for equilibrium and composure.
The Indo-European has confidence only in those spiritual powers which are to be experienced when the soul is in equilibrium, that is to say, in proportion and prudence.
He also mistrusts all insight and knowledge and experience, which the believer acquires only in some state of excitement. It is extraordinarily characteristic of Indo-European nature, that with the Hellenes eusebeia (religiosity) and sophrosyne (prudence) are often used in the same sense. In this the Nordic nature of true Hellenic religiosity is clearly seen, and results always in aidoos, that is to say, the shyness, or reserve of the worshippers. Religiosity expresses itself with these powerful resolute men in prudent conduct and noble reserve, which qualities alone become part of the fullness of the divine. Here the root of Indo-European religiosity is revealed to ethnological gaze: the religiosity of a farming aristocracy of Nordic race,22 and of honest generations, possessed of a secure self-consciousness and an equally secure reserve, who dispassionately contemplated all phenomena, and who preserved balance and dignity even when facing the divine. In the form and character of Indo-European religion speaks the nobility of the Nordic farming aristocratic nature — all those fides, virtus, pietas, and gravitas, which, summarised as religio, corresponding to the Hellenic aidoos (reserve), also formed the essence of the true Roman, originating from Indo-European ancestors. To this, however, there is a limit, which has been repeatedly alluded to above: Indo-European religiosity owing to its origin and its nature, can never become common to everyone.
What Nietzsche, the sick man, called Great Health and what appeared to him as of such high value, namely nobility, both permeate the religious life of the Indo-Europeans. Whoever wishes to measure religiosity by the visible excitement of the religious man must find the Indo-Europeans irreligious. The highest attainments of Indo-European religions are only accessible to him when he has learned to master his spiritual powers in due proportion, and when he has achieved a proper sense of balance. Therefore Horace (Carmina, II, 3, 1-2), in accordance with the wisdom of Hellenic teaching admonishes us:
| Aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem! |
As has been mentioned above, Plato described the man of moderation as a friend of the deity.
The Indo-European wishes to stand before the deity as a complete man who has achieved the balanced equilibrium of his powers which the deity demands from him.
A noble balance, the constantia and gravitas, which the Romans expected in particular from their senators and high officials, has also been found preserved, by one of the most eminent scholars of the pre-Christian Teutonic spirit, the Swiss, Andreas Heusler,23 in the spiritual expression of the numerous Roman sculptures (Kurt Schumacher: Germanendarstellungen, edited by Hans Klumbach, 1935) of Teutonic men and women: “What strikes one most about these great, nobly formed features, is their mastered calm, their integral nobility, indeed their reflective mildness.” But such spiritual features can also be recognised in the evidence of the ancient Teutonic moral teachings and wisdom of life which Andreas Heusler cites in the same connection. This evidence contradicts the slanders still sometimes repeated today that the Teutons were crude barbarians, to whom only the Mediaeval Church succeeded in inculcating moral standards.
The mastered calm and integral nobility mentioned by Heusler are, however, characteristics of the Indo-European in general, expressions of hereditary dispositions, which point back in time beyond the Teutonic into the Indo-European primal period, and thus into the early Stone Age of central Europe. This noble balance is the basis of Nordic religiosity: when facing the divine will the religious man preserves the equilibrium of his soul, the aequanimitas of the Romans, the metriotes and sophrosyne of the Hellenes, the upeksha of the Indians.
Hermann Oldenberg (Buddha, edited by Helmuth von Glasenapp, 1959, p. 185) has described the peculiarity of Buddhistic religiosity as: “The equilibrium of forces, inner proportion — these are what Buddha recommends us to strive for”. Buddha himself once compared the spiritual impulses of a religious man with a lute whose strings sound most beautifully of all when they are stretched neither too loosely nor too tightly (Mahavagga, V, 1, 15-16). This and not perhaps a flaccid mediocrity is also the meaning of the aurea mediocritas of Horatius, which can be explained from the Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle.
This ideal of integral nobility, common to all the Indo-Europeans, the sense of a noble balance has also expressed itself in works of the plastic arts and poetry. I have cited the festival of the Panathenaea, the ara pacis and the carmen saeculare of Horace as examples. In Athens every four years in celebration of the city goddess Athena, the all-Athenian (Pan-athenian) festival procession made its way to the Acropolis, as portrayed in the sculpture of the Parthenon frieze, one of the most beautiful creations of the noble balance of Hellenic and Indo-European religiosity. Ernst Langlotz, who wrote about this frieze in his book Schönheit und Hoheit (1948, p. 14), describes the long series of these sculptures in such a way that through their noble self-control the tragic Indo-European destiny of the Hellenic is also recognised: these figures are “filled by the dangerous spiritual tensions of power in their life, which, akin to tragedy, elevates men, while it crushes them”. Nobility of soul and calm, a calm which is above all expressed in the Parthenon, has also been described by Josef Strzygowski (Spuren indogermanischen Glaubens in der Bildenden Kunst, 1936, pp. 279 et seq.) as characteristic of Hellenic as well as of Indo-European nature in general.
The ara pacis, an altar dedicated in Rome in the year 9 B.C. probably based on Hellenic models and the Parthenon frieze, represents a sacrifice by noble Romans, in which Augustus himself and his family participates, accompanied by high officials and lictors. The architecture and its sculptures express the Hellenic-Roman religiosity of religio, of aidoos (reserve), even in this late period, in pure and mature shape.
The Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus has also expressed pure and mature religiosity of an Indo-European type in the midst of a spiritually confused and morally desolate late period, in a festive religious poem, the carmen saeculare (Carmina, III, 25). The Indo-European idea of world order, in which the man of belief strives to adapt himself, is here expressed again; Honour, manliness, loyalty, modesty and peace (Verse 57-58). The furtherance of all growth is implored from the Gods, the prospering of cattle and of the fruits of the fields; the Gods should present the Roman people “with success and children and everything beautiful” (Verse 45). The same attitude is evident in the greeting of the Scandinavian Teutons, who wished each other a fruitful year and peace (ar ok fridr) or also a fruitful year and prosperous herds of cattle (ar ok fesaela).
The upright man regards nothing in his nature as lower in value than deity; therefore for the Indo-Europeans there is no conflict between body and soul. This absence of conflict indeed already emanates from the will to preserve the equilibrium of the human powers, even when he conceives of the body and soul as different in essence. Yet on the whole the Indo-European has lived more in harmony of body and soul; the Teutons, for example, have always tended to regard the body as an expression of the soul.24 A perceptive form of theoretical dualism, in which the subject faces the object — in which the perceiver faces an “object of perception” (H. Rückert) — will be no more to the true Indo-European spirit, than a method, a convenient thought process for knowledge, and he will neither emphasise the concept of contrast between body and soul nor will he misjudge (as did Ludwig Klages) the spirit aroused in the tension between the subject and object as an adversary of the soul. To the Indo-European, the distinction between body and soul is not stimulating, not even to religiosity.
Thus this question has never vexed the Indo-Europeans, and they have never de-valued the body so as to value the soul more highly. Quite remote from them lies the idea that the body, addicted to this world, is a dirty prison for a soul striving out of it towards another world. Whenever the outer and inner in men are observed separately, then they are joined in the religious man in an effect of mutual equilibrium. The ideal of a healthy mind in a healthy body has become an English proverb in recent years, and in this we see the reassertion of Nordic religiosity in modern times. It is, after all, a reflection of the prayer which Plato, at the end of his Phaedrus causes Socrates to utter to the Gods:
“Grant that I may become beautiful within, and that my outward possessions do not conflict with the inner.”
The honouring of the body as a visible expression of membership of a selected genus or race is characteristic of the Indo-Europeans. For this reason, every idea of killing the senses, of asceticism, lies very remote from this race, and would appear to them as an attempt to paralyse rather than balance human nature. It is something especially peculiar to the Hither-Asiatic race,25 but it is also found in another form in the East Baltic race.26 Indo-European religiosity is that of the soul which finds health and goodness in the world and in the body. For the religious men of the Hither-Asiatic race and for the western Europeans governed by the Hither-Asiatic racial spirit the Indo-Europeans must appear as children of this world, because the non-Indo-European spirit can seldom understand even the essence of Indo-European religiosity and hence will assume that it lacks religiosity altogether.
Hermann Lommel (Iranische Religion, in Carl Clemen: Die Religionen der Erde, 1927, p. 146) uses the term “religiosity of this world” to characterise the Iranian (Persian) religion: “Life in this world”, he says, “offered the Iranians unbounded possibilities for the worship of God”. Goethe also, in his poem Vermächtnis altpersischen Glaubens has strikingly described the religiosity of the Iranians:
| Schwerer Dienste tägliche Bewahrung, Sonst bedarf es keiner Offenbarung. Daily preservation of hard services, No other kind of revelation is needed. |
The Indo-Europeans are truly children of this world in the sense that this world can allow the unfolding of the whole richness of their worshipping, confiding and entrusting dedication to the divine, a worshipful penetration of all aspects of this life and environment through an all embracing elevated disposition of the mind. The divine is found to be universally present, as Schiller (The Gods of Greece) has described it:
| Alles wies den eingeweihten Blicken, alles eines Gottes Spur. To the enlightened, the whole Universe breathes the spirit of God. |
Thus the religious forms of the Indo-Europeans have unfolded with great facility into a multiplicity of Gods, always accompanied, however, by a premonition or clear recognition that ultimately the many Gods are only names for the different aspects of the divine. In the worship of mountain heights, rivers, and trees, in the worship of the sun, the beginning of spring, and the dawn (Indian: Ushas, Iranian: Usha, Greek: Eos from Ausos, Latin: Aurora from Ausosa, Teutonic: Ostara), in the worship of ploughed land, and the tribal memory of outstanding individual leaders of prehistory subsequently elevated to the status of demi-Gods . . . in all this the Indo-European religiosity of “this world” is revealed as an expression of the experience of being sheltered and secure in the world which these peoples felt. W. Hauer27 has described the foundation of the Indo-European religiosity as “being sheltered by the world” (Weltgeborgenheit). One could also quote Eduard Spranger in support of this when he spoke of the religiosity of this world in which this feeling of being secure in the world has been expressed.
Since being secure in the world forms the basis of this religiosity, as soon as it is developed with philosophic reflection it easily assumes the concept of the universal deity and becomes pantheistic, but this tendency remains reflective, and Indo-European religiosity never becomes intoxicated by the more impulsive forms of mysticism.
The strictly theistic religions of the Semites proclaimed personal Gods. T. H. Robinson (Old Testament in the Modern World, in H. H. Rowley: The Old Testament and Modern Study, 1951, p. 348) states categorically that “in the Jewish or Old Testament belief, there is no room left open for any kind of Pantheism.” Arthur Drews, in Die Religion als Selbstbewusstsein Gottes (1906, pp. 114-115), called Theism the basic category of Semitic religiosity, and Pantheism the basic category of Indo-European religiosity. Hermann Güntert, in Der arische Weltkönig und Heiland (1923, pp. 413 et seq.) found that mysticism corresponds to the Indo-European kind of mind, and considers that the existence of such a common tendency depends on their original racial identity.
The original Indo-European characteristically did not conceive of temples as dwelling places for Gods, nor did the oldest Indians. The early Romans and the Italici probably neither built temples nor carved images of the Gods. Tacitus (Germania, IX) wrote that the Teutons’ idea of the greatness of the deity did not permit them to enclose their Gods within walls. For the same reason the Persian King Khshayarsha (Xerxes) burnt the temples in Greece (Cicero: de legibus, II, 26: quod parietibus includerunt deos) which the Hellenes, deviating from the original Indo-European outlook, had begun to construct in the seventh century B.C. — wooden buildings at first, unmistakeably derived from central European early Stone Age and Bronze Age rectangular houses. Similarly the fact that the Indo-Europeans originally possessed no images of their Gods may correspond to a religiosity originating in the feeling of being secure in the world, and of being men of broad vision, an attitude which from the beginning has tended towards the concept of universal divinity.
The broad vision of the Indo-Europeans — a vision of man summoned to spiritual freedom, to theoria, or beholding (gazing) as perfected by the classical art of the Hellenes — such a vision comprehends the whole world, and all divine government and all responsible human life in it, as part of a divine order. The Indians called it rita, over which Mitra and Varuna (Uranos in Greek mythology) stand guard — “the guardians of rita”;28 the Persians called it ascha or urto (salvation, right, order); the Hellenes, kosmos; the Italici, ratio; the Teutons, örlog, or Midgard. Hermann Lommel, in Zarathustra und seine Lehre (Universitas, Year XII, 1957), speaks of a “lawful order of world events”, which the Iranians are said to have represented. Such an idea, the idea of a world order in which both Gods and men are arranged, permeates the teaching of the Stoics, and when Cicero (de legibus, I, 45; de finibus, IV, 34) praises virtue (virtus) as the perfection of reason, which rules the entire world (natura), then he once more expressed the idea of universal ordered life. This idea was recognised and expounded by the Jena scholar of jurisprudence Burkhard Wilhelm Leist (1819-1906), in his works Ancient Aryan Jus gentium (1889) and Ancient Aryan Jus civile (1892-1896). Julius von Negelein in Die Weltanschauungen des Indogermanischen Asiens (Veröffentlichungen des Indogermanischen Seminars der Universität Erlangen, Vol. I, 1924, pp. 100 et seq., 104 et seq., 118 et seq.) has studied the idea of order as expressed in the course of the year with Indians and Iranians, an idea which corresponded to the teachings of the duty of the man of insight and of elevated moral outlook to fit himself into the order of the world. Later, Wolfgang Schultz (Zeitrechnung und Weltordnung, 1929), stressed that it is found solely of all the peoples on earth, amongst the Indo-Europeans. The fragment of a Hellenic prayer has been preserved which implores the Gods for order (eunomia) on behalf of mortals (Anthologia Graeca, Vol. II, edited by Diehl, p. 159).
In India the caste order also corresponded to universal order of life (Gustav Mensching: Kastenordnung und Führertum in Indien, Kriegsvorträge der Universität Bonn am Rh., Heft 93, 1942, pp. 8 et seq.). By means of the caste order, the three highest castes, descendants of the tribes which immigrated from south-eastern middle Europe in the second pre-Christian millenia (R. von Heine-Geldern: Die Wanderungen der Arier nach Indien in archäologischer Betrachtung, Forschungen und Fortschritte, Year 13, No. 26-27, p. 308; Richard Hauschild: Die Frühesten Arier im alten Orient), who, like the Iranians, called themselves Aryans, attempted to keep their race pure. The caste law was regarded as corresponding to the law of world order (dharma), or the ius divinum as the Romans described it. Participation in the superior spiritual world of the Vedas, Brahmanas and Upanishads originally determined the degree of caste. The higher the caste, the stricter was the sense of duty to lead a life corresponding to the world order. Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), who can be described as predominantly Nordic from the shape of his head and facial features, informs us in his autobiography, that he originated on both his father’s and mother’s side from the Brahman families of Kashmir — from the mountainous north-west of India, into which the Aryans had migrated in substantial numbers, where blond children are still sometimes found — and that one of his aunts had been taken for an English woman because of her fair skin, her light hair and her blue eyes. All the great ideas of Indian religion and philosophy were either brought into India with the Aryan immigrants or else have originated in the area of Aryan settlement, that is in the valley of the Indus, the land of the five streams (the Punjab) or the region of the upper Ganges.
If in Germany there were a university chair to study the spiritual life of the Indo-Europeans, in the same way as in France there is a chair to study “la civilisation Indo-Européenne”, at present occupied by the outstanding, though almost unknown, Georges Dumézil, then the inter-relationships of the Indo-European spirit and interpretation of the world (B. W. Leist bravely attempted this study towards the end of the nineteenth century), would have been investigated more zealously. The idea which took shape in the Christian Middle Ages, of co-ordinating everything in this world to another world, extending from the division of the classes of the state to include the segregation of all men into an ordo salutis, an order of salvation, is probably a blend of thought derived from the impact of the Indo-European concept of the meaningful world order upon the invocation of Pauline-Augustinian Christianity to retreat from “this world”. It is also interesting to find that Ernst Theodor Sehrt (Shakespeare und die Ordnung, Veröffentlichungen der Schleswig-Holsteinischen Universitätsgesellschaft, No. 12, 1955, pp. 7 et seq.), has shown that the Indo-European idea of order, linked with the Pythagorian and Platonic ideas of the harmony of the spheres and with the Stoic praise of reason, which is understood as in accord with world order, is also found in Shakespeare.
“The Gods fixed the measure and end of everything on mother earth,” says the Odyssey (XVIII, 592-593), and Pherecydes who was probably taught by Anaximandros speaks in the sixth century B.C. of “ordering Zeus”, and here the idea of the divine world order resounds, just as it resounds in the Edda in The Vision of the Seeress:
| Then go the Regi rulers all To their judgment stools, These great holy Goths And counselt together that To the Night and New Moon They’d give these names. Morning also they named And Mid-Day too Dinner and Afternoon The time for to tell. |
| (L. A. Waddell: The British Edda, 1930, p. 23.) |
Family, nation and state, worship and law, the seasons of the year and the festivals (cf. also Johannes Hertl: Die Awestischen Jahreszeitenfeste, Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse, Vol. 85, 2, 1933; Das indogermanische Neujahrsopfer, Vol. 90, 1, 1938) the customs and spiritual life, farmland, house and farm; all were related in a world order, and in this order man lived as a member of his race, which was perpetuated permanently in ordered procreation. This appears with the Hellenes as the Hestia idea, and was symbolised with all Indo-Europeans in the worship of the fire of the hearth (in Indian: Agni, in Latin: ignis, in Iranian: Atar, in Celtic: Brigit). Thus within the all-embracing world order, disciplined and selective procreation plays a divine role for the preservation of racial inheritance, the God-given racial heritage. Thus care of race is both a consequence and a requirement of the world order — a direct assertion of the Indo-European religious heart.
In the Indian Law Book of Manu, X, 61, may be found the idea of order in procreation: “The inhabitants of the kingdom, in which disorderly procreation occurs, rapidly deteriorate”. Hence the Indo-European holds sexual life sacred, enshrining it in the family and the woman, honouring the mistress of the house (despoina, matrona) as the guardian of their Racial Heritage. The worship of the divi parentes sprang naturally from the pride and reverence in which they held their ancestors. It follows that Indo-European religiosity calls for disciplined choice (Zuchtwahl), in selecting a husband or wife (a eugeneia), and that Indo-European families strive to preserve good breeding.
In the recorded cosmic or Midgard concepts of the Indo-Europeans, man has his proper place in the great scheme of ordered life, but he is not enchained to it as are the oriental religions, with their star worship and priestly prophesies of the future — the study of entrails and the flight of birds, practised by the Babylonians, Etruscans and others. He appears in a trusting relationship with his God, whose nature itself is connected with the world order, and he joins with this God on a national scale in the struggle against all powers hostile to man and God, against chaos, against Utgard. The Indo-European recognises Midgard, the earth-space, as the field in which he may fulfil his destiny, cherishing life as a cultivator or farmer, where plants, animals and men are each called to grow and ripen into powerful forces asserting themselves within the timeless order. Guilt in man — not sin — arises wherever an individual defies or threatens this order and attempts through short-sighted obstinacy to oppose the divine universal order in life. For such a crime an individual incurs guilt. By such a crime, his people are threatened with the danger of decline and degeneration, and the world order with confusion and distortion.
| Wenn des Leichtsinns Rotte die Natur entstellt, huldige du dem Götte durch die ganze Welt! If the frivolous mob, distort nature, Honour thou the God Through all the world! (Von Platen: Parsenlied) |
The Indo-Europeans, and particularly the Iranians, have to struggle continuously between on the one hand, the divine will, which strives to shape and introduce order into nations for the enhancement of every living thing, and between, on the other hand, a will hostile to God, which brings disintegration and distortion of form and the destruction of all seed on the other. The God Ahura Mazda (Ormuzd) perpetually struggles against the anti-God Angro Mainju (Ahriman). Midgard, the universal order of life, preserves and renews itself only through the brave and the constant struggle of men and Gods against the powers hostile to the Divine order, against Utgard. (cf. also Julius von Negelein, op. cit., pp. 116 et seq.). Midgard is the product of the harmonious ordering of human honour29 and the divine laws.
The ideas of rita and ascha, the kosmos and ratio, and the Midgard idea of the Indo-Europeans reveal particularly clearly that Indo-European religiosity was rooted in a will to enhance life. It was a religious outlook by virtue of which man, with his great soul, sought to stand proudly beside God as megalopsychos, inspired by the truly Indo-European magnitudo animi, the stormenska, the mental elevation and magnanimity of the Icelanders, the hochgemüte of the Mediaeval German knights; “rüm Hart, klar Kimming” as the Frisian proverb says, is characteristic of the religiosity of the Nordic Indo-European farming aristocracy.