Part 2 of 2
The Aryan World: A Romantic UtopiaIt is to be remembered that the Romantics held that the simplicity of religious dogmas defined the original state of man and its corollaries that monotheism was anterior to polytheism and primitive revelation had progressively degenerated. Once a people has unfolded its spirit to its fullest expression-from the Romantic point of view-it has fulfilled its role in history and only "repetition" (revivals), stagnation, and decay could follow. Muller's conclusions concerning the Veda recapitulated this central Romantic thesis.
What we see growing in the Veda, we have only encountered full grown or fast decaying in Persia, Greece, and Rome (Muller 1895: 1.26), where mythology had become a "disease" because "its poetical intention has been forgotten" (Muller 1895: 2.12; 5.90), "washed away by the successive waves of what we call tradition, whether we look upon it as a principle of growth or decay" (Muller 1849-74: 3.xliii). Homer showed but a view of outward life, not the inward thoughts regarding gods and men that one finds in the Veda (Muller 1891: 20). Hesiod presents a distorted caricature of the original image whereas, in the Veda, we find a real theogony (Muller 1895: 2.76). As the source of all other religions, the Veda could show us how the Persians came to worship Ormuzd and the Buddhists came to protest against temples and sacrifices. It explains how Zeus and the Olympian gods came to be what they were in the mind of Homer and how Jupiter and Mars came to be worshipped by Italian peasants (Muller 1895: 1.25). "What to the Greek scholar seems wild and fanciful is simply a matter of fact before the eyes of the student of Vedic hymns" (Muller 1897: 429).
Muller confirmed the Romantics' idealization of the Veda (Muller 1978: 12-15). The Veda was so important, it "impressed itself on all branches of literature, all religious and moral ideas, every public act" (Muller 1978: 9). It formed the background for the whole Indian world. No matter how fragmented (Muller 1978: 10) or corrupted, the Rig Veda was still a monument without equal (Muller 1909: 287); its point of origin a utopia and its Aryan authors the best and the brightest.
If I were to look over the whole world to find out the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power, and beauty that nature can bestow-in some parts a very paradise on earth-I should point to India. If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions to some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant-I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we, here in Europe, who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact, more truly human, a life not for this life only, but a transfigured and eternal life-again I should point to India ... I am thinking chiefly of India, such as it was a thousand, two thousand, it may be three thousand years ago-not of towns today but village communities. (Muller 1892: 6-7)
The hymns of the ancient Aryan seers were spontaneous expressions of a pure race (Muller 1978: 526); the Veda, spontaneous poetry (Muller 1895: 1.16) created by simple hearts (Muller 1895: 1.71).
There exists no literary relic that carries us back to a more primitive time than the Veda (Muller 1895: 1.34). However, its poetry was "neither beautiful, in our sense of the word, nor very profound" (Muller 1892: 163). Many of the hymns sound "childish and absurd" (Muller 1909: 282), "vulgar and obscure" (Muller 1849-74: 3.x1iii), or "utterly unmeaning and insipid" (Muller 1895: 1.37). Its "simplicity and naturalness" (Muller 1909: 188; 1892: 118) is what transports us back to our origins in religious thought and language (Muller 1909: 212). It was precisely what was "childish" (Muller 1895: 1.34, 37, 101),3 what harkened back to the childhood of humanity, that made the Veda particularly instructive (Muller 1892: 87). This was a period when childish thoughts presumably stood side by side with modern ideas. The fatal divorce between religion and philosophy had not yet occurred (Muller 1919: 33). The Veda gives us the very words of a generation of men, of whom otherwise we could form but the vaguest estimate by means of conjectures and inferences (Muller 1978: 63). It offers one of the few relics of humanity's childhood that had been preserved (Muller 1895: 1.3). In it, ancient thought is expressed in ancient language (Muller 1895: 1.67).
There is more real antiquity in the Veda than in all the inscriptions of Egypt or Ninevah ... old thoughts, old hopes, old faith, and old errors, the old Man altogether. (Muller 1895: 1.75-76)
Muller was careful to distinguish the Rig Veda from the other Vedas, which he viewed as solely liturgical (Muller 1895: 1.72)4 and dating from a period of complete brahmin ascendancy (Muller 1978: 461). The other Vedas, like the subsequent literature, contained exactly what Muller found absent from the Rig Veda: the unfortunate religious and cultic apparatus of Hinduism, under whose influence Aryan spontaneity and truth had become misunderstood and perverted (Muller 1909: 282). The Veda itself was not immune to the process of decay (Muller 1909: 281; 1895: 1.54; 1978: 456). In places, it too bears witness to the ruins of faded grandeur and the memories of noble aspirations (Muller 1978: 389). Signs of degeneration could be seen as early as the mantra period of the late hymns, when a spirit was at work in the literature of India that was no longer creative, free, and original but living only on the heritage of a former age: collecting, classifying, and imitative. On the whole, however, the Veda was strong, original, pure, and natural: the later creations were modern and artificial.5
The Veda chronicled a period when the Aryans had not yet become "completely enslaved by a system of mere formalities." Vedic poems were collected with great zeal and accuracy (Muller 1978: 477) at a time when the Aryans were still creative and impulsive and still had the power to uphold the tradition of a past. Muller compared this poetry to the later lyric, lamenting that Europe had first been introduced to India through the prettiness of Kalidasa. He judged Sanskrit kavya to be a mere literary curiosity, a pleasant occupation for a Jones or Colebrooke during leisure hours, not the object of life study (Muller 1879: 38). Aryan Indian differed from classical India. The natural and spontaneous (Muller 1978: 498) "half-naked Hindu" repeating under an Indian sky the sacred hymns that had been handed down for three or four thousand years by oral tradition (Muller 1879: 152) differed from the courtly lyricist. The Aryans differed from their antithesis, the modern practitioners of the "hideous" religion of Shiva and Vishnu (Muller 1879: 140).
Muller's constant concern was to distinguish between the Vedic Aryan and the degenerate Hindu who was ineffectual as an historical being (Muller 1895: 1.65).6 Toward this end, he read the Veda with a view toward rediscovering the purity of Aryan religion and promoting it as an antidote to corrupt Hindu practices. The primitive worship of ideal gods sanctioned in the Veda had degenerated into Hindu idolatry (Muller 1895: 1.37). There had been no worship of idols among the Aryans. The Aryans were actually monotheists of a sort. They believed in Kathenotheism (Henotheism, for short), the worship of single gods (Muller 1892: 147), where all deities are but different names of one and the same Godhead.7 Like the Romantics, the Aryans recognized God's presence in the bright and sunny aspects of nature. Belief in metempsychosis did not exist in Vedic times. Rather, we find the concept of immortality, the sine qua non of all "real" religions. Moreover, there were no caste distinctions among the Aryans. What is mistaken for caste in the Veda differs radically from the draconian regulations found in the Laws of Manu or in modern usage (Muller 1879: 330; 1895: 4.306). In short, the Aryan faith was a "real" religion and Hinduism appears as its distortion (Muller 1895: 2.76). The Aryans did not practice any of the "abuses" prevalent in Hinduism:
[t]here is no trace in the Veda of the atrocities of Shiva and Kali, nor the licentiousness of Krishna, nor of most of the miraculous adventures of Vishnu. We find in it no law to sanction the blasphemous pretentions of a priesthood to divine honors, or the degradations of any human being to a state below the animal. There is no text to countenance laws which allow the marriage of children and prohibit the remarriage of child-widows, and the unhallowed rite of burning the widow with the corpse of her husband is both against the spirit and the letter of the Veda. (Muller 1895: 4.307)
The Aryans' religion not only differed radically from Hinduism, it resembled our own beliefs in several respects (Muller 1895: 4.307). We even share their word for God.
The same word, Deva, in Sanskrit, Deus in Latin, remained unchanged in all their prayers, their rites, their superstitions, their philosophies, and even today it rises up to heaven from thousands of churches and cathedrals-a word which, before there were Brahmans or Germans, had been framed in the dark workshop of the Aryan world. (Muller 1895: 4.221)
As the above quote makes perfectly clear, it was to be through the medium of language that Muller was able to identify with the Aryan. The study of language (comparative philology) would provide him with the only true data (Muller 1897: 1.3-12, 18-19).
Language in the Service of MythIn a manner similar to that of Friedrich Schlegel, Muller applied linguistic systems of classification to interpret Aryan mythology and religion (Muller 1978: 1.178-80). Whitney was particularly critical of this methodology, noting that Muller did not employ a very good form of science (Whitney 1987: 1.258) and that comparative mythology could not be viewed as a branch of linguistics (Whitney 1987: 1.261). Muller, however, was not to be dissuaded.
From recognition of the connectedness of English, German, Greek, Latin, Slavonic, and Celtic with the languages of Armenia, Persia, and India, Muller set out to discover the roots these languages held in common. It is through an analysis of these common roots that Muller reconstructed the original Aryan home through a mosaic picture of their fauna, flora, agriculture, food, drink, family life, political organizations, arts, morality, and mythology (Muller 1888: 126-27). Since there had been no exchange between the Aryans who went toward Persia and India and those who went to Europe, all the common words, especially those of mythology and religion, could be claimed as common property of the whole Aryan race before the initial dispersion (Muller 1889: 295).
First, we can see that the Aryans of India separated from the Iranians before they reached the mouth of the Indus, because the names for sea in Sanskrit and Persian are totally different (Muller 1888: 152). The testimony of language also shows that before the separation, the Aryans led an agricultural and nomadic life, similar to that described by Tacitus for the ancient Germans (Muller 1899: 356). Muller concludes that the Aryans were agricultural from the existence of the root "ar" ("to stir"). Although Muller admitted that this root was not used in Sanskrit in the sense "to plough," it nevertheless bears witness to the Aryans' agrarian nature, since very old derivatives with this meaning can be found in other languages (Muller 1888: 134, see also 1895: 1.161). Following the same baroque logic and analyzing the Sanskrit term for daughter (duhitr) back to its "Vedic" significance as "little milkmaid," Muller proved that the Aryans were nomadic (Muller 1895: 2.24). Similar linguistic legerdemain allowed Muller to claim that the Aryans also knew the arts of making roads, building ships, weaving, sewing, and erecting houses. The science of language also suggests that they had domesticated the most important animals (cow, horse, sheep), were acquainted with the most useful metals, carried arms, recognized the bonds of blood and laws of marriage, and distinguished between right and wrong by law (Muller 1899: 356). All this data was "written in the archive of language, stretching back to times far beyond the reach of any documentary history" (Muller 1899: 357).
Since all Aryan languages have peaceful words in common and "differ so strangely in warlike expressions" (Muller 1895: 2.41), Muller concluded that all the Aryan nations led a long life of peace before they separated. Only as each colony searched for new homes and new generations formed new words reflecting their new warlike and adventurous lives, did their language acquire individuality and nationality. Aryan language preserved no traces of brutality, savagery or barbarism and "there is no evidence ... more ancient and more trustworthy than language" (Muller 1888: xvii). It enables us to describe the Aryan utopia and acknowledge our relationship to it or the place that it holds in our study of our true selves (Muller 1892: 14).
We are all essentially Aryans. Since Sanskrit is the most ancient type of English of the present day, being but varieties of one and the same language ... its thoughts and feelings contain in reality the first roots and germs of that intellectual growth which by an unbroken chain connects our own generation with the ancestors of the Aryan race. (Muller 1895: 1.4)
Sanskrit, the ancient language of the Veda, is no more distinct from the Greek of Homer, from the Gothic of Ulfilas, or from the Anglo-Saxon of Alfred than French is from Italian. All these languages together form one family, one whole, in which every member shares certain features in common with all the rest (Muller 1895: 1.21). We are, quite simply, "the descendants of those Vedic poets, their language is essentially our language, their thoughts are essentially our thoughts, the world we live in is much the same as their Aryan home" (Muller 1889: 240), and we can read the annals of our own race, the Aryan race, among dark-skinned people (Muller 1891: 17).
The language of the Sepoy and that of the English soldier are, in one sense, one and the same language. Both are built up of materials which were definitely shaped before the Teutonic and Indic branches separated (Muller 1899: 385).
In the Veda, we are going to our "old home, full of memories, if only we can read them" (Muller 1892: 31). Now, with the advantages of "special Oriental training ... a liberal truly historical education," we can read these memories (Muller 1892: 31).
Whatever the blood may be that runs through our veins, the blood that runs through our thoughts, I mean our language, is the same as that of the Aryas of India, and that language has more to do with ourselves than the blood that feeds our body and keeps us alive for a time" (Muller 1903: 71).
Within the fold of the Aryan race, Muller included the Hindus, the Persians, the Greeks and Romans, the Slavs, the Celts, and "last, not least, the Teutons" (Muller 1892: 116; see also 1891: 21). Certain groups, however, did not belong to his schema. For example, Muller excluded from the Aryan family the "really barbarian races" such as Africans and American Indians (Muller 1978: 558) as well as the Turanian and Semitic races, over all of whom the Aryans historically ruled (Muller 1978: 15). Even before the initial dispersion, the Aryans lived separately from the Semites and Turanians (Muller 1978: 14, also 1895: 1.63-66). Therefore, Europeans need claim no parenty with these races.
We are by nature Aryan, Indo-European, not Semitic: our spiritual kith and kin are to be found in India, Persia, Greece, Italy, Germany; not in Mesopotamia, Egypt, or Palestine. (Muller 1895: 1.4)
Until the deciphering of the Veda, there had been "but one oasis in that vast desert of ancient Asiatic history, the history of the Jews." The Veda now offers another such oasis (Muller 1895: 1.5-6) as well as another instance of revelation (Muller 1895: 1.17), "the wisdom of Him who is not the God of the Jews alone" (Muller 1978: 3). Our knowledge of universal history is imperfect if we narrow our horizon to history of Greeks and Romans, Saxons and Celts, with a dim background of Palestine, Egypt, and Babylon, and leave out of sight our nearest intellectual relatives, the Aryas of India, the framers of the most wonderful language, Sanskrit, the fellow-workers in the construction of our fundamental concepts, the fathers of the most transparent of mythologies, the inventors of the most subtle philosophy, and the givers of the most elaborate laws (Muller 1892: 15).8
In the contest between Sanskrit and Hebrew, it was necessary for Sanskrit to prevail. To do so, Muller first demoted Hebrew from its position as the Ursprache (Muller 1879: 246-67).9 Next, he sought to isolate Sanskrit from any filiation with Hebrew. The linguistic similarities between Sanskrit and Semitic, he noted, were coincidences, as were any parallelisms between Aryan and Semitic religions (Muller 1891: 274). They were just too dissimilar; it was simply impossible to imagine that a Semitic language could ever have sprung from an Aryan or an Aryan language from a Semitic tongue (Muller 1899: 324).
Similarly, in the contest between the Rig Veda and the Old Testament, it was clear which text Muller preferred. Since he could not fix the date of individual books of the Old Testament, Muller just dismissed them as the basis of our ideas on ancient history or religion (Muller 1891: 214). The Old Testament merely revealed the extent to which decay was prevalent in the religion of the Jews. Although Old Testament writers had tried to hide the traces of degeneration, by placing the religion of the Jews before us as readymade from the beginning, perfect, revealed, and incapable of improvement, they only succeeded in highlighting its pervasive decay (Muller 1879: 125).
Muller judged the Jews also to be deficient in poetry, scientific inquiry, political thought, and philosophical originality. The Jews were mired in their own subjectivity.
We look in vain among their poets for excellence in epic and dramatic composition. Painting and plastic arts never more than at the decorative stage. Politics patriarchal and despotic, and their inability to organize on a large scale has deprived them of the means of military success. Perhaps the most general feature of their character is a negative one,-their inability to perceive the general and abstract whether in thought, language, poetry or politics; and, on the other hand, a strong attraction towards the individual and personal, which makes them monotheistic in religion, lyrical in poetry, monarchical in politics, abrupt in style and useless for speculation. (Muller 1895: 1.339)
Muller thus sought to dismantle any Jewish pretensions of superiority. As we have seen elsewhere, the displacement of the Jews served as a prerequisite to the valorization of the Aryan.
Race was truly a metaphor for Muller. He spoke of the Aryan as a means of describing the ideal Self. To create a Self entailed distinguishing an Other, lacking those qualities one attributed to the Self. The Jew, of course, became that Other. In this manner, the mythologization of the Aryan completed the process of mythologizing the Jew. But we are still in the realm of the imagination. Muller might say anything he wanted about Jews and Aryans, but he resisted the appropriation of his catagorizations in the realm of the real.
On several occasions, he sought to distance himself from the misuse of his formulations by contemporary racial theorists (Muller 1869-76: 4.103-27), by distinguishing between linguistic and racial classification.
I have declared again and again that if I say Aryas, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language. The same applies to Hindus, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Celts and Slaves [sic]. When I speak of them I commit myself to no anatomical characteristics. The blue-eyed and fair-haired Scandinavians may have been conquerors or conquered, they may have adopted the language of their darker lords or their subjects, or vice versa. I assert nothing beyond their language when I call them Hindus, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Celts and Slaves [sic]; and in that sense and in that sense only, do I say that even the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians. This may seem strong language, but in matters of such importance, we cannot be too decided in our language. To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar. (Muller 1888: 120)
Blood has nothing to do with language (Muller 1888: 108). Aryanness becomes the sign of culture.
There is no Aryan race in blood, but who ever, through the imposition of hands, whether of his parents or his foreign masters, has received the Aryan blessing, belongs to that unbroken spiritual succession which began with the first apostles of that noble speech, and continues to the present day in every part of the globe. Aryan, in scientific language, is utterly inapplicable to race. It means language and nothing but language; and if we speak of Aryan race at all, we should know that it means no more than X + Aryan speech. (Muller 1888: 89-90)
In other words, he firmly stated that you cannot base ethnological classification on linguistic and anthropological terms (Muller 1872: 17).
The science of language and the science of ethnology should not be mixed up. Races can change languages. Different languages can be spoken by our race and the same language by different races (Muller 1899: 450). Of course, Muller spoke too little and too late. Myths take on lives of their own, when they support the political interests of those in power or those seeking power.
In a long letter to Risley commenting on his Ethnological Survey of India, Muller tried to exonerate himself from the mischief produced by employing the terminology of comparative philology in an ethnological sense.
My warnings have been of little effect; and such is the influence of evil communications, that I myself cannot help pleading guilty of having occasionally used linguistic terms in an ethnological sense. Still it is an evil that ought to be resisted with all our might. Ethnologists persist in writing of Aryas, Shemites and Turanians, Ugrians, Dravidians, Kolarians, Bantu races and c., forgetting that these terms have nothing to do with blood, or bones, or hair, or facial angles, but simply and solely with language. Aryas are those who speak Aryan languages, whatever their color, whatever their blood. In calling them Aryas we predicate nothing of them except that the grammar of their language is Aryan. The classification of Aryas and Shemites is based on linguistic grounds and on nothing else; and it is only because languages must be spoken by somebody that we may allow ourselves to speak of language as synonymous with peoples. (Muller 1888: 244-45).10
Muller's most public statement of position appeared in his Antrittsrede at the University of Strassburg in 1872, when he reiterated that there existed only Aryan and Semitic linguistic families, but no Aryan race, blood, or skulls. In later instances, Muller was clearly defensive. Eventually he did not speak of races and Volkern, rather "the Aryan family," "Aryan humanity," and "the civilization of the Aryan race, that race to which we and all the greatest nations of the world ... belong" (Muller 1892: 116).
However,
Muller's myth of the Aryan throughout the thirty-odd years of editing the Rig Veda entailed the very type of categorical mixing that he condemned in the Strassburg lecture. How do we explain this paradox? I have tried to show how it was far less an issue of Muller's blindness toward his methodology (though that too was at issue) than his adherance to a Romantic emplotment of India.
His need to construct the Vedic Aryan from the text and identity with this Aryan stemmed from religious and aesthetic concerns far more akin to the aims of Romanticism than nineteenth-century race theory.Muller would be shocked at an assessment of his work in light of Romanticism. He maintained that his Aryans were merely an earlier stage of our own race (Muller 1891: 385-86), not a "race of savages, of mere nomads and hunters" (Muller 1895: 2.40) as he felt they had been presented by his academic rivals. It was, he disclaimed, scholars like Pischel and Geldner, who were under the influence of Rousseau regarding the simplicity and innocence of primitive man versus the "modern" Aryans who had reached the summit of civilization. Muller did not recognize his penchant for lyricism, even when he speaks of Aryan "home-grown poetry" (Muller 1892: 140) as "natural growth" (Muller 1892: 97) that has been "carried down the stream of time, and washed up on the shores of so many nations" (Muller 1895: 2.40), or their "home-grown religion" that history has preserved for us "in order to teach us what the human mind can achieve if left to itself, surrounded by a scenery and by conditions of life that might have made man's life on earth a paradise if man did not possess the strange art of turning even a paradise into a place of misery" (Muller 1892: 140). But a Romantic he was and not just in a rhetorical sense.
One can see a pattern in Muller's classifications of language, gods, and mythology. His analyses move from the material to the immaterial, the concrete to the abstract, the simple to the complex, and the single to the general. Just as language began as monosyllabic and developed agglutination and inflection, so then did Muller conclude that monotheism preceded polytheism (Mukker 1978: 510-12, 528, 559; see also 1892: 1.91-92; 2.132). By placing mythology and polytheism at the door of language, he continued a tradition begun by Friedrich Schlegel. He retooled the methodology of Romantic linguistics into his science of language. Muller's reading of the Veda verified the Romantic claim that India was the original seat of true poetry and primitive revelation, and the site of its degeneration. Max Muller was a worthy heir to his father, the German Romantic poet Wilhelm Muller.
This Indologist, a final avatar of Romanticism in service of linguistics, popularized an ideal vision of the Aryan that would bear fruit. Although he himself tried to resist the "patriotic" impulses, Muller had to admit that he would be as proud as anyone to look upon "Germany as the cradle of all Aryan life" (Muller 1888: 127) and "Teutonic speech as the fountain of all Aryan thought" (Muller 1888: 154). So, indeed, did the nonspecialists who expanded upon his theories.
CONCLUSIONThe Western quest for origins received an initial formulation in the recognition of philological relationships among Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and other languages of Europe. Already, in the Enlightenment, there was much speculation regarding India, its culture, language, and peoples. Many of the uninformed assessments of this time would resurface in subsequent Orientalist scholarship, Romantic mythography, nineteenth-century linguistic science, and race theory. Excited by the linguistic affinity between Sanskrit and other languages, Orientalist scholars fostered the comparative science of religion and mythology that developed a vision of an Aryan race as the originator of Indian and European culture. The belief in the Indo-European origins of Europe and India further spurred European interest in Vedic Aryan sources. Enlightenment thinkers idealized the Vedic past in an attempt to find a utopia outside Europe and as an alternative to the biblical tradition. Romantic mythographers not only accepted Aryan genius, but prioritized it. Speculation regarding the Aryan provided a means whereby Indian history could be used to create a "fresh historical tradition" that expressed specifically European political and ideological interests (Thapar 1992: 2). While Evangelicals, Utilitarians, and colonial administrators could only envision India's salvation through a rejection of its irrational culture, conversion to Christianity, and embrace of British rule, scholars sympathetic to Indian culture, epitomized by the figure of F. Max Muller, effectively promulgated an idealized portrait of the Aryan in order to counter those who championed this backward view of the Indian past. By focusing on the common descent and the legitimate relationship between the Hindu and the Anglo-Saxon, however, Muller adopted a strategy that would have serious repercussions.
Let us remember the dates of Muller's Veda (1849-74). Rather than have it begin our examination of the reception of the Veda in the West, we have allowed it to mark the turning point of our inquiry.
The Veda as a "real" text was either unknown or little known to Western authors before Muller. Nevertheless, we have shown how the Veda played a significant role in Enlightenment, pre-Romantic, and Romantic literary and philosophical speculation.
As an absent text, it wielded great authority. Although neither discovered nor fully translated, the Veda served as an important tool in formulating European discourse concerning poetry, race, and religion. The possibility of the existence of the Veda effected a renewed interest in the Romantic theses of a revealed and primitive monotheism and the degeneration of Greek culture. What Europeans sought in India was not Indo-European religion, but a reassessment of Judeo-Christianity. The development of the concept of an Aryan religion proved to be a consequence, rather than the goal of these metaphorical journeys to the East.
The Romantics, whose origins can be traced to pre-Romanticism and Herder, sought in the Veda a religious and national poetry. By "national," they meant indigenous and popular. The Veda, in particular, permitted comparison with an ultimately diverse national mythology. As the publication of the Veda marks the birth of Indology (the philological, historical, and religious studies of ancient India), its appearance in print should have announced the death of Romantic Indomania. However, one is surprised by the similarity between Max Muller's exegesis and the critical discussion that preceded his work. When juxtaposed to the Enlightenment, Storm and Stress, and Romantic emplotment of the Aryan, Muller's commentary on the Rig Veda and its medieval native gloss revivified (with the aid of "science") those very Romantic yearnings believed dormant. The Romantic concepts of the degeneration of primitive monotheism into polytheism and the view of history as a development of the unique character of a people would reach complete articulation in time. Once the pinnacle was reached, the subsequent history was an inevitable falling off, punctuated by attempts and revitalization. Stagnation comes to define India in Western consciousness, appearing ultimately in the philosophy of Hegel, Marx, and Spengler.
History was in a state of motion, a living organism. Universal history was structured organically and could be reduced to certain recurring elementary phenomena with the birth, development, and death of the individual or group organism as eternal. Decadent cultures distinguished themselves from cultured populations. Decadent peoples consisted of those cut off from the soil, hovering between peace and war, the national and international. The cultured were those bound by a common destiny. Culture was Faustian, constantly in progress. The Rig Veda's "appearance" in Max Muller's abundant commentary merely confirmed these Romantic hypotheses.
The discovery that there existed in India a tradition older or at least as old as the biblical tradition was regarded as an event of the first magnitude, only to be compared in its consequences to the rediscovery of classical antiquity in the Renaissance. Through the study of India's past, it was hoped that scholars could reconstruct the history of mankind's origin and past, the development of religions and philosophies. By giving Vedic Aryans a place in universal history, a crucial displacement of the Jews was effected. Much of the discourse concerning the Veda effectively resulted in assigning the Jews a subaltern role in history. In Voltaire's case, we saw how the valorization of the Aryans, who had been ignored by the Bible and universal histories, necessarily entailed a devaluation of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Voltaire was always motivated by his need to challenge the primacy of the Church. For others, the motivations for this displacement were less clear.
Testimony from Vedic India also allowed Europe to refute and/or denounce the Greek miracle. In India, one could discover an old civilization whose cultural riches had been passed down to Greece. However, India could also be cited to prove that ancient Greece represented a real catastrophe, a mutilation that had detoured humanity from its true mission by replacing the cult of god with the cult of man. Finally, the Veda provided essential information concerning the European past. Thought to be the oldest available text of an "Indo-Germanic" language, the Rig Veda promised to reveal the state of civilization that was closest to the supposed common ancestors of all Indo-Germanic peoples.
One can distinguish, therefore, two motives for the beginnings of Vedic scholarship in the West. First, there entailed the search for the oldest forms of religion and language. Second, it set the stage for the inquiry into the origin and past of the European people through information drawn from old Indian sources. With the twentieth-century legacy of Aryanism fresh in our memory, it is difficult not to overstate the argument.
We can acknowledge, however, that the European discourse on the absent Veda created a portrait of pure and cultivated Aryan ancestors which wielded such authority that the subsequent discovery of the text could not alter the welter of assumptions and fantasies that formed its initial interpretation. This ideology of the Aryan participated in the formation of a new mythology of the past. This mythology was fueled by irrational impulses growing out of anxiety regarding questions of national identity and mission. Themes which resonate in the works of the authors we investigated found their way into the new mythology: the displacement of the Jews from a central position on the stage of history; theories regarding the degeneration of peoples and religions from unity and purity to multiplicity and polytheism; and the idealization of imaginary ancestors and their fictitious descendants. Thus, the myth of the Aryan was employed not only to construct the origins of society, but also to foster nationalism. In its latter configuration, it could eventually be used to disarticulate existing society and rearticulate an alternative noteworthy for its identification of a mythic scapegoat.