Enter, for here the Gods also dwell!
Reply #148 - August 06, 2014, 03:42 PM
IF we survey the whole field of Indo-European religiosity it is clear that much of what has been held in the Christian West as characteristic of the especially religious mind, will be found lacking in the Indo-European. Death can never be regarded by the Indo-European as a gloomy admonition to belief and religiosity. The fear of death, the threatened end of the world and the judgment of the dead have often been described as reasons for adhering to the narrow path of faith and morality. This is not true of the Indo-Europeans, for whom religiosity is a means to a fuller and wider life. As the Edda says:
Bright and cheerful
should each man be
until death strikes him!
(Edda, Vol. II, 1920, p. 144.)
Death is a significant phenomenon of human life, but the strength of Indo-European religiosity is not based upon the contemplation or fear of death. Death belongs to the universal order of life. The Indo-European faces it in the same way as the best in our people do today. Because for the honest man perfect human life is already possible on this earth, through balanced self-assertion; because in the order of the world the death of the individual is a natural phenomenon in the life , and because the beyond has no essential meaning in the life of the Indo-European, death has no influence on the Indo-European’s beliefs or moral concepts, except as a reminder that the time allowed to the individual to fulfil his purpose and duties..
It is striking how pallid and how unstimulating are the original Indo-European ideas of life after death, such as the kingdom of death, of Hades, or Hel as seen by the Teutons. The Teutonic concept of Valhalla is scarcely of value here, being a late and exceptional development, derived less from religious disposition than from the poetic descriptive gift, of the Norwegian and Icelandic poets of the Viking era. It is also striking to find that no memories of Valhalla have been preserved in German sagas and fairy tales. Fundamentally, death for the Indo-Europeans meant the passage to a life, which in its individual features resembled life in the world of the living, only it was quieter, more balanced. The dead person remained part of the clan soul, in which he had shared when alive. He was at no time an unbridled individual, but always part of the existence over generations of a clan. As part of the clan soul individual death had no meaning for him. What concerned him in the kingdom of death was the welfare and prosperity of his clan, with its horses and cattle, fields and meadows.
Achilles, when dead, asks Odysseus, who had penetrated into the underworld: “Give me news of my splendid sons!” (Odyssey, XL, 492), and goes away “with great strides, filled with joy” when he has learned of “his sons’ virtue” (XI, 539-540). As Paul Thieme (Studien zur indogermanischen Wortkunde und Religionsgeschichte, 1952, pp. 46 et seq.), has shown, the Indo-European ideas of a kingdom of the dead were originally less gloomy than the later Hellenic ideas of Hades or the Teutonic concept of Hel. In the Rig Veda of the Indians, as in the Avesta of the Iranians and as with Homer, memories are preserved of the kingdom of the dead as a pleasant meadow, a cattle meadow (Rig Veda) or a foal’s meadow (Homer) separated from the land of the living only by a river. On such green meadows the dead are reunited with their ancestors. According to Hans Hartmann (Der Totenkult in Irland, 1952, pp. 207-208) the honouring of dead ancestors ]as well as the worship of fire and the sun in Celtic Ireland corresponds to North-Germanic, Italic, Tocharic and Indo-Iranian customs, and seems therefore to form part of common Indo-European customs. Indo-European religiosity in fact has never emphasised the death of the individual, for the world order is regarded as timeless.
As long as the order of life is preserved by the efforts of man and God against the powers hostile to the divine, the idea of redemption is incomprehensible to the Indo-Europeans. Redemption from what — and to what other existence?
Revelation, the forming of religions through a prophet, the excitability and impulsiveness of the faithful for the revealed faith, are all phenomena which do not prosper in the realm of Indo-European religiosity. The elevation of faith in itself appears to the Indo-Europeans as a distortion of human nature. Faith in itself cannot be an Indo-European value. Excitedness for a belief, excitedness over an urge to convert, the mission to “unbelievers” the assertion that one’s own belief alone could make one blessed, an excitedness, further, which expresses itself in hatred towards other Gods and persecution of their believers: such excited rage or fanaticism has repeatedly emanated from people of Abrahamic faiths.
The Indo-European religiosity does not preach to non-believers, but is willing to explain to an enquirer the nature of his personal beliefs. Hence the patience of all Indo-Europeans in religious matters. Zeal to convert and intolerance have always remained alien to every aspect of Indo-European religiosity. One cannot imagine a true Hellene preaching his religious ideas to a non-Hellene; no Teuton, Roman, Persian or Aryan Brahman Indian, would have wished to ‘convert’ other men to his belief.
The kings Cyrus the Great and Darius passed commandments concerning the mutual tolerance of the religions of their Empire. The Indian King Asoka, who was converted to Buddhism, the sole religion which spread peacefully and without bloodshed, introduced laws prescribing mutual tolerance between the religions of his kingdoms. They were engraved on stone tablets, and many were rediscovered at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The historian can only cite such examples from the Indo-European realm. Vergil’s law of sparing the vanquished (parcere subjectis) was practised by the Romans not only on subject peoples, but also on their Gods and religions although an interpretatio Romana once attempted to include alien Gods as being off-shoots of their own deities.
In recording the events in his time, when Christianity had already become the state religion, Ammianus — a pagan — reported the intrigues of the Christians against Julian without abuse, since this would not have corresponded to his Hellenic-Roman attitude of tolerance. In the controversies of Pagan and Christian writers and poets, passionate worshippers of the old Roman belief such as Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, Ambrosius Theodosius Macrodius and Claudius Rutilius Namantianus, have given their opinion of Christianity and Christians in a dignified manner. Abuse and contempt for opponents is found in these times only amongst the Christian writers.Only after their conversion to Christianity, whose idea of God corresponded to the intolerant, religious war-waging Gods of the Abrahamics, have Indo-European peoples forced their beliefs on alien tribes; the king of the Franks, Charlemagne, forced Christianity upon the Saxons who were subjected after a bloody struggle. King Olav Tryggveson of Norway (995-1000), after being baptised in England, was persuaded to force conversion on his own people by cunning, treachery and cruel persecutions, as well as by bribing them to submit to baptism. Andreas Heusler (Germanentum, 1934, pp. 47, 48, 119, 122) has asserted that among the Northern Teutons there was quite enough violence, but never cruelty; only after the introduction of Christianity did converted zealots behave cruelly towards their countrymen.
Indo-European belief without tolerance is inconceivable, and any Indo-European religious form, which demanded “true believers”, is similarly inconceivable, just as much as an Indo-European form of belief in conflict with free research, and independent thought is inconceivable. Where excitedness of belief might damage the inborn love of truth and the inborn nobility of the freeman, rightness of belief cannot be considered as a value of religiosity. Indo-European forms of belief have generally remained free from any rigid doctrine of belief or dogma and from the worship of a revealed word.
Inborn Indo-European religiosity will unfold much more easily in a definite mystical form than in belief in redemption and revelation or in churchly forms. What causes the Indo-Europeans to show interest in mystical views, is the possibility of direct relationship with the deity, the deepening of an ever vital urge to “reciprocal friendship between Gods and men” (Plato) and the implicit tendency towards the ideas of the universal deity (Pantheism). Where Indo-Europeans accepted alien beliefs, mystical thought has later set in against these beliefs, as is already found with the Christian Boethius (480-525), who in his work, Concerning Consolation Through Philosophy, advances viewpoints which he had taken over from Plato, the Stoics, the Neo-Pythagorians, and from Plotinus, rather than from Christian services. The same mystic revolt, tending towards a return to Pantheism, is found in the Sufism which arose amongst the Aryan Persians after their forcible conversion to Islam. It also began to stir in Europe as soon as the Nordic-Teutonic spirit began to express itself against the Roman-Christian belief.
Topic: Enter, for here the Gods also dwell!