For over two hundred years, a series of historians, linguists, folklorists, and archaeologists have tried to re-create a lost culture. Using ancient texts, medieval records, philological observations, and archaeological remains, they have described a world, a religion, and a people older than the Sumerians, with whom all history is said to have begun. Those who maintained this culture have been called "Indo-Europeans" and "Proto-Indo-Europeans," "Aryans" and "Ancient Aryans," "Japhetites," and "wiros," among many other terms. These people have not left behind any texts, no objects can definitely be tied to them, nor do we know any "Indo-European" by name. In spite of that, scholars have stubbornly tried to reach back to the ancient "Indo-Europeans," with the help of bold historical, linguistic, and archaeological reconstructions, in the hopes of finding the foundation of their own culture and religion there.

The fundamental thesis of this study is that these prehistoric peoples have preoccupied people in modern times primarily because they were, to use the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, "good to think with," rather than because they were meaningful historical actors. The interest in the "Indo-Europeans," "Aryans," and their "others" (who have varied through history from Jews to savages, Orientals, aristocrats, priests, matriarchal peasants, warlike nomads, French liberals, and German nationalists), stemmed-and still stems-from a will to create alternatives to those identities that have been provided by tradition. The scholarship about the Indo-Europeans, their culture, and their religion has been an attempt to create new categories of thought, new identities, and thereby a future different from the one that seemed to be prescribed.

I began work on Aryan Idols in the fall of 1995. It has mainly been carried out at the Department of Theology at Lund University, which is a very stimulating milieu for anyone interested in studying how ideological motives influence science. For support, encouragement, and a great deal of wisdom, I thank the participants in the seminar on the history of religions. The seminar is led by Tord Olsson, who was also my adviser during the first years, and I thank him for stimulating and inspiring conversations. During the last years, Catharina Raudvere was my adviser, and I thank her for sage advice about cultural his-tory and historiography, and for an unfailing faith in the value of my work. I would further like to thank all of those who have been good enough to help me, by letter or otherwise, to understand things about the study of the Indo-Europeans and their mythology: Anders Andrén, Göran Dahl, Sten Dahlstedt, Ulf Drobin, Mattias Gardell, Cristiano Grottanelli, Jan Hjärpe, Åke Hultkrantz, Peter Jackson, Carl-Martin Edsman, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sven-Eric Liedman, Patrizia Pinotti, Edgar Polomé, Jaan Puhvel, Colin Renfrew, Stephanie von Schnurbein, Eva Stohlander Axelsson, Jesper Svenbro, and Ulla Wikander. For extra contributions in the area, I thank Erik af Edholm, Olav Hammer, and Leif Lindin. Many thanks to Jonathan Z. Smith, who let me use an unpublished manuscript about Frazer and Indo-European mythology. I thank Per Haupt for informing me of the educated public's opinion about my dissertation. Sincere thanks also for the invaluable contributions of the following people: editorial director Alan Thomas, manuscript editor Erik Carlson, promotions manager Stephanie Hlywak, and assistant editor Randy Petilos, of the University of Chicago Press, and translator Sonia Wichmann.

This study would never have been written without the intellectual and emotional help of three people. From the time when I sent my first draft to Chicago, Bruce Lincoln has steadfastly encouraged me to continue work and to send over new sections, in spite of the fact that he knew he would have to use all of his philological competence to understand these texts, in Swedish and not always well worked out. Bruce's comments have been invaluable, and to the extent the study has any merits as insight into Indo-European scholar-ship, this is almost entirely due to him. Still, it is not all of the scientific help Bruce has given that I value the most. For almost ten years, Nina Björk has been the first to read what I have put together. If the language in the study is readable and some of the arguments can be followed, it is probably thanks to her. I am however most grateful to Nina for all the discussions about thinking. life choices, and politics that she and I have had through the years. Between 1987 and 1999, Caj Schmitz and I had almost daily discussions about the pros and cons of modern society and about the essence and value of reason. I hope that Caj will not mind too much the theoretical shortcomings of the study when he reads it in that higher realm that none of us believes exists. Bruce, Nina, and Caj have all shown me that any intellectual activity worth its name is driven by the heart and guided by the brain, and that the wrath over how we human beings have wasted our chances to create a world of human dignity is the best fuel for humanism.

DUMÉZIL AND THE INDO-EUROPEAN IDEOLOGY

Georges Dumezil (1898-1986) is among the few historians of religion whose theories have found a wider audience outside the discipline, and even outside the academy. For half a century-from the 1930s up until his death-Dumezil was one of the foremost humanists in France, a status which was confirmed at the Panthéon in 1979 when he was welcomed into the Académie Française by Claude Lévi-Strauss as one of the "Forty Immortals." The scholarly work that had led Dumezil to this position was based on a wide-ranging hypothesis that all peoples who spoke Indo-European, or, as they were sometimes called even as late as the 1960s, "Aryan" languages had also inherited a common ideology In the course of his historical and philological research, Dumezil had found traces of this ideology in Roman texts, Greek myths, Indian hymns, and Old Norse saga literature. The ideology was characterized by a special three-part structure that organized distinct cultural fields. This structure above all guided the pantheon and the social order, but also such things as the classification of various kinds of heroic types, punishments, and taxes. At the highest level in this "Indo-European" tripartite structure was the "function" of the sovereign holders of power-the priests, lawmakers, and kings, below it, that of the warriors, and at the bottom, the function of the people, or producers.

Ever since the first books about the tripartite ideology (l'ideologie tripartite) of the Indo-Europeans came out during the 1930s, Dumézil's theories have won supporters. Among those supporters were not only experts on Indo-European religion, but also historians of religions (such as Mircea Eliade and Jan de Vries), historians (such as Georges Duby and Jacques LeGoff), anthropolo-gists (such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marshall Sahlins), and other humanists. In addition, some individuals whose interest in the prehistoric world of the Indo-Europeans was based not on scientific curiosity, but rather on a dream of rekindling the old pre-Christian "Indo-European" or "Aryan" paganism, also found inspiration in his work. There were even some who wanted to oppose the "Judeo-Christian" liberal and egalitarian society and who thought that Dumezil's discovery of a pre-Christian, Indo-European tradition that divided society into leaders, warriors, and producers fitted perfectly into their world. view. These persons declared that it was natural for people who belonged to the Indo-European branch of the human race to live in accordance with the hierarchical Indo-European ideology. The classification "the Indo-European branch of humanity could be defined either as the group of people who spoke some Indo-European language (Latin, Sanskrit, French, Swedish, Persian, and so forth) or as the group of Aryans, who were typically imagined as tall, blond, and blue-eyed specimens of homo sapiens.

In a few critical articles from the early 1980s, the two highly regarded historians Arnaldo Momigliano and Carlo Ginzburg claimed that Dumezil himself belonged to the group that opposed the "Judeo-Christian" society. In his research on Indo-European religion and mythology. Dumezil had, they suggested, not only carried out objective studies, but had in fact also sought to support the forces that wanted to re-create a traditional hierarchical order in Europe. Momigliano and Ginzburg argued that Dumezil's theory about the Indo-European tripartite ideology had more to do with the Fascism of the 19305 than with prehistoric religions. According to the two historians, Dumezil's work amounted to an attempt to confer historical background and legitimacy on the Fascist dream of a society that would be harmoniously integrated and, at the same time, hierarchically divided into leaders, soldiers, and workers. By implying that the prehistoric Indo-Europeans had structured their society and their worldview according to a hierarchical tripartite pattern, Dumezil wanted to make the Fascist ideals appear natural, and consequently to make the liberal and socialist ones appear inherently unnatural. Momigliano and Ginzburg even thought they could discern a certain sympathy for the German version of Fascism, or Nazism, in Dumezil's books from the 1930s. However, those who have continued Momigliano's and Ginzburg's ideological critique-in particular, the American historian of religion Bruce Lincoln-have discounted the latter accusation; Lincoln argues that Dumézil was, on the contrary, deeply anchored in a Germanophobic French Fascism.