H.F.K. Günther

The Religious Attitudes of the Indo-Europeans

By Hans F.K. Günther. Leading pre-war racial scientist Hans F.K. Günther provides an insightful overview of the religion of pre-Christian Indo-European peoples from India to Iceland. Through a comparison of the basic values, teachings, practices and holy books, he identifies to commonalities which underpinned all those religions, and then juxtaposes them against Christianity.

Included in this broad scope is an analysis of the Indian, Persian, Sacaean, Armenian, Slavic and Baltic languages, and of the Greek, Italian, Celtic and Teutonic dialects. He concludes that it is possible to determine a common or primal Indo-European language, approximating to the latter part of the early Stone Age.

In the same way, through an examination of the laws and legal customs of the different Indo-European languages, he also reveals a primal Indo-European attitude towards law and social structure.

Finally, a comparison of the different Indo-European religious forms reveals that the weltanschauung of the Indo-European folk are the product of their nature and are a distinctive behavioral trait of those people.

This work also points out the cultural decay which would result from Europe moving away from this rich tradition and racial background:

“There is no possible hope, under these circumstances, that the great spiritual and religious heights which were reached by the Indo-Europeans living between Europe and India at various times from the Bronze Age up to the nineteenth century will ever be matched again.

“For a world culture such as progressives seek to construct, an elevation of the spirit above and beyond the entertainment needs of the masses — above Jazz and Negro rhythm — is no longer to be hoped for, since what Europeans and North Americans have to offer today to the ‘undeveloped’ peoples (who, however, should have been able to utilise the 10,000 to 20,000 years which have passed since the end of the Old Stone Age for their own development), is nothing more than the spiritually vacuous ‘culture’ of a welfare state governed by a hundred soulless authorities.

“In such societies the Press, literature, radio, television and films and other media provide the masses with a controlled ‘tensioning’ and ‘de-tensioning’ by alternately playing up this or that belief or unbelief. With the further extinction of families capable of spiritual independence, and the further disappearance of talents, particularly amongst the peoples of North America and Europe capable of spiritual leadership, no alternative to the disappearance of the last remaining elements of the Indo-European peoples and their culture can be expected.”

About the author: Hans Friedrich Karl Günther (1891– 1968) was Germany’s pre-eminent racial scientist in the 1920s, and taught at the universities of Jena, Berlin, and Freiburg. He was appointed to the chair of racial theory at the University of Jena in May 1930 he was appointed to a new chair of racial theory at Jena. In 1935 he became a professor at the University of Berlin, teaching race science, human biology and rural ethnography. From 1940 to 1945 he was professor at Albert Ludwigs University. He was arrested in 1945, and after three years detention, was released when no charges could be brought against him. He remained active in the field of racial science after the war and produced several more books related to eugenics and racial betterment.

98 pages. Paperback.

$10.95

Additional information

Weight 4.62 oz
Dimensions 6 × 0.2 × 9 in
Writer

H.F.K. Günther

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