Book by Bruce Lincoln

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{Even as the likes of Romila Thapar and PAOLA E. RAFFETTA swear by Bruce Lincoln, he is extremely skeptical about the existence of a PIE religion - Kishore patnaik}

 

 

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One

of the world's leading specialists in Indo-European religion and

society, Bruce Lincoln expresses in these essays his severe doubts

about the existence of a much-hypothesized prototypical Indo-European

religion. Written over fifteen years, the essays—six of them previously

unpublished—fall into three parts. Part I deals with matters

" Indo-European " in a relatively unproblematized way, exploring a set of

haunting images that recur in descriptions of the Otherworld from many

cultures. While Lincoln later rejects this methodology, these chapters

remain the best available source of data for the topics they address.

In Part II, Lincoln takes the data for each essay from a single culture

area and shifts from the topic of dying to that of killing. Of

particular interest are the chapters connecting sacrifice to

physiology, a master discourse of antiquity that brought the cosmos,

the human body, and human society into an ideologically charged

correlation. Part III presents Lincoln's most controversial case

against a hypothetical Indo-European protoculture. Reconsidering the

work of the prominent Indo-Europeanist Georges Dumeacute;zil, Lincoln

argues that Dumeacute;zil's writings were informed and inflected by

covert political concerns characteristic of French fascism. This

collection is an invaluable resource for students of myth, ritual,

ancient societies, anthropology, and the history of religions. Bruce

Lincoln is professor of humanities and religious studies at the

University of Minnesota.-