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Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology Practice

About Specification

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previously unpublished — fall into three parts.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 Dumézil, Lincoln argues that Dumézil'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.