What Did the Indo-Europeans Believe? Part I

Groundwork and Preliminaries

For Part II, click here.

If you prefer the audio of this article, click here.

Folkish apologetics has started to make waves in the world of Substack, as proven by a number of articles engaging with and attempting to refute it. One such article we responded to in a two-part series, Folkishness Q&A[1][2]. Another one recently appeared which we responded to as well.

Most of these articles have focused on the simplest heuristic we have developed, a rule of thumb we have called the ancestral principle. We must stress that the ancestral principle is not the sum total of folkishness, and folkishness as a whole does not turn on its validity. However, this idea has garnered a great deal of attention because it is easily grasped but also radical in its implications.

The starkest implication is that the question “what should we do” on any topic XYZ is answered by “whatever the oldest legible command for XYZ is”. If you want to know how the family should be ordered, look not to some abstract schema, nor to some internal criterion of what a family is necessarily and in its essence, but to what your grandfather did. What if your grandfather disagreed with his own father? Then order the family as your great-grandfather did. What if your great-grandfather disagreed with his own father? Then do what your great-great-grandfather did. At some point you will reach a limit of intelligibility and that is the final answer.

This is not the place to defend this rule—we have done that elsewhere. It is enough to say that people are seeing in this rule something that needs to be taken very seriously. In this article series, we will answer the question “what specific things does the ancestral principle demand of us?”

The meaning and stakes of the ancestral principle is that what is oldest is most authoritative. Authority is, as we have also argued elsewhere, primordial. In practical terms, this means that the most authoritative source of commands for how we should live, how we should govern ourselves, how we should order our societies—in short, for oughts in general—are the archaic Aryans, also known as the Proto-Indo-Europeans. (I will simply call them the “Indo-Europeans” henceforth.) They are the foundation upon which all subsequent authority rests—yes, epistemic authority too.

In dealing with the beliefs of the Indo-Europeans, we must make a distinction here which is crucial (and which, again, we have made elsewhere). You have noticed that we have been speaking thus far of commands more than beliefs. These are foundationally different things, and it is critical to understand that a) any question of what we should do cashes out to a command, and that b) commands are non-discursive, meaning that unlike beliefs, they do not have a truth-value. With one exception in part III, we will not be saying much about what the Indo-Europeans thought was true, but rather what they thought was right, which is to say, what they commanded. Grasping this non-discursivity is key to understanding morality.

Still, just to keep things more understandable, we will use the term “belief” (perhaps somewhat loosely). When we say that the Indo-Europeans “believed in patriarchy”, this doesn’t mean that patriarchy is or even could be “true”—that is a category error and leads to all kinds of deep problems that modernity (and, for that matter, Axial religions) render insoluble. We will be speaking almost exclusively of practices rather than strict beliefs.

But before we do that, we must answer a few preliminary questions.

First, can the worldview and practices of the Indo-Europeans be reconstructed? A thought-terminating cliché has proliferated in anti-pagan apologetics that no they can’t. These articles will answer that yes they can. We can say with great certitude what these “great-great-grandfathers” of ours believed on many matters. Perhaps not all matters—perhaps not even on some very important matters—but on enough to offer substantive correctives to how we now live, and how we have lived for ages. We have been off-track for a very long time, and only now that the cancer has become terminal can we see that what we once mistook for health turns out, in the fullness of time, to be an early form of sickness.

Second, why reconstruct the worldview and practices of the Indo-Europeans? We have alluded to this already. They are the most impressive folk ever to live. They colonized the world so completely that almost half the globe speaks a dialect of their language. Their frameworks—whether moral, theological, or indeed epistemic—are the foundation of all later such frameworks among our folk. In establishing the commands of the Indo-Europeans, we are establishing the deepest available moral as well as epistemic foundationalism. Reaching back to these roots is the sole alternative to the “choose your own god” paradigm that later colonized us and then left us bereft of gods altogether; the sole alternative to wringing our hands over our ancestors as braindead, morally bankrupt savages; the sole alternative to being a footnote in someone else’s sacred history; the sole alternative to our spiritual axis bending toward a foreign land.

What the Indo-Europeans believed has immense weight and urgency for us as daughter-peoples. The implications for the folkish worldview are deep and systemic. What they established, and the commands they have bequeathed to us, are the non-negotiables. There is of course great room within this imperative framework for the Germanics to remain Germanic, Celts to remain Celtic, English to remain English, Italians to remain Italic, and so forth. But this imperative framework is not infinitely flexible—it is robust enough to offer substantial correctives to how we live, even to the earlier Indo-European branches. But this is the basic framework, and it is sufficiently legible to us that we can see that we are in dire need of its correction.

Non-pagans often complain that paganisms are “not living religions”. While they may not strictly be continuous religions, the accusation of being “dead” could not be less apt. A dead religion is a religion whose every theological move has been made. A dead religion is a religion bereft of movement, with every question answered, every apologetic nailed down with algorithmic precision, every liturgical or ritual mystery rationalized, annotated, categorized, and explained to death. That is not even a religion—is it a fossilized, sclerotic, dead husk that presides not over a living faith, but over a museum exhibit. If anything, paganisms are the most alive religions, because there is work to do. We hope you will join us in that work, because nothing brings greater joy and purpose than participating in the revival of your deepest and most treasured patrimony, to the glory of the gods of your fathers, who have given you the tools to succeed.

This article series offers a mere start toward that end. Before long, you will get an entry in the Imperium Press Practical Guides series with specific and actionable religious praxis in performing the cult of ancestors—the ur-religion of the Indo-Europeans.¹ This article series is not that. Consider this a sort of overview of the most primordial moral and religious commands, which we can only sketch out in outline.

Next week we will make that start, and will begin that outline.

1. Probably in 2026.