While kind of a dry read (it might have read better in the original Swedish), Arvidsson has taken on the difficult job of precisely outlining all the variety of ways that people have used the image of the Aryan to serve some particularly agenda, from bolstering Christian authority, to justifying notions of Western political supremacy or providing the foundation for genocidal ideologies. In part the mission here was also to put History of Religion on a better theoretical basis, an important goal to the author in the wake of religion again being important as political ideology. The ideal, as Arvidsson notes in his conclusion, is to demystify the myth-making that makes decision look like destiny, and not simply a veiled political conceit (he would take being called a deconstructionist a compliment).

About the only substantive problem with this book is that it came too late to take into account the fruits of the work of Western & Russian anthropologists collaborating to get a better grasp of what these people might actually have been like. For that you might want to look at David Anthony's "The Horse, the Wheel & Language" for a recent survey. ( )