Academics From The United States

"If you pick the heart up and look at the bottom... there are s... a spiral going inside-out, and outside-in. The same reciprocal spirals happen in flowers. ...[T]he circles get bigger as they get further outward. ...[T]hat increase in size is the secret of growth. ...[T]hese beautiful reciprocal spirals... are not just in daisies, but you see this in seashells... you pick the tip of the spiral... or the shell up... it becomes a , just like the heart... or the horns of an eland. ...Inside the horns ...are spirals within spirals. ...[T]he spirals... go into the... blueprint of life...in DNA between the sugar and the s. The use of the same reciprocal spirals exist in the microscopic way, just as they exist macroscopically in the galaxy. ...We all have spirals in our fingertips... But your finger is different than somebody else's finger, and that's because there is harmony in variance."

"[N]ot only does the fingertip have a spiral, but [there is] the spiral at the tip of your heart. Perhaps the tip of your heart is your apical fingertip. ...The ventricle, which is the beating part of the heart, has a spiral... it goes from inside-out, and outside-in. That spiral is very typical. It goes down to the apex of the heart, the tip of the heart, which is a vortex. The thing that really makes the heart a part of an active way of living."

"[I]f you look at the diseases we see... a narrowing in the coronary artery... a valve becomes leaky, either the or the , or people who have muscular disease. The heart changes from an ellipse to a sphere. In a sense... from a football to a basketball. ...[T]here's alteration in the fiber direction of the ventricle."

"Pythagoras... described the golden section: the small is to the large as the large is to the whole... Throughout nature, there is a symphony of harmonies between... parts. ... ...defined this concept of harmony between parts as a ... Throughout nature... logarithmic spirals are commonplace. ...[T]he logarithmic spiral of DNA, a double helix holding the sugar and phosphate ions... the recipe for the blueprint of... life. ...[W]e can proceed upward ...to observe the ...in ...enormous macroscopic form."

"To unfold the heart, we must separate the aorta from the pulmonary artery... to expose the free wall of the right ventricle. ...[W]e must unfold the helix of the heart ...unroofing ...the from its ventricular attachment to separate the ascending and descending [helix] limbs... by unwrapping the coil. ...[A] longitudinal myocardial band is demonstrated that corresponds directly to an open stretched rope. ...Dr Torrent-Guasp has performed this unfolding or unscrolling while dissecting an intact heart... to define the intact myocardium as a single muscle band that extends between the aorta at its termination to the at its beginning. ...A fascinating study was done by Dr P. P. Lunkenheimer... which can counteract concerns that this... may not be repro-ducible..."

"The classic view of cardiac anatomy relates to contracting and relaxing, or more specifically, constricting to narrow and eject, and dilating to widen and fill. This sequence was defined by William Harvey. However, the predominant motion of the heart is... rather shortening and narrowing. There are four fundamental motions... narrowing, shortening, lengthening, and widening... a downward twisting of the muscle fibers... shorten and thicken and thereby make the heart eject. This twisting or torsion was described by Borelli, in the 1600s, to simulate the wringing of a rag. ...[P]rogression of contraction into the ascending segment ...results in twisting and thickening in an opposite direction. This sequence is followed by relaxation to allow the ventricle to fill during the remainder of the diastolic phase. ...[T]he heart twists to eject and reciprocally twists to fill in a clockwise and counterclockwise manner... twisting and untwisting of the conical heart muscle in reciprocal directions. ...[T]he predominant action is shortening and lengthening, rather than narrowing and widening... ejection during shortening and suction to fill during lengthening..."

"William Harvey... who in England discovered the circulation... wrote this wonderful book called Anatomical Exercises... [S]uddenly he is here with the new idea of the circulation and some other ideas... He contradicted Vesalius who fitted to the Galenic system of ebb and flow concept. That's the twist and suction that the heart always has. Harvey says it didn't happen that way. It didn't dilate and take the shape of cupping glass and suck blood into it. Well, Harvey was a brilliant and wonderful person, but he wasn't perfect, and he was wrong. Because the heart does exactly what he said it didn't do."

"[A] normal heart... is twisting and it's very happy. But... a sick heart... it's dilated and not very efficient. ...What you have to make, is a basketball into a football. ...[A]s you do this operation, it's... not very complicated. Here's the dilated ventricle with the scar in it. We basically open the scar, put a little stitch in there, bring the edges together, throw a patch in there and fix the ventricle. ...The job is to make abnormality normality... restore nature, restore the natural form."

"Sudden death... cardiac arrest... occurs because the heart suddenly stops (having either no beat, or develops a totally ineffective beat such as ). CPR is typically performed... and if one is available, a defibrillator... restoring the heartbeat. Yet... the harsh reality is that 85 to 90% of these patients die, and severe brain damage develops in half of those who do survive. ...CPR, defibrillation ...does not address the heart defect ...[W]hy stay so stubbornly attached to a method in which 85 to 90% of patients perish?"

"The spiral formation within the helical heart conforms nicely to the mathematical description of spiral described by ... [A]fter manual dissection of the ascending segment from the descending segment... [t]hese lengths have a harmonic proportion, and... conform... to the ratio Pythagoras described within the golden section: the small is to the large as the large is to the whole. ...[A] hidden harmony of spirals... [that] starts with the master plan of DNA, a double helix..."

"The position I (Lincoln) urge is the following. First, we accept as established the existence of a language family that included Tocharian, Indic, Iranian, Armenian, Anatolian, Greek, Italic, Phrygian, Thracian, Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, and Celtic. Second, we acknowledge that the relations among these languages can be described in several fashions. Of the available hypotheses, the Stammbaum model is the most popular, but by no means the only one. It ought not to be accepted as long as others exists, and we ought not discard these others unless there is compelling reason to do so. In the absence of such compelling reason, we can remain agnostic, recognizing the existence of multiple hypotheses and maintaining a particularly skeptical posture toward those with histories of subtexts of racism. Third, we recognize that the existence of a language family does not necessarily imply the existence of a protolanguage. Still less the existence of a protopeople, protomyths, protoideology, or protohomeland (Lincoln 1999, p. 216)."

"Similarly, the Journal of Indo-European Studies (1973-) is guided by Roger Pearson (1927-), founder of the Northern League for Pan-Nordic Friendship and former director of the World Anti-Communist League (a position from which he was, rather incredibly, ousted for extremist excesses). A man who has been described as "one of the most persistent neo-Nazis in the world," "one of the foremost Nazi apologists in America," and "one of the best-connected racialists in the world," Pearson centers his writings on the relation of race, intelligence, and eugenics. 122"

"After the Nazis and their views had been defeated, Marija Gimbutas won considerable support for this thesis in a series of publications that began in 1956...The Soviet takeover of her native Lithuania was a transparent subtext.215"

"One can perceive a hierarchy of prestige and a legitimation strategy in the citation practices of those who write on Indo-European myth, religion, and civilization. Those who publish in the most scurrilous sources fail to provide footnotes at all, or do so in quite haphazard fashion. Those whose writings appear in Nouvelle Ecole and Mankind Quarterly, however, regularly invoke articles from the more reputable Etudes indo-europeennes and JIES to establish their scholarly bona fides. In the latter publications and the very best books, authors tend to base themselves on the writings of Georges Dumezil as the firm rock on which all can rest, secure against challenge. 123"

"The debate around Dumézil, Pearson, Haudry, Indo-European scholarship, and Fascism made Lincoln add his support to those who felt that the Indo- European scene had to be cleaned up. In several articles, Lincoln argued that it could actually be proved that Dumézil's sympathies for French and Italian Fascism had influenced his scientific research of the 1930s. As a consequence of this, Lincoln became more or less persona non grata among the Indo-Europeanists of the United States, and references to his work declined. In the 1990s, Lincoln continued to critically study the history of Indo-European scholarship, which resulted in Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship. His studies of Indo-European mythology have now made him question the very belief in an objective historiography, and he sees the scientific search for knowledge as a site for political power struggles. The work of cultural studies is, according to Lincoln, "myth plus footnotes.""

"After 1880, attitudes shifted , and scholars ... argued in favor of locating the origins of the world-conquering Aryan people on their own soil in the Germanic north. And when the aggressive tendency to conflate the Aryan with the Nordic caused alarm in the 1920s and 1930s, scholars who had their reasons for opposing the Nazis,... advocated a homeland out on the Russian steppes.215"

"All of these exercises in scholarship ( = myth + footnotes) suffer from the same problem . They attempt to reach so far back into prehistory that no textual sources are available to control the inquiry, but where archeology offers a plethora of data. In practice, all the remains found throughout Eurasia for a period of several millennia can be constituted as evidence from which to craft the final narrative, but it is often the researchers' desires that determine their principles of selection. When neither the data nor the criticism of one's colleagues inhibits desire-driven invention, the situation is ripe for scholarship as myth. Prehistory here becomes "pre-" in a radical sense: a terrain of frustration and opportunity where historians-cum -mythographers can offer origin accounts- complete with heroes, adventures, great voyages, and a primordial paradise lost- all of which reflect and advance the interests of those who tell them . Ideology in narrative form. 215"

"This combination of clockwise and counterclockwise vortexes is common in nature. For example, within the flower bud of a daisy..."

"Conceivably, the Stammbaum theory is correct, although its logic involves leaps that are open to question. First, it explains the relation among the Indo-European languages as the result of divergence from a hypothetical protolanguage, or Ursprache. In theory, however, one can also explain this as resulting from processes of convergence, rather than divergence, as N. S. Trubetzkoy argued in a famous article published on the eve of the Second World War. Pace the Stammbaum, Trubetzkoy offered a wave model, in which each group in a string of peoples had its own language and interacted socially and linguistically with its neighbors (Lincoln 1999, p. 212)."

"Other authors have challenged the Stammbaum model on other grounds, observing that even if the historically attested Indo-European languages did descend from a single proto-language, the existence of this ancestral language by no means implies the existence of a single, ethnically homogeneous people who spoke it. Thus Franco Crevatin suggested that Swahili—an artificial lingua franca, spoken across vast portions of Africa as an instrument to facilitate long distance trade—may be a better analogue than Latin for theorizing Proto-Indo-European. His desire, like Trubetzkoy's, seems to be to imagine a more irenic, more diverse past as a means to guard against scholarly narratives that encode racism and bellicosity. In Crevatin's view there was a Proto-Indo-European language and there were people who spoke it for certain finite purposes, but no community of Proto-Indo-Europeans. Similar is Stefan Zimmer's position, intended as a rebuke of racist theories, hypothesizing a protolanguage spoken not be an ethnically pristine Urvolk but by a shifting, nomadic colluvies gentium, a "filthy confluence of peoples," (Lincoln 1999, pp. 212-213)."

"We all have to be students, who are often wrong and always in doubt, while a professor is sometimes wrong and never in doubt. Please join me on my student pathway..."

"Nature contains many pathways of clockwise and counterclockwise spirals that are called reciprocal spirals. One example of natural reciprocal spirals is the sea shell. If one takes the tip of that shell and draws it outward, the formation becomes a helix... very similar to the shape of the heart."

"These helical patterns are common in many animals with horns, such as the ram or eland... [I]n combat... they do not break, because nature introduces... the formation of spirals within spirals... nature’s way of supporting one structure within itself. In a larger sense, nature introduces a harmony of structures from both outside and inside the visible shape."

"[T]he heart... is, in reality, a that contains an apex. The cardiac helix form... was described in the 1660s by Lower as having an apical , in which the muscle fibers go from outside in, in a clockwise way, and from inside out, in a counterclockwise direction."

"It is universally believed that just five minutes or more of no blood flow to the brain is always lethal. We had already verified that controlled reflow of blood after a heart attack (adding specific chemical ingredients...) returns healthy cardiac function. We tested if a similar recovery could occur in the brain... and showed an astounding return of complete brain function after 30 minutes of no brain blood flow! ...Yet ...the NIH rejected our request for funding to study this further. They... deemed this... as "not interesting.""

"I used [Paco's] heart model... as my guide, to place pacemaker electrodes through a location on top of the septum... to reach the natural conducting system. The twisting motion was immediately reproduced to create normal heart performance! This approach was applied to over 700 patients around the world... and yielded similarly positive outcomes. Yet conventional cardiac approaches have not changed. Why..? Manufacturers would need to produce new types of pacemakers... Cardiologists would need to learn new techniques... Acquiring proficiency... is a little harder at first, but once learned, requires only 20... minutes of added [surgery] time."

"[O]ur lab studies on test subjects... implied that while CPR plays a positive role in treating witnessed arrest (when applied quickly once the heart stops beating)... application of CPR in unwitnessed arrest (when there is a delay before its use) is... wrong... because after the brain has been ischemic... CPR will return normal blood to the brain. ...Yet medicine continues endorsing this approach—despite the 99% mortality."

"I have a way of looking at things, because I discover failure and find solutions. ...I'm grateful that I've been able to implement medical care that's given, but realize there are major limitations, major failures... I have spent... fifty years finding solutions to many of those different problems."

"Counterclockwise and clockwise spirals exist within our fingertips. ...[T]his harmonic pattern within our fingertips also occurs in our heart, where clockwise and counterclockwise spirals are evident at the apex [lower tip]... shown in 1864 by Pettigrew... [W]e look at the heart anatomically and observe the internal and external spiral loops ...previously called the bulbospiral and sinospiral loops. Their infolding into the heart develops a pathway... similar to those that appear in the Handbook of Physiology and were made by Dr. . Their format characterizes a structural problem... called the of anatomy."

"An alternate and effective three-step approach has been used experimentally... First, CPR specifically designed to provide sufficient blood pressure is employed to ensure blood nourishment to the brain. Second, body circulation is supported using a small portable heart-lung machine whose catheters easily access the groin arteries. ...Third, the dead heart is then brought back to life by the delivery of blood containing ...added ingredients ...[T]his new method was applied internationally to 34 sudden death patients. ...80% ...survived ...only one patient sustained brain injury. ...[W]ith present methods... 100% will die if CPR/defibrillation does not return an efficient heartbeat within 15 minutes. Yet these 34 patients underwent CPR for an average of 72 minutes... Because it also treated the cause behind the sudden death and not just the symptom (the heart stopping)."

"Dr Torrent-Guasp... formalized this description by indicating that the heart looked like a "rope"... [in] three parts: a beginning and an end at the and ; a wraparound loop called a basal loop; and... a helix that he called the apical loop. ...He described a [billion year old] worm... with a vascular tube... like a rope, with a venous and an arterial system. ...[F]ish evolved to show the first generation of a heart, containing a single pumping chamber, and included gills... [Next] the amphibian and the reptile appeared, in which we observe an atrium and a ventricle. Each chamber was separated by an atrial and ventricular septal defect. Human beings developed... [later] and both the atrial defect and the ventricular defect are closed."

"At 20 days of life, the heart of an evolving human being looks like a worm... At 25 days... a clear-cut... single pump... In a sense, we mirror... a fish... At 30 days, the embryologic heart contains a patent ventricular septal defect and an atrial septal defect... we resemble the amphibian and the reptile... Finally, at 50 days... an intact atrial and ventricular septum.... our cardiac evolution encompasses 1 billion years of the phylogenetic development."

"[T]he age-old obstacle to growth, it's called rigidity. ...When you talk about... finding an answer, proving it, and nobody uses it. A book called ' by ... it was about... who worked in a maternity ward and found that many women after they gave birth... would die. ...He found the women that lived were delivered by the wet nurses and the women that died were delivered by the doctors... He realized that the doctors that would deliver the babies, go across the street [and] do an autopsy, but there's no germ theory. The doctors would wipe off their hands, and go back and infect the women. ...[H]e said, what you have to do is to wash your hands. He told the Titans of medicine. They still exist today. All these Titans of medicine that know everything, that you're doing it wrong. ...[T]hey didn't listen to him but eventually... it did win, it was right, because truth always wins."

"Indeed, it is possible to perceive a certain confusion among them, reflecting the contradictory impulses of those on the French right in the late 1930s, whose nationalism made them antagonistic to Germany at the same time their ideology made them sympathetic to many of Hitler's positions. That Dumézil held such views is hardly surprising, given the circles he frequented during those years and what we know from his pseudonymous writings. 137"

"What differentiates him from others of like opinion is the intricate scholarly code he developed, through which he made the arcane data of Indo-European mythology serve as the vehicles for his views, and through which his work came to command the attention of scholars everywhere. the body of work he produced is so challenging, so dense, and so influential, it deserves continued attention but attention of a critical variety. 137"

"However appealing it may be, this picture of a science dégagée is hardly credible. Political interests have often figured powerfully in discussions of Indo-European (aka "Aryan") religion and society. This was particularly true in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, not only in Germany-so much is obvious-but also beyond, and some of Dumezil's closest colleagues can be numbered among the worst offenders. 125"

"No Germanist was more influential on Dumezil than Höfler, nor more closely associated with him throughout his career, except the Dutch historian of religions Jan de Vries (1890-1964), whose Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte (1935-37) remains a model of encyclopedic learning.... Also noteworthy is the Swedish Indo-Europeanist Stig Wikander (1908- 83 ), who remained a close friend and made fundamental contributions to Dumezil's thought over a period of five decades. 125ff"

"Finally, when those on the New Right, like Alain de Benoist, Jean Haudry, or Roger Pearson, cite Dumézil's wrtings in support of their postiions - their fondness for hierarchy and authority, for example, their antipathy toward egalitarianism and the ideals of the Enlightenment, or their triumphal view of "Indo-Europeans" as superior to all other peoples - we may suspect them of appropriating nothing other than postions of the Old Right that have been brilliantly recoded and misrepresented first as ancient wisdom, and second as scholarly discourse. 137"

"Since the atrocities of the Nazis in the Second World War, the term "Aryan" has virtually disappeared from polite conversation. Scholars who wish to pursue the old discourse while marking their distance from its less savory aspects now use the term "(Proto-)Indo-European," also a coinage of the nineteenth century. In doing so, many sincerely believe they have thereby sanitized the discourse and solved the problems, but things are not so simple. Often such euphemizing attempts are incomplete, superficial, evasive, and disingenuously amnesiac (Lincoln 1999, pp. 94-95)."

"To be sure, neither Jones nor anyone else was wrong to perceive strong and systematic similarities among Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and the rest. The question is what one makes of these similarities, and one steps onto a slippery slope whenever analysis moves from the descriptive to the historic plane of linguistics. In specific, reconstructing a "protolanguage" is an exercise that invites one to imagine speakers of that protolanguage, a community of such people, then a place for that community, a time in history, distinguishing characteristics, and a set of contrastive relations with other protocommunities where other protolanguages were spoken. For all of this, need it be said, there is no sound evidentiary warrant."

"Dumezil was an entirely different sort of person from Pearson, Haudry, and de Benoist, infinitely more intelligent, decent, and much, much less crude. To the best of my knowledge, he had no dealings with Pearson, and over the years he maintained a cautiously ambiguous relation with me two others, both of whom courted him avidly. 123"

"Reading Jones with these preconceptions and interests, Germans rapidly came to see themselves as a Volk with a much deeper, more glorious, and more heroic past than anyone previously dared to imagine. Germans were relieved of the need to compete with Greeks and Romans, for they now discovered themselves part of the same primordial group. Since India was assumed to be the oldest member of that group, interest in Sanskrit burgeoned, as did the prestige for all things ancient and Indic, particularly after publication of Friedrich Schlegel's Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808), which made the case for India as the Aryan homeland (Lincoln 1999, pp. 55-56)."

"One might think this position (that the English colonialist should convert their Indian "brethren" to the Gospel) would have endeared Max Muller to missionaries, but in fact it did not. Rather, they found him entirely too sympathetic to the "heathen" and suspected him of being insufficiently committed to the faith. Accordingly, in 1860 he was passed over for Oxford's Boden chair in Sanskrit, which carried responsibility for preparing the Sanskrit-English dictionary, both of which were intended, under the terms of Lt-Col Boden's will, to advance the conversion of Indians to Christianity, not to foster English understanding or respect for India (Lincoln 1999, p. 68, parenthesis added)."

"Herder developed his theory of Asia as the original homeland and site of human unity in the second volume of his Ideen, which appeared in 1785. One year later, the English Orientalist Sir William Jones (1746-94) delivered the famous lecture in which he posited the common origin of the languages to which others would later give the names "Aryan," "Indoger- manisch," and "Indo-European." After another three years,.Jones set the Urheimat of that linguistic commwlity also in central Asia. The coinci- dence is not the result of influence either scholar exerted on the other, but of common preconceptions based on their reading of the Bible. 54"

"His accomplishments and large body of admirers notwithstanding, Jones's reputation has slipped in recent years, particularly since Edward Said traced the genealogy of Orientalism—that is, an acquisitive, dominating, classifying, and distorting exercise of knowledge and power in the service of Western imperial interests—directly to Sir William's door (Lincoln 1999, p. 84)."

"Even the unhappy example of scholarship on myth, particularly that on Aryan or Indo-European myth, is one forced to conclude that scholarly discourse is simply another instance of ideology in narrative form? The topic is a painful but important one for me, as I continue my struggle to extricate from a discipline, a paradigm, and a discourse that I adopted early in my academic career with insufficient critical reflection. To a certain extent, writing this book has been an attempt to undo my (Lincoln's) earlier lack of awareness and make amends for it (Lincoln 1999, p. xii).""

"For his part, Eliade has been accused of using comparative method in an uncontrolled and tendentious fashion to advance both an idiosyncratic theology and political views that date to his involvement with the Romanian Iron Guard during the 1930s and 1940s. 13 In sinlliar fashion, Dumezil, who aligned himself with the Action Franc;:aise in his youth and flirted with the Nouvelle Droite in his later years, has also been charged with weaving fascist ideology into his reconstructions of Indo-European myths. 145"

"First, the hypothesis for which Sir William Jones is most famous had deep antecedents and was always problematic. Most immediately, Jones was influenced by Jacob Bryant's bibliocentric attempt to trace all world mythology back to Ham and all right religion to Shem. 94"

""As a student of history of religions, I (Lincoln) was taught that Fredric Max Muller inaugurated our discipline but his work on "comparative mythology" foundered on his own incompetence, as did the later attempt of Sir James George Frazer. The field was rescued, so the narrative went, by Dumezil with the support of some talented colleagues, Wikander, Otto Hoffer, Jan De Vries, and Emile Benveniste among them. Older scholars also entered my awareness, including Hermann Guntert, Herman Lommel, Walter Wust, Rudolf Much, Franz Altheirm, Richard Reitzenstein, and Hans Heinrich Schaeder, and many of these men were deeply involved with the Nazi movement. To that side of their work, however, I was largely blind. Instead of dangerous ideologues, I saw talented linguists, erudite Orientalist (a word not yet suspect), and trailblazing students of myth. Whatever questions I had—and they were not many—were deftly deflected. The "Aryan thesis" was fundamentally sound, I was told, although Hitler and Co. had badly abused it. But no one spoke of "Aryans'" anymore or located their (presumed) Urheimat in Scandinavia, Germany, or the North Pole. Rather, the postwar discourse dealt with Indo-Europeans, elided questions of race, and placed the origin of this sanitized people off to the east, on the Russian steppes. In the pages that follow, I hope to show that things are not so simple and the problems-moral and intellectual­ that attend this discourse and discipline are not so easily resolved."

"When one permits those whom one studies to define the terms in which they will be understood, suspends one’s interest in the temporal and contingent, or fails to distinguish between “truths,” “truth-claims,” and “regimes of truth,” one has ceased to function as historian or scholar, In that moment, a variety of roles are available: some perfectly respectable (amanuensis, collector, friend and advo­ cate), and some less appealing (cheerleader, voyeur, retailer of import goods). None, however should be confused with scholarship."