BY THE DAWN OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, Europeans had already held formed beliefs about India for over two thousand years. The core of these ideas was the notion that in India primordial knowledge older than that of Europe was guarded by high priests and demonic beasts, for two traditions of viewing India had developed: a vision of an enlightened land of primeval wisdom, or a savage place dominated by monsters. At the same time, beginning during the Protestant Reformation some European thinkers developed the idea that all Europeans were ethnically “Germans,” and they described the earliest Gothic tribes using terminology evocative of the language in earlier accounts of noble Indian Brahmins. A balanced understanding of the Romantic-era context of the European encounter with India that forms the nucleus of this study thus necessitates following these strands from as far back as we can locate them up to the periods in which they began to overlap, on the cusp of the Romantic Age. This chapter is therefore divided into three sections that address the beginnings of the Indo-German identification. The first concentrates on the classical European tradition of emphasizing the wisdom of Indian Brahmins, the second highlights the medieval tradition of describing the demons that supposedly dwelt in South Asia, and the third focuses on the Reformationera descriptions of the Goths as an original, blessedly simple race.