Isaac Bonewits founded ADF with the goal of "researching and expanding sound modern scholarship about the ancient Celts and other Indo-European peoples, in order to reconstruct what the Old Religions of Europe really were." Bonewits wanted to focus on scholarship as a reaction to more revisionist types of Neopaganism, such as those claiming direct descent from a "Great Matriarchy" of pre-historic times (see James Frazer's The Golden Bough). The works of Georges Dumézil on Indo-European social structures and mythologies were especially influential in Bonewits's thinking.