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Aryan race
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The Aryan race is a concept in European culture that was influential in the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It derives from the idea that the original speakers of the Indo-European languages and their descendants up to the present day constitute a distinctive race. Belief in the existence of the Aryan race is sometimes referred to as Aryanism (not to be confused with the unrelated Christian religious belief known as Arianism).
Origin and background of the concept
The term Aryan originates with the Indo-Iranian self-designation arya, attested in the ancient texts of Hinduism and Zoroastrianism, the Rigveda and the Avesta.
Since, in the 18th century, the most ancient known "Indo-European" languages were those of the Indo-Iranians' ancestors, the word Aryan was adopted to refer not only to the Indo-Iranian people, but also to Indo-European speakers as a whole, including the Armenians, Greeks, Romans and Germans.
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Encyclopedia
The Aryan race is a concept in European culture that was influential in the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It derives from the idea that the original speakers of the Indo-European languages and their descendants up to the present day constitute a distinctive race. Belief in the existence of the Aryan race is sometimes referred to as Aryanism (not to be confused with the unrelated Christian religious belief known as Arianism).
Origin and background of the concept
The term Aryan originates with the Indo-Iranian self-designation arya, attested in the ancient texts of Hinduism and Zoroastrianism, the Rigveda and the Avesta.
Since, in the 18th century, the most ancient known "Indo-European" languages were those of the Indo-Iranians' ancestors, the word Aryan was adopted to refer not only to the Indo-Iranian people, but also to Indo-European speakers as a whole, including the Armenians, Greeks, Romans and Germans. It was soon recognised that Balts, Celts, Slavs also belonged to the same group. It was argued that all of these languages originated from a common root — now known as Proto-Indo-European — spoken by an ancient people who must have been the original ancestors of the European, Iranian, and Indo-Aryan peoples. The ethnic group composed of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and their modern descendants was termed the Aryans.
This usage was common in the late 19th and early 20th century. An example of an influential best-selling book that reflects this usage is the 1920 book The Outline of History by H. G. Wells. In it he wrote of the accomplishments of the Aryan people, stating how they "learned methods of civilization" while "Sargon II and Sardanapalus were ruling in Assyria and fighting with Babylonia and Syria and Egypt". As such, Wells suggested that the Aryans had eventually "subjugated the whole ancient world, Semitic, Aegean and Egyptian alike".
The use of 'Aryan' as a synonym for 'Indo-European' or 'Indo-Iranian' today is regarded by many as obsolete and politically incorrect, but may still occasionally appear in material based on older scholarship, or written by persons accustomed to older usage, such as in a 1989 article in Scientific American by Colin Renfrew.
Racial interpretations of the term
Max Müller is often identified as the first writer to speak of an Aryan "race" in English. In his Lectures on the Science of Language in 1861 he referred to Aryans as a race of people. However, when this was interpreted to imply a biologically distinct sub-group of humanity, he soon clarified that he simply meant a line of descent, insisting that it was very dangerous to mix linguistics and anthropology. "The Science of Language and the Science of Man cannot be kept too much asunder…I must repeat what I have said many times before, it would be wrong to speak of Aryan blood as of dolichocephalic grammar". He restated his opposition to this method in 1888 in his essay Biographies of words and the home of the Aryas.
Müller was responding to the development of racial anthropology, and the influence of the work of Arthur de Gobineau who argued that the Indo-Europeans represented a superior branch of humanity. A number of later writers, such as the French anthropologist Vacher de Lapouge in his book L'Aryen, argued that this superior branch could be identified biologically by using the cephalic index (a measure of head shape) and other indicators. He argued that the long-headed "dolichocephalic-blond" Europeans, characteristically found in northern Europe, were natural leaders, destined to rule over more "brachiocephalic" (short headed) peoples..
This argument led to the claim that Nordic peoples of northern Europe were the ideal model of the Aryan race, an argument that was supplemented by the view that the Indo-European languages had originated there. This claim became increasingly important during the nineteenth century. In the mid 19th century, it was commonly believed that the Aryans originated in the southwestern steppes of present-day Russia. However, by the late 19th century the steppe theory of Aryan origins was challenged by view that the Aryans originated in ancient Germany or Scandinavia, or at least that in those countries the original Aryan ethnicity had been preserved. The German origin of the Aryans was especially promoted by the archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna, who claimed that the Proto-Indo-European peoples were identical to the Corded Ware culture of Neolithic Germany. This idea was widely circulated in both intellectual and popular culture by the early twentieth century.
Other anthropologists contested such claims. In Germany, Rudolf Virchow launched a study of craniometry, which prompted him to denounce "Nordic mysticism" in the 1885 Anthropology Congress in Karlsruhe, while Josef Kollmann , a collaborator of Virchow, stated in the same congress that the people of Europe, be they English, German, French, and Spaniard belonged to a "mixture of various races," furthermore declaring that the "results of craniology" led to "struggle against any theory concerning the superiority of this or that European race" on others.
Virchow's contribution to the debate sparked a controversy. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a strong supporter of the theory of a superior Aryan race, attacked Josef Kollmann arguments in detail. While the "Aryan race" theory remained popular, in particular in Germany, some authors defended Virchow's perspective, in particular Otto Schrader, Rudolph von Jhering and the ethnologist Robert Hartmann (1831-1893), who proposed to ban the notion of "Aryan" from anthropology.
British Raj
In India, under the British Empire, the British rulers also used the idea of a distinct Aryan race in order to ally British power with the Indian caste system. It was widely claimed that the Aryans were white people who had invaded India in ancient times, subordinating the darker skinned native Dravidian peoples, who were pushed to the south. Thus the foundation of Hinduism was ascribed to northern invaders who had established themselves as the dominant castes, and who were supposed to have created the sophisticated Vedic texts. Much of these theories were simply conjecture fueled by European imperialism. This styling of an Aryan invasion by British colonial fantasies of racial supremacy lies at the origin of the fact that all discussion of historical Indo-Aryan migrations or Aryan and Dravidian races remains highly controversial in India to this day, and does continue to affect political and religious debate. Some Dravidians, and supporters of the Dalit movement, most commonly Tamils, claim that the worship of Shiva is a distinct Dravidian religion going back to the Indus Civilization, to be distinguished from Brahminical "Aryan" Hinduism. In contrast, the Indian nationalist Hindutva movement argues that no Aryan invasion or migration ever occurred, asserting that Vedic beliefs emerged from the Indus Valley Civilisation, which pre-dated the supposed advent of the Indo-Aryans in India, and is identified as a likely candidate for a Proto-Dravidian culture.
Some Indians were also influenced by the debate about the Aryan race. The Indian nationalist V. D. Savarkar believed in the theory that an "Aryan race" migrated to India, but he didn't find much value in a racialized interpretation of the "Aryan race". Some Indian nationalists supported the theory because it gave them the prestige of common descent with the ruling British class.
Theosophy
These debates were addressed within the Theosophical movement founded by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott at the end of the nineteenth century. This philosophy took inspiration from Indian culture, in this case, perhaps, from the Hindu reform movement the Arya Samaj founded by Swami Dayananda.
Blavatsky argued that humanity had descended from a series of "Root Races", naming the fifth root race (out of seven) the Aryan Race. She thought that the Aryans originally came from Atlantis and described the Aryan races with the following words:
- "The Aryan races, for instance, now varying from dark brown, almost black, red-brown-yellow, down to the whitest creamy colour, are yet all of one and the same stock -- the Fifth Root-Race -- and spring from one single progenitor, (...) who is said to have lived over 18,000,000 years ago, and also 850,000 years ago -- at the time of the sinking of the last remnants of the great continent of Atlantis."
Blavatsky used "Root Race" as a technical term to describe human evolution over the large time periods in her cosmology. However, she also claimed that there were modern non-Aryan peoples who were inferior to Aryans. She regularly contrasts "Aryan" with "Semitic" culture, to the detriment of the latter, asserting that Semitic peoples are an offshoot of Aryans who have become "degenerate in spirituality and perfected in materiality." She also states that some peoples are "semi-animal creatures". These latter include "the Tasmanians, a portion of the Australians and a mountain tribe in China." There are also "considerable numbers of the mixed Lemuro-Atlantean peoples produced by various crossings with such semi-human stocks -- e.g., the wild men of Borneo, the Veddhas of Ceylon, classed by Prof. Flower among Aryans (!), most of the remaining Australians, Bushmen, Negritos, Andaman Islanders, etc."
Despite this, Blavatsky's admirers claim that her thinking was not connected to fascist or racialist ideas, asserting that she believed in a Universal Brotherhood of humanity and wrote that "all men have spiritually and physically the same origin" and that "mankind is essentially of one and the same essence". On the other hand, in The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky states: "Verily mankind is 'of one blood,' but not of the same essence."
Blavatsky connects physical race with spiritual attributes constantly throughout her works:
- "Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with the Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter (Chinamen, African Negroes, &c.) gradually brought the worship back. The Vedas countenance no idols; all the modern Hindu writings do".
- "The intellectual difference between the Aryan and other civilized nations and such savages as the South Sea Islanders, is inexplicable on any other grounds. No amount of culture, nor generations of training amid civilization, could raise such human specimens as the Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African tribes, to the same intellectual level as the Aryans, the Semites, and the Turanians so called. The 'sacred spark' is missing in them and it is they who are the only inferior races on the globe, now happily -- owing to the wise adjustment of nature which ever works in that direction -- fast dying out. Verily mankind is 'of one blood,' but not of the same essence. We are the hot-house, artificially quickened plants in nature, having in us a spark, which in them is latent".
According to Blavatsky, "the MONADS of the lowest specimens of humanity (the "narrow-brained" savage South-Sea Islander, the African, the Australian) had no Karma to work out when first born as men, as their more favoured brethren in intelligence had".
She also prophecies of the destruction of the racial "failures of nature" as the future "higher race" ascends:
- "Thus will mankind, race after race, perform its appointed cycle-pilgrimage. Climates will, and have already begun, to change, each tropical year after the other dropping one sub-race, but only to beget another higher race on the ascending cycle; while a series of other less favoured groups -- the failures of nature -- will, like some individual men, vanish from the human family without even leaving a trace behind".
Guido von List (and his followers such as Lanz von Liebenfels) later took up some of Blavatsky's ideas, mixing her ideology with nationalistic and fascist ideas; this system of thought became known as Ariosophy. Such views also fed into the development of Nazi ideology. However, the theosophical publications such as The Aryan Path were strongly opposed to the Nazi usage, attacking racialism.
Nazism
The theory of the Northern origins of the Aryans was particularly influential in Germany. It was widely believed that the "Vedic Aryans" were ethnically identical to the Goths, Vandals and other ancient Germanic peoples of the Völkerwanderung. This idea was often intertwined with anti-Semitic ideas. The distinctions between the "Aryan" and "Semitic" peoples were based on the aforementioned linguistic and ethnic history. Semitic peoples came to be seen as a foreign presence within Aryan societies, and the Semitic peoples were often pointed to as the cause of conversion and destruction of social order and values leading to culture and civilization's downfall by proto-Nazi and Nazi theorists such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Alfred Rosenberg.
According to the adherents to Ariosophy, the Aryan was a "master race" that built a civilization that dominated the world from Atlantis about ten thousand years ago. This alleged civilization declined when other parts of the world were colonized after the 8,000 BC destruction of Atlantis because the inferior races mixed with the Aryans but it left traces of their civilization in Tibet (via Buddhism), and even in Central America, South America, and Ancient Egypt. (The date of 8,000 BC for the destruction of Atlantis in Ariosophy is 2,000 years later than the date of 10,000 BC given for this event in Theosophy). These theories affected the more esotericist strand of Nazism.
A complete, highly speculative theory of Aryan and anti-Semitic history can be found in Alfred Rosenberg's major work, The Myth of the Twentieth Century. Rosenberg's well researched account of ancient history melded with his racial speculations proved to be very effective in spreading racialism among German intellectuals in the early 20th century, especially after the first World War.
These and other ideas evolved into the Nazi use of the term "Aryan race" to refer to what they saw as being a master race of people of northern European descent. They worked to maintain the purity of this race through eugenics programs (including anti-miscegenation legislation, compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and the mentally deficient, the execution of the institutionalized mentally ill as part of a euthanasia program).
Heinrich Himmler (the Reichsfuhrer of the SS), the person ordered by Adolf Hitler to implement the final solution (Holocaust), told his personal masseur Felix Kersten that he always carried with him a copy of the ancient Aryan scripture, the Bhagavad Gita because it relieved him of guilt about what he was doing — he felt that like the warrior Arjuna, he was simply doing his duty without attachment to his actions.
Himmler was also interested in Buddhism and his institute Ahnenerbe sought to mix some traditions from Hinduism and Buddhism.
Pan-Aryanism
Since the military defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allies in 1945, some neo-Nazis have expanded their concept of the Aryan race, moving from the Nazi concept that the purest Aryans were the Teutonics or Nordics of Northern Europe to the idea that the true Aryans are everyone descended from the Western or European branch of the Indo-European peoples. This is sometimes referred to as pan-Aryanism. According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clark, many neo-Nazis want to establish an autocratic state to be called the Western Imperium. This proposed state would be led by a Führer-like figure, and would include all areas inhabited by the Aryan race (defined as non-Jews of European ancestry), i.e. Europe (includes all of Russia), Anglo-America, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico (especially the northern part), and southern South America (especially Chile, Argentina, southern Brazil and Uruguay.) Only those of the Aryan race would be full citizens of the state. This concept is based on the 1947 book Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics by Francis Parker Yockey.
Further reading
- Arvidsson, Stefan. Aryan Idols. The Indo-European Mythology as Science and Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2006 ISBN 0-226-02860-7
- Poliakov, Leon. The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalistic Ideas In Europe New York: Barnes & Noble Books. 1996 ISBN 0-7607-0034-6
- Widney, Joseph P. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. 1907 In Two Volumes: Volume One--The Old World Volume Two--The New World ISBN B000859S6O
See also
External links
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