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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 descendents up to the present day constitute a distinctive race. In its best-known incarnation, under Nazism, it was argued that the earliest Aryans were identical to Nordic people. Belief in the superiority of the "Aryan race" is sometimes referred to as ''Aryanism''. This should not be confused with the unrelated Christian religious belief known as Arianism.

Contents

Origin and background of the concept

Interpretations of the term

British Raj

Theosophy

Nazism

Neo-Nazism

Quotations

References

Further reading

External links

Origin and background of the concept

Main articles: Aryan


The term ''Aryan'' originates with the Indo-Iranian self-designation ''arya'', attested in the ancient texts of Hinduism and Zoroastrianism, the Rigveda and the Gathas of Zoroaster.
Since, in the 19th century, the Indo-Iranians were the most ancient known speakers of "Indo-European" languages, 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, Romans, Greeks, the Germans, Balts, Celts and Slavs. 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 with the idea of distinctive behavioral and ancestral ethnicity marked by language distribution. 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^[1]. 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".^[2]
The usage of Aryan to mean "all Indo-Europeans" is now regarded by most scholars as obsolete, though it is still seen occasionally and some people continue this usage.^[3]
In today's English, "Aryan", if used at all in scholarly contexts, is normally synonymous to Indo-Iranian, or Proto-Indo-Iranian. The idea that the ''north'' Europeans were the "purest" of these people was later theorized by the Comte de Gobineau and by other writers, most notably his disciple Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who wrote of an "Aryan race"—those who spoke Indo-European languages and were claimed to be the "noblest" of people.

Interpretations of the term

During the 19th century, it was commonly believed that the Aryan race originated in the southwestern steppes of present-day Russia, and including the Caucasus Mountains. The Steppe theory of Aryan origins was not the only one circulating during the nineteenth century, however. Many British, American and German scholars argued 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.

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,^[4] 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 (see white man's burden). 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,^[5] 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,^[6] 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,^[7] but he didn't find much value in a racialized interpretation of the "Aryan race".^[8] Some Indian nationalists supported the theory because it gave them the prestige of common descent with the ruling British class.^[9]

Theosophy

These debates were addressed within the Theosophical movement founded by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott at the end of the nineteenth century. This was an early kind of New Age philosophy, that took inspiration from Indian culture, in particular 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.".^[10]
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.".^[11] 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.".^[12]
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".^[13] 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".^[14]
:"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".^[15]
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".^[16]
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".^[17]
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 linguistic and ethnic history described above. In this way 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 and racist theory of "Aryan" and anti-Semitic history can be found in Alfred Rosenberg's publication, ''Race and Race History''. Rosenberg's account of ancient history is very well researched, but his conclusions require great leaps in logic. But the seemingly scholarly nature of such works was very effective in spreading Aryan supremacist theories 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, going to extreme and violent lengths to "maintain the purity" of this "race" through a far-reaching eugenics program (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, and eventually the systematic targeting of "die Untermenschen," or lesser races, of Jews and Roma people in the Holocaust). This usage now has nearly no meaning outside of Nazi ideology.
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.^[18]

Neo-Nazism

Since the military defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allies in 1945, Neo-Nazi ideologues have expanded their concept of the "Aryan Race" 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". The degree of inclusivity varies between factions.^[19] This usage totally inverts the meaning of "Aryan" from the way it is used by most non-Neo-Nazis today, i.e., to refer to the Eastern or Asian (Indo-Iranian) branch of the Indo-European peoples. However, as noted above and below in the references, some people still use the term ''Aryan'' in its earlier sense as denoting ''all Indo-Europeans''.
Many Neo-Nazis view their political work as being directed towards the establishment of an autocratic state to be called the ''Western Imperium''. This proposed autocratic state would be led by a Führer-like figure and include all areas inhabited by the ''Aryan race'' (defined as non-Jews of European ancestry) i.e. Europe, Russia, Anglo-America, Australia, New Zealand, and southern South America. This concept is based on a 1947 book called '' by Francis Parker Yockey.^[20] It is envisioned that after the "Western Imperium" is established, all Jews and non-white illegal immigrants would be expelled from its territory.
Only those of the "Aryan race" would be full citizens of the State. Miscegenation would be outlawed. The State would mandate a two-child family to keep the population at replacement level to preserve the environment. Television would be used extensively for propaganda. There would be an aggressive program of space exploration. There would be strict environmental protection and animal rights laws (see Ecofascism). It is usually envisioned that the flag of the "Western Imperium" would be like the red Nazi flag, except within the white disc would be a black-colored nationalistic stylized Celtic cross rather than a black swastika: [1]. Some Neo-Nazi groups, however, such as the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party envisage using a green instead of a red flag for the "Western Imperium" to express Neo-Nazi concern about preserving the environment [2].

Quotations

References

1. Wells, H.G. ''The Outline of History'' New York:1920 Doubleday & Co. Chapter 19 The Aryan Speaking Peoples in Pre-Historic Times Pages 271-285
2. H.G. Wells describes the origin of the Aryans (Proto-Indo Europeans):
3. Renfrew, C. ''The Origins of Indo-European Languages'' Scientific American October 1989 Pages 106–114 The word "Aryan" is used to mean "all Indo-Europeans. (This article presents the Anatolian hypothesis, i.e., that the proto-Indo Europeans originated about 7000 BC in the city of Catal Huyuk.)
4. Genetic evidence suggests European migrants may have influenced
the origins of India's caste system Bijal P Trivedi
5. It is claimed that the Pashupati seal represents Shiva. J. Marshall 1931: Vol. 1, 52-55. Mohenjo-Daro and the IVC. London: Arthur Probsthain.
6. Although most pro-Aryan migration theory scholars also agree that a part of the IVC culture has influenced Hinduism. Renfrew says: "it is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley Civilization. Renfrew 1988:188-190. Archaeology and Language. New York: Cambridge University Press
7. Bryant 2001:271, Talageri 2000. The Rigveda.
8. After all there is throughout this world so far as man is concerned but a single race - the human race, kept alive by one common blood, the human blood. All other talk is at best provisional, a makeshift and only relatively true. (...) Even as it is, not even the aborigines of the Andamans are without some sprinkling of the so-called Aryan blood in their veins and vice-versa. Truly speaking all that one can claim is that one has the blood of all mankind in one’s veins. The fundamental unity of man from pole to pole is true, all else only relatively so. Savarkar: "Hindutva". Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Savarkar Samagra: Complete Works of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 10 volumes, ISBN 81-7315-331-0
9. Erdosy 1995:21, The Indo-Aryans of ancient South Asia.
10. The Secret Doctrine, the Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, Vol.II, p.249
11. Ibid., p.200
12. Ibid., pp.195-6
13. ''The Key to Theosophy'', Section 3
14. The Secret Doctrine, the Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, Vol. II, p.723
15. Ibid., p 421
16. Ibid., p.168
17. Ibid., p.446
18. Padfield, Peter ''Himmler'' New York:1990--Henry Holt Page 402
19. A modern exponent is the Pan-Aryan National Front, a web discussion forum, which has the stated claims of wanting to "arouse racial awareness" and to "liberate and unite" all "whites" according to the group's definition of white.
20. Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas ''Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and The Politics of Identity'' New York: 2002--N.Y. University Press, Chapters 4 and 11

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. ''Race Life of the Aryan Peoples'' New York: Funk & Wagnalls. 1907 ISBN B000859S6O In this massive best-selling two volume work, Joseph Pomeroy Widney, the chancellor of the University of Southern California, describes in Volume One the origin of the Aryans (i.e., the Proto-Indo-Europeans) in what is now Ukraine about 5000 BC, and how they spread out and formed the great Aryan empires such as the Hittite empire, Persian empire, Mauryan empire, Macedonian empire, Roman empire, Gupta empire, Spanish empire, French empire, and British empire; in Volume Two is described the major present-day subraces of the Aryans (i.e., the Indo-Europeans) and their varying racial characteristics, i.e., the Indo-Aryans (including the Sinhalese and Maldivians), Indo-Iranians (including Armenians), Balts, Slavs, Gypsies, Albanians, Greeks, Romanics, Nordics, Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Americans, Quebecois, North American White Hispanics, White Latin Americans, Anglo-Australians, Anglo-New Zealanders, Anglo-Africans, and Boers.

External links

★ The Aryan race