The Metaphysics of the Indo-Europeans By Brian Simpson
As I go through my anthropology file, I am coming across fascinating material which is just as well, as post-US election it is very much the eye of the storm, and there is not much other news. Still, as many get ready to meet their maker, this is an excellent time for reflection.
I have written about the Indo-Europeans, or Aryans as they used to be called prior to World War II. They are one of the three groups who came to comprise, genetically modern Northern Europeans. This issue has been discussed by L. A. Waddell, The Makers of Civilization in Race and History, (1929), and by Roger Pearson, Early Civilisations of the Nordic Peoples, (1965). Waddell saw the Indo-Europeans contributing to the Mesopotamian and ancient Egyptian civilisations, something supported more recently by Arthur Kemp, in The Children of Ra (2019):
Dr Pearson in his book, tells the story of how these early Nordic people of the Neolithic Age moved from central and south Germany, southward to the Balkans, to Troy, into Italy, and later, into to what is now Britain, France and Spain. They also moved into China and India, and in a previous article I covered the recent evidence for “Aryans” in India, as they called it. There are White mummies in China from this period, the Tarim mummies, and in the past I have written on this at this blog, which can be found through the search engine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_mummies
There is evidence that the Buddha may have been a blue-eyed, red bearded “devil”:
https://scorpiobarang.wordpress.com/2017/07/13/was-the-buddha-a-blue-eyed-white-guy/
The Indo-Europeans also had a racial and colour awareness even then, seen in the creation of the caste system in India. As stated by R. Thapar, A History of India, (1966), “The first step in the direction of caste (as distinct from class) was taken when the Aryans treated the Dasas [non-Aryans] as beyond the social pale, probably owing to a fear of the Dasas and the even greater fear that assimilation with them would lead to a loss of Aryan identity. Ostensibly the distinction was largely that of colour, the Dasas being darker and of an alien culture . . . The colour-element of caste was emphasized, throughout this period, and was eventually to become deep-rooted in north-Indian Aryan culture. Initially, therefore, the division was between the Aryans and the non-Aryans.” (Quoted from Clark, below)
In a fascinating essay, Edwin Clark covers this ground and more. One of the profound metaphysical orientations of the Indo-Europeans, was an acceptance of the existence of objective truth, realism, and the idea of a cosmic order:
https://www.amren.com/archives/back-issues/november-1996/
“The Cosmic Order: It is a widespread feature of early Aryan thought that there exists an objective order that is independent of what we believe or want to believe — in other words, truth. The Rig Veda calls this order rta, a term that may be linked with the word Arya itself, which seems to mean “noble” in The Laws of Manu. The word “Aryan” comes from “Arya” and a number of other Indo-European words seem to be connected — the Greek arete (virtue, the quality of acting like a man, from which we derive “aristocracy”); the Latin ara (altar) and the name “Arthur”. But regardless of the linguistic linkages, the Aryan concept of Cosmic Order contrasts with ideas of the universe found among ancient non-Aryans. For the latter, Cosmic Order is merely the product of will, a creature of magic, and it can change if those who know how to change it wish to do so. If the priests or the divine king did not perform the proper magical rituals, the sun literally would not rise, the Nile would not flood, and food would not grow. In this non-Aryan, magical view of nature, order does not exist as an externally independent and objective arrangement of nature and its functioning.
While early Aryans did believe in and practice magic, theirs was not a world-view in which nature and the universe were dependent on magic. Magic could be used to influence nature (through love potions or ointments to make weapons stronger and the like), but nature itself exists apart from the tricks of the magicians and sorcerers. Indeed, throughout Western history, magicians and sorcerers almost always come from pre-Aryan Mother Goddess figures or from the non-Aryan Orient — from Egypt, Babylonia, or the “Magi” of pre-Aryan Persia from whom we get the word “magic.”
Moreover, Indo-European gods are considerably less powerful than the deities adored by the non-Aryans. Zeus, Apollo, Odin, Thor, and the rest did not create the universe and are in fact subject to most of its rules. The subordination of Aryan gods to the regularities of the universe itself points toward a deep Indo-European belief in Cosmic Order, a belief that has major philosophical and ethical implications.
It follows from recognition of the Cosmic Order that some things are true and some aren’t, no matter what you prefer to think, that some things will always and always have been true or false, regardless of your wishes, and that some things will happen or will not happen, whether you like it or not. Hence, the Greek and Nordic ideas of “Fate” or “Destiny,” that some things are beyond the control of the human will and are inevitable because of the very fabric of the universe. The concept of Fate is probably the origin of the principle of causality and the ancestor of such Indo-European ideas as logic, mathematics, philosophy, science, and theology.
While Egyptians and Babylonians collected a great deal of information about mathematics and astronomy and practiced impressive engineering on a grand scale, their “sciences” never had a really scientific basis. Their knowledge existed either as the lore collected by the priests or as the products of practical trial-and-error. Only the Indo-European Greeks actually systematized scientific and mathematical knowledge, and they were able to construct it into a system because the system itself was their concept of a Cosmic Order in which all events and phenomena were related through causality and its inexorable linkages of one event and phenomenon to another.
It is notable that Christian theology itself, as developed under the Scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages and under the influence of rationalistic Greek philosophy, reflects this underlying Indo-European belief, that even God behaves according to certain principles, just as Zeus and Odin did, and it is also interesting that today even Christian fundamentalists who wish to disprove the theory of evolution on behalf of their religious beliefs try to do so through “creation science.” Among Indo-Europeans, even religion and the supernatural are subordinate to the ancient Aryan perception of a Cosmic Order that governs the universe from the remotest galaxies to the life-cycles of insects.
“It is no accident,” wrote V. Gordon Childe, “that the first great advances towards abstract natural science were made by the Aryan Greeks and the Hindus, not by the Babylonians or the Egyptians, despite their great material resources and their surprising progress in techniques — in astronomical observation for example. In the moralization of religion too Aryans have played a prominent role. The first great world religions which addressed their appeal to all men irrespective of race or nationality, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism, were the works of Aryans, propagated in Aryan speech . . . It is certain that the great concept of the Divine Law or Cosmic Order is associated with the first Aryan peoples who emerge upon the stage of history some 3,500 years ago.”
It is from the Aryan concept of a Cosmic Order that modern white men derive their mental inclinations both to universalism, a tendency to think in terms of generalizations and abstractions that apply universally rather than in terms of the specific, local, and temporary, and to objectivity, the tendency to evaluate events and phenomena with reference to the general and the abstract, rather than to judge them subjectively, as they relate to themselves. While these traits account for many of the achievements of European Man, they also, as we shall see, help to explain many of his racial problems in more recent times.”
Apart from laying the metaphysical basis of science, the Indo-Europeans also had an ethical foundation which also influenced the creation of the modern West, a result of the idea of a cosmic order, that human actions had consequences:
“Recognition of a Cosmic Order implies that human action has consequences — that you cannot do whatever you please and expect nothing to come of it — and also that sometimes no matter what you do, you will not be able to avoid the consequences of your Fate, what the Greeks and Norsemen respectively called your moira or wyrd. Thus, the central concept of Greek tragedy is that the tragic hero suffers as a consequence of a “tragic flaw” that may not be the result of his will or intent but that his fate is unavoidable. Oedipus was doomed to commit the sacrileges of patricide and incest through his very virtue, and there are many heroes in Greek mythology that encounter similar fates.
The ethical implication that Indo-Europeans drew from this belief is not that man should surrender or fecklessly seek to avoid his fate but rather that he should accept it courageously. Achilles in the Iliad knows that he is fated to die young but, as horrid as death is to Achilles, he readily prefers the glory of his brief heroic life to the obscurity of a long and safe existence. By contrast Gilgamesh, in the Mesopotamian epic, seeks only to avoid death and resorts to all sorts of magic and sorcery to prevent it.
In her survey of Norse myth, H.R. Ellis Davidson notes similar connections between fate, Cosmic Order, and the heroism of both Gods and men:
In spite of this awareness of fate, indeed perhaps because of it, the picture of man’s qualities which emerges from the myths is a noble one. The gods are heroic figures, men writ large, who led dangerous, individualistic lives, yet at the same time were part of a closely-knit small group, with a firm sense of values and certain intense loyalties. They would give up their lives rather than surrender these values, but they would fight on as long as they could, since life was well worth while. Men knew that the gods whom they served could not give them freedom from danger and calamity, and they did not demand that they should. We find in the myths no sense of bitterness at the harshness and unfairness of life, but rather a spirit of heroic resignation: humanity is born to trouble, but courage, adventure, and the wonders of life are matters of thankfulness, to be enjoyed while life is still granted to us. The great gifts of the gods were readiness to face the world as it was, the luck that sustains men in tight places, and the opportunity to win that glory which alone can outlive death.
The Norse gods know that their race and the world are doomed at the final battle of Ragnarok, but they go out to fight and to meet their fate regardless. The concept of the “Last Stand,” in which an outnumbered army of Aryan warriors face battle against overwhelming odds, usually without any realistic expectation of victory, recurs throughout Indo-European history and legend — at the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae, Horatius at the Bridge, in the Song of Roland, in the Arthurian legends, at Ragnarok itself, or in the fiery climax of Njal’s Saga, and at the Alamo, Rorke’s Drift, and the Little Big Horn.
Indeed, Indo-European scholars have recognized a distinctive Indo-European myth pattern called the “Final Battle.” As J.P. Mallory writes, “The epic traditions of a number of Indo-European peoples preserve an account of the ‘final battle,’ for example, Kurukshetra in the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata; the ‘Second Battle of Mag Tured’ among the early Irish; Ragnarok among the Norse; and several others.”
Moreover, the Indo-European hero, fighting in single combat, often is killed by treachery or trickery concocted by a non-Aryan or un-Aryan “trickster” figure. Thus Achilles is killed by an arrow shot by the Trojan Paris, Hercules is killed by the trickery of a centaur, Theseus is pushed over a cliff from behind, Baldur is killed by the jealous trickery of Loki, Siegfried is killed by the treachery of his own brother-in-law, etc. It is interesting that in the Biblical story of David and Goliath, the latter, a champion of the Aryan Philistines, is killed by the slingshot of David, and in the non-Aryan version recounted in the Old Testament, David’s conduct is portrayed as an act of prowess.
The Aryan concept of Cosmic Order is thus closely linked to the scientific and philosophical achievements of Indo-European Man as well as with his ethical ideas, especially with regard to Indo-European military behavior. The concept of Cosmic Order implied an essentially aristocratic obligation to carry out one’s duty regardless of the consequences but also a heroic recognition of what the consequences, including death and destruction, might be. While other races and cultures have certainly displayed and idealized courage, heroism, and struggle against odds, none has incorporated these ideals into its fundamental world-view and ethic as fully as Indo-European Man.”
I found these observations by Clark, profound and thought-provoking, much better articulated than anything I could produce. He showed that the scientific and metaphysical foundations of the West, were given to us by the Indo-Europeans, along with a genetic heritage. Will all of this be lost this century, for a few senseless slogans? That would be tragedy beyond measure.
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