Voltaire hoped to
prove how all the principles of Christian theology that had been lost with the
Veda, could still be found in the “Ezour Vedam”, thanks to its retrieval and circulation by a French
‘philosophe’.
Orientalist
critiques, tend to posit India as a constructed artifice, with little objective
content, but such a strategy is unhelpful if the fundamentals have been
systematically occluded. Authors espousing this critique identify even the
fundamental epistemology necessary for a constructive contribution as
irredeemably Eurocentric and colonial, for it was generated during the
Enlightenment, at the moment of European expansion on the cusp of modernity.
According to this assessment, the study of religion was an extension of a
secular, scientific rationality that was presumed to be universalistic and
value free. Yet, we are assured, the Enlightenment's discourse was really an
attempt to enshrine Eurocentrism in its position of cardinal authority. Thus we
are to accept that the very foundations of Indology are inspired by the
colonial movement, and other civilizations need not submit to its hegemonic
presumptions.
The development of
modern critical history is the direct result of the humanists of the Italian Renaissance,
beginning with Francesco Petrarcha (1304-1374). Their
task was to look at their own religious legacy in their own country, with a
focus on the city of Rome. These gentlemen did not employ the generalized sense
of humanist used in the modern period, a person exercising empathy and reason
in acting for the common welfare and dignity of humanity. Rather, they were
scholars of studia humanitatis:
the collective disciplines of grammar (we would say classical philology),
rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy. These fields were first
generated in the salons and college of Florence during the latter half of the
fourteenth century and spread throughout Northern Europe. Studia humanitatis is most explicitly distinguished from studia divinitatis, a
differentiation excluding theology from the humanities. And reached its
conclusion in the late Renaissance with the 1566 publication of Jean Bodin's Methodus ad facilem historiarum
cognitionen. Collectively, the authors of this period
laid the foundations and surveyed the fundamentals.
But according to
Rosenberg in the 1920’s, as in India, so too had Western Aryanhood
in its Greek, Latin, and Germanic forms been destroyed.
The cause of its
demise was decadent Christianity, which consisted of nothing but lies
perpetrated by bastardized Jews. Had Christianity retained its Aryan basis
(that is, the true teaching of the Aryan Jesus), then all would have been well.
However, Christ's message, dominated very early on by Paul's teachings,
repudiated any Aryan heritage. Christianity became nothing but a Semitized
version of Aryan ideals and a dumping ground for abusive Jewish concepts. It
was Rosenberg's task not only to condemn the distortion of Christianity
(primarily in its Roman Catholic configuration), but also to set the record
straight. The most important error that needed to be rectified pertained to
Jesus' true identity.
The figure of Christ
had been falsified by jewish fanatics like Matthew,
materialistic rabbis Eke Paul, Africans like Tertullian, and mongrel half
breeds like Augustine. The real Christ was an aggressive and courageous
revolutionary who defied Jewish and Roman systems and paid for his bravery with
his life. Christ, in fact, was an authentic Aryan rather than a Jew. He was not
of Jewish stock because the inhabitants of Galilee were descendants of
Amorites, Aryans who had come to the region around 700 B.C. By 100 B.C., the
Jews had established hegemony over the Aryan city of Jerusalem, forcing the
non-Jews into the Gentile district of Galilee. When Joseph returned to Bethelem, he was returning not as a son of the tribe of
David, but as the son of Aryan exiles who had been driven out by Jews.
Another important
point that needed clarification concerned Jesus' teaching. What we moderns
understand as the word of God is actually a gross distortion of His actual
message. The Jew Paul totally subverted Christ's teachings by Judaizing them.
Paul replaced the true, Aryan, and heroic Christ with a weakling seeking to
mediate human salvation through love, humility, and brotherhood. Proud Nordic
man should not prostrate himself before the Creator, as the Jew does before
Yahweh. Not only did the Jews distort Christ's message, the popes and, finally,
the Jesuits utterly destroyed the original Aryan Christianity. Even the heroic
efforts of Luther and Calvin could not reverse the damage. Rosenberg's primary
complaint with Roman Catholicism was its fundamental error that anyone,
regardless of racial origin, could enter its fold. This tenet destroyed any
ideal of racial purity. Doctrines of love and pity subverted Aryan virtues of
heroism, honor, and blood.
Despite the present
decay of the Church, Rosenberg felt it was possible to purify Christianity and
return to its Aryan Urform. In fact, the time was ripe for the creation of a
new, positive, and Germanic Christianity by restoring lost Aryan virtues,
vitality, and racial consciousness. First, it was necessary to reject ideas of
human universality and substitute race consciousness for the notion of the
common nature of humanity. True Christianity had been Aryan in its contours:
natural, brutally self-assertive, egotistical, powerful, and decisive.
Rosenberg viewed Christianity in its present form as a moral code of weaklings
(Rosenberg 1937: 147), in much the same manner as Nietzsche did. It had assumed
its degenerate form when the Jew, who represented the polar opposite of the
ancient Indian Aryan, took over Christianity (Rosenberg 1937: 265-66). The new
Nordic Christian Church that the Nazis sought to establish aimed at leading men
back to a heroic superhumanity. To return to the original Aryan faith, it was
also necessary to restore the feeling of individuality that had previously
existed. Aryan individuality had first been destroyed by the hazy monism of the
post-Aryan Indians (Rosenberg 1937: 389). It reasserted itself in Christ, only
to be destroyed again by the Roman Church (Rosenberg 1937: 390).10 The new
Aryan religion of National Socialism sought to reinstate the individual will
and commitment to action that Germans had lost during the post-Vedic era.
Rosenberg identified
several models of Aryan religious vision. He read into the Chandogya
Upanishad a vision of man as formed by the will and discovered in the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad lessons on the use of power
(Rosenberg 1937: 240-41). Rosenberg also recognized an Aryan Christ of will and
freedom in the mysticism of Meister Eckhart. By equating the
"message" of the Upanishads with that of Meister Eckhart, Rosenberg
textually tied the themes of will and power to the world of both the ancient
Aryan and the medieval German. Rosenberg also admired Justin Martyr as a figure
who had sought to free Christianity from its Ebionitic taint by returning to
the teaching of Christ as it existed before the corrupting influence of Paul.
Finally, Rosenberg sought inspiration from Zoroaster and his reformer Mani.
Like Christianity, Zoroastrianism had been corrupted by the Jews and
transformed into a ritualistic cult. It also had not been able to remain in
Aryan hands. The Babylonian captivity and Persian rule over Israel had led to
its Jewish corruption. Mani had tried to reinstate Zoroastrianism's absolute
dichotomy between good and evil that had been destroyed by the Jews. But his
attempt to revive the true teaching of Zoroaster was totally suppressed. We
only learn of Mani's existence through Augustine's bitter attacks on him and
his religious ideal.
Rosenberg identified
the Manichaean worldview as the common thread to all Aryan religious thought.
It was precisely the dichotomy between good and evil that had been intact in
Vedic times but had disappeared in the Vedantic union of Brahman with Atman. It
was at this point that the Aryan virtues of duty, honor, faithfulness, and
bravery had been destroyed. In their place, the weak India of the post-Aryan
period substituted love, pity, and the desire to escape from suffering
(Rosenberg 1937: 147-50). Rosenberg extended the Manichaean dichotomy to the
texts themselves: The Veda recorded the saga of the children of light and the
Talmud was a document registering the history of the children of darkness. It
was only through a wide-ranging Jewish conspiracy extending throughout history
that Jews contrived to switch roles with the Aryans. First, they took over
Jesus through Paul. Next, they suppressed Mani and Persian Aryan values.
Finally, Augustine, the Jesuits, and various popes brought to fulfilment the
Jewish conspiracy.
Rosenberg viewed
human history as a repetitive reenactment of the destruction of Aryan values.
India had destroyed its Vedic Aryanness with the
adoption of Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism. Subsequent
Aryan nations too had been corrupted and destroyed. First Greece, then Rome,
and finally Germany was the third Aryan empire to be immersed by hither-Asiatics and Jews. Rosenberg felt that it was still
possible to save Germany's Aryan identity. The first task was to stem the tide
of migration and eject the human flotsam. Judaism should then be studied so
that it might be more efficiently combated. If one could scientifically uncover
Judaism's core values, ferret out where they had been imposed on Christianity,
and expunge them from the New Testament, one could then renew the true teaching
of Jesus as it appears in the mysticism of Eckhart and Justin Martyr. Of
course, the Old Testament had to be rejected as cattle herders' renditions of
Jewish history. Remaining Aryan texts were to be added to the new Christian
canon. They were to be supplied by inferring what a true Aryan/Nordic soul
would place in an Aryan religion.
In other words,
Rosenberg called for the establishment of a purely synthetic Aryan Christian
canon: Dreams of honor and freedom would be culled from Nordic and German fairy
tales and sagas. Only expressions of the Aryan worldview and eternal soul of
the Germanic people would comprise this canon. For the more sophisticated,
religious representations from Aryan.
Persia and India
would be collected (Rosenberg 1937: 614-15). These texts need not necessarily
be authentic. The modern Aryan was not interested in literal formalities, but
in the philosophical and conceptual message of Nordic Aryan times. Rosenberg
contrived an incredible circular logic. Since Jesus was God, he had to tell the
truth; therefore, he must have spoken of Aryan nobility and race consciousness.
The texts deemed authentic for inclusion in the National Socialist canon were
those that dealt with these themes.
When I gave my
seminars on related topics in 2000, the content of the actual texts of Hinduism
where during the 20th century overwritten with slogans of strength, honour, obligation, violence and war.
Thus one aspect
all three, 'Orientalist' scholarship, modern Theosophy, or/and primordialist nationalist thinking, concerned the invention
of Vedic Aryanism as their ideological basis.
today the mythic time
of the Mahabharata battle is transposed to the Hindutva (BJP) war against
Muslims, Christians, 'pseudo-secularists' and Hindu 'traitors'. Of significance
in the Hindutva use of the Bhagavad Gita is not the complex ethical and moral
epistemology that it contains, nor, indeed, the dispersed ending of the
Mahabharata, but instead the primitive message that any kind of violence, if
undertaken for the protection of dharma, is a bounden obligation, regardless of
the abhorrence of violence for any individual sensibility.
For updates
click homepage here