The Warriors Caste and Society (I) - The Role of the Caste

[Menydh]

The Warriors Caste and Society (I)

The Role of the Caste


It has been thousands of years - and even hundreds of thousand of years - since the primitive human being one day grasped the femur of a gazelle with his right hand, and a knife made from the mandibles of an animal to defend his community or to obtain food for himself and his own people; since then this human being has had a long time to observe himself. He is no longer a being moved by instincts, he is something more than that: he is a social animal who considers himself - rightly so - radically different to the rest of nature; he is able not only of having consciousness of his own being but also of reflecting on himself. And it is his reflections and observations which have lead him to multiple rich conclusions. He knows that human beings are relatively equal and relatively different among themselves, and thus he establishes patterns. On the one hand, he has traits of identity (tribe, race, cult, sex; then national identity, culture, empire). On the other hand, he has certainties over the surrounding world (the importance of the sun, the rhythm of the seasons, the forecasting of weather conditions, the utilization of nature's resources in medicine, in nutrition, and in making tools). It is in this way that he starts to value that the equality among human beings, as well as their differences, are apparent. It is possible to reduce the human types to only a few in terms of highly visible functional traits which surge from within the human. In practice he perceives that such traits are complementary; he guesses through intuition that the different human types need each other. He sees how society grows increasingly more complex and that it is good that there is a division of functions and an increasing specialization. In the beginning, all the males were able to grasp a weapon and go out for food, while the females took care of the children and of the maintenance of home. There was the first specialization of biological character, derived from sexual differentiation. The experience indicated that not all reacted the same before a given danger. Some experienced an irrational feeling of fear which they couldn't help nor hide: they ran away before the danger. Others felt the same feeling of fear but could control it. For some, the physiologic alterations produced by fear impelled them from being able to answer with effectiveness; for others, such alterations were absent. Some looked forward to combat and to risk, while others avoided it and succumbed when they found themselves in front of it. However, surely among the latter, there were some who had learned to develop other abilities. Some observed the world around them and tried constantly to extract teachings and resources from it, for their everyday lives. Besides, they believed that they could perceive another reality and that they could communicate with nature, and to draw from it a power which they could direct towards healing: the perception of the magic. They enlightened the magical-religious thinking. Shamans, priests, and wizards who were enclosed within themselves and seemed to have the power to communicate with dimensions which were forbidden to the others. The warriors needed them to carry out the rites which would help them in combat, or which would identify them with the totems from where they extracted their powers. Conversely, the shamans also needed the warriors to procure food and security. In their observations, the early human being had adverted the presence of some minerals and had learned to use them. In the beginnings, he employed sideral metals which had arrived to earth in the form of meteorites. They looked to them as a gift from the gods and they forged with them the first iron weapons. So they learned to recognize those same minerals in other zones and to exploit them. But it wasn't the warriors nor the priests who carried out this function, but those who did not feel particularly able to speak to the gods, nor did they experienced an interior flame which could only be put out in combat. The productive function needed of the favor of the priest and his science, and also of the protection and security offered by the warrior. He would forge the weapons, would build defenses, would manufacture tools to improve the life of the community. This was the birth of what we could call civilization. Its complexity included the formation of the castes.

Race as a Form, Caste as a Spirit

Frithjof Schuon, an advantaged disciple of René Guénon, established the difference between caste and race:

"Caste is above race because the spirit is superior to the form; race is a form, the caste of a spirit. Neither the Hindu castes can limit themselves to only one race: there are Brahmins, Tamuls, Burmese and Siamese."

During the Middle Ages in the West it was clear that the castes were also above the nations. The religious and military orders were
supranational and even the craft guilds had more in common among themselves --even when they were divided by frontiers-- than with the castes of their own nationality. Race is the form, caste is the spirit.

Those belonging to a same race have, undoubtedly, some common uniqueness and, in some cases, even the conscience of belonging to a well differentiated group. Other than that, every race is better or worse endowed for any given terrain. Schuon said:

"However, it is impossible to admit that the races do not mean anything outside their physical characteristics since, if it is true that the formal constrains are not absolute, this does not imply that the forms have no reason enough; and though the races are not castes, they must however correspond with human differences of another order, a little like style differences can express spiritual equivalences and at the same time indicate divergences in the manner."

Following along the lines of his argument, later on he explains:

"If it is true that any racism must be rejected, it is also true that a anti-racism must be rejected."

There exist racial differences, but all of them pale before the differences in castes. It is what the racists of all times have never understood: that people belonging to a same caste, even from two different nationalities and races, have some psychical similarities which are more homogeneous than those of people from different castes but who belong to a same race or nationality. The warrior is a warrior here and in the Antipodes. The bourgeoisie is a bourgeoisie anywhere. The serenity of the priest is identical and it is placed above time and space. Needless to say, there are variants to this all. E.g. the level of civilization constrained by the anthropological and cultural conditions. But the verification of the matter does not vary. The military mentality is the same there where there is someone who has decided to defend his community, or among those who feel more able to produce goods with their own hands, or among those who seek a relation with transcendence.

The main characteristic of their social organization among the Indo-European peoples is the tri-functional distribution of their members. But we would err if we thought that this organic model is absent in other latitudes and among other races. It is perhaps not among the Indo-European peoples where the tri-functional system has reached its highest peaks and its higher refinement; but, with more or less coarseness, it appeared there where the human being settled. This alone indicates the primacy of the phenomenon.

In fact castes are vertical divisions of the society, while races are horizontal divisions settled over concrete territories. Verticality forcibly implies the stratification and hierarchical order. Therefore, the social combine was divided between castes and races, both settled over the geographical framework of nations and nationalities. The interactions between all of them generated sudden anthropological and cultural conditions specific to each people.

Race offers a primary and egalitarian identity. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, proposes to build a Reich where the humble street sweeper can be considered can enjoy a dignity equal to an emperor in a foreign land. It is obvious that he puts the concept of race to any other and that, within a same race, the egalitarian values dominate; although he conceives the relation between races as a hierarchical relation between superiors and inferiors. In some writings from Hitlerian ideologists there are specific mentioning of the settlers-soldiers (Walter Darré). In others they insist in the forge of a military order (Heinrich Himmler) and, even, in the prehistory of Nazism there are many mystical speculations which attributed the ability to guide a society to the godi (priests). But Nazism does not provide one single reference to the ancient tri-functional structure of the Indo-European societies (and consequently to the one in its Germanic variance), nor to their hierarchical relationships. In fact Nazism is a product of modernity which, just like Stalinism or any other ideology of the XXth century, insists often in the demos instead of the ethos. Amadeo Bordiga was ironical about the Soviet construction promoted by Stalin, when he said that it was "the more democratic in the world". In fact Stalin considered the whole of the Russian citizens as workers and, therefore, protected by the state. In the same way, introducing the racist element characteristic of Nazism, it can be said that all of the German race -- i.e. most of the people except for the ethnic minorities-- have the same rights. The first democratic constitutions would only allow voting rights to those who could justify a given level of incomes and, only much later, to women; and in some states it even excluded the racial minorities from most of the political rights. Democracy stops being democratic and turns totalitarian when it registers the inclination towards lump together in only one and undifferentiated structure to the whole of the population, be it by virtue of its ethnic background (the Germanic race in the case of Nazism) or of its condition (the proletarian condition in the case of Stalinism). The theorists of Democracy, throughout the XVIIIth century, elaborated their ideas which crystalized in the American Revolutions first, and in the French Revolutions a few years later. The idea of equality was the second in the triad which, initially defended in the Masonic lodges, it got famed together with the ideas of liberty and fraternity. That idea of rejection of the incipient masses of the bourgeoisie to the strata regime and its subordination to the aristocracy and the clergy. Deep inside, the ideological engine of the Liberal revolutions was the Freemasonry from the XVIIIth century, which practiced equality among its members, at the same time that the fraternity in the inside the lodges, which ideological fuel was the possibility to discuss freely about anything (freedom). These three values, which inside the lodges had had a good result, were transferred to society and crystallized in the bourgeoisie revolutionary paradigm: liberty, equality and fraternity. Since 1789 this would be the paradigm which would rule the political society. The notions of caste and race vanished.

In a framework such as the one created in the last centuries in the West, it is impossible to keep the system of castes. Schuon, in his work Castes and Races, sums up the process of dissolution of the castes which was followed in our geographical area:

"If it is hard for the Westerner to understand the system of the castes, it is above all because he underestimates the law of inheritance; and he underestimates this law because he has turn more or less inoperative in a medium as chaotic like it is the modern West, where nearly everyone wants to improve in the social scale --assuming that it still exists-- and where almost no one exercises his father's profession. One or two centuries of such a regime are enough to make inheritance more precarious and floating than it had been made yield before in a system as rigorous as that of the Hindu castes. But even there where there were guilds transmitted from father to son, the inheritance has been in practice abolished by machines."

However, once again, what it was intended to be stopped by slamming the door, ended up filtrating through the windows. The negation of the race made that a degenerated reflection filtered into the society in the form of the worse and more discriminative racism, from the very moment of the publication of the works of H.S. Chamberlain and Count Gobineau. Those who wrote the Declaration of Independence of the U.S. scorned and detested the Black slaves and they continued doing so after the American Civil WAr and until well into the XXth century.

With regards to the caste, its already degenerated and forged reflection infiltrated in society in the form of classism. Not only the aristocratic classes pursued classism, but especially the burgeoise, enriched with the new situation, and even the workers who grouped around doctrines specifically classists (Marxism, Anarchism) which considered an enemy to anyone who did not belong to the proletarian class and even to whoever would not assume the proletarian mentality.

When in the last third of the XXth century the developed societies started to get rid of the racist and classist prejudices and the political options which defended these prejudices sunk, a new humanist and globalizing doctrine was born which continued denying and distrusting the notions of caste and race. If any reference to race immediately evoked the disasters of Nazism, the caste seemed to suggest social immobility, and the caste system was considered as the worse form of social stratification. To belong to a race, since the 60s onwards, started to be considered discrediting and detrimental. The negative connotations with which the word race was signified are understandable in the lights of the unpleasant situations of discrimination reached in some countries which were not exactly underdeveloped. And also because of the original substratum of Nazism was racist. But the same connotations do not exist on the word caste. Perhaps because it was due to the sensation that the belonging to a caste by right of birth was considered fundamentally unjust, or because the permanence of the children in the same caste as their parents seemed to contradict the immortal principle of liberty. In any case, the caste was insulted and disparaged, although in the popular speak there were still expressions which magnified it.

If the pride of the caste has degenerated in classism, and the ethnic or racial identity has ended up in the most odious excluding racism, which elements can use a personal identity as foundations? It might be the case that, abolishing caste and denying race, there could be a lack of ground under the feet..

The Caste as a Reservoir of Potencialities

René Guénon, in his work Autorité Spirituelle et Pouvoir Temporel, wrote:

"The social classes as they are understood today in the West have nothing in common with the true castes, and they are not but some sort of falsification without value nor reach, as they are not based on the difference of possibilities implied in the nature of individuals."

If what counts in the castes is their function -- productive, priestly, warrior --, the only thing that counts in the classes is the place occupied in the process of production. At heart, social class is not but a stratification of human beings according to their role in the process of production or, what is the same, to their tax declares... And it is from this modern point of view that it only exists those who have and those who don't have; or, put it in another way, those who give a wage and those who perceive a wage; or, still better put, the owners of the means of production and those who have no ownership over the means of production. To summarize, social classes are ordered according to the laws of the matter (you are worth for what you have), while the castes are articulated around the laws of the spirit. Laws of the spirit? Yes, you see...

We have preferred to be Allan Watts, one of the mentors of the counter-culture, who explains it in a more accessible language. In his book The Supreme Identity: An Essay on Oriental Metaphysics & the Christian Religion, Watts says:

"The system of castes in India, often badly understood and today scorned, was based in the conception that society possesses a triple order which corresponds by analogy to the constitution of man (approximately what in Christianism is body, soul and spirit) and to the three cosmological principles of inertia (tamas), activity (rajas), and equilibrium (sattva)."

Thus, the social organization into castes is based in three principles: the existence of three basic human types, the specialization of every human being in the activity which is more according to their nature and, finally, the inheritance. Let us see them in more detail.

Tamas, rajas and sattva are the three gunas which constitute the fundamentals of the Sankhya philosophy. Gunas is the Sanskrit word that means qualities and attributes. The essential substances which synthesize the twenty-five cosmic principles (tattvas) emanated from the primary nature (prakriti). The Veddic philosophy understands by Prakriti the cosmic substance from which all of the elements of the material Universe have emanated.

On its opposite side there is Purusha, the individual souls. Prakriti is an unconscious substance which is eternally active; a multi-form nature which generates the totality of the material beings, or it reabsorbes itself returning to the tenuous undifferentiated status which had in its origins. It is unavoidable that this process, enunciated by the Sabkhya philosophy, reminds us somehow of the expansion of the Cosmos from the primary atom and from the original big-bang on the one hand, and other of the absorbtion of the Cosmos in itself from the black holes which will compress the Cosmos and, in the limits, will reconstruct again the original primary atom, it is described as a whole in the Veddic tradition under the name of the breath of Brahma that creates and destroys the worlds. Thus, we are far from mystic and religious doctrines and it is the Veddic philosophies those which contribute to give us an explanation of the Cosmos which does not differ from the ones which are building the more advanced theories. They only differ in that the vedanta gives us these explanations through poetry, while the current visions are configured through the scientific thought.


The Sabkhya philosophy maintains that this process of expansion and compression of the Cosmos is realized through the twenty-four cosmic principles (tattvas) emanated directly from the Prakriti. In the end, these principles are reduced to three essential substances or gunas. These substances are present in the human beings, defining and constituting the essential of their personality. From this point of view there are only three types of humans:

• Those who are interiorly conditioned for the action (or, in Watts's words, those where a tendency to activity and to action primes over any other impulse). They are characterized by the movement and the action. Their inclination is dynamic, expansive, passionate. It is the essential trait of the warrior function.
  
• Those who are interiorly conditioned for the contemplation (what Watts defines as equilibrium, using the Sanskrit term sattva with the root sat-, the being assimilated to Brahma; the real, the absolute real, the existence, what confers harmony; ascendant tendency, enlightening, conscious). It is the essential trait of the priestly function.
  
• Finally, those who have a tendency to operate over the matter, to produce goods or to trade with them (what Watts and the Hindu tradition call tamas, one of its senses being desire). It is the essential trait of the productive function.
  

Biolcati, in his book La Edad crepuscular; interpretación de la obra de René Guénon, says:

"The castes surge from a basic concept that consists in the knowledge that an individual is not a product for exchange with another individual, as it happens in the modern world as they differentiate from each other in the external, the matter, the visible and the apparent. The traditional idea is based in the fact that each human being has an intellectual and a physical nature different from that of any other, and another function in society."

Inertia, activity and equilibrium: to stay in a permanent status of stillness, to move by one's initiative, or to being pushed by others, are the only three attitudes related to matter.

In the Glossary of the Tradition on the Internet, one anonymous author (in any case a disciple of René Guénon, Julius Evola, Fritzjof Schuon and others) summarizes the system in a few lines: the institution of the castes, as explained by Guénon (Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power), "is the application of the metaphysical doctrine to the human order", according to which, the one who possesses the true knowledge -- i.e. the spiritual authority which, in the case of India it is represented by the caste of the Brahmans-- is to be found in the highest level in the communitarian hierarchy. this authority has the function of transmitting and preserving the Sacred Doctrine, and holds the superior level which is purely intellectual, and which is beyond historical contingencies. The temporal power is possessed by the caste of the Shatriyas. During the Middle Ages the social order which ruled in the countries which made up Christendom depended of a traditional structure and it was analogous to that in modern India. Thus, the clergy had a function similar to that of the Brahmans and the nobility to the caste of the Shatriyas. According to the Hindu hierarchy, after the Shatriyas there are the Vaishyas (merchants) and, after them the shudras. They were the third state and in Medieval Europe, the serfs.

These societies of priesthood (Brahmans), as the centre of spiritual orientation that they were, preserve the doctrine and contemplates teaching. It is an authority because it depends on itself. The warriors (Shatriyas) govern. That is to say that they exercise the administrative, judicial and military functions, preserving internal order and protecting it from external attacks. They constitute the power because their strength lies on the external or material strength. The craftsmen (Vaishyas) manufacture and exchange goods and services. The farmers (Shudras) work the lands and bring their fruits to the community. All of them under the inspiration and supervision of the caste of the wise men. Symbols, legends and caste systems keep the memory of this organization of functions according to the abilities of each human being. While the West kept loyal to a traditional doctrine, it kept too a parallel social structure. Europe in the Middle Ages consolidated happily like a complex of traditional civilization: Christianity reached an organization of equivalent political organization and St Bernard de Claraval, a speculative mystic, a knight and the founder of monastic orders all at the same time, is the human synthesis of such a culture with strong foundations in the Tradition.

We have seen then which are the three basic human types and the activity corresponding to each of them. They are specialized types which are transmitted through inheritance. Let us now see these two aspects. We can make an abstraction on the explanations that the traditional philosophies give to the stratification in castes. Their explanation is too complex and it would divert us greatly from the subject of this essay. And, besides, it is unnecessary since no one discusses the value of specialization. Someone who has specialized in a determined activity is that one who has transformed it in the spotlight of his own life. A watchmaker who is only a watchmaker and nothing but a watchmaker, who has been educated for making watches and who has been working among watches through his life, there is no doubt that he will be at the bare minimum a safe and sure watchmaker. Specialization is the opposite to dispersion. It tends to concentrate the activity in only one task, the one which fits better in the personality. This can be accepted easily. It is harder to accept that, in the old system of castes, professions were transmitted through inheritance. The profession of the children depends on that of the fathers, who have learned them from their ancestors. It is not as if the sibling X in any given moment has decided to become a watchmaker; it is that he descends from a lineage of watchmakers and so we could almost say that he is pre-programmed to be a watchmaker. Such a concept undoubtedly puts a limitation to the sacrosanct liberty. Therefore, from a modern viewpoint, it is easily rejected. But if we examine things from closer, we will be able to perceive a certain logic and some benefits.

Inside the traditional societies some basic questions around existence were automatically answered: What will I be when I grow up? What's my vocation? Answer: I'm going to be like my father, I have the same vocation as my father; and also: I am good to do what my lineage has done through the centuries. A man's vocation was not a problem formulated as it is in modern terms; it was enough to observe the father's trade to know which would be the way to follow. With the dismantling of the caste system, human beings became free. Another question is if they were ready to be free. In any case, what happened was that there was an ever increasing making of errors in the perception over one's own vocation, or simply a total vocational emptiness. It became increasingly frequent to find young men without a defined vocation. As the human being was free, he was not taught to make an objective introspection of himself and to answer the question: Who am I? What do I have deep inside me? Is my personality energetic and active, passive and pensive? Am I good to work the matter? The human being who was integrated in the caste system, by mere right of birth, had already all those questions resolved. He knew that, just for being born within a given caste or in a family which belonged to some given trade, he was determined to follow the family tradition. We can imagine that a family of watchmakers, through the generations, possessed the secrets of the trade and dominated the techniques of it. The fact that, from the cradle, the newborns saw and lived the profession of their fathers eased them a permanent education from the time when they arrived to the world. Besides, each family had to maintain, preserve and increase their prestige inside the trade. This was an additional pressure to improve through raising the self exiggence in the exercise of it. One was not just working for a personal prestige but for the lineage, for the good name of those who were and those who will be.

It is obvious that all of this has a translation in the warrior caste: from the caste of the Samurai there can only come samurais and, from their earliest childhood, they learn the laws of their caste and the arts of their tools, the weapons. The Spartan agogé, the famous education which forged the character of the Hoplite like the steel gets its temper on the anvil, started at the age of seven. The cadets started at that same age in the school which molded their courage and leadership abilities. The Musqueteers were admitted at the age of just fourteen years old and most of them were sons of the corps, or they belonged to the lesser nobility of Gasconha and Perigord. Military men, who were the children of military men, gave birth to siblings who would join automatically the Militia. The Spanish Army, still today, has plenty of illustre family names which are repeated since the XIIIth century without variability. In the ascetic-military orders, the vote of chastity impelled the transmission of the warrior condition to a children to whom one had voluntarily renounced. But these orders were an answer to an exiggence of the Medieval society: the first born -- who the ancients called the son of duty -- received the feud as an inheritance; it was the institution of the Mayorazgo in Castille or the Hereu in Catalonia. The rest of the children -- who the ancients called the sons of love -- had only the choice to join the clergy, to wander the world searching the adventure... or to join a military order.

Any objection from the modern point of view is admissible and this system of castes seems today an archaism destined to vanish. Fair, but in the modern system, completely unstable, where the errors of perception of one's own vocation and the valuing of oneself and of his potentials are the rule. In this modern system which its highest expression is the U.S., where it is normal the horizontal mobility (moving house) and the vertical mobility (changing profession), does not look better than the ancient world but, at best, more unstable.

To our study, the essential is not to enter in such discussions but to recognize the value and the reality of the three invariable types of characters: the one where action is the dominant trait finds its pñlace in a series of professions. The Militia is one of them. The Militia is a traditional profession which corresponds to those beings for who the tendency to action is higher than any other.



(c) Ernesto Milà Rodríguez - infokrisis - infokrisis@yahoo.es - 07.06.06
Translation by Mynydd
Corrections by Fyrstinne
Reproduced with permission of the author