Theosophy and Race – II: Nordic Aryans

Posted by Phil Hine in History  |  September 16th 2021  |  About poster:

In the previous post in this series, I briefly examined the influence of Sir William Jones, then followed through with Max Müller’s two-race theory of India, and his popularization (much to his later chagrin) of the term “Aryan” as a racial category. Continuing from where I left off, I will now turn to a brief discussion of how nineteenth-century race science deployed the concept of the Aryan.

By the 1850s, Müller’s theory that commonality of language implied a common racial origin came increasingly under attack, particularly from those who rejected any notion of commonality between Europeans and Indians, and that British soldiers had the same blood running in their veins as “the dark Bengalese.”

The ethno-philologist Robert G. Latham, for example, argued that the baseline classifications of humanity should be physical appearance and intelligence and that there was no commonality between Europeans and Indians. Latham placed the home of the Indo-Europeans in Lithuania. Latham’s views were not widely accepted, but they contributed to a growing representation of Aryans as Caucasians – tall, long-headed, blue-eyed, and blonde. Accordingly, the origin of the Aryans began to shift from Asia to Europe – the exact location dependent on an author’s particular allegiances. The German scholar Karl Penka, for example, in his 1866 work, Die Herkunft der Arier located the Aryan homeland in Scandinavia – and the term “Nordic race” began to be seen as synonymous with both “Aryan” and “Indo-Germanic race”. Some French scholars viewed the Aryans as Celtic in origin.

The appliance of racial science
All of this was helped along by the growth of racial science. Up until 1860, the generally accepted understanding of human history was that of Biblical chronology.  As I noted previously, the dominant view of the idea of “race” was that of monogenism – that all of humanity had a common descent from the three sons of Noah. Adamite monogenists cleaved strictly to the Biblical account of creation, whilst the so-called “rational monogenists” believed that differences in mankind were due to environmental factors such as climate. The development of Darwinism in the 1860s effectively brought about the collapse of the six-thousand-year Biblical account of human history on which monogenism was based.

As the nineteenth century progressed, the monogenist view was challenged by what became known as polygenism – the belief that races had different origins and could be ranked hierarchically. Some races were superior, and others were inferior, and that was that. It was pointless to try and improve the lot of inferior races. Moreover, race scientists believed that these differences could be measured using techniques of anthropometry. The American ethnologist Samuel Morton’s books Crania Americana (1839) and Crania Aegyptiaca (1844) concluded, based on the measuring of the skulls of the 5 major races – Caucasian, Mongolian, Malay, American, and Ethiopian –  that climate and environment had little effect on the development of the human form. Morton also stated that racial traits were fixed, and that descent from a common ancestor was unlikely. Morton though, did not quite reject the Biblical chronology of Christianity. His successors would have no such doubts. One of the most influential of these was Josiah C. Nott. His 1854 work, Types of Mankind (with George Gliddon) made the case that non-European races were, according to natural law, inferior and that the dilution of European blood with other races would bring about its collapse.

A staunch supporter of Nott’s views in England was James Hunt (1833-1869), co-founder of the Anthropological Society of London (with Richard Burton) and its first president (see this post for related discussion).

“Whatever may be the conclusion to which our scientific inquiries may lead us, we should always remember, by whatever means the Negro, for instance, acquired his present physical, mental and moral character, whether he has risen from an ape or descended from a perfect man, we still know that the Races of Europe have now much in their mental and moral nature which the races of Africa have not got.”

James Hunt, Introductory Address on the study of Anthropology, February 24 1863

Hunt was also influenced by Robert Knox’s The Races of Men (1850). Knox saw race as the foundation of civilization, and that racial hybridity was a horror to be avoided at all costs. Knox also held that particular races could only survive in their own environments and that attempts to transplant peoples of one race to a different climate – such as white men attempting to live in tropical countries – were doomed to failure.

Racial theories and Aryanism unite in the work of Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882). Born in France to a family of minor aristocrats, Gobineau initially worked as a journalist, and later gained a post in the diplomatic service. Between 1853-1855 he delivered his An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Race is everything, for Gobineau. The persistence and vitality of culture depend on racial purity, and conquering nations should beware of diluting their racial purity via miscegenation – which he sees as inevitable. Yet at the same time, Gobineau does allow that some degrees of blood mixing can be beneficial – that art is produced when white and black blood mix – a mingling of the white racial characteristics of order and intelligence with the sensuousness and passion that characterize the black races.

The Aryans, according to Gobineau, split into two branches, one settling in Iran, the other in Southeast Europe, where they would eventually become the Greeks and Romans, eventually to be corrupted by intermixture with lesser races, leading to the downfall of Greek and Roman culture. He argues that the Aryans who settled in Iran later migrated to India, but that their purest strain lives on in the Germanic peoples. The final cause of the degeneration of the Indian Aryan race, according to Gobineau, is the rise of Buddhism, which he believes sanctioned racial mixing through arguing for the abolition of caste separations.

Gobineau uses a racial hierarchy – with white at the top, then yellow, and black at the bottom. He asserts that all ‘high cultures’ were the work of Aryans – so the history of civilizations is the history of the Aryans. He believed that if Aryans interbred with races of lesser value, this would weaken the Aryan ruling class and the Aryan culture would be lost. The noblest of the various branches of the Aryans are, according to Gobineau, the Germanic and Scandinavian Aryans from the North. Gobineau’s “Essay” was not well received in his native France, but got a better reception in Germany. It was translated into German by Ludwig Schemann, which led to the founding of a number of “Gobineau Societies” and was influential to the development of “social anthropology”. Gobineau was befriended by the composer Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813-1883), a major advocate of nationalistic, racial ideology.

Similar themes can be seen in the work of Issac Taylor. Taylor’s The Origins of the Aryans (1889) held that Max Müller’s notion that unity of language implied unity of race was entirely erroneous. Taylor drew on craniology, archaeological findings, and the writings of race scientists such as Paul Broca and Karl Penka. For Taylor, the Aryan invaders – a higher civilization – moved into  India and subdued the lesser races living there. Unfortunately, in the process of assimilation, the “purity” of the race was “soiled” by intermarriage, and their society degenerated by the “foul Dravidian worships of Siva and Kali, and the adoration of the lingam and the snake.”

Taylor argued that the Aryanisation of Europe followed a similar pattern – a “white” race that spread the Indo-European language to other European races. Indians were excluded, and the origin of the Aryans was relocated to Europe, in the form of the “Slavo-Celtic” race.

It’s important to note that the relocation of the Aryans from India to Europe was not just a debate amongst scholars. The Aryan question was one of the hot topics of the nineteenth century, influencing not only ideas about history but politics (such as the rightness of the slave trade or Britain’s right to rule India) and studies of mythology and folklore (folklorists such as the Grimm brothers began to read folklore as survivals of Aryan myths). The matter was of considerable common interest long before the arrival of Madame Blavatsky and the foundation of the Theosophical Society in 1875.

Sources
Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science (University of Chicago Press, 2006)
Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Palgrave, 2002)
Dorothy M. Figueira, Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority through Myths of Identity (State University of New York Press, 2002)
Isaac Taylor, The Origins of the Aryans: An Account of the Prehistoric Ethnology and Civilisation of Europe (Scribner & Welford, 1890)
Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (University of California Press, 1997)
George W. Stocking, Jr. Victorian Anthropology, The Free Press, 1987.

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