Aryans

“ The folklore of the early Aryans is largely composed of tales concerning heroes who had saved their people from the ravages of those fierce men of the North, the Touranians. Century after century the wandering hordes of the great northern plains hovered, like threatening clouds, along the boundaries of Iran, [3] looking across the mountains from their own arid and wind-swept abodes to the rich and pleasant hills and valleys of the South. ”

“ All these institutions are odd, anomalous, decaying things among Aryans, and the more civilised the Aryans the more they decay. All of them are living, active things among savages, and, far from being anomalous, are in precise harmony with savage notions of the world. Surely, then, where they seem decaying and anomalous, as among Aryans, these customs and laws are mouldering relics of ideas and practices natural and inevitable among savages. ”

“ But why may not the pro-ethnic Aryans, as well as the savages, have had at one stage of their development a fear of dead kindred?"—a question arising simply from the fact that Mr. Jevons cannot bring himself to believe that the ancient Aryans ever borrowed any of the savage practices of the peoples they conquered. But, so far as I am concerned, I have never suggested that the Aryans have been wholesale borrowers of all the nasty and unpleasant customs and beliefs which are now found to survive amongst the nations who speak an Aryan language. ”

“ In this home-land, wherever it may have been, the Aryans lived in barbaric but not savage clans, tilling the soil and grazing their flocks and herds, workers in metal and skilled in many arts of life, a warlike folk who went forth to fight in chariots, a people able to govern and obey, to make laws and abide by them, a religious people earnest in the worship of the sun, and sky, and fire, and waters, and with pious faith in the divine spirits of their ancestors. ”

“ The Aryans, as far as the annals of their language allow us to see, recognized the presence of the Divine in the bright and sunny aspects of nature, and they, therefore, called the blue sky, the fertile earth, the genial fire, the bright day, the golden dawn their Devas, that is, their bright ones. ”

“ If we are to judge of the primitive religion of the European Aryans by comparing the religions of the different branches of the stock, the highest place in their pantheon must certainly be assigned to the oak. The result, then, of our inquiry is to make it probable that, down to the time of the Roman Empire and the beginning of our era, the primitive worship of the Aryans was maintained nearly in its original form in the sacred grove at Nemi, as in the oak woods of Gaul, of Prussia, and of Scandinavia ”

“ It is hard to draw any certain bodily picture of the primitive Aryans themselves (see page 109) , for in their course of migration and conquest they so mingled with other races, that now the nations united by Aryan speech range through the utmost varieties of white men, from the Icelander to the Hindu. The early home of the Aryans is supposed to have been in Inner Asia, perhaps in the present Turkestan, in the region of the Oxus and Yaxartes, for here the practicable way of migration for nomads with flocks and herds lies open down into Persia on the one side, and India on the other. ”

“ The Aryans were a fair-skinned people, unquestionably of the same general stock as ourselves. Pressing down from Central Asia through those north-western passes where alone land-access is possible to India, elsewhere impregnably guarded by the mountain wall of the Himalayas, the Aryans subdued the dark-skinned Dravidian aborigines, and settled down as masters. ”

“ It is scarcely probable that the primitively Aryans considered ‘thinking’ to be the essential characteristic of a man. We should rather assume from the earliest Aryan literature, the Old Indian Vedas, that the primitively Aryan felt he was closely allied to the brutes, since the Vedic Indian actually calls himself paçu, ‘beast.’ The literal meaning of Aryan manu-, ‘person,’ can hardly be ascertained now. ”

“ When we first hear of them, they had been living along the shores of the Caspian Sea for many centuries. But one day they had packed their tents and they had wandered forth in search of a new home. Some of them had moved into the mountains of Central Asia and for many centuries they had lived among the peaks which surround the plateau of Iran and that is why we call them Aryans. Others had followed the setting sun and they had taken possession of the plains of Europe as I shall tell you when I give you the story of Greece and Rome.
For the moment we must follow the Aryans. ”

“ The hoary antiquity of this ancient monument, the picture it affords of the earliest form of civilization that the Aryans developed in any part of the world, and the flood of light it throws on the origin of the myths and religions of all Aryan nations, make the Rig-Veda deeply interesting. It is, moreover, the oldest work in the Aryan world. It gives us a picture of the oldest civilization that the Aryans developed, and it enlightens and clears up much that is dark and obscure in the religions and myths of Aryan nations all over the world. ”

“ The Aryans of the West, by close study of the sacred languages of the Aryans of the East, have learned, not only a great deal about their own early history, but have been able to tell the Aryans of the East almost everything that these last know about their own history. ”

“ Of late, however, many considerations tend to prove that these Aryan nations were by no means one family; they are the product of a mixture of several races among which one has forced its language upon the others. If we call this race the Aryans proper we find that they are represented most purely in the Teutonic nations, the Saxons, Low Germans, and Scandinavians. These Aryans are a tall, blond, and dolichocephalic race. They appear as the conquerors of India, the masters of Persia, the Dorian immigrators of Greece, showing everywhere the same attributes. ”

“ Even without the fact of the existence, now, of such restrictions among the modern successors of the ancient Aryans in India, it would have been almost certain that they also were addicted to similar customs. It is certain that the notion of such usages was familiar enough to some at least of the tribes that preceded the Aryans in India. It is quite a mistake to look upon all these tribes as far below the Aryans in culture. Both the Kolarians and the Dravidians were probably quite the equals of the Aryans in social organisation. ”

“ A few years ago the philologists assured us, very positively, that the Aryans were a vigorous primitive race whose home was in central Asia and who had sent successive waves of emigration and conquest westwards, right across the continent of Europe, to be arrested in their onward march only by the wide waters of the Atlantic. ”

“ The process which has gone on may in part have been as follows:—Every race which has acquired very definite characteristics must have been for a long time isolated. The Aryans during their period of isolation probably developed many of their folk-germs into their larger myths, owing to the greater constructiveness of their imagination, and thus, in a way, they used up part of their material. ”

“ Nor is it universally admitted that the Aryans—that is, the ancestors of the Pelasgians, the Greeks, the Latins, Celts, Germans, and Slavs—are of Asiatic origin. Similarity of language may justify our belief in the common origin of the Aryans of Europe, the Persians, and the Hindoos, but it does not prove that their ancestral home should be looked for somewhere near the sources of the Oxus. Many men of learning3 look upon the Aryans as aborigines of Europe, but certainty on this point does not exist. ”

“ Through these long ages, periods of peace alternated with those of war, and the contact between the two races may have been as often friendly as hostile. The Aryans exercised a powerful influence upon their opponents, and we cannot doubt but that they themselves were also, but in a less degree, subject to some influence from them. ”

“ If this be granted, and if the supposed survivals of totemism among Aryans be accepted as genuine, then the Aryans have distinctly come through a period of kinship reckoned through women, with all that such an institution implies. ”

“ There can be no doubt, with regard to the question of the origin of these tales, that they were common in germ at least to the Aryan tribes before their migration. We find those germs developed in the popular traditions of the Eastern Aryans, and we find them developed in a hundred forms and shapes in every one of the nations into which the Western Aryans have shaped themselves in the course of ages. We are led, therefore, irresistibly to the conclusion, that these traditions are as much a portion of the common inheritance of our ancestors, as their language unquestionably is ”

“ Nevertheless, if the Aryans rule the world, they must obey their kings! By your act you have forfeited your lives and under the law are as dead men! I will go to the King and seek his pardon for you and for those he now holds in prison. ”

“ When the Aryans, who came from Europe, and Asia farther north than India, obtained a foothold here, and established themselves, they looked down upon other people in the land, and called themselves the twice-born, or born again, as some modern sects have it. ”

“ We no longer hold that it was from the high plateau of Asia that swept those tribes who eventually peopled Europe, but that they radiated from the centre of Europe herself. Far from forming the majority of the inhabitants of the Continent, the Aryans, if that term still preserves its meaning, are but one of its elements. They have mingled everywhere in variable quantities among the different hordes of Finnish and other races who have overrun our continent. ”

“ If the Aryan speech was imposed by one race upon other and different races, may not the complex of myths and customs which we are accustomed to call Aryan, be likewise the exclusive property of one race, and have been accepted with the Aryan speech by the inferior races whom the Aryans dominated, and upon whom they impressed their civilisation, whether that civilisation be regarded as a special product of the Aryans or as taken over by them from older, presumably Eastern, civilisations? ”

“ It is impossible, therefore, to avoid wondering whether the Aryans really found the rich plains of India a howling wilderness peopled by savages close in culture to the brutes, or whether, in parts of the vast continent at least, they found themselves pitted against another invading race, a Scythic race hailing from the north-east as the Aryan hails from north-west?
There is evidence even in the voice of the Rig-Veda for this. To begin with, there is the evidence of colour--colour which was hereafter to take form as caste. ”

“ The terms under these beads enable us to plant Aryan civilisation deeper, showing as they do a more profound grasp of what is in the best sense culture. They prove the truth of the maxim—"Nil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu." Whatever may be the psychologist's verdict on the scholastic question of primum cognitum and primum appellatum, these primitive concepts tell us that the Aryans reached the abstract through the concrete, and moved in a world of quick sensations. ”

“ The Western Aryans have every nation and tribe like their eastern brethren of the fifth race, their Golden and their Iron ages, their period of comparative irresponsibility, or the Satya age of purity, while now several of them have reached their Iron Age, the Kali Yuga, an age black with horrors. This state will last ... until we begin acting from within instead of ever following impulses from without. Until then the only palliative is union and harmony—a Brotherhood in actu and altruism not simply in name. ”

“ As it is assumed that all Aryans were blond and traced descent through males, so it is held that all Europeans, who are dark-complexioned, and whose forefathers traced descent through women, are non-Aryan in race, and that, although they now in almost every case speak an Aryan tongue, this is not their primitive speech, but simply that learned from their Aryan conquerors. ”

“ The earlier hymns exhibit the Aryans on the north-western frontiers of India just starting on their long journey. They show us the Aryans on the banks of the Indus, divided into various tribes, sometimes at war with each other, sometimes united against the “black-skinned” aborigines. Caste, in its later sense, is unknown. Each father of a family is the priest of his own household. The chieftain acts as father and priest to the tribe; but at the greater festivals he chooses some one specially learned in holy offerings to conduct the sacrifice in the name of the people. ”

“ But, it will naturally be asked, if the primitive Aryans were really a people of such moderate endowments, both in intellect and in morality, how do we explain the immense progress and the admitted headship and mastery among the nations of the world which their descendants have attained in Europe? ”

“ The Aryans have left no account of themselves sculptured on rocks or the walls of crumbling temples; but by careful study of the languages of Aryan origin we obtain, after the lapse of four thousand years, a glimpse of the social condition of those who spoke the mother-tongue among the mountains of Bactria. We infer that nouns similar in the various derived languages,—as father (protector) , brother (helper) , house, door, walls, boat, grain, etc.,—are the names of objects or notions familiar to the original family. ”

“ So, as Professor Max Müller tells us, the descendants of the ancient Aryans, "when they search for a name for what is most exalted and yet most dear to every one of us, when they wish to express both awe and love, the infinite and the finite, they can do but what their old fathers did when gazing up to the eternal sky, and feeling the presence of a Being as far as far, and as near as near can be ”