In his well-documented "Spiritualité hindoue" (Albin Michel, 1947),
Jean Herbert set himself the task "of giving to those who don't know
India a truthful general picture of the atmosphere in which Hindus
live, and of rectifying, for those who have already studied Hinduism,
many of the false ideas generally accepted in the West".
Not all the ideas generally accepted in the West about Hinduism are
false, yet. For instance, the Indian system of castes (chaturvarnya)
corresponds to a division of society in four (chatur) castes
(varna) : the brâhmanas, on whom religious duties, the keeping and
the transmission of sacred texts, and all that which has a sacerdotal
character, are incumbent. The kshatriyas, the warriors, are in charge
of imposing order (dharma) and of defending it, if necessary by
violence. The function of the third caste, the vaishyas', is to
increase, to manage and, to a certain extent, to use material wealth
in any of its form : they are thus in charge of agriculture, banking,
business, and charity. It falls upon the kshatriyas to distribute the
material wealth they create. The function of the fourth caste, the
shudras', is to carry out manual work.
Bearing this in mind, this passage of Dugin's 'Julius Evola e il
tradizionalismo russo' (
http://www.centrostudilaruna.it/evoladugin.html ), which we mentioned
a few weeks ago, is absurd : "(...) Evola has wrongly identified,
according to the logic of the non revolutionary Right, traditional
castes with the classes of Western society. In this respect, we
should bear in mind the extremely important warning of George Dumezil
about the fact that, in traditional Indo-European, thus Aryan,
society, workers belonged to the third caste, and not to the fourth
caste. Besides, merchants (that is proto-capitalists (sic)) did not
belong in any way to the system of castes in that society and all the
functions of distribution of goods and of money were the prerogative
of the warriors, of the kshatriyas. This means that the merchants
class does not correspond in any way to the structure of Aryan
society and was historically superimposed on it as a result of
cultural and racial mixing. Therefore, the antibourgeois struggle of
socialists has implicitly a traditional and Indo-European dimension."
When one washes with Marxist soap, no wonder one cannot rinse oneself
off. Dugin got it all wrong. As stressed by Evola in 'Sintesi di
dottrina della razza', far from being the result of a cultural and
racial mixing as seems to be suggested here, castes were established
by Aryans in India to prevent racial and cultural mixing. The
merchants caste or, as Dugin put it, the "merchants class", far from
having been "superimposed" on the structure of Aryan society as a
result of "cultural and racial mixing", was integrated organically
into it, just as Sabins, the representatives of the third function,
were integrated by early Romans, the representatives of the two first
functions, into Roman society, as explained by Dumézil in "De la
mythologie à l'histoire" (in 'La religion romaine archaïque').
Dumézil, however, was wrong in considering that "in traditional Indo-
European, thus Aryan, society, workers belonged to the third caste,
and not to the fourth caste". His mistake lies in his assumption that
the society of the Middle Ages was divided in three orders, namely
the Church, the Nobility and the Third Estate. It was actually
divided, just as Aryan traditional society, in four castes, or
orders, as shown unequivocally by K.F. Werner in "Naissance de la
noblesse", who also shows that the doctrine of the tripartition of
Feudal society was concocted by the Church, which, to this effect,
distorted facts and related legal documents ; this complete
fabrication was so persuasive that many authors of that time, such
as, for instance, Chaucer in his 'Canterbury Tales', were completely
fooled. In Northern Europe, however, the traces of the existence of
four estates were more difficult to erase : as is known, until 1865,
the Riksdag, the Swedish Parliament, comprised representatives of the
four estates : the Nobility, the Clergy, the Burghers and the
Peasantry.
If the mistake is made to consider that Feudal society was divided in
three orders, it is clear that "workers" are wrongly seen as
belonging to the third caste. Yet, they corresponded to the fourth
class. Thus, Evola has rightly identified traditional castes with the
classes of Western society, whose parody they are, and Dugin placed
the "workers" in the third class in an absurd attempt to justify the
revolution of the proletariat from a traditional standpoint.