[Guest Post] Louis Jacolliot's footnote from his ""Les législateurs religieux" that Nietzsche used for the concept of Chandala
...by Hayrah (@StateOfHayiran on twitter)
“Christianity, sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of race, privilege:—it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence. Christianity, the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base, the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favored, against ‘race’: the undying chandala hatred as the religion of love.”—Twilight of the Idols.
Great thanks is due to Hayrah for his translation and his permission for it to appear here
Translator’s Introduction: This footnote is taken from Louis Jacolliot’s Les Legislateurs Religieux – Manou, Moïse, Mahomet, page 98. Regarding the word decasté: Given that “outcast,” “pariah,” and “Chandala” all have their own use in the text, preferring to avoid mixing the terms interchangeably, I’ve chosen to use the contemporary (if clunky) term “outcaste.”
ENGLISH TRANSLATION Book III ON MARRIAGE AND DUTIES OF THE FATHER (Funeral rest) [...] A Brahmin who marries a Shudra is immediately degraded, and reduces his family to servile status[1]. He is rejected onto the Chandala or people of mixed classes.
[1]: “He is rejected onto the Chandala or people of mixed classes.”
The expression “Chandala” shows up so often in Manu that we believe it useful to offer some explanations on these people of mixed classes and the roads taken on some of their more curious migrations, on the basis of which we link India as an ancestor to Chaldeo-Babylonia.
The division of the people into four castes—the Brahmin, the Kshatriya, the Vayishia, and the Shudras, gave rise in India a penal code whose vestiges we find in all the nations of antiquity and even in modern law. In India, this form of penalty was called Caste Rejection.
In Athens, banishment with deprivation of one’s rights as a citizen. In Rome, reduction of status (translator’s note: capitis deminutio). In modern law, civil death.
In India, caste rejection not only meant a man’s loss of social rights, but also of his natural rights as well. Not only was he nothing to the people of his village and his caste, but also to his wife, children, and all his parents. On the day his caste rejection was pronounced, his succession was open.
He was forbidden water, rice, and fire, not that he didn’t retain the right to feed himself, but rather that it was forbidden to anyone to offer him these things, or observe the laws of hospitality toward him, on pain of suffering the same scourge.
Killing him was not a crime.
Hindu society had not yet invented prisons, torture, execution... It remained stationary for several thousand years before this mysterious problem of life without daring to touch it, only ever allowing a society to expel from its bosom any of its members who refused to submit to its laws.
This custom soon bore out an entire category of individuals who received the name of Chandala, or people of mixed classes.
Today’s pariahs descend from the Chandala.
When a Hindu was struck by a caste rejection order, he would not drag down his wife and children, unless complicit, in his fall; but if in their devotion chose to follow him in his disgrace, they were degraded by this very fact and rejected into the impure class. In this same way any children he begat, whether by his wife, or by passing unions, also belonged to the Chandala class.
This class had no legal existence. The law did not recognize the parental lineage of these members any more than those of animals; these unfortunate outcastes were in fact less protected than animals, given that one could harm or put them to death with impunity.
Like all races abandoned to natural life, the Chandala developed themselves with extraordinary speed. Drawn from criminals of all castes, even from the Brahmin and Kshatriya castes, they soon formed a more intelligent, more capable whole than the average among Shudras and even Vayishias; little by little, they gathered in villages in uncultivated regions previously considered uninhabitable; they cultivated the land, raised herds, and with each having preserved the caste they once held in the societies that expelled them, they soon formed a small nation, raising itself besides and modeling itself just like the larger one, and itself also having its Brahmin priests, its Kshatriya as leaders, its Vayishia as merchants, and its Shudras as farmers. The most ancient Hindu historians, Vina-Snati and Veda-Vyasa for example, attribute to them the invention of the brick.
The Brahmin could not accept this situation which would inevitably lead to secular struggles the day these Chandala would be strong enough to rise up against those who rejected them from their bosom.
The persecution began.
One of the first edicts by Brahmatma Yati-Richi forbade all people of mixed classes to live in villages.
They became nomads and lived with their herds, but never straying from the common rallying point, that is their brick ovens. They continued to develop and grow at an extraordinary speed.
Every province in India had their Chandala governed by those among them who were originally Brahmin or Kshatriya. What’s more, although they spoke different languages at different latitudes, all the Chandala groups had the same morals and beliefs as the Hindus, for the Brahmin who had been expelled from their caste had endowed the mixed classes with a cult and religious discipline similar to those of the regular castes. Soon they ventured to build a few modest structures out of earth and dry stone, serving as pagodas and schools... Despite all obstacles, despite the civil and religious law, a new nation was forming within the nation.
The Brahmin Vamana, the conqueror of Prithu, a man as intelligent as he was skilled, advised the Artaxchatria Aristanata, whose throne he had consolidated by his victories, to admit all the chandala groups into the castes as they were, and to restore to them the rights their ancestors had enjoyed. Had this advice prevailed, all the persecutions and servile revolutions that bloodied India for centuries would have been avoided. But even in that time, logic, justice and common sense had little weight in government councils, and they thought of defending themselves from the Chandala by inflicting the most odious treatment.
Around eight thousand years before our era (I've often been reproached for my dates with little good faith... need I say that they are the dates of Brahmanic chronology? Am I wrong to prefer them to the fanciful dates that Europe wants to impose on India? ), the Artaxchatria—great king—Pratichta issued against them the edict known in India as Arta—the righteous act, by which he forbade them to worship Brahma and read the Vedas.
Here’s the deed we’ve translated from the Avadana-Sastra, or collection of historical accounts.
“Manu said: chandalas are born of adultery, incest and crime. They can only have for clothing the clothes of the dead, for dishes broken pots, for adornment iron, for worship that of evil spirits, and they must wander ceaselessly from one place to another.
The sages have confirmed these decisions for all time. Chandalas are forbidden to perform funeral ceremonies in honor of the ancestors’ spirits, to gather in villages, to observe caste differences among themselves and to attach privileges to them, to offer sacrifices and oblations to water and fire, and to perform the prescribed ablutions.
They are forbidden to pronounce the name of Brahma, the self-existent being, and the mysterious monosyllable; to read, copy and teach the Veda; to write from left to right, which is the mode reserved for virtuous men of the four castes and for the transcription of sacred Scripture.
They are forbidden to write with the right hand, or in any other way than from right to left, for their own acts, or to note the hiring out of services for the removal of filth and rotting corpses, and for their brick markets. The right hand is the pure hand reserved for sacrifices to the gods and oblations that people of the recognized castes alone have the right to offer.” “May this be so under penalty of death.” “Such is the law.”
These distinctions of right and left hand, and of writing from left to right and right to left, are still observed in all the southern provinces of India, even though castes have infinitely multiplied; the higher castes have imposed them on the lower castes, and a pariah who tried to transgress them today would be struck down by people of good caste. Let’s not forget this fact:
Pratichta’s edict and Manu forbade people of mixed classes to use their right hand and write from left to right.
Nothing helped: the chandalas built huts of foliage, which they knocked down at the slightest alarm, lived and prayed in common, made pottery and bricks which they sold on the outskirts of the cities, as they were forbidden to enter, and the need for their help in this arduous work was such that a Karana (bull, rescript, ordinance) of the Brahmatma Yati-Richi declared:
“That it was permissible to use the brick made by men of mixed classes because the earth was so pure that it could not be soiled by the touch of the chandalas.” (Avadana-Sastra, Part 1.)
Finally, these poor outcasts, using every means at their disposal, gradually rebuilt among themselves the social pact torn apart by their ancestors.
They had no right to own the land, so the sale of the objects they manufactured, their sober lifestyle and centuries of savings, ended up concentrating into their hands part of the monetary wealth of Hindustan.
Despite the ban on water, rice and fire that still hung over them, they managed to procure, in secret, rice, saffron and all the items they needed to feed themselves and for their wives’ grooming. They had moved closer to the towns, and the leafy huts had been replaced by brick shelters built on a different model from that of their oppressors, so as not to provoke their persecution. Gradually they ruined the legal basis of their proscription. In two thousand years, they had come to form almost a third of the nation, and the day was approaching when it would be necessary to reckon with them, when, under the Artaxchatria Agastya, persecution began again with such rigor, that in a few months they were thrown back into the miserable condition that the law had originally made for them.
The Himalayan highlanders having, for the second time, burst into the plains of Hindustan, and destroyed Asgartha, the city of the sun, Agastya, after having been on the verge of ruin, finally annihilated them, and judged it a good occasion to seize all the wealth amassed by the chandalas. He accused the latter of having favored the invaders, and issued a series of edicts which he had his soldiers carry out.
The first, known as the karana-karaya, the royal tax edict, “Confiscates everything found in the possession of the chandalas, on the grounds that they had no right to possess anything.” (Avadana-Sastra, Part 1.)
The second, called karana-kuhanaya, the edict on terracotta objects, “Orders that the chandalas be henceforth employed solely in brick and pottery work, on behalf of the Vayishias whose slaves they become; and that, divided into squads, they be immediately employed in surrounding cities with brick walls, and in building pagodas and fortresses with no other wages than their food.” (Avadana-Sastra, Part 1.)
The third, called karana-munkundakaya, the edict on impure vegetables, “ordains that the only food permitted to be given to them shall consist of garlic and onions (munkundaka, onions), the sacred books forbid that either grain, or fruit bearing grain, or fire or water be given to the chandalas.” (Avadana-Sastra, Part 1.)
The same ordinance states: “That they may not take water for their sustenance, neither from rivers, springs nor ponds, but only in the vicinity of swamps and troughs, and in holes made in the mud by the footsteps of cattle.” (Id.)
They were also forbidden: “To wash their clothes and do their ablutions; the muddy water, which was conceded to them, was to be used only to quench their thirst.”
Shudra women were forbidden to assist in chandala women’s childbirth, and chandala women were forbidden to help each other, etc... (Avadana-Sastra, Part 1).
It would be hard to believe all these horrors, were it not for the antiquity of the East being full of such acts.
Everything, as we can see, was combined to bring about as quickly as possible the extinction of this race, which ordinary means had been unable to prevent from growing.
Excessive work in the sun and in front of brick kiln fires, raw vegetables for food—muddy water for drink—no cleanliness—no help for pregnant women to deliver. Such treatment, in just a few years, would be the death of even the most robust and energetic nation.
The first result of these atrocious provisions, as reported in the Avadana-Sastra, was that these unfortunate people were forbidden to perform any bodily ablutions.
Before long, almost all of these unfortunate people were afflicted with purulent sores on their genitals. As they were unable to work in this state, Agastya issued the decree known as karana-nistrincaja, the edict of the knife, by which: “Every man and every male child born to him was required to undergo circumcision, and every woman had to have her labia minora removed...” (Avadana-Sastra, Part 1).
All these prescriptions, carried out to the letter under Agastya, had resulted, by the time of this prince’s death, in a reduction in the number of chandalas by a good half.
Under the successors of this man of iron, the rigors eased a little, and the unfortunate people, although plunged into the harshest slavery, were able to procure a less unhealthy diet, and rebuild their primitive huts of branches.
We find them again, some four thousand years before our era, in possession of herds and living more or less peacefully, on condition that they did not build houses or form villages, and that they submitted to Manu’s prescriptions.
“The dwelling of chandalas must be outside villages; they may not have whole vases, and their only possessions must be dogs and donkeys. “Let their clothing be the clothes of the dead, their dishes broken pots, their ornaments iron. Let them wander ceaselessly from place to place. “Let no man faithful to his duties have dealings with them; they must have business only among themselves and marry only among themselves. “Let the food granted to them be given only on shards, and let them not circulate at night in villages and towns. “Let them enter by day only for their work, bearing the signs prescribed by the king so that they may be recognized. Let them be charged with transporting the dead who leave no relatives. “Let them carry out death sentences....”
They had become executioners for high crimes when, in order not to increase the number of people from mixed castes, penal repression through death and torture had replaced caste rejection, which had been retained only for exceptionally serious religious crimes, such as the disclosure of the mysteries by an initiate.
At the time of the Brahminic and Buddhist struggles, around four thousand years before our era, caught between enemies fiercely opposed to one another, the chandalas, according to the Avadana-Sastra:
“Emigrated in droves through the land of Sindh and Aria (Iran) with their herds, a route already traveled by Hara-Kala and his warriors...” As we can see, this is the path of the Euphrates and Tigris, the path of Chaldea and Babylonia.
The most important emigration recorded in Avadana’s historical tradition took place under the leadership of Artaxa-Phasical. A multitude of Babylonian rulers kept this expression after their names, a striking sign of their Hindu origins.
The Sanskrit word pal means tribal chief, hence the word palli, meaning tribe, village. The route followed was that of Sindh, which all subsequent emigrations took, for in these immense plains stretching along the Sea of Oman and the Persian Gulf, the chandalas were safe, themselves and their herds, from the pursuits of their oppressors, who, moreover, were perhaps not unhappy to see the flood of servile castes threatening to invade them pouring over foreign lands.
There is a fatal principle that presides over the development of nations, and from which modern peoples will no more escape than their ancestors of antiquity. Slavery is born of human egoism, in every society; work at the bottom sees its results in well-being benefiting above all those at the top; those who are fortunate by chance band together to preserve their situation, but there comes a day when the slave no longer wants to work for the master... All the ancient emigrations originated from there, apart from a few ambitious vanquished who, like Manu-Vena, Hara-Kala and Iodha, went on to colonise Egypt, Asia-Minor and the northern regions, following bloody struggles. Most of the tribes of Chandalas and others who left India were emigrations of the disinherited, seeking other realms where they could live freely, have families and own property.
The organization of Hindu society, as it results from the prescriptions of Manu, whose translation we have given, left no room for the outcaste man, the chandala, the outcast; as the number of these poor people grew, they went to seek a little air, sun and freedom on the immense plateaus of Central Asia, dotted with oases and deserts, where they did not find the living conditions that would enable them to form lasting nations and play a major role in the history of mankind.
The nature of the soil forced them to continue the nomadic life that had been their lot in India, and they continue it today in Baluchistan, the Karman deserts, Kurdistan, and in Arabia as far as the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.
The law of the past is the law of the present, and man obeys the necessities of the land. No great kingdom, no powerful nation could have been established, either in the past or in the present, in the region between the Caspian Sea, the Euphrates, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea and the Indus, and no people will play a major historical role there in the future, unless some unforeseeable geological upheaval turns the stunted oases, steppes and endless deserts of this country into rich, fertile land.
Just look at all these immense lands called:
Karinn Desert, Khorasan Desert or Salt Desert, Kohistan Desert, Kerman Desert, Zerah Desert, Djalk Desert, Lora Desert, Saravan Desert,
To name only the most important, and tell us if it isn’t absurd, from every ethnographic point of view, to have powerful civilizations living there, ancestors of the Chaldeo-Babylonians and of all the peoples that official science calls Semites.
You have made a science out of the Bible and you refuse to part with it, but your inventions are as outdated as the sacred books of Judaism, and the history of human families linked to the white race today requires something other than the conceptions of cabinets and compilations approved by orthodox Rome...
The emigrations of the disinherited, of the Hindu chandalas, bringing to these lands their different tribal languages, their unique religious beliefs, their habits of writing from right to left, the imposed circumcision that had finally passed into the customs, their nomadic habits, their knowledge of brick and pottery work... these are the true source of the so-called Semitic nations that developed as far as possible on the plateaus of Central Asia and the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.
As for all these great Assyrian and Babylonian battles, exaggerated by this oriental tradition which knows no bounds on the terrain of the emphatic epic, they were merely wars between tribes disputing the more favoured banks of the Euphrates, and the possession of the entrenched camps of Nineveh and Babylon, which gave temporary supremacy to the tribe that possessed them. All these interminable wars between Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Megara, etc., were nothing more than village disputes.
That’s the historical truth.
It’s time to see through all these ancient exaggerations, immortalizing village revolts and handing over to posterity the admiration of men who, like Alcibiades, the dubious friend of Socrates the shoemaker, had their dog’s tail cut off to amuse the crowd...
We’ll have to reduce all that, and while retaining a reasoned admiration for the artistic and literary development that originated in India and continued on Greek soil, bring a host of small men and small facts down to a size that Plutarch and his ilk have overly exaggerated.
None of the peoples of antiquity developed in isolation and in a single day, and everything in the artistic, literary, philosophical and scientific fields must be, like the rings of a chain, linked to the common cradle. Just as we have today a common foundation of European conceptions on all subjects, so antiquity had a common foundation of Indo-Asian conceptions.
The so-called Semites themselves were so much like emigrant chandala slaves that they were never able to rise above the vulgar conceptions they had brought with them from the motherland. The ignorant chandalas had seen in Hindu worship little more than the outward manifestations abandoned to the plebeians, and nothing in what the Chaldeans, their descendants, have left us proves that on religious ground they rose to the philosophical and spiritual beliefs of the Brahmin. Mr. Lenormand himself is about to give us proof of this, at the same time as he notes, perhaps unsuspectingly, the Hindu descent of the Chaldeans.
The eminent Assyriologist, citing the following description by the English writer Mr. J. Roberts of the superstitious character of the Hindu lower castes, applies it to the Chaldeans as well.
“The Hindu people deal with so many demons, gods and demi-gods, that they live in perpetual fear of their power. There isn’t a hamlet that doesn't have a tree or some secret place regarded as the abode of evil spirits. At night, the Hindu’s terror is redoubled, and it is only by the most pressing necessity that he can resolve, after sunset, to leave his home. When he is forced to do so, he advances only with the utmost circumspection and with his ear to the ground. He repeats incantations, touches amulets, mumbles prayers at all times, and carries a firebrand in his hand to ward off his invisible enemies. If he hears the slightest noise, the stirring of a leaf, the growl of some animal, he believes himself lost; he imagines that a demon is pursuing him, and in order to overcome his fear he begins to sing, to speak aloud; he hurries off and does not breathe freely until he has gained some place of safety.”
This is a most accurate picture. We were able to observe it during the long years we lived in India.
Not once did we go on a night excursion, without the Hindus we met on a deserted road following our car at a running pace, leaning on some part of the vehicle, to diminish by company the terrors of the road.
When we questioned them, they would reply in low, trembling tones, that at night, the spirits of the waters, forests and air came to torment men in order to obtain from them funeral purification ceremonies.
Commenting on the English author's description, Mr. Lenormand says: “This description of modern Hindus applies exactly to the ancient Chaldeans, and may give an idea of the state of superstitious terror in which they were constantly held by the beliefs we have just outlined. Against demons and evil influences of all kinds, which they imagined they were surrounded by at every moment of their existence, what help was offered by sacred magic, etc.?”
The inscriptions left by the Chaldeans reveal only the crudest superstitions; the resemblance between the customs of these peoples and those of the lower classes in India, as noted by Mr. Lenormand, is further evidence in favor of the system we have outlined.
We have only one minor quibble with the eminent Assyriologist.
Why does he say: This description of the modern Hindus applies trait for trait to the ancient Chaldeans? By contrasting modern words applied to Hindus with ancient ones applied to Chaldeans, does he mean to imply that Hindus took their customs from the Chaldeans? Mr. Lenormand, although he invented the Akkadians to repel Hindu influence with regard to Chaldeo-Babylonia, certainly had no intention of dictating such an anachronism... But as it could be that these oppositions of words—modern and ancient—could give rise to this opinion, we would say that this belief in spirits and the science of incantations and exorcisms form the basis of the vulgar theology of the Hindus, and that the Vedas, Manu and the Puranas, and all the religious works of ancient India without exception, testify highly to these beliefs. Please allow us not to weigh our meagre authority in the balance with that of Mr. Lenormand, and to turn to the illustrious William Jones, and to Loiseleur-Deslongchamps, his translator. These two Indianists, in a note on Manu, speaking of vampires and rakshasas or evil spirits, express themselves as follows:
“Rakchasas are evil spirits of several kinds: Some are great enemies of the gods, like Ravana, in the epic poem Ramayana; others are species of ogres and vampires hungry for human flesh, haunting forests and cemeteries, like Flidimbha in the curious episode of the Mahabharata published by Mr. Rapp. Rakchasas constantly disrupt the sacrifices of pious hermits, who are forced to call upon princes of great valour for help. In the Ramayana, Book I, for example, the muni Viswamitra calls on Rama, son of King Dasaratha, for assistance, and in the Sacountala drama, the hermits call on King Duchmanta for help. The number of rakchasas is incalculable and constantly renewed, criminal souls often being condemned to enter the body of a rakchasa and to be housed there for varying lengths of time, depending on the gravity of their offence.”
We believe that the word modern, applied to these Hindu customs, was not in Mr. Lenormand’s mind, otherwise he would be obliged to apply the same epithet to Manu, the Vedas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, etc., i.e. to all the most ancient written monuments of human thought.
Before all this evidence, there can be no doubt that this mingled crowd of which Aeschylus speaks, this multitude of men from different nations, speaking different languages, yet united by the same morals and religious beliefs, who, according to the Chaldean Berossus, came to colonise Chaldeo-Babylonia, did not leave India at the times indicated by the traditions of the Avadana-Sastra.
Chaldeans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Syrians, Phoenicians and Arabs therefore owe their origins to the different tribes of chandalas who emigrated from Hindustan at different times, during the long and bloody struggles of Brahmins and Buddhists.
In turn, the Hebrews were the product of a Chaldean emigration.
Egypt was the only one of these regions to be colonised by the high castes of Hindustan, so its social state, beliefs, worship and traditions were simply reproductions, copies of the customs of the motherland. The same priestly influences, the same caste divisions, the same impossibility of escaping from them, the same criminal law which, as in India, produced that crowd of outcastes and the same peoples who, as the Bible records, fled from Egypt with the Hebrews.
And so we reject, even by way of classification, all Turanian and Semitic conceptions, to admit only one conception, the Hindu conception, which was the summary of all antediluvian traditions and which we call for the western regions: Indo-European traditions; and for the East : Indo-Asiatic traditions.
The West was populated by emigrations of warriors, which makes us, to use an expression of Manu, still in general use in India, people of the right hand, i.e. from the high castes, and having the right to use the right hand reserved for sacrifices, to eat and write from left to right in the direction of the writing of the sacred books.
The East was populated by the chandalas, people without caste and known as left-handed, and as such subjected to circumcision, all the work of the servile castes and the obligation to work, eat and perform most acts of life with the left hand.
In the ethnographic field, the smallest facts are often of considerable importance. We believe it's worth pointing out that, even today, European populations have retained the right hand as the principal agent of all work, while all so-called Semites use the left hand.
The habits of slavery, isolation, and the deprivation of women often imposed on the chandalas to halt the development of the race, had given rise to unnatural vices that were not shared by Sodom and Gomorrah alone, for all the so-called Semitic peoples were and still are infected by them.
These ignoble and degrading customs are regarded with horror in India as the vices of pariahs, and have only been noted in European nations as an exception.
So everything, from the broad outlines to the most minute details, conspires to give this system the force of historical law!
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