15
Professional Associations
and the Arts; Slavery
When viewed as a relationship between potentiality and act, hierarchy allowed the same motif established at the top to be reproduced in the activities of the different castes or social organisms; though on the plane of different (more or less spiritual) paths of fulfillment, each one retained in its own way the same upward orientation. This is why in the more complete traditional forms, the “sacred” was a light that shone not only on what today are the profane sciences, arts, and professions, but on trades and various material activities as well. By virtue of the analogical correspondences existing between the various planes, the sciences, activities, and skills of the lower plane could traditionally be considered as symbols of a higher nature and thus help to communicate the meaning hidden in the latter, since it was already present in the former, even though in a potential form.[1]
In the domain of knowledge, the presupposition was of a system of sciences fundamentally different in their premises and methodologies from modern ones. Every modern, profane science corresponds in the world of Tradition to a “sacred” science that had an organic, qualitative character and considered nature as a whole in a hierarchy of degrees of reality and forms of experience in which the form connected to the physical senses is just one among others. It is precisely in this way that the system of transpositions and symbolic and ritual participations was made possible. This was the case in cosmology and in related disciplines: for instance, ancient alchemy was not at all a primitive chemistry and ancient astrology was not at all (as it is mistakenly assumed today) a superstitious deification of the heavenly bodies and of their movements, but a knowledge of the stars so organized as to be able to constitute a science of purely spiritual and metaphysical realities expressed in a symbolic form. The world of Tradition knew in these same terms a physiology, parts of which are still preserved in the East (for example, the knowledge of anatomy and physiology presupposed by Chinese acupuncture; Japanese ju-jitsu; and some aspects of Hindu haṭha-yoga). In this physiology, the consideration of the material aspect of the human organism represented only a particular chapter, becoming part of the general science of the correspondences between macrocosm and microcosm, human world and elemental world. Ancient medicine proceeded from these same premises as a “sacred science” in which “health” appeared as a symbol of “virtue”; virtue in turn was considered a superior form of health and due to the ambiguity of the term soter, he who “saves” was on a higher plane of the same type as he who “heals.”
The development of the physical and practical aspect of knowledge in these traditional sciences must naturally appear as limited when compared and contrasted with modern sciences. The cause of this, however, was a correct and healthy hierarchy in which the interests of traditional man were arranged; in other words, he did not give to the knowledge of external and physical reality more importance than it deserved or than was necessary.[2] What mattered the most in a traditional science was the anagogic element, namely, the power to “lead to higher planes” that was virtually present in the knowledge relative to a given domain of reality; this element is totally lacking today in modern profane sciences. The latter, in reality, may act and have acted exactly in the opposite direction: the worldview from which they originate and on which they are based is such as to affect human interiority in a dissolving and negative way—in other words, they are centrifugal.[3]
Coming back to our subject matter, analogous considerations to the previous ones may be extended to the domain of the arts, understood both as real arts and as the activities of professional artisans. Concerning the former, only in periods of decadence did the world of Tradition come to know the emancipation of the purely “aesthetic,” subjective, and human element that characterizes modern arts. In the figurative arts, even prehistoric findings (such as the civilization of the Cro-Magnon and of the reindeer) show the inseparability of the naturalistic element from a magical and symbolical intention; an analogous dimension was present also in later, more developed civilizations. The “theater” corresponded to reenactements of the Mysteries, to the “sacred dramas” and, in part, to the ludi of classical antiquity, more on which later. Ancient poetry had close ties with the art of telling the future and with sacred inspiration; poetic verse, in fact, was associated with incantation (see the ancient meaning of the word carmen). As far as literature is concerned, the symbolic and initiatory element (which proceeded from a conscious intention and also from infraconscious influences grafted onto the creative spontaneity of single individuals and of various groups) throughout the Middle Ages often influenced not only the myth, saga, and traditional fairy tale, but the epic stories and chivalrous and erotic literature as well. The same applies to music, dance, and rhythm; Lucian reports that dancers, who were assimilated to priests, had a knowledge of the “sacred mysteries of the Egyptians,”[4] as the science of the mudrās, the symbolic, magical gestures that play an important role in Hindu rituals and ascetical paths affected the dance, the mime and pantomime of that civilization. Again, these were various expressions of the same one intent: “one temple, sculptured in a forest of temples.”
With specific regard to professional and artisanal activities, a typical example is given in the art of construction and building (their moral transpositions in the Gospels are well known), which occasioned even higher and initiatory interpretations. In the ancient Egyptian tradition, construction was regarded as a regal art, so much so that the king himself performed in a symbolic sense the first acts of the building of the temples in the spirit of an “eternal work of art.” While on the one hand people today are nowadays puzzled when it comes to explaining how achievements that require a superior knowledge of mathematics and engineering were possible in antiquity, on the other hand what emerges are unquestionable signs of a priestly art in the orientation, placement, and other aspects of ancient buildings, especially temples and, later on, cathedrals. The symbolism of masonry established analogical connections between the “little art” on the one hand and the “great art” and the “great work” on the other within secret associations that in the beginning could claim links with the corresponding medieval professional corporations. This is also partially true in the case of the arts of the blacksmiths, weavers, navigators, and farmers. Concerning the latter, just as Egypt knew the ritual of regal constructions, likewise the Far East knew the ritual of regal plowing[5] and, in a symbolic transposition of the farming art, generally speaking, man himself was considered as a field to be cultivated, and the initiate as the cultivator of the field in an eminent sense.[6] (The echo of this has been preserved in the very origins of the modern term “culture” in its reductive, intellectualistic, and petit bourgeois meaning.)
The ancient arts, after all, were traditionally “sacred” to specific deities and heroes, always by virtue of analogical reasons, and thus they presented themselves as potentially endowed with the possibility of “ritually” transforming physical activities into symbolic actions endowed with a transcendent meaning.
In reality, in the caste system not only did every profession or trade correspond to a vocation (hence the double meaning preserved in the English term “calling”);[7] not only was there something to be found in every product as a “crystallized tradition” that could be activated by a free and personal activity and by an incomparable skill; not only were the dispositions developed in the exercise of a trade and acknowledged by the social organism transmitted through the blood as congenital and deep attitudes—but something else was present as well, namely, the transmission, if not the real initiation, of at least an “inner tradition” of the art that was preserved as a sacred and secret thing (arcanum magisterium), even though it was partly visible in the several details and rules, rich with symbolical and religious elements that were displayed in the traditional guilds (whether Eastern, Mexican, Roman, medieval, and so on).[8] Being introduced to the secrets of an art did not correspond to the mere empirical or rational teachings of modern man: in this domain certain cognitions were credited with a nonhuman origin, an idea expressed in a symbolic form by the traditions concerning the gods, the demons, or the heroes (Balder, Hermes, Vulcan, Prometheus) who originally initiated men into these arts. It is significant that Janus, who was also the god of initiation, was the god of the Collegia Fabrorum in Rome; in relation to this we find the idea that mysterious congregations of blacksmiths who came to Europe from the East, also brought with them a new civilization. Moreover, it is significant that in the locations where the oldest temples of Hera, Cupra, Aphrodite-Venus, Heracles-Hercules, and Aeneas were built, quite often it is possible to find archaeological evidence of the working of copper and bronze; and finally, it is significant that the Orphic and Dyonisiac mysteries were associated with the themes of the art of weaving and spinning. This order found its most complete fulfillment in examples found especially in the East, where the achievement of an effective mastery in a given art was just a symbol, a reflection, and a sign; in fact, it was the counterpart of a fulfillment and a parallel inner realization.
Even in those areas in which the caste system did not have the rigor and the determination exemplified by Aryan India, something resembling it was developed in a spontaneous way in relation to inferior activities. I am referring to the ancient corporations or artisan guilds that were omnipresent in the traditional world, and that in the case of ancient Rome date back to prehistoric times, reproducing on their own plane the typical makeup of the patrician gens and family. It is the art and the common activity that provide a bond and an order replacing those that in higher castes were provided by the aristocratic tradition of blood and ritual. This does not imply that the collegium and the corporation lacked a religious character and a virile, semimilitary constitution. In Sparta the cult of a “hero” represented the ideal bond between the members of a given profession, even in the case of an inferior one.[9] Just like every city and gens, in Rome every corporation (originally consisting of free men) had its own demon or lar; it had a temple consecrated to it and a correlative, common cult of the dead, that determined a unity in life and in death; it had its own sacrificial rites performed by the magisteron behalf of the community of the sodales or collegae, who celebrated certain events or holy days in a solemn, mystical way through feasts, agapes, and games. The fact that the anniversary of the collegium or corporation (natalis collegi) coincided with the anniversary of its patron deity (natalis dei) and of the “inauguration” or consecration of the temple (natalis templi), indicates that in the eyes of the sodales the sacred element constituted the center from which the inner life of the corporation originated.[10]
The Roman corporation is a good example of the virile and organic aspect that often accompanies the sacred dimension in traditional institutions; it was hierarchically constituted ad exemplum rei publicae and animated by a military spirit. The body of sodales was called populus or ordo, and just like the army and the people at solemn gatherings, it was divided into centuriae and decuriae. Every centuria had its leader, or centurion, and a lieutenant (optio), just like in the legions. To differentiate them from the masters the other members had the name of plebs and corporati, but also caligati or milites caligati like simple soldiers. And the magister, besides being the master of the art and the priest of the corporation in charge of his “fire,” was the administrator of justice and the overseer of the behavior of the members of the group.
Analogous characteristics were found in the medieval professional communities, especially in Germanic countries: together with the community of the art, a religious and ethical element bound the members of the Gilden and of the Zunften. In these corporate organizations, the members were bonded together “for life” more as in a common rite than on the basis of the economic interests and mere productive goals; the effects of intimate solidarity, which affected man as a whole and not just his particular aspect as an artisan, permeated everyday life in all of its forms. As the Roman professional collegia had their own lar or demon, the German guilds, which were constituted as small-scale images of cities, also had their own “patron saint,” altar, common funerary cult, symbolic insignia, ritual commemorations, ethical laws, and leaders (Vollenossen), who were supposed to regulate the art and guarantee compliance with the general norms and duties regulating the lives of the members of the corporation. The requirement for being admitted to the guilds was a spotless name and an honorable birth; people who were not free and those belonging to foreign races were not admitted. Typical of these professional associations were the sense of honor, purity, and impersonal character of their work, almost according to the Aryan canons of bhakti and of niṣkāma-karrna: everybody performed their work silently, setting their own person aside, while still remaining active and free human beings; this was an aspect of the great anonymity typical of the Middle Ages and of every great traditional civilization. Something else was shunned, namely, anything that could generate illicit competition or a monopoly, thus contaminating the purity of the art with mere economic concerns; the honor of one’s guild and the pride in the activity characterizing it constituted the firm, immaterial bases of these organizations. While not formally hereditary, these organizations often became so, thereby demonstrating the strength and the naturalness of the principle responsible for generating the castes.[11] In this way, even in the order of inferior activities connected to matter and to material conditions of life it was possible to find the reflection of the way of being of a purified and free action endowed with its own fides and living soul, which freed it from the bonds of selfishness and ordinary interests. In the corporations there was a natural and organic connection between the caste of the vaiśya (in modern terms, “management”) and the caste of the śūdras, namely, the working class.
Considering the spirit of an almost military solidarity that was both felt and willed, and whereby the vaiśya was the equivalent of a manager and the śūdra an employee, both of whom worked in the same company, the Marxist antithesis between capital and labor, between employers and employees, at that time would have been inconceivable. Everybody attended their own function and stayed in their own place. Especially in the German guilds, the faithfulness of the inferior was the counterpart of the pride the superior took in the subordinates’ zeal and efficiency. In this context too, the anarchy of “rights” and “demands” did not arise until the inner spiritual orientation died out and the action performed in purity was supplanted by one motivated by materialistic and individualistic concerns, and by the multiform and vain fever brought about by the modern spirit and a civilization that has turned economics into a guiding principle (daemon) and a destiny.
When the inner strength of a fides is no longer present, then every activity is defined according to its purely material aspect; also, equally worthy paths are replaced with an effect-driven differentiation dictated by the type of activity being performed. Hence, the sense of intermediary forms of social organization, such as ancient slavery. As paradoxical as it may first appear in the context of those civilizations that largely employed the institution of slavery, it was work that characterized the condition of a slave, and not vice versa. In other words: when the activity in the lower strata of the social hierarchy was no longer supported by a spiritual meaning, and when instead of an “action” there was only “work,” then the material criterion was destined to take over and those activities related to matter and connected to the material needs of life were destined to appear as degrading and as unworthy of any free human being. Therefore “work” (ponos) came to be seen as something that only a slave would engage in, and it became almost a sentence; likewise, the only dharma possible for a slave was work. The ancient world did not despise labor because it practiced slavery and because those who worked were slaves; on the contrary, since it despised labor, it despised the slave;[12] since those who “worked” could not be anything but slaves, the traditional world willed slavery into being and it differentiated, instituted, and regulated into a separated social class the mass of those people whose way of being could only be expressed through work.[13] Labor as ponos, an obscure effort strictly dictated by need, was the opposite of action, the former representing the material, heavy, dark pole, the latter the free pole of human possibilities detached from need. Free men and slaves, after all, represented the social crystallization of those two ways of performing an action—either according to matter, or ritually—that I have already discussed; we do not need to look elsewhere to find the basis for the contempt for work and of the view of hierarchy typical of the constitutions of an intermediate type. In such a world, speculative action, asceticism, contemplation (sometimes even “play” and war) characterized the pole of action vis-à-vis the servile pole of work.
Esoterically speaking, the limitations that slavery put on the possibilities of an individual who happened to be born in this condition correspond to the nature of his given “destiny,” of which slavery should be considered sometimes the natural consequence. On the plane of mythological transpositions, the Jewish tradition is not too far from a similar view when it considers work as a consequence of Adam’s fall and, at the same time, as an “expiation” of this transcendental fault taking place in human existence. On this basis, when Catholicism. tried to turn work into an instrument of purification it partially echoed the general idea of the ritual offering of an action conformed to one’s nature (in this context: the nature of “fallen man” according to the Judea-Christian view of life) as a path of liberation.
In antiquity, the vanquished were often assigned the functions of slaves. Was this barbarian-style materialism? Yes and no. Once more, we should not forget the truth that permeated the traditional world: nothing happens on this earth that is not the symbol and the parallel effect of spiritual events, since between spirit and reality (hence, power too) allegedly there was an intimate relationship. As a particular consequence of this truth, it has already been mentioned that winning or losing were never considered as mere coincidences. There still remains today among primitive populations the ancient belief that the person afflicted by misfortunes is always a guilty person; the outcomes of every struggle and every war are always mystical signs, or the results of a “divine judgment,” and therefore capable of revealing or unfolding a human destiny. Starting with this presupposition, it is possible to go further and establish a transcendental convergence of meanings between the traditional view of the “vanquished” and the Jewish view of the “sinner,” as they both inherit a fate befitting the dharma of the slave, namely, work. This convergence is inspired by the fact that Adam’s “fault” is associated with a defeat he suffered in a symbolical event (the attempt to come into possession of the fruit of the “Tree”), which may yet have had a victorious outcome. We know of myths in which the winning of the fruits of the Tree or of things symbolically equivalent (the “woman,” the “golden fleece,” etc.) is achieved by other heroes (Heracles, Jason, Siegfried) and does not lead them to damnation, as in the Judea-Christian myth, but rather to immortality or to a transcendent knowledge.[14]
If the modern world has disapproved of the “injustice” of the caste system, it has stigmatized much more vibrantly those ancient civilizations thast practiced slavery; recent times boast of having championed the principle of “human dignity.” This too is mere rhetoric. Let us set aside the fact that Europeans reintroduced and maintained slavery up to the nineteenth century in their overseas colonies in such heinous forms as to be rarely found in the ancient world; what should be emphasized is that if there ever was a civilization of slaves on a grand scale, the one in which we are living is it. No traditional civilization ever saw such great masses of people condemned to perform shallow, impersonal, automatic jobs; in the contemporary slave system the counterparts of figures such as lords or enlightened rulers are nowhere to be found. This slavery is imposed subtly through the tyranny of the economic factor and through the absurd structures of a more or less collectivized society. And since the modern view of life in its materialism has taken away from the single individual any possibility of bestowing on his destiny a transfiguring element and seeing in it a sign and a symbol, contemporary “slavery” should therefore be reckoned as one of the gloomiest and most desperate kinds of all times. It is not a surprise that in the masses of modern slaves the obscure forces of world subversion have found an easy, obtuse instrument to pursue their goals; while in the places where it has already triumphed, the vast Stalinist “work camps” testify to how the physical and moral subjection of man to the goals of collectivization and of the uprooting of every value of the personality is employed in a methodical and even satanic way.
In addition to the previous considerations concerning work as art in the world of Tradition, I will briefly mention the organic, functional, and consistent quality of the objects produced, by virtue of which the Beautiful did not appear as something separated or distinct from a certain privileged category of artistic objects and the mere utilitarian and mercantile character of the objects was totally lacking. Every object had its own beauty and a qualitative value, as well as its own function as a useful object. With regard to art in the traditional world,
While on the one hand what occurred was (a) the prodigy of the unification of the opposites, (b) the utter compliance with a set of established rules in which every personal élan appears to be sacrificed and suffocated and (c) the authentic arising of spirituality within an authentic, personal creation;[15]
on the other hand it could be rightly said that:
Every object did not have the imprint of an individual artistic personality, as happens today ‘with the so-called artistic objects; yet while revealing a “choral” taste, which makes of the object one of many, infinite expressions, it had the seal of a spiritual genuineness that prevented it from being called a “copy.”[16]
Such products bore witness to one stylistic personality whose creative activity developed through centuries; even when a name, whether real, fictitious, or symbolic was known, this was considered irrelevant. Anonymity, not of a subpersonal but of a superpersonal character, was therefore upheld; on this soil what was born and proliferated in all the domains of life were artisans’ creations that were far from both a shallow, plebeian sense of utility and an extrinsic, a functional, “artificial” beauty; this scission reflects the overall inorganic character of modern civilization.
Footnotes
1. R. Guénon, La Críse du monde moderne, 108–15.
2. Very appropriately O. Spann defines modern knowledge as “the knowledge of what is not worthy of being known.” Religionsphilosophie (Vienna, 1948), 44.
3. Concerning the illusions nourished by some in regard to modern science, see my Cavalcare la tigre (Milan, 1962).
4. Lucian of Samosata, On Dance, 59. The “dance of the seven veils,” which are removed one at a time until the dancer is totally nude, repeats on its own plane a precise initiatory schema.
5. Li Chi, 4.1. l3; 17.3.20.
6. J. Evola, The Hermetic Tradition, chap. 22.
7. In the language of the campagnonagge, in which these traditions were preserved, the word vocation was always synonymous with occupation: instead of asking a person what his occupation was, he was asked what was his “vocation.”
8. The medieval “manuals” that have been preserved often mention mysterious practices that were associated with the process of construction itself; they also relate legends according to which masters of the art were killed because they betrayed the oath of secrecy.
9. Herodotus, The Histories, 6.60.
10. According to a tradition, Numa, by instituting the collegia, intended for “every profession to celebrate its own cult” (Plutarch, Numa, 17). In India too each profession pursued by the inferior castes often corresponded to a special cult of divine or legendary patrons; this practice is also found in Greece, among Nordic people and the Aztecs, in Islam, and so on.
11. In Rome the professional guilds became hereditary during the third century A.D. From that time on. every member of a corporation passed on to his heirs not only a biological legacy, but his profession and his property as well, provided that they too followed in his footsteps. This succession was enforced by the state, however, and thus we can no longer speak of an authentic conformity of the castes to the traditional spirit.
12. [The translator of this work has come across a passage that he regards worth quoting in this context: “Around 1820 an astrologer says to the young hero of Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma: ‘In a century perhaps nobody will want idlers any more.’ He was right. It ill becomes anyone today to admit that he lives without working. Since Marx and Proudhon, labor has been universally accepted as a positive social value and a philosophical concept. As a result, the ancients’ contempt for labor, their undisguised scorn for those who work with their hands, their exaltation of leisure as the sine qua non of a ‘liberal’ life, the only life worthy of a man, shocks us deeply. Not only was the worker regarded as a social inferior; he was base, ignoble. It has often been held, therefore, that a society like the Roman, so mistaken about what we regard as proper values, must have been a deformed society, which inevitably paid the price of its deformity…. And yet, if we are honest, we must admit that the key to this enigma lies within ourselves. True, we believe that work is respectable and would not dare to admit to idleness. Nevertheless, we are sensitive to class distinction and, admit or not, regard workers and shopkeepers as people of relatively little importance. We would not want ourselves or our children to sink to their station, even if we are a little ashamed of harboring such sentiments. Therein lies the first of six keys to ancient attitudes toward labor: contempt for labor equals social contempt for laborers. ” Paul Veyne, ed., A History of Private Life, vol. 1, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 118–19.]
13. Aristotle (Politics, 1.4) based slavery on the presupposition that there are men who are only fit for physical labor, who therefore must be dominated and directed by others. According to this order of ideas, a distinction was made between “barbarians” and “Hellenes.” Likewise, the Hindu caste of the śūdras originally corresponded to the stratum of the black aboriginal race, the “enemy race” dominated by the Aryans, which had no other choice but to serve those who were “twice-born.”
14. See the introduction of my Hermetic Tradition.
15. G. Villa, La filosofia del mito secondo G. B. Vico (Milan, 1949), 98–99.
16. Ibid., 102.