4

The Law, the State,

the Empire

The traditional society’s view of both the law and the state is closely related to the order of ideas that I have been discussing so far. Generally speaking, a transcendent realism is the presupposition of the traditional notion of the law. Especially in Aryan formulations, the notion of law has an intimate relationship with the notions of truth, reality, and stability inherent to “that which is.” In the Vedas, the term ṛta often has the same meaning as dharma; it not only signifies the order found in the world (the world as order, or κόσµος), but it has a deeper meaning whenever it designates truth, law, or reality, just as its opposite, anṛta, designates falsehood, evil, or unreality. Thus, the world of the law and consequently of the state came to be equated with the world of truth and of reality in the eminent sense of the word.

As a natural consequence, traditional man either ignored or considered absurd the idea that one could talk about laws and the obedience due them if the laws in question had a mere human origin—whether individual or collective. Every law, in order to be regarded as an objective law, had to have a “divine” character. Once the “divine” character of a law was sanctioned and its origin traced back to a nonhuman tradition, then its authority became absolute; this law became then something ineffable, inflexible, immutable and beyond criticism. Thus, every transgression of such law was regarded not so much as a crime against society, but rather and foremost as sacrilege or as an act of impiety (άσέβεια), or as an act that jeopardized the spiritual destiny of the person who disobeyed it as well as of the people with whom that person was socially related. This is why, up to and including medieval civilization, rebellion against authority and the imperial law was considered as serious a crime as religious heresy. Thus the rebels were considered just like heretics, namely, as the enemies of their own natures and as beings who contradict the law of their very own being.^[1] Aryan India employed a special expression to designate those who broke the caste law: they were called “the fallen ones,” or “the lapsed” (more on which later). The usefulness of the law in the modern sense of the word, that is, its collective and empirical usefulness, was never the true criterion adopted in ancient times; not that this aspect was never considered, but it was rather thought to be an accessory or a consequential aspect in every law, once a law was sanctioned as true. After all, there are different views of what constitutes usefulness. The notion of usefulness is the ultimate materialistic criterion of modern society, though that was not the case in traditional societies, which rather regarded it as a means to be employed in the function of a higher purpose. But for a law to be considered useful it was necessary to appear as something other than a mere and repealable creation of the human will. Once it was established that its authority originated “from above,” its usefulness and efficacy were definitively acknowledged. This certainty was never questioned, even in those cases in which experience, in the most immediate and unrefined meaning of the word, did not confirm and even proved such a law to be wrong somehow, since as the saying goes, “the web of ‘Heaven’s way’ is complex and incomprehensible.” This is why in the traditional world the creation of a system of laws and rituals was always attributed to divine legislators or to divine mediators; these beings, in turn, were considered as various forms or apparitions of the “lord of the center,” or “king of justice,” the forms being determined by different geographical areas and by different populations. And even when in more recent times the electoral system was introduced, tradition retained a partial formal existence when the people’s decision was not considered to be sufficient; in that case, in order for new laws to be finally ratified, it was necessary to obtain the approval of the pontifexes and to make sure that the diviners ascertained whether these laws enjoyed the gods’ approval.^[2]

Moreover, laws and institutions, as in the case of all traditional civilizations, were both “from above” and oriented upwards. A political, economic, and social order created merely for the sake of temporal life is exclusively characteristic of the modern world, that is, of the antitraditional world. Traditionally the state had a transcendent meaning and purpose that were not inferior to the ones the Catholic Church claimed for itself in the West as a manifestation of , and a path to, the “world above.” The very term “state,” in Latin status, from the Greek ἲσταναι, “to stay,” empirically may have derived from the form of social life taken up by nomadic populations once they permanently settled down; however, it may also point to a higher meaning, namely, to an order concerned with hierarchical participation in a spiritual “stability” as opposed to the contingent, unstable, changeable, chaotic, and particularistic character of a naturalistic existence. This order constituted the accurate reflection of the world of being in the world of becoming, hence the words pronounced in the course of a Vedic royal consecration: “This world of the living is steady, and so is this king of the people.” In this way, traditional states and empires often employed the symbols of “centrality” and of “polarity” that have been associated with the archetype of regality.

Thus, while the ancient Chinese empire was called the Middle Empire and the seat of the world according to Nordic legends was called Midgard, the “middle abode” or center of the world, the capital of the Incas’ solar empire was called Cuzco, or “navel” of the world. Likewise in ancient Greece, Delphi enjoyed the same designation as the center of Doric civilization. It would be easy to find analogous references in different civilizations, all pointing to the ancient meaning of traditional states and organizations. Generally speaking, in prehistoric times the symbolism of “sacred stones” already points to the same order of ideas, the alleged fetishism of the cult of the stones partially being a mere fancy of modern researchers. The omphalos, or sacred stone, is not a naive representation of the shape of the world; its meaning in Greek (“navel”) brings it back to the idea of a “center,” of a “stable point”; and it can also be related to what may be called sacred geography: the “sacred stone” is often found, and not without reason, in selected ritual places that served as traditional centers in relation to a given historical cycle or to a given people.^[3] The meaning of the “sacred stone” was often that of a “foundation from above,” especially when the stone was “from the sky,” namely, an aerolith. Some examples are the lapis niger of the ancient Roman tradition and the “stone of destiny,” the black, fatal stone figuring in the British and Celtic traditions, which was important for its alleged ability to recognize legitimate kings among various pretenders to the throne.^[4] Following the same order of ideas, in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s view the Grail was a mysterious “divine stone” that also had the power of revealing who was worthy of the royal dignity.^[5] Hence, the obvious meaning of the trial consisting in being able to draw a sword from a stone (Theseus in Hellas, Sohrab in Persia, King Arthur in ancient Britannia, and so on).

The doctrine of the two natures—which is the foundation of the traditional view of life—is also reflected in the relationship that exists between the state and the people (demos). The idea that the state derives its origin from the demos and that the principle of its legitimacy and its foundation rests upon it is an ideological perversion typical of the modern world and essentially represents a regression; with this view we regress to what was typical of naturalistic social forms lacking an authentic spiritual chrism. Once this direction was taken, an inevitable downward spiraling occurred, which ended with the triumph of the collectivistic world of the masses and with the advent of radical democracy. This regression proceeds from a logical necessity and from the physical law of gravity that affects falling bodies. According to the traditional view, on the contrary, the state was related to the people, just as the Olympian and Uranian principles are related to the chthonic and “infernal” world; or as “idea,” “form,” or νο ς, are related to “matter,” “nature,” or ὕλὴ; or as the luminous, masculine, differentiating, individualizing, and life-giving principle is related to the unsteady, promiscuous, and nocturnal feminine principle. Between these two poles there is a deep tension, which in the traditional world was resolved in the sense of a transfiguration and of the establishment of an order from above. Thus, the very notion of “natural rights” is a mere fiction, and the antitraditional and subversive use of that is well documented. There is no such thing as a nature that is “good” in itself and in which the inalienable rights of an individual, which are to be equally enjoyed by every human being, are preformed and rooted. Even when the ethnic substance appears to be somewhat “well defined,” in other words, when it presents some elementary forms of order, these forms (unless they are residues and traces of previous formative actions) do not have a spiritual value in and of themselves unless by participating in a higher order, such as when they are assumed in the state or an analogous traditional organization, they are first consecrated as being from above. In the end, the demos’s substance is always demonic (in the ancient, non-Christian, and amoral sense of the word); it always requires a catharsis or a liberation before it can act as a force (δύναμις) and as the material of a traditional political system, and before it can favor the development of a differentiated and hierarchical order of dignity over and beyond a naturalistic substratum.

In this regard we shall see that the main principle upon which the differentiation between people and the hierarchy of the traditional castes is built has not been political or economical, but spiritual; and thus was developed an authentic system of participations as well as the progressive stages of a conquest and a victory of the cosmos over chaos. In addition to the four major castes, the Indo-Aryan tradition knew a broader and more significant distinction that points to the duality of natures; I am referring to the distinction between the ārya or dvīja and the śūdra. The former were the “nobles” or “the twice-born,” who represented the “divine” element (daivya). The latter were beings who belong to nature, and thus who represent the promiscuous substratum of the hierarchy that was gradually overcome by the formative influence exercised within the higher castes, from the heads of the households to the brāhmaṇa).^[6] Strictly speaking, this influence was the original meaning of the state and of the law within the world of Tradition; it had a meaning of supernatural “formation,” even where it did not manifest itself immediately in visible ways, because of either incomplete applications of the principle or later materialistic and degenerative processes.

These premises are the foundation upon which the potential affinity between the principle of every state and that of universality is founded; wherever an action takes place that is aimed at constituting life beyond the limits of nature and of contingent and empirical existence, it is unavoidable that some forms not connected to the particular will manifest themselves. The dimension of that which is universal may appear in different aspects and different degrees in various civilizations and traditional organizations. The “formative process” always encounters resistance from matter, which in its determinations caused by time and space acts in a differentiating and particularistic sense in relation to the effective historical application of the one principle that in itself is superior and antecedent to these manifestations. Nevertheless, there is no form of traditional organization—which despite any local characteristics, any empirical exclusivism, any “autochthonism” of the cults and institutions it jealously defends—that does not hide a higher principle; this principle is actualized whenever the traditional organization reaches the heights of the idea of the empire. Thus, there are occult ties of sympathy and of analogy between the individual traditional formations and something unique, indivisible, and perennial, and these ties are portrayed in many ways. Once in a while it is possible to detect in certain historical institutions (such as monarchies and empires) an esoteric and universal core that transcends the specific geographical and historical dimensions of said institutions, thus culminating in a unity of a higher kind; such are the imperial peaks of the world of Tradition. Ideally, one same line runs from the traditional idea of law and state to that of empire.

We have seen that the opposition between the higher castes (which are characterized by rebirth) and the inferior caste of the śūdra was considered by the Indo-Aryans as an opposition between the “divine” and the “demonic” element. In Iran the higher castes were believed to correspond to emanations of the heavenly fire descended to earth, and more specifically upon three distinct “peaks”; after the “glory” (hvareno), the supreme form that was embodied in kings and priests, such supernatural fire descended hierarchically to castes or classes of the warriors and of the patriarchical wealthy leaders (rathaestha and vastriya-ishuyant) until it reached and “glorified” the lands occupied by Aryan descent.^[7]

In the ancient Persian tradition, this was the background against which a metaphysical view of the empire was formulated in the terms of a reality unrelated to space and time. There are two possibilities: on the one hand there is the ashavan, the pure, the “faithful” on earth and the blessed in heaven. The ashavan is one who boosts the power of the principle of light here on earth, in the domain proper to him. The ashavan is exemplified by the members of three classes: the lords of the ritual and of fire, who exercise an invisible power over occult influences; the warriors, whose job is to fight against barbarians and impious people; and finally, those who work on the dry and arid land, whose job is a militia, since fertility is almost a victory that increases the mystical virtus of the Aryan land.

On the other hand, opposed to the ashavan, are the anashvan, the impure ones, those without law, or those who oppose the principle of light. In this context, the empire as a traditional system governed by the “king of kings” corresponds to what the principle of light has successfully snatched from the snares of the principle of darkness; the limit of the empire is illustrated by the myth of the hero Shaoshan, the universal lord of a future, complete, and victorious kingdom of “peace.”^[8]

A similar idea is found in the legend according to which the emperor Alexander the Great contained the onslaught of the peoples of Gog and Magog by building an iron wall. These people may represent in this context the “demonic” element that in the traditional hierarchies was successfully subjugated; one day these people will flood the earth in pursuit of conquest but they will ultimately be challenged by figures who, according to medieval sagas, will embody the archetype of the leaders of the Holy Roman Empire.^[9] A similar idea is expressed in some Nordic traditions with the image of the bulwarks that protect the “middle abode” (the legendary Midgard) from the elementary powers and that one day will be overpowered during the “twilight of the gods” (the ragna-rokkr).^[10] The relationship between aeternitas and imperium is also found in the Roman tradition; hence the transcendent, nonhuman character with which the notion of regere is associated; this is why the pagan world credited the gods for the greatness of Rome, the city of the eagle and of the axe. According to another view endowed with a deeper meaning, the “world” will not end as long as the Roman Empire existed. This idea is connected to the function of mystical salvation attributed to the empire, provided that the “world” is not understood in physical or political terms but rather in terms of “cosmos” and of a dam of order and stability containing the disruptive forces of chaos.^[11]

In relation to this theme, the Byzantine continuation of the Roman ideal acquires a particular meaning owing to the markedly theological and eschatological nature animating that ideal. The empire, which even in this context is conceived as an image of the heavenly kingdom, is willed and preordained by God. In the empire the earthly sovereign (the βασιλεύς αυτοκράτωρ) is himself an image of the Lord of the universe; as the Lord himself, the sovereign is alone and without a second. He presides over both the temporal and the spiritual domains and his formal right is universal. This right extends even over people who have an autonomous government and who are not directly subjected to the real imperial power (any such government being considered “barbaric” and not “according to justice,” since it has a mere naturalistic foundation). The subjects of the empire are the “Romans” (ρωμαîοι), no longer in an ethical and juridical sense, but in the sense of a superior dignity and chrism, since they live in the pax guaranteed by a law that is a reflection of the divine law. The imperial ecumene sums up the order of “salvation” as well as that of the law in the higher sense of the word.^[12]

The ideal of the empire reemerged one more time in the Ghibelline Middle Ages with the same metahistorical content, that is, as a supernatural universal institution created by Providence as a remedium contra infirmitatem peccati in order to straighten the fallen human nature and direct people to eternal salvation. This ideal was for all practical purposes paralyzed both by the Church and by historical circumstances, which precluded its comprehension as well as its effective realization according to its higher meaning. Dante, for instance, from a traditional point of view was correct in claiming for the empire the same origins and supernatural destiny of the Church. He was also correct in talking about the emperor as one who, “owning everything and no longer wishing for anything else,” is free of concupiscence, and who can therefore allow peace and justice to reign and thus strengthen the active life of his subjects; after the original sin, this life can no longer resist the seductions of cupiditas unless a higher power controls it and directs it.^[13]

Although he expressed traditionally correct views about the empire, Dante Alighieri was unable to carry these ideas beyond the political and material plane. In Dante’s view, the emperor’s “perfect possession” is not an inner possession, typical of “those who are” but it is rather a territorial possession. Also, the cupiditas that he abhors is not the root of an unregenerated life tied to the law of becoming and lived out in a naturalistic state, but rather the cupiditas of the princes competing for power and riches. Again, according to him, “peace” is that of the “world,” which constitutes the anticipation of a different order beyond that of the empire and of a contemplative life in an ascetical Christian sense.

Tradition lives on, however, although only in faint echoes. With the Hohenstaufen dynasty Tradition had a last bright flicker; eventually the empires would be replaced by “imperialisms” and the state would be understood only as a temporal, national, particularistic, social, and plebeian organization.

Footnotes

1. De Stefano, L’idea imperiale di Federico II, 75–79.

2. “Cities did not inquire whether the institutions which they had adopted were useful or not: these institutions had been established because it so pleased religion . . . Originally the higher rule on which the social order was founded was not self-interest.” Fustel de Coulanges, La Cit é antique (Paris, 1900), 365. (Up to Frederick II we still find the idea that the laws, to which the emperor himself is subjected, derive immediately not from men or from the people, but from God himself. De Stefano, L’idea imperiale, 57.)

3. R. Guénon, Roi du monde, chap. 9.

4. J. L. Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail (London, 1913), 12–13.

5. See J. Evola, Il mistero del Graal e l’idea imperiale ghibellina (Rome, 1972).

6. Often the caste of the śūdra, or servants, was considered to be “demonic”

(asurya) in opposition. to the caste of the brāhmaṇa which was considered to be “divine” (daivya) and at the peak of the hierarchy of the “twice-born.”

7. In Yasht (19.9) it is said that the “glory” belongs “to the Aryan people who have already been born and who are yet to be born, and to the holy Zarathustra.” This reminds us of the notion of “men of the primordial tradition” (paoiryo-thaesha), which was considered the true Aryan religion in every age, before and after Zarathustra.

8. Bundahesh, 30.10; Yasht, 29.89–90.

9. This deed of Alexander the Great is described in the Koran (18:93), in which he is called Dhul-Qarnain. Gog and Magog are also found in the Hindu tradition with the similar names of the demons Koka and Vikoka, who will be destroyed at the end of the present age by Kalki-avatara, yet another messianic-imperial figure. See my Il mistero del Graal e l’idea imperiale ghibellina.

10. Gylfaginning, 8.42; Voluspa, 82.

11. The dynamic interplay between the two opposite principles was represented in Aryan India during the feast of gavām-ayana, during which a black śūdra wrestled against a white Aryan for the possession of a solar symbol. One of the Nordic myths tells about a knight in white armor who fights against a knight in black armor; the knight in black wins the contest, but will eventually be vanquished once and for all by a king.

12. On an analogous basis in Islam we find the geographical distinction between Dar al-Islam, or “Land of Islam,” ruled by divine laws, and Dar al-Harb, or “Land of War,” the inhabitants of which must be brought into Dar al-Islam by means of jihad or “holy war.”

13. Dante, Convivium, 4.5.4; De monarchia, 1.11, 11–14.