6

On the Primordial Nature

of the Patriciate

The Indo-Aryan civilization exemplifies one of the most thorough applications of the foregoing principles. In this civilization, the brāhmaṇa caste was not at the top of the social hierarchy by virtue of its material strength or its wealth, or even of its para-ecclesiastical organization; only the sacrificial rite, which was its privilege, determined its higher status vis-à-vis other castes. By permeating those who performed them with some kind of dreadful and beneficial psychic power, the rite and the sacrifice allowed the brāhmaṇa to partake of the same nature as the evoked powers; not only would this quality abide in that person forever, making him directly superior to and revered and feared by others, but it would also be transmitted to his descendants. Having entered into the bloodstream as. some sort of transcendent legacy, this quality would become the characteristic feature of a race that is activated in individuals by the rite of initiation.^[1] The dignity of a caste was determined both by the difficulty and by the usefulness of the functions it exercised. Because of the abovementioned presuppositions, in the world of Tradition nothing was cherished more than the spiritual influences that the rite could activate through its necessitating action; nothing appeared as difficult as entering into a real and active relationship with the invisible forces that were ready to overcome the imprudent person who dared to confront them without possessing the necessary qualifications and knowledge. For this reason the brāhmaṇa caste, despite the fact that it was scattered throughout India, could evince the respect of the masses and enjoy a prestige that no tyrant ever enjoyed, no matter how well armed.^[2]

In China as well as in Greece and ancient Rome, the patriciate was essentially characterized by the possession and by the practice of those rites that were connected to the divine power emanating from the founder of a family. In China, only the patricians practiced the rites (yi-li), while the plebeians merely had customs (su). There is a Chinese saying: “The rites are not the legacy of ordinary people,” which corresponds to the famous saying of Appius Claudius: “Auspicia sunt patrum. “A Latin expression characterized the plebeians as gentem non habent: people who have no rites nor ancestors. This is why in ancient Rome the patricians viewed the plebeians’ lifestyle and sexual coupling as similar to that of wild animals (more ferarum). Thus, the supernatural element was the foundation of the idea of a traditional patriciate and of legitimate royalty: what constituted an ancient aristocrat was not merely a biological legacy or a racial selection, but rather a sacred tradition. In fact, even an animal may have biological and racial purity. After all, in the caste system the laws of blood, heredity, and endogamic restrictions did not apply only to the brāhmaṇa but to the other castes as well. It was not in this sense that the plebeian was said to lack ancestors: the true principle of the differentiation between patricians and plebeians was that the ancestors of the plebeian and of the slave were not “divine ancestors” (divi parentes) like the ancestors of the patrician stocks. No transcendent quality or “form” entrusted to a rigorous and secret ritual tradition was transmitted to them through the blood. The plebeians lacked that power through which the members of the aristocracy could directly celebrate their own cults or be members of the priestly class (as was the case in the ancient classical world, in ancient Northern and Germanic races, in the Far East, and so on). The plebeians did not have the privilege of the second birth that characterized the āyra (the noble) and the Manudharmaśāastra^[3] does not hesitate to say that even an āyra is not superior to the śūdra until he has been born again. The plebeians were not purified by any of the three heavenly fires that in ancient Iran were believed to act as the occult souls of the three higher castes in the empire. The plebeians also lacked the “solar” element that in ancient Peru characterized the race of the Incas. The plebeians’ promiscuity had no limits; they had no true cult of their own, and in a higher sense they had no founding father (patrem ciere non possunt).^[4] Therefore the plebeians’ religion could not help but have a collective and chthonic character. In India their religion was characterized by frenzied and ecstatic forms more or less connected to the substratum of pre-Aryan races. In the Mediterranean civilizations, the plebeians’ religion was characterized by the cult of the mothers and by subterranean forces instead of the luminous forms of the heroic and Olympian tradition. The plebeians, who in ancient Rome were called “children of the Earth,” had a religious devotion to the feminine deities of the earth. Even in China, the official aristocratic religion stood in contrast with the practices of those who were often called “obsessed” (ling-pao), and with the popular cults of a Mongolian and shamanic type.

We find the supernatural conception of the aristocracy also in ancient Teutonic traditions, not only because in these traditions every leader was at the same time the high priest of his people and of his lands, but also because claiming as an ancestor a divine being was enough to separate a family from all the others; a king was then chosen exclusively from among the members of these privileged families. This is why the king enjoyed a different dignity from that enjoyed, for instance, by a military leader (dux or heritzogo) who was occasionally appointed in military situations on the basis of his recognized individual talents. It seems that ancient Norwegian kings celebrated the rites by themselves, without the help of the priestly class. Even among the so-called primitive populations those who had not been initiated were looked down upon by their own people and excluded from all the military and political privileges of their clan. Before undergoing rites that were destined to transform one’s innermost nature and that were often associated with hard trials and a with a period of isolation, a person was not considered to be a true man but was rather seen as belonging to the same class as women, children, and animals. An individual became a member of the group of true men who control the community only through the new life awakened in him by initiation, almost as if he partook of a “mystery” or joined an order.^[5] Once an individual partakes of this new life, which is almost “unrelated to the old one,” he receives a new name, a new language, and new attributions. Thus, authors such as H. Schurtz have rightfully seen in this the germ of true political unity; this insight corroborates what I have said before concerning the plane proper to any traditional state, which is different from the plane typical of any unity built on merely naturalistic premises. These “virile groups” (in German, Männerbunde) to which one is admitted after a regeneration that truly confers manhood and differentiates a person from all other members of the community, enjoy power (imperium) and an undisputed prestige.^[6]

Only in recent times has aristocracy, like royalty, taken on a mere secular and political character. In the beginning, aristocracy and royalty were based on character, race, honor, valor, and faithfulness, on noblesse d’épée and on noblesse de coeur. In later times a plebeian view of the aristocracy arose that denied even the privileges of blood and tradition.

A typical example of the latter view is the so-called aristocracy of culture, or the aristocracy of intellectuals that arose as a by-product of bourgeois civilization. During a census taken in the reign of Frederick the Great, the head of an ancient German noble family humorously replied, ”Analphabet wegen des höhen Adels,” in reference to the ancient notion of the British lords who were considered “experienced in the law and learned, even though they may not know how to read.” The truth is that in the context of a normal hierarchical view, the principle that determined the precise ontological and essential differences between people and was at the basis of the notion of aristocracy and of its privileges was never “intellectuality” but rather “spirituality.” The tradition was preserved, though in an attenuated form, up to the time of the knightly nobility where it was embodied in a somewhat ascetical and sacral aspect in the great medieval orders. At that point the nobility already had its main reference point in the sacred, not in but outside itself and in a separate class, namely, the clergy, although the clergy represented a spirituality that was still a far cry from the spirituality of the primordial elites.

The ritual and sacral element was the foundation of the authority of both the higher castes and of the father in the ancient patrician family. In Western Aryan societies such as Greece and Rome, the pater familiae originally enjoyed a status similar to that of the priest-king. The term pater was synonymous with king (hence the words rex, ἅναξ, βασιλεύς; it conveyed the idea of a spiritual authority as well as that of power and majestic dignity. According to some views with which I totally concur, the state is an application on a larger scale of the same principle that in the beginning constituted the patrician family. Therefore the pater, though he was the military leader and the lord of justice of his relatives and slaves, in primis et ante omnia was the person entrusted with performing those traditional rites and sacrifices proper to every family, the rites and sacrifices that constituted its nonhuman legacy.

This legacy, which emanated from the founding father, was represented by fire (for example, the thirty fires of the thirty families surrounding the central fire of Vesta, in ancient Rome). This fire, which was fed with special substances and lit according to specific rituals and secret norms; was supposed to be kept burning at all times by every family as the living and tangible witness of its divine legacy. The father was the virile priest in charge of tending to the sacred family fire, but he was also one who must have appeared like a “hero” to his children, relatives, and servants; or like the natural mediator of every efficacious relationship with the supernatural; or like the supreme vivifier of the mystical force of the ritual, which was present in the substance of fire; or like the incarnation of “order,” as Agni was to the Indo-Aryans; or like the principle that “brings the gods to us”; or like “the firstborn from order”; or like “the son of strength”;^[7] or like “he who leads us away from this world, to higher dimensions, into the world of the right action.”^[8] The pater’s main responsibility was to prevent the “fire from going out” so that it might continue to reproduce, perpetuate, and nourish the mystical victory of the ancestor^[9] this responsibility to the fire was the manifestation of the “regal” component of his family, with the pater being the “lord of the spear and of the sacrifice.” In this way the pater really constituted the center of the family; the entire rigorous constitution of traditional paternal rights flowed from this center as a natural consequence, and it subsisted even when the awareness of its primordial foundation was lost. In ancient Rome, anyone who like the pater had the ius quiritium (the right to the bear the lance and to perform sacrifices), also had the right to own land; his privileges could never be abrogated. He spoke on behalf of the gods and on account of power. Just like the gods, he expressed himself through symbols and signs. He was immaterial. Originally, it was not possible (nulla auctoritas) to prosecute a patrician legally, since he was regarded as a minister of the gods, just like the king in recent times. If the patrician committed a crime in his mundus, the Curia would only declare that he did something wicked (improbe factum). His rights over his relatives were absolute: ius vitae necisque. His superhuman character made it natural for him to sell and even to put to death his own children, at his own discretion.^[10] It was in this spirit that the articulations of what Vico rightly called “natural heroic rights” or “divine rights of heroic people” were formulated.

According to a patrician tradition the rite, which corresponded to a “Uranian” component, enjoyed primacy over other elements of the same tradition that were related to nature; this can be established from several aspects of the ancient Greco-Roman laws. It has rightfully been said that:

In antiquity what united the members of a family was something more powerful than birth, feelings and physical strength: it was the cult of the hearth and of the ancestors. This cult shaped the family into a united body, both in this world and in the next. The ancient family was more a religious than a natural association.^[11]

The common ritual constituted the true bond of the family’s unity and often even of the gens itself. If an outsider was allowed to participate in the common rite, he thereby became an adoptive son who enjoyed those privileges that could also be taken away from a biological son guilty of neglecting the rite of his family, or from a son who was interdicted from participating in it. This obviously meant that according to the traditional idea, rite rather than blood had the power to unite or to differentiate people.^[12] In India, Greece, and Rome, a woman had to mystically join her future husband’s family or gens through the rite; the bride, before being a man’s bride, was the bride of Agni or the mystical fire. Those who were allowed to participate in the cult proper of a patrician stock were thereby allowed to enjoy an ennobling mystical participation that conferred upon them some of the privileges of that particular stock, while at the same time they committed their future offspring to it. Consequently, it is possible to understand the sacred aspect of the feudal principle as it previously emerged in ancient Egypt, since through the mystical “gift of life” emanating from him, the king gathered around himself a body of faithful subjects who were elevated to the priestly dignity. Analogous ideas can be found in Peru among the Incas, the “Children of the Sun,” and to a certain extent, even among the Japanese feudal nobility.

In India one finds the idea—which should be reduced to the doctrine of the “sacrifices” in general—of a family line of male descendants (primogeniture) that is strictly related to the problem of immortality. The firstborn—who alone has the right to invoke Indra, the heavenly warrior god—is seen as the one whose birth frees the father of his debt to the ancestors; thus, it is said that the firstborn “frees” or “saves” (trayate) the ancestors in the world beyond. The firstborn, standing on the “battlefield” represented by this earthly existence, confirms and continues the line of influence that constitutes the ancestors’ substance and that is carried on in the bloodstream as a purifying fire. It is significant that the firstborn is believed to have been generated in order to fulfill a “duty” to this ritual commitment that is not affected by human feelings or ties.

It is not impossible, therefore, that in some cases a family derived by adaptation from a superior and purely spiritual type of unity found in older times. For instance, Lao-tzu^[13] hinted that the family arose at the end of a relationship of direct participation, through blood, with the original spiritual principle. A similar idea still echoes as a residue in the priority acknowledged by several traditions of spiritual paternity over natural paternity, or of a “second birth” versus natural birth. In ancient Rome, for instance, we could refer to the inner aspect of the dignity conferred at the time of adoption, which was understood as an immaterial and supernatural filiation that was believed to take place under the aegis of “Olympian” deities; at one point in time adoption was also chosen as the basis for the continuation of the imperial function. According to an ancient Hindu text:

That his mother and father produced him through mutual desire and he was born in the womb, he should regard as his mere coming into existence. But the birth that a teacher produces for him … is real, free from old age and free from death.^[14]

In this way natural relationships not only are secondary, but they may also be reversed; thus according to the same text, “the brāhmaṇa who brings about the Vedic birth of an older person and who teaches him his own duties becomes his father, according to law, even if he is himself a child.”^[15] Wherever the law of patria potestas was considered from a social and juridical point of view to be absolute and almost superhuman, such a law could enjoy this spiritual character only if it had (or if it originally had) such a justification in the order of spiritual paternity, and also if it was related to blood ties as the “soul” is related to the “body” within the organic unity of the family stock. I will not dwell further on these concepts; however, it is noteworthy that a body of ancient beliefs also postulates the idea of a unity that is not merely biological but psychospiritual as well. Thus the guilt of a family member was believed to affect the entire family;^[16] also, according to this idea, a family member may redeem another or carry out an act of vengeance on behalf of another, and so on.

In all of these aspects one finds repeated confirmation of the view according to which traditional institutions were ordered “from above” and were not based on nature but on sacred legacies and on spiritual actions that bind, free, and “shape” nature. In the divine dimension what counts is the blood (θεοὶ σύναιμοι) and the family (θεοὶ εγγενεîς). The state, the community, the family, bourgeois feelings, duties in the modern (profane, human, and social) sense of the word—all these are human “fabrications,” things entirely made up and existing outside the realm of traditional reality, in the world of shadows. The light of Tradition did not know any of these things.

Footnotes

1. The brāhmaṇa, who was compared to the sun, was often thought to be substantiated by a radiant energy or splendor (tejas) that he drew from his vital force through his “spiritual knowledge,” Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, 13.2.6, 10.

2. Concerning the foundation of the brāhmaṇa’s authority, see The Laws of Manu 9, 313–17.

3. Laws of Manu, 2.39; 103; 157–58; 172.

4. In the mythical account of the establishment of the castes as it was handed down by the brāhmaṇa, while to each of the three higher castes corresponds a group of deities, this is not the case of the śūdra, who do not have any god of their own to whom they may pray and offer sacrifices.

5. Hutton Webster, Primitive Secret Societies (Italian trans., Bologna, 1921).

6. Concerning virility in an eminent and not naturalistic sense, we may refer to the Latin term vir as opposed to homo. G. B. Vico (The New Science, 3.41) had already remarked that this term implied a special dignity, since it designated not only a man to be married with a patrician woman, but also the nobility, the magistrates (duumviri, decemviri), the priests (quindicemviri, vigintiviri), judges (centemviri), because “the term vir indicated wisdom, priesthood and kingship, as I have previously demonstrated that it formed one thing in the person of the first fathers in the state constituted by families.”

7. Ṛg Veda, 1.1.7–8; 1.13.1; 10.5.7; 8.3.8.

8. Atharva Veda 6.120.1. The expression refers to gārhapatya-agni which, among the three fires, is that of the pater or head of the household.

9. “The father is the household’s fire.” Laws of Manu, 2.231. To keep fueling the sacred fire is the duty of the dvīja, the twice-born, who constitute the three higher castes (2.108). It is not possible now to elaborate beyond this brief reference to the traditional cult of fire. Later on I will discuss the role that men and women played in the cult of the fire, in the family and in social life.

10. Concerning the abovementioned expressions, see M. Michelet, Histoire de la république romaine (Paris, 1843), 1.138, 144–46. Similar elements are even found in more recent traditions. The British lords in the beginning were considered to be demigods and on the same footing with the king.

According to a law promulgated by Edward I, they enjoyed the privilege of simple homicide.

11. F. de Coulanges, Cité antique, 105.

12. In Rome there were two types of marriage, one related to the chthonic and the other to the Uranian component of Roman civilization. The first type was a secular and practical marriage, in which the woman was considered mere property to be transferred to the manum viri; the second type was a ritual and sacred marriage, a confarreatio, a sacrament or sacred union (hierogamos). The Hellenistic equivalent of the confarreatio was the eggineois; the sacral element that abided in the agape was considered to be so important that without it the validity of the marriage could be challenged.

13. Tao te Ching, 18.

14. Laws of Manu, 2.147–48.

15. Laws of Manu, 2.150.

16. Deut. 5:7.