The Wahhabis PART 2
The British thus sought to exacerbate the Ottoman Empire ’s growing weaknesses. The
typical strategy was that of Divide and
Conquer. Much of the Ottoman Empire consisted of numerous ethnicities, united
in their allegiance to Islam and to
the Caliphate as its guardian. By
dividing the Ottoman territories into
numerous independent and competing states, separated mainly along ethnic lines,
they could be more easily challenged. The goal of the British was to weaken
the Ottoman Empire by pitting Muslim
against Muslim, in this case, Arab against Turk.
However, in
Islam, Muslims fighting Muslims is
of course considered an enormity. Therefore, the only way to convince the Arab Muslims to fight their fellow
Muslims was to suggest that they were not Muslims after all, that they had apostatized
and become “unbelievers.” What makes
Abdul Wahhab’s mission so suspicious, then, is that his teachings
provided precisely this pretext. Instead of addressing where true reforms were
needed in the Ottoman Empire , he
instead chose to fixate on a far more
trivial issue, where he found the means to propose the absurdity that the
Ottoman Turks were not true Muslims. Ultimately, he chose to combat the
Empire from without rather than assisting it from within. In particular,
despite the more critical issues facing the
Ottoman Empire, Wahhab chose to address certain Sufi practices which he characterized as Shirk, or polytheism, and
therefore amounting to Kufr, or apostasy. His interpretation then suggested
that any at fault should be fought and killed, contrary to the basic tenet
of Islam, which prescribed Naseeha, or
“sincere advice.”
It is true that the practice of Islam had in many places become polluted with
certain questionable practices, of
ten through Sufi influence. The
particular practice that Abdul Wahhab
condemned was known as Tawassul, where
Sufis would ask intercession from
God through their Saints, or Walis. This,
Abdul Wahhab characterized as Shirk, or idolatry, because he believed it
to involve indirectly attributing divinity to the Saint. In other words, it
treated these saints as gods. It therefore, in his mind, constituted an act of
apostasy which supposedly justified
the perpetrator being killed. While the
practice of Tawassul is certainly
suspect, to suggest that asking intercession with God by way of some other
person is actually offering worship to that person is a stretch. In fact, Abdul Wahhab was criticized on the matter by
his own brother Sulayman, a judge in Huraymila, according to whom the consensus
of the scholars regarded such violations as “lesser idolatry” and not
qualifying as apostasy.8 As notes Madawi al-Rasheed, in Contesting the Saudi State, “even if tomb visiting, saint
veneration or tree worship was practiced in Arabian society, it cannot be taken
for granted that al members of their society indulged in such practices. It is
possible that they only existed among a minority of the population.” 9
It is one thing to denounce corruptive innovations
in the religion, but quite another to declare the entire community of Muslims
to have fallen into apostasy for the
errors of a few, and to then fight and
kill them! Adbul Wahhab claimed ignorantly that this corruption had infected
the Ummah since the earliest generations, known as the Salaf, and that all
Muslims since that time had effectively been unbelievers (Kuffar, plural
of Kafir ). In Islam, the act of declaring another Muslim
an unbeliever (Kafir) is considered repugnant, and tantamount to apostasy
itself if committed in error. There is a well-known Hadith where in the Prophet
Mohammed declared: “if a Muslim calls another Kafir, then if he is a Kafir let
it be so; otherwise, he [the accuser] is himself a ka fir.’’10 A man said to the Prophet: “I
have a neighbor who bears witness against me that I commit Shirk(idolatry).”
The Prophet replied: “Say: ‘La Ilaha illa Allah,’ (there is no god but God) you
will make him a liar.”11 Abdul Wahhab holds a striking resemblance to a man
condemned in a prophecy of the Prophet Mohammed:
Verily, I fear about a man from you who will
read the Quran so much that his face
will become enlightened and he will come to personify Islam. This will continue until God desires.
Then these things will be taken away from him when he will disregard them by
putting them all behind his back and will attack his neighbor with the sword
accusing him of Shirk.” The Prophet was asked, “Which of the two will be
deserving of such an accusation? The attacker or the attacked?” The Prophet
replied, “The attacker (the one accusing the other of Shirk).12
Abdul Wahhab’s claims are not only clearly
contradicted by the Quran , but by the
most fundamental expectations of the community of believers (Ummah). According
to the Quran: “You are the best nation
produced [as an example] for mankind.” 13 On the preservation of Islam, the
Quranreveals: “We have, without doubt, sent down the Message; and We
will assuredly guard it (from corruption).”14 According to an authentic narration, the Prophet Mohammed said:
“By God, I am not afraid that you will worship others along with God (commit
Shirk) after my death, but I am afraid that you will fight one another for worldly things.” 15 There could be exceptions of course, but on the whole as
the Prophet said: “verily my Ummah would not agree upon error and God’s hand is
over the majority and whoever dissents
from them departs to Hell.” 16 Based on this Hadith, the consensus or the
majority opinion of the Muslim scholars, known as “Ijma,” has been equated with
divine sanction. In Sunni Islam, Ijmais
therefore regarded as the third fundamental source of Shar iah law after the Quranand
Sunnah . This was the basis of
the broad acceptance of the many principles developed by the Madhhabs and the practice of Taqlid. The Prophet Mohammed forewarned,
“There will come a time when my Ummahwill splinter into seventy two sects all
of which will be in Hellfire, save those who
stick to the Jammah (majority).” 17
Adbul Wahhab nevertheless declared “ Jihad”
against the Ummah, that is, against all
except those who followed his prescriptions for “purifying” his
version of
monotheism (Tawhid). The unusual nature of Wahhab’s declaration is remarked upon by David Commins in The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia:
Since early Islamic history, Muslims have differed
on the essential point of what constitutes correct belief, but at most times,
such differences did not result in military conflict or the adoption
of coercive measures as in an
inquisition. 18
Given the sanctity of the role of the Caliph
in Islam, it is considered unlawful to
rebel against his authority. As the Prophet Mohammed commanded, “If someone
comes to you and you have already agreed on
the leadership of a particular
man and there by have become unified,
and he wants to create disunity in your group, you should kill him.”19 Instead
of open rebellion, unless it is clearly justified,
the Muslims’ duty is to reform the leader and the state through advice. As the Prophet
Mohammed said, “The Religion is Naseeha (sincere advice).” He was asked, “To
whom?” He replied, “To God, His Book, His Messenger, and to the leaders of the
Muslims and the people in general.” 20 The meaning of this Hadithwas explained
by Imam Nawawi in Sharh Sahih Muslim:
Advice to
the leaders is to help them upon the truth.
To obey them
in it.
To order
them with it.
To remind
and advise them with kindness and gentleness.
To remind
them of that which they are heedless and neglectful of.
To help them
fulfill those rights of the Muslims that has not reached them yet. Not to
rebel against them.
To enamor
the hearts of the people with obedience to them. Imam al Khattabi says, “From
sincerity to them is prayer behind them,
Jihad along with them, to give the Zakat(alms) to them, and not to rebel
against them with the sword when injustice or bad treatment appears from them.
And that they are not praised with false praises, and that Dua (supplication)
is made for their righteousness.“ 21
In a work written in 1659, by Imam Ala al Din al Haskafi , long-standing Grand Mufti
of Damascus, titled Durr al-Mukhtar fi
sharh Tanweer al
Absaar, widely considered as the central reference for Fatwa in the
Hanafi Madhhab , is explained the
ruling on rebellion against the Caliph. He lists three types of rebels, the
third which he equated Kharijites.
The Kharijites were a sect from the late seventh century AD who contributed to one of the
first great controversies among the Muslims.
They were noted for adopting a radical approach to Takfir whereby they declared
other Muslims to be unbelievers who had committed major sins, whereas the
Sunnis understood that a Muslim was nevertheless prone to error and was not an
apostate as long as he didn’t deny the illegality of his actions. The legal ruling for rebels such as these is,
according to al Haskafi :
…and
Kharijites, meaning men with military force who revolt against the Imam(Caliph)
because of a mistaken scriptural interpretation (Tawil), believing that he is
upon a falsehood of unbelief (Kufr) or disobedience to God (Masiya) that
necessitates their fighting him, according to their mistaken scriptural
interpretation, and who consider it lawful to take our lives, our property, and
take our women as slaves, and who consider the Companions of our Prophet (God
bless him and give him peace) to be disbelievers. Their ruling is the same as that
of rebels (Bughat) against the caliphate
by unanimous consensus of Fiqhscholars. [i.e. they are fought with as much
force as needed to put down the insurrection.] 22
Also, setting the precedent for the unusually
cruel interpretation of Islam which has
come to characterize perceptions of the
Shar iah , Abdul Wahhab ordered
the stoning of an adulteress. Contemporary reactions indicate the punishment
was quite rare. As David Commins’ explains, “In the chronicles, there is
something of a ‘Yes, it is hard to believe, but it is true’ tone to the account
of the stoning.” 23 Refutations of
Abdul Wahhab began with his own brother and father. During Abdul Wahhab’s early studies in the Hijaz his
teachers Mohammed Hayet Sindi and Mohammed Suleiman Kurdi had suspected him of atheism.
In Najd itself, Abdul Wahhab’s native
region, the campaign of criticism was led by a
Hanbali scholar named Mohammed bin Abdarahman Afaleq. Refutations spread
rapidly to Iraq, Yemen and to North Africa. In 1743 Ahmad ibn Barkat Tandatawi,
a Shafi scholar in Mecca wrote a refutation, which was endorsed by ten scholars, including the
Muftisof the four Madhhabs. But the most
important refutation was that
of Ahmad ibn Zayni Dahlan, the Shafi Mufti of
Mecca, who wrote Fitnatul Wahhabiya (“The
Wahhabi Controversy”). 24
Despite all his posturing as a reviver of “pure”
Islamic tradition, Abdul Wahhab also
then endorsed one of the greatest corruptive innovations ( Biddah) in recent
times, the establishment of Ibn Saud as “king,” not Caliph, thus incepting
the Saudi dynasty. It was agreed
between Abdul Wahhab and Ibn Saud that
from then on power would be held among their descendants, with the descendants
of the Saudis maintaining political authority,
and the descendants of Abdul Wahhab,
known as al Sheikh, administering the
Wahhabi cult. With the support of
al Saud and fired by Abdul
Wahhab’s “Fatwas,” the Wahhabis went on a rampage, killing thousands of
Muslims, taking their women and children as slaves, confiscating their property,
and destroying numerous Islamic shrines and
relics. They destroyed as many tombs of the Prophet’s Companions as they could find and in Medina
plundered the treasury of the Prophet’s mosque. But,
in the words of one nineteenth century English writer, they were notorious for “preferring
slaughter to booty” in their conquests.25
Finally, the Caliph in Istanbul sent an army
headed by Mohammed Ali Pasha in 1811, to
fight and annihilate the Wahhabi rebellion. Following their defeat,
the Wahhabi leaders, Uthman ul Mudayiqi
and Mubarak ibn Maghyan, were sent to
Istanbul, and paraded through the streets until they were executed. Ali Pasha
also sent troops under his second son, Ibrahim Pasha, to root the Wahhabis out
of Syria, Iraq and Kuwait. Those Arabs
that had suffered at the hands of the Wahhabis rose in revolt joining Ali
Pasha’s forces. In 1818, the Wahhabi stronghold of Diriyah was taken and
destroyed, though some of the Saudis received protection from the British in
Jeddah. Their leader, Abdullah ibn Saud, was sent to Istanbul where he was executed
along with other captured Wahhabis by order of Mustafa Asim Efendi, the Sheikh
al Islamof the day. The rest of the Wahhabi clan was held in captivity in Cairo.
It was in
India, where British influence
was most heavily focused, where the Revivalism
inspired by Abdul Wahhab contributed to numerous
seething sectarian controversies. Prior to the British occupation, much of India had been nder the rule of the Mughal Empire, which was effectively a
province of the Ottomans. The Mughal
emperors were descendants of the Mongols, through Genghis Khan. The Mughal Empire, which began in 1526, at the
height of their power in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,
controlled most of the Indian Subcontinent. The Mughals created an impressive
civilization, whose most memorable legacies are its architecture, especially
that of the reign Of Shah Jahan (1592–1666) who created the Taj
Mahal. The Mughal Empire reached the zenith of its territorial expansion during
the reign of Aurangzeb (1618 –1707), who may have been the
richest and most powerful man alive.
The
Mughal Empire was one the wealthiest empires ever, and certainly the
wealthiest in the world at that time. But the splendor of the Mughals attracted
the envy of the British who in 1600 established the East India Company, which would open the door to
their colonization of the country and so robbed the country of its wealth
that India is now ranked among the poorer
countries of the world. The East India
Company, which traded mainly in cotton,
silk, indigo dye, salt, saltpeter, tea and
opium, also came to rule large areas of
India, exercising military power and assuming administrative functions.
Company rule in India effectively began
in 1757 after the Battle of Plassey, and lasted until the Indian Mutiny of
1857, also known as the Sepoy Rebellion. Following the 1857 Rebellion, the
Company’s remaining powers were transferred to the Crown, initiating the direct
rule by the British Empire, known as the British Raj.
The first
reformer identified as a Revivalist in
India was Shah Waliullah (1703 –1762),
born during the Mughal reign of Aurangzeb. During a time of waning Muslim
power, he worked for the revival of Muslim rule and intellectual learning in
South Asia. Waliullah travelled to Mecca
for the Hajj pilgrimage in 1730, and studied under Sheikh al Madani, a renowned
teacher of Hadith, in whose library he discovered the works of Ibn Taymiyyah .
On his return to India, Waliullah, much
like Abdul Wahhab, preached the supposed purification of Islamic monotheism,
and as Ibn Taymiyyah had done, he
defied custom by setting himself up as a Mujtahid.
Wahhabi
influence in India resulted more directly in the emergence of groups
like the Deobandis and the Ahlul Hadith. The Deobandi movement was founded in 1866 at
Darul Uloom Deoband in Deoband, India.
The Ahlul Hadith emerged in the 1860s, through the influence of two
personalities, Nazir Husayn in
Delhi and Siddiq Hasan Khan in Bhopal. Like the Wahhabis, they were fiercely opposed to the Sufis and the
Shia, and ardent adherents of Ibn Taymiyyah . The two groups merged following a
pilgrimage to Mecca, and some Wahhabi scholars went to Bhopal and Delhi to
study with them. However, the Ahlul Hadith were more radical with regard
to Taqlid, which they rejected
entirely, dismissing the value of the
Madhhabs, in favor of relying exclusively on the Quranand
Sunnah . This emphasis on the exclusive importance of Hadithhad long been
the position of the medieval Ahlul Hadith,
which the Indian movement tried to
identify themselves with. 26 In 1857, a Fatwawas issued in India against
Wahhabism, the Deobandis and Ahlul Hadith, leading to the formation of the
Sufi - b a s e d Barelvi movement, founded by Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi, a disciple and successor of
Shah Waliullah’s son.
To this day, Muslims of India, probably more than any other Muslim community
in the world, are the most unfortunate victims of this British strategy of Divide and Conquer, where, because of the continuing
controversies between these groups, they are continually mired in incessant
bickering and acrimony. 27 Similarly, out of the Arab Bureau headquartered in Cairo Egypt ,
the British controlled a dozen different Muslim Revivalist movements. In North Africa, British
intrigue was headed by the Sanussi
Brotherhood, founded in Mecca in 1837 by an Algerian named Ali al Sanussi, who had come under the influence of
the Wahhabis. The Sanussi Brotherhood remained
only a minor facet of British intelligence until 1897, when Wilfred Scawen Blunt, a primary agent of the Oxford
Movement , took an active role. (By
World War I, the brotherhood was
formally appropriated as an asset of the
Arab Bureau. Eventually, the head of the order became the first king of Libya after independence).
Shambhala & Agartha Part 1
In a poem first published in 1889, English
author and original member of Rhodes’ Round Table, Rudyard Kipling, who also wrote
“The White Man’s Burden,” declared, “Oh,
East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” The context of Kipling’s expression was the
Great Game. Also known as the Tournament of Shadows in Russia, the Great Game refers
to the strategic rivalry and conflict for supremacy
in Central Asia, between the British Empire and the Russian Empire in the
eighteenth century. The classic Great Game period is generally regarded as
running from the Russo-Persian Treaty of 1813 to the Anglo-Russian Convention
of 1907. The term was introduced into mainstream consciousness by Kipling in
his novel Kim(1901), about a boy orphaned from his Masonic father, who
eventually works for the secret service in India.
Central Asia is not only the legendary home
of the Lost Tribes of Israel, but also the purported location of the mystical
city of Shambhala, which pervades modern occult myth. Not to say that the rival
Empires battled for control of a shibboleth, but rather that occult myth seems
to have been nurtured to serve imperial ambitions. Shambhala is also the
legendary home of the Aryan race who have been used in constructing the myth of
“Western Civilization.” While normally
associated with the Nazis, the notion of an Aryan race was created from the
racist tendencies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
particularly among the German Romantics. The theory is also closely associated
with the pre-Adamite hypothesis of millenarian Isaac La Peyrère as well as British-Israelism. But the theory was further influenced by the notion First proposed
by Emanuel Swedenborg and popularized by Scottish Rite Mason,
Chevalier Ramsay, of the Hindu Tantra as an expression of an “Asian Kabbalah,”
which provided the opportunity to propose an origin of the occult tradition in
a people other than the Jews, and to identify them as the purported ancestors
of the Europeans.
These ideas influenced the emerging European scholarship of the eighteenth century to
seek an account of human history distinct from that of the Jews, and to locate
the origin of their civilization, not in the Middle East but in Asia, and to
combine their theories with the popular occult legend of Atlantis, firstmentioned
by Plato. Although the occult tradition is founded on the Kabbalah developed in
Babylon in the sixth century BC, European occultists relied on the legendary
account of its origin, borrowing from the story of the Book of Genesis in the
Bible:
When man began to multiply on the face of the
land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of
man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord
said, “My Spirit shall not abide
in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” The
Nephilimwere on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of
God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were
the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown [Anakim].1
Occultists followed a Luciferian doctrine and
therefore equated the creation of the Aryan race with the Anakim, offspring of
these so-called Nephilim, or “ Sons of God,” and human beings. Although
Christians have struggled to interpret the passage, usually referring to them
as giants, according to the apocryphal Book of
Enoch, written between the fourth and first century BC, these “ Sons of God” were the devil and his “ Fallen
Angels” expelled from Heaven. They interbred with the female descendants of
Cain, to whom they taught magic, and so
corrupted the Earth that God determined to destroy them by the Flood. However,
to European occultists, following a Gnostic interpretation, the devil is the
true god, and the forbidden knowledge he and his Fallen Angels imparted to early humanity was
the Kabbalah. Thus, borrowing from the
story of Noah, it was suggested that
the Aryans were a race of semi “divine”
beings, offspring of the Sons of God
and, having survived the sinking of Atlantis, landed in the mountains of Asia,
from where they spread, bringing with them their “ Ancient Wisdom” everywhere
they went.
For example, in 1779, Jean Bailly, a
prominent occultist and member of the Masonic lodge called Neuf Soeursin Paris,
in his Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne, concluded that Atlantis was Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean,
which in ancient times had a warm climate, but its subsequent cooling made the
Atlanteans migrate south to Mongolia. Later, this race of giants dwelt in the
Caucasus and laid the foundations for all the ancient civilizations of Asia. In
1803, Bory de Saint-Vincent published his Essai sur les iles fortunees et
l’antique Atlantidein which he set forth the conventional Atlantis story. Saint-Vincent assumed that Atlantis was the original home of civilization
and when subjected to a cataclysm its inhabitants were forced to conquer the
known world in search of new territories. 1 In 1805, Francis Wilford advanced a
hypothesis according to which, in order to account for the occult teachings of
the Celtic Druids, the British Isles
must have been a remnant of a former Atlantic continent where the events of the
Old Testament took place.
When
an affinity was discovered between Sanskrit, the language of ancient India, and
the languages of Greek, German and other European languages, it was proposed
that these several languages all originated from a single common ancestor who were
called Indo-Europeans. The term Aryan
was later borrowed by European scholars from
Herodotus who referred to the Persians and Medes as “Arian,” from the Persian word, from
which is derived the word “Iranian.” According to Herodotus, “These Medes were called anciently by all people
Arian [Iranian or Aryan]; but when
Medea, the Colchian, came to them from
Athens, they changed their name. Such is the account which they themselves
give.” 2
Therefore, while it was intended
to refer to
a specifically European race, and often, in opposition to a “Semitic” one, the
notion of an Aryan race was also
connected to the legend of the Lost
Tribes of Israel who, according to the Bible,
were dispersed among the Medes and in Central
Asia. These connections were asserted by the British-Israelists, who exercised a broad influence outside the realm of academia.
British-Israelism is a sectarian religious movement which regarded the
Anglo-Saxon people as the descendants of the
Lost Tribes of Israel. Although British-Israelism originated in nineteenth-century
England, it had its roots in the millenarians of the seventieth century, such
as John Sadler, a British Member of Parliament and private secretary to
Oliver Cromwell, as well as member of
the Hartlib Circle and friend to Menasseh Ben
Israel. Sadler produced one of
the founding documents of British-Israelism,
The Rights of the Kingdom (1649), which proposed that the Anglo- Saxons were
descended from the northern kingdom of
Israel, and the Jews from the two
tribes in the southern kingdom of Judah. The reuniting of All- Israel, a prerequisite
of the Last Days, required that the Lost
Tribes of Israel should again join the
descendants of the Jews in the Holy Land.
For the theorists of the Aryan origin of European origins, it was the approximate
location of the Scythians in the Caucasus
Mountains that was the purported location for their sudden emergence,
eventually referring to them as Caucasians. Some etymologies proposed that the
word Scythians, from “Sacae,” in turn is
derived from “Isaac Sons” or “Sons of Isaac.” The Saxons were supposedly descended from
the Scythians, who first appeared in
Europe in the seventh century BC when they crossed the Araxes River and passed
out of Asia. Strabo asserts that the most ancient Greek historians knew the
Sacaea as a people who lived beyond the Caspian Sea. Ptolemy finds the Saxons in a race of Scythians, called Sakai, who came from Media. Pliny said: “The Sakai were among the most
distinguished people of Scythia, who settled in
Armenia, and were called Sacae-Sani.” Albinus, the learned tutor of Charlemagne, maintained that: “The Saxons were descended from the ancient Sacae
of Asia.”3
The Jewish Encyclopedia, although it did not support
the British Israel hypothesis, noticed:
“The identification of the Sacae,
or Scythians, with the Ten Tribes because they appear in history at the same
time, and very nearly in the same place, as the Israelites removed by Shalmanesar,
is one of the chief supports of the theory which identifies the English people, and indeed the whole
Teutonic race, with the Ten tribes.”4 Several Medieval Rabbis and Jewish Torah
scholars began to locate the ten lost tribes, but the location greatly varied.
Maimonides wrote: “…I believe the Ten Tribes to be in various parts of
Europe.”5 Moses ben Isaac Edrehi (1774 –1842), a
Moroccan-born Rabbi and Kabbalist,
also believed the lost tribes of Israel
were located in Europe, writing in his Historical Account Of The Ten Tribes (1836):
…Orteleus,
that great geographer, giving the description of Tartary, notices the kingdom of Arsareth, where the
Ten Tribes, retiring, succeeded [other]
Scythian inhabitants, and took the name Gauther [Goths], because they
were very jealous for the glory of God. In another place, he found the
Naphtalites, who had their hordes there. He also discovered the tribe of Dan in
the north, which has preserved its name… They further add, that the remains of
ancient Israel were more numerous here than in Muscovy and Poland—from which it
was concluded, that their habitation was
fixed in Tartary [i.e.,Scythia] from whence they passed into neighbouring places… it
is no wonder to find the Ten Tribes dispersed there; since it was no great way
to go from Assyria, whither they were transplanted, having only Armenia betwixt them.6
The term “ Aryan” gained widespread usage due
to Freemason Friedrich Schlegel, justified by
zconnecting the Vedic word Ariwith
the German word Ehre, or “honor.”
Schlegel supposed that as a result of mingling a new people had formed
itself in northern India and that this
people, motivated “by some impulse higher than the spur of necessity,” had
swarmed towards the West. Wishing to trace the origin of this people back to Cain,
he then theorizes, “Must not this unknown anxiety of which I speak have pursued
fugitive man, as is told of the first murderer whom the Lord marked with a bloody sign, and have flung him
to the ends of the earth?” 7 To
Schlegel, “Everything, absolutely everything, is of Indian origin.” He carried his
conviction a step further, suggesting that even the Egyptians were educated by
Indian missionaries. In turn, Egyptians founded a colony in Judea, though,
the Jews were only partially indoctrinated
with the Indian truths since they seemed to have been ignorant of a significant doctrine of the
occult tradition, the theory of reincarnation, and especially, of the
immortality of the soul. 8
In the early nineteenth century, the Romantic
movement emerged largely as a German
Protestant nationalistic response against the perceived excesses of the
Enlightenment, which they saw
as a tragic consequence of Latin influence, and from which they were saved
because of their Frankish heritage. They considered that the racial superiority
of the German people, or Volk, was embedded in its language and culture,
its “folklore.” Among the most influential
promoters of this new
nationalism was Jacob Grimm. Thus, Jacob Grimm and his brother compiled the famous
Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a collection folktales thought to represent the “folk”
lore of the German people, and included Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping
Beauty, and Hansel and Gretel. However, recent evidence has shown that while
the content of the tales was collected, the Grimms enhanced and inserted their
own expressions into them. In the History of the German Language, Jacob Grimm
claimed that:
All the people of Europe and, to begin with,
those which were originally related and which gained supremacy at the cost of
many wanderings and dangers, emigrated from Asia in the remote past. They were
propelled from East to West by an irresistible instinct (unhemmbarer Trieb),
the real cause of which is unknown to us. The vocation and courage of those
peoples, which were originally related and destined to rise to such heights, is
shown by the fact that European history was almost entirely made by them.9
Such ideas finally caught
on in the rest of Europe. In his History
of Rome, Jules Michelet, a French nationalist
historian, who was interested in the occult and wrote the classic Satanism and Magic, stated: “Follow the
migrations of mankind from East to West along the Sun’s course and along the
track of the world’s magnetic currents; observe its long voyage from Asia to
Europe, from India to France… At its starting point, in India, the birthplace of races and of
religions, the womb of the world…” 10
The chief propagandist of the Aryan myth
in France was Ernest Renan, philosopher,
historian, scholar of religion, leader of the school of critical philosophy
in France, and Freemason, who began
training for the priesthood but eventually left the Catholic church after
reading Faustby Illuminati member Goethe. According to Renan:
We salute those sacred summits, where the
great races, which carried the future of
humanity in their hearts, contemplated infinity
for the first time and
introduced two categories which changed the face of the world, morality and
reason. When the Aryan race, after
thousands of years of striving, shall have become masters of the planet which
they inhabit, their first duty will be to explore that mysterious region… No place in the world has had a comparable role to that
of the nameless mountain or valley where mankind first attained
self-consciousness. Let us be proud… of
the old patriarchs who, at the foot of Imaus [Himalayan mountain], laid the
foundations of what we are and of what we shall become. 11
Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, credited as being the father of
modern racial demography, became famous for developing the theory of the Aryan master race in his book An Essay on the
Inequality of the Human Races (1853–
1855 ). Gobineau came to believe that race created
culture, arguing that distinctions between the three races—“black,” “white,”
and “yellow”—were natural barriers, and that “race-mixing” breaks those
barriers and leads to chaos. Gobineau
believed the white race was superior to the other races in the creation of
civilized culture and in maintaining ordered government. He believed European
civilization represented the best of what remained of ancient civilizations and
held the most superior attributes capable for continued survival. His primary
thesis, in regards tothis theory, was that European civilizational flowering from Greece to Rome zzand Germanic
to contemporary sprang from, and corresponded to the ancient Indo-European
culture, also known as “ Aryan.”
z
Though England was not fond of the notion of
an ancestral relationship with its colonial subjects in India, the
Aryan myth was finally
popularized largely through the efforts of German Orientalist and
language scholar Max Mueller, who was one of the most renowned scholars of the
nineteenth century. A student of comparative religion, Mueller’s principal
achievement was the editing of The Sacred Books of the East, translations of
major Oriental scriptures. He was appointed deputy professor of modern
languages at Oxford in 1850, and professor of comparative philology in 1868. He
wrote:
The
Aryan nations, who pursued a northwesterly direction, stand before us in
history as the principal nations of northwestern Asia and Europe. They have
been the prominent actors in the great drama of history, and have carried to
their fullest growth all the elements of active life with which our nature is
endowed. They have perfected society and morals; and we learn from their
literature and works of art the elements of science, the laws of art, and the
principles of philosophy. In continual struggle with each other and with Semitic
and Turanian races, these Aryan nations have become the rulers of history, and
it seems to be their mission to link all parts of the world together by the
chains of civilization, commerce and religion. 12
But it was Russian mystic and spy Helena
P. Blavatsky, considered the “god-mother”
of the twentieth century New Age
movement, who would formulate the more outlandish theories that would become
the basis of the occult version of the
Aryan myth, and which would later be adopted by the Nazis with
devastating consequences. Blavatsky was
born in the Ukraine to Russian nobility. Endowed with extrasensory powers, she
traveled the world in search of occult teachings and spent many years on the
Indian subcontinent. After writing monumental works such as Isis Unveiledand The Secret Doctrine, considered
the bibles of Freemasonry, the Theosophical Society was formed in 1875, to
spread her teachings worldwide. 13
A circular issued by the founders of the Theosophical Society stated that their goal was:
“to oppose the materialism of science and every form of dogmatic theology, especially
the Christian, which the Chiefs of the Society regard as particularly pernicious.”
The Theosophical Society quickly gained
wide popularity. Albert Pike was a member for a short time. The poet W. B.
Yeats, artists Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and
inventor Thomas Edison, were all devoted members. However, in his 1885 report
to the Society for Psychical Research
(SPR), Richard Hodgson concluded that
Blavatsky was a fraud. And as is common with leading occultists, Hodgson
also reported that Blavatsky was a spy,
having reportedly worked for the Russian
Okhrana.
Blavatsky was also a member of the Carbonari. Referring to the role of secret
societies and occult organizations behind the numerous political upheavals
leading up to her time, beginning with the
French Revolution, which she says was predicted by St. Germain, Blavatsky adds, “Of all these degenerated
children of Chaldean Occultism, including the numerous societies of in relation to Occultism, namely, the ‘
Carbonari’.” 14 According to René
Guénon, “she frequented… Spiritualist circles and revolutionary milieux;
she allied herself notably with Mazzini and, around 1856, affiliated with the
Carbonarist association ‘Young Europe’.”15 Blavatsky had also volunteered with
the forces of Garibaldi at the battle of
Mentena in 1867, during which she claims to have received two bullet wounds.
Garibaldi was at the time Grand Master the Italian Grand Orient.
From 1867 to 1870, Blavatsky studied Tibetan Buddhism with
Indian masters, purportedly at a monastery in
Tibet. Blavatsky encountered
Tibetan Buddhism at a time when European scholarship was still in its infancy,
and she did much to awaken interest in the subject, though, through the
confused version of her teachings. In 1871,
Blavatsky arrived in Cairo where she founded a Spiritualistic society
aimed at studying of mental phenomena. However, soon the society became the locus
of a financial
scandal and was
disbanded. In 1872, after leaving
Cairo, Blavatsky came to Odessa through
Syria, Palestine and Constantinople where she lived for nine months. In 1873,
she moved from Odessa to Bucharest, and in 1873, to Paris and on to the US
where she met colonel Henry Steel Olcott, who had been part of the commission
to investigate the assassination of
Abraham Lincoln, and with whom she founded the Theosophical Society.
The
Theosophical Society was among the leading proponents of a period in the
late eighteenth century known as the
Occult Revival. The Occult Revival represented a reaction to the
secularizing trends that preceded it, and was an attempt to reaffirm the “spiritual” aspects of the universe. However,
zthe interests of the Occult Revival
confused spiritualism with spiritism.
The foundation of the spiritualist practices of the Occult Revival were set by
Swedenborg and his communication with angels and spirits,
and Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), who
heavily influenced Blavatsky and many others. A German Freemason and physician, Mesmer became widely popular for
artificially inducing trance-like states, where subjects tended to report time
travel and spirit contacts. With an interest in astronomy, Mesmer theorized
that there was a natural energetic transference that occurred between all
things, that he called “animal magnetism,” A magnetic fluid in the body was
supposed to connect humanity, the earth and the stars. Mesmer’s
name is the root of the English verb “mesmerize.”
The craze for
spiritism is said to have begun when mysterious rappings of spirits were
reported by the Fox family in their home in Hydesville, New York, which
attained international attention, igniting widespread interest in spirit
channeling. Séances became the vogue in Europe where mediums were in demand to
entertain guests with physical and mental phenomena at private parties. After
the news of the Fox affair came to France, people became interested in what was
sometimes termed the “Spiritual Telegraph.” A table would be spun by the energy
from the spirits, and later the “talking board” was also devised, where baskets
were attached to a pointed object that spun under the hands of the mediums, to
point at letters printed on cards scattered around, or engraved on, the table.
These were the precursor of the Ouija boards that also later became popular.
The fad was brought to England by Mrs.
Hayden, whose séances were attended by Edward
Bulwer-Lytton, a close friend of the man considered the founder of the
Occult Revival, French occultist Eliphas
Lévi, known as the “Professorz
of Transcendental Magic,” and who
was heavily influenced by the
Frankist Hoene-Wronski. In Dogme et
Rituel de la Haute Magie, which was translated into English by noted Masonic author Arthur Edward Waite as
Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritualin 1910, he outlined the essential
premise of occultism:
Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical
allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all
initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or
Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of
the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which
interpret to the faithful of India the
inspired pages of the Ved a s, in the
cryptic emblems of our old books on
alchemy, in the ceremonies practiced at reception by all secret societies,
there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and
everywhere carefully concealed. 16
