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The "Aryan race" is a concept in Europe an culture that was influential in the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It derives from the idea that speakers of the Indo-European Languages constitute a distinctive " Race ". In its most notorious incarnation, under Nazism , it was argued that the earliest Aryans were identical to Nordic Peoples . Belief in the superiority of the "Aryan race" is sometimes referred to as ''Aryanism''. This should not be confused with the unrelated Christian religious belief known as Arianism . ORIGIN AND BACKGROUND OF THE CONCEPT
Since, in the 19th century, the Indo-Iranians were the most ancient known speakers of " Indo-European " languages, the word Aryan was adopted to refer not only to the Indo-Iranian people, but also to Indo-European speakers as a whole, including the Romans , Greeks , the Germans , Balts , Celts and Slavs . It was argued that all of these languages originated from a common root - spoken by an ancient people who must have been the ancestors of the European, Iranian , and North Indian people. It should be noted that this usage is obsolete. In English, "Aryan", if used at all, is synonymous to Indo-Iranian , or in particular Proto-Indo-Iranian . The idea that the ''north'' Europeans were the "purest" of these people was later propagated most assiduously by the Comte De Gobineau and by other writers, most notably his disciple Houston Stewart Chamberlain , who wrote of an "Aryan race" – those who spoke Indo-European languages and were claimed to be the "noblest" of people. IMPERIALIST, NATIONALISTIC AND NAZI USES OF THE TERM as an "Aryan" (here meaning "Anglo-Saxon") whose instinct for racial solidarity leads him to protect a threatened woman because "she is of my people".]]During the 19th century, it was commonly believed that the Aryan race originated in the southwestern steppes of present-day Russia , and including the Caucasus Mountains . The Steppe theory of Aryan origins was not the only one circulating during the nineteenth century, however. Many British, American and German scholars argued that the Aryans originated in ancient Germany or Scandinavia , or at least that in those countries the original Aryan ethnicity had been preserved. This idea was widespread in both intellectual and popular culture by the early twentieth century. British Raj In India, under the peoples, who were pushed to the south. Thus the foundation of Hinduism was ascribed to white invaders who had established themselves as the dominant castes, and who were supposed to have created the sophisticated Vedic texts. Much of these theories were simply conjecture fuelled by European Imperialism (see White Man's Burden ). This styling of an " Aryan Invasion " by British colonial fantasies of racial supremacy lies at the origin of the fact that all discussion of historical Indo-Aryan Migration s or Aryan and Dravidian "races" remains highly controversial in India to this day, and does continue to affect political and religious debate. Some Dravidians, and supporters of the Dalit movement, most commonly Tamil s, claim that the worship of Shiva is a distinct Dravidian religion, to be distinguished from Brahmin ical "Aryan" Hinduism. In contrast, the Indian nationalist Hindutva movement argues that no Aryan invasion or migration ever occurred, asserting that Vedic beliefs emerged from the Indus Valley Civilisation , which pre-dated the supposed advent of the Indo-Aryans in India, and is identified as a likely candidate for a Proto-Dravidian culture. Theosophy These debates also led to the -- and spring from one single progenitor, (...) who is said to have lived over 18,000,000 years ago, and also 850,000 years ago -- at the time of the sinking of the last remnants of the great continent of Atlantis ." (Secret Doctrine, vol.II, p.249).'' Blavatsky used " Root Race " as a technical term to describe human evolution over the large Time periods in her Cosmology . However, she also claimed that there were modern non-Aryan peoples who were inferior to Aryans. She regularly contrasts "Aryan" with "Semitic" culture, to the detriment of the latter, asserting that Semitic peoples are an offshoot of Aryans who have become "degenerate in spirituality". She also states that some peoples are "semi-animal creatures". These latter include "the Tasmanians, a portion of the Australians and a mountain tribe in China." There are also "considerable numbers of the mixed Lemuro-Atlantean peoples produced by various crossings with such semi-human stocks -- e.g., the wild men of Borneo, the Veddhas of Ceylon, classed by Prof. Flower among Aryans (!), most of the remaining Australians, Bushmen, Negritos, Andaman Islanders, etc." (The Secret Doctrine vol.II, pp.195-6) Despite this, Blavatsky's admirers claim that her thinking was not connected to fascist or racialist ideas, asserting that she believed in a Universal Brotherhood of humanity and wrote that ''"all men have spiritually and physically the same origin" and that "mankind is essentially of one and the same essence." (''The Key to Theosophy'', Section 3)''. On the other hand, in The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky states: "Verily mankind is 'of one blood,' but not of the same essence." Blavatsky connects physical race with spiritual attributes constantly throughout her works: "Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with the Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter (Chinamen, African negroes, &c.) gradually brought the worship back. The Vedas countenance no idols; all the modern Hindu writings do" (The Secret Doctrine: Anthropogenesis). Blavatsky calls the physical Aryan race "the 'cream' of the Fourth Race", which "gravitated more and more toward the apex of physical and intellectual evolution", asserting that white Aryan humanity corresponds to "the final adjustment of the human organism -- which became perfect and symmetrical only in the Fifth Race" (The Secret Doctrine: Anthropogenesis). According to Blavatsky, "the MONADS of the lowest specimens of humanity (the "narrow-brained" savage South-Sea Islander, the African, the Australian) had no Karma to work out when first born as men, as their more favoured brethren in intelligence had" (Anthropogenesis). She also prophecies of the destruction of the racial "failures of nature" as the future "higher race" ascends: "Thus will mankind, race after race, perform its appointed cycle-pilgrimage. Climates will, and have already begun, to change, each tropical year after the other dropping one sub-race, but only to beget another higher race on the ascending cycle; while a series of other less favoured groups -- the failures of nature -- will, like some individual men, vanish from the human family without even leaving a trace behind." Guido Von List (and his followers such as Lanz Von Liebenfels ) later took up some of Blavatsky's ideas, mixing her ideology with nationalistic and fascist ideas. Such views also fed into the development of Nazi ideology. However, the theosophical publications such as ''The Aryan Path'' were strongly opposed to the Nazi usage, attacking Racialism . Nazism poster by Boris Efimov , portraying Goebbels as a mouse-like figure, countering Nazi propaganda about the Aryan race]]The theory of the Northern origins of the Aryans was particularly influential in Germany. It was widely believed that the Vedic Aryans were ethnically identical to the Goths , Vandals and other ancient Germanic peoples of the '' Völkerwanderung ''. This idea was often intertwined with Anti-semitic ideas. The distinctions between the "Aryan" and " Semitic " peoples were based on the linguistic and ethnic history described above. In this way Semitic peoples came to be seen as a foreign presence within "Aryan" societies, and the Semitic peoples were often pointed to as the cause of conversion and destruction of social order and values leading to culture and civilization's downfall by Nazi and Pre-Nazi theorists such as Alfred Rosenberg , Arthur De Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain . According to the Nazi ideologists, the Aryan was a Master Race that built a civilization that dominated the world ten thousand years ago. This alleged civilization declined because the inferior races mixed with the Aryans but it left traces of their civilization in Tibet (via Buddhism ), and even Central America , South America , Ancient Egypt . A complete, and highly speculative and racist theory of Aryan and anti-Syrian and anti-Semitic history can be found in Rosenberg's publication, "Race and Race History". Rosenberg's account of ancient history is very well researched, but his conclusions require great leaps in logic. But the seemingly scholarly nature of such works was very effective in spreading Aryan supremacist theories among German intellectuals in the early 20th century, especially after the first World War. These and other ideas evolved into the Nazi use of the term "Aryan race" to refer to what they saw as being a " Master Race " of people of northern European descent, going to extreme and violent lengths to "maintain the purity" of this race through a far-reaching Eugenics program (including Anti-miscegenation legislation, Compulsory Sterilization of the mentally ill and the mentally deficient, the execution of the institutionalized mentally ill as part of a Euthanasia Program , and eventually the systematic targeting of Jew s, Gypsies , and Homosexuals in The Holocaust ). This usage now has nearly no meaning outside of Nazi or Neo-Nazi ideology. QUOTATIONS EXTERNAL LINKS
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