Editor’s Preface

The following translation (the first of its material!) marks the first expansion of this publication beyond its original function as essentially a personal blog. There are other fellows (ʾAddīrīm) planning other things and more of this particular work soon to follow, and I myself have at least two posts near completion right now, though I know the audience may be righteously indignant that they have taken so long. I think we will have something substantial on our hands sooner than one might suppose, and I can only hope that a(nother) countermovement against the present general intellectual and aesthetic malaise might, if impossible to ‘create,’ at least be provoked in some sense and to whatever degree by what we will do here. We would aim, above all, jointly to cleanse the palates and reinvigorate the curiosity of those adjacent to us and invite that long-sought and desperately-needed stream of new and high-quality blood which has been petering out or perhaps ignored for the last 3 years at least. Really the simple staidness and sloth of ‘our own side’ is more to blame than anything for its absence or neglect. There are no copes or excuses as things stand. Of course, none of this is to condemn or overlook those already diligently engaged in the nobler pursuits. But be that all however it may, we will be enjoying our Gobineau content.

Editor’s Introduction

Arthur de Gobineau is best known among contemporary chuds and academia alike for his precocious racial theory of history, but in his own day he was just as much a traveloguer and scholar of a very singular kind. The experiences and insights detailed here, in his Religions and Philosophies in Central Asia, published in 1865 and never before put into English translation, were drawn from his time first as secretary and then minister of the French legation in Persia, from 1854 and 1861 respectively, as well as from his personal historical and anthropological erudition, which was far-reaching, if not particularly specialistic. His work here speaks for itself: this was a man constantly looking into the psychology and dynamic mutability of his interlocutors and subject material, which was often enough of just such a character as others—particularly his contemporaries—were given to overlook.

There are, however, perhaps four or five aspects of the present section which will provide particular difficulty or interest to the modern reader. The first is the sense in which he seems to ascribe to the Asiatic certain modes of thought basically universal to man in potentia—the capacity for holding logically contradictory, metaphysically (one might say aesthetically) ordered beliefs, the constant pressing of the ‘unseen world’ upon consciousness, and so on—in conjunction with others, (ketmân in particular, as well as specific metaphysical or scholarly propensities) unique to ‘Central Asia,’ or rather the farther Middle East; but we will shortly find in the succeeding chapter, if we could not already reasonably infer it here, that he was well aware of the possibilities of such a psychological overlap. The second really amounts to two aspects, closely related: the brevity wherewith he lays the foundations of this world recreated in miniature, which is both necessary and desirable, and the occasional looseness wherewith he treats academic problems which by now at least—and perhaps even in his own time—might have quite other solutions or emphases, which apparently could not have been helped. Nextly, one is easily struck by the nuance of his final estimation of Asia and the Asiatics, in part and in whole. One might well have expected a purely linear and condescending narrative of that civilizational sphere based on his avowed Aryanism, but despite the excessive weight placed by him on Persia as the nucleus thereof and his dismay at the racial situation prevailing throughout, he rates the people of the Middle East as morally quite capable of defending themselves and ascribes, as we will later see, the primary responsibility for their particularly lowly modern condition to mere historical happenstance. One might likewise have gone looking for hard-headed denunciations of Islam and the prophet himself in the vein of the hard historiographical dualism now prevalent on the Right, but one will have looked in vain—again, whatever final racial or conceptual-genealogical judgements are to be made. Whether or not one takes this nuance as fully justified, it certainly contradicts whatever memetic ideas one might have conjured in advance, second-hand. The final aspect worth noting before we leave off is how different the world of religion here described is from that now occupying the same region—for we meet with such incredible statements as, for instance, “[F]anaticism, insofar as it represents an exclusive persuasion of any religion whatsoever, is a phenomenon alien to the spirit of the Orientals and does not exist among them,” which the depth and range of his experiences cannot allow us to doubt, at least for that part of the Orient he knew.

The philosophy of translation and editing has been to follow as closely as possible the cadence and diction of the original as naturalness (even if antiquated) in the English language would allow, that the highly individual attitude of the author be preserved to the best of our abilities. And now—Arthur de Gobineau.

CHAPTER I, MORAL AND RELIGIOUS CHARACTER OF THE ASIATICS.

All that we think and every manner in which we think originates in Asia. It is thus interesting to know what Asia still thinks and how it does so. Such an inquiry is easily justified by the reasons I have already outlined, at least for those who value historical continuity. Moreover, if one considers that our relations of every kind with the peoples occupying the Oriental parts of our globe are becoming daily more numerous and fruitful, and that our interests, both material and political, the most elevated alongside many of the lesser, are increasingly engaged in such questions, one will fully admit not only the timeliness, but indeed the direct and practical utility of knowing as well as possible the intellectual and moral consciousness of these peoples, whom, willing or not, we wish to establish as our associates.

To have dealings with nations without knowing them, without understanding them, is sufficient for conquerors; less so for allies, and still less for their patrons; and nothing is more abhorrent and senseless for civilisers, which we purport to be.

I therefore do not believe that I am placing myself outside the general necessities of this time, nor that I am producing a book of pure speculation, in coming to analyse the current religious, philosophical, and moral notions of the inhabitants of Central Asia. Perhaps the results that I shall present, and the considerations to which these results will give rise, may furnish an explanation for many facts which remain poorly understood, assuming that they are understood at all.

What matters above all, in this study, is to consider the true nature of the Asiatic spirit.

When a European embraces a doctrine, his intelligence naturally tends to renounce everything else, or at least anything that creates too sharp a contrast. This process is rarely simple. We easily recognise that black and white are incompatible, and that, to preserve either of these colours in a desirable state of purity, it is important to isolate it and suppress its rival. The mind rarely carries sufficient energy to render this separation as absolute as it ought to be; it most often retains remnants of old opinions it no longer holds or even hints of beliefs it does not have. We may reject specific dogmas in clear declarations. However, we cannot always escape their consequences or the notions that rely on them. Resolutely black or white characters are rare; most are grey.

Nevertheless, I repeat, it must be acknowledged that, of all the peoples that have ever existed, those of our part of the world—I speak of our contemporaries—are still those who have most successfully cultivated beliefs of a homogeneous appearance. The same cannot be said of the Asiatics. They are so far from such a result that they do not even conceive of its utility; they turn their backs on it. Their preoccupation is less to seek, as we do, a state of truth that is neatly circumscribed, well-defined, enclosed by walls, and furnished with trenches impassable to error, than to ensure that not a single form, not a single idea, not a single atom of form or idea perceptible to the intellect escapes them. This is what they consider to be the truth. Antinomies do not frighten them; the immensity of the philosophical terrain delights them, and the vagueness of delimitations, or rather the absence of bounds, seems to them a primary obligation. Consequently, whatever thesis is argued before them, it will be considered important and worthy of their sympathy, not according to the degree of momentum towards exactitude one might observe within it, but according to the minutiae of the research devoted to some hitherto neglected point, whereof its subtlety allows one, if not to glimpse, at least to dream.

It is the immoderate use of the inductive method that has brought about this moral disposition; it has sharpened intellects very finely, but, at the same time, it has tempered them with a sort of unconscious scepticism which results from the very need to set no bounds to metaphysical curiosity. It has exhibited so many diverse things; it leads the imagination so well amidst the most varied landscapes; it is always so disposed to conduct it to the bottom of the abysses after having caused it to soar to the most ethereal of heights, that there remains neither the desire, nor the need, nor the time to attach oneself definitively to any of the results that it presents. One lets oneself be lulled into this vague atmosphere, or better, one experiences unceasingly the feeling which makes travellers walk with joy in certain mountainous regions; the path is narrow, without a horizon, the road invisible; the rocks rise to the right and to the left, threatening to conceal the sight of the last shred of azure which dominates their summit; one knows not how one shall emerge; one advances, nevertheless, and finally the passage manifests itself; then new doubts, a new exit, and soon one no longer walks in order to advance, but solely for the pleasure of unravelling the perpetual enigma of the road.

Thus it is with the Orientals and their philosophical horizons. We should say, and not without justice, that this habit wherein their judgement lies, of its abandoning itself without end or respite to so exaggerated a gymnastics, must have caused its dislocation. It is the pure truth; they are full of fire, and of a facility of intuition the most alert and the most skilful in the world; they excel, as it is said, at splitting a hair into four, and from these four intangibles they will make a bridge that will bear a carriage; they find matter for limitless meditations, not without value, upon the most minuscule notion; but it is certain, at the same time, that the moral faculty which we call common sense (and which, be it said in passing, depresses us at least as often as it guides us) is not among them in perfect equilibrium with their imaginative power and their rapidity of conception; to tell the truth, common sense is lacking among them; therefore one hardly perceives any trace of it in their affairs, of whatsoever order these might be. All that which conducts and impels them is generally alien to it. Their entire life passes by with scarcely any use being made of it. Great things, uncommon everywhere, are nevertheless more accessible and more familiar to them than reasonable things.

Certainly, nothing is so grievous in the conduct of positive affairs as this perpetual vacillation of judgement. Thus one sees, in the present centuries, the Orientals, who assuredly lack courage and resolution no more than they do intellect, becoming, at all levels, the victims of European adventurers cast from a metal far inferior to their own, yet more rigid. It is not in the advantages of material life, of social or political life, that the Asiatics have placed the ideal of the sovereign good. The foremost of all concerns, to their mind—and I speak here of the general disposition among them—is to know as much as possible, and with the greatest possible detail, of things supernatural. All the tidings thereof which one brings them, of whatsoever source these may be, possess value in their eyes. If they have but acquired a certain degree of confidence in you, the Asiatics are disposed to impart to you what they know of this object of their solicitude, in exchange for that which you yourselves know. They have need of the unseen world; they feel it weighing upon them; they struggle against the perpetual impression of mystery; they seek something above the ordinary course of existence, and, in an agitation, in an expectation, in a desire, in a fever which knows no abatement, one beholds them on the alert, their eyes wanting to open without restraint,1 gazing aloft and on all sides, solicitous for the life to come far more than for all that is in the world. They fear to miss God, or even that God should miss them.

If certain classes of their society alone were thus disposed, it would be no great marvel. But, once again, the salient feature is that all classes are given over to the same demon, and one feels it as keenly in the lowliest of muleteers as in the foremost of mullahs. Everyone, to tell the truth, in Asia possesses the ecclesiastical spirit; each loves to expound, to demonstrate, to preach, and to listen to preaching. There is no one there, not even the veriest reprobate, who, at certain moments, knows not how to assume, less to deceive others than to edify himself, a highly devout nasal intonation, and to deduce dogmatic considerations whereof one should not have expected to find even the most superficial instinct allied to that tavern-torn shirt, to that swaggering dagger, and to that cocked cap. Nor must it be overlooked that the question here is not of this or that sectarian, but indeed of all the Asiatics: the preceding observations apply to the generality, without distinction of creed. Thus one beholds these creeds, without distinction, I repeat, brought into proximity with one another, despite their divergences, by these three primary causes of sympathy: a common employment of inductive methods pushed to excess, an exaggerated curiosity for theological facts, and a habitude of digression.

There is no opinion truly hateful save that which, petrified within itself, speaks not. The Independents of Cromwell, the Puritans of the Great Rebellion, were exceedingly dangerous to the Catholics, because no consideration could have induced those sectaries to reason with persons condemned once and for all. But when one disputes, one discusses, and when one discusses, one converses; and here it is fitting to repeat, after Marshal de Montluc, that a town which parleys and a woman who listens are on the verge of surrender. The passion of the Orientals for colloquies of philosophy and religion has accustomed them to hear all things; and when it has twice occurred that the mullah most disposed to intolerance has met with Jews, Christians, or Gabrs2, or even with Hindu Banians, he feels himself disposed towards a certain calm; the more so since, with the natural mobility of his mind, he has not failed to preserve in his memory a portion of the arguments contrary to his own opinion which he has heard advanced; and he retains them less to reflect upon their perversity or their debility than to seek to extract therefrom some quintessence that he might mingle with the notions he already possesses.

These sorts of combinations constitute a most customary arrangement. The Albanian Muslims make it a duty to burn candles to Saint Nicholas. The Mirdite Christians consult the dervishes with reverence. The women of Khosrova, in Chaldea, make offerings to Our Lady to be blessed with children, and, should their petition prove successful, they never fail to present themselves at the church to offer their thanks; they take care to inquire after the rites they must perform in order to offer their prayers in the Christian fashion, which, in their view, better demonstrates their deference and goodwill. In Pondicherry, the territory not being very extensive, conciliation has gone still further; not only have the Muslims adopted the custom of processions from the Hindus and Christians—a practice originally alien to them, which they have nevertheless attached, as best they can, to the perfectly heterodox worship of their saints—but furthermore, the three communions make it a point of duty and merit to observe their festivals in common and to attend one another’s solemnities with equal reverence. In the shared inclination that draws them together, the communities have not confined their eclecticism to the pomp of absolutely identical processions. The Catholics have added to their rites the staging of interminable religious dramas which, owing to the dramatic system in which they are composed, make it impossible not to recognise them as copies of Shiite ta’ziyehs and, above all, of Brahmanic performances. However, the most complete example of a mixture of dogmas that I have seen presented itself to me at the fire temple in Baku.

This sanctuary, it should be said in passing, is by no means ancient, as is generally supposed. It does not date back beyond the seventeenth century, a period when numerous Indian merchants frequented the courts of the Tatar khans of Derbent, Ganja, Shamakhi, and Baku. It was these merchants who took it upon themselves to establish places of worship there for their own use.

The penitents who inhabit these places today no longer possess any notion of positive religion. For them, everything has dissolved into the practice of complete ascetic indifference, resulting from a syncretism more sceptical than believing. There I found an old friend whom I had known several years previously when he was traversing rather distant lands as a pilgrim; Mostanshah had me attend a sort of divine service that was celebrated in one of the cells of the temple to the accompaniment of small Gabr cymbals. Upon the altar, beside the Shivaistic divinities, were displayed vases belonging to the Parsi cult, Russian images of Saint Nicholas and the Virgin, and Catholic crucifixes; these highly diverse relics were treated with equal respect. Every penitent within the temple, owing to the heat of the naphtha fires, walked about almost naked, although it was the end of December. Yet their lean, or rather emaciated, bodies appeared no more sensitive to physical influences than the souls they contained were to the suggestions of common sense.

My friend did not conceal from me that the designation which suited him, as well as his companions, was that of padri, which he assured me was the English word meaning “Brahman.” He merely regretted that, for several years, no man versed in the practical science of austerities had come to Baku, which explained to me why I observed no voluntary martyrs. Moreover, he resigned himself to this as to everything else in the world. His language had become as variegated as his faith. Since we had last seen each other, he was no longer content to speak Persian with a mixture of several Hindu dialects; he had added a little English, a little French, a little Russian, and a great deal of German, which had been taught to him by a Livonian workman to whom he had rented half his room in the temple, for opposite it stands a candle factory by which the ascetics appear neither scandalised nor inconvenienced. One would swear they do not perceive it.

Among the classes more literate than those to which the examples I have just cited belong, the mixtures of ideas are, without doubt, of a less overt nature, but there they are carried to the most boundless complication. It is there that one enters a true pandemonium where everything permeates, embraces, mingles, and finds acceptance, expelling nothing save philosophical doubt; there are forms of scepticism that dispense with it altogether. History bearing witness that, from the remotest ages, Asia has opened its ear to all the assertions of supernaturalism, one can understand what a staggering wealth of theories has been produced there, how many of them it has wedded, and how many generations of mixed systems have emerged from such alliances; and none of all this has been forgotten, nothing lost. Transformations, less significant than one might suppose, have barely disguised the most ancient theories. This is what I have already demonstrated in another work3; one will see the most striking proof of it in this book, and incessantly, alongside these ancestors, their children and their children’s children have come and continue to come to take their place.

If all these doctrines and nuances of doctrine had isolated themselves, confined within defined circles of believers, there would be, in such a milieu, the possibility neither of dominant religions nor state religions. Such is their multitude that the picture would present a series of small, insignificant groups from the standpoint of the number of their adherents. But it is not thus that they must be conceived, and one may establish as an incontestable fact that every human mind contains and sustains, in sufficient harmony, a more or less considerable host of contending conceptions; and that, in the depths of a single intellect, these conceptions, always in motion, always in conflict, dominate by turns or eliminate one another, in such a way that, during the course of his life, their ingenious appraiser traverses a highly extensive gamut of beliefs that are scarcely compatible and often directly opposed.

This in no way prevents each individual from possessing a positive religion of his own. One is a Muslim, a Jew, a Christian, a Gabr, or a Hindu, and as one is born, so one dies. Conversions properly speaking, from one faith to another, are exceedingly rare, and so onerous for the small number of those who yield to them that one generally sees their children, if not the converts themselves, return to the religion of their ancestors. One may cite on this occasion the example of many Persian Jews who became Muslims, some of whom returned purely and simply to Mosaism, while others led their children back to it while themselves remaining in their new faith; and what is worthy of note is that no quarrel with the authorities of the country resulted from this for these apostates, even though the Koran decrees capital punishment for such a crime. But the political reasons that led the Prophet, without much success, to desire none but Muslims in Arabia, and which similarly prompted the Turks to show no pity for what constitutes a civil desertion among them, do not exist elsewhere. The practical tolerance of ideas therefore prevails, and each person is left free to do as he sees fit, unless entirely mundane causes oppose it. Thus, one must generally consider the conscience of an Asiatic to be composed of the following religious and philosophical ingredients:

1. A virtually bare title of religionist;

2. A more or less ardent faith in certain precepts of the avowed cult;

3. A resolute opposition to many of these precepts, even were they among the most essential;

4. A store of ideas pertaining to wholly foreign theories, which occupies a greater or lesser space;

5. A constant disposition to favour the peregrination of these ideas and theories, and to replace the old with the new.

The substitution is all the more assured when theories and ideas possess a greater flavour of contrast. Then the fortunate thinker supposes that a door, hitherto unnoticed by himself and by others, has just opened onto the infinite.

Such an organisation—or, if one prefers, such intellectual disorganisation—would be impossible among us, and for several reasons. First, the experimental method, in which Europeans place an absolute and routine confidence, leaves so faint a taste for supernaturalism that most minds exclude it absolutely, or at least admit only the smallest dose of it. Furthermore, discussion amongst us is firm, somewhat brutal, and for the most part without essential reticence—so that the partisan of an idea, unless he keeps it to himself, which constitutes a tête-à-tête of difficult duration, is compelled to risk it in the midst of combat, and consequently to ensure that it offers little hold upon itself. He will often be forced—far from allowing it too much licence—to treat it like a farmyard dog, cropping its tail and ears to leave less of a hold for the assailant. It is in this state that he presents it, and the inevitable result of this kind of martial arming is that the promoter of a theory, compelled in advance to examine this champion with severity lest he see it strangled at the first blow, treats it without indulgence, and he himself refuses, as much as he is able, to ramble alongside it. If the idea does not sufficiently accord with the notions to which he is attached, he will have repudiated it before bringing it forth. These motives for severity, these guarantees, these barriers, do not exist for the Asiatic; one may say, entirely to the contrary, that he has arranged matters in such a way that nothing might hinder the flight of his fantasy, and nothing, indeed, does hinder it.

It is a rule of ancient wisdom, as of that of the philosophers of Greece, that every opinion concerning higher entities must be surrounded by mystery. In the first place, the respect that one owes to holy things requires this. It is not reasonable (I speak here the language of the people whom I observe) to cast elevated truths before minds unworthy of conceiving them,4 and unworthiness results quite as much from a lack of preparation and mere ignorance as from hostility and ill will. To merit participation in any doctrine whatsoever, there must be an initiation, the character and trials of which vary according to the good or bad dispositions, known or supposed, of the neophyte. As for indiscreet divulgation, Antiquity, through the highly frequent accusations of profanation of the mysteries with which it pursued several of its great men, has shown us sufficiently how revolted it was by this. Such a manner of thinking, originating in Asia, has been preserved there in its entirety. It is one of the latent, yet certain, causes that justify the repugnance of Muslims to let Christians or Jews enter their temples. The same holds true for the latter regarding their places of prayer, and for the Gabrs regarding their Ateshgahs.5 Among them all, the reason for the prohibition is the same as it was for the priest of the Great Diana of the Ephesians.

Furthermore, it is not advisable to expose one’s faith to the insults of unbelievers, given that one might encounter a sophist who will exploit his superior skill to unsettle within the believer ideas, incontestable in themselves, which their partisan will not know how to defend. Consequently, the unfortunate man, struck by his imprudence, fallen from the august prerogatives of the believer, will find himself in the same position as a traveller stripped of his gold by bandits. The gold and the faith will have lost nothing of their value; but, in both cases, the victim no longer possesses them. It is therefore a matter of elementary prudence not to confront overly wily disputants; and, hence, it is necessary not to avow what one thinks and to conceal with care what one believes.

Another compelling reason, although of an entirely different order, points to the same conclusion. The possessor of truth must not expose his person, his property, or his standing to the blindness, folly, and the perversity of those whom it has pleased God to place and to maintain in error. As a wise man walking in the proper direction, he is precious to God; his prosperity and his salvation are of consequence to the world. To speak lightly could never yield any advantage; for God knows what He desires, and should it suit Him that the infidel or the misguided find the true faith, He has need of no one to perform this miracle. It is therefore necessary to consider silence as useful, and to recognise that speaking, by exposing the person of the believer and often the religion itself, is inopportune and is sometimes impious.

Yet there are cases in which silence no longer suffices, in which it might pass for a confession. Then one must not hesitate. Not only must one disavow one’s true opinion, but one is commanded to accumulate every ruse so that the adversary may be misled. One will pronounce all the professions of faith that might please him, one will perform all the rites that one recognises as completely vain, one will falsify one’s own books, one will exhaust every means of deceit. In this way, one will acquire the manifold satisfaction and merit of having sheltered oneself as well as one’s own, of not having exposed a venerable faith to the horrific contact of the infidel, and finally, of having, by deceiving the latter and confirming him in his error, imposed upon him the spiritual shame and misery that he deserves.

This is what Asiatic philosophy of all ages and all sects knows and practises, and what is termed ketmân.6 A European would be inclined to see a humiliating situation in this system, which not only renders reticence indispensable, but dictates the use of falsehood on the vastest scale. The Asiatic, conversely, finds it glorious. Ketmân fills with pride the man who puts it into practice. A believer elevates himself, by this fact, to a permanent state of superiority over the one he deceives; and were the latter a minister or a mighty king, it matters not. In the eyes of the man who employs ketmân against him, he is, above all, a blind wretch to whom the true path is closed, and who does not suspect it—whereas you, ragged and starving, outwardly trembling at the feet of deluded power, possess eyes full of light; you walk in brightness before your enemies. It is an unintelligent being that you mock; it is a dangerous beast that you disarm. What manifold delights at once!

Such is the system. Yet one must not be mistaken here. The Asiatic possesses within himself neither the active energy nor, above all, the imperturbable continuity of ideas that would be indispensable for him to apply ketmân in all its rigour. I have just outlined the theory; practice makes no point of following it step by step.

There exist near Trebizond and Erzurum communities of religionists who outwardly profess, they say, Sunni Islam. In their villages, they have mosques which they frequent on Fridays; they maintain mullahs to read the Koran to them and to expound to them the traditions of the Prophet. And yet they whisper, “we are not Muslims; we go to church, we hear Mass, we confess the divinity of Jesus Christ, and we venerate the images of the saints.”

This is strictly true. By dint of telling it in confidence to a few trusted persons, no one in Anatolia is ignorant of it, and it is as public as the tolling of bells. It would seem, therefore, that the pretence is useless: by no means. When the occasion arises, these men appear before the qadis, and they are not denied the prerogatives of faithful Muslims. They swear an oath upon the Book of God; their oath is as valid as that of the Sharif of Mecca. Everyone knows what their opinion is, but everyone feigns credence to their falsehood. It produces all the civil effects that one might expect from it, and, in reality, the injustice is not too severe, for these peasants are far less deceitful than they themselves believe. Were they to wish tomorrow to rid themselves of their hypocrisy, they could no longer abandon beliefs that have become their own by the sole fact that they have made a charade of them; and, being simultaneously Muslims and Christians, the mosque has become scarcely less indispensable to them than the church.

In Persia, the Nusayris, who believe neither in an individual God nor in the fixed determination of existences, also present themselves as Muslims, are admitted without difficulty to all the rights of believers, are received in the mosques, and may, at the same time, without being troubled, exercise their rights as unbelievers to break the fast of Ramadan rather publicly. These Nusayris, with a far more Muslim appearance than the Christians of whom I was just speaking, nevertheless stand further from Islam, for which they feel nothing but antipathy. Ordinarily, besides being Nusayris, they are Sufis. One of the remarkable inconsistencies that one may note in them is their attachment to circumcision. They do not possess, within their own system of belief, a single reason to justify this practice, and they concede that it is perfectly useless. Nevertheless, all are circumcised, and they do not fail to circumcise their black slaves, even when they purchase them at an adult age or even later. The women especially attach great importance to the observance of this ancient custom. A highly intelligent Nusayri, pressed upon this subject, confessed that it was conjugal influence that compelled him to have his children circumcised.7 Fundamentally, habit imposes this inconsistency; it is no less powerful in Asia than elsewhere, if not more so.

The Gabrs assert that the author of their religion, Zoroaster, was none other than the patriarch Abraham;8 they thus desire that their sacred books, originating from one of the prophets recognised by Islam, be admitted by Muslims as holy. By means of this interpretation, they would be classified among the People of the Book, and would enjoy the advantages assured by Muhammad to Jews and Christians. No one is unaware that the claim of the Gabrs is false and that they themselves are by no means duped by it. Nevertheless, it is officially accepted, and I have heard Muslims, affecting great rigidity, express to me, without believing it, the most flattering opinion concerning His Highness Zoroaster, assuring me that it was one of the names of Abraham. The Gabrs tend, moreover, strongly, apart from any other consideration, toward Islamic methods, and, by dint of seeking to conciliate the esteem of the unitarian doctors, they have made such concessions that one may today consider these dualists as a species of superstitious deists. Their ancient faith properly speaking is quite ailing in their minds. This is, moreover, not so novel as one might believe. Even before the time of the Sassanid reform, which occurred under Shapur, the unitarian spirit was instilled by Aramaism9 deep within the Zoroastrian priesthood.

One could multiply indefinitely the examples of ketmân in religious matters; there is not a single communion, nor a single sect, that does not afford itself the glory or the pleasure of it, sometimes upon one point, sometimes upon another, upon the whole or upon the details. But precisely for this reason, I shall be so often led back to speak of ketmân, and to demonstrate its action and effects, that it is useless to dwell upon it further here. With regard to philosophical opinions, one can readily conceive that this principle finds a thousand opportunities for application.

First, everyone’s disposition to frequently change his mind and to couple the most adverse opinions renders ketmân particularly convenient. When one conceals what one thinks, one avoids the inconvenience of defining one’s thoughts to oneself; and when one reveals one’s beliefs only in small measures, with reservations and disguises, one is not easily caught in flagrant contradiction. It is in this manner that Asiatics communicate their ideas to one another. One doubtless divines the general direction of the thought of someone whom one knows well; but one is never certain that this direction might not be modified by the action of some new or ancient belief of which one has never been made a confidant. And if, by chance, a deviation reveals itself and one points it out, the friend, out of fear, out of false shame, out of caprice, out of pride, or from an even slighter impulse that he cannot explain to himself, hastens to prove to you that you are mistaken. He does this by demonstrating that the idea you suppose him to hold is absurd, inadmissible, and culpable in the highest degree, and by avowing to you that his true way of seeing is diametrically opposed to it. A month later, he will have forgotten his fine defence, and, of his own accord, will expound to you in all its details the sentiment against which he had so greatly revolted.

For, among the Orientals, no secret is kept for long. One of the facts that most astonish when one lives among them is to perceive that this great affectation of mystery surrounding the life of each individual is but a veil suspended from above, unattached below, a light veil that the slightest breath of air disturbs, and that parts at every instant to reveal even those things least meant for the public eye. In the time of Fath-Ali Shah, the scenes of his harem fuelled the gossip of the bazaars with their rather singular details; men recounted to one another publicly and freely the name of the Georgian merchant, of the brilliant nomadic cavalier, or of the elegant Mirza who had found free access the evening before, and by what means he had entered. If these indiscretions are committed with such strange unconstraint regarding so delicate a matter, one may easily believe that the scandalous chronicle of private individuals is no more exempt from gossip. Indeed, indiscretion runs rampant in these matters, and one is forced to conclude very quickly that the enclosure of houses and the veiling of women have, for the preservation of secrets, precisely the opposite effect to that which one initially supposes.

Since the Asiatics speak with such ingenuousness of things that touch them so closely, there is no reason to be astonished that they display such an intemperate imagination and tongue in the realm of ideas. Ketmân serves them less to truly conceal their thought than to turn it into a perpetual carnival, rendering themselves elusive by means of disguises and constant mutability. A highly advanced Sufi Muslim confided to me that Persia, in his opinion, did not contain a single absolute Muslim. I am tempted to believe that the proposition must be extended and transformed thus: Central Asia does not contain a single believer who recognises only the precepts of his faith and who admits them all.

Now, one may understand without difficulty why I affirmed in another work that fanaticism, insofar as it represents an exclusive persuasion of any religion whatsoever, is a phenomenon alien to the spirit of the Orientals and does not exist among them. Just as there is no absolute faith there, neither is there any exclusive preoccupation. Because there is no sufficiently considerable group united by the bonds of a strictly accepted doctrine, neither is there any collective enthusiasm, nor any determined common hatred. What exists are individualities or small circles, into which one enters and from which one departs without fanfare and without noise. These circles claim to possess the truth in all things while wishing to conceal it, yet letting it escape in spite of themselves; they are contemptuous of whatever does not accord with their ideas of the moment, thus fostering a sectarian spirit and a narrow individualism, a primary cause of the political debility of the Orientals. Ultimately, they present to the eye of the observer nothing but a seething, incessant undulation of the most diverse doctrines, tossed about and mingled by ambient influences—doctrines, in sum, much too weak and too occupied with self-preservation to possess the leisure, the grand designs, the temerity, and the implacable resolution that constitute fanaticism.

[Footnotes by the editor.]

Last we left off, I had won some small portion of imperishable fame for myself by enduring a great ascesis as well as by mogging the natives. Our second form of mogging, however, would be mutual and convivial: it would be antisemitism. But more on that in a minute.

Shortly after coming down the mountain and breaking my fast, I had begun to enter a more chill mode of things. I had set the center, as it were, of my quest for knowledge at a little chai shop near the base of the Earth's lingam. Like any third world or particularly cozy Med affair, it was absolutely tiny in itself, with a great stove and pot or two for the business and a space behind where any tired old bhenchod might take his siesta on the floor. We patrons occupied a little space of dirt and pavement, adorned with a few tables and a dozen or so chairs, from which one might watch the continual stream of traffic and passers-by. Anyway, it was prime real estate and by far superior in its product to the more ramshackle operations which elsewhere supported the national infrastructure.

Here, then, I found myself one evening, perhaps having begun my superficial studies of Tibetan or Ugaritic or having entered upon Gibbon’s magnum opus via a well over hundred-hour audiobook. In any case, I must have been doing something to make myself feel productive between walking, hiking, and meditation, and I was now very much chilling out, as is so wont to happen to Anglo-Celts or Tacitean primitives such as ourselves, so prone to oscillate between the utmost exertion and sloth.

Whatever meditations had been occupying me then, they were rather abruptly intruded upon by a figure at once as suspicious and wholesome as one might perhaps ever encounter. A short fellow of medium or somewhat light skin for the area, wearing a slightly stained white shirt, wielding a little stick finished well enough by nature for the walking, smiling with yellow teeth, and topped with greasy and disheveled hair approached me and inquired what I was doing here, at this pilgrimage site. Having been similarly approached so many times by less than reputable chaps already, I might have been a little excessively guarded in my response, but I indicated well enough why I had come, to meditate and read and so on in relative freedom. But, contrary to my expectations, in the course of that conversation and many others to follow, I would find this fellow to be about as genuine a one as was ever fashioned by the gods. He was indeed my unc.

Unc was a Brahmin of exalted lineage from the far northwest of the country and had come down here to ask of Surya, the Sun, a better rebirth. He had hoped that his own Solar nature, in this present cycle inadequate to his liking, would be greater in the next and that, now as a proper Kshatriya, he might render his services to his country, ideally by resuming the war on Islam and founding a Platonic, martial-agrarian state. Well, that's to put it all up front and in brief—he had come to this place in particular to pay reverence to its deceased guru and to make use of the Shaivic energy innate to it, and he had taken an interest in me because I had seemed in some wise strange to him, as to many others. For one thing, I suppose there had been my whole heroic escapade earlier, and for another I was so young and, as he would later indicate, simply had that Brahmanical energy about me.

Whatever the case, we were thenceforth unc and wean, and besides reading and listening and meditating, I would eat with unc and even nap afterwards at his apartment. A good half of many a day was spent with him, discussing the Dharma and the state of the world and how Islam was bad and how Abrahamism was relatively bad in general (<—foreshadowing). Nonetheless, after some time frolicking and learning thus, my earlier, physically informed impression of the man would unfortunately receive some reinforcement. As mentioned, aspiring though he was for the heights of Lightning, in Savitri Devi’s sense, he was far too ‘Sun’ by birth and had as such come ironically to pray of the Sun his metamorphosis. That praying, however, was not free, or at least not the level of subsistence it demanded, and so he was in the very bad habit of being continually bailed out by his wealthy, almost French-passing family (you won't believe me but that's okay), from whom he had fallen off as a kind of ‘Kṛṣṇa,’ a ‘blackie,’ as he would say. Anyway, to avert this habit, he had gotten into the emigration business, ‘recommending’ individuals to a ‘friend’ of his, and it's here that I would be afforded an opportunity for treason to my country.

A few weeks after we'd met, while we were chilling eating almonds or something, he asked me to accompany him in his next venture, meeting prospective emigrants to the West—professionals and such like as wanted to jump ahead in line—and… just stand around looking nice, for which I would be remunerated handsomely. He naturally knew that I knew absolutely nothing of the matter, but he had told me by now of my very great Jupiter energy, which he hoped would act as a kind of magnet, and of course there was my pseudo-Trønder appearance and native American English as well. Anyway, I had already told him about Hitler and all that and how I kind of liked Trump, and I said now that I would never betray my country, and that was that.

Some will reproach me for not breaking off relations at this point, but his treatment of me in no wise changed thereafter—in fact he still helpfully sent me Sanskrit stotrams which he was practicing (he hadn't mastered the language) for my karmic wellbeing—and I can't really blame him for doing what he could for himself from the perspective of my own racial-national interests. If I had the button, I would of course press the button, but I would have always done so, just as he would always do what he was doing now.

Anyway, as you might have guessed, I had been getting rather bored and restless after a month or so of this relative inactivity of mine, but a chance reunion would abruptly save me from it. Still intent on reading and writing something, I had taken to circumambulating the holy hill, perhaps to work through Gibbon and to enjoy the purification and edification of some exertion as well as from the pilgrimage itself. On one such instance, I happened to encounter my original unc, the chap who had shown me up the mountain and back again, and he invited me to his house for dinner and proposed to take me to another holy mountain, much larger and much more an actual mountain, some distance off. I had already had a brief excursion to a former colony during one of the holy days, at the advice of my host, to avoid the swarming throngs, but now an opportunity much more to my taste presented itself to me, and I gladly accepted.

Early in the morning on the appointed day, the boys were back together at the bus station, and with the rising of the Sun we set off on our quest. With us were exactly two others: a tall professional with much better English than my guide and a somewhat shorter fellow of whom I remember very little. Initially, I may have just been oaking to Arditi over in my seat, but the conversation of the former chap was extensive enough and I was curious enough about our objective and the affairs of the country in general that I was soon roped in.

Somehow, our talk had turned to the matter of the drug trade—probably in accordance with unc's warning that I not stay the night in the little town over there—and the noble bourgeois brought things around to just how much worse and more organized the problem had gotten recently. He gave particular emphasis to the spectre of ‘juice,’ whereat I must have evidently shown some confusion. “You know, juice,” he said. Naturally, I assumed he was talking about some sort of Star Wars type drug, so after a second of feigned consideration, I nodded along and said something like, “Ah, yes, juice.” “Yes,” he said, “they come from Israel every year.” And with that, the antisemitism of that leg of the journey was concluded, though there will be more in another.

Anyway, speaking of Jews, the place was a true Gethsemane. The absolutely ubiquitous green-and-red of the region, for all its ubiquity, does not easily wear on one, and I was grateful for the natural gardens of the bottom which petered out only gradually towards its top. We were being wholesomely devoted as per usual and thus completed the thing barefoot, and I was again afforded the opportunity for mogging—for it was remarked upon by the bourgeois, not only what power there was in my stride, but how I sweat almost not at all in the late-spring Sun. I'm not sure whether this was a good thing in a climate such as that, but it is true that Anglo-Norwegians like ourselves have certain special abilities or modifiers of the kind—for instance, when it's particularly cold and my hands are just about to go numb, they will often suddenly turn orange and regain full warmth and utility. And as to the matter of my stride—well. I had once been warned back at the other place against stepping the wide gap from one boulder to another by a bespectacled nigga (nakama), upon my successful completion of which he could only stammer, “Your legs… very tight!”(?)

Mogging aside, then, we had our good fun of it and discovered at the mountain’s top just what a true mountain it was, for the area anyway. All that one might see, one saw, and so I was very pleased and rejoiced in my heart. Probably I ought to have called to mind the example of Petrarch and how little it might be expected of these people to do anything of the sort without the religious or vlogging incentive, but my thoughts were not so chudward—indeed, I think the pilgrimage aspect ought to always be present in one’s own heart, in an Evolian sort of way.

Down from our victorious (<—transcendent, Olympian) perch we came, myself and unc—I can't remember what happened to the others. Back at the old chai shop we parted, with some awkwardness; for the fellow was obviously expecting me to pay him some unannounced and unagreed massive sum of money, as before, but I followed some recent advice from unc #2 and desisted, seeing as there was indeed neither contract nor the implication of one, seeing as he had presented the expedition as a favor, whatever he was now obviously hoping from it, and seeing as I had last time given him very nearly a month’s rent for a half-day’s job. I don't know if it was a very Nietzschean Early-Medieval Arab thing of me to do (Gibbon had mentioned by now the generosity of Ḥātim aṭ-Ṭāʾiyy among others), but it was certainly a sufficiently Nietzschean ascesis against my own too-soft conscience. Off, then he plodded, downcast, from my silence and my farewell.

Following this excursion, there wasn't really much left for me to do in that area particularly: I drank my fucking bags of milk (6% fat, meant for baking, pints at a time; passers-by (Dravidian) were absolutely flabbergasted) and visited some of the smaller temples and other sites in between my studies while my interest still lasted. On one such latter instance, the motorcyclist I had been in the habit of hiring to take me about remarked, upon seeing my face as I left a temple to Kāli, that I was certainly thinking of the Mother, with a deeply satisfied smile. In fact, I had been thinking about Freemasonic Deism, and, for all my fondness of historical Hindudom, the garish Disneyland superstition all about was beginning to wear on me. In front of statues of Ganesha, worshippers would put their fists to the sides of their head and do rapid shallow squats; in front of a sacred pyre they would rub some citrus fruit over their bodies, a practice for which I searched online in vain. Anyway, thrown upon myself and dreading the stagnation of my spirit, it was just now, some two months into my stay, that the winds of the North began to whisper to me, and suddenly my heart turned to the mountains, true mountains—indeed, to the roof of the world.

I abruptly prepared my final departure from that place, first by bus to Chennai and then by plane to Kolkata, whence one train and one SUV ride would take myself and my backpack to Darjeeling, at the foot of Sikkim and thus of Greater Tibet (yeah, hail that). The only problem with its execution was that, on my final night in the big TN, the earlier mentioned motorcyclist was nowhere to be found. Thus my unc #2, whom I love very much, very concernedly saw to it that another take me in the middle of the night and navigate the confusing swarm of the bus station to claim me a seat. I gave this other fellow 500 rupees for the remarkable deed and was only prevented by my contrived and possibly fake Nietzscheanism from giving more, which I to this day sometimes regret (he was happy enough; it was objectively enough). Indeed, even the chai shop owner had offered to help for free, though things didn't quite line up for that. There is, my friends, an entire race of uncs down there, liable to return one's phone or card or give one lessons in life-saving acrobatics, in gross contradistinction with the general population; perhaps they were present here in some strength because it was a holy town.

As I sat there waiting and as the bus took me through night and dawn to Chennai of the Burning Waters, I may well have reflected upon the matter via a great trove of accumulated encounters. My very first trouble in the holy town had been with a rickshaw driver, who had stolen my phone on one of my first days there. Thankfully, I could just email my mom to find it via satellite, and it turned up in the middle of a field, where he and one of his fellows had been sleeping, as I later found out. One of the older, more respected, and more frequented drivers went over to find him and belabored the problem of satellites and trackers, which this gent had significant difficulty understanding, having to go so far as showing him my screenshots of its location, before it was returned to me in exchange for a voluntary compensation of 1,000 rupees, which my host suggested as good manners (I had left it on my seat after all) and which was a little ridiculous, looking back. This affair was actually quite blotted on the whole, for the older driver was dissatisfied with my 500 and afterwards begged for more (denied!), and my host supposed that I owed it to him to be accused of breaking a faucet and paying for it (also denied!!).

But, then again, I had once been saved by an unc whom I had rebuffed (“ille, paa”), after he had been somewhat annoyingly chummy with me, just as he pulled me from the ill-kept course of an oncoming bus. Indeed, I was humbled, and you can be sure word of the incident spread quickly (my buying chicken from a butcher was sufficient material for town-wide gossip). And again, on another occasion, I rather incomprehensibly chose to jump from a moving bus, wherewith my very powerful Nordic legs, by massive strides, carried me, with life and limb intact, dangerously hard forward, just to the side of a cyclist waiting at a stoplight. This master of the human form, certainly a veteran of some sport or other, calmly demonstrated, with flat hand and two running fingers, just how I should have pulled it off. To men such as these I indeed had much for which to be grateful—my life, for instance.

But not so often would I see them, these Hindu blacks, thereafter, for my star now led me far off to the Mongol and half-Mongol fringe. There I would seek jhāna, such as I might find it; and, whether or not it might be said that I truly did, I did find many other things besides—Lord Khanchendzonga, for instance, Lord Antisemitism, and (soshite) Lord… HEINRICH HIMMLER? (What the fuck.) But more on that later.

Hello, brahs.

If you have been anywhere at any point in the past 20-40 years, you have probably encountered the claim that the distinguishing germ of the American musical tradition lies, and perhaps has always lain, in the wise and caring hands of that country’s black population. Setting aside the most egregious statements of this sort, which do not even warrant criticism, there are a few widely-circulated empirical assertions which have served as the basis of post-war ethnomusicological revisionism in both popular and academic circles—none of which, as one might expect, stand well under any degree of objective scrutiny.

However frequently referred to in brief, if scratched even slightly the narrative essentially boils down to this: that the distinctive archaisms of American folk and popular music, namely microtonality (‘blue notes’), melismata (vocal ornamentation), and syncopation (birhythm, offbeat emphasis, ‘Scotch Snaps,’ etc.) in Old Time, Gospel, Ragtime, Blues, Country, Bluegrass, Jazz, R&B, Rock ‘n Roll, Soul, Rock, and their relatives and derivatives all have their ultimate origins, not in the well-documented precedents of these phenomena in pre-modern, colonial, and American liturgy, in Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Baroque secular compositions, in military and marching band music, in the folk music or spoken languages of Britain and Ireland, nor—get this—primarily in the musical traditions of Sub-Saharan West and coastal Central Africa, but in the more ornamented tradition of the Islamic Sahel.

Yes, that’s the standard genealogy. However phrased, that is what is most often meant by ‘African roots’ and ‘African influence’ by those scholars who make any direct reference to the inadequate—in many respects diametrically opposite—traditions of western tropical Africa and their actual descendants in the equatorial New World, except when conjecturing vaguely about jazz or a nebulous ‘rhythmic sense.’ Even to introduce such an idea in so little detail as this is effectively to refute it, but we will nonetheless be examining it in some depth, to redeem the hono(u)r of our (‘are’) Race and to touch as well upon the question of the chthonic element in aesthetics and its gradual purgation, resurgence, and sterilization historically.

My own counter-thesis is that what is valuable in the American musical tradition is precisely its retention of archaic European forms and their elaboration and, in certain respects, intensification in a new and strange environment—in which process the Negro element has indeed partaken, in some ways to a greater and in others a lesser degree than the rest of the population, owing to historical happenstance and their own subjective racial character. We will demonstrate our case by first, in this installment, rather straightforwardly examining the ethnomusicology of Africa and its hemispheric offshoots, at least as far as one such as myself is capable or qualified to do so.

Almost the entirety of black Africa can be divided between two endogenous musicological zones: that of the Rainforest and that of the northern Savannah and Sahel. The majority of the continent belongs to the former, which might also be called supra-Niger-Congo or Bantu-Pygmy or whatever else you like, including within its spread almost all non-Muslim populations. This area is almost completely dominated by the dual forces of choir and drum, with drum orchestras being the near-exclusive form of instrumental assembly: prior to European and increasing Islamic influence, these were only very rarely accompanied by the occasional horn or stringed instrument. Most drummers play a simple, straight, and constant rhythm; but these rhythms are mutually distinct, and the lead drummer is generally free to choose between any one of them at any given time—and thus, in concert, the result is an extreme layering, or polyrhythm, unequaled by any folk tradition in the world. The vocals, meanwhile, are by default a kind of simple collective polyphony—that is to say, a straightforward harmonic layering of parts and, much more seldom, the actual coincidence of independent melodies. The notes are almost exclusively ‘diatonic’ (to speak inexactly): whole or half tones formed into a balanced scale structure, ranging from pentatonic (5-tone) to heptatonic (7-tone), as is the case with European folk music as well as that of most primitives generally. In short, the music of the African heartland is just that which you hear in movies and documentaries: simple, communal, clear, harmonic, and generally vocally unaffected and, when accompanied, beholden most of all to its percussive section, which is its most distinguishing feature.

(You can really hear the uh Gospel in there.)

In its northwestern reaches, this style fades out into what might be called a kind of synthesis. The mostly Islamicized inhabitants of the wesrern Sahel adhere to a much more traditionally Eurasian typology, with voice and instrument substantially liberated from both the constraints of communality and the uniquely African tyranny of rhythm. It is not as such, however, merely a direct offshoot and intrusion of some Eurasian tradition southwards: far departed from the normal vocal range and tonal complexity of the Afroasiatic zone with its swaying wiles and rich ornamentation, as well as the idiosyncrasies of its vocal delivery, black Islam maintains (outside of the Arabian tradition of recital and direct jungle influences) a native style of an almost-universally light intonation, often pitched one or two octaves above speaking voice, frequently engaged in what might only be called a sort of aimless but repetitive meandering. It shares with American music a certain bending, sliding, gliding, or inflecting of notes within a diatonic melodic structure, though seldom to the same extremities or with the same hardness; still less, then, might it be likened to the vocal richness and the more genuine microtonality (using intervals smaller than semitones) of Arabian or Byzantine chant, which mostly divide and elaborate Greek harmonic precedent.

(I’m not sure whether this is bad by their own standards, but that dissonance really threw me off at first. He might be using his own tuning. Yeah, uh Bluesy as hell.)

(At the beginning we can see some jungle-drum polyrhythm and—BOY LOOK AT THAT BOY MOVE. YEAH. YEAH. Skip to 3:27 for an interesting vocal style.)

(Note the generic third-world happy-sad lalala character. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m not sure whether there might be any pop influence. Note also that she is probably his bitch, and that this is a good thing.)

(Says it all in the title.)

(Interesting playing off one another here.)

(Akonting, old wan banjo. Jungle beats also.)

(Here we just have straight up Western counterpoint.)

On the whole, it thus appears as a strange pulling of Sub-Saharan modality, mood, and vocal delivery towards another musicological world entirely. It cannot be answered definitively whether this process was begun endogenously or with ancient Berbers or non-Sudanic black pastoralists or with Islam, but the latter seems unlikely given the great distance still maintained between the calls-to-prayer and the secular native tradition. The synthesis (assuming that it began from without) was successful enough and enough of a novel quality obtained that, from a purely morphological perspective (and if we were to keep separate the dual influences of Islam and the jungle), it would be easier to group together, say, the Continental European choral, North Eurasian, Sub-Saharan, and Polynesian traditions on one side and the Arabian, Sahelian, Japanese, Medieval European (arguably), and Indian on the other, than to place side by side the bardic Sahelian and that broader Negroid tradition from which it otherwise seems to have been straightforwardly converted—for there are great depths of the world where the solo, mourning or storytelling bard is entirely unknown and where cattle-drivers will have minimal recourse to quavering in their calls as they soothe their beasts. As earlier indicated, it is largely owing to certain subtleties or intangibles that the Sahelian style might nonetheless appear as qualitatively African to an otherwise ignorant listener—we are somehow aware how Africans are predisposed to sing and play; but this is a matter of character, attitude, and language, and one to which we have been to some degree attuned, as well as of tonal similarity (whose general character is, as mentioned, quite universal in any case), rather than one of morphological belonging or derivation in the fullest sense.

Of these two musical worlds, then, only the jungle tradition is generally believed to have survived the voyage to the Caribbean and South America relatively intact, being directly echoed in Haitian and (for the most part) Jamaican music, and in a more modified form in the Hispanic world—most famously to form a core component of Samba and thus (quite distantly and indirectly) of Bossa Nova. In the United States its legacy is still weaker: in any objective investigation, like that of the famous Alan Lomax or of Melville Herskovitz (yeah, guess what he is), American Negro music is easily the furthest removed of any New World offshoot. At most it might be said that the generic call-and-response structure and communal openness of field songs and, to a lesser extent, of Gospel, as well as the general rhythmic consistency of historical American black music, have been brought over from that zone which supplied the great majority of its ancestors. Of actual tradition: of linguistic, lyrical, and melodic continuity; of vocal style, long since shifted greatly towards ornamentation and affectation, and, most importantly, of the genuine polyrhythmic layering which far more than anything distinguished the a ancestral Sub-Saharan form, very little was retained—the latter aspect has as such no attestation whatever until what might amount to a partial and exceedingly indirect morphological successor in the form of jazz.

(Note the Western church influence but also how naturally this blends.)

(Bro, this is Bluesy and Gospel as fuck broes.)

(This is all YouTube gave me. Not like the scholars did me any better. Hey, it’s from the Smithsonian.)

(Note the very different weight wherewith the syllables fall, more on which in another installment.)

(This comes from muezzins apparently. Who knew! Not the field-workers themselves.)

Even characterized with such reservations as these, though, the case of jazz is still fundamentally questionable: from a purely morphological perspective, if we are allowed to consider the rhythmic disparities or layering of the wind instruments as “polyrhythmic,” then we are equally qualified to do so for, say, late 14th century French choral music (the ‘Ars Subtilior’) which in this sense achieved the African standard of layering—with the sole qualification that in the case of jazz there is a drum set or percussion section underlying and supporting the conflicting melodic structures. The indignant reader will surely object with the ‘swinging’ or ‘riding’ character of jazz, whose origins will be considered in the next instalment or the one after; for the time being, let’s just see what professionally-trained, educated Africans, familiar with both the Western and their own native styles, thought of the comparison.

I had also spent a month as a visiting lecturer in the Department of African Studies at the University of Ghana in Legon near Accra […] There I had given daily lectures in Afro-American music, […] and held regular seminars with a group of students who were engaged in studies of Ghanaian music. […]

Visiting musicians from many parts of the country stayed on the campus and demonstrated their music which was thus available for the analysis of the students. Ga, Ewe, Ashanti, Fanti, Nzima and other Akan tribes were accessible and their many musical traditions were still much alive within miles of the coast.

The seminars with the students of the Department, almost all of whom came from the Akan tribes, and particularly from Ashanti, proved to be very perplexing. Accustomed as they were to the music of their own peoples but trained, too, in Western techniques of recording and analysis, they were in an ideal position both to detect and to identify ‘African’ retentions in jazz.

But seldom was there more than a ripple of positive response, and even when there was it was generally conceded that the differences vastly outweighed any points of similarity. By examining some West Indian musical forms where the retentions were clear and identifiable and relating these to examples of New Orleans jazz by veteran musicians, it was possible to agree on generalities concerning the rhythmic use of front line instruments, or the polyrhythmic texture of piano, guitar, bass and drums. Eventually some of the generalizations made concerning the relationships of African music to jazz could be substantiated in outline, but the positive evidence that I had sought and hoped for was elusive.

[Oliver (1970)]

Well then! Sounds more like an academic and historiographical exercise than a rediscovery of roots.

But, weak as these historical associations may be, they find their absolute nadir in the Blues, which, standing as a kind of bardic tradition, carries further than any genre the apparent American drift. Nonetheless—rather as with the sin that liberates or the poison that cures, our more objective libtards and Jews, never to be dissuaded, have found just the salvation of their sinking polemic therein: they thought they could detect in the strange and whining echoes of the Blues the heritage of the Sahel.

Originally, I was of the opinion that any such attribution was such a blatant counterfactual on the face of it that I would be able to listen to a few recordings and leave the matter be, but I have since moderated upon realizing that this attitude was largely owing to a polemical overextension by the other side, and that the actual material proffered and first-order linkages drawn directly therefrom (rather than their much grander extrapolations) are of so vague and uncertain a character as to be basically unfalsifiable. As earlier mentioned, the objective style of the vast majority of Sahelian performance music—historically reserved for a hereditary caste called Griots—is so contrary to black music in the Americas that any positive, linear argument solely on the grounds thereof is immediately ridiculous; but whether there was some influence specifically, say, from the relative tonal-melodic freedom of the Sahelian style in the characteristically free attitude which the Blues maintains (to some degree, and jazz more so) towards the notes of the Western chromatic (semitone) scale and towards dissonance in general (using uncommon Western modes), is, as indicated, an idea as possible as it is indirect and unfalsifiable.

(Is this chromatically pretty free? Yeah.)

Other than this very vague constructed association, then—be it plastered on every wall—one has also the uniquely melismatic (again, highly ornamented) black American vocal style and the uniquely syncopated (contrastive) character of its rhythm. The former, as anyone can hear by way of direct comparison, bears little resemblance to either the rich Islamic-Arabian or the light Islamic-African in its actual realization; between the two, however the more extreme forms of black vocal straining might be said, by this very extremity, to come closer to the Arabian style relatively speaking—and so it is that we have been given the absurd and actually humiliating polemic, which musicologists still incredibly defend, that the warbling of Mecca is singly responsible for the peculiarities of our own Negroes’ songs, and thus that they are in a sense twice-raped (rather as Brahmins and Aryans in general are ‘twice-born’).

(Bro they’re like the same.)

Syncopation, on the other hand, is a feature which is relatively universal musicologically and thus of no necessary relation to the complex polyrhythms of the jungle. Many standard definitions will give it out as merely the simultaneous occurrence of multiple rhythmic patterns (thus identical with ‘polyrhythm’), but this definition is ethnomusicologically worthless—Scotch reels, for instance, are highly syncopated single melodic strands, where the very melody seems to be in conflict with itself, whereas in the African traditions we are met with a simple, straightforward layering of an entirely different effect. In any case, we might grant that the jungle percussion has its foot in the door northwards in the Sahel to some degree and that some quality of generic rhythmic irregularity or disparity among the singers or else between them and the latter accompaniment exists; but this is hardly what we were looking for, and beyond this point we have doubts. From all I myself have heard, I have received no particular impression of syncopation among the bards, and turning to the experts has done me little better: for, in a 100-page monograph entitled SAVANNAH SYNCOPATORS from Paul Oliver, which was the launching point both of the enemy polemic and my investigation thereof, the word “syncopation” is employed exactly once, in one clause, in one sentence, to the effect that syncopation is indeed to some degree attested in the Savannah. That is all the fellow gives us.

From a good 2 dozen or so performances from the allegedly ancestral bardic traditions, I have found ONE potentially convincing overlap, tucked away in an article whose primary aim was a nuanced criticism of the Sahelian dogma, ironically enough—and this was a performance by a Tuareg elder in the vicinity of Timbuktu which closely resembled Charlie Patton’s Mississippi Bo Weavil Blues by means of a sort of extremely simple, narrow melodic sawing which serves a strongly rhythmic function in both; although the vocal delivery is as always disparate. But that’s all I’ve been given so far: a gift of the Tuareg nobility—Afroasiatic slavers of a remarkable racial purity historically (as painstakingly documented by Carlton Coon) owing to their system of matrilineal inheritance which as such disqualified the descendants of slaves. Who knows, maybe this peculiar, simplistic melodic style or sub-style did diffuse southward, and maybe it was in past centuries much more common than it is at present—like I said, the argument is basically unfalsifiable—but it is in any case a single data point, in absolute contradiction with the living Griot tradition, from an entirely distinct, distant, and hostile race (American blacks are ~0% West Asian / Berber; the Fulani are 1/4-1/3), and it is thus hardly the polemical win we were originally being sold.

There were one or two more questionable cases of a vaguely similar character on the part of some far-off desert Negroes: one being a YouTube video of a Malian performance whose commenters proudly advertised it as ancestral to the Blues, apparently for a ring of tourists (one musician is wearing a cowskin cowboy hat), and a similar such demonstration in more traditional garb for a Martin Scorsese documentary series on the topic. The problem with old Scorsese, however—other than the questionable origins and affiliation of the alleged sub-tradition—is that it forms an abject footnote in his own polemic. We rather spend most of our time following a few ‘Griots’ in Mali to hear a high-pitched ‘pentatonic’ (most universal scale in the world) piece on an acoustic guitar, a brief and directionless serenade by the world’s smallest violin, some very obviously Arabian or North African-style singing from some albino imam or something (on another acoustic guitar), and some guy fucking screeeaming a welcome. We had a good 40 minutes of buildup, and that’s all he gave us. We followed around a gay-ass scarfed-up Malian and he told us all about the Blues, but that’s all we got in the end.

(Brother is wearing a cowboy hat. But who put him up to it?)

Having done our due diligence musicologically with wholesome and true honesty, we now find ourselves compelled to investigate the mythic figure of the Griot itself (or of the civilized African Muslim generally), which, having already been given vastly undue attention by early scholarly works relative to the objective material to hand, has since swelled to absurd proportions in both the popular-cultural and educational spheres as a sort of Islamic or Islamo-pagan totemic ancestor of the bluesman and of the black American musician generally. There is, for starters, no attestation of a single Griot—a professional, hereditary, lore-keeping West African musician—in the Americas, or the rest of the Western Hemisphere for that matter. Not one, anywhere. We have Islamic scholars on some plantations (in the house, well-off and quite apart from the singing and hollering field slaves) and even Islamic and pagan princes, allegedly, but no Griots, nor anything remotely like one; but all this has done nothing to dissuade the enemy from making the case, evidently. For all my painful scratching and digging about, the argument literally stands thus, as it always has: the banjo came from Africa, and the banjo-players came from Africa, and in Africa there were Griots, and these Griots did not sound like Bach or Handel or Mozart, therefore… well, you know, you can fill in the blanks.

That this very banjo, bearer of polemical loads, was first attested in primitive form among Portuguese mulattoes on the Gambia River in 1620, or that it fittingly amounts to a roughly halfway intermediary between the European lute or guitar and something like the Senegambian Akonting (which in every genealogy is treated as its metaphysical equivalent)—not to speak of its further modernization in the 19th century—well, evidently none of this has had any influence on our polemical historiography either. That American blacks are to all appearances no more than about 20% Senegambian genetically (they are more than 20% White), or that post-Songhai West African civilization, Muslim and pagan alike, was anything but universal even within that zone; and further that America has never seen anything like a common Islamic or Sahelian consciousness—let alone an actual uprising of Muslim slaves such as occurred in Brazil—has all likewise done nothing to dissuade our scholars. Onward they will press: they will beat both us and their pet race over the head with the most deracinating, ahistorical, artificially pain-inducing narrative imaginable, and they… think… yeah, you know the Sam Hyde quote, whatever. Take it as you will, but they are evil, and they will cause evil for all parties involved.

But that evil is an old one: from at least Reconstruction onwards, even educated, bourgeois White Southerners of liberal persuasion would, with minimal information, ascribe such alien origins to a manner of singing which their own ancestors would have found in no way perplexing. Oliver provides us with two such instances: one from the bonafide libtard and race-traitor, the Louisianan George Cable, who, long after the fact, happily drools over himself in a lengthy description of black ‘princes,’ ‘Herculeses,’ and crafty merchants and so on in antebellum Congo Square, New Orleans (Reconstruction killed it permanently; don’t tell libtards), one of whom, a Mandingo, is credited as having brought a deep, low, and sonorous style of improvisation, of little resemblance to that prevailing back home less than one century later, as a gift of highest culture. The other comes from Jeanette Murphy, recalling in 1899 from her earlier Reconstruction-era fieldwork that the archetypal freedman singer:

must make his voice exceedingly nasal and undulating, that around every prominent note he must place a variety of small notes, called ‘trimmings,’ and he must sing notes not found in our [diatonic/chromatic] scale; that he must on no account leave one note until he has the next one well under control. He might be tempted ... to take breath whenever he came to the end of a line or verse! But ... he should carry over his breath from line to line and from verse to verse, even at the risk of bursting a blood vessel. He must often drop from a high note to a very low one, he must be very careful to divide many of his monosyllabic words in two syllables.

The problem in this case is that the exact same style, in every one of its particulars, had been sung by their masters and their masters’ ancestors in England and Scotland since the 17th century at the latest, that something akin to it had been attested since the Middle Ages—with ultimate probable roots in the Insular Celtic and Greco-Syriac traditions—and that, insofar as American blacks have deviated from this base, they have done so, not by means of a ‘swinging’ or ‘snapping’ which belongs to Southern speech and Scottish dance, nor by a somberness so unlike the mood prevailing in Africa or the Caribbean, nor by reaching high and falling low, nor by that bending and breaking of the Western tonal system wherein many a good Briton has long taken delight, nor by Blues modality, which is entirely Western—but, more than anything, by means of that rhythmic regularity and vocal sonorousness which everyone knows already and recognizes immediately: that is to say, if anything, in a Sub-Saharan rather than Sahelian direction. We thus have almost exactly what anyone might have guessed a priori: an Anglo-Celtic core pervading the entire American musical tradition, substantial indirect deviation among blacks towards Sub-Saharan rhythmical preferences, their own vocal and thematic innovations on the new soil, and a hypothetical, polite cutout for an even more indirect influence by the Sahel on the black stringed tradition specifically.

But more on that in the NEXT ONE or the one after.

(Two Gospel renditions of a Medieval or Early Modern English ballad, Appalachian and Gullah. Yeah I don’t think the White man is lacking in melismatic and atonal power. That the breaking, rasping, turning, and swinging of the voice here have mutually more in common with Black Gospel’s alteration of these same features (see the lining-out above) than the latter does with the call-to-prayer of all things ought need not be said, yet here we are. On the Negress note again the unevenness of the syllables, how she skips through the short ones and rounds out the others as she sees fit. I wonder where that comes from, what language—what dialect of what language—uniquely does that.)

(I don’t really like this. Is this Griotic?)

(With these two we’re veering off into folk R&B, I would suppose (although I’m not an expert). Look at the second guy. What a little Caucasoid in your Sudanid can do. Call that Artificial Nilotid, but not really. Leni Riefenstahl (and BAP) caused me to lose a game of GeoGuessr by way overstating those guys.)

(Congolid jumpscare at start. He reminisces wholesomely on the cotton-picking days at the end. Fucked up how the Jews (and banks) took that from him.)

(And here’s ole Dock Boggs being as White and Old Time as ever. Just hear that sound, the sound itself (and the modality, versification, etc.). The main distinction on the part of Blues is its greater regulatory of rhythm—secondarily, yes, in some chromatic freedom or meandering, though Johnson way up there is far apart from the average in this regard (and finally we also have the optional intrusion of old Gospel vocals where Whites usually kept it apart). Does that make them boys Tuaregs, metaphysically? Who knows. Someone will have to tell them, though. Thankfully we have the Electric Jew for problems like these. Anyway, more on that later. Like I said.)

(This is just straight wholesome. Metaphysically impenetrable to Country, though, somehow.)

(Some Old Time wholesome on a lindy (‘Ole Nigga’) banjo.)

Postscript

A reminder that my mommy needs me to make money and you can give me crypto via the links on the About page.

Main Sources and Further Reading

Savannah Syncopators (1970)

Folk Song, Style and Culture (1978)

The Land Where the Blues Began (1993)

The Blues (2003)

Blue Notes and Blue Tonality

Open Letter about ‘Black Music’, ‘Afro-American Music’ and ‘European Music’

Sub-Saharan Africa - International Research Center for Traditional Polyphony

Characterizing the admixed African ancestry of African Americans

The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans

Origins, Admixture Dynamics, and Homogenization of the African Gene Pool in the Americas

I am a Young Ascetic. I am a heroic youth. This having always been the case, it is unsurprising that some outward expression of the fact be made manifest in the course of my years. One such expression, and perhaps the most remarkable, was a 5 month sojourn in India during the spring and summer of 2022.

I had made the resolution to go for a variety of reasons: to wander about, to meditate and fast, and to upload videos of myself reading Savitri Devi or Evola or giving nuanced takes about Rome. Most importantly, however, I had hoped, by fulfilling the call to renunciation and leaving the prison-world of ZOG behind, to bring about such conditions internally as would allow my Soul, or as would allow Ātman, to descend upon me or be made apparent within me and burn up or wash away all accumulated dross. Evidently this did not really occur, but I think I made a pretty good effort of it in any case.

The first #Anecdote worthy of being relayed here occurred immediately I set foot on the Subcontinent. I had thankfully come via the Thulean route and had thus absorbed all the kino of mountain and ice shelf and glowing Siberian town, and my greeting by the open air was not so much one of smell, as others relate, as of heat—perhaps in part because I was in the cleaner South and it was nearly midnight. Mistaking, I suppose, the practices of the airport taxi-drivers for those of their street fellows, I had tried and failed to haggle down their prices—and, being sensitive, Nordic, and cold and disdaining both the insult to my personal honor and the intrusion of Dravidian bodies into Anglo-Norwegian spaces, I simply skirted about the whole throng of groping hands out into the main street. I don’t know if I had a concrete plan for walking the distance to my hotel, but that is indeed what I attempted to do, through streets absent pedestrians and very often sidewalks, diagonally and counter-intuitively, as the bird flies, or so they say, until I came to a dead end of buildings and a chain-link fence and a security guard who apparently didn’t understand even English loanwords.

Thwarted and unwilling to face the race of air-conditioned faggots in defeat, I made my way back just short of the airport itself, where I found some unseemly and suspicious gents, three in all, standing guard by a beat up old rickshaw and apparently waiting for just such an instance as I now presented them. I offered the rather generous figure of 300 rupees, only 200 less than what the taxis were charging, which I well knew to be a bit of an overshot; but I wanted to avoid arguing one way or another, and my earlier pride was foremost in my consciousness. I insisted again when they tried to negotiate, and the leader, a rather tall chap, agreed, making a point of saying “alright, THREE-HUNDRED,” or something like that, when the deal was made. Of his two companions, the Big Man appointed a short, fat goblin sort of a fellow to do the job, and off we whizzed.

I don’t know where the little guy had set his heart on taking me, but after a few minutes enjoying the wind and the shakiness and probably illegal speed of the thing, I realized what was up and reminded my pilot of our agreed course, which he duly wheeeeled about and took. As I got out and sorted the proper payment, counting out 300 rupees, he interrupted, with lowered brow and devilish grin, and said, “300… DOLLAR,” like he’d finally had me in the vise. I just gave him the rupees, squatted down in the street, and started putting my wallet back into my backpack, whereat he roared his engine most loudly, as though in threatening vilification of my Odyssean answer.

The hotel was up a narrow staircase which opened onto the street, through what I assume was a shared building. All was dark except for a small TV, and initially I thought no one was home, until a very small man picked himself up off the floor, where he had presumably been sleeping. Something was off-putting in his manner, or perhaps I was simply tired and unconsciously strained, and so I made a very ponderous speech of it establishing the payment. Naturally, I had miscalculated, inverting the fraction times one hundred whereby one established rough equivalence with the dollar, and the man happily accepted, with a sort of cowardly and suppressed nod, my 50% extra. I asked whether they had any water, but he told me it was only safe to drink from bottles (true), and I was compelled to buy one off him.

Established in my room, I made first the unfortunate discovery that Chennai shower water burns the skin of its user and then that neither a morning taxi nor anything else could be bought with my card. An agonizing hour later, and I realized that this was just a general problem for tourists and that I could get by just fine handling everything with cash. In the midst of all this, my mother asked me for a picture. The first I took revealed what a faggot’s face I had developed in the course of the night, and so I called to mind the sayings of Hagakure and stopped being a faggot. Thus was my problem solved.

In the morning I had my taxi, and a stout, young PUBG streamer saw to it that I crossed the land of the Devas in relative comfort. Though I had been fasting since my departure, he insisted we stop for some of the sweet and shitty chai or coffee which lines all the major roads down there, after which he tried to compel me to throw the cup out with the myriad others vastly adorning the semidry green-and-red landscape. This formed in a sense the first crucial juncture of my self-overcoming in that country—in that cup was the White race: high-trust society, low time preference, object permanence, situational awareness, etc. But I had to turn a blind eye for the time being—rather as Hitler, for instance, had once had to turn a blind eye to Hindu nationalism some eight decades prior.

Cutting through still more beautiful and ruined landscapes, we found ourselves on more sacred, though no less defiled, ground, at the holy site which was to serve as my first protracted stop in a much wider adventure. Thus did I part with my first companion—but before he left me to the wiles of the world, he had warned me sternly of a supposedly ubiquitous prostitution. And so I met my first interaction of substance there, an enthusiastic greeting from some of the local schoolgirls (not really a brag for obvious reasons), which was to be repeated every day thereafter, with contempt. I nignored them totally, just as my good friend had instructed.

Indeed, a persistent theme of my entire stay in India proper was constant staring from the natives and incessant compliments as to my appearance and inquiries (from the men) as to my sexual status and proclivities. On the one hand, it is both a gregarious and a faggot country, but on the other, they do worship the White Gods—as our teacher (guru) Robert Sepehr calls them—as they appear manifest in man. I personally would receive an unusual amount of such attention, as other White expats, even of similar age, told me. I was for instance called ‘Harry Potter’ (a term of high praise) I think seven times in that one town, by different people, on different occasions, days or weeks apart. I don’t even look like Harry Potter, neither phenotypically nor physiognomically—I’m a near-blond pseudo-Trønder, if that means anything to you—and neither am I very high on any objective looks scale, but evidently none of that mattered (although I do have beautiful eyes). My older Brahmin nationalist friend (his family was in the Mahābhārata) told me I had big “Jupiter energy,” a mark of a Brahmin by nature, coming off me, so maybe they just picked up on that without being aware of the fact.

In any case, I had reached my destination and set about my first and arguably only order of business, which was, as earlier mentioned, of an essentially spiritual nature. I went to the temples, and though at first awkward in my reverence for the gods, I eventually decided to just mog the locals and do full prostrations at every statue and lingam, with sincerity of heart but also wholesome Nietzschean skepsis. A more difficult matter would however present itself at the ashram, which formed the heart of the place.

The entire town owed both its structure and existence to a small, red, varyingly vegetated mountain (really a huge, rocky hill), which is taken to be a particularly potent instantiation of the god Shiva. The ashram begins at its base and acts as a kind of gate or at least hub for all the main, legally prescribed trails leading to its top, where offerings to the god are made at least once a year. A natural extension of the ashram is formed by rooms or facilities fashioned from or next to lower-lying caves, which are held to be holy.

I don’t think I had undergone any particularly profound alterations of consciousness up to that point, neither in my earlier states of duress or resolve, nor in a nominal or respectful interest at the holy sites or the main buildings of the ashram itself. When I crossed the threshold of a small, unassuming cave, however, of relatively minor significance to the cult of the mountain, I was threatened with an overwhelming wave of what I can only call bliss. I had to fight to hold firm inwardly and to keep my mind my own and prevent tears from streaming down my face. There was no warning or precedent for the change, except, again, in a sort of basic philosophical and meditative interest, and I have never experienced its like since. Its closest probable analogue would have been another precipice of consciousness, a foreboding of dissolution or breakthrough, which I once experienced in meditation in my closet at home and which I likewise consciously denied or shirked off. I had also known 3 or so seconds of a prerational (‘pre-egoical’) and unannounced temptation to return to the Christian faith two years prior, where something like the onset of divine grace hovered over me, but this was not quite the same.

I imagine some of the readership’s interest may fall off at this point, but it really is difficult for most Westerners (and most Men), even if they are redpilled, to empathize with the Hindu idea of ānanda, or bliss. It is not joy or happiness in the common sense, of latching onto or having achieved some pleasant mental or physical object, nor a mere passive coloration or pleasing diminution of consciousness. If I may be rude enough to presume to have at least approached it at certain points in my life, and if I am further permitted to make analogy with what are energetically or contemplatively inferior states, I would say that it is (as emotional condition, rather than as samādhi or else as a theoretical aspect of enlightenment) perhaps something in between bliss or ecstasy as commonly understood, those emotions called melancholic which entail no suffering, and the calm release, freedom, and unconcern of him who has suddenly denied or let go of some object or of some facet of his person. A being of higher rank than myself might object that this sensation merely amounts to that felt at the gateway of bliss, even as waking reality, and as such that the latter is categorically distinct from any attempted characterization of the kind, even were one such as myself to have had greater or direct knowledge of it. In any case, I have resisted and denied oncoming waves of this peculiar state or premonition of mine if I detected something potentially harmful in their directionality or composition, as being essentially foreign and unknown to myself and basically unlike that bliss which arises spontaneously in the course of active life or meditation as an accompaniment of dhyāna/jhāna, or the deeper meditative states.

On this occasion I again resisted successfully and afterward plotted the next move of my quest.

I don’t remember how the idea got into me, but I think one day shortly after the above incident I just veered off the established trail at some point with the intent of white knuckling the thing to the top, as befitted my Nordic spirit and as was arguably demanded by the very nature of my visit. Maybe the main side trail was closed off for some reason, and I simply rose up in indignation; I really don’t remember. I would in any case climb alone, barefoot (a standard sign of devotion), in broad, burning daylight, with relatively little water, having fasted the entire week since my flight. I found out afterward that this was actually illegal, since certain banchod Westerners had been having orgies up there, beyond the ashram trails, and defiling the place.

Needless to say, about halfway up, through boulder and bramble, and things weren’t looking so good for old me. I stood on one absolutely giant such rock to survey my progress thus far and found to my surprise that some schoolgoers had gathered in the street at some distance below to watch my noble, if unconscious, brazenness. I waved at them—big, healthy waves—but they didn’t wave back. A little farther and things were looking still less good, when suddenly some kindly middle-aged or older gentleman appeared from the rocks below with an offer of help. He said his friends had seen my promethean endeavor and reported it to him, and he had dutifully come to guide me through. I’m not sure if all the implications of this statement and the remarkable speed wherewith he had answered the call occurred to me immediately, given my depleted, though optimistic, condition, but I soon found out this fellow’s business and accepted his offer happily nonetheless.

We two niggas (nakama) indeed made good enough time of it, however torturous for my own self the journey had become, by following the rugged, half-formed minor trails on that far side of the hill which otherwise might have remained invisible to me. I had meanwhile begun to contemplate the idea of a seventh sense beyond the sixth of thought or intuition—perhaps whether such a faculty (mixing terms, yeah) would be a sense at all—and some insight I can’t quite remember occurred to me as a kind of cope to alleviate my duress. Nonetheless, I resisted the temptation to totally give into the hypnosis of the idea—being that I was and am Nietzschean and also Kantian kinda—as I had before in the cave and would thereafter whenever the Indic proclivities presented themselves to me in milder form. I also called to mind the section of a Lord of the Rings audiobook where Frodo and Sam climb Mount Doom, and then I thought about how that was kind of gay, when you think about it, given my situation and intentions. Probably the idea of Red Indians doing the Sun Dance or perhaps of Christ in the wilderness also occupied me.

My ruminations were at some point interrupted when we came at last to a pool of nasty, dirty water with some plastic floating in it, which he assured me was perfectly safe and good and wholesome and which he himself drank by way of demonstration, and I indeed subsisted thereon. Then there was a holy cave of sorts—indeed, a refuge for the faithful, of air sustaining as water—where we paid our respects and rested, and finally the top of the mountain (or close to it; I can’t remember) where layers upon layers of the annual offerings of ghee, hardened and blackened by the Sun, burned my feet—the pleasure-pain… of… the Dionysian. On our return, as the Sun came just short of setting, we were halted by a policeman, to whom my guide gave some sort of explanation or assuagement, and at last we had our repose by the giant, open well of the ashram. It was such a thing as might nourish childhood fantasies, its rock walls reaching some two storeys down to cool and (finally) potable water in perfect juxtaposition to the arduous devotion which both the mountain and its trails would ideally have always demanded of worshippers. I wonder, now that I am more learned, whether Bronze Age Sardinians, with their subterranean water temples and not entirely dissimilar natural environment and chthonicism of spirit, had ever had the opportunity for a similar sensation. In any case, the well past, our parting was imminent, and I gave the fellow a ridiculous amount of money (about $80) at my own discretion, bade him farewell, and walked home through the night, which seemed almost to fall without true twilight, simply because I had finished.

The following day, I found myself barely capable of climbing the stairs of my hotel and thus broke fast. I imagine the entire incident had a great effect on the citizenry, since every one of my doings was apparently public knowledge in that town thereafter.

Post-Script

This series will serve as a kind of reprieve from denser and more serious works, both for my own and perhaps the audience’s sake. We currently have the Judeo-Musicology, Hagakure, and Coup of 2/26/1936 materials ready for writing, and the American Celt, Amerindian, Female Beauty (Nietzschean), World Musicology, Christianization of Europe, Aryan Fathers (10k word draft), and others are more than halfway so. It may seem hard to believe, but I really have just been sitting on these things, much effort though they have cost me, for the longest time, for absolutely no discernable reason. I will also begin accepting crypto donations, with some guilt, since my mommy quite desperately needs me to make money. Addresses are in the About page.

Let us begin this second installment, not with arrogance or pride, but with humility. Let us acknowledge, by bow or by kneel, that the Great Father and Master Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and the Secondary Lord Oswald Spengler have already pointed the way and since been vindicated on the question of the origin of races: namely that a race is first of all a thing created from a morass of qualitative and physiognomic chaos—created, that is, in accordance with a definite shared experience, breeding, and inner destiny and not a mere inheritance by shared biological derivation, which is only its prerequisite. Whether one places the weight of physiognomy on a standard skeletal morphology which is easily identifiable in the fossil record, or on the subtler aspects of facial cast or soft features, or on character or the soul, affects very little the truth of the observation, surprisingly enough to our archaeologists and geneticists, if they cared anyway. Regardless, we will naturally be forced by the character of our investigation to begin our focus with the skeletal aspect before speculating upon the others, which we will do at a later date. Only by reviewing the paleontological record in some detail can we fulfill our designated polemic for the moment: to destroy and annihilate the Darwinian world-picture. I hope you can bear up with the thickness of it all.

For the Upper Paleolithic, when modern man is first found in Europe, it may seem well and good enough to plot a vague west-east spectrum of robust (or primitive) versus gracile (or modern) cranio-facial tendencies within the general archaic West Eurasian (or Cro-Magnid) form using the averages of the Aurignacian and Gravettian cultures, but all this would be to ignore the actual presence of Negroid (Grimaldi), Eskimoid (Chancelade), and other, racially non-specific morphologies (Kostënki) in many individuals, absent any genetic association with physically similar modern populations. In the Mesolithic too one has among Western Hunter-Gatherers alone a standard, somewhat more facially gracilized Cro-Magnid type, another further gracilized which was intermediate with Mediterranoids (Téviec, Combe Capelle), one resembling later Borreby or Alpinids by cranial rounding or shortening (Ofnet), and one apparently having undergone the entire process of gracilization, reduction, and Mediterranization natively (Muge). Among Eastern Hunter-Gatherers a Cro-Magnid base fades into a somewhat gracilized minority, and the great frequency of Mongoloid upper facial flatness creates in robust individuals a Uraloid and among those more reduced or cranially rounded a more Lapp-like type (both called Ladogan) and between these and the pure Europoids a type resembling later East Baltids; meanwhile still others exhibit bizarrely Australoid features. But what may seem strangest of all to our readers is that it is uncertain which of these latter traits, if any, might have been derived from the 20% or so ancient East Eurasian ancestry which Eastern Hunter-Gatherers carried, as it appears unlikely that a fully East Eurasian morphology had evolved before the mixture event which created their Ancient North Eurasian ancestors 24-30,000 years ago. Thus our absurd little Australoid-like friends (few though they be) might, if anything, have been the actual descendants of the archaic East Eurasian form—considered from skeletal and genetic evidence to have been an archaic intermediate between Western, Eastern, and Southern Eurasians—and the Mongoloid traits would have been evolved among Ancient North Eurasian descendants independently. …Unless you believe there might be a supra-spatial aspect to evolution.

However that may be, until the demographic expansion and stability provided by the Neolithic, the European fossil record certainly bears little resemblance to the relative homogeneity of its genetic clusters; but what we discover thereafter can be more easily characterized as the stabilization of individual forms within and between genetically defined races rather than their actual solidification into individual, geographically bound types. Thus, among Anatolian-derived (ANF or EEF) Mediterranid populations, the deceptively named “Atlantid” or Megalithic type (long-faced, long-headed) was found in an arc from Anatolia and possibly the Fertile Crescent and Caucasus through the European mainland and North Africa to the ocean for which it was named; meanwhile the “General” or Gracile type was almost ubiquitous in varying degrees and independently approximated by some Caucasian or Iranian Farmer groups. This Caucasian-Iranian race possessed another two or three types of its own: firstly a large and small variety of Mediterranid morphologically resembling early Atlantids and especially Corded Ware save in aspects of facial profile, from or beside which would suddenly spawn the extremely unique Armenoid morphology in the Bronze Age, which is one of the great mysteries of physical anthropology. The Indo-Europeans and their immediate ancestors and relatives would, however, form the most intense example of this late-prehistorical generative process, introducing a simultaneous spatio-temporal differentiation and universal proliferation of types unprecedented and unsurpassed in the entirety of human historical record.

How the modernizing processes of gracilization and to a lesser extent uniformization began in the Upper Paleolithic is itself uncertain, but what is far more worrying as far as modern science is concerned is, as indicated, the rapid and well-documented emergence and spread of new types thereafter where environmental, demographic, and selective circumstances as presently understood ought to have prevented any such occurrence on the face of it.

The Mesolithic examples provided earlier are perhaps too scattered and insufficiently morphologically extreme to be compelling in this regard, with one exception: those found by the Tagus Valley in Portugal, at Muge. In this case we are disfavored by the sparse degree of genetic sampling and a few centuries’ overlap with the arrival of Neolithic farmers, but the record of some 21 measured specimens is substantial enough to be taken note of and its peculiarity has been the subject of anthropological fascination for the past century. What it reveals is the sudden appearance of a unique Mediterranid (which is to say relatively narrow-faced, narrow or long-headed, and gracile) type in the context of a Mesolithic material culture. So extreme was the skeletal reduction, in fact, that it would have been very difficult to differentiate male and female specimens by any metric were it not for the relatively strong brow ridges of the former. Far from the dimorphism of other Mediterranoid (Mediterranid and Mediterranid-like) types, such as Megalithics and Corded Ware, there unfolded here an infantilization roughly on par with that of the post-Natufian Neolithic in the Levant or much of Neolithic North Africa, or among certain cultures throughout the Neolithic in Europe, or later in Anatolia.

It has naturally been proposed that the skeletons might have been mostly or entirely from the late period of the local material culture and thus that their peculiarity may have been the result of mixture with neighboring Neolithic farmers, or else that the latter had inserted themselves into the graves of the former. However, not only do the relative uniformity and uniqueness of the type, its distance to known mixed specimens such as the Megalith builders, and three genetic samples which carry Western Hunter-Gatherer maternal DNA (little else being analyzed) all point in the other direction, but, were a mixed breed of primarily Anatolian farmers to actually have had such a startling phenotype, further reduced than even their quite diminutive neighbors (let alone the Cardium Pottery complex as a whole, which was capable of producing quite robust fellows), then the case is hardly strengthened for the linear, mutational, genealogical model whose predicted result would have been either far more uniform or directionally the exact opposite.

Too much weight shouldn’t be put on this single instance regardless—certainly not until more skulls are measured and samples taken—but it can only remind one anyway of the original question as to how gracile racial forms could have arisen and solidified in the first place, which one might call the fundamental racial question of the Neolithic. What is indisputable is that in the Near East the phenomenon occurred endogenously, and if one draws a parallel between the intermediate, semi-gracile form of Mesolithic Natufians, who were the first people to partially cultivate grain, with the increasingly sedentary seafood-eaters of Combe-Capelle and Téviec in France of a similar cranial type (but later date), then the analogy of their fellows in Muge with the Near Eastern Neolithic doesn’t stand as so much of a problem historiographically, and one can draw a progression, however implausibly rapid, in both cases with at least some possible intermediate stage. A similar analogy further east is implied by the gracilizing and Mediterranizing influence which Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer admixture had on the Steppe, though skeletons of pure early bearers of that ancestry are as yet elusive.

But beyond this sketch of a universal progression, the difficulty with supposing there to have been either some adaptive advantage in a purely Darwinian sense for skeletal gracilization or infantilization in the context of an increasingly sedentary or communal form of life, or else that absent certain strenuous selective pressures man easily slides into infantilism, is that the process was, as earlier mentioned, by no means universal nor linear nor correlated with social or environmental phenomena in the way one might expect. Neither the Early Neolithic specimens from the communist hellworld of Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia, where the ugly mammy statuettes everyone loves to post come from, nor much of culturally unremarkable portions of Neolithic Europe, nor half of the Neolithic and Eneolithic of the Near East are on average infantile at all; rather it was the remarkably patriarchal and violent Linear Pottery Culture, whose important men were buried with the implements of a hunter and whose muscular markings indicate their frequent use, that most universally sloughed off tendencies from the relatively robust Megalithic or early Atlantid type and rapidly intensified the intermediate Danubian or generic Gracile form amongst themselves, giving the former its name by their own geographical spread. And the difficulty with proposing dietary deficiency as a prime cause is not only the obvious problem that the especially gracile types, whether as dominant or minority element, are historically persistent through material fluctuations, but that disparities in dairy consumption (which is a good metric for animal protein in general) do not correspond with physical differences across Neolithic Europe. In fact perhaps the strongest counterpoint to either assumption is that it was with a rise in pastoralism as well as Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestry in the Middle and Late Neolithic that skulls west of the Rhine actually shrank and the Alpine type very suddenly gained a degree of morphological, demographic, and geographical coherence.

Needless to say then, though correlations between what might be called skeletal Neolithization and individual cultural forms and ways of life can be identified, there is once more nothing obviously materially causative about this fact in a narrow scheme of random mutation and reproductive success—as if, rather than the relative universality of the types and their remarkable mutability or resilience before the changing cultural forms and modes of life of early man, there had instead taken place in deepest antiquity such highly specific incidents as the breaking off of the Small Nigga tribe in some locality or other, so starkly and in such isolation as to have created a new and internally consistent facial and cranial morphology, which then thrived owing to some communistic or other stat buffs so intense as to ensure its continued survival geographically and temporally as a permanent fixture of the human experience, even in the face of radical cultural-selective alterations or a subsequent Big Nigga victory, and that this happened over again everywhere evidently without generally having otherwise left a trace. In reality it is precisely the diversity of male haplogroups (especially of subclades) and the geographical and demographic near-impossibility of such sustained bottlenecks as real morphological alterations supposedly demand which characterize the entirety of the Neolithic—even the widespread usurpation by Western Hunter-Gatherer male lineages from the mid-5th millennium onwards lacked the personal, nation-founding aspect of the Steppe expansions.

If we wanted to locate an entirely opposite evolutionary process within the winding stream of Neolithic morphology, both directionally and in its ease of explanation within any evolutionary scheme, we would turn our attention briefly to the Megalith-builders of Britain. It might seem strange or intuitive to you, depending on your priors, that it is as far from Anatolia that the race of European Farmers could have ventured that one of its archetypal forms, the Atlantid, attains not only its greatest purity but actually intensifies and robustifies its defining characteristics. This case is, as stated, not really magical because it can easily be ascribed to artificial selection as commonly understood, but I thought I’d bring it up not only to give a clear counterpoint—that is, to show you what we supposedly ought to have been finding everywhere in the fossil record—but also because it’s kino.

The picture one has of the Megalithic culture might well be mostly or entirely defined by its offshoot in Britain, and there’s good reason for that, however incorrect the assumptions to which it might lead one for the horizon as a whole. The monumental tradition did indeed reach its pinnacle here and it’s here that the actual relation of skeletons collectively interred in its great tombs becomes particularly obvious and directly indicative of the character of cultural life: enduring patrilocality, polygyny, and, frankly, incest in Western Europe all have their most remarkable instances here, at least as far as the Late Neolithic is concerned. The men are larger and longer-headed and the sexes more generally dimorphic than among their relatives on the continent, though unlike many of the latter they seemingly absorbed almost no native hunter-gatherer DNA, or they at least preserved the total proportion thereof (~20%) from their ancestors in the Paris Basin. Thus their unique character can be almost entirely attributed to isolation, a unique consciousness of breeding, a unique reproductive imbalance, and the unique social stratification which the former two presuppose and which is implied by the grandiosity of their monumental projects as well as the impression which their culture left on the thoroughly chuddish Bell Beaker invaders (more on which at some other time).

I do hope I roused you at least a little just now. Well here we get to the Aryan part, where everything truly based and polemically incontrovertible happens.

The genetic core of the Indo-European or Indo-Anatolian race, which we will be calling Aryan, must be placed with the Sredny-Stog culture of the Pontic Steppe beginning circa 4400 BC. Here, where raiding, trading, and a substantially pastoralist subsistence first became a coherent mode of life and the kurgan was first brought west of the Don, a gradually solidifying union of Eurasian and European Cro-Magnid and Caucasian Mediterraniform races had, after some relatively brief intermediate stages, purged itself of many of the idiosyncrasies of the former. It might now be called almost entirely Europoid in both the facial and craniological sense; and this process would be so definitively completed by their immediate descendants that upper-facial Mongoloidism would be essentially relegated to historical insignificance in Western Eurasia until its partial re-emergence among Slavs well over 5,000 years later. It was from this relatively simple, basically dimorphic core, then, that there would spawn the greatest plethora of phenotypic diversity of any comparably small, culturally specific and developed population in history—acts of morphological creativity as immediate and complete as can possibly be imagined, in perhaps as full a light of consciousness as might be expected of pre-civilizational and essentially stateless man, in some way rendered malleable to the slightest hammer’s blow.

The first genetic solidification in this process began around 3700-3500 BC, centuries after the flower of Sredny-Stog culture and dominion over Old Europe had come to an end, when one of its subgroups (probably in the east by the Don or Volga) experienced the first in an incredible series of population bottlenecks, particularly on the male side. While this event itself is naturally quite invisible archaeologically, its result would be clear enough in the coming generations—by 3400-3300 the Yamnaya material culture had emerged in a vast, coherent territorial spread over the remnants of Sredny-Stog, bearing a new, highly productive, increasingly mobile mode of life, and almost all of its males would bear Y-haplogroup R-Z2103, a subclade of R1b whose latest common ancestor is dated to approximately 4100, or the time of Sredny-Stog’s pinnacle and collapse. At the very dawn of this new culture (or just prior), one of its branches, presumably in the Volga-Ural Steppe, made the incredible ~2000 km trek to the Altai Mountains and Mongolian uplands, where it established the Afanasievo material culture and the kurgan tradition in Inner Asia. Meanwhile, by 3000 the westernmost Yamnayans were filling the Hungarian plain with possibly the greatest density of kurgans of any region inhabited by their race and certainly of any period in that country thereafter.

What was remarkable about this people from the racial standpoint was, firstly, what might be called the universal distant kinship of its buried men, among whom there was no notable correlation between geographical and genetic distance, and thus also the rarity of any familial or dynastic relatedness between them, and, secondly, the simultaneous homogeneity and differentiation of its cranio-facial forms. We are thus confronted with two problems: firstly, that it was precisely the greatest cultural and demographic spread in prehistory which was—both by means of its recent founder event and in the actual distance between individuals—one of the most genetically homogeneous ever known, and, secondly, that this fact could have resulted in what degree of geographically varied outcomes there did exist skeletally. From Hungary to the Altai one will be able to find men at roughly a third or fourth-cousin’s distance many hundreds of kilometers apart, and yet those in the west bore on average a relatively stable long-headed and long-faced form of both gracile and robust tendencies, those on the lower Volga underwent a cranial rounding or shortening (brachycephalization) on par with that of Neolithic France, and those about the Altai bore a decidedly more Cro-Magnid stamp, actually approaching Upper Paleolithic averages in certain respects.

Naturally there are so many exceptions to this rule that for me to invoke a gotcha over the heads of the ignorant public would be dishonest, but the rule certainly reaches far beyond the expectations of our good scholars and laymen and does indeed stretch credulity just short of breaking point. Under any other circumstances, with any more remote or less extreme of a bottleneck or with any geographical differentiation genetically, the matter might be handwaved; but it’s just because the genetic aspect is so well known and so unique that Yamnayan morphology is as startling as it is. The case of its descendants, however, would only be more extreme.

Around 2950 BC, somewhere west of the Dnieper, a population of mixed, primarily Yamnayan ancestry founded what would come to be known as the Corded Ware Culture, inheriting alongside the 20-30% Globular Amphora ancestry earlier mentioned the personal weapons and burial sites of that people and their Funnelbeaker relatives. Whether the remaining Steppe core of Corded Ware ancestry bore any substantial input from another source cannot yet be definitively established, given the relative infancy of IBD analysis, which is used to determine kinship between individuals as well as more particular and recent layers of ancestral derivation. What does appear certain, however, is that at least the majority of this ancestry derived recently from Yamnaya and that it furthermore did so disproportionately on the female side. Indeed, both extremes of Yamnaya and Globular Amphora ancestry peak among female specimens—it’s the men who are uniquely distant to the founder events of either as well as being more stably mixed in their own ancestry. Whether this greater mutual distance merely derives from the simple fact of mixture is not yet certain, but what grants plausibility to a unique, third-party inheritance on the male side is that the great majority carry Y-haplogroup R1a, particularly its subclade R-M417, which was until then unattested and whose most recent ancestor is, incredibly, thought to have lived around 3300.

Whatever role any unique ancestry of theirs might have played genetically, the actual form of this people was clearly sundered from that of any of their possible ancestors. What had begun in Yamnaya as the simultaneous divergence of regional tendencies and the solidification of their ancestral phenotypic spectrum in favor of its more gracile elements into what arguably amounted to a core semi-gracile type, here definitively attained the form of a completely new and culture-defining phenotype in direct opposition to either of its ancestral components. It should stand as a remarkable feat of human breeding or the morphogenetic powers of nature that, when the racial core of the steppe finally made sustained and transformative contact with entirely foreign material, it immediately took the opportunity to so further define and differentiate itself in what cannot have amounted to more than a few generations. The men of the Corded Ware were the first to achieve at a population level, with a striking degree of regularity and universality across a massive expanse, an extremely narrow cranium (hyperdolichocephaly) and therewith too the earliest fundamentals of the Nordic facial type. In the largest such collation, early Corded averages from the Urals to the Rhine differ less than 1 point in cephalic and upper facial indices, even where size does so substantially; it thus appears as though almost no craniometric influence was exerted by the native element at all. Instead, the tendency of Ukrainian Yamnaya to cranial narrowing was intensified and its tendency to facial narrowing solidified, in opposition to the strange combination of individually erratic, generally medium facial proportions and medium-long crania of Funnelbeaker and Globular Amphora (in western Ukraine, the point of contact, individuals startlingly ranged from a 49-59 upper facial index). At most it might be said that the average facial narrowness of Corded was somewhat reduced from the Ukrainian extreme, that the subjectively oriental midface of some Yamnaya was made rarer, and that the forehead was made somewhat straighter, for any of which the dilution of that ancestry may have played some role; but all were just as well typical of earlier Ukrainian Hunter-Gatherers or contemporary Afanasievo.

It should only be stranger, then, given the unprecedented scale of this racial splitting and reformation, that it would be immediately followed by another, equally stark, which deviated in an almost entirely opposite direction and whose surreal result was that the very widest and narrowest crania of Eneolithic and Bronze Age Europe and (in absolute metrical terms) the entirety of European history directly bordered one another and split the continent between them, cohabiting and mixing in varying degrees from Jutland to the Carpathians, with the one having emerged directly from the midst of the other. I am referring, of course, to the sudden appearance in the fossil record of the craniofacial types of the Central European Bell Beaker culture, a genetic offshoot of Corded Ware which blended this cultural heritage with an EEF material culture of ultimately Eneolithic Iberian origins. By about 2600 BC its earliest prototypical form (Borreby) had appeared in some specimens from the Single Grave culture, a regional subgroup of Corded Ware in Denmark, which is also taken by some to have been the material basis of Steppe-derived Bell Beaker. By 2500-2450 Borreby had become the dominant element on the lower Rhine and therewith Britain, where, famously, nearly the entire race of Megalith-building agro-pastoralists was eventually replaced. Almost simultaneously the ‘Beaker Folk’ appears across Western Europe, from the Atlantic to the Adriatic, amalgamating in varying degrees with the native population and almost unilaterally imposing their various regional male sub-lineages, the mutating branches of which dominate the continent to this day. The Corded Ware ancestry of the first arrivals in Britain had already been about 10% diluted on the continent and gradually accepted perhaps another 10% from the natives, thus still maintaining more than 50% Steppe by the Late Bronze Age; in Central Europe and France the dilution was about 25%, thus making for 45% Steppe or more, and this was often preserved in relative purity at first by the new arrivals in Iberia, only to be halved by around 2200-2000, whereby the genetic core of all subsequent Peninsular history was established.

The Beaker race as a whole possessed a phenotypic spectrum of what might be called Borreby, Dinarid, and pseudo-Alpinid morphologies, all of which were entirely novel to Steppe-derived populations. The Borreby type, with its center on the North Sea, represented a re-robustification of a somewhat lesser intensity than that of Afanasievo facially, back towards Mesolithic Cro-Magnid averages, as well as an unprecedented rounding of the cranium which it shared with the other two; the Dinarid, which was most ubiquitous, corresponded morphologically with certain Armenoids in the Near East for having attained a facial form similarly intermediate between archaic and Mediterranid tendencies as well as a flattish back of the cranium; and the pseudo-Alpinid in continental Europe represented essentially a somewhat reduced Borreby with a higher and more globular cranium, in fact much higher than its supposed Neolithic Alpinid ancestor. It thus becomes apparent, first by the genetic purity of the earliest bearers of the Borreby type, then by the continued near-purity of the first arrivals in Britain, and finally by the metrical novelty of the other two types, that the core phenotypic bases of the ‘Beaker Folk’ cannot have been inherited from local elements, whatever influence these may have had on their particular realization, as may have been the case with the pseudo-Alpinid type, which would thereafter merge with its local approximant create the historical West Alpinid type proper.

(It’s worth mentioning in reference to subsequent history that the Dinarid type of the Balkans is substantially the result of oriental genetic influx during the Roman Period and, farther east, probably tendencies already present in the Catacomb culture or even Corded, themselves perhaps deriving their ultimate distal origin in a racial sense from the CHG proportion of Yamnaya.)

The very most that might be said empirically as to the fundamental origins of the Beaker phenotypes is that their varying tendencies to facial robusticity or semi-gracility already had precedence on the Steppe, but almost the same is true of any morphologically heterogeneous population. It’s difficult enough to try and account for how consistent a type as that of early Corded Ware could have possibly solidified in the first place, let alone in the span of literally a few generations, and furthermore how it could have maintained itself intact over such a wide expanse; but here we have to account for the same phenomenon twice or thrice over and in the form of an actually antagonistic development. It’s not at all impossible to imagine socially or politically less visible groups of somewhat rounder-headed or somewhat facially shorter or wider types accompanying the standard Corded form westward, although the great diversity of burial customs across the entire horizon and the persistence of Globular Amphora pockets centuries after the initial migration would make the invisibility of these fellows strange.

In any case, what is indisputable is that a single millennium of cultural development saw two population bottlenecks—first, in a complete sense, in early or pre-Yamnaya and then as a single, autosomally consistent migration event in the form of Corded Ware—and that the total result thereof was not the narrowing of this race’s phenotypic spectrum but such branching diversity as present understanding would require to have been the result of literally dog-like inbreeding in some fixed location. Although several reconstructible male founder events might pique the imagination of some in this regard, these were one-off affairs and generally absent morphogenetic correlations—in the case of Borreby, which carried the usual Corded R1a, there was apparently none at all, and neither did the branches of then-young R-P312 (the Central European ancestor of all non-Germanic Western R1b) individually result in new regional morphologies. There is thus no reasonable solution to be found within the present evolutionary framework, however one tries to torture the data, and the examples further ahead will only make this more apparent. Having cleared the air and owned the scientists, we will now return our attention to a bloodied and bashed continent.

For a few centuries, the racial landscape of Europe would be defined by the relatively simple bleeding of the Neolithic and Steppe morphologies described thus far into one another, until, by 2300-2000 BC, this process would be crowned by a second act of creativity, and a new race, long sought for in vain, would finally make its entry into world history. With the emergence of the chiefdoms of Únětice around 2300 in the Bell Beaker contact zone and, at the latest, the breakup of Fatyanovo either side of the Urals by 2200-2000, a second wave of gracilization overtook the Corded racial form from the Rhine eastwards. Alongside the widespread depigmentation mentioned in the last installment, there emerged a median cranio-facial type, in every respect less extreme than Corded proper, which might finally be called historically Nordid, more specifically East Nordid, in reference to modern related or descendant populations which notably preserve the high forehead and cranium of Corded, particularly in Únětice, alongside other, more generic and widespread tendencies which would more directly foreshadow the later development of the Nordid form in western Europe. That this could not have been primarily the result of an actual resurgence in EEF ancestry outside of Únětice was established in Part One, and even there the idea of a straightforward homogenization becomes morphologically irrelevant when one actually examines the metrical character of its series, which are more reduced than either Globular Amphora or Funnelbeaker. Thus the phenomenon must be regarded primarily as a direct racial successor to Corded Ware itself, whatever degree of relative responsibility one would like to assign to the EEF element present therein or, to a lesser extent, absorbed afterwards, as a morphogenetic agent—we have already mentioned the erratic metrical and physiognomic character of Globular Amphora specimens in particular, which is hardly resurrected by the change, but the possibility of some direct influence cannot be outright dismissed. In any case, this transformation would nowhere be complete and older Corded more robust Cro-Magnid forms would persist everywhere, especially far to the east, where a sort of second Afanasievization might be said to have occurred; but it would nonetheless form the background of all progressive developments in the Nordid form thereafter.

A close parallel within this great age of morphogenesis was, as earlier indicated, the appearance of the general Armenoid morphological category in the Near East in the course of the third millennium BC. What’s remarkable about this case relative to Europe is the absence of any remotely equivalent founder event or otherwise genetic narrowing—rather it was the phenotypically diverse Semitic pastoralists who would undergo such an Aryanizing, so to speak, in the Near East, with J-L858.

The Armenian Highlands and surrounding regions had throughout the Eneolithic been home to similarly dual robust and gracile tendencies as western Yamnaya, with a similar but more uniform result. The continued gracilization of this race created primarily a dominant type which might broadly be called Cappadocid, Iranid, Irano-Afghan, or Orientalid—essentially a moderate or robust Mediterranoid with an aquiline profile, bearing certain convergent resemblances to Corded Ware and, especially facially, to the basic type of Mesopotamia, although early on this did have very strong more purely Mediterranid influences in portraiture.

Beginning around 4500 BC and greatly accelerating by 3000, this race spread both its characteristic appearance and a primarily Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer genetic profile over the northern Levant, Anatolia, the Aegean Islands, southeastern Europe, and Sicily from its heartland about Lake Van. Using finer-scale ancestral analysis, the Reich lab has recently discovered that this involved a near-total replacement in the case of Early Bronze Age central Anatolia (by an Upper Mesopotamian source, thus already diluted), where a small Steppe component accompanied the general movement, and a majority replacement thence farther west.

The relevance here polemically is that this massive turnover—or the final and greatest waves of it—involved no phenotypic innovation, but rather a dilution of the active race into the passive surrounding material. Only with the Middle Bronze Age in the mid-3rd millennium does the Armenoid type—round-headed, flat-backed, high-vaulted, relatively wide-faced—suddenly appear in sites from Mesopotamia, to Palestine, to Cyprus, to Troy, to the Aegean. Thus, the only significant genetic turnover (which, again, involved no new male bottlenecks) had already played itself out (except perhaps at the very edges of the spread), when an innovation almost as significant as that of Bell Beaker unfolds, in a very similar direction, from a very similar base, at the head of a similar metal-culture revolution, at almost exactly the same time. You cannot cope with this, my brothers. They were not malnourished, they have not since been eliminated by industrialism, they did not emerge gradually because goat herders with flat crania could fuck more bitches—no indeed, they appear fully-formed, widely, and suddenly, over a broad and expanding demographical base, in proportion with their racially ancestral types (which they did not replace), all as is almost always the case paleontologically, and they have not since been annihilated by completely unrecognizable social or material circumstances, such as have especially befallen one of its admixed subtypes.

Returning to Europe: The next millennium would truly be a time of racial ease, racial relaxedness and good spirit, as Bell Beaker faded into Atlanto-Mediterranean, Alpinid, and Nordid, as Nordid faded into the Yamnayan successor, the Catacomb culture, which remained more robust and rounded somewhat cranially before getting raped (with a possible intermediate stage) and semi-assimilated by the mostly Nordid Srubnaya. All in all, a clear picture, you might say. But it would only get clearer, or simpler—in fact suspiciously so—and the Nord would venture west.

Cataloguing the actual formation and spread of the Iron Age Nordid types is somewhat difficult owing to the fact that the European landscape was no longer so dominated by newly-raised kurgans/barrows, that its early transitional period in the form of the Urnfield culture practiced cremation almost universally, and simply that less attention has been paid to it from a genetic and physical-anthropological perspective. But so happily straight is the line from then to the Middle Ages and so rich the finds which have received adequate treatment that one can safely relack and indeed give one’s full and confident attention to the matter.

If the Bronze Age proper belonged to the directly Corded-derivative forms and their heavily gracilized offshoot in Central Europe, the Iron Age belonged to its western brothers, the Hallstatt and Keltid. Ironically, the former, belonging to the Central European culture of the same name, almost certainly defined the original Celtic speakers, whereas the latter apparently marked a dramatic alteration among native Bell Beaker racial elements. As stated, the beginnings of these phenomena cannot be definitively established owing to the scarcity of Urnfield material, which included within its spread early Hallstatt, but the expansion of the former over the European heartland and into Britain from 1300-1000 BC probably signaled, in most cases, the first great diffusion of the Celtic languages over the former Bell Beaker West.

What skeletal material has passed down to us in Britain reveals the presence of both Keltid and Alpinid elements long before the full flower of Celtic pre-civilization in antiquity; but with the dawn and spread of the Iron Age proper from 800-300 BC, the record becomes much clearer—in central and northern Europe, from the heartlands of both the Celtic and Germanic races (which had already been separated for as much as two millennia), there radiated the new Hallstatt morphology, marked by a lower, somewhat more sloping, and rectangular vault and less reduced and narrowed craniofacial dimensions relative to the dominant gracile form in Únětice. Meanwhile, outside the Hallstatt heartland north of the Alps, Western Europe as a whole, from Ireland to the Elbe and the Loire to the Po, was witness to the dominion of the Keltid or Kelto-Nordid type, whose distinguishing features were a unique gracilization of the jaw and lower-midface relative to Hallstatt, a still lower and more sloping vault, and a tendency towards mesocephaly (medium cranial width) relative to other Nordids. That this type was not the mere result of a Celtic Hallstatt core fading into peripheral Bell Beaker elements is made likely firstly by its unique combination of traits, especially as the most gracile Nordid after the Middle Bronze Age, and more decisively by the fact that it would achieve a phenotypic majority or plurality in the British Isles regardless of actual continental genetic inflow, which was mostly confined to southern and eastern England—again reflecting the analogous spread of blondism. Indeed, the relative frequency of the respective types paleontologically points exactly in this direction: a notable Hallstatt minority in Iron Age England which otherwise failed to take hold in substantial numbers among the rest of the Celtic-speaking population, rather than the obvious Corded-Beaker contact zones with clear dominant, minority, and intermediate types in the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age. Thus we might liken the event to a kind of chaperoning by one race of another into its own evolutionary course, or else a general convergence by whatever shared historical circumstance, rather than a straightforward impress of racial characteristics, again beyond a superficial level. The extremely unique morphological development of the isolated Gaelic Aran Islanders, superseding even Hallstatt precedent in cranial length and lowness as well as the cylindrical tendency characteristic of Keltid crania, all whilst simultaneously returning towards Corded facial length, strongly suggests this possibility.

Taking all of this into consideration, the evolutionary course indicated by the available material, strange though it may sound to our very modern ears, is that the Dinarid Beaker type had simply morphed almost wholesale into its own variety of Nordid in at most a few centuries, further gracilizing facially and re-lengthening cranially until its skull became unrecognizable at first glance, being presumably joined in this process by the roughly 1/4 or less Corded element already present from the continent, itself already less extreme. Neither of its Beaker fellows experienced a similar near-deletion from the fossil record around the North Sea over this period, and its own geographical spread was almost identical to that of Keltid—most importantly, though, the two possessed strong facial and cranial resemblances which might still be seen today, as for instance between Basques and many Britons. Take note also of young Hitler, who is just as certainly basically Keltid metrically as it is uncertain whether this is primarily owing to a modification of Nordid by Dinarid or not (I think it is at least somewhat so myself).

Thus the final picture of Iron Age Europe was a superficially homogeneous one from a morphological perspective. In every macro-region save the Alps one has at least a plurality of long faces and heads, and an earlier convergent tendency among Indo-Iranians takes further hold, such that many Scythian specimens are hardly distinguishable their western relatives, as genetically diverged as they are. What could only follow from all this was brotherhood and love, Nords become Romans and Romans become Nords. But it could not last, as Christianity and silly superstition would eventually take its toll and the White Man’s head would round out again.

It has always baffled me that the best known craniometric transformation among HBDers online is that of Medieval Europe. What, West-Central Europe goes from a cephalic index of 76 to 83 from 900 to 1900—wherewith West Alpinid becomes the dominant element—and Poland goes from 74 to 84 starting from 1100, with the rest of Slavdom just behind—wherewith the Ladogan phenotype is resuscitated almost 6,000 years after its disappearance, out from its complete metrical opposite—and this doesn’t bother them, they just get to keep their worldview? They really think feudalism explains it? Where was feudalism in Northern Italy? Why is its heartland in Northern France less affected than any neighboring region? Why is Denmark fair game, but not England? Why are Cossacks rounder-headed than Tambov peasants? Which lords are going around killing long-headed niggas and giving extra breeding stock to the others? Putting aside that a flatly institutional explanation of that sort is retarded, we are once again compelled to ask how slightly better stress endurance (if you have a round head you endure more stress, wow) or literally anything else could lead to such an incredible, geographically defined fuck-bitches-or-die scenario as these people apparently think unfolded here, at the scale of however many tens of millions of sedentary agrarian souls. Once again, there’s nothing really to say; it’s so patently stupid to think that fully heritable human phenotypes with such definite and archaic origins and morphological integrity—most of all facial morphology, which is not subject to dietary or other environmental pressures—could be so increased or actually reinvented because of muh village life within a purely utilitarian, reproductive-mutative scheme, that the best I can do is to give you a brief catalogue of what happened and then shake my head.

The Germanics of the Migration Era had emerged from the relative phenotypic diversity of the preceding two millennia with two natively dominant types: the Hallstatt as already defined and an intermediate form between the former and certain older Cro-Magnid tendencies which had long persisted as a minority element from at least late Corded Ware onwards. This mixed type, still basically Nordid, might be called West Germanic or Saxonid for convenience’s sake, as it was among Germanics of the continent that it was most frequent. Those tribes farthest inland, however, would naturally blend into a Keltid or Alpinid majority, the former being the eventual fate of the Franks, the latter of the Burgundians.

Father east in Bavaria and Austria, such a replacement (in the fossil record anyway) was effected that the samples available to us are indistinguishable from those to their north; but is just the brevity of this reversal which makes it so remarkable. Although widespread racial amalgamation did eventually occur, its result should intuitively have been an intermediate between the Keltid-Alpinid mixture and Nordid Germanic means, or at the very most a gradual reversion of the latter to the former by whatever cause had begun their own morphogenesis to begin with. Instead what we find is that by the Early Modern period, skulls in the Alpine region had already far exceeded the medium-round Celtic cephalic mean, to approach that of their distant Bell Beaker ancestors, while Central Europe as a whole adopted the mean which had formerly been typical only of the Alps. Perhaps the saddest assimilation of all was that the ancient Borreby type in Swabia, still strong by the Early Modern period, had been mostly reduced or replaced by the time of the Industrial Revolution. We have as yet no idea what effect this may have had on the development of German Idealism.

At the same time, the area once dominated by the intermediate Germanic form gave way to a plurality of genuine Cro-Magnids in the form of the recently-consolidated Faelid and old Borreby types, except in England, where the Saxonid form only slightly rounded as did the purer Nordids generally. In an apparently opposite direction, what had once been the western, Atlantic fringe of Borreby had by now (and perhaps by the Iron Age) mostly given way to the Brünn phenotype, notably distinguished by its longer and narrower cranium, which would form perhaps the plural or equivalent element in the Irish population.

Meanwhile the western Mediterranean was mostly unaffected by Medievalization: Iberia was about as Gracile, Atlantid, and somewhat Beaker as usual, and the Alpinid and Armenoid tendencies in Southern Italy had some precedence from the Roman period at least—though brachycephaly was almost certainly intensified to some extent. The most that might be said in a fundamental sense is that northern Italy received additional Nordid elements and the hodgepodge Armeno-Lebanese graindole cities of Italy had long since been emptied of their unfortunate and transient contents.

By far the most famous transformation was that of the Slavs. It will seem strange perhaps to us, the redpilled, that the true heirs of Corded or Unetice Nordism were the Slavs, particularly Poles, but this was indeed the lay of things. In fact, nowhere in Europe do we have such robust and cranio-facially long fellows as those of Early (or High) Medieval Poland—and yet it was just these people who would form the nucleus of what is most often called the Neo-Danubian type, which is possibly the most facially infantile in Europe. From the peak of borderline Corded mogging, this nation, and the rest of its somewhat less imposing race, was brought to the second most extreme level of brachycephaly in Europe, the most extreme such transformation in European history; and it furthermore received such an anachronistic stamp facially as I cannot recall to have ever been replicated elsewhere. The post-Corded Steppe had occasionally seen prototypes of the broader spectrum which might be called generally East Europid, along with the occasional Uraloid re-approximation, but nowhere did these constitute a stable and lasting majority; once again, of all the East Nordid domain we should have least of all expected it to first take hold of this its southernmost and westernmost branch. Over the course of mere centuries, a diluted Ladogan facial form was revived over what was basically a brachycephalized and reduced East Nordid base, thereby synthesizing a new and characteristic type, the Neo-Danubian, over which older Nordid, Dinarid, and later Finnic elements still passed—especially the former to some degree among the native upper classes.

Indeed, the knee-jerk reaction which many might have to all of the above is that, at least in extreme cases, these transformations must have owed to some sort of class reversion or genuine ethnic distinction. We have already passed through so many instances of phenotypic creativity from unchanging genetic material, however, that I really don’t know why they would feel the need. Thankfully the cranial data are exceedingly broad and well paralleled by that of archaeogenetics. Whether one irrationally believes there to have been pockets of Faelids or Ladogans hiding in the swamps of Saxony or Polesia, excised from society for some reason (meanwhile the Burgundians sensibly allow themselves to become Alpinid), there is anyway no disputing the tens of thousands of skulls from the Medieval, Early Modern, and Industrial periods, the gradual progression of the former away from those of the Migration Era, and the incredible picture these all paint—namely that entire races were steadily altered, not in some scheme of merely ehrm dysgenic infantilization, but in order to realize certain definite phenotypes whose prototypical forms had been suppressed or eliminated millennia prior, and that this process correlated with no substantial genetic turnover of any kind.

Since the Industrial Revolution, at most it might be said that skulls in Europe have become somewhat larger and longer, though drastically changing material and reproductive circumstances have, as usual, completely failed to generate or annihilate phenotypes in the manner that history itself has done. Meanwhile, the Japanese experienced an incredible and entirely unprecedented, laudably unequaled widening in the form of an absolute metrical increase in the first half of the 20th century, followed again by lengthening and narrowing; but that is sasuga them and also probably because they were previously starved for protein or something and then got with the general trend.

Now, then, that we have passed through all relevant material, we are brought to the matter of our conclusions, the guiding star and final port of our adventure. Last time I didn’t have a worldview to give you, but this time I do. Just kidding, no I don’t. The morphogenetic processes treated will probably remain fundamentally mysterious for the foreseeable future, but, as I said last time, this should only act as a further stimulus to their understanding. Maybe in part three I will deal more thoroughly with the implications of racial morphology qualitatively speaking, particularly the aspect of synthesis in the light of both cultural and biological history; but here we have concerned ourselves with a rather narrower polemical matter.

Why do people believe very obviously stupid things? I don’t know, but they generally appear to have some moral reason for doing so. Of course, most chuds know next to nothing of the fossil record and only a very little about population genomics, and most are content to dabble in some sort of mysticism—so I’m not really expecting a demotic outcry from that quarter. Why, however, do gay faggots and some intelligent guys cling so dearly to the pillar of modern science as an ideology? I don’t really care about gay faggots—that is to say, Jewish bean counters, Levantine bean counters, Indian bean counters, etc.—and I should greatly dread to confound my own fellows with them. But why do my fellows cling to (Neo-)Darwinism? Most of all I suspect it’s the obvious contradiction maintained at a societal level between libtard morality and an evolutionary scheme whose fundamental unit is the individual and whose general course is upwards, towards structural complexity and harmony at the expense of simpler or more chaotic forms. Let us put aside for now that this outcome or even its general course is not a necessary extrapolation of the fundamental empirical claims of Darwinism. Indeed, many of its proponents will be the last to deny this—having superficially assimilated Nietzsche’s specific objection in this regard, they instead take the upward course of nature as something only incidentally given but its mechanism and materialism as absolutely so; it is thus a picture onto which one might unilaterally project one’s own will, a sandbox for the noble willing.

Though I have empirically annihilated and destroyed such a picture in miniature, we will at some point follow the morality of its mechanisms through to their logical conclusions. What societal schemes, what individual maxims do they proscribe, what man is really allowed to reach to the heights thereby? We shall take up this matter in full sometime, maybe as companion to a deeper analysis of the fossil record as a whole, maybe in connection with the Will to Power in Nature. For now, I will say: it is a suffocating world to draw around man, point-saving as the ultimate basis of life and act as fundamentally distinct from being. Even so, let it suffice for now that the empirical domain has been cleared, by me, somewhat.

Oh, my brothers, how can you cling to your folly? You are owned; there is no swimming away from this. I really don’t care what bullshit you can try and shoehorn in. I came to clear the mist, to shine a light merely and give a brief and reasoned account of things; I will not count the beans. Maybe I will, because I’m honest, but I will still have won.

MAIN SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

The Races of Europe (1939)

The evolution of European cranial morphology: From the Upper Paleolithic to the Late Eneolithic steppe invasions (2025)

The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans (2025)

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (2007)

Морфогенетические процессы в Волго-Уралье в эпоху раннего голоцена (2017)

Хвалынские энеолитические могильники и хвалынская энеолитическая культура (2010)

Восстановление Лица По Черепу. М. М. Герасимов (1955)

The origin of the Indo-Iranians (2007)

The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe (2022)

Ancient DNA connects large-scale migration with the spread of Slavs (2025)

Evidence for dynastic succession among early Celtic elites in Central Europe

Continental influx and pervasive matrilocality in Iron Age Britain

humanphenotypes.net

ancestralwhispers.org

yfull.com

adnaxp.github.io

I’ve been out gathering materials and writing drafts for some concerted cultural, historical, and evolutionary polemics wherewith to begin this project, but I thought I might make a diversion or two from the outset for you fellows’ sake, to clear the air of certain misconceptions which are commonly held on (((“our side”))), in this case pertaining to race and particularly racial evolution.

As things stand, there are two broad camps or tendencies worth considering in this regard, both as to general methodology and its empirical bases, namely scientific materialism and vitalism. Anything else, whether the vague spiritualism or naked value judgments which are perhaps more universal to the Right than anything, would naturally fall well outside our scope of interest. Nonetheless, the vast majority of historiographical discourse consists of basically independent polemics or memes which are capable of being sustained, rightly or wrongly, from almost any standpoint, regardless of their own conceptual origins. It is these concrete memes, then, that this series, which is of an essentially preliminary nature, will take as its basis, investigating several individually and only then drawing some general criticism of broader Right-Wing historiography or metaphysics as presently constituted.

From among the most prominent or odious of these memes I have chosen those which I feel myself uniquely capable of answering, namely: the gradualistic/mechanistic selection of recorded human traits or racial types, the anti-farmer (longhouse) polemic (in excess), the misunderstood origins and form of the Nordic race, the treatment of haplogroups as genetic clades, the underappreciation of the role of synthesis and novelty in racial formation, any uniformizing doctrine of the character of migration, and various cartoonish, basically hobbitish notions of historical behavioral Europeanness, and perhaps others still.

The most ambitious of these is of course the first, as not only relating most directly to fundamental Neo-Darwinian doctrine, but being almost ubiquitous as an assumption, consciously or not, among those who otherwise countersignal or ignore that system of thought as a whole; and the most obvious and easily objectifiable of evolutionary phenomena is the record of individual adaptations as found in ancient genetic material. Of these the most oft-cited cases are, thankfully for the polemicist, also the most difficult to reconcile with the prevailing scientific picture.

For our present limited purposes, let it suffice to say that the standard evolutionary dogma of the hour is that of the effective randomness of genetic mutation, its occurring gradually and individually, its being transmitted directly and materially, its being selected for on the exclusive or near-exclusive basis of reproductive viability, and its being influenced only secondarily—that is to say, with reference to its own synthetic function—by any other order of phenomena, all likewise assumed to be material and environmentally immediate and brought under the heading of epigenetics. It is my aim to demonstrate, however briefly, the weakness of these claims in the face of certain extracts from the archaeogenetic and paleontological record. As to my own solution to the problems raised: I have none, none comprehensive and complete anyway, except to remind the reader of the possibility of an active will or innate creativity and adaptability in nature, of the act of valuation which one might call the most primal and continuous act of all life and perhaps all natural phenomena, and of the weakness of the walls which are imagined to divide their effects. Well then! Hah!

The first and by far most startling evolutionary incident I will raise here is the acquisition of lactase persistence, or lactose tolerance, among Europeans in recent prehistory. The meme you’ll most commonly find in this regard is something to the effect that blond Yamnayans on chariots in 3000 BC carried the trait with them into soymammy grainsludge Europe, though a fair number have probably heard by now that this was not the case, neither the blondism nor the milk-drinking, nor indeed the chariots. Some years ago, Survive the Jive suggested the trait was actually acquired alongside an extreme selection for blondism during the Bronze Age after the initial Steppe migrations, as part of a general neotenization, that is the retention of childhood traits such as infant blondism as well as lactose tolerance into adulthood. I’m not sure what he thinks on the matter now, but this was certainly a creative solution at the time. Unfortunately it bears little resemblance to the archaeogenetic facts: the vast majority of European lactase persistence was acquired in the Iron Age.

If you know anything, and I mean anything at all, about historical demography, you will immediately recognize the problem here. What, the Iron Age? Agrarian expansion? Proto-urbanism? The division of the continent into distinct genetic and linguistic zones? No horrific, trans-continental plagues? Where was the bottleneck here? Where was the extreme environmental pressure? Less than a thousand years for a dietary trait? Again, you need only know anything at all about who was multiplying where and why, in what masses and under what constraints, for the idea to reveal its absurdity. The supposition here, according to modern Darwinian-Mendelian orthodoxy, is that not sponsorship by a chief, as in the entire Celtic and Germanic West, nor the safety of the vast and demographically distinct servile population which owed him loyalty for his protection, as among the Celts, but rather diarrhea and its greater or lesser frequency among individuals was by far the single greatest selective factor in the early historic or proto-historic period and possibly actually any period ever at all, as far as human physical adaptation is concerned. It evidently wasn’t so prior, during the 6,000 years of the Neolithic, Eneolithic, and Bronze Age, nor has it resumed being so in the intervening 2,000. Here and here alone, absent any known demographic upset, does the brute fact of caloric absorption supposedly so totally overthrow every other aspect of human life.

The basic fact is this: following a millennium or two of gradual increase, the allele associated with European lactase persistence (rs4988235-A) skyrocketed from ~5-20% of samples north of the Alps around 1000 BC to ~45-80% by the Roman Imperial period. There was no persistent internal individual or regional correlation of this process with actual milk consumption; indeed, stepping before its beginnings in the Bronze Age, as much dairy (and possibly more) was consumed by regional Neolithic cultures, particularly in the British Isles, as in following millennia throughout Europe, for almost twice as long as the Iron Age proper endured.

Well anyway, so everyone died horribly: did they at least get taller or healthier or something with all that cleanly-absorbed milk in their guts (Was that the real advantage?), or was the race grotesquely hobbled and reduced as the polygamous warrior nobility found itself slowly subsumed by the march of sturdier intestines? Nothing of the sort, apparently—again total dairy consumption hardly if at all changed—although new facial-cephalic racial types did come out of nowhere (more on which later). Thus it looks like the only orthodox analysis we’re left with here is indeed the foregoing—that the blazing furnace of very slight and generally optional stomach cramps had silently demographically reforged the White race absent any obvious second-order phenomena.

I won’t go into detail on the professional opinions (copes) on the matter, which are always fluctuating, except to inform you that the above is indeed literally what most scientists concerned believe, with the added qualifier that it was like super worse during plague and famine, which some take to be the real catalyst. Unfortunately, neither were particularly bad nor common in this era, especially among the British and Germanic semi-pastoralists who actually acquired the trait as a majority; in fact some scientists will hilariously try to positively link the phenomenon with the demographic sinkpit of Gaulish urbanization or something.

Anyway, enough of that. Nobody cares and it’s clearly stupid. Our second case, which is somewhat less stupid, might bear more directly on a more visceral conceptualization of race: the depigmentation of West Eurasian skin, hair, and eyes.

First of all, I personally do not believe the present consensus narrative of the evolution of white skin. It could be true that Western Hunter Gatherers were dark, Eastern Hunter Gatherers somewhat lighter, Anatolian Farmers basically light-skinned, and only Iron Age Europeans fully White in the modern sense, but all this presupposes that all genes for European skin pigmentation as well as their phenotypic manifestation are known, which is probably not the case given the erratic variation between individual samples within remarkably homogeneous cultures. But our point here isn’t the precise evolution of pigmentation, which may be impossible to definitively establish anyway for those races largely or entirely subsumed or extinct, but to take note of the actual, precipitous spread of certain mutations prehistorically, whatever the total phenotypic character of their bearers—in this case alleles associated with modern white skin which are taken to have evolved and spread from roughly 8,000 BC to the Christian era.

The argument here is essentially identical to that for lactase persistence, although again somewhat less stark and absurd. My objection is not that human pigmentation could not have possibly evolved in such a timespan by standard Darwinian understanding, but that the conditions for such an evolution were completely lacking. It was not hunter-gatherers faced with seasonal privation who adapted the trait, but farmers and pastoralists in relatively communal, patriarchal, and apparently polygynous conditions. The men most obviously spreading their seed throughout the period were: first, the most successful of the Neolithic farmers, who appear to have often established small enduring loci of hereditary power, who often symbolized that power by bestowing a bow or mace or axe on the honored dead, who easily fell into brutal and occasionally cannibalistic communal slaughter, and who furthermore experienced an incredible bottleneck and mass replacement of their own paternal lineages across the entirety of Western Europe by those of the native hunter-gatherer men by 4000 BC; secondly the Eneolithic to Early Bronze Age patriarchs carrying Steppe ancestry, less than a dozen of whom individually founded the male lineages of almost all Indo-Europeans from around 3,000-2,500 BC, an even greater bottleneck still and in scale probably the greatest in prehistory; and thirdly the documentedly polygynous and relatively meritocratic warrior nobility of incipient or actual Celtdom and Proto-Germandom.

The entire period is characterized by caloric surplus, strict patriarchy, and mass die-offs or reproductive restriction defined by communal (which is to say familial, ethnic, or political) belonging and personal capacity. To suggest that such a minor physiological convenience as slightly and gradually improved vitamin D absorption had by far its greatest selective period now of all times, or even that any trait not in some way related to the foregoing thoroughly artificial conditions (behaviorally for forethought or charisma or something) could have evolved within a 7-8,000 year timespan is simply something one shouldn’t have to refute. Even the heaviest possible leaning on the supposed vitamin-D deficiency of early agrarian diets can carry no weight, seeing as Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherers experienced the same depigmentation whilst maintaining an Eskimo-like diet. Thus the only alternative argument is that light skin was almost entirely selected for on universal and powerful sexual grounds, but besides facing similar demographic difficulties to those of lactase persistence from the Middle Bronze Age onwards, this does nothing to explain its north-south gradient unless one circles back again to the original claim that, beyond a certain point, absolutely devastating material environmental forces prevented or encouraged its promulgation in one direction or the other within such a narrow timeframe, which, as I have just demonstrated, is stupid.

The case of blond hair is approximately the same, except for its longer endurance as a minority and the more rapid fluctuation of its fortunes. Ancient North Eurasians from Paleolithic Siberia are the first known to have carried the trait, which their Eastern Hunter Gatherer descendants would carry as a minority tendency over the Urals, but by the 7th millennium BC it had strangely appeared among Anatolian Farmers as well. From then until the 5th millennium its frequency would continually increase with their settlement northwards into Europe (again, they were eating each other, so I don’t know when they had time to do this so precipitously), until light hair finally achieved a majority or plurality of samples among the Funnelbeaker culture centered on Greater Germany and southern Scandinavia around 4400 BC and probably among their eastern relatives, the Globular Amphora. It was these latter who would contribute the 20-30% Early European Farmer component of Corded Ware ancestry at around 2950 BC, which was then spread alongside the core Steppe component by direct Corded Ware successors in the north and east and by its Bell-Beaker offshoot in the south and west.

Before continuing into the late Eneolithic (or Copper Age) and the Early Bronze Age, it is worth noting how patchy our data can be for individual cases in this period, perhaps averaging a dozen or so samples for certain regional cultures (thankfully though these are often geographically or temporally scattered); but the tendencies observed at the culture-horizon, macro-regional, or continental scale at least are undeniable, and these changes fit well with our knowledge of changing craniofacial forms as well as with better pigmentation sampling from prior or later periods. If you want to see the samples for yourself, head to this site or take a look at Andrei DNA’s work. Now you see you can trust me, and we move along.

With the gradual realization among chuds in recent years that early Corded Ware proper, from whom data are abundant, were, like Yamnaya, almost entirely brunet (if certainly not dark-skinned much as certain groups would like them to be), the meme has slowly taken shape that blondism must have actually been contributed by the absorbed Globular Amphora ancestry, being intensively selected for sexually by the Great Lords for centuries after the initial contact. The problem here, other than the sort of gay cuck-fantasy implications, is that, except among lingering bands of hunter-gatherers in Europe, light hair was as far as we can tell nowhere particularly common until the period 2300-1800 BC, or the Early-Middle Bronze Age, during which it suddenly surges or resurges in a vast belt from the North Sea to Central Asia; and it wasn’t until the Iron Age and a second fortuitous increase that it would consistently appear as a third or more of samples across northwestern Europe.

To treat this fact as a fundamental problem is, I hope you realize by now, no invocation of voodoo on my part, seeing as it’s precisely after the initial Eneolithic-Early Bronze Age bottlenecks, where individual men of individual sexual and political appetite were, as far as primitive conditions allowed, remaking the form of our race that their labors begin to yield their supposed fruit, and it’s only with the spread of an increasingly complex and stable Celtic society as earlier outlined that they do so entirely. As mentioned, the easiest explanation for the phenomenon’s beginnings in a genetic or ethnological sense is to point out that the Early-Middle Bronze Age saw a rise in both Globular Amphora-like and Eastern Hunter Gatherer ancestry—on the one hand presumably from lower social orders or more racially mixed clans or tribes finally finding their way into the ruling stratum, corresponding with rapid growth of Y-haplogroup I2 in formal burials, and on the other hand from the two-pronged spread of Baltic or Eastern Hunter-Gatherer influence in the ethnogenesis of the Proto-Germanic race around 1800 BC, marked presumably by the sudden spread of I1, and the return southwards of a mixed Corded Ware-Baltic Hunter Gatherer population from beyond the Vistula into Central Europe by 2000 BC, marked by a late resurgence of R1a.

All of this is fine in a limited sense and almost certainly contributed to the process racially, but it can say little for the case of Russia and Central Asia, where a near-pure Corded Ware genetic profile prevailed, nor indeed why blond hair would suddenly become sexually desirable after centuries of at best a very gradual increase; and it offers still less explanation as to how the phenomenon would be completed in Western Europe, alongside widespread cranio-facial transformations, by the predominantly cultural process of Celticization almost two millennia after its beginnings. Romantically and at a great distance I suppose we can imagine the novi homines of at least a few regions monomaniacally bleaching the population in a century or three to match their own supposedly somewhat lighter hair whilst intensifying the trait amongst themselves, and I guess we can all stand up and hail that. Even in the strongest case, though, that of Bronze Age Central Europe, where an incredible 40% population turnover (in burials) is estimated to have occurred, such an undertaking would still have been an uphill battle, since less than half of that change amounted to an actual alteration of basal racial components between the two phases.

Perhaps you grasp my frothing polemical point by now, but there is another, very real correlation here, and that is the cultural ennoblement and further stratification of these societies, in however greatly different degrees, from the relatively uncertain case of late Bell Beaker in the west, to the small state-like societies of Únětice north of the Alps, to the increasingly militarized and industrialized Fatyanovo descendants by the Urals and beyond, and once again with the emergence and spread of first the Hallstatt and then La Tène cultures across Western Europe—all of which corresponded just as well with the continuing solidification and further development of the historical Nordic skeletal types, which we will address in the next installment. Let it suffice to say for now that, in the case of pigmentation as elsewhere, sweeping prehistorical phenomena and their interrelations can be observed, but that the material mechanisms which are generally supposed to be necessary for their production were either entirely or almost entirely lacking. It was precisely during the divergence of cultural spheres and the broadening of their demographic and material bases from the Middle Bronze Age to the Late Iron Age, and not under conditions of near-exterminatory genetic bottlenecks nor actual environmental deprivation, that the race attained its particular innovations in digestion and hair and eye pigmentation; and it was in apparent disregard for all historical contingencies that the lightening of European skin supposedly began suddenly in the Neolithic and continued rapidly apace well into the historical period.

These mysteries, staring anyone in the face who cares to take note of them, should only excite greater curiosity towards the question of fundamental evolutionary processes; but not only do those who ought to care take no note at all, they actually parade the latest archaeogenetic discoveries as though these acted as a positive bulwark for their pet model, as though the White Man had been living in Roblox until the Common Era. These people genuinely think the glans penis ‘evolved’ to scrape out competitors’ semen, they think Early Iron Age Celts could randomly look Arab—and so do you, probably, whether you know it or not.

Before concluding this section, I should probably mention in passing the case of blue eyes. The dark-haired Western Hunter-Gatherers of the European Mesolithic were the first to attain the trait as a majority, but elsewhere and thereafter it correlated almost entirely with blondness. This fact is also in itself mysterious, and it should be treated with its own degree of reverence—consider for instance the absurd and artificial meme that Scandinavian and Baltic Hunter-Gatherers, who were substantially blond-haired and blue-eyed well before the Funnelbeaker Culture, had received the one trait from their Western Hunter-Gatherer and the other from their Eastern Hunter-Gatherer ancestors, as though the latter were abounding in cases of light hair and dark eyes or something (they were not) and as though this combination possessing a mutually intensifying effect posed no question in itself. In any case, as far as the history of the agricultural or pastoral races is concerned, the problem of eye pigment is best conceived as being almost identical with that of blondism.

Beyond the evolutionary examples I’ve given so far, I might also give those of cognitive and immunological adaptations, but these are not only much more poorly documented and would necessarily follow the same argumentative structure for having belonged to the same prehistoric period, but they actually do possess genuine adaptive function in some way correlating with real and changing social and material circumstances and thus are far less problematic scientifically and far less relevant to an essay of a polemical nature, such as this is.

With all rising tension having been resolved at least of its internal contradictions, we finally come to that great matter to which I have referred several times and which I have put off long enough: the lodestone, cornerstone, and great gem of our inquiry, which will be the examination of the evolution of skeletal types. IN PART TWO.

MAIN SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

The Oxford Handbook of the Neolithic (2015)

The Oxford Handbook of the European Bronze Age (2013)

The Oxford Handbook of the European Iron Age (2018)

The selection landscape and genetic legacy of ancient Eurasians (2024)

Dairying, diseases and the evolution of lactase persistence in Europe (2022)

Low Prevalence of Lactase Persistence in Bronze Age Europe Indicates Ongoing Strong Selection over the Last 3,000 Years (2020)

Inference of human pigmentation from ancient DNA by genotype likelihoods (2025)

Skin colour and vitamin D: An update (2024)

Population genomics of post-glacial western Eurasia (2024)

Dynamic changes in genomic and social structures in third millennium BCE central Europe (2021)

Continental influx and pervasive matrilocality in Iron Age Britain (2025)

adnaxp.github.io

yfull.com

Subscribe now