Sages, warriors, and producers

Working with a knowledge of twenty Indo-European languages and employing methods that up to then had been reserved for historical linguistics, Dumezil spent a life time comparing the mythological and literary remains of the different Indo-European peoples. In these comparative studies, embracing sixty books and several hundred articles, he related details gleaned from the Rig Veda, the Homeric epics, the Irish tales of Cuchulainn, the Norse sagas, and other Indo-European literatures to patterns or configurations that seemed to make up shared wholes and to point to a common origin (or to what Claude Levi-Strauss, in his decontextualized and dehistoricized adaptation of Dumezil’s approach, called “structures”).(n48) The most significant achievement of these studies was the discovery of a “tripartite ideology,”(n49) which, he claimed, shaped the way Indo-Europeans organized their societies, ordered their values and envisaged their religious pantheons.

The discovery of tripartition constituted what is arguably the key event in modern Indo-European studies, for the presence of a common world-view “proves,” in effect, that these peoples were not merely a language group, but also a culture.(n50) Derived from linguistic and literary sources, Dumezil’s discovery rests empirically on the historical existence of three castes of men — sages, warriors, and producers –representing the three “functions” or orders responsible for regulating Indo-European society. These functions allegedly gave the Indo-Europeans their distinct cultural style, and later influenced the different national families branching off from their trunk.(n51) Although features of this ideology have been found among certain other peoples, Dumezil claimed it was institutionalization, and assumed conscious articulation only among Indo-Europeans, making it the defining element of their culture and the essence of their “living past.”(n52)

In the Grecistes’ reading of Dumezil, the tripartite ideology sanctioned principles that not only accorded with Indo-European sensibilities, but enabled the highest representatives of their people to govern, i.e., the wise men and priests who performed the sacred rituals and remembered the old stories, and the warrior aristocrats upon whose courage and self-sacrifice the community’s survival depended. By contrast, farmers, stock-herders, craftsmen, traders — the producers — were relegated ideologically to the lowest social order (the third caste) and refused sovereign authority. In thus conditioning the European mentality, tripartition made wisdom and courage more important than economic-reproductive functions. It also gave culture its high symbols and the power of its defining ideals, pride of place above all other pursuits, unlike modernity’s inversion of these values.(n53)

Yet, however crucial its role in constituting the basis of European civilization, the tripartite ideology represents but a single facet of the Indo-European heritage to serve as a Greciste foil to the liberal order. The “folk-centric, world-accepting” values animating the Vedic, Homeric, Roman, Celtic, and Germanic traditions of pre-Christian paganism, most of whose pantheons reflect the tripartite ideology, play a no less important role. Because these pagan values and the religiosity they inspired implicitly repudiate Christianity’s “world-rejecting” monotheism, Grecistes look to them as a way of “returning to ourselves” and of finding there a spirituality appropriate to Europeans disoriented by the disparity between their native identity and the universalist dictates of the Christian/modernist project.

This validation of pagan values does not, however, mean that Grecistes have taken to worshipping Zeus and Odin. Instead, their metapolitical activities endeavor to recuperate paganism’s nominalist avowal of difference, its theophany of the natural world, its heroic, aristocratic conception of man, its marriage of aesthetics and morality, and, above all, its pluralistic rejection of biblical dualism — in order to counter the liberal anti-identitarian currents they oppose.(n54) Not unrelatedly, their rejection of the linear conception of history and its unidimensional view of the world follows largely from this adherence to pagan values. The Philosophical Foundations of the French New Right by Michael Torigian