gat

monarchs of great Aryan houses. Abe Lincoln, Grover Cleveland, and John D. Rockefeller, said
Jordan, came out of the house of Henry I of France; Ulysses S. Grant was in a line from William
the Conqueror; Coolidge and Shakespeare descended from Charlemagne. William Howard Taft,
J.P. Morgan, and Jordan himself from King David of Scotland! So it went. 4 Was this all just
simple amusement or did the game have some implications for the rest of us not so blue-blooded?
Who were these fabulous Aryans the scholars were talking about? What was this "Great Race"?
The answers were to prove both fabulous and chilling.
4 The Crane plumbing family rejected the coat of arms suggested for them, a hand gripping the handle of a toilet
chain with the motto "Apres moi le deluge."
The Fatal Sound Shift
During the sixteenth century, a studious Italian merchant living in India pointed out to his wealthy
friends some striking similarities between ancient Sanskrit and Italian: deva/dio for God,
sarpa/serpe for snake, etc. All the Sanskrit numbers seemed related to the numbers of Italian.
What could this mean? This early intuition came and went without much of a stir.
Then in 1786, during the early British occupation of India, the subject was addressed anew. In his
speech to the Bengal-Oriental Society that year, Sir William Jones announced he believed a family
connection existed between Sanskrit and English. It was tantamount to the University of Rome
splitting the atom. Sir William declared Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit sprang "from some common
source which perhaps no longer exists." Among English and Sanskrit he showed evidence for "a
stronger affinity than could possibly have been produced by accident."
What common source might be the parent of Western civilization? Jones could not say, but only
thirteen years later Sharon Turner’s two-volume work, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, claimed
to provide clues. There, replete with thousands of illustrations, was a record of Angles, Saxons,
and Jutes out of ancient Germania as it had been preserved in song and story, Beowulf raised to a
haunting power. Hundreds of cognates between modern English custom and ancient prototypes
had been tracked by Turner; there seemed to be a stirring continuity between what Tacitus said
about Germania and what upper-class English/American eyes saw when they looked into their
modern mirrors.
The favorite occupations in antiquity were war, the chase, rough and tumble sports, wenching,
and drinking, not unlike the preferences of contemporary Englishmen. When not thus engaged,
men often lay idly about leaving all work for women to do. Gambling was common and every free
man was expected to bear arms. Could the English be the mighty Aryans of prehistory?
In 1808, Karl Wilhelm Frederick von Schlegel, founder and editor of the Athenaeum, chief voice
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