SunSword wrote:

> > De Vere laments that democracy has done away with the caste
> system. He explains that the caste system was not an arbitrary
> set of divisions or inequalities established through force or
> oppression. The system reflected the fact that people had
> varying capabilities, gifts and talents. Each group had its
> function in society. This is the way it should have stayed,
> according to de Vere, but the Roman Church, containing mostly
> peasants, clawed its way to the top and upturned the caste
> system on a false document called the Donation of Constantine.
> Following this, a Thousand-Year Holocaust massacred the Elven
> Race.
>
> Bunk. The "caste system was not an arbitrary set of divisions
> or inequalities established through force or aggression"????
> Total rot. That is exactly what is was, and remains today
> whereever it is found.
>
> True that ==>IF<== you could have a caste system where everyone

> was born into the bottom caste by law but could work their way
> up over life -- that would have interesting possibilities for
> sure -- but depend on it, the politically connected and those
> born into wealth would bend and warp such a system in just a
> few generations so that you would end up with the same cruddy
> caste setup as has been encountered in history and as exists
> today in India.
>

In other words, if you could have a caste system that was not hereditary but social. People would be given their roles based on who they were, NOT who their parents were. Peter Ouspensky puts forward a theory of this type of caste as the 'original' or 'correct' form in A New Model of the Universe, Chapter XI - Eternal Recurrence and the Laws of Manu. He points out that in the translations he had in Russian the references to having to be born into a new life to inherit a new caste are parenthetical comments -- added, not original. In other words, yes they did warp the original system. They were just slightly too reverent of the original to write their changes into the text but added their comments 'externally'. A study of a good modern scholarly translation of the Laws of Manu could turn up some very interesting insights into what the original caste system was supposed to be.

> As for the "the Roman Church, containing mostly peasants" blah
> blah -- that is not where their power came from. It came from
> the fact that 2nd born sons of the nobility entered the Church
> since they would not inherit the estates and title. Thus the
> leaders of the Church were nobility -- they didn't HAVE to
> "claw their way to the top".

And the Church itself as a political entity was established by the Roman Empire. Prior to the 'adoption' of Christianity by the Empire it was an informal organization more akin to a dinner club than a political party. So the power of the Church came originally from the Roman State itself, thus the tendency to staff it with scions of noble families. Power had to be kept in the 'right' hands of course. :) Even once the Empire was over-thrown by invading barbarians the families largely remained. They simply continued in their traditions as much as possible and included the new Goth invaders out of necessity.