True and False Vedas
Ludo Rocher has pointed our that for many Europeans the word Vedam (which is Veda pronounced the Tamil way) signified the sacred scripture or Bible of the Indians. La Croze, for example, defined it as "a collection of ancient sacred books of the Brachmans" that "has among these idolaters the same authority the Holy Scripture has among us" (Rocher 1984:65). However, for Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo, the word "Veda" "does not signify exclusively a sacred book but implies in general as much as a sacred law, whether observed by Indians or other nations" (p. 65). Of course, Paulinus famously (and wrongly) [??!] argued that "the Vedas" do not exist as a specific set of ancient Indian scriptures and that the Indians call many texts, even non-Indian ones, "Vedas." But modern southern Indian usage agrees with Paulinus's view about the word, as the entries in the University of Madras Tamil Lexicon cited by Rocher (1984:65) show:
vetam: 1. The Vedas; 2. The Jaina scriptures; 3. The Bible; ...
veta-k-karan: Christian (the only meaning!)
veta-pustakam: 1. The Vedas; 2. The Bible.
veta-vakkiyam: 1. Vedic text; 2. Gospel truth.
veta-vakkiyanam: 1. Commentaries on the Vedas; 2. Expounding the Bible.
As mentioned above, Calmette defined the word "Veda" as "divine scriptures [divines Ecritures]" and explained this use in a letter of the year 1730, which is when he got hold of the Vedas (Le Gobien 1781:13-384). But in order to understand how the author of the Ezour-vedam understood this word, we need to examine its use in the Ezour-vedam and in the notes published by those researchers who saw the originals of the other Pondicherry Vedas before they vanished in the 1930s (Rocher 1984:75). In the Ezour-vedam's first book, the fourth chapter is titled "Of the Vedams," and it is here that we can find the best expression of the Ezour-vedam author's overall view of the Vedas. In this chapter, Biache asks Chumontou how the vedams have come to humankind and who its authors are. Chumontou's explanation begins as follows:
At the outset, God dictated them [the vedams] to the first man, and ordered that he communicate them to the other men so that they might learn in that way to do good and avoid evil. These are the names that one gave to them: the first is called Rik, the second Chama, the third Zozur, and the fourth Adorbo. (Sainte-Croix 1778:1.200)12
Though the first man was in the Ezour-vedam's previous chapter called Adimo ("Adimo is the name of the first man to come from the hands of God," p. 195), we readily identify him as Adam. Instead of letting Biache ask immediately about the fate of these vedams, the Ezour-vedam's author makes him first inquire about the origin of evil.
Biache. One sees that on earth vice as well as virtue reign; God, who is author of all things, is thus the author of both; at least that's what I thought until now. But how could this God, whose goodness is his essence, create vice? That's a problem that weighs on me and that I cannot resolve.
Chumontou. You're wrong about that; God never created vice. He cannot be its author; and this God, who is wisdom and holiness itself, was author of nothing but virtue. He has given us his law in which he prescribes to us what we have to do. Sin is a transgression of this law and is expressly prohibited by this very law. Our bad inclinations have made us transgress God's law. From that [transgression] the first sin was born, and once the first sin was committed it entailed many others. (pp. 201-2)
The (Christian) reader will find this association of the first man with the first sin natural, but the Ezour-vedam's author used it ingeniously to create the basis for his transmission scenario of the Vedas. Thanks to evil and sin, God's original divine revelation (the vedams he dictated to Adimo) could get into the wrong hands:
Biache. You've told me the names of the Vedams that God communicated to the first man. Tell me now to whom the first man communicated them in turn?
Chumontou. The most virtuous children were the first to whom he communicated them, because they were the only ones who could appreciate them [prendre gout]. Sinners into whose hands these sacred books fell have abused and corrupted them, going so far as to have them serve as foundation for their fables and musings [reveries]. That's what you yourself have done. (pp. 202-3)
This conversation leaves no doubt that the author of the Ezour-vedam thought that the Indians and their purported Veda author Vyasa (Biache) used a corrupt version of the original divine revelation. In other words, what the Indians and Vyasa consider to be the true Veda is in reality a degenerate imitation Veda. For Chumontou (who speaks for the Ezour-vedam's author), the true Veda maintained its purity only in a single transmission line. A long time ago, this line had also reigned in India, and the "teachers" in the Ezour-vedam as well as the other Pondicherry Vedas represent this correct transmission.
By contrast, the "pupils" such as Biache (Vyasa) are transmitters of the corrupted tradition. Their Veda is thus for the most part degenerate, though its original pure source is still apparent in a few vestiges of genuine revealed truth. In the words of Calmette's 1735 letter, the Vedas in use by the Indian Brahmins are a "pile of dirt" since they contain "the principle of all Indian sects, and maybe the details of all errors that make up their body of doctrines"; but they also contain a few "specks of gold" (Le Gobien 1781:13.437). These specks could be used to highlight how degraded the original pure teaching has become. They could thus be used as a weapon for "the advancement of [our Christian] religion," which, of course, is the crown of the genuine transmission line. Calmette's view of the Vedam appears to be strikingly similar to both de Nobili's and Chumontou's.
To return to the Ezour-vedam's chapter on the Vedas, like a Catholic priest in a confessional, Chumontou now sternly reproaches Biache for having "abused and corrupted" the sacred books:
That's what you yourself have done, but you've promised me that you won't do it anymore. It's only on this condition, remember, that I will continue to teach you the Vedam, and you will only be in a position to profit from this [teaching] if you renounce these gross errors. (Sainte-Croix 1778:1.203)
With this the stage is set for the final question and answer of the Vedam chapter. It concerns the genuine Veda transmission:
Biache. I will not be satisfied if you do not tell me the names of those to whom the Vedams were entrusted for the first time, or who were its first authors.
Chumontou. Poilo was the author of the Rik-Vedam; Zomeni of the Chama-Vedam; Chumontou of the Ezour-Vedam; and finally, Onguiro composed the Adorbo-Vedam. Each of them communicated it to his children and made them learn it. And those [children] in turn communicated them to their descendants. That is how they have come down to us. (pp. 203-5)
What is important to keep in mind here is the fundamental narrative of the Pondicherry Vedas. It sets a pure, "teacher" transmission line of divine revelation against a degenerate "pupil" transmission line. Both teachers and pupils, of course, had to be Indian and not foreign Pranguis. Famous "pupils" were desirable, and authors of the Vedas or other sacred scriptures were an optimal choice. It is true that the author of the Ezour-vedam was far less knowledgeable and consistent than modern Indologists would wish, but in exchange, he was very systematic in his black-and-white vision. For him the objective was not the satisfaction of some scholar or Brahmin but rather the hammering in of a basic message conveyed to the people in the Telugu language by catechists. Each time the "teacher" insists on something, the famous "pupil" has to admit his error and promise to be a good boy from now on. The obvious objective was to pave the way for the "true Veda" and for conversion, and pupil Biache in the Ezour-vedam demonstrates what the desired outcome was: the rejection of his traditional creed and sacred scriptures, the confession of his sins, a place at his teacher's feet, and the permission to ask questions about the true transmission of God's teachings. For the author of the Ezour-vedam, the true Veda had to open the door for the Good News, the "science of salvation" at whose sight those suffering from bad transmission disease (especially the authors of the Indian Vedas) were to cry out: "Adoration to the Supreme Being! We have hitherto lived in ignorance, but you have now, great God, put us into the hands of the science of salvation!" (p. 205). It was pure praeparatio evangelica. But not all Indians reacted so enthusiastically, as the unfortunate catechist who read from his book about the degeneration of Indian religion had to learn the hard way.
Enhanced Genealogies
The problem of how to present a new religion as the origin of an older one is ubiquitous in Ur-tradition movements. Early Christianity had this problem in an acute form, and eminent early Christians such as Eusebius of Caesarea, Lactantius, and Augustine struggled with it. All three were among the favorite authors of missionaries since they faced similar problems in defining the relationship of their "new" religion to far older ones. The example of Eusebius is particularly illuminating and pertinent because he is also the source of much ancient information about Indian religion that was carefully studied by the missionaries. Eusebius created a scheme that made sure that Christianity was both oldest and newest. The studies of Jean Sirinelli (1961) and especially Jorg Ulrich (1999) show that Eusebius did this by portraying his religion not only as a reform of Judaism, which of course it was, but also as the pure transmission of a pre-Judaic original monotheism. In this scheme, Judaism was seen as an increasingly degenerate successor to the religion of a number of "just ones" that included Enoch and Abraham. These just men had received the correct transmission of the original divine revelation. On the other hand, there was, due to the fall, also a kind of Ur-atheism (Sirinelli 1961:170- 207) that developed into various well-known forms of ancient religion: astral cults, hero worship and divination, polytheism, and so on. But the central argument of Eusebius was that of a bifurcated transmission of original divine revelation. On the "pure" transmission side were not as usual Moses and Judaism but rather a more ancient line of "patriarchs" who had received divine revelation straight from the founder God via Adam.
In this manner, Christianity could, so to speak, jump the line and appear as a reform of Judaism and its ancestor. This was a truly ingenious scheme that Eusebius had worked out in intricate detail in one of the greatest displays of erudition of antiquity: his Praeparatio evangelica. This huge, early fourth-century work of preparation for the Good News is without any doubt the highest peak of early Christian apologetics, and it was supplemented by the Demonstratio evangelica and Eusebius's Church history (Historia ecclesiastica), which made him the founder of this field (Winkelmann 1991). For Jesuits, and even more for Jesuits dispatched to the missions, the Praeparatio evangelica was a must-read.
A very similar scheme, I believe, was adopted by the author of the Ezour-vedam and the other Pondicherry Vedas and helps explain a difficulty many commentators have felt. Julien Bach and Senator Lanjuinais put it this way:
What embarrassed the critics a bit was that the author of the Pseudo-vedas spoke of the four vedas of the brahmins to refute them; he described their origin and even gave the names of their authors. "It is something inexplicable," said M. Lanjuinais, "that the missionary [who wrote the Ezour-vedam] did not shy away from inserting in his work what could convict him of his imposture." (Bach 1848:63)
"It is an inexplicable thing, the missionary was not afraid to insert in his work which was capable of a convincing impostor. There is perhaps something more inexplicable still, it is that men of wit and taste allow themselves to be dominated by their prejudices to the point of closing their eyes to the evidence."
-- The Father Calmette and the Indianist Missionaries, by Father Julien Bach
Based on Christianity's direct link to the pure transmission of God's original teaching, Eusebius had called Christianity verus Israel, the true Israel (Ulrich 1999:119); so could the Ezour-vedam's author not call Christianity the vera India? In the Ezour-vedam's scheme of things, the authors of the "true Veda" transmission would belong to the "just men" lineage that jumps straight to Christianity, whereas the Brahmins with their Vedas would suffer gradual degeneration, just like Eusebius's Jews with their Old Testament. In Figure 18 this Indian component is indicated by dashed lines; the rectangle would represent Hinduism, which in this perspective is a form of degenerated monotheism similar to Judaism in Eusebius's scheme.
The overall character of the Ezour-vedam as praeparatio evangelica is similar to that of Eusebius's eponymous work since its aim is to refute the other religions as degenerate transmissions and to link one's own religion to the correct transmission of the original, pure doctrine. For Eusebius the pre-Judaic "just men" and Hebrews had to take the role of patriarchs of the correct transmission line. But the author of the Ezour-vedam could not risk inserting Pranguis anywhere along the path. He had to get his patriarchs, whether he liked it or not, from the pool of Indian "just men" rather than biblical patriarchs; and this was a problem that must have bugged him as much as it irritated Western readers who found these Indian patriarchs "inexplicable."
The Anti-Vedic Vedas
Figure 18. Christianity's transmission line in Eusebius of Caesarea (Urs App).
In 1816, Francis Ellis found in Pondicherry a total of eight manuscripts (including the Ezour-vedam) among the remains of the old Jesuit library. His description of these texts, published in 1822, was fortunately rather detailed and must be used here because the texts from the old Jesuit library that Ellis saw have all vanished. The last person to hold the Pondicherry texts in his hands appears to be the Jesuit Castets who examined them some time before 1935 (Rocher 1984:75). All we thus have at our disposal today are the Ezour-vedam manuscripts at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and a number of descriptions of other "Pondicherry Veda" texts (see below) by Ellis and others.13
These texts all employ the same basic scheme popular in mission literature: a conversation between a teacher and a pupil (Ellis 1822:43). As in the Ezour-vedam, the teacher figure represents the "cult of the genuine God" and the pupil the degenerate cult (p. 14). The teachers criticize the pupil's degenerate religion and urge a return to the faith of even earlier times. Both the style and content of these texts seem designed for easy memorization by catechists and maximum impact in debates and recitation before a public that needed to be convinced and prepared for the real Good News. The role of the Pondicherry Vedas was to prepare the ground by denouncing the reigning religion and undermining its claim to genuine transmission of divinely revealed teachings. This implied of course a frontal attack on the Vedas and its traditional guardians.
Once more, the comparison with Eusebius is helpful. He saw the exclusivity of Judaism and its sacred scripture as a symptom of degeneration, and Christianity as a liberation from such limits: it is a law for all peoples, not just for a small group or caste.
First of all, Christ is for Eusebius the telos [goal] of the law because he abolishes exactly those limitations that were inherent in the Jewish law: in Christ, the revelation of the divine will to save is directed at all mankind, not just at the Jews; and [it is directed] at the entire earth, not just at the narrow confines of Palestine. (Ulrich 1999:155)
Chumontou makes a similar argument. While deploring the "evils with which the earth is inundated in this unfortunate century," he regards it as more fortunate than past ones; and though Chumontou is supposedly speaking in the distant past, we hear through his mouth very distinctly the voice of a desperately optimistic French missionary in eighteenth-century India:
If in the first centuries virtue was easier to achieve, there were also more demands than today. Each profession, each caste was subject to particular ceremonies which are [now] abolished and no more in use. There were particular places, temples, and designated persons to offer sacrifices and carry out the other principal functions of religion. Only they could perform this. It would have been a crime for anybody else to interfere. Today one is no more subjugated to all this. Every person that has piety can carry out the functions of religion, and one can do this at any time and place. Furthermore, in the first centuries one could not teach the Vedan to the Choutres [Sudra] and the general population; it would even have been a sin to do this. Now one can do this without fear and scruples. It is on account of this that this century has some advantage over earlier ones. (Rocher 1984:171-72)
A Brahmin would immediately understand that this was a frontal attack on his religion, caste, and the Veda; and the editor of the Ezour-vedam's printed edition wrote in a note: "All that the author reports here can only apply to the times after the Mahommedan invasions and proves that his work is not of great antiquity" (Sainte-Croix 1778:2.81). Sainte-Croix [Guillaume Emmanuel Joseph SAINTE CROIX (de) ] could have gone a bit further, but he still clung to the belief that the Ezour-vedam was a translation of an Indian text.
Guillaume Emmanuel Joseph SAINTE CROIX (de)
The Ezur-Vedam or Old Commentary on Vedam. Containing the exhibition of religious and philosophical views of Indians. Translated from Samscretan by a Brame.
In the Imprimerie de M. de Felice, Yverdon 1778, in-12 (9.5x16cm), xij 13-332pp. and 264pp., 2 bound volumes.
First edition of this religious pastiche composed by Jesuit missionaries in India. Printed on the presses of Fortune Barthelemy Felice in Yverdon, it was published by the Holy Cross baron.
Binding post (1840) full fair calf. Back with five nerves decorated with gilded boxes and nets, as well as parts of title and volume number of long grain brown morocco. Triple gilt fillets in coaching contreplats. Quadruple threads and golden floral spandrels framing of paper contreplats to the tank. All edges gilt.
Pretty nice copy binding Niédrée, whose name is registered in pen on the first guard of the first volume.
-- Guillaume Emmanuel Joseph SAINTE CROIX (de), by EditionOriginale.com
TABLE 13. PROTAGONISTS OF THE PONDICHERRY VEDAS AND THEIR TRANSMISSION LINES
Veda transmission / 1st Veda (Rik; Rg) / 2nd Veda (Chama; Sama) / 3rd Veda (Ezour/Zozur; Yajur) / 4th Veda (Adorbo; Atharva)
Genuine (teacher) / Poilo/Poilapado / Zoimeni / Chumonrou (Sumanta) / Otri/Atri
Degenerate (pupil) / Narada / Naraion (Narayana) / Biache (Vyasa) / Ongira (Angiras)
The Pondicherry Vedas
Having thus gotten a taste of the genuinely anti-Vedic spirit of these "true Vedas," it is time to look at the Ezour-vedam's sister texts. Ellis's 1822 descriptions of the Pondicherry Vedas permit establishing the arrangement of the heroes and villains in the axes of the genuine and the corrupt transmission of divine revelation shown in Table 13.
Since the Ezour-vedam and its content were already to some degree discussed in Chapter I, I will here focus on Ellis's description of the fifth Pondicherry manuscript. It contained the Pondicherry Chama Vedam, traditionally the second Veda (Sama), and features in the first section Zoimeni as teacher and Naraion as disciple. Naraion can only be Narayana or Narayan, that is, the god Vishnu. So much for name recognition of the disciple! But in several parts of this text, the roles are reversed (p. 24), which may be a symptom of the author's "Indian patriarch" problem. According to Ellis, this fifth manuscript contained in the margins on the French side a sequence of abstracts that appear to be either the grid on which the author constructed his text or its summary by an astute reader or copyist. These comments are extremely interesting because they so clearly express intentions that often remain hidden in a finished text; but in this case, the finished text is lost, and we only possess these notes as recorded by Ellis. They begin as follows.
Book I. Chapter 1. Contains the introduction [exorde] of the whole work, the aim of ZOIMENI in composing it. -- Dedication of his book to the Supreme Being -- character of the genuine guru and his functions.
Chapter 2. Contains a grand idea of God and his attributes and refutes the false idea that the false Vedas give of the divinity. Summary of the creation of the world.
Chapter 3. Treats of the imaginary [fabuleuse] creation of the false Vedas, undertakes their refutation. It then treats of the virtue of those who are able and unable to read the Vedam.
Chapter 4. Speaks of the true God and of the cult that must be given to him -- in establishing the cult of the true God he condemns the cult which Naraion wants people to give to Vishnu and Shiva. (Ellis 1822:14)
Like the Ezour-vedam, this text also sets a "false Veda" transmission against the genuine one. The "false Vedas" convey a false idea of God, his attributes, and his cult, while the true Vedas explain the correct conception of these things. Chapter 3 is about the origin and transmission of both true and false Vedas and may also have discussed the caste restrictions regarding the reading and recitation of their "false" Veda in contrast with the "true" Veda that is open for all. This effort to undermine the authority of the Indian Vedas (and thus also that of the Brahmins) was sure to enrage Indian clergy, who must have been astonished by this kind of brazen hijack attempt by outcaste Johnny-come-latelies who had no idea of the Vedas. For the missionary author and the "teacher" of this text, on the other hand, the genuine tradition was now coming back to India, the cult of the true God was about to be restored, and the reigning cults of Vishnu and Shiva were on their way to extinction.
The Chama Vedam's second book starts by digging deeply into what Calmette called "dirt":
Book II. Chapter 1. Speaks of five mythical [fabuleuses] opinions of creation: the first called Padmokolpo, attributed to VICHNOU; the second into the tortoise; the third into the pig; the fourth into GONECH; the fifth into the goddess BIROZA; then the second creation, attributed to the tortoise, of the deluge, of the metamorphosis of the Supreme Being into the tortoise, of the creation of a maiden whom the tortoise marries ... [additional details omitted here but not in Ellis, p. 15]
Chapter 2. Includes the refutation of the preceding [chapter] -- beautiful idea of God drawn from the true Vedam.
Chapter 3. Contains the continuation of the metamorphosis of the Supreme Being in a tortoise; it includes the system of total and partial metamorphoses, that is to say that comprise the entire divinity; a system that one will find well developed in the Odorbo Bedo or fourth Ved, a book which treats of this ex professo, refutation of this system -- beautiful character of the true god. ZOIMENI makes in this chapter NARAION the author of the false Chama Ved, essential remark. (pp. 15-16)
Indian creation myths, incarnations, and metamorphoses of the "false" Chama Ved whose author is Naraion are contrasted with the pure gold of the true Vedam. This true Vedam is understood as the true "word of God," as Calmette had heard his Indian experts explain, and this is laid down in the genuine Chama Ved that is none other than this second Pondicherry Veda!
The third book of the Chama Vedam continues to expose the creation myths of Brahma and Shiva in order to refute them on the basis of the true revelation tradition as laid down in the Pondicherry Vedas.
Book III. Chapter 1. Contains the creation attributed to the boar, it is BRAMMA or the Supreme Being under the name of CHIB which metamorphoses itself into a boar; and Parvati his wife into a sow to withdraw and sustain the earth, description of the place where CHIB lived.
Chapter 2. Contains the refutation of the precedent.
Chapter 3. Contains the description of the creation brought about by the Boar God, the substance of this creation is found in the body of the true Ezour Ved.
Chapter 4. Is the refutation of the precedent. (p. 16)
The "true Ezour Ved," clearly refers to the Pondicherry text of the Ezour-vedam containing the creation account that is here alluded to (Rocher 1984:133). If there still was any doubt whether the author or commentator really identified the "true Vedam" as the Pondicherry Vedas, it is here resolved. The whole configuration and content of these Pondicherry Vedas make Rocher's idea that "Ezour stands for Y-ezus, i.e. Jesus" (p. 66) very unlikely and shows that it was not de Guignes who invented the identification of the Ezour-vedam with the third Veda.
The fourth and final book introduces a theme that will play a role later in this chapter, namely, emanation.
Book IV. Chapter 1. Contains the marriage of CHIB the Supreme Being[,] the birth of his son GONECH, the loss of his head, which CHIB substituted with that of an elephant and the beginning of the creation attributed to GONECH.
Chapter 2. Is the refutation of the fables of the preceding.
Chapter 3. Speaks of the manner in which GONECH made the 3 worlds with his 3 eyes: [ ... details ... ) This chapter ends with the two opinions about the nature of the soul [;] the first want it to be immortal, without principle and subjected to the Gounalous and that it reunites and identifies itself with God at the time of deluge, that is to say, at the end of each age; the second that it [the soul] is mortal and that it is compared to God what the reflection of the sun on water is to the sun.
Chapter 4. Is the refutation of the precedent. ZOIMENI author of the true Chama Vedam combats as false the system which makes the soul an emanation of God, that unites itself with God at the end of each age; system that Onguira, author of the true Odorbo Bedo, appears to adopt as one can see at that place.
N. Evident PROOF that the true Chama Vedam and the true Odorbana Vedam have not come from the same hand and that the Brame who has communicated them is not their author. (Ellis 1822:16-17)
The final note by the author or annotator of the Chama Vedam is hard to figure out but seems to be part of an attempt to justify the missionary's choice of "true Veda" authors. It is a pity that the manuscript is lost because this would throw light into a shady corner.
The Authorship of the Pondicherry Vedas
Ludo Rocher (1984:28-52, 57-60) has extensively discussed previous opinions about the Ezour-vedam's authorship, and there is no need to repeat this here. In most contributions, questions about the regional pronunciation of Sanskrit terms and regional information indicating either southern or Bengal origin play central roles. Often the Sanskrit translations and even the fate of the Ezour-vedam in Europe form part of the discussion of authorship. But we need to keep the issues separate.
First, the Ezour-vedam and its sister texts were created by one or several French missionaries, but as far as we know these missionaries did not have a European public in mind. Based on our analysis, we must conclude that these texts were written for an Indian audience. For a European readership, the link of ancient Indian figures in the texts to antediluvian patriarchs or to Noah and his sons would have been obligatory; but in the Ezour-vedam and its sister texts, such Prangui connections had to be avoided at all cost -- a clear indicator of the intended public. Some confusion about the identities of the Indian patriarchs suggests that this was no easy task. This first phase is the only truly relevant one for the authorship question. One must be careful not to muddle the issue by confusing the question of authorship with issues such as who later added Sanskrit translations, who gave the text to Maudave, who transcribed Indian words in certain ways, and other considerations.
The second level of media activities of the U.S. government are the covert operations in the traditional sense. In theory, these deception operations are directed at influencing foreign, not domestic, opinion. Prior to December 1981, domestic activities were theoretically forbidden by the CIA's charter and by the Executive Orders governing CIA behavior. For all practical purposes, however, the charter was systematically violated. But now under President Reagan's Executive Order 12333, the CIA can operate within the United States so long as what it does is not "intended" to influence public opinion domestically. Who or what determines CIA "intentions" is not specified, leaving a wide open field for more blatant manipulation of U.S. public opinion.
Even operations conducted entirely abroad are liable to cause "blowback," the situation wherein the U.S. media picks up reports from overseas, disseminating them at home, without realizing (or caring) that the reports are false and emanate from U.S. intelligence in the first place. Blowback is very dangerous; in Vietnam there was so much CIA disinformation being spread that U.S. military intelligence reports were often unwittingly based on complete fabrications which had been produced at CIA Headquarters. In other cases, the CIA itself performed as an anti-intelligence agency in which the covert operators had to supply the information that the policy makers wanted. Government thus became the victim of its own disinformation line, compounding the original damage and leading officials to be twice removed from reality. (Numerous examples of this are documented in Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA, a recent book by Ralph W. McGehee [Sheridan Square Publications, New York: 1983].)
One of the most graphic examples of an intentional blowback operation was cited by former CIA officer John Stockwell in his book about Angola, In Search of Enemies. In order to discredit the Cuban troops who were aiding the MPLA government forces in that country's war with South Africa, CIA propagandists in Kinshasa, Zaire, came up with a story about Cuban soldiers raping Angolan women. Using an agent/stringer for a wire service, the Agency had the story passed into the world media. Subsequently it was embellished by further spurious reports of the capture of some of the Cubans by the women they had raped, of their trial, and of their execution by their own weapons. The entire series, spread out in the U.S. press over a period of several months, was a complete CIA fabrication...
In the third instance of press manipulation, the U.S. disguises its handiwork by engaging in the double whammy: accusing the Soviet Union of disseminating the phoney documents it has itself produced. Given the widespread coverage these charges receive, the "proof" is astonishingly contradictory. Last year, for example, a supposedly bogus letter from President Reagan to King Juan Carlos of Spain was publicly denounced by the State Department as a Soviet forgery because it had errors in language and, as one officer noted, "it fits the pattern of known Soviet behavior." The previous year, another document was called a Soviet forgery because it was "so good" it had to be a Soviet product. Periodically the government will call forth one of their stable of "defectors" to confirm that something is a forgery and the U.S. media buy it without much question...
The greatest assistance in disinformation -- especially during the current Administration -- is always forthcoming from the Reader's Digest. In 1977 the Times series exposed Digest editor John Barron as having worked hand in glove with the CIA on a book about the KGB. Other fraudulent journalists like Robert Moss, Arnaud de Borchgrave, Daniel James, Claire Sterling, and Michael Ledeen, among others, seem to pick up disinformation themes almost automatically. In fact, coordination between the development of propaganda and disinformation themes by the covert media assets, the overt propaganda machine, and the bevy of puppet journalists is quite calculated. A theme which is floated on one level -- a feature item on VOA about Cuba for example -- will appear within record time as a lead article in Reader's Digest, or a feature in a Heritage Foundation report, or a series of "exposes" by Moss and de Borchgrave or Daniel James in some reactionary tabloid like Human Events or the Washington Times or Inquirer. Then they will all be called to testify by Senator Denton's Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, repeating one another's allegations as "expert witnesses."
After that they are given credibility by the "respectable" Cold War publications like the National Review, Commentary, and the New Republic. And finally, since they have repeated the theme so many times it must be true, they are given the opportunity to write Op Ed pieces for the New York Times or the Washington Post...
It is well established that all intelligence agencies will forge and plant documents and lie where practicable, so that from at least one of them it is possible to obtain virtually any desired "fact." Former CIA officer Ralph W. McGehee, for example, states that the CIA has "lied continually" and that "Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies" (Deadly Deceits, p. 192). This is commonplace...
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Church Committee), reporting later in 1976, found two "reasons for concern" with the CIA's use of journalists. One was the problem of "fallout" [blowback] -- "the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public. "The second was that all U.S. journalists and media would be discredited as the relationship between the CIA and some of them became known. The committee expressed no concern for the foreign victims of CIA lies...
In his recent book, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA, Ralph W. McGehee has shown that "the American people are the primary target audience of [the CIA's] lies," not simply an unfortunate, incidentally affected group.
-- The CIA and the Media, by CovertAction Information Bulletin
Speakes declined repeatedly to say whether CIA disinformation -- that is, false and-or misleading information -- was planted in foreign media.
It is a common CIA practice, according to both McGehee of Herndon, Va., and John Stockwell of Elgin, Texas, another former CIA agent. In 1976, the Senate Intelligence Committee estimated that 900 foreign journalists, or agents posing as journalists, helped the agency plant propaganda.
The phony news story "could be an article we'd write and just give to a reporter under contract," said McGehee. "Or we'd give them guidelines, saying, 'Here's the story we want generated; you write it in the local context.'
"Once you'd planted an article successfully, you'd clip it and airmail it around the world, get it placed in news media everywhere," he continued.
-- CIA Has Global Media Machine, Ex-Aides Say, by Frank Greve
Second, since the Ezour-vedam's original target public was speaking Telugu, Sanskrit translations must have been made later when some missionaries -- possibly but not necessarily including the author of the original French text -- decided to try to render some of the French text into as good a Sanskrit as they could manage. This individual or group of individuals may have studied Sanskrit in different regions of India, which helps explain the mixed transliterations,14 and these individuals may also have edited the original French text to some extent. Every copyist could modify the text, as the three extant manuscripts of the Ezour-vedam show. Since we have no way of knowing how many times and by whom these texts were copied or edited, all we can do is speculate. We may never know what the intentions of the Sanskrit translator(s) were; it may just have been a pastime of some retired missionary Sanskritists like Pons or Antoine Mozac. At any rate, there is no indication whatsoever that these Sanskrit translation drafts were ever intended for public consumption; otherwise, they would have been corrected with the help of an Indian Sanskritist and properly edited. The second production stage, therefore, involves editing and copying of the French text and adding Sanskrit translation exercises on the facing pages of some texts.
Third, two of these texts (the Ezour-vedam and Voltaire's Cormo-veidam) may have undergone some clean-up editing (for example, eliminating passages like the "Telugu place name" remark in the Haday manuscript) before being sent to Europe. The Ezour-vedam, which today is the only extant Pondicherry Veda, reached Europe in several somewhat different manuscript versions and thus entered, with the significant help of Voltaire and then Sainte-Croix, a new career stage. This issue was to some degree discussed in Chapter 1.
Special Pleading (Stacking The Deck):
using the arguments that support your position, but ignoring or somehow disallowing the arguments against.
Uri Geller used special pleading when he claimed that the presence of unbelievers (such as stage magicians) made him unable to demonstrate his psychic powers.
Excluded Middle (False Dichotomy, Faulty Dilemma, Bifurcation):
assuming there are only two alternatives when in fact there are more. For example, assuming Atheism is the only alternative to Fundamentalism, or being a traitor is the only alternative to being a loud patriot.
Short Term Versus Long Term:
this is a particular case of the Excluded Middle. For example, "We must deal with crime on the streets before improving the schools." (But why can't we do some of both?) Similarly, "We should take the scientific research budget and use it to feed starving children."
Burden Of Proof:
the claim that whatever has not yet been proved false must be true (or vice versa). Essentially the arguer claims that he should win by default if his opponent can't make a strong enough case.
There may be three problems here. First, the arguer claims priority, but can he back up that claim? Second, he is impatient with ambiguity, and wants a final answer right away. And third, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
Argument by Rhetorical Question:
asking a question in a way that leads to a particular answer. For example, "When are we going to give the old folks of this country the pension they deserve?" The speaker is leading the audience to the answer "Right now." Alternatively, he could have said "When will we be able to afford a major increase in old age pensions?" In that case, the answer he is aiming at is almost certainly not "Right now."
-- A List Of Fallacious Arguments, by Don Lindsay
Figure 19. Stages of Ezour-vedam creation and dissemination (Urs App).
STAGE 1: Creation by French Jesuits for Telgu translation; debate use, catechists. Pondicherry.
STAGE 2: Edition of French text, copying, Sanskrit draft translations for private use. Pondicherry.
STAGE 3: Ezour-vedam and Cormo-vedam copies & maybe edited: leaked & sent to Europe Geneva/Paris.
STAGE 4: Edition by Ste-Croix, 1778 publication. Discussed & edited by scholars. Europe.
STAGE 5: Use of manuscripts by Cocurdoux, Paulinus, and Dubois (plagiarism). Pondicherry, Paris, London.
Fourth, the Ezour-vedam was edited by the Baron of Sainte-Croix on the basis of Voltaire's and Anquetil-Duperron's manuscripts and published in 1778 as "the first original work published to date on the religious and philosophical dogmas of the Indians" (Sainte-Croix 1778:1.xii). Sainte-Croix's vision of the text and its authorship will be discussed below.
Fifth, the manuscripts of the Pondicherry Vedas (and possibly additional notes and related study materials) were from 1770 onward used and plagiarized by several persons and ended up directly and indirectly influencing the nineteenth-century image of Indian religion.
As explained above, the question of authorship of the French text concerns only the first of the stages shown in Figure 19. The author worked in the environment of the Malabar mission where Telugu was the target language. What he had in mind was not producing a fake Veda translation because he was inspired by La Croze's wish to see a European-language translation of the Vedas (Rocher 1984:73), nor did he have any intention of committing a literary forgery and a "religious imposition without parallel" (Ellis 1822:1). Rather, a missionary had the idea to create such texts for the education and conversion of heathens and designed a format that made them easy to memorize and use for missionaries and catechists and, of course, also easy to understand by the native audience who must for the most pan have been illiterate. There were no Voltaires sitting at the catechists' feet in those villages near Pondicherry. The main point of these entertaining repartees was to prepare Indians for instruction in Christianity by undermining their trust in the native religion and its clergy and squarely attacking the authority of the Veda by calling it "false." This meant digging up much "dirt" about the indecent adventures of Indian gods and goddesses, gods turning into boars, and the like; but other educational content was also mixed in, for example, how to construct a water clock from a simple copper tube (Sainte-Croix 1778:1.267) and, as we have seen, geography lessons. This was part of instruction in the tradition of the "genuine Vedas." At this stage, nothing could have been further from the author's mind than an elaborate plan to mislead a generation of budding Orientalists in Europe about India's ancient religion. His focus on undermining the Vedas and on conveying information to natives who knew little of the world is all too evident.
Among all the letter-writing Jesuit missionaries active in India in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries hitherto mentioned as possible authors of the Ezour-vedam, there is no one who comes even close to matching the profile of Jean Calmette with regard to motivation, eagerness, and ability to study Indian religions from primary materials; determination to use such materials as "weapons" in disputes; activity in the Telugu-speaking area; inspiration by de Nobili's conception of satya vedam; and other characteristics described above. Calmette has been on the authorship shortlist since Julien Bach's perceptive articles of 1847 and 1848 that were less concerned with linguistic issues than with questions of motivation and content. In his 1868 book, Bach summarized his argument as follows:
If we accept with the missionary that Indian superstitions derive from primitive traditions altered by ignorance or their taste for fables, and we give the term veda its real meaning revelation, we have the entire work of the missionary in a nutshell: there was a Veda, a primitive revelation, and its tradition spread as far as India; but you, brahmans, have corrupted the Veda by mistakes of all kinds. I shall destroy these mistakes. (Bach 1868:23; trans. Rocher 1984:44)
Calmette also found support for his view from a witness whom we will meet again later in this chapter: the famous Abbe Jean-Antoine Dubois. Bach reported:
What I said above made me suspicious not only that the Ezour-Vedam is a French work but also that Calmette was its author. To acquire certitude I thought of contacting the person in Paris who had to be most familiar with the question. I said to myself that the venerable Abbe Dubois -- who had spent forty years as a missionary in India, lived with the last remaining Jesuits, and stayed in Pondicherry -- had without any doubt seen these odd manuscripts that created such a brouhaha. I went to see him and asked him, without telling him my opinion, if he knew the author of the Ezour-vedam. -- It is Father Calmette, he said immediately. But, he added, several missionaries have had a hand in it. (Bach 1868:23)
Actually, Abbe Dubois was far more familiar with these Pondicherry materials than Father Bach could imagine. Rocher noted shortly before his book on the Ezour-vedam went to press that "long passages in the EzV [Ezour-vedam] correspond to Dubois' text" and that "these correspondences, even in Dubois' French version, are never verbatim, but too close to be accidental" (1984:87). In the meantime, Sylvia Murr (1987) has shown that Dubois systematically plagiarized the writings of Father Gaston Laurent Coeurdoux that he had found in the remains of the Jesuit mission library at Pondicherry; and we know that the Pondicherry Vedas were also there. So the conclusion that Dubois also plagiarized these manuscripts is not difficult to draw. This also means that, in Julien Bach's time, there was nobody in the world who knew these manuscripts better than Dubois -- yet Bach who questioned him had no idea of this fact. Dubois's opinion was thus incomparably more informed than that of Anquetil-Duperron and others who did not even know that several texts of the kind existed.
Bach's opinion convinced numerous library catalogers, but in the twentieth century, Julien Vinson rejected Calmette's authorship mainly with arguments related to Bengali transliterations and the fate of the text in Europe (Vinson 1902:293), which, as noted above, need to be separated from the authorship question. The objections of Castets (1935:40), too, are related to his idea that the Ezour-vedam must be of Bengali origin because of the transliterations. Additionally, Castets claims that "one can find nothing in this unpublished correspondence of Father Calmette that reminds one the slightest bit [de pres ou de loin] of the famous Ezour Vedam" (p. 40). But the letters by Calmette quoted by Castets actually offer excellent support for Calmette's admiration for and inspiration by de Nobili, and we have seen that this inspiration ties in very well with Calmette's published letters as well as the general trend of the Pondicherry Vedas. Objections by other people that were listed by Rocher (1984:45) are equally beside the point, and one must conclude that-unless one would like to have a single-author manuscript with no further interference by others -- so far not a single objection to Calmette's authorship has merit.
Now if other missionaries "had a hand in it," as Dubois put it, who was he thinking of? There is an interesting passage in the Ezour-vedam that can provide a hint. For some reason the text's author wanted to educate the Telugu-speaking audience not just about the construction of a simple waterclock and the geography of our earth but also about other religions, such as that of the evil "Baudistes":
Chumantou: ... The most criminal of all are those called Baudistes. They are really abominable people who are so impious and blasphemous as to seek to destroy and annihilate even the idea of divinity.
Biach: Tell me, Sir, what are these Baudistes?
Chumantou: The Baudistes are dominant in different countries. Their system is to not recognize any purely spiritual substance and no god except for themselves, which is the greatest and most horrible of all crimes. (Rocher 1984:171)
The author of these lines is likely to have read La Croze's book of '724 that contained, as discussed in Chapter 2, an early synthesis of information about Buddhism and argued mainly on the basis of Ziegenbalg's and La Loubere's information that Buddhism was a religion founded by an Indian man called Boudda who is called by various other names depending on the country, for example, "Fo" or "Foto" in China. This religion was long ago eradicated in India because of its atheism but found its way to various Asian countries including Siam, Tibet, China, and Japan. But the remark that the Baudistes do not recognize any purely spiritual substance is not found in La Croze and must come from another source. Now we have another very short description of this religion that stems from the very region in which the Pondicherry Vedas must have been written. It is by Father Pons who was from 1733 to 1740 with Calmette a member of the Malabar mission (Castets 1935:47) and had studied Sanskrit in the Bengal region. In this famous letter of November 23, 1740, about Sanskrit and Indian philosophy, Pons wrote:
The Bauddistes, whose doctrine of metempsychosis has been universally adopted, are accused of atheism and admit only our senses as principles of our knowledge. Boudda is the Photo revered by the people of China, and the Bauddistes are of the sect of the Bonzes and Lamas. (Le Gobien 1781:14.79)
TABLE 14. SIMILARITIES IN THE VIEW OF BUDDHISM IN THE EZOUR-VEDAM AND PONS'S LETTER
Theme / Ezour-vedam on Buddhism / Pons on Buddhism
atheism / recognize no god except for themselves, seek to annihilate even idea of divinity / accused of atheism
sensualism / do not recognize purely spiritual substance / admit only senses as principles of knowledge
presence / dominant in different countries / China, Tibet, Japan (Lamas and Bonzes)
founder / -(no point to explain this to Indians?) / Boudda = Photo
metempsychosis / -(too trite for Indians?) / doctrine of metempsychosis universally adopted
The very brief remarks about this religion in the Ezour-vedam and in this letter could be miles apart, given that so little was known about it at the time. But in spite of their extreme brevity, they show a similar vision, as shown in Table 14.
Pons and Calmette, who came from the same little town of Rodez in southern France, had both been eager to find the Vedas, and both collaborated closely with Abbe Bignon in procuring precious Indian books for the Royal Library in Paris. In the 1730s, these two men were the only missionaries in the region capable of studying the Vedas and related texts, and it would be strange indeed if they had not worked together. After Calmette died in 1739 in Pondicherry, Pons was for a decade busy in Karikal (1740-50), but he returned to Pondicherry in 1750, more than a year before his death (1751). He was by then retired, and it is conceivable that he used his leisure to try his hand not only at reading Sanskrit, as he had done for a quarter-century, bur also at practising his writing. What better texts to try his hand at translating than his friend Calmette's Pondicherry Vedas? I agree with Castets that Father Pons, the author of a treatise on Sanskrit prosody who had been both a superior in the Bengal mission from 1728 to 1733 and a longtime resident of the Malabar mission in the South, may have "distracted himself, reduced by his age and his tiring work, to forced leisure at the siege of the Pondicherry mission" (Castets 1935:46); but instead of just annotating the Pondicherry Vedas, I think he may have employed his great talents, instead of on the eighteenth-century equivalent of crossword puzzles, for some active mindsport that resulted in fragmentary, unrevised, unsystematic translations of Calmette's French texts into Sanskrit-translations that were full of mistakes, as is to be expected of someone who reads a language but never writes it. It is hard to imagine that such jottings were designed for mission use or for public consumption. Pons's interest in the real Vedas was limited, as a letter written in 1740 just after the death of Calmette shows:
The four Vedan or Bed are, according to them, of divine authority: one has them in Arabic at the Royal Library; accordingly the brahmins are divided in four sects of which each has its own law. Roukou Vedan or, according to the Hindustani pronunciation, Recbed, and the lajourvedam are the most followed on the Indian subcontinent between the seas, and the Samavedan and Latharvana or Brahmavedam in the North. The Vedan contain the theology of the brahmins; and the ancient Pouranam or poems the popular theology. The Vedan, as far as I can judge by the little I have seen of it, are nothing but a collection of different superstitious and often diabolical practices of the ancient Richi, penitents, or Mouni, or anachorets. Everything, even the gods, is subjected to the intrinsic power of sacrifices and Mantram; these are sacred formulae they use to consecrate, offer, invoke, etc. I was surprised to find the following: om Santih, Santih, Santih, harih. You surely know that the letter or syllable om contains the Trinity in Unity; the rest is the literal translation of Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus. Harih is a name of God which signifies Abductor. (Le Gobien 1781:14.75)