Let us look at the Hindu castes from the traditional perspective, and not from the sociological or historical explanation that is taken for granted today. The castes are not in the first place a social structure: they are the manifestation of an order that precedes the social. The principle is that every being has a determinate place and function within the whole, and that the harmony of the whole depends on each occupying his own.
Let us name them. The Hindu tradition distinguishes four: the brahmin guards and teaches sacred knowledge; the kshatriya governs and defends (temporal power is his); the vaishya produces (the land, the herds, trade, the crafts); and the shudra supplies the service and the material labor without which none of the foregoing stands.
Each caste is thus a function at once spiritual and social: not a table of values, but a distribution of what is necessary. The brahmin occupies the summit by his proximity to the principle, not by privilege. Each caste possesses besides its own dharma, its proper duty, and the fulfillment of that duty is what sustains simultaneously the order of the world and the inner growth of the individual. To fulfill the duty that falls to a man is worth more, in that doctrine, than to fulfill another man's well.
Here is what the controversy over the word never looks at, though opening a dictionary is enough: the Sanskrit word we translate as caste is varna, and varna means color. Not the color of skin. Color in the sense in which we say that a man has a temperament, a tonality of his own, a dominant quality that tinges everything. To each function corresponds a color: white for the brahmin, red for the kshatriya, yellow for the vaishya, black for the shudra. And behind those colors stand the three qualities the Hindu doctrine calls gunas: the one that tends upward and toward the light, the one that expands and agitates on the horizontal plane, and the one that pulls downward and toward inertia. A man is not of a caste by having been born into such and such a family: he is of it because one of those qualities predominates in him and decides what he is best fit for.
So caste is founded on the innate nature of the being. Every man brings with him dispositions that make him fit for one function and not another, and to force that nature liberates nobody: it disorganizes everybody.
That explains, in passing, why the system was hereditary without being unjust at its origin. If nature determines the function, and if the being is born into the family that corresponds to his nature (heredity is the sign, not the cause), then the family transmission of the trade did not impose the function: it recorded it. It was the normal way for each man to be where he ought to be. The degeneration begins when the hereditary form outlives the correspondence that justified it, and a man is left shut inside a caste that no longer describes what he is. Then it does indeed become a prison, and from there comes, with reason, all the modern contempt for the word.
There is one more detail, and it is the one that concerns us directly. In that tradition, the men of the first three castes are dvija: twice-born. They receive, besides the physical birth, a second ritual birth that qualifies them for sacred knowledge. The fourth does not receive it. Let us be exact about the parallel, because the instructed reader will demand it: in that tradition the qualification and the birth that follows it are not separated as they are with us: the second birth opens access to the sacred, and without it there is no passage. The analogy with our own case descends from there, and it is offered as an analogy. Let us hold on to the expression: every authentic initiation is a second birth, and not a metaphor of a second birth. Freemasonry did not invent that idea. It inherited it.
Hence we must acknowledge that the caste system has degenerated into a rigid and oppressive structure, wholly cut off from the foundations that justified it. Hence too we must criticize modern egalitarianism, which denies not the dignity of men but their differences: to pretend that we are all the same elevates nobody; it simply prevents each man from finding his place. Both things are true at once, and both have to be maintained at once.
When we say, then, that Freemasonry is a way for men of the third caste with the inclination of artisans, we are lowering nobody. We are situating with precision.
Let it be said rigorously what kind of statement that is: a correspondence of function, not a Hindu census; a reading the author takes as his own. What is spoken of is the place of the man who produces and deals with matter, by whatever name each tradition calls him. And in an age when castes are no longer read by birth, a man's varna is recognized in his disposition toward work: the first thing the Order ought to examine in the man who petitions for entrance.
The second half of the formula does a job that is usually overlooked. The third caste comprises the merchant and the artisan alike: both produce, both deal with matter, both belong to the same function. But the merchant works with exchange and the artisan with form, and that is not the same thing. In saying with the inclination of artisans one is choosing, within that caste, one disposition and not the other. The man who comes to the lodge with the merchant's temperament—to make contacts, to trade favors, to press the advantage of what he brings from outside—is in the right caste and the wrong inclination. That disposition is not diagnosed by the man himself: recognizing it is the office of whoever plumbs the man who knocks at the door (that is how these pages will name it), and it is recognized slowly, over the whole period of labor that precedes initiation, which exists for that. When that examination is skipped, the merchant comes in. And that confusion, which looks like a minor one, is the origin of a good part of what we shall examine further on.
By the same token, initiatic ways are distinguished by their point of support, and there are not two of them but three. There are sacerdotal initiations, which proceed by consecrated rite and by contemplation. There are chivalric initiations, which proceed by action and combat, and which answer to the nature of the kshatriya: the West had them; the best known was the Order of the Temple (a mixed case, strictly speaking: a military order under a religious rule borrows the frame of the first way in order to travel the second). And there are craft initiations, which proceed by work upon matter. Freemasonry, like the compagnonnage, is of the third sort: it is not a degraded sacerdotal initiation nor a disarmed chivalric one; it is another thing, with a method of its own and a dignity of its own.
We are saying, in short, something far more useful: that Freemasonry is a way of the craft. That its language is the language of building because its method is the builder's. That it proceeds neither by pure contemplation nor by the sacerdotal way, but by work upon matter (the stone, the square, the compasses, the gavel), and that this work upon matter is what produces, in the man who carries it out uprightly, a transformation that no abstract speculation would produce in him.
It is not a lesser way. It is a precise way.