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"THEREFORE NEVER SEEK TO KNOW FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS IT TOLLS FOR THEE"
John Donne
THE HOLY SINNER
Thomas Mann
1951
Page 1
"The ringing of bells, the surging and swelling of bells supra urbem, above the whole city, in its airs overfilled with sound. Bells, bells, they swing and sway, they wag and weave through their whole arc on their beams, in their seats, hundred-voiced, in Babylonish con-fusion. Slow and swift, blaring and booming - there is neither measure nor harmony, they talk all at once and all together, they break in even on themselves; on clang the clappers and leave no time for the excited metal to din itself out, for like a pendulum they are already back at the other edge, droning into its own droning; so that when echo still resounds: 'In te Domine speravi,' it is uttering already 'Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata' into its own midst; not only so, but lesser bells tinkle clear from smaller shrines, as though the mass-boy might be touching the little bell of the Host.
Ringing from the height and ringing from the depths; from the seven arch-holy places of pilgrimage and all the churches of the seven parishes on both sides of the twice-rounding Tiber. From the Aventine ringing; from the holy places of the Palatine and from St John of the Lateran; above the grave of him who bears the keys, in the Vatican Hill, from Santa Maria Maggiore, Santa Maria in Foro, in Domnica, in Cosmedin, and in Trastevere; frpm Ara-Coeli, St Paul's outside the Walls, St Peter in Chains, and from the basilica of the Most Holy Cross in Jerusalem. And from the chapels in the cemeteries, from the roofs of the basilicas and oratories in the narrow streets come the sounds as well. Who names their names and knows their titles? As when the wind, when the tempest rakes the strings of / Page 2 / the aeolian harp and rouses the whole world of sound, the far apart and the close at hand, in whirring, sweeping harmony; such, trans-lated in bronze, are the sounds that split the air, for here everything that is rings for the great feast and high procession.
Who is ringing the bells? Not the bell-ringers. They have run into the streets like all the folk, to list the uncanny ringing. Convince yourselves: the bell-chambers are empty. Lax hang the ropes, and yet the bells rock and the clappers clang. Shall one say that nobody rings them? - No, only an ungrammatical head, without logic, would be capable of the utterance. 'The bells are ringing': that means they are rung, and let the bell-chambers be never so empty. - So who is ringing the bells of Rome? - It is the spirit of story-telling. - Then can he be everywhere, hic et ubique, for instance at once on the Tower of St George in Velabro and up in Santa Sabina, which preserves columns from the abominable Temple of Diana? At a hundred consecrate seats at once? - Of a certainty, that he can. He is as air, bodiless, ubiquitous, not subject to distinctions of here and there. He it is that says: 'All the bells were ringing'; and, in con-sequence, it is he who rings them. So spiritual is this spirit and so abstract that grammatically he can be talked of only in the third person and simply referred to as 'It is he'. And yet he can gather himself into a person, namely into the first person, and be incarnate in somebody who speaks in him and says: 'I am he. I am the spirit of story-telling, who, sitting in his time-place, namely in the library of the cloister of St Gall in Alemannenland, where once Notker the Stammerer sat, tells this story for entertainment and exceptional edification; in that I begin with its grace-abounding end and ring the bells of Rome: id est, report that on that day of processional entry they all together began to ring of themselves.'
But also, in order that the second grammatical person should come into its own, the question runs: Who art thou then, who saying I sits at Notker's desk and embodies the spirit of narrative? - I am Clemens the Irishman, ordinis divi Benedicti, visiting here as Brother, accepted guest, and envoy from my Abbot Kilian of the cloister of Clonmacnoise, my house in Ireland, that I may foster the ancient relations which since the days of St Gall and St Columbanus obtain between my house and this strong citadel of Christ. I have on my / Page3 / journey visited a great many seats of pious learning and abodes of the Muses, such as Fulda, Reichenau, and Gandersheim, St Emeran in Regensburg, Lorsch, Echternach, and Corvey. But here, where the eye laves itself in evangeliaries and psalters with such priceless illumination in gold and in silver set on purple, with decoration in vermilion, green, and blue; where the Brothers under their choir- master intone more sweetly than ever elsewhere heard; where the bodily refection is excellent, not forgetting the cordial little wine which is poured out with it, and after table in the cloisters one can exercise so agreeably round the fountain; here I have made my station for a somewhat more spacious time, occupying one of the always ready guest-cells into which the highly estimable Abbot, Gozbert of his name, had thoughtfully put an Irish cross, whereon one sees figured a lamb in the coils of snakes, the arbor vitae, a dragon's head with the cross in his jaws, and the ecclesia catching the blood of Christ in a chalice, whilst the devil tries to snap up a bite and sup of it. The piece witnesses the early high standard of our Irish arts.
I am deeply attached to my home, St Patric's nook-shotten isle, its meadows, heaths, and moors. Its airs blow damp and mild, and mild too is the air in our cloister of Clonmacnoise, given as it is to training disciplined by a measured asceticism. With our Abbot Killian I am of the well-tried view that the religion of Jesus and the practice of ancient studies must go hand in hand in combating rude ways; that it is the same ignorance which knows nothing of the one and of the other, and that where the first took root the other also flourished. In fact the height of culture reached by our brotherhood in my experience quite considerably surpassed that of the Roman clerus itself, which is often all too little touched by the wisdom of antiquity and among whose members at times a truly lamentable Latin is written - if also none so bad as among German monks, one of whom, to be sure an Augustinian, lately wrote to me: 'Habes tibi aliqua secreta dicere. Robustissimus in corpore sum et saepe propterea temptationibus Diaboli succumbo.' That is indeed scarcely tolerable, stylistically as well as also in other ways, and probably such peasantly rubbish could never flow from a Roman pen. Altogether it would be mistaken to believe l would speak ill of Rome and its supremacy, whose loyal adherent on the contrary I profess myself. It may be / Page 4 / that we Irish monks, who have always held to independent dealings and in many regions of the Continent have first preached Christianity, have also acquired extraordinary merit in that everywhere, in Burgundy and Friesland, Thuringia and AIemannia, we erected cloisters as bastions of the faith and of our mission. That does not mean that we have not since early times recognized the Bishop in the Lateran as head of the Christian Church and seen in him a being of almost divine nature, in that we consider at most only the site of the divine resurrection as holier than St Peter's. One may say without untruth that the churches of Jerusalem, Ephesus, and Antioch are older than the Roman, and if Peter, at whose unassailable name one does not gladly think of certain cockcrows, founded the bishopric of Rome (he did found it), the same is indisputably true of the community of Antioch. But these matters can only play the role of fugitive comments at the margin of truth: that, firstly, our Lord and Saviour (as it stands in Matthew and may be read there, though indeed only in him) summoned Peter to be his vicar here below, but the latter transferred the vicariate to the Roman bishop and conferred on him the precedence over all the episcopates of the world. We even read indeed in decretals and protocols of early time the very speech which the apostle himself held at the ordination of his first successor, Pope Linus, which I regard as a real trial of faith and a challenge to the spirit to manifest its power and show what all it succeeds in believing.
In my so much more humble quality as incarnation of the spirit of story-telling, I have every interest that others like me shall regard the call to the sella gestatoria as the highest and most blessed of elections. And it is at once a sign of my devotion to Rome that I bear the name of Clemens. For natively I am named Morhold. But I have never liked the name, it strikes me as wild and heathenish, and with the cowl I put on that of the third successor of Peter, so that it is no longer the vulgar Morhold who moves in the girded tunic and scapular but a more refined Clemens, who has con- summated what St Paul to the Ephesians so happily called the 'putting on a new man'. Yes, it is no longer at all the body of flesh which went about in the doublet of that Morhold, but rather a
spiritual one which the cingulum girds - accordingly, a body which / Page 5 / makes not quite worthy of sanction my earlier statement: id est, that I am the 'incarnate spirit of story-telling', namely that it is 'embodied' in me. I do not care for this word 'embodiment' so much, since (of course) it derives from the body and the fleshly shape, which together with the name of Morhold I have put off, and which in all ways is a domain of Satan, through him capable of abominations and subject to them, though one scarcely understands why it does not reject them. On the other hand, the body is the vehicle of the soul and God-given reason, without which these would be deprived of their basis; and so one must regard the body as a necessary evil. Such is the recognition fitting to it; one more enthusiastic we owe it not, in its urgent need and its repulsiveness. And how should one, in act to relate a tale, or to retell it (for it has already been told, even several times, if also inadequately), which abounds in bodily abomination and affords frightful evidence to what all the body gives itself, without fear or faltering - how should one be inclined to boast overmuch about being an embodiment?
No; for the spirit of story-telling, having concentrated itself in my monkish person, called Clemens the Irishman, has preserved much of that abstraction which enables it to ring from all the titular basilicas of the city at once; two instances of the fact I will cite straightway. Firstly, then, it may escape the reader of this manuscript, and yet it is worthy of remark, that I have inscribed it with the name of the place where I sit, namely St Gall, at Notker's desk, but that I have not said in what times, in how-manyeth year and century after our Saviour's birth I sit here and cover the parchment with my small, fine scholarly, and decorative script. For there is no fixed term, and also the name of our Abbot here, Gozbert, does not furnish one. For it repeats itself all too oft in time, and, when one would cite it, turns quite readily into Fridolin or Hartmut. If one ask me, teasingly or maliciously, whether I myself indeed know where I am but not when, I answer pleasantly: there is truly nothing to know, for as a personification of the spirit of story-telling I rejoice in that abstraction, the second instance of which I now give.
For now I begin to write and address myself to tell a tale at once frightful and highly edifying. But it is quite uncertain in what language I write, whether Latin, French, German, or Anglo-Saxon, / Page 6 / and indeed it is all the same; for say I write Thiudisch, such as the Germans speak who live in Helvetia, then tomorrow British stands on the paper and it is a Breton book that I have written. By no means do I assert that I possess all the tongues; but they run all together in my writing and become one - in other words, language. For the thing is so, that the spirit of narration is free to the point of abstraction, whose medium is language in and for itself, language itself, which sets itself as absolute and does not greatly care about idioms and national linguistic gods. That indeed would be poly- theistic and pagan. God is spirit, and above languages is language.
One thing is certain: that I write prose and not little verses, for which on the whole I cherish no exaggerated regard. Rather in this respect I am in the tradition of the Emperor Carolus, who was not only a great lawgiver and judge of the nations but also the protector of grammar and an assiduous patron of correct and limpid prose. I hear said, indeed, that only metre and rhyme can result in a strict form, but I would like well to know why this hopping on three or four iambic feet, resulting to boot in all sorts of stumbling in dactyls and anapaests, with a little light-hearted assonance of the end words, is supposed to indicate the strict form, as against a shapely prose with its much finer and less obvious rhythmical laws. If I were to begin with:
There was a prince by name Grimald,
He had a stroke that laid him cold.
He left behind twinn children fair -
Aha, was that a sinful pair
or something in that kind, would it be a stricter form than the grammatical and dignified prose in which I now present my tale of grace, that many who come after, French, Angles, and Germans, may dip into it to make their little rimes?
So much by way of preface; I begin as follows:"
THOMAS MANN
1875 - 1955
Page 660
"Round the edge of the table, at regular intervals, were placed twenty-six little bone counters, each with a letter of the alphabet written on it in pen and ink."
twenty-six little bone counters, each with a letter of the alphabet written on it in pen and ink."
FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
G Hancock
1995
Page 287
"What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language"
THE
MAGIKALALPHABET
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1+0 |
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1+5 |
1+6 |
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2+1 |
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LIGHT AND LIFE
Lars Olof Bjorn
1976
"BY WRITING THE 26 LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET IN A CERTAIN ORDER ONE MAY PUT DOWN ALMOST ANY MESSAGE
( THIS BOOK IS WRITTEN WITH THE SAME LETTERS AS THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA AND WINNIE THE POOH, ONLY THE ORDER OF THE LETTERS DIFFERS). IN THE SAME WAY NATURE IS ABLE TO CONVEY WITH HER LANGUAGE HOW A CELL AND A WHOLE ORGANISM IS TO BE CONSTRUCTED AND HOW IT IS TO BE CONSTRUCTED AND HOW IT IS TO FUNCTION. NATURE HAS SUCCEEDED BETTER THAN WE HUMANS; FOR THE GENETIC CODE THERE IS ONLY ONE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE WHICH IS THE SAME IN A MAN, A BEAN PLANT AND A BACTERIUM.
THE
DNA
MESSAGE IN A HUMAN CELL COMPRISES ABOUT
1 000 000 000
'LETTERS'."
THE JESUS MYSTERIES
WAS THE ORIGINAL JESUS A PAGAN GOD
Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy
"This book isdedicated to the Christ in you"
Page 177
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
THOMAS MANN
1875 - 1955
Page 660
"Round the edge of the table, at regular intervals, were placed twenty-six little bone counters, each with a letter of the alphabet written on it in pen and ink."
twenty-six little bone counters, each with a letter of the alphabet written on it in pen and ink."
FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
G Hancock
1995
Page 287
"WHAT ONE WOULD LOOK FOR, THEREFORE, WOULD BE A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE"
THE
MAGIKALALPHABET
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ANUBIS
A NUMBER IS
NOT THIS MAN NOR THAT MAN TOTHER MAN
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
THOMAS MANN
1875 - 1955
Page 10
"Number 34"
Page 17
"The lift had stopped. running, so they climbed the stairs; in silence, somewhat taken aback by the encounter with Dr. Krokowski. Joachim went with his cousin to number thirty-four, where the lame porter had already deposited the luggage of the new arrival. They talked for another quarter-hour while Hans Castorp unpacked his night and toilet things, smoking a large, mild cigarette the while. A cigar would have been too much for him this evening - a fact which impressed him as odd indeed.
WHY SMASH ATOMS
A. K. SOLOMON
1940
Page
77
"THE SPHERE WILL CONTINUE TO ACCEPT CHARGE REGARDLESS OF ITS OWN VOLTAGE, THAT IS REGARDLESS OF THE ELECTRIC FIELD OUTSIDE IT. ONCE THE FAIRY TALE HERO HAS PENETRATED THE RING OF FIRE ROUND THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN HE IS FREE TO WOO THE HEROINE IN HER CASTLE ON THE MOUNTAIN TOP
Page
77
"IF IT WAS SAFE FOR THE ELECTRIC CHARGE INSIDE IT WAS SAFE FOR THE HERO"
THAT
FAR AWAY FOR A DAY FARADAY
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Thomas Mann 1855 - 1955
Page 10 Chapter 1
Page 664 / 665
Very well since they thought of nothing better, let the spirit out of the fullness of his knowledge answer this chance query. The glass hesitated then pushed off. It spelled out something very queer, which none of them succeeded in fathoming, it made the word , or the syllable Go, and then the word Slanting and then something about Hans Castorp's room. That was to say, through number thirty-four
What was the sense of that"
THE
ALPHABET
A KEY TO THE HISTORY OF MANKIND
David Diringer
1947
Page 164 (1) "I think (writes Professor Dhorme) that the pseudo-hieroglyphic texts of Byblos date from the period of Amenopsis IV ( that is to say, ca. 1375 B.C. - D.D.).
Page 165 " (7) The engravers or scribes of Byblos gave to the hieroglyphic signs meanings proper to their tongue, without taking into consideration their origin. The texts are in pure Phoenician.
( 8) My starting- point was the last line of the tablet c (here, Fig. 82, 2), in which the last sign written
seven
times is a numeral
(3 + 40 or 3 + 4),
preceded by the word b sh n t,"in the years." Hence, nkh sh, "bronze," in the first line: mzbh, "altar," in the 6th line; btmz, "in Tammuz," in the 14th line, etc., etc.
THE COMPLETE FORTUNE TELLER
Francis x King
Page 166 "…Again the totals of the four perpendicular, four, four horizontal, and two diagonal rows add up to
340, which reduces to 7 ( 3 + 4 + 0),
a number which has, for millenia, been thought to possess mystical properties.
THE COMPLETE FORTUNE TELLER
Francis x King
Page 166
"Durer's engraving 'Melancholia' shows the angel of Saturn,symbolizing an individual suffering from acute
melancholia. On the wall behind the angel is a 'magical square' made up of 16 separate numbers in four rows of four.
A 'magical square'is one in which the numbers in any particular row, whether across, perpendicular or diagonal, add up to the same figure. In the case of the square shown in Durer's engraving the signifi-cant number is 34. The reason for this is explained below."
CITY OF REVELATION
John Michel
1972
"The point is clearly made in Durer's Melencolia. The garden of paradise, symbol of the ultimate perfection of human consciousness, has many delightful inhabitants which are at the same time danger-ous beasts to whoever fails to recognise their nature and function; and of these the most treacherous is the mercurial old serpent of wisdom, that leads men on in the search of the treasure of which it is itself the venomous custodian."
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
THOMAS MANN
1875 - 1955
Page 653
"Edhin Krokowski's lectures had in the swift passage of the years taken an unexpected turn. His researches, which dealt with psycho-analysis and the dream-life of humanity, had always had a subterranean, not to say catacombish character;but now by a transition so gradual that one scarcely marked it, they had passed over to the frankly supernatural, and his fortnightly lectures in the dining-room - the prime attraction of the house, the pride of the prospectus, delivered in a drawling foreign voice, in frock coat and sandals from behind a little covered table, to the rapt and motionless Berghof audience-these lectures no longer treated of the disguised activities of love and the retransformation of the illness into the conscious emotion - They had gone on to the ex-traordinary phenomena of hypnotism and somnambulism, telep-athy, "dreaming true" and second sight; the marvels of hysteria, the expounding of which widened the philosophic horizon to such an extent that suddenly before the listener's eyes would glitter / Page 654 / darkly puzzles like that of the relation of matter to the psychical, yes even the puzzle of life itself, which it appeared, was easier to approach by uncanny, even morbid paths than by the way of health…"
"… The field of his study had always been those wide, dark tracts of the human soul, which one had been used to call the subconsciousness, though they might perhaps be better called the superconsciousness, since from them sometimes emanates a know-ingness beyond anything of which the conscious intelligence is capable, and giving rise to the hypothesis that there may subsist connexions and associations between the lowest and least illumined regions of the individual soul and a wholly knowing All-soul. The province of the subconscious,"occult" in the proper sense of the word, very soon shows itself to be occult in the narrower sense as well, and forms one of the sources whence flow the phenomena we have agreed to characterize But that is not all. Whoever recognizes a symptom of organic disease as an effect of the conscious soul-life of forbidden and hystericized emotions, recognizes the creative force of the psychical within the material - a force which one is inclined to claim as a second source of magic phenomena. Idealist of the pathological, not to say patho-logical idealist, he sees himself at the point of departure of certain trains of thought which will shortly issue in the problem of existence, that is to say in the problem of the relation between spirit and matter. The materialist, son of a philosophy of sheer animal vigour can never be dissuaded from explaining spirit as a mere phosphorescent product of matter; whereas the idealist, proceed-ing from the principle of creative hysteria, is inclined, and very readily resolved, to answer the question of primacy in the exactly opposite sense. Take it all in all, there is here nothing less than the old strife over which was first, the chicken or the egg - a strife which assumes its extraordinary complexity from the fact / Page 655 / that no egg is thinkable except one laid by a hen, and no hen that has not crept out of a previously postulated egg.
Well then, it was such matters as these that Dr. Krokowski discussed in his lectures. He came upon organically, legitimately - that fact cannot be over-emphasized. We will even add that he had already begun to treat of them before the arrival of Ellen Brand upon the scene of action, and the progress of matters into the empirical and experimental stage.
Who was Ellen Brand? We had almost forgotten that our readers do not know her, so familiar to us is the name. Who was she? Hardly anybody,at first glance. A sweet young thing of nineteen years a flaxen haired Dane,…"
"…Now this little Fraulein Brand, this friendly-natured little Danish bicycle-rider and stoop shouldered young counter jumper, had things about her, of which no one could have dreamed,…"
"…and these it became Dr. Krokowski's affair to lay bare in all their extraordinariness.
The learned man received his first hint in the course of a general evening conversation. Various guessing games were being played; hidden objects found by the aid of strains from the piano, which swelled higher when one approached the right spot, and died away when the seeker strayed away on a false scent. Then one person went outside and waited while it was decided what task he should perform; as, exchanging the rings of two selected persons; inviting someone to dance by making three bows before her; taking a / Page 656 / designated book from the shelves and presenting it to this or that person - and more of the same kind. It is worthy of remark that such games had not been the practice among the Bergof guests. Who had introduced them was not afterwards easy to decide;certainly it had not been Elly Brand, yet they had begun since her arrival.
The participants were nearly all old friends of ours, among them Hans Castorp. They showed themselves apt in greater or lesser degree - some of them were entirely incapable. But Elly Brand's talent was soon seen to be surpassing,striking unseemly. Her power of finding hidden articles was passed over with ap-plause and admiring laughter. But when it came to a concerted series of actions they were struck dumb. She did whatever they had covenanted she should do, did it directly she entered the room; with a gentle smile, without hesitation, without the help of music."
"…She had been listening.
She reddened.With a sense of relief at her embarrassment they began in chorus to chide her; but she assured them she had not blushed in that sense. She had not listened, not outside, not at the door, truly, truly she had not!
Not outside not at the door?
"Oh, no" - she begged their pardon. She had listened after she came back in the room she could not help it.
How not help it?
Something whispered to her, she said it whispered and told her what to do, softly but quite clearly and distinctly.
Obviously that was an admission. In a certain sense she was aware, she had confessed, that she had cheated. She should have said beforehand that she was no good to play such a game, if she had the advantage of being whispered to . A competition loses all sense if one of the competitors has unnatural advantages over the others.In a sporting sense, she was straightway disqualified - but disqualified in a way that made chills run up and down their backs. With one voice they called on Dr.Krokowski, they ran to fetch him and he came."
Page 657 / " …He asked questions and they told him. Ah there she was - come my child, is it true, what they are telling me?And he laid his hand on her head, as scarcely anyone could resist doing. Here was much ground for interest, none at all for consternation…"
"…Immediately there-after he expressed his opinion that everything was in perfect order, and sent the overwrought company off to the evening cure, with the exception of Elly Brand, with whom he said he wished to have a little chat
A little chat. Quite so. But nobody felt easy at the word, it was just the sort of word Krokowski the merry comrade used by preference, and it gave them cold shivers…"
Like everybody else, Hans Ca-storp had at his time of life, heard this and that about the mys-teries of nature, or the supernatural.
"… But the world of the supernatural, though theoretically and objectively he had recognised its existence, had never come close to him, he had never had any practical experience of it.
Page 658 "… But the "placet experiri"planted in Hans Castorp's mind by one who would surely and re-soundingly have reprobated any experimentation at all in this field, was planted firmly enough. By little and little his morality and his curiosity approached and overlapped, or had probably always done so; the pure curiosity of inquiring youth on its travels, which had already brought him pretty close to the forbidden field,what time he tasted the mystery of personality, and for which he had even claimed the justification that it too was almost military in character, in that it did not weakly avoid the forbidden, when it presented itself. Hans Castorp came to the final resolve not to avoid, but to stand his ground if it came to more developments in the case of Ellen Brand.
Dr Krokowski had issued a strict prohibition against any fur-ther experimentation on the part of the laity upon Fraulein Brand' mysterious gifts. He had pre-empted the child for his scientific use, held sittings with her in his analytical oubliette, hypnotized her, it was reported, in an effort to arouse and discipline her slum-bering potentialities, to make researches into her previous psychic life. Hermine Kleefeld, who mothered and patronized the child, tried to do the same; and under the seal of secrecy a certain num-ber of facts were ascertained, which under the same seal she spread throughout the house, even unto the porter's lodge.She learned for example, that he who - or that which - whispered the answers into the little one's ear at games was called Holger. This Holger was the departed and etherealized spirit of a young man, the familiar, something like the guardian angel, of little Elly."
Page 659 "…It was learned further, that from her childhood up Ellen had had visions, though at widely separated intervals of time; visible and invisible…."
Page 660 "…Hans Castorp, when Frauleinl Kleefeld related this to him, ex-pressed the view that there was some sort of sense in it: the apparition here, the death there - after all, they did hang together.And he consented to be present at a spiritualistic sitting,a table tipping, glass-moving game which they had determined to undertake with Ellen Brand, behind Dr Kronowski's back, and in defiance of his jealous prohibition.
A small and select group assembled for the purpose, their theatre being Fraulein Kleefeld's room. Besides the hostess, Fraulein Brand, and Hans Castorp, there was only Frau Stohr, Fraulein Levi, Herr Albin, the Czech Wenzel,and Dr.Ting-Fu. In the evening, on the stroke of ten, they gathered privily, and in whispers mustered the apparatus Hermine had provided, consisting of a medium-sized round table without a cloth, placed in the centre of the room, with a wine glass upside-down upon it, the foot in the air. Round the edge of the table, at regular intervals, were placed twenty-six little bone counters, each with a letter of the alphabet written on it in pen and ink.Fraulein Kleefeld served tea, which was gratefully received, as Frau Stohr and Fraulein Levi,despite the harmlessness of the undertaking, complained of cold feet and palpitations. Cheered by the tea, they took their places about the table, in the rosy twilight dispensed by the pink-shaded table-lamp, as Fraulein Kleefeld, in concession to the mood of the gath-ering, had put out the ceiling light; and each of them laid a finger of his right hand lightly on the foot of the wineglass. This was the prescribed technique.They waited for the glass to move.
That should happen with ease ,The top of the table was smooth, the rim of the glass well ground, the
pressure of the tremulous fingers, however lightly laid on, certainly unequal, some of it being exerted
vertically, some rather sidewise, and probably in sufficient strength to cause the glass finally to move from its posi-tion in the centre of the table. On the periphery of its field it would come in contact with the marked
counters ; and if the letters on these, when put together, made words that conveyed any sort of sense, the
resultant phenomena would be complex and contaminate, a mixed product of conscious, half-conscious,
and unconscious elements; the actual desire and pressure of some, to whom the wish was father to the act,
whether or not they were aware of what they did ; and the secret acquiescence of some dark stratum in the soul of the generality, a common if subterranean effort toward seemingly strange experiences, in which the sup- /
Page 661 / pressed self of the individual was more or less involved, most strongly, of course, that of little Elly. This they all knew be- forehand - Hans Castorp even blurted out something of the sort ,after his fashion, as they sat and waited. The ladies palpitation and cold extremities the forced hilarity of the men, arose from their knowledge that they were come together in the night to embark on an unclean traffic with their own natures, a fearsome prying into unfamiliar regions of themselves, and that they were awaiting the appearance of those illusory or half-realities which we call magic. It was almost entirely for form's sake' and came about quite conventionally, that they asked the spirits of the departed to speak to them through the movement of the glass. Herr Albin offered to be spokesman and deal with such spirits as mani-fested themselves - he had already had a little experience at seances.
Twenty minutes or more went by. The whisperings had run dry, the first tension relaxed. They supported
their right arms at the elbow with their left hands. The Czech Wenzel was almost dropping off. Ellen Brand
rested her finger lightly on the glass and directed her pure, childlike gaze away into the rosy light from the
table lamp.
Suddenly the glass tipped, knocked,and ran away from under their hands. They had difficulty in keeping
their fingers on it. It pushed over to the very edge of the table, ran along it for a space, then slanted back nearly to the middle; tapped again and remained quiet
They were all startled ; favourably, yet with some alarm. Frau Stohr whimpered that she would like to stop, but they told her she should have thought of that before, she must just keep quiet now. Things seemed in train. They stipulated that, in order to answer yes or no the glass need not run to the letters, but might give one or two knocks instead.
Is there an Intelligence present? Herr Albin asked, severly directing his gaze over their heads into vacancy. After some hesitation, the glass tipped and said yes.
" What is your name?" Herr Albin asked, almost gruffly, and emphasized his energetic speech by shaking his head.
The glass pushed off. It ran with resolution from one point to another, executing a zig zag by returning each time a little distance towards the centre of the table. It visited H, O,and L, then seemed exhausted; but pulled itself together again and sought out the G, and E, and the R. .Just as they thought. It was Holger in person, the spirit Holger, who understood such matters…"
Page 662 "…He was there, floating in the air, above the heads of the little circle. What should they do with him? A certain diffidence possessed them, they took counsel behind there hands, what they were to ask him.
Herr Albin decided to question him about his position and occupation in life, and did so, as before, severely, with frowning brows; as though he were cross-examining counsel.
The glass was silent awhile. Then it staggered over to the P, zigzagged and returned to O. Great suspense. Dr. Ting-Fu gig-gled and said Holger must be a poet. Frau Stohr began to laugh hysterically; which the glass appeared to resent, for after indi-cating the E it stuck and went no further. However it seemed fairly clear that Dr.Ting-Fu was right.
What the deuce, so Holger was a poet? The glass revived, and superfluously, in apparent pridefulness, rapped yes. A lyric poet, Fraulein Kleefeld asked? She said ly-ric, as Hans Castorp in- voluntarily noted. Holger was disinclined to specify. He gave no new answer, merely spelled out again, this time quickly and un-hesitatingly, the word poet, adding the T he had left off before.
Good, then a poet. The constraint increased. It was a con-straint that in reality had to do with manifestations on the part of their own inner, their subjective selves, but which, because of the illusory, half-actual conditions of these manifestations, referred itself to the objective and external. Did Holger feel at home, and content, in his present state? Dreamily the glass spelled out tranquil. Ah tranquil. It was not a word one would have hit upon oneself, but after the glass spelled it out, they found it well chosen and probable. And how long had Holger been in this tranquil state? The answer to this was again something one would never have thought of, and dreamily answered;it was "A hastening while" Very good. As a piece of ventriloquistic poesy from the Beyond, Hans Castorp, in particular, found it capital. A "hastening while" was the time element Hol-ger lived in: and of course had to answer as it were in parables, having very likely forgotten how to use earthly terminology and standards of exact measurement. Fraulein Levi confessed her curi-osity to know how he looked, or had looked, more or less. Had he been a handsome youth? Herr Albin said she might ask him her-self, he found the request beneath his dignity. So she asked if the spirit had fair hair.
" Beautiful, brown, brown curls" the glass responded, deib-erately spelling out the word brown twice. There was much merri- /
Page 663 / ment over this. The ladies said they were in love with him. They kissed their hands at the ceiling. Dr. Ting-Fu, giggling said Mister Holger must be rather vain.
Ah, what a fury the glass fell into! It ran like mad about the table, quite at random, rocked with rage, fell over and rolled into Frau Stohr's lap who stretched out her arms and looked down at it pallid with fear. They apologetically conveyed it back to its station, and rebuked the chinaman. How had he dared to say such a thing - did he see what his indiscretion had led to? Suppose Hol-ger was up and off in his wrath, and refused to say another word! They addressed themselves to the glass with the extreme of cour-tesy. Would Holger not make up some poetry for them? He had said he was a poet, before he went to hover in the hastening while.Ah, how they all yearned to hear him versify! They would love it so!
And lo, the good glass yielded and said yes! Truly there was something placable and good-humoured about the way it tapped. And then Holger the spirit began to poetize, and kept it up, circumstantially, without pausing for thought, for dear knows how long . It seemed impossible to stop him. And what a suprising poem it was, this ventriloquist effort, delivered to the admiration of the circle - stuff of magic, and shoreless as the sea of which it largely dealt. Sea-wrack in heaps and bands along the narrow strand of the far flung bay; an islanded coast, girt by steep, cliffy dunes. Ah see the dim green distance faint and die into eternity, while beneath broad veils of mist in dull carmine and milky radiancethe summer sun delays! to sink. No word can utter how and when the watery mirror turned from silver into untold changeful colour-play, to bright or pale, to spreading, opaline and moonstone gleams or how, mysteriously as it came, the voiceless magic died away. The sea slumbered yet the last traces of the sunset linger above and beyond. Until deep in the night it had not grown dark: a ghostly twilight reigns in the pine forrest on the downs, bleaching the sand until it looks like snow. Asimulated winter forest all in silence, save where an owl wings rustling flight. Let us stray here at this hour - so soft the sand beneath our tread , so sublime, so mild the night! Far beneath us the sea respires slowly and murmers a long whisperings in its dream. Does it crave thee to see it again? Step forth to the sallow, glacierlike cliffs of the dunes, and climb quite up into the softness, that runs coolly into thy shoes.The land falls harsh and bushy steeply down to the pebbly shore, and still the parting remnants of the day haunt the edge of the vanishing sky. Lie down here in the sand! How cool as death it is, /
Page 664 / how soft as silk, as flour! It flows in a colourless, thin stream from thy hand and makes a dainty little mound besides thee. Doest thou recognize it this tiny flowing ? It is the soundless, tiny stream through the hour-glass, that solemn, fragile toy that adorns the hermit's hut. An open book, a skull, and in its slender frame the double glass, holding a little sand, taken from eternity, to prolong here as time, its troubling, solemn, mysterious essence…
Thus Holger the spirit and his lyric improvisation, ranging with weird flights of thought from the familiar
sea-shore to the cell of a hermit and the tools of his mystic contemplation. And there was more; more, human and divine, involved in daring and dreamlike terminology - over which the members of the little circle puzzled endlessly as they spelled it out ;
Scarcely finding time for hurried though rapturous applause, so swiftly did the glass zigzag back and forth, so swiftly the words rollon and on. There was no dis-tant prospect of a period, even at the end of an hour. The glass improvised inexhaustably of the pangs of birth and the first kiss of lovers; the crown of sorrows, the fatherly goodness of God; plunged into the mysteries of creation, lost itself in other times and lands, in interstellar space;even mentioned the Chaldeans and the zodiac; and would most certainly have gone on all night, if the conspiritors had not taken their fingers from the glass, and expressing their gratitude to Holger, told him that must suffice them for the time, it had been wonderful beyond their wildest dreams, it was an everlasting pity there had been no one at hand to take it down, for now it must inevitably be forgotten, yes alas, they had already forgotten most of it, thanks to its quality which made it hard to retain, as dreams are. Next time they must ap-point an amanuesis to take it down, and see how it would look in black and white, and read connectedly. For the moment how-ever, and before Holger withdrew to the tranquillity of his hasten-ing while, it would be better, and certainly most amiable of him, if he would consent to answer a few practical questions. They scarcely as yet knew what, but would he at least be in principle inclined to do so, in his great amiability?
The answer was yes. But now they discovered a great perplex-ity what should they ask? It was as in the fairy- story, when the fairy or elf grants one question, and there is danger of letting the precious advantage slip through the fingers. There was much in the world much of the future, that seemed worth knowing, yet it was so difficult to choose. At length, as no one seemed able to settle, Hans Castorp, with his finger on the glass, supporting his cheek on his fist, said he would like to know what was to be / Page 665 / the actual length of his stay up here, instead of the three weeks originally fixed.
Very well since they thought of nothing better, let the spirit out of the fullness of his knowledge answer this chance query. The glass hesitated then pushed off. It spelled out something very queer, which none of them succeeded in fathoming, it made the word , or the syllable Go, and then the word Slanting and then something about Hans Castorp's room. That was to say, through number thirty-four. What was the sense of that"
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"That was to say, through number
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What was the sense of that"
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"That was to say, through number
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"That was to say, through number
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THE
LORD BLESS THEE AND KEEP THEE THE LORD
MAKE HIS FACE TO SHINE UPON
THEE AND BE GRACIOUS UNTO THEE
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IN THE NAME OF
GOD
THE COMPASSIONATE THE MERCIFUL
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"That was to say, through number
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GOD
SAID
LET THERE BE LIGHT AND THERE WAS LIGHT AND THE DARKNESS COMPREHENDED IT NOT
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Thomas Mann
1855-1955.
"Very well since they thought of nothing better, let the spirit out of the fullness of his knowledge answer this chance query. The glass hesitated then pushed off. It spelled out something very queer, which none of them succeeded in fathoming, it made the word , or the syllable Go, and then the word Slanting and then something about Hans Castorp's room. That was to say, through number
thirty-four.
What was the sense of that" ..."
HOW MANY TIMES SHALL I FORGIVE MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Thomas Mann
1855-1955.
TURNING
PAGE
9
Page10
"Number34"
CHAPTER
ENDS PAGE
18
Thomas Mann
1855-1955.
Page 417
PREACH
MATHEMATICS
"I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with
the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh."
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THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Thomas Mann
1855-1955.
FOREWORD
"THE STORY of Hans Castorp, which we would here set forth, not on his own account, for in him the reader will make acquaintance with a simple-minded though pleasing young man, but for the sake of the story itself, which seems to us highly worth telling- though it must needs be borne in mind, in Hans Castorp's behalf, that It is his story, and not every story happens to everybody- this story, we say, belongs to the long ago; is already, so to speak, covered with historic mould, and unquestionably to be presented in the tense best suited to a narrative out of the depth of the past.
That should be no drawback to a story, but rather the reverse. Since histories must be in the past, then the more past the better, it would seem, for them in their character as histories, and for him, the teller of them, rounding wizard of times gone by. With this story, moreover, it stands as it does to-day with human beings, not least among them writers of tales: it is far older than its years; its age may not be measured by length of days, nor the weight of time on its head reckoned by the rising or setting of suns. In a word, the degree of its antiquity has noways to do with the pas-sage of time - in which statement the author intentionally touches upon the strange and questionable double nature of that riddling element.
But we would not wilfully obscure a plain matter. The exag-gerated pastness of our narrative is due to its taking place before the epoch when a certain crisis shattered its way through life and consciousness and left a deep chasm behind. It takes place - or, rather, deliberately to avoid the present tense, it took place, and had taken place - in the long ago, in the old days, the days of the world before the Great War, in the beginning of which so much began that has scarcely yet left off beginning. Yes, it took place before that; yet not so long before. Is not the pastness of the past: the profounder, the completer, the more legendary, the more im- mediately before the present it falls? More than that, our story has, of its own nature, something of the legend about it now and again
Page xii
"We shall tell it at length, thoroughly, in detail - for when did a narrative seem too long or too short by reason of the actual timeor space it took up? We do not fear being called meticulous,in-clining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting
Not all in a minute, then, will the narrator be finished with the story of our Hans. The seven days of a week will not suffice, no,nor seven months either. Best not too soon make too plain how much mortal time must pass over his head while he sits spun round in his spell. Heaven forbid it should be seven years!
Page xii
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HANS-CASTORP |
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Page 14
Thomas Mann
1875 - 1955
IN THE RESTAURANT
"Joachim paid scant honour to the meal. He was tired of the cooking, he said; they all were, up here, and it was customary to grumble at the food. If one had to sit up here lor ever and a day-But, on the other hand, he partook of the wine with gusto, not to say abandon; and repeatedly, though with careful avoidance of emotional language, expressed his joy at having some-body here with whom one could have a little rational conversa-tion.
"Yes, it's first-rate you've come," he said, and his gentle voice betrayed some feeling. "I must say it is really an event for me - it is certainly a change; anyhow, a break in the everlasting monot-ony"
"But time must go fast, living up here," was Hans Castorp's view.
"Fast and slow, as you take it," answered Joachim. "It doesn't go at all, I tell you. You can't call it time-and you can't call it living either! "he said with a shake of the head, and fell to his glass again.
Hans Castorp drank too, though his face was like fire. Yet he was still cold, and felt a curious restlessness in his limbs, at once pleasurable and troubling. His words fell over each other, he often mis-spoke and passed it over with a deprecating wave. Joachim too was in a lively humour, and their conversation continued in a still freer and more convivial vein after the humming, tapping lady had got up suddenly and left the room. They gesticulated with their forks as they ate, nodded, shrugged their shoulders, talked with their mouths full. Joachim wanted to hear about Hamburg and brought the conversation round to the proposed regulation of the Elbe.
"Epoch-making," said Hans Castorp. "Epoch-making for the development of our shipping. Can't be over-estimated. We've budgeted fifty millions for immediate expenditure and you maybe sure We know what we're about. "
But notwithstanding all the importance he attacheq to the pro-jected improvements he jumped away from .the theme and de- manded that Joachim tell him more about life "up here" and about the guests - which the latter straightway did, being only too pleased to be able to unbosom himself . He had to repeat the story of the corpses sent down by bob-sleigh, and vouch for its truth. Hans Castorp being taken by another fit of laughing, his cousin laughed too, with hearty enjoyent, and told other funny things to add fuel to their merriment. There was a lady sitting at his table, named Frau Stohr, the wife of a Cannstadt musician; a / Page15 / rather serious case, she was, and the most ignorant creature he had ever seen. She said diseased for deceased, quite seriously, and she called Krokowski the Asst. And you had to take it all in without cracking a smile. She was a regular gossip - most people were, up here - and published it broadcast that another lady, a certain Frau Iltis, carried a " steriletto " on her person. "That is exactly what .she called it, isn't that priceless? " They lolled in their chairs, they flung themselves back and laughed so hard that they shook; and they began to hiccup at nearly the same time.
Now and then Joachim's face would cloud over and he would remember his lot.
"Yes, we sit here and laugh," he said, with a long face, his words interrupted by the heaving of his diaphragm, "we sit here and laugh, but there's no telling when I shall get away. When Behrens says half a year, you can make up your mind it will be more. It is hard, isn't it? - you just tell me if you don't think it is pretty hard on me. I had already been accepted, I could have taken my exams next month. And now I have to drool about with a thermometer stuck in my mouth, and count the howlers of this ignorant Frau Stohr, and watch the time slipping away. A year is so important at our age. Down below, one goes through so many changes, and makes so much progress, in a single year of life. And I have to stag-nate up here - yes, just stagnate like a filthy puddle; it isn't too crass a comparison."
Strange to say, Hans Castorp's only reply to all this was a query as to whether it was possible to get porter up here; when Joachim looked at him, in some astonishment, he perceived that his cousin was overcome with sleep, that in fact he was actually nodding.
" But you are going to sleep! "said Joachim. " Come along, it is time we both went to bed."
" You can't call it time,'" quoth Hans Castorp, thick-tongued. He went with his cousin, rather bent and stiff in the knees, like a man bowed to the earth with fatigue. However, in the dimly lighted corridor he rulled himself sharply together on hearing his cousin say: "There s Krokowski sitting there. I think I'll just have to present you, as briefly as possible."
Dr. Krokowski sat in the oright light at the fire-place of one of the reception-rooms, close to the folding doors. He was reading a paper, and got up as the young people approached.
Joachim, in military position, heels together, said: "Herr Doc-tor, may I present my cousin Castorp from Hamburg? He has just arrived."
Dr. Krokowski greeted the new inmate with a jovial and robust / Page 16 / heartiness, as who should say that with him all formaIity was superfluous, and only jocund mutual confidence in place. He was about thirty-five years old, broad-shouldered and fleshy, much: shorter than either of the youths before him, so that he had to tip back his head to look them in the face. He was unusually pale, of a translucent, yes, phosphorescent pallor, that was further ac-centuated by the dark ardour of his eyes, the blackness of his brows, and his rather long, full whisker, which ended in two points and already showed some white threads. He had on a black double-breasted, somewhat worn sack suit; black, open-worked sandal-like shoes over grey woollen socks, and a soft turn-down collar, such as Hans Castorp had previously seen worn only by a photographer in Danzig, which did, in fact, lend a certain stamp of the studio to Dr. Krokowski's. appearance. Smiling warmly and showmg his yellow teeth m his beard, he shook the young man by the hand, and said in a baritone voice, with rather a foreign drawl: "Wel-come to our midst, Herr Castorp! May you get quickly acclimatized and feel yourself at home among us! do you come as a patient, may I ask? "
It was touching to see Hans Castorp labour to master his drowsi-ness and be polite. It annoyed him to be in such bad form and with the self-consciousness of youth he read signs of mdulgent amusement in the warmth of the Assistant's manner. He replied, mentioning his examinations and his three weeks visit, and ended by saying he was, thank God, perfectly healthy.
"Really? " asked Krokowski, putting his head teasingly on one side. His smile grew broader. 'Then you are a phenomenon worthy of study. I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being. What were the examinations you have just passed, if I may ask? "
"I am an engineer, Herr Doctor," said Hans Castorp with modest dignity.
" Ah, an engineer! "Dr. Krokowski's smile retreated as it were, lost for the moment something of its genial warmth. " A splendid calling. And so you will not require any attention while you are here, either physical or psychical? "
" Oh, no, thank you ever so much," said Hans Castorp, and al-most drew back a step as he spoke.
At that Dr. Krokowski's smile burst forth triumphant; he shook the young man's hand afresh and cried briskly: "Well, sleep well, Herr Castorp, and rejoice in the fullness of your per-fect health; sleep well, and auf Wiedersehen!" With which he dismissed the cousins and returned to his paper.
Page 17 The lift had stopped. running, so they climbed the stairs; in silence, somewhat taken aback by the encounter with Dr. Krokowski. Joachim went with his cousin to number thirty-four,
. where the lame porter had already deposited the luggage of the new arrival. They talked for another quarter-hour while Hans Castorp unpacked his night and toilet things, smoking a large, Inild cigarette the while. A cigar would have been too much for him this evening - a fact which impressed him as odd indeed.
"He looks guite a personality," he said, blowing out the smoke. He is as pale as wax. But dear me, what hideous footgear he wears! Grey woollen socks, and then those sandals! Was he really offended at the end, do you think? "
"He is rather touchy," admitted Joachim. "You ought not to have refused the treatment so brusquely, at least not the psychical. He doesn't like to have people get out of it. He doesn't take much stock in me because I don't confide in him enough. But every now and then I tell him a dream I've had, so he can have something to analyse."
" Then I certainly did offend him," Hans Castorp said fretfully, for it annoyed him to give offence. His weariness rushed over him with renewed force at the thought.
" Good-night," he said; " I'm falling over."
At eight o'clock I'll come fetch you to breakfast," Joachim said, and went.
Hans Castorp made only a cursory toilet for the night. Hardly had he put out the bedside light when sleep overcame him; but he started up again, remembering that in that. bed, the day be-fore yesterday, someone had died. "That wasn't the first time either," he said to himself, as though the thought were reassur-ing. "It is a regular death-bed, a common death-bed." And he fell asleep.
No sooner had he gone off, however, than he began to dream, and dreamed almost without stopping until next morning. Prin-cipally he saw his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, in a strange, dislo-cated attitude on a bob-sled, riding down a steep course. He had a phosphorescent pallor like Dr. Krokowski, ana in front of him. sat the gentleman rider and steered. The gentleman rider was in. distinct, like someone one has heard cough, but never seen.
It's all the same to us up here," remarked the dislocated Joachim; and then it was he and not the gentleman rider who was coughing in that horribly pulpy manner. Hans Castorp wept bitterly to hear, and then perceived that he must run to the chemist's to get some cold cream. But Frau litis, with a pointed snout, sat / Page 18 /by the road-side with 'somed1ing in her hand, which must be her "steriletto," but was obviously nothing else than a safety-razor. This made Hans Castorp go from tears to laughing; and thus he was tossed back and forth among varying emotions, until the dawn came through his half-open balcony door and wakened him."
thirty-five"
Page 17 / The lift had stopped. running, so they climbed the stairs; in silence, somewhat taken aback by the encounter with Dr. Krokowski. Joachim went with his cousin to number
thirty-four,"
35 3 + 5 = 8 . . . 34 3 + 4 = 7
24 + 30
ISISIS
54
FIFTYFOUR
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CHILDREN OF THE LIGHT
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CITY OF REVELATION
John Michell
1972
CHAPTER
SEVEN
3168
THE PERIMETER OFTHETEMPLE
PAGE
77
OF ALL THE CANONICAL NUMBERS THE MOST NOTABLE IS
3168
PAGE
78
3168
IN PLATOS CITY
"A REMARKABLE USE OF THE NUMBER
3168
OCCURS IN PLATO'S ACCOUNT IN BOOK V OF LAWS OF THE MYSTICAL DIMENSIONS OF THE PERFECT CITY.
THROUGHOUT HIS WORK PLATO MAKES GUARDED REFERENCETO A SECRET CANON OF NUMBERS THAT APPLIES UNIVERSALLY TO TO EVERY ASPECT OF HUMAN LIFE AND ACTIVITY, INCLUDING GOVERNMENT, ASTRONOMY, ACOUSTICS, KINETICS, PLANE AND SOLID GEOMETRY AND DIVINATION. LINEAR MEASUREMENTS, AREAS AND VOLUMES ARE OBVIOSLY INCOMMMENSURABLE, BUT PLATO DECLARES THAT THERE ARE CERTAIN NUMBERS THAT LINK THESE WITH EACH OTHER AND WITH ALL PHENOMENA CAPABLEOFBEING MEASURED. AS AN EXAMPLE OF THESE NUMBERS, THE STUDY OF WHICH PLATO RECOMMENDS AS THE MOST SANCTIFYING OF ALL PURSUITS, HE GIVES
5040."
5 + 4
ISISIS
9
IGNORE THE ZEROS HEROES
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THE SIRIUS MYSTERY
Robert Temple
1998
Page 506
916th
anniversary"
"...the Academy of Athens, the Academy founded by Plato, lasted more than
nine
centuries
9 + 1 + 6
is
16
1+6
is
7
9 x 1 x 6
ISISIS
54
THE
MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Thomas Mann
1875 - 1955
HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE
Page 664
Hans Castorp, with his finger on the glass, supporting his cheek on his fist, said he would like to know what was to be / Page 665 / the actual length of his stay up here, instead of the three weeks originally fixed.
Very well, since they thought of nothing better, let the spirit out of the fullness of his knowledge answer this chance query. The glass hesitated, then pushed off. It spelled out something very queer, which none of them succeeded in fathoming, it made the word, or the syllable go, and then the word Slanting and then something about Hans Castorp's room. The whole seemed to be a direction to go SLanting through Bans Castorp's room, that was to say, through number thirty-four. What was the sense of that? As they sat puzzling and shaking their heads, suddenly there came the heavy thump of a fist on the door.
They all jumped. Was it a surprise? Was Dr. Krokowski stand- ing without come to break up the forbidden session? They looked up guiltily, expecting the betrayed one to enter. But then came a crashing knock on the middle of the the table, as if to testify that the first knock too had come from the inside and not the outside of the room.
They accused Herr Albin of perpetrating this rather contempt-ible jest, but he denied it on his honour; and even without his word they all felt fairly certain no one of their circle was guilty. Was it Holger, then? They looked at Elly, suddenly struck by her silence. She was leaning back in her chair, with drooping wrists and finger-tips poised on the table-edge, her head bent on one shoulder, her eyebrows raised, her little mouth drawn down so that it looked even smaller, with a tiny smile that had something both silly and sly about it, and gazing into space with vacant, childlike blue eyes. They called to her, but she gave no sign of consciousness. And suddenly the night-table light went out.
Went out? Frau Stohr, beside herself, made great outcry, for she had heard the switch turned. The light, then, had not gone out, but been put out, by a hand - a hand which one characterized afar off in calling it a " strange "hand. Was it Holger's? Up to then he had been so mild, so tractable, so poetic - but now he seemed to degenerate into clownish practical jokes. Who knew that a hand which could so roundly thump doors and tables, and knav-ishly turn off lights, might not next catch hold of someone's throat? They called for -matches, for pocket torches. Friiuleiri Levi shrieked out that someone had pulled her front hair. Frau Stohr made no bones of calling aloud on God in her distress: "O Lord, forgive me this once! " she moaned, and whimpered for mercy in-stead of justice, well knowing she had tempted hell. It was Dr. Ting-Fu who hit on the sound idea of turning on the ceiling light."
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
"Page 465 / 466
"They talked of humanity,"of nobility - but it was / the spirit alone that distinguished man, as a creature largely di-vorced from nature,'largely opposed to her in feeling, from all other forms of organic life. In man's spirit, then, resided his true nobility and his merit - in his state of disease, as it were; in a word, the more ailing he was, by so much was he the more man. The genius of disease was more human than the genius of health. How, then, could one who posed as the friend of man shut his eyes to these fundamental truths concerning man's h\tmanity? Herr Set- tembrini had progress ever on his lips: was he aware that all prog- ress, in so far as there was such a thing, was due to illness, and to illness alone? In other words, to genius, which was the same thing? Had not the normal, since time was, lived on the achievements of the abnormal? Men consciously and voluntarily descended into disease and madness, in search of knowledge which, acquired by fanaticism, would lead back to health; after the possession and use of it had ceased to be conditioned by that heroic and abnormal act of sacrifice. That was the true death on the cross, the true Atone-ment.
TRUE
ATONEMENT
AT
ONE
MENTALLY
CANST THOU HEAR
ME
O
NAMUH
AWAKEN THOU ART TRULY
A
LAZY
LAZARUS
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WAKE
UP
LAZY ARE YOU
O
LAZARUS
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U R A LAZY LAZARUS
BUT
SEE SO LOTH TO DO SO
THE SLOTH
STIRS
AT LAST THE SHE AS IN HE THAT IS THEE
WAKETH
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A SUN RISING
LAZARUS
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CITY OF REVELATION
John Michel
1972
"Suddenly the mythic rhythm is broken. Something happens, as the result of which the primal separation of heaven and earth is re- peated in the departure of the gods. The cause of the trouble is doubtless still to be found in human nature, which provides the one constant factor throughout history and was therefore the chief object of study in ancient civilisations, as it will necessarily become in our own. As all philosophers have realised, the human condition is basically unsatisfactory. Men are awkwardly placed, deprived of the comforts of unconsciousness, yet not intelligent enough to com-prehend fully the circumstances of existence. It is possible for the soul to experience a more essential reality beyond the shadow world of normal perception, but such experience is achieved at the ex- pense of the body, through asceticism, intoxication or hard and obsessive study. Nor are the dangers in the pursuit of knowledge merely physical. All who study the cabalistic science and the geo-metry and numbers of creation are attacked by melancholy, some-times fatally, the suicide rate among cabalists being notoriously high. The point is clearly made in Durer's Melancolia. The garden of paradise, symbol of the ultimate perfection of human consciousness, has many delightful inhabitants which are at the same time danger-ous beasts to whoever fails to recognise their nature and function; and of these the most treacherous is the mercurial old serpent of wisdom, that leads men on in the search of the treasure of which it is itself the venomous custodian. In every age there are those prepared to stake fortune and sanity on a quest which, if too rigorously pursued, may lead to loss of both, and there is no reason to suppose that the first men were more content with their limitations than their de-scendants have been, particularly at a time when the advantages enjoyed by the gods were apparent to all. The mythological accounts of jealousy and warfare between men and gods are eternally true, for the situation they describe is ever renewed from the fact that human ambition for knowledge is more highly developed than are the means to satisfy it; but they may also be true in the most literal sense as records of the first and decisive' episode in the human tragedy, the loss of direct contact with extraterrestrial life."
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JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS
Thomas Mann
1875 - 1955
PRELUDE
DESCENT INTO HELL
Page 3
Bottomless indeed, if - and perhaps only if - the past we mean is the past merely of the life of mankind, that riddling essence of which our own normally unsatisfied and quite abnormally wretched ex-istences form a part; whose mystery, of course, includes our own and is the alpha and omega of all our questions, lending burning immediacy to all we say, and significance to all our striving. For the deeper we sound, the further down into the lower world of the past we probe and press, the more do we find that the earliest founda-tions of humanity, its history and culture, reveal themselves un-fathomable. No matter to what hazardous lengths we let out our .line they still withdraw again, and further, into the depths. Again and further are the right words, for the unresearchable plays a kind of mocking game with our researching ardours; it offers ap-parent holds and goals, behind which, when we have gained them, new reaches of the past still open out - as happens to the coastwise voyager, who finds no end to his journey, for behind each headland of clayey dune he conquers, fresh headlands and new distances lure him on.
Thus there may exist provisional origins, which practically and in fact form the first beginnings of the particular tradition held by a given community, folk or communion of faith; and memory, though sufficiently instructed that the depths have not actually been plumbed, yet nationally may find reassurance in some primitive point of time and, personally and historically speaking, come to rest there.
Young Joseph, for instance, son of Jacob and the lovely, too-soon- departed Rachel; Joseph, living when Kurigalzu the Cassite reigned at Babel, Lord of the Four Regions, King of Sumeria and Akkadia, greatly comfortable to the heart of Bel-Marduk, a ruler both luxuri-ous and stern, the curls of whose beard stood ranged in such perfect rows that they looked like a division of well-furnished shield-bearers; while at Thebes, in the land whIch Joseph was used to call Mizraim, also Kemt, the Black, His Sanctity the good God, called Amun-is-satisfied, third of this name, the sun's very son, beamed on the horizon / Page 4 / of his palace and blinded the enraptured eyes of his dust-born sub-jects; when Asshur increased by the might of its gods, and on the great shore route from Gaza up to the passes of the cedar mountains the royal caravans went to and fro, bearing gifts in lapis-lazuli and stamped gold, between the court of the Land of the Rivers and Pharaoh's court; when in the cities of the Amorites, at Beth Shan, Ajalon, Ta'anach, Urushalim, they served Astarte, while at Shechem and Beth-lahma the seven days' wailing went up for the true Son, the dismembered one, and at Gebal, the City of the Book, El was adored, who needed no temple or rite; Joseph, then, living in that district of the land of Canaan which in Egypt is called the Upper Retenu, in his father's tents at Hebron, shaded by terebinths and evergreen oaks, a youth famed for his charm and charming especially by right from his mother, who had been sweet and lovely like to the moon when it is full and like Ishtar's star when it swims mildly in the clear sky; but also armed from the father's side with gifts of the spirit and perhaps in a sense excelling even him; Joseph, lastly and in conclusion (for the fifth and the sixth time I name his name, and with gratification, for there is mystery in names, and I will have it that knowledge of his confers power to invoke that once so living and conversable personality, albeit now sunk so deep below the marge of time); Joseph, for his part, regarded a certain town called Uru, in Southern Babylonia, which in his tongue he called Ur Kashdim, Ur of the Chaldees, as the beginning of all things - that is, of all that mattered to him.
Thence, namely, in times long gone by-Joseph was never quite clear how far back they lay - a brooding and inwardly unquiet man, with his wife, whom probably out of tenderness he would call his sister, together with other members of his family, had departed, to do as the moon did, that was the deity of Ur, to wander and to rove, because he found it most right and fitting to his unsatisfied, doubting, yes, tormented state. His removal, which wore an undeniable colour of contumacy, had been connected with certain structures which had impressed him as offensive, and which Nimrod the Mighty, then ruling in Ur, had, if not erected, yet restored and exceedingly in-creased in height..It was the private conviction of the man from Ur that Nimrod had done this less in honour of the divine lights of the firmament to which they were dedicated, than as a bar against dis-persion and as a sky-soaring monument to his own accumulated power. From that power the man from Ur had now escaped, by dis-persing himself, and with his dependents taking to pilgrimages of indeterminate length. The tradition handed down to Joseph varied somewhat as to which had more particularly annoyed the objector: whether the great moon-citadel of Ur, the turreted temple of the god Sin, after whom the whole land of Shinar was named, the same word / Page 5 / appearing in his own region, as for instance in the mountain called Sinai; or that towering house of the sun, E-sagila, the temple of Mar- duk at Babel itself, whose summit Nimrod had exalted to the height of the heavens, and a precise description of which Joseph had re- ceived by word of mouth. There had clearly been much else at which the musing man had taken offence, beginning with that very mighti- ness of Nimrod and
loing on to certain customs and practices which to others had seeme hallowed and unalienable by long tradition but more and more filled his own soul with doubts. And since it is not good to sit still when one's soul smarts with doubt, he had simply put himself in motion.
He reached Harran, city of the way and moon-city of the north in the land of Naharain, where he dwelt many years and gathered recruits, receiving them into close relationship with his own. But it was a relationship which spelt unrest and almost nothing else; a soul-unrest which expressed itself in an unrest of body that had little to do with ordinary light-hearted wanderlust and the adventurous- ness of the free-footed, but was rather the suffering of the hunted and solitary man, whose blood already throbbed with the dark beginnings of oncoming destiny; perhaps the burden of its weight a!1d scope stood in precise relation to his torment and unrest. Thus Harran too, lling as it did within Nimrod's sphere of control, proved but a , station on the way," from which the moon-man eventually set forth again, together with Sarah his sister-wife and all his kin and his and their possessions, to continue as their guide and Mahdi his hegira towards an unknown goal.
So they had reached the west country and the Amurru who dwelt in the land of Canaan, where once the Hittites had been lords; had crossed the country by stages and thrust deep, deep southwards under other suns, into the land of mud, where the water flows the wrong way, unlike the waters of the land of Naharina, and one travelled northwards downstream; where a people stiff with age worshipped its dead, and where for the man of Ur and for his requirements there would have been nothing to seek or to find. Backwards he turned to the westland, the middle land, which lay between Nimrod's do- mains and the land of mud; and in the southern part, not far from the desert, in a mountainous region, where there was little ploughland, but plenty of grazing for his cattle, he acquired a kind of superficial permanence and dwelt and dealt with the inhabitants on friendly terms.
Tradition has it that his god - that god upon whose image his spirit laboured, highest among all the rest, whom alone to serve he was in pride and love resolved, the God of the ages, for whom he sought a name and found none sufficient, wherefore he gave him the plural, calling him, provisionally, Elohim, the Godhead - Elohim, then, had / Page 6 / made him promises as far-reaching as clearly defined, to the effect not only that he, the man from Ur, should become a folk in numbers like the sands of the sea and a blessing unto all peoples, but also that the land wherein he now dwelt as a stranger, and whither Elohim had led him out of Chaldrea, should be to him and to his seed in ever- lasting possession in all its parts - whereby the God of gods had expressly specified the populations and present inhabitants of the land, whose "gates" the seed of the man from Ur should possess. In other words, God had destined these populations to defeat and sub- jection in the interest of the man from Ur and his seed. But all this must be accepted with caution, or at least with understanding. We are dealing with later interpolations deliberately calculated to confirm as the earliest intentions of the divine political situations which had first been established by force. As a matter of fact the moon-wander- er's spirit was by no means of a kind likely to receive or to elicit prom- ises of a political nature. There is no evidence that when he left home he had already thought of the Amurruland as a theatre of his future activities; and the fact that his wanderings also took him through the land of tombs and of the blunt-nosed lion maid would seem to point to the opposite conclusion. But when he left Nimrod's high and mIghty state in his rear, likewise avoiding the greatly estimable kingdom of the double-crowned king of the oasis, and turned westwards :- into a region, that is, whose shattered public life condemned it to impotence and servitude - his conduct does not argue the possession of political vision or of a taste for imperial greatness. What had set him in motion was unrest of the spirit, a nee of God, and if - as there can be no doubt - dispensations were vouchsafed him, they had reference to the irradiations of his personal experience of God, which was of a new kind altogether; and his whole concern from the beginning had been to win for it sympathy and adherence. He suffered; and when he compared the measure of his inward distress with that of the great majority, he drew the conclusion that it was pregnant with the future. Not in vain, so he heard from the newly beheld God, shall have been thy torment and thine unrest; for it shall fructify many souls and make proselytes in numbers like to the sands of the seas; and it shall give impulse to great expansions of life hidden in it as in a seed; and in one word, thou shalt be a blessing. A blessing? It is unlikely that the word gives the true meaning of that which happened to him in his vision and which corresponded to his temperament and to his experience of himself. For the word "blessing" carries with it an idea which but ill describes men of his sort: men, that is, of roving spirit and discomfortable mind, whose novel conception of the deity is destined to make its mark upon the future. The life of men with whom new histories begin can seldom or never be a sheer unclouded blessing; not this it is which their consciousness of self whispers in / Page 7 / 7 their ears. "And thou shalt be a destiny": such is the purer and more precise meaning of the promise, in whatever language it may have been spoken. And whether that destiny might or might not be a blessing is a question the twofold nature of which is apparent from the fact that it can always and without exception be answered in dif-ferent ways - though of course it was always answered in the affirma- tive by the community - continually waxing in numbers and in grace - of those who recognized the true Baal and Adad of the pan-theon in the God who had brought out of Chaldea the man from Or; that community to the existence of which young Joseph traced back his own spiritual and physical being.
SOMETIMES, indeed, he thought of the moon-wanderer as 'his own great-grandfather - though such an idea is to be stelernly excluded from the realms of the possible. He himself was perfectly aware, on the ground of much an varied instruction, that the position was one of far wider bearings. Not so wide, however, that that mighty man of the earth whose boundary stones, adorned with representations of the signs of the zodiac, the man from Ur had put behind him, had actually been Nimrod, the first king on earth, who had begotten Bel of Shinar. No, for according to the tablets, this had been Hammurabi, the Lawgiver, restorer of those citadels of the sun and moon; and when young Josefh put him on a level with that prehistoric Nimrod, it was by a play of thought which most charmingly becomes his spirit but which would be unbecoming and hence forbidden to ours. The same is true of his occasional confusion of the man from Ur with his father's ancestor and his, who had borne the same or a similar name. Between the boy Joseph and the pilgrimage of his ancestor in the spirit and the flesh there lay, according to the system of chronology which his age and sphere rejoiced in, fully twenty generations, or, roughly speaking, six hundred Babylonian years, a period as long as from our time back into the Gothic Middle Ages - as long, and yet not so long either.
True, we have received our mathematical sidereal time handed down to us from ages long before the man from Ur ever set out on his wanderings, and, in like manner, shall we hand it on to our furthest descendants. But even so, the meaning, weight and fullness of earthly time is not everywhere one and the same. Time has uneven measure, despite all the objectivity of the Chaldean chronology. Six hundred years at that time and under that sky did not mean what they mean in our western history. They were a more level, silent, speechless reach; time was less effective, her power to bring about change was both weaker a.nd more restricted in its range - though certainly in / Page 8 / those twenty generations she had produced changes and revolutions of a considerable kind: natural revolutions, even changes in the earth's surface in Joseph's immediate circle, as we know and as he knew too. For where, in his '"day, were Gomorrah, and Sodom, the dwelling- place of Lot of Harran, who had been received into the spiritual com- munity of the man from Ur; where were those voluptuous cities? Lo, the leaden alkaline lake lay there where their unchastity had flour- ished, for the whole region had been swept with a burning fiery flood of pitch and sulphur, so frightful and apparently so destructive of all life that Lot's daughters, timely escaped with their father, though he would have given them up to the lust of the Sodomites instead of certain important guests whom he harboured, went and lay with their father, being under the delusion that save themselves there were none left upon the earth, and out of womanly carefulness for the con-tinuance of the race.
Thus time in its course had left behind it even visible alterations. There had been times of blessing and times of curse, times of fullness and times of dearth, wars and campaigns, changing overlords and new gods. Yet on the whole time then had been more conservatively minded than time now, the frame of Joseph's life, his ways and habits of thought were far more like his ancestors' than ours are like the crusaders'. Memory, resting on oral tradition from generation to generation, was more direct and confiding, it flowed freer, time was a more unified and thus a briefer vista; young Joseph cannot be blamed for vaguely foreshortening it, for sometimes, in a dreamy mood, per-haps by night and moonlight, taking the man from Ur for his father's grandfather - or even worse. For it must be stated here that in all probability this man from Ur was not the original and actual man from Ur. Probably - even to young Joseph, in a preciser hour, and by broad daylight-this man from Ur had never seen the moon- citadel of Uru; it had been his father who had gone thence north- wards, towards Harran in the land of Naharain. And thus it was only from Harran that this falsely so-called man from Ur, having received the command from the Lord God, had set out towards the country of the Amorites, together with that Lot, later settled in Sodom, whom the tradition of the community vaguely stated to be the son of the brother of the man from Ur, on the ground, indeed, that he was the "son of Harran." Now Lot of Sodom was certainly a son of Harran, since he as well as the Ur-man came from there. But to turn flarran, the "city of the way," into a brother of the man from Ur, and thus to make a nephew out of his proselyte Lot, was a kind of dreamy toying with ideas which, while scarcely permissible in broad daylight, yet makes it easier to understand why young Joseph fell naturally into the same kind of game.
He did so in the same good faith as governed, for instance, the / Page 9 / star-worshippers and astrologers at Shinar, in their prognostications according to the principle of stellar representation, and exchanged one planet with another, for instance the sun, when it had set, with Ninurta the planet of war and state, or the planet Marduk with Scorpio, thereafter blithely callin.g Scorpio Marduk .and Ninurta the sun. He did so, that is, on practical grounds, for his desire to set a beginning to the chain of events to which he belonged encountered the same difficulty that it always does: the fact that everybody has a father, that nothing comes first and of itself, its own cause, but that everybody is begotten and points backwards, deeper down into the depths of beginnings, the bottoms and the abysses of the well of the past. Joseph knew, of course, that the father of the Ur-man, that is to say the real man from Uru, must have had a father, who must thus have really been the beginning of his own personal history, and so on, back to Abel, son of Adam, the ancestor of those who dwell intents and keep. sheep. Thus eve.n.the exodus from Shinar afforded him only one particular and conditioned beginning; he was well Instructed, by song and saga, how it went on further and further into the general, through many histories, back to Adapa or Adama, the first man, who, indeed, according to a lying Babylonian saga, which Joseph'more or less knew by heart, had been the son of Ea, god of wisdom and the water depths, and had served the gods as baketr and cup-bearer - but of whom Joseph had better and more Inspired knowledge; back to the garden in the East wherein had stood the two trees, the tree of life and the unchaste tree of death; back to the beginning, the origin of the world and the heavens and the earthly universe out of con- fusion and chaos, by the might of the Word, which moved above the face of the deep and was God. But this, too, was it not only a con-ditioned and particular beginning of things? For there had" already been forms of existence which looked up to the Creator in admiration and amaze: sons of God, angels of the starry firmament, about whom Joseph himself knew some odd and even funny stories, and also re-bellious demons. These must have had their origin in some past reon of the world, which had grown old and sunk and become raw ma- terial- and had even this been the very first beginning?
Here young Joseph's brain began to reel; just as ours does when we lean over the edge of the well; and despite some small inexacti- tudes which his pretty and well-favoured little head permitted itself but which are unsuitable for us, we may feel close to him and almost contemporary, in respect to those deep backwards and abysms of t~me into which so long ago he already gazed. He was a human being like ourselves, thus he must appear to us, and despite his earliness in time just as remote as we, mathematically speaking, from the begin-nings of humanity (not to speak.of the beginnings of things in gen-eral), for they do In actual fact lie deep down In the darkness at the / Page10 / bottom of the abyss, and we, in our researches, must either stop at the conditioned and apparent beginnings, confusing them with the real beginning, in the same way that Joseph confused the man from Ur on the one hand with his father, and on the other with Joseph's own great-grandfather; or else we must keep on being lured from one time-coulisse to the next, backwards and backwards into the im- measurable.
I HAVE said that Joseph knew by hean some pretty Babylonian verses which originally came from a written tradition of great extent and full of lying wisdom. He had learned them from travellers who touched at Hebron, with whom he had held speech, in his conversa- ble way, and from his tutor, old Eliezer, a freedman of his father, not to be confused (as Joseph sometimes confused him, and even the old man himself probably enjoyed doing) with that Eliezer who was the oldest servant of the original wanderer and who once had wooed the daughter of Bethuel for Isaac at the well. Now we know these verses and legends; we have texts of them, written on tablets found at Nineveh, in the palace of Asshurbanipal, king of the universe, son of Assarhaddon, son of Sennacherib; some of them, preserved in grace- ful cuneiform characters on greyish-y.ellow. clay, are our. earliest documented source for the Great Flood in whIch the Lord wiped out the first human race on account of its corruption, and which played such an imponant role in Joseph's own personal tradition. Literally speaking, this source itself is not an original one; these crumbling tab-lets bear transcriptions made by learned slaves only some six hundred years before our era, at the command of Asshurbanipal, a sovereign much addicted to the written word and the established view, an "ex- ceeding wise one," in the Babylonian phrase, and by a zealous accumu- lator of the fruits of exceeding wisdom. Indeed they were copied from an original a good thousand years older, from the time, that is, of the Lawgiver and the moon-wanderer; which was about as easy, or as hard, for Asshurbanipal's tablet-writers to read and to under- stand as for us to-day a manuscript of the time of Charlemagne. Written in a quite obsolete and undeveloped hand, a hieratic docu- ment, it must have been hard to decipher; whether its significance was wholly honoured in the copy remains matter for doubt.
And then, this original: it was not actually an original; not the original, when you come to look at it. It was itself a copy of a docu- ment out of God knows what distant time; upon which, then, though without precisely knowing where, one might rest, as upon a true original, if it were not itself provided with glosses and additions by the hand of the scribe, who thought thus to make more comprehen- / Page 11 / sible an original text lying again who knows how far back in time; though what they probably did was further to transmogrify the original wisdom of his text. And thus I might go on - if I were not convinced that my readers already understand what I mean when I speak of coulisses and abysses.
The Egyptians expressed it in a phrase which Joseph knew and himself used on occasion. For although none of the sons of Ham were tolerated in Jacob's tents, because of their ancestor the shamer of his sire, who had turned black allover, also because Jacob entertained religious doubts on the score of the morals of Mizraim; yet the eager- minded lad had often mingled with Egyptians, in the towns, in Kirjath Arba as well as in Shechem, and had picked up this and that of the tongue in which he was later to bear such brilliant witness. The Egyp-tian then, speaking of something that had high and indefinite an- tiquity, would say: "It comes from the days of Set." By 'whom, of course, they meant one of their gods, the wily brother of their Mar-duk or Tammuz, whom they called Osiris, the Martyr, because Set had first lured him into a sarcophagus and cast it into the river, and afterwards torn him to £ieces like a wild beast and killed him entirely, so that Osiris, the Sacrifice, now ruled as lord of the dead and ever- lasting king of the lower world. "From the days of Set"; the people of Egypt had many uses for the phrase, for with them the origins of everything went back in undemonstrable ways into that darkness.
At the edge of the Libyan desert, near Memphis, hewn out of the rock, crouched the colossus and hybrid, fifty-three metres high; lion and maid, with a maiden's breasts and the beard of a man, and on its headcloth the kingly serpent rearing itself. The huge paws of its cat's body stretched out before it, its nose was blunted by the tooth of time. It had always crouched there, always with its nose blunted by time; and of an age when its nose had not been blunted, or when it had not crouched there, there was no memory at all. Thothmes the Fourth, Golden Hawk and Strong Bull, King of Upper and of Lower Egypt, beloved of the goddess of truth and belonging to the eighteenth dynasty which was also the dynasty of Amun-is-satisfied, by reason of a command received in a dream before he mounted the throne, had had the colossal statue dug out of the sands of the desert, where it lay in great part drifted over and covered up. But some fifteen hun- dred years before that, King Cheops of the fourth dynasty - the same, by the bye, who built the great pyramid for his own tomb and made sacrifice to the sphinx - had found it half in ruins; and of any time when it had not been known, or even known with a whole nose, there was no knowledge at all.
Was it Set who himself hewed out of the stone that fabulous beast, in which later generations saw an image of the sun-god, calling it Horus in the mount of light? It was possible, of course, for Set, as / Page 12 / likewise Osiris the Sacrifice, had probably not always been a god, but sometime or other a man, and indeed a king over Egypt. The state- ment is often made that a certain Menes or Horus-Menes some six thousand years before our era founded the first Egyptian dynasty, and everything before that is "pre-dynastic"; he, Menes, having first united the two countries, the upper and the lower, the papyrus and the lily, the red and the white crown, and ruled as first king over Egypt, the history of which began with his reign. Of this statement probably every word is false; to the penetrating eye King Menes turns out to be nothing but a coulisse. Egyptian priests told Herodotus that the written history of their country went back eleven thousand, three hundred and forty years before his era, which means for us about fourteen thousand years; a reckoning which is calculated to rob King Menes' figure of all its primitiveness. The history of Egypt alternates between periods of discord and impotence and periods of brilliance and power; epochs of diverse rulers or none at all and epochs of strongly concentrated power; it becomes increasingly clear that these epochs alternated too often to make it likely that King Menes was the earliest ruler over a unified realm. The discords which he healed had followed upon earlier unification and that upon still earlier disruption. How many times the "older," "earlier," "again" are to be repeated we cannot tell; but only that the first unification took place under dynastic deities, whose sons presumably were that Set and Osiris; the sacrifice, murder and dismemberment of the latter being legendary references to quarrels over the succession, which at that time was determined by stratagem and crime. That was a past of a profound, mythical and theological character, even to the point of becoming spiritualized and ghostlike; it became present, it became the object of religious reverence in the shape of certain animals- falcons and jackals - honoured in the ancient capitals, Buto and Nekheb; in these the souls of those beings of primitive time were supposed to be mysteriously preserved.
"FROM the days of Set" - young Joseph relished the phrase, and I share his enjoyment; for like the Egyptians, I find it most applicable, and to nearly everything in life. Wherever I look, I think of the words: and the origin of all things, when I come to search for it, pales away into the days of Set.
At the time when our story begins - an arbitrary beginning, it is true, but we must begin somewhere, and fix a point behind which
we do not go, otherwise we too shall land in the days of Set - at this time young Joseph already kept the flocks with his brethren, though only under rather privileged conditions; which is to say that when it / Page13 / pleased him so to do, he watched as they did his father's sheep, goats and kine on the plains of Shechem and Hebron. What sort of animals were these, and wherein different from ours? In nothing at all. They were the very same peaceful and familiar beasts, at the same stage of development as those we know. The whole history of cattle-breeding - for instance of the domestic ox from the wild buffalo - lay even in young Joseph's day so far back in the past that "far" is a feeble word to use in such a connection. It has been shown that the ox was bred in the stone age, before the use of metal tools, that is before the bronze age; this boy of the Amurruland, Joseph, with his Egyptian and Babylonian culture, was almost as remote from those dim times as we ourselves are.
As for the wild sheep from which Jacob's flocks - and ours - were bred, we are told that it is extinct. It died out "long ago." It must have been completely domesticated "in the days of Set." And the breed- ing of the horse, the ass, the goat and the pig - out of that wild boar which mangled Tammuz, the young shepherd - all that was accom-plished in the same remote and misry past. Our historical records go back some seven thousand years - during which time no wild animal was still in process of domestication. There is no tradition nor any memory of such events.
If we look at the cultivation of wild grasses and their development into cereals, the story is the same. Our species of grain, our barley, oats, rye, maize and wheat - they are the very ones which nourished the youthful Joseph - have been cultivated so long that no botanist can trace the beginning of the process, nor any people boast of having been the first to initiate it. We are told that in the stone age there were five varieties of wheat and three of barley. As for the cultivation of the vine from its wild beginnings - an incomparable achievement, humanly speaking, whatever else one may think about it - tradition, echoing hollowly up from the depths of the past, ascribes it to Noah, the one upright man, survivor of the flood, the same whom the Baby- lonians called Utnapishtim and also Atrachasis, the exceeding wise one, who imparted to Gilgamesh, his late grandchild, hero of the legends written on the tablets, the story of the beginning of things. This upright man, then, as Joseph likewise knew, was the first to plant vineyards - nor did Joseph considered it such a very upright deed. Why could he not have planted somethIng useful: fig trees, for In- stance, or olives? But no, he chose to plant the vine, and was drunk therefrom, and in his drunkenness was mocked and shamed of his manhood. But when Joseph imagined all that to have happened not so very long ago, that miracle of the grape, perhaps some dozen of generations before his "great-grandfather," his ideas of time showed themselves to be hazy indeed; the past which he so lightly invoked being actually matter of remote and primeval distances. Having said / Page 14 / thus much, it only remains to add - however much we may pale at the thought - that those. distances themselves must have lain very late in time, compared with the remoteness of the begInnIng of the human race, for them to have produced a civilization capable of that high .emprise, the cultivation of the vine.
Where then do they lie in time, the beginnings of human civiliza-tion? How old is it? I put the question with reference to young Jo- seph, whose stage of development, though remote from ours, did not essentially differ from it, aside from those less precise habits of thought of his, at which we may benevolently smile. We have only to enquire, to conjure up a whole vista of time-coulisses opening out infinitely, as in mockery. When we ourselves speak of antiquity we mostly mean the Grreco-Roman world - which, relatively speaking, is of a brand new modernity. Going back to the so-called "primitive population" of Greece, the Pelasgians, we are told that before they settled in the islands, the latter were inhabited by the actual primitive population, a race which preceded the Phrenicians in the domination of the sea - a fact which reduces to the merest time-coulisse the Phrenician claim to have been the first seafaring folk. But science is increasingly unfavourable to all these theories; more and more it in- clines to the hypothesis and the conviction that these "barbarians" were colonists from Atlantis, the lost continent beyond the pillars of Hercules, which in times gone by united Europe with America. But whether this was the earliest region of the earth to be populated by human beings is very doubtful, so doubtful as to be unlikely; it is much more probable that the early history of civilization, including that of Noah, the exceeding wise one, is to be connected with regions of the earth's surface much older in point of time and already long before fallen to decay.
But these are foothills whereupon we may not wander, and only vaguely indicate by that before-quoted Egyptian phrase; the peoples of the east behaved with a piety equal to their wisdom when they ascribed to the gods their first knowledge of a civilized life. The red- hued folk of Mizraim saw in Osiris the Martyr the benefactor who had first given them laws and taught them to cultivate the soil; being prevented finally by the plotting of the crafty Set, who attacked him like a wild boar. As for the Chinese, they consider the founder of their empire to have been an imperial half-god named Fu-hsi, who introduced cattle into China and taught the priceless art of writing. This personage apparently did not consider the Chinese, at that time - some two thousand, eight hundred and fifty-two years before our era - to be ripe for astronomical. instruction; for according to their annals they received it only about thirteen hundred years later, from the great foreign emperor, Tai-Ko-Fokee; whereas the astrologers of Shinar were already several hundred years earlier instructed in / Page15 / the signs of the zodiac; and we are told that a man who accompanied Alexander of Macedon to Babylon sent to Aristotle Chaldrean astro- nomical records scratched on baked clay, whose antiquity would be to-day four thousand, one hundred and sixty years. That is easily possible, for it seems likely that observation of the heavens and astro-nomical calculations were made in Atlantis, whose disappearance, according to Solon, dated nine thousand years before that worthy's own time; from which it follows that man attained to skill in these lofty arts some eleven and a half thousand years before our era.
It is clear that the art of writing is not younger than this, and very possibly much older. I speak of it in particular because Joseph enter-tained such a lively fondness for the art, and unlike his brothers early perfected himself In It; beIng Instructed at first by Eliezer, m the Babylonian as well as in the Phrenician and Hittite scripts. He had a genuine weakness for the god or idol whom in the East they called Nabu, the writer of history, and in Tyre and Sidon Taut; in both places recognizing him as the inventor of letters and the chronicler of the beginnings of things: the Egyptian god Thoth of Hermopolis, the letter-writer of the gods and the patron of science, whose office was regarded in those parts as higher than all others; that sincere, solicitous and reasonable god, who was sometimes a white-haired ape, of pleasing appearance, sometimes wore an ibis head, and likewise had certain tender and spiritual affiliations with the moon which were quite to young Joseph's taste. These predilections the youth would not have dared confess to his father Jacob, who set his face sternly against all such coquetting with idols, being even stricter in his atti-tude than were certain very high places themselves to which his austerity was dedicated. For Joseph's history proves that such little departures on his part into the impermissible were not visited very severely, at least not in the long run.
As for the art of writing, with reference to its misty origins it would be proper to paraphrase the Egyptian expression and say that it came "from the days of Thoth." The written roll is represented in the oldest Egyptian art, and we know a papyrus which belonged to Horus-Send, a king of the second dynasty, six thousand years before our era, and which even then was supposed to be so old that it was said Sendi had inherited it from Set. When Sneferu and that Cheops reigned, sons of the sun, of the fourth dynasty, and the pyramids of Gizeh were built, knowledge of writing was so usual amongst the lower classes that we to-day can read the simple inscriptions scratched by artisans on the great building blocks. But it need not surprise us that such knowledge was common property in that distant time, when we recall the priestly account of the age of the written history of Egypt.
If, then, the days of an established language of signs are so unnum- / Page16 / bered, where shall we seek for the beginnings of oral speech? The oldest, the primeval language, we are told, is Indo-Germanic, Indo- European, Sanscrit. But we may be sure that that is a beginning as hasty as any other; and that there existed a still older mother-tongue which included the roots of the Aryanas well as the Semitic and Hamitic tongues. Probably it was spoken on Atlantis - that land which is the last far and faint coulisse still dimly visible to our eyes, but which itself can scarcely be the original home of articulate man.
CERTAIN discoveries have caused the exp.crts in the history of the earth to estimate the age of the human species at about five hundred thousand years. It is a scant reckoning, when we consider, first, how science to-day teaches that man in his character as animal is the old-est of all mammals and was already in the latter dawn of life existing upon this earth in various zoological modes, amphibious and reptilian, before any cerebral development took place; and second, what end- less and boundless expanses of time must have been at his disposal, to turn the crouching, dream-wandering, marsupial type, with un-separated fingers, and a sort of flickering pre-reason as his guide, such as mart must have been before the time of Noah-Utnapishtim, the exceeding wise, into the inventor of bow and arrow, the fire-maker, the welder of meteoric iron, the cultivator of corn and wine, the breeder of domestic cattle - in a word, intQ the shrewd, skilful and in every essential respect modem human being which appears before us at ~he earliest grey dawn of history. A priest at the temple of Sais explained to Solon the Greek myth of Phaeton through a human ex- periencing of some deviation in the course of the bodies which move round the earth in space, resulting in a devastating conflagration on the earth. Certainly it becomes clearer and clearer that the dream memory of man, formless but shaping itself ever anew after the man- ner of sagas, reaches back to catastrophes of vast antiquity, the tra-dition of which, fed by recurrent but lesser similar events, established itself among various peoples and produced that formation of coulisses which forever lures and leads onwards the traveller in time.
Those verses which Joseph had heard and learned by heart related among other things the story of the Great Flood. He would in any case have known this story even if he had not learned of it in the Babylonian tongue and version, for it existed in his western country and especially among his own people, although not in quite the same form, but wIth details differing from those in the version current in the land of the rivers; just at this very time, indeed, it was in process of establishing itself in a variant upon the eastern form. Joseph well knew the tale: how all that was flesh, the beasts of the field not ex- / Page 17 / cepted, had corrupted most indescribably His way upon the earth; yes, the earth herself practised whoredom and deceivingly brought forth oats where wheat had been sown - and all this despite the warn- ings of Noah; so that the Lord and Creator, who saw His very angels involved in this abomination, at length after a last trial of patience, of a hundred and twenty years, could no longer bear it and be re- sponsible for it, but must let the judgment of the flood prevail. And now He, in His majestic good-nature (which the angels in no wise shared), left open a little back door for life to escape by, in the shape of a chest, pitched and caulked, into which Noah went up with the animals. Joseph knew thar too and knew the day on which the crea- tures entered the ark; it had been the tenth of the month Marcheswan, and on the seventeenth the fountains of the great deep were broken up, at the time of the spring thawing, when Sirius rises in the day- time and the fountains of water begin to swell. It was on tbis day, tben-Josepb bad it from old Eliezer. But bow often had this day come round since then? He did not consider tbat, nor did old Eliezer; and here begin the foresbortenings, the confusions and the deceptive vistas which dominate the tradition. .
Heaven knows when there bappened that overwhelming encroach- ment of the Euphrates, a river at all times tending to irregular courses and sudden spate; or that startling irruption of tbe Persian Gulf into the solid land as the result of tornado and earthquake; that catastrophe which did not precisely create the tradition of the deluge, but gave it its final nourishment, revivified it with a horrible aspect of life and reality and now stood to all later generations as the Deluge. Perhaps the most recent catastrophe had not been so very long ago; and the nearer it was, the more fascinating becomes the question whether, and how, the generation which had personal experience of it suc- ceeded in confusing their present affliction with the subject of the tradition, in other words with the Deluge. It came to pass, and that it did so need cause us to feel neither surprise nor contempt. The event consisted less in that something past repeated itself, than in that it became present. But that it could acquire presentness rested upon the fact that the circumstances which brought it about were at all times present. The ways of the flesh are perennially corrupt, and may be so in all god-fearingness. For do men know whether they do well or ill before God and whether that which seems to them good is not to the Heavenly One an abomination? Men in their folly know not God nor the decrees of the lower world; at any time forbearance can show itself exhausted, and judgment come into force; and there is probably always a warning voice, a knowledgeable Atrachasis who knows how to interpret signs and by taking wise precautions is one among ten thousand to escape destruction. Not without having first confided to the earth the tablets of knowledge, as the seed-corn of / Page 18 / future wisdom, so that when the waters subside, everything can begin afresh from the written seed. "At any time": therein lies the mystery. For the mystery is timeless, but the form of timelessness is the now and the here.
The Deluge, then, had its theatre on the Euphrates River, but also in China. Round the year 1300 before our era there was a frightful flood in the Hoang-Ho after which the course of the river was regu- lated; it was a repetition of the great flood of some thousand and fifty years before, whose Noah had been the fifth Emperor, Yao, and which, chronologically speaking, was far from having been the true and original Deluge, since the tradition of the latter is common to both peoples. Just as the Babylonian account, known to Joseph, was only a reproduction of earlier and earlier accounts, so the flood itself is to be referred back to older and older prototypes; one is convinced of being on solid ground at last, when one fixes, as the original origi- nal, upon the sinking of the land Atlantis beneath the waves of the ocean - knowledge of which dread event penetrated into all the lands of the earth, previously populated from that same Atlantis, and fixed itself as a movable tradition forever in the minds of men. But it is only an apparent stop and temporary goal. According to a Chal- drean computation, a period of thirty-nine thousand, one hundred and eighty years lay between the Deluge and the first historical dy- nasty of the kingdom of the two rivers. It follows that the sinking of Atlantis, occurring only nine thousand years before Solon, a very recent catastrophe indeed, historically considered, certainly cannot have been the Deluge. It too was only a repetition, the becoming- present of something profoundly past, a frightful refresher to the memory, and the original story is to be referred back at least to that incalculable point of time when the island continent called "Lemuria," in its turn only a remnant of the old Gondwana continent, sank be- neath the waves of the Indian Ocean.
What concerns us here is not calculable time. Rather it is time's abrogation and dissolution in the alternation of tradition and proph- ecy, which lends to the phrase "once upon a time" its double sense of past and future and therewith its burden of potential present. Here the idea of reincarnation has its roots. The kings of Babel and the two Egypts, that curly-bearded Kurigalzu as well as Horus in the palace at Thebes, called Amun-is-satisfied, and all their predecessors and suc-cessors, 'Were manifestations in the flesh of the sun god, that is to say the myth became in them a my sterium, and there was no distinction left. between being and meaning. It was not until three thousand years later that men began disputing as to whether the Eucharist "was" or only "signified" the body of the Sacrifice; but even such highly super- erogatory discussions as these cannot alter the fact that the essence of the mystery is and remains the timeless present. Such is the mean- / Page 19 / ing of ritual, of the feast. Every Christmas the world-saving Babe is born anew and lies in the cradle, destined to suffer, to die and to arise again. And when Joseph, in midsummer, at Shechem or at Beth- Lahma, at the feast of the weeping women, the feast of the burning of lamps, the feast of Tammuz, amid much wailing of flutes and joy- ful shoutings relived in the explicit present the murder of the lamented Son, the youthful god, Osiris-Adonis, and his resurrection, there was occurring that phenomenon, the dissolution of time in mystery, which is of interest for us here because it makes logically unobjectionable a method of thought which quite simply recognized a deluge in every visitation by water.
PARALLEL with the story of the Flood is the tale of the Great Tower. Common property like the other, it possessed local presentness in many places, and affords quite as good material for dreamy specu- lation and the formation of time-coulisses. For instance, .it is as cer- tain as it is excusable that Joseph confused the Great Tower itself with the temple of the sun at Babel, the so-called E-sagila or House of the Lifting of the Head. The Wanderer from Ur had doubtless done the same in his time, and it was certainly so considered not only in Joseph's sphere but above all in the land of Shinar itself. To all the Chaldreans, E-sagila, the ancient and enormous terraced tower, built, according to their belief, by Bel, the Creator, with the help of the black men whom he created expressly for the purpose, and restored and completed by Hammurabi, the Lawgiver; the Tower, seven sto-ries high, of whose brilliantly enamelled splendours Joseph had a lively mental picture; to all the Chaldreans E-sagila signified the pres- ent embodiment of an abstract idea handed down from far-away an- tiquity; the Tower, the sky-soaring structure erected by human hands. In Joseph's particular milieu the legend of the Tower pos-sessed other and more far-reaching associations, which did not, pre- cisely speaking, belong to it, such as the idea of the dispersal. This is explainable only by the moon-man's own personal attitude, his taking Umbrage and going hence; for the people of Shinar had no such as- sociations whatever with the Midgals or citadels of their cities, but rather the contrary, seeing that Hammurabi, the Lawgiver, had ex-pressly caused it to be written that he had made their summits high in order to "bring together again" the scattered and dispersing peo- ple under the sway of "him who was sent." But the moon-man was thereby affronted in his notions of the deity, and in the face of Nim- rod's royal policy of concentration had dispersed himself and his; and thus in Joseph's home the past, made present in the shape of E-sagila, had become tinctured with the future and with prophecy; / Page20 / a judgment hung over the towering spite-monument of Nimrod's royal arrogance, not one brick was to remain upon another, and the builders thereof would be brought to confusion and scattered by the Lord God of Hosts. Thus old Eliezer taught the son of Jacob, and preserved thereby the double meaning of the "once upon a time," its mingled legend and prophecy, whose product was the timeless pres-ent, the Tower of the Chaldeans.
To Joseph its story was the story of the Great Tower itself. But it is plain that after all E-sagila is only a time-coulisse upon our endless path toward the original Tower. One time-coulisse, like many an-other. Mizraim's people, too, looked upon the tower as present, in the form of King Cheops' amazing desert tomb. And in lands of whose existence neither Joseph nor old Eliezer had the faintest no- tion, in Central America, that is, the people had likewise their tower or their image of a tower, the great pyramid of Cholula, the ruins of which are of a size and pretentiousness calculated to have aroused great anger and envy in the breast of King Cheops. The people of Cholula have always denied that they werc; the authors of this mighty structure. They declared it to be the work of giants, strangers from the east, they said, a superior race who, filled with drunken longing for the sun, had reared it up in their ardour, out of clay and asphalt, in order to draw near to the worshipped planet. There is much sup-port for the theory that these progressive foreigners were colonists from Atlantis, and it appears that these sun-worshippers and astrolo-gers incarnate always made it their first care, wherever they went, to set up mighty watch-towers, before the faces of the astonished na-tives, modelled upon the high towers of their native land, 'and in par- ticular upon the lofty mountain of the gods of which Plato speaks. In Atlantis, then, we may seek the prototype of the Great Tower. In any case we cannot follow its history further, but must here bring to an end our researches upon this extraordinary theme."
I
PARADE
I
PARADE EYES
7
BUT where was Paradise - the "garden in the East"? The place of happiness and repose, the home of man, where he ate of the tree of evil and was driven forth or actually drove himself forth and dis-persed himself? Young Joseph knew this as well as he knew about the flood, and from the same source. It made him smile a little when he heard dwellers in the Syrian desert say that the great oasis of Da-mascus was Paradise, for that nothing more paradisial could be dreamed of than the way it lay among fruit orchards and charm- ingly watered gardens nestled between, majestic mountain range and spreading seas of meadow, full of bustling folk of all races and the commerce of rich wares. And for politeness sake he shrugged his- / Page21 / shoulders only inwardly when men of Mizraim asserted that Egypt had been the earliest home of man, being as it was the centre and navel of the world. The curly-bearded folk of Shinar, of course, they too believed that their kingly city, called by them the "gateway of God" and "bond between heaven and earth' (Bab-ilu, markas same u ur- sitim: the boy Joseph could repeat the words glibly after them), in other words, that Babel was the sacred centre of the earth. But in this matter of the world-navel Joseph had better and more precise in- formation, drawn from the personal experience of his good and sol-emn and brooding father, who, when a young man on his way from "Seven Springs," the home of his family, to his uncle at Harran in the land of Naharain, had quite unexpectedly and unconsciously come upon the real world-navel, the hill-town of Luz, with its sa-cred stone circle, which he had then renamed Beth-el, the House of God, because, fleeing from Esau, he had there been vouchsafed that greatest and most solemn revelation of his whole life. On that height, where Jacob had set up his stone pillow for a mark and anointed it with oil, there henceforth was for Joseph and his people the centre of the world, the umbilical cord between heaven and earth. Yet not there lay Paradise; rather in the region of the beginnings and of the home - somewhere thereabouts, in Joseph's childish conviction, which was, moreover, a conviction widely held, whence the man of the moon city had once set out, in Lower Shinar, where the river drained away and the moist soil between its branches even yet abounded in luscious fruit-bearing trees.
Theologians have long favoured the theory that Eden was situ-ated somewhere in southern Babylonia and Adam's body formed of Babylonian soil. Yet this is only one more of the coulisse effects with which we are already so familiar; another illustration of the process of localization and back-reference - only that here it is of a kind extraordinary beyond all comparison, alluring us out beyond the earthly in the most literal sense and the most comprehensive way; only that here the bottom of the well which is human history dis- plays its whole, its immeasurable depth, or rather its bottomlessness, to which neither the conception of depth nor of darkness is any longer applicable, and we must introduce the conflicting idea of light and height; of those bright heights, that is, down from which the Fall could take place, the story of which is indissolubly bound up with our soul-memories of the garden of happiness.
The traditional description of Paradise is in one respect exact. There went out, it says, from Eden a river to water the garden, and from thence it was parted and came into four heads: the Pison, Gi-hon, Euphrates and Hiddekel. The Pison, it goes on to say, is also called the Ganges; it flows about all India and brings with it gold. The Gihon is the Nile, the greatest river of the world, that encom- / Page 22 / passeth the whole of Ethiopia. But Hiddekel, the arrow-swift river, is the Tigris, which flows towards the east of Assyria. This last is not disputed. But the identity of the Pison and the Gihon with the Gan- ges and the Nile is denied with considerable authority. These are thought to be rather the Araxes which flows into the Caspian Sea, and the Halys which flows into the Black Sea; and accordingly the site of Paradise would still be in the Babylonian sphere of interest, but not in Babylon itself, rather in the Armenian Alpine country north of the Mesopotamian plain, where the two rivers in question have their sources close together.
The theory seems reasonably acceptable. For if, as the most re-garded tradition has it, the "Phrat," or Euphrates, rose in Paradise, then Paradise cannot be situated at the mouth of that river. But even while, with this fact in mind, we award the palm to Armenia, we have done no more than take the step to the next-following fact; in other words, we have come only one more coulisse further on.
God, so old Eliezer had instructed Joseph, gave the world four quarters: morning, evening, noon and midnight guarded at the seat of the Most High by four sacred beasts and four guardian angels, which watch over this fixed condition with unchanging eyes. Did not the pyramids of Lower Egypt exactly face with their four sides, covered with shining cement, the four quarters of the earth? And thus the arrangement of the rivers of Paradise was conceived. They are to be thought of in their course as four serpents, the tips of whose tails touch, whose mouths lie far asunder, so that they go out from each other towards the four quarters of the heavens. This now is an obvious transference. It is a geography transferred to a site in Near Asia, but familiar to us in another place,-now lost; namely, in Atlan- tis, where, according to Plato's narrative and description, these same four streams went out from the mount of the gods towering up in the middle, and in the same way, that is, at right angles, to the four quarters of the earth. All learned strife as to the geographical mean- ing of the four head waters and as to the site of the garden itself has been shown to be idle and received its quietus, through the tracing backwards of the paradise-idea, from which it appears that the latter obtained in many places, founded on the popular memory of a lost land, where a wise and progressive humanity passed happy years in a frame of things as beneficent as it was blest. We have here an un- mistakable contamination of the tradition of an actual paradise with the legend of a golden age of humanity. Memory seems to go back to that land of the Hesperides, where, if reports say truth, a great people pursued a wise and pious course under conditions never since so favourable. But no, the Garden of Eden it was not; it was not that site of the original home and of the Fall; it is only a coulisse and an ap-parent goal upon our paradise-seeking pilgrimage in time and space;. / Page 23 / and our archreology of the earth's surface seeks for Adam, the first man, in times and places whose decline and fall took place before the population of Atlantis.
What a deluded pilgrimage, what an onward-luring hoax! For even if it were possible, or excusable, however misleading, to identify as Paradise the land of the golden apples, where the four great rivers flowed, how could we, even with the best will in the world to self- deception, hold with such an idea, in view of the Lemurian world which is our next and furthest time-coulisse; a scene wherein the tor- tured larva of the human being - our lovely and well-favoured young Joseph would have refused with pardonable irritation to recognize himself in the picture - endured the nightmare of fear and lust which made up his life, in desperate conflict with scaly mountains of flesh in the shape of flying lizards and giant newts? That was no garden of Eden, it was Hell. Or rather, it was the first accursed state after the Fall. Not here, not at the beginning of time and space was the fruit plucked from the tree of desire and death, plucked and tasted. That comes first. We have sounded the well of time to its depths, and not yet reached our goal: the history of man is older than the material world which is the work of his will, older than life, which rests upon his will. .
A VERY ancient tradition of human thought, based upon man's truest knowledge of himself and going back to exceeding early days whence it has become incorporated into the succession of religions, prophe-cies and doctrines of the East, into Avesta, Islam, Manichaeanism, Gnosticism and Hellenism, deals with the figure of the first or first completely human man, the Hebraic Adam qadmon,. conceived as a youthful being made out oflure light, formed before the beginning of the world as prototype an abstract of humanity. To this concep- tion others have attached themselves, varying to some extent, yet in essentials the same. Thus, and accordingly, primitive man was at his very beginning God's chosen champion in the struggle against that evil which penetrated into the new creation; yet harm befell him, he was fettered by demons, imprisoned in the flesh, estranged from his origins, and only freed from the darkness of earthly and fleshly exist- ence by a second emissary of the deity, who in some mysterious way was the same as himself, his own higher self, and restored to the world of light, leaving behind him, however, some portions of his light, which then were utilized for the creation of the material world and earthly creatures. Amazing tales, these, wherein the religious element of redemption is faintly visible behind the cosmogonic frame. For we are told that the original human Son of God contained in: His body of light the seven metals to which the seven planets correspond and / Page 24 / out of which the world is formed. Again it is said that this human light-essence, issuing from the paternal primitive. source, descended through the seven planetary spheres and the lord of each partook of his essence. But then looking down he perceived his image mirrored in matter, became enamoured of it, went down unto it and thus fell in bondage to lower nature. All which explains man's double self, an indissoluble combination of godlike attributes and free essence with sore enslavement to the baser world.
In this narcissistic picture, so full of tragic charm, the meaning of the tradition begins to clarify itself; the clarification is complete at the point where the descent of the Child of God from His world of light into the world of nature loses the character of mere obedient pursuance of a higher order, hence guiltless, and becomes an inde-pendent and voluntary motion of longing, by that token guilty. And at the same time we can begin to unravel the meaning of that "sec-ond emissary" who, identical in a higher sense with the light-man, comes to free him from his involvement with the darkness and to lead him home. For the doctrine now proceeds to divide the world into the three personal elements of matter, soul and spirit, among whom, and between whom and the Deity there is woven the romance, whose real protagonist is the soul of mankind, adventurous and in adven-ture creative, a myth us, which, complete by reason of its combina-tion of oldest record and newest prophecy, gives us clear leading as to the true site of Paradise and upon the story of the Fall."
FOR ALL
"It is stated that the soul, which is to say the primevally human, was, like matter, one of the principles laid down from the beginning, and that it possessed life but no knowledge. It had, in fact, so little that, though dwelling in the nearness of God, in a lofty sphere of happi- ness and peace, it let itse)f be disturbed and confused by the inclina- tion - in a literal sense, implying direction - towards still formless matter, avid to mingle with this and evoke forms upon which it could compass physical desires. But the yearning and pain of its passion did not diminish after the soul had let itself be betrayed to a descent from its home; they were heightened even to torment by the circum- stance that matter sluggishly and obstinately preferred to remain in its original formless state, would hear nothing of taking on form to please the soul, and set up all imaginable opposition to being so formed. But now God intervened; seeing nothing for it, probably, in such a posture of affairs, but to come to the aid of the soul, His errant concomitance. He supported the soul as it wrestled in love with refractory matter. He created the world; that is to say, by way of assisting the primitive human being He brought forth solId and permanent forms, in order that the soul might gratify physic;:al de- sires upon these and engender man. But immediately afterwards, in pursuance of a considered plan, He did something else. He sent, such / Page25 / literally are the words of the source upon which I am drawing, He sent out of the substance of His divinity spirit to man in this world, that it might rouse from its slumber the soul in the frame of man, and show it, by the Father's command, that this world was not its place, and that its sensual and passional enterprise had been a sin, as a con- sequence of which the creation of the world was to be regarded. What in truth the spirit ever strives to make clear to the human soul imprisoned in matter, the constant theme of its admonitions, is pre-cisely this: that the creation of the world came about only by reason of its folly in mingling with matter, and that once it parted therefrom the world of form would no longer have any existence. To rouse the soul to this view is the task of the reasonable spirit; all its hoping and striving are directed to the end that the passionate soul, once aware of the whole situation, will at length reacknowledge its home on high, strike out of its consciousness the lower world and strive to regain once more that lofty sphere of peace and happiness. In the very mo- ment when that happens the lower world will be absolved; matter will win back her own sluggish will, being released from the bonds of form to rejoice once more, as she ever did and ever shall, in form- lessness,and be happy in her owe way.
Thus far th~ doctrine and the romance of the soul. And here, be- yond a doubt, we have come to the very last "backward," reached the remotest human past, fixed upon Paradise and tracked down the story of the Fall, of knowledge and of death, to its pure and original form. The original human soul is the oldest thing, more correctly an oldest thing, for it has always been, befor~ time and before form, just as God has always been and likewise matter. As for the intelli- gent spirit, in whom we recognize the "second emissary" entrusted with the task of leading the soul back home; although in some unde- fined way closely related to it, yet it is after all not quite the same, for it is younger: a missionary sent by God for the soul's instruction and release, and thus for accomplishing the dissolution of the world of form. If in some of its phases the dogma asserts or allegorically in- dicates the higher oneness of soul and spirit, it probably does so on good ground; this, however, does not exclude the conception that the human soul is originally conceived as being God's champion against the evil in the world, and the role ascribed to it very like the one which falls to the spirit sent to effect its own release. Certainly the reason why the dogma fails to explain this matter clearly is that it has not achieved a complete portrayal of the role played by the spirit in the romance of the soul; obviously the tradition requires filling out on this point.
In this world of form and death conceived out of the marriage of soul and matter, the task of the spirit is clearly outlined and unequivo- cal. Its mission consists in awakening the soul, in its self-forgetful / Page26 / i involvement with form and death, to the memory of its higher ori-gin; to convince it that its relation with matter is a mistaken one, and finally to make it yearn for its original source with ever stronger yearning, until one day it frees itself wholly from pain and desire and wings away homewards. And therewith straightway the end of the world is come, death done away and matter restored to her ancient freedom. But as it will sometimes happen that an ambassador from one kingdom to another and hostile one, if he stay there for long, will fall a prey to corruption, from his own country's point of view, gliding unconsciously over to the other's habits of thought and fa- vouring its interests, settling down and adapting himself and taking on colour, until at last he becomes unavailable as a representative of his own world; this or something like it must be the experience of the spirit in its mission. The longer it stops below, the longer it plies its diplomatic activities, the more they suffer from an inward breach, not to be concealed from the higher sphere, and in all probability leading to its recall, were the problem of a substitute easier to solve than it seems is the case.
There is no doubt that its role as slayer and grave-digger of the world begins to trouble the spirit in the long run. For its point of view alters, being coloured by its sojourn below; while being, in its own mind, sent to dismiss death out of the world, it finds itself on the contrary regarded as the deathly principle, as that which brings death into the world. It is, in fact, a matter of the point of view, the angle of approach. One may look at it one way, or the other. Only one needs to know one's own proper attitude, that to which one is obli-gated from home; otherwise there is bound to occur the phenome-non which I objectively characterized as corruption, and one is alien- ated from one's natural duties. And here appears a certain weakness in the spirit's character: he does not enjoy his reputation as the prin- ciple of death and the destroyer of form - though he did largely bring it upon himself, out of his great impulse towards judgment, even when directed against himself - and it becomes a point of hon- our with him to get rid of it. Not that he would willfully betray his mission. Rather against his intention, under pressure, out of that im- pulse and from a stimulus which one might describe as an unsanc-tioned infatuation for the soul and its passional activities, the words of his own mouth betray him; they speak in favour of the soul and its enterprise, and by a kind of sympathetic refinement upon his own pure motives, utter themselves on the side of life and form. It is an open question, whether such a traitorous or near-traitorous attitude does the spirit any good, and whether he cannot help serving, even by that very conduct, the purpose for which he was sent, namely the dissolution of the material world by the releasing of the soul from it; or whether he does not know all this. and onlv thus conducts him- / Page 27 /self because he is at bottom certain that he may permit himself so much. At all events, this shrewd, self-denying identification of his own will with that of the soul explains the allegorical tendency of the tale, according to which the "second emissary" is another self of that light-man who was sent out to do battle with evil. Yes, it is possible that this part of the tale conceals a prophetic allusion to cer- tain mysterious decrees of God, which were considered by the teach-ers and preachers as too holy and inscrutable to be uttered.
WE can, objectively considered, speak of a "Fall" of the soul of the primeval light-man, only by over-emphasizing the moral factor. The soul, certainly, has sinned against itself, frivolously sacrificing its orig- inal blissful and peaceful state - but not against God in the sense of offending any prohibition of His in its passional enterprise, for such a prohibition, at least according to the doctrine we have received, was not issued. True, pious tradition has handed down to us the com- mand of God to the first man, not to eat of the tree of the "knowl-edge of good and evil"; but we must remember that we are here dealing with a secondary and already earthly event, and with human beings who had with God's own creative aid been generated out of the knowledge of matter by the soul; if God really set them this test, He undoubtedly knew beforehand how it would turn out, and the only obscurity lies in the question, why He did not refrain from is-suing a prohibition which, being disobeyed, would simply add to the malicious joy of His angelic host, whose attitude towards man was already most unfavourable. But the expression "good and evil" is a recognized and admitted gloss upon the text, and what we are really dealing with is knowledge, which has as its consequence not theabil-ity to distinguish between good and evil, but rather death itself; so that we need scarcely doubt that the "prohibition" too is a well- meant but not very pertinent addition of the same kind.
Everything speaks for such an explanation; but principally the fact that God was not incensed at the yearning behaviour of the soul, did not expel it nor add any punishment to the measure of suffering which it voluntarily drew upon itself and which indeed was outweighed by the might of its desire. It is even clear that He was seized if not by understanding at least by pity, when He saw the passion of the soul. Unsummoned and straightway He came to its aid, and took a hand personally in the struggles of the soul to know matter in love, by making the world of form and death issue from it, that the soul might take its pleasure thereupon; and certainly this was an attitude of God in which pity and understanding are scarcely to be distin- guished from one another. / Page 28 of sin in the sense of an offence to God and His expressed will we can scarcely speak in this connection, especially when we consider the peculiar immediacy of God's relation with the being which sprang from this mingling of soul and matter: this human being of whom the angels were unmistakably and with good reason jealous from the very first. It made a profound impression on Joseph, when old Eliezer told him of these matters, speaking of them just as we read them to-day in the Hebrew commentaries upon early history. Had not God, they say, held His tongue and wisely kept silence upon the fact that not only righteous but also evil things would pro- ceed from man, the creation of man would certainly not have been permitted by the "kingdom of the stern." The words give us an I extraordinary insight into the situation. They show, above all, that "sternness" was not so much the property of God Himself as of His i entourage, upon whom He seems to have been dependent, in a cer-ain, if of course not decisive way, for He preferred not to tell them what was going on, out of fear lest they make Him difficulties, and only revealed some things and kept others to Himself. But does not this indicate that He was interested in the creation of the world. rather than that He opposed it? So that if the soul was not directly provoked and encouraged by God to its enterprise, at least it did not act against His will, but only against the angels - and their somewhat less than friendly attitude towards man is clear from the beginning. The creation by God of that living world of good and evil, the inter- est He displayed in it, appeared to them in the light of a majestic caprice; it piqued them, indeed, for they saw in it, probably with some justice, a certain disgust with their own psalm-chanting purity. Astonished and reproachful questions, such as: "What is man, 0 Lord, that Thou art mindful of him?" are forever on their lips; and God answers indulgently, benevolently, evasively, sometimes with irritation and in a sense distinctly mortifying to their pride. The fall of Shemmrel, a very great prince among the angels, having twelve pairs of wings whereas the seraphim and sacred beasts had only six apiece, is not very easy to explain, but its immediate cause must have been these dissensions; so old Eliezer taught - the lad drank it in with strained attention. It had always been Shemmrel who stirred up the other angels against man, or rather against God's sympathy for him, and when one day God commanded the heavenly hosts to fall down before Adam, on account of his understanding and because he could call all things by their names, they did indeed comply with the order, some scowlingly, others with ill-concealed smiles - all but Shemmrel, :who did not do it. He declared, with a candour born of his wrathfulness, that it was ridiculous for beings created of the efful- gence of glory to bow down before those made out of the dust of the earth. And thereupon tOok place his fall - Eliezer described it by / Page29 /saying that it looked from a distance like a falling star. The other angels must have been well frightened by this event, which caused them to behave ever afterwards with great discretion on the subject of man; but it is plain that whenever sinfulness got the upper hand on earth, as in Sodom and Gomorrah and at the time of the Flood, there was rejoicing among the angels and corresponding embarrass- ment to the Creator, who found His hand forced to scourge the of. fenders, though less of His own desire. than under moral pressure from the heavenly host. But let us now consider once more, in the light of the foregoing, the matter of. the "second emissary" of the spirit, and whether he is really sent to effect the dissolution of the ma~ terial world by setting free the soul and bringing it back home.
It is possible to argue that this is not God's meaning, and that the spirit was not, in fact, sent down expressly after the soul in order to act the part of grave-digger to the world of forms created by it with God's connivance. The mystery is perhaps a different one, residing in that part of the doctrine which says that the "second emissary" was no other than the first light-man sent out anew against evil. We have long known that these mysteries deal very freely with the tenses, and may quite readily use the past with reference to the future. It is pos- sible that the saying, soul and spirit 'Were one, really means that they are sometime to become one. This seems the more tenable in that the spirit is of its nature and essentially the principle of the future, and represents the It will be, It is to be; whereas the goodness of the form-bound soul has reference to the last and the holy It was. It re-mains controversial, which is life an which death; since both, the soul involved with nature and the spirit detached from the world, the principle of the past and the principle of the future, claim, each in its own way, to be the water of life, and each accuses the other of dealings with death. Neither quite wrongly, since neither nature without spirit nor spirit without nature can truly be called life. But the mystery, and the unexpressed hope of God, lie In their union, in the genuine penetration of the spirit into the world of the soul, in the inter-penetration of both principles, in a hallowing of the one through the other which should bring about a present humanity blessed with blessing from heaven above and from the depths beneath.
Such then might be considered the ultimate meaning and hidden potentiality of the doctrine - though even so there must linger a strong element of doubt whether the bearing of the spirit, self- betraying and subservient as we have described it to be, out of all too sensitive reluctance to be considered the principle of death, is cal- culated to lead to the goal in view. Let him lend all his wit to the dumb passion of the soul; let him celebrate the grave, hail the past as life's unique source, and confess himself the malicious zealot and murderously life-enslaving will; whatever he says he remains that / Page30 / which he is, the warning emissary, the principle of contradiction, umbrage and dispersal, which stirs up emotions of disquiet and excep- i tional wretchedness in the breast of one single man among the blithely I agreeing and accepting host, drives him forth out of the gates of the past and the known into the uncertain and the adventurous, and makes him like unto the stone which, by detaching itself and rolling, is destined to set up an ever-increasing rolling and sequence of events, of which no man can see the end.
IN such wise are formed those beginnings, those time-coulisses of the past, where memory may pause and find a hold whereon to base its personal history - as Joseph did on Ur, the city, and his forefather's exodus therefrom. It was a tradition of spiritual unrest; he had it in his blood, the world about him and his own life were conditioned by it, and he paid it the tribute of recognition when he recited aloud those verses from the tablets which ran:
Disquiet, questioning, hearkening and seeking, wrestling for God, a bitterly sceptical labouring over the true and the just, the whence and the whither, his own name, his own nature, the true meaning of the Highest - how all that, bequeathed down the generations from the man from Ur, found expression in Jacob's look, in his lofty brow and the peering, careworn gaze of his brown eyes; and how confid- ingly Joseph loved this nature, of which his own was aware as a nobility and a distinction and which,- precisely as a consciousness of higher concerns and anxieties, lent to his father's person all the dig- nity, reserve and solemnity which made it so impressive. Unrest and dignity - that is the sign of the spirit; and with childishly unabashed fondness Joseph recognized the seal of tradition upon his father's brow, so different from that upon his own, which was so much blither and freer, coming as it chiefly did from his lovely mother's side, and making him the conversable, social, communicable being he pre-eminently was. But why should he have felt abashed before that brooding and careworn father, knowing himself so greatly beloved? The habitual knowledge that he was loved and preferred conditioned and coloured his being; it was decisive likewise for his attitude to-wards the Highest, to Whom, in his fancy, he ascribed a form, so far as was permissible, precisely like Jacob's. A higher replica of his fa-ther, by Whom, Joseph was naively convinced, he was beloved even as he was beloved of his father. For the moment, and still afar off, I should like to characterize as "bridelike" his relation to Adon the / Page31 / heavenly. For Joseph knew that there were Babylonian women, sa- cred to Ishtar or to Mylitta, unwedded but consecrated to pious de-votion, who dwelt in cells within the temple, and were called "pure" or "holy," also "brides of God," "enitu." Something of this feeling was in Joseph's own nature: a sense of consecration, an austere bond, and with it a flow of fantasy which may have been the decisive in-gredient in his mental inheritance, and which will give us to think when we are down below in the depths beside him.
On the other hand, despite all his own devotion, he did not quite follow or accept the form it had taken in his father's case: the care, the anxiousness, the unrest, which were expressed in Jacob's uncon-querable dislike of a settled existence such as would have befitted his dignity, and in his temporary, improvised, half-nomad mode of life. He too, without any doubt, was beloved, cherished and preferred of God - for if Joseph was that, surely it was on his father's account! The God Shaddai had made his father rich in Mesopotamia, rich in cattle and multifarious possessions; moving among his troop of sons, his train of women, his servants and his flocks, he might have been a prince among the princes of the land, and that he was, not only in outward seeming but also by the power of the spirit, as "nabi," which is: the prophesier; as a wise man, full of knowledge of God, "exceed- ing wise," as one of the spiritual leaders and elders upon whom the inheritance of the Chaldrean had come, and who had at times been thought of as his lineal descendants. No one approached Jacob save in the most respectful and ceremonious way; in dealings and trade one called him "my lord" and spoke of oneself in humble and con- temptuous terms. Why did he not live with his family, as a property-owner in one of the cities, in Hebron itself, Urusalim or Shechem, in a house built of stone and wood, beneath which he could bury his dead? Why did he live like an Ishmaelite or Bedouin, in tents outside the town, in the open country, not even in sight of the citadel of Kirjath Arba; beside the well, the caves, the oaks and the terebinths, in a camp which might be struck at any time - as though he might not stop and take root with the others, as though from hour to hour he must be awaiting the word which should make him take down huts and stalls, load poles, blankets and skins on the pack-camels, and be off? Joseph knew why, of course. Thus it must be, because one served a God whose nature was not repose and abiding comfort, but a God of designs for the future, in whose will inscrutable, great, far-reaching things were in process of becoming, who, with His brood-ing will and His world-planning, was Himself only in process of be-coming, and thus was a God of unrest, a God of cares, who must be sought for, for whom one must at all times keep oneself free, mobile and in readiness.
In a word, it was the spirit, he that dignified and then again he / Page 32 / that debased, who forbade Jacob to live a settled life in towns; and if little Joseph sometimes regretted the fact, having a taste for pomp and worldly circumstance, we must accept this trait of his character and let others make up for it. As for me, who now draw my narra-itive to a close, to .plunge, voluntarily, into limitless adventure (the word "plunge" bcmg used advisedly), I will not conceal my native and comprehensive understanding of the old man's restless unease and dislike of any fixed habitation. For do I not know the feeling? To me too has not unrest been ordamed, have not I too been endowed with a heart which knoweth not repose? The story-teller's star - is it not the moon, lord of the road, the wanderer, who moves in his stations, one after another, freeing himself from each? For the story- teller makes many a station, roving and relating, but pauses only teot- wise, awaiting further directions, and soon feels his heart beating high, partly with desire, partly too from fear and anguish of the flesh, but in any case as a sign that he must take the road, towards fresh adventures which are to be painstakingly lived through, down to their remotest details, according to the restless spirit's will.
Already we are well under way ,we have left far behind us the sta-tion where we briefly paused, we have forgotten it, and as is the fashion of travellers have begun to look across the distance at the world we are now to enter, in order that we may not feel too strange and awkward when we arrive. Has the journey already lasted too long? No wonder, for this time it is a descent into hell! Deep, deep down it goes, we pale as we leave the light of day and descend into the unsounded depths of the past.
Why do I turn pale, why does my heart beat high - not only since I set out, but even since the first command to do so- and not only with eagerness but still more with physical fear? Is not the past the story-teller's element and native air, does he not take to it as a fish to water? Agreed. But reasoning like this will not avail to make my heart cease throbbing with fear and curiosity, probably because the past by which I am well accustomed to let myself be carried far and far away is quite another from the past into which I now shudder- ingly descend: the past of life, the dead-and-gone world, to which my own life shall more and more profoundly belong, of which its beginnings are already a fairly deep part. To die: that means actually to lose sight of time, to travel beyond it, to exchange for it eternity and presentness and therewith for the first time, life. For the essence of life is presentness, and only in a mythical sense does its mystery appear in :the time-forms of past and future. They are the way, so to speak, in which life reveals itself to the folk; the mystery belongs to the initiate. Let the folk be taught that the soul wanders. But the wise know that this teaching is only the garment of the mystery of the / Page 33 / 33 eternal presentness of the soul, and that all life belongs to it, so soon as death shall have broken its solitary prison cell. I taste of death and knowledge when, as story-teller, I adventure into the past; hence my eagerness, hence my fear and pallor. But eagerness has the upper hand, and I do not deny that it is of the flesh, for its theme is the first and last of all our questioning and speaking and all our necessity; the nature of man. That it is which we shall seek out in the underworld and death, as Ishtar there sought Tammuz and Isis Osiris, to find it where it lies and is, in the past.
For it is, always is, however much we may say It was. Thus speaks the myth, which is only the garment of the mystery. But the holiday garment of the mystery is the feast, the recurrent feast which be- strides the tenses and makes the has-been and the to-be present to the popular sense. What wonder then, that on the day of the feast hu- manity is in a ferment and conducts itself with licensed abandon? For in it life and death meet and know each other. Feast of story-telling, thou art the festal garment of life's mystery, for thou conjurest up timelessness in the mind of the folk, and invokest the myth that It may be relived in the actual present. Feast of death, descent into hell, thou art verily a feast and a revelling of the soul of the flesh, which not for nothing clings to the past and the graves and the solemn It was. But may the spirit too be with thee and enter into thee, that thou mayest be blest with a blessing from heaven above and from the depths beneath.
Down, then, and no quaking! But are we going at one fell swoop into the bottomlessness of the well? No, not at all. Not much more than three thousand years deep - and what is that, compared with the bottom? At that stage men do not wear horn armour and eyes in their foreheads and do battle with flying newts. They are men like ourselves - aside from that measure of dreamy indefiniteness in their habits of thought which we have agreed to consider pardonable. So the homekeeping man talks to himself when he sets out on a journey, and then, when the matter becomes serious, gets fever and palpita-tions none the less. Am I really, he asks himself, going to the ends of the earth and away from the realms of the everyday? No, not at all; I am only going there and thither, where many people have been before, only a day or so away from home. And thus we too speak, with reference to the country which awaits us. Is it the land of no- where, the country of the moon, so different from aught that ever was on sea or land that we clutch our heads in sheer bewilderment? No, it is a country such as we have often seen, a Mediterranean land, not exactly like home, rather dusty and stony, but certainly not fan- tastic, and above it move the familiar stars. There it lies, mountain and valley, cities and roads and vineclad slopes, with a turbid river / Page 34 / darting arrowy among the green thickets; there it lies stretched out in the past, like meadows and streams in a fairy tale. Perhaps you closed your eyes, on the journey down; open them now! We have arrived. See how the moonlight-sharpened shadows lie across the peaceful, rolling landscape! Feel the mild spring freshness of the summer-starry night!"
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