_By Fabre d’Olivet_
Hermeneutic Interpretation
The Golden Verses of Pythagoras
[Illustration: FABRE D’OLIVET
After a miniature by Augustin
1799]
The Golden Verses of
Pythagoras
Explained and Translated into French and
Preceded by a Discourse upon the
Essence and Form of Poetry
Among the Principal
Peoples of the Earth
By
Fabre d’Olivet
Done into English by
Nayán Louise Redfield
Μηδὲν ἄγαν kαὶ γνῶθι σεαυτόν
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1917
COPYRIGHT, 1917
BY
NAYÁN LOUISE REDFIELD
_To the Travellers who have turned their Faces to the Dawn and their
Steps toward the Eternal Hills is offered this rich Fruit of Wisdom,
that, through it, they may achieve the Understanding of Knowledge._
TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD
In this twentieth century, the sacred books of the ancients are
undoubtedly better understood than they were even by their
contemporaries, for their authors, by the greatness of their genius,
are as much nearer to us, as they were distant from them. At the close
of the eighteenth century, the light which came from the illimitable
mind of Fabre d’Olivet shone with solitary splendour and was destined
to be seen by only a few devoted followers. But history shows that a
great inspirer always appears at the beginning of every great epoch,
and however small the number of his disciples, these disciples with
their pupils form the magnetic chain which, according to Plato,
carries his thought out into the world.
Fabre d’Olivet, born at Ganges, Bas-Languedoc, Dec. 8, 1768, was
distinguished even in his own day not only for the extent of his
learning but for the rectitude of his judgment and the sublimity of
his conceptions. If one can infer from the all too scarce records
available since the calamitous fire which destroyed so many of his
valued manuscripts, he evidently suffered keenly from the fetters of
mortality, and sought with unfailing fervour what Porphyry so aptly
called the “Olympia of the Soul.”
Saint Yves d’Alveydre, writing of him in _La France vraie_, says, that
it was in 1790, while in Germany, he received his Pythagorean
initiation, the profound imprint of which marked all his later
productions. After returning to Paris he applied himself to
philological and philosophical studies undisturbed by the terrible
revolutionary storm. In obscure seclusion he amassed, to quote Sédir,
“a disconcerting erudition.” He became familiar with all the Semitic
tongues and dialects, the Aryan languages, and even penetrated the
secrets of the Chinese hieroglyphics.
It was during these ten years of retirement that he wrote his
_Examinations of the Golden Verses_ which were not published until
1813, with its dedication to the Section of Literature of the Imperial
Institute of France. It is known that the _Golden Verses of
Pythagoras_ were originally transcribed by Lysis and that it is to
Hierocles we owe the version which has come down to us. Fabre d’Olivet
has translated them into French verse, the style of which he calls
_eumolpique_, that is, subject to measure and harmonious cadence but
free from rhyme, with alternate masculine and feminine terminations.
In the _Essence and Form of Poetry_ which precedes the Golden Verses,
he illustrates this melodious style, in applying it to the opening
lines of some of the well-known classics, and to others not so
well-known.
These Golden Verses, so remarkable for their moral elevation, present
the most beautiful monument of antiquity raised in honour of Wisdom.
They formed the _credo_ of the adepts and initiates. In his recondite
Examinations, Fabre d’Olivet has drawn the metaphysical correlation of
Providence, Destiny, and the Will of Man, in which combined action
Destiny reigns over the past, the Will of Man over the future, and
Providence over the present, which, always existing, may be called
Eternal. One will find this given at greater length in his
_Hermeneutic Interpretation of the Origin of the Social State of Man
and the Destiny of the Adamic Race_: admirable work of this little
known theosophist, “to give him the name he loved best to hold,” says
Pierre Leroux in _De l’Humanité_.
The inequality of human conditions, upon which depend the social and
political questions, forms one of the vital subjects of these esoteric
teachings. He has also endeavoured to explain the true opinion of
Pythagoras concerning metempsychosis which was his sacred dogma, and
said that the dogma of transmigration of souls, received by all
peoples and revealed in the ancient mysteries, has been absolutely
disfigured in what the moderns have called metempsychosis.
His strange death, which occurred March 25, 1825, is mentioned by des
Essarts in _Les Hiérophantes_, and other authorities including Pierre
Leroux, have asserted that he died at the foot of his altar.
NAYÁN LOUISE REDFIELD.
HARTFORD, CONN., October, 1916.
The Golden Verses of Pythagoras
DISCOURSE UPON THE ESSENCE AND FORM OF POETRY
DISCOURSE UPON THE ESSENCE AND FORM OF POETRY[1]
_Messieurs_:
Before publishing the translation of the _Golden Verses of
Pythagoras_, such as I have made it, in French verse which I have
designated by the expression _eumolpique_,[2] I would have liked to be
able to submit it to you and thus be enlightened by your counsels or
sustained by your approbation; but academic laws and usages, whose
justice I have felt, have prevented my enjoying this advantage. The
innovation, however, which I have endeavoured to make in French poetry
and the new explanation which I have tried to give of one of the most
celebrated pieces of Greek poetry, have seemed to me to hold too
closely to your labours and to enter too deeply into your literary
provinces, for me to believe myself able to dispense with calling your
attention to them. I crave your indulgence, if in the demonstration of
a just deference to your judgment I involuntarily neglect certain
formalities; and I beg you to judge the purity of my intentions.
I claim not to be a poet; I had even long ago renounced the art of
verse, but notwithstanding that, I am now presenting myself in the
poetic career to solicit the hazardous success of an innovation! Is it
the love of glory which inspires in me this temerity, which dazzles me
today as my autumn advances, whereas it was unable to move me when the
effervescence of my springtime ought to have doubled its strength? No:
however flattering the wreaths that you award to talent, they would
not concern me; and if an interest, as new as powerful, had not
induced me to address you, I would keep silent. This interest,
_Messieurs_, is that which science itself inspires in me, and the
desire, perhaps inconsiderate but commendable, of co-operating with my
limited ability for the development of a language whose literary and
moral influence, emerging from the bourns of Europe and the present
century, ought to invade the world and become universal like the
renown of the hero who extends his conquests with those of the empire
whose foundations he has laid.
I feel, _Messieurs_, that I should explain my thought. My assertion,
well founded as it may be, appears none the less extraordinary, and I
am bound to admit this. The disfavour which is attached to all new
ideas, to all innovations, the just defiance that they inspire, the
element of ridicule that springs from their downfall, would have
arrested my audacity, if I had had audacity alone, and if the worthy
ambition of effecting a general good had not raised me above a
particular evil which might have resulted for me. Besides I have
counted upon the judicious good-will of the two illustrious Academies
to which I am addressing myself: I have thought that they would
distinguish in the verse which I am presenting for their examination,
both as a means of execution in French poetry and as a means of
translation in ancient and foreign poetry, the real utility that they
can offer, of the fortuitous beauty which they lack, and which a more
capable hand would have been able to give them; I flatter myself, at
length, that they would grant to the end, without prejudice, the
attention which is necessary, and that if they refused an entire
approbation to my efforts, they would at least render justice to my
zeal and commend the motives which have made me attempt them.
§ I
When, after the revival of letters in Europe, Chancellor Bacon,
legislator of thought, sketched with bold strokes the tree of human
knowledge, and brought back each branch of science to that of the
moral faculties upon which it depends, he did not fail to observe
sagaciously that it was necessary to distinguish in poetry two things,
its essence and its form[3]: its essence as pertaining wholly to the
imagination, and composing by itself alone one of the principal
branches of science[4]; its form, as making part of the grammar, and
entering thus into the domain of philosophy and into the rational
faculty of the understanding.[5] This celebrated man had borrowed this
idea from a man much older and more celebrated than himself, Plato.
According to this admirable philosopher, poetry is either a simple
talent, an art which one uses to give to his own ideas a particular
form, or it is a divine inspiration by means of which one clothes in
the human language and transmits to men the ideas of the gods.[6] It
is because, never having felt sufficiently this important distinction
and having confused two ideas that ought to be separated, the essence
and the form of poetry, which are as the soul and body of this
science, that so many men among the modern nations proclaimed
themselves poets, whereas they were, in strict truth, only clever
versifiers. For it does not suffice, as Plato again said, to have
poetic talent, it does not suffice to make verse and even good verse,
to be called a poet[7]; it is necessary to possess that divine
enthusiasm, that inspiration which elevates the soul, enlightens it,
transports it, as it were, to intellectual regions and causes it to
draw from its source the very essence of this science.
How they delude themselves, those who, habitually deceived, foolishly
imagine that the lofty fame of Orpheus, Homer, Pindar, Æschylus, or
Sophocles and the immortality which they enjoy, belongs only to the
plan of their works, to the harmony of their verse, and to the happy
use of their talent! These flattering appearances which constitute the
form of their poetry would have disappeared long ago, they would have
become broken, like fragile vases, upon the torrent of centuries, if
the intelligence which animated them had not eternalized their
duration. But this secret intelligence does not reside, as certain
other superficial readers persuade themselves, being still deceived,
in the simple interest that the characters _mise en scène_ inspire;
this interest, which results from their contrast and from the shock of
the passions, is another sort of form, more hidden, and less frail,
than the former, it is true, but as variable generally and subject to
the great revolution of customs, laws, and usages. True poetry does
not depend upon that; it depends upon the primordial ideas which the
genius of the poet in his exaltation has seized in the intellectual
nature, and which his talent has shown afterwards in the elementary
nature, thus adapting the simulacra of physical things to the movement
inspired by the soul, instead of adapting this movement to those same
simulacra, as those who write history. This is what Bacon, the modern
philosopher whom I have already cited, has felt so perfectly.[8] He
says:
As the sentient world is inferior to the human soul, it is
for poetry to give to this nature what reality has refused
it, lending to it the faculties of the intellectual world;
and as the acts and events which make the subject of true
history have not that grandeur and that sublimity for which
the human soul seeks, it is necessary that poetry create
acts and events greater and more heroic. All must be
increased and embellished by its voice and receive from it a
new existence; it is necessary even that virtue shine with
an _éclat_ more pure; that the veil which covers truth be
lifted from its eyes and that the course of Providence,
better discerned, be allowed to penetrate into the most
secret causes of events.
The philosopher who expressed thus his thought regarding the essence
of poetry, was far from believing, as the vulgar have always believed,
and as certain modern writers have wished to convince the savants,[9]
that, of the two parts of poetry, the positive form might be the only
genuine; that is to say, that they do not by any means consider that
the human characters put upon the stage by the poets whom I have just
named, were historic characters. Bacon understood well that Achilles,
Agamemnon, Ulysses, Castor and Pollux, Helen, Iphigenia, Œdipus,
Phædra, etc., are somewhat more than they appear to be, and that their
virtues or their vices, their heroic actions, even their crimes,
celebrated by poetry, contain a profound meaning wherein lie buried
the mysteries of religion and the secrets of philosophy.[10]
It belongs only to the men to whom poetry is known by its exterior
forms alone and who have never penetrated as far as its essence, to
imagine that a small city of Asia, unknown to all Asia, around which
the King of kings of Greece waited in vain for ten years to avenge the
honour of his brother betrayed by his wife, should be able during
three thousand years to occupy the greatest minds of Europe, on
account of a quarrel which was raised in the tenth year of the siege,
between this King of kings and a petty prince of his army, angry and
sulky, named Achilles. It is only permitted to the phlegmatic
chronologists, whom the muses have never visited in their studies, to
seek seriously to fix the year and the day when this quarrel took
place. A man, strongly imbued with the spirit of Homer or of
Sophocles, would never see in Ulysses a real man, a king who,
returning to his isle after long wanderings, kills in cold blood a
crowd of lovers of his wife and rests confident of the conjugal
fidelity of that spouse abandoned for twenty years, and whom he had
won in the course,[11] although, according to the most common reports,
she was delivered of a son in his absence[12]; nor in Œdipus, another
king, who, without knowing it, without wishing it, always innocent,
kills his father, espouses his mother and, driven to parricide and
incest by an irresistible destiny, tears out his eyes and condemns
himself to wander over the earth, to be a frightful example of
celestial wrath. The platitudes and ridicule of the deed related by
Homer, and the horror which resulted from that presented on the stage
by Sophocles, are sufficient evidence against their reality. If the
poem of the one and the tragedy of the other do not conceal, under the
coarse exterior which covers them, a secret fire which acts unknown to
the reader, never would a sane man tolerate a presentation, on the one
side, of vice changed into virtue, and on the other, virtue changed
into vice, and the gods operating this strange metamorphosis against
all the laws of natural justice. He would throw aside the book with
disgust, or, agreeing with the judicious reflection of an ancient
Greek writer, exclaim with him[13]:
If Homer had merely thought with respect to the gods what he
said, he would have been an impious, sacrilegious man, a
veritable Salmoneus, a second Tantalus; but let us guard
against doing him this wrong, or taking for guides those
who, misunderstanding the allegorical genius of this great
poet, and hesitating before the outer court of his
mysterious poetry, have never succeeded in understanding the
sublime philosophy which is enclosed therein.
You are not, _Messieurs_, of those designated by Heraclides in the
words I have just quoted. Members of these celebrated Academies where
Homer and Sophocles have found so many admirers, defenders, and
illustrious disciples, you can easily admit that I see in these great
men more than ordinary poets, that I place their glory elsewhere than
in their talent, and that I say, particularly of Homer, that his most
just claims to immortality are less in the form than in the essence of
his poetry, because a form, however admirable it may be, passes and
yields to time which destroys it, whereas the essence or the spirit
which animates it, immutable as the Divinity from which it emanates by
inspiration, resists all vicissitudes and seems to increase in vigour
and _éclat_, in proportion as the centuries passing away reveal its
force and serve as evidence of its celestial origin. I flatter myself
that my sentiments in this regard are not foreign to yours and that
the successors of Corneille, Racine, and Boileau hear with pleasure
these eulogies given to the creator of epopœia, to the founders of
dramatic art, and agree with me in regarding them as particular organs
of the Divinity, the instruments chosen for the instruction and
civilization of men.
If you deign, _Messieurs_, to follow the development of my ideas with
as much attention as indulgence, you already know that what I call the
essence or spirit of poetry, and which, following upon the steps of
the founder of the Academy and of the regenerator of the sciences of
Europe, I distinguish from its form, is no other thing than the
allegorical genius, immediate production of the inspiration; you also
understand that I mean by inspiration, the infusion of this same
genius into the soul which, having power only in the intellectual
nature, is manifested in action by passing into the elementary nature
by means of the inner labour of the poet who invests it with a
sentient form according to his talent; you perceive finally, how,
following this simple theory, I explain the words of Plato, and how I
conceive that the inspired poet transmits to men the ideas of the
gods. I have no need I think of telling you that I make an enormous
difference between this divine inspiration which exalts the soul and
fills it with a real enthusiasm, and that sort of inner movement or
disorder which the vulgar also call inspiration, which in its greatest
perfection is only passion excited by the love of glory, united with a
habit of verse making, which constitutes the talent, and in its
imperfection is only a disordered passion called by Boileau, an ardour
for rhyming. These two kinds of inspiration in no wise resemble each
other; their effects are as different as their causes, their
productions as different as their sources. The one, issuing from the
intellectual nature, has its immutability: it is the same in all time,
among all peoples, and in the heart of all men who receive it; it
alone produces genius: its first manifestation is very rare, but its
second manifestation is less so, as I will show later on. The other
inspiration, inherent in sentient nature, born of passion, varies with
the whim of men and things, and takes on the hue of the customs and
the times; it can bring forth talent or at least modify it, and when
it is seconded by a great facility, can go to the extent of feigning
genius but never farther: its real domain is the mind. Its possession
is not very rare even in its perfection. One can sometimes find it
united with the true inspiration, first as in Homer, or second as in
Vergil; and then the form which it unceasingly works over, joining its
sentient beauties to the intellectual beauties of genius, creates the
monuments of science.
It may be that the development which I have just given of my ideas on
the essence of poetry will appear new, although I must acknowledge
that in reality they are not. I am addressing men who are too
enlightened to ignore what the ancients have said in this respect.
Heraclides, whom I have already cited, is not the only one who has
given this impression. Strabo assures positively that ancient poetry
was only the language of allegory,[14] and he refutes Eratosthenes who
pretended that the aim of Homer was only to amuse and please. In this
he is in accord with Denys of Halicarnassus who avows that the
mysteries of nature and the most sublime conceptions of morals have
been covered with the veil of allegory.[15] Phurnutus goes farther: he
declares that the allegories used by Hesiod and by Homer do not differ
from those which other foreign poets have used before them.[16]
Damascius said as much of the poems of Orpheus,[17] and Plutarch
confirms it in a passage which has been preserved to us by
Eusebius.[18]
In the first ages of Greece, poetry, consecrated to the service of the
altars, left the enclosures of the temples only for the instruction of
the people: it was as a sacred language in which the priests,
entrusted with presiding at the mysteries of religion, interpreted the
will of the gods. The oracles, dogmas, moral precepts, religious and
civil laws, teachings of all sorts concerning the labours of the body,
the operations of the mind, in fact all that which was regarded as an
emanation, an order, or a favour from the Divinity, all was written in
verse. To this sacred language was given the name _Poetry_, that is to
say, the Language of the Gods: a symbolic name which accords with it
perfectly, since it expressed at the same time its origin and its
usage.[19] It was said to have come from Thrace,[20] and the one who
had invented it and caused its first accents to be heard was called
Olen.[21] Now these are again two symbolic names perfectly adapted to
the idea that one had of this divine science: it was descended from
_Thrace_, that is to say, from the Ethereal Space; it was _Olen_ who
had invented it, that is to say, the Universal Being.[22] To
understand these three etymologies which can be regarded as the
fundamental points of the history of poetry, it is necessary to
remember, first, that the Phœnicians, at the epoch when they covered
not only Greece but the coasts of the rest of Europe with their
colonies, brought there their language, and gave their names to the
countries of which they had taken possession; secondly, that these
names drawn almost always from objects symbolic of their cult,
constituted for these countries a sort of sacred geography, which
Greece above all others, was faithful in preserving.[23] It was thus
(for there is nothing under the sun which cannot find either its model
or its copy) when the Europeans took possession of America and
colonized it, and carried to those regions their diverse dialects and
covered it with names drawn from the mysteries of Christianity. One
ought therefore, when one wishes to understand the ancient names of
the countries of Greece, those of their heroic personages, those of
the mysterious subjects of their cult, to have recourse to the
Phœnician dialect which although lost to us can easily be restored
with the aid of Hebrew, Aramaic, Chaldean, Syriac, Arabic, and Coptic.
I do not intend, _Messieurs_, to fatigue you with proofs of these
etymologies which are not in reality the subject of my discourse. I am
content to place them on the margin for the satisfaction of the
curious. Thus I shall make use of them later, when occasion demands.
But to return to Thrace, this country was always considered by the
Greeks as the place peculiar to their gods and the centre of their
cult; the divine country, _par excellence_. All the names that it has
borne in different dialects and which in the course of time have
become concentrated in particular regions, have been synonyms of
theirs. Thus, Getæ, Mœsia, Dacia, all signify the country of the
gods.[24] Strabo, in speaking of the Getæ, said that these peoples
recognized a sovereign pontiff to whom they gave the title of God, the
dignity of which existed still in his time.[25] This sovereign pontiff
resided upon a mountain that d’Anville believes he has recognized,
between Moldavia and Transylvania. The Thracians had also a sovereign
pontiff instituted in the same manner as that of the Getæ, and
residing likewise upon a sacred mountain.[26] It was, no doubt, from
the heights of these mountains that the divine oracles, the laws and
teachings which the great pontiffs had composed in verse, were at
first spread throughout Greece; so that it might be said, literally as
well as figuratively, that poetry, revered as the language of the
gods, production of an Eternal Being, descended from the ethereal
abode and was propagated upon earth for the instruction and delight of
mortals. It appears to me very certain that the temple of Delphi,
erected upon the famous mountain of Parnassus, differed not
essentially at first from those of Thrace; and what confirms me in
this idea is that, according to an ancient tradition, it was Olen who,
coming out from Lycia, that is to say from the light, caused all
Greece to recognize the cult of Apollo and Diana; composed the hymns
which were chanted at Delos in honour of these two divinities and
established the temple of Delphi of which he was the first
pontiff.[27] Thus the temple of Delphi rivalled those of Thrace. Its
foundation, doubtless due to some innovator priest, was attributed by
a poetic metaphor to the divinity which had inspired it. At that time
a schism arose and two cults were formed, that of the Thracians
consecrated to Bacchus and Ceres, or Dionysus the divine spirit, and
Demeter the earth-mother[28]; and that of the Greeks, properly
speaking, consecrated to the sun and the moon, adored under the names
of Apollo and Diana. It is to this schism that one should ascribe the
famous dispute which was raised, it is said, between Bacchus and
Apollo concerning the possession of the tripod of Delphi.[29] The
poetic fable woven from this subject was made to preserve the
remembrance of the moral incident and not of the physical event; for
at this remote epoch, when verse only was written, history, ever
allegorical, treated only of moral and providential matters,
disdaining all physical details deemed little worthy of occupying the
memory of men.
However that may be, it appears certain, notwithstanding this schism,
that the cult of the Thracians dominated Greece for a long time. The
new source of poetry opened at Delphi and on Mount Parnassus, destined
in time to become so celebrated, remained at first somewhat unknown.
It is worthy of observation that Hesiod, born in the village of Ascra,
a short distance from Delphi, makes no mention either of the oracle or
of the temple of Apollo. All that he said of this city, which he named
Pytho, has reference to the stone which Saturn had swallowed,
believing to devour his son.[30] Homer does not mention this Pytho in
the _Iliad_; he mentions in the _Odyssey_ an oracle delivered by
Apollo upon Parnassus. For a long time, the peoples of Greece,
accustomed to receive from the ancient mountains of Thrace both their
oracles and their instructions, turned toward that country and
neglected the new sacred mount. This is why the most ancient
traditions place in Thrace, with the supremacy of cult and
sacerdotalism, the cradle of the most famous poets and that of the
Muses who had inspired them: Orpheus, Musæus, Thamyris, and Eumolpus
were Thracians. Pieria, where the Muses were born, was a mountain of
Thrace; and when, at length, it was a question of rendering to the
gods a severe and orthodox cult, it was said that it was necessary
to imitate the Thracians, or, as one would say in French,
_thraciser_.[31]
Besides it must be observed, that at the epoch when the temple of
Delphi was founded, the new cult, presented to the Greeks under the
name of the universal Olen, tended to unite Apollo and Diana, or the
sun and the moon, under the same symbolic figure, and to make of it
only one and the same object of adoration, under the name of
_Œtolinos_, that is to say, _Sun-moon_.[32] It was proclaimed that the
middle of the earth, its paternal and maternal umbilicus, was found
placed exactly on the spot where the new sacred city was built, which
was called for this mystical reason Delphi.[33] But it seems that the
universality of this Œtolinos was never well understood by the Greeks,
who, in their minds, united only with difficulty that which custom and
their senses had taught them to separate. Moreover one can well
conjecture that, as in all religious schisms, a host of difficulties
and contradictory opinions were raised. If I can believe the
sacerdotal traditions of India, that I encounter, the greatest
difficulty was, not knowing which sex dominated in this mysterious
being whose essence was composed of the sun and moon and whose
hermaphroditic umbilicus was possessed in Delphi. This insoluble
question had more than once divided mankind and stained the earth with
blood. But here is not the place to touch upon one of the most
important and most singular facts of the history of man. I have
already deviated too much from my subject, and I return to it asking
pardon of my judges for this necessary digression.
§ II
Poetry, transported with the seat of religion from the mountains of
Thrace to those of Phocis, lost there, as did religion, its primitive
unity. Not only did each sovereign pontiff use it to spread his
dogmas, but the opposed sects born of the rending of the cult, vying
with each other, took possession of it. These sects, quite numerous,
personified by the allegorical genius which presided over poetry, and
which, as I have said, constituted its essence, were confused with the
mind which animated them and were considered as a particular being.
Thence, so many of the demi-gods, and the celebrated heroes, from whom
the Greek tribes pretended to have descended; thence, so many of the
famous poets to whom were attributed a mass of works that emanated
from the same sanctuary, or were composed for the support of the same
doctrine. For it is well to remember that the allegorical history of
these remote times, written in a different spirit from the positive
history which has succeeded it, resembled it in no way, and that it is
in having confused them that so many grave errors have arisen. It is a
very important observation that I again make here. This history,
confided to the memory of men or preserved among the sacerdotal
archives of the temples in detached fragments of poetry, considered
things only from the moral side, was never occupied with individuals,
but saw only the masses; that is to say, peoples, corporations, sects,
doctrines, even arts and sciences, as so many particular beings that
it designated by a generic name. It is not that these masses were
unable to have a chief to direct their movements, but this chief,
regarded as the instrument of a certain mind, was neglected by history
which attached itself to the mind only. One chief succeeded another
without allegorical history making the least mention of it. The
adventures of all were accumulated upon the head of one alone. It was
the moral thing whose course was examined, whose birth, progress, or
downfall was described. The succession of things replaced that of
individuals. Positive history, which ours has become, follows a method
entirely different. The individuals are everything for it: it notes
with scrupulous exactitude dates and facts which the other scorns. I
do not pronounce upon their common merit. The moderns would mock that
allegorical manner of the ancients, if they could believe it possible,
as I am persuaded the ancients would have mocked the method of the
moderns, had they been able to foresee its possibility in the future.
How approve of what is unknown? Man approves of only what he likes; he
always believes he knows all that he ought to like.
I can say, after having repeated this observation, that the poet
Linus, who is regarded as the author of all the melancholy chants of
the ancient world, represents nothing less than lunar poetry detached
from the doctrine of Œtolinos, of which I have spoken, and considered
as schismatic by the Thracians; I can also say, that the poet Amphion,
whose chants were, on the contrary, so powerful and so virile,
typifies the orthodox solar poetry, opposed by these same Thracians;
whereas the prophet Thamyris, who, it is said, celebrated in such
stately verse the creation of the world and the war of the Titans,[34]
represents quite plainly the universal doctrine of Olen,
re-established by his followers. The name of Amphion signifies the
orthodox or national voice of Greece; that of Thamyris, the twin
lights of the gods.[35] One feels, accordingly, that the evils which
came to Linus and to Thamyris, one of whom was killed by Hercules,[36]
and the other deprived of sight by the Muses,[37] are, in reality,
only some sort of criticism or unfortunate incident sustained by the
doctrines which they represented, on account of the opposition of the
Thracians. What I have said concerning Linus, Amphion, and Thamyris,
can be applied to the greater part of the poets who preceded Homer,
and Fabricius names seventy of these[38]; one could also extend it to
Orpheus, but only on a certain side; for although it may be very true,
that no positive detail is possessed regarding the character of the
celebrated man, founder or propagator of the doctrine which has borne
this name; although it may be very true, that all that concerns his
birth, his life, and his death is completely unknown, it is none the
less certain that this man has existed, that he has been actually the
head of a very extended sect, and that the allegorical fables which
remain to us on this subject depict, more particularly than they have
done with any other, the course of his thoughts and the success of his
institutions.
Orpheus belongs, on the one side, to anterior times, and on the other,
to times merely ancient. The epoch when he appeared is the line of
demarcation between pure allegory and mixed allegory, the intelligible
and the sentient. He taught how to ally the rational faculty with the
imaginative faculty. The science which was a long time after called
_philosophy_, originated with him. He laid its first basis.
One should guard against believing, following in the footsteps of
certain historians deceived by the meaning of allegorical fables, that
when Orpheus appeared, Greece, still barbarous, offered only the
traces of a civilization hardly outlined, or that the ferocious
animals, tamed by the charm of his poetry, should represent, in
effect, the inhabitants of this beautiful country. Men capable of
receiving a cult so brilliant as that of Orpheus, a doctrine so pure,
and mysteries so profound; men who possessed a language so formed, so
noble, so harmonious as that which served that inspired man to compose
his hymns, were far from being ignorant and savage to this degree. It
is not true, as has been said and repeated without examination, that
poetry had its birth in the forests, in regions rough and wild, nor
above all, that it may be the concomitant of the infancy of the
nations and the first stammerings of the human mind. Poetry, on the
contrary, having attained its perfection, indicates always a long
existence among the peoples, a civilization very advanced and all the
splendour of a virile age. The sanctuary of the temple is its true
cradle. Glance over the savage world and see if the Iroquois or the
Samoyeds have a poetry. Have the peoples who were found in their
infancy in the isles of the Pacific shown you hymns like those of
Orpheus, epic monuments like the poems of Homer? Is it not known that
the Tartars who have subjugated Asia, those proud Manchus who today
reign over China, have never been able to derive from their language,
rebellious to all kinds of melody and rhythm, a single verse,[39]
although since their conquests they have felt and appreciated the
charms of this art?[40]
Bears and lions, tamed and brought nearer together by Orphic poetry,
have no reference to men, but to things: they are the symbols of rival
sects which, imbibing their hatred at the very foot of the altars,
diffused it over all that surrounded them and filled Greece with
troubles.
For a long time this country was a prey to the double scourge of
religious and political anarchy. In detaching herself from the cult of
the metropolis, she also detached herself from its government. Once a
colony of the Phœnicians, she had thrown off their yoke, not however
spontaneously and _en masse_, but gradually, over and over again; so
that there were twenty rival temples, twenty rival cities, twenty
petty peoples divided by rite, by civil interest, and by the ambition
of the priests and princes who governed them. The Thracians, remaining
faithful to the ancient laws, were styled superstitious or enslaved,
whereas the innovators and the insurgents were considered, by the
Thracians and often by themselves, schismatics and rebels. Phœnicia
had vainly wished to oppose this general desertion. Asia came to
experience the most terrible shocks. India, which had long held the
sceptre there, was buried for fifteen hundred years in her
_Kali-youg_, or her age of darkness, and offered only the shadow of
her ancient splendour.[41] For fifteen centuries she had lost her
unity by the extinction of her imperial dynasties. Many rival kingdoms
were formed,[42] whose constant quarrels had left them neither the
leisure nor the possibility of watching over and supporting their
colonies from afar. The gradual lowering of the Mediterranean, and the
alluvial deposit of the shores of Egypt raising the Isthmus of
Suez,[43] had cut off all communication between this sea and the Red
Sea, and, by barriers difficult to surmount, separated the primitive
Phœnicians, established upon the shores of the Indian Ocean, from
those of Palestine.[44] The meridional Arabs were separated from the
septentrional, and both had broken with the Indians to whom they had
formerly belonged.[45] Tibet had adopted a particular cult and form of
government.[46] Persia had been subject to the empire of the
Assyrians.[47] At last the political ties which united all these
states, and which once formed only a vast group under the domination
of the Indian monarchs, had become relaxed or broken on all sides.
Egypt, long subject to the Philistines, known under the name of
Shepherds, came at length to drive them out, and emerging from her
lethargy prepared herself to seize the influence which Asia had
allowed to escape.[48] Already the most warlike of her kings, Sethos,
had extended his empire over both Libya and Arabia; Phœnicia and
Assyria had been subjugated; he had entered triumphant into Babylon
and was seated upon the throne of Belus.[49] He would not have
hesitated to attempt the conquest of Greece, if he had been able as
easily to lead his army there; but it was difficult for him to create
a marine force, and above all to overcome the invincible repugnance
that the Egyptians had for the sea.[50] Obliged to employ the
Phœnicians, his ancient enemies, he was able to draw from them only
mediocre service. In spite of these obstacles and the stubborn
resistance of the Greeks, he succeeded nevertheless in making some
conquests and forming some partial settlements. Athens, so celebrated
later, was one of the principal ones.[51]
These events, these revolutions, calamitous in appearance, were in
reality to produce great benefits. Greece, already impregnated with
the learning of the Phœnicians, which she had obtained and elaborated,
afterward received that of the Egyptians and elaborated it still
further. A man born in the heart of Thrace, but carried in his
childhood into Egypt through the desire for knowledge,[52] returned to
his country with one of the Egyptian colonies, to kindle there the new
light. He was initiated into all the mysteries of religion and
science: he surpassed, said Pausanias, all those who had preceded him,
by the beauty of his verse, the sublimity of his chants, and the
profoundness of his knowledge in the art of healing and of appeasing
the gods.[53] This was Orpheus: he took this name from that of his
doctrine[54] which aimed to cure and to save by knowledge.
I should greatly overstep the limits that I have prescribed for this
discourse if I should recall in detail all that Greece owed to this
celebrated man. The mythological tradition has consecrated in a
brilliant allegory the efforts which he made to restore to men the
truth which they had lost. His love for Eurydice, so much sung by the
poets, is but the symbol of the divine science for which he
longed.[55] The name of this mysterious spouse, whom he vainly wished
to return to the light, signified only the doctrine of the true
science, the teaching of what is beautiful and veritable, by which he
tried to enrich the earth. But man cannot look upon the face of truth
before attaining the intellectual light, without losing it; if he dare
to contemplate it in the darkness of his reason, it vanishes. This is
what the fable, which everyone knows, of Eurydice, found and lost,
signifies.
Orpheus, who felt by his own experience, perhaps, the great
disadvantage that he had here, of presenting the truth to men before
they might be in condition to receive it, instituted the divine
mysteries; an admirable school where the initiate, conducted from one
degree to another, slowly prepared and tried, received the share of
light in proportion to the strength of his intelligence, and gently
enlightened, without risk of being dazzled, attained to virtue,
wisdom, and truth. There has been but one opinion in antiquity
concerning the utility of the mysteries, before dissolution had
stained its precincts and corrupted its aim. All the sages, even
Socrates, have praised this institution,[56] the honour of which has
been constantly attributed to Orpheus.[57] It is not improbable that
this sage had found the model in Egypt and that he himself had been
initiated, as Moses[58] and Pythagoras[59] had been before and after
him; but in this case an imitation was equivalent to a creation.
I have said that after the appearance of Orpheus, poetry had lost its
unity: as divided as the cult, it had sustained its vicissitudes.
Entirely theosophical in its principle, and calm as the Divinity which
inspired it, it had taken in the midst of the opposed sects a
passionate character which it had not had previously. The priests, who
used it to uphold their opinions, had found, instead of the real
inspiration, that sort of physical exaltation which results from the
fire of passions, whose movement and fleeting splendour entrance the
vulgar. Vying with each other they had brought forth a mass of
theological systems, had multiplied the allegorical fables concerning
the universe, and had drowned, as it were, the unity of the Divinity
in the vain and minute distinction of its infinite faculties; and as
each composed in his own dialect and in pursuance of his own caprice,
each devised unceasingly new names for the same beings, according as
they believed they caught a glimpse of a certain new virtue in these
beings that another had not expressed, it came to pass that not only
were the gods multiplied by the distinction of their faculties, but
still more by the diversity of names employed in expressing them. Very
soon there was not a city nor a town in Greece, that did not have, or
at least believed that it had, its own particular god. If one had
carefully examined this prodigious number of divinities, one would
have clearly seen that they could be reduced, by elimination, to a
small number and would finally end by being mingled in a sole
Universal Being; but that was very difficult for people, flattered,
moreover, by a system which compared the condition of the gods with
theirs, and offered them thus, protectors and patrons so much the more
accessible as they were less occupied and less powerful.[60] Vainly,
therefore, the Egyptian colony established at Athens presented to the
adoration of this people imbued with the prejudice of polytheism, the
sovereign of the gods under the title of the Most-High[61]; the
veneration of this people was turned wholly towards Minerva, who
became its patron under the name of Athena,[62] as Juno was that of
Argos,[63] Ceres, that of Eleusis, Phigalia, Methydrium,[64] etc.
Orpheus, instructed as was Moses, in the sanctuaries of Egypt, had the
same ideas as the legislator of the Hebrews upon the unity of God, but
the different circumstances in which he found himself placed did not
permit him to divulge this dogma; he reserved this for making it the
basis of his mysteries, and continued, in the meantime, to personify
in his poetry the attributes of the Divinity. His institutions, drawn
from the same source, founded upon the same truths, received the
imprint of his character and that of the people to whom he had
destined them. As those of Moses were severe and, if one must admit,
harsh in form, enemies of the sciences and arts, so those of Orpheus
were brilliant, fitted to seduce the minds, favourable to all the
developments of the imagination. It was beneath the allurements of
pleasure, of joy, and of _fêtes_, that he concealed the utility of his
lessons and the depth of his doctrine. Nothing was more full of pomp
than the celebration of its mysteries. Whatever majesty, force, and
grace, poetry, music, and painting had, was used to excite the
enthusiasm of the initiate.[65] He found no pretext advantageous
enough, no form beautiful enough, no charm powerful enough to interest
the hearts and attract them toward the sublime truths which he
proclaimed. These truths, whose force the early Christians have
recognized,[66] went much further than those of which Moses had been
the interpreter; they seemed to anticipate the times. Not only did he
teach of the unity of God,[67] and give the most sublime ideas of this
unfathomable Being[68]; not only did he explain the birth of the
Universe and the origin of things[69]; but he represented this unique
God under the emblem of a mysterious Trinity endowed with three
names[70]; he spoke of the dogma which Plato announced a long time
after concerning the Logos, or the Divine Word; and, according to
Macrobius, taught even its incarnation or its union with matter, its
death or its division in the world of sense, its resurrection or its
transfiguration, and finally its return to the original Unity.[71]
This inspired man, by exalting in Man the imagination, that admirable
faculty which makes the charm of life, fettered the passions which
trouble its serenity. Through him his disciples enjoyed the enthusiasm
of the fine arts and he insisted that their customs should be pure and
simple.[72] The _régime_ that he prescribed for them was that which
Pythagoras introduced later[73]. One of the most pleasing rewards
which he offered to their endeavours, the very aim of their initiation
into his mysteries, was, putting themselves in communion with the
gods[74]; freeing themselves from the cycle of generations, purifying
their soul, and rendering it worthy of projecting itself, after the
downfall of its corporal covering toward its primal abode, to the
realms of light and happiness.[75]
Despite my resolution to be brief, I cannot resist the pleasure of
speaking at greater length of Orpheus, and of recalling, as is my
custom, things which, appearing today wholly foreign to my subject,
nevertheless, when examined from my viewpoint, belong to it. Poetry
was not at all in its origin what it became later, a simple
accomplishment, regarded by those who profess to be savants as even
rather frivolous[76]; it was the language of the gods, _par
excellence_, that of the prophets, the ministers of the altars, the
preceptors and the legislators of the world. I rejoice to repeat this
truth, after rendering homage to Orpheus, to this admirable man, to
whom Europe owes the _éclat_ with which she has shone and with which
she will shine a long time. Orpheus has been the real creator of
poetry and of music,[77] the father of mythology, of morals, and of
philosophy: it is he who has served as model for Hesiod and Homer, who
has illumined the footsteps of Pythagoras and Plato.