these diverse lives which we harbour within us; and each of us, if he
question himself sincerely and profoundly, will discover in himself
two or three clearly-defined types, which have nothing in common but
the body in which they reside, which rarely agree among themselves,
which are incessantly striving to gain the upper hand and which put up
with one another as best they can, in order to go through an existence
whose aggregate forms our ego. This ego will be good or bad, remarkable
or insignificant, more or less generous or selfish, calm or uneasy,
pacific or pugnacious, heroic or pusillanimous, hesitating or decided
and enterprising, brutal or refined, crafty or loyal, active or idle,
chaste or lascivious, modest or vainglorious, proud or obsequious,
unreliable or steadfast, according to the authority which the type
that captures the best positions of the heart or brain is able to
assume over the others. But, even in the life that appears the most
stable, the most homogeneous, the best-balanced, this authority will
never be final or undisputed. The dominant type will find itself for
ever disputed, attacked, thwarted, disturbed, circumvented, harassed,
tempted, deceived, betrayed and sometimes cunningly dethroned by one
of the rival or subordinate types which it failed to distrust or which
it did not watch narrowly enough. We behold unexpected coalitions,
fantastic compromises, regrettable defections, fierce competitions,
incessant intrigues and positive revolutions, especially at the
critical periods and at each moment of important happenings; and all
this prodigious inward tragedy does not cease for an instant until the
hour of death.
3
But, once again, why seek only in the past and among our ancestors for
the actors in this drama which is the essential drama of humanity? What
justification have we for supposing that the dead alone play all the
parts? Why should those from whom we have issued possess more influence
than those who will issue from us? The first are remote from our bodily
selves, they are separated from us by unfathomable mysteries and their
survival may perhaps be called in question; the others inhabit our
flesh and their existence is incontestable. We have just seen that the
argument deduced from the absence of any brain is not invincible.
“But,” you will perhaps go on to say, “how do you suppose that, when
they have not yet lived, they can possess habits, virtues and vices,
preferences and experience, in a word, all that constitutes a character
and cannot be acquired save by contact with life?”
But the same objection could be raised, in most cases, with regard
to our ancestors. Generally speaking, when we issued from them, they
were still young; they were not yet what they became and what we shall
become after them. They had not yet adopted the habits, the ways of
thinking or feeling, or cultivated the virtues or the vices which are
reproduced in us. The stubborn little mediocrity whom we all feel
within us, frugal, cautious and shabby in his dealings, was still
perhaps a prodigal, high-spirited and reckless youth; the rake was
still perhaps chaste, the thief had never stolen and the murderer may
have had a horror of bloodshed. All this is almost equally immaterial
and equally potential in both cases; the only present points at issue
are the amorphous tendencies and forces whereon the brain which we
receive from these and pass on to those bestows a form.
It is therefore very possible that the little mediocrity, the rake,
the thief or the murderer, far from being dead, are not yet born and
are taking as active a part as our ancestors in the agitations and
sometimes in the conduct of our existence. This is what the most
ancient and the most venerable religions of humanity always foresaw
or revealed, receiving it perhaps on the authority of an unknown and
loftier source; and of these religions Christianity, with its dogma
of original sin, is but an imperfect echo. Even to-day, more than six
hundred millions of human beings believe in the preexistence of the
soul, in successive lives and in reincarnation. In the eyes of these
religions, the little mediocrity who begot us several centuries ago
is the same who, a little less paltry, a little less narrow, improved
by his previous life and his passage through the mysteries of death,
is awaiting within us the moment of rebirth and who, while waiting,
shares our instincts, our feelings and our thoughts. He does not
wait in solitude; he is but one life in the host of lives which have
preceded us and which come back to live in us again; and all these past
and future lives form the sum total of our own.
4
We will not here discuss this doctrine of successive lives and of the
expiatory and purifying reincarnation, which is the noblest and, up
to now, the only acceptable explanation of nature’s injustices that
has been discovered. In the present state of our knowledge, it can be
only a magnificent theory or a statement impossible of proof. Let us
not forsake the indisputable ground on which heredity and preexistence
have their being. Heredity is an acquired fact, an experimental truth;
preexistence is a logical necessity. It is not indeed possible to
conceive that what will be born of us does not already exist within us
in fact, in principle, in the germ, in essence or in potentiality;
and, from the moment of its existence in a fashion probably more
spiritual than material, it is far less surprising that it should be
more or less responsible for thoughts and actions to which it could not
be wholly a stranger.
In any case, heredity, which is incontestable, and preexistence,
which is necessary, remind us yet once again that each of us is not a
single being, isolated, permanent, hermetically sealed, independent of
others and separated from all things in time and space, but a porous
vase dipping into the infinite; a sort of cross-roads, where all the
paths of the past, the present and the future meet; an inn beside the
eternal highways, where all the lives which make up our own foregather
for a few days’ sojourn. We believe ourselves dead when they leave the
inn; and we fancy that they too have perished. It is more likely that
this is not so at all. They are merely quitting the ruined hostel to
install themselves in a new and more habitable house. They carry with
them their debts and their obligations; they remove to their new abode
their instincts, their habits, their ideals, their passions also, their
merits and their faults, their acquisitions and their memories. The
house is different, but the guests are the same; and the old life will
resume its course in the new dwelling and will be perhaps a little
nobler, perhaps a little fairer, perhaps filled with a little brighter
light.
THE GREAT REVELATION
XVI
THE GREAT REVELATION
1
We despair of ever knowing the origin of the universe, its aim, its
laws, or its intentions; and we end by doubting whether there be any.
It were wiser very humbly to confess that we are not able to conceive
them. It is probable that, if the universe to-morrow were to yield us
the key of its riddle, we should be as incapable of understanding how
to use it as is a dog to whom we show the key of a clock. In revealing
its great secret to us, it would teach us hardly anything; or at least
the revelation would have but an insignificant influence upon our
life, our happiness, our ethics, our efforts, and our hopes. It would
soar at such heights that no one would perceive it; at most it would
disencumber the sky of our religious illusions, leaving only the
infinite void of the ether in their place.
2
For that matter, there is no saying but that we once possessed this
revelation. It is highly possible that the religions of nations which
have disappeared, such as the Lemurians, the Atlanteans and many
others, were aware of it and that we have discovered its remains in the
esoteric traditions that have come down to us. It must not indeed be
forgotten that there exists, side by side with the outward, scientific
history, a secret history of mankind which derives its substance
of legends, myths, hieroglyphics, strange monuments and mysterious
writings from the hidden meaning of the primitive books. One thing
is certain, that, though the imagination of those who interpret this
occult history is often venturesome, all that they declare is not to be
despised and deserves to be examined more seriously one day than has
hitherto been done.
The essence of this esoteric revelation is very well summed up by M.
Marc Saunier, a disciple of Fabre d’Olivet and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre,
in his book, _La Légende des symboles_.
“The Initiates,” he says, “have always regarded each continent as
a being subject to the same laws as man. For them, the minerals
constitute its skeleton, the flora its flesh, the fauna its
nerve-cells and the human races the grey matter of its brain. This
continent itself is but an organ of the earth, wherein each man is
treated as a thinking cell and whereof the thought is represented by
the sum of human thoughts. The earth itself is but an organ of the
solar system, which in turn is considered as an individual; and our
solar system thus becomes merely an organ of another being of the
infinite, whose heart would appear in the star Alpha in Aries. And
lastly, by a final synthesis, we come to the Cosmos, which expresses
the general sum of all things, in a being whose body is the world
and whose thought is the universal intelligence, exalted by the
religions to the rank of a deity.”
The basis of their doctrine is plainly evolutionistic. Each continent
has merely transformed, in its own time and according to its own ideal,
the seeds which came from the Hyperborean tracts; and man is but the
result of an animal evolution. For the rest, they borrow it in part
from the Hindus, thus anticipating by many thousands of years the
latest hypotheses of our modern science.
3
But, without loitering in these shifting sands, let us go direct to
clear and reliable sources. We possess, in the sacred and secret books
of India, of which we know only an infinitesimal part, a cosmogony
which no European conception has ever surpassed. It would not be
correct to say that it attained, at the first endeavour, the ultimate
limits beyond which the mind of man could not venture without
dissolving in the infinite, for it was the work of centuries of which
we do not know the tale; but it indisputably preceded all the others,
its birth was earlier than anything that we know and, at the beginning
of all things, it exceeded in grandeur all that we have learnt and all
that we can imagine.
It was the first, for instance, long before our historic periods, to
give us a dizzy yet concrete idea of the infinity of time. The Book of
Manu teaches us that twelve thousand years of mortals are but a day and
a night to the gods; their year, therefore, consisting of three hundred
and sixty days, numbers 4,320,000 years. A thousand years of the gods
make but one of Brahma’s days, that is to say, 4,320,000,000 human
years, representing the total life of our globe; and Brahma’s night is
of equal duration. Three hundred and sixty of these days and nights
make one of this god’s years; and a hundred of these years constitute
one of his lives, that is to say, the duration of the universe, which
is represented by the formidable figure of 311,090,000,000,000
years. After this he begins a new life. At present we have not yet
attained the noon of Brahma’s actual day nor half the life-time of our
terrestrial globe.
To complete this outline of the stupendous chronology of the Vedas,
I continue to profit by some notes received from my war-time godson,
who has a thorough knowledge of this unduly neglected science. For
the rest, it will be seen that chronology and cosmogony are here in
intimate connection:
“The day of Brahma (4,320,000,000 years) is divided into fourteen
lives of Manu, consisting alternately of seven Manvantaras and seven
Pralayas. The word Manvantara signifies the interval between two
Manus: one of these appears in the dawn and the other in the twilight
of this period of terrestrial activity. The morning Manu gives the
Manvantara its name and the evening Manu presides over the Pralaya,
that is to say, the period of dissolution, or negative _status quo_,
death, sleep, or inertia, as the case may be, which divides two waves
of life.
“Universal evolution is a chain without beginning or end, each
link of which in turn appears and disappears in our field of
consciousness. Brahma himself dies only to be reborn. But for the
sovereign of the worlds, as for a random star or the least of
organized creatures, there is death and dissolution only from the
individual point of view. Darkness is the ransom to be paid for
light, the evening balances the morning, age is the price of youth
and death the reverse of life. In reality, however, all evolution is
at the same time continuous and discontinuous; the Manvantaras and
Pralayas are at once simultaneous and successive; each individual
life is engendered by its elemental double and engenders its residual
double. Every decline of life in a given place coincides with an
increase of being in a corresponding place and proceeds by means of
a rebirth in a fresh place. Fundamentally, there is no individual
life. We are at once ourselves and another, ourselves and several
others, ourselves and all others, ourselves and the Universe,
ourselves and infinity.
“The evolution of our terrestrial globe is an infinitesimal cycle of
this universal evolution, corresponding merely with a day and a night
of Brahma, and is divided into fourteen cycles, each consisting of
a Manvantara and a Pralaya. The cycle of organic evolution upon our
solidified globe represents only one of these subdivisions, that is
to say, the radius of the organic sphere is only a fourteenth part
of the radius of the mineral sphere. Mineral evolution is manifestly
continuous from the formation of the globe to its dissolution. If,
between the periods of geological activity, there exists a Pralaya
of any kind, this latter, despite the etymology of the word, must
be not a dissolution, which would be perfectly inconceivable from
the logical and scientific point of view, but a period of inertia
or abatement, of which the hypothesis is readily admissible
and of which the glacial periods, occurring in the very course
of the present Manvantara, afford us an example. In the earlier
cycles of Manu, the earth passed in succession through the various
stages of condensation which science regards as igneous and which
correspond with the ethereal, gaseous and liquid evolution of the
elements. During these long periods, the life of the present existed
potentially in the soul of the earth and actually on other globes
than ours.”
4
But we will proceed no further with this outline, which would become
so complicated as to be inextricable. Let us remember simply the
magnificent doctrine of the reincarnation, which is the most ancient
reply, the only decisive and, no doubt, the most plausible reply, to
all the problems of justice and injustice, the immortal torture of
mortals, and its corollary, the law of Karma, which, as my godson
so truly says, “is the most wonderful of ethical discoveries: it
represents abstract liberty and is enough to enfranchise the human
will from any superior or even infinite being. We are our own creators
and the sole captains of our fate; no other than ourselves rewards
or punishes us; there is no sin, but only consequences; there is no
morality, but only responsibilities. Now Buddha taught that, merely by
virtue of this sovran law, the individual must be reborn to reap what
he has sowed; and this certainty of rebirth was enough to neutralize
the horror of death.”
* * * * *
Is all this nothing more than imagination, than the dreams of brains
more ardent than our own, the hallucinations of ascetics which amaze
the young and the immobility or the echo of immemorial traditions
bequeathed by other races, or by races anterior to man and more
spiritual? It is impossible to decide; but, whatever its origin, it is
certain that the monument whereof we have seen but a corner of the
pedestal is prodigious and that it has not a human aspect. All that we
can say is that our modern sciences, notably archæology, geology and
biology, confirm rather than invalidate either of these revelations.
5
But this is not the question for the moment. Let us suppose that one
of these revelations, for instance, that of the sacred books of India,
were true, incontestable and scientifically proved by our researches;
or that an interplanetary communication or a declaration of some
superhuman being no longer permitted us to doubt its authenticity: what
influence would such a revelation have upon our life? What would it
transform in our life, what novel element would it add to our morality
or our happiness? No doubt it would work but a very slight change. It
would pass too high above us; it would not descend to our level; it
would not touch us; we should lose ourselves in its immensity; and upon
the whole, knowing everything, we should be neither happier nor wiser
than when we knew nothing.
Not to know what he has come upon this earth to do: that is man’s great
and everlasting torment. Now we must perforce admit that the actual
truth of the universe, if some day we learn it, will probably be very
similar to one or other of those revelations which, while appearing to
teach us everything, teach us nothing at all. It will at least possess
the same inhuman character. It will necessarily be as unlimited in both
space and time, as abysmal, as foreign to our senses and our brain.
The more tremendous, the more majestic the revelation, the greater
chance will it have of being true; but also, the more remote from us
it is, the less will it interest us. We can hardly hope to escape
from this discouraging dilemma: those revelations, explanations or
interpretations which are too petty will not satisfy us, because we
shall instinctively feel them to be insufficient; while those which are
too great will pass us by too far to affect us.
6
It nevertheless seems desirable that this revelation of the sacred
books of India should be authentic and that our knowledge, still so
slight, so unimportant, so timid and so incoherent, should gradually
confirm, as indeed it unwittingly does daily, certain points scattered
through the boundless immensity of this immemorial truth.
It would in any case, even if it did not succeed in affecting us
directly, possess the advantage of enlarging our horizon, which is
narrower than we suppose, until it embraces infinity; of studding
this infinity with magnificent landmarks; of animating it, peopling
it, filling it with wonderful faces, making it a living, perceptible,
almost comprehensible thing.
We all know that we dwell in infinity; but this infinity is, for us,
only a bare and barren word, a black and uninhabitable void, a formless
abstraction, a lifeless expression, to which our imagination can
give only a momentary vitality, at the cost of a tiring, solitary,
unskilful, unassisted, ungrateful and unfruitful effort. We hold
ourselves, in fact, pent in this terrestrial world of ours and in our
brief historic ages; and at the most we raise our eyes, from time to
time, towards the other planets of our solar system and project our
thoughts, which are discouraged from the beginning, as far as the
nebulous periods that preceded man’s advent on our globe. More and more
deliberately we are directing the whole activity of our intelligence
upon ourselves; and, by a regrettable optical illusion, the more it
restricts its field of action, the deeper we believe it to be probing.
Our thinkers and philosophers, fearing lest they should stray as their
predecessors did before them, no longer concern themselves with any
but the least disputable aspects, problems and secrets; but, if these
are the least disputable, they are also the least sublime; and man, in
his quality as a terrestrial animal, becomes the sole object of their
investigations. The scientists, on the other hand, are accumulating
minor data and observations whose weight is stifling them; yet they no
longer dare to thrust them aside or open them out, so as to ventilate
them by some general law, some salutary hypothesis, for those which
they have hitherto ventured to advance have been pitiably contradicted,
one after the other, and scouted by experience.
Nevertheless, they are right to act as they do and to continue their
investigations according to their narrow and restricted methods; but
we are entitled to observe that, the closer they believe that they
have drawn to a fugitive truth, the greater are their uncertainty and
confusion, the more precarious, imaginary and insufficient seem the
foundations upon which they based their confidence and the more fully
do they perceive the immense distance that still divides them from the
least of life’s secrets. As one of the most illustrious of them, Sir
William Grove, prophetically remarked:
“The day is fast approaching when it will be confessed that the
Forces we know are but the phenomenal manifestations of Realities we
know nothing about, but which were known to the Ancients and by them
worshipped.”
7
This, indeed, is what we are bound to think if we study slightly this
primitive revelation, this ancient wisdom and what has grown out of it.
Man once knew more than he now knows. He was ignorant perhaps of the
enormous mass of petty details which we have observed and classified
and which have enabled us to subdue certain forces which he never
thought of turning to account: but it is probable that he understood
better than we do their nature, their essence and their origin.
The higher civilization of humanity, which history traces back
tentatively to five or six thousand years before Christ, is perhaps far
more ancient; and, without admitting, as has been asserted, that the
Egyptians kept astronomical records through a period of six hundred and
thirty thousand years, we may consider it as established that their
observations embraced two precessional cycles, two sidereal years, or
fifty-one thousand, seven hundred and thirty-six solar years. Now they
themselves were not initiators but initiates, who derived all that they
knew from a more ancient source. It was the same with the Semites,
in the matter of their primitive books and their Kabbalah; and the
Greeks, among whom all those who really taught us something about the
origin and constitution of the world and its elements, about nature and
divinity, mind and matter, men such as Hesiod, Pythagoras, Anaxagoras,
Plato and the Neo-Platonists, were likewise initiates, that is to say,
they were men who, having travelled in Egypt or India, had drunk of the
same one and immemorial spring. Our prehistoric religions, Scandinavian
or Germanic and the Druidism of the Celts, those of China and Japan, of
Mexico and Peru, despite numerous deformations, were also derived from
the same source, even as our great western metaphysics, which preceded
our modern materialism, with its somewhat sordid outlook, and notably
the metaphysics of Leibnitz, Kant, Schelling, Fichte and Hegel have
approached it and, more or less unconsciously, slaked their thirst at
it.
It is therefore certain that through the Greeks, through the Bible,
through Christianity, which is its last echo, for the author of the
Apocalypse and St. Paul were initiates, we are all steeped in this
revelation; that there is not and never has been any other; that it
is the great human or superhuman revelation; and that consequently
it would be right and salutary to study it more attentively and more
profoundly than we have hitherto done.
8
Where does the source of this revelation lie? We place it in the
east because nearly everything that we know about it is found in
the sacred books of India. But it is almost certainly of western or
rather Hyperborean origin and dates back to those wonderful vanished
Atlanteans, whose last Protoscythian colonies flourished over eleven
thousand years ago and whose existence can no longer be denied.
Remember that famous passage in Plato:
“One day, when Solon was conversing with the priests of Saïs on the
history of the remote ages, one of them said:
“‘O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children!... There is not
an opinion, not a tradition of knowledge among you that is old....
You know nothing of that noble race of heroes of whom you are a
remnant.... Nine thousand years, as our annals record, have elapsed
since what I am about to tell you.... The most famous of your actions
was the overthrow of the island of Atlantis, which lay over against
the Pillars of Hercules, was greater than Libya and Asia put together
and was the passage to other islands and to a great ocean whereof
the Mediterranean Sea was but a harbour; and within the Pillars the
empire of Atlantis reached in Europe to Tyrrhenia and in Libya to
Egypt. This mighty power was arrayed against Egypt and Greece and
all the Mediterranean countries. Then your city did bravely and won
renown throughout the earth. For, risking her own existence, she
repelled the invader and gave liberty to all the nations within the
Pillars. Soon after, earthquakes arose and floods; and your warlike
race was swallowed up by the earth; and the island of Atlantis also
disappeared in the sea.’”