14
This respect and admiration, however, do not militate against our liberty to choose or reject many things, or to reserve them while we wait for further light. When we are told, for instance, that the Cosmos is guided by an infinite series of hierarchies of sensient beings, each having a mission to fulfil, which are the agents of the Karmic and Cosmic laws; when it is added that each of these beings was a man in an earlier Manvantara, or is preparing to become one in the present or in a future Manvantara, that they are perfected men, or nascent men, and that, in their higher and less material spheres, they do not differ morally from terrestrial human beings save in that they do not possess the sense of personality and of emotional nature; when, lastly, we are assured that what we call unconscious Nature is in reality a complex of forces manipulated by semi-intelligent beings (Elementals) directed by the High Planetary Spirits (Dhyani-Shohans), whose total forms the Word Manifest of the non-manifest Logos and constitutes at the same time both the intelligence of the universe and its immutable law, we can do homage to the ingenuity of these speculations, as to that of thousands of others which perhaps embrace the truth more closely than our best and most recent scientific hypotheses; we are free to take what we please from them and to leave what we please. All this, I grant, is by no means proved, is not verified, or cannot be verified, save in certain details, whereas the great fundamental outlines will probably always escape the control of our unequipped intelligence. But what we must, I repeat, admire without reserve is the prodigious spiritual edifice offered by the sum total of this revelation, the immense intellectual effort which, since the dawn of humanity, has attempted to unravel the unfathomable chaos of the origin, structure, progress, direction and end of the universe and which appears to have succeeded to this extent, that hitherto nothing has been found that equals it, or is not inspired by it or, often unconsciously, returns to it.
15
I said in the first part of this essay that too lofty a revelation, even were it incontestable, would have hardly any influence upon our life, that it would change little in it, that it would occur too far from us in the immensity of space and that it would not sink into our hearts and minds. Was it thus with that of which we are now speaking, which is the only truly superhuman and yet acceptable and almost unassailable revelation that we have had? Yes and no, according to the point of view which we take up. All that it contains of too great a character, except its notion of eternity, has not really modified our ideas, has not permeated into our habits. It has not even profoundly affected the peoples who have handed it down to us and who, abandoning any endeavour to understand it, have transformed it into a barbarous and monstrous anthropomorphic polytheism. It is more or less the same everywhere. All the religions, from the pagan religions of China and Japan, Gaul and ancient Germany, Mexico and Peru, down to Christianity with its variants and its offshoots, have issued from it; but all have not been able to live and govern men, save by disfiguring and mutilating it, by dwarfing it to the lowest stature of the souls of their time, by altering it beyond recognition. It is therefore highly probable that matters would be the same with any other and greater revelation, if such were possible, even though this had all the signs of a divine, direct, authentic, indubitable, irrefutable, irrecusable revelation, in a word, with that which we are still awaiting without daring to hope for it.
THE NECESSARY SILENCE
XVII
THE NECESSARY SILENCE
1
THE practitioners of occult science in the east tell us of certain dwellers in the solitudes of Thibet and the Himalayas, Initiates, Masters, heirs to the wisdom of the “Sons of Light,” or the “Seven Primordials,” who possess the seven keys which enable them to understand the sacred prehistoric texts. They are said to be the silent depositories of the secret of the intermolecular or interetheric forces, by the aid of which the races of beings who preceded man upon this earth used to transport to enormous distances monoliths of more than five hundred tons’ weight, which have no relation to the stones that surround them and whose arrangement and astronomical orientation manifestly reveal the intervention of an intelligent and even a highly scientific mind.
These monoliths are sometimes carved, as for instance the famous colossal idols in the valley of Bamian, in Afghanistan, of which one is 173 feet high, or the five hundred and fifty monsters of Easter Island, in Polynesia, which, we may observe in passing, remain one of the most insoluble and perplexing riddles in the world. Hewn out of basalt, reclining or standing erect upon their platforms, these sculptures, one of which measures over 90 feet in height, are undoubtedly the most ancient human effigies to be found upon our earth. Official science ascribes to them an antediluvian origin, while esoteric tradition regards them as portraits of the giants of the last Atlantean race, which became degenerate and lapsed into witchcraft shortly before the disappearance of the mysterious continent whereof Easter Island is supposed to be merely one of the loftier summits to-day emerging from the lonely Pacific.
I have before me as I write the photographs of some of these haunting giants; and I do not believe that in our most oppressive nightmares it would be possible to imagine faces more formidable, more impassive and unfeeling, more eternally ferocious, more coldly supercilious, more pitilessly disdainful and icily omnipotent. Are they Selenites or Martians, with their tightly-closed, implacable mouths and those eyes of theirs, hollow, like wells of malediction, or protuberant and framed in an airman’s goggles? They are not in any way simian, as one might have supposed, but rather represent demoniacal and abstract entities, such as evil, doom and fatality. They seem not so much inhuman as prehuman or posthuman; and they bear a horrible relation to certain ancestral memories which slumber in the marrow of our bones, warning us that such faces undoubtedly once existed.