The Invisible Pyramid

by Loren Eiseley

  A story has been told of the founder of one of the world’s great religions—a religion which seeks constantly, in its higher manifestations, to wipe clean the mirror of the mind. Buddha is reported to have said to his sorrowing disciples as he lay dying, “Walk on.” He wanted his people to be free of earthly entanglement or desire. That is how one should go in dignity to the true harvest of the worlds. It is a philosophy transferred from the old sun civilizations of earth. It implies that one cannot proceed upon the path of human transcendence until one has made interiorly in one’s soul a road into the future. This is the warning of one who knew that the spaces within stretch as far as those without. Cyborgs and exosomatic evolution, however far they are carried, partake of the planet virus. They will never bring peace to man, but they will harry him onward through the circle of the worlds.

  II

  A scientific civilization in the full sense is an anomaly in world history. The civilizations of the sun never developed it. Only one culture, that of the West, has, through technology, reduced the religious mystique so long attached to agriculture. Never before have such large masses of people been so totally divorced from the land or the direct processing of their own foodstuffs.

  This phenomenon has undoubtedly contributed to the alienation of man from nature, as more and more acres go under cement for parking lots, shopping centers, and superhighways. A steadily mounting population threatens increasing damage to the natural environment from which food and breathable air are drawn. All kinds of sidelong, not very visible or dramatic dangers lurk about the edges of such an unstable situation. Any one of them could at some point become lethal, and an obscure and ignored problem turn into a disaster.

  The tragedy of a single man in the New York blackout in 1965 could easily become the symbol for an entire civilization. This man, as it happened, was trapped by the darkness on an upper floor of a skyscraper. A Negrito or any one of the bush folk would have known better than to go prowling in a spirit- haunted, leopard-infested jungle after nightfall. The forest dwellers would have remained in their huts until daybreak.

  In this case civilized man was troubled by no such inhibitions. Seizing a candle from a desk in his office, he made his way out into the corridor. Since the elevators were not running, he cast about for a stairway. Sighting what in the candlelight appeared to be a small service doorway near the bank of elevators, he opened it and, holding his small candle at eye level, stepped in. He was found the next day at the bottom of an elevator shaft, the extinguished candle still clutched in his hand.

  I have said that this episode is symbolic. Man, frail, anticipatory man, no longer possessed the caution to find his way through a disturbance in his nightly routine. Instead he had seized a candle, the little flickering light of human knowledge, with which to confront one of his own giant creations in the dark. A janitor had left a door unlocked that should have been secured. Urban man, used to walking on smooth surfaces, had never glanced below his feet. He and his inadequate candle had plunged recklessly forward and been swallowed up as neatly by a machine in its tunnel as by a leopard on a dark path.

  I have seen similar errors made at the onset of floods by men who no longer had the wit or conditioning to harken to the whispered warnings of wild nature. They had grown too confident of the powers of their own world, from which nature, so they thought, had been excluded. In the wider context of civilization, our candle flame may illuminate the next few moments but scarcely more. The old precarious world from which we came lurks always behind the door. It will find a way to be present, even if we should force it to retreat to the nearest star. Moreover, if, after the crust of the earth has been rifled and its resources consumed, civilization were to come upon evil times, man would have to start over with incredibly less than lay potentially before the flint users of the Ice Age.

  But there emerges to haunt us the question of why this peculiar civilization arose. In the first part of the twentieth century appeared a man destined to be widely read, criticized, and contended against, even to be called wicked. He was destined to influence the philosophical historians who followed him in the attempt to observe some kind of discernible pattern in the events of history. Our concern with this man, Oswald Spengler, and his book, The Decline of the West, relates to just one aspect of Spengler’s thought: the rise of our scientific civilization. That Spengler is periodically declared outmoded or resurrected need not involve us. What does affect us is that the man is basically a German poet-philosopher who glimpsed the leitmotif of the era we have been discussing and who pictured it well. It is the world in which we of the West find ourselves. Spengler is difficult, but in this aspect of his work he pictures the idea forms, the zeitgeist, lurking within the culture from which the rocket was to emerge.

  Perhaps what he terms the Faustian culture—our own—began as early as the eleventh century with the growing addiction to great unfillable cathedrals with huge naves and misty recesses where space seemed to hover without limits. In the words of one architect, the Gothic arch is “a bow always tending to expand.” Hidden within its tensions is the upward surge of the space rocket.

  Again, infinite solitude tormented the individual soul. A too guilty hunger for forbidden knowledge beset the introverted heroes of this culture. The legend of Faust to this day epitomizes the West; the Quest of the Holy Grail is another of its Christian symbols. The bell towers of Western Europe have rung of time and death and burial in a way characteristic of no other culture. The bells were hung high and intended to reach far across space.

  Faustian man is never at rest in the world. He is never the contemplative beneath the sacred Bô tree of the Buddha. He is, instead, a spokesman of the will. He is the embodiment of a restless, exploratory, and anticipating ego. In that last word we have the human head spun round to confront its future—the future it has created. It well may be that the new world, which began amidst time-tolling bells and the stained glass and dim interiors of Gothic cathedrals, laid an enchantment upon the people of Western Europe that provided at least a portion of the seedbed for the later rise of science—just as guilt has also haunted us. In its highest moments, science could also be said, not irreverently, to be a search for the Holy Grail. There the analogy lies—a poet’s vision perhaps, but a powerful one. I would merely add one observation: that the owl, Minerva’s symbol of wisdom, is able to turn its head through an angle of one hundred eighty degrees. It can be not visually anticipatory alone, it can look backward. Perhaps it is the lack of this ability that gives modern man and his children a slightly inhuman cast of countenance.

  III

  Giordano Bruno was burned at Rome in 1600. His body perished, but the ideas for which he died—the heretical concepts of the great depths of the universe and of life on other worlds—ran on with similar dreams across the centuries to enlighten our own time. Space travel unconsciously began when the first hunters took their bearings on the North Star or saw the rising of the Southern Cross. It grew incipiently with the mathematics and the magnetic needle of the mariners. Man, in retrospect, seems almost predestined for space. To master the dream in its entirety, however, man had to invent in two categories: inventions of power and inventions of understanding. The invention of the scientific method itself began as an adventure in understanding. Inventions of power without understanding have been the bane of human history.

  The word “invention” can denote ideas far removed from the machines to which the people of our mechanically inclined era seek constantly to limit the word. Let us take one refined example. The zero, invented twice in the mists of prehistory, once by the Hindus and once by the Maya, lies at the root of all complicated mathematics, yet it is not a “thing.” Rather, it is a “no thing,” a “nothing,” without which Roman mathematics was a heavy, lumbering affair. In our time that necessary zero leaps instantaneously through the circuits of computers, helping to guide a rocket on the long pathway to Mars. One might say that an unknown mathematical genius seeking pure abstract understanding w
as a necessary prehistoric prelude to the success of the computer. He was also, and tragically, the possible indirect creator of world disaster in the shape of atomic war.

  “Traveling long journeys is costly, at all times troublesome, at some times dangerous,” warned a seventeenth-century writer. These were true words spoken of great seas and unmapped continents. They can also be spoken of the scientific journey itself. Today, magnified beyond the comprehension of that ancient wayfarer, we contemplate roads across the planetary orbits, the penetration of unknown atmospheres, and the defiance of solar flares. This effort has become the primary obsession of the great continental powers. Into the organization of this endeavor has gone an outpouring of wealth and inventive genius so vast that it constitutes a public sacrifice equivalent in terms of relative wealth to the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza almost five thousand years ago. Indeed, there is a sense in which modern science is involved in the construction of just such a pyramid, though an invisible one.

  Science, too, demands great sacrifice, persistence of purpose across the generations, and an almost religious devotion. Whether its creations will loom to future ages as strangely antiquated as the sepulchres of the divine pharaohs, time alone will tell. Perhaps, in the final reckoning, only understanding will enable man to look back upon his pathway. For if inventions of power outrun understanding, as they now threaten to do, man may well sink into a night more abysmal than any he has yet experienced. Understanding increasingly begets power, but, as perceptive statesmen have long observed, power in the wrong hands has a way of corrupting understanding.

  There is an eye atop Palomar Mountain that peers at fleeing galaxies so remote that eons have elapsed since the light which reaches that great lens began its journey. There is another eye, that of the electron microscope, which peers deep into our own being. Both eyes are important. They are eyes of understanding. They balance and steady each other. They give our world perspective; they place man where he belongs. Such eyes, however, are subject to their human makers. Men may devise or acquire, and use beautiful or deathly machines and yet have no true time sense, no tolerance, no genuine awareness of their own history. By contrast, the balanced eye, the rare true eye of understanding, can explore the gulfs of history in a night or sense with uncanny accuracy the subtle moment when a civilization in all its panoply of power turns deathward. There are such troubled seers among us today—men who fear that the ramifications of the huge industrial complex centering upon space are draining us of energy and wealth for other enterprises—that it has about it a threatening, insensitive, and cataclysmic quality.

  A term in military parlance, “the objective,” may be pertinent here. It is intended to secure the mind against the diffuse and sometimes inept opportunism of the politician, or the waves of uninformed emotion to which the general public is so frequently subjected. An objective is delimited with precision and care. Its intention is to set a clearly defined goal. Armies, or for that matter sciences, do not advance on tides of words. Instead, they must be supplied logistically. Schedules must equate with a realistic appraisal of resources.

  There will never be enough men or material for a multitudinous advance on all fronts—even for a wealthy nation. Thus, as our technological feats grow more costly, the objectives of our society must be assessed with care. From conservation to hospitals, from defense to space, we are forced by circumstance to live more constantly in the future. Random “tinkering,” random response to the unexpected, become extraordinarily costly in the industrial world which Western society has created. Yet, paradoxically, the unexpected comes with increasing rapidity upon future-oriented societies such as ours. Psychological stresses appear. The current generation feels increasingly alienated from its predecessors. There is a quickening of vibrations running throughout the society. One might, in physiological terms, say that its metabolism has been feverishly accelerated. For this, a certain price in stability has been exacted, the effects of which may not be apparent until long afterward.

  The attempt to conquer space has seized the public imagination. To many of this generation, the sight of rockets roaring upward has brought home the feats of science so spectacularly that we sometimes forget the medical researcher brooding in his laboratory, or the archaeologist striving amidst broken shards and undeciphered hieroglyphs to understand what doom destroyed a city lying beneath the sands of centuries. The estimated cost of placing the unmanned Surveyor 3 upon the moon amounted to more than eighty million dollars. Just one unmanned space probe, in other words, equaled or exceeded the entire endowment of many a good college or university; the manned flight of Apollo 12 cost two hundred and fifty millions. The total space program is inconceivably costly, yet the taxpayer, up until recently, accepted it with little question. By contrast, his elected officials frequently boggle over the trifling sums necessary to save a redwood forest or to clear a river of pollution.

  What then, we are forced to ask, is our objective? Is it scientific? Is it purely military? Or is it these and more? Is there some unconscious symbolism at work? At heart, does each one of us, when a rocket hurtles into space, yearn once more for some lost green continent under other skies? Is humanity, like some ripening giant puffball, feeling the mounting pressure of the spores within? Are we, remote though we may be from habitable planets, driven by the same irresistible migrating impulse that descends upon an overpopulated hive? Are we each unconsciously escaping from the mechanized routine and urban troubles which increasingly surround us? Beneath our conscious rationalizations does this play a role in our willingness to sustain the growing burden?

  Any answers to these questions would be complex and would vary from individual to individual. They are worth asking because they are part of the venture in understanding that is necessary to human survival. Three successful moon landings, it goes without saying, are an enormous intellectual achievement. But what we must try to understand is more difficult than the mathematics of a moon shot—namely, the nature of the scientific civilization we are in the process of creating. Science has risen in a very brief interval into a giant social institution of enormous prestige and governmentally supported power. To many, it replaces primitive magic as the solution for all human problems.

  IV

  In the coastal jungles of eastern Mexico the archaeologist comes at intervals upon giant stone heads of many tons weight carved in a strikingly distinct style far different from that of the Maya. They mark the remains of the lost Olmec culture of the first millennium before the Christian era. Around the globe, more than one such society of clever artisans has arisen and placed its stamp, the order of its style, upon surrounding objects, only to lapse again into the night of time. Each was self-contained. Each, with the limited amount of wealth and energy at its disposal, placed its greatest emphasis upon some human dream, some lost philosophy, some inner drive beyond the satisfaction of the needs of the body. Each, in turn, vanished.

  Western man, with the triumph of the experimental method, has turned upon the world about him an intellectual instrument of enormous power never fully exploited by any previous society. Its feats of understanding include the discovery of evolutionary change as revealed in the stratified rocks. It has looked far down the scale of life to reveal man magically shrunken to a tiny tree shrew on a forest branch. Science has solved the mysteries of microbial disease and through the spectroscope has determined the chemical composition of distant stars. It has groped its way into a knowledge of the gigantic distances of the cosmos—distances too remote for short-lived man ever to penetrate. It has learned why the sun endures and at what pace light leaps across the universe.

  Man can speak into infinite spaces, but in this time in which I write violence and contention rage, not alone on opposite sides of the world, but here at home. How far are all these voices traveling, I wonder? Out beyond earth’s farthest shadow, on and on into the depths of the universe? And suppose that there were, out yonder, some hidden listening ear, would it be able to discern any diff
erence between the sounds man made when he was a chittering tree shrew contesting for a beetle and those produced at his appearance before a parliament of nations?

  It is a thing to consider, because with understanding arise instruments of power, which always spread faster than the inventions of calm understanding. The tools of violence appeal to the fanatic, the illiterate, the blindly venomous. The inventions of power have grown monstrous in our time. Man’s newfound ingenuity has given him health, wealth, and increase, but there is added now the ingredient of an ever-growing terror. Man is only beginning dimly to discern that the ultimate menace, the final interior zero, may lie in his own nature. It is said in an old tale that to understand life man must learn to shudder. This century seems doomed to master the lesson.

  Science, in spite of its awe-inspiring magnitude, contains one flaw that partakes of the nature of the universe itself. It can solve problems, but it also creates them in a genuinely confusing ratio. They escape unseen out of the laboratory into the body politic, whether they be germs inured to antibiotics, the waiting death in rocket silos, or the unloosed multiplying power of life. There are just so many masterful and inventive brains in the human population. Even with the growth of teamwork and the attempted solution of future problems now coming to be known as systems analysis, man is our most recalcitrant material. He does not yield cherished beliefs with rapidity; he will not take pills at the decree of some distant, well-intentioned savior.

  No one knows surely what was the purpose of Olmec art. We do know something of the seemingly endless political expansion and ethnic dilution that precipitated the fall of Rome. We know also that the pace of technological innovation in the modern world has multiplied throughout our lifetimes. The skills expended now upon space may in the end alter our philosophies and rewrite our dreams, even our very concepts of the nature of life—if there is life—beyond us in the void. Moreover the whole invisible pyramid is itself the incidental product of a primitive seed capsule, the human brain, whose motivations alter with time and circumstance.