The Invisible Pyramid

by Loren Eiseley

  After man had exercised his talents in the building of the first neolithic cities and empires, a period mostly marked by architectural and military triumphs, an intellectual transformation descended upon the known world, a time of questioning. This era is fundamental to an understanding of man, and has engaged the attention of such modern scholars as Karl Jaspers and Lewis Mumford. The period culminates in the first millennium before Christ. Here in the great centers of civilization, whether Chinese, Indian, Judaic, or Greek, man had begun to abandon inherited gods and purely tribal loyalties in favor of an inner world in which the pursuit of earthly power was ignored. The destiny of the human soul became of more significance than the looting of a province. Though these dreams are expressed in different ways by such divergent men as Christ, Buddha, Lao-tse, and Confucius, they share many things in common, not the least of which is respect for the dignity of the common man.

  The period of the creators of transcendent values—the axial thinkers, as they are called—created the world of universal thought that is our most precious human heritage. One can see it emerging in the mind of Christ as chronicled by Saint John. Here the personalized tribal deity of earlier Judaic thought becomes transformed into a world deity. Christ, the Good Shepherd, says: “Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold and one shepherd. . . . My sheep hear my voice . . . and they follow me.”

  These words spoken by the carpenter from Nazareth are those of a world changer. They passed boundaries, whispered in the ears of galley slaves: “One fold, one shepherd. Follow me.” These are no longer the wrathful words of a jealous city ravager, a local potentate god. They mark instead, in the high cultures, the rise of a new human image, a rejection of purely material goals, a turning toward some inner light. As these ideas diffused, they were, of course, subject to the wear of time and superstition, but the human ethic of the individual prophets and thinkers has outlasted empires.

  Such men speak to us across the ages. In their various approaches to life they encouraged the common man toward charity and humility. They did not come with weapons; instead they bespoke man’s purpose to subdue his animal nature and in so doing to create a radiantly new and noble being. These were the dreams of the first millennium B.C. Tormented man, arising, falling, still pursues those dreams today.

  Earlier I mentioned Plato’s path into the light that blinds the man who has lived in darkness. Out of just such darkness arose the first humanizing influence. It was genuinely the time of the good shepherds. No one can clearly determine why these prophets had such profound effects within the time at their disposal. Nor can we solve the mystery of how they came into existence across the Euro-Asiatic land mass in diverse cultures at roughly the same time. As Jaspers observes, he who can solve this mystery will know something common to all mankind.

  In this difficult era we are still living in the inspirational light of a tremendous historical event, one that opened up the human soul. But if the neophytes were blinded by the light, so, perhaps, the prophets were in turn confused by the human darkness they encountered. The scientific age replaced them. The common man, after brief days of enlightenment, turned once again to escape, propelled outward first by the world voyagers, and then by the atom breakers. We have called up vast powers which loom menacingly over us. They await our bidding, and we turn to outer space as though the solitary answer to the unspoken query must be flight, such flight as ancient man engaged in across ice ages and vanished game trails—the flight from nowhere.

  The good shepherds meantime have all faded into the darkness of history. One of them, however, left a cryptic message: “My doctrine is not mine but his that sent me.” Even in the time of unbelieving this carries a warning. For He that sent may still be couched in the body of man awaiting the end of the story.

  IV

  When I was a small boy I once lived near a brackish stream that wandered over the interminable salt flats south of our town. Between occasional floods the area became a giant sunflower forest, taller than the head of a man. Child gangs roved this wilderness, and guerrilla combats with sunflower spears sometimes took place when boys from the other side of the marsh ambushed the hidden trails. Now and then, when a raiding party sought a new path, one could see from high ground the sunflower heads shaking and closing over the passage of the life below. In some such manner nature’s green barriers must have trembled and subsided in silence behind the footsteps of the first man-apes who stumbled out of the vine- strewn morass of centuries into the full sunlight of human consciousness.

  The sunflower forest of personal and racial childhood is relived in every human generation. One reaches the high ground, and all is quiet in the shaken reeds. The nodding golden flowers spring up indifferently behind us, and the way backward is lost when finally we turn to look. There is something unutterably secretive involved in man’s intrusion into his second world, into the mutable domain of thought. Perhaps he questions still his right to be there.

  Some act unknown, some propitiation of unseen forces, is demanded of him. For this purpose he has raised pyramids and temples, but all in vain. A greater sacrifice is demanded, the act of a truly great magician, the man capable of transforming himself. For what, increasingly, is required of man is that he pursue the paradox of return. So desperate has been the human emergence from fen and thicket, so great has seemed the virtue of a single magical act carried beyond nature, that man hesitates, as long ago I had similarly shuddered to confront a phantom on a stair.

  Written deep in the human subconscious is a simple terror of what has come with us from the forest and sometimes haunts our dreams. Man does not wish to retrace his steps down to the margin of the reeds and peer within, lest by some magic he be permanently recaptured. Instead, men prefer to hide in cities of their own devising. I know a New Yorker who, when she visits the country, complains that the crickets keep her awake. I knew another who had to be awakened screaming from a nightmare of whose nature he would never speak. As for me, a long-time student of the past, I, too, have had my visitants.

  The dreams are true. By no slight effort have we made our way through the marshes. Something unseen has come along with each of us. The reeds sway shut, but not as definitively as we would wish. It is the price one pays for bringing almost the same body through two worlds. The animal’s needs are very old; it must sometimes be coaxed into staying in its new discordant realm. As a consequence all religions have realized that the soul must not be allowed to linger yearning at the edge of the sunflower forest.

  The curious sorcery of sound symbols and written hieroglyphs in man’s new brain had to be made to lure him farther and farther from the swaying reeds. Temples would better contain his thought and fix his dreams upon the stars in the night sky. A creature who has once passed from visible nature into the ghostly insubstantial world evolved and projected from his own mind will never cease to pursue thereafter the worlds beyond this world. Nevertheless the paradox remains: man’s crossing into the realm of space has forced him equally to turn and contemplate with renewed intensity the world of the sunflower forest—the ancient world of the body that he is doomed to inhabit, the body that completes his cosmic prison.

  Not long ago I chanced to fly over a forested section of country which, in my youth, was still an unfrequented wilderness. Across it now suburbia was spreading. Below, like the fungus upon a fruit, I could see the radiating lines of transport gouged through the naked earth. From far up in the wandering air one could see the lines stretching over the horizon. They led to cities clothed in an unmoving haze of smog. From my remote, abstract position in the clouds I could gaze upon all below and watch the incipient illness as it spread with all its slimy tendrils through the watershed.

  Farther out, I knew, on the astronauts’ track, the earth would hang in silver light and the seas hold their ancient blue. Man would be invisible; the creeping white rootlets of his urban growth would be equally unseen. The blue,
cloud-covered planet would appear still as when the first men stole warily along a trail in the forest. Upon one thing, however, the scientists of the space age have informed us. Earth is an inexpressibly unique possession. In the entire solar system it alone possesses water and oxygen sufficient to nourish higher life. It alone contains the seeds of mind. Mercury bakes in an inferno of heat beside the sun; something strange has twisted the destiny of Venus; Mars is a chill desert; Pluto is a cold wisp of reflected light over three billion miles away on the edge of the black void. Only on earth does life’s green engine fuel the oxygen-devouring brain.

  For centuries we have dreamed of intelligent beings throughout this solar system. We have been wrong; the earth we have taken for granted and treated so casually—the sunflower-shaded forest of man’s infancy—is an incredibly precious planetary jewel. We are all of us—man, beast, and growing plant—aboard a space ship of limited dimensions whose journey began so long ago that we have abandoned one set of gods and are now in the process of substituting another in the shape of science.

  The axial religions had sought to persuade man to transcend his own nature; they had pictured to him limitless perspectives of self-mastery. By contrast, science in our time has opened to man the prospect of limitless power over exterior nature. Its technicians sometimes seem, in fact, to have proffered us the power of the void as though flight were the most important value on earth.

  “We have got to spend everything we have, if necessary, to get off this planet,” one such representative of the aerospace industry remarked to me recently.

  “Why?” I asked, not averse to flight, but a little bewildered by his seeming desperation.

  “Because,” he insisted, his face turning red as though from some deep inner personal struggle, “because”—then he flung at me what I suspect he thought my kind of science would take seriously—“because of the ice—the ice is coming back, that’s why.”

  Finally, as though to make everything official, one of the space agency administrators was quoted in Newsweek shortly after the astronauts had returned from the moon: “Should man,” this official said, “fall back from his destiny . . . the confines of this planet will destroy him.”

  It was a strange way to consider our planet, I thought, closing the magazine and brooding over this sudden distaste for life at home. Why was there this hidden anger, this inner flight syndrome, these threats for those who remained on earth? Some powerful, not totally scientific impulse seemed tugging at the heart of man. Was it fear of his own mounting numbers, the creeping of the fungus threads? But where, then, did these men intend to flee? The solar system stretched bleak and cold and crater-strewn before my mind. The nearest, probably planetless star was four light-years and many human generations away. I held up the magazine once more. Here and here alone, photographed so beautifully from space, was the blue jewel compounded of water and of living green. Yet upon the page the words repeated themselves: “This planet will destroy him.”

  No, I thought, this planet nourished man. It took four million years to find our way through the sunflower forest, and after that only a few millennia to reach the moon. It is not fair to say this planet will destroy us. Space flight is a brave venture, but upon the soaring rockets are projected all the fears and evasions of man. He has fled across two worlds, from the windy corridors of wild savannahs to the sunlit world of the mind, and still he flees. Earth will not destroy him. It is he who threatens to destroy the earth. In sober terms we are forced to reflect that by enormous expenditure and effort we have ventured a small way out into the planetary system of a minor star, but an even smaller way into the distances, no less real, that separate man from man.

  Creatures who evolve as man has done sometimes bear the scar tissue of their evolutionary travels in their bodies. The human cortex, the center of high thought, has come to dominate, but not completely to suppress, the more ancient portions of the animal brain. Perhaps it was from this last wound that my engineer friend was unconsciously fleeing. We know that within our heads there still exists an irrational restive ghost that can whisper disastrous messages into the ear of reason.

  During the axial period, as we have noted, several great religions arose in Asia. For the first time in human history man’s philosophical thinking seems to have concerned itself with universal values, with man’s relation to man across the barriers of empire or tribal society. A new ethic, not even now perfected, struggled to emerge from the human mind. To these religions of self-sacrifice and disdain of worldly power men were drawn in enormous numbers. Though undergoing confused erosion in our time, they still constitute the primary allegiance of many millions of the world’s population.

  Today man’s mounting numbers and his technological power to pollute his environment reveal a single demanding necessity: the necessity for him consciously to reenter and preserve, for his own safety, the old first world from which he originally emerged. His second world, drawn from his own brain, has brought him far, but it cannot take him out of nature, nor can he live by escaping into his second world alone. He must now incorporate from the wisdom of the axial thinkers an ethic not alone directed toward his fellows, but extended to the living world around him. He must make, by way of his cultural world, an actual conscious reentry into the sunflower forest he had thought merely to exploit or abandon. He must do this in order to survive. If he succeeds he will, perhaps, have created a third world which combines elements of the original two and which should bring closer the responsibilities and nobleness of character envisioned by the axial thinkers who may be acclaimed as the creators, if not of man, then of his soul. They expressed, in a prescientific era, man’s hunger to transcend his own image, a hunger not entirely submerged even beneath the formidable weaponry and technological triumphs of the present.

  The story of the great saviors, whether Chinese, Indian, Greek, or Judaic, is the story of man in the process of enlightening himself, not simply by tools, but through the slow inward growth of the mind that made and may yet master them through knowledge of itself. “The poet, like the lightning rod,” Emerson once stated, “must reach from a point nearer the sky than all surrounding objects down to the earth, and into the dark wet soil, or neither is of use.” Today that effort is demanded not only of the poet. In the age of space it is demanded of all of us. Without it there can be no survival of mankind, for man himself must be his last magician. He must seek his own way home.

  The task is admittedly gigantic, but even Halley’s flaming star has rounded on its track, a pinpoint of light in the uttermost void. Man, like the comet, is both bound and free. Throughout the human generations the star has always turned homeward. Nor do man’s inner journeys differ from those of that far-flung elliptic. Now, as in earlier necromantic centuries, the meteors that afflicted ignorant travelers rush overhead. In the ancient years, when humankind wandered through briars and along windy precipices, it was thought well, when encountering comets or firedrakes, “to pronounce the name of God with a clear voice.”

  This act was performed once more by many millions when the wounded Apollo 13 swerved homeward, her desperate crew intent, if nothing else availed, upon leaving their ashes on the winds of earth. A love for earth, almost forgotten in man’s roving mind, had momentarily reasserted its mastery, a love for the green meadows we have so long taken for granted and desecrated to our cost. Man was born and took shape among earth’s leafy shadows. The most poignant thing the astronauts had revealed in their extremity was the nostalgic call still faintly ringing on the winds from the sunflower forest.

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