Thus, eternal geometry had its laws before the worlds came to be submissive to them.
It was the same with chemical affinities, before bodies came to test them.
Thus, vegetability and animality existed before there were vegetables and animals.
Now the universe can be born; matter may emerge from nothing, and appear in various forms; organization and life may be manifest.
II
Strophe
Our paltry planet, cast into infinite space, with its laws of gravitation and projection, takes its place in the universal harmony. The word of the Creator is the mold that gives it a spherical form by virtue of those primitive laws whose effect lasts forever. An external crust hides its incandescent entrails. Great cracks break its scoriated surface. Mountains are produced with such effort that, if the earth had not been contained in the powerful mode of the word, it would have split apart, and nothing would have rolled in its desolate ellipse but sterile debris. The beds of seas are hollowed out with a similar effort. The continents take shape like vast slashes. Vegetables full of creative sap cover them, in order to elaborate a brutal atmosphere.
That atmosphere, elaborated by the plants that are the garment of the earth, which serve neither as shelter or nourishment, are to be successively appropriate to animal life in its various degrees of organization. The air and the waters are populated by various species. Plains, hills, valleys, lakes and springs reflect the light, and the clouds pour out fertile inundations. The animals that fill these astonishing solitudes fly, swim, crawl and walk, unable to encounter any masters. They devour and are devoured. They live, and breathe without admiration and love. A creation without a goal! A spectacle without spectators! A world without prayer and worship! No voice that expresses a sentiment or a thought! Confused noises! Sounds that say nothing!
Hebal’s heart is gripped by fear.
But that atmosphere, rendered appropriate to animal life, needs to be, if it is permissible to put it thus, profoundly animalized, in order to be put in contact with the more delicate organs of those who will be spectators and monarchs, who will be able to know and worship, with faces turned toward the heavens. For them, the exhalations of the earth would be fatal if they arrived too soon. Climate and seasons are dormant in the chaos of a nature in search of its laws.
It required many centuries to prepare the habitation of human beings, and those silent centuries will only subsist in bleak and sad geological imprints.
Hebal thus had the impression of centuries anterior to humankind, a keen and rapid impression akin to a poignant sensation that that would kill if it endured.
He knew the science that would be the labor of human intelligence. Celestial globes traced curves that would be calculated. Other globes escaped calculation. There is one which describes a parabolic line whose term is infinite. Every globe has its name, known to God, and its laws, which he has made. Their number is equal to that of atoms without weight, measure or dimension.
Hebal sees the strata superimposed on the earth, which indicate cycles—an immensity of cycles—in the formation of the earth.
Thus, everything bears the imprint of a universal contemporaneity, which reposes in infinity. Thus, our naked and arid globe, before being organized, only knowing the eternal geometrical laws, orbits in space, with the porphyries, the granites, and the silicas that would be the beds of its seas and the escarpments of its mountains, and the humus that would be its vegetal earth. And while the earth only presents a sterile mass, and while great vegetables prepare the atmosphere thereafter, around them, for animals and humans, it travels the signs of the zodiac unwittingly, balancing on an axis that is sometimes equatorial, sometimes polar. And while the great reptiles come thereafter to slither in liberty amid those frightful wildernesses, and while, later, terrible quadrupeds reign unopposed, while light arrives in eyes devoid of intelligence, while air is respired by organs that do not know how to make sounds imprinted with thought, where is humankind? Where is the essence of humanity?
Human beings do not exist. The essence of humanity is in the thought of God.
Antistrophe
Now the divine thought decides to produce humankind. Here, bewildered human thought is refracted in a dogma like light in a prism, and yet the dogma must reflect the intimate and transcendental nature of humankind. The ideal epic affirms a mysterious fact, whose realization is ideal and mysterious. No chronology can express the time for an epoch in which the human essence is not in rapport with the external phenomena of Creation.
Hebal understands that when that essence was detached from the universal intelligent substance in order to be itself it received the gift of responsibility—which is to say, the capacity for good and evil.
And it has only received consciousness of itself in order to be a free creature, acting upon the world to complete it; its intention will be a destiny, its strength a power.
Hebal has the sentiment of an utterly marvelous physiology, a psychology more marvelous still, reposing in the bosom of a divine ontology.
From the beginning, however, human will gives birth to a destiny that Providence must break; human strength attempts a power beyond that which is attributed to it, and which, in consequence, encounters an invincible obstacle.
The laws of Providence are irrefutable; Providence reestablishes the harmony of its laws at the very moment when that harmony is threatened,
A long cry of pain escapes all the corners of the immense universe and learns that the new intelligence has succumbed to the ordeal.
Immediately, the Creator has come to the aid of his creature, and the decree of condemnation has been a decree of forbearance and mercy.
Hebal feels simultaneously the fallen being and the rehabilitated being, forming but one sole being, one identical being, reconstructing itself, condemned to march henceforth on the path of progress in order to reconquer what it has lost, the flair of its primitive ontological principle—for the principle, which alone constitutes identity, has not perished.
Epode
Fallen from their high sphere, human beings are imprisoned in organs. Labor—which is to say, a succession for further ordeals—is imposed upon them in order to replace the unknown ordeal to which they have succumbed.
And human beings, having arrived on the earth, which is given to them as a heritage, but a temporary heritage, immediately set about appropriating the earth’s surface, by the labors that must change its surface. And they cover it entirely with their first generations, in order to struggle everywhere, with a unanimous effort, against all the exuberant vegetative powers, against all the animal powers that flee before them, or which they learn to subjugate to the yoke of domesticity, against the elements that they must bend and tame. And it is said that humans complete the earth; and it is said, too, that by analogy, that it is given to them to contribute to the creation of the earth. Such is the continuing labor that is far from being complete.
The globe of the earth is thus delivered to human beings, in order that they might modify it by cultivation; in order that they should go around it; in order that they should study its general and particular laws; in order that they should exercise upon it the intellectual magism that tends to spiritualize matter; in order that they should study their relationship with the phenomena of the world, with the marvelous mysteries of the world of pure intelligences; in order that they should search for the place occupied by the poor planet, their place of exile, among the celestial bodies, objects of an endless contemplation.
And human beings are divided into two sexes, and the division of sexes is a cosmogonic law from which they would have escaped, but which also becomes their law: unity broken produces succession. Evil is dispersed in the generation of being, in order to attenuate its intensity.
Humans are bound to reconstruct themselves; for them, time will reconstitute eternity.
What subsists after the fall is free will exercising itself in variety before arriving at unity; it is the power of the return t
o unity by expiation. And when the return is accomplished, it will become the work of rehabilitated humankind.
And the division of the sexes will be the emblem of the division of castes and classes in primitive human institutions.
Thus, therefore, the division of human faculties between the individuals that must be born of the breakage of unity is the fundamental idea of the division of castes and classes.
And all the institutors of peoples will have the sentiment of that division, which is that of the active principle and the passive principle.
From that cosmogonic event, the fall and the rehabilitation, a dogma so profoundly buried in the mystery of origins, results the separation of the sexes, the attribution of castes and classes, and the distinct characteristics of races.
The passive sex will doubtless achieve equality with the active sex, since it belongs to the same original essence. That equality cannot be perfect, since the physiological difference with continue to exist.
Thus the emblem of castes and classes will survive castes and classes, which ought to be abolished by the virtue of Mediation.
And human identity attests its Genesiac unity, and prophecies its definitive unity.
All these notions, Hebal had intuitively, and he knew again the succession of cosmogonic time, mythic time and historic time. Nevertheless, an immobile thought of eternity came to mingle with the mobile thought of time, that all those times issued from one another would be perpetually reproduced, since the human species is always identical and what it was in the past it will be throughout the future.
Hebal’s contemplation is uninterrupted.
III
Strophe
Before the commencement of historic times, therefore, humans covered the entire earth. There were incessantly occupied in solidifying ground that crumbled beneath their steps, directing rivers, clearing forests, limiting the domain of animals and making fire and iron obedient.
And universal traditions speak of six cosmogonic days, which are six great revolutions brought about by frightful cataclysms.
And God was said to have rested on the seventh day—which is to say, to be confined to the irrefutable laws that he had imposed upon all things. And it was by virtue of condescension for a being become successive that the names of parts of phenomenal time were given to his divine actions.
And humans were said to have a facial resemblance to God, for it was given to them to comprehend the laws imposed on things.
And the divine breath had produced primitive human speech, a fugitive image of immortal thought.
And humans named things and beings; they named God. They did not know the intimacy of things, but the relationships of things to themselves, and their knowledge was thus restricted because they had succumbed to the ordeal of the capacity for good and evil. They had to achieve it one day because rehabilitation placed them on the path of progress.
In order to arrive at the intimacy of things and beings, however, it is necessary for humans to begin with self-knowledge, for it is a key that opens the treasures of Creation.
Furthermore, to arrive at a knowledge of God, it is necessary for humans to study in themselves their resemblance to God.
Now God has no need of a sign to know himself; the subjective faculty and the objective faculty are not separate in absolute existence.
Humans, being successive, need a sign in order to take account of their own intelligence. In them, the subjective faculty and the objective faculty are not simultaneous.
Hence, for them, the necessity of speech.
Antistrophe
Such were human beings; such are they still.
And they shivered and they labored.
And woman, who had emerged from the flesh of man during a magnetic sleep, and who was given to him as a companion, gave birth in pain.
And the evil was dispersed and subdivided, in order that it might lost its intensity.
And human beings had only been separated into two sexes in order to be subjected, by succession, to the sole ordeal by which their faculties were troubled.
And woman was said to have led man into temptation, because woman is the volitional expression of humankind.
And the ancient anathema weighed upon human beings because they were unable to master, in their volitional faculty, the capacity for good and evil—without which, however they would not have be able to accomplish God’s plan for them.
And reason was subjugated and enslaved for not having been able to tame the will.
And women, in all cosmogonies, were said to have introduced evil to the earth.
And the Redeemer was promised to humans at the very moment of their fall; and the Redeemer was to emerge from the volitional faculty of humans—which is to say, from women.
And men were the active sex, and women the passive sex, and their souls are equal, for men and women are of the same essence.
And prayer and Redemption unite in order to bring human back to the lost unity, and the unity remains in potential, and, veiled, produces solidarity and charity.
Epode
Hebal only had intelligence of these marvels at the moment when the curtain of historic times was lifted for him.
Nevertheless, historic times were still far off; Hebal could only see them in the future, but that future was beginning to be sketched out in the distance.
Universal traditions relate that the earth was accursed because of human beings, and yet beings had populated it before them.
The revelation was not given to present humans of what it is good for them to know or to discover, in order that they might be subjected to the ordeal of mystery.
Hebal could not go any further, for he had not passed through the palingenesis of death.
And all the principles that constitute the diversity of human beings are manifest in the generations that precede the cataclysm attested by the memory of the entire human species.
A first victim and a first murderer, and it is the first murderer who founds the first city; and the first city is a shelter, and the first legislator is a fratricide: a terrible symbol!
And the institutors of religion, and the inventors of arts, and those who are called giants, and those who receive the title of the children of God, and Lamech, the other murderer, and Enoch rise up to the heavens: who will attempt to explain all of that antediluvian cosmogony?
And the earth is threatened with a return to ancient chaos—but God would not want to abolish the ordeal inflicted upon the human species.
Noah collects, under the eyes of the Creator, the seeds and principles of all things, of all organization, of all life; he collects them seven times.
And the mysterious ark floats on the great waters.
And human beings, emerging from the ark, are required to remake the earth and the climates of the earth.
And human generations disperse over the entire earth.
They divide up the earth and the climates of the earth.
The human language is broken and divided; the human races share out among themselves the debris of the human tongue.
The human races are characterized by the blessings and curses of the forefathers of the human races.
Now the aurora of historical times is beginning to shine.
And historic times will unfold in turn before Hebal, and be explained by intelligence of original and Genesiac facts, for the human species is identical to itself.
And it was proved to Hebal that human essence had cosmogonic time as well as the globe.
And he was able to focus his attention on historic facts.
And historic facts are posed with a sad majesty, like a single fact, a continuous fact that finds the cause of its developments within itself.
And ordeal and initiation, redoubtable testimony of primitive dogma, were but a tissue of long, interminable calamities; without the history that precedes any chronology, how could Hebal know the reason for so many scourges, so many misfortunes, for war, slavery, the division of classes and caste
s, for anguish, for death?
What! So close to the cradle of the human race, and already there are great empires, powerful peoples, vast metropolises! And already seeds are falling on the threshing-floor, and the threshing floor has been swept more than once by the terrible harvester! It is because centuries have passed without Hebal perceiving them, because they have scarcely left a trace in human memory. And those unknown founders, and those nameless conquerors, and those events which were not sung by any poet: all that is dust. Behold, an old world has disappeared; but human beings survive; they survive with their traditions, their castes, their social forms.
And all the forefathers of the human race, dispersed over the entire earth, have been named by primitive tradition, which is a general tradition; and their names express the faculties that characterized them, the secrets of which they were the custodians, the missions that the peoples issued from them have accomplished.
In addition to the cosmogonic time of the entire human race there are the cosmogonic times of individual races, of individual countries, of every individual of the human race.
And at every step the great problem poses itself: where is the cradle of the human race? Where is the cradle of each individual race? Where is the cradle of each individual human?
But everywhere human thought is being imprinted on monuments, impregnating the soil, like the resemblance of God on the human face.
Hebal is plunged into religious admiration. The universal mystery does not astonish him, because it has been given to him suddenly to penetrate the ontological and cosmological principle of human being; because he knows, by virtue of a sudden and spontaneous illumination, what human essence is in the harmony of the worlds; because, at that moment, all the traditions spread over the surface of the earth make him hear a unanimous cry of assent; and because, finally, contact with the chain of universal destinies has stirred within him all the power of conviction, all the sympathy of identity.
Investigations of the Future Page 28