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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.
2
But let us return to our
great Initiates. They are, it appears, reputed to be the guardians of the irresistible and
incommensurable sidereal force, the force which supports and directs the worlds
and which is capable, if it were misused, of destroying in a moment the whole
human species, all that lives upon the earth and this very earth itself; but it
is also capable, if it were wisely tamed, of ensuring man an ultimate royalty,
perhaps access to other heavenly bodies and, in any case, a power so great that
the Golden Age which existed of old, thanks to the subjection of this force,
might flourish once more upon our planet.
All this is possible; and,
for the moment, we need not go into the matter. But that, possessing the secret
of this force and of many others, transmitted from Hierophant to Candidate, or,
as they say "from mouth to ear," the experts in occult science do not
divulge it and place it at the service of humanity: this is the great reproach
brought against them; and for all those who are not aware that the end of
Initiation is not power and material happiness but wisdom, development and the
uplifting of the inner being it is the best proof that they are cheats and
impostors. It may be that, driven into a corner, they are silent because they
have nothing to tell us; but the argument is not so unanswerable as those who
avail themselves of it are inclined to think. We shall perhaps see this before
long. It is indeed not impossible that one day some accident of knowledge will
place one or other of our scientists in a position analogous to that of these
Masters or Initiates. To him also the terrible question of the necessary silence
will then present itself. We have but lately witnessed in this war the
insensate and demoniacal use which man has made of certain inventions. What
will happen if other energies are placed in his hands, energies far more
formidable, which we seem to be on the point of discovering and releasing?
Man is not ready to know
more of such matters than he now knows. The safety of the species is at stake.
Humanity, which is hardly emerging from its infancy, or has only just attained
the dangerous period of adolescence (it would be about sixteen or seventeen
years of age, according to Dr. Jaworski's well-supported and striking historic
parallel), has already passed the limit of the inventions which it is able to
assimilate or endure without incurring the risk of death. Almost all of them,
from the subjection of steam and the still dubious taming of electricity, have
done it incomparably more harm than good. Explosives, for example; which have
helped it to build a few roads -- a work which the Romans, for that matter, did
quite as well as we do -- to open up a few mines, to pierce a few tunnels, have
cost it millions of young lives.
Perhaps it is time, not to
check the investigations of science, but to control its discoveries and to
reserve, as the occultists wisely did, for a select circle of Initiates,
rigorously tested and bound by inviolable oaths, the secret of those too
perilous energies around which we are feeling our way and which are on the
point of revealing themselves and becoming public property.
Our moral evolution is
several centuries behind our scientific evolution; and it is more than probable
that the latter, being too swift and too intensive, may disastrously impede the
former. It will profit no one to travel in three hours from Paris to Pekin,
from Pekin to New York and from New York to Calcutta, if these repeated and
miraculous journeys leave those who take them in the same frame of mind on
their arrival as on their departure. We are more or less in the same position
as Russia, whose heart and spirit were not steadfast enough, not resolute
enough, to bear what the head had too quickly and too artificially stored up.
Nothing is more quickly disseminated or more readily assimilated than the
results of science; nothing, on the other hand, is more slow, more painful or
more precarious than moral evolution; and yet it is upon this alone, as we are
realizing more and more clearly, that man's happiness and future depend.
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