The Invisible Pyramid

by Loren Eiseley

  Men wandering in the infinitude of space and time which their science has revealed are trapped in a world of darkening shadows, like those depicted in Giambattista Piranesi’s eighteenth-century etchings, the Carceri. The pictures reveal giant buildings in which the human figure wanders lost amidst huge beams and winding stairways ascending or descending into vacancy. Thick ropes hang from spiked machines of unspeakable intent. This world of the prisons is the world of man; the vast maze offers no exit.

  Unlike the cyclic time of the classical world, the time of the Christian era is novel. It proceeds to an end and it has arisen through a creative act. Though science has enormously extended the cosmic calendar, it has never succeeded in eliminating that foreknowledge of the non-existence of life and of individual genera and species which the Christian creation introduced. We bear in our actual bodies traces of our formation out of the animal remnants of the past. Thus causality plays a significant role in our thinking because we have been stitched together from the bones and tissues of creatures which are now extinct.

  As our knowledge of the evolutionary past has increased, we have unconsciously transferred the observed complexity of forms leading up through the geological strata to our cultural behavior. We speak of “progress” in a rather ill-defined way, and from surveying time past we have become devotees of time future. We maintain “think tanks” in which experts are employed to play all possible games, to create models, military or otherwise, that the future might produce. We are handicapped in just one way: the future may be guessed at, but only as a series of unknown alternatives.

  Some decades ago Henry Phillips of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology expressed this dilemma succinctly. “What will happen five minutes from now is pretty well determined,” he wrote, “but as that period is gradually lengthened a larger and larger number of purely accidental occurrences are included. Ultimately a point is reached beyond which events are more than half determined by accidents which have not yet happened. Present planning loses significance when that point is reached. . . . Here is the fundamental dilemma of civilization . . . there is serious doubt whether the way forward is known.”

  Mathematical statistics arose as a technique for achieving some insight into the contingencies of life—that is, variable phenomena. This technique does not, however, aid us in discerning those events which Dr. Phillips describes as not yet having happened. It can, at best, inform us that the urban mass is reaching fantastic numbers and that the birthrate must be reduced. Of the end result of these phenomena, as of pollution, it can tell us little. It can only inform us that the trends which are extrapolated into the future spell disaster. Infinitesimal man is beginning to draw the macrocosm into himself, or, rather, it might be stated that through his evolutionary advancement the cosmos is beginning to reach into him. He has yet to prove that he can master the powers he has summoned up.

  Man, oriented completely toward the future, suppresses his past as dissatisfying. He unconsciously resents continuity and causality; he is event-oriented. This is frequently reflected in the new motion pictures made to appeal to a youthful audience. Plot gives way to episode. The existential world of the hippy provokes sensate experience but does not demand dramatic continuity. The result is the onset of that chaos in which societal order threatens to disappear.

  Thus, with the near destruction of emotional continuity between the generations, time past is vilified or extinguished in favor of oncoming uncoordinated activist time. “Make the revolution,” exhorts one youngster. “Afterwards we will decide what to do about it.” Another pauses merely to exclaim, “Scrap the system.” With those words, we have reached the final culmination of the Faustian hunger for experience. Creative time has been obliterated in order to welcome something new in human history—the pure and disconnected “event” that has replaced reality. The LSD trip has reached a level with the experience of the classroom. It is not a coincidence that the memory effacers have emerged in the swarming time of the spore cities. Man has followed his own tracks in a circle as great as that of the cometary visitant from space that had ushered in my childhood.

  III

  As an anthropologist I once came upon time wrapped in a small leathern bag—a bag such as that in which Odysseus might once have carried the four winds. The way of the matter was this. It was a small Pawnee medicine bundle. The bundle, among other objects, contained some feathers, a mineralized fossil tooth, an archaic, square-headed iron nail, and a beautifully flaked Ice Age spearpoint of agate. The date of the latter was easy to identify because of its shape, which related it immediately to a long-gone mammoth-hunting people.

  The warrior to whom this precious bundle had once belonged must have had an alert eye for the things his guardian spirit had advised him to seek. There was no way of telling from this cracked receptacle what powers had been given its possessor or what had been his dreams. They had come swirling, presumably upon demand, from that dark region which contains the past. The square-headed nail represented the man’s own time, but it had obviously been regarded as too sacred to hammer into an arrowpoint.

  Most probably all this contained past in the little bundle was filled with streaming darkness and sudden emergences. For, as Joseph Campbell has so aptly pointed out, “where there is magic there is no death.” I was not so insensitive in undoing the crumbling hide that I failed to feel the shadow of an extinct animal, or touch with longing the intricately flaked weapon of a vanished day. The bundle held in my hand had been a sacred object among a people who believed implicitly in its powers and who understood the prayers and fastings through which the owner had been instructed. I was an outsider to whom the nail could never denote more than a nail, or the flaked weapon stand for more than a bygone historical moment. I was afflicted by causality, by technological time rather than the magic of genuine earth time.

  I have spoken of the time effacers in Western culture as those who would destroy all memory of the dead or, turning from the ancient institutions which have sustained our society, would engage in an orgiastic and undiscriminating embrace of the episodic moment—the statistical happening without significance. The deliberate effacement of defeated men and broken cultures is, as I have said, an ancient act in world history. The attempt to leap forward into the future or grudgingly to accept the fleeting moment as the only abode of man is particularly a phenomenon of our turbulent era. The causes I have to some degree explored. I have not, however, paused to examine the nature of time in those simple cultures which are without causal or novel time, and where the veil between life and death wavers fitfully at best. Borders are undefined, and animals or men, rather easily exchanging shapes, pass to and fro in ways unknown to the sophisticated world.

  Certainly this world of the primitive is a novel one by civilized standards, but not in terms of primitive thought. There are several reasons why this is so. The distinctions between animals and men that have been established by biological science do not obtain in the primitive mind. Animals talk, they carry messages, they may be supernaturals. Time itself may exhibit highly eccentric behavior. It may stand still, as it does to those who intrude into fairyland, or again, two kinds of time, the time of human beings and the time of the supernaturals, may exist side by side. This last is a phenomenon on which it would be advisable to dwell for a moment. It is highly characteristic of many peoples outside the urban swarming phase. It tells us something of the psychology of man while he still clung to the savage environment from which he had arisen.

  With the Australian aborigines, for example, there are two separate time scales: that of the immediate present, the common day of ordinary existence, and, in addition, that of the period of “dreamtime” or dawn beings which precedes the workaday world. This latter epoch is a sacred, mythological era in which man was first created and in which the supernatural beings laid down the laws that have since governed him.

  The past of the dreamtime, however, is not really past at all. The world, it is true, perhaps no longer visibly
responds to the forces that were exerted in the time of the ancestors. Nevertheless the atmosphere of the dreamtime still persists, like an autumnal light, across the landscape of the aborigines. It is elusive, it is immaterial, but it is there. The divine beings still exist, even though they may have shifted form or altered their abodes. Man survives by their aid and sufferance. He did not come into existence merely once at their behest. They are still his preceptors and guides. They continue to order his ways in the difficult environment that surrounds him—a countryside that has been appropriately described as his living age-old family tree.

  Totemic rituals establish for each generation the living reality of man’s relationship to the plant and animal world which sustains him. His occupations came from the totemic ancestors. Thus man, in his human time, subsists also in a kind of surviving dreamtime which is eternal and unchanging. Both men and animals come and go through the generations a little like actors slipping behind the curtain, in order to reappear later, drawn through the totemic center to precisely similar renewed roles in society. Sacred time is of another and higher dimension than secular time. It is, in reality, timeless; past and future are contained within it. All of primitive man’s meaningful relationship to his world is thus not history, not causality in a scientific sense, but a mythical ordering of life which has not deviated and will not in future deviate from the traditions of eternity.

  The emergence of novel events has no meaning to the timeless people. Sacred time enables man to escape from or, to a degree, to ignore the profane time in which he actually exists. Among the world’s most simple people, we find remarkably effective efforts to erase or ignore all that is not involved with the transcendent search for timelessness, the happy land of no change. Perhaps this was what Plato sought in his doctrine of the forms—the world beyond reality so poetically expressed by Margaret Mead as the “world of the first rose, and the first lark song.”

  Perhaps at this stage of human culture man has sought psychic protection for himself by buttressing the stability of his environment. In his own fashion, he has remolded nature in mytho-poetic terms. He lives his life amidst talking animals and the marks of the going and coming of the dream divinities who are both his creators and the guardians of his days. As closely as a mortal can manage, he exists in eternity.

  In this stage, in spite of numerous variations in religious practice over the world, man is basically not a consciously malicious time effacer. He is, instead, a creature to whom secular time has no meaning and no value; he is living in the perpetual light of a past dreamtime which still enfolds him. He is at peace with the seasons and, through decreed ritual, even with the animals he hunts. Frequently he is terrified by the unusual when it is thrust too prominently before his eyes or cannot be fitted into his accepted cosmology.

  This world, a world that man has inhabited for a far longer period than high civilization has existed upon earth, contrasts spectacularly with the secular domain of science. If it is illusory, we must admit that it is at the same time relatively stable. Man lived safely within the confines of nature. A few stones from the riverbed, a bit of shaped clay, some wild seeds, and a receptacle made of bark perhaps sufficed him. On a subsistence level of economic activity, the primitives had actually arrived at an ecological balance with nature. They had created another world of reentry into that nature upon a psychical level. One might say that, like a turtle, man had thrust out his curious head just far enough to glimpse the harshness of the profane landscape and had quickly chosen to mythologize and thereby make peace with it. On a simple basis he had achieved what modern man in his thickening shell of technology is only now seeking unsuccessfully to accomplish.

  Man, in other words, is not by innate psychology a world eater. He possesses, in his far-ranging mind, only the latent potentiality. The rise of Western urbanism, accompanied by science, produced the world eaters just as surely as those other less sophisticated primitives reentered nature by means of the sacred, never-to-be-disturbed time that was not, except as it developed in their heads.

  So vast is the gap that now yawns between the degraded remnants of the hunting folk and their brothers, the world eaters, that even a perceptive anthropologist of a generation ago, Paul Radin, was not prepared in the atmosphere of his time to recognize the unconscious irony in the conclusion of his book The World of Primitive Man. After narrating many things about the Eskimo and their philosophy, including their abhorrence of overweening pride, Radin quotes the statement of one Eskimo who had been taken to New York. After gazing down into the great canyons of the streets, the wondering native finally remarked, according to Radin’s informant, “Nature is great but man is greater still.” One can understand the confusion of an Eskimo brought from far ice fields to peer down upon the greatest city of the world eaters. More appalling is the discovery that an anthropologist could have quoted this simple remark with approbation as a profound message to modern man. The irony is deepened when we learn that nature sends no messages to man when all is well.

  If the message which Radin interpreted was sent, perhaps, like so many messages from the dark powers, it should have been read with a different emphasis. When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave him birth, will respond. She has dealt with the locust swarm and she has led the lemmings down to the sea. Even the world eaters will not be beyond her capacities. Sila, as the Eskimo call nature, remains apart from mankind “just as long as men do not abuse life.” This is the message that a more able shaman might have found a raven to carry—a raven who could still wing with an undefaced warning from the country of primeval time.

  SIX

  Man in the Autumn Light

  From a . . . dream . . . to touch the edges of Change where all numbers twist and break . . .

  —JACK LINDSAY

  THE FRENCH DRAMATIST Jean Cocteau has argued persuasively about the magic light of the theatre. People must remember, he contended, that “the theatre is a trick factory where truth has no currency, where anything natural has no value, where the only things that convince us are card tricks and sleights of hand of a difficulty unsuspected by the audience.”

  The cosmos itself gives evidence, on an infinitely greater scale, of being just such a trick factory, a set of lights forever changing, and the actors themselves shape shifters, elongated shadows of something above or without. Perhaps in the sense men use the word natural, there is really nothing at all natural in the universe or, at best, that the world is natural only in being unnatural, like some variegated, color-shifting chameleon.

  In Brazilian rivers there exists a fish, one of the cyprinodonts, which sees with a two-lensed eye, a kind of bifocal adjustment that permits the creature to examine the upper world of sunlight and air, while with the lower half of the lens he can survey the watery depths in which he lives. In this quality the fish resembles Blake, the English poet who asserted he saw with a double vision into a farther world than the natural. Now the fish, we might say, looks simultaneously into two worlds of reality, though what he makes of this divided knowledge we do not know. In the case of man, although there are degrees of seeing, we can observe that the individual has always possessed the ability to escape beyond naked reality into some other dimension, some place outside the realm of what might be called “facts.”

  Man is no more natural than the world. In reality he is, as we have seen, the creator of a phantom universe, the universe we call culture—a formidable realm of cloud shapes, ideas, potentialities, gods, and cities, which with man’s death will collapse into dust and vanish back into “expected” nature.

  Some landscapes, one learns, refuse history; some efface it so completely it is never found; in others the thronging memories of the past subdue the living. In my time I have experienced all these regions, but only in one place has the looming future overwhelmed my sense of the present. This happened in a man-made crater on the planet earth, but to reach that point it is necessary to take the long way round and to begin where time had lost its meanin
g. As near as I can pinpoint the place, it was somewhere at the edge of the Absaroka range along the headwaters of the Bighorn years ago in Wyoming. I had come down across a fierce land of crags and upland short-grass meadows, past aspens shivering in the mountain autumn. It was the season of the golden light. I was younger then and a hardened foot traveler. But youth had little to do with what I felt. In that country time did not exist. There was only the sound of water hurrying over pebbles to an unknown destination—water that made a tumult drowning the sound of human voices.

  Somewhere along a creek bank I stumbled on an old archaeological site whose beautifully flaked spearpoints of jasper represented a time level remote from me by something like ten thousand years. Yet, I repeat, this was a country in which time had no power because the sky did not know it, the aspens had not heard it passing, the river had been talking to itself since before man arose, and in that country it would talk on after man had departed.

  I was alone with the silvery aspens in the mountain light, looking upon time thousands of years remote, yet so meaningless that at any moment flame might spurt from the ash of a dead campfire and the hunters come slipping through the trees. My own race had no role in these mountains and would never have.

  I felt the light again, the light that was falling across the void on other worlds. No bird sang, no beast stirred. To the west the high ranges with their snows rose pure and cold. It was a place to meet the future quite as readily as the past. The fluttering aspens expressed no choice, and I, a youngster with but few memories, chose to leave them there. The place was of no true season, any more than the indifferent torrent that poured among the boulders through summer and deep snow alike.