by Gustave Kahn
Because it feared sages and scorned the inspired, the crowd hunted them down, exiled them and killed them. It appealed, with its billowing voice, to those who butchered oxen and sheep, those who caused fermented beverages to flow, those who stocked their granaries in seasons of abundance in order to profit therefrom in years of famine. It addressed itself to those who endured unjust justice in order that they might color its actions. And the leaders of the common people armed those who labored for others, those who extracted at from the arid shore, those who rowed on the sea for a meager wage, and promised them a golden age if they would pillage the palaces of the sages with them. They fattened themselves on the hope that those who disdained public functions and business must have stored up immense riches and that their cellars would disgorge gold and silver. When they had finished killing, and pillaged the little that they could, cruel and boastful soldiers rose up in their midst, who seduced and pressured them, and the men of violence suffered.
There is no safe haven for the man who lives according to his conscience and the true law; the sages, however, do not all die. If their lamps are broken by the fists of the strong, the parchment upon which they wrote will later be read, and the tablets that they filled.
All science is in the desire for science, all intelligence in the study of intelligence, all virtue is loving one’s own intelligence within universal intelligence. The primordial obscurity and the chaos in which formless creatures crept were not abolished by a posterior and superior structure of humankind and the universe; they still exist in base souls absorbed by the functions of living.
And the crowd will always seize the taciturn and gentle contemplator, to beat him with staves or put him to death. The ignorant soothsayer will prescribe the crime, and the most fortunate among the men of ideas will drag their disinherited lives into the wider world.
It was in that fashion, miraculously saved from the firsts and stones of a populace and offended by the sarcasm of a numerous crowd, that Theano the Savant, who lived and died like a man, came to die here. The men of her city detested her for her beauty, because it was illuminated by a gleam of intelligence more powerful than those of other women and her large dark eyes sparkled with a durable drop of Heaven, because her beauty was distant from the pleasantness of those who spun yarn and also those who displayed themselves indolently before the young merchants. They hated her because they could not understand her, or, in addition to the elevation of her mind, she was various. She explained at length to young men who sought the truth the origins and early history of the universe, then sang about the sufferings endured by the Titan and the beauty of the one whose smile was born from the sea in a nacreous dawn.
“When the ancestors sang,” she said, “the Immortals were haunting the light foliage and circulating in the clouds, and the caress of the breeze inflated with tenderness beneath the stars was their meditation and the allure of their bounty. Their wrath thundered in the storm and their benevolence gave the trees to the countryside, and the wheat; and everything became godly by virtue of having appeared. At first, human beings lying beneath the hand of the gods dreamed of the sources of happiness and rejoiced in seeing them masters of the fire that warmed them and the herds that nourished them; they prayed to them during the long years of wandering and thanked them for the comfortable city. Then, as storms are more frequent than days of albuminous purity, and misfortune visits houses, humbly demanding hospitality and fleeing surreptitiously amid outbursts of tears, more often than the happiness that arrives to the sound of flutes and cheerful bells, they feared them. O heavy terror of the man whose chimera might be dispersed like wisps of straw by an arbitrary fit of divine wrath, to every corner of the horizon! O terror of the man cannot live without the invisible witness and who hears the raucous approach of the Eumenides in the dark night, in search of sin in the sleeping city!
“The gods born of humans are beginning to disappear. Jupiter is the son of Minerva, the goddess of Intelligence, the star-studded ornament of our mirage. It is Minerva who built him before our eyes, a colossal statue whose forehead touched the fronton of the tallest temple, as a symbol of the enormous idol that the immensity of our terrors and the exiguity of our science are able to construct. It is a helpless rower weeping in the storm who sees disheveled Neptune rise up, a coward hampered by his shield in the obscure wood who dreams that Diana is firing arrows, and hears in the oak-trees agitated by the wind the formidable howling of Mars.
“There are no gods and goddesses but Beauty—let it be told again that she is born in the nacreous dawn of the sea—and Wisdom—let it be told again that she protected the subtle Ulysses—for it is necessary to dream aloud, so that others who listen to us might also dream, but dream of joy and not of terror. Listen to the fabulous voice of Marsyas; if someone runs through the wood so swiftly that people hear of it in every city, it is him, for he is the wood itself, its birds, its leaping beasts and the agility of shepherds, and their sing.
“Tear up your robes of terror! You are only imploring specious stones. Tear up your robes of terror, for no one is watching over your actions with a jealous eye; the crystal sky studded with golden stars is empty and devoid of any gaze. Only your mind goes forth to bump into the solid cupola. Live in contemplation, live in the mind. The minutes of the mind are fecund and happiness is born within yourselves. Let the shining processions pass by, with baskets of odorous flowers reposing on pretty leads, and the decorated carts, and the joyful priests, for all religion is there. It is a hymn to certain days. Tear up your robes of terror!
“There is no god or goddess but Birth, Death and Mind. You do not die, you finish and depart again in the bounding course of atoms, and live in accordance with recommenced curiosity. The fields of death are bright and gilded, they are those of knowledge. There is no Tartarus, nor judges at its threshold; there is no Lethe or Elysian Fields. Live and die in order to learn, to walk the paths of the knowledge that does not descend into the abyss but climbs in white hills toward the blue infinity. The soul, with its benevolent fire, enlightens you, envelops you, guides you: the inextinguishable lamp of the enduring soul remains alone and identical.
“What does it matter to you that it is not always the same, that it does not remember the journeys you undertook in your city, the insults of the stupid, the vexations of the rich, the enemy’s blades, your hunger or the appeasement of your hunger, if you awaken to another dawn without and memory of yesterday? Death will be the benevolent guide leading you to another facet of the world.
“Never fear; live in life, since within that moment your intelligence lives among perfumed dawns and ephemeral dusks; never despair. Eternity is a clepsydra, which empties and is renewed, and it is always the same sans; never hope and never be sad; you may discover the same flowers tomorrow, with a heart so much warmer that they appear more beautiful.
“The world is a screen on which one sees the moment pass in jeweled robes, veiled with regret; remain there. Your movements and travels are the sole cause of suffering. Honor beauty. Thought ought to move calmly in the ether as a trireme cuts through the white foam. Proteus must always resume his true form and become an evasive and pensive old man again—Proteus, the human soul in the innumerable liquid drops of existence.
“There is no chance; there is no specific destiny; there is a universe that is dying and coming into being at every instant. Await therefore, calmly, the instant that appears to you more agreeable or more severe...”
The scribe does not know anything more about the woman who came to die here, except that she did not pray to the gods of her nation, and yet celeb rated them in her verses as statues in the gardens of her race. She was beautiful, savant and persecuted...
HAGAR
Joseph of Arimathea lowered the parchment that he had unrolled, in which old annals displayed the ancient gold of vanished lives, and he murmured: “Mobed, Glyphtis, Theano.”12
King Balthazar advanced through the narrow and high-ceilinged galley, and the long pleats
of his orange robe, ornamented pectorally with bluish solver designs, slid over the white marble flagstones. He stopped beside a basin into which a brief jet of perfumed water trickled.
Having set down the manuscript, Joseph said to him: “Sire, since archives and legends depict them, were Mobed, Glyphtis and Theano living beings?”
“Living beings, forms, appearances, tales—it’s all one. What does it matter whether they lived, or whether the splendid mantle of an enchantment of glory was thrown upon their shoulders? The poet who carries myths and fables in his brain and the race that carries them in its loins, invent nothing that is impossible. They remember or they predict; they create, describing in advance by the indication of life that they give to great hearts, but every poetic invention is latent in the Earth, so it lives. Imagine the intellectual world as a vast meadow; the green surfaces as are great as the Earth, and the same flowers grow everywhere therein; the pollen is the same and the same wind bears it away.
“Oh, if we knew everything—and I’m not talking about the laws of the universe, remote laws that retreat even further as soon as we reach out toward any certainty, but only the memories of human beings, that which has happened and been thought; the melancholies of the Northern barbarians beside their grey rivers, which flow in blackened waves through their vast forests, and their cries of joy beside cups of foaming ales; and the nonchalant dreams of the fisher of the Persian Sea; that which the calm stars say to him, and that which the rippling waves murmur to him; and the promises that their own minds, extended and enlightened by the sky, make to the deprived and starving solitary dwellers in the highest Asian summits; and the words of the Chaldeans on the high towers nearest to the stars; and the infinity of the words of sadness of the great nomads of the deserts of the South; and that which the sages of Greece and Palestine have not said, and all the suffering and all the love and all the legends—oh, if we only knew!
“On the green meadow of the world, at enormous distances, the same plant germinates and deploys its ephemeral beauty, its instinctive beauty, which will recommence tomorrow and is hence eternal beauty. A herdsman, a poor man or a young woman, picks the common flower, the pretty and vulgar flower; they carry it away, and what does it matter what vase they place it in: a clay jar, a copper pot, a wooden vessel or one of pearly glass? And if the son of the king of kings passes before the young woman’s window, and takes away the plant that was, for a moment, the confidant of modesty and charming hesitation, the plant may wither and another will grow. It is one verse more in the young woman’s song. The son of the king has passed by. And if the herdsman loves the young woman whose eyes burn on seeing the mantlet of the king’s son, that is one more line of the song. It is the same song in the palaces of the North, the furnaces of the desert, the liquid gems of blessed shores; and the dolor amid the diversity of languages speaks everywhere in accordance with the same sad and beautiful modulation, ephemeral but eternal since it exists simultaneously and everywhere.
“It is from to the same spindles that the treads of life and dreams, moments and death are unwound. In fables, the guardians of forgetfulness, the numerators of death, are forever old, never having been young, but seeresses, and those who sing beside torrents, enjoy eternal youth and beauty. The wise and the weak have agreed, confusedly, in thinking that perhaps ages have elapsed without trace, and their enigma resides in these guardians, always hundreds of years old; but the recommenced spring lives and flourishes, we know not when, for how many ardent suns we do not know, and we all sing, and will sing more loudly than the little birds at dawn. Travel the great meadow and you will hear nothing there but alternating cries of fear and certainty; that is the echo of the noise of peoples you hear, and sages are little children before a black wall.”
“But the song is also an annunciation,” said Joseph.
“At every moment, since nothing has arrived before the eyes of the world. But listen to the possible origin of the myth of Mobed, the warrior woman for some, the most beautiful for others, the totality of womanhood for many of those here, who is their sister in every epoch, a spirit, while Ghyphtis and Theano come to them so variously in the thousands of mouths that repeat their names on Mediterranean shores—unless all three are merely the reflection of some dispersed cult even more ancient than our most audacious fables.
“In the great green meadow lived King Abraham, with warriors and flocks, and when his tribes came to some new land of the great meadow to build their huts of branches, one might have thought, the next day, that a marvelous forest had sprung up. King Abraham knew justice, tamed wild beasts and defeated rebels, and no one defended the part he had conquered better against the barbarians of the North and the pirates of the South.
“When King Abraham was still very young, his father, who was powerful in a great city nearly the ancient cradle of humankind, had sent him far away, with his servants, the sons of his former servants whim he no longer wanted to feed, for the city within its dry stone walls had become too narrow.
“Abraham augmented his people with slaves who moaned under heavy iron collars; he took them from miserly cities and diminished nomadic tribes of their number. He called poor people to the renown of his justice, as well as mild-mannered populations fleeing from galloping hordes. From the as-yet-pure dawn to the bloody sunset, Abraham offered to the Unknown his people’s prayers of hope and expectation, and he listened to the gentle advice of three night until the Unknown had spoken to him.
“You know that an embassy from his aged father Tharah, who lived in the cities of Chaldea, had brought him a wife, the most beautiful that he had fund among the daughters of his race. Dark and pale and tall, Sarah knew the travails of women better than anyone else. She became queen beside the king, but no lineage emerged from her and Abraham became desperate.
“And his people said: ‘We shall not be a great people, like the races that surround us; we shall never send our sons abroad, under the command of our king, to edict our laws and found a people in our image in the distant plains. The Elohim made humans in their image; the image of the human closest to the Elohim, the king, ought to guide the tribe, the image of the people, into the distance. Our people will not be able to engender a filial people; our people has not been chosen by the Lord and we shall not the founder of numerous and sovereign races.’
“Abraham thought as they did. He thought, dolorously, that his laws and his symbols would remain limited to one corner of the universe, and that the wisdom of pastor kings would die with him. As he loved Sarah, who was for him the only residue, and also the evident sign of the house of his father and his ancestors, He despaired without acing, and he loved Sarah, for her beauty as well as the memories she evoked.
“It happened that among the liberated slaves there was a very beautiful young woman, who was named Hagar.13 The dull bronze of her complexion made her dark phosphorescent eyes stand out; her, as lustrous as onyx, was beautiful when she bound it into a crown, and abundant when she loosed it, like the foliage of a willow tree, and the men said; ‘Queen Sarah is not the most beautiful woman in the camp. She is as splendid as the cold Moon in a calm sky, or as a ripe fruit, but she is the daughter of the Sun and her eyes warm like a flamboyant noon.’
“And Abraham shared the enthusiasm of his men, to the extent that he refused her to the best of his warriors, and had a son, Ishmael by her. But Queen Sarah threatened to go back to the cities of Chaldea. ‘I shall take with me,’ she said, ‘the memory of your race and the link of the ancestral chain that connects you to the Elohim; and it will be said that you were not able to abide by the law and justice, and you will be cut off from the past, and your people will be a new horde, without laws and without rights in the great green meadow.’
“‘A people does not only live in the past, Sarah,’ Abrahams replied. ‘Perhaps it is only a migration that plants the laws and faith of a fatherland elsewhere than in its cradle. You have not given me the son who could lead the son of my men to distant lands and unknown seas, a
nd the other has been sanctified by life.’
“‘In that case,’ said Sarah, ‘I do not want to wait for him to come of age, to bear your name and your laws elsewhere; let him depart immediately, and she with him to guide him; let them depart alone.’
“And King Abraham, still dominated by the memory of the long years of his first love, allowed it.
“Hagar went into the desert, and a few men followed her. Dire fatigue decimated them; many returned to Abraham’s camps, for it was humiliating to them that a woman should seem to have the power of supreme command.
“Hagar wandered in the desert. She suffered hunger; she suffered thirst; she suffered fear when the voices of large wild beasts reverberated in the solitudes; at meager oases, among the water-holes, she found populations still in their infancy; she taught them the arts she knew, and they protected her. She was a queen; she was a captive; her flights prepared her triumphs; her triumphs succumbed to the conspiracies of avarice and cunning, and she was often obliged to flee far from burning tents, carrying her son in her arms—and little Ishmael smiled at her abundant tears and ran his fingers through her beautiful black tresses. Her beauty often saved her life, when she appeared tall and upright between the fires of nomads to ask them for bread and shelter, and they prostrated themselves at first as before an apparition.
“Finally, Ishmael grew up to become a war-chief, and his people grew to be numerous; he reigned by conquest and by science, and Hagar fought beside him in battles. She promulgated wise laws, and the memory of her great beauty lived among the peoples.
“None of the old men had been able to forget the charm of her first appearance and the serenity of her first words, and when she died, her memory was deified and became parallel to that of a victorious Isis. She was the mother of races of splendor and courage, the vanquishing horses of which only stopped at the ocean waves, and when the Sun rises, it is her victorious face that sets the pale and charming Moon to flight.”
