Omnis homo mendax
Ps. CXVI, 11.
Paganism is a regressive mental and governmental state, reverting from graft to wild stock. Its formula: Primo mihi et sequere naturam. It is always symptomatic not of Evolution but Revolution. It proceeds from vitiated instruction, fruit of vicious education. One is to the other as Having to Being, and the vitiated being—whether by itself or its environment—vitiates all, even true Having, much more so a false one.
Its character is to be philosophistic and politicizing, anti-religious and anti-social. It is philosophical and anti-religious because it subordinates universal Reason to the individual, the two objective criteria of the former to the latter’s subjectivity. It is politicizing and anti-social because this subversion in understanding becomes supplantation in Will, and it strives to seize Legality by all means to oppose Legality.
Periodic in its historical crises, chronic in its ontological cause, this morbid state is natural to fallen human Spirit, deprived of its two true criteria we shall later examine: Science and Life. However much it erects its own Philomania into a system under the names of Philosophy and even Theosophy, its Essence is Anarchy, and this Anarchy is: Fiat Voluntas mea! It is the Will of Man. To make it a principle, and balance it with one or more others adorned with the names Providence and Destiny, is to recognize no principle. It is to create three Gods—two too many—and this, truly, is the intellectual Essence of Paganism, Polytheism at its core.
Fabre d’Olivet—to whom we shall return—has attributed this doctrine to Pythagoras, as have others, but it was never that of this great man. He knew too well the Trimurti which, under various names in India, Chaldea, and Egypt, Krishna had substituted for the patriarchal Trinity—that of the Proto-Synthesis recalled by Saint John. Whatever concessions the founder of current Brahmanism may have wished to make five thousand years ago to the mental state of the Lettered Sudras, he never intended to suggest that Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu were anything other than personifications of the three Powers of one and the same Creator, Transformer, and Preserver God. This Triad itself was merely the deliberate inversion of the prior Trinity—lowered from the eternal Principle to the temporal Origin of Beings and Things; from the divine Universe to the astral Universe; from Biology to Physiology; from the World of Species to the Embryogenesis of Individuals; from Involution to Evolution.
The mentality of this usurping third caste, the Sudras, corresponded only to ancient primary education and some remnants of secondary instruction. Their homicidal greed had invaded and annihilated the Social State of the two peninsulas—their metropolises contemporary with Nineveh and Babylon—the Templar Alliance of Aryan, Argive, Achaean Slavs and Hindu Pelasgians reconstituted by Orpheus, the Ribhu of the Vedas. Thus they had closed themselves, in religious Law as in Ontology, to the senses corresponding to the higher degrees of Revelation. Only rare exceptions would move from metropolis to metropolis, expiating at the cost of harshest trials their anathematized origins as Yavanas, Mlechtas, Pinkshas, Sudras, and revolutionary Hyksos. This is what Pythagoras did for over twenty years—some say forty. And even then, after all physical, moral, intellectual, and spiritual purifications, the learned religious Bodies kept them under prolonged observation before reopening within them the intimate Senses of Grace and its life from Above. In most cases, they revealed only the internals.
As for the lettered masses, degenerated from the Orphic Word into their own verbiage, they stood further from the Truth which is Life than their lowest slaves. Thus they never saw in Philosophy anything but their own Philomania of quibbling, casuistry, endless dialectic, mental and governmental anarchy. And despite all, this intellectual plebs, erected into a ruling class, remained as curious as it was profane toward the lost Sophia.
From Pythagoras to Hierocles stretches nearly the entire horizon of Greco-Latin secondary and higher studies—eleven centuries out of sixty in the most documented History of our terrestrial Humanity, which extends no further than six thousand years except in the sacred Books.
For four centuries now, this millennium of slave-owning Paganism, of anti-social Bourgeoisie, has been the sole mental and governmental model for all European Universities, both sacerdotal and secular.
Clergy and Clergiates (the distinction between which we shall make elsewhere) draw this same cliché of Anarchy in as many copies as they have students. These, in turn, stamp it upon everything: Science, Art and Life, Legislation, Politics and Morals. But increasingly, after-casting degrades the imitation already sterile and fatal to the Christian genius of our races.
Every lettered graduate of this system—from the heir apparent to a throne down to the last seminary or lycée scholarship holder—has the same vulgar instruction, the same banalized mentality. Only education differs slightly where the Christian hearth exists, and if that hearth can provide it. But this possibility grows ever rarer, even exceptional, thanks to fragmented fortunes, uprooted existences, economic anarchy—fruits of this same classical system incapable of governing the world it presumes to rule. In any case, religious instruction and education stop for all, indiscriminately, at mere catechization.
These facts cast into the scales show enormous weight favoring Paganism and enormous diminution to Christianity’s detriment. Thus it is intellectual demagoguery of pagans, too weakly tempered by a veneer of Christian bourgeoisie, that sits upon European thrones as upon all Clergiate chairs—including those of Higher Studies and Comparative Religions, the pinnacle of this Anarchy.
One need not be a great scholar to see that, in result, the Light of the Mysteries of the Father and Holy Spirit shines by its total absence from top to bottom of these lay hierarchies. Yet by the same token, this same Light contained in the Mysteries of the Son—Pontiff and King of the Universe, Word creator, Incarnate, Resurrected and Glorified—is wholly obscured by this mental and governmental Paganism.
Yet Instruction exists for Life, not the reverse—just as Law exists for Man, not Man for Law, according to Saint Paul’s word.
It is always the method of the Word formulating Life in all things, and here it concerns social Life. Education thus precedes instruction because the first pertains to Being, the second to Having. One is essential, the other auxiliary. But the classical Spirit’s character is to substitute its verbiage for the Word and supplant the spiritual to usurp the temporal. It seeks to be both teaching Reason and Reason of State, head and secular arm. It thus excludes Education, because political imitation of pagans excludes Being, leading only to demonic possession.
One may have billions and be nothing. One may have nothing and be of priceless worth. Instruction thus has value only according to its use—like fortune, talent, beauty.
When the Areopagus’ Hellenists absolve Phryne of all her crimes because she lets her chiton fall to her feet, Themis brands these boars of earthly Venus for the Roman butcher’s triumphal chariot. This is the penitentiary system compensating for absent education. The Mystery is this: social Life must devour death or all causes of collective mortality. Thus a thousand years after Zoroaster, Moses repeats: “Our God is a consuming fire.” Military history from Babylon to our day is but the long, painful commentary on this no less terrible utterance.
Practical observation and direct experience of Paganism lie daily before our eyes. It is childhood and adolescence passing from family under the press of the political State usurping the Social State and its Teaching power. Public Instruction thus uprooted is the Tree of Death, roots in air; its spirit walks head down. It takes from Society—represented by Family—a good and true living gold coin stamped J.C., Jesus Christ, and by reverse transmutation returns a false copper medal stamped J.C., Julius Caesar, Pontiff and Emperor of pagans.
The child is a blank page on which one may write Heaven or Hell. A dear little human wildstock upon which one may graft all flowers from the two trees of Paradise. At his right stands an invisible Angel of Light, but at his left a dark Demon. The Angel brings the seven radiant Gifts of the Holy Spirit, the Universal; the Demon brings the seven shadowy presents of the individual Self-Spirit. Thus from the cradle begins the struggle between Christian Revolution and pagan Reaction, and this invisible battle between Light and Darkness becomes visible in the little child.
No sooner does he stand on his toddling feet than he becomes the charming archetype of the true sans-culotte—the only good one, and lovable. Already in his own way he proclaims the rights of… individual man. This would soon signify in his young understanding that duties belong to parents; but the Angel is there!
How delightful to watch these pretty blossoms of early age unfold—these buttercups of free thought, free conscience, free action with all their consequences, from the secretly devoured jam pot to the bellyache and ruined socks. But the Angel makes a sign: Religion and Society stand present! Jesus is represented by the Father, the Church by the Mother; for the depth of the conjugal bond measures the full height of eternal Life. Thus blessed is the mother, for the holy Spirit of Jesus lives in her, joyfully assuming all duties of love commanded by these nascent young rights. And her love desires wings no more—how heavy they were!—nor freedom, nor thought, nor conscience, nor action, but all their chains, all their yoke—how light!
Like the divine Master washing His Apostles’ feet, she is wholly in her celestial servitude, grafting the beloved wildstock. Jesus says: “Let him who would be first among you be first your servant.” Words of Heaven’s great lord that only mothers comprehend, for they possess celestial understanding—that of the Heart.
Breathing into him her spirit and soul with her life, she wills her buttercup to become the fairest rose in humanity’s divine Paradise. But in this world’s current course—especially its spirit’s—how few young women can surrender to this seraphic slavery, how few who can preserve their clear-sighted love from their own idolatrous blindfold. Here begins the danger the Angel dreads and the Demon hopes for.
The cradle then the little bed form the center of eternity’s epic—Life’s. This tiny smiling being is the greatest and gravest thing that could interest Heaven and Earth at once—all present, all earthly and celestial future, not just of one family but of Society.
Therefore the divine Master wills that children come unto Him, therefore He says: “The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.” To resemble them is to listen and hear. The child, like woman, possesses true understanding—that of the heart; he listens to all said, but hears only what is lived. Thus the educator must live what he says, lest he instruct without educating—worse than leaving in ignorance. Worse, for Life’s School is the only true one; all Universities combined are worthless beside its humblest lesson.
The little laborer has this school in his poor parents, and thus the worker surpasses in heart all lettered classes from the university factory. Of the Self-Spirit’s seven black gifts, he scarcely has the last two, precisely because he owns nothing—or little—save affections that are goods of Being, more than Having, and the only True ones.
But education must not limit itself to worldly savoir-vivre, for then it would be mere savoir-paraître, not savoir-être—the real knowledge of Life. The latter without the former perfumes the deepest depths; the former without the latter is a pomade pot, fragrant on surface but reeking beneath.
Where today finds this essence, this spirit of Life? Rarely in lettered souls; still somewhat in beings of devotion or voluntary discipline—priests and soldiers of vocation; abundantly among the poor, those bearing the day’s burden without tomorrow’s security, the knights of labor upon whose shoulders contemporary Paganism weighs so heavily. But even this shall not last long, thanks to universal suffrage’s mendicant scholars—those political knights of industry.
”It is easier for a camel to pass through the needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter God’s Kingdom,” says Jesus. (The Needle’s Eye was one of Jerusalem’s low gates.) Wealth is all one owns, beginning with instruction; and when false, when one does not consider oneself its steward responsible before God, better have nothing—for wealth then only burdens the Ego, rendering it ventripetal. When the Lord recommends simplicity of spirit, He means the mind’s availability to Life, the heart’s to the head; but if the head is cluttered with useless or harmful things, it becomes the greatest protestor and its Reflection closes to Incidence.
Therefore—either no Instruction beyond elementary, or all possible Instruction reduced to simplicity, unity, humility of individual reason before the incidence of God’s Word in man’s universal reflection.
Only thus shall we remake Earth’s and Heaven’s three true hierarchical races; but let us not anticipate what follows, returning instead to the spoiled child for whom Heaven’s gate stands narrow. Woman in the Church is sole educator, man in the Lord is sole educator. The child who feels not this loving, wise mastery becomes master of paternal and maternal idolatry. Gradually small reason subordinates great, small will the moderate, small supplantation all gardening and the gardener of conjugal Eden. Year by year, the darling’s mind will have fashioned within a box of forbidden toys, a Noah’s ark full of idols—a whole pagan philosophy for his use—soon transforming this philosophy into governmental willfulness: gently first, then smashing all. The present darkens, the future blackens. The Demon laughs, mother weeps, increasingly losing firm direction, knowing not where to turn. In vain she invokes paternal secular arm; rods, whips, slaps—all Solomon’s Arsenal of Wisdom proves powerless where the disarmed wisdom of the Gospel would have already perfected all.
The Angel prays; chorus-leader of seven social virtues, religious piety is mother to filial piety. The priest comes to the maternal priestess’ aid. He has her tenderness, but joins to it that gentle gravity of the first two races—those of sacrifice: sacerdotal and royal. From him radiates a breath of the Holy Spirit that exorcises the Self-Spirit, wherein the rebellious child’s mind is rectified. From the mother’s lap to that of her model the Church, catechism resumes the faltering if not compromised work. It begins the divine graft at the point where it might have succeeded when the Word, through maternal lips, taught the Utterance in its divine source: Prayer, and Himself gave, through the young woman, the Living God’s response: smiles, caresses, kisses, light and warmth of Life.
Catechism is the primary Teaching of the Gospel, the best that can exist. But where, alas! is the secondary, that of the second race; the higher, that of the first? Yet they are indispensable for virile ages, for the initiatory phases of life, for initiation and guidance of individuals, and through their Fraternities—as through the Orders of their races—for the guidance of Societies.
The Gospel has but one Light, that of eternal Life, yet this Light has many degrees—from nightlight to lamp, from lamp to Moon, from Moon to the living Sun of existences and their spirits.
Scarcely is first communion completed, scarcely does the child step through the golden gates of the Church opening onto the City of God, when the bronze gates of the University gape, swallow him, and slam shut. Finished, Life’s education. Barely begun, death’s instruction will blow upon it. Behind the bars where Cerberus keeps watch, the child will descend the step he just ascended, changing soul and mind. Then the abyss’s other steps open before the youth; from puberty toward virility, the soul’s mind gradually feels weighing upon it the icy Spirit, the dead one—politics teaching government mercenaries—instead of Life’s warm spirit, the social one of all gratuitous devotions. The graft withers anew, the wildstock reclaims its rights, the sap of senses usurps the heart’s, and—no longer exorcised—the young spirit rises in rebellion or languishes under constraint.
But now Paganism’s magic lantern begins its projections, evocations, and—alas!—its mortuary reincarnations upon an attentive crowd of young mediums, living souls. Homer, Horace, Virgil, Demosthenes, Cicero, then all the saturnalia of philosophical individualism and politicians, sophists and rhetoricians—all the bourgeois lycanthropy of the Roman She-Wolf, all the mediocratic aegotropism of the Greek Goat.
What infernal possession befalls children! And how could they resist, since it overcomes grown men—lacking complete education, lacking integral instruction examining each doctrine one by one to verify errors or truths by the light of two objective criteria we shall address in this book’s second part.