FIRST PART

The Wisdom of Man and Paganism

Omnis homo mendax - Psalm CXVI, II. - All men are liars - Psalm 116:11

CHAPTER ONE

Mental Regression

FROM THE UNIVERSAL VERBAL SYNTHESIS TO INDIVIDUAL PHILOSOPHY — PAGAN INSTRUCTION AND CHRISTIAN EDUCATION

Definition of Paganism. — Its Character. — Its Essence is Anarchy. — Human Will Elevated to a Principle. — Krishna’s Trimurti. — The Sudras. — The Mentality of the Third Caste. — Its Rejection by Religious Bodies. — The Millennial Paganism of the Mediterranean. — Paganism Has Dominated the Clergy and Instruction for Over Four Centuries. — Exclusively Pagan Instruction. — Religious Education Reduced to Catechesis. — Imbalance in Favor of Paganism. — Being and Possessing. — Phryne and the Areopagus. — Experimental Paganism in the Child. — The Father and the Mother; Their Role. — The School of Life. — Where to Find the Spirit of Life? — Wealth. — The Pagan Evolution of the Child. — The Priest; His Role. — The Catechism. — The University. — Pagan Possession.

Paganism is a mental and governmental state that goes from the bud to the wild tree.

Its formula is: Primo mihi et sequere naturam.¹ It is always symptomatic not of an evolution but of a revolution. It arises from a corrupted instruction, the fruit of a flawed education. One is like the other, like possessing and being, and to be corrupt—either by oneself or through one’s mediation—corrupts everything, even true possession, and especially the false.

Its character is philosophical and political, anti-religious and anti-social. It is philosophical and anti-religious because it subjects universal reason to individual reason, in two criteria: the objective one of the former and the subjective one of the latter. It is political and anti-social because this subversion of understanding stems from the usurpation of the will, and because it seeks, by every means, to seize Legality in order to oppose Legitimacy.

Its historical crises occur periodically, chronic in their ontological cause, and this morbid condition is natural to the fallen human spirit—deprived of its two true criteria: science and Life, which we will examine later.

It has dared to erect its own system of Filomania,² under the name “Philosophy” or even “Theosophy”; its essence is anarchy, and that is: Fiat voluntas mea!³ It is the will of man. Making it a principle and weighing it alongside one or more derivatives of the word Providence and Destiny is to recognize no principle at all. It is like making three gods, two of which are superfluous; and this is indeed the intellectual essence of Paganism, with polytheism as its highest degree.

Fabre d’Olivet, on whom we will later comment further (following other authors), attributed this doctrine to Pythagoras; but this was never the doctrine of that great man. He thoroughly understood the Trimurti,⁴ by which, under different names in India, Chaldea, and Egypt, Krishna was substituted for the Patriarchal Trinity of the Proto-synthesis cited by Saint John.

Regardless of whatever concession the founder of current Brahmanism may have wanted to make, five thousand years ago, to the mental state of the literate sudras, he never intended to claim that Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu were anything but the personifications of the three Powers of one and the same God—Creator, Transformer, and Preserver. And that same Triad is nothing more than the intended inversion of the earlier Trinity, which neglects from the eternal principle up to the temporal origin of the Creative Hierarchies,⁵ of beings and things; from the Divine Universe to the Astral Universe; from Biology to Physiology; from the world of species to the embryogeny of individuals; from involution to evolution.

The mentality of this third usurping caste, of the seven sudras, corresponded only to the ancient primary education and a few fragments of secondary education. Its murderous greed had invaded and annihilated the social State of the two peninsulas, their metropolises contemporary with Nineveh and Babylon, the Templarian Alliance of the Slavic-Aryans, Argians, Achaeans, and of the Indian Pelasgians reconstituted by Orpheus, the Ribhou of the Vedas. They had closed off their corresponding senses to the higher degrees of Revelation, both in Religious Law and in Ontology.

With rare exceptions, they would atone, from metropolis to metropolis, paying the price of the harshest trials for their anathematized origins as yavanas, mlechtas, pinkshas, sudras, and revolutionary hyksos.

Such was the ordeal to which Pythagoras subjected them for over twenty years—some say forty. The postulant, after all physical, moral, intellectual, and spiritual purifications, was admitted to the religious scholarly bodies and kept under observation for a long period before the inner senses of grace and higher life could be reopened. In most cases, these senses were revealed only to those who resided within.

As for the educated masses, those who had degenerated from the Orphic Word into their own loquacity, they were farther from Truth, which is Life, than their lowest slaves. Thus they never saw in the Philosophy more than their own defiant Filomania, their sophistry, a never-ending casuistry and dialectic, a mental and governmental anarchy. And yet, this intellectual rabble turned into the ruling class, ever inquisitive while profaning the lost Sophia.

From Pythagoras to Hierocles spans an entire horizon between secondary Greco-Latin studies and higher ones—eleven centuries over sixty, forming the best-documented portion of our terrestrial humanity’s history. Outside of the Sacred Books, that history does not exceed six thousand years.

For four centuries, this millennial Paganism serving slavery, serving the anti-social bourgeoisie, has been the sole ruler of the mentality of the populace and of government leaders, as well as in all European Universities—both clerical and secular.

Both the Clergy and Instruction (whose differences we will address later) employ the same mold of anarchy in as many textbooks as there are students. These students, in turn, acquiesce to everything—art and life, science, legislation, politics, and customs. Yet the farther we go, the more the model of imitation, sterile and deadly, of our race’s Christian genius in this age diminishes.

Everyone who is taught in this way, from the heir to a throne to the last scholarship student in seminaries or lycées, receives the same vulgar instruction, fruit of the same banalized mentality. Education differs slightly in households more deeply rooted in the true Christian spirit. But that possibility becomes ever more rare—indeed, one might call it an exception—mainly due to discrepancies of fortune, the uprooting of lives, and the economic anarchy stemming from this classical system incapable of governing the world it seeks to rule. At any rate, instruction and religious education are restricted, indiscriminately, to pure and simple catechesis.

Weighing these facts in the balance, they show that the scale tips in favor of Paganism, drastically diminishing Christianity. Consequently, the intellectual demagoguery of the pagans—weakly tempered by a pinch of Christianity—dominates both Europe’s thrones and all chairs of instruction, including the higher studies of comparative religions, which represent the pinnacle of this anarchy.

One need not be a high cleric to see the result: the light of the mysteries of the Father and the Holy Spirit is entirely absent from these secular hierarchies, from the lowest ranks to the highest. At the same time, the light contained in the mysteries of the Son—Pontiff and King of the Universe, Creative, Incarnate, Resurrected, and Glorified Word—is completely overshadowed by this mental and governmental Paganism.

Yet Instruction was made for life, not the other way around. Likewise, the law was made for man, not man for the law, in the words of Saint Paul.

The method of the Word is always that which formulates everything in life, and here we are dealing with social life. Education therefore takes precedence over instruction, because the former points to being and the latter to having. One is essential; the other is auxiliary. But the character of the classical spirit is to replace the Word with its chatter and supplant the spiritual to usurp the temporal. It seeks to be simultaneously the reason that teaches and the reason of State—the head and secular arms. Consequently, it excludes education, because the political imitation of pagans concerns being no further than it leads to demonic possession.

A person might possess billions and be nothing. Someone might have nothing and yet be of immeasurable worth. Thus, the value of instruction depends on the error one makes of it, just like fortune, talent, and beauty.

When the Hellenists of the Areopagus acquit Phryne of all her crimes because she drops her garments to her feet, Themis⁶ brands those boars of earthly Venus on the back, for the triumphal chariot of the Roman butcher. The penitentiary system takes the place of education’s absence. Such is the Mystery: 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 a long and painful commentary on that no less terrifying phrase.

Daily practical observation and direct experience of Paganism stand constantly before our eyes. Children, in infancy and adolescence, pass from the family to the sieve of the political state, usurper of the social state and of its power to teach. Public instruction, thus uprooted, is the Tree of Death whose roots hang in the air; the spirit walks with its head bowed. The child receives from society, represented by the family, a living gold coin of valid and true mint, stamped with J. C. (Jesus Christ), and in an inverse transformation, society hands back a copper coin also marked J. C. but false (for it represents Julius Caesar—pontiff and emperor of the pagans).

A child is a blank page on which one can write anything about Heaven or Hell. It is a small, beloved wild sapling onto which can be grafted all the flowers of the trees of Paradise. To its right stands an invisible Angel of Light; to its left, a black Demon. The Angel contributes the seven gifts radiating from the Universal Holy Spirit; the Demon supplies the seven dark gifts of the individual self-spirit.

From the cradle, then, there is a struggle between Christian revolution and pagan reaction, an invisible battle waged between Light and Darkness, visible in the child itself.

Only when the child sets out to do something does he become a charming little individual—like a true sans-culotte (French revolutionary), who deems himself the only one, the good one, worthy of being loved, who proclaims the rights of man… individually. This immediately means, for his young mind, that duties fall to the parents. But the Angel is there!

How captivating it is to see these lovely manifestations of the earliest age, these sketches of free thought, freedom of conscience, free action with all its consequences, from the secret enjoyment of candy to torn trousers and worn-out socks. Yet the Angel signals: religion and society are at hand!

Jesus is represented by the father; the Church, by the mother; for the depth of the conjugal bond measures the entire length of eternal life. Blessed, then, is the mother in whom the Holy Spirit of Jesus dwells, who willingly assumes all the obligations of love to which all the young are entitled from birth. And her love neither needs wings—so heavy!—nor freedom, thoughts, conscience, or action; it merely wants all bonds, as burdens that seem so light!

Like the Divine Master washing the apostles’ feet, she devotes herself wholly to the heavenly servitude of that beloved wild sapling. Jesus said: “Whoever desires to be first among you, let him be your first servant.” Only mothers truly understand these words of the great Heavenly Father, for they have a heavenly comprehension: that of the heart.

Breathing her spirit into the soul and life of her children, she wants her offspring to become the loveliest of roses in the human and divine Paradise. However, in the clamor of today’s world—most of all its spirit—few young women manage to free themselves for this seraphic servitude, and fewer still preserve their clear-sighted love, their vision covered by their own idolatry. That is where the danger feared by the Angel and awaited by the Demon begins.

The cradle, and afterward the small bed, is the center of life’s eternal epic. This small, smiling being is the greatest, most solemn thing that concerns Heaven and Earth simultaneously—the entire present and entire earthly and celestial future, not just for a family, but for a society.

That is why the Divine Master allowed children to come near him, and why he said: “The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.” To resemble children is to know how to listen and understand. The child, like the woman, has the true understanding: that of the heart; a child listens to everything you say, but only truly understands by example. Thus the educator must practice what he preaches; otherwise, he is merely instructing without educating, which is far worse than leaving in ignorance. Worse because the school of life is the only true teaching; all the Universities together are worth less than a single humble life lesson.

The little worker has that school among his poor parents, and that is why he surpasses, in greatness of heart, every learned person of university origin. Of the seven dark gifts of the self-spirit, he possesses only the last two; for that reason, he possesses nothing of his own or very little, aside from his affections, which constitute the goods of being more than having—and the only true ones.

However, education must not be limited to knowing how to live in the world, or it would merely be learning how to appear rather than to be, which is the real knowledge of life. The latter, without the former, is embalmed at great depth; the former, without the latter, is a jar of ointment—fragrant on the surface, rancid beneath.

Where does one find this essence, this spirit of life today? Rarely in the soul of the Educated; there is, however, some of it among those who are dedicated or voluntarily disciplined, priests and soldiers by vocation; many among the poor, among those who bear the burden of the day without any assurance of tomorrow, among the noble workers who carry on their backs the entire weight of contemporary Paganism. But that will not last long, thanks to the learned beggars of universal suffrage, those noblemen of political industry.

“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” said Jesus. (The Eye of the Needle was the name of one of the gates of lower Jerusalem.) Wealth is anything a person owns personally, starting with instruction; and when that is false, when one does not believe he is simply its accountable custodian before God, it does him no good. In that case, wealth serves only to add weight to the Self, inflating it. When Our Lord recommends simplicity of spirit, He means openness to reflection on life—heart to head; but if the head is stuffed with useless or harmful things, it is the greatest dissenter, and its reflection will be closed to any illumination.

That is why there should be no instruction at all, aside from the most elementary, or else all possible instruction should be directed toward simplicity, toward unity, toward the humility of individual reason, before the incidence of the Word-God in man’s universal reflection.

Thus the three races of the true earthly and heavenly hierarchy will manifest themselves. But let us not get ahead of ourselves. Let us return to the pampered little child who finds it difficult to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The woman in the church is the only educator; the man in the Lord is the only teacher. A child who does not perceive this manifestation of love and wisdom becomes the master of paternal and maternal idolatry. Gradually, his small reason subordinates the greater one, his small will overcomes the moderate, and the small plant ends up supplanting the entire garden—and the gardener of conjugal Eden.⁷ Year by year, the child’s mind will settle in a box of toys for self-defense, a Noah’s Ark full of idols, an entire pagan philosophy put to personal use, which he soon transforms into governmental impositions—first affectionate and courteous, then by breaking everything. The present darkens; the future will be black. The Demon laughs; the mother weeps, for she loses control over events and no longer knows where to turn. In vain, she calls upon the father’s justice; when discipline and punishments, slaps, beatings, the whip—all of Solomon’s wise arsenal—are imposed, nothing works where the disarmed wisdom of the Gospel would have led everything to perfection.

The Angel prays; as the coryphaeus⁸ of the seven social virtues, religious piety is the mother of children’s piety. The priest comes to assist the maternal priestess. He counts on her tenderness but adds the sweet gravity of the first two races, those of sacrifice—the priestly and the royal. From him shines the breath of the Holy Spirit, which exorcises the Ego-Spirit and straightens the mentality of the rebellious child. The mother bends her knees at her model, the Church; catechesis resumes its uncertain, if not compromised, work. The divine implantation begins at the point where it could have succeeded when the Word, through the mother’s lips, taught the Word at its divine source: prayer, and God Himself answered through the young woman with smiles, caresses, kisses, light, and warmth of life.

Catechism is the Gospel’s primary teaching—the best that could exist. But where, oh where, is the secondary teaching—that of the second race, superior to the first? They are indispensable for manhood’s stages of life, for the initiation and guidance of individuals, for their Fraternities, and for the Orders of their races, which guide societies.

The Gospel has but one Light, that of Eternal Life, yet it has many degrees—from the candle to the lamp, from the lamp to the Moon, and from the Moon to the living Sun of beings and of their spirits.

Right after First Communion, when the child leaves through the Church’s golden doors, opened onto the City of God, the bronze doors of the Universe open, swallow him, and close again. The education of life, which was only just beginning, is done; the instruction of death arrives to blow over it. Behind bars guarded by the jailer, the child descends once more the steps he had just climbed, changing again his soul and his spirit. Then, further steps of the abyss will open before this youth, who passes from puberty into the fullness of manhood; his soul’s mind gradually feels the weight of the glacial spirit—death; the politics taught to governmental mercenaries, in place of the warm spirit of life—the social realm of all gratuitous devotion.

The graft wilts again; the wild sapling recovers its rights; the sap of the senses usurps that of the heart, and, being no longer exorcised, the young spirit rebels or weakens under compulsion.

But here appears the magic lantern of Paganism, which begins its projections, its evocations, and, oh, its funereal reincarnations, over a rapt group of young mediums, living souls: Homer, Horace, Virgil, Demosthenes, Cicero, and then all the Saturnalia of philosophical individualism and the politicians, the sophists, and the rhetoricians—every bourgeois Lycanthropy⁹ of the Roman she-wolf, every mediocre Aigothropy¹⁰ of the Greek he-goat.

What infernal possession afflicts the children! And how can they resist it, now that they have adult reason yet lack a complete education, lacking a holistic teaching that checks every doctrine to verify its errors or truths in light of the objective criteria, about which we shall speak in the second part of this book.