Fantasia of the Unconscious | Page 2

defined and expounded in the same way in the universities
of China or Bolivia or London or Moscow to-day, so, it seems to me, in
the great world previous to ours a great science and cosmology were
taught esoterically in all countries of the globe, Asia, Polynesia,
America, Atlantis and Europe. Belt's suggestion of the geographical

nature of this previous world seems to me most interesting. In the
period which geologists call the Glacial Period, the waters of the earth
must have been gathered up in a vast body on the higher places of our
globe, vast worlds of ice. And the sea-beds of to-day must have been
comparatively dry. So that the Azores rose up mountainous from the
plain of Atlantis, where the Atlantic now washes, and the Easter Isles
and the Marquesas and the rest rose lofty from the marvelous great
continent of the Pacific.
In that world men lived and taught and knew, and were in one complete
correspondence over all the earth. Men wandered back and forth from
Atlantis to the Polynesian Continent as men now sail from Europe to
America. The interchange was complete, and knowledge, science was
universal over the earth, cosmopolitan as it is to-day.
Then came the melting of the glaciers, and the world flood. The
refugees from the drowned continents fled to the high places of
America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Isles. And some degenerated
naturally into cave men, neolithic and paleolithic creatures, and some
retained their marvelous innate beauty and life-perfection, as the South
Sea Islanders, and some wandered savage in Africa, and some, like
Druids or Etruscans or Chaldeans or Amerindians or Chinese, refused
to forget, but taught the old wisdom, only in its half-forgotten,
symbolic forms. More or less forgotten, as knowledge: remembered as
ritual, gesture, and myth-story.
And so, the intense potency of symbols is part at least memory. And so
it is that all the great symbols and myths which dominate the world
when our history first begins, are very much the same in every country
and every people, the great myths all relate to one another. And so it is
that these myths now begin to hypnotize us again, our own impulse
towards our own scientific way of understanding being almost spent.
And so, besides myths, we find the same mathematic figures, cosmic
graphs which remain among the aboriginal peoples in all continents,
mystic figures and signs whose true cosmic or scientific significance is
lost, yet which continue in use for purposes of conjuring or divining.
If my reader finds this bosh and abracadabra, all right for him. Only I

have no more regard for his little crowings on his own little dunghill.
Myself, I am not so sure that I am one of the one-and-onlies. I like the
wide world of centuries and vast ages--mammoth worlds beyond our
day, and mankind so wonderful in his distances, his history that has no
beginning yet always the pomp and the magnificence of human
splendor unfolding through the earth's changing periods. Floods and
fire and convulsions and ice-arrest intervene between the great
glamorous civilizations of mankind. But nothing will ever quench
humanity and the human potentiality to evolve something magnificent
out of a renewed chaos.
I do not believe in evolution, but in the strangeness and
rainbow-change of ever-renewed creative civilizations.
So much, then, for my claim to remarkable discoveries. I believe I am
only trying to stammer out the first terms of a forgotten knowledge. But
I have no desire to revive dead kings, or dead sages. It is not for me to
arrange fossils, and decipher hieroglyphic phrases. I couldn't do it if I
wanted to. But then I can do something else. The soul must take the
hint from the relics our scientists have so marvelously gathered out of
the forgotten past, and from the hint develop a new living utterance.
The spark is from dead wisdom, but the fire is life.
And as an example--a very simple one--of how a scientist of the most
innocent modern sort may hint at truths which, when stated, he would
laugh at as fantastic nonsense, let us quote a word from the already
old-fashioned "Golden Bough." "It must have appeared to the ancient
Aryan that the sun was periodically recruited from the fire which
resided in the sacred oak."
Exactly. The fire which resided in the Tree of Life. That is, life itself.
So we must read: "It must have appeared to the ancient Aryan that the
sun was periodically recruited from life."--Which is what the early
Greek philosophers were always saying. And which still seems to me
the real truth, the clue to the cosmos. Instead of life being drawn from
the sun, it is the emanation from life itself, that is, from all the living
plants