So long as man has thought, so long as memory has remembered, rites, verses, incantations
have existed; rituals devised to bring hidden plentitudes into the open.
“Worlds pass effortlessly into worlds,” as it was written in the Vedas, the books of
knowledge, the oldest verses of which may represent a far older poetic gospel, a language
antedating the Sanskrit of the Vedas, a meter wrought not by reason, but yoked to words
through the vibrato of the undisclosed.
What was born into things, what was snared among things, required only
knowledge on its long journey through the ancient night to break free from the catastrophic
cycle of birth and death. Thinking, “digging and digging” as it is written in the Rig Veda,
until the spiral of consciousness, aware of its spiraling, sank, sank into itself, in spirit, down
to its origins, aloft in the Vedic wind of liturgy and verse, where spirit met spirit, which
was before being was, in the place where spirit was with spirit in spirit.
So long as man has thought, it was those “sunken in their secret inner spaces,” as
the Rig Veda states, who tried and tried to think, and who did think, “to cleave the darkness,
until it gave off its own light,” in their boat wending heavenward over the beck of hymn
and song.
The struggle for knowledge and for its prosody, worship, remained for millennia
an ether for its devotees, a sovereign realm consigning matter to resignation.
Folk belief regards the Vedas as a selection the Rishis or poet-seers chose from a
far larger codex compiling an abundance of historical descriptions. They did so with the
clairvoyance of those able to “glean the book of being in non-being,” to glimpse the
centuries of twilight and the darkness that would succeed them. A bequest from the age of
intuition to the age of logic, of reason, and of blindness.
Judaism and Hellenism: both are bound to the word, in both, the word occupies the
place assumed by spirit in the teachings of the Veda. For the Rishis, the word was a mere
surrogate. It was meter, the euphony of words, their the symmetry of their form and
purpose, that led to inspiration, to rapture, to redemption. For them, the art of expression
was simply a means of glimpsing what knowledge does not know. This is no less true for
the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries – whose spirit was the font of Platonic and
Pythagorean wisdom – and they may well have been vestiges of the teachings of the Vedas.
Even Democritus of Abdera, when he wished to know, tore out his eyes; down to the mid-
nineteenth century, those who looked past themselves in pursuit of knowledge, in the hopes
of expressing their ideal, were looked upon as poor fools.