{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

My friends, on the surface of things, it may now look as though we could start right in the story, the story of the first millennium of which we know: the millennium of pure speech, where nothing else existed but either peace or war, either speech or silence.

We'll return to this. But I must draw your attention to the fact that our own language, our vocabulary, the way we talk about history today is very faulty. And without your noticing the sickness of your speech, I can hardly hope to be understood. Of course, that's the hardest thing to say to anybody, that he cannot speak correctly. But I assure you that to study history is an attempt to correct one's language. In a much deeper sense than when you learn a foreign language, where you learn all the faults simply about your -- in your own language and in the foreign language. That only doubles the confusion. What is wrong with our own use of the word "history"? Well, I tried to prepare you for some better understanding by reading you the -- this monumental inscription in Concord, New Hampshire. I attach great significance to this monument, and I hope you will be good enough to copy it for your own preservation.

In Concord, New Hampshire, the Arc de Triomphe, the -- the arc in stone has this strange inscription: "To the memory of our soldiers and sailors, the city of Concord builds this monument." No year given. So there you have the typical effort of -- us human beings as mortals to think of history as something that went on before us. And if we remember it, then that's all we have to do. "Memory" is a word of the monument. And the word "monument" of course has to do with memory. Where there are monuments, we can ea- -- more easily remember than when this person had just died and disappeared, you see. So they leave a monument.

Horace has the famous verse, which ends the antiquity: {Exigi monumente perennius}, I have established a monument that is more enduring than all. And he has, his poems. And he was the first -- as all these Augustine poets at the threshold of Christianity -- they were all full--Virgil, for example, and Horace--they were full of some understanding of the problem of eternity. And we have forgotten this again, what it takes to be remembered. You will not be remembered, I suppose. And to be remembered just for the Nobel Prize is also very little. Because we want to be remembered by people who love us. Loving memory, as here in this -- on this monument is something very different from being registered in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

So the word "memory" today is in eclipse, I would say, in comparison to

scientific history, to all the monumental -- monumental books on the history of the last world war, which I suppose could just as well be fast forgotten.

What we remember today and what deserves to be remembered is not the same thing. And that's a very serious quist- -- question. You know that a whole -- a whole psychological theory--Mr. Freud's psychoanalysis--has been based on the fact that the people remember the wrong things. They suffer from repressions. The -- they do not remember that they wanted to sleep with their mother, allegedly, and they re- -- tried to remember other, more pleasant things.

Memory and history are today at odds. It is not true that because we remember, we understand history. And certainly our -- the history we learn in school has very little to do with your own memories. And there is a cleavage. And the first thousand years of history of which we know, the first millennium, has been -- made an attempt to prevent any cleavage between history and memory. It should be remembered what should be historical. And it was remembered in history, you see, what you could remember, because you had experienced it yourself. You have not experienced the last world war. But you are meant to remember it, and of course you can't. So that's what this -- they have today called "history." Write some book; may be true, may be not true. And one cannot read enough opposing opinions, because what is truth? What is -- has happened really in history? There are as many schools of history today as there are parties and interests.

Now I'd like to bring you up -- bring up to you some quite differ- -- opposite point about memory and history to show you that a healing power, or at least an opposite energy has been at work in history. A famous -- now-stillfamous German poetess wrote 120 years ago in a letter -- in 1843 actually it was written. And I think the good woman deserves your -- a memory -- the memory of her name in your heart. Because she has really said an important and quite unbelievable word.

She wrote, "I would like to be read in a hundred years. And perhaps I will succeed, because nothing is more easy. It's like the -- egg of Columbus"--you know, he puts his egg so that it would stand, by splashing it on the plate. "It's as easy as the egg of Columbus. The only thing required is the resolute forgoing of success today."

So she said, you see, if I -- if I am -- want to be immortal, I have not to think of today. So this would mean that she couldn't be remembered for what happened today, but she would be prepared; she would be the seed, the grain of seed in the ground that a hundred years later was -- you see, mighty, but not today.

The whole Christian era has attempted to do just this, to cure the -- the cleavage between memory and history by forgoing immediate success, by saying, "It doesn't matter that I am remembered now. I become historical by my power to forgo this recognition." This is unknown to you. You look only for the Who Is Who, and you look for -- for the headlines in the papers, and you think if you don't -- are not a success today --. I can give you the strangest experiences of publishers in this country who confuse success with the moment. They have no idea that any good deed has to undergo an incubation, that it takes a long time before an act bears fruit, and can be understood and remembered.

So before memory happens, much has to go on before. An historical event is an event that -- yes, partly is remembered, but for- -- partly also has forgone the claim to be remembered right away. And has been waiting, you see, lying fallow in the ground until the next springtime, when it would be -- grow up, and shoot up, and be visible, monumentally.

The whole story of our era is an attempt to try how much success we have to forgo before we are meaningfully successful.

In the years of Peter and Paul in Rome, you see, the only thing the Romans, and the Greeks in Hellas, and in Palestine the Syrians, wanted: the return of Emperor Nero. He had been murdered by the legions who were sat -- fed up with this monster. He had murdered his own mother, as you know. Just the same, Nero was acclaimed. He would return 10 years later in glory, in 89 -- 80 -- 78 of our era. Fortunately he didn't. But this is what the naive people in politics do. Perhaps they hope that Mr. Reagan will return in 20 years.

It's very strange. You must not believe that people living at a certain time have any idea of the historical stream in which they move. You don't understand history. You don't know what's going on. You can't. You have not sacrificed. You have never made this distinction between future and past. And since you live on -- in the moment, you don't understand anything. We all don't. Newspapers are the best means of confusing us about history. Nothing that is in the papers is of importance in a lasting way. It can be of importance, but not because it is in the paper.

This is today the conflict, and -- that's why I felt that at the end of my life, I should try to teach you the understanding of history. History moves then in a strange manner in that the past and the future can only be understood by people who are quite indifferent to the present. Anybody immersed in something he wants--get rich, be elected president, you see--cannot understand history. Success as of now, and succession as of yesterday and tomorrow, are in conflict.

And this is why it is difficult to understand the story of primitive man, because his whole story is a total indifference to immediate success. And you are not indifferent to immediate success. The good ones of you of course are, to a certain extent. But we are made to feel ashamed of this. The -- you will always find -- take your own generation, you see. The important man, of course, today is the boy of 18 or 19 who prepares himself to become president at 60. Now he cannot run around and demonstrate in Berkeley, you see. He has better things to do. And those who want to have the success visibly gather a thousand or 2,000 heads together--or legs, whatever it is--and demonstrate. Anything that is demonstrable, gentlemen, is -- is foam. Now I don't say that we don't -- have some foam in life. We -- we all need this. You -- have to go to the theater where a thousand people can clap in applause. But you all know that is not the argument, really. The applause of a -- in a given moment does not show that this is the case of God. It is only when all the thousand people are arrested and go to prison for 10 years, or be sent to Siberia in exile that you find out whether there is a Dostoevsky among you.

So the problem of history today is in a very bad way, because we reckon life by seconds, by minutes. "Reading time: 7 minutes, 3 seconds." Wherever you say -- see this, I can only say, take your choice, I mean. This is the tickling of your senses of the moment, and the other is your unique life over a long range of time. And it's a difference between a mother and a harlot.

Now the first millennium of mankind has tried to take man out of this flow of moments--this insect life of bees, and fleas, and fishes, and lions--and to give him the conviction that he's there forever. The ever-ness, what we used to call "eternity," and which I'm afraid today is not very much high in -- currency in our -- in your language--I don't have any other word; call it "perpetuity" --. The "revolution in perpetuation" the Russians called -- this problem, you see, of eternity. It's the same word, { }. Revolution is only a revolution if it is a revolution in perpetuity. A revolution of one day is no revolution.

So the word "eternal" I cannot introduce, because you wouldn't know what it is. You think it is a pious lie of some church people. But the desire for eternity is in all of us. And so let me set out to -- to say, or to discover, or to describe to you in which manner the -- our earliest ancestors have tried to emerge from this momentary McCarthy politics, of the sensation of the day, from the hatreds of the civil wars of any moment into something of perpetuity.

I just read yesterday a chapter by -- from {Quigley} on McCarthy. And he showed very -- it's a very elo- -- eloquent chapter, the incredible fact that this man really lived by the moment. That if he had lied about somebody, he had -- forgotten the next day that he had. And said, "Oh, did I? I didn't mein -- mean it

to." The -- the lack of memory is perhaps the most outstanding feature of the politician. But you are all visited by the same, you see. This -- inf- -- infamous impudence of saying, "I didn't! Yet, did I really? Yesterday? Oh yes, it was yesterday. I thought it was today. My convictions are, you see, just as -- at the shopper's corners, the prices change every minute."

Now you see, this is what you are visited by, you see, the -- lack of unity, of continuity. You will not be pinned down to anything you have said yesterday. And you will say, "How can I know what I have to say tomorrow?" As soon as this has gripped you, you see, you are on the way to the dungheap.

The constancy of our -- your -- of your -- now comes -- of your heart, of your mind, of your soul, of your body, is the condition of history. If there is nothing permanent, nothing that remains, there is no history. It is not so: to speak of history that everything is just in a kaleidoscopical change. When all your convictions, you see, consist in the fact that you had every day a different conviction, you had no conviction. That's how many people live today, with all their aliases. You know, there are people who had five or six different lives -- the nine lives of a cat.

I know such people. and you cannot cope with them. You -- you cannot reach them. They don't know where they are, who they are, how they are, or when they are. They think they -- they are wonderful because they adapt themselves. You know, there has been a whole school--the behaviorist school--in this country, this -- strange man Watson who said that behaviorism is the doctrine how we adapt, how do we adjust ourselves. All these poor schoolchildren have to adapt themselves to conditions {in school}. I don't see why they have to adapt themselves. I mean, I am a wonderful man because I'm absolutely inadaptable.

This idea that to adapt oneself is a merit is a very strange idea. Why is this a virtue? It may be very convenient. It may be very -- it make -- a lazy person of course -- wish to adapt himself, because he doesn't want to act, he doesn't want to respond, he doesn't want to say what he thinks, and he doesn't know what he thinks. So, in order never to find out what he thinks himself, he never says anything. That's called "adaptation." The adaptation of the unfittest, that's the rule of today.

It's all nonsense, I mean. Why should we adapt? To what? I won't adapt. Adapt yourself to me. You have to. You're sitting there. At my hour, and not at yours. Where -- where is there the adjustment, or the adaptation? I can only reconcile you to the fineness of coming at 11 o'clock on Thursday and -- and Tuesday by giving you something which makes you more yourself. If this exchange takes place, any lecture has done its part, you see. It has made you more

yourself, and me more myself. But certainly not adaptation. I don't wish you to adapt to anything.

So it is the essence of speech, of the creation of speech in humanity, to spare man the adaptation to any one moment. Speech is always more permanent than the moment in which I live at this moment. And the great criterion of the tribal order has been that names go on for thousands of years. If you think that is laughable, let me tell you that in the Small Antilles, in the British part of the Caribbean Sea--on those islands, those small islands on which the rich Americans take for a summer resort in winter--that there are many Negroes. It's a Negro population. And all these Negroes, since they escaped the Southern plantation owners, and their slavery -- enslavement, these Negroes all know from which tribe in Africa they stem. Now that's not a small thing, because if you come to think about you people here in this class, who of you knows what your ancestor in 1600 was, and what his name was, and where he lived? Very few of you. Some may. All right. But you know that's an exception. It is not an exception with these good people on these islands. Every one of them knows to which tribe he belongs. And this name makes him the equal of any white Protestant American. And because in the South they had the effrontery and the shamelessness to destroy the family relations, the tribal relations of their Negroes, they have really enslaved man, and have broken his back. And this problem is not slavery. But the problem is names. Because a name survives your changes. You are young; you are old, you have the same name. And any man who can say when he is call- -- his name is called, "That's me," enters the -- the courts of history.

And because you don't know this, you don't understand history, you think always history is something Greek, something scientific, something to be known from the outside, here the Greeks in Salamis, or in -- the Persians in -- in Marathon: that's not speech, that's not history. History is only when this town of New Hampshire -- in New Hampshire--Concord--can say, "To the memory of our sailors," when you can appropriate something that has happened as yours. Before, there is no history. And afterward, there is not history. What you know about world history is not yours unless you appropriate it, unless you say one day, "That's really me. I would have done the same." Without identity, no history.

And the great illness of all the professors { } your examinations on history is that they allow you to write papers without your participation. You aren't asked to identify yourself with this. What's this? Do we sit in judgment while the Trojans had to be destroyed by the Greeks? Only if you weep for Hector, or if you participate in the rape of Helena. Otherwise, it's not your business to know it at all. And that's why Homer had to write the story in such a way that you may weep. As soon as you weep about Hector's death, you are allowed to read Homer. Otherwise, if you read it, you do harm to your soul. And

you all do harm to your soul 10 times a day today. And that's why you at the end become totally indifferent people.

People who know too much, without sympathy and without antipathy are the curse of the earth today. They know more than they should know, and that they can know, and that they may know. We may not know anything without "yes," or "no," and "thank you," and "please."

If you say of Hector's death, "Oh, please let me die the same death," that's great. Or if you see {Percites}, the -- the Greek -- the Greek Bob Hope--I don't want to offend Bob Hope, by the way, I mean, pardon me. But I -- I have no word for the -- for the fool. No -- no other example. If you do not take sides in reading a poem, you don't deserve to read the poem. Don't read it. You may write a -- major thesis on this, and get an "A" in the thesis, you see, but that has nothing to do with the poem and the poet. That's a cheap game which we all play now in these -- in these overflowing colleges.

It's very serious. You see, the ordinary man at the filling station is much less in danger of his soul today than you are. You are allowed to read too much, to know too many things, and not to know them at all. And that is no use. It spoils you; it ruins you. How can you educate a child, if the child knows that you have 90 percent of your knowledge in indifference? In cold blood. This should only tell your -- the child the stories for which get you hot under the collar, which are very important, which you -- which make people cry, or makes people laugh.

Indifferent things we mustn't cope with. Rubble. And they speak of urbanization and of rubbish heaps, you see, in the cities. But it's not the visible rubbish heaps. It's the un- -- invisible rubbish heaps in your brain, in your skulls that is so terrifying. If you -- listen and know a thousand more things than you can take sides, for or against. That's very difficult to avoid, I know. But I must warn you that you cannot understand the -- an ancient tribe--or in anthropology, any ex- -- still-existing tribe, be it in California, be it in -- among the Eskimos, or be it now in Africa, where we come into this tribal life at the moment in which it dissolves--and you see all the sufferings of the Katanga Negroes, or of the Australian bushmen, you must understand that what has kept them going for much longer than you, for 7- -- 8,000 years, is this collective power of their memory. They have remembered what one has to remember in order to remain human. They have forgotten everything else. And the first thing they have remembered are their ancestors. With the help of ancestry, of progeny, of forefathers, these people find themselves as nobility.

And I assure you, these men in the Caribbean, with their names of 300

years' standing, they should lead the other Negroes now to a better life, to a free life, to a noble life, because they are noblemen. Anybody who can identify his existence on the earth with 300 years back, is lifted above his toothache as of the moment. He can go to the dentist and say, "But that's just passing." The dentist is not of first-rate importance to him. He can suffer; he can be mutilated; he can be operated on; he can vote; he can travel. But that is not the man.

If we turn to -- to this tri- -- primeval tribesman of which now the Rembrandts -- remnants are scattered over the globe, and which our anthropologists, so to speak, try to enliven, and to -- to speak of, and to describe to us, it's the last minute. Our language has destroyed any understanding of the connection between memory and history. You actually, if you come to think of it, think that history has nothing to do with your memory. You say you can -- read a history book, you see, and know it all. and there is no memory in you -- involved. As soon as you see this, believe this, you are barbarian. You are hopeless. Nothing will help your soul. You know things you shouldn't know; and you have forgotten things you should know. But most people live this way. That's what is called "urbanization." In a village, this cannot happen. There are -- people of three different generations--or four different generations, usually, you see--all around you. And you know that their lives -- has been formed by their living through different states of awareness, different states of memory. It's the same person who danced at 18, you see, and now walks slowly at 80. And because it is the same person, all the externals of life don't matter, compared to our identity. And the modern poet -- the modern writers who describe the cruelty of young -- of young men, for example, towards old, can only capitalize on this urbanization fact: where young people can laugh of the old -- out the old -- out of court the old people, because they think that will never happen to them.

Wherever you have this non-understanding of different ages, of another age--either by the old or by the young, it makes absolutely no difference--or by the -- by the manager in power, of -- who is just 45 and has still 20 years before he retires, with regard to the man who just happens to be 66 and has now to retire --. And you find in this country as the prepossession, as the obsession of most people, when they must retire, you see, and when he must retire. And -- as soon as you have this, humanity goes. These people -- wolf eats wolf.

Life begins where death is survived. Will you take this down? History begins where death is survived. That's history. Where it doesn't matter that you here sit, you see -- you'll be here with us tomorrow and -- tomorrow, whether here or not. And that is the essence of the historical process: the selection of the undying, of the -- what -- with the dif- -- dangerous word is called "undying" or "immortal." I don't like the word, because obviously we all die, but we all can be resurrected. History is the sto- -- the story of man's resurrection. It is not the story

of our permanency. No, not one of us must try to be permanent. Because I lecture here, I'm not allowed to say I can -- lecture when I'm 90 years old.

So the same thing must not be visible in my action. Only if this happens can I say it's the same man. The same soul, the same life, the same vitality is at work. A child must not live like his grandmother, but he must become a grandmother, which is something very different.

And this is now expressed in the great achievement of the tribal order. In the tribal order, death is survived. Death is survived. Not that it is denied, but it is survived. There is an -- a second difficulty in your vocabulary. Everybody today in anthropology speaks of "the tribes," in the plural. Now that is not the consciousness of primitive man. Primitive man is "the tribe," in the singular. You cannot understand tribal mentality by reading all these books by anthropologists. Because they are all pluralistic. They are all just poke there, and poke there, and say "This tribe has done this, and this tribe does this." It's true, you see. But the raison d'ˆtre, the motive, motivating power in the tribe's order, and law, and folklore, and dances is that there is only one tribe, my tribe. The others, can -- be slaughtered, or can be forgotten, or they are -- they don't count. They once have been mine, too; they split off.

The singular, gentlemen, is lacking in anthropology today to a terrible extent. That's why I feel my anthropological friends--I have some--are all wrong. They are not wrong -- about their facts. They are not wrong about their research. They are devoted men who have sacrificed perhaps a lifetime to understand the dialect, you see, on Borne- -- on Borneo, or Java, or New Guine- -- Guinea. But they have been corrupted by their high school teaching, or their college teaching in which we hear something about the migration of tribes. You must have heard this term. Who has not heard the term, "migration of tribes"?

Now by this arbi- -- stilted word, "migration of tribes," the plural has been sown into your consciousness. And the first time you heard of tribes was in this connection, with the migration of tribes, I am sure. Before, tribes do not play a real part. But "migration of tribes" is allegedly an event which undermines the Roman Empire between 300 of our era, you see, and the year 800. And in these 500 or 600 years, Islam conquered the W- -- East, and the Germanic tribes conquered the West. And so there they are in an infinite plurality, in infinite numbers -- Franks, and Saxons, and Bavarians, and Arabs, and what have you. And so you think today, too. When you speak of these benighted Negroes, you think they have -- they are tribesmen.

I wish you will have a little more respect for tribes. The power to believe in one perpetual stream of life, that's the essence of tribalism. You don't have

this. You go to Macy's, and buy a new -- a new coat. And then you are a new man. No tribal man believes this. And for this, he invented the first script, scripture. If you read the book of the anthropologists, and they'll tell you that writing was not -- did not exist among --. Nothing is more idiotic. All tribes write, but they write on their own bodies, and that's called "tattoo." Tattoo is the first script of mankind, and it makes a man into a man, because from his puberty, from his initiation to the rest of his life, he's the same man. Whether he loses his teeth, or loses his hair, or whether he is sick, or loses an arm, or in a limp, he is the man --. The write-ups show { }.

I have here for circulation an example of tattooing from the Amaz“nas River in South America. Will you kindly look at it and pass it on? And send it back, will you? I have only 11, so you must --. Pass it on, pass it on.

I think 10 -- 10 girls stand there and form together an inscription. They are all tattooed, but you have to see them standing in their solemn dances to understand what they -- what is written. The text of this editorial is only -- can only be deciphered if you subscribe to all the 11 girls. Pass it on, will you?

You understand that is -- there is a -- therefore a serious reason why I must ask you not to speak of "tribes." You will never understand 20 tribes. You will always understand one tribe. The whole -- all the anthropology today is a borrowed anthropology from humanism. There were the Greeks, and the Romans, and the rest were barbarians, or primitive people. And from this, on -- we talk about the tribes. Never has man lived in a tribe. He has lived in the tribe. Because when a man speaks, and when a man says, "I am William Smith," he means it. And nobody can deny that he is William Smith who speaks the same tongue. The tribe has a tongue which is divine. The word is not language, bec- -- although the word "language" is not a bad word. It's derived from "langue," "lingua," which means "tongue."

The people in this tribe all have one tongue planted into them. There are great ceremonies about this, you see. When man at puberty is implanted -- when the tongue is implanted into him, he undergoes terrible suffering; he is tattooed, you see; he is beaten; he is nearly murdered. But if he wakes up, he no longer has a childish tongue. But he has the tongue of the tribe. And when he speaks, not he speaks, but the whole tribe speaks.

That is, through me and through you -- here, as I am teaching, do you think I speak? If I am any good, we speak. The authority which has asked me to teach believes that I will speak in the name of truth, and in the name of historic tradition, in the name of the necessary, the name of tomorrow, or how -- many names you can give. And probably most of the men who have appointed me

have no idea what they have done. But they have faith in this vicarious representation, that when I say something, it is not my poor digestion which speaks, but the truth; experience, you see; charity, hope; my wish to -- to -- to take you in, into the community of man. And "man" in this sense is written m-a-n, as a singular. And all the natural scientists who bel- -- don't believe in God, all believe in m-a-n. That is, they all believe -- a physicist will always tell you, "Man must," or "Man does."

Now what is this strange singular? You -- all the books I read are always filled with this m-a-n, singular of "man." They never say of "men" in the plural, as I do, carefully. But then they deny that man has to be made into a singular. The tribe knew this. The tribe says, in -- by themselves, these people are many--like fleas, like ants, like mice, like rats, like chipmunks, or what have you. Usually rats.

But they can be made into one growth, one beautiful stem. And to stem from such a tradition, that's the humanity of which we speak when we enter history. History is the process of creating units, by putting into us one tongue. The tribe -- what is it? 500 people? 2,000 people? Somewhere on the Pacific Coast? Somewhere in the Medi-- in the Caribbean? Somewhere in Africa? For you, that's all contemptiv- -- you live by statistics, and if it isn't 10 million, you don't care.

Gentlemen, these 200 people, the Yaruros on the Amaz“nas River, of which you see there, this picture. They are 150 people, and they are in history; and you are not. You are just onlookers. You may get into history, but so far you haven't made it -- made the rank. You are not initiated. You have passed examinations, which is a very poor substitute for initiation. Because in initiation, you cannot copy from somebody else, but in your exams, you do.

It's very serious, gentlemen. Most of us--I, too--we have to look for our initiation outside the rigmarole of the schools, and the rigmaroles of what the family demands, you see. You can go to war--that's an initiation. Or you can fight the enemy at home. There are many ways of initiation. But few of you know that you don't -- are not initiated automatically, just by getting older. To -- getting older is no way of ini- -- being initiated. And in order to be fair, you live at a very great moment, gentlemen and ladies: at the moment in which the initiation of men has now to be transferred to women. Never before in the history of mankind did women have to be initiated. They were not. They were expected to wait till the man who was initiated could court, and could woo her -- { }.

Now that's a long story, of thousands of years. And today we are -- and that's why this course is offered to you, if I may, because I feel that between the

year 1967, and the year 2035--which you probably all will reach--a tremendous step has to be taken of a new form of initiation. Or into a new form of initiation. You cannot grow up any longer by high schools, grammar schools, and playgrounds. I mean, you can, but it isn't enough. There has to be some more. And the great innovation is that in the third millennium of our era, the Christian era, the name who has to be initiated will not just be male. But he will be male and woman. And that's the novelty. And that I hope will make you patient when I now talk about the past. It is not for nothing. I don't believe that we go back into the past for renewing. But I think we go back into the past for knowing what is lacking among us. What is lacking today is initiation. Lacking today is this great prowess and this great pride of a man in the Caribbean to say that he is a descendant of the {Kiboto} tribe.

In America, they said -- used to say that if a man in California asked somebody, "Who was your grandfather?" he would be shot. Nobody asks such a question in an immigration country, you see. That was private.

Now the initiation of which we have to -- with which we have to cope will not be a racial initiation. It will not be an initiation of making you proud for your father or your grandfather in the flesh. But there has to be an initiation just the same, because you have to inherit the powers by which man survives death, by which every generation can find themselves as continuing something, you see, and as not starting from scratch.

This is -- today a very painful process. And the different -- there is a difference then between our era in which I told you the Church Universal, and the universe of Heaven and earth, and now the universe of mankind of human- -- of humankind has to be created. This third universe, the throes or the birth-throes of which you and I are undergoing at this moment, you see, will be very different from the pre-Christian era, because it must include women.

And therefore man has changed his character in the last 2,000 years. Anything that has to be done today will have to be done by both sexes. Whereas in antiquity and -- antiquity in this -- way has -- has lasted until today in many ways, in -- in which both sexes are redeemed, are asked to come in and become conscious of their past. A woman has always married a man and changed her name. She was, you see, Mrs. -- Mrs. Essex, and -- or Miss Essex, and then married Mr. Wessex. And this was her problem. And it has been silently borne. And there now these professional women begin to say they have no two names, you see; they have just the name of their profession, and the more important name of their family and of their children is not mentioned. How -- Miss Perkins. You remember -- anybody remember Miss Perkins? Well, you never knew that she was married, and that she had a family name. But she was a very good person,

but she was "Miss Perkins." That's only a half-baked initiation. Wasn't the whole story. Many professional women do just the same.

Only I would -- try to show you only that we are in the birth-throes of a great, new millennium. Something new has had to happen. The initiation of women is unheard-of. And in order to arm you and me for this tremendous turn of the century, we go backward, and look into the pre-Greek, and pre-Egyptian, and pre-Assyrian times in which tribes were founded in such a manner that without land, without books, without stones, without houses, people remembered, and knew that they were exactly in line with a long succession. If you would have the prowess and the ability to say, "What I'm doing now is exactly in the best tradition of my ancestors 3,000 years ago," it would be quite a pedigree; a peerage, wouldn't it?

Now that's what any primitive tribesman can say. You can't and I can't. If you know who your grandparents were, this is already very much. And what does it help? Obviously our physical grandparents are not our true grandparents. We have other ancestors. We have many ancestors. You have to choose your ancestors. That will be the problem of future initiation. I anticipate the end of this course. There is something to be done. It hasn't been done, yet. It is obviously not enough to have a grandfather, a carnal grandfather, if you know nothing of him, and if be cannot educate you. But you have to have ancestors. That is, you have to stay -- say with conviction that you continue something. If you can't say this, it isn't worth living. The moment, ice cream, and Pepsi-Cola is just not important enough, I mean. If your -- a good digestion is all you can boast of, shoot yourself.

Well, this is more than a joke. Because speech is not lodged in the stomach. It is not lodged in the brain. The power to say, "This is me," is ledged -- lodged in your genitals. The heart and the genitals of man are what connects him with the race. The stomach and the mi- -- brain is that which connects him with the moment, with his own space environment. You think differently. You think that speech is a quality of the brain, of the mind. Simply not true, because you can only be { } people have spoken to you. The spirit has to be spoken into you. Because your mother smiles at you, you begin to open up, begin to think.

The greatest heresy of the Greek century of which we emerge--or the Greek century, the classical era, I mean, the humanistic era--is that people are told that this man of yours, you see, consists of a mind and a body. If it -- would consist of a mind and a body, you could have very strange ideas about me. But I wouldn't tolerate that you spoke to me. I would slap you in the face, because anything you would say of me would be beneath my dignity. I'm more than what you know. How can you address me in the proper manner if your mind is

master? It isn't. What's this little mind? That's a tool of society implanting in you certain apish -- certain repetitious words. "Yes, Sir," or "No, Sir," or whatever it is.

Speech is a sexual affair, in the greatest sense of the word. Sex without song is sin. And that's why you are suffering so much. You don't know this. You deny it. You think that sex is something by itself. The person who doesn't sing to his sweetheart has no right to -- to have sexual relations with her. Courtship is a serious thing. Courtship is the connection of the whole man in us, you see, with the moment. Everybody knows this, everybody practices it. You hope that it will be true. If somebody speaks to you, that he'll take you up on your totality.

This sentence is -- may not be very profound, but it is true: sex without song is sin. People sing in order to be able to reproduce the race, as nothing racial is outside the logos, outside speech. The great heresy of the last hundred years from which you have to emerge, or you will destroy you and your children, and the world--China included--is not based on physics. It is not based on your bodies. It is -- is based on your power to sing to each other, to court each other. The first law of the tribe is that he cannot be human if there is incest. There is no primitive tribe, be it in Pacific, or be it in the -- in the -- in the Atlantic Ocean, which allows that brothers marry their sisters. Only modern poets, like Thomas Mann -- Richard Wagner, had such ideas.

Incest is impossible, because incest would be sex without song. If you sleep with your sister, you don't have to court her, you don't have to speak a new tongue. It is also unknown between you and me, I'm -- I'm afraid, that he who courts, he who makes love, who he begins to say to a girl, "Really, I like you," speaks -- learns to speak a second time. We are all depraved, and corrupted, and poisoned by the wonderful, romantic idea of a mother tongue. Ladies and gentlemen, if you are worth the {candle -- your candle}, you have to sing when you court your sweetheart, or your -- another country to which you go, or whatever it is, your profession, you have to learn a second tongue, the bridal tongue of courtship. We all speak several languages. The first layer is English--poor English, I mean, daily -- daily English. When you are 14, or 15, or 16, and the -- hair is beginning to grow, you have to learn the power to speak something which no one has ever heard before. A boy who has never written a line of poetry is in great danger of not be- -- being a full-fledged man. Because what is poetry? The power to say something for the first time. And what is mother tongue? The power to say what has been said, again.

Now you and I consist of this tremendous dialectic, that partly we have to go on saying what has been said always: "How do you do?" "Nice weather," you see, et cetera. And the same man around the corner has to say to his sweetheart something she has never heard before. I hope she'll never listen to a man who

doesn't do that. He doesn't deserve to be listened to. Because the same man has to say something for the first time, and something for the xth time, for the thousandth time. Language lives on repetition and on new fervor. That's what we call "renaissance," you see. Renaissance is nothing that happened in 1400 or 1500, you see, but is something every student has to do. The difference of a college student and a man growing up in his parish, and in his farm is just this. To go to college would be absolutely silly--and perhaps it is in many cases, I don't know this--but I mean -- I -- I warn you: unless in those four years in this college here you learn to say certain things to somebody so that she says she has never heard this before, is impotent, has not the power of a man. Don't marry him.

This has to do with initiation today. Because today it is unknown. People think that the mother -- all nationalists in Europe, you see, got intoxicated and drunk with the mother tongue. And you know who these gentlemen were who prepared Hitler and the Third Reich--and -- and the same thing of course in the -- in France, the -- the nationalists and every country--the fascists in Italy, everywhere the same? They were all people who had gone to a Gymnasium and learned Latin and Greek. And they never became conscious of the fact that by learning this second language, they had become very potent and very powerful, and were listened to in their nation. And thanks to the second language they learned in school--and you do, you see--you suddenly overcome the laziness, the apathy of the mother tongue. That -- speech, after all is just repetition. And you come to know, some in more -- in higher degrees and some in lower degrees, but every one of you know something, that in a good moment, you can intone a verse, a song. And the moment you do this, the whole world begins again.

To sing means to start; to think means to end. Now both is necessary. But if you live by thoughts, by mind only, you are on the dungheap of history. You are reflecting, you are the last. We all have to be last, at first. So I too have to think, I'm afraid. But that's not the end; that's the beginning. As soon as I have thought something through, I dismiss it. It's now clear. And I try to find something very obscure, which, by a poem I begin to {eclare}, to lighten up. Illumination comes, you see, from the poem. And then you analyze Shakespeare, and then you write a thesis on -- on the word "fool" in Shakespeare.

All this is natural. These things, every human being has known since the beginning of the world. And we have acted upon them. It isn't nothing -- but it shakes you now -- I know, because we have separated your own literary, poetical, political life from the greatest need, from your sexual life. This cannot be done. Sex itself is a way of making you as an individual subservient to the eternity of the race. That is sex. Sex is the entrance in a -- of a power that is bigger than you and me, into us, demanding subjection. Any verse that you write comes with the -- with demand on us, you see, that has to be said. If this wouldn't be said,

you see, if Lincoln hadn't given the Second Inaugural, the United States would not exist today. They wouldn't exist. You understand; that's quite something. No battles, and no guns, and no money, you see, and no consulates, and no amnesty can save the United States from disintegration unless the speaker of this country, you see, is heard -- in the next and the next generation. Why -- that's why you have to learn the Gettysburg Address. That's not a luxury. By the -- Gettysburg, you recognize anyone who has lived after 1863. Before, just primitive man. Because here was a split nation, you see, who had to coalesce again. That was much more than the Declaration of Independence from England.

All the monuments of memory then--be they stone or be they speech--make the race, or the people, or the eternity of time, masters of the -- over the moment. All our appetites, all our five senses serve the moment. I'm hungry, I eat. That's all right. But if I mistake my hunger for the historical demand on me, I'll never be able to go -- starve. And -- you have to live on a starvation diet perhaps for two years in order to save your country. Where is your claim that you must be satisfied? No soldier can serve under such conditions. And im- -- it's not just a soldier. Take a -- a nurse in a hospital. Every one of us has to forgo certain claims of his natural body all the time. They are secondrate.

And when I see all of you with these oily coi- -- coiffures and beards, I -- beware. Don't give too much to this, you see. Man is not there to cultivate his ego. He is there to subject his ego to the needs and necessities of history. You have to be introduced, threaded-in, so to speak, you see, like a -- like a -- how you call it, what you thread in to a needle? wie? ja, like a thread--and that's our problem. And we do it by beginning to speak time and again, with a new enthusiasm, with a new language.

Now you well know that the tribal language has mastered this. As soon as you understand that the singular "the tribe" is the only congruous way of coping with tribes, that it is not true that any tribe considers other tribes, you see, but that he wants to be the genuine tribe, you will understand two things. That the whole world is their stage; all tribes migrate. That's not an accident. That is not just a byproduct of their existence. It's the essence, that the universe--when we speak here of the universal history of mankind, you see--the universe is in a strange manner pronged -- in two prongs, so to speak: space and time. The earth has to be migrated, has to be wandered through, has to be conquered by movement. The tribe has to be on the move. A tribe that can no longer move ceases to be a full-fledged tribe, a sovereign tribe. It is a part of the tribal existence that they can change their -- their springs, and their fruit trees, and their woods.

The old Germanic tribes, you see, didn't -- knew all about agriculture, but -- in the Roman days, for example. In the famous -- {Hermann, the Cheruska in the chorus of the Tuteborg}. But they didn't allow themselves to stay put. Next year they had to go away elsewhere to show that they were masters of their destiny. You go, you go, you go, you go. The "migration of tribes" is a misnomer. It's the migrating tribe of which we're speaking. Do you understand the difference? With "migration of tribes," it looks as though at one time the tribes began to migrate. That's totally erroneous. All tribes we know are full-fledged tribes as long as they are able to migrate. When the English come in and occupy New Guinea, all of a sudden these poor tribes are no longer allowed to move. So they decay. And they do.

And all these nice anthropological studies now, on {Maihai} Valley, and whatever the books are, are sick books, because they describe a tribe who, by a superior power, the great powers of the West, you see--has been negated, his raison d'ˆtre, his first power, that the whole world is open to him.

So you fee- -- find in Cambodia, Eskimos; and you find Mongolians in -- at the Amaz“nas River, the Bororos, and you find people from Melanesia in the Fire Land, in Patagonia. And it's a grandiose spectacle. The whole world has been migrated. Can you say this in English? Poor English. But I have to use the term to show you that it's a conquest. The tribe shows its cohesion by being indifferent to the place at which it exists, you see. It can win over cold and heat, summer and winter; and that is the tribe that puts the cohesion of its generations above the cohesion of its land.

All the great problems of anthropology are rooted in this great mystery, that it is more important for the tribe to endure through the ages than to occupy much territory. This -- this idea of -- of the frontier, and this idea of land hunger and so on, it's unknown to the tribal era. That's an invention of the people who came to this country in 1850. The tribe migrates in order to prove his identity through all ages. The first governing law is eternity, in time. Subject -- subordinate to this is the relation to space: somewhere in the bush, somewhere at a river, somewhere at the seashore. But it's quite indifferent. It's not -- no religious aspect of the land in a tribal {order}. The religious aspect goes with the ancestors.

And of course the most prominent feature of the ancestors is the tattoo. The tattoo is the written language of the tribe. To share the tattoo through the ages therefore is a tremendous achievement. Next time I -- want to tell you the story of the 150 Yaruros at the Amaz“nas River who are dying out now, in the last 30 years. They will disappear; there will be no Yaruros, but you can feel something of the reverence, I think, of mankind for his brothers. They are -- they

are doomed. No -- nothing can save them. But they represent in total purity the great power of man to last, to last against his own little specimen of a physical stomach, and a physical -- brain, and to say, "My heart and my genitals prove that I am the eternal man."

Thank you.