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

...it's no use teaching the Dartmouth students. With your reports, you are trying to refute me. I'm very surprised. So far, we have been very lucky.

I have to add a little story to the examples of last time. And then we plunge into the real narrative of the -- creation of speech as a first chapter of the acquired faculties. But to lead up to this, gentlemen, I must first say that in Judaism--I think I hadn't spoken about this--the highest holiday -- the day of atonement, Yom Kippur, also is like Easter--not one of the Sabbaths excelling in distinction, but it is the one real Sabbath, and all the other Sabbaths are imitations, as with Easter, you see. The 51 other Sabbaths are poor days of atonement, so to speak. He's called the Sabbath of the Sabbaths. Just as you could call Easter the Sunday of the Sundays.

I thought it was important to mention that through history, the -- the se- -- the same in Egypt--and in Rome where the New Year had this significance--one day gathers around itself the -- all the other days. And if the day of atonement and if the Easter is nothing arbitrary--if it is really necessary--you can perhaps now begin to understand what is meant by the -- today so very mis- -- abused and misunderstood term of "God." When man establishes time, like the Christian era, gentlemen, and when the cynic then says, "That's manmade, and therefore it can be forgotten," the question arises: did this man, when He was crucified, act just as a man, as you -- to think you act, as a playboy, arbitrarily?

I have had a -- boy in class who handed a paper to me which began, "That which I arbitrarily call 'God.'" Ja. It's very hard to save such a soul. He has lost something. He has lost some -- notion that even in his own stupid life, there are some higher verities than his whims. That the length of his time, and the fact that he was born, and the fact that he shall die is in God's hands, and not in his own. But you have come to understand that you do everything arbitrarily, gentlemen. I'll show you, you don't breathe arbitrarily. Any creature of God carries out the law that has been put into him.

Now when we say that Easter is not arbitrary, and that it is established, and that it is manmade at the same time, you may perhaps understand why the Christian fathers were forced to the compromise to say that God became man at Easter. Because into time, a necessary element entered, you see, which was part of the further creation of the unity of the human race. And it couldn't be done in any other -- -wise. And therefore, please say "farewell" to your idea that this -- speech is obsolete, wherever you want to distinguish in your own action between necessity and arbitrariness. And I hope when you marry, you will. And

you may treat your wedding day, perhaps, as your Easter. You must then say, "This is not my will, but it is a higher will." And we say, of course, say it: not "my will be done," but "Thy will be done." As soon as you say this, there enters the scene of your own actions: the dec- -- your decision that you will treat this one experience, you see, as not of your own choosing or your own making, but as representing a higher will.

All avenues of time, gentlemen, on which men have agreed, and by which they behave, are therefore of a superhuman nature in so far as you can only ask a man to work in the 42-hour or 47 days, if this is -- as you call it "scientific," or "industrial," or "technologically necessary." You can only force the people in the sub- -- into the suburbs of Chicago or New York and make them commute on the Long Island Railroad if this disaster and calamity is a higher will. It expresses the productivity of the United States; it expresses prosperity. These are your gods. They are very cheap gods. They are very simple gods, but they are gods. They are not arbitrary. Why do people -- the commuters put up with all this stuff? Why do you come to Dartmouth College, you see? It wouldn't be a good idea if it was just arbitrary. You -- to get an education is necessary. It is necessary, Sir, and therefore it does not depend on your assent or consent. Whether you agree, or whether you, at the age of 17, understand what's happening to you when you go to college is absolutely indifferent. For what motive do you come here? For childish motives, because you like Dartmouth -- all this rigmarole, when your parents go through the motions and say, "You have your choice of the college," you see. That's all fanc- -- fantasy. It is necessary that a man gets an education, whether he chooses or not. I mean, you go to elementary school before you even know what you're doing.

Today in this country there is raging today a war between the individual mentality--or brain--and the reason of God, the reason of creation, gentlemen. And you really think that because you select Dartmouth, that you have decided that you go to college. Gentlemen, nobody can see a difference between the Ivy League colleges. They are all the same. So we leave you this little leeway that you decide which of these Ivy League colleges you may choose, or -- it can be another college.

The more you believe in this country--as you know, that this is all arbitrary what you do--the less becomes the distinction between these things you choose. The -- all the colleges in this country are by and large today absolutely alike. You know, a -- father sent his -- one son to Princeton, and one son to Harvard, and one to Yale, and one to Dartmouth. And when they go ho- -- ha- -- came home, he couldn't tell the difference. Except for Dartmouth, of course.

The more you believe, gentlemen, that you make arbitrary choices, the

less real choices you will make. You know who is the most original man? There is only one. The one man who didn't try to be original. You see, there -- as soon as you -- long as you think that it is your arbitrary choice, it will be a stereotype choice. And the sooner you think that the original man in you has to look for that which is absolutely necessary, which is at another his moment the thing to do, the more original, the more creative will his act be.

That's the only reason why Jesus is called the Son of Man. He did nothing arbitrary in His life. Absolutely nothing. He never could say, "What I arbitrarily call 'God.'" And He could -- never could say that he went arbitrarily -- up to Jerusalem. He went when His hour had come.

This is very important, gentlemen. You must -- believe that you can only live in -- in -- in the modern world if you accept that your ancestors have done necessary things, that they have continued creation. As soon as you say, "My parents shouldn't have married; they don't fit," you de- -- condemn yourself. You must believe that they loved each other, and that there was a higher will at stake. And in any happy family that's the case. You're very glad that they did find each other. And even if they fell out with each other, at the time they married there was a great bliss in this, and you are--and your sisters and brothers--are the result of it.

Gentlemen, as soon as a man thinks that the history of the world is arbitrary, his choices are of course meaningless, you see. Because then he adds only the -- the leaps of a leapfrog to the life. He becomes a flea. A flea may be able to jump 70 year- -- 70 times its own altitude, its own height, but it's perfectly meaningless what it does. Do you really believe that the last 7,000 years are meaningless? Who has then created the meaning? Those people who found the meaning of creation, who co-created the world with the will of the creator. And the others, the arbitrars- -- the arbitrars--the men about town--they fell by the wayside, the Jim Walkers. They are playboys. They are forgotten. They are perfectly -- I mean, they thought they had to -- to choose their tie very carefully, the orig- -- the so-called "original" people, you see. And they are all forgotten, because they didn't concentrate on that which was now to be done.

As I told you, gentlemen, ask yourself what is necessary, and you can become original. Our -- most of our writers are so unoriginal, because they think they must think it up. But -- when Dante wrote his Divine Comedy, or Shakespeare his plays, there was nothing of the kind in them. The Eliz- -- Eliz- -- Elizabethan England was saved by the political character of the stage. Great truth had to be proclaimed to save a country that had at a stage the only medium which -- of a non-religious, non-controversial character. In the streets of London, the mob was either Catholic, or Protestant, or Puritan. On -- on the stage, you

spoke for the first time in modern times, a purely secular language. You know, Shakespeare is distinguished by the fact that nothing religious is debated in the plays. And therefore, he -- he melded together the British nation beyond the religious wars that otherwise tore to pieces at that time France, and very soon -- later the whole continent of Europe in the Thirty Years' War.

Only to show you that a man -- a poet like Shakespeare can only be called "great" because he was necessary, and because to this day the American people find their connection with Europe only through Shakespeare. If you hadn't Shakespeare, gentlemen, there would be no real connection between your soul and mine with the Old World. You would be just drifting, you see, on a lake of oil.

So the whole four -- first four chapters of antiquity, gentlemen, deal with an attempt of creating necessary avenues of time, and endow them with the appropriate names of divinities. God is that which man creates beyond his own will and whim. If you pray in the "Our Father": "Thy will be done," and not "mine," you also reverse the charges. And you can say that where His will has been done, God has entered history. And wherever we obey a tradition, we assume that God has entered history much more than the modern cynic thinks. If a -- my colleague is an atheist and he teaches at Dartmouth College, he still thinks that's divinely ordained that he should be called "Mr. Professor Such-andSuch" by you. And as soon as you give him the title "Professor," he assumes that that's a God-ordained order. And he would be very angry with -- without his special permission, you would call him "Phil." He wouldn't like it. He thinks that he has a claim to your obedience, to your loyalty, to your observance, to your politeness. Now what's this, gentlemen? He simply believes that there is very good reason for the fact that a teacher should, you see, enjoy some authority on the part of his students. So I don't care for his atheism, because he believes at least in this partial divinity of himself, that he is a professor.

Never believe an atheist before you have seen him live. They all believe that they themselves are divine. But of course they don't believe in a more universal divinity. They are perfectly satisfied with the little demon which rides them.

Now I'm quite serious by using these terms, gentlemen. We will see that in the first chapter, the creation of speech, the divine experience is of a pluralistic character. We call these -- to this day we speak of spirits and of demons. And later we speak of gods. And I want to induce you to admit at the end of the course that the coming of God into this world is a story of 5,000 years, that when Jesus could say that God had become man, He only summed up the whole story from Adam to Christ. We cannot understand antiquity if you do not see that this

-- Jesus is only the last little piece, the last -- ring in the chain by which man was chained to the triumphant chariot of God, the Creator. That since Jesus, we can claim that we have understood God's plan with man, and that we are co-creating the universe, or society, or mankind. Before, we have been groping, we have founded partial time avenues.

I already told you that there are four calendars. Now only one of these calendars is the eternal calendar and goes through all time. All the three other calendars are partial, you see, and therefore are not, in the same sense, God Himself, revealed. But they are divine. You wouldn't say that the United States don't have a custodian angel, or have not a -- spirit. When you sing, "That's the spirit," "He's a jolly good fellow," you say that there is a spirit in America, and it's different from any other country, I assure you. And therefore, they -- we have a spirit on foot. And as long as you can say, "That's the right spirit," "Men of Dartmouth," you see, then you have a college, alive. Without a spirit, you wouldn't.

This is partial divinity, gentlemen. And the whole problem of your future, when you educate your children, I think--and your grandchildren--it will be that you understand that today we recognize God not in the big, dogmatic statement of the large churches. But first of all, you must recognize Him in the spirit of your family, in the spirit of your college. And you must see that these are parts of the good life which we always feel present when we are rid of our arbitrariness. And when we enter upon the necessary things of life, you see, then we are in touch with what we would -- might call today, tentatively, "divine."

So once more, gentlemen, when we say at Easter, "God became man," this would make absolute -- no sense to me, myself--and I can only speak for myself in this relation--if I would try to mean thereby that God entered history in the year of the Lord 33 of our era, or 29 of our era--they debate the year when Jesus was crucified. It only makes sense to me if from the very first day that a man became man on this earth, man has tried to become necessary. That is, to bec- -- perhaps I -- may use this rather bold expression -- to become necessary, you see--instead of being a whimsical fellow, an odd fellow, an arbitrary man--to enter the stream of history by which he is carried into the future in clear shape and necessity.

You know that in biology and zoology, people today tend to stress the fact that man is in the mainstream of life, and the apes and the mammoth are sidelines, that they have been left behind because they missed the center. They have -- are ramifications; they are branches. Man does certainly not come from the ape. But ape -- the apes have at different times left the main line of life and have, you see, branched off, and are now oddities, as the Americans may one day,

easily, also become oddities. We don't know. Every generation is in great danger of being left behind.

If you go to Spain, or if you go to Maroc, or if you go to the Amaz“nas Basin -- I don't know. I haven't been there myself--I suppose there are quite a number of places in the universe--where you find that the people are God forsaken, that they have been left behind, that the spirit has abandoned them, that they are just there as they were. And we call them "Stone Age Indian" or --. And we feel they are sidelines now. The mainstream of life, you see, when it touches these left-behinds, only can make them perish. You give these people alcohol, like the Eskimos, you see, and sugar. And they just, in a few decades, they're gone. They cannot be brought back.

And so let me open this first chapter now, the creation of speech, with this simple consideration: that we have a practical challenge before us. We must recreate our speech, because it is destroyed rapidly by technology. But peo- -- people who still speak these original tribal languages, the Stone-Age people all over the globe are in the danger of condemning us, because we make them die so fast in the last decades. And we have not yet proven that, for example, we can save the Africans in the heart of Africa from merely perishing. We haven't yet found a way of reviving or of reconstructing, of regenerating their tribal life, so that they must not curse us and say, "We kill" -- "You kill us." The white man for the last hundred years has only murdered these tribal groups.

I have before me a report of a Spanish -- Spaniard who went to the central -- to the Orinoc Basin, and--in South America--and found there a tribe of 150 souls. And that's too little to li- -- to live, and too much to die. The half-casts, the half-breeds from their environments were carrying away their wives. That's going on now, day after day, just violating all rules of decency there. And these poor men were too weak to go on -- to the -- wa- -- the warpath. They have just to see how their women were abused, and most very often killed.

And so they were going down, and the last medicine man of the tribe said to this Spaniard, "It is very hard to keep the spirit alive when you know that you are doomed. We may s- -- perhaps last one more generation. Two more generations would be very much. But we know we are doomed. And all our tribal life has of course been based on the assumption that our spirit will not die."

So the avenue of time meted out by this tribe today loses its sense, if the white man destroys it. And it's -- the mu- -- in between, these half-casts, halfbreeds are of course still worse, and still less disciplined. And this case is one out of hundreds. And it's a great indictment against our misunderstanding of our position on the globe. I do think, gentlemen, that you will have to find -- the last

300 years some ways of meeting the spirit of these men, of our original plantation, so to speak, and allow them to represent this spirit. I think we need this. Just as we need the Olympic Games, I think we need a group in which language is still spoken as it was in the first day, with the full conviction that without -- with the word, all the life of the group comes into existence. Now that's to which I shall now apply myself.

Sir, do we have still some time to go?

(Yeah.)

Thank you. But I shall depend on your pleasure.

The creation of speech, gentlemen, is an attempt to make man the carrier of eternity, of eternal life--"life everlasting," as the Bible says. That is, to make him behave in his own generation in such a way that life shall carry on what he has done for all -- forever.

Therefore, all speech was in su- -- created in such a way, gentlemen, that it all depended on the living generation to keep this light aflame. There was no writing. There was no building necessary. The only thing a tribe has is the totem pole as a sign that it has cut out an avenue in time. And what connects the -- the eyes on the totem pole with the living generation? The only thing that a tribesman has to know is the name of his tribe, that he is an Iroquois, that he is an Apache, that he is a Sioux. He has to know the name of the tribe. The name is that which survives death, physical death.

The first avenue on time, gentlemen, consists of names. And man therefore in the tribe is created into a time-carrier, into a time-binder--as Mr. Korzybski has called this, time-binding animal, man--into a man who holds up his own time as a link in the chain of all generations--that's after all the creation of a time avenue--by saying what matters is that this name be represented in every generation again. There must be Iroquois forever. You don't care. You use up the whole American heritage. You don't say that the name "America" may be forgotten by your abuses, or by -- may be made stinking by your behavior. You think that -- an American name has enough of a good odor that it does no longer depend on you. We live in too-large communities, gentlemen. That's why I take back you into the small communities of 2-, 300 people, where everybody knew that he could make this name stinking, he couldn't make this name forgotten, he could make this name an abomination. You never think of this, that any one of your acts redounds either to the glory of your community, you see, or the -- its defamation.

So we come to the time, gentlemen, when fame and name are identical. A St- -- tribe in antiquity wanted to become famous, because it wanted to be named; and it had to be named in order to become famous. And it had to be -- have a good reputation. All these many words which today you take without any connection, gentlemen, are the very simple burden put on anyone initiated into the tribe, that on his rep- -- embodiment of the good name of the tribe, it -- it will depend whether the tribe smells good, or whether it is -- makes an abomination among the heathen, and will be wiped out. It's no difference between you and -- and the aborigines, gentlemen, in this respect.

How is this done? It can only be done when already the first generation, gentlemen, receives this name from the previous one and hands it over. Now that's a contradiction in terms. If you are the living, and everything that has died before is just dead, then you must pull yourself out of your own -- by your own bootstraps, out of nothingness. And if -- the -- the naturalistic interpretation of history in the last hundred years had this very funny situation, that since man began by his own will sometime in his own generation--of course, he was only a creature of his own generation--and if you could -- can't find the point of beginning, the starting point of man, at that point where two generations meet, then they can -- the topic of history cannot be continuity. But then it can only be orig- -- the independence of every generation. That's how you think. You are all selfmade men. You are the captain of your soul. So -- no soul, no captain. And you are just erratic blocks in an ocean of time, filling your own time with your good will, but never being able to say that you do a higher will, because you have not received into you a higher will. You are left alone here in this time and place.

Therefore, the problem of the beginning of history is quite a serious problem. And if you look into Toynbee or Spengler, you see that they have been wresting with it, and have n- -- found no answer.

It is very serious, because the first chapter in history must be the establishment of a tribe that could say to its living members that they were only continuing the past. If they said, "We start now," there was no way of identifying one's own behavior with either the people to come, or to go before, because if you said to the children, after, "You do as we tell you," they would say, "You are despots. We have our own will. We are just as good as you. We start all over again."

Let me begin with the rebellion, as it in Cain and Abel's story, or in the ta- -- story of the Titans, or the gi- -- gigan- -- gi- -- giants. It is quite true, gentlemen, that it is much more normal in old times as today--as with you against me, as with the Russians against the czar, or -- any rebellious group--any young group will say, "Why -- what our fathers started, means that we also can start what we

like. There is no continuity; we begin from scratch." And that's at least the ideal thing. If we only could have an island, a Robinson island, you see, Crusoe island, we would begin all over again. That's the idea of the frontier, you see.

Forty-eight times we founded states in this country. Seventy-seven Hanovers exist in the United States. Seventy-seven times people felt that they could found a better Hanover, you see. And I'm sure they could. It's quite remarkable, gentlemen. There is only one Hannover in Germany, but there are 77 in the United States. Which shows you that the rebellious spirit of this country is very much of -- making every generation independent. I'm -- dri- -- hammering this into you, because I think this is the great confusion in your mind, that for you, actually the normal man is somebody who begins what he pleases. And he begins then another Hanover, or another state. Arizona got its constitution I think in 1907, isn't that right? Wie?

({ }.)

Even 1912. So it is over 140 years that new states could receive a new constitution, and the people could live in the -- in the blissful ignorance of believing that they wrote the constitution by their own will. If you look at the 48 constitutions, you will find that it's nothing of the kind, that the minds of these 48 different populations were very much alike, very homogeneous, that they were all patterned to a very simple pattern, and that they repeated themselves 48 times. As I s- -- told you, if you do something arbitrary, you will never be original. All the good in these constitutions--these 48--is that which the people felt at the time when they wrote it, it wasn't arbitrary; it was absolutely necessary. You have some good points in every of the 48 states. But that -- are the points where the people were driven by necessity--as by the cattle fields in Wyoming, to put some teeth into their law, and into their police force, and into their constitutions. The other pipe dreams of a -- world reformers in these 48 states--and they were plenty, you see--are perfectly arbitrary, and perfectly uninteresting.

So the 48 states offer a -- a strange contrast. For your mind, that's normal: every generation goes out, founds a state, writes a constitution. From my point of view, it proves the opposite. Where these constitutions were written with the zest--as though they invented it--or they just imitated and copied practically the precedent, because even the modern -- the m- -- the human mind, gentlemen, is an heir of time. And most laws are just copied from other people's laws, because the mind is only original under great pressure of the heart.

If you are in love, they -- your mental prejudices and your mental phrases, "Oh, you are unusual," to his -- your girl, they may give -- yield to a real poem. Then you may become original. But the mind itself is unoriginal. The mind itself

is merely a repetitor of stock phrases. The mind is not original, gentlemen. Will you take this down? It's terribly important. And therefore if you begin life with your own mind, you will remain an imitator of the forms of the mind which you find -- have inherited. And man would have never found his -- world -- life -- his way out of animal and beastly life if he had only used his mind, because the mind is only imitative. The mind has no creativity. The mind has no originality. It is under tremendous pressures that we find a solution.

You see, as long as Mr. Dulles and Mr. Eisenhower sat here, pretty far away from the Mideastern scene in Thomasville, and in the Thousand Islands, they just ruled -- by yardstick. Most unoriginal. "Crime doesn't pay." "Children must be good." "Let's pray." But as -- the more the scene, the real scene, of the di- -- dire necessities of these people in Palestine, and Egypt, and Ara- -- Arabia was brought home to these men, the more people came to see them and told them that they were in danger of life; that people were killed every day there, at the frontier; that it wasn't a question of evacuating the Gaza Strip in this ridiculous manner, as it was demanded by our president at first; that it wasn't a question of school morality, but a question of existence; and that, after all, the charter of the United Nations says, that wherever a question of existence, and honor, and life is at stake, obviously every state has a right to go to war. That's in the charter. And the -- Israeli did not violate the charter at all. For example. And the more Mr. {Molley} and other people of some -- a little closer to the scene visit in Washington, the more emotion breaks into the mind. And that what -- to the mind at first is just one case, you see, of unjustice, or unfairness, or a breach of rules, suddenly, gradually grows into a concrete thing. A living thing of -- as of today. Then a solution is possible.

As long as the mind alone wants to find the solution, there is no solution. It took -- it took the -- the -- the government of the United States all these last seven months. The first reaction was: hatred against the people who had made the trouble. They -- so Mr. Eden had to be eliminated. And spite. Oh, the Israeli had made war; so, anger; so they have to evacuate because we are angry. That's the first emotion. But as you know, hate and anger are just emotions of pride and of the mind. They are not yet emotions of the heart. And the -- lay -- more the emotions of the kidneys, and of the stomach, and of the heart, and of all the other parts of the American body politic came into play, the nearer the solution draws. I haven't seen the papers today. Is there any progress made?

({ }.)

Ja, quite.

It is possible now, because the people on the scene have the feeling that

for the first time you condescend to share their feelings, instead of using your mind. You are in it, you are -- at least have a -- some realization of the dangers and of the -- of the -- of the emotions involved. Before, the mind, gentlemen, does nothing, except repeat.

I'm -- it's very important, because it's the -- the mind has not started the history of the human race. But sorrow has. At the cradle of every political group in the world is a strong emotion. And at the cradle of every rebellion is a predominati- -- -dom- -- -dominance of the human mind. This is very important, because we have to deal with a paradox. We have, all over the globe, languages spoken. And they have at one time begun. But at least nine-tenths of these languages have been created from spite, from imitation, from segregation, from secession. The war of secession, the war of the -- between the states is the original and constant method of multiplying groups, political groups. And we have to say from the beginning: the genuine language was created by strong and sympathetic emotions. But the multiplication of tongues, the fact that there are a hundred thousand tongues spoken is largely produced from spite. Ja, from spite, from anger, from excommunication, from outcasts, from outlaws, from werewolves--as we shall see--from people who had to leave Europe and came to America.

So what -- what I warned you against, not to look into your mind for the beginning of your political convictions, but for your loyalty or your emotions, is a division that exists -- in the caveman. You find in your first generation of humanity, or in the first generation of humanity as far as we can -- penetrate, we shall find a division. Some people going wrong, and some people remaining in the mainstream and doing the necessary thing. Ja? Now my time is up?

(Yeah.)

Five minutes. An avenue of time. Would you open the window?

(You said something very { } to my way of thinking...)

[tape interruption]

...sane, and of a historical group in which the living would feel that they are within a stream of time that's longer and powerful than their own lifetime, because it is more extended, that it is already tested, and that they can impose on the third generation. It can only be done if it is -- there is a war -- has -- was a way of unifying two generations, one dead and one living. And therefore all ancient tribes on -- are founded on the ritual of burial, of funerals; on the ritual of saying that the dead man is not totally dead. When the New Testament says

that Jesus gave back His spirit to His father, He reversed the order of the old tribes, which tried to catch the spirit of the dead man -- dying man into their own nostrils and mouths via his blessing, and therefore said, "He is not dead." All ancient tribes -- grabbed a part of the divinity, gentlemen, of all life by saying that death can be overcome.

The history, gentlemen, and the historical part of man's groups is a fight against death. It's a victory over death. In a tribe, it's a very partial victory. It is -- the fact that the -- the survivors declare that the dead man's spirit shall be carried on. You have this in -- in -- "John Brown's Body," you see, that his soul is marching on. That's not a joke, gentlemen. But as you know, when he died--where was he? Where was he killed?

(Harpers Ferry.)

Wie?

(Harpers Ferry.)

Harpers Ferry--the Civil War broke out. He -- he was right. And he didn't die in vain. And by his death, he inflamed the spirit of his own soul to such an extent that it became the soul of the armies of the North. You must take this a little more serious than you do. That's not just sentimentality. It's simply a fact. One man's spirit can inspire a whole army. It usually is. You would be surprised if I would go through history and show you how the many depend on the few, and how one man's spirit is enough to ruin, or to wake up a nation. That's why it is very important who is president, for example.

It is not just a pl- -- game, gentlemen, politics. It's a question of your own going to sleep, or your own being kept awake. If your leader is sound asleep, woe to the country.

The -- therefore the institution by which a political group comes into existence is a funeral. Animals do not bury their dead. Quite the contrary. They run away from the moment of death. If you -- taken from the herd. The others leave it alone. It's forgotten. The...

[tape interruption]

...Homer, it is nearly impossible for most people to say goodbye to their beloved when they really come to die. We have abolished death in this wonderful community of -- of -- of gadgets. And we have put the people, for the last six weeks of their -- of their life under -- in a coma of -- of anesthesias -- anesthetics.

And we don't tell them that they are going -- bound to die now, that it is time for them to get ready. And therefore we -- you have the hardest time, I think, of any generation in the world to understand the beginnings of human history. And that is why it's worthwhile telling you, gentlemen. Because without this know- -- your knowing it, you will not understand that the first glue, the first binding power of history was, of course, a relation between the dead and the living. Because without a relation between the dead and the living, nothing has to be continued. You can begin from scratch. And if nothing can be continued, there can be no history. Then your children are perfectly authorized to leave you alone, and to run away from you, and to put you into a -- old-ages home, and forget about you. All -- ev- -- all the things that are going on under our noses at this time. It's exactly what it is. We are back to animal nature to a large extent, as -- as long as the dead cannot speak to the living, gentlemen.

What is a funeral? A funeral is a recorded death. But it is more, gentlemen. A -- funeral is not only the recorded death, but the way of re-recording the death in perpetuity. Hence the totem pole. The totem pole saves the one expression of the -- vitality of the dead man, even if the -- the tribe has to migrate. Even if the grave cannot be held in evidence, the totem pole moves on, and they are carved--seven eyes on a complete totem pole--of the seven generations that have gone on before, that are 150 years. Generations are very short in those early days -- 20 to 25 years, only. And at least for 150 years, there is in evidence continuity. And man feels that by this one epoch which he holds in evidence, he is in a line which gives him direction. And nothing a man craves more than direction or orientation.

And perhaps you take down this perhaps strange vocabulary from the very beginning: revelation equals orientation. Orientation is only possible over more than one generation in time. You can only know what the meaning of your doings is, if you can see whether you make a corner in the road, and turn -- a turn in the road, or whether you go on -- straight, or whether you turn against your ancestors. You have, therefore, in order to know where you are, to know part of the road that has been traveled. And that is called "revelation," gentlemen. And you cannot live without drawing, in some form, the veil from your eyes, the shroud from your eyes which comes from your natural limitation to your own life. If you only see to your own time, gentlemen--since your 12 -- you only wake up at 15, by and large, or 14--then you would never understand the direction of your road. You couldn't, because it just begins to light up out of the sauce -- fog, when you're 14, when you come to -- have a mind of your own. And then you would run and run, and at 17, it would collapse, and it would have led nowhere, except to your own grave.

But in the tribe, gentlemen, the grave is made the beginning. The grave is the moment of a vow. And the first speech, that which makes languages possible,

gentlemen, is not that speech which you call "speech"--the everyday speech--but a speech that consists of vows, and oaths, and pledges, and cries. The distribution of language in the o- -- ancient tribe is obviously that the women do the wailing, and the shouting, and the crying to emphasize the emotional bias, the importance of the event, and that the men formulate the vow, and the name which -- out of this emotional bias must now be held onto and carried into the future.

I'm now of course imagining this, in order to be- -- become quite plain, that we can -- think that the first step into speech was the shout of the people bereft of their leader in the herd -- take a -- just a -- the leading lion, or the leading bear, or the leading horse, even today, in a horse of animals. The great freedom of man was in the fact that they could turn to the loss of the leader and declare that it shouldn't have happened. The abolition of death -- the fight against death is the content of any historical action. Can you see this? "I deny that this man is dead. I continue his work." At that moment, history is born. Because -- nature cannot do this, because nature does not speak. And history is explicit, gentlemen--will you take this very seriously--history is the step from merely accidental life to a deliberate and explicit selection of a fact and say, "This I will fight. I shall not recognize you, death, as a destroyer of my -- of my first leader. We will continue his leadership."

Therefore the vow taken at the funeral is the cradle of human speech. And so we come to the very important conclusion, gentlemen: that the first human speech is emphatic. Emphasis means to make shine, to make outstanding. Perhaps the best translation of "emphatic" is "to make it conspicuous." And therefore, the great thing in history is that we -- human beings, quite different from the animals, are led to make certain events so conspicuous that they cannot be forgotten, that they stand out. That's the meaning of "emphatic." And therefore I withdraw my term "explicit" and want to replace it by the better term, "emphatic," because the first funeral is already a great show. It's a pyre where the hero is burned, and the flames then, you see, kindle the passion in the hearts of the followers. Or he's carried for miles when -- while they are migrating, with them. Or he is embalmed. There are any number of rituals to find ways of making death conspicuous so that it can be overcome, that it -- does not remain an accident in a corner. You -- some of you who have -- may have read the New Testament, in which it is said of the death of Jesus, "This has not happened in a corner." That's a -- seems to be a very -- to us a very impertinent remark, but it is very important, gentlemen, that the events which make history cannot be left alone, as -- happening in a corner. You must transform the accident of debeath -- death into a show, into a conspicuous event, into am emphatic event, and you must speak about it. And there -- therefore you have to get hot on the -- in -- under the collar.

And I cannot tell you often enough--because you don't believe it--to you, all normal speech is half-tone and -- so that nobody else can understand you. You speak as -- with a -- such a low voice, and you think that's very refined. And never show any emotion, and "Don't get excited." Now -- "Don't be carried away." Now the only problem the ancients had, gentlemen, when they created speech, was: how to get carried away. There was no doubt that they couldn't achieve anything unless they were carried away.

This is very -- important, gentlemen, because all ancient religions, as you know, have this Dionysiac- -- -nysian rites. They have this -- excesses. They have the wailing, and the shouting, and the burning, and the wounding. They have in initiation all the cruelties. They send their boys into the bush before they can utter the name of the hero of their tribe, of the dead man, so that they have to fast, and they have to --. Well, the simplest expression, gentlemen, of the suffering, which -- speech produces when it is -- while it was created is the tattoo. What is a tattoo, gentlemen? The tattoo is an outcry, petrified, in your skin. The first language of the -- also created its first writing. But we don't call it writing. We call it unfortunately "tattoo," although it was -- the very word w-r-i-t-e, which means literally "scratch," you see. And we could call therefore the tattoo also "to write," because it doesn't mean write with ink or pencil. Originally it means to make a scar. In German, "ritzen." And the first tattoo means that man becomes the slave of this first outcry, the funeral, for the rest of his life. A real tattoo in a tribe marks a man as the son of the tribal ancestor forever. And so the whole man is put under the power of the first name he ever utters. And that is a real power in his life.

So forget all your little words -- weasel-words, which you call "language," gentlemen. When language was created, it had the power of a vow for a lifetime. Gen- -- when a monk today says that he will enter the monastery of St. Benedict or St. Thomas, then he speaks with the same emphasis--emphatically, you see--as every man spoke when he was invited to be at the funeral or at the religious dances which every year repeated the funeral. All the -- the ritual of the tribe, gentlemen, goes around the funeral and its repetitions. The first festival of the tribe is therefore the dance, in which the medicine man represents the dead man, and the others represent the living. And the dead man speaks through the mask of the medicine man to the living. The presence of two generations is needed before you have any political group. This you do not know. To you, politics are a -- kind of a society of friends.

The -- you know, here in this country, the -- the Quakers are hard-put with their Society of Friends, because they have the problem of the born Quakers' children. That's the second generation. And they hush it up, so to speak. Fictitiously, they think it's just a society of the living. Of course, it isn't. You --

you inherit your Quakerism, just as you inherit all good things. But they won't have it, because in this country, they -- the prevailing wind is that everything is done by the living generation. And they never ask the serious question: how come that so -- in so many families Quakerism is hereditary? Which means, you see, that a certain power, a certain vow has its effect on many generations to come. It's the difference between the Church and the sect, which in this country has been decided in favor of the sect. But it hasn't solved the problem: why we still adore the Founding Fathers of this country, although 7- -- how many years have now passed? 190 years have passed away, and you are at no way capable of refounding the United States, my dear people. You cannot dismiss the last 190 years. You are in for good.

Your fiction, your mind says that the state is based on a contract. And that's the -- it's the free ascent of the living that found a state. The truth is, gentlemen, that the dead people bind the living by their authority. And I'm wearing at this moment here the mask of a teacher. What is a teacher? I'm the heir of the medicine man. I represent the people who are no longer alive. And I have to remind you of the fact that they have done good things. That's the whole purpose of this course, is it not?

Now I don't wear a mask, but I have an office. And of course, my title as teacher is already such an office of representing that which is already known -- which has been known before you, you see. So don't say that in a college, the dead are not present. When you read Shakespeare, and when you read Dante, and when you read Homer, who are they? Aren't these the people who must not die, and -- but have died physically?

I know very well that I have to -- had to start with the most difficult thing. You do not believe in your heart of heart that the dead are more alive than you. If you have lived as long as I, you will come to know the fact that the living appear to you like ghosts who haven't yet drunk blood. You have not yet entered life. You only seem to -- live, and you are afraid of entering life. But the best men of -- whom I have known in my generation, who have lived, they seem to be dead. They are not dead. They are much less dead than you are. You have not yet come to life. But they have proved that they have fully entered life and that they have left something behind, which I have to try to carry on. And anybody who wants to live, because they have done the necessary thing.

A -- a medicine man is a man, gentlemen, who allows the dead man to speak through him. So in the medicine man, you have the first servant of the word, of the spirit. In the New Testament, the Apostles are called the "servants of the word." But that's the -- original meaning of the medicine man. When a medicine man puts on his mask--and you know, in every tribe there are these

very wonderful masks, marvelous masks--he does not speak, but he serves as the actor, as the agent--as -- as we have on the stage, still--for somebody else. Gentlemen, the modern actor in a play is the last heir of the medicine man. We would have no plays if the medicine man had not shown in all seriousness that we need the representation, you see, of former generations on the stage.

You take this all so lightly, gentlemen. But anybody who has taken Philosophy 9 knows that every play which we play today is the succession of serious business in older days. And just as football is the imitation of war, and hunting is the -- sequence -- the succession, you see, of the serious business of surviving in the old days, so in the same sense of course, play-acting, and the fraternity plays, and Shakespeare are the play forms of the very serious business of bringing the dead back into life. That's why these masks took all the finances, all the work, and all the consideration in antiquity--and today still--in the tribe, every energy is concentrated on making the most beautiful mask.

Who has seen such masks? Please, would you -- show of hands? Who has seen such masks? Not everybody? Have you really never seen one? Sir, you. How can you escape it? They are shown everywhere. Pictures, at least. Have you never seen a picture of a mask?

(I don't recall, no.)

Did you go to a high school?

(Yes.)

Which high school was this?

(Well, I went to prep school.)

Who's the -- what's the name?

(Roxbury Latin.)

Wie?

(Roxbury Latin.)

I'll write to this man. It's a scandal. Do you really pretend that this is true, or were you just with scarlet fever in bed? What?

(It's quite true.)

Have you never -- it's the Roxbury Latin, isn't it? Did you learn Latin?

(Yes.)

Well, even Scipio was buried with such a famous persona mask -- personal mask. The great Romans, on the Via Appia -- who has been to Rome? Well, don't you remember the Via Appia, with the monuments there, of the Romans? Well, they were their masks on the tomb. It was terribly important.

The word "person," gentlemen, is the Latin name for the mask of the medicine man through which we speak. A man is a person when he performs a -- an office in the community. You are not persons by birth, gentlemen. Nobody is by nature a person. But when you assume the importance of a spiritual value, of a spiritual power in the community, you become a person. And I think, even in Roxbury Latin, they can't deny this.

I cannot understand how a man liv- -- grows up today without seeing some mask, of the -- an ancient tribesman. Is- -- aren't you surprised, too? Isn't it shown everywhere? It is very important--what's your name, please?

(Dodge.)

--Mr. Dodge, that you should know this, because you will never have a relation -- a natural relation to these primitive -- so-called primitive men of the tribal order if you do not recognize that their masks are as beautiful as the Parthenon in Athens, or as the Picassos of today, or the Beethoven symphony. All the wit, energy, and genius that mankind possesses in any generation always goes into the art of their ti- -- own time, of course. Now if you want to recognize the greatness of an Indonesian tribe, you must look at their dancing masks at Bal- -- on Bali an- -- for example. They are insuperable. You cannot, as modern men, ever improve on the beauty of these masks. That's why it is not an oddity if I ask you to look at these masks, Sir. You have to go to -- now to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and look up under "Mask." They have some good pictures. Will you?

(Here in the museum, they have them.)

Ja?

(In the Dartmouth museum.)

{ } only important, gentlemen, to free you from the prejudice that the primitive man had no genius, and had no art, and had no sense of beauty. The --

masks of the primitive man are insuperable. That is, they are the best in its -- of its kind -- their kind. And there is nothing to -- to excel them by our own imitation.

There is in every era, gentlemen, something where man shows his faith, and his enthusiasm, and his divinity. And if you do not recognize the divinity of the tribesmen today in their masks, you can enter in -- into no natural relation to these people. You must know where they put their emphasis. I told you, "emphasis" means "to make visible," to make conspicuous, you see. And the spirit and the genius of a tribesman becomes conspicuous, or emphatic, or visible when you see their art. But you must know where to look for their art. You can't look for their art in their dress. You can't look for their art in their hats. You see, in their -- the -- that wasn't their interest. They wanted to -- to be -- keep moving. But they -- you'll see their art in their tattoos, and you'll see their art in their masks. And that's very great.

So my thesis is, gentlemen: that the first layer of life, the layer in which speech was created, had all the greatness of any time. And that explains why even we great people could even spring from these ancestors. If they hadn't been already completely human, and complete men, how come that we sit here? They produced us, gentlemen. Never think that the Stone Age Indians are not our own ancestors. And they showed their completeness in the fact that they created great religion, great art, and great speech. And we still speak their language. And if we are human at all, we still follow their ritual of funerals to a certain extent. We still remember our dead. Where we don't, we have fallen from grace. We are less than they. And you must first stoop down a little bit from your certainty that these people are primitive. Perhaps you are primitive. I think the barbarism at the end of an era is much more horrid, because you cannot be saved. You have fallen from grace. You could have inherited the earth, and you haven't accepted it. The people who created this earth in this order, gentlemen, they have done their part. They're already tested by time. We aren't, yet. We all can miss the bus, much more easily than these boys. These people have reached us. And we can speak English only because the old {Angla} was a -- were a tribe who spoke. And who made them speak? That they recognized each other by their names.

Every language, gentlemen, must at first consist of family names. That is the -- the center of any tribal language, that you can name father, mother, son, and daughter. That you can say in which relation this man stands to his ancestor--who is dead--to the dead man, so that you can give him his place accordingly in the community. The language of the first layer, so to speak, of the humanity, is based on being able to distribute the places in the community, in the group, by naming them. Around the name of the dead man who was shouted at the funeral as the great carpet -- as the great--how you -- "canopy," I think would be the right word, isn't it? or

"umbrella"--over everybody else, you see. Everybody could find his niche if he could be named in relation to the tribal hero. That's in the ti- -- you read the Old Testament on this, the time of the patriarchs. The relation to Abraham, and Jacob, and Isaac is everything. That is, around what the people can group. And you have to show what relation you have to the dead man in order to be received into the tribe.

The old tribe then was a family order. The relationship to the old man created all the necessary names. It is an American, gentlemen, Mr. Morgan, who in 1870 wrote his famous investigation on the importance of family -- the names of the -- relations in the family for all the origins of the -- humanity. It's a very proud paper, and a very fine paper, and was quite original, and American. The Europeans had never--in their drunkenness with Greece and Rome, and these late civilizations--never stooped to conquer the -- the darkness, obscurity of the beginnings of the human race. And Morgan saw very simply that you could not speak anything else, before you had not grouped people and could say to each other, "My brother, my sister, my mother, my father."

The old tribes, gentlemen, had no pronouns. They had only nouns. That is, "it," and "he," and "she," and "we," these are very late names. They are absolutely unnecessary for the {beginning} of speech. What is important is that we know how to call each other, with their real name. Pronoun is a word used instead of a name. Noun is a word -- the name used for this man, or this woman, or this child. And that is indispensable if you want to speak at all.

To end with a little example to show you how -- intricate and how intriguing these first investigations are. There is, in {Paplagonia}, in -- in the--how is it called? this country -- {del Fuoco}, I mean. You call it {Fire Landers}, in South America.

(Tierra del Fuego.)

Wie?

(Tierra --)

That's it. Tierra del Fuego. Thank you. There is a -- a tribe, very shrunk now, who speaks an Australian language, with the exception of the pronouns. That is, they must have left Australia--we don't know how they came over--at a time when the Australians had not yet created pronouns. You can have a language without these little words, these weasel-words: "I," "you," and "it." But you cannot have a language without names. And this is a nice example of the intricacies of the layers of created language. It isn't the first thing to speak of "I" and "we." But it is the first thing to call the hero with his name--and that's why he is

called the name-giving hero--and to organize a tribe around the authority of the dead man. What is a tribe, gentlemen? The will to continue the order of life which has existed in a former generation. And that has to be enacted time and again. And the whole life of a tribe is the re-enactment of the funeral in which the vow was taken to disregard death.

You have a tribe only as long as this respect for this ritual, you see, is present. Any tribe must decay where there is not this re-enactment of the great gluing-together, the great hinge between the living and the dead. And this I shall build in the next meeting, gentlemen; I shall explain to you once more the meaning of -- the whole content of the tribal life, is: the dead speak to the living. Speech in the first instance, gentlemen, is not what you call "speech": speech of one generation among themselves. There is no language if it isn't worth to hand it over to your children. The rest is abracadabra.

Now why do you hand English over to your children? Because you have inherited it. It's the only reason which really forces you to do it. You cannot give it up. And therefore, tradition of language, gentlemen, is essentially the recognition that the dead speak us into life. In the tribe, the relation of death and life is reversed for the first time. All history consists in a victory over death. In a tribe, the dead speak to the living, because otherwise, the living would have nothing to say. You assume that the living talk, talk, talk. But the -- less you listen to what's -- comes over the television set, the better it is.