Transcript

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

...instead of saying "Good morning," you say, "Hi." Instead of saying, "Father," you say, "Daddy." Instead of saying, "President of the United States," you say, "Ike." That is, everywhere you -- speak informally. Informality does not exist without formality. Informality is children's imitation of formality. You are -- everyone in this country tries to be informal. And therefore, he is not aware of the fact that there can be societies, gentlemen, who live by mere formality. But there cannot be societies who live by mere informality. You believe the opposite. But there have been, and there are still in the world people where the children and the women do not speak. Because that's not necessary for the existence of the group. It is only necessary that the warriors of the tribe, the lawyers, the priests, speak. It is not necessary that -- I -- the young animal speaks before he's initiated.

So gentlemen, we come to the statement which is the corollary of all -- everything I have told you: the difficulty of your relation to speech is that you think you have this as a natural gift, whereas it is a concession on the part of the adult that even children--although they destroy language--are allowed to use it in a playlike fashion. You are all -- preparing to speak, really, and you are talking. And you mistake talk as the original layer of speech, which it isn't. Gentlemen -- once more, there have been wide -- circles of the -- of the peoples of this earth in which the women and the children do not speak. In the presence, lovers do not have to speak. They can kiss, they can embrace, they can feed. A mother doesn't have to speak to her child. She can murmur, she can pat, she can -- like any animal with her young. They speak, but they don't speak articulatedly.

What we call language, gentlemen, has a -- quite another purpose. Every -- grammatical form in your English language, gentlemen, has a purpose to enable people who live at different times to view the same event. You can say that 10 years from now, you will be married and have a family. And your children can say 30 years later, that 20 years ago, they married. And they can say it with the same words. And therefore, these children and these parents speak around the same event, one from before, and one from afterwards. The same is true when the dead speak to the living. The dead man has left his law behind: how he ran the tribe, how he ran the group. Just take any -- any ringleader in the animal kingdom. The young remember, and see the same now in reverse, so that they expiate some deviation from the right -- path of righteousness, as we just have heard in the report.

Language is invented, gentlemen, to enable long-distant times and longdistant spaces to view one and the same ewent -- event. One from before, and

one from afterward. You have heard that there is a grammatical form: "I have said." And there is another grammatical form: "I shall say." And there is another -- grammatical form: "I am saying." Gentlemen, for children, that's all unnecessary. And so they all, of course, as you know, destroy grammar. If you look at America, that's a country with a -- language there -- English already without a grammar. It's just bricks. Nouns and verbs are the same, you see. You cannot distinguish. If you write three -- these three-letter words, whether they are used to -- use -- as used -- to be used as nouns or as verbs. That's quite impossible in original language. In original language the word must convey to you -- is the event before you? Is it an act? Is it a thing? Is it outside you? Is it within the group? Is it? Will it be? Will it have to be preserved?

Gentlemen, language is future and past, made present. That's what it is. That's why the wonder of language is not in the sentence, "I love you," but in the wonder that you can say, "Hearken Israel," and that the people can say, "We have hearkened." That there is a response, over centuries, over thousands of years, that today still the Jews can say that they have hearkened to Israel -- to the call of their God.

The wonder of -- language is never in any one sentence, gentlemen. That the ma- -- the wonder of marriage is only in the flow of speech through the ages. The -- I just ran into a little monograph on the Yiddish language, the Jewish language in -- in Europe and the Alsace. And they brought out there that the women there used different terms--older terms, as a matter of fact, of the 15thcentury German--for saying the same thing which the learned Jews who went to the synagogue, the men who represent the living creed today, use.

So -- you find everywhere, in ev- -- any society still traces that women's language and men's language is dis- -- different. We hide this, because we think it's expert language. When we speak of specialists' language, when a lawyer speaks, or a minister, you see. They aren't experts or specialists, but they have the full flavor of the language. And the cocktail-party language is just abbreviated language, and -- and curtailed language.

Any word you use, gentlemen, in your daily life, in this campus, is halfbaked, is an -- whittling away from real language. Now that's very difficult for you to understand for one reason, gentlemen: because you have grown up with this incredible heresy that babies -- gradually invent to speak. That they first say, "Mau," and then they say "Bau," and then they finally say, "Bau-bau." That's of course nonsense, gentlemen. The love of the living for the dead has created language, and still creates it. And they are grownups who can -- feel death. Children do not. They do not complain. They cannot even mourn.

So you live in a -- at an age where you are more removed than any one generation. Since you do -- no longer pray, you no longer have the words of the Bible, or the vows in your mouth, or the words of the law--that's all foreign to you. You are perfectly satisfied with the slang that comes over the broadcasting system. And that is third- -- fourth-degree language. It has nothing to do with real speech. And so you live in this illusion that what you -- say is speech, gentlemen, is language. It is the shadow of the light. It has no power. It carries no conviction. It is absolutely noncommittal. You can with- -- take back everything you say, and just say, "I spoke through my hat." You're never taken at your word, and therefore you don't know what language is. I must warn you: this is the real difficulty of this course, gentlemen, that I'm trying to bring back the times when these things meant something. They don't mean anything in your life.

We now pass on to the second chapter, gentlemen. We go from the realm of the ancestors and the law between people, between the dead and the living, and the unborn--we go to quite another realm. The tribe has as his home the universe, he is roaming. And we may say that already 8000 B.C., the earth probably--most parts of the earth, perhaps; not America--was filled with people. And their migrations continue to go on.

And when you look at the way the -- the American continent must -- seems to have been peopled by the way across the Bering Strait, you cannot have enough of an impression of the majesty of this stream of migration possible through the ancestral domination of the group. All these people speak a language which obviously is several thousand years old. So you can imagine what it means to keep alive a language in such circumstances. It means the authority of the medicine man, of the -- of the speaker through the mask. It means the beauty and the sublimity of this impression that through the mask, the spirit moves. I -- if I have one criticism, {Richard}, in your paper, it is this, that you spoke of the divine in the tribe, without this qualification that this was the only way in which the divine could move people, that they kept alive this -- this spring of ancestry, you see, in their lives. So -- I have to be so careful, because the word "divine" to most of you means nothing; use it for a perfume, or you use it for -- for ginger ale, even for Coca-Cola, I suppose.

And therefore, we have to back to first things. I call "divine," gentlemen--as I told you before--commanding spirits, commanding voices that do not care for your own private whims, but to which you bow, because they are the right voices, and you know it. Everybody has such voices. I mean, the -- the atheist believes in truth. That's his god. There is no atheist who can speak. The logical atheist is -- is mute and deaf. Anybody who speaks with the intent of being listened to, must assume that other people believe in truth. The atheist

always believes that other believe that he is God. Because that's a part of the divine which is in every man, that he can speak the truth. So if the atheist proves to you that there is no God--if he should care to prove it, you see--he believes that there is a power higher than his personal idiocy, or weakness, or cleverness, too. Where there is truth, there is belief in divi- -- divinity.

Now the only way in which the truth in the tribe is permitted to exist is through the mask of the medicine man, and his enthusiasm. His -- enthusiasm means to have God in oneself. And so the enthusiasm of the dancing dervish, or the dancing medicine man of these--shamans, as they are called in Siberia, many names for this -- such a man--is that he keeps alive the integrity of speech through the ages. And if you go today to Africa, or to South America, you see that these migrating tribes, wherever they roam, have become indifferent to the influences of their environment in this respect, that their spirits are going on through time.

We come now to the opposite solution, gentlemen, in the next ages, in the age in which the big empires were built. Babylon, Egypt, China, the Aztecs, the Incas. All the -- what we call an "empire," is based on one great renunciation of the human race, which for you would be quite untenable, and unmanageable: the renunciation to migrate. You cannot have in antiquity empires without a population that -- ceases to be tribal, and that at one time is lured, or is convinced, or is persuaded, or is forced to give up migration. Because, gentlemen, an empire is based on settlement. And settlement, like the word "residence," like the word "throne," like the word "to sit," like any seat of empire, is of course based on locality. The pope is in Rome, and cannot be -- anywhere else, successfully. When he went to Avignon, it was the Babylonian captivity of the Church. In the Rop- -- Roman pope, you have a last echo -- of the great age in which part of mankind left the ranks of nomadic tribes, and decided to live otherwise, and achieved thereby a totally new approach to life. What is the difference, gentlemen, between a man who says, "My -- world is the universe, is the earth," and the other who says, "I am a dweller of the Nile"--or of the Mississippi, of the Amaz“nas--"for good. My grandpar- -- -children still will be found living on the river Nile."

To this day, Egyptians do not migrate. They are perhaps the most petrified, most venerable group. And today they are burning up. The whole problem of Nasser is, of course, the end -- final end of the holy Nile water in Egypt. Once the -- new dam is built, there will be nothing left of the old order of life of Egypt, which you still can today realize, because it is based on a local problem, on the inundation of the -- of the whole valley of the Nile every year by the river Nile. That is Egypt. China is the inundation by two rivers, by the Yellow and the Green. And so is -- so is the Babylonian civilization, as you well know, based of

the floods of the Euphrates and Tigris.

So gentlemen, there are two things in the making, at the very moment that a group of people gets tired and says, "Let us build cities," "Let us build huts." You call it "urbanization." The ancients thought that a village already was pretty urban, compared to the tents of the migratory tribes. The -- at that time, the word -- would find that the word "village," and "peasantry," was already on the side of urbanization, of citification, of civilization--all the same words, you see. "Civilization" which you use, you see, for the unspeakable beauties of Broadway, has to do with "city," obv- -- as you can see. And primitive man of whom -- we have spoken, wou- -- could not be civilized. He is primitive because he is not embarked on the venture of building skyscrapers, or anything permanent. The only thing permanent in a tribe is his speech, are the names, is the totem pole. There is nothing else permanent. The altar can be carried on, you see. The mound of the grave cannot be carried on; so they have the totem pole. The dancing-ground can be meted out everywhere in the woods, and the warpath into the jungle has to be also found every -- each time afresh, wherever the occasion arises.

So gentlemen, a tribesman carries his environment with him. The new order, the empires, the state-builders of old don't carry their residences with them, or their graves. Quite the contrary. They draw a line and cut out a segment of the universe and call it a temple. A temple. They are temple-builders. That would be the best word. The difference between a nomadic tribe, gentlemen, and a resident civilization is the temple. What is a temple? The word has to do with "contempt," which is sniding, cutting. "Contempt" means to cut out -- I mean, to cut down. A templum is something cut out. But it is not cut out arbitrarily, gentlemen. Any of these great countries is cut out, out of the material of Heaven and earth. A templum is a part of the heavens, with certain constellations in it--like the -- like the Northern Star, or the sun and the moon--observed, and then projected down to earth.

So gentlemen, the people to whom we now turn are of quite a different character, as the Navajo Indians or the Sioux. They do not migrate, because they -- have a fixation. They have a fixation to Heaven and earth. For a tribesman, Heaven and earth play no part in their important law or lore. It is very remarkable that the primitive migrating man doesn't very much look up. Of course, he observes the -- the moon. But only a full moon, and in such quick term, that it makes no difference. Of course, he feels warm in summer and cold in winter; he knows what he has to do. But even the calendar of primitive man was only a -- a semestrial calendar. May 1st and November 1st were perhaps the great, important changes in a nomad's life. These are the two oldest holidays we have. The 1st of May, the day when you go out into the -- and look for the -- the -- the spir-

its outdoors; and in cold climate, on November 1st, when you invite these spirits to dwell with you in your huts, because you have to play -- go into hibernation and into winter quarters. November 1st and November 2nd, and May 1st, Labor Day, are the two oldest--perhaps--tribal festivals of humanity. And you see they do not reach beyond half a year. Because that would -- what we have in a calendar, the whole year, can only make sense in a -- in a -- the same place, when you have an observation point -- an observatory. And that's a temple.

A temple, gentlemen, fixes man's existence on this globe, and it fixes -- on a part of the globe. The earth was too small -- too big for any one group to have this fantastic idea at that time to organize the whole universe. That was too early.

So gentlemen, what we call an empire is a part of the universe, celestified, re- -- re- -- regarded as a mirror of the sky. That is the character of the son of Heaven in China, or of pharaoh in Egypt, that he is Heaven on earth. That's very literally true, gentlemen. So literally true that you really must think of a temple in these very plat- -- I mean, simple terms, that it is a quadrangle in the sky, observed, and carefully laid down on the earth with the idea that the earth is under celestial law, and that this place of the earth, therefore, is organized and privileged to bring order and peace to the people who dwell within its limits. It -- within what we call "precinct" today perhaps, comes near to giving you this feeling of an old Roman. If he lived within the walls of Rome, he was at peace with Jupiter, the god in the sky. And down below, Juno, Jupiter's wife, the good earth, you see, was wedded to the sky.

You have in all these -- these traditions of the empires--even you know this much--the relation of Heaven and earth as husband and wife. They must be married. But that has a very profound meaning, because it means that here is order, revealed. You can -- disarm, you can lay down your walking stick, and put your Ford car--these people were of course restless, just as you are. They roamed the whole earth, you see. You can cease to be restless.

What I want to convey at this moment is only this one thing, gentlemen: that the principle of settlement is a revolutionary principle. It is also disappearing among us today, because you feel that you must be roaming, that you must be free- -- fleet-footed, that you must be allowed to travel, to go around the globe. You have still in yourself this unrest--"Go west"--some remnants of this. But it is disappearing fast. And I want to bring out, gentlemen, the -- there is a contradictory way of life implied. If you now all will become Egyptians in these big corporations with this tremendous division of labor, this tremendous specialization, there is great danger that you get stuck.

And I think we have two ances- -- -estral lines to respect. One, the king-

doms which bring Heaven to earth, eben -- these old templar -- empires, by allowing every one of us an expert place in the universe, on earth, who give us our special task. And the other hand, the tribal no- -- nomad who allows every man to carry the whole spirit of the whole group: law, religion, poetry, and -- what -- ja, those are the three -- in himself. You cannot think of a more outstanding contrast than between a caste-man in -- in H- -- India. India is the last remnant of these old empires before our eyes, with the untouchables, you see; and the -- and the warrior caste, and the pre- -- Brahmin caste still living there. You know there are; there is a caste system to this day in India, which always makes me feel so good when I see the enthusiasm of Americans for India. Obviously Middletown is now going caste in this country, very quick. So admirable.

Beware of Hin- -- the Hindus, gentlemen. Their caste system is one of the most horrible things in the world today. And they still have it. I mean, they try to break it down, but it isn- -- hasn't been broken down.

What is a caste system, gentlemen? A caste system is the certainty that within a certain limited region, the various tasks of the various groups of men can be divided, can be separated. Division of labor is based on settlement. The tribesmen know of no division of labor except between the medicine man and the warriors. But that's a very small one. There is perhaps a medicine man, and his son and heir, to -- serving as a mask-bearer, as the person. The others are all complete people. Any warrior of the tribe can sing. Any warrior of the tribe can compose. Every warrior of the tribe can pass judgment. Every warrior of the tribe fights. Every warrior of the tribe prays. Every warrior of the tribe is married. As soon as you come to the new civil- -- order, civilization, gentlemen, you get eunuchs, you -- castrates, people who cannot marry because they have even left their virility -- lost their virility. You get priests, you get peasants, you get soldiers, you get -- therefore specialists. Egypt, gentlemen, is the first country of professional pride. You just read the Bible, and the Jews in -- in -- in -- Egypt are just -- used as bricklayers. There is no honor involved. They are not complete citizens of Egypt. But they do one thing. And others do other things.

Gentlemen, you go to the most poor -- poorest and primitive tribe: the glory of the tribe is that everybody is everything. And you go to the most elaborate civilization, and its pride is that nobody does the same, that everybody does something special. These, of course, are exaggerations. But as soon as you get specialization, as in this country, you hear the cry for hobbies go up. It's an attempt to leave the man, you see, still in his hobbies -- as a complete person, lest he become a specialist and therefore a member of a -- of a caste.

I grew up in a country when it was worth -- still the word was: once -- an academic person, always an academic person. Where you -- were never a jack-of-

all-trades, where everybody was so special that at 18, the whole life was, so to speak, already stigmatized. The school you had to -- gone to, and the profession you had professed, so to speak, you see, made for life. -- Germans are very professional men. They are highly trained, as you know, and very efficient in professionalism. But when you -- people -- hear people say that the Amer- -- the Germans are not democratic, the reason is that they are professionals. Professionalism is anti-democratic. And democracy is anti-professional.

You have to know this, gentlemen, because you are so naive that you think it depends on the will of man what we are. Democracy and professionalism, after all, are necessities. In certain regions, you have to have high skill and high standards of work. At this very moment, the man ceases to be an all-around priest, dancer, magician, warrior; and he becomes just a carpenter, or cabinetmaker. If you want to have a first-rate cabinet maker, he'd better not spoil his hands with -- with other activities. He can't be a stone mason at the same time or -- or a -- pave the road, because it would spoil his fingertips. Or take a piano player. They weren't even -- made to shoot during the war, in the army; they were made -- meant to entertain the others, because their poor fingers would suffer unless they were limited to this strange movement on the keyboard.

Specialization, gentlemen, and democracy in America, as you know, have never co-existed. Here was no specialization. Everybody was a jack-of-all-trades. Now you get specialization and out goes democracy. Because it makes for this lifetime distinction, you see, that a man is -- preferably does one thing all the time, instead of doing every day all the things that are needed.

I don't want to decide this at this moment, what is coming to us. It's a very difficult question, and very complicated. But I want to draw your attention to the fact that you are privileged among all the students of Dartmouth to live through an epoch in which you still can smell and remember both ways of life. The -- way of life in which nobody is a specialist, and everybody can do, so to speak, everything a little bit himself, and the other period now immediately breaking upon you, where everybody is a physicist, or a chemist, or something of these elaborate destroyers of the human race. And you have to work a lifetime to understand all these chemicals, or all these physical laws, and what-not. They're getting complic- -- more complicated every moment. And we first have to admit that these are two opposite ways of life. Then we can talk about the -- balancing them, perhaps, or using -- taking the good out of both of them.

The Egyptian way of life, gentlemen, is the first way of -- of the division of labor in classes, castes, professions, specialists. Expert knowledge is the great achievement of settled civilizations.

Why is that so, gentlemen? Because all these civilizations needed observations that lasted longer than a man's life. Because they had to observe the slowest movements in the universe, the movement of the stars. And in order to observe things that happen in the sky, gentlemen, you must sit down for more than a year -- or more than 10 years. Not one of you could be an astronomer from scratch, because you would be too restless. You wouldn't sittle and -- settle and leave to your grandchildren the completion of the tables of the stars. But don't you see that the first observations which taught men how often the sun had to rise before the sun would be exactly in the same field in Heaven--what I call the square, you see, this temple in the sky--before they could match this, they had to sit down and sit every night and be fed by other members of the community because at -- daytime they had to sleep. The stars are only out at night.

The first caste, gentlemen, is -- the first class created is the priestly caste. And the first priestly caste are the observers of the sky, the stargazers, as they are called in the Old Testament with some contempt. But gazing at that time of course was nothing contemptible. It was an enormous decision for any group of men to -- say to a man, "You are now on a Guggenheim fellowship for a lifetime. Your son will be again on one, and your grandson." It was the invention of salaried people. That doesn't exist in a tribe, gentlemen.

Can you see what that means to have even the idea for these roaming nomads, that it would be -- pay off to have one, stable place where -- over 100 years--we can prove this from the documents--over 100 years the same, hopeless task would go on just to observe what was going on in the sky, and to draw your conclusions.

Gentlemen, I always wonder that all our anthropologists always omit the most dramatic chapters in the human history. One of them is this breaking away from nomadism. The first man who decided that he--and his grandchildren still--should support a man who would have to sit on the same rooftop and always look at night, of course had immediately to invent not only one man who had to sit down, but many. He had to set aside a whole caste -- or group of priests. The first priest, gentlemen, in the strict sense of the word is a templedweller, a man who cannot leave the sanctuary, because he must observe the sky.

Fantastic situation. The poor man. And he was clad in -- in white, to be equal to sun, and moon, and stars. And he was taken out of the tremendous and horrid tradition of the tattoos of the tribe. He remained clean, because he was the servant of this untattooed, immaculate skylight. And therefore gentlemen, in Egypt we suddenly see people who have no tattoos, who have the same skin as we have, un- -- unblemished. And there is again, between a sailor--who is tat-

tooed to this day, gentlemen--and a city-dwelling lady, is a tremendous -- this one tremendous difference, that she doesn't wear tattoo. And the sailor still does, because he is still the last remnant of the migratory groups on this earth. As you know, sailors usually in their drunkenness get the most horrid tattoos somewhere on their body. They are the last genuine tribesmen, because to be tattooed is a -- an essential part of nomadism.

Why is that said, gentlemen? Because the nomad must be -- known anywhere, anyplace. And he has nothing else to show. That's his passport; it's his document. That's different with the settled priests, gentlemen. You look at any Egyptian document -- monument. What strikes me at least first is their absolute purity of skin. And ever since in priesthood, that immaculatedness has played a great part. The priest cannot be tattooed, because he is the mirror of the sky. And to him, observation of what's going on in the heaven is law, and he's freed from the law of the tribe. The revolution, gentlemen, of the settlement people, of the imperial people, you cannot too highly regard. It was a complete breaking-away with all the laws of the jungle.

To this day there live in Egypt 40,000 Bedouins. A Bedouin is a man who has not entered the magic of the temple-lore of Egypt. They still live around -- in the desert -- in the oases of the desert. And they have nothing to do with the native Egyptian. The fellahin, the people who till the earth in Egypt, and the Bedouin are still two peoples. And of course, I'm a superstitious man; I always believe that the testimonials the -- of the past are preserved necessarily. And that these Bedouins are a reminder of the fact that Egypt is an artificial creation against the tribesman of the desert, and the oasis, you see. That you still have people who do not share, who did not buy the ticket for the entrance into civilization. Just as there -- will be no Christians if there are no Jews, so there will not be Egyptians if there aren't still Bedouins -- if there are not -- also Bedouins.

You have to have this -- this transition visibly before you to understand that most Bedouins will perish before you can make them into city-dwellers. That's the reason why the -- we here in this country have such poor success with the red Indians. We haven't found the way of satisfying their real need. They cannot become city-dwellers, you see; then they perish. And we had no other standards. We thought that -- especially the Spaniards, when the Spaniards came, they took from their own civilization, and not from their church the way of life for the natives. And so they all withered on the stem and died.

We have to study them, gentlemen. By what cataclysm, or by what power was it possible to create people like the Incas, or the Aztecs, or the phar- -- pharaohs of India -- In- -- of Egypt, or the emperors of India, or the son of Heaven in China? By some mysterious trick of world history, gentlemen, the last empires

are only at this moment vanishing before your eyes. India, with its castes, China went in 1911, Egypt went in 2- -- in 395 of our era--perhaps you take down this date--when the great temple of Serapis in Alexandria was finally closed. That's the last moment of the imperial tradition of Egypt: 395 of our era.

So between -- 395 of our era and 1946, you may say--'47--when was India emancipated? Wie?

('47.)

'47--you have the end of all imper- -- purely imperial systems. We have still the -- the lion of Judah in Abyssinia, but it's neither a lion, nor Judah, nor an empire. Just a very poor country. Ethiopia is the last official empire in the world. And of course I feel highly sympathetic to them, because they invented the twoday weekend before we had it. You see, they also celebrate Sabbath and Sunday. They are half Jews and half Christians in their religion. And so they have two holidays, wonderfully enough. And we have it now, too.

So on the other hand, it's very important for you to notice, gentlemen, that the disappearance of the empires has taken such a long time. The most perfect empire went first, the Egyptian. And I'm going to concentrate--because I know it best; the Egyptians, there, can say that I know the language, and I know the monuments, and I know the people, and I know the literature, and I know the law. But from all I have been able to assess, all empires have followed the path of Egypt. Whether you talk of an Aztec, or an Inca, or a pharaoh, it makes very little difference. The principle is the same, gentlemen.

What time, please?

({ }.)

The principle is the same, gentlemen. And the great principle is that the heaviest burden shifts from men's -- the warriors in the tribe -- shoulders, shifts from his shoulders and is laid upon Heaven and earth. Man is emancipated in these localities which become the seat of temple-builders, and temple-dwellers, and stargazers. Half of the burden of transmission of acquired faculties, half of the burden of inheritance, is taken from the individual's shoulders, from his skin--he no longer has to bear a tattoo on his skin--because the law of life is now written into stone.

The temple is the new calligraphy, is the new constitution, is the new writing. And all these new civilizations therefore, gentlemen, do no longer have holy writ -- writ here scratched onto your skin, but they {writch} it on stone, and

they {writch} it on parchment, and they {writch} it on papyri. And what you call "writing" to you is the first invention. It is, in fact, a second invention. It replaces tattoo. Instead of the human body carrying the law of people, now the law of the land...

[tape interruption, end.]