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CHAPTER XI
TOO LATE AND TOO EARLY

The tragedy of Akhnaton’s life lies in what I am tempted to call the middle position which he occupies in our Age — i.e. in the Dark Age of the present Time-cycle, — and in our world of many races.

When he came into it, this world was nearly as old as it is to-day. (For what are thirty-three hundred years, compared with the aeons that the present Time-cycle had already lasted?) One still spoke, of course, of the hallowed and mysterious “days of Ra” or “days of the Gods” — the more and more distant Golden Age, when this earth had been in glorious harmony with the rest of the Cosmos and with itself. One will still speak of it, under some name or another, and with ever-increasing yearning, to the very last minute of this Time-cycle. But one had been, for millenniums and millenniums, out of touch with it, and it had become more and more mysterious. Even the Second great Age, or Silver Age, — into which decay had already set itself, in spite of the still clear and widespread knowledge of the original Nature-wisdom, — was so far away that one hardly distinguished it from the First. One had at the most, some faint idea of the last part of the Third Age — of the kingdoms before the Great Flood, — like now; and perhaps a more accurate idea of it and of them, then, through tradition alone, than now, through the painstaking piecing together of very scanty archaeological evidence. But one was, like now, already shut in the present Dark Age, just as in the court-yard of a prison. Like now, the Golden Age — “Age of Truth”; “Age of the Gods” — was not merely unreachable (even through Tradition) but unthinkable. The intuition even of such a man as Akhnaton could barely grasp but some of its glorious features, and stress them, while remaining impervious to others, and therefore incapable of evoking the real atmosphere of the divine epoch, in its organic integrity. Like now,

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the latter was already something towards which one tended, rather than something which one could in any way describe. And there was undoubtedly, at the bottom of the hearts of those who “tended” the most ardently towards it, (even in Akhnaton’s own heart, at times, at least) the secret feeling that all efforts were useless; that it was too late to try to restore it — the saddest and most depressing of all feelings; and the one corresponding to the sole fact of which we are sure, with regard to the long golden Dawn of our Time-cycle.

On the other hand, if the thirty-three centuries that separate Akhnaton from us are nothing compared with the many myriads of years that stand between both him and us and that far-gone First Age of innocence and glory, they still represent a long time if one takes, as one should, into account, the acceleration of the tempo of decay within the Age of Gloom.

This earth was surely no paradise, in Akhnaton’s days. Not only did it contain the “germs” of degeneracy, — these are inherent in life in Time as such, and became noticeable as soon as the Golden Age had come to an end, but it was already glaringly stamped with all the characteristics of the Dark Age: selfishness, wanton brutality, superstition, conceit, fear and hypocrisy. Its wars were (outwardly) about as horrible as ours, despite the fact that fewer people were killed and fewer buildings destroyed. And the everyday life of its men and women was about as dreary as that of the majority of our contemporaries. And yet, in spite of all, it was, decidedly, anything like as bad. Technical progress was not, for three thousand years more, to turn men’s heads and hearts to the new superstition of “happiness” through ever-increasing production. Nor were the dangerous — and false — idea of human equality and the dangerous illusion of liberty to appear, for a very long time. And things were still called by the right names, and facts — hard facts; consequences of the Fall that had started the obvious process of decay, thousands of years before, — were faced without fear or squeamishness, as things that have to be. However outwardly barbarous, wars were, innerly, far more honest than those of our world: they were not called “crusades” against this or that idea which

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people had, first, been systematically taught to hate,1 or wars “against war,” but were frankly carried out “to extend the limits” of a king’s realm, and to exploit the vanquished after plundering them, — to acquire living space, raw materials and cheap labour, as those of us who are not liars say to-day. But then, everybody said it. There were acts of cruelty in war. But people were neither ashamed of them nor indignant about them — did not call them “war crimes” when they happened to be “the enemy’s,” and conceal them, when they were their own doings. Kings caused, as a matter of fact, accounts of such actions of theirs to be written down upon stone, to last forever.2 There were, as now, enslaved people, — the spoils of war. And they worked in the victors’ mines, or rowed the victors’ ships. But many centuries were to pass before the victors’ priests were to bother their heads about their “souls” and offer them promises of hypothetical happiness in the hereafter, in compensation for their wretched lot on earth, — and many more centuries before the victors’ men of law were to give them lectures about an hypothetical “universal moral conscience,” the commands of which they should have obeyed, instead of ruthlessly fighting for their kings. They had no compensation for their lot, save the games of dice or the merry-making that occasionally relieved the monotony of daily tail, or — when they happened to be men of a higher type, — the pride of facing heroically a bitter, but unavoidable destiny.... Christianity as we know it — that anti-natural religion, based upon lies, — was not to appear for another one and a half millennium. And Jewish thought (for non-Jewish consumption) — the main factor of world disintegration from at least the third Century B.C. onwards, (if not from the fourth) — was yet totally inexistent.

And the perennial Paradise-dream, although it was just as unrealisable in practice as it is now, was purer, more sincere and more disinterested than all the pacifist utopias of later times. Its expression was not, like theirs, necessarily silly.


1 Like Eisenhower’s disgusting “Crusade to Europe.”
2 For instance. Amenhotep the Second’s account of his treatment of the seven Syrian Chiefs, and, later, the countless Assyrian written accounts.

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It could be great, and beautiful. It was great and beautiful when it was the product of the yearning, imagination and logic of such an artist as Akhnaton. The time had not yet come when wise men of his spiritual class would either, in despair, turn their backs to all manifestations in Time and choose the way of renunciation, or else, fight with the weapons of violence against the downward current of history — “against Time” — also in despair.

In other words, the latest Golden Age behind Akhnaton (and us) was by far too remote in time for any attempt to restore it not to be a complete failure. While, on the other hand, the world was not yet ripe — not yet corrupt enough; not yet visibly enough lost, — for a wise man, inspired with the dream of earthly Perfection, i.e. with the dream of harmony between earth and Cosmos, to feel himself “cornered” and, either to call every manifestation in Time a thing of sin and sorrow and to seek for Perfection in escape from the conditions of fallen life, through inner discipline, or else, to stick to this world as to his home, and to fight the increasing effects of Time in the advanced Dark Age, and establish a State “against Time,” forerunner, amidst this fallen mankind; of the next Golden Age, ahead of us and, a fortiori, of him. The impossible State “above Time — the State “Seat of Truth” — was still dreamable; dreamable for the last time perhaps in the history of this Dark Age; dreamable, but yet, as impossible, in practice, as it had been for millenniums, and as it is, a fortiori, to-day. Akhnaton’s unique position in history lies in the fact that he is the last Man “above Time” who had enough faith in the remaining goodness of men (in spite of the Fall) and enough courage-and enough political power — to try, in all earnest, to bring it into being.

* * *

The last, I say, for all the well-known men “above Time” who have, after him, proclaimed their uncompromising condemnation of violence — considering the latter incompatible with timeless Truth, — have renounced every temporal power for themselves, and every hope of a temporal order of perfection in this fallen world. They have given up the fallen world as past praying for, and rejected, before hand, as doomed

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utopias, all dreams of restoring the long destroyed harmony between Heaven and Earth, and turned to the individual “soul” — the only thing that one still can save, even up to the last day of the Dark Age. All the religions which they have preached: Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism and, finally, Christianity, (real Christianity as a purely personal faith and discipline, not as an organised Church), are paths leading the individual soul out of the sinking ship; out of this world, irredeemably unfaithful to its heavenly pattern: — out of the bondage of Time. And the “non-violence” common to all of them is not that implied in the lost Religion of the Sun-disk — not the radiant aura of an earthly paradise, but the tangible sign that the individual soul has given up its solidarity with this Time-ridden world, “its pomps and its vanities”; that it no longer accepts it as its real fatherland, and no longer is, therefore, bound to recognise the law of violence, which is its law.

Another characteristic of these religions of meekness and self-denial originated by men “above Time” is that they take absolutely no account of race either as a feature of the natural Order (as the Religion of the Disk did) or as a factor of salvation (as the oldest Way of life “against Time” which I can think of — Brahmanism, — did and still does.) And this is to be understood: they are, as I said, paths out of this fallen world; when one no longer belongs to this earth, the natural barriers within the realm of Life disappear no less than the artificial ones; the Sannyasi has no longer any caste. And it is written in the Book of books that “a sage” — i.e. a man who has freed himself from the ties of Time, — ”looks upon a learned Brahmin, a cow, an elephant, a dog, and even a man who eats dog’s flesh, in the same light,” or, according to another version, “sees in them the One Reality.”1

But Brahmanism is, as I said, essentially a way back to world harmony and perfection, taking into full account the conditions of each Age, and particularly those of the present Dark Age; a way of life “against Time.” The sannyasi, the man who has renounced the world completely, and risen “above Time,” has first lived in the world the life of the world: as


1 Bhagavad-Gita, V, verse 18.

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a young man struggling to be, even in thought, master of his senses, as a householder with responsibilities, as a dweller in retirement. At all these three classical stages,1 — as long as he has not yet renounced the world completely — a man’s caste, — his race2 — and the Age in which he lives, determine his duties and his rights. The higher his place within the natural hierarchy of races, the more exacting are his duties: what is allowed to a Sudra is forbidden to a Brahman or to a Kshattriya — a member of the Aryan castes. And also, the further one goes down the stream of Time, the stricter and the more exacting are the duties, and the greater the responsibilities of the higher race, destined to start a new world of perfection, here on earth, as soon as the Dark Age will — at last, — come to an end. Marriages that were, at former epochs, allowed to the members of the top-most castes, — the best in fact in a society dominated to this day by the ideal of blood-purity, — are, according to the Laws of Manu, no longer allowed within the Dark Age. And it is, — normally — less difficult for a man born as a Brahmin or a Kshattriya than for another, to become a real sage. Nay, he who has “fallen from yoga” — who has sincerely striven to attain the wisdom of Timelessness but who failed, — is finally “reborn in a pure and blessed house” and, “having recovered the characteristics of his former body, again laboureth for perfection.”3 Moreover, even the “sage” — as long at least as he has not severed all ties with human society, and become a mere meditative ascetic, — should act, and perform the duties of his race and position: fight and kill, in the name of a just cause, if he be of a race of warriors, “for there is nothing more welcome to a Kshattriya than righteous war.”4 But he should act with complete detachment “for duty’s sake alone.”5 In other words, in all Ages but that in which the manifested Universe, realm of Time, still is in tune with Eternity, the perfect Man “above Time” should also be the most active and the most thorough Man “against Time,” faithful to race and


1 The three ashrams: that of the brahmachari, of the grihastha, of the vanaprastha, which lead normally to the fourth: that of the sannyasi.
2 Varna, one of the usual Sanskrit names for caste means “colour.” The other name for it “jat” means race.
3 Bhagavad-Gita, VI, 41-43.
4 Bhagavad-Gita, II. 31.
5 Bhagavad-Gita, III, verses 19-25-30.

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State and duty in the natural sense of the word; faithful to this earth, in action, although living, in spirit, already in Eternity.

Akhnaton, in his youthful confidence in man and in his own power as a king, and the Founders of the great other-worldly religions of meekness and renunciation, in their thorough distrust of man taken en masse and of all mass-regulations and of all States, have both overlooked the fact that Life is irredeemably bound to the conditions of the Age through which it is passing. And both failed even to prepare the coming of the new Golden Age, save through the beauty of their own lives.

Akhnaton’s ideal theocratic State — ever-peaceful Kingdom of the Sun on earth, — was, and remains, an impossibility in our Dark Age. It was from the beginning stamped with the sign of failure. And the “un-Egyptian” character of the particular solar Wisdom upon which it was to be built, was, perhaps, the pretext, but certainly not the deeper cause, of its failure. (Other nations had accepted, or were to accept and keep, outwardly at least, for centuries, religions that were anything but in harmony with the genius of their people: one only has to think of the Aryan wisdom of the Vedas, held sacred to this day by millions of Dravidians, sons of the “Dasyus” of old, the overwhelming majority of the Hindu population; or to consider how Christianity was successfully forced upon the Germanic people of Northern Europe, much against their will; or how Buddhism peacefully conquered millions of followers among the yellow races — in particular, how it managed to become one of the leading creeds of warrior-like Japan, — or how Islam spread, also peacefully, to the Isle of Java.). The cause of the failure of the Religion of the Disk to survive, even in an imperfect form, is to be sought in its own inner contradictions: in the fact that it rests, as I said before, upon a thoroughly Indo-European conception of the Divine and yet, that its wisdom is not a wisdom “against Time,” a warrior-like wisdom as would befit the young race predestined to open the next Time-cycle, and to rule the world in the coming “days of Ra,” after the collapse of this Dark Age; not a wisdom “against Time” and also not a wisdom of despair. It is to be sought further still, perhaps, in the deepest

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contrasts of Akhnaton’s own heredity, as scion of the aristocracy of elder mankind (akin to Sumerians and to Mohenjo-Daro Indians), and, at the same time, of the rising Aryan race.

The Egyptians shared with the other noble races of the pre-Aryan world a profound love of peace. This may seem in fiat contradiction with the history of the Twelfth and specially of the Eighteenth Dynasty.1 Yet these recurring periods of conquest and of punitive expeditions in conquered land, even the hundred and fifty years of warfare that stretch (with one remarkable interruption)2 from Sequenen-Ra to Thotmose the Fourth, — partly to be understood as a reaction against the twice as long and bitterly hated domination of the Semitic conquerors of Egypt, the Hykso Kings, — were but mere episodes in the endless history of the “Two Lands.” The Egyptian, like the Indian of the Indus Valley Civilisation, only fought when he felt himself forced to, and then, never with the wholehearted ness of either the Semite or the Aryan.

Akhnaton inherited that deep-rooted reluctance to violence, which his immediate forefathers had discarded. He inherited it along with outstanding Aryan qualities: creative intelligence; will-power and consistency; thoroughness. These qualities enabled him to grasp the idea of the “Heat-and-Light-within-the-Sun-disk” and to worship it as the one Thing divine. And he made further use of them to forward, in the name of that amazingly impersonal God, a Golden Age ideal of peace within a beautiful world; of peace through the love of Life and Beauty — in other words, to answer, or try to answer, here and now, the immemorial yearning of the older races for the mysterious lost Paradise at the dawn of our Time-cycle.

There was. in him, too much of the softness of the very old and refined South for him to become a man “against Time” — a fighter, accepting the methods of this Dark Age and working, with their help, in view of the next Golden Age. And the Dark Age was, in his days, not quite advanced enough for escape out of the conditions of life in Time altogether, to have


1 See the great inscription of Senusret the Third (sixteenth year of his reign) at Semneh, thirty miles above the Second Cataract of the Nile. Also Thotmose the Third’s hymn of victory at Karnak.
2 The peaceful reign of Queen Hatshepsut.

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become, for an uncompromising peace-lover and lover the Life, gifted with unbending logic and will-power, the only thinkable course.

* * *

Thus, myriads of years after the latest Golden Age, the hazy vision of which was the pattern of his impossible theocracy, and centuries before the redeeming crash that will put an end to this present Age of Gloom, Akhnaton, half-Egyptian, half-Aryan, — last heir, in direct line, of the Southern royal house of Thebes, and heir of the kings of Mitanni, — stands alone, as a pillar of light, at a great turning point in the downward stream of Tine that nothing can hold back. He is the last man, at least the last great king and teacher, “above Time,” faithful to this sunlit world, like the earliest “sons of Ra,” or the “rajrishis” of most ancient India. After him, no peaceful divine rule on earth is even dreamable. (And he came already thousands of years too late for his solar theocracy to have been anything more than a dream). After him, at least in the Western half of what is now known as the old continent — from Europe to India, — the relatively peaceful non-Semitic Southern peoples were, gradually, to play a less and less active part in world history. The fair and vigourous Aryan race which, in its far-away (Northern home, had steadily clung to the perennial cult of Light and Life in its purest form, was to continue pushing southwards and eastwards, entering in contact with other cultures and, everywhere or nearly everywhere, while leaving the stamp of its creative genius upon conquered populations, forgetting something of the original solar Wisdom in an attempt to understand new myths or to account for new experiences. And the Semites were also to increase their influence — quite a different sort of influence — through political power and, later on, through faiths centred around a personal and transcendent God, the philosophical opposite of Akhnaton’s “Heat-and-Light-within-the-Disk.” The overthrow of Mitannian tutelage by Ashur-Uballit, son of Erba-Adad, king of a yet unimportant Assyria, during Akhnaton’s reign, and the intensified infiltration of the Habiru into Palestine, at the same time, fare early signs of this new rise of the Semite, while, in faraway India, Aryans were devising the Caste system, or giving

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it a new — racial — interpretation, and laying, in the midst of an immense foreign environment, the foundations of the oldest truly rational civilisation of the Dark Age: Brahmanism, a civilisation “against Time”; and while, less than a century later, the Thesprotian invasion was to carry to Greece “an overwhelmingly Aryan population”1: the new blood that was to evolve Hellenism out of its own genius and of the old Aegean culture, still alive.

But, I repeat, no race and no man was ever to renew Akhnaton’s experiment of a State ruled in defiance of the conditions of the Dark Age, according to a creed of this earth. In fact, as the Dark Age goes on, States and all temporal organisms — with a few glaring exceptions — become more and more organisms “in Time,” the real aim of which is merely the worldly welfare of a ruling family or of a ruling minority, or of a whole people, without that family, group, or people being, from the standpoint, of the natural hierarchy of life, “the worthiest”; without its privileges being justified in the light of cosmic Truth. The great men “above Time” who appear after Akhnaton turn their backs to this hopeless world and seek, as I said before, the salvation or “liberation” of the individual soul; its escape from the bondage of Time altogether. The Buddhist Sanga and the even more unworldly brotherhood: of Jain ascetics, are communities of people who deliberately leave no descendants, and concentrate all their efforts upon never being, themselves, born again, if they can help it. The Kingdom of Jesus Christ is “not of this world.” And although it is, according to the actual, practical founder of the Christian Church, Paul of Tarsus, “better” for a Christian (as it is, by the way, “better” also for a Buddhist or a Jain) “to marry than to burn” (with passion), it is, for him, better still, whenever possible, to live in celibacy. The Christian doctrine is doubtless less consistent than the Buddhist or Jain, with regard to non-violence. The much over-rated “love” that it preaches is shockingly limited to man, of all living beings. But the Christian ideal — the aim of the religious discipline both of the individual mystic and of the mystical community, — is also an essentially ascetic and other-worldly one; one in the light of which the saint who


1 H. R. Hall, “Ancient history of the Near East” (ninth edition), p. 67.

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is not of this earth is looked upon as the highest type of human being; the type to which the faithful should aspire. Whether the saint be finally expected to reach the state of nirvana or the more personal bliss of the Christian “Heaven” is, from the standpoint of wisdom rooted in and faithful to this earth, just the same. In either case, he saves himself, leaving the doomed earth to her fate, — at the most coming back (being born again) of his own free will, as a “Bodhisattva,” to help other souls out of the nightmare of existence in Time, or helping them directly, from the stage of bliss he has attained, in accordance with the Christian dogma of the “communion of saints” — the solidarity between the “triumphant” and the “militant” churches, which is nothing more than a natural fact expressed in religious language.

But he has no part in the one struggle, the aim of which is to prepare the coming of the next Golden Age: the struggle “against Time,” here and now.

On the contrary: the great other-worldly religions that exalt escape from the conditions of this Dark Age in particular and of Time in general, — individual “salvation” or “liberation” — merely succeed, in practice, in making the conditions of the Dark Age all the worse. They do so for the simple reason that they draw the best of human energy, — and, to begin with, the best of human blood, — away from this earth. The first, and many of the latter well-known Buddhist ascetics, and many of the Jain, were Brahmins or Kshattriyas — Aryans, — and many of the unmarried Christian saints were of Germanic stock.

If only the ascetic religions really could draw all men away from this planet, their effect would not be so tragic. It would, in course of time, amount to the extinction of mankind through the most non-violent process of all: through lack of interest in reproduction; lack of desire to live in this world as anything save travellers to the next or, beyond death, as anything save “liberated” soulsnot as new living men and women, inheritors of the character and possibilities of existing human races and of their Nature-ordained tasks, struggles and greatness. But only minorities are capable of carrying out an uncompromising teaching, to its last logical consequences. And therefore, no religion of however unworldly a character has, yet, as far as I know, ever had a sufficient appeal to lead the whole community

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of its believers to that extinction through indifference to life, which I just mentioned. For next to the good monk who, in thought and deed, holds virginity to be better than marriage, is the lay man who merely remembers that “it is better to marry than to burn,” and who has a family. The monk, — who often is a man of the very best blood, — is lost to this earth, in the earthly sense. The lay man becomes positively dangerous as soon as he forgets that disregard of race is, at the most, permissible to those who tread the ascetic path, and who disregard life as such; to those who, already in this world, “neither marry nor give in marriage.” And he always forgets this sooner or later, in the course of decades or centuries, for not a single other-worldly creed has, to my knowledge, taken the trouble of stressing the fact. (Brahmanism has stressed the fact. But Brahmanism is not an “other-worldly creed,” a religion “above Time”; it is the one social system “against Time” in the frame of which there is place for all creeds (worldly and other-worldly) and all races, form the lowest of all to the pure Aryan, in a harmony which reflects — or is, at least, intended to reflect — the original harmony of Creation).

Thus the practical result of the great religions of escape from the conditions of Time, the practical result of the teachings of the great, men “above Time” after Akhnaton, is a lowering of the racial level and therefore of the quality of their own adherents and, through them and their proselytes, of mankind in general: not — unfortunately! — a generation of “sadhus” and meditative saints, followed by a planet without men (doubtless more beautiful than it has been for a very long time) but cross-products of Aryan and Mongolic, or Aryan and Jewish blood, and a further non-descript hotch-potch of all the races of the Far and Middle East, or of all the races of the Near East and of Europe, professing increasingly debased forms of Buddhism or Christianity, and breeding, breeding and ever breeding increasingly debased specimens of the two-legged mammal. In other words: a tightening of the grip of Dark Age conditions upon the world, and further disintegration.

It is hardly necessary to add that this disintegration has been encouraged and exploited by every power “in Time” in need of Menschenmaterial regardless of quality. The other-worldly

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teaching according to which man is to be looked upon before all as “a soul” has been mobilised in support of schemes of unjustified worldly domination by the Christian Church itself and by a number of Christian rulers. A typical, but by no means unique, instance of this opportunism is that of Albukerque’s policy in Goa, encouraging mixt marriages between Portuguese and Indian Christians of any caste. Every new crossbreed, christened by the holy Church, would be — at least Albukerque expected, — a future saint in Heaven and, in the meantime, a loyal supporter of Portuguese interests. The Spanish viceroys of Mexico and Peru have encouraged mixed marriages in a similar spirit, and so did, long before them, in the Near East, the Byzantine Emperors and the Khalifs of Damascus and of Baghdad. It is the most natural policy of a ruler “in Time” whose religion happens to be a fraternity of faith, regardless of blood, — and all the more so if this religion be, like Islam, an other-worldly one, no doubt, but by no means a “non-violent” one.

Would the definitely non-violent but not other-worldly Religion of the Disk have followed, in practice, the same path, had it lasted? The path is in contradiction with the idea of the God-ordained separation of races, implied in Akhnaton’s words: “Thou hast put every man in his place; Thou hast made them different in shape, colour and speech; like a Divider, Thou hast divided the foreign people from one another.”1 But who can ever tell what a religion might become in the hands of ambitious and greedy lip-adherents, when it has no hard and fast code of conduct, nothing to guide the faithful (as far as we know) save the intuition of an artist, in tune with the beauty of Creation? We know that several of Akhnaton’s contemporaries and professed followers were, at least, anything but such artists. It is difficult to say what would have been his further followers, and whether any great man would have — could have — arisen among them, to save that which could be saved of the young king’s Golden Age theocracy in this Dark Age, giving it the rigid laws that any Dark Age organism needs, in order to endure. All we can say is that such a leader would necessarily have been — would have had to be — a man “against


1 Longer hymn to the Sun.

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Time”; “above Time,” no doubt, but “against Timealso, not merely “above Time” as Akhnaton himself and as the Founders of the non-violent, other-worldly religions after him. There is, as I said, in the Dark Age, no place, no possibility of existence for a State “above Time.” However much the inspiration, the philosophy, behind the State rule be oh a nonviolent nature, (worldly or other-worldly) the methods have to be the hard methods of the Dark Age. The one man who avoided these methods in his Buddhist Empire — Asoka, — was only able to do so because he had applied them, with a vengeance, before his conversion to non-violence.

In other words, there is, in this Dark Age, place only for religions “against Time” — apart from false religions “in Time.” The sincere, intelligent, and absolutely consistent follower of a teaching hundred per cent “above Time” — hundred per cent non-violent as such, — has only one course left to him: he should disappear. He does not belong to this planet in this Age; he should get out of it, — and never come back. Non-violence is not only incompatible with the existence of any State, nay, of any collective life, in any period of Time, apart from a Golden Age, (and, a fortiori, in our Age) but it is, save in a Golden Age, incompatible with Life itself.

Of all the followers of non-violent religions, the Jains are the ones who, apparently, have understood this the best. They are, no doubt, like others, divided into a minority of monks and a majority of people who live, — as non-violently as it is materially possible, — the life of this world. But their ascetics go further than any others I know along the path of renunciation for the sake of love towards all creatures. Not contented with respecting animal life alone, like the lay Jains and all the vegetarians of the world, they serenely refuse all compromise with the hard Law of Life in all times but the unthinkable Golden Age: kill, and eat; kill, and live. And, gradually pushing aside vegetables, fruits, and finally even water, they die of inanition in the name of the real logic of Non-violence — of the only logic of men of our Dark Age who cling to the bitter end to their will to defy the conditions of existence in Time.

There is one consistent alternative to this extreme position — one position as logical and as heroic as it — and that is the one of the philosophical equivalent of Brahmanical racialism in

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our technically advanced and yet dangerously decadent world; the one of the modern creed “against Time” and “faithful to this earth” par excellence, or, to be more accurate, of the modern form of the perennial Wisdom of Light and Life: National Socialism, which short-sighted people mistake for a mere political creed and nothing more.

And this alternative is, for those at least who are of Aryan blood and of a warrior-like nature — for Kshattriyas, — the best of the two. For it is written in the Book of books, addressed k by God Himself — i.e., by the Genius of the Race, in human garb, — to a prince of Kshattriyas, that “action is superior to, inaction.”1



Emsdetten in Westfalen (Germany), 23rd of May 1954


1 Bhagavad-Gita, III, Verse 8