What did happen to them we know.
One day Chaudesaigues—poor honest fellow, who died long before his time, which I shall speak of in its place—proposed to take me to the Mapah, and I accepted. He recognised me, as he had once dined or taken supper with me in the days when he was Gannot; and he had preserved a very clear memory of that meeting; he was very anxious at once to acquaint me with his symbolic figures, and to initiate me, like the Egyptian proselytes, into his most secret mysteries. Now, I had, by chance, just been studying in earnest the subjects of the early ages of the world and its great wars, which apparently devastated those primitive times without seeming reason; I was, therefore, in a measure, perfectly able not only to understand the most obscure traditions of the religion of the Mapah, but also to explain them to others, which I will now endeavour to do here.
At the period when the Celts had conquered India, that ancestor of Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilisations, they found a complete system of physical and metaphysical sciences already established; Atlantic cosmogony related to absolute unity, and, according to it, everything emanated from one single principle, called Iswara, which was purely spiritual. But soon the Indian savants perceived with fear, that this world, which they had looked upon for long as the product of absolute unity, was incontestably that of a combined duality. They might have looked upon these two principles, as did the first Zoroaster a long time after them, as principiés—i.e. as the son and daughter of Iswara, thus leaving the ancient Iswara his old position, by supporting him on a double column of creating beings, as we see a Roman general being carried raised up on two shields by his soldiers; but they wished to divide these two principles into principiant principles; they therefore satisfied themselves by joining a fresh principle to that of Iswara, by mating Iswara with Pracriti, or nature. This explained everything. Pracriti possessed the sakti—i.e. the conceptive power, and the old Iswara was the bidja or generative power.
I think, up to now, I have been as clear as possible, and I mean to try to continue my explanations with equal lucidity; which will not be an easy matter seeing that (and I am happy to give my reader due warning of it) we are dealing only with pure science, of which fact he might not be aware.
This early discovery of the Indian savants, which resulted in the marriage of Iswara with Pracriti, led to the consideration of the universe as the product of two principles, each possessing its own peculiar function of the male and female qualities. Iswara and Pracriti stood for Adam and Eve to the whole of the universe, not simply for humanity. This system, remarkable by its very simplicity, which attracted men by giving to all that surrounded him an origin similar to his own, is to be found amongst most races, which received it from the Hindus. Sanchoniathon calls his male principle Hypsistos, the Most High, and his female principle Berouth, nature; the Greeks call this male principle Saturn, and their female principle Rhea; both one and the other correspond to Iswara and Pracriti. All went well for several centuries; but the mania for controversy is innate in man, and it led to the following questions, which the Hindu savants propounded, and which provoked the struggle of half the human race against the other.
"Since," say the controversials, "the universe is the result of two principiant powers, one acting with male, the other with female qualities, must we then consider the relations that they bear to one another? Are they independent one of the other? are they pre-existent to matter and contemporaneous with eternity? Or ought we rather to look upon one of them as the procreative cause of its companion? If they are independent, how came they to be reunited? Was it by some coercive force? If so, what divinity of greater power than themselves exercised that pressure upon them? Was it by sympathy? Why, then, did it not act either earlier or later? If they are not independent of one another, which of the two is to be under subjection to the other? Which is first in order of antiquity or of power? Did Iswara produce Pracriti or Pracriti Iswara? Which of them acts with the greatest energy and is the most necessary to the procreation of inanimate things and animate beings? Which should be called first in the sacrifices made to them or in the hymns addressed to them? Ought the worship offered them to be combined or separated? Ought men and women to raise separate altars to them or one for both together?"[1]
These questions, which have divided the minds of millions of men, which have caused rivers of blood to flow, nowadays sound idle and even absurd to our readers, who hear Hindu religion spoken of as mere mythology, and India as some far-off planet; but, at the time of which we are now speaking, the Indian Empire was the centre of the civilised world and master of the known world. These questions, then, were of the highest importance. They circulated quietly in the empire at first, but soon each one collected quite a large enough number of partisans for the religious question to appear under a political aspect. The supreme priesthood, which at first had begun by holding itself aloof from all controversy, sacrificed equally to Iswara and to Pracriti—to the generative power and to the conceptive power: sacerdotalism, which had long remained neutral between the bidja and the sakti principles, was compelled to decide, and as it was composed of men—that is to say of the generative power, it decided in favour of males, and proclaimed the dominance of the masculine sex over the feminine. This decision was, of course, looked upon as tyrannical by the Pracritists, that is, the followers of the conceptive power theory; they revolted. Government rose to suppress the revolution and, hence, the declaration of civil war. Figure to yourselves upon an immense scale, in an empire of several hundreds of millions of men, a war similar to that of the Albigenses, the Vaudois or the Protestants. Meantime two princes of the reigning dynasty,[2] both sons of King Ongra, the oldest called Tarak'hya, the youngest Irshou, divided the Indian Empire between them, less from personal conviction than to make proselytes. One took bija for his standard, the other took sakti. The followers of each of these two symbols rallied at the same time under their leaders, and India had a political and civil and religious war; Irshou, the younger of the two brothers, having positively declared that he had broken with sacerdotalism and intended to worship the feminine or conceptive faculty, as the first cause in the universe, according priority to it and pre-eminence over the generative or masculine faculty. A political war can be ended by a division of territory; a religious war is never-ending. Sects exterminate one another and yet are not convinced. A deadly, bitter, relentless war, then, ravaged the empire. As Irshou represented popular opinion and the Socialism of the time, and his army was largely composed of herdsmen, they called his followers the pallis, that is to say, shepherds, from the Celtic word pal, which means shepherd's crook. Irshou was defeated by Tarak'hya, and driven back as far as Egypt. The Pallis there became the stock from which those primitive dynasties sprang which lasted for two hundred and sixty-one years, and are known as the dynasties of Shepherd Kings. The etymology this time is palpably evident; therefore, let us hope we shall not meet with any contradiction on this head. Now, we have stated that Irshou took as his standard the symbol which represented the divinity he had worshipped; that sign, in Sanscrit, was called yoni, from whence is derived yoneh—which means a dove—this explains, we may point out in passing, why the dove became the bird of Venus. The men who wore the badge of the yoni were called Yoniens, and, as they always wore it symbolically depicted on a red flag, red or purple became, at Tyre and Sidon and in Greece, the royal colour, and was adopted by the consuls and emperors and popes of Rome and, finally, by all reigning princes, no matter what race they were descended from or what religion they professed. My readers may assume that I am rather pleased to be able to teach kings the derivation of their purple robes.
Well, then, it was on account of his studying these great questions of dispute, which had lasted more than two thousand years and had cost a million of men's lives; it was from fear lest they should be revived in our days that the philanthropic Gannot endeavoured to found a religion, under the title of Evadism which was to reunite these two creeds into a single one. To that end were his strange figures moulded in plaster and the eccentric lithographs that he designed and executed upon coloured paper, with the earnestness of a Brahmin disciple of bidja or an Egyptian adherent of sakti.[3]
The joy of the Mapah can be imagined when he found I was acquainted with the primitive dogmas of his religion and with the disasters which the discussion of those doctrines had brought with them. He offered me the position of his chief disciple, on the spot, in place of him who had once been Caillaux; but I have ever been averse to usurpation, and had no intention of devoting myself to a principle, by my example, which, some day or other, I should be called upon to oppose. The Mapah next offered to abdicate in my favour and himself be my head disciple. The position did not seem to me sufficiently clearly defined, in the face of both spiritual and temporal powers, to accept that offer, fascinating though it was. I therefore contented myself with carrying away from the Mapah's studio one of the most beautiful specimens of the bidja and sakti, promising to exhibit them in the most conspicuous place in my sitting-room, which I took good care not to do, and then I departed. I did not see the Mapah again until after the Revolution of 24 February, when, by chance, I met him in the offices of the Commune de Paris, where I went to ask for the insertion of an article on exiles in general, and those of the family of Orléans in particular. The article had been declined by the chief editor of the Liberté, M. Lepoitevin-Saint-Alme. The revolution predicted by Gannot had come. I expected, therefore, to find him overwhelmed with delight; and, as a matter of fact, he did praise the three days of February, but with a faint voice and dulled feelings; he seemed to be singularly enfeebled by that strange and sensual mysticism, which presented every event to his mind in dogmatic form. The lines of the upper part of his face were more deeply drawn towards his prominent forehead, and his whole person bespoke the visionary in whom the hallucination of being a god had degenerated into a disease.