Thus the complementarism of the conditions of existence is manifested in the following way: those who work for time are stabilized in space; those who wander in space are ceaselessly modified within time. And the antinomy of the ‘inverse sense’ appears as follows: those who live according to time, the changing and destroying element, fix and conserve themselves; those who live according to space, the fixed and permanent element, disperse themselves and change unceasingly. This must be so in order that the existence of each may remain possible, for in this way at least a relative equilibrium is established between the terms representing the two contrary tendencies; if only one or the other of the compressive and expansive tendencies were in action the end would come soon, either by ‘crystallization’ or by ‘volatilization’, if it be allowable to use symbolical expressions in this connection such as must recall the ‘coagulation’ and ‘solution’ of the alchemists; moreover these expressions do actually correspond to two phases in the present world of which the exact significance will be explained later.[83] Here indeed we find ourselves in a domain where all the consequences of the cosmic dualities show themselves with special clarity, those dualities being more or less distant images or reflections of the primary duality, that of essence and substance, of Heaven and Earth, or Purusha and Prakriti, which generates and rules all manifestation.
To return to Biblical symbolism, the animal sacrifice is fatal to Abel,[84] and the vegetable offering of Cain was not accepted;[85] he who is blessed dies, he who lives is accursed. Equilibrium is thus broken on both sides; how can it be re-established except by exchanges such that each has its part in the productions of the other? Thus it is that movement brings together time and space, being in a way a resultant of their combination, and reconciles in them the two opposed tendencies just mentioned;[86] movement itself is moreover only a series of disequilibria, but the sum of these constitutes a relative equilibrium compatible with the law of manifestation or of ‘becoming’, that is to say with contingent existence itself. Every exchange between beings subject to spatial and temporal conditions is in effect a movement, or rather a combination of two inverse and reciprocal movements, which harmonize and compensate one another; in this case equilibrium is realized directly by virtue of the fact that this compensation exists.[87] The alternating movement of the exchanges may impinge on the three domains, spiritual (or pure intellectual), psychic, and corporeal, corresponding to the ‘three worlds’: the exchange of principles, of symbols, and of offerings — such is the triple foundation, in the true traditional history of terrestrial humanity, on which rests the mystery of pacts, alliances, and benedictions, basically equivalent to the sharing out of the ‘spiritual influences’ at work in our world; but these last considerations cannot be dwelt on, for they obviously belong to a normal state of affairs from which we are now very far removed in all respects, a state of which the modern world as such is in truth no more than the simple and direct negation.[88]
22
The Significance of Metallurgy
We have seen that the arts or crafts that involve a direction of activity toward the mineral kingdom belong properly to the sedentary peoples, and that such activities were forbidden by the traditional laws of the nomadic peoples, of which the Hebrew law is the most generally known example; it is indeed evident that these arts tend toward ‘solidification’, and in the corporeal world as we know it ‘solidification’ in fact reaches its most pronounced form in minerals as such. Moreover, minerals, in their commonest form, that of stone, are principally used in the construction of stable buildings;[89] a town, considered as the collectivity of the buildings of which it is made up, appears in particular as something like an artificial agglomeration of minerals; and it must be reiterated that life in towns represents a more complete sedentarism than does agricultural life, just as the mineral is more fixed and more ‘solid’ than the vegetable. But there is something more: the arts applied to minerals include metallurgy in all its forms; now the evident fact that metal tends increasingly in these days to be substituted for stone in building, just as stone was formerly substituted for wood, leads to a supposition that this change must be a symptom of a more ‘advanced’ phase in the downward movement of the cycle; and this supposition is confirmed by the fact that in a general way metal plays an ever-growing part in the ‘industrialized’ and ‘mechanized’ civilization of today, and that from a destructive point of view, if it may be so expressed, no less than from a constructive point of view, for the consumption of metal brought about by modern wars is truly prodigious.
This observation moreover is in accord with a peculiarity met with in the Hebrew tradition: from the beginning of the time when the use of stone was allowed in special cases, such as in the building of an altar, it was nevertheless specified that these stones must be ‘whole’, for ‘you shall lift up no iron tool upon them’;[90] according to the precise terms of this passage, insistence is directed not so much to the stone being unworked as to no metal being used on it: the prohibition of the use of metal was thus more especially strict in the case of anything intended to be put to a specifically ritual use.[91] Traces of this prohibition still persisted even when Israel had ceased to be nomadic and had built, or caused to be built, stable edifices: when the Temple of Jerusalem was built the stone was ‘prepared at the quarry; so that neither hammer nor ax nor any tool of iron was heard in the temple, while it was being built.’[92] There is nothing at all exceptional in this, and a mass of concordant indications of the same kind could be found: for instance, in many countries a sort of partial exclusion from the community, or at least a ‘holding aloof’, was practiced and even still is practiced so far as metal-workers are concerned, and more particularly blacksmiths, whose craft is often associated with the practice of an inferior and dangerous kind of magic, which has eventually degenerated in most cases into mere sorcery. Nevertheless, on the other side, metallurgy has been specially revered in some traditional forms, and has even served as the basis of very important initiatic organizations; it must suffice to quote in this connection the instance of the Kabiric Mysteries, without dwelling longer at this point on a very complex subject that would lead much too far afield; all that need be said for the moment is that metallurgy has both a ‘sacred’ aspect and an ‘execrated’ aspect, and that in their origin these two aspects proceed from a twofold symbolism inherent in the metals themselves.
83
This is why nomadism, in its ‘malefic’ and deviated aspect, easily comes to exercise a ‘dissolving’ action on everything with which it comes into contact; sedentarism on its side, and under the same aspect, must inevitably lead only toward the grossest forms of an aimless materialism.
84
As Abel shed the blood of animals, his blood was shed by Cain; this is as it were an expression of a ‘law of compensation’ by virtue of which the partial disequilibria, in which the whole of manifestation consists fundamentally, are integrated in the total equilibrium.
85
It is important to note that the Hebrew Bible nevertheless admits the validity of the bloodless sacrifice considered in itself: as in the case of the sacrifice of Melchizedek, consisting in the essentially vegetable offering of bread and wine; but this is really connected with the rite of the Vedic
86
These two tendencies are again manifested in movement itself, in the form of centripetal and centrifugal movement respectively.
87
Equilibrium, harmony, and justice are really but three forms or aspects of one and the same thing; they could even in a certain sense be brought respectively into correspondence with the three domains shortly to be referred to, on condition of course that justice be taken in its most immediate meaning, of which in the modern world mere ‘honesty’ in commercial transactions represents an expression, diminished and degraded by the reduction of all things to the profane point of view and the narrow banality of ‘ordinary life’.
88
The intervention of the spiritual authority in the matter of money in traditional civilizations is directly connected with what has just been said: indeed money itself is in a certain sense the very embodiment of exchange, hence a much more exact idea can be formed of the real purpose of the symbols that it bore and that therefore circulated with it, for they gave to exchange a significance quite other than is contained in its mere ‘materiality’, though this last is all that it retains under the profane conditions that govern the relations of peoples, no less than those of individuals, in the modern world.
89
It is true that among many peoples the buildings of most ancient date were of wood, but such buildings were obviously not so durable, and consequently not so fixed, as stone buildings; the use of minerals in building thus always implies a greater degree of ‘solidity’ in every sense of the word.
92
1 Kings 6:7. Nevertheless the Temple of Jerusalem held a large quantity of metallic objects, but their employment is connected with the other aspect of the symbolism of metals, which is twofold, as we shall see presently: it seems moreover that the prohibition ended by being to some extent ‘localized’, mainly against the use of iron, and iron is the very metal of all others that plays the predominant part in modern times.