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way, the esoteric message from afar into a proper context in our own
tradition and nature, and to avoid the willed blindness and infatuation
of the
theosop~ists
on the one h and, and the sterilizing anatomy and
dehydration of the merely intellectual approach of the sheer scientist–
philologists on the other hand. The insight that gradually unfolds on
this 'Middle Path' between these two extremes or pitfalls, naturally
has
to be fragmentary at the outset: you are allowed to write down what
is given to you to understand by assimilation and mutual transmutation.
All my books and articles, from
Kunst/arm und Yoga
on, are parts and
documents of this process." Having surrendered to India's truths, he
had found in time that he understood easily not only the texts but
the arts of India; and not only of India but of that entire garden of
civilizations rooted in the Neolithic which had burgeoned over the
earth from the fourth millennium B.C. to the end of the eighteenth
century A.D.
"The victorious one-sidedness of modern man, which has given to
the earth its spatial unity," he wrote in the introduction to
Ewiges
lndien,
"is impotent to bring forth the true heritage of the earth's
unified future. To the spatial unity there must be added the living
his–
torical unity of man with everything that he ever was and willed–
so that he too may become a totality. Whatever, during the archaic
periods of civilization, was favored in his character but now slumben
within him, concealed and unconscious . . . must be brought to light.
The meaning and the return gift to us of the shattered civilizations, and
of those already gone, is to assist us, and therewith everyone, to this
realization. . . . We cannot, however, drape ourselves with anything
taken from them ready-made without becoming apes. In India, as in
all those other cultures, there lie for us only great clues: figures and
signs of what man can be (possibilities and greatnesses that are strange
to us), and of what the world can be (goals of knowledge, manners of
contemplation, experiences of the most wondrous kind)."
Zimmer, of course, was not the only modern seeker looking beyond
the pavements of our own civilization to find the catalyst now needed for
mankind's transfiguration.
T.
S. Eliot found water for
The Waste Land
in Frazer's
Golden Bough
and in the Sanskrit
datta, dayadhvam, dam–
yata
of the
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.
Leopold Bloom, in Joyce's
brothel, beheld the vision of an Irish poet in the guise of the Celtic sea–
god Manannan MacLir, intoning a Tantric parody: "(
With a voice
of waves.)
Aum! Hek! Wal! Ak! Lub! Mor! Ma! White yoghin of the
Gods. . . .
(With a voice of whistling seawind.)
Punarjanam patsypun–
jaub!. ... Beware the left, the cult of Shakti.
(With a cry of storm–
birds.)
Shakti, Shiva! Dark hidden Father!.... Aum! Baum! Pyjaum!"
