There is really nothing so strange about Julian’s choice of imagery, inasmuch as the hebdomad, the mystique of the number seven, is found in many ancient cultures, and Julian could have absorbed it either from Indian sources or from others. But what indicates a strange disjuncture of thought is the series of examples that follows hard upon Maistre’s evocation of Julian. First of all, he notes, the “true” system of the universe was known from most remote antiquity, as is shown by the pyramids of Egypt, which are rigorously oriented according to astronomical criteria. Then, whether as proof or consequence of this fact, we observe that a people like the Egyptians, who could create colors that have lasted thirty centuries, raise boulders against every law of mechanics to a height of six hundred feet, carve in granite birds of all known species, could hardly fail to excel in every other art, and therefore they must have known things of which we are ignorant. Finally, in Asia, consider the ancient astronomical observations carved on the walls of Nimrud, which rose on land still damp from the Flood. All this drives one—notice the conclusion—to ask oneself, “So where will we place the so-called times of barbarism and ignorance?” (42).
We cannot see a direct rapport between the metaphor of the seven rays and the pyramids, unless it is to be found in the fact that different myths and archetypes tried to explain astronomical phenomena and furnished a pre-Galilean version of a world written in mathematical characters. But to confirm the existence of these trends Plato would again suffice, with his Timaeus. If anything, it is the knowledge that even more ancient images circulated in African and Asian culture that explains why Julian followed this tradition. Whether he followed it or revitalized it, however, this does not show that he was its direct and authorized heir or that the tradition spoke any truth.
But this reasoning had been typical of the same Masonic tradition that influenced Maistre: the fact that an association decided to hark back to the Templar tradition became a sign of direct descent.
It is obvious that in this reasoning there is no linguistic-etymological discovery, but only biased polemic against sick modern civilization: “Under skimpy northern dress, his head lost in the curls of deceptive locks, his arms loaded with books and instruments of all kinds, pale from long nights and work, the modern scientist drags himself along the road to truth, soiled with ink and panting, always bending his algebra-furrowed brow towards the earth” (43). Compared to that of our modern civilization, the knowledge of the origins reveals its obvious superiority:
In so far as it is possible to perceive the science of early times at such a distance, one always see it free and isolated, soaring rather than walking, and presenting in its whole being something airy and supernatural. Exposing to the winds the hair that escapes from an oriental mitre, an efod covering a breast uplifted with inspiration, it looked only to the heavens, and its disdainful foot seemed to touch the earth only to leave it. However, although it demanded nothing of anyone and seemed to know no human support, it is no less proven that it possessed the rarest knowledge. (43)
The proof of this primacy would lie in the fact that traditional science was exempted from the task imposed on modern science, while all the calculations that we base on experimentation are the most false that can be imagined. Whence we see that the thesis (modern civilization is inferior to ancient civilization) is reasserted as proof.
At this point the Greek myth of the golden age is proposed as proof that the state of perfect and luminous knowledge existed only in the civilizations of the origins (44). Thus the man who had written pages, truly beautiful from a literary point of view, on the revolution’s crime, rediscovers the root of every Jacobin degradation in the act (so remote that it can no longer be collocated in history) with which language fell away from the original tree (44).
Seekers after original Hebrew, even they could retrace its origin only into a past Eden (of which they had to make an effort, moreover, to offer, however fancifully, a chronology) did not therefore refrain from reconstructing its grammar. Compared with the efforts of a man such as Athanasius Kircher to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics and study the generating of alphabets, the efforts of Maistre seem fairly puerile: “Here is the mystery, gentlemen: one generation said ba, the other said be; the Assyrians invented the nominative, and the Medes, the genitive” (116)—which, if anything, would be proof not of a divine origin of languages but precisely of their slow evolution. Maistre asks himself why, in the languages of the ancient peoples, we find reflections of knowledge that those people could not have possessed. The correct question naturally would not be “why” but “whether.” In fact, Maistre goes on to illustrate not inconceivable knowledge but proofs of the fact, common among ancients as among moderns, that poets are capable of finding ingenious metaphors to name phenomena fundamental to human experience.
For example, from where did the Greeks, at least three thousand years ago, take the epithet Physizoos (giving or possessing life), which Homer sometimes gives to the earth? Or that of Pheresbios, very nearly synonymous, which he attributes to Hesiod? From where did they take the still more singular epithet of Philemate (amorous or thirsty for blood), given to the earth in a tragedy? Who would have taught them to call sulphur, which is the cipher of fire, the divine? I am no less struck by the name Cosmos given to the world. The Greeks named it beauty because all order is beauty, as the good Eustathius said somehere, and supreme order is in the world. The Latins encountered the same idea and expressed it by their word Mundus, which we have adopted by merely giving it a French ending, except however that one of these words excludes disorder and the other excludes defilement. Nevertheless it is the same idea, and the two words are equally correct and equally false. But again tell me, I ask you, how these ancient Latins, when they still knew only war and ploughing, thought to express by the same word ideas of prayer and torture? And who taught them to call fever the purifier or the expiator? We would not say that there is here a real knowledge of cause by which a people affirmed the correctness of a name. But do you believe that these sorts of judgment could have belonged to a time when they scarcely knew how to write, when the dictator spaded his own garden, when they wrote verses that Varro and Cicero no longer understood? These words and still others that could be cited, and that belong completely to oriental metaphysics, are the evident debris of more ancient languages destroyed or forgotten. (48–49)
Here we are simply demonstrating that every epoch had its poets, capable of naming things in an unusual and perspicacious fashion. Or, at most, we are repeating, in a simplified form, a thesis inspired by Vico on the metaphoric origin of language that is, if anything, a reflection of the perceptive freshness of ancient peoples, not of their presumed occult knowledge. It hardly seems that any profound learning was necessary for agrarian peoples to call the earth “life-giving” as they lived, in fact, on the earth’s fruits.
Maistre was a vigorous thinker, capable of historically based critical judgments (it suffices to look at his contestations of the Templar myth of the Scottish masonry). And he was not ignorant of the attempts made to construct an a priori philosophical language, from Bacon to Wilkins and beyond. He perceives the contrivances of the artificial languages proposed in the course of the previous two centuries, to which common sense would reply that natural languages seem more flexible in handling our experience. But then this position (which, thus enunciated, would prove disastrously “enlightened”) in Maistre’s discourse is radically transformed. To demonstrate the agility of natural languages Maistre cannot avoid recurring to another notion, born in the eighteenth century: that of the “genius” of languages. But the notion of genius recalls that of polygenesis, or at least of autonomous development, unreconcilable with any monogenetic hypothesis. Maistre thus finds himself entangled in a line of reasoning that leads to wild paralogisms:
I do not want to take up the question of the origins of language (the same, it must be noted in passing, as that of innate ideas), in the most refined of centuries, drew attention to this talent in nascent peoples, but what I can assure you of, for nothing is clearer, is the prodigious talent of infant peoples in forming words and of the absolute incapacity of philosophers to do the same thing. I recall that Plato, in the most refined of centuries, drew attention to this talent in nascent peoples. What is remarkable about this is that it has been said they proceeded by way of deliberation, in virtue of a determined system of agreement,
