I am indebted to Andrew White for some suggestions on the way the mystical version of the monogenetic hypothesis was prolonged in the theosophical ambience of the late eighteenth century (in Louis-Claude de Saint Martin, De l’ésprit des choses, for example) and among the French Catholic legitimists such as De Bonald (Récherches philosophiques) and Lamennais (Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion).3 White also quoted Joseph de Maistre, an alluring clue, because Maistre represents a fusion of the themes of classic legitimism (of which he can be considered the initiator) and those of the theosophism hovering in the circles of Scottish and Templar masonry to which Maistre had at first belonged, though he broke with them for reasons of religious orthodoxy (reaffirming the authority of the Church and the pope against that of any clique of Illuminati).
In a debate on the subject, Raffaele Simone suggested that much of the search for a perfect language derived from a sort of neurotic uneasiness, because people would like to find in words an expression of the way the world works, and they are regularly disappointed. This is certainly true. In the legitimist tradition, the assertion of the sacrality of language aims not so much at reconstructing a primigenial language as at rediscovering the traces of our natural languages. The intent is first of all to question the materialistic claims of all the epicurean, polygenetic hypotheses and then to reject every conventionalist theory as a way of separating language from the very source of Truth.
Since it is linguistically difficult to demonstrate that a relationship exists between words and the essence of things (not least because of the plurality of languages), the way followed by the monogeneticists does not differ much from that of the most fanciful etymologists of the past, Isidore of Seville at their head. The fact that many of these etymologies also reappear in some contemporary thought (in Heidegger, for example) only indicates the toughness of the dream, or perhaps an irrepressible need to have some contact with Being.
If we take a look at the text in which Maistre discussed at greatest length the nature of languages, his Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, we see that the first declarations simply repropose what is found even today among authors who hark back to tradition as the source of all knowledge, opposing the degenerate learning of a secularized culture, “modern,” “enlightened,” or “scientistic “4
Listen to wise antiquity on the subject of the first men; it will tell you that they were wondrous and that beings of a higher order deigned to favor them with the most precious of revelations. On this point all agree, the initiates, the philosophers, the poets, history, legend: Asia and Europe have a sole voice. This accord among reason, Revelation, and all human traditions represents such a demonstration that it can be contradicted only in words. Men therefore have not only begun with science but with a science different from ours and superior to it, because it began at a higher level, making it also very dangerous. And this explains why science, at its beginnings, remained closed within the temples, where finally it became extinguished when this flame could serve no purpose save to burn. (97–98)
But just when readers might expect proof of this theory, they always find themselves confronted by inconsistent, circular arguments. Maistre recalls that Julian the Apostate in one of his discourses called the sun “the seven-rayed god,” and he wonders where the emperor found such a singular attribute. His answer is that the idea could have come to him only from the ancient Asiatic tradition to which he recurred in his theurgic renovation. Maistre cites, for example, “the sacred books of India,” which speak of seven virgins gathered to celebrate the advent of Krishna when the god suddenly appears to them, inviting them to dance. When the virgins object that they have no dancing partners, the god divides himself into seven, giving each virgin her own Krishna.
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, “Where will we collocate then the so-called eras of barbarism and ignorance?” (101–102).
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 the tight dress of the north, its head stifled by the curls of false hair, arms laden with books and instruments of every kind, pale from vigils and labor, it draws itself on, ink-stained and out of breath, along the path of truth, lowering always its brow, furrowed by algebraic formulas” (104). Compared to that of our modern civilization, the knowledge of the origins reveals its obvious superiority:
As far as it is possible to observe the science of the primitive ages, despite the enormous distance, we see it always free, independent; it does not so much walk as fly, and in all its bearing there is something aerial and supernatural. It flings its hair to the wind, beneath an Oriental miter. The efod covers its bosom; lifted by inspiration, it looks only at the sky; and its scornful foot seems to touch the earth only to detach itself from it. Although this primitive science never asked anything of anyone, and relied on no human support, we still have proof that it possessed the most rare kinds of knowledge.
(104–105)
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—demonstrate that 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 (107). 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 (108).
Seekers after original Hebrew, even if 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 Father 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, where, at least three thousand years ago, did the Greeks find the attribute of phisizoos
