This ran in his mind with certainty. Though his thought assumed no form
of little phrases, his brain yet furnished detailed statements that
clinched the marvellous thing with simile and incident which daily
life might apprehend: That knowledge arises from action; that to do
the thing invites the teaching and explains it. Action, moreover, is
symbolical; a group of men, a family, an entire nation, engaged in
those daily movements which are the working out of their destiny,
perform a Ceremony which is in direct relation somewhere to the
pattern of greater happenings which are the teachings of the Gods. Let
the body imitate, reproduce--in a bedroom, in a wood--anywhere--the
movements of the stars, and the meaning of those stars shall sink
down into the heart. The movements constitute a script, a language.
To mimic the gestures of a stranger is to understand his mood, his
point of view--to establish a grave and solemn intimacy. Temples are
everywhere, for the entire earth is a temple, and the body, House of
Royalty, is the biggest temple of them all. To ascertain the pattern
its movements trace in daily life, _could_ be to determine the relation
of that particular ceremony to the Cosmos, and so learn power. The
entire system of Pythagoras, he realised, could be taught without a
single word--by movements; and in everyday life even the commonest
act and vulgarest movement are part of some big Ceremony--a message
from the Gods. Ceremony, in a word, is three-dimensional language, and
action, therefore, is the language of the Gods. The Gods he had denied
were speaking to him ... passing with tumult close across his broken
life.... Their passage it was, indeed, that had caused the breaking!
In this cryptic, condensed fashion the great fact came over him--that
he and these other two, here and now, took part in some great Ceremony
of whose ultimate object as yet he was in ignorance. The impact with
which it dropped upon his mind was tremendous. He realised it most
fully when he stepped from the darkness of the forest and entered the
expanse of glimmering, early light; up till this moment his mind was
being prepared only, whereas now he knew. The innate desire to worship
which all along had been his, the momentum his religious temperament
had acquired during forty years, the yearning to have proof, in a word,
that the Gods he once acknowledged were really true, swept back upon
him with that violent reaction which denial had aroused.
He wavered where he stood....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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