Читать книгу The Conquest of Our Western Empire - Agnes Christina Laut - Страница 3

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The next time you are passing through the Grand Central Terminal of New York City, pause and look up at the Dome!

What do you see?

Mystic figures of stars and mythical prehistoric legendary monsters. What do they portray?

The Sun-dial of the Universe—the ancient Zodiac: only where our modern watches have twelve numbers marking the hours, the Zodiac has scrolled pictures of Cancer the Crab and Capricorn the Goat and Aquarius the Water Bearer round in its circuit of twelve, marking, not hours of the day and night, but the processional of the years and the centuries from the time “the Morning Stars sang together” and “the Sons of Gods married the Daughters of Men.”

What did architect and artist mean by placing that design above one of the greatest transportation centers in the world? Did they mean to imply that we, too, are part of the Grand Processional of the human race, that the clock of time may strike for us also, to enter new wonder lands of endeavor and realization?

Certainly that magnificent mural was not accidental. Some day when your train is late or you are early, instead of watching the ant-hill of millions of travelers racing back and forward through the gates, try to figure out what that drawing means. Whence came the Zodiac, the Sun-dial of the Universe? From the Far East—the Cradle of the Race—legend says from Enoch or Noah, when they buried certain tablets of revelation before the Flood—pre-Atlantean, if you like to put it that way, or pre-Glacial, if you prefer another way. At any rate, there is not a race in the known world without some symbol of the Zodiac, giving hints of racial pasts lost to history, giving still more potent hints of what may be before us far down the future corridors of time.

The Zodiac sends the mind harking back to strange racial memories, and those memories come in two streams—from the East west and from the West east. We all know of the great trek westward that began with Abraham at Ur on the Persian Gulf and ended with the steel rail spanning the New World from Atlantic to Pacific. But long before Abraham began his great migration from the Persian Gulf northwestward to the Mediterranean, another stranger, wilder migration had taken place from Asia across the Pacific to the west coast of America. When? That question cannot be answered. The date is unknown. How? Perhaps by scudding in little boats from land point to land point, with the Aleutian Islands for stepping stones. Perhaps by the wreckage of Mongolian sailor folk drifting across the Pacific to the west coast of America. Perhaps by the link of an ancient continent called Lemuria between the South Sea Islands and the tropical zones of what is now known as Spanish America. These are shadowy facts but they seem to prove each guess has the substance of some truth.

The physical similarity between the Mongolian and the Indian is strong, though not convincing. Copper color, stringy hair, high cheek-bones—yes. Stature, profile, figure, hands and feet—no. We do know there are rock inscriptions of an ancient civilization in the South Sea Islands; and there are rock inscriptions of an ancient civilization in Western Mexico, Chile and Peru. Perhaps all three explanations—Aleutian Islands as a causeway between Asia and America, chance wreckage among sailor folk of Asia, an ancient continent linking the South Sea Islands to the American tropics—may give the key to the secret of whence came the first Indian peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Certainly the tribes of the Pacific varied almost as greatly among themselves as did the inhabitants of the two continents. The Aleuts were wild hunters of the tempestuous Northern Sea but never, as far as we know, were they cannibals; nor, before antagonized and wronged, were they man-hunters. Of civilization as we know it, they had not a trace. They were stone-age men.

But come south a zone to the Indians from Sitka to Northern California. Here we encounter an entirely different and inferior type—fish eaters but cannibals, man-hunters and man-killers and raiders for slaves, corpulent, squat, indolent, treacherous, without a trace of civilization.

Come south to the zone of tropical Latin America—here is the highest type of Indian known, a worker in metals, a race with pictographs and sign language on stones, leaving relics of civilizations that are the enigma of history to-day; and then as if to confute these differences comes the testimony of scholars in the Vatican that in spite of the Aleuts being stone-age savages and the ancient Peruvians and Chileans being metal workers—the roots of both languages are the same.

It was when the Mongolian or Indian migration worked eastward across the American plains to the Atlantic seaboard, and the European migration worked westward across the Atlantic and up the river system of the Atlantic to the river system of the Pacific, that stone age and modern age clashed in the “Bloody Ground” of the Frontier.

And yet there were strange, almost fantastic resemblances or parallels between these two types of races in clash for final ascendancy.

Abraham trekked from Persian Gulf to Mediterranean Sea between 1800 and 2000 B.C. Balboa and Drake and Bering and Cook trekked from Atlantic to Pacific—Bering and Cook reaching their objective between 1741 and 1800 A.D. Both ancient migration and modern sea adventure realized their supreme goals in their search for facts behind obviously faulty but universally accepted myths. Both movements demanded and exacted sacrifice of life in the quest of truth. “Yes, worship the Sun and the Moon,” Abraham says in old Jewish legends. “My father made his living sculpturing old idols of such gods; but I want to know who silvered the stars? Who incarnadined the sun? That God do I worship”; and, driven out by persecution, he began the long trek that ended only on our own Pacific shores. What were Balboa and Drake and Bering and Cook seeking? A short passageway between East and West that did not exist.

CALLICUM AND MAQUINNA, CHIEFS OF THE PRINCIPAL NOOTKA SOUND TRIBES

We are apt to regard the sons of Jacob as Divine Torch-bearers in their ruthless raids on the lawless bandits of Palestine or Canaan. Compared to the people they conquered, they were enlightened; but in method of war, not far different from our North American Indian raiders. What the Jews were really seeking in their foraging across from the Euphrates to Egypt was free pasturage for their wealth of flocks. Our own early fur traders who blazed the trail to the Pacific we call lawless adventurers—heroes some of them, arrant scoundrels others; but what lured the trail makers was profit from the little beaver of inland waters for the canoe men, and from the sea otter for keels that plowed a silver chart around the world.

MAQUINNA

TATOOSH, THE KILLER

THE ONLY REMAINING INDIAN SEPULCHER ON MENNALOOSE ISLAND

For utterly unselfish leadership, Moses and Aaron stand first in Old World annals, guiding a rabble for forty years through a wilderness, and near as we can trace their wanderings covered 2,000 miles; and Moses died of his task, broken-hearted, on Nebo—mountain of wisdom. For utterly unselfish leadership, Lewis and Clark, inspired by Jefferson, stand first in modern records; but their traverse covered almost 8,000 miles; and Lewis we now know also died, if not of a broken heart, of a mind broken in his tremendous task; and in his wanderings he encountered Indians whose god of wisdom was also Nebo or Nepo.

What do the King David Wars stand for in ancient history? Efforts to weld lawless raiding clans into a nation. And for what do our Indian Wars stand in modern history? The same.

In the history of the ancient racial movement we have the prophets and martyrs—Isaiah sawn asunder, Jeremiah stoned to death, Ezekiel exiled. Have we their counterparts in our racial movements in America? Have we? Have you read the history of the first missionaries and the first pioneers to the Pacific? It is acknowledged in the missionary board reports that in spite of baptisms and professions, of sincere converts among the Indians not one was made in twenty years. The mission boards were about to suppress the Pacific missions when the terrible massacres began; but these massacres were the torch that wakened the country to flame and brought the pioneers to lay the foundations for a new Pacific Empire. Do you wonder that the Pacific Empire to-day regards its past as a sacred epic and derides the cowboy-miner rough-stuff era as the travesty of a deeper racial movement that is part of the great processional portrayed in the Zodiac of the centuries—a transportation that now spans the world?

The architect and the artist who designed these murals knew what they were doing, though few of us, hurrying daily beneath that dome, pause to look up, or looking up, realize what our eyes see.

Still more remarkable, though neither startling nor fantastic, is the parallel between the wild races subdued by an Abraham or a Jacob or a Moses or a David, and the wild races subdued by our own trail blazers to the Pacific.

You may believe with Plato that an Atlantis once spanned the sea between Europe and America, or you may disbelieve it, though hydrographic surveys have found a submerged marine continent in the Atlantic; and the pictographs in the South Sea Islands suggest a Lemuria in the Pacific—but the parallels between the wild Arabs of the sandy Asiatic deserts and the native North American Indians from Mexico to the Athabasca, or from the Lakes to the Pacific, are too marked to be ignored. When Catlin first noted these similarities in the 1830’s, and Schoolcraft began to narrate their legends, and General Miles in his recollections suggested the same inferences—a modern world smiled. Catlin, they said, was a wild enthusiast; Schoolcraft, wed to an Indian chief’s daughter, was more poetic than true. The modern world no longer scoffs nor smiles. Our North American Indians may be descendants of pre-Atlanteans, or they may not; but no one now denies they are of Asiatic origin and divided from their Nordic successors by an impassable gulf that has never been spanned and can only be crossed by gradual absorption.

They believed in one Supreme God symbolized by the Sun, ruling by the Moon and the Stars. They worshiped Sun, Moon and Stars. They sacrificed slaves to their deities; and if slaves were unavailing to propitiate these deities, then their own dearest possessions—sons and daughters. These were all characteristics of early Hebrew culture. They believed winds, streams, woods, peopled by a multitude of spirits, who could help or hurt mankind. They were inclined to make offerings to the evil spirits on the principle that the good spirits would not harm them in any case, and the evil demons might be appeased. They regarded blood as the principle of life and drank the blood of brave foes to acquire the best qualities of those foes, as the Canaanites in Palestine did. They regarded the Great God as invisible behind the Sun and held the belief that He became manifest to men in a Star Son born of a flawless mother, and told of how that Son came to earth to teach men the path to Heaven. They believed in immortality. To them, the Thunder God was the War God with the lightning for his arrows, as David sings in the Psalms. The serpent was a sacred emblem—sinister as an enemy but a wise guide to water pools if one drew his fangs and made him servant, not master. They had legends of the Fall of Man from the greed of a woman snatching at forbidden fruit; but where the Asiatics called the fruit a Tree of Life, the Indians called it a Grape Vine reaching from the heavens to the earth. The Indians had similar legends of a great Flood from which the Asiatics escaped in an ark, the Indians in a canoe—which science may interpret as an era of rain following the recession of the Glacial Ages. The North American Indian had pictographs of prehistoric monsters, which we now dimly recognize as the giant life of the marine ages. They believed in cycles of seven, and do to this day. The Asiatic’s week of seven days, year of seven jubilees and seven times seven have their counterparts in the Indians’ account of drought in periods of seven years, and animal life—such as the rabbit—being swept off by pestilence every seven years; which, by the way, is a fact in the animal life of the North. North American Indian and Arab were by vocation man-hunters, man-killers, animal-hunters, animal-killers. To this there are only two exceptions in North America—the Mandans on the Missouri and the Aztecs of the Southwest—sedentary tribes who had to become man-killers to defend themselves from extinction; and Indian and Arab present the inexplicable problem of sparse races kept down in population by war living in lands of plenty, where they could have existed in prosperity and peace, but preferring to live by the hazards of perpetual war and raid. Indian and Arab used the same types of boats: the dugout for rough water, the canoe for inland stream, or the coracle—the skin boat round as a tub, fastened to willow frame and propelled by hand or pole. Indian and Arab expressed their emotions in music, song, the symbolic dance, pictographs, personal decorations. Both practiced polygamy and slavery for the selfsame reason—to increase the tribes’ fighters and to take care of the superfluous women when raid killed off the warriors. In both, the aged man was counselor and priest, but never leader; and in both, the leader was the greatest killer. Of government and law, Arab and Indian knew nothing. Each was a law to himself and did what he pleased so long as his right arm could defend himself. Arab and Indian regarded hospitality as sacred to the guest under tent roof and both held the blood feud of vengeance as equally sacred unless wiped out by gift; and few in either race ever rose above the dead level of a purely animal existence of perpetual prey by the strong on the weak.

We may deplore the passing of such a free and picturesque era in human history; but pass it had to because that era was doomed in the evolution to a higher humanity.

We have a foolish way of saying human history goes round in endless cycles. It does; but the cycles are circles that spiral, and the race that will not or cannot go up that spiral goes down and out in the Progress of Time, or the Grand Processional pictured in the Zodiac.

The fact that transportation has hastened the Grand Processional—accomplishing in America during a century what took four thousand years in Asia—was probably the motive that inspired architect and artist to reproduce the Zodiac in the dome of the Grand Central Terminal.

Into this era, then, of the stone age came the pathfinders. Gain, trade, sea otter, beaver, were the lure; but gain was not the end.

What is the end?

Who can tell?

Perhaps the Persian Prophet’s Dream of God as sung by Watson, the Canadian poet—

“Thus spake El Bab: ‘There cometh one in might

And splendor of the Universal Light,

Shall show the beauty of a brighter day

To every soul that has the inner sight.’

“Then strange new light comes flaming up the sea—

A sense of being strong and greatly free;

And through the clear apocalyptic air,

We hear new songs of ages yet to be.

“A heavenly presence o’er the silence broods;

And sweeps away our soul-depressing moods;

Then all reality to sight appears,

And earth the sense of earth and time eludes.

“A shout breaks o’er the mountains

And up the sun’s bright way;

The dream of God is rising

To fullness in our day.

“Behold His herald cometh;

Let not our voices cease

To tell the gentle story

Of universal peace.”