The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

21 Cain and Abel

The ‘solidification’ of the world has yet other consequences not mentioned hitherto in the human and social order, for it engenders therein a state of affairs in which everything is counted, recorded, and regulated, and this is really only another kind of ‘mechanization’; it is only too easy nowadays to find typical instances anywhere, such as for example the mania for census-taking (which is of course directly connected with the importance attributed to statistics),[72] and more generally, the endless multiplication of administrative interventions in all the circumstances of life. These interventions must naturally have the effect of ensuring the most complete uniformity possible between individuals, all the more so because it is almost a ‘principle’ of all modern administration to treat individuals as mere numerical units all exactly alike, that is, to act as if, by hypothesis, the ‘ideal’ of uniformity had already been realized, thus constraining all men to adjust themselves, so to speak, to the same ‘average’ level. In another respect, this ever more inordinate regulation has a highly paradoxical consequence, and it is this: the growing rapidity and ease of communication between the most distant countries, thanks to the inventions of modern industry, are matters of pride, yet at the same time every possible obstacle is put in the way of the freedom of these communications, to the extent that it is often practically impossible to get from one country to another, and in any case it has become much more difficult now than it was when no mechanical means of transport existed. This is another special aspect of ‘solidification’: in such a world there is no longer any room for nomadic peoples such as formerly survived in various circumstances, for these peoples gradually come to a point at which they no longer find in front of them any free space; and in addition to this, all possible means are used to cause them to adopt a sedentary life,[73] so that in this connection also the time seems not to be far distant when the ‘wheel will stop turning’; while in addition, within the sedentary life, the towns, representing something like the final degree of ‘fixation’, take on an overwhelming importance and tend more and more to absorb everything else;[74] this is how it comes about that, toward the end of the cycle, Cain really and finally slays Abel.

Cain is represented in Biblical symbolism as being primarily a farmer and Abel as a stockmaster, thus they are the types of the two sorts of peoples who have existed since the origins of the present humanity, or at least since the earliest differentiation took place, namely that between the sedentary peoples, devoted to the cultivation of the soil, and the nomads, devoted to the raising of flocks and herds.[75] It must be emphasized that these two occupations are essential and primordial in the two human types; anything else is only accidental, derived, or superadded, and to speak of people as hunters or fishers for example, as modern ethnologists so often do, is either to mistake the accidental for the essential, or it is to restrict attention to more or less late cases of anomaly or degeneration, such as can be met with in certain savages (but the mainly commercial or industrial peoples of the modern West are by no means less abnormal, though in another way).[76] Each of these two categories naturally had its own traditional law, different from that of the other, and adapted to its way of life and the nature of its occupations; this difference was particularly apparent in the sacrificial rites, hence the special mention made of the vegetable offerings of Cain and the animal offerings of Abel in the account given in Genesis.[77] As Biblical symbolism in particular is now being considered, it is as well to note at once in that connection that the Hebrew Torah belongs properly to the type of law appropriate to nomadic peoples. Hence the way in which the story of Cain and Abel is presented, for it would appear in a different light in the eyes of a sedentary people and would be susceptible of a different interpretation, although the aspects corresponding to the two points of view are of course both included in the profound meaning of the story; this is nothing more than an application of the double meaning of symbols, to which some allusion was made in connection with ‘solidification’, since this question, as will perhaps appear more clearly from what follows, is closely bound up with the symbolism of the murder of Abel by Cain. The special character of the Hebrew tradition is also responsible for the disapproval that is brought to bear on certain arts and certain trades specially appropriate to sedentary peoples, notably on everything connected with the construction of fixed dwellings; at any rate that was the state of affairs until the time when Israel actually ceased, at least for several centuries, to be nomadic, that is, up to the time of David and Solomon, and we know that it was even then necessary to resort to foreign workers for the building of the Temple in Jerusalem.[78]

The agricultural peoples, just because they are sedentary, are naturally those who arrive sooner or later at the building of towns; indeed, it is said that the first town was founded by Cain himself; moreover its foundation did not take place till well after the time during which he is said to have been occupied in agriculture, which shows clearly that there are as it were two successive phases in ‘sedentarism’, the second representing a relatively more pronounced degree of fixity and spatial ‘constriction’ than the first. It could be said in a general way that the works of sedentary peoples are works of time: these peoples are fixed in space within a strictly limited domain, and develop their activities in a temporal continuity that appears to them to be indefinite. On the other hand, nomadic and pastoral peoples build nothing durable, and do not work for a future that escapes them; but they have space before them, not facing them with any limitation, but on the contrary always offering them new possibilities. In this way is revealed the correspondence of the cosmic principles to which, in another order, the symbolism of Cain and Abel is related: the principle of compression, represented by time, and the principle of expansion, represented by space.[79] In actual fact, both these two principles are manifested simultaneously in time and in space, as in everything else; it is necessary to point this out in order to avoid unduly ‘simplified’ identifications or assimilations, as well as to resolve occasional apparent oppositions; but it is no less certain that the action of the principle of compression predominates in the temporal condition, and of expansion in the spatial condition. Moreover, time uses up space, if it may be put so; and correspondingly in the course of the ages the sedentary peoples gradually absorb the nomads; this gives, as indicated above, a social and historical significance to the murder of Abel by Cain.

Nomads direct their activities particularly to the animal kingdom, mobile like themselves; sedentary peoples on the other hand direct them in the first place to the two non-mobile kingdoms, the vegetable and the mineral.[80] Furthermore, it is in the nature of things that sedentary peoples should tend to the making of visual symbols, images made up of various substances, and these images can always be related back, in their essential significance, more or less directly to the geometrical viewpoint, the origin and foundation of all spatial conception. Nomads, on the other hand, to whom images are forbidden, like everything else that might tend to attach them to some definite place, make sonorous symbols, the only symbols compatible with their state of continual migration.[81] It is, however, remarkable that, among the sensible faculties, sight is directly related to space, and hearing to time: the elements of the visual symbol occur simultaneously, and those of the sonorous symbol in succession; so that there is in this respect a kind of reversal of the relations previously considered: but this reversal is in fact necessary so that some equilibrium may be established between the two contrary principles mentioned above, and so that their respective actions may be kept within limits compatible with normal human existence. Thus the sedentary peoples create the plastic arts (architecture, sculpture, painting), the arts consisting of forms developed in space; the nomads create the phonetic arts (music, poetry), the arts consisting of forms unfolded in time; for, let us say it again, all art is in its origin essentially symbolical and ritual, and only through a late degeneration, indeed a very recent degeneration, has it lost its sacred character so as to become at last the purely profane ‘recreation’ to which it has been reduced among our contemporaries.[82]

Thus the complementarism of the conditions of existence is manifested in the following way: those who work for time are stabilized in space; those who wander in space are ceaselessly modified within time. And the antinomy of the ‘inverse sense’ appears as follows: those who live according to time, the changing and destroying element, fix and conserve themselves; those who live according to space, the fixed and permanent element, disperse themselves and change unceasingly. This must be so in order that the existence of each may remain possible, for in this way at least a relative equilibrium is established between the terms representing the two contrary tendencies; if only one or the other of the compressive and expansive tendencies were in action the end would come soon, either by ‘crystallization’ or by ‘volatilization’, if it be allowable to use symbolical expressions in this connection such as must recall the ‘coagulation’ and ‘solution’ of the alchemists; moreover these expressions do actually correspond to two phases in the present world of which the exact significance will be explained later.[83] Here indeed we find ourselves in a domain where all the consequences of the cosmic dualities show themselves with special clarity, those dualities being more or less distant images or reflections of the primary duality, that of essence and substance, of Heaven and Earth, or Purusha and Prakriti, which generates and rules all manifestation.

To return to Biblical symbolism, the animal sacrifice is fatal to Abel,[84] and the vegetable offering of Cain was not accepted;[85] he who is blessed dies, he who lives is accursed. Equilibrium is thus broken on both sides; how can it be re-established except by exchanges such that each has its part in the productions of the other? Thus it is that movement brings together time and space, being in a way a resultant of their combination, and reconciles in them the two opposed tendencies just mentioned;[86] movement itself is moreover only a series of disequilibria, but the sum of these constitutes a relative equilibrium compatible with the law of manifestation or of ‘becoming’, that is to say with contingent existence itself. Every exchange between beings subject to spatial and temporal conditions is in effect a movement, or rather a combination of two inverse and reciprocal movements, which harmonize and compensate one another; in this case equilibrium is realized directly by virtue of the fact that this compensation exists.[87] The alternating movement of the exchanges may impinge on the three domains, spiritual (or pure intellectual), psychic, and corporeal, corresponding to the ‘three worlds’: the exchange of principles, of symbols, and of offerings — such is the triple foundation, in the true traditional history of terrestrial humanity, on which rests the mystery of pacts, alliances, and benedictions, basically equivalent to the sharing out of the ‘spiritual influences’ at work in our world; but these last considerations cannot be dwelt on, for they obviously belong to a normal state of affairs from which we are now very far removed in all respects, a state of which the modern world as such is in truth no more than the simple and direct negation.[88]