English Summary/英文概要： So long as man has thought, so long as memory has remembered, rites, verses, incantations have existed; rituals devised to bring hidden plentitudes into the open.

“Worlds pass effortlessly into worlds,” as it was written in the Vedas, the books of knowledge, the oldest verses of which may represent a far older poetic gospel, a language antedating the Sanskrit of the Vedas, a meter wrought not by reason, but yoked to words through the vibrato of the undisclosed.

What was born into things, what was snared among things, required only knowledge on its long journey through the ancient night to break free from the catastrophic cycle of birth and death. Thinking, “digging and digging” as it is written in the Rig Veda, until the spiral of consciousness, aware of its spiraling, sank, sank into itself, in spirit, down to its origins, aloft in the Vedic wind of liturgy and verse, where spirit met spirit, which was before being was, in the place where spirit was with spirit in spirit.

So long as man has thought, it was those “sunken in their secret inner spaces,” as the Rig Veda states, who tried and tried to think, and who did think, “to cleave the darkness, until it gave off its own light,” in their boat wending heavenward over the beck of hymn and song.

The struggle for knowledge and for its prosody, worship, remained for millennia an ether for its devotees, a sovereign realm consigning matter to resignation.

Folk belief regards the Vedas as a selection the Rishis or poet-seers chose from a far larger codex compiling an abundance of historical descriptions. They did so with the clairvoyance of those able to “glean the book of being in non-being,” to glimpse the centuries of twilight and the darkness that would succeed them. A bequest from the age of intuition to the age of logic, of reason, and of blindness.

Judaism and Hellenism: both are bound to the word, in both, the word occupies the place assumed by spirit in the teachings of the Veda. For the Rishis, the word was a mere surrogate. It was meter, the euphony of words, their the symmetry of their form and purpose, that led to inspiration, to rapture, to redemption. For them, the art of expression was simply a means of glimpsing what knowledge does not know. This is no less true for the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries – whose spirit was the font of Platonic and Pythagorean wisdom – and they may well have been vestiges of the teachings of the Vedas. Even Democritus of Abdera, when he wished to know, tore out his eyes; down to the mid- nineteenth century, those who looked past themselves in pursuit of knowledge, in the hopes of expressing their ideal, were looked upon as poor fools.