32
SAVING DISCIPLINE
This article appeared in La Flèche No. 19, March 15, 1934. This appears to be the last time that Naglowska had much energy for writing in her little newspaper, which would have only one more issue, in January of 1935. Issue No. 19 contained advertising for her book The Hanging Mystery, which had just come out. It seems safe to say that Naglowska’s health was already in decline.
Man wishes to be free. It is thus that he conceives of his happiness.
But society must limit him in every way, for, it is only at this cost that it can cause order to reign among the crowds and obtain an efficacious result for its many and various efforts, joined into a harmonious whole.
The more men are evolved (the older they are), the less painfully they bend themselves to the severe law of discipline, for on the one hand they understand the deep sense of the collective work and the relative insignificance of isolated individual work, and, on the other, having widened their interior horizons, they are driven by less violent appetites.
The superior man accepts the law without rebelling, the inferior man undergoes it with distaste.
But the superior man is rare, and the others are innumerable; because of that constraints exist, and slavery, draped in various disguises, will last until the day when a means shall be found to open everyone’s interior eye, which permits one to see the Universe as it really is.
Opening this eye is the task of religions. Science adds to Man’s knowledge, but it does not widen his capacities. It does not enrich him in his interior possibilities. It leaves him as he is and in doing so ensures his failure.
For to not grow interiorly is equivalent to dying and to rapid rotting.
Science enriches Man exteriorly, but it impoverishes him within himself.
But religion augments people.
By its hierarchical organization . . . for there is no true religion without its pyramidal social organization . . . it places the persons of proven value in the superior ranks of the human collectivity, in such a way that the ones below, seeing the light of those above, receive it effectively, thanks to the magical virtue of the admiration that real perfection gives rise to in those who have not attained it.
Exterior brightness provokes jealousy and base envy. True interior light emits rays whose charm is fecund, undeniable, and uncontested. One accepts it without humiliation, because it does not humiliate. It enriches him who accepts it and creates in him new possibilities.
The man on the bottom looks to the man at the top with confidence and hope, and the latter gives to him the vital force that he is lacking. Then the human cone is formed and the Divine Cone becomes wedded to it as the hair on a head. From above to below Wisdom then descends, while from below to above the Work rises . . . the work of cerebral thought, the work of the heart, the work of the sex . . . the construction of human arms.
But retain this: no one shall build the human cone on the debris of the current destruction, if it has not been given to him from on high to do this, if God himself (Life) does not speak fully through his mouth.
The human brain, whatever its force, will never know, if the divine Sun should not inspire it, in what manner to act, nor how to place upon the ruins of the collapsed building . . . the structure of the Roman Church . . . the foundation stones of the new construction: for without the help of the Sun the brain will never understand that the first requirement is the faith that animates and envisions and then the struggle for the realization at any cost.
The realization of what?
The realization of freedom in slavery, of interior liberty in rigorous exterior discipline.
“The Spirit breathes in you because it is free; but you will regulate each of your acts in conformity with the general Law, because you belong to all.”
The Great Moses had said: “Be ye the slaves of God; it is thus that ye shall become the masters of this world.”*15
Later, Christ proclaimed: “Renounce yourselves completely and so ye shall gain heavenly joy.”†3
Today, the Invisible says: “May the brain of Man accept slavery, for it has no other destiny; may his heart love the Universe and God, his life, for it is his only plenitude; may his sex realize its magic, for victory passes under the Arch, but the Arch symbolizes the Yoke if it is not that of the Triumph.”
The new building of the human cone must begin with sex, because before ordering the new hierarchies, capable of reestablishing order among the crowds and of judiciously harmonizing the common work, the men and the women must purify the root themselves, the feminine and masculine sexes.
Now, no purification is possible in darkness and disorder.
O! Blind and deaf slaves, who do not hear the Voice of the Invisible!
You will curse the Eternal, if the joyous feast of the Golden Mass takes place without you, but you will not put yourselves on the way to get there in time!
You call for the chaotic liberty of the wild animal, and you do not understand that Man’s privilege is precisely discipline!
The entry door to the City of free citizens is small and narrow. One enters by bending the spine. But on the public square the Arch of Triumph is taller than all the houses, and the freed warrior comes there on horseback, for his intrepid courser has been mastered.*16
The intrepid courser symbolizes sex, and discipline must begin there, at the root of the human being. The man who is undisciplined in his sex is no more than an animal and all his pretensions are ridiculous.
The freed warrior is, on the other hand, a disciplined man who has understood the benefits of slavery. He guards his rank in the initiatic hierarchy, he obeys his chiefs without arguing, and passes the orders to the inferiors with no explanation.
But the wild, irremediable question “why?”—what is that about?
Do you want to remain savages and participate in the inevitable regression through the degradations of the lower animal species? Do you want the fall into the shadows, from whence the return is slow and painful?
A choice is offered to you: to obey or not. But if you do not obey, your loss is irremediable.
We have just begun the new line of the Triangle, the line of the Ascension.
All those who stay behind, all those who do not wish to accept the obligatory saving discipline are, by this very fact, thrown into the exterior shadows. The joy of the Golden Mass will not be for them!