Does the great oak of a thousand years not love its roots, however humble they may be? Does the gleaming tower of a thousand stories not rest upon its foundation, however unsightly it may be? All living things generate and are generated. The World itself generates and is generated: Heaven is its father and Earth its mother, and a new World will one day be its issue. Growing out from the roots, every new generation is further and further down from the last, yet is nourished by the essence that drips from on high. It branches and branches again, but no matter how many times it branches, it never ceases to resemble the most Ancient God. "Day and night it flows without stopping." It bears the God's stamp wherever it goes and can never erase it, for the stamp and the God too live in its essence, and there is nothing that can erase its own essence.
In the most remote epoch, at the eternal moment when time was born, there shines forth a light of infinite brilliance, although it is shrouded in mist. But the light is so bright that it shines through the mist, and we can still see it shining today when we look upward, though it is nonetheless dimmed as a consequence of passing through the mist. This is the meaning of History. Our World is a derived World, and the same is true of all Worlds, for there are infinitely many, all of them generating and being generated at the tempo fixed by Heaven above. But with each new generation, the mist cannot help but grow thicker, and the light gets dimmer as a consequence. That is why when we today look upon the body of History, we come up inevitably upon a horizon of mist, beyond which nothing is known nor can be known. Only the dim light continues to assure us that something is there, and continues to illuminate the insides of things.
The great body of History dwells beneath the surface of all things and swims within the blood of all men. Current temples are built using the stones of former temples, current houses upon the ruins of former houses. When men these days talk about such things as 'History' they do so often with the most grievous indiscretion and impiety, for they pretend that what is here now spawned out of the incorporeal aether, they assume that there is nothing prior to Memory, nothing beyond the mist. As a result of that disastrous mode of thinking, those small men fail to comprehend History on its own ground, but twist it into something monstrous and insulting both to gods and to men: they conceive it as something floating in the void, which grew out of nothing and grows into nothing, or else, even more absurd, which does not grow at all but is dead like a stone. But the World is alive. The tendrils of regions and epochs and realms grow forth like vines. The Gods are not mere statues, they too generate and are generated.
The past is not that which "passes away"; the past is that which ascends. When the Spirit of the World ascends, it becomes a God. When it ascends, its shadow descends. The higher it ascends, the bigger and longer the shadow. When that happens, the Spirit of the World is looked up to by the descended men, who call it by the names of "Ancestor" and "God". Whence arises the custom passed down of old that is common to all stocks of men in all epochs, namely, the worship and veneration of the Ancestors as Gods in their own right. In his veneration and worship by the generations of descended men, the God completes his Godhood. If it were not so, then the God would be like a thing that is luminous yet casts no shadow, and nothing can be so absurd as that. In that they are the shadow of the God, the descended men recognize their kinship with the God, recognize that they are the body of the God that generates and is generated, and will continue to do so for ever. It is from this kinship of God and Man, of Ancestor and Descendant, that the Love of the Ancient is born.
The Sage is a lover of the Ancient--he has to be, because the Sage is nourished by what is Ancient. The Sage lives in the past, not in "what is past", but in what ascends. Like a man on a mountain, he dwells in the higher spheres. The God's breath is the wind that fills his sail, and with every step he takes he follows his God's upward path, the God's path becoming his path, and his becoming the God's. And thanks to his power, all the people in the realm follow suit, and the World ascends with him.
Being a lover of the Ancient, the Sage understands the Ages, for the Ages are his teacher. As when one first learns a musical instrument or learns to write, the Sage learns from the Ages by imitating them. All of the questions he asks his teacher are questions of History, and from the answers he receives to his questions he learns how to reconstruct the Ages. When he has attained the ability to reconstruct the Ages faithfully, then and only then may he be called a Sage and a lover of the Ancient. He commits to memory the sayings of the God, then he pronounces the sayings again and again, so regenerating History. And since his knowledge is derived from what generates and is generated in turn, it is truly bottomless. History contains reference to everything that once was and will once again be, which is the other proof of its being an infinite fount of knowledge. He knows that the teachings of all Worlds lie hidden within the immemorial annals of History, which is the indestructible corpus of invisible knowledge. The knowledge that is gained in this way is what lights the Sage's path.
When the Sage's path is illuminated thus, he walks it with the utmost confidence, for he knows it is the path the God himself once walked before him. But as he walks the path, he is also paving it for future Sages to follow and to carry on the work of the Sages. For every Sage is a link in a chain stretching infinitely into both the past and the future. Every Sage builds a bridge between 'now' and 'then'. But 'then' is just another 'now', which has its own Sage. For that reason, there is no Sage who does not follow in the footsteps of a predecessor, and likewise there is also no Sage who does not prepare the way for his successor. Every Sage must pick up what the previous Sage has left him, and what he leaves will one day be picked up by the next Sage. This is not to say that the path walked by the Sages is the same, however, for every path walked by a Sage bears the mark of that Sage's own ego and nobody else's. The Sages are not all the same, but they are all Sages. They all walk the path Heaven has written into their fates, but since their fates are theirs and nobody else's, their paths all differ, and yet for all their difference none of their paths is disjoint with the commandments of Heaven, that is, the Great Path.
All of what is called History takes place within the footprints of the Sages. When the Sages walk, their steps generate ages and epochs. But each footprint bears the imprint of the Sage's ego and is the habitat of the Sage's spirit. So, to the extent that the Sages all differ from one another, these ages are all unique, but to the extent that all the Sages are carrying out the will of Heaven (which is everywhere always the same), these ages are all the same. Hence it is not an error to say that the succession of these ages is a repetition. This is the reason for the common belief that History is a circle, though the people of this vulgar age have forgotten the true reason which we have expounded above, and simply draw comparisons between the succession of the ages and the revolution of the Heavens, the seasons, the phases of the moon, etc. One must acknowledge that the motions of these Heavenly phenomena are the works of gods and daimons who are intermediaries of the commandments of Heaven, then one will understand that, in the Worlds of Man, too, analogous gods and daimons are at work, which we call Sages. It is by the same mechanism that both the moon and empires wax and wane, both the seasons and History turn.
But the repeatability of the ages naturally depends on Sages' being able to learn what the commandments of Heaven are, apart from what is directly manifest in nature. This is a secret knowledge. Where does the Sage get this knowledge? It is just as we already said: the Sage learns from the Ages, that is, he learns from the earlier Sages, abstracting and extracting their sayings, which go back ultimately to the sayings of the God. The Light of Heaven is transmitted in a chain just like this--just like this, it is distributed to the Ages, with the Ages to the Worlds, with the Worlds to all people. History is never exhausted. Each new World is brought about in time in the Love of the Ancient, that is, in its selfsameness with the previous Worlds. But in each case this Love brings together the unchanging Light and a new substrate, which it subdues for its own sake, but without which it would lack the virility to successfully replicate itself. Nourishing the new substrate with the secret knowledge, while being nourished by its voluptuous fertility, the Sage is the author of faithful self-transmission and self-revelation. He is thus the steward of the Worlds.
In that the Love of the Ancient means the acceptance--indeed, the reflection--of what is Ancient, it also must involve a special attitude of piety. It is not merely piety for the God, for eternal Heaven, but for all the particular beings who make up the links in the chain that unites us to the God, every single one of which is a Sage. Not only does the younger Sage owe piety to the elder Sage, but we, all people, owe piety to all the Sages of all Ages and all Worlds. So it is also that we owe piety to our ancestors, who are in many cases Sages themselves. It is only in the worship of our ancestors, chief among them the Sage known as Lord Tengir, that our souls dwell upon their native ground. For of all forms of worship, it is the worship of the ancestors alone that honors the spirit of the God that is still remnant inside of us all. That spirit does not simply fall out of the sky into our hands--it is passed down to us through the chain of generation. It is handed to us with the utmost care, not because it is fragile (it is actually indestructible), but because it is subtle and thus easily misplaced, forgotten, accidentally dropped and lost. The generation that heeds the words of the Sage and exhibits Love of the Ancient handles it with care, treasuring and safeguarding it against all evil, so that it is one day passed on again. But the heedless generation regards it as cheap and commonplace, lets it get wet and muddy, applying it where it does not belong, like using a lute as firewood or cloaking a page-boy in purple silk. So the spirit is lost and the chain is broken. And when the next generation comes and looks to their fathers, by instinct expecting to receive this treasure from them, they receive nothing except maybe scraps and shards and pieces of rot. Pitiful indeed. By no fault of their own, such a generation is condemned to oblivion, for they will forget who they are and will fall out of the world. They will die in the Shadow, thanks to the impiety of their fathers' generation.
Such a thing could happen even today, now that the cult of the ancestors has been largely reduced to a mere formality, and the rituals are carried out with nothing but hollow and passionless motions by people who are without understanding of their true meaning and import. All you need to do is walk down a street--even in this glorious Capital of ours--and you will go past uncountable ancestral and clan shrines which are dusty, cracked, whose roofs are caving in, pillars eroded, icons faded, whose tripods are empty. No scent of incense lingers in the air, for the shrine is merely an antique ornament that sits on the peripheries of a colossal estate that belongs to a family that has made itself rich from trade, careerism, embezzlement or war plundering. The family's coffers have never been fuller, but the money goes not to renovating the shrine and supplying it with sacrifices, but to acquiring golden wares, to filling the cellars with wine and the pantries and ice-houses with exotic foods, to covering the maids in colorful silks. The shrine bell is cracked, but not even a silver coin will be spared to fix it. The eaves are rotten from age, but the master of the house needs a new silk-canopied carriage and his lady a new set of bejeweled trinkets. Such a thing as this is all too common in our latter age, and you who are reading my words very likely come from a house that is not all that different from what I have described. Unfortunately people like this, who are becoming more common by the day, are wholly ignorant of how grave of an impropriety this is, much more so of the disastrous consequences it could lead to.
There are some today--especially among the followers of the so-called "Prophets"--who argue we should do away with the practice of ancestor worship and tear down all the ancestral shrines in the country. And the reason they give for this proposition of theirs is that the Godhead, so they say, is best approached directly, and communion with it is diluted by passing through the interstitial figures of the Ancestors. "We worship none but the Godhead," they say, "for when compared to the infinite reality of the Godhead, nothing has any reality at all." But followers of the Prophets, I have these words for you: neglect the veneration of your ancestors to your own peril, for as soon as you do so, you shall lose the subtle treasure spoken of above, which means that you shall lose possession of your selves. You will surely disappear before the Godhead, for which you might think yourselves pious, but the spark of the Godhead that is within you, that swims in your blood and as such is surely most yours, will disappear along with you--you will have done violence to the Godhead's creation. But the true knowledge of the way of the Sages says this: that the Sage is the one who dwells constantly in his Ego. The old tales relate that the Deity came to the Ancient Tribe as an outsider and found them in a vestigial state, for they did not know who they are. They had once venerated their ancestors at a shrine in the forest, but the location of this forest and the shrine lapsed from their memory, and as one of his labors the Deity divined the location of both the forest and the shrine, conducting the Tribe there, to reacquaint themselves with who they are, to shine a light on the roots they did not even know they had forgotten--thus was their Ego reborn thanks to the help of a Sage who was already steadfast in his own Ego. It is one thing when the roots become hidden, for even then we can still feel their presence; though we don't see them, we remember they are there. It is another thing, when we have forgotten they are there, and then we are confused when we try to walk away and find some invisible force tugging us back to the same spot. But this forgetting is the beginning of the end. For it is another thing still, when after a long time of loathing what we perceive as our being cruelly chained to this spot, we lop off our own trunk with a hatchet and try to walk away. For when the trunk is so severed from its roots, both are as good as dead.
We said earlier that this World is a descended World, but because this averment on its own may incline people to the false opinion that we live in a lost, irrecoverable age, I should like to remind you all that while the Ages may recess, the principle of History--being its fundamental inexhaustibility--rejoins with the promise that the Ages can be, and indeed must be, renewed. Every death is a promise of renewal; every birth a prayer to live forever. All that goes on in the latter Ages is preparatory work for the arrival of the next Sage, for the Sages arise out of necessity, when the time is ripe, when the World is in need of them, when the life of the World seems to have exhausted itself. When madness and chaos reign on the Earth, when in every state there is a tyrant, when the resplendence of the Emperor eclipses, when wars part father from son and brother from brother, and all are devoured by the most evil calamities, both natural and manmade--then the Earth is overcome with smoke from the fiery destruction of cities and from the uncountable funeral pyres. When the World is so replete with smoke, Heaven decrees that the new Sage rises to emerge out of the mist and rekindle the Light. And the Light, rekindled, dissipates the smoke that still lingers even after the fires have burnt themselves out--so is Light restored to the World. The destruction that has been wrought up to that point, not even the Sage can undo, for what is past is past, it has become Fate, but Fate is also that singular force which ushers in the future, once it enters the hands of the Sages, the Sage Kings and Sage Emperors. A new dynasty is inaugurated. But the Love of the Ancient has still not died; to the contrary, the Love of the Ancient is the milk that nourishes the new kingdom. And this milk is drawn from the breast of overflowing, inexhaustible History. Heaven's guarantee that the Light survives the calamity is also the guarantee that the ones who perished in it do not perish in spirit, but are given a new life in the body of the new kingdom. A new dwelling-place is constructed on the Earth to house their spirit; it is called a Temple. This is what the Lady of Dawn means when she says: "If ye let the Light guide you, ye will dwell in an eternal palace which ye will yourselves construct." In just this way, the chain of selfsameness is not broken. Those who have survived the calamity and rebuild, receive the spirits of the ancestors anew. The knowledge of History, combined with the Love of the Ancient (which is the natural outcome of that knowledge), assures the new people that they will not lose sight of who they are. They receive the smoke-stained treasure, in-tact and unharmed despite being ravished in the flames of the calamity. But this ravishment is really just like the tempering of a new blade in the flames of the smith's furnace: it produces a more perfect implement.