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Full download Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System Young file pdf all chapter on 2024
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Forever Prisoners
ii
Forever Prisoner s
How the United States Made the World’s
Largest Immigrant Detention System
Elliott Young
1
iv
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For
Reiko, Zulema, and Ryo
And all the migrants who strive to be free
vi
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
1. Dawn of Immigrant Incarceration: Chinese and Other Aliens at
McNeil Island Prison 23
2. Nathan Cohen, the Man without a Country 54
3. Japanese Peruvian Enemy Aliens during World War II 86
4. “We Have No End”: Mariel Cuban Prisoners Rise Up 119
5. “A Particularly Serious Crime”: Mayra Machado in an Age of
Crimmigration 158
Conclusion: A Nation of Immigrant Prisons 185
Notes 197
Bibliography 231
Index 249
vi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Innovation Law Lab for getting me involved in such work. My hat goes off
to the many immigration attorneys across the country and in the United
Kingdom with whom I have collaborated on asylum cases. They are doing
amazing work under the most difficult conditions.
Intellectually, I have been sustained by the Tepoztlán Institute for
Transnational History of the Americas, an institute I co-founded with
Pamela Voekel in 2004, which brings together scholars from across the
Americas in a small town outside of Mexico City each summer. I have
learned and drawn inspiration from the amazing array of scholars, artists,
and activists who have participated. The collective that runs the institute
has become my alt-family. I want to particularly thank collectivistas Josie
Saldaña, David Kazanjian, Alejandra Puerto, Marisa Belausteguigoitia,
Micol Seigel, David Sartorius, Jorge Giovannetti, Anna Moore, and Shane
Dillingham for their comradeship and ideas. I want to also thank my
colleagues in the History department at Lewis & Clark College who have
read various chapters of this book in our colloquium, and especially Mo
Healy and Andy Bernstein for their comments in an intensive summer
workshop. Law scholars and professors Stephen Manning, Juliet Stumpf,
and Aliza Kaplan were my legal dream team who helped me get the legal
details right for the final chapter. Over the years I have also been lucky
to have amazing Lewis & Clark College student research assistants who
helped me do archival research in Washington, DC; Mexico City; Seattle;
San Francisco; and New York City: Kate Wackett, Megan Scott-Busenbark,
Alexander Castanes, Lauren Krumholz, Maya Litauer Chan, Will Sarvis,
Maggie Costello, and Sofia Knutson.
This kind of project could not have happened without the scholarship
and mentorship from many scholars of migration (too many to name),
including the following: Ana Raquel Minian, Madeline Hsu, Mae Ngai,
Erika Lee, Maria Cristina Garcia, Maddalena Marrinari, Hidetaka Hirota,
Torrie Hester, Naomi Paik, Adam Goodman, and Alexander Stephens. Mad
props to Kelly Lytle-Hernández who invited me to participate in a special
issue on the Carceral West, resulting in the article, “Caging Immigrants at
McNeil Island Federal Prison, 1880–1940,” Pacific Historical Review (2019)
88 (1): 48–85, which eventually formed the basis for the first chapter in the
book. Through her activism in Los Angeles, her rigorous scholarship, and
her keen editorial eye, Kelly is a model for scholar-activists.
History does not get written without the archivists, so thank you to those
at the National Archives in Washington, DC, and Seattle, the Washington
State archives, the Atlanta History Center, and the Canadian Archives who
made this book possible. Thanks to the two anonymous reviewers who gave
me detailed and intense feedback that pushed me to hone my argument.
[x] Acknowledgments
And to Susan Ferber at Oxford University Press, who understood what
I was trying to do with this book and helped me to make it the best version
that it could be.
I especially want to recognize the people shared their personal and
traumatic stories with me. Elsa Kudo, Seeichi and Angelica Higashide’s
daughter, who was herself locked up in a detention camp in Texas as a child,
told me about her and her family’s experiences. Tami Kudo Harnish, Elsa’s
daughter, also generously commented on the chapter about her family.
Gary Leshaw, who provided legal defense for Mariel Cubans at Atlanta
Penitentiary, and Sally Sandige, who coordinated the Coalition to Support
Cuban Detainees, both granted me interviews and allowed me access to
dozens of boxes of documents that provided me with a unique under-
standing of the detainees’ own views on their incarceration. Finally, Mayra
Machado has been a constant source of inspiration for me. Seeing how
she organized her own legal defense, coordinated solidarity from around
the country, and supported her children, all from inside an ICE detention
center in rural Louisiana, was a lesson in persistence. She has lost all of
her legal battles thus far, but she refuses to give up. Big shout out to Isabel
Medina and Benjamin Osorio, attorneys, who both took on Mayra’s case
pro bono and who continue to pursue justice for her.
What often gets forgotten is that research is an embodied enterprise,
and one needs food and lodging while digging through dusty boxes in the
archive. In Atlanta, Johnny Hillyer provided shelter, food, and a makeshift
photography studio, and J. T. Way stayed up with me until the wee hours
one Saturday night in a clandestine scanning operation at Georgia State. In
Washington, DC, David Sartorius runs the best secret residency program
out of his apartment (take note Mellon Foundation) and gave my students
and me a place to crash.
Finally, Reiko Hillyer continues to be my best interlocutor and editor for
this book, and so many other life projects. Ryo Havana, our daughter, has
watched me for the first four years of her life pound away at the keyboard
working on this book. She recently asked me if my story would have lots of
pictures. When I said it would have only a few, she predicted it would be a
boring book. Let’s hope other readers are more generous.
Acknowledgments [ xi ]
xi
A B B R E V I AT I O N S
I’m not a bad person. I shouldn’t be here. . . . I’m not a threat to society and I’m not going
to hurt anybody. I should be taking care of my children.
—Mayra Machado, from a Louisiana immigrant detention center, 2016
Machado had an unpaid traffic fine for another failure to yield charge.
Although she offered to pay the ticket immediately with a credit card, the
officer arrested her and had her car towed away. In 2019, Machado told me
her story from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention
facility in Louisiana.1
On the side of the road, Machado’s three children witnessed their
mother being handcuffed and arrested, an image that still haunts them
to this day. This was not the first time they had heard of family members
being snatched by police. At the station, Machado knew many of the police
officers because they had visited the ophthalmologist where she worked.
She figured she would pay the fine and be home by evening. However, an
old, bald officer said, “Bring her over here,” and he demanded to know
where she was born and her immigration status. The officer flashed a 287(g)
badge that authorized him as an ICE agent. After checking the immigration
status of her mother, sister, and grandmother, the officer said he was is-
suing an immigration hold based on her undocumented status and felony
convictions for a writing a hot check a decade earlier. Machado was born in
El Salvador and brought by her mother to this country when she was five
years old. Her three children were born in the United States. At that point
Machado was told she was being taken to Fort Smith detention center in
Arkansas where she would be issued a bond and released. Instead, Machado
was shackled and sent to an ICE detention center in rural Louisiana where
she was ordered deported to a country she left as a child and where she
knew nobody.2 For the relatively minor crime of writing a bad check when
she was a teenager, Machado was punished with banishment and separa-
tion from her children. Even for a criminal justice system rife with extreme
sentences, this was an absurdly disproportionate outcome. And yet, for
immigrants such extremities are the norm.
This book begins with Machado’s story because it illustrates how tough-
on-crime laws intersected with harsh immigration policies in the last
three decades to make millions of immigrants vulnerable to deportation
based on criminal acts, even minor ones, that had been committed years
or decades earlier. Machado’s history also shows how much had changed
between 2004, when she was first arrested on felony charges for writing
the fraudulent checks, and 2015, when her immigration status became the
central issue in what was a routine traffic stop. The integration of local po-
lice with immigration enforcement in the 2010s cast a much wider net,
entrapping millions of long-term immigrant residents in the jaws of an
enhanced deportation machine. By the end of Obama’s second term, he
had earned the dubious distinction of deporting over three million people,
more immigrants than any other president in history. In doing so, the
From the late nineteenth century, when the US government held hundreds
of Chinese in federal prisons pending deportation, to the early twentieth
century, when it caged hundreds of thousands of immigrants in insane
asylums, to World War I and World War II, when the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) declared tens of thousands of foreigners “enemy aliens”
and locked them up in Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) camps
in Texas and New Mexico, and through the 1980s detention of over 125,000
Cuban and almost 23,000 Haitian refugees, the incarceration of foreigners
nationally has ebbed and flowed.3 Although far more immigrants are being
held in prison today than at any other time in US history, earlier moments
of immigrant incarceration echo present-day patterns. In fact, the legal
debates about incarcerating immigrants indefinitely pending deportation
stretches all the way back to the late 1880s, and the rates of institutional-
ization (all forms of incarceration) in the early to mid-twentieth century
rival those of the twenty-first century.
Until very recently, the study of incarcerated immigrants has fallen in
the crack between prison and migration studies. Migration scholars focus
on movement of people across borders and the communities they establish
in their adopted countries. Prison scholarship has mostly ignored the ques-
tion of migrant incarceration, focusing instead on the mass imprisonment
of largely Black and Brown citizens.4 Although the issue of migrant incar-
ceration is touched upon in both fields, there is little sustained effort to
describe, measure, or account for their imprisonment, especially before the
1980s. Recent books focusing on the rise of immigrant and refugee deten-
tion since the 1970s help to flesh out the latest period of mass immigrant
Introduction [3]
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
In the Chaldean Book of Numbers, its location is designated in
numerals, and in the cipher Rosicrucian manuscript, left by Count St.
Germain, it is fully described. In the Assyrian Tablets, it is rendered
gan-dunyas. “Behold,” say the אלהיםEloim of Genesis, “the man is
become as one of us.” The Eloim may be accepted in one sense for
gods or powers, and taken in another one for the Aleim, or priests;
the hierophants initiated into the good and the evil of this world; for
there was a college of priests called the Aleim, while the head of
their caste, or the chief of the hierophants, was known as Java
Aleim. Instead of becoming a neophyte, and gradually obtaining his
esoteric knowledge through a regular initiation, an Adam, or man,
uses his intuitional faculties, and, prompted by the Serpent—Woman
and matter—tastes of the Tree of Knowledge—the esoteric or secret
doctrine—unlawfully. The priests of Hercules, or Mel-Karth, the
“Lord” of the Eden, all wore “coats of skin.” The text says: “And Java
Aleim, made for Adam and his wife כתנות עור, chitonuth our.” The first
Hebrew word, chitun, is the Greek χιτων, chiton. It became a
Slavonic word by adoption from the Bible, and means a coat, an
upper garment.
Though containing the same substratum of esoteric truth as every
early cosmogony, the Hebrew Scripture wears on its face the marks
of its double origin. Its Genesis is purely a reminiscence of the
Babylonian captivity. The names of places, men, and even objects,
can be traced from the original text to the Chaldeans and the
Akkadians, the progenitors and Aryan instructors of the former. It is
strongly contested that the Akkad tribes of Chaldea, Babylonia, and
Assyria were in any way cognate with the Brahmans, of Hindustan;
but there are more proofs in favor of this opinion than otherwise. The
Shemite, or Assyrian, ought, perchance, to have been called the
Turanian, and the Mongolians have been denominated Scyths. But if
the Akkadians ever existed otherwise than in the imagination of
some philologists and ethnologists, they certainly would never have
been a Turanian tribe, as some Assyriologists have striven to make
us believe. They were simply emigrants on their way to Asia Minor
from India, the cradle of humanity, and their sacerdotal adepts tarried
to civilize and initiate a barbarian people. Halevy proved the fallacy
of the Turanian mania in regard to the Akkadian people, whose very
name has been changed a dozen times already; and other scientists
have proved that the Babylonian civilization was neither born nor
developed in that country. It was imported from India, and the
importers were Brahmanical Hindus.
It is the opinion of Professor A. Wilder, that if the Assyrians had
been called Turanians and the Mongolians Scyths, then, in such a
case the wars of Iran and Turan, Zohak and Jemshid, or Yima, would
have been fairly comprehended as the struggle of the old Persians
against the endeavors of the Assyrian satraps to conquer them,
which ended in the overthrow of Nineveh; “the spider weaving her
web in the palace of Afrasiab.”[857]
“The Turanian of Prof. Müller and his school,” adds our
correspondent, “was evidently the savage and nomadic Caucasian,
out of whom the Hamite or Æthiopian builders come; then the
Shemites—perhaps a hybrid of Hamite and Aryan; and lastly the
Aryan—Median, Persian, Hindu; and later, the Gothic and Slavic
peoples of Europe. He supposes the Celt to have been a hybrid,
analogous to the Assyrians—between the Aryan invaders of Europe
and the Iberic (probably Æthiopic) population of Europe.” In such a
case he must admit the possibility of our assertion that the
Akkadians were a tribe of the earliest Hindus. Now, whether they
were Brahmans, from the Brahmanic planisphere proper (40° north
latitude), or from India (Hindustan), or, again, from the India of
Central Asia, we will leave to philologists of future ages to decide.
An opinion which with us amounts to certitude, demonstrated by
an inductive method of our own, which we are afraid will be but little
appreciated by the orthodox methods of modern science, is based
on what will appear to the latter merely circumstantial evidence. For
years we have repeatedly noticed that the same esoteric truths were
expressed in identical symbols and allegories in countries between
which there had never been traced any historical affiliation. We have
found the Jewish Kabala and the Bible repeating the Babylonian
“myths,”[858] and the Oriental and Chaldean allegories, given in form
and substance in the oldest manuscripts of the Siamese Talapoin
(monks), and in the popular but oldest traditions of Ceylon.
In the latter place we have an old and valued acquaintance whom
we have also met in other parts of the globe, a Pali scholar, and a
native Cingalese, who has in his possession a curious palm leaf, to
which, by chemical processes, a timeproof durability has been given,
and an enormous conch, or rather one-half of a conch—for it has
been split in two. On the leaf we saw the representation of a giant of
Ceylonian antiquity and fame, blind, and pulling down—with his
outstretched arms, which are embracing the four central pillars of a
pagoda—the whole temple on a crowd of armed enemies. His hair is
long and reaches nearly to the ground. We were informed by the
possessor of this curious relic, that the blind giant was “Somona, the
Little;” so called in contradistinction with Somona-Kadom, the
Siamese saviour. Moreover, the Pali legend, in its important
particulars, corresponds with that of the biblical Samson.
The shell bore upon its pearly surface a pictorial engraving,
divided in two compartments, and the workmanship was far more
artistic, as to conception and execution, than the crucifixes and other
religious trinkets carved out of the same material in our days, at Jaffa
and Jerusalem. In the first panel is represented Siva, with all his
Hindu attributes, sacrificing his son—whether the “only-begotten,” or
one of many, we never stopped to inquire. The victim is laid on a
funeral pile, and the father is hovering in the air over him, with an
uplifted weapon ready to strike; but the god’s face is turned toward a
jungle in which a rhinoceros has deeply buried its horn in a huge tree
and is unable to extricate it. The adjoining panel, or division,
represents the same rhinoceros on the pile with the weapon plunged
in its side, and the intended victim—Siva’s son—free, and helping
the god to kindle the fire upon the sacrificial altar.
Now, we have but to remember that Siva and the Palentinian Baal,
or Moloch, and Saturn are identical; that Abraham is held until the
present day by the Mahometan Arabs as Saturn in the Kaaba;[859]
that Abraham and Israel were names of Saturn;[860] and that
Sanchoniathon tells us that Saturn offered his only-begotten son as
a sacrifice to his father Ouranos, and even circumcised himself and
forced all his household and allies to do the same,[861] to trace
unerringly the biblical myth to its source. But this source is neither
Phœnician, nor Chaldean; it is purely Indian, and the original of it
may be found in the Maha-Bharata. But, whether Brahmanical or
Buddhistical, it must certainly be much older than the Jewish
Pentateuch, as compiled by Ezra after the Babylonian captivity, and
revised by the Rabbis of the Great Synagogue.
Therefore, we are bold enough to maintain our assertion against
the opinion of many men of learning, whom, nevertheless, we
consider far more learned than ourselves. Scientific induction is one
thing, and knowledge of facts, however unscientific they may seem
at first, is another. But science has discovered enough to inform us
that Sanscrit originals, of Nepaul, were translated by Buddhistic
missionaries into nearly every Asiatic language. Likewise Pali
manuscripts were translated into Siamese, and carried to Burmah
and Siam; it is easy, therefore, to account for the same religious
legends and myths circulating in all these countries. But Manetho
tells us also of Pali shepherds who emigrated westward; and when
we find some of the oldest Ceylonic traditions in the Chaldean
Kabala and Jewish Bible, we must think that either Chaldeans or
Babylonians had been in Ceylon or India, or the ancient Pali had the
same traditions as the Akkadians, whose origin is so uncertain.
Suppose even Rawlinson to be right, and that the Akkadians did
come from Armenia, he did not trace them farther back. As the field
is now opened for any kind of hypothesis, we submit that this tribe
might as well have come to Armenia from beyond the Indus,
following their way in the direction of the Caspian Sea—a part which
was also India, once upon a time—and from thence to the Euxine.
Or they might have come originally from Ceylon by the same way. It
has been found impossible to follow, with any degree of certitude,
the wanderings of these nomadic Aryan tribes; hence we are left to
judge from inference, and by comparing their esoteric myths.
Abraham himself, for all our scientists can know, might have been
one of these Pali shepherds who emigrated West. He is shown to
have gone with his father, Terah, from “Ur of the Chaldees;” and Sir
H. Rawlinson found the Phœnician city of Martu or Marathos
mentioned in an inscription at Ur, and shows it to signify the West.
If their language seems in one sense to oppose their identity with
the Brahmans of Hindustan, yet there are other reasons which make
good our claims that the biblical allegories of Genesis are entirely
due to these nomadic tribes. Their name Ak-ad, is of the same class
as Ad-Am, Ha-va,[862] or Ed-En—“perhaps,” says Dr. Wilder,
“meaning son of Ad, like the sons of Ad in ancient Arabia. In
Assyrian, Ak is creator and Ad-ad is Ad, the father.” In Aramean Ad
also means one, and Ad-ad the only-one; and in the Kabala Ad-am
is the only-begotten, the first emanation of the unseen Creator. Adon
was the “Lord” god of Syria and the consort of Adar-gat, or Aster-‘t,’
the Syrian goddess, who was Venus, Isis, Istar, or Mylitta, etc.; and
each of these was “mother of all living” the Magna Mater.
Thus, while the first, second, and third chapters of Genesis are but
disfigured imitations of other cosmogonies, the fourth chapter,
beginning at the sixteenth verse, and the fifth chapter to the end—
give purely historical facts; though the latter were never correctly
interpreted. They are taken, word for word, from the secret Book of
Numbers, of the Great Oriental Kabala. From the birth of Enoch, the
appropriated first parent of modern Freemasonry, begins the
genealogy of the so-called Turanian, Aryan, and Semitic families, if
such they be correctly. Every woman is an euhemerized land or city;
every man and patriarch a race, a branch, or a subdivision of a race.
The wives of Lamech give the key to the riddle which some good
scholar might easily master, even without studying the esoteric
sciences. “And Ad-ah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell
in tents, and of such as have cattle,” nomadic Aryan race; “ ... and
his brother was Jubal; he was the father of all such as handle the
harp and organ; ... and Zillah bare Tubal-Cain, an instructor of every
artificer in brass and iron,” etc. Every word has a significance; but it
is no revelation. It is simply a compilation of the most historical facts,
although history is too perplexed upon this point to know how to
claim them. It is from the Euxine to Kashmere, and beyond that we
must search for the cradle of mankind and the sons of Ad-ah; and
leave the particular garden of Ed-en on the Euphrates to the college
of the weird astrologers and magi, the Aleim.[863] No wonder that the
Northern seer, Swedenborg, advises people to search for the lost
word among the hierophants of Tartary, China, and Thibet; for it is
there, and only there now, although we find it inscribed on the
monuments of the oldest Egyptian dynasties.
The grandiose poetry of the four Vedas; the Books of Hermes; the
Chaldean Book of Numbers; the Nazarene Codex; the Kabala of the
Tanaïm; the Sepher Jezira; the Book of Wisdom, of Schlomah
(Solomon); the secret treatise on Muhta and Badha,[864] attributed
by the Buddhist kabalists to Kapila, the founder of the Sankhya
system; the Brahmanas;[865] the Stan-gyour,[866] of the Thibetans;
all these volumes have the same groundwork. Varying but in
allegories they teach the same secret doctrine which, when once
thoroughly eliminated, will prove to be the Ultima Thulè of true
philosophy, and disclose what is this lost word.
It is useless to expect scientists to find in these works anything of
interest except that which is in direct relation to either philology or
comparative mythology. Even Max Müller, as soon as he refers to
the mysticism and metaphysical philosophy scattered through the old
Sanscrit literature, sees in it naught but “theological absurdities” and
“fantastic nonsense.”
Speaking of the Brahmanas, all full of mysterious, therefore, as a
matter of course, absurd, meanings, we find him saying: “The
greater portion of them is simply twaddle, and what is worse,
theological twaddle. No person who is not acquainted beforehand
with “the place which the Brahmanas fill in the history of the Indian
mind, could read more than ten pages without being disgusted.”[867]
We do not wonder at the severe criticism of this erudite scientist.
Without a clew to the real meaning of this “twaddle” of religious
conceptions, how can they judge of the esoteric by the exoteric? We
find an answer in another of the highly-interesting lectures of the
German savant: “No Jew, no Roman, no Brahman ever thought of
converting people to his own national form of worship. Religion was
looked upon as private or national property. It was to be guarded
against strangers. The most sacred names of the gods, the prayers
by which their favor could be gained, were kept secret. No religion
was more exclusive than that of the Brahmans.”[868]
Therefore, when we find scholars who imagine, because they
have learned the meaning of a few exoteric rites from a srotriya, a
Brahman priest initiated in the sacrificial mysteries, that they are
capable of interpreting all the symbols, and have sifted the Hindu
religions, we cannot help admiring the completeness of their
scientific delusions. The more so, since we find Max Müller himself
asserting that since “a Brahman was born—nay, twice-born, and
could not be made, not even the lowest caste, that of the Sudras,
would open its ranks to a stranger.” How much less likely that he
would allow that stranger to unveil to the world his most sacred
religious Mysteries, the secret of which has been guarded so
jealousy from profanation throughout untold ages.
No; our scientists do not—nay, cannot understand correctly the old
Hindu literature, any more than an atheist or materialist is able to
appreciate at their just value the feelings of a seer, a mystic, whose
whole life is given to contemplation. They have a perfect right to
soothe themselves with the sweet lullaby of their self-admiration, and
the just consciousness of their great learning, but none at all to lead
the world into their own error, by making it believe that they have
solved the last problem of ancient thought in literature, whether
Sanscrit or any other; that there lies not behind the external
“twaddle” far more than was ever dreamed of by our modern exact
philosophy; or that above and beyond the correct rendering of
Sanscrit words and sentences there is no deeper thought, intelligible
to some of the descendants of those who veiled it in the morning
hours of earth’s day, if they are not to the profane reader.
We do not feel in the least astonished that a materialist, and even
an orthodox Christian, is unable to read either the old Brahmanical
works or their progeny, the Kabala, the Codex of Bardesanes, or the
Jewish Scripture without disgust at their immodesty and apparent
lack of what the uninitiated reader is pleased to call “common
sense.” But if we can hardly blame them for such a feeling,
especially in the case of the Hebrew, and even the Greek and Latin
literature, and are quite ready to agree with Professor Fiske that “it is
a mark of wisdom to be dissatisfied with imperfect evidence;” on the
other hand we have a right to expect that they should recognize that
it is no less a mark of honesty to confess one’s ignorance in cases
where there are two sides to the question, and in the solution of
which the scientist may as easily blunder as any ignoramus. When
we find Professor Draper, in his definition of periods in the
Intellectual Development of Europe, classifying the time from the
days of Socrates, the precursor and teacher of Plato, to Karneades,
as “the age of faith;” and that from Philo to the destruction of the
Neo-platonic schools by Justinian—the “age of decrepitude,” we may
be allowed to infer that the learned professor knows as little about
the real tendency of Greek philosophy and the Attic schools as he
understood the true character of Giordano Bruno. So when we see
one of the best of Sanscrit scholars stating on his own unsupported
authority that the “greater portion of the Brahmanas is simply
theological twaddle,” we deeply regret to think that Professor Müller
must be far better acquainted with the old Sanscrit verbs and nouns
than with Sanscrit thought; and that a scholar so uniformly disposed
to do justice to the religions and the men of old should so effectually
play into the hands of Christian theologians. “What is the use of
Sanscrit?” exclaims Jacquemont, who alone has made more false
statements about the East than all the Orientalists put together. At
such a rate there would be none indeed. If we are to exchange one
corpse for another, then we may as well dissect the dead letter of the
Jewish Bible as that of the Vedas. He who is not intuitionally vivified
by the religious spirit of old, will never see beyond the exoteric
“twaddle.”
When first we read that “in the cavity of the cranium of
Macroposopos—the Long-Face—lies hidden the aërial Wisdom
which nowhere is opened; and it is not discovered, and not opened;”
or again, that “the nose of the ‘ancient of days’ is Life in every part;”
we are inclined to regard it as the incoherent ravings of a lunatic.
And when, moreover, we are apprized by the Codex Nazaræus that
“she, the Spiritus,” invites her son Karabtanos, “who is frantic and
without judgment,” to an unnatural crime with his own mother, we are
pretty well disposed to throw the book aside in disgust. But is this
only meaningless trash, expressed in rude and even obscene
language? No more can it be judged by external appearance than
the sexual symbols of the Egyptian and Hindu religions, or the
coarse frankness of expression of the “holy” Bible itself. No more
than the allegory of Eve and the tempting serpent of Eden. The ever-
insinuating, restless spirit, when once it “falls into matter,” tempts
Eve, or Hava, which bodily represents chaotic matter “frantic and
without judgment.” For matter, Karabtanos, is the son of Spirit, or the
Spiritus of the Nazarenes, the Sophia-Achamoth, and the latter is the
daughter of the pure, intellectual spirit, the divine breath. When
science shall have effectually demonstrated to us the origin of
matter, and proved the fallacy of the occultists’ and old philosophers
who held (as their descendants now hold) that matter is but one of
the correlations of spirit, then will the world of skeptics have a right to
reject the old Wisdom, or throw the charge of obscenity in the teeth
of the old religions.