{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

[Opening remarks missing]

... want to stress one point, gentlemen: that the power of a name given for the first time is the deepest reason for the incest rules. That the way we live is from the high moments of first seeing something to the commonplace, to seeing people repeatedly. The honeymoon is an expression of this fact that the routines of life must not come without some passion, some high day. In the German language, the word for wedding is "high time," which means that the time is exceptionally sub- -- sublimated, and it's like a water tank put up with pressure. From there -- the -- the life can then run down, as a clock would. Well, this means, gentlemen, that it is not only that "Sister" cannot precede "Sweetheart" because it is a different name. That wouldn't make -- wouldn't be important. But that the name given for the first time must be experienced by the lovers. The great thing is that somebody who had no name, you see, now receives a name. This is the -- like the discovery of America. Obviously any first-generation man who lands at the Statue of Liberty loves this country much more emphatically than a man whose fourth generation -- goes to Dartmouth College. He's lukewarm. He's accustomed to this. It's routine. He knows all {-- gone} soft.

So this first-generation spirit, gentlemen, of the pioneer, of which we talk here so much in this country -- pioneer spirit -- is exactly what was introduced into the marriage of the tribe. It was a pioneering experience. And as you well know, to pioneer is to have -- twice the intensity of the man who does something from routine. This is the general concept of the pioneer, which you must keep. In this country, it is easy to discover the pioneer spirit -- at the frontier. But you rarely know that anything in life has to pass through these two phases of being first called, for the first time, and then because of the greatness of the discovery, being made permanent and stabilizing gratitude for the greatness and the high point of this experience. This is the deepest reason why the girl cannot come from a too-familiar group.

If you want to understand the tribe, compared to modern industry, modern industry produces factories. You believe that factories constitute together modern industry. That's your fiction, your illusion. Fifty factories do not make industry. Because, as you well know, every day factories must go out of business and others must come in when the ways of production change. You learn in Tuck School that factories, to get -- statistically comprehended, build up industry. Not a word of truth in that. Industry is that principle which creates factories and dismisses and dismantles factories. Boom, bust. Ghost towns. How do you explain ghost towns? They have been factories. They are -- all gone out of exist-

ence. That doesn't change the fact that we live by industry. Because the industry, when it is worthwhile, there creates a factory, brings down a factory. And -- you see, it must withdraw its support and out goes the factory. You can never explain modern production by thinking, as you are accustomed to think, from the atom. When Mr. {Debohr} wanted to explain the atom, he had to go to the solar system, and had to -- to design, as you may have heard, a system of planets circulating, rotating inside the atom. So it -- is it quite impossible ever to explain the whole out of its parts, gentlemen. You can never understand the tribe if you start from marriage, simply, and say, "All the married couples together form the tribe." And the same way, if you have a thousand factories -- General Motors, and Ford, and General Electric -- you still haven't industry, because industry is production of the basis of science. And wherever science leads you to a new discovery of electricity, or of oil, there industry goes. And accordingly older pla- -- centers of production go out of business. And new sprang up.

Now that's exactly what the tribe does with families. It is giving up decadent families and it is founding new families. And it is mending families. How does it do this, gentlemen? The superiority of the tribe over the family, as the principle of the life of primitive man, of primordial man, I should say, is found in the law of adoption. From the very first day of life -- as we have surgery, as people try to mend wounds of the body, of a single person wounded in battle, as you find that the earliest tribes, of course, tried to save a valiant warrior, so that he shouldn't bleed to death -- in the same sense, a marriage is cured by adoption. Adoption is as old as the spirit of the tribe, and that means, as old as marriage. That's very strange. It isn't that the Hollywood stars have invented adoption because of their waistline. That's an old story. Kings, and nobility, and rich men have always needed heirs to continue. To find somebody who would continue the family was something that should -- had to be done artificially in cases when it hadn't happened physically.

So it is very strange to behold, gentlemen, that the possibility of adoption shows you how the power of the tribe to name somebody as the child of somebody else reveals the stupendous capacity of the tribal organization. It could fill lacunae in the physical world. It could say of somebody that he now was to be recognized as the son of somebody else -- though there was no physical tie. And why -- how could he do it? By initiating this one in the same form as -- in -- at the tribal meeting other such things were done, in the great ecstatic dance on the tribal green. I think that from this rule of adoption, you may be able to think out for yourself the -- my right to claim that the tribe explains the families. The families do not explain the tribe. The factory does not explain the -- the industry, but industry explains every one workshop of -- that exists, or that gives up the spirit. This is very important for you because the modern man is so -- so completely particularized that he really thinks you can -- you can create the world out of sun

and moon. But you can only understand sun and moon if there is a sky and a world and at -- at large. You cannot build up the universe by putting it together. This is however the fantastic undertaking of most modern men. So they never get anywhere.

You see this is very interesting by an industry -- from the point of view of the unemployed. As long as you try to understand industry as the sum of factories, you have no interest in the unemployed. And that was the case in this country down through the Depression, as you know. But if you understand industry, then you understand that unemployment is a part of the industrial process. And it is the most important part in which you recognize it's the functioning of the industrial process. The unemployed belong to the whole of industry, although they do not belong into any one part of industry.

Now the same is true, gentlemen, of the overpopulation in the tribe. They are also unemployed. They are also people who can't get married. The tribe suffers either from no children -- that's cured by adoption -- or a {tribe -- it } suffers from overcrowding. The problem of unemployment, gentlemen, is as old as the tribe -- as mankind on this earth. It isn't an invention of our days. Only the stupidity, the folly, with which the 19th century has dealt with unemployment -- the economic theory which you learn, which omits the problem of unemployment, the so-called capitalistic theory which you learn -- that is fantastically stupid. Now the tribe wasn't that stupid. But it was tragically hit by an -- the unemployment problem. It saw it, but it couldn't solve it, as little as the single nation can solve it. Luxembourg cannot solve its unemployment problem. Guatemala cannot solve its unemployment problem. Unemployment forces a change of the frontiers of the world, all the time. If you have 10 million people unemployed in Italy, then the United States must write the Marshall Plan. It's a very poor way of {dealing} the unemployment problem, but we should let these 10 million Italians come in here. We don't do this. But we have to do something, so at least we pay them some money. The dole. Because the unemployment is that motor, gentlemen, that transcends the existing political organization on the globe. Now the tribe is an organization of people who actually can meet. And we said that the numbers of the tribe move between 500 and 5,000. When you get to higher units, you get the United Nations, as you know. The five tribes here in this -- in upper New York state. That was an attempt to go beyond the physical measure of supporting for three days and three nights, or for a week, and the orgies of the tribe, 5,000 people. Well, you can't feed more, you see, within primitive times. Therefore you can't have a tribal organization that exceeds these 5,000 people. So you get to this -- this theory of five -- five united tribes. As you know, at this country that has been the biggest entity ever created without the white man's interference. Deep reason, because the tribe is stymied when the people cannot be locally vaccinated with the ecstatic experience of having one ancestor

in the spirit, of worshiping one -- dead hero, of looking up to the same totem poles, of receiving the same tattoos on their body, you see. All these things have to be performed physically, there in the presence of the ancestral spirit. So that's the limit.

Now what did the tribe with -- do with the su- -- with the -- with the surplus? Gentlemen, the history of mankind is that of an eternal stream of people creating new tribes, and new tribes. These people, who had to leave the tribe in various ways in many times -- regions were called "wolves," -- wolves. You have perhaps read in the paper that the -- Nazis tried to -- or are said to have tried to organize werewolves. The werewolf. Who has heard this -- this term in 1945? Well, this is an interesting word, {betwe-} -- because the word be- -- because the word -- the term "wer," -- w-e-r is the same as Latin, tir. And it means "man." A wolf is -- the werewolf is a man turned wolf. That is, a man -- an unemployed. And by and large, we have treated in this country, in -- during the 19th century, in the capitalistic countries in Europe the same way, the unemployed as werewolves. They had no place to go. They had no -- and when they were poor, as you know. They didn't even the vote, in England, for example. Because they were poor. So they couldn't even express their economic needs by the political machinery. You see, so were -- they were not members of the tribe, of the country, of the state.

So you see this is all present-day history. The way you treat today the unemployed of the world, not just of the Americans, but the unemployed, shows whether you have a vision of the -- of that one world. All these people who sign up for One World, {Mr. Stride} or something to me are utterly foolish. If they are -- but if I see an American boy bring in one foreigner, he does more for the organization of one world than with all the subscriptions to these fantastic abstract newspapers on One World. Because he accepts the fact that one unemployed is stateless, is asocial. He's not integrated into society. It's a very serious problem -- proposition, gentlemen, produced every day.

Now in the ancient days, we shall see that this changed later, these people set out to found another tribe. And that's why we get these perhaps hundred thousand or more tribes, poured out. If you come to think that from the Bering Strait, the people who tran- -- who came over from Asia, have spread out through the whole of this American continent. And that we have here several thousand languages spoken. You can -- must begin to think not of the individual tribe, but of the eternal stream by which tribes were produced. Tribes were produced by this surplus so that every tribe is again the matrix of other tribes, through the werewolves, through those who were cut off.

That's the real story, gentlemen, the history of the tribes. It's a great story, because it didn't come to an end until the whole world was filled with people.

You never think how this was done. Well, it is one story. These tribal languages, gentlemen, have been invented by human genius. Usually in a dialectical fashion, because the Indo-Europeans say "pater" and "mater." The Semites say "abu." That is, they put the vowel before the "b" and the Romans and the Germans put the word in "father" and "pater" the vowel after the "p." But it is the same word. You must think that the tribes couldn't have invented these languages without the constant irritation and stimulation from do -- going one better, for distinguishing themself from each other. I know where found this even mentioned in the literature. That's why the literature always strikes -- strikes me as being so unmodern, so static. People describe primitive man: here's one, and there's one. That's not the story of mankind. Mankind was perfectly aware of the unity of the human race, from the very beginning. Marriage proves it. Memory proves it. What we have seen, they were unable with the help of tattoos to reach a greater perspective than seven generations. You remember what we said about this time { }.

Now the full stream of historical life was, of course, more than seven generations. It goes now on for 6,000 years, 7,000 years. By and large, that's my guess. That perhaps all this started 7000 B.C. or 6000 B.C. The history of mankind is very short, gentlemen. All what you hear is all nonsense. There is no million years, or 500,000 years of human history. It's a very short story. People who don't believe in the spirit always replace the spirit by millions of years. That's { } -- would escape -- they say, "It came to pass in 500 million of years, which -- that shows more probable." Gentlemen, it's even more improbable that anything reasonable should happen in 500 million years than in 7,000. But all this is mythology. It's just childish. The ancients -- the Egyptians did the same. They had -- also had -- had for their Egypt 500,000 years back. But we know when it started. It started exactly the year 2782. And the tribal history then, before the empires settled down in a different manner, may be traced, I would say to 6000 B.C. -- 7000 B.C. But we have no proof of anything older, as what human-speaking, humanorganized mankind goes. That's, of course, in contradiction to all these cheap evolutionary schemes, which have never applied the first experiences about human speech, how we see languages develop. After all, we have these languages to this day. We can -- we can poke into them. There are 4,927 languages spoken in Africa to this day. There they are. They are not from eternity. And they all are mutually dependent. They all have been developed by something which you must know is very important: by contrast imitation. Imitation by contrast.

When you get black shirts in Italy, gentlemen, that was fascism, as you may have heard. Mr. Mussolini introduced black shirts, because he had no soap. Then you get silver shirts in America and brown shirts in Germany. Now what is a brown shirt and a silver shirt? That is an imitation by contrast. You understand what that is? You have to have the shirt, but it has to have another color. This is

one of the most frequent political recipes for multiplication. The -- political order, gentlemen, at any one time demands from everybody to do exactly the same. So the -- we have the FBI, and the counterintelligence, and other people have the secret police. And we boast that we have not the G- -- the GPU in -- of Russia. Well, we have something similar, gentlemen: an imitation by contrast. And if Mr. McCarthy had his way, we would have exactly the same. But it would, of course, be called, you see, the defense of liberty. That's imitation by contrast. You can call it DOL, you see, and it's still the GPU. DOL meaning "defense of liberty," you see.

So gentlemen -- this is one of the first things the political departments -- science -- the departments of political science should begin to teach you: how the -- in any one era you get 50 different nations, and they all do exactly the same. But they cannot confess that do exactly the same. So you see, what is brown for one is black for the other. But the black and the brown is absolutely indifferent, compared to the problem of the shirt.

Now that's what the tribes did. You find identity of purpose in the -- every tribal system in the world. But you find nuances. You find in some tribes, as I told you, that the man has to go to bed when the ch- -- his son is born so that he suffers with the others. In other tribes, people say, "We won't do this," just as the Germans will not eat an omelet-souffl‚, because it's French, you see. And vice versa. But they eat the same. They live on eggs and chicken, both nations.

So all -- all tribalism, nationalism, I mean all over the globe, is always beset of course by vanity and jealousy, and by the great fear of becoming superfluous. So every tribe had to prove its own inevitability that you couldn't dispense with, you see. And that, of course, is for any group leader a great insurance against unemployment, that he proves that he -- people can't do without {him}.

So imitation by contrast, gentlemen, is the nerve of tribalism. There are two limitations to the individual tribe. Size, 5,000 is of course an arbitrary number, but not quite. You find it still in Plato's laws. The citizens- -- -ry of Plato's best state is exactly 5,040 citizens. Very strange. But obviously he caught on to my class.

And the second is the limitation in the time. If you have only tattoos and migrating groups, and you have no written -- you see, therefore you can't have a library carried with you, and no stones of inscriptions, because you move on -- then you cannot have a memory that extends over seven generations. So gentlemen, you get between the various tribes, as the growing point of mankind in those primordial days, the so-called hero. The hero is a man who starts a new tribe. That's, I think, the simplest definition of a hero. Very important.

You hear much of heroism today, and -- and heroes are revived today in many ways, strange ways. But the founding fathers, they come nearest. What did -- had -- did George Washington have to do compared to Samuel Hancock? Who was the bankrupt man? Not Samuel Hancock, it was the other -- Samuel Adams, in -- Massachusetts. You had a rich man, George Washington, a gentlemen, who had served in the British Army with great distinction, under Sir Pepperell. And here was George Washington. He didn't need to become an American. He had all the honors he could wish for from George III. And here you get Samuel Adams, I think it's Samuel Adams -- is it Sam Adams? -- who was bankrupt and had to try to keep out of -- of jail for his debts. George Washington is the hero in the ancient sense of the tribe and Samuel Adams is not, because he has nothing to translate from the old society into the new, except something minus, except some shipwreck. He is a, you see, the { } of the old order { } Samuel Adams. The riffraff, the rabble of the Revolution, gentlemen, in this country could never have built up the United States. That's why the Federalists had to do it. The founding fathers of this country are people who had something to lose.

A hero is a man -- now, would you bear with me for a very strange word which I use for good reason. Because it's a theological term which has lost its strength in your imagination. I want to give it this strength again. It's a simple secular process of transubstantiation. You may know that we say at the Communion supper of the Lord that bread and wine are transubstantiated into the body and the blood of Christ. This is nothing superstitious, but Christ had, of course, to do something which every tribesman could understand. I mean, Christianity is -- Christ didn't come into the world through His contemporaries. He came into the world to all the people who had lived from 7000 B.C. to His own day, you must understand. That is His mission. That is -- means to be the Messiah. Jesus was not interested in His contemporaries. He treated them very superciliously and contemptuously. But He was interested in all the tribes, all the cities, all the empires over the whole world. Since you do not understand it, you do not understand Christianity, and you do not understand transubstantiation.

But every hero had to transubstantiate his former allegiance to an old tribe into the founding qualities of the beginner of a new tribe. He is -- how would you call such a -- what's the term for such link that is at the same time, you see, the heir of one group and the ancestor of anther group? That is a hero.

You see, this is a very strange situation, because any -- you can understand it more than any European, because your ancestors have come in the same way to this country. They had to transubstantiate their marrow, the marrow of their existence as Germans, as Britishers, as Irish, into this existence here as Americans, whether you know it or not. And whether they knew it or not. Having lived 20 years, 30 years in another world, they come here, you see, and here they are only

known for what they are here. Nobody asks any questions what they have been elsewhere. But they have been elsewhere. You see. And that has made America. This constant transubstantiation of heredity into ancestry: this is what America is. You are this, gentlemen. You must understand the old tribal world better than anybody else. Because this is transubstantiation. A substance is transformed from an end into a beginning. We all -- you always speak of your heritage. There is no American heritage. There is only this heritage of transubstantiation, which is between the old and the new world, which is not American, properly speaking, but is this secret of bringing into this country, you see, something that is not of this country. A Nisei in this country is not simply an American, but somebody who has transubstantiated his virtues of a samurai, or whatever it is at home, into an American. And this is much more, gentlemen.

You should never fall for this cheap Americanism. Your heritage is the -- again this great factory of Americans called the pioneer spirit, called the melting pot, however you call it. It is a process. Melting pot makes it very clear: a crucible into which forms are thrown and the substance is transubstantiated. Can you see this? That is the heroic phase of the creating of a new order of society. It is heroic.

Gentlemen, the word "hero" I must try to free from all sentimentality, from all pep talk. It is a very sober, scientific statement, just as in chemistry when you define any compound. A hero is somebody who binds together two generations without showing one generation in evidence, without mentioning the other generation. The beginner of a group cannot mention the past without the weakening the future. And this is the hero. A hero is a two-generation man forced to act as though he was a one-generation man. This is a very important definition, gentlemen. This makes you understand that heroism is with us all the time, wherever a man is forced to be silent about his former allegiance, because his associates know nothing about it, you see. They don't care. If the president of the Dante Society of Florence, when he comes to this country, he cannot talk here to Americans about the, you see, his {Dante -- being} the president of the Dante Society in Florence, you see. Doesn't help him. He has to start from scratch. And -- the deep feeling about this in this country that you have -- should have sold shoelaces on the curbstone at -- Brooklyn Bridge before you can become an American, which only says, "Don't mention anything that has gone on before."

But gentlemen, that doesn't mean that it hasn't gone on before. We -- you must learn to be free in two ways. You must be free not to mention the past of your family in -- out of America. And yet to be proud of it. This is the combination. Your people -- the people here are not interested in what the family did at home -- that you were an illegitimate child of David Bruce, king of Scotland. But you must have this power of using all this heritage, and throw it into this melt-

ing pot here. Can you see this point of a hero? The heroes, gentlemen, of the different tribes are the dynamism of the history of primordial man. The wolves in the eyes of the old tribe are the heroes in the eyes of the new tribe. For the old tribe, the story is, they go into the jungle and they disappear. And for the new tribe, they come from nowhere and there they begin. That's what all the fairy tales are talking about. All the fairy tales, as you know, speak of the prince who comes out of the jungle. He's a bear, he's a -- he's a wolf, he's something, you see, some animal. And suddenly he's a prince. Well, there are many rivulets, and brooks, and contributaries who have formed these fairy tales. But the main point of the fairy tale is that the hero begins from scratch. Nobody knows where he comes from.

But he is somebody already when he comes. He's full of power, full of pep, and he knows exactly what he has to do. He has to found a new tribe. And how does he know it? Because he has to create a counter-language, a new language. All this is so obvious to anybody who looks on -- { } that you -- I always wonder that it is never mentioned. As I said, it's all today a description of differences. But it is never the story of this -- what I like to call, gentlemen, the one great stream of the tribes. The tribes formed one great stream pouring out over this globe exactly like the great rivers. In exactly the same manner. You can only explain it as a tremendous surge. We know of the birds who go to Florida, as you know, nesting and then come -- go back north incredible distances. The North -- the eels traveling in the ocean, from the North Sea down to the Med- -- Caribbean. Well, man is -- is strange, certainly very strange. From the very first day we find him moving from one corner of the earth to the opposite. You'll find the Australians now to be living in Patagonia. Incredible! They separated as the -- Firelanders south of Argentina -- separated at a time from the Australian primitives when they had no words, no demonstratives, no pronouns. We can see this in the language. The language is identical in its roots with regard to nouns and with regard to numerals. But the word for "this" and "that" hadn't yet been created in the maternal language, so the Patagonians, you see, didn't. Well, there was a peaceful emigration. No new -- completely new tribe had to be created because it was so far away. This same group in Fireland, which today still can be recognized as Australian would had -- had to create a totally new language in Australia itself, because they would have been too close, you see. They couldn't have had the passion, the ecstasy, the emphasis without your own {marks}, and without your own totems, and without your own terms, so to speak.

The closer by, the more had the tribes to be differentiated. You find today in this country tribes very close -- neighborly tribes speaking a totally different language. And you find on the other hand relationships between languages over long distances. Because the more far away the werewolf could get, the founder of the next tribe, the less it was, you see, vital to change the equipment of the

tribe. You had to be -- you always had to be more original at home, you see. All -- every family cramps one's style, as you know.

There was a nice article the other day, "My family cramps my style." It does. It's very easy to represent your family when nobody else, no other member of the family is present, you see. Then you are all for the Millers. But when all the Millers are together, you try to get out. I hope you do. You seem -- look rather uncertain. Wie? He travels so much he never sees the Millers anyway. Isn't that true?

(Not quite.)

So I think we have here found the secret of thousands of years of human life. And of course you can understand this tribal life in some corners of the globe is even at this moment going on, although it's ebbing. We have no other example, and that the -- the number of languages spoken in Europe has doubled -- over the last 50 years. The literary languages of Europe have doubled. That is, the tendency to revive life through tribalism is coming back with a vengeance. The Brit- -- in Brittany they speak Breton, in Welsh they -- Wales they speak -- Walesian again, and all -- Gaelic, and on it goes. It's fantastic. And the oldest civilizations of the globe, the Europeans, try to regain the power of creating languages.

They may not succeed, but I mention it to show you how serious this desire is to go tribal today, to revive the or- -- most original power of man to speak. In this country, it's all in the opposite direction. We still are here in a -- in a melting pot where a man can get away with murder and he calls it basic English. Well, you believe in Esperanto, and all this nonsense, gentlemen. If you want to live, destroy Esperanto. If you want to make money, then have Esperanto. It's good for commerce, but it's not good for the soul. Because language makes you speak with conviction, and Esperanto makes you speak without conviction.

Why is that so, gentlemen? Let me now come back to one more feature of the tribe. The tribe organizes existence in this hierarchy: names given to each other. The character of a name in a language is that it is given mutually. The hero is suffering, and that makes him heroic. That he calls, and he isn't called back. I mean, a hero is a man who can stand the solitude, you see, of the lack of mutuality, because he begins. That is the -- the -- that is why the hero is always a tragic hero, because the hero has not yet a group that calls him by his name. He makes a name for himself, you see. He's the first name. The namer, you may -- call him. A hero is somebody who can name others, but they have not known, you see, anything before he comes -- in the picture. He has lost those people who named him -- his parents, his friends, his relatives, you see. He is the unnamed.

This is important, gentlemen, that names are mutual. Then you get words. They are from mouth to mouth. They are between the dead and the living, as we have seen in the tribe. That is, the chorus of the living who dance at the burying green and the mask of the medicine man, who represents the dead, speak to each other: certain songs, certain magical songs. They are words. I mean, there you must mention the sun and the moon, and the stars, and the earth, and the feed, and the hens. That is, you get words for all the things which express your actions. And finally you get the priest and the lawyer. You get a -- case. You get a murder. You get a crime in the tribe. You have to go to the altar, as we said, and expiate an act of impiety. Whenever you get -- go to court, gentlemen, for wrong -- righting a wrong, you have to define your terms. And this is, therefore, the world of concepts, of definitions, definitions or concepts. That is, gentlemen, the world of the wrong-doing, the world when we step -- step -- stop living is the world of concepts, the world when we doubt that we know what is right. Then we have to try to define our terms, when we suspect each other. When we are confide-ent in each other, we can speak words, because we understand each other. We don't have to define our terms. And when we are in love with each other, and in great passion, and give orders to each other, then we call each other and the spirit that moves us by their proper names mutually.

Names are above your heads, gentlemen. In the -- I could put your name here -- here, up here. That would be the right place. Not here, where you always wear it. It should be up here. Any man has his halo on top of him, and that is the meaning of the halo of the saint. That it is surrounding him, you see, that he appears in this name as the spirit -- as a body embodying the spirit that is -- contained in this name. When a grandchild has the name of his ancestor -- of his grandfather, this name is his halo, originally.

We'll see in Greece that this played a great part in the whole myth of Greece -- that comes later. The names then, gentlemen, are mutual. They are the currents of force that regulate our behavior as sister and brother, as husband and wife. I talked to you about this division of the sanctuary inside the home, you see, and the warpath and the free paths of the orgies of the tribe there. Where boy meets girl. This is done by names, by calling out.

You have learned the opposite. When I talk to you, you come from a world of schools -- scholastic upbringing. You are all medieval minds of 1100 to me. Very dark ages you belong to. You don't believe in scholasticism, you think, and in medievalism; but you define your terms. Now, a man who defines his terms is a very poor scholastic. He's a -- he's a man who has not the spirit anymore to move mutually by invocation of a name. And he has lost the power of immediate talk. And he must define his terms. And he's a lame duck. If a man gets up in a lecture and says, "Let me define my terms," I leave the room. I'm not interested. Why

should -- he can -- I can define my terms. He can define his terms. We have nothing to say to each other. That's good for lawyers, in court. But you believe this. You -- you are impressed by this man's logic, and cleverness, and smartness, because he defines his terms. A man who defines his terms in your -- in your presence says that he suspects you, and that you have nothing to say to each other. It's ridiculous. But that is the alpha and omega of a -- of Dartmouth student, to ask another person to define his terms. Can I do it? I have to use words for the definition. Well, I may have to -- this is one term which I have to define, but all the other words by which I define the terms, gentlemen, that is again just the confidential treasure of the English language on which you have to rely. If it comes -- all comes down that you can define one term, you may -- be able to define two terms. You can never possibly define all your terms without depending on your -- my being the professor, and you being the student; or one being the classmate of the other fellow. That is, by calling each other, you see, names, either host- -- in a hostile sense, or in a friendly sense. And by first being able to speak to each other. This precedes everything.

So throw this out, this business of plea- -- playing the smart one and then getting up on a -- before these innocent voters and saying, "Let me define my terms." There is a famous book in the -- literature of the last 30 years written by a Mr. Alfred Whitehead. Alfred Whitehead was a charming English gentleman who happened to be a mathematician down to his 65th year. In the 65th year, he was called to Harvard, because the spirit was dying there, or was already dead. And he was -- I -- he was a great soul and a very inspiring man. And so he came there. But he wrote a terrible book, which begins with 28 definitions. Because he was a mathematician, he -- that was what he had learned to do. He was a great man despite the 28 definitions, but never believe that he was a great man because of the 28 definitions, because nobody in the -- whole, wide world can keep in mind the 28 definitions. He cannot. Nobody can -- can, you see, understand after having read five pages of 28 definitions. Show me the man who can keep in mind 28 -- first-time definitions, of which you have never heard before. He pleased himself with this fiction. It didn't matter. As I said, he was a very great man despite this fact. But if you open this book of Whitehead, you can study the tomfoolery of the academic world. It is utter foolishness to believe that a man can define 28 terms.

You can define this in mathematics, because that is the science were you want to get away from words and names, you see, because you do not wish to talk to people in mathematics. So don't take mathematics, as you all do, as the argument, or as the -- the right direction for the polit- -- politics of society. The social sciences in this country are so im- -- immeasurably childish, because they all have as their ideal the want -- they want to determine their terms. You cannot determine their terms as long as you speak to -- of people who can talk back, because

then they have to speak your language and you have to speak their language.

Like the social worker who came to a woman and said, "I understand your -- your husband is a drunkard. And we have made him a case in our study. And I -- let me then ask you how he behaves when he's drunk."

And so the woman gave the only sensible answer. She said, "My husband is not a drunkard. Is yours? Is yours?" And by -- thereby she had the social scientist -- worker, you see, completely baffled.

So this lady had defined a drunkard, but she had never looked at her own husband in the light of this definition. She called him "Charlie," and so did this woman her -- think of her own little -- of her own husband as a -- as "Johnny," who would perhaps drink sometimes, but he wasn't a drunkard. And if only all the cases in this country would talk back to the social workers, we would get rid of all the social workers.

They are all defining their terms, and all killing people. Because anybody who is defined by your terms, you see, is no longer -- has no longer the right to his -- the name in which he wants to be spoken to in his own right. When a man is a drunkard, he has -- cease to be John Smith. Don't you see this? All these case workers kill! They decline to use that name by which this man is known among his friends. They label him. This is very serious, gentlemen. That's how you destroy democracy at this moment. The psychologists destroy the society, by taking upon themselves the impertinence of describing this man as a case. The man has the right to be called by his name, and by no other thing. Come to know him and find out what his -- what -- how he is, how he behaves. But don't label him. But -- what do you do? You label them all: "feeble-minded," "idiots." The social workers are the feeble-minded.

This is very serious, gentlemen. And you must understand that in a primordial society, this cruelty might be applied to the prisoner of war. He was a case, you see, the man who had no name in the tribe. And you -- we produce in this modern society again these nameless people, which led finally to the concentration camp. The modern concentration camp is the triumph of the case-worker, of the man or the woman who takes it upon himself to label a man with a name which they do not dare to speak to him in his presence. That's the -- when you define your terms. That's the result.

So this is very serious business, gentlemen. You can define your terms at the altar, in a law-court. When a man is a murderer, you have to prove it. And finally, you see, that sticks, and he is a murderer. But that's serious business before

you can call a man a thief. He has to be -- stand condemned. There is all the rigamarole of justice, and law, and defense, and complaint before you are allowed to label a man a thief. Isn't that true?

But we are today in our modern social sciences imitating the law courts, because you have learned that a concept is better -- and a definition -- than a word. And you have also learned names are shadows, powerless. To give you an example of the modern power of a name, gentlemen, let me give you one simple example. When a worker is called by his employer for a readjustment of his wages, he simply has today to say that he is a member of the CIO. The name CIO is a magic which forbids the employer to talk to him directly. That is the whole problem of collective bargaining. The whole problem of collective bargaining is: this man, William Ryan, is still William Ryan for his play -- playmates, and for his wife. But he is not William Ryan to Mr. Wilson when he directs General Motors. Then he has to be treated as a unionized worker. And Mr. Ryan -- Wilson can a hundred times call him "William Ryan." With regard to leave, and wages, and benefits, he, William Ryan, says, "I'm sorry, I'm organized." And that means that the workers have a different name when they speak with their employer. And they demand from the employer that he speak to them through the union. This is the power of a name. But then we are told that names are just -- what is in a name? That names are just fictions. It is incredible. Names are the greatest powers in the world today. Think of McCarthy, or Malenkov, or Stalin. These are the real powers that govern the world. And then you are told in this college that names are superstitions.

Names are the only political powers we have. There are no others. Lincoln and Washington -- what else do we have in this country? Racetracks.

We have very few names by which we can direct our steps. Don't destroy them by your superciliousness. As -- as students you are superior to names. You are not superior to names at all. Only when you destroy the sacred names you will fall for the diabolical names. Then you will worship Mr. Freud, as you all do. But isn't that a name? What do you understand of psychoanalysis? But you say, "Freud's a great man." Because you must have a great name. So you put the -- the anti-names, instead of the sacred names -- or Marx, or whatever it is, whom you choose. I don't care which debunker you take. All these debunkers are only taken up by you in the power of their names. You don't understand them. You can't define their terms. You believe it. Because you need names. All -- we all do.

If you could only see, gentlemen: the tribal language creates three levels of speech. One is names, and they are always mutual. You can only be a son because somebody else is a father. And the greatness of this relation is that, you see, when you say "Sister," she calls you "Brother," you see. This is tremendous be-

cause it means, gentlemen, names have a compelling force. Compelling. They are compulsory. You cannot enter this re- -- magic relation, you see, without putting yourself inside of it. You yourself are named as you name. Do you see it -- when -- once you begin to see this, you know that all this talk against magic, or sorcery, or witchcraft is all nonsense. We all live by sorcery. Only we live by white witchcraft, by genuine witchcraft. Your mother uses witchcraft when she calls you "Johnny." And she receives back her -- your name, "Mother." That's witchcraft in the sense that it is compulsory. Can you deny -- can you withhold the term -- the name "Mother" from your mother? You cannot. You have to use it. How does she produce it? Just because she acts as your mother and treats you as her son. Very simple.

Gentlemen, life is compelling. But it is mutually compelled. White witchcraft means that the person who uses it puts himself under the magic, too. It means the difference between, gentlemen, the propagation of the faith by a missionary who dies in Japan like Saba- -- what was his name? The gro- -- great missionary to the Japanese? The Jesuit?

(Francis Xavier?)

Wie?

(St. Francis Xavier?)

Francis Kavi -- Kavia, wasn't it?

(Xavier?)

How do you spell it?

(X-a-v-i-e-r.)

Yes. How do you pronounce that?

(Ex-savior.)

Yes, quite. Or you are an advertising man who laughs at his own advertising, who uses magic for the other people, but says, "I would never buy this product," you see. The difference in life is only, gentlemen, between black sorcery and white sorcery. The black sorcerer says the others must believe. I don't. The white sorcerer says, "I believe, too. And I {act accordingly}."

You don't believe that you are under the spell, gentlemen. But the old tribes

believed in spells. They were -- had spellbinders. We still have this word "spellbinder," which reminds you, gentlemen, that in this term "spellbinder," you reach to the first layer of human history. The whole tribe lived by spells. These spells were spoken in plainchant. That is, in a language which had not yet distinguished between singing and speaking. When you go to a m- -- Catholic mass or when you go to the synagogue and hear -- how do you call the -- the man who leads the prayer in the synagogue?

(Cantor.)

Wie?

(Cantor.)

The cantor. They speak like primitive men. The Church, as you know, is an institution that exists since the beginning of time, so obviously the Catholic priest must speak in the tone of the first man. And so he has this half-song, what we call plainchant. And there you have still the power of the spell; because as he speaks, he wants to be spoken to.

So we have, to this day, gentlemen, a much more normal relation to this problem of primitive man, as you admit. When this was purified in Christianity, in the Church, when the priest took over plainchant from the tribal sorcerer, or medicine man, as we call him, and when the masks could disappear, these tremendous masks -- I have here -- I want to { } some picture of it. Who hasn't -- has not seen tribals masks? Is there anybody? Well, it's known to you. They are very elaborate as you know, and they are the -- the great technique of the tribe. Well, when this disappeared, gentlemen, the orgies of the tribe still were kept, as you all know, in the May celebrations, around the Maypole. To this day, gentlemen, everything connected to the first of May in Europe, for example, in the Walpurgis Nacht in the Faust by Goethe, is tribal ritual. The same is true of the witchcraft here of the Indians, of course, you see. It is tribal ritual of the orgies still there, the masks at Carnival, that is, the ludicrous aspect, you see, of the tribe, in this sense, preserved. Because mankind always preserves the serious life of a former phase as a plaything. When our children play, you usually can be sure that it is an old ritual that is observed. All children's plays -- Hide and Seek, and Heaven and Hell, and how all these names -- these games go contain usually very old rituals. Legal ritual, or -- or others. Well, the dances around the Maypole were in England, for example, the remnants of the pre-Christian order of the tribes. And this has to be understood, gentlemen, that the positive character of tribalism is -- is really retained in the doctrine of transubstantiation in the Mass and in the plainchant of the priest. And that the byproducts of the old tribal life went into the modern carnival with its masks, and its {lauras}, and its dances.

One last thing, gentlemen. Where a person has his heart, he has also his genius. The great artistic achievements of the tribes were the masks. They are insuperable. They are of a beauty. They can compete with any Madonna of Michelangelo, or Raphael. They are masks. They are animals. They are wasps or butterflies, or lions, or dragons. But they are insuperable. Every group of society, gentlemen, has as much genius as any other. And the greatness of the art of the tribe is there. The topic -- the topics do not interest us so much. We do not find that people should express their highest aspirations by going beaver. But the mask of the beaver, there is no greater artist today than there was in those days when they made masks, you see, showing eagles or -- or beavers. That is, what you must recover, recuperate, gentlemen, in your -- inside yourself is the reverence for the genius of these primordial men. They had just as much genius as we have, or perhaps more, because they have after all created us, and we have still to give proof that we can create anything. Here we are, thanks to them. Now who is going to say to you, "Thanks to you, I'm here."

So that has -- remains to be seen what we are going to perform. But these people have performed. Therefore they had great genius. And they show it in the incredible beauty and perfection of their masks. Would you kindly take this, gentlemen, as a great clue to the history of art? What has to be artistically given changes according to the period. But the way it is mastered has exactly the same fortissimo, the same excellency then as today. Otherwise, these people would be of no interest to us. But what they have done, they have done to perfection.

The -- the order of any one tribe, gentlemen, and the order of the eternal stream can then be shown in a kind of figure. If you get the tomb, or the totem pole, then the whole tribe would try to direct itself towards this past. The eyes of the tribe are directed backward. Anything that is a disturbance has to be expiated on the altar. That is, the future of the tribe -- look at the -- at the eyes of the Mexicans marching there to their doom, so to speak, in the, you see -- to their -- on the mural. The eyes are, as the Bible calls it, they are held, as though they had a veil for their -- around their eyes. They cannot see into the future. They look away from the future. It is too much. They need protection. They need the ancestral spirit to direct them. Therefore anything, gentlemen, that has to do with future leads into the jungle outside the -- tribe and begins the next tribe. This is the story of the hero. That is, the tribe has as its future: inside expiation, making up by sacrifice -- what has been changed, or if the change is too much, expulsion. Excommunication. What the Church does -- when it excommunicates, gentlemen -- it has inherited from the tribe. The excommunication, the saying, "You do not belong to the community." We said that the -- on the altar you can expiate. You can adopt. That is, you can create by a spiritual act some deficiency inside. But adoption would be backward into the ancestral tradition, wouldn't it? Excommunication is its very opposite. It leads beyond the tribe. So the beyond of the

tribe, gentlemen, is really beyond its knowledge. The tribe does not look into a future. And it cannot look beyond its own boundaries. So we can't either, by the way.

This is the horizon of the tribe, as we call it, and we said that the horizon is here determined by the warpath against the enemy. And it is here on the dancing-green defined by the power to unite for initiation and marriage. Now those of you who have taken Philosophy 9 -- who has taken Philosophy 9? Is there anybody? You'll remember the cross of reality. It is exactly the problem of any political group, of course, as the family, you see, to have a past and a future, and an inner sanctuary, you see, an inner body and -- of time, and an outer -- opponent, an outer defense organism. And so, you see, the warpath is the form of the fortress of life ...

[tape interruption]

... you see, by inroads made by impure spirits, so to speak. The flame on the altar is the symbol of the light this tribe tries to in -- entertain in its midst, as an eternal flame. And here comes, of course, the old ritual which you still find in the -- in any cathedral church of an eternal lamp burning. There has to be some fire that burns all the time and devours the impurities of this -- that may, you see, extinguish the spirit. And on the dancing green, you have the center meeting ground of the tribe.

This much then is the relation, gentlemen, of a tribe to the land, to the earth as created by {God's} { }. In the main, a tribe is an organization, gentlemen, which is purely personal, purely human, which has no relation to -- Heaven on earth. In the Church, today, everything that has to do with ancestry and offspring has been taken over from the tribe. And has been purified there, as I told you, the plainchant, you see, adoption, initiation -- all these things you find in the ordination of the priest, and so on. But what there is not existing in the tribe is the decent relation to the territory on which these tribes move. The earth is an enemy. The earth is an enemy, and you also find in the tribes no interest whatsoever in astronomy. It is not true that any primordial man looked up to the stars. They did not. They looked individually, but it was not a part of their political organization. The politics of a tribe, gentlemen, are this side of astrology or astronomy. The typical tribe, gentlemen, makes people move through the darkness of the night. And neither the heaven nor the earth have more to say to them than that there are other living beings. What speaks to the tribesman is the river, the sea, the leaves, or the trees when they shake in the wind, the otter, the beaver, the lion, the eagle, the birds, the fishes -- that is, people have called the tribal organization "animistic" because man looked into the universe: life as his own. But he did not see that which did not live: stone, diamonds, gold -- all these

things had no meaning for tribesmen. They despised them. Because they do not make the nature around them akin to them. What they feel brotherhood with is the -- is the animal, the moving thing, the breathing thing, the procreating thing: the fox, and the dog, and the chicken. And all these things that -- the primitive man had already.

So gentlemen, what is called animism in anthropology -- who has heard of this term "animism"? Well, it's very common. You must think through -- it's very important. Primitive man has a -- a preference for that which is alive, like himself. And he neglects, or he can't do much with the things that are dead. This is terribly important, gentlemen, for us, the living, because as you know we today are exposed to a terrible problem. We have to dig into the earth several thousand feet to get oil. That's very dead. The stench in our cities proves to you that -- how dead it is. It's completely dead. We have coal, which is partly dead. We have stone and steel, uranium. That is, we have for the first time embarked on a venture of living really with dead material to an extent no {one} in other generations has ever dared to commit themselves to dealing with dead things that grows on surface of the earth. It's such an -- extent that even the question of its being alive doesn't exist. We shoot our pilots up into the air where they can't breathe. And we torture these people so that they are able to fly beyond sound.

Gentlemen, we are people without any relation to animism, because our main materials are inanimate. This is very important, gentlemen, because most of your heresies, most what poisons the air in -- America is this mechanization, as you call it, this idea that -- the world consists of not-living material, or that you can neglect the living element, and that you can be called "very good material" for Dartmouth College. Gentlemen, you should rise in arms and say, "I'm not material. I'm a human creature." You are not material, {as -- unless} you're cannon fodder. You aren't expendable. All these are terms that come from the inanimate character given -- by our statistics and by our techniques, you see, to the world at large. And finally we begin ourselves to believe that we are nothing but electrons. Gentlemen, you are alive, you see. Dead things cannot die. Would you take this down? We talked about it before, did we? I'm sorry to have to repeat it, because it remains true. Dead things cannot die. The greatness of the tribes {dealt} -- that they exclusively dealt with such parts of the created universe which could die. Because it is the great honor of the living that they can die. And it is the great dishonor of the dead things that they cannot die. Material cannot die. Marble doesn't die. Dust doesn't die. Sand doesn't die. You see the deader a thing, the less it can die.

The breath of the spirit, gentlemen, to use this term in its full sense, which filled these tribes with immortality for the last 9,000 years -- 7000 B.C. to 1954 A.D. -- this breath of life comes from their tremendous reverence for anything

that might die. You have -- don't have this. You think life is just a quantity. Now the tribe knew that it could be extinguished any minute. The frailty of the tribe has made these people save every ounce of inspiration, of spirit, of spell, of magic, of invocation, of religion, you see. Because they needed to fan the flame of life any one minute. If you take this -- it's more than a simile. It's a fact, gentlemen. The tribe is an institution we said to -- institute marriages. But you can also say that the tribe is an institution to fan life, to a burning flame, and to find anything living under the sun -- lions, and panthers, and leopards, and snakes, and bees, and ants, you see, and to gather them with the tribe together in one big pyre of burning fire against the powers of death, the powers of darkness. And the powers of darkness were the soil, were the sky, were all these things later worshiped, but not in the tribe. All the dead things. All the things you couldn't speak to, you couldn't charm. That's why any tribesman can charm a snake. She's alive. He will not give in before he has not, you see, dealt with a -- with a serpent. He can do this.

As you know, the rattlesnake is a very favorite in -- in Harlem County, Kentucky, for the white miners there. They show their innocence by allowing the snake to bite them. When they die, their -- their own wife can say, "Well, he was just guilty. It's -- justice be done." That's very strange, gentlemen. Why is that so? Because the -- the tribe does not draw any frontier between man and other life. All life is on the side of the tribe. All non-life is outside the tribe. The jungle is outside, the animals are inside.

So gentlemen, the -- the boundaries of the science, of the philosophy, of the theology of the tribe just run differently from yours. You distinguish between men and the world. That is not the idea of the primordial man. Primordial man says, "Where there's life, it's part of my existence." That's why he could see in these totems, you see, something utterly natural, utterly normal -- these totems, these --. And when there is no life, I run away, I move on. Corpses, and so on, of the enemy, you see, have to be gotten out of the way and this probably also explains this tremendous zest of the tribes to fill the whole globe, to find new sources of life, and not to worship any wall, or any Statue of Liberty, or any place. They could not sanctify space as we do, gentlemen, with your stratospheric nonsense, as your younger brothers do. That would have been too dead for them. If I listen to these stratospheric talks over the radio I'm frightened, because that's the generation that prefers dead things to living things. That's terrible. It's completely dead, everything I -- I gather in the -- I always buy off and on some magazine on stratospheric nonsense. I'm always frightened by the complete deadness for what's going on there. It's nothing, you see. Perhaps some crime, somebody is -- doing -- going to be murdered. That's the only thing that makes the blood coil.

But in the tribe gentlemen, it is very different. Anything alive is revered. Anything dead is feared.

Thank you.