Origin of language

You ask me today, dear and beloved listeners, that I dictate to my medium the history of the origin of language. I shall endeavor to satisfy you. You must, however, understand that it will be impossible for me, in a few lines, to treat this grave question entirely, to which another even more important one is necessarily linked: that of the origin of the human races.

May God Almighty, so benevolent toward the Spiritists, grant me the lucidity necessary to keep obscurity, confusion and, above all, all error away from my dissertation!

I enter into the matter by saying to you: Let us admit as a principle this truth: that the Creator gave to all beings of the same race a special, but sure, mode for understanding one another and for communicating among themselves. Nevertheless, that language, that mode of communication was the more restricted the more inferior the species were. It is by virtue of this truth, of this law, that savages and little-civilized tribes possess languages so poor that a number of terms used in the regions favored by civilization find there no corresponding words. And it is in obedience to that same law that the nations which progress create new expressions for new discoveries and needs.

As I said elsewhere, Humanity has already passed through three great periods: the barbarous phase, the Hebraic and pagan phase, and the Christian phase. This last will be succeeded by the great Spiritist period, whose initial foundations we lay among you.

Let us examine, then, the first phase and the beginning of the second. I shall repeat only what I have already said. The first human phase, which we may call pre-Hebraic or barbarous, dragged on slowly and for a prolonged time amid horrors and convulsions of a terrible barbarism. There man is hairy like a wild animal and, like the beasts, shelters himself in caves and in the woods. He lives on raw flesh and feeds on his fellow being, as if it were excellent game. It is the most absolute reign of anthropophagy. No society, no family! A few scattered groups here and there, living in the most complete promiscuity and always ready to devour one another: such is the picture of that cruel period. No worship, no tradition, no religious idea. Only animal needs to satisfy, that is all! Prisoner of a stupefying matter, the soul remains lukewarm and latent in its carnal prison; it can do nothing against the gross envelope that encloses it and its intelligence can move only in the recesses of a limited brain. The eye is dull, the eyelid heavy, the lip thick, the skull flattened and the language is restricted to a few guttural sounds. Nothing foretells that from that brute animal will come forth the father of the Hebraic and pagan races. Nevertheless, with time they feel the need to defend themselves against other carnivores, such as the lion and the tiger, whose terrible fangs and sharp claws easily overcame the isolated man. Meanwhile, the reign of matter and of brute force was maintained throughout that cruel phase. Seek in the man of that epoch neither sentiments, nor reason, nor language properly speaking; he merely obeys gross sensation and has but one objective: to drink, to eat and to sleep. Nothing beyond that. It may be said that the intelligent man is there in germ, but does not yet exist. However, it must be noted that, among the brutal races, some superior beings already appear, Spirits incarnated with the charge of leading Humanity to its objective and hastening the advent of the Hebraic and pagan eras. I must add that, besides these incarnated Spirits, the terrestrial globe was frequently visited by those ministers of God, whose tradition memory has consecrated under the names of angels and archangels and who, almost every day, placed themselves in contact with the superior beings, incarnated Spirits, of whom I have just spoken. The mission of some of those angels continued during a great part of the second phase, or humanitarian phase. I must add that the picture I have just sketched, of the first times of Humanity, teaches you a little to what rigorous laws the Spirits are subjected who undertake to live on planets of recent formation. Language properly speaking, like social life, only begins to have a definite character from the Hebraic and pagan era onward, during which the incarnated Spirit, always subject to matter, begins to revolt and to break some links of its heavy chain. The soul ferments and stirs in its carnal prison; by reiterated efforts it reacts energetically against the walls of the brain, whose matter it sensitizes; it improves and perfects, by constant work, the play of its faculties, developing, consequently, the physical organs; at last thought can be read in a limpid and clear gaze. We are now far from the flattened brows! It is that the soul feels itself, recognizes itself, has consciousness of itself and begins to understand that it is independent of the body. From then on it struggles ardently to free itself from the oppression of its robust rival. Man modifies himself more and more and intelligence moves more freely in a more developed brain. We note, however, that in that epoch man is still circumscribed and considered as an animal; man is the slave of man. Slavery is consecrated by the God of the Hebrews, as much as by the pagan gods; and Jehovah, just like Olympian Jupiter, asks for blood and living victims. This second phase offers curious aspects, from the philosophical point of view. I have already traced a rapid picture, which my medium will communicate to you in due time. Be that as it may, and to return to the theme under study, be assured that it was only in the epoch of the great pastoral and patriarchal periods that human language took on a regular aspect and adopted special forms and sounds. During that primitive epoch, in which Humanity freed itself from the swaddling clothes and the babbling of earliest infancy, few words sufficed for men, for whom science had not yet been born, whose needs were very restricted and whose social relations did not go beyond the door of the tents, the scope of the family and, later, the confines of the tribes. It was the epoch in which the father, the shepherd, the elder, the patriarch, in a word, dominated as absolute lord, with the right of life and death. The primitive tongue was uniform; but, as the number of shepherds grew, these, leaving in their turn the paternal tent, went to constitute new families in uninhabited regions, forming new tribes. Then the tongue used by them was gradually modified, from generation to generation, from that which was used in the paternal tent, which they had once abandoned. Thus were created the various idioms. Moreover, although it is not my intention to give a course in linguistics, you must already have noted that the most discordant languages present words whose root has varied little and whose meaning is almost the same. On the other hand, although you have the pretension of forming an old world, the same reason, which corrupted the primitive tongue, still reigns sovereign in your France, so proud of its civilization, where you see the agreements, the terms and the meaning vary, I will no longer say from province to province, but from commune to commune. I appeal to those who have traveled through Brittany, as to those who have traveled to Provence and to Languedoc. It is a variety of idioms and of dialects that astonishes anyone who would wish to collect them in a single dictionary. Once primitive men, aided by the missionaries of the Eternal, lent to certain special sounds so many special ideas, the spoken tongue was created; the modifications that it later underwent were always by reason of human progress. Consequently, according to the richness of the tongue, one can easily establish the degree of civilization to which the people that speaks it has arrived. What I can add is that Humanity marches toward a single tongue, the forced consequence of a communion of moral, political and, above all, religious ideas. Such will be the work of the new philosophy — Spiritism — that we teach today.

Erasto. n [1]

[v. Thomas Erasto.]