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<font size="4">Nicholas Roerich</font></b></p>
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<FONT SIZE=3><I>Ex oriente lux.</I> Out of the East the Light, and
that light is of the nature and substance of beauty, of creative and
dynamic beauty in the life the spirit. This, I suppose, is Roerich's
message in a nutshell. The Light of the East is always the light of
the “ample consciousnessâ€ that dwells on the heights of our being
in God.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>The call that stirred a Western soul, made him a
wanderer over the world in quest of the Holy Grail and finally lodged
him in the Home of the Snows is symbolic of a more than individual
destiny. It is representative of the secret history of a whole
culture and civilisation that have been ruling humanity for some
centuries, its inner want and need and hankering – and fulfilment.
The West shall come to the East and be reborn. That is the prophecy
of occult seers and sages.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>I speak of Roerich as a Western soul, but more precisely
perhaps he is a soul of the mid-region (as also in another sense we
shall see subsequently) intermediary between the East and the West.
His external make-up had all the characteristic elements of the
Western culture, but his mind and temperament, his inner soul was
oriental. And yet it was not the calm luminous static – ancient –
soul that an Indian or a Chinese sage is; it is a nomad soul, newly
awakened, young and fresh and ardent, something primitive, pulsating
with the unspoilt green sap of life – something in the manner of
Whitman. And that makes him all the more representative of the young
and ardent West yearning for the light that was never on sea or land.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Is it not strange that one should look to the East for
the light? There is a light indeed that dwells in the setting suns,
but that is the inferior light, the light that moves level with the </FONT>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page – 150</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>earth, pins us down to the normal and ordinary life and
con&shy;sciousness: it&quot; leads into the Night, into Nihil,
pralaya. It is the light of the morning sun that man looks up to in
his forward march, the sun that rises in the East whom the Vedic
Rishi invoked in these magnificent lines:</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Lo, the supreme light of all lights is come, a vast and
varied consciousness is born in us. . . .</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>It is not a mere notion or superstition, it is an occult
reality that gives sanctity to a particular place or region. The
saintly soul has always been also a pilgrim, physically, to holy
places, even to one single holy place, if he so chooses. The puritan
poet may say tauntingly:</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Here pilgrims roam, that strayed so far to seek In
Golgotha him dead who lives in heaven – </FONT>
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<FONT SIZE=3>the pilgrim soul of Roerich declares with but equal
vehemence and assurance:</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>All teachers journeyed to the mountains. The higher
knowledge, the most inspired songs, the most superb sounds and
colours are created in the mountains. On the highest mountains there
is the Supreme: the highest mountains stand as witnesses of Great
Reality.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Indeed, Roerich considers the Himalayas as the very
abode, the tabernacle itself – the <I>sanctum sanctorum – </I><SPAN STYLE="font-weight: medium"><SPAN STYLE="font-style: normal">of</SPAN><I>
</I>the Spirit, the Light Divine. Many of Roerich's paintings have
mountain ranges, especially snow-bound mountain ranges, as their
theme. There is a strange kinship between this yearning artistic
soul, which seems solitary in spite of its ardent humanism, and the
silent heights, rising white tier upon tier reflecting prismlike the
fiery glowing colours, the vast horizons, the wide vistas vanishing
beyond.</span></font></P><FONT SIZE=3>
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Roerich is one of the prophets and seers who have ever
been acclaiming and preparing the Golden Age, the dream that humanity
has been dreaming continuously since its very childhood, that is to
say, when there will be peace and harmony on<BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page – 151</font><BR>
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earth, when racial, cultural or ideological egoism will
no longer divide man and man – a thing that seems today a chimera
and a hallucination – when there will be one culture, one
civilisation, one spiritual life welding all humanity into a single
unit of life luminous and beautiful. Roerich believes that such a
consummation can arrive only or chiefly through the growth of the
sense of beauty, of the aesthetic temperament, of creative labour
leading to a wider and higher consciousness. Beauty, Harmony, Light,
Knowledge, Culture, Love, Delight are cardinal terms in his vision of
the deeper and higher life of the future.</P>
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The stress of the inner urge to the heights and depths
of spiritual values and realities found special and significant
expression in his paintings. It is a difficult problem, a problem
which artists and poets are tackling today with all their skill and
talent. Man's consciousness is no longer satisfied with the customary
and the ordinary actions and reactions of life (or thought), with the
old-world and time-worn modes and manners. It is no more turned to
the apparent and the obvious, to the surface forms and movements of
things. It yearns to look behind and beyond, for the secret
mechanism, the hidden agency that really drives things. Poets and
artists are the vanguards of the age to come, prophets and pioneers
preparing the way for the Lord.</P>
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Roerich discovered and elaborated his own technique to
reveal that which is secret, express that which is not expressed or
expressible. First of all, he is symbolical and allegorical:
secondly, the choice of his symbols and allegories is hieratic, that
is to say, the subject-matter refers to objects and events connected
with saints and legends, shrines and enchanted places, hidden
treasures, spirits and angels, etc. etc.; thirdly, the manner or
style of execution is what we may term pantomimic, in other words,
concrete, graphic, dramatic, even melodramatic. He has a special
predilection for geometrical patterns the artistic effect of which –
balance, regularity, fixity, solidity – was greatly utilised by the
French painter C<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">&eacute;</FONT>zanne and poet
Mallarm<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">&eacute;</FONT> who seem to have
influenced Roerich to a considerable degree. But this Northerner had
not the reticence, the suavity, the tonic unity of the classicist,
nor the normality and clarity of the Latin temperament. The prophet,
the priest<BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page – 152</font><BR>
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<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">in him was
the stronger element and made use of the artist as the rites and
<I>ceremonies – mudras </I>and <I>chakras – </I><SPAN STYLE="font-style: normal">of</SPAN><I>
</I>his vocation demanded. Indeed, he stands as the hierophant of a
new cultural religion and his paintings and utterances are, as it
were, gestures that accompany a holy ceremonial.</P>
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A Russian artist (Monsieur Benois) has stressed upon the
primitive-almost aboriginal-element in Roerich and was not happy over
it. Well, as has been pointed out by other prophets and thinkers, man
today happens to be so sophisticated, artificial, material, cerebral
that a [all-back seems to be necessary for him to take a new leap
forward on to a higher ground. The pure aesthete is a closed system,
with a consciousness immured in an ivory tower; but man is something
more. A curious paradox. Man can reach the highest, realise the
integral truth when he takes his leap, not from the relatively higher
levels of his consciousness – his intellectual and aesthetic and
even moral status – but when he can do so from his lower levels,
when the physico-vital element in him serves as the springing-board.
The decent and the beautiful-the classic grace and aristocracy –
form one aspect of man, the aspect of &quot;light&quot;; but the
aspect of energy and power lies precisely in him where the aboriginal
and the barbarian find also a lodging. Man as a mental being is
naturally sattwic, but prone to passivity and weakness; his
physico-vital reactions, on the other hand, are obscure and crude,
simple and vehement, but they have life and energy and creative
power, they are there to be trained and transfigured, made effective
instruments of a higher illumination.</P>
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All elemental personalities have something of the
unconventional and irrational in them. And Roerich is one such in his
own way. The truths and realities that he envisages and seeks to
realise on earth are elemental and fundamental, although apparently
simple and commonplace.<BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page – 153</font></P>
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