A Sufi tale relates how the little stream succeeds in crossing over the desert by evaporating and allowing itself to be carried by the wind (dying in order to be reborn). In The Divine Comedy, Dante uses a metaphor similar to Daumal’s: “One climbs to the summit of Bismantua with only one’s feet: but here one has to fly; I say, fly with light wings and the feathers of a great desire,”26 and, of course, in the Gospel, it is written: “Except a kernel of wheat die, it bringeth forth no fruit.”27

Finally, Father Sogol declares that he gives up “my general’s helmet, which was a crown of thorns for the image I had of myself. In the untroubled depths of my memory of myself, a little child is awakening and makes the old man’s mask sob.”28 Father Sogol was trying to become sanskrita, “one who remakes himself,” one who has an interior being and measure for judging. Only then could the mysterious synchronicity occur: at that moment he discovers a “peradam,” the precious curved crystal hidden in the slopes of Mount Analogue “with an index of refraction so close to that of air despite the crystal’s great density, the unaccustomed eye barely perceives it.”29 The paradam was considered to be a miraculous material entity, a little bit of evidence that slips through from another dimension of reality. Only when Father Sogol humbled himself, could he detect the tiny peradam, the highest material reward of a seeker’s sincerity on Mount Analogue. Truly, this was the quintessential philosopher’s stone, representing the activation of true insight, the reconciling energy that can reconnect man’s two disparate natures. Pierre Sogol, whose very name meant Stone Word, could now touch the material evidence of his inner work.

If there is any doubt about the meaning behind Daumal’s allegory, he provides short variations to drive home his message. Woven into the narrative are two beautiful mythic tales, “The History of the Hollow Men and the Bitter Rose,” based on an old folktale of the Ardennes, and the “Myth of the Sphere and the Tetrahedron.” The first story is a poetic allegory about man’s place in the universe. “The hollow-men live in the rock, they move around inside it like nomadic cave dwellers. In the ice they wander like bubbles in the shape of men.” 30 The four pages that follow give free rein to his vast store of imagery, and express his inklings of another reality concurrent with our usual one. “Others say that every living man has his hollow-man in the mountains, just as the sword has its sheath, and the foot its footprint, and that they will be united in death.”31

He draws upon Gurdjieff’s theory that the energy we expend, especially that of our thoughts and emotions, is always used, eaten up by something else in nature’s chain (the biggest consumer being our moon). “They eat only emptiness, such as the shape of corpses, they get drunk on empty words, on all the empty speech we utter.”32

Then follows the drama of the twin brothers Mo and Ho and their battle with the Hollow Men in their search for the elusive Bitter Rose: “Whoever eats it discovers that whenever he is about to tell a lie, out loud or only to himself, his tongue begins to burn.”33 Finally Mo and Ho are forced to inhabit the same body and become a composite being, “Moho.” If they continue to evolve, they might even become a homo (a man). This transformation recalls the metamorphosis of the caterpillar in A Night of Serious Drinking. The tale of the Hollow Men is yet another vision quest—a story of a search for knowledge encapsulated in Daumal’s larger one, both in the tradition of the grail and the holy mountain.

Here, as throughout Mount Analogue, Daumal combines a lightness of poetic imagery with a weightiness of thought reminiscent of the poetry of the most Eastern of our Western literary ancestors, the Greeks. One line will be light as air, likening the Bitter Rose to a swarm of butterflies. Another has a weight as if it were carved in stone: “The hollow-men cannot enter our world, but they can come up to the surface of things. Beware of the surface of things.”34

In his imagery, Daumal achieves the Hindu ideal of suavité (liquidity) which Visvanatha likened to flowing liquid. The Vedic literary scholar, Jan Gonda, believes that the Hindus achieved this suavity through the use of concise, elliptical phraseology, and vocabulary that was nuanced, melodious, and dignified. Daumal’s imagery is not only liquid, but limpid—the quality of light passing through liquid. Visvanatha called limpidity the “evidence” produced by fire and water, the interaction of ardor and flow. Gonda also points out that Vedic writers often made graphic references to natural phenomenon, and showed a keen power of observation and pictorial expression. Likewise, Daumal presents a poetic, nuanced vision of the natural world. Now that he had achieved a certain security of having found a “path,” it seems that he was finally able to see the holy in earthly images as well, rather than often denouncing them as in his early poetry. It bespeaks of his sense of joy as he was preparing to leave the earth. He graphically details Mo’s movements:

Sometimes like a lizard and sometimes like a spider, he crawls up he high red rock walls, between the white snows and the blue-black sky. Swift little clouds envelop hime from time to time, then release him suddenly into the light. And there, just above him, he sees the Bitter-Rose, gleaming with colors that are beyond the seven colors of he rainbow.35

The second myth is a prose poem that was also included in a 1954 collection of Daumal’s poetry entitled, “Black Poetry White Poetry.” It is another creation myth, similar to his earlier poem, “The Keys of a Big Game,” reflecting the Vedic myth of primordial man multiplying himself into all forms and species. As in the earlier poem, this growth is conceived in terms of contraction and expansion. “In the beginning, the Sphere and the Tetrahedron were united in a single unthinkable, unimaginable Form. Concentration and Expansion mysteriously united in a single Will.”36 Daumal describes the familiar theme of the One multiplying into the many that he had experienced in his drug-induced death experience:

The Sphere became primordial man who, wishing to realize separately all his desires and possibilities, broke into pieces in the shape of all animal species and the men of today.