These peoples are, however, the heirs of a civilization misunderstood by Christians then and now and transmitted from ancient communism. Insipid modern individualism can only be flabbergasted by it, especially in this dull text where we read that graves are unmarked and that dishes are prepared even for those dead who no one remembers. True “unknown dead,” not because a sluggish, demagogic rhetoric says so but through the powerful simplicity of a life which is of the species and for the species, eternal like nature and not like a stupid swarm of souls wandering in the “beyond” for whose development the experiences of the dead, the living, and the as yet unborn are valid, in an historical sequence whose unfolding is not mourning but joy in all the moments of the material cycle.

Even in what they symbolize, these customs are nobler than ours. For example, these women who make themselves beautiful for the dead and not for the richest of the living, as in our mercantile society, this sewer in which we are immersed.

If under the guise of the squalid Catholic saints the most ancient form of a not-inhuman divinity, like the Sun, continues to live, this brings to mind what knowledge we have — all too often a travesty! — of the Incan civilization that Marx admired. It is not that they were primitive and ferocious enough to sacrifice the most beautiful specimens of their young to the Sun who cried out for human blood, but that such a community, magnificent and powerfully intuitive, recognised the flow of life in that same energy which the Sun radiates on the planet and which flows through the arteries of a living man, and which becomes unity and love in the whole species, which, until it falls into the superstition of an individual soul with its sanctimonious balance sheet of give and take, the superstructure of monetary venality, does not fear death and knows personal death as nothing other than a hymn of joy and a fecund contribution to the life of humanity.

In natural and primitive communism, even though humanity is conceived within the limits of the horde, the individual does not aim to subtract wealth from his brother but rather is willing to be sacrificed without the slightest fear for the survival of the great phratry.[1] Idiotic conventional wisdom sees this as the terror of a God who must be placated with blood.

In the form of exchange, of money, and of class, the species’ sense of permanence [perennità] disappears, and what is ignoble in the continued existence [perennità] of private property increases. This is translated into the immortality of the soul which contracts for happiness outside of nature with the usurer-god who runs this vile bank. In these societies which pretend to be raised from barbarism to civilization we live in dread of personal death and lie prostrate before mummies, like the mausoleum in Moscow, with its infamous history.