The Morning of the Magicians by Pauwels and Bergier

[Sweet Tooth]

THE MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS
By Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier
Selected Excerpts

Louis Pauwels, an editor and writer, is the founder and editor of the amazing magazine Planete, an outgrowth of the great popularity of THE MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS in France.

Jacques Bergier has a distinguished reputation as a nuclear physicist and chemical engineer.

First published in France under the title
Le Matin des Magiciens.
Copyright © 1960 by Editions Gallimard.
The Morning of the Magicians was published in England in 1963 as The Dawn of Magic.
Translation copyright © 1963 by
Anthony Gibbs and Phillips Ltd.


To the fine soul, to the warm heart of Gustave Bonju, a worker, a real father to me.
In memorium.
L.P.


CONTENTS

Preface

Part One

THE FUTURE PERFECT

I. Salute to the reader in a hurry – A resignation in 1875 – Birds of ill omen – How the nineteenth century closed the doors – The end of science and the repression of fantasy – Poincare’s despair – We are our own grandfathers – Youth, Youth!

II. Bourgeois delights – A crisis for the intelligence, or the hurricane of unrealism – Glimpses of another reality – Beyond logic and literary philosophies – The idea of an Eternal Present – Science without conscience or conscience without science? – Hope.

III. Brief reflections on the backwardness of sociology – Talking cross-purposes – Planetary versus provincial – Crusader in the modern world – The poetry of science.

AN OPEN CONSPIRACY

I. The generation of the “workers of the Earth” – Are you a behind-the-times modern, or a contemporary of the future? – A poster on the walls of Paris 1622 – The esoteric language is the technical language – A new conception of a secret society – A new aspect of the “religious spirit”.

II. The prophets of the Apocalypse – A Committee of Despair – A Louis XVI machine-gun – Science is not a Sacred Cow – Monsieur Despotopoulos would like to arrest progress – The legend of the Nine Unknown Men.

III. Fantastic realism again – Past techniques – Further consideration on the necessity for secrecy – We take a voyage through time – The spirit’s continuity – The engineer and the magician once again – Past and future – The present is lagging in both directions – Gold from ancient books – A new vision of the ancient world.

IV. The concealment of knowledge and power – The meaning of revolutionary war – Technology brings back the guilds – A return to the age of the Adepts – A fiction writer’s prediction, The Power-House – From monarchy to cryptocracy – The secret society as government of the future – Intelligence itself a secret society – A knocking at the door.

THE EXAMPLE OF ALCHEMY

I. An alchemist in the Café Procope in 1953 – A conversation about Gurdjieff – A believer in the reality of the philosopher’s stone – I change my ideas about the value of progress – What we really think about alchemy: neither a revelation nor a groping in the dark – Some reflections on the “spiral” and on hope.

II. A hundred thousand books that no one reads – Wanted: a scientific expedition to the land of the alchemists – The inventors – Madness from mercury – A code language – Was there another atomic civilization? – The electric batteries of the museum of Baghdad – Newton and the great Initiates – Helvetius and Spinoza and the philosopher’s stone – Alchemy and modern physics – A hydrogen bomb in an oven – Transformation of matter, men and spirits.

III. In which a little Jew is seen to prefer honey to sugar – In which an alchemist who might be the mysterious Fulcanelli speaks of the atomic danger in 1937, describes the atomic pile and evokes civilization now extinct – In which Bergier breaks a safe with a blow-lamp and carries off a bottle of uranium under his arm – In which a nameless American major seeks a Fulcanelli now definitely vanished – In which Oppenheimer echoes a Chinese sage of a thousand years ago.

IV. The modern alchemist and the spirit of research – Description of what an alchemist does in his laboratory – Experiments repeated indefinitely – What is he waiting for? – The preparation of darkness – Electronic gas – Water that dissolves – Is the philosopher’s stone energy in suspension? – The transmutation of the alchemist himself – This is where true metaphysics begin.

V. There is time for everything – There is even a time for the times to come together.

THE VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS

I. In which the authors introduce a fantastic personage – Mr. Fort – The fire at the “sanatorium of overworked coincidences” – Mr. Fort and universal knowledge – 40,000 notes on a gush of periwinkles, a downpour of frogs and showers of blood – The Book of the Damned – A certain Professor Kreyssaler – In praise of “intermediarism” with some examples – The Hermit of the Bronx, or the cosmic Rabelais – Visit of the author to the Cathedral of Saint Elsewhere – Au revoir, Mr. Fort!

II. An hypothesis condemned to the stake – Where a clergyman and a biologist become comic figures – Wanted: a Copernicus in anthropology – Many blank spaces on all the maps – Dr. Fortune’s lack of curiosity – The mystery of the melted platinum – Cords used as books – The tree and the telephone – Cultural relativity.

III. In which the authors speculate about the Great Pyramid – Possibility of “other techniques” – The example of Hitler – The Empire of Almanzar – Recurrence of “ends of the world” – The impossible Easter Island – The legend of the white man – The civilization of America – The mystery of Maya – From the “bridge of light” to the strange plain of Nazca.

IV. Memory older than us – Metallic birds – A strange map of the world – Atomic bombardments and interplanetary vessels in “sacred texts” – A new view of machines – The cult of the “cargo” – Another vision of esoterism – The rites of the intelligence.

Part Two

A FEW YEARS IN THE ABSOLUTE ELSEWHERE

I. All the marbles in the same bag – The historian’s despair – Two amateurs of the unusual – At the bottom of the Devil’s Lake – An empty anti-fascism – The authors in the presence of the Infinitely Strange – Troy, too, was only a legend – History lags behind – From visible banality to invisible fantasy – The fable of the golden beetle – Undercurrents of the future – There are other things beside soulless machinery.

II. In the Tribune Des Nations the Devil and madness are refused recognition – Yet there are rivalries between deities – The Germans and Atlantis – Magic socialism – A secret religion and a secret Order – An expedition to hidden regions – The first guide will be a poet.

III. P.J. Toulet and Arthur Machen – A great neglected genius – A Robinson Crusoe of the soul – The story of the angels at Mons – The life, adventures and misfortunes of Arthur Machen – How we discovered an English secret society – A Nobel Prize-winner in a black mask – The Golden Dawn and its members.

IV. A hollow Earth, a frozen world, a New Man – “We are the enemies of the mind and spirit” – Against Nature and against God – The Vril Society – The race which will supplant us – Haushofer and the Vril – The idea of the mutation of man – The “Unknown Superman” – Mathers, chief of the Golden Dawn meets the “Great Terrorists” – Hitler claims to have met them too – An hallucination or a real presence? – A door opening on to something other – A prophecy of Rene Guenon – The Nazis’ enemy No. 1: Steiner.

V. An ultimatum for the scientists – The prophet Horbiger, a twentieth-century Copernicus – The theory of the frozen world – History of the solar system – The end of the world – The Earth and its four Moons – Apparition of the giants – Moons, giants and men – The civilization of Atlantis – The five cities 300,000 years old – From Tiahuanaco to Tibet – The second Atlantis – The Deluge – Degeneration and Christianity – We are approaching another era – The law of ice and fire.

VI. Horbiger still has a million followers – Waiting for the Messiah – Hitler and political esoterism – Nordic science and magic thinking – A civilization utterly different from our own – Gurdjieff, Horbiger, Hitler and the man responsible for the Cosmos – The cycle of fire – Hitler speaks – The basis of Nazi anti-Semitism – Martians at Nuremberg – The anti-pact – The rockets’ summer – Stalingrad, or the fall of the Magi – The prayer on Mount Elbruz – The little man victorious over the superman – The little man opens the gates of Heaven – The Twilight of the Gods – The flooding of the Berlin Underground and the myth of the Deluge – A Chorus by Shelley.

VII. A hollow Earth – We are living inside it – The Sun and Moon are in the center of the Earth – Radar in the service of the Wise Men – Birth of a new religion in America – Its prophet was a German airman – Anti-Einstein – The work of a madman – A hollow Earth, Artificial Satellites and the notion of Infinity – Hitler as arbiter – Beyond coherence.

VIII. Grist for our horrible mill – The last prayer of Dietrich Eckardt – The legend of Thule – A nursery for mediums – Haushofer and the magician – Hess’s silence – The swastika – The seven men who wanted to change life – A Tibetan colony – Exterminations and ritual – It is darker than you thought.

IX. Himmler and the other side of the problem – 1934 a turning-point – The Black Order in power – The death’s-head warrior monks – Initiation in the Burgs – Siever’s last prayer – The strange doings of the Ahnenerbe – The High Priest Frederick Hielscher – A forgotten note of Junger’s – Impressions of war and victory.

Part Three

THAT INFINITY CALLED MAN

I. A New Kind of Intuition: The Fantastic in fire and blood – The barriers of incredulity – The first rocket – Bourgeois and “Workers of the Earth” – False facts and true fiction – Inhabited worlds – Visitors from Beyond – The great lines of communication – Modern myths – Fantastic realism in psychology – Towards an exploration of the fantastic within – The method described – Another conception of liberty.

II. The Fantastic Within: Some pioneers: Balzac, Hugo, Flammarion – Jules Romains and the “Great Question” – The end of positivism – What is para-psychology? – Some extraordinary facts and experiences – The example of the Titanic – Clairvoyance – Precognition and dreams – Parapsychology and psychoanalysis – We reject occultism and the pseudo-sciences – In quest of machinery for sounding the depths.

III. Towards a Psychological Revolution: The mind’s “second wind” – Wanted: an Einstein for psychology – A renaissance of religion – Our society is at death’s door – Jaures and the “tree buzzing with flies” – We see little because we are little.

IV. The Magic Mind Rediscovered: The green eye of the Vatican – The “other” intelligence – The story of the “relavote” – Is Nature playing a double game? – The starting-handle of the super-machine – New cathedrals and new slang – The last door – Existence as an instrument – A new view of symbols – All is not everything.

V. The Notion of an “Awakened State”: After the fashion of theologians, scientists, magicians and children – Salute to an expert at putting spokes in wheels – The conflict between spiritualism and materialism: the story of an allergy – The legend of tea – Could it be a natural faculty? – Thought as a means of travel on the ground or in the air – A supplement to the Rights of Man – Some reflections on the “awakened” Man – Ourselves as honest savages.

VI. Three True Stories as Illustration: The story of a great mathematician “in the raw” – The story of the most wonderful clairvoyant – The story of a scientist of the future who lived in 1750.

VII. The “Awakened” Man: Some Paradozes and Hypotheses: Why our three stories may have disappointed some readers – We know very little about levitation, immortality, etc. – Yet Man has the gift of ubiquity, has long sight, etc. – How do you define a machine? – How the first “awakened” Man could have been born – A fabulous, yet reasonable dream about vanished civilizations – The fable of the panther – The writing of God.

VIII. Some Documents on the “Awakened State”: Wanted: an anthology – The sayings of Gurdjieff – When I was at the school for “awakening” – Raymond Abellio’s story – A striking extract for the works of Gustav Meyrinck, a neglected genius.

IX. The Point Beyond Infinity: From Surrealism to Fantastic Realism – The Supreme Point – Beware of images – The madness of Georg Cantor – The Yogi and the mathematician – A fundamental aspiration of the human spirit – An extract from a story by Jorge Luis Borges.

X. Some reflections on the Mutants: The child astronomer – A sudden access of intelligence – The theory of mutation – The myth of the Great Superior Ones – The mutants among us – From Horla to Leonard Euler – An invisible society of Mutants? – The birth of the collective being – Love of the living.

[Sweet Tooth]

Part One

THE FUTURE PERFECT

I. Salute to the reader in a hurry – A resignation in 1875 – Birds of ill omen – How the nineteenth century closed the doors – The end of science and the repression of fantasy – Poincare’s despair – We are our own grandfathers – Youth, Youth!

How can an intelligent man today not feel in a hurry? “Get up sir; you’ve got important things to do!” But one has to rise earlier every day. Speed up your machines for seeing, hearing, thinking, remembering and imagining. Our best reader, the one we value the most, will have finished with us in two or three hours.

There are men I know who can read with the greatest profit one hundred pages of mathematics, philosophy, history, or archeology in twenty minutes. Actors learn how to “place” their voice. Who will teach us to “place” our attention? At a certain height everything changes speed. So far as this work is concerned, I’m not one of those writers who want to keep their readers with them as long as possible and lull them to sleep. I’m not interested in sleep, only in waking. Get on with it quickly; take what you want and go. There’s plenty to do outside. Skip chapters if you want to; begin where you like and read in any direction; this book is a multi-use tool, like the knives campers use. For example, if you’re afraid of arriving too slowly at the heart of the subject that interests you, skip these first pages. You should understand, however, that they show how the nineteenth century had closed its doors against fantasy as a positive element in man and the world and the Universe, and how the twentieth has opened them again, although our morality, our philosophy and our sociology, which ought to be contemporary with the future, are nothing of the kind and remain attached to the out-of-date nineteenth century. The bridge between the era of muskets and that of rockets hasn’t yet been built; but it’s being thought about. And the object of this book is to make people think about it harder. If we’re in a hurry, it’s not because we’re crying over the past but are worried about the present, and getting impatient. There you have it. You know enough now to be able, if necessary, to skim through this introduction and push on further.

***

His name is not recorded in the history books – unfortunately. He was a Director of the American Patent Office and it was he who first sounded the alarm. In 1875 he sent in his resignation to the Secretary of the Board of Trade. What’s the good of going on, is the gist of what he said; there’s nothing left to invent.

Twelve years later, in 1887, the great chemist Marcellin Berthelot wrote: “From now on there is no mystery about the Universe.” To get a coherent picture of the world science had cleared everything up: perfection by omission. Matter consisted of a certain number of elements, none of which could be turned into another. But while Berthelot in his learned work was rejecting the dreams of the alchemists, the elements, which knew nothing about this, continued to transmute themselves as a result of natural radioactivity. In 1852, the phenomenon had been described by Reichenbach, but was immediately repudiated. Scientists before 1870 had referred to a “fourth state of matter,” observed in gases. Any kind of mystery, however, had to be suppressed. Repression is the right word; some nineteenth century thinking ought to be psychoanalyzed.

A German named Zeppelin, returning home after fighting with the Southerners, tried to get the industrialists interested in a dirigible balloon… “Unhappy man! Don’t you know that there are three subjects which can no longer be the subject of a paper submitted to the French Academy of Science: the squaring of the circle, the tunnel under the Channel and dirigible balloons.”

Another German, Herman Gaswindt, had the idea of building flying machines heavier than air to be propelled by rockets. On his fifth blueprint the German War Minister, after consulting the technicians, wrote, with the habitual moderation of his race and office: “How long will it be before this bird of ill-omen is finally bumped off?”

The Russians, on their side, had got rid of another bird of ill-omen. Kibaltchich who was also in favor of rocket-propelled flying machines: a firing squad saw to that. It is true that Kibaltchich had used his technical skill to fabricate the bomb that had just cut up into little pieces the Emperor Alexander II. But it wasn’t necessary to execute Professor Langley, of the Smithsonian Institute, who had imagined flying machines propelled by the recently invented internal combustion engine. It was enough for him to be dishonored, ruined and expelled from the Smithsonian. Professor Simon Newcomb proved mathematically the impossibility of a heavier-than-air machine. A few months before the death of Langley, who died of grief, a little English boy came back from school one day in tears. He had shown his companions the photograph of a design that Langley had just sent to his father. He declared that men would one day be able to fly. His comrades had laughed at him. And the schoolmaster had asked him how his father could be such a fool. The name of this “fool” was H.G. Wells.

And so all the doors were closing with a bang. There was, in fact, nothing left to do but to resign, and M. Brunetiere in 1895 was able calmly to speak of the “bankruptcy of science.” The celebrated Professor Lippmann told one of his pupils, about the same time, that physics was a subject that had been exhausted and was finished and done with, and that he would do better to turn his attention in other directions. This pupil’s name was Helbronner who later was to become the greatest authority in Europe on physical chemistry and make remarkable discoveries relating to liquid air, ultra-violet rays and colloidal metals. Moissan, a chemist of genius, was forced to recant and declare in public that he had not manufactured diamonds, but had made a mistake during an experiment. It was useless to seek any further: the great discoveries of the century were the steam-engine and the gas lamp, and no greater human inventions were possible. Electricity? A mere technical curiosity. A mad Englishman, Maxwell, had pretended that invisible light rays could be produced by means of electricity: this couldn’t be taken seriously.

A few years later Ambrose Bierce wrote in his Devil’s Dictionary, “No one knows what electricity is, but in any case it gives a better light than a horse-power and travels quicker than a gas jet.”

As for energy, this was something quite independent of matter and devoid of mystery. It was composed of fluids. These fluids filled everything up, could be described in equations of great formal beauty and were intellectually satisfying: they could be electric, luminous, calorific, etc. Here was a continuous and obvious progression: matter in its three states, solid, liquid and gaseous, and the various energy-fluids, more elusive even than gases. To preserve a “scientific” image of the world it was only necessary to reject as philosophic dreams the theories about the atom that were beginning to take shape. Planck’s and Einstein’s “grains of energy” were still a very long way off.

The German Clausius maintained that no source of energy other than fire was conceivable. And though energy may be preserved quantitatively, it deteriorates in quality. The Universe has been wound up once and for all, like a watch, and will run down when the spring is worn out. No surprises are to be expected. Into this Universe, whose destiny is foreseeable, life entered by chance and developed according to the simple laws of natural selection. At the apex of this evolution came man – a mechanical and chemical compound endowed with an illusion – consciousness. Under the influence of this illusion man invented time and space: concepts of the mind. If you had told an official nineteenth century scientists that physics would one day absorb space and time and would study experimentally the curvature of space and the contraction of time, he would have summoned the police. Space and time have no real existence; they are the mathematician’s variables and subjects for philosophers to discuss at their leisure. There can be no connection between man and such immensities. Despite the work of Charcot, Breuer, Hyslop, extra-sensory or extra-temporal perception is an idea to be rejected with scorn. Nothing unknown in the universe, nothing unknown in man.

It was quite useless to attempt any internal exploration; nevertheless there was one fact that defied simplication: hypnotism. People like the naïve Flammarion, the skeptical Edgar Poe and the suspect H.G. Wells were interested in this phenomenon. And yet, fantastic as this may seem, the nineteenth century proved officially that there was no such thing as hypnotism. Patients tend to tell lies and pretend in order to please the hypnotizer. That is true. However, since Freud and Morton Price, we know that there is such a thing as a split personality. Thanks to a generally critical attitude this century succeeded in creating a negative mythology, in eliminating any trace of the unknown in man and in repressing any suggestion of mystery.

Biology, too, was finished. M. Claude Bernard had exhausted its possibilities, and the conclusion had been reached that the brain secreted thoughts as the liver secretes bile. Doubtless it would soon be possible to analyze this secretion and write out its chemical formula to fit in with the pretty patterns of hexagons for which M. Berthelot was famous. As soon as we discover how the hexagons of carbon combine to create mind the last page will have been turned. Let’s get on with the job! and have all the madmen shut up. One fine day in 1898 a certain seriously-minded gentlemen forbade the governess to allow his children to read Jules Verne. These false ideas would only deform their young minds. The gentleman’s name was Edouard Branly. He had just decided to abandon his experiments with sound-waves as being devoid of interest, and take up the career of a general practitioner.

Scientists have to give up their throne. But they also have to get rid of the “adventurers” – that is to say, people who think and dream and are endowed with imagination. Berthelot attacked the philosophers – “fencing with their own ghosts in the solitary field of abstract logic” (a good description that, of Einstein, for example). And Claude Berhard declared that “a man who discovers the simplest fact does a greater service than the greatest philosopher in the world.” Science can only be experimental; without it we are lost. Shut the gates; nobody will ever be the equal of the giants who invented the steam-engine.

In this organized, comprehensible and yet doomed universe the place assigned to man was that of an epiphenomenon. There could be no Utopia and no hope. Coal deposits would be exhausted in a few hundred years, and humanity would perish by cold and starvation. Men would never fly and would never travel through space. Nor would they ever explore the bottom of the sea. Strange that this ban should have been imposed on any investigation of the ocean depths! From a technical point of view there was nothing, in the nineteenth century, to prevent Professor Picard from constructing his bathyscaphe. Nothing but an extreme timidity and concern that man should “stay in his proper place.”

Turpin, who invented melinite, was promptly jailed. The inventors of the internal combustion engine were discouraged, and an attempt was made to show that electric machines were merely forms of perpetual motion. Those were the days when the great inventors were persecuted, isolated and in revolt. Hertz wrote to the Dresden Chamber of Commerce that research into the transmission of the Hertzian waves should be discouraged, as they could not be used for any practical purpose. Napoleon III’s experts proved that Gramme’s dynamo could never function.

As for the first automobiles, the submarine, the dirigible balloon and the electric light (“one of that fellow Edison’s swindles”) the learned societies were not interested. There is an immortal entry in the Minutes of the Paris Academy of Sciences recording the reception of the first phonograph: “No sooner had the machine emitted a few words than the Permanent Secretary threw himself upon the imposter (presenting it) seizing his throat in a grip of iron. ‘You see, gentlemen,’ he exclaimed ‘what it is…’ But, to the stupefaction of everyone present, the machine continued to utter sounds.”

Nevertheless, some great minds, profoundly discontented with the situation, were secretly preparing the most formidable revolution in human knowledge in the history of mankind. For the time being, however, every avenue was barred.

Barred in every direction – in front and in the rear. The fossils of pre-human creatures that were beginning to be discovered in large numbers were not taken seriously. Did not the great Heinrich Helmnoltz prove that the Sun derived its energy from its own contractions – that is to say, from the only force, its own combustion, existing in the Universe? And did not his calculations show that the Sun had not been in existence for more than about a hundred thousand years? How, then, could there have been a long process of evolution? Moreover, it would never be possible to fix a date for the beginning of the world. In the short interval between two states of nothingness, we human “epiphenomena” must be serious. Facts, facts! Nothing but facts!

As their researches into matter and energy had met with little encouragement, the best among the inquiring minds turned to explore an impasse – the ether, a substance that permeates matter in all its forms and acts as a vehicle for luminous and electromagnetic waves. It is at once both infinitely solid and infinitely tenuous. Lord Rayleigh, who at the end of the nineteenth century represented official English science in all its splendor, formulated the theory of a gyroscopic ether – an ether consisting of a mass of spinning tops, turning in all directions and reacting on one another. Aldous Huxley has remarked since that “if it is possible for a human invention to convey the idea of absolute ugliness, then Lord Rayleigh’s theory has succeeded.”

Scientists everywhere were engaged in speculations on the ether on the eve of the twentieth century. Then in 1898 came a catastrophe: the Michelson-Morley experiment shattered the hypothesis of the ether. All the work of Henri Poincare bears witness to this collapse. Poincare, a mathematician of genius, felt crushed by the enormous weight of this nineteenth century prison, the destroyer of all fantasy. He would have discovered the theory of relativity, had he dared. But he did not dare. His books – La Valeur de la Science, La Science et L’Hypothese, are expressions of despair and abdication. For him, a scientific hypothesis is never true and can at best be useful. Like the Spanish inn – you only find there what you bring yourself. According to Poincare, if the Universe contracted a million times and ourselves with it, nobody would notice anything. Such speculations are therefore useless because they have no connection with reality as we perceive it.

This argument, up to the beginning of this century, was cited as a model of profound reasoning. Until one day a practical engineer pointed out that the butcher, at any rate, would notice it, as all his joints would fall down. The weight of a leg of mutton is proportional to its volume, but the strength of a piece of string is proportional only to its length. Therefore, were the universe to contract by only a millionth of a degree, there would be no more joints hanging from the ceiling! Poor, great and dear Poincare! It was this great thinker who wrote: “Common sense alone is enough to tell us that the destruction of a town by a pound of metal is an evident impossibility.”

The limited nature of the physical structure of the Universe; the non-existence of atoms; restricted sources of fundamental energy; the inability of mathematical formula to yield more than it already contains; the futility of intuition; the narrowness and absolutely mechanical nature of Man’s internal world; these were the things the scientists believed in, and this attitude of mind applied to everything and created the climate which permeated every branch of knowledge in this century. A minor century? No; a great century, but narrow – a dwarf stretched out.

But suddenly the doors so carefully closed by the nineteenth century in the face of the infinite possibilities of man, of matter, of energy, of time and of space are about to burst asunder. Science and technical skills will make enormous progress, and a new assessment will be made of the very nature of knowledge.

Not merely progress, this, but a transformation. In this new state of the world, consciousness itself acquires a new status. Today, in every domain, all forms of imagination are rampant – except in those spheres where our “historical” life goes on, stifled, unhappy and precarious, like everything that is out of date. An immense gulf separates the man of adventure from humanity and our societies from our civilization. We are living with ideas of morality, sociology, philosophy and psychology that belong to the nineteenth century. We are our own great-great-grandfathers. As we watch rockets rising to the sky and feel the ground vibrating with a thousand new radiations, we are still smoking the pipe of Thomas Graindorge. Our literature, our philosophical discussions, our ideological conflicts, our attitude toward reality – all this is still slumbering behind the doors that have been burst open. Youth! Youth! – go forth and tell the world that everything is opened up and already the Outside has come in!

[Sweet Tooth]

Part One

AN OPEN CONSPIRACY

IV. The concealment of knowledge and power – The meaning of revolutionary war – Technology brings back the guilds – A return to the age of the Adepts – A fiction writer’s prediction, The Power-House – From monarchy to cryptocracy – The secret society as government of the future – Intelligence itself a secret society – A knocking at the door.

In a very strange article, but one which I think reflects the views of many French intellectuals, Jean-Paul Sartre refused purely and simply to admit the H-bomb’s right to exist. Existence, according to the theory of this philosopher, precedes essence. But here is a phenomenon whose essence he doesn’t approve of: therefore he denies its existence. A singular contradiction! “The H-bomb,” wrote Sartre, “is against history.”

How can a fact of civilization be “against history”? What is history? For Sartre, it is the movement that must necessarily bring the masses to power. What is the H-bomb? A reserve of power to which only a few have access. A very narrow society of scientists, technicians and politicians can decide the destiny of humanity. Therefore, so that history can mean what we have said it means, let us abolish the H-bomb… Here is an example of the apostle of social progressism demanding that progress should be halted. A sociology with its roots in the nineteenth century asking to go back to the age in which it was born. Let there be no misunderstanding. For us it is not a question either of approving the fabrication of weapons of destruction or of decrying the thirst for justice that inspires all that is purest in human societies. It is a question of looking at things from a different angle.

(1) It is true that the existence of the “ultimate weapon” is an appalling danger for humanity. But the fewer the people who control such weapons, the less likely are they to be used. Human society in the modern world survives only because the decisions are taken by only a very small number of men.

(2) Nothing can be done with these “ultimate” weapons except develop them further. In the realm of avant-garde operational research the frontiers between good and evil are continually shrinking. Every discovery at the level of basic structures is at the same time both positive and negative. Moreover, as techniques progress, they do not become more complicated; on the contrary, they get simpler, moving on to a plane where elementals are involved. The number of operations diminishes and less equipment is required. In the end men will hold the key to universal forces in the hollow of their hand. A child will be able to make and handle it. The more simplification becomes synonymous with power, the more necessary will it become to hide what is going on behind higher barriers in order to preserve the continuity of life.

(3) This occultation, moreover, happens automatically, as real power passes to the scientists and scholars. The later have their own language and their own ways of thinking. This is not an artificial barrier. Their language is different because their thought is on a different level. The scientists have convinced the rich that they would be better off, and the ruling classes that they would become more powerful if they invoked their help. And they have rapidly won for themselves a position beyond wealth and beyond governments. How has this been done? In the first place, by making everything infinitely complicated. When intellectuals wish to gain control they complicate as much as possible the system which they wish to destroy so as to render it defenseless, as the spider enmeshes its victims into its web. The so-called “rulers,” the propertied and governing classes, are no longer anything but intermediaries in an epoch which is itself intermediary.

(4) While “ultimate” weapons are produced in ever greater numbers the character of war is changing. An uninterrupted combat goes on in the form of guerrillas, palace revolutions, ambushes, maquis, articles, books and speeches. Instead of ordinary wars there are revolutionary wars. These new forms of war correspond to a change in the aims and aspirations of humanity. Wars used to be waged for material ends; revolutionary wars are fought to change the conditions in which men live. Formerly men destroyed one another in order to acquire territory, while the spoil was shared between the conquerors. Today, throughout this incessant struggle, resembling nothing so much as a dance of insects interlocking their antennae, it would seem that humanity was seeking some sort of union, a grouping of forces, a unity that would change the face of the Earth. Instead of wanting to enjoy things, today, men want to do them. The intellectuals, who have not forgotten to prepare for psychological warfare, also have a hand in this profound change of attitude. The revolutionary war corresponds to the birth of a new spirit: the worker’s spirit. The spirit of the “ouvriers de la Terre.” It is in this sense that history represents a Messianic movement of the masses. This movement coincides with the concentration of knowledge in the hands of a few. This is the phase we are now going through in our campaign for a growing integration of man into the universe as a whole, and a continuous spiritualization of the mind.

Let us descend to concrete cases, and we shall find ourselves once more in the era of secret societies. When we ascend again to consider more important, and consequently less visible facts, we shall see that we are also returning to the age of the Adepts. The Adepts (or Initiates) spread their knowledge among a group of societies organized to keep new techniques secret. It is not impossible to imagine a world run on these lines in the very near future. Except for the fact that history does not repeat itself. Or, rather, if it does pass the same point, it does so on a higher level of the spiral.

Throughout history, the preservation of techniques has always been one of the objects of the secret societies. The Egyptian priests were the jealous guardians of the laws of plane geometry. Recent researches have established the existence at Baghdad of a society that possessed the secret of the electric battery and the monopoly of galvano-plastics two thousand years ago. The Middle Ages saw the formulation in France, Germany and Spain of technicians’ guilds. Consider the history of alchemy: the secret method of coloring glass red by introducing gold at the moment of fusion; the secret of Greek Fire – a mixture of coagulated linseed oil and gelatine, the forerunner of napalm. Not all the secrets of the Middle Ages have been recovered, e.g. that of a flexible mineral glass, or the simple method of obtaining “la lumiere froide,” etc.

We also observe the apparition of groups of technicians preserving secrets of manufacture, either artesan techniques for making such things as harmonicas or glass ball-bearings, or industrial techniques, e.g. for the production of synthetic petrol. In the great American atomic centers the physicists wear badges indicating the level of their qualifications and the extent of their responsibilities, and may only speak to those who wear the same badge as themselves. They form clubs, and friendships and attachments are formed within the same category.

In this way closed circles come into being very similar to the guilds of the Middle Ages, whether the subject of study be jet airplanes, cyclotrons or electronics. In 1956 thirty-five Chinese students on leaving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asked to return to their country. They had not been working on military problems, but it was considered that they knew too much and they were forbidden to leave the country. The Chinese government, anxious to secure the return of these enlightened young people, proposed in exchange to send back some American airmen who had been detained on charges of espionage.

The safe-keeping of techniques and scientific secrets cannot be entrusted to the police. Or, rather, security officials today are obliged to know something about the sciences and techniques which it is their duty to protect. These specialists are trained to work in nuclear laboratories, and nuclear physicists to be responsible for their security. This leads to the creation of a caste more powerful than governments and political police.

To complete the picture, one has only to think of the groups of experts who are prepared to work for the country that offers the most advantageous terms. These are the new mercenaries, the “hired men-at-arms” of our civilization in which the condottiere wear white overalls. South African, the Argentine and India are their best hunting grounds where they win for themselves positions of real authority.

If we turn now to the less visible but more important facts, we shall see that we are witnessing a return to the age of the Adepts. “Nothing in the universe can resist the cumulative ardor of a sufficiently large number of enlightened minds working together in organized groups”: Teilhard de Chardin told this in confidence to George Magloire.

More than fifty years ago John Buchan, who was an important figure in British politics, wrote a short story which was at the same time a message intended for the ears of a few enlightened individuals. In this story, entitled (and not by chance) The Power-House, the hero meets a distinguished gentleman who, in the course of a seemingly casual conversation, puts forward some very disturbing ideas:

“Of course there are many key-points in civilization,” I said, “and the loss of them would bring ruin. But those keys are strongly held.”

“Not as strongly as you think. Consider how delicate the machinery is growing. As life grows more complex, the machinery grows more intricate, and therefore more vulnerable. Your so-called sanctions become so infinitely numerous that each in itself is frail. In the Dark Ages, you had one great power – the terror of God, and his Church. Now you have a multiplicity of small things, all delicate and fragile, and strong only by our tacit agreement not to question them.”

“You forget one thing,” I said, “the fact that men really are agreed to keep the machine going. That is what I call the goodwill of civilization.”

“You have put your finger on the one that that matters. Civilization is a conspiracy. What value would your police be if every criminal could find a sanctuary across the Channel, or your law courts, if no other tribunal recognized their decisions? Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretenses. And it will succeed till the day comes when there is another compact to strip them bare.”

“We won’t dispute on the indisputable,” I said. “But I should have thought that it was in the interest of all the best brains of the world to keep up what you call the conspiracy.”

“I wonder,” he said slowly. “Do we really get the best brains working on the side of the compact. Take the business of government. When all said is said, we are ruled by amateurs and the second-rate. The methods of our departments would bring any private firm to bankruptcy. The methods of Parliament – pardon me – would disgrace any board of directors. Our rulers pretend to buy expert knowledge, but they never pay the price for it that a businessman would pay, and if they get it they have not the courage to use it. Where is the inducement for a man of genius to sell his brains to our insipid governors?

“And yet knowledge is the only power – now as ever. A little mechanical device will wreck your navies. A new chemical combination will upset every rule of war. It is the same with our commerce. One or two minute changes might sink Britain to the level of Ecuador, or give China the key of the world’s wealth. And yet we never dream that these things are possible. We think our castles of sand are the ramparts of the universe.”

“I have never had the gift of gab, but I admire it in others. There is a morbid charm in such talk, a kind of exhilaration, of which one is half ashamed. I found myself interested, and more than a little impressed.

“But surely,” I said, “the first thing a discoverer does is to make his discovery public. He wants the honor and glory, and he wants money for it. It becomes part of the world’s knowledge, and everything is readjusted to meet it. That was what happened with electricity. You call our civilization a machine, but it is something far more flexible. It has the power of adaptation of a living organism.”

“That might be true if the new knowledge really became the world’s property. But does it? I read now and then in the papers that some eminent scientist has made a great discovery. He reads a paper before some Academy of Science, and there are leading articles on it and his photograph adorns the magazines. That kind of man is not the danger. He is a bit of the machine, a party to the compact. It is the men who stand outside it that are to be reckoned with, the artists in discovery who will never use their knowledge till they can use it with full effect. Believe me, the biggest brains are without the ring which we call civilization.”

Then his voice seemed to hesitate.

“You may hear people say that submarines have done away with the battleship, and that aircraft have annulled the mastery of the sea. That is what our pessimists say. But do you imagine that the clumsy submarine or the fragile airplane is really the last word of science?”

“No doubt they will develop,” I said, “but by that time the power of the defense will have advanced also.”

He shook his head. “It is not so. Even now the knowledge which makes possible great engines of destruction is far beyond the capacity of any defense. You see only the productions of second-rate folk who are in a hurry to get wealth and fame. The true knowledge, the deadly knowledge is still kept secret. But, believe me, my friend, it is there.”

He paused for a second; and I saw the faint outline of the smoke from his cigar against the background of the dark. Then he quoted me one or two cases, slowly, as if in some doubt about the wisdom of his words.

It was these cases that startled me. They were of different kinds – a great calamity, a sudden breach between two nations, a blight on a vital crop, a war, a pestilence. I will not repeat them. I do not think I believed in them then, and now I believe less. But they were horribly impressive, as told in that quiet voice in that somber room on that dark June night. If he was right, these things had not been the work of Nature or accident but of a devilish art. The nameless brains that he spoke of, working silently in the background, now and then showed their power by some cataclysmic revelation. I did not believe him, but, as he put the case, showing with strange clearness the steps in the game, I had no words to protest. At last I found my voice:

“What you describe is super-anarchy, and yet it makes no headway. What is the motive of those diabolical brains?”

He laughed. “How should I be able to tell you? I am a humble inquirer, and in my researches I come on curious bits of facts. But I cannot pry into motives. I only know of the existence of great extra-social intelligences. Let us say they distrust the machine. They may be idealists and desire to make a new world, or they may simply be artists, loving for its own sake the pursuit of truth. If I were to hazard a guess, I should say that it took both types to bring about results, for the second to find the knowledge and the first the will to use it.”

A souvenir came back to me. It was of a hot upland meadow in Tyrol, where among acres of flowers and beside a leaping stream I was breakfasting after a morning spent in climbing the white crags. I had picked up a German on the way, a small man of the Professor class, who did me the honor to share my sandwiches. He conversed fluently but quaintly in English, and he was, I remember, a Nietzschean and a hot rebel against the established order.

“The pity,” he cried, “is that the reformers do not know, and those who know are too idle to reform. Some day there will come the marriage of knowledge and will, and then the world will march.”

“You draw an awful picture,” I said to my host. “But if those extra-social brains are so potent, why after all do they effect so little? A dull police officer, with the machine behind him, can afford to laugh at most experiments in anarchy.”

“True,” he said, “and civilization will win until its enemies learn from it the importance of the machine. The compact must endure until there is a counter-compact. Consider the ways of that form of foolishness which today we call nihilism or anarchy. A few illiterate bandits in a Paris slum defy the world, and in a week they are in jail. Half a dozen crazy Russian intellectuals in Geneva conspire to upset the Romanoffs, and are hunted down by the police of Europe. All the Governments and their not very intelligent police forces join hands, and, hey presto! There is an end of the conspirators. For civilization knows how to use such powers as it has, while the immense potentiality of the unlicensed is dissipated in vapor. Civilization wins because it is a world-wide league; its enemies fail because they are parochial. But supposing…”

Again he stopped and rose from his chair. He found a switch and flooded the room with light. I glanced up, blinking to see my host smiling down on me, a most benevolent and courteous old gentleman.

“I want to hear the end of your prophecies,” I said. “You were saying…?”
“I said: supposing anarchy learned from civilization and became international. Oh, I don’t mean the bands of advertising donkeys who call themselves the International Union of Workers and suchlike rubbish. I mean if the real brain-stuff of the world were internationalized. Suppose that the links in that cordon of civilization were neutralized by other links in a far more potent chain. The Earth is seething with incoherent power and unorganized intelligence. Have you ever reflected on the case of China? There you have millions of quick brains stifled in trumpery crafts. They have no direction, no driving power, so the sum of their efforts is futile, and the world laughs at China. Europe throws her a million or two on loan now and then, and she cynically responds by begging the prayers of Christendom. And yet, I say, supposing…”

“It’s a horrible idea,” I said, “and, thank God, I don’t believe it possible. Mere destruction is too barren a creed to inspire a new Napoleon, and you can do with nothing short of one.”

“It would scarcely be destruction,” he replied gently. “Let us call it iconoclasm, the swallowing of formulas, which has always had its full retinue of idealists. And you do not want a Napoleon. All that is needed is direction, which could be given by men of far lower gifts than a Bonaparte. In a word, you want a Power House, and then the age of miracles will begin.”

When one reflects that Buchan wrote these lines about 1910, and then looks back on all the upheavals the world has endured since then and the mass-movements which are sweeping through China, Africa and India, one may well wonder whether, after all, one or more of these power-houses has not been active. This view will only appear romantic to superficial observers, i.e. to historians wedded to the theory that “facts explain events” which, in the last resort, depends on the way in which you choose your facts.

Elsewhere in this book we shall be describing a power-house which failed, but only after it had plunged the world into a bath of blood and fire: the Fascist power-house. Nor can one doubt the existence of a Communist power-house, or question its prodigious efficiency. “Nothing in the Universe can resist the cumulative ardor of a sufficiently large number of enlightened minds working together in organized groups.” I repeat my quotation, the truth of which is startling in this context.

Our ideas about secret societies are academic; we take a conventional view of extraordinary facts. If we want to understand the world of the future, we shall have to reconsider and refresh our ideas about secret societies by making a more thorough study of the past and discovering a point of view which will render intelligible the phase of history through which we are now passing.

It is possible, even probably, that the secret society will be the future form of government in the new world of the “esprit ouvrier.” Let us take a quick glance at the way things have developed. The monarchies claimed to possess supernatural powers. Kings and nobles and ministers and all the other authorities try to appear more than natural, and to arouse astonishment and admiration by their way of dressing, living and behaving. They do everything they can to attract notice; they encourage pomp and ceremony. And they are always on view, infinitely approachable and infinitely different. Remember the French king Henri IV with his: “Ralliez vous a mon panache blanc!” And sometimes in summer this king bathed naked in the Seine, in the heart of Paris. Louis XIV was a Sun, but anybody at any time was free to enter the palace and be present at his table. Always exposed to the public view, demi-gods decked in gold and feathers, continually attracting attention and living two lives, one private and the other public. After the Revolution, abstract theories prevailed, and governments concealed themselves. The authorities made a point of being “like everyone else,” but at the same time adopted a haughty attitude. On the personal as well as on the factual plane, it became difficult to define exactly what the government consisted of. Modern democracies lend themselves to a thousand and one “esoteric” interpretations. Some intellectuals assert that America is governed by a handful of industrial tycoons, England by the City bankers, France by the Freemasons, etc. With the advent of governments thrown up by revolutionary wars, power is almost completely hidden. Observers of the Chinese revolution, the war in Indo-China, the Algerian War, the special agents in the Soviet world, are all impressed by the way in which power is submerged in the mystery of the Masses, by the secrecy surrounding the responsible authorities, by the impossibility of knowing “who is who” and “who decides what.”

A veritable “cryptocracy” has taken over. We have no time now to analyze this phenomenon, but a volume might well be written about what we have called the “cryptocracy.” In a novel by Jean Largeguy, who took part in the revolution of Azerbaijan, the war in Palestine and the Korean War, a French captain is taken prisoner after the defeat of Dien-Bien-Phu:

“Glatigny found himself in a tunnel-shaped shelter, long and narrow. He was sitting on the ground, his naked back propped against the earth walls. Opposite him a nha-que squatting on his heels, was smoking some foul tobacco rolled in an old piece of newspaper.
“The nha-que was bare-headed, and wearing a khaki uniform without any badges of rank. He had no sandals, and was wiggling his toes voluptuously in the warm mud. Between puffs he said a few words, and a supple-jointed bo-doi, looking like a boy, leant towards Glatigny:
“The battalion commander, he ask where is French major commanding post.”
“Glatigny’s reaction was that of a regular Army officer; he could not believe that this nha-que squatting there smoking stinking tobacco was in command, like himself, of a battalion, and had the same rank and responsibilities. … He must, then, have been one of the officers of the 308th Division, the best and most efficiently staffed in the whole Popular Army. So it was this peasant from the rice plantations who had beaten him – him, Glatigny, descendant of one of the great military dynasties of the West…”

Paul Mousset, the well-known journalist, and a war correspondent in Indo-China and Algeria, once said to me: “I have always thought that the boy, or the small shopkeeper were perhaps the ones who wielded the greatest authority… The new world camouflages its leaders, like those insects that resemble twigs or leaves.”

After the downfall of Stalin, the political experts were unable to agree as to the identity of the real ruler of the USSR. Just as they were telling us at last that it was Beria, the news came of his assassination. No one could possibly name the real rulers of a country with authority over a thousand million souls and extending over half the inhabited areas of the globe.

The threat of war is what reveals the true form of governments. In June 1955 America had planned an operation simulating actual war conditions in the course of which the Government left Washington to carry on “somewhere in the United States.” In the event of this refuge being destroyed, arrangements had been made for this government to transfer its powers to a “shadow government” that had already been constituted. This latter consisted of senators, deputies and experts whose names could not be disclosed. Thus the way to a cryptocracy, in one of the most powerful countries on this planet, was officially indicated.

Should war break out, we should no doubt see the regular governments replaced by “shadow” governments installed, perhaps for the USA in some caves in Virginia, and for the USSR on a floating station in the Arctic. And from that moment it would be treason to disclose the identity of the country’s rulers. Equipped with electronic brains to reduce administrative staff to a minimum, secret societies would organize the gigantic conflict between the two great blocs of humanity. It is even conceivable that these governments might be situated outside our world, in artificial satellites revolving around the Earth.

We are not indulging in philosophy-fiction or history-fiction, but in a fantastic realism. We are skeptical with regard to many points about which others, who are considered to be reasonable men, are less so. We are not in any way trying to focus attention on some empty kind of occultism, or to suggest a semi-crazy, semi-magical interpretation of facts. Nor are we proposing some form of religion. We believe only in human intelligence, and we believe that, at a certain level, intelligence itself is a kind of secret society. We believe that its powers are unlimited when it can develop to its fullest extent, like an oak-tree growing freely in the forest, instead of being dwarfed like a plant in a pot.

It is therefore in the light of the discoveries we have just been making, and of others, still stranger, which we shall soon be confronted with, that we should try to reconsider our conception of a secret society. Here, as elsewhere, we have been able only to outline briefly the general direction of future researches and reflections. And we are well aware that the view we take of things may well seem mad: this is because we are saying rapidly and brutally what we have to say, like a man knocking on a sleeper’s door when time is running short.
[/quote]

[Sweet Tooth]

THE FUTURE PERFECT

II. Bourgeois delights – A crisis for the intelligence, or the hurricane of unrealism – Glimpses of another reality – Beyond logic and literary philosophies – The idea of an Eternal Present – Science without conscience or conscience without science? – Hope.

“The Countess had her tea at five o’clock”: Valery said something to the effect that that kind of thing could not be written by anyone who had gained an entrance to the world of ideas, a thousand times stronger, more romantic and more real than the world of the heart and senses. “Anthony loved Mary who loved Paul; they were very unhappy and had lots of little nothings.” A whole literature! – to describe the palpitations of a mass of amoeba and infusoria, whereas human Thought gives rise to tragedies and gigantic dramas, transmutes human beings, alters the course of whole civilizations and enrolls in its service vast sections of the human race. As to soporific pleasures and bourgeois delights – we workers of the earth, devotees of intellectual enlightenment, are well aware of all that they contain in the way of insignificance, decadence and rottenness…

At the end of the nineteenth century the “bourgeois” theater and novel were in their hey-day, and for a time the literary generation of 1885 paid homage to Anatole France and Paul Bourget.

Nevertheless, about the same time, a much more important and exciting drama than any in which the characters of Divorce or Le Lys Rouge were involved was being played out in the sphere of pure knowledge. The dialogue between materialism and spiritualism, science and religion, suddenly entered on a new and exciting phase.

The scientists, who had inherited the positivism of Taine and Renan, were confronted with staggering discoveries which were to demolish the strongholds of incredulity. Where hitherto only a reality that was well vouched for could be believed in, suddenly the unreal became a possibility, and things were viewed from the standpoint of a romantic intrigue, with the transformation of characters, the intrusion of traitors, conflicting passions and illusory discussions.

The principle of the conservation of energy was established as a certainty, solid as a rock. And yet here was radium, producing energy without acquiring it from any source. No one doubted that light and electricity were identical: they could only proceed in a straight line and were incapable of traversing any obstacle. And yet here were X-rays which could go through solid objects. In the discharge tubes matter seemed to disappear or be transformed into particles of energy. The transmutation of the elements was taking place in nature: radium turns into helium or lead. And so the Temple of Consecrated Beliefs is ready to collapse; Reason no longer reigns supreme! It seemed that anything was possible. The scientists who were supposed to have the monopoly of knowledge suddenly ceased to make a distinction between physics and metaphysics – between fact and fantasy. The pillars of the Temple dissolve into clouds, and the High Priests of Descartes are dumbfounded. If the theory of the conservation of energy is false, what is there to prevent a medium from manufacturing an ectoplasm out of nothing? If magnetic waves can traverse the earth, why should thought-transmission not be possible? If all known bodies emit invisible forces, why should there not be astral bodies? If there is a fourth dimension, could this be the spirits’ world?

Mme. Curie, Crookes and Lodge go in for table-turning; Edison tries to construct a machine for communicating with the dead. Marconi, in 1901, thought he had intercepted messages from Mars. Simon Newcomb was not surprised when a medium materialized sea-shells fresh from the Pacific. The seekers after reality are bowled over by strong blasts of the fantastic and the un-real.

But the stalwarts, the Old Guard, endeavor to stem the flood. The Positivists, in the name of Truth and of Reality, reject everything en bloc: X-rays, ectoplasms, atoms, spirits of the dead, the fourth phase of matter and the idea of there being inhabitants on Mars.

And so begins a conflict between fantasy and reality – a conflict often seemingly absurd, blind and confused, but one which will soon have repercussions on all forms of thought in every sphere: literature, sociology, philosophy, morals and aesthetics. But in the physical sciences order will be re-established, not though retreat or the whittling down of claims, but thanks to fresh advances. A new conception of physics takes shape, due to the efforts of titans such as Langevin, Perrin, Einstein. A new science is born less dogmatic than the old one. Doors are opened on to a different kind of reality. As in all great novels, in the end there are neither good nor bad characters, and all the heroes are right so long as the novelist’s ideas are directed towards a complementary dimension where all their destinies converge and become one, and are raised, together, to a higher level.

***

How do we stand today? Doors have been thrown open in almost all the strongholds of science, but that of physics has lost almost all its walls to become a cathedral entirely built of glass wherein can be seen the reflections of another world infinitely near.

Matter has been shown to be as rich, if not richer in possibilities than the spirit. The energy it contains is incaluculable; its resources can only be guessed at’ it can undergo an infinite number of transformations. The term “materialist” in its nineteenth century connotation has become meaningless; and so has the expression “rationalist.” The logic of “common sense” is no longer valid. In the new physics a proposition can be both true and false. A.B. no longer equals B.A. An entity can be at once continuous and discontinuous. Physics can no longer be relied on to determine what is or is not possible. One of the most astonishing signs of the breach that has been made in the domain of physics is the introduction of what has been called the “strangeness quantum number.” What has happened is roughly as follows. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was believed, somewhat naively, that two, or at most three, numbers were enough to define a particle, referring respectively to its mass, its electric charge and its magnetic moment. This turned out to be very far from the truth. In order to define completely a particle, another dimension, which cannot be expressed in words, had to be allowed for, known as spin. It was believed at first that this “dimension” corresponded to a period in the particle’s rotation on itself, rather like the period of twenty-four hours which, in the case of the planet Earth, regulates the alternation of night and day. However, it soon became clear that the explanation could not possibly be as simple as that. The spin was simply the spin – a quantity of energy connected with the particle, envisaged mathematically as a rotation, although nothing whatever within the particle actually turns.

In spite of erudite research carried out, notably by Professor Louis de Broglie, the mystery of the spin has only been partially explained. Then suddenly the discovery was made that among the three known particles – protons, electrons and neutrons (and their mirror-reflections, the negative anti-proton, positron and anti-neutron) there were at least thirty other particles. The cosmic rays, the great accelerators, produced them in enormous quantities. But to describe these particles the three numbers used hitherto, mass, “charge,” “magnetic moment” no longer sufficed. It was necessary to create a fourth, perhaps a fifth number, or even more. And so, quite naturally, the physicists called these new dimensions “strangeness quantum numbers.” There is something supremely poetic about this salute to the angel of the bizarre. Like many other expressions used in modern physics – “forbidden radiation,” “absolute elsewhere,” “strangeness quantum number,” has overtones which seem to go beyond physics to rejoin the profounder regions of the human mind.

Take a sheet of paper. Pierce two holes in it, near together. Obviously, common sense tells us, an object small enough to go through these holes will go through either one or the other. By the same criterion, an electron is an object. It has a definite weight and produces a ray of light when it strikes a television screen and a shock when it hits a microphone. Here we have, then, an object small enough to go through one of our two holes. Now, the electronic microscope will tell us that the electron has gone through both holes at the same time. What? If it has gone through one, it can’t have gone through the other at the same time. But indeed it has gone through both. It sounds crazy, but the experiment has been made. Attempts to explain it have led to the formulation of various theories, notably that of wave mechanics. But this theory is still not a complete explanation of a fact that defies reason, which can only function in terms of Yes or No, A or B. In order to understand it, the very structure of our reason will have to be changed. Our philosophy is based on thesis and antithesis. But it looks as if, in the philosophy of the electron, thesis and antithesis are both true at the same time. Are we talking about absurdities? The electron seems to obey laws, and television, for example, is a reality. Does the electron exist, or not? What nature calls existence is not existence in our eyes. Is an electron something or nothing? The question is meaningless. And so, at the extreme limits of knowledge, our normal methods of thought and the “literary” philosophies, born of an outdated outlook on the world, simply disappear.

The Earth is part of the Universe; Man is not only in contact with the planet he inhabits. Cosmic rays, radio-astronomy and theoretical physics reveal the contacts he has with the Cosmos as a whole. We no longer live in a closed world, as no intelligent person in tune with our times can have failed to notice. How, then, in these circumstances, is it possible for a thinking man to be still preoccupied with problems that are not even planetary, but narrowly regional and provincial? And how can our psychology, as revealed in works of fiction, remain so enclosed and confined to the analysis of the subconscious impulses of human sensuality and sentimentality? While millions of civilized people read books and go to the cinema or the theater to see how Francoise can be in love with Rene and yet, through her hatred of her father’s mistress, revenge herself by becoming a Lesbian, there are scientists, making a celestial music out of mathematics, who are speculating as to whether space does not contract around a vehicle. The whole universe would then be accessible; one could visit the farthest star in the space of a lifetime. If equations like these could be verified, human thinking would be revolutionized. If mankind is no longer confined to this Earth, new questions will have to be asked with regard to the deeper aspects of Initiation and the possibility of making contact with intelligent beings from Beyond.

What, then, is our position today? As regards research into the structure of space and time, our notions of past and future are no longer valid. Where particles are concerned, time travels in the two directions simultaneously – past and future. At the very high speeds, at the velocity of light, for example, where does time come in? We are in London in October 1944. A V2 rocket traveling at 5,000 km per second (a speed which makes the rocket appear to be crawling) the trajectory of the bomb is already traced. He can only watch; there is nothing he can do. Humanly speaking, nothing can now intercept the engine of death; no warning can be given. In the eyes of the operator the rocket has already crashed. At the speed of radar time is practically non-existent. The occupants of the house are “about to die”; in the radar’s eye they are already dead.

Another example: when the cosmic rays reach the Earth’s surface, they are found to contain particles, the “mu mesons” which live on Earth only for a millionth of a second, destroying themselves by radio-activity. Now, these particles are born thirty kilometers up in the air when the atmosphere of our planet is beginning to be dense. So, by the time they have covered this distance, they have already exceeded their life span by our reckoning. But their time is not ours. Their journey was made in eternity, and they only entered time when they lost their energy on arriving at sea level. Apparatus, it is thought, could be built to reproduce these conditions. In this way drawers of time, as it were, could be created in which objects enjoying only a brief span of life would be placed and preserved in the fourth dimension. This receptacle would be a hollow glass ring placed in a field of intense energy in which the particles would rotate so rapidly that for them time would practically have ceased to exist. A life-span of a millionth of a second might thus be maintained and observed for minutes, or even hours…

“It must not be supposed that past time vanishes into the void; time is one and eternal, of which past, present and future are only different aspects – different ‘pressings,’ if you like – of a continuous, invariable recording of perpetual existence.”

The modern disciples of Einstein recognize nothing but an eternal present, which was also what the ancient mystics believed. If the future exists already, then precognition is a fact. The whole trend of advanced knowledge is to place the laws of physics, and biology and psychology as well, in a four-dimensional continuum – that is to say, in the eternal present. Past, present and future are. Perhaps it is only our consciousness that moves. For the first time, consciousness is admitted in its own right into the equations of theoretical physics. In this eternal present, matter appears as a slender thread stretched between past and future. Along this thread glides human consciousness. By what means is it able to modify the tensions of this thread so as to have an influence on events? One day we shall know, and psychology will then become a branch of physics.

And no doubt there is a place for freedom within this eternal present. “The traveler in a boat on the Seine knows in advance what bridges he will encounter. He none the less has freedom of action and is capable of foreseeing anything that could happen en route.” [R.P. Dubarle, in a broadcast discussion, April 12, 1957]

Freedom to become in the midst of an eternity which is! A double vision, an admirable vision of human destiny bound up with that of the whole Universe.

If I had my life to live again I should certainly not choose to be a writer and spend my days in a backward society where adventure is kept under the bed like a dog. I should want a lion-like adventure: I would go in for theoretical physics in order to live at the very heart of true romance.

The new world of physics explicitly contradicts the philosophies of despair and non-sense. Science without conscience spells ruin for the soul. But conscience without science means ruin, too.

These philosophies which were all the rage in Europe in the twentieth century were nothing but phantoms of nineteenth-century creeds dressed up in the new fashions. Real, objective knowledge in the field of technology and science, which sooner or later englobes the domain of sociology, teaches us that the history of mankind follows a definite path, accompanied by an increase in man’s powers, a rise in the general level of intelligence and a compulsive force which acts on the masses transforming them into active thinkers and giving them access to a civilization where life will be as much superior to ours as ours is now to that of the animals. The literary philosophers had been telling us that man is incapable of understanding the world. Andre Maurois, in Les Nouveaux Discours du Docteur O’Grady, for example, wrote as follows: “Yet you will admit, Doctor, that nineteenth-century man believed that science would one day be able to explain the Universe. Renan, Berthelot, Taine, early in their lives, hoped that this would come about. Twentieth-century man has no such hopes. He knows that discoveries only make the mystery deeper. As to progress, we have seen how man, with all his powerful resources, has only succeeded in producing famine, terror, disorder, torture and confusion in the mind. What hope is there left? Why do you go on living, Doctor?” In point of fact, however, the problem could no longer be stated in these terms. Though the protagonists in this discussion were unaware of it, the circle was already closing round the mystery, and the “progress” so bitterly decried, was opening the gates of heaven. We do not turn to Berthelot or Taine for enlightenment on the future of mankind, but rather to men like Teilhard de Chardin. At a recent discussion between representatives of the various scientific disciplines the following idea was put forward: one day, perhaps, the ultimate secrets of the elementary particles will be revealed to us by what takes place deep down in the brain, for it is here that the most complex reactions in our region of the universe are finally registered, and the brain, no doubt, contains in itself the laws which govern the profoundest mysteries of this region. The world is not absurd, and the mind is surely not incapable of understanding it. On the contrary; it may well be that the human mind has already understood the world, but doesn’t know that – yet.

[Sweet Tooth]

THE VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS

II. An hypothesis condemned to the stake – Where a clergyman and a biologist become comic figures – Wanted: a Copernicus in anthropology – Many blank spaces on all the maps – Dr. Fortune’s lack of curiosity – The mystery of the melted platinum – Cords used as books – The tree and the telephone – Cultural relativity.

As an example of militant action in favor of the greatest possible degree of open-mindedness, and as an initiation into the cosmic consciousness, the works of Charles Fort have been a direct source of inspiration for the greatest poet and champion of the theory of parallel universes, H.P. Lovecraft, the father of what has come to be known as Science-Fiction to which he has contributed some ten or fifteen masterpieces of their kind, a sort of Iliad and Odyssey of a forward-marching civilization. To a certain extent, we too have been inspired in our task by the spirit of Charles Fort. We do not believe everything, but we believe that everything ought to be investigated. Sometimes an inquiry into doubtful facts will throw into their proper perspective facts that are true. Complete results cannot be achieved if anything is omitted. Like Fort, we are trying to repair certain omissions, and are prepared to run the risk of being accused of aberrations. We will leave to others the task of discovering which are the right tracks to follow in our jungle.

Fort studied everything which had apparently fallen from the sky. We are studying all the probable, or less probable, traces left on the Earth by civilizations that have long since disappeared. No hypothesis is excluded: an atomic civilization long before what we call the prehistoric era; enlightenment received from the inhabitants of Another World; etc… Considering that the scientific study of humanity’s remote past has scarcely begun and is at present in a state of complete confusion, these hypotheses are no wilder and just as well founded as those which are currently admired. The important thing, in our opinion, is to throw open the whole question as wide as possible. We are not going to impose upon you a thesis on vanished civilizations, but merely to suggest that you envisage the problem from a new, and non-inquisitorial point of view.

According to the classical method there are two kinds of facts: the “cursed” ones and the others. For example, the descriptions of flying engines in very ancient sacred texts, the use of parapsychological powers among primitive peoples, or the presence of nickel in coins dating from 235 BC are “cursed” facts.

They are banned; no one will even investigate them. And there are two kinds of hypotheses: the disquieting ones, and the others. The frescoes discovered in the caves at Tassili and the Sahara represent, among other things, human figures wearing helmets with long horns from which project spindles outlined in myriads of little points, or dots. Ears of corn, we are told; the symbol of a pastoral civilization. Possibly; but there is nothing to prove it. And suppose this was a way of representing a magnetic field? Shame! A shocking suggestion! Witchcraft! To the stake!

The following is an extreme example of what the classical, or as we call it the inquisitorial method, may lead to:

An Indian clergyman, the Rev. Pravanananvanda, and an American biologist, a Dr. Strauss of the John Hopkins University, have just identified the “Abominable Snowman” as being none other than the brown Himalayan bear. Neither of these gentlemen has seen the animal. They have stated, however, that “since our hypothesis is the only one which is not fantastic, it must be the right one.” So it would be a derogation of the scientific spirit to pursue useless researches. All honor to our clergyman and doctor! It only remains for us to inform the Yeti that he is the brown Himalayan bear.

Our method, in keeping with the times we live in, not unlike the Renaissance, is based on the principle of toleration. No more inquisitions. We refuse to exclude facts and reject hypotheses. Sifting lentils is a useful action; gravel is unfit for human consumption. But there is nothing to prove that certain rejected hypotheses and certain “accursed” facts are not nourishing. We are not working on behalf of the weak and the allergic, but for all those who, as the saying goes, have “guts.”

We are convinced that the study of past civilizations has been marred by numerous cases of rejected evidence, a priori exclusions and inquisitorial executions. The humane sciences have made less progress than physical and chemical science, and the positivist nineteenth century spirit still reigns supreme, and is all the more exacting because it knows it is doomed.

***

Anthropology is awaiting its Copernicus. Before Copernicus, the Earth was the center of the universe. For the classical anthropologist, our civilization is the center of all human thought in space and time. Let us pity poor primitive man, engulfed in the darkness of his pre-logical mentality. Five hundred years separate us from the Middle Ages, and we are only just beginning to exonerate this epoch from the charge of obscurantism. The century of Louis XV paved the way for modern Europe, and the recent work of Pierre Gaxotte has done much to demolish the view that this century was a stronghold of egoism erected to arrest the flow of history. Our civilization, like any other, is a conspiracy.

Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough is a standard and authoritative work containing a description of the folk-lore of every country. Not for a moment did it enter his head that he was dealing with anything but some touching superstitions and picturesque customs.

Savages suffering from infectious illnesses eat penicillum notatum (a kind of mushroom): this must be a form of imitative magic whereby they seek to increase their vigor by consuming this phallic symbol. Their use of digitaline is no doubt another superstition. The science of antibiotics, operations done under hypnosis, creating artificial rain by scattering salts of silver, for example, ought to be enough to remove the label of “naïve” attached to certain primitive practices.

Sir James Frazer, confident of belonging to the only civilization worthy of the name, refuses to envisage the possibility of “inferior” peoples possessing technical skills which, though different from our own, are none the less real, and his Golden Bough is like one of those illuminated maps of the world designed by artists who only knew the Mediterranean and used to fill up the blank spaces with drawings and inscriptions: “Here is the country of the Dragons,” “Here is the Island of the Centaurs…” And did not the nineteenth century too, in every domain, make haste to camouflage all the blank spaces everywhere – even on geographical maps? There is in Brazil, between the Rio Tapajos and the Rio Xingu, an unknown land as big as Belgium. No explorer has ever approached El Yafri, the forbidden city of Arabia. A Japanese division under arms in New Guinea disappeared one day in 1943 without leaving any trace. And if the two Great Powers who share the world between them ever reach agreement the real map of the planet we will have some surprises in store for us.

Ever since the H-bomb the military have been secretly listing the whereabouts of underground caves: an extraordinary subterranean labyrinth in Sweden; caves beneath the soil of Virginia and Czechoslovakia; a hidden lake under the Balearic Islands… Blank spaces on the physical world, blanks on the world of humanity. We do not know everything about man’s powers or the resources of his intelligence and psychic make-up, and we have invented Islands of Centaurs and Dragon Lands: a pre-logical mentality, superstition, folk-lore, imitative magic.

Hypothesis: some civilizations have gone much further than we have in exploiting parapsychological powers.

Answer: there are no parapsychological powers.

Lavoisier proved that meteorites did not exist by stating: “It is impossible for stones to fall from the sky because there are no stones in the sky.” Simon Newcomb proved that it would be impossible for airplanes o fly since an airship heavier than air was an impossibility.

Dr. Fortune went to New Guinea to study the Dobu tribe. They are a people of magicians, whose peculiarity it is to believe that their magical techniques are valid everywhere and for everyone. When Dr. Fortune went away, one of the natives presented him with a charm which had the power of conferring invisibility, saying: “I often use it for stealing pork in broad daylight. Follow my instructions carefully, and you will be able to pinch anything you want in the shops in Sydney.” … “Naturally,” remarked Dr. Fortune, “I never tried it out.” Remember the saying of our friend, Charles Fort: “In the topography of intelligence, knowledge could be defined as ignorance accompanied by derision.”

Nevertheless, a new school of anthropology is coming into being, and M. Levi-Strauss has aroused indignation by boldly declaring that the Negritos are probably more advanced than we are in psychotherapy. A pioneer of this new school, the American William Seabrook, went to Haiti just after the First World War to study the Voodoo cult. Not to observe it from the outside, but to take an active part in this magic and enter this other world with an open mind. Paul Morand [Preface to The Magic Island, by William Seabrook] has written the following magnificent tribute to him:

“Seabrook is perhaps the only white man of our time to have received the baptism of blood. He did so without skepticism and without fanaticism. His attitude towards mystery is that of a man of today. Science in the last ten years has brought us to the brink of the infinite: there, anything might happen in the future – interplanetary travel, discovery of the fourth dimension, radio communication with God. Our superiority over our forefathers must be admitted in so far as from now on we are ready for anything, less credulous and more ready to believe.

The farther we go back into the origins of the world, and the more closely we study primitive peoples, the more often we discover that their traditional secrets coincide with the present state of scientific research. It is only recently that the Milky Way has been considered as the source and origin of the stellar world: the Aztecs, however, expressly affirmed it, and no one believed them. Savages have preserved what science is rediscovering today. They believed in the unity of matter long before the hydrogen atom was isolated. They believed in tree-men and iron-men long before Sir J. C. Bose measured the sensitivity of plants and poisoned metal with cobra’s venom. ‘Human faith,’ said Huxley in Essays of a Biologist, ‘has passed from the Spirit to spirits, and then from spirits to gods and from gods to God.’ It could be added that from God we return to the Spirit.”

But if we are to show that the traditional secrets of the “primitives” coincide with our present researches, it will be necessary to establish communications between anthropology and recent advances in the physical, chemical and mathematical sciences. The simple traveler, intelligent, full of curiosity and with an historical and literary background, is in danger of missing some of the most important discoveries. Exploration up to now has been only a branch of literature, a subjective activity indulged in as a luxury. When it develops into something else, we shall then perhaps perceive that there have been, in remotest antiquity, civilizations endowed with a technical equipment as important and extensive as ours, though of a different nature.

J. Alden Mason, an eminent and very orthodox anthropologist, asserts and produces reliable evidence to support his claim, that ornaments made of melted platinum have been found on the high plateaus in Peru. Now platinum’s melting point is 1730 degrees Celsius, and to work it, techniques comparable to our own would be required.

[Further mysteries in the history of techniques include the following: the method of spectral analysis has recently been employed by the Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Science to examine a girdle with openwork ornaments, 1600 years old, found buried along with a lot of other objects in the tomb of the famous Tsin Genreal Chou Chou, who lived about AD 265-316. It appears that the metal in this girdle was composed of 85 percent aluminum, 10 percent copper and 5 percent manganese. Now, although aluminum is found in many places on the Earth, it is difficult to extract. The only method known today of extracting aluminum from bauxite, namely by electrolysis, has only been in use since 1808. The fact that Chinese technicians were able 1600 years ago to extract aluminum from such a bauxite is therefore an important discovery in the history of metallurgy. Horizons No. 89, October 1958]

Professor Mason sees the difficulty, and concludes that these ornaments were made from powder obtained by calcinations, and not melted. This supposition reveals a real ignorance of metallurgy.

A ten-minute study of Schwarzkopf’s Treatise on Calcinated Powders (Traite des Poudres Frittees) would have shown him that such a hypothesis was inadmissible. Why did he not consult specialists in other branches of science? This is the whole case against anthropology. Professor Mason asserts, equally innocently, that examples have been found, dating from the most ancient Peruvian civilization, of the welding of metals by the use of resin and molten metallic salts. The fact that this technique is the basis of electronics and is used in conjunction with the most advanced technologies, seems to have escaped his notice. We apologize for seeming to make a display of our knowledge, but it is here that we feel the necessity for the “concomitant information” so strongly recommended by Charles Fort.

Despite his extremely prudent approach, Professor John Alden Mason, Curator Emeritus of the Museum of American Antiquities of the University of Pennsylvania, does open a door to the realms of fantastic reality when, in his book The Ancient Civilization of Peru, he speaks about the Quipu. The Quipu are cords tied into complicated knots, and are a feature of Inca and pre-Inca civilizations. They appear to be a form of writing, and may have been used to express abstract ideas. One of the best known specialists in the matter, Nordeskjold, thinks that the Quipu were used for mathematical calculations, horoscopes, and various methods of foretelling the future. The problem is a vital one: there may be other means of registering thought than writing.

Let us take the matter further: the knot, on which Quipu is based, is considered by modern mathematicians to be one of the greatest mysteries. It is only possible in an odd number of dimensions; impossible in dimensions of even numbers – 4, 6, 2 – and the topologists have only been able to study the simplest knots. It is therefore not improbable that the Quipu may conceal knowledge that we do not yet possess.

Take another example: modern thinking on the nature of knowledge and the structure of the mind might be enriched by a study of the language of the Hopi Indians. This language is better adapted than our own to the exact sciences. It contains words representing not verbs or nouns, but events, and is thus more applicable to the space-time continuum in which we now know that we are living. Furthermore, the “event-word” has three moods: certitude, probability, imagination. Instead of saying: a man crossed the river in a boat, the Hopi would employ the group: man-river-boat in three different combinations, according to whether the event was observed by the narrator, reported by a third party, or dreamt.

The really “modern man,” in the sense that Paul Morand and we ourselves understand the term, discovers that intelligence is a unity manifested in different structures, just as man’s need for shelter is universal, expressed in a thousand different architectural forms.

It is possible that our civilization is the result of a long struggle to obtain from machines the powers that primitive man possessed, enabling him to communicate from a distance, to rise into the air, to liberate the energy of matter, abolish gravitation, etc. It is also possible that we may ultimately discover that these powers can be exercised with an equipment so simple that the word “machine” will acquire a different meaning. If this happens we shall have gone from mind to machine and from machine to mind, and certain remote civilizations will appear to us to be less remote.

In his reception address to Oxford University in 1946 Jean Cocteau told the following story: “My friend Pobers, Professor of parapsychology at the University of Utrecht, was sent on a mission to the West Indies to study the part played there by telepathy, in current use among the simple people. If they want to communicate with their husbands or sons in town, the women speak to a tree, and the men bring back whatever they have been asked for. One day Pobers was present at one of these occasions and asked the peasant woman why she addressed herself to a tree. Her reply was surprising and conducive to solving the whole modern problem of our instincts being atrophied by the machines on which we have come to rely. This, then, was the question: ‘Why do you address yourself to a tree?’ And this the answer: ‘Because I am poor. If I were rich I should have the telephone.’”

Electro-encephalograms of Yogis in a state of ecstasy show curves which do not correspond to any cerebral activities known to us either in states of wakefulness or in sleep. There are plenty of colored blank spaces on the map of the mind of civilized man: precognition, intuition, telepathy, genius, etc. By the time these regions have been thoroughly explored, and a path opened up through various states of consciousness unknown to our classical psychologists, the study of ancient civilizations and of peoples we call primitive will perhaps reveal the existence of veritable technologies and essential aspects of knowledge. A cultural centralism will be succeeded by a relativism which will throw a new and fantastic light on the history of humanity. Progress does not consist so much in emphasizing parentheses as in multiplying hyphens.

[Sweet Tooth]

THE VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS

I. In which the authors introduce a fantastic personage – Mr. Fort – The fire at the “sanatorium of overworked coincidences” – Mr. Fort and universal knowledge – 40,000 notes on a gush of periwinkles, a downpour of frogs and showers of blood – The Book of the Damned – A certain Professor Kreyssaler – In praise of “intermediarism” with some examples – The Hermit of the Bronx, or the cosmic Rabelais – Visit of the author to the Cathedral of Saint Elsewhere – Au revoir, Mr. Fort!

In the year 1910 there lived in New York, in a little bourgeois apartment in the Bronx, a little man, neither old nor young, who looked like a very shy seal. His name was Charles Hoy Fort. His hands were round and plump, his figure paunchy and he had no neck, a big head growing bald, a large Asiatic nose, iron-rimmed spectacles and mustaches a la Gurdjieff. He seldom went out, except to go to the Municipal Library where he devoured a quantity of newspapers, reviews and yearbooks of all different countries and all periods. Round his roll-topped desk were heaped empty shoe boxes and piles of periodicals: the American Almanach of 1833; the London Times for the years 1880-93; the Annual Record of Science; twenty years of the Philosophical Magazine, Les Annales de la Societe Entomologique de France, the Monthly Weather Review, The Observatory, the Meteorological Journal, etc. … He wore a green eyeshade, and when his wife lighted the gas-stove for dinner he used to go into the kitchen to see that she didn’t set the place on fire. That was the only thing that annoyed Mrs. Fort, nee Anna Filan, whom he had chosen for her complete absence of intellectual curiosity and of whom he was very fond.

Until the age of thirty-four Charles Fort, whose parents had a grocer’s shop in Albany, had managed to earn a living, thanks to a mediocre talent for journalism and his skill in embalming butterflies. On the death of his parents he sold the shop, and the slender income he derived from the proceeds enabled him at last to devote himself exclusively to his ruling passion which was the accumulation of notes on improbable and yet well established events.

Red rain over Blankenbergue on 2nd November, 1819; a rain of mud in Tasmania on 14th November, 1902. Snowflakes as big as saucers at Nashville on 24th January, 1891; a rain of frogs in Birmingham on 30th June, 1892. Meteorites. Balls of fire. Footprints of a fabulous animal in Devonshire. Flying disks. Marks of cupping-glasses on mountains. Engines in the sky. Erratic comets. Strange disappearances. Inexplicable catastrophes. Inscriptions on meteorites. Black snow. Blue moons. Green suns. Showers of blood…

He collected in this way twenty-five thousand notes, filed in cardboard boxes. Facts, no sooner recorded than forgotten. And yet – facts.

He called this his “sanatorium of overworked coincidences.” Facts no one would speak about. From his files he could hear a “noisy silence” escaping. He felt a kind of affection for these incongruous realities, banished from the realms of knowledge, to which he gave shelter in his humble little office in the Bronx and talked to affectionately as he filed them away. “Little trollops and midgets, humpbacks and buffoons all of you; but the solidity of the procession as a whole: the impressiveness of things that pass and pass and pass and keep on and keep on and keep on coming…”

When he grew tired of passing in review this procession of facts which science had decided to ignore (a flying iceberg fell in fragments on Rouen on 5th July, 1853. Argosies of celestial travelers. Winged beings at a height of 8,000 meters in the sky above Palermo on 30th November, 1880. Luminous wheels in the sea. Rains of sulphur, of flesh. Remains of giants in Scotland. Coffins of little creatures from another world in the cliffs at Edinburgh) … when he grew tired, he found relaxation in playing all alone interminable games of super-checkers on a board of his own invention that had 1,600 squares.

And then one day Charles Hoy Fort realized that all this formidable labor amounted to nothing at all. It was useless, of dubious value, nothing but the pastime of a maniac. He perceived that he had only been treading on the threshold of what he was obscurely seeking, and that he had done none of the things that really needed to be done. This wasn’t research, only a caricature of the real thing. And this man who was so afraid of fire consigned all his boxes and files to the flames.

He had just discovered his real nature. This maniac with a passion for extraordinary occurrences and facts was really only interested in general ideas. What had he unconsciously been doing during those half-wasted years? Ensconced in his den, surrounded by butterflies and old papers, he was in fact attacking one of the most powerful prejudices of this century, namely the civilized man’s conviction that he knows everything there is to know about the Universe in which he lives. Why, then, did Mr. Charles Hoy Fort hide himself, as if he had something to be ashamed of?

The truth is that the slightest allusion to the fact that the Universe may contain vast areas of the Great Unknown has a disturbing and disagreeable effect on men’s minds. Mr. Charles Fort, in fact, was behaving like an erotomaniac: let us keep our vices secret so that society shall not be furious at discovering that it has been allowing large tracts in the field of sexuality to lie fallow. The next stage was to advance from indulgence in a crazy hobby to a declaration of principles, and from being a crank to becoming a prophet. From now on there was real work to be done – revolutionary work.

Scientific knowledge is not objective. Like civilization, it is a conspiracy. Quantities of facts are rejected because they would upset preconceived ideas. We live under an inquisitional regime where the weapon most frequently employed against non-conformist reality is derision. Under such conditions, then, what can our knowledge amount to? “In the topography of intellection,” said Fort, “I should say that what we call knowledge is ignorance surrounded by laughter.” Therefore we shall be obliged to claim another freedom in addition to those guaranteed by the Constitution: freedom to disbelieve science. Freedom to disbelieve in evolution (suppose Darwin’s work was only fiction?), in the rotation of the Earth, in the existence of such a thing as the speed of light, in gravitation, etc. To disbelieve everything, in short, except facts. Not carefully selected facts, but facts as they occur – noble or ignoble, bastard or pure-blooded, with all their accompanying oddities and incongruous appendages. Nothing factual must be rejected; the science of the future will discover unknown relationships between facts which seem to us disconnected. Science needs to be galvanized by a spirit of insatiable curiosity; not credulous, but fresh and wild. What the world needs is an encyclopedia of rejected facts and realities that have been condemned. “I’m afraid we shall have to give to civilization upon this Earth some new worlds. Places with white frogs in them.”

In the space of eight years, our timid little seal-man from the Bronx applied himself to learning all the arts and all the sciences – and to inventing another half-dozen or so as his own contribution. Smitten by an encyclopedic fever, he devoted himself to the gigantic task, not so much of learning, as of taking cognizance of everything in life. “I marveled that anybody could be satisfied to be a novelist, or the head of a steel-trust, or a tailor, or a governor or a street-cleaner.”

Principles, formulae, laws, phenomena of all kinds were devoured and digested at the New York Municipal Library, at the British Museum, and also thanks to an enormous correspondence with all the biggest libraries and bookshops in the world. Result: forty thousand notes divided into thirteen hundred sections, written in pencil on minute scraps of paper in a stenographic language of his own invention. And above all, this wild enterprise was presided over by a man with the gift of being able to consider each subject from the point of view of a superior intelligence confronted with it for the first time. Example: “Astronomy. And a watchman looking at half a dozen lanterns where a street’s been torn up. There are gas lights and kerosene lamps and electric lights in the neighborhood: matches flaring, fires in stores, bonfires, house afire somewhere; lights of automobiles, illuminated signs – The watchman and his one little system…”

At the same time he resumes his inquiries into the facts that have been rejected, but systematically this time, taking care to check and cross-check all his references. He plans his researches under headings covering astronomy, sociology, psychology, morphology, chemistry and magnetism. He no longer collects; he tries to invent a compass for navigating oceans “on the other side,” and to solve the puzzle of other worlds hidden behind this world. He must pluck every trembling leaf from the immense tree of fantasy: screams are heard in the sky over Naples on 22nd November, 1821; fish fall from the clouds over Singapore in 1861; in Indre-et-Loire, on a certain 10th of April there is a cataract of dead leaves; stone hatchets fall on Sumatra in a thunderstorm; living matter descends from the sky; there are kidnappings by supermen from outer space; derelict worlds are floating all around us… “I am intelligent, as contrasted with the orthodox. I haven’t the aristocratic disregard of a New York Curator of an Eskimo medicine-man; I have to dissipate myself in acceptance of a host of other worlds.”

Mrs. Fort was not in the least interested in all this. She did not even see anything strange in it. He never talked about his work, except perhaps to one or two astonished friends, to whom he wrote occasionally. “I think this is a vice we’re writing. I recommend it to those who have hankered for a new sin. At first some of our data were of so frightful or ridiculous mien as to be hated or eyebrowed… then some pity crept in?”

With the strain on his eyes there was a danger of his going blind. He stopped work and meditated for some months, eating nothing but brown bread and cheese. When his eyes were rested he began to expound his own view of the Universe, in which there was no room for dogma, and to arouse the interest of those around him by appealing to their sense of humor. The more he studied the various sciences, the more aware he became of their inadequacies. They needed to be destroyed from the base upwards; the attitude behind them was all wrong. A fresh start would have to be made by re-introducing the rejected facts on which he had assembled a vast documentation. Present them first; explain them afterwards. “I am not convinced that we make a fetish of the preposterous. I think our feeling is that in first gropings there’s no knowing what will afterwards be the acceptable. I think that if an early biologist heard of birds that grow on trees, he should record that he had heard of birds that grow on trees. Then let sorting over of data occur afterwards.”

Let everything be reported, then one day we may have a revelation.

***

The very structure of our knowledge needs to be revised. Charles Hoy Fort is full of exciting theories, all tinged with an element of the bizarre. He sees science as a highly sophisticated motor-car speeding along on a highway. But on either side of this marvelous track, with its shining asphalt and neon lightning, there are great tracts of wild country, full of prodigies and mystery.

Stop! Explore in every direction! Leave the high road and wander! Even if you have to make wild and clown-like gestures, as people do when they are trying to stop a car, no matter; it’s urgent! Mr. Charles Hoy Fort, the hermit of the Bronx, feels obliged to go through a number of clownish acts which he considers indispensable as quickly and as energetically as possible.

Convinced of the importance of his mission, and able to dispense now with his documentations, he sets out to assemble all his best explosives in 300 pages.

He writes his first book, The Book of the Damned in which he proposes “a certain number of experiments concerning the structure of knowledge.” This work was published in New York in 1919 and provoked a revolution in intellectual circles. Before the first manifestations of Dadaism and Surrealism, Charles Fort introduced into science what Tzara, Breton and their disciples were going to introduce into art and literature: a defiant refusal to play at a game where everybody cheats, a furious insistence that there is “something else.” A huge effort, not so much, perhaps, to grasp reality in its entirety, as to prevent reality being conceived in a falsely coherent way. A rupture that had to be. “I am a horse-fly that stings the scalp of knowledge to prevent it from sleeping.”

The Book of the Damned? “The crack-pots’ Golden Bough” – John Winterich. “One of the monstrosities of literature” – Edmund Pearson. For Ben Hecht, “Charles Fort is the apostle of the exceptional and the high priest of the improbable.” Martin Gardner, however, admitted that “his sarcasms are in harmony with the best attested analyses of Einstein and Russell.” John W. Campbell asserted that “this work contains the germs of at least six new sciences.” “To read Charles Fort,” wrote Maynard Shipley, “is like taking a ride on a comet.” While Theodore Dreiser saw in him, “the greatest literary personality since Edgar Poe.”

It was not until 1955 that The Book of the Damned was published in France. This was done at my instigation but, in spite of an excellent translation and introduction by Robert Benayoun and a message from Tiffany Thayer, President in the USA of the “Society of Friends of Charles Fort,” this extraordinary work attracted hardly any attention. (1.)

Bergier and I consoled ourselves for this mishap to one of our most cherished idols by imagining with what relish he would be listening, from the bottom of the super-Sargasso Sea where he has doubtless made his home, to the “noisy silence” reaching him from the country of Descartes.

***

Our ex-embalmer of butterflies had a horror of anything fixed, classified or defined. Science isolates phenomena in order to observe them. Charles Fort’s great idea was that nothing can be isolated. An isolated object ceases to exist. A swallow-tail butterfly sucks nectar from a flower. Result: a butterfly plus nectar; a flower minus the butterfly’s appetite. Every definition of a thing in itself is a crime against reality. “In some so-called savage tribes the feeble-minded are held in great respect. It is generally recognized that the definition of an object in terms of itself is a sign of feeble-mindedness. All scientists begin by using this kind of definition, and in our communities scientists are held in great respect.”

Here we have Charles Hoy Fort, lover of the unusual, recorder of miracles, engaged in the formidable task of reflecting on reflection. What he is attacking is the mental structure of civilized man. He is completely out of sympathy with the two-stroke motor which is the driving power of modern reasoning. Two strokes: Yes and No, Positive and Negative. Modern knowledge and modern intelligence are based on this binary system: right, wrong, open, closed; living, dead, liquid, solid, etc. … Where Fort is opposed to Descartes is in his insistence that we should envisage the general from an angle which would allow the particular to be defined in its relation thereto, in such a way that every object or thing would be seen as intermediaries between other things. What he demands is a new mental structure, capable of recognizing as real the intermediate states between the yes and the no, the positive and the negative. In other words, a system of reasoning which is higher than binary and would be, as it were, a third eye for the intelligence.

To express what this third eye perceives, language (which is a binary product, an organized conspiracy and limitation) is not sufficient. Fort was therefore constrained to use double-faced adjectives, Janus-epithets such as “real-unreal,” “immaterial-material,” “soluble-insoluble,” etc.

One day when Bergier and I were lunching with him, a friend of ours invented, out of his head, a grave Austrian Professor, the son of an innkeeper at Madgebourg called Kreyssler. The Herr Professor Kreyssler, he informed us, had undertaken the gigantic task of refashioning the language of the West. Our friend was thinking of publishing in a serious review a study of “The Verbalism of Kreyssler,” which would have been a very fruitful mystification. This Kreyssler, then, had tried to loosen the corset of language so that it would find room for the intermediary states neglected in our present mental structure. Let us take an example: backwardness and progress (“retard” and “avance”). How am I to define the backwardness of the progress I hoped to make? There is no word for it. Kreyssler proposed: “atard.” And for my progress in making up for my backwardness? “Revance.” [Possible English equivalents would be “slowgress” and “backforwardness” – Ed]

Here we are talking about intermediate degrees in time. Now let us take the plunge into psychological states. Love and hate. If I love in a cowardly way, loving only myself through the other person and thus being on the way to hate, is this love? No, it is only “lhate.”

If, on the other hand, I hate my enemy, without however losing the thread of unity that binds all creatures, doing my duty as an enemy but reconciling hatred and love, this would be “hatrove.” And now for the fundamental intermediates. What is dying, and what is living? So many intermediate states that we refuse to recognize! There is “mouvre” (“delive”), which is not living but merely preventing oneself from dying. And there is “virir” (“lidie”) which is really living despite having to die. Finally, the states of consciousness. For example, our consciousness is suspended between sleeping and waking. How often is my consciousness only “wakleeping” (“vemir”) thinking it is awake when it is allowing itself to sleep! If, on the other hand, knowing its inclination to sleep it tries to keep awake, that would be a state of “slakefulness” (“doriller”).

Our friend had just been reading Fort when he presented us with his farcical but ingenious idea. “In general metaphysical terms,” said Fort, “our expression is that, like a purgatory, all that is commonly described as ‘existence,’ which we call ‘Intermediateness,’ is quasi-existence, neither real nor unreal, but expression of attempt to become real, or to generate for or recruit a real existence.” Such an enterprise is without a parallel in modern times. It foreshadows the great changes in the structure of the mind that are called for today by the discovery of certain physico-mathematical realities. Where the particle is concerned, for example, time moves in two directions at once. Equations are both true and false. Light is continuous and at the same time interrupted.

“But that all that we call ‘Being’ is motion; and that all motion is the expression not of equilibrium, but of equilibrating, or of equilibrium unattained; and that to have what is called being is to be intermediate to Equilibrium and In-equilibrium.” These words were spoken in 1919 and echo the observations of a contemporary biologist and physicist, Jacques Menetrier, on the inversion of the entropy:

“All phenomena in our intermediary state, or quasi-state of being represent a movement towards organization, harmonization and individualization, in other words, an attempt to attain reality. But all attempts are thwarted by continuity, or by external forces – non-recognized facts side by side with others that are recognized.”

This anticipates one of the most abstract operations in quantum physics: the normalization of functions – an operation which consists in determining the function characterizing a physical object in such a way that it is possible to find this object anywhere in the entire Universe.

“We conceive of all things as occupying gradations, or steps in series between realness and unrealness.” That is why it was all the same to Fort whether he started with this fact or that in trying to describe totality. And why choose a rational and reassuring fact rather than a disturbing one? Why exclude? “One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.” For example, he drew attention to flying objects. There you have a group of facts from which it is possible to begin to understand totality. But he hastens to assert that “gushes of periwinkles would be just as good.”

“We are not realists. We are not idealists. We are intermediatists.” But how is anyone to make himself understood if he attacks the very roots of understanding, the basic principles of the intellect? By an apparent eccentricity, which is the shock-language of the genuine “centralist” genius: the more far-fetched his images, the surer he is to be able to connect them with the focal point of his profoundest meditations. To a certain extent, Charles Hoy Fort follows Rabelais’s example, blending humor and imagery in a chorus loud enough to wake the dead.

“I am a collector of notes upon subjects that have diversity, such as deviations from concentricity in the lunar crater of Copernicus and a sudden appearance of purple Englishmen, stationary meteor-radiants; and a reported growth of hair on the bald head of a mummy. But my liveliest interest is not so much in things as in relations of things. I have spent much time thinking about the alleged pseudo-relations that are called coincidences. What if some of them should not be coincidences?”

“In days of yore, when I was an especially bad young one, my punishment was having to go to the store on Saturdays and work. I had to scrape off labels of other dealers’ canned goods and paste them on my parents’ label… One time I had pyramids of canned goods containing a variety of fruit and vegetables. But I had used all except peach labels. I pasted the peach labels on peach cans and then came to apricots. Well, aren’t apricots peaches? And there are plums that are virtually apricots. I went on either mischievously or scientifically, pasting the peach labels on cans of plums, cherries, string beans and succotash. I can’t quite define my motive, because to this day it has not been decided whether I am a scientist or a humorist.”

“If there are no positive differences, it is not possible to say what anything is, as positively distinguished from anything else. What is a house? A barn is a house, if one lives in it. If residence constitutes house-ness because style of architecture does not, then a bird’s nest is a house, and human occupancy is not the standard to judge by, because we speak of dogs’ houses; nor material, because we speak of snow houses of Eskimos… or things seemingly so positively different as the White House at Washington and a shell on the seashore are seen to be continuous.”

“White coral islands in a dark blue sea. Their seeming of distinctness: the seeming of individuality, or of positive difference one from another – but all are only projections from the same sea bottom. The difference between sea and land is not positive. In all water there is some earth; in all earth there is some water. So then that all seeming things are not things at all, if all are inter-continuous, any more than is a table-leg a thing in itself, if it is only a projection from something else: that not one of us is a real person if, physically, we are continuous with environment; if, physically, there is nothing to us but expression of relation to environment. Our general expression has two aspects: conventional monism, or that all things that seem to have identity of their own are only islands that are projections from something underlying, and have no real outlines of their own.”

“By beauty, I mean that which seems complete. Obversely, that the incomplete, or the mutilated, is the ugly. Venus of Milo: to a child she is ugly. When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness… she is beautiful. A hand, thought of only as a hand, may seem beautiful; found on a battlefield, obviously a part, not beautiful. But everything in our experience is only part of something else that in turn is only a part of still something else – or that there is nothing beautiful in our experience; only appearances that are intermediate to beauty and ugliness – that only universality is complete; that only the complete is the beautiful: that every attempt to achieve beauty is an attempt to give to the local the attribute of the universal.”

Fort’s profound thinking is thus based on the subjacent unity of every thing and of all phenomena. Yet civilized thought at the end of the nineteenth century opened parentheses everywhere, and our binary system of reasoning can only conceive duality. So, then, we see the crazy wise man of the Bronx in revolt against the exclusionist science of his day, and also against the very structure of our intelligence. It seems to him another kind of intelligence is needed: an intelligence partly mystical, and awakened to an awareness of the presence of Totality. From these premises he goes on to suggest other methods of knowledge. To prepare us for this he proceeds to tear up, or blow up, our set ways of thinking. “I’ll send you reeling against the doors that open on to ’something other.’”

And yet Mr. Fort is not an idealist. He militates against our limited realism: we reject reality when it is fantastic. Mr. Fort does not preach a new religion. On the contrary, he endeavors to surround his teaching with a barrier to prevent the feeble-minded from entering. That “everything is in everything,” that the Universe is contained in a grain of sand, he is convinced. But this metaphysical certainty can only be apprehended at the highest level of our reflective intelligence. Brought down to the level of an elementary occultism it would appear ridiculous. It cannot be used to justify the ravings of analogical thinking so dear to those rather suspect esoterics who are continually explaining one thing by something else: the Bible by numbers, the last war by the Great Pyramids, Revolution by cartomancy and my future by the stars – and who see signs everywhere.

“There is probably a connection between a rose and a hippopotamus and yet no young man would ever think of offering his fiancée a bouquet of hippopotami.” Mark Twain, denouncing the same false thinking, declared jokingly that the Spring Song can be explained by the Tables of the Law since Moses and Mendelssohn are the same name: you have only to replace “-oses” by “-endelssohn.” And Charles Fort renews the attack with his caricature: “An elephant can be identified as a sunflower: both have long stems. A camel is indistinguishable from a peanut, if only their humps can be considered.” There you have a picture of the man – one who carries his solid learning lightly. Let us see now how his thought can be expanded to cosmic dimensions.

***

Supposing the Earth, itself, as such, were not real? What if it were only something intermediary in the cosmos? Perhaps the Earth has no independent existence, and perhaps life on the Earth is by no means independent of other lives and other existences in space…

Forty thousand notes on all sorts of rains which have fallen on the earth obliged Charles Fort to admit the hypothesis that most of them were not of terrestrial origin. “I suggest that beyond this earth are other lands from which come things as, from America, float things to Europe.”

It should be made quite clear that Fort is certainly not naïve. He does not believe everything. He only protests against our habit of denying everything a priori. He does not point his finger at truths; he hits out with his fists to demolish the scientific set-up of his day, built up of truths so very imperfect as to resemble errors. If he laughs, it is because there seems to be no reason why man’s striving after knowledge should not sometimes be accompanied by laughter, which is also human. Does he invent? Dream? Extrapolate? A cosmic Rabelais? He admits it:

“This book,” he writes, “is fiction, like Gulliver’s Travels, The Origin of Species, Newton’s Principia and every history of the United States.”

“Black rains and black snows, jet-black snowflakes…” “Slag washed upon the Scottish coast – to have produced so much of it would have required the united output of all the smelting works in the world.” “My own notion is of an island near an oceanic trade-route: it might receive debris from passing vessels.” Why not debris or refuse from inter-stellar ships?

Sometimes, again, rains contain animal substances, gelatinous matter accompanied by a strong smell of decay. “Will it be admitted that there are vast viscous and gelatinous regions floating about in infinite space?” Could all this be accounted for by food cargoes deposited in the sky by the Great Travelers from other worlds?

“We have a sense of a stationary region overhead in which this Earth’s gravitational and meteorological forces are relatively inert, or a region that receives products like this Earth’s products, but from external sources.”

What about the rains that contain live animals – fish, frogs, tortoises? If they come from elsewhere, then human beings, too, ancestrally speaking, may also come from “elsewhere”… Unless they are animals that have been snatched up from the Earth by hurricanes or whirlwinds and deposited in a region in outer space where there is no gravitation, a sort of cold chamber where the objects ravished in this way are indefinitely preserved.

Removed from the Earth, and having crossed the threshold of the gates opening on to “elsewhere,” they are assembled in a kind of super-sea of Sargasso in the skies. “Objects caught up in hurricanes may enter a region of suspension over this Earth…”

“Those are your data; do with them as you please… Where do the whirlwinds go? Of what do they consists? … A super-sea of Sargasso: derelicts, rubbish, old cargoes from inter-planetary wrecks; things cast out into what is called space by convulsions of other planets, things from the times of the Alexanders, Caesars and Napoleons of Mars, or Jupiter, or Neptune. Things raised by this Earth’s cyclones: horses and barns and elephants and flies, and dodos, pterodactyls and moas; leaves from modern trees and leaves of the carboniferous era – all, however, tending to disintegrate into homogeneous-looking muds or dusts – red or black or yellow – treasure-troves for the paleontologists and for the archeologists – accumulations of centuries, cyclones of Egypt, Greece and Assyria…”

“When lightning is accompanied by thunderbolts, the peasants thought they were meteorites. Scientists exclude meteorites. Peasants believe in ‘thunderstones’; Scientists exclude thunderstones. It is useless to argue that peasants are out in the fields and that scientists are shut up in laboratories and lecture rooms…”

Thunderbolts apparently shaped and covered with marks and signs… could it be that other worlds were trying, in this and other ways, to communicate with us, or at any rate, with some of us? “With a sect, perhaps, or a secret society, or certain esoteric ones of this Earth’s inhabitants.” … There are innumerable instances of attempts at this kind of communication. “Because of our experience with suppression and disregard, we suspect, before we go into the subject at all, that astronomers have seen these phenomena; that meteorologists and navigators have seen them; that individual scientists and other trained observers have seen them many times; that it is the System that has excluded data of them.”

We would remind readers once again that this was written about 1910. Today the Russians and the Americans are building laboratories to study signals that might be coming to us from other worlds.

Perhaps we have been visited in the distant past? And supposing the paleontologists were wrong, and that the great skeletal remains discovered by the exclusionist scientists of the nineteenth century had been arbitrarily assembled? Were they the remains of gigantic beings, occasional visitors to our planet? What really obliges us to believe in the pre-human fauna talked about by the paleontologists who know no more about it than we do? “No matter how cheerful and unsuspicious my disposition may be, when I go to the American Museum of Natural History dark cynicisms arise the moment I come to the fossils or old bones that have been found – gigantic things, reconstructed into terrifying but “proper” Dinosaurs. On one of the floors below they have a reconstructed Dodo. It’s frankly a fiction… but it’s been reconstructed so cleverly and so convincingly…”

“Why, if we have been visited, before, are we not visited now? A simple and immediately acceptable answer would be: Would we, if we could, educate and sophisticate pigs, geese, cattle? Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relations with the hen that now functions, satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way of compensation?

“I think we are property. I should say we belong to something; that once upon a time this Earth was no-man’s land, that other worlds explored and colonized here and fought among themselves for possession, but that now it’s owned by something; that something owns this Earth – all others warned off. Nothing in our own times has ever appeared upon this Earth, from somewhere else so openly as Columbus landed upon San Salvador, or as Hudson sailed up his river. But as to surreptitious visits to this Earth in recent times, or as to emissaries, perhaps, from other worlds, or voyagers who have shown every indication of intent to evade and avoid, we shall have data as convincing as our data of oil, or coalburning aerial super-constructions. But in this vast subject I shall have to do considerable neglecting or disregarding myself. I do not see how I can in this book take up at all the subject of the possible use of humanity to some other mode of existence, or the flattering notion that we can possibly be worth something. Pigs, geese and cattle. First find out that they are owned. Then find out the whyness of it. I suspect that, after all, we’re useful – that among contesting claimants adjustment has occurred, or that something now has a legal right to us, by force, or by having paid out analogues of beads for us to former, more primitive, owners of us – and that all this has been known, perhaps for ages, to certain ones upon this Earth, a cult, or Order, members of which function like bell-weathers to the rest of us, or as superior slaves or overseers, directing in accordance with instructions received – from Somewhere else – in our mysterious usefulness.”

“In the past, before proprietorship was established, inhabitants of a host of other worlds have dropped here, hopped here, wafted, sailed, flown, motored – walked here, for all I know – been pulled here, been pushed; have come singly, have come in enormous numbers; have visited occasionally, have visited periodically, for hunting, trading, mining, replenishing harems: have established colonies here, have been lost here; far-advanced peoples, or things, and primitive peoples or whatever they were: - white ones, black ones, yellow ones…”

We are not alone; the Earth is not alone; “I think we’re all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese” whose odor of fermentation we dimly perceive. There are other worlds behind ours, other lives behind what we call life. We must do away with the parentheses of exclusionism in exchange for the hypotheses of a fantastic Unity. And no matter if we make mistakes, such as drawing a map of America on which the Hudson is set down as a passage leading to Siberia; what is essential, at a time like this when new methods of knowledge and new ways of thinking are being opened up, is that we should have no doubts at all that maps will have to be altered, that the world is not what we thought it was, and that we ourselves, in the depths of our own consciousness will have to change into something different from what we were before.

Other worlds are in communication with the Earth. Proofs of this exist. Those which we think we can see are not, perhaps, the right ones. But they exist. The marks of cupping glasses on mountains: do they prove anything? We do not know. At least they stimulate us to look for further signs: “…These marks look to me like symbols of communication. But they do not look to me like means of communication between some inhabitants of this Earth and other inhabitants of this Earth. My own impression is that some external force has marked, with symbols, rocks of this Earth from far away. I do not think that cup-marks are inscribed communications among different inhabitants of this Earth, because it seems too unacceptable that inhabitants of China, Scotland and America should all have conceived of the same system. Cup-marks are strings of cup-like impressions in rocks. Sometimes there are rings around them, and sometimes they have only semicircles. England, France, America, Algeria, Circassia and Palestine – they are virtually everywhere – except, in the far North, I think. In China cliffs are dotted with them. On a cliff near Lake Como there is a maze of these markings. In Italy, Spain and India they occur in enormous numbers. Given that a force, say, like electric force, could from a distance mark such a substance as rocks as, from a distance of hundreds of miles, selenium can be marked by telephotographers. But I am of two minds: the Lost Explorers from Somewhere, and an attempt from Somewhere, to communicate with them: so a frenzy of showering of messages toward this Earth in the hope that some of them would mark rocks near the lost explorers. Or that somewhere upon this Earth, there is an especial rocky surface or receptor or Polar construction, or a steep conical hill upon which for ages have been received messages from some other world; but that, at times, messages go astray and mark substances perhaps thousands of miles from the receptor; that perhaps forces behind the history of this Earth have left upon the rocks of Palestine, England, China and India records that may some day be deciphered, of their misdirected instructions to certain esoteric ones – Order of the Freemasons, the Jesuits –”

No image can be too fanciful, no hypothesis too extreme: anything can be used to storm the fortress. There are such things as flying engines and space-explorers. And suppose they pick up en route, for examination, a few living organisms from the Earth? … “I think that we’re fished for. It may be that we are highly esteemed by super-epicures somewhere. It makes me more cheerful when I think that we may be of some use after all. I think that drag-nets have often come down and have been mistaken for whirlwinds and waterspouts… I think we’re fished for, but this is a little expression on the side.”

And now we have reached the depths of the inadmissible, murmurs of our strange Mr. Charles Hoy Fort with quiet satisfaction. He takes off his green eyeshade, rubs his big tired eyes, smoothes down his seal’s mustache and goes off to the kitchen to see whether his good wife Anna, in cooking the haricots for dinner, is not in danger of setting fire to the shed, the folders, the card-index, the museum of coincidences, the conservatory of the improbable, the salon of celestial artists, the office of fallen objects and to that library of other worlds, that Cathedral of Saint Elsewhere, and the fabulous and shining Jester’s costume that Wisdom wears.

Anna, my dear, turn off your gas.

Good appetite, Mr. Fort.


[1. Mr. Tiffany Thayer wrote, among other things, as follows: “The qualities of Charles Fort greatly impressed a group of American writers who decided to pursue, in his honor, the attack which he had launched against the all-powerful priests of the new god: Science, and against all forms of dogma. It was for this purpose that the Charles Fort Society was founded on the 26th January 1931. The founder-members included Theodore Dreiser, Booth Tarkington, Ben Hecht, Harry Leon Wilson, John Cowper Powys, Alexander Woolcott, Burton Rascoe, Aaron Sussman and the secretary, the undersigned, Tiffany Thayer. Charles Fort died in 1932 shortly before the publication of his fourth book, Wild Talents. The innumerable notes he had assembled from libraries throughout the world and from his international correspondence were bequeathed to the Charles Fort Society; today they form the nucleus of the archives of this society, which are swollen every day by contributions from members in forty-nine countries, not counting the USA, Alaska, and Hawaii. The Society publishes a quarterly review: Doubt. There is also a sort of clearing-house for all the “outlawed” facts, i.e. those which orthodox science cannot or will not accept, e.g. the flying saucers. In point of fact, the body of information and statistics on this subject which the Society possesses is the oldest, most extensive and the most complete in existence. The review Doubt also publishes some of Fort’s notes.”]

[Sweet Tooth]

THE VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS

III. In which the authors speculate about the Great Pyramid – Possibility of “other techniques” – The example of Hitler – The Empire of Almanzar – Recurrence of “ends of the world” – The impossible Easter Island – The legend of the white man – The civilization of America – The mystery of Maya – From the “bridge of light” to the strange plain of Nazca.

It has taken humanity 2200 years, from Aristarchus of Samos to the year 1900, to calculate with sufficient accuracy the distance from the Earth to the Sun: 149,400,000 kilometers. To arrive at the same result it was only necessary to multiply by a thousand million the height of the Pyramid of Cheops, built in 2900 BC.

We know today that the symbol ‘pi’, the exact calculation of the duration of the solar year and of the radius and weight of the Earth, the law of the precession of the equinoxes, the figure of the degree of longitude, the position of the True North, and perhaps many other data not yet deciphered. Where did this knowledge come from? How was it obtained or transmitted? And, in the latter case, by whom?

The Abbe Moreux believes that God imparted scientific knowledge to the Ancients. “Hearken to me, O my son: the number 3.1416 will enable thee to calculate the surface of a circumference!”

According to Piazzi Smyth, God dictated this information to the Egyptians who were too impious and too ignorant to understand what they were inscribing in their stone. And why should God, who is omniscient, be seriously mistaken as to the quality of his pupils? In the opinion of the positivist Egyptologists, the measurements carried out at Gizeh have been faked by explorers too intent on discovering marvels: in fact, they reveal no special science. But the discussion turns on questions of decimals, and the fact remains that the construction of the Pyramids reveals a technique that to us is still totally incomprehensible. Gizeh is a mountain weighing 6,500,000 tons. Blocks of twelve tons are adjusted to a demi-millimeter. The least imaginative idea is the one most generally accepted – namely, that the Pharaohs had a colossal manpower at their disposal. It has never been explained how the problem of dealing with the overcrowding caused by these vast hordes was solved. Nor the reason for such a mad undertaking. How were the blocks of stone extracted from the quarries? Classical Egyptology recognizes no other technique than the use of wedges of wet wood thrust into fissures in the rock. The builders, it seems, had only stone hammers, copper saws and soft metal to work with. This only deepens the mystery. How were those chipped stones weighing 10,000 kg and more hoisted and put into place? In the nineteenth century we had the greatest difficulty in transporting two obelisks which the Pharaohs used to transport by the dozen. What did the Egyptians use to light the interior of the Pyramids? Until 1890, we ourselves only had lamps that smoked and left a sooty deposit on the ceiling. No trace of smoke, however, has ever been found on the walls of the Pyramids. Did they perhaps intercept the Sun’s light and convey it to the interior by some optical contrivance? No traces of a lens of any kind have ever been found.

Nor has any instrument for scientific calculations, nor any evidence of an advanced technology been discovered. There are two possible explanations. The first is the elementary-mystical theory of God dictating astronomical information to dense but willing stone-masons and lending them a helping hand.

Is it true that there is no scientific knowledge embodied in the Pyramids? The positivists maintain that if there is it is only a coincidence. When coincidences are, as Fort would have said, as exaggerated as in this case, what ought they to be called?

The second alternative is to believe that a few surrealist architects and decorators, in order to satisfy the megalomania of their king, and working to measurements improvised and imagined on the spur of the moment, succeeded in causing the 2,600,000 blocks of the Great Pyramid to be extracted, decorated, hoisted and adjusted to a demi-millimeter by hordes of laborers working with nothing but pieces of wood and saws for cutting cardboard and treading on each other’s toes.

All this happened 5000 years ago, and we know almost nothing about it. What we do know, however, is that research has been in the hands of people for whom the techniques of our modern civilization are the only ones that count. They are therefore obliged to imagine either Divine intervention, or else to look upon the whole thing as a bizarre and colossal task performed by ant-like hordes. It is possible, however, that minds quite different from our own were able to conceive techniques as highly perfected as ours, but also quite different, involving instruments for measuring and methods of manipulating matter unlike anything we know, and leaving no traces that we can see. It may be that a science and a technology of great potency, which provided solutions to these problems very different from anything we can imagine, disappeared completely along with the world of the Pharaohs. It is difficult to believe that a civilization can die and leave no trace. It is still more difficult to believe that it could be so different from our own that we are unable to recognize it as a civilization. And yet!

When the War in Europe ended on May 8th, 1945, missions of investigation were immediately sent out to visit Germany after her defeat. Their reports have been published; the catalogue alone has 300 pages. Germany had only been separated from the rest of the world since 1933. In twelve years the technical evolution of the Reich developed along strangely divergent lines. Although the Germans were behindhand as regards the atomic bomb, they had perfected giant rockets unmatched by any in America or Russia. They may not have had radar, but they had perfected a system of infra-red ray detectors which were quite as effective. Though they did not invent silicones, they had developed an entirely new organic chemistry, based on the eight-ring carbon chain.

In addition to these radical differences in matters of technique there were still more stupefying differences in the field of philosophy. They had rejected the theory of relativity and tended to neglect the quantum theory. Their cosmogony would have startled astrophysicists in the Allied countries: they believed in the existence of eternal ice and that the planets and the stars were blocks of ice floating in space. [See Part Two of the present work] If it has been possible for such wide divergences to develop in the space of twelve years in our modern world, in spite of the exchange of ideas and mass communications, what view must one take of the civilizations of the past? To what extent are our archeologists qualified to judge the state of the sciences, techniques, philosophy and knowledge that distinguished, say, the Maya or Khmer civilizations?

We must avoid falling into the trap of paying too much attention to legends: Lemuria or Atlantis. Plato, in the Critias, singing the praises of the vanished city, and before him, Homer evoking in the Odyssey the fabulous Scheria were perhaps describing Tartessos, the Biblical Tarshish of the Book of Jonah, and the object of the prophet’s journey. At the mouth of the Guadalquivir, Tartessos was the richest mining town in the world and represented the quintessence of a civilization. It flourished for an unknown number of centuries, and had been the seat of wisdom and the depository of many secrets. About the year 500 BC it vanished completely, no one knows how or why. [cf. Sprague de Camp and Willy Ley: De l’Atlantide a l’Eldorado; ed. Plon, Paris]

It may be that Numinor, that mysterious Celtic center of the fifth century BC, was not a legend [cf. works of Professor Tolkien of Oxford], but we do not really know. The civilizations of whose existence in the past we can be certain but which are now dead are quite as strange as Lemuria. The Arab civilization of Cordoba and Grenada was the cradle of modern science, the founder of experimental research and its practical applications; and among the subjects it studied were chemistry and even jet-propulsion. Arab manuscripts of the twelfth century contain designs for rockets used for bombardment. If the Empire of Almanzar had been as advanced in biology as it was in other spheres, and if the plague had not assisted the Spaniards in its destruction, the Industrial Revolution would perhaps have started in Andalusia in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and the twentieth would then have been the era of Arab interplanetary adventurers colonizing the Moon, Mars and Venus.

The Empire of Hitler, like that of Almanzar, collapsed in blood and fire. One fine morning in June 1940, the sky over Paris grew dark, the air was filled with petrol fumes, and under this immense cloud that blackened the faces of the population overcome by astonishment, terror and shame, millions of human beings took blindly to flight along roads raked by machine-gun fire. Whoever has lived through that experience, and known also the Twilight of the Gods of the Third Reich, can imagine what the end of Cordoba and Granada was like, and a thousand other ends of the world since time began. The end of the world for the Incas, for the Toltecs, for the Mayas: the whole history of humanity – an endless end.

Easter Island, 3000 km from the coast of Chile, is about as big as Jersey. When the first European navigator, a Dutchman, landed there in 1722, he though it was inhabited by giants. Towering over this little piece of volcanic land in Polynesia are 593 enormous statues. Some of them are more than 20 meters high and weigh 50 tons. When were they erected? And how? And for what purpose? Examination of these monuments reveals, it is thought, three levels of civilization, the most advanced one being the oldest. As in Egypt, the enormous blocks of tuff-stone, basalt and lava are adjusted with prodigious skill. The island, however, is hilly, and a few stunted trees could not have provided enough rollers; how, then, were these huge stones transported? Certainly there was no large labor-force available. In the nineteenth century the inhabitants of Easter Island numbered two hundred – three times less than the number of their statues, and there can never have been more than three or four thousand inhabitants on this island where the soil is fertile, but there are no animals. What, then, are we to believe?

As happened in Africa and in South America, the first missionaries to arrive on Easter Island took steps to remove all traces of a dead civilization. At the foot of the statues there were wooden tablets covered with hieroglyphics: these were all burned or dispatched to the Vatican Library which houses many secrets. Was this done to destroy all traces of ancient superstitions, or to remove what could have been evidence of some Unknown Power? A record of the presence on the Earth of other beings – visitors from Elsewhere?

The first Europeans to visit Easter Island discovered that the inhabitants included a race of white men with beards. Where did they come from? The descendants, perhaps, of some degenerate race, in existence for many thousands of years and today completely submerged? There are references in legends to a Master Race of Teachers, of great antiquity, fallen from the skies.

Our friend, the Peruvian explorer and philosopher Daniel Ruzo, went off in 1952 to investigate the desert plateau of Marcahuasi situated at a height of 3800 meters to the west of the Cordillera of the Andes. [Daniel Ruzo: La Culture Masma. Revue de la Societe d’Ethnographie de Paris, 1956 and 1959]

This plateau, where there is no life of any kind and which can only be approached on mule-back, covers an area of three square km. Ruzo found there animal and human faces carved in the rock and visible only at the summer equinox, thanks to a particular combination of light and shade. He also found there statues of animals belonging to the secondary era such as the stegosaur; also lions, tortoises and camels which are unknown in South America.

One hill was carved in the shape of an old man’s head. The negative of the photograph showed a radiant young man… Visible, perhaps, at some initiation rite? It has not been possible to employ carbon 14 to ascertain the date; there are no organic traces on Marcahuasi. The geological indications go back to the remotest antiquity. Ruzo thinks that this plateau may have been the cradle of the Masma civilization, perhaps the oldest in the world.

There is evidence pointing to the existence of white men on another fabulous plateau, Tiahuanaco, at an altitude of 4000 meters. When the Incas conquered this region round Lake Titicaca, Tiahuanaco was already the heap of gigantic, inexplicable ruins that we see today. When Pizarro arrived there in 1532, the Indians called their conquerors Viracochas: white masters. Their tradition, now more or less extinct, spoke of a master race of huge white men who had come out of space – Sons of the Sun. Many thousands of years ago these men had reigned over them and taught them. Suddenly they disappeared, but will return again. Everywhere in South America, Europeans in quest of gold heard of this tradition of the white man, and benefited by it. Their basest desires for conquest and gain were aided by these mysterious and lofty memories.

Modern exploration on the American continent has revealed traces of an extraordinarily advanced civilization. Cortez was amazed to discover that the Aztecs were as civilized as the Spaniards. We know today that they had inherited an even higher culture from the Toltecs. The Toltecs erected the most gigantic monuments in all America. The Pyramids of the Sun at Teotihuacan and Cholula are twice as large as the tomb of Cheops. But the Toltecs were themselves the descendents of an even more perfect civilization, that of the Mayas, the remains of which have been discovered in the jungles of Honduras, Guatemala and Yucatan. Buried under huge forests of dense vegetation are traces of a civilization far older than that of Greece, and some say superior. When and how did this civilization perish? It died a double death, in any case, for here, too, the missionaries made a point of destroying manuscripts, breaking statues, and demolishing altars. Summarizing the results of recent research on vanished civilizations, Raymond Cartier writes as follows:

“In many fields the science of the Mayas surpassed that of the Greeks and Romans. Possessing a profound knowledge of mathematics and astronomy, they had achieved a rare degree of perfection in chronology and everything pertaining to calendar-making. They built observatories whose domes were better orientated than the one erected in Paris in the 17th century – notably, the Caradol with its three terraces in their capital of Chichen Itza. They had adopted a sacred year of 260 days, a solar year of 365 days, and a Venusian year of 584 days. The exact duration of the solar year has been fixed at 365.2422 days. The Mayas put it at 365.2420 days – that is to say, within a decimal point of the number we have arrived at after lengthy calculations. It is possible that the Egyptians arrived at the same approximation, but to establish that we should have to believe in the concordances in the Pyramids which have been contested, whereas we actually possess the Maya calendar.

Other analogies with Egypt are discernible in the admirable art of the Mayas. Their mural painting and frescoes and decorated vases show a race of men with strongly marked Semitic features, engaged in all sorts of activities: agriculture, fishing, building, politics and religion. Egypt alone has depicted these activities with the same cruel verisimilitude; but the pottery of the Mayas recalls that of the Etruscans; their bas-reliefs remind one of India, and the huge, steep stairways of their pyramidal temples are like those at Angkor. Unless they obtained their models from outside, their brains must have been so constructed that they adopted the same forms of artistic expression as all the other great ancient civilizations of Europe and Asia. Did civilization, then, spring from one particular geographical region and then spread gradually in every direction like a forest fire? Or did it appear spontaneously and separately in various parts of the world? Were some races the teachers and others the pupils, or were they all self-taught? Isolated seeds, or one parent stem giving off shoots in every direction?”

We do not know, and we have no satisfactory explanation of the origins of civilizations such as these – nor of the ways in which they came to an end. According to Bolivian legends recorded in her book on Bolivia by Mme. Cynthia Fain, the civilizations of antiquity collapsed after a struggle with a non-human race whose blood was not red.

The high plateaus of Bolivia and Peru give an impression of being on another planet. This is not the Earth, but Mars. The oxygen pressure is 50 percent less than at sea-level, and yet there are people living there at an altitude of 3500 meters. They have two or three more pints of blood than we have, eight million red corpuscles instead of five, and their hearts beat more slowly. The radio-carbon methods of dating reveal the presence of human beings here 9000 years ago. Certain recent calculations suggest that there may have been human life here 30,000 years ago. Under whose guidance?

Some of the irrigation works carried out by the pre-Inca peoples could hardly be done today by our electric turbo-drills. And why did men, before the invention of the wheel, construct enormous paved roads?

The American archeologist Hyatt Verrill devoted thirty years of research to the lost civilization of Central and South America. In his opinion, these ancient peoples did not use in their great building operations tools for cutting stone, but a kind of radio-active paste which ate into the granite; a sort of etching, in fact, on the scale of the great Pyramids. This radio-active paste, handed down from still more ancient times, Verrill claims to have seen in the hands of the last surviving sorcerers. In his fine novel, The Bridge of Light, he describes a pre-Inca city which can be approached only over a “bridge of light,” a bridge of ionized matter that appears and disappears at will, and provides a passage over a rocky gorge that is otherwise inaccessible. Up to the end of his life (he died at the age of 84), Verrill maintained that his book was much more than a legend, and his wife, who has survived him, still makes this claim.

What do the figures at Nazca signify? I refer to the immense geometrical designs traced in the plain of Nazca which can only be seen from a plane or a balloon, and which have only recently been discovered, as a result of aeronautical exploration.

Professor Mason, who, unlike Verrill, can hardly be suspected of fantasy, is at a loss to know what to suggest. The builders could only have been guided by some sort of machine floating in the sky?

Mason rejects this hypothesis, and imagines that these figures were constructed by using a small-scale model or a stenciled plan. Given the level of technique of the pre-Incas, as allowed by classical archeologists, this seems even more improbable. And what was the purpose of these tracings? Had they a religious significance? That is always the stock explanation – a reference to an unknown religion. People are always more ready to suppose all kinds of strange beliefs rather than admit the possibility of other levels of consciousness and techniques. It is a question of priority: the knowledge we possess today is the only knowledge we recognize. Photographs taken on the plain of Nazca remind one irresistibly of the ground-lighting of an airfield. Sons of the Sun, coming from the sky… Professor Mason is careful not to see any connection with these legends, and has imagined a kind of religion of trigonometry, which must be unique in the history of religious beliefs. Nevertheless, a little later he refers to the pre-Inca mythology according to which the stars are inhabited and the gods have come down from the constellation of the Pleiades.

We do not reject the possibility of visits from the inhabitants of another world, or of atomic civilizations that vanished without leaving a trace, or of stages of knowledge and techniques comparable to those of today, or of remnants of forgotten sciences surviving in various forms of what is known as esoterism, or of factual evidence of what we might call magic. We do not mean that we believe everything, but we shall show in the next chapter that the field of the humane sciences is probably much vaster than is believed. By integrating all facts and excluding none, and being willing to consider all the hypotheses suggested by those facts, without any kind of a priorism, a Darwin or a Copernicus of anthropology will create a completely new science, provided they also establish a constant connection between the objective observation of the past and the latest developments in parapsychology, physics, chemistry and mathematics. They will then, perhaps, perceive that the idea of the evolution of intelligence being always slow, and the road to knowledge always long, is not, perhaps, the truth, but rather a taboo that we have set up in order that we may believe ourselves today to be enjoying the benefits of the whole history of mankind.

Why should not the civilizations of the past have experienced sudden periods of enlightenment during which the quasi-totality of all human knowledge was revealed to them? Is there any reason why the moments of illumination, of blinding intuition, and the sudden explosion of genius that occur in the life of a man should not have occurred several times in the life of the human race? Are we not suggesting an entirely false interpretation of such evidence of these moments as has come down to us by talking of a mythology, legends and magic? If I am shown an unfaked photograph of a man floating in the air, I do not say: That represents the myth of Icarus, but: That is a snapshot of a high jump or a man diving. Why should there not be similar instantaneous states in the life of civilizations?

We shall be citing other facts, establishing other connections and formulating other hypotheses in due course. Our book, we repeat, will doubtless contain a lot of nonsense, but that is of no importance if it inspires some readers with a sense of vocation and, to a certain extent, opens up new and wider paths for research.

We authors are only a couple of poor stone-breakers; others will follow and make the road.

[Sweet Tooth]

THE VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS

VI. Memory older than us – Metallic birds – A strange map of the world – Atomic bombardments and interplanetary vessels in “sacred texts” – A new view of machines – The cult of the “cargo” – Another vision of esoterism – The rites of the intelligence.

During the last ten years the exploration of the past has been facilitated by the discovery of new methods based on radio-activity and by the progress of cosmology. As a result, two extraordinary facts have been established: [cf. Dr. Bowen: The Exploration of Time, London, 1958]

(1) The Earth is as old as the Universe: some 4,500 million years. It was probably formed at the same time as, and perhaps before, the Sun, by condensation of particles at low temperatures.

(2) Man as we know him, homo sapiens, has only existed for some 75,000 years. This short period saw the transition from prehistoric man to man. Here we would like to ask two questions:
(a) In the course of these 75,000 years have there been other “technical” civilizations before our own? The specialists, as one man, answer NO. But it is by no means clear that they are able to distinguish an instrument, or tool, from what is called an object of worship. In this field research has not even begun. Nevertheless, there are some disquieting problems to examine. Most paleontologists consider eoliths (stones discovered near Orleans in 1867) to be natural objects. Some, however, believe them to be man-made. But by what kind of man? Not homo sapiens. Other objects have been found at Ipswich, in Suffolk, which are believed to indicate the existence in Western Europe of “tertiary” man.
(b) The experiments of Washburn and Dice prove that the evolution of man may have been brought about by quite trivial modifications. For example: a slight alteration in the bones of the skull. [To prove the correctness of his theory, Washburn changed the skull formation of rats from a “Neanderthaloid” to a “modern” shape.]

Thus, a single mutation, and not, as had hitherto been believed, a complex combination of mutations, would have been enough to effect the transition from prehistoric Man to modern Man.

Only one mutation in 4,500 million years? It is possible, but why should it be a certainty? Why should there not have been several evolutionary cycles before this period of 75,000 years? It may be that other forms of humanity, or rather other thinking beings, made their appearance and disappeared. They may not have left visible traces, but their memory is preserved in legends. “The bust outlives the city”: their memory may be perpetuated in power houses, and machines, monuments to their vanished civilizations. Our memory perhaps goes back much farther than our own existence, or even than the existence of our species. What records of an infinitely remote past may not be dissimulated in our age in our genes and chromosomes? “D’ou te vient ceci, ame de l’homme, d’ou te vient ceci?”

In archeology, big changes have already taken place. Our civilization has speeded up communications, and observations carried out all over the globe and then collected and compared bring us to the brink of great mysteries. In June 1958 the Smithsonian Institute published the results obtained by American, Indian and Russian archeologists. [cf. New York Herald Tribune, June 11th, 1958] In the course of excavations carried out in Mongolia, Scandinavia, Ceylon, near Lake Baikal and in the upper reaches of the Lena in Siberia, similar objects in bone and stone were discovered as those found among the Eskimos.

Now the techniques required for the manufacture of these objects do not exist among the Eskimos. The Smithsonian Institute therefore deduced that ten thousand years ago the Eskimos inhabited Central Asia, Ceylon and Mongolia. Later it is assumed that they suddenly emigrated to Greenland. But why? What caused these primitive peoples to decide, all at the same time, to leave these countries and settle in this inhospitable corner of the globe? And how did they get there? To this day they do not know that the Earth is round, and have no idea of geography. And why should they have left Ceylon, that earthly paradise? The institute does not attempt to answer these questions.

We do not wish to impose our own theory, and only propose it as a kind of exercise in open-mindedness: Ten thousand years ago an enlightened civilization controlled the world. It set up in the Frozen North a zone of deportation. Now what do we find in Eskimo folk-lore? References to tribes being transported to the Frozen North at the beginning of time by giant metallic birds. Nineteenth-century archeologists have always scoffed at these “metallic birds.” And what do we think?

No work on objects of a more clearly defined character has as yet been done comparable to that accomplished by the Smithsonian Institute. On lenses, for example. Optical lenses have been found in Iraq and Central Australia. The question is: do they come from the same source, the same civilization? No modern optician has yet been asked to give an opinion. All optical glasses for the last twenty years, in our civilization, have been polished with ceria. In a thousand years from now spectroscopic analysis will prove, from an analysis of these glasses, the existence of a single civilization all over the world. And that will be the truth.

A new vision of the ancient world might result from studies of this nature. We can only hope that our book, in spite of being light-weight and poorly documented, may inspire some still naïve young man to embark on a crazy enterprise which will one day provide him with the key to the wisdom of the past.

There are still other facts to be noted.

Over vast areas in the desert of Gobi patches of vitrified soil have been observed similar to those produced by an atomic explosion.

In the caves of Bohistan inscriptions have been found, accompanied by astronomical maps showing the stars in the positions they occupied thirteen thousand years ago. Lines connect Venus with the Earth.

In the middle of the nineteenth century a Turkish naval officer, Piri Reis, presented the Library of Congress with a set of maps which he had discovered in the East. The most recent date from the time of Christopher Columbus; the oldest from the first century AD, the former having been copied from the latter. In 1952 Arlington H. Mallery, a well-known expert in cartography, examined these documents [All this was the subject of a debate at Georgetown University in December 1958. See the study by Ivan T. Sanderson in Fantastic Universe, January 1959.] He noticed, for example, that everything that exists in the Mediterranean had been recorded, but not in the right relationship. Did these people think the Earth was flat? This is not a sufficient explanation. Did they use the projection method in drawing up their maps, taking into account the fact that the Earth is round? Impossible; projective geometry dates from the time of Monge. Mallery then entrusted the study of these maps to an official cartographer, Walters, who compared them with a modern globe map o the World, and found that they were all correct, not only for the Mediterranean, but for all the countries of the world, including the two Americas and the Antarctic. In 1955 Mallery and Walters submitted their work to the Geophysical Year Committee. The Committee passed the file to the Jesuit Father Daniel Lineham, director of the Weston Observatory and in charge of the cartographical department of the American Navy. Father Lineham confirmed that the contours of North America, the location of the lakes and mountains of Canada, the coastal outline of the extreme north of the continent and the contours of the Antarctic (covered with ice and distinguishable only with the greatest difficulty by our modern instruments of measurement) were all correct. Were those copies of still earlier maps? Had they been traced from observations made on board a flying machine or space vessel of some kind? Notes taken by visitors from Beyond?

We shall doubtless be criticized for asking these questions. Yet the Popul Vuh, the sacred Book of the Quiches of America speaks of an infinitely ancient civilization which knew about the nebulae and the whole solar system. This is what we read: “The first race of men were capable of all knowledge. They examined the four corners of the horizon, the four (cardinal) points of the firmament, and the round surface of the Earth.”

“Some of the beliefs and legends bequeathed to us by Antiquity are so universally and firmly established that we have become accustomed to consider them as being almost as ancient as humanity itself. Nevertheless we are tempted to inquire how far the fact that some of these beliefs and legends have so many features in common is due to chance, and whether the similarity between them may not point to the existence of an ancient, totally unknown and unsuspected civilization of which all other traces have disappeared.”

The man who, in 1910, whore these lines was neither a writer of science-fiction, nor some vague dabbler in the occult. He was one of the pioneers of science, Professor Frederick Soddy, Nobel Prize winner and the discoverer of isotopes and of the laws of transformation in natural radio-activity. [Professor at Oxford University, Fellow of the Royal Society. The passage is taken from his book Radium.]

The University of Oklahoma in 1954 published some records of Indian tribes in Guatemala dating from the sixteenth century. These contained fantastic accounts of apparitions of legendary beings and imaginary descriptions of the private life of their gods. On closer examination it became clear that the Indians were not just spinning yarns, but referring in their own way to their first contacts with the Spanish invaders, whom the Indian “historians” looked upon as being of the same order as those that figured in their own mythology. In this way reality is disguised as a legend. Indeed, it is highly probable that texts considered as belonging purely to folk-lore or mythology may be based on actual facts that have been wrongly interpreted and integrated with others which are, in fact, imaginary. All this has not yet been sorted out, with the result that while the shelves of our specialized libraries are loaded with a whole literature labeled “legend”, no one has ever thought for a moment that this label may conceal picturesquely presented accounts of events that actually happened.

And yet, with our knowledge of modern science and techniques, we ought to examine this literature with an un-prejudiced eye.

The book of Dzyan speaks of “superior beings of dazzling aspect” who abandoned the Earth, depriving the impure human race of its knowledge, and effacing by disintegration all traces of their passage. They departed in flying chariots propelled by light, to rejoin their land “of iron and metal.”

In a recent study published in the Literatturnava Gazeta (1959) Professor Agrest, who accepts the hypothesis of the Earth having been visited long ago by interplanetary travelers, relates his discovery among the first texts introduced into the Bible by Jewish priests of references to beings from another world who, like Enoch, disappeared into the heavens in mysterious ark-like vessels. The sacred Hindu texts, such as the Ramayana and the Maha Bharata, contain descriptions of airships appearing in the sky at the very beginning of time and looking like “bluish clouds in the shape of an egg or a luminous globe.”

They could encircle the Earth several times, and were propelled by “an ethereal force which struck the ground as they rose,” or by “a vibration produced by an invisible force.” They emitted “sweet and melodious sounds,” and “a shining light as bright as fire,” and their trajectory was not straight, but appeared “to follow a long and undulating course bringing them alternately nearer to and farther from the Earth.” The material of which these engines were composed is defined, in these texts more than three thousand years old and doubtless based on memories going back infinitely farther into the past, as being a blend of several metals, some white and light, others red.

In the Mausola Purva, we find this singular description, which must have been incomprehensible to nineteenth-century ethnologists though not to us today: “…it was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which reduced to ashes the entire race of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas. The corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable. Their hair and nails fell out; pottery broke without any apparent cause, and the birds turned white. After a few hours, all foodstuffs were infected. The thunderbolt was reduced to a fine dust.”

And again: “Cukra, flying on board a high-powered vimana, hurled on to the triple city a single projectile charged with all the power of the Universe. An incandescent column of smoke and flame, as bright as ten thousand Suns, rose in all its splendor… When the vimana returned to Earth, it looked like a splendid block of antinomy resting on the ground.”

Objection: if you admit the existence of such fabulously advanced civilizations, how do you explain the fact that the innumerable excavations that have been carried out all over the globe have never brought to light a single fragment of any object that could induce us to believe in such civilizations?

Answer: (1) Systematic archeological exploration has been going on for little more than a century, whereas our atomic civilization is barely twenty years old. No serious exploration has been carried out in South Russia, China, or in Central and South Africa. Vast areas still preserve the secrets of their past.

(3) If a German engineer, Wilhelm Konig, had not paid a chance visit to the Museum at Baghdad, it might never have been discovered that some flat stones found in Iraq, and classified as such, were in reality electric batteries, that had been in use two thousand years before Galvani. The archeological museums are full of objects classified as “objects of worship,” or “various,” about which nothing is known.

The Russians recently discovered in some caves in the desert of Gobi and in Turkestan semicircular objects made of ceramics or glass ending in a cone containing a drop of mercury. What could these have been? Finally, few archeologists have any scientific or technical knowledge. Still fewer are capable of realizing that a technical problem can be solved in several different ways, and that there are machines which do not resemble what we call machines – without crankshafts, driving-rods or cogwheels. A few lines traced with special ink on specially prepared paper will serve as a receiver for electro-magnetic waves. Diamonds are sensitive to nuclear and cosmic radiation. Complicated recordings can be contained in crystals, and may there not be whole libraries enclosed in small cut stones? Suppose that a thousand years hence, after the extinction of our civilization, some future archeologist discovered, say, some magnetic bands – what would he make of them? And how would he distinguish between a virgin band and one that had been used for a recording?

Today we are on the brink of discovering the secrets of anti-matter and anti-gravitation. Tomorrow we do not know whether the manipulation of these secrets will call for cumbersome or, on the contrary, for surprisingly light machinery. As techniques develop, they do not become more complex; rather, they tend to become simpler, until the apparatus they require shrinks almost to zero. In his book Magie Chaldeenne (Chaldean Magic) Lenormand citing a legend which recalls the Orpheus myth, wrote that: “In olden times the priests of On, by means of sounds, caused high winds to blow and thus raised into the air huge stones to build their temples which a thousand men could not have lifted.”

I quote now from Walter Owen: “Sound vibrations are forces… Cosmic creation is sustained by vibrations which could equally well bring it to an end.” This theory is not so far removed from modern conceptions. Tomorrow will be fantastic, as everyone knows. Perhaps it will be doubly so if it rids us of the idea that yesterday was still banal.

We regard tradition, that is to say, the corpus of the most ancient texts known to humanity, entirely from a literary, religious or philosophical point of view. What if it really consisted of immemorial memories, recorded by peoples living long after the events themselves which have since been transposed and embroidered? Immemorial memories of civilizations that were technically and scientifically quite as advanced, and perhaps infinitely more so, than our own?

What has tradition to tell us, if we adopt this view?

In the first place, that science is dangerous. This idea might have seemed surprising to a nineteenth-century man. But we know now that two bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were enough to kill 300,000 people, that these bombs are now completely obsolete, and that one cobalt bomb of 500 tons could destroy all life over the greater part of the globe.

We know, too, that it is possible to make contact with non-terrestrial beings. What was an absurdity in the nineteenth century is no longer one for us. It is not inconceivable that there are Universes parallel with our own with which communication might be established. [This idea is frequently met with in modern research. See, e.g.: the review Atomic Industries, No. 1, 1958, page 17, article by E.C.G. Stuckelberg.]

Radio-telescopes receive waves emitted ten thousand million light years ago and modulated in such a way as to resemble messages. The astronomer John Krauss, of the University of Ohio, claims to have captured signals coming from Venus on June 2, 1956. Other signals from Jupiter, it is alleged, were received at the Princeton Institute.

Finally, tradition asserts that everything that has happened since the beginning of time has left an impression in matter, in space and in all sources of energy, and can be revealed. This is exactly what is asserted by the distinguished scientist Bowen in his book The Exploration of Time, and this view is shared today by the majority of investigators.

Another objection: a highly developed technical and scientific civilization does not disappear completely without leaving any trace.

Reply: “We civilizations know now that we are mortal.” It is precisely the most highly developed techniques that threaten to cause the civilization of which they are a product to disappear completely. Take the case of our own civilization in the near future. All power stations, weapons, transmitting and receiving apparatus in telecommunications, all electric and nuclear instruments – in short, all our technological equipment is based on the same principle of the production of energy. As a result of some chain reaction all these instruments, from the largest to the smallest, might at any time explode. In this way every trace of the material and the greater part of the human potential of a civilization would disappear. All that would remain would be things that threw no light on that civilization, and men who were more or less excluded from it. The survivors would relapse into a state of primitive simplicity. Only memories would remain, unskillfully and inaccurately recorded after the catastrophe: stories of a mythical and legendary character through which might run the theme of expulsion from an earthly paradise and the feeling that there are great dangers and great secrets hidden at the heart of the matter. Everything begins again, as in the Book of Revelation: “The Moon became as blood … and the Heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together…”

Australian Government patrols exploring in 1946 unknown regions in New Guinea found there tribes in a state of great religious excitement over a new cult – the cult of the “cargo” – which had just been inaugurated. This arose out of the arrival of various commodities – paraffin lamps, bottles of alcohol, tins of preserves and the like, which had been sent for native consumption. For men still living in the Stone Age, sudden contact with riches of this kind must have been an overwhelming experience. But could the white men have produced all these things themselves? Impossible.

No white men they had ever seen could possibly have made anything wonderful with their hands. Let us be clear about this – one can imagine the natives of New Guinea saying to one another – have you ever seen a white man making anything? No; but they do engage in mysterious activities: they all dress alike, and sometimes they sit in front of a metal box with dials on it and listen to the strange sounds that emerge from it. They also make signs on sheets of white paper. These are magic rites, thanks to which they obtain this “cargo” from the gods. The natives thereupon tried to copy these “rites”; they tried to dress in European style, talked into tins of preserves, and put bamboo branches on the roofs of their huts in imitation of wireless antennae. They also constructed false landing-grounds in anticipation of the arrival of the “cargo.”

Now let us suppose that our ancestors had interpreted in the same sort of way their contacts with superior civilizations? We should still have tradition, i.e. the teaching of “rites” which were, in reality, perfectly legitimate ways of acting in the presence of knowledge of a different, unfamiliar order. We should have childishly copied attitudes, gestures and practices without understanding them and without connecting them with a whole system of complex realities beyond our comprehension, in the expectation that these gestures and these attitudes would produce for us tangible results. Results that never materialized – a kind of Manna from Heaven produced by means impossible for us to imagine. It is easier to accept a ritual than to gain access to knowledge, easier to invent gods than to understand techniques. Nevertheless, I wish to make it plain that neither Bergier nor myself are trying to equate all spirituality with material ignorance. On the contrary; we believe there is such a thing as a spiritual life. If God is higher than all reality, we shall find God when we know everything that is reality. And if man possesses powers which enable him to understand the whole Universe, God is perhaps the whole Universe, plus something else.

Another question now arises: supposing what we call esoterism were in fact only a form of exotericism? What if the most ancient texts known to humanity, sacred in our eyes, were nothing but spurious interpretations, haphazard vulgarizations, third-hand reports of somewhat inaccurate memories of technical realities? We interpret these old sacred texts as if they were unquestionably the expression of spiritual “truths,” philosophical symbols or religious images. This is because, when we read them, we are thinking only of ourselves, preoccupied as we are with our own little private mysteries: I love good and do evil; I am alive and am going to die, etc. Their message is for us: all these engines, and thunderbolts and Manna from Heaven and apocalyptic visions represent the world of our thoughts and feelings. It’s all for my benefit, and concerns me and my affairs… But what if we are only confronted with distant, distorted memories of other worlds which have existed, and of the sojourn on this Earth of other beings who were seeking something, who possessed knowledge and who put their knowledge into practice?

Imagine a time very long ago when messages coming from other intelligent beings in the Universe were intercepted and interpreted when interplanetary visitors had set up a network on the Earth and organized a cosmic traffic. Imagine that hidden in some sanctuary somewhere there are still in existence notes and diagrams and reports that have been deciphered with the greatest difficulty throughout the ages by monks entrusted with these ancient secrets; incapable of understanding their full significance, but ceaselessly engaged in interpreting and extrapolating their message. Exactly like the witch-doctors of New Guinea trying to understand a sheet of paper containing the time-table of flights between New York and San Francisco. As an extreme example, there is Gurdjieff’s book, Tales of Beelzebub, full of references to unknown concepts and to a fantastic language.

Gurdjieff claimed to have access to “sources” – sources which were themselves only deviations. He was translating at a thousand removes, and adding his own ideas; representing symbolically the human psychism: a perfect example of esotericism.

From the prospectus of an internal airline in the USA: “You can reserve your seat anywhere. Your application will be recorded by an electronic robot. Another robot will reserve your seat on whatever plane you wish. Your ticket will be issued to you already made out… etc.” Now imagine what that would look like, after being translated for the thousandth time, in an Amazonian dialect, by people who have never seen an airplane, have no idea what a robot is and who have never heard of the cities mentioned in the guide. Then think of an esoteric studying this text, going back to the sources of ancient wisdom and seeking what message it may contain for the guidance of the human soul…

If there had been in the far distant past civilizations built on a system of specialized knowledge, there must have been textbooks. It is thought that the cathedrals are the textbooks, so to speak, of the science of alchemy. It may well be that some of these textbooks, or fragments of them, have been found and piously preserved and copied over and over again by monks whose duty it was not so much to understand them as to hold them in safe-keeping.

Copied and re-copied indefinitely; illuminated, transposed and interpreted not in terms of this ancient, profound and complex knowledge, but in terms of the relative ignorance of a succeeding age. In the last resort, however, all real scientific or technical knowledge carried to its highest level of consciousness. If these “esoteric” texts – even if they are only what we have just been saying – have enabled men to attain this high level of consciousness, then they have, in a sense, provided a link with the splendor of vanished civilizations. It is also conceivable that there were two kinds of “sacred texts”: fragments containing evidence of the existence of a very ancient technology, and fragments of purely religious books, inspired by God.

The two have probably been confused in the absence of any references that would help to distinguish one from the other. And in both cases the texts would be equally sacred.

Sacred, too, is the adventure, forever recommencing and yet forever advancing, of intelligence on the Earth, and no less sacred the light in which God looks upon this adventure and by which it is guided.

[Sweet Tooth]

THE FUTURE PERFECT

III. Brief reflections on the backwardness of sociology – Talking cross-purposes – Planetary versus provincial – Crusader in the modern world – The poetry of science.

The outlook in modern physics, mathematics and biology is limitless. Sociology, on the other hand, is barred from new horizons by the monuments of the last century. I remember how astonished and disappointed we were, Jacques Bergier and myself, in 1957 when we were following the correspondence between the celebrated Soviet economist Eugene Varga is an intelligent writer, and is respected by the powers that be. A public discussion between two such authorities might have done much, one would have thought, to bring about a better understanding of the times we live in. In the event, however, it proved a ghastly failure.

Mr. Varga stuck faithfully to his gospel. Karl Marx had predicted the inevitable collapse of capitalism, and Mr. Varga thought this collapse was imminent. The fact that the economic situation of the United States was steadily improving and that the great problem from now on would be how the workers’ leisure time could best be employed had escaped the notice of this theoretician who, in these days of radar, was still looking at the world through Karl’s spectacles.

The idea that the predicted collapse might not happen according to prearranged schedule, and that it was possible that a new society was coming into being across the Atlantic did not for a moment enter into his head. Neither did the editor of Fortune, for his part, foresee any change in the structure of society in the USSR, and made it clear that the America of 1957 was the expression of a perfect and unchangeable ideal. All that the Russians could hope for was to attain, if they behaved themselves, a similar state of perfection in a century, or a century and a half. Nothing worried or disturbed the theoretical adversaries of Mr. Varga – not even the multiplicity of new cults springing up everywhere in American intellectual circles (Oppenheimer, Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Henry Miller and many others seduced by ancient Oriental philosophies) nor yet the existence in the great cities of millions of young “rebels without a cause” going about in gangs, nor yet again the twenty million individuals unable to support modern life without absorbing drugs as dangerous as morphine and opium. The problem of finding a purpose in life did not seem to exist for them. When all American families possess two cars, they will then have to buy a third. When the market for television sets is saturated, motor-cars will have to be equipped with them.

And yet, compared to French sociologists, economists and thinkers, Mr. Eugene Varga and the editors of Fortune are more advanced. They are not paralyzed by the complex of decadence. They do not indulge in morbid pleasures, or believe that the world is absurd and life not worth living. They firmly believe in the virtues of progress, and are confident that man’s domination over nature will increase indefinitely. They have energy and a certain grandeur, and their outlook is broad, if not very elevated. To say that Mr. Varga is in favor of free enterprise and the editors of Fortune are all progressists might seem outrageous; and yet, from a strictly doctrinal, European point of view, it is true. Mr. Varga is not a communist; Fortune is not capitalist, according to our narrow, provincial ideas. What the Russian and the American in this case have in common is ambition, the will to power and an unshakeable optimism. These are the forces at work in science and technology which will demolish the old sociological order established in the nineteenth century. Even if Western Europe became involved in and were destroyed by some Byzantine struggle (which God forbid!) the forward march of humanity would still go on, bursting open the old structure of society and setting up a new form of civilization between the two new poles of militant thought represented by Chicago and Tashkent, while the vast hordes in the East and in Africa would launch out into industry.

While one of our best French sociologists sheds tears over Le Travail en Miettes (the title of one of his books) American syndicates are studying the twenty-hour week. And while Parisian so-called avant-garde intellectuals are wondering whether Marx is not perhaps a back number, or whether existentialism is or is not a revolutionary form of humanism, the Sternfeld Institute in Moscow is examining the possibility of settling human beings on the moon. While Mr. Varga awaits the collapse of the United States announced by the Prophet, American biologists are preparing to create life artificially. While the problem of co-existence is still being debated, communism and capitalism are being transformed by the most sweeping technological revolution this planet has ever known. Our eyes are in the back of our heads; it is time to put them in their right place.

The last sociologist with any imagination or drive was no doubt Lenin. He had accurately defined the communism of 1917 as “socialism plus electricity.” After nearly half a century, the definition still holds good for China, Africa and India, but is obsolete as regards the modern world. Russia awaits the thinker who will describe the new order: communism plus atomic energy, plus automation, plus the synthetic creation of fuel and food from water and air, plus the physics of solid bodies, plus the conquest of the stars, etc, etc. John Buchan, after attending the funeral of Lenin, announced the coming of another Seer who would promulgate a “four-dimensional communism.”

If the USSR lacks a sociologist of sufficient eminence, America is no better off. The reaction against the “red historians” at the end of the nineteenth century has led economic observers to indulge in uninhibited praise of the great capitalist dynasties and powerful institutions. This is a healthy reaction up to a point, but a short-sighted one. Critics of the American way of life are rare, and their attitude is literary and purely negative. None of them seems to have enough imagination to see, beyond this “solitary crowd,” a civilization that belies its external forms, or to sense the collapse of old values and the advent of new myths. And yet the astonishing and abundant production of what is known as science fiction points to the emergence of a new spirit, leaving adolescence behind, unfolding on a planetary level, preoccupied with cosmic speculations and adopting an entirely new approach to the question of the destiny of mankind within the vast universe. But this kind of literature, having so much in common with the oral tradition of the story-tellers of ancient times and so clearly indicating a profound change in people’s mental habits, is not taken seriously by the sociologists.

As regards European sociology, it is still quite provincial in outlook, and preoccupied with inessentials. It is therefore not surprising that the more sensitive sections of society take refuge in a philosophy of despair. Everything is absurd, and the H-bomb has put an end to history. It is easier to live with this philosophy which appears to be at once sinister and profound, than to attempt the arduous task of analyzing the world of reality. It is a temporary sickness of mind among civilized people who have not adapted the ideas they have inherited about such things as the freedom of the individual, human personality, happiness, etc., to the new set of values envisaged by the civilization of the future. It is a sign of nervous fatigue affecting the human spirit at a time when, fully occupied in coping with its own conquests, it is important that it should not give up the struggle, but change its own structure. After all, it is not the first time in the history of humanity that human consciousness has had to switch to another level. All operations are painful; but if there is to be any future, it is worth investigating. And, at the rate things are moving today, our criterion should not be the immediate past. Our immediate future is as different from anything we have known as the nineteenth century was from the Maya civilization. We must therefore proceed by projecting ourselves farther and farther into space and time instead of making trivial comparisons within an infinitely small period where the past we have just been living in bears no resemblance to the future, and where the present has no sooner come into being than it is swallowed up by this unusuable [This is how it’s spelled in the book] past.

The first really fruitful idea is that there has been a change in what our civilization is aiming at. A Crusader from the past revisiting the world would immediately ask why we are not using the atomic bomb against the Infidels. Stalwart-hearted and intelligent, he would in the last resort be less disconcerted by our modern techniques than by the fact that the Infidels still hold half the Holy Sepulcher, the other half being in the hands of the Jews. He would find it harder still to understand why the wealth and power of a powerful and wealthy civilization are not being devoted to the service and glory of Jesus. What would our sociologists have to say to this? That the exclusive aim of all these immense efforts, conflicts and discoveries has been to raise the “standard of living” of the human race? He would find that absurd since, for him, such a life would seem to him an aimless one. They would talk to him about Justice, Liberty and the Rights of Man, and recite to him the humanistic-materialist gospel of the nineteenth century. And our Crusader no doubt would reply: “But liberty to do what? And justice in what cause? And what are the rights of man?” If we want our knight to look upon our civilization as a worthy setting for a human soul, it is useless to talk to him in the retrospective language of our sociologists. We must use a forward-looking vocabulary, and present to him, as evidence of the beginning of a triumphant new crusade, the achievements, material and intellectual, of our progressive world.

Once again, it’s a question of saving the Holy Sepulcher – spirit weighed down by matter – and repulsing the Infidel – everything that is unfaithful to the infinite might of the spirit. It is still a religious question: making manifest everything that binds man to his own greatness, and that greatness to the laws of the Universe. We should have to show our Crusader a world in which cyclotrons are like cathedrals, and mathematics like Gregorian plain-chant; where transmutations take place not only in matter, but in the brain; where human beings of all races and colors are on the march; where man in his quest for knowledge extends his antennae into cosmic space, and where the soul of our planet is awakening. Perhaps, then, our Crusader would ask to go back to the past. Perhaps he would feel at home here, but placed as it were, on a different level. Perhaps, on the other hand, he would march eagerly toward the future, just as long ago he marched toward the East, inspired once again by faith, but this time of a different kind.

You see now the adventure on which we are engaged. Make sure your eyes are in their right place! It is time to turn darkness into light!

[Joe Hillshoist]

Cheers.

[Sweet Tooth]

You're welcome! Hope lots of people clipped, saved and read this.