Page 23

and our archeology of the earth's surface seeks for Adam, the first man, in times and places whose decline and fall took place before the population of Atlantis.

What a deluded pilgrimage, what an onward-luring hoax! For even if it were possible, or excusable, however misleading, to identify as Paradise the land of the golden apples, where the four great rivers flowed, how could we, even with the best will in the world to self- deception, hold with such an idea, in view of the Lemurian world which is our next and furthest time."coulisse; a scene wherein the tor-tured larva of the human being - our lovely and well-favoured young Joseph would have refused with pardonable irritation to recognize himself in the picture - endured the nightmare of fear and lust which made up his life, in desperate conflict with scaly mountains of flesh in the shape of flying lizards and giant newts? That was no garden of Eden, it was Hell. Or rather, it was the first accursed state after the Fall. Not here, not at the beginning of time and space was the fruit plucked from the tree of desire and death, plucked and tasted. That comes first. We have sounded the well of time to its depths, and not yet reached our goal: the history of man is older than the material world which is the work of his will, older than life, which rests upon his will.

A VERY ancient tradition of human thought, based upon man's truest knowledge of himself and going back to exceeding early days whence it has become incorporated into the succession of religions, prophe-cies and doctrines of the East, into Avesta, Islam, Manichaeanism, Gnosticism and Hellenism, deals with the figure of the first or first completely human man, the Hebraic Adam qadmon; conceived as a youthful being made out of pure light, formed before the beginning of the world as prototype an abstract of humanity. To this concep-tion others have attached themselves, varying to some extent, yet in essentials the same. Thus, and accordingly, primitive man was at his very beginning God's chosen champion in the struggle against that evil which penetrated into the new creation; yet harm befell him, he was fettered by demons, imprisoned in the flesh, estranged from his origins, and only freed from the darkness of earthly and fleshly exist-ence by a second emissary of the deity, who in some mysterious way was the same as himself, his own higher self, and restored to the world of light, leaving behind him, however, some portions of his light, which then were utilized for the creation of the material world and earthly creatures. Amazing tales, these, wherein the religious element of redemption is faintly visible behind the cosmogonic frame. For we are told that the original human Son of God contained in His body of light the seven metals to which the seven planets correspond and / Page 24 / out of which the world is formed. Again it is said that this human light-essence, issuing from the paternal primitive source, descended through the seven planetary spheres and the lord of each partook of his essence. But then looking down he perceived his image mirrored in matter, became enamoured of it, went down unto it and thus fell in bondage to lower nature. All which explains man's double self, an indissoluble combination of godlike attributes and free essence with sore enslavement to the baser world.

In this narcissistic picture, so full of tragic charm, the meaning of the tradition begins to clarify itself; the clarification is complete at the point where the descent of the Child of God from His world of light into the world of nature loses the character of mere obedient pursuance of a higher order, hence guiltless, and becomes an independent and voluntary motion of longing, by that token guilty. And at the same time we can begin to unravel the meaning of that "second emissary" who, identical in a higher sense with the light-man, comes to free him from his involvement with the darkness and to lead him home. For the doctrine now proceeds to divide the world into the three personal elements of matter, soul and spirit, among whom, and between whom and the Deity there is woven the romance, whose real protagonist is the soul of mankind, adventurous and in adventure creative, a mythus, which, complete by reason of its combination of oldest record and newest prophecy, gives us clear leading as to the true site of Paradise and upon the story of the Fall.

It is stated that the soul, which is to say the primevally human, was, like matter, one of the principles laid down from the beginning, and that it possessed life but no knowledge. It had, in fact, so little that, though dwelling in the nearness of God, in a lofty sphere of happiness and peace, it let itself be disturbed and confused by the inclination - in a literal sense, implying direction - towards still formless matter, avid to mingle with this and evoke forms upon which it could compass physical desires. But the yearning and pain of its passion did not diminish after the soul had let itself be betrayed to a descent from its home; they were heightened even to torment by the circumstance that matter sluggishly and obstinately preferred to remain in its original formless state, would hear nothing of taking on form to please the soul, and set up all imaginable opposition to being so formed. But now God intervened; seeing nothing for it, probably, in such a posture of affairs, but to come to the aid of the soul, His errant concomitance. He supported the soul as it wrestled in love with refractory matter. He created the world; that is to say, by way of assisting the primitive human being He brought forth solid and permanent forms, in order that the soul might gratify physical desires upon these and engender man. But immediately afterwards, in pursuance of a considered plan, He did something else. He sent,such / Page 25 / literally are the words of the source upon which I am drawing, He sent out of the substance of His divinity spirit to man in this world, that it might rouse from its slumber the soul in the frame of man, and show it, by the Father's command, that this world was not its place, and that its sensual and passionate enterprise had been a sin, as a consequence of which the creation of the world was to be regarded. What in truth the spirit ever strives to make clear to the human soul imprisoned in matter, the constant theme of its admonitions, is precisely this: that the creation of the world came about only by reason of its folly in mingling with matter, and that once it parted there from the world of form would no longer have any existence. To rouse the soul to this view is the task of the reasonable spirit; all its hoping and striving are directed to the end that the passionate soul, once aware of the whole situation, will at length reacknowledge its home on high, strike out of its consciousness the lower world and strive to regain once more that lofty sphere of peace and happiness. In the very moment when that happens the lower world will be absolved; matter will win back her own sluggish will, being released from the bonds of form to rejoice once more, as she ever did and ever shall, in formlessness, and be happy in her own way.

Thus far the doctrine and the romance of the soul. And here, beyond a doubt, we have come to the very last "backward," reached the remotest human past, fixed upon Paradise and tracked down the story of the Fall, of knowledge and of death, to its pure and original form. The original human soul is the oldest thing, more correctly an oldest thing, for it has always been, before time and before form, just as God has always been and likewise matter. As for the intelligent spirit, in whom we recognize the "second emissary" entrusted with the task of leading the soul back home; although in some undefined way closely related to it, yet it is after all not quite the same, for it is younger: a missionary sent by God for the soul's instruction and release, and thus for accomplishing the dissolution of the world of form. If in some of its phases the dogma asserts or allegorically indicates the higher oneness of soul and spirit, it probably does so on good ground; this, however, does not exclude the conception that the human soul is originally conceived as being God's champion against the evil in the world, and the role ascribed to it very like the one which falls to the spirit sent to effect its own release. Certainly the reason why the dogma fails to explain this matter clearly is that it has not achieved a complete portrayal of the role played by the spirit in the romance of the soul; obviously the tradition requires filling out on this point.

In this world of form and death conceived out of the marriage of soul and matter, the task of the spirit is clearly outlined and unequivocal. Its mission consists in awakening the soul, in its self-forgetful / Page 26/ involvement with form and death, to the memory of its higher origin; to convince it that its relation with matter is a mistaken one, and finally to make it yearn for its original source with ever stronger yearning, until one day it frees itself wholly from pain and desire and wings away homewards. And therewith straightway the end of the world is come, death done away and matter restored to her ancient freedom. But as it will sometimes happen that an ambassador from one kingdom to another and hostile one, if he stay there for long, will fall a prey to corruption, from his own country's point of view, gliding unconsciously over to the other's habits of thought and favouring its interests, settling down and adapting himself and taking on colour, until at last he becomes unavailable as a representative of his own world; this or something like it must be the experience of the spirit in its mission. The longer it stops below, the longer it plies its diplomatic activities, the more they suffer from an inward breach, not to be concealed from the higher sphere, and in all probability leading to its recall, were the problem of a substitute easier to solve than it seems is the case.

There is no doubt that its role as slayer and grave-digger of the world begins to trouble the spirit in the long run. For its point of view alters, being coloured by its sojourn below; while being, in its own mind, sent to dismiss death out of the world, it finds itself on the contrary regarded as the deathly principle, as that which brings death into the world. It is, in fact, a matter of the point of view, the angle of approach. One may look at it one way, or the other. Only one needs to know one's own proper attitude, that to which one is obligated from home; otherwise there is bound to occur the phenomenon which I objectively characterized as corruption, and one is alienated from one's natural duties. And here appears a certain weakness in the spirit's character: he does not enjoy his reputation as the principle of death and the destroyer of form - though he did largely bring it upon himself, out of his great impulse towards judgment, even when directed against himself - and it becomes a point of honour with him to get rid of it. Not that he would willfully betray his mission. Rather against his intention, under pressure, out of that impulse and from a stimulus which one might describe as an unsanctioned infatuation for the soul and its passionate activities, the words of his own mouth betray him; they speak in favour of the soul and its enterprise, and by a kind of sympathetic refinement upon his own pure motives, utter themselves on the side of life and form. It is an open question, whether such a traitorous or near-traitorous attitude does the spirit any good, and whether he cannot help serving, even by that very conduct, the purpose for which he was sent, namely the dissolution of the material world by the releasing of the soul from it; or whether he does not know all this. and only thus conducts him- / Page 27 / self because he is at bottom certain that he may permit himself so much. At all events, this shrewd, self-denying identification of his own will with that of the soul explains the allegorical tendency of the tale, according to which the "second emissary" is another self of that light-man who was sent out to do battle with evil. Yes, it is possible that this part of the tale conceals a prophetic allusion to certain mysterious decrees of God, which were considered by the teachers and preachers as too holy and inscrutable to be uttered.

WE can, objectively considered, speak of a "Fall" of the soul of the primeval light-man, only by over-emphasizing the moral factor. The soul, certainly, has sinned against itself, frivolously sacrificing its original blissful and peaceful state - but not against God in the sense of offending any prohibition of His in its passionate enterprise, for such a prohibition, at least according to the doctrine we have received, was not issued. True, pious tradition has handed down to us the command of God to the first man, not to eat of the tree of the "knowledge of good and evil"; but we must remember that we are here dealing with a secondary and already earthly event, and with human beings who had with God's own creative aid been generated out of the knowledge of matter by the soul; if God really set them this test, He undoubtedly knew beforehand how it would turn out, and the only obscurity lies in the question, why He did not refrain from issuing a prohibition which, being disobeyed, would simply add to the malicious joy of His angelic host, whose attitude towards man was already most unfavourable. But the expression "good and evil" is a recognized and admitted gloss upon the text, and what we are really dealing with is knowledge, which has as its consequence not the ability to distinguish between good and evil, but rather death itself; so that we need scarcely doubt that the "prohibition" too is a well- meant but not very pertinent addition of the same kind.

Everything speaks for such an explanation; but principally the fact that God was not incensed at the yearning behaviour of the soul, did not expel it nor add any punishment to the measure of suffering which it voluntarily drew upon itself and which indeed was outweighed by the might of its desire. It is even clear that He was seized if not by understanding at least by pity, when He saw the passion of the soul. Unsummoned and straightway He came to its aid, and took a hand personally in the struggles of the soul to know matter in love, by making the world of form and death issue from it, that the soul might take its pleasure thereupon; and certainly this was an attitude of God in which pity and understanding are scarcely to be distinguished from one another

/ Page28/ Of sin in the sense of an offence to God and His expressed will we can scarcely speak in this connection, especially when we consider the peculiar immediacy of God's relation with the being which sprang from this mingling of soul and matter: this human being of whom the angels were unmistakably and with good reason jealous from the very first. It made a profound impression on Joseph, when old Eliezer told him of these matters, speaking of them just as we read them to-day in the Hebrew commentaries upon early history. Had not God, they say, held His tongue and wisely kept silence upon the fact that not only righteous but also evil things would proceed from man, the creation of man would certainly not have been permitted by the "kingdom of the stern." The words give us an extraordinary insight into the situation. They show, above all, that "sternness" was not so much the property of. God Himself as of His entourage, upon whom He seems to have been dependent, in a certain, if of course not decisive way, for He preferred not to tell them what was going on, out of fear lest they make Him difficulties, and only revealed some things and kept others to Himself. But does not this indicate that He was interested in the creation of the world, rather than that He opposed it? So that if the soul was not directly provoked and encouraged by God to its enterprise, at least it did not act against His will, but only against the angels - and their somewhat less than friendly attitude towards man is clear from the beginning. The creation by God of that living world of good and evil, the interest He displayed in it, appeared to them in the light of a majestic caprice; it piqued them, indeed, for they saw in it, probably with some justice, a certain disgust with their own psalm-chanting purity. Astonished and reproachful questions, such as: "What is man, 0 Lord, that Thou art mindful of him?" are forever on their lips; and God answers indulgently, benevolently, evasively, sometimes with irritation and in a sense distinctly mortifying to their pride. The fall of Shemmrel, a very great prince among the angels, having twelve pairs of wings whereas the seraphim and sacred beasts had only six apiece, is not very easy to explain, but its immediate cause must have been these dissensions; so old Eliezer taught - the lad drank it in with strained attention. It had always been Shemmrel who stirred up the other angels against man, or rather against God's sympathy for him, and when one day God commanded the heavenly hosts to fall down before Adam, on account of his understanding and because he could call all things by their names, they did indeed comply with the order, some scowlingly, others with ill-concealed smiles - all but Shemmrel, who did not do it. He declared, with a candour born of his wrathfulness, that it was ridiculous for beings created of the effulgence of glory to bow down before those made out of the dust of the earth. And thereupon took place his fall- Eliezer described it by / Page 29 / saying that it looked from a distance like a falling star. The other angels must have been well frightened by this event, which caused them to behave ever afterwards with great discretion on the subject of man; but it is plain that whenever sinfulness got the upper hand on earth, as in Sodom and Gomorrah and at the time of the Flood, there was rejoicing among the angels and corresponding embarrassment to the Creator, who found His hand forced to scourge the offenders, though less of His own desire - than under moral pressure from the heavenly host. But let us now consider once more, in the light of the foregoing, the matter of. the "second emissary" of the spirit, and whether he is really sent to effect the dissolution of the material world by setting free the soul and bringing it back home.

It is possible to argue that this is not God's meaning, and that the spirit was not, in fact, sent down expressly after the soul in order to act the part of grave-digger to the world of forms created by it with God's connivance. The mystery is perhaps a different one, residing in that part of the doctrine which says that the "second emissary" was no other than the first light-man sent out anew against evil. We have long known that these mysteries deal very freely with the tenses, and may quite readily use the past with reference to the future. It is possible that the saying, soul and spirit were one, really means that they are sometime to become one. This seems the more tenable in that the spirit is of its nature and essentially the principle of the future, and represents the It will be, It is to be; whereas the goodness of the form-bound soul has reference to the past and the holy It was. It remains controversial, which is life an which death; since both, the soul involved with nature and the spirit detached from the world, the principle of the past and the principle of the future, claim, each in its own way, to be the water of life, and each accuses the other of dealings with death. Neither quite wrongly, since neither nature without spirit nor spirit without nature can truly be called life. But the mystery, and the unexpressed hope of God, lie in their union, in the genuine penetration of the spirit into the world of the soul, in the inter-penetration of both principles, in a hallowing of the one through the other which should bring about a present humanity blessed with blessing from heaven above and from the depths beneath.

Such then might be considered the ultimate meaning and hidden potentiality of the doctrine - though even so there must linger a strong element of doubt whether the bearing of the spirit, self- betraying and subservient as we have described it to be, out of all too sensitive reluctance to be considered the principle of death, is calculated to lead to the goal in view. Let him lend all his wit to the dumb passion of the soul; let him celebrate the grave, hail the past as life's unique source, and confess himself the malicious zealot and murderously life-enslaving will; whatever he says he remains that / Page 30/ which he is, the warning emissary, the principle of contradiction, umbrage and dispersal, which stirs up emotions of disquiet and exceptional wretchedness in the breast of one single man among the blithely agreeing and accepting host, drives him forth out of the gates of the past and the known into the uncertain and the adventurous, and makes him like unto the stone which, by detaching itself and rolling, is destined to set up an ever-increasing rolling and sequence of events, of which no man can see the end.

IN such wise are formed those beginnings, those time-coulisses of the past, where memory may pause and find a hold whereon to base its personal history - as Joseph did on Ur, the city, and his forefather's exodus therefrom. .It was a tradition of spiritual unrest; he had it in his blood, the world about him and his own life were conditioned by it, and he paid it the tribute of recognition when he recited aloud those verses from the tablets which ran:

Disquiet, questioning, hearkening and seeking, wrestling for God, a bitterly sceptical labouring over the true and the just, the whence and the whither, his own name, his own nature, the true meaning of the Highest - how all that, bequeathed down the generations from the man from Ur, found expression in Jacob's look, in his lofty brow and the peering, careworn gaze of his brown eyes; and how confidingly Joseph loved this nature, of which his own was aware as a nobility and a distinction and which,- precisely as a consciousness of higher concerns and anxieties, lent to his father's person all the dignity, reserve and solemnity which made it so impressive. Unrest and dignity - that is the sign of the spirit; and with childishly unabashed fondness Joseph recognized the seal of tradition upon his father's brow, so different from that upon his own, which was so much blither and freer, coming as it chiefly did from his lovely mother's side, and making him the conversable, social, communicable being he pre-eminently was. But why should he have felt abashed before that brooding and careworn father, knowing himself so greatly beloved? The habitual knowledge that he was loved and preferred conditioned and coloured his being; it was decisive likewise for his attitude towards the Highest, to Whom, in his fancy, he ascribed a form, so far as was permissible, precisely like Jacob's. A higher replica of his father, by Whom, Joseph was naively convinced, he was beloved even as he was beloved of his father. For the moment, and still afar off, I should like to characterize as "bridelike" his relation to Adon the / Page 31 / heavenly. For Joseph knew that there were Babylonian women, sacred to Ishtar or to Mylitta, unwedded but consecrated to pious devotion, who dwelt in cells within the temple, and were called "pure" or "holy," also "brides of God," "enitu." Something of this feeling was in Joseph's own nature: a sense of consecration, an austere bond, and with it a flow of fantasy which may have been the decisive ingredient in his mental inheritance, and which will give us to think when we are down below in the depths beside him.

On the other hand, despite all his own devotion, he did not quite follow or accept the form it had taken in his father's case: the care, the anxiousness, the unrest, which were expressed in Jacob's unconquerable dislike of a settled existence such as would have befitted his dignity, and in his temporary, improvised, half-nomad mode of life. He too, without any doubt, was beloved, cherished and preferred of God - for if Joseph was that, surely it was on his father's account! The God Shaddai had made his father rich in Mesopotamia, rich in cattle and multifarious possessions; moving among his troop of sons, his train of women, his servants and his flocks, he might have been a prince among the princes of the land, and that he was, not only in outward seeming but also by the power of the spirit, as "nabi," which is: the prophesier; as a wise man, full of knowledge of God, "exceeding wise," as one of the spiritual leaders and elders upon whom the inheritance of the Chaldaean had come, and who had at times been thought of as his lineal descendants. No one approached Jacob save in the most respectful and ceremonious way; in dealings and trade one called him "my lord" and spoke of oneself in humble and contemptuous terms. Why did he not live with his family, as a property- owner in one of the cities, in Hebron itself, Urusalim or Shechem, in a house built of stone and wood, beneath which he could bury his dead? Why did he live like an Ishmaelite or Bedouin, in tents outside the town, in the open country, not even in sight of the citadel of Kirjath Arba; beside the well, the caves, the oaks and the terebinths, in a camp which might be struck at any time - as though he might not stop and take root with the others, as though from hour to hour he must be awaiting the word which should make him take down huts and stalls, load poles, blankets and skins on the pack-camels, and be off? Joseph knew why, of course. Thus it must be, because one served a God whose nature was not repose and abiding comfort, but a God of designs for the future, in whose will inscrutable, great, far- reaching things were in process of becoming, who, with His brooding will and His world-planning, was Himself only in process of becoming, and thus was a God of unrest, a God of cares, who must be sought for, for whom one must at all times keep oneself free, mobile and in readiness.

In a word, it was the spirit, he that dignified and then again he / Page 32 / that debased, who forbade Jacob to live a settled life in towns; and if little Joseph sometimes regretted the fact, having a taste for pomp and worldly circumstance, we must accept this trait of his character and let others make up for it. As for me, who now draw my narrative to a close, to plunge, voluntarily, into limitless adventure (the word "plunge" being used advisedly), I will not conceal my native and comprehensive understanding of the old man's restless unease and dislike of any fixed habitation. For do I not know the feeling? To me too has not unrest been ordained, have not I too been endowed with a heart which knoweth not repose? The story-teller's star - is it not the moon, lord of the road, the wanderer, who moves in his stations, one after another, freeing himself from each? For the story- teller makes many a station, roving and relating, but pauses only tent- wise, awaiting further directions, and soon feels his heart beating high, partly with desire, partly too from fear and anguish of the flesh, but in any case as a sign that he must take the road, towards fresh adventures which are to be painstakingly lived through, down to their remotest details, according to the restless spirit's will.

Already we are well under way, we have left far behind us the station where we briefly paused, we have forgotten it, and as is the fashion of travellers have begun to look across the distance at the world we are now to enter, in order that we may not feel too strange and awkward when we arrive. Has the journey already lasted too long? No wonder, for this time it is a descent into hell! Deep, deep down it goes, we pale as we leave the light of day and descend into the unsounded depths of the past.

Why do I turn pale, why does my heart beat high - not only since I set out, but even since the first command to do so- and not only with eagerness but still more with physical fear? Is not the past the story-teller's element and native air, does he not take to it as a fish to water? Agreed. But reasoning like this will not avail to make my heart cease throbbing with fear and curiosity, probably because the past by which I am well accustomed to let myself be carried far and far away is quite another from the past into which I now shudderingly descend: the past of life, the dead-and-gone world, to which my own life shall more and more profoundly belong, of which its beginnings are already a fairly deep part. To die: that means actually to lose sight of time, to travel beyond it, to exchange for it eternity and presentness and therewith for the first time, life. For the essence of life is presentness, and only in a mythical sense does its mystery appear in the time-forms of past and future. They are the way, so to speak, in which life reveals itself to the folk; the mystery belongs to the initiate. Let the folk be taught that the soul wanders. But the wise know that this teaching is only the garment of the mystery of the / Page 33 / eternal presentness of the soul, and that all life belongs to it, so soon as death shall have broken its solitary prison cell. I taste of death and knowledge when, as story-teller, I adventure into the past; hence my eagerness, hence my fear and pallor. But eagerness has the upper hand, and I do not deny that it is of the flesh, for its theme is the first and last of all our questioning and speaking and all our necessity; the nature of man. That it is which we shall seek out in the underworld and death, as Ishtar there sought Tammuz and Isis Osiris, to find it where it lies and is, in the past.

For it is, always is, however much we may say It was. Thus speaks the myth, which is only the garment of the mystery. But the holiday garment of the mystery is the feast, the recurrent feast which bestrides the tenses and makes the has-been and the to-be present to the popular sense. What wonder then, that on the day of the feast humanity is in a ferment and conducts itself with licensed abandon? For in it life and death meet and know each other. Feast of story-telling, thou art the festal garment of life's mystery, for thou conjurest up timelessness in the mind of the folk, and invokest the myth that It may be relived in the actual present. Feast of death, descent into hell, thou art verily a feast and a revelling of the soul of the flesh, which not for nothing clings to the past and the graves and the solemn It was. But may the spirit too be with thee and enter into thee, that thou mayest be blest with a blessing from heaven above and from the depths beneath.

Down, then, and no quaking! But are we going at one fell swoop into the bottomlessness of the well? No, not at all. Not much more than three thousand years deep - and what is that, compared with the bottom? At that stage men do not wear horn armour and eyes in their foreheads and do battle with flying newts. They are men like ourselves - aside from that measure of dreamy indefiniteness in their habits of thought which we have agreed to consider pardonable. So the homekeeping man talks to himself when he sets out on a journey, and then, when the matter becomes serious, gets fever and palpitations none the less. Am I really, he asks himself, going to the ends of the earth and away from the realms of the everyday? No, not at all; I am only going there and thither, where many people have been before, only a day or so away from home. And thus we too speak, with reference to the country which awaits us. Is it the land of no- where, the country of the moon, so different from aught that ever was on sea or land that we clutch our heads in sheer bewilderment? No, it is a country such as we have often seen, a Mediterranean land, not exactly like home, rather dusty and stony, but certainly not fantastic, and above it move the familiar stars. There it lies, mountain and valley, cities and roads and vineclad slopes, with a turbid river / Page 34 / darting arrowy among the green thickets; there it lies stretched out in the past, like meadows and streams in a fairy tale. Perhaps you closed your eyes, on the journey down; open them now! We have arrived. See how the moonlight-sharpened shadows lie across the peaceful, rolling landscape! Feel the mild spring freshness of the summer-starry night! "

Page 1079

"They shook their heads.. They even kept on shaking their heads in their sleep, often several at a time. And they sighed, too, as they slept - probably not one of them but unconsciously heaved a sigh twice or thrice in the night. Yet anon a smile would play on the lips of this or that sleeper; yes, several of them smiled happily in their sleep.

Good news! The return of his sons was announced to Jacob, and their approach towards the paternal tent, with their asses moving heavily under the burden of Mizraim's corn. At first it was not no-ticed that there were only nine of them, instead of the ten who had gone forth Nine makes a sizable group, and with all their animals, nine was almost like ten to the eye. Only a very sharp eye will notice that it is not one more. Benjamin, standing with his father before the house of hair (the old man had him by the hand, the husband of Mahalia and Arbath, like a little lad), did not notice anything wrong. He saw neither nine nor ten - just the brothers, moving up in their goodly numbers. But Jacob saw at once.

Astonishing. After all, the patriarch was close to ninety; one would ot expect keenness of vision from those brown eyes, faded and blinking from age, with the flabby sacs beneath them. For unimpor-tant things - and how much has not become unimportant? -they were not keen. But the deficiencies of age are more mental than physical: the senses have seen and heard and felt enough - let them grow dull. But there are things for which they can surprisingly regain the keen ear of the hunter, the quick eye of the sheep-counting shep-herd; and the integrality of Israel was a subject on which Jacob saw better than anybody else.

"There are only nine," he said in a decisive though somewhat uavering tone, and pointed. After a very brief space he added: "Simeon is not there."

"Yes, Simeon is missing," replied Benjamin after a careful look. "I don't see him either. He must be comirig after them."

"We will hope so," said the old man very firmly, and clasped the hand of his youngest in his. Thus he let them come up. He did not smile, he said not a word of greeting. He only asked:

"Where is Simeon?"

There they had it. Obviously he was minded, as before, to make things as hard as he could for them.

"Of Simeon later," answered Judah. "Greeting, Father! Of him presently; for the moment only this much: that you have no cause for worry about him. Look, we are back from our journey and once more with the head of our house." ..."

Page 979

"IT is well that this conversation between Pharaoh and Joseph - which led to the lifting up of the departed one, so that he was made great in the West - this famous and yet almost unknown conversation which the great mother, who was present, not unaptly called a conversation of gods about God, has now been re-established from beginning to end in all its turnings, windings, and conversational episodes. Well that it has been set down with exactitude once and for all, so that everyone can follow the course which in its time it pursued in .reality; so that if some point or other should slip the memory, one need only turn back and read. The summary nature of the tradition up till now almost makes it, however venerable, unconvincing. For instance upon Joseph's interpretation and his advice to the King to look about for a wise and knowledgeable and forethoughted man, Pharaoh straight-way answers: "Nobody is so knowledgeable and wise as you. I will set you over all Egypt." And overwhelms him on the spot with the most extravagant honours and dignities. There is too much abridge-ment and condensation about this, it is too dry, it is a drawn and salted and embalmed remnant of the truth, not truth's living lineaments. Pharaoh's inordinate enthusiasm and favour seem to lack foundation and motivation. Long ago when, overcoming the shrinking of our flesh, we pulled ourselves together for the trip down through millen- nial abysses, down to the regions below, to the field and the fountain where Joseph was standing; even so long ago what we were actually after was to listen to that very conversation and to bring it back with us in all its members as it really came to pass and took place at On in Lower Egypt.

Of course, there is really nothing against condensation in itself. It is useful and even necessary. In the long run it is quite impossible to narrate life just as it flows. What would it lead to? Into the infinite. It would be beyond human powers. Whoever got such an idea fixed in his head would not only never finish, he would be suffocated at the outset. Entangled in a web of delusory exactitude, a madness of detail. No, excision must play its part at the beautiful feast of narra- / Page 980 / tion and recreation; it has an important and indispensable role, Here, then, the art wIll be Judiciously practIsed, to the end of getting finally quit of a preoccupation which, though after all it has a distant kin-ship with the attempt to drink the sea dry, must not be driven to the extreme and utter folly of actually and literally doing so.

What would have become of us, for instance, when Jacob was serv-ing with the devil Laban, seven and thirteen and five - in short, twenty-five years, of which every tiniest time element was full of a life-in-itself, quite worth telling? And what would become of us now without that reasonable principle, when our little bark, driven by the measuredly moving stream of narration, hovers again on the brink of a time-cataract of seven and seven prophesied years? Well, to begin with, and just among ourselves: in these fourteen years things were neither quite so definitely good nor so definitely bad as the prophecy would have them. It was fulfilled, no doubt about that. But fulfilled as life fulfils, imprecisely. For life and reality always assert a certain independence, sometimes on such a scale as to blur the prophecy out of all recognition. Of course, life is bound to the prophecy; but within those limits it moves so freely that one almost has one's choice as to whether the prophecy has been fulfilled or not. In our present case we are dealing with a time and a people animated by the best will in the world to believe in the fulfilment, however inexact, For the sake of the prophecy they are willing to agree that two and two make five - if the phrase may be used in a context where .not five but an even higher odd number, namely seven, is in question. Probably this would constitute no great difficufty, five being almost as respectable a number as seven; and surely no reasonable man would insist that five instead of seven could constitute an inex-actitude.

In fact and in reality the prophesied seven looked rather more like five. Life, being living, put no clear or absolute emphasis on either number. The fat and the lean years did not come up out of the womb of time to balance each other so unequivocally as in the dream. The fat and lean years that came were like life in not being entirely fat or entirely lean. Among the fat ones were one or two which might have been described as certainly not lean, but to a critical eye as cer-tainly no more than very moderately fat. The lean ones were all lean enough, at least five of them, if not seven; but among them there may have been a couple which did not reach the last extreme of exiguity and even half-way approached'the middling. Indeed, if the prophecy had not existed they might not have been recognized as years of famine at all. As it was, they were blithely reckoned in along with the others.

Does all this detract from the fulfilment of the prophecy? Of course not. Its fulfilment is incontestable, for we have the fact - the / Page 981 facts of our tale, of which our tale consists, without which it would not be in the world and without which, after the snatching away and the lifting up, the making to come after could not have happened. Certainly things were fat and lean enough in the land of Egypt and adjacent regions, years-long fat and years-long more or less lean, and Joseph had plenty of chance to husband the plenty and distribute the crying lack, and like Utnapishtim-Atrachasis, like Noah the ex-ceeding wise one, to prove himself a man of prudence and foresight, whose ark rocks safe on the flood. In loyal service to the highest he did this as his minister, and by Jtis dealings he gilded Pharaoh over and over again.

 Page 89

In the 19th century numerous toads were found encased in rock and - inexplicably - alive. How did they get there,

and how did they survive? The resulting controversy threw Victorian scientists into disarray

IN THE WINTER of 1856, French workmen were blasting a tunnel to carry the railway line from Saint-Dizier to Nancy when they came across a 'monstrous form' in the darkness. They had just split open a huge boulder 'lias', or Jurassic limestone, when the thing staggered from a cavity within the rock, rattled its wings, gave a hoarse cry, and died without further ado.

It was the size and shape of a large goose, though its head was 'hideous' and its mouth contained sharp teeth. Four long legs ended in hooked talons and were joined by a bat-like membrane, and the skin itself was black, leathery, thick and oily.

Somewhat gingerly, the workmen carried the carcase to the nearby town of Gray where, according to a report in the Illustrated London News of 9 February 1856, 'a naturalist, versed in palaeontology, immediately recognised it as belonging to the genus (sic) Pterodactylus anas.'

The rock strata from which it had come tallied with the era in which pterodactyls flourished, and it was noted that the cavity whence it had emerged formed an 'exact hollow mould of its body, which indicates that it was completely enveloped with the sedimentary deposit.'

The story of the French pterodactyl was perhaps the most dramatic of a series of accounts concerning living creatures immured for thousands of years in solid rock that set the fringe of Victorian science in quiet disarray and caused more entrenched taking of sides than, for instance, even physicist William. Crookes's experiments with psychical research. Its nearest modern equivalent is the UFO question and, like this, it simmered for decades without any satisfactory conclusion being reached.

The foundations of the 'suspended animation' controversy were laid in 1761 with the publication of the Annual Register, which that year devoted its pages to accounts - some from antiquity, some from more recent times - of living creatures, usually small reptiles or shellfish, having been found sealed in stone. Among other things, it reported that the stones used for paving Toulon harbour were often broken open to yield up living shellfish of 'exquisite taste', and quoted the writings of such as Francis Bacon, Baptist Fulgosa, Agricola and Horstius in seeking to show that snakes, crabs, lobsters, toads and frogs could all live indefinitely while apparently de- prived of food, air, light and moisture.

It also retailed the first known personal observation on the subject, by Ambroise Pare, who was principal surgeon to Henry III. Pare stated that, in the late 16th century, while at his house in Meudon, he was watching a quarryman break 'some very large and hard stones, in the middle of one we found a huge toad, full of life and without any visible / Page 90 / aperture by which it could get there. . . .'

With only minor alterations, Pare's story was to be echoed over and over again during the Victorian era - sometimes well documen- ted, sometimes not, but always rather impressively consistent in detail.

There can have been few more academically respectable accounts, for example, than that given by the geologist Dr E. D. Clarke during a lecture at Caius College, Cambridge, in February 1818. Dr Clarke had been supervising the digging out of a chalk pit in the hope of finding fossils, and at a depth of 45 fathoms had uncovered a layer of fossilised sea urchins and newts. Three of the latter appeared to be in perfect condition, and Dr Clarke carefully excavated them and placed them on a piece of paper in the sunlight. To his astonishment, they moved. Although two of them died shortly afterwards, the third was placed in pond water and 'skipped and twisted about, as well as if it had never been torpid' and became so active that it escaped. Dr Clarke immediately began collecting examples of all the live newts in the area in the hope of matching them with the disinterred bodies, but none resembled the long-buried ones. The Reverend Richard Cobbold, who attended the lecture and saw the newts, said 'They are of an entirely extinct species, never before known.'

On 31 October 1862 a paragraph in the Stamford Mercury anticipated criticism when it told of a living toad found 7 feet (2 metres) down in bedrock during the excavation of a cellar in Spittlegate, Stamford. 'No fact,' insisted the anonymous reporter sternly, 'can be more fully or certainly established by human evidence, let the sceptics on this subject say what they will.'

The toad that barked

Three years later, on 8 April 1865, the august and sober Leeds Mercury was careful to go into meticulous detail when it reported the finding of a living, embedded toad during the excavation of Hartlepool Waterworks. Quarrymen, under their foreman Mr James Yeal, found the creature in a block of magnesian limestone 'at a depth of twenty five feet [8 metres] from the surface of the earth and eight feet [2.5 metres] from any spring water vein.'

As in many similar instances, the toad's body had been perfectly moulded into the rock, 'and presented the appearance of being a cast of it. The toad's eyes shone with unusual brilliancy, and it was full of vivacity on its liberation. It appeared when first discovered, desirous to perform the process of respiration, but evidently experienced some difficulty, and the only sign of success consisted of a "barking" noise. . . .'

This was not surprising, as its mouth proved to be completely closed and the 'barking' came from its nostrils. The paper reported that though at first it had been as pale as the stone from which it came, it later changed colour to a fine olive brown. Apart from these facts, and the 'extraordinary length' of its hind claws, it was quite normal. The Rev. Robert Taylor, vicar of St Hilda's and a local geologist of renown, estimated that the magnesian limestone in which it was found was at least 200 million years old. Yet the toad stayed alive for some days.

Sir,-The controversy in your columns on the above subject reminds me of what I heard when resident in Northumberland, as having occurred at Chillingham Castle, the seat of the Earl of Tankerville.

A slab of marble, forming one side of the chimneypiece, in either the dining-room or drawing-room, was observed to be always damp and somewhat diacoloured, and partly from curiosity, and partly because the chimneypiece was injured in appearance at that part, it was determined to examine the place carefully. The slab was removed, and, I believe, was cut by a saw near the part where the unusual appearance existed, and a toad was discovered, alive, in the marble at this spot, and in the marble was found a recess of the size of the toad, and in which it exactly fitted.

I give you the story exactly as I heard it in the immediate neighbourhood of Chillingham Castle, and a single line from the Earl of Tankerville would confirm or disprove the above statement, as its truth or want of foundation must be perfectly well known to his Lordship, and to those resident thereabouts.

If the story is substantially true, I suppose that it is not more astonishing that a toad should be found in coal than in marble.

Your obedient servant,

GODFREY SINCLAIR.

Ormsary. Lochgilphead, North Britain, Sept. 18.

Several reports came in from the United States, via such respected scientific journals as American Naturalist and Scientific American. A typical story, from the latter, told how a silver miner named Moses Gaines was chipping away at a boulder 2 feet (60 centimetres) square when it broke open to reveal a toad; again, the toad's body fitted its crevice precisely. The animal was 'three inches [7.5 centimetres] long and very plump and fat . . . its eyes were about the size of a silver cent piece, being much larger than those of.....

One of the numerous letters written to The Times in 1862 on the toad controversy

(Illustrations omitted)

Top: this mummified toad in a flint nodule was discovered by workmen in Lewes, Sussex. It is probably the only existing example of the phenomenon and is now preserved in the Brighton Museum, England

Above: Dr Edward Clarke, who in 1818 discovered three 'fossilised', but living, newts

/ Page 91 / toads of the same size such as we see every day.' Although alive, Gaine's toad was leth-gic: 'They tried to make him hop or jump touching him with a stick, but he paid no attention. . . "

These and similar stories, although de-lighting the sensation-hungry general public, upset the scientific flock no end.

There was no question in the mind of one Captain Buckland, who wrote sternly to the directors of the Great Exhibition of 1862 via The Times. Toads in rocks were 'a gross imposition', he declared, and demanded that an example from a coalmine in Newport, Monmouthshire, should be 'expelled' from the show. To be fair, the Captain had some claim to prior knowledge of the subject, for his father Dr Frank Buckland, late Dean of Westminster, had experimented with the burial of toads in 1825. He had taken two blocks of stone, one limestone, the other sandstone, and had cut six small cells in each, into which he placed live toads, sealing them in with a sheet of glass and slate, and burying them 3 feet (1 metre) down in his garden. A year later he dug up the blocks. All the toads in the sandstone appeared to have been dead for some time, though some of those in the limestone were alive, and two had actually put on weight. Unfortunately the glass had cracked, and it was possible that small insects had got in and inadvertently provided food for the entombed creatures. When Dr Buckland tried the experiment again, this time sealing the toads securely, all of them died.

For most 'scientists, Dr Buckland's experiments marked an end to the matter, and yet there remained a dissident group to support the possibility of survival.

One of its spokesmen, William Howitt, commented on the question in his History of the supernatural (1863). He pointed out that all naturalists were familiar with the fact that frogs and toads sink themselves into the mud at the bottom of ponds to pass the winter. He recalled an occasion at Farnsfield, Notting- lamshire, when, during the digging out of a ditch, he had seen a 'regular stratum 'of frogs' in a foot of mud, 'as stiff as butter. Scores of frogs speedily woke up and hopped away to eek fresh quarters. If these frogs could live six months in this nearly solid casing of 'iscous mud, why not six or any number of years?'

In time, of course, the mud would become rock; but the great question remained: could frogs and toads survive the enormous pres- sure involved, let alone the vast geological time spans, before such a metamorphosis could take place?

The answer to the first point seemed to be that the frail bodies could indeed survive; the great 18th-century naturalist Gilbert White, among others, had recorded finding a mummified frog in a stone - mummified, not fossilised. And this question of surviving the pressure, as opponents of the Buckland faction pointed out, seemed to depend on the fact that the rock, in its plastic state, was moulded to the body of the frog or toad as neatly as a nutshell to the kernel. Buckland had failed because his 'cells' did not fit the bodies of his subjects,' whereas a Monsieur Seguin of France; according to The Times of 23 September 1862, had encased 20 toads in a block of plaster of Paris, which was then allowed to set and was buried. After 12 years, four were still alive.

(Illustrations omitted)

Below: Dr Frank Buckland, whose experiments led him to surmise that toads could lot live incarcerated in rocks

:Centre: common frogs (Rana temporaria) can survive for months buried in mud

Worthen's limestone theory

A further theory was put forward by A. H. Worthen in the American Naturalist of 1871. Examining a toad found alive in limestone near St Louis, Worthen found that the original Warsaw limestone had been coated with a deposit of calcium carbonate to a depth of over an inch. Supposing, he reasoned, that the toad had hibernated in a crevice of the mother rock, and had been sealed in by the dripping of water that held carbonate of lime in solution? To the uninitiated, the entire mass would be solid limestone, with no difference between the old rock and the new deposit. At best, Worthen's theory went some way towards explaining what might happen in some circumstances.

'Toad in the hole'

The vast majority of doubting scientists refused to look into the matter even so far, however; they fell back on the theory that the witnesses, many of them workmen, had been dishonest, credulous, or both. But why should a man such as Dr Clarke of Cambridge lay his reputation on the line, as it were, for the sake of sensation?

The pros and cons continued to be argued until the end of the century, when the issue finally all but died. It did leave behind one curious culinary legacy, that indigestible, but delicious concoction of sausage and batter that the Victorians dubbed 'toad in the hole,

/ Page 51 /

A toad found in the heart of a stone . Robert Malcolm, who had been at sea, returns from a northern voyage. Kate Malcolm's clandestine correspondence with Lady Macadam's son

I HAVE my doubts whether it was in the beginning of this year, or in the end of the last, that a very extraordinar thing came to light in the parish; but howsoever that may be, there is nothing more certain than the fact, which it is my duty to record. I have mentioned already how it was that the toll, or trust-road,¹ was set a-going, on account of the Lord Eglesham's tumbling on the midden in the vennel. Well, it happened to one of the labouring men, in breaking the stones to make metal for the new road, that he broke a stone that was both large and remarkable, and in the heart or it, which was boss,² there was found a living creature, that jumped out the moment it saw the light of heaven, to the great terrification of the man, who could think it was nothing but an evil spirit that had been imprisoned therein for a time. The man came to me like a demented creature, and the whole clachan gathered out, young and old, and I went at their head, to see what the miracle could be, for the man said it was a fiery dragon, spuing smoke and flames. But when we came to the spot, it was just a yird³ toad, and the laddie weans nevelled⁴ it to death with stones, before I could persuade them to give over. Since then I have read of such things coming to light in the Scots Magazine,⁵ a very valuable book."

Page110

In several daily newspapers of July 1st, 1938, there was a story of an Egyptian called Rahman Bey, who threw himself into a trance, and stayed for an hour at the bottom of a swimming bath in a metal tank. "My peculiar gift was discovered by a Yogi priest when I was a child," he is reported to have said. And the whole thing is put across to the British public as a sample of the mysterious gifts of Orientals, who, of course, are so unlike us!

Now there are two funny things about this story, before we come to the tank at all. The name Rahman Bey means Colonel Merciful, which strikes me as funny. And as the Yogi philosophy is a product of India, it is remarkable that its adherents should experiment on Egyptian children.

The Daily Herald gave a photograph of the tank, which measures 8 feet by 1 feet by 2 feet, according to one of my colleagues, and rather less according to me. So it holds 20 to 25 cubic feet. An average man occupies 2 cubic feet, so Rahman Bey had about 20 cubic feet of air. Now a man doing light work uses about 24 cubic feet of oxygen in 24 hours. If he lies still, this is reduced to about half.

So Colonel Merciful used about half a cubic foot of oxygen in an hour. As 20 cubic feet of air contain just over 4 cubic feet of oxygen, he had plenty to spare at the end of the hour, and could have gone on for another two hours After this time he would have been very short of breath and would have panted so much that the remaining oxygen would have been used up more, quickly. And when he came out after three hours he would have had a nasty / Page 111 / headache. For besides using oxygen, a man makes a slightly smaller amount of carbon dioxide; and after breathing air containing anything over 6 per cent of this gas for an hour, one has a short but violent headache, and I for one sometimes vomit.^l

Before being shut up in the tank, Rahman Bey "shook like a pneumatic drill and then flung himself violently into unconsciousness." I should have lain down quietly. But if Rahman Bey was unconscious he saved himself an hour of boredom. However, if I can borrow a tank, 1 am perfectly willing to spend an hour at the 'bottom of a swimming bath for a suitable fee to be paid to the International Brigade Dependants' Fund.²

Many readers will say "What does all this matter?" It matters quite a lot. The physiology of human breathing is involved in questions of mine and factory ventilation, and of protection against poison gas, which to-day concerns everybody.³ And because we are not educated in "the matter, we take the Government's statements on gas defence as seriously as the journalists took Rahman Bey.

I recently had an airtight tank with a 'glass window made in which a child could be shut up for several hours during a gas attack. I stayed in it for an hour myself, and got rather warm, whereas Rahman Bey was doubtless cool at, the bottom of his swimming bath. But I had to try three mothers before any of them would allow their baby to stay in it for even half an hour.

There are no gas masks for babies,⁴ and a tank of this kind would give protection for some hours at any rate. But because we are not taught such e!ementary facts about ourselves as how much oxygen a man uses per hour, a good many babies are going to die if gas is used against civilians in a future war.

You may call me a crass materialist, but it seems to me more important that children should be taught such facts as this than that they should know how often King Henry VIII married or who won the Battle of Agincourt.

There are a great many strange stories about the wonderful powers displayed by various Asiatics and Africans.

¹ So do others, as the experiments on the International Brigaders in connection with the loss of the Thetis showed.

² Unfortunately, this challenge was not taken up.

³ As the Thetis case showed, it is also important to submarine crews.

⁴ They are now available.

/ Page 112 / When they are investigated they generally turn out either to be untrue or to be based on elementary facts of human physiology which are known to certain groups in India, but not yet generally known in Europe.

For example, I have pushed a red-hot cigarette end against the finger of a hypnotised Englishman without causing either pain or blistering. If he had been an Indian, it would have made a story for the daily Press.

These stories are very useful to imperialists, because they help to spread the idea that the human races are very different. If people in England believe the myth that members of coloured races have powers which Europeans do not possess, they will be ready, to believe another myth -namely, that they do not possess the power of looking after their own affairs.

It is time that we realised that scientific investigation has shown that people of different races are remarkably alike, and that it is only prejudice and the self-interest of exploiters which prevent them from being brothers.

" In 1959 chance led to the discovery, in a cave in Sonara province in Mexico, of thirty well preserved mummies dating from about 10,000 years ago and belonging to an unknown civilization.

These facts are remarkable enough in themselves, but Sr. Beltran Garcia embroiders them after his own fashion

'The mummies of the five Inca sovereigns,' he tells us, were removed from the temple before Garcilaso was born, and their discovery was due to an error.From the scientific point of view they were bodies in a state of hibernation, with all their organs inert but living. The Incas were skilled at producing this condition, and they did so in the expectation that scientists would one day be able to re-suscitate the bodies. The technique of embalming was used at the Vatican too, and the "pitch" used by the Incas was in fact a solid transperent cream consisting of three ingrediants, one of which was quinine.'

We report these singular ideas merely as a curiosity, though some people have been taken in by them. Garcilaso's account makes it clear that he is talking of dead bodies, but his decendant, referring to the Chilean discovery,writes as follows : ' Garcilaso de la Vega states that the method of the "frozen toad" ( sapo helado ) was an Inca secret.

It seems that the child was meant to be the bearer of a message to scientists of the future, but that the body's sudden exhumation deprived it of life. The gold figurines, especially that with the toad's head, contained a secret explanation of the experiment.'

If and when Sr Garcia and those who share his views are privelidged to hold telepathic converse with some half- immortal Inca scientist whose hiding place is unknown to the rest of us, it is to be hoped that they can give a fuller ex-planation of the gold figurines. Meanwhile, we are assured 'other live mummies are hidden in the creators of volcanoes and in Andean glaciers. Those in craters are in a state of lethergy induced by the curare process, while those in glaciers are in artificial hibernation due to the "toad method"

The Zed AlizZed cracked open the any stone and gooddayed the toad

The scribe carefully noted the comments made by Brother Kolosimo with regard to Senor Beltran Garcia.

ZedAlizZed meanwhile calculated the odds.

Page 182

"Garcilaso Inca de la Vega. Garcilaso, who lived from

1539 to 1616"

1539 - 1616 = 77

Page 65

If the earth or the moon were a living animal it would" perhaps have "eyes" sensitive to radio waves. They would consist of receiving sets each picking up waves from a certain direction, and tuned in to a certain wavelength or "colour ." With these it would "see" broadcasting stations as lights, and also a source of short radio waves in the sky, emitting waves round 15 metres in length, and rising and setting like the sun.

This mysterious heavenly body, the sun of the radio world, rises and sets 366 times; not 365, in the year. It is near the middle of the milky way in the constellation Sagittarius, and was only discovered two years ago, so we don't yet know much about it.

Just as lamps are coloured because they give out light / Page 66 / of certain wavelengths, so non-luminous things are coloured because they absorb some wavelengths and reflect others. Thus gold is yellow because it absorbs blue light and reflects the rest.

In our upper atmosphere there are layers of gas which reflect long radio waves and let through shorter ones, so that a radio "eye" would see the sky as red in colour. These layers are being investigated by Professor Appleton and his colleagues with a transmitter at King's College, London, and a receiver at Hampstead which picks up the echoes from them.

If there were no reflecting layer, radio waves would fly off into space in straight lines, and. it would be impossible to broadcast from Daventry to Glasgow, let alone Australia. When this was first realised it was thought that there was only one reflecting layer. Now we know that there are three, and that below the lowest there are little clouds of "coloured" gas.

Such are some of the real but invisible things around us. Materialists are often accused of reducing the human mind to the level of mere matter. But when one knows a little science, materialism comes to mean the belief that the mind is as wonderful as the material world which it reflects.

OSIRIS

The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann 1875-1955

Page 510

"The higher degrees of Freemasonary were initiates of the 'physica et mystica ,'the representatives of a magic natural science, they were in the main great alchemists"

"…Alchemy :transmuting into gold, the philosophers stone, aurum potabile ."

"In the popular mind, yes. More informedly put, it was purifi-cation, refinement,metamorphosis,

transubstantiation ,into a higher state , of course; the lapis philosophorum, the male female product /

Page 511 / of sulphur and mercury,the res bina,the double-sexed prima ma-teria was no more ,and no less, than the principle of levitation, of the upward impulse due to the working of influences from with-out. Instruction in magic if you like."

Page 511"

The primary symbol of alchemic transmutation "

"was par exellence the sepulchre." "The grave? " "Yes, the place of corruption .It comprehends all hermetics, all alchemy, it is nothing else than the receptacle, the well - guarded crystal retort wherein the material is compressed to its final trans - ormation and purification."

Page 511

"Hermetics - what a lovely word "

"…It sounds like magiking,and has all sorts of vague and extended associations .You must excuse my speaking of such a thing but it reminds me of the conserve jars that our housekeeper …"

"…keeps in her larder. She has rows of them on her shelves, air-tight glasses full of fruit and meat and all sorts of things.They stand there maybe a whole year-you open them as you need them and the contents are as fresh as on the day they were put up, you can eat them just as they are.To be sure, that isn't alchemy or purification, it is simply conserving , hence the word conserve.The magic part of it lies in the fact that the stuff that is conserved is withdrawn from the effects of time, it is her-metically sealed from time, time passes it by, it stand there on its shelf shut away from time."

Brahma

If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep and pass and turn again.

R.W.Emerson

Encyclopedia Of Ancient And Forbidden Knowledge

Zolar 1988 Edition

Page 39 KABBALISTIC WISDOM

There is no death; there is no destruction. All is but change and transformation-first the caterpillar, then the chrysalis, then the mighty mind, and at last a noble Soul."

Now, said Zed Aliz Zed, not for the last time, and meaning, like now, and now, being that now, as and when our I's don't meet across a crowded room.

Presented az iz,and just for the record, an upside down, free, three card trick, especially chosen for your very own I's delectation, and delight. The following introductions, including a re-introduction, of an introduction, introduced by that much further than that, far yonder scribe, and appearing, in, an as and when order.

Page 195

" As Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola expresses it:

'It will thus be clear that the alchemical process of creation, is a microscopic reconstitution of the process of creation, in other words a re-creation. It is effected by the interplay of forces symbolized by two dragons, one black and one white, locked in an eternal circular combat. The white one is winged, or volatile, the black one wingless, or fixed; they are accompanied by the universal alchemical formula solve et / Page196 / coagula. This formula and this emblem symbolize the alternating role of the two indespensible halves that compose the whole. Solve et coagula is an injunction to alternate dissolution, which is a spiritualization or sublimation of solids, with coagulation, that is to say a re-matrialization of the purified products of the first operation. Its cyclic aspect is clearly expressed by Nicholas Valois: " Solvite corpora et coagulate spiritum " ; " Dissolve the body and coagulate the spirit." ' note 1

…'But when we marry the crowned king to our red

daughter, and in a gentle fire, not hurtful she doth concieve

an exellent and supernatural son, which permanent life she

doth also feed with a subtle heat, so that he lives at length in

our fire…Then he is transformed, and his tincture by help /

Page197 / of the fire remains red, as it were flesh. But our son the King

begotten, takes his tincture from the fire, and death even,

and darkness, and the waters flee away. The Dragon shuns

the sunbeams which dart through the crevices and our dead

son lives; the king comes from the fire and rejoins with

his spouse, the occult treasures are laid open, and the

virgin's milk is whitened.'

- Tractacus aureus, or Golden Tracate of Hermes.

Or again:

' Take the serpent and place it in the chariot with four

wheels and let it be turned about on the earth until it is

immersed in the depths of the sea , and nothing more is

visible but the blackest Dead Sea …and when the vapour is

precipitated like rain… you should bring the chariot from

water to dry land, and then you have placed the four wheels

on the chariot and will obtain the result if you will advance

further to the Red Sea, running without running, moving

without motion'

- The Tractate of Aristotle to Alexander the Great.

…" Whatever their names and however many processes might have been applied, the important factor to remember is that the alchemists saw their work as reflective and imitative of the cyclic order of Nature ; of the formation, development and eventual dissolution of the All - followed by its natural

and /

Page 198 1 x 9 x 8 = 72 7 + 2 = 9 / inevitable re-formation. ( This may be compared quite favour-ably with a cyclic uni-verse, which begins as a primal atom containing everything,explodes to form the cosmos, then ultimately collapses back upon itself eventually to repeat the process over again ad infinitum) This process similarly applied on a lesser scale to all living entities including the earth, which went through an obvious cycle of birth, growth, decay death, and re-birth annually. Man himself also followed this assumed pattern of birth, life death and re-birth.

-

Page 97

"Sound, of course, is a vibration that can be conducted only through an elastic medium; it cannot travel through a vac-uum. Electromagnetic waves do travel through free space, and we know far less about factors governing their resonance. There is however, one quite extraordinary piece of evidence which suggests that shape could be important in receiving even cosmic stimuli. It comes from those favourites of mystics throughout the ages-the pyramids of Egypt.

'The most celebrated are those at Giza built during the fourth. dynasty of which the largest is the one that housed the pharaoh Khufu, better known as Cheops. This is now called the Great Pyramid Some years ago it was visited by a

French-man named Bovis, who took refuge from the midday sun in the pharaoh's chamber, which is situated at the center of the pyramid, exactly one third of the way up from the base He found it unusually humid there,but what really surprised /

Page 98 9 x 8 = 72 7 + 2 = 9 / him were the garbage cans that contained, among the usual tourist litter,the bodies of a dead cat and some small desert animals that had wandered into the pyramid

Page 98 9 x 8 = 72

Bovis made an accurate scale model of the Cheops pyramid and placed it like the original with the base lines,facing precisely north-south east-west. Inside the model one third of the way up, he put a dead cat. It became mummified and he concluded that the pyramid promoted rapid dehy-dration.

Page 217

Page 25

" One of the most important branches of physics is called Quantum theory, because it deals with the tiny packages of energy (quanta ) that comprise the subatomic micro world. Light which we normally think of as an electro magnetic wave, can also be visualized as a stream of tiny particles-quanta-called photons. Conversely , Subatomic entities like electrons are commonly considered as tiny particles but under certain experimental conditions they exhibit a wave like character. This wave / particle duality is a cornerstone of quantum physics

The bizarre side of quantum theory comes when we try to figure out what a quantum particle like an electron actually is. One thing it is not is a particle in the ordinary sense of a speck of matter which occupies both a defined amount of space and a defined position in space Physicists in the 1920s and 1930s discovered that it is impossible to determine the position and the velocity of an electron at the same time. This is not a flaw in in technique. Rather, the electron, in a fundamental sense, does not have a specific position /

Page 26 / and velocity the uncertainty is an in built feature of our real world, not a fault of our instruments

"A deeper understanding revealed the quixotic fact that a particle like an electron has only a certain mathematical probability of being found in any one spot.This probability has a ripple or wave-like form, but it is more like a 'crime wave'- a statistical distribution - than a physical undulation

" The basis of matter , then , when examined intimately, dissolves into a ghostlike intangibility ; the quantum wave is a mathematical wraith , a ripple of possibilities."

"The quantum wave only has this wraithlike character when it is not being looked at. When an observer intrudes, when a scientist for example, tries to measure the properties of an electron the, the ghostly wave function collapses.The particle becomes real it can now be specifically assigned a fixed location, with a probability of 1,i.ea certainty

This is a staggering conclusion .It means that consciousness is not an observer in the dynamics of the universe; it is an active participant. Consciousness , literally and factually, creates reality , by summoning forth material particles,

definable certainties, from the elusive quantum wave .Objective 'reality' in this perspective falters on the brink of a profound ambiguity. Subject and object; mind and matter are not separate; they interact and interlock."

Page 31 "…In the perspective of physics the past does not cease to exist simply because our awareness moves beyond it"

Page 33

" The laws of physics have no inbuilt time asymmetery.They work just as well in the future-to-past sense as the past-to-future sense. We see this clearly when we look at the quantum wave .The wave is a ripple of possibility, not a real thing It has neither past nor future; it can be described as travelling forwards in time and backward in time with equal validity. This is true not just of the quantum wave. Subatomic particles exhibit the same disregard for time. In the last half century physics has unearthed a garden of so-called 'fundamental particles' - mesons, positrons, neutrinos, etc. For each of these particles of ordinary matter there exists an antiparticle of equal mass but opposite 'charge' (antimatter)

Page 95

Page 209 "At this stage in the evolution of our minds, our experience of reality is like that of a shadow, a limited, impoverished ghost-image projected into the three dimensions of our present (average) mode of consciousness by the invisible (to us ) four-dimensional 'truth structure' that lies beyond and behind it, extended in time as we are extended in space. I cannot stress too strongly that it is this four-dimensional truth structure which is the universe's reality. What we call objective reality, our everyday commonsense world, is but a dim phantom construct of the timeless hyperstructure that exists, in or perhaps as, the 'mind of God', to use religious imagery. Yet, just as our present three-dimensional state of consciousness evolved from the one dimensional mode of our remote ancestors, so there is abundant evidence that the four-dimensional mode is struggling to be born in the homo sapiens species at this human moment in the cosmic story we are almost there."

"…This seems to bring us to the end of our quest.Yet one problem remains and like all final problems, it is the greatest one of all, sticking like a thorn in the vision of hope which the inner eye holds out to us. The cosmos is a spacetime continium and in this regard, the poet's intuition of a timeless state of consciousness merely / Page 210 / reflects the facts of the physical universe as science depicts them.However timelessness implies foreverness and the same science that reveals spacetime to us also tells us that the universe will one day end in fire or ice.

The death of forever. The fact that the very cosmos in which we live is 'mortal' This was where this journey started and it is from this existentialist crisis of truly universal proportions that this book gets its name.At the finish of the race, we seem to run head-on into one last, unresolvable paradox, just as light was dawning. Something that seems to make our intuition of timelessness as insubstantial as a lovely vision, dreamed by a dreamer in a quiet time but dissolving like a snowflake at first contact with brute fact.

Is this really the case? In chapter 7, I discussed a recent model of spacetime put forward by Stephen Hawking"

"…Hawking built a model of the cosmos which he called the 'no boundary' model because in his theory, time does not begin at a 'point' nor does it end in one (Figure 7.3.).From the earlier perspec-tive of Chapter 7, this model seemed from many points of view unsatisfactory, because it used imaginary time, not real time. Chapter 9 gives the model a new source of credibility for it is characteristic of the inner eye that it can disregard the 'commonsense' aspects of experience and penetrate to the inner logic of nature.

Thus when the inner eye 'sees a circle, a mandela, and recog-nises therein some form of flawnessness, it is, at a different level, seeing the endless number 3.1415926…It may be significant we call such numbers trancendental. Indeed, science builds its deepest truths using numbers that are, in an important sense, 'illogical'. The square root of minus one is imaginary (it is in fact, part of the number system Hawking uses to build his model ). The square root of 2 is irrational. And so it goes on.

Moreover, the word 'imaginary', like all symbols invented by the conceptual mind, confuses the issue by implying that such numbers are in some way 'unreal' This is fundamentally false. As Hawking's colleague

mathematician, Roger Penrose, says cryptically:

Page 211 It is important to stress the fact that these 'imaginary' numbers are no less real than the real numbers we have become accustomed to…the relationship between such

Page 25

" One of the most important branches of physics is called Quantum theory, because it deals with the tiny packages of energy (quanta ) that comprise the subatomic micro world. Light which we normally think of as an electro magnetic wave, can also be visualized as a stream of tiny particles-quanta-called photons. Conversely , Subatomic entities like electrons are commonly considered as tiny particles but under certain experimental conditions they exhibit a wave like character. This wave / particle duality is a cornerstone of quantum physics

The bizarre side of quantum theory comes when we try to figure out what a quantum particle like an electron actually is. One thing it is not is a particle in the ordinary sense of a speck of matter which occupies both a defined amount of space and a defined position in space Physicists in the 1920s and 1930s discovered that it is impossible to determine the position and the velocity of an electron at the same time. This is not a flaw in in technique. Rather, the electron, in a fundamental sense, does not have a specific position /

Page 26 / and velocity the uncertainty is an in built feature of our real world, not a fault of our instruments

"A deeper understanding revealed the quixotic fact that a particle like an electron has only a certain mathematical probability of being found in any one spot.This probability has a ripple or wave-like form, but it is more like a 'crime wave'- a statistical distribution - than a physical undulation

" The basis of matter , then , when examined intimately, dissolves into a ghostlike intangibility ; the quantum wave is a mathematical wraith , a ripple of possibilities."

"The quantum wave only has this wraithlike character when it is not being looked at. When an observer intrudes, when a scientist for example, tries to measure the properties of an electron the, the ghostly wave function collapses.The particle becomes real it can now be specifically assigned a fixed location, with a probability of 1,i.e a certainty

This is a staggering conclusion .It means that consciousness is not an observer in the dynamics of the universe; it is an active participant. Consciousness , literally and factually, creates reality , by summoning forth material particles,

definable certainties, from the elusive quantum wave .Objective 'reality' in this perspective falters on the brink of a profound ambiguity. Subject and object; mind and matter are not separate; they interact and interlock."

When the thats away the how's will play said Zed Aliz to the scribe .

The scribe writ simply A cat is said to have nine lives'.

 Page 31 "…In the perspective of physics the past does not cease to exist simply because our awareness moves beyond it"

Page 33

" The laws of physics have no inbuilt time asymmetery.They work just as well in the future-to-past sense as the past-to-future sense. We see this clearly when we look at the quantum wave .The wave is a ripple of possibility, not a real thing It has neither past nor future; it can be described as travelling forwards in time and backward in time with equal validity. This is true not just of the quantum wave. Subatomic particles exhibit the same disregard for time. In the last half century physics has unearthed a garden of so-called 'fundamental particles' - mesons, positrons, neutrinos, etc. For each of these particles of ordinary matter there exists an antiparticle of equal mass but opposite 'charge' (antimatter)

Page 34 According to modern physics, both the quantum wave and the physical particles that constitute matter are symmetric with respect to the direction of time. The spacetime landscape , at least as far as quanta are concerned, can be crossed with equal ease.

 Page 209 "At this stage in the evolution of our minds, our experience of reality is like that of a shadow, a limited, impoverished ghost-image projected into the three dimensions of our present (average) mode of consciousness by the invisible (to us ) four-dimensional 'truth structure' that lies beyond and behind it, extended in time as we are extended in space. I cannot stress too strongly that it is this four-dimensional truth structure which is the universe's reality. What we call objective reality, our everyday commonsense world, is but a dim phantom construct of the timeless hyperstructure that exists, in or perhaps as, the 'mind of God', to use religious imagery. Yet, just as our present three-dimensional state of consciousness evolved from the one dimensional mode of our remote ancestors, so there is abundant evidence that the four-dimensional mode is struggling to be born in the homo sapiens species at this human moment in the cosmic story we are almost there."

"…This seems to bring us to the end of our quest. Yet one problem remains and like all final problems, it is the greatest one of all, sticking like a thorn in the vision of hope which the inner eye holds out to us. The cosmos is a spacetime continium and in this regard, the poet's intuition of a timeless state of consciousness merely /

Page 210 / reflects the facts of the physical universe as science depicts them.However timelessness implies foreverness and the same science that reveals spacetime to us also tells us that the universe will one day end in fire or ice.

The death of forever. The fact that the very cosmos in which we live is 'mortal' This was where this journey started and it is from this existentialist crisis of truly universal proportions that this book gets its name.At the finish of the race, we seem to run head-on into one last, unresolvable paradox, just as light was dawning. Something that seems to make our intuition of timelessness as insubstantial as a lovely vision, dreamed by a dreamer in a quiet time but dissolving like a snowflake at first contact with brute fact.

Is this really the case? In chapter 7, I discussed a recent model of spacetime put forward by Stephen Hawking"

"…Hawking built a model of the cosmos which he called the 'no boundary' model because in his theory, time does not begin at a 'point' nor does it end in one (Figure 7.3.).From the earlier perspec-tive of Chapter 7, this model seemed from many points of view unsatisfactory, because it used imaginary time, not real time. Chapter 9 gives the model a new source of credibility for it is characteristic of the inner eye that it can disregard the 'commonsense' aspects of experience and penetrate to the inner logic of nature.

Thus when the inner eye 'sees a circle, a mandela, and recog-nises therein some form of flawnessness, it is, at a different level, seeing the endless number 3.1415926…It may be significant we call such numbers trancendental. Indeed, science builds its deepest truths using numbers that are, in an important sense, 'illogical'. The square root of minus one is imaginary (it is in fact, part of the number system Hawking uses to build his model ). The square root of 2 is irrational. And so it goes on.

Moreover, the word 'imaginary', like all symbols invented by the conceptual mind, confuses the issue by implying that such numbers are in some way 'unreal' This is fundamentally false. As Hawking's colleague mathematician, Roger Penrose, says cryptically:

Page 211

It is important to stress the fact that these 'imaginary' numbers are no less real than the real numbers we have become accustomed to…the relationship between such real numbers and physical reality is not as direct or compelling as it may at first seem to be…

We find a similar situation in particle physics where the so-called ultimate building blocks of matter (quarks) are given such mythic names as 'strange', charmed etc. At this deep level of reality, the distinction between scientist and poet breaks down and scien-tists use the language of song and parable in their intuitive attempts to seek out the basic structures of the world.

To return to my point, I find it fascinating that Hawking himself recognises that his use of imaginary time, far from being a ruse or trick, may in fact be a door to a higher order of insight. Listen to his own words:

This goes to the heart of the matter for the defining quality of the inner eye in its most highly evolved form is that it can 'see' the deepest hidden structures of reality without impediment. If timeless-ness is an authentic feature of consciousness - and the evidence I have summarised in this book very strongly suggests that it is - then consciousness may just as well 'exist' in what the mathematicians call 'imaginary time as in 'real time. Indeed it may be precisely because the ego-self lives in real time that it 'knows', death. While it may be precisely because consciousness lives in imaginary time that it 'knows' eternity."