by Unknown
And so I did it, making sure not to change any of the content, but filtering out irrelevant notes pertaining to Dienach’s early life and emphasizing his experience of the future, but in a simpler language and without the gaps that Dienach’s narration had.
I have tried to keep the true essence of his story intact. This was my debt to Dienach, whose chronicles from the future completely changed my perspective of life. Nothing more, nothing less. My only goal was to make it accessible to all of you, because if Dienach’s experience was indeed real, this book contains revolutionary information – something the Masons clearly recognized – and has the potential to radically change your view of the world and mankind.
Now that you know the background to this unique story, I will simply deposit the future in your hands with an abstract from the introduction of the 1979 edition of the book by George Papachatzis, the man who personally knew Dienach:
“The translator of the original texts knew Dienach personally. His belief is that the inspiration and writing of these texts wasn’t an imaginary creation of Dienach, based on his education and insightful abilities. It is a true phenomenon of parapsychology that was linked to his life. Maybe he has also added his own things, maybe he didn’t see or live all of the events that he so vividly describes and presents. What is certain is that most of the basic elements of his texts are true experiences that he had; he lived in advance a part of the future to come and a metaphysical phenomenon of incredible clarity happened to him - a phenomenon of parapsychology that rarely happens with such an intensity and roughness. Because of him, what is going to happen on Earth starting from the last decades of the 20th century up to 3906 AD, is now known to us, at least in general terms.”
I have to tell you that while Papachatzis was just a student at the time of receiving Dienach’s diary, he went on to become a very respectable man of his era. He was Vice President of the European Movement (National Council of Greece), Founding Member of the Greek Philosophical Society, and a Professor of Philosophy and Culture. He risked a lot in publishing Dienach’s work and this on its own reflects his unwavering belief in its authenticity.
Now I leave you with Dienach’s diary, a chronicle from the future…
Achilleas Sirigos
May 2015
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION (1972) OF THE VALLEY OF THE ROSES
(Pre-introductory and Critical Note, a kind of Preface, to Dienach’s published remnants. It was written six years prior to the first edition of The Valley of the Roses [1972]).
Dienach’s “Chronicles From The Future” (“Pages from a Diary” was the original title of the first edition) offers the essence of the cultural development of Western Europeans in the distant future. More specifically, here, right after Dienach’s “First” and “Second Diary”, the continuation of Western civilization’s history, from the 21st century onwards, is illustrated over a long period of time. Outwardly, however, these prophetic manuscripts are very simple in form: they appear to be passages of travel fiction, a time travel to the countries of our continent, to those distant future times, a panoramic view of social and spiritual life, within that distant future cultural development—pieces of a vivid and real life as seen and known by the author, who hereby narrates it as a traveller-narrator. It was, he says, his own fate that his life be bound, as he writes, with one of the rarest meta-psychic and spiritualistic phenomena. It was thanks to this that he managed to experience all he describes.
Paul Amadeus Dienach left neither a name nor, most probably, the slightest publication in his homeland. In autumn 1922, he arrived from central Europe in Athens and later on, in winter, started tutoring students of limited financial means in foreign languages, namely French and German for a small fee. Having spent, as he said, his childhood in one of the various districts of Zurich, where his parents had settled after his birth, he went on to spend his adolescence in a village, close to this big cultural hub of Germanic-speaking countries. Afterwards, he pursued humanistic studies, with a particular flair for history of civilisation and classical studies.
In 1906, he briefly worked as a teacher, in a private school most likely, perhaps in one of the towns surrounding Zurich. Being of weak and delicate constitution—he had the appearance of an intellectual—he travelled, though rarely and as much as he could afford, to the West and South. Of his travels to Paris and Rome, I gather he has written about it somewhere in his manuscripts.
I remember his deep affection for his mother, who appears to have been a saintly woman from all that he told me and, above all, a wonderful mother. When I met him, she had already passed away.
As he was leaving the manuscripts in my care, he had called me “his most appreciated one in his small circle of students” and I remember him using the phrase “my young friend”. It is nothing but obvious that feelings of loneliness and desolation flooded his soul at the time of writing the note. None of his family was left. At some other point, he had told me: “He who has not experienced isolation cannot know its meaning.”
He passed away, I gather, in the Athenian suburb of Maroussi or perhaps on his way back to his homeland, through Italy, in some town of our neighbouring peninsula, most probably during the first six months of 1924, after suffering an attack of tuberculosis, which manifested in Athens and did not last but a few months. Over the course of my twelve recent summer trips to Zurich, from 1952 to 1966, I did not manage to locate his relatives or other traces of the Dienach family. Maybe, however, he has distant relatives of the new generation on the outskirts. It could be, nevertheless, that the young anti-Hitler reserve officer of the German Occupation army was right—I shall write about his version further down, at the end of this pre-introductory note—that my teacher “suffered from the complex of his people’s guilt” of the imperial era. In this last case, one would search in vain outside the German ethnicity to find him based on a “borrowed” surname.
Had Paul Amadeus happened to be born in the Indies, he would have expressed himself without a second thought. He would have talked, even as early as 1922, about his two lives, the self-cognisance of the ego, the reminiscences of incomparable richness, his other existence, which had developed in such different periods. However, Dienach was born a European, a Central European in fact, the offspring of a highly educated German-speaking Swiss man and his Salzburgian exceptional mother. He was always careful with his words, cautious not to let slip things that went beyond rationality and scientific, cognitive thinking. He strongly believed, all the same, in a spiritual element of an undefined nature in man, which eludes the law of biological decay, surpassing the barriers of time and space. He believed this was true not only for our own biological species, at least in the finest cases of individuals, but also in a variety of superior species of beings endowed with thought, language and feelings, with emotional wealth he meant to say, on millions of planets, unknown to us for the time being. It is thanks to this, Dienach says, that cultivated man, individuality enriched with values of inner culture, rises above confined and cruel biological fate. It is thanks to this element, which could be, as he said, much different from the one-sided view of the soul-unit of religious faith or other established spiritual preachings and convictions, that free spirit continues to exist unfettered by the law of biological evolution and decay. Regarding the course of the individual’s spiritual being, the time-space continuum is not an obstacle—he saw it and he lived it—as he writes in his manuscripts.
“It was only in the field of celestial mechanics and generally of research of the natural universe that we humans managed to become Copernicans,” I remember him telling me when he talked to me about the course of the human spirit through the centuries. “Our entire philosophy and our worldview continue to be Ptolemaic: geocentric and anthropocentric.”
He would often speak of the triple blinders of time, space and biological species—the finite, that is, cognitive sensors, inherent spiritual abilities and knowledge potential of the human-receiver—which prevent
us from acquiring a superior perception and view of the world and life. At the same time, he believed—something quite astounding given the times—in the possibility of a future expansion of the limits of the worlds of existing things, the worlds of Being.
He often talked about a majority of spiritual civilisations and a parallel upward course of myriads of biological species within the cosmos, of myriads of species of rational beings existing on a large number of golden celestial spheres, about a progress and evolution of a moral rather than a technological nature. He would not concede that our planet is the only inhabited celestial body or that our biological species is unique, the crown of Creation. He disapproved of excessive technological development and the forms of techno-economic societies, considering them of secondary importance, and believed that what mainly served the great purposes of Creation was the elevation by means of noble pain, abnegation, kindness, love, self-sacrifice—inner cultivation in general.
However, he had never talked about the rare fate of his private life—so much rarer in our European, geographical and intellectual sphere. Neither had he told me much about the content of his manuscripts, which he had decided to send me upon leaving. He had given me quite a few pages and I had read them while he was still alive, causing me to experience an indescribable thirst to read these manuscripts. Nonetheless, when he spoke, the many wonderful things he talked about seemed to be his deepest beliefs, but not experiences he had truly lived.
Up to the day I lost track of him, I recall that he did not strike me as a type of mystic, endowed with elements of the exceptional or the supernatural. He appeared to be a very cautious, careful and reserved Western European, a restless philosophical spirit of the 20th century, like the “next century’s Faust”, but without the latter’s versatile education; Dienach seemed to be a simple educator, who had, however, burning questions, with that longing of the heart that honours the human race. He possessed an irresistible longing in an age of materialism and pragmatism, which the final decades of the 19th century had passed down to the first decades of the 20th. It was perhaps in this intellectual clime, where he was born, raised and became a man, in this exact context of intellect and scientific perception of the world where his education lay. It was perhaps precisely to this that he owed his great hesitance and cautiousness about even hinting at anything that lay beyond what was established, what was accepted on the basis of rationality or facts of the positive sciences.
Ever since the day the handwritten translation of his manuscripts resurfaced, his distant remembrance returned unintentionally and insistently occupied my thoughts. This time, I took the final decision to have them published as soon as I saw them emerge from the old drawer one morning while looking for something else. Among them, I also discovered with some excitement some favourite yellowed letters and a notebook with notes from when I used to study along with other students whom I remember fondly.
A strange thing happened to me with Dienach: in those days of old, he was for me just an acquaintance of a few months. My carefree spirit at the time and, besides, the big age difference would not allow for a bond to develop between us worthy of being called friendship. But the more years went by, the more I realised that, when leaving for Italy in 1924—going there to die—Dienach had bequeathed a huge part of his soul to me. Thus, my spiritual connection with him flourished upon his death. A simple earlier acquaintance with this man of unique and unprecedented personal fate in life slowly became compassion and friendship over time.
As I later understood, he had formed the impression that from our entire group, a lively bunch of young students, I had somehow treated him better. The truth is I found him less boring that the rest did and, besides, I had set my mind on learning a foreign language at the time. Therefore, it is not strange that we happened to spend entire evenings together talking about all sorts of things. I shall always remember that cautiousness in his words as I mentioned before, even though he liked to exchange views with me—more than with the rest—on various philosophical and historical issues.
During the first years after his death, every time I read his manuscripts—I had since started translating them as best as I could and that was the case from 1926 to 1940—I would always say to myself: “Look, Dienach was set on writing literature. He attempted to portray a mentally ill character and by inventing a myth, a plot, he found the way to write his own ideas on all sorts of things.”
At the time, I was infused with scepticism, something very common for students of my time. I refused to believe anything defying the accepted laws of nature. I actually remember finding that religiousness flooding Dienach’s thinking, evident in the pages of his Diary, somehow exaggerated. As time went by, I realised how little we humans know of these laws and how thoughtless it would be to entirely exclude phenomena regarding psychological functions that defy the ordinary, rare as they may be.
But even more so, the more years went by, the better I pondered on some incidents from the time of my acquaintance with Dienach, some of his reserved words, which only now could truly interpret. In this way, my conviction that all these manuscripts written by a dead man, the sad man with the deep-set eyes who seemed so tedious to the rest of us—as one companion of ours had said not entirely unfairly one day—was actually his Diary. I have now come to believe that this man, who was probably not highly educated or intelligent, this practically unemployed man in his final years, who was neither a craftsman of language, as is evident from his manuscripts (futile were the translator’s efforts to simplify the style in some cases, without betraying the meaning; to present the phrase less presumptuous and not so brightly coloured and ornate with all kinds of adjectives—as Dienach was given to waxing lyrical quite often, which he actually admits somewhere in his manuscripts), nor had professed having any other job in his homeland, apart from teaching, did not write of figments of his own imagination and nor could he have all those things he wrote about within him. He did nothing but narrate what happened in his life and what was meant for him to see and live by a strange turn of events.
One more thing: Dienach did not invent a mentally ill character, but was ill himself, even before the attack of tuberculosis, I mean to say. He was an aloof and whiny hypochondriac, to say the least—notice his never-ending complaining in his writings—and hypersensitive almost to a pathological degree. He did not wish to speak of his two past illnesses (in 1917 and 1921-1922). Still, I recall him vaguely telling me at some point that “lethargic sleep is not an enigma for science anymore” and that “this reaction of the neuro-psychological system, this defence mechanism can be beneficial at times when neural cells are overcharged. It contributes to regulating their alternating current flow and protects them from impending collapse”. In either case, had it not been for his illness, he would not have encountered such fate in his life, which nowadays astounds us.
Who, indeed, could have predicted that this man’s illness would take such an incredible and unique turn? Much has been said about the unknown powers hidden within the human soul. It is true that we are unaware of thousands of things that exist and that thousands of things happen around us about which we are clueless. Nevertheless, who would ever speak of such potential of the human psychodynamics that resembles a miracle? Of course, this does not mean every emotionally overloaded psychological state bears such incredible potential, as was Dienach’s case. However, certain similar states—few among the many—may appear to lead to such parapsychic (or metapsychic) wanderings, as was the case of the spirit of these manuscripts’ author.
I recall that in 1923 we only saw Dienach as a man whose life was crushed by incurable sadness. Back in those days, the phrase “some great love affair” would frivolously come to our smiling and slightly sarcastic lips. Indeed, the writings in his “First Notebook” show that he was a man who had failed at his job and ended up being good at nothing in life due to his morbid predisposition of the incurable romantic and his unfortunate love affair (See e.g. Dec. 6, 1918 [First Edition]: I was t
elling myself to be strong, pull myself together and go out—but I couldn’t. Jan 17, 1919 [First Edition]: I feel guilty towards my mother, etc.). That exaggerated purple prose and those repetitions here and there, along with quite a few redundancies, retained by the translator, as well as that excessive sentimentality are everywhere to be found in his manuscripts.
It is true, however, that every time he was not absent-minded or lost in his never-ending daydreaming, it was interesting to talk to him. He would often like to ask us about our studies. In fact, during one of our conversations, he told us that he had also pursued history and classical studies in his homeland when he was young, but a few years later, an illness forced him to permanently leave his job.
Another time, when someone asked him about his choice to come and live in Greece, he told us, revising his first strange answer that he did it “for reasons of nostalgia”, that he came motivated, as many others, by love for this renowned city.
“And besides,” he added with that hesitance in his voice—the same voice he used every time he had doubts whether his words would come across as right and rational—“I had this wish to see a place that lives two lives, divided by twenty entire centuries.”
The fact that a kind of nostalgia was dogging him once again here in Greece as well was evident to anyone spending time with him. As every ailing person, he would also blame the place and the climate. In fact, I believe that this man, who felt at times, as we would say about him then, that “life was too short for him” wherever he went, he could not manage to get these thoughts out of his head: “Where could the exit be?” In the end, he had stopped teaching and spent, as we found out afterwards, the final months of his life in a somewhat dismal financial situation.
He was not interested in material needs. Instead, he was tormented by the thought of dying young—as it finally came to be before he had turned thirty-eight— and that he would not have enough time to write, as only he knew how, the history of European culture, which was his lifelong dream. “In two volumes,” he would fervently say. He was convinced he could. The only thing lacking was time. When I asked him about how he would divide the historical periods and he told me that the first volume would reach up to our great 19thcentury, he felt my puzzlement at that moment. He immediately hinted, hesitantly and vaguely, that he had his own personal methodological convictions and that the second volume would be more of a critical work. However, it was obvious there was something more to this. It was only when the Diary reached my hands and I started reading it that I realised that Dienach intended to reach up to spring 3906 in that second volume. He had been hiding this from me during our conversations. How bright his face was, I recall, how bright… Every single time I bring that moment to mind, I feel the faith that kindled and inspired him stronger—the conviction that he knew all that came later and that he could narrate it—if only, he said, he had been given health and available time by fate. He had the courage to do so. “There are,” he said, “occasions, very rare, to be honest, when we already know what the future holds for us. We have so many incidents where forward knowledge clearly manifested itself.”
