Investigations of the Future

by Brian Stableford

  Nevertheless, in these days of crisis in which an entire people expresses itself by a sudden and unpremeditated movement, it is a mystery that will challenged minds until it has emerged from its solemn obscurity. Human societies advance incessantly; incessantly, a past is destroyed, and a future forms. Successive manifestations constitute palingenetic epochs. At these epochs, human societies are bound to divine a double enigma, the general enigma of humankind, and the enigma of the present ordeal: it is at that price alone that they are assured of progress.

  Thus the spontaneous Sphinx of the barricades has flown from the Louvre to the Tuileries, and from the Tuileries to the Hôtel-de-Ville.

  Who will have the sentiment of the social transformation, perhaps accomplished prematurely? In whom will the thought of all be assimilated? Who will declare the right resulting from the unexpected event? Who will force the accidental concrete to produce the normal abstract?

  Hebal is not mistaken in this respect. Two stages of initiation have been overtaken simultaneously. The law of successive development intends that humans should atone for a step taken without a preparatory ordeal. Hebal foresees great disturbances. But the law of progress is so powerful that it will finish up reestablishing harmony.

  And the struggle of the volitional principle and the fatal principle will recommence between France and Europe.

  An entirely new Europe must emerge from the former Europe, still clad in worn-out institutions as in an old cloak.

  An apparent incredulity threatens to abolish all belief; but the religion of the human species will be reborn, more brilliant and more beautiful.

  It will be reborn at the moment when the Middle Ages will have yielded their last sigh in their death throes; resurrection is the daughter of death.

  Has it not been said: “I shall engrave my law in their entrails, and I shall write in their hearts.”

  And has Christ not said: “I have other ewes that are not of this flock.”

  All the expressions of intimate beliefs tend to summarize themselves in a symbol that is formed in silence, in the midst of terrible agitations of human society; and a few sounds of that future symbol are already beginning to mingle with the funeral knell of the dying Middle Ages.

  Hebal does not seek out these theurgies, these magical and superstitious sciences, which, at the end of a religious cycle, attempt to substitute themselves for faith.

  He knows very well that the human species is not giving birth to a new religion, because he knows that everything is in Christianity, that Christianity has said everything.

  All the Christian communions are gravitating toward a Catholic unity; the time has come when all heresies will confess their insufficiency.

  It is in vain that, in the metropolis of civilization, the sign of the promise has been outraged; the civilizing cross will reign over the world.

  Greece, Belgium and Poland have demanded the liberty promised to the children of the faith—and look at the miracles that have been produced! Will their renown be immortal palms for as many heroes?

  A voice, the ardent prayer of a entire people demanding baptism in blood, rises toward the heights of heaven, toward the mother of Christ.

  “Let Poland, which calls you her Queen, which has so often been the firmest support of Christianity, flourish again under the protection of the Holy Gospel, and also be the aegis of the liberty of peoples. Holy Virgin, if the All-Powerful has decided, in his profound wisdom, that our entire Christian fatherland must suffer a martyr’s death, like your Son, let it glory be part of the eternal glory of the world!”

  Hebal sees once again Sagonte and Saragossa, Thermopylae and Missolonghi, and the rock of Caledonia, and the bloody division of Poland, the sad conclusion to a beautiful history that is beginning again.

  Let civilization be saved once more!

  Will Italy not conquer its independence, and will the Iberian peninsula not enter into the law of progress?

  The eternal city knows that a new reign is promised for it; the Roman pontificate will declare the traditions of which it is the custodian.

  The peoples will no longer be penned up according to the caprice of conquests or politics. Three limits will be recognized to mark the diversity of nations: mores, languages and geographical basins. And the natural lines will not harm the great unity of the human species, expressed by the universal religion.

  All general sympathies and all the sympathies of races are manifest again as in primitive times; it is the certain sign of an immense regeneration.

  And Russia will cease to be a European power.

  A mission will be accorded to it to stir up Asia.

  How many more times will Austria be camped on the banks of the Brenta and the Po?

  England will rip apart the last teguments of the powerful chrysalis.

  In the same way that France and Europe want to act as one person, the entire world, in its turn, will want to do so.

  Another curtain is torn away, another seal is broken.

  And the past recounts the future.

  And a voice makes itself heard: Who will tell the future?

  Europe, then, reconstitutes itself.

  And a general frisson is felt throughout Creation.

  The blood that was shed on Golgotha finally proclaims the abolition of the death penalty, and declares the impiety of war. And solidarity become charity.

  The law is founded on the identity of human essence.

  Christianity achieves its evolution; it reigns over the world, but it is a peaceful reign.

  And Christianity, identical to itself, accomplishes its promises in all its traditions, which are the general traditions of the human race.

  Perfectibility emerges from rehabilitation.

  The successive ordeals have led to emancipation.

  The Occident triumphs. Now the Orient is shaken up and loses consciousness of its immobility.

  Islam succumbs in the struggle.

  Even China become progressive.

  The Ganges is crossed.

  Everywhere, the glare of dogma extinguishes the uncertain gleams of myth; traditions are resplendent above and beyond the condescension of symbols.

  And at the remotest point of the future, at the limit of the final horizon of humankind, human beings complete the creation of the earth. By means of a new magism they spiritualize nature.

  The animals disappear, for all life has become, by assimilation, human life.

  Thus are all the successive animalities that have preceded humankind summarize one another successively; everything has ended up being subsumed in humankind, the final term of Creation for the globe of the earth.

  Antistrophe

  Hebal believes that he is witnessing the death-throes of the immense universe.

  The laws that made its harmony seem to have ceased.

  And yet the celestial bodies continue to follow their ellipses, traced since the origin of things, in silence. But the earth, the earth alone, no longer knows where its equator is or where its poles are. It totters on its axis. Its atmosphere has become fatal again. All life is perishing, as in the days of the Deluge. Hebal feels himself dying in the bosom of that universal anguish. His soul, detached from his mortal envelope, floats over that vast ruination; it prepares to contemplate a new act of supreme power. The earth, an extinct globe devoid of life, vegetable or animal, is hurled into another corner of space.

  At a sign from the supreme power the entire human race awakes from death.

  Humans emerge from the bowels of the earth, from places that were mountains, valleys or deep sea-beds. They raise themselves upright, and do not recognize either the earth or the heavens, for everything has changed. Hebal puts on for the last time the garment of dust that he had just quit. He finds himself in the midst of the multitude that is the entire human race.

  And the beasts were roaring in the last limits of the Creation that no longer was. And the domestic animals, and the mute fish, and the birds, were quivering as if touched by a galv
anic rod. But for the animal races it was only an apparent resurrection, for humans alone were really resuscitated. But the immaterial was not to be annihilated, and all life had taken refuge in human life.

  What a spectacle!

  The human species, the only subsisting form, awaking from death, and setting out, as Job once did, to interrogate the Creator, the Creator whose work is about to perish! So many generations speaking with a unanimous cry, having become an articulate voice, a single voice, the voice of universal humankind; and that voice is a groan, which contains the image and the memory of all human calamities from the beginning to the end.

  And that groaning voice of anguish and death, says:

  “Behold the earth that was given to me as a heritage!

  “Behold the earth that I watered with my sweat, that I bathed with my blood, that I have kneaded with my tears!

  “Behold the earth as it has been made by deluges, tempests, volcanoes, scourges, cataclysms and the unfruitful labor of humans!

  “I have struggled against the forces of nature; I have struggled against the elements; I have made the soil and the climates! The forces of nature have tamed me; the elements have vanquished me; the soil and the climates have risen up against me!

  “I was dust and I have become dust again!

  “And my life has been nothing but a battle, and anguish.

  “Why so many calamities, so many crimes, so many dolors?

  “Why war, devastations, slavery, castes and classes? Why human sacrifices, superstitions, infamies? Why have innocent young women and chaste spouses been profaned?”

  And all of that cry of universal humankind seemed to be summarized in the cry that escaped the Mediator on Golgotha: “Why have you forsaken me?”

  But God does not debate as once he had debated with Job, his servant. An immense intellectual clarity descends upon the human race.

  Hebal’s consciousness, assimilated to the universal consciousness, has understood without any speech resounding in the expiring world.

  Epode

  And the earth, instead of the splendors that were inherent in the sight of mountains, waters, forests and the play of light in the clouds, is enveloped by a real light.

  A clap of thunder devours or globe, which is lost in space like a diamond in the chemist’s crucible.

  The form that veiled matter in assimilating it disappears; matter is returned to nothingness; thus, matter and the form of matter have disappeared. Sensation is no more; the world no longer has an external vestment to appear to organs. Beings have retreated into their essences.

  The dust, all the atoms of which have been mingled with animal or vegetal life, all the atoms of which were the support of sounds, odors, light and physical properties, having become gaseous and ethereal, is lost in the bosom of incommensurable space, and then has no longer been.

  In the realms of eternity, sight sees and is not mistaken. That which is, is not an appearance. Form is a reality; it is not transitory.

  Calm of the eternal abode: analogy of that which was before Creation with that which is after Creation has disappeared.

  Once again, idea contemplates idea.

  The soul no longer has location.

  Humankind has completed the successive ordeal that was inflicted to take the place of the ancient ordeal.

  The capacity for good and evil has produced liberty in good.

  The human essence has sanctified its terrestrial organs.

  Humankind has accomplished the law of its being.

  It knows the goal of creation.

  It knows itself.

  It knows God.

  It identifies with the Mediator.

  It no longer inhabits either the entrails of woman nor the darkness of the tomb.

  It will no longer emerge from the dust in order to return to the dust.

  The resemblance of God will no longer be engraved on its fugitive features.

  Jesus transfigured on Tabor: such is cosmogonic humankind; such is humankind at the end of time.

  And humankind was an intellectual flower growing on a terrestrial stem, an immortal flower whose foot was buried in a soil destined to perish.

  Human intelligence before, intelligence afterwards.

  The earth, the futile theater of human action, when phenomenal humankind is no more.

  The laws of the world are troubled by the liberty of intelligent beings; the harmony of intelligent wills with the ultimate will is reestablished.

  But other events have taken place before the ultimate event. The Mediator has judged the living and the dead.

  Centuries have been heaped up on centuries, and it has not been granted to Hebal to see the last.

  And it is only on the last day of the last century that the Sin of Man has appeared as on Tabor. And, no longer an ironic speech, the word of truth has said: “Behold the man!”

  The Story

  That strange contemplation ended for Hebal and he heard nine o’clock chime.

  His voyage, which had embraced the entire duration of the ages from the beginning to the end, had been accomplished in the time that it took the clock to play the tune of the Ave Maria.

  Thus, his magnetic reverie, composed of all the dreams of a life magnetic itself, of a life that, for several years, had so often been a kind of habitual dreams, that last reverie, which was an active epic, the plastic intuition of human destinies in their magnificent unity, had commenced with the tune of the Ave Maria and finished with it.

  And he experienced a great fatigue. He did not have the time to recount what had happened to him, and no one around him suspected it.

  And he had not been able to recount all that he had seen, and he had not been able to describe al that he had felt, for successive speech is impotent with regard to such an instantaneity.

  And he was not even certain of the exactitude of his language; he had passed too abruptly from the region of the mind to the region of form.

  And he rendered the last sigh in pronouncing the word eternity.

  He had sensed that every human life is the summary of all of human destiny, and that a human life can only summarize itself at the palingenetic moment of death.

  At that moment, undoubtedly, all the curtains have been raised for him, all the seals have been broken, and he has had the true sentiment of things of which he had previously had an obscure sentiment.

  The inspiration marked a visible trace on his visage, but that definitive inspiration was unable to produce any other external expression than a fugitive trace on his features, soon extinguished.

  Now the tune of Ave Maria, which had lulled his ear during his rapid voyage in the regions of the mind, seemed to rest again upon his face; for it is the amicable sign of Mediation, and Mediation is the key to the enigma of humanity.

  Heroic Poland, you do well to invoke the mother of the Savior of humankind! And the virgin par excellence is human will absorbed in the divine will.

  The Church has fixed for 25 March the celebration of that great mystery, the mystery of the assimilation of the human will to the divine will; that is the feast it names the feast of the Annunciation; and it is the day of that festival that Poland entire has said, like a single human being prostrate at the foot of the holy altar, the admirable prayer whose words Hebal heard rising toward the heavens.

  To give an idea of the manner in which Hebal considered time and space, here is a passage from a letter he wrote to one of his friends:

  God encloses infinity within a molecule of matter. He encloses the perception of eternity in an indivisible instant. Let us represent by means of thought the tiniest insect in Creation. Our eyes cannot perceive it; the most powerful microscope can scarcely show it to us. And yet there is a life there, an action, a locomotive faculty. That insect has been tinier still, since it has been born, since it has developed. That is not all. A movement of circulation maintains within it that organic life so obscure for us. Some kind of fluid comes and goes throughout the apparatus of channels that onl
y analogy demonstrates; for our eyes, aided by the most powerful instrument, stop at the external form of such an animal. It is, however, true that the fiber of that being has a location in space, and that every movement of circulation that operates within it has a location in time. If it has eyes itself, and that is incontestable, how can the extreme tenuousness of the organ be conceived? How can an idea be formed of the molecule of light that can awaken the sense of sight within it? How can the objects that it sees be imagined, which it attempts to reach, the circle of which forms the entire sphere in which it stirs imperceptibly? Its most extensive horizon is doubtless circumscribed within a space that, in a sense, does not exist for us; but for it, as for us, light travels at sixty-six thousand leagues a second before reaching its eye coloring the objects that limit its narrow horizon. But again, every molecule of light that penetrates such an eye, has a location in space, and every span traveled by it must be traveled in a time that needs to be repeated a hundred and sixty-five million times to make up a second.

  Now suppose a human intelligence with the faulty of arriving at that appreciation of time and space. Penetrate further into the hypothesis: suppose a human intelligence capable of a rapidity of conception analogous to the rapidity of sensations that is required to appreciate such measurements of time and space. It follows that the intelligence in question would have, within a second, a succession of thoughts equal to all those that human intelligence in general could produce, in a state of wakefulness lasting at least four months; a minute would then be equivalent to twenty years of a life spent in wakefulness and meditation—a continuous and uninterrupted meditation. Furthermore, I believe that I am timid in my calculation. Thus, all historical times, whatever limit you care to assign to hem, could be encompassed within a few hours.

  It is easy to see that the hypothesis is not exhausted.

  In another letter, he wrote:

  The miracle of Joshua is a theosophical miracle.

  “And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher?” (Joshua 10:13)