The Rose of the World

But the East was also to pass through that phase, though those societies colored it in their own way. The asceticism of radical varieties of Hinduism, the struggle of Buddhism to liberate the human self from the power of Nature-all this is too well known to dwell on here. Thus, we can say that in the first phase people were almost never conscious of Nature as a whole, and only poeticized and deified individual natural phenomena, while in the second phase they viewed it as hostile and under the sway of the demonic.

The third phase is associated with the era of scientific supremacy and with the impoverishment of the world of religious feelings. Having inherited a hostile attitude toward nature from Christianity, people of the third phase freed it of its religious overtones. They did not undertake to overcome the elements of Nature in their own being. They established a strictly utilitarian view of Nature. Nature was, first of all, an object of rational (scientific) research; second, it was a mass of lifeless powers to be harnessed for human use. Our physical horizons expanded immeasurably, knowledge of the structure and laws of our plane reached dizzying heights; that is the value of the third phase.

But there is no point in speaking of natural scientists' love of Nature. One can experience intellectual love only for products of the intellect: one can love with one's mind an idea, a thought, a theory, or a scientific field. In such a manner one can love physiology, microbiology, even parasitology but not a lymph node, or bacteria, or a flea. Love of Nature can be of a physiological nature, of an aesthetic nature, and lastly, of a moral and religious nature. But one thing it cannot be is intellectual. If individual specialists in the natural sciences do love Nature, then that feeling has no relation whatsoever to their specialty or, more generally, to the scientific method of knowledge of Nature. Rather, it is a feeling of a physiological or aesthetic nature.

Civilized (or at least, Western) humanity attained the greatest degree of alienation from Nature not, as it might seem, in the twentieth century but in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. Never were fashions so artificial as in the age of the powdered wig. Never were sections of Nature neighboring humanity disfigured so rationally and unnaturally as in the age of the Park at Versailles. It is just as impossible to picture

an aristocrat from the age of Louis XIV sunbathing or walking barefoot as it is to imagine a Spartan woman from the period of the Greco-Persian wars wearing a corset and high-heeled shoes. The ascetic attitude toward Nature that had become ingrained in Christianity was wholly responsible, but it was an attitude that in the course of development had replaced spiritual snobbery with the snobbery of civilized society and replaced religious pride with the pride of reason, experiencing nothing but amused contempt for anything that did not bear the stamp of rationality.

The philosophy of Rousseau marks the turning point. But another century and a half had to pass and the world had to enter the age of the metropolis in order for most of humanity to experience a longing for Nature. The Lake poets of England, Goethe and the Romantics in Germany, Pushkin and, especially, Lermontov in Russia loved Nature with a higher aesthetic, and for some, pantheistic love. The Barbizon school of painting emerged, and by the end of the nineteenth century aesthetic love had become firmly established in culture.

In the twentieth century bodily love came into its own as well Passive contemplation of Nature became insufficient; the need arose to experience it in a tactile, active manner, with one's whole body and through the exercise of one's muscles. The need was in part met by hiking and sports. Finally, in the first half of our century, the beach, with its physiological evaporation of people into a mixture of sunlight, warmth, water, and play, became an entrenched and lasting part of our everyday life. It is the same enjoyment of the beach that in the days of Ronsard and Watteau would have appeared to be the indecent eccentricities of lunatics and in the Middle Ages would have been equated with the witches' sabbat on Bald Mountain or with a Black Mass. If one imagines Torquemada suddenly transported as a spectator to the beach in Osten or Yalta, then there can hardly be a doubt that into the mind of that guardian of human souls would pop the thought of promptly organizing an auto-da-fe for those thousands of brazen heretics.

Perhaps nothing so graphically illustrates the narrowing of the rift between humans and Nature during the last hundred years as the evolution of fashion. Overcoats and headwear,at one time the inseparable accompaniments of"cultured" people, even on summer middays, began to be used only when climate dictated. Fifty years ago it seemed improper to leave the house without gloves; now people use them only in cold weather. In place of suits and starched fronts, which our grandfathers roasted in for the sake of decorum even in ninety-degree heat, people began going to work in short- sleeve shirts with open collars. Feet that had been, cramped in fashionable boots were treated to the delight of slippers and sandals. Women were liberated from the nightmare of corsets. Dresses shortened at the legs and open at the neck became the fashion in summer, while long dresses survived only as evening wear. Boys whose great-grandfathers had at the same age paraded about wearing school blazers and a cap even in July now run about barefoot, with no top, kissed dark by the sun. People in large cities, separated from Nature as never before by such great distances and missing its warm embrace, have begun returning to it, as yet almost unconsciously, propelled by an instinctive bodily love, but carrying the seeds of a new, more mature relationship with Nature within the historical experience amassed in their hearts. That is the fourth phase.

Thus, there have been roughly four phases: the pagan, the ascetic, the scientific-utilitarian, and the instinctive-physiological.

We can summarize thus: by the second half of our century in the educated and semi-educated classes of those nations belonging to the Roman Catholic, German Protestant, and Russian spheres of cultural influence, two attitudes toward Nature that thus far have almost never conflicted with one another have become entrenched. One of them, the scientific-utilitarian attitude, which is utterly devoid of love, is older. It has focused its attention on exploiting the energy resources contained in Nature and measures everything against the criterion of material benefit for humanity or, what is still worse, for certain antagonistic groupings within it. From that point of view, it also approves of sport, the beach, and hiking. Partisans of that attitude calmly dissect live cats and dogs out of a desire to answer the question, «How does that work?» and shoot rabbits and partridge to satisfy an atavistic hunting instinct. Perhaps in the former case love for humanity is also involved. An Everest of canine corpses may yield, in the end, a grain of knowledge concerning, for example, conditional reflexes. That is the cost to be paid, as is said, to enlighten the inquisitive mind and spur medical progress. But there is not even a hint of love for Nature to be found there. I will go further: such an attitude toward Nature is immoral because, besides humans, the interests of no living being are taken into account, and because it leads to a view of all Nature as a cow to be milked. Fortunately, that attitude has begun to be tempered by a newer one: an unconscious egoistic-bodily love of nature, at times mixed with aesthetic elements.

But that evolution has not yet brought people to a recognition that it is possible and necessary, while maintaining the older shades of love of Nature (with the exception, of course, of the amoral utilitarian attitude), to infinitely enrich our attitude with moral and religious meaning. Not with pantheistic meaning, in which people have but a vague intuition of the presence of some impersonal, evenly distributed divine force in Nature. No. That stage is past, and prehistoric preanimism is proof that the pantheistic feeling possessed by some people nowadays is nothing other than a modification of the ancient experience of arungviltaprana. No! We are dealing with something different here. We are dealing with an attitude that is incomparably more moral and conscious, more coherent, developed, and refined, more joyful, more responsible. It can be founded only on the experience people have when they come into direct contact, through Nature, with the rich and multifarious worlds of the elementals. By «come into contact» I mean to enter into a relationship with the elementals, understanding better and better the opportunities for rewarding and creative friendship with them, our wonderful responsibility toward them, and our grievous, age-old guilt.

True, a vague feeling of guilt toward Nature, and animals in particular, has begun to have some effect. Societies for the humane treatment of animals have sprung up, love for them has even begun to be encouraged within the school curriculum, and that renowned wellspring of love known as the State has assumed

guardianship of the environment. Unfortunately it is doing so only out of economic considerations. As for the humane treatment of animals, these charitable organizations were taught a brutal lesson by the natural scientists: after heated debate, vivisection without prior authorization has occupied a leading place among the methods of science. Citing the benefits to humanity as justification, scientists have firmly established this disgrace to all humanity in universities, laboratories, and even in those same high schools where children are taught to love cats and dogs.

What is the attitude toward Nature of the worldview that could serve as the foundation for the teachings of the Rose of the World?

This is a very broad question, but it is not difficult, I think, to deduce what the chief component of that attitude will be. The perspectives of the Rose of the World are, after all, distinguished first and foremost by a sense of the transparency of the physical plane, by the experience of the transphysical planes showing through it, by a passionate love of that experience and its painstaking cultivation. That sense of transparency, in encompassing the fields of culture and history, will be molded into a metahistorical teaching. In being directed toward the Sun, the Moon, and the starry sky, it will become the basis for an ecumenical-that is, metaevolutionary-teaching. In encompassing terrestrial Nature, it will find expression in the teaching about elementals. The teaching about elementals is but one branch of a broader teaching about the structure of Shadanakar-a transphysical teaching.

No matter how much the ancient beliefs about elementals (nature spirits in the broadest sense) were muddied by impurities introduced by the limitations of the human mind and imagination, no matter how many aberrations distorted the images of nature divinities in the pantheons of polytheistic religions-at the very heart of these beliefs lies the truth.

But it is our task, of course, to apprehend and show reverence for the worlds of elementals in a manner completely different from that of the peoples of antiquity. Subsequent experience has enriched us, broadened our knowledge, and sharpened our mystical awareness.

The chief distinctions between our belief in elementals and the belief of ancient peoples are as follows.

The ancients anthropomorphized their images of elemental divinities. We will no longer feel the need to attribute human forms to them.

The ancients viewed these worlds as forever constant and unchanging. We will recognize that they evolve, though in a manner unlike the evolution of our organic world, and we will strive to apprehend the path of their evolution.

The ancients were able to experience their link with individual planes of elementals but drew ill-defined boundaries between them, and they had no idea about the spiritual growth of these monads. Strictly speaking, they had no clear conception of the plurality of these planes. For us, the plurality of and interconnection between these planes and the spiritual growth of monads abiding on them will become objects of transphysical knowledge.

The ancients were incapable of drawing a rough map of our planetary cosmos. We will distinguish each plane in a much more precise manner and include it together with all its unique features in the overall panorama of Shadanakar.

The ancients were unable to reconcile belief in these worlds with belief in the One God. For us there will be no conflict between these two beliefs.

It should also be added that the ancients regarded propitialion and praise, and nothing else, as their spiritual duty toward elementals. For our part, we will strive to actualize our link with them through a readiness to participate in their play and creative work, through encouragement of their beneficent participation in our lives (possible paths to achieving that will be set forth in the relevant chapters) and last, through aid to elementals of Light and through work in enlightening dark elementals.

Such an attitude toward Nature combines a paganistic joy for life, monotheistic spirituality, and the breadth of knowledge of the scientific age.

All these elements will come together in a higher synthesis through the spiritual experience of the emerging sum religion.

There is a widespread misconception that all religious outlooks are hostile to this life and that they substitute the values of the afterlife for the values of this world. There is no more justification for that generalization than for the claim, for example, that the art of painting distances one from this world, a claim based on the fact that it is partly true of the painting of the Middle Ages. Only religious credos of a particular phase have been hostile to life, and even then only in their more extreme manifestations. This outlook I am speaking of will not distance people from this world but will teach them to love it with a passionate and selfless love. It does not contrast «other worlds» with this one but sees them all as a magnificent whole, as a necklace on the breast of God. Do we like a crystal icon lamp less because it is transparent? Will we really love our world less because other worlds show through it? For people who feel that way, this life is good, and death is not an enemy but a dear guide, for a worthy life on earth predetermines an ascent to other worlds fuller, richer, and more wonderful.

But in what manner, on what paths, can humans achieve transparent perception of the world? Does it come independently of our will and efforts, like a lucky gift of fate, or can we knowingly cultivate it within ourselves and whole generations?

Until the combined efforts of a great many people are channeled into that cultivation, the joy of transparent perception will indeed remain a matter of the grace of God, and we will expend hardly any effort in acquiring it. Only through the protracted labor of the invisible friends of our heart, the executors of Providential will, do organs capable of such perception come unblocked in some of us, though often, much more often, the organs occasionally open a narrow crack and then close back up. But even these small cracks are enough for transparent perception of the physical world to begin and for those fortunate enough to experience it to resemble the blind who can see.

To initiate the process entirely at will-in oneself or others- is hardly possible, at least for the present. But we can work in such a way that in each one of us and in our children our labors will complement the labors of the Providential powers. Thus, a tunnel through the psychophysical strata will be dug, as it were, simultaneously from two ends: by us and by the friends of our heart.

The colossal task of creating such a pedagogy can at present only be designated as one of the tasks of a future civilization. An immense amount of preliminary work related to the study and systematization of experience in that area is still needed. I will treat that in greater detail in one of the last sections of the book. At this time I will only provide some necessary information concerning two or three possible varieties of that methodology These varieties and many others not mentioned here can, of course, be combined to complement each other.

There is one prior condition without which efforts in this direction will lead nowhere. It is the desire personally to apprehend the transparency of that crystal vessel we call Nature. The process is therefore open either to those who themselves admit the possibility that worlds of elementals exist (otherwise one would not seek the transparency of the physical plane, but, to the contrary, would hope for nothing to happen, so that one's scientific skepticism could triumph) or to children, provided their trust of the elements and love of Nature is reinforced from an early age by the example of their elders. Naturally, they who deny beforehand the existence of those worlds will not waste time and energy on such experiments. And even if, for the sake of experiment, it entered their heads to make some efforts toward that end, they would achieve nothing, because their personal disbelief would constantly inform the results obtained They would ascribe the results to self- suggestion or something of that sort. It would be no more than a step forward followed by a step backward, or running in place.

Thus, if that necessary inner condition is met, we must then concern ourselves with creating the necessary external conditions. It is easy to guess that what we are referring to here are those periods (six to eight weeks a year) when modern-day men and women are freed from earning a living and can permit themselves time alone in Nature. I would think that summer conditions are more conducive, because it is in summer, with its longer days, lush plant growth, and full awakening of earth and water, that the elementals' activity increases many times over as more and more planes become reanimated. Also, is usually summertime when people go on vacation-that is, they have the chance, if only for a month, to spend time with Nature. But it should be stated from the start that one will not make much headway in a month, and there is no point whatsoever in embarking on such efforts during a two-week holiday. Of course, those who feel more affmity for the winter months' should make allowances for that preference.

Someone might be expecting precise instructions from me: get up at such a time, go to bed at such a time, keep to such and such a daily schedule. I would prefer to avoid going into such niggling recommendations. What is our task? It is to immerse ourselves as deeply as possible in Nature, in the life of the elements, not as a sower of death or inquiring researcher but as a son or daughter who has returned home after years of wandering in foreign climes. To accomplish that task one individual will find it more natural and effective to do one thing, someone else, another. I would only like to relate what circumstances aided me personally.

Having secured for my summer holidays a "homebase," as they say, in a beautiful and, obviously, remote place, I first of all endeavored to avoid cluttering my heart and mind with sundry worldly cares. I minimized my links to the outside world, listened to the radio less often, and tried to get by as long as possible without newspapers, provided of course the world was not in the midst of a dangerous crisis. It was imperative to simplify my lifestyle, wear as little clothing as possible, and forget completely about the existence of shoes. I bathed two or three times a day in a river, lake, or the sea, finding a spot where it was possible to be alone with Nature.

I read books that induced a peaceful, benevolent mood and helped my thoughts attune themselves to Nature. Literature dealing with the natural sciences would be of no help during such times, as it puts one in a completely different frame of mind. The study of the exact sciences and technology would lead one even further astray. Best of all is good poetry and certain classics of prose: Turgenev, Dickens, Erckmann-Chatrian, Tagore (but not Stendhal, Zola, Swift, or Shedrin, and the like). It is a good time to reread children's classics, such as Tom Sawyer or Treasure Island, and books about children. All in all, spending lots of time with children and playing and talking with them can only help matters. I may scare off some with one injunction, but unfortunately it is firm: minimal consumption of meat and fish products and moderation in the use of alcohol. And one categorical requiremeet: no hunting or fishing whatsoever.

That was the atmosphere in which my travels began. It doesn't feel right to use the words «hike» or «excursion» to describe them. I would be gone for the entire day, from sunrise to sunset, or on a three-or four-day trip-in the forest, roving down country roads and field paths, over meadows, through woods, villages, farms, across rivers on slow ferries. These travels included chance meetings and casual conversations, and overnight camping, perhaps beside a campfire on the banks of a river, or in the fields, or in haystacks, or on some village hayloft. I tried to avoid any sort of contact with machines, conversations on technical topics, and reading of that sort, with the exception of occasionally resorting to mechanized transport. Then back to my remote homebase for a few days of rest and relaxation, listening to the crow of roosters, the rustle of tree tops, the voices of children and villagers, reading tranquil, deep, and innocent books-then off for more of the same roving.

That style of living can sometimes arouse in others puzzlement and snickering. One should not expect to be understood. People busy with farm work will even be inclined to view such eccentrics as no-good loafers: the majority of countryfolk are as yet capable of viewing only their own duties as real work. One should not take it too much to heart. One must know enough to ignore the opinions of others when sure of the rightness of one's actions.

But those are all external considerations. You can spend the whole summer tramping over hill and dale till you drop and still end up with nothing to show for it. Outside circumstances must be supplemented by efforts of the heart and mind. What sort of efforts are needed?

What people need to do is gradually train themselves to perceive the sounds of an ocean of trees, the swaying of the grass, the glide of clouds, and the flow of rivers, every voice and movement of the visible world, as alive, fully aware, and kindly-disposed toward them. A feeling that invariably oversees the emergence of new thoughts and feelings will grow stronger, gradually enveloping all one's days and nights: a feeling that, in lying down on your back, you are letting your head sink lower and lower into soothing depths that glimmer with soft light-loving, intimate, depths that have existed since time immemorial. A feeling of simple joy, of profound calm will absorb the smallest spill of everyday cares. These are good times to lie on the bank of a river, oblivious to time, and gaze lazily at the cool water glittering in the sunlight. Or, lying somewhere under ancient pines to listen to the organ-like music of the treetops and the knocking of woodpeckers. One must have faith that the elementals of Liurna are overjoyed at your coming and will speak to your body as soon as it enters their flowing bodies, that the elementals of Faltora and Arashamf are even now singing you songs through the rustle of leaves, the buzzing of bees, and warm breaths of wind. When you are returning home from a long hike at dusk over fields smelling of freshly cut hay, climbing sun-warmed knolls and descending into the coolness of ravines, and a soft mist begins to flood over everything but the tops of haystacks-it feels good to take off your shirt and let your hot body be caressed through the mist by those who are fashioning the mist above the nodding meadows.

I could describe hundreds of other such times-from sunbathing on the sand to berry-picking, my mind divided between action and contemplation- but whoever embarks on that carefree and bright path will recognize them without any prior description. After all, such a path is possible not only in Central Russia but in the countryside of any country, from Norway to Ethiopia, from Portugal to the Philippines and Argentina. Only the specifics of the path will vary, but they can vary as well within the confines of a single region, depending on one's personal preferences. What is important is to generate that radiance and easygoing frame of mind within oneself and if possible to repeat those periods each year.

«What utter nonsense!» some will say. «As if we were not in possession of definite facts concerning why and how mists, the wind, or dew come about. As if we didn't know by what processes rain, rivers, and vegetation occur. To serve up such fairy tales with a straight face in the middle of the twentieth century! No wonder the author hints that he feels more at ease in the company of children: an adult would never put up with listening to such drivel!»

They are mistaken, those absolutists of the scientific method of knowledge: not the slightest contradiction of science is to be found here. To repeat: I mean here objective and critical science, as distinct from the philosophical doctrine of materialism. After all, if some rational microscopic being existed that was studying my body and was itself a part of it, it would be right in saying the moment I moved my arm that the arm is a lump of matter composed of such and such molecules that moved because certain of its parts-the muscles-contracted. They contracted because such and such a reaction occurred in the nerve centers and the reaction arose from such and such reasons of a chemical nature. And there you are! Clear as day. And naturally the researcher would be scandalized if it occurred to anyone to point out that the «lump» moved because such was the wish, free and conscious, of its owner, while the muscles, nerves, chemical processes, and the rest merely served to transmit the owner's will.

Physiology is concerned with the study of the mechanics of the process. That does not preclude the existence of psychology- the science dealing with the consciousness that puts the mechanics to use. Meteorology, aerodynamics, hydrology, and a number of other sciences concern themselves with the study of the mechanics of natural elements. That should not and will not interfere in time with the emergence of a teaching about elementals, about those consciousnesses that put the mechanics to use.

It all began for me personally near the town of Tripolye in the Ukraine on a sultry summer day in 1929. Weary but content after a hike of many miles through open fields and over slopes with windmills, from where a panoramic view opened onto tne bright-blue branches of the Dnieper and the sandbars between them, I climbed the ridge of yet another hill and was all of a sudden literally blinded. Before me, motionless under the streaming rays of the sun, stretched a vast sea of sunflowers. At the same moment, I sensed an invisible ocean of vibrant joy quivering above that magnificent scene. I stepped up to the very edge of the field and, my heart pounding, pressed two bristly sunflowers to my cheeks. I stared at the thousands of earthbound suns, almost breathless with love for them and for the beings whose joy I felt above the field. I felt something strange: I felt that those invisible beings were leading me with joy and pride, like a guest of honor, to a fantastic celebration that resembled both a ceremony and a feast. I gingerly took a couple of steps into the midst of the flowers and, closing my eyes, listened to their touch, to their barely audible rustle, and to the celestial heat that was blazing all around.

It all began with that. True, I can recall experiences of that kind from my younger days, when I was a teenager, but they were not nearly as powerful. But both before and after the experience in Tripolye-not every year, but sometimes several times in the course of one summer-minutes of strange, inebriating joy came upon me while alone in Nature. They occurred, for the most part, when I had already covered hundreds of kilometers on foot and then chanced upon unfamiliar places distinguished by the lushness and wildness of vegetation growing unchecked. Transported by ecstasy and trembling from head to foot, I made my way, oblivious to everything, through dense thickets, sunbaked marshes, and prickly bushes, finally throwing myself down into the grass to feel it with my whole body. The most important thing was that during those minutes I was aware with all my senses that the invisible beings whose existence is mysteriously linked to the vegetation, water, and soil loved me and flowed through me.

In the years that followed, I spent the summers, for the most part, in the Bryansk Forest region. The memory of all that happened to me there is the joy of my life. But I am particularly fond of recalling my encounters with the elementals of Liurna, which at the time I called river spirits.

Once, during a drought, I set off alone on a one-week camping trip in the Bryansk Forest. The smoke of forest fires stretched out in fingers of bluish black, and sometimes whitish puffs of smoke, slowly curling and twisting, would rise above the huge fir forests. It so happened that I walked for several hours along a hot dirt road without seeing a spring or brook. The heat, as stifling as in a greenhouse, gave me an agonizing thirst. I had brought a detailed map of the area, and I knew that I would soon come across a small stream-one so small that even on my local map it did not have a name. Sure enough, the woods began taking on a different look: fir trees gave way to maples and alders. Suddenly the scorching road that was burning my feet began to slope down, the green of a meadow appeared up ahead, and skirting a clump of trees, I caught sight of a bend of the long-anticipated stream a dozen meters ahead. The road crossed it at a ford. What a pearl of creation, what a delightful child of God laughed at my coming! A few steps wide, shaded everywhere by the low-hanging branches of old willows and alders, it streamed as if through green caverns, softly gurgling and glittering with thousands of sparkles of sunlight.

Throwing my heavy knapsack down on the grass and tearing off my light clothing on the run, I entered the water up to my chest. When my overheated body plunged into the cool wetness, and dapples of shadow and sunlight flitted over my shoulders and face, I felt some invisible being, composed of what I don't know, embrace my soul with such innocent joy, with such laughing playfulness, as if it had long loved me and been waiting for me. It was like the rarefied soul of the river-all flowing, all trembling, all caressing, all coolness and light, carefree laughter and tenderness, joy and love. And when, after my body had long been in its body, and my soul in its soul, I lay down with eyes closed on the bank under the shady branches of the trees, my heart felt so refreshed, so cleansed, so purified, so blessed as it could only have been during the first days of Creation, at the dawn of time. And I realized that what had happened to me this time was no ordinary bathing in a river but a true ablution, in the very highest sense of the word.

Some might reply that they, too, have spent time in the forests and bathed in rivers, that they, too, have walked through woods and fields and, standing on the mating ground of grouse, have felt at one with Nature, but that they have never experienced anything resembling elementals. If it is a hunter speaking, it is no wonder: the elementals see only an enemy and desecrator in that destroyer of Nature, and there is no surer way of repelling them than taking a hunting rifle into the forest. If those who speak are not hunters, let them carefully reconstruct the weeks they spent in Nature and they will discover their own breaches of the conditions I set forth at the start.

It is impossible, of course, to predetermine the duration of the stages of that process of knowledge: the lengths of time vary depending on many circumstances, both objective and individual. But sooner or later the first day will arrive, and you will suddenly feel all of Nature as if it were the first day of Creation and the Earth were celebrating its heavenly beauty. It could happen at night by the campfire or during the day in the middle of a rye field, in the evening on the warm steps of a porch or in the morning in a dewy meadow, but the nature of the moment will everywhere be one and the same: the dizzying joy of one's first cosmic awakening. It will not yet mean that your inner vision has come unblocked for good. You will still see nothing besides the customary landscape, but you will experience with your whole being its multiplaned reality and permeation by spirit. The elementals will become even more accessible to those who undergo that first awakening. Such people will become more and more aware of the constant proximity of those wonderful beings through organs of the soul that have no names in our language.

But the essence of a first awakening lies in something else, something higher. It concerns not only transphysical knowledge but also what I am unable to find a name for other than the old word ecumenical. Many authors have attempted to throw light on similar states. William James calls it a breakthrough of cosmic consciousness. It can clearly take on very different shades for different people, but the experience of cosmic harmony lies at its heart. The methods I have described in this chapter are, to a certain extent, capable of hastening that hour, but there is no reason to hope that such joys will become frequent guests in the home of our soul. On the other hand, a soul can be overcome by such a state without any conscious preparation Such an instance is described, for example, by Rabindranath Tagore in his Memoirs.

It is easy for people who have more than once experienced a feeling of general harmony with Nature to think that this is what I am referring to. No, far from it. A breakthrough of cosmic consciousness is an event of colossal personal significance, such as can occur in a person's lifetime only an extremely limited number of times. It comes on one suddenly. It is neither a mood nor pleasure nor happiness nor even a joy of astonishing dimensions-it is something bigger. More so than the breakthrough itself, recollections of it will have a powerful effect on one's being. The breakthrough itself is full of such bliss that it would be more accurate to speak of it not as astonishment but enlightenment.

Such states occur when the Universe-not the Earth alone, but the whole Universe-reveals itself in its higher aspect, reveals the divine spirituality that permeates and envelops it, erasing all the painful questions of suffering, conflict, and evil.

In my life such an experience took place on the moonlit night of July 29, 1931, on the banks of the Nerussa, a small river in the Bryansk Forest. I usually try to be alone when in Nature, but that time it so happened that I had taken part in a camping trip with a small group. It was composed of teenagers and young adults, including an aspiring artist. Each of us was carrying a knapsack with food, and the artist had also brought along a sketch pad. We wore nothing heavier than pants and shirts, and some had even taken off their shirts. We walked along quickly and silently, in single file, like tribespeople along the wild paths of Africa. We were not hunters or explorers or mineral prospectors-we were simply friends who wanted to camp by a fire on the famed banks of the Nerussa.

As always happens in the Bryansk Forest along the flats of a river, a fir forest as vast as the sea gave way to a deciduous wood. Century-old oaks, maples, and ashes rose up before us; aspens that resembled palm trees, with their crown of leaves at a dizzying height, enchanted us with their grace and stature; the roundish canopies of kindly willows shone silver as they hung over the water of creeks. In individual clumps, thickets, and glades, the forest approached the river as though with loving care. There were no villages, no signs of civilization. The wilderness spell was broken only by the barely distinguishable path left by mowers and by the rounded tops of haystacks, rising here and there in the fields in preparation for the winter, when they would be transported by sled to the villages of Chukhrai or Neporen.

We reached the banks of the river at the close of a hot, cloudless day. We took a leisurely dip, then gathered brush, and, building a fire two meters from the quietly flowing river under the canopy of three old willows, prepared a simple meal. The sky darkened. A low July full moon glided out from behind the oaks. Little by little the conversations and stories died down; one by one my companions fell asleep around the crackling wood. I was left awake at the fire, lazily waving a branch to ward off the mosquitoes.

When the moon, noiselessly moving behind the finely patterned, leafy branches of the willow, entered the range of my vision, those hours that come close to being the most wonderful of my entire life began. Breathing softly, having laid back on a handful of hay, I heard the Nerussa flowing not behind me, a few paces back, but as if through my own soul. That was the first unusual thing I noticed. Everything on Earth and everything that must exist in the heavens poured exultantly and noiselessly through me in a single stream. In bliss barely supportable by the human heart, I felt as if slowly revolving, graceful spheres glided through me in a universal dance, and everything I could think of or imagine merged in a jubilant oneness. The ancient forests and clear rivers, the people sleeping by the fire, the peoples of countries near and far, cities waking up and busy streets, cathedrals with sacred icons, seas tossing tirelessly, and steppes with blowing grass- everything indeed was within me that night, and I was within everything. I lay with eyes closed, and beautiful white stars, large and blossoming, not at all like those we are used to seeing, also floated along the world-turned-river like white water lilies. Although the sun was not visible, it was as if it, too, were flowing somewhere just outside the range of my vision. Everything was suffused not by its glow but by a different light, one I had never seen before. Everything flowed through me and at the same time rocked me, like a child in a cradle, with all- soothing love.

In trying to express in words such experiences, one understands better than ever the poverty of language. How many times have I attempted through poetry and prose to convey to others what happened to me that night! And I know that no attempt, including this one, will ever succeed in communicating to anyone else the true significance, dimensions, and profound effect that occurrence had on my life.

Afterward I tried with all my might to summon the experience again. I recreated all the same outside circumstances under which it took place in 1931. Many times in the years that followed I camped in the exact same spot on the very same nights It was all in vain. But twenty years later, just as unexpectedly, it came on me again. This time it was not during a moonlit night by a forest river but in a prison cell.

Oh, that is only the beginning. It is not yet the enlightenment after which a person seems to become someone new, a person enlightened in the higher sense of the word, the sense attached to the word by the great peoples of the East. This is the holiest and most mysterious of enlightenments it is the opening of one's spiritual eyes.

There is no greater joy on Earth than the complete opening of one's inner vision, hearing, and deep memory. The joy of people born deaf or blind who suddenly, in middle age, experience the opening of their physical eyes and ears is but a dim echo of it.

I can only repeat what I know of it by what others have said There is a wonderful passage in Edwin Arnold's book The Light of Asia in which such a state is described, a state that turned one searcher of the truth into the one now known by all humanity as Gautama Buddha.

Here is the description. It deals with Buddha's entry into the state of abhidjna:

insight vast to spheres unnamed,

System on system, countless worlds and suns Moving in splendid measures, band by band Linked in division, one yet separate, The silver islands of a sapphire sea With waves which roll in restless tides of change. He saw those Lords of Light who hold their worlds By bonds invisible, how they themselves Circle obedient around mightier orbs star to star

Flashing the ceaseless radiance of life From centers ever shifting unto cirques Knowing no uttermost. These he beheld With unsealed vision Cycle on epicycle, all their tale

of Kalpas, Mahakalpas-terms of time Which no man grasps

Sakwal by Sakwal, depths and heights he passed Marking-behind all modes, above all spheres, Beyond the burning impulse of each orb- That fixed decree of silent work which wills Evolve the dark to light, the dead to life, To fullness void, to form the yet unformed, Good unto better, better unto best By wordless edict; having none to bid, None to forbid; for this is past all gods Immutable, unspeakable, supreme, A Power which builds, unbuilds and builds again, Ruling all things accordant to the rule Of virtue, which is beauty, truth, and use."

What is there left to say? It would be not pride but sheer naivete to hope even in the innermost corner of our heart that someday such an hour will strike for us as well. Yet comfort can be taken from the fact that every human monad without exception, sooner or later, even if after an almost endless period of time, perhaps in another, nonhuman form, in another world, will attain that state, surpass it, and continue on.

In the meantime it is our duty to share with others the best that we possess. My best is what I experienced on the paths of transphysical and metahistorical knowledge. That is why I am writing this book. In these last two chapters I have described as best I could the major signposts on my inner path. Everything that follows will be the presentation of what was understood on that path about God, about other worlds, and about humanity. I will try to avoid any further discussion of how it was understood; the time has come to speak of what was understood.

2.3. Points of Departure

Multiplaned Reality

Our physical plane - a concept synonymous with what astronomy calls the Universe-is characterized, as we know, by threedimensional space and one time stream. In the terminology of the Rose of the World, the physical plane is called Enrof.

In modern science and philosophy debate continues about the infinity or finiteness of Enrof in time and space and whether the whole Universe is contained within Enrof, whether all forms of being are exhausted by its forms. The discovery of antimatter; the appearance and even extraction of physically material particles from out of a physical vacuum, particles that had hitherto existed in the world of negative energy; the experimental corroboration of the theory that the physical vacuum of space in Enrof is awash with oceans of particles of a different materiality-all these facts are signposts on the route that plodding science is following away from the ideas of classical materialism toward those that differ greatly both from them and from the views of the old idealistic philosophy. It is highly probable that the muddle the proponents of the philosophy of materialism have made of the issue by claiming that all its opponents are merely rehashing the old arguments of idealism is one of the tactics in the last stand of the materialistic consciousness before it "steps on the brakes," as they say, abandoning one position after another, and at the same time reassuring all that the classic thinkers of materialism had foreseen and long affirmed those very same things. It will be particularly interesting to see what acrobatics philosophy will have to resort to in the near future, when it is forced by the weight of evidence to incorporate antimatter into its system.

The primacy of matter over consciousness, the knowability in principle of the entire Universe, and at the same time, its infinite and eternal nature-these naive doctrines of materialism, which were conceived during past stages of science, are still regarded as current owing only to contrived manipulations and, more important, to the intervention of authorities that are associated not so much with philosophy as with the police state. On the other hand, many doctrines of traditional religion will not bear up under the scrutiny of modern science to the same degree. The new methods of knowledge-metahistorical and transphysical-will not intrude on fields of scientific knowledge or in any way contradict science in its essentials. At the same time they will anticipate science's answers to certain questions.

A conception of the Universe as multiplaned lies at the heart of the Rose of the World's worldview. By plane is meant a material world whose materiality differs from that of other planes by virtue of the number of its dimensions and time streams. For example, there are interconnected planes neighboring ours, planes in which space has the same three dimensions but time has not one stream, as on our plane, but several. That means that on such planes time flows as several parallel streams of differing speed. On such a plane events take place simultaneously in all its time streams but their locus is situated in only one or two of them.

It is not easy, of course, to visualize what this means. The inhabitants of such a plane, although they act predominantly in one or two time streams, exist in and are aware of them all. The synchronicity of their being wakens them to the fullness of life to a degree unknown to us. At the risk of getting slightly ahead of myself, I will add that a large number of time streams in combination with a minimal number (one or two) of dimensions has the opposite effect, causing the inhabitants of such planes suffering. This suffering resembles an awareness of one's limitations, a searing feeling of powerless spite, a constant reminder of the enticing opportunities one is not in the position to take advantage of. Some of us would call it being «so close yet so far» or recognize it as the torment of Tantalus.

With a few exceptions, such as Enrof, the number of time streams on a plane far exceeds the number of dimensions. If I remember correctly, there are no planes in Shadanakar with more than six dimensions. As for the number of time streams on the highest of the planes in the bramfatura it rises to an astronomical height of 236.

In extrapolating the specific features of Enrof onto other planes, it would be a mistake to think that all partitions separating plane from plane must be as difficult to pass through as the partitions separating Enrof from planes of different dimensions. True, there are partitions surrounding some planes that are even more difficult to pass through and that block them off from others even more securely. But such planes are few. There are far more groups of planes in which movement from plane to plane does not require death or a difficult material transformation, as with us, but only the attainment of special inner states. There are also those from which movement to neighboring planes requires no more effort than, say, travel from one country of terrestrial Enrof to another. Several of those planes together form a system. I am accustomed to using the Indian term sakwala when referring to each of those systems of planes or series of worlds. Along with sakwalas, however, there also exist solitary planes like Enrof.

Planes and entire sakwalas also differ from each other in the amount of space they occupy. Not all of them encompass the same cosmic area Enrof does. Difficult as it is to imagine, many of them do not extend beyond the limits of our solar system. Others are even more localized: they are immured, as it were, within the confines of our planet. There are even several that are linked not to the planet as a whole but to only one of its physical strata or regions. There is obviously nothing on those planes that can be likened to the sky.

Bound together by shared metahistorical processes, the majority having two rival spiritual poles, as it were, all the planes of every heavenly body together form a gigantic, tightly integrated system. I have already mentioned that such systems are called bramfaturas. In some of them the total number of planes does not exceed single digits, while in others it numbers several hundred. Besides Shadanakar, where the total number of planes now stands at 242, bramfaturas of the Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, the Moon, and certain moons orbiting the larger planets exist at present in the solar system. The bramfatura of Venus is in the embryonic stage. The remaining planets and moons are as lifeless on their other planes as they are in Enrof. They are either the ruins of former bramfaturas that were abandoned by all their monads or else they have never been bramfaturas.

Multiplaned systems of materiality somewhat analogous to bramfaturas, but incomparably larger, encompass certain solar systems-for example, the majority of the stars of Orion or the system of Antares' double suns and its many planets. Even larger are the galactic systems and the system of the entire Universe. They are macrobramfaturas. There are macrobramfaturas known to have an enormous number of variomaterial planes-up to eight thousand. There is nothing in the macrobramfaturas that can be likened to so- called vacuum, areas of extreme material paucity in Enrof. It is easy to see that macrobramfaturas are beyond the comprehension of even the greatest of the great human souls that now dwell in Enrof. No one can directly glean any concrete information about them except in the form of distant presentiments. Such information sometimes comes to us from the higher spirits of Shadanakar, those immeasurably greater than us, through the medium of the invisible friends of our heart. But even these accounts are extremely difficult for us to comprehend. Thus, it was nearly impossible for me to understand the strange and sorrowful communication that there is in the macrobramfatura of our Galaxy a material plane where space exists but time does not- a kind of hole in Time, where movement is yet possible. It is the plane of torment of great demons, the realm of eternal darkness. But it is eternal not in the sense of endlessly flowing time, but in the sense of the absence of any time (I would like to point out in passing that the difference between these two senses of the word eternity has thus far barely been grasped in our philosophical thought).

That eternity is not absolute, as Time can arise there, and therein lies one of the tasks of the grand cycles of cosmic evolution. For only the emergence of Time will make it possible to liberate the great sufferers imprisoned in their galactic hell.

Molecules and some types of atoms form microbramfaturas: minute systems, whose existence in our time is sometimes exceedingly brief. They are, however, quite complex worlds, and one should be aware of the fact that elementary particles are living beings, some of whom possess free will and intelligence. But it is practically impossible to communicate with them, let alone personally enter microbramfaturas directly. There is no being in any of the planes of Shadanakar who is capable of that at the present time: it surpasses for now even the power of the Planetary Logos. Only in the macrobramfaturas of the Galaxy are there spirits of such unimaginable power and grandeur that t hey are capable of descending simultaneously into multitudes of microbramfaturas. To do so such a spirit must, while maintaining its oneness, incarnate simultaneously in millions of those minuscule worlds, revealing itself in all its fullness in each one of them and within the tiniest fractions of time.

I have, in one way or another, been talking exclusively about material planes, since spiritual planes as such do not exist. The difference between matter and spirit is more a question of degree than of kind, although spirit is created by God alone and emanates from Him, while monads create materiality. In its initial state, free of any coating we could call material, spirit takes the form of a substance that we could roughly, and only as a first approximation, compare to the subtlest of energy. Only God and monads are of the spirit-monads being the countless hosts of God-born and God-created higher selves, indivisible spiritual entities. They differ from each other in the degree of their inborn potential, the inexhaustible variety of their material coatings, and the paths their lives take. A monad that has ascended to great heights can be here, there, at many points of the Universe at once, but it is not omnipresent. Only the Divine Spirit is truly omnipresent. It abides even where there are no monads- for example, in those ruins of bramfaturas abandoned by all monads. Nothing can exist without Him, not even matter we call dead. If the Divine Spirit left it, it would cease to be-not in the sense of a transformation into another form of matter or energy, but absolutely.

The Origin of Evil, Planetary Laws, Karma

If we examine the myth of the rebellion and fall of Lucifer within the context of the spiritual history of Shadanakar, it fails to shed light on anything. Never in the metahistory of our planet have any events taken place that could be said to have been mirrored in that myth. Something else did take place once, a long time ago, and recollections of it, though distorted, have been preserved in certain other myths-for example, in the legend of the revolt of the Titans. That will be discussed in more detail, however, in regard to something else. As for the legend of the rebellion and fall of Lucifer, those events took place at one time on an ecumenical scale, on the level of that macrobramfatura that encompasses the Universe, a level that surpasses all categories of our reason. What happened was translated by the seers of olden times into narrow human concepts specific to their era and took shape as the myth. Those time-specific conceptions have become outdated as the scope of our knowledge has broadened immeasurably, and if we now wish to discern the eternal and true seed of the idea within the myth, we must disregard all the time-specific features introduced into it and focus only on the one central fact affirmed by it.

It was only natural that the knowledge even the wisest of those times possessed concerning the magnitude and structure of the Universe lagged so far behind contemporary knowledge that the ecumenical information that filtered into their minds through the efforts of the invisible friends of their heart was flattened and compressed into the narrow confines of their empirical experience, of their powerful, but as yet unenlightened and unsubtle, minds. On the other hand, the task of anyone who attempts nowadays to convey in human words and concepts even an echo of the ecumenical mystery of the rebellion of the so-called Morning Star could hardly be much easier. Such an attempt would consist of two stages: first, a search in the ocean of our concepts for words and phrases that mirror better than others that fantastic reality; second, a search in the ocean of our language for words and phrases that are capable of even slightly mirroring, in turn, those elusive concepts. But the success of such an undertaking is dependent on a person's inner growth and on his or her ecumenical insight. It cannot be accomplished on a whim.

I feel myself capable of only the beginning stages of such a work. I therefore cannot state anything concerning ecumenical events of that nature except to give simple confirmation of an event that at one time occurred. Back in the forgotten depths of time, a spirit, one of the greatest, whom we call Lucifer or Satan, in exercising his free will, which is the inalienable attribute of every monad, rejected its Creator in order to create another universe according to its own plan. He was joined by a host of other monads, both great and small. They began to create another universe within the confines of this one. They tried to create worlds, but those worlds proved unstable and collapsed, because, in rebelling, the monads that turned from God in so doing also renounced love-the single unifying, bonding principle.

The ecumenical plan of Providence leads a great many monads up to a higher oneness. As they ascend the steps of being, the forms of their unions evolve: love for God and for each other bring them closer and closer together. When each of them immerses itself in the Universal Sun and co-creates with Him, the most perfect of unions takes place: merger with God without the loss of one's unique self.

The ecumenical design of Lucifer is exactly the opposite. Each of the monads that allied themselves with Lucifer is but a temporary ally and a potential victim. Every demonic monad, from the greatest to the lowest, clings to the dream of becoming the ruler of the Universe; pride prompts it to think that it is the one with the potential to be the strongest of all. It is ruled in its actions by a kind of categorical imperative, which can to a certain extent be reduced to the formula, There is I and not-I; all not-I must become I. In other words, everything and everyone must be swallowed up by that single, absolutely self-asserting self. God gives of Himself; the powers that rejected God try to absorb everything into themselves. That is why they are first and foremost vampires and tyrants, and that is why a tyrannical tendency is not only inherent in any demonic self but is one of its essential attributes.

Therefore, demonic monads temporarily join forces, but deep down they are rivals to the death. That antagonism surfaces when some limited power is seized by their group. A free-for-all then begins, and the strongest triumphs.

The hopelessness of the demons' cosmic struggle also springs from the fact that God is always creating more and more monads and, since the demons are incapable of creating even one, the balance of power is constantly shifting against them. There are not nor will there ever again be any more falls. That is absolutely guaranteed, and I deeply regret that the extreme complexity of the question prevents me from finding the concepts necessary to present it in some kind of intelligible manner. In any case, all the demonic monads are of very ancient origin. They are all veterans of that great rebellion. True, something like a fall but in fact different has taken place since and takes place now: a highlyconscious being, sometimes even a whole group of them, temporarily choose to oppose Providential will. That choice against God is not made by the monad itself but by the lower self, by a limited mind. For that reason, its rejection of God takes place not in the spiritual world but in the material worlds, which are subject, by the will of those same demons, to the law of retribution. The mutiny is thus doomed to failure, and the mutineer embarks on a long road of atonement.

Gradually, in the course of their struggle, the futility of trying to create their own universe became apparent to the demonic forces. So while continuing to create individual worlds and expending incredible amounts of energy to stabilize them, those forces set themselves another goal: to take over worlds already in existence or in the process of being created by the Providential powers. Their goal is the takeover, not the destruction, of those worlds. But destruction is the objective end result. Bereft of the bonding principles of love and co-creation, held together only by the conflicting principle of coercion, such worlds cannot exist for any extended period of time. There are galaxies in the process of disintegration even now. And when astronomy begins to observe intergalactic nebulae over a longer period of time than it does now, the process of those galactic catastrophes will be revealed to science. There are planets either dead or dying-Mars, Mercury, Pluto-the ruins of bramfaturas. All the monads of Light were driven from those systems, which had fallen under demonic rule, after which a final catastrophe ensued, and the demon legions were left to roam homeless in space, seeking a new bramfatura to invade.

On the other hand, there are macrobramfaturas and whole galaxies where the legions of the rebel have been unable to force a breach. Orion-a macrobramfatura of extraordinary spiritual Light-is a solar system within our Galaxy that has entirely freed itself of the demonic. Those who gaze through a telescope at the great nebula of Andromeda will see with their own eyes a galaxy that has never been invaded by demons. It is a world that from start to finish has been ascending steps of ever-increasing bliss. There are many such worlds among the millions of galaxies in the Universe, but our Galaxy, unfortunately, is not one of them. Long ago expelled from the macrobramfatura of the Universe, the forces of the rebel are waging a continuous, relentless war against the forces of Light in the worlds of our Galaxy. This war has taken millions of forms. Shadanakar also came to be a war front.

Shadanakar became a front far back in those distant times when the Earth was no more than a semimolten globe in Enrof, while other planes in Shadanakar, as yet numbering in the single digits, had only just been created by the great hierarchies of macrobramfaturas. There was no law of survival on those planes. There, in the worlds of those beings now known to us by the generic term angels, the principles of love and friendship between all ruled. There was no law of death: everyone moved from plane to plane by means of a painless material transformation that did not rule out the possibility of returning. In those worlds-which at the time had only three dimensions and were consequently almost as dense as Enrof-there was no law of retribution: mistakes were rectified with the help of the higher powers. A glimmer of recollections of that time, floating up into the consciousness of ancient sages from their treasury of deep memory, but vulgarized and simplified by that consciousness, became crystallized in the legend of paradise lost. In reality, it was not paradise but a gorgeous dawn rising not over terrestrial Enrof, which back then was devoid of organic life, but over the world that is now called Olirna. The dawn glowed and was preserved in the memories of those few human monads who did not, like most, come later to Shadanakar, but who began their journey in times before the distant past-and not in Enrof, but in angelic Olirna.That community of protoangels can be called, in a certain sense, the first humankind of Shadanakar.

A great demon, a cohort of Lucifer's named Gagtungr, irrupted into Shadanakar with legions of lesser demons. The long and fierce battle that ensued ended in a partial victory for him. He was unable to drive the forces of Light from the bramfatura, but he did succeed in creating several demonic planes and turning them into impregnable fortresses. He succeeded in tampering with the emergence and evolution of life on terrestrial Enrof and in leaving his mark on the animal world. The planetary laws that the forces of Light were using to create organic life on Enrof were warped beyond recognition. It is wrong and blasphemous to attribute the laws of survival, retribution, and death to the Godhead, for «God is Light and in Him there is no darkness.»

From God comes only salvation. From God comes only joy. From God comes only grace. If we are shocked by the cruelty of the world's laws, it is because the voice of God cries out in our soul against the work of the Great Torturer. The infighting between demonic monads, the victory of the strong over the right, and the expulsion of the vanquished down into the chasm of torment- that law of Lucifer's forces was carved on the face of organic life in Enrof and took the form of the law of survival.

All the suffering that beings experience, all their pain and agony, emit radiations-both here, in Enrof, and there, in the worlds of the afterlife. Every feeling, every emotional response necessarily emits corresponding radiations. Radiations from anger, hate, greed, or animal and human lust sink to the demonic planes, replenishing the energy of their various classes and groups of inhabitants. True, those radiations are barely sufficient to replenish the energy of individual demonic groups. But the radiation from suffering and pain, or gavvakh, is capable of satisfying hosts of demons of almost all types and sizes. Gavvakh is essentially their food.

In laying his claws on Shadanakar's laws, Gagtungr warped them in such a way as to generate and increase suffering. He made them onerous, cruel, and unbearable. He resisted the establishment of the law of transformation in Enrof; death arose as the resultant vector of the two opposing forces and became law. He resisted the principle of universal friendship: the law of survival arose as the resultant vector of the two forces and became a law of life. Finally, the demonic forces tampered with the life of other planes in Shadanakar-those planes through which travel beings who have incarnated at least once on terrestrial Enrof. Those planes were transformed into worlds of retributton, where tormentors reign and imbibe the pain of those who suffer there.

Among the various types of gavvakh, the one associated with the shedding of physical blood occupies a particularly significant place. When people and animals bleed, a burning radiation of especial intensity is released in the first few minutes. Therefore, certain categories of demons are not so much interested in the death of living beings in Enrof, or in the suffering of their souls in the afterlife, as they are in bloodshed. Not one bloodbath in history has occurred or will occur without the subliminal instigation of those bloodsuckers of the afterlife. Further, the bloody sacrificial rites of some ancient cultures were horrifying not only because of their cruelty but also because it was not gods but those very same demons that were feeding on them.

To replenish the power of Light, the Planetary Logos-the first and greatest of Shadanakar's monads-created a new plane and laid the foundations for a new humankind. Enrof was left to the animal world; the new plane was populated by Titans, whose external appearance was similar to ours, only larger and more majestic. In a world resembling Enrof, but one still wrapped in twilight, their glowing figures moved against the backdrop of a bluish-gray sky up the slopes and around the curves of the desert hills they worked on. The Titan humankind numbered a few thousand. They had no gender-the birth of new Titans was in no way connected with the sexual union of two adults. But Gagtungr succeeded in fomenting among them a mutiny against Providence. They were motivated by the idea that they were the seed and nucleus of a new universal power, a third power that opposed both God and the demons. They hungered for absolute freedom but despised the cruelty and malice of the demons. The mutiny ended with the forces of Gagtungr invoking the law of retribution to draw the Titan's souls down to deep planes of torment. Their suffering lasted more than a million years, until with the aid of the Providential powers they were able to break out of captivity. The majority of them are now completing their journeys among humanity, standing out from the general mass o people by the magnitude of their genius and its somber, though far from dark, tint. Their creative work is marked by dim recol lections of their struggle against God, scorched, as it were, by a ancient fire. It is astonishing in its power. Their spirit differs from demonic monads in its striving for Light, its scorn for the base and its thirst for divine love. (I could name a few such people from among the number of giants of world culture: Aeschylus, Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Goethe, Beethoven, Wagner, Ibsen, Lermontov, and Lev Tolstoy.)

In the last millennium before Christ, the power of Gagtungr was so great that retribution was stripped of its temporality in the afterlife planes of many of humanity's metacultures. All exit from the planes of torment were shut tight, and the sufferer there were deprived of all hope.

The law of retribution, the iron law of moral cause and effect- those effects that can manifest themselves in one's present life but most fully manifest themselves in the afterlife and even in subsequent reincarnations- can be referred to by the Indian term karma. Karma is just as much a result of two opposing wills as are the law of death and the law of survival. If the demonic forces had not encountered continuous resistance from their enemies, the laws would be even harsher, because the demonic purpose of the laws is to generate gavvakh and paralyze any manifestation of Light by the souls that fall afoul of them. The laws have another side-their cleansing nature, a vestige of the ancient protolaws of Light laid down by the great hierarchies that created the world. The goal of those hierarchies, and of all the forces of Light in Shadanakar, was and is the mitigation and enlightenment of the laws. The goal of the demonic forces is their harshening.

Providence's design is to save all victims. Gagtungr's design is to turn all into victims. The theohumankind of the next global era will be a voluntary union in love of all. The satanohumankind-its rise at the end of the current era appears to be unavoidable-will be an absolute dictatorship of one.

The cosmos is the maturating ground of monads. The anticosmos is a universal union of rivals and a host of crippled monads of Light held captive by them in worlds over which demons rule. The captives have been deprived of the most sacrosanct of their attributes: freedom of choice.

Gagtungr is not dismayed by the disparity in magnitude between himself and Lucifer. He, like all demonic monads, sees his comparatively small stature as only temporary. Blind faith in his boundless growth and ultimate victory is an inseparable part of his self. Every one of those monads, no matter how minuscule it may be at present and no matter what lowly post it may occupy within the rebel hierarchy, believes in like manner in its future macrogalactic triumph. For that reason, all of them, including Gagtungr, are tyrants not only in their dreams and not only at a given moment, but at every stage of their path to the extent permitted by the power they wield at that stage.

Tyranny produces a more copious supply of gavvakh than any other form of rule. The ingestion of gavvakh increases the energy of demons. If they were to replenish their energy by imbibing other psychic radiations-from joy, love, self-sacrifice, religious devotion, ecstasy, or happiness-their essence would be transformed and they would cease to be demons. But that is exactly what they do not want. Through tyranny and tyranny alone can they bridle the centrifugal forces within the legions of demons subordinate to them. For that very reason, defections from and uprisings against Gagtungr by individual demonic monads sometimes take place in metahistory (and are reflected in history). The forces of Light cannot come to the aid of such uprisings, since any one of those monads has the potential to become just such a planetary demon. If it proved stronger than Gagtungr, it would become an even worse tormentor than he. One should bear in mind, however, that incidences of uprisings by individual demonic monads not against Gagtungr, as such, but against the demonic world order in general are not so rare. Such uprisings are nothing other than the conversion of demonic monads to Light, and it goes without saying that they are afforded every available means of help from the Providential powers.

Despite all the satanic cunning of Gagtungr's cosmic designs, those designs are flawed for the reasons given above. The chances that the planetary demon will be able to master all the demonic monads of the universe, and eventually Lucifer himself, are incredibly slim. But his relentless pursuit of dominion over the Universe affords him the only joy he can understand: he experiences such joy every time the smallest victory appears to bring him another step closer to the ultimate goal. Those victories consist of his enslavement of other monads or their souls: the demonic monads as half-allies, half-slaves, and the monads of Light as prisoners and objects of torment. As far as Gagtungr can picture the future of the cosmos, he sees himself as a kind of sun around which countless monads orbit, one after another falling into him and being swallowed up, with the entire Universe entering into orbit around him and being swallowed up, world by world, by the monstrously swollen hypermonad. The demonic mind is powerless to picture anything further. The smaller demonic monads are incapable of visualizing even that apotheosis. With unshakeable faith in their own ultimate victory over the Universe, they focus their will and thoughts on stages that are more immediate and easier to envision.

There exists a misconception, a particular mindset held by a large number of people in our time, that has been assiduously inculcated into the minds of many peoples over the last four decades. It is a train of thought that leads the thinker to the conclusion, which in time grows into an axiom and dogma, that religion supposedly deprives people of their freedom, demands blind obedience to higher powers, and makes them wholly dependent on those powers. Furthermore, so the thinking goes, since those powers are only figments of the imagination, it is people's dependence on all the very real human institutions that endeavor to exploit the ignorance of the masses that is actually increased. That is the essence of'religious slavery," from which humanity is supposedly liberated by science and the philosophy of materialism.

To dispute this argument would require writing a tract refuting the basic tenets of materialistic philosophy. Such tracts have already been written, and if they have been insufficiently known in Russia, then the reason for that has more to do with politics than philosophy.

As for the claim that all religions demand submission to higher powers, there is no doubt that some religious doctrines have indeed preached predestination and the virtual absence of free will among humans. That is a fact, and I least of all am inclined to defend without discrimination any and all religious forms. But to make that charge against religion as a whole is no more justified than to claim, for instance, that literature is essentially reactionary, and to substantiate that claim by citing examples of individual reactionary writers and schools.

I would like to explain forthwith the fallaciousness of such an accusation in relation to the worldview of the Rose of the World.

First, I would like to voice some puzzlement: no science or philosophy (except subjective idealism), materialism included, disputes the assertion that the human will is dependent on a host of material factors. That very same philosophy of materialism even takes special pains to emphasize the will's heavy dependence on economic factors. Yet, no one is bothered by human subordination to natural and historical necessity. No one expresses outrage at humanity's bondage to the law of gravity, the law of the preservation of matter, the law of evolution, the laws of economic development, and so forth.Everyone understands that there is still enough room for the exercise of our will within the bounds of these laws.

The worldview of the Rose of the World, however, does not add a single new, supplementary factor to the list of factors that determine our will. What is important is their interpretation, not their number. That boundless and endlessly diverse something that is summed up by the phrase «the higher powers» acts on our will not so much through supernatural intrusions as through the medium of those same factors-those same laws of nature, evolution, and so forth-that we have just agreed to regard as objective facts. To a great extent those sets of factors determine not only our consciousness but our subconsciousness and superconsciousness as well. They are the origin of the voice of conscience, duty, instinct, and the like, which we hear within ourselves and which determine our behavior in a tangible manner. That is how the link between «the higher powers» and our will operates. True, there are some phenomena that could at first glance appear to be violations of the laws of nature by the higher powers. They are called miracles. But in cases when such phenomena, as opposed to tricks of the mind, do occur, they are not at all «arbitrary» violations of natural laws by the higher powers but the actions of those powers through a number of other laws as yet unknown to us.

What frequently appears to us to be the single, monolithic, and indivisible mover of our actions-for example, conscience- is in reality the extremely complex result of the interaction of various factors. Conscience is primarily the voice of our monad. But whether it gains access to our waking consciousness is determined by other factors-for example, some incident that serves as a shock to waken us to the monad's voice: a manifestation of Providence, the action of powers of a Providential nature.

Thus, people's choices are predetermined by three sets of forces: the Providential powers, which utilize the laws of nature

and history to achieve their purposes and which gradually enlighten those laws; the demonic powers, which utilize those same laws and work to strengthen them more and more; and the will of our own monad, transmitted within the range of our consciousness by the voices of our heart and reason with the help of the Providential powers. Therefore, whether we view the laws of nature and history as mechanical, lifeless necessities or as the tools of living, individual, variomaterial or spiritual beings, the degree of our freedom will neither decrease nor increase.

It follows that the degree of our freedom of choice is no less from the point of view of the Rose of the World worldview than it is from the point of view of materialism. But the determining i:> factors are interpreted differently and are more precisely bro- ken down into their component parts.

If the materialist is not bothered by the limitations placed on our freedom by utterly impersonal and lifeless laws of nature, then how can we view as demeaning the limitations placed on our freedom by the will of the Providential powers? Only the limitations placed on our freedom by the will of the demonic powers can gall us. It does indeed gall us, but after all, they are those powers, those age-old enemies of ours, the disarming, conversion, and enlightenment of whom is our goal. We will cease to feel galled only when we render ourselves insusceptible to their influence. The evolution of life on Earth raises groups of beings up from a minimal degree of freedom among the simplest forms. The voice of a microbe's monad almost always fails to reach its embryonic consciousness, and its behavior is primarily determined by demonic powers acting on it through the medium of the laws of nature. The higher animals are much freer than a microbe; the amplitude of their conscious action is far greater. In humans conscious action is increased to an incomparable degree.

Opponents of religion as such argue that it demands the renunciation of our individual will and the subordination of that will to God's. In regard to some religions of the past, they are right. But the Rose of the World is not a religious teaching of the past. It is a religious and social-moral teaching of the future. The Rose of the World will not demand submission to the will of God, for only what humans do voluntarily, not under compulsion, is of value.

It will not be demands for slavish submission to God's will that will sound from the churches of the sum religion. From there will sound forth a call to universal love and free divine co-creation.

The Divine Spirit is our unchanging, inexpressible, and highest yearning. It is the power that creates spirit, that is active in all souls, that is not silenced even in the depths of demonic monads, and that is directing worlds and worlds-from microbramfaturas to supergalaxies-toward something more perfect than good and something higher than bliss. The higher the stage reached by a monad, the closer its will coincides with the creative will of God. And when, having begun its cosmic journey from the simplest forms of animate matter, it passes through the stages of human being and national, planetary, stellar, and galactic demiurge, it merges, through the agency of God the Son, with God the Father, and its will completely coincides with God's will, its power with God's power, its image with God's image, and its work with the work of God.

Divine co-creation is the creative work of Light of all ascending monads of the Universe, from humans, elementals, and enlightened animals to giants of unimaginable grandeur, the galactic demiurges. That is why one sees here so often the word Demiurge, a word almost never used in the older religions. Everyone who works for the greater glory of God, out of love for the world and its Creator, is a demiurge.

God is absolutely good. The old theology also asserted that God is omnipotent. But if God is omnipotent, He is then responsible for the evil and suffering in the world. Therefore, He is not good.

It would seem impossible to find a way out of that vicious circle.

But God creates of Himself. All the monads flowing out of His depths possess, as inalienable attributes, all the properties of those depths, including absolute freedom. Thus, divine creation itself limits the Creator, it fixes His power at a line beyond which the freedom and power of His creations begin. But freedom is freedom for the very reason that it offers the possibility of different choices. For many monads, it took the form of a negative choice, through their assertion of self only, through their rejection of God. That is the origin of what we call evil in the world, the origin of suffering, the origin of barbaric laws, and therein lies the possibility that evil and suffering can be overcome. The laws protect the world from descending into chaos. The

demons, too, are forced to operate within them, if worlds are not to crumble into dust. For that reason, they do not try to overturn laws but to strengthen them. Laws are blind. And they cannot be enlightened in the blink of an eye, not by a miracle, not by divine intercession. They can be enlightened through the protracted cosmic process whereby monads that have rejected God renounce their evil will.

In God, all-embracing love and inexhaustible creativity are blended into one. All living beings, humans included, draw closer to God through the exercise of three divine properties innate to each: freedom, love, and divine co-creation. Divine co-creation is the goal, love is the means, and freedom is the condition.

Demonic monads are as free as all monads, but their love is grossly disfigured. It is directed exclusively inward: a demon loves only itself. And since the entire great reservoir of love in its spirit is focused on that single object, a demon loves itself with a degree of intensity no human is capable of achieving.

Demonic monads have also not lost their ability to create. But divine co- creation evokes nothing in them but extreme hostility. Every demon creates for its own sake and in its own name only.

People's creative work becomes divine co-creation from the moment and to the extent that their irresistible creative impulse is guided by their will and faith not toward the attainment of one or another egoistic goal-fame, pleasure, riches, the service of a cruel and base teaching-but toward the service of the God of Love.

Freedom, love, and divine co-creation are the three words that sum up the Rose of the World's perspective on art, science, education, marriage, family, nature, and even on those aspects of modern life ignored by all religions: social justice and harmony.

Being and Consciousness

What I have said supplies us with a new point of view on the centuries- long debate over the primacy of being or consciousness.

"Consciousness determines being," was the formula of the idealistic schools. During the next, secular stage of culture, the formula was turned on its head, but its content remained untouched. It was the same juxtaposition of two components, and so the new formula inherited the simplism of its predecessor. The question is much more complex than those formulas. At the same time, it is simpler than the ungainly edifices of premises and

conclusions constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the extraction of such modest gains.

«Being determines consciousness.» "Consciousness determines being." Whose being? Whose consciousness? Of a specific individual? Of humanity? Of the world? Of living, conscious matter? Everything is so jumbled, so imprecise.

The consciousness of specific individuals (for simplicity's sake we will speak only of humans) is not determined by any one consciousness or by being in general but by a set of factors. These factors are

the individual's own physical being;

the being of the individual's natural and cultural environment;

the consciousness of a large number of people, both living and dead, for by their efforts these consciousnesses determine, to a significant extent, the cultural milieu in which the individuals live and that affect their being and consciousness;

the consciousness of xnumber of other beings who influence the natural environment and transform it;

the being and consciousness of the hierarchies that create worlds;

the superconscious individuality inherent in the monad of the individual;

the being-consciousness of the One God, in Whom being and consciousness are one, rather than different, conflicting categories.

If the question refers not to individuals and their being and consciousness but to the Universe (or to be more exact, the emergence of consciousness in the organic matter of worlds in the Universe), then clearly, since the Universe is determined by the nature of the One God, the conflict between being and

consciousness vanishes, for the above-mentioned reason. Since the Universe is determined by the work of God-created monads, the question concerning the emergence of consciousness after some period of unconscious existence becomes irrelevant. For if there were no God-created monads with their consciousness and being, then no matter, neither organic nor inorganic, could come into being either.

We could today afford to chuckle over the simplism of the classical formulas if one of them had not become the philosophical dogma of political despotism and caused untold harm, stifling the independent thought of a host of people and barring spirituality from access to their consciousness. The other formula, just as flawed, is nevertheless not as dangerous for the very reason that it is more spiritual. But that does not at all excuse the older religions and their philosophizing, their waste of so many centuries on intellectual speculation without coming a step closer to understanding the relationship between being and consciousness.

The Variomaterial Composition of Humans

Among the numerous planes of Shadanakar, there is a multidimensional world where human monads-indivisible and immortal spiritual entities, the higher selves of humans-abide. Created by God and God alone, with some (a very few) mysteriously born of Him, they enter Shadanakar, coating themselves in rarefied matter, or rather, energy. This is a substance that permeates all of Shadanakar; every individual spirit, in entering our bramfatura, must coat itself in it. The world where our monads abide is called Iroln.

Creative work toward the eventual enlightenment of the Universe is the task of every monad, except demonic ones. There are no demonic human monads. Human monads carry out that enlightening work in lower worlds assigned to them, creating material coatings for themselves there and acting on the environment of those planes by means of the coatings.

The monad first creates a shelt from five-dimensional materiality, then an astral body from four-dimensional materiality. We often group these two coatings together under the word soul. A shelt is the material vessel of the monad with all its divine properties and capacities. It is not the monad, which remains in fivedimensional Iroln, but the shelt that begins the journey on the lower planes. The shelt is created by the monad alone.

Mother Earth, the great elemental, takes part in the creation of the astral body. She takes part in the creation of astral bodies for all beings of Shadanakar: humans, angels, daemons, animals, elementals, demons, and even the great hierarchies, when the latter descend to planes where an astral body is required. The astral body is the higher instrument of the shelt. Concentrated within it are the gifts of spiritual sight, spiritual hearing, spiritual smell, deep memory, the ability to levitate, to communicate with the Synclites, daemons, elementals, and angels, and to perceive cosmic panoramas and perspectives.

Mother Earth, fertilized by the spirit of the Sun, next creates an ether body for the incarnating monad. No life in three and four dimensional worlds is possible without it. When the shelt with all its coatings, including the ether body, abandons the physical body-the last, outermost, and shortest-lived of its vessels- nothing but a corpse remains in Enrof. Our physical body is created for us by the angelic hierarchies-they create the matter- and by Lilith, the great elemental of humanity, who forges the family chain from three- dimensional materiality. The monad itself, through the shelt, contributes to the process by bestowing individuality on a given link in the chain.

Once the process of descent has concluded, the process of ascent begins. A monad can assume a physical body either just one time or over and over again. An ether body is created anew only if the bearer, in falling afoul of the law of retribution, is forced to embark on a journey through the great planes of torment. As for the path of ascent, the ether body accompanies the bearer through all the worlds of Enlightenment, all the way up to the zatomis-the abodes of enlightened humankind, the celestial cities of the metacultures. The ether body is composed of a living substance that is not everywhere uniform, differing as it does in all three and four dimensional worlds. It would be proper to call it, in recalling the ancient revelation given to humanity, arungvilta-prana.

The astral body accompanies the bearer higher, up to and including the sakwala of Higher Purpose. Higher than that, only the shelt is left to achieve final enlightenment and merge with the monad. Then the monad departs from Iroln and, coated with an extremely rarefied shelt, rises up the stairway to the highest worlds of Shadanakar.

All these planes will be discussed in later parts of the book; many of them will be described in as much detail as possible. But I am, unfortunately, incapable of throwing more light on the interaction between the various coatings of the monad and on their functions and structure.

Metacultures

The structure of Shadanakar (a vast area of investigation that we shall soon enter) will remain unintelligible at the most basic of levels if the meaning of the words suprapeople, metaculture, and transmyth is not firmly grasped beforehand.

The term suprapeople refers to a group of nations united by a common, jointly created culture, or to an individual nation, if that nation alone has created a culture that has reached a high level of distinction and maturity. It goes without saying that completely isolated cultures do not exist. Cultures interact with each other. But on the whole each culture is entirely unique and, despite the influence it exerts on other cultures, it remains, in all its fullness, the achievement of only one suprapeople, which is its creator.

It would not be necessary to introduce the suprapeople concept if it did not possess metahistorical, as well as historical, significance. Its metahistorical significance rests in the fact that the distinctiveness of a suprapeople is not limited to its own cultural sphere of influence in Enrof but also affects many variomaterial planes, both of ascent and descent, for certain parts of those planes are subject to the activities of one suprapeople alone. One should bear in mind that the term suprapeople not only includes those individuals, our contemporaries, who belong to it now. A great many of those who belonged to it earlier, even at the very dawn of its history, and who afterward, in the afterlife, have acted and act now on transphysical planes linked to that suprapeople. A staircase of planes common to all suprapeoples rises above humanity, but the complexion, landscape, and function of each plane varies above each suprapeople. There are even planes that only exist above a single suprapeople. The exact same is true of the demonic worlds of descent, which exist, as it were, beneath suprapeoples. Thus, a significant portion of Shadanakar consists of individual multiplaned segments. In each of those segments the Enrof plane is occupied by only one suprapeople and its culture. Those multiplaned segments of Shadanakar are called metacultures.

Every suprapeople has its own myth, which does not take shape in the culture's infant stage alone. Since the traditional use of the word myth does not match the meaning attached to it here, it is necessary to explain carefully in what sense I use the word.

When we speak of a tightly integrated system of rich symbols that embody some comprehensive international teaching and that find expression in legends and ritual, in theology and philosophy, in monuments of literature and art, and lastly, in a moral code, we are speaking of myths of the great international religions. There are four such myths: Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim.

When we speak of a tightly integrated system of rich symbols that define the relationship of one suprapeople to Enrof and to the transphysical and spiritual worlds, a system molded into a definite religion that has played an enormously significant role in the history of the given suprapeople but has rarely spread beyond its boundaries, we are speaking of national religious myths of individual suprapeoples. Such are the Egyptian, ancient Iranian, Jewish, Germanic, Gallic, Aztec, Incan, Japanese, and some other myths.

When we are referring to symbols just as rich and perhaps also tied, although not as closely, to ideas of a religious and moral nature, which, though they have not evolved into a strictly formulated system, reflect, nonetheless, a group of common moral, transphysical, metahistorical, or cosmic truths in connection with the specific nature and role of that culture, we are dealing with shared myths of suprapeoples. Such are the myths of the South-Western (Roman Catholic) suprapeople, the North-Western (Germanic

Protestant) suprapeople, or the Russian suprapeople (In some cultures, the Greco-Roman or Babylonian-Canaanite, for example, their myths had already passed the «shared» stage of development but did not take shape in a system strictly formulated enough to allow the Olympic or Babylonian myths to be numbered among the national religious myths of suprapeoples).

Last is the fourth and final group-shared national myths. They are myths of individual ethnic groups within a suprapeople that have created, as a supplement to the shared suprapeople myth, their own particular, very restricted variations of that myth, variations that have not evolved into any strictly formulated system or religion. One could cite as examples the pagan myths of the Slavic tribes, the Finnish tribes, the Turkish tribes, as well as the myths of some isolated and primal tribes in India. Ethnic myths in their embryonic state can be observed among many ethnic groups, but they rarely achieve any clear expression.

We will not use the word myth in reference to any other phenomenon in the history of culture.

The last three groups of myths are concerned with one specific culture. The first group-the myths of international religions- are (with one exception) mystically linked to planes in Shadanakar above those segmented sections called metacultures.

It seems to me that the concept of national religious myths can be grasped without too much difficulty. As for the shared myths of suprapeoples, for the sake of clarity, a pair of supplementary definitions are in order.

Defined inductively, the shared myth of a suprapeople is the sum of its beliefs concerning the transphysical cosmos and the part the given culture and each self belonging to that culture play within it (The very concept «given culture» can be no more precisely formulated than it was, for example, by the Greco-Romans, who distinguished between themselves and the rest of humanity, whom they lumped together as barbarians).

The culture elaborates these beliefs, molding them into cycles of religious-philosophical ideas, iconography, social-moral systems, state- political institutions, and cycles of national lifestyle manifested in ritual, daily routines, and tradition.

Defined deductively, the shared myth of a suprapeople is an awakening by the suprapeople, in the person of its most creative representatives, to a second reality above them, of which the suprapeople is a part and in which the direction of its growth and the roots of its fate are hidden. This awakening is made groggy by additives foreign to it issuing from unattuned human nature. We can give that second reality, which serves as the object of transphysical, metahistorical, artistic, and philosophical apprehensions, the provisional name of transmyth.

It goes without saying that the discrepancy between myth and transmyth can vary considerably. The limitations of those who apprehended the transmyth through intuition, dreams, artistic inspiration, religious meditation, or metahistorical enlightenment; the national, temporal, class, and individual peculiarities of their conscious and subconscious minds (the latter playing an active part in the process); the impossibility of finding words or three- dimensional images to convey precisely the reality of variodimensional worlds-can not all that lead to countless aberrations, to the cluttering of the myth with a mass of chance, inaccurate, anthropomorphic, simplistic, and even simply wrong ideas? But myths are dynamic. They exist in time, evolving and changing in appearance, and their later phases, as a rule, approach more closely the transmyth, because the minds that apprehend it have over the centuries become subtler, richer, keener, and broader.

But in the meantime, the transmyth is also evolving. The reality behind our reality is seething with movement, and there can be no question of it remaining static. The landscapes, edifices, and activities within a transmyth at the time of its emergence differ from those at the end of its metahistorical development as much as the city-fortresses of the Merovingians differ from modern-day Paris.

But two different realities, two different planes, two poles of the metacultural globe exist at every stage of the transmyth development together with the people on Enrof who apprehend it.

There are also other planes around those planes and between them, but each of them either appeared at a later time or has undergone radical changes. Some have even disappeared. Only three realms are stable and enduring. First, the suprapeople in Enrof; second, the abode of its enlightened souls, the holy cities and celestial land of its metaculture in the variodimensional space above them; and third, down below, in the worlds of descent, the antipode of the heavenly land-a bastion erected in worlds bound to strata deep within the planet's physical body. It is the focal point of the demonic in the given metaculture. The heavenly lands and everything contained within them are called zatomis; the subterranean bastions are called shrastrs.

Of these two poles, it is the zatomis that are usually reflected in a more detailed and distinct manner in myths. The images of shrastrs often do not take a finished form. As for the zatomis, the abode of the Synclites of metacultures, they can be found in the myths of every suprapeople, in both religious and shared myths. Such is Eanna of the Babylonians: the ziggurat in the city of Erech was, in the view of the Sumero-Akkadians, a model of the mountain of the gods, Heavenly Eanna. Later, the Babylonians saw an analogous meaning in the chief religious edifice of their great city-the seven- storied temple of Esagila. Such is Olympus of the Greeks and Romans. Such

is Sumera, or Mount Meru, of the Indians-the Indian Olympus, on the slopes of which glitter the celestial cities of Hindu gods. Such are the images of Paradise and Eden in the Byzantine and Roman Catholic metacultures, Jannet in the Arab-Muslim metaculture, Shang Ti in the Chinese metaculture, Monsalvat in the North-Western metaculture, and Kitezh in the Russian metaculture.

As we attempt to descry the heavenly land of the North-Western metaculture through the thick haze of art, religion, mythology, and social systems, we should always bear in mind that suprapeoples, while they exist in Enrof, never cease creating their myths. The forms of expression change. New groups of people enter the historical scene as depictors of the myths. From the anonymous creators of folklore and customs, the task of myth- building passes to thinkers and artists, whose names are washed by waves of national love. But the myth lives on. It lives on, deepening, injected with new content, revealing new meaning in old symbols and introducing new symbols, in accordance with the higher level of overall cultural development of those apprehending it and, secondly, with the continuing metahistorical growth of the transmyth itself.

The heavenly land of the North-Western culture appears to us as Monsalvat, an eternally illuminated mountaintop where, through the centuries, righteous knights have guarded the Holy Grail, which contains the blood of the Logos Incarnate that Joseph of Arimathea collected at the Crucifixion and which was committed to the charge of the pilgrim Titurel, the founder of Monsalvat. In the distance towers an eerie castle built by the sorcerer Klingsor. This is the focal point of the forces that reject God and strive with dogged resolve to crush the power of the Monsalvat community- the keepers of the greatest of the holy relics and mysteries. These are the two poles of the shared myth of the North-Western suprapeople, which came down from the anonymous composers of Old Celtic legends, through Wolfram von Eschenbach, and down to Richard Wagner. The claim that Wagner's Parsifal is the last word on the myth is far from indisputable and surely premature. The Monsalvat transmyth is evolving; it is becoming ever more magnificent. We can only hope that thinkers and poets whose metahistorical enlightenment will allow them to apprehend and depict the heavenly land of Monsalvat as it is today will yet emerge from among the peoples of the North-West.

It is easy to see that the majority of even the greatest human images in the North-Western myth do not and cannot have a direct connection to the image of Monsalvat. To expect a direct connection in every case would be to reveal a narrow and formalistic approach to the question, even a complete failure to grasp what a shared myth of a suprapeople (not a national religious myth) is.

Basically, every human image created by a great writer, artist, or composer, an image that continues to live on in the conscious and subconscious minds of millions of people and has become the inner acquisition of all who creatively perceive the image-every such image is a mythical image. Kriemhild and Ophelia, Macbeth and Brandt, Rembrandt's Esther and Goethe's Margaret, Egmont and Mr. Pickwick, Jean Christophe and Jolyon Forsyte are mythical to the same degree as Lohengrin and Parsifal. But what is the connection between the iconography, as well as the philosophical and social ideas, of the North-Western culture and the poles of the North-Western myth-Monsalvat and Klingsor's castle?

The poles of every suprapeople myth are ringed by a large number of circles, by whole worlds of images whose connection with the myth's focal point springs from their inner affinity with it-not from the role they play in the particular story-and from our ability to interpret and apprehend them through metahistorical contemplation within, or next to, the center of the myth.

Faust, of course, is not Merlin; Byron's Cain is not Klingsor; Peer Gynt is not Amfortas; and it would be strange indeed, at first glance, to compare Hauptmann's Emmanuel Quint with Parsifal. The image of Kundry, so central to the myth, has not been given equal treatment anywhere on the myth's outskirts. On the other hand, we will not find any prototypes of Hamlet or King Lear, of Margaret or Solveig within the center of the North-Western myth. But their gaze is directed toward it. One can make out a reddish glow on their clothing, a reflection of either the Holy Grail or the sorcerous fires of Klingsor. These colossal figures, rising up from various stages of artistic realism, at various stages of mystic illumination, resemble sculptures that guard the approach up the landings of the stairway to the sanctuary where the greatest mystery of the North-Western peoples is kept: the holy relic that sends out spiritual waves of Providence and grace to countries wrapped in thickening gloom.

Do we really discern the glow from the light of the holy relic- or from the light of the other pole of the myth, the satanic castle of Klingsor-on the legends of the Knights of the Round Table alone? Or on the Bayreuth operas alone? If Monsalvat ceased to be for us a mere poetic image among images, just an enchanting tale or musical melody, and assumed its true significance- the significance of a higher reality-we would discern its glow on Gothic abbeys and Baroque architecture, on the canvases of Ruisdal and Durer, in the landscapes of the Rhine and Danube, Bohemia and Bretagne, in the stained glass windows behind church altars, and in the austere liturgy and ritual of Lutheranism. The glow would be visible to us as well in the sanitized, soulless palace grounds of the Sun King and in the skylines of cities rising across the ocean like a Palmir of skyscrapers. We would see it in the lyrical poems of the Romantics and in the works of the great playwrights, in Masonry and Jacobism, in the systems of Fichte and Hegel, even in the doctrines of Sainte-Simon and Fourier. It would require a separate volume to illustrate how the power of contemporary science, the wonders of technology, and the ideas of socialism, even communism, on the one hand, and Nazism on the other, are contained within the myth of Monsalvat and Klingsor's castle. Nothing, no modern scientific discoveries, including the splitting of the atom, takes North-Western humanity outside the limits circumscribed by the prophetic sym holism of its myth. I imagine that other interconnections, as yet undisclosed, will reveal themselves to those who read through this book.

I have touched on one of the metacultures with its myth and transmyth only to help readers comprehend in a concrete manner the concept of the heavenly lands of humankind located on enlightened planes at the summits of the respective metacultures and to help them grasp the significance of their antipodes-the bastions of the powers that reject God, that are actively engaged in constructing their anticosmos and in struggling with the forces of Light within all the suprapeoples of Enrof, on every plane, and in every metacultural region.

But the stairway of planes in Shadanakar does not end where the segments of metacultures reach their zenith. Above them rise five and six- dimensional worlds, which have also been reflected, though hazily, in the religions and myths of humanity. The title transmyth is also used in that sense in reference to many of these planes. But the word transmyth is used in a narrower and higher sense in reference to one sakwala in particular: a system of fivedimensional worlds with an immense number of time streams. It consists of five magnificent, wondrous, translucent pyramids, which seem to glow with an inner light and which tower imposingly over Enrof. From there, not only Enrof but the heavenly lands of the metacultures, too, seem to be shrouded in murk far below. Those worlds are the highest aspects of three (not four) great international religions and of two religions that have, for a number of historical reasons, almost never broken out of their national confines, but that are illuminated by the glow from both their zatomis and that incomparably higher sakwala. More will be said about that sakwala in one of the later chapters.

I would also like to mention something as an aside. I imagine that many readers of this book are wondering why all the new words and names used to refer to the lands of the transphysical world and the planes of Shadanakar, even the names of almost all the hierarchies, do not sound Russian. That is because the Russian metaculture is one of the youngest. By the time its

Synelite had begun to form, everything had already been named by others. One most often hears in these words sounds suggestive of Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, and sometimes even more ancient tongues of which no philologist as yet has any inkling. I don't know them either, of course. I have based my judgments concerning their strange phonetic construction only on individual words.

It now seems to me that everything necessary has been said to allow subsequent parts of the book to be fully intelligible. We have before us four parts almost wholly devoted to a description of the structure of Shadanakar-a kind of transphysical geography. Only by gaining an understanding, if only approximate, of the theater of and participants in the metahistorical drama can we proceed to those parts that are devoted to the metahistorical processes themselves-in particular, the metahistory of Russia and its culture, as well as the metahistory of modern times. This is connected with the tasks and concrete program of the Rose of the World and with an account of those historical paths that make possible the bloodless unification of humanity, global prosperity, the ennobling education of younger generations, and the transformation of the planet into a garden and the global state into a family. From there a bridge will be built to the final chapters: to certain distant historical prognoses, to the problem of the final catastrophe of global history, and to the inevitable, cataclysmic passage of Enrof to a higher material) a different plane of existence. The last few pages are devoted the cosmic panorama that will unfold when that happens.

3. The structure of Shadanakar: Worlds of Ascent

3.1. The Sakwala of Enlightment

I have at times met people who have the same kind of cracklike opening in their deep memory, but not one of them has summoned the courage to speak of it with any but those closest to them. It has never even occurred to them to attempt to set those recollections down in writing. What has prevented them was both a conviction that such disclosures would evoke only ridicule and the natural diffidence of the inner self, which shrinks from holding up to the judgment of skeptical strangers what is intimate, inviolate, and at the same time unverifiable. For a long time I, too, viewed the matter in the same light, and even now I am undertaking the task without the least pleasure. But since positively everything I speak of in this book comes from the same unverifiable source, I see no reason to remain silent about the breaches in my deep memory. I should either have not begun the book at all or, once having started, I should, despite my apprehensions, speak of everything. In addition, I am encouraged by the hope that those readers who do not trust me stopped reading during the first chapters and that only people who are favorably disposed will continue to read further.

My last death occurred approximately three hundred years ago in a country at the head of a different, very old, and powerful metaculture. I have suffered my entire present life, since earliest childhood, from homesickness for my former homeland. It may be that I feel that homesickness so strongly and deeply because I lived not one but two lives in that country, and very full lives at that. But in departing from Enrof three hundred years ago, I was, for the first time in my entire journey through Shadanakar, free of the obligation of expiatory descents after death to the depths of planes where sinners unravel-sometimes for centuries, even millennia-the karmic knots they tie during their lives. For the first time, I succeeded in unraveling the knots in time-that is, while still in Enrof-having paid for the wrongs and mistakes of my youth with long years of suffering and painful personal losses. For the first time, I died with a light heart, though according to the religious beliefs of that country a truly horrific afterlife should have been awaiting me. But I already knew that, through expulsion from my caste and a forty-year life lived among the pariahs, I had atoned for everything. My death was replete with serenity and hope.

It was a prophetic hope, the kind that does not deceive. To the present day, I have been unable to recall anything about the first hours, even the first few days, of my new existence. But I do remember some sections of the new plane on which I existed for a long time afterward.

Although it is common to all the metacultures, this plane differs widely from one metaculture to another. In the ancient, tropical, immense metaculture that twice played host to my life on Earth, it resembled the metaculture's natural environment in Enrof, only milder, without its extremes of harshness and splendor, without its violent tropical storms and the deadly aridity of its deserts. I remember white clouds of unusually full and glorious forms on the horizon, towering almost motionless up to the middle of the sky. Days and nights passed, and still the gigantic, radiant towers hovered there, their outlines barely changing. The sky was not light or dark blue, but a deep green. And the sun there was more beautiful than here. It glittered with slowly and smoothly alternating colors, and I am unable to explain why the color of the light source had no effect on the color of what the light illuminated: the landscape looked almost the same as ours, the dominant colors being green, white, and gold.

There were rivers and lakes. There was an ocean, though I never did get a chance to see it: once or twice I made it only as far as the shore of a sea. There were mountains, forests, and wide open spaces reminiscent of the steppe. But the vegetation in these areas was almost transparent and as sparse as in the northern forests of Enrof in late spring, when plants have only just begun to don their leafy mantle. The mountain ranges and even the soil were just as airy and translucent, as if they were the ether bodies of those elements whose physical bodies we know so well in Enrof.

But there was no trace of bird, fish, or animal. Humans were the sole inhabitants. I say "humans," meaning not such as we are while in Enrof but such as we become after death in the first of the worlds of Enlightenment. On that plane I at last discovered firsthand that the comfort older religions offer us in the prospect of being reunited with loved ones in the afterlife is neither fable nor delusion, but it occurs only if our actions during our lifetime do not draw us down to the woeful planes of atonement. Some of my loved ones were there waiting to welcome me, and whole periods of my life on that plane were taken up by the joy of being with them. The plane is a very old one, at one time having been the home of the angelic protohumankind. It is called Olirna, and that melodious word seems to me a fitting choice for its name. Being with loved ones did not give rise to any of the tension, sorrow, petty worries, or misunderstandings that tarnish it here. The experience was true communion, sometimes accompanied by speech, but more often by silence, the kind we know here only at especially tender moments with the few to whom we are joined by an especially deep love.

Our life was entirely free of worries about the daily necessities of life, worries that play such a pivotal role in Enrof. The mildness of the climate eliminated any need for shelter. That may not be true in the Olirna of some other metacultures, but I cannot say for sure. The wonderful vegetation served as food, and springs and brooks, which, as I recall, tasted different from our water, served as drink. Clothing-or rather, that beautiful, living, softly glowing material that we try to replace in Enrof with garments of wool, silk, or linen-was produced by our very own body, by that same ether body of which we are here almost never aware, but which in the afterlife becomes just as visible and seems just as vital as the physical body is for us. Life is impossible without it both in the worlds of Enlightenment and in Enrof.

Nevertheless, my first while in Olirna was clouded by thoughts of those I had left behind in Enrof. I had left behind children and grandchildren, friends, and my elderly wife-the woman I treasured above all other people in Enrof, the woman for whom I had violated the laws of caste and become an untouchable. After our separation, I was constantly beset by anxiety for their fates, but I soon learned to distinguish their figures through the haze as they stumbled down thorny paths in Enrof. Some time later, it was my turn to welcome my wife, as young as she had once been, only more beautiful. Her journey in Enrof had come to an end a few years after mine, and now there was nothing to tarnish the joy of our reunion.

One after another new sense organs came unblocked: not those organs of sight and hearing that in the ether body coincide exactly with the corresponding organs of the physical body. No! These organs of sight and hearing had been working since the first minutes of my arrival, and it was with them that I perceived Olirna. What came unblocked were those organs we call spiritual vision, spiritual hearing, and deep memory; what the wisest of the wise strive to unblock in Enrof and what is successfully unblocked by only a few out of millions; what gradually comes unblocked in each one of us in Olirna. Spiritual vision and hearing can penetrate the partitions between many planes. It was with them that I perceived the life of those I had left behind on Earth-as yet hazily, but perceived nonetheless.

I enjoyed spending time in the enlightened natural surroundings-never have I seen such picturesque beauty in Enrof. But strangely enough, I felt there was something missing, and soon I realized what: a variety of life. With sadness I recalled the singing and chirping of birds, the buzzing of insects, the darting of fish, the graceful bodies and unconscious wisdom of the higher animals. Only then did I realize how much the animal world means for us and our relationship with nature. However, I was assured by those who knew more than I that humanity's ancient, vague dream about the existence of planes where animals are enlightened and intelligent is not a dream at all but an intuition of the truth. In time I, too, would be able to enter those planes.

Later-quite recently in fact-I was reminded about certain areas in the Olirna of all metacultures. They are regions that resemble rolling steppe, and those who were too engrossed in their own personal growth in Enrof, whose karmic knots have been unraveled but whose soul is too constricted and cramped, remain there for a time. Now nothing prevents them from redressing that inner imbalance amidst the transparent, silent hills and under the magnificent sky, absorbing the rays and voices of the cosmos and stretching the limits of their everexpanding selves.

I was also reminded about areas in Olirna that resemble alpine country. Those who were able only after death to believe in-or to be more precise, to personally experience-the existence of a different reality, work on themselves there, in the valleys. From down below, they gaze up to the mountaintops, mountains that appear not as we see them but in their spiritual glory. The powerful spirits that hold sway there pour forth into the gazers streams of their own energy. And the faculties of the gazers' souls, which had been paralyzed by a lack of faith, come unblocked over days and years of direct contemplation of the multiplaned universe and of the glorious majesty of other worlds. But I have no clear recollection of all that, perhaps because I was only a guest there. Also, I cannot be entirely sure from the source of the information that the information itself was not simplified and thus distorted to facilitate my understanding of it.

Besides enjoying nature and the company of humans, I also spent time working on my own body. I needed to prepare it for transformation, as the path out of Olirna to the next, higher worlds lies not through death but through transfiguration. I

understood that the verses in the Gospel that tell of the Ascension of Jesus Christ hint at something similar. His Resurrection from the dead altered the nature of His physical body. Upon His ascension out of Olirna, it was transfigured a second time, together with the ether body. I, like everyone else, was to undergo the transfiguration of my ether body alone, a transfiguration similar to the one the Apostles once saw with vision that penetrated into Olirna but could not yet reach the worlds lying beyond. How else could the Evangelists have expressed the passage of our Savior from Olirna to higher planes if not by calling the event His Ascension into heaven? And I, raised under strict Brahmanism, began to understand what strange and inexhaustible truth the Christian myth contained.

The image of the great betrayer, which I had hitherto taken to be mere legend, became reality in my eyes. I learned that he lives there in total seclusion, on a desert island amidst the seas of Olirna. His journey through the planes of torment took more than sixteen centuries. He was hurled down to the deepest of them all by the weight of his karma, a karma unparalleled in its gravity, and neither before nor after did he encounter a solitary human being. He was subsequently raised by the One he had betrayed on Earth, but only after the Betrayed had attained in His afterlife the incredible spiritual strength needed for it, strength that no one in Shadanakar had ever attained before. Raised higher and higher up the stairway of purgatories by the forces of Light, he finally reached Olirna, having atoned in full for his betrayal. Having not yet had any contact with its inhabitants, he is preparing himself on the island for his further ascent. I saw the island from a distance: it has a forbidding appearance. Strange cliffs, the tops of which all point in one direction, rise upon it. The tops are jagged, and the cliffs are a dark color, even black in places. But no one in Olirna has seen Judas himself: only the glow from his vigils can be seen above the island at night. In the future, when the rule of the one whom it has become customary to call the Antichrist has begun in Enrof, Judas, accepting an important mission from the hands of the Betrayed, will be born again on Earth and, after performing his task, will die a martyr's death at the hands of the Prince of Darkness.

But I am unable to say through what exact efforts I arrived at my own transformation and what actually happened to my body at that moment. At present, I am only able to recall what then took place before my eyes: a crowd of people, perhaps hundreds, gathered to see me off on my journey upward. The attainment of transformation by anyone living in Olirna is always a cause for, celebration for others as well; a bright and joyous atmosphere surrounds the event. As I recall, it took place in the afternoon, on a height like a hill and, as with everything else in Indian Olirna, in the open air. I remember the rows of human faces turned toward me slowly beginning to blur as they seemingly receded into the distance, though it must have been I rising above the ground who was moving away from them. I could see a mountain range far away on the horizon, translucent as ever, as if it were of crystallite. Suddenly I noticed that the mountains had begun to radiate a marvelous light. Quivering rainbows crisscrossed the low horizon, out of nowhere wondrous luminaries of different colors appeared high above me, and the resplendent sun could not outshine them. I remember experiencing a mixed feeling of breathtaking beauty, incomparable joy, and astonishment. When my gaze wandered down, I saw that the crowd of well-wishers was no longer there beneath me; it was a different landscape altogether, and I realized that the moment of my passage to the next, higher plane was already past.

I had earlier been told that my stay on that plane would be very short, as all those passing through it leave after only a few hours. But during those hours the entire plane-it is called Faer-would be immersed in rejoicing for me, who had reached it. It is a great celebration prepared for every ascending soul- not only for human souls but also for those of other monads of Shadanakar that are climbing the stairway of Enlightenment, even those of higher animals. Faer is in a certain sense a parting of the ways: reincarnations in Enrof can still take place afterward, but only when there is a definite mission to perform. Subsequent falls or revolts are not precluded. Neither is a deeply conscious-and thus all the more grave-betrayal of God. A blind fall, however, will never be possible again, and spiritual paralysis is struck from the list of potentialities forevermore. This spiritual paralysis, which manifests itself in the psyche of those living, has through the centuries changed its complexion and name in Enrof. In our century it is primarily, but not exclusively, defined as materialism.

If one searches for a familiar image even distantly analogous to what one sees in Faer, it is impossible to settle for anything less than a holiday fireworks display. There is hardly a need to add that the most lavish fireworks display on Enrof compared to Faer are no more than a few lamps compared to the constellation Orion.

I saw a great many beings in their doubly and triply enlightened forms. They had come there from higher planes out of a desire to share in my joy. The enlightened are capable of sharing others'joy to an incomparably greater degree and intensity than we are. Every soul that reaches Faer arouses rejoicing in millions of those who have already passed through it. How can I convey my feelings when I saw hosts of the enlightened rejoicing because I, insignificant I, had reached that world? It was not gratitude, not embarrassed joy, not even shock-it was more like waves of that blissful emotion that causes mortals in Enrof to burst into silent tears.

I do not recall the time or manner of my passage to the next plane. The overpowering experience of Faer brought on a deep exhaustion and a relaxation, as it were, of the tissue of my entire soul. Everything that I can now reconstruct from my memory of the experiences at the next stage of my ascent can be reduced to a single state, yet one that lasted very long, perhaps for many years.

Radiant calm. Does it not sound like a contradiction in terms? We associate an abundance of light with activity, not rest-with movement, not calm. But that is here, in Enrof. It is not like that everywhere. Besides, the word «radiant» itself is not as precise as I would like. For the light of this next plane, called Nertis, is radiant and at the same time inexpressibly gentle. It combines the enchanting softness of moonlit nights with the bright airiness of blue springtime skies. As if lulled by something more soothing than the softest music, I sank into a contented sleep, feeling like a child who, after months of neglect, suffering, and undeserved pain, is cradled in his or her mother's lap. Feminine tenderness permeated everything, even the air, but it radiated with particular warmth from those who hovered around me, like caregivers who look after the sick and weary with inexhaustible love. They were beings who had earlier risen to even higher planes and had descended from there to Nertis, to such as me, to perform works of tenderness, love, and

^joy.

Nertis is the land of great rest. Imperceptibly, without any efforts on my part, but as a result only of the work of the friends of my heart, my ether body slowly underwent changes, becoming ever lighter, more permeated with spirit, and more obedient to my wishes. It is in Nertis that our ether body acquires the form it takes in the zatomis, the heavenly lands of metacultures. And if the loved ones I had left behind in Enrof could have seen me, they would have known it was I. They would have caught an elusive resemblance between my new appearance and the one they were familiar with, but they would have been astounded to the bottom of t heir hearts by the otherworldly brightness of my transfigured self.

What remained from before? My facial features? Yes, but now they shone with everlasting, unearthly youth. The organs of my body? Yes, but two soft blue flowers, as it were, glowed on my temples-my organs of spiritual hearing. My brow seemed to be decorated with a magical glittering jewel-my organ of spiritual sight. My organ of deep memory, located in the brain, was not visible. The changes that my internal organs underwent were also not visible, as all those adapted to feeding and procreation either disappeared altogether or were subjected to radical changes and took on new functions. Eating resembled breathing, and I replenished my energy by absorbing radiations of Light emanating from the elementals. Procreation as we know it is not to be found in any of the worlds of ascent. There is something else, and I will speak of it when we have reached the chapter on Heavenly Russia.

After a long period of time, I began to feel with joy my strength growing ever greater, as if mysterious and long-awaited

wings were opening. The reader should not take me too literally: I am not referring to anything resembling the wings of flying beings on Enrof. I refer to the ability to move freely through four-dimensional space. It was still only something to look forward to-immobility lay on me as before-but the possibility of flight turned from a vague dream into a definite prospect.

I learned from the friends of my heart that my stay in Nertis was drawing to a close. It seemed to me that the cradle-like something in which I was resting began slowly to swing up and down, as it were, with every swing higher than the previous one. The motion aroused in me an eagerness to taste the even greater happiness I was soon to experience, and I realized that I was already on another plane, in Gotimna, the last of the worlds in the sakwala of Enlightenment. It was filled with gigantic flowers, as it were, whose size did not deprive them of a wonderful softness, and the spaces between them revealed endless heights and expanses of nine colors. All I can say about the two colors that lie outside our spectrum is that the impression produced by one of them is closest to a sky blue, and the impression from the other is distantly reminiscent of our gold.

Entire forests of the enormous flowers of Gotimna bob up and down, swing and sway, making sounds of unimaginable rhythm. Their rustling is like the softest of music, never wearying, as peaceful as the sound of forests on Earth. Yet it is full of inexhaustible meaning, affectionate love, and concern for all those living there. We moved with a lightness and ease no being in Enrof is capable of approaching, gliding, as it were, between the singing flowers in any one of the four directions of space or pausing to talk with them, for we came to understand their language and they understood ours. There, in sky-blue meadows or next to huge, softly glittering gold petals, we were visited by those who descend to Gotimna from the zatomis to prepare us, their younger brothers and sisters, for the next legs of our journey.

Gotimna is called the Garden of Higher Fate, for the destiny of souls for a long time to come is decided there. I arrived at a crossroads, one that lies on the path of all who ascend to that plane. For many centuries afterward it is impossible to change.

That was the path I chose. I understood that I had agreed to shoulder a burden that would be impossible for me ever to throw off without serious repercussions for myself and others.

From the Indian Gotimna I was taken to the Russian Gotimna, where preparation for the mission my higher self had undertaken was to be completed. But falls, revolts, and betrayals are possible after moral lives of Light as well, because what slept in the sunlight can later awaken in the soul. Such falls also took place on my journey after Gotimna. I will have to shed light on that, however, in other chapters of the book. Now it is time to speak of the zatomis, the heavenly lands of the metacultures.

I have been able to speak of the sakwala of Enlightenment on the basis of what I have been able to recall from experience. In contrast, my memory contains only infrequent, sporadic images of the zatomis sakwala, images imprinted in my mind much later, during the transphysical travels I made while asleep here, in the Enrof of Russia. Those hazy images were supplemented by another, invaluable source of information: transphysical meetings and talks. The autobiographical style is not suited to the

presentation of this material. Thus, the following chapters will unfortunately be formal and dry, like the chapter on points of departure.

3.2 The Zatomis

The summits of metacultures, the zatomis,to a certain extent follow the geographical contours of their respective cultures in Enrof. All zatomis have four dimensions, but they each differ in their number of time streams. The materiality of the sakwala is created by the Principalities, one of the angelic hierarchies. The zatomis themselves are slowly built through the combined efforts of hierarchies, heroes, geniuses, saints, and a broad spectrum of people capable of creative work, both while the suprapeople that produced them continues its historical journey and after, when that journey comes to an end and millions of its immortal monads continue to ascend from one height of universal knowledge and creative work to another. Each of the zatomis was founded by a great human spirit.

From a distance the planes bear a remote resemblance to our natural environment. The natural element on Earth that best describes the zatomis landscape is clouds in the sky. Regions of soft mist glowing with an inner light are the equivalent of our oceans and seas. They are the souls of marine elementals. The place of rivers of Enrof is taken by the rivers' own souls, forms of inexpressible beauty to which the words «shimmering mists» do not do justice. The vegetation bears little resemblance to ours: it is the souls of elementals, which we will speak of later. I think it sufficient for now to state that the souls of some elementals abide in the zatomis in the intervals between incarnations.

The alternation of night and day takes place on the planes in the exact same manner as here, resulting as it does from the identical rotation of the planet on its axis. The weather fluctuates between pleasant and gorgeous.

Higher humankind-the Synclites of metacultures-is our hope, our joy, our buttress, and our aspiration. Saints, as well as some visionaries and heroes, enter the zatomis almost immediately after their death in Enrof, quickly passing through the worlds of Enlightenment. History makes no mention of the overwhelming majority of such souls, those who lived quiet lives among the people, leaving no traces in chronicles or legend but only in the memory of those who knew them or heard of them from eyewitnesses. They are the unsung heroes of our life. To think otherwise-in other words, to picture the Synclite of a metaculture as a kind of"celebrity" gathering-would only go to show that our moral-mystical mind is still fast asleep.

Others, in particular the recipients of special gifts, who have fallen into the depths of purgatories after death are raised up by the forces of Light, which shorten the duration of their expiatory cleansing so they may join the Synclite. Some geniuses of the arts, many visionaries and heroes, and all saints unraveled their karmic knots while still in Enrof, having expiated the weight of their sins. For them, death was a wide-open gate to the zatomis.

Death caught others still burdened, and thus unprepared, for the higher planes. Such people must first pass through a series of planes in the upper purgatories (upper relative to the terrible circles of magma and the Earth's core, but lower relative to where we are). After finally reaching Gotimna, thousands of those souls do not choose to descend anew to Enrof, choosing instead to work and contribute to the great struggle from within the zatomis communities.

A third group of people did not burden their souls in Enrof with any mortal sins, but their outlook, the scope of their knowledge, and their sense of the cosmic-expanded though they were in Olirna-need to grow still more. For them departure from Olirna marks the beginning of travels, sometimes long, lasting even centuries, until they are capable of internalizing the tasks and wisdom of their Synclite. Thus, from the time of their death in Enrof until they join the Synclite, these souls do not undergo atonement but the expansion and enrichment of their selves.

Reincarnation is far from a universal law. The majority of monads do proceed along that path, however. They have already undergone a number of births among different peoples in Enrof, in different metacultures, even in different millennia in different corners of the globe, and many of them journeyed through other dominions of Shadanakar before their human cycle. Their shelts could even have presided over beings of the plant or animal worlds. Others have experienced, in times immemorial, incarnations as Titans, protoangels, or daemons. Recollections of their garland of births are stored in their deep memory, and the spiritual stature of such monads is especially great, the well of their memories is especially deep, and their future wisdom is distinguished by particular breadth. All recipients of a higher gift of artistic genius have woven such garlands of past reincarnations. Saints of Christian metacultures, unlike the saints of some Eastern metacultures, embark primarily on a different journey of ascent, one that brings them to Enrof but once. But during travels through other planes, that journey reveals to their eyes such heights of the universe that the memory burns within them like a star, and its rays disentangle their hearts from all webs of darkness during their one life in Enrof.

The activities of the Synclites are boundless in variety and scope and are in many respects beyond our power to comprehend. I can point to three branches of their activities: help, creative work, and struggle.

Help is for everyone who has not yet reached the zatomis. The angels of darkness, keepers of the purgatories, would not release their victims for centuries to come if not for the tireless efforts of the Synclites. Those suffering in the horrifying worlds of the magma and the Earth's core would be imprisoned there right up until the third global period. (We are now only approaching the end of the first.) If it were not for the Synclites, those living in Enrof would be encased in an almost impenetrable shell of spiritual darkness.

But that work-rescuing and relieving some, protecting and enriching others, and enlightening still others-is only one branch. Another branch is the creation of independent things of value, the significance of which cannot be exaggerated. But contemplating, let alone understanding, the works of the Synclitesis possible for us only to a minimal degree. To convey their meaning using our concepts is completely out of the question.

Somewhat easier to grasp is the third branch of the Synclites's activities: their struggle with the demonic powers. One might say that they fight in the literal sense, but their weapons, of course, do not have a single thing in common with weapons in Enrof. They vary greatly according to both the degree of control they have over one's own being and those against whom they are directed. They all operate on the same principle, however, which is the concentration of volitional radiations to paralyze the adversary. Synclite members cannot die in battle. In the case of defeat, what can happen is prolonged captivity in the dungeons of demonic strongholds.

The zatomis landscapes are dotted with a sort of equivalent of cities. They bear little resemblance to ours, however, especially since there is no housing in the strict sense of the word. The buildings there serve a very special function: they are primarily meeting places for Synclite members and the spirits of other hierarchies from other worlds. The buildings where their enlightened meetings with monads of elementals take place are called sheritals.

Zatomis architecture is nevertheless suggestive of styles we are familiar with, only raised to an incomparably higher level. It is the result of two parallel processes that are difficult, but necessary, to understand. It so happens that the great architectural masterpieces of Enrof, in being saturated with the radiations of many human psyches, acquire a soul, or more precisely, an astral body. These astral bodies abide in the zatomis. But there are also buildings in the zatomis that have no twin in Enrof, for example, these same sheritals. There are also those structures that builders in Enrof envisioned, designed, and set about constructing on Earth, but history placed insurmountable barriers in their path.

Synclite members can penetrate as far down as the magma in the worlds of descent and can rise up to very high planes known as the Highest Aspects of the Transmyths of the Global Religions.

Oral communication takes place in each zatomis in the transfigured language of the corresponding country in Enrof, but it is a language both of sound and light. There would be nothing strange in applying our concept of'vocabulary" to these languages, but their vocabulary, with its distinct, incomparably richer store of concepts, differs greatly from ours. Besides these metacultural languages, there is also a lingua franca: the names of the planes, beings, and hierarchies have their origin in it. The speed and ease with which foreign languages are mastered there cannot be compared to the same process in Enrof, for it takes place effortlessly, by itself. It is customary to call the zatomis lingua franca the language of the World Synclite, though the name is not entirely accurate: the World Synclite, which we will speak of much later, possesses methods of communication that have nothing in common with any kind of oral language. But the members of the World Synclite descended from their heights to the zatomis of metacultures to oversee the creation of a common zatomis language, and that is why the provisional name of the language is associated with them.

Besides the Synclites, other beings abide in the zatomis: future angels. They are wondrous creations of God, and if we recall the Sirins and Alkonosts of Russian legends, we will approach an image of those whose presence adorns life in the Byzantine and Russian zatomis, an image of beings destined later to become «solar archangels.» Other beings, no less beautiful, abide in other zatomis.

There are nineteen zatomis, and I shall say something here of each.

Maif is the oldest of the zatomis, the heavenly land and Synclite of the Atlantis metaculture, which existed in Enrof from approximately the twelfth to the ninth millennium B.C.

Atlantis was an archipelago; the largest and most important of its islands approached Sicily in size. It was populated by a socalled Red people. It was a slave-based society, which at first comprised a number of lesser states that were later unified under a dictatorship. Its worldview was polytheistic, with an important role reserved for magic. Its pantheon of gods and religious life were tainted by devil worship. Of those cultures known to us, Atlantis most closely resembled Egypt and, in part, the Aztec civilization, only grimmer. Architecture, sculpture, and dance were the principal art forms. Their civilization could by no means be called advanced, though its people, taking advantage of the chain of small islands running between Atlantis and America, maintained contact with the continent of their origin. Later they were to reach West Africa, and the legend of Atlantis subsequently came to Egypt via the ancient Sudanese civilization, which remains unknown to this day but whose ruins may still be unearthed in the future. Images of merciless and greedy divinities left their mark on the moral code of Atlantis, and ritual cannibalism played an important role in their religious life. In a late period of its history, semi-esoteric religious movements of Light emerged. But because of the active presence of the demonic, the overall spiritual picture was rather bleak.

The main island and the smaller ones surrounding it were destroyed by a series of catastrophic earthquakes. A few small groups of inhabitants escaped to America, and one group to Africa, where it was assimilated into the black population of Sudan. At present, Maif, which has already existed for almost fifteen millennia over a certain section of the Atlantic Ocean, has attained immense power of Light. Its emblem consists of a red temple on a black background; four white-clad figures stand in front of the temple with arms upraised. The figures represent the cults of the four divinities of Light. It was through these cults that spirituality flowed down into the Atlantis culture.

Linat is the name of the zatomis of Gondwana, by which I mean not the ancient continent that existed in the Indian Ocean long before the emergence of humans but rather the metaculture whose centers in Enrof were Java, Sumatra, South Hindustan, and certain cities that now lie on the ocean floor. The Gondwanese culture existed as late as the sixth millennium B.C.

This culture was composed of a federation of states-a commercial oligarchy with a slave-based economy. In addition, the advanced state of Gondwanese marine navigation enabled it to establish commercial and cultural links with the coast of Indochina, Ceylon, and many Indonesian islands. As in Atlantis, polytheism was dominant, as were the same three art forms, though in Gondwana dance developed into religious drama. But the bloodthirstiness and demonic, mystic cruelty of Atlantis was alien to Gondwana. They were a sensuous, sanguine, lifeloving people, richly gifted in the arts, and possessed of a very active sex life. Sexual mysticism permeated both their religious and everyday life, and attained genuine sumptuousness at the civilization's height. Not Atlantis, not even Babylon or Egypt knew such luxury. It seems to me that the Gondwanese race could be called pro/o-Malaysian. In any case, taut, brown' skin covered their high cheekbones and full lips, their oblong eyes were slightly slanted, and their bodies were well proportioned and muscular, with broad shoulders, slender waists, and very strong calves. They were a people blessed with the full- blooded and passionate beauty of the south.

Some millennia later, the Indo-Malaysian culture arose in the same region, which in some ways resembled its predecessors, but was much more spiritually mature.

The emblem of Linat is a violet-clad woman and a green-clad man on a gold background. They are under the lower half of a red sun, their arms around each other's shoulders.

Violet here represents a mix of dark blue and red. Dark blue symbolizes the powers of Universal Femininity, Whose emanation into the Gondwanese metaculture marked the first time in the existence of humanity that such an event had taken place with such intensity. Red symbolizes the elements-not the elementals of Nature but the extremely active presence of certain elementals linked with humanity. Green represents the same intense activity by elementals of Nature. Gold is the hieratic background that speaks of the already developed spiritual reality existing behind the suprapeople.

Ialu is the zatomis of the metaculture of Ancient Egypt. (If I remember correctly, it also has another name, which sounds something like Atkheam.) This culture, which utterly eclipsed Atlantis in size and splendor, had created, even before the end of its historical existence, a huge Synclite and dazzling zatomis.

The demonic powers, however, dealt it a serious blow in the fourteenth century B.C., when the Providential powers, operating through the great visionary leader and prophet Akhenaton, made the first attempt in world history to enlighten the minds of the people with the truth of the One God. If Akhenaton's reforms had succeeded and met with worthy successors Christ would have undertaken His mission several centuries earlier, and he would have done so not on the banks of the Jordan but in the Nile River valley.

I would like to mention that the Egyptian belief in the Heavenly Nile was based on experience of a higher reality. The magnificent river flowing through Ialu, the mythical Land of the Blessed-that is, the metaculture's zatomis-is multiplaned: it is both the great spiritualized elemental of the terrestrial Nile and the Collective Ideal Soul of the Egyptian people.

The emblem of Ialu depicts a white barge with sails on a blue river that flows into the sun.

Eanna is the zatomis of the ancient Babylonian-AssyrianCanaanite metaculture, which arose, it appears, in the fourth millennium B.C. The seven-tiered temples/observatories, which were the centers and pinnacles of the great cities of the Tigris-Euphrates region, mirrored, like a terrestrial reflection, the grandiose heavenly city built by the Synclite of the zatomis. But the ziggurats in the cities of Babylonia and the collective of initiates who absorbed the radiations of the cosmic powers of Light on top of their mystical observatories were also not shielded from the extremely harmful radiations coming from the galactic anticosmos, whose center in Enrof is located in the Antares system. That tainted the already ambivalent religion even more and injected a subtle poison into the essence of those exposed, encrusting and weighting their inner self with doubt and pessimism.

The Babylonian metaculture was the first in which Gagtungr was able to effect the incarnation of a Witzraor, a powerful demonic being, in the subterranean four-dimensional plane bordering the Babylonian shrastr. The descendants of that demon have played and continue to play a huge and deadly role in the metahistory of humanity. To a significant degree the Witzraor was to blame for the general spiritual decline that distinguished the culture in Enrof. And although Ereshkigal, the goddess of the underworld, was defeated in the end by Astarte, the goddess of Light, who, in a burst of sacrificial love, descended to the Babylonian transphysical planes of torment, their beliefs about the afterlife of all human souls, excluding those of kings and priests, was nevertheless steeped in a pessimistic, almost nihilistic despondency: it was an intuitive understanding of the paralyzing power of the demonic.

The emblem of Eanna pictures a seven-tiered white ziggurat. The seven stories represent the seven planes that were clearly intuited by the religious consciousness of the Babylonian suprapeople.

Shang Ti is the zatomis of the Chinese metaculture, which has existed in Enrof since the second millennium B.C. It began to grow significantly in strength in the last centuries prior to Christ, when Confucianism created a lasting code of morality and everyday conduct that enabled the people's overall moral level to rise. However, a very low ceiling was placed on the free development of the higher aspects of the soul. Confucianist law, in gradually fossilizing, became not so much a vehicle for ascent as a brake to it. This explains why the size and strength of the Chinese zatomis, in spite of its long history, are not as great as one would expect. Another zatomis that coexists with Shang Ti encroached upon geographical China after the spread of Buddhism. In the last few centuries it has admitted many more enlightened souls than the national zatomis. The emblem of Shang Ti is the face of a beautiful woman wearing a lotus-shaped crown.

Sumera, or Meru, (I do not know which of these names should be considered correct) is the zatomis of the Indian metaculture, the most powerful of all zatomis in Shadanakar. In earliest mythology, the summit of Mount Sumera was topped by the city of Brahma and the cities of other Hindu deities were on its slopes. But Heavenly India was not limited to them, for it encompassed several large tracts of land separated by water.

At present Heavenly India overlooks a geographical area of Enrof that stretches far beyond the borders of the Indian state.

Over the course of 4,000 years the spiritual life of the Indian peoples, who are exceptionally gifted in the religious sense, has resulted in two metacultures separating from it and becoming independent systems of planes. In the meantime, Heavenly India itself has been reinforced by such a huge number of enlightened that by the twentieth century the influence of its Synclite had come to outweigh the power of all the demonic forces combined. India is the only culture in Enrof that has unwaveringly developed along a high moral path. Much earlier the power of the Indian Synclite prevented the forces of Gagtungr from creating, as they did in the other metacultures, planes of eternal torment. Before Christ, it was the one metaculture with purgatories and the only one whose lower extremity did not extend as far as the magmas.

Meru has two major centers-one above the Himalayas and one above the Nilgiri mountains in central India-and a host of lesser ones. In addition, the Indian Synclite possesses a stable base of support in Enrof in the form of a fluid collective of people that moves along a kind of geographical curve from age to age. Prior to the Second World War it was located in Pamir, and it is now located in south India.

The landscape of Heavenly India resembles that of Heavenly Russia, but the natural environment is lusher. Both the tropical character of the corresponding countries in Enrof and the zatomis' longer history account for this. The Heavenly Ganges, which has the same double meaning for the Indian metaculture as the Heavenly Nile has for Egypt, flows through the entire zatomis.

The emblem of Sumeru depicts three white mountain chains, each higher than the previous one, each topped by golden cities. The first chain is the zatomis, and the second and third are very high worlds, the highest aspect of the Hindu transmyth.

Zurvan is the zatomis of the ancient Iranian (Zoroastrian) metaculture.

The insufficiently precise formulation of the idea of the One God in this nevertheless lofty and pure religion did not allow it to lay the necessary groundwork for Christ's mission to take place in Iran. A later attempt by the Iranian metaculture to make up for that failure through the creation of a new international religion- Manichaeanism-ended in a second failure, when demonic emanations gained access to the creative consciousness of its founders. By the time of the Muslim conquest, the Iranian culture had exhausted its forward momentum. During the centuries that followed, its only base of support in Enrof has been a Parsi community in India. As one would expect, the number of people entering Zurvan through the worlds of Enlightenment is now extremely small, while Zurvan itself has almost detached from its geographical area in Enrof.

Zurvan's emblem: a sacrificial altar with a burning fire.

Olympus is the zatomis of the ancient Greco-Roman metaculture. The name Olympus refers both to the center of the zatomis, a great city of the enlightened that is indeed connected to the geographical site of Mount Olympus, and to the entire heavenly land of the Greco-Roman metaculture. Having been, at the time of ancient Greece and Rome, the abode and theater of activity of those nonhuman hierarchies that were reflected in the persona of the Greco-Roman pantheon, the zatomis gradually became, in the millennium after Christ, the abode of the Synclite. The hierarchies that at one time abided there have, in the course of centuries, completed a great journey of ascent. They now abide and work in incomparably higher worlds, and at the same time they overlook Olympus and emanate beneficent energy to its Synclite.

Apollo is the name of the demiurge of the Greco-Roman metaculture. Pallas Athena is the name of the Collective Ideal Soul of the suprapeople.

The emblem of Olympus is a white temple, in the classical style, on a mountain against a blue sky.

Nikhord is the zatomis of the Jewish metaculture. It is the lower plane of the Synclite of Israel.

The great human spirit Abraham was the founder of Nikhord. The ancient teachers of Judaism were inspired by the demiurge of the suprapeople, but the purity of the inspiration was tainted first by elemental emanations from the «genius» of the Sinai mountains and then by emanations from the Jewish Witzraor.

Nonetheless, one should still regard the I of the Old Testament as the Almighty. Monotheism, as the soil without which Christ's task could not be carried out in Enrof, was essential for all humanity. Nikhord was able to instill the idea of the One God into the people's consciousness at the cost of a massive expenditure of energy, which exhausted it for a long time afterward. That is the reason for their not always successful struggle with the demonic and of the tragic nature of Jewish history. In the century that witnessed the life and death of Jesus, that geographically small region was the site of a ferocious battle between the forces of Gagtungr and God. That will be discussed in more detail elsewhere. Christ's Resurrection was greeted in Nikhord with great rejoicing. The attitude of theJewish Synclite toward the Planetary Logos is the same as in all other zatomis-there can be no question of any other. But the revelation of Christ's truth awaits those in Olirna who are destined to enter Nikhord later. They did not accept this truth while on Earth and it is so astonishing that many are unable to come to terms with it for a long time afterward.

The destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish kingdom gave rise to mourning in Nikhord, but with an awareness of the logic of events. No other fate was possible for the aggressive but weak Jewish Witzraor after it entered into irreconcilable battle with the demiurge of the suprapeople during the years of Christ's mission on Earth. There have been no more Jewish Witzraors since the final defeat of the Jews by Hadrian. But behind the Witzraor stood another, more terrible demonic hierarchy-the spawn of

Gagtungr and true rival of the demiurge-which continued to influence Jewry even during the diaspora. Medieval Judaism continued to develop under the influence of two opposing wills: that demon and Nikhord. At present, Nikhord admits a very small number of new members, who do nevertheless enter the worlds of Enlightenment through Judaism.

Geographically, Nikhord is still linked to the Palestine region. But the refounding of the state of Israel in the twentieth century has nothing whatsoever to do with Nikhord. The restored temple is a showpiece, no more. No new Israeli Witzraor has appeared, but a similar role is being played by one of the beings to be discussed in the chapter on egregors. It is under the powerful influence of the main camp of demonic forces.

Nikhord's emblem depicts a tentlike structure surrounded by trees with large red fruit. The tent is the Ark of the Covenant, the symbol of the first enduring revelation in history of the One God; the fruit-laden trees are the Promised Land, which awaits the suprapeople not on Earth but in the zatomis.

Paradise is the provisional name of the zatomis of the Byzantine metaculture. Like the other zatomis of Christian metacultures, it is one of the staircases rising from different directions to an extremely high world called Heavenly Jerusalem, which is nothing other than the Higher Aspect of the Christian Transmyth. This will be discussed more a little later.

Paradise is an ancient, powerful plane, a section of which exists in part over Russia as well. Its founder is the great human spirit who in Enrof was John the Baptist.

The victory of Jesus Christ, though only partial, gave rise to a great mobilization of forces in the demonic worlds. In particular, their efforts were aimed at preventing the planes of torment of the Byzantine metaculture from being turned into temporary purgatories. Their efforts were crowned with success, but the end result was the collapse of the Byzantine culture in Enrof. The lack of purgatories and the unavoidable descent by sinners after death to the endless tortures of the magma and core gave rise among the more spiritually gifted of the Byzantine people to a constant feeling of horror toward the most venial sin. To a significant extent that was what led to their extreme asceticism.

Metahistorically, the southern Slavs are located in a transitional area bordering the Byzantine, Russian, Roman Catholic, and Muslim metacultures. Their Synclites are in Paradise.

The emblem of Paradise is of a stream running through a garden in blossom, in which people are clad in golden garments. Their clothing symbolizes the transfigured body, and the color gold represents the body's permeation by the power of the Creator of the Universe.

Eden is the provisional name of the zatomis of the Roman Catholic metaculture, and it is one of the staircases to Heavenly

Jerusalem. Several peoples of various ethnic roots belong to the metaculture Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Irish, Croats.

The founder of Eden is the great human spirit who in Enrof was the Apostle Peter.

The emblem is the same as for Paradise, but the dominant color is light blue. Light blue represents the dense permeation of Catholicism by the spirit of Universal Femininity.

Monsalvat is the zatomis of the metaculture of North-Western Europe, North America, Australia, and some parts of Africa. Geographically, it is the largest and most dispersed of all the zatomis. The founder of Monsalvat is the great human spirit Titurel, who had close ties with Christ long before our Savior's incarnation in Palestine. Like Lohengrin and Parsifal, he is not a fictional hero but a person who did at one time live in Enrof (though not in Palestine). The Holy Grail contains the ether blood that Christ shed on Golgotha.

The division of the planes of Eden and Monsalvat is based for the most part on national and cultural distinctions between the Romanic and Germanic peoples. But the greater or lesser part played by the ecclesiastic or lay segments of the populace led to a host of changes taking place in the afterlife fates of the people of Western Europe, especially since Monsalvat appeared several centuries after Eden. France is in an interim stage; its tragedy lies in the fact that it has no Synclite of its own. Some of the ascending monads from France rise to Eden after death, and others to Monsalvat.

The center of Monsalvat, which had earlier been connected with the Alps, was relocated far to the East at the end of the Middle Ages and is now located near Pamir. (The reasons for this are very complex.) But a host of other, lesser metacities shine above Europe and America. Some of them overlook centers in Enrof that are small in size but spiritually powerful, such as Heidelberg, Cambridge, and Weimar.

Monsalvat's emblem is a Gothic cathedral, white in color, on a mountain peak. In the foreground is a cup glowing red.

Zhunfleya is the zatomis of the Ethiopian metaculture, which for two thousand years has struggled to survive under exceptionally unfavorable historical and geographical conditions: a small island of Christianity between two hostile oceans, Islam and the paganism of African tribes. The metaculture has not been able to realize even one-tenth of its potential. At present, a distressing metahistorical process is taking place: Zhunfleya is being relocated to another sakwala, the sakwala of developmentally arrested metacultures in Enrof. An exceptionally fortunate combination of historical circumstances could still reverse the process.

Its emblem is a white circular building draped in fluttering cloths. The building represents the zatomis, and the cloths represent subtle materiality.

The zatomis of the Islamic metaculture isJannet. Islam differs from the other global religions in that it lacks a higher aspect of its transmyth-that is, there is no world dedicated specifically to Islam in the very high sakwala of the worlds of the higher transmyths of the global religions. That accounts for the poverty of Muslim mythology, for the lack of originality of most transphysical images and themes formulated in it, which were borrowed primarily from Judaism and Christianity. Islam, which is in many respects a regression in relation to Christianity, nevertheless offers a soul the possibility of ascent, enables spiritual energy to flow through it into our world, and in the course of its history has created a very bright, if not powerful, zatomis and a dazzling Synclite.

Its emblem is a white mosque between two symmetrically bending palms with people clad in green and white. The mosque represents the zatomis; the palms represent the two chief branches of Islam.

Sukhavati-which is in Buddhist mythology the western paradise of Amitabha Buddha-is the zatomis of the metaculture associated with northern Buddhism, known as the Mahayana. It overlooks Tibet and Mongolia and coexists over China and Japan with Shang Ti and Nikisaka, theJapanese national zatomis.

Sukhavati separated from its parent Indian metaculture in the ninth century A.D., when the centers of Buddhism moved once and for all out of India into Tibet and China. It particularly grew in strength three to four centuries later, when the Himalayan metaculture, which had had a brilliant beginning, started to show signs of a premature decline, and the leading role of the Tibetan and Chinese centers of Buddhism was reaffirmed.

The zatomis of Sukhavati is one of the most populous and strongest. It is one of two staircases to the high world of the Higher Aspect of the Buddhist Transmyth which is called Nirvana and of which we will speak later.

The emblem of Sukhavati is the sun dawning over lotus flowers.

Aireng-Dalyang is the zatomis of the prodigious Indo-Malaysian metaculture, which is as yet relatively unknown here in Russia. Having separated from the Indian metaculture around the fifth century A.D., it encompassed the Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of Java, Indochina, and Ceylon, at one point taking historical form as the Shailendra Empire. The metaculture was later seriously weakened both by the succession of Java, which fell under Islamic control, and by predatory demons-the European Witzraors-at the end of the nineteenth century. The metaculture is still smoldering within the Indochinese kingdoms, but a favorable historical climate could give rise to a renewed blossoming.

Its emblem depicts laughing children in the garden of a temple-palace.

Heavenly Russia will be described in more detail than the others a few paragraphs below.

Unfortunately I know virtually nothing about the zatomis of the Black metaculture, not even its name. I know that it is young and still very weak. After the collapse of the Sudanese culture, together with its religion, which had enabled spirituality to flow down not only among the elite but even among the masses of the Black peoples of equatorial Africa, Blacks were for a long time deprived of the possibility of ascent after death. The possibility arose for them again only a few centuries ago in connection with the fact that some tribes had reached the stage where their hazily formulated polytheistic systems became capable of assimilating the first manifestations of spirituality. The door to an ascending afterlife was opened to the Black peoples to an even greater extent by the spread among them-unfortunately weak-of

Islam and Christianity. The founding of Liberia was also of metahistorical significance, establishing as it did a small but stable center of Christian spirituality in equatorial Africa. The Black population of North America is also connected with the Black zatomis. White people rise to the zatomis only in rare instances. Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, after having reached Monsalvat, left it for the Black zatomis, where her work has for a long time been of great significance, and her position has partly resembled that of a queen and partly that of a high priestess.

Its emblem is a stairway leading from a lake to an orange circular building. The lake represents the materiality of the suprapeople and the building represents the zatomis. The color orange is a blend of the gold of the sun with the scarlet of elementals linked not with the natural realms but with humanity.

The last of the great zatomis is in the midst of construction. It is Arimoya, the future zatomis of the global metaculture, which is connected with the appearance and dominion of the Rose of the World, the future interreligion. As in the other zatomis, the materiality of Arimoya is being created by the Principalities, one of the angelic hierarchies. The great human spirit who was Zoroaster in his last reincarnation on Earth is overseeing the creation of what I will provisionally designate with the term great design.

The emblem of Arimoya is a white, multitowered cathedral, with one main central tower, colonnades, and stairways. It is surrounded by a number of large string instruments resembling golden lyres. The towers represent the zatomis of humanity; the central tower is Arimoya; the colonnades are the worlds of daemons, angels, elementals, and enlightened animals; the lyres represent all the peoples of the Earth.

Heavenly Russia. Its emblem is a pink-white city of many churches on a high bank overlooking the dark blue bend of a river.

Like the other zatomis, Heavenly Russia, or Holy Russia, is linked with the three-dimensional territory that roughly follows the contours of our country. Its great centers correspond to certain of our cities; between them are beautiful regions of enlightened nature. The principal center is the Heavenly Kremlin, which overlooks Moscow. Its cathedrals shine with unearthly gold and white. And high above meta-Petersburg, in the clouds of that world, soars the lofty white sculpture of a galloping horseman. It is not intended to be a representation of anyone in particular; it is, rather, a symbol of the direction of our metahistorical journey. Lesser centers are scattered throughout the entire zatomis, including the metacultural summits of other nations that together with Russia form a single suprapeople. There abide the Synclites of the Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia. Recently the Synclite of the Bulgarian people, along with its own heavenly cities, has begun to merge with the zatomis. I do not know the total population of Heavenly Russia, but I do know that about half a million enlightened souls now abide in the Heavenly Kremlin.

Yarosvet, the Demiurge, takes the form of a transparent ocean of energy in the air of that world, passing from horizon to horizon and flooding all hearts with Light. His power is concentrated in the temples of the demiurge. There he assumes individual features, his voice becomes audible, and interaction takes place between him and the enlightened, interaction that imparts to them strength and higher wisdom.

Another hierarchy similar to the demiurge manifest themselves in the same way. They are the great guiding spirits of the individual nations that are also part of our metaculture. Ones older than Yarosvet can be found among them, as can the young guiding spirit of the Ukraine.

But neither Navna-the Collective Ideal Soul of the Russian people-nor her sisters-the Collective Souls of the other peoples-are there. They are prisoners behind thick walls of state power in the citadel of the Witzraor, the state demon, in the underworld of Russian antihumankind. Only their distant voices and weak light reach Heavenly Russia.

There, seas of glowing ether-the souls of elementals, which shine with colors beyond our imagination-lap against structures that bear a remote resemblance to the azure and white hulks of mountains. The Russian church sings of that world when it sends the deceased on their final journey, so that the Lord may give them rest in «a place of light, a place of plenty, a place of calm, so they may know neither sorrow, nor grief, but life everlasting.»

Newcomers to Heavenly Russia materialize in special sanctuaries as children, not infants. Their inner world is similar to that of children. As for aging, it is replaced by growth in enlightenment and spiritual strength. There is neither conception nor birth. Guardians, not parents, make provision for the conditions necessary for the enlightenment of souls rising up from Gotimna.

One can discern in the external appearance of some Synclite members features that their lives in Enrof have made famous: now those features are radiant and dazzling. Rarefied and softened, they shine with spiritual glory. Their clothing, produced by their transfigured body, glows of itself. They move freely in all four directions of space in a manner that is vaguely reminiscent of the soaring of birds, but which surpasses it in ease, freedom, and speed. They have no wings. A great many planes are within the sight and hearing of the enlightened. Among the planes of descent are purgatories, the magma, and terrible Gashsharva. The worlds of Enlightenment, the circles of angels, daemons, and elementals, the worlds of emanations from other bramfaturas, and the worlds of the Higher Aspects of Global Transmyths are among the planes of ascent. Synclite members can enter the dark shrastrs, the worlds of antihumankind, where the inhabitants can see them but are powerless to destroy them. They can enter our Enrof as well, but humans can perceive them only with spiritual sight.

The love between man and woman in Enrof, which is worthy of the title of greatness, continues there as well, growing and deepening, liberated from all things that may burden it here. There is bodily intimacy between some as well, but it has been freed of any procreative function and has nothing whatsoever in common with physical intimacy in Enrof. Many bodily organs have by that time undergone radical alterations in their structure, function, and purpose, including organs concerned with the consumption and digestion of food, since the replenishment of bodily energy there resembles breathing. Growth in spirituality eventually brings the enlightened to the next great transfiguration of the body, which leads to higher worlds, to Heavenly Jerusalem, and still higher-all the way to the World Synclite and the Elite of Shadanakar.

There is nothing in the zatomis resembling our technology; its place is taken by something extremely difficult to grasp. I can nevertheless state with surety that, instead of creating mechanical devices from external matter, it operates on the principle of developing the manifold abilities of one's own essence. There, only that which is to a certain extent comparable to our works of architecture is created from external matter.

The souls of churches that were built on Earth, or were supposed to have been built, gleam everywhere there. Many temples, however, serve a function difficult for us to comprehend. There are sanctuaries for interaction with angels, the World Synclite, daemons, and the upper hierarchies. A few large temples are reserved for meetings with Jesus Christ, Who descends there from time to time, assuming a visible, humanlike form. Other temples are for meetings with the Virgin Mary. A magnificent temple is now being erected, destined to be the sanctum of the Great Feminine Spirit, Who will take on an astral and ether body from the marriage of the Russian demiurge with the Collective Ideal Soul of Russia. I have been accustomed since childhood to calling it the Temple of the Universal Sun, but the name is wrong. It properly refers to a different and even more majestic building, the one destined to be built in Arimoya. As for the temple being erected in the Heavenly Kremlin, it is called the Sanctum of Zventa-Sventana, and I will later explain the meaning of that name. That great Feminine Essence has by now already entered one of the highest worlds of Shadanakar. She will never incarnate physically in Enrof but will be born in Heavenly Russia and assume human form. She will not be our queen or goddess; she will be Light, divine grace, and celestial beauty.

Staircases of wondrous worlds, each visible through the other, rise from the altars in the Temple of Femininity, the Temples of Christ, and the Temples of Yarosvet, the demiurge. The staircases rise up through Heavenly Jerusalem to the threshold of the World Salvaterra.

From time to time, great human spirits are born in Heavenly Russia: those who have completed their journey in Shadanakar, having reached its highest worlds, and who now co-create with the Planetary Logos. They leave the Elite of Shadanakar to help those below and, in order to carry out missions beyond the co~,nprehension of the greatest mystical minds of humanity, they materialize in the zatomis. There they assume the same enlightened bodies as the Synclite members but far surpass them in the speed with which they reach full spiritual maturity and in their inner stature. Their paths in the zatomis resemble the lives of geniuses among the masses of humanity. The Synclites are notified ahead of time of their arrival and await them with gladness and rejoicing.

Those who were geniuses and messengers on Earth continue their work in the zatomis after atonement, enlightenment, and transformations.

The bliss of the Gamayuns and Sirins themselves increases when they see the masterpieces being wrought by great spirits that last walked the Earth in the persons of Derzhavin and Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Rublev and Surikov, Glinka and Mussorgsky, Kazakov and Bazhenov. Shining waves of inconceivable sounds swell in places as if from out of the heart of the celestial mountains. They usher souls into a state of such spiritual joy that a heart on Earth would burst from it, and, rising and twisting like clouds of glory, they plunge down into love and quiet bliss.

The great architect who at one time undertook construction of the Church of the Body, Soul, and Spirit on the Vorobyov Hills in Moscow, and who lived through the death of his dream, exile, oblivion, and impoverishment, is now at work on the most sacred of all things in the Heavenly Kremlin: the inner chapel of the Sanctum of Zventa-Sventana.

Only a handful of enlightened souls in Heavenly Russia would be recognized by those of us familiar with the history of our Motherland. The names of the rest will mean nothing to us.

In the monasteries of Kievan and Muscovite Russia, as well as in those of later times, quiet souls, not gifted enough to blaze forth like saints, lived their lives unnoticed, silently and humbly contributing in their small way to religious work and to the collective labor of the spirit.

Down the roads of Russia throughout the centuries roamed pilgrims and searchers, raconteurs and minstrels, the anonymous authors of fairy tales and uplifting poetry, of songs and legends, of unrecorded stories, now lost, about the heroes and ideals of those times. The brilliant masters of spinning, engraving, and icon-painting; the carpenters and builders of splendid terems, humble wooden churches, and brightly decorated houses; masons, cabinetmakers, potters, weavers, jewelers, and copiers; people who loved their work and pursued it in studios, shops, monastery cells, and in the open air; whose works, stamped with the joy of the creative process and a passionate love for life, have pleased and delighted entire generations- where else can those creators be and what could they be creating now if not the everlasting treasures of Holy Russia?

Throughout every period in Russian history thousands of peasants-land- clearers, farmers, hired hands, serfs and free alike, have lived simple and pure lives, have carried out the sowing and reaping as a duty laid on them by God, with veneration for and gratitude to Mother Earth, and have died simply and peacefully, believing in God and forgiving everyone.

Throughout those centuries thousands of mothers have borne their cross, raising children worthy of the name «human» and seeing their life's purpose in that calling. Is that not one of the highest forms of creative work?

When schools began to be built, hundreds of people abandoned their customary surroundings and way of life and left for (one could say descended into) the lower levels of society, shutting themselves off for for their whole life in remote areas, amidst chronic ignorance, where there was no one with whom to exchange an intelligent word: all for the sake of educating the uneducated.

And what of medical practitioners who worked one to an entire district? And doctors who displayed their heroism during

epidemics? And those revolutionaries who were motivated not by fanaticism, hate, and a thirst for power but by a genuine love for the people and by anguish at seeing their anguish? And those priests who, to the extent the gifts given them by God allowed, were models of a pure and simple life, cultivating in many the best that was in their simple hearts? It is impossible to list all the paths by which travelers on Earth arrive sooner or later at the Synclite. It is only a question of time, of stages still to be passed through on the way to that goal. It is a goal that people are not fully conscious of but that is known to their immortal monads and thus draws them onward.

Oh, it is pointless to imagine Heavenly Russia as a never-ending, monotonous series of solemn liturgies and prayer sessions. We have no idea of the spiritual delights they enjoy there or of the jokes, laughter, and even games, especially among the children.

I could list the names of some Russian cultural and historical figures who have entered Heavenly Russia in the last forty years. Let those-who-will laugh over the information. After all, I have long been accustomed to having a reputation of a lunatic. So here are the names of some of those who did not descend in their afterlife, and instead entered the Synclite through the worlds of Enlightenment immediately upon their death in Enrof: Leskov, Rimsky- Korsakov, Kluchevsky, Gumilov, Voloshin, Rachmaninov, Anna Pavlova, Sergei Bulgakov, John of Kronshtadt, Patriarch Tikhon, Prince Alexci Nikolayevich, several masters of the arts, and thousands of heroes who died at the hands of Stalin. Here are the names of only a very few of those who joined the Synclite after a brief time in the upper purgatories: Fet, L. Andreyev, Alexander Blok, Shalyapin, Alexander II, Konstantin Romanov, Professor Pavlov.

I know, as well, the names of some among the enlightened who have risen to special heights in Heavenly Russia: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Lev Tolstoy, A. K. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, the Aksakovs, Vitberg, Kutuzov, and Chemezov, a little-known engraver of the eighteenth century who died young.

The following are at present closer than the rest to the great transformation that will raise them to Heavenly Jerusalem and

the World Synclite: Lermontov, Vladimir Solovyov, the Emperor Ivan VI, as well as two spirits whose names surprised me but which were twice repeated: Shevchenko and PavelFlorensky.

During the whole existence of the Russian zatomis, a few dozen people have risen through it to the World Synclite. Of these the following names are known to me: Saint Vladimir, Yaroslav the Wise, Antony and Feodosy of

Pechery, Nestor the Chronicler, Sergi the soldier, who was the author of The Lay of the Host of Igor, Alexander Nevsky, Sergi of Radonezh, Andrei Rublev, Nil of Sory, Lomonosov, Alexander I, Ambrosius of Optina, and Serafim of Sarov.

Our sight, once it bursts the fetters of our space, can discern the heavenly lands of other metacultures in the distance, beyond the borders of the Russian metaculture, lands just as radiant and full of unique variety. Preparations through love and mutual understanding for the creation of holy Arimoya, the heavenly land of all humanity-that is the bond that now joins the Synclites and cities of different metacultures. The greatest of the children of humanity, after completing their work in their holy cities, leave their metaculture. Rising up to the World Synclite from different directions, as it were, they come together at last, but still long before they have reached that world. The world where they meet is called Gridruttva, the white chamber where they devise the overall plan for the ascent of humanity. Their further ascent takes them to planes where their wisdom and power surpass those of demiurges. The Higher Providential Plan, which we can sometimes distinguish in history as the pattern behind the individual plans of the demiurges, is the product of their creative work. They are the World Synclite. While maintaining full clarity of spiritual consciousness, they co-create with the Planetary Logos Himself.

Work on Arimoya in four-dimensional worlds has only just begun; its historical reflection on Earth will constitute the meaning and goal of the coming century. It is for that very purpose that the energy of the Eternal Virgin Mother, energy that is concentrated within one divine monad, flowed down from transcosmic spheres into the highest planes of Shadanakar. It is also for that purpose that a fabulous temple is being erected in Heavenly Russia-in order to receive Her, Whose birth in the four-dimensional worlds is the goal and purpose of the future marriage of the Russian demiurgeand Collective Soul. In historical terms, it is through the manifestation of the Great Feminine Spirit in the Rose of the World that the transformation of the governments of all peoples into a global community will begin. In all that, the Russian Synclite is being helped and will be helped by the Synclites of all the metacultures. In turn, the World Synclite will inherit and continue their work, so as to crown it with the appearance of a global theohumankind.

There is, however, another sakwala of zatomis in Shadanakar besides the nineteen great ones. These are the zatomis of metacultures whose development was tragically arrested in Enrof. If it becomes clear that the Providential forces of a given metaculture cannot withstand the onslaught of the demonic, its zatomis is transferred to a plane in that other sakwala. Its cultural and sometimes its state institutions in Enrof dissolve little by little

into the cultures surrounding it, its Witzraors die, the underworld shrastrs hunger in miserable inactivity and eventually die off. But the zatomis continues to develop; its Synclite continues and intensifies its creative work. Souls that have not yet attained a level at which the zatomis of such a metaculture opens its doors to them may complete the necessary stages of growth outside of Enrof or undergo incarnations in other metacultures and countries. But in the end they always ascend to their own zatomis. There are also instances when the cultural-historical base in Enrof continues to exist while experiencing gradual decay, and the zatomis maintains an active link with it. In such cases, it is still possible, under favorable circumstances, for the zatomis to be restored to its former sakwala, and its suprapeople to historical life. Something like that is now taking place with Zhunfleya, as I have already mentioned.

It remains for me to list briefly the fifteen zatomis of that second sakwala.

Nanzbata is the zatomis of the Ancient Sudanese metaculture, which developed very slowly, barely smoldering under very unfavorable conditions in the Niger Valley, in the vicinity of Lake Chad, and in Cordophan between the ninth and fifth millennia B.C. It collapsed under the centrifugal forces that exhausted it during continuous internecine wars. That first attempt in the history of humanity to unite antagonistic and ethnographically diverse peoples through a common interethnic religion (polytheistic, of course) failed because of the intense demonic influence emanating from the religion's extremely ambivalent pantheon. Archaeological ruins of the culture may still be unearthed.

Its emblem is a circle of naked black dancers on an emeraldgreen background.

Tsen-Tin is the zatomis of the pro/o-Mongolian metaculture (pro/o- Mongolian in the geographical, not ethnographic, sense). Its people were Asiatic, but both anthropologically and spiritually they were more closely related to the peoples of Gondwana than to those of later Mongolia. Its people settled northern China and the Amur region in the fourth or third millennium B.C. and were in the process of converting from a nomadic to a settled way of life. Small cities had already begun to spring up. The culture had a remarkable beginning. It was not a demiurge of the suprapeople at the head of their hierarchy but a powerful demonic being that was to convert and had already begun to convert to Light. The being was thrown down by Gagrungr and the suprapeople were crushed by hordes sweeping over from Central Asia.

Its emblem is a winged dragon with its head thrown up to the sun, all awash with the sun's rays.

Pred is the zatomis of the Dravidian metaculture, which is a provisional designation, as it comprised peoples of various ethnic roots, including some closely related to the Sumerians. The cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa belong to the later stages of the metaculture. Its collapse (at the beginning of the second millennium B.C.) resulted from factors both internal (I have no idea of their nature) and external (the invasion of the Aryans).

I did not see clearly the emblem of Pred. But I did see a pink pagoda.

Asgard, which is sometimes incorrectly referred to by the more popular name Valhalla, is the zatomis of the ancient Germanic metaculture, which was crippled by the spread of historical Christianity. Disaster overtook it in the twelfth century A.D.

Its emblem is a golden hall in the clouds.

Tokka is the zatomis of the ancient Peruvian (pre-Inca) metaculture, which developed historically in the centuries immediately prior to and after the birth of Christ. There is, perhaps, no reason to bewail the collapse of the culture in Enrof, for the influence of the demonic was very strong in it (That culture was supposed to have greatly advanced the task of enlightening the animal world, but historically it came to deify it and degenerate into widespread cannibalism).

Its emblem depicts the stone statue of a seated puma.

Bon is the zatomis of the ancient Tibetan metaculture, which was destroyed by Buddhism, but elements of it were assimilated by the Mahayana culture.

The Bon emblem depicts red and blue bolts of lightning crisscrossing above the orange tent of a king. The blue lightning represents Buddhism and its spirituality; the red represents the pre-Buddhist Tibetan religion, which was tainted to a very great extent by demonism. The tent represents royalty, which fell as a result of the meeting of those two powers.

Gauripur is the zatomis of the small Himalayan metaculture, which separated from India too soon, yet had immense poten

tial. It was there that the brightest centers of Buddhism were at one time kindled. There, in the context of the teaching, those metahistorical processes took place that fashioned it into a religion in the full sense of the word-that is, a teaching that was not only moral but transphysical and spiritual as well. The moral aspect of Buddhism was raised in the Himalayas to a height known only in the purest forms of Christianity.

The Himalayan metaculture collapsed under the two-pronged onslaught of state demons: the Turkic Witzraors from the north and west, and the Witzraors of the Great Mogul Empire from the south. At present the metaculture is dying out in Nepal.

Its emblem is a crowned mountain peak beneath the constellation Orion.

Yunkif is the zatomis of the Mongolian metaculture, which immediately fell prey to an unusually powerful Witzraor. Disaster overtook it in the thirteenth century.

Yunkif s emblem is a rolling line of hills, with two flocks, white and red, battling above them.

Yiru is the zatomis of the ancient Australian metaculture, which for two thousand years existed in central Australia in total isolation from the rest of humanity. Their society reached the level of a slave state. The metaculture collapsed as the result of the extremely active role played by demonic elementals-the spirits of deserts and impenetrable thickets. For many centuries two religions-«right hand» and "left hand," polytheistic and demonic- were locked in struggle within the culture. The latter offered human sacrifices to those same malevolent elementals that were engaged in destroying the metaculture. Toward the end, it was that religion that prevailed, and resistance to the encroachment of the desert and thickets was proclaimed taboo. The culture in Enrof died out from internal dessication. The most refined of their arts was painting. It was to a certain extent reminiscent of Cretan painting but was more distinctive and imaginative. The ruins to be unearthed will not be extensive enough to permit a picture of the civilization to be reconstructed.

Its emblem is a cloud above a volcano, representing the suprapeople and its Synclite.

Taltnom is the zatomis of the Tolteko-Aztec metaculture. Its emblem is the face of a hero crowned by the sun.

Kertu is the zatomis of the Yucatan (Mayan) metaculture. Its emblem depicts a blue serpent twined around a golden tree. Not every people has regarded the serpent as a dark symbol. The golden tree represents the spiritual (transphysical) world. The blue serpent symbolizes the suprapeople, who through spirallike growth rise into the spirit.

Intil is the zatomis of the Incan metaculture, whose collapse in Enrof, strange as it may seem, saved the world from great peril. (This will be discussed in another part of the book.) Its emblem is a red-clad figure, wearing a miter, with arms uplifted to the sun. Red here symbolizes majesty, and the miter, the high priesthood.

Daffam is the zatomis of the metaculture of the Great Lakes Indians. (That culture was specially charged with combating Voglea, the female lunar demon. That accounts for the suprapeople's exceptional chasteness and their rejection of urban-based civilization.)

Its emblem is a group of warriors pointing their spears at the crescent of a waning moon.

Lea is the zatomis of the Polynesian metaculture, which was doomed by its extreme geographical dispersion. Embers of that metaculture are still smouldering on Hawaii, Tahiti, and other archipelagoes. Its emblem is a golden mountain on an island in a blue sea.