The Rose of the World

The Providential powers continued to be faced with the task of enlightening three-dimensional materiality. Since the animal world had been incapacitated in that respect, at least for the foreseeable future, preconditions were created for one species to be singled out, a species that could perform the task successfully in a shorter period of time. The species was singled out in a manner that resembled a giant leap forward. At the same time, the parent species, from which the new, progressive species separated, served as a kind of trampoline for it. The more humanity leaped forward, the farther back the parent species that had served as a trampoline recoiled. Later that species evolved into the order of primates-a tragic example of regression. Thus, our leap from animal to human took place at the cost of a halt in the development of a great many other beings.

The more predatory an animal, the more demonized it is. That demonization is, of course, restricted to their shelts and denser material coatings. It cannot affect the monad. But the demonization of the shelt can attain horrifying degrees and give rise to terrible consequences. It is enough to recall what happened to many species of the reptile class. The Mesozoic era was marked by the fact that the reptile class, some of whose members had by that time grown to colossal size, was split into two. The half that remained herbivorous was given the opportunity to continue their development on other planes, and there now exists a material world, Zhimeira, where such beings as brontosaurs and iguanodons, which have undergone countless incarnations, now abide in the form of fully intelligent, kindly, and extremely affectionate beings. As for the other half of the giant lizards, the predators, they evolved on other planes in the opposite direction. For a long time now, they have had karrokh instead of physical bodies, and it is none other than they who rampage in the shrastrs in the form of raruggs.

Zhimeira, the present abode of the better half of prehistoric animals, has already begun to disappear, for they are moving on to higher planes. Two other planes are full of a myriad of beings: Isolde-the world of the souls of most animals in existence today, through which they flash very quickly in the intervals between incarnations, and Ermastig-the world of the souls of the higher animals. The representatives of only a few species ascend to Ermastig after death, and only some members even of those species do so. They remain in that world much longer than the others remain in Isong.

That all brings to mind the words of Zosima the Elder in The Brothers Karamazov, words remarkable for their wisdom:

«Look at the horse ... or the lowly, pensive ox ... Iook at their visages, what meekness, what devotion to man, who often beats them mercilessly. What gentleness, what confidence, and what beauty in their visages!»

To refer to a horse or a cow as having a visage-now that requires the power of true insight. The customary surface of things revealed its depths to the prophetic eye of Dostoyevsky, and he saw what the future holds for animals. For a world already exists where the mature souls of many of them, coated in enlightened bodies, are beautiful, wise in spirit, and highly intelligent. All of them will in time attain that world, Hangvilla, the highest in the sakwala, and then rise higher, to Faer, Usnorm, and Kaermis.

Oh, the vile marks of Gagtungr's claws can be seen on much else in the animal world! For example, by squeezing together the shelts of some animals, he was able to do them harm in a way for which it is hard to find an analogy on our plane. He did not exactly press or graft them together, but he turned them from individual into collective shelts. The individual shelts of many lower life forms are but short-lived manifestations of that one collective shelt. Such, for example, are most insects, not to mention protozoa. The individual shelt of a fly or a bee, for example, is, in a manner of speaking, only a tiny swelling on the surface of the collective soul. If a bee or fly dies here in Enrof, the swelling disappears back into the communal shelt of the swarm of bees or flies.

The world of the collective souls of insects and protozoa is called Nigoyda. There the collective souls, especially those of bees and ants, are endowed with intelligence. In external appearance they resemble the beings that embody them in Enrof, but they are larger and more imbued with Light. Some of them-at present only a few-ascend higher, to Hangvilla, and there become beautiful and wise, even acquiring a certain magnificence and nobility. Hangvilla is the great zatomis common to the entire animal world, and from there the animals' enlightened souls ascend through Faer directly to Usnorm itself; where they take part in the eternal liturgy of Shadanakar.

What will seem even stranger concerns not live animals but some children's toys. I am referring to the teddy bears, stuffed rabbits, and other toy animals everyone knows and loves. Each one of us loved them in childhood, and we all experienced the same sadness and pain when we began to understand that they were only the work of human hands and not really alive. But happily, children who cling faithfully to the belief that their toys are alive and can even speak are closer to the truth than we are. Using our higher faculties, we could in such cases witness a singular creative process. At first such a toy has neither an ether nor astral body nor a shelt nor, of course, a monad. But the more a teddy bear is loved, the more a child's soul showers it with tenderness, warmth, affection, pity, and trust, the denser and more concentrated becomes the fine matter within it, of which a shelt is made. A genuine shelt gradually forms, but it has neither astral nor ether body, and therefore the physical body-the toy- cannot come to life. But when the toy, permeated throughout with an immortal shelt, perishes in Enrof; a divine act takes place, and the newly created shelt is paired with a young monad entering Shadanakar from the heart of God. Among the souls of the higher animals that are coated in astral and ether, an astonishing being makes its appearance in Ermastig, a being for whom those same coatings are to be fashioned there. They are striking not for their beauty or grandeur but, rather, for that inexpressible something that softens our hard hearts at the sight of a baby rabbit or fawn. In Ermastig those beings are even more wonderful, because their respective toys have never had a drop of evil in them. There, together with the souls of real bears and deer, they live a delightful life, receive an astral body, and then ascend to Hangvilla like the rest.

I can give here only a bare outline of a method for solving problems associated with the transphysics and eschatology of the animal world. But even that will be enough to realize how much more complex the matter is than the thinkers of the older religions believed. The simplistic formula «Animals know no sin» does not do the least justice to the essence of the matter. If in the given case «sin» refers to the state of sexual consciousness in which a feeling of shame and the idea of a prohibition on certain kinds of sexual activity are lacking, then animals truly do not know sin. But it would be better to say that for them these activities are not prohibited, not punishable by karma, and not a sin. On the other hand, the concept of sin encompasses an area infinitely broader than just sex. Malice, cruelty, unfounded and unbridled anger, bloodthirstiness, and jealousy are the sins of the animal world, and we are not in the possession of any facts on the basis of which we could judge the extent that one or another animal is conscious of the wrongness of such actions. In addition, that does not resolve the question of whether or not such a prohibition exists for them. It is absurd to assume that a law comes into effect only when it is cognized. No one before Newton knew of the law of gravity, but everyone and everything has always been subject to it. It matters not whether animals are conscious of a higher law or not, whether they have a vague intuition of it or no intuition at all: causality remains causality, and karma remains karma.

As far as I understand, a hungry lion that kills an antelope does not incur individual guilt, since the killing was a necessity for it, but it does incur the guilt of its species or class-the ancient guilt of all predators. But a tiger with a full belly that attacks an antelope out of excessive bloodthirstiness and malice incurs individual guilt as well as the guilt common to the species, for it was not driven by necessity to kill its victim. A wolf that, in defending itself from dogs, kills one in the fight is not guilty individually, but it is guilty as a member of a predatory species, whose ancestors at one time elected to evolve in that direction.

We are dealing here with a kind of original sin. But a plump, well-fed cat that amuses itself by playing with a mouse is guilty of both original and individual sins, because there is no call for its actions. Some will say I am applying human, even legalistic, concepts to the animal world. But the concept of guilt is not only a legal concept; it is a transphysical, metahistorical, and ontological concept as well. The nature of guilt can vary between natural realms and hierarchies, but that in no way means that the concept itself and the reality of karma behind it is applicable to humanity alone.

The secular era of thought also has failed to introduce any new ideas to the question. To the contrary, the dominant attitude toward animals in modern times began to form from two opposing principles-the utilitarian and the emotional. The animal world has been divided into categories in concordance with the relationship a given species has to humans. First of all, of course, come pets and domesticated animals. People take care of them and sometimes even love them. If a cow falls sick they shed tears over it. But if it stops giving milk, they take it away, with deep sighs, to a certain place where their beloved animal is converted into so many kilos of beef. With childlike innocence farmers then feed off the meat themselves and feed it to their households. The second category includes a large segment of wild animals, as well as fish. People do not domesticate them; they do not lavish care on them, but they simply trap or hunt them down. The matter is simple with the third group, predators and parasites. People kill them whenever and however they can. A fourth group comprises wild animals, birds in particular, that show their usefulness by killing harmful insects and rodents. That category is permitted to live and multiply, and in certain cases-for example, starlings or storks-they are even protected by law. As for all the other animals, from lizards and frogs to jackdaws and magpies, they are sometimes caught for scientific purposes or simply for the sport of it. Children may throw rocks at them, but it is more common for people, from the heights of their greatness, simply not to notice them.

That is an outline, albeit very rough, of the utilitarian attitude toward animals. The emotional attitude of most of us consists of the feeling of sympathy, real attachment, or aesthetic pleasure toward one or another species, or toward individual animals. In addition, many humans are also endowed (thank heavens!) with a general feeling of compassion for animals. That compassion is largely responsible for the laws in many countries concerned with the treatment of animals and the operation of a network of volunteer associations devoted specifically to promoting the humane treatment of animals. The emotional attitude, in conjunction with such a powerful ally as the utilitarian concern that commercially valuable species not be completely exterminated, has made the establishment of wildlife parks possible. And certain exceptional parks have no utilitarian purpose whatsoever- for example, the feeding stations for pigeons that can be found in many places.

I have been speaking, of course, about the attitude toward animals in Europe, North America, and many countries in the East. But India presents an altogether different picture. Brahmanism, as we know, has long forbidden the consumption of various kinds of meat, has practically reduced the human diet to dairy and vegetable products, has declared work in leather and fur sinful and impure, and has proclaimed the cow and certain other species holy animals. And they should be applauded for it.

Europeans, of course, are at turns amused and exasperated by the spectacle of cows wandering freely through bazaars, helping themselves to anything that catches their eye in the stalls. I do not dispute the fact that the religious worship of the cow is a specific feature of the Indian worldview alone and cannot be an object of imitation in our century. But the feeling that underlies that worship is so pure, so lofty, and so holy that it itself deserves our respect. Gandhi did a fine job explaining the psychological roots of the worship of the cow. He pointed out that in the given case the cow represents all living beings below humanity. A humble reverence for the cow and service of it in the form of disinterested care, affection, and decoration are an expression of the religious idea and moral sense of our duty toward the world of living beings, of the idea of helping and protecting all that is weak or below us, all that has not yet succeeded in developing into higher forms. Not only that, it is also an expression of a mystical sense of the profound guilt shared by all humanity toward the animal world, for humanity was singled out from animals at the cost of the retardation and regression of those weaker than us. We were singled out and, having been singled out, compounded our guilt by mercilessly exploiting those weaker than us. Over the centuries our shared human guilt has snowballed and has lately assumed vast proportions.

Glory to that people who have been able to rise to such understanding, not just in the minds of a few but in the conscience of millions!

What idea or ethic can we, who boast of our centuries-long profession of Christianity, put forward to match that ethic?

There was an incident in my life that I must speak of here. It is a painful memory, but I would not want anyone to form, on the basis of this chapter about animals, an image of the author that he does not deserve. It so happens that once, several decades ago, I consciously, even purposely, committed a vile, loathsome crime against an animal that belonged to the category of «friends of humanity.» It all happened because I was at that time going through a phase, or rather, an inner detour, that was most dark. I decided to enter into, as I then put it, "the service of Evil"-an idea so naive as to be stupid. But because of the romantic aura that I cloaked it in, it took hold of my imagination and resulted in a chain of actions, each more appalling than the previous one. I was seized by the desire to find out if there really was an action so base, petty, and inhumane that I would not dare to carry it out. I do not even have the excuse that I was a thick-headed child or had fallen in with a bad crowd. There was no such crowd in my social circle, and I had reached the age of majority and was even a university student. How and on what exact animal the action was carried out is here immaterial, but carried out it was. The compunction I felt, however, was so strong that a revolution of terrific force took place in my attitude toward animals, an attitude that I have had ever since. It also served as the overall turning point in my inner life. If that shameful stain were not on my conscience I might not now experience such aversion, sometimes even to the point of a complete loss of self-control, toward any torture or murder of animals. It is for me now axiomatic that in the overwhelming majority of cases (excepting only self-defense from predators or parasites or the lack of any other food source) the killing or torture of animals is loathsome, unacceptable, and unworthy of humans. To do so is to violate one of those moral foundations on which we must firmly stand in order to retain the right to call ourselves human.

Of course, hunting, when it is the principal means of livelihood for certain primitive tribes, cannot be condemned morally. One would have to be a vegetarian Pharisee to censure Hottentots or Goldi, for whom abandonment of the hunt would be tantamount to death. And all who find themselves in similar circumstances can and should support their own lives and the lives of others through hunting, for the life of a human is more valuable than the life of any animal.

For the very same reason, people have the right to defend themselves from predators and parasites. It is known that many Jains and some followers of extreme Buddhist sects do not drink water except through gauze and, while walking, sweep the path in front of them before every step. I seem to recall there even being ascetics in India who let parasites feed on them. What better example is there to show how any idea can be carried to absurd extremes! The mistake being made here is that humans, for the sake of saving the lives of insects and even protozoa-that is, beings of much less value-place themselves in conditions where both social and technological progress become impossible. All forms of transport would have to be abandoned, since they cause the death of multitudes of tiny beings. A ban would even have to be laid on agriculture and the tilling of the soil in general, since it results in the death of billions of tiny creatures. In modern India, Jains are primarily engaged in liberal professions and commerce. But what would they do if the majority of humanity adopted their outlook on life? Of course, such an outlook, whereby a low ceiling is placed on the ascent of humanity, cannot be right.

But what, from the transphysical, not materialist, point of view, are parasites and protozoa? Like the majority of insects, they possess collective souls, but they lag far behind in spiritual growth. Properly speaking, we are not dealing here with a simple lag, but with Gagtungr's active demonization of their collective shelt. The shelts have the status of slaves in Nigoyda, possess only partial intelligence, and face a journey of spiritual growth exceptional for its slowness and duration. Only at the moment of our planet's passage into the third eon will they attain enlightenment. For the present, parasites-that is, beings of much lesser value-live on and get fat off of animals and humans, beings of comparatively higher value. We are therefore right to exterminate them, as we have no other alternative at the given stage.

Predators live at the expense of animals, beings of the same value, or of humans, beings of higher value. Those species of predators whose predatory nature we are incapable of altering should be gradually exterminated in Enrof. I say gradually not only because it cannot be done in any other manner but also because the means to alter even their nature might be discovered in the meantime. There is every reason to hope that the nature of many predatory species, especially among the higher mammals, can be changed at a fundamental level. It is enough to recall that the dog, that one-time wolf, is now capable of doing entirely without meat, and this despite the fact that humans have never set themselves the goal of turning dogs into vegetarians. Dogs were weaned away from meat out of purely economic considerations, but the success of these measures points to the excellent prospects in that area, prospects that are only now revealing themselves. Thus, hunting predators is the second kind of hunting that should not be condemned at the present stage of humanity. But another set of measures will be necessary alongside it. I will speak of them further on.

What will be subject to unconditional abolition, even a strict ban, is hunting for sport. I know full well what a howl of protest will be raised by the lovers of deer- and pheasant-shooting were this demand to gain widespread support in society and from a utopian dream of individual eccentrics turn into the insistent appeal of all progressive humanity. It is not difficult to foresee the arguments they will use in their defense. They will enlist the aid of every rationalization a crafty mind is capable of concocting when it is called on to assist a twisted instinct. They will scream, for example, about the benefits of hunting, about how it tempers one's body (as if it could not be tempered in some other fashion), how it builds character, will, resourcefulness, courage (as if humans faced some kind of danger hunting wild game). They will shower us with assurances that hunting is essentially a pretext, a mere means to the genuine end of enjoying the great outdoors, as if it couldn't be enjoyed without the additional pleasure of seeing a hare run down by a dog. They will arm themselves with brilliant psychological concoctions a la Knut Hamsun to prove that the hunting instinct is an inalienable human attribute and that the joy of hunting originates from a combination of the satisfaction of that instinct and a sense of being a part of

Nature. From their perspective, they do not view Nature through the eyes of idle city slickers in the woods, not from the outside looking in; they become part of Nature when they wait in ambush behind a tree. But no matter how much they imagine themselves part of Nature, all their feelings are not worth one glance from the dying eyes of a goose they have shot. All the twists and turns a cunning mind may make are refuted by one short statement by Turgenev. Himself a passionate hunter, he was honest both with the reader and himself. He knew and said firmly and plainly that hunting has no relation whatsoever to a love of Nature.

«I can't enjoy nature while I'm hunting-all that is nonsense: you enjoy it when you're lying down or resting after the hunt. Hunting is a passion, and I don't nor can I see anything except some pheasant hiding in a bush. No true hunter goes into the wild to enjoy nature.»

Turgenev speaks openly and plainly. Why do others deceive themselves and those around them by justifying hunting as love of Nature?

Oh, I know their kind well enough: courage, honesty, simplicity, a keen eye, broad shoulders, a weather-beaten face, a clipped manner of speech, a racy joke from time to time-what more could be asked for in a real man? They are held in respect by those around them, and they hold themselves in respect-for their strong nerves (which they mistake for a strong spirit), for their sober view of things (which they mistake for intelligence), for the bulge of their biceps (worthy, they think, of the «lord of nature»), for what seems to them an eagle-like gaze. But if you look at them closely, if you peek behind their imposing facade, you will find only a tangle of every possible kind of egoism. They are courageous and brave because they are physically strong males and because their infatuation with their own greatness does not permit them to exhibit cowardice. They are straightforward and honest because their awareness of these virtues permits them to rationalize self-worship. And if their eyes, having witnessed so many death agonies of the beings they have killed, remain as clear and bright as a cloudless sky, then it is not to their credit, but to their shame.

Oh, you will not find their kind among the inhabitants of the taigaor the pampas, whom they wish to resemble. They want everyone to admire how they have succeeded so well in harmonizing within themselves the cultivated European and the proud child of Nature. But the truth is that they are a product of urban civilization, just as rational, self-centered, cruel, and sensual as that civilization. But one half of their being yields to the atavistic pull of long-past stages of civilization. You encounter such people more than you would like, among physicists, biologists, journalists, businesspeople, government officials, artists, and even great scholars. There is a powerful current in world literature that has been created by such people or by those who are of kindred spirit. It weaves through the novels of Knut Hamsun, it surges into the stories of Jack London, it seethes without restraint in the poetry and writing of Kipling, and in a poisonous rivulet it spoils the genuine love for Nature in the otherwise delightful essays of Prishvin. The justification of cruelty as a so-called unavoidable law of Nature, the cult of anthrocentrism, the ideal of the strong predator, the heartless attitude toward all living beings that is masked by a romantic spirit of adventure and travel and sweetened by poetic descriptions of the natural surroundings-it is high time to call such things by their rightful names!

We have no right, absolutely no right, to purchase our pleasure at the price of the suffering and death of other living beings. If you do not know any other way to feel a part of Nature, then do not try. It is better to remain completely «outside Nature» than to be a monster within it. For in entering Nature with a gun and amusing yourself by sowing death all around, you become a pitiful pawn in the hands of the one who invented death, who invented the law of survival, and who grows fat and swollen on the suffering of living beings.

There will be others who will say, «Ha! What are animals? People are dying by the millions in our century-from wars, from starvation, from political tyranny-what a time to weep over squirrels and grouses!» Yes, it is time. And I am simply incapable of understanding what world wars, tyranny, and other human atrocities have to do with animals. Why must animals die for the amusement of heartless vacationers until humanity finally irons out its social problems and takes up the softening of hearts in its free time? What is the link between the two? Could it only be that as long as humanity afflicts itself with wars and tyranny the public conscience will be too muffled, overwhelmed, and preoccupied to feel all the vileness of hunting and fishing?

Yes, fishing, too. That same fishing that we so love to indulge in against an a idyllic backdrop of summer sunrises and sunsets, almost moved to tears by a feeling of deep inner peace. But at the same time that we pick up a squirming worm with our fingers and run a hook through its body, in our thoughtlessness we fail to realize that it is now feeling what we would feel if a monster the size of a mountain grabbed us by the leg, stuck an iron spike through our stomach, and threw us into the water to a waiting shark.

People will say, «Fine. But you do not have to fish using worms-you can use bread, lures, and so on.» Yes you can. And it will no doubt be a great comfort for the caught fish to know that it will die having been fooled by a shiny piece of metal and not a worm.

One can also still come across relics from the distant past who continue to believe in all seriousness that a fish or lobster does not experience suffering because they are cold-blooded. And in actual fact, there was a time long ago when humanity, ignorant of animal anatomy, imagined that sensitivity was a function of blood temperature. Incidentally, it was because of this fallacy that the Semitic religions included fish in the list of their permitted dishes, and even saints did not shrink from indulging in it. Heaven forbid that we should condemn them for it. Religious experience, no matter how great and high it may be, cannot entirely take the place of scientific knowledge (and vice versa). Science was at that time in its infancy, and no one-not even saints-is to blame for the delusion that cold-blooded animals feel no pain. But we now know what nonsense that is! We now realize, after all, that a fish dangling from a hook or squirming on the sand is writhing in pain and nothing else! What are we to conclude then? The white raiments of poetic contemplation that we clothe ourselves in during bucolic hours of sitting with fishing rod in hand-are they not spattered to the point of revulsion with blood, mucus, and the guts of living beings, the same beings that frolicked in the crystal clear water and could have lived even longer if not for our supposed love of Nature?

One is also confronted with the rationalization that since everything in the animal world is founded on the law of the jungle, why should humans be an exception? That everything in the animal world is founded on the law of the jungle is simply not true. Or are there too few herbivores? Or have the Providential powers not wrested hundreds of species from Gagtungr's clutches in that single respect alone? Are there really too few completely harmless beings in Nature that are not even physically equipped to consume meat? What is more important, wherever did the human brain come up with the idea that the morality of animals should serve as a model for our behavior? If our hunters admire the «courage» of predators (incidentally, this is not so much courage as simple confidence in their physical strength and impunity), then why not imitate predators-the wolf, for example-in other ways, say, in killing a wounded or weakened member of one's own pack? And how can we justify confining ourselves to imitating only mammal predators? Why not take an even more striking example as a model? For instance, among spiders, is not the male devoured by the female right after fertilization? I think that such a brilliant idea will not occur to apologists of our «animal nature» only because they, as a rule, belong to the male half of humanity. If it were the female spider that was devoured by the male spider after giving birth, proponents of such a courageous mode of action would no doubt turn up among us.

But with all its grotesqueness, hunting for sport does not cause as much evil as another source, one that has arisen, unfortunately, in connection with recent progress in science and mass education.

I pick up a book from the series "A Practical Guide for High School Teachers," by a certain Y. A. Zinger and published by Uchpedgiz in 1947 under the title Protozoa. I open it to page 60 and read the directions on how an experiment dealing with the extraction of gregarine parasites from the intestines of a flour worm should be conducted during a biology class: «Slice open the back side of the worm and detach a section of the intestines. One can also simply cut off the head and end of the worm and then pull out the intestines from behind with tweezers. Squeeze the contents of the intestines onto a slide and, moistening it with water, look at it under low magnification.»

Do you mean to say that students don't throw up watching that? Are they already inured to it? Have they already learned, with the aid of the teacher, to suppress their horror and disgust? Do they already know enough to label natural pity sentimentality? Have they learned to call a boy a «sissy» because his hands shake or his eyes display pain, revulsion, and shame during such an experiment?

I turn two pages: «Ether is used to put the frog to sleep.... There is also a simpler method: taking the frog by its hind legs and holding it belly-up, strike its head hard and quickly against the end of the desk. Then slice open the belly of the frog.»

In that manner, children may very well receive a graphic lesson about parasites in a frog's intestines-something of vital necessity for everyone, I am sure, for life would be impossible without it. But the pedagogue and lover of «simpler methods» no less graphically demonstrates human vileness as well.

I have not yet addressed the essential question of whether the natural sciences can manage without experiments on live material. But even if those experiments were a sad necessity, what arguments can there be for inuring all high school students to them? No more than 20 percent of those children go on to a postsecondary course of study in the natural sciences or medicine. Why stifle a basic feeling of pity and cripple the very foundations of conscience in the remaining 80 percent? For the sake of what fabricated «good of humanity» do we kill hundreds of thousands of experimental animals? Why and for what? What right do we have to turn high school biology classes into lessons in the murder and torture of defenseless beings? Certainly it is not impossible to replace that bloodbath with slides, large-scale models, or diagrams. And if we want to keep to the tried and true method, then having said A we must say B. If we are to adopt the hands-on method of teaching, then why shouldn't a history teacher who is discussing the Inquisition stage an instructive demonstration that familiarizes students in a concrete manner with the use of Spanish boots, garrotes, the rack, and other scientific and technological achievements of the day?

And now a few more words about «live material» in general. Scientists have become so accustomed to their own terminology that they no longer notice what moral sterility, what petrifaction of conscience resounds in the stilted, crudely utilitarian phrase «live material.» Regarding the subject of live material in scientific laboratories, and the use of that method in science in general, what is done is done, the dead cannot be brought back to life, and it is pointless to argue whether scientific progress in previous centuries would have been possible without it. But is it possible now? It is the desire to economize one's efforts that is to blame for scientists focusing their attention on that method as the cheapest and easiest way to their goal. Having become legalized, it now appears to many to be irreplaceable, the only feasible method. Nonsense! It is laziness that prevents them from spending time and energy on developing a different method, that and the stinginess of the public and private sectors, nothing more. Laziness and stinginess are, generally speaking, disreputable traits, and when they prove to be responsible for such mounds of victims, how are we properly to view them?

Of course, to seek out single-handedly a new methodology is a hopeless task. Thousands of young doctors, teachers, and laboratory assistants, on beginning their careers, experience a natural feeling of revulsion for the scientific techniques associated with the torture and killing of living beings. But as things stand, every such person faces a dilemma: either stifle their compassion with rationalizations about the good of humanity or abandon a career in science, since there is no other methodology. The overwhelming majority, of course, choose the former and gradually become more and more inured in the practice of inhumane methods. The discovery of a new methodology is realistically possible only as the result of a long-term commitment by a large collective body-an association made up of people working in various branches of science-devoted to that goal. Such an undertaking can be realized only if it is funded by a wealthy body in the public or private sector.

But the victims of our «love of Nature» and the victims of our «thirst for knowledge» are but hillocks or knolls next to the Mont Blancs, the Everests of fish netted on the open sea, of the corpses of cattle and pigs piled high in slaughterhouses-in short, the corpses we buy in stores and consume at finely set tables. Even worse, the utilitarianism of technological progress has at last reached the peak where it has been proved cheaper to can crabs, for example, without killing them first, but instead ripping their shells off while they are alive, cutting off their claws, and throwing what's left of the half-alive crab back into the sea to be eaten by some passing fish. It would be a good idea to give the inventor of that crab-canning apparatus a few years holiday in solitary confinement. Let the inventor spend time pondering the question of whether he or she is a human being or not. And it would be even more gratifying to have the enterprising industrial manager, thanks to whose zealousness those torture devices for crabs and lobsters were adopted by the industry, on the other side of the wall, in the next cell, on vacation from money-saving concerns.

Let's suppose such abominations are extreme cases and will soon be eliminated. How are we to regard meat and fish as products of mass consumption? Or the manufacture of leather? Or the processing of animal fur? Even if all this is not very moral, is it not a necessity?

True, we are still faced with an element of necessity in this respect, but, if the truth be stated, it is already much less than is thought. It can be said that we are approaching a level of scientific and social progress-thank heavens- where nothing will remain of that necessity but painful memories.

Every year, applied chemistry is improving the quality of leather substitutes. Artificial fur is becoming cheaper and more readily available than the natural variety, and if it is still inferior to it in quality, in time that defect will be rectified. The time is thus approaching when the processing of animal skins or furs for commercial purposes could be banned. What is truly the most difficult question is the problem of fish and meat, which many people consider necessary for their health.

But why, in truth, are they necessary? It is not meat or fish per se that are necessary, but a definite quantity of carbohydrates, proteins, and calories. But we can supply our body with them through other kinds of food: dairy products, cereals, fruits, and vegetables. It is ridiculous to pretend that we are unaware of the existence of millions of vegetarians who live healthy lives. All of us are also well aware that for thousands of years a nation of millions has existed that consumes hardly any meat-a fact that is unpleasant for our conscience but true. More nutritional substitutes will no doubt be required to make up for fish and meat dishes in a northern climate than in tropical India. It is also true that at present such nutritional substitutes cost more and are therefore not within everyone's budget. The solution of the problem thus consists in raising the overall standard of living. But it has become a truism, after all, that humanity's prosperity increases along with progress. And the time is not far off when such nutritional substitutes will be affordable for everyone.

A program, a chain of step-by-step measures thus begins to take shape, a program that will become realizable after the Rose of the World's ascension to power. The first set of measures will be carried out without delay.

1. A ban on painful methods of killing animals, whether in industry or anywhere else.

A ban on experiments on «live material» in schools or anywhere else, with the exception of specially designated scientific institutions.

A total ban on experiments on animals without the use of soporifics or anesthetics.

The establishment and funding of large scientific bodies for research into and development of a new experimental method in science.

The restriction of sport hunting and fishing to the extermination of predators.

A revamping of the educational system that would ingrain a love for animals in primary and secondary school students, an unselfish love born not of an awareness of a given species' usefulness but of an organic need to love and help all beings weaker and less developed than humans.

Widespread promotion of the new attitude toward animals.

But the core of the new attitude will not only entail protecting animals from torture and murder by humans. That is only its negative side, and there is nothing new there. Its positive side, which is indeed new, entails providing active assistance to the animal world in its evolution and reducing the number of stages and the time span needed for that evolution.

But what does that mean? It means the establishment of «peace» between humans and animals, excluding predators; research into methods for the reorientation of certain predatory species; renunciation of the use of any animal for the purposes of security; and the artificial acceleration of the intellectual and spiritual development of certain higher species in the animal world.

Enormous funds will have to be invested in the development of «zoopsychology.» Fine! No amount of funds can make amends for the evil we have done to the animal world over these thousands of years. A new branch of knowledge will appear: zoopedagogy, the pedagogy of animals. Careful study will lead to the singling out of some species of predators that, like the dog and cat, can be reoriented. Did I not already mention that the one-time wolf has before our very eyes become capable of digesting plant food? And that is in spite of the fact that humans did not try to curb but, to the contrary, cultivated its instinct for blood in the interests of hunting and security. If not for that, what playfulness, what meekness, what goodness would we now witness in dogs in addition to their loyalty, courage, and intelligence! And who can doubt that such work on many predatory species, work done by people equipped with a knowledge of animal psychology, physiology, pedagogy, and more importantly, love, can reorient them, help them to evolve physically and intellectually, soften their hearts, and transform them?

Even now, dogs are capable of remembering as many as two hundred words, and not mechanically, like a parrot, but with full awareness of their meaning. They are beings with truly immense potential. Their development has reached the point where the species can make a giant leap forward. It is up to us to ensure that that radical transformation takes place in our lifetime, to see that the inadaptability of some of the dog's organs do not retard its evolution for centuries to come. The emergence of speech in dogs is not impeded by their overall level of intelligence but by a purely mechanical barrier in the form of the unsuitable structure of those organs necessary for speech. Its overall development is also impeded by another barrier: the absence of extremities for grasping, or rather, the inability of their paws to perform those functions performed by our hands. Yet another branch of animal physiology will develop: a science concerned with biochemical engineering of the embryo to effect the structural changes necessary for the accelerated development of speech organs and the transformation of its forepaws into hands. Dogs' mastery of speech, even if only a few dozen words, will have a trickle-down effect on the rate of their overall growth in intelligence. In one hundred years people will have extraordinary friends who, thanks to human help, will have shortened their allotted path to the span of a few generations instead of a hundred thousand years.

The next candidates for accelerated development will probably be cats, elephants, bears, and perhaps some species of rodents. Horses, which have progressed very far intellectually and are indubitably morally superior to cats and dogs, are endowed with an unfortunate feature, hooves, that prevents them from entering onto that path any time soon. The same is true of deer and buffalo. Elephants, which are endowed with a marvelous trunk for grasping, face a different impediment: their size, which requires an inordinate amount of food. It is possible, however, that science will discover a way to shrink their size and thus remove the chief obstacle to the rapid development of their intellect. It is reasonable to suppose that elephants will not lose any of their extraordinary charm if, while endowed with the gift of speech, they do not surpass a modern-day baby elephant in size.

Thus, after a certain period of time the Rose of the World will be able to carry out a second set of measures.

A ban on the murder of animals for any kind of commercial or scientific purpose.

Tight restrictions on animal slaughter for the purpose of consumption.

The designation of large tracts of land as wildlife parks in all countries, so that animals that are not domesticated may live in their natural habitat.

Freedom of movement-both in Nature and in populated areas-for both traditionally and recently domesticated species.

The coordination of the work of zoopedagogical institutes on a global scale, the prioritization of that work, and research into endowing the higher animals with the gift of speech.

Particularly careful research into artificially weakening the predatory nature of certain animals.

This is how the creative work of elevating animals will proceed-work that is selfless, not prompted by narrow material

interests but by feelings of guilt and love. It will be a growing love that will be too broad in scope to confine itself to humans alone.

It will be a love that will find solutions to problems that now appear insoluble. For instance, where will we find room for all those animals if humans stop killing them en masse? Will not the same thing happen on a global scale that happened with rabbits in Australia, where they multiplied at an alarming rate and became the scourge of agriculture? But those fears resemble Malthusianism extrapolated to the animal world. It is impossible at present, of course, to envision the measures that will be discovered and undertaken in that regard by our descendants. At the very worst, specific quotas will have to be set. If they are surpassed then society at the end of the twenty-first century will be forced to resort to the artificial regulation of animal birth rates. There is, however, reason to hope that the problem will be solved differently, in a manner that is impossible to foresee at the current level of science, technology, economics, and morality. But even were there to be quotas, it would still be an infinitely lesser evil than what is taking place now. The sum of suffering caused by humans would be greatly reduced, and that is, after all, our goal.

The sum of good done will correspondingly increase, becoming what the Hindus speak of as pram sagar-an ocean of love. The proverbial image of the lion Iying down with the lamb or child is not at all utopian. That will come to pass. It was an intuition granted to great prophets who knew the heart of humanity. The descendants of modern-day hares and tapirs, leopards and squirrels, bears and crows, giraffes and lizards will not dwell in cages, or even in wildlife preserves, but in our cities, parks, groves, and meadows. They will not fear people but will show them affection and play with them, working together with them on improving the natural and cultural environment and on fostering their own self-development. By the next century, economic prosperity will reach almost incredible levels, and feeding those gentle, peaceful, affectionate, and intelligent beings will pose no problems. And generations to come will read with a shudder of how, not so long before, humans used not only to eat the corpses of animals they themselves had killed but even took pleasure in hunting them down and cold- heartedly murdering them.

6. The highest Worlds of Shadanakar

6.1. Up to the World Salvaterra

It should come as no surprise that I not only have much less information at my disposal about the regions in question here than about any others but that, in essence, I am almost entirely lacking in such information. There are two reasons for that. The first reason is the incommensurability of the reality of those regions with our earthly images, ideas, and language. The second reason is the exceptionally high level of spiritual insight needed to gain a personal glimpse of those worlds. Almost nothing of what is said about them here has been gleaned from my own first-hand experience. Rather, I am only communicating in words what I grasped from the accounts of my invisible friends. May they forgive me if I err in some way, if my mind introduces anything unworthy or purely human into their accounts or clouds them with subjective additions.

All the planes to be discussed first are five-dimensional. As for time streams-that is, the parallel currents of time-they are more than two hundred in number on those planes. That alone should be sufficient to convey how feeble must be attempts to express the nature and meaning of those regions using human images. Customary geometrical notions must be discarded outright, but attempts to fill in the gap with concepts dealing with energies, force fields, and the like are also doomed to failure.

Far above the sakwala of the Transmyths of the Five Higher Religions (I have already described them as five gigantic, varicolored pyramids of glowing crystals) and encompassing all Shadanakar rises the indescribable sakwala of the Synclite of Humanity, a sakwala of seven regions. There, oceans of radiant ethers-I use that word for lack of a better one-glittering with colors beyond the imagination of even the Synclites of the metacultures lap upon structures that bear a vague resemblance both to shining mountain peaks and to buildings of some inconceivable architecture. The fundamental dissimilarity between the great works of human genius and the great creations of Nature does not hold true there, for both elements have at last merged in a synthesis that is beyond our powers to grasp. How can we hope to capture a sense of those euphoric masterpieces brimming with the light in which the beautiful spirits of mature elementals have coated themselves? Or of the resplendent waves of sound that soar upward as if from the blissful heart of celestial mountains? I will have achieved my purpose if even a few readers of this book gain a sense, through those almost amorphous images, of a reality that our spirit can strive toward but that is beyond the reach of almost everyone who lives on our dark and arid Earth.

If I remember correctly, the chosen few who at present compose the Synclite of Humanity number no more than a thousand. Although they no longer possess a human appearance, they willingly assume a higher, enlightened human likeness when they descend to lower planes. Borne along by the Sun's rays, they are able to travel distances between the bramfaturas of the solar system at the speed of light.

Beyond their names, I know nothing about the various regions of the Synclite of Humanity, and even those names I know only to the extent I was able to translate them into the sounds of human language. (Arvantakernis. Dyedarnis. Ranmatirnis. Serbarinus. Magraleinos. Ivaroinis. Nammarinos).

More than a hundred people from Monsalvat and Eden have already entered the Synclite of Humanity. The huge, ancient Indian metaculture has contributed even more. If I remember correctly, the last one before 1955 to rise to the World Synclite was Ramakrishna. Approximately seventy years passed from the moment of his death in Enrof until his entry into those higher regions. But it is more common for that ascent to take several centuries. For example, it was only relatively recently that the prophet Muhammad reached the World Synclite, even though his afterlife had not been marred by any descent. The prophets Ezekiel and Daniel, who have long abided in the World Synclite, as well as Vasily the Great, will soon ascend from the Synclite of Humanity even higher.

That is all I am able to say about the regions of that sakwala. But I have even less to say, and in an even dryer, terser manner, about the eleven regions of the following sakwala of the Great Hierarchies.

Those are the worlds of the very same higher beings who cannot be called anything but great hierarchies. In their time many of them were objects of worship in the ancient religions of various countries. Those exalted beings were mirrored-if only to a limited extent-in the divine pantheons of the Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, Old Germanic, and Aztec religions, as well as in some aspects of the higher Indian deities. They were mirrored, not as they are now, but as they were then, or rather, as they appeared to the consciousness of the peoples who intuited them in olden times. In the centuries that have passed since the rise and flowering of their cults in Enrof, the hierarchies have risen to their greatest heights.

I do know that the regions of that sakwala are no longer delineated according to one or another hierarchy's link with a specific metaculture. Those lower planes of Shadanakar that are divided vertically and form the segments of human metacultures have been left far behind, or rather, far below. The borders between regions in the sakwala of the Great Hierarchies are determined by the power and height attained by each of those beings.

As before, I know only the names of those planes. I have little confidence in the correspondence between their phonetic structure, as expressed by our letters, and their actual sound. There is no doubt that these names should be treated as only very rough approximations: Aolinor, Ramnagor, Pleiragor, Foraigor, Stranganor, Tseliror, Likhanga, Devenga, Siringa, Khranga, and Ganga.

If, during the stage of metahistorical formulation, one gives free reign to the reason, it will, by its very nature, attempt to

introduce conventional notions from the physical and historical plane and logical, scientific-like parameters into the scope, configurations, and specific character of metahistory. In this particular case, reason's propensity for uniformity and order, naively viewed as symmetry, causes it to assume that identical groups of hierarchies taking part in people's lives preside over-in the metahistorical sense-all the suprapeoples. In reality that is not so.

It is true that there is no suprapeople over which a demiurge does not preside, for then it would not be a suprapeople but a random conglomeration of a number of ethnic groups that share nothing in common. Nor is there a nation that does not have a Collective Ideal Soul, for such a nation would then be a numerical sum of individuals who have chanced to gravitate together for a brief time. But the Collective Ideal Soul is far from being the totality of psychological or other, easily recognizable attributes of a given people that determine their distinct historical path. The Collective Ideal Soul is a being with a single great monad. She harbors the prototypes of the highest potential of the nation within herself and is coated in multidimensional matter. In proportion to the historical growth of the nation and the personal growth of individuals within that nation, a greater and greater portion of subtle materiality from each of them gravitates toward her and is encompassed within her, thus imparting to her a collective nature.

There are several national collective souls in almost every metaculture, but as a rule, one of them belongs to a different hierarchy than the others. Only she is God-born, as is the demiurge of the suprapeople, and only she is linked to him by a special, mysterious, spiritual, and material bond of love. Together such collective souls form the hierarchy of the Great Sisters. In Earth's bramfatura, there are about forty of them.

Every distinct nation has a Collective Soul, but the other sisters belong to the category of God-created monads. They, the Younger Sisters, are paired with national guiding spirits, the inspirers of those nations who are part of the suprapeople but do not play the leading role in its history. Some of the

Younger Sisters, however, proceed along their metahistorical path without a national guiding spirit as companion.

There are also transitional phases, sometimes lasting a century or more, when a nation, its Collective Soul, and the national guiding spirit remain stranded outside the metacultures, between them, as it were. The peoples of the Balkans, who were at one time part of the Byzantine metaculture, can be cited as an example. The Greeks, Serbs, and Croats were enslaved by one of the Witzraors of the Muslim metaculture, and at present they abide in the gap between the Roman Catholic and Russian metacultures. No less tragic is the fate of the Bulgarian people, who were also part of the Byzantine suprapeople and were destined for a great future of primacy, both spiritual and cultural, in the Eastern Christian world. The Turkish Witzraor put an end to those prospects once and for all, crippling the Bulgarian nation by clipping its spiritual wings, so to speak. It has now begun to merge with the Russian suprapeople. As for the Rumanians, they are only just starting to emerge as a nation. Their Collective Soul and national guiding spirit as yet preside very high above them, barely maintaining a link with the ethnic group in Enrof, and the time is still far offwhen they will mature to full strength.

The demiurge of a suprapeople is also a great God-born monad, a monad more powerful and active than a collective soul and alien to any collectivity. He is one in himself.

One of the Great Sisters-each of whom is the Collective Soul of the leading nation in the metaculture-is paired with him. There are, however, more complex liaisons. In the North-Western metaculture, for instance, the demiurge of the suprapeople was until the nineteenth century paired with the Collective Soul of Germany. But the second German Witzraor grew to be so strong during that century that the Collective Soul's imprisonment in one of the citadels of Mudgarb turned into an almost complete enslavement of her will, and the demiurge entered into a union with another Great Sister, the Collective Soul of England.

The birth of monads of either hierarchy-the demiurges of suprapeoples and the Great Sisters-by the everlasting Universal Sun can be neither understood nor imagined by us, and any rationalization on that count is doomed to remain empty speculation. The same can be said of attempts to fill the gaps in our knowledge about those stages of cosmic growth preceding the monads' appearance in Shadanakar. In what bramfaturas, in what forms, and through what stages did they journey and incarnate before entering the confines of our planet ~ I may be mistaken but, for us, such interbramfaturic mysteries are, I think, transcendental. Both those hierarchies enter the range of our apprehension (and that is apprehension, not in the form of metahistorical enlightenment, but only in the form of the passive reception of information from the lips of our invisible friends) at the moment of their metaether birth. We will use the term mesa-ether provisionally to designate what happens when their monads enter five-dimensional space in Shadanakar. From the Planetary Logos, Who can also be understood as the Being that has become the supreme demiurge of our bramfatura, they receive a certain stimulus: the creative impulse to realize and express themselves in the three- and four-dimensional materiality of a future suprapeople, which had not existed up till then and could not have existed without them. It is that stimulus that causes them to descend, coating themselves in denser, fourdimensional materiality, and embark in that manner on their planetary cycle. That is their second, or astral, birth in Shadanakar. They of course never undergo physical birth. I realize that it is not an easy concept to grasp, but I doubt that it can be explained any simpler.

The worlds where these hierarchies abide in the interval between these two births and where their monads abide during the entire course of their cycle in Shadanakar form the sakwala of the Demiurges. It comprises three regions. The birthplace of the demiurges and Great Sisters-the ideal souls of suprapeoples-is called Rangaraidr. The names of the other two are Astr and Oamma. Astr is the birthplace and abode of the monads of the Younger Sisters and the national guiding spirits. I am unable to say anything about Oamma.

I do, however, know that in the last five hundred years one demiurge has emerged from the rest and has undertaken a

mission or global, not just suprapeople, significance: the Demiurge of the North-Western metaculture. From his labors during the last few centuries certain prior conditions have been created for the unification of humanity into one whole. In the near future the global leadership of that task will likely pass for a short time to the demiurge of the Russian suprapeople, and then to the demiurge of India. After that, from all appearances, the leadership will no longer be concentrated in one single demiurge.

Yarosvet and Navna are the names that I have provisionally and arbitrarily adopted to refer to the hierarchies of the Russian metaculture. I do not know the actual names of the demiurges and Great Sisters. In any case they cannot be rendered in any human language (I hope that the reader will understand that the use of any customary anthropomorphic concepts of age, marital relations, and so on in reference to the hierarchies is resorted to only for the purpose of bringing us closer, through the use of the only possible, albeit distant, analogies, to a conception of phenomena that literally share almost nothing in common with phenomena familiar to us.)

The metahistorical task-a task of planetary importance-to be realized by Yarosvet and Navna's future marital union and by their whole life in

Shadanakar in general can be roughly stated as the generation by them (or to be more exact, the ether embodiment through them) of a Great Feminine Monad (By the term ether I mean a materiality more rarefied and higher than the physical. The materiality of the worlds of Enlightenment, the zatomis, and the elementals of l.ight is composed of ether. To refer to even more rarefied materiality-typical, for example, of the sakwala of Higher Purpose and the sakwala of Angels-the term astral is used, while the term meta-ether refers to the most rarefied of materiality imaginable. It is the materiality of the highest planes of Shadanakar. The word spiritual is used in reference to everything situated even higher on the hierarchical ladder).

A personal, physical incarnation for her is, of course, unthinkable. But she is prepared in time to flow into an ether vessel, one that is enlightened, individual, living, and immaculate. This vessel will appear at the same time as its crystallization in Enrof in the form of the Global Community. The Russian people are regarded by their demiurge as an ether-physical substance still unenlightened in Enrof but enlightened in Heavenly Russia, a substance from which these two-physical and ether-vessels of Light will be wrought. At the same time, the Russian people are regarded as the site of that theurgical act.

Above the sakwala of the Demiurges and Great Sisters soars a sakwala that I can designate only with the term Waves of Universal Femininity. Limnarna, the first of its regions, is the feminine Synclite of Humanity, while Bayushmi, the second, is the present abode of the Great Feminine Monad. I know only the names of the remaining regions of that sakwala: Faolemmis, Saora, and Naolitis. I am not privy to the name of the sixth, and last, of those regions.

That sakwala is encompassed within another-the worlds of interaction between the hierarchies of Shadanakar, those of the macrobramfatura, and those of the Universe. Of these three worlds I am only able to name the middle one-Raoris, the initial abode of the Great Feminine Monad when She emanated into Shadanakar.

From there begin the planes of the One Church of our bramfatura, which encompasses, in addition to the sakwala I have just mentioned, the three regions of an even higher sakwala: the Elite of Shadanakar. Oceans of repeatedly enlightened and spiritualized matter ebb and flow around it. Their shining crests, meeting no obstacles at its transparent boundaries, glide inside and, breaking over that abode of the Perfected, impart to it the fullness of life. The humanity of Enrof, the humankind of daemons, the lunar humankind, the angels, the elementals, and even the animal world, whose metaphysical meaning has been such a profound enigma-all find their highest purpose and supremely transfigured essence in the heart of that paradise most high, which blends within it peace and strength, bliss and work, perfection and limitless growth ever further along a dazzling path. There abide all those who see the World Salvaterra with their own eyes. It is the highest step on the staircase of Shadanakar for all its monads, both God-born and God-created, except the Planetary Logos, the Virgin Mary, and the Great Feminine Spirit. All that I can do while on the subject of the Elite of Shadanakar is list the last human names of some of those great human spirits who have reached the Elite: Akhenaton, Zoroaster, Moses, Hosia, Lao-tse, Gautama Buddha, Mahavira, Asoka, Chandragupta Maurya, Patanjali, Nagarjuna, Samudra Gupta, Kanishka, Shankara, Aristotle, Plato, all the Apostles except Paul, Titurel, Mary Magdalene, John of Damascus, St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, Dante, Leonardo da Vinci.

We have now brought this survey of the structure of Shadanakar to its conclusion, to the very highest of the sakwalas, whose three regions encompass our entire bramfatura: the Region of the Planetary Logos, the Region of the Virgin Mary, and the Region of the Great Feminine Monad.

For purely personal reasons, I am accustomed to calling the focal point and summit of Shadanakar the World Salvaterra-a name quite provisional, of course, even arbitrary, having not even a distant connection to Palestine, the Salvaterra of the medieval Crusaders. I do not in the slightest insist on it, but I am forced to use it for lack of a better name.

To varying degrees, the World Salvaterra permeates all of Shadanakar, except the four worlds of the Demonic Base and Sufetkh. It is most fully manifested in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The religious meaning attached to the word «heavens» is not the result of an aberration by ignorant minds from olden times but the expression of a reality that great souls intuited thousands of years ago.

All that is Providential in the history of Shadanakar, humanity, and individual souls has its origin in Salvaterra. It is the locus of the emanations of the higher cosmic Beings who manifest themselves both in the evolution of galactic worlds and in our evolution. «Shining Crystal of Heavenly Will» is an epithet applicable to the World Salvaterra, and not only in a poetic sense. Constant waves of grace and energy pour down from those heights and from out of those depths. Such terms as «resplendent sound of church bells» or «sounding resplendence» could be of hardly any aid to us in approaching a conception of them. That which such imagery hints at has been left far below, in the worlds of angels, in the sakwala of Higher Purpose, or in the World Synclite. Even what the Biblical story of Jacob's Ladder tried to describe ends there, having passed through all of Shadanakar. Great essences and great beings climb and descend the steps of material existence from Salvaterra to Earth and back again. It is the heart of the planet and its inner Sun. Through it and it alone open the heights, expanses and depths of the Spiritual Universe, which encompasses both the stellar archipelagoes and the metagalactic oceans of space that to us appear so empty.

The Spiritual Universe cannot be described in any language and can only be experienced, of course, in the vaguest of intuitions. The highest spiritual rapture of Christian mystics, the highest level of ecstasy among Hindus, or the abhijua of Buddha are all states connected with these same vague intuitions. Our systematic reason tries to pour them into the molds of teachings in order to initiate the many, and thus creates dim echoes of it, such as the teachings of the Tao, Pleroma, Empirei, or the breath of Parabrahma.

When voyagers from variomaterial worlds speak of Eden, as do the teachers of Semitic religions, or of the chambers of Brahma or Vishnu, of the heavens of Iranian azurs or Hindu devas, of the blessed land of Sukavati, even of Nirvana, they assume as their final goal only individual levels within Shadanakar, the summits of various metacultures and the highest transmyths of religions, or, in the end, the reality of the World Salvaterra.

When humankind-both physical and extraphysical- completes its colossal cycle, and when all the dominions of terrestrial Nature complete it as well, they will have wholly merged with that planetary Paradise. Then the World Salvaterra will open up like a flower into the waiting expanses of the Spiritual Universe. The Universal Sun will shine on that flower and admit the flower's fragrant radiations into its heavens.

But even then the ultimate goal will still be immeasurably far off. It is at present beyond the reach of even the most dazzling intuitions.

6.2. The Logos of Shadanakar

As far as I know at present, all the countless numbers of monads fall into two ontologically distinct categories. God-born monads represent one category. They are fewer. They are greater in stature, having issued directly from out of the unfathomable depths of the Creator. They are destined to lead worlds, from the start assuming that leadership unblemished by moral falls or setbacks, and continuing to grow only greater in glory and strength. No one besides themselves can apprehend, or will ever apprehend, the mystery of their divine birth. In Shadanakar, the Planetary Logos, Zventa-Sventana, the Demiurges of the suprapeoples, the Great Sisters, and some of the Great Hierarchies are God-born monads. No demonic monad in Shadanakar numbers among them, though one should not forget that Lucifer is a God- born monad, the only one to turn from God.

The rest of the world's monads belong to the other category, those that are God-created. Each of them can apprehend the mystery of their creation by God, though only, of course, at an extremely high level of ascent.

The Planetary Logos is a great God-born monad, the seat of divine reason in our bramfatura, the oldest and first of all its monads. He differs from all the other monads in that, as the Word is the expression of the Speaker, He expresses one of the hypostases of the Trinity: that of God the Son. The Logos of Shadanakar is proceeding along a path of creative work and ascent up the cosmic staircase, a path beyond our conception, and no bramfatura, besides demonic ones, can exist without such a monad. For one such monad appears in every bramfatura at the dawn of its existence and remains the locus of Providence and the Divine Spirit throughout the evolution of all its sakwalas.

The Planetary Logos descended to Shadanakar as soon as the materiality created by the hierarchies for the bramfatura was capable of accommodating Him. The plane to which He first descended was later to become Iroln. The plane was readied through the efforts of the Logos to accommodate a multitude of young, God-created monads. But those efforts were insufficient to safeguard Shadanakar from the invasion of Gagtungr, and the Planetary Logos and hosts of monads of Light were forced to engage in battle with him. Illumined global laws alien to suffering, death, and any kind of darkness were created. The foundation for the first, angelic, humankind was laid by the Planetary Logos Himself and Lilith, whose essence at that time was as yet untainted by the demonic yetzerhare. While a constant struggle raged with the demonic camp, Olirna was created, as were the sakwalas of Higher Purpose, of the Great Hierarchies, and of the Great Elementals. In addition, those planes that later became the sakwalas of emanations from the other

planets, the Sun, and Astrafire were being readied. Some of the planes created then no longer exist: for instance, those planes the human angels used to rise to, after having attained enlightenment. And since the materiality of those beings was not tainted by a yetzerhare, no moral falls cast a shadow on the ascent of angelic humankind.

What is meant by the concept of original sin occurred between Lilith and Gagtungr when the latter invaded her world. As a result, all beings in whose densely material family chain Lilith took or has taken part carry a yetzerhare, the satanic seed. In demonic beings the yetzerhare holds sway over the monad, while in all others it holds sway, at the very worst, over the shelt. As for the story of Adam and Eve, all the planes, eras, and hierarchies in it have become so muddled that it is better to pass over that legend. In any case, universal expiation-that is, the incineration of all yetzerhares - would have eventually been accomplished by Christ had His mission in Enrof not been curtailed.

Like a mirror image of the descent of the angelic monads into Shadanakar, Gagtungr created a densely material plane where lesser Demons underwent incarnatlon. these were the same demons who in time turned into the monsters of modern times: Witzraors, velgas, ryphras, igvas, and the angels of darkness. At the same time that angelic humankind was ascending, organic life in Enrof, which had been entrusted to the care of the animal world, began to emerge. The animal world was envisaged as a grand community of new, young, God-created monads commissioned to descend to very dense planes of materiality in order to enlighten them.

After Gagtungr succeeded in perverting the laws of life in Enrof, leaving his imprint on the animal world and in that way marring the Providential design, a second, Titan, humankind was created through the efforts of the Planetary Logos. Its purpose was identical to that of all the communities of Light: the enlightenment of matter. In time they were meant to relocate to Enrof and oversee the enlightenment of the animal world and of certain elementals that had been demonized or checked in their growth. But with the revolt and fall of the Titans, yet another catastrophe overtook the Providential powers. The demise of the second humankind boosted Gagtungr's power to a level he had never before known. The animal world had only been slowed in its development and the Titans were cast down to the worlds of Retribution only to escape later, but the Lunar humankind, which had been created by the Planetary Logos and His forces, was dealt an even more crushing blow in the post-Titan period, and having passed through a phase when almost all its shelts became demonized, it disappeared altogether from the face of Enrof. That took place approximately eight hundred thousand years ago, when man began to evolve from the animal world in terrestrial Enrof and the Planetary

Logos and His camp created the daemon humankind on other three- dimensional planes. Its creation was necessitated by the urgency of reinforcing the camp of Light and by the fact that more and more hosts of monads flowing out of the depths of the Creator were seeking ways to descend to the densely material planes to enlighten them. The daemons were not commissioned with the task of enlightening the animal world-their planes are in no way connected with animals-but one of their tasks was, and is, the enlightenment of elementals checked in their growth.

As for the so-called dawn of humanity-that is, the era of the emergence of the human species from the animal world-it was an extremely bleak and dreary dawn. Prehistoric humanity can and should be pitied, but not idealized: it was violent, mean, and crudely utilitarian. It knew of absolutely nothing spiritual besides magic, and magic is by its very nature utilitarian and selfseeking. A microscopic minority slowly conceived a mystifying sense of the Great Elementals and the first tremblings of an appreciation for beauty. The first mass experience of the transphysical side of reality was the revelation of the omnipresent arungvilta-prana.

The slow process whereby the spiritual filtered into human consciousness proceeded millennium after millennium, drop by drop. Every few centuries, a certain charge of energy, as it were, a kind of spiritual quantum, would accumulate in the subconscious of individuals and suddenly burst into their hearts and minds. They were messengers of sorts, the first people on missions of Light. Small groups formed around them, and the first steps on the road to spiritual growth were discovered. It is difficult to pinpoint when that began, but flashes are perceptible as early as the late Cro-Magnon period. A long period of regression then ensued, followed by new sparks in the Americas that, on the eve of the rise of the Atlantean culture, at last combined to form unbroken chains of Light.

The demise of Atlantis jeopardized all the gains in spirituality made during those cheerless centuries. A fine thread managed to be spirited off to Africa and relayed to Egypt via the Sudanese culture. Another thread was conveyed to America. Then began centuries of constant anxiety for all the powers of Light, as the onslaught of darkness was such that the thread was sometimes embodied on Earth in a single person. It is not easy to imagine their incomparable feeling of isolation and the malevolent darkness raging all around them. I could list a few strange-sounding, unfamiliar names, but it is better to say that those prophets and heroes of the spirit from the bloody dawn of humanity were later to weave into their garlands those beautiful and bright flowers whose names are known to us all now: Akhenaton, Zoroaster, Moses, Hosia, the Buddha, Mahavira, Lao-tse, John the Apostle. The future Gautama Buddha weathered an especially fierce struggle. It took place among the African tribes in the vicinity of Lake Chad, before the rise of the Sudanese culture, when the already fading light of Atlantean wisdom and spirituality flickered in the soul of that single person alone. The thread conveyed to America had been snipped, and he was the only flame of spirit left on the globe. By standards later applied to messengers and prophets, he was far from outstanding, but he was alone, and nothing else need be said. The Synclite of Atlantis was too far removed geographically to help him in any concrete way, and he did not yet know how to tap with his waking consciousness into the energy extended by other forces of Light. It seemed to him that he was all alone, engaged in an endless battle in darkness. Fortunately, he acquired several worthy disciples at the close of that incarnation and all was saved. In that lies the unbelievable nature of his feat: that was all accomplished without a Synclite!

Approximately ten thousand years ago, when Atlantis was at its zenith, the Planetary Logos incarnated in Zheram, the Enrof of daemons. Gagtungr was unable to thwart or interfere with His mission in the daemon world, nor was Gagtungr able to kill His bodily incarnation before it had been imbued with the full power of the Logos. The path of the Logos in the daemon world ended in His apotheosis, and the entire sakwala embarked on a road of successive stages of enlightenment. The mission of the Logos in the daemon world resembled His later mission among humanity, but there it was brought to a successful conclusion, which in turn accelerated the sakwala's development.

Before taking a human form in which His essence would be fully reflected, the Great Spirit made a preliminary descent, incarnating approximately seven thousand years ago in Gondwana. He became a great teacher there. Humanity, however, was as yet unprepared to assimilate the spirituality flowing down through the incarnated Logos. But a profound and pure esoteric teaching was formulated and its first seeds sown, seeds that were later to be carried by the winds of history to the soil of other countries and cultures: India, Egypt, China, Iran, Babylon. The incarnation of the Logos in Gondwana did not yet possess the same fullness that was later manifested in Jesus Christ; it was essentially nothing more than a preparation for the later descent.

What people, culture, and country were to be the setting for Christ's life did not become clear, of course, all at once. A precisely-formulated monotheism, not professed by just a handful but embraced by the people as a whole, was a prerequisite. Otherwise the psychological soil necessary for the revelation of God the Son would have been lacking. But the geographical and historical factors that shaped the cultural and religious character of the Indian and Chinese peoples deprived monotheism of any means of filtering into the consciousness of the masses. The monotheistic teaching of Lao-tse and similar movements in Brahmanism remained virtually esoteric doctrines. All of them were limited to the spiritual ecstasies of individual adepts and private theosophical speculations.

The unmatched religious genius of the Indian peoples enabled them to assimilate the revelations of many Great Hierarchies and to create a Synclite unrivaled in size. But the great Indian pantheon eclipsed, as it were, the even higher reality of the World Salvaterra. The Indian religious consciousness had long been accustomed to the idea of hierarchies incarnating as people and even animals; it was therefore unable to grasp the altogether exceptional and specific nature of the Planetary Logos's incarnation, its complete and fundamental dissimilarity from the avatars of Vishou or the incarnations of any other powers of Light. Buddhism, with all its brilliant moral teachings, avoided a precise formulation of the question of the Absolute. The Buddha, like Mahavira, believed that when it came to salvation people did better to rely solely on their own efforts. That mistaken belief was prompted by the negative side of the terrible spiritual experience he had acquired during his solitary vigil in the midst of planetary night-an experience he recalled after becoming Gautama but was clearly unable to fathom fully. One way or another, the Buddhist teaching, by avoiding profession of the One God, struck India once and for all from the list of potential sites of the Planetary Logos's incarnation.

In the fourteenth century B.C. the first attempt in history was made to establish a clearly formulated, Sun-centered monotheism as a national religion. It took place in Egypt, and the giant figure of its pharaoh reformer towers to this day over the horizon of past centuries as an example of one of history's first prophets. What utter isolation that genius poet and seer must have felt, concluding his inspired hymn to the One God with the tragic plaint: «And no one knows You besides Your Son, Akhenaton!»

One should not, however, take that plaint too literally. There was at least one person who shared his feeling of isolation. The role of Queen Nefertiti, his wife, as an inspirer of and participant in the religious reforms can hardly be exaggerated. That astonishing woman traversed the golden sands of her country as a messenger of the same heavenly Light as her spouse. Both of them, inseparably bound together by creative work and divine love at every stage of their journey, long ago reached the highest worlds of Shadanakar.

As we know, Akhenaton's efforts came to naught. Not only the religion he founded but even the name of the reformer himself was erased from the annals of Egyptian historiography. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century, through the efforts of European archaeologists, that the historical truth was reestablished. With the failure of that plan and the persistence of polytheism as the dominant religious form, Egypt too had to be dropped from the list of potential sites of Christ's incarnation.

In Iran, Zoroastrianism was also unable to develop into a distinctly monotheistic religion. The myth of that religion failed to incorporate even a fraction of its immense transmyth. The responsibility for that does not rest on its founders, for they, and first and foremost Zoroaster himself, provided a religious framework capacious enough to accommodate spiritual truths of immense proportions. It is the Witzraors and shrastr of Iran that bear the blame. Their reflection in Enrof-the Achaemenid empire-was able to check any and all spiritual growth, provoke an ossification of the religious forms of Zoroastrianism, suppress its mysticism, petrify its morality, redirect the focus of the arts on itself in place of the religion, and rechannel the spiritual energy of the suprapeople into the building of a state empire. By the time that empire fell and the Collective Soul of Iran was for a short time liberated, it was already too late. The religion of Mithra, which was spreading at the time, bore the telltale marks of work too rushed, of revelation too blurred. The gaze of the Elector finally came to rest on the Jews.

A metahistorical study of the Bible permits one to trace how the prophets were inspired by the demiurge of that people; how the authors of the Book of Job, the Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes caught the echoes, distorted though they were, of his voice; how that revelation was at first contaminated and debased by inspiration from Shalem and the elemental of Mount Sinai, a grim, harsh, and intractable spirit; and how later the notes of anger, fury, belligerence, and unreasonable demands-the characteristic voice of Witzraors-cast a darker and darker shadow on the books of the Old Testament. But monotheism as a national religion was essential to Christ's mission, and it was the Jews that supplied it. Therein lies their historical and metahistorical contribution. What is important is that in spite of the innumerable misrepresentations, the tangle of hierarchies that inspired the mind and creative impulses of the authors of the Old Testament, the monotheistic religion did survive and the I of the Bible can, though, of course, not always, be understood as the Almighty.

To the degree that metahistorical knowledge enables one to comprehend the tasks that faced Christ during His life on Earth, one can for now define them in the following manner: to initiate humanity into the mystery of the Spiritual Universe, instead of leaving it to guess about it with the help of speculative philosophy and individual intuitions; to unblock the organs of spiritual perception in humans; to repeal the law of the jungle; to break the iron wheel of the law of karma; to abolish the principle of coercion and, consequently, the state in human society; to transform humanity into a community; to repeal the law of death and replace it with material transformation; to raise humans to the level of theohumankind. Oh, Christ was not supposed to die a violent or even a natural death. After living a long life in Enrof and accomplishing those tasks for which He had undergone incarnation, He was to have experienced not death but transformation-the transfiguration of His whole being and His passage into Olirna before the eyes of the world. If it had been completed, Christ's mission would have given rise to the establishment of an ideal Church/Community two or three centuries later, instead of states with their armies and bloody bacchanalias. The number of victims, the sum of suffering, and the time span required for humanity's ascent would have been lessened immeasurably.

Christ's founding of the Church in Enrof was preceded by an emanation of energy from the Virgin Mother-another hypostasis of the Trinity-into the higher worlds of Shadanakar. The emanation of energy did not take on a personal aspect; it was not connected with the descent of a God-born monad. Nor was it the first emanation of Femininity in the history of Enrof. The first emanation of Femininity in the existence of humanity took place some fourteen centuries earlier, and one can find echoes of an intuition of that fact in certain myths where, however, it melds with legends concerning the sacrificial descents of collective souls of suprapeoples into the dark planes, as we can see, for example, in Babylon. But that brightest of God-created monads, which was later to become the Mother of the Planetary Logos on Earth, took human form twice in that same Babylon, the second time during the very period of the first emanation of Femininity. Her life that time did not take Her beyond the limits of a small city in Sennaar, where She became a holy woman and was subsequently put to death. At the moment of Her death, Universal Femininity enlightened Her whole being, and that predestined Her to become the Mother of God. Even earlier, before Babylon, She lived in Atlantis, where She was a simple, beautiful woman and the mother of a large family. Before Atlantis, at the very dawn of human civilization, She lived in a small village in Central America. It is a long-lost settlement whose meager ruins will never be recovered from the tropical jungles of Honduras and Guatemala. Before that, during the prehistoric era, the monad of the future Mother of God was not born in human form.

The second emanation of Universal Femininity in Shadanakar was echoed by a softening, as it were, of the inner crust of many people in Enrof, without which the establishment of the Church on Earth by Jesus Christ would not have been possible. The Christian churches, in that abortive, unfinished form familiar to us in history, are nothing more than the pale, inchoate, partial, and distorted reflections of the Church that abides on the very highest planes of Shadanakar.

From the age of fourteen to thirty, Jesus traveled in Iran and India, where He was initiated into the deepest wisdom then possessed by humanity, only to far outstrip it.

Why did Christ not leave a written record of His teachings? Why did He prefer to entrust the task to His disciples? After all, the evangelists, inspired by God though they were, were still human, and the great enemy was not sleeping, so that even in the Gospels of the New Testament there are in places clear traces of his distorting imprint. But Christ could not set down His teachings in a book because His teachings were not only His words but His whole life. His teachings were the Immaculate Conception and His birth on a quiet Bethlehem night, illumined by the singing of angels; His meeting with Gagtungr in the desert and his travels on the roads of Galilee; His poverty and His love; the healing of the sick and the resurrection of the dead; His walking on water and His transfiguration on Mt. Favor; His suffering and Resurrection. Such teachings could only have been recorded, even if with gaps and errors, by eyewitnesses of that divine life.

But our sworn enemy crept into the gaps. By infiltrating the alltoo-human consciousness of the evangelists, he succeeded in corrupting many testimonies, distorting and harshening ideas, debasing and qualifying ideals, even in ascribing words to Christ that our Savior could never have uttered. We as yet do not possess the means to separate the genuine from the false in the Gospels. There are neither precise criteria nor visible markers. Everyone who reads the New Testament should only keep in mind that Christ's teachings were His whole life, not just His words. As for the words ascribed to Him, everything that concurs with a spirit of love is genuine, while everything that is marked by a threatening and merciless spirit is false.

It is difficult to say at what moment in Jesus' life on Earth worry first crept into His soul, when he first felt doubt in the ultimate success of His mission. But in the latter period of His ministry, an awareness that the leader of the dark forces might well finish with a partial, short-term victory shows more and more clearly through His words-as much as we know them from the Gospels. That partial victory took concrete form in the betrayal by Judas that led to Golgotha.

Judas's personal motives for the betrayal resulted from the shattering by Christ of Judas's cherished nationalist dream of the Messiah as the King of the Jews and lord of the world. Until the day he met Jesus, Judas's heart had burned with that dream his entire life, and its death was a great tragedy for him. He did not entertain the slightest doubt as to Jesus' divinity, and his betrayal was an act of bitter hate, the conscious murder of God. The thirty pieces of silver and the motive of greed in general were only a hastily adopted disguise-he could not very well reveal the genuine motives of his crime! It was the nature of those genuine motives that entailed his descent to Zhursch, a form of karmic retribution unparalleled in its severity.

Now it becomes clear what vast importance can be attached to the events that unfolded after Jesus Christ's triumphant entry into Jerusalem. The Planetary Logos was as yet unable to complete the preparations for His transformation, and a painful human death awaited Him on Golgotha. Although He could have escaped crucifixion, He did not want to, for it would have meant a retreat. Further, Gagtungr would in any case have ensured He was killed a little later. But the possibility of a different kind of transformation after death arose: resurrection. In the interval between His death and Resurrection there took place His bramfatura-shaking descent into the worlds of Retribution and the opening of the eternally closed gates of those worlds, a descent that truly earned Jesus the title of Savior. He descended through all the planes of magma and the core; only the entrance to Sufetkh was barred to Him. All the other gateways were forced, the locks broken, and the sufferers raised some to the worlds of Enlightenment, others to the shrastrs, still others to the upper planes of Retribution, which began to transform from planes of eternal torment into temporary purgatories. Thus was begun the great task of mitigating the law of karma, work on which was to intensify even more.

Lying in the tomb, the physical body of Our Savior became enlightened and, resurrected to life, entered Olirna, a different, higher three-dimensional plane of materiality. This explains those properties of His body that the apostles observed between His Resurrection and Ascension, such as the ability to walk through objects of our plane, and yet to partake of food, or the ability to travel distances at great speed. The other, second transformation described in the Gospels as the Ascension was nothing other than Our Savior's ascent from Olirna even higher, up to the next of those planes existing at the time. A little while later, He guided Mary, Mother of God, through the same transformation, and John the Apostle a few decades after that. The transformation of some other great human souls has also taken place since then.

Gradually growing from strength to strength, the Risen Christ has been leading the struggle of all the powers of Light of Shadanakar against the demonic. New planes of enlightenment-Faer, Nertis, Gotimna, and, later, Usnorm-were created

during the first centuries of Christianity, and the passage of many millions of those to be enlightened through that sakwala was accelerated. A powerful current of spirituality, which rarefies and enlightens ever more human souls, has been pouring down through the Christian churches, and the radiant zatomis of Christian metacultures, with their populous, ever brighter

Synclites, sprouted and flowered. The grandiose process of converting planes of torment into purgatories has neared the halfway point:

Left to be transformed is the sakwala of magma, while the purgatories themselves are gradually to undergo even more changes. They will be rid of any and all elements of retribution. Instead, souls with burdened ether bodies will be given spiritual assistance from the Synclites, assistance that could be likened more to therapy than to punishment.

Mary, the Mother of God, has in the course of these centuries completed Her ascent from world to world. She is the comfort of all those suffering (especially those in the inferno), the Mediatrix of All Graces and the Mater Dolorosa for everyone and everything. She, like Her Son, abides in the World Salvaterra, donning a resplendent ether coating to descend to other planes. Our Savior, who as the Planetary Logos abides in the inner chamber of Salvaterra, has had for many centuries the power to create and coat Himself in a radiant ether body, and in that form He descends to the zatomis and meets with the Synclites of metacultures. His power has grown immeasurably. We are not, however, yet able to grasp the meaning of the processes that have been taking place in the very highest worlds of Shadanakar during the last two thousand years, though they are clearly what is most significant from the point of view of metahistory.

But if Jesus Christ's struggle with the demonic beyond the bounds of Enrof has been marked by a series of major victories, the curtailment of His mission in Enrof itself has resulted in an endless number of tragic consequences.

His very teachings ended up distorted, having been mixed with elements from the Old Testament, just those elements that Christ's life had been superseding and would have superseded once and for all if it had not been cut short. The chief features of those elements is the attribution to the image of God of the traits of a fearful, merciless judge, even an avenger, and the ascription of the inhumane laws of nature and moral retribution to Him and no one else. That ancient misrepresentation has acted as no small brake on the ascending journey of the soul. The confusion in one's mind between the divine and the demonic leaves one no choice but to resign oneself to the idea of the just, eternal, and immutable nature of those same laws for which Gagtungr bears the responsibility and which should be mitigated, spiritualized, and radically reformed. The resulting drop in moral consciousness naturally leads to people focusing their efforts on their own salvation, while their active commitment to social justice and the enlightenment of the world atrophies.

The curtailment of Christ's mission also resulted in the material in nature and the carnal in humans not undergoing the enlightenment that was supposed to occur on a global scale, and not just in the essence of Christ alone. Left unenlightened, they were excluded by the Christian Church from what it sanctioned, consecrated, and blessed. The sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist were believed to sunder the neophyte from the pagan celebration of the flesh as a good unto itself. No other higher formulation of the relationship was forthcoming. That tendency toward asceticism in Christianity, barely mitigated by the compromise institution of the sacrament of marriage, that polarization of the concepts of «spirit» and «flesh» that followed in Christianity's wake to all the cultures it embraced, in the long run resulting in the secular era of civilization-all that is no simple accident or even a mere historical phenomenon. To the contrary, it is a reflection of one aspect of Christianity's metahistorical fate, an aspect born of the curtailment of Christ's mission in Enrof.

What is most important is that no radical change whatsoever took place in Enrof. Laws remained laws, instincts remained instincts, passions remained passions, disease remained disease, death remained death, states remained states, wars remained wars, and tyrannies remained tyrannies. The birth of the Church among humanity, a church encumbered by an inherited arrogance and not immune to dark inspiration, could not generate the rapid growth-both spiritual and moral-that would have taken place if Gagtungr had not cut short Christ's life. For that reason, humanity has for nineteen centuries stumbled along a broken, crooked, irregular, and one-sided path: the resultant vector of the work of the Providential powers and the furious actions of Gagtungr.

The indecisive character of the great demon's victory cast him into a prolonged state of uncontrollable rage. The effects of his maniacal fury were felt in Enrof, giving rise to unprecedented disturbances on the surface of global history. The series of monstrous tyrants on the throne of the Roman Empire in the first century A.D.-their atrocities, unrivaled by anything either before or after; their irrational bloodthirstiness; their pride; their frenzies; their inhuman resourcefulness in devising new methods of torture; their warped creative impulses, which caused them to have erected buildings of unparalleled grandeur that either catered, like the Coliseum, to the baser instincts of the masses or, like the madcap projects of Caligula, were utterly senseless-all these were echoes of the fury of the demon, who saw that his sworn enemy, though delayed on His path, had grown in power and would thenceforth rise from glory to glory.

Several centuries before Christ, Gagtungr had acquired an imposing weapon: he had been able to effect the incarnation of certain gargantuan demonic beings on neighboring planes and thus to found the first dynasty of Witzraors in Babylon-Assyria and Carthage. One of that first Witzraor's offsprings, the Jewish Witzraor, dutifully assisted Gagtungr in his struggle with Christ during our Savior's life in Enrof: without the help of that Witzraor it would hardly have been possible to subvert the will of Judas Iscariot and of many Jewish leaders and delude them into thinking they were acting in their people's interests by persecuting Christ and putting Him to death. In addition, Gagtungr knew full well that the creation of two, three, or several predators of one and the same kind on the same plane would eventually lead, through the law of the jungle, to the victory of the strongest ones, until the strongest of them all succeeded in extending its power over all the shrastrs and the power of its human puppets over all terrestrial Enrof. With that, all the necessary conditions for absolute tyranny would be present. It was with a view to realizing that plan that a dynasty of Witzraors was also founded in Iran and Rome, and the Roman one proved stronger than the rest.

It appears that it was on Forsuth, the Witzraor of the Roman Empire, that Gagtungr placed his greatest hope in the first century A.D., after Christ's Resurrection. What is more, it seems that even the Synclites at that time could not be sure that the mad frenzy of Gagtungr, which had doubled his strength, would not lead to the appearance of the Antichrist in the near future and hasten the end of the first eon, thus multiplying the number of spiritual victims to unimaginable proportions and greatly complicating the tasks of the second eon. That alarm explains the apocalyptic, or rather, the eschatological mood, the expectation of the imminent end of the world that gripped the Christian communities and the Jews in the first decades after Christ's Resurrection. Fortunately, those fears proved unfounded.

Gagtungr's strength at that time was only sufficient to invoke the incredibly senseless bloodbaths of the caesars and to attempt to exterminate the Christian Church physically. By the middle of the first century, however, another plan of attack could be observed. Christ had been unable to complete His mission in Enrof and thus the Church He had founded, instead of proceeding on to global apotheosis, was barely smoldering in the form of a few small communities pressed beneath the backbreaking layers of state institutions created by the Witzraors and beneath the hard crust of psyches inspired by those demons. Taking advantage of this, the forces of Gagtungr began to meddle in the life of the Church itself. A strong-willed and highly gifted individual emerged, one deeply sincere in his conversion to Christ, and in whom Jewish singlemindedness and a messianic Jewish severity were combined with the legal-rational mind of a Roman citizen. He was an agent on a mission of indubitable Light, but the abovementioned personal and ethnic character traits warped his own understanding of that mission. Instead of furthering Christ's work, instead of strengthening and enlightening the Church with the spirit of love and love alone, the thirteenth Apostle launched a massive, far-reaching organizational effort, binding the scattered communities together with strict regulations, unquestioning obedience to a single leader, and even fear, since the threat of being expelled from the bosom of the Church, in the case of disobedience, inspired just that: spiritual fear. The Apostle Paul never met Jesus Christ during His lifetime and was consequently denied all the grace that issued directly from Jesus. Nor was Paul present when the Holy Spirit descended on the other Apostles.

Yet the other apostles recede, as it were, into the background, each of them concentrating on local missions, on the creation of Christian communities in one or another country, while Paul, the one apostle lacking divine grace, gradually becomes the dominant figure towering over all the communities, unifying them, and dictating to them what he thinks to be the continuation of Christ's work.

That may have been the first clear indication of Gagtungr's determination to revise radically the demonic plan. Toward the end of the first century the dynamics and whole atmosphere within the Roman ruling elite suddenly change. Domitian, the last monster on the throne, falls victim to conspirators. The mad frenzies of the caesars abruptly cease. In the course of the next century there is a steady succession of exemplary monarchs. It is true that they perform what the logic of power-that is, the will of the Witzraor Forsuth-demands, and try to bolster the state, which supplies the Witzraor with such an inexhaustible stream of the red, dew-like food called shavva, but gone are former delusions of world conquest, the deranged building projects, and the "living torches"- Christians dipped in tar and set afire-which Nero used to illuminate his orgies. State affairs keep to a more or less prescribed path. In other words, Forsuth occupies itself with survival and is no longer encouraged to seek global dominion. The focus of the higher demonic plan switches. Abandoned are any ideas of guiding the Roman Empire to planetary rule. Usurping control of the Christian Church from within becomes the cornerstone of their plan.

In spite of all the distortions generated in Christianity by the lack of spiritual depth in the thousands that created it, the Christian Church (and subsequently, its various churches) has been the mouth of a powerful current of spirituality flowing down from planetary heights. In the eyes of Gagtungr the Church became a factor of overriding importance and every means available was utilized to seize control of it from within. The religious exclusivity of the Semites, the spiritual isolationism of the Greeks, the mercilessness and ruthless thirst for political hegemony of the Romans-all that was enlisted to that end in the second, third, fourth, and fifth centuries. That was insufficient, of course, to accomplish the primary goal, but it was quite enough to lead the Church away from its principal tasks, to contaminate it with a spirit of hatred, to lure it into the ocean of politics, to substitute transient worldly goals for its enduring spiritual ones, and to subordinate its Eastern half to the rule of the emperors and its Western half to the dogma of a wrongly conceived theocracy. The Church becomes a political power so much the worse for it! Humanity still had a long way to go to reach the moral height at which it is possible to combine political leadership with moral purity.

My ignorance prevents me from outlining the principal stages, let alone drawing a full panoramic view, of Gagtungr's nineteencentury-long battle with the forces of the Risen Christ. Only a very few individual links in the chain are, to a greater or lesser extent, clearly visible to me.

For example, in the context of that battle the metahistorical meaning of the person and ministry of Muhammad gradually comes to light. From an orthodox point of view, whether it be Muslim or Christian, it is relatively easy to make one or another positive or negative assessment of that ministry. But in endeavoring to remain impartial, one is inevitably confronted with ideas and arguments whose contradictory natures preclude definitive judgment. One would think that Muhammad's religious genius, his sincerity, his inspiration by higher ideals, and that peculiar fiery conviction of his teaching that compels one to recognize him as a genuine prophet-that is, a messenger sent from the other world-are not subject to doubt. On the other hand, it is hard to see wherein lies the progressivity of his teachings when compared with Christianity. If there was no such progressivity in his teachings, then what need did humanity have of them? To treat Muhammad as a false prophet also fails to settle the matter, since it then becomes impossible to understand how a false religious teaching could nevertheless become a channel through which spirituality has flowed into the soil of great peoples, uplifting millions and millions of souls through a passionate worship of the One God.

Metahistorical knowledge supplies an unexpected answer to the problem, an answer that is, unfortunately, equally unacceptable to both Christian and Muslim orthodoxy. We can arrive at a correct answer only if we realize that Muhammad appeared at the moment when Gagtungr had already paved the way for the appearance on the historical scene of a genuinely false prophet. He was to have been a figure of great stature, and just as great would have been the spiritual danger humanity would have faced in his person. The false prophet was to have stripped Christianity of a number of outlying peoples who were still in the initial stages of Christianization, convert a number of other nations that had not been Christianized, and prompt a powerful and decidedly demonic movement within Christianity itself. The flawed development of the Christian Church would have been the soil in which that poisonous seed would have yielded a rich harvest, culminating in the installation at the helm of ecclesiastical and state power of a group of both open and secret devotees of Gagtungr.

The Prophet Muhammad was an agent on a higher mission. In brief, its aim was to draw the young and pure Arab people, who were only just coming into contact with Christianity, into the religion, and to generate through their efforts a fervent movement in the Christian Church toward a religious reformation, toward the purgation from Christianity of extreme asceticism, of subordination of the Church to the state, of the theocratic dictatorship established by the Papacy. But Muhammad was not only a religious teacher; he was a poet of genius, even more a poet than a prophet sent from the other world. Indeed, he was one of the greatest poets of all time.

That poetic genius, in conjunction with certain of his character traits, deflected him from his unwavering religious path. A powerful jet of poetic creativity shot into the main channel of his religious mission, distorting and clouding the revelation given to him. Instead of reforming Christianity, Muhammad allowed himself to be diverted by the idea of founding a new, pure religion. And found it he did. But since his revelation was not sufficient for him to say anything truly new after Christ, the religion he founded proved to be regressive (though not false or demonic) in comparison to Christ's teachings.

The religion did in fact gather into its fold those peoples who without Muhammad would have fallen victim to the false prophet Gagtungr was readying. The final assessment of Muhammad's role can therefore be neither wholly negative nor wholly positive. Yes, he was a prophet, and the religion he founded is one of the great right-hand religions. Yes, the rise of Islam saved humanity from a great spiritual catastrophe. But in rejecting many fundamental Christian beliefs, the religion regressed to a simplified monotheism. It offers nothing essentially new, and that is why there is no transmyth of Islam among the Great Transmyths, among the five crystal pyramids shining from the heights of Shadanakar.

Here I will point out only one other demonic plan of attack, without the knowledge of which it would be impossible to understand what follows and which should, both in history and metahistory, in time develop into, in a manner of speaking, the principal offensive thrust.

In mentioning the fact that no demon, no matter how powerful it might be, is capable of creating a monad, I had hoped that the reader would give due consideration to its implications. After the incarnation of the Planetary Logos, humanity became the decisive battleground, and an idea began to form in the demonic mind: to create, slowly if need be, a human puppet who would be capable of achieving absolute tyranny in terrestrial Enrof, of turning the population of the Earth into a satanohumankind. But once again the demonic lack of creativity made itself felt. Unable to come up with anything original, all the demonic forces could do was resort to the law of opposites and devise a blueprint to create a distorted mirror image of the efforts and paths of Providence. The Anticosmos was counterposed to the Cosmos, the principle of form to the Logos, satanohumankind to theohumankind, and the Antichrist to Christ.

The Antichrist! I will probably drive away more readers by introducing that concept into the Rose of the World's worldview than I have driven away in all the previous chapters combined.

The concept has been discredited numerous times: by the shallow, petty, and vulgarized meaning attached to it; by the abuse of those who proclaimed their political foes the servants of the Antichrist; and by the failed prophecies of those who saw signs of the imminent coming of the Antichrist in the events of the long-past periods of history in which they lived. But if by resurrecting the concept I were to drive away ten times more people than I actually will, I would still introduce it, for the concept of the Antichrist is woven into the worldview I am presenting with the strongest threads and will not be removed from it as long as the worldview itself exists.

As Gagtungr is incapable of creating monads, and demonic monads cannot be incarnated as humans, he had no alternative but to use a human monad in his plan. No matter what dark mission people perform, no matter what terrible stamps they leave on history, all that is dark has its origin in their shelt, not in their monad. It is only the shelt that can be demonized, not the human monad. In those rare cases, as with the father of the igvas or Klingsor, when an individual, having attained an extremely high clarity of consciousness, rejects God, it is his or her shelt, and not the monad, that does the rejecting. Thereupon something truly dreadful occurs: the renunciation of one's monad, for the very reason that it cannot sanction a rejection of God, and a total surrender of oneself - that is, of the shelt and all its material coatings - to the will and power of Gagtungr. The link between the monad and shelt is severed. The monad leaves Shadanakar to begin its journey anew in another bramfatura, and the shelt is either given to a demonic monad that for some reason has none or becomes the personal tool of Gagtungr, in which case the influence of his own spirit in part takes the place of the monad. In both instances, the shelt becomes demonized once and for all that is, there is a gradual transformation of its material composition. siaira, the materiality made by the bramfatura's forces of Light, is replaced by agga, the materiality of demonic origin. The same happens to the astral body as well. (Structurally agga differs from siaira in that it lacks microbramfaturas-the elementary particles that compose it are not animate and not even partly intelligent beings, as in siaira, but inanimate, indivisible material units. Agga is made up of only eleven types of those dark antiatoms, being the sum of their innumerable combinations.) Naturally, beings with such demonized shelts and astral bodies can no longer be born anywhere except on demonic planes. Thus, they are denied all possibility of incarnating as humans.

Since the plan to create an Antichrist called for its incarnation as a human, Gagtungr was left with only one alternative: kidnap a human monad, strip it of all its coats of siaira (that is, the shelt, the astral body, and the ether body), and by gradual effort fashion different coatings for it out of agga. It would be beyond the power of Gagtungr to destroy its former shelt of Light, but, without a monad, spiritually decapitated as it were, it would remain indefinitely in a state of spiritual lethargy somewhere in some out-ofthe-way transphysical crypt in Gashsharva. The kidnapping of a monad required enormous effort and long preparation. It was only in the fourth century A.D. that it was finally accomplished, and Gagtungr succeeded in snatching a human monad from Iroln, a monad that at one time had had an incarnation as a Titan and was presently linked to a shelt that had just completed a journey in Enrof in the person of one of the Roman emperors. But having only one such being caused the Antigod to fear that some unforeseen interference on the part of Providence might jeopardize the demonic plan. So later a few more monads were kidnapped as a kind of reserve of what we might call Antichrist candidates. Historically they faced the prospect of violent clashes with each other, the eventual victory of the strongest and luckiest, and the focusing of demonic efforts on that victor alone.

The shelts whose monads were kidnapped were indeed denied the possibility of being born anywhere. Walled up, as it were, in the depths of Gashsharva, they remain there to this day. The kidnapped monads, burdened by their material coatings of agga, with hands tied, so to speak, and controlled personally by Gagtungr, traveled down the road of demonic excellence, incarnating as humans from century to century.

One of them-that same monad of the former emperor soon began to outpace the others. Its kidnapper guided it from

incarnation to incarnation, overcoming its resistance, and over time causing an almost total extinguishment of its will of Light. As early as that startling being's incarnation in the fifteenth century, it had become obvious that the monad as an autonomous will was fully paralyzed and that the material coatings created for it were growing more and more obedient to demonic commands. The coatings were, however, still a long way from realizing their full potential. The incarnation in which that occurred was at the climax of the metahistorical battle within the Roman Catholic metaculture. It was connected with one of Gagtungr's most blatant, dramatic,

and sinister attempts to usurp control of the Church from within, an attempt that to this day remains the last.

I have already mentioned that behind the fanatical movement in Catholicism that cast a shadow over the end of the Middle Ages and found fullest expression in the Inquisition was one of the most nightmarish of the spawns of Gagtungr, and it was only in the eighteenth century that the forces of Light emerged victorious over it. As for the demonic human puppet, it appeared on the historical scene earlier, assuming the outward guise of an active champion of global theocracy. There is in Russian literature an astonishing piece of writing, the author of which undoubtedly must have had spiritual knowledge of that fact, though his waking self did not have full access to that knowledge. I am referring to «The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor» in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. The one who is to become the Antichrist in the not too distant future was, one could say, captured by Dostoyevsky at one of the most crucial stages of its previous existence. It is true that he is not a widely known historical figure. His name is known now only to medievalists as the name of one of the rather notable figures of the Spanish Inquisition. It was about that time that Gagtungr was forced to admit the failure of his overall scheme to turn historical Catholicism into his lackey and the impossibility of unifying the whole world on the basis of a Roman cosmopolitan hierocracy. Absolute tyranny was impossible without the unification of humanity, and a host of prior conditions for unification of any kind was still lacking.

I will elsewhere pause over certain critical metahistorical clashes that have taken place over the centuries. As Jesus Christ foresaw, the course of events has led to the imminence of the decisive battle, a battle made inevitable by the ancient hunger for power of the demonic powers and by their pursuit of universal tyranny.

The power of the One Who was Jesus Christ has grown beyond measure over the centuries. Were He to reappear in Enrof now, all the miracles of the Gospels, and all the miracles of Indian and Arab legends would pale beside the miracles He could perform. But there is no need for that yet. There are still two or three centuries before His Second Coming, and during that time He will be able to acquire the power to perform the greatest act in history and in metahistory: the turn of the eon. The turn of the eon will involve a qualitative transformation of humanity's materiality, the birth of the Synclites of all the metacultures in enlightened physical bodies here in Enrof, the beginning of a long road of expiation on other planes for those belonging to satanohumankind, and the commencement in Enrof of what is called in the Holy Scriptures the «thousand-year Kingdom of the Righteous.» The Second Coming is to occur simultaneously at a multitude of points on terrestrial

Enrof, so that every single being will have seen and heard Him. In other words, the Planetary Logos is to attain the inconceivable power to materialize simultaneously in as many places as there will then be consciousnesses to perceive Him in Enrof. These ether-physical materializations, however, will be but brief expressions of His single Entity, and they will merge back with Him for permanent residency in enlightened Enrof. That is what Christ meant when He prophesied that the Second Coming would be "like lightning coming from the east and flashing far into the west," so that all peoples and nations on Earth will see «the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven.»

6.3. Femininity

I have now arrived at a critical juncture of this work. And yet, no matter how important it may be, I barely have the courage to say a few words on the subject.

It is time to reexamine a Christian dogma that is nearly two thousand years old. All sorts of dogmas of the Christian creed have been questioned in the past; schisms, sects, and heresies have been born of differing interpretations of them; even the slightest departures in ritual have sometimes grown into a virtual abyss separating schismatics from the dominant church. But in the course of those nineteen centuries it appears that no dispute has ever arisen over what has been considered the cornerstone of the religion: the belief in the three hypostases of the Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

I do not intend to undertake a historical or psychological analysis of the circumstances surrounding the emergence of that specific understanding of the Trinity in the Christian Church. I possess neither the necessary sources nor the erudition required for such a task. And even if I did, I would be loathe to use the lances of rational analysis to probe the mysterious spiritual depths in which the idea appeared and took shape in the first centuries A.D.

I will permit myself only to cite one page from the Gospels that seems to me to support another interpretation of the Trinity. Matthew and Luke state plainly and unequivocally that the Virgin Mary conceived the Baby Jesus through the Holy Spirit. One could thus conclude that it was the Holy Spirit, and not God the Father, that was the Father of the human Christ. But how can that be? Could the timeless birth of God the Son from God the Father find expression in the historical, human world except as the birth of the human Jesus through the power of that latter hypostasis? But no, the story in the Gospels is unequivocal on that point. What is equivocal is the Christian Church's understanding of the third hypostasis. In the course of its entire history, the Church has never elaborated the dogma of the third hypostasis. One is even struck by the contrast between the detailed-perhaps too detailed- teaching about God the Son and what is almost an empty space where should be the doctrines about the Holy Spirit.

But there is nothing essentially strange about that. It is no coincidence that the Christian religion is called Christian. Besides specifying the religion's origin in Christ, the name also reflects the fact that the religion is primarily the revelation of God the Son-that is, it is not so much a religion of the Trinity as it is one of the Son. That explains the extremely hazy generalizations, the equivocality, incompleteness, and even contradictions in the dogmas concerned with the other hypostases.

Who, after all, could God the Father be if not the Spirit and the Spirit only? And, in contrast to all the other spirits He has created, He is Holy. For every God-created and even God-born monad can make - and many have made - a wrong choice and turn away from God. But the Father, as should be obvious to all, cannot turn from Himself. He is primordial, unchanging, unclouded, and unsoiled, and He is called Holy in that very sense. What good can come of depriving God the Father of two of His eternally inherent attributes-His spirituality and His holiness? What is the justification for investing these attributes with an entirely autonomous meaning in the aspect of the Third Person of the Trinity? And in fact, on which of Christ's words, on what testimonies of the four Gospels can the teaching be based that God the Father is one hypostasis of the Trinity and the Holy Spirit is another? There are no such statements to that effect in the Gospels. The words of Jesus cited in support of that claim come from His well-known prophecy: «I will send to you a Counselor, even a Spirit of Truth.» Differing interpretations of these very words even led to the Great Schism, which split the one Christian Church into Eastern and Western halves. But both interpretations still proceeded from a common postulate: the strangely undisputed supposition that by the «Counselor» Christ meant the third hypostasis. But there is not even the shadow of an intimation in these words that the Counselor to be sent by the Risen Savior is the third hypostasis or even a hypostasis at all. Nor is there any indication that the expressions «Counselor» and «God the Holy Spirit» refer to one and the same entity. Surely it is more natural, consistent, and sensible from every possible point of view to draw an altogether different conclusion, namely, that God the Holy Spirit is God the Father, for God the Father can be nothing other than Holy and the Spirit.

Once again, in reexamining here the cornerstone of a great teaching, I am setting my lone voice against a stupendous, vast choir, which has been thundering for so many centuries that there can be no doubt as to the reactions it will evoke, if it is even heard. I am even aware that in the eyes of some I am guilty of a great spiritual offense, having committed what is according to the Gospels the one unforgivable sin: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. I solemnly proclaim: I prostrate myself before the Holy Spirit, I worship Him and pray to Him with as much veneration as other Christians. And I fail not only to see blasphemy of His name but even the slightest debasement of His image in the idea that He is God the Father and that God the Father is God the Holy Spirit, that these are two names for one and the same Person-the first Person of the Holy Trinity.

I would like to emphasize that I am expressing my own humble opinion here. True, that opinion appears to me a conclusion at which more and more people will in time arrive. It has also been corroborated by those higher authorities that have always been my single supreme court of appeal. But I believe that no one has the right to insist on the exclusive and absolute validity of the idea, on its dogmatic force. The one legal, universally recognized body with the authority to resolve the issue might be the Eighth Ecumenical Council, where the representatives of all contemporary Christian faiths and the Rose of the World would discuss that postulate, as well as the postulate affirming the infallibility and irrevocability of the resolutions of ecumenical councils in general. Perhaps they might also reexamine certain tenets of Orthodox doctrine. Until that time, no one in the Rose of the World should unreservedly assert the error of the old dogma. They should only believe as their conscience and personal spiritual experience dictate, and work toward the unification of the churches and the resolution of all their outstanding differences.

The above idea, however, clears the path to the solution of a different, no less crucial, problem.

It is known that a vague yet intense and persistent sense of a Universal Feminine Principle has been alive in Christianity from the time of the gnostics up until the Christian thinkers of the early twentieth century-a sense that the Principle is not an illusion and not the projection of human categories onto the cosmic, but that it is a higher spiritual reality. It was clearly the Church's intention to provide an outlet for that feeling when in the East it gave its blessing to the cult of the Mother of God and in the West to that of the Madonna. And a concrete image did in fact emerge and was embraced by the people as an object for their spontaneous veneration of the Maternal Principle. But the mystical sense I spoke of-the sense of Eternal Femininity as a cosmic and divine principle-remained without an outlet. The early dogmatization of the teaching on the hypostases, in rendering it beyond dispute, placed those with that sense in an unenviable position: to avoid accusations of heresy they were forced to skirt the fundamental question and not give full voice to their thoughts, sometimes equating Universal Femininity with the Universal Church or, in the end, depriving the One God of one of His attributes-Wisdom-and personifying it as Holy Sophia. The higher Church authorities refrained from voicing any definite opinion on the subject, and they should not be faulted for it, because the belief in Universal Femininity could not help but grow into the belief in a Feminine Aspect of God, and that, of course, would have threatened to undermine the dogmatized beliefs about the Persons of the Holy Trinity (It would be extremely interesting to see a comprehensive study done of the history and evolution of the belief in Eternal Femininity in the Christian cultures at the very least. But such a work could only benefit from including other religions as well, if only those in whose pantheons the images of the great merciful goddesses are immortalized: Hinduism, Mahayana, ancient polytheistic teachings, and, of course, Gnosticism).

I have met many people who are extremely sophisticated culturally and intellectually, and are in possession of undoubted spiritual experience, yet they have been surprised, even appalled, at the very idea of what they perceived to be the projection of gender and human categories in general onto worlds of the highest reality, even onto the mystery of God Himself. They considered it a vestige of the ancient tendency of the limited human mind to anthropomorphize the spiritual. Incidentally, the Islamic objection to the belief in the Trinity and to the cult of the Mother of God derives from quite similar (psychological) sources. It is for the very same reason that deism and contemporary abstract cosmopolitan monism reject so vehemently belief in the Trinity, in hierarchies, and, of course, in Eternal Femininity. Ridiculous as it may seem, even the charge of polytheism that Muhammad leveled at Christianity thirteen hundred years ago has been reiterated.

Such charges are rooted either in an oversimplified understanding of Christian beliefs or in an unwillingness to penetrate deeper into the question. There has been no projection of human categories onto the Divine in historical Christianity, let alone in the worldview of the Rose of the World, but something in principle quite the reverse. No one is questioning the oneness of God, of course. It would be naive to suspect anyone here of reversion to the age of Carthage, Ur, and Heliopolis. The hypostases are separate external manifestations of the One Essence. They are how He reveals Himself to the world, not how He exists within Himself. But God's external manifestations are just as absolute in their reality as His existence within Himself. Therefore, the hypostases should not in any way be taken for illusions or aberrations of our mind.

In manifesting Himself externally, the One God reveals His inherent inner polarity. The essence of that polarity within the Divine is transcendental for us. But we perceive the external manifestations of that essence as the polarity of two principles gravitating to each other and not existing one without the other, eternally and timelessly united in creative love and bringing forth the third and consummating principle: the Son, the Foundation of the Universe, the Logos. Flowing into the universe, the Divine retains that inherent polarity; all spirituality and all materiality in the universe is permeated by it. It is manifested differently at different levels of being. At the level of inorganic matter perceptible by humans it can no doubt be seen as the basis of what we call the universal law of gravity, the polarity of electricity, and much more. In the organic matter of our plane here, the polarity of the Divine is manifested in the distinction between male and female. I wish to stress that it is manifested thus here, but the polarity of the Divine that is the basis for that distinction cannot be comprehended in itself, in its essence.

That is why we call Divine Femininity the Mother of Logos, and through Him, Mother of the entire Universe. But the eternal union between the Mother and Father does not change Her timeless essence. It is for that reason that we call the Mother of Worlds the Virgin.

Thus, one does not discern in the teaching on the Trinity and the Feminine Aspect of the Divine the projection of thinking that is «all too human» onto the cosmic realms. To the contrary, the teaching represents an intuition of the objective polarity-the male and female-of our planes as a projection of the transcendental polarity within the essence of God.

"God is Love," said John. Centuries will pass, then eons, then finally bramfaturas and galaxies, and each of us, sooner or later, will reach Pleroma- divine Fullness-and enter the beloved Heart no longer as a child only but as a divine brother as well. All memory of our current beliefs about the Divine will vanish from our mind like pale, dull shadows we no longer have any need for. But even then the truth that God is Love will continue to hold. God does not love Himself (such a claim would be blasphemy), but each of the Transcendencies within Him directs His love onto the Other, and in that love a Third is born: the Foundation of the Universe. Thus, the Father-the Virgin Mother-the Son.

The greatest of mysteries and the inner mystery of the Divine the mystery of the love between the Father and Mother-is not mirrored in human love, no matter what form that love may take. Nothing in the finite world is commensurate with or analogous to the essence of that mystery. Nor can anything in the world, with the exception of what issues from those who have rejected God, be extrinsic to that mystery. The essence of the Trinity, the essence that is love, is expressed (but not mirrored) in universal love- that is, in our love for all living beings. In the love between man and woman, the inner mystery of the union of Father and Mother is expressed (but not mirrored) to the degree that it reaches us, having been refracted by a multitude of planes in the cosmic continuum. Therein lies the fundamental ontological distinction between these two aspects of our spiritual life, aspects that have almost nothing in common yet are expressed by one and the same word-love-in our impoverished language.

Love for all living things has long been-if not in practice then at least ideally-a cornerstone of religion, and not of Christianity alone. We can expect the bounds encompassed by love to expand ever more in the future. True, a reversion to love in an extremely narrow sense is clearly evident in modern secular teachings: love for one's nation, for its allies and friends abroad, and for one's family and friends. But that is a purely temporary phenomenon occasioned by the nature of the secular age as a whole, with its crudely self- centered morality, and it will last only as long as the whole secular stage of development itself lasts. The next religious age will be a new age for the very reason that it will proclaim and strive to put into practice love for all humanity, for all the realms of nature, and for all the hierarchies of ascent. (It was already pointed out in the chapter on the animal world that there is one exception - a class of living beings that cannot and should not enter within our circle of love in the conditions of the current eon: parasites. We are faced with an ethical dilemma here that we are incapable of resolving at our present level of ascent. One should not harbor any illusions in that regard).

In the distant future even more spiritual possibilities will arise. Even love for demons will become viable and necessary. History has already seen some saints who grew to such a love. But to get ahead of oneself and cultivate in one's soul a love for the sworn enemies of God and of all living beings, when one is not yet free of temptation and when one's love does not yet embrace even the whole of humanity and the animal world, would jeopardize the ascending path of one's own soul. Demons are only waiting for someone to pity them. But they are not waiting because they need pity (they are consumed with pride and despise human pity), but because it is only one step from pity for demons to doubt in their evil ways, and a stone's throw away from such doubt to the temptation to reject God and rebel. To do so would consign the soul to harsh retribution and the generation of gavvakh, radiations of suffering, in just those quantities that demons dream about to replenish their energy. Love for demons is therefore extremely dangerous for everyone except souls already enlightened. Enlightened souls know how to love without feeling sympathy (for sympathy for someone is impossible without sympathy for their chief occupations, and demons are occupied only with doing evil) or concelebration (for only what is repellent to Providence gives demons cause to celebrate). That love can be expressed only by a feeling of deep pity, by faith in their ultimate enlightenment, and by a readiness to sacrifice everything but loyalty to God for the sake of that enlightenment.

But love for all living beings is, in practical terms, but one aspect of the problem. How are we to regard the other aspect of our life-both the inner and outer life-that involves everything called the love between man and woman?

The «burning coals» within every being, the implacable procreational instinct-wellspring of self-sacrifice, violent passions, purest aspiration, crimes, heroism, eve and suicides-Is it any wonder it was eros that was always the biggest stumbling block for ascetics and saints? People tried to distinguish duality within that love itself: physical love was contrasted with platonic love, infatuation with everlasting love, free relationships with the work and duty of childbearing, depravity with fairy-tale romance.

Sometimes they made a distinction between two transphysical wellsprings of love: Aphrodite Uranus and Aphrodite Pandernos. But in concrete situations, in real-life feelings, in day-to-day relationships everything became tangled, confused, blended, and knotted in a manner that was impossible to unravel. It began to seem better to pull up that love in oneself by the roots than to allow one's path to heaven to become overgrown with its lush vegetation.

Thus began the great ascetic era in religion. There is no need, I think, to reiterate what contortions of their own spirit Christianity and Buddhism had to resort to so as not to degenerate into ascetic sects that hated life and were in turn hated by it. Marriage was consecrated as a sacrament, childbearing was given their blessing, but celibacy continued to be regarded-with perfect consistency, one might add-as the higher state.

Love as a cause of various human tragedies revolves around the capacity for the feeling of love to be unilateral. It will be a long time, of course, before love loses that unilaterality-not until the second eon. But besides tragedies of that kind-tragedies of the first order, in a manner of speaking-humanity, in order to bring stability to an ever more complex life, laid the groundwork for yet other tragedies-those take place when the love between man and woman enters into conflict with established custom, societal values, or the law. When a man or woman loves but that love is not reciprocated, that is a tragedy of the first order, and there is nothing that can be done about it until humanity, as Dostoyevsky said, «is transformed physically.» But when two people love each other and yet are unable to come together in a harmonious and joyful union, in the full meaning of the word, because of the familial or societal position of one of them, that is a tragedy of the second order. Customs and the law should in time be reformed in such a way as to reduce tragedies of that kind to a minimum, if not to eliminate them altogether.

It is a task of immense complexity. It is even doubtful whether a universal set of laws could be drafted for all humanity in that regard. The level of social and cultural development, traditions, and the national psyche vary too widely among countries. It will most likely have to be the task of the national legislative branches of the Rose of the World, and not the central legislative organ. It is sufficiently clear, in addition, that society will have to be led, here as in everything else, through a series of gradual stages, because a unilateral decision in favor of freedom-that is, a swift repeal of all legal barriers-would lead, as Russia's experience after the revolution demonstrated, to moral anarchy and force the government to repeal the repeal and put the prohibitions back in force. That is because the government repealed the laws in an automatic fashion, without first inculcating an attitude toward love and marriage in the younger generations that would have helped them to avoid abusing such freedom.

It seems that there can only be one correct religious answer to the question of love between man and woman: such love is blessed, beautiful, and sacred to the extent that it is creative.

What is meant by that?

The most common type of creative love in our eon is the bearing and rearing of children, but that is far from the only form of creative love and loving creativity. Cooperation in any sphere of life, the cultivation of the best sides of each other's character, mutual self-improvement, mutual inspiration in artistic, religious, and other creative pursuits, or the simple joy of a young, fresh, passionate love that enriches, strengthens, and uplifts both partners-this is all divine co-creation, because it leads to their growth and enlightenment and to a rise in the level of the worldwide ocean of love and joy. The radiations from the exquisite love between a man and woman rise up to the very highest worlds those described in one of the preceding chapters as the Waves of Universal Femininity-and strengthen them. Even if the loving couple jointly pursues an erroneous path of creative work-if they both, for example, work at something with socially harmful consequences- even in that case only the orientation of the work merits condemnation; the impulse to co- create that marks their love, and the spirit of comradeship, companionship, and friendship that permeates it, are blessed from above.

Until humanity is transformed physically, the love between woman and man will remain harnessed, as it were, to the

reproductive 1nstmct. In time that will change - creative love will take on a different meaning. The concept of physical reproduction will altogether cease to be applicable to transformed humanity. The future will witness monads incarnated in enlightened bodies, a process altogether different from our birth. But under the conditions of our eon, of course, childbearing and rearing remains the primary form of creative love.

Here I think it is the right time to highlight some specific features of those historical tasks that the women of the era just beginning will face not only in childbearing but in life as a whole.

One sometimes hears, from both men and women who lack a deeper understanding of the feminine, the categorical claim that the cultural and creative tasks of both sexes are identical and if until now women have been a distant second to men in the amount and significance of what has been contributed to society, politics, science, technology, philosophy, and even art, then that is simply attributable to the historical subjugation and oppression of women.

This opinion is more widespread than one might think. One could even say it is the fashionable view nowadays.

But have women really been oppressed always and everywhere? For the last two hundred years in Europe and Russia, at least in the privileged classes, the doors of creative work in the fields of literature and art have been open to women just as they are to men. Is there any need to mention that women, while displaying unquestionable talent and producing no small number of musicians, have in the last two centuries (and in the whole course of global history, I might add) failed to enrich the pantheon of musical composers of genius with a single name? It is sad to have to point out that among the giants of world literature there are six or seven female names to two or three hundred male names. In many countries it has been nearly a century since women won the right to higher education. And they have replaced men successfully in a wide range of professional endeavors: in hospitals, laboratories, classrooms, sometimes even on field expeditions. But where are the hundreds of names of eminent female scientists that could counterbalance the hundreds of male names that have become famous throughout the world during the same period of time? The world stage shines like a starry sky with the names of great actresses. But has even one female director won truly global renown? Has anyone heard of a great female philosopher? A great female architect? A great female political leader? A renowned female metallurgist, sage critic, outstanding industrial manager, or an acclaimed chess player? To deny or ignore those facts would be to reveal a total lack of objectivity. Instead of denying the facts it would be more profitable to change the way one looks at them. Are women less gifted than men? It is beyond question that in some respects the answer is yes. And it is equally beyond question that in other respects they possess gifts that men will never have.

It would, of course, be reactionary nonsense to deny that women can be fine geologists, conscientious engineers, talented artists, highly qualified chemists or biologists or to doubt the usefulness and value of their work in these fields. But one can and should internalize two indisputable facts: first, the list of geniuses in these fields has not been enriched and probably never will be by any female names and, secondly, women are irreplaceable and highly gifted in other respects.

Motherhood. Childbearing. Creative work in the home. Care for the sick and elderly. The moral rehabilitation of criminals. The transformation of Nature. The enlightenment of animals. Certain areas of religious service. Creative love. And, lastly, the creative fertilization of the one she loves. That is where women are irreplaceable and possess unlimited gifts.

They are absolutely irreplaceable in the first and last of these categories of creative work. As for the rest, men are less gifted than them to the same degree that women are less gifted than men in the fields of government or science. For the above types of work require a female, feminine, inner orientation: gentleness, loving tenderness, selflessness, perseverance, caring, intuitiveness, warmth, and sensitivity.

Something that is the reverse of what we observe in the physical world takes place in higher creative work: there the woman fertilizes the man, who conceives the idea and brings it to life.

The Divine Comedy is the product of two people, and it would never have been written without Beatrice just as it would not -rave been written without Dante. If we plumbed the depths of the creative process of the majority of geniuses of the arts, we would find that it was women who sowed the spiritual seed of the geniuses' immortal works into the depths of their subconscious, into their innermost creative recesses. In that light, the proposal to erect in Weimar a monument to Ulrike von Levetzow, the woman who inspired Goethe to write such beautiful poems, is fitting and profound. One should not be bothered that in the biographies of the majority of artistic geniuses it is difficult to uncover, using traditional methods, the names of those women who deserve the gratitude of later generations to the same degree as the geniuses themselves, who sometimes do not know themselves to whom they owe the seeds of their works. In due time and in the proper place - outside of the bounds of Enrof every one of them will learn the truth.

For thousands of years, males and masculine qualities - strength, daring, pride, courage, ambition, cruelty, and competitiveness - have run rampant in humanity. The Spanish have a saying that confounds the mind and is appalling to the conscience: «A man must be savage.» Alas, the people who produced that saying have done their best to live up to it. The barbarity of the conquistadors and the viciousness of the Spanish Inquisition have splashed the pages of world history with such savageness that the evil radiating from them affects souls to this day.

Be that as it may, many other peoples have rivaled the Spaniards in that respect. Millennium after millennium, waves of wars, rebellions, revolutions, persecutions, and savage, merciless reprisals have rolled, and roll today, over the face of the Earth. The countless drops that together form those waves have been male wills and male hearts. People sometimes speak of female cruelty. But, for heavens sake, were the bloodbaths of the Genghis Khans, the Tamerlanes, and the Napoleons, the agony of torture chambers, the frenzy of the Jacobin terror, the rampages of colonial conquests, or the mass persecutions by the Nazis and other dictatorships-were these horrors initiated and overseen by women? History has witnessed female poisoners, child

murderers, killers, ingenious female sadists, but it has not witnessed one woman who left a stamp on history comparable to that left by Tiberius and Nero, Assargadon and Ala cl-Dir,' Torquemada and Pizarro, the Count of Alba de Liste and Robespierre, Ivan the Terrible and Skuratov, Himmler and Beria.

Shrinking from the horror, driven to seek refuge deep within the family unit, the feminine was saved from extinction only because without it men are as barren as lead, and without women the physical perpetuation of the species is not possible.

To this day there are cries that women as well as men should be manly. If by manliness we mean courage and determination in the face of life's struggle, then one would of course have to agree. But if by womanliness we do not mean a mode of manners and behavior, not affectation and sentimentality, but rather a mixture of emotional warmth, inner delicacy, tenderness, and the ability to sacrifice oneself daily for those one loves, then men as well as women should be womanly. How long must humanity wait for the dawn of an age when a false understanding of what it is to be a man does not transform men into savage conquerors, into thugs flaunting their own crudity, into beings part peacock and part tiger? How long until men are no longer brought up to be ashamed of their own deep-down tenderness, which they themselves trample on and suppress? It will be difficult to surmount that age-old complex of conventions, preconceptions, emotional disfigurement, and atavistic instincts, but surmounted it must be. At all costs.

A mysterious event is taking place in the metahistory of contemporary times: new divine-creative energy is emanating into our bramfatura. Since ancient times the loftiest hearts and subtlest minds have anticipated this event that is now taking place. The first link in the chain of events- events so important that they can only be compared to the incarnation of the Planetary Logos- occurred at the turn of the nineteenth century. This was the emanation of the energy of the Virgin Mother, an emanation that was not amorphous, as it had been twice before in human history, but incomparably intensified by the personal aspect it assumed. A great God-born monad descended from the heights of the Universe into Shadanakar. Almost a century later, Vladimir Solovyov was given a glimpse of Raoris-one of the highest planes in our bramfatura, which She had entered when, on a starry night in the Egyptian desert, he experienced a stunning breach of his consciousness and saw the Great Feminine Being with his own eyes. Zventa-Sventana we call Her, She Who is the Brightest and All-Good, the expression of the Feminine Hypostasis of the Trinity. She now abides in Bayushmi, one of the regions that are part of the sakwala of the Waves of World Femininity. The long- awaited day approaches when She will descend to one of the great cities in the metacultures. There She is to be born in a body of enlightened ether, the child of a demiurge and one of the Great Sisters. A host of the loftiest souls from the Elite of Shadanakar will descend with Her into that zatomis. There She is, our hope and joy, Light and Divine Beauty! For Her birth will be mirrored in our history as something that our grandchildren and great­grandchildren will witness: the founding of the Rose of the World, its spread throughout the world, and, if a terrible human blunder does not hurl us down into the depths of darkness, the assumption by the Rose of the World of supreme authority over the entire Earth.

Oh, that will not yet signify the final victory of the forces of Light- do not forget the Horsemen of the Apocalypse! Only the historical order of appearance of the Horsemen does not follow the order foretold on the island of Patmos by the Apostle John. The Black Horseman-the era of feudal hierocracy-was the first to gallop by. Now the second Horseman, the Red one, is nearing the end of his ride: everyone should be able to guess what is behind that symbol. We wait in anticipation for the White Horseman-the Rose of the World, the golden age of humanity! Nothing will be able to forestall the coming of the last, Pale Horseman: Gagtungr will see the one he has been preparing for so many centuries born in human form. But the era of the Rose of the World will immeasurably reduce the number of spiritual victims. It will succeed in raising a number of generations of ennobled humanity. It will give spiritual fortitude to millions, even billions, of those wavering. By warning about the coming Antichrist, and pointing him out and unmasking him when he appears, by cultivating unshakeable faith within human hearts and a grasp of the metahistorical perspectives and global spiritual prospects within human minds, it will inure generations and generations against the temptations of the future spawn of darkness.

In Enrof, Zventa-Sventana's (As I have already mentioned, the phonetics of Enrof cannot precisely reproduce the sounds of words in the language of the World Synclite. Each such word has, as it were, a chord of sounds, a chord of meanings, and is accompanied, in addition, by light effects. The approximate meaning of the name «Zventa-Sventana» is «The Brightest of the Bright and the Holiest of the Holy.» The name has a Slavic root, since the zatomis where her birth will take place is connected with peoples predominantly Slavic in origin) birth in one of the zatomis will be mirrored not only by the Rose of the World. Feminine power and its role in contemporary life is increasing everywhere. It is that circumstance above all that is giving rise to worldwide peace movements, an abhorrence of bloodshed, disillusion over coercive methods of change, an increase in women's role in society proper, an ever-growing tenderness and concern for children, and a burning hunger for beauty and love. We are entering an age when the female soul will become ever purer and broader, when an ever greater number of women will become profound inspirers, sensitive mothers, wise counselors and far-sighted leaders. It will be an age when the feminine in humanity will manifest itself with unprecedented strength, striking a perfect balance with masculine impulses. See, you who have eyes.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Agga

All materiality created by the demonic in our bramfatura (see entry). It differs in structure from physical materiality and from siaira (see entry) in that there are an extremely limited number of elementary particles in agga, particles that are neither animate nor possessed of free will.

Anticosmos

Provisional designation of all those worlds created by the demonic to supersede the Divine Cosmos. At present the anticosmos of our bramfatura consists of the planes of Shog, Digm, Gashsharva, Sufetkh, and the Pit.

Arimoya

The zatomis (see entry) of global culture currently under construction.

Arungvilta-prana

An impersonal, unconscious, rarefied substance flowing in Enrof (see entry) from body to body and providing for individual organic life. An intuition of the existence of arungviltaprana was at the center of the spiritual life of preanimistic humanity and appears to be the most ancient of revelations.

Astral body

The second of the subtle material coatings of a monad (see entry). The shelt (see entry), the first of the subtle material coatings, is fashioned by the monad itself. The Great Elemental Mother Earth takes part in the creation of the astral body. She takes part in the creation of the individual astral bodies of every being in Shadanakar (see entry): humans, angels, daemons (see entry), animals, elementals (see entry), 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 vision, spiritual hearing, spiritual smell, deep memory, the ability to levitate, the ability to interact with beings of other planes, and the ability to contemplate cosmic panoramas and perspectives.

Bramfatura

Almost every heavenly body possesses a number of variomaterial planes that together form a closely integrated system. These systems, united by the commonality of processes taking place on their planes, are called bramfaturas. In the majority of bramfaturas in our Galaxy the chief process uniting the planes of each is the struggle between the Providential and the demonic forces. There are, however, bramfaturas that have completely fallen under the sway of the demonic and those that have freed themselves entirely of it.

Daemons

The higher humankind of Shadanakar, who abide in a sakwala (see entry) of four-dimensional worlds with differing numbers of time streams. Daemons proceed along a path of growth similar to ours, but they began much earlier and are completing it with greater success. They are linked to our humanity by a variety of threads, some of which are described in the main text.

Digm

The abode of Gagtungr, one of the five-dimensional worlds with an abundance of time streams.

Dingra

The karossa (see entry) of Russia.

Drukkarg

The shrastr (see entry) of the Russian metaculture (see entry).

Duggur

A plane of demonic elementals that plays a special role in the life of humanity. The beings that incarnate in Duggur replenish their energy with eiphos (see entry).

Egregors

Here the term means variomaterial formations that take shape over large collectives-tribes, states, some political parties and religious groups-from certain emanations of the human psyche. They do not have monads but possess a volitional charge of limited duration and the equivalent of consciousness.

Eiphos

Radiations from human lust.

Elementals

A category of God-created monads that proceed along a path of growth in Shadanakar, primarily through the realms of nature. In the majority of cases, however, they do not undergo physical incarnation. Since humanity is an aspect of one realm of Nature, there are various groups of elementals linked not to the natural elements, in the broad sense of the word, but to the natural, elemental aspect of humanity.

Enrof

The name of our physical plane-a concept synonymous with what astronomy calls the universe. It is characterized by three dimensions of space and one time stream.

Eons

Here the term means universal periods of time characterized by altered conditions in the Enrof of one bramfatura. A change in conditions is determined by one or another degree of manifestation of spirituality in the materiality of Enrof. What is meant is not individual departures from the norm but the overall, predominant conditions. Thus, during the passage of the Enrof of Shadanakar into the second eon, the transformation of the materiality of organic matter will take place, and during its passage into the third eon, the transformation of inorganic matter will occur as well. In that manner, Shadanakar will disappear from the confines of universal Enrof.

Ether body

The third of the subtle coatings of an incarnating monad. No organic life is possible in three- and four-dimensional worlds without it.

Gagtungr

The name of the planetary demon of our bramfatura. He is three persons in one, like certain other beings among the uppermost hierarchies. The first hypostasis of Gagtungr is Gisturg, the Great Torturer; the second is Fokerma, the Great Harlot; and the third is Urparp, the great implementer of the demonic plan, who is sometimes called the Principle of Form.

Gashsharva

One of the principal planes in the demonic anticosmos of Shadanakar, a two-dimensional world where a variety of powerful demonic beings abide.

Gawakh

Fine material radiations from human suffering released both during one's life and during a descent after death. Gavvakh replenishes the energy of many categories of demonic beings and of Gagtungr himself.

Heavenly Russia

Holy Russia. The zatomis of the Russian metaculture and abode of its Synclite (see entry).

Hierarchy

Used in this book in two senses:

a series of subordinate ranks, whether they be ecclesiastical, military, or administrative; and

different categories of varionatural, variomaterial, or spiritual beings- for example, the angelic, demonic, elemental, or daemonic hierarchies.

Igvas

The principal race of antihumankind, it is made up of highly intelligent demonic beings who abide in the shrastrs, the «underside of the world.»

Iroln

The five-dimensional world where human monads abide.

Karossas

Regional manifestations of Lilith (see entry) linked to individual nations or suprapeoples (see entry). Karossas do not have monads, but they do possess the equivalent of will and consciousness.

Karrokh

The densely material body, analogous to our physical body, of certain demonic beings, for example, igvas and raruggs (see entry). It is fashioned from agga, not siaira.

Lilith

The great elemental of humanity, at one time the spouse of the Prime Angel, and later the fashioner of the physical flesh of humans and some other beings. Her own being was demonized by Gagtungr long before the emergence of humanity in Enrof.

Metaculture

The inner sakwalas of Shadanakar, which take the form of multiplaned segments, as it were. Metacultures are composed of varying numbers of planes, but each has at least three specific planes: the physical plane-the abode of the corresponding suprapeople in Enrof that create the culture; the zatomis-the heavenly land of enlightened souls of the people; and the shrastr- the demonic underworld that counterposes the zatomis. In addition, every metaculture includes one or another number of planes of Enlightenment and Retribution. The nature of these worlds varies between metacultures in accordance with the course metahistory takes in each.

Metahistory

The sum of processes, as yet outside the field of vision and methodology of science, that take place on planes of variobeing existing in other times streams and dimensions and that are sometimes visible through the process we perceive as history.

The religious teaching about those processes.

Monad

Here the term means a primal, indivisible, immortal spiritual entity, which can be either God-created or God-born. The Universe is composed of a countless number of monads and of the numerous kinds of materiality created by them.

Monsalvat

The zatomis of the North-Western metaculture.

Mudgabr

The shrastr of the North-Western metaculture.

Navna

A God-born monad, one of the Great Sisters, and the Ideal Collective Soul of the Russian metaculture. A provisional designation.

Nertis

One of the worlds of Enlightenment. A land of radiant calm and blessed rest.

Olirna

The first of the worlds of ascent, the land of the dead common to all humanity, although the landscape varies between metacultures.

Planetary Logos

A great God-born monad, the expression of God the Son, the divine mind of our bramfatura, the oldest and first of its monads. He expressed Himself in humanity as Jesus Christ and is overseeing preparations for the turn of the eon. The Planetary Logos is the leader of all the forces of Light in Shadanakar.

Raruggs

The second race of antihumankind, into which the great predators of prehistoric times developed after countless incarnations on the planes of demonic materiality.

Rose of the World

The future Christian Church of the final centuries, which will reunite within itself the Christian Churches of the past and will be joined on the basis of a free amalgamation with all religions of Light. It is in this sense that the Rose of the World is interreligious or panreligious. Its principal task is to save as many human souls as possible and help them avert the danger of being spiritually enslaved by the future Antigod. The birth of the Rose of the World among humanity will be a reflection of the ether birth of Zventa Sventana (see entry) in one of the zatomis.

Sakwala

Here it means a system of two or more variomaterial planes closely connected in structure and metahistory.

Shadanakar

The proper name of the bramfatura of our planet. It comprises a huge (more than 240) number of variomaterial planes of varying dimensions and time streams.

Shavva

Radiations of subtle materiality from certain states of the human psyche connected with «state feelings.» Witzraors, igvas, and raruggs replenish their energy with shavva.

Shelt

The first of the material coatings of a monad. The shelt is fashioned by the monad itself from five-dimensional materiality. It is the vessel of the monad together with its divine properties and capacities. It is not the monad, which remains in Iroln, but the shelt that is the self that embarks on its journey through the lower planes in order to enlighten them.

Shrastrs

Variodimensional material worlds connected with areas within the physical body of the Earth known as countervailing prominences, which point to the center of the planet. The abode of antihumankind, which is composed of two races-igvas and raruggs. There are great metropolises in the shrastrs and a very advanced demonic technology.

Siaira

All materiality created by the Providential powers.

Skrivnus

The uppermost of the purgatories of Christian metacultures. There are analogous planes in other metacultures as well. Every soul, except those that enter Olirna directly after death and continue up through the worlds of Enlightenment, invariably descends to Skrivnus after death.

Suprapeople

A group of nations or ethnic groups united by a common, jointly created culture.

Synclites

The hosts of enlightened human souls that abide in the zatomis of metacultures.

Uppum

One of the planes of Retribution, the hell of the Witzraors, known as the Rain of Eternal Misery.

Visionary leaders

Here it refers to historical figures who have a powerful and benign effect on the fate of a people or state and are ruled in their actions by the inspiration of hierarchies that guide that people.

Voglea

The name of the great female demon who is to blame for the catastrophe that overtook the humankind of the Lunar bramfatura. Having for a long time maintained a sort of neutrality, at odds with the Providential powers and at times with Gagtungr as well, Voglea is at present joining forces with the planetary demon.

Witzraors

Powerful, intelligent, and extremely predatory beings that abide on planes adjacent to the shrastrs. From the human point of view, they are demons of state power. There are very few of them. Witzraors play a colossal, conflicting, and double-edged role in metahistory.

World Salvaterra

The provisional designation of the summit and heart of Shadanakar, the uppermost of its sakwalas, comprising three worlds: the abode of the Planetary Logos, the abode of Mary, the Mother of God, and the abode of Zventa-Sventana.

Yarosvet

A God-born monad, one of the great demiurges of humanity, and the guiding spirit of the Russian metaculture. A provisional designation.

Yetzerhare

Here this Hebrew term means the demonic part of every being in whose material embodiment Lilith has taken part-that is, not only humans but Titans, igvas, raruggs, and Witzraors.

Zatomis

The highest planes of human metacultures, their heavenly lands, the bulwark of the demiurges and national guiding spirits, and the abodes of the Synclites. Together with Arimoya-the zatomis of the Rose of the World now under construction-they are thirty-four in number.

Zhrugr

The Russian Witzraor.

Zventa-Sventana

A great God-born monad, an expression of Eternal Femininity. The Bride of the Planetary Logos, She descended from the heights of the spiritual cosmos to the upper planes of Shadanakar approximately 150 years ago and is destined to assume an enlightened (and not physical) incarnation in one of the zatomis of humanity. That metahistorical event will be reflected in terrestrial Enrof in the birth of the Rose of the World.