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Thread: C.S. Lewis, The Space Trilogy

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    Default C.S. Lewis, The Space Trilogy

    The topic of this thread is C.S. Lewis and his Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945).
    Lewises are in the news right now: John Lewis; Julian Lewis. And as I write this, some other Lewis is mentioned on the radio. I take this all a sign of timeliness. I’ll begin with some general introductory remarks.

    The above three novels are FANTASY, i.e. beyond fiction: in terms of content, any idea of a connection with ‘reality’ is not even pertinent. Nonetheless, in terms of form, fantasy can have various degrees of reality. A fleeting daydream no sooner come than gone is not nothing if it happened at all. But some fantasies are recorded, and shared, and take on a life of their own. Some are even carved in stone. So there is continuum between what exists and what does not exist – yet. Hence we know that creation exists, as a concept, because we are ourselves creators, capable of turning creative concepts into real things. Hence we believe in creators, and when we encounter creations that we know are not our doing we experience Otherness. This takes place on multiple levels: among equals, we marvel at other people’s inventions and discoveries. (Alternatively we can react badly, wondering jealously ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’) At another level, we discover that we are someone else’s creature. Again, either we marvel that someone thought of me, or we reject this otherness of which we are a part, and attempt to reduce all of creation to our own tiny production.

    RELIGION is the part of this creative fantasy that has been cast in stone and survives through time, from the beginnings of human consciousness up to the present moment and beyond. This is the part of Lewis’s fantasy that he takes really seriously as the basis of all our reality. He became an atheist until brought back, ‘kicking and screaming’, to Christianity, becoming an eminent apologist for what GK Chesterton called ‘mere Christianity’, i.e. the common basis that all Christians agree upon. Lewis views monotheistic Christianity as a new evolutionary growth out of earlier polytheism, which it does not prove false any more than the cortex or neocortex falsify the reptilian brain – another example of multiple levels. Gods and God are no more incompatible than middle management and a CEO. ‘Goodness’ is merely acceptance that this is how things work. But there will always be one of two individuals who think they know better and put themselves in the centre of things. To be sure, they will expand their sphere of influence way beyond what it should be and cause havoc all around, but ultimately in the larger scheme of things they cause no more than local, temporary inconvenience until they are swept aside.

    My favourite analogy for this situation is the kiddies’ banana slide. Regardless of how it was designed (but it WAS designed in a certain way), the most fun is to be had by the greatest numbers when everyone climbs the steps and enjoys the slide from top to bottom. But it only takes one naughty boy climbing up the slide to bring everything to a grinding halt; but that can only happen when an opening is created. It can be dangerous if a child starts coming down when another is coming up, and it usually takes adult intervention to sort things out. This would seem to be the stage that religion has reached according to many, including CS Lewis, who presents this satanic element that puts everything into reverse as what he calls ‘scientific nihilism’.

    Scientific nihilism is the perceived reality that stimulated the Oxford don Lewis to start writing in 1938. His fantasy villain is a scientist on a par with Einstein and Schrödinger, who morphs into an engineer, but as engineers go, more like the entire JPL than a mere Wernher von Braun figure; and then into a glorified Neil Armstrong-cum-Elon Musk figure, personally piloting his homemade spacecraft to Mars and Venus. Total, shameless fantasy, especially as strictly no attempt is made to imagine what this technology might involve: this is not even science fiction. Interplanetary transport being required is simply created ex nihilo – not a nuts-and-bolts affair at all; here we are working on a purely spiritual plane. (This incidentally is rather like Terence McKenna’s psychedelic experience, since his psilocybin mushroom runs through the entire gamut of UFOs.)

    In addition, the entire adventure is conducted in total secrecy, as if such a thing could exist. But this one man, called ‘Weston’, is not a single flesh-and-blood creature, but a work of fiction depicting fallen ‘Western’ man, who exists as an abstraction with multiple embodiments, just as a technological invention exists as a patented concept with multiple actual and/or possible embodiments. The unexpected angle on religion here is that ‘God’ as the creator (of this solar system) is the ultimate… materialist, and that, counterintuitively, his enemy, the rebel angel, is stuck in the realm of the immaterial. Nihilism is therefore the destructive force that denies or seeks to counter the material creation as some kind of mistake. It is itself a mistake inasmuch as it cannot stop creation from actually happening/having happened, because to do so it has to operate through that creation itself. Acting in the only way it really can, nihilism has a nihilistic effect on nothing but itself, producing its own destruction. God’s joke: I once thought I made a mistake, but I was wrong!

    In terms of ‘historical reality’, religion has reached a point where Christianity seems to have been superseded by nothing but the power of supposedly unaided human endeavour. However, since this is just another name for scientific nihilism, this is destined to fade into the nothingness it always was, while the underlying reality now coming into view is the fully materialistic yet fully idealistic reality of our evolving creation. ‘Stop the world - I want to get off’ is OK; ‘I am stopping – I want the world to get off’ is simply a more self-centred way of saying the same thing, and is perfectly OK save to the extent that it interferes with the desires of others.

    I mentioned timeliness. CS Lewis’s prewar fantasy was as timely as a conductor’s baton: slightly ahead of the beat: written just before and during the war and the final volume That Hideous Strength published in 1945, the year Reinhard Gehlen escaped the clutches of Adolf Hitler, moving on to bigger things. It is what I was referring to the other day with respect to ongoing Nazism by quoting the eugenicist phrase ‘hackable humans can become godlike’.

    In Lewis’s treatment of the subject, godlike in Satan’s agenda means pure spirit. His war on the material creation involves of course trashing the planet until it becomes like the Moon, and population reduction to levels way beyond the Georgia Guidestones: just one man, in fact less than one man, just one head – what we now call artificial intelligence. Hence there is no way out of the satanic organization but death, since membership itself ultimately involves personal and collective extinction. But straightaway, you see the problem with hardcore nihilism: it cannot involve total destruction, there is this tiny remnant that has to be saved.

    Meanwhile, religion has moved on, from Christian dogma imposing blind faith to sensemaking. Lewis understands how God becoming man not only makes sense, it becomes totally necessary. Lewis is brought back, ‘kicking and screaming’, to Christianity not through some mystical illumination but following a rational study of the bigger picture, which he can turn into a logical narrative. This is also the story of the human brain. The reptilian brain is not ditched in favour of the cortex and neocortex; simply, its basic instinct of flight or fight has to be tamed, and sometimes overridden in novel circumstances by rational thought, which in turn creates new habits and eventually new instincts. So with religion; it passes from passive love/fear of God to a more understanding, participatory role for man.

    The problem then becomes distinguishing between science (evil) and rationality (good), because the two things are close enough to be confused. Actually, the difference is quite simple. This form of ‘science’, claiming ‘objectivity’ as its goal is seen to be… irrational, meaning that it is ultimately unscientific and totally subjective. In other words, it is a useless self-defeating concept that can only appeal to ‘the bent, the crooked or the diseased’. Synonyms for the correct approach include ‘the Straight or Normal or Wholesome’. The natural, straight, normal wholesome attitude for a human being to adopt is obviously humanity, a concept not limited to our own race, but on the contrary like the human brain is open to necessary hardware and software upgrades.

    It is the ultimate in non-scientificity if in order to deny all that exists one has to seek to destroy it, when the rational (truly scientific) minds takes it all as its original datum and starting-point. One single human head operated artificially is more than enough to demonstrate that total destruction is not going to happen. This is where fantasy comes back to bite you in the rear. Apart from one quality (sphericity), Weston’s so-called nuts-and-bolts spacecraft performing to perfection is in fact nothing but a figment of the imagination. The fact that such a thing later came into existence is simply one more contradiction, for if man is a species that now ‘excretes technical objects’ (T. McKenna), this would merely indicate the pursuit of destruction by means of construction. Totally crazy and self-defeating. On the other hand, the fantasy may be a form of remote viewing on the author’s part: we are told where he takes us, but not when – probably to the distant past…

    This basically is the situation explored in Lewis’s trilogy in terms of content but also form. I’ll leave it for another post to describe some of the content. In terms of form, the fantasy element is at the lower level of instinct/irrational mythical and religious beliefs; the hard reality element being at a higher level where things actually happen for a reason and where the protagonists have a higher consciousness of what is going on. This higher consciousness is necessary at this time because, while the path of good comes naturally to a great majority, this is also where the danger lies: a kind of unthinking ‘herd vulnerability’ if you will. ‘We are all in this together’ is a two-edged sword: no one can simply follow the crowd, every single individual needs to be thinking and deciding for themselves.

    However, we also come up against an unavoidable truth. With respect to religion – ‘mere religion’ we might call it – it doesn’t matter what we believe or don’t believe now (there is a time component), certain improbable things have to have happened for us to be where we are at. The present evolution of the overall situation does not override past facts or their current relevance. That is what the kicking and screaming is all about. It is about bringing together into a coherent whole many strands still being explored seventy years later, no longer as fantasy but as fact-finding, by the alternative media. Like most people, I have my misgivings about ‘conspiracy theory’: by definition, it extends too far in every direction, out into the realms of naivety, disinformation and the rest. But when I see it on the front page of mainstream newspapers, and in the writings of harmless establishment academics, then I start kicking and screaming.


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    Default Re: C.S. Lewis, The Space Trilogy

    Possibly owing to the subject matter, this and the next post have taken me an age to put together, and are still not altogether satisfactory. Feel free to ask questions. I’ll try and provide a few links in another post. Meanwhile the link in my opening post to the Wikipedia entry on the Space Trilogy may be useful.

    I first brought up this subject in connection with Terence McKenna and the JFK assassination. CS Lewis’s connection to the latter is both clear and highly obscure: it marked fairly precisely the moment of his own death. Kennedy was likely killed for taking psychedelic trips. Hence McKenna’s material can shed light on that, notably with respect to UFOs, and the materiality or otherwise thereof. The Space Trilogy involves fantasy trips, first to Mars in an unidentified manmade craft of unspecified technology, then to Venus using alien means, leading to a showdown, an end date or apocalyptic event, albeit on a local level back on Earth. McKenna’s notion of time stopping sometime soon at a stage of maximum novelty. In Lewis’s solar system, time does not seem to flow in an earthly way on his paradisiac worlds, where novelty is the rule.


    This is part of what I mean by fantasy. That the Mars and Venus accessible by mid-twentieth-century man are at an earlier stage of their existence does not necessarily make them fiction. Lewis’s source of inspiration was presumably religious meditation, whatever that involves. In the case of Mars, clearly the leap into the past would have to go back over ten million years [correction: to 3.2 million years ago], when according to the astronomer Tom Van Flandern, the planet Maldek blew up to form the asteroid belt and other space debris and turning Mars into the lifeless planet we think we know today.

    Thus I have been looking at two strands of Farsight Institute research into scientific remote viewing brought together the other day in a single post. Hence what I mean by fantasy may include a dose of non-scientific or artistic remote viewing. So the scientific discipline would appear all at once to make the whole adventure much less fantastical and much less likely as it stands. Therein lies an epistemological problem that can only be resolved through the dialectical process. Any two strands of information supposed to have validity need to be weavable together; this is how they are testable. Another aspect of non-scientific remote viewing I would say is simply WRITING. This is why the Internet revolution is having unexpected effect on the world. Millions of people have discovered the practice of writing, which leads to having unexpected thoughts on unexpected subjects. It is often called creative writing for this reason, but this is basically a pleonasm. Failure to understand the creative nature of writing leads to the misuse of terms like ‘fake news’; instead of information versus deliberate disinformation, we are often talking about perceptions and misperceptions, simply because we are on this learning curve whereby we pick up things without understanding what or how. I had this experience myself a while back, ahead of a Farsight Institute announcement about a forthcoming publication: it turned out to have targetted the pyramids, and I started talking about triangles.

    On a deeper level, as a writer, Lewis attaches great importance to language. The collapse of language communication is a key feature of his finale. He is careful to explain how the storyline for his second book (a rewriting of the Adam and Eve story) is derived from his description of floating islands on Venus, not the other way round. A writer does not have something to say, which he then puts into words. He has something to write, a blank page to fill, which process ends up saying something. So in a way, the story per se is not as important as the telling of it. However, while it is indeed built upon what has gone before, the written word has a timeless quality that the linear spoken word does not have, or not to the same degree. The written word can also look forward; it can anticipate what is to come because it is potentially and typically all one piece, not necessarily written in the order in which it is read. There is a bit of both here: three novels published separately at different times, and yet which hold together as a three-in-one unit; three planets in distant orbits, and yet which hold together as parts of a solar system.
    A corollary of all the above is that a piece of writing may go way beyond or indeed against the writer’s ‘intentions’. What these were is ultimately irrelevant, which is no bad thing when he or she is no longer available for comment.

    As I hinted earlier, there is a theological aspect to this trilogy. As a Christian apologist, Lewis’s ‘magic mushroom’ was the experience of God, and also the entire hierarchy of celestial beings, angels good and bad, thrones, dominations and the rest. But this is also tied into pre-Christian mythologies of planetary deities: Thoth/Mercury, Aphrodite/Venus etc. residing in the heavens, on Mount Olympus etc. The solar system’s tutelary deity (maker?) is called Maleldil, and at a lower level, the eldila are each responsible for a particular planet. These are the Oyarsa: ‘the Oyarsa would not say that he lives on Malacandra [Mars] and that another Oyarsa lives on another earth. For him Malacandra is only a place in the heavens; it is in the heavens that he and the others live. Of course they talk together …’ (Lewis, C. S.. The Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength (pp. 103-104). HarperCollins Publishers. Édition du Kindle.) This is a top-down organization, where compliance or obedience comes naturally as its own source of joy and happiness while looking after lower order beings: except in the case of one rebel eldil, who has other ideas. The cornerstone of this edifice is Terence McKenna’s novelty: here history does not repeat itself (although I have just done so, not for the last time either, I fear!). Hence, while things take a turn for the worse on Earth, they turn out rather better elsewhere.

    At the next level down are the Adam and Eve figures as founders of the conscious race appointed to rule over life forms on the planet as king and queen. On Venus, called Perelandra, there are so far only these two (green-skinned) humans, and living on floating islands drifting one way and another, they don’t see as much of each other as they would like. So when the woman spots a man, she is briefly disappointed to find he is not who she expected. It is a 20th-century earth human and she quickly adjusts to the novelty of the here and now. This man is the novel element in the whole story. Compared with the unfortunate outcome on Earth, he is the spanner in the works that defeats the satanic element and saves the planet for its intended positive future of expanding novelty through increase-and-multiply.

    This satanic element is specifically Earth-based. The planet’s ‘eldil’ is called the Black Archon. Responsible for the Fall, he is restricted to the Moon’s orbit, and likewise Earth is off limits to his opposite numbers: making Earth the ‘Silent Planet’. To go beyond the sublunary world, he latches onto the first spacefarer, a scientist and one-man Nasa called Weston (obviously representing Western man). In the first novel he takes a crony to Mars with base intentions of conquest and enrichment. They are escorted off the planet with just enough time to get home before the spaceship self-destructs. For their second visit, having been asked to bring someone with them, for human sacrifice or so they think, they have captured a young idiot; but the hero, aptly named Ransom, unwittingly contrives to replace him. He is a philologist (obviously Dan Brown has been reading this) who learns the interplanetary language, and in the second book is selected for a trip to Venus, travelling in a divinely powered coffin. Weston arrives on Venus, being possessed by the Black Archon, and almost succeeds in causing a repeat of the Fall, until the man is killed by Ransom.

    So what you have is an interplanetary cold war heating up by stepping off the prison planet into alien territory through space flight. This action also causes the Archon’s downfall, because Ransom comes along for the ride. He now appears as a Christ-like figure (a Redeemer pays a Ransom), i.e. a human from other realms (or at least who is on their side), who is born on Earth, which is normally out of bounds, and who at the end of the third novel ‘ascends’ back to Perelandra. He is the bridge on Earth to bring in the various eldila from the heavens in order to take out the organization working towards taking control of the UK: a scientific institute called the NICE at a small university at a fictional Cambridge. I have mentioned the god of language; who destroys all communication, causing havoc, death and murder at a reception where all these people are brought together in a kind of reverse image of the Last Supper; the site is also destroyed by Jovian thunderbolts and earthquakes. Meanwhile, Aphrodite visits Ransom and his team, reuniting husbands and wives, a bear with its new mate, and the birds and the bees all in love as well. ‘Perelandra is all about us and Man is no longer isolated. We are now as we ought to be – between the angels who are our elder brothers and the beasts who are our jesters, servants and playfellows.’

    Many of the tactics used by the NICE will be more familiar to present-day alternative thinkers. Enrolment by coercion and blackmail sanctioned by murder; private police engaged in torture; an experimental asylum furthering a programme of eugenics; deliberate environmental destruction and depopulation; the Moon as an example of the desired environment; artificial intelligence; Satanism; the planning of pseudo-spontaneous riots and the preparation in advance of leading articles for the next day’s press. The alleged goal of scientific ‘objectivity’, synonymous with ‘total allegeance’, collapses when an unwilling member is required to stamp on and insult a crucifix. He refuses, not because he is a Christian, but because he is not a Christian, and therefore any response to superstitious nonsense is itself superstitious nonsense.

    C.S. Lewis, however, was a Christian, and clearly these fictions in no way conflict with his religious views. The historical Christ is mentioned as a part of the overall picture, so clearly Ransom the middle-aged university professor (i.e. someone like himself, or rather someone like his friend and colleague Tolkein) is simply a modern-day avatar of the Christ consciousness exemplifying what can and needs to happen on a much wider scale. He is taken out of his comfort zone and required to kill a man with his bare hands. This is where novelty comes in: ‘If he were not the ransom, Another would be. Yet nothing was ever repeated. Not a second crucifixion’… This is not unlawful killing suddenly becoming lawful, it is a one-off response to a war of aggression. Nor is it incitement to kill: any copycat action is ruled out.

    So what is this war all about? It is ‘the Straight or Normal or Wholesome’ being opposed by the bent, the crooked or the diseased. As we saw, when an agenda for scientific objectivity involves stamping on a crucifix, that is clearly bent or crooked: enough to make any normal person stop in their tracks. The question then is: is this piece of fantasy not itself bent? I say no, and here’s why. We are told in the third book the downfall of the bent is engineered by themselves when they engineer a technological solution to escape their prison planet. For a moment I wondered how the historical Jesus would fit into this picture without the use of a spacecraft. I had already read the answer in the first book, where it is stated:
    Quote What had happened on Earth, when Maleldil was born a man at Bethlehem, had altered the universe for ever. The new world of Perelandra was not a mere repetition of the old world Tellus. Maleldil never repeated Himself. As the Lady had said, the same wave never came twice. When Eve fell, God was not Man. He had not yet made men members of His body: since then He had, and through them henceforward He would save and suffer.
    This linchpin event not only explains the Eucharist; it posits that Jesus was the earthly incarnation of Maleldil, the creator/overseer of the entire solar system, which is what is meant by the title Son of God. ‘Lewis’s trilemma’ which states that Christ must be stating the truth as he is plainly not lying or crazy (Lord, Liar or Lunatic) has been the subject of much debate: https://infidels.org/library/modern/.../trilemma.html .
    https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/b...ument-unsound/
    Let me just say that this fantastic fictional account, besides its internal consistency, is enough to justify the conversion back to Christianity, ‘kicking and screaming’, after years of atheism, amply documented in countless publications and broadcasts. It is intuition more than compensating for any supposed lack of logic. This previous incarnation is what enables Maleldil to act through Ransom, in the first instance taking the place of a simpleton merely through an act of kindness to his mother, and going on from there. The premise of tutelary spiritual beings, gods and God is one aspect that has the benefit of a certain amount of documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony; we also have plenty of experience of how this translates into human goodness. What the fantasy part of the story brings is paradoxically a new intellectual understanding of how this might actually work.

    What happens with this incarnation is the transformation of a transcendental deity appearing as a pillar of light (the eldila do this, as does the Old Testament Yahweh) into an immanence, a materialist god present everywhere and in all things. This has always been the case, so the transformation is only a change in human perceptions, and what better way to achieve that than for it to take exemplary human form? Given that this is how the world is made and works, such an appearance in the physical is the ultimate realist expression of reality. To offer a crude analogy, it is like explaining that the Eiffel Tower is first and foremost an assemblage of steel girders producing an elegant geometrical configuration of sections of empty space, not a geometrical configuration of sections of empty space spoilt by this assemblage of steel girders that can safely be done away with. To claim otherwise is totally unrealistic – idealistic – nihilism, harmless in its intellectual form, but highly dangerous when presented as the ultimate in spirituality. The paradox here is that the history of architecture is all about using less and less material to create more and more space; the minimalist excellence of less is more. However the purpose of this is not to create the void of empty space, but the plenum of living space, breathing space. A contrary trend in demographics has led to the filling of this space with more and more human beings. The whole can of worms relating to population control, eugenics and racism, and of course oligarchy is derived from the application of the ‘less is more’ philosophy to this situation. On an individual level, the issue is the filling of our space with bigger and bigger human beings. There are two sides to this: on the positive side, people generally are getting taller and healthier; on the downside, poverty-related obesity is rife, and getting ill.

    These are very real problems facing the world today. The easy radical solutions of nihilism become tempting, so the stigma of ‘evil’ is gradually removed to make them even more attractive. But in a universe where ‘matter matters’, such notions are wrong, not just in the moral sense: they are technically a wrong answer that will solve nothing. The killing of the incarnation of ‘Maleldil’ as Jesus solved nothing. On the contrary, as more and more Earth matter takes human form, the presence of the Creator/Jesus has grown to become a planetary version of the elephant in the room.

    The basic issue then is literally one of ‘keeping body and soul together’. In the harsh climate of Russia and its environs, where people have to be communistic materialists working together to eke out a collective existence, the Slavs are noted for being a soulful race, which is something of a coping mechanism in prevalent times of hardship. In the generous conditions of America, on the other hand, people can afford to be egoistic materialists noted for being religiously minded, which can sometimes be seen as an unnecessary hindrance: God has given them all they need, so they might come to believe they no longer need God. It looks like the seeds of nihilism lie in having too much: material overload.

    What Lewis brings into focus is the mirror image between God (Maleldil) and Satan (Earths’ ‘Black Archon’), the one being the expansion through delegation that we call life, the other being the contraction of one aspect of that through death to nihilism. What you have is a spirit placed in charge of a whole physical world to which it is totally allergic. When Adam and Eve come along, it is this planetary deity that makes the project backfire. Humanity is weaponized in a manner that is diametrically opposed to it. The idea is ‘the abolition of man’, to reduce humanity to just one individual human as the receptacle for an artificial intelligence destined to rule the universe. Actually, even less than just a single man: the ‘head’ of the NICE organization is precisely that, a decapitated head kept alive artificially.

    This is hard-core nihilism with a vengeance; but nihilism is not something that can be watered down. It is one member of the spirit world rejecting the entire physical creation as a valid expression of the divine being. Given that the local supreme being is embodied in the entire creation of its solar system, its incarnation as Christ is merely the Norm seen against a deviant background.
    Last edited by araucaria; 13th August 2020 at 19:13.


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    Default Re: C.S. Lewis, The Space Trilogy

    This trilogy is possibly my favorite of all the works of Lewis. I shall have to procure fresh copies to read to my kids, and thanks to you for reminding me of them!

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    Default Re: C.S. Lewis, The Space Trilogy

    Thank you Reilly, good to see you.

    Lewis’s severed head is a burlesque reworking of H.G. Wells’ invading bloodsucker Martians, who have evolved into heads and very little else. Wells mentions this morphology as having being previously described by a ‘speculative writer’, real or imaginary I don’t know: ‘The brain alone remained a cardinal necessity.’ Whether or not evolution would lead in this direction, one thing seems certain: there is no short cut to evolution, especially when done with a guillotine. Organs need to atrophy over time. So in a sense, Lewis’s one-earthman invasion of Mars (actually two men countered by a third) is a reverse-angle view of The War of the Worlds. Met not by fear and panic but with benevolence, the invader is sent packing with zero violence, as opposed to being wiped out by some virus harmless to earthlings. Notice how another opposite of Wells’ scenario also played out in history, when Cortes’s attack on Mexico was accompanied by disease helping the invader instead of protecting the invaded. This is the novelty of novels: if you are looking for patterns, you will find only variations on a theme. In Lewis’s world view, the gold-grabbing Cortés was actually an agent of good, being instrumental in the Christianization of the Americas. We saw earlier the importance of Christianity entering the human conscious or unconscious mindset on a global scale. Montezuma was not so much defeated in war as enabling the return of the god Quetzalcoatl; that was his perception of the situation and, regardless of its ‘truth’, this perception is the fact of the matter. The same comment applies to the Latter-Day Saints’ idea that the original Quetzalcoatl was the resurrected Christ. It would seem that in morphing into the Aztecs, with their emphasis on human sacrifice, the Maya had lost their way. William H. Prescott’s influential (although not necessarily accurate) account in The History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) mentions a demand by the Aztecs of twenty young men and women for sacrifice to the gods (Folio Society, p.173). So the inhuman violence that the scientist Weston attributes to the Martians of Lewis’s Malacandra seems to be based on this historical colonial adventure, but mistakenly so. War is not an option, nor is it necessary:
    Quote In fighting those who serve devils one always has this on one’s side; their Masters hate them as much as they hate us. The moment we disable the human pawns enough to make them useless to Hell, their own Masters finish the work for us. They break their tools. (Lewis, C. S.. The Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength (p. 720). HarperCollins Publishers. Édition du Kindle.)
    The paradox of the materialist God/Maleldil is resolved by Lewis with a bit of unconscious dialectics by reversing the conventional wisdom of light beings being light, as in ‘not heavy’, not solid. The reverse is true, he says, when speed is factored in:

    Quote ‘If movement is faster, then that which moves is more nearly in two places at once.’ ‘That is true.’ ‘But if the movement were faster still – it is difficult, for you do not know many words – you see that if you made it faster and faster, in the end the moving thing would be in all places at once, Small One.’ ‘I think I see that.’ ‘Well, then, that is the thing at the top of all bodies – so fast that it is at rest, so truly body that it has ceased being body at all. But we will not talk of that. Start from where we are, Small One. The swiftest thing that touches our senses is light. We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge – the last thing we know before things become too swift for us. But the body of an eldil is a movement swift as light; you may say its body is made of light, but not of that which is light for the eldil. His “light” is a swifter movement which for us is nothing at all; and what we call light is for him a thing like water, a visible thing, a thing he can touch and bathe in – even a dark thing when not illumined by the swifter. And what we call firm things – flesh and earth – seems to him thinner, and harder to see, than our light, and more like clouds, and nearly nothing. To us the eldil is a thin, half-real body that can go through walls and rocks; to himself he goes through them because he is solid and firm and they are like cloud. And what is true light to him and fills the heaven, so that he will plunge into the rays of the sun to refresh himself from it, is to us the black nothing in the sky at night. These things are not strange, Small One, though they are beyond our senses. (Lewis, C. S.. The Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength (pp. 102-103). HarperCollins Publishers. Édition du Kindle.)
    Hence the solar system is in a very real sense the body of its maker, moving so fast as to be everywhere at once. (Any scaling up to galaxies and beyond can come later.) My take on the Eucharist would be in this light. Any time you take bread and wine, or for that matter a sandwich and a coffee, you are unavoidably feeding off that body; that is just the way this thing works. This is the maker issuing user instructions for getting the best out of this product, the zeroth commandment being ‘if all else fails, read the instructions!’. If you are against this system and not starving to death, then you are not being entirely honest with yourself: you are feeding off something that you reject. When you become conscious of that, you have a choice to make: either you learn acceptance, or you remove yourself totally and for good. This is the choice portrayed in Lewis’s third novel: when the eldila Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn come down to Earth in the person of the resurrected Merlin, they produce opposite effects on the two opposing groups brought together in two locations for the purpose. Among Ransom’s positive team they produce great eloquence, love and joy and peace. Among the nasty ‘NICE’ people, they produce total babbling, hate and rage and all-destructive conflict; everyone is wiped out.

    This reversed perspective of matter as we know it being the solid stuff and the ethereal being insubstantial, immaterial, may be simply our worm’s-eye view of the cosmos, or it may be satanic in nature: possibly the serpent’s gift of ‘knowledge’ was this back-to-front pseudo-understanding. What it means though is that we need to reverse our picture of this rebel spirit mired in matter: we now have an incredibly solid creature hampered by a cloud of fog. An alternative analogy might be the impatient driver of a fast car caught up in slow traffic.

    This analogy ties in with the notion of higher frequencies. Spiritual evolution involves adding on extra gears, while still holding on to the lower gears; but the lower gears work to higher revs because the engine is more powerful. The incarnation is a prime example: God/Maleldil, who has all the gears, drops down to third to live a superhuman life among humans, who are themselves doing something similar looking after the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms. This would be how divine love works: looking after ‘lower’ life forms so that all the traffic speeds up together. Hence the hierarchical pyramid operates by going down and acting at a lower level, which paradoxically raises one up; the perverse option (the sin of pride or ambition) is upward-looking, leading to a downfall. Returning to my analogy, the rebel option offers a kind of devolution where the faster vehicle causes the havoc of multiple pileups bringing traffic to a standstill. Hence we see ‘car-crash’ interviews or press conferences from the self-important where some of these drivers are taking only themselves off the road.
    …/….


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    Default Re: C.S. Lewis, The Space Trilogy

    Here are the three books in the Avalon Library:
    1. Out of the Silent Planet (1938), set mostly on Mars (Malacandra). In this book, Elwin Ransom voyages to Mars and discovers that Earth is exiled from the rest of the Solar System. Far back in Earth's past, it fell to an angelic being known as the Bent Oyarsa, and now, to prevent contamination of the rest of the Solar System ("The Field of Arbol"), it is known as "the silent planet" (Thulcandra).
      http://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/C.%20S.%20Lewis%20-%20Out%20of%20the%20Silent%20Planet%20(1938).pdf

    2. Perelandra (1943), set mostly on Venus. Also known as Voyage to Venus. Here Dr Ransom journeys to an unspoiled Venus in which the first humanoids have just emerged.
      http://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/C.%20S.%20Lewis%20-%20Perelandra%20(1943).pdf

    3. That Hideous Strength (1945), set on Earth. A scientific think tank called the N.I.C.E. (The National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments) is secretly in touch with demonic entities who plan to ravage and lay waste to planet Earth.
      http://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/C.%2...h%20(1945).pdf

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    Default Re: C.S. Lewis, The Space Trilogy

    CS Lewis’s fictional view of solar system ‘politics’ is both enabled and limited by contemporary knowledge or lack thereof, at a time when HG Wells had more to say about Mars than most astronomers. One conceit of Wells seems to be at play, namely that the outer planets are older and tireder than the inner planets. Hence Mars is running down and it is somewhat understandable for the Martians to invade the younger Earth. Incidentally, Wells’s invasion is preceded by sightings on Mars of a type that actually happened, as recorded by Charles Fort. Lewis’s Mars is also older, with four intelligent species, later reduced to one on Earth, and also on Venus, which is younger (closer to the Sun) and still at the beginning of the human adventure. Interestingly, the Queen on Perelandra sees learning in terms of ageing: youth is ignorance, new knowledge makes one older. Conversely, the Martians are older – and wiser.

    Uranus and Neptune do not even enter the picture, and of course Mars and Venus are not at all the planets known to us today. Added to that, there is nothing about the asteroids, a fortiori nothing about the planet, known as Maldek, whence they seem to have exploded. The astronomer Tom van Flandern, who had experience in tracing the orbits of satellite debris, calculating backwards in time the orbits of asteroids, comets and other space debris, discovered that 3.2 million years ago (correcting my earlier figure of ten million), they were all in the same place, doubtless forming a single planet which subsequently exploded. This is hard science: everything is where it is now because of where it was then before it was blasted away. Courtney Brown’s research was designed to establish whether the biblical ‘war in heaven’ refers to this event. Whatever one thinks of his method and findings is irrelevant to the hard fact of the current state of the solar system. My point here, however, is that neither researcher invalidates the fictional scenario put forward by CS Lewis, although it does needs updating to take into account this data acquired since the time of writing.

    While this content notably with respect to Maleldil and his eldila is not invalidated, clearly a certain number of adjustments need to be made nonetheless in order to bring this picture up to date. Maleldil remains in charge of the solar system and the Jovian deity remains number one among the eldila. What must change, however, is the position and role of the rebel ‘angel’, since several million years before human earthlings came along, there was major disruption in heaven leading to annihilation of one planet and the near destruction of at least one other. The planetary deity associated with Maldek appears to have been way more satanically effective than anything achieved – to date at least – by Earth’s ‘Black Archon’. This suggests that the latter is the former relocated here, who would not have been destroyed along with his planet. Hence Satan would have ‘previous’ and become free to roam the heavens and cause havoc elsewhere. The immediate mechanism for this would be on the lines of Lewis’s space-traveller Weston. If Maldek had space flight at the time of the disaster, then it would very likely have sent survivors to Earth… with room on board for this stowaway.

    Compared then with Lewis’s fictional account, the Earth is still the pariah world, the ‘silent planet’, but only vicariously, having had this role inflicted upon it by circumstance when it became a refugee planet for surviving Maldekians, and presumably Martians as well. This in turn puts a different complexion on the plight of the original earth humans. It suggests that the Adam and Eve story was imported from Maldek, and that, since novelty reigns, something different happened here. If so, then the theological concept of original sin derived from that scenario has also been misapplied to Earth. The notion that we are all sinners who need to be redeemed by some intervention from outside is exactly back to front. Earth humans are basically good people under attack from outside influences.

    This starts at the very top. The local Oyarsa, or planetary deity, whose body is the planet, was originally not Satan, but… Gaia. Satan hitched a lift here by physical means, exactly as in Lewis’s tale he hitches a lift to Perelandra/Venus through the scientist-astronaut Weston. But he came not only with survivors of Maldek, but I would suggest, with pieces of the planet itself. Courtney Brown sent his remote viewers to Mars at the time of disintegration of Maldek; they experience the bombardment of Mars by material from Maldek. I’d be curious to know what they would see on Earth in the same time frame. I am wondering for example if, in addition to a few comets and meteorites, a whole deluge of water did not come this way at the time from that source. Certainly we have an enormous quantity of the stuff, and I for one don’t really know where it all came from. Those meteorites may have been made of water, and would justify the deep-seated fear of comets as evil omens if that was what they accompanied. Speculation to be sure; but the thought here is that to some unknown degree, Maldek itself merged with the Earth, and hence the satanic spirit that ruled over the now dead planet is literally to that same degree at home, embodied, on Earth.

    The biblical story of the flood makes little sense in purely terrestrial terms. Extreme flooding affects low-lying areas, but there is no way it is going to cover mountaintops. On the other hand, a predictable event (Noah was forewarned) lasting numerous days and nights and then stopping could result from the Earth’s orbit taking it through a cloud of material, possibly produced by an earlier planetary explosion. Forty days and forty nights corresponds to about forty degrees of arc. An ice-cold cloud in space would melt on entering the Earth’s atmosphere and overwhelm the weather system for that length of time, before suddenly clearing.


    .../...


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    Default Re: C.S. Lewis, The Space Trilogy

    Why does all this sound vaguely familiar? Well, Lewis’s use of the word Archon suggests that he is thinking of Gnosticism. From the Christian viewpoint, Gnosticism was originally heresy, but as we saw, Lewis practises tolerant Chestertonian ‘mere christianity’. Of course a lot less was known about Gnosticism in the thirties and forties than we know now since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Having said that, the great earth goddess Sophia/Gaia fits in perfectly with his presentation of planetary deities… even though she is entirely absent from this picture, in which the Black Archon is entirely in charge on our Silent Planet. So the task now becomes to reintegrate Sophia/Gaia, in other words to reconcile Christianity and Gnosticism. Unfortunately, a leading exponent of Gnosticism is John Lash, whose hatred of salvationist christianity extends to violent rejection of Jesus Christ himself. So this process will have to involve a good deal of peace-making and reconciliation.

    The basic equation is as follows. Maleldil’s creation, his physical body, is the solar system. Within that is Sophia’s creation, her physical body, the Earth. This is no more contradictory than saying that the heart or other organ has an identity of its own within the larger framework of a human body. The difficulty arises when the satanic usurper takes over Sophia’s creation, imposing his own identity on another body. You end up with a hybrid body, like a heart transplant patient suddenly discovering he is someone else. Notice in passing how HEAD transplants are now the latest in transplantation research, a procedure known as Cephalosomatic anastomosis.
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5705925/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/w...ng/3287179002/
    Briefly, the issue with John Lash’s standpoint is that he confuses the satanic usurper with the benevolent creator. This is what some of his critics mean by saying that he is himself archontically infected. For that is what Satan is doing and what theologians mean by his sin of pride.
    Another related current issue is migration. When migrants are not assimilated, they are rejected, like the foreign organ they are. But these migrants from Maldek were here before earth humans developed; hence a major territorial issue, which is similar to and the reverse of the situation in Palestine.

    Let’s come to this gnostic angle, which has already been much discussed on Avalon, notably over an interview recorded with John Lash that Bill Ryan and the mod team deemed unpublishable. Lewis on the other hand is more in line with what I refer to as the polite conversation of Avalon as opposed to gurus: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post967919
    I know of two threads on the forum, on ‘Sophia’s correction’
    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post866276
    and ‘Re: John Lash's Kalika war party’. You can check out my contributions to that thread, but for now I prefer to recommend some excellent posts by others, gripreaper and Delight:
    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post919166.
    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post866433
    Ulli on Adam and Eve:
    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post919223
    and a couple of many posts by former member Selkie, who got all too close to John Lash:
    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post935017
    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post935486

    Christianity and Gnosticism have always been at loggerheads when in fact there is absolutely no reason to choose one or the other rather than tolerate both. Lash takes issue with the ‘alien’ influence of a God not of this world offering redemption: ‘The authority of the off-planet deity suited [Roman] imperial lust for power to a T’ (p. 21). Yes, anything and everything can be misused and/or deliberately weaponized. On that basis you will find yourself rejecting anything and everything. But the Gnostic Earth-based view is entirely subsumable by the ‘mere Christian’ one. To replace the word ‘redemption’ by ‘correction’ in the following excerpt is merely playing on words, intellectualism gone wrong, betraying a fear-based blinkered approach often called racism:
    Quote Central to the Sophianic myth was an event called in Gnostic terminology the “correction of the Earth goddess, a concept that verges towards teleology without predefining it. In Sophia’s correction, Gnostics imagined the realignment of life on our planet with the cosmic center, the source from which the earth goddess originated and emerged. This intriguing idea is found in Gnostic cosmological writings from Nag Hammadi, including the Apocryphon of John (cited below). Scholars sometimes translate the Greek diorthosis as redemption rather than correction, but the concept of correction taught in the Mysteries was utterly unlike the divinely insured redemption promised in salvationist religion. It was not a matter of belief in a higher power located somewhere beyond this world, off-planet, but an experiential faith in our connection to the divine power that is here, fully earthbound, providing the matrix in which we live, move, and have our being… (Not in His Image p.15)
    The conflict expressed in this paragraph is readily dispelled by dialectical synthesis: see this post by Ulli: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post919232
    Taking things to a higher level in this way, we find ‘the cosmic center, the source from which the earth goddess originated and emerged’ literally at a higher level, that of the solar system. It is no contradiction to state that Earth’s best interests are served as part of that solar system (any resemblance to the Brexit debate is entirely relevant!). And of course we can expand outwards from there, which is how we dispel the paralyzing fear – call it safety in numbers, herd immunity, the joy of being part of something really big, whatever.

    I quoted gripreaper not least for his reference to not killing the messenger, as one aspect of tolerance. Tolerance as a positive value leaves everyone a little slack. We are in an age of zero tolerance, when tolerance actually becomes connivance in whatever wrongdoing, perceived or real, happens to be going on somewhere near you. We have an example of zero tolerance versus tolerance in John Lamb Lash’s Not in His Image, where he returns to the notion of St Paul being the ‘Man of lies’ of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library: ‘the ideological virus carried by Paul went pandemic in the One True Faith. It spread to Europa, then to the Americas. Today it infects the entire world.’ (p. 96). For centuries, the ordinary layman has rightly ignored these messenger issues and simply taken to heart the message of 1 Corinthians 13, where whoever it was provides a detailed definition of what love is. The message rings true, however vile the messenger may have been. Think of Graham Greene’s whisky priest in The Power and the Glory: damned to hell on his own terms even as he brings God to the people. Or Shakespeare’s Shylock, whose problem has nothing to do with his Jewishness and everything to do with his mercantile inability to recognize the quality of mercy when it hits him in the face.

    The message of God/’Maleldil’ incarnate was aimed at the grassroots: it had to go mainstream, with all the risks that that involved. It saw off the Roman Empire within a few centuries, so it didn’t really ‘suit it to a T’, even though it remains the basis of ordinary human decency, regardless of religious beliefs. As I suggested earlier, the message was in the form of a maker’s instructions for the hands-on user: actually, more like a tutorial complete with demo and without social distancing. Lesson one, this power tool requires a power source, which is love; here is how you plug it in. It was not a patent application, with a full exposé of the prior state of the art, details of the innovation and some possible embodiments of the appliance. Getting down to work was a matter of some urgency. Just turn on the power for immediate proof of concept and instant relief. It was so novel and revolutionary that mistakes would inevitably be made, if only through inexperience. Meanwhile, the theoretical understanding had to wait.

    All this was a very slow process, and yet what we need to understand here is how far Christianity has brought the human race collectively. Like the air we breathe, we don’t even notice how much more we think about other people. The energy has quickened noticeably within living memory, so by extrapolating back over two millennia, we can imagine just how backward they must have been in the days of the Roman Empire. We are sure to be mistaken if we think they were exactly like us. In the 16th century, the Church was debating whether blacks had souls (some retrograde people today still behave as if they didn’t – in some quarters the knowhow would be lost over time, or misused). In the time of Jesus, the vast majority, who had never heard of the likes of Plato or Aristotle, needed to be told that Europeans had souls.

    Jesus used parables to make a point. Many of us today are still fond of an analogy. Here is analogy that springs to mind from some building work I have been doing of late. Yesterday I filled a tub to overflowing with sand and cement or lime: where would the water go? Well, the tub still contained a lot of air, which was replaced more efficiently by the water by bonding the particles closer together so as to form a sticky bonding material. When the mortar dries, the water disappears in a chemical reaction called hydration, when its physical bonding properties kick in, potentially for centuries: Rome is still full of imperial brickwork. Now, everything is as dry as the Giza plateau, but we know that at one time it was wet. In taking the dry materials to a higher density, and being itself affected by this closer bonding, the water stopped being wet, stopped being just water. This is maybe what we mean when we say that God is dead… He stepped into time, and never actually left. He can still draw water from a stone.


    The beauty of an analogy is that it does what it says and says what it does: it gives… concrete form to a concept, in the simplest, most understandable terms. Anything you do in life will do that: creation is by definition the materialization of a thought. Normally speaking the creative process comes naturally. The patent application does the opposite: it conceptualizes a novel concrete form. However, some effort is usually involved, unless you are dealing with a genius to whom the creative process comes naturally. Alternatively, some patent applications turn out to be duds, either because they cannot be used to materialize the thought or the materialization doesn’t do what it is supposed to do – two ways of saying the same thing.

    Of course it is not impossible to write up a kind of patent application documenting the theory behind the device. This is perhaps what Gnosticism has been doing all this time, and it does seem to be what John Lash is doing. Am I doing the same? Well, I am setting out the state of the art; whether or not some innovation will follow remains to be seen. Lash describes an offshoot of the ‘sophisticated shamans’ or ‘Magi’ in ‘around 4000 BCE’. Hence the havoc caused by these ‘Illuminati’, as he calls them, hugely predates the ‘cover, perpetrator religion’ of Christianity, which therefore cannot be a cause: an in some ways ineffective remedy perhaps, but definitely not a cause of the world’s problem. Gnostics were misbehaving with their elite gifts long before Jesus came along. Lash writes:
    Quote Around 4000 B.C.E., with the rise of urban civilization in the Near East, some members of the Magian order chose to apply certain secrets of initiation to statecraft and social engineering. They became the advisors to the first theocrats of the patriarchal nation-states, but in fact the advisors were running the show. Their subjects were systematically programmed to believe they were descended from the gods. The Illuminati inaugurated elaborate rites of empowerment, or kingship rituals. These rituals were in fact methods of mind control exercised on the general populace through the collective symbology and mystique of royal authority… (Not in His Image, p.148)
    If the words ‘deep state’ or the name Dominic Cummings come to mind in connection with this idea of ‘advisors running the show’, it shows that the problem is now 6000 years old. These people were already Gnostic heretics before ever becoming Christian heretics justifiably prevented from trying to run the new show, one deliberately designed to thwart their top-down approach by a grassroots-up method. It is a bit like the CEO putting in an appearance on the factory floor to settle a middle management dispute. The religious equivalent of middle management being the priesthood, which is precisely the Illuminati’s gift to Christianity. For Christian priests, acting vicariously (i.e. vicars), were preceded by these Gnostic advisors, also called priests. Continuing from the previous quotation:
    Quote … Kingship rituals were distinct from the rites of initiation that led to instruction by the Light and consecration to the Great Goddess. Their purpose was not education and enlightenment, but social management. Gnostics refrained from assuming any role in politics because their intention was not to change society but to produce skilled, well-balanced, enlightened individuals who would create a society good enough that it did not need to be run by external management. The intention of the dissident Magians to run society by covert controls was based on their assumption that human beings are not innately good enough, or gifted enough, to create a humane world. This difference in views of human potential was the main factor that precipitated the division of the Magians.
    Historians recognize a split in the Magian order, but do not understand either its origin or its consequences. Within the order, the telestai were given the title of vaedemna, “seer,” “wise one”, as distinguished from the priest, the zoatar, who officiated openly in society and advised Middle Eastern theocrats on matters of statecraft and social morality, not to mention agricultural planning – for Zoroaster was by all accounts responsible for the introduction of planned, large-scale agriculture. It is generally agreed that women discovered by gathering plants how to cultivate them, and men late expanded this discovery into the ancient equivalent to agribusiness. So arose the first theocratic city-states in the Fertile Crescent. (Civilization may be defined as the way of life that begins by amassing vegetables to increase population, and ends with a population of vegetables.) Urban populations required social control, and the Illuminati assumed the role of planners and controllers – more often than not, hidden controllers. (Not in His Image, p.148-9)
    Note in passing how this analysis is in line with the work of Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael and Beyond Civilization
    The bottom line, therefore, concerning the source of ‘evil’ (shorthand term), is that it appears from the above to be an internal issue of Gnosticism. Christianity can be left out of the equation altogether, except as a remedy. There was this attempt at contamination, but as I said earlier, ‘certain improbable things have to have happened for us to be where we are at’. Regardless of what anyone says or thinks, the incarnation of ‘Maleldil’ is the one thing that has to have happened, and it cannot be undone. It is like drawing water from a lump of homemade concrete: you can grind it to dust, but you may not find the water, even though you remember putting it there yourself. All the same, let’s mix a metaphor, the genie is still literally in the bottle, which it never really left.


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    Default Re: C.S. Lewis, The Space Trilogy

    CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy is a fascinating story, but it does raise all kinds of problems. His cosmic battle between good and evil takes place on two levels: discarnate planetary deities are positively oriented, with one notable exception. At some stage, humanity becomes mixed up in this conflict. With Adam and Eve this happens at the very beginning of human consciousness, but presumably the spiritual war started much earlier. The fantasy of Perelandra is a rerun of Adam and Eve on Venus involving 20th century humanity on an early trip off-planet. The problem is nipped in the bud when Satan is present only through one human individual: killing the human is enough to remove the satanic presence. However, it is also a drastic solution made necessary by the fact that no logical argument is sufficiently persuasive when the other side is using a subtly distorted version of the same arguments. It is also a paradoxical non-solution in that involves murder in order to save human life. In the Bible story, murder is a second-generation occurrence, when Cain kills Abel. Hence it is an example of original sin at work, not an avoidance of it. The other problem here is that the satanic presence is removed from only one planet – not removed at all in fact, merely displaced. It is like killing the patsy while the real culprit goes free. On the other hand, problems are solved by taking them to a higher level: here, on the contrary, the problem is seemingly lowered from the spiritual to the physical plane. Certainly, this may only be how it looks from one perspective. From another perspective, a human being in the full sense of the word, i.e. as a combination of the spiritual and the physical, is naturally going to trump a negative discarnate entity, which is both disembodied and despiritualized. So the outcome of the human duel on Venus makes sense: the man with the soul overcomes the man who has lost his soul.

    The next stage therefore, recounted in That Hideous Strength, is to remove the evil from the Earth, where it is still fairly localized: one group of scientific nihilists in a small university town. This group ends up going crazy, which is the logical outcome of the built-in contradiction when materialism and nihilism come together. For if matter is all that is, and nihilism is the destruction of anything to hand, then self-destruction is the only possible minimum outcome. The problem with this scenario for the modern reader is that the world has moved on, the issue is no longer localized, and so any self-destruction would take everyone and everything with it. We are no longer at the dawn of the atomic age, but more likely at its culmination. See this post.

    Whatever the limitations of this story, it does have one key merit, in that it focusses on artificial intelligence and the paradox of that idea. The paradox is that AI is based on human intelligence; it can seek to whittle down the human input to a single severed head, but the human input remains the key feature of the entire system that cannot be eliminated altogether. This is a rather grotesque metaphor for what we see today, where the human input is the more abstract programming function. It is more abstract but nonetheless crucial. AI remains a human artefact, hence not totally alien, at best some kind of hybrid. Ultimately, no doubt, nothing is ever totally alien; but, pragmatically speaking, things and entities can be more or less harmful to humans, and shunned or sought out in consequence. What is of particular concern at the present moment (but the problem is apparently being addressed as we speak) is the reversal of this process, whereby Facebook, Twitter etc. enjoy this veneer of human interaction – briefly – to hide motives of data collection for nefarious purposes.

    The more obvious take on the above is the humanoid robot learning human behaviour. A short story by Arthur C. Clarke describes two such, male and female, absconding from work in order to spend some quality time together. And in Asimov’s Foundation series, the psychohistorian Hari Seldon enjoys a long happy marriage with a robot whose respect for the benevolent laws of robotics verges on the human emotions of love, devotion, etc. In Asimov’s cycle, the humanoid element merges at some point with the clandestine element. The Second Foundation involves humans acting behind the scenes; but already there are robots pulling the strings. In both cases, secret government is not equatable with non-benevolent dictatorship: there is no suggestion of evil-doing on either level. Indeed, one would expect that on anything on a bigger scale than our own, government would require resources on the same altogether larger scale than is currently available. The robots are presented as individuals, and little reference is made to all the infrastructure of huge mainframe computers etc. I think national governments today have reached the stage where they are no longer competent to do all that is required without something similar, and are doubly incompetent because they fail to respond appropriately. Conspiracy theorists will say that someone else is doing the job for them: I simply don’t know.

    Back to Asimov: eventually the First and Second Foundations make way for a better solution, namely Gaia, a power involving all the human, non-human intelligence comprising the entire planet itself, everything animal vegetable and mineral, and presumably therefore including the local AI resources as well. So what this means is that at some level, the hybrid human/AI interface is operating smoothly at this planetary level, with a greater capacity to ensure galactic governance.

    What changes from Lewis to Asimov is the scale: being based on statistics and large numbers, psychohistory calls for this wider canvas. In so doing however, he gets into the robotic aspects of human behaviour, and the human aspects of robotic behaviour. We all know for instance how we do something relatively new out of free choice, only to discover that 50% of the population is doing the same thing. And we don’t need to be outliers to enjoy free will, because even the outliers are statistically accounted for. However, government is to a large extent about undermining that free will with carrots and sticks, incentives and punishments leading us to behave in a preferred manner. Most of the time, free will will free wheel; it is only very rarely that something unusual or even unique will crop up to disturb that pattern. CS Lewis’s stories focus almost exclusively on those events. What these two writers have in common, however, is the status of the non-human elements mingling with humanity. Asimov’s robots and humans with highly developed mental capabilities operate behind the scenes in a very similar way to Lewis’s angelic beings/planetary deities. To be sure, they are much more hands-on, but in both case we see unseen forces at work that the humans can only surmise, and yet which fully belong to this universe, albeit on this non-physical or pseudo-non-physical level.

    This brings me to a novel by A.E. Vogt, which leaves the plane of the immanent deity to propose not just a transcendent God but a transcendent component in humanity. The author is exclusively concerned with earthlings, but I would not limit the concept to that, especially as he is actually only talking about Americans The novel is La Machine ultime (1983), better known to the English world as Computerworld: a late 20th c. view of the late 21st c. (2092). Here, none of your sexy robots: the computer is very much the giant 36-storey central computer. Van Vogt has been criticized for ignoring the advent of the personal computer, then in its infancy. Not so: this computer notably handles personal (telephone) communications, individual entertainment, so the Internet, Facebook, Twitter etc. are all implicitly included in advance, only viewed from the other side – from the viewpoint of the service provider, not the user. The machine also handles all surveillance and policing operations, as well as driving most vehicles, and doing most of the work in American society. So this is not a story about enslavement: on the contrary, people don’t have enough to do. I guess with hindsight that they are suffering from a kind of… lockdown. Certainly, it is a story about people getting killed, for the computer has a range of weapons that it uses to enforce the status quo.

    What is of interest to me here is how humanity and AI interface with this huge central computer as far removed as one can get from the humanoid robot. Yet, from the outset, it does something very human: it starts telling a story based on what it ‘sees’ through a few of the surveillance devices, along with some exchanges with authorized personnel. This is a first-person account of some important episodes in its life and growth, a kind of Bildungsroman describing how it gets an education. To begin with, it is too early to talk of ‘personal growth’, but that is what it becomes: this unlikeliest candidate for humanization does in fact develop a personality. At one stage, it drops the polite deference and starts speaking to people in familiar, insolent and even sweary language, enough to make the more conventional humanoids start to blush. So that injects a bit of humour which the reader might not readily associate with readers of things like World of Null-A.

    The plot is about a small group of objectors who still believe in the ‘soul’, for want of a better word. The machine is able to detect what might be termed the aura, which it uses as a redundant mechanism for identifying individuals, after face recognition. Not exactly redundant, because if it is present, it simply means a person is alive, maybe asleep; if absent they are dead; if floating upwards, they are dying. This is circumstantial evidence for a soul but falling short of proof. The group’s leader is the one survivor of a research study where the researcher and the other eleven child subjects have been eliminated. In a scene recalling the massacre of the innocents, he escapes after being sent to England. This guy taps into a spiritual energy supply not recognized by the science operating the computer, an energy stronger in the vicinity of more more spiritually energized people. The computer begins to sit up when he starts doing unusual things with his and other people’s auras. For example, he can park someone in a limbo resembling death while he shapeshifts to become that person. He himself resurrects from such a state after a supposedly fatal road accident provoked by the computer.

    This man is obviously a huge threat to the computer and to the whole society it governs, not only because he almost single-handedly throws its entire surveillance system into disarray, but also because he clearly masters a technology that is beyond the science of the day. Except that it is not a technology at all; it is something he describes as dating back to BEFORE THE BIG BANG – to paraphrase: a divine spark in humans. This is going above the computer’s pay grade, because naturally, its information stops just short of the Big Bang, at the Planck time. It has a very human reaction at this stage: while it will happily check through the entire Bible in a few millionths of a second, it only has a few hazy recollections of philosophy and metaphysics talking about this subject. In other words, the All-Seeing Eye is denounced in purely scientific terms as a myth.

    Hence Van Vogt’s approach is more radical than others I mentioned previously: for instead of IMMANENT deities and such, he is talking about a TRANSCENDENT function, which can of course be deified as the Creator of the Universe, but that is not the point. The point is that humanity reconciles the transcendent and the immanent, whereas the machine is neither: it is simply an extremely antihuman object in the world with tentacles that stretch out, but ultimately no more than that. If it were any more than that, it would be as a brazen contradiction of the founding principle behind the Universe. So what comes next is an explanation understandable by the machine of where it stands and what it needs to do.

    One aspect is that the machine gains its power from humans: its chief operator is a self-appointed future president of the United States who has murdered the former chief operator and self-appointed future president of the United States. The logical conclusion in this direction is that the machine eliminates the self-appointed future president of the United States and becomes de facto head of state in his place. But beyond that, the machine gains its incredible power from the access it has to all humans, whose soul energy is decreasing as it gains more power. A second – contradictory – conclusion in this direction is that the machine is humanized. You can see this in two ways. First, it literally drains energy from the population, which is the source of its power; but at the same time, (possibly a case of Jungian enantiodromia), since it is acting upon human energy, this has to be in furtherance of human affairs.

    What happens next has nothing to do with the Big Bang: on the contrary it fast forwards to the end of the Universe. In Biblical (or at least Christian?) terms, this is the ’resurrection of the body’ when everyone who ever lived rises from the grave and lives happily ever after in ‘paradise’. The machine gets to visualize this scene of huge numbers of resurrecting humans. And then it gets to visualize the corresponding scene for its own species. Being one of a kind, as its surveillance cameras are steadily extinguished, it finds itself totally isolated.

    At this point, the machine is forced to make a choice, which it is not normally qualified to make: it can ‘serve’ humanity, meaning it can fulfil its potential, or it can take control of nothing and no one. ‘Hobson’s choice’ is the operative phrase. Van Vogt’s story is hugely positive in that the yes-no logic of the computer is stymied into submission. Artificial intelligence stands and falls on the basis of the non-artificial intelligence that created it. In itself it has no future, because it has no past: it is simply there. If it has no existence before the Big Bang and no existence after the end of the world, it has no existence at all.

    Not being a machine, I need to make another post after this one.


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    Default Re: C.S. Lewis, The Space Trilogy

    Van Vogt’s story ends on an optimistic note. The alarming depletion of spiritual energy as observed in dimming auras is stopped when the drain on this energy is mended. The human fly enters the Spider’s web where it is stored and uses it to overcome the AI monster, which reverts to being a faithful servant of humanity. But for what happens next, we need to look to other SF writers. This victory was won by somewhat humanizing the machine. It has experienced supreme power and backed down. It has also experienced supreme loneliness; how it responds to that is up in the air. Does it begin to downsize and start a family of smaller creatures: robots? Humanoid robots? Here we move into Asimov territory. His machines remain respectful of the three laws of robotics which maintain subservience. At some stage, the whole venture is aborted, and apart from a handful of exceptions, these robots become a thing of the past, the stuff of legends. From then on, evolving humanity is in the driving seat. However, an alternative scenario might lead to the growth of a subculture of humanoids that become conscious of their status as second-class citizens; they might rebel at doing all the work etc. Nothing evil involved: simply the natural growth of what has evolved into a silicone-based life form with legitimate desires. Here we move into Clifford D Simak territory; City, his collection of SF short stories. His society of dogs taught to speak by humans evolves from being pets into a fully-fledged earth civilization, all the more so when the humans move off-planet the better to accommodate their development. In this scenario, humanity becomes the stuff of legends among those researcher dogs with nostalgia for the good times spent with their masters. Notice how in both the Asimov and the Simak scenarios, life goes on rather than ending up quickly in doomsday.

    Be that as it may, these various possibilities of looking forward and looking back identify time as THE major issue. In this regard, Van Vogt’s idea of going back to before the Big Bang, i.e. before the beginning of time, may be seen as either the ultimate writer’s ploy – a dubious gadget – or as a profoundly important insight. This is the great undecidable that we can explore in order perhaps to make some kind of intuitive choice that falls short of scientific proof. While reaching what would be demonstrable certainty has been some people’s life’s work, I do not believe that is what is required. A wrong answer is less important than the appropriateness of the method: how we live our lives.

    Going back to before the Big Bang makes strategic sense as an outflanking manoeuvre: this is where science stops. In the words of Stephen Hawking, to ask what happened in the ‘moment’ before time came into being is like asking where north of the north pole is. While naturally I am not qualified to judge Hawking’s science, I did propose a ready answer to that supposedly nonsensical question. See below. Be that as it may, the bottom line is science placing a limit on its own scope, marking on its own map a no-go territory with the sign ‘here be dragons’. So science has this Achilles heel: it can discover Big Bang scenarios only to pull up short at the final hurdle. The ultimate machine won’t go there; it will stop anyone else from trying, and until someone does, Achilles remains immortal. To that extent, this is much more powerful than some mediocre writer’s tame ploy.

    Fast forward twenty years. Something happens in science when the French twins Igor and Grichka Bogdanov attempt a scientific look behind the curtain. If you have followed me thus far, you will understand that there was no way their work was going simply to join the literature, with top careers and a Nobel Prize. This was the typical stuff of fringe theories; see the examples given here.
    It had to be debunked as non-science, and of course it was: this was the infamous ‘Bogdanov affair’. It eventually became a Wikipedia affair when the French whistleblower site Mediapart run by Edwy Plenel, a former editor of Le Monde newspaper (you don’t get more respectable than that) published evidence of suppressed modifications to the above Wiki article.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
    https://blogs.mediapart.fr/scientia/...danov-affair-i
    The scale of this affair is huge compared with the ‘Sokal affair’, where someone published a single spoof article in a peer-reviewed journal and promptly owned up in order to denounce the quality of peer-reviewing in general. The Bogdanovs published five articles which were meant seriously and taken seriously – including one in MIT’s Annals of Physics, which they say accepts less than one in three hundred submissions. They also obtained doctoral degrees, Igor in theoretical physics, Grichka in mathematics. Mediapart’s contribution is in stating that the University of Burgundy did not overturn but confirmed the validity of their theses (the links are broken of course).

    This subject does need to be addressed, for until some explanation is found, the whole of science is based on what Terence McKenna calls ‘one free miracle’.

    With this type of research, only a handful of people are qualified to have an opinion. Even string theorists may not be well placed to distinguish between groundbreaking work and nonsense (especially as string theory itself has spent a long time getting nowhere). One doesn’t need to be one of those people to see that the frontiers of science are at once vulnerable and policed in proportion. The above quoted article on Theoretical physics blandly states, ‘Some fringe theories go on to become a widely accepted part of physics. Other fringe theories end up being disproven. Some fringe theories are a form of protoscience and others are a form of pseudoscience.’ Actually, as with many borders, we are talking about a war zone. The Bogdanovs’ science seems to be neither protoscience nor pseudoscience, more like popular science of the kind that can affect everyone but a few scientists in their ivory tower. It is as though the scientific elite has commandeered the entire universe except for that tiny point at the very beginning which it would like to brush under the carpet. That would be a very good place to be if it were the point where the tables could be turned, e.g. if it turned out that it contained the entire universe to come. One doesn’t need to be a mathematical physicist to understand that this is exactly what is being suggested, or to understand how this would be hugely threatening to any elite maintaining its ascendancy through a corresponding ignorance. Ultimately, with that nearly all-encompassing net, their only catch is themselves, with everyone else potentially on the outside.

    This is in line with the Hawking quote about the north pole. In my understanding , the north pole is no barrier: you just keep going on; OK you start heading south, but the whole planet is straight ahead wherever you want to go. See this post. The intuition/knowledge on which Van Vogt has based his novel is at the very least an extremely useful way of viewing the world. Don’t get me wrong: I am not trying to evaluate science on the basis of an SF novel: that would be silly. Au contraire, I am trying to evaluate a science fiction novel on the basis of science. That may sound silly too, until one remembers that the quality of science fiction depends on its quality as science as well as on its quality as fiction.

    Now let’s flesh this out with some of the Bogdanovs’ conclusions, translated into ordinary language. Somewhat surprisingly, the mathematics is easier to grasp than the physics. They describe a preliminary cold Big Bang that triggers the hot one in terms of something out of nothing, number out of zero. Mathematically speaking, if you start with just zero, then you also have an ‘empty set’. Place the 0 in that empty set: it is no longer empty but has a value of 1. After that, the number system just keeps going, expanding in the physical. Interestingly, this twin solution is in the image of the twins themselves, the physicist teaming up with the mathematician. This observation might be taken as a sign that they are expressing themselves more than any external reality; on the other hand, it might be taken as an explanation as to why they were particularly suited to doing this research.

    The Bogdanovs have a second, physics, way of explaining Big Bang expansion, but the mathematical explanation jives with something I had already worked out for myself, namely how Blaise Pascal constructed his famous triangle. The triangle itself is fairly self-explanatory, but there is a problem with how he came to write down the original 1 at the apex of the triangle. See this post from ten years ago.

    First, they state that after the Big Bang, a) entropy grows, although increasingly slowly (meaning that universe can grow very old), and b) information also grows over time, although not starting from nothing. They go on to examine how entropy and information interact. Secondly, prior to the Big Bang, the information is all there in conditions where space has reverted to our familiar Euclidean space, but where real time is replaced by imaginary time. In my own words, you might say that time no longer passes, but it still exists in some form, where the term imaginary seems to suggest as information rather than as experience. The analogy they use is a movie recorded on a DVD. All the information is on the disc, but you need to inject passing time of your own here and now in order to read the disc and view the movie. An analogy like this takes us from the realm of the (counter)-intuitive to that of the readily hands-on understandable, which is the ultimate aim of popular science: i.e. undiluted science and undiluted popular.

    There is quite a bit to be said about this analogy. First of course, it suggests that the (holographic) film has already been made: written, enacted and recorded if not by some divine creator, at least by some cosmic film director. However, it is not quite clear to me how the idea that information grows over time fits in here. It could imply some room for improvisation. I once mentioned a story by Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, which recounts how someone discovers a holographic film, and contrives to start rerecording and inserting a role for himself. See this post. Or it might involve some kind of Groundhog Day scenario; something of this sort does seem to be going on at another level (see below). To close this personal speculation, the negative satanic influence could also conceivably have been introduced in this manner.

    The question of information and entropy relates to the library function of Van Vogt’s central computer. Any library based in a building will at some time reach maximum capacity. This moment can be put off by introducing compact storage systems, digitizing books etc. But at some stage, space is at a premium the only way to bring in new titles is to eliminate old ones (standard practice). This is one instance of how the notion of the mainstream comes into play. Regarding new acquisitions, you cannot have everything, so what lies at the fringe gets ignored. And when it comes to choosing what to discard, it seems safer to hang on to the mainstream stuff and again offload some fringe material. Hence the tempting trend is towards ever greater conformism. It comes at the potentially high cost of missing out on what could turn out to be vital data.

    There is no criticism involved at this stage: this is simply how things work. Anyone who has a personal library will at some stage wonder whether to expand into another room or a bigger house, or sell off/give away some of their books, and if so which ones. From personal experience, great value is occasionally to be found in old unread paperbacks decades after they entered the collection.

    As an example, In The Morning of the Magicians, Louis Pauwels, reporting on the work of the scientist Jacques Bergier, describes the potential value in taking a good look at over 100,000 neglected alchemical works. One example they give is methodological: the purification of a substance over and over and over again, which science still uses. They describe the Nazis’ methodical scouring of this type of neglected literature: not, of course, to defend Nazism, but to explain how it very nearly won the war against its numerous enemies. Obviously, endless purification of humanity on racial criteria was a wrong direction to take.

    Van Vogt’s central computer operates on similar lines. At first it records everything it picks up on its surveillance camera. Later, as space is needed, it is obliged to crunch the data, eliminating what it can and summarizing the rest. Obviously, with total surveillance of a mostly law-abiding citizenry going about its humdrum everyday business, the vast majority of data can safely be ditched. But again (my interpretation), it is impossible to know in advance what might prove vital decades in the future. So, the database of the computer that records everything is actually full of holes, and this is not helped with a computer devoid of human intuition.

    So, all the above might readily be summarized by saying that while information increases, so does entropy, albeit somewhat more slowly. Take the Internet: so far, we have seen unbridled growth. But what about the colossal infrastructure and energy consumption it entails? We are not told much about that. Meanwhile, the social media have produced a big bang of their own, and it is only very recently that steps have been taken to restrict the sheer quantity of information in storage: unfortunately it comes as censorship. Maybe the above helps to understand why certain Facebook/Twitter/etc. accounts are blocked and not others. All this of course is in direct contrast with the notion of the Akashic record, whereby no information is lost, including all the information that no computer system could ever collect in the first place.

    This entire discussion is of course of the utmost relevance to life on this planet when we consider what the man who saved the world in September 1983 actually did.
    What he did was decide – correctly – that a computer glitch (actually at least five hallucinated missiles) was way more likely than the sheer madness of an American first strike. The Cold War was a sham: neither side as it turned out was prepared to strike first. Lt-Col Petrov understood that intuitively. Although manned by many humans, this huge computer dedicated to stifling a hot war, did not. No one has worked out what went wrong. Almost humanly, it had this wet dream/nightmare of finally getting to do what it was built for; Petrov gave it a tranquillizer and put it to bed. You might say that it had strayed from real time into imaginary time. This goes to show that not only was a first strike sheer madness, but a second, defensive/retaliatory strike was also insane, whether or not it turned into an accidental first strike. In other words, Petrov made the only sane decision, which involved overruling the computer. Interestingly, this happened around the time when Van Vogt’s story had just been published.

    Meanwhile, the information continues to grow; and while the fringes remain marginal, the mainstream broadens. Take the St Lawrence River: where does it end? Arguably it becomes sea when its opposite bank is no longer visible; and by the time it hits the ocean, it no longer exists as such. The next step is water evaporation and fresh rain falling around the source. This is analogous to the Bogdanovs’ cosmic scenario whereby the Universe winds down, not in a big crunch, but back to its starting point, ready for another run. In that sense (my interpretation), parallel universes may actually be consecutive. Alternatively, given that at every new beginning we pass into imaginary time, it may just a library of DVDs to be viewed in any order. Or, instead of a read-only device, some entity may be editing the whole lot into something better. This is where the ‘Groundhog Day’ universe might come into play. The fact that we cannot come to any great understanding of such things of course leaves them in the undecidable category of neither right nor wrong. We do not necessarily have a need to know, we simply do our best. But in order to do our best, we need to understand that there is always something more, and whenever a limit is placed, it is not an absolute boundary. The beauty of the Bogdanovs’ theory as understandable by the layman is that it removes the absolute boundary suggested by conventional Big Bang theory (again as understood by the layman), not only as a mechanism for creating a multiverse but also possibly compatible with steady state theory as well. The steady state would then be the view one would get when observing leakage between universes.

    This is all too brief. It will take another post.


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