The Archive of Stanley Messenger World Telepathic History in the English Language

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ARCHIVE CCCLXIV  Vol 853

HOLT RICHARDS
AND THE WORLD ELECTRO-MAGNETIC RECESSION OF 2045

This edition re-annotated in 2458/60 A.D
for the Northern Hemisphere Memory Bank

1. The bill for the simultaneous creation of Ministries of Psionics in thirty-seven of the eighty-five Folk Parliaments of the World Federation came up for its third reading in the latter part of July. It was on the Thursday of the third week in most of the seaboard parliaments, which at that time were still obliged to devote the first half of each week to the immensely complicated problems thrust on them by the marine culture labour camps. Inland, however, the debates were in full swing by Wednesday afternoon. In most of Asia and Africa this mattered very little, since the result was a foregone conclusion. But in Europe and America, where Russian and German mechanistic psychology had its strongest centres, a decisive swing inland at an early stage for retaining control of psionics by the older Ministries of Psychology could still have greatly prejudiced the growing influence of African and other psionic faculties, particularly in England, Scandinavia and uncommitted parts of North America. And, of course, in most of the Southern Hemisphere apart from Africa it did not matter either, for the opposite reason that there was no-one to form such bodies.

2. Along the lakeside boulevards of the huge new Interfolk University at Zurich, where the Russian and German-speaking faculties had their strongest following, a huge exhibition had been erected by the white-dominated World Scientific Federation. This no longer representative and now largely political body was the present world rallying point for what its opponents called ‘antipsionics’. For several weeks a great deal of education had been sacrificed to polemics. The press organisation of the W.S.F. had even managed to take over quite a large lecture hall formerly shared by three minor colleges, and was broadcasting daily half-hour TV programmes with a youthful, not to say juvenile, appeal. In these programmes ‘Science’ played a part not dissimilar to that of the ‘pure Aryan race’ lauded by the German National Socialists of a century earlier. ‘Science’ was a noble beleaguered being threatened on all sides by atavistic savagery. Instead of ‘the Jews’, the villain of the piece was the Lunatic, the delusionary maniac, the new witch doctor spawned in European cultural life by the newly articulate African continent, the apostle of ‘so-called psionics’, who dictated to the educated world from a sick-bed of degenerate... etc. etc. And, as usual, in every century before or since, there were the students, always good for a lark. But the students’ lark is a bird that can be taught to sing on a deeper and more threatening note when occasion demands. Discomfited professors of Archaeology and of Insect Life, displaced for the time-being from the academic round, sat in cafes by the lake, or mooned round the exhibits, wondering how long their talents would have any place in a world with less and less time for byways.

3. To get anything like a clear picture, we have to realise that this was the tail end of a fantastic struggle for over fifty years to retain civilised forms of society in face of a veritable avalanche of complications, largely unforeseen, in the very nature of man himself. Most political prophets from the middle of the twentieth century till 1990 or a bit later would have said that the main problems would continue to be economic and technical. In an expanding universe with the planets in reach, the accelerating pressure of new problems from outside would largely integrate poverty, crime and racial differences. Many would have admitted the possibility that larger numbers would succumb to psychological strain, but the emphasis was always on the results of outer pressure. What nobody foresaw was the formidable increase in insoluble problems springing from quite new inner experiences, many of them previously undescribed, which were apparently unrelated to any coherent clinical history. Already by the mid eighties the demand for psychiatric treatment had carried the organisation of mental health services well beyond anything that could be dealt with in patterns familiar to a previous generation. Even during the previous decades the clear line between mental and physical health had blurred. The medical profession as a social class gave way to the medical service as a government department. More and more specific physical illnesses were conquered, and more and more generalised mental/physical debilities replaced them. In the later part of the century it was assumed that everyone was mentally ill for part of their lives, and society was organised round this fact. That characteristic phenomenon of the twenty-first century, the Hygaeon (pronounced Hew-gay-on), made its appearance. Modelled on a cross between the nineteenth century ‘Spa’, and the resort frequented by the twentieth century ‘Film-star’, with a dash of Higher Education Centre thrown in, the Hygaeon made lunacy first respectable and later in may cases highly fashionable. At Geneva, at Montpellier, at Goslar and Uttoxeter, in the great glass and concrete palaces on the shores of Lake Nyasa, and in countless smaller resorts on the Mediterranean littoral, men and women of all races faced the nightmares and compensations, the defeats and triumphs of mental aberration and spiritual adventure.

4. Within these centres, which started as places of healing, but quickly became the hub of the cultural and scientific life, there arose a new class of wise man, the ‘Adviser’, who, for most people in the West, replaced not only family doctor and psychiatrist, but also the priest, lawyer and MP. There was a great diversity of religious and political views among these men and women, but the absolute dependence of society upon them ensured that, for the Establishment’s sake and for their own, the great majority of them remained government servants. By 2010-15 by far the greater number of the Western peoples, and millions of Africans and Asians too, had passed through the Advisers’ hands at one time or another in their lives. Over fifty percent in the West had spent some time in a Hygaeon before they were thirty. There was a mighty shift in the power to indoctrinate, to force acceptance of doctrinal loyalties as the price of mental coherence. This was foreshadowed by the brainwashing techniques of the twentieth century. But in the latter, the disease to be cured by the indoctrinator had first to be induced in the patient by a technique of terror. As time went on the balance shifted, as more and more victims sought salvation from the very people from whom they had formerly fled. Reigns of terror gave place to administrations of benign perversion in the guise of healing. Particularly in the East, the character of left-dominated political systems altered as these civilisations, in their turn, were overtaken by the pathological symptoms of spontaneous psychological and spiritual evolution.

5. The ideological power of Communism in the twentieth century sprang from the fact that this belief could be openly proclaimed and backed by science, while in the West the cult of the individual was bedevilled by an uneasy suspicion that Liberalism had no sanction in natural law. It took universal insanity to prove to man that his salvation could only proceed piecemeal through the healing of individual personalities. This persuasion was immensely fortified by the fact that the renegades, the newly-gifted ‘psionic’ individuals, claimed the objective reality of an inwardly apprehended world, parallel to that accessible to the senses. Many of these were Africans, already of an alien racial mentality to the white Westerners who bore the main weight of orthodox science and philosophy. These new and influential human beings showed an increasing talent for mental healing, which put orthodox materialistic science at a great disadvantage with the unthinking masses of people.

6. It was inevitable that not all these new saviours of psychotic humanity were on the side of the angels. Many African Advisers brought with them a traditional hatred of the West, which half a century of self-government and social evolution had not eradicated. Twentieth century liberalism had hoped for a slow integration of the newly enfranchised Africans into a Western pattern of experience. Instead of this the atmosphere of increasing psychological imbalance encouraged a rapid worsening of racial intolerance on the one hand and, on the other, an hysterical mystical absorption of different races in each other’s more extreme characteristics. Many talented African healers discovered the power they could wield over weak and sophisticated Western minds, vitiated by excesses of superficial sense-experience, and floundering among scientific opinions which gave them no clue as to the nature of their expanding and chaotic inner life. They extorted a wicked revenge for past indignities by restoring mental health to these derelicts at the price of their enslavement to much atavistic mysticism and superstitious fear. During this unhappy phase, which reached its peak in the thirties and forties of the twenty-first century, many vicious cults arose, achieving not so much healing as the substitution of one disease for another. The destructive beliefs of these societies were all the more strongly held for being won in the course of the restoration of mental coherence by thousands of their adherents.

7. Almost worse, and certainly more widespread, were the appalling slave societies that arose in Siberia and Mongolia. Here psychological medicine and brain surgery remained in the hands of people with a century of more of materialistic science behind them. Crude lobotomy gave place to increasingly selective surgery of the central nervous system. As the detailed electrical behaviour of the brain was more accurately mapped they learned how to destroy it electronically, almost one neurone at a time. In the course of ‘curing’ psychoses by these methods they learned to produce labour forces specifically adapted to particular tasks, with certain senses selectively heightened and with ‘unnecessary’ functions eliminated. In the science fiction of the early twentieth century similar developments were prophesied. These stories, however, were based on the grossly materialistic science of the time. There was no such thing for the authors of such stories as a total human organism, centred on a real spiritual core, or ego, of non-earthly origin. It did not occur to them that the crippled organism produced by advanced materialistic knowledge would become biologically non-viable in a relatively short period of time. They would have been even more surprised to know that it made little difference in the long run whether the changes in the brain were brought about by the relatively crude micro-surgical methods of the later Russian and Chinese medical workers, or by the long, drawn-out and subtler violence wrought upon the brain by centuries-long education in materialistic thought-patterns, as practised throughout the West. It was this fact, however, which saved humanity from the worst disasters forecast in the prophetic literature of the time. As we know now, humanity was saved in order to go through certain experiences which people of that time could not have borne to contemplate, even in the form of fiction. But the Communistic societies of those days died, like so many monsters, of their own horrifying successes. Fertility is fortunately not high among zombies.

8. In other parts of the world the deterioration of society took different forms. The Communist areas of Europe and Western Asia remained at a more uncomplicated cultural level, economically sound, well fed, and less subject to the psychoses of over-stimulation. But these areas shared in the world-wide biological sickness of man as a whole, and where this showed itself as psychosis it was more ruthlessly and experimentally dealt with. The drastically falling population of the middle of the twenty-first century affected these areas as severely as anywhere, but there it could be attributed directly to human interference. In Western Europe and America it was very different. In the sophisticated, highly conscious, and ever more over-stimulated urban population, madness and sterility went hand in hand. But the very sensitivity and fine balance which led to the collapse of inner life amongst such appalling numbers of people led also to the incomparable skill and stature of the great figures in the early history of the Hygaeon movement. Hardly anyone remembers the names of the Russian and Chinese electronic surgeons. But everyone knows who Hofmeyer was, and Holt Richards.

9. The climax of Holt Richards’ career has become a textbook legend. To recapture the precise flavour of a too well-known story is the historian’s most difficult and most responsible task. He has to reset it in perspective with other contemporary events. He must reduce it to an ordinary level, and then heighten the hearer’s sense of wonder for the whole world in which it took place. In this way the supreme historical event can illuminate a world, instead of throwing that world into obscurity by the event’s own exaggerated importance. Our task in surveying the last three centuries has been made in one sense immeasurably easier by virtue of the tremendous quantity of recorded material made available at the time of the recession through the titanic efforts of the ******** (and during the last decades still more by the increasing influence of direct observation).**

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Throughout this manuscript there appear at intervals rows of asterisks and bracketed sentences in special type. Obviously the actual existence of it in manuscript form identifies the material as deriving from at least a century and a half into the early post-recession period. But in addition the bracketed sentences are numbered. Unfortunately, however, the reference list is missing. Internal evidence indicates that the numbers are intended for cross-reference to some more advanced historical course. This is also unknown at the time of the present edition, 2458 AD.]

Recordings survive of over two hundred lectures of Holt Richards, together with the proceedings of several hundred administrative sessions at which he presided or took part. Many of the latter are informal, and there are many records of spontaneous conversations that are as enlightening to us now as the more formal records.

The famous so-called ‘informal’ session took place in the afternoon of July 18th

2045, not many miles from Zurich, where the feverish preparations of the World Scientific Federation were now in full swing. It would be easy to misunderstand the use of the word ‘informal’ in this connection. Informality is a very different experience in a highly evolved society like our own from that in a society in rapid chaotic development, as was the case in the twentieth century. To twentieth century people, formality conveyed the rigidity of a dying age, which they wished to outgrow. Later on people hungered for new social forms in proportion to the pressure of the new experiences which mental and spiritual healing brought them. At the time we are now speaking of, the world was divided into two interwoven groups: the mentally ill in their hundreds of millions, in whom informality had ceased to mean emancipation and had degenerated into chaos; and the mentally healed, in tens of millions, on their way to spiritual discovery, for whom the entirely new social forms and rituals initiated by the Advisers, and inherent in their healing methods, represented a social and spiritual goal towards which they strove. The formality, then, of the Advisers themselves in their own social life appears even to us, since it was very largely pedagogic in function and directly related to the millions it helped to heal. Their informality necessarily carried overtones of control, which we nowadays find unnecessary, and would have found unbearable. Nevertheless it was a necessary stage, even a prototype, for the control we now need in order to survive physically.

The headquarters of the whole Hygaeon movement lay south west of Zurich in the foothills of the Jura. It covered an area of many square miles, and was the supreme architectural achievement of its age. The central building, of which our own World School is the sole present indication, was the largest single artifact ever erected on the Earth’s surface. Now that we are beginning to understand the causes of the increasing deterioration of the crustal minerals of the Earth in the last two centuries, we can better appreciate the irony in the natural laws which ensured that it was as a direct result of man’s striving away from the ground under his feet into what he naively thought of as ‘outer space’ -- that the ground under his feet began literally to deteriorate. Now that we have to maintain our environment more and more by sustained consciousness, we can hardly appreciate the feelings of people who beheld mountain ranges of solid rock, whose outlines had endured for millennia and, sheltering beneath them, the vast constructions of their own contrivance showing very nearly the same qualities of endurance. The Arch-Hygaeon of Solothurn dominated not only the mountains but the minds of the whole world.

A great part of the construction consisted in a vast hollowing out of the limestone, the resultant surfaces being calcined and then penetrated with water-soluble plastics, which slaked the lime into compounds of almost indestructible hardness. These remoulded mountains and hollows were the gigantic sculptural forms within which and upon the surfaces of which thousands, at times hundreds of thousands of human beings lived and worked. They enshrined the entire co-ordinating nexus of the world-wide Hygaeon movement and, more importantly, the higher training grades of the Advisers themselves. In addition to that the complex housed the central therapeutic research establishment, whose origins could be traced to spiritual scientific pioneers in the area as far back as the twenties of the previous century. Naturally, therefore, some of the most skilled treatments not only of individuals, but also of whole groupings of people whose life of relationships had developed morbidly, sometimes directly through the malpractice of vicious renegade Advisers, took place in the Solothurn Therapeutica.

At the heart of the whole city -- dwarfed by, but in a striking visual and psycho-spiritual way also the focus of all the vast forms surrounding it and deferring to it -- stood a building which had survived with alterations from the early twentieth century, when it had been the headquarters of a little-known esoteric society. Known as the General Anthroposophical Society this grouping of some tens of thousands of individuals owed its world-view to the spiritual impact and dynamism of an Austrian sage and saint, Rudolf Stiener, who taught at the turn of the nineteenth century till his death in 1925. Isolated by its odd name, its unpopular manner of presentation, and the uncompromising rejection by its members of much of the habitual lifestyle of their contemporaries, this pioneering philosophical and spiritual-scientific school made little impact on its contemporary world. Knowing what we do now, however, there is little doubt that we owe to the founder of this movement, and to the researches of some of his early followers, what were to prove to be the first halting steps in the mighty march of knowledge by which we, in this age, manage to retain our increasingly tenuous hold on the Earth’s surface. The vital importance of this fact, and a history of its outcome, are treated in the advanced courses. For the purpose of this account we require only to know that this building and its archives were sought increasingly by the early Advisers as the Hygaeon movement got under way, and the locality became the inevitable centre for it.

The hall of the central building, known by its traditional name, the Goetheanum, consisted of a large auditorium and a stage. This stage was dominated from the back by a large wooden sculpture, attributed to the founder of the Anthroposophical Society, Rudolf Steiner. Traditionally this was the setting for a mystery drama, now lost, but surviving in the names given to certain functionaries of the later phases of the Anthroposophical Society. The doings of these officials and the accounts of their transactions give some clue to the relationships between the characters in the original drama, and what is more to the point, make it a lot easier to understand the ritual life of the Advisers themselves. If they did not actually possess Rudolf Stiener’s mystery play, they must have known a good deal more about it than we do. At all events they had adopted the traditional names of the Anthroposophical Society’s functionaries in their own Praesidium, whose meetings took place with extreme formality on the stage. No table was used. The members sat in a semicircle on tall red-backed chairs in front of the sculptured group, facing the empty auditorium.

The meeting were always scheduled at an extremely early hour, but were never permitted to last beyond noon, whatever was on hand at the time. If necessary they were continued on the following day. The meeting of July 18^th 2045 had been of extraordinary importance. But, for the first time for many years, it had been found impossible to reach a conclusion. Broadly speaking the issue was simple. If Ministries of Psionics were formed they would either have to be manned by the Praesidiuim’s own nominees, or to be abandoned to the not-so-tender mercies of the African-dominated witch-doctorate, upon which the World Science Foundation were now training the big guns of their propaganda, hoping thereby to discredit the whole Hygaeon movement as a political force. If the Praesidium supported the new Ministries however, it would lose the support of millions of its own followers, who were not yet ready to give credence to all that ‘psionics’ implied. This would throw the power in the older Ministries of Psychology squarely into the hands of the W.S.F. who, since these Ministries largely controlled the world-wide administration of the Hygaea, could then effectively imprison the Advisers in a tower of their own construction. If, however, the Praesidium came out squarely against the formation of separate ministries, then that smaller but influential section of its own followers who believed in the reality of ‘psionics’, but who were all too often at the mercy of the African magicians, would regard themselves as a persecuted minority betrayed by their own leaders. They would then undoubtedly drift even further into the orbit of the deceivers. It seemed that protection of white as against black magic could only be won at the cost of losing political influence, perhaps forever. The fact that imputations of racialism against the Praesidium were already widespread made the decision no easier. It was as broad as it was long.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Little is known about the early years of this society. It is not known at what stage the mystery drama was incorporated into its ritual structure.]

The fact was that the public demand for overt recognition by governments, not only of the status of the Advisers, which went without saying, but of the reality of the spiritual sources from which their power was derived, anticipated by a long way the public’s real readiness for such a recognition. A decision either way could discredit the only creditable element in the psionic field.

On the south side of the Goetheanum, on a hollowed slope of the artificial crag upon which it stood, was a small building known as the Schreinerei. Nobody remembered the existence of a workshop on this site, though it may well have been the womb of the Goetheanum itself. In this building, which housed some of the relics of the old anthroposophists, it was the custom of the Praesidium members and other Advisers who belonged to their subsidiary colleges to foregather in the afternoons. Certain traditional beverages, herbal concoctions whose precise significance has been lost, were served, and the Advisers relaxed. On this particular afternoon relaxation was hardly the word. In fact the conversation was of such vital importance for the history of the world that it is necessary to relate it in some detail. Only the later part was recorded verbatim, but we have several accounts from the participants themselves in their own subsequent writings, and it is fairly clear what took place.

Protocol laid down that the trays of herbs and extracts and the charcoal-heated urn of hot water were prepared shortly after the midday meal by the Adviser who carried the title Felicia Balde. These titles were held by election, but they depended so much upon an innate and recognisable suitability of character that re-election for a number of successive years was the rule rather than the exception. This particular Felicia Balde, however, was new. The former incumbent had taken over a newly opened Hygaeon in Australia. She was also new to the ritual, and somewhat nervous about it. There was a strict order of precedence of entry to the room, and of the order in which the drinks were served. Moreover these changed at certain seasons of the year. Much of this is of great interest in our time. (Cross reference bracket). The main point for our attention here is that conversations began only when drinks were served, and that the precedence rule did not imply that late arrivals were waited for.

Shortly before two o’clock a group of three appeared in the foyer. Felicia, as we shall call her, a woman of acute hearing and somewhat nervous disposition, had been ready for them for some minutes, and was standing by the west window of the long low L-shaped room, composing herself by trying to identify the song of a bird somewhere down the slope to her right. She thus became aware of the crunch of gravel outside before she realised that two men were already in the room. She turned sharply and was already somewhat guiltily offering them her alternative brews, when she realised that they were numbers two and three on her mental list, ‘Johannes Thomasius’ and ‘Strader’. Afraid of making a further mistake, she slightly lost her head and retired round the corner of the L-shaped room to collect her wits, only to be confronted by the giant figure of Holt Richards himself, still in his presidential regalia, the long black cloak and leather boots associated with the character ‘Benedictus’. He was leaning back in a large winged leather chair, completely out of view of the room, and was clearly in an unusual state of consciousness. She gave a startled cry and dropped her tray. The conversation of Johannes and Strader came to an abrupt end and, for a moment, nobody knew how to pick up the threads of protocol, precedence or even peppermint tea. There were times, however, in which man was more the master of his own rituals than he has often been before or since. Felicia recovered herself and her tray and calmly left the room in search of a cloth. By this time four more people were in the room. Strader now deftly possessed himself of Johannes’ cup and conveyed the drinks to a side table, while the party advanced on Holt Richards, who had stood up and was facing them from his enormous height at the angle of the room.

It would have been necessary to explain to most people in the twentieth century that if only a ‘committee’, as they called them in those days, could find a dramatic form in which the mutual relationships of its members were precisely known, then most of the difficulties which arise through needless misunderstanding would never appear at all. It is clearer to us that when human affairs become so complex that ordinary rules no longer apply, then we are on the threshold of a stage of human development where systems of rules as such start to transcend the level at which a single human intelligence can grasp them. There is then usually a reactive stage when human beings start to put their faith in spontaneity, whose laws are still to be discovered. There then has to be what is called a metanoeia in human thinking, an evolutionary leap forward onto a higher stage of development. This is usually possible only in extremes. Intelligence is driven into a corner like a drowning rat. It can neither return to a system of super-rules that it can grasp by the old expedients, nor has its intuition matured far enough to act directly from super-insight. This is the point, so we now believe, which the Advisers reached as their dilemmas threatened to overwhelm them in the world insanity against which they were the only remaining bulwark. They experienced a metanoeia. This took the form of recognising that the mythological-dramatic form surviving in the protocol traditions of an obscure esoteric sect embodied a reliable base-line from which a group of people could reach a decision in situations which totally defeated individual intelligence. From the relationship stances that resulted from this, corporate decisions arose to which they could give genuine assent as a group. It seems unlikely that they could have achieved this, at least in the early centuries of the process, without possessing the original mystery drama. But this we cannot be sure of. It may already have been lost or destroyed by their own teachers.

With few exceptions, none of this would have made sense to the leaders of twentieth-century society. Knowledge of the laws of karma which operate in human destiny, was in its infancy. Reincarnation was scarcely more, to most of them, than a stimulating theory. Only those few thousand human beings who were beginning to grasp those realities could take the further step of grasping the precision with which a sense for mythological-dramatic relationships can be trained as an intuitive instrument. The Advisers had so trained themselves, and it was they who had trained our own ancestors, little suspecting the desperate uses to which their expedients would be put. But it is to these beginnings that we owe the existence of our own Twelvefold Cells, and indeed our very survival. (For further extrapolation see... etc)

All these people, therefore, were now in process of struggling inwardly to assess a dramatic situation. In their different degrees of inward evolution they were not aware of being puppets following a dead ritual according to precedent. They were aware that the further outcome of a lost drama was being written in and through the controlled spontaneity of their own actions, a freedom exercised within the discipline of an intuitively apprehended ritual form. The twentieth-century, with its fetish of liberal self-expression, would have sneeringly dismissed this as a ‘literary’ cult. By this time, however, the limits of so-called ‘freedom’, and the exact significance of dramatic form, were better known.

It was these mental and spiritual searchings which accounted for the complete silence with which they now awaited Felicia’s return. A single thought dominated the group. That Holt Richards had reached an important decision and was about to announce it. But a secondary thought washed round the shores of this clear image, blurring its outlines and lending to Holt Richards’ stance a questioning mood, as if he were balanced on the balls of his feet and not quite ready to step forward. What had Johannes and Strader been interrupted in saying? What had Strader done by reversing them? Since, on her return, she would now be obliged to offer the cup first to Benedictus, there was no way of avoiding the possibility that Holt Richards’ announcement would be made out of context with what Johannes and Strader had said.

In a few seconds Felicia returned, passing the table, and gathering the replenished tray in one hand while she concealed the cloth beneath it with the other. In silence, Benedictus received the cup and drank. As Felicia knelt behind him with the cloth he caught the eye of a heavy dark man just entering the room and gave him a signal, which was an instruction to exercise total recall. This power is only exercised at the cost of a certain sacrifice, as the one who remembers is rendered powerless to affect the outcome of the events he recalls.

It was then, at this moment, a few minutes after two o’clock in the afternoon of July 18th, that Holt Richards spoke those much too well-remembered words. For centuries we have wondered whether he retarded or advanced the course of history by doing so. His red hair was somewhat ruffled, and he pushed it back from his forehead with a disarming gesture which betrayed the partial uncertainty with which he carried out the decision to speak.

"We are compelled to act. Neither of the alternatives forced upon us by circumstance leads anywhere but into total darkness for humankind, beyond which it is difficult to discern a dawn for centuries to come. But we have arrived at political significance half a century too late, which has meant an extra half-century for the forces of black occultism to prepare themselves for political significance alongside us. We therefore have to launch out upon an unrehearsed performance, trusting to the element of surprise to achieve a success we have no right to expect. This is precisely what I had hoped we would never be obliged to do. There is still an alternative, in fact two alternatives. We can still choose one or another path into obscurity, and trust that in a few centuries or less the individual isolated souls we have healed will themselves reach by a longer route the goal of leadership now barred to us…unless we seize it."

"Friends, we have set ourselves a dramatic framework for action. If there is one of us who doubts the validity of this it is open to him to say so. In that case we will ask Johannes Thomasius and Strader to repeat the words they spoke together after they received the cup on the first occasion this afternoon". But in the silence which followed it was clear that no one would meet this challenge.

As if reanimated from a species of catalepsy by the fire on Holt Richards’ eye, Felicia now propelled herself across the room and rapidly distributed the remaining beverages. With barely perceptible hesitation Johannes and Strader received new cups and began to drink, their eyes resting somewhat warily upon Holt Richards. The latter gave them a long look and then sat down, whereupon the conversation became general and everybody found a chair.

As soon as everyone was served they looked expectantly at Holt Richards, who then proceeded to expound in quite remarkable detail his plan for taking over the reins of government in the thirty-five so-called ‘psi’ parliaments. This plan is fully documented, and need not detain us. Its reception by the Praesidium was unanimous, but it is clear that they all felt they had made an irreversible decision, which would have the profoundest repercussions on their own destiny. As is well known, they never met again.

Within a few hours the inner circles of every loyal Hygaeon in the world had heard the plan and understood what they were to do. It took just under a week for the outermost circles of students, patients and sympathisers to be fully instructed. Such was the loyalty, and so efficient the techniques of communication and delegation, that the inevitable leakages did not begin till the Thursday evening, when the parliamentary debates were at an end, and all but two of the ‘psi’ parliaments awaited only presidential ratification for the new Ministries of Psionics to become legal. Even so, only half-a-dozen parliaments had a few short hours’ warning. But it was enough. W.S.F. Radio and Television blazoned the news across the world in time to alert four of the American parliaments and a number of smaller African states before the take-overs there were fully organised. Even there, however, the loyalty of the masses of adherents was a match for the arms and preparations of both reactionary science and dissentient Hygaea. So with a minimum of bloodshed the hegemony of the Advisers began.

And as it began Holt Richards made his historic blunder. Some would say that as a consequence of this error of judgement we are now fighting a losing battle for our very existence on Earth. But there is another viewpoint. Firstly it is questionable whether a man of his calibre really misjudged either the mood and loyalty of the Praesidium, or what the consequences of his action would be. Secondly we know enough nowadays to be able to hope that even a struggle as apparently hopeless as ours is capable of throwing up factors for survival whose nature is completely unknown to us, and which we cannot even formulate.

To understand the nature of his action we have to turn from Holt Richards the politician to Holt Richards the scientist. From his lectures and writings it is clear that he had gone a long way towards grasping what is now clear to us about the part played by the Earth itself, as a being, in maintaining a viable balance between matter, space and time. The Anthroposophists forecast this in the twentieth century, but few others did. Holt Richards, however, realised, as we do today, that the very earliest efforts by humanity to transfer earthly matter in the form of artefacts beyond the influence of the Earth had led to balancing reactions in the Earth itself. In terms of axioms the situation is quite a simple one, but of course the problem with scientific development in the past has not been the difficult of grasping simple propositions but the extraordinarily chancy way in which mankind’s attention has been drawn to them. The perfection of the constructs which his fantastically clever reasoning had built upon the premises he happened to have observed was always quite sufficient to divert him from the majority of other premises he might just as well have used had he observed them. Be this as it may, twentieth century man had never happened to give his attention to the fact that on Earth there was matter, and elsewhere, as far as his direct experience was concerned, there was not. He certainly deduced its presence elsewhere, but only by methods which, when applied on Earth itself, were highly indirect. This was, of course in the nature of the case since, according to his estimate of the nature and capacities of his own consciousness at the time, he could not observe the phenomena in any other way or from any other vantage point. These considerations further confused him, and if at any time it did occur to him that the reason there was no matter out in ‘space’ might be that conditions there were unsuitable for it, he laughed off such thoughts as childish. He was therefore not surprised when his first efforts to hurl his artefacts off the Earth met with apparent success. Moreover when he accompanied these artefacts to the Moon there certainly appeared to be matter there, at least by the time he got there. Once again it would have seemed gratuitous to suppose that it was he who had artificially created conditions for the survival of space-time and matter in a non-earthly setting. The further corollary that this was bound to have repercussions on the viability of this finely balanced syndrome on the Earth itself probably occurred to a mere handful of men. Such, however, was the case, and Holt Richards was fully aware of it. Moreover he had done a good deal of experimental work to prove it at a time when already a very considerable quantity of both functional and useless ironmongery was daily encircling the Earth and Moon in widely-spread orbits.

At first the effect was very slight, and of course quite unspecific, a vague general tendency noticeable among certain metals towards more rapid fatigue, attributed for years to that universal scapegoat, radiation. But gradually in his own lifetime it was apparent that quite a lot of the old materials, particularly the metals, were losing their industrial usefulness. They not only wouldn’t retain their artefact shapes, but their ores resisted smelting, and reverted from it in some circumstances in a most alarming manner. The astonishing invasion of the plastic organic world by technology diverted attention from this process for longer than would otherwise have been the case. But no one ever quite understood the rapidity with which iron disappeared from industry, in spite of the lucky finds in the realm of magnetism, which both diverted attention from the effect and saved it from being the cataclysm it would otherwise have been.

These instances are quoted not only to demonstrate how the first grains of sand began to trickle, which has now become the devastating avalanche of our own times. Unquestionably Holt Richards went to Zurich assured of the success of his coup, on the very eve of its success. Unquestionably he did not suspect that the W.S.F. had the faintest knowledge of this. We can only surmise that it was his intention to demonstrate the final proofs of his theory before the plenary session of the W.S.F., since his notes were never found, and such records as exist of his mature work are indicative but by no means conclusive. All we know for certain is that he left Solothurn late on Thursday night without informing his friends. No-one admits to seeing him again till he appeared before the astonished gaze of his opponents, alone and unarmed, on the steps of the W.S.F. Television Theatre in the middle of Friday morning, and asked for a certain Professor Johnson, a known expert in space-time theory. And there, in full view of the holidaymakers, in the blazing sunshine of the lakeside boulevard, among the garish posters and balloons in the processions of his opponents’ publicity campaign, the assassin’s bullet found him.

35. The systematic erection and manning of multiple satellite worlds began only five years later, and nothing the Adviser-led governments could do was able to stop it. It was another two centuries before the resultant weakening in the coherence of the whole matter-space-time syndrome, the so-called World Electro-Magnetic Recession, took full effect. Powers destined for the task of building the ether-body of man in future millennia were wrenched back by hierarchical beings to make possible the bare physical survival of a few million scattered human beings. It is by these powers, once destined to mature in reserve for further millennia, that we now barely hold together a physical human body in which to survive, and an unstable planet to give it partial protection. Who is to say whether, if Holt Richards had ‘succeeded’, we should still be here to telepathise this report? Whether indeed, in his day, humankind had already so weakened by indulgence the natural power of survival that only by submitting himself to a condition of uttermost desperation could the will to survive be restored?

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