Anamnesis

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.

— Jorge Luis Borges, “A New Refutation of Time” (1946)

Time is cyclic, organic, and cataclysmic. We perceive the geography of time as a matter of habit, not as an external, independent entity, but through the shifting positions of objects in our environment. These organs of time impress on our senses a notion of clockwork procession. But these are ghost fossils living in the walls of Kronos’ golden cave.

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1328) once wrote about the Thing we call time:

In eternity there is no yesterday nor any tomorrow but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence, and is at this moment, and as it will be after death… The Now wherein God made the world is as near this time as the now I am speaking in this moment, and the last day is as near this Now as was yesterday.

There is no past and future, only infinite tessellations of the Now. This is a sentiment we all intuit, but the local geography of time is dependent upon the percipient— to an insect, a surging river is a cataclysmic event, but from a great height the river’s branching appears to take the form of a Lichtenberg figure. Indeed, from an immense distance, there is a Jovian pattern to Time, as well. As we elevate our view, we observe a pattern that unites what we call 'the past' and 'the future'—under the aspect of the eternal, immutable reality of the hyperouranios topos.

Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832), the German poet, once met himself while out for a ride. He described the incident:

I was riding on the footpath towards Drusenheim, and there one of the strangest presentiments occurred to me. I saw myself coming to meet myself on the same road on horseback, but in clothes such as I had never worn. They were light grey mixed with gold. As soon as I had aroused myself from the day dream the vision disappeared. Strange, however, it is that eight years later I found myself on the identical spot, intending to visit Frederika once more, and in the same clothes which I had seen in my vision, and which I now wore, not from choice, but by accident.

Goethe's grandfather was revered for his alleged prophetic abilities, particularly for events pertaining to him and his family. These prophetic instances were often revealed through vivid dreams. Additionally, those who spent time near him occasionally gained a temporary sense of premonition, especially during times of illness or death.

"His dreams were matter-of-fact, simple, and without a trace of the fantastic or superstitious, so far, at least, as they ever became known to us. I recollect, too , that when, as a boy, I used to look over his books and papers, I often found, mixed up with memoranda about gardening , such sentences as these: " Last night * * * came to me and told me * * * '-the name and the circumstance being written in cipher. Or, again, it ran thus : Last night I saw * * * -the rest in characters unintelligible to me.”

—Aus meinem Leben, by J. W. von Goethe, Stuttgart, 1853, vol. i . pp .41 to 43

Just as Goethe is in the presence of his grandfather, we who live in the presence of the ‘freemasonry of the dead’ are initiated into the order of their perception. That received hallucination of linear time, contradicted at every turn by cycles of life and death, breath, heartbeat, cellular, and celestial rhythms, is an altered state of consciousness caused by sensory deprivation. A total lack of exposure to the Real. The fact that we are able to view time as linear is a clue to our predicament.

What causes a cosmic sphere to appear as a flat circle, and then the circle flatten into a straight line? Lo, all around we perceive collapse of dimensionality, loss of information, and immersion in simulation: this is machinic time.

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Air Marshal Sir Robert Victor Goddard Time-Slip

In 1935, Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard had a surreal experience in North Berwick. As a staff officer for No. 3 Bomber Group, he flew his Hawker Hart plane from Andover to Tumhouse, now known as Edinburgh Airport. During his visit, he and his hostess, Mrs. Peploe, inspected an old, deteriorating airfield at Drem, assessing its potential for future use. Familiar with the airfield from World War I, Goddard found it unfit for operation due to damaged hangars, worn-out tarmac, and pastures scattered with cattle, separated by barbed wire fences. The following day, Goddard flew back to Tumhouse. His peculiar experience, recounted in an article titled 'Breaking the time barrier,' was published in 1966 in Light, the journal of The College of Psychic Studies:

“Flying at 150 miles an hour in an open cockpit aeroplane with heavy rain driving on one’s forehead and flying goggles is not only painful but very difficult, especially as I could not go other than close to the ground (20-30 feet) because of the very low cloud (about 40-60 feet). I was determined to head straight on to identify my position for, with my compass swinging, I did not know which side of the Firth of Forth I might be. The easiest landmark to find would be, I presumed, Drem airfield where I had been only the day before. In a few minutes I was aware of my position. I identified the road to Edinburgh, and soon after saw looming through the gloom the black silhouettes of the Drem hangars. In a moment I was over the airfield boundary in deluging rain and in very dark, turbulent flying conditions.

”On crossing the boundary, the airfield and all my immediate surroundings were miraculously bathed in full sunlight, as it seemed to me; the rain had ceased, the hangars were nearby, their north-west end doors open. Lined out in spick and span order on a newly laid tarmac were four aeroplanes: three bi-planes of a standard flying-training type of aircraft called Avro 504N; one monoplane of an unknown type. We had at that time no monoplanes in the RAF, but the one I saw then was of the type which thereafter I carried in my memory and identified with the Magister which became, later on, a ‘trainer’. Another peculiarity about the aeroplanes on the tarmac was that they were painted bright chrome yellow. All aircraft in the RAF in 1935 were exclusively aluminium-doped; there were no yellow aeroplanes. Later, because of an alarming increase in fatal accidents at flying training schools during the first phase of the expansion of the Air Force, the need became apparent for making training aircraft easily seen: in 1938 and 1939, more probably the latter, yellow aeroplanes became universal at all RAF flying training schools. In the mouth of the hangar closest to me another monoplane was being wheeled out. The mechanics pushing it were wearing blue overalls.

“As I passed over them, having climbed from only a few feet above ground to just high enough to clear the roof of the hangar, I must have been making a great deal of noise and, normally, this would have caused a considerable sensation. Zooming the hangars, as I was doing, was a court-martial offence! It was quite certain that those mechanics must have looked up at me (had I been ‘there’ to them) as I flew over so close. But none of them looked up. This struck me as very strange. It also struck me as strange that the airmen were wearing blue overalls, RAF mechanics had never worn anything but brown overalls when working in hangars on aircraft.

”The hangar roofs, above which I was flying a moment later, were gleaming with the wetness of recent rain, but the bituminous fabric was entirely new and in very good order. Also the tarmac all around the hangars was new. I don’t now recall any other particularly novel or interesting technical features, but I remember that, at the time, there were many points quickly seen which struck me as unusual, anomalous - and non-existent at Drern the day before. The line of hangars was not more than a hundred and sixty yards long from end to end. To fly that length would only take a few seconds. I was then immediately confronted once more with deluging rain, turbulent semi-darkness and the prospect of having, once more, to climb through continuous cloud over mountain”

quoted from Riddle of the future : a modern study of precognition by Mackenzie, Andrew, 1975

Upon landing at Andover, he discussed this peculiar experience with fellow Wing Commanders, who humorously dismissed it. Years later, he discovered that Drem airfield had indeed been renovated and reopened in 1939, fitting the description of what he had seen, with the exception of hangar construction. While the hangars he saw were of the old design, the renovated airfield had new steel and corrugated iron hangars.

Sir Victor had been perilously close to death when he managed to regain control of his aircraft in the moments preceding the incident. Folk wisdom dictates that the implications of this high-stress, near-death experience caused his soul to cross the border into the “next world” and so was allowed free range along the dimension of time until the progress of the aircraft into bad weather necessitated its return. Sir Victor gives us a clue to the nature of this experience: “There was something ethereal about the sunlight; it was brilliant and glorious, but yet somewhat other than normal bright sunlight.”

The golden quality of sunlight has been frequently noted in mystical experiences. Add this to the feeling of “elation” that Goddard reported and one final detail, the discrepancy between his vision and its ultimate concretization was of a particular technic-aesthetic nature. Dr. Mackenzie notes: “It was not until 1964 that Sir Victor was able to visit Drem and found, rather to his horror, ‘that (the hangars) that were then there were of steel construction, covered with corrugated iron” rather than the "bituminous fabric" of his vision. Perhaps his vision was correct in 1935, but by 1939 the timeline had been “edited” from the outside by retrocausal contamination.

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Anamnesis

The dialectician selects a soul of the right type, and in it he plants and sows his words founded on knowledge… words which instead of remaining barren contain a seed whence new words grow up in new characters

(Phedra 266e–277a)

Anamnesis, the act of re-cognition by which the soul introspects, understands itself, and thereby progresses towards the domain of ultimate existence, relies initially on the communicative interactions of a group of living souls within the evolving world. These interactions, despite being ontologically subordinate, play a crucial role in this journey.

”The domain of ultimate existence” sounds strange, but it really is the most familiar thing. Every story and every film that has ever captured your imagination is oriented toward that place, it is the cause of your Sehnsucht. Beyond the current day regime of these counter-initiatic pseudo-myths, in rarefied, supersolar space, history transforms into the enactment of Myth, as the act of co-gnoscere (anamnesis) allows the Self to realize that myth essentially traces the suppressed history of the Soul. The self, confined within a narrow temporal frame (akin to Plato's cave), tends to reinterpret experiences from other dimensions of the soul using the shapes and imagery familiar in the everyday world. However, during moments of intrusion, the self understands that these narratives carry a much deeper meaning than what appears on the surface.

In metaphoric tales and allegorical cyphers, there exist certain fundamental structures or archetypes that originate from the cosmic order's principles. These principles function less as symbols of existence and more as crystalline seeds or blueprints for the evolution of existence. Now we see as though a mirror, dimly, but in the ‘fullness of time’, in those great and terrible moments where our mind is thrust up into rarefied recollection of the soul, we transcend the symbolic or figurative level of consciousness to reach the cymatic, hieroglyphic level.

But down here, in the miasma of dementia-apocalypse, anything is used to fill the hungry maw at the center of our soul, to sate our hunger for memory. Films, movies, games, social media, a vast system of temporal objects re-ordering the flow of time. These offer us a zone of simulated liminality, and there we gorge on queer nostalgia. In order to achieve true anamnesis, to slip loose the iron net of machinic time, we must find our moment. For Philip K Dick, it was the glint of light bouncing from a fish necklace that formed the portal through which he slipped—

(Re Eliade) A mythological event unfolds in another kind of time (illo tempore,* etc.). Therefore if you can get (your self) into a mythological narrative you will enter this dream time (as opposed to entering dream time and, by means of that, entering the myth). The entrée to dream time is to reenact the (i.e., a) myth. I accidentally did this in 2-3-74 vis-à-vis "Acts" due to (1) Tears; and (2) the girl with the fish necklace. These plunged me into that other kind of time and so I saw world under that aspect, i.e., made eternal and holy—and experienced anamnesis. Also the Xerox missive somehow acted toward being a part of the mythic ritual. (The message opened and read? Perhaps some myth I don't know.)

So I got into mythic time by reenacting the sacred myth, and, having done so, saw world under that aspect (e.g., the blood of the cosmic Christ, Rome, the secret real Christians). I fell into the myth by chance, and entered the realm of the sacred.

Exegesis [83:69] September 3, 1980

On March 2, 1974, Dick underwent a profound transformation in his perception. He was engulfed by visions where his everyday surroundings were overlaid with scenes from the ancient Roman Empire. He penned his experiences in a letter to Claudia Bush, stating, "In March I looked around and saw Rome! Rome everywhere! Power and force, stone walls, iron bars... I pierced the veil, so to speak, and saw my society exactly as it was... which is... like Rome was... It was a dreadful sight: a slave state, like Gulag."

On one occasion, while Tessa (his wife) and Philip were out for a stroll, they passed by a daycare center with a playground full of children enclosed within a fence. Tessa observed a typical scene of youthful play, but Philip's vision was altered. He saw the daycare center as an ancient Roman prison. The chain-link fence transformed into iron bars in his view, and the carefree children became sorrowful Christian martyrs awaiting their fate before hungry lions. Similarly, in subsequent walks around the neighborhood, Dick perceived passersby garbed in Roman military uniforms, walls of stone, and iron bars gracing the windows of apartments.

"I hadn’t gone back in time," Dick explained to Bush, "but in a sense, Rome had come forward, by insidious and sly degrees, under new names, hidden by the flak talk and phony obscurations, at last into our world again." Dick interpreted his visions to signify that the modern world was a facade, and he was, in fact, inhabiting ancient Rome. This led him to entertain the idea that time might have come to a halt ages ago, and that humanity remained suspended in the year 70 AD, the time when the temple of Jerusalem fell under a Roman siege. This perceived temporal stasis, Dick named as "the Black Iron Prison."

What is involved is a restoring, a new life which is the igniting by means of the penetrating of the solar spermatikos of what had lain dormant, asleep over two thousand, maybe five to ten thousand years; it could not wake itself up—like the root or bulb called to by spring (by the healing warming Sun of Righteousness) it had to be summoned. If new birth or new life refers to a restoring (which it does) then at one time that Healing Sun was present and somehow withdrew, at which time the higher life in us fell asleep, in the darkness (vide the pineal body secreting the hormone melatonia, in darkness, which impedes the expansion, the growth, the coming into activity, of the latent form or entelechy). The very idea of "Wake up" implies winter time and the slumbering during winter time of all life. In some fashion, however, we once were awake and then fell asleep, which is what the Greeks meant by Lethe, by forgetfulness; forgetfulness is equated with falling asleep, and waking up with anamnesis. I guess the nourishing and feeding by the solar spermatika is understandable when one realizes that all life is "fed" by sunlight per se; this is an analog of that. It cannot wake unless fed; the first impulse rouses it from slumber, as when I felt that an Essene or someone holy who had been slumbering in me thousands of years and who possessed Sophia Pistis had awakened; the shock was of such enormity as to be beyond words to express.

Exegesis [5:67]

The “solar spermatikos” causes a process of rejuvenation. Awakening from the “winter of life” is associated with "anamnesis," entailing the recovery of knowledge that the soul possessed in a previous or higher-order existence, in other words, non-local memory. Its opposite is "lethe" or forgetfulness. The immediate circumstance of lethe is the received hallucination of hyper-localized, linear time. The "solar spermatika" nourishes and awakens this dormant life, much like sunlight nourishes all life on Earth. The immediate circumstance of this intrusion of solar spermatika is a “time slip”.

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The Allegory of Xenocrates’ Cave

‘No god or man ever created this world which is the same for all, but it was and is and ever will be everlasting fire’

—Heraclitus, Fragment 30

Xenocrates was a student of Plato who extended and modified Plato's ideas, as presented in the Timaeus, about the makeup of celestial beings. Plato proposed that all celestial beings consisted of a mix of fire and earth. Xenocrates, however, divided the physical universe (or "Physis") into three distinct parts: the sublunary, subsolar, and suprasolar realms. These realms have different physical qualities, primarily distinguished by their varying degrees of density. Specifically, he argued that:

1. The stars and the sun consist of a conjunction of Fire and first-degree density.

2. The moon consists of a unique form of Air and second-degree density.

3. The earth consists of Water and third-degree density.

Plutarch's De Eapud Delphos 21 393d extols those who revere the Sun, in the conviction that it holds the highest station in the reality they comprehend. Yet, it proclaims that these individuals possess a knowledge of the divine akin to dreamers. They must be roused to scale greater heights: the Sun is merely an image of god. Hence, the subsolar, terrestrial realm is like an underwater dream-world.

In Plutarch’s De Faciae, the Island of Kronos, situated near the Island of Ogygia, is depicted as a realm that exists between the abode of the gods and the home of human beings. There are abundant resources for sacrifices and celebrations and regular and direct interactions with daemons. This constant supernatural assistance distinguishes life on Kronos Island from life on Earth, where such help is sporadic.

Yet, this island isn't a dwelling place for gods. The only deity present is Kronos, a dethroned and imprisoned god, reflecting the narrative from Hesiod's Theogony. Here, Kronos is trapped in an eternal sleep by Zeus, symbolizing his demotion and deprivation of supreme divine dignity. This unconscious state robs him of perfect knowledge and understanding, which impacts all life depending on him, making it a reflection of Kronos' lack of cognitive clarity.

For Cronus himself sleeps confined in a deep cave of rock that shines like gold — the sleep that Zeus has contrived as a bond for him —, and birds flying in over the summit of the rock bring ambrosia to him, and all the island is suffused with fragrance scattered from the rock as from a fountain; and those spirits mentioned before tend and serve Cronus, having been his comrades what time he ruled as king over gods and men. Many things they do foretell of themselves, for they are oracular; but the prophecies that are greatest and of the greatest matters they come down and report as dreams of Cronus, for all that Zeus premeditates Cronus sees in his dreams and the titanic affections and motions of his soul make him rigidly tense <until> sleep <restores> his repose once more and the royal and divine element is all by itself, pure and unalloyed.

Plutarch, De Faciae 26

Interestingly, the connection between humans and daemonic beings parallels Kronos' contact with divine knowledge. Both are indirect and dreamlike. While sleeping, Kronos can participate in the knowledge of Zeus, similar to how humans receive visions of daemonic origin in dreams that can guide their earthly existence. These insights are however intermittent, obscured by the 'titanic affections and motions of his soul' as noted by H. Cherniss. The cyclical interruptions of these connections signify the precariousness of a composite being's existence, reflecting the dichotomy of body and soul in human somatikoi, and likewise, in Kronos.

I have turned so as to see under the sun, that not to the swift is the race, nor to the mighty the battle, nor even to the wise bread, nor even to the intelligent wealth, nor even to the skilful grace, for time and chance happen with them all. For even man knoweth not his time; as fish that are taken hold of by an evil net, and as birds that are taken hold of by a snare, like these are the sons of man snared at an evil time, when it falleth upon them suddenly.

Ecclesiastes 9:11-12

The Consensus Dream of material, subsolar existence is defined by loss of rarefaction, a muddy and humiliating admixture of elements, and a reduction to homogenous miasma. The terrestrial experience of supra-solar reality is indirect, symbolic, and only accessed in trance or sleep. In Ecclesiastes, an arbitrary condition of “the whole [is] as to the whole” is described, there is a universal parity, and therefore meaninglessness, of material experience is the result of “an evil among all that hath been done under the sun, that one event [is] to all, and also the heart of the sons of man is full of evil, and madness [is] in their heart during their life”.

In other words, moral deformity flattens the soul into a 2D prokaryote, perfect communism is the end result of spiritual morbidity, wherein time decomposes into a flat line progressing into the void.

“Ah how shameless – the way these mortals blame the gods. From us alone, they say, come all their miseries, yes, but they themselves, with their own reckless ways, compound their pains beyond their proper share."

—Homer, quoting Zeus, The Odyssey, Book 1, lines 37-40

In Plutarch's mythical theology, Zeus is identified as the Transcendent, the metaphysical source of all life and cognition, while Kronos symbolizes the lower cosmic levels. A connection is made with Plato's Phaedrus, where the cosmos is bounded by an exterior celestial sphere. This sphere acts as a wall enclosing the imperfect souls and can only be surpassed through a challenging ascent by the soul, particularly the mind of the soul. In this view, Kronos' golden cave can be seen as a symbol of all cosmic reality in both its sublunary and supralunary aspects. Consequently, Kronos represents the entire celestial region or the power governing that region, signifying a cosmic deity who is inferior to the transcendence of Zeus. This lesser status is illustrated by his 'imprisonment' and 'sleep'. From this, we can frame Kronos as the symbol of the exterior celestial sphere or of the World-soul in its entirety, or as the dynamic principle which pervades all the celestial spheres.

The clouding of Kronos' mind is a punishment that automatically results from his Titanic passions. This emerges from the perfection of the divine order thought out by Zeus, in which evil brings about its own punishment. The child of man, the monstrous infant, exists in parallel to the Titan - its demands are unconditional, and it recognizes no horizon beyond "eternity" or "this instant". But the cognition required to enforce its demands is unformed, there is only chubby, imperial Rage.

“The mind of man is hypothetically considered to consist of two parts: the lower mind, which is linked to the demiurgic sphere of Jupiter, and the higher mind, which ascends toward and is akin to the substance of the divine power of Kronos.” (Hall 1929). Just as Kronos is entrapped in a state of perpetual dreaming, humans too are constrained by their earthly madness and the limitations of the flesh. Yet, in this seeming confinement, there exists a potential for escape. As Kronos's dreaming state suggests an internal life beyond his physical imprisonment, humans too have a Super-Observer locked in their dreaming state.

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Time is Biological

Paracelsus, influenced by the ideas of Plotinus and Proclus, conceived of time qualitatively rather than quantitatively. He saw the stars as luminous indicators of time but rejected that they generate time as a measure of their motion. Nor do they ultimately determine man and man's actions, as according to Paracelsus, the wise can control the stars.

Paracelsus tied time closely with the celestial objects, considering them a kind of register of all changes and events on Earth. Each object and individual on Earth, he argued, has its own "astral" virtue that follows the pattern indicated by its associated star. This virtue shapes the course of an individual's life according to their own specific plan, referred to as the "Light of Nature".

The Morning Stars, Sarah Paxton Ball Dodson (1847-1906)

In Paracelsus' conception, each individual object reaches its perfection at a certain moment, which he refers to as its "monarchy". Time is thus determined by the moments when individual objects reach their perfection. All objects have their own pace and rhythm of life, which are intrinsic in their "seed" and are derived from the stars.

Paracelsus extended this idea to periods and epochs in human history, each of which has its own Zeitgeist (spirit of time). He believed that ancient medicine had its peak in antiquity but was useless in his time, their monarchy had passed, prompting his pursuit of a new medicine for his era.

John Baptista Van Helmont (1579-1644) built on Paracelsus’ concept of time— every entity in the Universe carries an aspect of life, following a distinct path ordained by an inherent "seed" bestowed upon it at the moment of its inception. This "seed" possesses its own unique life span and rhythm, immune to reductionist explanations such as a distinctive blend of elements, atoms, or humours. It remains untouched by mathematical principles originating from star observations or numerical mysticism.

Preconceived laws, those entrenched in arithmetic and cosmic patterns, were assumed to govern all within the Universe - from the grand cosmic bodies to the microscopic living organisms. Yet, van Helmont challenged this belief, asserting the independent nature of the "seed" that guides every being in the universe.

Van Helmont's time-concept is biological, focusing heavily on time’s relationship with individual beings and their respective lives. Contrasting this, Plotinus' doctrine accentuates the role of the "world soul" as a universal basis for time. Van Helmont builds his inferences on Plotinus' exposition of Time's intimate relation with "Life." He perceives authentic time, or "duration," as devoid of succession. His idea of duration is synonymous with Eternity, characterized by its infinite nature and supremacy over created entities. Nonetheless, it permeates the "semina," dispersing and unfurling "Life," that is, the Divine within them. In simple terms, what we perceive as time is an entelechy, or a guiding vital principle, that is determined by the individual’s distance from the hyperouranios topos, rather than their bloodline’s distance from Arcadia.

Here then, Time doesn't inherently follow a sequence or progression. Instead, succession is a property of physical motion, terrestrial inertia, not of time. Helmont argued that the soul, which does not experience physical time (day or night, aging, etc.) still exists within the same duration of time as a physically embodied soul. Helmont speculated on the nature of time as a being – as an entity that is either a creator or a creature. He argued that time is not an incidental property. Instead, he proposed that time is a divine organism governing creation, an integral force guiding the entirety of creation.

In this context, Time does not merely serve as a backdrop against which events occur, but rather as a pervasive principle in the orchestration of reality. Man, in his billions, is a living wave of time.

Helmont talks about 'duration determination', which can be interpreted as the process through which an entity's intrinsic duration or lifespan is defined. For Van Helmont, this is 'contained within seminal beginnings', suggesting that the unique lifespan, rhythm, or duration of an entity is determined at its creation or inception. The immediate circumstance of this, for example, is that the lifespan of a tree, the period of activity of a particular cell, or the life cycle of an animal species is set out from the moment of its conception or birth. Indeed, this concept of “seminal beginnings” was confirmed, at least in part, by the work of Dr. Ebner—

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Moberly-Jourdain Incident

In August 1901, Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, two academics from Oxford, visited the Palace of Versailles and experienced an unusual event, which they later termed the "Adventure". As they explored the gardens around Petit Trianon, they encountered figures in 18th-century dress and felt an overwhelming sense of depression. When they shared their experiences later, they believed they might have experienced a form of time travel or entered into the memory of Marie Antoinette.

The date of their visit coincided with the historical date of the storming of the Tuileries in 1792, the beginning of the end of the French monarchy. They began investigating the figures they had encountered and the features of the gardens, comparing them with historical records of Versailles in 1792. They identified the figures as guardsmen, Marie Antoinette herself, the Comte de Vaudreuil, and a messenger warning of an approaching mob.

Their story was published as "An Adventure" in 1911 and reviewed by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which suggested the women had embellished their tale, a claim they disputed vehemently. Some details are worth noting—

Standing on a terrace, Moberly and Jourdain were approached by a young man who asked them to depart. The women managed to locate the house in 1905, only to discover it was in a state of severe disrepair. Further investigation revealed that the building was a former chapel. Strangely, the door that they remembered to have effortlessly swung open in 1901, was completely sealed off. Their guide informed them, "The door had not been opened in memory of any man there: not since it was used by the Court.”

Both women distinctly recalled observing a plow near a duo of gardeners during their visit. This ordinary item gained significance only after they discovered in 1905 that the Petit Trianon hadn't housed a plow for decades. However, in Gustav Desjardins' book, "Le Petit Trianon," it's mentioned that Louis XVI maintained an old plow at the Petit Trianon for a considerable period. This plow, along with other possessions of the king, was sold during the French Revolution.

“I began to feel as if we had lost our way, and as if something were wrong. There were two men there in official dress (greenish in colour), with something in their hands ; it might have been a staff. A wheelbarrow and some other gardening tools were near them. They told us, in answer to my enquiry, to go straight on. I remember repeating my question, because they answered in a seemingly casual and mechanical way, but only got the same answer in the same manner.”

—An adventure, with appendix and maps, by Moberly, C. A. E. (Charlotte Anne Elizabeth), 1846-1937; Jourdain, Eleanor F. (Eleanor Frances), 1863-1924

Despite their seeming communication, it was observed that the dialogue in the Trianon case sounded artificial, potentially mirroring a prerecorded message, thus lacking spontaneity. This lack of organicity would not permit its classification as an example of two-way retrocognition. Furthermore, considering the present scarcity of accounts, one cannot disregard the possibility of dual-awareness visions as hypnagogic (transition from wakefulness to sleep) or hypnopompic (transition from sleep to wakefulness) experiences, potentially inclusive of speech.

Time-slips that feature this diminishing organicity could be understood as a literal “breaking down” of time, breaking down towards the mechanical, toward lower dimensionality, a rotting of Time, down into the Order of Robots.

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The Kersey Time-Slip

In 1957, there were three fifteen-year-old Royal Navy cadets—Ray Baker from London, William Laing from Perthshire in Scotland, and Michael Crowley from Worcestershire—embarked on a training exercise in the serene county of Suffolk. The exercise required them to navigate a map, trek to a specific waypoint, observe their findings, and return.

It was a tranquil Sunday in October when the cadets chanced upon the village of Kersey. As they approached the village, typical Sunday morning scenes of rural England unfolded: a towering church spire, chimneys puffing smoke, and the melodic tolling of church bells. However, as they drew closer, a strange aura began to enshroud the village.

They were first struck by an overwhelming silence. The church bells dwindled into a hush, the melodious birdsong ceased abruptly, and the wind stilled. No more smoke billowed from the chimneys, and everything felt eerily still.

The cadets noticed a peculiar flatness to the scenery, like a two-dimensional canvas, and the trees cast no shadows under the pale sunlight. They observed ducks on the stream, frozen mid-activity.

The usually bustling streets of Kersey were vacant, devoid of any Sunday morning activities. The antiquated houses, reminiscent of medieval times, stood in stark contrast to the modern era. They were rustic, hand-crafted, timber-framed structures, bereft of any signs of modern amenities such as wires or aerials.

Adding to the uncanny atmosphere, the season appeared to have transitioned. Despite the surrounding countryside being adorned with autumnal hues, the village was vibrant with the verdancy of spring or summer.

Venturing closer to a nearby house, they peered through a grimy window to see three aged carcasses hanging inside. Their primitive appearance and the seemingly uninhabited condition of the house, equipped with a wooden door and small multi-paned windows, suggested a bygone era. The sight was unsettling in the context of modern health regulations.

Overwhelmed by the oddity of their observations, the cadets decided to leave the eerily deserted village. As they stepped out of the village boundary, the church bells resumed their tolling, smoke began to rise from the chimneys, and normality seemingly returned, adding another layer of mystery to their peculiar experience.

The village appeared frozen in time, with ancient, diminutive houses lining dusty streets and an uncanny silence prevailing. The atmosphere was eerily devoid of human or animal life, save for a few ducks idling by a shallow stream and a rustic wooden bridge.

William Laing, described the place as “a ghost settlement,” many years afterward.

“It felt like we’d taken a step back in time… Although I felt heavy grief and depression at Kersey, I also got the distinct impression that I was being watched by unseen entities. A part of me wondered who might have answered the door if we’d pounded on it with a query. There’s no point in considering it.”

The “heavy grief and depression” echoes the Trianon case—

Following the directions of the two men we walked on : but the path pointed out to us seemed to lead away from where we imagined the Petit Trianon to be ; and there was a feeling of depression and loneliness about the place. I began to feel as if I were walking in my sleep; the heavy dreaminess was oppressive.

—An adventure, with appendix and maps

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Place Memory

The luminescent pebble glows with the treasured light of long-set suns. And if this delicate and fugitive energy of light be thus persistent, who shall limit the influences which may have stored themselves within the labyrinth of vibrations which constitute the pebble ?—influences evocable, perhaps, and recognisable when the summons and the perception come.

—Frederic Myers, The Subliminal Self, Proceedings Of The Society For Psychical Research; Volume 11

An implicit model often used in the context of the paranormal likens the geology of the earth to a storage medium: when a tragic, violent, or sorrowful event takes place at a specific location, it's as if a record is being engraved, preserving the incident for potential future reliving. According to this metaphorical conception, specific conditions may act like reinserting a record onto a turntable or placing a cassette into a tape player. A person sensitive to these occurrences could be likened to a phonograph needle or tape head, facilitating the playback of these past events.

Despite being recognized early on, the place memory or “Stone Tape” hypothesis has been largely overlooked in parapsychological research, possibly due to its lack of clarity and empirical backing. However, some researchers have found implications for this concept in the study of psychokinesis and mind-matter interaction.

As proposed by Heath (2004, 2005), place memory could potentially involve psychokinetic effects upon localized space, possibly triggered by strong emotional reactions or repetitive actions in a particular place. Similarities are drawn between place memory and the phenomenon of psychometry, or token-object association, where certain objects seem to hold memory-like impressions of associated individuals or events. However, the idea that memory needs a material or even etheric substrate, as by mortal beings perceived or inferred, is derived from retarded modes of experience, or rather, a ‘concrescence of thought’.

This concrescence can be conceived as the muddy re-duplication of vital mentation, as sourced through the genius personae, genius loci, or hereditary daemons. It is the mineralization of signifies a sort of phantasmagoric scree, which is an insult to mundus imaginalis. Among congenital materialists, no organic psyche is present, their work is a parafictional residue, guarded by a freemasonry of golem. It is as if the original image is haunted by its own geomythology, the dragon disgraced as the malformed “dinosaur”. All the hauntological aspects of the Materialist paradigm of this past century—of kabbalah and theosophy being extended and reified as cosmology—will be categorized as the ghost fossils of a dark age in natural philosophy. In Fortean or psychical research, an overriding appeal to material physics is nothing but a failure of metaphysics.

Frederic W. Myers, founder of the Society for Psychical Research and coiner of the term “telepathy”, in the National Review Volume 24 (1895), was still able to take a coherent stance in his time:

(1) There exists in each of us a subliminal self ; that is to say, a certain part of our being, conscious and intelligent, does not enter into our ordinary waking intelligence, nor rise above our habitual threshold of consciousness, into our supraliminal life.

(2) This subliminal self exerts supernormal faculties—that is to say, faculties which apparently transcend our known level of evolution. Some of these-such as hyperesthesia, or keener sensibility, and hypermnesia, or fuller memory—seem to be extensions of faculties already known. Others, however, altogether exceed our supraliminal range of powers-as telepathy, or direct knowledge of other minds ; telo-æsthesia (called also clairvoyance) , or direct knowledge of distant facts ; retrocognition , or direct knowledge of past facts ; and precognition, or knowledge, direct or inferential , of facts in the future. These faculties apparently do not depend for their exercise upon either the world of matter or that of ether, as by us perceived or inferred. They imply a vital or transcendental environment ; some world in which, as well as in the material and in the ethereal worlds, we must ourselves be existing. "

It is worth noting that Myers and the Society for Psychical Research were decidedly materialist in their approach, conducting large-scale statistical studies, with rigorous standards that far exceed the modern “consensus forming rituals” of the hallucinatory body known as “the scientific community”, with its replication crises, hoax papers and “data” that is absolutely not “available upon request”. The “American Psychological Association”, with its roots in OSS “black propaganda”, psycho-pharmaceutical control, and cybernetics, seems to require that man first fall into the fugue-delusion that he is an assemblage of chemicals for their sorcery to reach optimal effect.

The Lament of Icarus

Myers's hermeneutics of the paranormal were suppressed for “occult reasons” that are beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that there appears to be a boundary layer, a dark firmament that limits attempts to attain a rigorous, comparative system of collecting, organizing, and analyzing experiential data that isn't entirely explained by reductive scientific categories. Regardless, the “architectonics” of Myers’ psychological system could be considered a superior alternative to modern psychology. Aldous Huxley, an admirer of Myers, esteemed him highly in his own psychological universe, placing him above both Freud and Jung (Kripal 2010). Alas, in this timeline, the “metetheric” and “psycho-folklore” of Myers lost out to “militarized psychologists” with their fathomless funding and connections to the intelligence community.

In Fragments of Inner Life, Myers maintains “that all things thought and felt, as well as all things done, are somehow photographed imperishably upon the Universe”. In the National Review, Myers employs the rather straightforward metaphor of visible and non-visible spectra, saying that there is “no reason to assume that the whole range of our perceptions and faculties will habitually be included in our consciousness above the waking threshold. To identify that with ourselves is a mere assumption.” On one end, consciousness fades into basic organic processes, and on the other, it fades into elusive "inspirations of genius." For each person, there are gaps or "dark lines" in this spectrum where awareness is diminished or absent.

The limits of our spectrum do not inhere in the sun that shines, but in the eye that marks his shining… The artifices of the modern physicist have extended far in each direction the visible spectrum known to Newton. It is for the modern psychologist to discover artifices which may extend in each direction the conscious spectrum as known to Plato or to Kant. (Myers 1907, HP 1:17–18)

In Jeffrey Kripal’s Authors of the Impossible, his section on Myers discusses Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit, as a pre-Darwinian understanding of evolution representing a cosmic Mind gradually awakening through history and culture. Through the reading of M.H. Abrams, the work is seen as a Romantic narrative of the mind coming into self-awareness. In this narrative, the Spirit or Mind (Geist) is the protagonist, who experiences various metamorphoses and plays different roles in the unfolding story. As readers engage with the text, they also become part of this continuous manifestation of the Spirit. Kripal compares Abrams’ lens to Philip K Dick’s VALIS, summarizing his reading of Phenomenology as “autobiography told explicitly ‘in the mode of a double consciousness,’ that is, in the mode of the Human as Two as both author and reader.”

In addition to “telepathy,” Myers also coined the term “retrocognition” which he defined as ”knowledge of the past, super-normally acquired.” In Human Personality, fitting perfectly with the “stone tape” motif, he deploys a geological metaphor: “Our retrocognitions seem often a recovery of isolated fragments of thought and feeling, pebbles still hard and rounded amid the indecipherable sands over which the mighty waters are ‘rolling evermore.’”

The Subliminal Self

Examining the above model, let’s bring our attention to the line that starts at point M and runs through points C, C', and ends at C". In Myers’ vision, this trajectory symbolizes the organic, physical component of memory.

1. The segment between M and C stands for supraliminal organic memory. That's to say, these are physical memories that we're able to consciously and intentionally recall.

2. From C to C', we're exploring the realm of subliminal organic memories, spanning a wide spectrum from hypnotic memories to inherited genetic information. Heredity, in a way, is like a memory passed down, and a record of all our ancestors is embedded within our DNA.

3. Advancing along the line from C' to C", we extend beyond the borders of profound organic personality and encounter the question of whether similar traces or enduring records of past experiences can also exist and be perceived in non-living objects.
   

Myers posits that if the line C'C", were to be “prolonged to infinity,” it might give us a complete history of the universe. In the case of “telaesthesic traces” impressed upon the inorganic medium, he uses the metaphor of a bloodhound: “[h]is cap or glove will give trace enough for the hound to follow his movements,—to reconstruct his life from the hound's point of view; and similarly there may be signs in the man's body or environment which may afford a transcendental trace, from which his history may be reconstructed by a gaze which is not of the eye alone.”

A case with no dreamlike or “transcendent” elements, that seems to indicate a cold reading of a “stone tape” is as follows: in 1951, two English women, Mrs. Dorothy Norton and Miss Agnes Norton (pseudonyms) experienced a strange event while on a holiday in Puys, near Dieppe, France. They stayed in a house that had been used as quarters for German troops during World War II, located about a quarter of a mile away from the sea.

On August 4th, starting at 4:20 a.m., they both began hearing what sounded like the noises of a battle taking place - men shouting, gunfire, and the sounds of dive bombers. The noises came in waves and were intense enough to cause them surprised that others in the house were not awakened.

This auditory experience lasted for nearly three hours, ceasing entirely by 7:00 a.m. Both women provided detailed accounts of the events and timings. They correlated these timings with the historical accounts of a raid on Dieppe by Canadian forces on August 19, 1942, during World War II. The timings of the 'battle sounds' they heard closely matched the timings of the actual battle.

The Dieppe Raid, 19 August 1942 Bombs being released from a Douglas Boston bomber over the target area.

Dorothy Norton’s statement about the events on Saturday, August 1951 is as follows:

At 4.20 a.m. A. got up and went out of the room. I said, ‘Would you like to
put the light on?’, but she didn’t. She came back in a few minutes. She said,
‘Do you hear that noise?’ I had in fact been listening to it for about 20
minutes. I woke up before it started. It started suddenly and sounded like a
storm getting up at sea. A. said she had also been listening to it for about 20
minutes. We lay in the dark for a little listening to the sound. It sounded like
a roar that ebbed and flowed, and we could distinctly hear the sounds of
cries and shouts and gunfire. We put the light on and it continued. We went
out on the balcony where we could look down towards the beach, though we
could not actually see the sea. The noise came from that direction and
became very intense, it came in rolls of sounds and the separate sounds of
cries, guns and dive bombing were very distinct. Many times we heard the
sound of a shell at the same moment. The roaring became very loud. At 4.50
it suddenly stopped. At 5.5 a.m. it started again and once more became very
intense, so much so that as we stood on our balcony, we were amazed that it
did not wake other people in the house. By now it was getting light, cocks
were crowing and birds were singing. We heard a rifle shot on the hill above
the beach.

The sounds became more distinctly those of dive bombers rather than the
cries and shouts we had heard earlier, although we could still hear them.
The noise was very loud and came in waves as before. It stopped abruptly at
5.40.

At 5.50 it started again but was not so loud and sounded more like planes.
This died away at 6 a.m. At 6.20 a.m. the sound became audible again but it
was fainter than before, and I fell asleep as I was very tired.

I was woken by a similar sound on Monday, July 30th, it sounded exactly
the same only fainter and not so intense. At the end I seemed to hear a lot of
men singing. It ended when the cocks started crowing and I went to sleep.
My sister-in-law did not waken.

This occurrence was investigated and written about by G. W. Lambert and the Honourable Mrs. Kathleen Gay of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). They concluded that it wasn't possible that the women were misinterpreting ordinary noises, nor that they could have gleaned the detailed timeline of the raid from the scant information available to them at the time.

However, a skeptical account by R. A. Eades of the SPR in 1968 suggested that the sounds the women heard might have been from a dredger operating in the Dieppe harbor during their stay. This was investigated and it was found that the timing of the dredger's operation did not align with the women's auditory experience, and the character of the noises seemed distinctly different. In addition to this, both percipients involved had served in the military and it can be reasonably assumed that they would be quite capable of distinguishing between the sporadic noise of civilian aircraft flying steadily along a known route, versus the sound of RAF planes flying in large formations and conducting dive-bombing maneuvers.

The last moments of a Dornier Do217 over Dieppe on 19 August 1942, as recorded by Sergeant Helge Sognnes of No 331 Squadron

The women reported no ethereal light or feelings of oppression. There seemed to be no symbolic value for the percipients involved. According to Mackenzie, the women “seemed to be well-balanced individuals, with no tendency to add color to their accounts.” It is worth noting that the primary witness Agnes Norton was in the Women’s Royal Naval Service during the war, and had long been accustomed to the accurate recording of time. This helped to match the timings of her experience to historical events, establishing the authenticity of the case.

According to Mackenzie, the case of the Dieppe Raid stood as an anomaly among all other instances of paranormal visual or auditory experiences linked to specific locations. In other well-documented cases, such as the Versailles Case mentioned above, the individuals involved didn't immediately recognize whether what they were seeing or hearing was natural or supernatural, they were “mystified”. By contrast, in the Dieppe Raid case, which spanned about three hours, the individuals involved maintained a sufficient degree of normalcy to critique their experience throughout its entirety.

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Serialism

According to J.W. Dunne’s theory of Serialism, a philosophy that employs a "tabular" method of analysis to compartmentalize and clarify stages of thought, the attention of your mind can be focused anywhere along your brain's “world line”, the path that it traces through time and space, irrespective of where the 'now' is. However, the intensity of sense data at 'now' is significantly greater due to energy, a physical entity, passing from brain to mind, indicating that the mind has a physical aspect. This interaction allows the mind to affect the body and alter its world-lines at the 'now', aligning with the common belief that the mind can influence the body.

During sleep, when the brain is not in a condition for the appearance of sense data, attention shifts along the duller sense data within the four-dimensional field, resulting in dreams. These sense data serve as 'bricks' for constructing dream fantasies.

Once the brain wakes, attention rushes back to the point of intense sense data at the 'now'. In cases where waking points are distant, dreaming continues until the 'now' reaches it. “In dreaming, moreover, observation may be concentrating (attention may be focusing) at half-a-dozen places in your time-1 history [time as perceived or experienced in our familiar three-dimensional world] simultaneously, and producing thereby those strange synthetic images which are so characteristic of dreams.” (JW Dunne, Intrusions?, 1955)

It is no surprise then that, in certain rarefied states, the child or the poet or the berserker may experience time differently, and may encounter all the various orders of synchronicity. It is possible to practice a kind of hypnagogic reverie halfway between sleep and wake, and there is indeed a great deal of anecdotal evidence that suggests writers, artists, inventors, and so-called “schizophrenics” are naturally prone to such “intrusions”.

Attention channels determine time flows. The non-lucid dream state being an example of attention following a multitude of channels converging on a world line at random points all at once, while the so-called “waking state” is intensely preoccupied with its immediate circumstance. The inertial imbalance of the “waking state” can be overcome through concentration, practicing “lucid dreaming,” or the use of some artifice (mescaline, sensory deprivation chamber, entrainment, prolonged exposure to anomalous specimens like Goethe’s grandfather). On the other hand, sinking intense, mass-synchronized attention into artificially created voids could create phantom “world lines”, causing a kind of “psychic chimerism”, a fusion of oneiric and technical organs, leading to a collective, cybernetically legible “twilight state”.

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The Machinic Time Sink

Time and space are complementary, akin to how the Infinite complements the Absolute, and how energy complements matter (Schuon 1982). Time can only be gauged indirectly by connecting it to space via the mechanism of motion, serving as a measurement link (Guénon 1995). Space provides the 'field' for physical manifestation (Guénon 1995). Although time 'consumes' space, it itself undergoes progressive contraction during a manifestation cycle, observable in the proportionate shortening of the four Yugas (Guénon 1995). At the extreme end of a cyclic manifestation, time ceases to exist, becoming absorbed into space, (or into virtual space).

Thus it is that 'time the devourer ends by devouring itself, in such a way that, at the 'end of the world', that is to say at the extreme limit of cyclical manifestation, 'there will be no more time'; this is also why it is said that 'death is the last being to die', for wherever there is no succession of any kind death is no longer possible. As soon as succession has come to an end, or, in symbolical terms, 'the wheel has ceased to turn', all that exists cannot but be in perfect simultaneity; succession is thus as it were transformed into simultaneity, and this can also be expressed by saying that 'time has been changed into space'.

—The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, René Guénon, 1945

The transmutation of time into space occurs at the end of a cosmic cycle, aligning with the religious notion of the Eschaton signifying the 'end of the world.' This is when a cycle of manifestation reverts to its timeless primordial state (Guénon 1995). Nearly every technological advancement for the past century has been in the direction of a vast assemblage of machinic “time sinks”. (Unsurprisingly, these time sinks all seem to have the theme of transport, through the Screen, into other realms, into virtual times, parafictional world lines.)

The 'reversal' speaks of a cosmic shift where Time, which was seemingly on the brink of consuming everything (space), gets absorbed into space. This could be interpreted as a shift from a dynamic, temporal existence to a static, spatial one. The programming industries, particularly the mediasphere industry, create “time-based content” that is consumed at the same moment by millions, and sometimes by tens, hundreds of millions of people. This widespread synchronized engagement shapes the structure of the media event and leads to the development of radically altered images of man. This is the concrescence of memory into the stasis of temporal objects: this is machinic time.

Artificial intelligence enables the expansion of space until the possibility for symbolic cognition is reduced to zero. The organic duration of the image is synthetically extrapolated until all resolution (meaning) is lost. The possibility of action (perception of the Moment), hence of change and consequently of Time, is consumed by this communistic, mechanical doppelganger. Indeed, artificial intelligence is nothing but the Archon of Quantity, the ruler of mass, mocking the psyche of man.

This image has been “extrapolated” by artificial intelligence.

Imagine “space” suddenly increasing to the point where the possibility of meaningful action, or perception, is impossible, where “world lines” stretch into virtual, pseudo-imaginal infinities, and all organic territory is lost in a sea of uncanny, “procedurally generated” terrain. A vast and empty “open world” alternate reality game with no win condition, a sprawling panoply of hollow golems, and total, ludic limbo paralyzing the player. The horizon melts into self-replicating mud, aping the shape of the symbolic order, covering every surface, clogging every portal of sense until we are blind, deaf and dreaming in solipsistic insanity. A sensory deprivation experiment on a cosmic scale.

Starry Night illustrates the scene from the window facing east in Van Gogh’s room at the Saint-Rémy-de-Provence asylum, captured in June 1889. The limited perspective is the point. Entire books have been written about the context surrounding this painting, every detail-laden with meaning.

The machinic consumption of time is in direct, antagonistic competition with the human mind as an organic repository of time. Anamnesis versus mechamnesis. The organic time processing and storage capabilities of the brain are essential for human self-expression, in other words, reproduction of the image of man. As the organic time processing and storage capabilities of the brain come under threat from machinic encroachments, more and more people are seeking refuge in those realms of psychedelic intoxication, hypnagogic reverie, and ecstatic rapture.

One of the first indications that this encroachment is occurring is a paucity of dreams, a thinning or a noticeable two-dimensional quality of the imagistic space of the Unconscious. Night after night of floppy dream-organs produced as a joke, as if by radiation-induced mutation, yet possessing a dreadful homogeneity. Yet, hollow and meaningless dreams are only the beginning. The long-term symptoms of this machinic interference with the libido/vital élan of man, this interruption of the Super-Observer of Time, is warped sexuality, mutation, amnesia, and psychosis on a planetary scale.

The mythic image influences how we perceive the world. These perceptions then drive the formation of protocols, and these protocols in turn shape events and circumstances. This massive confluence orders the event’s structure to which new forms of consciousness and collective unconsciousness correspond. The initiation of this cycle fuels its conclusion, and the conclusion in return justifies—and reaffirms—the initiation. This recurrence is what Freud referred to as a "self-fulfilling prophecy", in other words, retro-causation, a time-loop.

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Addendum: Carl Jung Ravenna Case

Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, renowned for his concepts of living psychic realities, was also known for his travels. In 1913, he journeyed to the historical city of Ravenna in Italy, once the Western Roman Empire's capital. Here, he developed a fascination with the tomb of Roman princess Galla Placida, who was the daughter of Emperor Theodosius the First and passed away in 450 AD.

Two decades later, Jung revisited the city, this time accompanied by a woman. He recalls in 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections':

My first visit to Ravenna in 1913 was when I became captivated by the tomb of Galla Placidia, finding it significant and unusually intriguing. The same sensation struck me when I returned twenty years later. Once more, I fell into a strange mood in the tomb of Galla Placidia, deeply moved by its atmosphere. I was accompanied by an acquaintance, and we went directly from the tomb into the Baptistery of the Orthodox.

The first thing that struck me was the gentle blue light that filled the room. However, I didn't question its source, so the wonder of this light without an apparent origin didn't trouble me. What astonished me was the sight of four magnificent mosaic frescoes, where I remembered seeing windows during my first visit. The frescoes were incredibly beautiful, and to my surprise, it seemed I had entirely forgotten them, which annoyed me since I found my memory to be unreliable.

The mosaic on the south side represented the baptism in the Jordan. The second picture, on the north, was of the passage of the Children of Israel through the Red Sea. The third, on the east, soon faded from my memory. It might have depicted Naaman being cleansed of leprosy in the Jordan; there was a similar picture in the old Merian Bible in my library. The fourth mosaic on the west side of the baptistery was the most striking. We observed this one last. It portrayed Christ extending his hand to Peter, who was sinking beneath the waves.

We stood in front of this mosaic for at least twenty minutes and discussed the original ritual of baptism, especially the curious, archaic conception of it as an initiation connected with a real threat of death. Such initiations often symbolized the archetypal idea of death and rebirth. Baptism was initially a real immersion, suggesting the danger of drowning.

I retained a vivid memory of the mosaic of Peter sinking and can still see every detail: the blue of the sea, individual chips of the mosaic, the inscribed scrolls proceeding from the mouths of Peter and Christ, which I attempted to decipher. After leaving the baptistery, I promptly visited Alinari, intending to buy photographs of the mosaics, but I couldn't find any. Time was short during this visit, so I decided to order the pictures later from Zurich.

When I returned home, I asked an acquaintance who was traveling to Ravenna to obtain the photographs for me. However, he discovered that the mosaics I had described did not exist.

In the meantime, I had already spoken at a seminar about the original conception of baptism and mentioned the mosaics I had seen in the Baptistery of the Orthodox. The memory of those images is still vivid to me.

What's remarkable is that the woman who accompanied Jung on this trip also reported seeing the frescos. Jung emphasizes, "The lady who had been there with me long refused to believe what she had seen with her own eyes had not existed". The presence of unusual blue light and his own account of entering a "strange mood" also hints at the possibility of a time slip occurrence. Jung ponders:

As we know, it is difficult to ascertain whether and to what extent two people simultaneously see the same thing. In this instance, however, I was able to confirm that at least the main features of what we both observed were the same. … [s]ince my experience in the baptistery in Ravenna, I know with certainty that something internal can appear to be external, and that something external can seem to be internal. The actual walls of the baptistery, even though they must have been perceived by my physical eyes, were overlaid with a vision of a completely different scene which was as vividly real as the unaltered baptismal font. Which was real at that moment?