A Postulate on Man’s Spiritual Destiny ¹

In the first essay that Alfred Russel Wallace devoted exclusively to the law of natural selection and man (in truth, the first essay devoted exclusively to the law of natural selection and man), “The Development of Human Races Under the Law of Natural Selection” (1864), Wallace already remarks that the steady and permanent advance of society toward moral and intellectual elevation cannot be imputed in any way to the survival of the fittest: “I am forced to conclude that it is due to the inherent progressive power of those glorious qualities which raise us so immeasurably above our fellow animals, and at the same time afford us the surest proof that there are other and higher existences than ourselves, from whom these qualities may have been derived, and towards whom we may be ever tending” (Conclusion, p. 185). This human tendency towards spiritual or “angelic” being Wallace merely mentions in his first essay on man. In his second, “The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man” (1870), Wallace exemplifies this tendency with a short list of faculties and characteristics that he believes cannot be the result of natural selection alone: the organ of the mind prepared in advance for the moral and intellectual development of human nature; naked and sensitive skin; erect form; the perfection of the vocal organs; feelings of abstract justice and benevolence; conscience, or the moral sense; the capacity to form ideal conceptions of space, time, eternity, and infinity; the capacity for intense aesthetic pleasure in form and color and composition. This class of phenomena, evidently essential to the perfect development of terrestrial man as a spiritual being, Wallace suitably introduces and then humbly infers: “. . . a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms.“² Later, on the same page, he makes this suggestion: “. . . if we are not the highest intelligences in the universe, some higher intelligence may have directed the process by which the human race was developed, by means of some more subtle agencies than we are acquainted with. At the same time I must confess that this theory has the disadvantage of requiring the intervention of some distinct individual intelligence, to aid in the production of what we can hardly avoid considering as the ultimate aim and outcome of all organized existence – intellectual, ever-advancing, spiritual man” (Summary of the Argument as to the Insufficiency of Natural Selection to Account for the Development of Man, pp. 204– 205). In the 1889 essay “Darwinism Applied to Man,” Wallace transforms the inference he made in 1870 into a bold and forceful statement: “To us, the whole purpose, the only raison d’être of the world – with all its complexities of physical structure, with its grand geological progress, the slow evolution of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, the ultimate appearance of man – was the development of the human spirit in association with the human body” (Concluding Remarks, p. 477).

The above statements, trimmed of all merely rhetorical phrases and joined together into a single statement of teleological principle, we now assume to form Wallace’s postulate on the spiritual destiny of man:

Those glorious qualities which raise us so immeasurably above our fellow animals may have been derived from higher existences than ourselves towards whom we may be ever tending – some higher intelligence that has guided the development of man, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms, by means of some more subtle agencies than we are acquainted with – to aid in the production of ever-advancing, spiritual man, which, to us, was the whole purpose, the only raison d’être of the world: the development of the human spirit in association with the human body.

Though tentative, this glorifying sentence does contain phrases that some may find questionable. I will attempt briefly to address these questions.

First, you may ask, what are the glorious qualities which raise us so immeasurably above our fellow animals? In his 1870 second essay on man, Wallace gives us a list of these qualities (reproduced above). In his 1889 essay, he suggests the addition of three primary faculties – the mathematical, the artistic, and the musical – as well as the “metaphysical faculty” and the “peculiar faculty of wit and humor.” I see no reason to modify Wallace’s list, except to add to it the spiritual faculty, to which the world’s sacred records attest and to which I, and others, can attest from personal experience. (If you attribute these glorious qualities to some more mundane source, I would beg an answer to the question: “What are the fiduciary credentials, spiritually speaking, of the intellectual authorities in whom you bank your trust?”)

Next, you may ask, what is this superior intelligence Wallace speaks of, and what is the nature of its subtle agencies? This is a question that holds its meaning outside of time and space – in sequences without duration, in forms without spatial limit, incalculable and primary – one of those questions that is called “eternal.”³ Some would deny me this adjective and construct instead some image of the universe that accounts only for what can be perceived and measured by the senses of the terrestrial body or by those same senses refined by technology. To do so, it seems to me, can only result in oversimplification. For myself, I find enough coincident evidence for such a superior intelligence and its agencies, beyond my own experience even, in the formulas and commentaries that remain of the spiritual sciences which the adherents of True Religion have applied over millennia, even since the latest great catastrophe changed again and for all time the rules of physical existence for our world.

Finally, there is the question: Can it actually be that the whole purpose, the only raison d’être of the world is the development of the human spirit in association with the human body? ⁴ For me, the answer can only be yes. No science, no religion offers another. At best there arises here and there in the intellectual fray a philosophical suggestion, or a theoretical argument, that the world has no purpose or that that purpose cannot be known. The notion that the world has no purpose must, in effect, always be expressed as a kind of tautology, an explanation of the perception of the limits of physical life with perceptory senses that are derivatives of that limited life; in other words, a statement in which like is more or less explained with like, and so, ultimately, a statement in which nothing is more or less explained with nothing – no matter what opposing terms are used to convey the processes of life and nihility. The notion that the purpose of the world cannot be known always betrays a sense of tragic insufficiency, an inability to go deeper than the creation of a formal argument that makes use of the unfortunate but unavoidable imprecisions inherent in human language and its premises; such a notion is the antithesis of the certain experience upon which the theories of science, and the tests of those theories, claim to be built. Both these alternatives are void and insubstantial, and so, untenable, as science.

Robert G. Petrovich 2000, 2010

FOOTNOTES

1. All the essays of Wallace quoted herein may be found in Natural Selection (1891), with the exception of “Darwinism Applied to Man,” which may be found in Darwinism (1889). The emphasis added to the passages quoted is my own.

2. For further discussion of this statement, I refer the reader to Part 4: “Corollary to the First Theory of Natural Selection.”

3. For future discussion of this superior intelligence and its subtle agencies, I refer the reader to Part 8: “General Theory of Natural Selection Applied to Man Under the Influence of the Dark Nature” and Part 9 “General Theory of Natural Selection Applied to Man Under the Influence of the Light Nature.”

4. For further discussion of this question, I refer the reader to Part 5: “General Theory of Natural Selection Applied to Homo sapiens sapiens.”

 

< PART 3 >

The greater Reno community gathering to celebrate “the shift in consciousness occurring now” from noon Friday, December 21-Saturday, December 22 was videotaped and presentations are now available online at the organization’s web site. Participants from the International Community of Christ were Reverend Gary Buchanan and Bishop Gene Savoy Jr.

To read more about the event and to see videos of the presentations, follow this link to renobirth2012.tumblr.com and the “presentations and cameos” page  or go directly to the  YouTube channel for Reno Birth 2012 .

Rev. Buchanan spoke on the Community’s perspective of the year 2012, cycles, and changes in the sun. On the YouTube presentations page, scroll down to #28 “Historical Cycles of the Sun.”

Bishop Savoy participated in a panel of interfaith leaders that included a protestant, a member of Latter Days Saints, two Jewish rabbis, a Buddhist priest, a Hindu, a Muslim, and an atheist. The group spoke on the topic “How can the religions Get Along?” To see this presentation on YouTube, scroll down to #21 “Northern Nevada Religious Leaders discuss how to get along.”

Also of interest may be the presentation by long-time friend of the Community and president of the Satyachetana Movement in the United States, David Mitchell. To see his presentation, scroll down the YouTube page to #32 “The Scientific and spiritual Meaning of 2012.”

First Theory of Natural Selection

The works of Alfred Russel Wallace, last reprinted only one hundred years ago, are perhaps as little known to our generation as the noncanonical scriptures of the ancients. His first major essay, “On the tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type,” first appeared – without the author’s knowledge or consent – on July 1, 1858, at the famous meeting of the fellows of the Linnaean Society of London that introduced to the world Darwin’s theory of natural selection. At this meeting, Darwin’s two closest friends presented Wallace’s uncorrected manuscript draft as a foil for the famous naturalist’s incomplete work on the theory of natural selection, along with a few notes by Darwin.¹ Years later, Wallace published the essay himself, clarified with section headings and footnotes, together with other essays on man and nature in Natural Selection and Tropical Nature (1891). Darwin’s celebrated Origin of Species continues to be reproduced annually by the thousands, despite the length of the volume and its assuming and domestic nature. Wallace’s ten pages of force and clarity have gone unnoticed and out of print. It is my purpose in these pages to raise up to view again Wallace’s version of the theory as it applies to Man so that it may be seen in the light of the new spirit of our age.

Wallace’s theory – when it is absolved of all exemplary beings (all woodpeckers, house sparrows, wild cats, rabbits, mollusks and crustacea, antelope, horses, and plants), all specific references (to wings, feet, velocity, defensive weapons, and the retractile talons of the falcon and cat tribes), all general discussion (of number, animal fecundity, migratory patterns, vicissitudes of seasons, escapes from enemies, peculiar variations in color, compensation for deficiencies, temporary superiority of special varieties), all mention of Tartarean deserts and luxuriant American prairies and pampas, and all of Wallace’s own personal renunciations (of the prejudiced and false assumptions of his Victorian contemporaries) – may be purely expressed thus:

There is a general tendency in nature which will cause a certain variety to survive the parent species, and to give rise to successive variations departing further and further from that original type, and which also produces, in varieties induced by the directing influence of men, the tendency to return to the parent form.

This colorless and abstract statement reflects nothing of the remarkable volcanic island in the Moluccas where the theory was conceived, nothing of the bright robe of its verdant rain forest, and nothing of the exotic splendors of Ornithoptera priamus (the rare bird of paradise) and rarerbutterflies. Neither does this statement reflect the mental and psychological circumstances: the catastrophic drought in Aru or the Galela men bearing sago and rice, the author’s extensive travel and long residence in the wild, the fever of imagination in which the theory had its origin. The sentence does, however, suggest a fundamental tendency or law that, according to Wallace, once governed the dramatic mutations of Man’s physical body and continues to govern the transformation of Man’s mind. Few researchers of our century have given their assent to Wallace’s variant of the theory of natural selection. The dissenters – those who have produced, and who maintain, the species of thought currently dominant – are legion.

Thanks to the efforts of our biologists, it is now common knowledge that 98 percent of all identified species have vanished from the face of the earth over time. The remnant of natural beings that now exist, the 2 percent, of which we are a part, are subject to the same fate as the other 98 : the inability to adapt, whether to showers of meteors and comets, to floods of waters or ice, to the elimination of food sources, to predatory attacks, or to radiations still mysterious to us. Students of ecology have added to this list of natural delimiters the unnatural menace of modern pollutants that may artificially induce or accelerate the process of our extinction. Our physicists have gone further. They have predicted the ultimate destruction of our terrestrial abode, the sun that nourishes it, and the entire space-time continuum that we know as the physical universe. In the popular terminology of physics, an abstract language more familiar to us today than the mythic narratives of ancient metaphysics, they have projected eschatological images that are perhaps more exact (more tedious and more limited in dimension) than the portraits drawn in ancient literature – and in several possible versions. None of them, however, varies substantially from either the traditional fire of New Testament eschatology or the in-breathing of multiple universes by Brahma. ²

Each of us is more or less resigned to the inevitable extinction of the physical organism of our individual beings. But what of our species? Our physicists have made it possible for us to conceive of this final event of nature. Is it also possible for us to conceive of a variety of our species able to survive the promised catastrophe? Certainly, this variety would require no body subject to natural laws (for there will then be no nature) and no mind to process the perceptions of physical senses (for there will then be no physical bodies); what is required is a being more radiant than the sun and a consciousness more extensive than space and time.

The law that Wallace has uncovered thus appears to me, in a more general form, to be applicable beyond terrestrial nature, beyond even the stars. Wallace, of course, never imagined his theory of evolution to be so all-encompassing. He, who postulated a spiritual origin for Man³ and a spiritual destiny,⁴ was not able to conceive of the means by which we humans may be able to produce, and reproduce, our spiritual (nonphysical) natures to become an Eternal Race; neither was he able to conceive clearly of the parent form of such a spiritual variety.

All natural laws remember, to some degree, the patterns of Heaven. The general law behind Wallace’s first theory in its precise and limpid form – angular, crystalline, almost transparent – does reflect the image of Man-becoming – the sequence of variant species of changing physical and mental forms over millions of years, from the time of the descent into matter (the time presupposed in Christian cosmogony and called “The Fall”) to the present time and our present varieties – as well as the image of the possible Man-to-come – a sequence of forms more and more spiritual, more transparent, more resistant to radiation, et cetera. This general law also reflects the image of the special variant of the human that each of us may realize now, individually: the spiritual being proposed for us long ago and exemplified in the Diamond Body of Lao Tzu and Lu Yen, the Golden Body of Buddha, the Sun Body of Viracocha, the Light Body of Jesus and his promise (John 14:2).

It is a demonstrated corollary of Wallace’s theory that procuring a constant supply of wholesome food is almost the sole requisite for ensuring the increase of a given species.⁵ The doctrines of the Eternal Race speak of a supranatural food, but its members were not permitted to reveal to the uninitiated either its nature or its source or how it may be procured. Their writings assure us, however, that this spiritual food is accessible and as abundant as daylight.

Robert G. Petrovich, 2000

FOOTNOTES

1. I refer the reader to my summary of the events surrounding the hidden public life of both the document and its author in “The Modesty of A. R. Wallace,” an address delivered in 1996 before the Advocates for Religious Rights and Freedoms at a celebration in Wallace’s honor.

2. The basic theory of the physicist may be stated in this way: The first law of thermodynamics declares that the energy of the physical universe is constant; the second, that this energy tends to noncommunication and disorder, although the total amount does not decrease (this gradual disintegration of the forces that compose the universe is called entropy). Once all different temperatures have been equalized, once the action of one body on another has been barred or compensated for, the world will be a fortuitous concurrence of atoms. In the deep center of stars, it is said, that difficult and fatal balance has been accomplished. By dint of interchanges, the entire physical universe will achieve it; and it will be tepid and dead. The variations of this basic statement involve time and the concept of single or multiple universes. One variation has it that light is losing heat, that the universe is becoming invisible minute by minute, and that, at some point, it will be nothing but heat – balanced, immovable, equal heat; then it will have died.

3. See Part 3: “A Postulate on Man’s Spiritual Origin.”

4. See Part 2: “A Postulate on Man’s Spiritual Destiny.”

5. For a discussion of this corollary and its application to a spiritual variation of the human, see Part 6: “First Corollary to the General Theory of Natural Selection Applied to Homo sapiens sapiens.

 

< PART 2 >

 

FOREWORD

The series of notes collected here under the generic title “On the Tendency of Humans Toward the Spiritual” attempts to expand and develop, in a preliminary manner, the theory of Alfred Russel Wallace on the spiritual origin and nature of the human species. In his own time, the statements Wallace made as a scientist on Man’s spiritual nature, especially as the codiscoverer, with Charles Darwin, of the theory of natural selection, drew popular attention. His statements also attracted the attention of the antithetical and antispiritual proponents of Darwin’s version of Man’s nature, a series of men who, from that time to the present, have attributed to themselves the character of mean-spirited dogs—from the agnostic “bulldog” Thomas Huxley in Wallace’s time to the atheistic “rottweiler” Richard Dawkins in our time—in the interest of keeping modern science purely materialistic.

My purpose in these brief notes is to take the topic of the evolution of Man out of academic kennels and intellectual fighting pits and into more spiritually elevated pockets of general human consciousness. To accomplish this task, it seems to me best to arrange these little pieces of theory and mulled-over thoughts (each of which, I hope, is nourishing in itself and assimilable in a single bite) simply in the order in which they occurred to me. The first note expands upon Wallace’s first general statement of his theory on natural selection and applies this statement to the spiritual nature of man. The next two summarize Wallace’s thought on the spiritual origin and destiny of Man. The fourth note applies Wallace’s general statement on natural selection to the nature of Man as a physical being; the fifth, to the present varieties of the species Homo sapiens sapiens. The sixth posits a spiritual variety of the species and suggests what is needed to encourage the progressive development of this special and endangered variety.

Future notes will attempt to extend Wallace’s thesis into new dimensions, primarily as expansions of the notion of “angels and archangels, spirits and demons so long abolished from our belief as to have become actually unthinkable as actual existences” that are mentioned by Wallace in a footnote in one of his essays and that have nothing yet in modern philosophy to take their place.

December 24, 2012

 

< PART 1 >

 

JANUARY 2013

9
Matthew McKean †
Harriet Hillier †

 12
Harriet Hillier †
Matthew McKean †
Donna Cary
Ezekiel James Dutcher

 16
Mibrak Hagos
Ezekiel James Dutcher

19
Mibrak Hagos
Ezekiel James Dutcher
Zachariah Logan
Hannelore Fuelling †
Debbie McCarthy
Donna Cary
Hannelore Fuelling †
Verita Black Prothro

23
Luzmila Bernales de Ontaneda †
Jaime Casapia Bueno †

26
Luzmila Bernales de Ontaneda †
Jaime Casapia Bueno †
Dorothy Kubiak

 30
Sharon Morgan

 † indicates Memorial Prayer

 

Saturday, February 2, 2013
ADVENT VIGIL: SECOND ADVENT DAY
6:58 AM NEW DIVINE SERVICE
Church of New Epiphany
Leave: 6:00
Gate: 6:40
Sunrise: 7:13
RR Gene Savoy, Jr
Concelebrant: RR Sean Savoy
Assistants:
RC Roger Weld
Rev. Ted Staver
RM Carol Ann Crabb
Organist: RC Gary Buchanan

11:00 AM COMMUNION
Chapel of The Holy Child
RR Gene Savoy Jr.
Lector: RC Roger Weld
Cantor: Rev. Gary Huss, Sr.
Reader: Rev. Barbara Whitney
Organist: RC Gary Buchanan

 Sunday, February 3, 2013
ADVENT VIGIL
6:57 AM NEW DIVINE SERVICE
Church of New Epiphany
Leave: 6:00
Gate: 6:40
Sunrise: 7:12
RR Gene Savoy, Jr
Concelebrant: RR Sean Savoy
Assistants:
RC Roger Weld
RC Robert Petrovich
Rev. Barbara Whitney
Organist: RC Gary Buchanan

OPEN-AIR COMMUNION
Church of the Races of Man                    Rev. Bruce Kanzelmeyer
Church of the End Times                   Rev. Robert Roy
Church of the Americas                   Rev. Larry Coesens

Monday, February 4, 2013
ADVENT VIGIL
6:56 AM NEW DIVINE SERVICE
Church of New Epiphany
Leave: 6:00
Gate: 6:40
Sunrise: 7:13
RR Gene Savoy, Jr
Concelebrant: RR Sean Savoy
Assistants:
RC Roger Weld
Rev. Ted Staver
RM Carol Ann Crabb
Organist: RC Gary Buchanan

 Tuesday, February 5, 2013
ADVENT VIGIL
6:55 AM NEW DIVINE SERVICE
Church of New Epiphany
Leave: 6:00
Gate: 6:40
Sunrise: 7:10
RR Gene Savoy, Jr
Concelebrant: RR Sean Savoy
Assistants:
RC Roger Weld
RC Robert Petrovich
Rev. Barbara Snyder
Organist: RC Gary Buchanan

Wednesday, February 6, 2013
ADVENT VIGIL
6:54 AM NEW DIVINE SERVICE
Church of New Epiphany
Leave: 5:45
Gate: 6:39
Sunrise: 7:09
RR Gene Savoy, Jr
Concelebrant: RR Sean Savoy
Assistants:
RC Roger Weld
Rev. Ted Staver
RM Carol Ann Crabb
Organist: RC Gary Buchanan

12 N COMMUNION
Chapel of the Holy Child
Service Suspended: Chancellery closed for Advent Holiday 

Friday, February 8, 2013
9:00 AM PRAYER & FELLOWSHIP
Chapel of the Roses
Rev. Frank Burkitt

SUPPLEMENTS

SUPPLEMENT 1

Translations by Walter Kaufman (Beyond Good and Evil; Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1966).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SUPPLEMENT 2

Regional outgrowths of the Serbian – in Montenegro, in Bosnia, in Macedonia, in Lika, in Dalmatia, in the Baèka, Banat or Baranja regions of Vojvodina, in Slavonia, in Old Serbia, in Central Serbia – whether Muslim or Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian – are really one racial family of peoples. The Croat (Khorvat) bears a heritage and fate similar to that of the Serb. The forms “Choratos” and “Chorouatos” have been found among inscriptions in ancient Tanais on the Don. According to the records of the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus (AD 912-925), the White Croats (Belochrobati), a “Slavic” people, occupied the upper Vistula and northern Bohemia. Arab travelers of the time noted certain Sarmatian characteristics among them: they had, besides the king, a viceroy called župan; they practiced artificial cranial deformation; and the names of their chiefs were non-Slavic. After the eclipse of the Huns, the Sarmatian Croats, like the Sarmatian Serbs, remained in northern Europe to rule the country themselves. Ultimately the Croats, like the Serbs, were slavicized, and their name was taken by the subject population. These new people were known as White (or Western) Croats just as the Serbs in Saxony were known as White Serbs (T. Sulimirski, The Sarmatians, pages 190-192). Such facts suggest that it may be more accurate to speak of the two modern peoples in adjectival form – the Croatian and the Serbian – to remind us that they are actually Sarmatian modifications of the West Slav.

 

 

 

 

SUPPLEMENT 3
From standard references at hand I draw the following illustrations of these other complexes:

 

The Pole and the Russian. No certain historical data exists for the Pole until the tenth century, but traditions of the West Alan (possibly the Alanic Antae) survived among them for centuries after the Alan’s fifth-century invasion and the consequent mixing with the indigenous Slavs who had arrived in the area during the first century of our era. The belief in a Sarmatian origin of Poland was widespread among the nobility of that nation for centuries. The most striking survival is in Polish heraldry: ancient tamgas, the religious monograms of the West Alan, appear in stylized form as crescents, arrows, and horseshoes. The beliefs associated with the tamgas spread also among the conquered Slavic population further east. The symbols turn up again in the coats of arms of the Rurikovich dynasty of Old Russia. Evidently the West Alan ruler was gradually Slavicized (a process completed not earlier than the sixth century) and the new breed was subjected to the Turkic Avar and the Caucasian Khazar before this vast disarray of people invited the Viking Rurik and his Swedish followers to govern them. With the assimilation of the Finn, beginning in the ninth century, Russian settlers in the country of the Upper Volga acquired the mental characteristics of steadfastness and fatalism that made them a new type, distinct from the Old Russian of Kiev and Novgorod. (The Tatar invasion of Russia during the thirteenth century practically mixed no blood.)

 

 

 

 

The Bulgarian. Of the Bulgars, a Turanian race who came westward after the Huns, a small horde of the Utigari tribe broke off to invade the Balkan peninsula and gradually merged into the Slavic population to form the modern Bulgarian.

 

 

 

 

The Rumanian. The eighth century blended the primary elements of the Rumanian nation: (1) a few remaining Dacians of the ancient Thracian stock called “Getae” by the Greeks and annihilated by the Romans; (2) the old growth of Roman colonists forsaken by Emperor Aurelian in the third century who had developed into bellicose, Latin-speaking nomads, the “Vlachs” or “Rumans”; (3) numerous Slavic newcomers. Not until the thirteenth century did Ruman state history begin.

 

 

 

 

The Hungarian. The Hungarian nation appears in history under two names: “Magyar” (used by themselves) and “Hungarian” (used by foreigners). The predecessors of the Magyar, the Hun and the Avar, had ranged the Hungarian plain for two centuries before the Magyar arrived. At first, Roman emperors sought the aid of the seven tribes who were united under the Magyar chieftain to help them fight the enemies of Byzantium. In the ninth century perhaps as many as one million uninvited nomads, among them two hundred thousand men under arms, were led with discipline by their chieftain across the Carpathians. The new military state of Magyarska (Hungary) appeared about the year one thousand. In time, the Magyars mixed with the Slavs within the limits of their kingdom and with the descendants of Roman colonists to the southeast of it and thereby enhanced the complexion of their race. Attila “the Hun” was regarded as a Magyar hero. The national dress of the Magyar nobleman, worn until the early twentieth century, was named for him – the “Attila.”

 

 

 

 

The Spanish. While Greece, the parent of classical European civilization, was still in a state of barbarism, the Iberian and the Celt amalgamated at the center of Spain in admirable cities where they taught philosophy and the arts. This early population was cultivated and, for several centuries, increased by the colonial soldiers of Rome. During the fifth century, the Vandal, the Suevi, and the Alan burst in and chose lots for the three administrative units of Iberia apportioned by Rome. A state of division and confusion was inaugurated and sustained for a thousand years: first by the stern authority of the Visigoth; next by the inconstancy of the Frank; and finally by the Arab, whose imposing slave armies brought them first victory and then destruction. When the slave armies disassociated themselves from the Arab, the Mauritanian Negroes, who formed one of the slave armies, came to be known as Moors. References at hand do not make clear whether the members of the second slave army, Slavs who were sold by the Germans to the Jews and then to the Arabs, remained as settlers.

 

 

 

 

The Berber. The Vandals, pushed westward by the Huns in the fifth century, joined the union of German tribes and crisscrossed the Alps in search of a new home before they took possession of southern Spain and gave their name to Andalusia (Vandalusia). Later the Roman governor of Africa invited them to assist in putting down a revolt against the Empire. The Vandals crossed the Straits of Gibraltar in a body, took possession of the Roman provinces along the north coast of Africa eastward as far as Tunis, and made of these provinces a kingdom for a hundred years . . . until the Romans restored the region to themselves. The Vandals disappeared as a race, but their descendants, with light hair, blue eyes, and fair skin, still live among the valleys of the Atlas Mountains, where they are known as Berbers and keep themselves distinct from the Arab population.

 

 

 

 

 

The Northern Italian. The Lombards lent Attila their aid in his expeditions, and allied themselves with the Turkic Avars to drive out the Gepidae, before they descended from the Alps with their wives, children, wagons, oxen, and flocks to take possession of the whole of northern Italy. There, in the sixth century, this germanic people still drank liquor from the skulls of their enemies when they assembled at the festivals of Odin. The Goths, who had arrived before them, became a defeated people; those who remained gradually put aside their ferocious ways and mingled with the mild climate, the fertile soil, and the other Italians.

 

 

 

 

The English. The ancestors of the modern English were known to the Britons of the fifth century (whom they displaced) as cruel and merciless pirates who captured men and women for the slave market and tortured to death one of every ten as a sacrifice to their gods. Those fierce and restless conquerors, for the most part young men who seized the daughters of slain Britons for their wives, gave to their new lands mild names: the South Saxons, Sussex; the East Saxons, Essex; the two gangs of Angles, the North folk and the South folk, the names Norfolk, Suffolk, and East Anglia.

 

 

 

 

The Swiss. In the Swiss Alps, the Helvetian eked out an unquiet existence, and the Rhaetian and the Allobroge led wild lives of war and pillage, before Roman culture made the miserable conditions of these Celtic peoples vanish by degrees. The Allobroge exchanged the sword for the plow; the Rhaetian adopted the gentle habit of Alpine farmer or mountain guide. During the fifth century, the obstinate struggle between Roman and Teuton was decided in favor of the Teuton. The great migrations of the Alamanni and the Burgundians established in the Alps a germanic way of life. At the end of the fifth century, the Franks overcame the Alamanni who remained.

 

 

 

 

 

The French. The medieval French were a compilation of half-civilized Gauls, cultured Romans, barbarous Germans, and expatriated Britons – almost every physical type found in Europe – who had collected on the same countryside during two thousand years. The germanic Frank rudely shocked them all into transformation. Two peoples were exempted: the Celtic Gaul of Britanny and the Gascon, a descendant of the Iberian, were able to resist the germanic influx.

 

 

 

Il nous est souvenu du lieu natal
o nous n’avons naissance

[With us is remembered the natal place
where we were not born]

— St. John Perse, Amers, IV

The process of human generation is psychic as well as physical. The fact of psychic phylogenesis was corroborated in clinical research a generation ago by the analytical psychologist Carl Jung. The dialectical process itself was intuited by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche three generations before that. Many years ago, as a university student, I traced out the principal facts of human genealogy in Nietzsche’s pages without complete awareness of their significance. I trace them again here, in these pages, with, I hope, more understanding.