A Vision of the Future

A Glimpse of the Shape of Things to Come…

I’d like to take a slight break from my usual fare.

As an antiquarian, a folklorist, and a Traditionalist, my interests are often chained to the past—or so, at least, it seems. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth; according to the cyclic understanding of time, of the cycle of the ages and the circular or even helical progression and regression of time and history, the past in many ways can be considered the future, and the future the past.

That is a deeply esoteric philosophy, the recondite meaning of which is elusive, and I don’t expect everyone to understand; the truth is, I can’t say I fully understand its many intricacies, contradictions, paradoxes, and future implications myself. That would take an esotericist and metaphysicist of far greater erudition and standing than my humble self, that much is for certain. There are plenty of sages in the College of Seth and the Order of Janus (about which I shall write in a future post) who are far better versed in these matters than me; I leave it to them, and gladly, to brood over the mysteries of time.

The point I’m trying to make is that my interests are as fully directed futureward as they are toward the past—in fact, I would even say more so.

And that brings me to the topic of today’s essay: a vision of the future. I have upon my desk a statuette of Antevorta, or Porrima, an ancient Roman nymph or goddess of the future; she was one of the divine Camenae, and a sister to Dea Egeria, the quasi-mythical instructress and helpmeet of the wise early Roman king Numa Pompilius.

The curious effigy was given to me as a gift by a fellow antiquarian, who discovered it in Rome many decades ago; this individual told me that it was found in the ruins of the Aedes Hecates, the ancient meeting place of the Sodales Chaldaici, but I have no way of verifying that information.

In any case, I fancy that the numen of Antevorta still inspirits this statuette, and that she—or it—still sometimes vouchsafes glimpses of the future, and I even imagine that I have been privileged at times to receive these visions.

I suppose this is my roundabout way of saying that, some weeks ago, I experienced such a vision of the future. Now I am not a clairvoyant, nor am I gifted with anything that might even approximately be called a precognitive or anticipatory faculty; the shape of things to come are as closed to me as they are to any other human being.

So perhaps it was a gift of Antevorta; or perhaps it is merely, as René Guénon concludes, that those with Traditionalist leanings may possess “an outlook that allows them to reconstitute the shape of a ‘lost world,’ as well as to foresee, at least in its broad outlines, what will be the shape of a future world.”¹

I have sometimes been privileged to “reconstitute a ‘lost world,’” as Guénon so idiosyncratically puts it, as well as to foresee the shape of a future world. Sometime I shall write about the lost worlds of earlier periods in our present cycle, and even anterior cycles altogether, that I have seen; today, what is far more interesting is to explore what seems to be in store for us in the future.

---

I cannot say how far in the future my vision took place.

Perhaps it was a few hundred years. Although, it occurs to me that it was much further afield than that; I would say a thousand years, at least. Certainly no less than eight hundred years.

That sounds like such a bizarre thing to say, but there it is. I glimpsed a future world many centuries from now, and the world was a very different place. No, there was none of the usual science fiction tripe: no gleaming cities with mile-high towers, nanotech architecture, flying cars or personal aero-flitters, artificially-intelligent robotic humanoids, extraterrestrial visitors, immense starships lifting off for alien worlds, or any of that glittery nonsense.

I too have seen these future “predictions,” and I scoff at them as surely as you must.

No, what I saw was a very different world. I cannot say that it was a better world, or a more desirable one. I can only say that it was very strange, and unlike ours in almost every way.

It was a future in which the Tradition had been rediscovered, and was honored and venerated by a humbler and less frenetic people. There had been wars, of course; many of them, and brutal. Weapons of unimaginable potency had been used in these conflicts—I have a glimpse of unfamiliar energy weapons, and probably nuclear weapons as well. Diseases of ferocious virulency were also employed, and the world was much changed, and the numbers of people much reduced.

In short, the modern world had reached its natural dénouement—chaos, horror, death, destruction.

The world that followed this devastation was divided into great civilizational blocs or spheres of influence; I would call them empires, for each region seemed to be politically and organizationally integrated, but that elicits an image of militaristic and expansionist political entities, and these civilizations were as far from that as could be imagined.

Broadly, these civilizational blocs seemed to correspond to the distinct civilizations we know today—the European, the Eurasian, the Islamic, the African, the Indian, and the East Asian. There were civilizations centered in North and South America as well, and it was upon the latter continent, in a strange culture that had its seat in the Altiplano among the towering Andean Cordillera, and which comprehended a vast expanse of territory from the Darien Gap to assorted remote Antarctic colonies, that my vision was especially fixed.

There was an ethnic component to these blocs, or at least so it seemed to me; each civilization had more or less consolidated into a generally uniform racial and ethnic configuration over the intervening centuries. The North American and European types seemed to be the most mongrelized, but were quite attractive nonetheless; the South American type, with heavy admixtures of ancient European and East Asian blood, was the most beautiful.

Of the globalistic, technocratic, ruthlessly materialistic and economistic Liberal Democratic civilization of our own day, there was not a trace. It had, evidently, been consumed in the wars that swept away the old world; I could discern no traces of its iconography or ideology in any of what I beheld in that future world, and its passage was neither mourned nor lamented.

I say that in this world the Tradition had been rediscovered and resurrected; each civilization cultivated and pursued its own contingent manifestation of Tradition, of the Absolute, and in South America it was their lot to nurture and preserve the Christian tradition. It was not the degraded Catholicism of today, nor the degenerate tag-ends of materialistic and spiritually empty Protestantism we see shuffling toward their appointed extinction in our own time; this was a vibrant, energized Christianity that seemed to combine the intellectually vibrant Catholicism of the Middle Ages—prior to the destruction of the Knights Templar—with the masculine vigor of Orthodox Christianity.

I explored what seemed to be the chief city of this South American civilization, and though I never learned its name, it was magnificent beyond anything I could dream of. It was built upon a great plateau over a mile high, surrounded by placid lakes and forests of monkey puzzle and southern beech; the city’s many buildings split the thin air and rivaled the nearby ramparts of the Andean Range for grandeur.

Its architecture was utterly alien to me, although it clearly had a lengthy artistic and iconographic tradition behind it; there was nothing of the weird, untraditional, and unbeautiful lines and styles of the buildings of modern cities. I saw no metals in use; there were no great glass and steel titans in this metropolis. Instead, the buildings were all of a beautiful white stone—some technological innovation no doubt—which seemed soft and sometimes opalescent, and yet possessed a strength and sturdiness that could sustain soaring constructions and ambitious architectural fantasies.

It was the social and political dynamics of this civilization, however, that intrigued me most. You see, there was nothing superficial about my vision of the future; it wasn’t limited merely to sights and impressions, but I was able to learn how things really worked.

I can’t say if there was anything about this political organization that possesses historical parallels or antecedents—at least I am not aware of it. Perhaps the College of Seth, and some other Traditionalist groups that I know of, have records of such things in earlier periods of our cycle.

Anyhow, the South American bloc was strictly hierarchical, and was rigidly divided into mutually immiscible castes—a metaphysical or brahmanic caste, a military or warrior caste, an economic caste, and finally a lowest, serf-like caste. At the apex was the Autarch, whose office combined the duties and dignities of the metaphysical and military castes. The Autarch was advised and elected by a council of highest-caste metaphysicists, the interpreters of Tradition and the religious legislators of the society; the new Autarch was always drawn from this advisory body.

The Autarch’s power was absolute and unquestioned, with no real checks and balances; nevertheless, his training and education, to say nothing of his intellectual orientation, assured that he was far from being an arbitrary and autocratic tyrant—a species of “leader” that is all too frequent in our modern societies, even in the self-styled Liberal Democratic ones.

As I said, the society itself was rigidly hierarchical. Democracy, as we understand it, was a dead letter; only the learned metaphysicists had any say in the government of the continent, with even the military caste being relegated to an outer position. I was intrigued but somewhat disturbed by their educational arrangements—the great masses of people were restricted to a rudimentary and limited education that focused largely on historical, religious, and artistic subjects. Literacy, however, was almost non-existent; very few were taught to read or write, apparently on the principle that few in the old civilizations had profitably employed this knowledge, and that its misuse had led to the terrible abuses and usurpations that generated such social chaos, spiritual malaise, and intellectual stagnation in the old world.

Those few who demonstrated a true aptitude for reading and writing, and were incorrigible when it came to learning the art, were noticed and quickly advanced to the higher schools of learning, were they were more fully trained and educated to enter the metaphysical caste. In that way, social mobility of a kind was preserved; for the higher castes were closed to none, but admitted only those who possessed certain rare aptitudes and talents.

I was also shocked to discover that this society had none of the evolutionistic or materialistic leanings that are so natural, and stifling, in our own. Although the intellectual clerisy, the metaphysicists, were certainly aware of evolutionist thought and theories, and were deeply familiar with its proposed mechanisms and doctrine, they were implacably hostile to it, and forbade its instruction. It was seen as corrosive, intellectually destructive, nihilistic, and anti-metaphysical. In its place, the people were taught a subtle and sophisticated metaphysics of the origin of life and mankind, in which I discerned many similarities to the Hermetic notion of cosmic correspondences, “man the microcosm,” as well as other esoteric doctrines about the Absolute, the diffusion of Tradition throughout history, and the multiple states of the being.

Astronomy, too, was not so much rejected as reorganized into something more in keeping with the metaphysics of Tradition; there was none of the cold, inhuman physics that distinguishes that science today. Instead, the science of correspondences was extended to all celestial objects—even the remotest black holes and most inhospitable extrasolar worlds were shown to be connected, in a mysterious fashion I could scarcely understand, to the earth and ultimately to man.

What we would call the scientific and technological disciplines and fields were not exactly neglected in this society, but they were decidedly subordinate to metaphysical and spiritual education, and were held in less reverence by a civilization whose priorities were directed toward other aims than the merely economic and material.

Scientific disciplines no longer held pride of place in the educational field, and were reserved largely for the lower, economic caste; even so, there was neither technological nor scientific stagnation, and technical innovations continued apace. In fact, the advances in theoretical metaphysics and the cultivation of intellectual intuition, together with the perfusion of these notions and ideas throughout the society at large, improved the lesser, materialistic sciences in ways that are not possible in our civilization.

The broadening of mental horizons triggered numerous “scientific” and technical advancements, which were reflected in the impressive—although not all-consuming—material conditions of the South American civilization. But there was nothing technocratic or “device-obsessed” about this culture; material technology was useful, but it was not the centerpiece of human life, nor was there any of that technological destructiveness that leads to such dissipation in our own time.

As an example, these people possessed a “science” of gravity and inertial mechanics that enabled them to develop a propulsion method that was unlike anything I could imagine. They had certain aerial vehicles that could travel at blistering velocities far greater than the swiftest aircraft of our own day; they could stop on a dime with no harm to the vehicle’s occupants, and they were capable of unrestricted travel through various media, including water or even a vacuum, without any change in shape or propulsive techniques.

Space exploration was also a pursuit for these people, but it was far from the insufferable and plodding scientism of today’s inert space agencies; it was undertaken as an inherently dangerous and heroic enterprise, the preserve of reckless youths from the warrior caste, who wished to prove themselves and enlarge human scientific and metaphysical knowledge.

It was, in other words, a deeply religious enterprise, and these people scoffed at the notion of using robotic craft to do what was properly man’s role to perform. In fact, this civilization had no automatic or robotic technology at all, and artificial intelligence and computer programs were almost entirely unknown.

The metaphysical caste, I discovered, had prohibited the artificial approximation or imitation of human intelligence, by any method or means, in a series of ancient (but still far future to our time) religious injunctions. The result, from the little I could glimpse of this society’s operation, was a far more harmonious social integration, and although the majority of the people belonged to the lowest, or “serf,” caste, they seemed happier—both socially, spiritually, and even economically—than the vast horizon of essentially financially enslaved peoples in our own civilization.

I have little space to digress on the economic organization of these future people; from what I could tell, it was certainly a top-down command economy, probably fascistic in essential nature, yet with many socialist and even capitalist elements. But the lowest castes seemed to have a sophisticated guild-like organization that educated them to a trade and protected their interests. There was none of the chaotic and socially disruptive human migration that so disfigures our own polities; the elite of each civilizational bloc was totally sejunct, disconnected and with few avenues of communication with one another, which prevented them from cooperating and organizing for their own interests against those of their people.

And this was—as the social conditions of the South American civilization at least evinced—a very salutary development. As a further note, it was obvious that women held little political visibility in this civilization; they were disbarred from positions of rule or government altogether, and all peoples—male or female—were denied the democratic franchise, so there was none of that gynecocratic and matriarchal dysfunction that has ground our own civilization to a precipitate halt.

That must come as an unwelcome surprise to modern sensibilities—but then the spurious notion of “progress” was always an illusory thing, invented by counter-traditional forces to lend an aura of inevitability to their subversive guerrilla campaign against history.

That is not to say, of course, that women were unhappy or unfulfilled; but each person, male or female, intelligent or unintelligent, metaphysical or unmetaphysical, weak or strong, wealthy or destitute, had their allotted role to play in the harmonious functioning of this society, whose stratification was in some ways far simpler, yet in others far more complex, than our own. As a modern, despite myself, I could not say that I would be happy in this civilization; it was too alien to me, and undoubtedly my meager talents and aptitudes would not have suited me for a very high caste at all.

In fact, I’d probably be fit only for the lowest caste, and that is a prospect I hardly relish compared to the success—limited though it is—that I’ve enjoyed in this society. Still, I can’t help but admire this future civilization, which seems in so many ways a saner and better adjusted one. As to conflicts with the other civilizational blocs, I saw little evidence of this; relations seemed cordial enough, though there wasn’t much in the way of international trade, and each society seemed more or less autarkous and self sufficient.

Of those busy and insufferable international bodies, societies, councils, and organizations that proliferate in our age like unwholesome fungi in the wake of a drenching rain, there were none to be seen.

Wars did apparently happen, for there was a military caste. But I think this caste existed more for complementary and symmetrical purposes, for a society without a warrior caste is a society that is missing an important part of itself. What little war there was seemed restricted to the peripheries of the empires, and was likely enough intended more as a proving ground and theater for the exercise and honing of the warrior caste and its virtues.

There was one other thing, and this was less clear to me. In the vision of the future that was vouchsafed to me, I had the lingering feeling that the South American civilization was anticipating or preparing for some impending and epochal event. What that was, I never learned.

Might it have been some contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence or civilization? It’s possible, and I had brief glimpses of what seemed to be plans for starships or something of the sort, which were doubtless meant for the exploration of the near stars. But I think this explanation is unlikely, for a variety of reasons.

Was there some new stage impending in the development of man and his intellectual and physical powers? I saw nothing to overtly indicate this possibility. Nor was there any indication of a great technological or scientific advance; most intellectual research was conducted along metaphysical avenues in this future age, and this did not lend itself to tangible fruits—at least as our civilization measures such.

And it wasn’t only the South American peoples who seemed caught up in this feeling of dread expectancy. All the races, all the civilizations, were equally participating in this mysterious feeling. Though I never learned the answer, I suspected that it had something to do with the inevitable progression of the cycles, and that the Iron Age, the Kali-Yuga, was nearing its appointed end, and that people looked with fearful anticipation toward the conclusion of the cycle and the impending birth of a future Golden Age.

Although the time of this appointed end is unknown to us, it was apparently otherwise with the metaphysicists of this future age; I believe they knew the hour of the Eschaton, and that it was quickly approaching at the time of my vision. There was a great deal of excitement in the air, as well as terror, and this I can well understand…

Anyhow, I’ve written enough of this strange vision of the future for now. I promised myself that I wouldn’t write posts that are this long, but this one felt cathartic for some reason. I will undoubtedly return to this topic again at some point; there is a lot to unpack here, as the kids say, and I’ve hardly scratched the surface.

I didn’t even mention the numerous paranormal phenomena that I witnessed in that future time, and the strange creatures and entities whose presence confirmed my earlier musings on the nature of such things—for these people of the future were unquestionably less materialized and “solidified” than us moderns, and were far more receptive to the subtle world.

I can tell you that it came as quite a shock to see what I had always thought were mythological and legendary creatures promiscuously roaming the streets of the great city, alongside human beings who seemed to think nothing of it at all.

Well, that’s all I have for now. In the meantime, the statuette of Antevorta remains on my desk, and I pray that she sends me dreams of the future…

1. René Guénon, La Règne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945).[The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001), pg. 44.]