Some weeks ago I published an article in this newsletter that discussed the science-fictional concept of time travel—a notion that has always fascinated me, perhaps even a little too much.
In that article, I very largely dismissed the plausibility of time travel, and I adduced the sophisticated argumentation of Traditionalism, and no less an authority than René Guénon himself, to demonstrate this implausibility in as precise and rigorous a way as possible. Now, the arguments I put forward in that article may or may not have convinced the reader; regardless, I feel it’s important—for the sake of that objective impartiality that so few scientists display these days—to give equal weight to a counter-argument, which is put forward by an occult school of thought that is at least as worthy of attention as that of the Traditionalists.
Specifically, I’m referring to the rather unusual ideas held by members of the College of Seth, whose cosmological and eschatological theories reserve a very important place for time travel. I beg the reader’s indulgence in this—the College’s thinking on these matters is very unorthodox, but that’s part of the reason I thought it was so important to explain it in the following essay.
I have before me as I write a pamphlet or monograph by the College’s scientific section, which explores in some detail the matter of time travel, and—perhaps most importantly—describes several alleged instances of historical time travel. These are not the usual suspects adduced in these sorts of claims, such as the infamous Moberly-Jourdain Incident, the supposed time-slip of Sir Robert Victor Goddard, or even such entertaining nonsense as the so-called “Time-Traveling Hipster.”
On the contrary, the pamphlet put out by the College claims that its scientific section has investigated and confirmed the veracity of a number of other incidents that allegedly prove that time travel is not only possible but is a verifiable reality, and has had a profound impact on human history and indeed on the history of the earth itself, irrespective of whatever species claims the mantle of being its most advanced and intelligent.
The pamphlet begins by enumerating several instances of so-called “OOPArts,” or “out-of-place artifacts.” These are anomalous objects that appear in the archaeological or even the fossil record, and seemingly provide proof that advanced—or at the very least anachronistic—technology or artifacts were inexplicably present in remote prehistoric time periods.
The most intriguing claims in this section come from investigations conducted by members of the College of Seth who were involved in government research, or who had access to comprehensive academic and governmental research archives. Among the OOPArts considered most credible were:
The discovery, in Triassic strata in southern Utah, of fossilized human tissue and skeletal fragments; the material included teeth, certain bones, and even the fossil impressions of what appear to be various non-mineralizable tissue systems (nervous tissue, circulatory networks, internal organs, etc.). Extensive excavations in the 1970s proved that the fossil material was distributed downward across hundreds of feet of strata, with a different tissue system confined to a single layer—almost like one of those superimposable anatomical diagrams of the human body found in old textbooks or encyclopedias. The material was completely uncovered and removed for study by scientists from the College of Seth, and their research was never publicized. Their conclusion was that it represented the tragic outcome of some future experiment in time travel that went gruesomely awry—the human experimental subject had obviously encountered some mishap that caused his tissue systems to be disaggregated and deposited at intervals of thousands of years in the desert interior of Triassic Laurasia over two hundred million years ago (fortunately, the taphonomic conditions of this part of the earth at this particular time in prehistory were peculiarly conducive to fossilization).
The impression of a men’s size thirteen boot, found in the Precambrian shales of an undisclosed Arctic island by a Canadian research team. Again, this discovery was never made public, but it was considered accurate and truthful by the College’s scientific section. This fossil print was attributed to a time traveler in the earth’s remote past.1
Apparently, the College of Seth preserves certain historical records indicating that the Germans discovered a massive OOPArt in German East Africa shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. It was something like a giant stone egg in appearance, but was really a kind of “geode” containing what could only be described as a time machine from the far future that had become encased in sedimentary rock. The object was taken to Berlin under close guard and was subjected to intense scientific scrutiny; a fragmentary and incomplete “reverse engineering” of some of its technology was said to be behind the startling scientific and technological achievements of Germany during the National Socialist period.
Finally, Soviet scientists apparently found a gigantic OOPArt underneath the Black Sea in the 1950s; intelligence sources claim they brought the thing to the surface, in whole or in part, over many years, and had ascertained that it was some kind of “city” or perhaps even a spacecraft from the remote future that had “time-shifted” into a period several hundred thousand years in the past, before being inundated and submerged in the same cataclysm that created the Black Sea. No further information, including as to who or what might have created the object, was available.
Obviously, this is all very dubious stuff, at best.2 But the authors of the pamphlet are earnest in their belief that it is true, and they don’t stop there. A further section makes the startling claim that many of the sightings in the so-called “Airship Scares” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States, New Zealand, and Europe were really of time-traveling craft.
This even extends to the strange story of the brig “Christine,” which was recounted in the pages of the Houston Daily Post in 1897. The last survivor of this vessel, which had shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean in 1862, told his harrowing tale to a John Leander of El Campo, Texas. Marooned on a small island, the survivors saw some kind of massive, four-winged airship in the sky which was in evident distress, and finally crashed near the island.
Eventually, the survivors explored the craft, and found it to contain the bodies of strange-featured and extremely tall men. Everything about the vessel, including its strange markings, was incomprehensible to the shipwrecked sailors, and that fact even drove some of them mad. In any case, some of the men rigged up a makeshift raft from the wreckage, and escaped the island. They kept quiet about their experience, fearing ridicule, but the last survivor finally disburdened himself of the strange story on the eve of the new century. This man also claimed to have retained an artifact from the airship—a kind of ring or annular device.
Anyhow, the story is almost universally panned as an obvious bit of late-nineteenth-century journalistic nonsense, but the College researchers claim to have verified it, and even say they possess the “ring” that was salvaged from the airship. The craft itself they claim is an “early quadripennate time-ship” from something called a “late-stage Diomedean Empire,” which they say will exist some five thousand years in the future, based upon certain occult histories that are in the College’s possession.
I am aware that the College of Seth possesses some very interesting occult histories of the earth…but a history of the future is a new one to me.
The pamphlet concludes with a section that explains in great detail a theory that has gained much currency in recent years—namely, that many, if not most, of the unidentified flying objects (UFOs) or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) witnessed throughout history, and more commonly in the past century, are undoubtedly time-traveling vessels from a more or less remote future. Actually, I’m quite certain that the books, films, and other propaganda efforts pushing this theory are either created by or can be traced directly to members of the College of Seth.
It’s in these theories that the College most nakedly displays its extreme materialistic and evolutionistic tendencies, since the theory holds that a race or species of highly-evolved future humans has cracked the seemingly intractable problem of time travel, and is now exploring past and maybe even future ages. As I explained in my earlier article on this topic, both concepts—that of “evolved” and morphologically or intellectually “advanced” or derived human species (whatever that might mean), as well as time travel in any form—are anti-metaphysical and counter-traditional.
Nevertheless, the pamphlet goes on to make some extraordinary claims, including one about the supposedly veracious “alien encounter” of Filiberto Caponi in 1993, near Ascoli Piceno in eastern Italy. The College’s scientific section affirms that the creature observed and photographed by Caponi is not only real, but is not in fact an alien at all—rather, it is a kind of highly-devolved near-human congener from a known period many millions of years in the future. The creature was presumably kept as a pet by some future time-explorer, but escaped during one of these expeditions and—unfortunately for it—was abandoned in the Italian countryside.
What is one to make of such an incredible statement? And why is there such an insistence on the reality of time travel among the College’s members? The simple—although unsatisfying—answer is that I am not permitted to give a full accounting of the reason for this.
All that I can say is that the occult cosmology and eschatology of the College of Seth, which is outlined in their secret history of the world, is something like an Ouroboros, the tail-swallowing serpent of occult semiology—they maintain, in a kind of convoluted form of “Ancient Alienism,” that there is both fossil, mythological, and traditional evidence for the existence of a race of extremely advanced beings on Mars, Venus, and the earth beginning a little over a billion years ago. This was the first intelligent race on earth, they assert (though not the first in the solar system), but there is a twist—they are also the last intelligent race on earth, for they are supposedly the endpoint of the evolution of life on this planet, whose demise in the far future the creatures will apparently flee by traveling through time, to a period over a billion years in our past.3
According to the College’s occult history, these beings—which some believe are not merely the endpoint of terrestrial evolution generally, but of human evolution specifically—manipulated the primitive life of the earth, Mars, and Venus (which has since become extinct on the latter two planets), and are essentially our Creators. But as to what led to their extinction, sometime around a quarter of a billion years ago…the occult histories are curiously silent on that topic.4
I have a great deal of respect for the men and women of the College of Seth; I hold their contributions to occult and paranormal research of every kind in the highest esteem, and I have cultivated long and fruitful friendships with many of their most distinguished members. But adherence to a false philosophy cannot be overlooked, and here, it must be said, it has led the College widely astray.
The manifest materialism and evolutionism of the College, it pains me to say, effectively disqualifies its ideological leanings from any pretense to truth. Even so, I thought it important, and considered myself honor-bound, to present their rather idiosyncratic views on the matter of time travel in as honest and impartial an attitude as I could muster. After all, the immense clout enjoyed by the College of Seth in occult and paranormalist circles entitles them to nothing less—even if their ideas, as I think you’ll agree, cannot be anything else than purest fantasy.
It all reminds me of another time-travel tale I had of a friend from South Florida, which involves a little bit of everything—a mysterious porn star in Miami, a hard-bitten private detective, fugitive National Socialists in the future, and beings from an even remoter period of time—but I’ll have to save that corker for another article…
Given the age of the print impression (in strata dated to approximately seven hundred to eight hundred million years ago), the research team floated the theory that the anomalous presence of this time traveler at this precise period in the earth’s prehistory may be behind the fortuitous appearance at the same time of multicellular animal life (“Ediacaran” or “Vendian” fauna) in the fossil record. The ridiculous theory, if I recall it correctly, maintains that all animal life on earth evolved from the inadvertently discarded biological matter of this anonymous “chrononaut.”
And even were it not, it is at least conceivable—albeit remotely—that these anomalies might be more readily explained by Traditionalist theories of temporal cyclicity. That is a more plausible explanation, at any rate, than the appeals of the College of Seth to outlandish time-travel hypotheses.
It’s worth pointing out that there seems to be an interesting and not inconsiderable degree of consilience between this idea of a time-traveling, multi-planetary race as posited by the members of the College of Seth—the knowledge of which is said to derive from this society’s privileged access to certain occult data—and some of the more outlandish notions put forward by the Heideggerian and Prometheist philosopher Jason Reza Jorjani, for instance in such books as Prometheism (Arktos: London, 2020) and Closer Encounters (Arktos: London, 2021). This consilience, I should add, includes not only the matter of time-traveling races but even extends to Jorjani’s highly idiosyncratic notion of a far-future “Trickster” entity, which also seems to be a kind of evolutionary endpoint of terrestrial life, and is said to exert an influence on past ages; there is a great deal of correspondence, I think, between Jorjani’s “Trickster” and an entity only ever darkly alluded to as “The Inhabitant” by members of the College. Nevertheless, I have no reason to believe that Jorjani is a member of the College of Seth, or is even aware of its existence; any similarities between their thinking is unlikely to be the product of anything more than a fortuitous convergence of two completely independent schools of thought.
There is a sub-chapter in an extensive secret history of the world—which was prepared by a member of the College about thirty or so years ago—that goes into greater detail about these beings, which are denominated “Martians” in the elaborate cosmogony of the College of Seth (so-named because they were originally believed to be the native inhabitants of the Red Planet). It is also claimed that they were the primordial inhabitants of the ancient ur-continents of Hyperborea and Mu:
“In fact, the Martians were almost entirely confined to the primordial continent of Mu; the formation of the Hyperborean and Lemurian landmasses postdate their demise by some millions of years—though many fossils and shale impressions of these strange, invertebrate creatures have been discovered upon certain circumpolar islands, the remnants of Hyperborea, as a function of continental drift…and it has been shown that at the period of their first appearance in the Solar System, 1.2 billion years ago, the Martians quickly colonized not only the earth and Mars, but Venus as well, and were somehow connected with the destruction of the latter’s formerly very extensive biosphere.
“The Martians have been a profound mystery throughout human history. Almost nothing about them is known—aside from the spare, confusing facts vouchsafed by a study of their few fossil remains, and a handful of scarcely-credible legends contained within the occult tradition. The exact nature of their appearance is not even surely known; their biology, while undoubtedly adventitious to the earth and Solar System, seemed to possess certain very telltale hallmarks of the life native to our sidereal universe—they were neither extradimensional nor ultracosmic. It is not even known whether they comprised one species or many—the classified research of the NASA Viking III lander on Mars disclosed a number of interesting fossil structures, which apparently corresponded to something like habitations or cities of some sort. These fossils, though immensely greater in size, apparently possessed an ‘anatomy’ and biological structure very similar to the Martians; moreover, the discovery of an enormous submarine fossil in Arctic waters by researchers from our own College in 1983, which was later correlated with a secret report on the findings of the 1982 Soviet Venera-14 probe on Venus, suggests that they employed an immense ‘organism’ of close evolutionary affinities to themselves as a means of space travel.
“Whatever they were, and however arrived, they were unquestionably the sole intelligent race upon the earth—and probably in the Solar System—from the period 1.2 billion to 250 million years ago. It is at least highly likely that they tampered with the primitive living things of the earth’s oceans, which represented the highest form of organized matter on the planet at the time; the appearance of increasingly more sophisticated multicellular life shortly after the Martians’ appearance is too coincidental to be merely fortuitous [cf. note 1 above]. Whether this was done deliberately, with some definite purpose in mind, or simply through accident or sheer indifference, is impossible to say…
[…]
“All that we can say with certainty—according to what, admittedly sparse, textual evidence we have—is that…the Martians committed racial suicide at the close of the Permian period, over 250 million years ago…But though it was long believed that the Martians destroyed themselves—and the theories for why they should do so are as numerous as those who care to speculate—some have come, in recent years, to doubt that this was the case at all. Or, if they did commit suicide, that they were compelled to it by some terrible catastrophe, or some kind of racial fear or panic the horror of which we cannot even begin to comprehend. The circumstances of the demise of the Martians are, at the very least, highly suspect; and that date, 250 million years ago at the close of the Permian, is remarkable for more things than just the extinction of the enigmatic Martians…” (Diomedes Palaeologus, The Slaves of the Black Sun: A Secret History of the World (London: Sethian Publishing House, 1989), pp. 7-9.)