Joan and the English colonization of America

Rudolf Steiner had this interesting take on how Joan of Arc affected world history, from a 1915 lecture.

At that time it was indeed the Christ impulse acting in Joan of Arc, through its Michaelic servants, that prevented a possible merging of France and England, causing England to be forced back onto its island. And this achieved two things: first, France continued to have a free hand in Europe. This can be seen if we study the history of France over the following centuries — the essential element of the French spirit was able to influence European culture entirely without hindrance. The second thing which was achieved was that England was given its domain outside the continent of Europe. This deed, brought in through Joan of Arc, was a blessing not only for the French but also for the English, compelling them to take up their domain.

The reason the English later built an empire in America and elsewhere, Steiner implies, is that Joan had prevented them from building an empire in Europe.

This is synchronistically interesting. On December 29, 2020, after the sync fairies had brought Joan to my attention and just three days before my direct encounter with her, I noted that Joan's surname was sometimes written as Dare rather than Darc and connected that with the name of the first English child born in America.

Dare as an alternative form of Joan's surname is interesting because it suggests Virginia Dare -- whose given name, Virginia, has the same meaning as La Pucelle.

On March 30, 2022, I noted that John Dee also had a name suggestive of the Maid's.

According to Wikipedia, John Dee's surname comes from the Welsh word for "black." In other words, his name was John Dark.

At the time, I didn't know what to make of this link. Dee, a spy and magician, seemed to have nothing to do with the purity of Joan, and associating the two seemed almost blasphemous. Now it makes a bit more sense, if we accept Steiner's idea that Joan's defeat of the English set in motion the chain of events that resulted in the creation of the British Empire. John Dee was the one who coined the term British Empire, well before any such empire existed, and then pushed Queen Elizabeth to make it a reality by colonizing the New World -- a colonization which symbolically began with the birth of Virginia Dare in 1587.

My recent posts about John Dee have focused on the event of April 27, 1592. I learned of the Steiner lecture quoted above through an email I was sent on April 27, 2022 -- but which I didn't discover until last night because it had been sent to my spam folder.

Lucifer, Ahriman, and Ganymede virtue sets

Rudolf Steiner saw Lucifer, Ahriman, and the Christ in Aristotelian terms: Lucifer is one extreme; Ahriman, the other; and the Christ represents the perfectly balanced "golden mean" between the two. This corresponds to the virtue theory propounded in the Nicomachean Ethics -- where, for example, Courage is seen as a golden mean between the extremes of Cowardice and Rashness.

It is wrong to conceptualize the Christ this way -- as if the goodness of God consisted in being just Ahrimanic enough without being too Ahrimanic -- as if Lucifer were 0, Ahriman were 1, and the Christ were 0.618... (realized to infinite decimal places in the Christ himself, but only approximated by mere mortals!). "Moderation in all things" is a Greek maxim, not a Christian one. The Christian version is this: "I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth" (Rev. 3:15-16).

As I pointed out in my post "Vice and vice versa," Aristotle's one-dimensional theory of virtue is also an inadequate conceptualization of evil. It is quite possible to be simultaneously cowardly and rash -- it has in fact been the norm since 2020 -- but there is no Aristotelian way to model that. I recommended as an improvement the Ganymede virtue set (GVS) as pioneered by "G" of the Junior Ganymede blog.

A two-dimensional GVS consists of two virtues and two vices (whereas a one-dimensional Aristotelian virtue set, or AVS, has only one virtue per two vices). Cowardice and Rashness are not opposites; Cowardice is the opposite of Courage, and Rashness is the opposite of Prudence. Cowardice and Rashness are complementary (not opposite) vices, and Courage and Prudence are complementary virtues. It is (as we see every day now) possible to be both extremely cowardly and extremely rash. And it is possible to be (like the Christ?) both perfectly courageous and perfectly prudent. To quote G himself, referring to a slightly different virtue set, "Confident Humility sounds like a contradiction. So does Arrogant Timidity. But they are common enough that they are almost archetypes."

In the GVS diagram above, it is clear that one of the vices (Rashness) is Luciferic, and the other (Cowardice) is Ahrimanic. Is that a general rule? Here are some more GVS diagrams from G (taken from "Charting Virtue" and the other posts linked therein, to which the reader is referred for more details on these particular virtue sets).

Immodesty is Luciferic. Uglification is Ahrimanic.

Pride is Luciferic. Despair and contemptibleness are Ahrimanic.

The cult of authenticity etc. is Luciferic. Hypocrisy is Ahrimanic.

The cult of authenticity etc. is Luciferic. Conspiracy and blackmail are Ahrimanic.

Rebellion is Luciferic. Legalism is Ahrimanic.

High time preference, like all the multitude of sins G puts under the heading of "authenticity," is Luciferic. Fear and timidity are Ahrimanic.

Every single GVS we've looked at contains one vice that is obviously Luciferic and another that is obviously Ahrimanic, and there is never any uncertainty or ambiguity as to which is which. (I have so arranged the charts that the Luciferic vice is always in the upper right, and its Ahrimanic complement in the lower left.) I'm going to go ahead and call this a general rule.

This implies that just as there is Luciferic evil and Ahrimanic evil, there are two complementary categories of good. Here are how these four categories are exemplified in the GVS diagrams above:

• Luciferic vices: Rashness, immodesty, pride, "authenticity," "being true to yourself," the god within, gossip, "What? It's the truth!", confessionalism, rebellion, avant-gardism, high time preference
• Anti-Luciferic virtues: Prudence, modesty, humility, the "nameless virtue" of which hypocrisy is a distortion, discretion, obedience
• Ahrimanic vices: Cowardice, uglification, despair, contemptibleness, hypocrisy, conspiracy, blackmail, legalism, Pharisaism, fear, timidity
• Anti-Ahrimanic virtues: Courage, comeliness, glory, sincerity, plainspokenness, speaking out, breaking the letter to keep the spirit, trusting God to provide

All four of these seem to be coherent categories, and they need names. In my post "Satan divided against himself," I described Luciferic sin as "sacrificing the avoidance of evil in order to pursue good" and Ahrimanic sin as "sacrificing the pursuit of good in order to avoid evil." This suggests the following analysis.

However, "seeking good" and "avoiding evil" are too abstract to fully capture the "feel" of each type of virtue. They really need names, like Lucifer and Ahriman.

Well, Ahriman comes from Zoroastrianism, where his opposite is Ahura Mazda -- so perhaps we can call the good-seeking, anti-Ahrimanic virtues Ahuric. In Zoroastrianism, ahuras are good and daevas are evil. In Vedic usage, though, asuras are evil and devas are good. It would seem, then, that the anti-Luciferic, evil-avoiding virtues that complement the Ahuric should be called the Devic. The master GVS, then, underlying all others, is this:

If anyone has better name suggestions, leave them in the comments.

Satan divided against himself

Disclaimer: My terms are borrowed (by way of Terry Boardman and Bruce Charlton) from Rudolf Steiner, but I cannot claim to be using them in anything like a strictly Steinerian sense. In fact I have read only a tiny fraction of Steiner's voluminous output and assimilated only a tiny fraction of that. However, his demonology has long since taken on a life of its own.

These are just some tentative notes. I neither pretend nor aspire to be an expert on evil.

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Sorath

MEPHISTO:

I am the spirit that negates.

And rightly so, for all that comes to be

Deserves to perish wretchedly;

'Twere better nothing would begin.

Thus everything that your terms, sin,

Destruction, evil represent—

That is my proper element.

-- Goethe's Faust (Walter Kaufmann's translation)

By Sorath I mean the principle of evil at its purest, the devil of all devils, Goethe's "spirit that negates." God is the love-motivated Creator, and Sorath is the hate-motivated anti-Creator, who opposes all creation -- who thinks it "better nothing would begin" and that all that has begun "deserves to perish wretchedly."

Sorath's ultimate goal is that nothing at all exist, including Sorath himself. Does Sorath exist, then? Perhaps not. Perhaps it is not possible that he should. It may be possible to be God, even to be Lucifer, but not to be Sorath. After all, who can fail to see the self-contradictory nature of the statement, "I am the spirit that negates"? Sorath should probably not be thought of as a person at all, but as the hypothetical limit to which evil converges. Appropriately, Sorath is not a name from folklore, not a demon people are actually said to have interacted with, but an artificial creation of Steiner's, made from the Hebrew numerals for 666.

God is, ultimately, a Person -- and, pace Yeats, there is no Deus Inversus, no equal and opposite God of Evil, no Angra Mainyu ("Ahriman" in the original Zoroastrian, non-Steiner sense of that name). Devils who are persons certainly exist, but the devil of all devils is an abstraction, a mathematical limit which none of them can quite reach. And the name we give to this limit, this outer darkness, is also mathematical: Sorath.

We may nevertheless speak, and not altogether figuratively, of "what Sorath wants" and what it means to "serve Sorath."

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What Sorath is up against

Sorath is against creation and against Creator -- that is, against existence, against being as such -- so any understanding of Sorath's battle plan must begin with answering that ever-popular question, Why is there something rather than nothing? (And, yes, I intend to answer that little question en passant and then forge ahead with my demonology. This attitude is, incidentally, why there is something rather than nothing posted on this blog.)

Descartes, meet Berkeley. Berkeley, Descartes. Let's have each of you chuck your most famous Latin catchphrase into this here crucible and see what comes out, shall we? And . . . splendid: Esse est cogitari aut cogitare. "To be is to be thought, or to think." Sorath's enemies are thinkers -- God, the gods, and such humbler beings as ourselves -- and the combined harmonious thought of these thinkers, which is the creative Logos.

New thinkers think themselves into existence, oh, probably all the time -- beginning as "minor presences, riffraff of consciousness" (Iris Murdoch's phrase) and then, some of them, developing from there, some even to the threshold of Godhood itself.

But this is likely a one-way street. Thinkers don't ever think themselves out of existence -- how could they? How could you cease, by an act of will, to have an active will? To say, or think, "I will my own annihilation," you have to say I will. Existence cannot be undone.

Thinkers -- excepting perhaps those dragons and titans and hecatoncheires who came into being before there was a Logos -- have a natural tendency to think and act in harmony with the Logos. At first, at the most rudimentary levels of development, this tendency is almost wholly passive and unconscious. "For behold, the dust of the earth moveth hither and thither . . . at the command of our great and everlasting God" (Hel. 12:8) and "even the wind and the sea obey him" (Mark 4:41).

As a thinker develops, though, and becomes increasingly active and conscious, the possibility of deliberately rebelling against the Logos begins to emerge. Sorath wants to persuade as many as possible to choose that path, with the ultimate goal of undoing creation, reducing the cosmos, if not to nothing at all, at least to chaos.

The problem, though, is how to persuade anyone to join you when you have quite literally nothing to offer. The devil of all devils wants everyone "to choose captivity and death, . . . that all men might be miserable like unto himself" (2 Ne. 2:27). Uh, what's the selling point again?

Ultimately, many can and will choose just that -- will say, "Evil, be thou my good!" and walk willingly into hell -- but they must be brought to that point by a circuitous route. That's where Lucifer and Ahriman come in.

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Lucifer

In The Song of the Strange Ascetic (which I discuss here), G. K. Chesterton imagines how he would have lived if he "had been a Heathen" and expresses bafflement at the choice of an actual heathen called Higgins -- a sort of Caspar Milquetoast of heathenism -- not to live that life. Heathenism, we are to infer, is as much wasted on the heathens as youth is on the young.

A heathen Chesterton would have filled his life with wine, love affairs, dancing girls, and glorious military campaigns against the Chieftains of the North. He would have served Lucifer, in other words -- pursued forbidden pleasures -- and doesn't quite get this Ahriman fellow whom the prissy bourgeois Higgins chooses to serve instead.

Lucifer is all about wine, women, and song. Those who follow Lucifer are motivated by pleasure rather than the avoidance of pain, and are willing to embrace risk, danger, adventure, even a sort of heroism, in its pursuit. They do not shy away from violence and may even revel in it. Alcibiades, Casanova, Blackbeard -- Falstaff, even. (Not Epicurus, who, despite the modern connotation of his name, was a consummate Higgins.) This is the most relatable and accessible form of evil, the sort a good man like Chesterton could easily fantasize about embracing. "Gateway drug" is the term, I believe.

Why call this aspect of evil Lucifer? Well, because Steiner did, obviously, but we can also invent an ex post facto etymology for it. Lucifer, "light-bearer," is from the Latin lux, "light," but we can imagine that it derives instead from luxus, "luxury, debauchery." Also, Lucifer was originally a name for the planet Venus -- whose other name is that of the ancient Roman goddess of sex, drugs, and rock-'n'-roll.

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Ahriman

How did Satan become Satan? Joseph Smith, the Prophet, proposes a somewhat novel origin story for this supervillain: One of the angels comes before the Lord and proposes, "send me, . . . and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost." And it is for this offer of universal salvation -- because, that is, he "sought to destroy the agency of man" -- that he is cast out of heaven and becomes the devil (see Moses 4:1-4).

If Lucifer seeks pleasure, Ahriman seeks control. Note that this is not necessarily the same thing as seeking power. Those who serve Ahriman may seek to be in control themselves, but more often their goal may simply be that everything be under control. Hierarchy is of Ahriman, because even those who are far from the top have no objection to it. Even an Ahrimanist who has the ability to control things personally will generally defer these personal decisions to a system or algorithm, personal responsibility being unpleasantly risky. A near-perfect example of Ahrimanic man is the 2020s birdemicist, happy to submit to house arrest, universal surveillance and censorship, and forced medical procedures -- rather than take a chance of catching the flu. "Non serviam" is Lucifer's motto, not Ahriman's; if Ahrimanism were condensed into a two-word motto, it would be, "Safety first" -- or, if more than two words are needed, "None are safe until all are safe" ("that one soul shall not be lost").

Lucifer's motivation is positive: the pursuit of pleasure. Ahriman's is negative: the elimination of risk. Lucifer's focus is personal; Ahriman's, universal. Thus Ahriman, though less obviously "evil" than Lucifer, is actually considerably closer than Lucifer to Sorath, to the pure and universal "spirit that negates."

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Evilution

Suicide has cause and stillbirth, logic; and cancer, simple as a flower, blooms.

-- Karl Shapiro

Conceptually, Sorath is primary, and I have discussed him first. Chronologically, in the evolutionary development of evil, he comes last. The natural progression is from Good to Luciferic, from Luciferic to Ahrimanic, and from Ahrimanic to Sorathic.

First, the good are tempted by forbidden pleasures, and by forbidden means of pursuing good ends, and embrace the ethos of Abbey of Thélème: Fay ce que vouldras, "Do what you want."

This Luciferic playing-with-fire leads to predictable results, people begin to feel that the world has become a chaotic and dangerous place, and they turn to Ahriman. We can see a clear example of this if we look back at the past half-century: As the flower children (those fleurs de mal) blossomed into flower fogeys, a movement that began with free speech, free love, and letting it all hang out evolved organically into the world of PC, sexual harassment prevention training, and a superstitious horror of the "inappropriate."

As Ahriman drains the world of its charm and turns everything into management and bureaucracy, as he extinguishes joy and the memory of joy, as everyone, to one degree or another, is assimilated into his soulless system, mutual respect becomes impossible, more and more people live in a state of barely suppressed rage, and the prospect of burning everything to the ground becomes increasingly attractive. Sorath has arrived.

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The Blood War

When Sin claps his broad wings over the battle,

And sails rejoicing in the flood of Death;

When souls are torn to everlasting fire,

And fiends of Hell rejoice upon the slain,

O who can stand?

-- William Blake

In the Dungeons and Dragons cosmology, one of the defining features of the "Lower Planes" (hell) is the Blood War -- the interminable conflict between the chaotic-evil (Luciferic) demons and the lawful-evil (Ahrimanic) devils, with a third class of neutral-evil (Sorathic?) fiends manipulatively playing each side against the other. So -- did the D&D guys get hell more or less right? Was old Gary Gygax privy to one or two of the deep things of Satan?

If the Blood War did not exist, Sorath would have to invent it. Remember what Sorath wants -- for men to hate the good as such and to pursue evil strictly for the evulz -- and how contrary to human nature that is. How to get us humans to sail against the wind of our own deepest nature? By tacking, of course.

• Sorath's goal: Avoid good, pursue evil
• Human nature: Pursue good, avoid evil
• Lucifer tack: Sacrifice the avoidance of evil in order to pursue good (e.g. to seek pleasure)
• Ahriman tack: Sacrifice the pursuit of good in order to avoid evil (e.g. to be "safe")

Clever little devil, right? But so far this is just tacking, and no one ever said tacking was hell. War is hell. That's the next step. Notice that the Lucifer tack and the Ahriman tack are polar opposites and are both evil. With just a bit of nudging, we get this:

• Sorathized Lucifer: Sacrifice the avoidance of evil in order to destroy Ahriman!
• Sorathized Ahriman: Sacrifice the pursuit of good in order to crush Lucifer!

Rage against the machine! Machinate against the rage! Behead those who insult Sorath -- who, for his part, claps his broad wings above the battle and sails rejoicing in the flood of Death. O who can stand?

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La fin de Satan?

And he called them unto him, and said unto them in parables, "How can Satan cast out Satan? And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan rise up against himself, and be divided, he cannot stand, but hath an end.

-- Mark 3:23-26

Given what we have discussed thus far, what are we to make of this statement attributed to Jesus? 

Victor Hugo's unfinished poem does not really address the matter; I have pilfered the title because of its ambiguity. La fin de Satan could mean the annihilation of Satan, or it could mean Satan's objective, his telos (which is in fact the word used in Mark) -- and, wait, are those even two different things? Didn't we say that "Sorath's ultimate goal is that nothing at all exist, including Sorath himself"? La fin de Satan est la fin de Satan.

Jesus, in the passage quoted, is responding to the claim that "by the prince of the devils casteth he out devils." The implication is that devils obviously don't work that way, because if they did, the whole enterprise of devilry would have collapsed long ago, torn apart by infighting. The continued existence of Satan is proof that Satan is not in the habit of undermining himself, and thus that the whole idea of a power-of-Satan-compels-you exorcist is inherently implausible.

Everything I've written in this post thus far -- Lucifer vs. Ahriman, the Blood War, all that -- seems to be saying that the kingdom of Satan succeeds by being divided against itself, and thus that Jesus was wrong. Well, as a Christian, I obviously can't leave it at that!

The easy way out would be to point out that this quote from Jesus does not appear in the Fourth and most authoritative Gospel, that Mark consists of notes compiled by a non-witness, and that Jesus may well never have said anything like this. Honestly, though, it sounds quite Jesusy to me, and I believe he probably did say it or something like it.

Another possibility is that Jesus was speaking specifically about exorcism. Back when I still believed the mainstream idea that Mark's was the most trustworthy Gospel and was focusing my studies on it, I went so far as to read an entire book called Demonic Possession in the New Testament, by William Menzies Alexander. Alexander draws a distinction between possession by "demons" or "unclean spirits" (a condition cured by Jesus on many occasions) and possession by "Satan" (attributed only to Judas Iscariot). The latter (which also has the distinction of being the only "possession" mentioned in the Fourth Gospel) is clearly moral in nature and leads to damnation. In contrast, those troubled by "unclean spirits" are treated as victims who bear no moral responsibility for their condition. The other important point that Alexander makes is that the wave of demon-possession described in Mark was a unique phenomenon, localized in time and space. With a few ambiguous exceptions like the case of King Saul, there is scarcely a hint of demon-possession in the Old Testament, nor does demon-possession in the Marcan mold appear to happen much in the modern world. (Satan-possession, in contrast, seems to be at an all-time high.) The demoniacs of first-century Palestine, a bit like the Convulsionnaires of Saint-Médard centuries later, appear to have represented a sort of spiritual outbreak or epidemic which flared up, spread through the population, and then burnt itself out -- with this last process perhaps expedited by the activity of Jesus and his disciples. If this phenomenon was the "Satan" Jesus' accusers were referring to, it would appear that its kingdom didn't stand, and it did have an end.

Something else to keep in mind is that Jesus' responses to critics or those who tried to catch him in his words generally worked on two levels. At the level of mere repartee, their purpose was to pwn and silence his opponents; at a deeper level, they were "parables" -- riddles -- conveying more substantive truth. For example, Jesus' famous statement about the unforgivable sin against the Holy Ghost was also a response to accusations that he used demonic power to cast out demons. As rhetoric, its message was, "Be very careful calling something demonic which may actually be from the Holy Ghost" -- but we can hardly conclude that mistakenly thinking a particular "miracle" may be demonic is the unforgivable sin! The deeper meaning of this statement is, well, deep, and a great deal has been thought and written about it -- almost all of which, rightly, departs from the statement's original rhetorical context.

So focusing too much on the conclusion "and therefore exorcisms are never performed by demonic power" may be much too narrow a constraint when it comes to understanding the deeper meaning of "How can Satan cast out Satan?" Rhetorically, it is supposed to work as a reductio ad absurbum: Satan obviously wouldn't undermine his own power; therefore, no exorcist is a servant of Satan. But those who think it out realize at that what it reduces to isn't absurd at all: Satan cannot stand, but hath an end. I mean, what's the alternative, really? That Satan and his works will endure forever? That Satan -- ce monstre délicat -- has eternal life?

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What if they gave a Blood War and nobody came?

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil.

-- Matt. 5:39

Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil, . . . durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, "The Lord rebuke thee."

-- Jude 9

Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight."

-- John 18:36

But Jesus said unto him, "Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead."

-- Matt. 8:22

We are not here to fight in the Blood War. We are not here to contend against Satan and those who serve him. The example of the Messiah conspicuously not overthrowing the Empire should have made that clear enough. We are here to learn, to serve God, and to follow Jesus to eternal life. Anything else is a distraction.

The twilight of the brain

St. Denis of Paris, noted cephalophore

In a recent post (qv), Bruce Charlton discusses Rudolf Steiner's statement that "hearts must begin to think."

My understanding is that Steiner meant that the divine destiny of modern Man is to become a thinker with 'the heart' primarily: that is, an intuitive thinker; and with the feeling that our thoughts are located in the chest.

And the 'must' comes in, because Steiner also predicted that 'Head thinking', intellect, the thinking that we feel is located behind the eyes - would decline.

Therefore, if Men failed to to be heart-thinkers, failed to embrace our destiny; then we would after a while hardly be able to think at all.

I suspect that what follows bears very little relation to what Bruce had in mind when he wrote that, but it nevertheless seems proper to cite him as the source of this train of thought.

"Head thinking" is, obviously enough, that thinking which is performed by, or through the instrumentality of, the brain. Since thinking is not among the functions of the circulatory system, "heart thinking" can only be a metaphor; but it apparently refers to a sort of thinking that bypasses the brain, and which can go on even when the brain is switched-off or dead -- the sort of thinking manifested by the dreaming mind, or by the demented shades in Hades.

The prospect of men abandoning the brain and becoming a race of "heart-thinkers" is a chilling one, because as things stand, the "heart" can hardly think at all, at least not at a level that is recognizably human. (Steiner himself implies as much when he says "hearts must begin to think.") The only heart-thinkers of which we have any direct experience are the dreaming, the demented, and the dead -- which is what makes the idea so immediately repulsive. To embrace that as "the divine destiny of modern Man" would be the ultimate obscenity.

But we are not to embrace heart-thinking as it now stands. We are to develop it into something worthy of the name. Imagine some ancient sarcopterygian fish being informed that its race's destiny is to abandon swimming and rely instead on the vastly inferior means of locomotion known as walking. How could it see such a prospect as anything other than horrible? How could it imagine how its clumsy scrabbling from tidal pool to tidal pool would evolve into walking as we know it today, to say nothing of running or flying?

For astrologers, the present is a time of transition from Pisces to Aquarius -- that is, from fish swimming about in water to that water being unceremoniously dumped out. The fish can learn to walk, and to breathe air, or they can die. Men, likewise, can learn to think with the heart -- developing what rudimentary ability we already have -- or we can cease to think at all.

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But why assume that the water is going to be dumped out? Why assume that the twilight of the brain is upon us?

Well, IQs have been in free fall for several generations now, to the point where roughly 85% of us would have been below-average by Victorian standards -- and this is very likely an inevitable development, something that will happen to every species with a highly developed brain. High levels of biologically-based (brain-based) intelligence are inherently unstable. Basically, highly intelligent animals use their intelligence to create a more hospitable environment for themselves -- that is, one in which basic selection pressures are relaxed, deleterious mutations can accumulate, and intelligence (and every other form of fitness) will decline. The smart make it too easy for the stupid to survive, and once that happens the days of smartness are numbered.

In theory, brainy beings could escape this fate by taking an active role in designing and maintaining their own brains, bypassing biological evolution -- using such technologies as genetic engineering, the augmentation of brain power by means of neurological prosthetics, etc. In practice, the adequate development of such technologies requires a sustained period of high intelligence and high technology -- sustained for a longer period than evolution appears to allow. A mere six or seven generations after the Industrial Revolution, here we are.

One of the most memorable images from Whitley Strieber's book Transformation is that of "a university a million years old." Is such a thing possible? Can intelligence ever persist at that level for that long? Only, it would seem, by making the leap to something not dependent on the biological brain -- which, despite the corporeality of the metaphor, is what I take "heart-thinking" to mean.

Backing up this theoretical argument, there are reports (the accuracy of which is probably unknowable) of contact with intelligences much older than Man -- the gods, the fairies, the greys -- and a few common threads emerge: (1) they are "psychic"; (2) their relationship to their bodies is different from, and looser than, our own; and (3) their way of thinking is, from the human point of view, extremely strange. To me, all of this is consistent with the hypothesis that these beings have a developed a mode of intelligence that is not biologically based.

(Against this, what is to be made of the grotesquely enlarged crania of the greys, if their cognition is not brain-based? I suppose that non-brain intelligence, the development of which is necessitated by the decline of the brain, can then be used to reverse that decline, bring the brain back, and develop it even further -- but that brain-thinking would ever after be secondary to non-brain-thinking.)

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Even setting to one side these speculations about the future of Man as an intelligent species, it remains true that each one of us will eventually have to learn to think without a functioning brain. Many of us will develop dementia as we get older, and every one of us, without exception, will die and become -- at least in the interval between death and resurrection -- a demented shade.

(Bruce Charlton has an interesting theory that this is why Christianity emphasizes the need for a childlike and decidedly non-intellectual "faith" in Jesus: because it is as demented shades, without access to the brain, that we must make the crucial choice to follow him to resurrection.)

Is it possible to survive death with a fully human degree of intelligence? It certainly seems to be rare. One of the most universal features of ghost stories around the world is that ghosts behave as if they were severely retarded. Possible exceptions include such shades as those of Samuel and Tiresias -- men who were "psychic" in life and may have developed an unusual degree of non-biological cognitive ability.

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The idea that the the brain must teach the soul to think is touched upon by J. W. Dunne in An Experiment With Time (pp. 212-213).

So we are driven to the interesting conception of an ultimate thinker who is learning to interpret what is presented to his notice, the educative process involved being his following, during the waking hours, with unremitting, three-dimensional attention, the facile, automatic action of that marvellous piece of associative machinery, the brain.

This, admittedly, is a complete reversal of the old-time animist's conception of the 'higher' observer as an individual of superlative intelligence producing the best effect he can with the aid of a clumsy material equipment. But it seems to me there is not getting away from the plain evidence afforded by the character of our dream thinking. Whatever capacities for eventually superior intelligence may be latent in the observer at infinity, they are capacities which await development. At the outset brain is the teacher and mind the pupil. Mind begins its struggle towards structure and individuality by moulding itself upon the brain. [. . .] the brain serves as a machine for teaching the embryonic soul to think.

Dunne expands on this in Intrusions? (pp. 64-65).

Your [immortal soul] has plenty of intuitive knowledge: his ability to perceive what lies ahead in time-1 is an instance of that. Moreover, a study of dreams shows that he is thinking in a rudimentary fashion. [. . .] But the logic, usually, is little better than that of a very young child [. . .] He is not in the least surprised by any incongruity which he encounters: he accepts it without hesitation. [. . .] But there are times in dreaming when the more rational part of the mind rouses from its uncritical inspection of the fantasies presented to it by its half-witted partner, and you find definite though still rather feeble thinking going on. It has all the characteristics of brain thinking, incredulity, criticism, judgement, planning: and this is the thinking it has learned from brain during the earlier travels of the three-dimensional 'now'.

Later in the same book (p. 76), Dunne lists the capacities of the mind (as separate from the brain) as follows.

These are: (a) control of attention; (b) an ability to learn from experience; (c) foreknowledge of sense data lying ahead in time-1; (d) as a consequence of (c) and (b), purpose, expemplified in intervention to avoid, or ensure reaching, those foreseen sense data; and (e) a very limited amount of thinking (tutored by that mechanical thinker, the brain).

Dunne's perspective on this is of course inseparable from his unique theory regarding the nature of time. (The references to "time-1" in the passages I have quoted refer to the first of the infinite number of temporal dimensions postulated by Dunne's theory.) While I believe Dunne's theory of time to be essentially correct, I also believe -- as he does not -- that the spirit pre-existed the body, and persists after bodily death, in time-1. For Dunne, the immortality of the soul is strictly a time-2 phenomenon. Nevertheless, his thoughts provide a fruitful starting point for speculation.

⁂

As should be fairly obvious, this post has been an exercise in thinking-aloud and throwing out possibilities, and it does not represent my final, considered opinion. One obvious problem with all that I have written is that it does not deal adequately with the fact that brainless minds must have predated brain-mediated ones and must have been able to develop a high degree of intelligence without the aid of a biological brain. This is something I need to think a lot more about and, while I do not expect this post to resonate with very many people, I do welcome comments from anyone sufficiently sympathetic to be able to engage with it.