Part Four

Lewis’ closing remarks are oddly framed by his addenda of statements that the story was actually true, and while we should be disappointed to find all of it to be true, or even half of it, the ambiguity is an invitation, even a conventional one, to thorough exploration of the premise, and so, too, in ways that incorporate the odd details of the mechanics of worlds in Lewis’ fictions for children.

Taken to the extreme, such concerns and concepts can take us to some interesting places. Imagine a view of the space-time continuum, where the exceedingly large quantum values that scientists are learning to assign to large bodies throughout the heavens would be made to mirror such oddities as a one-quantum universe. Not oddly, one of Bearden’s more intriguing - if also more unfathomable - works has been devoted to strategies of materialization and dematerialization that rely on a premise of a one-particle universe, in which one particle is moving so fast as to be like an actor playing all of the roles in a play, portraying all of the particles in a more conventional universe as it proceeds (Physicist John Wheeler, to name only one, has thrown out a number of things no less odd, by any means).

We might wonder if our nearest world is what our world would eventually be, in time, or the closest semblance that reason permits. In such a view, is there any distance between worlds in space at all, or only distance between one another in time?

They are indeed interesting questions.

We might also reshape Lewis’ rather inexplicable moralizing into several interesting ideas, one of them being that terra-forming an entire uninhabitable planet is easier by traveling through time to when it was habitated or habitable. Alternately, that it is habitable right now, but our experience has been as relativistically bent as the bent space-time which yields the planet itself (’bent" is a favorite word in this work), just as we could seize upon many-worlds theories that might permit that there is a habitable Mars in another reality right now that we can reach by dimensional travel.

Consider also that any of these diverse habitable versions of uninhabitable worlds could be used as patterns in the magickal terra-forming of their uninhabitable expressions.

Lewis’ writing, in spite of the frequent denials from himself and others that he concerned himself with mathematics or science, often touches on exploring these exactly these very kinds of issues, or intrinsically related ones, and even propositions that may have yet to be guessed. If the architecture on Mars proves to be older than human life itself, is Lewis asking us to consider the proposition that they were built by human time travelers, in, ironically, a sincere and through attempt to apply all possibilities in the course of using scientific reasoning?

Not that this is his eventual or ultimate claim, but then it’s hard to assure one’s self that one has ruled out possibilities that remained unconsidered altogether.

The fragments of "The Dark Tower" also explore some issues in considerable depth, and they are of course the ones that should be familiar if one has devoted themselves not so much to the expressed context of time travel, but the physics of time reversal. It’s an inconclusive but a very powerful suggestion that the ultimate purpose of the treasure map that extends from the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau through the works of the Inklings, is indeed conscious of the philosophical or logistic difficulties of the alchemist’s feat of resurrection, palingenics...

Even though in reality such concerns and details may be truncated by the understanding of the nature of objects that we may be granted, for example, by the holographic physics of David Bohm, or perhaps the same thing in an earlier incarnation in the works of Hildegard of Bingen, its indeed something to contend with to find Lewis’ work encompassing such discussions after the proposal has been made that this is the great treasure of the Prieure de Sion.

Something else that merits mention is the "Christian" elements of "Out of the Silent Planet". If we strive to actually apply Christian values, one finds that the unsatisfactory dramatic presentation of morality leave us with little for the story’s version of a "Satan" to be but an echo of a more ancient use of the character as a personification of certain physical forces, almost identical to the liberties that the Prieure took in creating the idiosyncratic demon and the countless other peculiarities of their church.

Time and time again, Lewis gives the eventual appearance that, in spite of all other appearances, of possessing a mind and a philosophy that is rare, but very much like Sauniere’s own.

There is much more, of course.

We may be intended to take the "problems" of palingenics into consideration as much as possible in light of these alternate views of reality, and such an approach in fact seems to be demonstrated in Charles William’s "The Place of the Lion". His descriptions of what the visionary sees around the ailing Mr. Beringer sound very much like a sophisticated scientific emphasis that the point at which the form of a living body is restored by palingenics is in fact a point where the opportunity to extend into alternate realities in the form of different possibilities of expression for the alchemically created form. It implies that there is merit to considering palingenics in contrast to the eventual change in form in a reincarnating body, and underscores the inherent relationship to the magickal premise of shape-shifting when those possibilities not only include the spirit’s physical conformity to a new human body, but to the traditional Hindu premise of reincarnation in an animal body.

In other words, we find the elements of the Inkling’s works reflecting off of one another as if there is far more than just utilization of inspiring discussions between them or the occasional borrowing of a concept; there are many tell-tale signs that all of their works are carefully organized and orchestrated to a potentially singular and extremely important purpose, exactly as an initial implication of their involvement with the Priuere de Sion implies.

In fact, the concert and organized nature of their efforts is well known. We find that the rear cover of Vol. 5 of Tolkien’s posthumous "History of Middle Earth" , "The Lost Road", informs us that,

"J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were friends and fellow members of the literary circle known as the Inklings. It is hardly surprising that, at one point, these talented gentlemen embarked on a challenge: Lewis was to write on ’space-travel’ and Tolkien on ’time travel’."

In an introduction, "The Early History of the Legend" Christopher Tokien refers to several letters written by his father, describing how C.S. Lewis had complained of there being "too little of what we really like in stories", and they subsequently decided to write their own.

"When C. S. Lewis and I tossed up, and he was to write on space travel and I on time-travel, I began an abortive book of time-travel of which the end was to be the presence of my hero in the drowning of Atlantis. This was to be called Numenor, the Land in the West...

We agreed that he should try ’space-travel’, and I should try ’time-travel’. His result was well known. My effort, after a few promising chapters, ran dry; it was too long a way round to what I really wanted to make, a new version of the Atlantis legend. The final scene survives as the downfall of Numenor..."

While Christopher careful ponders exactly how a sensible chronology defines the nature of the surviving fragments,

"But what is the meaning of ’so I brought all the stuff I had written on the originally unrelated legends of Numenor into relation with the main mythology’?...But what was this material? He cannot have meant the Numenorean matter contained in the Lost Road itself... it must therefore have been something else, already existing when The Lost Road was begun"

Perhaps there somehow remains work yet to be found, or even a work in the possession of someone such as Lewis, which if so might have perished in his oblivious brother’s bonfires. Had Tolkien truly created something in full alignment with the hidden agendas of the Inklings, however, perhaps some of the intrigues which surround the Prieure of Sion might apply to any mysteriously missing documents.

On the other hand, it’s equally possible that Tolkien anticipated the need for subtlety with which the Inklings have long eluded notice as initiates, and spent a great while perfecting the task of burying some great revelation ever more deeply into the work at hand.

One finds it interesting that Tolkien’s work includes a translation of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", not because it is an obvious expression of his inevitable affection for Arthuriana, but of course because this is one of the more powerful - and sometimes more transparent - of the legends in which we see glimpses of the encoded ancient science. Bertilak exhibits the power to cause his head to return after being decapitated, a stunning example of the applications of time-reversal, and one which still carries connotations denoting the iconography of certain magickal herbs. It’s exactly what one might expect under the auspices which we here suspect to have surrounded the Inklings as initiates, and it’s a gesture from which we might eventually infer much.

We find the "unscientific" Lewis, in "The Dark Tower", going to rather scientific lengths to illustrate rather scientific principles, even while his Perelanda Trilogy is known to disparage scientists or their doings. It would be perhaps an unbearably hypocritical gesture on his part were he not apparently answering to a higher calling, a higher scientific one rather than a higher spiritual one.

What is also interesting is that in the course of it, he manages to beg to differ with the automatic presumption of the "Cartesian coordinate" dimensional axes, of presuming length, height, and width - three dimensions of space, to only one dimension of time.

It’s an important thing, because as we look at going back to where science and mathematics went wrong, that the message of Cydonia and the secrets of free energy should seem so elusive to engineers and scientists, there’s really no telling that some of the wrong turns didn’t happen even further back. Why should we presume there are as many as three dimensions of a single quality called space, and why in turn should we presume there are so few as only three? This in turn can take on back to being able to explain miraculous science even without the concern of dimensions, but in terms of vibration or resonance, and holography.

The hyperspatial science may be to a degree useful, but it may not be necessary whatsoever, and it does manage to confound many, who while they can easily grasp the concepts (it’s accessible enough to have often served in later science fiction, and with a good deal of possible accuracy), in turn cannot begin to grasp the mechanics, which do not seem to grace the lists of achievements in applied science.

This new interest in hyperspace and hyperdimensionality does not, as a rule, bring us closer at all to a communion between the inhabitants of Earth and the red planet, and the need to be most cautious here cannot be overstated, and as usual, even the "non-mathematical" and "unscientific" Lewis is there to give warning and to touch on the potentially arbitrary nature of the measures we are still struggling to use with what is now the most important cutting edge on which humanity’s well being rests. That we may, in the course of trying to extricate ourselves from previous scientific dogma, if we presume, end up entangling ourselves in yet another dogmatic paradigm for a serious length of time, is a point well made.

I’ve a hunch, having read the story, "The Lost Road", once. While it’s a marvelous fantasy, and one that gives a tangible feel to anyone’s subtle reveries of the distant past, of glimpses of panoramas, and of ancient words, knowledge, and long-lost loves, it’s hard to find a sort of clue in it, at least at first sight. It seems to all too easily be merely a brilliant, sentimental piece of fiction.

Still, the idea that it was intended to touch on Atlantis seems irrelevant outside of the sort of context we get from John Mitchell in his classic work on sacred sites and ley lines, "The View Over Atlantis".

The ley lines have often been associated with time-bending effects, not only like the Tesla and Bearden physics, but classic accounts of seemingly having stepped for a moment, by all appearances, into the past, and they’ve been often associated with a similar type of time distortion, the appearance of ghosts. They are also central to the grid-work of earth energies to which the Martian artifacts of Cydonia point, and they are certainly implicated in the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau.

And of course, "The Lost Road" not only makes a wonderful euphemism for "The Old Straight Track", the once forgotten ley lines, but it’s also linked by an intermediate expression which can be found within the text of the book.

While there may be many more subtleties in this Tolkien work yet awaiting identification, ("The Lost Road" is also an expression very similar to some folklore motifs, with which Tolkien was likely well acquainted, some of which may also be euphemisms for man’s lost ability to see microscopically and telescopically) we may nonetheless have seen the most important solution to such a riddle here, and one which we have the good fortune of accumulated investigations into these popular subjects to be able to solve backwards in the present day.

It is, not ironically, while inconclusive, exactly what we should have expected.

Lewis’ work manages to even include a diagram, and an interesting one. Its premise is not a casual observation, and the diagram itself may be possibly affiliated to a soliton wave, as the first page of this series begins its inclusions of science, but this model is also achieved at one point during the complete rotation of a hypercube. In other words, we not only have Patricia and Lionel Fanthorpe’s detailed exploration of the hypercube in the mysteries of Rennes-le-Chateau, but we may have it beginning to actually appear in this most graphic way in the works of the Inklings, along with Lewis’ peculiarly placed but recognizable description of the segment of a tesseract.

(One cannot yet rule out either that Lewis’ description of the spaceship in "Out of the Silent Planet" may be peculiar because it may be poised to provide clues to Sauniere’s cipher, even while this may restrains the ability of the tesseract to behave in the story in some of the ways we would expect.)

If one take the liberty of accepting Lewis’ diagram as one that allows two different directions of time at two different rates, we have a diagram that acknowledges still another extremely critical concern of magick and phenomena involving time reversal: that the rate of action in ’backwards" kinetics can be many times that of the original forward progression of the event to be undone. It may also allow and account for the disparities of time rates which appear both in Lewis’ otherworldly fiction and in many, many classical occult traditions when other worlds are in question.

There’s a disturbing thing about "The Dark Tower" as well, and that is exactly where the surviving fragment ends. So far, there’s not much trace of the intrigue or cloak and dagger that surrounded the Prieure and so many others hanging over the Inklings, of manuscripts stolen or destroyed or both, in order to suppress various world-changing technologies, and yet it’s both a little too disappointing and perhaps a little too convenient that as it ends, Lewis is about to launch again into another exploration of the intricacies of the philosophy of the mastery of space-time, about to describe the details of some miraculous device, and very likely about to do so a little "too" explicitly. We can only wonder.

Still, enough of the pieces may remain with us.

The exploration of these contexts is certainly a healthy one. Until this work, I have taken it for granted, for example that muons for magick and elixirs might only come in the rigid fashion of the alchemists through chemical processes, or through relativistic transformation, and never before a clear picture of their generation through control of the mastery of time, through time-reversed or time-reversing phase-conjugation of muon decay. There is much more to consider of course, the muon tends to be a rather dodgy particle as far as mainstream science is concerned, and its exact behavior is troublesome. Unlike the electron, it is said to exist in neutral form, which is sometimes helpful and sometimes confusing.

At least, the idea of a time-reversed anti-decay may very well conform with the rather rash supposition that the door of the Chalice Well may show us what particles it can be made of in an anti-decay mode, in case it’s dubious that a particle that decays into an electron, a positron and a neutrino should want to appear out of an electron and a positron in order to be more commonplace.

It’s an important and practical step, whose inspiration has been following more closely the details and premises of the work of the Inklings. I can certainly tell you it hasn’t been a lost cause. Quite the contrary, however precise are the things suggested on these pages, it’s been a wonderful exercise, and quite a lot of fun, and of course, it isn’t over yet. There’s too much connection to other phenomena, crop circles for example, that all of this should evade application in that realm. Is the plasma vortex routinely associated with crop circles, for example, a configuration which can easily cause the time squeezing effects or other muon-generation modes, such as perhaps "relativistic ion-accoustic effects"? And what of muon-magnetic effects or residual exotic matter in the flattened grain? Are these a great Grail to the alchemist?

If even as an afterthought here, it’s also possible to make another connection, one that is a more elegant if concise combination of the conspicuous themes of the Inklings, and that is that all of the speculation and discourse, as voluminous as it is managing to become, has yet managed to overlook a set of connections that already reinforces what should have on its own been obvious, that the magickal science of magickal mirrors and time cameras is a science that also entails some mastery of time; it is both a technology that Nikola Tesla almost inevitably knew quite well, and it is a technology that promises not only the anti-decay of sights and sounds, but of our mystically important particles as well, such as the muon.

It is perhaps no surprise at all when the magick mirrors and alchemic elixirs have been so routinely linked, to think that a magick mirror is potentially a powerful tool to create these very substances.

We are still, for all the mileage, only just beginning, and it is a fabulous journey.

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