THE COSMIC ARC

THE WORLD IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK IT IS

My narrative here is high fantasy in its scope, its characters, its peril and purpose—but it is not fiction; it is an unfolding truth.

The deepest secrets of the world are beginning to be revealed. The veil is being lifted, and as it lifts, we see that our world is not at all what it seems to be. Beneath the mundane lies a realm of mythopoeic drama—and we begin to recognize the true nature of our troubled times, and the real danger that we must confront.

And this drama, with its cast of incredible-but-real characters, the great king, Helios, and mysterious Maia, of the ancient races not of this earth, the dangerous colossus named PoMo (Enemy of Truth), and the heroic wizard-warriors, the whole phenomenon of Helios' emergence from the egg called Gaiaon, all this is like our Grand Canyon, whose sublime grandeur, the very presence of the immense structure, is invisible to us until we find ourselves at its rim. Once we understand that the colossi (my name for collective persons) are real persons, we will have positioned ourselves to view the Panoply. And only then can we understand the true nature of the danger that we all face and the great importance of our quest.

Even in Gaiaon, Helios exerts a vital, positive influence on us, and once he is born, he will bring about a Golden Age for humankind. But now, PoMo threatens to destroy Helios in the egg. Only Helios, once born, can save himself—and stop PoMo, so the task has fallen to the wizard warriors to bring Helios out of Gaiaon, and they will do this by playing an arcane game—rational in structure, mythic in spirit—called the Game of a Trillion Worlds.

So as PoMo comes near to the realm, and when her movement, like a crash of thunder, terrifies the non-initiates of the land, the wizard warriors will calmly return to their chambers and arrange their cards according to their signs, and inscribe their contentions in the Notebooks of Truth—in this way, they will be preparing their weapons for the coming wordwar against the Enemy of Truth.

So, it falls now to the wizard warriors to do what has to be done, which is to join the League of Dialecticians, to play the Game of a Trillion Worlds, to change the world forever.

Those who seek hidden worlds, heroic contests, and pure beauty might be among the few able to perceive such a quest, and perhaps even to join it. For this is not a fiction, not a metaphor, not a commercial pitch, but a real and unfolding work: a Game of reason, a system of signs, a weapon of clarity. Beneath the symbols lies structure. Beneath the myth, logic. And those who understand both are needed now—for the old era is ending, and a new one must be born. The task is not escape, but synthesis. Not rebellion, but transfiguration. Those who stand at the threshold must help build the bridge.

In gloria vivent

I claim that this describes the world as it really is.

The fantasy is real.

IV. THE CULTURAL EVOLUTION OF THE HEART OF HELIOS.

HELIOS CONSOLIDATES HIS FACULTY OF FEELING.

The recent Apollonian era, comprised, in accord with the Apollonian love of unity, only one named period, the Enlightenment. But the present Dionysian era, the “R-PT” era, comprises, in accord with the Dionysian love of diversity, several named periods: the Romantic, the Modernist, the Postmodernist and, now, the Post-Truth period. The present text is an account of how Helios’ integrated faculty of Will has been developed. This document discusses how Helios’ heart, his feelings, the consolidation of his will, evolved significantly by means of the natural cultural dialectic as he neared what must be the end of his incubation in Gaiaon during the first part of the R-PT period, the time of Dionysos Metria, the Romantic and the Modernist periods. Progress was made as humanity learned how one human being can most effectively communicate his or her positive feelings to another. The evolution ended when Dionysos Akraia emerged and came to dominate.

It ia appropriate to confine this narrative to the art of painting, though a discussion of the other arts would be similar: this is the story of how progress had been made toward the consolidation of Helios’ Good-Will during the Romantic and Modernist periods, only to have all progress stopped during the Postmodern and Post-Truth periods. But the knowledge that the early R-PT pioneers had acquired has been preserved—it will serve, now, at the beginning of the Postnatal era, as a solid foundation for work that will complete the consolidation.

We trace this dynamic, thesis to antithesis to synthesis to decay, in the art movements of the time, specifically, he looked at painting as an art. He placed the focus upon meaning, representation of visual reality, and formal qualities (or composition; or beauty) in painting.

The drama of modern art can be seen most sagaciously as Helios’ struggle to understand how best to consolidate the feelings of the quasi-autonomous elements of his psyche (the pre-processing brainlets, his human emergers, those from whom he emerged) into one integrated sensibility.

This drama can also be seen as a phase of the long struggle (which had begun with the Australopithecines) between the two elemental, subordinate, emergers of Helios, the colossi, Apollo and Dionysos. This recent “modern art” phase of the “Elemental War” began with a quarrel between Apollo Akraia and Dionysos Metria: “left-brained” Apollo, as Apollo Metria had productively come to dominate over unproductive “right-brained” Dionysos during the early and mid Enlightenment, but now had become the dogmatic and unyielding Apollo Akraia; and Dionysos had become Dionysos Metria, the fresh force who would now drive innovation as the antithesis to the stale thesis of Apollo Akraia and who would, during the struggle, come to dominate, only then to degenerate into the destructive, crazy Dionysos Akraia at the close of the modernist period.

And the drama can also be seen as a struggle between Helios’ art-world emergers, the painters and art theorists themselves—those who adhered dogmatically to the old attitudes being those from whom Apollo Akraia emerged, and those individuals who were at first driving the evolutionary dialectic toward Helios’ consolidation of his feelings being those from whom the productive Dionysos Metria emerged, and from whom destructive Dionysos Akraia (PoMo) later emerged.

Keeping in mind how the drama most generally represents Helios’ struggle to understand the truth, let us describe the dialectic broadly, looking at it mostly as the battle between the subordinate terrestrial colossi, Apollo and Dionysos, and in detail, looking at it in terms of the artists and theorists.

Chapter I. the Classical era, the Renaissance and the

Enlightenment and the Neo-Classical period

During the CLASSICAL ERA, the RENAISSANCE and the ENLIGHTENMENT, both Apollo and Dionysos believed that for a painting to be esteemed in the broad sense that highly esteemed art of the past had been esteemed, it was necessary (and some might have said sufficient) for it to possess MEANING.

And they believed that REPRESENTATION in a painting was necessary for it to possess meaning.

And they believed that ACCURATE representation in a painting was necessary for it to possess meaning. (The influential Renaissance artist and theorist, Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) believed that the aim of art was to represent the world faithfully).

And they sensed that GOOD FORMAL COMPOSITION somehow complemented the painting’s meaning or was necessary for the painting to possess meaning. (Vasari said, “All the arts belong to desegno or depend on it.” Francis Hutcheson [1694–1746] correctly defined good formal composition as amounting to Unity in Variety, but his views were not widely embraced; nor are they to this day. Immanuel Kant [1724–1804] came close to truth when he defined it as having no purpose though appearing to be purposive.)

Chapter II. The Neo-Classical period (1760-1830)

Artists of the NEO-CLASSICAL PERIOD included Jaques-Louis David (1748 –1825), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780 –1867)

MEANING: During that part of Helios’ development that is called, in one aspect, the Neo-Classical Period and, in its other aspect, the Romantic Period Apollo Akraia, whose activity defined Neo-Classicism, still believed that for a painting to be esteem-worthy, it was necessary (and some of his emergers might have said sufficient) for it to possess meaning, that is, to be worthy of esteem, a painting had to be expressive of the artist’s feelings about the subject matter, or it had to convey some insight into reality. For instance, he saw that Titus Reading, painted by the very late Renaissance/Baroque painter, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), evoked in the viewer the artist’s love for his son, and, more generally, that Rembrandt’s portraits provided insight into the character of their subjects—and that it was this expression and these insights, that is, the paintings’ meaning, that evoked in the viewer the deep sense of satisfaction and joy that made Rembrandt’s paintings worthy of esteem.

Meaning in the works of David and Ingres consisted of the expression of Apollo’s own aspirations at the time, the aspirations of the Enlightenment: a sense of the classical, clarity of contours, a sense of the eternal, a noble simplicity and a calm grandeur.

And, as he had for centuries, Apollo believed that the REPRESENTATION of visual reality was a necessary condition for a painting to possess meaning.

And, as he had for centuries, Apollo believed that ACCURATE representation of visual reality was necessary for a painting to be esteemed.

And he continued to sense that GOOD FORMAL COMPOSITION, was somehow a necessary condition for a painting to be worthy of esteem—either because good formal composition made meaning possible, or because it was a necessary complement to meaning. According to Ingres, it seems, beauty was tied to representational accuracy; he said, “the secret of beauty has to be found through truth.” And he said, “Calmness is the main beauty of the body.” He may have conceived of beauty’s value as that which facilitated expression, that emotions are best expressed through the portrayal of calmness, not activity.

Chapter III. The Romantic Period (1780-mid 1800s)

THE ERASURE OF REPRESENTATIONAL ACCURACY

Artists of the ROMANTIC PERIOD included Caspar David Friedrich (1774 –1840), J. M. W. Turner (1775 –1851), Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), Francisco Goya (1746 –1828) and Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863).

These are among the names—forever to be associated with the last years of the Prenatal world—of those heroes from whom Dionysos Metria, whose activity defined Romanticism, emerged during the time of the Neo-Classicists.

MEANING: Dionysos Metria, at this time, believed, as did Apollo Akraia, that for a painting to be esteem-worthy, it was necessary for it to possess meaning; although in the Dionysian view, meaning did not consist of the expression of the Apollonian aspirations of the Enlightenment, but, rather, the emotions—awe, terror, sublimity, exaltation—of nature and of the past, of medieval rather than classical times, and of heroic individualism.

REPRESENTATION: Dionysos Metria (Apollo in both his aspects is a different person from Dionysos in both his aspects, but (in the “Metrian unity”) the Metrias are, in fundamental ways, the same person), like Apollo Akraia, still believed that representation in a painting was necessary for it to possess meaning, and thus for it to possess esteem-worthiness.

ACCURACY OF REPRESENTATION: But Dionysos Metria argued against Apollo Akraia; unlike Apollo, Dionysos did not believe that accurate representation was necessary for a painting to possess significant meaning, and thus was not necessary for the painting to possess esteem-worthiness. His painter-emergers, the Romantic artists, applied their paint in a more liberated way than had been done in the past. Their paintings were less restrained and more expressive of feeling. Turner’s work was often very abstract.

This argument would eventually turn into a monumental struggle, a major dialectical conflict in Helios’ biography, one that would someday reveal to him the true source of art’s power—since the colossi Apollo and Dionysos are emergers of Helios, the struggle was Helios’ struggle: Helios had begun to doubt the correctness of his belief that accurate representation was a condition of a painting’s esteem. Even though the doubt was small, the thought troubled him—intuitively, he sensed that the issue was important, and that he should be clear about it, In fact, that he should clearly understand art, that he should understand how positive feelings might best be communicated among his emergers, so as to become consolidated within his psyche, so that he could complete himself, so that he could be born. He tried to push the argument out of his mind, but the notion kept returning.

GOOD FORMAL COMPOSITION: It is important, at this point, also to see how Dionysos Metria, that is, how the Romanticist artists and theorists, understood beauty, that is, good formal composition. For them, beauty was independent of, and complementing, meaning—the Romantic artists clearly viewed good formal composition as necessary for esteem-worthiness. Delacroix, in fact, apparently believed that formal composition was the most important factor determining a painting’s esteem-worthiness. He said, "The primary merit of a painting is to be a feast for the eye”—however, the romantic painters’ colors were often somber, and the subject matter was sometimes unpleasant.

Modernism (1860s-1970s)

Chapter IV. Early Modernism

During the period of Early Modernism, Dionysos Metria began to grow bolder in his challenge to Apollo Akraia. The art movements of Dionysos Metria were:

AESTHETIC MOVEMENT (1860-1900): artists included James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834 – 1903), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 –1882) and Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898).

REALISM (1840-1880): artists included. Edouard Manet (1832-1883) and Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) were Realist artists.

IMPRESSIONISM (1872-1892): artists included Claude Monet (1840-1926), Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Mary Cassatt (1845-1926), Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919).

MEANING: Dionysos Metria (and therefore the early Modernist artists and theorists) continued to believe that for a painting to be esteem-worthy, it was necessary for it to possess meaning.

AESTHETIC MOVEMENT: these artists believed that meaning consisted of the expression of the feelings of the artist. But emphasis was taken off of expression and placed onto formal beauty by these artists—this despite criticism from writers such as Tolstoy, who believed that art’s conveying of morality and knowledge was its essential function.

REALISM: these artists believed that meaning in a painting involved challenging public ethical and aesthetic boundaries. IMPRESSIONISM: Monet, believed that meaning in a painting nvolved illustrating how we see. Renoir and Cassatt focused on the human figure and on the sychological state of their subjects.

REPRESENTATION: Dionysos Metria, like Apollo Akraia, continued to believe that representation in a painting was necessary for it to possess meaning, and thus for it to possess esteem-worthiness.

ACCURACY OF REPRESENTATION: Dionysos Metria was now completely convinced that accurate representation was not necessary in a painting for it to possess significant meaning, and thus for it to possess esteem-worthiness—and he continued quarreling with Apollo Akraia, who still dominated the arts.

AESTHETIC MOVEMENT: Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875) is as abstract as Turner’s paintings.

REALISM: Manet’s paintings were executed with a loose painting style and bright colors; his work advanced the move toward abstraction.

IMPRESSIONISM: The Impressionists took abstraction farther than did their predecessors—Monet’s plein air images are extremely painterly--the loose brushwork and intense colors betray to the viewer their identity as paint on canvas. But, for the Impressionists, accurate representation was still a goal, in a way: they believed that, by capturing the momentary impression, the fleeting sensory effect, of the scene, they were capturing reality more truly than artists of the past had.

GOOD FORMAL COMPOSITION: For Dionysos Metria during the Early Modernist era (that is, for most of the artists and the theorists of the time) good formal composition complemented meaning.

AESTHETIC MOVEMENT: The thoughts of these artists constituted, at this time, Dionysos Metria’s inkling that he might be mistaken about the role of beauty in art: artists of the aesthetic movement believed that beauty (composition, the painting’s formal qualities) played an important and independent role in the estimation of a painting’s esteem-worthiness; for Whistler, in fact, formal composition was of primary interest. Whistler was the main proponent of “art for art’s sake.” Acknowledging the close relationship between painting and music, he gave his paintings titles such as “harmonies,” “arrangements,” and “nocturnes.” The artists of the aesthetic movement were beginning to grasp the superior power of good formal composition. Thus, the truth continued to emerge, more and more fully, that good formal composition is the power source of the artistic expression of positive will, a truth the possession of which by mankind would, as noted above, someday facilitate the completion of Helios’ faculty of Will-consolidation. But the full realization that Unity in Variety is the key to formal excellence will have to wait until the time of the Ontological Revolution.

IMPRESSIONISM: at least one of the Impressionists was beginning to see good formal composition as primary. For Renoir, beauty was a stated goal; he said, "Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world." Later in his career, he noted the limitations of the Impressionist goal of focusing on optical sensations and became an advocate of line and composition.

Chapter V. Middle Modernism

THE ERASURE OF REPRESENTATION

During the period of Middle Modernism, Dionysos Metria continued to evolve Helios’ ability to consolidate his Will. His art movements during this period were:

POST-IMPRESSIONISM (early 1880s-1914): artists included Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Paul Gauguin (1848 – 1903), Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), Georges Seurat (1859 – 1891), Edvard Munch (1863-1944) and Gustav Klimt (1862-1918).

FAUVISM (1899-1908): artists included Henri Matisse (1869-1954)—the leader of the movement, Andre Derain (1880-1954), Maurice De Vlaminck (1876-1958), Raoul Dufy (1877-1953), Kees van Dongen (1877-1968), George Braque (1882-1963)—later a cubist, Paul Gauguin (1848 – 1903).

EXPRESSIONISM (1905-1933): artists included those of the Die Brücke group: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976), Emil Nolde (1867-1956), members of the Der Blaue Reiter group: Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Franz Marc (1880-1916), Paul Klee (1879-1940), August Macke (1887-1914). Other expressionist artists were: Marc Chagall (1887-1985), Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943), Oskar Kokoshka (1886-1980), and Egon Shiele (1890-1918)

CUBISM (1907-1922): artists included Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Georges Braque (1882-1963) and the Salon Cubists, Juan Gris (1887-1927), Robert Delauney (1885-1941) and Fernand Léger (1881-1955), who, though influenced by Picasso and Braque, were not close associates of them. The first phase of Cubism is called “Analytic Cubism.” The second phase, when newspapers and other printed materials were incorporated into the artists’ collages, is called “Synthetic Cubism.”

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MEANING: Dionysos Metria (and therefore the middle Modernist artists and theorists) continued to agree, in general, with Apollo Akraia that for a painting to be esteem-worthy, it was necessary for it to possess meaning.

POST-IMPRESSIONISM: these artists believed that for a painting to be esteem-worthy, it was necessary for it to possess meaning. Whereas the Impressionists had focused on the mere momentary visual impression perceived by the viewer, the Post-Impressionists focused on self-expression and their own subjective vision—there were exceptions—Cezanne and Gaugin, for example, felt that they were revealing hidden realities.

For Cézanne, meaning involved the ostensible revelation that physical nature is composed of basic, constituent, geometric shapes.

Gauguin’s brand of Post-impressionism has been called Synthetism, a term that refers to the way in which Gauguin’s work brings together the three possible properties upon which we focus here: outward appearances (representation of visual reality), the artist’s feelings (meaning) and the abstract effects of color, line and form (beauty/composition). For Gauguin, meaning consisted of his disclosure of a parallel world of spirit and mystery existing beneath the world of ordinary experience. He said, “Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.” And he said, “How do you see this tree? Is it green? ...Don't be afraid to paint it as green as possible.”

Van Gogh was interested in expressing his feelings through his art: in Starry Night, we sense the artist’s tumultuous, chaotic feelings, yet the scene is beautiful: we feel that van Gogh loved the world, and perhaps was here expressing the spirituality he found in nature. “I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion.” “I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say 'he feels deeply, he feels tenderly'.” But it is not the expression that gives van Gogh’s work its power. Compare van Gogh’s Starry Night with a typical painting by a troubled person who, perhaps, is confined to an institution—expressive and interesting for the psychiatrist or therapist, but not something that would be considered esteem-worthy as art.

Meaning for the Post-Impressionists also involved challenging the public ethical and aesthetic boundaries.

FAUVISM: The Fauves believed that they were expressing their strong reaction to their subject matter. Matisse said, "Color was not given to us in order that we should imitate Nature. It was given to us so that we can express our emotions." And he said, "I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me." And, he said, “The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive; the place occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything has its share." So, Matisse saw his art as an “expression of my emotion.” But artists do not always fully understand their own motivations: if an artist’s primary (conscious or unconscious) goal is to produce beauty, and that beauty produces an emotion, namely, a feeling of satisfaction in both the artist and viewer, then the artist has created that feeling—he did not express it.

EXPRESSIONISM: The Expressionists, for the most part, did express their subjective feelings and moods in their work. The artists of the Die Brücke group were interested to express emotions connected to the alienation and to the loss of the spiritual dimension in German cities, or to express the decadence of Austrian society.

The artists of the Der Blaue Reiter group sought to express their emotions and to convey, by means of the symbolic qualities of color, a spiritual experience. Paul Klee, like Gauguin, believed that visual art, like music, could reveal realms beyond the physical world. Klee felt that he was expressing unseen truths. His painting is expressive, very abstract but representational, symbolic and poetic. Klee said, "All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist." Franz Marc said, "I try to intensify my sensitivity for the organic rhythm of all things; I seek pantheist empathy with the vibration and flow of the blood of nature—In the trees, in the animals, in the air.” Kandinsky (wrongly) saw formal composition as completely and powerfully expressive.

CUBISM: Braque, was interested in expression, but not as fervently as many of his fellow painters; he sought an art that avoided ”the expressive excesses of Fauvism." Braque said, “Perspective is a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress.” His work was nearly non-objective, though there was a certain amount of symbolism, images that communicated his thoughts about the world.

Meaning for Picasso consisted of portraying truth. Influenced by Cézanne's idea of reducing objects to their simple geometric forms, he was especially interested in presenting objects as if multiple sides of them could be seen at the same time--he felt that he was thereby depicting the world in some sense more accurately or more fully than other artists did. Picasso said, "Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth." It is unclear whether Picasso was interested primarily in abstraction or in supposedly representing a truer, or somehow a fuller, picture of the world. In his collages, he created groups of signs that referred to objects in the world.

REPRESENTATION: Not only did Dionysos Metria remain convinced that accurate representation was not necessary in a painting, he was beginning to believe that representation in a painting was actually not necessary at all for there to be meaning, and thus for the painting to possess esteem-worthiness. That is, although the Middle Modernist artists believed that accurate representation was not necessary for esteem-worthiness, most of them still believed that representation was necessary for there to be meaning, and that meaning was necessary for a painting to possess esteem-worthiness.

POST-IMPRESSIONISM: these artists believed that that representation in a painting was necessary for it to possess meaning, and thus for it to possess esteem-worthiness.

FAUVISM: Though some of their work was highly abstract, the Fauves continued to view their paintings as representational.

EXPRESSIONISM: It was one of the Expressionists that erased representation: Kandinsky, though believing that meaning, expression, was necessary for esteem-worthiness, did not believe that representation was necessary for there to be expression—he created the first non-objective paintings in 1910.

CUBISM: Though some of their work was highly abstract, the Cubists continued to view their paintings as representational. A possible exception was Braque, who became critical of Picasso’s quasi-representational work.

ACCURACY OF REPRESENTATION: Dionysos Metria was still completely convinced that accurate representation was not necessary in a painting for it to possess significant meaning, and thus for it to possess esteem-worthiness—and he continued quarreling with Apollo Akraia, who, though becoming weaker—Dionysos was beginning to win the argument—still dominated the arts.

POST-IMPRESSIONISM: these artists, retaining a focus on expression, believed that color could transmit feelings and insights in a way that did not rely on accurate representation.

Gauguin said, “Don't paint from nature too much. Art is an abstraction. Derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it, and think more of the creation that will result.” He said, “I shut my eyes in order to see.”

Cézanne did not accurately represent the world as we see it, but he believed that, in representing objects by emphasizing the basic geometric shapes from which they were constituted, he was portraying reality more truly than if he had faithfully reproduced their visual appearance.

FAUVISM: The Fauves’ work is characterized by intense color, applied as flat patches in a painterly manner. Some of Matisse’s works are nearly non-objective (see, for instance, his collage, The Snail). They believed that this method could best convey meaning.

EXPRESSIONISM: Those Expressionists who continued to see their work as representational did not believe that accuracy of representation was necessary for esteem.

CUBISM: The Cubist, Picasso, distorted reality in his paintings, though he might have argued that he was showing us a truer reality.

GOOD FORMAL COMPOSITION: For Dionysos Metria during the Middle Modernist era (that is, for most of the artists and the theorists of the time) good formal composition complemented meaning.

POST-IMPRESSIONISM: Like Renoir, the postimpressionist, Cézanne, was dissatisfied with the lack of compositional structure in impressionist painting. He said that he wanted to "redo [Nicolas] Poussin after nature and make Impressionism something solid and durable like the Old Masters." In another quote he said, “… I wanted to make out of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art of the museums.” Gaugin asked, “Is there a recipe for making beauty? The schools give recipes, but they do not beget works that make people exclaim: "How beautiful that is!” “Beautiful colors exist, though we do not realize it, and are glimpsed behind the veil that modesty has drawn over them.” He saw beauty in single colors; he said, “When two of us (he and Van Gogh) were together in Arles, both of us mad and at constant war over the beauty of color, me, i loved the color red.” Van Gogh’s work has great compositional beauty, but the source of that beauty in nature was more important to van Gogh than the rigid rules that were promulgate by the Academy. Speaking disparagingly of the Dutch painters—except for Rembrandt—he said, “Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.” He struggled against the Academy, that “mistress who freezes you, who petrifies you, who sucks your blood…this woman of marble (or is it plaster of Paris??? how horrible!)” Whereas, “If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.”

FAUVISM: The Fauves, too, were concerned with the formal qualities of paintings—in particular, they were interested in color theory, and how complementary colors intensified each other. They were interested in how form could be put in service of expression (however, they did not realize that Unity In Variety was enough for esteem-worthiness, or that aesthetic pleasure was what gave expression its energy—color clashes can add to expression, but without the beauty, it lacks power.) Matisse saw the formal qualities as only furthering expression: "The chief function of color should be to serve expression as well as possible.” He also said, “You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.”

EXPRESSIONISM: Wassily Kandinsky, believed that the formal qualities of a painting had sufficient expressive power, all by themselves, without the painting representing visual reality at all, to make the work esteem-worthy. He believed that the composition of line and color could express, could communicate, deep emotion, spirituality. He wrote, "Color is a means of exerting direct influence on the soul." So he believed that the formal qualities of a painting had sufficient expressive power, all by themselves, without the painting representing visual reality at all, to make the work esteem-worthy. Kandinsky, who still saw expression as the source of art’s power, theorized that the painting’s formal qualities were inherently expressive (which they can be, but minimally) and so that no representation was necessary at all for a painting to be esteem-worthy.

CUBISM: Braque, possibly more clearly than most of the modernist painters, seemed actually to sense that good formal composition was the primary condition for a painting’s esteem-worthiness. He regarded the source of formal composition’s power as a mystery: he said, “There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain;” and “To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would do irreparable harm... If there is no mystery, then there is no poetry, the quality I value above all else in art.” Pictorial composition, balance and harmony were his primary conscious goals. Braque said, “I couldn't portray a women in all her natural loveliness.. I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is mere a pretext for decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to express the absolute, not merely the factitious woman.” Braque, did, in fact, have some insight into the real nature of formal beauty, of unity in variety, as the play of sameness and difference; he said, “I do not believe in objects. I believe only in their relationships.” Of all the well-known artists of the period, Braque may have had a view closest to truth—he had the insight that formal composition, not expression, was the source of art’s power, though the precise nature of that source was a mystery to him .

Summary: Most of these artists continued to misattribute the deep sense of satisfaction and joy that the viewer of their paintings felt to meanings that the artist bestowed upon a represented subject—the artists were not the authorities on what they were doing. The truth continued to emerge, helped along most notably by Braque, Matisse and, especially, Kandinsky, that good formal composition is the power source of artistic expression of positive will. That Unity In Variety is key to the power of formal composition is yet to be understood by Helios—but his possession of these great and essential truths will someday facilitate the completion of his own faculty of will-consolidation..

Chapter VI. Formalism

Theorists Roger Fry (1866-1934), writing c.1920-1934, and Clive Bell (1881-1964), writing c. 1914-1956, understood that esteem-worthiness was not rooted in expression of the “emotions of life,” or in any sort of meaning, but in the special “aesthetic emotion” (Bell’s term)— Fry and Bell were unknowingly pointing to the joy that is felt when we see parity in sameness and difference, Unity in Variety.

There were no named groups of artists and few artists who would have described their goal as creating work that focused not on meaning but only on the power of the formal elements alone to stimulate the aesthetic emotion within the viewer. Unity in Variety is art’s power source, but few if any during the period of Dionysos’ ascendancy were able to appreciate this fact.

Written works by Fry and Bell, published in the nineteen-teens, -twenties and -thirties, reinforced the ideas that paintings could be created that possessed esteem-worthiness but that lacked all meaning and representation, and that Good Formal Composition is the power source of artistic expression of positive will, a truth the possession of which by mankind would someday facilitate the completion of Helios’ faculty of will-consolidation (but these theorists did not articulate what Francis Hutcheson had shown already in 1725, namely, that Unity in Variety was the key to formal excellence.)

Chapter VII. Late Modernism

DADA (1916-1924): artists included Henri Jean Arp (1886-1966), Marcel Duchamp(1887-1968), Max Ernst(1891-1976), George Grosz(1893-1959), Francis Picabia(1879-1953), Man Ray(1890-1976), Hans Richter(1888-1976), Kurt Schwitters(1887-1948), Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943).

DE STIJL (1917-1931): artists included Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931).

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM (1943-late 1965): artists included Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Clyfford Still (1904-1980), Franz Kline (1910-1962), Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) and Barnett Newman (1905-1970).

MEANING: Dionysos Metria (and therefore his emergers, including the artists and theorists of the time) continued to believe that for a painting to be esteem-worthy, it was necessary for it to possess meaning.

DADA: Dada painters described the meaning that they wished to express as discontent with society, expressing irrationality, nonsense, intuition, anti-war, as a rejection of cultural conformity, of nationalism, and of the aesthetics and the logic, the reason, of the modern world. Grosz: the Dadaist artists were protesting "against this world of mutual destruction."

DE STIJL: Mondrian, saw his non-objective work having meaning, as expressing a spiritual order that underlies the visible world. Mondrian painted in order to express, to reveal, what he believed to be the true, spiritual foundation of things: basic forms, balance, rhythm, tension, dynamic evolutionary forces—forms of “universal beauty.” Though he did not clearly grasp the nature of UIV, he did correctly discern the fact that the evolution of art coincided with the evolution of humanity.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM: The stated goal of the Abstract Expressionists was to imbue their canvases with expression. De Kooning: “I paint the way I do because I can keep on putting more and more things in - like drama, pain, anger, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas of space.” Newman: 'Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘'life'’, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.'

REPRESENTATION: Some of these artists’ work was representational and some was not.

DADA: The paintings of the Dada artists were sometimes representational--some of their works are quite non-objective.

DE STIJL: the work of the members of the De Stijl group was totally non-objective. Much of the mature work of Mondrian and van Doesburg consisted of black grid lines forming rectangles that were filled with color of left white. Mondrian, calling his art “Neoplasticist,” limited himself to horizontal and vertical lines and primary colors, while van Doesburg used diagonals and a greater variety of colors.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM: Almost all of the work of the Abstract Expressionists is totally non-objective (De Kooning is an exception). The compositions of the “color field” abstract expressionists like Newman and Rothko were characterized by large areas of color; the compositions of the “action painters” of the group, like Pollock and de Kooning consisted of sweeping, expressive brush stokes that had been, or that gave the impression of having been, spontaneous applied, directly from the unconscious mind to the canvas. De Kooning said, “I might work on a painting for a month, but it has to look like I painted it in a minute.”

ACCURACY OF REPRESENTATION: none of these artists whose work was representational thought that accurate representation was necessary for there to be meaning, and thus for for a painting to possess esteem-worthiness.

GOOD FORMAL COMPOSITION: For Dionysos Metria during the Late Modernist era (that is, for most of the artists and the theorists of the time) good formal composition complemented meaning.

DADA: Dada painters protested against existing traditions, yet it’s clear that some of them, for example, Kurt Schwitters, Sophie Taeuber Arp and Jean Arp, at least intuitively, were masters of good formal composition.

DE STIJL: the paintings of these artists were clearly the products of a desire to produce aesthetically refined work, in a rather minimal sense. Mondrian equated beauty with what he saw as the spiritual realities underlying the processes of nature, balance, rhythm, tension, and dynamic evolutionary forces.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM: The Abstract Expressionists minimized the importance of formal qualities, though their work was generally aesthetically well-formed: de Kooning said, “I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color.” Rothko said, “If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom.”

Summary: During this time, Apollo Akraia struggled against the now dominant Dionysos Metria, who was now just beginning to transform himself into Dionysos Akraia, who is also known as PoMo—the first such transformation occurred in the arts. Some of the Dada artist-emergers’ work, and all of the work of the De Stijl and then of the Abstract Expressionist artist-emergers reinforced and continued to acknowledge the idea that paintings could be created that possessed esteem-worthiness even though they failed to represent visual reality at all, but due to the growing presence of Dionysis Akraia, the knowledge that pure form is the source of art’s power was not advanced by these innovators—Mondrian, for instance, believed that he was revealing a truth about the world, a spiritual foundation of human experience, when his work was actually an act of creation. Dionysos Metria had “erased” the notion that representation was necessary for esteem, but mistakenly retained the idea that meaning was the source of esteem-worthiness. The advances that had been made by Braque, Matisse and Kandinsky were not being reinforced; the idea that Formal Composition is the power source of artistic expression of positive will, this truth the possession of which by mankind would someday facilitate the completion of Helios’ faculty of will-consolidation, was being lost. The truth that Unity in Variety was the key to formal excellence, which just a decade or so before had been nearly within the grasp of humanity, was now very far from being possessed by mankind.

Chapter VIII. Postmodernism

THE EVOLUTIONARY PAUSE—

THE DESTRUCTIVE THOUGHTS OF DIONYSOS AKRAIA

Up until the 1950s, whether intentionally or not, Dionysos Metria, his emerger artists, were identifying and uncovering the conditions for artistic greatness, for what made highly esteemed artworks of the past highly esteemed—it was an important inquiry, because if this could be revealed, then Helios would gain important knowledge about how his feelings could best be consolidated. Over the decades of Romanticism and Modernism, these pioneers had first discovered that, surprising many, these conditions did not include accuracy of representation, and then they found out that, in fact, they did not include representation at all.

At the time of the abstract expressionists, however, Dionysos Metria was just beginning to transform into his destructive form, and the search for truth was beginning to come to an end. Artists still (wrongly) believed that the key to a painting’s esteem lay in the meanings, the feelings, that the artist was able to imbue it with—Dionysos Akraia (PoMo), who had a strong affinity for emotion, was not able to admit that esteem came from something as intellectual as the calculus of relations. Further progress would be impossible until Apollo Metria became dominant.

With postmodernism, progress ended. Postmodernism continued modernism’s rejection of artistic tradition, but in a radical way: The early examples of postmodern art anticipated the popularity in academic circles of the French postmodern sophists. Postmodern artists rejected the past “grand narratives” of art, the idea of progress in art, and so rejects the idea of the avant-garde. It often blurred the traditional concept of high and low art by using industrial materials and images of ordinary objects; it undermined the traditional ideas of authenticity and originality. Postmodernists have aimed at pluralism and diversity. It no longer seemed to make sense to try to figure out what made great art of the past great.

Many, embracing the diversity of relative truth, goodness and beauty, deny that paintings can legitimately possess any objective values whatsoever, not inherent meaning, much less formal value. Nothing of the Enlightenment has remained, the productive synthesis has been all but destroyed: Those that do not accept these ultra-radically Dionysian views are nonetheless radically Dionysian, believing that expression, a focus on the diverse emotions, is key (the earlier artists were Dionysian, but not so radical)—formalist views, with their focus on the Apollonian unity of form, are vehemently eschewed. The progress made by the artist emergers of the Romantic and Modernist periods has been wiped from public consciousness--but it has been retained in Helios’ unconscious memory, and it can now be resurrected by Apollo Metria.

NEO-DADA (1952-1970): Artists of the Neo-Dada movement included Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) and Jasper Johns (1930-).

POP ART (mid 1950s-early 1970s): Artists of the Pop Art movement included Andy Warhole (1928-1987), Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) and James Rosenquist (1933-2017).

MEANING: Postmodern artists seem to have thought that art should have meaning, but their view of meaning was nihilistic. Postmodernism rejected the idea that a painting could inherently express a single meaning, determined by the artist. It maintained that a painting’s meaning consisted of whatever the viewer saw in it. Meaning no longer was seen as something that artists of the past had infused their paintings with and that made their work great—there was no clear sense that, other than being the subject of multiple interpretations, a painting could have any intrinsic value..

NEO-DADA: The Neo-Dada artists rejected the Abstract Expressionists’ focus on intense emotion. Rather, they were interested to incorporate mundane subject matter into their works, simultaneously deriding it and saluting it. They borrowed imagery from mass media and popular culture—this lack of input from the artist took the focus away from artist’s intent and onto what each viewer might see in the work. These artists paved the way for Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism. For the Neo-Dada artists, a painting’s meaning was whatever the viewer might see in it.

POP ART: The Pop Art artists often simply reproduced imagery of mass culture, thus rejecting the values that earlier artists took seriously. Humor is a kind of Unity In Variety, and the notion that such mundane images should be found in art museums and galleries may be said to be slightly funny—a small bit of humor, not consciously recognized as such, may make the work seem important. Unity in Variety can manifest as beauty (the usual kind in art) or as humor (e.g. Pop art and Jonathan Winters’ art) or as surrealism (e.g. Dali)/symbolism. With Pop Art, the good work of the emergers of Dionysos Metria, which had been in decline since the Abstract Expressionists, had come to an end.

REPRESENTATION: Some Postmodern artists incorporated photographs into their paintings; many postmodern paintings are loosely representational.

NEO-DADA: The For the Neo-Dada artists, Johns and Rauschenberg, representation is not necessary

for meaning, and thus for esteem-worthiness—much of their work is totally non-objective.

POP ART: Some of Warhole’s work is realistically representational.

GOOD FORMAL COMPOSITION: The postmodern embrace of low-art features had the effect that formal composition, beauty, was not a consideration in many postmodern works. The postmodernists were averse to judging paintings good or bad on the basis of traditional criteria.

Chapter IX. the Completion of Helios’ Heart/Will

Summary of the Early to Mid R-PT Era—and the Future

THE FUTURE ERASURE OF MEANING—THE PRODUCTIVE THOUGHTS OF

APOLLO METRIA

First, the Romantics and the Early and Middle Modernist artists showed Helios that (1) accurate representation was not necessary for there to be esteem-worthy expression in a work of art. Then Matisse, Braque and especially Kandinsky (who believed that formal composition was essentially expressive) convinced Helios that (2) representation was not necessary for expression at all; this is what Helios was thinking when Dionysos Akraia brought to an end the brilliant, hard-fought, evolutionary progress forged by the romantic and early-to-middle modernist artists. Dionysos Akraia was then dominant during a long period of slow, then very fast, degeneration.

But Apollo Metria will now pick up the lost thread. Taking lessons not only from these great artists, but from theorists like Hutcheson, Fry and Bell—and others, Helios will take the next step: he will realize that (3) formal composition, itself essentially non-expressive, is the power behind expression. Then he will realize that (4) good formal composition is potentially so powerful that it alone, in stimulating the mysterious aesthetic emotion within the viewer, can make a painting esteem-worthy, that meaning is not necessary for esteem-worthiness at all; then he will come to understand that (5) Unity in Variety, parity of sameness and difference, is the key to formal composition. Helios will learn then that which it is his destiny to learn; that is, Helios will come to realize that (6) UNITY IN VARIETY, THAT IS, PARITY OF SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE, IS THE POWER BEHIND EXPRESSION AND SO IS THE KEY TO THE CONSOLIDATION OF HIS WILL; this is true because with the discovery that Unity in Variety is the power source in conveying meaning in art, humans will now know how to maximize the expression of their feelings.

V. Under Strange Skies

UFO Encounters Reconstructed from Witness Accounts

For more than eighty years, people in very different circumstances have reported encounters with things in the sky that they could not explain. Pilots, police officers, military personnel, families, schoolchildren and ordinary people going about their lives have described objects ranging from distant lights to enormous structures close enough to dominate the landscape.

This page presents a chronological selection of those encounters, accompanied by visual reconstructions intended to make the witnesses' descriptions easier to imagine. The purpose is not to settle what the objects were, but to ask a simpler question: what did the witnesses say they experienced?

Foo Fighters — World War II

During the Second World War, Allied aircrews began reporting mysterious lights that appeared near their aircraft during night missions. The objects were often described simply as glowing balls or lights rather than as clearly structured machines. They could pace an aircraft, shift position, disappear, and later return. Because the reports emerged in a wartime environment, crews naturally considered whether the lights might represent an enemy weapon, a tracking device, or some unfamiliar aircraft.

In one well-known episode, Beaufighter pilot Edward Schlueter, radar operator Donald Meiers and squadron intelligence officer Fred Ringwald watched unexplained lights maneuver near them. The men could see no conventional aircraft body behind the lights, and the radar set did not reveal a corresponding target. When Schlueter turned toward the lights, they disappeared. Later, they returned. The encounter was brief and visually simple, but it contained a pattern that would recur in later UFO reports: something apparently responsive to the observers' actions, yet difficult to confront directly.

Reports of “foo fighters” were never resolved into a single agreed explanation. Some cases may have had conventional causes, while others remained ambiguous. Their historical importance lies partly in the fact that trained military aircrews were already reporting strange aerial phenomena before the postwar “flying saucer” era had even begun.

Kenneth Arnold — 1947

On June 24, 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mount Rainier in Washington State in exceptionally clear daylight. While searching the area, he noticed a chain of bright objects moving rapidly across the mountains. There were nine of them. Arnold did not simply glance at the objects and later report a vague impression; he tried to study them as a pilot would, comparing their positions with familiar landmarks and estimating how long they took to cross the visible distance.

The objects did not appear to him as ordinary aircraft. He described them as thin and highly reflective, with flashes of light as their orientation changed. At certain angles they became difficult to see, then reappeared brightly. Arnold attempted to estimate their speed and concluded that they were moving extraordinarily fast. His account would later become one of the founding incidents of the modern UFO era.

Arnold's own description was more complicated than the simple round disk that later became the popular image of a “flying saucer.” The famous phrase arose from the way he described the objects' motion, and newspapers quickly transformed the wording into a cultural symbol. Within days, reports of strange disks and saucer-like craft multiplied. Whatever Arnold had seen, his sighting did more than enter the record as a single event: it changed the language in which later sightings would be described and discussed.

Roswell — 1947

Only weeks after Arnold's sighting, unusual debris recovered near Roswell, New Mexico, became the center of what would eventually become the most famous UFO controversy of all. Rancher Mac Brazel discovered scattered material on remote land after severe weather. The debris attracted military attention, and Major Jesse Marcel, an intelligence officer from Roswell Army Air Field, was sent to investigate.

Marcel carried some of the material home before returning to the base. There, on the kitchen floor, Marcel, his wife Viaud and their young son Jesse Jr. examined the fragments and tried to fit pieces together. Jesse Jr. would later remember a light, beam-like fragment bearing strange purple-violet markings or symbols. Other later witnesses also described materials they considered unusually light, strong, or difficult to damage, although those memories became part of a heavily disputed historical record.

The official explanation eventually centered on Project Mogul, a secret balloon program intended to detect evidence of Soviet atomic testing. The case therefore developed two very different evidential traditions: one emphasizing the resemblance between the recovered material and balloon equipment, and another emphasizing later testimony that the debris possessed extraordinary properties. Roswell became a case in which the original event, official secrecy, changing explanations, and memories recorded decades afterward became inseparably entangled.

Green Fireballs — 1948–49

Beginning in the late 1940s, residents, military personnel and scientists in the American Southwest reported brilliant green fireballs crossing the night sky. New Mexico received particular attention because some reports occurred near Los Alamos, Sandia and other locations associated with the country's atomic program. The lights were described as unusually bright and intensely green, sometimes moving on trajectories that seemed different from ordinary meteors.

Astronomer Lincoln LaPaz became one of the principal scientific figures associated with the mystery. Investigators considered natural explanations, including meteors, but the reported color, apparent trajectories and concentration of sightings near sensitive installations helped turn the phenomenon into both a scientific and a security problem. The uncertainty was sharpened by the early Cold War atmosphere, when anything unexplained near atomic facilities could not be treated casually.

Today the “green fireball” episode remains a good example of the difficulty of reconstructing historical aerial phenomena. Some reports may have had ordinary astronomical causes; others were considered unusual even by experienced observers. What made the episode memorable was the combination of spectacular appearance, sensitive geography and unresolved interpretation.

Great Falls / Nicholas Mariana — 1950

In August 1950, Nicholas Mariana, general manager of the Great Falls Electrics baseball club in Montana, was at the team's ballpark when he noticed two bright objects in the clear northern sky. His secretary Virginia was nearby and also saw them. Mariana described the objects as highly polished silver disks, without wings, fuselages, exhaust or visible cabins, moving together through the daylight.

What made the case especially important was that Mariana had access to a movie camera. A 16-millimeter camera fitted with a telephoto lens was in the glove compartment of his automobile. He hurried down from the grandstand, retrieved the camera, prepared it, and searched for the objects through the viewfinder. By the time filming began, the objects had moved farther away, but he managed to record them as they continued across the sky.

The resulting film became one of the earliest major motion-picture records in the UFO controversy. Analysts argued over what the images showed and whether the lights could be explained by conventional aircraft or reflections. The film itself was less impressive than Mariana's description of what he had seen before he began filming, but that difference became part of the case: the camera preserved something, yet not necessarily the full visual experience described by the witness.

Tremonton / Delbert Newhouse — 1952

In July 1952, Navy Chief Photographer Delbert Newhouse was driving through Utah with his wife and children when his wife noticed something unusual in the brilliant, cloudless sky. Newhouse stopped the car and looked upward. Nearly overhead was a loose group of approximately twelve brilliant silvery objects moving generally westward.

Newhouse was not an inexperienced observer. He had professional photographic training and extensive experience in aviation. He later said the objects looked unlike anything he had seen in the air. As their aspect changed, he thought they showed structure, comparing them to two saucers, one inverted over the other. One object eventually separated from the group, reversed direction and disappeared toward the eastern horizon while the others continued west.

Newhouse had a 16-millimeter Bell & Howell camera with him, but it was packed away, and the film was stored separately. By the time he retrieved both, loaded the camera, set the focus and exposure and began filming, the objects had moved much farther away. The resulting film shows distant points of light rather than the structured forms he said he had first observed. Newhouse later remarked that if the camera had been loaded and ready beside him at the beginning, the resulting evidence might have been far more decisive.

Washington National — 1952

During two weekends in July 1952, radar operators around Washington, D.C., began tracking unexplained targets moving through and near restricted airspace. Some appeared on radar at Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base. The timing could hardly have been more dramatic: the targets were appearing around the political center of the United States, near the White House and Capitol, during a period of intense national interest in flying saucers.

Controllers watched targets behave in ways they found difficult to explain. Air Force interceptors were sent up. On the ground, officials, radar controllers and, at times, journalists were present to observe the displays. Albert Chop, then associated with the Air Force's public information effort, later described a scene in which those around the radar scope took the events seriously and felt acutely that the situation was beyond their control.

During one interception, Lieutenant William Patterson flew an F-94 Starfire toward the reported lights. He could not overtake them. Then the geometry of the encounter changed: instead of Patterson simply pursuing the objects, several lights appeared around his aircraft at different bearings. Patterson radioed the ground and asked what he should do. Those watching could offer no useful instruction.

Chop later summarized the emotional atmosphere with a memorable distinction: the men around the scope were not experiencing disbelief so much as helplessness. Whatever the targets ultimately were, the Washington events became one of the most public and institutionally embarrassing episodes of the early UFO era because radar operators, military aircraft and the capital's protected airspace all became part of the same unresolved story.

Kelly-Hopkinsville — 1955

On the night of August 21–22, 1955, members of an extended family at a farmhouse near Kelly and Hopkinsville, Kentucky, reported a prolonged encounter with small, bizarre humanoid figures. The episode began after one of the men said he had seen a bright object descend toward the area. Not long afterward, the people inside the house began seeing strange figures approaching from outside.

The reported beings were unlike the later standardized image of a “gray alien.” Witnesses described disproportionately large heads, glowing or reflective eyes, long arms and peculiar movements. Some said the figures seemed to float, glide or tumble rather than move like ordinary humans. The family became frightened enough to arm themselves, and shots were reportedly fired when figures approached windows or doors.

Police later responded, but by then the immediate activity had subsided. The case became famous partly because of the number of witnesses and partly because the reported creatures were so visually peculiar that later retellings often compared them to goblins. Skeptical explanations have included owls and misperception under stress, while proponents have emphasized the witnesses' consistency and the duration of the episode.

Levelland — 1957

In November 1957, motorists near Levelland, Texas, began reporting luminous objects close to highways and roads. The reports were notable not simply because of the lights, but because several witnesses described an unusual recurring effect on automobiles. Engines sputtered or stopped as an object approached, headlights dimmed or went out, and normal operation returned after the object moved away.

The descriptions differed in detail. Some witnesses reported glowing, elongated or egg-shaped objects; others described bright lights near the roadway. What gave the case its force was the repetition of the same general sequence across more than one witness: approach of the phenomenon, disruption of the vehicle, departure of the phenomenon, restoration of normal function.

The case quickly encouraged speculation about electromagnetic interference. That interpretation became influential because it appeared to connect the visual phenomenon with a measurable physical effect. Skeptical explanations have included storms, electrical effects and misidentification, but Levelland remains one of the classic examples of a UFO case in which the alleged object seemed to interact directly with ordinary technology.

Boianai / Father Gill — 1959

In June 1959, Reverend William Gill, an Anglican missionary at Boianai in Papua New Guinea, and a number of other witnesses watched a strange luminous craft in the sky. What made the episode especially unusual was that Gill believed he could see humanoid figures associated with the object rather than merely distant lights.

Gill and the other witnesses watched for an extended period. At one point Gill raised an arm and waved toward the figures. A figure appeared to wave back. Others on the ground joined in, and the figures again seemed to respond. Gill later recorded the event in notes and correspondence, giving the case a relatively detailed contemporaneous record.

The incident has remained controversial because the apparent interaction is so simple and direct. If the witnesses interpreted the scene correctly, they were not merely observing an unexplained object but participating in reciprocal communication. Skeptics have proposed astronomical or perceptual explanations, while supporters of the case emphasize Gill's character, the number of witnesses and the conversational quality of the exchange.

Betty and Barney Hill — 1961

On the night of September 19–20, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were driving south through New Hampshire after a trip to Canada when they noticed an unusual light in the sky. The light seemed to change position and, at times, approach the road. Barney eventually stopped the car and used binoculars to get a closer look. He later described seeing a large structured craft with figures visible through what appeared to be windows.

The Hills continued their journey but arrived home with puzzling impressions and an apparent gap in their memory of the drive. In the months that followed, Betty experienced vivid dreams involving strange beings and an examination aboard a craft. Several years later, both underwent hypnosis, during which they gave overlapping but not identical accounts of being stopped, taken aboard, examined and later released.

The details became famous. Betty described medical procedures, questions about human anatomy and an apparent fascination with the difference between her removable dentures and Barney's natural teeth. Barney's recollections emphasized the beings' unusual eyes and his intense emotional reaction to them. The case became one of the most influential abduction narratives in UFO history.

Betty also recalled being shown a large book or object containing unfamiliar writing and, separately, a map marked with stars and routes. She wanted to keep the book but was not allowed to do so. The remembered star map later became the subject of extensive interpretation and dispute, with various researchers attempting to identify a possible astronomical pattern.

The Hill case remains important not because every detail is established beyond dispute, but because it introduced a new kind of UFO narrative into public consciousness: a close encounter involving not only a craft and occupants but an extended sequence of interaction, examination, memory disturbance and later reconstruction.

Socorro — 1964

On April 24, 1964, Socorro, New Mexico, police officer Lonnie Zamora was pursuing a speeding vehicle when he heard a loud roar and saw what he thought might be an explosion in the distance. He abandoned the traffic pursuit and drove toward the source. As he approached rough terrain, he reported seeing a white object on or near the ground and two small figures nearby.

Zamora initially wondered whether he was looking at an overturned automobile. As he came closer, however, the scene appeared increasingly strange. The figures disappeared from view, and the object became the focus of his attention. Zamora described a smooth white craft resting or hovering close to the ground, marked with a red insignia or symbol.

Then the encounter changed abruptly. Zamora said a tremendous roar began and a brilliant flame appeared beneath the object. He ran toward his patrol car and took cover as the craft rose and departed. Investigators later examined the site and reported impressions in the ground along with disturbed or burned vegetation. Because Zamora was a police officer and because physical traces were reported, Socorro became one of the most intensively discussed close-encounter cases of the 1960s.

Exeter — 1965

In the early hours of September 3, 1965, eighteen-year-old Norman Muscarello was walking along a road near Exeter, New Hampshire, when he saw five brilliant red lights above the trees. They appeared in a straight line tilted steeply across the sky. The lights illuminated in sequence along the row and then back again, producing a repetitive pulsing pattern.

The brilliance was extraordinary. Muscarello later described nearby fields, trees and a white farmhouse being washed in red light. When the object seemed to move toward him, Muscarello became frightened and threw himself into a roadside ditch. After it moved away, he ran to a nearby house and pounded on the door, calling for help, but no one answered. Returning to the road, he managed to flag down a passing automobile, and the occupants drove him to the Exeter police station.

Patrolman Eugene Bertrand returned to the area with Muscarello, and additional witnesses later became involved. The case became one of the most famous American sightings of the mid-1960s partly because police officers were drawn into the event and partly because the reported lights were so distinctive. The Exeter incident remains an example of how a seemingly simple light display can become physically overwhelming when it is close enough to illuminate the landscape.

Westall — 1966

On April 6, 1966, students and teachers at Westall High School in suburban Melbourne, Australia, reported strange silver objects in the daylight sky. The event unfolded during the school day, and students poured from classrooms and school grounds as word spread. Some ran after the objects toward nearby open land known as the Grange.

Accounts varied, as they often do in mass sightings. Some witnesses remembered one object, others more than one. Some described simple silver disks, while others recalled more complex shapes. Several later said that at least one object came very close to the ground. Victor Zakry recalled two identical silver craft at ground level, while Terry Peck later described a silver object hovering just above the ground.

The number of young witnesses gave Westall unusual social force. It was not a solitary roadside encounter but an event remembered by a school community. Decades later, former students continued to describe the experience in interviews and reunions, often emphasizing how vivid the memory remained. The case also illustrates the difficulty of reconstructing mass sightings: the broad outline may be shared while details differ from witness to witness.

Dexter and Hillsdale — 1966

In March 1966, a cluster of sightings in Michigan drew national attention. Near Dexter, farmer Frank Mannor and his eighteen-year-old son Ronald went into marshy land behind their property after strange lights had been reported. Mannor described a broad, oddly shaped object with a textured or waffled-looking surface and changing lights. Police officers and other witnesses became involved as the report spread.

The following night, approximately sixty miles away at Hillsdale College, another cluster of witnesses reported strange lights near marshy ground. Students, local residents and officials watched luminous phenomena that seemed to move, hover or descend. Because the two incidents occurred so close together in time, they became linked in public discussion.

The Air Force explanation associated the sightings with “swamp gas,” a phrase that quickly became famous and widely ridiculed. Whether or not natural luminous phenomena contributed to some observations, the explanation seemed inadequate to many witnesses who believed they had seen structured objects. The controversy helped turn Michigan into one of the symbolic battlegrounds of the 1960s UFO debate.

Portage County — 1966

In the early morning of April 17, 1966, Portage County Deputy Sheriff Dale Spaur and mounted deputy Wilbur “Barney” Neff encountered a brilliant object near the road in northeastern Ohio. What began as a stationary or low-moving light soon became something much more dramatic. The object rose from behind trees and approached, startling the officers.

Spaur and Neff began following it. The pursuit continued for many miles and drew other police departments into the event. The object seemed able to maintain a position ahead of the patrol car regardless of the officers' attempts to close the distance. The prolonged nature of the chase turned a single sighting into a moving chain of observations across jurisdictions.

Farther along the route, East Palestine patrolman H. Wayne Huston heard Spaur's radio reports, went outside and waited for the object to arrive. He saw something approach from the northwest and watched it pass overhead before joining the pursuit. The chase continued into Pennsylvania, where patrolman Frank Panzanella also became involved.

Eventually the officers watched the object rise rapidly and disappear. The aftermath was difficult for Spaur, whose life was heavily affected by the publicity and controversy surrounding the case. Portage County remains one of the classic police UFO pursuits because the object was not reported by one officer in one location but by a succession of law-enforcement witnesses along a route.

Malmstrom — 1967

In March 1967, a series of incidents at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana became associated with one of the most controversial claims in UFO history: temporary failure of nuclear missile systems during reports of strange aerial objects. At Echo Flight, ten Minuteman missiles abruptly lost strategic-alert status. The missiles were not physically destroyed and could later be restored, but the simultaneous loss of several weapons was a serious technical event.

Days later, Robert Salas was underground at Oscar Flight when security personnel above reported strange lights and then a large glowing red object hovering outside the gate. As those reports were being relayed, missiles under the officers' control began entering No-Go condition. Salas later connected the two events and became a prominent public witness.

The exact relationship between the reported aerial phenomenon and the missile failures remains disputed. Skeptics emphasize technical explanations and documentary ambiguities; proponents emphasize the timing and the testimony of former Air Force personnel. The case endures because it links one of the most extraordinary claims in UFO history with the most sensitive technology of the Cold War.

Pascagoula — 1973

On October 11, 1973, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were fishing near Pascagoula, Mississippi, when they reported a strange craft approaching and bizarre occupants emerging from it. The beings they described were unlike the more human-looking entities of many other UFO reports. They appeared stiff and almost mechanical, with unusual facial structures and forms that Hickson found deeply unsettling.

According to the men, they became immobilized. Hickson later described being taken aboard while Parker appeared to lose consciousness or enter a state of shock. Hickson reported that an eye-like apparatus moved around his body as though conducting an examination. The procedure was strange but not overtly violent.

The men were eventually released. Police initially suspected a hoax, but after questioning the men, officers deliberately left them alone with a concealed tape recorder still running, hoping to discover whether their story would change when they believed no one was listening. Instead, the recording captured Hickson and Parker continuing to speak about the experience in evident distress. Supporters of the case have therefore regarded the recording as evidence that, whatever had happened to them, the two men sincerely believed they had undergone a frightening experience.. The Pascagoula case became one of the defining occupant encounters of the 1970s because the reported beings were so unlike the stereotypical alien image that would later dominate popular culture.

Tehran — 1976

Shortly after midnight on September 19, 1976, residents of Tehran reported an extraordinarily bright object in the sky. The reports reached the Iranian Air Force, which sent an F-4 Phantom fighter to investigate. As the first aircraft approached, the pilot reportedly experienced loss of instrumentation and UHF and intercom communications. When he broke off the interception and moved away, the systems returned.

A second F-4 was then sent up. Its crew reported obtaining radar contact with the object. The sighting became increasingly complex when a smaller luminous object appeared to emerge from the primary one and move toward the fighter. The pilot prepared to fire an AIM-9 Sidewinder.

At that moment, the weapons system and communications reportedly failed. The smaller object later rejoined the larger one. Another luminous body was then seen descending toward the ground, illuminating a broad area below. The combination of visual observation, radar, military pilots, apparent system interference and multiple luminous objects made Tehran one of the most elaborate military UFO cases of the 1970s.

Rendlesham Forest — 1980

Late in December 1980, strange lights were reported in Rendlesham Forest near RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters in Britain, bases then used by the United States Air Force. Airmen John Burroughs and Jim Penniston went into the forest to investigate. Penniston later described approaching a small dark, manufactured-looking object on or just above the ground, close enough to examine in detail.

Penniston said the object had a smooth surface and unusual geometric markings. He made drawings and notes and later stated that he touched the surface. Burroughs remembered the experience differently in some respects, illustrating how even witnesses to the same event can preserve different details.

Two nights later, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt and other servicemen returned to investigate continuing activity. Halt made an audio recording while in the forest, describing unusual lights and movements. He later reported a narrow beam of light descending toward the ground near the group and similar beams appearing in the direction of the Weapons Storage Area.

The case became known as “Britain's Roswell,” though the two incidents are very different. Rendlesham remains controversial because it involves military witnesses, contemporaneous notes and audio, and several nights of reported activity, but also conflicting recollections and competing interpretations.

The Hudson Valley — 1980s

Beginning in the early 1980s, large numbers of people in New York's Hudson Valley and adjoining areas of Connecticut reported enormous, structured objects in the night sky. Many were described as V-shaped or boomerang-like and marked by arrays of white and colored lights. Witnesses repeatedly emphasized the apparent scale: objects hundreds of feet across, moving extraordinarily slowly and producing surprisingly little sound.

The reports differed, and some sightings were eventually associated with groups of small aircraft flying in formation. Yet other witnesses remained convinced that they had seen single, coherent structures rather than separate airplanes. One of the most striking features of the wave was the repeated impression that something vast could hover or move over populated areas without producing the roar one would expect from a conventional aircraft of comparable size.

On March 17, 1983, Dennis Sant watched one of these objects near Brewster, New York. Later, from near his home, he described an immense dark structure crowded with lights moving toward him and hovering nearby. Sant compared the effect to a city suspended in the sky. That phrase captures something many Hudson Valley witnesses struggled to express: the object seemed less like an aircraft than like a piece of illuminated architecture moving through the night.

The “Kathie Davis” / Debra Jordan-Kauble Case — 1983

In the early 1980s, an Indiana woman later publicly identified as Debra Jordan-Kauble began reporting a series of experiences that became central to Budd Hopkins's book Intruders. In the book she was given the pseudonym “Kathie Davis.” Her case became part of a growing body of abduction literature in which repeated encounters, reproductive themes and strange familial imagery played major roles.

In one memorable episode, she went into her backyard carrying her father's unloaded shotgun. She reported seeing six small beings with disproportionately large heads, an intense light, a small brilliant sphere and a peculiar egg-shaped object standing in the yard. The scene combined the ordinary domestic setting of a backyard with imagery that seemed completely alien to it.

The broader “Kathie Davis” narrative remains controversial, especially because much of the material emerged through hypnosis and retrospective investigation. Yet the case became influential because of the complexity and repetition of the reported experiences and because it helped shape later public ideas about abduction, hybridization and long-term contact.

Japan Airlines Flight 1628 — 1986

On November 17, 1986, Japan Airlines Flight 1628, a Boeing 747 freighter commanded by Captain Kenju Terauchi, was flying over Alaska toward Anchorage when the crew reported unexplained lights and objects. Terauchi was an experienced pilot, and the encounter unfolded over a substantial period rather than as a momentary glimpse.

The crew first reported bright objects near the aircraft. Terauchi later described them as maneuvering in ways he found extraordinary. Communications with Anchorage Air Route Traffic Control Center continued while controllers attempted to understand what the crew was seeing. At different moments, radar information also became part of the event, though the interpretation of that data has remained disputed.

The most dramatic part of Terauchi's account came later. He described a gigantic dark form off the aircraft's left side, with pale lights toward its extremities. He compared its size to one and a half or two aircraft carriers. The comparison was so extreme that it became one of the defining details of the case: a huge Boeing 747 appeared small beside whatever Terauchi believed he was seeing.

The case produced radio communications, interviews, FAA records and later controversy over how official agencies handled the report. Whether every element can be reconciled is still debated, but JAL 1628 remains one of the most famous large-object encounters involving a commercial flight crew.

The Belgian Wave — 1989–90

On November 29, 1989, two Belgian gendarmes near Eupen reported an enormous dark triangular object with brilliant lights moving very slowly and making little or no sound. The sighting was not isolated. Over the following months, numerous people across Belgium reported large triangular or delta-shaped objects, often described as hovering, moving at unusually low speeds or changing direction with surprising ease.

Police officers were among the witnesses, giving the wave unusual institutional visibility. Civilian investigators collected reports, and Belgian authorities did not simply dismiss the subject. The Belgian Air Force eventually became publicly involved and discussed the phenomenon with an openness uncommon in many earlier UFO controversies.

On the night of March 30–31, 1990, two F-16 fighters were sent up after reports and radar observations. The aircraft obtained intermittent radar contacts, some of which appeared to show rapid changes in speed or altitude. Those contacts have themselves become a subject of debate, with questions about radar artifacts and interpretation.

The Belgian Wave remains important because it combined repeated reports of a distinctive object type with police witnesses, military attention and radar data. It also helped establish the large black triangle as one of the most recognizable forms in late twentieth-century UFO reports.

Ariel School — 1994

On September 16, 1994, children at Ariel School near Ruwa, Zimbabwe, were outside during recess when some noticed unusual objects in the sky and something apparently descending beyond the playground. A number of children ran toward the rough ground beyond the maintained school area, where trees and scrub limited the view.

The children later described a strange craft among the trees and small dark figures associated with it. Their drawings differed in important ways. Some showed a simple disk or saucer, others windows, lights, a dome or more complicated forms. One child described a figure on top of the craft; others saw figures on the ground. Some remembered long black hair, while many emphasized unusually large dark eyes.

The witnesses were interviewed, and their testimony became internationally known. One especially unusual element was the environmental content that appeared in some of the children's recollections: impressions or messages concerning damage to the Earth, technology and the future. Not every child reported this, and the details varied.

Ariel remains one of the most discussed mass-witness cases involving children. Supporters emphasize the number of witnesses and the persistence of their memories over decades. Skeptics point to the difficulty of separating independent testimony from group influence, suggestion and later retelling. Whatever happened, the event became a powerful example of how a schoolyard experience can remain psychologically vivid for an entire lifetime.

The Phoenix Lights — 1997

On the evening of March 13, 1997, witnesses across Arizona reported an enormous formation or object moving south toward Phoenix. The reports began in northern parts of the state and continued as the phenomenon progressed toward heavily populated areas. Descriptions varied—V-shaped, wedge-shaped, boomerang-shaped—but many witnesses said the lights seemed to be associated with something dark and very large between them.

As the object approached Phoenix, estimates of its apparent scale became astonishing. Some witnesses described a structure hundreds of feet across. Others thought it might extend for a mile. Several said stars seemed to disappear behind it, giving the impression that the lights were not simply separate aircraft but were attached to, or outlining, a single enormous dark body.

The movement was also striking. Witnesses often described the object as slow and remarkably quiet for something apparently so large. Arizona governor Fife Symington later said that he himself had seen a large delta-shaped craft, though at the time he publicly treated the subject with humor during a press conference.

This earlier moving event should be distinguished from the later arc of bright lights seen around 10 p.m. southwest of Phoenix. Those later lights were extensively videotaped and have been plausibly associated with military illumination flares. Much of the public imagery of the “Phoenix Lights” comes from that later episode, while the earlier reports concerned a moving object or formation crossing the state.

Southwestern Illinois — 2000

In the early morning of January 5, 2000, a large dark object was reported moving across southwestern Illinois. The sequence is unusual because the object was apparently seen successively from different communities, first by civilians and then by police officers in several jurisdictions. This makes the case less like a single isolated sighting and more like a moving chain of observations.

In Highland, businessman Melvern Noll described an enormous object with window-like lights, red lights beneath it and a light toward the front. Lebanon police officer Ed Barton later saw what he described as a narrow triangular or arrowhead-like object. Accounts and later graphics associated with his sighting emphasized brilliant white lights and a smaller red light, along with a concave rear edge marked by additional lights.

Shiloh officer David Martin and Millstadt officer Craig Stevens also reported the object. Their descriptions of the arrangement of the large white lights differed. In one account the lights appeared in a line; in another they seemed more widely spaced toward the rear. Stevens even drew the object as he had perceived it. These differences are part of what makes the case so interesting: if the witnesses were observing the same object, why did its lighting configuration appear to change?

Simple perceptual differences are one possibility. Different viewing angles, changing lights, or an object with more lights than any one witness saw could also account for the variation. Whatever the explanation, the Illinois case stands out because multiple police officers described a very large, very dark and unusually quiet object moving across the region during the same general period.

Nimitz / Tic Tac — 2004

On November 14, 2004, pilots from the USS Nimitz carrier strike group were sent to investigate unusual radar contacts off Southern California. Radar operators aboard the USS Princeton had reportedly been observing strange tracks for days. Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich, each flying an F/A-18F Super Hornet with a weapons systems officer, were diverted from a training exercise to investigate.

The weather was clear and the ocean comparatively calm. When the four aviators reached the designated area, they noticed a patch of violently disturbed white water below them. Above that disturbance moved a small white object. Fravor described it as roughly forty feet long, smooth, white and oblong, without wings, rotors, windows or any visible means of propulsion. Its shape reminded him of a Tic Tac.

Fravor began descending for a closer look while Dietrich remained higher. For a time the object continued moving erratically above the water. Then, according to Fravor, it abruptly changed its longitudinal orientation so that it faced his aircraft and began climbing toward him in a turn. Fravor cut across the circle in an attempt to close the distance.

The object then accelerated away with extraordinary speed. Soon afterward, the Princeton reported that it had appeared near the fighters' prearranged combat-air-patrol point miles away. A later flight obtained the infrared video that eventually became famous as the “FLIR1” or Tic Tac footage.

The case remained largely outside public attention until years later, when military UAP investigations and released videos brought it into mainstream discussion. The Nimitz encounter became especially important because it combined multiple aviators, radar context, a later infrared recording and witnesses whose professional backgrounds made the case difficult to dismiss casually.

Stephenville / Ricky Sorrells — 2008

Near Dublin, Texas, Ricky Sorrells was hunting on his property around the turn of 2008 when he looked upward through the trees and saw something that, by his account, transformed the entire sky above him. Instead of open daylight, he saw an enormous gray surface extending across the visible canopy. He could not find its edge.

Sorrells later tried to estimate the scale. He thought the object extended for hundreds of feet, perhaps longer than three football fields, and hovered only a few hundred feet above him. The distance was close enough that the underside did not appear as a remote shape in the sky; it appeared as a vast ceiling above the woods.

He compared the surface to pressed sheet metal. He reported no obvious rivets, bolts or seams. Across the underside were enormous circular recesses spaced at regular intervals. He also described a shimmering or mirage-like distortion in the air beneath the object. At one point he used the scope of his hunting rifle simply to examine the surface more closely.

From an investigator's point of view, Sorrells's account has an obvious limitation: he was alone during the close encounter. There was no second witness beside him whose observations could be compared directly with his. But his experience occurred shortly before a much broader series of reports that would make the Stephenville-Dublin area famous.

On January 8, 2008, numerous people in the region reported unusual lights and large objects in the clear Texas sky. Some described extraordinary apparent size, others rapid movement, and still others slower, more structured displays. Police officers and other experienced observers were among those who reported seeing something unusual.

Initially, the Air Force said that no military aircraft had been operating in the area that evening. It later reversed that statement and acknowledged that ten F-16s from the 457th Fighter Squadron had been conducting training in the region. Investigators Glen Schulze and Robert Powell later obtained millions of FAA radar returns from several radar sites and compared them with witness reports. Their analysis identified known civilian and military traffic but also radar returns without transponder signals that they could not confidently associate with those aircraft.

Stephenville therefore combines two very different kinds of material: Sorrells's extraordinary close encounter beneath an apparently gigantic object, and a later regional event involving multiple witnesses, military activity and radar analysis. Whatever ultimately explains the reports, the case is one of the most striking late examples of the “giant object” tradition in UFO history.

What the Reconstructions Are For

Written reports can make extraordinary events feel abstract. A witness says that an object was “hundreds of feet across,” that a light was “above the trees,” or that a craft was “close to the ground,” but those phrases do not necessarily convey what such an experience would have looked like from the witness's actual position.

A visual reconstruction cannot tell us whether the witness was correct about what caused the experience. It cannot turn testimony into proof. But it can help recover scale, viewpoint, distance and emotional immediacy. It can make us notice questions that remain invisible in prose: how much of the sky would an object occupy, how close would a pilot appear beside it, what would a line of lights look like from the roadside, or how overwhelming would a structure seem if its edge could not be seen through the trees?

That is the purpose of these images: not to replace the evidence, but to make the testimony easier to imagine.

VI. THE GAME

THE TRIDIVISIONAL SCHOOL

The Cosmic Arc has so far described a process: the long development of mind, the emergence of collective persons, and the unfinished birth of Helios. But contemplation is not enough. The Arc eventually presents us with a practical question: What are we supposed to do?

The answer proposed here begins with a school.

The TriDivisional School is an institution devoted to the three great domains of judgment: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Its central purpose is to teach the Game of a Trillion Worlds—a method by which people can reason together about the questions that confront an intelligent civilization.

But learning to play such a Game requires much more than learning its rules. The Game can concern almost anything. Its players may debate questions in physics or history, politics or philosophy, biology or economics; they may investigate what ought to be done, or ask why one work of art possesses a beauty that another lacks. The TriDivisional School must therefore teach the subjects taught throughout a university. What distinguishes it from an ordinary university is that these subjects ultimately converge upon a common activity: their students learn not merely what others have discovered, but how to bring what they know into disciplined collective inquiry.

Alongside these familiar fields, the School therefore teaches something less familiar: the Truth Engine itself. Students learn how arguments can be represented, criticized, answered and improved; how competing positions can be preserved in their strongest forms; and how the results of one inquiry can become the starting point of another. They learn, in short, how to play the Game.

Why should an entire school be organized around such an activity?

The answer depends upon an idea encountered throughout the Cosmic Arc but now requiring closer examination: collective intelligence. If groups of human beings can genuinely think—if the exchange and integration of their individual thoughts can produce conclusions that none of them could have reached independently—then education can have a purpose beyond improving the minds of individual students. It can improve the operation of a larger mind.

And if such collective intelligences can themselves be persons, the implications become greater still. Debate may then be understood not merely as something that people do, but as one of the ways in which a collective person thinks. Improving debate would therefore mean improving the faculty of thought of that larger being.

That is the chain of ideas that leads from the TriDivisional School to the Game of a Trillion Worlds. To see why the Game is needed, then, we should begin with the simplest question:

What is collective intelligence?

There’s a very important term that must be made clear from the very beginning: That term is: Collective Intelligence. I will define it like this:

Collective Intelligence, or CI, arises when you have a group of individuals, and the various thoughts of these individuals are communicated to one, some, or all of the members of the group, who then process those thoughts and arrive at conclusions that no single member of the group could have arrived at independently.

We hear a great deal about Artificial Intelligence, but Collective Intelligence is much more powerful—after all, Collective Intelligence created AI and it uses AI as a tool.

So now let’s look at an example where collective intelligence is going on: Imagine that a husband and a wife are having a conversation: The husband says, “Where are the car keys?” The wife answers, “They’re on the dining room table, where I put them.” And the husband says, “I was just in there; they aren’t on the table.” The wife says, “Oh, then our son, Danny, must’ve taken them.” And the husband says, “Yes, Danny must have them.”

So this little group of two people figured out where the car keys are, and that’s something that neither of them could’ve done alone without further investigation.

The philosopher, Descartes, said, and I think correctly, that where there are thoughts, there’s a thinker. So this group of two is a thinker. Does that mean that the group is a person? I believe it does.

The social ontologists talk about whether or not a group engaging in collective thinking can legitimately be called a person. These social ontologists are philosophers/slash-sociologists, and they are divided about whether such a group can be a person.

Some of them who say that it cannot be a person, point to the fact that that a human being, a human person, has a single field of experience—a unitary consciousness; whereas a group governed by collective intelligence has many such fields, one in each of the group’s biological members, and, they claim that no entity with many experiential fields can be a person.

This objection can be answered in three ways:

First, we might say that a Collective-Intelligence group does, or can, have a single, unified experiential field. Whether this is true seems to have to do with the nature of consciousness. Can a collective group be conscious? I think so: the Higher Order Thought (HOT) Theory, which I subscribe to, has it that when, for instance, I am thinking only “There’s a tree there,” I’m not conscious that there’s a tree there, but when I’m thinking, “I’m perceiving that there’s a tree there,” now I’m conscious that there’s a tree there. That is, if I have an “intentional” thought, a thought about my own mental state and its content, then that content becomes conscious. Surely a collective group can have such thoughts about itself. It can have a single consciousness. Recall the husband and wife reasoning together about the missing keys. Suppose the husband now asks, “So we think Mikey took them?” and the wife answers, “Yes.” The collective is now thinking about its own thought. If HOT is correct, that thought is conscious. There are not merely two conscious persons here, but a conscious third person.

The second possible response to the objection that a group, because it appears to have multiple fields of consciousness, can’t be a person is this: a being does not have to have a single experiential field in order to be a person. We can simply ask: Does a collective-intelligence group, despite its multi-centeredness, nevertheless instantiate what we ordinarily mean by the word “person”? Or, very simply stated: Consider the collective-intelligence group itself. Does it seem true to call it a person? I think that it does. We do not have to settle every theoretical detail. When I’ve heard or used the word “person,” I never cared whether “person” implied a simple or a complex experiential field—it was enough that the psyche be unified.

A third response (which I would not make) is: “Maybe a collective-intelligence group is not a person, but it is a thinking being that is enough like a person to be interesting—it is a big, person-like creature. A collective-thinking group is an awesome thinking and feeling being, of a species like no other species on earth, no matter what we call it.”

So, not everyone agrees with me, but, at the very least, our world is turning into a big person-like creature—however, my claim is that collective-intelligence groups are collective persons.

I call collective persons “colossi.”

So, Walmart…the local book club…Italy... the husband-and-wife pair arguing about the car keys…—each of these groups is a person, a real person, a colossus.

And there is a colossus that emerges from the group that is made up of every human in the world. I call him Helios.

Nikolai Kardashev, in 1964, developed a method for measuring a civilization's technological advancement based on its total energy consumption and capability. A type II society is a stellar civilization that is able to capture and utilize the entire energy output of its own star. In the future: we will control the energy of the solar system—I take this to mean that we will control the solar system.

But who is the “we” who will control our solar system? The we is none other than Helios, the collective person, the colossus, who is emerging from all the humans of the earth.

So, the SURPRISE, in my view, is that the solar system, the system of our sun, is becoming a person—amazing but, I think, clearly true.

Now, my theory involves A CALL TO ACTION

To explain this, I first have to ask, How has this creation of a sentient and caring solar system, a person, Helios, whose body is a burning sphere surrounded by rocky and gaseous planets, the whole surrounded by a plasma envelope—how has all this come about, how has Helios been created? How did it happen? By what process is this happening?

My answer is that the creative, evolutionary drive for it all is THE LAW OF THE DIALECTIC—or maybe more accurately, I should say that the sun has fueled the process, and the dialectic has shaped it.

But what is the law of the dialectic? In a dialectic, a state of equilibrium exists which is called the thesis; the thesis is followed by a state of conflict, which is called the antithesis, and the antithesis is followed by a resolution of the conflict—this resolution is called the synthesis—which is a new reality in which parts of the thesis and antithesis are retained. So the dialectic is a great cosmic principle of change that is inexorably, with a certain necessity, building this brilliant, caring solar system, which is to become the great person that I am naming Helios.

Incidentally, from this necessity we can infer that this development of personhood has been the destiny of our system of the sun—in philosophical terms, there is a telos, there is a goal of evolution on earth. Another way to put it is that the general cosmic role of the dialectic is to produce Helios-like super-colossi—that is the job of the dialectic.

Now, suppose that I discover that a regular-looking egg is destined to produce a chick, a baby chicken, and then I see other eggs—I think that I am justified to conclude that these other eggs are also destined to produce baby birds. So, the REALLY BIG SURPRISE in all this is that it seems legitimate to conclude that the stars are people!

Amazing, but apparently true..

But let us go back to the dialectical process as it unfolded to produce the colossus Helios here on earth.

The dialectical process on earth began with biological evolution, which was the dominant form of evolution at work from the time of the microorganisms of three or four billion years ago to the appearance on earth of humankind. The simple minds of the microorganisms were the first glimmer of Helios’ mind. Helios grew more intelligent as more complex animals evolved.

Consider this example of the biological evolution of intelligence and will:

The early long-necked dinosaur of the Triassic period ate the leaves of an early form of the araucaria tree; this is the thesis. The tree, as a species, then evolved a taller trunk—the dinosaur then lost the ability to easily reach the crown; this is the conflict, the antithesis. Then the dinosaur evolved to have a longer neck and could then easily reach the tree’s crown again; this is the resolution, the synthesis, a new reality that incorporated elements of both the thesis and the antithesis—the synthesis immediately becomes a new thesis and the process continues.

Or, we can look at how the shaping force of the dialectic produced greater and greater intelligence in its creatures for instance, a carnivore caught and ate an early monkey-like mammal—that’s the thesis. Then the monkey-like creature, as a species, evolved to be more intelligent, and the monkeys now outwitted the carnivores—this is the antithesis. Then the carnivores became more intelligent and once more could catch the monkeys—this is the synthesis, which quickly became a new thesis, etc. and on and on, as intelligence on earth increased.

Now, when human beings appeared on earth, the dominant form of the dialectic changed from biological evolution to cultural evolution. We can trace both of these kinds of evolution as contributing to the development of the Mind and Heart of Helios, the collective person who now emerges from humanity, as he incubates in his egg, which I call Gaiaon, which is just the earth—and the earth really is an egg…literally.

I think that to understand cultural evolution, to understand this second form of dialectic, we have to take a close look at consciousness:

First, let me say that I believe that consciousness is consciousness of sameness and difference relations. I believe that once we account for the incredible numbers of sameness and difference relations in our awareness, there is nothing else there.

And I believe that young children develop irrational dispositions with respect to these elemental sameness and difference relations: some children develop a fear of difference (to borrow a term from Nietzsche, I call this Apollonianism) —an Apollonian person favors rational, linear thinking, clarifying, ordering, the sociopolitical Right, belief in absolute truth—that is, in one truth—and absolute goodness and beauty. On the other hand, some children develop a fear of sameness (this is Dionysianism)—a Dionysian person is imaginative, passionate, emotional, and favors emotion over linear thinking and the sociopolitical Left, and sometimes: believes in relative truth—that is, in many truths—and absolute goodness and beauty). I call these two irrational dispositions the “elemental biases” –all of us seem to have one or the other elemental bias, in various degrees of intensity.

And I also think that an individual’s cultural environment acts to reinforce or discourage his or her elemental bias. So, I think, these dispositions transfer into society and we have roughly 200-year-long cycles where Helios himself—or, in other words, society itself—alternately takes on an Apollonian or Dionysian disposition.

Each cycle starts off productively but, as the societal fear increases, the cycle ends in disaster. The Enlightenment, of the 16 and 1700s, was an Apollonian era that began with a scientific revolution, and then, closer to the end of the cycle, the French Encyclopédie appeared—the great encyclopedia of Denis Diderot--but at the very end, the Apollonian cycle became rigid and intolerant: wonderful Dionysian Romanticist artists and composers were initiating a new Dionysian cycle—and the Apollonian critics, ridiculed and disparaged them. Critics viewed Delacroix’s compositions, for instance, as chaotic, and called his abandonment of classical, linear perspective barbaric. Great composers, like Beethoven, introduced swings of emotion that the Apollonians found intolerable. Then the new Dionysian cycle became more intense, and the great Modernist painters appeared—all this was extremely productive. But during the second half of the 1900s, the ever-intensifying Dionysian cycle was, I claim, becoming destructive, with the development of Postmodernism, where the existence of absolute Truth was questioned or denied: “There is ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth,’” the Postmodernist-minded person falsely claimed, “but there is no ‘the truth.’ “ (The Dionysian Postmodernists, fearing sameness, feared the singularity of one truth.)

And now, in the 21st century, a collective person, a colossus, who has emerged from the Post-postmodernist individuals of our time, the ultra-Dionysians of our age, has become dominant. I call this colossus PoMo, a word deriving from “Postmodernism”.—she represents one part of those who are Dionysian—not all of them by any means--and she is dangerous, not because she is driven by malice, but because she dissolves our shared methods of critical thinking and the possibility of good-faith disagreement. Originally drifting toward the view that a single, objective truth does not exist, she now too often, because of her disdain for linear thought, treats truth as immediately given to us—as if we simply “see” truth as we would perceive a tree in the yard. And, since she believes that everyone must perceive the same truth, she sees all dissent as a moral failure. The humans that she emerges from are often good people, but in their judgments, they enact her pattern.

Debate is the way that Helios thinks, but PoMo, because she tends to believe that all disagreements derive from moral disagreements, spurns debate because debate only makes sense as a search for truth. And so, PoMo hates Helios. She is trying, in her overt acts and in her seductive ways, to destroy Helios in his egg, Gaiaon—she knows that Helios stands for the search for Truth and that while he is in his egg, he is weak, he is vulnerable. Where PoMo rules, argument gives way to emotion and accusation, and reason gives way to force. In her wake comes weakened institutions, restricted speech, silenced dissent, intimidated opponents, and confusion spreads where judgment once ruled. Under the influence of the pre-born Helios, still in his egg, our world had been becoming, in many places, a realm of human fulfillement, relative freedom from want, a realm of happiness, even fun—bustling, busy and productive. But PoMo, the Enemy of Debate, is bringing chaos, destruction, strange and confused ideas—and as a result we are in real danger of greater and greater harm; I believe that Helios can be destroyed by PoMo if she is allowed to continue unchecked, and I believe that our civilization in in danger of collapse—like Pompei under the ash of Vesuvius.

But after Helios is born, when his faculty of thought is strengthened by more robust debate, Helios will be able to stop PoMo (and only Helios can stop PoMo), and once he is born, Helios will bring us a Golden Age: he will inspect humanity’s controversies and perplexities, and with respect to each, he will tell us what is true, what is good and what is beautiful.

If PoMo’s dominion persists, however, the space of reason itself will collapse; Helios will be lost in Gaiaon.

The call to action, then, to Apollonians and Dionysians alike, lovers of truth, is to give birth to Helios so that he can first resist PoMo then stop her and bestow upon us the Golden Age, a paradise on earth.

But how can this be done? How can Helios be born?

He is not born yet because, although his faculty of feeling, his Heart, was essentially completed by the Modernist artists, his intellectual faculty, his Mind, is still incomplete. When that is completed, when his IQ is vastly increased, he will be born. So how can Helios’ Mind be completed so that he will be born and be able to stop PoMo? Since debate is the way that Helios thinks, his Mind can be completed by the restoration of public person-to-person debate; and not just debate, but a better method of debate must be used, and I have come up with a better method—I call it “Truth Engine” debate. The key to Truth Engine debate is that a companion article of best arguments, a text that I call a canonical dialectic, will be paired with every debate on a topic. The canonical dialectic for a given topic will be periodically improved by audience suggestions and will serve as a reference for the participants of debates on that topic. So, this recursive process—the article shaping a debate, the debate reshaping the article, the new edition of the article shaping the next debate on the same topic, etc.—will sharpen the arguments more and more over time, clarifying truth with unprecedented velocity.

So, we have to wage war—a war of words—PoMo has to be met in open battle and cast down—her authority broken, her hold on the rule of reason shattered—not by the sword, but by the word that strikes, and unmasks, and does not yield—and we'll wage this wordwar by playing a game—let me repeat that: we'll wage this wordwar by playing a game—and this game will be the Game of a Trillion Worlds, a game as old as the universe, a game that employs symbols that have no doubt been used on worlds too numerous to count over eons too vast to comprehend,

Those who will participate in this ancient Game of a Trillion Worlds, in this battle against PoMo, I call the “wizard warriors.” Left and right, they will debate together in tournaments, and they will engage in Truth Engine debate—and in their tournaments, they will have debates pertaining to all our contentious issues under the categories of Truth, Goodness and Beauty. And their very act of playing this game will weaken and destroy PoMo; and their very act of playing the game will complete Helios’ mind—vastly increasing his intelligence—and he will be born.

As an aside, let me say that I am sure that what I mean by “Truth” and by “Goodness” is clear, but let me give a very quick example of what I mean by “Beauty”.

Lord Byron writes:

‘The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.”

The lines communicate a sense of grandeur and antiquity. Now listen to this slightly altered version:

'The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in gold and purple”

Nothing in the meaning changes—but the power, the sublime sense of grandeur and antiquity, vanishes completely. This suggests that what we experience as expression may depend on the relations between elements—the form.

So, people think that there is this thing and that thing and there is debate, etc.; but debate is not “just another thing;” it is very special: it is how we think as a collective—that is, it’s how the collective, the colossus, Helios thinks.

And, by the way, the collective that we are is not the collective of the Borg, not a hive, but a vibrant, free collective, a collective who, ideally, comes to unity of thought not via force but via hard-won discovery of Truth.

Now, there's a way of looking at all this philosophically. In my theory, I speak of an “arc” which is the timeline of the development of collective mind on a developing world, It defines the development of Helios’ mind, from the beginning of evolution on earth to the end, when the goal of evolution has been reached. As I‘ve explained, I see conscious mind as consciousness of sameness and difference relations—and I see the terrestrial evolutionary development of mind as beginning with there being essentially equal amounts of each of the two relations—this Mind is really the universe itself, where every sameness relation is balanced by a difference relation, and evey difference relation is balanced by a sameness relation. This can be interpreted as a net overall condition of neither sameness nor difference—a kind of annihilation of opposites. I call this original state of mind the Absolute Mind, the Mind of Heaven or Inrelate mind. Then came, in the primitive non-conscious minds of the early microorganisms of earth, a grasping in the environment of “kinds” of things, of general patterns of sameness and difference—this can be understood as a time of fragmentation, where parity no longer existed in minds—I call this state, from the Greek, nous. Then, the more advanced creatures became able to distinguish individual things, or instances—the fragmentation in this way increased; I call this state instantial mind. Then, with the appearance of the human races, came conscious mind, and almost at the same time, collective mind developed. After this will come the Birth of the Giant, that is, the Birth of the colossus, Helios. This marks the inception of what I call Awakened mind, in which, in the realms of Truth, Goodness and Beauty, the mind returns to parity, to equal numbers of sameness and difference relations, to the original Absolute, in various interesting ways: In Truth, as we seek and find the general Forms amid the multitude of individuals, consciousness of sameness relations increases and the number of sameness relations and difference relations become more and more the same. In Goodness, the differences between the self and others breaks down as we more and more treat others as we treat ourselves—again, parity develops. And in Beauty, as we learn that Beauty is just perceptual parity, visual and audio, in painting, music and literature, same-different parity more and more fills our world.

So, broadly speaking, the arc goes from Absolute Mind to Fragmentation, to the Giant to the Return. Amazingly, this very arc appears to be embedded, but not nearly as clearly as it’s depicted in my theory of the Panoply, within the philosophy of the important ancient Platonist named Plotinus, and also in the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The same arc, I believe, can be found within the world’s major religions, and, surprisingly, within the oracular systems of western astrology and the I Ching, (See chapter X.)

Right now, at the beginning of the 21st century, we’re at the intersection between what I call the prenatal and the postnatal eras of evolution on earth. What is about to happen now—the birth of Helios—is not merely another chapter in history, but the unique event that divides history itself in half.

To summarize all this:

Our solar system, fueled by the sun and shaped by the law of the dialectic, is becoming a brilliant and good-willed collective person, a colossus named Helios, who, once born, will bring about a Golden Age for humankind—but, although the wonderful Romantics and Modernists of the early part of this Dionysian period worked productively to perfect Helios’ Heart, PoMo now, at the frenzied end of the period, seeks to crush Helios; she brings only a recipe for chaos and destruction into our world. The heroic wizard warriors, of the principled Right and Left, will gather together in the face of these great dangers to themselves and to others on a great quest to save the world by asserting the awesome power of Truth Engine debate, the power of the Game of a Trillion Worlds, to give birth to Helios by perfecting his Mind, by making him brilliant, so that he will be able to stop PoMo and bring about the promised Golden Age.

And there’s something more—it has to do with an interesting machine that may be developed in the future—but the idea’s is speculative. (See chapter IX)

So, to complete the mind of Helios, the Game of a Trillion Worlds will have to be played; that is, a new kind of debate must take place and the debate videos and the companion canonical dialectic for each topic must become articles in a new encyclopedia—where arguments are made clear, concise, and open to revision—and a new kind of news site—a record of current debates as they unfold, a new kind of news governed by reason rather than one-sided opinion.

The Game is simple in its elements—it incorporates basic logical forms—when the player gets used to them, the rules themselves will pose no challenge for him; the challenge will be in coming up with good arguments. When used in a structured way, the Game allows a group to think together with a clarity that is otherwise very difficult to achieve. These are the rules of the game:

1. In this debate game, three kinds of debates are possible: (1) Truth debates are about matters of fact (for example, Resolved: some UFOs are otherworldly devices), (2) Goodness debates are about matters of good and bad, right and wrong (example: This candidate is the better choice), and (3) Beauty debates are about issues in the arts (example: this painting is long esteemed because it is moderational).

2. Each tournament will be an open-ended series of debates on a single topic. A Truth tournament is made up of only Truth debates; a Goodness tournament is made up of only Goodness debates; and a Beauty tournament is made up of only Beauty debates.

3. Every debate is made up of many arguments. A Truth debate will be made up of only Truth arguments. A Goodness debate will be made up of both Truth arguments and Goodness arguments. A Beauty debate will be made up of Truth arguments, Goodness arguments, and Beauty arguments.

4. Definition of a “turn:” in any debate, debater A says something, then debater B. says something, etc. Each such utterance is called a “turn,” even if it is only a single word, such as “Yes.” In this game, there are no rules for the length or content of a turn, other than these: (1) what’s said should be decorous; (2) every argument will be either formal or informal, and the first turn of the game must be a formal argument (which can be original or taken from the companion article); that is, you must begin a Truth debate with a Formal Truth argument; you must begin a Goodness debate with a Formal Goodness argument, and you must begin a Beauty debate with a Formal Beauty argument; in addition, (3) You are required to make sure that a good number of your Truth arguments are Formal Truth arguments. (4) In a rebuttal to a Formal Truth argument, a Fact-like Formal Goodness argument or or a Fact-like Formal Beauty argument, always state the letter name of the part of the argument that you are objecting to, and state whether you think that it’s false or unproven.

5.

a. For instructions on how to create a Formal Truth Argument, see Appendix I (page 2).

b. For instructions on how to create a Formal Goodness Argument, see Appendix II (page 15).

c. For instructions on how to create a Formal Beauty Argument, see Appendix III (page 18).

6. The game will begin with a resolution; for instance: “Resolved: some UFOs are otherworldly devices.” If you are the affirmative debater, you will argue for the resolution. If you are the negative debater, you will either argue the negation of the resolution statement (for instance: “No UFOs are otherworldly devices”) or you will argue that the resolution statement is unsubstantiated.

7.

a. If you are the affirmative debater and you are starting the debate, you should present an introduction to the debate. For instance, if the debate is a truth debate- and the topic is the UFO controversy, you might give a short exposition. For instance, you might say, “I would like to refer to the third case in the companion book. This is the 1966 Portage County Police Chase case, where officers chased a UFO from Ohio into Pennsylvania….[etc.]” Then present your (formal) argument.

b. If you are the affirmative debater and it’s your turn but it’s not your first turn, or if you are the negative debater, make your arguments as you please (keeping in mind that you must make sure that a good percentage of your Truth arguments are formal).

APPENDIX I

How to Construct a Formal Truth Argument

1. There are four ways to construct a Formal Truth argument: the canonical method, the card method, the tile method and the boardgame method. The debater is free to choose his or her method. The canonical method is, by far, the easiest to master.

2.

a. To construct a Canonical Formal Truth Argument, go to 3 (page 2).

b. To construct a Card/Tile Formal Truth Argument, go to 31 (page 6).

c. To construct a Gameboard Formal Truth Argument, go to 47 (page 12).

3. Constructing a Canonical Formal Truth Argument:

4. You will have 9 panels. Each panel has writing on it:

The 9 panels

If p then q If q then r If p then r p or q p q r not-p not-q

5. You must choose a deductive form. These are your choices (In what follows, p is a proposition and q is another proposition):

i. MODUS PONENS

6. To construct a Modus Ponens Formal Truth Argument, first open your Thorn notebook to empty pages. Write (for example) a, b, c.

7. Arrange your panels as illustrated. (The space stands for “therefore”):

You have now set up this Modus Ponens form:

a. If p then q

b. p________

c. q

8. On the left-hand page of your open Thorn notebook, write out the meaning of p. For instance:

p = Col. Garrett had had no need to know about the Roswell debris

9. And on the right-hand page, write out the meaning of q; for instance:

q = Col. McCoy would not have mentioned such debris in the letter he sent in response to Garrett's inquiry

10. You’ve now set up the whole argument. This is the argument that you’ve set up:

(a) If Col. Garrett had had no need to know about the Roswell debris, then Col. McCoy would not have mentioned such debris in the letter he sent in response to Garrett's inquiry. (b) Col. Garrett had had no need to know about the Roswell debris. Therefore, (c) Col. McCoy would not have mentioned such debris in the letter he sent in response to Garrett's inquiry [ab MP]

11. You will now present your argument to your opponent. You might add details and change the wording. You might say,

(a) If Col. Garrett had had no need to know about the Roswell debris, then Col. McCoy, even if he had known about the recovery of exotic debris near Roswell, would not

have mentioned such debris in the letter he sent in response to Garrett's inquiry. (b) There was, in fact, no need for Garrett to know about any crashed UFO to do his job. (c) Therefore, it is distinctly possible that McCoy knew about the Roswell materials, yet would nevertheless have sent the letter that implied that no such evidence existed.

ii. MODUS TOLLENS:

12. To construct a Modus Tollens Formal Truth Argument, first open your Thorn notebook to empty pages. Write (for example) a, b, c.

13. Arrange your panels as illustrated. (The space stands for “therefore.”):

14. You have now set up this Modus Tollens form:

a. If p then q

b. not q____

c. not p

15. On the left-hand page of your open Thorn notebook, write out the meaning of p. For instance:

p = alien materials had been recovered in New Mexico in 1947

16. And on the right-hand page, write out the meaning of q; for instance:

q = McCoy knew of such materials

17. You’ve now set up the whole argument. This is the argument that you’ve set up. Here we’ve plugged in the meanings of p and q, and translated the horizontal line as “Therefore.”:

(a) If alien materials had been recovered, then McCoy would’ve known about them. But, (b) McCoy did not know of any such materials. Therefore, we can be sure that (c) no alien materials had been recovered in New Mexico in 1947. [ab2]

18. You will now present your argument to your opponent. You might add details and change the wording.

iii. DISJUNCTIVE SYLLOGISM

19. To construct a Disjunctive Syllogism Formal Truth Argument, first open your Thorn notebook to empty pages. Write (for example) a, b, c.

20. Arrange your panels as illustrated. (The space stands for “therefore.”):

21. You have now set up this Disjunctive Syllogism form:

a. p or q

b. not p

c. q

22. On the left-hand page of your open Thorn notebook, write out the meaning of p.

23. And on the right-hand page, write out the meaning of q.

24. You will now present your argument to your opponent. You might add details and change the wording.

iv. HYPOTHETICAL SYLLOGISM

25. To construct a Hypothetical Syllogism FTA, first open your Thorn notebook to empty pages. Write (for example) a, b, c.

26. Arrange your panels as illustrated. (The space stands for “therefore.”):

27. You have now set up the Hypothetical Syllogism form:

28. On the left-hand page of your open Thorn notebook, write out the meaning of p.

29. And on the right-hand page, write out the meaning of q.

30. You will now present your argument to your opponent. You might add details and change the wording.

31. Constructing a Card/Tile Formal Truth Argument

32. These two methods, the tile method and the card method are essentially identical, with the tiles being used exactly as the cards are used. For a complete explanation of Engine Logic, see Appendix IV (page 19).

33. As a player using the card method, this is what your set-up will look like:

This illustration shows the desk of a wizard-warrior using the card game to prepare a Game of a Trillion Worlds formal argument: there’s a deck of cards at upper left. The three books are notebooks that the player writes in— these are the notebooks of “Thorn” (þ), “Eth” (ð) and “Ash” (æ), corresponding to dialectics of Truth, Goodness and Beauty, and just under the open Thorn Notebook, there is the central stack of cards. The connector associated with the uppermost card in the stack is taken to connect the propositions on the left and right pages of the Thorn Notebook, thus creating a claim. (The tile version is similar.)

34. THE 16 CONNECTOR CARDS

35. Each connector card or connector tile stands for a logical connector. At the bottom on the face of every connector card, or on the face of the tile, there is a connector sign that identifies the logical function of the card or tile. The connector signs are: (a), (b), (c), (d), (e), (f), (g), (h), (i), (j), (k), (l). (m), (n), (o), and (p). There are two general kinds of connector cards and tiles:

a. There are 16 premise cards and 16 premise tiles. Each premise card or tile has a yellow connector sign.

b. There are 16 conclusion cards and 16 conclusion tiles. Each conclusion card or tile has a red connector sign.

36. To understand the special logical notation for the three Dialectician’s methods of making formal arguments, see Appendix I.

37. Suppose that you have decided to make a Modus Ponens argument.

38. Since you are engaged in a truth-argument (that is, where, at the moment, you aren’t debating an ethical or aesthetic point, even if the debate is a Goodness or Beauty debate- game), you will be using your “Thorn” (þ for theoretics) Notebook. You should open the notebook to a place where the left and right pages are empty and write out the p proposition on the left page and write out the q proposition on the right page (if there had been an r proposition, you would have written it out on the second page along with the q proposition).

39. So, on the left-hand page you’ve written, say,

The appearance and performance of the object that was chased by the officers was unmatched by any earth-made aircraft, or any natural phenomenon

And on the right-hand page you’ve written:

It was an exotic craft that was visiting American airspace in 1966.

40. So now you’ve written your p-statement and q-statement on the pages of your open Thorn notebook, and you are about to make your Modus Ponens argument. Now stack the cards bottom to top as you create the “central stack,” right below the center of the Thorn Notebook (see the drawing above). Or if you are playing with tiles, place the tiles in a horizontal row, left to right, underneath the open Thorn Notebook. (Y = yellow = premise; R = red = conclusion).

41. Whenever you place a card on top of another card in the center stack, you should always take care not to cover the connector sign (the yellow or red symbol at the bottom of the card) of the card below.

42. Since you’re making a Modus Ponens argument, you place these cards/tiles in this order:

nY fY bR gR

43. On the left-side page of the Thorn notebook, write, say, “abcd”. Now you have constructied an argument whose form is Modus Ponens, and whose separate statements are given letter names a-

d.

44. This is the argument that you have constructed:

(a) The appearance and performance of the object that was chased by the officers was unmatched by any earth-made aircraft, or any natural phenomenon n it was an exotic craft that was visiting American airspace in 1966. (b) The appearance and performance of the object that was chased by the officers was unmatched by any earth-made aircraft, or any natural phenomenon f it was an exotic craft that was visiting American airspace in 1966.______________________________________________________________ (c) The appearance and performance of the object that was chased by the officers was unmatched by any earth-made aircraft, or any natural phenomenon b it was an exotic craft that was visiting American airspace in 1966. (ic)___________________________________________________________ (d) The appearance and performance of the object that was chased by the officers was unmatched by any earth-made aircraft, or any natural phenomenon g it was an exotic craft that was visiting American airspace in 1966. (aa) [ab1]

Where (a) means “If the appearance and performance of the object that was chased by the officers was unmatched by any earth-made aircraft, or any natural phenomenon, then it was an exotic craft that was visiting American airspace in 1966.” (b) means “the appearance and performance of the object that was chased by the officers was unmatched by any earth-made aircraft, or any natural phenomenon.” The horizontal line means “Therefore.” (c) means “The appearance and performance of the object that was chased by the officers was unmatched by any earth-made aircraft, or any natural phenomenon, and it was an exotic craft that was visiting American airspace in 1966,” as proven by the in-common (ic) rule (write all and only the p lines that the premises have in common). The horizontal line means “Therefore.” (d) means “It was an exotic craft that was visiting American airspace in 1966,” as proven by the add-anything (aa) rule (add any p lines) . [ab1] means: this line is the conclusion to premises a and b, and the form of the argument is Form 1, which is Modus Ponens—see step 17 above for the common Forms.

45. Now, on a separate piece of paper, you might write a supplement to argument line b; perhaps something like:

The object was as big as a house. It was silent except, possibly, for a humming sound. The object was oval-shaped, 18 to 24 feet in its vertical dimension, 35 to 45 feet in diameter, and had rounded underside and a top that was

dimly visible as a silhouette. The object gave off a blue-white light that was so bright that it lit the ground as if it was “high noon.” . It was so bright that “it’d make your eyes water” (Spaur). It was silent, except, perhaps, for a slight hum, and it had no flight surfaces or rotor blades-- so it could not have been an airplane of helicopter. It’s movements were completely un- balloon like.

46. You will now deliver your argument verbally. You have now finished the formal presentation and should now open the floor to your opponent’s rebuttal.

47. To Prepare a Board Game Formal Truth Argument: The board game is set up like this:

The Game of a Trillion Worlds as a board game.

48. The board game is initially set-up with 7 cups, each setting on a square ceramic trivet. There are 7 kinds of pieces: Circle, Double, Triple, Chip, Pipe, Peg, Trilobe:

.

49. Each kind of piece includes pieces that are red for premises, yellow for conclusion-premises, and blue for conclusions. There are many small red and black spheres and many small red and black teardrop-shaped pieces.

THE BOARD GAME ALGORITHM

50. Then you construct your argument by first defining the shape-pieces that you will use. For instance: you might first fill one of the cups, on its trivet, with the circles (the disc pieces with the center hole).

51. For a complete explanation of Engine Logic, see Appendix IV (page 19).

52. Suppose that you have decided to make a Modus Ponens argument.

53. Since you are engaged in a truth-argument (that is, where, at the moment, you aren’t debating an ethical or aesthetic point, even if the debate is a Goodness or Beauty debate- game), you will be using your “Thorn” (þ for theoretics) Notebook. You should open the notebook to a place where the left and right pages are empty and write out the p proposition on the left page and write out the q proposition on the right page (if there had been an r proposition, you would have written it out on the second page along with the q proposition).

54. So, on the left-hand page you’ve written, say,

The appearance and performance of the object that was chased by the officers was unmatched by any earth-made aircraft, or any natural phenomenon

55. And on the right-hand page you’ve written:

It was an exotic craft that was visiting American airspace in 1966.

56. So now you’ve written your p-statement and you’ve written your q-statement on the pages of your open Thorn notebook, and you are about to make your Modus Ponens argument. Now you might define every circle piece as n. To do this, place spheres and teardrops on the corners of the circles trivit in order to represent n, whose symbol is composed of a high line, a rising line and a low line. In this case, to represent the high line, put two red teardrops (the red teardrop symbolizes high) on one corner of the trivet; to represent the rising line, put, on another corner of the trivet, a red sphere (which symbolizes low) and a red teardrop to represent high, the red sphere to the left of the red teardrop. In a third corner of the trivit, put two red spheres, to represent the low line.

57. Then fill another cup, on its trivet, with, say, the chips. To define every chip as f, put two red teardrops on one corner of the chip trivet and a red teardrop and a red sphere, the red teardrop to the left of the red sphere, on another corner.

58. Then fill another cup, on its trivet, with, say, the doubles. Let’s say that he wants to define every double as b, and, just for fun, he wants to define the doubles by representing what they are not. He places a black teardrop and a black sphere on one corner to represent a “not-falling” line; he

places a black sphere and a black teardrop on another corner to represent a “not-rising” line; and he places two black spheres on another corner to represent a “not-low” line. Therefore, now every double stands for not-o, that is, b.

59. Then fill a fourth cup, on its trivet, with, say, the triples, and define every one of them as g: put two red teardrops on one corner and a red sphere and a red teardrope on another corner.

cups and trivits

60. Now he puts a red circle, a red chip, a yellow double, and a blue triple in front of his man-on- the-board. He has now set up his argument. The forms are defined as:

nR fR bY gB

61 Any time that a player places premise (red) pieces in front of his man-on-the-board, he is making a claim not only that he takes to be true, but that he expects his opponent to agree with. The sequence of premise to conclusion must follow the rules of deductive logic as set forth above in the deductive logic section.

62. Now Believer has constructied an argument whose form is Modus Ponens, and whose separate statements are given letter names (here, a-d, written on the left-hand page of the Thorn notebook). This is the argument that you have constructed:

(a) The appearance and performance of the object that was chased by the officers was unmatched by any earth-made aircraft, or any natural phenomenon n it was an exotic craft that was visiting American airspace in 1966. (b) The appearance and performance of the object that was chased by the officers was unmatched by any earth-made aircraft, or any natural phenomenon f it was an exotic craft that was visiting American airspace in 1966.______________________________________________________________ (c) The appearance and performance of the object that was chased by the officers was unmatched by any earth-made aircraft, or any natural phenomenon b it was an exotic craft that was visiting American airspace in 1966. (ic)___________________________________________________________ (d) The appearance and performance of the object that was chased by the officers was unmatched by any earth-made aircraft, or any natural phenomenon g it was an exotic craft that was visiting American airspace in 1966. (aa) [ab1]

Where (a) means “If the appearance and performance of the object that was chased by the officers was unmatched by any earth-made aircraft, or any natural phenomenon, then it was an exotic craft that was visiting American airspace in 1966.” (b) means “the appearance and performance of the object that was chased by the officers was unmatched by any earth-made aircraft, or any natural phenomenon.” The horizontal line means “Therefore.” (c) means “The appearance and performance of the object that was chased by the officers was unmatched by any earth-made aircraft, or any natural phenomenon, and it was an exotic craft that was visiting American airspace in 1966,” as proven by the in-common (ic) rule (write all and only the lines that the premises have in common). The horizontal line means “Therefore.” (d) means “It was an exotic craft that was visiting American airspace in 1966,” as proven by the add-anything (aa) rule (add any lines) . [ab1] means: this line is the conclusion to premises a and b, and the form of the argument is Form 1, which is Modus Ponens—see step 17 above for the common Forms.

63. Now, on a separate piece of paper, you might write a supplement to argument line b; perhaps something like:

The object was as big as a house. It was silent except, possibly, for a humming sound. The object was oval-shaped, 18 to 24 feet in its vertical dimension, 35 to 45 feet in diameter, and had rounded underside and a top that was dimly visible as a silhouette. The object gave off a blue-white light that was so bright that it lit the ground as if it was “high noon.” . It was so bright that “it’d make your eyes water” (Spaur). It was silent, except, perhaps, for a slight hum, and it had no flight surfaces or rotor blades-- so it could not have been an airplane of helicopter. It’s movements were completely un- balloon like.

APPENDIX II

How to create a Formal Goodness Argument

A. Informal Goodness Arguments.

1. To present an Informal Goodness Argument, just argue in the ordinary way that people argue a point that involves ethics. Example: Your (b) is false. Trump acts in accord with the constitution and benefits the American people—he is a good person.

B. Formal Goodness Arguments

2. To make a Formal Goodness Argument, you must choose one of these two kinds: (1) the Fact-like (looking back) kind and (2) the CEANA (looking ahead) kind.

1. The Fact-like Formal Goodness Argument.

3. This kind of argument is structured just like a Formal Truth Argument, but with the conclusion of the Formal Goodness Argument being

“therefore, [the person/act] is morally wrong [or right].”

4. Because this kind of Formal Goodness Argument is constructed exactly the same way that a Formal Truth Argument is, it can be presented as a Canonical, a Tile/Card or a Game Board Formal Truth Argument. Here is a snippet from a Goodness Game, showing two examples of Fact-Like Formal Goodness Arguments (followed by a couple Informal Arguments).

5. ProTrump.[content of an argument presented as a Canonical, Tile/Card or Boardgame Formal Goodness Argument] (i) if Trump acts in accord with the constitution and benefits the American people, then he is a good person. (ii) Trump acts in accord with the constitution and benefits the American people. Therefore (iii) Trump is a good person. [This is the game’s foundation argument. ProTrump was required to present it as a Formal Goodness Argument.]

AntiTrump. [content of an argument presented as a Canonical, Tile/Card or Boardgame Formal Goodness Argument:] Your (ii) is false. (a) If for 187 minutes on Jan 6, Trump refused to tell his supporters to end the violence at the Capitol, then he was trying to overturn a legitimate election and so is a dangerously immoral person. (b) For 187 minutes after the end of his speech on Jan 6, Trump refused to tell his supporters to end the violence. Therefore, (c) He was trying to overturn a legitimate election and so is a dangerously immoral person. [AntiTrump chose to present this as a Formal Goodness Argument.]

ProTrump. [ProTrump chooses not to present this as an FGA] Your (b) is false. Trump did not wait for 187 minutes before telling his supporters to stand down; he told them on Twitter to be peaceful at 2:38, only 85 minutes after the end of his speech. He again told his followers to “remain peaceful” 120 minutes after his speech, at 3:13. At 4:17 he told them to go home— this is the video that was released some 187 minutes after the end of his speech. At 6:01, he again told them to go home.

AntiTrump. Even 85 minutes is too long.

2. The CEANA-based Formal Goodness Argument .

6. This kind of Formal Goodness Argument incorporates a CEANA (Cause, Effect, Action, Non-Action) statement within it. Example (fictitious):

7. The CEANA-Based Formal Goodness Argument is a complex statement which incorporates Truth Argument and which articulates the player’s notion of available choices and the probable results of each choice in terms of probable happiness.

8. For a (fictitious) example, write out the following in your Eth notebook :

ProWar. (i) if an act maximizes the happiness of all people, then that act is morally right. (ii)

Therefore, (iii) act A1, attack the Sea Kingdom, is morally right. See APPENDIX V (page 27) for a Short Course in Goodness.

APPENDIX III

How to create a Formal Beauty Argument

A. Informal Beauty Arguments 1 To present an Informal Beauty Argument, just argue in the ordinary way that people argue a point that involves aesthetics. Example: Your (b) is false. [some relational analysis].

B. Formal Beauty Arguments

2. To construct a Formal Beauty Argument, you must choose one of these two kinds: (1) the Fact-like kind and (2) the Line and Dot analytical kind. —see Appendix VI (page 29)

1. The Fact-like Formal Beauty Argument

3. This kind of argument is structured just like a Formal Truth Argument, but with the conclusion of the Formal Beauty Argument being

“therefore, this work of art is [formally beautiful, meaningful (that is, insightful or expressive)].”

4. Because this kind of Formal Beauty Argument is constructed exactly the same way that a Formal Truth Argument is, it can be presented as a Canonical, a Tile/Card or a Game Board Formal Truth Argument. Here is a snippet from a Beauty Game, showing two examples of Fact-Like Formal Beauty Arguments (followed by a couple Informal Arguments).

5. Formalist. (a) if this particular painting has the power to produce substantial happiness, then it is worthy of substantial esteem. (b) [the pseudo CEANA statement:] The degree of a painting’s moderation richness [see Appendix VI] is causally in direct proportion to the “aesthetic emotion,” that is, to the “aesthetic happiness,” that is felt by the viewer. (c) Rembrandt’s Titus Reading has substantial formal beauty: (d) Therefore, Titus Reading causes substantial aesthetic happiness to be felt by the viewer. [b, c MP]

(e) The degree of a painting’s ability to produce aesthetic happiness to be felt by the viewer is in causative direct proportion to the degree to which a painting’s positive meaning will be productive of “semantic happiness” in the world and will be in causative direct proportion to the degree to which a painting’s negative meaning will be productive of “semantic unhappiness” in the world. (f) The meaning in this work is positive (Rembrandt’s expression of his love for his son). (g) Therefore, Titus Reading is productive of substantial semantic happiness. [e, d MP]

(h) Therefore, Titus Reading is substantially esteem-worthy. [a, d+g MP] [This is the game’s foundation argument]

[At this point, it is possible to argue to what extent the artist’s act is morally justified by using a Formal or Informal Goodness Argument.]

2. The Line-and-Dot Formal Beauty Argument

6. The Line-and-Dot Formal Beauty Argument is different from the Fact-Like Formal Beauty Argument only in (c):

(c) Rembrandt’s Titus Reading is substantially moderation rich: [write out, in your Ash notebook and using line-and-dot notation, a proposition illustrating your claim. See Appendix VI].

APPENDIX IV

A Course in Reason

Module I. INDUCTIVE REASON

1. Inductive reasoning works like this:

Inductive reasoning has to do with my awareness of the existence of one thing, A, causing me to presume the existence of another thing, B. The strength of my presumption of B, given A, is directly proportional to the number of times in the past that I’ve been aware of A being associated with B and inversely proportional to the number of times I’ve been aware of A not being associated with B.

When my awareness of A causes me to presume B, I am making an “inductive inference,” belief in the presence of B, from the premise, awareness of the presence of A.

An example of inductive inference (ii):

I have seen machines very much like the one I’m looking at right now, and in every case, there was a wheel on the right, a part of the machine that I’m looking at now that is obscured by a sign. There’s a wheel behind the sign. [ii]

Module II. DEDUCTIVE REASON

2. The fundamental fact of deductive reasoning:

If we know that

ONE AND ONLY ONE OF THESE IS [an adjective]: [a list of items]

then we are entitled to believe certain other things.

For instance, assigning different adjectives and different lists:

if we believe that

● “One and only one of these is edible: holly berry, cloudberry, ivy berry, mistletoe berry”. OR ● “One and only one of these is odd: 12, 8, 23.” OR ● “One and only one of these is meaningful: x y Y w .”

then we are entitled to believe certain other things.

What are these “other things”?

THE 3 LAWS OF PURE DEDUCTION

Taking the third example above to illustrate the three obviously true laws of deduction:

Assuming that one and only one of these is meaningful: x y Y w :

THE COMPLEMENTS LAW (comp)

1. The meaningful one is one of these: y w.

2. Therefore, the meaningful one is not one of these: x Y. [2 comp]

THE IN-COMMON LAW (ic)

1. The meaningful one is one of these: x Y w.

2. The meaningful one is one of these: x y

3. Therefore, the meaningful one is x. [1,2 ic—List all the items that 1 and 2 have in

and THE ADD-ANYTHING LAW (aa)

1. The meaningful one is this: Y.

2. Therefore, the meaningful one is one of thers: y Y w [1 aa—add anything]

Definitions:

● suppose that “p” stands for

“There is a penny in my hand,”

● And suppose that “q” stands for

“There is a quarter in my hand.”

4. “pbq” means: “p and q”—“There is a penny in my hand and there is a quarter in my hand.”

2, “p c q” means: “p and not-q”— “There is a penny in my hand and there isn’t a quarter in my hand.”

3. “p d q” means: “not-p and q”—“There’s not a penny in my hand and there’s a quarter in my hand.”

4. “p e q” means: “not-p and not-q”—“There’s not a penny in my hand and there’s not a quarter in my hand,”

There are no coins in my hand.

One and only one of the four possibilities above must be true; that is,

One and only one of these is true: pbq p c q p d q p e q

which has the same form as:

One and only one of these is meaningful: x y Y w

3 So the 3 laws of deduction apply; these then become the 3 laws of deductive logic:

Module III. DEDUCTIVE LOGIC

THE COMPLEMENTS LAW (comp)

1. The true one is one of these: p c q p e q

2. Therefore, the true one is not one of these: pbq p d q. [2 comp]

THE IN-COMMON LAW (ic)

1. The true one is one of these: pbq p d q p e q.

2. The true one is one of these: pbq p c q

3. Therefore, the true one is pbq. [1,2 ic—List all and only the items that 1 and 2 have in common.

And THE ADD-ANYTHING LAW (aa)

1. The true one is this: p d q.

2. Therefore, the true one is one of thers: p c q p d q p e q [1 aa—add anything]

Note that the sentence,

One and only one of these is true: pbq p c q p d q p e q

can be written

p p q

And the sentence

The true one is one of these: p c q p e q

can be written

p j q

And the sentence

The true one is one of these: pbq p d q p e q.

can be written

p n q

Etc.

So, using the above definitions (p = There is a penny in my hand and q = There is a quarter in my hand), if I write: p n q* and p f q**, you can conclude by ic that pbq, which just means that there’s a penny and a quarter in my hand. * The true one is one of these: pbq p d q p e q. ** The true one is one of these: pbq p c q.

4 So,

where “p” stands for a proposition, and “q” stands for another proposition, the following are the “16 signs,” which have been used with the same meanings on worlds too numerous to count, over eons too vast to comprehend:

p a q means “None of these is true: ‘p and q’, ‘p and not-q’, ‘not-p and q’, ‘not-p and not-q.’” (Any statement of this form cannot be true.)

pbq means: “p and q”—for instance, “The rain came down b the wind blew” means “The rain came down and the wind blew.”

P c q means: “p and not-q”—for instance, “The rain came down c the wind blew” means “The rain came down and the wind did not blow.” (In this case, instead of “and,” one might use the word “but.”)

p d q means: “not-p and q”—for instance, “The rain came down d the wind blew” means “The rain didn’t come down and the wind blew.” (In this case, instead of “and,” one might use the word “but.”)

p e q means: “not-p and not-q”—for instance, “The rain came down e the wind blew” means “The rain didn’t come down and the wind didn’t blow.”

P f q means: “The true one is one of these: ‘pbq,’ ‘p c q,’” which just means “p.” For instance, “The rain came down f the wind blew” means “The true one is one of these: ‘The rain came down and the wind blew,’ ‘The rain came down and the wind didn’t blow.’” This tells us that the rain fell.

P g q means: “The true one is one of these: ‘pbq’, ‘p d q’,” which just means “q”

p h q means: “The true one is one of these: ‘pbq’, ‘p e q’,” which just means “p if and only if q.”

p I q means: “The true one is one of these: ‘p c q,’ ‘p d q,’” which just means “p or q (not both)”.

P j q means “The true one is one of these: ‘p c q,’ ‘p e q,’” which just means “not-q”.

p k q means “The true one is one of these: ‘p d q’, ‘p e q’,” which just means “not-p”.

p l q means “The true one is one of these: ‘pbq’, ‘p c q’, ‘p d q’,” which just means “p or q (or both).”

P m q means “The true one is one of these: ‘pbq’, ‘p c q’, ‘p e q’,” which is logically the same as “If q then p,” and “p if q” and “q only if p.”

p n q means “The true one is one of these: ‘pbq’, ‘p d q’, ‘p e q’,” which is logically the same as “If p then q” and “q if p” and “p only if q”.

p o q means “The true one is one of these: ‘p c q’, ‘p d q’, ‘p e q’,” which just means “p or q (or neither)”.

P p q means “One and only one of these is true: ‘pbq’, ‘p c q’, ‘p d q’, ‘p e q’.”

5. pp q is a kind of only-1 statement whose predicate is “is true,” and that has a special list of four 2-proposition andline statements. Call any statement of the form p p q a “P|Q” (“P-pipe-Q”) statement. So, an example of a p p q Statement is:

“The rain came down p the wind blew.” That is,

“One and only one of these is true: ‘The rain came down and the wind blew,’ ‘The rain came down and the wind did not blow,’ ‘The rain did not come down and the wind blew,’ ‘The rain did not come down and the wind did not blow.’”

6. If p stands for a proposition, these are the two fundamental Laws of Deductive Logic:

The Law of the Excluded Middle: For all p, at least one of the following is true: p, not-p.1 The Law of Contradiction: For all p, no more than one of the following is true: p, not-p.

7. These two laws are combined in the following statement, which is true a priori and which makes every p p q statement about the real world always true:

“One and only one of these is true: p, not-p.”

8. More examples of logical deduction ( p p q is implicit in each example):

1. His light’s on h He’s at home. His light’s on if and only if he’s home.

2. Therefore, not-(His light’s on I He’s at home). [2 comp] It’s not the case that either his light’s on and he’s not home, or his light’s off and he’s at home.

Where the lines of the “i” constitute the complement of the lines of the “h“. Or you can make this deduction, using ic and aa:

1. His light’s on n He’s at home. That is, “If his light’s on, then he’s home.”

2. His light’s on f He’s at home. That is, “His light’s on” 3 His light’s on b He’s at home. [1,2 ic] All the lines that 1 and 2 have in common

4. His light’s on g He’s at home. [3. Aa] That is, “He’s at home;” sdd any line(s) to 3

So, from “If his light’s on, then he’s home” and “His light’s on,” you have, by a process known as Modus Ponens, concluded that the proposition “He’s home” is true.

9. Proving some familiar deductions—p p q is implicit

Modus Ponens:

p n q

1. P n q If p then q p f q

2. P f q p_______ p g q

3. P b q 1,2 in-common (i.c.) q

4. P g q 3 add-anything (a.a.) Modus Tollens:

p n q

1. P n q If p then q

2. P j q not q____ q+____

3. P e q 1,2 in-common (i.c.) not p p+

4. p k q 3 add-anything (a.a.)

Disjunctive Syllogism:

p l q

1. P l q p or q

2. P k q not p p+___

3. P d q 1,2 in-common (i.c.) q q

4. p g q 3 add-anything (a.a.)

Hypothetical Syllogism (HS) is proved using a system of three variables. The player needn’t learn this system.

p n q

1. Pqr bb bc db dc ed ee * If p then q q n r

2. Pqr bb db cd ed ce ee If q then r p n r

3. Pqr bb db ed ee_______ 1,2 in-common (i.c.) If p then r

4. pqr bb cd db ed dc ee 3 add-anything (a.a.) *The true one is one of these: p & q & r p & q & not-r not-p & q & r not-p & q & not-r not-p & not- q & r not-p & not-q & not-r.

10. Categorical Syllogisms (CS)

AAA-1 All B are C All A are B All A are C

EAE-1

AII-1 No B are C All B are C All A are B Some A are B No A are C Some A are C

EIO-1

EAE-2 No B are C No C are B Some A are B All A are B Some A are not No A are C C

AEE-2

EIO-2 All C are B No C are B No A are B Some A are B No A are C Some A are not C

AOO-2

IAI-3 All C are B Some B are C Some A are not All B are A B Some A are C Some A are not C

OAO-3 Some B are not C

AII-3 All B are A All B are C Some A are not C Some B are A Some A are C

AEE-4 All C are B

EIO-3 No B are A No B are C No A are C Some B are A Some A are not

EIO-4

No C are B C Some B are A Some A are not C

IAI-4 Some C are B All B are A Some A are C

APPENDIX V. A VERY SHORT COURSE IN GOODNESS.

A Very Short Course in Goodness.

1. All terrestrial creatures that can think have evolved to possess the desire to represent the perceptual sameness and difference patterns correctly—thus they embrace the value of Truth; these creatures are also motivated to seek out certain patterns of sameness and difference. The pattern that it seeks is the organism’s practical goodness. Whereas less evolved creatures exhibit sympathies, more advanced creatures have consciences, and seek moral goodness. A conscience has a structure and acts as a somehow separate voice that issues one or more directives. The desires of the creature manifest as the value of PRACTICAL GOODNESS. The specific desires of the conscience manifest as the value of MORAL GOODNESS. To fully understand the making of moral decisions, we first have to ask, What is the content of our conscience? Different people have answered that question differently: Some people say that our conscience contains this single directive: “Maximize the probable happiness of all people.” Those who say this are the utilitarians. But if a great amount of benefit goes to one person and a tiny amount to another, is this better than a tiny bit smaller total, divided equally between the two persons? Other people say that our conscience contains this single directive: “Maximize the equality of the distribution of probable happiness among all people.” These are the egalitarians. But is a tiny total benefit going equally to two people better than a great amount going to the two, there being a tiny inequality of the distribution? Some, the libertarians, say that our conscience contains this one directive: “Do not harm innocent people.” But is not helping someone in distress a moral good? The deontologists claim that our conscience contains at least one “nonconsequentialist” directive; that is, one directive, such as “do not lie,” that does not have to do with the results of the action. But is not a lie that benefits many innocent people, when not telling the lie would cause great suffering, a moral good? The utilitarian-egalitarian believes—truly, it might well be said—that our conscience contains these directives: “Maximize everyone’s probable happiness, and maximize the equality of its distribution.”

The CEANA statement can be used by the utilitarian, the utilitarian-egalitarian and the deontologist. Or it might be better to say: “Do your best to maximize everyone’s probable happiness, and to maximize the equality of its distribution”—this puts the focus on character [virtue ethics] rather than accomplishment. And “fulfilment” might be a better word than “happiness.” When a sentient being thinks in order to determine what to do, it generates a CEANA (Cause, Effect, Action, Non-Action) statement/belief, which maps causes and effects in terms of probable happiness, of self and others. When the issue is about moral choice, to represent the CEANA belief we use a notation that has no doubt been used, with the same meaning, over immeasurable spans of time on uncountable worlds, but never before on earth, though something similar is now used on earth; it is called a “decision tree.” Here is an example of a CEANA statement (part 2 on the “utilitarian calculus sheet” [UCS] illustrated)—the people of a fictional republic are deciding whether to invade a dangerous totalitarian land called the Sea Kingdom. This is the UCS sheet:

2.The dialectician uses the Goodness algorithm, in conjunction with the Truth algorithm, to develop and communicate an argument about what to do with respect to some controversial sociopolitical

matter. The Goodness algorithm charts the results, in terms of expected happiness, of several possible choices we might make as a response to some state of affairs. It serves as a complete articulation of a utilitarian deliberation and can constitute a part of the utilitarian-egalitarian’s and the deontologist’s deliberations.

3. The dialectician writes out in the Eth Notebook, on a left-hand page (next to a blank right-hand page) a version of the utilitarian directive: “1. If an act maximizes the probable happiness of all persons, then it’s right.” This begins the creation of his UCS, an example of which is provided above.

4. On his UCS, the dialectician writes “2.” and constructs his CEANA statement. The CEANA statement can be called a diagram (though, strictly speaking it is a statement). Across the bottom of the diagram, a set of choices is given. Arrows show the results in terms of the probable happiness that the act is expected to bring about. This expected happiness is impressionistically symbolized by a drawn rectangle. The rectangle’s horizontal dimension represents the probability of the described result, and the vertical dimension represents the amount of resultant happiness (when the rectangle is clear) or unhappiness (when it’s solid).

5. The dialectician combines the results of each action: the amount of probable happiness, or unhappiness, expected to result from each choice is symbolized by the shape’s area.

6. Suppose that it is action A1 that, according to the dialecticians reasoning and as represented in step 66, maximizes probable happiness. The dialectican writes, “Act A1 maximizes the potential happiness of all persons.”

7. The dialectician writes, “Therefore, act A1 is right. [1,4 Modus Ponens]”

(Recall the Modus Ponens form: p n q and p f q. Therefore p b q. Therefore p g q.)

8. Since the claimed causal relationships, indicated by the arrows in the CEANA diagram will, as a rule, have to be argued for, the CEANA diagram will link to the Truth algorithm (the Thorn notebook and the logic cards). The arrows will be numbered, and on the right-hand page the numbers will be cross-referenced to the relevant pages in the Thorn notebook.

Appendix VI

A course in Beauty

I. General

1. The Form-Seeking faculty that has evolved to cause a creature to enjoy the experience of sameness-difference parity even when that faculty is not revealing the general among the specifics. When the faculty is working this way, call it the Aesthetic faculty.

Insights can be communicated about the aesthetic experience (and about the conscious experience of sameness and difference relations in general) by giving a careful account of the work of the artist, the painter. As can every act, the act of putting brush to canvas can be evaluated from the standpoint of ethics: regardless of what the artist intended in creating his painting, is the work productive of happiness in the world? It seems true that artistic activity of all kinds should be evaluated this way, but of course a proponent of art for art's sake (depending on how that phrase is interpreted) might disagree, and, often, art’s consequences are simply not taken cognizance of. The big question which many ask is “What is art?” But “art” carries many different meanings, and a search for a definition or essence leads people away from the question which was really, in the past, being asked. Actually, the search for the essence of art, for analysis of its concept, for definition of the word “art,” has been used as a means to answer the unconsciously conceived question of how it is that esteemed works make us happy. For, how can we explain the passion that has gone into attempts to answer the question, “What is art?”, unless we suppose of those who asked the question that they, after having witnessed the power of particular masterpieces to bring happiness in the world, were moved to uncover art’s essence in order to understand the observed process better, so that they, as critics and philosophers, might play a role in enhancing future production of the same effect? But answering the question of how these particular works make us happy does not in fact require that one take up the question of essence at all. Thus, the question which was really being asked is: “How is it that long-esteemed paintings, sculptures, musical compositions, novels, etc. make us happy?” Lacking the right answer once this question has been raised is a condition which corrupts artistic activity and tends to produce a state in which there is less good art than there would otherwise be. The world, at present anyway, is less happy than it would have been if the question had never been asked. Once possessing the right answer to the question, however, will serve to make the world a happier place than it would have been. In order to articulate clearly the answer to this question, let us, somewhat arbitrarily, narrow the focus to consider a more specific question: “How is it that long-esteemed paintings are productive of happiness?” In fact, the right answer to this question has primarily to do with the spectator’s direct awareness in these paintings of something like parity between internal relations of sameness and difference, or between relations of similarity and dissimilarity. Only dialecticians who are participating in a philosophical Beauty dialectic or game tournament, or debates about consciousness, need study this difficult section in detail. It should at least be skimmed through by one participating in a critical Beauty dialectic, so that he or she will have insight into the complexity of the topic.

2. A Course in Beauty; s-d Analysis

Now, what relations can be identified as those that hold among the formal elements of a painted surface? Let us call sameness and difference “r-relations.” And we can construct the following list of five primary kinds of “R-relation” [pronounced “capital R” relation]:

Ixy (x is identical to y) Sxy (x is similar to y) Mxy (x is moderational to y)

Dxy (x is dissimilar to y) Oxy (x is oppositional to y)

Thus, for instance, two different points in a visual presentation may have identical hues (e.g. one may be a pure orange and the other may be brown such that the red/yellow mixture is the same); or they may have similar hues (e.g. the hue element in one may be red, the other orange); or they may have moderational hues (the hue element in one may be red and the other yellow-orange); or they may have dissimilar hues (one may be red and the other yellow-green); or they may have oppositional hues (one may be red and the other green). The use of these terms can be extended to cover situations involving the existence of multiple sameness (write it like this: SAMxy) and difference (write it like this: DIFxy) relations within any part of the visual presentation:

I — The number of DIF relations = 0. S —The number of SAM relations > the number of DIF relations. M— The number of SAM relations = the number of DIF relations. D — The number of SAM relations < the number of DIF relations. O — The number of SAM relations = 0.

Look at this scale, call it the R-scale (having 100 R-degrees) affords us a more precise way of naming R-relations:

Another useful scale, which I will call the M-scale (a scale of 50 M-degrees), is this:

So we can call the relations of sameness and difference “r-relations” and the relations of identity, similarity, moderation, dissimilarity, and opposition “R-relations.” Clearly, r- and R- relations hold between R-relations themselves. Here is an example of an R-relation (which we may call a second-order R-relation) of R-relations: Imagine two pairs of shapes, the first pair consisting of a pure red shape and a pure yellow one, and the second pair consisting of a pure orange shape and a light, 25% intense, pink one. The R-relation of intensity (Ii) holding between the shapes of the first pair has an R-degree of 01R(zero) and an M-degree of 01M (zero). The R-relation (Di) holding between the shapes of the seond pair has an R-degree of 75iR and an M-degree of 25iM“. Therefore, the second-order R-relation which holds between the Ii relation and the Di relation has an R-degree both of (i.e. with respect to the R-scale values of the first-order R-relations) and of MR(M) (with respect to their M-scale values). I will show you here a handy notation for relations, a notation that has no doubt been used, with the same meaning, over immeasurable spans of time on uncountable worlds. Suppose that I have three colors c1, c2, c3 such that

S. Mhc1c2 & Dic1c2 & Sgc1c2 & Dhc1c3 & Sic1c3 & Sgc1c3 & Shc2c3 & Dic2c3 & Igc2c3.

where Rh = R in hue, Ri = R in intensity, and Rg = R in gray-value.

Perspicuity can be achieved if we adopt the following notational scheme: Symmetrical relation Rxy becomes

And we have (S’)

which is essentially the same statement as S. Call any “line-and-dot” statement like this a Special Beauty Statement. “special,” because statements having this form are special; they constitute the basis of all deductive reason about aesthetics. Here is a sketch for a survey of SAM, DIF, I, S, M, D, and O relations in the perception of a painted surface:

Consider three points, A, B, and C on the surface. We can say that (SI)

where two secondary kinds of difference are indicated: the points are different, DIFg, from one another in spatial separation, and these relations themselves are numerically different, DIFr, from one another. (Note that for every secondary kind of DIF relation, there is a corresponding secondary kind of SAM relation.) The location differences have quantity: for example, suppose that DIF, has a quantity of 10 units (A is ten units from B), and that DIFg’ has a quantity of 5 units, and DIFg” has a quantity of 11 units. Thus we can now identify a third secondary kind, q (relation of spatial quantity), of sameness/difference relation: we can say that (S2)

Were we to look at the actual separations on a surface (where the separations are defined either as colored lines or separations between points whose color contrasts with the background) we would become aware that spatial-quantity difference relations such as these are also R-type relations (S, M, D, O relations. A spatial-quantity sameness relation is also an I relation). But a problem immediately presents itself: what conditions must be satisfied in order for us to apply the terms “similar,” “moderational,” “dissimilar,” and “oppositional” to a relation holding between any two color-defined spatial separations, between any two straight lines for example? Precisely stated, this question amounts to this: when we compare two straight lines, what dimension are we dealing with when we wish to refer to them as being identical in length, similar in length, moderational in length, etc.? Assuming that the dimension we are dealing with is one whose minimum separation is zero (or the shortest perceptible unit), there are several possibilities for its maximum separation: its maximum separation may be (1) the longer of the two separations, (2) the longest of all existing color-defined separations on the surface, or (3) the longest perceptible separation. In order to answer this important question, we can consider the following picture:

If (1), above, describes the dimension we are dealing with, then the following Statement will be true:

(i.e., statement S1 states, “Line a is dissimilar in length to line b, and line a is dissimilar in length to line c.”) If (2) describes the dimension, then this will be true:

If (3) describes the dimension, then this will be true:

Inspection shows that statement S1 is true, and so, when we compare two lines, the dimension we are dealing with is one whose minimum separation is zero and whose maximum separation is the separation whose quantity is that of the longer of the two lines. So, we can add this secondary kind of R-relation to our catalog. In our 10 x 5 x 11 example, it is true that (S3)

(Mq, because 5 is half-way between 0 and 10; Dq because 5 is between 0 and 11 divided by 2; Sq because 10 is greater than 11 divided by 2). We can note in passing that for all Rx, there is a corresponding rx, where “r” stands for a SAM or DEF relation, but the reverse is not true. Different DIF,-triplets such as the one described by S3 define different angles ABC, each angle having a quantity from 0° to 180°. If the angle ABC is 0°, then A and C are positioned in the same direction from B, or (LdB)AC. If ABC = 180°, then A and C are positioned in opposite directions from B, or (OdB)AC. Thus the relation (RdB)AC is different for each angle ABC (from 0° to 180°), every angle is to be associated with an identity, or a similarity, etc., and angles can be compared in these terms. Presumably (but perhaps not), if ABC = 90°, then (MdB)AC. Orientation, Ro, is different from direction (RdX): If line LI is parallel to line L2, then LI and L2 have the same (identical) orientation, i.e.,

(S4)

If LI is perpendicular to L2, then (S5)

If LI is rotated 45° from L2, then (S6)

And degrees of S and D exist regularly distributed in association with angles between 0°and 180°. (In general, for more precise analysis, a scale from 0 (zero) to, say, 100 could be used: 0 (zero) = I, 50 = M, 100 = O (opposition), so that S6 would read

etc.

Of course, A, B, and C may be of identical, similar, moderational, etc., color, i.e.color is a secondary kind of visual-field R-relation. But color as a property has component properties, perhaps three of them, but perhaps four or five, and those properries are themselves tied to secondary kinds of R-relation. Those kinds which should be considered are:

1. hue (Rh) -- A hue circle can be used to illustrate how any two hues are related in terms of I, S, M, D, and O, sc long as it is kept in mind that no distance greater than vi the circumference is meaningful.

2. intensity (Ri) - this term refers to the amount of pure hue in the color. Opposites are: (a) gray (including white and black) and (b) pure hue.

3. gray-value (Rg) -- this term refers to the character of the gray component of a color. Opposites are (a) black and (b)white.

4. value (Rv) - this term refers to the amount of light perceived. Opposites are: (a) black and (b) the amount of light associated with pure white.

5. purity (Rp) - Opposites are (a) black and (b) pure hue, pure hue+white, or pure white. Thus, we can in general say that, given three points, A, B, and C, on a painted surface,

and in contemplating this statement form, which is about just three points on a surface, we begin more fully to appreciate the complexity of any analysis in these terms, and to understand why the secret of beauty has remained difficult to discover, and more fully to appreciate the power of our faculty for unconscious discrimination.

But there are many more relations to catalog before this sort of analysis can be complete. Some examples should suffice:

1. The grouping of objects: In our 10x5x11 example above (S3), B and C have the same property in that they both belong to the same group, i.e., (S8)

In general, any time there are three objects A, B, and C, such that (S9)

and R1 is closer to I (identity) than is eitherR2 or R3, there exists a naturally-defined group consisting of A and B, which is different from a group consisting of C; that is

(S10)

and we can say that (S11)

and in complex cases, there will be groups contained within groups, and spatially-defined groups interlaced with color-defined groups, etc. in intricate patterns. And groups which are more well-defined and groups which are less well-defined may be defined by groups of R-relations. In a representational painting, two separate shapes which represent parts of an object will tend to be seen to be grouped together, and two shapes which would, if there were no representation, be seen as being of the same group, may be viewed as belonging to different groups if the objects which the shapes represent are separate. It is clear that difference relations can hold between groups. I believe that it is

also clear that R-relations hold between groups; but to attempt to answer the important question of exactly how the relations which hold between the individual components of two groups might determine the R-relation(s) holding between the groups themselves is a project which is beyond the scope of the present work.

2. combinative relations: There seems to be good reason for supposing that when Rx and Ry both hold between two objects there appears a third relation Rx+y which is in some sense a combination of, or at least grounded upon, the first two. For instance, in the figure described by S7, we can add Ro+q relations, and in a similar figure involving colored lines in place of mere point-to-point separations, we could no doubt add Ro+q+c relations to the list.

3. But how is the color relation, Rc , to be derived from its component relations, Rh , Ri, Rg, Rv, and Rp? For example, is Rc an average of its components? Many authors have invented color solids which, on the model of the hue circle, can be construed as attempts to represent the relation between component distances and color distances. A full discussion of these is beyond the scope of what we will talk about tonight.

4. Two complex shapes can be compared in R-relational terms (Rah). It Is beyond the scope of tonight’s discussion to show how Rah is grounded upon the already- mentioned (and other) relations.

5. What is balance? If we place a single point P within a frame, the distances from P to the frame are significant: With P at the center: there are many Sq relations existing between pairs of the P-to-frame distances. There is thus a new Sbal relation (perhaps conceived of as existing between P and the surface itself). With P near a corner: there are many Dq relations of high degree of dissimilarity. There is thus a Dbal. There exist placements of P which present a variety of Sq and Dq relations between the P-to- frame distances, such that a relation approaching a Mbal relation exists. Since larger shapes have contours composed of more discriminable points than small shapes, over-long shape-to-frame distances for the larger shape, since they are more numerous, are more significant than similarly over-long shape-to-frame distances for the smaller shape.

We have identified a good number of the secondary kinds of r and R relations which exist in the field of a picture. In general, the relevant R-relations exist among single points, naturally-defined groups68 (whether these are shapes or are composed of shapes), R-relations themselves, and among the parts of a shape’s contour. A full catalog of secondary kinds of R-relation will contain many more kinds. In ways which should be apparent, the application of the moderation-richness principles (I will soon present statements S1 and S2) to the complete set of relevant relations can greatly facilitate the production of great paintings. In the case of representational painting, we are dealing with, in addition to relations of the 2-D surface, relations in represented 3-D space, but no new kinds of relations come into play in transferring attention from the formal relations of the surface to the formal relations of the represented space.

What is the true conception of Unity In Variety (UIV). and how is it connected to the production of human Happiness?

I now turn from the descriptive approach to the evaluative approach. In describing this Unity-In- Variety conception, in order to avoid misunderstandings which derive from the use of equivocal terms, what I will say will not involve definitions of such terms. Terms such as “beauty” and “art” are equivocal in the sense that their meaning varies from person to person, and from decade to decade. I need not use, nor try to define, these terms in order to present the fact that the [visual] perception of moderation-richness is fulfilling to human beings and that the Lascaux paintings, Rembrandt portraits, Kandinsky abstracts, etc, are moderation-rich, and that this is primarily what accounts for the high esteem in which they are held. I need only use concepts freshly articulated (though not necessarily new) utilizing a set of unequivocal basic terms. So, in a fresh articulation of concepts, I will present the following stipulative definitions (that is, the new terms are introduced, mainly, for the sake of brevity):

color-identity = identity of color color-similarity = similarity of color x is color-identical to y = x is identical in color to y hue-identity = identity of hue etc.

and if I use a term of the form

norm-x

the reader will be justified in inferring that I myself have a liking for x, and that I expect the reader to like x as well.

moderation-rich = having much moderation and having highly equal distribution of the moderation throughout the field (“moderation-rich” is a strictly descriptive, non-normative term). moderation-poor = having little moderation and/or having unequal distribution of moderation throughout the field (a non-normative term), similarity-rich = having many similarity relations, similarity-poor = having few similarity relations, dissimilarity-rich = having many dissimilarity relations, dissimilarity-poor = having few dissimilarity relations. moderation-richD - moderation-rich qua contrasted with dissimilarity-rich, moderation-richS= moderation-rich qua contrasted with similarity-rich, moderation-object = an object whose visual presentation is moderation-rich, moderation-artifact = a man-made moderation-object intentional-moderation-artifact = a moderation-artifact made intentionally to be such and in the way that it actually is such.

The univocal intelligibility of these basic terms, and my enumeration (below) of examples of what I take to be norm-intentional-moderation-artifacts should be enough to show what extension

my concepts have. Here is a list of some suggested identifications; the terms to the right are commonly used:

norm-moderation-rich = beautiful moderation-richnessD = unity, uniformity moderation-richnessS = variety norm-moderation-object = beautiful object, aesthetic object norm-intentional-moderation-artifact = art object norm-color-moderation = (color) harmony norm-location-moderation = (aesthetic) balance, equilibrium similarity-rich = simple dissimilarity-rich = complex

But these suggested identifications are included only to facilitate understanding - they are peripheral to my main exposition, and the correctness of them does not, strictly speaking, bear upon the truth of what I say.

Here is a primary principle of Beauty; it is an evaluative statement:

S1 The awareness of moderation-richness is, as a rule, a fundamental good. (informal paraphrase: awareness of moderation-richness makes us happy).

Here is a second statement:

S2 Many objects, including the Lascaux paintings, Rembrandt portraits, and Kandinsky abstracts, are moderation-rich (both in 2D and represented 3D), and this is, at least primarily, what accounts for the high esteem in which they are held.

if unity in variety is a good in the visual arts, then it is a good in music as well. In fact, evidence can be found in music to support the (general) UIV thesis: Each note is separated by twelve half-steps (= an octave) from a note having the same letter- name. These two notes are the same (they are both c’s for instance, and possess a certain sameness of quality) and different (they are different c’s, for instance, and possess a certain difference of quality). The fact of their sameness implies the existence of a hue-circle-like oppositional dimension of twelve notes:

Thus, for instance, D is oppositional to G# is similar to D# and to E, is dissimilar to F# and to G, and is moderational to F and to B. In general, if we play a series of single notes, creating a melody

on a piano, the most satisfying resolution occurs when the 1st note of the scale follows the 5th note –

e.g. when C follows G. It may be seen as evidence for the Unity In Variety theses that G with its two moderation-notes A# (midway between G and C#, up) G E (midway between G and C# down)

are precisely those notes which, with C itseif, make up the set of the first seven harmonics of C:

A# (approximately) - seventh harmonic. G - third and sixth harmonics. E - fifth harmonic. C - first (= the fundamental tone), second and fourth harmonics.

Thus, playing C after G repeats the G while supplying G’s moderation-notes, creating a satisfying cadence. It is interesting that the only two-note progression within a scale whose second note supplies no M-notes at all to the first note is the 4-1 progression — and when we arrive at the fourth note, generally in the middle of a phrase, we are indeed left hanging, having to work our way back to 1 via the 5.

3. The claim in the Beauty Debate-game (Critical Dialectic—not Philosophical or Practical) will consist of an s/d analysis, on the pages of the Ash notebook (integrated into the arguments of Truth and Goodness) of elements of a work of art, done with the goal of showing these elements to possess or lack moderation. A work’s expressive merit is addressed in the Truth-argument and in the Goodness-argument.

4. list of meanings often attributed to esteemed paintings:

a. INSIGHTS:

Rembrandt: insight into the character of his portrait subjects. Impressionists: how we see—momentary visual impressions. Post-impressionists: Gauguin—hidden realities, a parallel world of spirit and mystery; Cezanne—hidden realities, how nature is made up of simple forms. Expressionists: Klee—revealing realms beyond the visible world, unseen truths, “a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live in the artist;” Marc—“the organic rhythm of all things.” De Stijl: Mondriam—revealing the true, spiritual foundation of things, basic forms, balance, rhythm, tension, dynamic evolutionary forces.” Cubism: Picasso—showing multiple sides of objects, depicting the world more accurately.

b. EXPRESSION:

Rembrandt: love for others (for example: Titus Reading), love of Christianity. Romanticists: awe, terror, sublimity, exaltation, a calm grandeur, the eternal, noble simplicity. Realists:

challenging public ethical and aesthetic boundaries. Post-impressionists: Van Gogh— tumultuous, chaotic, love of the world, deep, tender feelings; Matisse—feelings inspired by even common object, such as a table. Expressionists: alienation, loss of the spiritual dimension in German cities; der Blaue Reiter—a spiritual experience; Kandinsky—forms are expressive. Dada: discontent with society, irrationality, nonsense, intuition, anti-war feelings, rejection of cultural conformity, of nationalism and of the aesthetics, logic and reason of the modern world. Abstract Impressionism; De Kooning—"drama, pain, anger, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas of space;” tragedy, ecstasy and doom.

APPENDIX VII

Cards of Rank

These are the Truth Engine cards of rank; the hierarchy follows the order in which their insignia appear in the exposition of the Panoply:

The House of the Philosopher This is the symbol of the Mind of Heaven, which contains the Form of the Panoply, the Form of the generation of all great collective beings, colossi of colossi, such as Ouranos (the Cosmic Seeder), Maia (the midwife) and Gaia. This icon is the insignia of the rank of Initiate.

:

THE PLACES OF TRUTH WITHIN THE MIND OF HEAVEN: THE THEORETICS

LIBRARY IN THE HOUSE OF THE PHILOSOPHER, AND THE MUSEUM FOR MAN.

In the iconography of the Truth Engine, the Theoretics Library and the Museum for Man represent the parts of the Mind of Heaven that encompass all truth and matters of pure truth (ethical and aesthetic issues are not treated in this section). These are images of the Theoretics Library and the Museum for Man:

The Glass Doors in the Study The large door or window in the Theoretics Library, the Philosopher’s Study, looking out at the natural world, at the sea, signifies how the source of the work (the revelation of truth) of the dialectician is the Mind of Heaven, which is at the heart of nature and encompasses the entire World. The image also reminds us how every day for the dialectician is like a day in midsummer, when nature, in the form of clement weather, cooperates with our human plans.

This icon is the insignia of the rank of Novice 2nd Class.

The Desk of the Philosopher the Will, and the Intellect, and the Sensibility of the Mind of Heaven as that (as Blueprint and Engine) which instantiates and galvanizes all allocyclonic hearts and minds, creating balance from imbalance.

This icon is the insignia of the rank of Novice 1st Class.

The Archaeopteryx Cabinet and the Maps of World History, in the Theoretics Library The “Cabinet and Maps” Icon symbolizes the instantiation in time of the eternal Form—which resides in the eternal Mind of Heaven—of the Panoply, of the allocyclic (galaxial and stellar systemic) Evolution of Mind by means of the circle of conflict and memory.

This icon is the insignia of the rank of Student.

The Piano, in the Theoretics Library The “Art in the Theoretics Library” icon symbolozes the Form of balance in Truth: seeking the general in the specific. Understanding its role in art is the penultimate step in the division of history into prenatal and postnatal—such understanding constitutes the condition of the Gaian Mind where Gaia’s heart becomes fully developed.

This icon is the insignia of the rank of Specialist 3rd Class.

The Sculpture Table, in the Theoretics Library This is another example of the “Art in the Theoretics Library” icon.

This icon is the insignia of the rank of Specialist 2nd Class.

The Bookcase, in the Theoretics Library This signifies the Form of the Record of Thought, of the Memory of Thought, and the Form of Consolidation of Mind, of the Dissemination of Truth, of Mind becoming confident in its knowledge.

This icon is the insignia of the rank of Specialist 1st Class.

The Game of Truth. In the Theoretics Library This symbolizes the Form of Reason, of Logic, of thinking, where the truth of one P-and-Q type compound statement implies the truth of another.

This icon is the insignia of the rank of Adept.

Two allosaurs are observed by alien visitors Images depicting prehistoric animals on the wall in the Theoretics Library represent how Heaven’s creation of the Panoply plays out in time, the Form of the evolutionary Dialectic as the Engine of Creation, as individual minds become ever more able to possess knowledge. The aliens represent how the Midwife watches, waiting for the time to help the Dialecticians who will someday evolve.

This icon is the insignia of the rank of Chief Adept.

A painting of an elaphrosaurus and observers, in the Theoretics Library This is another example of the “Watching Aliens” icon.

This icon is the insignia of the rank of Technician 2nd Class.

A painting of stegosaurus and observers, in the Theoretics Library This is a third example of the “Watching Aliens” icon. This icon is the insignia of the rank of Technician 1st Class.

The Museum for Man, containing preserved specimens of all of earth’s life forms, collected over the ages of the earth by the ancient races not of this Earth. The Museum, in whatever form it appears, represents the entire Panoply as it exists as an eternal Form within the Mind of Heaven.

This icon is the insignia of the rank of Lieutenant Master.

The Tyrannosaur in the Museum for Man Here is a second example of the Museum icon, portraying a specimen in the Museum

This icon is the insignia of the rank of Associate Master.

A Pteranodon in the Museum for Man Here is a fifth example of the Museum icon, a painting portraying a specimen in the Museum. This icon is the insignia of the rank of Deputy Master.

The Pangaia of Truth This, the image of a painting in the Theoretics Library is the symbol for the unity of the earth that is to be brought about when Gaia is born, when the goal of evolution on earth has been reached.

This icon is the insignia of the rank of Master of the Engine.

The Room of Dangers in the basement of the House of the Philosopher This mythical building, in whatever form it is depicted (but which is always to be portrayed as being in the House’s basement), is the principle symbol of the Primal Dispositions. The Apollonian and the Dionysian predispositions are irrational, but present themselves as rational intuitions—they are responsible for great error. They constitute a lack of balance and are impediments to Truth Engine work. They must be overcome.

This icon is the insignia of the rank of Lieutenant Dialectician.

Mapping the Dispositions: an astrology wheel in the Astrology Room Adjoining the Thoretics Library on the House’s second floor Astrological equipment represents the conscientous and intellectual working-through of our sd biases, the process that the Cosmic Law, as given in the Form of the Panoply, demands that the dialectician pursue.

This icon is the insignia of the rank of Associate Dialectician.

The desk in Astrology Room This is another example of the Astrological Equipment icon.

This icon is the insignia of the rank of Deputy Dialectician.

The little symbol-cart figurines, on the table in the Room of Honors, which adjoins the Theoretics Library Honors must be bestowed upon the dialectician who overcomes his or her predispositions.

This icon is the insignia of the rank of Dialectician of the Engine.

The House of Birth in the far north The tiny, cozy, safe and isolated House of the Dialectician’s birth and childhood, reminiscent of the womb, represents the origin of the biases, which set the stage for life’s drama. The dialecticians must struggle against their biases, but we are born into a world that supplies us with what our work demands of us.

This icon is the insignia of the rank of Chief Logician.

VIII. THE VISITORS

The story did not end with Helios. There were other worlds, other peoples, and other great persons struggling to be born. Across the stars, civilizations followed paths unlike humanity's own. Their bodies were different. Their histories were different. Their sciences, arts, religions, and institutions had arisen from circumstances no human being had ever known.

But the great pattern could recur. A civilization might grow brilliant while remaining divided against itself. Its powers might increase faster than its wisdom. Old institutions might cease to contain new forces, and rival dispositions might harden into hostility. The approaching crisis might become visible long before those living within it understood what was coming. Another world might approach its Dionysian age, and those who had survived such an age themselves would recognize the signs.

Humanity was no longer the frightened species looking upward.

Now, sometimes, we were the visitors.

The airplane belonged to a civilization that had only recently learned to cross its own skies. Its pilot knew nothing of Helios, nothing of humanity, and nothing of the older persons who had watched his world for generations. He knew only that four small objects had appeared around his aircraft. They had no wings, no propellers, no visible means of propulsion. They moved effortlessly, keeping pace with him and changing position with impossible precision. Inside one of them, a human operator watched.

There was no danger. The encounter had been planned carefully. The spheres would approach, remain long enough to be seen, and withdraw. They would leave no explanation behind. That was the point. The inhabitants of this world were approaching a crisis familiar to humanity. Their civilization was becoming powerful enough to destroy much of what it had created, while the dispositions within it were becoming increasingly unable to understand one another. The collective person struggling to emerge from them had not yet learned to think.

They could not simply be given the answer. They had to learn to ask the question. And so, long before the crisis reached its height, a strange controversy was introduced into their world. Some would believe the pilot. Others would insist that he had mistaken an ordinary phenomenon. Scientists would propose explanations. Journalists would investigate. Governments would worry. Hoaxers would imitate what they had heard. Witnesses would disagree. Evidence would accumulate without becoming decisive. The visitors would appear again—not often enough to settle the matter, but not rarely enough for it to disappear.

A debate would begin. Humanity had once participated in such a debate without understanding why. Now humans helped to create one.

The first encounters had been private. A pilot might see strange objects accompanying his aircraft and tell others what he had seen. Stories would circulate and questions would be asked, but the controversy had not yet begun. That required an Initiation Event. Every Pageant had one. The witness would have to be credible, the encounter unmistakable, and the story would have to escape the small circle of those who first heard it and enter the public world.

On this world, the moment was about to come.

The pilot had been chosen carefully. He was experienced, observant, and unlikely to be dismissed as a fantasist. Ahead of his aircraft, a procession of strange objects crossed the sky. He watched them and tried to understand what he was seeing. He would remember their number, their formation, and their extraordinary movement. Inside one of the objects, two human operators watched him in return.

They did not need him to understand.

They needed him to report.

If the operation succeeded, his account would travel farther than he could imagine. Newspapers would repeat it. Others would begin watching the skies. New witnesses would come forward. Explanations would be proposed and challenged. What had been a collection of strange stories would become a public question.

The Pageant had already begun. The Initiation Event began the debate.

The Initiation Event had succeeded. The strange objects had entered public consciousness, and the argument had begun. But if the controversy were to endure through the approaching Dionysian crisis, something else was required. The governments of this world would inevitably become involved, and sooner or later they might acquire evidence strong enough to settle the question. If they disclosed what they knew—if they simply announced that visitors were real—the great debate would end. The Pageant therefore required the governments themselves to have a reason to conceal the phenomenon.

The humans prepared one.

But nothing had crashed.

High above the ground, a human vessel hovered silently while its crews completed the scene beneath it. Powerful lamps illuminated the chosen site. An egg-shaped craft, manufactured for the purpose, had been made to look damaged and placed upon the ground. Fragments were scattered across the surrounding terrain. Among them lay bodies made to resemble the occupants of the wrecked vehicle. Every element had been prepared to tell the same apparently obvious story: a vehicle from another world had failed, fallen from the sky, and killed those who had traveled within it.

The story was false. The wreckage had never crossed the stars, and the bodies had never been alive. The humans who constructed the scene were themselves the visitors, and their own craft remained intact above it. But the deception had a precise purpose. The wreck would be discovered by the authorities. They would recover the vehicle, the debris, and the apparent bodies. From that moment onward, they would know that something extraordinary was occurring—and they would also believe things about the visitors that were not true.

That was what the Pageant required. The government had to conceal the crash, because disclosure would mean revealing an event whose implications it did not understand and whose apparent technology, intentions, and occupants it could not safely explain—and it would mistakenly believe that reverse engineering of the craft could yield valuable advantages over its various enemies . Once secrecy began, every later encounter would be interpreted in the shadow of what had been recovered. Officials would investigate the phenomenon while withholding what they believed they already knew about it. Publicly, the existence of the visitors could remain uncertain; privately, the government would behave as though the matter were terribly real.

The concealment was not an accidental consequence of the operation. It was the reason for the staged crash. If the government openly confirmed the visitors, the controversy would disappear. There would still be questions about who the visitors were and what they wanted, but the foundational dispute—whether the phenomenon itself was real—would be over. The long argument that the developing collective person needed would never occur. The Pageant therefore gave the government knowledge, misinformation, and a reason to keep both to itself.

When the work was finished, the great human vessel departed. The lights vanished from the night, leaving behind the broken egg, the scattered fragments, and the bodies of beings who had never lived. Soon the inhabitants of the planet would arrive. They would believe that they were investigating an accident.

They were actually being given a secret.

And for the Pageant to work, they would have to keep it.

By now, the controversy had acquired something it had previously lacked: a history. There had been sightings, reports, arguments, denials, and the extraordinary story of a crashed craft that the government itself could never safely explain. But testimony remained testimony. However credible a witness might be, those who had not been present could always ask whether something had been misunderstood, exaggerated, or remembered incorrectly. The Pageant therefore moved to another of its standard operations. This time the visitors would not merely arrange to be seen. They would arrange to be recorded.

The witness was chosen, the place was chosen, and the encounter was designed around the limitations of the native technology. The human crews knew what sort of camera he carried, how well it could resolve a distant object, how rapidly he could bring it into use, and how long the objects would have to remain within his field of view. They did not descend dramatically or approach him. They simply crossed the sky in daylight, conspicuous enough to attract his attention and slowly enough for him to film them. From the shore of his world, among the strange plants that had grown there for millions of years, he raised his camera and followed three impossible objects across the sky.

The resulting film would be real. There would be no trick photography, no fabricated images, and no mistake about what the camera had recorded. Three human craft had actually passed through that sky, and the images on the film would be images of them. But that did not mean the evidence would be decisive. Distance would be uncertain. Size would be difficult to establish. Motion could be interpreted in different ways. Analysts could study the frames and reach different conclusions. Some would argue that the objects behaved unlike anything known to the inhabitants of the planet; others would find explanations that required no visitors at all. The recording would provide something solid enough to argue about without providing enough to end the argument.

That was precisely what the Pageant required. Its purpose was not to prove the existence of the visitors. Proof, given too early, would destroy the controversy just as surely as complete invisibility would prevent one from beginning. The developing civilization needed a question that could survive—one capable of drawing different dispositions into sustained disagreement and forcing them, eventually, to confront the problem of how truth was to be determined when intelligent and sincere people saw the same evidence differently. The visitors therefore gave the world evidence in carefully measured quantities: enough to keep the question alive, never enough to close it.

The cameraman could know none of this. To him, the event was an astonishing piece of luck. He had looked upward at the right moment, had possessed a camera, and had managed to record something extraordinary before it disappeared. Later, others would watch what he had filmed. The images would be enlarged, measured, analyzed, reproduced, criticized, defended, and remembered. What seemed to him an accidental encounter on a quiet shore had in fact been prepared for him by persons from another world.

Humanity had once examined films like these and wondered whether their makers had captured something extraordinary by chance.

Now humans were the extraordinary thing being filmed—and chance was part of the presentation.

The controversy had now acquired witnesses, photographs, and moving images. But these remained evidence brought to the institutions of the developing world from outside. A witness could be mistaken. A photograph could be questioned. A film could be analyzed until disagreement about what it showed became almost as elaborate as the mystery itself. For the Pageant to develop further, the phenomenon had to enter the instruments of the state. The government itself had to discover that the visitors were real.

The operation was a familiar one. Human craft moved into the airspace surrounding the world's capital, appearing where the civilization's developing radar system could detect them. They remained long enough to be tracked by trained operators, disappeared, returned, and moved in ways that ordinary aircraft could not readily explain. Different stations obtained returns. Reports moved upward through the governmental hierarchy. What had been a troublesome collection of stories told by citizens was suddenly present on the state's own instruments.

The operators did not know that the objects on their great circular display were there precisely because they were watching. The humans had chosen the place, the time, and the movements of their craft so that the encounter could not remain merely another public report. The government had to encounter the mystery for itself. Its officials needed evidence strong enough to convince at least some of them that something genuinely unknown was operating in their skies.

But once again, certainty was not the objective. Public certainty would have defeated the purpose of the Pageant. If the government announced that visitors from another world had unquestionably arrived, the great controversy would collapse into an accepted fact. The competing interpretations, the accumulating evidence, the arguments over witnesses and photographs and films—the prolonged exercise through which a civilization might slowly learn to confront radically opposed accounts of reality—would end almost as soon as it had begun.

The Capital City Overflight Event therefore accomplished something subtler. It created a division between what the government could publicly establish and what some of those within it had privately come to believe. Officials who had seen the returns, compared reports, and followed the incidents could no longer dismiss the entire phenomenon. Yet they still lacked an explanation they could safely give to the population. The visitors had forced the beginnings of an enclave into existence: a group within the government that knew there was something behind the controversy even while the controversy itself remained unresolved.

That division was not an accidental consequence of the operation. It was the purpose of it. The Pageant needed a government that knew enough to take the visitors seriously, but not one that would simply disclose their reality and bring the debate to an end. After the staged crash, the state had already acquired powerful reasons for secrecy. Now its own instruments reinforced them. The public would continue arguing about whether the visitors existed while, behind closed doors, some of its officials would confront the much more disturbing question of what the visitors wanted.

And the humans would give them no answer.

The Pageant required them to keep watching.

The Pageant sometimes required evidence that seemed to reveal not merely the existence of the visitors, but the principles by which their machines operated. Such evidence had to be especially carefully designed. If the inhabitants concluded that the visitors possessed powers wholly beyond physical explanation, they might also begin to doubt an earlier and indispensable part of the Pageant: that one of the visitors' craft could have malfunctioned and crashed. The staged wreckage had helped draw the government into secrecy. It was important that the government's interpretation of that event remain plausible.

The humans therefore arranged a series of encounters involving automobiles. A strange craft would approach a vehicle traveling at night. As it drew near, the engine would suddenly stop; lights and other electrical equipment might fail or weaken. When the object moved away, the automobile would mysteriously return to normal. The pattern invited an obvious inference. Whatever force propelled the visitors' craft seemed capable of interfering with electrical systems. Perhaps their extraordinary vehicles operated through enormously powerful electromagnetic fields.

The inference was false.

Hours before an encounter, the humans had secretly installed a small remotely controlled device in the chosen automobile. At the appropriate moment, an operator aboard the nearby craft activated it. The engine stopped. The lights failed. The luminous object remained close enough for the frightened driver to connect the two events. Then the craft withdrew, the device was switched off, and the automobile started again. Later, after the owner had returned home and the neighborhood had gone dark, a human quietly came back to remove the apparatus.

Nothing emitted by the craft had disabled the automobile. The apparent electromagnetic effect had been manufactured.

But the deception did more than produce another puzzling story. It supplied a false technological principle that helped the other pieces of the Pageant fit together. Investigators could reason that the visitors' craft were extraordinarily advanced but still comprehensible machines, propelled by forces their own science already knew something about. Machines of that kind could malfunction. Their fields could fail. Their control systems could break down. A craft might even fall from the sky.

And therefore the crash that the government believed it had already recovered remained believable.

That mattered enormously. The staged crash had given officials a reason to conceal the visitors' existence, while the continuing secrecy helped preserve the public controversy upon which the Pageant depended. If the government came to suspect that the crash itself had been deliberately presented to it, the architecture of the deception might begin to unravel. The automobile encounters instead reinforced the false story from another direction. What appeared to be independent evidence about the visitors' propulsion system quietly supported the government's belief that it possessed the remains of an actual accident.

Once again, the Pageant did not merely provide evidence. It provided evidence designed to generate the wrong explanation.

The automobile incidents had supplied the developing world's investigators with an apparent clue to the visitors' technology. But another inference was equally important. The beings behind the phenomenon must not seem so far beyond the inhabitants of this world that their actions became incomprehensible. They had to appear to be persons engaged in recognizable activities: travelers, investigators, explorers. And it would help if the evidence suggested that the craft in the skies did not all belong to a single civilization.

The humans therefore invented another species.

Two workers at a refuse yard were chosen for the encounter. In broad daylight, an unfamiliar craft descended among the discarded machines and rusting automobiles. From it emerged two beings unlike any occupants previously associated with the mysterious objects. They appeared completely biological. They wore elaborate clothing suggesting a sophisticated culture of their own. They approached the astonished workers, remained close enough to be observed in considerable detail, and then departed in the craft from which they had come.

The workers had encountered no extraterrestrials. The two splendidly dressed beings were robots manufactured by humans, their bodies designed to simulate a species that did not exist. But the witnesses could not know that. To them—and eventually to investigators who heard their account—the encounter suggested something much more consequential: more than one race was visiting their world.

That possibility encouraged a particular interpretation of the entire phenomenon. Perhaps the visitors were not a single mysterious power pursuing some incomprehensible purpose. Perhaps advanced civilizations throughout the universe simply explored. The inhabitants of this world already understood such behavior. Their own scientists traveled into unfamiliar environments, studied strange organisms, investigated distant places, and returned with what they had learned. The beings descending from the sky might be doing essentially the same thing on a vastly greater scale.

It was another carefully planted analogy. If the visitors were explorers, then however advanced they might be, they were not gods. They were persons much like the inhabitants themselves, undertaking expeditions with equipment of their own manufacture. Their vehicles might cross distances the developing civilization could scarcely imagine, but they were still machines. And machines could malfunction.

The lesson reinforced the one planted by the automobile incidents. Those encounters had supplied a false physics: the craft apparently depended upon powerful electromagnetic forces, advanced but comprehensible enough to fail. This encounter supplied a false sociology: different extraterrestrial peoples apparently traveled from world to world as explorers, much as the inhabitants of this planet already traveled through their own world in pursuit of knowledge. The two deceptions converged upon the same conclusion.

Yes, one of their craft could crash.

That conclusion was intended especially for the government. Its officials had already hidden what they believed to be the remains of such an accident. Everything that followed had to make that original interpretation more credible, not less. The Pageant was constructing an entire imaginary world behind the phenomenon—a universe populated by multiple races of explorers traveling in astonishing but fallible machines. None of it was true. But so long as the government believed it, the staged crash remained an accident, the recovered materials remained an extraordinary secret, and there remained every reason to keep the visitors' existence from the public.

The Pageant had another purpose besides sustaining the great debate. Someday, if the developing civilization survived its Dionysian crisis, its people might meet humanity and the other members of a vastly larger family. But beings from other worlds would appear profoundly alien to them, and alien would naturally mean not family. That association would have to be weakened long before open contact became possible.

The humans approached the problem didactically. A teacher who wishes to make a distinction vivid can begin with a stark contrast. To teach together, she might first show two objects apart and then show them together. The Pageant would use the same method on a concept the inhabitants already understood: family. First it would make the existing boundary as vivid as possible. Only later would it begin to cross it.

For the first lesson, the humans manufactured small robots modeled grotesquely upon the inhabitants themselves. Their distorted faces and unnatural movements were designed to make them seem as radically Other as possible—not merely strangers, but creatures almost impossible to imagine as members of one's family.

The machines were prepared for an encounter with an isolated extended family. At night they would surround the family's home, peer through its openings, retreat when confronted, and return. They would behave frighteningly but would be carefully controlled so that no member of the household was seriously harmed. To the terrified witnesses, there would be no robots and no human technicians—only inexplicable little beings emerging repeatedly from the darkness.

The contrast could hardly have been stronger. Alien with alien: family. Alien with one of these creatures: family seemed impossible. The Pageant was not yet trying to persuade anyone otherwise. Like a teacher beginning with two sharply contrasting pictures, it was first making the boundary unmistakable.

Later lessons would cross it. Other visitors would remain just as alien in appearance, but they would acknowledge a greeting, return a gesture, establish trust, show concern. Step by step, the Pageant would separate Other from not family. What had first seemed an impossible conjunction would gradually become imaginable.

The goblins therefore taught only the first half of the lesson: make the distinction clear before teaching the student to transcend it.

The encounter with the goblins had been deliberately frightening. The strange little beings had appeared around the home of an extended family, approaching from the darkness, peering through windows, resisting every attempt to drive them away. The lesson depended upon contrast. The inhabitants of this world already understood what a family was; the Pageant did not need to teach them the concept. It needed to make one of its boundaries unusually vivid. These creatures could never be family. However intelligent they might be, nothing in the encounter invited relationship. The family was inside; the goblins were outside. Between them lay an apparently absolute division.

The second half of the lesson came later, and it could hardly have been simpler. A human craft appeared high above a settlement in broad daylight. This time there were no mysterious occupants glimpsed through windows, no fabricated monsters, and no threatening movements. Three humans walked onto an exterior platform at the top of the hovering craft, where the inhabitants below could see them plainly. A crowd gradually gathered among the buildings. The humans looked down at the strange cylindrical-headed beings watching them from another world.

Then the humans waved.

Some of the inhabitants waved back. Others merely watched, pointed upward, or spoke excitedly to those beside them. Nothing more was required. A gesture had crossed the distance between two worlds, had been understood, and had been returned. The biological difference between the beings above and those below was enormous, yet the simplest of social acts had passed effortlessly between them. The visitors could recognize a greeting. They could offer one. They could participate in the elementary reciprocity from which relationships begin.

Placed after the goblin encounter, the event completed a contrastive lesson. The first presentation had made one relation starkly intelligible: alien and goblin—family impossible. The second presented the opposite possibility: alien and human—family possible. The important contrast was not between family and non-family among the inhabitants themselves. It was between two kinds of relationship with beings who came from somewhere beyond their world. The goblins had seemed radically other and remained radically other. The humans were more radically other still—they had arisen beneath another sun—and yet mutual recognition was possible.

That distinction mattered because the Pageant's purpose extended beyond the crisis immediately facing this civilization. If the developing collective person survived its Dionysian age, there would eventually come a time when the truth could be revealed and the peoples of different worlds could meet openly. By then, the inhabitants must not automatically equate otherworldly with outside the possibility of belonging. The Pageant could not command them to regard visitors as kin, nor could a single encounter teach them to do so. It could, however, prepare the conceptual ground. First it made the boundary of family conspicuous; then it demonstrated that the boundary did not coincide with the boundary between worlds.

The three humans knew exactly what they were doing. Long before their own time, on Earth, another Pageant had included an encounter in which beings associated with a strange craft responded to the wave of a man watching from below. What had seemed almost absurdly trivial—a raised hand answered by another raised hand—had carried a remarkably large implication. Otherness had become relationship.

Now humanity was teaching the same lesson.

And this time, the humans were the ones waving from the sky.

By now the Pageant had made two propositions vivid. The goblin encounter had presented a being from elsewhere with whom family seemed impossible. The wave event had presented the opposite possibility: creatures born beneath different suns could recognize one another, exchange a friendly gesture, and begin the simplest kind of social relationship. But the lesson could be made more intimate. The humans wanted an encounter in which the possibility of family across difference would not merely be demonstrated before a crowd. It would be presented to two particular people whose own lives already embodied the principle.

The couple was chosen carefully. They belonged to visibly different populations of the developing world, populations whose differences had once carried powerful social boundaries. Yet the two had crossed one of those boundaries and married. They were already living proof of something the Pageant wanted their civilization eventually to understand on a vastly larger scale: difference need not prevent union. The humans did not expect the couple consciously to draw an analogy between their marriage and membership in an interplanetary family. The method was subtler than that. Their own relationship supplied an existing structure into which the extraordinary encounter could someday fit. Here were two persons who already knew, in the most intimate way possible, that someone who looked different, came from a different group, and had once been regarded as belonging on the other side of a social boundary could nevertheless become family.

The humans themselves would appear openly. There would be no goblin robots and no invented extraterrestrial species. The couple would be brought aboard a human craft and encounter actual men and women from another world. Yet before that happened, there was the ordinary business of getting ready. In a compartment hidden from the witnesses, the men who would receive the couple put on the distinctive clothing selected for the encounter. Other members of the team monitored the operation. One woman watched the instruments as the couple approached. Another found something amusing about the appearance of one of her colleagues and, laughing, reached up to straighten his hair. The man laughed with her. A few feet away, the others waited for their cue.

The moment was trivial, but it revealed the truth concealed behind the Pageant better than almost anything the witnesses themselves would see. There were no inscrutable gods waiting aboard the craft. There were people. They joked with one another, worried about appearances, performed assigned roles, and watched instruments while an operation proceeded. In a few minutes the couple would enter a bewildering event whose meaning they could not possibly understand. Behind the curtain, the visitors were getting ready for it much as actors might prepare before walking onto a stage.

Even the visitors' apparent limitations were part of the performance. The humans had no wish to appear omniscient. An intelligence so far beyond the inhabitants that nothing puzzled it and nothing escaped its understanding would defeat another important purpose of the Pageant. The visitors needed to be extraordinary, but not infinitely advanced. During the encounter they could examine some commonplace possession or bodily artifact belonging to the couple and fail to understand immediately what it was. The witnesses would thus encounter beings capable of crossing the stars who nevertheless had things to learn.

That apparent ignorance supported a fiction already being constructed elsewhere. The automobile incidents suggested a technology based upon powerful but comprehensible electromagnetic effects. The staged crash suggested that a visitor's machine could fail. The encounter at the refuse yard suggested that several extraterrestrial peoples were traveling from world to world as explorers. Now the couple would encounter visitors who themselves seemed curious—beings who investigated, examined, and occasionally failed to understand what they found. The implications converged. These were not gods. They were explorers. However astonishing their accomplishments, they remained finite persons using machines, gathering information about an unfamiliar world much as the inhabitants' own scientists did.

That inference mattered especially to the government. If the visitors were merely inconceivably advanced beings whose technology never failed, the supposed crash hidden by the authorities would become increasingly difficult to believe. But explorers operating extraordinarily sophisticated machines could make mistakes. Their equipment could malfunction. Their knowledge could have limits. A civilization advanced enough to reach another world need not be advanced enough to be infallible. The Pageant was carefully maintaining the intellectual world within which the government's secret continued to make sense. Belief in the crash, reinforced by the visitors' threats against disclosure, gave the government continuing reason to maintain the cover-up. And the cover-up, in turn, served the larger purpose of the Pageant: so long as the government withheld what it knew, the question of the visitors' reality could remain unresolved, and the Great Debate could continue. Yet beneath that deception lay the deeper lesson. The humans were simultaneously making themselves less godlike and more relatable. The very limitations planted to sustain the cover-up also narrowed the psychological distance between visitor and visited. These beings were astonishingly different, but they could be curious, puzzled, friendly, amused. They could recognize another person. They could enter into relationships.

And the couple selected to encounter them already carried the central principle home with them. Their own marriage had crossed a boundary once thought important enough to separate people. The Pageant was quietly asking their civilization to contemplate a still greater boundary.

If difference of one kind did not make family impossible, perhaps difference of another kind would not either.

Perhaps, someday, even the boundary between worlds would cease to be the boundary of family.

The Lights by the Airfield

The next lesson required something more difficult. Evidence alone would not sustain the debate. There had to be a way not to believe it.

The humans chose their location carefully. A lonely road crossed open country several miles from a small airfield. At night, its runway could be seen in the distance as two converging rows of bluish-white lights. They were faint from the road, but unmistakable once someone knew where to look.

That made the place useful.

Late one night, a native traveler driving alone along the road saw two rows of brilliant blue-green lights appear above the fields. They were vastly brighter than the lights of the distant airfield. Their radiance washed across the countryside, coloring the strange fruit trees beside the road and throwing blue-green reflections across his automobile. Frightened, he stopped. The lights approached. He left the vehicle and crouched behind it while the luminous formation passed terrifyingly near.

Nothing about the experience seemed ambiguous to him.

But ambiguity had been prepared for those who had not been there.

When the report became public, investigators discovered the airfield. Its runway lights lay in approximately the direction in which the phenomenon had first been seen. They too appeared as two rows of lights receding into the distance. Perhaps, some suggested, an anxious traveler on a dark road had mistaken those ordinary lights for something in the sky. Atmospheric conditions might have altered their color and apparent brightness. Memory might have enlarged what fear had already distorted.

The explanation did not fit very well. Fixed runway lights could not easily account for lights that seemed to move across the countryside, nor did their dim bluish-white glow resemble the extraordinary blue-green brilliance the witness described. But the explanation did not have to be good enough to settle the case.

It only had to be good enough to dispute it.

The humans had understood this before the encounter was staged. They had selected the road because the runway was visible from it. The resemblance between the two arrays was no accident. As Maia had done on Earth, they were providing the skeptics with something they could reasonably point to without providing enough to make the extraordinary event disappear.

They had planned not only what the witness would see.

They had planned what others would say he had seen.

THE CHILDREN

There was another kind of witness whose usefulness could be measured only in decades.

Children were poor witnesses. Everyone knew it. They misunderstood things. They embellished. They influenced one another. Adults could smile at an extraordinary story told in a schoolyard and explain it as excitement, imagination, or contagion. If many children told similar stories, that could itself become part of the explanation. One child had said something remarkable, the others had taken it up, and soon an adventure belonged to them all.

But children possessed one property that made them uniquely valuable to a Pageant designed to endure.

They grew old.

The visitors chose a school.

The craft came down in an open field beyond the buildings, where children could reach it before the adults understood what was happening. They did not all arrive together. Some came close. Others remained farther away. Some saw the craft clearly; some saw only portions of it through the other children and the vegetation. Their accounts would never agree perfectly.

That was desirable.

A perfectly uniform story would look rehearsed. Real witnesses remembered different things because they had stood in different places, looked in different directions, and noticed different details. The children would carry away not a script but overlapping memories of the same impossible afternoon.

The human expedition was not alone. Members of another emerger species had accompanied it. They moved near the lander with the humans, unloading equipment and attending to the craft with the unremarkable ease of old colleagues.

That, too, was part of the lesson.

The children were seeing beings whose bodies could scarcely have been more different working together without hesitation. Neither species appeared subordinate to the other. Difference had ceased to be an obstacle to fellowship long before either had come to this world.

One of the human women walked away from the lander.

A young girl stood watching her.

The woman knelt.

She had no common language with the child, but by then language was no longer always necessary. Human beings had learned to reach beneath it—or had learned how to ask the lower levels of nature to carry meaning from one mind to another. The distinction had become difficult even for them to draw. No sound passed between the woman and the girl. Nothing visible crossed the space between their faces.

The woman looked into her eyes.

Do not be afraid.

The child understood.

Not the words. There had been no words. She received something nearer to the thought itself, accompanied by an impression that would prove harder to forget than a sentence: reassurance, recognition, and the extraordinary discovery that the creature before her was not merely intelligent but was addressing her.

The woman allowed something more to pass between them—not a lecture about worlds or civilizations, and not information that could prematurely end the debate her people had come to begin. Only an intuition: There are others. You are not alone. We can meet without becoming enemies.

Then she rose and returned to the others.

At first the children's testimony would be easy to diminish. They were children. Memory was unreliable. Excitement spread. Perhaps they had seen an unfamiliar aircraft. Perhaps adults had asked leading questions. Perhaps, in retelling the story to one another, they had gradually constructed something that had never occurred.

The visitors needed none of those explanations to be absurd. They needed them to be possible.

Time would perform the rest of the experiment.

Ten years would pass. Then twenty. Then forty.

The witnesses would cease to be schoolchildren. They would become workers, parents, teachers, technicians, officials, grandparents. They would scatter through their society. Many would have little reason to maintain contact with one another. Their childhood reputations would no longer matter. Yet some would continue to describe the craft in the field, the strange visitors beside it, and the beings who had approached them.

One woman would remember something stranger still.

She would remember looking into the eyes of a visitor and knowing that something had been said to her without speech.

Now the old objection would begin to turn against itself.

Yes, they had been children.

But they had been children then.

They were adults now, and the event had remained with them for most of their lives.

The Pageant had acquired witnesses whose testimony could become more troublesome, rather than less, as the encounter receded into the past.

THE SWAMP

Maia had given them a blueprint.

It was not a sequence to be copied mechanically. Every developing world had its own institutions, expectations, fears, and peculiar susceptibilities. But Maia had learned during her long work on Earth that some combinations were extraordinarily effective. A setting that made an event mysterious before anyone had even described it. Respectable witnesses—and, better still, a great many of them. An official explanation plausible enough to be defended but inadequate enough to provoke argument.

And headlines.

The Pageant had to enter the imagination of a civilization before it could become one of that civilization's great debates. An event witnessed by a handful of people might become a case. The right event, involving the right people in the right place, could become a story repeated everywhere.

Maia found the humans a swamp.

It lay outside a provincial town, a broad wetland of dark pools and dense, unfamiliar vegetation. Strange nocturnal lights were occasionally reported there even without the visitors' assistance. Local organisms produced faint luminescence, and gases released by decaying vegetation could sometimes glow under unusual conditions. There was already something slightly uncanny about the place.

That made it useful twice over.

The humans began with the police.

Residents reported brilliant lights moving among the trees. Several officers were sent to investigate. They expected pranksters, an aircraft in trouble, or one of the swamp's familiar luminous phenomena.

Instead they saw a metallic object.

It moved slowly among the vegetation, glowing brilliantly at times, disappearing behind trees and then becoming visible again. One officer approached closely enough to be certain that he was not looking at a patch of luminous gas. Another saw the object rise briefly before settling again farther into the wetland.

By morning, the newspapers had their story.

POLICE SEE FLYING SAUCER IN SWAMP

Maia had understood the value of the combination. A strange light was commonplace. A flying saucer was news. Police officers seeing a flying saucer was better. Police officers seeing one in a swamp was a story.

But the blueprint called for another turn.

Not far away, an ecological organization maintained a field station from which researchers studied the wetland. A group of female university students had come there for several days of field work. Sixty-three young women were staying at the station.

The humans waited until night.

Someone noticed the lights first. A few students came to the windows. Others stepped onto the veranda. Word passed through the bungalow, and more joined them.

Across the lawn, among the trees and tangled plants of the swamp, sat a disk.

It was not enormous. It did not need to be. Parts of it disappeared behind trunks and vegetation, but its shape could be made out between them, and a row of brilliant lights marked its circumference. It remained there long enough for students to summon friends from elsewhere in the bungalow.

They watched it together.

The newspapers received an even better gift the following morning.

SIXTY-THREE COEDS SEE FLYING SAUCER IN SWAMP

There was nothing scandalous about the event. The young women had been conducting ecological fieldwork and had looked out from their bungalow at something extraordinary. Yet the headline possessed an almost indecent attractiveness. Coeds. A bungalow. A swamp. A flying saucer. Editors who might have ignored another report of mysterious lights could hardly resist it.

That was precisely the point.

The two incidents reinforced one another. Police officers had seen something. Now scores of university students had seen something nearby. Reporters arrived. The students were interviewed. Their descriptions differed in details, as witness descriptions did, but the central elements remained stubbornly similar.

For a time the Pageant belonged to the newspapers.

Then came the explanation.

A government investigator pointed to the swamp's known luminous phenomena. Under unusual atmospheric conditions, glowing gases and biological lights could appear surprisingly bright. Reflections on water could multiply lights or make them seem to move. Darkness made distances difficult to judge. Excitement among a group of witnesses could transform an unfamiliar natural phenomenon into something far more extraordinary in memory.

It was not nonsense.

That was important.

A ridiculous explanation would merely have strengthened the extraordinary interpretation. Maia needed something better: an explanation sufficiently reasonable that intelligent skeptics could defend it and sufficiently inadequate that intelligent opponents could attack it.

The students themselves presented an obvious difficulty. They had come to the field station precisely to study the wetland. They knew its ordinary nocturnal lights. They knew where the pools lay and where the trees stood. They had spent days observing the environment that was now being invoked to explain away what they had seen.

They insisted that the object had not been a marsh light.

The explanation therefore did not end the story.

It enlarged it.

Newspapers mocked it. Scientists defended it. Witnesses objected to it. Other scientists questioned whether the proposed phenomena could account for the reported size, duration, structure, and movement of the object. People who had never previously cared about visitors from other worlds suddenly had opinions about luminous gases in swamps.

Maia had planned for that too.

The swamp had not been chosen merely because it supplied mystery, mass witnesses, irresistible headlines, and the seed of a skeptical explanation. It lay within the district of a particular representative in the national legislature.

Maia had studied him.

He was not an enthusiast for visitors from other worlds. He did not need to be. Indeed, it was better that he was not. He was protective of his constituency, sensitive to suggestions that provincial citizens were being treated with contempt, and sufficiently prominent within the legislature to demand answers from the agencies responsible for the investigation.

The humans understood this part of the blueprint particularly well. They were not to approach him. They were not to influence his thoughts or instruct him what to do. Maia's method did not require puppets.

It required circumstances.

Police officers in his district were now being portrayed as unable to distinguish a structured object from swamp lights. Dozens of university students believed that their testimony had been dismissed without serious consideration. Their instructors objected. Their families complained. Local newspapers asked why respectable citizens were being treated as fools.

And behind all of it were those marvelous headlines, which had carried a provincial swamp into conversations throughout the country.

Maia had arranged the pieces.

The representative made his own decision.

He demanded hearings.

Officials, scientists, military officers, and witnesses were summoned before the legislature. Newspapers that had initially treated the affair as an irresistible curiosity now covered it as a matter of national controversy. Questions that had belonged to enthusiasts and skeptics were asked by elected representatives beneath the lights of a hearing chamber.

The Pageant had crossed another boundary.

The humans had not arranged the hearings. They had not ordered newspapers to publish the stories, instructed scientists to disagree, induced citizens to complain, or compelled a representative to act. Each participant had responded for reasons of his or her own.

But the outcome had not been an accident.

Maia knew what a mass sighting could do. She knew what a fantastic headline could do. She knew what could happen when an official explanation seemed to belittle respectable witnesses, and she knew what a politician might do when those witnesses were his constituents.

The humans had arranged a saucer in a swamp.

Maia had known where to put it.

A SWEET SADNESS

There was something about the work that the humans had not anticipated.

They sometimes felt sorry for the people they were fooling.

Not principally because the deception caused them hardship. Usually it did not. Nor was it guilt. The humans understood why the Pageant was necessary, and they willingly followed Maia's blueprint. They knew the extraordinary good toward which it was directed.

It was something simpler.

They had grown fond of these people.

They would watch a police officer carefully trying to describe the impossible thing he had seen, or a group of students excitedly comparing memories of the lights in the swamp, and feel an unexpected tenderness toward them. These were dear, intelligent people doing their best to understand their world.

And the humans knew so much that they did not know.

The humans knew where the saucer had come from. They knew who had built it. They knew why it had appeared in that particular swamp on that particular night. They knew that life had arisen on other worlds, that the stars were alive, that civilizations could cross the distances between them, that minds of radically different kinds could become friends, and that somewhere beyond the sky an immense family was waiting for these people to become ready to meet it.

How they would have loved to know.

Maia understood the feeling. She had known it herself.

But telling them was not yet the gift it appeared to be. The greater gift required waiting. Their understanding had to become their own, and the civilization capable of receiving the truth had still to be built.

So the humans kept the secret.

But they never quite stopped wishing that they could lean down, as one might toward a beloved younger companion who was puzzling over a mystery, and whisper:

You'll understand someday.

THE WARNING

As the developing civilization approached its crisis, its powers increased more rapidly than its wisdom.

This was not peculiar to this world. Again and again, Maia had watched emerging peoples acquire the ability to do extraordinary things while dispositions inherited from much earlier stages of their development remained powerful within them. The ingenuity that mastered matter did not abolish fear of the stranger, loyalty to tribe, the desire to dominate, or the impulse to answer threat with threat.

On many worlds, the approach of the crisis therefore announced itself in terrible inventions.

Here, as on Earth, one of them was the nuclear weapon.

The inhabitants had learned to release energies that only generations earlier would have seemed almost divine. They had built missiles capable of carrying those energies across continents and buried them beneath the ground in hardened installations. Rival nations accumulated enough of them that a sufficiently great failure of judgment might bring the developing history of the world to an end.

Yet the weapons were also evidence of how far that history had come.

A civilization capable of building them was approaching the moment when the older Dionysian powers within it would either be brought into a larger order or acquire instruments with which they could destroy that order before it was born.

The Pageant was approaching that moment too.

For decades, a small enclave within one of the alien world's great democracies had known that the visitors were real. Presidents and ministers came and went. Military officers retired. Intelligence officials were replaced. But the secret passed from one generation of government to another.

Then the democracy did something admirable.

Following controversies over government secrecy, it strengthened its laws governing public access to official information. Citizens acquired broader rights to demand records. A legislative investigation followed, and eventually a distinguished commission was appointed to examine great bodies of classified material and determine what still genuinely required protection.

Among the records were the visitor files.

For the first time, the possibility arose that the government itself might end the Pageant.

The danger did not come from an enthusiast determined to expose a conspiracy. Several of the officials overseeing the review were cautious people with long experience in government. They understood the reasons that had originally been given for secrecy. They also knew that some of those reasons had grown weaker with time.

And they knew something the public did not.

The visitors were real.

The evidence available inside the government left them no room for doubt.

Some of the officials had begun to wonder whether continued concealment could still be justified. Perhaps the public did not need every operational detail. Perhaps some records should remain classified. But the central fact—that intelligent beings from beyond their world had been visiting it—might finally be acknowledged.

Maia watched the discussion develop.

The humans watched with her.

They knew the blueprint now. They understood why the great debate could not yet be ended by an announcement from authority. A civilization had to develop the habits of mind through which the truth could eventually become its own possession. If the government simply opened its files and supplied the answer, the long dialectic Maia had cultivated could be cut short at precisely the stage when it was becoming most important.

So the Pageant answered.

Several of the most respected officials involved in the review met privately in a secure government room. Among them were senior figures from the military, intelligence services, legislature, and executive government. They had gathered to decide how far the coming recommendations should go.

The discussion had lasted for more than an hour when it stopped.

No one interrupted it.

There was no sound.

Yet suddenly each person at the table became aware of words.

They did not seem to enter through the ears. There was no direction from which they came. Each official experienced them with the peculiar intimacy of thought, yet with an equally unmistakable sense that the thought was not his own.

The message was brief.

You are preparing to reveal our presence.

Do not.

You believe the weapons beneath your ground are under your control.

Yours are within our reach.

So are theirs.

And then it was gone.

For several seconds nobody spoke.

One official looked down at the papers before him. Another glanced toward the door. A third seemed about to say something and stopped.

Finally the senior minister cleared his throat.

“Did anyone else just have an odd experience?”

There was another silence.

“Yes,” said the woman across from him.

He looked at her.

“You did?”

She nodded.

Another official leaned forward. “Something like a voice?”

“Not exactly a voice.”

“No,” said someone else. “But words.”

The minister looked slowly around the table.

“What did it say?”

They compared their experiences reluctantly. None had wanted to be the first distinguished public servant in the room to announce that words had appeared inexplicably within his mind.

The words were the same.

That changed everything.

A private experience might have been fatigue, imagination, or some momentary disorder of the brain. Five people could not independently imagine the same sentences at the same instant.

And these five already knew that someone was there.

They adjourned without resolving the question of disclosure.

The humans disliked this part of the plan. They had become fond of these people. They respected the seriousness with which the officials were trying to reconcile truth, public responsibility, and the obligations of government. Yet the blueprint they had willingly undertaken required them to frighten precisely such people.

The threat did not have to be one the humans were prepared to carry out.

It had only to be believed.

The following day, a luminous craft appeared near one of the country's principal missile fields.

It did not hide.

Military personnel saw it. Radar followed it. Security teams reported it passing above installations whose locations were among the most closely guarded secrets of the state.

There were humans aboard.

That was ordinarily how the Pageant worked. Deception was used where deception was necessary, but it was not multiplied without purpose. A craft that appeared to be piloted usually was. An action that could be performed openly was ordinarily performed openly. The developing people had enough difficulty reasoning from incomplete evidence without being given more false evidence than the design required.

The craft moved slowly across the missile field.

Beneath it, the first missile went offline.

Then another.

Then another.

Control crews attempted to restore them. Commands failed. Diagnostic systems produced readings that should not have been possible. Communications between components ceased and resumed without apparent cause. Within minutes, weapons scattered across several installations had become unavailable to the people whose elaborate systems existed precisely to guarantee their control over them.

The humans had not entered the silos.

They did not need to.

The same mastery that allowed them elsewhere to interfere remotely with the electronics of aircraft allowed them to reach into the missile systems below. Their intervention was extraordinarily precise. They were not smashing machinery or flooding the installations with indiscriminate energy. They were altering selected operations within machines they had never touched.

Then the craft departed.

The missiles returned to normal.

That alone would have been alarming.

The second report made it terrifying.

Across the border, the country's principal adversary had experienced an incident of its own.

Several of its nuclear missiles had suddenly begun responding as though legitimate launch preparations were under way. Systems that required separate authorizations activated without them. Guidance equipment came alive. Protected mechanisms responded to commands no one had issued. For a short time, the officers responsible for those weapons discovered that they no longer controlled them.

Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the sequence ended.

Nothing had been damaged.

Nothing had been launched.

At first, the officials who had sat around the table knew only what had happened to their own missile fields. The event across the border was itself secret. But great powers watched one another closely, and intelligence has ways of discovering the things governments most wish their enemies not to know.

Within days, the reports were brought to them.

No one needed to interpret the message again.

Yours are within our reach.

So are theirs.

The implications were appalling.

If the visitors could make one nation's missiles unavailable while assuming control of another nation's weapons, then the nuclear balance on which both governments believed their security depended existed only by the visitors' permission.

And if the visitors had chosen to demonstrate that fact immediately after warning the officials not to disclose their presence—

The thought completed itself.

The humans never had to state it.

That was the important part.

The officials themselves supplied the consequence.

The disclosure recommendation disappeared.

Not forever, Maia knew. Nothing in the Pageant was intended to last forever. The government would change. The culture would change. The great debate would continue outside the classified enclave, accumulating evidence, explanations, arguments, mistakes, discoveries, and increasingly sophisticated ways of deciding among them.

But the government would not settle it now.

The officials who had shared the message became custodians of another secret within the secret. They could tell their successors not merely that the visitors existed, but that an earlier generation had once seriously considered revealing them—and had received an answer.

The answer would acquire a history of its own.

Years later, an incoming official might ask why the old files still could not be opened. Someone who had been present, or someone entrusted with his testimony, could place the missile reports before him and recount what five respected people had experienced together in a secure room.

The new official might find the story incredible.

Then he would read the reports.

And the Pageant would continue.

Years later, the visitors arranged an incident of a different kind. It took place at a military air base, one of the more sensitive installations in the region, where weapons of exceptional destructive power were stored. During the night, personnel reported strange lights beyond the perimeter and brief failures of equipment. Patrols were sent out, but nothing that could be identified was found. Then someone in the motor pool noticed the trucks.

Six military transports had been parked side by side. On the canvas covering of each vehicle a different symbol had appeared. The markings were simple and did not resemble the writing used by any nation known to the soldiers. Nor did they appear to have been painted onto the canvas. They shone with a deep red light that seemed to come from the material itself. More personnel were summoned. Photographs were taken, and one soldier began hurriedly copying the symbols into a notebook. It was fortunate that he did. The symbol on the nearest truck was already fading. Its red light weakened first; then portions of the figure disappeared, leaving only a pale, broken remnant. Farther down the line the symbols remained progressively brighter, the last still glowing brilliant red. As the soldiers watched, the disappearance advanced from one truck to the next.

By the time the last symbol vanished, the soldiers had photographs and several drawings. Examination of the trucks found nothing unusual. The canvas had not been burned, painted, chemically altered, or apparently changed at all. The incident entered the military files and eventually the larger controversy. Investigators argued about the witnesses and the photographs. Skeptics proposed explanations. Advocates reproduced the drawings. Years passed, and the six peculiar figures became another small piece of the immense and unresolved literature surrounding the visitors.

That was what the human mission wanted. The soldiers naturally assumed that the symbols had been displayed for them, and in one sense they had been. The incident had occurred at a highly protected military installation. Whatever had produced the markings had done so inside a security system designed to prevent unauthorized access, in proximity to some of the civilization's most dangerous weapons. The implication required no translation. The visitors could reach places the military believed secure.

But that was not the only reason the symbols had appeared. Indeed, the symbols themselves were not principally a message to anyone at the base. Their intended recipient would come much later.

The humans had learned something from Maia's ancient Pageant. A communication need not be delivered when its recipient was present. It could instead be placed into the history of a civilization. If the event surrounding it were sufficiently extraordinary, people would preserve it. Witnesses would make reports, investigators would copy documents, advocates would reproduce them, and skeptics would challenge them. The very controversy that prevented the evidence from becoming accepted fact would also prevent it from disappearing. In that way, the dialectic itself could carry a message through time.

Decades later, a private dialectician on that world would independently develop a set of forms that became important to his attempt to understand the structure he was uncovering. Then, in the course of investigating the long history of the visitor controversy, he encountered an account of the old air-base incident. There, reproduced from the drawings made by military personnel many years before, were the forms.

For a long time he stared at them. The soldiers who had copied the symbols had never known why they mattered. The investigators who preserved their reports had not known. The advocates who reproduced the drawings had not known. Even the skeptics who had helped keep the controversy alive had unknowingly participated in carrying the message toward its destination. Its journey had begun on six military trucks decades before its intended recipient was ready to receive it.

The humans had not told the dialectician what the symbols meant. That would have defeated the purpose. Nor had they given him the forms from which to construct his system; he had reached them independently, through his own reasoning. They had done something subtler. Long before he undertook that reasoning, they had placed those same forms where history would preserve them, arranging matters so that one day, after he had discovered them for himself, he could encounter the old record and realize something astonishing:

Someone else already knew the forms he had found.

The Child

There was another part of the human plan that was more difficult to defend. It could not be explained as a warning, a demonstration, or even a deception intended to preserve the great controversy. It involved particular people much more intimately. A small number of the planet's inhabitants were taken aboard the visitors' craft. They were examined, their reproductive biology was studied, and genetic material was obtained from them. The humans then combined that material with their own. They were creating hybrids: children biologically descended from both the people of this world and from human beings. Most of those who had been taken remembered little afterward. Some retained fragments: rooms they could not identify, unfamiliar beings standing nearby, procedures whose purposes they did not understand. The experiences were frightening. And unlike the appearances in the sky, the strange failures of machines, or even the intrusion at the isolated house, these events entered a domain that belonged peculiarly to the individual. The humans knew this. They understood that a person's body was not theirs to use merely because they possessed the power to do so.

Yet they did it.

The reason was not simply that the interests of a civilization outweighed the interests of one of its members. Perhaps there were circumstances in which they did. A civilization was itself a person, and its rights could not cease to matter merely because the person was immense. But stating the principle did not make its application painless, and it did not make the rights of the smaller person disappear. The woman taken aboard the craft would not experience a principle. She would experience what was done to her. If the humans were justified in overriding her choice, they had to be able to say more than that something larger and more important was at stake.

The humans understood the problem in another way. Sometimes an agent could act freely only because another agent did not know what his action was about to do. If someone began closing a door without seeing that another person's hand lay between the door and its frame, one might seize his arm and prevent him from completing the movement. For an instant his choice would have been overridden. Ordinarily one had no right to take hold of another person's arm and determine what he would do with it. But in this case the unseen hand mattered too. The right to choose had not disappeared; it had encountered another reality of which the chooser was unaware.

The humans believed that something analogous was happening here, although on a scale that made the analogy almost absurdly small. The people of this world did not yet know that they were approaching membership in a much larger society of persons. They did not know what was being born within their world, or what that new being would eventually need. An astrocolossus could not fulfill its purposes forever in isolation. Beyond this system were other worlds, other peoples, other emergers, and other beings like the one struggling toward birth here. Communication with them would eventually become not a curiosity but part of ordinary existence. The future being prepared was therefore not merely one in which the inhabitants of this planet discovered that extraterrestrials existed. It was one in which their world entered a family that already extended far beyond it. The humans could see consequences of choices that the people below could not yet see, just as the person reaching for the door could not see the fingers resting against its frame.

But even that did not make everything permissible. If the humans were going to bring a child into existence, the child could not be merely an instrument for educating a civilization. She would possess precisely the moral standing that made the entire undertaking difficult. They would owe her a life—not merely biological survival, but affection, education, companionship, freedom, and a place among people who did not regard her as an experiment. And if they deprived a mother, for a time, of knowledge and choice concerning her own child, they incurred an obligation to her as well. The Pageant could conceal the truth for a while; it could not make the truth morally irrelevant. What had been separated would eventually have to be brought together.

The first human-alien hybrid children were therefore raised with extraordinary care. They were neither curiosities nor members of a privileged caste. Among the humans and the other emerger peoples who knew of them, however, they possessed a peculiar and entirely genuine dignity. They were the first people of this world who belonged, by birth, to more than one world. The difference was important. For years the Pageant had been teaching through images and encounters that radical difference need not prevent kinship. A family could remain a family when its members looked unlike one another. A stranger could cease to be a stranger. A hand raised across the distance between species could be answered by another hand. But those had still been demonstrations. With the children, the proposition ceased to be metaphorical. A child could actually have ancestors beneath two different suns.

One of the mothers was eventually brought back. By then her daughter was old enough to speak, to play, to form attachments, and to understand that some adults were familiar while others were not. The humans did not tell the girl that she was about to meet her mother and then instruct her to perform affection she did not yet feel. Nor did they place the mother alone before a company of strangers. Humans accompanied both of them. One stood beside the mother as she entered; another, who had helped care for the child, held the little girl's hand. The mother understood before the child did. She saw something of her own people in the girl's coloring and features, something unmistakably foreign as well, and then something for which neither category was adequate. She moved toward her, stopped, and waited. The girl looked back with the solemn uncertainty of a child who knows that something important is happening but does not yet know why.

The alien mother is introduced to her hybrid daughter.

No one pushed the girl forward. The woman whose hand she held did not release it. The humans had arranged the encounter, but this part could not be arranged. Whatever relationship came into existence between the two would have to become theirs. The mother extended a hand without touching her. The girl studied the strange face above her. She did not recoil, but neither did she run into the woman's arms. There would be time for recognition to acquire meanings deeper than resemblance. Around them the humans remained quiet. One of the women who had helped raise the child turned partly away and wiped tears from her face. She loved the girl too. Nothing in the purpose of the Pageant required that love, and nothing in the humans' calculations could make the moment painless. That was precisely why the tears mattered. The humans had not become indifferent to the people whose lives they were changing.

The mother would eventually learn more. Not everything, and not immediately; the larger design still depended upon uncertainty. But she was permitted to see her daughter again, and the daughter came gradually to know her. As the years passed, the child learned that there was no simple answer to the question of which people were hers. The humans were hers. Her mother's people were hers. In time, other peoples would be hers as well. She grew up among individuals who did not treat her mixed ancestry as a defect to be overcome or a marvel to be displayed. It was simply a fact about her, although an important one. When she was old enough to understand the circumstances of her birth, she was not told that she ought to be grateful for them. The humans could explain why they had acted; they could not dictate the judgment of the person whose existence had resulted from the act. That judgment belonged to her.

She did not remain a child hidden aboard a visiting ship. She grew into a world much larger than the one into which her mother had been born. She learned languages her mother had never heard, walked beneath skies her mother's astronomers knew only as points of light, and met persons whose ancestors had arisen on worlds neither human nor her own. The peculiar respect accorded the hybrids followed her, but it did not imprison her in a ceremonial role. She could choose what to make of the inheritance she had been given. If she became an interpreter between peoples, it would be because she wished to. If she loved someone born beneath another sun, that relationship would belong to them rather than to the architects of the Pageant. The humans had opened a possibility. They could not be permitted to own what grew from it.

Only much later would the meaning of these children become fully apparent. When concealment was no longer necessary and the visitors could finally stand openly before the inhabitants of the planet, the announcement would not be quite what everyone had imagined. The humans would not be arriving to ask whether two previously separate peoples might someday learn to live together. That future would already have begun. There would be adults who had known both peoples since childhood, mothers who had held children whose faces joined two evolutionary histories, friendships crossing worlds, and eventually families whose genealogies could no longer be contained on a single planet. The great revelation would disclose not merely that strangers existed, but that some of the supposed strangers were already relatives.

That was why the humans had taken upon themselves an act they could neither dismiss as harmless nor defend by appealing to power. They believed they were preventing a door from closing upon something the people of this world could not yet see. But the analogy had a final implication. One does not seize another person's hand and thereafter acquire the right to control it. The justification lasts only as long as the unseen danger does. So too with the Pageant. Its intrusions, concealments, and temporary violations could be justified, if they could be justified at all, only by the future in which they became unnecessary. Success would not mean perfecting the intervention. Success would mean bringing into existence a world in which no such intervention ever had to happen again.

And among the first inhabitants of that world would be the children.

The Giant

By then the Great Debate had lasted for many years. It had survived photographs, radar returns, close encounters, disabled machines, military investigations, strange intrusions into private lives, and the accumulating testimony of people who insisted that they had seen things for which the accepted explanations seemed inadequate. At times the controversy flared; at other times it receded into the background of public life. That rhythm was useful. The humans did not want the question settled prematurely, but neither could they allow it to become merely an inherited curiosity, endlessly repeated by enthusiasts while the rest of the civilization ceased to care. The Pageant occasionally needed something capable of making millions of people look upward again. More importantly, it needed to speak to a much smaller audience that did not yet know it was being addressed. Somewhere among the scientists, philosophers, journalists, investigators, and thoughtful members of the public were the dialecticians and the ancestors of the dialecticians this world would eventually require. For them, the humans prepared something enormous.

The machine itself was not designed merely to travel. Its appearance had been considered as carefully as its capabilities. It was a vast black triangle, hundreds of feet across, thick enough to contain occupied decks and machinery but so broad that its depth seemed slight in comparison with its width. Three immense white lights occupied its corners; a red light glowed at the center of its underside. In the hangar where it was prepared, the craft seemed less like a vehicle than a piece of architecture temporarily detached from the ground. Technicians on elevated platforms worked beneath it. Others crossed the floor so far below the dark hull that they seemed almost too small to belong to the same scene. The humans checked the lights, the control systems, and the route. They were not preparing an experiment. They had no intention of discovering how much evidence the Great Debate could survive by accidentally providing too much and ending it. They understood the civilization below well enough to know what they could risk. The Giant was a performance, and like the other performances of the Pageant, it had been designed to accomplish several things at once.

Humans prepare the Giant for its nighttime performance.

When the Giant appeared, it did not behave like something trying to avoid observation. It came at night, when its lights would be impossible to miss, and moved across inhabited country. At times it proceeded so slowly that witnesses could follow it for minutes. At other times it seemed simply to hang in the sky. Drivers stopped their vehicles and got out. People called relatives from their houses. Police officers watched it. Groups formed along roads and in open places as word spread that something extraordinary was overhead. Three brilliant white lights marked the corners of an immense dark form, with a red light nearer its center. Against lighter portions of the sky, some observers could make out the black body connecting them. The object was not merely large in the abstract sense produced by an unidentified light whose distance was unknown. On some occasions its passage relative to buildings, trees, roads, and other familiar features made its dimensions difficult to evade. Most extraordinary of all was the silence. An object apparently large enough to cover a substantial portion of the sky could hover or move with almost no sound. It was, in its way, an extravagant display: a black machine lit almost like a festival decoration, lingering above people who had ample time to look at it.

The reports spread rapidly, and the Great Debate surged back into public attention. Witnesses who had never previously cared about visitors found themselves trying to describe an experience for which their ordinary vocabulary seemed inadequate. Investigators drew diagrams. Newspapers published maps showing the sequence of sightings. People compared the positions of the lights and discovered that descriptions from different locations resembled one another. Some witnesses were uncertain about details; others disagreed about apparent size or altitude; a few reports undoubtedly became embellished in retelling. None of this was surprising. Human memory was imperfect on this world just as it was on the visitors' own. But beneath the ordinary noise of testimony remained a remarkably stubborn core: very large dark triangular objects had been seen at close enough range and for long enough periods that many witnesses were certain they had observed a structured craft, and the strongest cases included behavior that conventional aircraft could not plausibly reproduce.

Then came the airplanes.

Perhaps, it was suggested, witnesses had seen several conventional aircraft flying in formation. Three aircraft carrying bright lights could create the impression of the corners of a triangle. Against a dark sky, an observer might mentally supply a solid surface between them. Estimates of distance at night were unreliable, and therefore estimates of size were unreliable as well. Some reports might have been ordinary aircraft seen under unusual conditions; later witnesses, having heard the earlier stories, might interpret unrelated lights according to expectations created by the publicity. Each proposition contained enough general truth to sound reasonable when considered by itself. People could misjudge distance. Expectations could affect perception. Aircraft did fly in formation. Memories could change. But the explanation did not account for the strongest cases. A formation of ordinary airplanes could not hover almost motionlessly for long periods. It could not remain essentially silent at close range while appearing hundreds of feet across. It could not easily account for witnesses who perceived a continuous dark body between the lights, or for observations made relative to nearby objects that constrained distance and size. To explain those reports, the hypothesis had to cease being an explanation of the evidence and become a way of declining to accept it.

Yet it survived.

That was the important part. The civilization possessed no dependable mechanism by which the weakness of the explanation, once exposed, caused it to lose its place in the controversy. A critic could point out that airplanes could not perform what had been reported; another critic could reply that witnesses were sometimes mistaken. The first could answer that the explanation now required numerous independent witnesses to make mutually compatible mistakes. Someone else could observe that extraordinary claims demanded extraordinary evidence. A witness could insist that what had passed above his house was not three airplanes. A commentator could reply that sincere witnesses were not necessarily accurate witnesses. The discussion could continue indefinitely because almost every answer generated another statement that was true in general, whether or not it answered the particular evidence at issue. The question slowly ceased to be whether the airplane explanation successfully accounted for the strongest observations. It became whether an airplane explanation existed. Once it did, newspapers and broadcasters could report that there were competing explanations. Soon the social fact that two positions remained in circulation began to masquerade as an intellectual fact: the evidence itself must somehow be evenly balanced.

The humans had seen this happen before. They did not suppose that the inhabitants of the planet were unintelligent. The failure lay elsewhere. Their civilization's still undeveloped intellectual facility could gather enormous quantities of information, distribute arguments with remarkable speed, create institutions devoted to specialized knowledge, and sustain controversies across generations. What it could not reliably do was organize disagreement so that the strength of competing arguments became progressively clearer. Weak objections were not forced to confront the strongest versions of the claims they opposed. A rebuttal answered in one place could reappear somewhere else as though it had never been answered. Peripheral mistakes could be attached to a strong case until the mistakes and the case acquired the same reputation. A ridiculous claim made by an enthusiast could become evidence against an entirely different claim made by careful witnesses. Above all, the continued presence of two sides could be mistaken for evidence that the two sides possessed approximately equal intellectual weight.

For most of the population, the Giant therefore performed its first task. It energized the Great Debate. People who had stopped thinking about the visitors thought about them again. New witnesses entered the controversy without having inherited the allegiances of the old participants. Some became convinced. Others became skeptical. Investigators reopened older cases. Governments were asked questions they preferred not to answer. The enormous black triangles entered the culture and remained there, simultaneously unforgettable and unresolved. The Pageant had received another infusion of life.

But the deeper performance was intended for the dialecticians.

The humans could not know precisely who they would be. Some might not yet have been born. Nor could the visitors simply identify promising individuals, descend upon them, and explain the defect. A Central Intellectual Organizing Facility worthy of the being emerging from this world could not be delivered as a foreign technology. The civilization had to discover why it needed one. Its dialecticians would have to experience the frustration of arguments that did not converge, evidence that did not accumulate properly, defeated claims that returned unchanged, and controversies in which enormous intellectual effort produced remarkably little collective movement. Only then could someone begin asking whether the problem lay not merely with the participants in a debate but with the architecture of debate itself.

For those future thinkers, the Giant contained a second message. The first was obvious: Look at the sky. The second could be perceived only by watching what happened afterward: Now look at your argument.

Suppose a witness had stood beneath the enormous craft for several minutes. Suppose he had seen its dark body obscure stars, watched its three white lights maintain fixed positions at the corners of a single structure, observed it remain almost stationary above familiar terrain, and heard virtually nothing. Suppose dozens of other people in the surrounding area reported substantially the same thing. Then suppose the civilization placed beside all of that the proposition that several airplanes had probably been flying in formation—and continued treating the two accounts as serious competitors long after the inadequacy of the latter had been pointed out. What, exactly, had gone wrong? The question was larger than visitors. If the civilization could not reliably distinguish a powerful explanation from a weak one here, what happened when the subject was war, economics, history, science, morality, or the purposes of the civilization itself? How many other unresolved disputes survived not because the evidence was genuinely balanced, but because the intellectual machinery had no effective way of registering that one side of an argument had become weaker than the other?

The humans did not answer those questions. The questions were the revelation.

Nor was the failure merely a defect in the civilization's institutions. The civilization was part of a person struggling to be born. Its controversies were among the processes by which the emerging astrocolossus pondered the world, and that pondering was not yet good enough. Vast quantities of information entered it; arguments collided within it; conclusions formed and dissolved; questions of enormous consequence could remain unresolved long after the evidence should have moved them toward resolution. The emerging person needed more than additional facts and more than cleverer participants in the old debates. He needed an intellectual faculty capable of organizing the thought already occurring throughout his immense body—capable of preserving what had been established, exposing what remained uncertain, and allowing reasons to accumulate rather than endlessly starting over. In the simplest terms, his intelligence had to increase. A functioning Central Intellectual Organizing Facility would help make that possible. And this was no merely desirable improvement in the institutions of his civilization. The astrocolossus was approaching the crisis of his own emergence. He needed a mind adequate to what was coming. He needed to be born.

That was why the Giant could be spectacular without defeating the purpose of the Pageant. Its intended lesson was not simply that the visitors were real. Anyone who stood beneath it might reach that conclusion without learning the more important thing. The future dialectician had to notice the disparity between the quality of the evidence and the quality of some of the arguments capable of neutralizing it socially. A weak argument could be intellectually weak and nevertheless enormously powerful within a defective system of debate. It could preserve uncertainty after it had ceased to deserve that power. It could prevent a civilization from knowing collectively something that many of its members had excellent reason to know individually.

Somewhere, the humans hoped, a few people would eventually become more astonished by that than by the enormous triangle.

The Giant disappeared into the night. The witnesses remained. The photographs, drawings, reports, arguments, counterarguments, television discussions, official statements, investigations, exaggerations, careful analyses, and bad explanations accumulated behind it. Years later, people would still argue over what had crossed those skies. Some would cite the episode as among the strongest evidence that visitors were present. Others would continue to invoke conventional aircraft. The dispute would become another layer of the Pageant, joined to everything that had preceded it and everything that would follow.

The humans had not settled the Great Debate.

They had made it roar again.

And for the people who would one day learn how to conduct a different kind of debate, how to think better together; they had left something else behind: a contradiction so enormous that it had once hovered, brilliantly illuminated and almost silent, over their heads.

The Pageant in the Age of Cameras

There was a problem Maia had anticipated long before it arrived. The Pageant had begun in an age when cameras were uncommon, photographs were expensive, and a person who unexpectedly encountered something extraordinary might have nothing with which to record it. That circumstance had been useful. The humans could permit astonishing things to be seen while retaining considerable control over what survived afterward. A witness might describe a machine at close range and still leave behind only testimony. A photograph, when one existed, might be distant, blurred, or disputed. But technology was changing. Cameras became smaller and cheaper. Soon they were incorporated into devices that people carried everywhere. Eventually much of the civilization walked about equipped to photograph or record almost anything that happened in front of it. If the humans continued staging the old performances in the old places, sooner or later an unmistakable craft might hover above a crowded street while hundreds of cameras recorded it simultaneously. The Great Debate could end in an afternoon.

Maia did not end the Pageant. She changed its habitat.

Increasingly, important performances occurred around the civilization's military forces, particularly those of its leading democracy. The choice offered several advantages at once. Military personnel were trained observers. Their ships and aircraft carried some of the finest instruments on the planet. Radar, infrared cameras, optical systems, communications records, and observations from separate platforms could sometimes document the same event. The resulting evidence could therefore be far better than much of the evidence produced during the earlier decades of the Pageant. Yet military institutions also possessed something ordinary witnesses did not: systems of classification, restricted information, compartmentalized knowledge, and legitimate reasons for withholding the capabilities of their sensors. An event could be observed extraordinarily well and nevertheless reach the public only in fragments.

On one occasion, a naval serviceman aboard a vessel of the leading democracy noticed something over the sea. Through his binoculars he could see a bright, smooth object, roughly egg-shaped but lying horizontally, with no wings, rotors, exhaust, or other visible means of remaining aloft. It hovered quietly at a distance. There was nothing theatrical about the sight. No enormous black machine passed overhead. No brilliant lights illuminated the water. No occupants appeared. The object simply remained where an ordinary object of its apparent kind should not have been able to remain. Other military encounters during this period were different, and some were recorded by instruments rather than seen clearly by anyone at all. Taken together, however, they returned the visitors to public attention in a new form. The witnesses now wore uniforms, and some of the evidence had been produced not by startled civilians with inexpensive cameras but by the technological apparatus of a modern military.

A naval serviceman observes one of the new manifestations of the Pageant.

The change solved one problem while creating an appearance of another. If cameras were now everywhere, skeptics could reasonably ask, why had the expected flood of unmistakable photographs not arrived? The answer was hidden in the changing structure of the Pageant itself. The humans were no longer behaving as they had when a farmer, police officer, family, or motorist might encounter them at close range. The performances had become more selective. Some occurred far offshore. Others took place in restricted airspace or around military installations. The humans could determine how near to come, how long to remain, what kinds of instruments were likely to observe them, and how much information an institution would subsequently possess. The absence of the photograph everyone demanded was therefore not necessarily evidence that the phenomenon had disappeared. It could also be evidence that the performance had changed.

In time, another word became increasingly useful: drones. Unidentified objects appeared near bases, weapons facilities, ships, and other sensitive locations. Some undoubtedly were drones belonging to the inhabitants themselves. Some were misidentifications. Some may have been surveillance conducted by rival nations. And among that growing population of ordinary and extraordinary intrusions, the humans could operate. The ambiguity was nearly ideal. An earlier generation had looked upward and said flying saucer. A later generation looked upward and said drone. The vocabulary changed with the technology of the civilization observing the Pageant, and the new vocabulary carried new assumptions with it. Something categorized as a drone could remain mysterious without immediately forcing the older and more dangerous question of who might be visiting the world.

There was another consequence, and Maia had reason to welcome it. The spectacular military incidents pulled attention toward the present. Journalists pursued new recordings. Legislators demanded reports. Officials were questioned about incursions into restricted airspace. Former military personnel described what they had seen. Committees asked what departments possessed and what had been withheld from them. The public began speaking increasingly of disclosure. What did the government know? What files remained classified? What photographs had not been released? Who had been briefed? Which officials were concealing information? When would the government finally tell everyone what it knew?

These were reasonable questions. But they were not the same question with which the Great Debate had begun.

The government already knew that the visitors existed. Some portions of it had known for generations. Yet that did not mean that the government knew the truth about the visitors. Maia had never performed only for the public. Governments too had been among the audiences of the Pageant, and some performances had been designed specifically to cause them to believe things. They possessed genuine observations, classified photographs, sensor records, reports unavailable to ordinary citizens, and memories preserved inside secret institutions. They also possessed interpretations, inferences, suspicions, and conclusions that were wrong. Some of those errors had arisen naturally. Others had been cultivated. A government could therefore disclose everything it sincerely believed and still disclose a mixture of truth and falsehood.

The secret archive was not an answer key.

That distinction became easier to lose as disclosure moved toward the center of the Great Debate. The government knew things the public did not know, and so it was natural to imagine that somewhere behind the classified doors lay the solution to the mystery. Attention consequently shifted from the phenomenon to the institutions concealing information about the phenomenon. What had once been an inquiry into decades of strange events increasingly became an inquiry into what officials would admit about the latest ones. The question What have the visitors been doing? could quietly become What will the government tell us?

For Maia, that displacement had another advantage. The Pageant had accumulated an extraordinary history. There were old photographs whose circumstances were difficult to dismiss, radar incidents involving multiple observers, encounters in which machines had apparently been affected, episodes involving military facilities, close observations, strange communications, and cases whose separate peculiarities began to acquire meaning when placed beside one another. If all of that evidence were continuously held together and evaluated cumulatively, the Great Debate might become increasingly difficult to sustain. But civilizations did not naturally debate that way. Their attention moved. News replaced news. New controversies acquired new vocabularies and new participants. Old cases became anecdotes from another era, remembered by specialists and enthusiasts while disappearing from the active reasoning of the larger culture.

The new military encounters accelerated that process. Skeptics could concentrate upon the newest recordings and ask what those recordings alone established. Governments could concentrate upon current threats to military installations. Journalists could concentrate upon disclosure. Believers could concentrate upon the latest revelation promised by the latest official or former official. Everyone could be intensely engaged with the visitors while the accumulated evidence concerning the visitors gradually slipped out of the argument.

The quantity of evidence was increasing. The historical memory of the Great Debate was shrinking.

A functioning Central Intellectual Organizing Facility would have made that much harder. It would have preserved the evidential history of the controversy as an active structure rather than as an archive waiting to be rediscovered. New observations would have entered a debate that still contained the strongest old observations. New explanations would have had to confront what earlier explanations had and had not successfully explained. A new military video could modify the evidential picture without replacing it. Government testimony could become evidence about the phenomenon without becoming the center of the phenomenon. Even disclosure itself would have taken its proper place: enormously important if it occurred, but still evidence supplied by one participant in a history much larger than any government.

That was precisely what this civilization did not yet possess.

And so the Pageant survived the camera. Indeed, in an odd way, the civilization's increasing ability to record the phenomenon helped reveal another weakness in its ability to think about it. Better instruments produced more information. More information produced more reports, more controversies, more investigations, and more demands for disclosure. Yet none of those things guaranteed that the civilization would become better at holding its evidence together across time. It could see more and remember less. It could accumulate facts while repeatedly losing the structure that gave those facts their meaning.

The answers had never been hidden entirely behind government doors. They were scattered across the Pageant itself.

The Dialecticians

Eventually, some of the dialecticians began to look there.

They did not begin with the assumption that the Pageant existed. They began with the same disorder everyone else had inherited: decades of sightings, photographs, radar encounters, military reports, close encounters, alleged abductions, government denials, later admissions, absurd stories, careful investigations, obvious mistakes, and cases that stubbornly resisted every conventional explanation offered for them. But instead of asking only whether this or that incident proved that visitors were present, they began to ask what happened when the incidents were considered together. They restored old cases to the debate. They distinguished what had actually been reported at the time from embellishments added years later. They separated strong evidence from weak evidence without allowing the weakness of one case to contaminate another. They compared episodes that had previously belonged to different literatures and different generations. And gradually something strange appeared—not merely evidence of visitors, but evidence of conduct.

The phenomenon had a history. More than that, it seemed to have a strategy. At one moment the visitors appeared almost openly; at another they withdrew. They allowed themselves to be photographed, but rarely well enough to end the argument. They interfered with machines in ways that suggested particular technological possibilities. They approached military installations and weapons. They permitted some witnesses extraordinarily close encounters while leaving others with little more than lights in the sky. They produced frightening episodes and reassuring ones, apparent threats and intimations of kinship. At crucial moments the evidence became spectacular; when the controversy threatened to become too settled or too culturally exhausted, something changed. Even the migration of the phenomenon into military environments during the age of ubiquitous cameras began to look different when placed inside the longer history. What had appeared to be an incoherent succession of mysteries could instead be read as a sequence of responses to changing conditions.

That possibility transformed the question. If the visitors possessed the capabilities attributed to them by the strongest cases, their persistent failure either to reveal themselves unmistakably or to remain successfully hidden became difficult to understand as incompetence. The contradiction had lasted too long. They were extraordinarily good at reaching another inhabited world and extraordinarily bad at concealing their presence. Or perhaps concealment had never been the objective. Perhaps the uncertainty itself was being maintained.

The dialecticians began to consider an extraordinary possibility: the Great Debate was part of the phenomenon.

If so, many of its apparent absurdities became intelligible. The visitors did not need everyone to believe, and they did not need everyone to disbelieve. They needed the question to remain alive. Enough evidence had to exist to prevent dismissal; enough uncertainty had to remain to prevent premature resolution. Governments could be given reasons to maintain secrecy. Skeptics could be left room in which to construct alternatives. Believers could receive evidence powerful enough to sustain them through periods of ridicule. New generations could inherit the controversy without inheriting its conclusion. What had looked like an accidental argument surrounding the visitors might instead be one of the things the visitors had come to create.

But that only produced a larger question. Why?

The answer could not be found in any single encounter. It emerged from the direction of the whole. Again and again, the Pageant had placed the civilization in situations where its existing methods of collective reasoning performed badly. Strong evidence could be neutralized by weak objections. A defeated explanation could return unchanged. The weakness of one witness could be transferred to stronger witnesses. New evidence could displace old evidence instead of being integrated with it. Government secrecy could become a substitute subject for the phenomenon the government was concealing. Entire generations of argument could accumulate without producing an intellectual structure in which later generations could see clearly what their predecessors had established. The Pageant had not merely been leaving evidence of visitors. It had been exposing something about the mind of the world that encountered them.

That realization did not tell the dialecticians how to repair it.

They struggled. Some tried to devise new forms of debate. Some tried to construct maps in which claims, evidence, objections, and replies could be seen together. They searched for ways to prevent an argument from disappearing merely because public attention had moved elsewhere, and for ways to make a defeated objection remain defeated unless new reasons revived it. They tried to separate disagreement from confusion, uncertainty from ignorance, and the mere existence of two opposing positions from genuine evidential equilibrium. They needed a system in which opponents would be required to confront the strongest versions of one another's positions, in which the history of an argument remained available to its present participants, and in which thousands of individual acts of reasoning could become something more than thousands of individual acts of reasoning.

Most attempts were incomplete. Some were cumbersome. Institutions already devoted to knowledge had their own procedures, hierarchies, disciplines, incentives, and habits, and did not necessarily welcome the suggestion that the architecture within which they reasoned might itself be inadequate. The dialecticians disagreed among themselves. They made mistakes. Some abandoned the effort. Others worked for years on pieces of the problem without knowing whether those pieces would ever join. What they were attempting was difficult partly because there was no finished example they could copy. They were trying to invent an intellectual organ that their civilization had never possessed.

And Maia watched them.

She could not simply give them the answer. The limitation was deeper than any rule against interference. A Central Intellectual Organizing Facility imposed from outside would not be the intellectual achievement that was required. The emerging astrocolossus needed to develop the faculty through the activities of his own constituent minds. His people had to recognize the deficiency, understand why it mattered, devise the architecture that could correct it, and choose to use what they had made. The struggle itself belonged to the process of emergence.

But noninterference had never meant indifference.

The dialecticians had already discovered enough of the Pageant to understand that events around them might not always be accidental. That changed the relationship between performer and audience. A coincidence could now be noticed as a coincidence. A useful encounter between people who otherwise might never have met could provoke a second thought. An old document unexpectedly brought back into attention might be examined more carefully. A new performance might be interpreted not merely for what it seemed to say about visitors but for what it seemed to say about the debate surrounding them. Maia did not need to announce herself. Nor did every fortunate occurrence have to be hers. It was enough that the dialecticians had learned to entertain the possibility that some were.

And Maia, in turn, could see that they had begun to understand.

Something had therefore changed in the Pageant. For most of its history, Maia and the humans had acted while the inhabitants of the world struggled to determine whether there were actors at all. Now a few of those inhabitants had begun to perceive not merely the visitors but the performance. They could look backward across generations and recognize an intelligence operating through its changing forms. They could ask what that intelligence wanted of them. And if they were right, they could sometimes act with the knowledge that their actions too might be seen.

It was not disclosure. It was something stranger: the beginning of a relationship between minds that still could not openly meet.

The humans continued their performances. Governments continued their secrecy. Skeptics continued to object. Believers continued to believe things both true and false. New sightings displaced old ones in public attention. The Great Debate continued exactly as it had been intended to continue. Yet inside it, a second process was now underway. A few people were trying to construct the means by which their civilization might someday conduct such a debate differently.

Their task reached far beyond the visitors. Their world was approaching decisions of a magnitude its existing intellectual organization had never been built to handle. The immense person developing through its civilizations could ponder: billions of constituent minds observed, remembered, argued, imagined, calculated, judged, and chose. But their thought did not yet combine into a sufficiently coherent faculty of his own. He could possess enormous knowledge without being able to bring the relevant parts of that knowledge together. He could contain brilliant arguments without reliably determining which arguments prevailed. He could confront an existential question and remain divided among incompatible answers without possessing an adequate means of working his way through them.

His intelligence had to grow.

The Truth Engine, if the dialecticians could bring it into existence, would not merely be a better forum, a clever method of debate, or another institution among the institutions of civilization. It would become part of a Central Intellectual Organizing Facility: a means by which the thinking already occurring throughout the astrocolossus could begin to organize itself into a higher-order process. Arguments could accumulate instead of endlessly restarting. Conclusions could remain provisional without becoming disposable. Disagreement could drive development rather than merely perpetuate division. The innumerable minds within the greater person could remain genuinely themselves while participating in a new faculty that none possessed alone.

There was no guarantee that the dialecticians would succeed. Maia could prepare circumstances. She could preserve possibilities. The humans could perform the Pageant she had devised. But neither Maia nor the humans could perform the final act on this world's behalf.

The people of the world would have to do that.

For generations, they had looked into their skies and wondered whether they were alone. They had imagined that the answer, if it ever came, would arrive when the visitors finally landed openly, when a government opened its files, or when some incontrovertible image ended the argument forever. But the deeper answer had been unfolding around them all along. They were not alone. They had never been alone. Another intelligence had been present, watching the development of their world, sometimes frightening them, sometimes misleading them, sometimes showing them astonishing things, and patiently maintaining a controversy whose ultimate subject was larger than the existence of visitors.

The Pageant had been about them.

Now some of them knew it.

And somewhere within the immense, unfinished mind of their world, a few small groups of people were arguing over diagrams, revising rules, testing procedures, failing, beginning again, and trying to build something that had never existed before. They could not yet know whether they would succeed. They could not know whether enough others would understand what they were attempting before the approaching crisis made the question urgent.

Maia knew only that the possibility was there.

For a very long time, she had helped keep it there.

The rest belonged to the being who was trying to be born.

X. THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION OF THE PANOPLY

THE PANOPLY

The Mind of Heaven (Inrelate Mind, The Mind of God)
There exists a transcendental Mind, the eternal Mind of Heaven, that thinks a blueprint, the Panoply, for the evolution of worlds and that wills the instantiation of that blueprint an infinite number of times, throughout the universe and throughout all time. The dialectic of the instantiated Panoply drives the evolution of every living world.

Mind in general is just the universe, in which neither the relation of sameness, nor the relation of difference appears to dominate, but in which there is a parity of samenesses and differences. I say that the universe is therefore "moderational."

These are the stages of the history of terrestrial evolution:

Nous

The instantiation of the Panoply begins with Nous. In Nous, the minds of early, simple organisms contemplate, by means of simple coding, only universals—this is early mind. The part of the universe that can be found in a small region of space and time, is not moderational. In Nous, the pure and unified Mind of Heaven manifests as fragmented.

Instancial Mind

Then Instancial mind evolves and thinks both universals and individuals. This is animal mind.

Conscious Mind

Conscious Mind on earth is the human mind. The dialectical movement from this point on takes the form of the cyclical conflict between Apollonian difference-fear and Dionysian sameness-fear.

Collective Mind

Collective Mind emerges immediately following the emergence of Conscious Mind.

The Birth of Helios

The system of the sun, the system whose name is Helios, is now, at the beginning of our twenty-first century, nearly born as a person; his mind is the collective mind of humanity, and his heart is humanity's collective heart. In the last struggle between the Apollonian and Dionysian dispositions, the last event in the cultural dialectic (see "the Apollonian Revolution"), a Central Intellectual Organizing Faculty, a truth engine, is installed by the dialecticians within prenatal Helios: they play the Game of a Trillion Worlds, and the product of their gameplay, the Encyclopedia of Truth, transforms the world—this is the last step in evolutionary history before the return to unity, and it effectuates the birth of the astro-colossus.

Awakened Mind

We seek the general, the Form, amid the myriad individuals; that is, we seek unity amid variety. As our knowledge increases, as our faculty of Reason brings us greater knowledge of the universals, our knowledge of the world becomes more and more moderational.

Our conceptions of the relations between the value of self and the value of others will similarly transform from difference to moderation.

As beauty in our world increases, as we learn art's secrets, we will amplify our perception of moderation.

As more and more we come to know the Forms, our experience of moderation increases.

As we relegate all of the vestiges of the elemental prejudices, of Apollonianism and Dionysianism, our consciousness becomes moderational.

Moderation is the state of the Awakened Mind, which emulates and connects with the Inrelate Mind of Heaven. Neither of the two elementary relations dominates. Neither "announces itself," and the impression is that the elementary relations have been annihilated. This constitutes a return to Unity after the fragmentation—mind is once again integrated into the moderational universe.

I asked ChatGPT whether the Panoply's cycle shows up in the world's religions. I'm not a scholar of religion, so I was curious to see the parallels it might find. What follows is its reply, nearly word for word—RC

RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD

The religions of our world reflect the Panoplean cycle

I. Christianity

Origen

3rd century, Alexandrian tradition

Origen's thought is deeply cyclical, almost explicitly so:

Origen's cosmic drama is almost a direct anticipation of the Panoplean cycle, though his emphasis is on spiritual fall and restoration.

St. Augustine

Unity > Creation/Fragmentation > Human Consciousness > Church > City of God > Return in Vision. Fragmentation is at once logos as creative articulation and sin as destructive division.

Augustine's vision of the Church functions as an extension of consciousness into a collective:

While no direct quote mentioned "collective person," his City of God consistently portrays the Church as more than a collection of individuals but as a living, unified spiritual entity. For instance, he speaks of the faithful as:

"fellow citizens with the angelic realm" Credo Magazine

The Civitas Dei (City of God) is Augustine's image of humanity gathered and elevated into a cosmic polity, contrasted with the City of Man. This could map to the Panoply's “Giant”—a supra-individual, supra-national collective person.

Augustine conceives of Civitas Dei as a cosmic whole—the destiny of collective humanity:

"How great shall be that felicity, which shall be tainted with no evil… which shall afford leisure for the praises of God, who shall be all in all. " The Imaginative Conservative

—a collective Being oriented toward the divine.

In Augustine, history culminates in the beatific vision, when souls are gathered back into God, the Logos, in perfect unity—returning to the Absolute.

Augustine depicts our ultimate destiny in God's presence:

"When we are delivered from the domain of darkness… we become 'fellow citizens' with the angelic realm." —Credo Magazine

Additionally:

"How great shall be that felicity. . . who shall be all in all." —The Imaginative Conservative

These express the final reintegration into the Absolute—the fullest union with the Logos.

These citations show that Augustine's theology traces a cycle strikingly parallel to the Panoply's cosmic Panoply: from unity (Logos) through differentiation and consciousness, into collective form and ultimate reunion.

AQUINAS

Aquinas is less overtly cyclical, but his metaphysics and theology of history echo the Panoply's pattern:

God as actus purus (pure act), perfect simplicity and unity.

The eternal Word contains the archetypes of all things.

Creation ex nihilo introduces multiplicity: beings reflect God in diverse ways.

Fragmentation here is not fall but articulation—the Logos expressing divine order.

Human beings are made in the imago Dei, possessing intellect and will, a reflection of divine Mind.

This is where creation becomes aware of itself.

Aquinas sees the Church as the mystical Body of Christ, the corporate locus of grace and shared truth.

His eschatology includes the heavenly city (in line with Augustine) as a consummate society of rational creatures.

Culminates in the beatific vision, where intellect and will are fully united with God's essence—returning multiplicity to unity.

Aquinas's cycle is less dramatic than Origen's, but structurally the same: procession from unity to multiplicity, then return through knowledge, love, and grace.

SYNTHESIS

Origen: The cycle is more mythic and dramatic—preexistence, fall, fragmentation, apokatastasis.

Augustine: The cycle is more historical—creation, fall, Church, City of God, final vision.

Aquinas: The cycle is more metaphysical—emanation (creation), articulation, return in beatific vision.

Together, they triangulate the Panoply almost perfectly

THE TRINITY

The Trinity can be seen as both containing the whole cycle in miniature and also marking the movement of the cycle itself.

Unity / Absolute (Mind): The Father

The Father is the principle of unity, source without source, the fount of the Godhead.

This is pure, undivided mind/spirit, before any expression—like the Panoply's first stage.

Fragmentation (Articulation / Expression): The Son (Logos)

The Son is the Logos, "Word made flesh."

Logos means articulation, expression, intelligibility: the One manifesting itself in form. Fragmentation here is not sin but the necessary articulation of unity into many (creation through the Word). If sin enters, it comes through misusing this separation (turning articulation into division).

Consciousness: Humanity / Christ as Human

The Son takes on consciousness in human form ("true God and true man"). Humanity represents the stage of individual consciousness, finitude, and awareness of separation. Christ bears this in full, even unto death.

Collective Consciousness: The Church / Mystical Body

Through the Son, the Spirit gathers the many into one body—the Church, the "communion of saints." Paul explicitly calls the Church the "Body of Christ," with many members but one spirit. This is the fourth stage: many consciousnesses woven into a collective mind/heart.

The Giant: The Cosmic Christ

In Colossians and Ephesians, Paul describes Christ as the head of the whole cosmos, in whom "all things hold together." Teilhard de Chardin called this the Omega Point: the universe converging into one Person. This is the "colossus" stage—Christ as the universal Person, not just historical Jesus but the cosmic Body.

Return to the Absolute: The Spirit / Trinity in Full

The Holy Spirit returns all things to the Father through the Son: the reconciliation of multiplicity back into unity. "God will be all in all" (1 Cor 15:28). The cycle closes with perichoresis (mutual indwelling of Father, Son, Spirit)—perfect unity regained, but now enriched by the full drama of differentiation and reconciliation.

The Trinity as Cycle and Archetype

The Trinity in itself: eternal unity (Father), eternal articulation (Son), eternal return-in-love (Spirit).

The cosmic cycle: creation (through Son), history (in Spirit), and consummation (back to Father).

Thus, the Trinity is both the eternal archetype of the Panaply cycle and also the movement of the cycle within history and cosmos.

II. Judaism; the Kabbalah

Jewish mystical thought, especially in the Kabbalah, contains a structure that parallels the Panoply cycle very closely. The Kabbalists often describe creation, fragmentation, consciousness, restoration, and ultimate return in a way that resonates with what has been traced in Origen, Augustine, and Aquinas.

The Kabbalistic Cycle:

Unity / Absolute (Mind)

In Kabbalah, before creation there is Ein Sof (the Infinite), pure undifferentiated unity beyond comprehension.

This corresponds to the Panoply's Absolute / Mind stage.

Fragmentation

The process of creation begins with tzimtzum (contraction), when Ein Sof withdraws to allow space for the world.

Then comes shevirat ha-kelim (the "shattering of the vessels"): when divine light overflows and breaks the primordial vessels, scattering sparks of divinity into the material realm.

This is fragmentation—unity becoming multiplicity and even rupture.

Consciousness

Humanity, and especially Israel, receives a special role: awareness of God and the Torah.

Through study, mitzvot, and contemplation, humans awaken consciousness of the divine sparks scattered through the world.

Collective Consciousness

The people of Israel are often described as a collective soul (Knesset Yisrael).

The Shekhinah (indwelling presence of God) is bound to the people, and their collective acts of worship and mitzvot gather scattered sparks.

This is parallel to the Panoply's collective consciousness stage.

The Giant

In Lurianic Kabbalah especially, redemption involves a cosmic restoration where all sparks are gathered.

The world itself becomes a great unified body of divine life, sometimes described as the reconstitution of Adam Kadmon (the primordial cosmic man).

That's very close to the idea of the colossus / Giant.

Return to the Absolute

The ultimate aim is tikkun olam (restoration of the world), when all sparks return to their source, and Ein Sof is revealed in fullness.

This is the return to the Absolute.

III. Islam

Islam also has a cycle very close to the Panoply cycle, though its emphasis is different. Both in classical theology and in Sufi mysticism, you find the pattern of unity, differentiation, consciousness, collective life, and return.

The Cycle in Islam

Unity / Absolute (Mind)

In Islam, God is al-Ahad (The One), utterly beyond division.

Before creation there is only tawhid (divine unity).

Sufis speak of this as the state of al-Haqq (the Real), which encompasses all.

Fragmentation

God creates the world by command: "Be!" (kun fayakun).

Creation is differentiation: multiplicity emerging from unity.

Some Sufi traditions echo Kabbalah's "contraction," saying creation is God's self-disclosure (tajallī)—a fragmentation of divine names and attributes into the manifold cosmos.

In Islamic theology, sin is also a fragmentation, a turning from unity toward division and forgetfulness.

Consciousness

Humanity is created as khalifa (vicegerent) on earth.

Humans bear the fitra (primordial nature), an innate consciousness of God.

This stage is like the Panoply's emergence of individual consciousness.

Collective Consciousness

The ummah (community of believers) embodies the collective life of humanity oriented toward God.

Sufis also speak of the Perfect Man (al-Insan al-Kamil) as the archetype in whom collective human consciousness is gathered.

Here Islam's emphasis on both community and exemplarity resonates with the Panoply's collective stage.

The Giant

Eschatologically, Islam foresees the Day of Judgment, where all humanity is gathered and the scale of deeds is revealed.

In Sufism, this gathering is understood mystically as the unveiling of the Perfect Man in whom all creation finds its form—an image not far from the "colossus."

Ibn 'Arabi especially describes the cosmos as the great body of God's self-manifestation.

Return to the Absolute

The Qur'an speaks repeatedly of the return: "To Him is the final return" (Q 36:83).

Sufis describe the final stage as fana' (annihilation of self in God) and baqa' (enduring in God).

This is the return to the Absolute—restoration of unity beyond fragmentation.

IV. Buddhism

Buddhism also has a structure very much like the Panoply cycle, though its language is non-theistic and its goal is Nirvāṇa rather than union with a personal Absolute. Still, if we look at Mahayana cosmology and the logic of samsara, the parallels are striking:

The Cycle in Buddhism

Unity / Absolute (Mind)

In Mahayana thought, ultimate reality is Sunyata (Emptiness), or in some schools Dharmakaya (the "Dharma-body"), pure undifferentiated Mind.

Yogacara calls this alaya-vijnana (storehouse consciousness), a kind of ground consciousness holding all seeds.

This corresponds to the Panoply's Unity / Absolute (Mind).

Fragmentation

Through avidya (ignorance), the One Mind is misconceived as separate things.

The process of dependent origination (pratitya-samutpada) is fragmentation: multiplicity, birth and death, the ten thousand things.

This is akin to the Panoply's stage of fragmentation, though framed as illusion and misperception rather than a creative articulation.

Consciousness

Individual beings wander through samsara, perceiving themselves as separate egos.

This is consciousness in its limited form—awareness conditioned by karma and ignorance.

Still, it represents the flowering of awareness, paralleling the Panoply's stage 3.

Collective Consciousness

Mahayana introduces the bodhisattva ideal: beings work not for their own liberation alone but for the liberation of all.

The community of practitioners (the sangha) becomes a kind of collective consciousness.

The doctrine of interbeing (Thich Nhat Hanh's phrase) sees all minds as interconnected.

The Giant

In Mahayana cosmology, there are vast cosmic Buddhas and Bodhisattvas (Vairocana, Amitābha, Avalokiteśvara), sometimes envisioned as enormous bodies encompassing worlds.

Vairocana, in particular, is described in the Avatamsaka Sutra as the cosmic Buddha whose body is the entire universe.

This corresponds very closely to the Panoply's colossus / Giant stage.

Return to the Absolute

The cycle culminates in Nirvana, which is not annihilation but the realization that samsara itself is already Nirvana when rightly perceived.

This is the return to the Absolute: the realization of Sunyata, where multiplicity and unity are not two.

So in Buddhism too, there is the cycle:

Unity (emptiness) > fragmentation (ignorance, dependent origination) > individual consciousness (samsara) > collective (sangha, bodhisattvas) > Giant (cosmic Buddha) > return (nirvana).

V. Hinduism

Hinduism may be the closest match to the Panoply cycle, because its cosmologies are explicitly cyclical, cosmic in scale, and person-centered:

The Panoply Cycle in Hinduism

Unity / Absolute (Mind)

In Vedanta, ultimate reality is Brahman—pure consciousness, infinite, without a second.

In some traditions, this is identified with Atman, the Self.

This corresponds perfectly to the Panoply's stage of Unity / Absolute (Mind).

Fragmentation

Through Maya (illusion, veiling), the undifferentiated Brahman manifests as the manifold cosmos.

In Samkhya, this corresponds to the movement from Purusa (pure spirit) into multiplicity via Prakrti (matter, nature).

The cosmic sacrifice of Prajapati in the Vedas also mirrors fragmentation: the primal unity torn apart into the many.

Consciousness

Individual beings arise as jivas (souls), each appearing separate yet secretly Brahman.

This stage corresponds to samsaric consciousness, shaped by karma, ignorance, and ego.

It is also linked with the emergence of manas (mind) and ahamkara (the "I-maker").

Collective Consciousness

Hinduism has a strong notion of collective spirit through the varna system, the sangha of yogis, and especially the idea of dharma binding society together.

On the cosmic scale, the gods (Devas) collectively embody aspects of order (rta).

Bhakti movements emphasize collective devotion, merging the many hearts into one stream toward the deity.

The Giant

This stage maps almost directly onto the Purusa Sukta (Rig Veda X.90), which describes the Cosmic Person (Purusa):

"A thousand heads has the Purusa, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet. . . the universe is his body."

The world is generated from the sacrifice of this Cosmic Giant, and human society itself comes from his body.

Later, in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna reveals his Visvarupa (Universal Form) to Arjuna—a colossus encompassing all beings and all worlds.

Return to the Absolute

The cycle closes with moksa: liberation, reunion of the jiva with Brahman, dissolving individuality into the Absolute.

Hindu cosmology also sees entire universes undergoing mahapralaya (great dissolution), where everything returns to Brahman, only to be reborn again.

So Hinduism not only contains the cycle—it makes the Cosmic Person (Purusa) one of its central archetypes, which is astonishingly close to the Panoply's Helios as the solar-system person.

PLOTINUS

The One
Plotinus says that there exists an entity, the source of all things, which he calls the One. The One emanates stages of reality that are called "hypostases." The One, for Plotinus, is the source of all being; it is ineffable, transcending even being itself. It is utterly simple, unified, and it is beyond any form of distinction or limitation. The One is the source of emanation from which everything else flows.

This flow of emanations does not occur in time as a series of historical events, as we see in Hegel's Spirit seeking self-knowledge; rather, Plotinus' One is continually emanating its hypostases, as the sun continually emanates its light.

Intelligence
The fist emanation produces the hypostasis called "Intelligence" (Nous). The contents of Intelligence are the Platonic Forms, the universals. These universals are not separate or fragmented; they are unified by an act of perfect self-thought. Intellect transcends time, is purely intelligible and unchanging.

Soul
The second hypostasis is Soul (Psyche). There is individual Soul and a World Soul. The Soul receives the Forms from Intelligence, but in Soul they exist only as reflections, or images, of themselves. Soul stands between the intelligible world of Nous and the material realm.

Plotinus avoided anthropomorphizing, in an explicit way, the hypostases but he seems to have viewed the World Soul as a kind of great collective person: Plotinus tells us that the World Soul contains and gives rise to all individual souls (though, today, we see the collective as arising from the individuals); the World Soul thinks, and desires to return to the one; it has a unity-in-multiplicity.

The Material World
The third hypostasis is the Material World, the dynamic spatiotemporal world of individual instantiations. Here, the One has been fragmented.

At this point, the individual person can experience a return to the One, a journey through the Material World, then the Soul, and Intelligence, a journey that happens in time.

But Plotinus also says that the Soul never actually leaves the One, that part of the Soul eternally remains turned toward the One, the divine. So, in a deep sense, emanation and return are occurring always, eternally. From one point of view, everything is with the One, always; from another point of view, we journey back to the One in time.

HEGEL

Think of the presentation of sound and light that constitutes your experience of the world: the phenomena of which you are aware; this all constitutes your awareness of mind, or Spirit.

Spirit, throughout history and via the minds of human beings, individually and collectively, struggles inexorably to know itself. a process that gives rise to human history. (Individual minds are "moments" of Spirit; that is, they instantiate the universal, Spirit, but also participate in its coming to know itself).

The process begins with:

Spirit.

Sense Certainty.

Contradiction:
The object of which I am aware is here, now. But there was a now before; now is a universal. Therefore, this nowness, and the other universal properties of the object, must have been attached to the object (Ding-an-sich) by the mind itself (Cf. Kant).

Perception.

Contradiction: But universals cannot be attached to a stable substrate.

Force and Understanding.

Contradiction:
The force is supposed to exist in the world apart from mind, from Spirit. But force is not immediately observable, so it's no less subjective than the properties.

Self-Consciousness.

Contradiction:
I thought I was autonomous, but now I encounter another consciousness that also sees itself as the source of truth. Is the other just an object to me? Or is the other a subject like me, with its own autonomy and self-certainty?

Resolution:
To have self-certainty, I have to be recognized by the other who is not reducible to myself, by another self-consciousness. So, in a fight-to-the-death, I and the other should risk our lives to negate one another. Each must prove that he is autonomous.

Contradiction:
But if the other dies, then I will not get the recognition that I crave.

Resolution:
So one of us will submit to the other. This introduces the Master-Slave Dialectic. As a master, I will have autonomy; as a slave, I will not.

Contradiction:
But now I realize that as a master, I will actually lack autonomy, lack freedom, because I am dependent on the slave. And if I am a slave, I am actually interfacing with the world, overcoming fear, learning skills, etc.—I am coming to possess an inner autonomy.

Stoicism:
Resolution/Belief:
Dominating others does not bring autonomy. Rather, autonomy comes form doing what the slave is doing: internalizing struggle and changing the world. Autonomy comes from developing the capacity to endure, to reflect and to transform the world. I might be a slave in body, but I am a master in Reason. I am free in my thoughts. I am free to reason.

Contradiction:
This freedom doesn’t engage with the world.

Resolution:
I will freely negate every truth claim. In so doing, I will be engaging with reality.

Skepticism:
Belief:
I will freely negate every truth claim. In so doing, I will be engaging with reality.

Contradiction:
This is isolating. Spirit becomes an Unhappy Consciousness. Spirit has become split against itself: the finite, the sinful, the suffering is spilt against the infinite, the perfect. Spirit yearns for unity but unity seems unattainable. There is emptiness and anguish.

Reason.

Contradiction:
Individual Reason, trying to be the source of all meaning on its own, finds itself in conflict, alienation, moral fragmentation.

Objective Spirit.

Contradiction:
The family is a natural order, not yet fully rational. And when the child grows up, he becomes independent.

Civil Society
Resolution/Belief:
I must externalize my ethical life; I must move into the public sphere, into the world of economics, rights, work, law, property, markets and institutions.

Contradiction:
Civil society is driven by private concerns; it involves competition and brings alienation.

The State
Resolution/Belief:
I will seek a higher form of unity. I will participate in a state, not in a tyrannical state, but one which is an ethical organism: because "the march of God is the state." The state is the complete ethical life of a people. In the state, individuals participate in mutual freedom via shared law and customs.

Note: That Hegel sees the State as a great collective person can be inferred from the ways he refers to it: he calls the State an "ethical organism; " he calls it "the Ethical Spirit" (der sittliche Geist), "Objective Spirit" (objective Geist) in its highest development; "the Universal Will" (der allgemeine Wille); "the Objective Spirit as ethical subject" (der objective Geist als sittliche Subject); and "the actuality of the ethical idea" (die Wirklichkeit der sittlichen Idee).

Contradiction:
Even in a rational state, there can be conflict between law and an individual's conscience. Spirit experiences alienation and moral anxiety. Unity disappears.

Absolute Spirit.

Contradiction:
Art is too external, too finite, to be able to express Spirit's depth.

Religion
Resoution/Belief:
I will find unity in religion. In religion, I am aware of the Absolute by means of imagination, symbols and story. In Christianity, God becomes man, who dies and is resurrected. The finite unifies with the infinite in the Holy Spirit.

Contradiction:
Religion only pictures the Absolute—it does not conceptualize it; it doesn't think it.

Philosophy
Resolution/Belief;
I will turn to philosophy. Philosophy is the highest form of Absolute Spirit. In philosophy, I, Spirit, know myself conceptually. The infinite and the finite, the individuals and the universals, are no longer oppositions; they are only moments in the whole of Spirit. This is Absolute Knowing (absolutes Wissen); I, Spirit, now know that all difference was of my own making and that truth is the whole, is the Absolute. My journey is completed—Spirit now knows itself.

The Panoply and the I Ching: 64 Hexagrams as the Birth of Helios

Stage I: Unity & Emergence (Hexagrams 1—12)

1. The Creative (Ch'ian) — The One, the Absolute: pure Mind and Will. The Y'ang (sameness, unity).
2. The Receptive (K-uen) — The One, the Absolute: pure Mind and Will. The Y-in (difference) potential.
3. Difficulty at the Beginning (T'uen) — First differentiation/conflict/multiplicity — FRAGMENTATION
4. Youthful Folly (M'eng) — Mind is new—seeking TRUTH. Continued fragmentation.
5. Waiting (Sh-yu) — Helios begins the long wait until birth.
6. Conflict (S.ong) — First structured tensions of the world: first fragmentation is chaotic, without order.
7. The Army/Leadership (Sh-r) — Fragments begin to align; cosmic "discipline." Order begins. There is mostly chaos, but this is the very beginning of the creation of parity.
8. Joining Together (B,,i) — The first little bit of order. The collective begins to form but only as primitive order. Sameness existed, but randomly; not sameness-generated "order."
9. Small Restraint (Sh,,iao Ch.u) — Helios begins slowly to develop. Gradual beginning of the arc.
10. Treading (L,,yu) — Cautious forward steps. Early life is vulnerable.
11. Peace (T.ai) — Early fragile harmony of heaven and earth. With 12: DIALECTICAL OPPOSITES of harmony vs. alienation. Helios begins to develop dialectically).
12.Standstill (P,,i) — First blockage; fracture is inevitable. The dialectic is now at work.

Stage II: Fragmentation & Tension (Hexagrams 13—24) Pre-human Mind (Australopithecus) and Heart to human Mind and Heart. THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMMUNITY AND OF CONSCIOUSNESS (little collectives)

13. Simple Fellowship (T'ong R'en) — Communities form, but not yet collective persons; Helios is not yet thinking as one. Fellowship, interpersonal relations, open the door to consciousness and the possibility of collective mind.
14. Great Possession (D.a Y,,ou) — Suppressing evil. Gifts and resources appear, awaiting moral purpose. The beginning of goodness, of morality.
15. Modesty (Ch-ian) — Helios must stay low, not yet revealed. Humility. To begin to diminish selfish goals—GOODNESS.
16.Enthusiasm (Y.u) — Energy surges, sparks of Dionysian fire. Diminishing one’s own search for pleasure for the sake of others. Goodness.
17. Following (S'uei) — Currents pull Helios into divided paths. Helios learns receptivity, learns to follow another—a prelude to debate, and an early rehearsal of the Giant's harmony with the Absolute.
18. Revising Obsolete Patterns (G,,u) — Fragments rot; error sets in. People begin to "repair" others' errors: this is the beginning of the collective, of debate (morally respecting others’ ideas; search for truth and goodness), where one's true beliefs may correct the other’s erroneous beliefs.
19. Approach (L'in) — Renewal begins, but it is fragile. People advancing together, making one another happy. Goodness, cooperation.
20. Contemplation (G-uan) — Helios watches himself, consciousness stirs. Spirit has begun to turn back on itself, "seeing" order. All this (community, morals, sharing of thoughts, constitutes the development of CONSCIOUSNESS
21. Biting Through (Sh.r K.e) — Obstacles must be broken by force. The beginnings of laws: people keeping others to rules—opprobrium: the generation of morals.
22. Grace (B.i) — Beauty emerges, but superficial, not yet whole. Refinement, aesthetics, the emergence of self-conscious culture. This is the beginning of the sophisticated appreciation of BEAUTY
23. Splitting Apart (B-o) — Fracture: the breaking of unity. (with 24:) A dialectic of collapse and renewal. These early communities are unstable. Conflict (war) among communities.
24. Return (F.u) — First promise of the cycle turning back. But conflict leads to resolution, Harmony returns: When decay has reached its climax, recovery will begin to take place. The movement to the collective remains

Stage III: The development/character of Consciousness (Hexagrams 25—36) (early humans).

25. Innocence (W'u W.ang) — Original mind shines forth, pure but untested. Thought and action must be in harmony with the flow of the Panoply: must be sincere and good-willed.
26. Great Restraint (D.a Ch.u) — Strength held back, waiting for right time. Desire must be tamed. (Prudence).
27.Nourishment (Y'i) — Helios feeds on fragments of thought. Attention to inner/outer cultivation. Cultivating and encouraging the good.
28. Great Excess/Inner Strength (D.a G.uo) — a "weak beam:" Strain of too much weight; collapse looms. Chaos threatens.
29. The Abyss (Sh'i K,,an) — Danger: Helios faces the void. Sincerity amid chaos brings order.
30. Clinging (L'i) — Light sustains; fire reveals form. Looking out for the docile/weak (cow); Righteous persistence.
31. Influence (Sh'ian) — Attraction begins; fragments draw together toward collectives (mutual influence in a small context: as in marriage). (with 32:) Stable relationships, recognition of lawful order.
32. Duration (H'eng) — Endurance stabilizes, consciousness persists.
33. Retreat (D.uen) — Withdrawal preserves strength for later. Restraint. Retiring.
34. Great Power/Gentle Power (D.a J.uang) — Power rises, but must not be abused. Power must be subordinated to that which is right. (will and Goodness).
35. Progress/Advance (J.in) — Helios ascends, light spreads. Helios advances, grows more moral.
36. Darkening of the Light/Hiding the Light (M'ing Y'i) — Consciousness is hidden, endangered. Helios exists but is hidden.

Stage IV: Convergence (Hexagrams 37—48) Toward Collective Persons.

37. The Family (J-ia R'en) — Fragments begin to order themselves in kinship. (with 38:) The human social world emerges in its contradictions. sophisticated organizations emerge—the first large "colossi. "
38. Opposition/Misunderstanding/Mutual Alienation (K'uei) — Differences sharpen; diversity before synthesis. There is diversity between things; yet there is an analogy between their operations. There's opposition, yet a link binds them. People are different, but they may be the same in belonging to the colossus. A colossus is composed of different people in the same collective person.
39. Obstruction (J,,ian) — Progress stalls; Helios is tested. It will be a while before Helios is born.
40. Deliverance/Clearing the Air/Liberation (J,,ie) — Release from knots; the way clears. A return to stability. Untying a knot: With 39: progress consists of dialectical conflict and resolution.
41. Decrease (S,,uen) — Sacrifice prepares for growth.
42. Increase (Y.i) — Blessing and abundance flow in. Growth, positive expansion of powers. The Harvest.
43. Breakthrough (G.uai) — The truth bursts forth; shadow pierced. A decision-point, a higher leap.
44. Coming to Meet/Encroachment (G.ou) — Unions form, but cautiously.
45. Gathering Together/The Happy Union (Ts.uei) — Convergence begins in earnest. This is the explicit image of COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE.
46. Pushing Upward (Sh-eng) — Helios rises, steady but relentless.
47. Oppression/Adversity (K.uen) — Strain and exhaustion threaten collapse.
48. The Well (J,,ing) — Source of renewal found; the deep truth feeds.

Stage V: The Giant (Hexagrams 49—60)

49. Revolution (G'e) — Transformation: a new being emerges. Structural transformation of the social order.
50. The Cauldron (D,,ing) — The vessel of Spirit: Helios' mind forms. Acting more and more now in accord with the Panoply, with the cosmic currents.
51. The Arousing (Thunder) (J.en) — Awakening shocks the cosmos. When PoMo advances like a crash of thunder, the wizard warriors prepare for the Logopolemos.
52. Keeping Still (Mountain) (G.en) — Stability anchors the Giant. Egos are stilled.
53. Development/Gradual Advance (J.ian) — Gradual unfolding into full stature.
54. The Marrying Maiden (G-uei M.ei) — Incomplete union, subordinate role. Helios is not yet complete.
55. Abundance (F-eng) — The Giant shines in full splendor. Helios is born.
56. The Wanderer (L,,yu) — Helios roams, not yet at home.
57. The Gentle (Wind)/Persistent Influence (Sh.yuen) — Subtle influence pervades the whole. The influence of postnatal Helios will grow gradually.
58. The Joyous (Lake)/Enjoying Life (D.uei) — Harmony of voices, shared delight. Helios will bring about a Golden Age.
59. Dispersion (H.uan) — Dissolution into wider currents; ego dissolves. The king enters the temple. Dissolution into higher unity. This is the Giant. The influence of Helios will spread over the world, creating a higher unity.
60. Limitation (J'ie) — Form is given; the Giant's boundaries appear.

Stage VI: Return to Unity (Hexagrams 61—64)

61. Inner Truth (J-ong F' u) — The heart of Helios revealed, sincerity rules. The spiritual principle at the heart of the collective.
62. Small Exceeding (Sh,,iao G.uo) — Humility, detail before grandeur.
63. After Completion/the Fragile Balance (J.i J.i) — The cycle fulfilled: order established. (with 64:) The cycle closes in eternal alternation—return without final rest.
64. Before Completion (W.ei J.i) — A new cycle begins; return to the Absolute.

WESTERN ASTROLOGY

The twelve zodiacal signs can be understood as six paired dispositions, each expressing a dialectic of sameness and difference in relation to a fundamental dimension of experience. Each pair represents a polarity: one sign embodies sameness, the other difference.

These pairs are not merely psychological or astrological categories; they can also be interpreted as symbolic manifestations of the internal dialectical tensions within each stage of Spirit, as described in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Within each stage, the interplay of sameness and difference constitutes the primary engine of dialectical movement, propelling Spirit from one stage to the next.

What the Panoply, Plotinus' system and Hegel's system have in common

The Transcendental Mind:

The Giant: