KALKI MAITREYAStarting upon the long journey immaculate; descending more and more into sinful matter, and having connected himself with every atom in manifested Space -- the Pilgrim, having struggled through and suffered in every form of life and being, is only at the bottom of the valley of matter, and half through his cycle, when he has identified himself with collective Humanity. This, he has made in his own image. In order to progress upwards and homewards, the "God" has now to ascend the weary uphill path of the Golgotha of Life. It is the martyrdom of self-conscious existence. Like Vishvakarman he has to sacrifice himself to himself in order to redeem all creatures, to resurrect from the many into the One Life. Then he ascends into heaven indeed; where, plunged into the incomprehensible absolute Being and BIiss of Paranirvana, he reigns unconditionally, and whence he will redescend again at the next "coming", which one portion of humanity expects in its dead-letter sense as the second advent and the other as the last "Kalki Avatar". The Secret Doctrine, i 268 If any one among you thinks that he Everyone who has the priceless privilege to enter the ancient Path to the Divine Mysteries is the recipient of a sacred trust. It can be transmitted only through a life of unremitting sacrifice and striving for the sake of universal enlightenment. Entry into the far-flung orbit of the Avatar may be seen as an approach, even if unintentional, to the antechamber or the threshold of the inward spiritual Path leading to the true Mysteries. A few fortunate souls are able to avail themselves of the sacred Teachings concerning the hiranyagarbha, the golden sphere of the Cosmic Egg, the brahmanda, and its mirroring in the immortal individuality of human souls. It is the basis of the sutratmic thread, the luminous link binding together all the incarnations of the pilgrim-soul and the divine vesture within which is gestated the possibility of spiritual birth into self-conscious immortality. It is the hallowed vessel within which the eternal seed of divine humanity is sown and fructified, the pristine medium of the potent current flowing between the higher Triad overbrooding man and the Logos in the cosmos. The initial self-awakening in the earnest seeker for wisdom is the starting-point of the "longest journey", the arduous Path pointing not merely to individual enlightenment, which is an extremely sublimated form of exalted selfishness, but even more to ultimate reunion and total identification with the Self of all, the Logos in the Cosmos and the God in Man. The true life of the indwelling Spirit in Man and Nature is a life of eternal Wisdom-Sacrifice, jnana yajna, ceaselessly enacted on each plane of being and in all worlds of differentiated subjects and objects. The spiritual seeker is invited to participate self-consciously in this primordial Sacrifice, adhiyadna, through self-purification and self-correction, mystic meditation and joyous initiation into the realm of cosmic ideation. In order to do this effectively, it is essential to withdraw allegiance to the outer shell of the composite personality. One must separate entirely one's sense of being from the epiphenomenal activity of the external form with an assumed name, the namarupa. Like the Self-governed Sage in the second discourse of the Bhagavad Gita, one must withdraw all the powers of perception and conception from the outer organs and objects, reconsecrating them for a noumenal task within the inmost chamber of contemplation. This withdrawal is certainly not a selfish retreat into what The Voice of the Silence calls "the carapace of selfhood". Rather, it is the complete realization of contentment in the universal Self alone, within the omnipresent paramatman, the unmanifest source of all creativity, inward illumination and spiritual self-regeneration. When the soul withdraws into the inmost Holy of Holies, the sacred ark of the Mystery Fires, it becomes as "an everlasting lode-star, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night". Ever and always, from its distant dawn down to the present historical moment, the spiritual pilgrimage of Humanity has been presided over by the highest and holiest of beings, the sacrificial servers of Arghyanath, the mysterious Lord of Libations, the chief custodian of the sacred Mysteries. Arghya Varsha is the Land of Libations or the sanctuary of divine Hierophants, which stretches from Mount Kailas to the Shamo Desert. This is the spiritual home and birthplace of Io, the mother of physical humanity. It is also the real Argos, the fountain-head of the ancient lineages of divine dynasties of King-Initiates. Mount Meru, the navel of the world and the abode of Mahavishnu and Mahashiva, is the magnetic centre of the preservative and regenerative forces in the invisible cosmos. It is the Sacred Lha – the sanctuary of those whose destiny is to last from the commencement to the ending of the manvantara during each Round. It is the dwelling-place of the last divine mortal chosen as the sishtha or sacred germ for the future seed of humanity. It is also the spiritual realm from which the divine descent of Kalki Maitreya takes place. All spiritual life on earth is encompassed in the Religion of Humanity, the sacrificial service of the Spirit of Divine Truth, SAT, and Absolute Compassion, mahakaruna. Perpetually sweeping away everything that is moribund and morbid in human nature, all the incrustations of falsehood and mummery stifling the human soul, the eternal Lord of the Mysteries, Dakshinamurti, Hari-Hara, the True Saviour of Humanity and the Good Gardener of Nature, guides and nurtures with perfect gnosis and divine impartiality the potent seeds of human futurity, including all, excluding none except the self-excluded. Every sacred tradition revolves around the seminal utterances, the abounding grace and magnanimous benediction of God-men, all of whom are accredited reflections of Him who was in the beginning, the Ancient of Days and the Initiator of Initiates. Those who comprehend this central truth in their hearts and minds, to whatever degree, are able to come closer in consciousness to the Supreme Source of Divine Wisdom, to Brahma Vach. Such souls are readily willing to purify themselves, practise the quintessential ethics of the immemorial Teachings, meditate on the metaphysics which lies at the basis of true theurgy, and elevate themselves with deep, unconditional devotion to lokasangraha, the welfare of the whole world. Unfortunately, there are also those who, inherently incapable of resonating to the anti-élitist and universal keynote of the timeless Teachings, compensate for their own insecurities and failures by attempting to limit access to the Philosophia Perennis. That is why it is so vital to the present epoch and the future of humanity that no motive even a shadow less than a sincere, all-absorbing desire to serve the universal enlightenment of all beings should concern any seeker of wisdom. Nothing less will do, and nothing else will work as a substitute or stimulus. Lord Krishna stated in the Bhagavad Gita that "in whatever way men approach Me, in that way do I accept them". As the Qur'an teaches, there are as many ways to God as there are breaths of the children of men. There is room for each and all under the mighty banyan Tree of Divine Wisdom, the Tree of Immortality and Life Eternal. Gupta Vidya takes its starting-point and also attains its summit in the same transcendental and absolute Divine Ground, THAT (TAT) which is beyond all differentiations of spirit and matter, all dimensions of space and time, all rates and quanta of motion. This is the Divine Darkness, the Supreme Silence or maunam which is the eternal source of both light and sound. The archetypal mode of pristine creativity at the basis of the cosmos and Man lies hidden in the mystery of the Soundless Sound, the Eternal AUM throughout the ages. The Sacred Word, Vach, the Verbum, is the original and enduring vibration in akasha behind the myriad reverberations that bring into being myriad worlds and vast hosts of sentient creatures belonging to all the seven kingdoms of Nature. The living presence of the sound in the silence is the invisible and inaudible core of every monad, divine and human, solar and lunar. As the sound in the light and the light in the sound, it is the fecund source of all the supernal and sublunar, celestial and terrestrial, manifestations of embodied intelligence and concentrated wisdom, for all these are the sacred progeny of the sublime Vach. In its subtlest and highest meaning, this is realized in its fullness by that unseen tribe of casteless and classless Magi, the Sages and Seers, the Initiators and Instructors, of the elect of all peoples and societies, cultures and civilizations. It is impossible to draw closer to Them without rediscovering and rebecoming the Sacred Word that is the Rootless Root of all immortal monads, all souls who are like multi-hued rays of the hidden Spiritual Sun. Through the Word, one recovers one's true stature as one's own master and inner god, attuning oneself to the currents of divine ideation that flow forth from the primal source, the fons et origo of each and all. Every form of partisanship and partiality, all concern for the lesser self, every element in oneself that is bound up with the part and does not flow with the whole, must be let go. Anything less leaves one unworthy of the great gift of the manasa, the priceless potency of pure self-consciousness, the supreme inheritance of the whole of the human family. This is the true spirit in which one must and can prepare to draw closer to the sacred threshold of the Holy of Holies, the adytum of the Mysteries, in which one may be reborn and reclaim one's divine birthright. Thus one may relearn how to live in that light and sound which suffuses, sustains and regenerates the human tabernacle of the self-realized, self-existent godhead. One must come to comprehend fully the complex set of solar and lunar forces in the cosmos as in the human constitution. One must thereby learn to pay one's deep debt of gratitude to all the elements and principles, essences and hosts, that have created the varied vestures of the divine monad and the hallowed temple of the human form. Inevitably, this means repaying unacknowledged debts and engaging in wise self-correction and the alchemical transmutation. To rebecome the Egg, to live in it self-consciously and continuously, one must reduce oneself to a zero. Then one may come into the presence of the pristine flame within the forty-nine fires, the all-presence which is no-thing, the ever unmanifest ground of all Nature and Humanity. Thus one may constitute oneself an authentic co-worker with Nature, a true servant of Humanity, a silent worshipper of the Divine in all its noumenal radiations. This is the meaning of daily self-purification (tapas), self-surrender (bhakti) and self-sacrifice (yajna), the abiding basis of intuitive (buddhic) perception and noetic action. There is certainly nothing wrong in the creative use of pure reason, the consistent application of the principle of ratio in the service of the progressive understanding of divine ideas and symbols. How else would it be possible to perceive and apprehend, much less engage in constructive self-correction in relation to errors and omissions? If one is going to be an authentic devotee of Divine Wisdom, then one must certainly be prepared to think, and to think deeply, about every aspect of human life, including birth and death, decay and sickness, illusion and delusion. Naturally, such concentrated reflection must be accompanied by the profoundest feelings of universal gratitude towards all Teachers, magnanimity to all beings and effortless, unconstrained compassion. The finest feelings are the inevitable concomitants of any abiding realization of Sat, the truth in all things. The highest understanding and the deepest love are inseparably interwoven in genuine meditation upon abstract glyphs and concrete symbols of the diffusion of the divine Life-Force in the cosmos and in all Humanity. Everything has its dharma, which can be described from the standpoint of the lower kingdoms as the laws of Nature, and which works in the animal kingdom with the unerring precision of instinct. For the self-conscious human monad, however, deliberation, choice and commitment constitute the appropriate terms of discourse within which to formulate human obligation, duty and destiny. Svadharma, which is one's self-chosen, self-renewed and self-exemplified duty, that which is due from each individual to the whole of Nature and Humanity, is not a personal possession or a private, cloistered arena. Since each soul is self- conscious to some degree, dharma becomes the svadharma of each, sui generis, unique, incomparable and inalienable, that which none can delegate or transfer to another. At the same time, since all human selves are essentially rays of the Self of all, and as all human beings are like limbs in the collective, composite organism of Vaivasvata Manu or Adam Kadmon, svadharma cannot be construed in exclusively separatist terms or individualistic language. Any person can only individuate truly to the extent to which he or she can universalize consciousness, and svadharma has to be understood in the context of the universal dharma of the human family in any age or epoch. Svadharma is the deft application of dharma to the karmic conditions of the moment in any situation, with its limits, parameters and possibilities. The Bhagavad Gita (III.35) affirms: "Better is one's own duty, though imperfectly done, than the duty of another well done. Better is death in doing one's own duty (svadharma); the duty of another brings danger." The perverse refusal or pathetic inability to translate dharma into the appropriate thought and action in the present moment is indeed adharma, unrighteousness, the source of all sordid confusion and culpable wrongdoing, as well as moral backsliding. No doubt, none can, without the self-validating universal vision of the Adept, judge the duty of another. This makes it all the more vital that each and every one enacts svadharma with the modicum of courage needed to act on one's deepest convictions and fullest understanding. Given the inevitability of falling short of these time and again, it is an elementary requirement of the Golden Rule to show genuine tolerance and empathy for the frailties of others. Conflicts between individuals, groups, societies and nations are all too often the outgrowth of militant self-righteousness and fearful intolerance, whilst reflecting abysmal lack of clarity or fidelity in regard to one's own svadharma. Human beings exist today in the most spiritually straitened or diminished circumstances. They are mentally diminished in an age of immense proliferation of information; they are psychically diminished at a time when there is an involuntary recognition of universal interdependence, at least in the economic and ecological spheres; they are emotionally diminished in a generation which has received a succession of emotional shocks in regard to human depravity, duplicity and cruelty; they are even physically diminished in an era of mass consumption and compulsive multiplication of wants; above all, they are spiritually impoverished in an age of unprecedented access to the world"s sacred texts and spiritual manuals. And yet, at rare moments of harmonic convergence of human hopes and desperate longings for a safer and saner world, there are poignant tokens and gestures of suppressed feelings of universal solidarity in distress, even a collective outpouring of cries and appeals for the visible appearance of a Secret Saviour, a New Revelation, the Day of Final Reckoning or Divine Judgement, and a new Elysium on a new earth. As pilgrim-souls, all human beings are essentially integral parts of a single monadic stream of evolution and a vast collective spiritual odyssey, the limits and contours of which cannot be conceived by ordinary temporal consciousness. Each and every individual is inescapably involved in a set of composite vestures which reflect the complex karma of a long history of thought and conduct, in a world which each one's karma has inexorably determined to be suitable for spiritual self-correction and further progress or retardation, according to one's willingness to learn and unlearn. Owing to deep-rooted ignorance, lack of mental clarity and moral resolution, age-old proclivities and persisting habits formed in this life, much of one's involuntary involvement in the world"s malaise can become inverted and deflected. As a result, all too many weak-willed persons exacerbate and intensely react to much that is unnecessary, behaving like moral serfs with mindless and slavish tendencies, entangling themselves in messes of their own making. They are terrified to assume the burden of responsibility for themselves and others. Since all true learning requires patient assimilation and skilful practice, mere theoretical knowledge and mechanical techniques cannot reverse this tropism, let alone the strange infatuation with the insufferable pride in spiritual failure. If one thinks seriously in terms of the striking metaphors of The Voice of the Silence, seeing oneself and others as immaculate rays of light with opaque clay material on the outer surface, no amount of scrutiny of the dense covering can release any insight into light-energy. One must show the courage to turn aside from externals and look within the seeming darkness. Since "inner" and "outer", "within" and "without", are relative terms, one will in no time discover that one's initial notions of what is within will be displaced by deeper awareness. The very postulation of the spiritual Path to self-enlightenment implies that one must begin where one is, rather than waiting for others before making a start in self-scrutiny. So one must retire in secret to converse with the imprisoned soul, to consider the plight of the greater self one has pushed aside into the abyss of non-being, leaving oneself in a sorry state of self-alienation, impotence and bondage to delusion. The more one contemplates one's role as a callous jailer of one's own better self, the more one will notice the complicity of others, with all their compulsive verbiage and mediocre rationalizations, in the profanation of the sacred and in the downward path of self-destruction. This wretched condition is due to cowardly neglect and diabolical abuse in the past. In the realm of the sacred, even neglect is a form of abuse and every abuse is an act of perfidy and self-betrayal. The only way out is to acknowledge one's forgotten pact with the legions of the demoniac and to proceed to ask for a permanent divorce. One must show that one is in earnest by invoking the Holy Light and the Holy Power of the imprisoned Christos. One must seriously strive to meditate upon the Spiritual Sun, the most potent of all healers, and upon Agathon, Universal Good. It does not matter that one's conception of dhyana or deep meditation, and one's ability to initiate and sustain it, are woefully inadequate, muddled and pitiable. Like ghee drawn from heated butter, practice clarifies, chanting aloud helps, and the act of abject self-surrender may itself be converted into the posture of redemptive humility. As one works persistently and patiently to establish a more intimate relation with one's imprisoned splendour, one's exiled alter ego, Pollux, the banished brother of Castor, one's frail conceptions of meditative stillness and one's feeble attempts at sustained practice will undergo change. The temple of the tortured body can be cleansed and purified, even now, as with the daily act of taking a shower. At this stage it helps enormously to take a brief holiday from one's sordid self-preoccupation, and to reflect upon human souls in distress. One simple form of preliminary meditation is known in the Tibetan tradition as "taking and giving". This consists of consciously and imaginatively breathing in the sufferings and sins of others, their self-suffocating distress and immeasurable ignorance, which are like black rays of pollution, and breathing out white rays of hope and faith, love and charity, fellowship and compassion. Done repeatedly, especially before a deep sleep of innocence, it can help on waking up to think about benevolent breathing before going out into the world. It would now help to intensify and deepen this daily practice by calming the mind and making a bold attempt to develop the power of clear visualization, whether of the boundless sky or of omnipresent space, of the fathomless ocean of life or of the subterranean streams of life-giving elixirs in the Himalayan mountain ranges, of pure white light or the rainbow bridge between the earth and the empyrean, of the evening star or the midnight sun, of the radiant hosts of enlightened Buddhas and compassionate Bodhisattvas seated around the central figure of the healing Maitreya Buddha, as in many a Tibetan tanka, or even of the all-conquering Rider on the White Horse (Kalki) of the Book of Revelation of St. John of Patmos. Vishnu-Soshios-Lakshminarayana leads the Legions of Light and the toilers of Maitreya, unseen by all who would be blinded by the radiant vision, joyously greeted by myriads of perceptive souls in the silence of their grateful hearts, rural exemplars of Himalayan patience, supremely confident that Truth will triumph in the fullness of days; that the armies of Belial and Moloch and the host of lesser demonic chiefs will be frustrated in their designs to set up a global robotocracy and to convert this entire planet into a necropolis of the damned; that the meek shall yet inherit the earth; and the decisive victory of Shamballa will light up the Mystery Fires in hallowed places, in groves of good goblins and wizened gremlins, in the humble huts and haunts of innocent fools and inspired children, revelling in sacred chants and hymnodies of divine rhapsody. In the words of the mystic Hallaj, "Now, brightly blazing forth, Truth"s luminary hath driven out of sight each flickering, lesser light." In the incantatory, initiatory language of The Voice of the Silence, "the Dhyana gate is like an alabaster vase, white and transparent; within there burns a steady golden fire, the flame of Prajna that radiates from Atma. . . . Behold! thou hast become the Light, thou hast become the Sound, thou art thy Master and thy God." It is foretold in the ancient Puranas that Kalki will come not once, but over and over again, each time the world passes through another catastrophic cycle of precipitous decline in righteousness and the earth groans with its insupportable burden of demonic cacophony and spiritual barrenness. It now seems to many tortured souls that our own epoch, in the most barbaric of centuries in recent recorded history, is marked and mauled by the most appalling and pervasive desecration of the Holy of Holies, in thought and speech, emotion and action, in so-called religious sanctuaries, in the chancelleries and capitals of nations, in secular forums, in schools and in streets, in divided homes and blood-stained battlefields, in the mass media and on the lips of pseudo-sophisticates, in the perverted minds and poisonous hearts of well-disguised "murderers of souls", in the moral plagues sweeping the countryside as well as the drug-infested cities, let alone the massive corruption in the reeking corridors of power and paper money, in the citadels of selfish leaders and in the market-places of the demoralized and the doomed. So long as the heavy karma of the desecration of the Holy of Holies remains as a sinister albatross casting its nefarious shadow over the stormy sea of samsara, so long will the Kalki function be a paramount concern and inescapable facet of the mysterious work of all Divine Incarnations, spiritual reformers and World-Teachers, who are both light-bringers and fire-bringers. Yet, awful and execrable as this profanation of the sacred is in its impact upon the astral light, Nature"s "infinite negative", it is not the entire truth about the contemporary epoch or indeed about any century or civilization, including even the Atlanteans five million years ago. If, as ancient Sages hint, the real difficulty extends back about eleven million years ago, there still reverberates in the akasha the golden vibration inscribed in the "antique heart" of mankind over eighteen and three-quarter million years ago, in the dawn of human self-consciousness. Five thousand years ago, on the eve of the commencement of Kali Yuga, Lord Krishna struck the sacred keynote of svadharma, nishkama karma and jnana yajna, of self-chosen duty, disinterestedness and wisdom-sacrifice, in an age of accelerated change, wherein there is varnashankara, the confounding of all the social orders. There is no reliable clue in the world of externals to the inward journey and spiritual growth of the human soul; there are no institutionalized guarantees for human progress whilst Karma-Nemesis does its necessary work of destruction of old modes and codes in the midst of universal social chaos and psychological disintegration. This was also the deeper meaning of the Mahabharata War, wherein to look behind to the annals of historical memory was to be lost. Now, more than ever before, as courageous individuals gain the clarity of philosophic insight (vijnana), rooted in deep meditation (dhyana), they can reconnect themselves with the primordial vibration of the Mysteries, "the eternal thought in the eternal mind", the authentic source of the abundant creative potentials in themselves and in all Humanity. The irreversible tidal wave of the present historical moment will sweep away many of the relics and monuments of moribund traditions and the monstrosities of modern, so-called civilization. Divine Wisdom is immensely vaster and much more ancient than can remotely be sensed within the perspectives of present-day humanity. It is inconceivable that anything can stand in its way, that even the accumulated sins and crimes of fallen sorcerers and their myriad vampirized victims can resist the mighty onrush of the New Cycle, which, working mostly in the realm of akasha, acts as a potent alchemical solvent in the astral light and in the inmost consciousness of hosts of souls, both embodied and awaiting incarnation. It would be a costly illusion for any group of monads, for any religious sect or social coterie, for any nation or continent, to transfer its own sense of doom to the whole of the human family, or to imagine that any power on earth can resist the rising tide of the progressive enlightenment of the humanity of the future. In a very real sense, all human souls are always exiles in this world, but this is poignantly true of so many in a time of colossal karmic precipitation, widespread sifting between the "quick" and the "dead", and the dawning of a new global civilization, rising phoenix-like out of the ashes of the older orders. Porphyry"s profound words on self-exile have a peculiar appositeness to our age:
All the outward forms and manifestations that constitute the clutter and outworn furniture of physical existence and psychic fantasy obscure and suppress the spiritual intuitions and intimations in human consciousness. By becoming caught up in the region of ephemera, true inward perception, buddhic awareness, is blocked. Authentic depth perception is a perception of essences, a laserlike clarity in regard to primary causes, a bringing together of the centripetal, concentrated ideation of manas and the centrifugal, expansive empathy of buddhi, until there emerges a radiation of buddhi-manas-taijasi which can flow downward and illumine the brain, the heart and the sensorium. As a human being learns to live progressively and increasingly in the divine egg of sat-chit-ananda, a deeper sense of being, of ideation and eros, is awakened in all the vestures; there is a clarification and purification of all perception, and the awakening of an eye for essentials, the eye of transcendental synthesis fusing the standpoints of eternity and time. To light up the promise and possibility of such a radical reorientation of human consciousness in as many souls as possible is the awesome task and the noble prospect of the Aquarian Age, as well as the humanity and civilization of the future. There is no learning, no acquisition of Divine Wisdom, no spiritual enlightenment without a life consecrated by sacrifice. The true mark of the authentic member of the Army of the Voice is instantaneous responsiveness to the law of sacrifice, without reservation, let or hindrance. The willingness to suffer and sacrifice separates the Lords of Light from the legions of darkness, the right-hand Path from the left-hand, the Sage from the sorcerer. We would all gladly suffer for those we love, like the mother for her newborn child. Much more is needed: to suffer for all others means to become a compassionator and creator of beneficent ideation, a theurgist who breathes benevolently and effortlessly radiates streams of light-energy and selfless love. A familiar line from Edwin Markham"s poem is often cited: "But Love and I had the wit to win", pointing to the vital connection between readiness and ripeness, love and wisdom, rooted in self-knowledge. Wisdom penetrates and clarifies; love expands and includes, it does not expel and exclude. As more and more sensitive souls come to grasp fully that everyone is an integral part of a whole, which is now enacting a decisive drama that involves the Mysteries and cannot be understood in less than cosmic terms, profound currents of magnetic love-energy may be released that can act in and through many an unseen actor on the contemporary scene. Mahavishnu, whilst reclining upon Shesha (the cosmic serpent eating its tail, floating upon the crystalline waters of Aditi-Akasha, noumenal Space in Eternal Duration), emanates this entire cosmos and yet remains in supreme repose. Kalahansa is the Swan of Everlasting and also the Eternal Saviour in the realm of Time. The Purna Avatar is fully incarnated on earth as the decisive determinant of the destinies of all monads, in the context of all karmic sum-totals displayed on the cosmic computer of mahat, and yet he stands apart from all manifestation, with a mere amsha or fragment of his divine splendour ensouling the fullest possible embodiment in the materials of contemporary humanity. As Kalki, he is the manvantaric harbinger of the Day of Reckoning for each and all; as Maitreya, he is linked with Hermes-Mercury as the Avatar of unconditional love and universal mercy. As the anonymous author of a French work on the Tarot and Hermeticism prophesied in 1967:
Almost forty years earlier, in his Heart of Asia, Nicholas Roerich, the mystic painter and explorer, conveyed the esoteric teaching he received in trans-Himalayan monasteries concerning the work of Kalki Maitreya before the end of the twentieth century:
Hermes, November 1987 |