Quaternary

The Quaternary appears in Mario’s philosophy as the remote prehistoric threshold at which humanity first became distinct from animal life. He treats that moment not as a completed origin but as the opening movement of an unfinished process: the being that emerged from the animal world can continue remaking its body, mind, and social existence. In this framework, the Quaternary supplies the first term in a long history of conscious human self-creation, while eroticism represents its projected next stage.

The Quaternary as Human Threshold

Mario defines art as the force through which “the hominid of the Quaternary” separated from the beast and became human. The formulation makes artistic creation more than an ornament of civilization: it is the activity that marks humanity’s departure from merely biological existence. The human being is unique, in his account, because it will leave more in the universe than it found. The Quaternary therefore functions as a temporal marker for the first decisive passage from animal inheritance to human authorship.

That passage is connected to the earliest images of culture. Mario recalls the figures of Apsaras and Corai as forms drawn from dreams, just as the earliest ochre and smoke figures on cave walls opened a future for prehistoric humanity. These examples place the Quaternary at the beginning of a continuum in which human beings transform matter, image, and eventually themselves. The historical distance of the period intensifies Mario’s argument: what began with primitive marks and imagined figures can culminate in the deliberate reshaping of living bodies and minds.

From Art to Eroticism

For Mario, traditional arts of colour, curves, and sound no longer satisfy humanity’s creative passion. The decisive artistic material has become human flesh and consciousness. Stone, bronze, and paste belong to an earlier stage because they leave the natural body untouched; eroticism, by contrast, works directly upon living existence. He presents it as the only art adequate to the human being of the space age and capable of carrying humanity beyond the stars.

This claim reverses the usual hierarchy between nature and culture. Mario does not regard the natural human form as the final standard to be preserved. He imagines a more radical art that can seize the body, contest its inherited shape and substance, and reconstruct the human being according to self-imposed laws. In his most extreme formulation, such reconstruction would free humanity from the limitations associated with cells, matter, bodily gravity, and the degradation of energy. The Quaternary marks the first emancipation from the beast; eroticism becomes the projected art of emancipation from biological destiny itself.

Evolution Recast as Conscious Choice

Mario’s erotic philosophy presents this development as a form of progress grounded in reason rather than credulity, confidence rather than fear, and love of life rather than a mysticism of death. He insists that eroticism is not a collection of social amusements but a code, a science, an education of character, and an instrument of mental and social health. Its purpose is to replace the passions of illusion with the passions of lucidity.

The Quaternary is important within this argument because it allows biological history to be reinterpreted as an unfinished sequence of transformations. Mario later imagines a future “mutant branch” of humanity: at some sudden dawn, the brain will change, and the human being will think differently, no longer understanding the ignorance, terror, and servitude of the former race. Sexual conduct itself is secondary to the freedom of spirit with which it is undertaken. The evolutionary leap is thus inward as well as physical, a change in moral perception through which pleasure becomes the measure of good and pain the measure of evil.

The Prehistoric Past and the Murias

The Quaternary past also frames Mario’s discussion of the Murias, whom Quentin has encountered in India with the sociologist Verrier Elwin. Although “civilized” Indians call the tribe primitive, Mario interprets its sexual morality as evidence of an advanced intelligence. Their communal dormitory, Gothul, educates children of both sexes from an early age in the art of love. Their system is described as formative rather than prohibitive, and jealousy, rather than violation or murder, is identified as the gravest crime.

This example complicates the ordinary meaning of historical progress. A society labeled primitive may, in Mario’s interpretation, already embody a moral order closer to the future age of reason than modern civilization does. Emmanuelle objects that such a system must be an innate grace rather than an acquired discipline, but Mario rejects the idea that poetry, genius, or erotic capacity is naturally bestowed. The lesson he draws is that humanity must learn to become human: the Quaternary produced the first human transformation, while education can produce further transformations in any historical period.

Significance in Mario’s Worldview

The Quaternary is therefore less a setting than a philosophical hinge. It names the point where animal life became capable of art, culture, and self-definition, while also exposing the incompleteness of the conventional human condition. Mario uses it to connect prehistoric cave imagery, modern artistic creation, sexual education, biological mutation, and the anticipated age of reason within one developmental narrative.

Its significance lies in the tension between inheritance and invention. Humanity begins as a creature shaped by nature, but Mario’s argument gives it a destiny of becoming its own maker. Erotic practice is consequently elevated into a civilizational and evolutionary project, not because every sexual act automatically produces progress, but because liberated desire is imagined as a means of refusing fear, myth, and passive submission to the body’s inherited form. The Quaternary is the remote beginning of that project; eroticism is the proposed continuation.