Crusade to Liberate the Past

The Crusade to Liberate the Past begins as a response to the misery discovered in human history and becomes, for the Last Men, a practice of understanding, intervention, and fidelity to life. First imagined by the Sixteenth Men after they entered past minds, the project is later judged desperate but not wholly fantastic: its purpose is not simply to recover lost knowledge, but to help earlier minds recognize truths and beauties their own experience contains yet leaves unseen.

Origins in the encounter with the past

When the Sixteenth Men had possessed their world for nearly fifty million years, they learned to enter past minds. Their first encounter with the immense volume of historical misery overwhelmed them. For a time, despite their own blessings and spontaneous gaiety, existence seemed a mockery. They eventually came to see the past’s suffering not only as a horror to contemplate but as a call for help, and resolved to keep in view a great crusade to liberate it. They could not imagine how such a task could be accomplished; they nevertheless made it an aim within their larger effort to create a higher human type.

The project’s historical background is a succession of civilizations that lose knowledge and then recover fragments of it in altered forms. Among the First Men, the Swastika endured on crude stone tools as a symbol whose meaning had changed: first associated with an aeroplane diving to destruction and the overthrow of Gordelpus and the State, it was later treated as the sacred sign of a divine ancestor and a vanished golden age. The emblem preserved a trace of history, but its successive meanings also showed how memory could obscure what it carried.

Archives, recovery, and reinterpretation

The Patagonians’ encounter with ancient history made the costs of that distortion vivid. Archaeologists found durable metal plates in the basement of a shattered pylon in China. The plates were ancient printing blocks, bearing crowded writing; further deposits followed, and the language was deciphered over time. Within three centuries, researchers had reconstructed the outline of the earlier culture and confronted the history of humanity’s rise and ruin. The discovery overturned the Patagonians’ sense that they were pioneers: their achievements were slight beside the material civilization of the past, and their scattered knowledge settlements had once been an empire.

The recovery was not a simple inheritance of truth. The Patagonian scientists tested what the records disclosed, distinguishing the achievements of earlier civilizations from the later degeneration of the World State. The discovery divided the population between those who rejected the new learning as a satanic lie and those who accepted its implications. For the latter, the past’s vast knowledge was at once daunting and hopeful; they argued that Patagonia might answer its lack of youthfulness with greater sanity. The archival encounter therefore supplied both historical evidence and a new, divisive demand about what the living should do with it.

The Second Men encountered a different kind of archive in the Siberian Stone Library. Engineers came upon its broken, disordered, weathered tablets while preparing to sink an energy shaft. Reconstructed with the help of a pictorial dictionary, the tablets interested the Second Men less as a source of scientific or philosophical instruction than as a vivid historical record of the earlier species. The worldview they described seemed too naïve and artificial to serve as reliable knowledge of the universe, but the tablets offered an invaluable view into the minds that had produced it.

One record carried a more personal significance: a biologist leading the Siberian party had preserved much of the sacred text of the Life of the Divine Boy, including the prophet’s final words. The Second Men recognized in those words an intuition familiar from their own experience, rather than treating it merely as an unattained ideal. Such encounters show why the past matters to the crusade: an old text may be intellectually limited yet still preserve a possibility of experience that a later people can recognize anew.

How the Last Men seek to help

For the Last Men, entering past minds creates a particular obligation. They seek to offer intuitions of truth and value that would have been beyond the unaided past, directing individuals and races toward beauties implicit in their experience but otherwise overlooked. Their intervention is not uniform. With a mind of unusual originality and power, they can suggest only a vague intuition, which the individual reshapes into a form suited to that age. With an average mind whose circumstances serve their purpose, they can convey more detailed ideas, though that person cannot transform the material into a comparably potent cultural creation.

Their early attempts at influence were often disastrous. The Last Men attribute some historical claims of messages from gods, fiends, or the dead to the confused results of their own experiments. Even the book through which their account reaches the past was, they say, conceived admirably but emerged from a contemporary writer’s mind in disorder and largely as rubbish. The episode makes the crusade’s method precarious: the intention to assist does not ensure that an idea will arrive intact, or that its recipient will understand it as intended.

Love, beauty, and the work of remembrance

The Last Men’s first motive is their growing knowledge of past people. By entering their minds, they become intimately acquainted with them and, as a result, love them. Learning and loving each past mind becomes an act of filial piety: the relation creates something new and beautiful in the cosmos. They aim to understand each mind with greater comprehension than that mind could bring to itself, and to exclude none—not even the least or the worst—from this work of understanding and admiration.

A second motive is aesthetic as well as historical. The Last Men regard humanity’s successive planetary lives as a profoundly beautiful process, though one far from perfect and beautiful in the manner of tragic art. If that process is beautiful, their participation at particular points in the past is part of what makes it so. The past is therefore not merely an archive to inspect or a population to console from a distance: it is a necessary part of the living pattern in which the Last Men themselves take part.

Cosmic hope and the return to action

The Last Men’s account gives the rescue of the past a possible cosmic consequence. If the cosmic ideal is ever realized, even briefly, the awakened Soul of All will embrace every spirit throughout time. Each spirit, including the least, would then seem to awaken as the Soul of All, knowing and rejoicing in all things. Though the stars’ inevitable decay would end that vision, the Last Men consider the possibility that the awakened Soul of All would have eternal being, and that every martyred spirit would thereby possess eternal beatitude. They do not claim certainty: if this possibility fails, the past’s martyrs remain only martyred, not blessed.

The project also serves an immediate purpose in the Last Men’s own declining world. Their final energies must go not only to ecstatic contemplation and exploration of the past, but to designing an artificial human seed, producing it in immense quantities, and projecting it among the stars. That demanding work requires lengthy physical research and worldwide manufacture, and will continue as their constitution weakens and their community begins to disintegrate. The Last Men turn to the past for help because their peace and acceptance of fate have made them reluctant to struggle. Remembering earlier, often forlorn ventures rekindles their primitive zeal for life: they return to their own task able to work as though victory alone mattered, while retaining their hard-won peace. The crusade thus joins attention to the dead with the labor of preserving life beyond the Last Men themselves.