D. THE PROCESS OF EVOCATION
(I) THE INVERSION OF AN ORIGINAL
HISTORICAL ORDER
A
" first sight it might seem possible to call up the whole culture of a
dead antecedent society en bloc, since ex hypotkesi the whole of
this dead society's history has already been played put to a finish, and,
just because it is all now dead, and is extant only in the tradition of a
living society, it might be expected to be also all now revocable simul-
taneously. Actually, as we have found in our survey of renaissances,1
the elements of a dead antecedent culture are apt to be resuscitated
piecemeal; and there are two reasons for this. One reason, as we have
seen,2 is that a ghost is never raised except for the immediate practical
purpose of obtaining its assistance for the solution of some pressing
problem in the necromancer's own life; and the clement which, with
this purpose in view, he selects for reanimation out of the compre-
hensive spectrum of a dead civilization's accumulated experience will
be only what is relevant to the current problem that is exercising the
necromancer himself at the time. If, however, the necromancer were
nevertheless to overstep the limit of his immediate requirements by
trying to resuscitate the dead culture in its entirety, a positive obstacle
to an integral renaissance would then present itself, The simultaneous
presence of elements of human action and experience that have never
been in existence simultaneously 'in real life* is only possible in a psychic
world in which these elements have been reduced to the tenuous con-
sistency of disembodied memories. As soon as the Will takes delivery
of these ghosts from the Intellect in order to translate them into real life
again, they once again become amenable to a law of real life which debars
incompatible institutions, ideas, and ideals from reigning simultaneously
in one and the same social milieu.
The most crack-brained Medieval Western votary of Hellenism
would never, for example, have dreamed of deliberately resuscitating,
side by side, a bevy of sovereign independent parochial city-states wot
Greca and an oecumenical Roman Empire which, in the history of the
Hellenic Civilization, had been the tardily applied antidote to the fatal
anarchy which the licence of parochial sovereignty had eventually let
loose upon the Hellenic World. When, in the twelfth century of the
Christian Era, these two resuscitated Hellenic institutions did come
face to face with one another in a Western arena as a result of the un-
co-ordinated operations of rival schools of Medieval Western necro-
mancers, their inherent incompatibility promptly brought them into
violent collision; and it proved impossible to make a Medieval Northern
and Central Italy safe for a plenary indulgence in the Greek vice of
parochial sovereignty without reducing 'the Holy Roman Empire' to
nonentity.
For these reasons the ghosts of elements which, in the life of a dead
* On pp. 6-114, above.	a On «r»- TrR-** •km**