358	LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY
this impression faithfully reflected the patent historical truth that the
Scandinavian peoples' tour de force of grafting themselves on to the
stem of an alien Western Christian Civilization had been achieved by a
forced march.
Part of the price of this feat of acceleration had been the cultural
impoverishment to which the Nordiska Museet bore witness; for the
banality of the Italianate Modern Western paraphernalia attesting the
Scandinavians5 success at that stage in drawing abreast of the main body
of Western Christendom was thrown into relief by the inimitable excel-
lence of the products of ages anterior to Scandinavia's cultural conversion
in the eleventh century of the Christian Era; and this excellence had
been one of the fruits of a previous Time-lag which the Scandinavian
converts to a Western Christian culture had subsequently made good.
The products of a Scandinavian Palaeolithic Age, Neolithic Age, and
Bronze Age had been excellent because a laggardly Scandinavian
craftsmanship had been wont to go on cultivating and perfecting im-
ported techniques and motifs long after these had been abandoned in
favour of some new-fangled device in the culturally precocious regions
in which these motifs and techniques had originated.1 To retain the
cultural advantages of laggardliness while achieving the tour deforce of
catching up with precocious neighbours was beyond the wit of the
Scandinavian or any other school of culture; and, over and above a cul-
tural acceleration's inescapable penalty of cultural impoverishment, the
Scandinavian Herodians also had to pay the further penalty of spiritual
demoralization2 which had likewise been the price of the Romans'
forced march to catch up with the Greeks,3 and of the Vandals' forced
march to catch up with the Romans.
After this glance at one instance of acceleration in the field of en-
counters between contemporaries, in which a long procession of Wes-
ternizing Herodians, extending from Hauk Erlendsson through Peter
the Great to Mustafa Kemal, had succeeded, through forced marches,
in catching up, at least on the surface of life, with the current Western
culture of their day, we may turn next to the field of renaissances in
which dead cultures had been brought back to life through being con-
jured up by living societies; and in this field we shall see that an accelera-
tion of cultural tempo is part and parcel of the response to the challenge
from the revenant which we have labelled 'the Antaean rebound'.4
This lively reaction to the evocation of a ghost is evidence that the
establishment of a psychic contact with the dead can be exhilarating;
and this at first sight surprisingly stimulating emotional effect of so
eerie an encounter is explained by the fact that the necromancer's com-
munion with the dead gives him a chance of sharing in experiences
which are still out of his reach in his own living world. This exciting
possibility is opened up by the gruesome art of Necromancy because an
experience that lies chronologically in the Past may be situate philoso-
phically in the Future, in the sense of being something that the necro-
mancer who has conjured it up out of a dead civilization's repertory has
1 See II. ii. 342-3; III. iii. 138 and 157,	2 See II. ii. 357-60.
3 See IV. iv. 505-10.	4 See pp. 140-8, above.