Ir6 RENAISSANCES

performing his act of magic—is at the same time able to call up, at will,
out of the storehouse of his memory, elements of the dead party's life
taken from all stages of this dead party's history that are on mental
record there. Moreover, the evocator has it in his power to bring on to
his inner mental stage simultaneously any number of events in the dead
party's history that in real life were not simultaneous but were successive.

The difference in the setting of the stages of renaissances and 'en-
counters in the flesh' also sets different limits to the number of the
characters that can take part in the play. In 'encounters in the flesh* the
possible number is limited only by the capacity of the habitable surface
of the planet for simultaneously providing coexisting human societies
with the habitat and subsistence requisite for keeping them all alive, side
by side, on minimum scdes of Z/eieTwraw/w and welfare. In renaissances the
maximum possible number of dramatis personae is three, since ex hypo-
then there can be no more than two dead civilizations whose ghosts the
living necromancer will be able to conjure up out of the Sheol of his own
subconscious psyche by animating some memory of them that has been
lying entranced there. There cannot be an intact mental record where
there is not an unbroken cultural tradition; and there can be only two
dead antecedent civilizations with which a living society will have been
able to maintain this necessary cultural contact across the gulf of an
intervening social interregnum.

One of the two will be the civilization to which the living society is
'affiliated* ;* the other will be a contemporary of this antecedent civili-
zation which has been implicated with it through an 'encounter in the
flesh5 at the time when those two now dead civilizations were simul-
taneously alive, and which, in the course of this encounter, has imparted
to the 'apparented' civilization's internal proletariat the 'spark of life'
or 'germ of creative power' inspiring a church, incubated in the bosom
of this proletariat, which has eventually served the 'affiliated* society as
a chrysalis.2 In the history of the Western Civilization, for example, the
renaissances that our foregoing survey has brought to light will be found
to be revivals of some element of the life either of an antecedent Hellenic
Civilization, to which the Western Civilization is 'affiliated1, or else of an
antecedent Syriac Civilization, contemporary with, and implicated with,
the Hellenic, to which the Western Civilization is related through a germ
of creative power derived from the Syriac Civilization by a Christian
Church that has served the Western Civilization as its chrysalis.

Until not much more than a hundred and fifty years before A,D. 1952,
renaissances and 'encounters in the flesh' were the only kinds of con-
tact between one civilization and another of which there had been
historical instances within the Time-span of some five or six thousand
years during which societies of this species had been in existence up to
date. But, within a period inaugurated by the French invasion of Egypt
in A.D. 1798 (to give this new era a convenient, though conventional,
initial date), a third kind of contact had been established through the
enterprise of Late Modern and post-Modern Western archaeologists.
These brilliant pioneers of historical exploration had succeeded in
* See I. i. 43-44. a S«e I, i. 57,