IMMUNITY, MORTALITY, AND PRECOCITY 165

the nature of the event, be apt to make in the psychic constitution of the
necromancer will manifestly be apt to vary in accordance with the de-
gree of the patient's powers of resistance at the time when he wantonly
infects himself with the bacillus; and in the history of a healthily grow-
ing civilization, so long as the growth has not been cut short by a break-
down, we may presume that every further decade, generation, and
century of growth will enhance the robustness of the growing body
social's constitution and accordingly will, to that degree, increase its
capacity for carrying Atlas' load without collapsing under the weight of
the incubus, even if the patient's vitality, in the hour of crisis, does not
prove lively enough to enable him to avoid falling into an Atlantean
stance by responding to the challenge with an Antaean rebound. The
better the spiritual health of the victim of a renaissance at the time of his
self-inflicted ordeal, the better his chance of metabolizing the uncanny
treasure that he has wrested from the coffers of Hades, and, in metabol-
izing it, constraining it to serve his weal as an elixir instead of working
his woe as a cancer. A subconscious awareness of these saving truths
reveals itself in phenomena that have already come to our notice in the
present Part of this Study. This is, in fact, the reason why divers ele-
ments in the culture of a dead antecedent civilization are apt to be re-
suscitated in a chronological order that is the inverse of their original
sequence in the history of the civilization that has been their native
milieu.1 It is also the reason why a necromantically inclined society is apt
to discriminate among the ghosts that are within range of its magician's
wand by studiously ignoring shades whose psychic stature would dwarf
the wizard's if he were so foolhardy as to reanimate them, while at the
same time he may be eagerly courting other shades whose psychic
stature is not thus unmanageably incommensurate with his own.2

(IV) THE STERILITY OF THE BLACK ART

Even, however, when a necromancer avoids or escapes the nemesis
of being enslaved by a ghost that he has reanimated at his own expense
by nurturing it with a transfusion of his own life-blood, the sterility
to which even the least noxious achievements of the Black Art are con-
demned ex officio originis is exposed remorselessly when these are com-
pared with the contemporary achievements of a necromantic society's
native genius.

In the field of politics, for example, it is evident that, in the Medieval
chapter of Western history, the master-institution was not an Imperium
Romanwn Redivivum but was a newly created Papal Roman Respublica
Christiana* and that in Arabic Muslim history it was, not the Cairene
ghost of an 'Abbasid Caliphate, but a novel self-recruiting Mamluk corps,
that endowed this society, in its infancy, with the strength to hold its
own even against the world-conquering Mongols.4 In the modern chapter
of Western history, again, the indigenous Western institution of parlia-
mentary representative government eclipsed the resuscitated Hellenic

* See pp. 124-30, above. a See pp. 130-7, above.

3 See IV. iv. 405. * See IV. iy. 446-50.