My first teacher in psychohistory was Isaac Asimov, a university lecturer and writer. I learned from his books that history cannot be in books. The story - the real one - is present in the collective psyche and in the matter involved in events. What is called "history" is at best a chronicle adjusted to meet the needs of the powerful involved in the events described .. or it reflects the ideological positions of the narrators, who in any case must always deal with the power in charge. We also see it in the current chronicles, those of newspapers, radio and TV, in which the narration of the facts is always adjusted in order to satisfy a "power" or an "idea" ...

Isaac Asimov, as the name suggests, was an American Jew of Russian origin, his secret passion was to imagine incredible intergalactic events, which never happened but could have happened .. In short, he was a professor and wrote scientific books .. but come on more he was known for his science fiction novels .. And it is on one of those novels that I learned the concept of psychohistory ... But obviously that concept was just sketched in order to leave the reader, like me, room to hypothesize implications and occult meanings.

Well, at this point I no longer know if in my mind I am following Asimov's hypotheses or if a new inspiration has taken over that allows me today to speak so freely and fully about this matter. In the meantime, let's begin to establish what psychohistory means (for me).

According to the theory of another great scientist (also of Jewish origin), Albert Einstein A form that manifests itself in space is simply lasting over time. As if to say that the energetic projection of the form is identifiable only in relation to its temporal continuation. Hence the idea that everything and every event are simple space-time projections, and therefore "imaginary", that is, perceptible through consciousness, which is indeed an inseparable continuum ... Only a reflected consciousness, that of the mind, is able to stop the frames in the chaotic space-time energy flow making the forms, the facts, in short what makes up the development of the action, not only visible but also consequential and sensorially experimentable.

In the description of events, defined as history, the observer's impression prevails (as highlighted above), this is the characteristic of the individual mind which, perceiving through the network of its predispositions, interprets and adjusts the meanings of the actions experienced or reported.

At this point, in order to know the "truth", it is necessary to turn to psycho-history, or the ability to read the automatic, empirical memorization of the non-perceptible accounting record, present in all the events. So if we want to know the true story, it is necessary to enter the Akashic store of the vital mnemonic function, which is present in a holographic key in each of us.

We must fish in the unconscious, we must perceive what is present in the universal mind in the form of a psycho-physical mnemonic trace. It is necessary to understand the events narrated not only from the point of view of the narrator but from that of the various characters described. It is necessary to sink into the archetypal world and be able to recognize oneself in each of the evoked “models”. We must let go of reason and analysis to dwell on the collective memory from which messages and insights different from the conclusions described in the official history can thus emerge.

Isaac Asimov set out to achieve this through the residual memoric analysis imprinted in the objects involved in the events. For example, if we wanted to establish the truth about the events that accompanied Gaddafi's death, even in the absence of his corpse, which obviously could be the best transmitter, we could use any object he owned and used in those fateful moments .. his golden gun? His boots? But I personally do not support this "physicalist" view, preferring the "psychic" one of reworking within the mind, with specific references to the event, through a kind of meditative trance, a bit like what happens to mediums during séances.

With this method, "overwhelming" results can be obtained with respect to the opinions on the causes of historical events, for example in the analysis that establishes the reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire, both the decadence of customs and the decline of the of the barbarians but the consequences of the Christian affirmation are never taken into account, which was truly a disintegrating and destructive fact of the Roman world, transforming it from a secular political civilization into a mere religious foundation.

And here it seems useful to me to make a small disgression. After the discovery of the Qumran scrolls it became evident that the teachings and chronicles contained therein anticipated in fact all Christian teachings. Only that those scrolls were long before the hypothetical birth of Christ. After the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, the Jewish diaspora intensified (which had already begun from time immemorial as the Jews were already present in many places in the world). Among the various Jewish groups or sects that of the Essenes was the most spiritually qualified and the least rooted in rabbinic traditions. The Essenes pursued a "humanitarian" philosophy in which a "universal" ideology was already prefigured, which was then continued by the Christian church. Furthermore, the Essenes had understood one thing ... that in the Jewish scriptural imagination the arrival of a messiah, the savior of Israel, continued to be envisaged. But dozens of messiahs - or self-defined ones - had passed over the centuries and the result had always been disappointing. For this reason the Essenes decided - pragmatically - that it was no longer worthwhile to project the coming of the Messiah into the distant future (which for all the other Jews was a reason for hope and strength to continue to maintain the "faith") and intuited also that a religion that was transmissible only by direct inheritance (genetically) could not triumph among human populations. They therefore decided two things that radically changed their structure, enlarging it more and more, and also making their "religion" more affordable for everyone.

First of all they established that the messiah should not have come in the future but had already come in the past and they "described" (as a historical fact) a character (who from the point of view of the Roman official chronicles never existed) putting into his mouth those teachings part of their tradition (that of the famous Dead Sea scrolls mentioned above) and above all they established that you could adhere to their "religion" not only for wealth but also for conversion…. That was the cause of the definitive fracture between the Essene sect and traditional Judaism and from that fracture Christianity was born (which assumed its own specific identity starting from the third century AD or rather from the year 1000 of Rome).

This illustrative path, which I have told you here, is the result of a psycho-historical "reading". And now let's go forward, indeed let's go even further back in time and history.

Do you remember Methuselah? But without dwelling on him you will remember all the stories of all the traditions in which it is told how in mythological antiquity men lived for hundreds of years. Well, in the very remote antiquity the calculation of time was not done in "years", being that the result of a subsequent evaluation and understanding, time passed and was calculated on the basis of visibly more effective facts. It was calculated in moons. All calendars of antiquity were lunar calendars. The age of people was based on the number of moons. Even relatively recently, when the British invaded North America, the Aborigines calculated their age in moons. And how many moons are there in a lifetime?

Obviously there can be hundreds - if not thousands - considering that there are 13 new moons in a year, so an average life (in the distant past) of about 30 or 40 years became a life of 400 moons and more. If a man happened to live for 80 years, his existence enumerated a thousand moons ... which gives a different meaning to the life span of various patriarchs and company ... (in fact from the genetic point of view we know that the duration of life in man has never come to span the hundreds or thousands of years as stated in the mythological stories.

But let's continue with the 13 moons .. which among other things were connected to the fertile periods of women and therefore the calculation in moons was an excellent system to describe the events of life, and in fact for thousands of years the value of existence was based on the female capacity to procreate, on the importance of women as the matrix and expression of Mother Earth. And the moon, as we know, is a feminine symbol par excellence, linked to instinct, intuition, magic, etc.

Then a reversal of values took place, without wishing to examine the causes here, let's say that a patriarchal or solar culture took over. From that moment on, time had to be calculated in rational quadrature, through the understanding of the movement of the solar star. Thus the twelve months were born, as fragments of a year, and from that moment on the "solar" years were the yardstick of everything that happens on earth. So life (measured in years) seemed to get shorter. Another implication is that to stay in the 4 seasons the months had to be even and not odd.

The primordial archetypes, which originally were 13 like moons, in a path concluded between one spring and the next (in the ancient lunar calculation the year began in March), here we had to adapt to the new calculation, and human civilization gave up to a model, to a symbolic divinity. The zodiac signs in solar astrology are in fact 12, and all connected to the way of acting in the world, while the element of spiritual conjunction has been lacking.

Once the thirteenth archetype was eliminated, the same thing happened with the disappearance of the fifth element (originally there are five elements: ether, air, fire, water and earth), the more subtle, the ether, which also represents the spirit. In short, the adjustment to the solar and patriarchal meter excluded both an archetype and an element from the existing. We know that the missing element is the ether (however in the ancient Indian tradition it still exists) but what is the missing archetype, the 13th ...?

Here I introduce a psycho-historical discourse that was inspired by the careful study done by another Jew of Russian origin, Alejandro Jodorowsky, on the archetypes embodied by the Arcana of the Tarot. A few words about the Tarot won't hurt.

Covelluzzo da Viterbo says: “Year 1379; the card game that comes from Seracenia and is called naibi was brought to Viterbo ... "This is the first historical certification of the advent of the Tarot in Italy," nabi or navi "in the Semitic languages means" prophet or soothsayer "but certainly also this system very remote divinatory comes from the Indus Valley. The complete Tarot is composed of 21 major Arcana + 0 (mad) and 52 cards (minor arcana) divided into four suits.

But right now what I'm interested in highlighting is the aspect of Arcanum XIII. This Arcanum has no name, tradition makes the mistake of arbitrarily attributing to it that of "Death", perhaps simply because the image portrayed is that of a skeleton that advances holding a scythe. Usually death is described in these guises .. but if we analyze more carefully we discover that - first and foremost - the Arcanum XIII did not write - like all the other Arcana - the name on the card, it is a nameless Arcane.

Then if we observe the portrayed figure we discover that on the spine there are highlighted the points corresponding to some important Chakras, especially the one at the base of the coccyx, the traditional seat of Muladhara (Root Support in Sanskrit, and in fact it is attributed the Earth value). Muladhara, seat of the Universal Mother Kundalini, represents the creative force (in a feminine key) imagined as the infinite generating capacity in the form of a snake coiled on itself. When this energy awakens, the spiritual path begins. The truth and direct experience of the unity of matter and spirit make their way into the consciousness of the initiate. Still observing other details of this map we discover that there are two severed heads on the ground, one female and the other male, surrounded by various organs of locomotion and action (hands and feet) also severed.

The spectrum, as we said above, advances along a path and seems to make its way by eliminating the concepts of masculine and feminine and the organs with which man performs actions in the world, that is the sense of acting and of considering himself the author of lived events. This identification in duality is clearly the ego (individual self) .. and the ghost, or Spirit, by eliminating the separative illusion leads the soul towards liberation.

And now we see how this Arcane XIII is in essence, the secretly transmuted and preserved image of the disappeared 13th lunar archetype ... It is the archetype that brings everything back to the Whole, to what it has always been. It leads back the spirit, deluded by the forms and by the temporal and spatial separation, to the all-encompassing and eternal Spirit ...

In short, the "missing" archetype is the one canceled by the patriarchal monotheistic religions that have transformed the knowledge of the non-dual Absolute, into knowledge of good and evil, in the form of a tempting serpent that distances man from God ... While it is exactly the opposite ... that is, it is the exclusion of the spontaneous and natural spiritual consciousness of man (and the introduction into the culture and the human psyche of religious concepts based on the historical "description" of a linear creation made by a God separated from his own creation and its creatures) which contributes to the alienation of the individual self from the Whole.

In short, the missing XIII archetype is Lay Spirituality…

Paolo D’Arpini