Each Particle of Matter Is a Register of All That Has Happened

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 8 pages

The oddest item in this batch, and the only piece of speculative fiction in it. The manuscript is in Blavatsky's handwriting, was found in the Adyar archives, and was first printed in The Theosophist in 1929, nearly forty years after her death; it was never finished. The device is a narrator writing five centuries in the future who opens by placing the good days of old — in fact, 1879 — and who condescends to the comparative ignorance of that age, great as the nineteenth century was.

The joke sustains itself. Newspapers, this future historian recalls, were briefly printed on cloth that could be washed and used as pocket handkerchiefs, until a preacher in love with his own sermons and afraid the rats would eat them prompted the discovery that changed everything. What follows is the Antitypion — an apparatus by which, from a comfortable armchair and by signal through a private telephone, one may specify a point in the space around oneself and have long-past scenes from the life of any chosen individual re-enacted there, voices included. Behind the comedy is the serious proposition of the title, which the rest of the library states in earnest: that each particle of matter is a register of all that has happened, and matter the mirror of futurity.

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