Part III - De/tension

Summary

If ‘millennial accomplishment’ be more than a play on words, it is about playing profoundly and delightedly with time. Here in Part III our authors find their millennial subjects caught up in a French proverb: Réculer pour mieux sauter. Backing up so as to leap farther ahead, Western theosophists of the late-nineteenth century reversed the Brunonian and Baconian arrows of time so as to ground in ancient Egyptian and Vedic secrets a reincarnational future that was millennial in its vision of universal perfectibility and the infinite range of human communication. Backing up so as to leap farther ahead, the Free Energy Movement has been, like its patent applications, in perpetual motion, reversing entropy and installing the millennium by way of what lies imbedded in the universe itself, free for the asking, had we only known how to ask. Active in Theosophy and Free Energy is De-tension in two forms: reducing the tension between apocalypse and millennium through a set of heartwarming and astonishing revelations; de-taining the hidden energies of esoteric bodies in the interest of undoing exhaustion, death, and decay. Cathy Gutierrez puts American Theosophy in the context of a waxing disenchantment with liberal or mechanistic notions of progress; Fred Nadis puts the Free Energizers in the context of a technological revivalism and revivalist technologies that hearken back as often to the initial purities of first atoms and Adams as to the most current articles in Popular Mechanics.