I quote this from Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, in a passage in the fourth chapter where the young hero, Joseph Knecht, visits the Benedictine historian Father Jacobus. When I first read this line decades ago, it stayed with me, and has always been one of those foundational ideas I can’t shake. Nor want to.

It probably had all the more effect at the time because I was about to leave The Process at the time, and The Process had its own uber-theory, or theories, of history. We had our cycles, our Game of the Gods, our divinely ordained passage through human existence, and here was a writer I’d previously admired saying that history, at least as The Process outlined it, was bunk.

I never entirely accepted Hesse’s view, but I do accept that we can’t know the processes of history. The Archduke Ferdinand was simply one of a string of imperial assassination victims (including his mother, the Empress Elisabeth), when he was murdered in Sarajevo in 1914. The result? Vast armies slaughtering each other across the east European plains and from the Swiss border to the coast of Holland for four horrendous years. Or a vain, deluded and overbudgeted Saudi punk persuades some equally disaffected young men that he has God on his side, they take out a few thousand people in New York … and Iraq, of all places, is plunged the outermost circle of hell much deeper into the Inferno.

And so on. The rationale isn’t very rational at all, even if we factor in supposedly omniscient conspirators.

I was complaining recently (Omar and Dan the Poor Taxpayer) about comments on news sites, which so often seem like cheap-shots from the back of the stands. When a propane facility exploded recently in Toronto, with devastating results, I recall a comment to the CBC site that lamented it hadn’t taken out a troubled ethnic neighbourhood not far away. Today, with a plane crashed in Madrid and 150 people killed, on the same site a “Christian” was gloating that they must all have been sinners who merited their demise, while armchair physicists were offering dubious theories on how a burning engine could or could not cause a crash. And so it goes: meanness upon meanness, stupidity upon stupidity. ’Twas ever thus, but until a few years ago we could only write to the editor, which meant paying for a stamp, and also having to spell words properly.

But what strikes me most about such comments is that we live in an almost anhistoric world. Certainly, in an anti-historic one. We don’t know our own traditional narratives any more, and we don’t know how unpredictable and unknowable life – history, that is – apparently has to be. If we did, could we fire off opinions on that plane crash when smouldering corpses are still being pulled from the wreckage? Instead, we would view the event against the extremely high level of safety in flying today, taking note of the thousands of incidents where back-up systems or good piloting prevented anything worse than brief inconvenience. Simply knowing that flying is one of the safest of all modes of travel (albeit one of the least comfortable) needs a sense of history – of the ebb and flow of things, and the sheer complexity of ... well, complexity.

It’s here, I find, that my professed Thelemic banner is most likely to be furled. Thelema’s primary text, the Book of the Law, states that a new Aeon began in 1904, that of the Solar Son, which follows that attributed to the Dying Father-God. Horus has replaced Osiris, and the old has given way to the new. This is one of the few dogmatic statements in Thelemic philosophy, though admittedly the student is encouraged to test it against perceived reality. I personally find it very plausible, based on the stated criteria for the warlike Son and the ‘formula’ of the dying or dismembered or crucified Father. But it is, on an empirical basis, very hard to prove. Even setting aside his Christian background as a Benedictine monk, Father Jacobus would surely be shaking his head over it.

The usual Thelemic answer is that those who accept the Book of the Law agree that “thou hast no right but to do thy will,” and knowing the will (which here means the essential core-reality of oneself) of another or others, is irrelevant. That within us Which guides us, once we give it a voice and a place, knows and shows what needs to be known. Yet to relate meaningfully to What that is, requires an appreciation of history. Aleister Crowley, into whose bewildered ears the Book was dictated in 1904, understood that for inner guidance to be effective, we need to know the nature of the world through which we are to be guided, and he insisted his students become proficient in science as well as in the major schools of mysticism.

Yet after all, we still have to accept the imponderable and the unknown – the faith which Hesse’s fictional historian insisted upon. Awareness of how we, as individuals, as nations and as a species have come to where we are, is the best way to be able to contemplate the vastness of That which we are not.

Sometimes scholars can be unintentionally funny, like one whose words I came across yesterday while checking the Wikipedia entry on the Battle of France in 1940. The German victory that year is attributed to Nazi weaponry, communist-undermined morale, the low birth-rate in France after World War 1, and innumerable other factors. The Wikipedia text also quotes a Canadian historian by the name of John Cairns, who had “in a number of articles warned against the tendency to read the defeat into all previous events.”

Obviously, he had studied Father Jacobus’ wise words. History is, on the surface, about facts, which frequently lead to bafflement. But in the end, its proper study leads to wonderment.