Juliusz SŁOWACKI «GENESIS from the SPIRIT» (v1.1)

Juliusz SŁOWACKI «GENESIS from the SPIRIT» (v1.1 Dec 9 2025) 

On the rocks of the Ocean, Thou didst place me, O Lord, that I might recall the ancient deeds of my spirit, and suddenly, I felt myself as an Immortal Son of God from the past, a creator of visibility, and one who offers Thee voluntary love on golden garlands of suns and stars. For my spirit, before the creation’s beginning, dwelt in the Word, and the Word was in Thee, and I was in the Word. And we, spirits of the Word, demanded forms; and forthwith Thou madest us visible, O Lord, permitting us to draw forth the first forms from our own will and love, that we might stand revealed before Thee. Thou didst then separate the spirits who chose light for their form from those who elected to manifest themselves in darkness; the former bound to suns and stars, the latter to earths and moons, they began the labour of forms, from which Thou, Lord, dost ever reap the ultimate harvest: Love — for whom all things were created, through whom all that is born comes into being. Here, where behind me blaze rocks of gold and silver studded with mica, like huge shields dreamed before the eyes of Homer; here where the sun, speeding across the heavens, floods my shoulders with flame, and in the roar of the sea is heard the ceaseless voice of Chaos labouring upon form; here where spirits climb Jacob’s ladder by the same path I once trod; above these waves on which my spirit so often launched itself toward unknown horizons in search of new worlds: suffer me, O God, like a child to stammer forth the ancient work of life and to read it in the forms that are the writings of my past. 
For my spirit — the first Trinity, composed of Spirit, Love, and Will — soared above the abyss, summoning fraternal spirits of like nature; by love it awakened will within itself and transformed a single point of invisible space into a flash of magneto-attractive forces. These became electric and thunderous, unfolding in warmth within the Spirit. But when my spirit, grown slothful in its task, failed to bring forth its solar essence and strayed from the way of Creation, Thou didst punish it, Lord, with the strife and discord of its inner powers; Thou forcedst it no longer to shine with light but to blaze with destroying fire; making it debtor to the worlds of moon and sun, Thou didst turn my spirit into a whirlwind of flame and hung it above the void. And lo, in the heavens appears a second ring of luminous spirits, akin to a crown of fire yet of a purer and redeemed nature: a golden angel, hair streaming, mighty and ravishing, seizes a handful of globes, whirls them like a fiery rainbow, and sweeps them after him. Then the three angels — solar, lunar, and planetary — coming together, established the first law of dependence, succour, and weight; and from that time I called the season of light day, and the season bereft of light I called night. Centuries passed, O Lord, yet never once did my spirit rest throughout those bygone days: ever labouring, it turned each new thought of form into form itself; in accord with the planetary Word it set down law, then submitted to its own law, that it might stand upon the foundation thus laid and devise for the spirit new and loftier paths. Already within the rocks, O Lord, the spirit lies as a statue of perfect Beauty, still sleeping yet prepared for the humanity of form, girdled with the sixfold rainbow-garland of divine thought. From that abyss it brought back the mathematical science of forms and numbers, which to this day lies deepest in the spirit’s treasury and seems ingrafted without its knowledge or merit. But Thou knowest, Lord, that the diamond shape was born of living powers; that waters sprang from spirits in motion, lightly bound, learning balance; that upon the globe all was life and transmutation — and what we now call death, the passage of the spirit from one form to another, was not yet. Behold, I summon before Thee, my God, these hard crystals — once the first bodies of our spirit, now forsaken by all motion yet still alive, crowned with clouds and lightning: these are the Egyptians of the primal nature who, scorning movement, loved only duration and repose, and built themselves bodies to last millennia. How many thunderbolts hurled against the basalt of the primal world, how many subterranean fires and convulsions didst Thou employ, Lord, to shatter these crystals and reduce them to the dust of earth — the wreckage of the first colossi raised by the spirit’s attraction? Didst Thou bid the spirit destroy itself? Or in terror did it cast down upon its own head the vaults it had raised? And thus from the riven rocks it won fire — the first spark, perhaps like a mighty moon, burst from the ruin of stones, became a pillar of flame, and stood upon the earth as the Angel of Destruction; it lies now in the depths beneath the seven-day crust of our works and ashes. Then, O Lord, the first spirits advancing toward Thee through the martyrdom of fire made Thee the first offering: they offered themselves to death. What was death to them was to Thine eyes, O God, only the spirit’s sleep in one form and its awakening in another more perfect, without memory of the past or the least recollection of former visions. Thus the first sacrifice of that lowly snail which besought Thee, O God, to grant it fuller life within a fragment of stone and thereafter to destroy it by death, was already an image of the sacrifice of Christ the Lord and did not remain barren: Thou didst reward that death — the first to appear in nature — with the gift we now name organism. From that death, the first offering, sprang the first resurrection. And by Thy grace, Lord, the spirit received the wondrous power to reproduce forms like unto itself; by this power spirits, fused together in diverse numbers, clashing and kindling their forces into fire, became creators of forms in their own likeness. Spirits began, therefore, to die and to rise again instead of merely combining, flowing, joining, and disintegrating into gases. I know full well, Lord, that my spirit, lodged in the first spark, already lived wholly within the stone; yet to my wretched eyes it is only from this death and this first mortal sacrifice that the spirit begins to live visibly and becomes my brother. One single offering of the spirit to death, made with all the might of love and will, brought forth an innumerable progeny of forms — wonders my human tongue cannot now recount unto Thee, Lord; yet Thou knowest them all, for never did any later form arise from its predecessor without Thy knowledge. It was Thou who first took the suppliant spirit into Thy hands, heard its childish pleas, and according to its desire clothed it in a new form. How wise and how childish together are these forms! For every spirit, tormented by long suffering in a dwelling of discomfort, knew and with tears besought Thee, my God, for the repair of its miserable walls; and even when those walls were of pearl or diamond, it always offered Thee something of its former ease and treasure that the spirit might receive the greater portion according to its need. Ancient Ocean, tell me: how in thy womb were wrought the first mysteries of organism, the first unfolding of those nervous flowers wherein the spirit bloomed? Yet twice thou didst blot from the face of the earth those monstrous and clumsy forms of the primal spirit, and surely today thou wilt not unveil the marvels that God’s gaze beheld in thy depths. Giant sponges and plant-reptiles rose from the silver waves; zoophytes touched the earth with hundreds of feet, mouths turned toward the abyss. The snail and the oyster, having received from their father-rock a shield of stone, clung to the cliffs, amazed at life. For the first time prudence appeared in the snail’s horns; the need of shelter and the terror born of life’s motion fixed the oyster to the rock.  Then were born in the womb of the waters monsters wary, slothful, and cold, who in despair withstood the tossing of the waves and awaited death in the very place of their birth, knowing nothing of any further nature. Tell me, Lord: what were the first prayers these creatures addressed to Thee, what strange and monstrous desires? For I know not which of those formless scarecrows, feeling in its nervous system tremor and tenderness, demanded a triple heart — and Thou gavest it, Lord: one in the centre, two like sentinels at the sides; and thenceforward the spirit dwelling in that form received from Thee the joy of birth in three hearts, and in three hearts the sting and pain of death. Tell me: which of those martyrs offered Thee two of its hearts and, keeping only one within its breast, turned all its creative power and longing toward curiosity, fashioning eyes which even now in fossil molluscs astonish by their perfection and which in the first days shone beneath the waters like enchanted carbuncles — living stones, moving, turning, beholding the world for the first time; ever open since then to serve as lanterns of reason, and nowdays for the first time voluntarily closed by doubters and named by sceptics traitors to reason, deceivers of experience. O my God, in the octopus and the cuttlefish I behold the revelation of brain and hearing; in the underwater world I see the complete first sketch of man — all its limbs already formed and moving, destined one day to grow together, yet then only a body torn asunder, filled with dread and horror. At last the spirit, worn out by combat with the vast waves of Ocean, offered Thee its three hearts; it tore sight from its weeping, martyred pupils; it took its mouth — that once sighed toward heaven — and set it beneath its feet, multiplied a hundredfold to draw the juices of earth; and it stood upon the land as a zoophytic fungus — spirit grown slothful, turned aside from the path of progress, offering even its nervous system for peace, for a form more lasting and less painful. Then Thou destroyedst that nature, my God, and of the beast that resembled a tree Thou madest a tree. And behold, O Lord, the fall of the spirit repeated once more. For its sloth upon the path of  progress, its longing to linger longer in matter, its care for permanence and the comfort of forms — these were and remain the sole sin of my brethren and of the spirits, Thy sons. Beneath this single law labour suns, stars, and moons; yet every spirit that goes forward, even stained or imperfect, merely because it has turned its face toward the final ends, though still far from perfection, is written in the Book of Life. How provident is Thy goodness, my God, to have preserved for me beneath remote layers spared by floods, beneath forests turned to coal by fire, that first attempt of the spirit to conquer earth, its first encircling with a nervous ring, its triple endowment with heart — which in man alone was bled, yet for the first time in Thy Son Christ suffered for others. 
Blessed are they who, without Thy Spirit’s aid, discovered this strange nature of primal creatures, lit it with reason’s lantern, and spoke of corpses, not knowing they proclaimed their own life. The lamp they left in those dark depths lighted my way when I entered; I found bones arrayed, almost in the order of life — lacking only Thy Spirit, O Lord, whose story Thou alone canst tell, for even today Thou feelest the pains that were suffered in the depths of ages past. Thou alone knowest how greatly suffered those of whom only bones remain. Thus the spirit offered Thee organism, my God, and with the remnant of its immortal strength conquered earth and kept alive the spark of life in vegetable forms. Its immensity appeared in heather, its wrath and resistance in harsh and thorny thistles that covered the earth with towering forests. Amid Thy stars sped this roaring globe, dark and dishevelled; mists and vapours hung like shreds of funeral crêpe upon the brows of nature’s first transgressors. I dare not look into those forests: there the branch raised in defiance against the storm smote the air with thunder’s roar; when heather-seed burst, a hundred thunderbolts seemed to sound at once; vapour burst from the ground with such force that rocks and basalt mountains, torn up and hurled skyward, fell again shattered into dust and sand. 
In clouds, mists, and darkness I behold the immense labour of the spirit — the kingdom of forest-Pan where the spirit toiled more for the body than for its own angelic nature. What after death was to fall from it — charred logs become coal, leaves rotted — was the greatest fruit of its labour, while the spirit itself, already raised above form, awaited fire and flood from Thy mercy. Then upon the dead forms of the primal creation, upon the petrified bodies of sea-monsters, descended a pillar of fire — the second destroyer, Enceladus warring against life: from his cloud-crowned brow poured the deluge, his fiery feet dried the ocean-beds; for ages this earth burned, glowing red before the Most High — the same earth which, after many ages, transfigured by the spirit of love, shall blaze with the fire of twelve precious stones in the radiance wherein Saint John beheld it burning incandescent above the abyss of worlds. O my spirit, even in the formless seed of thy beginning there already dwelt thought and feeling. By thought thou didst meditate new forms; aflame with feeling and the fire of love, thou didst beg them of thy Creator and Father. Thou didst gather these two powers into two single points of thy body — the brain and the heart; and what thou won by them in the first days of creation the Lord never took from thee again, but by constraint and pain He forced thy nature toward the making of better forms and called forth from thee a mightier power of creation. Terrified and angered by the body’s resistance, thou begannest to spin silver ribbons in the depths of the sea and didst enter the third and most terrible kingdom — the kingdom of serpents. 
It seemed that the charred trunks were resurrected of themselves from the ocean floor, turned their woody marrow into a nervous system, stretched forth thought and heart upon the land, yet first sent thought ahead as a wary scout armed with the lanterns of its eyes to go before the heart — with a prudence that bespoke the spirit’s terror. O Lord! Behold, I see the head of a giant reptile, the first to emerge from the calm bosom of the sea, feeling itself the master of all nature, sovereign of all perfection. With solemn gaze it surveys the whole vault of heaven, meets the solar orb eye to eye, and in terror hides again in the depths of darkness. Only after centuries of serpentine life does that same head dare rise once more for a second contest with the sun: it opens its gaping jaws, it hisses — and in that hiss it discovers the gift of voice, a gift likewise won by the labour of the spirit. Trembling, it returns to the womb of waters, asking whether among its treasures wrought in ages past there be anything worthy, Lord, to offer Thee for the voice — that song of feeling and reason which, centuries later, still sings Thee hymns and remains the bond and watchword of the spirits journeying toward Thee. From that time onward, O Lord, I hear the world filled with the groaning of nature in travail; I hear the lament of manatees rising from the steep cliffs above the sea, crying through the mist for Thy mercy. For the spirit within them suffers greatly, ever more conquered by sentiment. Behold, close to the heart appears the nursing breast – the seal of maternal love; behold, the blood of reptiles reddens and turns to milk (blood destined one day to gush forth, whiter yet, transformed into a fluid of diamond from the wounds of Christ crucified). At last is born that order which to shallow eyes brings everlasting terror and lamentation; for the spirit, having earned through toil a more perfect form, perceived the lowliness of the form it had cast off, despised it, and most often lay down like a son of Cain to gnaw the brain and wipe its bloodied mouth upon the hair of its younger brother. This was the first Cain-act of nature – harmful to the higher spirit, for it bound it to the spirit of a lower kind. Yet in Thy sight, O Lord, no link was broken in the great chain of being; rather, by hastening the death of bodies, the onward rush of spiritual life was quickened, and death – the law of form – remained, if I may so speak, the queen of masks and husks and garments of the spirit, and to this day she is a phantom that has no true power over creation.Thou knowest, O God, that I did not set out to describe all the works of Nature; that task belongs to the ages – to discover by what paths the creative spirit journeyed, what offerings it laid before Thee, what it took, what it lost, and what it won back again. That chain is still a mystery; the human spirit would be seized with dread if Thou, O Lord, were to unveil its whole history at a single stroke. Thou wouldst have to lead it by the hand like a child after suddenly opening beneath its feet such an abyss of knowledge and blinding its eyes with the lightning-flashes of Thy truth. Wandering and lost in contemplation of Thee, I have scarcely tasted joy in a few fleeting intuitions of truth while gazing at the creatures around me – often no more than a blade of grass or a tiny bird singing on the fence. Yet with what joy, O Lord, I saw that every thing unfolded before me from one single idea: the creative power of the spirit! Thou knowest it well – Thou who heldest back the spirit upon my lips and granted me yet a few more days of life, wholly given to this unending conversation with the mysteries of nature. I will no longer set before the eyes of men those other subterranean kingdoms and catacombs where lie the corpses of the second great forms – often no farther from us than the length of a spade, yet separated from the living world of today by the duration of countless ages. Like some great poet drunk with the nectar of the gods, the spirit that once dwelt in them drew itself before Thee, O Lord, in monstrous and gigantic shapes. In every shape there sleeps a memory of what went before and a revelation of what is to come; and in all of them together lies the revelation of mankind – the forms dreaming, as it were, of man. For through immense durations man was the final goal of the creating spirit upon earth. Yet all is disorder, all is straining effort. It seems the spirit creates in despair, not yet assured of its own power and creativity. It is precisely in the leaps from kingdom to kingdom that this monstrosity reveals itself… so that Thou, O God, didst destroy nearly all those intermediate forms, as though wishing, by a yet deeper mystery, to lend greater gravity to nature and, veiling the past, to turn our spirit more fully toward the future. In my dreams I see again, O Lord, those mournful moonlit nights of the first nature, the chaos of the serpent-kingdom; I see upon a broken crag that first lizard in whom the spirit already broods upon the thought of a bird’s head, upon the dream of Icarus-wings. For the spirit descending to earth must first circle the globe as a bird; it must possess a synthetic vision of nature – know how rivers flow, how far the forests stretch, whither the mountain chains lead. And by inspiration the first seer of Israel, the first singer of the Epic of Creation, knew that birds were granted precedence of birth over the beasts of the earth… that the spirits of the earth first rose upon wings, surveyed their future dwelling-place, and then offered up their flight as a sacrifice for a form more firmly rooted in the soil – a form capable of fuller dominion over the world. I smile now, O Lord, when I behold an unearthed skeleton that has no name in today’s tongue (for it is blotted out forever from the ranks of living forms). I smile when I see that first lizard with a bird-like beak and a single wing growing from its leg, setting forth like Columbus upon a voyage of discovery across the world – to spy out a dwelling-place for the heavy monsters that came after, devouring whole meadows of grass and stripping entire forests of leaf and branch. And who knows whether the faculty of producing light – now lost to spirit – did not once make of that quartermaster of monsters a fearful lantern burning high above the earth: a fiery dragon of which, even to this day, there lingers in the human soul some dark, terror-laden memory? Behind that dragon there crept upon the earth those dreadful vessels built of ship-bones by the Spirit – enamoured of the belly, eyes glittering for prey, ready to devour the world; a gigantic herd which thrice, O Lord, Thou didst sweep away with waves, and which now, beneath three shrouds of ash – as in three coffins – Thou keepest for our dread and remembrance.
What spirit, then, O Lord, was that fifth-evening Noah who barred the lizards and the monstrous elephants from entering the Ark already built, yet gathered therein the ancient forms that laboured to bring forth the human shape – creatures that now live in harmony and oneness? This mystery is veiled from me, O God; yet I behold therein Thy personal will and the laying of Thy hand upon the world – a hand Thou didst not remove from oppressed nature until the day of Thy final covenant with man, when Thou didst grant her her own laws, and to man, according to those laws, creativity and freedom of spirit. Thus, with the sixth day, the thought of man first stirred in spirit, and even the least blade of grass already bears it logically inscribed within its form. 
The Spirit, that worker of the Lord, began to create and advanced slowly, for in its age-long labour upon matter it had more than once fallen in love with form itself, grown angry, become infected with desire, and risen in rebellion against its own former laws. More than once it grew slothful and fell asleep upon the way of creation; more than once it drew back, O Lord, and sold its birthright for food, for a mess of lentils; whereas another, bolder though later born, clothed itself in sheep’s fleece, received the father’s blessing, and outstripped its elder brother’s offspring with its own. Thus must we understand that Mosaic “injustice” which Moses, by inspiration, knew to be justice in the spiritual world. For the whole history of spirit in nature is mirrored, as in a glass, in the history of mankind. To trace with certainty that chain of forms, one would need to raise the corpses of those five dead days and converse with the spirits of lost shapes – for the sages have already sought carnal knowledge of it; yet Thou knowest, O God, that certain transitional, monstrous forms, capable of passing from kingdom to kingdom, were not admitted into the Ark of Life. Because of these very missing links in the chain of creation, all efforts of merely formal observers will be vain; only he who begins from spirit and contemplates nature shall, in the depths of his own spirit, attain sure knowledge of her mysteries. Grant me now, O God, to feel once more – as it were for the second time – my pre-human labour… the labour of the sixth day, which my spirit, grown wise through five days’ schooling, accomplished: recreating all things anew, yet so that none of the gifts and properties already won should perish. Every tree is the grand solution of a mathematical problem, a mystery of number which, in less perfect plants, advances by even phyllotaxes and in progressive ones by odd, until in the whole tree it resolves itself into unity. That inward feeling of multiplicity resolved through unity is the first task, the deep joy and full contentment of the vegetal spirit. This primal colour we see upon the trees today is logical: it is the resultant of the yellow light by which plants are fed, mingled with blue air and water.  Those two atmospheric colours, condensed and compacted into plant tissue, wove for the spirit of the trees its first raiment – those emerald mantles and tresses already prefigured in the books of Moses by the fig-leaf with which man made himself his first garment. Therefore, O Lord, no colour and no shape of the tiniest leaf is indifferent to me, for each reveals the nature of spirit and recounts to me my own labour once performed within the plant. I know the meaning of every serration upon the leaf – for by every shape my spirit once explained itself. If, then, I trace the path of an evil but vigorous spirit that struggles desperately against the sea-wind, overcomes the resistance of the elements, rises upward, then—defeated—gathers itself again, only to shoot skyward once more with all the force it has amassed and drive back the tyranny of the elements; if, on both sides of a straight line leading to the goal, I twice draw its jagged zigzag of sharp angles, I shall obtain the prickly leaf of the thistle—its pallor and the very design of the path trodden by that evil yet mighty spirit which, beneath those stabbing angles, laboured in this plant to conquer form itself. But if a spirit of modest strength, meeting only modest resistance from the world, sketches its little path around the median line, I behold the finely serrated leaf of the rosebush, and I think: here is a spirit in which—not the serpent’s venom, not the oak’s raw strength, but the delicate property of beauty, perhaps even the very feeling of beauty, was born for the first time in the world. And such is now the path of the human spirit as was, centuries ago, the track it blazed when, as a plant’s leaf, it moved toward its ultimate ends. O how wondrous, O my God, that in those first strivings the spirits of plants created forms that would later repeat themselves throughout the organisation of the world—some of which have become today the glory of human invention!
Behold the daisy: it seems a single flower, yet in truth it is a nation of tiny flowers settled in one calyx and governed by one fertilising organ—a nation whose centre is held by citizen-flowers (for they labour and beget), while the white, sexless petals stand guard along the edges like an army of helots. O Lord, gazing upon this first marvel of the creative spirit, I already see that the same spirit, in its onward labour, will establish the swarm and kingdom of bees, the servitude of the hive and its royal order; that it will repeat the same pattern in flocks of birds; that at last, in a similar form, it will manifest among men—who do not suspect that the first idea of association and government germinated in the labour of plants and, passing through a chain of forms, had to unfold fully in human nature. And you too, republic of Athens, forgive me if I discern your origin in that little clover flower composed of equal yet distinct citizens who hold together not in a single calyx but upon one common stem—among whom Themistocles, though in no wise different from the rest, sits nevertheless at the pyramid’s summit and occupies the highest place. Until then, thought alone had been at work in the vegetable spirit: advancing along the stem it counted in threes, in the flower it expressed itself in fives; it was thought that gathered flowers around a single mother, creating family and the presentiment of nationhood. It seems it was purely mathematical thought that unfolded for ages in plants, while feeling—this astonished sap, this heart that reaches everywhere—drew meekly from the qualities wrought by thought its first lesson for the labour yet to come. Yet flower and fruit are already the outcome of both powers of the spirit working together; the sweetness of the plant’s final yield, or the biting poison in the berry of a thorny shrub, already fall under moral judgment. Already the apple could be pointed out to man as a symbol containing both the virtue and the sin of his own spirit; already, by eating it, one could unite either with the spirit of guilt or with the spirit of merit. For in bringing forth flower and fruit, the spirit already possessed knowledge of good and evil, the sense of beauty and of deformity; already it merited or sinned against the ultimate purpose of spirit. O first book of Creation! Everything in you is an unfathomable depth of knowledge and truth; yet as the veils are slowly drawn aside, you reveal and explain all things to those children who grow into the divine sonship.
Where, then, does your labour end, O vegetable spirit?  In your pensive brooding upon a more perfect organism; in the creation of those plants which, transmuted into a nervous system, could at once have appeared among living beings.  My God, it was not that insect I once saw pictured in books—so perfectly resembling a leaf—that enlightened me concerning this mystery of spirit; it might, after all, have been a mere play of nature, a simple accident of forming things.  But here, Lord—beneath a village hedge—I watched a pea push forth from a rotten seed and, like a green caterpillar, creep cautiously along its supporting stake.  
Everything that the spirit’s nature could offer the Lord from its vegetable organisation, it seems already to have offered up—for a more perfect life. The odd numbers within her already bear witness to the ultimate perfection of thought; the Spirit can neither amend nor transform them further. Yet behold, O Lord, how this frail and fragile plant, pale and forgetful of its own endurance, flings its desperate arms into the air; and its flower – already it yearns to break free from the stem, already winged like Psyche it beseeches Thee, Lord, for the flight of the butterfly. Thou wilt hearken to the prayer of that spirit, O God, and wilt suffer it to fashion the form for which it pleads; and that form – so fragile, yet eternal – it will bequeath to the brother-spirits that come after. O Lord! How much wisdom, how consummate a mastery of craft do I discern in the first and fulfilled supplications of the vegetable spirit! There, upon the sea-coasts where the biting salt in the dew gnaws even the bricks of human monuments, the spirits of the shore have devised velvets in which they clothe themselves; and, like Nymphs, upon their bristling hair they poise aloft the silver pearls that fall from the tresses of the Oceanids; thus the sun drinks those airy diamonds, and the sea’s corrosive tears are dried ere ever they reach the vegetal heart. Elsewhere, the Dryads of the lemon trees have fashioned mirrors against the scorching arrows of the sun; riddled with golden shafts, they fling back the light with the lacquered lustre of their leaves…  Show me nature where the madness of the elements holds sway, where winds wrestle with waves, where plants cleft upon the rocks labour painfully to live – and, without asking any Dryad, from the depths of my own spirit I shall tell thee the prayer whereby those spirits besought God for their temporal form. For throughout the ages my spirit prayed and toiled even as they, and now it grieves when, amid wild nature, it beholds in pale plants that terrible labour. Here suffer me, O God, to betray one of the lesser mysteries of the spirit, perhaps to the premature scorn of judgment. The sense of smell is my witness of an age-old sojourn in vegetable forms, when the spirit of this body that I now bear was fashioning blood-vessels together with the feeling of beauty or deformity, and of venom. When I inhale the fragrance of the rose, for one instant, as though intoxicated, I forget the desires and sorrows of my human nature and return as it were to the time when the sole aim of my spirit was the creation of beauty, and the aspiration of scent was its only relief in toil and its sole delight. Thus, O Lord, I return for a moment to my childhood, and from the abysses of Genesis there comes to me a wind of refreshment and youth. In vain, O Lord, has science sought to explain this phenomenon to me by the action of odour upon the sense of smell; I asked of it the action of that sense upon my soul, which rejoices or grows sad in the sensation of fragrance. Such was the path, O Immortal One, whereby the poorest of angels and Thy most humble son laboured in the kingdom of the plants, until at last, in its ultimate form, he passed into a higher world and there encountered other streams of planetary toil, all hastening toward the final human form. There, O Lord, the snail – first dweller of the sea, cautious and assured of long life beneath its stony shield – at last made Thee the sacrifice of its pearly house and, by the spirit of desire, refashioned it into the horny shell of the tortoise; then, yielding yet more of its security, and having secretly wrought wings beneath its scaled shield, it flew forth as the scarab (that image of the Divinity among the Egyptians) into the butterfly-realms of the spirit… Throughout all that dolorous way of metamorphosis and unceasing labour it sacrificed not its fecundity unto Thee, O Lord, but kept a certain traditional likeness of forms and bore it from the depths of the sea even into the celestial kingdom of flight. And behold the kingdom of serpents which, in the pterodactyl of the first days, had already merited the wonder of flight – it offers Thee its lizard-wings in sacrifice, humbles itself before Thee, reddens its blood, and, through the whole class of annelids, creeps onward into the more perfect nature of insects. For in insects, O Lord, the spirit begins to fashion the first moral virtues: industry in the ant, social order in the bee. Thereafter it gathers and weds those same virtues in pairs, so that courage and nobility in the horse, fidelity and humility in the dog, are henceforth inseparable and dwell as sister-virtues even in human souls. Thou knowest, O Lord, that the entire table of the materialist philosophers – all faculties, instincts, and virtues wrought by the labour of Genesis – were given to man already almost complete, yet in the form of crude matter, that he might work them anew with knowledge, kindle them with the fire of divine love, and lead them toward fresh creation. I shall not recount these virtues nor these labours of the spirit, for every spirit will read them in the creature nearest to itself. I shall tell only of certain events that, in the progress of the spirit, seem to me singular and wondrous. At times the spirit, desiring a new form and a new ordering, reserved for itself a small difference between individuals – most often marked by colour alone. Certain flowers and creatures kept, as it were, by a concession wrested from God in perpetuity, a difference of hue or coat. God did not reject the spirit’s demand, but He punished the incompleteness of the offering with the weakness of a spirit not fully gathered into one sure form. For such flowers are mostly fruitless, and the birds and beasts of that kind entered into domestic service and sought the protection of higher spirits. The cat, having offered the Lord this one small thing without reservation, became the tiger – master of the wilderness. And we, O Lord, when we have surrendered all that made us unlike Christ, to what height of dignity and power shall we be raised in the holy hierarchy of Thy Word?
Yet even upon spirits that seemed sold into bondage Thou hast laid, O Lord, the hand of Thy singular grace and care. The Arab, drawing close to the horse and cultivating in him the spirit of nobility and courage, becomes to him a father of liberation; the shepherd, seated in the field with his dog, raises to himself and sets free the spirit of humility and faithfulness. In this mystery lies hidden the whole history of Joseph in Egypt – weaker than his brothers, condemned to servitude, yet in that very servitude he grew mighty and became the saviour of his own kindred. I see also, O Lord, that those virtues now rare among men had once their rare preparatory forms in the ancient kingdoms of creation – and this is to me a witness that we are, in spirit, the same who once fashioned those forms. For the virtue of diligence in man, the spirit laboured in ants and bees and in countless domestic creatures; whereas the rare, heroic spirit of nobility and might took seldom the form of the lion, or the breast of the eagle that loves the storm and the thunderbolt. And now, O God, I feel this whole nature, already heavy with spirit, crying out to Thee with its most perfect mouth for its final form – the form of man. For it knows that by the raising of one single spirit the whole creation is lifted even to its utmost bounds. And now, O God, I feel this whole nature, already heavy with spirit, crying out to Thee with its most perfect mouth for its final form – the form of man. For it knows that by the raising of one single spirit the whole creation is lifted even to its utmost bounds. Behold, for this last prayer to move Thee, O Lord, the trees have put on their fairest flowers and fruits, that they may show Thee the merit and the labour of the spirit in its most perfect shapes. Behold, the proudest creatures have gathered upon the meadow of Eden, forgetting their lusts, their rages, their blood-thirst, lifted in prayer above their own nature by the sighing of the spirit. Behold, the eagles have come, girt with garlands of swans and cranes; they hover in the heavens, encircled by wheeling rings of glittering birds – like Thine angelic court, like a living image of the rainbow-winged angels about Thy throne. And that was the one moment of Eden and of peace upon the earth. Then, O Lord, from among them Thou didst call the spirit that was already worthy of humanity; Thou didst hear him, judge him, and suffer him to take a new form upon the earth. And into his body, as into one book, Thou didst write all the mysteries of the ancient labour that was before man. That book lies to this day folded at the bottom of every human spirit. And though the whole race and all creation were to perish, O Lord, the last man alone would find within his spirit the whole labour of the past; and apart from the lost forms themselves, the inheritance of the globe would suffer no loss. Hosanna therefore to Thee, O Lord, for Thou art the Creator – and my spirit has at once the merit of its own creation. From what height shall I now descend? Shall I return to the old standpoint of knowledge – to that abyss where life before the cradle was mystery to me and the I see what I have wrought, and what yet remains to be wrought.future had no goal? No. Emerging from the past, I have set my foot as upon the rock of creation itself.  
I see what I have wrought, and what yet remains to be wrought. Behold, the greater part of this work my spirit has already performed together with humanity. Already above the instincts and virtues of the beasts it has gained many works of the truly human spirit, many powers already more than human – almost angelic. These works I shall recount to Thee, Lord, in other books. But now permit me, going toward the future, to turn once more toward the six-day abysses of resting and stiffened nature, and to bid her farewell. 
**O my spirit!**  When you were still locked in flint and offered the sacrifice of shape and duration, thinking you were sacrificing your eternity — when, I say, you offered yourself to death, the Lord accepted your gift, yet deceived you as a father sometimes deceives a dearly beloved son. For through that sacrifice you did not only, across the ages, attain man and could cry out with Eve: I have gained a man for the Lord! — no, the Lord gave you far more than you had ever dreamed: He granted you the eternity of ever-renascent forms, the power to bring forth anew a form like your own.  By this grace man, losing neither his immortality nor a single particle of his spiritual might, begets a form like himself — and that form becomes the dwelling-place of a spirit like himself. For he does not beget the spirit; rather, to a spirit already waiting to be born and akin to him, he gives a kindred body and thus leads a brother-spirit into the realm of the visible.  In this likeness lies the whole mystery of virtues preserved through generations — not poured, as it were, with the blood from body to body, but arising from the law that only like spirits can inhabit like bodies. This immortality of forms, won through death, reveals that by sacrifice the spirit gains dominion over death: it passes beyond the laws of inert matter, overcomes them, destroys them. Behold, O God, once the vast ruin-heaps of the ancient Roman Empire filled me with dread. My eyes searched in vain for even one column that might trace upon my retina the very shapes once traced upon the retina of Caesar. But all things wrought by human hand had changed their face; monuments raised to outlast the ages crumbled into dust; drops of dew had eaten away the eyes of marble statues. Uncertain whether any shape I saw had been seen centuries before, I noticed a sparrow alight on the sandy road and settle among the broken tombs. And at once my spirit knew with certainty: the self-same pattern of feathers, the self-same black throat had been seen by the legions of Varus. Truly, since then the seas have withdrawn and Rome has sunk beneath twenty feet of ash and dust. O spirit, worker before all ages! You know that within you dwells the principle of light that makes matter eternal — holy adversary of fire, the power that will one day, on the last day, transfigure you. 
That principle of redemption which in the future will bathe all faces of form in wondrous gold — it once showed itself only as a fleeting shadow in the depths of the elements: it clothed certain tiny sea-plants in uncertain rainbow gleam, turned certain butterflies into stars of the soul — then faded, bartered by wretched spirits for some more useful property. No longer is it seen among birds. The cranes that once led the migrating garlands of birds on their mournful night journeys no longer turn into lamps and torches; no longer do they cast ribbons of rainbow fire across the mist to guide bewildered sailors. And yet that golden light, O Lord — higher than the voice, far more able to express divine ecstasy — reveals itself to us in the future as the most perfect instrument of sacred song, as our heavenly nourishment in the City that descends to us from the clouds.  
From such works of ages, from such victories over chaos and storm, O my spirit, is woven your first crown and your first merit before God. The Lord has not forgotten your works — on the contrary, He has honoured them: He preserves the forms you created and permits no further improvement in them. Upon the book you filled with writing He has set the seal of His eternity; and when you prove worthy, when true understanding of nature awakens in you, He opens before you the golden pages of Genesis — pages you yourself inscribed in many scripts — that you may read them, fathom them, and compare them with that other mysterious book laid deep within your spirit.  
Therefore you rejoice, O spirit, each time you uncover one of the true mysteries of the painful way, and your conscience bears witness: you have truly read God’s thought enclosed in forms. Yet knowledge of the past is nothing if it does not unveil the whole future. In these books the mystery of death lies open, and there is clearly written the law of all further creation: sacrifice. Therefore never separate yourself from your Origin, O Angel made visible! Keep faith in the truth of thy conscience against the vicious habit of scientific routine. For in your holiness lies the liberation of the spirit, its coming power, its wisdom, the form of every future deed, its victory, its freedom, its deliverance from the yoke of falsehood and violence. 
O Lord, Thou who commandedst the murmur of the sea—the rustling of these airy meadows covered with fragile flowers—to teach me the words of this book, to awaken in me the knowledge dormant in the depths of my soul—make these words, written in a sigh, fly away like the wind and the roar of the sea; and when they touch those powerful but slumbering spiritual forces in my homeland, may they draw them from their unconsciousness to bring them to the clarity of their self‑knowledge. 
May from this Alpha, from Christ, and from Thy Word, the whole world be inspired and derived; may the luminous wisdom, created in souls by divine love, be the enlightenment of all science. 
This is what I ask, O my God and Lord: a clear‑sighted faith and the sense of immortality born of faith in souls.
This is what I pray to Thee, O God, my Lord—grant me a visionary faith together with the sense of immortality, aroused by such faith in souls. I ask Thee for the sun of divine wisdom, where I already see the Angel with the sword of the coming sacrifice. 
For upon these words — that everything was created by the Spirit and for the Spirit, and nothing for any material end — shall be founded the future sacred science of my Nation. In the unity of knowledge shall be conceived the unity of feeling, and the vision of those sacrifices which, through the spirit of our holy fatherland, lead to the ultimate ends.  O Father God, who according to the testimony of Christ our Lord has never yet been seen by any man on earth — You who through the blood-stained, tormented throng of the forms of Genesis looked upon me with a face dark toward matter yet merciful and just toward spirits and my spirit, and therefore all the brighter and closer: cause this one path of light and revelation — the path of love and understanding — to shine ever more brightly with the suns of knowledge, and lead Your chosen people, now walking the way of sorrows, into the Kingdom of God.
V 1.1 (Dec 9 2025)

(The above translation is a synthesis of computer translations carried out using Grok, Google Translate, DeepSeek, chatGPT, DeepL etc.)

J.S.'s "Genesis from the Spirit" in Polish: https://literat.ug.edu.pl/genezis/genezis.htm