Introduction to the English translation
Juliusz Słowacki’s [1809–1849] prose poem« Genesis from the Spirit » (likely written between 1844 and 1847) is a form of meditation—an account of a mystical vision experienced by a speaker who recalls his spiritual prehistory. The text describes the birth of the cosmos, life on Earth, the emergence of the first organisms, their evolution, and, finally, the birth of humanity. It is written as a naïve, childlike prayer—a conversation with the Creator. This rather short work is exceptional, filled with striking images of global catastrophes and depicting a process whose ultimate goal is the creation of life: a kind of “planetary factory” or machine whose final product is humankind. It features numerous monumental scenes, sometimes very cinematic; for example, here the author seems to observe the scene from space:"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 gaze into those forests…" The poem is occasionally interwoven with scientific observations and intuitions worthy of the greatest minds—for instance, the author’s reflections on mathematics in botany or a cosmology comparable to the modern theory of the Big Bang. As one commentator noted, “This reads like William Blake rewriting Genesis after reading Darwin—though infused with a Catholic sense of sacrifice and suffering,” or more succinctly, “William Blake plus paleontology.” According to Słowacki himself, this was “the most important work he ever wrote, as it contains the Alpha and Omega of the world”. The aim of this translation was to convey the author’s thoughts as faithfully as possible. It was created with extensive use of computer applications such as grok, deepseek, ChatGPT, QuillBot, Google Translate, DeepL, meta.ai, use.ai, mistral.ai, and others.
« Genesis from the Spirit v1.35»
Upon the Ocean rocks, Thou didst place me, O Lord, so that I might remember the ancient deeds of my spirit; and lo, suddenly I beheld myself as an Immortal Son of God from ages past—a creator of the visible world, and one who freely offers Thee love upon golden garlands of suns and stars.
For my spirit, ere the dawn of creation, dwelt in the Word; and the Word was in Thee[, and I in the Word].
And we, spirits of the Word, demanded forms. And straightway Thou didst reveal us to sight, O Lord, granting us to bring 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 planets and moons, they began the work of shaping forms. From this work Thou, O Lord, dost ever reap the ultimate harvest: Love — for whom all things were created, through whom all that is born comes into being.
Here, amid rocks of gold and silver, studded with mica like mighty shields from Homer's dreams, which blaze behind me; here where the sun races across the sky, bathing my shoulders in fire, and the sea's roar echoes the ceaseless voice of Chaos laboring to shape 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 scriptures 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 burst of magneto-attractive forces.
These became electric and thunderous, unfolding in warmth within the Spirit.
Yet when my spirit, grown slothful in its task, failed to bring forth its solar essence and strayed from the way of Creation, Thou didst chastise it, O Lord, with strife and discord among its inner powers. Thou didst compel it no longer to shine with gentle light, but to blaze with devouring fire; and binding it in debt to the worlds of moon and sun, Thou didst transform my spirit into a whirlwind of flame, suspending it above the void.
And behold, in the heavens there appeared a second ring of luminous spirits—a crown of fire, yet purer and redeemed. A golden angel, his hair streaming in the abyss, mighty and ravishing, seized a handful of globes, whirled them into a fiery rainbow, and drew them after him in a sweeping train.
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 - '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, a knowledge that lies deepest in the spirit’s treasury to this day, seemingly ingrafted there without the spirit's knowledge or merit.
But Thou knowest, Lord, that the diamond-like 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 movement 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 in fiery torment, made unto Thee the first offering. They offered themselves to death. What they called death was, in Thine eyes, O God, but the spirit sleeping in one form and awakening in another, more perfect — devoid of memory of the past or any 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 prove 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.
Thus spirits began to die and rise again, rather than merely combine, flow together, and disintegrating into gases.¹. 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.
A single self-offering of the spirit unto death, made with all the might of love and will, brought forth an innumerable generation of forms — wonders my mortal tongue cannot now recount unto Thee, O 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 these forms are together ! For every spirit, tormented by long suffering in a dwelling of discomfort, knew Thee, 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 nerve-like 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 ground 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, in the womb of the waters, monsters wary, slothful, and cold were born, 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. Reveal unto me, O Lord: what were the first prayers these creatures addressed to Thee, what strange and monstrous desires? For I know not which of those formless monstrosities, 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 astonish in fossil molluscs 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 nowadays for the first time voluntarily closed by doubters and named by sceptics traitors to reason, deceivers of experience. O my Lord, in the octopus and cuttlefish I behold the revelation of brain and hearing; in the underwater world, the first complete sketch of man—its limbs already formed and moving, destined one day to unite, yet then a body rent 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 didst destroy that nature, my God, and of the beast that resembled a tree, Thou madest a tree indeed.
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 gaze 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; vapors erupted 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 flesh 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 primal creation, upon petrified sea-monsters, a pillar of fire descended – the second destroyer, Enceladus warring against life. His cloud-crowned brow unleashed the deluge; his fiery feet dried the ocean beds. For ages the earth burned, aglow with ruddy fire before the Most High – the selfsame earth which, after many ages, transfigured by the spirit of love, shall blaze with twelve precious stones’s fire, in the radiance where Saint John beheld it burning incandescent above the abyss of worlds.
O my spirit, even in the formless seed of thy beginning, there already dwelled thought and setiment. By thought, thou didst meditate new forms; ablaze with passion and the fire of love, thou didst beg them of thy Creator and Father. Thou didst gather these two powers into two singular points of thy body — the brain and the heart; and what thou didst win 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 nobler forms, and called forth from thee a mightier power of creation. Daunted and vexed by the body's limitations, thou didst begin 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 as though the charred trunks arose of themselves from the ocean floor, turning their woody marrow into a nervous system; they 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 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, O 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 echoing 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 still, 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 the baseness of its former form, despised it, and most often lay down after the manner of Cain, to gnaw the brain and wipe its bloodied mouth upon the hair of its younger brother. This was the first Cain-like deed of nature — harmful to the higher spirit, for it bound it to one of 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 forward surge of spiritual vitality was quickened, and death—the law of form—remained, if I may so speak, the queen of disguises, masks, and garments of the spirit. 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 remains a mystery; the human spirit would be seized with dread if Thou, O Lord, wert to unveil its whole history at a single stroke. Thou wouldst needs take it by the hand as a child, having suddenly opened beneath its feet so vast an abyss of knowledge and blinded 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 form of being – 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 did draw itself before Thee, O Lord, in monstrous and gigantic shapes. In every shape there sleeps a memory of what went before and a foreshadowing 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 spans of time 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 anguish, not yet assured of its own might and art. It is precisely in the transitions between kingdoms 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 survey the globe as a bird does; it must possess a comprehensive vision of nature—know how rivers flow, how far forests stretch, where mountain chains lead. And by inspiration the first seer of Israel, the first bard 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, a form blotted out forever from the ranks of the living. 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 over the world – to spy out a dwelling-place for the ponderous 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 – a power now lost to the 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 – given over to gluttony, eyes gleaming 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 preservest for our dread and remembrance.
What spirit, then, O Lord, was that Noah of the fifth evening who barred the lizards and the gigantic 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 arose in the spirit, and even the least blade of grass already bears it logically inscribed within its form. The Spirit, the Lord’s worksman, 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 seized with desire, and risen in rebellion against its own former laws (laws that had governed the past). 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 the offspring of its elder brother 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 the spirit in nature is mirrored, reflected in the glass of human history.
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 physical understanding of it; yet Thou knowest, O God, that certain transitional, monstrous forms, capable of crossing from one kingdom to another, were not admitted into the Ark of Life. Because of these very missing links in the chain of creation, all efforts of mere observers of form 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 has a logic of its own: it is born of the yellow light that feeds the plants, mingled with the blue of 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 on the leaf—each shape once revealed to me by my spirit.
If I trace the path of a wicked yet vigorous spirit, struggling desperately against the sea-wind, overcoming the resistance of the elements, rising upward, then—defeated—it regathers itself, only to shoot skyward again, harnessing all its amassed force, driving back the elements’ dominance. If, on either side of a straight line leading to its goal, I draw its jagged zigzag of sharp angles, I shall obtain the thorny leaf of the thistle with its slender appearance, and this will be nothing other than the outline of the path traveled by the evil but powerful spirit, who, beneath those stabbing angles, labored in this plant to conquer form itself. While if I depict this spirit not as wicked but as one whose strength resists nature even more powerfully, I will have rounded indentations on both sides of the oak leaf, in which the spirit, battered by the force of the elements, retreats into curves and straightens its power like the waves of the ocean, with gravity and vigor.
But if a spirit of modest strength, meeting only modest resistance from the world, sketches a small path around the median line, I behold the finely serrated leaf of the rosebush.
And thus, I ponder: here is a spirit in which—not the serpent’s venom, nor the oak’s raw strength, but the delicate essence of beauty. Perhaps, in this spirit, 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, just as it was centuries ago when, moving as a plant's leaf, it blazed its track toward 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 deliberate), 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 merit 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 thy labour end, O vegetable spirit? In thy pensive brooding upon a more perfect organism; in the creating of those plants which, transmuted into a nervous system, might have appeared at once among living beings. My God, it was not that insect, once seen in books—so perfectly resembling a leaf—that enlightened me about this mystery of spirit; it might after all have been merely a play of Nature, a simple accident in the formation of things. But here, Lord—beneath a village hedge—I watched a pea push forth from its rotten seed, and, like a green caterpillar, creep cautiously along its supporting stake. Whatever the spirit’s nature could offer Thee from its vegetable being, it seems already to have offered up—for a more perfect life. The odd numbers within it already express 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 heedless 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 pleads with Thee, Lord, for the flight of the butterfly. Thou wilt hearken unto 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 unto its 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 the winds wrestle with waves, where plants clinging to the rocks struggle to live—and without asking any Dryad, from the depths of mine 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 to behold that terrible labor in pale plants amidst wild Nature.
Here, suffer me, O God, to reveal one of the lesser mysteries of the spirit, perhaps risking premature scorn of judgment. My sense of smell witness to my age-old sojourn in vegetable forms, when the spirit of this body which I now bear was fashioning blood-vessels, and experiencing beauty, deformity, and 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 towards 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 of youth. In vain, O Lord, hath science sought to explain this phenomenon to me by the action of odour upon the sense of smell; I asked it, rather, about 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 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 in the sea, cautious and assured of long life beneath its stony shield—at last made Thee the sacrifice of its pearly house, and driven 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 arduous way of metamorphosis and unceasing labour it did not sacrifice its fecundity unto Thee, O Lord, but kept a certain traditional likeness of forms, and bore it from the depths of the sea even unto the celestial kingdom of flight.
And behold the kingdom of serpents, which, in the pterodactyls of the primal days, had already found merit in the wonder of flight— it offers unto Thee its lizard-wings in sacrifice, humbles itself, reddens its own blood, and, through the annelids, creeps onward toward the more perfect nature of insects.
For in insects, O Lord, the spirit begins to forge the first moral virtues: industry in the ant, social order in the bee. Thereafter, it gathers and unites 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, the whole picture of the materialist philosophers—all faculties, instincts, and virtues wrought by the labor of Creation—was given to man already well-nigh complete, yet in the form of crude matter, that he might refine them with knowledge, ignite them with the fire of divine love, and lead them toward fresh creation.
I shall not recount these virtues, nor these labors of the spirit, for every spirit will read them in the creature nearest unto itself. I shall tell only of certain events that, in the course of the spirit's progress, seem to me singular and wondrous.
At times, the spirit, desiring a new form and order, reserved for itself a small difference between individuals — most often marked only by color. Certain flowers and creatures, as it were, retained by a concession wrested from God in perpetuity, a difference of hue or coat. God did not reject the spirit’s plea, but He punished the incompleteness of the offering with the weakness of a spirit not yet fully gathered into one sure form. For most such flowers are fruitless, and the birds and beasts of that kind entered into domestic service and sought the protection of higher spirits. The cat, having offered unto the Lord this one small thing without reserve, became the tiger — the 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 near unto the horse and nurturing in him the spirit of nobility and courage, became to him a father of liberation; the shepherd, seated in the field with his dog, awakened within himself and set 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 savior of his own kindred.
O Lord, I behold that virtues now scarce among men once found their nascent forms in creation’s ancient realms — and this is to me a witness that we are, in spirit, the same who once fashioned those forms. For man’s diligence, the spirit toiled in ants, bees, and countless domestic creatures; whereas the heroic spirit of nobility and might took the form of lions, or eagles that love the storm and thunderbolt.
And now, O God, I sense all nature, spirit-laden, crying out to Thee through its most perfect voice for its consummate form: the form of man. For it knows that uplifting one spirit elevates all creation to its utmost limits. Behold, O Lord, the trees adorn themselves with their fairest flowers and fruits, that this final prayer may move Thee, that they may show Thee the merit and the labor of the spirit in its most perfect shapes. Behold, the proudest creatures gather on Eden’s meadow, forgetting lust, rage, and bloodlust, uplifted in prayer above their own nature by the sighing of the spirit.Behold, eagles descend, adorned with garlands of swans and cranes, hovering in the heavens, encircled by glittering birds – as if Thy angelic court, a living image of rainbow-winged angels about Thy throne. And that was the one moment. Of Eden, and of peace upon the earth. Then, O Lord, Thou didst call forth a spirit worthy of humanity from among them; Thou didst hear him, judge him, and suffer him to take a new form upon the earth. And into his body, as into a book, Thou inscribed the mysteries of ancient labour before man. That book lies to this day folded at the bottom of every human spirit. And even if all creation and humankind perish, O Lord, the last man alone would find the whole of the labour of the past within his spirit; and apart from the lost forms themselves, the inheritance of the globe would suffer no loss. Therefore, Hosanna to Thee, O Lord, for Thou art the Creator – and my spirit has the merit of its own creation. From what height shall I descend? Shall I return to the old vantage point of knowledge – that abyss where life before the cradle was mystery, and the future, goal-less? Nay. Emerging from the past, I have set my foot upon the very rock of creation, I see what I have wrought, and what yet remains to be done. Behold, my spirit, in concert with humanity, has wrought much of this work. Above the beasts' instincts and virtues, it has already gained works of the truly human spirit, powers almost angelic. These works, Lord, I shall recount in other books. But now, permit me, bound for the future, to turn toward the six-day abysses of dormant nature, and bid her farewell.
O my spirit! When thou wast yet imprisoned in flint and didst offer the sacrifice of form and duration, deeming thine eternity sacrificed, the Lord accepted thy gift, yet deceived thee as a father sometimes deceives a dearly beloved son. For through that sacrifice, thou not only attained humanity, but couldst cry with Eve: I have gained a man for the Lord! — nay, the Lord gave thee far more than thou hadst dreamed: eternity of ever-renascent forms, and power to bring forth a form like thine own. By this grace man, losing neither his immortality nor a single particle of his spiritual might, begets a form like himself — which becomes the dwelling of a similar spirit. For he begets not the spirit; rather, to a waiting, kindred spirit, he gives a body, leading a brother-spirit into the realm of the visible. In this likeness lies the mystery of virtues preserved through generations — not poured with blood from body to body, but arising from the law that only spirits alike in nature can inhabit like bodies. This immortality of forms, won through death, reveals the spirit's dominion over death, gained by sacrifice. Behold, O God, once I was struck with terror by the mighty power of the vast ruin-heaps of the ancient Roman Empire. My eyes sought in vain a column that might trace upon my retina very shapes once seen by 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 what I saw belonged to forms once seen in ages past, 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 of eternity ! Thou knowest within thee dwells light's principle, which eternalizes the body – fire's holy opponent, thy own transfigurer in the last days. That redemption principle, which in the future will bathe all faces of form in wondrous gold it once shone as a fleeting shadow in the depths of the elements: clothing sea-plants in rainbow gleam, turning butterflies to soul-stars — then faded, bartered by wretched spirits for utility. The cranes that once led the migrating birds-garlands on their mournful night journeys no longer turn into lamps and torches; no longer cast ribbons of rainbow fire across the mist to guide bewildered sailors (it is seen no longer in birds). And yet that golden light, O Lord — higher than voice, for more capable of expressing divine ecstasy – reveals itself as the most perfect instrument of sacred song, as our heavenly nourisher in the City descending from clouds.
From such works of ages, from such victories over chaos and storm, O my spirit, is woven thy first crown and merit before God. The Lord hath not forgotten — on the contrary, He honours thy works: preserving forms, permitting no improvement. Upon the book thou filledst, He set His eternity's seal; when worthy, nature's understanding awakes, He opens Genesis' golden pages that you may read them, fathom them, and compare them with that other mysterious book laid deep within your spirit. Therefore thou rejoicest, O spirit, uncovering mysteries of the painful way; thy conscience witnesseth: thou hast read God's thought in forms. Yet past knowledge is naught if it unveils not the future. In these books lies death's mystery, and there is clearly written the law of all further creation: sacrifice. Therefore, O visible Angel, separate not from thy Origin! Keep faith in conscience's truth against the deceptive habit of scientific routine. For in thy holiness lies the liberation of the spirit, its nascent power, its wisdom, the mould of every future deed, its victory, its freedom, its deliverance from the yoke of falsehood and violence.
O Lord, Thou who didst command the murmur of the sea—the rustling of these airy meadows beset 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, take wing like the wind and the roar of the sea; and when they touch those puissant yet 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, become 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 beseech Thee for the sun of divine wisdom, wherein already I behold the Angel bearing the sword of the sacrifice to come.
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 as Christ our Lord testified, hast never yet been seen by man on earth — Thou 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: let this path of light and revelation — the path of love and understanding — shine ever brighter with the suns of knowledge, and lead Thy chosen people, now walking the way of sorrows, into the Kingdom of God.
(Eng.Transl v1.35 Jan 22, 2026)
J.S.'s "Genesis from the Spirit" in Polish: https://literat.ug.edu.pl/genezis/genezis.htm
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