Rejuvenating apples; boiling vats, plunging into which you can become a young handsome man (you can, however, boil alive); cherished bottles with dead and living water, capable of resurrecting a fallen hero … These are our Russian fairy tales.
But the epic and folklore of any country reflects people's attempts to gain immortality. Much that has come down to us from time immemorial does not look like fairy tales and has all the signs of historical chronicles.
So, facts have been recorded when, in different eras, in different places of the Earth, spontaneously or thanks to special secret methods, the Chinese, Taoist monks or Indian hermits lived from more than a hundred years to four hundred or more.
Our elderly compatriot, who applied to a Tomsk hospital at the beginning of the 20th century, presented quite reliable documents, from which, as well as from his stories, it followed that he was more than two hundred years old …
The maximum that even the most magical fairy tale did not dare to surpass is the age of 5000 years! It was witnessed by the long-liver of Indian origin Tapaswiji, who himself lived for over 180 years. At the foot of the Himalayas, he once met a hermit who spoke only in ancient Indian Sanskrit. A severe diet and knowledge of the composition of the drug, the secret of which he kept, helped the elder to achieve such a long and healthy stay in our world.
Let us turn to the Bible, the subjects of which, in our opinion, are the natural history of mankind "from the very beginning." It is no coincidence that the first of the books of the Old Testament (the First Book of Moses) is called Genesis. From it we learn that Adam named his wife Eve, which means, if not eternal, but still “life”. In the Slavic version, this proper name was transformed into the word "virgin".
It also says that Adam lived 930 years, his son Seth - 912, son of Seth and grandson of Adam Enos lived 905 years, etc. Moreover, the son of Seth was born to Adam when he was 130 years old; Seth's son Enos was born at 105; Enos became a father when he was 90, and so on. Old people don't have children. This means that at the age of 100 in Old Testament times people were young.
We are looking for allegories where they do not exist. Obviously, before people really lived for almost a thousand years, unlike our incomplete hundred. Our vitality is clearly dwindling. Maybe the End Times? By the way, there is an opinion that the average age of human life depends on the number of earthlings. There are six billion of us now. If there were fewer of us, we would live longer (and better). And so we must live as long as we can and quickly give way under the sun to "the next knocking."
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… The legendary Count Cagliostro was a very specific person. And in the second half of the 18th century, he even visited St. Petersburg with his wife. Following the newspapers and word of mouth, which always ran ahead of the artistic adventurer or great adept, the secular public received indirect confirmation that the powerful count possesses, if not the secret of eternal life, then a very long youth. The Count's wife, the beautiful Lorenza, mother of an adult son-captain, was so young for her more than forty years that she did not even deny the merits of her husband in this. Known not only the date of birth (1743), but also the date of death of the mysterious Count Cagliostro - 1795. He, possessed of mystical power and a mystery that bewitches everyone, he, the favorite of Louis XVI, by whose order disrespect to Cagliostro was equated to an insult to the august person,ended his life as a martyr in the dungeons of the Inquisition.
According to the rules of that time, the papers of the strange count were burned as unclean. But the Vatican has kept something. For example, a record (copy) of "Cagliostro regeneration". True, it describes a process (convulsions, sleep, loss of hair and teeth, growth of new ones, etc.), lasting forty days, but not a recipe for pills that give such an effect. The story of Alexander Cagliostro, recorded by the court of the Inquisition, has also survived that he visited the Count of Saint-Germain (the one whose glory was akin to that of Cagliostro himself) and saw a vessel in which the owner kept his mysterious elixir of immortality.
The intrigue is best illustrated by the case in Dresden. Someone asked the Count's coachman if it was true that Saint-Germain was four hundred years old. He replied that he did not know, but in the 130 years that he served with him, the owner had not changed at all. Of course, all this could be a hoax. But contemporaries were struck by such a detailed knowledge of the past by Saint Germain, which could only have a participant, an eyewitness to the events. Elderly people recognized this person, as they had seen before, in the days of their youth. Only he, unlike them, did not age.
He was known in different cities and countries under different pseudonyms. At one time he even was "in the form" of a Russian general, only the surname was somewhat distorted - Soltykov (through "o"). The mysterious count seemed to have no past. No one knew him, did not remember him as a child, etc. Even the death of Saint Germain in Holstein in 1784 was called "imaginary" by one of his acquaintances. And no wonder: no gravestones with the corresponding surname appeared anywhere in the district. In addition, the "deceased" himself many times after his "death" appeared in public (the last time in Paris in the winter of 1939) and generally lived a full life.
Maybe he, no longer dressed in a tailcoat, but in a denim suit, met you yesterday on the bus or in the store … Maybe he still lives next to us, burdened with so many memories that most of us do not have. And maybe he is not alone … If now even atheists recognize Christ as a real historical person, maybe it is worth recognizing other biblical testimonies as reliable, in particular about the times of "general" longevity?
Then not as fantasies, but as echoes, the remnants of those former possibilities should be perceived and the evidence of a huge number of quite sober-minded, by no means crazy people about the ageless Count Saint-Germain and others like him. And only clothed in a halo of fantasy, but having many real prototypes, appears before us the hero of the series "Highlander", one of the immortals Duncan Macleod and his comrades.
Immortality has already been granted to man with the immortality of the soul. Only the body grows old and dies. So, to put it more precisely, humanity has always looked for a way to prolong the life and youth of the existing body as a vessel, a receptacle for the soul.
Why we are largely following the same path in our time of universal nihilism is understandable. But why did this happen in the past, when the religious consciousness of people of various faiths contained the notion that our world is not the only and far from the best of the worlds? Gradually, humanity began to think about transplanting a brain into another, younger head, about replacing sick or worn-out human organs with cybernetic devices or flesh from flesh grown by cloning. And finally, he approached immortality from the other side, refusing to endlessly reanimate the body and deciding to try to preserve the inner world of man for eternity.
How to become forever young
Not so long ago, the magazine "Business Week" spoke about the scientific search for electronic methods of reproducing a person's personality after his death. We are talking about virtual analogs of a specific brain and a specific nervous system, which will preserve the individual characteristics of thinking, the memory of a lived life, thoughts and feelings. A person who wants this version of the immortality of his own mind and soul will have to insert miniature video cameras into the frames of glasses, whose signals (his life through his eyes) will be recorded on a tiny hard disk the size of a button. These are already being produced, one disc is enough to record a month of life.
It turns out, thanks to "intelligent electricity", in a hundred years the living will be able to communicate with the absolute equivalent of the personality of deceased people. I wonder if the answers to the questions received through the computer will differ from those received at the spiritualistic sessions? If not, was the game worth the candle? But this is a topic for another material.
In the meantime, the regeneration (rejuvenation) of an existing organism as a way to stay longer in this world seems preferable to people. Gerontologists have noticed that water plays an important role here. Most modern centenarians drink water from mountain rivers formed by melting glaciers - melt water. As in the Old Testament times. It is no coincidence that knights, heroes and adventurers of all times and peoples were literally looking for a source of eternal youth, living water …
You can stay in this world for up to 200 years by lowering the constant temperature of the human body by a couple of degrees. And you can use the experience of suspended animation, borrowed from some animals. Nowadays, quite a few earthlings sleep, frozen in a special way to wake up in better times. It is true that these will be the times, another question …
The biological clock that measures the time of our life is located in chromosomes, in the nuclei of cells. The number of cell divisions is limited. But a way of influencing this process has already been identified, therefore, a way of increasing human life. There are many anti-aging diets, exercises, extracts from plants and animal organs, and special spiritual practices. The full range of modern possibilities is used by the famous singer Michael Jackson to stay young and outlast us all.
It is believed that more than “visible energy” (water, food, medicines, etc.), the aging process is influenced by “invisible energies” that permeate us, because we ourselves generate and receive them from the outside. For example, electricity. With age, residues, waste products, fragments of molecules with high electrical potential (free radicals) accumulate in our organisms. In one of the Moscow newspapers in 1998, it is described how by chance it was possible to include the hidden program of returning to youth, which each of us has, in addition to the program of old age.
Generally, they treated osteochondrosis and other diseases of the spine. The spine is our energy column, our energy base. The know-how consisted in influencing the entire energy system, which, while recovering, “captures” both the spine and the body as a whole. With the help of special equipment, the patients were sent special electrical signals. Soon one patient, who was already in her 50s, began to visibly and quickly look younger. Until now, the exact reasons for this have not been clarified. Presumably, the frequency of the healing electrical signal resonated with the frequency of a gene or a section of DNA responsible for turning on the countdown of the biological clock, that is, rejuvenation.
The woman's natural joy soon gave way to exactly the opposite feelings: she began to look younger than her own daughter. What's next? Have you found a way to stop this process? Does everyone want to stay in this world indefinitely? Not.
Tradition says that King Solomon himself rejected the elixir that gives immortality, because he did not see happiness in life without those he loved.
Cagliostro, who owns the secret of regeneration, did not take advantage of the opportunity. This leads some to the idea that he was bluffing, because he was fabulously rich and probably could bribe the guards to give him the coveted pills. But why did he need another "portion" of life and youth? To keep on rotting in a dark and fetid stone bag on a chain?
It is likely that he, who owns the secret of extending life, deliberately preferred death at fifty. As deliverance.
And the legend of the Eternal Jew? Remember, a man named Ahasuerus was among others on the path of Christ to Calvary. The convict, exhausted under the weight of the cross, wanted to rest a little at the house of Ahasuerus, but he rudely drove Christ away. And Christ told Ahasuerus that he would go all his life, wander, not knowing death. And so it happened. More than a thousand years later, it has been seen by people whose testimonies are credible. So, in the XIII century, Agasfer was in Armenia and talked with the Armenian archbishop. Later he was seen, other bishops, Psk legates, historians, burgomasters spoke to him in all languages of the Earth. At the end of the 16th century, the Eternal Jew goes to Moscow and soon visits it.
A century later, the professors of the prestigious English universities of Cambridge and Oxford even tested, examined Ahasfera, but could not convict him of ignorance of the history, customs, culture and geography of the ancient Earth, which he walked all over during the years of wandering. In the first third of the 19th century, some Englishmen had the opportunity to make sure that Ahasuerus was still wandering in a world that had become alien to him …
Still, the main question to which humanity must first find an answer is why live. Then it will immediately become clear why we do not live for a thousand years, whether it is worth trying and why.