The Celestial Artisans

44:2.1Mor­tal man can hardly hope for more than a mea­ger and dis­torted con­cept of the func­tions of the heav­enly re­pro­duc­ers, which I must at­tempt to il­lus­trate through the gross and lim­ited sym­bol­ism of your ma­te­rial lan­guage. The spirit-mor­ontia world has a thou­sand and one things of su­preme value, things wor­thy of re­pro­duc­tion but un­known on Uran­tia, ex­pe­ri­ences that be­long in the cat­e­gory of the ac­tiv­i­ties which have hardly “en­tered into the mind of man,” those re­al­i­ties which God has in wait­ing for those who sur­vive the life in the flesh.

44:2.2There are seven groups of the heav­enly re­pro­duc­ers, and I will at­tempt to il­lus­trate their work by the fol­low­ing clas­si­fi­ca­tion:

44:2.31. The singers—har­monists who re­it­er­ate the spe­cific har­monies of the past and in­ter­pret the mel­o­dies of the pres­ent. But all of this is ef­fected on the mor­ontia level.

44:2.42. The color work­ers—those artists of light and shade you might call sketch­ers and painters, artists who pre­serve pass­ing scenes and tran­sient episodes for fu­ture mor­ontia en­joy­ment.

44:2.53. The light pic­tur­iz­ers—the mak­ers of the real semispirit-phe­nom­ena preser­va­tions of which mo­tion pic­tures would be a very crude il­lus­tra­tion.

44:2.64. The his­toric pagean­teers—those who dra­mat­i­cally re­pro­duce the cru­cial events of uni­verse rec­ords and his­tory.

44:2.75. The pro­phetic artists—those who project the mean­ings of his­tory into the fu­ture.

44:2.86. The life-story tellers—those who per­pet­u­ate the mean­ing and sig­nif­i­cance of life ex­pe­ri­ence. The pro­jec­tion of pres­ent per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ences into fu­ture at­tain­ment val­ues.

44:2.97. The ad­min­is­tra­tive en­ac­tors—those who de­pict the sig­nif­i­cance of gov­ern­men­tal phi­los­o­phy and ad­min­is­tra­tive tech­nique, the ce­les­tial drama­tists of sov­er­eignty.

44:2.10Very of­ten and ef­fec­tively the heav­enly re­pro­duc­ers col­lab­o­rate with the re­ver­sion di­rec­tors in com­bin­ing mem­ory re­ca­pit­u­la­tion with cer­tain forms of mind rest and per­son­al­ity di­ver­sion. Be­fore the mor­ontia con­claves and spirit as­sem­blies these re­pro­duc­ers some­times as­so­ciate them­selves in tremen­dous dra­matic spec­ta­cles rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the pur­pose of such gath­er­ings. I re­cently wit­nessed such a stu­pen­dous pre­sen­ta­tion in which more than one mil­lion ac­tors pro­duced a suc­ces­sion of one thou­sand scenes.

44:2.11The higher in­tel­lec­tual teach­ers and the tran­si­tion min­is­ters freely and ef­fec­tively uti­lize these var­i­ous groups of re­pro­duc­ers in their mor­ontia ed­u­ca­tional ac­tiv­i­ties. But not all of their ef­forts are de­voted to tran­sient il­lus­tra­tion; much, very much, of their work is of a per­ma­nent na­ture and will for­ever re­main as a legacy to all fu­ture time. So ver­sa­tile are these ar­ti­sans that, when they func­tion en masse, they are able to re-en­act an age, and in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the se­raphic min­is­ters they can ac­tu­ally por­tray the eter­nal val­ues of the spirit world to the mor­tal seers of time.