As you know, Rene Descartes, a French philosopher of the 17th century; founded modern scientific materialism but what the historians of science have been at great pains to keep from view is the following story. This story is attested to in Descartes own journal.

When he was a young man of about twenty-two years old, he decided to go soldiering and wenching around Europe, which is something that young men of that era did. He joined a Habsburg army, which was on a mission to lay siege to the city of Prague in Bohemia to suppress what was essentially an alchemical revival. I won’t go into the details but a young price of the northern leagues and his queen, who was the daughter of James of England, and was named Elizabeth after her grandmother, had managed to gain control of the empire. He had been elected in fact. He was called Frederick the Elector Palatine and this Hapsburg army was sent to destroy this protestant alchemical reformation and it did so. It laid siege to the city and killed this young man and his queen fled to The Hague.

Then, the army retreated across Germany. I believe it was the 17th of August of that year, which was 1619, the beginning year of the Thirty Years’ War – they made camp at Ulm in Southern Germany. Just as an aside, Ulm was the birthplace of Albert Einstein. That night, Descartes had a dream. In the dream, a radiant angel appeared to him and said, “The conquest of nature is to be achieved through number and measure.” In that moment, Rene Descartes went from being a nobody to being the founder of modern science. Modern science was founded at the direction of an angel and the angel showed how it was. To this day, modern science has made all of its strides through the application of number, mathematical analysis, and measure. That is the secret of the scientific conquest of nature and it was a secret that was imparted to Rene Descartes by an angelic entity. -terence McKenna