The Mystery of the Double: Geographic Medicine

For this purpose a very special arrangement was required. You must try to understand what developed at that time. In the centuries preceding the fourteenth century, the human being had to be guarded from this double. The double had to be gradually withdrawn from man's circle of vision. Only now is he gradually permitted to come into it again, now when the human being must adapt his relationship to him. A really significant arrangement was required, which could be attained only in the following way. Since the ninth or tenth century, conditions in Europe were gradually adjusted in such a way that the European people lost a certain connection that they had formerly, a connection that was still important for human beings in earlier centuries, the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. Beginning in the ninth century and especially from the twelfth century on, the entire shipping exchange with America with the kind of ships there were at that time, was abolished.