Silvanus Tertium and the Anaxial Fold: Reassessing Temporality through the Lense of Proto-Process Anti-Relationism
Among the many minor heliotropes orbiting the Parmenidean sun of Western metaphysical inquiry, few burn as strangely as Silvanus Tertium, the 17th-century Catalan mystic-philosopher whose fragmentary manuscript, “Tractatus Anaxiotikos,” remained largely neglected until its partial translation by Arturo Maldonado in 1893. Situated stylistically at the confluence of Late Scholasticism and nascent process metaphysics, Tertium’s thought possesses that peculiar, semi-transparent iridescence one finds only in the works of those who labored entirely outside the legitimizing mechanisms of both Church and emerging Scientific Rationalism. While many commentators—admittedly few—have focused on his apophatic cosmology and the notion of “divine crepusculence” (crepusculentia divina), a subtle yet significant detail has eluded closer scrutiny: namely, Tertium’s notion of “the anaxial fold,” and its role as a critique of temporal relationism.
To comprehend the gravity of this notion, we must force ourselves into Tertium’s lexicon, one saturated with terms he referred to as “exogene primitives”—concepts born not of human categories but of what he calls “the real syntax” (syntaxus veritatis), an ontological grammar presumed to underlie all experience prior to the imposition of rational form. Within this framework, the anaxial fold (plica anaxiotica) is defined as “the point beyond all relationalities wherein temporal movement reverses, not along the axis of time, but orthogonally to time itself.” This reversal, or more accurately, invagination, constitutes not merely a metaphysical gesture, but a form of epistemic destabilization. What Tertium prescribes, implicitly, is a world wherein time is not a series of relations between events, but an emergent property of localized negations of temporal orthodoxy.
It is therefore essential to clarify that Tertium was no simple anti-relationist in the Humean-Russellian sense. His attack on relationism was neither empirical nor logical, but rather mystical and ontosemic—that is, he held that relations did not emerge between things but within the disintegrating tissue of Being’s resistance to unity. In his third Treatise fragment, he writes:
>“To say that A precedes B is to lie twice: first, in pretending to see a line in chaos; second, in forgetting that such a line requires a silent witness who has no part in the world.”
This witness, whom Tertium elsewhere calls the “Paracronaut,” reflects an esoteric variant of the observer—a consciousness not external to time, nor within time, but “between tendencies to temporalization.” That is, the observer exists in the anaxial fold: not in a temporal relation with events, but in a perpendicular resistance to them. The anaxial fold thus appears as a metaphysical fulcrum wherein the illusion of temporality collapses under the weight of its own gravitational self-reference.
Scholars such as Jan-Rodolfo Gleiber have attempted unfruitfully to identify the anaxial fold with what modern process philosophers, such as Whitehead, termed the “concrescence” of actual occasions. However, this vastly underestimates Tertium’s commitment not to becoming, but to “foreclosure.” That is, all becoming is merely the groping of Being toward its own unwritten past—a past that Tertium contends never occurred but exists only as the memory of a possibility. Within the fold, one finds not the future coalescing from the present, but rather the refusal of the present to authenticate itself.
Consider for instance his Dialogus Commutativus, a formative piece in which two archetypes—Fides and Ambiguus—discuss the origin of time. Fides demands proof that time had a beginning, whereas Ambiguus replies enigmatically:
>“Listen not to beginnings, for they grow backwards. Time, like mold, colonizes the vessel once it has been emptied of wine.”
We must take this seriously. To Tertium, time is retrojective: it performs sovereignty only after the cessation of action. It is a forensic phenomenon, not a causal one; and the anaxial fold is precisely where this forensic logic fails to cohere, allowing the philosopher—or Paracronaut—to extract himself from the tyranny of sequential certitudes.
This has staggering implications. The very idea that the structure of temporal being is not linear nor circular but folded in an orthogonal plane—that is, a plane inaccessible to empirical measure—prefigures in philosophical mysticism what non-linear time theories would only clumsily graze centuries later. Nevertheless, caution is warranted. Tertium’s conception does not lend itself to quantification or positivist reduction. His anaxial fold is not a spatial geometry but a metaphenomenological condition—the ‘mute hallway’ between perception and conception.
It is thus necessary to distinguish Tertium’s anaxiality from the commonly cited “void” of Eastern traditions or the eschatonic stasis of Neoplatonism. The fold is not absence (kenosis) nor transcendence (anabasis), but a turning inwards of process into para-process. It is, in short, a betrayal that Being commits against its own becoming. In this regard, Tertium’s role as a transitional figure between medieval ontology and modern anti-foundationalism becomes clear. He wrests the notion of reality from the domain of linear inference, placing it instead within the trembling hands of an epistemology that only functions once abandoned.
Modern philosophy, enamored as it is with coherence and functionality, would do well to reexamine this fevered moment of speculative dissent. Tertium’s anaxial fold is not simply a metaphysical curiosity; it is a weapon against temporal mimicry, a revealer of the auto-occlusions that pervade our most sacred rationalities. In an age when time is profaned into productivity and Being dissolved into data, perhaps only by stepping orthogonally into the fold may we remember to forget the false mirror of succession.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, anti-relationism, temporality, mysticism, heresy
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1. See Maldonado, Arturo. “Obscura lucis: The Rediscovery of Silvanus Tertium,” *Acta Hermetica*, vol. 4, 1893, pp. 91–109.
2. Gleiber, Jan-Rodolfo. “Precessions of Temporality: Refracting the Anaxial Fold,” *Journal of Marginal Thought*, vol. 12, 1974, pp. 211–234.
3. Tertium, Silvanus. *Tractatus Anaxiotikos*, Fragment III, translated by Carmen Velásquez (unpublished manuscript, Moonmoth Archive).
4. See also Elder, Thomas. “Chronoheresy and the Catalan Schismatics,” in *Latent Theologies*, Oxford University Press, 1921.