Several million evolvate computers, computers who said that they were the only true born-again humans, accompanied the pilgrimage or tour instrumentally. Entities of races closely related to the humans were on the pilgrimage also, and fortunately most of these entities had the quality of ‘being present but not occupying space.’ And there were representatives of quite a few animal species, barons and dukes of bears and apes and asses and dolphins and most of the other intelligent animal realms. This was probably tourism in its finest hour. "In Deepest Glass"
I’ve written here about Lafferty’s zoon anthropikon, his vision of humanity not merely as a rational or political animal, but as a layered, haunted being, bound both to the fallen animal world and to a higher order of reality, and his twists on it. It’s a major theme in his work.
Lafferty is drawn to a conception of human nature that bears traces of an older, more inclusive state—one in which animals were not separate from human consciousness but integral to it. The Fall disrupted this unity. But the disruption becomes an imaginative opening, where deprivation and possibility surface in moments when reason alone proves insufficient.
Picking up on yesterday’s thoughts about “Boomer Flats” (1971), I want to consider two ways the zoon anthropikon appears in Lafferty’s work. Sometimes, we encounter it fully in the present—its synchronic form—while at other times, it is stretched across a timeline, taking a diachronic shape. In this latter mode, it often stands as an emblem of how Lafferty envisions heilsgeschichte, or salvation history.
In “Boomer Flats,” the magi-scientists undergo an enwidening of sacramental possibility. It is entirely present in the bar at Boomer Flats, where beings of the past (the giants), beings of the present (Vonk as Neanderthal, McGilly as Comet), and intimations of a more spiritually expansive future coexist. These temporal strata stand in relation to one another in such a way that the zoon anthropikon comes into view as a kind of Necker cube, an image whose meaning shifts depending on the angle of attention.
This spatialization of the zoon anthropikon, where the temporal layers of salvation history exist at once, appears in stories such as “Happening in Chosky Bottoms” and novels like Serpent’s Egg (1987). But there is another way Lafferty presents the zoon anthropikon, and that is as something developing along a timeline. This version shows up in his stories that build up to humanity needing to make a leap forward, as depicted, for instance, in Fourth Mansions (1968) or The Elliptical Grave (1989). It is the diachronic dimension, which we see in "In Deepest Glass."
Both “Boomer Flats” and “In Deepest Glass” are Lafferty using his fast ball, writing at the top of his powers in the short form. Like “Boomer Flats,” “In Deepest Glass” is dense with meaning, but for this post I want to bracket out everything except the zoon anthropikon: the idea that humanity once encompassed all animal-kind, remains haunted and alienated by the loss of that plenitude, and lives in anticipation of its eventual recovery.
Lafferty drew on both the “Stained Glass” entry in The Catholic Encyclopedia and sections on glazes and glasses in The Oxford History of Technology when writing the story. He adopts his familiar, ironizing popularizer-of-history voice to narrate the true, hidden history of stained glass, stretching from the Neanderthals to the twenty-second century. The plot runs roughly as follows.
The Neanderthals possess a tradition of stained glass, aided by volcanic-acid frost etchings and by “spirits” that impress images onto sheets of volcanic glass. The Cro-Magnons destroy this early art, but medieval artisans later revive it through more deliberate, handcrafted methods. In the middle ages, the form comes into focus. As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, the stained glass of this period
. . . were sermons which "reached the heart through the eyes instead of entering at the ears." But their choice of subjects was not made at random; it fell under the same rule that guided the encyclopedias of the time in their classification of the universe, commencing with God and the creation of angelic beings, and so on through nature, science, ethics, and history. The windows were indeed poems in glass: "The first canto, reflecting the image of God as the Creator, the Father, and the giver of all good gifts; the second, nature, organic and inorganic; the third, science; the fourth, the moral sense; and lastly, the entire world." Where there were not enough windows in a church to carry out the complete scheme, one or more portions were represented.
In the twenty-second century, a surge in volcanic and industrial acidity sparks a new golden age of stained glass, recalling the earlier period when nature took the leading hand in shaping it during the time of the Neanderthals. Much of this new glass is uninspired and marked by self-involvement, but a significant number of “Masterworks” are produced, collectively forming a vast, mystical narrative known as the Great Epic. This epic is a poem in glass, and its subject is salvation history.
A conflict arises when authorities move to suppress the possibilities of the glass, culminating in a brief return of icy conditions and the appearance of red Armageddon glass bearing the message “Repent, Repent!” The story ends with people creating new stained glass, while the Armageddon glass ticks ominously in the background. Most of the earlier glass is now lost or inaccessible, but its poetry is certain to reappear.
Unlike in “Boomer Flats,” where we encounter the entire sacramental community simultaneously in a bar outside Tulsa that serves as a heterotopia, the Neanderthals in “In Deepest Glass” belong to humanity’s past. Here, the zoon anthropikon is situated in its diachronic dimension. Nonetheless, Lafferty continues to depict animals and humans as bound to the same higher reality. They are not purely rational nor purely spiritual—they are fallen
The layered condition that defines Lafferty’s zoon anthropikon first appears in the Neanderthal Age, when everything from mammoths and sabretooths to herders and “gentle dire-wolves” coexists within the naturally formed stained glass. “All of the things had heraldic aspects to them, and yet all were full of fluid life,” Lafferty writes.
This earliest glass, etched by windborne acids and frost rather than by human hands, is more than decorative. It reveals a deep connection among species—a psychic and spiritual link between animal and human—conveyed through “strong and colorful etched pictures” depicting mammoths, bison, Neanderthal herders, dire-wolves, and other figures, each beautifully present within the glass. Humans and animals mingle in a state of reduced alienation, their minds overlapping more fully than in later periods. The story underscores this decline through the appearance of computers in the twenty-second century, machines that now function as impoverished stand-ins for lost fauna.
Even after the Neanderthals have vanished, the story preserves this early unity as a lost possibility. Later civilizations may undervalue stained glass, but the surviving fragments retain the ghost of that primal bond. “Even when handling a small fragment of this old glass one can feel a spirit or spirits inhabiting it,” Lafferty tells us. Instrumental reason cannot fully erase the earlier connection that once bound humans, beasts, and unseen presences.
Although Lafferty’s reflections on the Middle Ages and stained glass form a key strand of the story’s soteriological allegory, the zoon anthropikon itself resurfaces in the twenty-second-century wave of etched glass. In this period, countless new images depict humans, animals, and the “Living Spirits of the World” intertwined within a unified global narrative that Lafferty calls The Epic.
The faint memory of the original glass recurs in the refrain, “We remember a lot of it.” Humanity collectively senses—though some resist the knowledge—that it once occupied a broader spiritual territory, one that encompassed the animal world.
A recurring pattern in the story’s chronology is the return of the parathuouclasts, or window-breakers. The first are the Cro-Magnons, but whenever the beauty of deepest glass reappears, these destroyers soon follow. Whether by shattering the windows outright or devising new glass resistant to beauty, they attempt to desacralize the human story. The glass breaks. The conditions that made it possible remain.
We even learn that in the future, “some of the Living Spirits of the World were surely the Neanderthals themselves,” suggesting that the older human-animal consciousness persists. Lafferty’s stance seems to be precisely the opposite of post-humanism.
Whereas posthumanism rejects the anthropocentric frame as overly species-centric, Lafferty rejects it because our current concept of the human species is too limited.
Anthropocentrism unimaginatively misrecognizes what humans truly are. If we could recover and recognize, the issue would become obvious: if we have indeed been speciesist, it is because we've confined our vision of the species to Homo lapsens—humankind after the fall. We have insufficiently appreciated Homo innocens.
In “In Deepest Glass,” the zoon anthropikon partially inheres in a lost yet ever-recurring invitation wherein beast, human, and higher spirit commingle. First, there is the original Cro-Magnon smashing, representing the temptation to sever the sacramental link with God. Then comes the reappearance of sacred glass in the Middle Ages—a luminous but incomplete recovery of original grace. Later, in the 22nd century, sacred glass returns once again, offering the possibility of the Grand Tour that reveals how everything fits together, reaffirming universal revelation.
This moment, too, experiences iconoclasm, followed by the eschatological wake-up call of the Armageddon glass, displaying images of the four final things. Lafferty leaves the reader with the last of the sacred glass diminished yet still present and, as he describes it, ticking toward judgment. Set against this is the image retained by those who saw the glass in the 22nd century, who glimpsed its potential through the memory of its past:
Man was in his full powers at his first appearance in The Epic. He was living in the First Age of Magic. He was the Lord of the World then, and he gave a definition to all the other creatures. Some of those creatures that he defined were unbodied and invisible; but that made no difference at all. In his full powers, paradoxical man could see all invisible things. In that early era, time stood still when man ordered it to do so. Man had the Midas Touch then, the transmuting touch. He could walk through walls then, or through rock cliffs. He could fly then. He would walk on water. He could literally move mountains. He could converse with both spirits and animals, as well as with the superior plants and trees, and the mountains. He traded repartee with the lightning, and he didn't do too badly in that exchange.
Current notes:
The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907. Article on stained glass, available at: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14299a.htm.
Singer, Charles, et al., eds. The Oxford History of Technology. Vol. 2, The Mediterranean Civilizations and the Middle Ages c. 700 B.C. to c. A.D. 1500. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.
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