As René Girard brilliantly exposed, every narrative structure rests on a sacrificial logic. To build a consensual story, one must sacrifice what does not fit: discordant facts, anomalies, the abundance of reality. The official story acts as a filter, a machine for standardization, concealing the complexity of a world where no event is ever simple or entirely univocal.

In Lost Illusions, a collection from the period 1837–1843, Balzac shares this:

“You don’t seem to know much about History. There are two Histories: the official, lying one that is taught, the History ad usum delphini; then the secret History, where the real causes of events are, a shameful history.”

Behind the consensual facade lies another story. A story of shadows and secrets, where the true forces of reality are woven: mimetic desires, underground power plays, and the chaotic flows of the imaginary. This story does not follow a linear trajectory. It is tumultuous, derailing, disturbing. And above all, it integrates what the official story is relentless in excluding: the bizarre, the strange, and the fantastic.

Inspired by magical realism, fantastic realism, in this sense, opens a valuable pathway. It proposes to reread history by reincorporating these disconcerting elements, these forgotten or deliberately obscured fragments, to reveal a broader, richer reality. It is not about replacing one narrative with another but rather expanding the field of possibilities, recognizing that history, as a narrative, is always partial, always oriented, always unfinished.

This series of articles invites a journey. It does not claim to offer an alternative narrative or a hidden truth—that would still fall into the trap of oversimplification. Instead, it offers an exploration: of the reverse of time, where narratives shatter, certainties waver, and history becomes a fractal, abundant territory, traversed by invisible forces.

For history, whether official or hidden, obeys the same logic: divide to rule, simplify to convince, and sacrifice to standardize. By venturing into the reverse of time, we will seek to go beyond this sacrificial mechanism, to look beyond the veil, and to reintegrate into the narrative what has been excluded. A plunge into the meanders of the strange, the fantastic, and the unknown.

Welcome to the other story. Where reality overflows, where the bizarre makes sense, and where exploration takes precedence over explanation. Where history is no longer a predetermined path but a labyrinth of possible horizons.

But what exactly do we mean by the “reverse of time”?

The reverse of time, as it might be understood in light of the reflections of Marie-Louise von Franz and Carl Gustav Jung, refers to a mode of perceiving time that escapes causal linearity to embrace a deeper, acausal, and meaningful dimension. It is not a simple opposition between two visions—one Western and rectilinear, the other Eastern and cyclical—but an acknowledgment of a plurality of coexisting temporalities, where the fabric of events intertwines according to patterns often invisible to a rationalist consciousness.

Causal Time and History

The linear vision, dominant in our Western tradition, permeates both our scientific conception and our writing of history. Events here follow one another according to a cause-and-effect logic, each moment serving as the foundation for the next. This approach, rooted in mechanistic thought, has enabled considerable advances but rests on a radical simplification: everything that does not fit into this causal chain is dismissed as anecdotal or irrational.

Thus written, history becomes a sacrificial narrative. To impose a coherent and consensual version, it sacrifices complexity, ambiguity, and what René Girard called mimetic violence: what is marginal, strange, or contradictory is relegated to the shadows. This sacrifice is not neutral; it is the foundation of the construction of uniformity, where the richness of reality dissolves into a one-dimensional narrative.

Synchronistic Time and the Reverse of History

By opposing linear causality with a synchronistic perception, Jung and von Franz reveal another way of thinking about time and events. In this vision, events are not linked by a mechanical chain but by their profound meaning, their correspondence. Thus, the official history, founded on logical sequences and apparent causalities, collapses in favor of a multiplicity of intertwined narratives, like a tapestry where each thread contributes to the overall pattern.

The reverse of time is this domain where synchronistic events reveal unsuspected correspondences. In the context of history, this means reintegrating what the dominant narrative has occluded: the bizarre, the fantastic, significant coincidences, and the invisible forces that permeate apparent structures. Here, fantastic realism, as an intellectual current, makes an essential contribution. By reintroducing the strange and the marvelous into history, it subverts sacrificial simplification to reveal dimensions forgotten or concealed.

The Angles of Time and the Complexity of Reality

If we conceive of time not as a straight line but as an angular or fractal space, then the key moments of history become meeting points where multiple forces intersect rather than successive stages in a linear progression. These “angles of time” are emergence sites where seemingly unrelated events acquire meaning through their interrelations.

Marie-Louise von Franz, in exploring divination, shows how these angles can be captured through practices that do not seek to predict the future according to rigid causality but to grasp the profound significance of the present moment in its entanglement with the fabric of existence. These temporal angles, corresponding to tipping points or synchrony, challenge linear rationality to open a richer, more intuitive interpretive space.

Thinking History in Reverse

In this perspective, history becomes not a finished narrative but a shifting matrix, full of resonances and hidden meanings. The reverse of time is the space where these correspondences emerge, where the bizarre and the strange cease to be anomalies to become constitutive elements of reality.

Reintroducing this dimension into our reading of history means rejecting the tyranny of simplification, acknowledging the richness of plurality, and rehabilitating the fantastic as a key to understanding. History, then, is no longer a sacrificial narrative but a space of co-creation where the visible and the invisible, the rational and the intuitive, the causal and the synchronistic meet to unveil the complex fabric of the real.

Axiological Neutrality

To conclude this introduction, this project is intended as a bold experiment in interpretation, free from unconscious bias or moral judgment rooted in any specific era or culture, while remaining fully aware of its own determinisms. Our ambition is to conduct a narrative inquiry grounded in Max Weber’s principle of axiological neutrality, approaching history not as a battleground of ideologies or morals, but as a space for lucid contemplation, devoid of impulsive attachment. Like a theatrical play, its plot serves as a mise en abyme of the manufacture of reality through the power of the Word, which shapes worlds through narratives of various orders (mythological, legal, scientific, etc.).

Here, the aim is neither to embrace what seems pleasing nor to reject what is disturbing, but rather to confront the complex and often uncomfortable fabric of history with a consciousness freed from cultural and emotional conditioning. This stance demands constant vigilance—a refusal to succumb to the temptation of simplification or judgment—and instead calls for radical curiosity and unconditional openness to reality in all its richness and strangeness.

History, thus explored, will not be a mere linear narrative or a succession of anecdotes with moral purposes. It will become a multidimensional mirror, an invitation to perceive what lies behind official accounts, to hear the silences, and to reintegrate the fabulous, the complex, and the unknown into our understanding of the past.

“The lifting of the constraints of cosmological time has the positive counterpart of the independence of fiction in exploring the resources of phenomenological time, which remain unexplored, inhibited, by historical narrative, precisely because of the latter’s concern to always relate historical time to cosmic time by reinscribing the former onto the latter. […] Fiction, I would say, is a reservoir of imaginative variations applied to the theme of phenomenological time and its aporias.”

Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative 3: Narrated Time, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988; “Points,” 1991, p. 231.