NEUOFFENBARUNG8 March 1842
[Fl.01_001,01] The fly is indeed a small creature, and often a nuisance to people and to many other living creatures on earth, especially at the time of year when the sun’s rays strike the ground more strongly. Yet in the order of things it is neither as insignificant nor as purposeless as it appears.
[Fl.01_001,02] To understand this fully and to good purpose, let us begin by looking briefly at the natural constitution of this little creature.
[Fl.01_001,03] It would hardly be necessary to describe the shape of the fly we are about to discuss, since you have surely seen more than one fly. But we cannot pass over its remarkable features or the way it comes into being. We must attend to them with great care and an attentive mind.
[Fl.01_001,04] How, then, does the fly come into being?
[Fl.01_001,05] Naturalists know that the fly lays eggs so small that the human eye can scarcely see them. They are therefore so light that, like dust motes in a sunbeam, they can readily remain suspended in the air.
[Fl.01_001,06] But where does the fly lay its tiny eggs, given that the number laid by a single fly not infrequently exceeds a million? And where and how are they hatched? You have surely never seen a young fly, and you must not mistake little gnats for young flies.
[Fl.01_001,07] Once a fly is ready to lay, it leaves its eggs wherever it happens to settle, without any further concern for what becomes of them. Millions are carried and scattered by the winds to every quarter of the world, and millions fall into the water. You can hardly think of anything on earth that escapes the fly’s eggs. There is scarcely anything the fly itself holds too sacred to settle upon and sniff at. Apart from a glowing coal and a blazing flame, there is hardly anything it will not speckle with its little eggs.
[Fl.01_001,08] We now know where the fly lays its eggs and what they look like. We shall now consider how they hatch and how many of the countless eggs laid actually do so.
[Fl.01_001,09] Nearly all the eggs laid on damp walls, especially those of animal sheds, on rotting wood or on anything else that holds the moisture of decay, survive. Of those swept away by wind and water, indescribably few hatch into flies. Even so, nothing is lost or fails to serve some other wise purpose, not even the eggs that people and animals often breathe in by the million in a single breath. Let us leave those destined for other purposes and turn directly to those that hatch.
[Fl.01_001,10] How, then, do they hatch?
[Fl.01_001,11] When the sun begins to warm the earth sufficiently, the eggs begin to grow until even a moderately keen eye can see them as a greyish-white dust like pollen. Naturally, they are visible only where the fly deposited them. Then comes the time of hatching, which proceeds as follows.
[Fl.01_001,12] The tiny eggs split open under the pressure of the awakened spirits of the precursor creatures gathered in due order within each egg. These spirits unite into a single life in the form of a scarcely visible, whitish little worm. For several days it feeds on the moisture at the place where it hatched. The length of this feeding period is not fixed, but always depends on how much nourishment is available.
[Fl.01_001,13] Up to this point, however, the fly comes into being in an entirely natural way.
[Fl.01_001,14] At the very beginning I asked whether you had ever seen a young fly. In that lies the real wonder of this little creature. All at once it is there, fully formed, and no one knows where it came from or where it was born.
[Fl.01_001,15] How, then, does this wonder take place?
[Fl.01_001,16] You may have heard older people say from time to time that flies arise partly from a kind of dust and partly from the scattered remains of old, dead flies. It may seem so, but that is not what actually happens.
[Fl.01_001,17] When the little worm reaches its full size, about that of a small comma in moderately large print, it bursts and turns itself inside out. Its former outer skin then expands into the body of the fly itself, equipped with all its internal digestive vessels. What was formerly inside the worm forms the visible outer parts of the fly. Once this reversal has taken place and these parts come into contact with the air, they develop fully within five to seven seconds at most, and the fly is then complete.
[Fl.01_001,18] That, then, is the birth, or rather the decidedly remarkable origin, of the fly. It must seem wonderful enough to anyone who looks closely. Yet all this is the least wonderful thing about the creature. What follows, which I shall tell as briefly as possible, will astonish you far more. We shall leave these remarkable matters for another day.
Source: Jakob Lorber, Die Fliege, German text based on the sixth edition (1988). The English translation preserves the source’s paragraph identifiers. It presents the work as a nineteenth-century spiritual text, including its historical accounts of nature.