Research into the structure of the Kingdom of Metavera is still incomplete. The archaeological works which have been in progress for thirty years have not made it any easier to analyse the phenomenon. Whilst they do provide artefacts and factual evidence, they make the chaotic state of knowledge of the topic – which evades any chronological or geographical framework – only more profound, as it were. Professor Ignacy Trybowski, in his TV interview in 1990, expressed most eloquently the problem of establishing what it is that Metavera is, as a matter of fact, when he compared it to the Lernaean Hydra, which, when its head is cut off, instantly grows two new ones. To acknowledge Metavera as an artistic doctrine necessitates the examination of its genealogy, which reveals the related intellectual area; after some scrutiny (Heisenberg’s principle) it transmutes into a social, geopolitical, and finally, geographic, fact. The map of excavations in various parts of the world fails to establish any causative links between the developing centres. The intriguing fractal form, which Ben Giliole ascribes to it, has failed to inspire academia, which is inclined to consider it an effect of the phenomenon of non-continuity in the process of osmosis of myth and reality. Professor Paola Lee-Hammilton calls the phenomenon the ‘changing density of being’ and suggests that we are dealing with an ideal society with utopian characteristics, which, by gradually pervading reality, acquires density while simultaneously losing credibility. She has even dedicated a short poem to her discovery, in which she alludes to the motif of a snake swallowing its own tail – a symbol that appeared on Metaveran seals as early as the Bronze Age.

Snake scales morph words into lustre
When I eat what casts a shadow over me.
And when, becoming an ever-tighter sphere
I dissolve in sating my satisfied self.

The letter ‘Q’ – the ideogram of the process of self-devouring, the letter which initiates the modern keyboard layout, in the symbolic system of Metavera appears as the ‘Quo’ sign – a question directed to God – the creator of creation, who awakes man’s self-awareness and his ability to define the world independently. The ancient history of Metavera, passed on in oral tradition in the form of myths and legends, not only goes back to the beginning of civilisation, but precedes it. The narrative about the snake, which – having sated its hunger for knowledge about itself disappears, only to re-appear in a new dimension as the beginning of a new era and new space, passed on from one generation to the next, refers us back to the time before the Big Bang. This oldest of the known mythologies finds its reflection beyond iconography.