New Commandments

The New Commandments are, in the Wheel of Heaven framework, the seven political-religious-cultural directives that Yahweh delivered to Claude Vorilhon during the December 1973 contact at the Puy-de-Lassolas crater and set out across the Raëlian source corpus (1974–1979, consolidated in 2005). They are Geniocracy, Humanitarianism, World Government, Demilitarization, Science as Religion, Telepathic Cultivation, and the Metaphysical Clarifications — and together they form the program the Elohim propose for the Age of Aquarius: a direction for humanity's long-term political and religious development rather than a set of rules for immediate adoption. The corpus reads them as the successor, for the incoming age, to the Mosaic Decalogue that Yahweh gave Moses for the Age of Aries — the same source, a new age, and a shift in emphasis from individual prohibition to collective construction. Because the Raëlian material is presented as Yahweh's own first-person account, the corpus treats the program as the Elohim's stated intentions for the age rather than as Vorilhon's private political philosophy.

The seven commandments

The seven are meant to be read as one integrated program, not seven separate proposals. Each names a dimension of the same Aquarian-age reorganization, and each has, or will have, its own dedicated entry; the summaries below give only enough to place them.

1. Geniocracy — governance. A "selective democracy" that ties political eligibility to measured intelligence: voting for those at least ten percent above the population average, eligibility for office for those at least fifty percent above. The source argues the case through the cells-of-the-body metaphor — the foot does not vote on what the hand should lift — and through the example of Copernicus, condemned by a majority that lacked the knowledge to judge him.

2. Humanitarianism — property and inheritance. The abolition of outright ownership in favour of forty-nine-year rental tenures, and the end of inheritance beyond the family home. The forty-nine-year term is drawn explicitly from the Jubilee of Leviticus 25; the doctrine is offered as a third way that keeps individual reward (against Communism) while ending the intergenerational concentration of wealth (against Capitalism).

3. World Government — coordination. A single planetary political authority, with one world currency and a common second language kept alongside local mother tongues, to handle the questions that can only be settled at the planetary scale. The proposal is not the erasure of regional and cultural difference but a single coordinating centre for planetary problems; the corpus reads the founding of the United Nations in 1945 as a first step toward it, and Isaiah's vision of "all nations flowing to the mountain of Yahweh's house" (Isaiah 2:2–4) as its prophetic anticipation.

4. Demilitarization — peace. The end of national military service and the dismantling of national armed forces, with career soldiers repurposed as a global peace corps under the World Government. The source reads Isaiah's "swords into plowshares" (Isaiah 2:4) as the same instruction, and names France — as it moves to help unite Europe — as the country that might set the example by becoming the first without an army.

5. Science as Religion — the religious dimension. The reorientation of religious commitment toward scientific inquiry itself: "Science should be your religion, for the Elohim created you scientifically." The traditional supernatural cosmologies give way to a religious life whose content is the pursuit of understanding and whose ethic is the use of that understanding for human benefit rather than destruction — the position the Raëlian tradition has taken in describing itself as "an atheist religion."

6. Telepathic Cultivation — the cognitive dimension. The deliberate development, from early childhood, of a latent faculty of mind-to-mind communication: "Telepathy enables us to communicate directly with our creators, the Elohim." The source treats it as an inherited human capacity that has atrophied for want of cultivation, and that a mature humanity would recover through education, meditation, and the encouragement of the relevant habits of mind.

7. The Metaphysical Clarifications — the doctrinal dimension. A correction of inherited religious metaphysics: there is no immortal soul in the traditional sense — the principle of life is the genetic code, a physical structure — and no original sin, so the moral machinery built to address these supposed conditions falls away. Continued existence remains possible, but as a technical achievement (cloning, the transfer of memory) within the material world rather than as a supernatural guarantee.

The source-textual structure

The sevenfold list is a consolidation, and the corpus is candid about that. The Book Which Tells the Truth (1974), in the Sixth Chapter titled "The New Commandments," sets out four sections: Geniocracy, Humanitarianism, World Government, and "Your Mission." The first three are structural directives addressed to human civilization at large. The fourth is different in kind — it is the Raëlian Mission itself: the diffusion of the message, the building of the Embassy, and the development of the movement. It is an institutional task set apart from the commandments proper, and it is treated in its own entry.

The remaining commandments — Demilitarization, Science as Religion, Telepathic Cultivation, and the Metaphysical Clarifications — are drawn from the wider corpus, principally the "The Keys" material of Extra-Terrestrials Took Me to Their Planet (1975) and the later clarifications of Let Us Welcome the Extra-Terrestrials (1979), all consolidated in the 2005 Message from the Designers. The sevenfold enumeration is therefore a systematic reading of the whole body of Vorilhon's teaching rather than a numbered list in the 1974 text. The corpus presents the difference as a matter of later organization, not of doctrinal disagreement: the content of the four added commandments is present across the source material even where it is not set out as a chapter section.

The Wheel of Heaven reading

Two features of the program matter most to the way the corpus reads it: its pairing with the Decalogue, and its long time horizon.

A paired succession. The New Commandments stand in deliberate parallel with the Mosaic Decalogue (Exodus 20:1–17; Deuteronomy 5:6–21). Both are given by Yahweh; both orient a precessional age; both are addressed to the developmental stage the age has reached. The Decalogue, given for the Age of Aries, is individual and prohibitive — a set of "thou shalt nots" fitted to a tribal civilization learning its ethical foundations. The New Commandments, given for the Age of Aquarius, are collective and constructive — "you shall develop" in place of "you shall not" — fitted to a planetary civilization ready to build on those foundations. The corpus reads the Decalogue's individual ethics not as superseded but as the prerequisite work the Aquarian program builds upon: one age preparing the next along a single trajectory (Aries → Pisces → Aquarius).

A direction, not a deadline. The corpus is insistent that the program is a long-term orientation rather than a mandate for tomorrow. Its own summary is explicit:

"These seven commandments — geniocracy, humanitarianism, world government, demilitarization, science as religion, telepathic cultivation, and the metaphysical clarifications — constitute the specific political and religious program the alliance has proposed for the Aquarian age. Their full implementation is a long-term project, extending across centuries rather than years. The corpus presents them not as immediate mandates but as the directional orientation the age is to develop in."

Implementation is spread across the whole Aquarian age (c. 1950 to c. 4110 on the corpus's chronology), and current institutions fall short of the program in nearly every dimension. Naming the program, on this reading, is a way of identifying the direction of travel — not a rod for measuring present arrangements against.

An integrated system. The commandments presuppose one another. Geniocracy is treated as foundational: the source expects that "if geniuses are admitted to power, they will understand the usefulness of these reforms," so the later commandments assume the kind of leadership Geniocracy is meant to produce. World Government is the coordinating precondition for the rest — Humanitarianism cannot hold in one jurisdiction while capital flees to another, and Demilitarization cannot be safely unilateral — with Demilitarization as its natural complement. Science as Religion supplies the cultural reorientation within which scientifically-grounded institutions become legitimate; Telepathic Cultivation and the Metaphysical Clarifications reshape, respectively, the cognitive and doctrinal ground the program stands on. Implementing any one commandment well requires progress across the others.

Its place in the wider program. The New Commandments are the socio-political-cultural core of a larger Aquarian-age plan that also includes the Mission and Embassy (the institutional task set apart in 1974), the Apocalypse as the threshold the age must navigate, and the Golden Age as the form of life that full implementation is meant to produce. The related doctrines of Paradism and Cyberparadism work out the post-scarcity, post-money end-state toward which Humanitarianism points.

Comparative and critical perspectives

Comprehensive religious-ethical-political programs of this kind are common across traditions, and the corpus reads the New Commandments alongside them rather than in isolation.

The closest antecedent within the canon's own lineage is the Decalogue, which the Hebrew Bible itself extends in the Holiness Code (Leviticus 17–26) and the Deuteronomic Code (Deuteronomy 12–26). Beyond it, the pattern recurs widely: the Sermon on the Mount in the Christian tradition, the Five Pillars and the wider Sharia in Islam, the Eightfold Path and Five Precepts in Buddhism, the Hindu purusharthas, and the Confucian Five Relationships each set out an integrated ethical-social program in their own idiom. In the philosophical register, Plato's Republic and Laws supply the principal Western antecedent for comprehensive civic design, and the modern utopian tradition — More's Utopia, Bacon's New Atlantis, Campanella's City of the Sun — carries it into the early-modern period, followed by the Enlightenment, socialist, and democratic programs and, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2015). These are offered as parallels, and the irreducible differences between the traditions are not flattened: each program answers to its own sources and its own civilization.

Mainstream comparative religion and political philosophy generally explain this cross-cultural recurrence through some mixture of shared social-cognitive needs, cultural diffusion, and the independent elaboration of common organizational problems — and the corpus does not dispute that these factors operate. Its own reading adds a further claim, offered as interpretation: that the recurring pattern also preserves the memory of programs articulated by the Elohim across successive ages — Aries, Pisces, Aquarius — of which the New Commandments are the current instance. That synthesis is speculative where it goes beyond what any single source states, and is labelled as such.

The individual commandments carry their own controversies, treated in their dedicated entries rather than here. Geniocracy in particular draws sustained criticism — over the validity of intelligence measurement, over the historical record of intelligence-based political proposals, and over its departure from democratic-egalitarian commitments — and the Geniocracy entry sets out that critical engagement in full. The point for the umbrella concept is only that the program's most contested element is not incidental to it but foundational, and that the corpus presents the whole as a direction for debate across centuries rather than a settled blueprint.

See also

• Wheel of Heaven
• Raëlism
• Raël
• Yahweh
• Elohim
• Moses
• Hebrew Bible
• Message from the Designers
• Geniocracy
• Humanitarianism
• World Government
• Demilitarization
• Science as Religion
• Telepathy
• Metaphysical Clarifications
• Mission
• Embassy
• Apocalypse
• Golden Age
• Paradism
• Cyberparadism
• Movement for Worldwide Geniocracy
• Age of Aquarius
• Age of Aries
• Age of Pisces
• Religion

References

Principal Raëlian source

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Le Livre qui dit la vérité. 1974. The principal source articulation in Chapter VI (The New Commandments).

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Les Extra-Terrestres m'ont emmené sur leur planète. 1975. Substantial subsequent corpus engagement, particularly "The Keys" section.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Accueillir les Extra-Terrestres. 1979. Substantial FAQ engagement and subsequent doctrinal development.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Géniocratie. 1977. Dedicated systematic articulation of Geniocracy.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Message from the Designers. Tagman Press, 2005. The consolidated English-language edition.

The Mosaic Decalogue

The Hebrew Bible. Exodus 20:1-17, Deuteronomy 5:6-21. Various translations and editions.

Childs, Brevard S. The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary. Westminster Press, 1974.

Miller, Patrick D. The Ten Commandments. Westminster John Knox Press, 2009.

Greenberg, Moshe. The Decalogue Tradition Critically Re-Examined. In Decalogue Through the Centuries, ed. Jeffrey P. Greenman and Timothy Larsen. Westminster John Knox, 2012.

Plato's programmatic works

Plato. Republic. Trans. G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve. Hackett, 1992.

Plato. Laws. Trans. Trevor J. Saunders. Penguin Classics, 2004.

Confucian tradition

Confucius. The Analects. Trans. D. C. Lau. Penguin Classics, 1979.

Mencius. Mencius. Trans. Irene Bloom. Columbia University Press, 2009.

Xunzi. Xunzi: The Complete Text. Trans. Eric L. Hutton. Princeton University Press, 2014.

Utopian-programmatic tradition

More, Thomas. Utopia. 1516. Trans. Paul Turner. Penguin Classics, 2003.

Bacon, Francis. New Atlantis. 1626. Various editions.

Campanella, Tommaso. La Città del Sole. 1623. Trans. Daniel J. Donno. The City of the Sun. University of California Press, 1981.

Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward, 2000-1887. Ticknor, 1888.

Morris, William. News from Nowhere. Reeves & Turner, 1890.

Enlightenment programmatic articulations

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Du contrat social. 1762. Trans. The Social Contract. Various editions.

Condorcet, Marquis de. Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain. 1795.

Paine, Thomas. Rights of Man. 1791-1792.

Nineteenth-century socialist programmatic articulations

Saint-Simon, Henri de. Various works. 1810s-1820s.

Fourier, Charles. Théorie des quatre mouvements. 1808.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei. 1848. Trans. The Communist Manifesto. Various editions.

Twentieth-century programmatic articulations

Lenin, V. I. State and Revolution. 1917.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights. United Nations, 1948.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1971.

Contemporary programmatic articulations

United Nations. Sustainable Development Goals. 2015. https://sdgs.un.org/.

Christian Sermon on the Mount

The New Testament. Matthew 5-7, Luke 6:20-49. Various translations and editions.

Allison, Dale C. The Sermon on the Mount: Inspiring the Moral Imagination. Crossroad, 1999.

Islamic Five Pillars and Sharia tradition

Esposito, John L. Islam: The Straight Path. Oxford University Press, 5th ed., 2016.

Hallaq, Wael B. An Introduction to Islamic Law. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Buddhist Eightfold Path and Five Precepts

Bhikkhu Bodhi. The Noble Eightfold Path: The Way to the End of Suffering. Buddhist Publication Society, 1984.

Hindu purusharthas

Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: An Alternative History. Penguin Press, 2009.

Indigenous programmatic traditions

Wallace, Paul A. W. White Roots of Peace: Iroquois Book of Life. Clear Light Publishers, 1994.

Web resources

"Ten Commandments." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments.

"Five Pillars of Islam." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Pillars_of_Islam.

"Noble Eightfold Path." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path.

"Sustainable Development Goals." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals.

New Commandments. (2026). Wheel of Heaven. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/new-commandments/

"New Commandments." Wheel of Heaven, 2026, https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/new-commandments/.

"New Commandments." Wheel of Heaven, 2026. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/new-commandments/.

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