The Decline and Fall of Civilisations
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All manner of decay is justified in the name of “progress.” A sage from corresponding periods of decay in Rome, India, Egypt, Greece, or Arabia would find the corruption of today’s Western civilisation familiar. He might say, “Here we go again”, and would be ridiculed as “old fashioned,” and “reactionary”.
Here we will examine the historical perspectives of a number of traditional cultures. The traditionalist approach is based upon a religious perspective, a feeling or intuition for the numinous at work; the belief that society is in balance when it maintains a nexus with the Divine. This sacral nexus is maintained through ceremonies and the ordering of society to reflect a cosmic order. Traditional societies are hierarchical rather than egalitarian, and their ethos is spiritual, not materialistic.
What is required is an overcoming of the Age of Materialism. This looms over the entirety of the world, obliterating the few vestiges of tradition with its cultural pathogens. The contention here is that man must reconnect with the divine. Those who rebel against the present Zeitgeist or Spirit of the Age, generally oppose its symptoms, but not the root cause which is of a spiritual character. They are themselves caught up in the materialistic quagmire. Like Karl Marx, their solutions therefore become mirror images rather than those of transcendence. Hence, “races” are defined in materialistic terms. Measuring physiological indices does not tell anything about the élan of a “race” any more than statistics on the gross national product inform about the élan of a nation other than from an economist’s viewpoint.
Conclusions are drawn about why civilisations fall that are fallacious and deflect from the actual reasons. Such assumptions also lead to a preoccupation with secondary symptoms of decline, such as immigration, and again causes are obscured. Additionally, by neglecting to consider whether the very notions of “progress” and “evolution” are even legitimate, the contagion of the Age is accepted and those who revolt against the symptoms of decay put themselves on the defensive by accepting the assumptions of the opposition. Race-materialism implies the acceptance of evolution and the illusion of “progress”. By accepting such assumptions there is an implicit acceptance of the liberal, positivist, and universalist ideologies that are part of the process of decay. Posited here instead is a total rejection of the modern world under the thrall of the spirit of mammon.
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1 “Perennial” insofar as there are concepts that seem timeless yet eternally relevant because they reflect the laws of the cosmos.
Part I - Tradition
Traditional Historical Outlook
A culture ceases to be “traditional” when it no longer feels its relationship with the Divine.1 Baron Julius Evola2 described this traditionalist outlook as the “metaphysics of history.”3
High Cultures have structural features in common, expressed in different ways because each represents a different spiritual outlook. This structural commonality transcends time, race and geography. The same broad structures of organisation in High Cultures have existed as far apart geographically and ethnically as the Germanic, Egyptian, Aztec, Japanese and Vedic-Indian. They possess castes as the basis of social order reflecting the cosmic order on Earth, hold the ruler to be literally of divine origin, a priest-king and often a God-King. They consider their own culture as part of a cosmic-divine cycle. The God-King is not only the ruler of his own civilisation, and a direct nexus between the human and the divine, he is also the “King of the World”, and his capital is the centre of the world; the axis mundi.
The Axis
Traditional societies revolve around a symbolic axial point. Each civilisation has had a holy centre, where the terrestrial and the celestial bisect. The axis might be physical or mythic. The Germanics had the World Column Irminsul, the Norse the World Tree Yggdrasil. The Gate of the Sun was the axis of the Tiahuanaco-centred civilisation in Bolivia. The Teotihuacan civilisation of Mesoamerica had the Temple of the Sun. The Hindus and Buddhists have Mount Meru; Mount Olympus for the Greek Civilisation; the Mount and Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinu for the Roman; Al Kaaba Al Musharrafah at Mecca for the Arabic; Mount Fuji for Japan; Mauna Kea for Hawaii; various mountains, rivers and legendary migratory canoes that symbolise the divine nexus for Maori tribes throughout New Zealand; Jerusalem for the Jewish, and for the Western Gothic High Culture.
The Khmer Empire, extending from Cambodia over most of Southeast Asia, and into Laos, Thailand and southern Vietnam, was founded in 802 A.D. by King Jayavarman II, who was regarded as the chakravartin, or King of the World, the God-King Deva Raja in Sanskrit. He was ritually sanctified on Mount Mahendraparvata.4
The Chinese Temple of Heaven, designated in their characters as the “altar of heaven” (天壇) was the point where emperors, embodying the nexus between heaven and earth, performed rituals and prayed for the maintenance of right order. The Chinese expressed the cosmic axis ethically as Tao. Behaviour not in accord with the standard of morality which, in Chinese, is denoted by the two characters Dao De, meaning “Tao” and “Virtue” respectively, was said “not to follow the principle of Tao.” Peasant uprisings raised banners proclaiming “achieve the Way on behalf of heaven”. Lao Zi (6th Century B.C.) credited with being the founder of Taoism, wrote:
“There is something mysterious and whole, which existed before heaven and earth. Silent, formless, complete, and never changing. Living eternally everywhere in perfection, it is the mother of all things. I do not know its name; I call it the Way. Man follows the earth, the earth follows heaven, heaven follows the Tao, and the Tao follows what is natural”.5
An emperor who failed to harmonise with heaven was said to have lost the “mandate of heaven”, his dynasty would fall, and be replaced by another “dynastic cycle”. The Tao is changeless, hence the universe is ordered. By respecting the Tao mankind also lives harmoniously. Everything in traditional Chinese culture revolved around this concept, prior to Communism.
The Wheel
The wheel is a motif in many cultures representing the cyclic nature of life, for the individual, society and entire civilisations. The spiralling motion represents the action of the cosmos itself. The wheel symbolises the axial foundation of cultures.
The Medieval world of Western High Culture had its “Wheel of Fortune”, Rota Fortunae, with eight spokes of opposites reminiscent of the Buddhist Wheel of Dharma. The Wheel of Fortune was a feature of Medieval churches, hanging from the ceiling, and used as an oracle.6 It is depicted on the 10th Major Arcana of the Tarot oracle, which is of Medieval origin.
The Greek Boethius, writing in Rome during the 6th century A.D., on the chaotic cusp between Roman ruin and Western birth, composed his Consolation of Philosophy as a Socratic dialogue between Fortunae and himself. Here the Roman goddess of good fortune is transformed into a principle of cyclic time in the service of the Christian God, who will just as likely bring collapse as favour in the unfolding of fate. Her symbol is the wheel. Her spinning of the fortune of kings and peasants alike is as inexorable as that of the seasons and the tides. She replies to Boethius:
“Or am I alone kept from exercising my right? Heaven is permitted to reveal bright days and to conceal the same with dark nights;
the year is permitted to redeem the face of the land at one time with flowers and fruits at another to confound it with clouds and frosts;
it is right for the sea at one time to charm with a level surface at another to tremble with storms and waves: is incessant human greed to bind us to a consistency alien to our morals?
“This is our power; we play this continuous game: we turn the wheel in a revolving cycle, we like to change the lowest to the highest, the highest to the lowest. Ascend if it pleases, but choose it, only if you will not think it an injury when the procedure of my game requires you to descend”.7
Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy became one of the most influential texts of the Western Medieval epoch, translated and read throughout Europe.
Carmina Burana, a corpus of poems by mo
nks, was another text of the Western medieval epoch that included the cyclic motif as a wheel:
The wheel of Fortune turns;
I go down, demeaned;
another is carried to the height;
far too high up
sits the king at the summit -
let him beware ruin!
for under the axis we read:
Queen Hecuba.8
The Jains9 hold that time is endless, and is represented by a wheel of twelve spokes. Like the Medieval West’s Rota Fortunae and the Dharmic wheel, the Jain wheel represents polarities of life, divided into pairs of six. It is a specifically cyclic motif. One set represents a descending cycle in which good things gradually give place to bad, and the other an ascending cycle. The Jains state that the present cycle is the fifth spoke of the descending cycle.10
Apart from the Celtic Cross, a variation of the Norse Sun Wheel, the Celts had the Triskele, a curved three armed cross, radiating from an axial point; an intermediate motif between the Sun Wheel and the Swastika, representing the three cycles of life, both physical and metaphysical. The Triskele was a common motif in Celtic art particularly between 5th century B.C. and 8th century A.D. It represents with its three spiralling arms the importance of the Triad in the Celtic outlook. The Triskele represents the three cycles of life, death and rebirth within the three primary elements, Land, Sea, Sky, and also represents the interaction between the three physical spheres and the spiritual realm. As the arms spiral from an axis, we again see the traditionalist motif of life radiating from a central – cosmic-axis, which W. B. Yeats alluded to in The Second Coming, where he describes the end cycle of this Civilisation: “everything falls apart; the centre cannot hold”. The three aspects, life, death, rebirth, revolve and return to the centre, the divine or cosmic pillar or axial point, analogous to the Teutonic World Column Irminsul, the Norse Yggdrasil, and the Hindu Wheel.
Another widespread motif of the cyclical nature of life relates to the Fates weaving Time. Fate is derived from Latin fatum, meaning decrees of the Gods, which we can call destiny, both individual and collective. Traditionally even the Gods are subjected to Fate, like the Norse Gods meeting this death at Ragnarok; a necessary cyclic sacrifice.
Nemesis is the Greek Goddess of Fate who punishes those guilty of hubris or arrogance towards the Gods through their wealth or power. It is a reminder that mortals are subject to the cosmic laws of time, the relentless motion of the cosmic wheel, as destiny is spun according to those laws. Fate became represented by the Triple Goddess Moirai among the Greeks, and Parcae among the Romans. Hesiod records their names as Lotho, spinner of destiny; Lachesis, weaver of the web of chance or luck that sustains life; and Atropos, the inescapable, who cuts the thread of life.11 The Three Fates sat among the Gods, and Zeus himself was often considered to be subject to them.12
In the Germanic tradition Fate is represented again by Three, known collectively as the Norns. Like the Greek Fates, they also weave destiny at a spinning wheel. They are named Urd, past; Vervandi, present; and Skuld, future.13
The Norse World Tree Yggdrasil has its three roots fed by Urd, the past. Here again the traditional cultures are based on the belief that society is sustained by its nexus with its divine origins, which when cast asunder lead to the collapse of that cycle. It is notable that Yggdrasil is being continuously gnawed at and interfered with by a serpent, a reminder of the precarious position of a culture’s foundations.
Urd, the past, is the cause of both present and future. Vervande, present, also means becoming. Therefore the present is not static, but is seeded with the possibilities of the future (Fate). These two Norns, past and present, create the third, Skuld, future, which is defined as something owed. What is owing is the restoration of balance from the interaction of Urd and Vervande. The Voluspo states:
Thence come the maidens
Three from the dwelling
Urt is one named,
On the wood they scored,-
Laws they made there,
To the sons of men,
mighty in wisdom,
down ‘neath the tree;
Verthandi the next,-
and Skuld the third.
and life allotted
and set their fates 14
This Germanic concept of Fate, like the Hellenic, was symbolised by Three sisters at a spinning wheel. It has come down to us in Wagner’s Siegfried:
On the world’s loom
Weave the Norns doom
Nor may they guide it nor change.15
In Arthurian legend it is three mysterious maidens in white who take the body of Arthur to Avalon, where he is not dead, but asleep, and will return to rally the British from the depths of decline. Arthur fulfils the role of the Norse Baldur who awaits the allotted time to return after Ragnarok to preside over a new heaven and a new Earth, and other mythic figures often represented in Messianic terms. The Arthurian legend has the primary elements of tradition: the assumption to power of Arthur as a youthful regenerative force amidst a land sunk into decay, the Holy Grail as the axis around which the warrior caste maintains its connection to the divine, the round table itself as a symbol of cyclicity, and the cyclic return to decay, with Arthur awaiting to return to set in motion a new cycle.
The Indian flag is instructive as to wheel symbolism. The 24-spoked wheel on the flag is the Ashoka Chakra. Dr. S. Radhakrishnan speaking before the Constituent Assembly, which adopted the flag in 1947, explained:
“The Ashoka Wheel in the centre of the white is the wheel of the law of dharma. Truth or satya, dharma or virtue ought to be the controlling principles of those who work under this flag. Again, the wheel denotes motion. There is death in stagnation. There is life in movement”.16
The cosmos is subjected to constant change, but also founded on unchanging cyclic laws (dharma). The Akosha Wheel is derived from the Sanskrit Dharma Chakra, meaning literally the “wheel of the law”, the cosmic law of cyclic motion.
The same concept of the “wheel of time” is held by the Q’ero Indians in Peru, and the Hopi of Arizona. The Hopi conception of time is cyclic. Benjamin Lee Whorf, the American linguist, stated that the Hopi “has no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past”.17 This cyclic concept is manifested as a wheel that is spinning in one place without forward momentum, producing an eternal recurrence explained in seasonal terms, reminiscent of the way Spengler explained cultural morphology. This produces the cyclic eternal recurrence of the same sequence of seasons, which are never accumulated into years and decades, or “the tape measure of Western linear time”. More familiarly known as the Hopi Medicine Wheels, the designs of stone with spokes emanating from an axis are based upon the teaching of cycles. This is associated with the “hoop dance”: “The hoop is symbolic of ‘the never-ending cycle of life’. It has no beginning and no end. Tribal healers and holy men have regarded the hoop as sacred and have always used it in their ceremonies. Its significance enhanced the embodiment of healing ceremonies”.18
The Wheel is a universal, archetypal motif of civilisations across time and space, attesting to the cyclical perspective common to traditional societies. What the centre of a wheel symbolises is the axis mundi, or world axis, the Tree of Genesis, Yggdrasil, Irminsul, and many others. The priest-King or God-King, another universal motif, is the human representation standing at the axis mundi. With the turning of the epochal cycles the spokes separate with decay, and everything falls apart from the axis mundi, in the way poetically described by Yeats.
Universality of Cyclic Outlook
“The whole cosmic order is under Me. By My will it is manifested again and again, and by My will it is annihilated at the end.”
— Bhagavad Gita 19
Because traditionalists are attuned to the cosmic rhythm of life, depicted by the Dance of Shiva, by the Buddhist Wheel of Life, the universality of the Swastika, and
the related Sun-Wheel of the Celts and Norse, they are aware that history is comprised of the ebb and flow of great expanses of time within which civilisations are born, mature, grow old and die, like any living organism. Within these great expanses of time are cycles, the “Great Year” of the Chaldeans and Hellenes, the Etruscan and Latin Saeculum, the Iranian Aeon, and the Hindu Kalpas.
The Egyptians were bound to the unchangeability of their rites and prayers because of their role in sustaining the cosmos. The hieroglyphs were the “words of god” that gave expression to the divine in the world. Rites required precise repetition. The sacred does not change, so the symbolic expression of the sacred cannot change. Rites and recitations reflected “cosmic life and the cyclical recurrence of its natural phenomena: day and night, summer and winter, the motions of the stars, the inundations of the Nile, sowing and reaping, decay and regeneration”.20
“The purpose of this ritual mimesis was dual: first, it was designed to incorporate the decline and decay with a chance of regeneration… second, it served to sustain cosmic life itself in its circularity, not merely to ‘keep’ time by observing its calendrical progress, but actually to generate it”.21
The calendar stabilised the cosmic that it represented. The cyclical stability of the cosmos was continually threatened, and the permanence of ritual and recitation maintained its stability. Cultural order sustained cosmic order. “The world is commemorated in order to counterbalance the perpetual drift towards decline, inertia, entropy and chaos”.22
The Greeks and Romans referred to four eras named after the four metals: gold, silver, bronze and iron. Between the Bronze and Iron cycles was an intervening Heroic cycle, where the Heroes resist encroaching Chaos. The Hindus also have four cyclic divisions: Satya Yuga, Treta, Dvapara and Kali, a demon not to be confused with the goddess Kālī, the Kali Yuga being the Dark Age of decline and chaos. The Persians had four cycles named after gold, silver, steel and “an iron compound”.23 The Chaldean view was similar.