The Decline and Fall of Civilisations
Page 3
The Mayans had solar cycles24, with a fifth Heroic cycle in which giants are fought. Each world in a cycle of creations had its own Sun. The presiding God preceding the present cycle was Vucub Caquix (“Seven Macaw”) who was a usurper presiding over humans that had been carved as effigies from wood. From the descriptions of the Popul Vuh creation myth, these “humans” were noted for their cruelty and disregard for animals and nature, and this world was destroyed by the Gods. The false “Sun God”, Vacub Caquix, was the “antithesis of all behaviour and values held dear by the Maya”. He was destroyed by the Hero Twins.25 These Hero Twins represent the beginning of a new cycle. It is notable that the legend arises immediately after the disintegration of the Olmec civilisation, indicating the birth of a new culture cycle under a new leadership.26 It is evident that these worlds were destroyed, according to the myth because, like Sodom and Gomorrah and the civilisation of the Noah legend, they were thoroughly degenerate, and this was the prelude to a new culture cycle.
The Hopi of Arizona state that there have been three prior “world cycles” or “Suns”.27 According to the Hopi lore related by an elder, this cycle will end “If people do not change their ways.” The “spirit of the world will become frustrated.” The elder believed that the world had worsened since he was told of the lore by his grandfather during the early 20th century. “There are no values at all any more – none at all – and people live any way they want, without morals or laws. These are the signs that the time has come”.28 The only chance is “that the Hopi do not abandon their traditions”, and that they impart their tradition to the rest of the world. He explained that all is fated according to divine law.29 The Hopi are a remnant of a truly traditional culture.
In the Book of Daniel the rise and fall of civilisations are depicted on a statue with a head of gold, chest and arms of silver, stomach and thighs of brass, legs of iron, and feet of iron and clay, symbolising four civilisations30
Islam states that there is a succession of “prophetic cycles”, each ending in corruption, and the nexus with the divinity restored by a new prophet. For example the cycle initiated by the Prophet Jesus was corrupted by teaching that he was the “son” of God. Muhammad serves as the final Prophet.31
Chinese tradition recounts ten former Ages called kis that have died in succession. The Chinese have an historical perspective based on “dynastic cycles”. The Buddhists have “Seven Suns” or epochal cycles, including the present.32
Norse cosmology is recorded in Voluspo, where the seeress explains to Odin the creation and destruction of the cosmos. She states that prior to the present there had been Nine Worlds:
Nine worlds I knew,
With mighty roots
the nine in the tree
beneath the mold”.33
The present or tenth cycle ends with the death of Baldur the sun god, and the dark forces representing chaos are unleashed to do battle with the gods in the cataclysm called Ragnarok.34 Norse cosmology shows that even the gods are subject to the cycles of history. They meet their death at Ragnarok, but this is their Wyrd, of which they are conscious. The cycle preceding Ragnarok is, like the Hindu, one of chaos among mortals. In particular there is a sundering of family bonds and infidelity becomes common place:
Brothers shall fight
And sisters’ sons
and fell each other,
shall kinship stain”35
This passage depicts the moral rot typical of the end-cycle of a civilisation. As can be discerned there is nothing “progressive” or “new” about the present West’s “permissive society”. It is also a time of violence:
Hard is it on earth,
Axe-time, sword-time,
Wind-time, wolf-time,
Nor ever shall men
Yggdrasil shakes,
The ancient limbs”36
with mighty whoredom;
shields are sundered,
ere the world falls;
each other spare”.37
and shiver on high
The forces of chaos, the world serpent Iormungandr, the Fenrir Wolf, Garm the Hel Hound, Surtr with a flaming sword, and their hordes are loosened upon the worlds of gods and mortals.38 The earth staggers, the sun dims, stars fall, fire engulfs the cosmos itself, and entwines the “Life-supporter”, the World Tree.39
Following the cataclysm a new cycle begins:
Now do I see
Rise all green
the earth anew
from the waves again” 40
Baldur returns as the principal God of the new cycle.41 This ushers in a new Golden Age of virtue, joy and serenity “during long ages.”42 Hence another civilisation begins further cycles of life and eventual death.
In wondrous beauty
Shall the golden tables
Which the gods had owned
once again
stand mid the grass,
in the days of old”43
It is notable that Baldur is the founder-god of this new civilisation on the death of the old; he embodies the spark of the prior civilisation that is used to reignite a new civilisation. Evola counselled a new generation youth, for whom he was a guru in Italy, that one can no longer defend Western civilisation, which is in an inexorable cycle of death. The best that can be done is to “ride the tiger”, adopting an Eastern term, during the present era, and lay the foundations of the next civilisation. This is the new generation’s cosmic duty, or dharma.44
Time and Tradition
The Golden Age
In contrast to the lineal view of history, the traditional perspective sees humanity as having declined or “fallen” from a Golden Age, rather than evolving.
The Golden Age was at the beginning, from whence proceeds a gradual stagnation and decline, and a return to chaos, as the nexus between man and the divine breaks through descending cycles. There is a reflection of this belief in the Hebrew myth of Adam and Eve representing primordial human perfection and the Fall from this state.45
Jesus can be seen in this traditional context in heroic terms as having sacrificed Himself to restore the connection between man and God, as well as being at the head of an army which militarily defeats its foes at the end of a decadent cycle that is analogous with the Hindu Kali Yuga, and the Norse Wolf Age.46
The primordial Golden Age is called Satya Yuga by the Hindus (Satya = Being), in Latin Saturn presided over the Golden Age.47 In Egypt the first Cycle, Zep Tepi, was the Golden Age, ruled directly under a dynasty of the gods. The Mayan civilisation refers to its Golden Age as a time of great knowledge, which has been lost, including the ability to have “measured the round face of the earth.” The Golden Ages of the traditional cultures are times when humanity was one with the gods, maintained by the performance of rites, and enforced by a warrior caste, under the rulership of priest-kings.
Evola in explaining a universal general decline, asked how the “higher can emerge from the lower”, “greater from less”?48 The traditionalist rejects evolution whether in social, historical, or biological forms.
Expanses of Time
According to Plato’s account of the dialogue between Solon and the Egyptian priests, the priests stated:
“Oh Solon, you Greeks are all children, and there is no such thing as an old Greek. You are all young in kind; you have no belief rooted in old tradition and no knowledge hoary with age. And the reason is this. There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind… so these genealogies of your own people… are little more than children’s stories”.49
The Egyptian priests were describing Atlantis as having existed 9,000 years before their own civilisation. Such an account is impossible under our own era’s darwinian linear historical paradigm. However there are many archaeological anomalies which do not accord with the darwinian time frame, which may show technologically advanced civilisations not only well before our own but which make the fabled Atlantis very “young”.
A large amount of data on anomalous archaeolo
gy has been assembled by Michael Cremo and Dr. Richard Thompson, which despite the heretical nature of the subject, has received critical acclaim by a number of eminent academics. Cremo and Thompson provided many examples of anomalous artefacts indicating that civilisations may have been rising and falling well before our present common assumptions. Anomalous artefacts such as a gold thread found in a stone at a depth of 8 feet, identified as being 320-360 million years old; and the inscribed coin found in Illinois 114 feet underground in deposits between 200,000 and 400,000 years old, may point to the antiquity of civilisations of high technical achievement that have risen and fallen millions of years prior to our own time.50
Many such archaeological anomalies question the assumed age of homo sapiens by evolution. Leif A. Jensen marshals science to refute darwinism from a Vedic traditionalist perspective.51 He quotes astrophysicist Carl Sagan that “the Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion on which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology”.52 As we have seen, Hinduism is not the “only” such religion, but it is an extant traditional religion that remains significant to much of the world.
Traditional Perspective of Time
Traditional man lives in continual communion with the divine and his society maintains its reverence for the sacred. Professor Mircea Eliade in his seminal study53 on the time-conceptions of sacred and profane societies examined many cultures across distances of both history and geography. He drew the distinction between societies that are “sacred” and “profane”, like Julius Evola referred to societies as “traditional” and “modern”. The sacral view of time, wrote Eliade, did not see life as a straight line leading to death, but as something that could be renewed by reconnecting with creation through the annual performance of rites. The balance of the cosmic with the terrestrial was sustained and renewed, lest chaos return and engulf the world. The distinction between sacred time and mundane is that profane time was bridged by the religious character of society. While our modern rational mind baulks at such “superstition”, this continual communion with divine origins ensured that the foundations of the culture were reaffirmed. The rites were – and in some places still are – a reminder of one’s place in the cosmos:
“For religious man time too, like space, is neither homogeneous nor continuous. On the one hand there are the intervals of a sacred time, the time of festivals (by far the greater part of which are periodical); on the other there is profane time, ordinary temporal duration, in which acts without religious meaning have their setting. Between these two kinds of time there is, of course, solution of continuity; but by means of rites religious man can pass without danger from ordinary temporal duration to sacred time”.54
The sacred quality of the world at its godly origin is re-enacted through rituals that restore the primordial quality to the mundane world, and sustain the nexus with the divine. To the Hindus this is one’s dharma – cosmic duty – performed through right-action in accordance with the obligations of one’s caste. As we have seen the Hopi Indian performs his ritual to sustain the world, without which chaos and world destruction descend. Annually the Chinese emperor, in his role as priest would ascend the temple platform within the Forbidden City and perform the rites necessary to maintain universal order. Eliade continues:
“One essential difference between these two qualities of time strikes us immediately: by its very nature sacred time is reversible in the sense that properly speaking it is a primordial mythical time made present. Every religious festival, any liturgical time, represents reactualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past, ‘in the beginning.’ Religious participation in a festival implies emerging from ordinary temporal duration and reintegration of the mythical time reactualized by the festival itself. Hence sacred time is indefinitely recoverable, indefinitely repeatable. From one point of view it could be said that it does not ‘pass,’ that it does not constitute an irreversible duration. … In other words the participants in the festival meet in it the first appearance of sacred time, as it appeared [originally]. For the sacred time in which the festival runs its course did not exist before the divine gesta that the festival commemorates. By creating the various realities that today constitute the world, the gods also founded sacred time, for the time contemporary with a creation was necessarily sanctified by the presence and activity of the gods”.55
Sacral society is based on a sense of eternity that time is cyclical insofar as through right-action – dharma – including the correct rites, cosmic balance can be renewed. It is time that is “circular”, “reversible and recoverable, a sort of eternal mythical present that is periodically reintegrated by means of rites”.56 Eliade stated that this difference in time-perception is what primarily distinguishes “religious from nonreligious man”. Traditional man refuses to live in what the modernist calls the “historical present”; he attempts to “regain sacred time” and a sense of eternity.57 When Evola counselled “ride the tiger”, live in the world but remain detached, this is a primary lesson of the Bhagavad Gita. Christians were counselled similarly: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God”.58 Here also is the theme of inner “renewal” for the “religious man”, and the rite performed is that of the Holy Communion, literally a communion with God.
For “modern” “non-religious man”, time is measured by the drudgery of his work, which he interrupts with “celebrations and spectacles”; what Eliade calls “festal time”. Non-religious man seeks escape from “the comparatively monotonous time”. Some escape allows modern man to experience “a different temporal rhythm from that which he experiences when he is working or bored”.59 Eliade gives the examples of listening to music or waiting for a loved one as experiences that change time-perception for modern man. Our “modern” epoch of Western civilisation, having broken the sacred nexus, attempts to relieve the monotony of profane time by ever more crass levels of distraction.
The more Western time is detached from the Eternal the more depraved or trivial the distractions. The prophets and sages of all the civilisations have lamented these epochs. Those civilisations at a certain point in their life-cycle stopped adhering to the traditions of their forefathers, or reformed them, moderated them, “modernised” them. For Western civilisation the finale of this disconnection was Vatican II (1962-1965) when fundamental reforms “modernised” the Catholic Church, the last vestige of tradition in the West.
Time As An Organism
The traditional perception of society and of history was organic and hence cyclic, or “seasonal”. Diverse cultures performed rituals for the return of the Sun, and hence a new beginning of a cycle of life: the Egyptian Atum and Ra, Mesopotamian Shamash, Hindu Surya, Greek Helios, Slavic Svarog, Germanic Sol, Norse Baldur, Cetlic Lugh, Aztec Tonatiuh, Roman Sol Invictus, Chinese Rigong Riguang Pusa, Buddhist Sūryaprabha, Japanese Amaterasu, Maori Tamanuiterā, Massai Ngai, Australian Aboriginal Yhi, and many others.
The Soyal Solstice Ceremony symbolising the renewal of life is the main rite of the Hopi Indians. For Persians, continuing to celebrate the ancient traditions, the rite of Shab-e Yalda is performed for the victory of Mithras, the Sun Father, later adopted by the Roman Legions as Sol Invictus, the conquering sun. With the adoption of Christianity by Constantine, Sol Invictus became the conserving “Son” (Christ), and the Solstice celebration became his birthdate. The Church Father Ambrose (339–397), called Christ the true sun, alluding to Christ as the “morning light”, the “rooster’s call”, “light … upon the senses”,
Eternal maker of all things
Of day and night the sov’reign King,
Refreshing mortals, You arrange
The rhythm of the seasons’ change.60
Note even here at the fou
ndation of what became the faith of the West that Ambrose referred to the “rhythm of the seasons’ change”. Returning to Eliade, he states that in North American Indian dialects,
“the term world (= Cosmos) is also used in the sense of year. The Yokuts say ‘the world has passed,’ meaning ‘a year has gone by.’ For the Yuki, the year is expressed by the words for earth or world. Like the Yokuts, they say ‘the world has passed’ when a year has passed. This vocabulary reveals the intimate religious connection between the world and cosmic time. The cosmos is conceived as a living unity that is born, develops, and dies on the last day of the year, to be reborn on New Year’s Day. [Emphasis added] We shall see that this rebirth is a birth, that the cosmos is reborn each year because, at every New Year, time begins ab initio. 61
“The intimate connection between the cosmos and time is religious in nature: the cosmos is homologizable to cosmic time (= the Year) because they are both sacred realities, divine creations. Among some North American Peoples this cosmic-temporal connection is revealed even in the structure of sacred buildings. Since the temple presents the image of the world, it can also comprise temporal symbolism. We find this, for example, among Algonquins and the Sioux. … Their sacred lodge represents the universe; but at the same time it symbolizes the year. For the year is conceived as a journey through the four cardinal directions, signified by the four doors and four windows of the lodge. The Dakotas say: ‘The Year is a circle around the world’ - that is, around their sacred lodge, which is an imago mundi”.62
Eliade also raises a significant point, which we shall consider in the chapter on the “Birth of the West”; that architecture reflects the spiritual outlook of a people. Eliade refers to the sacred lodge as constructed to reflect the cosmic outlook of the North American Indian, no less than the Gothic spire of the Western, or the domed Mosque of the Islamic.