Living at the End of an Age

Living at the End of an Age

Dr. K.R. Bolton

    Turning and turning in the

    widening gyre

    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

    Things fall apart; the centre

    cannot hold;

    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,

    and everywhere

    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

    The best lack all conviction,

    while the worst

    Are full of passionate intensity

    – W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

Apocalyptic literature and prophecies are found throughout history. But as the ‘world’ has not ‘ended’, our modern day smug intelligentsia – imbued with a belief in ‘progress’ and the Darwinian concept of history that sees a ‘march of humanity’ – scoffs at such notions. Dr. A. R. Wallace, a leading Darwinian scientist of the Victorian era, in a book optimistically entitled The Wonderful Century (1898), wrote of this as the best of all times:

    Not only is our century superior to any that have gone before it but… it may be best compared with the whole preceding historical period. It must therefore be held to constitute the beginning of a new era of human progress.

The philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler predicted the ‘decline of the West’ in the aftermath of World War I. The word most commonly used to describe him, even by his admirers, was that of a ‘pessimist’. Does one, however, become a ‘pessimist’ to acknowledge the mortality of organisms, and acknowledge they have life cycles that end in death? Such is life; such is history. Spengler explained:

    I see in place of that empty figment of ONE linear history… the drama of a number of mighty cultures, each having its own life; its own death… Each culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return…. I see world history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvellous waxing and waning of organic forms… The professional historian on the other hand, sees it as a sort of tapeworm industriously adding to itself one epoch after another.

Entitling the first chapter of his treatise on alchemy ‘The Plurality & Duality of Civilisations’, Julius Evola – Spengler’s Italian translator – states:

    Recently in contrast to the notion of progress and the idea that history has been represented by more or less continuous upward evolution of collective humanity, the idea of a plurality of the forms of civilisation and of a relative incommunicability between them has been confirmed. According to this second and new vision of history, history breaks down into epochs and disconnected cycles.… A civilisation springs up, gradually reaches a culminating point, and falls into darkness and, more often than not, disappears. A cycle has ended….

Today’s liberal-democratic intelligentsia actually refer to our era as ‘the end of history’, the term used by Francis Fukuyama as the title of an essay and a subsequent book. Our liberal-democratic ideals, epitomised and imposed over the world by the USA, have supposedly reached such perfection there is nothing left other than to establish a liberal dispensation over the universe for all time, and nothing more need be done. Another name for it is ‘American millennialism’.

    Romans, Greeks, Chinese, Moors, Iranians, Assyrians, regarded their empires as eternal. They had their ‘prophets of doom’ who predicted the empire would fall if they forgot their traditions. These doomsayers arose at those very epochs where their civilisations were at the height of wealth and power, typically at the empire-state. Here stands the dilemma, the paradox. When a High Culture (Civilisation) has reached its external limits – as when a human organism reaches middle age – sudden or gradual disintegration is the only course possible. A slow decline may be largely imperceptible. It is what T. S. Eliot referred to when writing of the end of Western civilisation, “not with a bang but with a whimper.”

Oswald Spengler stated that he could show the West is going through the same cycles as Greece and Rome in their epochs of decay. He revealed through studying analogous eras of the history of civilisations, that there is nothing unique about the West’s cycle. It is therefore nonsense to refer to something as ‘progress’ when it has appeared many times before over thousands of years. This is especially true of liberal and left-wing ideas implemented as ‘progressive’, such as the West’s birth control and high abortion rates. A sage from ancient Greece, Rome, India, Egypt, Israel, would say in regard to Western social doctrines called ‘progressive’: ‘been there, done that, and it does not end well’.

Universality of Cyclic Outlook

Traditional societies, that is, those societies that intuited and maintained a connection with divinity and saw their place in a cosmos, regarded cultures as living organisms that passed through cycles of birth, youth, maturity, old age, decay and death.

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 have four cyclic divisions called yugas: Satya, 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. The Chaldean view was similar. The Mayans had solar cycles, with a fifth Heroic cycle in which giants are fought. Chinese tradition recounts ten former Ages called ‘kis’ that have passed in succession. The Chinese also have an historical perspective based on ‘dynastic cycles’. The Buddhists have ‘Seven Suns’ or epochal cycles.

The Hopi of Arizona say there have been three prior ‘world cycles’ or ‘Suns’. According to Hopi lore, this cycle will end if people do not change their ways. The spirit of the world will become frustrated. A Hopi elder commented to author Graham Hancock that, “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.” The elder stated that the only chance is “that the Hopi do not abandon their traditions,” and that the Hopi impart their Traditionalism to the rest of the world. He explained that all is fated according to divine law.

In the Old Testament ‘Daniel’ this rise and fall is represented by a statue of four civilisations symbolised by a head of gold, chest and arms of silver, stomach and thighs of brass, and the legs of iron and feet of iron and clay.

According to Islam, there is a succession of ‘prophetic cycles’, each ending with the corruption of that cycle and the nexus with the divinity restored by a new prophet.

    “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

Read the full article here:wakingtimes.com