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The Metaphysics of History
Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment for the Degree of Th.D.
by Kerry R Bolton
"On the world's loom Weave the Norns doom
Nor may they guide it nor change."
Richard Wagner, Siegfried Act III¹

Thesis Statement

That the traditional outlook of High Cultures is cyclic. This cyclic perspective provides a predictive technique for the course of Western Civilisation in its Late cycle. Our "Modern" lineal approach to historical analysis in based on faulty assumptions arising from the optimism of our supposedly unique technical "progress", which is neither unique nor assuring this Civilisation infinite duration.

Abstract
This thesis examines the historical perspectives of a number of High Cultures and concludes that the common Traditional outlook is based on a cyclic approach which considers the rise, flourishing and death of societies and more broadly of civilisations as analogous to the cycles of Seasons. The Traditionalist approach is based upon a religious perspective, a feeling or intuition for the numinous at work, and the belief that society flourishes when it maintains a nexus with the Divine. This sacral nexus is maintained through ceremonies and the ordering of society to reflect a divine or cosmic order. The 'divine right of kings' is a debased vestige of the original Traditionalist concept of the priest-king; the present forms of "constitutional monarchy" being much more of a debasement; just as our present conception of the "soldier" is a far-removed debasement of the Traditionalist concept of the dharmic warrior who fulfils a divine duty to uphold the cosmic order. Traditional societies are therefore hierarchical rather than egalitarian, and their ethos is spiritual rather than materialistic or hedonistic. Symptoms of decline are seen as being the results of a falling away from this nexus between society and Divinity. A number of prophetic texts warn of the consequences of this sundering in apocalyptic terms. In our own time, historians in this Tradition have arisen, such as Evola and Spengler. The value of the Traditionalist approach is considered as a predictive method of greater legitimacy than non-Traditionalist approaches to history which are lineal, Darwinian and 'progressive'.

Traditional Historical Outlook

The Traditionalist approach to history is cyclic. This thesis will deal mainly with High Cultures². A culture ceases to be "Traditional" when it no longer feels its relationship with the Divine³.

Evola⁴ describes this traditionalist outlook as the "metaphysics of history." (Evola, Foreword, xxxvii, 1995a). The poet Yeats cogently described the Traditional social order as a "unity of being", writing of the Byzantium culture: "The religious, aesthetic and practical life were one. …" (Bolton, 48).

High Cultures have fundamental features in common. This commonality transcends time, race and geography. Hence one sees the same broad attitudes and structures of organisation in High Cultures as far apart geographically and ethnically as the Germanic, Egyptian, Aztec, Japanese and Vedic. They possess castes⁵ as the basis of social order reflecting the divine cosmic order on earth, hold the ruler to be literally of divine origin, a priest-king at least, often a God-King, and consider their own culture as part of a cycle. (Evola, 89-100, 1995a).

Modern History Predicated on Darwinism
Like the theory of biological evolution, which sees life as ascending in a progressive lineal manner, history today is seen as a chronicle of generalised human ascent from non-technical tribe to "modern" technical civilisation. Hence the general optimism of the 19th Century with the introduction of the Machine Age as being the ultimate in human potential and of infinite duration, which set the stage for the continued superiority complex of our own era. This optimism among the highest intellectual circles was cogently expressed for e.g. by 19th C. biologist (and hence an exponent of Darwinism) A R Wallace in a book aptly titled The Wonderful Century (1898):

"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. … We men of the 19th C. have not been slow to praise it. The wise and the foolish, the learned and the unlearned, the poet and the pressman, the rich and the poor, alike swell the chorus of admiration for the marvellous inventions and discoveries of our own age, and especially for those innumerable applications of science which now form part of our daily life, and which remind us every hour or our immense superiority over our comparatively ignorant forefathers." (Briggs, 29). ⁶

Perhaps few passages more succinctly expresses the antithesis between the non-Traditionalist or Modernist and the Traditionalist approaches to history. Dr Wallace epitomises the Darwinian outlook not just in terms of biological evolution, but in terms of how this evolutionary doctrine was and is applied to history and society. He sees history as a straight line of ascent from primitive to modern, with his (and our) own era being at the apex.

Rise & Fall
Traditionalists see⁷ things differently. There is no one Age that represents the apex of human social or cultural evolution. Rather Traditionalists see an ebb and flow of many cultures and civilisations rising and falling within their own context. The 19th C. and our 20th and 21st centuries, represent to the neo-Traditionalist one aspect of a specific Civilisation, the Western in this instance, rather than the culmination of a generalised history. The technical inventions of our Civilisation are not even unique phenomena for the Traditionalist, who recognises that such great technical civilisations have risen in the distant past, only to decay and die amidst their own feelings of optimism, or what was called hubris⁸.

Traditional societies were the manifestation of the divine cosmic order. Much ceremony went into assuring the continuity between society and the Divine, for e.g. in the rites of Hinduism⁹, or the Aztec human sacrifices to the Sun¹⁰. Modernist as distinct from Traditionalist societies can be defined in terms of a break of this nexus, which is most readily seen in the importance that a society begins to give to commerce and the merely technical.

Spengler states that "money wills" in all Late Civilisations. (Spengler, 469-587). Traditionalists from the Vedic¹¹ to the Norse¹² have a suspicion of the merchant, in contrast to the modernist who sees business success as the ultimate meaning. Something of the same outlook can be seen in I Timothy 6:10, referring to the love of money as the root of all evil. Hence social orders and institutions considered of Divine origin¹³ are replaced in the Late or "Winter"¹⁴ cycle of a Civilisation¹⁵ by degraded materialistic forms: Dharmic warriors are replaced by soldiers, God-Kings by parliaments, religion by social doctrines, the merchant, becomes the de facto ruler in the Late cycle.
Evola in his work on Alchemy states that the Traditionalist perspective is necessary for any understanding of Alchemy. The "hermetic-alchemical tradition" "forms part of the cycle of pre-modern 'traditional' civilisation". In order to understand it the aspirant has to evoke this Traditionalist spirit into the present. Whoever attempts to understand Alchemy and hermeticism without having risen above the modern mindset' and having awakened a sensitivity that connects with the "general spiritual stream that gave life to the tradition in the first place, will succeed only in filling his head with words, symbols and fantastic allegories.". This is not a question of mere intellectual process but "a different way of perceiving and knowing". Consciousness itself has to be transformed. (Evola, 1995b, 14).
Evola's political, philosophical and historical teachings were motivated by his esoteric traditionalism as a manifestation of what he termed the "revolt against the modern world".

Modern & Traditional
While adhering to the cyclic conception of history, as per Spengler, of whom he was the Italian translator, and of the Ancients, Evola added to this the concept of a duality of civilisations categorised as Traditional and Modern. Evola saw the end cycle of Western Civilisation, the beginning of which he ascribed to the Late Medieval Period, as the start of the super-cycle of the Modern. All those civilisations that had come and gone before were still within the context of the Traditional. Entitling the first chapter of his treatise on Alchemy "The Plurality & Duality of Civilisations", Evola 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 incommunicality¹⁶ between them has been confirmed. According to this second and new¹⁷ 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…." (Evola, 1995b, 13).

Evola considered this revived cyclic approach to history as "a healthy reaction to the superstition of history as progress", which was a product of Western materialism. He offered this added dualist dimension however, and cautioned that Spenglerian cyclicism did not offer the entire story. In addition to "a plurality of civilisations", an historical "duality" should be recognised. "Modern civilisation stands on one side and on the other the entirety of all the civilisations that have preceded it." For the Western Civilisation he put the end of the Traditional phase and the beginning of the modern super-cycle as the "late Middle Ages", when the point of rapture with Tradition is complete. Since that time, "modern civilisation' has completely cut itself off from the past. "For the great majority of moderns, that means any possibility of understanding the traditional world has been completely lost." (Evola, 1995b, 14).
The great work of the esotericist is to transcend the modern age and reconnect with Tradition.

In 1938 Evola sought to write a brief synopsis on the Traditionalist approach to history, where he defined the Traditional and Modern civilisations:

"On the one hand there are the traditional cultures… The axis of these cultures and the summit of their hierarchical order consist of metaphysical, supra-individual powers and actions, which serve to inform and justify all that which is merely human, temporal, subject to becoming and to 'history'. On the other hand there is 'modern culture', which is actually anti-tradition and which exhausts itself in a construction of purely human and earthly conditions and in the total development of these, in pursuit of a life entirely detached from the 'higher world.'" (Evola, 1938).

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, Ch.9:8).
Because Traditionalists are attuned to the rhythm of Life¹⁸ they are aware that history is comprised of the ebbs and flows of great expanses¹⁹ within which civilisations rise, flourish and fall, organically, like any living organism. Within these great expanses of time are cycles, the Great Year of the Chaldeans and Hellenes, Etruscan and Latin Saeculum, Iranian Aeon, and Hindu Kalpas.

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, the last being the Dark Age of decline and chaos. The Persians had four cycles named after gold, silver, steel and 'an iron compound'. (Evola, 177-78, 1995a). The Chaldean view was similar. The Mayans had solar cycles , with a fifth Heroic cycle in which giants are fought.

Chinese tradition recounts 10 former Ages called kis that have died in succession. The Buddhists have "Seven Suns" or epochal cycles, including the present. (Hancock, 213).

The Hopi of Arizona, precursors to the Mayan Civilisation, state that there have been three prior ""world cycles "or "Suns""(Hancock, 213). According to the Hopi lore related to Hancock 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 C. The elder spoke as a Traditionalist who sees the moral and spiritual decay as being responsible for the end to the present Cycle:

"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." (Hancock, 532). 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. (Hancock, 533).

In Daniel the rise and fall of civilisations are 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. (Daniel 2).

Islam states that 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. For e.g. the cycle initiated by the Prophet Jesus was corrupted by teaching that he was the "son" of God. Muhammad serves as the final Prophet. (Coogan, 95).

Norse cosmology is cogently recorded in Voluspa, 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 remember, Nine trees of life/ Before the World Tree grew from the ground." (Voluspa, v. 2).

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. (Voluspa v. 33-60).

Norse cosmology shows that even the Gods are subject to the cycles of history, as most meet their death at Ragnarok, but this is their Fate or Wyrd, of which they are conscious.

The cycle preceding Ragnarok is, like the Vedic, one of chaos among mortals. In particular there is a sundering of family bonds and infidelity becomes common place. "Brothers shall battle and slay one another/ Blood ties of sisters' sons shall be sundered./ Harsh is the world. Fornication is rife,/ Luring to faithlessness spouses of others." (Voluspa, v. 46).

This passage depicts the moral rot typical of the end-cycle of a Civilisation. It is also a time of violence: "Axe time, sword time, shields shall be cloven;/ Wind time, wolf time, ere the world wanes… / no man shall then spare another." (Voluspa v. 47).
"The dying world tree flares/ At the sound of the shrill trump of doom…" (Voluspa 48).²²

The forces of chaos, the world serpent Iormungandr, the Fenrir Wolf, Garm the Hel Hound, Surtr, and their hordes are loosened upon the worlds of gods and mortals. (Voluspa, v. 50) The earth staggers, the sun dims, stars fall, fire engulfs the cosmos itself, and entwines the "Life-supporter".²³ (Voluspa, v. 59).

Following the cataclysm a new cycle begins: "Another earth from the sea/ Once more turning green." (Voluspa, v. 61). Baldur returns as the principal God of the new cycle. (Voluspa, v. 64). This ushers in a new Golden Age of virtue, joy and serenity "during long ages." (Voluspa, v. 66).

Symbols of Fate
Wheel Symbolism
I have alluded to the sun-wheel of the Norse and Celts as a symbol of the Traditionalist view of society as revolving around an axis.

The wheel is a motif in sundry cultures representing the cyclic nature of life, both for the individual, society and entire civilisations.

The Medieval world of the Western Civilisation had its Wheel of Fortune with eight spokes of opposites (Walter, 17) reminiscent of the Buddhist Wheel of Dharma, attesting again to the universality of the cyclic approach to life. The Wheel of Fortune was a feature of Medieval churches, hanging from the ceiling, and used as an oracle. (Phillips, 3014-3015).

The Wheel of Fortune entered Western occultism via the Tarot, Key 10 representing the cyclic nature of the cosmos: "In Key 10 self-consciousness grasps the import of the basic wheel pattern of cosmic manifestation." (Case, Intro. 11: 1). The positioning of the Wheel of Fortune as Number 10 of the Tarot Major Arcana tells the Traditionalist the nature of this symbol and its relation to the Tarot as a cosmic book of many chapters and infinite application. Hence as representing "10" with "0" (The Fool in the Tarot Major Arcana) representing Eternity, Undifferentiated Power, that which we call "God"; and the "1" (The Magician) representing the manifestation of that Source as the Beginning, 10"²⁴ means the return to the "Eternal No-Thing", and the beginning of a New Cycle; proceeding "9" (The Hermit) which is the conclusion of a Cycle, "a single cycle of evolution only". (Case, Fundamentals, 2: 3). Case writes:

"The completion of a cycle is always a return to the Eternal No-Thing, 0, but since 0 is essentially changeless in its inherent nature, the Eternal Source is eternally a self-manifesting power. Consequently, a new cycle begins as soon as the proceeding cycle ends. Thus the number 10 symbolises the eternal creativeness of the Life-Power; the incessant whirling forth of the Self-expression of the Primal Will, the ever-turning wheel of manifestation." (Case, ibid.).

The Magician is therefore the individual as the expression of the undifferentiated power we call "God", the individual as the means by which the Super-Consciousness or God-force is made manifest or made conscious. To the Western Traditionalist this equates with the Eastern Dharma, one's cosmic duty.

The Jains²⁵ hold that time is endless, and is represented by a wheel of twelve spokes. Like the Medieval West's Wheel of Fortune and the Dharmic wheel, the Jains 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. (Phillips, op.cit.).

Triskele - Celtic Wheel of Life
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 C. BC and 8th C. AD. 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 - point, which the Traditionalist poet Yeats alludes to in The Second Coming²⁶ , when 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, etc., referred to above.

Present day Celtic craftsmen have noted that the Triskele is drawn as a single line without beginning or end, representing the eternal cosmic laws. (Celtic History, The Triskele).

Spinners of Time
Another widespread motif of the cyclical nature of life, both microcosmic and macrocosmic relates to the Fates weaving Time.

The word Fate is derived form Latin fatum, meaning decrees of the Gods, which we can call destiny, both individual and collective. Generally even the Gods are subjected however to Fate, as per the Norse Gods at Ragnarok.

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. (Rakoczi, 918). The Three Fates sat among the Gods, but Zeus himself was often considered to be subject to them (Rakoczi, 920).

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. (Rakocazi, ibid.).

Interestingly the Norse World Tree Yggdrasil, the archetypal column or axis sustaining the universe, has its three roots fed by Urd, the past (Titchell, 27). Here again we see that the Traditional cultures are predicated on the belief that society is sustained by its nexus with its divine origins, which when cast asunder lead to collapse of that cycle. It is notable too Yggdrasil is being continuously gnawed at and interfered with by a number of creatures, a reminder of the precarious position of a culture's foundations.

Titchell comments that Urd, the past, is the cause of both present and future. Vervande, present, also means Becoming. (Titchell, ibid.). Therefore the present is not static, but is seeded with the possibilities of the future (destiny, Fate). These two Norns, past and present, create the third, Skuld, future, which is defined as Debt, something owed. What is owing is the restoration of balance from the interaction of Urd and Vervande. (Titchell, ibid.). The Voluspa states:

"Thence comes maidens who knew much
Three form the hall beneath the Tree
One was named Origin, the second, Becoming
These two fashioned the third, Debt." (Voluspa, 20).

Modern philosophy recognises this ancient concept in its mundane form as "dialectics": thesis + antithesis + synthesis, the synthesis containing within itself the seed of contradiction, thereby leading to further synthesis, ad infinitum. The concept was developed by the philosopher Hegel, who gave it a spiritual dimension by recognising a imminent World Spirit, but this was rendered in a specifically anti-Traditional form by Marx²⁷ as dialectical, materialism, the epitome of the negation of the Traditionalist world-view.²⁸

This Germanic concept of Fate, like the Hellenic, was symbolised by Three sisters at a spinning wheel. It has comes down to us in Wagner's Siegfried, quoted at the beginning of this thesis, and in Shakespeare's MacBeth, as the Weird (Norse Wryd + Fate) Sisters or Witches. Shamas in his thesis on the "Weird Sisters" writes:

"The Weird Sisters, from William Shakespeare's play Macbeth are, arguably, the most famous trio of witches in English literature. Shakespeare's Weird Sisters are a complex trinitarian mythological construction, a unique amalgamation of classical, folkloric, and socio-political elements. …
Early accounts of the Weird Sisters, dating from 1420 and including Raphael Holinshed's 1577 History of England, Scotland and Ireland, assign archetypal value to the Weird Sisters as goddesses of destiny, nymphs or fairies. … Shakespeare transforms the Weird Sisters from goddesses into "witches" lead by Hecate. Thus, Shakespeare joins an Anglo-Saxon mythological trio to a Graeco-Roman three-headed deity, fusing together aspects of two separate pantheons in order to create a unique cosmology involving female trinitarian archetypes. In Macbeth, the bard depicts both a pale "lunar" Hecate, and a black "underworld" Hecate, related to Nox. … Shakespeare mines trinitarian aspects in stage directions, dialogue, plot, ritual, and symbols. Hecate, Nox, and other archetypal Triple Goddess figures from Celtic mythology are part of Shakespeare's Weird Sisters' archetypal resonance. …"

Interestingly, it is three mysterious maidens in white (Phillips & Keatman, 2) who take the body of the deceased Arthur to Avalon²⁹, where according to the mythos he is not dead, but asleep, and will return to again rally Britons from the depths of decline. He fulfils the role of Baldur who awaits the allotted time to return after Ragnarok and preside over a new cosmos, and other mythic figures often represented in Messianic terms.
The Golden Age
In contrast to the lineal view of history, Traditionalists hold that humanity has declined from a Golden Age, rather than having evolved from a primitive state.
Traditionalism states that the Golden Age was at the beginning, from whence there proceeds a gradual stagnation and decline, and a return to chaos, as the nexus between man and the Divine breaks. There is a reflection of this belief in the Hebrew and Christian myth of Adam and Eve representing primordial human perfection and the Fall from this state, which is a break of the nexus between perfect humanity and the Divinity. (Genesis 2-3).
Jesus can be seen in this Traditionalist 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 equates with Kali Yuga, the Wolf Age, etc. (Revelation 19: 11-15).
The primordial Golden Age is called Satya Yuga by the Hindus (Satya = Being), in Latin Saturn, who presided over the Latin Golden Age. In Egypt the first Cycle, Zep Tepi, was the Golden Age, ruled directly under a dynasty of the Gods. (Hancock, 403). 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 warrior castes , under the rulership of priest-kings.
The Mayan Civilisation refers to its Golden Age as a time of great knowledge, which like many others, has been lost, including the ability to have "measured the round face of the earth." (Popul Vuh, 168).
Evola in explaining a universal general decline, asked how the 'higher can emerge form the lower', 'greater form less'? (Evola, 1938).

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." (Donnelly, pp. 6-21).
The Egyptian priests were describing Atlantis as having existed 9,000 years before their own Civilisation, which was said to have been technologically advanced.
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 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 archaeology 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. The authors are adherents of Vedantism. Therefore they are Traditionalists who have used scientific methodology.
Cremo and Thompson provide many examples of anomalous artefacts indicating that Civilisations have been rising and falling well before our present orthodox comprehension. 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; an inscribed coin found in Illinois 114 feet underground in deposits between 200,000 and 400,000 years old, etc. point to the vast antiquity of civilisations of high technical advancement that have risen and fallen millions of years prior to our own time.

Ebb & Flow of History
Spengler in his epochal Decline of The West brought the Traditionalist approach to the Western public with empirical evidence, stating:
"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." (Spengler, vol. 1, pp. 21-22).
While each Civilisation has characteristics particular to itself, its own type of art, architecture and mathematics, they have analogous cycles of birth, flourishing , decline and death. Therefore, under the cyclic paradigm there is nothing unique about the decay of present "modern" society. Neither is there anything "new" or "progressive" about certain movements such as communism, capitalism, methods of banking, birth control, the breakdown of family and marriage, etc. They are manifested during the decline cycle of a Civilisation. Typically, the cycle of decline is marked by religious scepticism, seen as scientific or progressive, materialism, and the rise of the merchant class/money ethics, over traditional castes based on birth and obligations to duty (Hindu dharma). Family and children are seen as a burden, as interfering in the economic process, rather than as assuring continuity of one's lineage.
Spengler described these analogous cycles succinctly in this paragraph from The Decline of the West:
"You (the West) are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your immorality, your broken down marriages, your birth control that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in the brains - I can prove to you that these were the characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient states - Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome." (Spengler, Decline).
This statement might seem remarkably prophetic today given the current state of the "West" and given that Spengler was writing over eighty years ago. Spengler was however able to speak with the advantage of being empirically able to examine the causes of decline of a series of civilisations which rose and fell over the course of thousands of years. How more remarkable then the prophetic insights of the Traditionalists who wrote in a similar manner thousands of years ago, which continue to stand, like our Civilisation's "prophet", Spengler, as prophets warning us from prior Ages and long-gone civilisations.
In describing the Kali Yuga the Hindu text Visnu Purana, describes conditions that could just as well have been written by a contemporary critic of Western 'modern' society, and which are remarkably similar to that of Spengler:
"Wealth (inner) and piety (following one's dharma) will decrease day by day until the whole world will be entirely depraved. Then property alone will confer rank; material wealth will be the only source of devotion; passion will be the sole bond between the sexes; falsehood will be the only means of success in litigation…
"Earth will be venerated for its mineral treasures…
"He who gives away much money will be the master of men, and family descent will no longer be a title of supremacy…
"Men will fix their desires upon riches, even though dishonestly acquired." (Evola, 1995a 367-369).
This example from the ancient Vedic text indicates the predictive value of the Traditionalist approach to history.
The Revelation of John has a similar account of the end cycle of a world-encompassing Civilisation that in our own context might be viewed as the "Western". Using the analogy of a prior fallen Civilisation, the figure of the Whore of Babylon is evoked to describe a world system that has amassed great power and wealth, that is devoid of a spiritual nexus and that is in the throes of collapse. Leaving aside whether the outcome is the result of God's judgement, Revelation 18 is within the Traditionalist cyclical approach to history:
"Babylon the great is fallen," exclaims the prophet, the "habitation of devils and of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird." (Rev. 18:2).
The prophet is declaring that the future world civilisation he is visualising, a civilisation based on wealth and power, is spiritually and morally bankrupt. It is the end cycle of a Civilisation when outward glamour, wealth, excess, and hedonism predominant, as in the end cycle of Greece or Rome, and the founding values of the original culture from which the Civilisation originated, are devalued and ridiculed.
John sees this Late Civilisation in terms of a world power. Civilisations as both Toynbee and Spengler described them, typically end with a last hurrah, a world-encompassing empire. Contemporary political observers might today see this world empire as being manifested in the world outreach of the USA, which has declared its "war on terrorism" for e.g. in terms of a "clash of civilisations" with itself as the leader of the "West." (sic) Whether these values are actually those of the founding principles of Western Civilisation is a pertinent question. Appearance is not the same as substance.
That this end cycle is in a phase as a world encompassing empire is indicated by John's revelation when he states:
"For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies." (Rev. 18: 3).
Here John sees this final world empire as receiving the homage of all or most other nations ("the kings of the earth"), and as being the basis of a world financial and economic system ("the merchants of the earth…"). The nexus around which this "civilisation" is based is therefore described as being that of money rather than Divinity.
This is parallel to the Traditionalist passages already quoted from Hindu to Hopi; and from our neo-Traditionalist historians Spengler and Evola.
In keeping with the Traditionalist outlook, John's revelation has the crumbling to decay and death of this godless empire, with plagues, death and mourning, "utterly burned", with the "kings of the earth" who have ingratiated themselves with this empire lamenting its end, along with the merchants." (Rev. 18: 8-10).
John also reminds us, in keeping with the Traditionalist prophets and historians, that the basis of this neo-Babylonian civilisation in its end cycle of corruption is that of commerce. The merchants lament its demise because the commerce will no longer be done in gold and sliver and precious metals and the symbols of decadent opulence. (Rev. 18: 12). John's revelation states that it is the merchants who rule this world empire, just as Spengler said that merchant values come to dominate civilisations in their Winter cycle. John describes the merchants in this civilisation as "the great men of the earth" who rule the earth, "for by their sorceries were all nations deceived." (Rev. 18: 23).
It is notable that the merchant castes in Traditionalist societies are well down the hierarchical pyramid; and in the case of money lenders, today's bankers, they are universally despised whether in the Judaic and Christian scriptures or in Traditionalist Islamic societies, where usury continues to be regarded as a sin. This Traditionalist outlook of High Cultures is precisely antithetical to the outlook of Civilisations in the end cycle where merchants are brought to the apex of society, and usurers are regarded as respectable businessmen.
Their great riches will "come to nought." (Rev. 18: 13-19).
John's revaluation follows the cyclical process, where he sees on the ruins of the dead empire a new civilisation emerging that reconnects to the Divine. The Norse Ragnarok and other Traditions speak of a new dispensation both terrestrial and celestial, which is also what John's revelation speaks of:
"And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth are passed away…" (Rev. 21:1).
Influenced by Buddhist cyclic principles, the Samurai ethic refers to the "flow of time" in the ethical treatise Hagakure, by Jocho Yamamoto. In his commentary on Hagakure for the present day, the Japanese literary figure Yukio Mishima , alludes to this cyclicism. Mishima states of Jocho: "Lamenting as he does the decadence of his era and the degeneration of the young samurai, Jocho is also a realistic observer of the flow of time…"
Resisting the flow of time rarely produces desirable results, he states. (Mishima 81-82).. Citing Book Two of Hagakure Mishima quotes: "The climate of an age is unalterable. That conditions are worsening steadily is proof that we have entered that last stage of the Law." (Mishima, 83).
Jocho employs the analogy of the seasons, reminiscent of Spengler, in describing the historical cycles: "However the season cannot always be spring or summer, nor can we have daylight forever." (Mishima, 83).
According to Jocho's advice, one should not look to nostalgia and the return of obsolete forms, nor to the superficiality of what is "up to date" while "detesting the old fashioned", but should "make each era as good as it can be according to its nature."
Metaphysics of Caste
Since caste is central to the Traditionalist analysis for the causes of the decline of Civilisation, as will be considered in the chapter Traditional and Racial Approaches to Cyclic History, it is necessary to briefly look at caste as a metaphysical expression.
Castes and their relationships in a hierarchical social order are the foundation of Traditional societies, and extend not only to High Cultures but also to the "primitive". There is nothing egalitarian or communistic about Traditional societies. Castes are distinct from mere economic classes, which are a debasement of caste that arise in the Late or Winter Cycle of a Civilisation, when Money governs and the nexus with the Divine has been broken. Castes in Traditional societies are, like all else, a manifestation of the Divine cosmic order.
In the Hindu scriptures Krishna says to Arjuna: "According to the three modes of material nature and the work ascribed to them, the corresponding four divisions of human society were created by Me…"(Bhagavad Gita 4:13).
The Norse Song of Rig poetically renders in detail the divine origins of the castes. Rig is a name of the Aesir God Heimdal. He arrives at the abodes of couples and bears sons by the women of each, from which arise respectively the castes of Thrall (serf), Karl (freeman), Jarl (warrior nobility) and Kon (King).
Evola explains that the Traditionalist conception of caste is distinct from the petty class tyranny of debased societies:
"For this we must be clear about one thing: it is an error to assume that the hierarchy of the traditional world is based on a tyranny of the upper classes. That is merely a 'modern' conception, completely alien to the traditional way of thinking. The traditional doctrine in fact conceived of spiritual action as an 'action without acting', it spoke of the 'unmoved mover'; everywhere it used the symbolism of the 'pole', the unalterable axis around which every ordered movement takes place… it always stressed the…spirituality, and genuine authority, as well as its way of acting directly on its subordinates, not through violence but through 'presence'; finally, it used the simile of the magnet, wherein lies the key to our question, as we shall now see.
"Only today could anyone imagine the authentic bearers of the Spirit, or of Tradition, pursue people so as to seize and put them in their places - in short, that they 'manage' people, or have any personal interest in setting up and maintaining those hierarchical relationships by virtue of which they can appear visibly as rulers. This would be ridiculous and senseless. It is much more the recognition on the part of the lower ones that is the true basis of any traditional ranking. It is not the higher that needs the lower, but the other way round. The essence of hierarchy is that there is something living as a reality in certain people; which in the rest is only present in the condition of an ideal, a premonition, an unfocussed effort. Thus the latter are fatefully attracted to the former, and their lower condition is one of subordination less to something foreign, than to their own true 'self'. Herein lies the secret, in the traditional world, of all readiness for sacrifice, all heroism, all loyalty, and, on the other side, of a prestige, an authority, and a calm power which the most heavily-armed tyrant can never count upon." (Evola, 1938).
Today we 'moderns' can only glimpse a vestige of this former spirit that animated the caste structure when thinking of such terms and words as elan, chivalry, noblesse oblige, the vague feeling of contempt when hearing the term 'nouveau riche', the distaste still felt by a few people to even talk about money; and the intuition by some that something, someone or some societies are 'crass'.
Something of the spirit that animated the traditional hierarchy can still be seen in such vestiges as the instinctive respect multitudes of people have for what remains of the royal families, regardless of their debased condition. A royal family retains an aura that is lacking in any president or Prime Minister, no matter how grandiose such secular and humanist rulers might be portrayed, no matter what edifices they might seek to erect in their own honour and memory. Even the communists were obliged to recognise what seems to be an inherited need to look upward, thereby repudiating any notion that "the people" yearn for the universal drabness of equality, by replacing Monarchy with the cult of personality. For e.g. the mummification of the corpse of Lenin and its depositing in a stepped pyramid. When genuinely great leaders arise and inspire "the people" by sheer force of personality rather than by sheer force per se, they assume the attributes of kingship or queenship, in substance if not in name, and might even be accorded the status of sainthood, as per the e.g. of Eva Peron. The most copious amounts of blood have been spilt not in the name of a monarch but in the name of equality, as per the French Revolutionary Terror and the Bolshevik Red Terror.
As we'll see below, the answer to the problem of cultural decay is found in the rotting of the top.

Neo-Traditionalists
Many in the West, with its outward affluence and inward poverty yearn for a return to the mystical that has been wrecked upon the edifice of rationalism and the mechanical. From the popularity of novels of a mystical theme, to the success of motion pictures and books such as Harry Potter, the resurgence of Tolkien both in print and film, to the proliferation of cults, New Age movements and interest in the esoteric there is an increasingly widespread dissatisfaction with the materialistic life, devoid of spirit and mystique. More than half a century of communism in the USSR for e.g., with its militant atheism, showed that dialectal materialism doesn't satisfy what seems to be a universal, intrinsic human need for the spiritual and the religious.
This resurgence is also of a cyclic nature. Spengler referred to it as the Second Religiousness, when a Civilisation enters its Winter cycle, and the prevalent materialism of that cycle results in a reaction via a spiritual revival. (Spengler, vol II, pp 310-314).
The cyclical approach has been a part of the doctrines of a number of occult revivalists during our own era. Evola, referred to throughout, is a major figure in this simmering resurgence. A few others follow:
Blavatsky
Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, sought a synthesis of occult beliefs of the Traditional cultures. Whatever one might say about the authenticity of the alleged Book of Dzyan and her claims, as with many other occultists, to be channelling the messages of Secret or Hidden Chiefs, she has had a major influence on the revival of occult traditionalism, especially through the influence of one of her heirs, Alice Bailey, whose array of movements such as World Goodwill and Lucis have laid the basis for the "New Age" movement.
Blavatsky writes of the cyclical basis of the occult Traditions:
"The revolution of the physical world, according to the ancient doctrine, is attended to by a like revolution in the world of intellect - the spiritual evolution of the world preceding in cycles, like the physical one.
"Thus we see in history a regular alternation of ebb and flow in the tide of human progress. The great kingdoms and empires of the world, after reaching the culmination of their greatness, descend again, in accordance with the same law by which they ascend, till having reached the lowest point, humanity reasserts itself and mounts once more, the height of its attainment being, by this law of ascending progression of cycles, somewhat higher than that point from which it had descended before." (Blavastky, vol I, 641-642).
Blavatsky however, like Spengler and Evola, and as distinct from the Darwinian lineal historians, does not accept any notion of a nebulous, generalised human history, despite her allusion above to 'humanity reasserting itself'. She refers rather to "the Racial division of cycles." Her system of root races holds that these have their own 'destiny and evolution', again akin to what was later stated by Spengler and Evola, although neither were influenced by Blavatsky. (Blavatsky, op.cit., 642).

Aleister Crowley
There has been a revival of interest in Crowley in recent years, in keeping with the manifestation of a nascent Second Religiousness. However, this interest is also a symptom of the hedonism of the Winter cycle. Crowley's doctrine of Thelema is summarised by his mis-interpreted libertarian slogan "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." Although Crowley's doctrine will not be detailed here other than as it relates to a cyclic outlook, this "do what thou wilt" has too often been interpreted as a modern, nihilistic "do what you want". Crowley himself was dismissive of such an interpretation and stated to the contrary that it required the utmost self-discipline, a Nietzschean self-overcoming to find one's "True Will" and manifest it beyond all difficulties.
Crowley's religion is set out in his "bible", The Book of the Law, a poetic rendition of what Crowley claimed to be channelled from the God's via a supernatural intermediary called Aiwas, in Cairo, 1904. This states that the old religions were to be superseded by Thelema.
Drawing from the Egyptian basis of the occultism of the Order of the Golden Dawn, from which Crowley received his magickal training, his cyclic doctrine is represented by three Egyptian deities, Isis, Osiris and Horus. In this trinity, Isis represents the earliest culture of humanity as matriarchy, represented religiously in the fertility cults; Osiris as patriarchy represented by resurrection cults. Horus would represent the religion of the new cycle as the "Crowned and Conquering Child." This "Aeon of Horus" would be one of "force and fire", a martial cycle: "I am the warrior Lord of the Forties: the Eighties cower before me and are abased." (Crowley, Book of Law, 3: 46).
In Crowley's cyclic cosmology the "Gods" are defined as "vast stars" which are "aggregates of experience." Crowley's cycles are called "Periods" and are of durations of 2000 years. "The moment of change from one period to another is technically called The Equinox of the Gods." (Crowley, op.cit. 11). World history is divided into three Periods: each in turn under the jurisdiction of "Isis, the mother, when the Universe was conceived as simple nourishment drawn directly from her; this period is marked by matriarchal government.
"Next, beginning 500BC, Osiris the father, when the Universe was imagined as catastrophic, love, death, resurrection, as the method by which experience was built up; this corresponds to patriarchal systems.
"Now Horus, the child, in which we come to perceive events as a continual growth partaking in its elements of both these methods, and not to be overcome by circumstance. The present period involves the recognition of the individual as the unit of society." (Crowley, op.cit. Intro. 11-12).
Crowley explains that the "decay of the sense of sin", increasing "bi-sexuality", childlike confidence in progress as well as dread, "infantile cults" and dictatorships such as communism and fascism, popularity of frivolous entertainment, war and atrocities, are the adolescent phase of the emerging "new Aeon of Horus". (Crowley,op.cit.. 12-13).
The Book of the Law is divided into three, each the statement of Isis, Osiris and Horus respectively. The Third Book is full of Nietzschean fervour, condemning mercy, humanitarianism, pity (Crowley, 3:18). The Aeon is a "blasphemy against all the gods of men".
"With my hawk's head I peck at the eyes of Jesus as he hangs upon the cross, I flap my wings in the face of Mohammed and blind him, with my claws I tear at the flesh of the Indian [Hindu] and the Buddhist, Mongol and Din. Bahlasti! Ompehda! I spit on your crapulous creeds!" (Crolwey, op.cit. 3:51-54).
However, the Aeon of Horus is not the final cycle, but will be replaced by the Aeon of Maat, that of Justice. Another prophet (Crowley being the prophet of this Aeon) will replace him, "and the double-wanded one assume my [Horus'] place and throne." "Another king shall reign, and blessing be no longer poured to the Hawk-headed mystical Lord." (Crowley, op.cit. 3: 42-43).
Crowley explains that since he is not the prophet of the next Aeon he can only mention its coming. "Following will arise the Equinox of Maat, the goddess of Justice. It may be a hundred or ten thousand years form now, for the computation of time is not here as there." (Crowley, 1985, 288-289).
As a predictive technique for historical analysis Crowley's cyclic theory seems of little value. The division of history into Periods of three seems too broad and general, and is reminiscent of the orthodox lineal-progressive historical approach; a succession of cycles each "progressing" a general humanity. His contention that preoccupation with trivial entertainment, gender confusion, the proliferation of cults, and dictatorships are signs of a new Aeon in its adolescent cycle might rather be symptoms of the present Western Civilisation in its Winter cycle; not the beginning of something new but the end of something old. The theory serves the purpose of rationalising Crowley's Thelema.
Savitri Devi - In Time, Above Time, Against Time
It would be expedient not to mention Savitri because where she is remembered it is usually as the "priestess of Hitlerism". However, whatever may be said of her belief that Hitler was an avatar of Vishnu, she also developed a cyclic theory of history based on her devotion to Hinduism, the theory of which provides a unique analytic method based on tradition, without necessitating recourse to Hitlerism. Savitri was a Greek born convert to Hinduism which she regarded as the final vestige of ancient Aryan wisdom. Spending most of her long life in India, she hardly fits the stereotype of a 'white racist'. That she was married to a Brahmin of swarthy complexion, and broad nose, rather than of fair, aquiline "Aryan" type, whose picture has only been published on the internet within the last year, has caused disquiet among some of her neo-nazi admirers.
Searching for a Heathen alternative to Christianity, looking first to her native Hellas, then to Egypt and Akhnaton, she reached India in 1932. In 1937 she came to the Hindu Mission in Calcutta, under the leadership of Srimar Swami Satyananda, an admirer of Hitler, like many Hindus, who saw significance in his adoption of the swastika. It was the Swami who told Devi that Hitler was an incarnation of Vishnu. Devi being fluent in Bengali and Hindi was sent out as a lecturer for the Mission. (Goodrick-Clarke, 44). She held fast to her Hindu-Hitlerite faith, living most of her life in poverty in India, befriending dozens of cats, and dying during a brief visit to England in 1982.
Savitri's erudition was recognised, despite her Hitlerism, by the principal Rosicrucian order, AMORC, which published her work on Akhnaton, Son of the Sun, in 1952, which remains in print as "a key volume in the AMORC Rosicrucian Library", their last reprinting being 1992. (Goodrick-Clarke, 225).
Savitri wrote a number of books mostly on Hitlerian themes, apart from her book on Akhnaton and one championing animal rights and vegetarianism (Impeachment of Man) a kind of precursor to Earth First in its radical contempt for fallen humanity and admiration at the nobility of the animal world. However her principal philosophical work is The Lightning & The Sun. This is based on her cyclic conception of history as derived from her Hinduism. Her first chapter is entitled "The Cyclic View of History", and she re-iterates the Traditional themes, including the illusion of "progress", the fall of man, and the remoteness of a Golden Age which will return by the "iron laws of the cosmos." (Devi, 1958, 2).
What she contributes to an added perception of history is her paradigm that categorises world leaders as "In Time", Above Time" and "Against Time." These three categories are symbolised by Lightning, Sun, and Lightning & Sun respectively.
Devi provides three world historical figures as epitomising her concepts: Genghis Khan, Lightning, is a "Man In Time", a ruthless ruler and shaper of an empire devoid of idealism, acting out in accord with the conditions of his epoch. (Devi, 1952, 59-108).
Pharaoh Akhnaton, Sun, is the "Man Above Time", an idealist, motivated by religious impulse, attempting a great reformation against the religious status quo, for which he is destroyed. (Devi, ibid. 129-196).
Hitler is held to encompass both Lightning & Sun, as the "Man Against Time"; he is battling against the forces of the Cycle he was born into, to re-establish the cosmic order. To Devi he was an avatar of Vishnu who returns at the end of every cycle to destroy the old and usher in the new cycle. (Devi, ibid., 213-354).
The concept of events being categorised as cycles In Time, Above Time and Against Time can be profitably applied. For e.g. in the current world situation, world leaders could be categorised as to how they fit within Devi's cosmology along with the historical circumstances in which they are working. It is difficult not to be subjective, however. For e.g. how should George Bush, Putin or Saddam Hussein be categorised? Perhaps they would most aptly ALL be described as "Men In Time"? A certain type of Muslim might see Bush as a "Man In Time" lacking ideals and being solely a product of the decadent age; with Saddam (or Bin Ladin) a "Man Against Time" battling the forces of the "Great Satan"? That the cry of Jihad is again heard is indicative of this. An American Christian fundamentalist would perceive things from an opposite viewpoint, if he was prevailed upon to use such a "Heathen" cosmology; Bush leading the forces of Christ in a holy war against anti-Christ Islam, a "Man against time", embodying both the Lightning & Sun, as a Christian warrior.
The possibilities are open for the utilisation of Devi's added perception of cyclic history.

Rene Guenon
Guenon is the father of neo-Traditionalism. Evola himself was Guenon's student. H T Hansen in his introduction to Revolt Against the Modern World, describes Evola as 'Guenon's leading Italian representative'. Evola has recourse to cite Guenon throughout Revolt, the title itself being reminiscent of Guenon's Crisis of the Modern World, published in France in 1927. It is Guneon who wrote of the concepts of the "axis of the world", the "Tree of Life" as the Way for the return to the Absolute. It was Guenon who provided a spiritual analysis for the crisis of the modern world.
Not much is known of Guenon's life. He was born in Bloise, France, in 1886, and during the early 20th C. was in Paris immersed in the occult revival. Here he was initiated into the tradition of Shiva by a Hindu sect. He was troubled by the anti-religious agitation of the French intelligentsia at this time . Although he became an initiate of Sufism and remained a Sufi in this for the rest of his life, Guenon regarded Hinduism as the best means of trying to revive a lost spirituality in the West, particularly since Hinduism - unlike the Ancient Classical Mysteries, remained a living Tradition. Because of the ultimate kinship Europeans had with the Indo-Aryans, he regarded it as more amenable to the Western psyche.
Guenon moved to Cairo in 1930, where he remained until his death in 1951. He was cautious about making his whereabouts known, suspecting a magical war against him. One could speculate as to whether he had drawn the ire in Paris of one of the Masonic cults that was imbued with revolutionary ideas. He wrote numerous books on Tradition and on the need of the West to reconnect to the Absolute. This connection he saw running through all Traditions, as in the Hindu concept of yoga, the Buddhists nirvana, the Sufi tahaqquq (self-realisation in God), and the Catholic deificatio.
Dr Martin Lings who became part of Guenon's household in Cairo and is the English translator of Guenon, summarised Guenon thus:
"The Mysteries and especially the Greater Mysteries are explicitly or implicitly the main theme of Guénon's writing, even in The Crisis of the Modern World and The Reign of Quantity. The troubles in question are shown to have sprung ultimately from loss of the mystical dimension, that is, the dimension of the mysteries of esotericism. He traces all the troubles in the modern world to the forgetting of the higher aspects of religion. He was conscious of being a pioneer, and I will end simply by quoting something he wrote of himself, "All that we shall do or say will amount to giving those who come afterwards facilities which we ourselves were not given. Here as everywhere else it is the beginning of the work that is hardest." (Lings).
Guenon, although an ascetic and hermit did not counsel a resigned fatalism, but like Evola called for an 'elect' to prepare for the aftermath of the cyclic 'cataclysm':
"If the elect of which we spoke could be formed while there is still time, they could so prepare the change that it would take place in the most favourable conditions possible, and the disturbances that must inevitably accompany it would in this way be reduced to a minimum ; but even if they cannot do this, they will still have before them another yet more important task, that of helping to preserve the elements which must survive from the present world to be used in building up the -one that is to follow. Once one knows that a re-ascent must come, even though it may prove impossible to prevent the downward movement first ending in some cataclysm, there is clearly no reason for waiting until the descent has reached its nadir before preparing the way for the re-ascent. This means /that whatever may happen the work done will not be wasted : it cannot be useless in so far as the benefit that the elect will draw from it for themselves is concerned, but neither will it. be wasted in so far as concerns its later effects on mankind as a whole." (Guenon, 1927).

Aeonics
The Numinous Cyclic Theory of David Myatt
British esotericist and now convert to Islam, David Myatt, formulated a cyclic theory called Aeonics. This merits individual attention as Aeonics provides another perspective on history from a specifically spiritual standpoint. Myatt's Aeonics, as the term makes obvious, is based on cycles as "aeons" or Ages, each with its own numinous or spiritual character and stemming from what Myatt terms the acausal, the supra-natural acting upon the causal or physical world.
Myatt himself ascribes the foundations of Aeonics to both Spengler and Toynbee, (Myatt, 1984, 1-3) the latter providing the paradigm of civilisations as arising from challenges. Myatt's own concern for much of his life has been the overcoming of the Western cycle of decline, that it might fulfil what he considered its destiny. While Toynbee states that Civilisations end in a last hurrah of world-empire, Myatt adds Spengler's Faustian challenge, stating that the destiny of the Western Civilisation is that of Galactic Empire. Spengler's definition of the Western cultural ethos as Faustian meant that the West's own unique culture-soul is based on an unquenchable reach for infinity and exploration, unfolding all the secrets of nature. This Faustian ethos is manifested as the cultural soul in all the elements of the West in its cycles of becoming. Hence the distance and perspective of the art of Rembrandt and the feelings of infinity conjured by the outreach of the Gothic spire. (Myatt, 1984, The West, 3).
Myatt goes beyond this seeing the space ship, space exploration and ultimately galactic settlement and Galactic empire as the logical ultimate expression of the Faustian soul. (Myatt, 1984, The Faustian Spirit, 6). Myatt succinctly states: "If we need a symbol to represent our Western civilisation - to express its quintessence - it is the spacecraft." (Myatt, ibid. 7.).The Western Civilisation would be superseded by a Galactic Civilisation just as the Roman Civilisation had superseded the Greek, and the Western the Roman.
This Western destiny Myatt explained in the opening paragraphs to Vindex referring to Toynbee in defining civilisations: "Acceding to Toynbee, a civilisation arises from either a physical or a social challenge - that is, civilisation is man's successful response to a particular geographical or social challenge." He gives as an e.g. the Egyptian civilisation as arising from the challenge of the Nile River Valley. Each civilisation declines and produces what Toynbee calls a "Universal State, usually an empire which lasts generally for a 400 year cycle. (Myatt, 1984, 1).
Myatt's 1984 book was directed to those working on a causal, political level. Esoterically, Aeons could be influenced by those working magickally, adepts who had reached a level of consciousness to utilise the theory of Aeonics to work consciously to intervene in the cycles of history by opening the causal to acausal energies, or what are called the "dark gods". Hitherto civilisations had arisen unconsciously, and man had been subject to the laws of cyclicity without being aware of the forces that were controlling him. Now through Aeonics and the conscious Aeonic magick directed by occult adepts, the cyclic laws could be consciously directed. Western Civilisation would go through its final cycle, but this would be the prelude to a new civilisation, the Galactic empire, extending the West's Faustian scientific impulse.
In order for this destiny to unfold, those conscious of this cultural destiny would have to actively work for it both esoterically and exoterically. Myatt was therefore involved in formulating a system of occultism via the Order of Nine Angles (ONA) , the primary magickal purpose being to open what Myatt called "nexions", the meaning of which can be readily deduced from the word: a nexus or star-gate between the acausal and the casual worlds. The ONA had a unique pantheon of dark gods and goddesses relating to the opening of star gates through which acausal energies would be manifested on earth. A large corpus of occult literature was formulated by the ONA, indicating Myatt's depth of occult knowledge.

Myatt explained the cyclic interregnum during which adepts could work to herald the next civilisation:
"Regarding Aeons, two important facts should be borne in mind. First the last five hundred years or so of an Aeon show a marked decline in the magickal energy associated with it, and it is during this time that the energies of the next Aeon gradually become evident (at first usually only to Adepts) these energies may be increased (or decreased) by Aeonic magick worked by those who understand the forces involved. Second, each Aeon is associated with what is called a 'higher civilisation' from which the Aeon usually takes its name. Within the physical confines of this higher civilisation is the (usually sacred) place where the magickal energies of the Aeon are pronounced - and this because such a place is usually a physical Gate where the causal and the acausal meet. For instance, the centre associated with the Hyperborean Aeon was Stonehenge; that of the Hellenic, Delphi. " (Myatt aka Thorold West, 1989, Naos, The Septenary System).
In explaining terms, Myatt defines a Star-Gate or nexion as "a nexus between the acausal and the causal." These star-gates are in the ONA Tradition "the regions of space near the stars Algol, Dabih, and Naos" and they are said to be actual physical gates, not simply metaphors. (Myatt, Naos, Notes on Esoteric Tradition).

The Adept opens a nexion within the psyche by following the "seven fold way" of the ONA, a grade system that tests the physical endurance of the aspirant as much as the mental and psychological. (Myatt, Naos, Part One: Physis Magick).
In defining the causal and the acausal, Myatt states that "the causal is the 'physical universe", described by three dimensional and linear time. The acausal is the universe described by "an unspecified number of spatial dimensions and by non-linear time." Life is a manifestation of the acausal within the causal. It is in the psyche where the two universes coincide, and where the individual might become part of the acausal by opening a nexion. Archetypes are a manifestation of this. As this relates to Aeons, Myatt explains:
"An Aeon is a particular ordering of the causal on Earth which is manifest as a civilisation - i.e. an increasing of the acausal, usually at a specified place/area for a specified period of (linear) time). Magick is the presencing of the acausal in the causal." (Myatt, Naos, Acausal/Causal).
These fundamentals of Aeonics and Aeonic magick were articulated and refined over a number of MSS some by Myatt, others by his protégé and successor as ONA Grand Master Richard Moult, a talented artist and musician, both often writing under the generic pseudonym Anton Long.
Myatt himself has had a long spiritual odyssey, somewhat reminiscent of the legend of Doctor Faustus himself, a never-ending quest for knowledge.
In 1998 Myatt converted to Islam and identifies with the militant manifestations of the Muslim world. Like Ungern-Sternberg, who is considered below, who converted to a militaristic Buddhism as his answer to Bolshevism and Western decadence in the aftermath of World War I, Myatt became a Muslim as his answer to the West's spiritual void and break with Tradition. He now sees the West as irredeemably lost and not capable of emerging from its cycle of decline. Myatt, now known as Abdul-Aziz ibn Myatt, relates something of this spiritual odyssey in a recent interview:
"What it is about this faith, rather than all of the others, that has gripped you? What is it about Islamic culture, law and the way of life that has so spoken to your heart and soul over ours?
Basically, Islam is a true middle-way. It is simple both in practice and in theory, and is an easy Way for we fallible, error-prone, human beings to become better individuals. Consider, for instance, prayer - Salat (also called Namaz). This is always short, and easy to do. It is a combination of words, gestures and movement - unlike any other form of prayer such as Nazarene, Buddhist, heathen. … In my life, I have experienced and performed many types of prayer - from Buddhist to Taoist to Anglican, to Catholic (including those of Benedictine and Carthusian monasticism) to Hinduism - and of all of them I found Namaz to be both the most human and the most numinous, the most imbued with the Divine, for we prostrate ourselves before God, knowing ourselves for the weak individuals we are. One of the many remarkable things I remember about Islam is when, only a short while after my own conversion, I went to travel again in the Desert, and it was so poignant doing Namaz there, with no one around for hundreds of miles: saying the same words, and praying in the same way, as the Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu 'alayhi wa sallam) had done, over one thousand and forty years ago; for alone, in the Desert, one can feel the closeness of God, of Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala - feel how slender is the thread by which we cling to life. One can sense the true Peace that is Jannah (Paradise) and the wonder of Life, of Creation." (Myatt, http://www.dwmyatt.info/questions-dm.html).
He sees Islam as the only means by which Western decadence can be swept from the world, to make way for a numinous civilisation based on Islam. Myatt sees instead of a Western Imperium leading to Galactic Empire, a world Muslim Civilisation; under a world Khalifate, re-establishing a chivalrous, honourable ethos, where the West cannot. One could be reminded that it was the Islamic civilisation in its "Spring" Cycle that provided the impetus for learning and culture, that brought much to Europe, laid the basis for modern chemistry and mathematics, and provided the basis for the West's Knightly chivalry which the Crusaders had encountered among their Muslim foes.
While Myatt repudiates many of his previous views his fundamental ethos remains, the ideals of the numinous; of life based on honour and chivalry; a detestation of the ignoble and the cowardly, the hedonistic and materialistic that he continues to see dominating the West in its decline, and of the prospect of a Galactic Empire, all these now possibly being manifested under Islam rather than by calling upon dark astral gods. In a recent interview Myatt explains the position he's adhered to since his conversion in 1998:
"What I gradually discovered in the years leading toward my reversion to Islam was that the numinous is presenced in Deen Al-Islam, and that it is Deen Al-Islam which today as in the past produces honourable, modest, individuals who possess manners, who respect what is sacred, and who thus are civilized. In addition, who are the honourable warriors of today other than the Mujahideen who fight against often overwhelming odds and who prefer death to dishonour? What kind of community - "society" - would and could Deen Al-Islam create were such honourable warriors to be triumphant? Would they not build a Khilafah led by an Ameer, a Khalifah (a leader) and would this Khilafah not be everything I once dreamed an Imperium might be, and might not this Khilafah be an example to others as the Khilafah in Al-Andulus was to the barbarians of Europe, and might it not, its enemies defeated, reach out toward the stars and so establish a new and Galactic Empire? Thus, as I wrote in an autobiographical essay:
"As for my dream, my life-long vision, of a Galactic Empire - of the exploration and settlement of Outer Space - there was a time, not that long ago, when I came to the conclusion that we human beings were too ignoble, too barbaric, too uncivilized, to do this, and that, if we did undertake such adventures beyond the Earth, we would only be spreading dishonour: spreading our disease of hubris, spreading our destruction of the Numinous. But now - now as I veer toward the sixth decade of my life - I feel that we can avoid such things: that there is a cure for the disease of hubris and of dishonour, and that were we to be cured - and thus return to our natural fitrah - then we could and perhaps should so venture forth, under the banner of Deen Al-Islam." (Myatt, http://www.dwmyatt.info/questions-dm.html).
On a question regarding the present state of the West, Myatt states:
"The peoples of the West have significantly changed in the last fifty or so years. The England I knew as a youth, fresh from a life in the Far East and Africa - the England my father and my grandfather thought they fought in two World Wars for - has almost disappeared. Manners have been replaced with arrogant selfishness; gentlemanly (and lady-like) self-effacement and modesty has been replaced by loutish behaviour in public and in private; and restraint has given way to decadence, greed and self-indulgence. Honour is almost completely lacking, in public and in private. The West is now the domain of Homo Hubris: of the arrogant, the preening, the dishonourable human being who is intolerant of, or unmindful of, the numinous, which numinous is, in truth, the genesis of honour and of manners and of all the civilizing virtues." (Myatt, ibid.).
From a cyclic perspective, the question remains as to whether Islam itself passed its own cycle of decline centuries ago, and descended irredeemably into what Spengler (Spengler, 1963, 159-186, Primitives, Culture-Peoples, Fellaheen) called a Fellaheen culture ; that is to say a culture that has expended all its energies, and is not capable of revival. At the very least, what might be said of the present world crisis is that Islam is the only bloc representing Tradition that is consciously in revolt against globalisation.

Traditionalist & Racial Approaches to Cyclic History
Nazi doctrine is based on a racial interpretation of Darwinism, which spawned a race-based theory of evolution, and of the rise and fall of civilisations based around race purity and miscegenation. Hence, Nazi doctrine so far from being a manifestation "Against Time" as per Devi, seems to have been a product of the zeitgeist of the 19th Century, which also gave rise to Marxism and Capitalism.
Hitler explained the biological determinism of Nazi doctrine:
"…This is how civilisations and empires break up and make room for new creations. Blood mixture, and the lowering of the racial level which accompanies it, are the one and only cause why old civilisations disappear…" (Hitler, 123).
His Darwinism manifested was a struggle for existence between nations for living space: "…The strength of the conqueror and the weakness of those who lose [territory]… solely constitutes the right to possess." (Hitler, 257).
Darwinism, Marxism and Capitalism are all rooted in materialist conceptions of history, contrary to any spiritual, religious or Traditional element. The 20th C. was dominated by this zeitgeist; as we still are.
While Evola's relations with Fascist Italy were ambiguous, Nazi Germany regarded him as subversive. He was portrayed in SS documents as a reactionary aristocratic Italian. As a Traditionalist he opposed the centralisation of the State in favour of the revival of Principalities, and was at odds with the biological determinism of Nazi race doctrine. (Evola, 2002, 62).
While giving a passing nod to the contribution to the 19th C. race theorist Gobineau, probably conscious of writing in a German publication, Evola points out that there 'have been many cases in which a culture has collapsed even when its race has remained pure, as is especially clear in certain groups that have suffered slow, inexorable extinction despite remaining as racially isolated as if they were islands." (He gives Sweden and the Netherlands as examples close at hand, pointing out that although the race has remained unchanged, there is little of the "heroic disposition' those cultures possessed just several centuries previously. He refers to other great cultures as having remained in a state as if like mummies, inwardly dead, awaiting a push 'to knock them down.' He gives Peru as an e.g. of how readily static culture succumbed to Spain. (Evola, 1938). Such cultures are referred to as Fellaheen by Spengler, having exhausted their historical possibilities.
Oswald Spengler was of a class of German intellectuals known as Conservative Revolutionaries. The race doctrine held that cycles of rise and fall are predicated on race purity. Spengler eschewed such determinism in favour, like Evola, of a spiritual conception of "race", as distinct from a zoological concept. Spengler refers to the early studies of American anthropologist Franz Boas (Spengler, 119, ch. Peoples, Races, Tongues) in stating that head form is changed within one generation of immigrants (in this instance Sicilian and Jewish migrant children) by the impress of environment; that race is therefore malleable. Races emerge from a metaphysical rootedness to land. "A race has roots. Race and landscape go together." Where individuals migrate they do so not as a race but as individuals about to be formed into a new race under the impress of their new environment. Spengler cites other studies that show whites of all types, along with Indians and Negroes have attained a similar average in body size and time of maturity in America. Hence a new type, "American" was being formed involving both "body and soul." (Spengler, op.cit.). "Race" Spengler succinctly defines as: "a character of duration." (Spengler, 113).
Spengler was left unharmed and unhindered by the Nazi regime, which he lived only briefly to see. Like all such Traditionalists he was suspicious of any mass movement.
Evola looked in askance at the nature of Fascism as a mass movement, which he considered to be a form of socialism and collectivism. He stated before a court in Rome in 1951, charged with trying to revive Fascism, that: "As to historical Fascism, if I have supported those aspects of it that can be justified within this order of ideas, I have combated the ideas in it that are more or less redolent with the materialistic political climate of recent times…" (Evola, 2002, 294, Self Defence Statement). He was acquitted of the charges.
Spengler's chief ideological rival from the Nazi regime was Alfred Rosenberg whose Foundations of the 20th Century was second only to Mein Kampf as the doctrinal statement of Nazism. This was in the pedigree as the Frenchman Count Arthur de Gobineau whose Inequality of the Human Races published during the 19th C. really starts the movement for a cyclic history based on race purity and miscegenation.
Spengler and the other Traditionalists hold that the rise and fall of civilisations is, as we've noted, based on great spiritual epochs and the contamination of the spiritual foundations of a culture not by means of alien races, but by a morphological, organic inward process of maturation and decay. Such a concept was held to be pessimistic, and fatalistic.
Rosenberg describes Spengler's cyclicism as based on 'mechanistic causality and irreversibility'; he attacks it as "Semitic fatalism", neglecting to consider that it is precisely the fatalism of the Vedas and the Havamal, and therefore intrinsic to "Indo-Aryan" cosmology. Rosenberg does however give some respect to Spengler as an historian, but the Nazi "racial-spiritual awakening" with the promise of actively intervening to revive a culture had superseded Spengler's fatalistic "morphology". (Rosenberg, 249).

Decline Caused by Laws of Cyclicity, Not Miscegenation
Where the concept of "alien races" becomes a factor in the decline and fall of Civilisations is when ideas, ethics and spiritualities foreign to the founding impulse of the Civilisation are introduced. Hence the so-called "alien menace" to the Traditionalist is not one of zoological miscegenation, the so-called contamination of blood, but the contamination of the founding ethos of the Civilisation. Aware of this, Rome appointed a Pontifex Maximus, literally a 'bridge' between society and the divine, to oversee the spiritual welfare of the Civilisation. However, foreign ideas are not the cause for the fall of a Civilisation but a symptom that accelerates the decline. The Civilisation will only be adversely affected by alien ideas when its founding ethos is already weakened and when it has already entered a Cycle of decline.
The impact of alleged miscegenation on the decline of the Hellenic Civilisation, for e.g., is a basis for the zoological race theory. Recent studies in physical anthropology however have concluded that the ancient Hellenes as a 'race' were of the same type as today's Greeks, and were mostly Dinaric-Alpine, broad heads, rather than the Nordics supposedly responsible for Hellenic civilisation. Therefore the ancient Hellenic civilisation did not suffer decline because of admixture with Negroid and Asiatic elements, as per Bilbo et al. The contemporary Greek anthropologist Dienekes Pontikos cites studies on this on his anthropological website, showing that the head form as measured by cranial remains, has been constant from ancient, through to Medieval and present times.
In seeking for causes of decline the Traditionalist therefore looks to places other than biological. The weakening of the cultural organism takes place when economics dominates state policy during the last cycles of a Civilisation. Trade and profit become more important than religion and the nexus with the Divine is broken, regarded as mere superstition. "The measure of a man" becomes his wealth. Immigrants are accepted on the basis of what they can contribute to the economy, the ethos becomes one of whether a migrant is hard working and pays taxes, rather than how he will relate to the spirit of the culture. Our own Western societies are witnessing this phenomenon at present, this being a sign that our Civilisation is in its final cycle.
As we've seen, cycles of civilisations are analogous. Hence, we see that what is taking place today in the West has taken place before, many times over, during the past thousands of years.
The English scholar Prof. C Northcote Parkinson, writing on the fall of Rome, commented that Roman conquerors were subject "to cultural inundation and grassroots influence." Because Rome extended throughout the world, drained of its local population through wars, the economic opportunities accorded by Rome drew in all the elements of the subject peoples, "groups of mixed origin and alien ways of life." "Even more significant was what the Romans learnt while on duty overseas, for men so influenced were of the highest rank. " Parkinson quotes Gibbon who is here referring to the Roman colony of Antioch:
"…Fashion was the only law, pleasure the only pursuit, and the splendour of dress and furniture was the only distinction of the citizens of Antioch. The arts of luxury were honoured, the serious and manly virtues were the subject of ridicule, and the contempt for female modesty and reverent age announced the universal corruption of the capitals of the East…" (Gibbon, vol. 2, ch. 24).
The Roman traditional ethos of severity, austerity and disdain for softness that Emperor Julian attempted to reassert were greeted by "fashionable society" with 'disgust'. (Parkinson 100-101).
Parkinson remarks that "there is just such a tendency in the London of today, as there was still earlier in Boston and New York." (Parkinson, ibid. 100).
The eminent British historian Arnold Toynbee, a liberal rather than a traditionalist and not a metaphysician, nonetheless postulated his own cyclic method of history, identifying spiritual factors as the basis of decline. He writes of this:
"The schism in the body social… is a collective experience and therefore superficial. Its significance lies in its being the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual rift. A schism in the souls of human beings will be found to underlie any schism that reveals itself on the surface of the society which is the common ground of these human actors' fields of activity…" (Toynbee, 429).
Evola ultimately places the cause of decline on the spiritual decay of the ruling caste, those at the apex of a traditional social hierarchy. Parkinson and Toynbee, as quoted above indicate something of the type. Evola states that the traditional social order is only overthrown when the individuals comprising the highest ranks degenerate. It is an analogy where he previously refers to the healthy man who can becomes sick, where the virtuous man can turn to vice, in pointing out that higher forms cannot emanate from lower, but higher forms can degenerate into lower. This occurs when the culture-bearing stratum uses its freedom to "deny the Spirit." We might then say in our present context our much-lauded "freedom" generally becomes moral and spiritual license. That this license, this moral rot, is being manipulated as a deliberate strategy by the forces of the Kali Yuga, we'll consider below.
Evola continues:
"Then the contacts are fatefully broken, the metaphysical tension, to which the traditional organism owes its unity, gives way, every force wavers in it path, and finally breaks free." The mass descends to the depths. "This is the secret of every degeneration and revolution."
It is the "Fall" referred to in the Jewish and Christian and other Traditions, previously referred to. It is the sundering of filial bonds and other manifestations of decay dramatically rendered in the Norse and Vedic literature, and by Yeats in The Second Coming.
The economic booms and busts, class divisions, the influence of money and the way such factors impact on all manifestations of culture, from religion, to art and architecture, music, commerce, to common manners etc., are but the outward reflections of an inner decay, as this thesis has attempted to demonstrate. Whether the present proliferation of cults and revival of interest in the metaphysical, a new yearning for a sense of Being beyond the egotistical and materialistic is a prelude to a "Second Religiousness" or becomes itself nothing more than a symptom of decline as with the proliferation of foreign cults in the final days of Rome and of Greece, remains to be seen, based upon whether those involved in the occult revival recognise their dharmic duty, and whether they can summon the strength to defeat counter-esoteric forces at work. (Bolton, 2006).

Jewish Tradition Thwarts Cyclic Laws of Decline
A Traditionalist "race", conscious of its nexus with the Divine as the basis of culture, endures regardless of contact with foreigners because of its inward strength. This allows it to accept foreigners not only without weakening the cultural organism but even strengthening it; because it accepts foreign input on its own terms. A Traditionalist "race" (in Spengler's definition: "a character of duration") surviving over the course of millennia without succumbing to the cyclical laws of decay is the Jewish. They are the Traditionalist "race" par excellence, yet ironically were considered the "anti-race" by the Nazi race theorists. No better example can be had than this People that has maintained its nexus with its Divinity as the basis of cultural survival.
Contrary to the beliefs of certain racial ideologues, including extreme Zionists and certain types ultra-Orthodox Jews , this survival is not the result of bans on miscegenation. The Jewish law as embodied in the Torah, the first Five Books of the Old Testament, is based not on zoological purity, but cultural purity. It is only "race purity" in the Traditionalist sense of "race" as defined by Spengler,' an enduring character'.
Bizarrely, some white racists have adopted the Torah commandments as being based on genetic purity, in their belief that whites are the true Israelites. For example the priest Phineas, at the time of Moses is held in esteem by such racists because according to the Old Testament he speared an Israelite and a Midianite in the act of copulation. At this time apparently the Midianites were seducing Israel away from its God, towards Baal. A purge of Israel took place. However the chapter in its entirety makes plain this was a matter of religion, not miscegenation. The nexus between Israel and the Divine was being broken by the influence of "the daughters of Moab." Israel's Divinity is recorded as having threatened wrath because of "my insistence on exclusive devotion." The Divine nexus was established for eternity with the line of Phineas because he had 'not tolerated any rivalry towards his god'. (Numbers, 25-26). Moses himself had married the daughter of a Midianite priest, (Exodus 18), so the quarrel with the Midianites was clearly a religious matter. Where marriages with Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, et al are prohibited it is because the Israelite religion would be subverted. (Deut. 7). However, in the same book Deuteronomy, where the Israelite war code is being established, when a City has been defeated the adult males are to be eliminated, and the women and children are to be taken to be grafted on to Israel. (Deut. 20:14). The commandments for this type of 'scorched earth policy' were based on preventing foreigners from teaching Israel their religions. (Deut. 20:18). There are precise laws as to marrying a foreign captive woman, who after a month of mourning for the deaths of her family, will have the marriage consummated and thereby become part of Israel. (Deut. 21:10-14).
The perennial survival of the Israelites is based on their adherence to Tradition. Whatever others might think of some of their laws and beliefs their maintenance of a Traditionalist nexus with their conception of Divinity has allowed them to supersede the cyclic laws of decay perhaps like no other people.

Interregnum : The Heroic Cycle : Against Time

We have seen that the cyclic metaphysics of history often includes an "Heroic Cycle" where "heroic" figures including even the Gods fight against the forces of decay, in order to restore cosmic balance. The Hindus as we've seen refer to this as the dahrmic duty of the ksatriya or warrior caste. It is what the Bhagavad Gita is based upon, taking the form of a dialogue between Krishna and his "divine archer" Arjuna. The raison d'etre of the Viking warrior was to meet his fate on the battlefield in heroic death so that he might join Odin in Valhalla, and practice his martial skills in preparation for Ragnarok, the final confrontation between the Gods and the forces of Chaos. While even the Gods themselves are Fated to die, they meet this Fate as their cosmic duty to usher in a renewed cosmic order. (Havamal, op.cit). The Hellenes as mentioned had their Heroic Cycle as an interregnum between the cycles they called the Bronze and the Iron; and the Mayans also had an Heroic cycle in which they too fought the forces of Chaos.
Savitri Devi has provided an interesting paradigm that places outstanding individuals within the context of the cycles. Those who oppose the forces of the end cycle into which they are born, are Men (and Women) Above Time, and Against Time, as distinct from those who are the products of their Age and do not seek to transcend or counter it (In Time). Those Above Time are the idealists in which we might include certain poets and writers of our era such as Yeats, D H Lawrence, et al, who saw modern civilisation with its mechanisation and money as ushering in an age of cultural degradation base on profit margins. (Bolton, 2003).

Case study: Ungern Sternberg, A Tragic-Heroic Figure at the Modernist Juncture
An e.g. of a Man Against Time in our own era is that of a now obscure individual Baron Gen. Roman Freodorovitch von Ungern-Sternberg. If he is no longer known it is because he did fight Against Time and succumbed. His role was important in that he emerged at a pivotal juncture for the Western Civilisation, at the
end of the cataclysm of World War I and the beginning of Bolshevism in Russia. He thus stood as much against the decadence of the capitalist West as against the bestial reversion of Bolshevism, and was aware of his historical role at the cataclysmic epoch of the West. Ungern-Sternberg was also conscious of the Dharmic role he was allotted, as a committed Buddhist and metaphysician.
He combines the attributes of Lightning & Sun as per Devi's paradigm, leading a military campaign against the forces of chaos and decay, and heralded as the incarnation of the War God by Mongolia. He therefore represents an interesting case study as encompassing the concept of the Man Against Time fulfilling the role of dharmic warrior or hero, at an interregnum between the final blow against the vestiges of Tradition that World War I and the rise of Bolshevism represented.
The Baron drew the attention of Evola in a 1973 article in which Evola alludes to the General's clairvoyant abilities and his commitment to a militant Buddhism. In describing "the ideal defended by Ungern", Evola states:
"The combat against bolshevism would have been the signal for a vaster action. According to Ungern, Bolshevism was not an isolated phenomenon, but the last and inevitable consequence of the processes of involution that have been verified for a long time in the Western Civilisation. …. He exactly perceived a continuity between the different phases and forms of the world-wide subversion, from the time of the French Revolution. However, according to Ungern also, the reaction would have to start from the East, still faithful to its spiritual traditions; an East united in a spiritual rebellion against the modern world and against the threatening danger. The first task would have consisted of eliminating Bolshevism and freeing Russia." (Evola, 1973).
The Baron, under the command of Cossack Ataman Gen. Semenov, had been a military attaché to the Russian Protectorate of Mongolia, after it had gained independence from China in 1911 and signed a Treaty with Russia in 1912. In 1917 the Bolsheviks assumed power in Russia, the war with Germany was ended, and the Civil War between the White and Red Armies commenced. Semenov was one of the key figures of the White Army. In 1919 a Chinese warlord took advantage of the chaos in Russia and invaded Mongolia. In 1921 Sternberg, whose wife had been raped and murdered with their children by the Bolsheviks, then fighting the Red Army in Siberia with Semenov, took 5000 men, and routed the Chinese and the Soviet influence. Ungern restored the Living Buddha, Jebtsu Damba, who made the Baron his Representative, giving him the title Ungern Khan.
Ungern thus became the political and military ruler of Mongolia, and was the last White General to hold out against the Bolsheviks. Ungern's one-year rule over Mongolia brought order, communications, hygiene, a veterinary laboratory and hospital were established, a newspaper founded, schools reopened and public transport introduced. His last outpost against Bolshevism was considered with much consternation by the Soviets, who found him difficult to dislodge. (Evola, 1973).
In 1923 the Russian scientist Ossendowski published his book Beasts, Gods and Men, where the primary account of Ungern Khan is found, Ossendowski being pursued by the Bolsheviks, having stopped at Mongolia. Ungern related to Ossendowski that he was born form a family whose military exploits go back to the Crusades, including the Children's Crusade, where an Ungern had died at 11, and who were intimately involved with the Teutonic Knights. His own military exploits started with the Russo-Japanese War where his association with the Cossacks began. He had become a Buddhist after his grandfather introduced him to it from India. During the Russian Civil War, seeing the Bolshevik Revolution in metaphysical terms as a struggle against "depravity" he formed the Order of Military Buddhists.
Indeed, the Czar had been the victim of occult forces operating even at the level of his own Court, as had the same forces in the Court of Louis XIV before the French Revolution . (Bolton, 21, 2006). These were the forces described by leading French occultist Eliphas Levi when he lamented that 'Masonry has not merely been profaned but has served as the veil and pretext of anarchic conspiracies…' (Levi, 310). The same forces schemed in the Court of Czar Nicholas where Philippe de Lyon became the Czar and Czarina's "spiritual adviser". (Baigent, 198). De Lyon was the agent of Papus, Grand Master of Memphis-Mizraim Masonry and Grand Master of the Supreme Council of Martinst Masonry, founded by M de Pasquales, who had served with Weishaupt's Illuminati. De Lyon established a Martinist Lodge at the Czar's Court in 1899. He had been introduced to the Court by Rasputin's adviser, Manuilov. (Baigent, 159, 198, 498). It was this Martinist coterie in the Czar's Court that discredited and displaced the Orthodox mystic Sergei Nilus, who would have warned the Czar of the conspiratorial occult forces and how they work. (Baigent, , 198-199). An intriguing aspect of the Czar's tragedy was the Cabalistic markings that were inscribed on the wall of the room where the Royal Family was massacred. The letters depict "L" in Greek, Hebrew and Samaritan. Although there have been several theories regarding this inscription, to this writer the letter "L" featured in three languages seems to relate to the Hebrew "Lamed", corresponding Cabalistically to "Justice"; the markings indicate the signature of a Cabalist well versed in occult correspondences and ancient alphabets .
Ungern believed that Bolshevism was a manifestation of Mara, the Buddhist conception of evil. He referred extensively also to the Christian books in his description of the start of a 'war between the good and evil spirits.' "Then there must come the unknown 'Curse' which will conquer the world, blot out culture, kill morality and destroy all the people. Its weapon is revolution." The great 'Curse, "tuned back the wheel, of progress and blocked our road to Divinity…. The Great Spirit put at the threshold of our lives Karma, who knows neither anger nor pardon." In apocalyptic terms Ungern sees "famine, destruction, the death of culture, of glory, of honour and of spirit, the death of states and the death of peoples. I see already this horror, this dark, mad destruction of humanity."
Ungern explained that he had founded the Order of Military Buddhists as an uncompromising fight against Bolshevism, and saw revolution as leading to "bestiality", as opposed to an evolution towards Divinity. He saw the West Civilisation as irredeemably lost, and believed that the rebirth of humanity would have to take place through a militant, pan-Eurasian movement. He aimed to "join together all the Mongolian peoples which had not forgotten their ancient faiths and customs into one Asiatic State. This Eurasian super-state, reaching from Tibetans to Tartars and Kalmucks, would decisively end Bolshevism and decadence if the "Divine Spirit in mankind" continued to be threatened.
Ungern's death was prophesied in the presence of Ossendowski, and Ungern lamented that he wouldn't live to see the final battle as a "Buddhist warrior." With the Soviets approaching Ungern headed towards Russia to take the battle to the Red Army in May 1921. An initial encounter with the Red Army saw Ungern victorious, the last victory a White Army had over the Red. He aimed to link with Tibet, which he believed to be the centre of Agartha and the abode of the World King . However he was captured by the Soviets and Gen. Blucher unsuccessfully tired to persuade Ungern to join them. Ungern was tired in Siberia on September 15 1921. Adorned with a large talisman given to him by the Living Buddha, facing the firing squad, bullets ricocheted off it killing at least one of the executioners.
In his final words to his troops Ungern had stated:
"Revolution must be eradicated from the world. Against it the Revelations of St John have warned us thus: ' And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and jewels, having in her hand the cup full of abominations… "

Conclusion
"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…" (Yeats, The Second Coming).
For the Traditionalist of the present, who can utilise the predictive technique of cyclic history, and who observes a dharmic duty as exemplified in the Bhagavad-Gita and other Traditionalist texts, that individual becomes a focus for the seeding of a new cycle upon the death of the old.
The Visnu Purana counsels that at the darkest time of the Kali Yuga, when the divine law is all but forgotten, there will be a reawakening.
"The men who are thus changed by virtue of that particular time shall be the seeds of [new] human beings, and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the… age of purity." (Evola, 369).
Although many Traditionalists such as Evola are anti-Christian, this Vedic and other traditions are analogous to the Christian, where a remnant who have stayed true to Christian doctrine are restored to a new divine age where Jesus rules literally as God-King. (Revelations 19: 15). History does not end with the death of this Civilisation. What manner of Civilisation the new one shall be rests with those who, in the words of Evola 'ride the tiger'. (Evola, 2003, 8).
In regard to further research, a subject of significance for the present is the application of the Traditionalist approach to an analysis of what might be defined as the "American Empire." Is this an Empire in the Traditional sense, with an inner spiritual form, returning to Western traditions , or is it an excrescence of a dying Civilisation without spiritual impetus, whose world outreach is resulting in cultural pathology for the remnants of Traditional cultures such as the Islamic?
Here's what a conservative syndicated columnist Joe Sobran has said about America's world outreach, in connection with the Arab world:
"Anti-Americanism is no longer a mere fad of Marxist university students; it's a profound reaction of traditional societies against a corrupt and corrupting modernization that is being imposed on them, by both violence and seduction. The very word values implies a whole modern culture of moral whim, in which good and evil are matters of personal preference and sodomy and abortion can be treated as "rights." Confronted with today's America, then, the Christian Arab finds himself in unexpected sympathy with his Muslim enemy." (Sobran, 2001).
Sobran is here writing as a Traditionalist, 'against the modern world', as Evola put it, albeit from a Catholic viewpoint. He writes in recognition of a commonality that Traditionalists of various backgrounds, in this instance Arab Muslims and Christians, are finding when confronted with globalist modernism. Sobran is also writing as what is now called a "palaeo-conservative" in the USA, as distinct from the so-called "neo-conservatives" or "neo-cons", who are not actually out to "conservative" anything of Tradition, and whose backgrounds are largely as old Trotskyite communists from the Cold War era.
America's current ruling circles attest to what they are saying is America's manifest destiny as a catalyst for revolutionary change. The world revolution does not proceed against Tradition from any communist state, but from the currently self-proclaimed 'leader of the Western world.'
Maj. Ralph Peters writing in the organ of the US Army War College has stated that the de facto role of the army is to keep the world "open to our cultural assault." He talks of information as being the "most destabilising factor of our time." He calls this the "American century" where the USA will become "culturally more lethal…." He talks of the "clash of civilisations". Entertainment, media and internet are the basis for destroying traditional religions, which he derides as "fundamentalism" which will be unable to "control its children." "Our victims volunteer" he states. The Muslims in the USA are what he calls the "rejectionist segment of our own population". They are "enraged because their cultures are under assault." He calls their "cherished values dysfunctional".
"Hollywood goes where Harvard never penetrated, and the foreigner, unable to touch the reality of America, is touched by America's irresponsible fantasies itself…" "Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg and Madonna" are replacing "traditional intellectual elites." "Our cultural empire has addicted - men and women everywhere - clamouring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment." "If religion is the opium of the people, video is their crack cocaine…" "There will be no peace…" "Our military power is culturally based…" "Our American culture is infectious, a plague of pleasure… But Hollywood is preparing the battlefield and burgers precede the bullets. … What could be more threatening to traditional cultures?"
This then is America's spiritual and cultural mission as related by Maj. Peters, a member of the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for intelligence; Foreign Area Officer for Eurasia. (Peters).

Occult War
The current world turmoil is at its foundation an occult war, because it is operating on subterranean, subliminal levels. It reaches to the very unconscious of the whole world, and at the root of any vestige and remnant of spirituality. Several specific examples of how occult forces operate against Tradition have already been cited, as per those of the French and Russian Revolutions.
The Chilean diplomat, author and esotericist Miguel Serrano has described this 'occult war', cogently in these terms:
"…In a way the whole world is hypnotised by psychotronic, technotronic and cybertronic … means… combined with subliminal messages found in today's media, as well as drugs and drink like coca cola etc. Yes, mental war can only be fought with a similar type of war. Of course this needs a special discipline and training… like the ancient religious military orders. … Our struggle is to save the soul of this Earth…" (Serrano, personal interview with Bolton).

Islam as a Regenerative Tradition?
Something of Islam has already been considered in relation to the conversion of Myatt, who sought a living Tradition in Islam as an antidote to the Western cycle of decline just as Ungern-Sternberg converted to Buddhism, Savitri Devi to Hinduism, and Rene Guenon to Sufism. The situation of Islam is important to the present world crisis that has arisen from the West's cycle of Kali Yuga. Islam as a Civilisation has already gone through its full cycles of birth, blossoming, decay and senility, and has for centuries existed in an ossified state that Spengler describes as Fellaheen. The Golden Age of Islam and its positive cultural and scientific impact on the Western Civilisation has previously been alluded to (Coke, op.cit).
Islamic Civilisation had its own Spengler, a scholar of remarkable vision who sought the causes of history and saw the cyclic ebb and flow. Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) grappled with the same problems confronting Islamic Civilisation as those Spengler confronted in regard to the West. A celebrated scholar, political adviser, and jurist, Ibn Khaldun's domain of influence extended over the whole Islamic world. His major theoretical work is Muqaddimah intended as a preface to his universal history, Kitabal-Ibar, where he sought to establish basic principles of history by which historians could understand events. His theory is cyclic based on "conditions within nations and races [which] change with the change of periods and the passage of time." (Ibn Khaldun, 24). Like Evola he was pessimistic as to what can be achieved by political action in the cycle of decline, writing that the "past resembles the future more than one drop of water another." (Ibn Khaldun, 12). History can be understood as a recurrence of similar patterns motivated by the drives of acquisition, group co-operation, regal authority, in the creation of a civilisation, followed by a cycle of decay when th