The
plurality and duality of civilizations
from Julius Evola, The Hermetic Tradition (Chapter 1)
Recently, in contrast to the notion of progress and
the idea that history has been represented as the more or less continuous
upward evolution of collective humanity, the idea of a plurality of the forms
of civilization and of a relative incommunicability between them has been
confirmed. According to this second and new vision of history, civilization
breaks down into epochs and disconnected cycles. At a given moment and within a
given race a specific conception of the world and of life is affirmed from
which follows a specific system of truths, principles, understandings, and
realizations. A civilizations springs up, gradually reches a culminating point,
and then falls into darkness and, more often than not, disappears. A cycle has
ended. Perhaps another will rise again some day, somewhere else. Perhaps it may
even tale up the concerns of preceding civilizations, but any connection
between them will be strictly analogical. The transition from on cycle of
civilization to another – one completely alien to the other – implies a jump,
which in mathematics is called a discontinuity.[1]
Although this view is a healthy reaction to the
superstition of history as progress – which came into fashion more or less at
the same time as materialism and western scientism [2] – nevertheless, we
should be cautious, for in addition to a plurality of civilizations we have to
recognize a duality – especially when we limit ourselves to those times and the
central structures that we can embrace with some measure of certainty.
Modern civilization stands on one side and on the
other the entirety of all the civilizations that have preceded it (for the
West, we can put the dividing line at the end of the middle-ages). At this
point the rupture is complete. Apart from the multitudinous variety of its
forms, pre-modern civilisation, which we may as well call “traditional”[3],
mean something quite different. For there are two worlds, one of which has
separated itself by cutting of nearly every contact with the past period. For
the great majority of the moderns, that means any possibility of understanding
the traditional world has completely lost.
This premise is indispensable for the examination of
our subject. The hermetico-alchemical tradition forms part of the cycle of
pre-modern “traditional” civilization and in order to understand its spirit we
need to translate it inwardly from one world into the other. Who undertakes
this study without having acquired the ability to rise above the modern
mind-set or who has not awakened to a new sensitivity that can place itself in
contact with the general spiritual stream that gave life to the tradition in
the first place, will succed only in filling his head with words, symbols, and
fantastic allegories. Moreover, it is not just a question of intellectual
understanding. We have to bear in mind that ancient men not only had a
different way of thinking and feeling, but also a different way of perceiving and knowing. The heart of the matter that will concern us is to
re-evoke, by means of an actual transformation of the consciousness, this older
basis of understanding and action.
Only then will the unexpected light of certain
expressions dawn on us and certain symbols be empowered to awaken our interior
perception. Only then will we be conducted through them to new heights of human
realization and to the understanding that will it possible for designated
“rites” to confer “magical” and operant power, and for the creation of a new
“science” that bears no resemblance to anything that goes by that name today.
Notes
[1] The best known exponent of this concept is O.
Spengler (The Decline of the West). Since de Gobineau this theory has had
futher developments in connection with the doctrin of race.
[2] In fact, the extraordinary idea of a continuous
evolution could have been born of an exclusive contepmplation of the material
and technical aspect of civilizations, completely overlooking their qualitative
and spiritual elements.
[3] The source for the precise concept of “traditional
civilization”, as opposed to “modern” in Rene Guenon’s The Crisis of the Modern World (London 1942).