Archilogon 059 - 7. Dogma - 6. The Myth of Decadence

Video transcription

If the Myth of Progress places the summit of knowledge at the end of History, the Myth of Decadence places it at the beginning. According to a widespread belief within esoteric thought, humanity once possessed a higher form of knowledge, which gradually became obscured over the centuries.

History thus becomes the story of a loss. Ancient traditions are believed to preserve fragments of a primordial wisdom, while modernity represents the most advanced stage of its impoverishment.

In 'The Crisis of the Modern World', René Guénon invokes the doctrine of the Four Ages of the human cycle and identifies our own era with the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age:

"Those truths which were formerly accessible to all have become increasingly hidden and inaccessible. Those who possess them are ever fewer in number and, although the treasure of non-human — that is, superhuman — Wisdom, which precedes all the ages, can never be lost, it nevertheless becomes enveloped in increasingly impenetrable veils, which conceal it from human sight and make it exceedingly difficult to discover."

Let us set aside the assertion that this knowledge is "superhuman", a claim whose foundations would first need to be demonstrated. Guénon proposes a generalisation that reverses the Myth of Progress: he attributes to primordial humanity universal access to metaphysical truths. Frithjof Schuon goes even further, describing a ‘Golden Age’ in which everyone supposedly lived by their own inner revelation and was born already "initiated". Helena Blavatsky maintains that the most ancient civilisations possessed spiritual, psychic and divine faculties which modern humanity has progressively lost through a process of increasing materialisation of the spirit. Julius Evola likewise interprets the course of History as a departure from a superior primordial condition. Modernity, in his view, represents not the advancement of humanity, but the ultimate outcome of an involutionary process.

But what knowledge did primordial humanity supposedly possess that modernity has obscured?

Guénon describes this ancient wisdom as the product of ‘Intellectual Intuition’:

"In civilisations of a traditional character, Intellectual Intuition lies at the root of everything; in other words, pure metaphysical doctrine constitutes what is essential, while everything else is connected to it as a consequence or as an application to the various orders of contingent reality. This applies not only to social institutions, but also to the sciences, that is, to those branches of knowledge concerned with the relative domain, which in such civilisations are regarded merely as dependencies, extensions or reflections of absolute or principial knowledge."

According to Guénon, Intellectual Intuition, which he regards as the foundation of Metaphysics, is a form of direct, unmediated knowledge. In his 'General Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrines', he writes:

"In describing the essential characteristics of Metaphysics, we have said that it constitutes an intuitive, that is, immediate knowledge, as opposed to the discursive and mediated knowledge belonging to the rational order. Intellectual Intuition is even more immediate than sensible intuition, since it lies beyond the distinction between subject and object which the latter preserves; it is simultaneously the means of knowledge and knowledge itself, and within it subject and object are identified. The immediate consequence is that “knowing” and “being” are fundamentally one and the same thing; they are, so to speak, two inseparable aspects of a single reality, which are no longer even genuinely distinguishable where everything is without duality."

Metaphysical certainty would therefore arise from overcoming the distinction between the knower and what is known.

From our perspective, the problem is not necessarily to deny the possibility of "direct knowledge", but to establish how such knowledge can be recognised and transmitted to other conscious minds. An experience in which subject and object become identified, even if authentic for the person undergoing it, does not guarantee that its content will become ‘knowledge’ or ‘comprehension’ for those to whom it is communicated. Even if we accept that someone has attained genuine, direct knowledge, that knowledge is not automatically transferred to those who listen. The recipient may believe — that is, place their trust in what they are told — but ‘believing’ is equivalent neither to ‘knowing’ nor to ‘comprehending’.

Objective Knowledge, or Episteme, requires instruments through which evidence, whether empirical or logical, can be recognised and shared, and the reasons supporting it can be examined. If the authenticity of Intellectual Intuition can be guaranteed only by the person claiming to possess it, its transmission takes on the characteristics of dogma. When the content of a doctrine is placed beyond the recipient's examination, what is transmitted is not a shared ‘comprehension’, but an assent grounded in faith.

The claim that this form of knowledge was once a ‘common’ possession of humanity is therefore rather fragile, especially when viewed from the standpoint of "direct knowledge". The widespread acceptance of a doctrine does not demonstrate that its understanding has become universal. It demonstrates only that more people believe its message. The danger inherent in such a generalisation is that a society's greater or lesser inclination towards Spiritualism or Materialism may be taken as an indicator of humanity's level of ‘knowledge’, rather than of its religious needs.

Through the Divided Line, Plato enables us to distinguish different modes of inference even within the same community. It is a mistake of perspective to attribute to a collective condition something that must instead be attained by an individual consciousness, provided with the appropriate psychological and material conditions. Historical circumstances may facilitate or obstruct the attainment of 'comprehension', but no historical age can attain it on behalf of the individual. Initiation into the Mysteries might have been valued and admired by society as a whole, and might have taken place through collective rites. Yet participation in a ritual does not, in itself, demonstrate that its participants attained ‘comprehension’.

The four noetic dispositions do not belong to particular historical periods. They represent different ways of approaching Reality, potentially accessible to human beings in every age. A materialistic society may restrict the circulation of metaphysical teachings, but this does not mean that every individual loses either the ability or the desire to understand them. Minds predisposed towards spatial and visual inference — towards Noesis — may actively seek the necessary instruments, even when their cultural environment does little to encourage such a pursuit. Responding to this need is also one of the reasons why certain esoteric traditions have developed throughout History.

Yet the Myth of Decadence, like every myth, preserves traces of a genuine feeling. Nostalgia for a past we have never experienced prompts us to ask what, precisely, has been lost.

We have no reason to conclude that humanity has lost an ‘organ’ capable of perceiving the supersensible. A society may lose texts, methods, languages and institutions that facilitate knowledge. It may become more difficult for us to encounter a teaching, interpret its symbols or find someone capable of guiding us in its practice. But all this concerns the conditions under which knowledge is pursued. It does not, in itself, demonstrate the universal weakening of a human faculty.

A particularly interesting interpretation is offered by Mircea Eliade.

Through the comparative study of religions, Eliade identifies a fundamental difference between the experience of people in archaic societies and that of modern humanity. For the former, existence was embedded within a sacred order in which events acquired meaning through their relationship to archetypal models.

There is no need to suppose that every individual in a traditional civilisation possessed metaphysical knowledge. Through rituals, symbols and institutions, collective life could be organised according to an order which individuals did not necessarily understand, but which helped shape their psyche in accordance with the Relations arising from what we have called ‘Synthetic Logic’.

In 'The Myth of the Eternal Return', Eliade writes:

"The metaphysical concepts of the archaic world were not always formulated in theoretical language; but the symbol, the myth, the rite, express, on different planes and through the means proper to them, a complex system of coherent affirmations about the ultimate reality of things, a system that can be regarded as constituting a Metaphysics."

Ancient people were not necessarily ‘wise’, but they could live within an order derived from a wisdom transmitted through religious institutions. The priest-philosopher contemplated the structure of the Cosmos and established rituals through which the order of Reality — its phases and hierarchies — became manifest to the faithful in a concrete, tangible form. The ritual did not impart a ‘comprehension’ of cosmic structure to the worshipper, but accustomed them to recognising particular Relations and recurring patterns.

As Eliade writes in 'The Sacred and the Profane':

"Greece too knew the myth of the Eternal Return, and the Greek philosophers of the late period carried the conception of 'Circular Time' to its furthest limits. All cosmic becoming, and, in the same manner, the duration of this world of generation and corruption in which we live, will progress in a circle, or in accordance with an indefinite succession of cycles in the course of which the same reality is made, unmade, and remade in conformity with an immutable law and immutable alternatives. Cosmic duration is repetition and "anakuklosis": eternal return."

Let us now consider these observations from the perspective of the Archilogon.

A cycle, understood in terms of its structure, constitutes a Whole articulated into Parts and determinate Relations. Each moment acquires its meaning through the position it occupies within the Whole. This structure can be symbolically transposed into myths and rituals, becoming a model through which the human psyche can interpret its own experience and gives it a ‘sense’, understood not merely as ‘meaning’, but also as ‘direction’.

As Eliade writes:

"It is not difficult to see why the religious moment implies the cosmogonic moment. The sacred reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world, in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world."

The concept of ‘orientation’ explains what has truly been lost. Not a supersensible faculty supposedly possessed by primordial humanity, but a system of ‘symbolic reference points’ capable of situating individual experience within an ordered, meaningful universe: in other words, within a Cosmos.

As modern humanity has become increasingly independent of traditional institutions, it has progressively lost many of those collective reference points. It consequently finds itself deprived of the symbolic framework through which it could recognise an order, a direction and its own place within existence.

It is in this sense that modernity may appear to represent a period of involution in comparison with the past. Not because the ancients universally possessed superior knowledge, but because their existence was oriented by symbolic structures that no longer fulfil the same collective function today.

It is worth emphasising, however, that contempt for the present and the desire to return to the past are not philosophical positions, but ethical and political ones.

Synthetic Logic teaches the philosopher that every apparent ‘involution’ can instead be understood as a moment within a cyclical process. What returns is not the phenomena of the past, but the formal Relations governing the cycle of transformation. Everything that Reality unfolds throughout History possesses its own significance as a necessary moment within a dialectical process.

For the philosopher living today, the present constitutes the challenge to which they are called to respond.

The philosopher's task, therefore, is neither to mourn a lost Golden Age nor to despise the present, but to understand the meaning and necessity of the historical phase in which they live. To do so, they must investigate its essence and significance, not from a partial and subjective perspective, but by returning, as Plato envisaged, to the task of making their own mind a ‘Cosmos’.

"To the Principle!"