The Mythic Cycle of History

The usual view of history is that it is a linear sequence of mostly disconnected events. Or rather, that while there may be found patterns in specific things, such as the development of computers or the raising or lowering of women's hemlines in fashion, that there is no overarching pattern to the whole thing. 

This is in sharp contrast to many myths and religious views of history in which history is not linear but a circle, which is a continuation of a universal circular pattern that can be found in everything from the life and deaths of people to the passing of the seasons to the circular paths of the Sun and Moon. Birth, life, death, rebirth. Spring, summer, autumn, winter, and spring again. We can see the pattern in Christian mythology in which there was an original Eden, a fall from grace, a message of the return to grace, the end of the fallen world and a rebirth of a new Eden. All these circular understandings of history bear a family resemblance, though of course colored by the particular culture and spiritual tradition that they are found in. I leave it to you whether or not to acknowledge any of these circular views of history. 

However, whenever we are talking about history and particularly about time, we are getting into very tricky territory, so lets back up a moment. Previous posts of mine dealing with time probably only have parenthetic connections with this topic, though of course there are the similarities in terms of my denial that linear time is the only or even best understanding of time. Here I speak of a Mythic Age inside history: one may also speak of a Mythic Age outside history as Mircea Eliade does in his concept of the Eternal Return. I would say that this version of the Mythic Age is a religious experience of an essentially non-historical reality and so to call it an Age can be misleading, though usually traditional peoples who connect with this Age typically do view it as existing in the heroic past. Eliade's Mythic Age is similar to my experience in the Elysium Visions, an encounter with a sort of archetypal template of divine or mythic life which I did not view at the time as a particularly historical phenomenon. However the two do have a connection in that the Mythic Age IN history which I talk about here is typified by its harmony with the Mythic Age OUTSIDE history - Eliade's Mythic Age. The idea that Eliade's Mythic Age is essentially not historical is validated by the fact that people enacted patterns and rituals in which they were not merely repeating the actions of their mythic ancestors but actually participating in them by repeating. This can be most clearly seen in the Australian aborigine's ideas of Dreamtime; that by walking over the landscape reciting and repeating the epic events which are supposed to have happened in that landscape in the past, the person is not simply repeating things at a different sequential moment in time but actually participating in the original event. This signifies to me that the event is not an event, as if it existed in sequential time. It is an unhistorical archetypal pattern, a divine template. However, a historical Mythic Age does have much to do with this unhistorical version, in that it is in harmony with that template. The Cycle of History as I am talking about it now can be seen as a progressively increasing disconnect from that divine template, that unhistorical Mythic Age. 

You may understand this better in Judeo-Christian terms, limited though they are. In Christian myth there was originally no distance between the divine plan (unhistorical Mythic Age) and Man's actions (historical Mythic Age). Then the Fall happened, then the consequent spiritual decay leading to Armageddon, then the return to the original harmony. 

In this version of the circle of history, history is divided into three ages: the Mythic Age, in which the world and the "divine" are in sync; the Middle Age in which Man asserts his independence, and the Dark Age in which Man experiences the consequences of usurping the divine, and loses control over his fate to his dead idols which have taken on a weird life of their own, independent of him. The Dark Age is the result of "the arrogance men get when they see what they can do with their minds" to steal a quote from Freeman Dyson. It is important to note that this is a circle of history that concerns human history: it may be that it completely does not apply outside that. 

Now when I say divine, or when I say gods, do not imagine that I mean gods as conventionally imagined. Whether single God or multiple gods, gods are pictured in the image of human kings, which is itself a symptom of a post-Mythic world. To make the divine in the image of human power is a sign of a cycle of history that is well under way towards decay. I do not mean any such thing. The divine is not susceptible to definition in words, and the desire to so define it is an attempt to move it under human control.

MYTHIC AGE:

Age of Life

The Mythic Age is a time period, which probably ended at different times in different places, when there is no hard division of sacred and profane time. All time is sacred time, and people very regularly and easily interacted with mythic reality and in fact interacted with it in mundane everyday things. In most cases, it would be a pre-neolithic or at best very early neolithic world although it is often reimagined as later in the myths of later generations. It is characterized by the level of human power and control over their environment: they have very little of it. There is no significant imagined difference between "human" and "animal." Acts of heroism were to some extent required by the environment, facilitated by the regular strenuous physical activity that would often be needed to survive, and so tales of such heroism and epic feats of strength would be common. There are no centralized authorities, no work per se (relatively little time had to be spent obtaining food, shelter and so on), and visionary experiences and altered states of consciousness would be fairly common and expected. It is entirely possible, even likely, that their normal state of consciousness would be characterized by us today as an altered or visionary state of consciousness. Divination and other forms of prophetic activity would not be common as they would be later, since divination presumes a divide between the divine and mundane that needs to be bridged. There would be few or no religious leaders although some individuals might be prized for special abilities.

It goes without saying that in this age, there was little trade, no money, and life was centered on life itself. Actual life was everything.

MIDDLE AGE:
Age of Power

In certain areas even before the development of agriculture, there would have been areas which were so rich in food sources that the centralization of power in chiefs or kings, division of labor, and creation of religious specialists could occur even without agriculture. Organized warfare would have also started over possession of such areas. With the advent of agriculture however came the idea that life could be "reinvented" by humans: that the stable established pattern of life that had persisted for thousands of years could be changed at the will of humans, and that their immediate environment could be changed for the benefit of humans. However, these changes generally were not to the benefit of humans: they had to work harder, live shorter, be unhealthier and more prone to disease. Compared to the lives of their ancestors in all but one respect, their lives were worse. The one significant advantage of this way of life lie in warfare: large agricultural communities could both defend themselves better against attack and attack others more effectively than earlier peoples. This was a short-term advantage however as more centralized civilizations arose and the level and scale of wars increased. This era led to the rise of human kings, who then changed the myths and the religion of the people to reinforce their power and justify their rule. Religion became the province of specialists who could be placed under the power of the king, and rogue spiritual authorities who contradicted their message eliminated. Religion morphed from something which dealt with the whole world, to something primarily centered on humans, and god in the image of a human king. Kings who then claimed right of rulership from the god they made in their own image. Money was first developed, a conceptual exchange that began to mean more than the real things it represented. At the same time, people instinctively realized that something had been lost, and this gave rise to myths of a primordial paradise, golden age or Eden. Sometimes people who no longer understood this Eden primarily in spiritual terms developed myths of especially divine or wise kingship that allowed a golden age, such as in the Arthurian mythos. 

The various stages of this human revolution exploded across the world like waves of an ocean, as cultures that possessed stronger centralized control and higher technology and more human-centered religions conquered those who were still living in earlier stages and replaced the myths and religious practices of such people with their own. Under the pressure of these succeeding waves, the original heart of a culture could be completely overwhelmed and erased, and there are many cultures who we only know from the accounts of the people who destroyed them. The people themselves usually mostly survived, but the culture was killed. When Europeans with gunpowder-age technology encountered the still neolithic societies of the New World, the result was pure devastation of both culture and people, but devastation of that sort had been going on in the Old World for a long time. The Native Americans weren't the first people who got their culture raped, the conquistadors themselves came from a long line of raped cultures. 

However, though people were subjugated and enslaved, at least you could say they were still enslaved to individual persons. Kings or bigwigs of some sort. Neither concepts, capital, organizations or technology had at this point taken a life of their own and started essentially running the show. 

DARK AGE:

Age of Ghouls

The name "Age of Ghouls" might sound melodramatic, but it was the best phrase I could think of to describe the overall trend of this era. Technology had been developing in fits and starts - Roman technology depended on large armies (literally, the Imperial Legions) to build things like aqueducts and stadiums, which later times couldn't sustain because it lacked that labor base. However in about the 12th Century or thereabouts technology began to be a self-sustaining march, the pace of which was originally very slow but which increased with each passing century. The mechanical clock in the 13th century allowed those in power to order the lives of workers in accordance with abstract time rather than the natural rhythms of the days and seasons. By the 14th Century Europeans had gunpowder, which allowed them to dominate those that did not. By the 16th century they had steel. Corporations had their origins prior to the 14th Century, but didn't really catch on until the 17th Century when corporations like the Dutch East India Company, the British East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company could ruthlessly wield power greater than many kings had at their disposal, purely in the name of money. Importantly, corporations were not tied to any living thing: they could have a life of their own. They could long outlive the people that founded them. Ideologies had long been able to take on a life of their own, as sort of mental viruses, and actually redefine the words that defined them. Concepts like "freedom". 

In the earlier Age of Power, ideology served power and always had. In the Age of Ghouls, ideology serves capital. Now we have a self-perpetuating, world-reconstructing power that has nothing to do with real biological life at all except as merchandise. It needs no king, and even Presidents and world leaders can be seen as servants of it rather than rulers of it. It depends on no individual people. It doesn't even depend on any one country; it can shift around as it pleases. And since it gets to redefine the public dialogue to suit it, it shifts the concerns of people from real things (whole food, clean water, clean air, clothes and shelter) to their fake surrogate reality (jobs, money, "opportunity," "free trade"). Moreover, by now people on the whole lack the ability to see through this manufactured reality, since they and their ancestors already had a warped worldview from the Middle Age and its focus on power and kings rather than the lives of people. The language in play in this new ideological environment literally does not allow them to see clearly unless something nudges them loose. Sacred time, which had been progressively more and more dislodged from people's experience (as something potentially disruptive to the prevailing power), is now declared not to exist. All time is profane time. We imagine that human beings are in control of our civilization, but in truth we are not. We have been captured by the ghouls of money and image and put in a cage of false language, so that we may never even see the bars of the cage we were put in. 

Divine realities are hidden at this time, but they aren't gone. You have to go looking for them, but how do you look for something that you don't think is there? How do you look for something when people for 6000 years have been pointing in other directions, or not pointing? Thus, for most people this is a trap without an escape, and certainly without an easy escape. As long as the handcuffs aren't binding too tightly, one might not look for the key, and become comfortable with the cage. It requires enormous courage to buck thousands of years of history.

How does the Dark Age end? Well, it certainly seems to think it will never end, that it can go on in just this way indefinitely, and in fact it might continue for centuries (a horrible thought.) However, eventually it will end sort of like the Norse said it would. Ragnarok. The End Of The World As We Know It. It could in fact involve literal battle, as different powers fight over the scraps of a falling system, or fight to prop up the system. In Norse mythology, Ragnarok is preceded by an unusual winter, a year at least without a summer. In essence, civilization as we know it is just that far away from utter collapse: one year without a summer. One year without a crop. Perhaps some natural disaster will precipitate this.

Eventually the Age will be destroyed, and humanity perhaps almost destroyed along with it because the mass of people will be so alienated from any process of actual biological survival that they will just wander the ruined streets until they die. There will be massive ecological damage as well, but the Earth can recover. Eventually, the cycle begins again, a new Mythic Age.

******

I was prompted to make this post because of a sort of vision I had, half-awake. There was a man or god who was a being of goodness in charge of an age of light. This man or god was slain, leading to the beginning of the age of darkness. I did not know the name at that time, but later I was doing a little research and came across him and instantly recognized him: Baldr. Baldr had begun to have dreams of his death, and this concerned his mother Frigg enough that she made every object or entity in every realm swear not to harm him. Since Baldr was good and loved, she was able to obtain that vow... from all but one thing. Mistletoe, for whatever reason was ineligible to swear a vow. 

The other gods had begun to make a sport of shooting arrows at Baldr and watching them fall harmlessly to the ground because the arrows would not harm him. Loki, the trickster god, put an arrow made of mistletoe in the quiver of Baldr's blind brother Hodr, who shot and killed Baldr. Frigg begged Hel, ruler of the underworld, to release Baldr and Hel agreed on the condition that all beings alive or dead would weep for him. All beings did, except one giantess, who is believed to have been Loki himself in disguise. The death of Baldr starts a series of events that leads to Loki's imprisonment and ultimately to Ragnarok. 

Baldr being shot by arrows. Loki is at right handing a mistletoe arrow to Hodr.