9

Life and Death of Civilizations

In those areas in which Tradition retained all of its vitality the dynastic succession of sacred kings represented an axis of light and of eternity within the temporal framework, the victorious presence of the supernatural in the world, and the “Olympian” component that transfigures the demonic element of chaos and bestows a higher meaning to state, nation, and race. Even in the lower strata of society, the hierarchical bond created by a conscious and virile devotion was considered a means to approach, and to participate in, the supernatural.

In fact, invested with authority from above, the simple law acted as a reference and a support that went beyond mere human individuality for those who could not light the supernatural fire for themselves. In reality, the intimate, free, and effective dedication of one’s entire life to traditional norms, even when a full understanding of their inner dimension was not present to justify such an adherence, was enough to acquire objectively a higher meaning: through obedience, faithfulness, and action in conformity with traditional principles and limitations an invisible force shaped such a life and oriented it toward that supernatural axis that in others (in those privileged few at the top of the hierarchy) existed as a state of truth, realization, and light. In this manner, a stable and lively organism was formed that was constantly oriented toward the overworld and sanctified in power and in act according to its hierarchical degrees in the various domains of thinking, feeling, acting, and struggling. Such was the climate of the world of Tradition.

All of the exterior life was a rite, namely, an approximation, more or less efficacious and depending on individuals and groups, to a truth that the exterior life cannot produce by itself, but that allows a person to realize one’s self in part or entirely, provided it is lived in a saintly way. These people lived the same life that they led for centuries; they made of this world a ladder in order to achieve liberation. These peoples used to think, to act, to love, to hate, and to wage war on each other in a saintly way; they had erected the one temple among a great number of other temples through which the stream of the waters ran. This temple was the bed of the river, the traditional truth, the holy syllable in the heart of the world.^[1]

At this level to leave the parameters of Tradition meant to leave the true life. To abandon the rites, alter or violate the laws or mix the castes corresponded to a regression from a structured universe (cosmos) back into chaos, or to a relapse to the state of being under the power of the elements and of the totems—to take the “path leading to the hells” where death is the ultimate reality and where a destiny of contingency and of dissolution is the supreme rule.

This applied to both single individuals and to entire peoples. Any analysis of history will reveal that just like man, civilizations too, after a dawn and an ensuing development, eventually decline and die. Some people have attempted to discover the law responsible for the decline of various civilizations. I do not think that the cause or causes can be reduced to merely historical and naturalistic factors.

Among various writers, de Gobineau is the one who probably better demonstrates the insufficiency of the majority of the empirical causes that have been adduced to explain the decline of great civilizations. He showed, for instance, that a civilization does not collapse simply because its political power has been either broken or swept away: “The same type of civilization sometimes endures even under a foreign occupation and defies the worst catastrophic events, while some other times, in the presence of mediocre mishaps, it just disappears.” Not even the quality of the governments, in the empirical (namely, administrative and organizational) sense of the word, exercises much influence on the longevity of civilizations. De Gobineau remarked that civilizations, just like living organisms, may survive for a long time even though they carry within themselves disorganizing tendencies in addition to the spiritual unity that is the life of the one common Tradition; India and feudal Europe, for example, show precisely the absence of both a unitary organization and a single economic system or form of legislation on the one hand and a marked pluralism with repeatedly recurring antagonisms on the other.^[2]

Not even the so-called corruption of morals, in its most profane and moralistically bourgeois sense, may be considered the cause of the collapse of civilizations; the corruption of morals at most may be an effect, but it is not the real cause. In almost every instance we have to agree with Nietzsche, who claimed that wherever the preoccupation with “morals” arises is an indication that a process of decadence is already at work; the mos of Vico’s “heroic ages” has nothing to do with moralistic limitations. The Far Eastern tradition especially has emphasized the idea that morals and laws in general (in a conformist and social sense) arise where “virtue” and the “Way” are no longer known:

When the Tao was lost, its attributes appeared; when its attributes were lost, benevolence appeared; when benevolence was lost, righteousness appeared; and when righteousness was lost, the proprieties appeared. Now propriety is the attenuated form of filial piety and good faith, and is also the commencement of disorder.^[3]

As far as the traditional laws are concerned, taken in their sacred character and in their transcendent finality, then just as they had a nonhuman value, likewise they could not be reduced in any way to the domain of morality in the current sense of the word. Antagonism between peoples or a state of war between them is in itself not the cause of a civilization’s collapse; on the contrary, the imminent sense of danger, just like victory, can consolidate, even in a material way, the network of a unitary structure and heat up a people’s spirit through external manifestations, while peace and well-being may lead to a state of reduced tension that favors the action of the deeper causes of a possible disintegration.^[4]

The idea that is sometimes upheld against the insufficiency of these explanations is that of race. The unity and the purity of blood are believed by some to be the foundation of life and the strength of a civilization; therefore, the mixing and the ensuing “poisoning” of the blood are considered the initial cause of a civilization’s decline. This too is an illusion, which among other things, lowers the notion of civilization to a naturalistic and biological plane, since this is the plane on which race is thought of in our day and age. Race, blood, hereditary purity of blood: these are merely “material” factors. A civilization in the true, traditional sense of the word arises only when a supernatural and nonhuman force of a higher order—a force that corresponds to the “pontifical” function, to the component of the rite, and to the principle of spirituality as the basis of a hierarchical differentiation of people—acts upon these factors. At the origin of every true civilization there lies a “divine” event (every great civilization has its own myth concerning divine founders): thus, no human or naturalistic factor can fully account for it. The adulteration and decline of civilizations is caused by an event of the same order, though jt acts in the opposite, degenerative sense. When a race has lost contact with the only thing that has and can provide stability, namely, with the world of “Being”; and when in a race that which forms its most subtle yet most essential element has been lost, namely, the inner race and the race of the spirit—compared to which the race of the body and of the soul are only external manifestations and means of expression—^[5]then the collective organisms that a race has generated, no matter how great and powerful, are destined to descend into the world of contingency; they are at the mercy of what is irrational, becoming, and “historical,” and of what is shaped “from below” and from the outside.

Blood and ethnic purity are factors that are valued in traditional civilizations too; their value, however, never justifies the employment, in the case of human beings, of the same criteria employed to ascertain the presence of “pure blood” in a dog or in a horse—as is the case in some modern racist ideologies. The “blood” or “racial” factor plays a certain role not because it exists in the “psyche” (in the brain and in the opinions of an individual), but in the deepest forces of life that various traditions experience and act upon as typical formative energies. The blood registers the effects of this action, yet it provides through heredity a material that is preformed and refined so that through several generations, realizations similar to the original ones may be prepared and developed in a natural and spontaneous way. It is on this foundation—and on this foundation only—that, as we shall see, the traditional world often practiced the heredity of the castes and willed endogamous laws. If we refer, however, to the Indo-Aryan tradition in which the caste system was the most rigorously applied, simply to be born in a caste, though neoessary1 was not considered enough; it was necessary for the quality virtually conferred upon a person at birth to be actualized by initiation. I have already mentioned that according to the Manudharmaśāstra, unless a man undergos initiation or”second birth,” even though he may be an Aryan, he is not superior to a śūdra. I also related how three special differentiations of the divine fire animated the three hierarchically higher Persian pishtra, and that definite membership in one of them was sealed at the moment of initiation. Even in these instances we should not lose sight of two factors being present, and never mistake the formative element for the element that is formed, nor the conditioning for the conditioned factor. Both the higher castes and traditional aristocracies, as well as superior civilizations and races (those that enjoy the same status that the consecrated castes enjoy vis-à-vis the plebeian castes of the “children of the Earth”) cannot be explained by blood, but through the blood, by something that goes beyond blood and that has a metabiological character.

When this “something” is truly powerful, or when it constitutes the deeper and most stable nucleus of a traditional civilization, then that civilization can preserve and reaffirm itself—even when ethnical mixtures and alterations occur (no matter how destructive they may be)—by reacting on the heterogeneous elements, and shaping them, by reducing them slowly but gradually to their own type, or by regenerating itself into a new, vibrant unity. In historical times there are a number of cases of this: China, Greece, Rome, Islam. Only when a civilization’s generating root “from above” is no longer alive and its “spiritual race” is worn out or broken does its decline set in, and this in tandem with its secularization and humanization.^[6]

When it comes to this point, the only forces that can be relied upon are those of the blood, which still carries atavistically within itself, through race and instinct, the echo and the trace of the departed higher element that has been lost; it is only in this way that the “racist” thesis in defense of the purity of blood can be validly upheld—if not to prevent, at least to delay the fatal outcome of the process of dissolution. It is impossible, however, to really prevent this outcome without an inner awakening.

Analogous observations can be made concerning the value and the power of traditional forms, principles, and laws. In a traditional social order there must be somebody in whom the principle upon which various institutions, legislations, and ethical and ritual regulations are based is truly active; this principle, though, must be an objective spiritual realization and not a simulacrum. In other words, what is required is an individual or an elite to assume the “pontifical” function of lords and mediators of power from above. Then even those who can only obey but who cannot adopt the law other than by complying with the external authority and tradition are able intuitively to know why they must obey; their obedience is not sterile because it allows them to participate effectively in the power and in the light. Just as when a magnetic current is present in a main circuit and induced currents are produced in other distinct circuits, provided they are syntonically arranged—likewise, some of the greatness, stability, and “fortune” that are found in the hierarchical apex pass invisibly into those who follow the mere form and the ritual with a pure heart. In that case, the tradition is firmly rooted, the social organism is unified and connected in all of its parts by an occult bond that is generally stronger than external contingencies.

When at the center, however, there is only a shallow function or when the titles of the representatives of the spiritual and regal authority are only nominal, then the pinnacle dissolves and the support crumbles.^[7] A highly significant legend in this regard is that of the people of Gog and Magog, who symbolize chaotic and demonic forces that are held back by traditional structures. According to this legend, these people attack when they realize that there is no longer anybody blowing the trumpets on that wall upon which an imperial type had previously arrested their siege, and that it was only the wind that produced the sounds they were hearing. Rites, institutions, laws, and customs may still continue to exist for a certain time; but with their meaning lost and their “virtue” paralyzed they are nothing but empty shells. Once they are abandoned to themselves and have become secularized, they crumble like parched olay and become increasingly disfigured and altered, despite all attempts to retain from the outside, whether through violence or imposition, the lost inner unity. As long as a shadow of the action of the superior element remains, however, and an echo of it exists in the blood, the structure remains standing, the body still appears endowed with a soul, and the corpse—to use an image employed by de Gobineau—walks and is still capable of knocking down obstacles in its path. When the last residue of the force from above and of the race of the spirit is exhausted, in the new generations nothing else remains; there is no longer a riverbed to channel the current that is now dispersed in every direction. What emerges at this point is individualism, chaos, anarchy, a humanist hubris, and degeneration in every domain. The dam is broken. Although a semblance of ancient grandeur still remains, the smallest impact is enough to make an empire or state collapse and be replaced with a demonic inversion, namely, with the modern, omnipotent Leviathan, which is a mechanized and “totalitarian” collective system.

From prehistoric times to our own day and age this is what “evolution” has been all about. As we shall see, from the distant myth of divine regality through the descent from one caste to the next, mankind will reach the faceless forms of our contemporary civilization in which the tyranny of the pure demos and the world of the masses is increasingly and frightfully reawakening in the structures of mechanization.

Footnotes

1. G. De Giorgio, “Azione e contemplazione,” La Torre, no. 2 (1930).

2. J. de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races.

3. Tao te Ching, 38, in R. Van Over, ed., Chinese Mystics (New York, 1973), 22.

4. For a critique of these alleged causes of the decline of civilizations, see de Gobineau’s The Inequality of Human Races.

5. For a more detailed account of race and of the relationship between the somatic, soul, and spiritual race, see my Sintesi di dottrina della razza (Milan, 1941).

6. We may here consider A. J. Toynbee’s thesis (A Study of History [London, 1934]) according to which, a few exceptions notwithstanding, there have never been civilizations that have been killed, but only civilizations that have committed suicide. Wherever the inner strength exists and does not abdicate, then difficulties, dangers, an adverse environment, attacks from the outside, and even invasions may become a stimulus or a challenge that induces that inner strength to react in a creative way. Toynbee saw in these external elements the conditions for the advent and for the development of civilizations.

7. According to the Hindu tradition, the four great ages of the world, or yugas, depend on the kings’s state: the Dark Age (Kali Yuga) corresponds to the state in which the regal function is “asleep”; the Golden Age corresponds to the state in which the king reproduces the symbolic actions of the Aryan gods.