PART TWO

Genesis and Face

of the Modern World

Many things are known by the Wise. They foresee many things: the decline of the world and the end of the Aesir.

— Voluspa, 44

I reveal to you a secret. The time has come when the Groom will crown the Bride. But where is the crown? In the North … And whence comes the Groom? From the Center, where the heat generates the Light and turns towards the North … where the Light becomes radiant. What are the people living in the South doing? They have fallen asleep in the heat; but they will reawaken in the storm and many among them will be terrified unto death.

—J. Boehme, Aurora, 2.11.43

Introduction

I would like to point out the difference between the methodology employed in the first part of this work and the methodology adopted in the second part.

In the first part, which had a morphological and typological character, I attempted to draw from various testimonies those elements that were more suitable for characterizing, in a universal and metahistorical fashion, the nature of the traditional spirit and the traditional view of the world, of man, and of life. Therefore, I neglected to examine the relationship between the chosen elements and the overall spirit of the different historical traditions to which they belonged. Those elements that in the context of a particular and concrete tradition did not conform to the traditional spirit were considered to be absent and unable to influence the value and the meaning of the rest of the elements. I did not even attempt to determine up to what point certain attitudes and historical institutions had truly been “traditional” in the spirit rather than just the form.

Now my approach is going to be different. I will attempt to follow the dynamic unfolding of the traditional and antitraditional forces in history, and therefore it will no longer be possible to apply the same methodology; it will be impossible to isolate and to bring out some particular elements in the complex of various historical civilizations because of their “traditional potential.” The overall spirit of a given civilization and the way it has concretely utilized all of the elements included in it, will now become the relevant and specific object of my discussion. The synthetic consideration of the forces at work will replace my analysis, which had previously isolated the valid elements. I will attempt to discover the “dominating factor” within the various historical complexes and to determine the value of the different elements, not in an absolute and abstract way, but according to the action they exercised within a given civilization.

While so far I have attempted to integrate the historical and particular element with the ideal, universal, and “typical” element, I will henceforth attempt to integrate the ideal element with the real one. The latter integration, just like the former, more than following the methods and the results of the researches of modern critical historiography, is going to be based mainly on a “traditional” and metaphysical perspective, on the intuition of a sense that cannot be deduced from the individual elements but that presupposes them; by beginning from this sense it is possible to grasp the different instrumental and organic roles that such elements may have played in various eras of the past and in the different historically conditioned forms.

Therefore, it may happen that whatever has been left out in the first integration will become prominent in the second integration, and vice versa; in the framework of a given civilization some elements may be valued and considered to be decisive, while in other civilizations they are present but in the background and deemed to be irrelevant.

This warning may be helpful to a certain category of readers. To shift from the consideration of Tradition as metahistory to the consideration of Tradition as history implies a change of perspectives; it causes the same elements to be valued differently; it causes united things to become separated and separated things to unite according to whatever the contingencies of history may determine from case to case.