THE PATTERN of HISTORY

Now we must look a little more closely at the concept of the Historical Cycle. According to the traditions of the Indo-European world (though the same concept can be found as far afield as the Americas, despite the fact that no cultural contact between the two worlds had taken place for millennia), the Great Cycle or Manvantara is divided into four Yugas, or Ages. In the Hellenic tradition, which is the direct ancestor of modern European civilisation, the ages were termed the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age (these last two should not be confused with the similarly-named Ages of modern archaeology).

The duration of these ages accords to the pattern known as the Tetrakys; that is, ten units of time are arranged in the ratio 4:3:2:1; the Golden Age being the longest Age and the Iron Age the shortest. Precisely what length of time is involved is not known, but the most conservative estimates of the Iron Age put its length at over 6,000 years, many put it much longer. Part of the reason for the variation is undoubtedly that this macrocosmic pattern of the Historical Cycle is repeated microcosmically at various levels of historical movement. The greatest of all "Great Years" is that in which material manifestation--the entire universe itself--is manifested, developed and comes to an end. Within this, the life of maid on our planet is but a small sub-cycle, yet the Historical Cycle of which we speak is, if we may put it thus, a sub-sub cycle, a cycle within the greater cycle of the duration of humankind, and perhaps another cycle within that, nested several cycles deep. These things it is not given us to know. All that matters is that we should understand the fundamental nature of the cycle and know that microcosmically one cycle stands for all. So, if we speak at times of our Historical Cycle as if it were the entire cycle of manifestation, that is entirely legitimate, for it is the perfect mirror thereof and obeys the same laws.

It should be noted that even in the case of the smallest sub-cycle, the period of patriarchy occupies only a part of the Iron Age: thus, for the vast majority of history we are speaking of feminine civilisations.

What, then, was the Golden Age? Let us recall that the movement of the Cycle of manifestation is always from Essence to Substance; from the subtler and more refined to the grosser and more consolidated. In the earliest ages, maid was not manifest as a physical being at all. This is recognised by all traditions (the Semitic religions, for example, including Christianity, speak of humanity inhabiting Paradise before descending to earth).

As the Golden Age continued (and here, we are speaking of the primordial Golden Age of this earth), maid became increasingly earth-bound and materialised and her Intellectuality declined, though not, of course, to anything approaching the low level of later ages.

Here it is important to define what we mean by Intellectuality. Intellect is a faculty very different from mere reason (although the two have become increasingly confused in late patriarchal times). Its organ is the heart, which, in the human microcosm, corresponds to the sun in the cosmos. Here we are speaking of the True Heart, the spiritual centre of the human being, rather than the mere physical organ which represents it on the plane of matter (just as the true or Supernal Sun must be distinguished from the ball of fire that represents Her on the earthly plane).

Heart-Intellect is that which sees pure Truth directly. Plato (who transmits a portion of the Primordial Tradition carried by Socrates from his female teacher, Diotima of Mantinea) speaks of the cave of the world, where the things about us are but shadows cast on the wall. He speaks of the soul who transcends the cave and sees the Real Things, the celestial Archetypes of which earthly things are but shadows. This soul, escaping from the cave and seeing the Real World, is exercising the faculty of pure Intellect. As maid declines from her primordial state, this faculty becomes more and more difficult of attainment, and rigorous disciplines of contemplation and meditation are required to lift even a corner of the veil of matter. But in the Golden Age, the vision of pure Intellect was as natural to her as seeing physical objects is to you or I.

What she saw of the material world we cannot say, for she scarcely lived there,

The Taoist sage, Chuang Tzu writes:

"The knowledge of the ancients was perfect. How perfect? At first they did not yet know that there were things (apart from the Tao, the Way, which signifies the Eternal and Infinite). That is the most perfect knowledge; nothing can be added. Next they knew that there were things but did not yet make distinctions between them . . ."

As the golden age wears on, maid becomes more rooted in the earth. Both she and her physical environment become more consolidated (though still extremely subtle as compared to the materiality of later ages), and she turns increasingly from the higher faculty of Intellect to the lesser faculties of memory, imagination and reason. Just as Intellect is the Solar faculty, so these are Lunar faculties (the very words "mind" and "mental" are connected to "moon", Gk. mene). They have no light of their own, but reflect the light of the Solar Intellect in a lesser mode, and they act upon the 'things' of which Chuang Tzu speaks: that is, the shadows on the cave of the world — material objects and events, (but still perceived primarily in the light of their underlying Archetypes). For the mental faculties, like the moon herself, stand ever between the sun and the earth; sometimes dark like the earth, sometimes bright like the sun, mediating between them.

Much later in her downward course, various things became necessary to maid: language (first spoken, much later, as memory deteriorates, written) was one, art another (and all the crafts necessary to material existence — for the distinction between art and craft, and the divorce of both from spiritual symbolism belongs only to the later Iron Age), and in each case, the development was not from crude beginnings upward, but from the highest level downward. Language, as we have seen, rather than describing an upward course from `primitive' squeaks and grunts, becomes ever more complex as we go backwards, and we have heard a distinguished professor of linguistics forced to the conclusion (much to his own surprise) that the earliest spoken languages must have been akin to poetry.

In his book Palaeolithic Art, the art historian Paolo Graziosi writes: "Undoubtedly the most perplexing aspect of the art phenomenon when it appears to us for the first time is the high degree of maturity shown in the earliest expressions. The sudden appearance of stylistically evolved works of art takes us completely by surprise, with a marvelous eruption of aesthetic values . . . even the examples which belong unquestionably to the earliest phase . . . are works of amazing artistic maturity."

It must be understood, moreover, that these Primordial artists and craftmaids were not trying to 'imitate nature' or make realistic copies of material objects, but were depicting, in a highly subtle artistic language, the Archetypes — the Real Forms — behind those objects. This was true of the art of every civilisation until the European 'Renaissance' (with the exception of the Western 'classical' period, where Plato rebuked the artists for making 'copies of copies': that is, 'naturalistic' representations of material objects which are themselves only copies of the Real Forms), but these first artists did it most purely.

The renowned art historian and metaphysician Ananda Coomaraswamy tells us:--"The characteristic pronouncements of anthropologists on the 'primitive mentality' . . . are often very remarkable, and may be said to represent not what the writers intended, the description of an inferior type of consciousness and experience, but one intrinsically superior to that of 'civilised' man and approximating to that which we are accustomed to think of as 'primordial' . . . Dr. Macalister actually compares what he calls 'the Ascent of Man' to Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, not realising that the poem is a description of the descent or materialisation of consciousness."

R.R.Schmidt in Dawn of the Human Mind writes: "In 'heathenish' popular customs, in the 'superstitions' of our folk, the spiritual adventures of prehistoric times, the imagery of primitive insight are living still; a divine inheritance."

Dr. Coomaraswamy comments further: "We say that what seems to 'us' irrational in the life of 'savages' and may be unpractical since it unfits them to compete with our material force, represents the vestiges of a primordial state of metaphysical understanding, and that if the savage himself is, generally speaking, no longer a comprehensor of his own 'divine inheritance', this ignorance on his part is no more shameful than ours who do not recognise the intrinsic nature of his 'lore' and understand it no better than he does. We do not say that the modern 'savage' exemplifies the 'primordial state' itself, but that his beliefs, and the whole content of folklore, bear witness to such a state."

As the great American scholar John Ellerton Lodge has said: "From the stone age until now — quelle dégringolade [what a degeneration]".

In short, modern scholarship, often to its own surprise and consternation, finds itself continually making discoveries that undermine the evolutionist prejudices with which it approaches its task, and confirm again and again the wisdom handed down from the earliest times: that Primordial Maid represented not a lower, but an immeasurably higher state of humanity and that her increasing involvement with the world of matter, the progressive 'consolidation' of herself and her environment, while leading to ever greater developments on the horizontal plane — from language to art, from art to cities — was bought at the cost of a steady decline on the highest plane of all: that of pure Intellect and spiritual vision.

But let us recall that in these relatively early times — let us say, the period of maid fully acclimatised on earth in the first Silver-Age cities — we are still speaking of a state of spiritual refinement, of subtlety and beauty almost inconceivable from our position toward the dark end of the historical cycle. The life of maid, as all traditions agree, was much longer than the hundred years or less enjoyed by the people of the Iron Age, and her wisdom, though descended from its primordial pinnacle was yet majestic. Her vision, while now fixed upon 'things' rather than the Principle, was far subtler than ours, seeing always, though at an ever lower level, the immaterial essences behind material manifestation. Much of what later ages achieved by material force, she accomplished by subtle means which a later age might call 'magic'; and the essential harmony of her being with nature as a whole (being at one with the essence behind it) allowed her to live with but minimal "struggle for existence" and great concentration upon the higher things.

What might strike a modern visitor most about life in these early times would be its beauty — especially if she were enabled, as the people of those times were, to see the subtle forms as well as the outward physical shell of such a civilisation. Beauty has always been considered primarily a feminine quality, and as the patriarchal age progressed has been more and more relegated to the position of an inessential and trivial part of life: increasingly the first thing to be sacrificed when 'serious' practical or economic considerations conflicted with it, yet, until very recently, preserved carefully and at times fiercely by the female sex, in her surroundings, her home and her personal appearance.

Plato, so often the spokesman for the traditional consciousness to the early patriarchal West, by no means thought beauty trivial or unimportant. He used to kalon — the Beautiful — as a term for the Absolute, expounding the primordial knowledge that all earthly beauty is such only because it participates in the absolute Beauty of the Divine. Beauty is not, as the modern dogma would have it, a mere subjective product of the human brain, but a universal quality that predates the very existence of earthly humanity.

Beauty is the mark of Essence or Form. Only insofar as the Essences or Archetypes are imperfectly reflected in matter can there ever be ugliness in this world, and above this material world, ugliness cannot exist. To make life beautiful is to bring it into conformity with its spiritual Source.

Thus the first ages, just as they were ages of femininity, were also ages of beauty; while, as the feminine orientation of civilisation diminished, its beauty diminished likewise. The patriarchal ages were in many respects ugly, though almost always they retained a reverence for beauty. Only after the seventeenth-century 'Enlightenment' do we begin to see beauty formally written off as a matter of no serious importance, and not until the twentieth century itself do we see a cult of deliberate ugliness manifest itself in human life — an ultra-masculine sensibility which actually prefers the deformed, the lopsided, the odd and the low to things high and noble and fair of aspect. In the early part of the century this perversion was confined to certain distorted 'intellectuals', but after the cultural Eclipse of the 1960s it increasingly invaded the everyday sensibility of the entire culture until the point when (to take one highly significant example) a large proportion of late-twentieth-century women deliberately dressed in a manner that was as unkempt, drab and masculine as possible, and human culture had reached the complete inversion of the Golden Age.

Woman had capitulated and accepted completely the masculine scale of values against which she had for so long been the bulwark and the 'reminder' of a higher mode of being. She was now at the furthest remove from the feminine majesty of Primordial Maid.

Paper 2, Return to paper 1

VISITS FROM 14 JULY