To many observers, the present world dispensation is a bewildering thing to behold.
I suppose I should say, parenthetically, that this is self-evident only to those of a more or less reasonable or sane mental temperament; for there are those, obviously, for whom the accelerating chaos and madness of the modern world is an exhilarating and highly desirable thing. But it is not for them that I write these words.
The point is this: it can be a difficult—even an impossible—task to come to grips with the manifestations of Subversion and the Counter-Tradition that distill themselves into our consciousness with increasing insistence the further we descend into the Kali-Yuga—the Iron Age, the Age of Darkness and Inversion. But there are, even so, historiographical models or templates, so to speak, that wiser minds have bequeathed to us in order that we might make greater sense of the world.
It’s not a matter of a simplistic or reductionist theory of everything—such as the evolutionists, the Marxists, the latter-day gnostics of the global Left, or the votaries of scientism delude themselves with—but is instead a matter of employing a schema that descends to us from the great sapiential treasury that is the Sophia Perennis. It is not for us to dream up novel theories and explanations, which is where Western philosophy and its bastard child, scientism, has wandered so hopelessly astray; it is rather for us to merely apply that template of wisdom that all civilizations and traditions have inherited…even if we have forgotten it, or pretend to have forgotten it.
One such template is the concept of the “Regression of the Castes,” which was most articulately formulated and explicated by Julius Evola, the great Italian Traditionalist thinker and writer. I have spoken elsewhere of the essential premise, which maintains that the descent or devolution of society mirrors the progression of the cycle, or Manvantara, itself; in other words, there is a kind of declension from the Golden Age, through to the Silver and Bronze Ages, and thence to the Iron Age, or Kali-Yuga, and this is reflected in the history of lesser cycles of time and in the development of human civilization itself.
In many ways, time is the fundament of all that we know; it is at once the simplest and yet the most complex thing that there is. I think I have demonstrated—at least insofar as my incomplete knowledge of such things would permit—that time is not reversible, and that time travel is but a latter-day fantasy (a surprisingly controversial understanding that flies in the face of the beliefs of certain modern esoteric or pseudo-esoteric organizations, such as the College of Seth, to say nothing of the more quasi-esoteric strains of scientism). Time lies at the heart of all things, and it is not mutable, as we imagine, nor does the past lie in what was nor the future in a time unborn; time is simply now, the “Eternal Now,” which when viewed from above time, from the perspective of Eternity (sub specie aeternitatis), would comprise past and present and future, all at once, in perfect simultaneity.
These are difficult concepts, and are far better explored in the works of a competent Traditionalist or esoterist, such as in Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Time and Eternity. But the point is that time unfolds ineluctably through the progression of the cycles, the Manvantaras, and so the unfolding of man’s society reflects the image of time, the image of Eternity, and this is as it should be.
Even the simplistic and reductionist secular history of civilization admits as much, with the earliest (recognized) civilizations of Göbekli Tepe, Çatalhöyük, Pharaonic Egypt, Mesopotamian Sumer, the megalith-builders of Western Europe, and Peruvian Caral-Supe betraying a decidedly polar axis consonant with rule by the spiritual authority of the priestly caste (the Brâhmanas). Thereafter, civilization devolves by predictable degrees into rule by the temporal power of kings and aristocrats (the warrior class, the Kshatriyas), and thence to the reign of the merchant or capitalist class (the Vaishyas), and finally the disarticulated and largely acephalous rule of the slave or serf class (the Shûdras). This process can often be found repeated throughout a myriad of lesser historical cycles and periods.
There are cycles within cycles, of course, and mixtures and mélanges of the different caste systems throughout history, but the theory of the Regression of the Castes broadly holds, and explains much that seems at first blush inexplicable. Naturally, mired as we are at the nadir of the Kali-Yuga, we find ourselves in the ultimate civilization, the lastmost iteration of the Regression of the Castes, when all of society is mixed together in the thinnest and most unappetizing of gruels, when democracy and ochlocracy are venerated as almost religious in nature, when all higher aspirations are ridiculed and cast down into the mud, and all is leveled and reduced to its basest and most contemptible denominator.
I probably don’t have to point out that this is needful if the Counter-Tradition is to gain a foothold. The Regression of the Castes is the precondition, as it were, for the infiltration of the Counter-Tradition and the triumph of the Counter-Initiation. The devolution of human civilization through time, until the meanest of all castes rules the day in its Posthistoric civilization of fruitless toil, pointless sexual gratification and expression, and total scientism and desacralization, is inevitable.
In such a civilization, the old, discredited philosophies of Becoming gain unprecedented currency and popularity, with evolutionism infecting every aspect of intellectual and social life, such that individuals are even deluded into believing that they are capable of becoming whichever sex or gender they wish…or even dreaming up new fantastical identities altogether. Philosophies of Being, meanwhile, which speak to the immutable, the constant, the eternal, are rejected, scoffed at, ridiculed, and mocked as old-fashioned and anti-progressive.
As Evola himself observes:
“Such are the horizons facing the contemporary world. Just as it is only by adhering to free activity that man can truly be free and realize his own self, likewise, by focusing on practical and utilitarian goals, economic achievements, and whatever was once the exclusive domain of the inferior castes man abdicates, disintegrates, loses his center, and opens himself up to infernal forces of which he is destined to become the unwilling and unconscious instrument. Moreover, contemporary society looks like an organism that has shifted from a human to a subhuman type, in which every activity and reaction is determined by the needs and the dictates of purely physical life. Man’s dominating principles are those typical of the material part of traditional hierarchies: gold and work. This is how things are today; these two elements, almost without exception, affect every possibility of existence and give shape to the ideologies and myths that clearly testify to the gravity of the modern perversion of all values.”1
It is a frighteningly accurate depiction of modern civilization. We are no longer human; we are subhuman. We are no longer men; we are brute-men. And this despite all our vaunted technology, our science and our “progress.”
Far worse, as Evola notes, man “opens himself up to infernal forces of which he is destined to become the unwilling and unconscious instrument.” This is the key to the meaning of the quoted passage. It is not merely that we have become slaves to the basest and most material of things, to gold and work and all that defines the lowest castes; it is that we have become the slaves of inferior subtle forces and powers, and their agents among the human masses.
We have levered open, heedlessly and with reckless abandon, those formerly hairline cracks and fissures in the Great Wall; is it any wonder that we have become prey to that which has come flooding through the breach?
It is truly the old Faustian bargain in its most horrible manifestation: power over the material world—power unexcelled by any civilization known to secular and evolutionist history—but at what terrible cost?
Alas, it is the way of things. The Regression of the Castes is inevitable, but so is the rectification of the cycle, in which all things come out in the wash, in which all wrongs are redressed, and what is inverted is set aright. That rectification draws nearer with each passing day.
It is said that pride goeth before a fall. We have but lately witnessed the now yearly spectacle of that abomination called “Pride Month,” a garish celebration of modernity’s foolish embrace of Becoming, and its arrogant and contemptuous rejection of Being—of what is constant and eternal and true. But the Tradition abides, irrespective of man’s impudence and pride.
The pride of man has never before waxed so great and so arrogant. So shall the fall be proportionate to the sin…
Julius Evola, Rivolta contro il mondo moderno (Roma: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1969) [Revolt Against the Modern World (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1995) trans. Guido Stucco, pg. 330].