The following is a short essay I had written almost a year ago when tracing the roots of Spengler’s own philosophy, which had ultimately led me to the works of Herder. Both Spengler and Herder adhere to a specific paradigm that I call the "Goethean Paradigm” due to Goethe’s influence on their overarching philosophy. This essay explores the notions of race and genetics, through comparing the Goethean and Darwinian conceptions of evolution. It also briefly explores imperialism in Herder and Spengler’s work. The essay explores the distinction between Newtonian and Goethean sciences, presenting both as distinct paradigms. It is also presents Goethe’s philosophy as a critique of Kant’s empirical realism and epistemological dualism, and how the works of Herder and Spengler are both expressions of this specific type of thinking. Enjoy!

Comparable to Spengler’s in depth analysis of the plant and animal world in both The Decline of the West (1917) and Man and Technics (1932), in order to locate where humans stand in relation to them and to highlight their unique characteristics, Herder surveys these realms in order to highlight to important features that stand out, namely, reasoning as a result of man’s upright posture affecting their brains, speech and language, and most importantly for Herder, morality and religion (Walsh, 1960, p. 133). Herder concludes that man stands in the middle ground between two worlds, the animal and spiritual world, of the former he is the highest being, and of the latter the lowest. One can easily see the resemblance between Spengler and Herder’s arguments, Spengler also places man at the top of the animal world, and is the most violent of “beasts of prey” with a distinctive feature that separates him from the rest of the animal world, not only to understand causality, but to think it out as with the story and creation of fire (Spengler, 1932). Like Spengler, and many other speculative philosophers of history, Herder’s philosophy of history is anthropocentric, that is, following his thorough and in depth study of the animal and plant worlds in the opening chapters of his magnum opus, humans stand out and are seen as an exception to the laws of nature, and thus his philosophy of history is centered around man as the highest of natural beings. Concerning this Herder said:

In man everything is adapted to the form he now bears: from this everything in his history is explicable; without it nothing is capable of explanation : and since all the forms of the animal creation seem to converge to this, as to the exalted image of divinity, and the most elaborate and prime beauty of the Earth; without which, as without the domination of man, our world would be destitute of it’s supreme ornament and crown : why should we humble in the dust this diadem of our destination, and obstinately shut our eyes to that central point, in which all the radii of the circle seem to unite? (Herder, 1784, p. 70).

Anthropocentrism, as opposed to ecocentric or biocentric approaches that emerged following the second half of the 21^st century, are a common characteristic of all types of speculative philosophies of history, be it the linear progressive and universalist forms (Kant, Voltaire) or the cyclical relativist type (Herder, Spengler). Moreover, Herder, like Spengler after him, possessed a unique conception of biological evolution, which also proves further that there is continuity between Herder and Spengler shedding further light on the emergence of a divergent strain of speculative philosophy of history within Western thought. The similarity between Herder and Spengler’s arguments on human evolution is a result of Spengler’s adherence, or acknowledgment of, Goethean science, which could be described as a phenomenology of nature in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s philosophy of nature (Seamon, 2005, p. 86). Spengler makes a distinction between what he called “Newtonian science” and “Goethaen science”, the former dissects in order to understand the natural phenomenon as function and is based on the causality principle and the logic of space presents them as “things-become”, the latter observes the natural phenomenon as a form rather than function and is based on “the destiny-idea” and the logic of time presents them as “things-becoming” (Spengler, 1917, p. 7). What Spengler is describing could be observed in Goethe’s critique, or skepticism of Newton’s color theory, as seen in his Theory of Color (1810), which is technically based on human experience as opposed to Newton’s theoretical approach which Goethe argued does not allow us to comprehend the phenomenon as it is (Seamon, 2005, 87-88). The clash between these two forms of sciences is also observed in the difference between Goethe and Darwin’s conceptions of evolution. Spengler argued that in Goethe’s morphological study of “Living Nature” excluded the idea of causality, which was of course a crucial principle in Darwin’s evolutionary theory and his concept of natural selection which Spengler called a “pragmatic zoology” (Spengler, 1917, p. 111). Following his work on morphology Goethe has been attributed with finding the premaxilla bone, also previously called intermaxillary bone, and this specific discovery was mentioned initially in a private letter to Herder:

I have found neither gold nor silver, but something that unspeakably delights me–the human Os intermaxillary! I was comparing human and animal skulls with Loder, hit up the right track, and behold–Eureka! Only, I beg of you, not a word–for this must be a great secret for the present. You ought to be very much delighted too, for it is like the keystone to anthropology–and it’s there, no mistake! But how? (Feigenbaum, 2015).

Although Goethe’s discovery has paved the way for modern evolutionary theories his ideas concerning evolution were unique as revealed by his adaptation of Aristotle’s principle of compensation, that is “nothing can be added to any part without something being subtracted from another” (Wells, 1967, p. 359). Using this principle Goethe argued that there was an inverse correlation between horns and teeth, and this primarily due to his concept of biological archetypes. A lion with strong upper incisors and canine teeth cannot have horns, and the recession of the premaxilla in a Walrus is a result of a dominance of the canines that have morphed into tusks. In contradistinction to Goethe’s idea of compensation, Darwin applied the principle of natural selection and argued that specific organs are reduced when they lose their function, and grow when their function is significant. Yet Goethe had already critiqued the arguments of “physicotheologians”, prior to the emergence of Darwin, who also argued that all organs of a specific animals were designed to be useful functionally, arguing that an ox possesses horns for defensives purposes (Wells, 1967, p. 360). Against this point Goethe argued that if the argument of functionality was true, why would sheep lack this specific organ, or why if they possessed such organ it would be rendered useless due to its curled shape. Goethe believed that the principle of compensation determined why the ox has horns, and not necessarily function alone, since the functionality principle fails upon trying to analyze the usefulness of sheep horns for defensive or offensive purposes, but if we apply the principle of compensation and think in archetypes, the horns are necessary since they belong to that specific archetype (Wells, 1967, p. 360). Goethe’s approach to biology is quite distinct from Darwin, and this distinction is a clue to explaining the emergence of distinct and radical forms of speculative philosophies of history such as the works of Herder and Spengler, who adhere to an approach to science and biology similar to Goethe, or openly adopt Goethaen science. Spengler openly argued that there is a direct connection between Darwinism on one hand, and progressive or linear Eurocentric conceptions of history, which he described as mechanistic and dependent on causal laws, as opposed to Goethaen science which is not involved in causal assumptions, is organic and is a more accurate representation of “living nature” (Spengler, 1917, p. 105, 111). A glimpse of this mechanistic and purely causal approach is seen in the use of language used by Darwin to describe natural selection upon confronting Goethe’s argument, that natural selection is “continually trying to economise in every part of the organization”, and that:

If under changed conditions of life a structure before useful becomes less useful, any diminution, however slight, in its development, will be seized on by natural selection, for it will profit the individual not to have its nutriment wasted in building up an useless structure (Darwin, 1859, p. 128)

Thus, whether Goethe was a precursor to Darwin and modern evolutionary theories is still a matter of debate, and some have argued that perhaps Goethe is the embodiment of another approach to biology and science, a more holistic biology as seen in Seamon’s Goethe’s Way of Science a Phenomenology of Nature (2005). Seamon described this approach to biology as one where:

Each feature of an animal is seen as significant because the whole is reflected in each part. The aim is to recognize the inner organic order in an animal in such a way that its individual features can be understood by the basic organization of the animal itself (Seamon, 2005, p.97).

In the extensive opening of his philosophy of history Herder wrestled with ideas concerning the evolution of humans and their connection to apes, which reflected a similar approach to evolutionary biology to Goethe focused on a morphological method, that is the study of biological forms through the notion of homology exploring the biological relationships between structures of similar origins but different functions. Goethe’s main argument in his method of morphology and Metamorphosis of Plants, is that one form can transform or morph to another while maintaining a relationship to an “archetypal form” or Urphänomen. The epistemological status of archetypes is debatable as Goethe never placed it under any specific category, however, whether it is viewed as transcendental, phenomenal, intuitive or conceptual, it can be agreed that archetypal form is the idea that guides the metamorphosis of a species, such as the concept of the “archetypal plant” or Urpflanze, if a plant transforms from one form to another due to adaptation to a different terrain or climate, the two different forms are still part of the same archetype (Hata, 2020).

To Herder nature produces a genus, and each genus then branches out and divides itself into different species and varieties. Herder rejected the idea that humans and apes share a similar origin and genus stating that although there are biological similarities they “never were one and the same genus” (Herder, 1784, p. 166). In his in depth comparison of internal and external anatomy between man and ape, he concluded that “The upper jaw is protruded forwards, and the insertion of a proper intermaxillary bone cuts off the last mark of resemblance of the human visage in the ape” and that “the ape remains still a brute, however great it’s resemblance to man” (Herder, 1784, p. 73). Herder argued that such false theories that attempt to bridge this biological gap between man and ape are dangerous in the sense that it could lead dangerous sociopolitical consequences between different human races, and a flawed understanding of the concept of race that could lead to disastrous consequences. Thinking in terms of “race” alludes to a “difference of origin”, which in the case of humans does not exist, and instead Herder opts for categorization of nation of peoples and stated:

For every nation is one people, having it’s own national form, as well as it’s own language: the climate, it is true, stamps on each it’s mark, or spreads over it a slight veil, but not sufficient to destroy the original national character (Herder, 1784, p. 166).

Thus, there are no specific races per se, but rather diverse forms of the same genetic character that are all “shades of the same great picture, extending through all ages, and over all parts of the Earth”. Consequently, the study of the different forms of humans and their history do not belong to “systematic natural history”, but to “physico-geographical history of man” (Herder,1784, p. 166). In his emphasis on the racial unity of humans, in a sort of Goethean sense, Herder stated that “the whole course of man’s life is change: the different periods of his life are tales of transformation, and the whole species is one continued metamorphosis” (Herder, 1784, p. 164). Herder’s approach to philosophy of history necessitates an in-depth exploration of the biological origins of humans, and he ultimately accepts resemblance between other species and humans, but emphasizes what he believed to be the importance of acknowledging that man belongs to a genus, or archetype, of his own that is distinct from the rest. The critique of scientific notions of biological evolution is a trait found within some further speculative philosophers of history that have emerged during the 19^th and 20^th centuries, such as Russian naturalist and historian Nikolai Danilevsky the author of Russia and Europe (1888), and Darwinism: Critical Research (1889) where he vehemently critiqued Darwin’s notion of evolution and opted for a natural theology as an alternative model. Like Herder, Danilevsky also argued that the main units of analysis of history should be higher cultures, each with its own respective life span and a unique theme and style that shapes it. Spengler, as we previously mentioned also subscribed to this position as well, a rejection of Darwinism, and designated cultures as the main units of analysis of history from a relativistic perspective. As can be seen, Herder was skeptical of the optimistic, or rather dominant, nature of the rationalism of the enlightenment. He did appreciate the outcomes of the sciences and the philosophies emergent in Europe but argued that a limit should be set to their growth, or at least, lines should be drawn in order to not allow the now powerful sciences and enlightenment philosophies to impose their specific world-outlooks and suppositions on other realms. The rationalistic scientific tendency of the enlightenment does not only lead to false conclusions concerning the connection between man and ape, but also to a false and dangerous racial categorization, which was the result of the of what Herder called “a laudable zeal for discriminating science” (Herder, 1784, p. 166). Herder rejected the concept of national identities based on race, and instead claimed that national identity is built through language. Thus, he rejected any form of slavery and said:

O man, honour thyself: neither the pongo nor the gibbon is thy brother: the american and the negro are: these therefore thou shouldst not oppress, or murder, or steal; for they are men, like thee (Herder, 1784, p. 166)

Furthermore, in the analysis of any non-European culture or nation, one must proceed with modesty and lay aside “proud prejudices”, concerning the example of Africa he stated:

Since whiteness is a mark of degeneracy in many animals near the pole, the negro has as much right to term his savage robbers albinos and white devils, degenerated through the weakness of nature, as we have to deem him the emblem of evil, and a descendant of Ham, branded by his father’s curse. I, might he say, I the black, am the original man (Herder, 1784, p. 146).

As mentioned earlier in the chapter, Spengler and Herder both believed that imperialistic tendencies are a turning point in a culture from an organic to an inorganic mode of being. To Herder organic cultures, that is, in their authentic form, are not imperialistic (Anderson-Gold, 2009, p. 464). Moreover, although many of his critics tie his works to fascist conceptions of race, Spengler’s conception of race was not biological, rather, it was based on a spiritual connection that a specific people have with its respective land which is similar to Herder. Although both Herder and Spengler adopt a similar naturalistic framework, adopt a form of relativism, and parallel opinions on multiple problems, being products of different times and philosophical movements, some differences can still be seen in the degrees pessimism and relativism in both thinkers. Sharon Anderson-Gold shed further light on this issue when she argued that despite his cultural relativism, he still believed that cultures in a sense do influence one another to a limited degree. Moreover, although he did not believe in the enlightenment conception of progress, and argued for natural cycles that dominate the rise and fall of nations, he still believed in the idea of spiritual progression of humanity as a whole determined by divine providence (Anderson-Gold, 463). This of course is in stark contrast to Spengler, at least as seen in his first and published philosophy of history, reflecting the zeitgeist adopted a form of pessimism that did not allow for any of form spiritual progress beyond the natural cycles of cultures. Divine providence a notion that dominated most of Western thought was buried by the advent of the 20^th century, and in the case of Spengler, it was replaced by Nietzsche’s eternal return (Farrenkopf). Spengler’s cultural relativism was more extreme and did not leave room for interaction between different cultures. Spengler’s extreme relativism accompanied his severe pessimism, to a degree that although like Herder he did believe imperial tendencies were signs of a decaying inorganic culture, his works revealed a nihilistic indifference to what occurs between cultures as they develop and interact. This is of course also the result of Nietzsche’s philosophical influence on Spengler, specifically adopting Nietzsche’s concept of “total detachment” in his philosophy of history, that is, to “view the whole fact of Man from an immense distance, to regard the individual Cultures, one’s own included, as one regards the range of mountain peaks along a horizon” (Spengler, 93). Herder’s pessimism, on the other hand, was of a lesser degree, for although he witnessed what he perceived as a decaying imperialistic West, he was optimistic enough to trust “divine providence” working through nature in giving birth to a new organic culture (Anderson-Gold, 2009, 464). Finally, this is also revealed in another similarity between Herder and Spengler, as seen in his Journal of My Travels in the Year 1769 where Herder predicted the rise of a future Slavic culture beyond the West (Sydoruk, 1955). Spengler in a similar fashion argued that the future belong to what he perceived was a younger and more organic Slavic culture, yet as he witnessed the first world war, and the turbulent inter-war period, his pessimism grew and consumed him to a degree that his doubts grew concerning a future organic culture beyond the artificial modern West (Farrenkopf).

Spengler adopted Goethe’s methodology in order to come up with his respective theses in The Decline of the West, Herder’s approach to philosophy of history can be seen as a precursor to this specific type which is characterized not only by ideas of what would be called the “Counter-Enlightenment”, but also a different approach to science and epistemology, since it could be argued that both construct an approach to history that is in line with holistic and organic Goethean science, rather than the purely rationalist-empirical Cartesian or Newtonian science, and a critique of Kantian epistemology. These works emerge as a reaction to the enlightenment’s over emphasis on rationality, which many counter-enlightenment thinkers found problematic since this allows rationality to be unleashed as a cultural destabilizing force, leading to a flawed understanding of natural and social phenomena. Proposing instead, their own imaginative, holistic and intuitive approach that paves the way for a deeper understanding of natural and social phenomena, as evident with Johann Hamann’s rejection of the enlightenment and critique of segregating rationality and faith, as well as his critique of the imperialistic dominance of the sciences over other fields, arguing instead that we could learn more from history than science (Knikman, 2017, p. 9). It is crucial to note that Hamann is argued to have been a precursor to the Sturm und Drang, a literary and musical movement that espoused extreme emotions and passion that emerged as a result of the restrictive rationalism enforced by the enlightenment, this movement is also argued by some to have been a proto-romanticist movement (Wilson, 2002). Hamann has also had a significant influence on Herder, perhaps a stronger influence than Kant who was his academic advisor. Goethe’s Faust and Prometheus were both also notable works that reflected characteristics of Sturm and Drang (Wilson, 2002). The architects of the Sturm and Drang, as proto-romanticists, and the romanticists, emerged as a result of what they perceived to be a catastrophic problem as a result of enlightenment’s fixation on reason as embodied by Kant’s epistemological dualism presented in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Kant’s epistemological dualism divides objects into phenomena and noumena, the former is an object that is known through the senses, the latter is not an object of that is known through the senses but as a thing in itself through “pure understanding” (Kant, 1781, p. 350). Kant agreed that such a dualism is possible and not contradictory, and argued that one cannot argue that sensibility is the only possible form of intuition. That said, the concept of noumenon, that is “of a thing that is not to be thought of as an object of the sense but rather as a thing in itself (solely through pure understanding), cannot be cognized through sensibility for Kant argued that we have no insight in “the domain outside the sphere of appearances” and:

We have an understanding that extends farther than sensibility problematically, but no intuition, indeed not even the concept of a possible intuition, through which objects outside the field of sensibility could be given, and about which the understanding could be employed assertorically (Kant, 1781, p. 350).

Without diving too deep into these philosophical issues for the sake of brevity, we could argue Goethe attempted to overcome this specific Kantian epistemological dualism by arguing for a pure “archetypal” form of thinking that Kant had presupposed in his works but claimed was impossible to attain. Reaching that specific form of cognition, according to Goethe, is possible “if one intensifies one’s cognitive activity to such a degree that what for Kant had been a limit is turned into a threshold” (Amrine, 2012, p. 35). As Fredrick Amrine put it, in the Metamorphosis of Plants, Goethe has essentially produced the epistemology which “teaches us how to engage in a controlled way the constructive activity that Kant had talked about which allows us to intuit the ideal within the real”. In The Philosophical Roots of Waldorf Education, Amrine argued that Goethe has essentially created a distinct “school for a certain kind of thinking” (Amrine, 2012, p. 34), and it is precisely this kind of thinking that has had a significant effect on the works of Herder, Spengler, and perhaps other thinkers who have also been affected by Goethe, in one way or another, such as Hegel. Thus, it can be argued that the similarities between Herder and Spengler stemmed from their adherence to a non-conventional paradigm, that remained, and perhaps still remains, in its pre-scientific stage due to a dominance of an opposing paradigm. This strict adherence to a non-conventional scientific paradigm, in both Herder and Spengler, has shaped their unique conceptions of biology, evolution, race, and culture.

A Spenglerian lens is less about taking his assessment wholesale and more about taking his general frame seriously. In this spirit, it's appropriate to adopt his organic and cyclic emphasis, using what he couldn’t have known into account. While a certain form of materialism is inherent to this type of approach, a complete assessment includes human agency and the metaphysical.

Frontier Thesis

The US is a frontier nation. The narrative of the United States as a “country of immigrants” has some modicum of truth if we limit our perspective from 1890 to the present. But, if we widen our aperture, for almost three centuries before “the country of immigrants” line picked up mainstream adoption, the peoples that formed and developed the US were at the edge of the known world with a lightly populated and unsettled wild expanse to their West. They were not immigrating to much of anything safe or developed.

Interaction with the native peoples was a mix of negotiation, partnership, racial enmity, peace, trade, miscegenation, stochastic savagery, and war over three centuries. Anyone selling you any one of these or a subset in isolation is not telling you the entire truth. The relationship over long expanses of time and space with many different tribes in many different contexts is anything but monolithic.

Shatterzone Nation

Demographically, the early United States was a “shatter-zone” of Northwest European peoples. The intermixing of an English majority and elite, with Dutch, Scots, German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian peoples, was the primary constituents for the ethno-genesis of what we might call an ethnic “American.”

The US served as a self-selecting attractor for the Germanic and Celtic peoples of Christendom, escaping the machinations of the Ancien Régime in the Old World. They were ambitious, tough, enterprising, and/or desperate enough to make the trip and make it work. The frontier was and is a filter.

American Savage

According to American historian Frederick Jackson Turner, this was a radical “re-wilding” or “re-savaging” of European man, forcing him to battle the wilderness and natives while providing near infinite social and natural space to advance or fail on his own merits. This experience, coupled with the stark differences between the present United States and the rest of the Faustian bloc, forces me to depart slightly from Spengler on the American Question.

Spengler was right about the decline of the West. What’s amazing is he started writing before the outbreak of World War 1, at arguably the peak of global Western power. Since the publication of "Decline of the West", a Great Depression, World War II, Soviet occupation, decolonization, intellectual deconstruction, and general malaise have afflicted the European Continent.

The lead actors in the Cold War, in political and military terms, were the United States and the Soviet Union, with Europe playing a strong supporting role but ultimately a proxy role and economic power. Today, the lead actors in the neo-Cold War are the United States & China, not only in terms of raw force, but China’s techno-economic vitality also dwarfs the EU’s.

To add insult to injury, the Middle East, even with all its dysfunction and challenges, is set up to make tremendous gains, closing the global influence gap between it and Europe. Birth rates, resources, diplomatic influence, asabiyyan energies, and enthusiasm for growth and technological progress are all healthy or gaining, while Europe stagnates. It’s hard to imagine Europe becoming peers with the United States or China any time soon. But the prospect of Magian civilization increasingly rivaling Europe is possible. It’s really up to Europe. They have the human and cultural capital, but is the Will still there?

Is there enough juice left to choose optimistic realism and energetic excellence or will going on holiday in the Mediterranean remain their highest aspiration?

The US has its problems, they are legion, but Spengler didn’t differentiate the US enough from the Old West. Thymotic dynamism is still here. The world’s Faustian engine is not yet exhausted. As I hinted at earlier, the geographic and circumstantial situation of the United States helped delay Faustian man’s winter on the North American continent. The battle with the frontier, forcing him out of over-socialization and sclerotic institutions, into a highly un-mediated, raw reality. The “American” has always been seen as more brutish and less refined than his European counterpart. This stereotype, like most, is generally correct.

Although the American wasn’t shielded from violence nor shied away from it, he also largely avoided the industrial-scale meat grinder Europe had become from the Napoleonic Wars onward. The United States had its Civil War and contributed a lot of blood and treasure to the World Wars, but the scale of loss, destruction, and demoralization dwarfs what happened to European Man.

Big & small-tech, military capability, readiness, & recruitment, energy production, traditional capital markets, crypto-capital markets, artificial intelligence production, re-industrialization, and techno-scientific research in America have positive momentum.

Within Spengler’s paradigm, this shouldn’t be surprising. Even during the civilizational phase, or winter, great engineering achievements are still possible. The United States, a Faustian outpost molded by the frontier, is still pushing techno-industrial civilization forward.

Departing from present day and going back in time to the creative scene of the young United States, also adds weight to my point of view. Artistic and intellectual leaders are a good gauge of a group’s general mood and focus. English-American artist Thomas Cole has a famous series of paintings named “The Course of Empire”. The five paintings in the series map well to Spengler’s seasonal paradigm.

Cole’s series starts with the “Savage State” and ends with “Desolation”.

Cole is credited as the founder of the Hudson River School, the early Republic’s dominant artistic movement. HRS artists focused almost exclusively on natural landscapes that romanticized Cole’s Savage State and the next stage, the Pastoral State. Vast, natural expanses, divine in beauty and virginity, with very little to no human beings or civilizational artifice in sight.

In contrast, European art movements during this period, which include Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, and others, had a much greater focus on the social, on civilization, and the abstract.

In the early intellectual scene, a key theme of the Transcendentalists, the first truly American philosophical school, is the importance of immersing oneself in Nature, a source of unmediated wisdom, rejuvenation, as well as a place to connect with God and Man’s true self.

Moving on from the artistic and metaphysical, taking the full scope of Spengler’s outlook seriously, we must account for the raw geography that shape peoples, cultures, and civilizations. The US is a large land mass with incredible climatic diversity and abundant natural resource wealth. The US is home to close to twenty climate subzones and is sitting on an almost endless treasure chest of natural resources valued in the range of 40- 60 trillion dollars. In contrast, the European continent has at most a dozen climate subzones and its natural resource reserves are valued in the range of 10-20 trillion. On a long enough timeline, the physics of climate and resource wealth have to have an impact on the potential and personality of a people.

Americans, because of geography, will, and circumstance, conquered a bounty, were able to delay the over-civilization of European man, and largely avoided the European meat-grinder. American Man re-entered the Savage and Pastoral States and developed there for quite some time. I believe the inevitable is unavoidable but it can be negotiated with and delayed through novel circumstance and human agency.

Four Immigration Regimes

Immigration in the early Republic was pragmatically used to populate the vast frontier to its west and to feed its emerging industrial centers with plenty of fresh labor. This openness to immigration was highly selective. The early Republic explicitly prioritized immigration from Western Europe to maintain social cohesion. Immigration from other places was difficult and not desired.

Beginning in the 1880s, immigration from the entire European continent started accelerating, starting the US’s march toward a more pan-European identity. Italians, Russians, Austrians, Hungarians, Poles, Slavs, Jews, and more all rushed in due to a similar set of push & pull factors. But, by the time they came, the frontier was effectively closed and the second industrial revolution was in full swing, making this group more immigrant and less frontiersmen.

It also eventually led to the first systemic federal backlash against immigration since John Adams’ Presidency. There was some state-level backlash to Irish immigration in the 1830s-50s and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that echoed the anti-immigration feelings in the 20s, but neither was as comprehensive as the legislation passed in the 1920s.

After about four decades of very limited immigration, the passage of the Hart-Cellar Act turned the pan-European United States into a shatter-zone for the entire world. This re-opening of immigration was less about needing labor for industry or population to settle open space, but more about strategic considerations concerning the Soviet Union, and genuine high-minded idealism about the US being a non-racist City on a Hill, a refuge and place of plenty for the World to escape to.

Today, we’re in the middle of the closing of the Hart-Cellar era, allowing for a new ethno-genesis and cultural transformation to unfold. What could it look like?

From Boomer to Alpha

The Baby Boomers’ days are numbered. Given current life expectancy, even the youngest of the baby boomers will pass away or at least not be consequential members of the political body by 2030. Going with them will be the founding myths of their generation, as well as their general orientations and their boogeymen. Boomer shibboleths around foreign policy, economics, race, religion, governance, manners, and meaning have been and will continue to come under increasing assault.

The eldest in every generation is a human Chesterton’s Fence as well as a suffocating gerontocracy. Their passing is a tragedy and an opportunity. Both are true.

According to American demographers Strauss and Howe’s “turnings”theory, a cyclical demographic model of the United States, the Boomers were an idealist generation. Imagination, chasing your dreams, optimism, and being open to the positive vibes of the universe were the driving forces for many boomers. They came into the world surfing a wave of unprecedented post-War American prosperity, a bipolar geopolitical paradigm, and the feeling that you could be whoever you wanted and the United States could do whatever it put its mind to.

In comparison, our present and immediate future will be increasingly influenced by a more sober and cynical realism, acknowledging constraints and less tolerance for lofty idealism.

Diluted but Resilient Roots

Hart-Cellar America resulted in a remarkably less European and Protestant country than what came before it. Z and Alpha bear witness to this.

However, Trump’s ascendence in 2016, the forgotten boomer’s last stand, and his comeback in 2024, the young man’s awakening, severely slowed the momentum of Hart-Cellar America. If Hillary was successfully anointed or Kamala successfully installed, the momentum towards a more Globalized, Third-World America would have required even more force to stop and reverse than what MAGA is currently attempting.

If the MAGA movement can follow through, successfully coercing and incentivizing mass remigration while also keeping a tight lid on new immigration, the United States will be able to maintain its European Protestant roots as its dominant force. But the magnitude of this dominance is an order of magnitude less than pre-Boomer America, and another magnitude less than pre-New Deal America.

Many newly naturalized citizens, recent migrants, and pro-immigration natives view this as a barbaric assault they’re losing but in reality they’ve already won. The United States is a much more diverse and multicultural society. The heritage nativists never wanted immigration levels that severely changed the ethnic and religious make up of the country. They were promised by advocates of Hart-Cellar that this wouldn’t happen. But it did. From this perspective, MAGA is only stopping the bleeding and stopping Hart-Cellar Americans from achieving total and overwhelming demographic victory.

What remains is a severely weakened dominance that allows for new cultural forms to emerge, bounded by the tolerance and capability of its heritage population, for better and for worse.

Lumen Gentium

If immigration flows came mostly from one direction, it would make it easier to develop a clear direction. But this didn’t happen.

Latin America was the largest source of immigration, but Asia was also another large source. And Asian immigrants punch way above their demographic weight. Their over-representation among the technocratic and professional elite is well documented. Overall influence on the political body might be somewhat even between the two. It might make sense to think about commonalities and overlapping characteristics between the two largest sources of bio-political change.

Somewhat surprising and under-appreciated about the Asian group is that its largest religious affiliation is Christianity, with an even split between Catholicism and Protestant denominations. It’s not a majority, but it is the largest connective tissue among an extremely diverse group that is pragmatically grouped under “Asian”.

It’s well known that the Hispanic community is largely affiliated with Christianity and Catholicism in particular. We have some overlap here. And if we’re trying to find overlapping connective tissue throughout an extremely fragmented population, the Catholicism link is worth double-clicking on.

A few eerily related factoids: The leading contenders for MAGA succession, Vice President JD Vance & Secretary of State Marco Rubio, are Catholic. Six of the nine Supreme Court justices are Catholic. The unequivocal intellectual and strategic leader of MAGA, Steve Bannon, is Catholic. Paleo-conservative icon, the quintessential proto-MAGA, Pat Buchanan, was Catholic. The Pope, for the first time, with 250 years of this being a possibility, is an American.

What are we to make of this? I’m not exactly sure, but if we connect these threads, what we get is a multi-racial, multi-class, & multi-region bloc with considerable demographic weight and a Catholic Church that might be signaling their intent to maintain and grow their American foothold.

American Catholics have a wide range of ideological prejudices and policy priorities. As a result, its difficult to be too specific about them. Moderate social conservatism, greater attention and care for labor over capital, and greater comfort with a strong executive are some safe generalizations of this disparate group. This largely aligns with the MAGA realignment sweeping through the country.

American Catholics are poised to be an incredibly potent moderating and unifying force in an increasingly polarized and fractured social space. They will be a bulwark against complete deference to global markets, communist radicalization, fringe scriptural interpretation, racial balkanization, and individualist excess in all forms.

Having said that, I don’t want to give the impression of an overstated case. Rising Catholic influence is not the same as increasing levels of Catholic conversion and is not the same as Catholic dominance. If we’re being generous, this would describe, at best, a fifth of the population. The United States was formed and developed by Protestant peoples via revolution near the height of the Enlightenment. Our narratives, institutions, customs, and largest demographic groups come out of this dispensation. American Catholics are undoubtedly shaped by it as well.

The core claim is that in a balkanized and polarized environment, large minority factions with highly engaged elites and enough community cohesion, like American Catholics, can tip the scales in certain directions and create boundaries around the direction the nation might go in. The rise of Jewish power in the United States during the 20th Century is a testament to this. In certain ways, 20th-century domestic politics in the United States can be understood as a tense dance between Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish factions.

Cyborg Theocracy

The title of Alex Karp’s (CEO of Palantir) first book, “The Technological Republic”, is an apt description for another dominant tendency running throughout American History. Deep faith in enlightenment reason, techne, scientific discovery, and material progress has been a cornerstone of the American project. Especially for those within it who are skeptical of or completely reject a more traditional theological framework.

And this group, unsurprisingly, has become a larger and larger force within the American political body. Today, they’re estimated to be around 25-30% of the population. This would make them the second largest group in the United States, behind Christians (all denominations), but larger than the sub-category of Catholic Americans.

And interestingly, this group largely forms a high-low social bloc. At the top of the hierarchy are atheists and agnostics, who are more likely to be white, educated, politically active, and well paid relative to American averages. At the bottom of the hierarchy are what are known as the “nones,” which is a broad classification for people who don’t identify with anything that can be considered a ”concrete” metaphysical belief, philosophy, or tradition. This group is more likely to be non-white, less educated, less politically active, and paid less relative to American averages. Generally, this is a group of people who are not engaged in white collar cognitive work nor regularly exposed to higher-level thinking, either intellectual or spiritual. They probably don’t care and have limited ability to do so. This is the American Last Man.

Nominally, this group isn’t religious, but Man is a spiritual being with spiritual needs. Man looks to authority for answers to the infinite questions he couldn’t possibly answer on his own. He has objects and ideals of worship as well as a need to belong, submit, and serve.

This was made crystal clear during COVID. Many in the unaffiliated group were fanatically obedient to the scientific and political establishment. They tended to treat secular institutions, and their leaders, as sacred, beyond the reaches of legitimate questioning.

Elite atheists and agnostics are well represented in the techno-sciences, acting as high priests, manufacturing the knowledge, tooling, and recommendations that get passed down to a middle caste of political apparatchiks, communicators, and the faithful. This caste legislates, broadcasts, operationalizes, and militantly enforces the consensus among the populace, and in particular, the unaffiliated, who often don’t have the cognitive ability nor social capital to thwart this type of unrelenting mental and spiritual assault.

What we have here at the top of this hierarchy is a fairly large and highly decentralized group that doesn’t see themselves as a group with a point of view or theology but rather see themselves as righteous, free-thinkers and truth-seekers, trusting the science, having faith in the machines’ outputs, in all its forms.

Cyborg Theocracy.

This is a hallmark of a confident theocracy. They're not a competing truth claim or method with limits, but rather the Truth itself. To question is to blaspheme.

Grok, is this true?

This group, because of its respectable size, institutional influence, and technical ability, is as existentially dangerous as more traditional fringe religious sects, even when taking terrorism by the later group into account.

Trans-Humanism

Transhumanism is the more popular and secularized name for the Cyborg Theocracy. If we go deep into the history of this ideology, we see it, like many other Western ideologies, is a secularized version of some pre-existing idea or framework of Christendom.

The seeds of modern trans-humanism were planted by the Russian Cosmists in the late 19th century, fusing extreme technological optimism with Orthodox mysticism. Thinkers like Nikolai Fyodorov speculated on ways technology could be used to achieve Christian ends, such as mass resurrection of souls and eternal life. These were deeply futuristic ambitions, wildly unachievable with the technology of the time, and today, but nevertheless, it was a not-so-surprising syncretic attempt to steer the impressive innovation exploding out of the West towards Christian ends.

Eventually, Russian Cosmism became more secularized and focused on more readily achievable goals such as incremental scientific progress and space travel, serving as inspiration for the Soviet technocracy to push past human limitations, creating a new Soviet Man.

These trends didn’t happen out of nowhere and weren’t happening in isolation. The Cosmists were influenced by the Italian Futurists, and the American techno-scientific scene has been influenced by both. Western trans-humanism was completely untethered from Christian dogma right out of the gate. In its most extreme, modern form, trans-humanists argue for complete augmentation and transformation of the human being through techno-science and for complete submergence into artifice.

This rightly worries people, but it should worry people in the same way that any radical fanaticism should. It should also be recognized that every religious disposition has levels and gradations of seriousness, sophistication, and radicalism. A large contingent of trans-humanists or those adjacent to it, can and do have fairly moderate or reasonable views on a whole host of matters. Reasonable people are reasonable.

Much like it behooves the atheist to recognize Man as a spiritual being with spiritual needs, Christians and other more traditional groups need to recognize that there is a trans-humanistic impulse within humanity, Western thought, and even to some extent Christianity, which centers itself around a Man who transcended death and promises its believers eternal life. Many of the more sophisticated traditionalists do in fact recognize this and are not as reflexively hostile to the secular partisans of the transhumanistic milieu would have you believe.

The earliest Church Fathers, from our modern perspective, occupied a primitive time, but from the perspective of deep time and deep humanity, were operating on top of an existing layer of techno-scientific, or put another way, trans-humanistic progress.

The taming of fire and animals. The invention of the wheel. The development of agriculture, language, metallurgy, mathematics, coined money, writing, aqueducts, roads, ships, and governance systems is all “artifice” that predate and help facilitate the triumph of the Christian paradigm. And despite Protestant and Enlightenment propaganda to the contrary, Catholic monasteries and religious orders have been hot beds of intellectual and scientific activity for centuries creating the foundation that the former was able to blossom out of.

The explosive techno-scientific development of the modern West brought Christianity out of containment within Europe and small slices of the Middle East to become the largest religious bloc on earth, with faithful in every corner of the world.

There is also a somewhat counter-intuitive reason not to be reflexively “anti”-trans-humanist for the more traditionally oriented. If you’re particularly disturbed about the power, progression, and pervasiveness of the techno-sphere, which is more than reasonable, you can also look at this horror show as a challenge to humanity that necessitates improvement in order to adequately keep apocalyptic scenarios at bay. Nature was and is a blessing and a challenge. So is technology. Both, in their own ways, are forcing functions for human improvement or transcendence of previous limitations.

Seen through a more spiritual and less humanistic lens: if you believe Satanic forces are weaponizing a powerful technology, is it not the responsibility of the faithful and pious to catechize that very same technology for the glory of God? I would think so.

The better questions here that everyone needs to grapple with are related to pace, extent, moral red-lines, and teleology, not reflexive binary frames of pro or anti, this or that.

American Cosmism

Just outside the City of Angels, in El Segundo, California, is a microcosm that allows us to peek into the possibility of these dominant forces in American culture being threaded together into a somewhat coherent whole.

“The Gundo” is a large industrial park on the California Coast full of companies and individuals with the unique fusion of unbridled patriotism, bold risk taking, enthusiasm for technical progress, and a more confident and unapologetic Christianity espoused by some of its young leadership.

This is a generalization for a varied group, but nonetheless, a very real phenomenon. The Gundo culture represents a profound “vibe-shift” from the last few decades, dominated by SaaS executives and venture capitalists who didn’t want to be seen as, or were not, overtly religious, patriotic, or traditionally masculine.

The Gundo-bros represent a rising subculture of techno-frontiersmen at the forefront of the ascendant paleo-futurist coalition. Cosmism, not Russian, but American, might be the syncretism that threads the needle enough to create the proper mindset and material conditions for a new American dawn.

Recommend Transcendental-Pragmatica to your readers

America is a people, a synthesis, a way of being, and the eternal frontier

Transcendental-Pragmatica

america is a people, a synthesis, a way of being, and the eternal frontier

By Maverick

The longue durée nature of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1917) cannot be overstated, almost a century after his magnum opus has been published it still stands in the face of its critics, who can neither refute it, nor accept it. A refutation of Spengler is clearly a matter of incongruence of paradigms, the incongruity of paradigms is clearly a perennial constant when exploring the development of ideas across world history. The fear of accepting Spengler’s thesis despite the accuracy of his predictions and the fulfilment of his vision is not a paradigmatic one, rather, it is clearly shaped by a dread that fills all individuals when reading Spengler’s work and vision of the future of the West. It is a feeling of dread and hopelessness that one is faced with when confronting the impersonal forces – cultural superorganisms – Spengler designates as the primary driving forces of history. The sheer scale of Spenglerian high cultures dissolve the individual in history, the concept of agency in the liberal Western sense becomes almost irrelevant, which is a view of history that is clearly antithetical to the liberal Whiggish, Hegelian, and progressive notions of history that came to dominate the Western thought during the post-war international order. The individual is only relevant in specific cases where cultural archetypes emerge that essentially play a crucial role in the morphological development of the culture. Further, the individual is relevant only in relation to his participation in his own specific culture. Although the liberal order is intrinsically Western, it had eventually produced a notion of the individual agency that would eventually evolve into one that intentionally detaches the individual from participating as a productive member of his own higher culture. This is essentially why such speculative forms of philosophy of history, like Spengler’s own, where impersonal forces restrict individual agency, are anathema within the liberal world. But as we shall see later across the essay, Spengler’s higher cultures also produced harsh reactions from the political right as well.

The Nietzschean Spengler

That all being said, Spengler was brave enough to face the abyss of decline, in a rather Nietzschean manner, when others were afraid to confront it, or admit to the clear crisis developing within Western civilization. When eventually confronting the criticism he had received of his work, Spengler reaffirmed his position and defended his pessimism describing his work as a form of “brave pessimism”. Spengler’s intellectual journey can be described as one of perpetually growing pessimism and determinism concerning the fate of Western civilization. The sociopolitical and geopolitical landscape of his own time, that is, the Europe of the First World War and Interwar periods, is one that had clearly strengthened these feelings within Spengler – The Decline of the West is clearly a product of its own zeitgeist. But it is not solely a product of its own zeitgeist, it is a philosophy of history that attempts to transcend its own zeitgeist and project itself unto the future where it remains relevant, it is in itself functioning within the longue durée. This is essentially what makes Spengler’s work unique, the fact that his own work lives on beyond the higher culture that had produced it, outlasting superorganisms. Like Braudel’s slow changing geographic landscapes, the rivers, cliffs, and mountains that have existed, and will continue to exist, beyond the individual and the cultural, Spengler’s timeless Decline as an idea will exist beyond the West. Moreover, Spengler’s philosophy of history was, again, not solely a product of its own zeitgeist, and a work that functions in the longue durée, but it was also much more. It was a product of the very high culture that it had emerged from, namely, the Western-European-Northern-American culture that Spengler had famously dubbed “Faustian”.

The Goethean Spengler

Alongside the Nietzschean Spengler that bravely confronted the abyss of decline, was the humble Goethean Spengler who possessed the poetic insight necessary to reveal the primary actors in the stage of world-history. The Goethean Spengler, who many had wrongly mistaken for a positivist, was a devout student of Goethe whom he was indebted to for his method – the morphology of cultures. The Goethean Spengler argued for a strict separation between the worlds of time and space, the historical and natural, the phenomenal and noumenal. The Kantian element in Spengler becomes very clear here, as many of my more experienced peers have always attempted to remind me. That said, while Kant viewed the phenomenal realm, the world as we experience it with our senses, as the only accessible realm to humans, he denied the possibility of accessing the noumenal world, the realm of “things-in-themselves”, that is the world beyond our senses. Spengler, like Schopenhauer, argued that it was possible to access this specific realm, but where the natural sciences are used to discover the phenomenal world-as-nature, poetry, art, and history are the means by which we can access the noumenal world-as-history, through instinct and feeling rather than intellect. This is the side of Spengler that had produced the most fruitful approach to world history, one that views world history as a drama of several might cultures, cultures guided by unique prime symbols – the driving force of their ontological being – allowing them to produce their unique political, religious, philosophical, scientific, and artistic forms. Spengler truly believed that cultures possessed souls, and once one discovers the soul of a specific culture they cannot help but see this specific soul manifesting itself across all facets of that culture. Cultures are therefore alive, and they are born unto history, grow and expand, bearing their scientific and philosophical fruits to the rest of the world, mature, decay, and eventually die after their destiny is fulfilled. Spengler’s approach is a Goethean one, that is not teleological in the Hegelian sense, nor causal in the progressive Darwinian sense, it is one where the notion of destiny is given primacy over teleology, progress, and causality.

The Faustian Spengler

As mentioned earlier, Spengler himself described his philosophy of history as a truly Faustian treatment of history, where the Faustian obsessive tendency to conquer space and time manifest themselves in the very scope and scale he adopted. Like other Western speculative philosophies of history, he had attempted to provide a historical narrative of history as a whole, a totality. Speculative philosophy of history in Western thought was inaugurated as a field by Kant, Herder, and Hegel who had all played different roles in either setting the objectives and subject matter of the field, introducing units of historical analysis, or popularizing the field in Western academic circles as Hegel had done. It is, in a sense, a reflection of a distinct German historical instinct, one that clearly overlaps with the German historicist tradition, which is a term that is difficult to define, but could be simply understood as a unique historiographical paradigm, intellectual culture, and disciplinary matrix. Spengler did describe his philosophy of history as a reflection of a purely German worldview, and philosophy. Here, the Faustian elements are evident, Spengler’s obsession with conquering the laws apparent within world history is quite clear, and in my judgement had profound implications on his personal life. Spengler is a thinker of the Faustian-stamp, one whose personal life is a reflection of a Faustian yearning for the infinite that was directed towards the conquest of world-history and expressed through his philosophy of history. This is the same spirit that had possessed, and is continuing to possess, many significant Faustian characters of world historical significance, all expressing the same spirit in their own specific realms. This is essentially why Spengler had called his treatment of history a purely Faustian one, that is, unique to a specific culture in space and time.

The Spenglerian Paradox

The relativity of Spengler’s own philosophy of history is one of the many points that reveal the paradoxes in Spenglerian thought. Greg Swer had argued that the relativity of Spengler’s philosophy of history, due to his radical stance of cultural relativism and cultural isolation theory, alongside the positivist elements of his work that aims to explore observable historical laws and patterns in history, almost contradict one another, leading him to describe this as a “comparative paradox”, one that makes it challenging to locate Spengler’s ideas within a definite philosophical position. This is a point that many of his critics had mentioned, Adorno, who despite rejecting his thesis continued to revisit Spengler due to the materialization of his predictions, had described Spengler’s work as possessing a totalitarian like power, stating:

He made positivism into metaphysics, subordination to the given into, amor fati, swimming with the stream into cosmic tact, meaninglessness into mystery, and the denial of truth into truth itself. This is the source of his power.

Likewise, other thinkers had described Spengler’s adoption of contradicting ideas as producing a “self-immunizing” effect that allows it to withstand any form of criticism. Spengler’s work, despite its rejection, had generated a considerable amount of criticism, love, respect, and hate, a tome written by a profound thinker working at the periphery of academia that had profound political, social, and philosophical implications, and continues to do so. The Spenglerian paradox, as I call it, the uniqueness of his philosophy of history and its predictive and retrodictive powers, the profound sociopolitical implications of his work when weaponized or practically applied, the infusion of cultural morphology and relativism alongside his position of Nietzschean total detachment, its ever-growing relevance and power when complemented with a position of hindsight, is indictive of the complexity and depth apparent in Spengler and his thought. One can go on for days discussing the thousands of unique ideas and philosophical rabbit holes that can be found in The Decline, let alone the rest of his unpublished and recently translated works. Spengler’s writings are hidden treasure troves of profound historicist insights, unique views on scientific paradigms, original ideas on the links between funerary practices and a culture’s perception of time and space, the existence of cultural-specific mathematical mentalities, art theory, critique of the notion of spacetime, simple history, futurism, philosophy of technology, comparative anatomy and its use in cultural analogy, the borrowing of insights from minerology to discuss the interaction between cultures, and much more. Many often ask me which of Spengler’s works are useful to begin with, and the answer is quite clear when looking at the disparity in scale and size when comparing his works, with The Decline dwarfing most of his other works. The size of the book coupled with the complex subject matter usually intimidates many, naturally of course. That said, I would usually advise many who cannot find the time to read Spengler to simply view his book as a type of encyclopedia, that beyond the initial critical 30 pages, one can jump through different parts of book at will, depending on what specific topic one is interested in. Like other speculative philosophies of history, and perhaps even more, Spengler’s work is a multidisciplinary one, and I have met engineers, poets, businessmen, scientists, and priests who regularly read his work, its appeal becomes apparent once one simply gathers the courage necessary to seriously wrestle and embrace some of his ideas – not surrender to his ideas, bur rather, giving them a chance while leaving space for criticism.

The Spenglerian Experience

There are a number of stages one necessarily goes through when reading Spengler’s work, or at least, this has been my own journey with his writings. Initially, one is confronted with the complexity and seriousness of the subject matter, a similar feeling that I had developed when reading Hegel’s work but in a more subtle manner, perhaps this is a perennial trait within specific German philosophies. Beyond this brief shock, one continues to read his work, which almost always manages to immediately fascinate any reader, first, because he openly argued to have deciphered the secret to historical laws through a paradigm shifting approach to history, and second, because he oddly begins his book with a conclusion in a rather non-conventional manner. At this state, the reader is perplexed, and continues to read the opening chapter to his magnum opus, and almost unknowingly, begins to gradually lower their philosophical guard. Reading beyond this point, not realizing that the allure of Spengler’s work, his poetic tone, profound insights, and bizarre claims, paves the reader’s path towards an ontological shock, this is the turning point that many serious readers of Spengler have gone through. Subsequently, if one possesses a weak world-view or philosophical standpoint, it is immediately either shattered or challenged at this point. The philosophically stubborn and bright few thinkers who are challenged by Spengler, but continue to face him rather than run away are caught within endless discourse of Spenglerian paradoxes, and produce works that reveal a clear fascination with Spengler despite rejecting his thesis. These types find themselves stuck in a philosophical ouroboros almost always without noticing, it is a useless attempt at explaining the philosophical paradoxes and consistencies in Spengler’s philosophy of history. These attempts at explaining away Spengler are futile, and any serious Spenglerian thinker knows this primarily because they understand that Spengler’s philosophy of history belongs to a completely different paradigm that is incongruent with ones adopted by these persistent thinkers, such as Theodor Adorno, Stuart Hughes, John Farrenkopf, and more recently, Greg Swer. These specific thinkers that have bravely confronted Spengler despite rejecting his work deserve intellectual respect because many thinkers tend to usually ignore his work altogether, and an in depth exploration of Spengler without changing one’s philosophical standpoint reflects resilience on their part. Yet, reading their works, one can clearly see the Spenglerian effect, and more, one occasionally feels the enchantment of Spengler’s work in the words of critics. This is quite obvious with Adorno’s case, in fact, elements of Adorno’s work eventually overlapped with Spengler’s own, specifically in his critique of the enlightenment and its implications. That said, as opposed to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Marxian critique of the enlightenment, the power of Spengler’s work on the other hand led to its anathematization within the anglophone world, and eventually, the rest of Europe during the post-war period. Thus, one can see the hesitance of implicit Spenglerians in professing their acceptance of Spengler’s work, Frye, although clearly inspired by Spengler, had to occasionally defend his sympathetic view of Spengler through claiming that one can adopt Spengler’s method without necessarily believing in everything he said. Spengler’s method is beneficial even when viewing his notion of cultural superorganisms metaphorically, argued Frye, and reading his writings on Spengler, I could not help but feel he had to refrain from fully supporting his ideas for the sake of career progression. Wittgenstein is also similar in this sense, the Spenglerian elements are quite clear, that said, he does not allow Spengler’s idea to fully impose themselves upon his own world-view and philosophical standpoint. Paradigms, however, are mortal as Thomas Kuhn had argued, and are eventually confronted by anomalies that challenge their very existence, paving the way for newer paradigms that replace them.

Spengler as a Post-Modern Prophet

The historicity of Spengler’s own philosophy of history, combined with our historical vantage point, due to hindsight, allows us to both reaffirm his own ideas, and more importantly, to develop them beyond where he stopped. My argument here is linked to Stephen Clark’s concept of Spenglerian Optimism, which is a creative attempt at projecting Spengler’s own philosophy of history beyond the decline of Western civilization, one shaped by an optimism for the historicity of cultures, and the potential for the human spirit to produce a new high culture. Clark’s paper on this specific topic had inspired me to begin the Spenglerian Optimism series which explores the potential for new future cultures, hidden cultures that might exist around us today, and past forgotten cultures (we should not forget that Spengler’s method was both predictive, and retrodictive). This position is not a departure from Spengler’s philosophy of history, rather, it is an affirmation of Spengler’s own optimism that was expressed in his writings during his younger years, and one could argue, briefly manifested itself in Spengler’s late years when he had moved beyond the cyclicality of his first philosophy of history, infusing it with an extra dose of directionality, to produce an upward spiraling world history in his second philosophy of history. That being said, Spengler’s upward spiral, as a result of modernity’s destructiveness, and the West’s own state of demise, had made him conclude that the next stop for humanity in the spiral of world history is a natural cataclysm, and not a new high culture. The war between nature and man had reached its apex with the advent of Faustian Western culture, Spengler concluded, and thus, it is only natural that nature, and the cosmos – the macrocosm, delivers a final blow due to the existential threat Faustian man had become with his total war against nature. Yet, if one were to revisit the paradoxes in Spengler’s work, namely, the relativity and historicity of his own position, emerging as a byproduct of Western civilization itself, and unique to a specific time and place, combined with the deterministic historical laws apparent in the decline and birth of cultures, one can essentially arrive at a position which affirms a spiral shape to world history, and the necessary birth of a new culture beyond the West’s decline, specifically if that culture is born beyond the Western realms. This, however, is not an absolute departure from Spengler’s critique of modernity as a possible force that could either, transition humanity into a new post-human mode of collective existence, or pave the way for the end of man, and the world as a whole through a real “end of history” – historico-terminus. Spengler’s approach is truly eschatological, and even a position of Spenglerian optimism acknowledges the eschatological dimension of such a subject matter, and thus, Spenglerian Optimism can be described as a katechon philosophy of history, one that attempts to envision a future where organic cultures proliferate in a post-modern future in order to avoid, or postpone, the eschaton – apocalypse. This, to me, is a moral imperative, in a world where Spengler’s own predictions seem to be materializing in front of our very eyes, from the rise of Caesarism in the West as a result of the crisis of parliamentary crisis, to the exponential growth of technological progress and the ever-increasing meaninglessness of hypermodern reality, and the intensification of the ecological crisis as a result of Faustian man’s war with nature. Chris Rojek once described Spengler’s work as possessing vampiric qualities, dubbing it the nosferatu of theories of social change, sucking the blood out of crises in order to renew itself again despite being constantly buried and neglected. Spengler is the prophet of our own age, and a realization of this almost instantly leads to a scarier awareness of the seriousness of this statement, since Spengler’s final prophecies are literally ones of pure eschatological dimension, losing faith in Western man, and humanity as a whole, he had not only predicted the Second World War, the destruction of Germany beyond this war, but also a global cataclysm once the episode of Western civilization terminates the saga of higher cultures in world history. As mentioned previously, Spengler was profoundly controversial to a degree that he was not only anathematized in the liberal spheres, but his works were also banned by the Nazis at one point after they had realized they themselves were viewed as symptoms of decline in Spengler’s historically totalitarian thesis, where even the Nazis themselves felt threatened when he had imposed his bleak pessimism on their shortly lived megalomania-driven optimism. “A prophet is not honored in his own country”, and their relevance and value only become realized centuries after their anathematization and crucifixion, such was the case of Spengler with his own Western civilization. Yet, with our unique historical vantage point, observing Spengler’s spiral of world history extend itself into the remote past, and make its away to our present moment, we can predict and manifest a new future:

There we are sounding the last necessities of life itself. We are learning out of another life-course to know ourselves what we are, what we must be, what we shall be. It is the great school of our future. We who have history still, are making history still, find here on the extreme frontiers of historical humanity what history is. -Oswald Spengler

Spenglerian Optimism

With a position of Spenglarian optimism many possible futures emerge, multiple temporalities, and new possible cultures that might as well already be functioning around us today without us realizing their existence. The optimist within Spengler himself, like Herder before him, had spoken of a new potential high culture emerging “between the Vistula and Amur” signifying not only the uniqueness of the Russian-Slavic world, arguing for a clear distinction between the West and Russia, but also the possibility of this culture growing into a fully-fledged high culture producing its own unique forms in the future. The last phase one arrives at when reading Spengler, which I had not mentioned earlier, is the stage of adopting a Spenglerian paradigm and world view, this is essentially when the individual affirms Spengler’s approach to all phenomena, to a degree that the individual cannot unsee Spengler’s work in everything they experience or observe. Spenglerians cannot help but view morphological connections between all facets of a culture, whereby the West’s conquest of space is not a surprise when observing Gothic architecture’s unique use of space; or the clear morphological connections between the emergence of bells within the West and their current modern obsession with time and the end of time perfectly embodied with the Doomsday Clock; it is the clear connection between the oneness of God, Arabesque, and domed structures in Magian (Middle Eastern) culture; and the obvious link between Indian mathematical conceptions, the Hindu concept of maya, and the practice of cremation in their funerary rituals. A Spenglerian position is thus a pre-requisite for Spenglerian optimism, since the latter is merely an attempt to extend the former beyond its temporal and spatial limitations, that is, limitations based on the theories cultural-specific position in the West, and Spengler’s own extreme pessimism as a result of living through the metaphysical decline of the West (these ideas are explored further in my previous writings, and will be expanded on properly across the series). Ever since Clark published his paper introducing the concept, many Spenglerians have attempted to project their own visions of new possible cultures that could exist beyond the West’s decline, from the concept of an “Aenean” civilization emerging from within the West itself (which I introduced and critiqued previously), to the notion of an Aridoamerican culture emerging as a result of the synthesis between the West and indigenous American cultures, and the possibility of a new high culture emerging within the ASEAN sphere in Asia. Some have also projected this approach into the deep human past, in what could be described as retrodictions of past hidden, or dead, cultures, such as the idea of a unique Celtic culture that was distinct from the Germanic and thus guided by a different principle and unique prime symbol, or soul, with the symbol of the trinity knot as its designated prime symbol. A lost, or extinct, Polynesian culture that possessed a unique conception of space that Spengler described as one that could have developed a peculiar mathematical instinct that would evolve into a non-static higher geometry, hence their discovery of the boomerang. Both the retrodictive and predictive elements in Spenglerian optimism makes it necessary to borrow ideas shared by other speculative philosophers of history that complement the Spenglerian paradigm, such as Arnold Toynbee, William Irwin Thompson, Carroll Quigley, and Jean Gebser, to name a few. Of course, this can only be done if specific ideas are borrowed and not their overarching theses that conflict with Spengler’s own. More recently, Eric A. Castro, whose efforts in inaugurating a new reconsideration of Spengler’s work had inspired me to write this specific piece, had provided his own unique view of the West’s future, one that I describe as a form of Spenglerian optimism, but also one that is clearly adhering to the Faustian spirit and form. This “Faustian Optimism” as I call it, is not only controversial (for many reasons I shall expand on soon), but also a new brave and daring attempt to extend the life of the West beyond its own Spenglerian timeline. These traits are precisely why his idea of a Faustian future guided solely by the “Spanish spirit” should be taken into consideration. I will not say much about this here and now but will provide my own critique and examination of his argument in a different post. But prior to publishing my critique, I will post Castro’s argument, alongside a new contribution to the series that presents the idea of Aridoamerican culture that clashes with the concept of Western “Hispanidad”. Despite the clash of these two future Spenglerian visions however, there are also clearly a lot of areas where these two ideas overlap, which could possibly present a middle ground where these two ideas possibly converge. Castro’s initiative to revive the discussion on Spengler’s timeline is not only timely, but crucial when considering the most recent world developments. It is also a reminder that Spengler’s work should be presented within alternative platforms beyond the academic world where his work had been denied the intellectual respectability it deserved for almost a century now

Links:

Substack -

Spenglerian Musings

Substack on Oswald Spengler's philosophy of history, and speculative philosophy of history.

By Arabian Magus

Eric Aaron Castro - Society, Soul, and Style: Spengler and the Question of the West in the 21st Century: https://substack.com/home/post/p-164903163

Aksinya Staar , Eric Aaron Castro, and myself, will be initiating a dialogue on Spengler's work in the 21st century, and the recurring relevance of Spenglerian concepts. Stay tuned!

Eric Aaron Castro argues that an extension of Faustian civilization is possible only through an affirmation of the Spanish spirit, which he described as possessing a “Faustian drive fused with eschatological yearning and honor-driven fatalism”. Castro does not only present a controversial claim here, for many obvious reasons, but presents a rather original and unique analysis of the complex dynamic between the different national spirits that drive Western culture. This is also an argument that clashes, and potentially overlaps, with the concept of Aridoamerican culture presented by Aspen in the Spenglerian Optimism series (Read his contribution here!). Castro’s argument here, whether one agrees with them, or not, should be clearly taken seriously. For although I do somewhat disagree with some points he makes, or rather, his approach to the topic, there is a lot of truth in what is being presented here — truths that should be taken seriously at this stage of Western culture’s life-cycle! I will not say much now, since these serious ideas deserve a proper critique which I will be working on soon. Enjoy the read!

*Eric Aaron Castro is not on Substack yet, but will hopefully be joining soon. If you want to contact him please reach out to him on his Linkedin page:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericaaroncastro/

Society, Soul, and Style: Spengler and the Question of the West in the 21st Century

The public needs a serious update of the status of the world-civilizations in 2025. Right now, most people’s perception of the world is via piecemeal sight; fragments which consist of isolated headlines, viral trends, algorithmic feeds. Like a pointillist painting viewed too closely, our perception is made up of disjointed dots: economic anxiety, technology hypes, identity politics, digital surveillance, spiritual malaise. What’s missing is the frame; a world-historical structure that brings individual clarity into an operative state of awareness. If we want to win the west, we need a shared understanding from which to act on because when there is no overarching coherence structure, action does not lead to design, but to damage.

“Faustian man does not feel that he belongs to any particular group, but rather to a world-historical idea.” — Oswald Spengler. So, what is this world-historical idea of the West?

Faustian also known as the Western culture is the civilizational form that originated in Europe and extended outward through its cultural projections: the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and other settled societies shaped by European institutional mechanisms: languages, religious tradition, legal systems, educational institutions and scientific theories.

Oswald Spengler proposed a cyclical theory of civilizations. For the West, he identified two primary cultural forms (Apollonian and Faustian) that have shaped its civilizational trajectory:

Apollonian (Classical: Greek/Roman) Culture

• Emergence: circa 1100 BC (early Homeric period)

• Flourishing: 800 BC – BC 100

• Civilizational Phase / Decline: 100 AD – 500 AD

Faustian (Western: Latin Christian) Culture

• Emergence: circa AD 900 (Carolingian Renaissance)

• Flourishing: 1000 AD – 2000

• Civilizational Phase / Decline: 2000 – Present

Western identity can be seen as a synthesis: the Apollonian ideals of clear, measured reason; a disciplined appreciation of form and proportion; and a focus on the tangible, immediate world are given new life within the Latin Christian framework, which emphasizes individual dignity, moral responsibility, and a transcendent inwardness that orients life beyond the temporal toward the eternal. As Colombian philosopher and aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila wrote, “The dignity of the individual is a Christian cast made out of Greek clay.” This is the aphoristic image that truly captures how Christian ethics have molded classical Greek ideals into the distinctive Western worldview and aligns seamlessly with Spengler’s two-phase cultural cycles that the West has undergone. To first know the West, we start here.

“We should of course press our inquiry only so far as the insight of man’s reason is allowed to climb the height of heavenly knowledge” — Boethius’ Theological Tractates: De Trinitate.

Boethius captures the fusion of the Greek reverence for rational inquiry with the Christian belief in divine transcendence. Boethius represents for us the moment where reason becomes a ladder not merely for understanding the world, but for approaching the eternal.

It is in this moment that we see a genesis of the inner drama that defines the Faustian spirit.

Through Spengler’s lens, the Latin Christian West is animated by a Faustian spirit (reappropriated from Goethe’s tragic play Faust): marked by an unquenchable striving, a relentless pursuit of knowledge, and an unrelenting confrontation with the Infinite. These are not merely cultural traits; they reflect the very spiritual architecture of Christianity, with its profound orientation toward eternal life. Unlike the cyclical cosmologies of Apollonian Civilization, Christianity introduced a linear conception of time: a historical arc with origin, purpose, and consummation. This sense of directed history (narrative time) is Christianity’s unique contribution to the civilizational imagination, shaping a shared outlook in the West.

This table is a succinct intellectual genealogy that tracks the evolution of Western identity:

The Faustian (Latin Christian) West begins to express itself through new and distinctive forms. In St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, we see the emergence of a uniquely Western interior metaphysics: a disciplined inward journey of the soul toward divine truth. Shakespeare’s Hamlet dramatizes the birth of the internal drama, revealing the deep conflict and conscience within the individual. The birth of the scholastic, monastic university as an institution gave rise to infinite system-building, crafting comprehensive intellectual frameworks that sought to explain all of existence. The Renaissance ideal of individual greatness is powerfully embodied in Michelangelo’s statue David, celebrating human dignity and creative potential. Finally, Immanuel Kant’s philosophy affirms liberal individualism, in which a modern, rational individual is free to choose and act according to moral autonomy.

“It is necessary that there be as many forms of human characters as there are forms of regimes.” — Plato, Republic, 544d. So, what are the traits of a Western soul in the West?

As Oswald Spengler writes, there are three dominant strands of Faustian DNA: “Only the Spanish, the English, and the Prussians have given European civilization universal ideas.”

Anglo-Liberalism expresses itself through bourgeois pragmatism, empirical inquiry, and expansionist energy. Rooted in Protestant individualism and a mercantile moral order, its society tends toward atomization, governed more by contracts than covenants. The civilizational archetypes it produces are the Merchant, the Engineer, and the Administrator; world-builders through commerce, industry, and bureaucratic infrastructure. Historically, this spirit animated the British Empire, driven by maritime trade, colonization, and structured governance. The Industrial Revolution exemplified technical innovation wedded to market logic, while the Protestant Reformation emphasized private conscience and individual interpretation of faith. America’s founding synthesized Enlightenment ideals into pragmatic governance. Thinkers such as Adam Smith and John Locke codified the ethical logic of property, liberty, and markets, while global financial centers like the City of London and Wall Street emerged as the symbols of Anglo civilization’s organizing principle: finance and flow.

Prussian-German Idealism expresses itself as philosophical, introspective, artistic, and systematic. Its civilizational roles are those of the Thinker, the Poet, and the Metaphysician; figures who seek truth not through accumulation, but contemplation. This tradition produced German Idealists like Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, who viewed reason as a path to spiritual self-realization. The Romantic poets like Goethe and Schiller channeling inner life into prophetic literature, while the Humboldtian model of the University of Berlin made soul-cultivation (Bildung) the telos of education. In music, Beethoven and Wagner transformed sound into metaphysical drama, elevating national consciousness. Politically, Bismarck's Realpolitik merged pragmatic governance with cultural warfare (Kulturkampf), conceiving the state as a moral organ which Spengler expands on. Finally, Nietzsche exposed the nihilistic nature of modernity and called forth the Zarathustra’s Übermensch as a response.

Spanish Catholicism, born in Spain and extended throughout the Spanish-speaking world, is defined by its religious fervor, sacrificial ethos, militant mindset, and mystical vision. It embodies the spirit of the Knight, the Crusader, the Conquistador, and the Martyr; those who give their lives for faith, glory, and eternal purpose. This ethos drove the Reconquista, an 800-year spiritual and military campaign to reclaim Iberia followed by the Inquisition to defend sacred order against any encroaching chaos. In the Age of Exploration, figures like Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro sought not only conquest but conversion. Charles V aspired to a universal monarchy that could unite Christendom. The Jesuits, led by St. Ignatius of Loyola, became global agents of evangelization missions. Spanish Baroque mystics like St. Teresa of Ávila and St. John of the Cross mapped the soul’s inner trials in search of divine union. And in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the Spanish soul appears in its most poignant form: the tragicomic last knight of a disenchanted world; a literary martyr for transcendent ideals.

Today, in 2025, these Faustian forms have morphed. Anglo-Liberalism has scaled into Global Neoliberalism, dominating commerce, governance, and digital life; but increasingly devoid of spiritual direction. It has substituted Protestantism with secularism and relativism. Its mercantile nature is represented by the arbitrary crypto-currency exchanges as well as obscured monetary transaction mechanisms such as blockchain. Its atomization of the individual is represented in social media application developing everyone into their own personal brand and “entrepreneur of the self” pressurizing all into self-optimization trends. Now, with the exhaustion of the market ethos, we are witnessing counter-impulses emerge. Prussian-German Idealism has slowly seen the rise of a diffident Neo-Romanticism stressing an awareness to Neoliberalism with an undertone of an aesthetic pessimism. Spanish Catholicism, long maligned, is forming as Reactionary Hispanidad; a metaphysical resistance rooted in a tradition, a spiritual hierarchy, and a resurrected hidalguía of the soul.

Now, Spengler’s core Faustian forms of the West have morphed into late-stage expressions:

Oswald Spengler, who detested the Anglo-Liberal aka English Liberalism, predicated that the English Liberal strain, which is Protestant, mercantile, atomized; representing, in his schema, the bourgeois phase of Faustian civilization, would be spent, producing, What Peter Turchin refers to as, too many counter-elites. Now, we are witness to the exhaustion of the late stage-expression of the Anglo-Protestant strain, Neo-Liberalism, which is shallow, decadent, and fated to collapse under the weight of its own self-interest disguised as virtue.

Goethe’s 1827 poem “Amerika, du hast es besser” (“America, you are better off”) is often misread as a simple compliment to the New World. In truth, it's a subtle, even ironic reflection on America's lack of historical depth and civilizational rootedness compared to Europe. He intuits that a civilization without roots may struggle to endure, its trajectory governed by expansion, utility, and individual striving but lacking gravitas or metaphysical depth. In the Spenglerian sense, the United States embodies the Faustian will to power but it is unmoored from the sacred, a pure expression of the civilization’s final, dissolving stage.

Now, the Spanish are unique in this sense. They retain closer ties to the Greco-Latin heritage than either the English or Germans. In many ways, they are more Roman than the Italians themselves being heirs to Catholic imperialism. For Spengler, the Spanish strand represents a hybrid: the Faustian drive fused with eschatological yearning and honor-driven fatalism (e.g. Inquisition, Reconquista, Conquistadors, Holy Roman Empire, Jesuit Missionaries, etc.) The Spanish are the knights, crusaders and martyrs of the Western world with a passionate embrace of death, honor and the eternal. As Franco once called Spain “the spiritual reserve of the West,” we may now ask: Could it again become a source of counter-modern vitality? Spain, after all, led the Counter-Reformation and resisted the anti-Christian revolution of modernity in 1936. Its past (global, heroic, missionary) has long been defamed by Enlightenment critics and secular modernizers. But perhaps, precisely through its rejection, a new cultural and spiritual resurrection is rising. Perhaps, Hispanidad-infused reactionary metaphysics can form itself into the “mystical” counter-impulse to Neo-liberal globalism.

As we consider future reformation, I will conclude with a case study from a prior civilization:

In the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus, we see Emperor Julian undertake a bold mission: the Renovatio Imperii Morumque (translated as “Renewal of the Empire and its Morals.”) His policies for political reform in the fourth-century Classical Greco-Latin civilization represented a deliberate effort to restore and revitalize a weak society with a weakened immune system. Julian understood that the strength of a state lies in the character and virtue of its people. If Julian’s mission was to renew the inner soul of a decaying empire by returning to its origins, then our answer lies in reflecting for our own times what the Western soul is; where did it originate from and what direction is it going in?

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Aridoamerica and its People

My writings documenting the rise of a potential new civilization between the United States and Mexico.

By Aspen

Introduction: Spengler’s Russia

The middle of the 20th Century and the Cold War was a romanticization of the triumph of technology and utopianism. However, some have argued that there isn’t a whole lot utopian or scientific about these works. It’s commonly credited that many aspects of the Soviet Union’s science fiction were at least partially based on more ancient Russian traditions. While this much is certainly true, a lot of focus isn’t placed on America. The assumption that NATO was “The West”, and America, as a subcontinent, was part of this “West”, had led to a negligence of a critical look into its unique cultural expressions during this time. When viewing America might have much more interesting aspects. When acknowledging these flawed geographic and cultural presumptions, other more interesting aspects are revealed. Due to its presence and focus on the Southwestern Deserts, another primordial spirit influences much of America’s fiction. As will be made abundantly clear further on; many of these works seem to indicate that underneath all the mid-20th century optimism and technology veneer; what we see in American Science fiction during the Space Race is the retellings of how the Anglos colonized the Southwest and the echoes of what I argue is an entirely new civilization forming. In many ways, as America was pressured with the Soviets to reach the stars during the Space Race, much as people have argued that the Russian identity came into fruition; so too did the true American one.

In The Decline of the West, the legendary Oswald Spengler lays out an apocalyptic and melancholic tone about the future of the West. Spengler’s main thesis is based on the study of other civilizations that have come and gone. Each of these civilizations (High Cultures as he calls them, with Civilization being the moribund decline. However English speakers refer to High Cultures as civilizations as well, unlike the Germans.) was motivated by a prime symbol, based on internal and ecological assumptions of that society. Spengler argued that Western civilization, which he calls Faustian, was guided by the concept of Infinite Space, or man’s reach towards heaven. He argued this could be seen in the Gothic Cathedrals which were some of the tallest structures in the world when they were built. Under this Faustian logic, it would come as no surprise that this was a civilization that looked to the stars. If you see many of the rocket ships that came out of the 20th century, many have the same upward thrust as the much earlier Gothic Cathedrals.

Fig. 1: Criticism of Notre Dame Proposals - Sebastian Errazuriz 2019

Note: While a critique of Notre Dame Proposals, this artwork spectacularly describes Spengler’s thoughts on the Faustian West as an upward and onward looking people. The towering pointing thrust of the rocket and the Gothic Cathedral are very much products of the same people with the same worldview.

However, following the World Wars, Europe was flanked on two sides by two foreign powers. To the east, you had the Russians who Spengler argued were actually under the cultural distortion of Europe and were a separate civilization, which he argues by the fact communism morphed into an anti-European/American ideology despite being pioneered by Western Intellects for Western society. Spengler described the Russians and other Slavic peoples as being guided by an Infinite Horizontal Plane which had originated from the connection many Slavic peoples had to the steppe. Through the Cold War and the Space Race, much of Soviet pop culture and fiction was based on this eternal steppe, including how the Russians wanted to reach the stars. Much of the Soviet media was influenced by Cosmism. On the other side, you had the Americans. The Americans of Spengler’s time were easily a part of the Faustian West and probably the most extreme of them in its base assumptions (i.e. Progress, Capitalism, Aggressive Conquest), unlike Russia which Spengler saw as a distinct emergent civilization with Communism as its rebellion. This has been argued many times over and is a guiding principle of explaining why the Russo-Ukraine war has erupted; especially among Vladimir Putin’s justification to invade as well as Alexander Dugin’s Eurasianism.

America’s Hidden Culture

However, America in my opinion is much more interesting. We live a century after Spengler and the America in this paper will be argued, and though tiny ruptures of his time, over the Cold War it’ll become very clear that America, though firmly Western and European east of the Mississippi River, is too likely highly influenced by an emergent new civilization. Although seemingly obscure at a shallow glance, it has hidden itself in our pop culture and many facets of American culture as it is exported through its nexus point in Los Angeles, many of which came into fruition after Spengler had passed to have noticed the general trajectory. Outside of and partially including the major metropolitan zones of much of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico, the people not only live in a vastly different ecology from their country’s capitals; but are very ethnically and culturally different from them as well. This trend isn’t just present in the people and ecology, one of Spengler’s main arguments was the having a unique form of architecture which we have seen in the Adobe and its many offshoots, or arguably how incredibly spread out and empty this part of America is compared to European Countries. The area also has a unique demographic character with Anglos and Hispanics being a plurality and Indigenous people a prominent minority.

Fig. 2: Erosion No. 2 Mother Earth Laid Bare - Alexander Hogue 1936

Note: Alexander Hogue was a prominent Southwestern Painter and this commentary on the dust bowl presents Americans with the idea that the means of cultivating America are very different from the older assumptions we dealt with, which caused the crisis of the Dust Bowl.

The famous postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard sensed much the same. In his book America, although likely distorted by the then presentism of 80’s America made the argument present throughout the book that America was the most itself instead of influenced by foreign culture (i.e. Europe) in the Southwestern Deserts and believed it to be a society which constantly floated around the Vanishing Point. In the 1910’s a patroness by the name of Mabel Dodge Luhan also sensed it, in fact arguing on multiple occasions that Western/Anglo Civilization would be saved by the merger of it and an integration of indigenous traditions due to a deracination by mechanization. Luhan would go on to start an art colony and create the Southwest as a center of intellectual talent and founded the Taos Art Colony. She would influence some incredibly famous artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe. She would at one point host Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World who very conspicuously put the Southwest as the “Human Reservation” or the last place on the earth that had not been touched by the mechanization of humanity. Luhan is credited with causing many seismic shifts in Western Art and philosophy well into the post-war period.

However, unlike Mabel Dodge Luhan, I do not think this culture is Western or Faustian. In the background of my academic career, I have found that America and Mexico much like Russia are harboring a new emergent high culture/civilization. One that, much like Spengler’s depiction of the Russians, is still in a primordial phase. It can be found in many of the Southwest’s unique cultural quirks, the highly esoteric tone of the Chicano movement, the many bizarre (by our standards) religious and cultural movements in the Southwest, most relevantly to our paper much of America’s Cold War-era and Space Race science fiction and with how America cultivated its identity during the Space Race. I call this new forming civilization Aridoamerica and it encompasses the General American Desert West and Northern Mexico.

Much as how Europe formed from Latin, Germanic, Celtic, and Christian elements in a synthesis; here we see a synthesis of American, Spanish, Mesoamerican, and local Indigenous influences, and this broad cultural sphere includes large swathes of various peoples from the Puebloans, Nuevomexicanos, and the Mormons. This side of America is legitimately very foreign and alien to the rest of the world and large swathes of the world see it no other way. When Europeans look to America, they often have a particular distaste with many of the European-like aspects. While this may confuse Americans, when one looks at what they consider “American,” a lot of it is mainly Texas, California, and the Southwest. This is the land of the deserts which bizarrely have some of the highest biodiversity outside a rainforest ecosystem on the planet. This is America’s mystical land of the frontier, the land of the endless desert sky; the land where the Jaguar can encounter an elk.

The Story of Settlement

Fig. 3: Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed - Ray Bradburry 1949 (Artist Unknown)

Note: This painting for the short story was done to show the Martian Settlement that Americans were forced to evacuate in order to avoid the nuclear war being waged on Earth. Also very suspiciously looks like Santa Fe and Albuquerque down to the clouds.

We see this play out largely during the Space Race in our expression of science fiction which was in many ways an extension of this new culture’s expression. In 1949 there was a short story called Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed by Ray Bradbury (Author of Fahrenheit 451) which was about Americans fleeing to Mars after nuclear armageddon on a mission from the US Government. Ray, although born in Illinois, frequented between it and the Southwestern Borderlands. Tucson to be specific and eventually, he moved to Los Angeles. It follows a suburban 50s family in their new Martian home. Over the story, these Americans had been feeding on the flora they brought to terraform Mars. Over the story, there’s at first a horror of the family watching their food and friends distort into something else starting with their objects, then themselves. Some people assumed it was normal and always a part of them. Some panicked and tried to escape it. Our protagonists, the 50’s White nuclear family turned into golden-eyed people with very dark skin. By the end of the story and after the war had ended on Earth, an American expedition to Mars showed an abandoned settlement. What had happened was that those original Martian colonists had disappeared into the Martian land and were nothing else but martians.

Fig. 4: Villages Set (Indian, Anglo, Spanish) - William Lumpkins 1934

Note: Lumpkins demonstrates the construction of local villages. You have the very Gothic and Georgian styled central Anglo village, however the Spanish village on the right has a lot of commonalities with the Indian village on the left.

As Spengler argues on the concept of race; “A Race has roots. Race and landscape belong together. Where a plant takes root, there it dies also.” later on in the paragraph he adds to this by stating “A race does not migrate. Men migrate, and their successive generations are born in ever-changing landscapes; but the landscape exercises a secret force upon the plant nature in them, and eventually, the race expression is completely transformed by the extinction of the old and the appearance of the new one.” We saw this play out in an earlier people, the Nuevomexicanos, a Mexican adjacent people who have lived in the Southwest since the late 1500s many of whom have direct familial lineage to the conquistadors who settled the area centuries ago.

They are by some estimates the most genetically European New World Hispanic peoples competing with the Argentines and Uruguayans. However, despite this and historical frictions; you would not believe this by viewing their culture, architecture, and how they speak of themselves. Instead what you find is a people that are culturally indigenized who carve religious icons similar to how the Puebloans carve Kachina dolls and build in adobe with methods taught to them by the Puebloans. Many identify as Spanish but as mixed Spanish/Indian, not just due to historical frictions with the then condescending Anglos but also the fact that New Mexico is the older Mexico, and was named as such far before Mexico became a country. Much as Bradbury’s story played out, they became Dark Skinned and Golden Eyed and disappeared into the immediate land.

Fig. 5: Enterprise Dam, Washington County, Utah c. 1910

Note: Large scale infrastructure projects like this were common across large swathes of the American West from 1865-1980’s

The very theme of terraforming and building planetary colonies also has direct parallels to how white settlers encountered this area. America during the course of the space race dreamed of colonizing the stars and expressed that much through its medium of science fiction. However, unlike the Eastern United States which was full of the same type of farmland as Europe, here the deserts were like entering an alien planet; one which required entirely new methods of cultivation. The Mormons for example utilized a central planning structure to divide farmers as loyal members of the church with many of the communities in Utah being essentially planned self-sufficient communities. This in many ways resembles the idea of having colonies on the moon or Mars. Centralized projects, mainly standing alone and isolated while having to be incredibly self-sufficient.

When Anglos ran into the established Hispanic communities in New Mexico, they found many Spanish Ranchers and Puebloans which had more communitarian aspects to water management. As Maria Lane Argues in Fluid Geographies: Water, Science, and Settler Colonialism in New Mexico, her general thesis was that there was a considerable clash between the centralized Technocratic Management of water done by the Anglos and the more decentralized communitarian one done by the Nuevomexicanos and Puebloans. The Anglos also came across very foreign structures in the form of the Pueblos which were mud and horizontal, with the Taos coming most to mind. Many of these Pueblos have a very organic look to them and have to be maintained as such due to Grandpa’s Handaxe effect. Compared to the Western buildings of Europe and the Eastern United States, this was effectively like stepping onto another planet.

Our Indigenized Cold War Pop Culture

We also see this in a much more famous science fiction series; Star Wars. Star Wars bears very little resemblance to many of the European folk tales and is in many ways a direct retelling of general Southwestern Mythology. We first see this in Luke Skywalker who fundamentally is a rural man living in a clay and mud house in the middle of a vast expansive desert, one which he sits in the center of in many frames. Many aspects of Star Wars resemble a general Southwestern mythology. Another great example comes from Princess Leia. Her hair is treated as a distinct pop culture icon, but it is a hairstyle called the Squash Blossom which was endemic among many of the Puebloan communities of the Southwest such as the Hopi. It was also worn during the Mexican Revolution by many women freedom fighters.

Fig. 6: Princess Leia and a Hopi Woman

The Puebloan similarities don’t stop here, Chewbacca is very likely a retelling of the Bear Spirit in Dine (Navajo) mythology. In the Dine Tradition, Bears are seen as spiritual guides who represent strength and self-knowledge. The Hopi, a Puebloan people view the Bear Kachina as associated with Strength, Courage, Wisdom, and Healing the sick. If any of these sound familiar, you wouldn’t be hard-pressed. Chewbacca not only physically resembles a bear standing upright but is often seen behind Han Solo, acting as a very courageous sidekick to him. Chewbacca is very clearly a spiritual guide for him and towers over Han in height, giving him an almost spiritual-like presence. Although Star Wars initially seems like a retelling of WWII, deep down, many aspects of it resemble Southwestern Mythology. In the greatest sense of irony to Chewbacca being a Bear Kachina, some have used Chewbacca to heal themselves.

Fig. 7: Han Solo with Chewbacca and a Bear Kachina Doll

I am not the only one who has taken notice of this. There is a considerable interest among many of the Southwest Natives and Star Wars and other aspects of modern pop culture, as well as a particular insistence on merging their older traditions with it. A group of people translated Star Wars into the Dine Language and many people from these indigenous communities have taken a particular passionate interest in Star Wars. This in recent times has led to an artistic movement among many called Indigenous Futurism that often approaches Sci-Fi from a much more Amerindian perspective. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, it’s likely that deep down they gravitate towards these because deep down they know it’s their ancient spiritually imprinted cultural mythos. Added to that is a story of resistance from an overwhelmingly large foe, and the plot of the movie at the surface does seem like a retelling of WWII. However, it bears the story of the Southwestern Natives. Star Wars is thus an Indo-Hispano story. Its elements have portions of local Native traditions as well as important political events in the history of the place such as the Mexican Revolution.

Fig. 8: Hopi R2 with Child - Duane Koyawena & Joe Mastroianni 2019

Note: If one uses the Spenglerian methodology, this version of R2D2 is in fact the more spiritually authentic version, and is less distorted by a pseudomorphosis.

David Annan in Movie Fantastic: Beyond the Dream Machine argues a very similar viewpoint largely regarding the Indigenous influences on our perception of space aliens. His argument was built upon in Vincent Di Fate's Where do Little Green Men Come From? A speculative look at the origins of a Pop Culture Icon, where he argued that the idea of a space alien is also in fact Indigenous. Annan utilizes a Mesoamerican stone mask to solidify this point and our idea of the gray aliens' stone mask. The same in many ways could be argued for Little Green Men and the Mesoamerican Jade Masks. However, I would add to this even further. In the Hopi tradition, there is a group of people called the Ant People. In the early worlds of Hopi myth, the Ant people were a pale, short statured, and industrious race of people who helped the Hopi during a time of crisis. They have been shown either with horns or with big bulbous heads. In the myth, they fed the Hopi and taught them how to live as well as about the stars and the world. When their early world fell apart, the Ant People guided the Hopi underground where they survived the destruction. To add to this, the reason the Hopi believe ants to have thin waists is because they sacrificed their corn to the Hopi in an ultimate act of compassion, causing their wastes to be thin. When one sees the space men, they are thin, are industrious, and have bulbous heads. Unsurprisingly, due to these similarities, many modern adherents of the New Age Movement made connections that the Ant People and these little bulbous-headed aliens are the same thing. However, I argue the inverse. Our Gray Aliens are retellings of the Ant People, not the other way around. It makes sense why there is such an obsession of UFOs and Aliens in the Southwest, with certain cults dedicated to worshipping them.

Fig. 9: Gray Alien and Ant People Petroglyph

Remember Spengler’s quote on how Race and Land go hand and hand. We may believe that we shape the land, but in truth, it’s the land that shapes us. Even though Star Wars and many of these depictions of space aliens were created by White People, “Westerners”; by America’s movies being created in Los Angeles, a city firmly placed in Aridoamerica with distinct cultural ties to Mexico and the Local Indigenous peoples has thus been much more Mexican and Native in its cultural influence. As America competed with the Soviets to conquer space, it became less European and more itself.

The Influences on the Space Race

Another aspect of this colonization comes from our contingencies to live in outer space. Take Nader Khalili’s architecture for example. In 1984, He developed the Earthbag building technique for NASA as a means of what mankind would live like on the moon and Mars. In totally unsurprising fashion, a later more refined design of earthbag building was called Superadobe which he had based upon his homeland in Iran. However, his design of earthbag buildings has become popular with the American Southwesterners living off the grid. This came at the tail end of the space race. The idea of us colonizing the stars was a downstream effect of us wanting to beat the Soviets, and leading into the 80s we saw much more experimentation of actual human habitation on other planets.

Fig. 10: Superadobe House

We would see another example of this post-space race interplanetary habitation emerge just a few years later with the construction of Biosphere 2. It was built to experiment how people would live on other planets. This simulation was built in the Sonoran Desert just outside of Tucson and was created as an experiment to simulate the life processes on earth to show our life among the stars and create a self contained oasis in the desert. It also was created as the downstream result of anxiety about a potential nuclear war with Russia and wanting to keep humanity safe in case the world was converted into a nuclear wasteland. Ironically, with the usages of water in many of Arizona and Nevada’s Metropolis’ it can be argued that there many separate Biosphere 2s.

Fig. 11: Biosphere 2

Note: Tucson and Biosphere 2 are the same experiment.

Many of these cities act as oasis bastions often pulling water up from the ground and are surrounded by large amounts of space. We constructed Biosphere 2 the same way we constructed Tucson. Many of these “Space Colony” cities that dot the Southwest likely aren’t sustainable. However, it remains that we built these Southwestern mega cities the same way we fantasize about building colonies on the moon. The Eastern United States administers the general southwest; our speculative interstellar galactic empires run their colonies; as large mostly isolated peripherals that stick out like sore thumbs in their general landscape which it takes great infrastructural effort to reach. Due to how ecologically different it and its colonizer are; it seems highly plausible at some point in the undetermined future that you will see a schism between these two America’s. From the American settlement of a foreign land to the very exotic nature of the pre-existing peoples within it in comparison to where the settlers had come from. If America’s main pop culture apparatus had remained on the East Coast, the fiction that was made during this time would likely have resembled much more like Europe due to the mutual transatlantic connection. However, Los Angeles being firmly placed in the Southwest, which one of its earliest intellectuals Charles Lummis deemed and wanted to cultivate as “A Santa Fe on the Pacific.” America’s science fiction and aspects of Modernity is not as a glimpse of the supposed glorious future among the stars but rather a subtle retelling of how the Anglos colonized the Southwest, and how underneath the surface was a monumental sized undercurrent of Mexican and Indigenous culture.

Fig. 12: Taos Pueblo and Speculative Martian Colony

Note: America fantasized of colonizing planets in order to compete with the Soviets. However, much of our story does not interlink with the older Faustian pursuit of the stars. America may have led “The West” but the Cold War and the Space Race pressured America into becoming more like the future emergent Aridoamerican Civilization.

Conclusion

These influences have worked to change the local Anglos into something completely unrecognizable from where they came from much as Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed foretold. Some fought and are fighting against these Mexican and Native influences, others have completely embraced them with some even assuming this is how it always was. It's likely that the endpoint of Anglos of the American West is much the same and much the same that happened to the Nuevomexicanos, a people so utterly touched by the desert and cacti they disappear into it. The myth of the American Cowboy is a halfway point to this.

Many of us growing up often assumed and were conditioned to believe that America was just a shallow extension of Western Europe. The America of the Cold War thought of itself as much and it being the leader of the “Western Alliance.” While this is certainly true east of the Mississippi, the cultural shifts West of the Mississippi following the 30s and deep into the Cold War era indicate that what formed out West, and which was shown to us through our media and our fiction, not only isn’t European but is evidence of something new entirely, something very alien and never before seen to the rest of the world. A people and a culture who in reality have as much in common with the Aztecs and Puebloans as they do with Europe/Spengler’s Faustian West.

Fig. 13: The Sonoran Desert and 70’s Science Fiction Painting

This is a society that in many ways sits between all of these cultures in a synthesis much like what birthed the Western Latin, Germanic, Celtic, and Christian identity itself. Much as how Russian Mythology silently returned to prominence in its Soviet Period under the veneer of science fiction and window dressing of Faustian Man’s pursuit of the stars (Which in many ways the Soviets were trying to bookend); much the same happened in America where our science fiction has very little of us reaching the stars but are various retellings of the story of the Southwest both in the form of the story of colonization as well as the local cultures present within it. Our idealistic pursuit of the stars merely brought this identity closer to fruition.

In conclusion, while many have argued that the Soviet Union’s Science Fiction has come from many of the older Russian traditions; the same is just as if not more definitely closer to being true for America. Many aspects of our pop culture in Cold War era science fiction are retellings of what I consider a future emergent Aridoamerican Civilization currently in an embryonic stage of its development. As America raced with the Soviets to reach the stars, it was not fulfilling the European ethos. Much like Russia, America was defining itself through an increasingly hispanic and indigenized lens. From stories from the perspectives of the Indigenous peoples as well as how we supposedly will colonize the stars, these are all retellings of how the Anglos colonized the Southwest rather than future speculations; they tell the true American History. In some cases, such as Bradbury’s work, it may be a prediction of our future and what happened to the European settler peoples as they disappeared into the desert much like what happened to the Nuevomexicanos from their older Spanish history. The science fiction of the 20th Century was not the West vs. East, it was two new emergent specifically post-European civilizations with partial European cultural ancestry closing the book on that history for good and utilizing the Space Race to further solidify what it meant to be themselves.

Aridoamerica and its People

My writings documenting the rise of a potential new civilization between the United States and Mexico.

By Aspen

The following is an excerpt of an essay on Islamic civilization within Oswald Spengler’s philosophy of history published with Qawwam Magazine.

"The 'Glad Tidings' of Jesus, like those of Zoroaster, of Mani, of Muhammad, of the Neo-Platonists and of all the cognate of Magian religions were mystic benefits displayed but in nowise imposed" -Oswald Spengler

As this culture began to slowly shed off the pseudomorphic effect its true religious form became more apparent. A new powerful piety emerges which Spengler described as a “will-less resignation, to which the spiritual ‘I’ is unknown, and which feels the spiritual ‘We’ that has entered into the quickened body as simply a reflection of the divine light”. This piety is synonymous with the Arabic word for Islam, that is, submission in its fullest essence, which was also the tendency which dominated the spirit of Jesus. This is in stark contrast to the Classical form of piety, and antithetical to Western Faustian culture where the freedom of the will – ego – plays a role in spiritual transcendence, which is impossible in Islam since the ego – the personal – is in essence a manifestation of darkness and evil. This is embodied perfectly in the stories of the prophets Job and Jonah, reflecting the ultimate meaning of suffering in their tragedy that only the metaphysically deep can comprehend, whereby it is sinful to even question why man suffers. Hence, why Spengler places only one other hero beside the Faustian Western hero as the most powerful expressions of tragedy, the hero who fights towards pure Islam.

This unique spirituality gave birth to a unique philosophical form that Spinoza called the “intellectual love of god”, or in Sufi traditions “annihilation of the self through God” or what is called “Fanaa”, where contemplation ultimately leads to understanding. Another philosophical form that has emerged is where the approach is reversed and inward understanding leads to contemplation, what is called “Ilm al Kalam”. This is in stark contrast to the philosophical forms of Western and Classical culture, and the exploration of Classical philosophy in the Islamic world was the result of the pursuit of knowledge – translation, preservation, and evaluation – on part of golden age philosophers of the Islamic world. To Spengler the Magian spirituality dissolves the individual ego and replaces it with a single “pneuma”, or spirit, existent in each and all the members simultaneously. Hence the concept of ijma’ which Spengler described as a “lived experience” and “overwhelming force” not purely a notion or idea, which Max Horten described when he said:

The mystic community of Islam extends from the here into the beyond; it reaches beyond the grave, in that it comprises the dead Muslims of earlier generations, nay, even the righteous of the times before Islam. The Muslim feels himself bound up in one unity with them all.

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This specific short piece is an introduction to some of my arguments concerning the implicit philosophies of history of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper, and how the debate between the two had to a degree shaped the reception of speculative philosophies of history in modern Western thought. This is a useful introduction to my longer piece to be published with exploring the roots of Russiaphobia in Western philosophy of history.

The debate between Kant and Herder has not only lead to the emergence of two divergent types of philosophy of history, but one could also argue that it has to some degree shaped the opinion of critics against speculative philosophy of history. Popper, who has critiqued Spengler, Hegel, Fichte, and perhaps speculative philosophy of history as a whole, viewed Kant’s critique of Herder’s as one of the first, and perhaps most crucial cases of resistance against “historicism”, or speculative philosophy of history (Popper, 1945, p. 50). Popper described modern nationalism as a threat to reason and what he called the “open society”, nationalism was inherently reactionary and irrational, and “by accident it had made its way into the camp of freedom”. According to Popper, Herder, along with Hegel, was one of the chief architects of this modern nationalism, and Kant already had realized the dangers of this “irrational romanticism” in his works critiquing the fact that emotions and passions shaped his respective theories rather than pure intellect and reason (Popper, 1945, p. 50). The intellectual clash between Herder and Kant is a result of the fact that both thinkers were products of different intellectual movements, while Kant was a typical product, and perhaps the epitome, of the German Enlightenment, Herder on the other hand was a product of the Romanticist movement (Walsh, 1960), or what Berlin termed the “Counter-Enlightenment” (Knikman, 2017). Berlin argued that one of the main traits of counter-enlightenment thought is their “relativistic or pluralistic worldview”, and Berlin argues that this form of relativism was already existent with the works of Vico, whose philosophy of history can qualify as a relativistic one since each nation springs forth with unique values and moral systems. These very same tendencies and opposition to the universalism of enlightenment ideas emerge with the works of Herder in a more profound manner, in his extensive, and incomplete, magnum opus the Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1784). A narrow outlook of the history and development of Western speculative philosophy of history overlooks the deeper dimension of the clash between universalism and relativism, and how this in effect not only shaped the field, but has also produced the arguments that contributed to its outright rejection and marginalization in academia. This clash or debate traverses the field of philosophy of history as seen in Popper’s critique of Thomas Kuhn’s theory concerning the non-linear progression of the sciences as a result of cycles caused by what he termed “paradigm shifts” in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). A closer look at the Kuhn-Popper debate sheds further light on the reasons why speculative philosophies of history, especially of the cyclical and relativistic types, were rejected within 20^th century academic episteme. What makes this debate even more intriguing is that although Popper and Kuhn were both philosophers of science, the former could be argued to have been more scientifically inclined, and the latter is more historically inclined. The Kuhn-Popper debate reflects the fact that the universalist-relativist dichotomy remained beyond the moral and cultural Herder-Kant debate and traverses the realm of science, and perhaps could be a clue to one of the reasons why speculative philosophers of history, like Spengler, were rejected since even Kuhn was labelled a “historicist” by Popper and Popperians (Fuller, 2003). Popper’s position could be argued to be the logical end, or continuity, of the Enlightenment, and Steve Fuller in Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science argued that in “his epistemological sensibility, Popper follows in the footsteps of the philosophers of the 18^th century Enlightenment” (Fuller, 2003, p. 127). Beyond this, in their treatment of the history of science Popper may be viewed as a “universalist”, while Kuhn would be viewed as a relativist, although both thinkers admitted that a specific paradigm dominated understanding in a specific era of human history, the former viewed the phenomenon as something that should be overcome, whilst the latter viewed at as a natural and positive process (Fuller, 2003, p. 53). Moreover, one could argue that Popper’s philosophy of science cannot be read in exclusion of his political philosophy as reflected in his writings in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Combing his philosophy of science and political philosophy reveals that the ethos of what Popper called “the open society” is expressed in both modern scientific inquiry and democratic politics (Fuller, 2003, 26). As mentioned earlier speculating about history and its relation to the future is a basic human concern that is expressed through different forms, if not reflected explicitly its done implicitly. In the philosophy and history of science the mainstream scientists usually adhere to what is called “Whig history”, a linear-progressive form of history (Fuller, 2003, 94). From this perspective science is the logical result of inevitable progress of human affairs, and this is precisely what Kuhn critiqued when writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn revolutionized the historiography of science through providing an alternative narrative beyond the self-serving historical narrative provided by scientists whose historiography is shaped by commitments to scientific disciplines. Kuhn’s philosophy of history of science is based on endless cycles dominated by paradigm shifts–scientific revolutions that occur almost instantly, and leads to the displacement of older paradigms that are no longer viable in dealing with a number of anomalies, to be replaced by a new alternative paradigm. However, although Kuhn did “demythologize” the history of science, he argued that a new paradigm almost necessitates a new narrative that compliments the world-picture of the paradigm. But this heroic historical narrative, as reflected by the modern progressive history, does not reveal the actual shape of the history of science which is more complex and imperfect (Fuller, 2003, 19-21). Popper however rejected both of these models, and like Kant, attempted to leave room for human agency in history, rejecting any deterministic model that would restrict human freedom. Thus, it is no surprise that Popper lumps Kuhn along with other giants of philosophy of history that have been trapped by the sin of “historicism”. Ultimately, to Popper, Kuhn’s argument concerning paradigm shifts in the history of science is a form of concealed cyclical philosophy of history that attempts to impose itself upon human agency attempting to alter the course of history (Fuller, 2003, p. 27; p. 56-57). The Kuhn-Popper debate does not only reflect that the philosophical binaries, universalism and relativism, were at play within Western thought as a whole, but also fundamentally shaped specific fields like philosophy of history. The historical, or rather, historicist, dimension of the Kuhn-Popper debate additionally allows one to comprehend the continuity of many perennial ideas that shaped speculative philosophy of history which have eventually spilled over to other fields of inquiry, such as the concept of social cycles, directionality or progress, questions concerning human agency in history, and determinism in historical time.

While most of the other civilizational blocs, China, India, and Russia, are transcending modern political paradigms (the Modern nation-state), the Islamic-Arabo-Persian-Turkic (?) world is far from that. This is occurring in these other poles and blocs through state and non-state actors, even if they clash at specific points. Even Africa is liberating itself from such forms as seen in current developments in the Sahel-Central Africa region.

The Middle East is clearly still functioning within such modern imposed paradigms and will continue to suffer while it does. What is also more problematic about the most recent developments in Turkey and Syria is how it could result in a clash between Turkic and Russian geopolitical goals. This would lead to a clash between both of these worlds, spilling over, and possibly affecting stability in the Caucasus, and more importantly, in the Levant, and parts of Northern Iraq, possibly.

These are all not indicators of a culture in a position of power and imminent growth, these are essentially indicators of a culture experiencing a cultural immune system disorder and dysfunction. While different cultures globally re-assert themselves, our immune system response is again, either extremely reactive against its own body, as seen with some Sunni non-state actors, who tend to afflict the cultural body at large, without taking into consideration the larger civilization context. (Shia non-state actors also do this at times, but as seen the past year, they are taking into consideration the larger civilizational context, and have been wiped out as a result of doing so, the Axis of resistance is going through its final countdown clearly). More progressive states are in a state of ontological and epistemological uselessness, too stuck within liberal-capitalist realities (Corporate salaries and Iced Lattes) and are thus too ineffective in their liberal forms of resistance -- a clear example of an immune response that is underactive when threatened. The most that could be done in the case of the latter, social media posting, sociopolitical activism in Western states (that are not part of the cultural body), all leading to an exponential increase in mental illnesses and cognitive dissonance as a result of living enforcing a hypdermodern life into a cultural that is totally incompatible with modernity. Life becomes meaningless, confusing, and too complex for one to handle, leading to an amplification of the negative aspects of modern lifestyles, which Arabs tend to do due to our passionate tendencies, tragic..

That all being said, the ironic thing about our own Middle Eastern culture, or even better, our Judeo(pre-exodus)-Christian-Islamic-Mandaen-Magian-Druze-ex-Manichaen-Yazidi-Alawi-Arabo-Persian-Kurdish-Turkic civilization, or what Hodgson called the land between the "Nile and Oxus", for a lack of a better term, is how our spiritual "technologies" are profound to a degree that it provides us with an eschatological narrative that allows one to make sense of these insane developments currently taking place, and the current state of dysfunction within our civilization as a whole. The fact that we do not have a proper, or more inclusive, and appropriate, name or term for our civilization is a clear sign of civilizational dissonance. It is also why Spengler uses the term Magian to describe our culture which he saw as more suitable and inclusive of the ethnic and religious plurality. It is no coincidence that India has changed the country's official name to "bharat" recently, a reflection of primordial energies being revived within the Indian subcontinent. Multipolarity will express itself in other aspects of society, beyond the geopolitical, which is clearly what is occurring here. Yet back to my point, the realization of the power of our real spiritual forms, when the eschatological dimension of current developments reaches a crescendo, will inevitably lead to a revival at the civilizational level. It leads to conclude that some civilizations, and cultures, require intense suffering prior to reviving themselves.

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What most people tend to misunderstand concerning civilizational dynamics is the role nations and people play within them. The modern misconception usually asserts that a specific nation or ethnicity guides a specific civilization which somewhat oversimplifies the quite complex dynamics at play, and underplays the role of kultur within the history, the present, and future. Some nations lie within the borders of civilizations, or crossroads, we have many such regions emerging globally as we enter a multipolar order. The Silk Road region has always played a role as a "nervous system" connecting different civilizations globally, a form of globalization of a Eurasian form prior to the Atlanticist Western form of globalization, and current Californian planetization of the world through technics -- there is actually alot in common between Silicon Valley and the Silk Road as forces inter-connecting different realms. The morphological connection is quite clear, but the difference is seen in the terminology being used to describe each of the nervous systems, the "Silk" road based on an organic item of a specific zeitgeist and culture across time, and silicon as the primary material of our own current time, as one of primary materials in microprocessors.

Other periphery areas between civilizations, the Sahel within Africa, the Levant as a crossroads of empires, the region between Central America and the Southern borders of the US, all these are civilizational borders, or what Huntington called "cleft" regions, which would experience geopolitical, social, cultural, and economic tremors as we continue to head towards the imminent "Clash of Civilizations". The different civilizations across the globe can be viewed here as tectonic plates, all currently being revived simultaneously, and as a result, some would move towards one another, leading to the aforementioned geopolitical and cultural "tremors". I do not rule out the possibility of civilizations that remain static, albeit attempting to revive their primordial forms and spirit, not all cultures are expansive like the West, or if they are, they are expansive in their own unique ways, take a look at India and China for instance. All in all, the civilizational boundaries are experiencing clear tensions today, and the different nations within those zones will play a significant role in the geopolitical developments to come.

Back to my main point, civilizations are all made up of a number of different nations and groups, thus, some nations can exist across different civilizations simultaneously, expressing themselves in different forms in the different civilizational zones. Turcoman tribes in Iraq are experiencing a different cultural reality than Turkic peoples within Russian civilization, and Chinese civilization (East Turkestan). This can be seen in the architectural forms they adopt, the linguistic forms, and at times religious elements as well. The Turkic nations are quite the geopolitical and civilizational anomaly. First, as a nation they seem to be situated in between two separate civilizational spaces, the Russian Orthodox Eurasian sphere, and the Islamic Middle Eastern world. Their extended nature is also a reminder of their nomadic origins, and thus their own national spirit, volkgeist, is one that is expansive in that sense. This national expansiveness is today embodied trans-nationally by the Turkic council today as a confederal between the different Turkic states which dominate a large region, and perhaps most crucial region, of the old Silk Road. This expansiveness, in my judgement, is what gives them an edge when compared to Slavs, who although also share a nomadic spirit, it is more of a "semi-" nomadic spirit when compared to the Turkic or Mongol nations. As Huntington's "cleft" regions ignite within a new multipolar order, the Turkic nations, guided by a hawkish Turkish foreign policy as seen in Erdogan's recent geopolitical stunts, will play a crucial role. The nomadic nature of this specific nation allows it to transcend the civilizational at will, and move towards national and tribal affiliation, thus the primary concern shifts from the civilization (China, Russian, or Islamic civilization) to the tribe or nation. This, in my judgement, is what gives the Turks an edge, geopolitically and militarily, and could significantly damage Russia if a clash occurs in the near future, and which seems to be imminent in the long run. Finally, and tragically if I may add, my recent conversations with family and friends in Russia, and friends from Turkic lands, reveal a clear antagonism between both of these worlds, that is quite entrenched and deep, and hateful, that one cannot help but predict a clash between them. This I heard from professionals on both sides, and all stratums of both societies, especially in Central Asian regions, and the cities in Russia. I cannot help but remember the comments of Russian mystic Konstantin Leontiev, on the similarity between the Turk and Russian, and how the destiny of both of these nations seem to be intertwined. Berdyaev has described the Russian people, as an eschatological one, I cannot recall what he had said about the Turks, but I can imagine he probably had some interesting things to say about them and their destiny.

Definition:

Due to the complex nature of this topic, I thought it would be fitting to begin with an excerpt from Nick Nielsen’s recent post on Spengler’s concept of cultural pseudomorphosis titled “Permutations of Pseudomorphosis”, where he provides a brief description of the concept:

The term “pseudomorphosis” is from geology (or mineralogy). A Dictionary of Geological Terms (Anchor, 1974) that I happen to have to hand gives this definition of pseudomorph:

“A crystal, or apparent crystal, having the outward form proper to another species of mineral, which it has replaced by substitution or by chemical alteration.”

Spengler doesn’t get around to his explicit discussion of pseudomorphosis until the second volume of The Decline of the West, Chapter VII, “Problems of the Arabian Culture.” In the first paragraph of this chapter Spengler gives an account of pseudomorphosis similar to that above, and in the next paragraph he describes the analogous use of the term that applies to history rather than geology:

“By the term ‘historical pseudomorphosis’ I propose to designate those cases in which an older alien Culture lies so massively over the land that a young Culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific expression-forms, but even to develop fully its own self-consciousness. All that wells up from the depths of the young soul is cast in the old moulds, young feelings stiffen in senile works, and instead of rearing itself up in its own creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that grows to be monstrous.”

Spengler admits that all cultures go through a form of pseudomorphosis, albeit some in more severe form than others. The Mesoamerican, Chinese and Egyptian are exceptions to the rule due to their culturally isolated geographic locations . As Nielsen argued:

The first obvious generalization of pseudomorphosis is that it admits of degrees of greater or less. I would be willing to go further and say that pseudomorphosis is rarely entirely absent; it’s a matter of whether the pseudomorphosis is a sufficient constraint on a culture that it results in distorting the culture, thus the kind of moral reaction that Spengler describes. Low level pseudomorphosis can pass with very little notice and little power to result in the malformation of a culture.

Nielsen’s argument here reminds me of Adorno’s critical description of Spengler’s philosophy of history, where he argued that Spengler had a habit, or a gift perhaps, of creating self-immunizing concepts, that cannot be refuted, nor accepted. In my judgement, his concept of pseudomorphosis is a perfect example of such “self-immunizing” effects in his philosophy of history.

The Case of India:

With that all being said, if we take his concept quite seriously, and extend it beyond the extreme cases of Russia and Arabia, it could be argued that an acute form of pseudomorphosis was present within the Indian subcontinent due to Alexander’s adventurism. There are many examples of this, including but not limited to, the rise of Greco-Buddhist Gandharan sculptures across the Indian culture. Although the Indian art form included sculptures prior to the late pseudomorphic effect, the sculptures never embodied any form of idealistic realism as seen within Greco-Roman sculptures – this specific art form would have been totally alien to the Indian culture and soul. Yet, following the rise of Buddhism we witness the emergence of a totally new art form within India that somewhat resonate with the Greco-Roman sculptures. One could argue that this is a form of late pseudomorphosis since the sculptures were not a perfect reflection of the Greco-Roman temperament and world-outlook, but instead these sculptures displayed elements inherent to the Indian culture. Primarily, as once argued, the Buddha’s closed eyes within most Greco-Buddhist statues are a manifestation of the Indian soul and prime symbol – the Hindu concept of maya, or illusion. Although, both the Greco-Roman and Hindu cultures possess ahistorical souls, the Greco-Roman appreciated the near and present as evident within their art and architectural forms, whilst the Indian soul denied the present as well, to the Indian man everything is maya. During the emergence of syncretism in sculptures and arts within Bactria (modern day Afghanistan) and Gandhara, we notice the appearance of Greco-Roman Corinthian columns with Indian touches, namely Indo-Corinthian capitals. Demonstrating that the Indian culture could has experienced a mild form of pseudomorphosis since the Classical cultural influences infiltrated the artistic and architectural forms, and is not simply an example of syncretism between two cultures. Moreover, it is crucial to remember that Spenglerian cultures are not fixed-static, rather, they move, migrate, overlap, clash, and at times converge, as clearly seen with the concept of cultural pseudomorphosis. Thus, as the Greco-Roman and Indian worlds converged, the Magian culture also managed to permeate Indian culture and shape specific forms, as seen with the Mauryan Empire in the Indian subcontinent where the three worlds collided. Artistic forms are always the best indicators of emergent cultures, and at times, convergence of cultures. Pataliputra, the capital of the Mauryan Empire, gave birth to its unique rectangular capital with volutes on top of its columns, in what seemed to blend the Greek, Persian, and Indian forms into one, leading to an original pseudomorphic design. The rectangular shape in itself was a clear indication of Achaemanid influence, the design and volutes of Greek influence, all expressing themselves in an Indian form.

Cultural Crossroads & Islands:

In Spengler’s second philosophy of history he leaves space for interaction between different cultures, like Toynbee does, exploring the degree to which the convergence of cultures has given birth to unique cultures. This approach clearly is a shift from Spengler’s earlier philosophy of history where the focus was primarily on the heartland of every respective culture, where he instead emphasizes the interactions at the borders of different civilizations. I could not help but notice this myself when traveling to the Caucasus, the feeling of being at the area where three worlds overlap, and at times, collide. This is perhaps the feeling one would also get upon visiting the Balkans which is another hotspot of cultural-civilizational interaction, a region where the Orthodox, Western, and Islamic worlds overlap. The borders of civilizations are the most turbulent, or volatile, when two cultures start moving towards one another subsequently leading to a clash which usually occurs at the border regions, or what Huntington called “cleft” regions. Huntington compared civilizations to tectonic plates, thus if they move towards one another, the cleft regions would witness “geopolitical” or “social” tremors, this is how he was successfully able to predict the war in Ukraine two decades before its occurrence. That all being said, the borders of civilizations are also characterized by fruitful transactions between different cultures, and could be essentially compared to a central nervous system, connecting different human cultures globally. Yet, clearly, this comes with a price, as seen with the examples above. However, when large cultural zones are static, these areas usually flourish, producing a unique mode of organization that is distinct from higher-cultures yet connected to them, such is the case with the Silk Road, Sassanid Empire, and the Levant, or what are called “cross-roads” of civilizations. In Spengler’s second philosophy of history he distinguishes the Sassanid Empire as a unique phenomenon amongst civilizations describing it as “a most decisive creation at the crossroads of four high cultures”.

As an undergrad student, I had once visited one of my professors to discuss some matters relating to the course material. Funnily enough, that course was one which focused on the development of world cultures across history. Almost implicitly, the course was designed in a manner similar to Spengler’s historical model, and this was years before I had even read Spengler or Toynbee. Revisiting one’s own past circumstances sometimes allow one to realize that their own life’s trajectory is not coincidental or a matter of chance, but there is indeed a sort of entelechy or telos manifest in each individual’s life. At the office, as Professor Giovannucci was looking for the specific course material I had asked for, my eyes caught sight of a peculiar drawing behind her, it was a sort of Middle Eastern magic lamp with smoke or mist rising from it, and oddly, the mist itself eventually forms the shape of a country. Being obsessed with geography when I was younger, I had come to memorize the shapes of most islands, states, and ancient kingdoms as well. I instantly figured out that the depicted country was actually an island, namely, Sicily. I then immediately asked her:

“Is that a drawing of Sicily?”

“Yes it is?! How did you know?” she asked, almost shocked.

“You could say I am blessed with a photographic memory”, I said laughing.

“That is quite the gift” she said, smiling.

“Why a Moorish lamp though? Is it because of the brief Islamic conquests of Sicily?”, I asked her.

“Indeed, Sicily to me is a unique case culturally speaking, have you been to Palermo? If not, you MUST – it is a city which keeps alive all of those diverse cultural elements. Byzantine, Arab, Latin, Norman – it’s all there. You must see the palace of the Norman king, Roger, who patronized a multicultural golden age. The palace itself and, especially, its chapel, the Cappella Palatina, was created by Muslim and Christian architects and artisans in a composite of characteristic styles. Even the food reflects this heritage. It is a fascinating city and you will love it, especially with a historian’s eye.”.

Reflecting upon this dialogue I have had with one of my professors who had indirectly instilled a passion and eye for cultural interactions and dynamics, made me realize the unique nature of islands across history. Several speculative philosophies of history based their analysis of cultures on the intrinsic connection between a certain people or nation and their respective land-geography and climate (Herder, Spengler, Toynbee, and to a lesser degree Hegel). Islands, geographically, and spiritually, exist in isolation of other land masses. Thus, this geographic isolation allows the island to retain cultural forms in a sort of static state historically-speaking. The island is not only isolated geographically, but also from world-history, and goes through its shorter historical cycles that are more in tune with natural cycles. Yet of course, this may vary depending on the island’s significance within events of world-historical significance. Hawaii may have been in such a static cyclical-natural state, but its absorption into the United States, and involvement in the Second World War has placed it briefly within World History — and has made it, effectively, a geographic arena where Western destiny plays out. That all being said, when eventually history moves beyond such events, the islands then return back to their static states. When viewing the cultural interactions that occur in such islands through a longue durée, the historically static nature of islands makes them function almost as time capsules. This leads to a retention of cultures as mentioned earlier, and in some cases, the rise of fascinating cases of syncretism and synthesis — hybrid cultures. This is seen perfectly in the cases of Sicily and Malta, both situated in the Mediterranean where the destiny of three high-cultures converge. It is also seen in the peculiar case of Hawaii, where the Japanese cultural elements have been retained for centuries. The same argument can be applied to Zanzibar, and the retention of Magian, Western, as well as the original African forms there, though the harsher climatic conditions of tropical islands make them more susceptible to the cycles of nature rather than the directionality of history — the extreme humidity and heat leads to less retention of cultural forms due to erosion.

The Faustian West:

When exploring the case of Faustian Western culture, it is evident that more than two cultures overlap within specific regions. This is apparent within the south of Europe, more importantly this phenomenon occurs in extreme forms within islands. Sicily, due to its secluded nature harnessed impulses from three different cultures leading to the formation of a unique amalgamation of Byzantine, Moorish, Nordic cultures. The Islamic-Byzantine craft-arts, for instance, invaded the young Western culture and imposed an alien art form that came to be embraced within the Carolingian empire. The unity between the round arch and the column is another Magian architectural design adopted in the West prior to the development of the Gothic form. Spengler marks Italy as the spot where the Faustian, Classical and Magian cultures meet, he describes it as a “Byzantine-tinted Gothic”. Prior to the birth of the Gothic style, Italy embraced the Moorish culture in the South and the Byzantine in the East. Thus, Spengler argued, when the Gothic first flourished within Italy it entrenched itself with so much passion – due to the existence of other competitive tendencies in art and music. Yet, it was still resisted by non-Gothic forces. To comprehend what Spengler was trying to convey here it is vital to briefly explore Spengler’s view of the renaissance. First off, Spengler’s rejection of the tripartite periodization of world-history almost necessitates a negation of the renaissance and enlightenment, or at least, a radically different view of these movements when compared to the views espoused by mainstream historians. The renaissance is viewed by Spengler as “a revolt against the spirit of the Faustian forest music of counterpoint”. Although it was dependent on the forms of the Western Gothic feeling, such as linear and depth perspective in painting – with the introduction of the never-ending vanishing point within renaissance art as the artistic embodiment of the Faustian obsession for infinite space. The very essence of the renaissance was anti-Gothic, whilst the baroque as a reactionary movement represented a continuation of the Gothic. Spengler argued that the complexity in renaissance research, stems from the fact that it is difficult to determine the purpose or aim of the movement, yet it is quite simple to define what the movement is opposing. The renaissance, as a counter-movement to the Gothic world feeling, failed in its essential purpose, that is, to renew or revive the Classical-Byzantine world feeling with a Magian-Moorish veil. The reason for this is the fact that the movement was contradictory. The movement revolted against a specific world feeling, yet it espoused musical and artistic methods that were Gothic in essence. Finally, an additional factor of the Western predisposition to pseudomorphosis is the Magian origin of Christianity. Under Spengler’s philosophy of history, a culture is born only through the beginning of a new religion within its respective motherland. Hence, it could be argued that the overarching religious structure of the West is distorted, and if Christianity or Manicheanism never set foot upon Europe we would have witnessed a form of Nordic-Germanic religion with the eddas functioning as the foundation texts. With that being said, the whole underlying structure of Western civilization, whether it be described as Judeo-Christian or purely Western, exhibits what Spengler terms a “Nordic prime-feeling of Viking Gothic”. Thus, even if the Western culture’s whole underlying infrastructure was based upon an alien religion, the culture did not yield to these alien ideas. Instead they modified and altered these alien forms in order to unleash their true world-feeling without any form of hindrance as witnessed within other cultures. The same could be said about the Classical culture, that was unquestionably influenced by Egyptian culture but possessed a robust cultural immune system to resist any underlying effects on the growth of the culture. In my essay titled “Faustian Hubris Versus Magian Piety”, I discussed how this phenomenon, the Christian veneer in Western culture, is almost a historically necessary phenomenon rather than a pseudomorphosis per se. We could describe it as “acute” pseudomorphosis, but unlike the case of the Magian culture and Greco-Roman hegemony, or Russia with the West today, this acute pseudomorphosis was necessary to Spengler. Why? Primarily because the Faustian tendency of Western culture would essentially lead to a diabolic expression of its forms, to a degree that is so unnatural to history compared to previous cultural expressions. Thus, as I said before, and Spengler repeated multiple times, the Christian veneer is a restraining force that balances out the Faustian tendencies in the West. Every era where the Faustian expressions are released is usually followed by an era where these Faustian tendencies are suppressed by the Christian spirit in the West. A quick overview of Western history will give you an idea of what Spengler was alluding to here. However, even Christianity was not able to suppress the Faustian tendencies, not only did Western culture transform Christianity, but it had evidently killed God. Thus, if this is seen as an acute form of pseudomorphosis, that is destined and thus necessary due to the unique nature of the West, and is currently perhaps almost fully shed off, what would emerge out of the West within the final stages of its civilizational development?

In the following essay, I provide a thorough explanation of Spenglerian Optimism through discussing the primordial forms of speculative philosophy of history across time, and where we could locate Spenglerian Optimism amongst the different forms of philosophy of history that have existed in the past. Moreover, I go through some of the ideas presented by Stephen Clark, who coined the term in question, and his critique of Spengler’s extreme pessimism concerning the rise of a new high-culture. The essay also explores some powerful examples of Spenglerian Optimism that have been published on Substack, more specifically, ’s recent contribution on the topic, titled “Aegean Civilization”. Finally, the essay describes the different scenarios Spengler provides beyond the decline of the West, and how this shapes the project as a whole.

Stephen R. L. Clark’s paper introducing the concept of “Spenglerian Optimism” begins with a reaffirmation of Oswald Spengler’s pessimism, to the author of The Decline of the West (1917), the future is one of imminent decline, as Clark argued:

Our future, the future of “Faustian” humanity, can only be a long-drawn-out decline into a culturally stagnant, caste-divided, irreligious, inconsequential order of “fellaheen”.

This pessimism was not only unique to Spengler, but permeated within the rest of the episteme in Western culture, Wittgenstein, Blish, Kerouac, Toynbee, Chesterton, and Yeats, all shared this sense of pessimism and a bleak outlook for what the future holds. Yet, as Clark pointed, and I shall expand on here, this specific sociocultural phenomenon in itself, this sense of despair and pessimism during the 20th century, was not observed beyond the West, it was a uniquely Western phenomenon. Greg Swer had recently mentioned how Spengler himself argued for the relativity of his own theory, not only was history relative, but also truth, philosophy, and also his own specific philosophy of history — relevant to a specific place, time, and perhaps culture. This extreme relativism, combined with a quasi-positivism, is what Swer had called the “comparative paradox”. But what does this mean to us today a century after Spengler had published his philosophy of history, and future, in The Decline of the West (1917). This reveals a profound realization: the relativity of knowledge, and historicity of all phenomenon, combined with directionality (forward movement) of historical time, and our present gift of hindsight, could mean that Spengler’s philosophy of history could be amended — adjusted to a different time, culture, and new possible historical futures. As Clark mentioned, the Western civilization, which he and Spengler are both a part of, is not the rest of humankind: first, this means that even though the West is dying, it can still hope to “achieve great things”. Second, and more importantly, “Even if the Faustian Culture were entirely moribund there may already be another more youthful Culture beginning to find its Springtime”. Finally, even if these alternative Cultures—futures, are not currently present, they could appear spontaneously before our eyes. Moreover, Spengler’s philosophy of history as a whole emphasizes the theme of tragedy when witnessing history unfold through the rise and fall of cultures. This pessimism, which I have discussed in previous papers, is quite profound, precisely because the tragedy seems to close with an ultimate tragedy, which Spengler attributed to the rise of modernity — that is, modernity as an anti-cultural force. Farrenkopf, who has written extensively about Spengler’s work, has noticed this pessimism grow in Spengler as he grew older. Spengler could not help but notice the mechanization of the Earth, distorting its very face, with its animals, plants, and even human tribes and nations. The Goethean methodology Spengler deploys within his world-history, is one that focuses on the organic, plant-like, development of high-cultures, as seen in Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants (1790). Every culture emerges from a specific homeland, of which it has an intrinsic connection to, hence why the prime symbol of every culture is developed through the connection between a specific people and their own land — their unique ecological origin. Prior to modernity, these specific “ecological origins” were fertile, and untouched, thus, capable of giving birth to their respective cultures. Modern industrial society, however, has caused a sort of ecological deterioration, as seen with industrial society’s war with nature, at a deeper level, the lands could now also possibly not be capable of producing another high-culture, precisely because of the mechanizing effects of modernity, its expansiveness and transformative implications. When viewed metaphysically, this is quite a scary realization, if true, since the teleological development of Spenglerian high-cultures would come to an end, and the Earth — life — would have no purpose for the continued existence Man, especially in his hyper-modern anti-natural form. Spengler predicted the end of man, through a natural cataclysm, and even when he absorbs linearity—directionality, his cyclical philosophy of history is transformed into a spiral, which spirals upwards into the ultimate tragedy — to a crescendo, an apocalyptic end as a result of Man’s war with nature. If, however, by some miracle, industrial society — modernity as a whole, collapses, then Man could have another chance to give birth to new cultures that could have it as their sole purpose to heal this severance with nature, the spirit, and life.

The purpose of my project, is to allow us to imagine these possible futures, philosophies of history, to me, are basic human concerns. Philosophizing about the nature of history—time, patterns in history, its directionality, its meaning, and values, are natural to every human. But more than that, every specific philosophy of history is a different vision for a possible future, and his its own unique social, political, ecological, technological, and economic implications. This explains the last, and perhaps most original, element within philosophies of history, its predictive elements and aspirations. The purpose of my own project, is to produce optimistic visions of Spenglerian philosophies of history with the sole purpose of producing visions that would lead to the birth of new human cultures, revive older petrified cultures, heal sickened cultures, and re-discover lost ones. During the past four years I have explored the vast literature on the development of philosophy of history across time, and in doing so I have noticed that philosophy of history, as a modern mode of knowledge, finds its origins in the intersection between apocalyptical-eschatological traditions, cosmologies and cosmogonies, and mythical grand-narratives. Hence why Augustine is seen as one of the first examples of a speculative philosopher of history across time, and of course there are many other examples, such as the Hindi Yuga Cycles, Monotheistic eschatological narratives, and even Greco-Roman cyclical conceptions of time as seen in the works of Hesiod and Plato for instance. That all being said, as Karl Lowith has pointed out in his work on the development of philosophy of history across history, namely, Meaning in History (1949), there seems to be perennial constants, or models, at play here, a cyclical pagan conception of time, perfectly embodied in the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros ( ⥀ ) which finds its expression in the Yuga cycles and Greco-Roman cyclicality, and the Monotheistic idea of eschatological directionality ( → ), as seen in Judeo-Christian-Islamic eschatological narratives. A third type eventually evolves out of the Enlightenment according to Lowith, which is essentially a modern inversion, or secularization, of the monotheistic Judeo-Christian-Islamic notion of eschatological direction. This third position is what we would today call the linear-progressive ( ↗ ) secular vision which is essentially inseparable from the spirit of modernity, if it even has a spirit, it is however a force, clearly, and a force to be reckoned with … unfortunately. The 20th century has witnessed, in my judgement, a synthesis of the two older, and more organic conceptions of time as a result of the enforcement of an inorganic-artificial linear notion of time embodied by the modern idea of linear-progress. This new conception is that of a spiral conception of time, which affirms the cyclicality of nature—space, what Spengler had called “world as nature”, and the directionality of history—time, of gradual organic progression in the Herderian sense of the term, rather than the Enlightenment progress, which is a reflection of the other realm, and perhaps the most dominant realm for us humans, the realm of historical-time which Spengler called “world as history”. The spiral is the final form that Spengler’s philosophy of history takes, and it merges perfectly the realms of time and space into one, not the Einsteinian flawed notion of spacetime, but the real synthesis of the realms of space and time that dominate what Kant had called the phenomenal and noumenal worlds, spatially represented by the symbol of the spiral— 𖦹 . The spiral conception of time is the guiding principle of the emerging paradigm which negates and transcends the outdated and currently dominant materialistic scientific paradigm. Thus, it was only natural that Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin vehemently attacked speculative philosophies of history as a whole, ridiculing the notions of pattern, meaning, and directionality in history, for they were adherents to the worst forms of the Enlightenment conception of progress that was materialist in every sense and devoid of any spirit. Leading to a negation of time itself, a flawed conception of the past, and history. Both Popper and Berlin instead preferred a hubris filled scientificized form of history, in the form of an advanced sociology, or social dynamics, paired with the fields of social engineering and social physics, where the human is reduced to a simple cog or battery within a larger Frankenstein-like machine, an abomination of a culture — hyper-modernity. To move beyond such conceptions, an alternative paradigm emerges with the works of Karl Jaspers, Oswald Spengler, Rudolf Steiner, Rene Guenon, and other thinkers that have worked around the periphery of the dominant corrupt modern paradigm. Today however, as the outdated paradigms are exhausted, alternative paradigms emerge to fill their place, and the spiral paradigm will definitely emerge as one of the dominant paradigms out of many — leading to new possible futures. However, the upward-rolling spiral that Spengler envisioned, as opposed to the Hegelian Western moving spiral, cannot be deployed properly when combined with a purely pessimistic position. I do not usually, or perhaps ever, say that Spengler was wrong, indeed, even when it comes to his own extreme late pessimism, he was not wrong at all. For Spengler was a human after all, and one thing that many Spenglerians tend to forget, is this specific fact. A position of Spenglerian Optimism is thus only possible through humanizing Spengler, moving beyond the eternal death-stare of Decline that he is today known for. As humans, when exploring, or appreciating, Spengler’s own life as a human, we are faced with an individual of immense depth, but also facing an entrenched traumatic experience that perfectly explains how he had created such a profoundly complex and creative philosophy of history. However, it is our duty today, with the blessings of our own hindsight, growing up in an age of relative stability, and currently at the threshold between that stability and a return of history with all its chaotic vicissitudes, to liberate Spengler’s philosophy of history from its natural pessimism of its own relative zeitgeist.

Clark reconciles the doomsayer in Spengler, who affirms decline, with the optimistic cultural relativist, by arguing that if we were to take Spengler’s philosophy of history seriously we would realize that universalizing the Decline is in itself a symptom of a culture in its civilizational stage or winter period. Whether we do so in a Spenglerian manner, or Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis, both arguments are true but cannot be applied to all human cultures. In Clark’s words, “The claim itself epitomizes Spengler’s ‘Civilized’ humanity”, and thus, the future opens up once more, concerning the future and present Spenglerian cultures, Clark said:

We cannot know what new spirit or image will awaken to entrance and animate humanity, what “rough beast,” in Yeats’s terms, is “slouching toward Bethlehem to be born” (whether for good or ill), nor even what new thought will reconstruct our own science or our society.

Clark also quotes Wittgenstein’s own argument concerning these possible futures, which he argued in a quite Spenglerian manner:

When we think of the world’s future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction.

To Clark, Spengler’s own philosophy of history is in itself intrinsically optimistic concerning the possibility of new human cultures beyond the Faustian West, as Spengler said, all cultures emerge from the sleep of the “ever-childish humanity”, as a “form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring” — in the words of William Irwin Thompson, a conscious expression of the unconscious. These cultures to Spengler bloom on the soil of an “exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound”, indeed they have done so across world history. Yet, how many of these lands still remain fertile? how many lands and seas, in the vastness of our planet, with all its continents and oceans, have still not expressed their own spirit and forms? What of the Siberian and Eurasian steppes and plains? The Arido-American plane? What of the Polynesian islands in the Pacific Ocean, and the Far Eastern archipelagos? Surely, humanity still has the spiritual and organic capacity to live — to give birth to a new culture and resume our trajectory in the spiral of historical time. The pessimism about the future, clearly stems from the existential crisis brought about by modernity. Spengler was aware of the anti-cultural characteristics of modernity, and this has also clearly shaped his late pessimism, after having experienced its transformative powers permeating and corrupting all aspects of the human realm from art, to architecture, war, and science. Frobenius possessed an extremely pessimistic vision of the future prior to Spengler, witnessing the globalized and expansive characteristics of modernity, he had eventually argued that this could poison the whole planet and perhaps we could never witness the birth of a new culture:

For when it is considered what constantly increasing expansion the 'modern' culture assumes with its machines of motion, its news service, its economic needs, how book printing, newspaper, and telephone service draw wider and wider areas into their sphere of power, so it is not difficult to calculate in how short a time the entire habitable space of the earth will be spun over with these preparatory organs of a mechanical age and its actualities, so that no people of the earth will remain any more in the enjoyment of its undisturbed and secluded state, which is necessary in order to develop (the ideals leading to high culture].

Thus, it is clear that Spenglerian Optimism is in itself a critique of modernity, since modernity as a force is now seen as the primary antagonist in this re-imagined Spenglerian narrative. Instead of a pessimistic Spenglerian vision which pushes each culture against the other, all separated like Leibnizian monads, the optimistic vision emphasizes the human element found in all cultures whilst respecting their uniqueness. The spiral unifies all cultures in a fight for their sovereignty as cultures against modernity. As John Farrenkopf argued, the early Spengler hoped that a future culture would emerge but was aware that this was contingent on the collapse of modernity to pave the way for a “non-modernistic spirit to take root”. That is, if that collapse does not itself lead to the eschaton, or the fulfillment of multiple eschatological realities materializing Ragnarok, John’s apocalypse, the Kali Yuga, and the end of the Mayan great cycle all at once.

On the possibility of a new culture Clark asserts that the new birth cannot be “imagined before-hand”, and could occur almost instantaneously, or is “happening already”, that is, the emergence of a new world-view and conception of the universe that is different from the Western, Magian, and Apollonian forms. He also argued that the birth of the new culture would need to occur far away from current existing cultures and civilizations, which is indeed a plausible argument. Especially considering the fact that some cultures have been born in close proximity to older cultures, the Magian, the Faustian Western, and a potential new Russian culture. Yet, some cultures have also been born in isolation from other cultures, such as the Chinese and the Mesoamerican cultures. But perhaps what fascinated me the most about Clark’s argument here, is his rejection of Virgil’s conception of humankind, that is, humankind as a single oikoumene that share one destiny within Earthly existence. Rather, Clark envisions a future filled with successors, who if possessing a Spenglerian conception of history will look back at our on specific times and view the birth of their own new culture with the gift of hindsight, which we ourselves cannot comprehend yet due to the relativity of time—history, and culture. I describe Clark’s rejection of Virgil as an interesting precisely because the most elaborate and profound example of Spenglerian optimism to have been materialized recently was one where the author named his new Spenglerian culture using an eponym from Virgil’s magnum opus, namely, the Aenid. The author, who goes by the username Tree of Woe, describes the emergence of a new possible civilization — the Aenean Civilization — that embodies the shift from “infinity”, as expressed by the Faustian Western culture, to “liminality”: the affirmation that humanity stands at an existential threshold — liminal space. Realizing liminal space, means to possess a position of eschatological realism, believing that humanity could perish, whilst finding the hope necessary to transcend such realities. Thus, somewhat like the Magian culture, the Aenean civilization is somewhat dualistic, based on the duality of “destruction and destiny” and “depletion and rejuvenation”. First off, the author here gives us a perfect glimpse of what Spenglerian optimism would look like in practice, and I advise everyone to read his impeccable work on this specific topic. Yet it is ironic that the author himself names the civilization after a character from Virgil’s epic, who is not only a character from a now dead civilization, the Greco-Roman, but also from Virgil himself who possessed a view of mankind that is incompatible with the Spenglerian model (the problem with this becomes clear when realizing that all of the eponyms used for Spengler’s cultures emerge from the cultures themselves, Faust and the West, Apollo and Greece, the Magi and the Judeo-Christian-Islamic culture, Spengler also compared the tragedy of the Prophet Job to the Magian culture as a whole), as Clark argued: “We need not suppose, like Virgil, that humankind is a single thing, to be redeemed from the Iron Age by divine fiat”. I say this because although the author constructs a powerful futuristic vision based on Spenglerian optimism, the vision in itself is flawed. Which is only a natural mistake, that had already occurred to many bright minds in the past. Kant for instance had inaugurated the field of speculative philosophy of history within Western thought —designated the field’s subject matter, possible units of analysis, and objective, yet produced a philosophy of history that was not perfect when compared to the model produced by his student, Herder. The reason why this specific vision is flawed, is because it does not adhere to Spengler’s model of cultural development. In other words, the author did not take into consideration Spengler’s laws when drawing his own vision. For instance, if an Aenean civilization is emerging, and it is an organic high-culture, it should have a specific ecological origin or homeland from where it derives its respective prime symbol, ethos, and spirit. There does not seem to be any specific ecological origin to this culture, at least not an organic one. There are also specific indicators of a potential high-culture that are quite straight forward, such as the emergence of a new artistic, architectural, religious, or political form, or even new methods of disposing the dead — such as the case of mummification in Egypt, the Towers of Silence in Persia, cremation in India and Greece, and several other forms connected to other unique cultures. Additionally, when a specific architectural form is presented, it is essentially not a unique one, but rather, a modern Western form. That said, the author describes the form as one which does not emphasize straight lines, or Faustian verticality, but instead orients towards “arches, gateways, and portals” which are symbols of transition. What makes this specific argument problematic, is the fact that Spengler’s form of speculative philosophy of history, despite its deeply metaphysical framework, is a form of realism, and not purely imaginative. Spengler’s higher cultures cannot be manifested or imagined into existence, they should rather be perceived, as Spengler argued, as higher organisms that are born through a peoples connection a specific landscape—ecological origin. Of course, one can argue that the individuals within the culture, especially the ones of world-historical significance, possess a form of intuitive experience with their own culture, and could either help materialize specific realities (Napoleon, Caesar, Alexander), or prophecy, manifest, or foresee their own culture’s future (Plato, St. Augustine, Joachim of Fiore, Hegel, Spengler). But for that process to occur a large amount of people should be present in a specific land that could all be tangibly accounted for, that is, they should exist, for us to at least attempt to argue for their existence within a new, present, or older, culture. Even dead and buried cultures leave tangible traces behind, be it through architecture through the form of megaliths, colosseums, mausoleums, etc., or through texts and scrolls, and even at times different artistic expressions. The cases for new cultures has been made in the past, and the present, Spengler himself has famously argued that a new culture would emerge between the “Vistula and Amur”, that the Slavic and Turkic peoples have an intrinsic connection to. Immediately one cannot help but notice the emergence of a new architectural form as an expression of a new world-view and culture, perfectly embodied by the Russian Orthodox cathedral. Others have additionally argued that a new culture is emerging in what could be called "the Aridoamerican plane”, with the new unique prime symbol of the “radiating sun”. Even here, we witness the emergence of new architectural expressions, that are both tied to the land and people, and reflect the emergence of a new world-view. Thus, I cannot help but ask, if the Aenean civilization exists, where are its own unique architectural expressions beyond the hyper-modern forms presented in the thesis? Moreover, beyond architecture, one of the most critical indicators of a young culture is the birth of a new religious form, and of course being clearly aware of this, the author (Tree of Woe) did not hesitate in speculating what this new religion would look like, again, in a truly creative manner. Yet even then one cannot help but ask whether these realities are actually coming into fruition, or just speculative flights and extremely optimistic imaginations. In the case of Russia, both the ancient elemental paganism — Rodnovery — and Orthodoxy seem to be on the rise. In the Aridoamerican plane, a new form of religiosity seems to be emerging, albeit one that is clearly still in the syncretic state as seen clearly with the cults surrounding Lady of Guadalupe. Prior to continuing, it is crucial to highlight the fact that the author himself does occasionally mention how “highly speculative” his own conceptions of Aenean culture and “liminal religion” are, the latter he described as an “imaginary reconstruction” and the former “remains an emergent ethos, not yet realized and possibly never to be realized at all”. Concerning the possibility of an Aenean civilization and religion, the author said:

At present both these systems of thought are nothing more than houses of cards built atop windy summits. They are as real as the St. Louis Arch on the moon.

Thus, what seems to be occurring here, with the case of Aenean civilization, is a projection of a future mini-golden age that could ensue prior to the end of Western civilization, and not a new culture per se. That is, an optimistic imagination of the fulfillment of Faustian culture through the rise of Caesarism, a Second Religiosity, and the final expression of the Faustian soul through grand-scale engineering and technological projects. The author also explicitly states this, and said “the Aenean soul is not merely the successor to the Faustian; it is its redemption”. In my judgement the Aenean phase, is the final form of the Faustian, one that resolves the Western culture’s obsession with the infinite through liminality, which is only possible through a Second Religiousness, one that has already, and is still, taking place in the West. The Aenean soul, or reality, is thus the swan song of the Faustian West, and not a new Spenglerian high culture.

Yet one cannot dismiss such arguments without considering other types of cultures, or modes of human organization, that Spengler has mentioned across his work. Although Spengler’s work focused on high-cultures, or what we could call a type-d culture, as opposed to the three former primitive types of spiritual and psychological existence: Type-a cultures, or the age of lava, the inception of the human race spreading across the surface of the earth like lava. Type-b cultures, during the crystal era, symbolizing the crystallization or awakening of the human psyche, here the first forms emerge. Type-c cultures, which Spengler spent most of his last years exploring, are what he called Wanderkulturen, wandering or amoebic cultures that were mobile and which preceding the more static-fixed higher cultures that are the subject matter of his Decline of the West. The third “amoebic” type of cultural organization is based on an organic existence, producing languages, individual awareness, tribal collectivity, and artistic forms. Spengler named three Amoebic cultures, Atlantis, Kasch, and Turan. Beyond these are the type-d higher cultures that all descend from previous Amoebic cultures. It is crucial to mention here, that Spengler also questioned whether a new typus of culture could eventually emerge as the most evolved form of human collective existence. What we might call a “type-e culture” the late, and extremely pessimistic, Spengler eventually rejected. However, though Spengler just briefly toyed with this idea, what would have such a culture looked like? Nikolai Kardashev devised the Kardashev scale which presents different possible types of civilizations that could evolve out of our current one which could give us an idea of what that would look like if emergent from our current modern technological paradigms. The first possibility is a “Type I” civilization, that is a planetary civilization which hypothetically harnesses the energy and resources of the planet as a whole. William Irwin Thompson also argued for the possibility of an emerging planetary culture. This is then followed by a “Type II” civilization which is stellar and moves beyond the planet to harnessing the energy of stars through the use of “Dyson Spheres”. The concept of a “break away civilization” is essentially a Type II civilization that splits off, and disconnects, from the planetary civilization. Finally, the “Type III” civilization is a hypothetical civilization that moves beyond planets and stars to include whole galaxies. The concept of an Aenean civilization is one that is still based on the current modern Faustian Western paradigms, and this is clearly seen with the primary objective of the civilization, namely, the “colonization of Mars”. If such a civilization does attain stellar existence, and does indeed evolve into a new typus of culture, then the concept of an Aenean civilization here could be a reality. Yet even then, one would have to question whether such a civilization would not evolve into another mode of collective existence, but remain in the old mould (high-culture), and eventually either die out, as all high cultures do, or remain in a state of perpetual repetition, a sort of eternal recurrence albeit within a Bishop Ring rotating across space meaninglessly. The other possibilities beyond the decline of the West, for Spengler, were either, continuations of the Spenglerian high cultures, such as a possible Russian-Slavic-Orthodox culture, or the other high cultures we are attempting to imagine with the Spenglerian Optimism project. His last prediction, which we have mentioned earlier, is modernity’s war against nature reaching a climax-crescendo with a cataclysmic end, a bang, a natural and cosmic apocalypse. The series of high-cultures stops, and history ends.

All in all, the argument I am attempting to put forward here, is one that considers all the different scenarios when constructing an optimistic Spenglerian narrative. That is, the possibility of continuity of higher cultures in a postmodern world beyond the decline of the West, one or several cultures. Additionally, the possibility of a new typus of civilization, or a break away civilization as well suggesting the continuity of both the older higher cultures and the newer evolved forms. Finally, it is crucial to remember that the project is not only a predictive one, attempting to foresee the future, but also a retrospective one since Spengler argued for the possibility of retrodiction as well — the rediscovery of lost cultures in history. Thus, one can also attempt to sketch a narrative that re-explores hidden cultures of the past, and yes, many would be surprised, but there are many. These cultures, despite being dead and buried, deserve to be heard and given their rightful place amongst other higher cultures. Some have reached the status of high-culture, albeit briefly (Celtic?), whilst others have had the potential to evolve into one, but were either murdered by another culture, or their growth was hampered due to natural reasons (natural disaster or extreme climates, Polynesia, Eskimos). In the next contribution the series I will be going through Toynbee’s concept of abortive and arrested civilizations which will be extremely beneficial to the project as a whole. This might also mean covering Toynbee’s concept of “fossilized” societies, and Spengler’s concept of “wandering-cultures” and its application on some cultures that have emerged alongside high-cultures (Jewish culture embodied in the story of the Wandering Jew, or the Romani Gypsies with their prime symbol of the Caravan). Additionally, and more importantly, we will cover Clark’s concept of “Hidden Cultures” and how this could potentially assist us in identifying hidden cultures among us today, as well as his concept of “New Beginnings” and how it ties to Spengler’s necessary stages, or seasons, of cultures.

While writing about the case of the Magian soul in Oswald Spengler’s philosophy of history this summer, I could not help but notice that his conception of Jesus Christ, at least when dealing with this specific culture residing over the Middle East today, was surprisingly similar to the Islamic view of the character in question. That said, Spengler’s cultural relativism – his appreciation of every culture’s uniqueness in time and space – means that he does not impose this specific view of Jesus Christ on other cultures like the West and the Russian Orthodox, who both have their unique perspectives on this significant figure within the history of humanity, and the cosmos.

In my own philosophy of history, and spiritual journey, Jesus Christ is seen as a turning point not only in world history, but the cosmos as a whole, the only exception in history, and philosophy of history as a whole. If my own philosophy of history affirms Spengler’s cyclicality in the earthly realm, the repetition of specific forms of different human cultures in time and space, arguing that no specific sociopolitical, economic, and artistic phenomena are unique in themselves, but rather, what makes them unique are the specific cultures they arise from. Then my argument here, in a quasi-Hegelian manner, is that Jesus Christ in himself is the only unique event across human history, that, in the words of Hegel “can happen only once”. For although every culture in world history, the Western, Islamic, Chinese, Indian, and others, are unique in their own right, they are all cultural organisms that share a similarity as modes of human organization. Thus, again, the only exception is Jesus himself, and this is perhaps what makes this specific figure play a significant role in the development of all the cultures that have emerged after his birth, namely, the Magian-Islamic, Western, and Orthodox cultures. The biblical notion of Jesus as the Logos is embodied here historically, as a gateway towards the Meta-physical — God, beyond the cyclical destruction of the cosmos. His birth initiates eschatological directionality of the cosmos, and his return fulfills and transcends it.

If the shape of time was that of an Analemma, then the birth of Jesus Christ represents the center of it. Some esoteric traditions also believe that as the center of time—history, anything occurring before and after the '0' event are parallel to one another, but occurring in the reverse manner. Hegel believed in this as well, people tend to ignore the profoundly esoteric nature of his work, which is quite annoying when you see him say this in his philosophy of history. Read Persian history and keep an eye on the transition from BC to AD, quite the thing really. This concept is based on the argument that the existence of Jesus, and his very being in time and space, could be seen as the only exception within the past-present-future continuum. (Khidr, the Celtic Green man, exists primarily beyond phenomenal space; of course some other characters could be mentioned here Enoch etc. but they play a secondary role in the overarching narrative). Spengler, and other philosophers of history also say something almost similar, which I will build upon this next year. But to grasp this concept, take a closer and deeper look at the dominant periodization of our time, BC - 0 - AD, although our historiography is chronological, the exception, and point ‘0’ event is based on the figure of Jesus Christ and his own life. Before his birth our periodization and chronology is inverted, and after his birth it is organized into a logical chronological order as embodied by the Western tripartite periodization model, namely, Ancient-Medieval-Modern.

I will be describing this in further detail with a long paper I will post on my substack next year. A lot of this is from my own spiritual journey, alongside my academic research on philosophy of history. Once you understand this specific concept it leads you to a wonderful, and perhaps to some scary, realization. I build this from the esoteric concept of history, that is, history beyond Jesus' life — eschatology — is history in reverse order. I know it is quite confusing, as are all deep spiritual and metaphysical ideas, it is essentially hard to put into words. A lot of this I have retained from my own spiritual journey that I actually struggle to put into words, where the ideas can be felt, but not spoken. This conclusion is the result of primarily all Abrahamic texts, alongside Hegelian and Spenglerian philosophy of history, as well as writings from the esoteric traditions. Additionally, Jonathan Black's Secret History of the World, quite an odd book, but for some reason completely changed my life, also shaped these specific ideas.

Again, to go back to the practical application of the Analemma, it is not just an abstract idea. It is quite clear, Jesus as the Center point, and the analemma returns into itself at one point. Thus what I am suggesting is the shape of infinity, or analemma, as the model for a universal history of man. A big history that is soul centric and not reductionist like David Christian's Big History project. Once you ultimately realize the eschatological dimension of such a model of universal history you will get what I meant above concerning the profound implications if such a model is correct. Today then, we are living in our modern Babylon akin to Abraham during 2000 BC. We also seem to be approaching the inflection point once more, but remember, everything occurs in reverse order — eschatology is history unfolding backwards.

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I would like to remind everyone, especially concerning the recent talks on Islamic history, that our own “historical-picture” is non-existent today as Wael Hallaq has pointed out. We believe we possess a historical picture and instinct, but like the state of our civilization, our own historiography is dysfunctional and dead. We think we own a unique historical narrative, when it is infact a Western view of our own history that is imposed upon us, and it is not a Western form of history that forgets to include us in their linear histories as many Muslim liberals who are obsessed with the enlightenment are asserting nowadays. But it is actually a darker reality, as Hallaq mentioned, everything we know about our history is basically from the Western historiographer and archeologist’s perspective. I do not want to downgrade the Western contribution to historiography, for the archaeological and historical contributions emerging from the West since Petrarch reflect a culture with a powerful historical instinct, a care for the past and future that we in the Islamic world today, and perhaps many other cultures globally, fail to possess and do not even want to admit that. Let us be honest, when Napoleon arrived in Egypt, the historical megaliths were almost buried and forgotten, and the same could be said about all other historically relevant sights in the region. I do not blame our culture’s past, but rather, the current dysfunctional state of the Middle East as a whole. I also do not want to blame the West, for our civilization was slumbering in a collective amnesia and is dysfunctional to a degree that it was up for grabs. Again, as Hallaq argued, we need to re-discover, and re-write, our own history and past, from our own perspective. This, I argue, will only be done once we take our own history and archaeology seriously. Although I do not agree with many things that Dan Gibson says, I do acknowledge the fact that he takes our own history and archaeology more seriously than we do.

This is also why I laugh at many who critique and attack Western museums in a shallow manner pointing towards colonialism solely, not realizing that such a concept, “museums” which evolved from “cabinets of curiosities”, reflect an extremely powerful historical instinct and care for the past. It is not perfect yes, like all other human cultures, but the Greeks never wondered where the Battle of Troy took place, and instead focused on the dramatic theatrical reproductions of the narrative. It was only with the advent of the West, with its unique historical instinct and “Petrarch-types”; that the location in itself was discovered and explored empirically. The same goes for Petra, the Levantine and Mesopotamian historical sights, and other Middle Eastern ones.

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I will soon re-read Stephen Clark’s beautiful contribution to Spenglerian literature titled “New Histories of the World: Spenglerian Optimism”, which I recommend to anyone interested in developing his understanding of Spengler’s model. Clark’s revolutionary idea here is the inspiration to the new series I will be publishing on my substack titled “Spenglerian Optimism”, which will include the works of external authors. Initially I will be accepting all types of works, from amateur writers, to professional ones (if you are interested in writing a piece, or know anyone who could be, please contact me here or on twitter). My long-term goal, is to transform this work into a fully fledged academic journal hopefully. There is a clear gap in Spenglerian literature which I hope to fill with this initiative in the right time.

Dealing with Spengler’s work is not easy. In my current PhD thesis, I came to the realization that his work has a sort of immunizing effect against any form of negative criticism. Many different thinkers across the 20th and 21st century have also come to a similar conclusion, Rojek called this the “vampiric traits” apparent within Spengler’s work, dubbing it the “Nosferatu” of philosophies of history, sucking the blood out of international crises to “renew itself again”. Adorno argued that Spengler’s cannot be attacked externally, but enforces one to dismantle it from within— to that I say, good luck not succumbing to his powers while doing just that. But Adorno was on point here. Greg Swer also recently described his work as one possessing what he called a “comparative paradox” as a result of its comparative approach to culture and attempt to predict the laws of history combined with a position that argued for the relativity of all phenomenon. The unique nature of Spengler’s work, has led many to argue that his philosophy of history is ultimately a paradoxical one, combining ideas that contradict one another, at least according to mainstream thinkers, professional historians, and the representatives of the academic establishment. The same line of argument could be seen in Jeffery Herf’s critique of Spengler’s philosophy of technology in Reactionary Modernism (1984). A fascinating quote from Adorno’s writings on Spengler, described this unique trait accurately, eerily, and beautifully:

Nietzsche, whose domineering tone Spengler constantly imitates without ever dissociating himself, as Nietzsche did, from complicity with the world, observes at one point that Kant used scientific means to defend the common man’s prejudices against science. Something similar applies to Spengler. He used metaphysical weapons to defend positivism’s belief in facts and its ability to adjust to the given against the critical opposition of metaphysics. A second Comte, he made positivism into metaphysics, subordination to the given into, amor fati, swimming with the stream into cosmic tact, meaninglessness into mystery, and the denial of truth into truth itself. This is the source of his power.

Manfred Schroter whilst defending Spengler’s work against the aggressive criticism from the Vienna Circle, especially Neurath’s Anti-Spengler (1919), argued that a successful critique would be one that provides an alternative morphology of history, that is, through accepting the very paradigm that his work represents. A century later, and prior to reading Schroter’s defense here, I had come to a similar conclusion, namely, that real criticism of Spengler would only be possible if one were to wrestle with his ideas seriously, or at least, in my judgement, take speculative philosophy of history, as a field in its own right, seriously. This I say here in order to shed light on the creativity, and perhaps, bravery, required to conceive of such an approach to Spengler’s work with an attempt to transform its pessimism into an optimism. Spengler’s late writings reflected an ever-growing pessimism that had led him to conclude the end of all spenglerian cultures, as much as his work possessed a powerful immune system, and vampiric powers, he himself was a human after all — thus, he was a product and victim of his own zeitgeist. A zeitgeist which he wrestled with as clearly illustrated by his creative works, but a zeitgeist that destroyed his faith in human cultures nevertheless. I hope, and perhaps we all hope, that Spengler was wrong, although I fear he rarely was wrong.

If, however, human cultures prevail beyond the upcoming decline, transition, and shift, we would need to re-envision the future of Spenglerian cultures. Of a potential new culture, hidden in plain sight, growing out of the aridoamerican plane — almost possessing a morphology of the cacti that are native to that specific region. A future Russian-Slavic-Orthodox culture was also a prediction that Spengler had made when he was younger, and perhaps more optimistic. A prediction that could become a reality considering the current developments. Russian culture is a mysterious one, and not because of the typical tropes and cliche arguments used to describe Russia, but due to its extreme polarity, and double-belief, the existence of an implicit paganism-rodnovery, across its culture. Beyond Russia, a miracle civilizational revival is possible and imminent in the Middle East as a result of a powerful divine-magical foundation, which when combined with the intense stress it is currently facing could lead to a miraculous revival. Some people have also been suggesting a potential culture emerging in the South East of Asia, a culture that could possibly redefine the notion of “relationships”. A common theme that is found amongst most of these emerging cultures is the fact that they all attempt to provide a new conception of the notions of "brotherhood”, “family”, “relationship”, and “humanity”, which I believe are natural coping mechanisms triggered by unborn cultures when faced with the tragic reality of a future where time—history, ceases to exist. This is not a fear of death that embodies late dying cultures, it is a young culture’s fear as it comes to the realization that the world around it could cease to exist at any moment as a result of a daemonic war against nature by the forces of industrial society, capitalism, globalization—modernity, as an anti-cultural force. This war against God, nature, the human, the cosmos, has not only angered mother nature with its clear shift in tone with recent shifts in the climate. It also angers the Sun which now bombards us with powerful solar flares as we enter a new solar maximum in the solar cycle. The war angers God, who has forsaken humanity long ago when we ourselves unleashed the gates of hell welcoming modernity and its spirit. It is also one that we have willingly chosen when we ourselves have forsaken the human—in modern warfare, through genocides, across poverty and hunger stricken lands, and in mass extinction of nations and tribes. All of these tragic realities have been witnessed by Spengler and with the extremely expansive, destructive and Faustian nature of Western culture, he could only envision a future where these realities reach their logical limits—through a cosmic and natural cataclysm, the final solution of nature, the cosmos, and God against man. The current cultures that could potentially emerge are still concealed by the modern facades enforced upon them, but a deep-dive into their souls reveals a love for nature, an attempt to reconstruct our harmony with nature. A naive piety combined with a reverence for nature that is already existent in parts of Russian Siberia, the Aridoamerican plane, and the Sahara desert. These cultures attempt to present new truths concerning our conception of relations primarily because such truths do not exist anymore, or have been shattered as a result of the irreversible vicissitudes that have conflicted man ever since the West made a Faustian bargain with modernity, dragging the rest of humanity with it.

Once more, as much as one tries, we are constantly dragged back to pessimism when we approach historical phenomenon through a Spenglerian morphological lens with its emphasis on Destiny. I have previously argued that in order to transition into a new paradigm which affirms life and being, one would have to come to terms with the reality of life, birth, fulfillment, and death — all necessitating one another. Spengler’s pessimistic tone was not only a form of realism, but it was also a cry against the imminent extinction of humanity as a whole as a result of its current tragic trajectory. An end of time means that a future where diverse cultures could fulfill their respective destiny is no longer possible, where a newly born culture cannot share its fruits with neighboring cultures, where new artistic forms cannot exist, and where new realities cease to be possible. Now, lets imagine a reconciliation with nature, a repentance of our sins through a reconnection with God and the cosmos. A collective process, on multiple fronts, in different ecological regions, by energetic and creative young cultures, each with their own unique forms, solutions, and paths, yet all organic in their approach. This is a possible scenario, yet nevertheless one that is contingent on a divergence from the current path enforced on us by hyper-modernity. A new path that introduces revolutionary life-styles, new architectural expressions, and new organic political forms that lead humanity towards a new age. A neo-axial age—a new aeon focused on healing earth’s scars and deformities as a result of the destruction brought about by modern forces. A Spenglerian future where humans are given a last chance, prolonging pending eschatologies, paving the way for fertile grounds where new cultures can arise and continue history’s magical spiral across noumenal time and the cosmos — as an alternative to the daemonic march of history pushed by the cult of materialistic sciences and the “cult of progress”. This precisely, is “Spenglerian Optimism”, a speculative approach towards Spengler’s philosophy of the future that bravely attempts to imagine possible organic futures beyond The Decline of the West, whilst affirming the possibility of an imminent end of time as a result of the West’s Faustian bargain. It attempts to envision the continued existence of human cultures whilst realizing the eschatological urgency of current developments, it attempts to avoid the eschatological as a katechon of philosophies of history, yet it is in itself eschatological. This is clearly illustrated in the eschatological dimension of all new upcoming cultures as we shall see across the series.

It is also important to note that Spengler’s philosophy of history affirms a past-present-future continuum, which does not only project itself unto the future, but also attempts to retrodict the past. This leads me to the second purpose of the series, namely, the retrodiction of lost and hidden cultures across history. Of these, Toynbee has written about many possible lost, abortive, and arrested civilizations, which we shall attempt to shed further light on across the series. Toynbee briefly mentioned the case of a Polynesian culture that could have developed into a high-culture if it were not faced with extreme natural conditions that hindered its growth. Spengler’s imaginative insights attempted to reveal the soul of such a culture, and how their mathematical expression could be understood through their boomerang, which revealed a complex unique mathematical mentality which focused on non-static moveable geometry. A Spenglerian optimist, would attempt to create a futurist narrative that envisions the possible large scale practical applications of such mathematical mentalities, what would that look like? The process of envisioning futures, practical ones, or inspiring them as a whole, could be seen in the works of many futurists such as Marinetti, who I call prophet of the Italian automotive industry, inspiring a whole generation of automotive pioneers, that have made his unconscious expressions come to life. Beyond Polynesia, the Eskimo people are also another case worthy of exploration in this series; as well as the Irish Celtic culture that has produced one of the most complex artistic scripts across history, as seen with The Book of Kells, which perhaps reflects the unique nature of this culture when compared to the West as a whole. These are just few examples, yet the beauty of history reveals the limitless possibilities whether we attempt to retrodict the past, re-imagine the present, or predict the future. Finally, with all the talk of decline nowadays, I believe it is necessary that we emphasize a position of Spenglerian optimism, not only because it is creative, but because it is necessary. Necessary to manifest or envision a future of birth, alongside the decline, for in the end, they both necessitate each other.

What form will the Western Caesarism take? A glance at Spengler’s Hour of Decision and Prussianism and Socialism sheds further light on this point. Firstly, Spengler’s concept of Prussian, or modern, socialism should not be mistaken for Marxist socialism. It is, however, a product that arose alongside Marxism, albeit possessing more right-leaning views; an instinct that nurtures the Faustian temperaments of will to power and yearning for the infinite, yet in modern times it has turned into the will to “absolute domination of the world in the military, economic and intellectual sense.” This instinct was perhaps drastically felt during the First World War and is manifested in the Western form of Imperialism. Whilst other world cultures did pursue conquest in their own respective manner, the Faustian soul recognizes no limit, and thus obsesses with world domination as embodied by the conquest of the Americas and of large swathes of lands globally. Thus, the ambition to universal domination is technically “modern socialism,” and it is, ipso facto — the drive towards globalization in every sense. Although an antithesis might always exist, as evident in all cultures, the Caesarism that is to come, according to Spengler, will forcibly combine any conflicting sentiments, just as “Caesar combined senate and plebs.” Spengler introduces the idea that there are two distinctly Faustian economic principles at a war of annihilation: on one hand, the English Viking evolved into a free tradesman embodied economically by capitalism; on the other, the German Teutonic Knight progressed to an administrative official symbolized by Prussian socialism. Spengler questions whether the economic structure of the future Caesarism will be through “worldwide exploitation, or worldwide organization,” and asks “are the Caesars of the coming empire to be billionaires or universal administrators?” Although, in The Decline of the West, Spengler suggested that the coming Caesars of the Western world hold ideals that are antithetical to capitalism, in Prussianism and Socialism, Spengler seemed hesitant to assert that. This is revealed when he asked whether the Caesars would come in the form of “billionaires or generals, bankers or civil servants of the highest quality? That is the eternal question.” In this work, he believes that the dialectal clash between what he calls Anglo- Saxon capitalism and Prussian socialism will eventually decide the winner. Moreover, Spengler seems sure about another point regarding the battle for universal dominance: it will definitely be fought in blood. In a typically pessimistic tone, Spengler says:

Everything that proceeds from the innermost soul to become flesh or fleshly creation demands a sacrifice of flesh in return. Ideas that have become blood demand blood. War is the eternal pattern of higher human existence, and countries exist for war’s sake, they are signs of readiness for war. And even if a tired and blood-drained humanity desired to do away with war, like the citizens of Classical world during its final centuries, like the Indians and Chinese of today, it would merely exchange its role of war-wager for that of the object about and which others would wage war.

Although this projection was given almost a decade prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, and Spengler’s deteriorating health led to his unexpected death, one cannot dismiss the fact that the clash of Nazi National-Socialism, on the one hand, and the liberal democratic Anglo-American, on the other, resemble what Spengler envisioned in his works. Before his passing, Spengler accurately predicted the demise of the Third Reich, and went as far as critiquing the racial theories, anti-Semitism, and narrow ideological foundation employed by the Nazis, leading to the marginalization and banning of some of his works in Germany. Is it safe to conclude that Anglo-Saxon capitalism has fully defeated what Spengler termed “Prussian Socialism” following the fall of the Third Reich? Or is too early to assume the fulfilment of his predictions? While this is a topic for another paper, one could argue that the outcome of the Second World War has led to an Anglo-Saxon political, economic, and cultural global hegemony that is still evident today. War is a theme Spengler thoroughly employs alongside his discussion of Caesarism in all of his works. Spengler provides a somewhat more confident assessment in The Hour of Decision. Perhaps this change in tone is the result of the drastic change in the European geopolitical, socio-political, and economic landscape, which Spengler had witnessed in the decade between publishing The Decline of the West (1918) and Prussianism and Socialism (1919), and the late Hour of Decision (1933). In the latter, he suggested that the true Caesarism of all cultures always takes hold and emerges within “the small, strong minorities.” Here he also reasserts the idea that the Western form of Caesarism replaces a paid professional army, that belongs to the money-age period, with mercenaries and volunteer peasant armies, such as the transition in the Classical world following the Marian reforms of the Roman army — paving the way for “instinctive revolt of the blood” against “the forces of money and intellect.” Consequently, at the point of virtual extinction, an ageing society rises through proletarian Caesarism, which ends both “the Gracchian and Catilinarian tendencies.” Spengler argued that the impending Caesarism would only take hold when majorities are despised — when party-politics, programs, and ideologies are looked down upon — this includes both Fascist and Marxist tendencies.

Spengler introduces the concept of “Napoleonism,” a stage of the evolutionary process that transitions every culture into Caesarism. In the Chinese culture, the counterpart of Napoleonism is the period of contending states, from 480 to 130 BC roughly, corresponding to the Greco-Roman 300-50 BC; these periods correspond to the 19th and 20th centuries in the history of the West. The period of contending or warring states, as the name implies, consists of a series of total global wars and revolutions between several powerful states of the respective culture. Concerning this era, Spengler says “No era confronts its mankind so distinctly with alternative of great form or great individual powers as this period of contending states.” The collective political condition of nations deteriorates, and thus opens up the path for energetic and Machiavellian private individuals to take hold of the destiny of whole nations and cultures. Spengler terms this “the accident of great fact-men”; their rise allows a fragile nation to rise to the peak of the geopolitical arena almost instantaneously, as exemplified by the case of Macedonia and Alexander the Great. On the other hand, their accidental death, as in Julius Caesar’s case, plummets a secured world into pandemonium. The transition from culture into civilization, or end-culture, and its Napoleonism, commenced during the emergence of Napoleon and climaxed during the First World War; in the Classical world, it began when Hannibal challenged Rome and sparked the Punic Wars. In the Arabo-Persian Islamic or Magian civilization, correspondingly, the transition from Napoleonism to Caesarism appeared in a different form, yet still exhibited the same characteristics, as the Caliphate gradually transformed from the world-city of Baghdad into a Sultanate. As a culture is beginning to enter the state of historical formlessness, the era of the powerful individuals begins. During the transition period, the culture releases all its forces that have been previously buried to produce the respective form of the culture. Spengler argued that the transition from absolute state to the clash between nations, which marks the beginning of the period of contending states, is essentially the switch from a government in “the pulse and style of a strict tradition,” to a governmental form which perfectly epitomizes the Latin phrase sic volo, sic jubeo, or “Thus I will, thus I command” — a personal regime characterized by an extraconstitutional supremacy of the executive branch. The era preceding the formation and consolidation of Caesarism experiences revolutions, interstate and internal conflicts. Spengler believed that the revolutions of this period were historically of no importance, since he viewed them as predominately comprised of a blind megalopolitan mass who only accelerated the annihilation of the ancient forms in order to clear the path for the impending Caesarism. Militarily, this period is characterized by a return to nature — an inclination to rawer and ferocious forms — thus the methods and tactics became more savage and cruel, chivalry and rules of the past become irrelevant. This tendency first manifested itself in the West during the French Revolution and the rise of the Napoleonic armies, which brought the whole nation to the battlefield through conscription. In terms of technics, the civilizational era that Caesarism rises within leads to a technological revolution, as the culture races to press all mechanical possibilities, in accordance with the spirit of the times. In Man and Technics, Spengler explores the history and nature of technology and provides his speculation regarding the existential threat of Western technology and its correlation with an additional global catastrophic risk, namely, the ecological crisis. In the cultural phase, the technique of war is not prioritized over craftsmanship, but the start of the civilizational phase ushers an era of mechanization, due to the demands of military necessity. Thus, the result is more catastrophic wars, albeit it “renders largely ineffectual the personal heroism of the thoroughbred, the ethos of the noble, and the subtle intellect of the late culture.” The machine-like nature of the late Roman legion of the civilizational period exhibited such characteristics, as opposed to the early Spartan and Athenian militias. In the West, its obsession over speed, mobility, and mass- effects, combined with its will to dominate nature, “produced dynamic methods of war that even to Fredrick the Great would have seemed like lunacy, but to us today, in close proximity to our technics of transportation and industry, are perfectly natural.” In accordance with the Faustian spirit of the West, Napoleon, as the Western counterpart of Alexander the Great, introduces the horsed artillery for the first time. The American Civil War integrated, for the first time, the technologies in transportation and communication into warfare, marking the second stage in the evolution of Western weaponry. Finally, the third stage is marked by the Russo-Japanese war and the First World War, where technologies in aviation and submarine technology were incorporated into the war machine. Through a Spenglerian lens, the rise of technology in warfare has a negative correlation with chivalry. Hence, annihilation wars were impossible during the age of chivalry, and usually appeared in a civilizational phase of a culture. In China, we see this in the destruction of the State of Wu, which would have been virtually impossible during earlier periods. The evolution is seen in Rome during the Punic wars, whereby the notion of annihilating a power became common, as exemplified by the Latin phrase associated with Cato, Carthago delenda est — paving the way for total obliteration of Carthage. Spengler viewed the treaty of Versailles as the last chivalrous attempt in avoiding the total destruction of a power. Indeed, in hindsight, the wars that followed the treaty were essentially wars of annihilation, as illustrated by the concepts which emerged during that era and their respective implications, namely, Lebensraum and Vernichtungskrieg.

By Caesarism, Spengler meant the form of government where power is exclusively exercised by the Caesar; it is the transition of a civilized form of politics into a primitive one, through the triumph of force politics over money and the formation of an autocratic imperium. The cosmopolis appears at the peak of civilization, made up of the human masses; this artificial, yet ingenious marvel is the final victory of intellect and money. Paradoxically, intellect and money destroy the cultural foundations of the culture, which paves the way for its own destruction by the Caesar men:

Before them the money collapses. The imperial age, in every culture alike, signifies the end of the politics of mind and money. The powers of the blood, unbroken bodily forces, resume their ancient lordship. “Race” springs forth, pure and irresistible — the strongest win and the residue is their spoil. They seize the management of the world, and the realm of books and problems petrifies or vanishes from memory.

Spengler argued that the end of politics is imminent; in Rome, this was evident when notable individuals refused to be involved in the electoral process during the reigns of Caesar, Tiberius, and Nero. The intellectual clashes, which represented most cultural political forms prior to Caesarism and functioned as an alternative to war, will eventually be dominated by primitive forms of war. The constitution, as the foundation of most Western states, now loses its function and power, since the Caesars view situations as they are and disregard the constitutional foundations. As Caesarism surfaces, the political parties of the pre-Caesarian age become a thing of the past; what is left from the debris is nothing more than a minority of ideologues who disguise their political dissatisfaction in philosophy. The Stoics in Imperial Rome and Confucians in Imperial China were both factions of these ideologues that appear during the formation of Caesarism within a civilization. Hence, the episode of the burning of books and burying of scholars that occurred alongside the rise of emperor Qin Shi Huang, whom Spengler equates with the Roman emperor Augustus. On the other hand, in Rome, Stoics who lamented the collapse of freedom and secretly promoted conspiracies, such as the Pisonian plot to assassinate Nero, were likewise executed. During that specific time period, Nero executes the Stoic Thrasea Paetus, Vespasian orders the execution of the philosopher Helvidius Priscus, and the works of the historian Cordus are burnt. This was essentially an act of defense on the part of the state against the blind ideologues, which Spengler viewed as nothing but “the destruction of the politico-philosophical literature and the abolition of propaganda and secret organizations.” Ironically, as in the case of the era of party politics, at its maturity, Caesarism succumbs to the very forces it tries to destroy. Stoicism slowly became the dominant world-outlook during the maturity of the imperial age, as can be seen during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. All in all, Spengler argued that the spirits of the Germanic ancestors of the West are bound to rise once again and usher in the age of Caesarism:

In our Germanic world the spirits of Alaric and Theodoric will come again — there is a first hint of them in Cecil Rhodes — and the alien executioners of the Russian preface, from Jengiz Khan to Trotski (with the episode of Petrine Tsarism between them) are, when all is said and done, very little different from most of the pretenders of the Latin-American republics, whose private struggles have long since put an end to the form-rich age of the Spanish baroque.

To Spengler, parliamentary democracies were weak, and their arrival only paved the way for the new Caesarism. With the rise and fall of Mussolini and Hitler, many of Spengler’s critics pointed out the inaccuracy of his conception of Caesarism, since the tendencies that Spengler spoke of vanished from the scene during the period of relative peace and economic prosperity which followed the Second World War. Despite that, the reemergence of the right wing on the European political scene and the Trump presidency in the USA are a reminder that Spengler’s conception of Caesarism has not lost its relevance. It is hard to come to terms with the reality of the political changes occurring in the West today, such as the undeniable frailty of the fabric of democracy in the West and irrefutable rise of right-wing populism. Conclusively, it is vital to grasp Spengler’s pessimism to further comprehend his concept of Caesarism, which is perhaps perfectly illustrated in his popular quote “optimism is cowardice.” By optimism, Spengler meant the deceptive confidence in ideals and utopias, and under pessimism, he implies realism and the acknowledgement of the inevitable tides of historical change. Spengler extensively revered war and despised the pacifist “world- improvers” of the money-age, dominated by false ideals and hopes. But that to him is not an admiration of violence, but of the nature of man, for the age of ideals, where pacifists rule, first brings down the culture to its knees, prior to collapsing, and demolishes the very foundations that built the respective culture — through the dominance of city over nature — as mentioned earlier. Accordingly, the history of man is, in Spengler’s judgement, the history of war. The ages that are dawning upon Western man are, in Spengler’s judgement, the mightiest, as they correspond to the ages of Hannibal to Caesar. Spengler argued, through his pessimistic realism, that, if war, the collapse of democracy, and the end of money are predestined, the West should come to terms with these changes, rather than try to delay them. “We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end,” Spengler says. Hence, Spengler’s pessimism is, essentially, a form of realism, albeit a rather deterministic one. In Man and Technics, Spengler concludes by providing a final advice through the example of the Roman soldier who died at his post following the eruption of Vesuvius. Since all cultures are bound to fall, Spengler suggested that the West come to terms with its imminent demise, and only through that — the realization of the nature of reality, birth and death — can it achieve an honorable end.

In order to comprehend Spengler’s conception of second religiousness, it is necessary to borrow his method of historical analysis and draw analogies between the high-cultures. In Spengler’s morphology of world-history, a culture expresses a lifespan akin to plants and even humans. Thus, the birth of a culture in the spring phase is equated with childhood or a blossoming flower, yearning to actualize the full sum of possibilities, and, as it ages and fulfils all possibilities, “it suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down.” Analogous to an elder who mournfully reflects on his childhood and youth, the dying culture looks back to its springtime romantically and desires the spirituality apparent in the springtime, and thus the second religiousness emerges within it. A quick glimpse of the final centuries of Imperial Rome reveals the birth of various cults, namely, the cults of Isis, Sol, and Mithras; according to Spengler, this same pattern was apparent in all high-cultures. Spengler argued that there is no science without a precedent metaphysical presupposition, namely, that the scientific forms of all cultures emerge from their underlying belief structure. In his magnum opus, Spengler states “there is no distinction between the Catholic and the materialistic views of the world — both say the same thing in different words.” Just as how the primitive religion of the countryside exhausted its possibilities and reached the limit of its evolution, so too will the materialistic scientific outlook of the late autumn and winter periods be replaced by the world outlook of the second religiousness. Atheism, as “the expression of spirituality that has accomplished itself and exhausted its religious possibilities,” essentially an inorganic form of spiritual expression, preludes the second religiousness; it is the mechanistic, rather than the organic, form of expressing spirituality, and it fundamentally belongs to the city rather than the country. From this perspective, and since most cultures exhibit homological and analogical features, all past, present, as well as future, cultures experience their own form of atheism and second religiousness, albeit with a different design or composition. Stoicism, appearing alongside Caesarism and the emergent cults within the Classical civilization, were the Greco-Roman form of atheism — Aristotle, according to Spengler, was “an atheist unawares.” Buddhism was the Indian culture’s equivalent of atheism; as for the West, Spengler designated socialism as the ideological counterpart. The Nietzschean phrase “God is dead” could be equated with the Classical phrase “Gods who dwell in the holy places are dead”; however, the former (Western Faustian culture) is demonstrating that boundless space has become atheistic, whilst the latter (Classical Apollonian culture) is indicating that countless bodies have become atheistic —– each reflecting the soul or spirit of the respective culture. To Spengler, the metaphysical and religious picture of the early man of culture is what the late atheist confines to physics, one determined by wisdom and the other by pure intelligence.

In Spengler’s view, ideological beliefs and sciences, like cultures and organisms, experience the same cycles of birth and death. Like Arabian, Greek, and Indian sciences, Western science will one day fulfil itself and reach its logical conclusions. The 19th century was the great century of Western science, embodied by the works of Gauss and Humboldt. In all fields of Western science, the “great masters are dead”; what follows their demise is the arrangement, collection, and adjustments of their scientific theories and frameworks by their disciples and pupils. Be that as it may, before the will-to-victory of science is overthrown, there has to be, in the words of Spengler, “a morphology of the exact sciences, which shall discover how all laws, concepts and theories inwardly hang together as forms and what they meant as such in the life-course of the Faustian culture.” The unity of the sciences, ironically, will pave the way for Western science to fall on its own sword. Spengler argued that all the separate sciences are rapidly moving towards one another, and the result will be the fusion and merger of all the underlying theories. Spengler stated:

The retreatment of theoretical physics, of chemistry, of mathematics as a sum of symbols — this will be definitive conquest of the mechanical world-aspect by an intuitive, once more religious, world-outlook, a last master-effort of physiognomic to break down even systematic and to absorb it, as expression and symbol, into its own domain.

Spengler argued that, in the not so far future, one will not question how the laws of the various sciences function; instead, we shall establish a link between the various sciences unique to Western culture and their springtime myths. The theories and laws established in the sciences will be viewed as a re-embodiment of the myths and symbols of Western culture, albeit in a modern guise. Spengler believed that, after the fall of science, the central task will be to pursue the origins of the Western scientific form, why has Western culture received such forms, and the hidden meanings behind their emergence within the respective culture, in that specific arrangement and time. This imminent convergence of the sciences, according to Spengler, could already be witnessed by the interrelation between physics and chemistry; during the 19th century they seemed separate — yet today they cannot be divorced from one another. The same could be said about the relationship between chemistry and mathematics, as well as about that between physiology and calculus. All in all, the unification of the sciences will first shed light on the undistinguishable logical and numerical results of all the various fields; second, it will reveal the symbolic nature of the theories concealing the Faustian spirit through numbers. Every civilization manifests a materialistic world-outlook at one point during their journey through history. The phrase “knowledge is virtue” is espoused by Buddha, Socrates, and Confucius; however, the Western Faustian soul rephrases the saying and concludes that “knowledge is power.” This is what distinguishes the Western form of materialism from the rest of the cultures in world-history. Spengler stated that Western culture eliminates “all the forces that stand between the practical intelligence and nature,” and in turn paves the way for man’s domination of nature. This Western form of materialism permitted the development of the “machine-technics” in such an extreme manner, not seen in any former culture. Thus, to Spengler, the modern technics of the 19th and 20th century are innately Western and are byproducts of this specific culture alone. The rise of the machine and the mechanization of the planet will bring forth a precarious phase of tensity, poison the natural world, and replace it with an artificial world.

Paradoxically, a materialistic outlook necessitates the relaxation of collective intellectual tension by occasionally enjoying myths, the irrational, and the supernatural. This tendency is exemplified by the rise of Buddhist brotherhoods, the publicly ridiculed Isis cults of Rome, and the corresponding occultists and theosophists of European-American civilization. Although the initial re-emergence of religion is fraudulent, the arrival of a “shallow and dishonest” mock-religion, from a Spenglerian perspective, indicates that it is possible to witness a new and authentic religious spirit prepared to reveal itself, that of the second religiousness. The reason why this paper explores Spengler’s conception of the second religiousness, prior to submerging into his contribution on the concept of Caesarism, is precisely because he argued that the second religiousness is a crucial counterpart of Caesarism. The phenomenon of second religiousness brings with it deep piety, which we could witness today in the fascination of Western culture with Islam, China, and India. The foundation of the second religiousness is that of the earlier young religiousness, albeit with a different expression, as it commences with the gradual disappearance of rationalism. Almost without warning, the primitive religions of the spring stage come back to the forefront in the appearance of syncretism. Spengler believed that ages of enlightenment always proceed from an unrestricted megalopolitan confidence in reason, accompanied by unconditional skepticism. The sovereign waking-consciousness criticizes the illusory world, which it has eliminated from everyday experience, and “continues to do so till it has found the last and subtlest result, the form of the form — itself: namely, nothing.” Through this, physics as a mode of world-understanding is exhausted, and the culture yearns once more for a purely metaphysical world-outlook. It is not the intellect, nor the educated circles of the early religiousness, who have submerged themselves in literature, that paves the way for the second religiousness. Instead, according to Spengler, the source is “a naïve belief” that emerges almost spontaneously and that acknowledges the mystical constitution underlying reality. In the Classical culture, the death of rationalism started occurring about 150 B.C.; rationalism was essentially the religion of the educated men, scholarly philosophy belonged to the upper classes, whilst naïve superstition belonged to the masses. At first, philosophy, as in the 19th and 20th century West, submerged itself with the intellect; from then on it had interacted with the popular syncretism and slowly formed a new religiousness. Hence, myth belief and piety proliferated once more during that respective period of Classical history. The syncretism in the Classical, or Apollonian, culture was an amalgamation of the Phrygian, Syrian, and Egyptian myths, and Greek mysteries. Moreover, alongside the syncretism appears a return towards alchemy, astrology, and occultism, as illustrated by the emergence of such movements in China, during the syncretism that took place between Confucianism and Taoism. In Chinese culture, the gradual abandonment of Lao Tse’s rationalist doctrines occurred alongside the reemergence of religion. Whilst the Classical culture revived Orphism and imported Egyptian and Levantine myths, the Chinese absorbed Indian Mahayana Buddhism. In regard to Western culture, a glimpse of the dawn of the second religiousness and syncretism is given in Spengler’s Man and Technics, where he argued that the Western man is starting to despise the machines and the materialistic world-outlook embodied by the great cities. If the materialistic world-outlook aims to exploit, and demolish, nature, a return to religion necessitates an outlook that lives in harmony with nature. This, according to Spengler, has already been taking place within Western culture, as demonstrated by the rise of forms of life that are closer to nature, such as sports and nature getaways. Moreover, Spengler believed that the turn towards the second religiousness could be observed today in the creative talents that attempt to abolish practicality and sciences for a purely speculative approach. Spengler argued:

Occultism and Spiritualism, Hindu philosophies, metaphysical inquisitiveness under Christian or pagan coloring, all of which were despised in the Darwinian period, are coming up again. It is the spirit of Rome in the Age of Augustus. Out of satiety of life, men take refuge from civilization in the more primitive parts of the earth, in vagabondage, in suicide. The flight of the born leader from the machine is beginning.

Although Spengler’s work was popular at the time of its publication, it was gradually marginalized and ridiculed by mainstream academia. Yet, the stunning precision of his predictions continues to perplex many of his readers, as mentioned above. In accordance with Spengler’s forecasts, the Western equivalent of the Classical Cynics and Orphics arrived on the scene with the advent of the 1960’s counterculture. These movements practiced a form of Bohemianism, an unconventional form of life which proliferated around the second half of the 20th century. They displayed a temperament similar to that of Greco-Roman Cynics, quasi-religious groups and anti-establishment movements that emerged within many other cultures during the winter stage of their cultural development cycle. The voluntary vagabondage, poverty, and simple living associated with hippie movements are social phenomena that precede the reemergence of religion. Additionally, the beat generation and hippie movements displayed elements similar to the various groups, ideas, and temperaments prior to and during the emergence of a second or new religiousness. These range from the negation of prevailing norms to the rejection of materialism, vegetarianism, the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment, and the exploration of psychedelic drugs. Moreover, in terms of spirituality and religion, the 1960’s counterculture absorbed features from Taoism, Hinduism, restorationist Christianity, Buddhism, and Paganism — exhibiting a severe form of syncretism reflecting the nature of the Faustian spirit, that of extreme dynamism. Experimentation with psychedelic substances, a central practice within the hippie and beat movements, is analogous to Orphic cults, which revived the rituals of the Dionysian mysteries — well-known for their initiation through psychoactive drugs. The difference, however, was the method of initiation and the psychedelics used: the movements arising from the Western counterculture investigated LSD, Marijuana, and Psilocybin mushrooms, whilst their Apollonian counterparts, the Eleusinian mysteries, in particular, experimented with kykeon, a drink made up of barley infected with ergot, a fungus that produces psychedelic alkaloids. Alongside the spread of atheism, the West experienced a resurgence of religiosity embodied by the New Age movement and the spiritual beliefs that have emerged from it. The seeds of these movements were planted as early as the 19th century by Western esoteric groups, namely, the Theosophical and Anthroposophical societies. Jung, Steiner, and Blavatsky are some of the many architects who have built the foundation that would eventually accommodate the growing number of religious and spiritual movements to rise out of the West in the 1970s and 80s.

Magian-Judeo-Christian-Islamic Piety as the Number 7 — ٧

vs

the Faustian-Western Hubris as the number 8 — ∞

The cultural critic John David Ebert once described an unusual point concerning Spengler's high-cultures, especially concerning the Magian-Islamic and Faustian cultures. Namely, that the Magian culture is chronologically the seventh high-culture to materialize in world-history, which makes the Faustian West the eighth. What makes this odd, is the fact that the number 7 plays an important role in Magian-Judeo-Christian-Islamic culture, while number 8 plays a crucial role in the Faustian West. The significance of the number 7 in Magian culture is reflected in its symbolic significance for Ancient Hebrews, as seen in the fact that the word for 7 in Hebrew (שבע), is the root for the word "complete", "full", or "satiated" (שׂבע). Linguistically, the word in itself requires seven strokes when written in old Hebrew. In Genesis God created the world in six days, and rested on the seventh, this is also the case in Islamic traditions. In Christian eschatological traditions, seven were the number of seals and vials in the apocalypse of John's Revelation, and like the Old Testament, patterns of seven are common throughout. In Islamic cosmology, there are seven "skies " or heavens, which are also found in Mandaen, Manichaen, and Judaic traditions, as well as gnostic traditions. The first chapter of the Quran, Al Fatiha, consists of seven verses, and during pilgrimage the Kaaba is circulated seven times. Finally, the very high-culture which was a manifestation of these religions was in itself the seventh high-culture in world-history under the Spenglerian model.

The Magian world was in full submission to the sole divine entity which inspires its own respective prime symbol, that is, the world as a cavern protected by the sole creator God of the universe. This prime symbol, based on a full submission to God led to a different form of science, which could be described as a humble form of inquiry when compared to modern science. The Magian sciences had limits to their progress, which I describe as a limit demarcating what God had intended them to explore, manipulate, and study, in the phenomenal world. These scientific limits ensured that the civilization as a whole would develop a science to ensure technical and material growth, but also to ensure that the scientists and culture as a whole does not develop a hubris as a result of these scientific advances. Scientific breakthroughs therefore ensured that one appreciated God, and is in constant awe of God and his creation, rather than the Western sciences which induced modern men to implicitly apotheosize Man and reason. The Magian-Islamic sciences were neither based on a rejection of metaphysics, nor an ontological separation with nature. This subsequently led to practical applications of Islamic scientific paradigms that neither denied nature, nor exploited nature the way modern sciences does. More importantly, it leads to a form of science that accommodates the concept of the metaphysical concept of the Soul, as opposed to Western Modern science that rejects it along with metaphysics. It is not a coincidence then that the Faustian culture is the eighth culture to arrive following the Magian culture, it is also no coincidence that its prime symbol could be described with the idea of infinite space. As John David Ebert said, the Western-Faustian culture rejects the Magian world-view, it despises anything the Magian-Christian-Islamic world stands for, it replaces the Magian 7, with the number 8 and turns it sideways to create infinity ∞ . The Western culture with its Faustian rebellion against God’s order creates a science that rejects metaphysics when reaching its logical limits, ontologically separating man from nature infinitely. The practical application of Western sciences sets no limits to progress, it shatters the biblical firmament, and attempts to pierce through the cosmos, conquering the Moon, terraforming Mars, setting its eyes on Saturn's moon, Titan. The extreme dynamism of this culture’s force combined with its separation from nature has altered the shape of the Earth, burnt its forests, paved its deserts with concrete, conquered its skies with skyscrapers, airplanes, rockets, and satellites. Transformative, yes, but also, rebellious, Promethean, Daemonic, Satanic... Faustian par excellence, and Spengler was clearly aware of that. The notions of truth, completeness, and fulfillment in most cultures contradict or clash, but the polarity between Magian and Faustian truths is perhaps the most extreme. The Faustian man’s yearning for the infinite has made his culture give birth to what we call modernity today, and what I designate as a culture per se, but as “Anti-Culture” in the Guenonian sense of the term, an anti-cultural force, which does not only destroy the organic on earth, the plant and animal worlds, but also sucks the life out of other human cultures with its mechanization of the globe. The Faustian man was destined for space, but even then, due to his Faustian urge, he will not find fulfillment. Yet nevertheless the Faustian culture was destined for space and this destiny was implicitly revealed in their Gothic art and architecture. One cannot shake off the similarity and homology between the Gothic cathedral and the Modern rocket (A perfect example is the Scott Monument in Edinburgh), it is one of those things that once seen almost cannot be unseen, as if the culture in itself was attempting to tell us its ultimate aim. This is not the case with Magian culture, and as much as many implicit believers of progress would reject this point, the Magian man is, or at least was, content with not reaching the stars, but rather to admire the stars, and attain internal gnosis and peace instead through praising God and his creation. The reactionary, or liberal, forms of modernism that appears in the Magian world in the form of accelerationists or futurists, as well as the rest of the world today, is all a result of modernity as an anti-cultural force. Modernity conquest of world cultures is not a pseudomorphosis like the West’s cultural hegemony on Russia, or the Greco-Roman world with the Levant, but more like a cancerous effect, a unique form of influence that is corrosive and deadly in every sense apart from technical development. I would also go as far as arguing that when these Faustian tendencies emerge in a dark manner within the Islamic world it had occurred alongside the rise of the West, and had found expression in the periphery of Islamic sciences, more precisely at the intersection between alchemy and the occult. This resulted in the formation of dark magic in the Magian world, and the emergence of what would become the corpus of Western occultism, necromancy, and demonology. Examples of these are Ghayat Al-Hakim, the Goal of the Wise, what is known in the West today as the “Picatrix”, whom many argue that Al Majriti authored, or Shams Al Ma’arif, The Book of Sun of the Gnosis, a grimoire written by Al Buni, that also played a significant role in shaping many esoteric and occult groups that would emerge in the West.

Spengler denied Hegel's notion of dialectics existent in history, hence his denial of any form of linear progress in history. If any form of dialectic existed it only functioned within the parameters of a specific high-culture, and not beyond. His culture's existed independently, almost like Liebnezian monads, hence why one can observe that the benevolent gods of one culture become the malevolent demons of another. This can be clearly seen with Zoroastrianism and Hinduism, where Asuras who are seen as beneficent entities in Zoroastrianism are seen as demons in Hinduism. Moreover, devas are seen as gods in Hinduism but seen as chaotic and evil supernatural being in Zoroastrians. The same could be said for Levantine-Canaanite, Greco-Roman, and Arab paganism and Judeo-Christian-Islamic faiths. Baal, Astarte (Al-Lat), Dushara (Dionysus), who were part of pre-Magian pantheons, were all eventually seen as lesser entities, demons, by the religious forms to emerge from Magian culture. Logically then, this opposition based on inversion of entities will have to exist between Magian and Faustian cultures. Indeed it has, the Faustian-Daemonic elements apparent in Western culture can hardly go unnoticed at a closer look into the ethos of Western culture. This can be noticed despite the Christian external veneer which could also be argued to be a lesser Magian pseudomorphosis in the case of the West. In fact, if anything, the Christian veneer had allowed the Magian world to translate the Western ethos into an idea that is comprehensible to the Magian mind and world-view. During the brief time-periods when this veneer was tested, or removed, such as the French Revolution, Nazi Germany, and perhaps even the post-Cold War decade, we see a glimpse of what lies lurking under the Christian mould. In France, it came in the form of Robespierre's "Cult of Supreme Being", a form of deism that was enforced as a the state religion of France until Robespierre's own execution at the guillotine. Across 18th and 19th century Westphalian Europe, the spiritual and religious void left by the Church's decline was slowly filled by philosophies and spiritual beliefs that were pantheistic and naturalistic in orientation, clearly reflected in the works of Fichte and Hegel. The enlightenment cult of progress and reason is another expression of this spirit, as Karl Lowith argued, the enlightenment philosophers had ultimately taken the Judeo-Christian idea of eschatological direction, removed its spiritual dimension, inverted it, and created a deformed secular linear idea of progress based solely on man's reason, rather than divine providence. Hence why Voltaire despised the Muslim and ancient Hebrew wars fought in the name of God, but found no problem in wars fought for reason. Caricatures of the prophetic figures in Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions were common in France, with many plays and writings ridiculing them, a tradition that finds continuity in modern France. Beyond exoteric beliefs, the unique nature of Faustian culture had led to their intrinsic spiritual and religious ideas finding expression in esotericism, and this is perhaps due to the effect the Christian veneer had on the religious views of the general public. This came in the form of Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and during the 20th century in Theosophy, Thelema, the Golden Dawn, Satanism, and other forms of Western occultism. The esoteric beliefs were necessary since the Faustian spiritual forces required expression as the exoteric and explicit anti-Christian ethos was balanced alongside the Christian elements still existent in the West. These two forces balanced each other at times naturally, as seen in Thomas Paine's critique of Christianity in The Age of Reason simultaneously occurring alongside the Second Great Awakening, and Brumidi's Apotheosis of Washington with its clear Masonic influence occurring in parallel with the Third Great Awakening.

In other words, although Christianity was a lesser degree of pseudomorphosis, unlike the Russian and Magian worlds, this pseudomorphosis oddly shaped the Faustian tendency in Western culture. In other words, the Faustian soul cannot be understood when Christianity’s effect on the West is taken out of the context, this is of course different than Russia and the Magian worlds, whose souls could be understood only if we remove the Western and Hellenic pseudomorphic effects. This Faustian spirit is ironically dependent on the Christian veneer as a counter-idea, and they necessitate one another dialectically. This according to Spengler is illustrated clearly in Western history when Mary-myths and the Devil-myth “formed themselves side by side, neither possible without the other. Disbelief in either of them was a sin”. Concerning this Spengler said:

There was a Mary-cult of prayer, and a Devil-cult of spells and exorcisms. Man walked continuously on the thin crust of the bottomless pit. Life in this world is a ceaseless and desperate contest with the Devil.

This polarity, as exhibited in these two legends, had found expression in the arts, mysticism, and scholasticism, even in the symbolism of colors, with the Madonna represented with “white, blue, and gold”, and the Devil “black, sulphur-yellow, and red”. It is almost as if Christianity in the West functioned as a naturally necessary pseudomorphosis, that perhaps many in the West felt, or knew, that Christianity functioned as a force to restrain the devilish and Faustian tendency deep within the collective unconscious of the West. This necessary pseudomorphosis, in the form of Germanic-Catholic Christianity, had to manifest itself in a fundamentalist extremist manner to hold back the Gothic darkness that lies deep within the Western soul. The former as a manifestation of the “world of purity, light, and utter beauty of soul”, and the latter as a reflection of a “world that throughout nature and throughout mankind weaves and breeds ill, pierces, destroys, seduces — namely, the realm of the Devil”. As mentioned above, to Spengler it is only natural that the Western sciences developed the way they did, since it is a representative of this spirit that “penetrates the whole of Creation”. This contrast to Spengler is clearly reflected in the imagery of Christian and Gothic arts and literature, when he said:

Church Triumphant of angels and saints in their glory looks down from on high, and heavenly Grace is the warrior’s shield in the battle. Mary is the protectress to whose bosom he can fly to be comforted, and the high lady who awards the prizes of valor.

This is contrasted with the Gothic:

All around is an army of goblins, night-spirits, witches, werewolves, all in human shape. No man knows whether or not his neighbor has signed himself away to the Evil One. No one can say of an unfolding child that it is not already a devil’s temptress. An appalling fear, such as is perhaps only paralleled in the early spring of Egypt, weighs upon man. Every moment he many stumble in to the abyss. There were black magic, and devil’s masses and witches’ sabbaths, night feasts on mountain tops, magic draughts and charm formulas. The Prince of Hell, with his relatives — mother and grandmother, for as his very existence denies and scorns the sacrament of marriage, he may not have a wife or child — his fallen angels and his uncanny henchmen, is one of the most tremendous creations in all religious history.

These are all images and ideas embedded in the Western psyche, whether knowingly or unknowingly, and these, especially the Gothic-Faustian anti-Christian spirit, is one that the present day West forgets, and to Spengler they deliberately forget. To Spengler, the inquisition was an expression of these two spirits clashing, and was not an accident or coincidence, but was a necessary climax between these two clashing ideas in the West. It is no coincidence to me that the inquisition was specifically adamant on exterminating the Cathars in France, not because of their Magian Manichaen-Gnostic heretical teachings, but because deep beneath the Manichaen-Gnostic veneer lied a deeper Faustian spiritual force that would eventually to shape Western esotericism after they went into hiding following the inquisition. As Spengler said concerning the inquisition, “for the Devil gained possession of human souls and seduced them into heresy, lechery, and black arts. It was war that was against him on earth, and waged with fire and sword upon those who had given themselves up to him”. The inquisition took different shapes internally and externally, it was deployed against the Muslims in Spain for clearly different reasons than the inquisition on Pagans, Cathars, and other groups that belong to the cultural body of the West. But it is precisely these dark episodes of history, centuries after Charlemagne, that shaped by the Gothic spirit, cathedrals, the crusader, the deep and spiritual painting and the mysticism. “In its shadow flowered that profound Gothic blissfulness of which today we cannot even form an idea”. Upon wrestling with these ideas, Spengler’s argument concerning the tragic nature of Western culture becomes clear, the Faustian eponym makes total sense, that the culture as a whole had an urge to sell its soul to the devil, an urge that only the most fundamentalist and militant form of Christianity was able to restrain, a form that was alien even to the Magian Christian world. This explains my earlier point, that all scientific breakthroughs and technological leaps were accompanied by periods where the Faustian forces were victorious over the Catholic Church. This was the case with Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton, and their scientific war with the Papal order, not for the sake of truth, but for the sake of “Faustian” truths. To Spengler this Faustian form of scientific inquiry and its subsequent practical applications differs from the rest of the cultures who despite also attempting to rob nature of its metals, wood, and stones, the Faustian man attemps to “enslave her and harness her very forces”. Centuries before the 20th century Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus had already been dreaming about steam engines, steamships, and air machines — and the Faustian dream of a machine in perpetual machine, as the ultimate practical expression of infinite space. It is therefore only the individual who does not suffer from this Faustian will to conquer nature and harness its powers, who is not possessed by this daemonic force, who views Modern progress and technology as “devilish”, as Spengler argued with Bacon we start seeing the first of the scientists who suffer from this spirit hence why he is located at the intersection between science and the occult.

It is therefore clearly not a coincidence that whenever the external Christian veneer is compromised in the West it is usually accompanied by political and scientific breakthroughs that are Faustian in nature. Whether it is the Protestant reformation and the Gutenberg press, the French Revolution-Napoleonic era and the rise of universal conscription and horsed artillery. The American Civil War and the integration of technologies in transportation and communication into warfare. The First World War and Second World Wars, as European powers began a war of annihilation, total wars, in defiance of both God and Man, we see the development and incorporation of aviation, submarine, and nuclear technologies into the war machine. Spengler viewed technological warfare as having a negative correlation with chivalry, and I would add, were a manifestation of the winter stage tendencies, of Godlessness, since it led to annihilation wars which were non-existent during the era of chivalry. Additionally, when they did occur during the crusades, or chivalrous eras, they were expressed by the forces that could be described as the earliest examples of this dark Late-Faustian tendency, namely, the Templars — whose spirits found continuity in the freemasons, and eventually the City of London Corporation today. Finally, it is also not a coincidence that the age of nihilism and destruction had paved the way for breakthroughs in jet propulsion and aerospace engineering. In Germany the rise of Nazism was an act of shedding the pseudomorphic Christian veneer, even prior to the rise of the Nazis, these primordial Germanic paganistic tendencies were rising with the resurgence Ariosophy and Thule society, eventually German scientists and engineers were successful in developing rocket propulsion technology as seen with the V-2 rocket program. The Allies victory subsequently led to Operation Paperclip where Nazi scientists and engineers were secretly taken to the US to assist in developing NASA, military technologies (Weapon Systems), and other technologies. In the US alone, even before this operation, Jack Parsons, an American engineer and Thelemite occulist, argued that the concept of Magick in Alesteir Crowley's religious movement could be understood as a force through quantum physics. It is also interesting to note that Parson's was close to L. Ron Hubbard the founder of the Chruch of Scientology. Parson's himself when conducting some of the most powerful Thelemite rituals and invocations such as the "Babalon working", said that he was the embodiment of an entity named Belarion Armillus Al Dajjal, the Antichrist "who am come to fulfill the law of the Beast 666 [Aleister Crowley]". As mentioned earlier, civilizations that succeed or precede one another tend to possess inherent spiritual forces that are almost antithetical. This is perhaps clearly illustrated in the stark contrast between the spiritual foundations of the Faustian-West and the Magian world, and extreme dynamism and yearning for the infinite in the West has made that contrast even more extreme. Perhaps Samuel Huntington was right in arguing that in the case of a Clash of Civilizations, the deadliest clash will be between the West and the Islamic world, he was not wrong, and asides from Western foreign policy in the Middle East, the clashing intrinsic spiritual presuppositions are quite clear.

The next questions to be asking concerning the spiritual forms of Spenglerian cultures, is whether the newly emerging cultures, the Russian-Orthodox, Aridoamerican, and South East Asian worlds (Also a possible new culture emerging in the Sahel area in Africa) to name a few, will produce religious forms and spiritual beliefs that are compatible or congruent with the Magian-Islamic world. Whether they will produce spiritual beliefs that find the Faustian Western world as a daemonic one, and whether they will produce scientific forms that clash with modern paradigms, healing the ontological disconnection with nature and metaphysics as a result of modern materialistic reductionist paradigms.

Below, I share an excerpt of my contribution with @QawwamMagazine on the topic of Spenglerian pseudmorphosis and Islamic civilization. I want to share this specific section in light of recent groundbreaking developments in the fields of archaeology and history in the past decades. These new findings have led to a rise of powerful critiques of mainstream Judeo-Christian historiography and historical narratives. These new critiques aim to question the conventional theological foundations of Christianity and its history through blurring the lines between early Christianity and Greco-Roman cults. The works of Brian Muraresku and Ammon Hillman, respectively, are perfect examples of this, as well as @Gnosisinformant. These recent developments are also not limited to Christian history, but also Islamic history, with the recent controversial critique provided by Dan Gibson, who recently argued that the Petra was the actual Mecca and thus mainstream Islamic narratives are geographically flawed. Now, I do not want to dismiss such contributions, if anything, I actually share their position of disagreeing with most mainstream historiographical accounts of early Christianity and Islam, perhaps even Judaic history. I do however disagree with their theological conclusions concerning Christianity and Islam, and thus I argue that through Spengler's concept of pseudomorphosis, one is able to critique mainstream historical accounts whilst maintaining the theological and cultural foundations of both Islam and Christianity. If anything, the recent archaeological developments actually complement Spengler's philosophy of history, that said, both Spengler, and I, would not agree with most of the emerging theological and cultural arguments as a result of the new findings. A Spenglerian lens allows one to comprehend why many early Jesus-cults clearly shared similar characteristics with their Greco-Roman counterparts such as the Dionysian and Eleusinian mysteries. It also reveals why the cult of Dushara, the Arab equivalent of Dionysus, played a significant role in pre-Islamic Arabia. It also explains why some Byzantine emperors and Christian groups practiced iconoclasm prior to the emergence of Islam. This perhaps also explains why Russian Orthodox approaches to spirituality, due to their Byzantine origins, are closer to Islamic-Magian ones, as opposed to Western and Greek forms (Though I personally do not believe that Orthodoxy is the sole form within Russia, but only a face within many). Finally, this does not provide us with a powerful critique of Gibson's argument concerning Petra being the original Mecca, for I believe the answers to that will be derived from archaeology, and to a lesser degree Islamic/Middle Eastern historiography, not philosophy of history. But it does provide us with the basis for a critique of any reductive argument on the origins of Islam and its theological foundations, which is already being preached by many online who have weaponized Gibson's theory. Although Gibson himself never possessed similar arguments to those who have used the theory to attack Islamic history, a recent presentation of his made me have some second thoughts. All in all the excerpt below is a brief template of an approach to Islamic and early Christian history that critiques mainstream historical narratives (both conventional Christian and Islamic ones), yet defends their cultural, spiritual, and theological integrity. One of the main examples I use is the inverted, and perverted, form of Magian spirituality that had emerged during the reign of Roman Emperor Elagabalus, the infamous transgender who had ruled Rome at one point in history (but in Greco-Roman form, yes I do believe even homosexuality and transgenderism emerge in different forms in each culture). Originally from Syria, which was part of the pseudomorphosized Magian culture, Elagabalus attempted to apotheosize himself, and proclaimed himself as god, Elagabalus can be translated to Elah Al Gabal, literally, God of the Mountain. Yet what I found fascinating about this new religion, is the fact that it was clearly Magian, but spiritually and culturally inverted. The reason the Greco-Roman culture rejected it however, was not because of its inversion, but because of the fact that it was alien to the culture. What also reflects its Magian origins is the use of the Baetylus, a black stone, which was the embodiment of the house of god. Of course, any Muslim reading this will instantly realize the significance of the black stone, since a black stone also plays a significant role in Islam and is literally placed on the corner of the holiest building in Islam. I do not want to speak any further concerning this for now, enjoy the excerpt provided below.

*Note: I am also not rejecting Gibson's Petra argument, due to the significant amount of evidence available, and I have seen this first hand when I conducted some brief field work on this in some specific countries that I will not mention here. Nor am I accepting the theory fully, rather, I argue that the answer to the Petra-Mecca issue will emerge once muslims, and Middle Easterners as a whole, take their archaeology and historiography more seriously, and attempt to provide an explanation, or answer, to such developments from those respective fields, and not by simply rejecting it blindly.

Every culture is born through a new metaphysical outlook, a new religion and death cult. The Classical religion is represented by the diverse cults spread across its respective motherland that reflect the static essence of Greco-Roman culture, as well as the appreciation for the body, present and nearby space. These cults were bound to specific areas and put an emphasis on ritual performance rather than doctrine, dogma or principles as apparent within Magian forms of religions for example. These cults in turn spread only through large migratory shifts, which was an element that was antithetical to the Magian religions. Moreover, in consistence with the Apollonian Classical world feeling, there was no component of interconnectivity between these separate cults. Asides from being born within the same respective culture and mythogenic region, the Greco-Roman cults were in essence separate from one another with no unified doctrine connecting them. Hence, Spengler said “within the Classical religion multiplication was the only form of growth, and missionary effort of any sort was excluded, for men could practice these cults without belonging to them”. The notion of a collective community of “believers” was alien to the Classical culture, if this was manifested at one point it was philosophy and not religion that brought forth this idea. Furthermore, it only appealed to a few thinkers and did not affect the whole nation. Thus, it could be argued that Greco-Roman philosophy was analogous to the religions of Magian culture, in the sense that they both performed the same function within their respective cultures but were completely different organs. Contrasting the Greco-Roman conception of religion, is the Magian idea of religion, church, doctrine and creed. The Magian religions, as opposed to the Classical, was not bound to any land or home. Its main principle is the belief of one omnipresent true God and the negation of other gods and demigods. The Classical pseudomorphosis was fueled by its spiritual strength, and the resistance to this cultural hegemony was likewise dependent on the spiritual force of the Arabian culture. This battle between the spiritual forces of the Classical and Magian cultures Spengler divides into two phases. The first occurred with the initial birth of the Magian soul, whereby the syncretism between the two cultures led to the rise of Churches in the East which mimicked the Western cults. In Persia we see this with the emergence of Mithraism, in Mesopotamia and the Levant with the rise of the star-god worshiping cults. Spengler went as far as claiming that the early forms of Christianity morphed into a Jesus-cult. To Spengler all these exhibit severe symptoms of pseudomorphosis, the spiritual union between them was almost non-existent, an element which was the norm within Greco-Roman cults. Yet, they all possessed Magian elements in their devotion to their respective church. Within pure Classical cults an individual could follow a number of the cults, yet within these new syncretic churches or cults, that was virtually impossible. The second phase begins around the turn of the second century, where the spiritual forces of the Classical were being depleted and the blooming of the Magian soul began. Here Spengler says, the roles were reversed as the cults of the West become new Churches in the East. At this specific phase, we can observe the emergence of what Spengler terms “Magian Greek nationality”. This point marks the shift from worshipping gods of localities, to the rise of belief in an omnipresent Magian God. Spengler dives deep into the history of the spiritual tension between the Classical and Magian religions, where he explores the connections, similarities and differences between Neoplatonism, Mandaenism, Islam, early denominations of Christianity, Judaism, Neopythagoreans, Zoroastrianism and dozens of other religious and philosophical groups.

Yet, the most intriguing element of Spengler’s notion of pseudomorphosis is not when these Magian forms finally reveal themselves through Islam. For these pure forms have been the subject of historic research for centuries, whether these studies conform to Spengler’s idea of a collective Magian culture or not. But when a thorough analysis of Greco-Roman history allows us to reveal the Magian soul and expression permeating through the Roman empire forming religious forms that emanated an inverted spirituality. An example of this would be the construction of the Elagabalium during the reign of Roman Emperor Elagabalus. Being of Syrian origin, the new emperor imports the beliefs of his own homeland to Rome, the result is the construction of a temple dedicated to the mountain goddess of Edessa symbolized by a black stone called a baetylus. The rituals performed around the baetylus within the Elagabalium, as well as the collection of all items holy to Greco-Roman cults, could be viewed as a deformed and spiritually inverted precursor of what would eventually become the holiest building in Islam, namely, the Kaaba. One could easily notice how trying to enforce a Magian ritual and belief structure, the worshipping or adoration of black stones and elevation of a Magian goddess above the local gods and goddesses, was a reflection of the Magian soul attempting to assert itself as it attempts to break free from the pseudomorphosis. The rituals practiced within the Elagabalium, were the very same rituals practiced along the Levant and Arabia, as evident by the early history of pre-Islamic Arabia where the city of Mecca housed the black stone and other idolized local and foreign deities. The polytheistic elements were alien to the Magian soul, and were essentially nothing more than a symptom of the pseudomorphosis, hence why the Paulician Gnostic Christian movement and Islam practiced iconoclasm against this alien form of worship. These iconoclastic tendencies rising from Magian Christian and Islamic movements were acting like cultural immune systems to what they perceived as a spiritual virus permeating their respective culture. Whilst the traditional historian tries to establish causal reasons as to why Emperor Leo the third of the Byzantine Empire ordered the destruction of icons, Spengler views this as an affirmation of the Magian soul following centuries of being chained and tormented by Greco-Roman hegemony. Another interesting example worth noting, is Spengler’s controversial argument regarding the first mosque, namely, the Pantheon in Rome. According to the author, the domed building reflected an architectural expression alien to the Greco-Roman world, an expression that embodied the Magian prime symbol, that of an enclosed dome. As opposed to the Doric temple which was the actual architectural expression of the Classical world view and soul. The Pantheon is thus seen as an architectural expression of this inverted Magian spirituality manifesting itself in the Greco-Roman world. The Jesus-cults that emerged during the phase of pseudomorphosis, a subject that is a topic of debate amongst many revisionists of Christian history today, are also manifestations of this inverted spirituality. Hence why recent discoveries reveal similarities between these early Christian cults and their Greco-Roman Dionysian counterparts such as the Eleusinian mysteries. It is thus not a surprise that Dushara, the Arab equivalent of Dionysius, had a large following in pre-Islamic Arabia, as seen in Petra and Mecca. Spengler believed that Christianity should have initially developed as a religion with a crusading spirit – a military order. The Levant’s proximity to Greece meant that Mazdean Zoroastrianism became the spiritual foundation which fueled the crusades against Rome.

The lessening of the cosmic beat within the modern Western man, alongside the tensions of his waking-consciousness, attach him to the artificial world-city — the existence of this tension exclusive of cosmic rhythms is, according to Spengler, “the transition to nothingness.” The wisdom of the countryside, natural common sense, mother wit, and instinct are all traits common to the countryman, and to him alone — based on the cosmic beat of life. The cosmopolitan intelligence substitutes this old “destiny-feeling” with “an unrestrained augmentation of needs according to the operation of causality.” If the spirit of the countryside constituted unconscious living, the city — through intelligence — exercises thought and forms a mindset almost antithetical to the former. Thus, if the birth of the city necessitates death, this very essence of death permeates the populace — as revealed by the decrease in birth rates. To Spengler, this phenomenon, “the sterility of civilized man,” is not the result of causal reasons as described by modern science, but a purely “metaphysical turn towards death.” Modern man yearns for death; although he may try to preserve his life as an individual, the individualistic existence reflects an essence of death. Discontinuity of the family, tribe, or name, a concept that frightens the peasant, is nonexistent in the cosmopolitan man’s life. Regarding progenies, Spengler stated that “children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence.” To Spengler, the difference between the sexes corresponds to the contrast between the animal and plant worlds, whereby the masculine is closer to the animal in the comprehension of causality and is “the causal logic of the become.” The feminine, on the other hand, is more connected to the cosmic, akin to plants, and is “herself destiny and time and the organic logic of the becoming,” in other words, in Spenglerian terms, “Man makes history, the woman is history.” This, according to Spengler, is further demonstrated by the feminine form given to destiny in most cultures. Hence, most seers and oracles were female, not because they foresaw the future — but because they are the future. Spengler’s depiction of the dual being of history allows us to comprehend his arguments regarding infertility in the final stage of all cultures, whereby the plant-like, maternal or feminine elements within the soul of the culture, which essentially give birth to culture, are eradicated when the respective culture severs the connection with nature, as the cultural soul perishes. Instead, the animal-like or masculine elements dominate the culture, and thus the culture experiences a period of appalling depopulation — a crisis which escalates until the phenomenon spreads toward the provinces and countryside. What emerges out of the ashes of the culture is the “fellah” type, and the civilization is replaced by what Spengler terms “fellaheen society,” which shifts the culture into an eternal phase of cosmic historylessness. This symptom of decline, which occurs alongside the gradual rise of Caesarism, is irreversible, as illustrated by the history of the Roman empire. Lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus, a law Augustus introduced during his reign to regulate and promote marriages and the reproduction of offspring, failed to quell the depletion of the population. The phenomenon of depopulation as a result of cultural bankruptcy has also struck the Egyptian civilization during the new empire era, the Indian civilization during the advent of Buddhism, the Mayans prior to, and during, the brutal Spanish invasions, as well as Western culture today. Furthermore, in The Hour of Decision, Spengler introduces the idea of the “woman of race,” whose instinct is antithetical to the “Ibsen woman” whose arrival plays a critical role in dismantling the family unit. As opposed to the Ibsen woman, the woman of race yearns for motherhood, rather than for obtaining a companion or lover. Spengler borrows an anecdote told to him by a Russian concerning the women of Russia, that they would effectively reproduce the numbers that have been lost during the revolution within a matter of years. To Spengler, the reproductive instinct embodied by Russian women reflects the strength of the Russian nation. In The Decline of the West, Spengler labels the Ibsen woman, as opposed to the woman of race, as “the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature,” as exemplified by the works of Henrik Ibsen — she desired freedom from the burden of children, rather than independence from the husband. In Ibsen’s Loves Comedy, the man who possessed many children was ridiculed in the megalopolitan society. Although Ibsen’s works initially received harsh criticism for condemning traditional marital roles, the ideas presented in his works are the norms of 21st century Western civilization. The arrival of the ethical-practical tendencies of an irreligious, materialistic, and unmetaphysical cosmopolitanism is first met by resistance within the respective culture, since these tendencies are inclined towards the dismantling of the foundations of the very culture they belong to. Hence, the initial resistance the “Socratic man” faces as he emerges in the history of a culture, since his rationalistic view undermines the foundational structure of the culture. The “Socratic man” is viewed as a threat to the culture, which is why Socrates was put to death by his society. However, at the winter stage, these types, the Socratic man and the Ibsen woman, proliferate and dominate the civilization; their early rejection is the result of the clash between the springtime tendencies and the emerging winter tendencies. Finally, Spengler argued that, since the country and city are in fact polar opposites, even the forms of pleasure and recreation practiced in each of these societies are adversative. The humble form of recreation in the countryside is nonexistent in the city; rather, the intellectual tensions experienced in the city lead to a sensual thirst for a different type of pleasure, unique to the city — namely, cinema, expressionism, erotic pleasure, boxing contests, dancing, and racing — the Western equivalent of Rome’s bread and circuses, the type of pleasure and hedonism which Dorian Gray pursues in Oscar Wilde’s magnum opus, or which are displayed in Huysmans’ Against Nature, the alleged book that corrupts Dorian Gray and is regarded as the manual of decadence. Conclusively, the Western world that Spengler envisions prior to the emergence of Western Caesarism is one which demolishes its own belief system, a world similarly prophesized by Nietzsche, where the inherent belief system of the West collapses and is replaced by the cult of rationalistic science and communism as the final world sentiment of the West. As a result of this radical change in the underlying metaphysical presuppositions of Western culture, the symptoms of decline mentioned above, which have been gradually lurking within the core of the Faustian culture, emerge and obliterate the pillars that had held Western civilization together. Yet, paradoxically, what occurs alongside this collapse of the religious belief system inherent to a culture is what Spengler terms “second religiousness,” which we shall explore prior to diving into Spengler’s conception of money, democracy, and Caesarism.

In my latest paper on Arktos (@ArktosJournal), I explored Spengler's concept of Second Religiousness, that is not only manifesting around us in real time today, but could also pave the way for a future paradigm shift in the sciences and humanities. I am no expert on the history of science or philosophy of science, hence why I explore this phenomenon through the lens of Spengler's cultural analysis and Thomas Kuhn's arguments concerning the development of science. But I do think many open-minded scientists, philosophers of science, and historians specialized in the history of science, should explore this topic further today. Especially considering the developments emerging in the sciences as we speak.

When exploring Spengler's notion of second religiousness, I have found out that this specific phenomenon had already materialized prior to the 60s counter-cultures, as clearly seen with the German social reform movements, lebensreform, which Spengler was clearly aware of. Spengler saw this phenomenon occur around the periphery of industrial society, and accurately predicted its re-emergence, which had occurred with the 1960's counter-cultures across the West. What I also noticed, is the possible emergence of a new scientific paradigm, precisely with the works of Walter Russell and Nikola Tesla that clearly defied the dominant modern paradigm. Russell's arguments on a unifying principle of rhythmic balance across the universe, and Tesla's rejection of mainstream theories on electricity and magnetism and his arguments for a fifth element, namely, "aether", were rejected by mainstream scientists. Beyond this, a century earlier, Goethe introduced his own theory of light, and unique ontology and methodology for the study of life. Like the former two, Goethe's work was not taken seriously by most scientists, despite his extraordinary contributions to many other scientific fields, including his contributions in paleo-anthropology and comparative anatomy. His controversial ideas on evolution, which were in stark contrast to Darwin's mechanistic theory, made many view him as a founder of a different, and more humble, approach to science, Goethean science, as opposed to Newtonian and Darwinian sciences. These are just examples of some creative individuals who had come up with the foundations of what I believe to be to a newly emerging scientific paradigm. Again, I am no expert on the field, but I would guarantee that if one were to explore this further, we would definitely find more examples of ideas that contradict or clash with the mainstream scientific paradigm that emerge from around the early 18th century to our present day.

More recently, many have also been arguing for a possible paradigm shift in the humanities. The emergence of a new paradigm that is characterized by holism, that is more intuitive in approach, emphasizes the distinction between the organic and artificial, and is ecologically affirming. This paradigm critiques Eurocentrism, secularism, and pure objectivism, and is clearly shaped by ideas that have emerged from New Age movements. Ewa Domanska has recently explored this topic further, arguing that we are witnessing the emergence of new systems of knowledge that combine humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences with indigenous knowledge (2021).

I argue that this specific paradigm had materialized as early as the late 19th century and early 20th, with the works of Nietzsche, Spengler, Jaspers, and Jung, who could all be argued to belong to a neo-axial age. All these thinkers, and their groundbreaking contributions to the humanities unsurprisingly emerged alongside one of the significant waves of second religiosity in the West. The works of William Irwin Thompson clearly belong to, or are precursors, of this paradigm. This also includes Randall Carlson's (@randallwcarlson) contributions in geology and archaeology, and his attempt to bridge sacred geometry and modern science. The cultural critic John David Ebert and his work, which could be described as an anti-mainstream philosophy ironically combining the pessimism of Spengler and the Optimism of Thompson into a coherent whole. Other examples I have come across in my own journey are the works of @KaliYugaSurfCo & @orphicresonance, who have attempted to unveil the shape of time through the infamous spiral of history–the meta saeculum. The meta-saeculum is an adaptation of Strauss and Howe's saeculum cycles, albeit immersed in deep metaphysical propositions, and applied in the longue durée. This specific project is special to me because of a profound vision that I have experienced during the summer of 2020. That specific stage of my life was quite transformative, which I could describe as a short yet powerful spiritual journey that culminated in a dream, or vision, that I experienced after weeks of intense fasting, holotropic breathing, meditating, earthing, sleep deprivation, and praying. The dream was that of a spiral, when asked what the spiral was, I could not hear the words, but I rather felt them, and they alluded to the directional spiral being the shape of history, time, and life. Funnily enough, many critics have argued that Spengler had contradicted his own arguments against causality in history by representing his theory in a chronological table. Indeed, I agree, because his theory can only be represented visually through the spiral, hence why the meta-Saeculum overlaps with Spengler's model perfectly.

There are many mutuals that I have also managed to connect with during the past years that seem to be converging into similar conclusions, applying similar methodologies, and throughout the spectrum, they all seem to be emanating a distinct and new spirit transcending current the current reductive and materialistic paradigm. These individuals are drawing knowledge from many different, and sometimes extremely opposing, realms and fields (including theology, astrology, mineralogy, history, the social sciences, and nutrition and biology), yet their answers seem to overlap and at times converge.

Beyond the humanities, this convergence manifests in the recent groundbreaking work of Malcolm Bendall (@malcolmbendall) which could be seen as the practical application of some of the theoretical foundations provided by Randall Carlson (@randallwcarlson), and other past thinkers. If his findings and inventions (Plasmoid generator) are proven to be true and functional, then it could potentially pave the way for a revolution across many fields and industries. This could open up the door to the practical application of this new paradigm transforming the world as we know it.

Finally, the recent attempts to explore supernatural and paranormal phenomena in the sciences (Psychic phenomena, ESP, remote viewing, UFOs), are perhaps another example of the indigenization of the humanities, bridging the gap between the sciences and the supernatural. It is clearly not a coincidence that such attempts are increasing today when compared to the mid-20th century where the opposing materialistic paradigm was at its peak.

It is also not surprising that recent research volume has been at an all-time high, but that also ironically revealed the decline in breakthroughs in the past 50 years. This decline in breakthroughs, and subsequent rise in scientific anomalies, perfectly overlaps with the Kuhn cycle and are symptoms of a crisis stage in a science, which is eventually followed by a model revolution and paradigm shift. As Spengler said, the modern Western science will fall upon its own sword when all the sciences converge into one conclusion, which I believe would result in the new paradigm which is more holistic in nature. The project to unify the sciences will occur beyond the materialistic reductive paradigm, in a new paradigm that shatters the presumptions of the old.

As William Irwin Thompson said, the material world around us is essentially the practical-conscious expression of a deeper unconscious reality, which had first emerged as ideas, but these ideas eventually actualized in our surrounding architecture, technology, art, urban planning, political and economic forms. The new paradigm, which I call the spiral paradigm, due to the dominance of this symbol across its different ideas and theories, has been expressing itself at the unconscious level for some time now. At one point, these unconscious ideas will find expression in the conscious world around us, shaping a new world, and perhaps a new culture.