What The Passing Of An Age Means

The idea of the passing of an age has been on my mind recently. As we cut deeper into the 21^st century, I get more and more of the feeling of completeness and finality with regard to Western civilization. This is only natural. As you near the end of your life you tend to look back and take stock of what has happened and what it all means. 

At Volkish we have long ago forsworn normal political activism, but over the last year I have let go of other dreams as well, all of which have to do with the resuscitation of our current civilization. The idea that a reconstructed Germanic paganism could do the trick of reigniting our spark, or that in the warp and chaos of a civil war we could usher in a kind of authoritarian imperial age and thereby add a few centuries of life and greatness to Western civilization, have all fallen from my mind.

I now think none of that will come to pass. I believe that we really are at the end of this journey. The one that began for us in the 11^th century with the founding of the French and English Royal houses, the final defeat of the pagan Vikings, and the creation of the Papal College and the distinctiveness of the Western Roman Catholic Church. And of course the beginning of writing and record keeping again after a century of darkness and the civilizational unity found in the first Crusade. We are a thousand years on from these founding events. 

An age lasts a thousand years—give or take. Look back to the Classical age. Though our dating for these events are much less secure, it is agreed that they emerged from their dark age in the 8^th century B.C. The founding of Rome, the first Olympic games, and the writing of the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer are all given to this century.

A thousand years on from that founding century and the Classical world is in the 3^rd century A.D. The Peace of Rome had came to an end and the empire was being sundered by plague, population decline, invasion, civil war, domination by foreign elites, and cultural schizophrenia. Despite attempts to revive themselves and reestablish their old culture, by the next century a new age had announced itself. 

We in the 21^st century are in that fateful era of chaos between ages where everything detaches, breaks down and is mixed together. Where the cultural memory starts to fade and people forget their past. And despite all the betrayal and treachery, the missed opportunities and how we can all imagine the way things could have been different, I think this a necessary and natural phenomenon in the cycle of history. As Hesse said, “the world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish—and it will.”

This is what cultural decline feels like. The recent pulling down and desecration of our statues and monuments is a good example. They only fell because they no longer meant anything to us. As Junger said, all culture begins with the cult of the dead. If thats true, then we must have something of an anti-culture today, considering the lack of respect—nay, the total shame—paid to our ancestors and our past. A people proud and concerned with its identity and future would never allow such a thing, no matter the laws or social oppression. Those statues came down generations ago in people’s hearts. The present physical destruction only confirms that. 

What is happening slowly is that our people are just no longer showing up for life in its fullest meaning. They have simply stop caring. The decline has gotten so bad that we don’t even want talk about it anymore. Things that used to mean something to us, that we used to enjoy, we let slip away, as if we all are under a great depression. Unity, direction, destiny, all go away. We fragment into constituent parts, spin off in our own directions and are sucked down collectively.

In fact—and in subtle but profound ways—our people have been letting go of this civilization for many years now. Each generation sheds a little more, buries a little more. Our people are letting themselves forget, loosening their grip on what they used to believe. This is what we are doing now. People do it without even understanding it. It just feels natural.

But in the end none of this is blameworthy, despite how ugly and wretched it appears to us in the present time. As Robinson Jeffers said: 

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make 
fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, 
ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

Does this mean that all is lost forever? Of course not. Aryan man has had many civilizations, seen many ages. But we need to have the courage to let go of this civilization. Our generation needs to have the vision and strength to do this. If we try to hold on to it, we will fail and be made ridiculous in the effort. 

But our task not just a passive one of stepping back and letting something fall. Less still are we called to push as Nietzsche said. That is altogether unnecessary at this point. What we are called to do is plant the seedpods of the New Order, to find good soil for them, tend to them and protect them, as the storm of this passing age rages about. As we know, the old always contains within it the embryo of the new. 

Walter Schubart perceived this several generations ago when he prophesied, “No battle has ever been fought from which the victor has emerged as he was at the outset: he is always, in some measure, changed by his vanquished enemy. Dying epochs and declining cultures continue to live as a result of having forced their successors to overcome them. Here, as always, death and birth are interwoven with one another and, in the end, the stirrings of new life can always be felt. As in the lowest forms of life, so in the apocalyptic stage of an epoch, death and procreation are united in conception and new life. Not only the agony, but also the ecstasy of death is a sign of the pregnance that heralds a new being coming into existence. In the twentieth century, the interdependence of love and death is manifested in the fate of a whole generation. And therefore Europe has no reason to feel that she is the victim of history.”