Every account of history carries a shape. Some histories are flat, a sequence of events with no direction. Most of those that have mattered to people are not. They describe a fall, or an ascent, or a circle, and they place the reader at a particular point on it.
Esoteric traditions have been unusually attached to such shapes, and unusually willing to combine them. This primer describes the two great patterns, decline from a golden age and ascent toward a higher consciousness, and the way in which modern esotericism learned to hold both at the same time. It closes with some suggestions for reading histories of this kind without either swallowing them or sneering at them.
From gold to iron
The oldest pattern is decline. In the Greek poem known as the Works and Days, composed around 700 BCE, humanity passes through a sequence of races named for metals. The golden race lived like gods, without toil or old age. The silver race was foolish and short-lived. The bronze race was violent. After an interval of heroes came the race of iron, which is ours: condemned to labor and grief, and destined to grow worse until the gods destroy it.
Indian tradition tells a version on an incomparably larger scale. Time is divided into four ages, or yugas, each shorter and more degraded than the last. In the first, righteousness stands on four legs; in the last it hobbles on one. The present age is the fourth and darkest, the Kali Yuga, an age of quarrel and confusion. When it ends the whole sequence begins again from the age of truth.
These schemes look pessimistic, and in one sense they are. They also offer a kind of comfort. If the present is bad because the age is bad, then nobody in particular is to blame, and the disorder of the world is, at least, in order.
The great year
A second ancient idea supplied the machinery for a cyclical history. Astronomers noticed that the point in the sky at which the sun rises at the spring equinox drifts slowly backward through the constellations, completing a circuit in about twenty-six thousand years. Philosophers in the Platonic tradition spoke of a great year, at the end of which the heavens return to their starting position and history, perhaps, repeats.
Astrologers later divided the great year into twelve ages of roughly two thousand years, each named for the constellation in which the equinox falls. The age now ending is usually reckoned as that of the Fishes. The one beginning, on most calculations, is that of the Water Carrier. Nobody agrees on when the change occurs, which has allowed every generation since the nineteenth century to suspect that it is happening now. The idea reached its widest audience in the popular songs of the 1960s, which announced the new age with an assurance the astronomers never shared.
The ladder of evolution
The nineteenth century brought a new shape. Evolution, as the scientists described it, was a story of ascent: from simple to complex, from lower to higher. Esoteric writers seized on it and gave it a spiritual meaning.
The most influential of them belonged to Theosophy, the movement founded in New York in 1875 that set out to recover an ancient wisdom said to underlie all religions. Its teachers combined the vast Indian cycles with the Victorian idea of progress. In their system, spirit descends into matter and then climbs back out, through immense rounds of time, on a ladder of planets and epochs. Humanity is somewhere near the bottom of the arc, beginning the long climb, assisted by hidden adepts who have gone ahead.
Part of this scheme was a sequence of successive human types, called root races, each said to be more spiritually advanced than the last. Later writers put the idea to ugly uses, and most modern readers of the tradition treat it as an embarrassment rather than a teaching. It belongs in any honest account all the same, as a reminder of how easily a spiritual hierarchy becomes a human one.
Theosophy's cultural reach was enormous and is still underrated. Painters, composers, educators and reformers drew on it, often without saying so. Its picture of history as a spiritual ascent passed into much of what was later called the New Age, together with the conviction that a great shift was due soon.
If consciousness is evolving, why are things not getting better?
The evolution of consciousness
In the twentieth century the idea of spiritual ascent took a subtler form. A number of writers, some esoteric and some not, argued that what changes over history is not merely what people think but the way in which they are conscious at all.
One version started from language. Older languages, it observed, are far more figurative than ours: their words for abstract things are pictures of concrete ones. The conclusion drawn was that earlier people did not merely speak metaphorically but experienced the world as alive and participated in it, and that modern consciousness was the result of a long withdrawal from that participation. Another version described a sequence of structures of consciousness, from the archaic through the magical, the mythical and the rational, each mutating into the next, and suggested that the rational structure was now breaking down to make way for an integral one.
The obvious objection was put by these writers themselves. If consciousness is evolving, why are things not getting better? Their answer is the most interesting part of the theory. An evolution of consciousness, they replied, is not the same as progress. The breakdown of one structure is experienced from inside as crisis, fragmentation and loss of meaning. The disorder of the present is not evidence against the change; it is what the change feels like. Some of them were careful to add that the new consciousness would not make the world much better, only different.
Living at the turning point
Put the two patterns together and a characteristic esoteric view of the present emerges. We stand at the bottom of a long decline, which is also the threshold of an ascent. The darkest age is the one before the dawn. The same structure appears in alchemy, where the matter must blacken and rot before it can whiten, as described in Nigredo, and in the apocalyptic literature, where the worst tribulation comes immediately before the new heaven and the new earth.
The appeal of this view is plain. It turns suffering into labor pains. It also has a weakness that the archive has documented at length in A Calendar of Failed Prophecies: every generation that adopts it discovers that it is the generation at the turning point. The age changes, by most reckonings, now. It has been changing now for about a hundred and fifty years.
Reading these histories
As history in the ordinary sense, none of these schemes can be tested. The cycles are too long, the structures too general and the evidence too selectively chosen. As documents, they are invaluable. They record what people felt about their own time, and the feeling they record most consistently is that something has been lost and something is coming.
- Ask what the scheme says has been lost. The answer is usually more precise than the cosmology: community, attention, the sense of a living world.
- Ask where it places the reader. A history that puts its own audience at the hinge of the ages should be read with the same care as an advertisement that says this offer ends today.
- Ask what it asks the reader to do. Some schemes counsel patience and inner work. Others counsel preparation for an imminent event. The difference matters a great deal to the people who believe them.
The archive's own view of endings, set out in The Slow Apocalypse, is closer to the decline than to the ascent, and suspicious of turning points altogether. But the esoteric histories make one point that deserves to be kept. A time of disintegration is not only a time of loss. It is also a time in which the shape of what is ending becomes, for once, visible.