Springtime Religion

The primitive period is marked by a lack of historical direction. Truths are hard to establish, ideas waft over the landscape and organically come in and out of existence, resulting in a world-picture dominated by uncertainty. Thus, religion within this period is marked by fear of the unknown rather than love. Entering into the culture period brings a change of form.

‘It begins, in every case, like a great cry. The dull confusedness of terror and defence suddenly passes into a pure awakening of inwardness that blossoms up, wholly plantwise, from mother earth, and sees and comprehends the depth of the light-world with one outlook.’ (Decline 2.9.5)

What begins to stir in the pre-cultural period, showcasing a clear religious personality unique to the landscape, actualizes in the springtime. Religion no longer floats like language over the land arbitrarily, but roots itself in a particular land and the race that resides there. When it does so, it takes on the worldview of the young culture, and its understanding of God and the divine comes to reflect the prime symbol of the higher culture. This is felt in 1 John as the battle of light and dark, the Iliad evidences the demi-god hero as the mediator of higher and lower bodies, and the veneration of Mary in Gothic symbolism, expresses the ultimate form of care in a Christian theology that no longer resembles the middle eastern battle of good and evil, but the absolute force of the loving God we all reside within.

In Egypt around 3000 BC we see the beginnings of a great religion, and in this era we see the construction of the Giza Pyramids. Egypt’s cultural output was towards longevity, the sarcophagus preserves the body to the best of Egyptian ability and thus these time capsules last to the modern day. A feat producible only by a deeply felt religious feeling in the good of their construction.

1100 BC onwards, Classical ‘religion’ makes an appearance. Much about early Classical religion remains unknown and Spengler chooses to address the sum of Homer and Hesiod for what can be salvaged. Homer and Hesiod belong to the nobility and peasantry respectively and not the priesthood. The glory of Achilles in the Iliad is through honour and greatness – a name that lasts forever, not dissimilar to Gilgamesh – while the observing gods are far from holy, taking sides in a petty dispute between houses. Hesiod affirms these petty Gods and their dynastic disputes, likely also assembling Theogony out of fables and not of agreed-upon holy books. Both epics were narrated orally, and the classical cities they were popular within were intellectually dominated by aristocracies and not a clergy. As in the Gothic period we have the Western depictions of Mary, there are traces of Demeter-worship in the forms of myth, imagery and figures, as well as motherly depictions of Gaia and Persephone, and around Dionysus arose chthonian festivals and mysteries and phallic cults. Classical religion focused in on the body, and Demeter celebrated its conception, whilst Dionysus represented present corporeality.

Western religion begins with Mary.

‘She is the guardian of the Church’s store of Grace, the Great Intercessor. Among the Franciscans arose the festival of the Visitation, amongst the English Benedictines (even before 1100) that of the Immaculate Conception, which elevated her completely above mortal humanity into the world of light.’ (Decline 2.9.3)

Mary as the mother of God carries a special significance to us for the implicit lineage that she promises. God is eternal, but God is also born, our conception of God defines our reality, thus a fundamental truth of reality is birth, bloodlines, generations, heritage, time and care. Against her, as in Revelation, is the Dragon, the devil, an opposing force that breeds destruction; light and dark as substance becomes light and dark as battling wills. Before Christianity, Loki the trickster god would have served the same symbolic purpose, and in the Middle Ages Satan’s face would be the one face universally recognised for his pagan features across Europe. A symbolism of colour painted their opposition, Mary cloaked in white and blue, the Devil, black, yellow and red. So perhaps it is antithetical that it was still through woman that the devil spread sin. The witch became the enemy of the male ascetic, like in Greece, China and India, so its no surprise that the witch became the face of evil in the rise of Puritanism.

The gothic cathedral exemplifies the early religious feeling of our culture perfectly. Man felt himself as an ego lost in infinity. Dwarfed and surrounded by forces infinitely greater than he. He fights endlessly for his freedom to breathe in a world that tries to smother him, and every limitation is seen as a chain upon him, a chain to be broken. Man looked to the heavens and saw not a closed in space but a great infinite without end, populated by an expanse of greater and greater sums of forces in the stars and planets. What purpose might one so small have in this great expanse? How might man justify himself before God’s unfathomably large creation? It was guilt that raised taller and taller cathedrals across Europe. The innovation of the pointed arch and its vaulting, the flying buttress, weightless walls of glass between which an interior filled with organ-sound and choir music made medieval populations feel small before their own works. But when the music stopped and the sun set what remained was the continued ambivalence of God’s silence, within which the devil snickers in the darkness.

Spring religion is the first effort for a higher culture to display its prime symbol, and the character traits that will run through its history like motifs.