1. Cycles And Civilisations
It is a speech that could begin as follows:
“At the end of the 20th century, humanity faces problems that are beyond its power, all the more difficult to solve as they concern the entire planet and require a minimum agreement between people. It seems only perverted freedom remains from the Liberty-Equality-Fraternity trilogy, that of enriching oneself with all the rights while having no duties. Equality has been confused with levelling, Fraternity with Social Security and Liberty with free speculation. All ideals have been sacrificed on the altars of Efficiency and Competition. The West, handicapped, so to speak, by its democratic habits which forbid any slightly authoritarian action, seems more sensitive than the East to this crisis affecting its meaning and values, which it tries to explain and circumvent by all means. Through its revealed religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the West turned towards an exclusively virile model by extraditing the feminine from Heaven to the benefit of a unique and “Fatherly God”, without any counterpart other than “the powers of hell”. These religions moved away from anything that could induce a feeling of sacredness. Some substitutes were established, but nothing that could simultaneously satisfy reason and mobilise hope. The myth of infinite progress as a source of happiness fizzled out, even though defenders of the communication society still attempt to play this card. Religions, slow to question themselves, have lost much influence over the people dubbed – rightly or wrongly so – as the “most civilised”, while they sometimes acquire a new vigour among those left out by the economic growth. Trials of societies based on Equality have come to a standstill, for they carried the deprivation of liberty within themselves. No one even dares to dream of societies with Brotherhood as a fundamental value yet. The only remaining power left to the individual seems to be that of money, in a post-industrial society that has given rise to much despair … ”
By changing a few words to put the discourse in a different historical context, one could easily attribute it to a Greek orator from the middle of the Hellenistic period. For the Greeks, too, questioned the meaning of things and mourned their violated ideals and lost hope during this period, which saw the greatness of Greece vanish. This period, distant from us by twenty centuries, consecrated the end of the values around which the Greek civilisation was constituted and prepared the transition to the Roman Empire. If there is a loss of meaning, and for many a lack of hope and faith in mankind, it means that there is most probably a lack of perspective and the absence of a clear vision of the goal towards which to tend.
This book has been written to participate, however little, in the development of such a vision. We are aware that it broaches domains that are obscure for many, such as symbolism or mythology, where pure critical reason must sometimes withdraw to leave access to fields of knowledge that are still barely known. When we refer to them, it is because they are the only sources of information that we can use in the context of our subject.
The very usefulness of a study spanning several millennia could be challenged at the outset, when the problems that beset us require urgent and down-to-earth answers. There are two types of response, one taking the individual into account, and the other taking the community into account.
On an individual level, he who seeks to deepen the foundations of his morals and beliefs, or attempts to answer fundamental questions about the meaning of things, beyond the ready-made and often contradictory answers that philosophies and religions offer, will sooner or later be confronted to the evolutionary question, both individual and collective, because the two are inseparable. And just as one will have to go back far into his childhood to understand the origin of much of his adult behaviour, he will also have to understand how his grandparents, his ancestors and the civilisations from which he descends have forged what he has become today. And the more he is able to incorporate these multiple influences, accepting them as his own, without fighting them, but the more he will be able to endorse his full human condition.
From a collective point of view, and whatever the specific motives might be – seeking more justice or a better world for our children, or trying to solve collective problems – it is never useless to take a step back and consider the current concerns from the broadest point of view that we can apprehend. It is perhaps the only way, we will be able to avoid the catastrophes that many predict, by accompanying evolution in the direction towards which it calls us, and not by solely attempting to fill the gaps of a civilisation that is egoistic to the highest degree, one that acts without worrying about the future, at the risk of destroying itself. To cite an example, if we realised early enough that only a woman will be able to preserve nature from total destruction, because she carries, within herself, the instinct of preservation of the body and therefore that of our common body, the earth, perhaps we would not have put so many obstacles to her access to the joint management of society. When it comes to survival, women have qualities such as inflexibility, determination and mental strength that are seriously lacking in men. These same qualities no doubt enable women, who give birth, to solve the first problem of humanity today: overpopulation.
It is true that some deplore the decline in birth rates in certain Western countries. But, from a global point of view, and considering man with his egoism and his current limits, overpopulation remains one of the major challenges of the end of this century, even if the demographic growth seems to be stabilised.
If the “shift” I am going to talk about turns into reality, then we have to expect vast changes that go far beyond the upheavals promised by the visionaries of the internet or of other toys of our materialistic civilisations.
This shift corresponds to a specific moment of a cyclical process that we will try to explain in this book and that we can present in a general manner as follows:
The human mind, and therefore the cultures and civilisations it produces, is not only subjected to spatial influences but also to temporal ones. (By “mind” we mean the totality of faculties that belong to this plane, to be distinguished from the planes of life and matter. The mind thus includes all the logical capacities of the left brain as well as the intuitive capacities of the right hemisphere.)
There would be a vast alternation between the forces of separation, individuation and the forces of fusion, union, which would result in the alternating domination of each of the two cerebral hemispheres, the logical left brain and the intuitive right brain. (We link here the terms separation and individuation on one side, and fusion and union on the other, the latter representing the fulfilment of the former. We will explain this at length further in this book.) The total duration of a cycle would be of the order of twenty-six thousand years and humanity today would be experiencing the passage of an era of separation, which saw the domination of man as representative of forces of individuation, for nearly thirteen thousand years, to a period of fusion of which the woman would be, through intuition, if not the dominant pole, at least the inspiring one.
Just as the day contains twelve symbolic hours – not the current twenty-four hours which are a duplication – which each characterise a “colour” of the day, a nature of vibration and activity, just as the year contains twelve months, twelve degrees of life, growth and decline, the great cycle of twenty six thousand years would be divided into twelve periods of two thousand one hundred and sixty years each, which, like the great period, would each include a separative phase and a fusional phase.
(The last four periods are well known by the traditions as the eras of Taurus, Aries, Pisces, and Aquarius, though no one really knows where to place their limits. The surroundings of the year 2000 are supposed to characterise the entry into the Aquarian era.)
In other words, the mind of man, both individually and collectively, would be subjected to certain laws of space and time, beyond the immediate socio-economic influences that colour, at a given time, a particular mental mode. Local influences, which result from belonging to a particular human group or geographical area, are relatively well known and are not the ones we are interested in here.
Nor will we be concerned with spatial influences, that is, the influence of latitude and longitude on the development of a culture. At most, we will propose a general hypothesis concerning the major East-West and North-South trends in the light of the theory of holograms. Because if some approach the problem timidly by evoking similarities between the external signs that certain civilisations manifest and the functioning of the two cerebral hemispheres, they are barely at the stage of stating what they see and far still from offering an explanation.
According to a Hegelian vision of the world, as well as a study of vibrations out of the spectrum of our current measuring instruments, indeed, the problem is complex because it covers such controversial notions as the soul, – fate and the spirit of people. Moreover, it implies being able to isolate, the purely spatial influences of all the climatic, sociological, religious or other factors in the study of civilisations.
We will therefore focus essentially on the cyclical temporal aspect. This study focuses on the long durations that animate the movements of our cultures/civilisations, without our being aware of it. It amounts to saying that our fundamental mode of mental activity is never entirely free, that it depends largely on cosmic cyclical phenomena which we are unable to control in the present state of our mental development – with the exception of some exceptional beings.
If, intuitively, this hypothesis can be admitted quite easily – because very few phenomena escape the vibratory principle – it is a very different problem when it comes to demonstrating it. It is because we know very little about the human mind and its base, the physical body, and more specifically, the brain. And also, because we know even less about the laws of the universe.
First and foremost, we must deal with the question raised by the statement of our hypothesis: why cycles of 26,000 and 2160 years and not 1000 or 10,000 years, or any other duration?
In fact, our approach was not to take random durations and to then look for how history or the mind could conform to it. This would have been a relatively tedious approach and the attempt would be doomed to fail. We followed the opposite process: convinced by research in other domains of the existence of precise cycles, we tried to understand them and find their traces in history. As we will see later, our efforts were not in vain with this approach. When it comes to the reasoning of their existence, we are still at the stage of hypotheses, even if some tracks appear promising.
The existence of such a cycle – lasting a few millennia – that would guide the mind into a very slow oscillation, and would be at the origin of the domination of one cerebral hemisphere and then the other, implies the existence of a clock somewhere. Either this clock is a characteristic of the mental field itself, not an individual field, but a cosmic field of which only a tiny part would seep through each of the individual minds and on which they would synchronise, or it is located in another plane than the mind and impels the rhythm from outside. It could be either a rhythm of life resulting from internal biological clocks, themselves possibly synchronised by the rhythms of matter; either a rhythm of matter, resulting from electromagnetic force fields, the race of planets or galaxies or any other material phenomenon; or finally, a rhythm coming from some plane, sub-material or supra-mental that is still totally unknown to us.
It is likely that the answer lies, to a certain extent, in each of these hypothesis, because we always forget that the universe is One and that what happens in a plane has interactions with all other planes. This Oneness of the Universe results from the hypothesis – or experience or intimate conviction – of the existence of an “Absolute” or “Truth” beyond which nothing can be.
However, by examining the evolutionary process, we can see that life cycles have developed on the basis of those of matter. Gradually, a number of internal biological clocks appeared within living beings, these clocks sometimes freeing themselves from their dependence to the material environment through some mysterious process, but, conversely, not governing any cycles of matter. The mind, which appeared after life, was thus most likely based on the rhythms of life and matter. Just as life does not seem to be able to influence the rhythms of matter, it also seems that the mind is not able to influence the rhythms of life in a sustainable way. Yogis who manage to modify their respiratory or cardiac rhythm do not seem to call upon the mind but to appeal to the energies of life itself. If one day man must modify or free himself from the laws of the universe, he will have to emerge in another plane, superior to the mind, which can be called the Supramental.
Without completely rejecting the first hypothesis, namely the existence of a rhythm inherent to the mental substance – for even if it is based on the rhythms of the lower planes, the durations which are specific to it must come from a source – it is likely that the rhythms of the mind are synchronised with those of life and matter.
For long cycles, life can hardly offer adequate clocks, because its own rhythms hardly exceed a few hundred years. It would thus be the planetary and cosmic movements that regulate the dance. But it still has to be proved. What relationship can be established between a cosmic phenomenon and a mental cycle? What is the link? We have not found the answer yet. The astronomical theory of paleoclimates may seem like a promising avenue. The glacial periods follow a double periodicity of 23,000 years and 19,000 years. With the glacial periods, the composition of the atmosphere changes and the proportion of CO2 in the air varies, which could induce a preferential functioning of one of the two cerebral hemispheres. But all this still has to be demonstrated.
There is another cycle of about 21,000 years that characterises the variation of the position of solstices and equinoxes in the orbit of the earth around the sun. This cycle results from the phenomenon of astronomical precession and the rotational movement of the ecliptic. But for this cycle, we could not find any material elements that could be linked with the cerebral functions.
So if we are able to highlight some paleo-climatology cycles that are a little closer to the duration of our 26,000-year cycle – the so-called precession cycle of the equinoxes – we have not found anything concerning the 2160-year cycle, apart from deducing it from the great cycle according to the model of holograms applied to time. However, it seems premature to develop this point before even being convinced of the existence of these cycles and their influence on human history.
This is what we will try to achieve in the next chapters for these cycles of about 2160 years, after presenting what is known about how the ancients considered the problem of cycles.
Fundamentally, our proposal has nothing that could surprise them. The subject has already been widely debated. From the earliest times, the idea of cycles seduced the great minds of the past. In China, the alternation of the two aspects, Yin and Yang, is one of the pillars of philosophy. Applied to history, nothing could better reflect the succession of static periods and dynamic activities than the symbol associated with this Yin/Yang duality.
In India, philosophers developed a cyclical vision of the world: succession of creations, of universes, reproducing themselves on the model of a great cosmic breath, which, in their subdivisions, are composed of four Yugas or eras. These four periods follow a ratio of degressive durations 4, 3, 2, 1, and reflect a progressive obscuration of the truth. The last period, the Kali Yuga, in which we have already entered since several millennia, represents the Dark Age, filled with vices and perversities.
This idea is also present among the ancient Greeks: “Thereafter, would that I were not among the men of the fifth race, but either had died before or been born afterwards. For now truly is a race of iron” claimed Hesiod, Greek poet of the seventh century BC.
Probably already prevalent at the dawn of Western history, this idea gains all its strength with the discovery of the cycle of the precession of the equinoxes which we locate approximately in the Babylonian world towards the end of the third millennium before Jesus Christ. We call this The Great Cycle, with a total duration of approximately 26,000 years – 25,920 years for some authors who are more interested in the symbolic aspect – corresponds to the slight shift that the position of the sun at the spring equinox shows each year. It is produced by the slow oscillation of the axis of the Earth’s poles. 26,000 years is an average duration because the number of parameters coming into play for its determination is considerable.
Beyond the diurnal cycle, the twenty-eight-day lunar cycle and the solar year, there would therefore be a vast rhythm of great months and years that would constitute the cosmic cycle.
Plato’s work is deeply imbued with this idea (Cf. The Statesman): “During a certain period God himself goes with the universe as guide in its revolving course, but at another epoch, when the cycles have at length reached the measure of his allotted time, he lets it go, and of its own accord it turns backward in the opposite direction, since it is a living creature and is endowed with intelligence by him who fashioned it in the beginning.”
Empedocles, a Greek scientist of the fourth century BC, who, one could say, was in the same movement as the Chinese school of thought, attributed the transformations on the surface of the universe to the alternating flow and reflux of two complementary and contradictory forces. A force of integration which he called “friendship”, and a force of disintegration which he called “discord”. These terms convey the same idea than what we will call in a more general manner the “force of separation” and the “force of fusion” in the rest of this book.
Closer to us, Saint-Simon saw history as an alternating succession of organic periods and critical periods; Hegel, as a spiral succession of stable forms and phases of disorder and so on.
If this idea of cycles in history was widely debated, it remains nonetheless that it was generally rejected by historians, despite a set of coincidences that goes well beyond mere probabilities.
Those of antiquity probably had few sources, apart from oral traditions, to try to support the thesis, that their intuition could suggest, with history. The evidence, such as in Plato, was rather metaphysical or symbolic than historical.
Some have argued that during the Middle Ages, omnipresent death did not justify spending time on such an idea. We rather think that the men in the Middle Ages were interested, but in a different way. Indeed, for the men of this epoch, it is God who rules the world’s affairs, and understanding, which is the concern of the historian of the separating periods, does not seem indispensable. If history gives sense of progress in time by marking the many transitions occurring as societies lose the sense of the sacred in a separation period, then the Middle Ages do not produce these marks, because they remain immersed in the timeless sacred, like India was until recently.
We will see later that if Greco-Roman Antiquity and the Modern Times can be said to be sons of Time, the Middle Ages, on the other hand, is a daughter of Space. And sacredness is of the order of space, that is to say the harmony that results from a space ordered according to the laws of Reality (or a world of Truth towards which creation evolves), where everything is in its right place. What characterises space is distance, if we lose the distance, the sacred disappears, and in a sacred space, time disappears. The Middle Ages lived out of time in a sacred space, on a sacred land, which they express through the construction of cathedrals, pilgrimages and crusades.
In the West, interest in history manifested itself at the time of entry into the Modern Times. The first – slightly simplistic – diagram, which prevailed for a long time was that of the Antiquity – Middle Ages – Modern Times trilogy: Europe, entering the Renaissance in what I call the separating period of the cycle and rediscovering the values that are related to it – logic, reason, individualism, … – denied the Middle Ages as a meaningful story and instead valued the previous period of separation, the Greco-Latin period.
This first historical classification was succeeded by two others, born first from the concept of nation, then, at the beginning of the 20th century, from the concept of civilisation. It is only very recently that we have seen a revaluation of what we call cultures, while history very often taught the story of the separating periods: that of males, that of civilisations.
It is therefore only very recently that enough material and concepts were accumulated to create the philosophies of history. They took shape in the eighteenth century, at the time of the enlightenment, with Voltaire, Kant and Condorcet. Hegel and Auguste Comte also contributed. But they did not bloom because they clashed at the beginning of the twentieth century with the historians of the methodical school, then with those of “L’école des Annales”. According to Guy Bourdé and Hervé Martin (Les Écoles historiques, Coll. Points. Seuil) “the day after the second war, Raymond Aron is forced to admit that the uncertainty of our documentation, the immensity of visions, the claim to subject the complexity of the real to a rigid pattern, all these defects which one attributes to the classical systems, pass for characteristics of the philosophy of History. The false laws of history, which are at best only approximate patterns in the course of events, are rejected, … “. In the book by R. Aron “Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity” (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1948), we can read “the appropriate logical notion matters little, moreover: the essential thing is to mark the essential uncertainty and, so to speak, the intrinsic improbability of such panoramic visions.”
In this same work, we read: “Consequently, global philosophical systems, which claim to state the meaning of history, are hardly prized in the Annals. This disfavour also affects the theology of history, including the contemporary works of H. I. Marrou and P. Ricœur as Vico, Hegel, Croce and Toynbee’s great interpretations of human destiny, and dogmatic Marxism itself, challenged for its linear and finalist conception of history.”
Thus, it would seem that as soon as we approach the question of rhythms in history, we come up against an almost systematic opposition whose causes are very difficult for us to determine, since we are not historians ourselves. It is easy to assume that many attempts have been made to force historical facts into repetitive patterns, as some coincidences are sometimes disturbing. We study in detail two of the most famous attempts, those of Spengler and that of Toynbee.
But it is probable that all failed because of an inability to extend their model to all civilisations, to all eras and to all places. So the easiest attitude to adopt for the historians was probably to decree that any attempt to propose a modelling of history was pretentious and doomed to failure. But, more than anything, it seems that for historians, the search or the supposition of any meaning is not necessary for them to glorify history: they are wary of philosophy and even more of the philosophy of history because they fear that the latter might crush history under the spirit of the system and that it might kill the immense wealth that lies in its very diversity.
On the other hand, it seems that this hypothesis of rhythms receives more attention from epistemologists and philosophers of history. Thus Paul Ricœur, in “History and Truth” (trans. Charles A. Kelbley. Evanston Northwestern University Press 1965) writes: “Through history, I seek to justify the meaning of the history of consciousness. (…) In other words, history as a flow of events must be such that through this flow, man befalls”, and again: “humanity lasts through passing civilisations; it is therefore possible to hold both a cyclical conception of historical periods and a linear conception of progress; these two conceptions are uneven: one is on a more ethical level, the other on a more technical level.”
It seems that the pressure remains so strong that even contemporary professional historians do not dare approach the subject. They barely allow themselves to mention disturbing similarities, such as the similarity between the Roman and present period mentioned by Peter Green in his book Alexander to Actium, The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age of which we will speak again.
But the unquestionable condemnation of the thesis of cycles by historians is not the only difficulty we encounter in our study. We will examine some that are necessary for a better understanding of this work.
The first comes from a refusal to consider the spiritual evolution of the human. If humanity has no spiritual evolution, history becomes a cyclical pattern leading to a dead end. At the very most, one can wonder about the evolutionary processes and the modes of diffusion and storage of the acquired information.
Our thesis presents a vision of human spirituality that evolves, while rising and falling, over time. Then many phenomena can be linked by cause and effect, and cyclical phenomena become an immense evolutionary opportunity: the processes that are not mastered are represented to the human consciousness repeatedly until a manifested evolution takes place.
The observation of the last centuries, with their linearity and barbarism, could cast doubt on the existence of such patterns. But history, both individual and collective, does not hesitate, in our opinion, to go back when the corresponding elements of human nature have not sufficiently evolved.
The second difficulty stems from the general tendency to associate the idea of cycles with that of determinism, which is immediately associated with that of fatality, the cause of immobility and, for a Westerner, a sign of obscurantism.
But the existence of cycles as we are going to define them does not in any way imply that events repeat themselves identically according to a certain periodicity fixed in advance, but only that there is a vibration, a stable frequency underlying these events. Potential determinism is only the result of the law of cause and effect which dictates that, all things being equal, the same causes produce the same effects. Just as day and night punctuate our lives, the existence of energetic rhythms that underlie history can only involve similar events if humanity has absolutely not evolved in the corresponding domain. By analogy, the existence of the diurnal and nocturnal rhythm does not imply in any way that all go to sleep or get up at the same time, or that one does the same activity every day and has identical dreams, even if the general tendency is to rest during the night and to be active during the day. The annual rhythm of the seasons does not mean that all live at the rhythm of plowing and harvesting.
Thus, we think, it is the same when it comes to people and civilisations. Their responses to identical rhythms may have varied considerably according to the nature of these people, both in time and space. Thus, it is not the reproduction of events that interests us in the first place, but rather the general trend, the wind that blows over the different periods of history.
So it seems to us that highlighting such rhythms, associated with the idea of a more or less linear evolution of consciousness, far from enclosing history in a straitjacket, could give it a breath and a greatness that is difficult to perceive in the statement of a mass of uncoordinated and often indigestible facts: the study of the participation of each people, each civilisation, each nation in the progressive elaboration of human consciousness would open the story to horizons much larger than the worries of the moment.
The third difficulty comes from the fact that history has not been written according to an alternation – periods in which the domination of faith and reason succeed one another – but rather in terms of conquests, of commerce, of expansion, of organisation of cities and of law, of power relations, of kingdoms, of great external events, all, one could say, of the masculine domain: it is an undeniable fact that history was not written by women but by men, to be used by and for men. With a nuance, however, when it comes to the writings of this end of the century that try to give history a more intimate, more sensitive character, for example through research about daily life in specific times.
Thus it will often be periods unknown to historians because “nothing happened” that will be, for us, the surest sign of a fusional period. The history written by men has tried to persuade us that the winters of people and civilisations were periods of distraction beyond the light of reason, and that only the prowess or the arts in which they excelled were worth reporting. And yet, who could say that summer is more beautiful and more worthy of interest than winter, spring than autumn, woman than man or day than night?
Human groups with more stable, more internalised cultures have never, until recently, captured the interest of historians, especially since they were the easy and defenceless prey of so-called more civilised societies. The people who put all their energy into making an inventory of the arcanes of the human psyche were generally ignored, while the slightest movement of the conquerors of matter or space was sung in great detail. What was once true, is true still today: no one has been able to ignore the tremendous feat that was the organisation of male logic in the conquest of space, but little interest was given to the genocide of the Tibetan people and the destruction of their archives concerning the inventory of the human psyche and its unexplored possibilities in the West. Until the recent craze, cultures or periods of retreat and internalisation were ignored. They were most often assimilated to so-called primitive societies without it being quite clear what this “primitive” refers to: the conquest of the American West was the work of a civilisation against primitive societies, but one wonders which ones were the most barbaric and primitive. So we can estimate at first sight that a large part of the history corresponding to fusional periods in our diagram is hidden from us, despite all the recent rehabilitation efforts, especially that of Europe’s medieval period.
This fact is further highlighted when one considers what Arnold Toynbee calls “an intelligible field of historical study”: after having been, at the beginning of the century, the concept of nation, it is now and without any doubt possibly replaced by the notion of civilisation, in an ever greater and laudable effort to make this field of study independent from the particular social milieu in which historians live.
However, despite the fact that the term “civilisation” is used in everyday language, it is very difficult to obtain its clear definition. F. Braudel, in his Grammar of Civilisations (see in French Grammaire des civilisations. Fernand Braudel. Champs-Flammarion 1993), devotes no less than two chapters to it, calling on sociology, geography, economics, collective psychology, anthropology and history. He highlights its main characteristics but does not specify whether they are necessary and sufficient conditions: he tells us that civilisations are spaces, societies, economies, a set of structures, but above and before all, continuities. They are based on progress, emulation and often competition, and have powerful hierarchical relationships. They are marked by a perpetual evolution. They are collective mentalities, a collective unconscious, of which external religion has often been the strongest trait. They can therefore encompass a succession of societies, overlapping centuries and even millennia, unfold in different dynasties while keeping the same vision of the world. Their characteristic sign is the city, with an economy, while that of culture is nature.
It seems to be in the true sense of the dictionary which defines them by the notions of evolution and progress and does not reject the definitions of anthropologists (C. Lévi-Strauss): civilisations would be based on hierarchical societies, with tensions between groups, struggles and a perpetual evolution while cultures would be societies that produce little disorder, with an egalitarian tendency whose relations between groups are settled once for all and repeat themselves. He adds that civilisation is distinguishable from culture by the presence of cities. However, this definition can hardly be applied to China, for which he notes: “Far Eastern civilisations present themselves as ensembles that would have attained a remarkable maturity very early, but in a setting such that it has rendered almost immutable some of their essential structures. They drew a unity, a surprising cohesion, from this. But also an extreme difficulty to transform themselves, to want and to evolve, as if they had systematically refused to change and progress.” No one, however, would dare to rely on this refusal of change to deny them the name of civilisation.
Finally, it is worth noting that the notion of civilisation also calls for the consciousness of belonging to a particular collectivity in a given time, an awareness based on ideological, political, economic or cultural distinctions, and thus on the underlying risks of conflict: the current idea of the upcoming shock of civilisations illustrates it well.
We dwelt on this notion of civilisation, to show that it will not always constitute, in our working perspective, “the intelligible field” that it represents for historians, even if it is this precious basic material that we will use: we will often have to consider a set of civilisations, or cut some into several phases, as will be the case for example, with Ancient Egypt.
Finally, before going into historical considerations, we will cite some other difficulties of our study without going deeper:
First of all, as Toynbee pointed out, our era – located in the separating phase of the vibration – has praised specialists immensely. There has therefore been a great lack of generalist historians interested in the global movements of history, supposing that this research were authorised by the academic authorities. History was thus decomposed and fragmented, and it existed only where historians sought. History exists only through those who manufacture it. This is an obvious fact that we often forget.
Secondly, a minimum of honesty forces us to consider the difficulty we have to imagine, except in our science fiction books, that we are not the almighty masters of our thoughts, that we could be, in this domain, the toy of forces that are unknown to us and that we cannot control. In addition, the myth of the omnipotence of the man-god comes into play here. The idea of cycle would undermine this extreme arrogance, forcing us to adopt a humility that is foreign to us.
Finally, it is necessary for the totality of the complexity of History, in all places and in all times, to correspond to the proposed diagram. Which, as we shall see, often poses difficult problems, even with the theory of the soul of people. This last theory draws a parallel between people and individuals, who have different personalities and react to events in different ways. If an influence or field of separating forces resonate more with the people who mainly function with the logical mind, other more intuitive, more emotional or more physical human groups flourish and gain a new vigour when the former, more masculine, sink into what appeared to historians as a recession, a decline. We should therefore find jumbles of peoples growing while others are becoming interiorised.
If we succeed in removing the major objections to our thesis, and after having exposed the nature of the shift we might be confronted with, we will have to consider whether we must resolve to twelve millennia of obscurantism – by homothety of the fusional period of The Great Cycle with the medieval period of the small cycle – or if women – or at least the feminine nature within the human race – could not lead us to horizons more radiant than those we know today, which we do not even dare to dream of. We will then see which directions humanity must avoid taking, at the risk of sinking into barbarism. Indeed, a new era requires the elaboration of a new genesis, a new beginning that also includes a synthesis of elapsed achievements and falls. Just as it was necessary to warn men who entered a period of discernment when they ate the apple of knowledge not to deviate too much from the awareness of their unity, so will it be necessary to exhort them, in a period of fusion, not to reject the precious benefits of their individuation and discernment.
After apprehending the main characteristics of the separating and fusional periods through the definitions given of cultures and civilisations, we must define more precisely the distinctive signs of each phase of the cycle which will allow us to differentiate them. We need to distinguish the different periods within a long-lasting civilisation, like Egypt for example, that extends over several phases of separation and fusion.
The separation periods can be assimilated in a first approach to the periods of civilisation as defined by F. Braudel. What dominates is progress, competition, and reason, all elements steering humanity towards freedom; but their deviated forms lead, not to unity, but to growing individualism. Man looks outside himself. He organises society according to a social hierarchy – although proclaiming equality and democracy – where, in general, he carefully separates the secular from the religious. This social hierarchy is expressed through urban structures. Power is of human right. It belongs unambiguously to the laity, to the state, while generally all forms of religious expression are tolerated as long as they do not call the established order into question. Philosophy and the arts are experiencing an extraordinary spurt at the beginning of the separating period but the movement soon runs out of steam, replaced by a quest for originality. The predominant value is reason, and man its spokesperson. Everything that looks like magic, superstition, what is then called obscurantism, is hunted down, with sometimes, the exception of oracles, perfectly set in a proper ritual most often reserved for the elite. Women can take important positions at the condition that it is in the order established by man. The economy generally flourishes. Wars are motivated by economics or power. The greatness of man is affirmed against the brute force of nature. Freedom is, if not a quest, the main claim. And yet, man never suffers as much oppression as during those periods when slavery in all its forms is common practice.
During the fusional, intuitive periods of the cycle, the human is steered towards the opposite of individuation. In approximate terms, we can associate with them the criteria attributed by Braudel to cultures: immutable, egalitarian societies, generating little disorder. Man looks within himself, and doing this, he finds his place in the scale of creation with humility. While the religious institutions are fixed in the last forms acquired during the preceding period, it is the vitality of the sacred that takes over. This notion of “sacred” implies to both the unknown and those in awe, in its highest sense, alongwith the possibility for man to come into contact with the Truth, the essence of things and beings. Nature finds its place as a participant in divinity. Access to the supernatural worlds to man, becomes a means of dialogue with it. Magic and witchcraft flourish, both in their obscure and healthy forms. Mother Earth regains her rights. (at least those that men agree to let her keep, the same men who, let us not forget, have retained their position of power, because, even if we describe here a fusional phase of a small cycle of 2160 years, a period of 1080 years, we have been settled in the male-dominated separative phase of a large period of 26,000 years for the last thirteen thousand years. In this period of fusion, most often the religious and secular hierarchies are mixed. In fact, just like in Asia, religion pervades life in all its aspects. Faith rules with its tool: intuition. If the previous period was progress and its word of order Liberty, this is repetition, immobilism, immutability and its ideal Equality, with man-to-man relations where all, aware of their insignificance, are equal before God. The greatness of God and His creation is exalted while man is reminded of his wretched condition. Highly centralised hierarchical structures make way for local or feudal organisations. Wars are religious. If the previous period was classicism and dry intelligence, this one is romance and anxious hearts. It is marked by a great diversity and a strong vigour, a vital energy liberated from the excessive suffocation brought about by the normalisation of reason at the end of separation period. However, it should be noted that this choking sensation is also present at the end of the fusional period, when the momentum of faith has given way to rigid dogmatism. It is then a sign that the periods of “rebirth” are no longer far away.
These few elements are sufficient to address the history and study of what we call small cycles, lasting 2160 years.
Each of these cycles necessarily involves a period of separation or individuation, which lasts 1080 years and another of fusion or unification, of the same duration, each of which also has an ascending period and a period of decline of 540 years.
True to what we have said about determinism, it is the spirit blowing over history that we will seek to capture, without stopping too much on isolated events. However, the beginnings and apogees of each period, which are periods of reversal, of rocking energies, should make themselves known through particular events, like the storms during the equinoxes, for example. Moreover, at the risk of repeating ourselves, it has to be clear from the start that we are talking about energy trends that underlie civilisations and not repetitions of events. This can sometimes produce significant shifts in our eyes in these possible similarities, especially in quantitative terms. For example, the conflict between the Greek cities two thousand years ago was subtended by the same vibration that animated the two world wars.
In terms of time, we will see that the accuracy between similar events is a few percentage points. It is the same phenomenon for civilisations and for seasons that never begin or end rigorously at the same time.
We will deal with the problem of the exact positioning of the different phases in a later chapter. Here we will only give the result so that the reader can follow the next chapters more easily:
- -2830 to -1750: Period of separation. Typically the Ancient and the Middle Egyptian Empire.
- -1750 to -670: Period of fusion. Ancient Middle Ages.
- -670 to +410: Period of separation. Greco-Roman period.
- +410 to +1490: Period of fusion. European Middle Ages. Arab and Byzantine civilisations.
- +1490 to +2570: Period of separation. Modern times. Apogee of the great cycle.
After this general presentation of the cycle, we will approach in the next chapter the theses of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee who are, to our knowledge, the most famous historians to have studied the problem of cycles.
While approaching the work of Spengler, however, we must try to forget the cyclical presentation we just made and remember that he only imagined repetitive periods of 1000 years developing in a linear pattern. If this model adapted coherently to the Greco-Roman and modern civilisations, and for good reason, since they were in corresponding phases of the cycle, he had trouble understanding the evolution of the Arab civilisation that flourished in the middle of the two previous ones, but in a totally different way.