3. The Nature Of The Mental Cycle

One time Yin, one time Yang,
this is the Tao.
— I Ching

If historians so quickly and firmly rejected the question of rhythms, it is because they probably had good reasons to do so, reasons that were justified by the fact that, in our opinion, they lacked three things: a correct understanding of the forces in action, cause of these rhythms, consideration of the exact duration of the cycles, and an explanation for the anomalies and exceptions which could contradict this thesis.

We have already discussed the problem of the duration of cycles in Chapter 1 and we will come back to this later in Chapter 7. The question of anomalies will be dealt with in Chapter 6 after the presentation of historical periods.

This chapter is therefore devoted to the first problem: the nature of the movements involved, whose mutual play creates these rhythms. Not from the point of view of the reality of their existence, but from that of their quality.

Everyone has heard about these two poles of the Chinese tradition, Yin and Yang, but they convey so many erroneous notions about their origin and their meaning that it is difficult to use them in the West. Indeed, for everyone, they express themselves through duality, polarities, and oppositions: it is the hot and the cold, the day and the night, the masculine and the feminine, the matter and the spirit, the sun and the moon, fission and fusion, the exterior and the interior etc., and this list can be continued almost indefinitely.

But none of these notions can actually translate what the ideas of Yin and Yang represent, because, as Cyrille Javary, a specialist of Yi Jing (in French, Le Yi Jing. Cyrille Javary. Ed Cerf 1989), tells us, they do not express static and fixed states, but changes, types of movement. This appears clearly in their ideograms which are composed according to the usual Chinese method, using image association. Yang is the particular moment when the clouds diminish, where the sun is revealed, where the air becomes warmer and brighter. Yin is the complementary movement of the Yang: the clouds of rain are gathering, the sun is hidden, the sky is low, the air becomes darker and colder.

This single presentation of ideograms proves how wrong the usual translation into masculine and feminine actually is. Masculine and feminine are fixed states, not mutations. Moreover, we will see in a later chapter that currents with Yin and Yang characteristics intermingle within both men and women and in all living nature, in such way that there can be absolutely no univocal correspondence. To cite just one example, Force, the physical attribute of the masculine, is a psychological characteristic of women.

Yin and Yang are not the dual states we have listed above. Yin is not cold, but a tendency to refresh. It is neither interior nor rest, it is a movement oriented towards oneself, as well as a curb.

The Yin-Yang couple cannot be separated. To illustrate this concept, it can be compared to the movement of both feet on the pedals of a bicycle: when one foot presses, the other is forced to rest. It does not apply only to natural phenomena, but to all levels of thought and action, because, in fact, it is a descriptive model of the functioning of the universe.

It offers no explanation. It simply describes the functioning of perpetual change as well as the symbol associated with it late in the eleventh century, the drawing of the Great Turnover.

Cyrille Javary tells us that this diagram is neither specifically Chinese, because it is seen on the Gothic cathedrals, nor specific to the time of the Song (or neoconfucianism, 960/1279). It already existed at the time of the Han (-206/+221), and owes its fame to Zhu Xi (1130/1200) who decided to make the keystone of all the Yi Jing, calling it “diagram of Tai Ji”.

The Yin/Yang concept itself was introduced into Chinese thought only around the fourth century BC, with the text of Yi Jing’s Great Commentary. It was at this time that it became the emblem of the alternative movement that animates the universe. It conferred on the book of divination that was until then the Yi Jing, whose first handwritten transcriptions date from the Zhou dynasty (12th to 8th century BCE), a philosophical dimension that propelled this book on a par with major treaties of wisdom.

From the beginning, Yin and Yang were represented by solid and discontinuous lines as shown below. Cyrille Javary recommends “squinting to see them like the Chinese do” to properly understand these signs.

Yang is an expansion movement. This movement is oriented towards the outside. Yin, on the other hand, is a centripetal concentration movement.

By dint of separating tension, Yang breaks and transforms into Yin, which is immediately animated by a momentum of the two parts towards each other, until they touch again and realise the Yang.

It is this perpetual movement that Yi Jing describes in detail through 64 hexagrams and their mutations. This movement becomes circular in the Great Turnover emblem.

Two things that we will find in the evolution of civilisations must be noted. On the one hand, at the peak of the power of one of the Yin or Yang movements, the seed of the other appears. Similarly, one foot starts pressing the pedal again when the other is at maximum power. On the other hand, there is a phenomenon of inertia which makes that the maximum power of a movement takes place after the climax, just as the maximum heat of the sun is felt long after the passage of the sun to the zenith at midday and as the power of summer is manifested after the summer solstice.

This phenomenon partly explains why civilisations and cultures were able to maintain themselves in almost stable states, long after the passage of the highest point.

The fusion movement manifests itself as a seed from the top of the curve and increases to reach its culminating point at the bottom of the curve. It is exactly the opposite when it comes to the movement of separation, of individuation. Because of the phenomenon of inertia of which we have spoken, a quarter of the curve after the zenith or the nadir is still largely under the influence of previous energies. This is why we will call separating phase the part of the curve above the horizontal and the fusion phase the one below.

It goes without saying that the symbolisation we have adopted of a horizontal sinusoid, with the separating periods above, does not imply any value connotation. We could have placed the fusional period at the top as well, or we could have drawn the sinusoid vertically.

Having laid the conceptual foundations of this alternating movement that animates the universe, when we approach the detailed study of the cycle, we must imperatively avoid the pitfalls in which Spengler and Toynbee fell, that is to say the valorisation of one of the two phases of the cycle. Spengler execrated the separating periods, the civilisations, in that they caused a progressive destruction of the soul through their loss of contact with their deep self. He failed to grasp and understand what an extraordinary opportunity to grow is given to the soul during this period, what a fantastic opportunity is given to creation to experience freedom, even if it must be done at the cost of a descent to hell.

Toynbee, on the contrary, a fierce proponent of progress and the Enlightenment, did not give a single glance to the Middle Ages or to the Arab civilisation. A man of his times, all that reason did not explain was thrown into the abyss of obscurantism.

Also, in order to try to grasp the movements of History in what they are trying to express, most often by the exact opposite, we must go beyond our preferences for one or other phase of alternation. We must forget our natural inclinations either for individualistic societies, who are in love with freedom, but are sources of solitude, or for the warm but oppressive Middle Ages.

Likewise, we must go beyond our opinions and our prejudices to rise above our narrow conceptions of good or evil. Indeed, no phase of the alternation is all white or all black. The obscurantism of the Middle Ages hid a solidarity and a joy of life that is lacking in our civilised societies.

And democracy, the flagship of the separating periods, would probably be perceived, in a fusional period, as an absurdity, an insult to the sacred order of the world; progress, like an excessive pride; the claim of liberty, like a revolt against God; written law, as an insult to the probity and sincerity of man, to his honour and his ability to repair the offence. On the contrary, our age, despite its errors and its destructive vanity, allows a freedom of research, progress, thought and behaviour that the Middle Ages would have envied us for.

Beyond even the notions of good and evil and our preferences, what we want to try to make clear is that perceptions – which are organisations of sensations – and therefore the thought that results, are totally different in the separating and fusional phases, because of the influence of the fusion/separation cycle that we are trying to uncover progressively. If already some believe that in our time, there is a gap of misunderstanding between men and women who operate according to a different mode of apprehension of the world, a gap that we will explain later, it is a gap which is at least as profound and of the same nature as the one that exists between the man of the Middle Ages and the civilised Greco-Roman or contemporary man. And this not because of a return of civilisation to barbarism or vice versa, but because of the change in underlying currents of force that influence the mind. History is merely the expression and the consequence of these currents, not their cause.

It is necessary to perceive this mental rhythm of fusion and separation just like we apprehend day and night. We are well acquainted with the day to which our age is related, but we ignore and reject the night as we have banished life from our civilised lives. Not the night of unconsciousness and sleep, but the night of meeting souls and of the sacred, of annihilation of the self, of the expression of dreams, of sharing. The night is also nightmares and fears, like those great fears of the Middle Ages that carry ideas of end of the world, damnation, possession, devil and hell. The night is a feast of bodies, communion with the spirits of nature, which the Enlightenment called orgies or obscurantism.

The night is familiar with the body, the disease, but also its remedies. It is probably from this more instinctive period that comes our whole pharmacopoeia. It seems absurd, in fact, that man has successively tried all the plants one by one for all diseases, and that he has deduced from them the properties of wild plants. Far more likely is the fact that, like animals, man is endowed in fusional periods with a much finer quality of sensation than at present, for the development of the rational mind during separating phases weakens our sensory possibilities. It is as if today’s man devotes all his energies to developing his logical mind and can only do so at the expense of faculties he previously possessed. We will explain later in detail, the process of loss of knowledge over the ages.

One of the great difficulties that we encounter for the perception and recognition of this alternation comes from the fact that we are so imbued with our times’ way of thinking, so convinced of the correctness of our institutions and the validity of our values, that it is very difficult for us to imagine that our ideas can only be conjectural, linked to the moment of the cycle in which we find ourselves: conjectural ideas of material progress, of the supremacy of logic, of atheism, the claim of the right to be oneself, or the exaltation of the individual. Cyclical, the values of doubt, of external equality, of freedom of enterprise, of democracy.

Perhaps it is even more unbearable to imagine the influence of external forces or phenomena on our mind, the idea that we cannot be all-powerful authors and free from all influence of our thoughts.

The identification of the ego with the thought is such that few will be able to recognize here that they are not masters in their mental castle. In our time, someone is defined by his ideas, is recognised for them. If man could admit, for want of doing otherwise, his enslavement to the biological laws, he made the supposed freedom of his thought the standard of his glory, and even the core of his being: I think, therefore I am. Everyone, and this is especially valid for men, believes they hold the truth and woe to the one who thinks something else! As will be explained later, women, by the nature of the currents that shape them, have remained closer to the perception of the unity of nature. So much so that some regimes tried to eradicate individual thought. It is also what the liberal economy does in a more indirect way, which, by its necessity of numbers, raises the quantity in truth: since the majority thinks that or lives this, it is because it is right.

Our intention, however, is not to trial our Western civilisation, but to show that civilisations, pure products of thought, are subject to the same rhythm as it is. If we want to learn how to orient ourselves and master our future, we must know its rhythms.

In the remainder of this chapter, we will first present the two separating and fusional phases, statically, by the characteristics of the extremes of our curve. It will be necessary, however, that the reader tries to keep in mind in this first presentation that the transitions from one to the other are carried out continuously, like the succession of seasons. We will conclude the chapter with a dynamic description of the succession of the four main phases, in the image of the succession of seasons.

The peaks of the curve, as we have presented it, are the fulfilment of two tendencies: one that pushes each individual form towards its fulfilment, its total expression, towards the realisation of all its potentialities. This is what we call the “separation” movement. When we say forms, they are as much archetypes, ideas, social forms, civilisations, as individual living beings, men, animals or plants. This first movement is necessarily a process of individuation, within the limits and laws of the genres. And when this movement acts in human development, man loses consciousness of the nature of his origin. (We will further deal with the process by which this loss of consciousness occurs, which we think is due to a shift of the centre of consciousness from one cerebral hemisphere to another.) If it was not the case, he could never separate from unity. He loses this consciousness because he loses the sensitivity that brings the feeling of unity. This is both his tragedy and his luck, because he can then experience what he calls Liberty. This is the meaning of the myth of Genesis.

This separating tendency, resulting from the movement that pushes each individual form toward its fulfilment, is therefore inseparable from the notions of progress, research, perfection, tension towards fulfilment, because it is the very nature of this movement. Having to lead any form towards its accomplishment, it must remove what disturbs, while also limiting, sometimes structuring/framing. In the mind, it is the power of execution. It needs repetition to build experience and relies on memory.

This separation movement is not in itself a weakening of sensation, but rather a displacement of perception. It is a lesser reliance on direct experience and more from the organisation and memory of sensations.

The other movement, fusion encourages rest, withdrawal, the return to the essence of all things, each according to its law: the power from concentrated consciousness creates the potential of infinite expansion; this tendency encourages the crossing of limits.

If the separation movement unfolds in time as a becoming, the fusion movement reveals itself as a manifestation of Unity, and governs space, that is to say the ordered spatial relations where time disappears. This is what Kant means when he says “space is the a priori form of intuition”, intuition being that faculty that connects us to Unity, to the essence of Reality.

If separation movement is a force of individuation, it will work to break all the barriers of dependence, all the links of authority and subjection. In terms of physics, it is a process of increasing entropy, that is to say of increasing disorder, agitation and increasing heat. Everyone is urged to claim full freedom of fulfilment. But the counterpart of this requirement is the loss of awareness of the whole, as long as man is not able to focus his consciousness both on the whole and the part, that is to say on himself and the others as a unit. This force of separation is for the individual, a tool of construction of the ego, of the personality composed by the vital and mental parts of the being, of which personality is a reflection of individuality, in itself it is an expression of the soul. (We recall that personality comes from the Latin “persona” which meant the mask worn by the actor.) For the societies, this force in action is never as sensitive as when it emerges at the dawn of civilisations, in the Egypt of the Old Kingdom, the Greece of Pericles or the European Renaissance.

The ideas that animate societies during the phase of separation thus tend to proclaim ideals of freedom with equal participation in power for everyone, in the sense that everyone is his sole master. But reality often shows an opposite phenomenon of unequal and coercive participation because, at the present stage of human development – which is not able to retain the consciousness of unity that it acquires in the fusion phases – the ideas are not powerful enough to put a stop to the appetites of the individual egos.

The opposite happens in the fusion phase of the cycle. The energies in action encourage the gathering, the consciousness of unity and thereby the sacred and the mystery that accompanies it. They make the order of the world perceptible in the big things as in the small ones and incite to the respect of the sacred order according to the laws specific to the essence of each species and each being. It is a negentropic process, during which the desire for progress and change in matter is lost, which leads to fixity and immutability, to restfulness.

In an extremely primitive way, the play of these two forces can be seen in the very young child, in the intensity of energy with which he seizes the coveted object to establish his kingdom and to give, some time later, a drawing to his mother with all his being in a radiant smile: to take and to give, law of nature, fundamental impulse which participates with the sacred. Everything in nature takes and gives alternately. The plant draws air and water from the ground, in winter and spring, and gives fruit in the summer. The animal gives the movement, the rhythm and the harmony, and also the characteristic of its species, like loyalty for dogs.

Taking and giving are two aspects of the cycle that we will find in civilisations, almost identical to the behaviour of young children: predatory civilisations and oblate and sacrificial civilisations. Because it is a law of the behaviour of groups which makes them behave at the level of the least evolved of its members.

Thus, in the separating phases, the dominant consciousness in civilisations is that of the predator: shameless exploitation of the earth, of plants, animals and of man by man to establish his own power of self, clan, nation or multinational firm. The dominant mental attitude is the search for power, and its instrument is covetousness. It is easy to understand this attitude if one considers that this tendency is the construction of the individual ego, the realisation of the ego which confers the feeling of existence, goes through the affirmation of its own power of action. And in the separating phases in which the consciousness of unity is lost, this translates into power over the other and nature, self-sufficiency, the contemplation of one’s own importance.

At the service of this predatory behaviour, there is the cold reason, which evaluates and classifies effectively, in its sole interest. Conversely, in the fusional phases, it is no longer the consciousness of the predator, but that of oblation, of sacrifice which takes over, which can go as far as the exaltation of the sacrifice of one’s own life, but may be diverted in the sacrifice of others practiced to satisfy or appease the gods. So it was with these sacrifices of thousands of people – not always prisoners – practiced by the Toltecs and the Aztecs, sacrifices which stupefied the Spaniards to the point of disgust, even though the latter were not tender beings.

Taking and giving is a couple that represents a fundamental law of the universe to which all reigns must submit. But man must take only what falls to him and his gift of self, his sacrifice must not be understood as the necessity of suffering, but as an injunction to make “sacred”, that is to say to accept the order of the universe and its laws. If man is allowed to take, to feed on other reigns, he must also give.

The force in the separation phase pushes each being, each idea, to its full realisation; it separates, isolates and classifies. Without intuition, the force needs discernment to act. It uses reason, or rather, it develops in the mind the power of compartmentalization which is based on memory and what we call logic. The force is a cause and not consequence. It is that which structures the left brain and organises it. It is that which raises the ideals of freedom and equality. Because without freedom, there is no possibility for the individual to accomplish his own destiny. Without equality, that is to say without equal opportunity for all to obtain what is considered as fundamental rights (physiological need, health, education), there is no possibility either.

Deprivation of liberty through physical slavery or forcible indoctrination may be forces of opposition that emerge to assert these values, but are primarily the expression of the exacerbation of the phenomenon of predation and the search for power. Slavery indeed does not exist in general in fusional periods. These forces have never been more physically and intellectually violent than during this 20th century, because the call for the emergence of the higher level, the contact of the ego with its true nature has never been stronger.

For the same reason, and despite the egalitarian ideals proclaimed loud and clear, inequalities are never more striking than in these separating epochs. The Middle Ages, which, on the contrary, saw the development of a hierarchical social order, was in fact undoubtedly much more egalitarian than our time. Neither clothing nor food, it is said, could distinguish one from another.

In the present state of human nature, this power of individuation, far from leading to the diversity that should in theory be the object of its full realisation, paradoxically leads to more uniformity. We suppose that this opposite result is due to the still very primary nature of the human mind: the economic processes put in place by the predatory ego imply the law of numbers against the individual. And this law of quantity pulls downwards, towards levelling, towards the easiest and therefore the most mediocre.

This power of separation is, as we have said, a force of material progress: revealing and supporting the ideas of endless material progress and the happiness it is supposed to procure. Man in this phase lost the awareness of his unity with the rest of the cosmos. The power of separation arouses competition along with its accomplices, rivalry and speculation. The collective and individual ego seize this energy to proclaim their “me-I”. It is the development of self-sufficiency, vanity, self-contemplation, difficulty in uniting with others. It is the exacerbation of the thirst for power. At the level of people and nations, this may be expressed by ideas of the superiority of races and people, the all-powerful imperialist will to submit the world, without faith or law, until a man proclaims himself to be god, such as Huang Di among the Chinese or Augustus among the Romans. It is the grandiose and terrifying appearance of some deified human egos. We are not talking here about the holders of absolute power in general, but about the way in which it is acquired and used. It must be understood that this force of separation is not the cause of absolute power, since it exists in almost every phase of the cycle – the search for power being inherent in man – but in the way it is exercised.

But all these phenomena of megalomaniac drift of the cult of personality are only the collective beginnings of an individuality which must be born. For this, man must gradually learn to acquire a free thought, capable of extending to infinity by including all opposites in a synthesis of higher truth. But it is clear to us that in today’s humanity, very few have learned to think for themselves. This first stage, the elaboration of an autonomous thought, constitutes, however, the elementary process towards the freedom of the mind, which reaches its peak in a phenomenon which is called “Illumination” or enlightened mind.

This power of separation is mainly active in the male psyche, because at a mental level, men are in resonance with the logical left brain while women are closer to the intuitive right hemisphere. This force calls for the quest for knowledge and therefore for power, because knowledge is power. It encourages mastery, but man deviates from its purpose and uses it to his advantage to seize power and dictate his law. What we see is a perversion of this power into an exploitation of man by man, and a devastation of nature. And as this influence has lasted for twelve thousand years, because we are at the top of a great separating phase, it is not surprising that Simone de Beauvoir can note that never, in all the known history – which does not go back to more than 6000 years – man was divested of his power of domination.

In separating periods, man is at the centre of the world. In the other half of the cycle, in a fusional period, it is the sacred, regardless of the form it takes or the names attributed to it in religions and various cults. In the first reigns doubt, necessary for discernment and logical consequence of the loss of contact with reality. In the second, it is, faith, inseparable from the feeling of unity. In separating periods, the place of honour is for those who fight; in fusional period, the place of honour is for those who pray.

The separating phase is the time of the man-god, and the rejection of all the forms and all the outward signs of religion. The latter is nothing but an empty shell because it has lost contact with the breath that animated it throughout the fusion period. At the apogee of this phase is manifested the desire for a new interiority, a contact with the inner god. In this period when everything is pushing for externalisation, the man’s task is to make contact with the inner god dormant in him, because it is the only way to manage the world if he does not want to lead it towards absurdity, and maybe even destruction. The loss of the awareness of ordered relationships in space, a loss that results from its distance from reality, makes it necessary for it to be located in time, to integrate the lessons of history. For the progression towards self-realisation supposes discerning what is good for oneself, in accordance with one’s secret and most often unconscious inner goal. And discernment needs the memory to build itself. And memory is based on time, which involves the past, the present and the future. The will for progress uses the future to develop a project. So it is a time when man is projecting himself into the world, by the project that reason dictates to him.

In the other half-alternation, on the contrary, time disappears as well as its borders: death is familiar. Man takes his place between the hierarchies of divine beings and those of nature. The sacred reigns throughout, embodied in religious buildings. Creativity is expressed, not as what has been pretentiously judged to be naive art in the Middle Ages, but as a game within a spatial harmony.

In essence, both parts of the cycle have a relationship similar to that of day and night. The day makes it possible to distinguish objects, to separate, invites to activity, to projects, to rhythmic time. The night unites everything in its shadow, in silence and receptivity, an invitation to rest. But it is also close to the realms of the shadows and the unconscious, of hidden or obscure powers, of magic and enchantment. Angels and demons wander. White magic and black magic mingle: it is a magical period. And if the intelligent reign over the day, through the mastery of knowledge, the Mage reigns over the night, through his participation in the essence of things, through his familiarity with the unseen.

Day is being-in-itself. Night, being-for-others. Day is the great, the realisation, the conquest. Night is the detail, the perfection of the intuitive order of the real.

In the separation period, man places himself at the centre of the world. It is humanism that proclaims the greatness of man against the brute force of nature. All, or almost everything, is known. The fear of the unknown has disappeared. Interest turns to the individual and not to the community. In principle, man is “against”, in permanent opposition to others and their thought, to nature. He calls this opposition freedom.

In these times of self-government, institutions thrive. Man has a passion for intelligibility and doubt is raised to the position of highest virtue. The end of this period sees the twilight of “duty”. Man is left with only rights. The major claim is to let everyone be oneself; it is supported by an ethic of so-called authenticity, that is to say a justification of a selfish and egotistical “me”. The notion of sacrifice, in the sense of making something sacred and not of passive resignation, is rejected if not hated. This is a time when morality is banished, a time when the self-assertion of individuals and communities reaches its climax and where speculation has no limits. No more connection to the sacred can discourage the open defiance of the ideals proclaimed by reason. Man is isolated, facing himself. God no longer walks in the garden of Eden as he used to, the Bible tells us allegorically, before man bites into the Forbidden Apple. There is no more contact with people. It is the ordeal of loneliness and anguish that can lead to the absurd gesture of suicide through total disconnection from reality.

In this separation period, progress and its tool, science, are deified. The expert replaces the priest. Power goes to the smartest or the richest. The state belongs to those who take it. Wars are economic and most often meet individual ambitions. The goal to be achieved is to rule the world.

Man lives in causal time, fast, urgent, without respite. His approach is battle. He only lives for tomorrow, never in the present. Material accumulation is often the only power left to him, for he has delegated all others to the state. The loss of contact with reality made him fall into a permanent feeling of insecurity. In his frantic quest for identity and security, he clings to futile banners and glorifies his belonging to a territory, a clan or a party. The societies he develops are essentially individualistic and utilitarian.

If we tend to underline here the negative aspects of this period, it is to draw attention to these deviations that make this passage difficult and dangerous for mankind. It must not be forgotten, however, that these are exceptional periods for man to find himself and seek his truth in the greatest extremities: in a way, God withdraws from his creation and leaves man free. It is an extraordinary time when man has the leisure to dismiss all his beliefs and experience emptiness and freedom.

It is the reverse in a fusion period. The sacred regains primacy and acquires an exceptional vitality. It pervades every aspect of everyday life. The sacred, the order of things, walks hand in hand with faith, for it is faith that is the bridge between the daily world and the divine. Religion dominates because man always needed to frame his relationship to the sacred. It is God, and nature, its creation, which is at the centre of the world, which is exalted before the misery of man. Transcendence and immanence are living, lived realities. The creation reveals some of its mysteries before which one bows with awe, a feeling that no longer exists in the separation period.

The sensation of the unknown is always present. The dry intelligence of the separation period is succeeded by the impatient heart. Wonder is part of the present, and marvels hatch before the ones who wonder. But dread is also present, when faced with the manifestations of the mysterious worlds that surround us. Angels and demons, elfs, mermaids, goblins, sylphs are perceptible realities and not, as today, mere figures of children’s myths.

Our current rationality soon made us classify these things as pure fantasies of the men of that time. But we believe it is not so; these beliefs were certainly based on perceptions that are no longer available to us. In the next chapter, we will discuss the process through which the loss of sensitivity to these phenomena takes place during the cycle.

These perceptions of the world around us – spirits of nature, angelic and demonic hierarchies – open the door to many magical practices. When the perception of these worlds diminishes, at the end of the fusion period, the witch hunt begins. Nicolas Rémy, judge and prosecutor of Lorraine in the 16th century, sends about three thousand sorcerers and witches to the stake. And this phenomenon took senseless proportions in the 17th century: a million witches were said to have been burned alive in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, between the 14th and the beginning of the 18th century.

The dominant feeling of this fusion period is that of the crypt, the meditation, the gilding which exalts the sacred, the supernatural and the marvellous. Time loses its importance and societies succumb to the temptation of immobilism. Becoming is replaced by being. The rural area is organised, when, in separation periods, urban time is fragmented and twitchy.

Man lives in a set of ordered relationships with his pairs, where personal ties are based on fidelity, honour and dedication. It is also ordered relationships that govern the realm of beliefs, where man takes his place between the gods and nature. Relationships are man-to-man without going through institutions. Personal relationships replace the sense of state.

Among all the traits that differentiate the fusional and separating periods, the transfer of law, the passage of written law to oral customary law, and conversely, should be presented in detail. This mutation is all the more complex since we have seen these two forms of law coexist many times: It is said, for example, that Roman law was the continual temptation of the Middle Ages. It follows, in its outline, the evolution of religion and philosophy. If the study of this mutation is relatively difficult to grasp, it is because one has to consider its spirit and not its external form. The first, written law is at the service of the individual, designed to guarantee property, ownership, trafficking and trading, the second, customary law is made for living beings in a community in relation to the sacred. Roman law is a striking example of the first, the law of the separative periods: “Designed for soldiers, officials, merchants, it confers to the owner the jus utendi and abutendi, the right to use and abuse, in complete contradiction with customary law, but eminently favourable to the wealthy, especially the property owners “. It is praised not only by the bourgeoisie, but by all those who see it as an instrument of centralisation and authority. “This Roman law is not favourable to the woman, nor to the child. It is a monarchical right, which admits only one term: the right of the pater familias“. The place of honour that was previously been given to the woman during the fusional period completely disappears.

Conversely, the law of fusional periods is not normative. The sentences for the same offence can be very different from one place to another. It even happens that the accused is judged according to his own law, that of his clan or of the family of beliefs to which he belongs.

In the fusion period, power is not conceivable outside religion; the separation of church and state would even be absurd, for power can only be a responsibility entrusted by God, not a personal benefit. On the other hand, the ecclesial structure, which is masculine, remains animated by the desire for power because, let us not forget, we are in a vast separative alternation favourable to man’s desire for power: the Catholic Church that deviated from the spirit of the early Middle Ages, tried to assume power over the world, in the deepest part of the curve.

Nowadays, in the midst of the separation period, religions that seem to follow the pattern that we have just described and attempt to impose themselves as the only structure of power can do so only through oppression, and therefore are not animated by the same spirit.

In the field of trade, barter replaces competition economy. Competition is replaced by cooperation, and even a desire for self-help. Society is essentially egalitarian, for everyone feels equality before God as obvious: it is not a claim, like what emerged from the French Revolution against an abusive power which lost all contact to the sacred, but an intimate perception of each person.

Society becomes static, as if frozen in an immutable time. What we call progress stops. Or rather the desire for progress: why should it improve anything since the order here down is governed by unchanging divine laws. Since salvation lies in the hereafter, since paradise is not and will never be on this earth. What only matters is how to reach it and escape from hell. The Earth’s future has little meaning. It is reported that in the Middle Ages, the rural masses do not feel the need to know their age or the years that have elapsed. Infant mortality by sickness, wars or epidemics is not enough to justify this fact. We think this is due to another relationship to time, as we attempt to demonstrate.

In the field of ideas, the Middle Ages lived on those of Aristotle, without feeling the need to deepen or criticise. “All the details that have been added to his work and tirelessly copied, without critical thought or concern for updating during the entirety of this period, also come from Antiquity and (…) the vulgar has believed or known the same thing for a thousand years.” (Robert Delors. Life in the Middle Ages. Edita Lausanne distributed by Universe Books, 1973)

Wars are religious or vital, crusades or barbarian invasions. The interest of the species for the continuity of life has supplanted that for the individual. Uniting, helping and giving individuals the sense of community are powerful needs.

It is, in essence, a period of predominance of female values. Not only by the magical practices of witchcraft, or healing, not only by the passion to unite which is expressed by courteous love, but also in respect for the woman and the responsibilities that she takes on. It would seem – because few studies have been done about it – that she had at that time a place at least equivalent to that of man. Regine Pernoud (Pour en finir avec le Moyen-Âge. Ed du seuil. Coll. Points), reports that a woman was the abbess of a convent of monks. It was only after the Middle Ages that the woman was taken away from everything that gave her some autonomy.

According to Robert Delors (Ref. above): “The number of husbands reprimanded, beaten, tyrannized and cuckolded by their strong mouthed ogress wives, wearing the pants as sole bosses in their homes, is much higher than that of women punished by their husbands, at least in the literature of the 12th and 13th centuries.”

Before God, all are equal. But that is not to say that everyone has the same rights, because everyone has to stand up to their rank, like the Indian castes. However, slavery is an unknown notion and the serf is not as servile as one could have said. It is Regine Pernoud who makes us understand this best. She notes that slavery is probably the fact of civilisation that most deeply marks the ancient and modern societies (separating), and that its disappearance at the very beginning of the early Middle Ages and its abrupt reappearance in the early sixteenth century are almost ignored. The Antique society considered it natural and necessary. Our time did the same during the first centuries of modern times and today’s slavery is probably no better than the old. But R. Pernoud stresses that there is no common measure between the ancient servus, the slave, and the medieval servus, the serf, one being a thing and the other a man. The sense of the human person from ancient times to medieval times has undergone a slow mutation. And between the Middle Ages and our time, it experienced a reverse mutation. This is relatively easy to understand within our theory: in the separating periods, the sense of unity – unity of man with nature and the divine – has been completely lost. As a result, the sacred nature of the human person disappears – and let us not mention that of animals. The other becomes what he manifests externally, an object, a thing. And to things, we can do anything.

It is also important to note an essential difference in the relationship to land between the fusional periods that favour use, and the separating periods in which the concept of ownership dominates. In the fusion period, Mother Earth offers herself to satisfy the needs of man.

The fusion phase is also a symbolic, ritual period, where myths hold a great place. Symbolic because only the symbol can translate the truths of the sacred perceived by intuition. Thus, for example, St. Augustin considers numbers as thoughts of God. Reason is only valuable to enlighten the truths of faith perceived by intuition. And this, both for the Vedic maharishis and in the time of the Greek and European Middle Ages. Rituals express and stage the sacred, and allow man to position himself in the universe. Art is idealised, expressive, and always religious: cathedrals, mosques, etc. Often outrageousness reigns and some elementary rules of architecture seem to be ignored, considered irrelevant. The symbolic, on the other hand, is omnipresent in measurements, orientations, and colours. The building always aims at providing the highest emotion, the purest feeling, within a sacred space. This makes Oswald Spengler say that these periods are “magical times where the feeling of the crypt dominates”.

While it may seem that we have given the fusional periods a brilliance that seems unjustified in relation to the separating periods, it must not be forgotten that these periods of return to the sense of unity are extremely unsuitable for individual expression and present many aspects that we feel are intolerable today: reactions to events are most often subjective, impulsive or emotional in nature. What could be described as a certain mental confusion reigns. Or perhaps as the so-called incoherence that man often reproaches women. It is perhaps not so much the goal to be achieved that counts than the way to achieve it, unlike in our century, because in any case, the ultimate goal, joining God, is unreachable. Superstitions escort the wonderful. Black and white magic are also practiced, and credulity widespread. There is almost always lack of unity in constructions, a lack of rigour and often incompleteness. Robert Delors points out that in many cases, the buttresses that are designed to support the pillars where they receive the pressure of the vaults end between the points where the pressure is exerted. He tells us that it is no exaggeration to point out that besides the vast indifference to time, there exists an equal indifference or a certain inability to grasp space. But, he says, it was not the mark of imprecise minds. Although there were no maps of the Kingdom of France before the fifteenth century, the king, his officers and his subjects were aware of the frontier lines.

This inability to grasp space may seem contradictory to the fact that we previously said that space was the characteristic of the fusion phase, because it is linked to intuition. But it was the relationship to things and to their right placement and not the perception of measurements. The first is the field of harmony, the second is that of geometric structures. The first is a function of the intuitive right brain, the second of the logical left brain. Generally speaking, we can say that the Middle Ages worked more with the right brain, while today’s humanity works with the left. The reasons mentioned above, coupled with a feeling of suffocation created by a certain immobilism and rigid church structures who are gradually losing their substance, explain why there was such rejection of the Middle Ages for nearly three centuries and a corresponding craze for the classical Greek period.

The Course of the Cycle

After this first overview of the general characteristics of the two phases of the cycle, we move towards describing their progress over time.

Perhaps the reader will sometimes have the impression of seeing repetitions, because the adopted approach progresses more in a spiral movement rather than a straight line in order to gradually bring the reader towards an understanding of the nature of the cycle. On the other hand, and throughout the rest of the book, we must constantly remember that if the underlying forces that we have just explained remain the same, the responses of individuals and people vary according to their nature and state of development. It is therefore only the historical manifestations of these tendencies, which are largely subject to the current state of development of mankind, which we will examine.

As a preliminary remark, we will also note that if some individuals can move very fast and rise far above the others, the human race progresses at the pace of its slowest members. For the two reasons that have just been mentioned, the phenomena observed at the level of civilisations will always retain an immature character: desires for possession, expansion, security, freedom, struggles for the preservation of what has been acquired, fears of the unknown, … Which always translate into the same types of events: wars, conquests, and human gatherings of varying sizes. We will therefore have to focus more on changes in institutions, ideas, art and social forms than on the war exploits of a particular people. And if we direct our attention towards wars, it is the motives of these fights and not the victories or the defeats that we will have to examine. We will therefore be led to study similar influences across the ages despite very different population scales. Thus, the wars between cities among the Greeks respond to the same separating influence of individuation that was at the source of the wars between nations during the last two centuries.

We must also bear in mind that the course of small cycles of 2160 years lies within a broad cycle of 26,000 years in which we are, as we shall see, at the peak of the separating period. The small cycles are thus globally marked by a strong separating imprint, which, concretely, has been reflected for millennia through the domination of man, conquests, wars, and the quest for power. It is probable that the tendencies of a small cycle, in the fusion period of the great cycle, are quite radically different. But this taking place 12,000 years away from us belongs to the realm of imagination.

The last question that arises concerns the starting point of the cycle. In fact, there is none, because the undulation is, of course, perpetual. However, our description has to begin somewhere. The point which seems most judicious to us is the end of the medieval period of the cycle, because it is the point where historians generally begin the history of civilisations. This is the point where the curve crosses the horizontal line under the impulse of the separating energy, the great comeback of humanism: beginning of the Old Egyptian Empire, in 2778 BC. under the reign of Djoser, probable beginning of the civilisation of the Indus, end of the Greek Middle Ages (VIII century BC.), end of the “dark ages” in Europe, end of feudal China, with the birth of Taoism and Confucianism, and closer to us, the Renaissance.

This moment that we arbitrarily choose to describe the cycle marks not the climax, which will take place 540 years later, not the planting of the seed, which took place 540 years earlier in the depths of the fusional period and which was soon followed by the first buds, such as the creation of universities in the twelfth century, but the coming to light of the separating powers of individuation, both for people and for nations. It is a point of balance between separative and fusional tendencies, but to the advantage of the first ones which are following an expansion movement. The perception of the sacred has already largely faded. Either more humanistic new religions appear, like Buddhism and Taoism, or the churches, after having fought against heresies for a long time, are obliged to reform themselves: Council of Trent being one example. This point of pseudo-equilibrium also marks the culmination of divine royalty: Pharaonic absolutism at the time of the pyramids, where the Pharaoh is worshipped as son of Ra (Saqqara, -2668, great pyramids -2589 to -2496), the end of the Etruscan monarchy in Italy, and Louis XIV’s rise to power in 1643. And in the same period began the control of the Church by the state, before their separation was pronounced a few centuries later. It is, at all times, the end of the Middle Ages, the end of the so-called “obscure” centuries. The world is now organised into cities or nations that will seek more and more to assert their own identities, their individuality, starting of course by the demarcation of each one’s spaces.

What will develop during the first quarter of the curve until its climax is the self-awareness of human entities, cities or nations, sometimes even with a vague sense of their role and function in the human becoming. This attempt to objectify takes place within a total rejection of what is no longer felt, and therefore misunderstood: rejection of what is called obscurantism, but which is in fact only a loss of sensitivity and therefore of the corresponding perceptions and concepts. When everyone tries to assert their space and personality by shouting louder than all the others, and by claiming the right to be right, to be the best and the strongest, only conflicts can follow. This is the beginning of the period that historians refer to as the “Warring States period”. It is found within the -2900/-2300 period in the Middle East where the cities-states of the Sumerian civilisations in the south, Uruk, Our, Nippur and Lagash, or the Semitic civilisations in the north, Kish, Mari, and Ebla, oppose for the dominance of the region. This also obviously includes the warring kingdoms in China, from -481 to -221. The entire Greco-Roman period before the advent of the Caesars is part of this as well. And the European and World wars, since the French Revolution.

During this same period, art liberates itself from religious constraints and the representation of sacred things. Driven by reason, it seeks the mathematical forms of beauty and balance: Egyptian art from the ancient Empire or from ancient Greece until Pericles’ time, and the Italian and European Renaissance. Creativity seems to take off, free from the structures and forms that are no longer relevant. It is the beginning of the so-called classical periods that attempt to develop the rules of aesthetics.

In the same period, the occult knowledge concerning the nature of reality which was unveiling during the period of faith is being progressively forgotten, and the schools of mystery try their best to perpetuate it before disappearing. These are the Egyptian mysteries of Heliopolis, introduced towards -3360 in the depths of the curve. These are also the Egyptian mysteries that were spread from -2000, during the first social revolution. From that moment on, each one appropriates the rights of the Pharaohs that are given by the funeral and can therefore become a god, just like him. Finally, the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries gradually disappeared without ever being unveiled. (refer to Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind).

Power gradually liberates itself from guardianship and then from the influence of the church. The wind of progress blows over the world. The aspirations for freedom and equality are strengthened. But, paradoxically, because of the loss of meaning, the exploitation of man by man reappears in all its forms: slavery begins in Greece in -480 and stops with the fall of the Roman Empire, reappearing at the end of the Middle Ages to satisfy the requirements of the colonisation of America. Paradoxically – but it is not a paradox in our theory, because it is the moment where man loses the sensation and the feeling of unity – it is the separating periods, those who boast of their ideals of freedom, who practice human exploitation most thoroughly. There were never so many victims of the Inquisition and of witch hunts than during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And our time is not excluded: The International Labour Office estimates that 250 million children today are reduced to forced labour. And it is safe to say that there are a greater number of slaves in the world at the end of the twentieth century than at any time in the past (see on this subject Dominique Torrès, Esclaves Ed Phébus 1996).

The development of the process in this first quarter of the curve is well known to us, because it corresponds to the history of modern times since the Renaissance. Of course, it is not exactly identical to the Greco-Roman period, because evolution is not only cyclical but also linear, resulting in a spiral movement. But the trends are the same. As Spengler says, Alexander and Napoleon are contemporary. Punic Wars and World wars are also considered contemporary. Similarly, still with a 2160 year interval, the creation of universal empires take place, inevitably, “almost in spite of themselves”: The first Mesopotamian Empire, under the tutelage of the city-state of Akkad, founded by Sargon I; the Ancient Egyptian Empire; probably, the Indus empire; the Roman Empire; the American Empire (still to be conforted).

If there are two words that can sum up this first quarter of the curve, they are “violence” and “creativity”. As the sensitivity and perception of the sacred and unity diminish, moral rules lose their foundation. Notions that were obvious in the previous period, such as solidarity, disappear. Absurd violence, as a rule of life or as entertainment, makes its appearance at the top of the curve: Circus games in the time of the Romans, and nowadays, television violence, tapes, etc. Under the double influence of two separating forces – we are at the peaks of the great cycle of 26,000 years and the small cycle of 2160 years – there are almost no limits to dehumanisation: child killers, methodical extermination, …, as if man were to explore the depths of absurdity and horror.

Countless examples in all fields could be taken to illustrate this evolution of the sacred to the profane in the first quarter of the curve, like the passage from courteous love to pornography. It is an energy progression similar to that of the first few months of spring, the first three signs of the zodiac. The group, the city, the nation, turn to their own needs, their own construction. Aristotelian logic and Cartesianism echo each other. This is the rejection of dogma, the exit from the medieval maternal womb. Very soon, the desire for power will be exacerbated. Building on the popular masses, it gradually conjures democracy and a universal centralised state. This emergence of the unified Empire with the man-god, the Pharaoh-sun-God, the divine Augustus and Huang Di at its head the period of the Warring States ends.

In the field of art, as we move closer to the top of the curve, the creative impulse emerged almost 1000 years ago tends to disappear, replaced by a quest for originality. The copying of works of Art appeared in Alexandria, from the second century BCE; the Middle and New Egyptian Empire will only be an extension of the impulses issued during the Ancient Empire. Our time is no exception to this rule. For Spengler, at the top of the curve, man, like art, has lost his soul.

For Toynbee, it is the sign that he must begin to seek it within himself, for the maturation of civilisation leads it towards a slow reversal, from the outer to the inner: Man’s challenge becomes himself, and no longer the world. Indeed, at the top of the curve, the universal Empire is stabilised. He no longer knows any enemies capable of seriously threatening him. The outer Barbarians are contained. The inner Barbarians (mafia, gangs, bands, …) have not become too powerful yet. If Toynbee has understood that there is something special going on at the maximum point of development of a civilisation, a kind of reversal of energies, he has not been able to give a valid reason because his model of economic challenge cannot suffice to explain such a reversal in direction.

This summit of the curve is the culmination of pure reason, separatism. The victory of the bourgeoisie that consumed the fruits of the revolution. But logic and pure reason isolate individuals from the powers of feeling. They disconnect them from reality and lead, through crystallisation, to a certain sterility: not only of the soul and of the arts, but oddly of the bodies too. This phenomenon of increasing physical sterility does not belong only to certain developed countries of this late twentieth century, since it had already been noticed from the time of the Romans. This corresponds to the current drop in birthrates in many countries.

And this period, difficult and painful for the soul but conducive to the search for identity, where knowledge is fragmented, where the experts act as high priests, serves as a matrix for the deposit of the germ of the next phase of alternation, the period of faith. Thus, Egypt of the Middle Kingdom and Mesopotamia were the cradle of the Assyrian civilisation and undoubtedly of Vedic India; Greece and Rome were the ones of Christianity and of the Arab civilisation.

As we have seen, this summit of the curve is the realisation of political unity in the form of the universal Empire. However, the underlying force, which leads to the realisation of all possibilities, does not allow, a priori, to foresee this political unity of the world, because a separation force is at work. However, a set of phenomena seem to contradict this force, or to be its application on a very childish humanity. First, the rise in power of humanism and therefore the need for this child-humanity to worship a man-god. One of the current warning signs is the growing idolatry for showbiz or football idols. Then, this force stimulates the power of the ego, and those who know how to use it inevitably drive the world with them towards the universal Empire, presented as the only solution for peace. It is a vast manipulation carried out with almost no one being aware of it, based on the fact that men are afraid of each other.

(In the other phase of alternation – which is political diversity/cultural unity – the evolution of power is easier to understand. Men mainly fear God, not death. Subservience is therefore accepted only in exchange for tangible protection.)

At the top of the curve, powerful egos end up seizing the disoriented human crowds that continue their insatiable quest for security and enjoyment. Chaos grows, as does the aspiration for order. In the general collapse of the values appears “the second religiosity”, a phenomenon which is easily explained at this stage of the curve. In fact, religions are nothing more than empty envelopes. Not that they have lost all their followers, for a certain aspiration to transcendence is always present in the human species, but by total loss of contact with the sacred, the contact which prepares for true spirituality.

With the change of energies, some people, perhaps more sensitive than the others, feel a call to reconnect with the sacred. But in the absence of adequate guides, they stray into the meanders of a false spirituality presented to them by people of goodwill but ignorant of true spirituality, or unscrupulous charlatans. This second religiosity, as Oswald Spengler calls it, seeks satisfaction of the emotional part of the being, refusing the demands of true faith, which involves combat and not soppiness. The impulse of the soul and the strength of the commitment are replaced by a suave and vaporous sentimentality. The submission to the decrees of chance, to Dame Tyche in the ending Greece, through all kinds of interpreters, took the place of a rigorous asceticism guided by experienced people. Spirituality becomes a consumer commodity, bearer of a fruitful market. With this inner call which he no longer recognises, man transfers his need for transcendence to politicians or idols, who eventually declare themselves living gods, divine Emperors. We find ourselves at the dawn of such a time.

As Arnold Toynbee has pointed out, it is by serving their own interests that the universal Empires consolidate their power and not through a deliberate desire for conquest. As bearers of the leadership torch that civilisations transmit one another, they embody the forces of progress at work in the world and benefit from it. The other powers, countries or nations, after claiming their arbitration, seek their protection, one after the other. In principle, the periods located on the peaks of the curve do not have to fear religions, because the latter, as we have seen, are no longer related to the sacred and are emptied of their substance, even if some extremist movements or emotional impulses attempt to throw them off the track. So they have no difficulty in proclaiming their tolerance and freedom of thought, as long as their interests and power are not challenged. Thus, for Rome and its representative Pilate, Christ was not more dangerous than the different religious currents of that time, the same way religions and sects are no threat to the political power of our time, even if they want us to believe otherwise.

And if the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century sought to eradicate religions, it was more to prevent the freedom of thought – especially thoughts that did not conform with the imposed doctrine, which are always a threat to power – than a negation of this or that religion. Religion, in itself, is subversive for these doctrines, for it is foreign to their domain. In a separation period, faith is to reason what woman is to man: object of desire, fascination or rejection.

This summit of the curve is marked in ancient times by the collapse of the Mesopotamian Empire of Akkad (-2160), that of the ancient Egyptian Empire (-2160), the placing under guardianship of Greece by Rome (-146), and nowadays the grip exerted over Europe by the United States.

After the climax of the separative period comes a period of relative calm of nearly 300 years: the “Pax Romana”, a period that ends with the beginning of the Lower Roman Empire, and it is also the period of the middle Egyptian Empire, from 2160 to 1785 BC. In this second part of the curve, the process of meeting, of fusion, which emerged at the highest of the curve, at the height of reason, or in the deepest of the human night separated from the divine (because it is the same thing), gradually develops. When the germ of a religion has been sown the process, as in the early days of Christianity, continues through the consolidation of the Church and the stabilisation of dogmas, sheltered from the structures of the Empire. If religion already existed, as in the Middle Egyptian Empire, it strengthens its structures.

This is a period of pseudo-stability, which marks, as the sign of the Tao indicates, the continuation of the movement on its momentum and the maximum energy of the separating forces. A period said to be pomp, but whose slow decline escapes no one. The rich are always richer, the poor always more numerous and poorer. The beginning of the low Roman Empire will be felt as early as the 3rd century, with the period of military anarchy (235/284). From 272, Rome protected itself against barbaric threats, and in 330 the decline of Rome was consecrated by the inauguration of Constantinople.

Little by little, religion was imposed as a force with which political power must count with. While a thousand years later, in its ending phase, it will be exhausted in wars of religions, reforms and counter-reforms, to be finally ousted, in this first descending part of the curve, it is a rising force, full of sap. On the other hand, the structures of the Empire, which have become fossilised, collapse under the pressure of the Barbarians: Hycsos in Egypt; Visigoths, Vandals, Burgundians and Huns in Italy.

Throughout this first descending part of the curve, before the final collapse, there is a gradual exacerbation of the tensions between rich and poor or more generally those that Toynbee called the Barbarians from within. These are the ones left behind during the progression to the Empire, the slaves and the poor without work, which eventually revolt. It is a social revolution that ends in -2260 with the ancient Egyptian Empire, and Rome must face, before the beginning of the millennium, the revolt of the slaves. In our time, which has not yet reached the top of the curve, and therefore has not yet seen the appearance of its “Augustus”, some large-scale movements are already taking shape.

The elites do not hesitate to lean on those who provide their wealth more and more every day. Speculation becomes a mode of government and the Empire becomes impoverished. If, at first, some rich speculators devote part of their fortune to their city or country of origin, the money is soon solely used by their holder for their own pleasure and their own glory. Palaces and country villas become worlds of their own. For the rich flee the city to barricade themselves in the countryside, in a reverse movement of what saw the dawn of civilisation, when the city attracted people like a magnet.

Cities are gradually being abandoned to the hands of the people fleeing the countryside. Lands, which became objects of speculation, no longer enable survival. The Empire becomes an immense network of drainage of riches from the most remote provinces, as they become progressively insufficient to the satisfaction of the speculation, the court and the rich.

Above all, a unique, homogeneous operation, where all diversity, all deviance, is hunted down is established throughout the world, subject to this universal Empire. Under the guise of so-called freedom of thought and expression, a standardisation of ideas and behaviours is introduced. A unique thought that justifies the rich, speculation, and the exploitation of others. In the context of this standardisation of behaviours, we can associate togas and Coca-Cola, television and circus games. Peter Brown tells us that in the third century, peasants no longer have the opportunity to go directly to the imperial court to protect themselves from injustice and must pass through intermediaries (patrones). (Peter Brown was a Professor Emeritus in History at Princeton University and wrote many books about Late Antiquity.)

The fascination for power spreads across all segments of the population, because the unique thought conveys the ideal of domination: each tries to crush those weaker than themselves. The Wolf-Men are put on a pedestal and lies glorified. All values are reversed. The fantasy of the possibility of wealth for all is used outrageously by speculation and gambling, despite the obvious collapse foreseeable for the majority.

We could go on describing the decline of civilisations in this sinister, even cynical way. This is the autumn of the curve, but an autumn deprived of its splendid joys and colours, for mankind, still childish, falls into all the traps of selfishness. Possession, power and enjoyment fascinate it, for it has not tasted the higher joys yet.

This period is not only one of outer decline. There is also a strong nostalgia of the soul within, which arouses, as response, a first contact with reality. This is manifested by the growth of a new religion or belief. The long-forgotten power of Wonder reappears. Miracle of Nature, miracle of unity. And this spring of faith will triumph over all obstacles. Oppression will give it its noble heritage. The religions that dominated during the separative phase of the cycle were humanistic or philosophical, such as Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism, all three appearing at the dawn of a separation period. They must give way to religions that reintroduce transcendence and change the focus from man to God. Their expansion is either slow, as for Christianity, or fast, like with Islam, which is more than half a millennium late.

We arrived at the midpoint of the downward curve, opposite the point where we began. It is also a place of pseudo-equilibrium, but the dominant forces are forces that lead to fusion and unity. Before approaching this third quarter of the curve, we must question ourselves about a point that we have left aside so far: we have only taken examples in the dominant civilisations, and not in those which have remained in the shadows during the same period, without attempting to explain the reasons for the domination of these civilisations which, a priori, receive the same influx as the others.

It is a point that we do not know how to explain, except by considering, like Oswald Spengler, that every person has a soul, a peculiar nature. However, we have not found anything to date that has been endorsed by the scientific community, other than very vague considerations of climate influence about whether everyone agrees to attribute specific characters to certain people, We will propose in a next chapter an explanation based on the theory of holograms: there would be a kind of homothety between Man and Earth, and the Energies would act spatially in a similar manner, conferring a particular energy and function to precise geographical areas. Some resonate with the fusional periods, others with periods of individuation, with all possible nuances. People wake up when there is a period with which they feel connected, and retire in the shadows when it ends. At any time in the world, there is always people in resonance with this particular moment of the curve, which then shines in all its glory. Thus, the Arab and Byzantine civilisations culminated during the Middle Ages of Europe. Similarly, India went through a golden age during the low Roman Empire, with the climax of Buddhism when it tends to slumber into our industrial civilisation. A detailed study of the emergence of people at certain precise moments of the curve would undoubtedly show their nature and their particular vocation for mankind. Reciprocally, the perception of the soul of people might enable us to guess the time of its full expression.

But the nature specific to each country or geographical area does not prevent them from being subject to general influences: for example China, of a rather fusional nature, nevertheless showed, in agreement with the curve, all the symptoms of the separative periods during the time of the Warring States.

By approaching the third quarter of the curve – the descent into the Middle Ages – we must simultaneously bear in mind the European Middle Ages, the Byzantine civilisation and the extremely brilliant Arab civilisation. This period is essentially marked by a powerful upswing of spiritual power. It is a winter time, made to retreat within oneself, with very little outer creativity. Arts and letters hibernate. The preceding quarter had ended with the cessation of the predominance of reason; symbolically, the closing of the University of Athens in 529, preceded in 392 by the promulgation by Theodosius of Christianity as the only religion tolerated in the Roman Empire. A few years later, in 425, Theodosius II founded the Christian University of Constantinople.

The problem of the death of civilisations, a thesis dear to Spengler, or of their rebirth in a series of successive civilisations, an idea dear to Toynbee, does not arise for us. Indeed, the movements underlying mutations exist regardless of the external forms that societies take. It seems obvious to us that the values that animated the Eastern Roman Empire had more to do with Arab civilisation than with the Lower Roman Empire. As we recall, what is important is to discern beyond the outer forms of power within empires (which are always in keeping with the masculine spirit) and note the movements that animate these societies.

This third quarter is also frequently marked in its beginnings by a vast movement of return to the land, to peasantry. These are often times that historians will call primitive culture, such as the early Middle Ages, before the actual feudal times begin. But it may be, for some people, relatively brilliant periods, or at least attempts to revitalise the seeds of the vanished civilisation. Such as the Egyptian New Kingdom (-1580/-1085) who went through a resurgence of the apotheosis of the Old Kingdom, after the second intermediate period marked by the invasion of the Hyksos (-1785/-1580). Like the Mycenaean civilisation which developed simultaneously on the same model as the Egyptian civilisation.

If they are brilliant, these periods are nonetheless not very creative, and are content to copy or perfect the previous art forms. Even in the realm of ideas, it will be necessary to wait for the Arab philosophers of the year 1000, such as Avicenna, to give a new impulse to thought. The European Middle Ages remained dependent on the thought of Aristotle for nearly a thousand years, without concerns about discussing or improving it. For it was no longer a matter of thinking; one had to believe.

When we speak of a culture period, we also speak of a return to cultural unity. When man begins his journey inward, towards his essence, to the point where he feels unified with Nature, others, and the cosmos, a communion of understanding and of expression, a cultural unity, necessarily follows.

Throughout this period, the organisation of the nobility and the clergy into orders is slowly developed. If, as is the case in the classical explanation, this feudal structuring took place in part because of the need to protect the peasantry, we think that these organisational models can be explained more easily by the fact that we are approaching the depths of the fusional period, which is, as we have already mentioned, a spatial period in which man can do no more than live in a totally ordered space. As much in his relationship to nature and to God as in his social relations.

Throughout this outer winter, the power of the Church continues to grow. This movement culminates with the Gregorian reform – it takes its name from Pope Gregory VII, begins under Leo IX (1049-1054), and ends with Innocent III – in the depths of the curve in the eleventh century, the absolute predominance of the spiritual over the temporal is instituted. This principle puts an end to the co-government of the world by the Pope and the Emperor.

God becomes the undisputed centre of the universe. Theology is king. The mother-goddess, the Virgin Mary, reigns over the world whereas she was only a minor character at the beginning of Christianity. It should be noted that the characteristic points of the curve present particular energies, and are thus often accompanied by important movements, in the same way that we have diseases caused by the rebalancing of energies during the changes of seasons. This was especially true around the year -1200, with the collapse of the Hittite, Mycenaean, and Chang (China) civilisations, and the Egyptian and probably Assyrian declines.

With the last quarter of the curve, which we can associate with spring in the logical continuation of the analogy with seasons, begin feudal times, that is to say the times of the multiple centres of power. The place of honour is for those who pray, then to the fighters and then come artisans and peasants.

In the pre-ancient period, from -1210 to -670, is the medieval Zou period in China, which precedes Confucius and Lao-Tseu. This is also the chivalrous culture of the Mahabharata in India, the military feudalism in Egypt, the “dark centuries” of Greece, where Homer (-900) describes a chivalrous culture in the Iliad and the Odyssey. This is also, 2160 years later, from 940 to 1453, the European Middle Ages, feudal Japan, but also the apogee of the Arab civilisation, the splendour of Islam, the Mongolian civilisation, and the Byzantine Empire.

It is in the depths of the curve that the humanist impulse is born in the Arab crypt, a seed that will take a thousand years to reach its climax. An impulse that will be perverted very soon by the emergence of the first bourgeois and their security oriented mentality, whose climax will take place a thousand years later.

From the year one thousand, faith is in search of intelligence, or understanding. The dogmas laid out by the Church are no longer sufficient. The names that remain of this time are the pioneers of the dialectic: Anselm and Abelard (1142), Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great attempt a great synthesis of faith and intelligence shortly after.

At the very beginning, there is a renewal of art on entirely new bases: Romanesque, then Gothic in the West. From the end of the Gregorian reform begins the time of the Crusades, both devotion and achievement of the concept of sacrifice; pilgrimage becomes crusade.

After a short period of absolute domination of spirituality, the struggle for supremacy of the latter with the temporal starts again. But always to the advantage of the Church, because it is dominant in this part of the curve, indisputably. Its power echoes the universal peace of the Empire with a 1000 year interval. However, the final outcome of the fight is known because the winds are now blowing towards the humanist summits. Thought seeks to free itself from faith. This was the flourishing of scholasticism in the thirteenth century through contact with the Arab and Byzantine thought, which themselves transmitted the Greek thought which in itself is heir to the Egyptian thought. The Lateran Council in 1215 can be considered the last flash of religious supremacy with the apogee of the pontifical monarchy.

During the first two centuries of this time, that is to say during the period of prosperity of the Church, the path of persuasion is considered sufficient to bring heretics back onto the path of truth. Soon, this is no longer enough. Under the feverish thrust of thought, faith must defend itself from heresies: the establishment of the Inquisition brands the end of the Middle Ages, finally ending with a murderous witch hunt under the cover of a fight against obscurantism. The end of this cycle, which barely precedes dawn, when the night is at its darkest, is marked by a time of crisis: it is what has been called the “philosophical crisis” at the end of feudal China in 500 BC, or the “economic crisis” or decline from the 13th to the 15th century AD. Each time, the religions must reform to survive, as the contact to the sacred has already been lost and the dogmas deprived of their substance. While Renaissances are starting to take shape, churches have lost the sense of human unity. Then begins the time of the wars of religion, which marks the return to the point where our description began. Often even this linear part of the curve echoes the same part, but reversed, a thousand years earlier: in 410, we find the looting of Rome by Alaric which follows, in 395, the division of the Roman Empire by Theodosius, while in 1527 we find the sack of Rome by Charles V who divides his empire in two in 1556.