Call to Order, Occultist Geopolitics, Spirit Wars

Abstract

Early twentieth-century utopias were built on the old order’s ruins. From 1911, traditional empires like Manchu China, Tsarist Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires fell to the upheavals of modernization and mechanized war. In a physical sense, this brought the ‘long middle ages’ to a close. But at an inner mythico-occult level, it reinvigorated the longue duree’s prophetic-gnostic forms of knowledge. The pattern which developed—one of the forces of politico-cultural modernity wedded to the atavistic power of apocalyptic and myth—was repeated, briefly, in the (sub-modernist) countercultural sixties, and on a grander scale with the Soviet Union’s fall. When the phoenix rises from the ashes, its support is the ‘mythopoetic function’, to redeploy Myers’s term. Modern revolutions are scarcely secular events: their prime, mass-mobilizing need is to lodge their programmes in the mind’s ‘oldest strata’ (Ball), and to that end, like modernism, they enlist prophecies, myths, magic, invented traditions, all to legitimate or glamourize the new.