The decline of the West

by Oswald Spengler

VIII

Scientists are wont to assume that myths and God-ideas are creations of primitive man, and that as spiritual culture “advances,” this myth-forming power is shed. In reality it is the exact opposite, and had not the morphology of history remained to this day an almost unexplored field, the supposedly universal mythopoetic power would long ago have been found to be limited to particular periods. It would have been realized that this ability of a soul to fill its world with shapes, traits and symbols—like and consistent amongst themselves—belongs most decidedly not to the world-age of the primitives but exclusively to the springtimes of great Cultures.[^[492]] Every myth of the great style stands at the beginning of an awakening spirituality. It is the first formative act of that spirituality. Nowhere else is it to be found. There—it must be.

I make the assumption that that which a primitive folk—like the Egyptians of Thinite times, the Jews and Persians before Cyrus,[^[493]] the heroes of the Mycenæan burghs and the Germans of the Migrations—possesses in the way of religious ideas is not yet myth in the higher sense. It may well be a sum of scattered and irregular traits, of cults adhering to names, fragmentary saga-pictures, but it is not yet a divine order, a mythic organism, and I no more regard this as myth than I regard the ornament of that stage as art. And, be it said, the greatest caution is necessary in dealing with the symbols and sagas current to-day, or even those current centuries ago, amongst ostensibly primitive peoples, for in those thousands of years every country in the world has been more or less affected by some high Culture alien to it.

There are, therefore, as many form-worlds of great myth as there are Cultures and early architectures. The antecedents—that chaos of undeveloped imagery in which modern folk-lore research, for want of a guiding principle, loses itself—do not, on this hypothesis, concern us; but we are concerned, on the other hand, with certain cultural manifestations that have never yet been thought of as belonging to this category. It was in the Homeric age (1100-800 B.C.) and in the corresponding knightly age of Teutonism (900-1200 A.D.), that is, the epic ages, and neither before nor after them, that the great world-image of a new religion came into being. The corresponding ages in India and Egypt are the Vedic and the Pyramid periods; one day it will be discovered that Egyptian mythology did in fact ripen into depth during the Third and Fourth Dynasties.

Only in this way can we understand the immense wealth of religious-intuitive creations that fills the three centuries of the Imperial Age in Germany. What came into existence then was the Faustian mythology. Hitherto, owing to religious and learned preconceptions, either the Catholic element has been treated to the exclusion of the Northern-Heathen or vice versa, and consequently we have been blind to the breadth and the unity of this form-world. In reality there is no such difference. The deep change of meaning in the Christian circle of ideas is identical, as a creative act, with the consolidation of the old heathen cults of the Migrations. It was in this age that the folk-lore of Western Europe became an entirety; if the bulk of its material was far older, and if, far later again, it came to be linked with new outer experiences and enriched by more conscious treatment, yet it was then and neither earlier nor later that it was vitalized with its symbolic meaning. To this lore belong the great God-legends of the Edda and many motives in the gospel-poetry of learned monks; the German hero-tales of Siegfried and Gudrun, Dietrich and Wayland; the vast wealth of chivalry-tales, derived from ancient Celtic fables, that was simultaneously coming to harvest on French soil, concerning King Arthur and the Round Table, the Holy Grail, Tristan, Percival and Roland. And with these are to be counted—beside the spiritual transvaluation, unremarked but all the deeper for that, of the Passion-Story—the Catholic hagiology of which the richest floraison was in the 10th and 11th Centuries and which produced the Lives of the Virgin and the histories of SS. Roch, Sebald, Severin, Francis, Bernard, Odilia. The Legenda Aurea was composed about 1250—this was the blossoming-time of courtly epic and Icelandic skald-poetry alike. The great Valhalla Gods of the North and the mythic group of the “Fourteen Helpers” in South Germany are contemporary, and by the side of Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, in the Völuspa we have a Christian form in the South German Muspilli. This great myth develops, like heroic poetry, at the climax of the early Culture. They both belong to the two primary estates, priesthood and nobility; they are at home in the cathedral and the castle and not in the village below, where amongst the people the simple saga-world lives on for centuries, called “fairy-tale,” “popular beliefs” or “superstition” and yet inseparable from the world of high centemplation.[^[494]]

Nowhere is the final meaning of these religious creations more clearly indicated than in the history of Valhalla. It was not an original German idea, and even the tribes of the Migrations were totally without it. It took shape just at this time, instantly and as an inward necessity, in the consciousness of the peoples newly-arisen on the soil of the West. Thus it is “contemporary” with Olympus, which we know from the Homeric epos and which is as little Mycenæan as Valhalla is German in origin. Moreover[Moreover], it is only for the two higher estates that Valhalla emerges from the notion of Hel; in the beliefs of the people Hel remained the realm of the dead.[^[495]]

The deep inward unity of this Faustian world of myth and saga and the complete congruence of its expression-symbolism has never hitherto been realized, and yet Siegfried, Baldur, Roland, Christ the King in the “Heliand,” are different names for one and the same figure. Valhalla and Avalon, the Round Table and the communion of the Grail-templars, Mary, Frigga and Frau Holle mean the same. On the other hand, the external provenance of the material motives and elements, on which mythological research has wasted an excessive zeal, is a matter of which the importance does not go deeper than the surface. As to the meaning of a myth, its provenance proves nothing. The “numen” itself, the primary form of the world-feeling, is a pure, necessary and unconscious creation, and it is not transferable. What one people takes over from another—in “conversion” or in admiring imitation—is a name, dress and mask for its own feeling, never the feeling of that other. The old Celtic and old Germanic myth-motives have to be treated, like the repertory of Classical forms possessed by the learned monk, and like the entire body of Christian-Eastern faith taken over by the Western Church, simply as the material out of which the Faustian soul in these centuries created a mythic architecture of its own. It mattered little whether the persons through whose minds and mouths the myth came to life were individual skalds, missionaries, priests or “the people,” nor did the circumstance that the Christian ideas dictated its forms affect the inward independence of that which had come to life.

In the Classical, Arabian and Western Cultures, the myth of the springtime is in each case that which we should expect; in the first static, in the second Magian, in the third dynamic. Examine every detail of form, and see how in the Classical it is an attitude and in the West a deed, there a being and here a will that underlies them; how in the Classical the bodily and tangible, the sensuously-saturated, prevails and how therefore in the mode of worshipping the centre of gravity lies in the sense-impressive cult, whereas in the North it is space, force and therefore a religiousness that is predominantly dogmatic in colouring that rule. These very earliest creations of the young soul tell us that there is relationship between the Olympian figures, the statue and the corporeal Doric temple; between the domical basilica, the “Spirit” of God and the arabesque; between Valhalla and the Mary myth, the soaring nave and instrumental music.

The Arabian soul built up its myth in the centuries between Cæsar and Constantine—that fantastic mass of cults, visions and legends that to-day we can hardly even survey,[^[496]] syncretic cults like that of the Syrian Baal and of Isis and Mithras not only transported to but transformed in Syrian soil; Gospels, Acts of Apostles and Apocalypses in astonishing profusion; Christian, Persian, Jewish, Neoplatonist and Manichæan legends, and the heavenly hierarchy of angels and spirits of the Fathers and the Gnostics. In the suffering-story of the Gospels, the very epic of the Christian nation, set between the story of Jesus’s childhood and the Acts of the Apostles, and in the Zoroaster-legend that is contemporary with it, we are looking upon the hero-figures of Early Arabian epic as we see Achilles in the Classical and Siegfried and Percival in the Faustian. The scenes of Gethsemane and Golgotha stand beside the noblest pictures of Greek and Germanic saga. These Magian visions, almost without exception, grew up under the pressure of the dying Classical which, in the nature of things unable to communicate its spirit, the more insistently lent its forms. It is almost impossible now to estimate the extent to which given Apollinian elements had to be accepted and transvalued before the old Christian myth assumed the firmness that it possessed in the time of Augustine.