Revisiting the Eternal: Myth, History, and the Question of Progress

[Sir Darius the Clairvoyent]

Perspectives on Time

Neil Oliver begins his book Wisdom of the Ancients by reflecting on the uncertainties of our modern world. He contrasts apocalyptic warnings of catastrophe with evidence of progress: fewer people in poverty, better living conditions, increased life expectancy, and groundbreaking advancements in medicine and technology. Yet, even with these achievements, peace of mind remains elusive. In search of wisdom, Oliver turns to the past, exploring how our ancestors perceived and navigated their world.

 

Similarly, the question of how time is understood—whether as a linear progression or as a recurring cycle—has shaped the worldviews of different cultures throughout history. Lets explore

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The Greek View: Hesiod’s Ages of Man

Hesiod’s Works and Days presents one of the most detailed accounts of time as a sequence of ages, each with distinct characteristics and a gradual decline from an ideal past. Hesiod describes five ages:

• The Golden Age: Ruled by Cronos, this was a time of perfect harmony and abundance. Humans lived without toil, suffering, or conflict. The earth provided its fruits freely, and death came gently, like sleep. After their deaths, the spirits of the Golden Age became guardians of humanity.

• The Silver Age: This generation was less noble, characterized by immaturity and foolishness. Humans lived as children for a hundred years and showed no reverence for the gods. Zeus, angered by their impiety, ended their time.

• The Bronze Age: A race of warriors arose, obsessed with violence and destruction. They were hard-hearted, used bronze for tools and weapons, and left no lasting legacy, as their lives ended in self-destruction.

• The Heroic Age: A deviation from the pattern of decline, this age produced noble demigods who fought in legendary wars like Troy. After death, they were granted a special place in the Islands of the Blessed.

• The Iron Age: Hesiod’s own era, marked by toil, strife, and moral decay. In this time, envy, dishonor, and injustice prevail, and Hesiod laments the loss of virtue and harmony.

This linear progression, from an idealized beginning to a degraded present, mirrors a sense of nostalgia and pessimism about humanity's trajectory. Hesiod’s narrative ends with a sense of inevitability: decline is unavoidable, and Zeus will eventually destroy even this race of men.

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The Norse and Indian Cycles of Time

While the Greek conception of time in Hesiod's Works and Days is linear, the Norse and Indian traditions embrace a cyclical view of time, with the universe moving through repeating phases of creation, destruction, and renewal.

The Norse Perspective:
In Norse mythology, time begins with the creation of the world from Ymir’s body, but this harmony is temporary. Over time, chaos grows as Loki and his monstrous offspring bring strife to the gods and humanity. The world reaches its breaking point at Ragnarok, the apocalyptic battle where gods and mortals perish. However, Ragnarok is not the end. After the destruction, a new world emerges from the sea, green and fertile, and survivors live in peace. The cycle begins anew, symbolizing endless renewal.

The Indian Yugas:
Indian cosmology divides time into four yugas, or ages, which form a repeating cycle:

1. Satya Yuga (Golden Age): A time of perfect virtue, harmony, and abundance.
2. Treta Yuga (Silver Age): Moral and spiritual decline begins, and humanity must work to sustain itself.
3. Dvapara Yuga (Bronze Age): Conflict, greed, and suffering grow.
4. Kali Yuga (Iron Age): The current age, characterized by chaos, immorality, and decay.

At the end of Kali Yuga, the universe is destroyed and then recreated, beginning a new cycle with Satya Yuga. This cyclical understanding of time reflects a belief in eternal renewal and the inevitability of change, contrasting sharply with Hesiod’s finality.'

 

Shared Patterns Across Traditions

While the specifics differ, the Greek, Norse, and Indian traditions share remarkable similarities in how they describe the epochs of time:

• The Ideal Beginning:
  All three traditions start with a Golden Age: a time of peace, abundance, and harmony. In Hesiod's Works and Days, this is the era under Cronos, where humans lived like gods. In Norse mythology, it is the initial creation, where the gods live in peace and craft beautiful things from gold. In Indian tradition, it is the Satya Yuga, a time of perfect dharma (virtue).

• Gradual Decline:
  Each tradition describes a process of degeneration. The Greeks move from the Golden to the Iron Age, marked by increasing toil and moral decay. Similarly, the Norse narrative shows harmony breaking down as chaos and conflict culminate in Ragnarok. In Indian cosmology, the yugas progress from Satya (virtue) to Kali (chaos).

• Violence and Strife in the Middle Ages:
  The Bronze Age in Hesiod’s account, the later yugas in Indian tradition, and the Norse struggles against the jotnar all highlight a period dominated by violence, conflict, and a focus on martial prowess. These ages are transitional, setting the stage for ultimate destruction or renewal.

• The Apocalyptic End:
  The Iron Age in Hesiod’s account aligns with the chaotic Kali Yuga and the Norse Ragnarok, all depicting a final collapse marked by greed, strife, and a loss of morality.

• Possibility of Renewal:
  While the Greek tradition ends on a pessimistic note, both Norse and Indian cosmologies emphasize cyclical renewal. After Ragnarok, the Norse world is reborn, and after Kali Yuga, the Indian cosmos begins anew with Satya Yuga.

 

 

Here’s the continuation with the remaining sections translated into English:

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Liberalism, Marxism, and Nationalism

The past two centuries have been marked by three major ideologies that have shaped societal development: liberalism, Marxism, and nationalism. While all three emerged from the challenges of modernity, they can be understood as reactions to one another—each attempting to address society's issues but from radically different perspectives.

Liberalism arose during the Enlightenment with a focus on individual freedom, rights, and property. Inspired by thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith, it became the foundation of modern democracy and capitalism. Through market economies and rational institutions, society was envisioned as progressing linearly toward greater liberty and prosperity.

However, the massive social inequalities of industrialization revealed liberalism’s limitations. The working class was marginalized, and many felt alienated in a system that rewarded the privileged. This created room for a powerful critique of liberalism, led by Karl Marx.

Marxism was developed as a direct reaction to the ideals of liberalism. Marx argued that the "free" market economy and individual liberty were illusions because capitalism reduced workers to commodities in a system that served the wealthy. Where liberalism celebrated individual rights, Marxism claimed these masked class oppression.

For Marx, history was a process driven by class struggle. The goal was a radical transformation of society—a classless community where the means of production were collectively owned. Marxism rejected liberalism’s belief in gradual progress and called for revolution as the path to liberation. At the same time, Marx’s vision of international class struggle stood in contrast to a third emerging ideology: nationalism.

Nationalism, which developed alongside liberalism and Marxism, offered a different response to the challenges of modernity. While liberalism emphasized the individual and Marxism focused on international solidarity, nationalism placed the nation at the center—a community built on shared language, culture, and history.

Nationalism was a reaction against liberalism’s global market and Marxism’s universalism. It provided a collective identity in a time when many experienced fragmentation and rootlessness. Through struggles for national independence and cultural revival, nationalism became a powerful political force but also a source of conflict.

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A Life Governed by the Clock

The introduction of mechanical clocks, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), and the practice of punctuality marked a dramatic shift from traditional understandings of time. In older societies, time was tied to the rhythms of nature—sunrise, noon, and sunset dictated work and rest. For farmers in Norway, expressions like "sun in the eyes" and "sun behind the mountain" served as practical markers of the day’s progress. Similarly, medieval churches used the ringing of bells to signal prayer times, still aligned with daylight cycles.

In the 14th century, mechanical clocks began to break this connection by introducing a uniform division of time. Church bells regulated daily life in cities, and in monasteries, time was strictly measured by scheduled chimes. This abstract, mechanical understanding of time became a cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution, where factories required workers to adhere to precise schedules. Flexible work rhythms adapted to weather or seasons were replaced by rigid timetables. For many workers, alarm clocks—or in England, the curious profession of “knocker-uppers,” who tapped on windows to wake people—became symbols of a new and stricter time regime.

The need for coordination across distances culminated in the standardization of time. In the 19th century, GMT was established partly to ensure railways and trade operated seamlessly. Time, previously localized and tied to the sun’s position, was now globalized. Yet this standardization met resistance in many rural communities, where the abstract, uniform time system clashed with natural cycles.

This transition from an organic understanding of time to a mechanical one brought both opportunities and challenges. Mechanical clocks and GMT enabled global coordination and industrial advances, but they also replaced humanity’s natural rhythms with a uniform, strict time regime. Time, once adapted to life’s cycles, became a tool for control and efficiency—a change that continues to shape our modern relationship with the clock.

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The State of Nature

The concept of the state of nature explores how humans related to one another before the establishment of societies, laws, and other constructs. For Thomas Hobbes, this state was marked by constant war, with human nature described as fundamentally brutal and selfish. In Leviathan, he famously characterized life in the state of nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." To escape this chaotic condition, Hobbes argued that it was necessary to enter into a social contract and establish a strongly hierarchical and centralized societal structure.

In contrast, Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that humans were naturally good, with an inherent ability to cooperate, living in harmony with each other and nature. This was a state marked by freedom and innocence, inspiring his slogan "back to nature!" Whether we align with Rousseau, Hobbes, or something in between, I believe our view of human nature—whether we are inherently "good" or "bad"—shapes how we think society should be organized.

David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything challenges these traditional dichotomies. They argue that early human societies were not confined to a single form of social organization. Instead, they experimented with various forms of governance, hierarchy, and social arrangements long before the advent of agriculture or the state. This diversity undermines the idea of a single "state of nature" from which modern societies evolved. The authors suggest that early humans had the creativity and freedom to choose how they organized their communities—an overlooked capacity in conventional narratives of human history.

In essence, they show that early humans were as diverse and complex as "us civilized folks" today.

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Final Reflections

What am I trying to convey? It’s difficult to say. Maybe nothing. Maybe just that there are no definitive answers to how we should live. But I want to preserve and honour the histories, cultures, mysteries and people who have shaped us. And maybe looking to the past can be just as valuable as the future. This is an immense and complex topic, so my thoughts may feel scattered, and the language might not always flow perfectly. Instead of endlessly refining this, I’ll leave you with some art and quotations:

 

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Spoiler

 

France, ca. 35.000bc. I have a copy on my wall.

 

Lion man, 40.000bc. 

 

Cologne Cathedral, reaching towards the heavens

 

In the Roman era, elite citizens often honoured the death of a family member by creating idealised funerary masks. These "imagines" weren't usually buried with the deceased, but kept as memorials and stored in special niches in the family home – and even sometimes worn to other funerals by living family members.

 

Banana taped to wall

 

"A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics or free thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in capitalist society.

In capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity. Compare the thorough-bred in Rothschild’s stables, served by a retinue of bipeds, with the heavy brute of the Norman farms which plows the earth, carts the manure, hauls the crops. Look at the noble savage whom the missionaries of trade and the traders of religion have not yet corrupted with Christianity, syphilis and the dogma of work, and then look at our miserable slaves of machines. [1]

When, in our civilized Europe, we would find a trace of the native beauty of man, we must go seek it in the nations where economic prejudices have not vet uprooted the hatred of work. Spain, which, alas, is degenerating, may still boast of possessing fewer factories than we have of prisons and barracks; but the artist rejoices in his admiration of the hardy Andalusian, brown as his native chestnuts, straight and flexible as a steel rod; and the heart leaps at hearing the beggar, superbly draped in his ragged capa, parleying on terms of equality with the duke of Ossuna. For the Spaniard, in whom the primitive animal has not been atrophied, work is the worst sort of slavery. [2] The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind. And so it was in this era that men like Aristotle, Phidias, Aristophanes moved and breathed among the people; it was the time when a handful of heroes at Marathon crushed the hordes of Asia, soon to be subdued by Alexander. The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods:

O Melibae Deus nobis haec otia fecit.

Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, preached idleness: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Jehovah the bearded and angry god, gave his worshipers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of work, he rests for all eternity."

The right to be lazy

 

«I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can't think of a single way they act that is not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case as long as you stick to your distinctions of 'mine' and 'thine'. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one's soul is like imagining one could preserve one's life at the bottom of a lake.»
Kondiaronk, Huron chief, 1600s

«They are really better to us, than we are to them;they always give us Victuals [6] at their Quarters [7], and take care we are arm'd against Hunger and Thirst: We do not so by them (generally speaking) but let them walk by our Doors Hungry, and do not often relieve them. We look upon them with Scorn and Disdain, and think them little better than Beasts in Humane Shape, though if well examined, we shall find that, for all our Religion and Education, we possess more Moral Deformities, and Evils than these Savages do, or are acquainted withal»
John Lawson's Assessment of the Tuscarora

[...] I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country. As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live: there is always the perfect religion, there the perfect government, there the most exact and accomplished usage of all things. They are savages at the same rate that we say fruits are wild, which nature produces of herself and by her own ordinary progress; whereas, in truth, we ought rather to call those wild whose natures we have changed by our artifice and diverted from the common order. In those, the genuine, most useful, and natural virtues and properties are vigorous and sprightly, which we have helped to degenerate in these, by accommodating them to the pleasure of our own corrupted palate. And yet for all this, our taste confesses a flavour and delicacy excellent even to emulation of the best of ours, in several fruits wherein those countries abound without art or culture. Neither is it reasonable that art should gain the pre-eminence of our great and powerful mother nature. We have so surcharged her with the additional ornaments and graces we have added to the beauty and riches of her own works by our inventions, that we have almost smothered her; yet in other places, where she shines in her own purity and proper lustre, she marvellously baffles and disgraces all our vain and frivolous attempts
Of Cannibals, Montaigne 1500s

The course of empire

 

Writing in the 1920s, Chadwick – Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge, at much the same time J. R. R. Tolkien held that post at Oxford – was initially concerned with why great traditions of epic poetry (Nordic sagas, the works of Homer, the Ramayana) always seemed to emerge among people in contact with and often employed by the urban civilizations of their day, but who ultimately rejected the values of those same civilizations. For a long time, his notion of ‘heroic societies’ fell into a certain disfavour: there was a widespread assumption that such societies did not really exist but were, like the society represented in Homer’s Iliad, retroactively reconstructed in epic literature. But as archaeologists have more recently discovered, there is a very real pattern of heroic burials, indicating in turn an emerging cultural emphasis on feasting, drinking, the beauty and fame of the individual male warrior. 80 And it appears time and again around the fringes of urban life, often in strikingly similar forms, over the course of the Eurasian Bronze Age. In searching for the common features of such ‘heroic societies’, we can find a fairly consistent list in precisely the traditions of epic poetry that Chadwick compared (in each region, the first written versions being much later in date than the heroic burials themselves, but shedding light on earlier customs). It’s a list which applies just as well, in most of its features, to the potlatch societies of the Northwest Coast or, for that matter, the Māori of New Zealand. All these cultures were aristocracies, without any centralized authority or principle of sovereignty (or, maybe, some largely symbolic, formal one). Instead of a single centre, we find numerous heroic figures competing fiercely with one another for retainers and slaves. ‘Politics’, in such societies, was composed of a history of personal debts of loyalty or vengeance between heroic individuals; all, moreover, focus on game-like contests as the primary business of ritual, indeed political, life.81 Often, massive amounts of loot or wealth were squandered, sacrificed or given away in such theatrical performances. Moreover, all such groups explicitly resisted certain features of nearby urban civilizations: above all, writing, for which they tended to substitute poets or priests who engaged in rote memorization or elaborate techniques of oral composition. Inside their own societies, at least, they also rejected commerce. Hence standardized currency, either in physical or credit forms, tended to be eschewed, with the focus instead on unique material treasures.

The dawn of everything

 

 

The recent discovery of a burial site in Vedbaek, Denmark has revealed a fascinating and heart-wrenching story from the distant past. This ancient grave, dating back approximately 7000 to 6000 years, serves as the final resting place of a young woman, estimated to be around 20 years old, and her newborn baby. The circumstances surrounding their demise tell a tale of tragedy, loss, and the profound connection between humans and the natural world

https://vocal.media/history/a-7000-6000-year-old-burial-in-vedbaek-denmark-unveils-a-tragic-tale-of-motherhood

 

 

There's a boy, don't know what he's hidin'
He's got his mother's eyes and his daddy's charm
Just the right mix
And there's a girl, she knew where to find him
In the local bar, smokin' in the dark
It was perfect timing

But what they both didn't know
Is how far this thing would go
And they might not want the truth
But if they do

Play 'em our home movies
If they wonder who I was
Even if they don't
Then play 'em just because
Let 'em see the highlights
And don't forget the lows
Everybody's got a story no one knows
So just let 'em play until the credits roll

There's a story, I didn't know we'd write it
However long it took, it's an open book
If you love surprises
There's a song underneath the silence
You can hear the crowd sing the words out loud
In just the right pitch

But what we both didn't know
Was how far this thing would go
And we might not make it through
But if we do

Play 'em our home movies
If they wonder who I was
Even if they don't
Then play 'em just because
Let 'em see the highlights
And don't forget the lows
Everybody's got a story no one knows
So just let 'em play until the credits roll

There's nothing I could be without these memories
Even though they might not show the best of me (oh-oh)

Play 'em our home movies
If they wonder who I was
Even if they don't
Then play 'em just because (play 'em just because)
Let 'em see the highlights
And don't forget the lows
Everybody's got a story no one knows (no one knows)
So just let 'em play until the credits roll