René Guénon - The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

Nevertheless, although the Kali-Yuga as a whole is intrinsically a period of obscuration, so that ‘fissures’ have been possible ever since it began, the degree of obscuration pervading its later phases is far from having been attained at once, and that is why ‘fissures’ could be repaired relatively easily in earlier times; it was nonetheless necessary to maintain a constant vigilance against them, and this task was naturally among those assigned to the spiritual centers of the various traditions. Later on there came a period when, as a consequence of the extreme ‘solidification’ of the world, these same ‘fissures’ were much less to be feared, at least temporarily; this period corresponds to the first part of modern times, the part that can be defined as being characteristically mechanistic and materialistic, in which the ‘closed system’ alluded to was most nearly realized, at least to the extent that any such thing is actually possible. Nowadays, that is to say in the period which can be called the second part of modern times and which has already begun, conditions are certainly very different from the conditions obtaining in all earlier periods: not only can ‘fissures’ occur more and more extensively, and be much more serious in character, because a greater proportion of the descending course of manifestation has been accomplished, but also the possibilities of repairing them are not the same as they used to be; the action of the spiritual centers has indeed become ever more enclosed, because the superior influences that they normally transmit to our world can no longer be manifested externally, since they are held back by the ‘shell’ alluded to above; and when the whole of the human and cosmic order is in such a condition, where could a means of defence possibly be found such as might be effective in any way against the ‘hordes of Gog and Magog’?

But that is not all: what has been said so far covers so to speak only the negative side of the growing difficulties encountered by all attempts to oppose the intrusion of malefic influences, among these difficulties being a sort of inertia resulting from the general ignorance of such matters, and from ‘survivals’ of the materialistic mentality and of the outlook it engenders; this inertia may endure longer than it otherwise would because the outlook in question has become more or less instinctive in the moderns and is now incorporated in their very nature. Of course a majority of ‘spiritualists’ and even of ‘traditionalists’, or of people who call themselves such, are in fact quite as materialistic as other people when matters of this kind are in question, so that the situation is made even more irremediable by the fact that those who most sincerely want to combat the modern spirit are almost all unwittingly affected by it, and all their efforts are therefore condemned to remain without any appreciable result; for these are matters in which goodwill is far from being sufficient; effective knowledge being needed as well, indeed, more needed than anything else. But effective knowledge is the very thing that is made impossible by the influence of the modern spirit with all its limitations, even in the case of those who might have some intellectual capabilities of the required kind if conditions were less abnormal.

But apart from all these negative elements, the difficulties now under review have an aspect that can be called positive, and this may be taken to include everything in our world as we know it that is actively favorable to the intervention of subtle influences of an inferior kind, whether its work be done consciously or unconsciously. The logical sequence here would be to consider in the first place the more or less ‘determining’ part played by the actual agents of the whole modern deviation, since the intervention of inferior influences really represents a new phase in the said deviation, and fits in exactly with the sequence of the ‘plan’ by which it is brought about; it would clearly be necessary to seek in some such direction for the conscious auxiliaries of the malefic forces, though the extent to which they are individually conscious of what they are doing may actually differ greatly in particular cases. As for the other auxiliaries, those who act in good faith then, because they know nothing of the true nature of the forces involved (thanks to the recently mentioned influence of the modern spirit) are never anything but mere dupes, though this does not prevent their activity from being proportional to their sincerity and to their blindness; these auxiliaries are already virtually numberless, and they can be placed in many categories, ranging from the ingenuous adherents of all sorts of ‘neo-spiritualist’ organizations to the ‘intuitionist’ philosophers, by way of the ‘metapsychical’ scientists and the psychologists of the more recent schools. This matter need not be pursued any further for the moment, for to do so would be to anticipate what will come later; in the meantime some examples must be given of some of the ways in which ‘fissures’ can actually be brought about, also of the ‘supports’ that the inferior order of subtle or psychic influences (for the terms ‘subtle’ and ‘psychic’ applied to a domain are for present purposes synonymous) are able to find in the cosmic environment itself, to assist them in bringing their action to bear on the human world and to enable them to propagate themselves therein.

The present period corresponds to the final phases of a cyclical manifestation, and for that reason must exhaust its most inferior possibilities; that is why the period can be said to be using up everything that had been set aside in earlier periods: that and nothing else is truly characteristic of the modern experimental and quantitative sciences in particular, together with their industrial applications. For similar reasons the profane sciences, as has been said, even when considered from a historical point of view as well as from the point of view of their content, are really and truly ‘residues’ of some of the traditional sciences. [120] But only of some of them, for there were other traditional sciences which have not left in the modern world even the smallest trace, however deformed and deviated. It goes without saying, too, that all the enumerations and classifications of the philosophers apply only to the profane sciences, and that the traditional sciences could in no way be made to fit into their narrow and ‘systematic’ categories; at this time, more appropriately than ever before, could the Arabic saying be applied to the current period, to the effect that ‘there are many sciences, but few scientists’ ( al-‘ulūm kathīr walakin al-‘ulamā’ qalīl ). There is yet another fact that accords with those just mentioned, though its real significance is scarcely ever grasped, and that is the frenzy with which the moderns have undertaken the exhumation of the vestiges of past periods and vanished civilizations, despite their incapacity really to understand anything about them. This in itself is not a very reassuring symptom, because of the nature of the subtle influences that remain attached to such vestiges and are brought back into the light of day with them, and are so to speak set at liberty by the exhumation as such, without raising any suspicion in the minds of the investigators. In order to explain this more fully, it will first be necessary to deal briefly with certain things that in themselves are as a matter of fact wholly outside the modern world, but are not for that reason any the less capable of being used so as to exert a particularly ‘disorganizing’ influence in that world; the rest of this chapter is therefore a digression only in appearance, and it will incidentally provide an opportunity for the elucidation of certain matters about which too little is generally known.