ENDING THE COSMIC WAR

THE FEELING I GET WHEN I LOOK TO THE WEST

And my spirit is crying for leaving. Led Zeppelin knew it when they wrote Stairway to Heaven, the lyrics above; Tolkien knew it. We know it. We yearn for home, for a distant past, for a golden age, for the true grain of the world, for the return.

Kia Ora tatou, this is Karen Effie, and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War.

You can feel it, can’t you, that pull homewards, that elegy, that wordless need for place and belonging and depth of ancestry. We want to know where we come from. We do our genealogies, at least we do when we are my age. We go on retreats where we live like Iron Age Vikings. We cosplay. We read fantasy novels set in alternative histories. We study our heritage. Not just in an academic way, it’s not just for knowledge, it’s for the feel of home. Not just home, which for me was a small damp wooden house in a social housing area that always smelled of yesterday’s boiled cabbage, but Home.  

You know, don’t you, that the times we live in are just absolute shite. The world has gone to hell in a hand cart. We are governed by the stupidest people. They are venal and openly corrupt. Injustice is everywhere, not just on social media but in our daily lives. We can’t make ends meet. We are beset. Society is divided. It is not just bad politics, is it, it is something more profound, as if we have become a diminished people. As if we have given up, got weak and stupid and stunted. Deep in our hearts is a memory of a memory, a hint of what we once might have been. It might be history, or it might be myth, but it tugs on us and stirs us and makes us wish and yearn. It might be called atavism, or nostalgia even. It is thought and sensation and a feel for something that is just out of reach. Ever been out walking for a day, in the countryside, and crested a hill, and seen before you a valley, awash with the last of the sunlight, with a sweet river and green swards leading down to it, and the smoke from the cottages rising gently in the still air? No, me neither, but you know exactly what I mean, don’t you? It is that sort of vibe I am talking about.

So, when was “back then”, when things were so much better? Just before you were born? Fearless kids on bikes, Dad working in his shed, cricket on the lawn.  Fifty years before you were born? 1950s United States of America? Single income households, the nuclear family, limited roles for women. The 1890’s United States? Cottagecore, butter churns, lumberjacks, honest labour, Little House on the Prairie. Western Europe in the Middle Ages? Chivalry, a hint of magic, Mallory’s King Arthur, Crusaders forging Europe against the Muslim hordes. Or further back? How far?

Once, a very long time ago, there was a golden age, and this is where our hearts still go when we are full of this exquisite yearning. It is described, this golden age, in some of our earliest writings. We lived in harmony with nature back then. The weather was truly temperate, with crisp autumns, bracing winters, cheerful springs and warm blessed summers. We were healthy, because our diets were all natural, and we lived much longer than we do now. Our women gave birth naturally, almost painlessly. It was easier to care about each other because our societies were smaller. We were unified. We knew who we were. We worked hard, but work was meaningful and useful. Sturdy farmers and their apple-cheeked wives brought the harvest in, all working together. We often made merry, because we knew we were safe. The great lords looked after us, and never took more than was their due. And we had great kings then, real philosopher kings, who were noble and wise, and whose purity of lineage made them more than human, made them legendary, made them healers, and they were most beautiful, and their queens also, with their ash blonde hair and laughing grey eyes, and we cheered as they rode past, because we knew they were more than rulers, they were representatives of the great order of the universe, and it was all good.

Excuse me for a moment. Cough. Cough. That is better. Back now. Dearie, dearie me.  

In the word picture above, what do you imagine? What do the people look like? Who is absent? When do think this might have been? Did it ever exist? Would you want to live there?  Who might you be if you lived there? Who might not be able to live there?

When I was a young person, I was a kind of deeply conservative hippie. I pined for a golden age, but it had to be a bit myffic, as Terry Pratchett would say. I read LOTR about once a year for a good decade, even the poetry. I was as Anglophilic as Pound and Eliot. I liked the idea of a very high sort of Anglicanism, one redolent of the censer and the book, of Oxbridge. Or a very high sort of paganism, one redolent of ancient Greece and willow banks, of Albion, or even Avalon. I really could almost taste it. It was an escape from life, of course it was, but it was also a real impulse, I think, because we stand in our ancestral streams and the past pours through us when we are sensitive to it.

The thing is, to know where to put it. Because if we indulge it, we are walking straight into the thinking behind the Cosmic War, with our eyes closed. It’s a trap!

The Cosmic War starts with this golden age, with Eden, or the age of innocence and purity, when God first created a perfect earth, and before Satan, or Angra Mainyu, or Belial, or whoever the adversary is, breaches it. After that, we get history. Good and bad, the ongoing Cosmic War which we are in now, but which will end soon, because we are always in the end times.

The golden age is not a good Story. It is what Tyson Yunkaporta, Australian aboriginal academic and wise chap, calls wrong story. Its allure is fake. Consider how I described it, although admittedly I bordered on parody at times. (Bordered?) It is a caste system. Great men, and they are men, rule with near perfect wisdom. There is a hierarchy of priests, warriors, merchants, and peasants/slaves/serfs/whatever. Righteousness, beauty, nobility and virtue trickle down. Whiteness, heteronormativity, all taken for granted. This is absolutely good, and correct. This represents the cosmic order, and to change it would defy the cosmic order and bring destruction.

Remember in the first episode I outlined an old Indo-European Story about two guys wandering around in the void? I will tell it again.

Two guys (and sometimes their cow) are wandering around in the void. They are sometimes brothers, sometimes twins. One of them kills the other (sometimes the two of them kill a third man). From the dead body, the world is forged. The heavens are forged from his skull, the rivers from his blood stream, and humans from different parts of his body. This is the first sacrifice, and priests from then on undertake this kind of sacrifice as a vital rite, echoing the first sacrifice down the ages and reminding the people of the order of things. The caste system arises from this first sacrifice. The upper castes are formed from the upper parts of the sacrificed body, and the lower castes from the lower parts. Thus, the social order mirrors the cosmic order, and it is literally organic, and it is right and true. When we long for the oldest age, for the golden time of our ancestors, we need to remember that this was an age of strict caste, and where many people were enslaved.

For some of us, this is not a problem.

Here is another old Story for us: that of the long cycles of time. Empires rise, then deteriorate and become corrupt, and fall. But this is not just about politics. It is about culture in the deepest sense, a kind of spiritual culture. And there is a strong moral element. Empires rise because they are worthy, because they align with the cosmic order, because their men are strong. They weaken because their people weaken, because the cosmic order is subverted, women think they are men, Jack is as good as his master, people don’t even know what gender they are, women stop having children, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, and so on. Empires collapse because they are no longer worthy. All you can do is destroy what is left and start again. The sooner the better.

The idea of dividing history into periods has been around since Zoroastrianism. This was another remarkable idea, as prior to that, the life of the cosmos was seen as unchanging. The Nile may flood, drought might cause starvation in Mesopotamia, but these things were seen as blips on the cosmic radar. The cosmos was eternally as it is, even if it was often under threat from evil cosmic forces that had to be kept at bay by the gods. Zarathustra divided history into the original brief period of perfect creation, then the Mixture, where the good Ahura Mazda fought the evil Angra Mainyu, then the Separation, when evil was vanquished, and a final period of paradise for all. Consider then King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, in Daniel 2, where Daniel interpreted the king’s dream as the future of four empires, ending in God’s eternal kingdom. Consider also the rise of the theology of dispensationalism in Christianity. Dispensationalism divides history into different periods, where God interacts with humanity in different ways. While dispensationalism does not in itself entail a deterioration in the condition of humankind over time, dispensationalist thinkers generally see history starting with a time of innocence (the garden of Eden) and ending with – well, the end times. And taking a step way back, consider the Hindu idea of the Yuga, or age of humanity. Humanity is compared to a bull. There are four ages. At the end of each age the bull loses a leg. We are now in the last and worst age, the Kali Yuga. The poor bull of humanity has no legs. The Kali Yuga began at the death of Lord Krishna, and the time of the end depends on who has done the calculations, and there are many. Originally, each Yuga took many thousands of years, the Kali Yuga being the shortest. But the idea of the end times being upon us has beguiled Hindu-inspired eschatologists as well as everyone else, and there is even a prophecy that it will end in 2025. It will end catastrophically, and the cycle will begin again.

Of course, we are always not just in the Kali Yuga, but at the end of it, in the depth of decadence, and the cosmic order is upset, more dogs and cats living together etc. The main way we know this is observing how the strong are ruled by the weak. Instead of philosopher kings with complete political and cultural power, we have a melange of god knows what. Committees. Experts in gender studies. Language police. The woke mind virus. White men are ruled by women and queer people and black people. This is how upset is the natural order of things. White men have been weakened; they have allowed this to happen. They need to take back their natural power. So, you can guess to whom these ideas appeal. This state of affairs is intolerable to some white men and there are only a few ways of managing their grievances. They can withdraw. They can work on themselves, their fitness, their strength, see themselves as a project. They can break out into terrible acts of violence. They can believe that the end of the world will come soon, and they will take their rightful, divinely-appointed places, or they can try to hasten the end of the world, what the chaos magicians call immanentizing the eschaton.

The idea of empires rising and falling is essentially Victorian, but also gets its expression in the works of Ibn Khaldun, a 14^th century CE Muslim historian from Andalusia, who observed this cyclical phenomenon. He influenced early modern Western thinkers who in turn influenced those Victorians. I think they were wrong, and historians now see change as being, well, change. Empires don’t fall, they just change. But it is another of those beguiling ideas that feeds into the Cosmic War. We just know we are in a degraded state, that things were better back then, even just politically. We just feel it, dang, even the last lot of toilet paper I bought was crap, and there’s no proper explanation for the price of things.

We are brought up to see history as linear. Either we are brought up with the positivist idea of progress, or the Christian idea of humanity drawing further away from the true church, and the Cosmic War which will end soon. But neither Christian, Zoroastrian, Muslim, Judaic history is linear. And neither is Pure Land Buddhism, or the idea of the Yugas in the Hindu faiths. And neither is Norse myth for that matter. History is a circular return plot. After the end of the world, is a new world, a paradise. History might end there, or the cycle might go round again.

You can have this view of history without the Cosmic War. There is no reasoned necessity for it. However, all the faiths mentioned above have it. It is super useful. It explains why there is this decline in the human state, and the need for renewal. It helps us continue to take the side of good. It gives us hope, because we know our instincts are correct. It justifies our yearnings. I will probably repeat myself a lot about this, the reason true Cosmic War believers are hard to beat is because they are so goddam motivated.

There are people who genuinely want to bring on the end of the world. This is because they are assured of their place on the right side of history, or the right side of their faith. Some of these are accelerationists, who are working to hasten the decline of society and bring on violence and chaos. Most of these accelerationists are on the far right. Bringing on a race war is one way of hastening the end times. Some of them are in the spiritual community; they believe that our human reality, and the Earth, are about to ascend into a greater dimension, but they are being held back by evil powers. Spiritual lightworkers and other enlightened souls are trying to help this ascension, and it is all happening now. Some accelerationists are Silicon Valley billionaires, who believe they can transcend humanity as it is. They are either indifferent to the near future, or they want to bring it all on so they can live out their dreams of personal immortality. Some other accelerationists are Christians or Jews who want to bring on the eschaton. Israel is key for them, as it is the seat of Armageddon, and the renewal of the Temple in Jerusalem is a great need for the Jewish people. You can see how suddenly we lurch from golden ages to bang on now. These are ideas with reach. I will go into them further later as I unpack the Cosmic War.

It is important to be aware of that atavistic pull, to put it in its place, to be aware of it as a Story. A few of those who have succumbed to it want the wrong things. An ethnostate. The rollback of human rights. Conspirituality. Occasionally violence and chaos. Actually, the end of the world. The world! My world, and yours, this beloved world, of real people, human and other than human,  and real valleys and hills, and suburbs, and train stations, and muddy football fields on a Saturday evening, and the real threat of climate disaster.

Further exploration: “Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream: The Crusades, Apocalyptic Prophecy and the End of History” by Jay Rubinstein.

Thank you for your company, especially if you like Ghostbusters memes, and I look forward to your company next time. Ma te Wa!