The citizen had no freedom of religion; either he participated in the religion of the city or he was banished. The hierarchy of family, tribe and city introduced the idea of a wider and wider influence of the gods, but the knowledge of the one god had been lost. Philosophers and initiates in the mystery schools would have known otherwise, yet they also participated in the sacred ceremonies of the city. The esoteric did not preclude the exoteric, a point emphasized by Guenon and Tomberg.

The practices common to the Ancient City recur in different ways in the Medieval period. Priesthood, prayer, sacrifice, communion meals, liturgy, reading the signs of the times, piety, dispassion, the spiritual integrity and unity of the polis, insider vs outsider recognition, spiritual authority, the primacy of spiritual unity over genetic similarity: these are all aspects of Tradition of the past. The Tradition of the future will look similar.

Cologero

Here we see a prediction about the spontaneous arising and arrival of a pre-modern religious tradition, necessarily different in different parts of the earth, but “at one in heart & mind” in their necessary rejection of the dry modern rationalism and liberalism which has proved so virulent since the end of WWII. In our next quote, we will see that Rosenstock-Huessy (the great “underground man” of German thought) puts his finger on the same issue, although there is more than a “whiff of Hegelianism” about his answer that we will wish to reject.

With a conscious economic organization of the whole earth, subconscious tribal organizations are needed to protect man’s mind from commercialization and disintegration. The more our shrinking globe demands technical and economic cooperation, the more necessary it will prove to restore the balance by admitting the primitive archetypes of man’s nature…before any tribe or group can sacrifice reason to the unreal myth and magic of pre-history, its food and shelter must be guaranteed by the peaceful world-wide organization of production…Nazism is premature, it cannot co-exist with the possibility of war. Frightened by the Proletarian revolution, Nazism is attempting a ‘classless society’, a solution which lies even beyond the Russian society. They are developing the characteristics of the primitive tribes before they can commit themselves to such an adventure…and the professed pacifism of Hitler hinges upon the fact that the Nazis plan to return into the forests like the Germanic tribes. The Jews, who represent the universal history of mankind, stand in their way. Yet it is perhaps only through the Jews that the world may become a playground for tribal primitivism!

Rosenstock-Huessy, “The Future of Revolution”, Out of Revolution

Rosenstock-Huessy was not aware of, and therefore could not possibly have foreseen, the coming useful pre-eminence of esoteric and traditional studies, which will (instead) form the basis of a world-wide relative peace between various competing tribalisms. He did not grasp the extent to which Judaism would identify itself, not with the Judaism of a certain refined type of his day, but with the politically secularized elements of the modern global super-state.

Now, every collapse is different, but the particular shape of the collapse is given not just by the conditions that cause it, but by the quality of our response; men will go mad, or men will go rational, and that will seem like a kind of madness. And it is in this regard that the study of the coming collapse is important for this group, for it is only groups like this, I believe, that can form a remnant, and the purpose of a remnant is to conserve true faith and knowledge, and, when the moment comes, to rebuild the world, or more importantly, to rebuild their own neighborhoods. That moment, I believe, is fast upon us. It is the remnant that must lead the way, must exercise that rational madness which will allow us to rebuild—if not the world—then our communities, and these functioning communities must show the world the way to rebuild itself. Here my thesis is very simple: culture has been subordinated to the needs of commerce, a commerce that has exhibited some rather peculiar and even demonic needs. Now, at many times in the past, the merchant has moved culture, and this was not always a bad arrangement. Commerce sought to ennoble itself with culture, an arrangement that was often to their mutual benefit, as many of the monuments of Italy give testimony. The merchant, through his patronage of the arts and the Church, sought to lift up his fellow citizens, ennoble his city, and obtain honor for himself. But what is happening today is something quite different. Although something of the old spirit of patronage remains, in the main the vast engines of culture have been turned from uplifting the citizen to degrading him. Indeed, the whole point of the exercise is to turn each of us from being a citizen into being a a pure consumer; that is, from being a person who takes responsibility for himself, his family, and his community, into being a person whose self-respect is invested only in what he buys, and who is directed only by unregulated and easily manipulated passions. We are told that the economy is regulated by “self-interest,” but this is a lie. Indeed, it cannot be so, since self-interest is never something known in advance, but rather something discovered by experience. Who among us has not had the experience of getting exactly what we wanted only to find that it wasn’t what we wanted at all? And who has not feared the worst, only to find that it was all for the best? No, self-interest is revealed to us, not known in advance. What we can know—and what advertising appeals to—is our desires. Desire can be converted to self-interest only when guided by the intelligence to good ends and disciplined by the virtues to good means. Intelligence and virtue: these are the enemies of any good marketing program. Modern advertising appeals not to our virtues but to our vices. And it has at its beck and call an incredible and bewildering array of technologies capable of intruding into every corner of our lives and our souls. Marketing has displaced philosophy to become the preeminent integrative science of the modern age

John Medaille, Front Porch Republic

This is the same truth, articulated from a paleo-conservative point of view. Medaille here contemplates the necessary (thank God) death of the advertising culture as the formative element of the earth. Instead, local communities based on liturgy (as Cologero indicates) and using low-tech/high-tech means (even if the local community is a large city like Curitiba) will be the “nodes” of a future earth organization.

What is dying is the world of Descartes.