The forms of historicism include the myths of eons and epochs. Our data leads us through this terrain, yet gives us a handle on the mythological confusions. We live in an age when the millennial calendar of eschatological Christianity, a very ancient cousin of the idea of a New Age, suggests an illusory finish to our affairs that might distract from the practical efforts demanded by problems that have no miraculous solutions. Behind the idea of the last age lies the idea of a ‘new age’, and the endless echoes of antique notions of epochs, ages of man, and great cycles of nature. Ideas of a ‘new age’ braided with that of an ‘eschaton’ and its strange futures are clearly evident in the thinking of the New Testament.

For the onset of the New Age, if this has any meaning, has already come and gone as far as historical Grand Dramatics is concerned. Beyond the issues of the greater future on a scale of millennia, our ‘new age’ crisis might be very real on a scale of mere centuries: a loss of momentum or postmodern chaotification in the unfolding of a new phase of ‘civilization’ from its roots in the period of the earliest modernity. Our moment, that one might wish to move ‘toward a new enlightenment’, instead moves quickly ‘toward a new age movement’. A further confusion lies in the idea of decline, near ideas of the rise and fall of civilization, such as those advocated by Spengler and Toynbee. These views cleverly find the Enlightenment the onset of the fallen man’s last hurrah, in some hellish finish of ‘western’ civilization. But secular thought lays the best claim to the ‘new age’.[i]

The confusions of eschatology, new ages, last ages, and cyclical views of history are chronic, and in the recent versions, come with an anti-modern ideological twist. The eonic effect produces a useful commentary on the issue. We should note that the term ‘eonic’ was made a synonym for ‘intermittent’, and invokes a systems analysis metaphor (e.g. digital samplers), but also obviously puns on the word ‘eon’, and this is both an afterthought, and a means of seeing why myths of ‘New Ages’ are endemic to history for a reason the eonic effect makes clear. Our ‘eonic sequence’, will elicit the confusion over myths of the Great Year, and hopefully displace that with something else.

The great shockwave of modernism is the onset of a great new period of history and joins the short list of two previous such transitions, the great force of the first civilizations, and the second great wave of change that gave birth to the classical world. One and the same pattern of geographical differentiation followed by ‘globalizing’ integration is clearly at work, with, however, a rising expansion of scale in each case. The resemblance of the modernist transformation to these early cousins completes the list of three ‘new ages’. Is any of this important? Our eonic pattern moves through this territory, and it is good to be wary of merely recycling archetypes. Our approach is different, purely empirical. The New Age obsession is much ridiculed, but contains a valid impulse. An age of spiritual democracy is clearly coming into existence amidst considerable confusion. Further, the ‘new age’ idea is an outstanding challenge to the legacy of the great religions now challenged to a great renewal.

The issue of the New Age is simple. Everyone is observing fragments of the eonic effect, without seeing the whole pattern, which is ‘evolutionary’ in our sense. This has nothing to do with current New Age ideas of ‘evolution’ as personal transformation. The eonic effect grants no foundational status to the idea of a new age, but solves the problem at once on a de facto basis by suggesting the mistake of periodization in most efforts to periodize New Ages. The quest for the Age of Aquarius was silly, as is the postmodern attempt to undermine the rise of the modern with a ‘New Age’. There is even a new myth of the ‘Second Axial Age’ appearing. The myths of the ‘New Age’ spring from the lore of the Great Year, a total red herring, whose astrological periodization of the precession of the equinoxes is too short and throws everything else our of whack, leaving the field in total confusion. The mystery of historical cycles has always haunted civilization, for reasons that we will see. It is time to lay the issue to rest. It is hopeless question, but we can take a chance and use our eonic model to attempt some clarification.

One reason for the importance of the idea of a New Age is that the periodic renewal of religious formations, correctly anticipated by many New Agers and Eastern thinkers, is a force to be reckoned with and can have devastating impact on received religions. It is probably the case that the religions generated in the wake of the Axial period will slowly pass away, or be transformed into something else. The effect is very clear from the Axial period itself, which pressed against the remains of still earlier religions, and we can see the issue clearly in the modern world where all the old religions are clearly falling to pieces. The place of the better idea of evolution here is obvious, although Darwinism,  due to its reductionist account of man has, if anything, miscast the tone of secularization which was proceeding in more intelligent fashion before the false metaphysics of selectionist theories gave religious reaction a fresh impetus. Consider that preeminent New Ager, Spinoza, giving birth promptly in the early modern to Biblical Criticism. Also, please note, the Protestant Reformation, in the mainline of our eonic sequence recycles a Christian stream. We should therefore be wary of any predictions.

The mysterious discontinuity of the sixteenth century, and the onset of the modern in the nineteenth are a de facto resolution of the Great Expectation predicted, but whose secular character was not wished for. That the early champions of revolution  and change, during the French Revolution, saw fit to periodize a New Age in the ‘revolution’ of time by attempting to invent a new calendar of the Year Zero is altogether apt, and not quite as ridiculous as the swift reactions of conservatives were soon to make that seem.

Thus, the rise of the modern world has often been seen as the beginning of a New Age, Novus Ordo Seclorum. But this falls out of sync with the periodization of the Great Year. We can breathe a sigh of relief, determining the onset of the Aquarian age is superfluous. But a host of ‘New Age’ gurus, plying the ‘standard postmodern strategy’ pioneered by Spengler, find the rise of the modern to be an aberration, and the situation to require their ministrations, please forget the many achievements of human liberty attending the old New Age. The new New Age requires the sacrifice of human autonomy, in the name of spiritual guidance. We are presented with the Old Age movement, in a flood of cults promoting archaic confusions.

The condemnation in spiritual terms of the new age of the modern with its revolutionary struggle for freedom is currently being amplified by the postmodern strategies of forces of reaction. In a strange irony, the West was the last place on the planet not subject to the concealed domination of spiritual or ‘esoteric’ mystifications. It has produced in short order the groundwork for a new disposition of the true spiritual man, able to inherit his autonomy as the natural freedom of his own self-consciousness. We are still living in the future of this moment of this transition to a new era of world history, symbolically climaxing in the generation of the French Revolution, in the sense that our current culture came into existence very swiftly in the century from 1750 to 1850. This greater significance of the Revolutionary period was clearly in the mind of the philosopher Hegel who, ideas of the ‘end of history’ apart, was inspired both to the early enthusiasm for and the reactionary rejection of this event in its excesses, as one of its most notable observers.

As Hegel notes in his Phenomenology of Spirit, written on the eve of Napoleon’s approach to Jena, as the supposed (hubristic) World Spirit on horseback:

Our epoch is a birth time, a period of transition. The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things, and with old ways of thinking. The spirit of the times, growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates one piece after another of the structure of the previous world. That it is tottering to its fall is now indicated only by symptoms here and there...but something else is approaching. This gradual crumbling to pieces will be interrupted by the sunrise, which in a flash and at a single stroke, brings to view the form and structure of the new world.

Hegel is useful in one way for he restates a classic mystical theme of the ancients, but slips in the idea of freedom . The guru game will never be the same, and the current New Age conspiracies against human autonomy using the postmodern strategy should soon play themselves out. Hegel, of course, is sometimes well challenged for his version of the Freedom idea. Indeed, is he not a sly version from the same game? His concealed occult roots should leave us wondering. But the point is clear. Failing Hegel, the pack of left Hegelians, New Agers in the vein of Feuerbach, rewrote the terms of the New Age rather well, although Marxist ‘materialism’ is too constricted to handle these issues. The terms are set, the ‘class struggle’ is very much present at the core of religion. The Enlightenment theme of autonomy creates quiet alarm in the spiritual authorities of antiquity. And why would that be so? The dark rumors of the occult fascism pass through the New Age underground.

In the end, there is no theoretical basis for the New Age concept as such in the eonic effect with its crude stages of self-organization, but the battle of the ancients and moderns takes its place, and now takes new forms so visible in the ‘old and new’ of the vigorous movements styled ‘New Age’. But the new age of the modern is real enough, and connects to historical dynamics. The postmodern swindles of the gurus attempting to displace modernity with their own ‘New Age’ should hopefully prove transparent, and proof they have little grasp of history.

New Age Movements The generation of the sixties and seventies in the West with its plethora of New Age movements rising from the multicultural compression of the emerging world culture, in a proliferation of spiritual groups whose radical therapeutic fringe mixed with an easternizing, semi-Theosophical character, proceeds by such a swift and grim law from the language of spiritual renewal to the commercialization of astrology, pseudo-yoga and channeling that one must wonder what happened. The question of world religion is crucial to our subject, but it is hard for standard historiography to get to the bottom of it, impossible in an age of Darwinism, and the history of India is especially interesting and difficult in this respect. Our discovery of the Shiva seal puts the whole question to the fore, and we have fulfilled our task, to a first approximation, by placing these issues in some relation to real historical evolution.

Shiva Seal: Yoga and Tantra The Indic tradition, witness the Shiva seal, is an elusive play on what is really the twin legacy of yoga and tantra, one tradition, the latter no doubt the evolutionary source of the former, in a fashion lost to us. The degenerations of tantra veil the obvious path to the discovery of yoga.[ii]

It is not our business to pass judgment on these movements, which constitute part of our eonic history, and which show a thriving realization (attempted) of spiritual democracy, but the amount of sheer drivel produced is enough to completely paralyze the ‘spiritual paths’ of anyone who ventures here. It should be noted that the world historical significance of Indian religion is reflected in its entry into late modernism, just at our divide, as if to squeeze in on time, and its evaluation an important task of contemporary culture. Note that our eonic sequence never repeats itself, and the Indic stream bids fair to be cheated out of a future transition. But we see the reverse diffusion effect in the spread of modern technology and the Indic tradition starts to flood into modernity almost exactly at the modern divide. We can’t play favorites with our term ‘eonic determination’, but we can see that these traditions from the Axial Age are not going to get renewed treatment from our eonic mainline, which has already completed its business by the time of the divide. Or so our model suggests.

This helps explain the strange dilemma of the New Age movements we see. In any case a last phase of the Reformation seems to be the case, as the modern pluralistic omnibus picks up all passengers. Note how the seemingly oddball Reformation does in fact show the factor of eonic determination and climaxes near the divide with the birth of such ideas as ‘rational theology’, as seen in Kant, or Hegel. Hegel was very clear on this point, that German philosophy was the endcap of the Reformation. And it is no accident that it tries to lift itself up by its bootstraps to ‘beat the competition’ by disgorging a sort of wild flower Upanishadic rabbit from the hat. But the result can’t really compete with the Indic strain, at least at first sight. But if we study the Kantian Dialectic carefully we see that the religions of antiquity fall into place around the antinomies of self, soul, divinity, with the idea of freedom appearing in concert. We have the clue. A great new ‘Freedom Sutra’ is struggling to be born, to integrate all the religions crowding for space in modernity.

That early entry of Indic religion, before the stampede of gurus, began with the generation of the Romantics, and figures such as Schlegel. And the critique from this perspective of the monotheistic traditions is also a significant liberation for the mass hypnosis macro-cults that haunt the Western tradition. But its legacy should be its own self-liberation into an age of spiritual democracy. In fact, despite his disavowals, the figure Schopenhauer is proof these issues were built into modernism at its foundations, so we need not apologize for introducing them. The West has its own confused and concealed Hermetic traditions, but little profit to the public comes from them, it would seem.

Beyond that the New Age shows one irony, that none of the great religions of antiquity are likely to survive in their current form. And yet Hinduism probably gestates in the Neolithic, so we should not predict. A host of gurus have said as much, and the point is hardly controversial. Beside the great religions, the great yogas, and their Sufi variants, are not always benign vehicles. Nor is the classic ashram adapted to needs of modern man. The clear evidence of Christian totalitarianism in the legacy of Constantine suppressing Gnostic cults was not benign either. The endless efforts to repackage antiquity go on and on, to no avail.

The modern Enlightenment is suddenly undervalued now, but its final task will be to rewrite the archaic sutras in a critical vein, a task not easily accomplished, and barely to be hoped for. The Enlightenment  chord of Reason in history is taken as some degenerate vice by some, but was already visible in the streamlining of the ancient tradition in the great Gautama. We should certainly be open to a postmodern or yogic critique of reason, but too many, who could use a good scientific education, have wrecked a great thematic of history in the name of mystical idiocy. It is a false quarrel. Reason is the common carrier of historical man. Study the theology Luther was forced to deal with before renouncing the theme of Reason in History. If it can outperform, in the long run, the mystical confusions of self-styled prophets and sages, and it can, then it claims history, leaving the Buddhas to exit history, as wished.

The Enlightenment has been underrated by self-appointed wizards, but will sooner or later show a resurgent effort to evaluate this heritage of antiquity, whose decayed forms are proliferating at a rapid rate. Beside Hegel, a perfect example is the brilliant, if imperfect, formulation of Schopenhauer who automatically proceeds to resurrect these ancient questions (which are obviously latent in Kant). But these men were doing something quite different. Modernity has done its business by staging pluralism, and there these rival stains prosper as never before. What is the objection to modernity?

The problem is that horizontal history rarely produces a viable spiritual movement, and we notice the way the intersection of the ancient Indian stream with the Axial phase suddenly produces such a world religion. Let us note that the original Buddhism does not resemble anything by that name now, a good example being its rejection of vegetarianism.

The authority of gurus is bogus. Due to a false mystique of pre-democratic ages, they have become an obstacle to development. There is no cosmic involution of spiritual men. Instead we see the bottom up bootstrap of autonomous freethinking men realizing their mysterious and latent evolutionary psychology. The point is clearer from something like the early Jain, or early Buddhist, traditions.

In any case, we can also see that this ferment of New Age religion is a delayed aspect of modernism and global diffusion. Note from our later model the fact that it occurs late in this rise and has no special status overriding modernist foundations. This is not the new Axial Age, nor are we likely to see a replication of the period creating a world religion like Buddhism or Christianity. It is thus worth noting again that the only period of Indian religion intersecting with our eonic effect is that of the Axial period, and the result was the creative ferment that gave birth to traditions such as the Buddhist, traditions as rich as that seen in the world of the parallel Greeks.

The Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns recommences in a different form, and a global Reformation  moves to interact with the full scope and antiquity of the religion s of classical period. That New Age movements have had their opportunity to surpass modernity, yet are unable to do so, can be seen from the confusion created by Theosophy. And yet this movement contained a valid protest against the completely false view of man coming into existence in an age of positivism and Darwinism.

Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon The modern secularist has only himself to blame for attempting to foist a ‘soul-less’ post-Cartesian positivism on the globalizing universal culture. The counterattack was swift, even as Huxley was debating Wilberforce, the Indian world starts launching a series of torpedoes to reset the balance. Darwinism was and is a standing joke in many minds.

But is Theosophy any better than Darwinism? The rapid appearance of a new metaphysics of ‘spiritual evolution’ in Blavatsky’s wake has produced still another field of confusion. But behind the carnival of Blavatsky’s ‘rubbish heap’ lay a serious effort to remind Westerners that the man in the Shiva seal existed before the rise of civilization, and that the deeper evolutionary psychology of man is hard pressed to survive into a scientific age. Such issues as reincarnation , condemned as crackpot by Scientific Committees investigating the occult, are certainly not the simple one scientific psychology pretends it to be, and the ancient legacy is soon resurgent. The real and deeper issue is human autonomy and the threat to this in the realms of spiritual domination so strangely embraced by the Theosophical obsession with Himalayan masters. Never let the phantoms of the ‘Himalayan Masters’ control your unconscious.[iii]

The New Age movement is thus likely to be the vehicle for conservative mystifications and restorations of the worst kind of false postmodernist traditionalism, including the regime of the imitation Hindu-style guru, to a receptive public eager for mysticism and unaware of the hegemonic nature of Brahmanism and the history of the Indian religion  between Buddha and Shankara. This world is beautiful in itself, in spite of its historical shadows, and it is unfair to denounce as ‘gurus’ the modern crop of hucksters trotting down the road with this label.

Nonetheless, this recent movement, frequently excoriated, is of historical interest in its own right, and one whose issues and history deserve their own telling, beginning, not in the seventies, not in the nineteenth century, but in the wake of the first phase of global interaction, and the fascination of the philosophes with the arriving data of other cultures, such as the traditions of China. The first achievement of modern culture is a pluralism that can yield a field of renewal to the manifold sources of antique spiritualities to find stowaway passage in modernity, near a technocratic Lord Jim.

The ‘self’ of man is a mystery not easily understood, and the recorded testimony of complex states of consciousness, however confused, makes Darwinism a dead letter, with its complete absence of any definition of what an organism such as man might be. There are no simple answers here and the Indian tradition promptly equivocates the nature of self/no-self.

A Challenge to Guruism The New Age movement is neglected by modern thought, and these remarks are not a rejection of the so-called New Age movement, as such. In fact, we have potentially built into our thesis the great issues of Indian religion. But if we do so we need to sound a warning that we are not in the endorsement business for the many deceptions that pass under the name of esoteric spirituality. It is important to remember that these movements have none of the factor of macro-action we see in the Axial Age. That’s a fact of life, and a warning to false hopes the next guru will ever match, viz. the emergence of Buddhism.

A good starting point is Kant’s classic essay, What is Enlightenment? The issue of autonomy is an apparent threat to the legacy of guruism, and the time has come to challenge the spiritual authority of these ancient traditions. No mention of the guru is made in the Buddhist Eightfold Way. The manufacture of proxy fascist agents in downfield reincarnation sequences with the unwitting trust of ‘disciples’ is the end of the line for the legacy of naïve guruism.

Wolves in sheep’s clothing. The figure ‘Jesus’ gave a sound warning. The New Age collapse of Sufistic and Buddhist traditions (to say nothing of the Christian) is already showing the proliferation of freelancers and spiritual capitalists and degenerate cannibals armed with occult means of exploitation. Occult fascists put democratic politicians at risk. The modern transition with its emphasis on freedom and autonomy should, but won’t, put these operators out of business. The modern liberal is a perfectly good exemplar of ‘Santanadharma’, with a Kantian angle on transcendental freedom, historically mindful of the spiritual slavery peddled as dharma by the reactionary Neo-Brahmins and their massacre of the Buddhists.

We should inject a caution against an emerging false, or misleading, view of evolution taken as ‘spiritual self-evolution’. It is not evolution to do yoga exercises, unless you define it that way, in which case you should not confuse it with general evolution. Noone, not even Gautama Buddha can operate on the level of the eonic evolution we see in history. These people are not evolutionary guides for mankind in the sense of macro-evolution. The propaganda of gurus is in a state of rapid diffusion, and many wild claims are made to buttress an authoritarianism inappropriate to the real development of human autonomy. The question is simple. If we examine the relation of religion to the eonic mainline we can see that evolution in our sense far outstrips any of the cultural initiatives of Buddha figures. Claims related to this of the ‘Sufi guides’ behind the evolution of man are false, and misleading. We can see the scale of the eonic sequence is so awesome in its effects as to sweep up the religions of entire continents in a greater pattern. The sad truth is that these authoritarian traditions show the same drift and deviation as every other, and could as well profit from the challenges of the Enlightenment to recast their foundations. It is hard to think of a better foundation for a truly informed modern ‘spiritual path’, based on the individual’s autonomy, and receptive to the classic findings of ancient sutras (subjected to some historical sandblasting). The eonic sequence shows us that evolution in our sense is on scale far greater than any initiative of religion.

Looking at the legacy of Buddhas and gurus we notice a highly embarrassing fact. They cannot resolve their own history, its ideologies, or even its data, let alone detect evolution. The many attempts to speak of ‘spiritual evolution’, sometimes with involutionary myths, have muddled the issue of both the classic sutras, and modern empirical evolutionism.

The endless guru wars between the Buddhists and Neo-Brahmanism are forgotten. The latter was the enforcer of last resort of the spurious law of caste and has never repented of this even as it spreads globally. The realm of the guru has an immense propaganda, but it belongs to another age, and is a dangerous game that will turn the disciple into a Faust with a Mephisto problem. Be wary! The issue is that there is a critical point of danger in the release of the ‘sovereignty of your own will’, which you alone can fritter away. There is absolutely no spiritual law of spiritual guru authority.

The point should be stated then that there are absolutely no spiritual authorities anywhere to which anyone is required to submit. The gurus, Buddhas, Sufis, popes, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, are not spiritual authorities. Their conspiracy to undermine the legacy of the Enlightenment and generate propaganda against human autonomy stretches all the way to fascist anti-modernism. Enlightened men often perform poorly on cultural issues, and have a poor understanding of history. The long string of hopeless idiots with this label in the recent New Age movement suggests an essential caution: the term can only be verified by individuals after making their own efforts. There is no public standard definition of the term. Rarely does the field get lucky with someone like Gautama (and significantly this occurred in the Axial period). Acquire a stash of bootleg sutras and be off. You are alone here, completely. And that is unfortunate, but it so. That’s the way it started, bootstrap from ground zero. Look at the ferment of philosophers and yogis in the period before Buddha, Axial India (about which we know too little). The shadowy gurus come later. And Buddhism is already quite late.

The always unstated problem is that of captive agency, or agency invultuation. One must always be suspicious of what happened with Wagner, Nietzsche coming to in puzzlement. Something terrible was afoot at the end of the nineteenth century. Rumors abound. Declare yourself a ‘null occultist’ to figure through the dangerous possibilities, and never be tempted. The most shining Buddha is no more than Mephistopheles to you. Behind too many spiritual fronts lies a predatory world of the esoteric mafias, ‘Sufi’ hyenas of the will. In the West as Christianity passes with its minimal protection a dangerous realm flows into the void. It is significant the Christ figure warned of it. It is a serious problem with no public resolution.

The world of modern science leaves the typical Westerner ill-equipped to confront or resist the devastating tactics applied without warning by the practitioners of exotic hypnosis known to agents in these traditions. Never trust or join an organization you suspect is a front in the cancerated traditions of the exoteric and esoteric division. The case of Sufism is especially devious in this respect. The legacy of Theosophy is revealing here, yet it is a promoter of the very problem of passive spirituality and cultic dependency that are the opposite of any true search for enlightenment. Dark rumors, or slanders, of fascist Buddhism begin to undermine the whole basis of trust in the spiritual fronts of these antiquated and corrupt religions. Noone can exploit your sovereign will unless you yourself consent.