An age of dissolution

This book sets out to study some of the ways in which the present age appears essentially as an age of dissolution. At the same time, it addresses the question of what kind of conduct and what form of existence are appropriate under the circumstances for a particular human type.

This restriction must be kept in mind. What I am about to say does not concern the ordinary man of our day. On the contrary, I have in mind the man who finds himself involved in today’s world, even at its most problematic and paroxysmal points; yet he does not belong inwardly to such a world, nor will he give in to it. He feels himself, in essence, as belonging to a different race from that of the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries.

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In the classical world, it was presented in terms of humanity’s progressive descent from the Golden Age to what Hesiod called the Iron Age. In the corresponding Hindu teaching, the final age is called the Kali Yuga (Dark Age). Its essential quality is emphatically said to be a climate of dissolution, in which all the forces—individual and collective, material, psychic, and spiritual—that were previously held in check by a higher law and by influences of a superior order pass into a state of freedom and chaos. The texts of Tantra have a striking image for this situation, saying that it is the time when Kali is “wide awake.” Kali is a female divinity symbolizing the elementary, primordial forces of the world and of life, but in her “lower” aspects she is also presented as a goddess of sex and orgiastic rites. In previous ages she was “sleeping,” that is, latent in the latter aspects, but in the Dark Age she is said to be completely awake and active. Everything points to the fact that exactly this situation has been reached in recent times, having for its epicenter the civilization and society of the West, from which it has rapidly spread over the whole planet.

Julius Evola
Ride the Tiger