/lit/ - Literature

>>11097111
If this comforts you, the current state of Western spiritually is best described as bardo, the intermediate stage between death and rebirth. At some point in the near future, there's going to be a Second Religiousness where Faustian civilization, having exhausted even postmodernity, will attempt to return to the religion of its roots (best bets being either Traditional Catholicism or Western Rite Orthodoxy). Also concurrent to the Second Religiousness is Caesarism, where modern political institutions and ideologies are so corroded by late capitalism that they will simply be swept aside by a return to absolute rulership. Being the political counterpart to the Second Religiousness, the future Caesars will be keen to patronize the spiritual renewal (or ossification, depending on which side you take) of the West. Historical parallels would be the Roman Caesars with their Divus cults, the Han Dynasty institutionalizing ancestral rites under a Confucian framework, and the Seljuks sponsoring al-Ghazali and his reinvigoration of Sufism. Not to say that the process of involution has completely ceased overall, but history does a cycle of Tradition decaying and reasserting itself.