John David Ebert

Our discussion of Spengler's Second Religiousness will be on The Hypermodernity Podcast Episode 2 on this Sunday night with myself, Michael Aaron Kamins and Dom Romani. Stay tuned.

"finally, the whole world of the primitive religion, which had receded before the grand forms of the early faith, returns to the foreground, powerful, in the guise of the popular syncretism that is to be found in every Culture at this phase." -Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West

"The material of the Second Religiousness is simply that of the first, genuine, young religiousness--only otherwise experienced and expressed. It starts with Rationalism's fading out in helplessness, then the forms of the Springtime become visible"

In both phenomena the creative young strength of the Early Culture is lacking. But both have their greatness nevertheless. That of the Second Religiousness consists in a deep piety that fills the waking-consciousness and that of Caesarism in its unchained might of colossal facts.

"The Second Religiousness is the necessary counterpart of Caesarism, which is the final POLITICAL constitution of Late Civilizations; it becomes visible therefore in the Augustan Age of the Classical and about the time of Shi-wang-ti's time in China."

"This next phase I call the Second Religiousness. It appears in all Civilizations as soon as they have fully formed themselves as such and are beginning to pass, slowly and imperceptibly, into the non-historical state in which time-periods cease to mean anything."

"the soul of the Culture itself expresses this by putting into the field of the day ever smaller, narrower and more unfruitful investigators...To Eratosthenes and Archimedes succeed Posidonius and Pliny, collectors of taste, and finally Ptolemy and Galen, mere copyists."

"It constitutes the death of a science when no one any longer regards it as an event, and an orgy of two centuries of exact scientific-ness brings satiety."

"The individual renounces by laying aside books. The Culture renounces by ceasing to manifest itself in high scientific intellects."

"...from Skepsis, there is a path to 'second religiousness,' which is the sequel and not the preface of the Culture. Men dispense with proof, desire only to believe and not to dissect."

Spengler: "In this very century, I prophesy, the century of scientific-critical Alexandrianism, of the great harvests, of the final formulations, a new element of inwardness will arise to overthrow the will to victory of science."

Spengler: "The spell of a 'second religiousness' comes upon it, and Late Classical man turns to the practice of the cults of Mithras, of Isis, of the Sun--those very cults into which a soul just born in the East has been pouring a new wine of dreams and fears and loneliness."

"The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism."

Spengler on the Second Religiousness: “Materialism is shallow and honest, mock religion shallow and dishonest...the fact that the latter is possible at all foreshadows a new and genuine spirit of seeking that declares itself...in the civilized waking-consciousness.”

For "The Hypermodernity Podcast Episode 3" we will be having special guest Andrew McLuhan coming on to discuss his grandfather's legacy and his foundation of The McLuhan Institute.