Secret_History

530 The Secret History of the World
and, frighteningly, in the present day regression into fundamentalism in America
and Israel. It is also a fundamental concept of the many secret societies currently
promoting Egyptian mysticism and the return of the Egyptian Gods and the Divine
Theocracy.
An important question now is: how does free will enter in here?
It seems, on the surface, that modern man has affirmed his “autonomy” by
rejecting concepts of periodicity and cycles and archetypes. The modern
“historical man” or Christian, views archaic man’s view of history as endlessly
repeating archetypal gestures as a symptom of a fear of movement and spontaneity
- or having no free will or courage.
On the other hand, the more modern and “mechanistic” man becomes, the less able
he is to “make” history himself. As a “cog” in a vast, mechanized society, history is
made by an increasingly small number of men who not only prohibit the mass of
their contemporaries from directly or indirectly intervening in the history they are
making, but in addition, have at their disposal means sufficient to force each
individual to endure, for his own part, the consequences of this history, that is, to
live immediately and continuously in dread of history. Modern man’s boasted
freedom to make history is illusory for nearly the whole of the human race. At
most, man is left free to choose between two positions:
(1) to oppose the history that is being made by the very small minority (and, in this
case, he is free to choose between suicide and deportation);
(2) to take refuge in a subhuman existence or flight.
Marxism and Fascism must lead to the establishment of two types of historical
existence: that of the leader (the only really “free” man) and that of the followers,
who find, in the historical existence of the leader, not an archetype of their own
existence, but the lawgiver of the gestures that are provisionally permitted to
them. 376
Thus, modern man in his linear time, is neither free nor a creator of history.
And worse, he is trapped in this horror house with a prophesied end to it all
looming on the horizon, with all the guilt of endless millennia of human suffering
on his shoulders!
So we see that, even if only in a certain psychological sense, the ancients, in
their cyclical existence, were free! They were free to annul their history, to abolish
time, to regenerate themselves - even if only symbolically. And, in the very most
ancient times, perhaps they were free to do this literally. And, if not this time,
another time! No eternal blame, no arbitrary guilt, no everlasting Hell-fire and
damnation. The King is dead; long live the King.
376 Ibid., pp. 156-157.