Editorial: In Search of the Primeval Myth

Civilisation. Few words in the Western canon are more charged. Couple it with ‘high culture,’ and many a reader’s mind will jump to Oswald Spengler’s gloomy masterwork The Decline of the West (1918). The book struck postwar Europe like a thunderclap. With its trenches still warm and empires still smouldering, the Continent was primed for cultural pessimism. The heady days of pre-war optimism had soured into depression. The Roaring Twenties roared mostly in America—Europe barely managed a polite cough.

To this day, Spengler’s thesis is wheeled out whenever the West appears to be tottering. What’s often missed, though, is that Spengler didn’t predict Europe’s imminent demise. Rather, he foresaw an imperial twilight, a final, flamboyant flourish before cultural dusk—an endgame all high cultures, he claimed, eventually play.

Spengler’s readers tend to fall into two camps: the left, which dismisses him out of hand, and the right, which co-opts him as a rhetorical battering ram without grasping the implications of his grim cyclical theory. Few bother to read on past the foreboding title.

Spengler had company. In 1934, the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee began publishing A Study of History, another multi-volume meditation on civilisational life-cycles. Toynbee introduced the idea of ‘challenge and response’—that civilisations rise not from inevitability, but from pressure. Unlike Spengler’s fated metaphysics, Toynbee offered agency. But after the Second World War, cultural morphology—a school of thought that treated history as a recurring drama of birth, bloom and breakdown—fell out of fashion. The war had dampened the taste for decline. Or, as Spenglerians would sniff, the age of realism had ended.

Borkenau: The Lost Prophet

Born Pollack in Vienna to a Jewish Habsburg official, Borkenau began on the hard left. He was a star of the Communist student movement in Berlin, until Stalin cured him of that enthusiasm. A brief stint with the Frankfurt School ended in mutual disappointment. He fled Nazi Germany in 1933, landing in the intellectually fertile soil of France’s Annales school, alongside Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel. There, he found his métier: the deep, structural study of history.

While Spengler imagined cultures as sealed monads—windowless and self-contained—Borkenau saw cross-pollination. Civilisations, he argued, don’t arise from thin air. They feed off each other. He borrowed Toynbee’s idea of ‘affiliation,’ but with more nuance: influence, yes—but in symbiosis, not succession.

Where Borkenau truly broke ground, though, was in his focus not on the golden ages of high culture, but on the murky times between them—the ‘barbarian periods.’ These interludes are not productive, in the classical sense. They don't birth cathedrals or constitutions. But they are creatively destructive. They corrode old orders, break down ossified systems, and reduce them to base elements. From these ruins, a new cultural synthesis arises, usually organised around a single, powerful founding myth—a Urmythos.

In Borkenau’s reading, the Urmythos of Western civilisation emerges from the rubble of the Migration Period, tempered by political scheming and epic storytelling. The eventual result? A startling fusion of politics and metaphysics: the doctrine of transubstantiation, first formulated in the 9th century. That holy alchemy—bread into body, wine into blood—became the spiritual nucleus of Latin Christendom. The West had found its myth.

This matters. If one can locate the birth of a civilisation, one can also track its middle-age crises and senescence. For Borkenau, the Reformation was not a beginning but a rupture—what he called a ‘mid-crisis.’ If the zenith of Western civilisation came around 1500, as both Spengler and Borkenau imply, then the civilisational clock is ticking ever closer to midnight.

Twilight, Not Collapse

When did it end? Probably with the Second World War. Civilisations do not die with a bang. Rome didn’t vanish overnight; its aqueducts crumbled slowly, and its roads endured for centuries. Likewise, the West’s decline is not marked by lost GDP or shuttered factories, but by the evaporation of its spiritual centre.

The Reformation had already shaken the Church’s primacy. The Enlightenment and its revolutions dealt further blows to the old mythos. For a while, reason tried to fill the void. But as Borkenau might have noted, Enlightenment ideals make for flimsy altars. Only retired scholars and dentists still dream of a Western revival powered by Voltaire.

The real action is elsewhere: in climate guilt cults, Gaia-worshipping eco-mysticism, or Silicon Valley’s search for an AI deity. Each one a candidate Urmythos, each battling for supremacy in our barbarian interregnum.

Yet Borkenau left a door ajar. Perhaps the age of civilisational cycles is itself coming to an end. What comes after? He didn’t say. But he left us a clue. The richness of a culture, he argued, derives from the breadth and variety of its affiliations. The West must become once again a collector of fragments, a weaver of myths - not least of its own past!

The question is no longer whether the old world is ending. It is. The question is who will write the myth for what comes next.

Statement

The West is no longer in decline—it is in between myths. Its spiritual core hollowed out, its old narratives shattered by reformations, revolutions, and reason, what remains is a cultural twilight: not collapse, but corrosion. Once, a doctrine like transubstantiation could fuse politics and metaphysics into a civilisational spine. Today, contenders for a new founding myth abound—from climate sanctity to AI divinity—but none yet cohere. History teaches that out of such barbarian interludes, something new emerges. Whether this next synthesis deepens human meaning or reduces it to algorithmic faith will define not just a civilisation, but the age to follow.

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