The Spirit(s) of Our Age
On historical forces and what is to be done
To look at history — which is to say to look at human lives and the things we do together — this way is not to be a fatalist nor a supernaturalist. It’s not that things are “out of our hands” or that some singular deity has preordained our collective suffering. It’s instead — as with the Tao — to understand what can truly be done and what is only wasted effort.
In other words, it’s to look for the cycles, to understand which spirits and which forces are sweeping across our lives, and to then act not against them but rather according to what’s best done in such times.
All life turns, and we turn with it, wheels within wheels spinning at different rates and towards different ends. Not like clockwork wound up by some divine intelligence, no. There is no great pattern, nothing pre-ordained, and we are hardly cogs.
Instead, we turn like leaves in wind as we reach towards the sun which moves through the sky on its own time. We grow and die in a cycle, while we shake and bend and sway to the cycles of heat and cold balancing each other out across the land.
The earth has its cycles, its seasons. Here, now, is the time of growing, the great warmth awakening great desire for life. And so it is easiest to grow, and to desire, and to build upon what comes from that growth and desire. Earlier, it was not so easy to grow and desire, and later it will not be easy, either. Before and after are other parts of the cycle, other turns of the wheels, but this part of the cycle is our now.
Lives and loves have their cycles as well. Times for desire to awaken, to increase, to settle, and to rest before the next awakening. These wheels turn, and we are happiest when we let ourselves turn with them. To try otherwise is to court misery, fatigue, and bitterness because the world and its cycles will never turn for us.
Tracing these circles is like tracing the Tao, knowing when effort matters and when effort is waste. Or like gardening, which is anyway how I’ve best come to understand these cycles and the Tao. Seeds have their time, and so does water, and planting, and harvest, and composting, and all of it again and again, each according to their times.
This wisdom, of which I am hardly a master but most certainly a student, still sometimes feels foreign, sometimes even wrong. Sometimes I feel like I should be doing something else, fighting against a current, planting in the off-season, or working out on a rest day. The more I trace these cycles, though, the more I understand why this happens. As if hosting a picnic during a winter storm, I start too often from what I think should be done rather than what wants to and can be done. Or, often enough, I miss a previous moment of a cycle and try to make up for lost time, forgetting that the wheel turns again and again.
It’s perhaps often seemed strange to people that I am both a Pagan and a Marxist. The apparent contradiction, of course, is between the belief in gods and spirits and the belief in historical forces, two perspectives that would seem obviously opposed to each other. Yet to my mind and to all knowledge of my body, they’re both frameworks describing the very same thing, and neither makes much sense without the other.
The place this is most obvious is when we try to speak about cycles as they apply to human societies. When a great and unstoppable change sweeps through a people or even a civilization, a Marxist would see “historical forces” at work which a Pagan might name as “spirits” or even “gods.”
It’s not nearly as bizarre as it might seem, since we already speak this way. That’s what a zeitgeist is, literally a “spirit” of an age or a time. And when we instead use psychological terms like “madness” or “hysteria” gripping a society or of mass “delusions,” we are speaking of symptoms that until only very recently were thought to have demonic or magical causes.
Forces sweep across and through societies like waves and like wind, and these are both likewise “material” forces with unseen agency. You cannot see the wind, only its effects, nor can you pick up and hold a wave in the sea. Yet they both exist, and they both cycle, swelling and ebbing and then swelling again.
To look at history — which is to say to look at human lives and the things we do together — this way is not to be a fatalist nor a supernaturalist. It’s not that things are “out of our hands” or that some singular deity has preordained our collective suffering. It’s instead — as with the Tao — to understand what can truly be done and what is only wasted effort.
In other words, it’s to look for the cycles, to understand which spirits and which forces are sweeping across our lives, and to then act not against them but rather according to what’s best done in such times.
And what, then, are the historical forces sweeping through our world now, and what is really best done now? Here, I absolutely agree with John Michael Greer’s account: we’re in a “long descent,” a slow but inevitable decline of industrial civilization. Not catastrophe but catabolism, a steady breaking-down of a previous order during which each calamity will feel apocalyptic but will in retrospect be understood only as a previous symptom:
What we can expect, though, is something far more terrifying to most people than the most lurid disaster a Hollywood screenwriter ever imagined: more of what we’ve already seen. The long, slow, unsteady descent that’s shaped all our lives for the last half century or more? That’s going to continue along the trajectory it’s already following, for the rest of your life, and into the lives of your grandchildren’s grandchildren.
In the light of that longer view, it doesn’t especially matter who’s in the White House, or for that matter who’s in the doghouse. It matters very little more which policies get put in place and which policies get chucked in the dumpster. There are still things that individuals, families, and communities can do to brace themselves for the future ahead, and some of those things are very important—we’ll get to them in future posts. None of these will affect the overall course of this nation or of industrial society as a whole. That train left the station long ago. Listen carefully and you can hear the distant whistle on the wind, fading to silence.
That’s the larger cycle, the greatest of the historical forces at work. It’s Saturn, the time of contraction and hard natural limits, or Ceridwen, the inevitability of death before transformation. It’s capitalism and the industrial society it created slowly imploding through the pressure of its cascading internal contradictions. And there’s no point in waiting around for it to complete itself, let alone trying to reverse it.
What’s best done in such a time are the things we’re our best when we do. What’s best done in such a time is to learn the other cycles, to understand the other forces, and to work alongside the other spirits. We’re our best when we labor —when we create and build and make beauty — as we choose. We’re our best when we dream, and live, and love, not for distant centers of power and glittering futures that cannot come to pass, but for each other and for ourselves.
Brief Updates:
Normally I’d have posted a new chapter of Other-Song this weekend, but if you’re really into fiction I’d like to instead direct your attention to this chapter from
’s fantastic just-released book, A Demonology of Desires.And speaking of publishing, all print and digital titles at Sul Books are 20% off for the month of May (use code MAY2025).
And speaking of sales, annual subscriptions for From The Forests of Arduinna are also 20% off.
The science of these cycles is called astrology. Surprisingly it suggests that we are heading at the moment toward not breakdown but breakthrough. Between November 2024 and July 2025, Pluto, Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter, and Uranus all change signs, an unprecedented cluster of planetary sign changes that indicates we are living through the most concentrated period of cultural change in our lifetimes. When these planets do change signs, they will form a very auspicious pattern known as a Minor Triangle, involving only harmonious aspects between them. This pattern will last for the next 3-4 years, and will undoubtedly bring a period of spectacular creativity and cultural dynamism. Yes the old and outdated systems will be unceremoniously destroyed, but we need to understand that process primarily as an expression of the power of the new era that's birthing.
I really love this piece, Rhyd. So lyrical and so perspicacious. Well done!
I'm working on a farm this summer, and though I have a couple decades experience with food and medicine growing, I still have moments of feeling totally out of my depth, or that what I'm doing might be wrong. (I mean, given that agriculture is the single biggest cause of habitat destruction, which in turn is the biggest cause of species extinction.)
I really appreciate all the elements you brought together here and especially like image of leaves blowing in the wind rather than cogs in a clockwork mechanism.