In all places and at all times it has been agreed that the direction of history is always “downward”, from the Golden Age, or Garden of Eden to the Iron Age or Latter Days. The religions, philosophies and traditions of the world are unanimous in seeing not a pattern of progress, but of decline and degeneration.

If they are correct, then it follows from what we know about the matriarchal origins of civilisation that the highest and noblest and most spiritual forms of culture must have been those primordial feminine ones, while masculine-dominated civilisations must have come into being as quite a late phase of the process of decline.

This view of history, is, of course, completely alien to that of the late-patriarchal world-view with which we have all been inculcated from the earliest age, and which places late-patriarchy itself at the pinnacle of a long process of ‘human progress’, relegating earlier civilisations to varying degrees of ‘ignorance’ and ‘barbarism’.

Nevertheless, when one looks at the facts pertaining to the very medium of our thought itself—language, it is hard to deny that superior intellectuality lies with the past rather than the present. Every language we know is a debased and simplified “scaling-down” of some earlier language. The modern Romance languages, for example (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Roumanian) are greatly simplified dialects of Latin. Many of the grammatical complexities have slipped away with time, leaving the language less expressive, less flexible, less capable of dealing with subtle ideas, but very much easier. Latin and Greek are a maze of case-endings for modern speakers, but as we go back further in time, to even earlier languages in the same Indo-European family, such as Sanskrit, we find language which makes Latin and Greek seem positively childish by comparison.

And wherever a language or group of languages can be historically studied, we find the same thing. The ancient forms of language require more concentration, more presence of mind, more sheer intelligence on the part of speakers than do the later forms. Language is clearly being progressively simplified for a simpler people.

These changes, as we might expect, also alter the character of language. It becomes less and less an instrument for expressing subtle spiritual and metaphysical concepts and fine shades of meaning, but it becomes increasingly well adapted to handling physical phenomena and the material world.

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From Satya Yuga to Kali Yuga: The True Pattern of History