THE GREAT MYTH. FAUSTIAN, CLASSICAL, MAGIAN NUMINA

Scientists are wont to assume that myths and God-ideas are creations of primitive Man, and that as spiritual culture "advances,"this myth forming power is shed. In reality it is the exact opposite, and had not the morphology of history remained to this day an unexplored field, the supposedly universal mythopoetic powers would long ago have been found to be limited to particular periods.

THE PRESS

Now whereas the Classical, and supremely the Forum of Rome, drew the mass of the people together as a visible body in order to compel it to make that use of its rights which was desired of it, the contemporary" English-American politics have created through the press a force-field of world-wide intellectual and financial tensions, in which every individual unconsciously takes up the place alloted to him,so that he must think ,will and act as a ruling personality somewhere or other In the fit. This is dynamics against statics, Faustian against apollian world-feeling, the passion of the third dimension against the pure sensible present. Man does not speak to man:the press and its associate, the electrical news-service,keep the waking- consciousness of whole peoples and continents drum-fire of theses, catchwords, standpoints, day by day and year by year, so that every Ego becomes a mere function of a monstrous intellectual Something.money does not pass, politically, from one band to the other. It does not turn itself into cards and wine. It is turned into force,and its quantity determines the intensity of its working influence.

Gunpowder and printing belong together-both discovered at the culmination of the Gothic, both arising out of Germanic technical thought-as the two grand means of Faustian distance tactics. The Reformation in the beginning of the late period witnessed the first flysheets and the first field guns,theFrench Revolution in the beginning of the Civilization witnessed the first tempest of pamphlets in the autumn of 1788 and the first mass fire of artillery at Valmy. But with this the printed word produced in vast quantity and distributed over enormous areas, came an uncanny weapon in the hands of him who knew how to use it. In France it was still in 1788 a matter of expressing private convictions, but England was already deliberately seeking to produce impressions on the reader.The war of articles, flysheets, spurious memoirs, from London on French soil against Napoleon is the first great example.

Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inwatd detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has accomplished its task so well that the objectssense of freedom is actually flattered by the most the thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.

What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears. A forlorn little drop may settle somewhere and collect grounds on which to determine -"the truth"-but what it Obtains is just its truth. The other, the public truth of the moment, which alone matters for effects and successes in the fact-world ,is today a product of the Press. What the Press wills,is true.Its commanders evoke, transform, interchange truths.

Three weeks of press-work, and the "truth" is acknowledged by everybody.

With the political press is bound up the need of universal school education, which in the Classical world was completely lacking .1n this demand there is an element-quite unconscious ,of desiring to shepherd the masses, as the object of party politics,into the newspaper’s power-area. The idealist of the early democracy regarded popular education, without arriere pensee, as enlightenment pure and simple, and even today one finds here weak heads that become enthusiastic on the Freedom of the press-but it is precisely this that smooths the path for the coming Caesars of the world-press. Those who have

learnt to read succumb to their power, and the visionary self determination of Late democracy becomes a thorough-going determination of the people by the powers whom the printed word obeys.

No tamer has his animals more under his power. Unleash the people as reader-mass and it will storm through the streets, and hurl itself upon the target indicated, terrifying and breaking windows.A hint to the press-staff and it will become quiet and go home.

The Press today is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers .But here as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly,and war aims , and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling charicature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot:his will to think is only a willingness to think to order,and this is what he feels as his liberty.

Democracy

This is the end of Democracy. If in the world of truths it is proof that decides all, in that of facts it is sueccess.Success means that one being triumphs over the others. Life has won through and the dreams of the world improvers have turned out to be but the tools of master-natures. In the late democracy race bursts forth and either makes ideals its slaves or throws scornfully into the pit. It was so, too, in Egypt, Rome, in China-but in no other Civilization has the will-to- power manifested itself in so inexorable a form as in this of ours. The thought, and conseqquently the action, of the mass are kept under iron pressure-for which reason, and only, men are permitted to be readers and voters-this is,in a dual slavery-while the parties become the obedient retinue of a few, and the shadow of coming Caesarism already touches them.

Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer,after money has destroyed intellect. But, just because the illusion that actuality can allow itself to be improved by the ideas of any zeno or Marx: has fled away; because men have learned that in the realm of reality one power-will can be overthrown only by another (for that is the great human experience of the contending States periods); there wakes at last a deep yearning for all old and worthy tradition that still lingers alive.Men are tired to disgust of money-economy. They hope for salvation from somewhere or other, for some true ideal of honour and chivalry, inward nobility, of unselfishness and duty. And now dawns the time when the form-filled powers of the blood which the rationalism of the Megalopolls has suppressed,reawaken in the depths.