Did McLuhan Get It Backwards?

A brief foray into kooky woo-woo theories about the stages of man

Artwork from a folio of a Janamsakhi manuscript depicting Kaljug (Kali Yuga) in the presence of Guru Nanak stating that he will bind the people in the vices of lust and gluttony whilst holding an erect penis

I. McLuhan vs. Eliade and the Perennial Traditionalists

Marshall McLuhan generally wasn’t the kind of guy to talk shit on people, with two major exceptions: one was Northfrop Frye, with whom he initiated a longstanding feud, which became the subject of an entire monograph. The other was Mircea Eliade, to whom McLuhan directed his caustic words in probably his most important book, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). Not only does he dismiss Eliade’s ideas, but he treats them as a foil for his own argument:

Eliade is under a gross illusion in supposing that modern man "finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies." Modern man, since the electro-magnetic discoveries of more than a century ago, is investing himself with all the dimensions of archaic man plus. The art and scholarship of the past century and more have become a monotonous crescendo of archaic primitivism. Eliade's own work is an extreme popularization of such art and scholarship. But that is not to say that he is factually wrong. Certainly he is right in saying that "the wholly desacralized cosmos is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit." In fact, the discovery results from the phonetic alphabet and the acceptance of its consequences, especially since Gutenberg. But I question the quality of insight that causes a human voice to quaver and resonate with hebdomadal vehemence when citing the "history of the human spirit."

The later section of this book will accept the role declined by Eliade when he says: "It does not devolve upon us to show by what historical processes … modern man has desacralized his world and assumed a profane existence." To show by exactly what historical process this was done is the theme of The Gutenberg Galaxy.

At the time Eliade wrote The Sacred and the Profane (1957), he was hoping for a re-sacralization of the cosmos; a second religiosity that would meet his criteria for what a true religion must be. McLuhan was singling out Eliade, but his real target was what Eliade represented. As one blogger put it earlier this year (all spelling errors are his),

McLuhan’s media theory is a demystification of what might variously called mysticism or occultism or, in a very, very ideosyncretic sense of the term, “gnosticism.” It’s what Mircea Elliade talks about as religion, which is why in Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan rags on Elliade so hard: mere psychological processes, which are conditioned by environmental factors, aren’t ‘religious.’ They can be explained in material terms.

Eliade posited that prior to the advent of monotheism, there was a deeply felt religious sensibility that everyone held, and much of his work was devoted to describing its characteristics. Modernity, he further held, was lacking in this religious sentiment that he hoped to reinvigorate. Then the beats and hippies came along and got all worked up, and they looked to him as an inspiration because they really wanted to make this re-sacralization of the cosmos happen. McLuhan, being a devout Catholic, was responding to that whole situation.

But the problem with singling out one guy as the representative of a widespread feeling is that one guy is just one guy. And Eliade was representing a mode of thinking that consisted of intellectuals who had more interesting things to say about modernity than he. The most obvious influence on Eliade was René Guénon, who posited that long ago, there was golden age in which everyone held beliefs belonging to a sophia perennis, or traditional wisdom. Guénon saw the sophia perennis as a sort of latently articulated metaphysics under which all religions can be placed — the implication being that all true religions are ultimately compatible when viewed from the perspective of this sacrosanct metaphysical system that he sought to elucidate. Julius Evola was another guy who believed in such a sophia perennis, and he, too, was a major follower of Guénon. He exchanged letters with Eliade, though he disagreed with Guénon on some key points, such as whether or not organized religions have an enduring value, or if it’s possible for one to achieve an initiation into the higher mysteries via the left hand path. Evola, despite being far-right-wing politically, was temperamentally less conservative.

Eliade, to be clear, was a big fan of Guénon in his early days, and there’s a lot of evidence for it. In the essay collection Fragmentarium, one can get a taste of his enthusiasm during the mid-to-late-1930s. In his essay “Technique of Contempt,” he praises Guénon for his anti-historical, apocalyptic attitude, and the all-encompassing nature with which he rejected modernity. He says,

I don’t think there was anyone who despised contemporaneity more categorically than this prodigious René Guénon. And never does a trace of anger, a hint of irritation or even of melancholy transpire in his compact, Olympic contempt. He is a true master.¹

Eliade rarely if ever bothered to cite Guénon, and later on in the early 1950s, he in fact distanced himself from him and his followers. But the affinity between their beliefs is discernible, and it has led the pre-eminent scholar on Guénonian Traditionalism, Mark Sedgwick, to label Eliade a “soft Traditionalist.” Simply put: you can’t really understand what Mircea Eliade was trying to do without knowing something about René Guénon and Julius Evola.

Now, back to McLuhan. In that first block quote I provided, I admit it is not entirely clear to me who McLuhan means when he says, “The art and scholarship of the past century and more have become a monotonous crescendo of archaic primitivism.” Who are these artists and scholars? Helena Blavatsky and the theosophists? Aleister Crowley? Fidus and the neopagan German symbolists? Guénon and Evola themselves?

I suspect it couldn’t have been the last two, since they were mostly unknown in North America at the time. But if he indeed had them in mind, he would have gotten more mileage out of citing their views on modernity, which were at least more interesting. Eliade made for a convenient target, since he was more famous both inside and outside of academia, and he didn’t spend much time discussing the modern world. Thus, there were no spicy claims to address about how modernity functions as it does.

But the Traditionalists whom Guénon represented had McLuhan’s point completely anticipated. They, more than anyone, had a serious problem with the new religious sensibility pervading the atmosphere that McLuhan describes, and Guénon in particular devoted a major chunk of his work to exposing its falsity. His second-ever monograph was entitled Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion (1921), probably one of the most pissed-off screeds against Helena Blavatsky and the entire theosophical circle you’re likely to find. Julius Evola, for his part, wrote a book called Mask and Face of Contemporary Spiritualism (1932), which he updated a few times all the way into the late 1960s, and it comprises a series of roasts directed towards various strains of New Age thinking, as well as Freudian psychoanalysts including C.G. Jung. It even mentions both Anton Lavey’s Church of Satan and Charles Manson in the last edition.

Perhaps the most amusing aspect of McLuhan’s unwitting attack on the Perennial Traditionalist mentality is that Julius Evola viewed Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a strong influence on McLuhan, as an example of modernity’s perverse and corrupted new spiritualism, particularly since he placed a scientific veneer upon the kind of optimistic evolutionism that the Traditionalists recognized in Blavatsky and the theosophists — and certainly Guénon would’ve agreed had he lived long enough to know Chardin’s work. Here is Evola in The Bow and the Club (1968):

There are also Catholics who have stated that basically, true Christianity today is alive and active precisely in democratic, Marxist, and communist movements, hence the appearance of the so-called nuovi preti [new priests] and, coming from the highest authority, the formula of “dialogue” with the very forces and ideologies that Pope Pius IX had openly stigmatized and condemned in the Syllabus.

The modernist Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin had already paved the way for all of this by formulating a doctrine, now in the course of being rehabilitated by the Church, which could serve as a theoretical framework. Teilhard has transposed the Christian idea of a providential direction of the course of history into the terms of a progressive and linear evolutionism, including science, technology, and social achievements.

Naturally, one prefers to forget certain essential themes of the original Christian view of history and of times to come, a conception that is much less linear and has less of a happy end.

McLuhan block quotes Chardin three times in Gutenberg Galaxy.

And, moreover, anyone familiar with McLuhan will know that he was a massive hit with the hippies in the 1960s. They, more than anyone, championed him as the prophet of the new electronic Age of Aquarius, despite his ambivalence regarding where things were headed, which he repeatedly voiced. It is thus surprising to anyone with only passing familiarity to hear that McLuhan was a serious Catholic who hated these occult, heterodox, kooky, woo-woo ideas. He certainly seemed like he belonged to that crowd.

II. The Agreement of Various Woo-woo Theories on World History

a. McLuhan’s tetrapartite model

If you zoom out far enough and look at this situation, nothing here should be too astonishing. One woo-woo group hates all the other woo-woo groups and sees them as false. Evola, a woo-woo guy, hates other woo-woo guys. McLuhan, a Catholic woo-woo guy, calls out all the other woo-woo guys while being rather woo-woo-y himself. Some woo-woos are more drawn to other woo-woos. Woo-woo alliances are formed. Woo-woo enemies are declared. No big whoop. If you aren’t invested in one side, it looks like the typical backbiting one witnesses in any intellectually competitive environment where the need for clout is high and resources are scarce. And even Mircea Eliade later argued that the bigger problem with our age was misguided occultist groups rather than secularism itself, so he too wasn’t innocent of this tendency. But McLuhan guys will insist on the incompatibility between McLuhan and everyone else, while the Traditionalists will say the same of their guys, and so on. And for them, I’d like to suggest here that McLuhan was not so radically different from the people whom he opposed, so I’m going to elaborate upon this now.

McLuhan basically saw world history as media-driven, occurring in these four stages:

• Primary orality - no literacy has been invented, information is stored entirely through vocal tradition in utterances like proverbs, song, and epic poetry

• Literacy - occurs in various places, leads to metaphysics, formal logic, and the sciences, Greeks drive history forward with the invention of the phonetic alphabet

• Print - further growth from literacy, modernity, ideas travel long distances, nationalism blossoms, alienation between head and body occurs, emphasis on the visual as the predominate sense is fully realized

• Electronic - Return to conditions of orality with some adjustments - acoustic space - new senses open up - global village - return to tribalism and the primitive

b. The four yugas

I’m simplifying, so you’ll have to forgive me, but that’s pretty much it. Now, if you compare his tetrad here to that of the Hindus, as expressed in the cycle of Yugas, there’s not much compatibility.

• Satya/krita yuga - egalitarianism - no war, disease - no labor - long lifespans - people often dispense with earthly desires and find enlightenment (rough correspondence to the “golden age” intimated by Hesiod, Zarathustra, Buddha, and Lao-Tse)

• Treta yuga - kind of the same as before, only less so (correspondence to a “silver age”)

• Dvapara yuga - divine intellect ceases, people become less truthful, people are kingly and noble but also pleasure-seeking, crimes begin to spread

• Kali yuga - everything becomes corrupt, the castes are in disarray, a typical lifespan becomes very short, crimes everywhere, the animals and nature yield bad fruit (correspondence to “iron age,” “age of the wolf” in Norse mythology — also called “age of darkness” elsewhere)

I bring this up because Guénon and Evola are fans of this schema, as are the theosophists. In fact, just about everybody with a new age/occultist bent is at least interested in it to some degree, because so many old pagan religions have something like this in which various ages are laid out like so, and they all demonstrate some kind of deterioration in quality of life. But according to the Hindu primary sources (various puranas) each of these yugas lasts a long, long, long time - over a million years each, meaning there’d be no way to apply this schema to our own understanding of world history. Guénon says not to worry about that, because the numbers have symbolic significance (which he doesn’t explain), and the importance of the symbolism effaces their literal meaning.

But even taking away the problem of time and dating, this theory of the yugas, which Guénon endorses, has no correspondence whatsoever with McLuhan’s system. They both indicate a concern with man’s experience of the divine, but McLuhan’s is devoid of any moral judgment, and it doesn’t say anything about quality of life, nor does it propose a steady deterioration. If you’re trying to find correspondences between McLuhan’s ideas and those of the other woo-woo guys, the cycles of yugas will amount to a big, fat red herring.

c. Guénon’s tripartite model

But in Guénon’s writings, there’s a different system of world history, one that he doesn’t codify into a map or chart, but which is distinctly there nonetheless. You can read about it in two major books: The Crisis of the Modern World (1927) and especially his masterpiece The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (1945). It goes like so:

• Tradition - roughly corresponds with what Karl Jaspers calls “the axial age” (though he predates Jaspers’s term) - true religiosity all over the world, canonized and put in writing, access to the higher mysteries - compatible faiths expressing aspects of the same metaphysics - Guénon defends the medieval period as essentially traditional

• Anti-tradition - the renaissance is when these ideas flourish most perceptibly and modernity begins (though hints were present in the Catholic church beforehand) - secularism and atheism flourishes - nationalism blossoms - Cartesian pseudo-metaphysics is the philosophy par excellence of this condition - man stops treating phenomena “qualitatively” and instead views it “quantitatively” - cf. Heidegger’s observations about “enframing” - Communism and National Socialism are atheistic and anti-traditional

• Counter-tradition - the age beginning as Guénon was writing - ancient symbols are restored but their meanings are inverted - religious sensibility returns but is altogether corrupted - theosophists, occultists, and new-agers represent the counter-tradition - correspondence with the anti-Christ as “parody” of the real Christ - endpoint of quantity’s reign over quality - age of apocalypse

There are a few qualifications I must make, here. First, Guénon refuses to date anything, because he doesn’t believe that these conditions truly take place in time. Rather, time takes place within them. He believes that they exist as eternal potentialities, and although they assume an outward manifestation in concentrated places at various points of history, they as suprasensible phenomena are what drive the world, not the reverse. Thus, he rejects the materialist view of history exemplified in thinkers like Hegel and Marx. Secondly, he never mentions anything about “primary orality,” and of course all of his references to the distant past can only come from a period of literacy (since the oral tradition is, by definition, lost to us). But it’s almost certain that he would consider such a time superior to the one in which literacy had been invented.

In any case, we can now start to see some real correspondence between Guénon and McLuhan. The age of “tradition” is the age of clay tablets and parchment manuscripts; the age of “anti-tradition” is the age of print; the age of “counter-tradition” is the electronic age. And it’s genuinely interesting just how closely these models overlap with one another. There’s no doubt that both men would reject each other’s methodology, and I’ll address that more in a bit. But for now, I’m trying to demonstrate the depth of insight with which even the kooky, zany guys who weren’t relying on materialist explanations could assess the world around them.

d. Steiner’s tripartite model

Another such kooky guy, hated by Guénon and probably McLuhan, was Rudolf Steiner, who is most famous for inventing the Waldorf school system. He was an associate of the theosophy circle, but he eventually broke off from them and created something called “anthroposophy.” Here is Julius Evola describing him in Mask and Face of Contemporary Spiritualism:

As in so many specific points of anthroposophic teaching, and likewise in Steiner’s own overall personality, one has the painful sensation of a straight and clear direction that has been broken by sudden and tyrannical visionary influxes, and by irruptions of collective complexes. Steiner’s is a typical and highly instructive example of what might happen when one ventures alone in the world of the supersensible without a connection to a proper initiatic tradition and without a protective chrism, utilizing a variety of practices and cultivating, for example, “thought detached from the senses.”²

Like Guénon, Steiner had his own tripartite model of world history, and it was similarly non-materialistic, but his was a bit different. He divided it into three stages: the age of Lucifer, the age of Christ, and the age of Ahriman (you can read all about it here, though he discussed his theory in many other lectures). I’ll explain it a bit before I jot down some bullet points.

For Steiner, Lucifer took the form of a real guy, some Chinaman from around 3,000 BC. Lucifer then revolutionized human consciousness, and this shift in consciousness guided the events of the Bronze age. I have no idea who, if anyone, Steiner had in mind — his claim seems reminiscent of the romanticist tendency to attribute the genius of Greek antiquity to the Orientals. But anyway, for Lucifer, the ultimate goal is transcendence from the body and the achievement of oneness with everything. The “axial age” (again, this idea came after Steiner) in which monistic metaphysics emerged would appear to be the culmination of Luciferic thinking. But as this philosophical revolution came along, it disappeared just as soon, for it gave way to the emergence of the age of Christ.

As for Ahriman, who will supposedly emerge in the West during the third millennium AD (this one!), he is highly clever and analytical; machine-like in his thinking. Whereas Lucifer strives to universalize, Ahriman strives to particularize. And when Ahriman finally emerges, he will not be some deceitful hoaxer. On the contrary, he will give each man great clairvoyance and wisdom, but in a highly differentiated manner, so that each man's vision of the truth differs from the other. Ahriman is a decentralizing force, and he wants everyone to strive toward being ultimately comfortable within his own body, atomized and isolated. Steiner, who lived from 1861-1925, already felt that the world was experiencing precursors to the Ahrimanic age. Let me draw out the chart:

• Lucifer - all ideas come from revelation rather than reasoning - transcendence of the body - all is one - hallucinatory, dreamlike thinking

• Christ - synthesis of Lucifer and Ahriman - bridging of immaterial and carnal reality - followers are “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16) - correct assessment of relationship between heaven and earth, or solar and telluric principles

• Ahriman - materialistic, atheistic - ideas come from reason, not revelation - desire to become comfortable in the body - everything is discrete and divided - fragmentation of populations (Steiner calls this “nationalism” but he makes it clear that he sees “nationalism” as a fragmentary process rather than unification)

The principle of Christ, then, is what everyone ought to aim for within himself, since it doesn’t doggedly reject Lucifer and Ahriman but rather combines the positive aspects of both into an integrated mode of being. For Steiner, Lucifer and Ahriman are constantly working together, and ultimately the spirit of Lucifer serves Ahriman when he finally emerges. I intend to write about this subject at greater length later on, but for now, it will suffice to say: although Steiner uses a different temporal division than the others, with needlessly precise divisions of 3,000 years each, and some of his reasoning gets a bit rough at times, it’s nonetheless possible to perceive the Ahrimanic in the electronic age, and similarly hints of the Luciferic in the age of pre-print literacy (in fact Lucifer’s arrival roughly coincides with the time in which literacy was invented in ancient Sumeria). Maybe there’s some Steinerian out there who feels that the avatar of Ahriman, when he finally arrives, will be the first true A.I. robot.

e. Hamvas’s bipartite distinction between Golden Age and Apocalypse

The last kooky guy I want to discuss is Béla Hamvas, the most important Hungarian representative of Guénonian Traditionalism. Over in Romania next door, there were a few: Mircea Eliade, Mihai Vâlsan, and the avant-garde poet Marcel Avramescu AKA Ionathan X. Uranus. But in Hungary at the time, pretty much the only guy was Béla Hamvas, who was influenced by both Guénon and Evola. And outside of Hungary, he’s certainly obscure, too. Mark Sedgwick’s book on the history of Perennial Traditionalism Against the Modern World (2004), which is considered the most definitive scholarly treatment on the subject, dedicates a mere two sentences to Hamvas. And only one very short book of his, The Philosophy of Wine (1945), has been translated into English.³

But I’m bringing him up because despite his obscurity, he’s an underrated figure with some interesting things to say. Apropos of our discussion: unlike the other Traditionalists, he was quite aware of Karl Jaspers, who created the concept of an “axial age” in 1949. And he also directly commented on matters of media technology when describing the problems facing modernity, which makes him particularly relevant here.

Hamvas took Guénon’s rejection of historical temporality quite seriously and pushed it even further. He had no desire to get involved with dating the time at which modernity began, or any phase of time between then and now. For him, history has always been a conflict between The Golden Age and the forces of Apocalypse. This isn’t to say that he rejected the theory of yugas, or any of the other ancient divisions of ages, but more that he emphasized their symbolic character above all else, as opposed to their correspondence with this-or-that quantity of time. He thought that time has two dimensions: horizontal and vertical, and he wanted to emphasize its verticality. To do this, he simplifies his model and further de-temporalizes it, rendering it a simple binary.

Unsurprisingly, then, Hamvas never discusses any “axial age.” But he does write of a canon of sacred books that all happened to be written around the same basic time period. For him, such a canon is actually a sign of disorder and degeneration rather than the scientific/philosophical revolution that Jaspers took it as. He believed that all of its ideas were already known beforehand, and the fact that they were written down at all was a sign of their corruption (this follows Plato’s hostility towards writing expressed in Phaedrus). His evidence isn’t too surprising: it’s the books themselves. Heraclitus, the Buddha, and Lao-Tse all agree that the age in which they’re writing is corrupt. Lao-Tse, while purportedly introducing Taoism to the world, also at one point bemoans the fact that people have forgotten the meaning of the Tao. Heraclitus, for his part, says that he’s surrounded by sleepwalkers who possess unprecedented levels of blindness and stupidity. So, taking these figures at their word, Hamvas argues that the philosophical ideas they’re expressing aren’t new at all. Rather, the manner in which they’re expressing them is, and that innovation in expression is unfortunately borne of crisis, not epiphany. In his essay “Platonism of the Writing,” he goes on to say that writing the ideas down in fact worsens the crisis by canonizing them textually, rendering them inflexible and inert, and impoverishing their meaning by opening them up to corrupt exegesis.

Whatever one thinks of his esoterism, Hamvas indeed recognized the importance of literacy/canonization as a new mode of cultural memory preservation to replace the oral and ritual traditions that came before, and he understood the effect this had on collective identity. Had he bothered to extend his thinking further, there’s no reason to believe he wouldn’t be able to assess the impact of other various technologies, like the printing press, the phonograph, etc. But whatever the case may be, if you compare his views on literacy to those of the media ecologists like McLuhan, the major difference is that he had the causality reversed. Literacy didn’t push man toward a new mode of consciousness; instead, a new mode of consciousness pushed man toward literacy (or at least, the use of literacy for cultural reasons rather than mere economic ones, the latter being its original purpose).

III. Conclusion: So What Came First?

I’ve titled this discussion “Did McLuhan get it backwards?” because McLuhan’s theory was that media technology drives human attitudes, and he saw Eliade as the chief example of how zany, kooky, woo-woo theories of religion fail to account for the material underpinnings of human perception. But as I’ve shown, if one looks at the Perennial Traditionalists more closely, along with some of their equally kooky contemporaries, they show some hints of awareness of the material circumstances that media ecologists are concerned with. However, I think it’s clear that they would argue that the various inventions and innovations in information technology are not the driving force behind anything but rather the expression of previously embedded crises. And I think this position can be further justified in at least a couple ways.

For instance, we often call the invention of the printing press the very thing that allowed Lutheranism to thrive. But before Martin Luther showed up, there were Christian sects and theologians who thought the Catholic church was in crisis, and their solution was to translate the Bible into the vernacular and teach the laity the true words of God. Among them were the Lollards John Wyclif and Walter Brut, as well as the Czech heretic Jan Hus, who was burnt at the stake. It was remarkably soon thereafter that the Gutenberg press showed up, and then voila, their ideas were soon redeemed through Luther. So, it is undeniable that the ideas preceded the technology.

Similarly: many people recognize “wokeness” as a sort of new religious sensibility. I don’t think it would be too cavalier to lump it in with what Guénon called “counter-tradition,” especially given its association with a) gender theories that opportunistically cherry-pick the sexual practices of various primitive tribes as examples of the correct perspective, and b) afrocentric historical theories, some of which have been promulgated heavily by black occult religious movements such as the Five-Percent Nation. But “wokeness” was around for much longer than when it was first identified as a political force. It was there in the 1970s, it took the name “political correctness” in the 90s, and yet only recently has it taken on a major force. I would argue that the invention of the internet allowed it to thrive, in the same way that the printing press allowed Protestantism to occur, but again, the spirit of it was there beforehand. So, once more: did the internet create “the great awokening”? Or, in a deeper, subtler sense, did “the great awokening” summon the internet into existence?

Now is not the time to answer such questions. Instead, I will end by suggesting that whether or not you see material conditions as the engine or the caboose of what drives man’s spiritual evolution — or something in between — it is nonetheless possible to address and acknowledge material conditions productively, giving them adequate description and analysis for the role they play. I think that just about any vantage point can work. But it requires discipline, the gift of observation, and perhaps most importantly, the willingness to be honest with oneself. You can be a kook and get it right.

1. I’m quoting this from an essay entitled “Mircea Eliade and René Guénon: Patterns of Initiation and the ‘Myth of Affinity’” by Davide Marino (2022). While the essay has some great info, I’m not sold on his argument at all. I also, FWIW, totally disagree with Eliade’s claim here. Guénon was one pissed off little guy, and his rage is almost palpable throughout his writing. Evola always struck me as a the more relaxed one.

2. I’m quoting from a translation from John Bruce Leonard rendered into English as The Fall of Spirituality: The Corruption of Tradition in the Modern World (2021). I should also add that Guénon and Evola privately disagreed about the value of Steiner. Correspondence between them reveals that Guénon rejected him entirely, while Evola perceived some occasional sparks of insight in his thinking.

3. For this discussion I’m relying on two articles. One is called “Between Tradition and Christianity: The Axial Age in the Perspective of Béla Hamvas” by Arpad Szakolczai, which can be found in the volume Axial Civilizations and World History (2004). The other is “Béla Hamvas’s Concept of Authentic Tradition in European Context” by Béla Mester (2020).